Difficult? Yes, it will be difficult. The short-fibre cotton; that too was difficult. The waste cotton-shrub, long useless, disobedient, as the thistle by the wayside,—have ye not conquered it; made it into beautiful bandana webs; white woven shirts for men; bright-tinted air-garments wherein flit goddesses? Ye have shivered mountains asunder, made the hard iron pliant to you as soft putty: the Forest-giants, Marsh- jotuns bear sheaves of golden grain; Aegir the Sea-demon himself stretches his back for a sleek highway to you, and on Firehorses and Windhorses ye career. Ye are most strong. Thor red-bearded, with his blue sun-eyes, with his cheery heart and strong thunder- hammer, he and you have prevailed. Ye are most strong, ye Sons of the icy North, of the far East,—far marching from your rugged Eastern Wildernesses, hitherward from the grey Dawn of Time! Ye are Sons of the Jotun-land; the land of Difficulties Conquered. Difficult? You must try this thing. Once try it with the understanding that it will and shall have to be done. Try it as ye try the paltrier thing, making of money! I will bet on you once more, against all Jotuns, Tailor-gods, Double- barrelled Law-wards, and Denizens of Chaos whatsoever!
Chapter V
Permanence
Standing on the threshold, nay as yet outside the threshold, of a 'Chivalry of Labour,' and an immeasurable Future which it is to fill with fruitfulness and verdant shade; where so much has not yet come even to the rudimental state, and all speech of positive enactments were hasardous in those who know this business only by the eye,—let us here hint at simply one widest universal principle, as the basis from which all organisation hitherto has grown up among men, and all henceforth will have to grow: The principle of Permanent Contract instead of Temporary.
Permanent not Temporary:—you do not hire the mere redcoated fighter by the day, but by the score of years' Permanence, persistance is the first condition of all fruitfulness in the ways of men. The 'tendency to persevere,' to persist in spite of hindrances, discouragements and 'impossibilities:' it is this that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak; the civilised burgher from the nomadic savage,—the Species Man from the Genus Ape! The Nomad has his very house set on wheels; the Nomad, and in a still higher degree the Ape, are all for 'liberty;' the privilege to flit continually is indispensable for them. Alas, in how many ways, does our humour, in this swift-rolling self-abrading Time, shew itself nomadic, apelike; mournful enough to him that looks on it with eyes! This humour will have to abate; it is the first element of all fertility in human things, that such 'liberty' of apes and nomads do by freewill or constraint abridge itself, give place to a better. The civilised man lives not in wheeled houses. He builds stone castles, plants lands, makes lifelong marriage-contracts;—has long-dated hundred-fold possessions, not to be valued in the money-market; has pedigrees, libraries, law-codes; has memories and hopes, even for this Earth, that reach over thousands of years. Life-long marriage-contracts: how much preferable were year-long or month-long—to the nomad or ape!
Month-long contracts please me little, in any province where there can by possibility be found virtue enough for more. Month- long contracts do not answer well even with your house-servants; the liberty on both sides to change every month is growing very apelike, nomadic;—and I hear philosophers predict that it will alter, or that strange results will follow: that wise men, pestered with nomads, with unattached ever-shifting spies and enemies rather than friends and servants, will gradually, weighing substance against semblance, with indignation, dismiss such, down almost to the very shoeblack, and say, "Begone; I will serve myself rather, and have peace!" Gurth was hired for life to Cedric, and Cedric to Gurth. O Anti-Slavery Convention, loud-sounding long-eared Exeter-Hall—But in thee too is a kind of instinct towards justice, and I will complain of nothing. Only, black Quashee over the seas being once sufficiently attended to, wilt thou not perhaps open thy dull sodden eyes to the 'sixty-thousand valets in London itself who are yearly dismissed to the streets, to be what they can, when the season ends;'—or to the hunger-stricken, pallid, yellow-coloured 'Free Labourers' in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Buckinghamshire, and all other shires! These Yellow-coloured, for the present, absorb all my sympathies: if I had a Twenty Millions, with Model-Farms and Niger Expeditions, it is to these that I would give it! Quashee has already victuals, clothing; Quashee is not dying of such despair as the yellow-coloured pale man's. Quashee, it must be owned, is hitherto a kind of blockhead. The Haiti Duke of Marmalade, educated now for almost half a century, seems to have next to no sense in him. Why, in one of those Lancashire Weavers, dying of hunger, there is more thought and heart, a greater arithmetical amount of misery and desperation, than in whole gangs of Quashees. It must be owned, thy eyes are of the sodden sort; and with thy emancipations, and thy twenty- millionings and long-eared clamourings, thou, like Robespierre with his pasteboard Etre Supreme, threatenest to become a bore to us, _Avec ton Etre Supreme tu commences m'embeter!—
In a Printed Sheet of the assiduous, much-abused, and truly useful Mr. Chadwick's, containing queries and responses from far and near, as to this great question, 'What is the effect of Education on workingmen, in respect of their value as mere workers?' the present Editor, reading with satisfaction a decisive unanimous verdict as to Education, reads with inexpressible interest this special remark, put in by way of marginal incidental note, from a practical manufacturing Quaker, whom, as he is anonymous, we will call Friend Prudence. Prudence keeps a thousand workmen; has striven in all ways to attach them to him; has provided conversational soirees; playgrounds, bands of music for the young ones; went even 'the length of buying them a drum:' all which has turned out to be an excellent investment. For a certain person, marked here by a black stroke, whom we shall name Blank, living over the way,—he also keeps somewhere about a thousand men; but has done none of these things for them, nor any other thing, except due payment of the wages by supply-and-demand. Blank's workers are perpetually getting into mutiny, into broils and coils: every six months, we suppose, Blank has a strike; every one month, every day and every hour, they are fretting and obstructing the short-sighted Blank; pilfering from him, wasting and idling for him, omitting and committing for him. "I would not," says Friend Prudence, "exchange my workers for his with seven thousand pounds to boot."
—————— *Report on the Training of Pauper Children (1841), p. 18. ——————
Right, O honourable Prudence; thou art wholly in the right: Seven thousand pounds even as a matter of profit for this world, nay for the mere cash-market of this worrd! And as a matter of profit not for this world only, but for the other world and all worlds, it outweighs the Bank of England!—Can the sagacious reader descry here, as it were the outmost inconsiderable rockledge of a universal rock-foundation, deep once more as the Centre of the World, emerging so, in the experience of this good Quaker, through the Stygian mud-vortexes and general Mother of Dead Dogs, whereon, for the present, all swags and insecurely hovers, as if ready to be swallowed?
Some Permanence of Contract is already almost possible; the principle of Permanence, year by year, better seen into and elaborated, may enlarge itself, expand gradually on every side into a system. This once secured, the basis of all good results were laid. Once permanent, you do not quarrel with the first difficulty on your path, and quit it in weak disgust; you reflect that it cannot be quitted, that it must be conquered, a wise arrangement fallen on with regard to it. Ye foolish Wedded Two, who have quarrelled, between whom the Evil Spirit has stirred up transient strife and bitterness, so that 'incompatibility' seems almost nigh, ye are nevertheless the Two who, by long habit, were it by nothing more, do best of all others suit each other: it is expedient for your own two foolish selves, to say nothing of the infants, pedigrees and public in general, that ye agree again; that ye put away the Evil Spirit, and wisely on both hands struggle for the guidance of a Good Spirit!
The very horse that is permanent, how much kindlier do his rider and he work, than the temporary one, hired on any hack principle yet known! I am for permanence in all things, at the earliest possible moment, and to the latest possible. Blessed is he that continueth where he is. Here let us rest, and lay out seedfields; here let us learn to dwell. Here, even here, the orchards that we plant will yield us fruit; the acorns will be wood and pleasant umbrage, if we wait. How much grows everywhere, if we do but wait! Through the swamps we will shape causeways, force purifying drains; we will learn to thread the rocky inaccessibilities; and beaten tracks, worn smooth by mere traveling of human feet, will form themselves. Not a difficulty but can transfigure itself into a triumph; not even a deformity but, if our own soul have imprinted worth on it, will grow dear to us. The sunny plains and deep indigo transparent skies of Italy are all indifferent to the great sick heart of a Sir Walter Scott: on the back of the Apennines, in wild spring weather, the sight of bleak Scotch firs, and snow-spotted heath and desolation, brings tears into his eyes.*
—————- *Lockhart's Life of Scott —————-
O unwise mortals that forever change and shift, and say, Yonder, not Here! Wealth richer than both the Indies lies everywhere for man, if he will endure. Not his oaks only and his fruit-trees, his very heart roots itself wherever he will abide;—roots itself, draws nourishment from the deep fountains of Universal Being! Vagrant Sam-Slicks, who rove over the Earth doing 'strokes of trade,' what wealth have they? Horseloads, shiploads of white or yellow metal: in very sooth, what are these? Slick rests nowhere, he is homeless. He can build stone or marble houses; but to continue in them is denied him. The wealth of a man is the number of things which he loves and blesses, which he is loved and blessed by! The herdsman in his poor clay shealing, where his very cow and dog are friends to him, and not a cataract but carries memories for him, and not a mountain-top but nods old recognition: his life, all encircled as in blessed mother's- arms, is it poorer than Slick's with the ass-loads of yellow metal on his back? Unhappy Slick! Alas, there has so much grown nomadic, apelike, with us: so much will have, with whatever pain, repugnance and 'impossibility,' to alter itself, to fix itself again,—in some wise way, in any not delirious way!
A question arises here: Whether, in some ulterior, perhaps some not far-distant stage of this 'Chivalry of Labour,' your Master- Worker may not find it possible, and needful, to grant his Workers permanent interest in his enterprise and theirs? So that it become, in practical result, what in essential fact and justice it ever is, a joint enterprise; all men, from the Chief Master down to the lowest Overseer and Operative, economically as well as loyally concerned for it?—Which question I do not answer. The answer, near or else far, is perhaps, Yes;—and yet one knows the difficulties. Despotism is essential in most enterprises; I am told, they do not tolerate 'freedom of debate' on board a Seventy-four! Republican senate and plebiscita would not answer well in Cotton-Mills. And yet observe there too: Freedom, not nomad's or ape's Freedom, but man's Freedom; this is indispensable. We must have it, and will have it! To reconcile Despotism with Freedom:—well, is that such a mystery? Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism just. Rigorous as Destiny; but just too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, and have no 'Freedom' at all but in obeying them. The way is already known, part of the way;—and courage and some qualities are needed for walking on it!
Chapter VI
The Landed
A man with fifty, with five hundred, with a thousand pounds a day, given him freely, without condition at all,—on condition, as it now runs, that he will sit with his hands in his pockets and do no mischief, pass no Corn-Laws or the like,—he too, you would say, is or might be a rather strong Worker! He is a Worker with such tools as no man in this world ever before had. But in practice, very astonishing, very ominous to look at, he proves not a strong Worker;—you are too happy if he will prove but a No-worker, do nothing, and not be a Wrong-worker.
You ask him, at the year's end: "Where is your three-hundred thousand pound; what have you realised to us with that?" He answers, in indignant surprise: "Done with it? Who are you that ask? I have eaten it; I and my flunkeys, and parasites, and slaves two-footed and four-footed, in an ornamental manner; and I am here alive by it; I am realised by it to you!"—It is, as we have often said, such an answer as was never before given under this Sun. An answer that fills me with boding apprehension, with foreshadows of despair. O stolid Use-and-wont of an atheistic Half-century, O Ignavia, Tailor-godhood, soul- killing Cant, to what passes art thou bringing us!—Out of the loud-piping whirlwind, audibly to him that has ears, the Highest God is again announcing in these days: "Idleness shall not be." God has said it, man cannot gainsay.
Ah, how happy were it, if he this Aristocrat Worker would, in like manner, see his work and do it! It is frightful seeking another to do it for him. Guillotines, Meudon Tanneries, and half-a-million men shot dead, have already been expended in that business; and it is yet far from done. This man too is something; nay he is a great thing. Look on him there: a man of manful aspect; something of the 'cheerfulness of pride' still lingering in him. A free air of graceful stoicism, of easy silent dignity sits well on him; in his heart, could we reach it, lie elements of generosity, self-sacrificing justice, true human valour. Why should he, with such appliances, stand an incumbrance in the Present; perish disastrously out of the Future! From no section of the Future would we lose these noble courtesies, impalpable yet all-controlling; these dignified reticences, these kingly simplicities;—lose aught of what the fruitful Past still gives us token of, memento of, in this man. Can we not save him:—can he not help us to save him! A brave man he too; had not undivine Ignavia, Hearsay, Speech without meaning,—had not Cant, thousandfold Cant within him and around him, enveloping him like choke-damp, like thick Egyptian darkness, thrown his soul into asphyxia, as it were extinguished his soul; so that he sees not, hears not, and Moses and all the Prophets address him in vain.
Will he awaken, be alive again, and have a soul; or is this death-fit very death? It is a question of questions, for himself and for us all! Alas, is there no noble work for this man too? Has he not thick-headed ignorant boors; lazy, enslaved farmers; weedy lands? Lands! Has he not weary heavy-laden ploughers of land; immortal souls of men, ploughing, ditching, day-drudging; bare of back, empty of stomach, nigh desperate of heart; and none peaceably to help them but he, under Heaven? Does he find, with his three hundred thousand pounds, no noble thing trodden down in the thoroughfares, which it were godlike to help up? Can he do nothing for his Burns but make a Gauger of him; lionise him, bedinner him, for a foolish while; then whistle him down the wind, to desperation and bitter death?—His work too is difficult, in these modern, far-dislocated ages. But it may be done; it may be tried;—it must be done.
A modern Duke of Weimar, not a god he either, but a human duke, levied, as I reckon, in rents and taxes and all incomings whatsoever, less than several of our English Dukes do in rent alone. The Duke of Weimar, with these incomings, had to govern, judge, defend, every way administer his Dukedom. He does all this as few others did: and he improves lands besides all this, makes river-embankments, maintains not soldiers only but Universities and Institutions;—and in his Court were these four men: Wieland, Herder, Schiller, Goethe. Not as parasites, which was impossible; not as table-wits and poetic Katerfeltoes; but as noble Spiritual Men working under a noble Practical Man. Shielded by him from many miseries; perhaps from many shortcomings, destructive aberrations. Heaven had sent, once more, heavenly Light into the world; and this man's honour was that he gave it welcome. A new noble kind of Clergy, under an old but still noble kind of King! I reckon that this one Duke of Weimar did more for the Culture of his Nation than all the English Dukes and Duces now extant, or that were extant since Henry the Eighth gave them the Church Lands to eat, have done for theirs!—I am ashamed, I am alarmed for my English Dukes: what word have I to say?
If our Actual Aristocracy, appointed 'Best-and-Bravest,' will be wise, how inexpressibly happy for us! If not,—the voice of God from the whirlwind is very audible to me. Nay, I will thank the Great God, that He has said, in whatever fearful ways, and just wrath against us, "Idleness shall be no more!" Idleness? The awakened soul of man, all but the asphyxied soul of man, turns from it as from worse than death. It is the life-in-death of Poet Coleridge. That fable of the Dead-Sea Apes ceases to be a fable. The poor Worker starved to death is not the saddest of sights. He lies there, dead on his shield; fallen down into the bosom of his old Mother; with haggard pale face, sorrow-worn, but stilled now into divine peace, silently appeals to the Eternal God and all the Universe,—the most silent, the most eloquent of men.
Exceptions,—ah yes, thank Heaven, we know there are exceptions. Our case were too hard, were there not exceptions, and partial exceptions not a few, whom we know, and whom we do not know. Honour to the name of Ashley,—honour to this and the other valiant Abdiel, found faithful still; who would fain, by work and by word, admonish their Order not to rush upon destruction! These are they who will, if not save their Order, postpone the wreck of it;—by whom, under blessing of the Upper Powers, 'a quiet euthanasia spread over generations, instead of a swift torture-death concentred into years,' may be brought about for many things. All honour and success to these. The noble man can still strive nobly to save and serve his Order;—at lowest, he can remember the precept of the Prophet: "Come out of her, my people; come out of her!"
To sit idle aloft, like living statues, like absurd Epicurus'- gods, in pampered isolation, in exclusion from the glorious fateful battlefield of this God's-World: it is a poor life for a man, when all Upholsterers and French-Cooks have done their utmost for it!—Nay, what a shallow delusion is this we have all got into. That any man should or can keep himself apart from men, have 'no business' with them, except a cash-account business!' It is the silliest tale a distressed generation of men ever took to telling one another. Men cannot live isolated: we are all bound together, for mutual good or else for mutual misery, as living nerves in the same body. No highest man can disunite himself from any lowest. Consider it. Your poor 'Werter blowing out his distracted existence because Charlotte will not have the keeping thereof:' this is no peculiar phasis; it is simply the highest expression of a phasis traceable wherever one human creature meets another! Let the meanest crookbacked Thersites teach the supremest Agamemnon that he actually does not reverence him, the supremest Agamemnon's eyes flash fire responsive; a real pain, and partial insanity, has seized Agamemnon. Strange enough: a many-counselled Ulysses is set in motion by a scoundrel-blockhead; plays tunes, like a barrel-organ, at the scoundrel-blockhead's touch,—has to snatch, namely, his sceptre cudgel, and weal the crooked back with bumps and thumps! Let a chief of men reflect well on it. Not in having 'no business' with men, but in having no unjust business with them, and in having all manner of true and just business, can either his or their blessedness be found possible, and this waste world become, for both parties, a home and peopled garden.
Men do reverence men. Men do worship in that 'one temple of the world,' as Novalis calls it, the Presence of a Man! Hero- worship, true and blessed, or else mistaken, false and accursed, goes on everywhere and everywhen. In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that was or ever will be of godlike in this world: the veneration done to Human Worth by the hearts of men. Hero-worship, in the souls of the heroic, of the clear and wise,—it is the perpetual presence of Heaven in our poor Earth: when it is not there, Heaven is veiled from us; and all is under Heaven's ban and interdict, and there is no worship, or worthship, or worth or blessedness in the Earth any more!—
Independence, 'lord of the lion-heart and eagle-eye'—alas, yes, he is a lord we have got acquainted with in these late times: a very indispensable lord, for spurning off with due energy innumerable sham-superiors, Tailor-made: honour to him, entire success to him! Entire success is sure to him. But he must not stop there, at that small success, with his eagle-eye. He has now a second far greater success to gain: to seek out his real superiors, whom not the Tailor but the Almighty God has made superior to him, and see a little what he will do with these! Rebel against these also? Pass by with minatory eagle-glance, with calm-sniffing mockery, or even without any mockery or sniff, when these present themselves? The lion-hearted will never dream of such a thing. Forever far be it from him! His minatory eagle-glance will veil itself in softness of the dove: his lion- heart will become a lamb's; all is just indignation changed into just reverence, dissolved in blessed floods of noble humble love, how much heavenlier than any pride, nay, if you will, how much prouder! I know him, this lion-hearted, eagle-eyed one; have met him, rushing on, 'with bosom bare,' in a very distracted dishevelled manner, the times being hard;—and can say, and guarantee on my life, That in him is no rebellion; that in him is the reverse of rebellion, the needful preparation for obedience. For if you do mean to obey God-made superiors, your first step is to sweep out the Tailormade ones; order them, under penalties, to vanish, to make ready for vanishing!
Nay, what is best of all, he cannot rebel, if he would. Superiors whom God has made for us we cannot order to withdraw! Not in the least. No Grand-Turk himself, thickest-quilted tailor-made Brother of the Sun and Moon can do it: but an Arab Man, in cloak of his own clouting; with black beaming eyes, with flaming sovereign-heart direct from the centre of the Universe; and also, I am told, with terrible 'horse-shoe vein' of swelling wrath in his brow, and lightning (if you will not have it as light) tingling through every vein of him,—he rises; says authoritatively: "Thickest-quilted Grand-Turk, tailor-made Brother of the Sun and Moon, No:—I withdraw not; thou shalt obey me or withdraw!" And so accordingly it is: thickest- quilted Grand-Turks and all their progeny, to this hour, obey that man in the remarkablest manner; preferring not to withdraw.
O brother, it is an endless consolation to me, in this disorganic, as yet so quack-ridden, what you may well call hag- ridden and hell-ridden world, to find that disobedience to the Heavens, when they send any messenger whatever, is and remains impossible. It cannot be done; no Turk grand or small can do it. 'Skew the dullest clodpole,' says my invaluable German friend, 'shew the haughtiest featherhead, that a soul higher than himself is here; were his knees stiffened into brass, he must down and worship.
Chapter VII
The Gifted
Yes, in what tumultuous huge anarchy soever a Noble human Principle may dwell and strive, such tumult is in the way of being calmed into a fruitful sovereignty. It is inevitable. No Chaos can continue chaotic with a soul in it. Besouled with earnest human Nobleness, did not slaughter, violence and fire- eyed fury, grow into a Chivalry; into a blessed Loyalty of Governor and Governed? And in Work, which is of itself noble, and the only true fighting, there shall be no such possibility? Believe it not; it is incredible; the whole Universe contradicts it. Here too the Chactaw Principle will be subordinated; the Man Principle will, by degrees, become superior, become supreme.
I know Mammon too; Banks-of-England, Credit-Systems, worldwide possibilities of work and traffic; and applaud and admire them. Mammon is like Fire; the usefulest of all servants, if the frightfulest of all masters! The Cliffords, Fitzadelms and Chivalry Fighters 'wished to gain victory,' never doubt it: but victory, unless gained in a certain spirit, was no victory; defeat, sustained in a certain spirit, was itself victory. I say again and again, had they counted the scalps alone, they had continued Chactaws, and no Chivalry or lasting victory had been. And in Industrial Fighters and Captains is there no nobleness discoverable? To them, alone of men, there shall forever be no blessedness but in swollen coffers? To see beauty, order, gratitude, loyal human hearts around them, shall be of no moment; to see fuliginous deformity, mutiny, hatred and despair, with the addition of half a million guineas, shall be better? Heaven's blessedness not there; Hell's cursedness, and your half-million bits of metal, a substitute for that! Is there no profit in diffusing Heaven's blessedness, but only in gaining gold?—If so, I apprise the Mill-owner and Millionaire, that he too must prepare for vanishing; that neither is he born to be of the sovereigns of this world; that he will have to be trampled and chained down in whatever terrible ways, and brass-collared safe, among the born thralls of this worrd! We cannot have Canailles and Doggeries that will not make some Chivalry of themselves: our noble Planet is impatient of such; in the end, totally intolerant of such!
For the Heavens, unwearying in their bounty, do send other souls into this world, to whom yet, as to their forerunners, in Old Roman, in Old Hebrew and all noble times, the omnipotent guinea is, on the whole, an impotent guinea. Has your half-dead avaricious Corn-Law Lord, your half-alive avaricious Cotton-Law Lord, never seen one such? Such are, not one, but several; are, and will be, unless the gods have doomed this world to swift dire ruin. These are they, the elect of the world; the born champions, strong men, and liberatory Samsons of this poor world: whom the poor Delilah-world will not always shear of their strength and eyesight, and set to grind in darkness at its poor gin-wheel! Such souls are, in these days, getting somewhat out of humour with the world. Your very Byron, in these days, is at least driven mad; flatly refuses fealty to the world. The world with its injustices, its golden brutalities, and dull yellow guineas, is a disgust to such souls: the ray of Heaven that is in them does at least pre-doom them to be very miserable here. Yes:—and yet all misery is faculty misdirected, strength that has not yet found its way. The black whirlwind is mother of the lightning. No smoke, in any sense, but can become flame and radiance! Such soul, once graduated in Heaven's stern University, steps out superior to your guinea.
Dost thou know, O sumptuous Corn-Lord, Cotton-Lord, O mutinous Trades-Unionist, gin-vanquished, undeliverable; O much-enslaved World,—this man is not a slave with thee! None of thy promotions is necessary for him. His place is with the stars of Heaven: to thee it may be momentous, to him it is indifferent, whether thou place him in the lowest hut, or forty feet higher at the top of thy stupendous high tower, while here on Earth. The joys of Earth that are precious, they depend not on thee and thy promotions. Food and raiment, and, round a social hearth, souls who love him, whom he loves: these are already his. He wants none of thy rewards; behold also, he fears none of thy penalties. Thou canst not answer even by killing him: the case of Anaxarchus thou canst kill; but the self of Anaxarchus, the word or act of Anaxarchus, in no wise whatever. To this man death is not a bugbear; to this man life is already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and terrible, as death.
Not a May-game is this man's life; but a battle and a march, a warfare with principalities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant orange-groves and green flowery spaces, waited on by the choral Muses and the rosy Hours: it is a stern pilgrimage through burning sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men; loves men, with inexpressible soft pity,—as they cannot love him: but his soul dwells in solitude, in the uttermost parts of Creation. In green oases by the palm-tree wells, he rests a space; but anon he has to journey forward, escorted by the Terrors and the Splendours, the Archdemons and Archangels. All Heaven, all Pandemonium are his escort. The stars keen-glancing, from the Immensities, send tidings to him; the graves, silent with their dead, from the Eternities. Deep calls for him unto Deep.
Thou, O World, how wilt thou secure thyself against this man? Thou canst not hire him by thy guineas; nor by thy gibbets and law-penalties restrain him. He eludes thee like a Spirit. Thou canst not forward him, thou canst not hinder him. Thy penalties, thy poverties, neglects, contumelies: behold, all these are good for him. Come to him as an enemy; turn from him as an unfriend; only do not this one thing,—infect him not with thy own delusion: the benign Genius, were it by very death, shall guard him against this!—What wilt thou do with him? He is above thee, like a god. Thou, in thy stupendous three-inch pattens, art under him. He is thy born king, thy conqueror and supreme lawgiver: not all the guineas and cannons, and leather and prunella, under the sky can save thee from him. Hardest thickskinned Mammon-world, ruggedest Caliban shall obey him, or become not Caliban but a cramp. Oh, if in this man, whose eyes can flash Heaven's lightning, and make all Calibans into a cramp, there dwelt not, as the essence of his very being, a God's justice, human Nobleness, Veracity and Mercy,—I should tremble for the world. But his strength, let us rejoice to understand, is even this: The quantity of Justice, of Valour and Pity that is in him. To hypocrites and tailored quacks in high places, his eyes are lightning; but they melt in dewy pity softer than a mother's to the downpressed, maltreated; in his heart, in his great thought, is a sanctuary for all the wretched. This world's improvement is forever sure.
'Man of Genius?' Thou hast small notion, meseems, O Mecaenas Twiddledee, of what a Man of Genius is! Read in thy New Testament and elsewhere,—if, with floods of mealymouthed inanity, with miserable froth-vortices of Cant now several centuries old, thy New Testament is not all bedimmed for thee. Canst thou read in thy New Testament at all? The Highest Man of Genius, knowest thou him; Godlike and a God to this hour? His crown a Crown of Thorns? Thou fool, with thy empty Godhoods, Apotheoses edgegilt; the Crown of Thorns made into a poor jewel-room crown, fit for the head of blockheads; the bearing of the Cross changed to a riding in the Long-Acre Gig! Pause in thy mass-chantings, in thy litanyings, and Calmuck prayings by machinery; and pray, if noisily, at least in a more human manner. How with thy rubrics and dalmatics, and clothwebs and cobwebs, and with thy stupidities and grovelling baseheartedness, hast thou hidden the Holiest into all but invisibility!—
'Man of Genius:' O Mecaenas Twiddledee, hast thou any notion what a Man of Genius is? Genius is 'the inspired gift of God.' It is the clearer presence of God Most High in a man. Dim, potential in all men; in this man it has become clear, actual. So says John Milton, who ought to be a judge; so answer him the Voices of all Ages and all Worlds. Wouldst thou commune with such a one,—be his real peer then: does that lie in thee? Know thyself and thy real and thy apparent place, and know him and his real and his apparent place, and act in some noble conformity therewith. What! The star-fire of the Empyrean shall eclipse itself, and illuminate magic-lanterns to amuse grown children? He, the god-inspired, is to twang harps for thee, and blow through scrannel-pipes; soothe thy sated soul with visions of new, still wider Eldorados, Houri Paradises, richer Lands of Cockaigne? Brother, this is not he; this is a counterfeit, this twangling, jangling, vain, acrid, scrannel-piping man. Thou dost well to say with sick Saul, "It is naught, such harping!"—and in sudden rage grasp thy spear, and try if thou canst pin such a one to the wall. King Saul was mistaken in his man, but thou art right in thine. It is the due of such a one: nail him to the wall, and leave him there. So ought copper shillings to be nailed on counters; copper geniuses on walls, and left there for a sign!—
I conclude that the Men of Letters too may become a 'Chivalry,' an actual instead of a virtual Priesthood, with result immeasurable,—so soon as there is nobleness in themselves for that. And, to a certainty, not sooner! Of intrinsic Valetisms you cannot, with whole Parliaments to help you, make a Heroism. Doggeries never so gold-plated, Doggeries never so escutcheoned, Doggeries never so diplomaed, bepuffed, gas-lighted, continue Doggeries, and must take the fate of such.
Chapter VIII
The Didactic
Certainly it were a fond imagination to expect that any preaching of mine could abate Mammonism; that Bobus of Houndsditch will love his guineas less, or his poor soul more, for any preaching of mine! But there is one Preacher who does preach with effect, and gradually persuade all persons: his name is Destiny, is Divine Providence, and his Sermon the inflexible Course of Things. Experience does take dreadfully high school-wages; but he teaches like no other!
I revert to Friend Prudence the good Quaker's refusal of 'seven thousand pounds to boot.' Friend Prudence's practical conclusion will, by degrees, become that of all rational practical men whatsover. On the present scheme and principle, Work cannot continue. Trades' Strikes, Trades' Unions, Chartisms; mutiny, squalor, rage and desperate revolt, growing ever more desperate, will go on their way. As dark misery settles down on us, and our refuges of lies fall in pieces one after one, the hearts of men, now at last serious, will turn to refuges of truth. The eternal stars shine out again, so soon as it is dark enough.
Begirt with desperate Trades' Unionism and Anarchic Mutiny, many an Industrial Law-ward, by and by, who has neglected to make laws and keep them, will be heard saying to himself: "Why have I realised five hundred thousand pounds? I rose early and sat late, I toiled and moiled, and in the sweat of my brow and of my soul I strove to gain this money, that I might become conspicuous, and have some honour among my fellow-creatures. I wanted them to honour me, to love me. The money is here, earned with my best lifeblood: but the honour? I am encircled with squalor, with hunger, rage, and sooty desperation. Not honoured, hardly even envied; only fools and the flunkey-species so much as envy me. I am conspicuous,—as a mark for curses and brickbats. What good is it? My five hundred scalps hang here in my wigwam: would to Heaven I had sought something else than the scalps; would to Heaven I had been a Christian Fighter, not a Chactaw one! To have ruled and fought not in a Mammonish but in a Godlike spirit; to have had the hearts of the people bless me, as a true ruler and captain of my people; to have felt my own heart bless me, and that God above instead of Mammon below was blessing me,—this had been something. Out of my sight, ye beggarly five hundred scalps of banker's-thousands: I will try for something other, or account my life a tragical futility!"
Friend Prudence's 'rock-ledge,' as we called it, will gradually disclose itself to many a man; to all men. Gradually, assaulted from beneath and from above, the Stygian mud-deluge of Laissez- faire, Supply-and-demand, Cash-payment the one Duty, will abate on all hands; and the everlasting mountain-tops, and secure rock-foundations that reach to the centre of the world, and rest on Nature's self, will again emerge, to found on, and to build on. When Mammon-worshippers here and there begin to be God- worshippers, and bipeds-of-prey become men, and there is a Soul felt once more in the huge-pulsing elephantine mechanic Animalism of this Earth, it will be again a blessed Earth.
"Men cease to regard money?" cries Bobus of Houndsditch: "What else do all men strive for? The very Bishop informs me that Christianity cannot get on without a minimum of Four thousand five hundred in its pocket. Cease to regard money? That will be at Doomsday in the afternoon!"—O Bobus, my opinion is somewhat different. My opinion is, that the Upper Powers have not yet determined on destroying this Lower World. A respectable, ever- increasing minority, who do strive for something higher than money, I with confidence anticipate; ever-increasing, till there be a sprinkling of them found in all quarters, as salt of the Earth' once more. The Christianity that cannot get on without a minimum of Four thousand five hundred, will give place to something better that can. Thou wilt not join our small minority, thou? Not till Doomsday in the afternoon? Well; then, at least, thou wilt join it, thou and the majority in mass!
But truly it is beautiful to see the brutish empire of Mammon cracking everywhere; giving sure promise of dying, or of being changed. A strange, chill, almost ghastly dayspring strikes up in Yankeeland itself: my Transcendental friends announce there, in a distinct, though somewhat lankhaired, ungainly manner, that the Demiurgus Dollar is dethroned; that new unheard-of Demiurgusships, Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Growths and Destructions, are already visible in the grey of coming Time. Chronos is dethroned by Jove; Odin by St. Olaf: the Dollar cannot rule in Heaven forever. No; I reckon, not. Socinian Preachers quit their pulpits in Yankeeland, saying, "Friends, this is all gone to a coloured cobweb, we regret to say!"—and retire into the fields to cultivate onion-beds, and live frugally on vegetables. It is very notable. Old godlike Calvinism declares that its old body is now fallen to tatters, and done; and its mournful ghost, disembodied, seeking new embodiment, pipes again in the winds;—a ghost and spirit as yet, but heralding new Spirit-worlds, and better Dynasties than the Dollar one.
Yes, here as there, light is coming into the world; men love not darkness, they do love light. A deep feeling of the eternal nature of justice looks out among us everywhere,—even through the dull eyes of Exeter Hall; an unspeakable religiousness struggles, in the most helpless manner, to speak itself, in Puseyisms and the like. Of our Cant, all condemnable, how much is not condemnable without pity; we had almost said, without respect! The inarticulate worth and truth that is in England goes down yet to the Foundations.
Some 'Chivalry of Labour,' some noble Humanity and practical Divineness of Labour, will yet be realised on this Earth. Or why will; why do we pray to Heaven, without setting our own shoulder to the wheel? The Present, if it will have the Future accomplish, shall itself commence. Thou who prophesiest, who believest, begin thou to fulfil. Here or nowhere, now equally as at any time! That outcast help-needing thing or person, trampled down under vulgar feet or hoofs, no help 'possible' for it, no prize offered for the saving of it,—canst not thou save it, then, without prize? Put forth thy hand, in God's name; know that 'impossible,' where Truth and Mercy and the everlasting Voice of Nature order, has no place in the brave man's dictionary. That when all men have said "Impossible," and tumbled noisily elsewhither, and thou alone art left, then first thy time and possibility have come. It is for thee now: do thou that, and ask no man's counsel, but thy own only and God's. Brother, thou hast possibility in thee for much: the possibility of writing on the eternal skies the record of a heroic life. That noble downfallen or yet unborn 'Impossibility,' thou canst lift it up, thou canst, by thy soul's travail, bring it into clear being. That loud inane Actuality, with millions in its pocket, too 'possible' that, which rolls along there, with quilted trumpeters blaring round it, and all the world escorting it as mute or vocal flunkey,—escort it not thou; say to it, either nothing, or else deeply in thy heart: "Loud-blaring Nonentity, no force of trumpets, cash, Long-Acre art, or universal flunkeyhood of men, makes thee an Entity; thou art a _Non_entity, and deceptive Simulacrum, more accursed than thou seemest. Pass on in the Devil's name, unworshipped by at least one man, and leave the thoroughfare clear!"
Not on Ilion's or Latium's plains; on far other plains and places henceforth can noble deeds be now done. Not on Ilion's plains; how much less in Mayfair's drawingrooms! Not in victory over poor brother French or Phrygians; but in victory over Frost-jotuns, Marsh-giants, over demons of Discord, Idleness, Injustice, Unreason, and Chaos come again. None of the old Epics is longer possible. The Epic of French and Phrygians was comparatively a small Epic: but that of Flirts and Fribbles, what is that? A thing that vanishes at cock-crowing,—that already begins to scent the morning air! Game-preserving Aristocracies, let them 'bush' never so effectually, cannot escape the Subtle Fowler. Game seasons will be excellent, and again will be indifferent, and by and by they will not be at all. The Last Partridge of England, of an England where millions of men can get no corn to eat, will be shot and ended. Aristocracies with beards on their chins will find other work to do than amuse themselves with trundling-hoops.
But it is to you, ye Workers, who do already work, and are as grown men, noble and honourable in a sort, that the whole world calls for new work and nobleness. Subdue mutiny, discord, widespread despair, by manfulness, justice, mercy and wisdom. Chaos is dark, deep as Hell; let light be, and there is instead a green flowery World. O, it is great, and there is no other greatness. To make some nook of God's Creation a little fruitfuler, better, more worthy of God; to make some human hearts a little wiser, manfuler, happier,—more blessed, less accursed! It is work for a God. Sooty Hell of mutiny and savagery and despair can, by man's energy, be made a kind of Heaven; cleared of its soot, of its mutiny, of its need to mutiny; the everlasting arch of Heaven's azure overspanning it too, and its cunning mechanisms and tall chimney-steeples, as a birth of Heaven; God and all men looking on it well pleased.
Unstained by wasteful deformities, by wasted tears or heart's- blood of men, or any defacement of the Pit, noble fruitful Labour, growing ever nobler, will come forth,—the grand sole miracle of Man; whereby Man has risen from the low places of this Earth, very literally, into divine Heavens. Ploughers, Spinners, Builders; Prophets, Poets, Kings; Brindleys and Goethes, Odins and Arkwrights; all martyrs, and noble men, and gods are of one grand Host: immeasurable; marching ever forward since the Beginnings of the World. The enormous, all-conquering, flame-crowned Host, noble every soldier in it; sacred, and alone noble. Let him who is not of it hide himself; let him tremble for himself. Stars at every button cannot make him noble; sheaves of Bath-garters, nor bushels of Georges; nor any other contrivance but manfully enlisting in it, valiantly taking place and step in it. O Heavens, will he not bethink himself; he too is so needed in the Host! It were so blessed, thrice-blessed, for himself and for us all! In hope of the Last Partridge, and some Duke of Weimar among our English Dukes, we will be patient yet a while.
The Future hides in it
Gladness and sorrow;
We press still thorow,
Nought that abides in it
Daunting us,—onward.
THE END
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Summary
Book I—Proem
Chap. I Midas
The condition of England one of the most ominous ever seen in this world: Full of wealth in every kind, yet dying of inanition; Workhouses, in which no work cane be done. Destitution in Scotland. Stockport Assizes. England's unprofitable success: Human faces glooming discordantly on one another. Midas longed for gold, and the gods gave it him.
Chap. II. The Sphinx
The grand unnamable Sphinx-riddle, which each man is called upon to solve. Notions of the foolish concerning justice and judgment. Courts of Westminster, and the general High Court of the Universe. The one strong thing, the just thing, the true thing. A noble Conservatism, as well as an ignoble. In all battles of men each fighter, in the end, prospers according to his right: Wallace of Scotland. Fact and Semblance. What is justice? As many men as there are in a Nation who can see Heaven's justice, so many are there who stand between it and perdition.
Chap. III. Manchester Insurrection
Peterloo not an unsuccessful Insurrection. Governors who wait for Insurrection to instruct them, getting into the fatalest courses. Unspeakable County Yeomanry. Poor Manchester operatives, and their huge inarticulate question: Unhappy Workers, unhappier idlers, of this actual England! Fair day's- wages for fair day's-work: Milton's 'wages;' Cromwell's. Pay to each man what he has earned and done and deserved; what more have we to ask? Some not _in_supportable approximation indispensable and inevitable.
Chap. IV. Morrison's Pill
A state of mind worth reflecting on. No Morrison's Pill for curing the maladies of Society: Universal alteration of regimen and way of life: Vain jargon giving place to some genuine Speech again. If we walk according to the Law of this Universe, the Law-Maker will befriend us; if not, not. Quacks, sham heroes, the one bane of the world. Quack and Dupe, upper side and under of the selfsame substance.
Chap. V. Aristocracy of Talent
All misery the fruit of unwisdom: Neither with individuals nor with Nations is it fundamentally otherwise. Nature in late centuries universally supposed to be dead; but now everywhere asserting herself to be alive and miraculous. That guidance of this country not sufficiently wise. Aristocracy of talent, or government by the Wisest, a dreadfully difficult affair to get started. The true eye for talent; and the flunky eye for respectabilities, warm garnitures and larders dropping fatness: Bobus and Bobissimus.
Chap. VI. Hero-worship
Enlightened Egoism, never so luminous, not the rule by which man's life can be led: A soul, different from a stomach in any sense of the word. Hero-worship done differently in every different epoch of the world. Reform, like Charity, must begin at home. Arrestment of the knaves and dastards, beginning by arresting our own poor selves out of that fraternity. The present Editor's purpose to himself full of hope. A Loadstar in the eternal sky: glimmering of light, for here and there a human soul.
Book II—The Ancient Monk
Chap. I. Jocelin of Brakelond
How the Centuries stand lineally related to each other. The one Book not permissible, the kind that has nothing in it. Jocelin's 'Chronicle,' a private Boswellean Note-book, now seven centuries old. How Jocelin, from under his monk's cowl, looked out on that narrow section of the world in a really human manner: A wise simplicity in him; a veracity that goes deeper than words. Jocelin's Monk-Latin; and Mr. Rokewood's editorial helpfulness and fidelity. A veritable Monk of old Bury St. Edmunds worth attending to. This England of ours, of the year 1200: Coeur-de- Lion: King Lackland, and his thirteenpenny mass. The poorest historical Fact, and the grandest imaginative Fiction.
Chap. II. St. Edmundsbury
St. Edmund's Bury, a prosperous brisk Town: Extensive ruins of the Abbey still visible. Assiduous Pedantry, and its rubbish- heaps called 'History.' Another world it was, when those black ruins first saw the sun as walls. At lowest, O dilettante friend, let us know always that it was a world. No easy matter to get across the chasm of Seven Centuries: Of all helps; a Boswell, even a small Boswell, the welcomest.
Chap. III. Landlord Edmund
'Battle of Fornham,' a fact, though a forgotten one. Edmund, Landlord of the Eastern Counties: A very singular kind of 'landlord.' How he came to be 'sainted.' Seen and felt to have done verily a man's part in this life pilgrimage of his. How they took up the slain body of their Edmund, and reverently embalmed it. Pious munificence, ever growing by new pious gifts. Certain Times do crystallise themselves in a magnificent manner; others in a rather shabby one.
Chap. IV. Abbot Hugo
All things have two faces, a light one and dark: The Ideal has to grow in the Real, and to seek its bed and board there, often in a very sorry manner. Abbot Hugo, grown old and feeble. Jew debts and Jew creditors. How approximate justice strives to accomplish itself. In the old monastic Books almost no Mention whatever of 'personal religion.' A poor Lord Abbot, all stuck- over with horse-leeches: A 'royal commission of inquiry,' to no purpose. A monk's first duty, obedience. Magister Samson, Teacher of the Novices. The Abbot's providential death.
Chap. V. Twelfth Century
Inspectors of Custodiars; the King not in any breathless haste to appoint a new Abbot. Dim and very strange looks that monk- life to us. Our venerable ancient spinning grandmothers, shrieking, and rushing out with their distaffs. Lakenheath eels too slippery to be caught. How much is alive in England, in that Twelfth Century; how much, not yet come into life. Feudal Aristocracy; Willelmus conquaestor: Not a steeple-chimney yet got on end from sea to sea.
Chap. VI. Monk Samson
Monk-Life and Monk-Religion: A great heaven-high Unquestionability, encompassing, interpenetrating all human Duties. Our modern Arkwright Joe-Manton ages: All human dues and reciprocities, changed into one great due of 'cash-payment' The old monks but a limited class of creatures, with a somewhat dull life of it. One Monk of a taciturn nature distinguishes himself among those babling ones. A Son of poor Norfolk parents. Little Samson's awful dream: His poor Mother dedicates him to St. Edmund. He grows to be a learned man, of devout grave nature. Sent to Rome on business; and returns too successful: Method of traveling thither in those days. His tribulations at home: Strange conditions under which Wisdom has sometimes to struggle with folly.
Chap. VII. The Canvassing
A new Abbot to be elected. Even gossip, seven centuries off, has
significance. The Prior with Twelve Monks, to wait on his
Majesty at Waltham. An 'election' the on important social act:
Given the Man a People choose, the worth and worthlessness of the
People itself is given.
Chap. VIII. The Election
Electoral methods and manipulations. Brother Samson ready oftenest with some question, some suggestion that his wisdom in it. The Thirteen off to Waltham, to choose their Abott: In the solitude of the Convent, Destiny thus big and in her birthtime, what gossiping, babbling, dreaming of dreams! King Henry II in his high Presence-chamber. Samson chosen Abbot: the King's royal acceptation. St. Edmundsbury Monks, without express ballot box or other winnowing machine. In every nation and Community there is at all times a fittest, wisest, bravest, best. Human Worth and human Worthlessness.
Chap. IX. Abbot Samson
The Lord Abbot's arrival at St. Edmundsbury: The self-same Samson yesterday a poor mendicant, this day, finds himself a Dominus Abbas and mitred Peer of Parliament. Depth and opulence of true social vitality in those old barbarous ages. True Governors go about under all manner of disguises now as then. Genius, Poet; what these words mean. George the Third, head charioteer of England; and Robert Burns, gauger of ale in Dumfries. How Abbot Samson found a Convert all in dilapidation. His life-long harsh apprenticeship to governing, namely obeying. First get your Man; all is got. Danger of blockheads.
Chap. X. Government
Beautiful, how the chrysalis governing-soul, shaking off its dusty slough and prison, starts forth winged, a true royal soul! One first labour, to institute a strenuous review and radical reform of his economics. Wheresoever Disorder may stand or lie, let it have a care; here is a man that has declared war with it. In less than four years the Convent debts are all liquidated, and the harpy Jews banished from St. Edmundsbury. New life springs beneficent everywhere: Spiritual rubbish as little tolerated as material.
Chap. XI. The Abbot's Ways
Reproaches, open and secret, of ingratitude, unsociability; Except for 'fit men' in all kinds, hard to say for whom Abbot Samson had much favour. Remembrance of benefits. An eloquent man, but intent more on substance than on ornament. A just clear heart the basis of all true talent. One of the justest of judges; His invaluable 'talent of silence.' Kind of people he liked worst. Hospitality and stocism. The country in those days still dark with noble wood and umbrage; How the old trees gradually died out, no man heeding it. Monachism itself, so rich and fruitful once, now all rotted into peat. Devastations of four-footed cattle and Henry-the-Eighths.
Chap. XII. The Abbot's Troubles
The troubles of Abbot Samson more than tongue can tell. Not the spoil of victory, only the glorious toil of battle, can be theirs who really govern. An insurrection of the Monks: Behave better, ye remiss Monks, and thank Heaven for such an Abbot. Worn down with incessant toil and tribulation: Gleams of hilarity too; little snatches of encouragement granted even to a Governor. How my Lord of Clare, coming to claim his _un_due 'debt,' gets a Roland for his Oliver. A Life of Literature, noble and ignoble.
Chap. XIII. In Parliament
Confused days of Lackland's usurpation, while Coeur-de-Lion was away: Our brave Abbot took helmet himself, excommunicating all who should favour Lackland. Kind Richard a captive in Germany. St. Edmund's Shrine not meddled with: A heavenly Awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought and must, all earthly Business whatsoever.
Chap. XIV. Henry of Essex
How St. Edmund punished terribly, yet with mercy; A Naratice significant of the time. Henry Earl of Essex, standard-bearer of England: No right reverence for the Heavenly in Man. A traitor or coward. Solemn Duel, by the King's appointment. An evil Conscience doth make cowards of us all.
Chap. XV. Practical-Devotional
A Tournament proclaimed and held in the Abbot's domain, in spite of him. Roystering young dogs brought to reason. The Abbot a man that generally remains master at last: The importunate Bishop of Ely outwitted. A man that dare abide King Richard's anger, with justice on his side. Thou brave Richard, thou brave Samson! The basis of Abbot Samson's life truly religion. His zealous interest in the Crusades. The great antique heart, like a child's in its simplicity, like a man's in its earnest solemnity and depth. His comparative silence as to his religion precisely the healthiest sign of him and it. Methodism, dilettantism, Puseyism.
Chap. XVI. St. Edmund
Abbot Samson built many useful, many pious edifices: All ruinous, incomplete things an eye-sorrow to him. Rebuilding the great Altar: A glimpse of the glorious Martyr's very Body. What a scene; how far vanished from us, in these unworshipping ages of ours! The manner of men's Hero-worship, verily the innermost fact of their existence, determining all the rest. On the whole, who knows how to reverence the Body of man? Abbot Samson, at the culminating point of his existence: Our real-phantasmagory of St. Edmundsbury plunges into the bosom of the Twelfth Century again, and all is over.
Chap. XVII. The Beginnings
Formulas the very skin and muscular tissue of a Man's Life: Living Formulas and dead. Habit the deepest law of human nature. A pathway through the pathless. Nationalities. Pulpy infancy, kneaded, baked into any form you choose: The Man of business; the hard-handed Labourer; the genus Dandy. No Mortal out of the depths of Bedlam but lives by Formulas. The hosts and generations of brave men Oblivion has swallowed: Their crumbled dust, the soil our life-fruit grows on. Invention of Speech; Forms of Worship; Methods of Justice. This English Land, here and now, the summary of what was wise and noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the generations of English Men. The thing called 'Fame.'
Book III.—The Modern Worker
Chap. I. Phenomena
How men have 'forgotten God;' taken the Fact of this Universe as it is not; God's Laws become a Greatest-happiness Principle, a Parliamentary Expediency. Man has lost the soul out of him, and begins to find the want of it. The old Pope of Rome, with his stuffed dummy to do the kneeling for him. Few men that worship by the rotatory Calabash, do it in half so great, frank or effectual a way. Our Aristocracy no longer able to do its work, and not in the least conscious that it has any work to do. The Champion of England 'lifted into his saddle.' The hatter in the Strand, mounting a huge lath-and-plaster Hat. Our noble ancestors have fashioned for us, in how many thousand sense, a 'life-road;' and we their sons are madly, literally enough, 'consuming the way.'
Chap. II. Gospel of Mammonism
Heaven and Hell, often as the words are on our tongue, got to be fabulous or semi-fabulous for most of us. The real 'Hell' of the English. Cash-payment, not the sole or even chief relation of human beings. Practical Atheism, and its despicable fruits. One of Dr. Alison's melancholy facts: A poor Irish widow, in the Lanes of Endinburgh, proving her sisterhood. Until we get a human soul within us, all things are _im_possible: Infatuated geese, with feathers and without.
Chap. III. Gospel of Dilettantism
Mammonism at least works; but 'Go gracefully idle in Mayfair,' what does or can that mean?—Impotent, insolent Donothingism in Practice and Saynothingism in Speech. No man now speaks a plain word: Insincere Speech the prime material of insincere Action. Moslem parable of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead sea: The Universe become a Humbug to the Apes that thought it one.
Chap. IV. Happy
All work noble; and every noble crown a crown of thorns. Man's pitiful pretension to be what he calls "happy;" His Greatest- Happiness Principle fast becoming a rather unhappy one. Byron's large audience. A philosophical Doctor: A disconsolate Meat- jack, gnarring and creaking with rust and work. The only 'happiness' a brave man ever troubled himself much about, the happiness to get his work done.
Chap. V. The English
With all thy theoretic platitudes, what a depth of practical sense in thee, great England! A dumb people, who can do great acts, but not describe them. The noble Warhorse, and the Dog of Knowledge: The freest utterances not by any means the best. The done Work, much more than the spoken Word, an epitome of the man. The Man of Practice, and the Man of Theory: Ineloquent Brindley. The English, of all Nations the stupidest in speech, the wisest in action: Sadness and seriousness: Unconsciously this great Universe is great to them. The silent Romans. John Bull's admirable insensibility to Logic. All great Peoples conservative. Kind of Ready-Reckoner a Solecism in East-cheap. Berserkir rage. Truth and Justice alone capable of being 'conserved.' Bitter indignation engendered by the Corn-Laws in every just English heart.
Chap. VI. Two Centuries
The 'Settlement' of the year 1660 one of the mournfulest that ever took place in this land of ours. The true end of Government to guide men in the way they should go: The true good of this life, the portal of infinite good in the life to come. Oliver Cromwell's body hung on the Tyburn gallows, the type of Puritanism found futil, inexecutable, execrable. The Spiritualism of England, for two godless centuries, utterly forgettable: Her practical material Work alone memorable. Bewildering obscurations and impediments: Valiant Sons of Toil enchanted, by the million, in their Poor-Law Bastille. Giant Labour yet to be King of this Earth.
Chap. VII. Over-Production
An idle Governing Class addressing its Workers with an indictment of 'Over-production.' Duty of justly apportioning the Wages of Work done. A game-preserving Aristocracy, guiltless of producing or apportioning anything. Owning the soil of England. The Working Aristocracy steeped in ignoble Mammonism: The Idle Aristocracy, with its yellow parchments and pretentious futilities.
Chap. VIII. Unworking Aristocracy
Our Land the Mother of us all: No true Aristocracy but must possess the Land. Men talk of 'selling' Land: Whom it belongs to. Our much-consuming Aristocracy: By the law of their position bound to furnish guidance and governance. Man and miserable Corn-Laws. The Working Aristocracy, and its terrible New-Work: The Idle Aristocracy, and its horoscope of despair. A High Class without duties to do, like a tree planted on precipices. In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie. The pagan Hercules; the Czar of Russia. Parchments, venerable and not venerable. Benedict the Jew, and his usuries. No Chapter on the Corn-Laws: The Corn-Laws too mad to have a Chapter.
Chap. IX. Working Aristocracy
Many things for the Working Aristocracy, in their exteme need, to consider. A national Existence supposed to depend on 'selling cheaper' than any other People. Let inventive men try to invent a little how cotton at its present cheapness could be somewhat justlier divided. Many 'imposibilities' will have to become possible. Supply-and-demand: For what noble work was there ever yet any audible 'demand' in that poor sense?
Chap. X. Plugson of Undershot
Man's Philosophies usually the 'supplement of his practice:' Symptoms of social death. Cash-Payment: The Plugson Ledger, and the Tablets of heaven's Chancery, discrepant exceedingly. All human things do require to have an Ideal in them. How murderous fighting became a 'glorious Chivalry.' Noble devout-hearted Chevaliers. Ignoble Bucaniers and Chactaw Indians: Howel Davies, Napoleon flung out, at last, to St. Helena; the latter end of him sternly compensating for the beginning. The indomitable Plugson, as yet a Bacanier and Chactaw. William Conqueror and his Norman followers. Organisation of Labour: Courage, there are yet many brave men in England!
Chap. XI. Labour
A perennial nobleness and even sacredness in Work. Significance of the Potter's Wheel. Blessed is he who has found his Work; let him ask no other blessedness. A brave Sir Christopher, and his Paul's Cathedral: Every noble work at first 'impossible.' Columbus royalest Sea-king of all: a depth of Silence, deeper than the Sea; a silence unsoundable; known to God only.
Chap. XII. Reward
Work is worship: Labour, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven. One monster there is in the world, the idle man. 'Fair day's-wages for a fair day's-work,' the most unrefusable demand. The 'wages' of every noble Work in Heaven, or else Nowhere: The brave man has to give his Life away. He that works bodies forth the form of Things Unseen. Strange mystic affinity of Wisdom and Insanity: All Work, in its degree, a making of Madness sane. Labour not a devil, even when encased in Mammonism: The unredeemed ugliness, a slothful People. The vulgarist Plugson of a Master-Worker, not a man to strangle by Corn-Laws and Shotbelts.
Chap. XIII. Democracy
Man must actually have his debts and earnings a little better paid by man. At no time was the lot of the dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as now. Sisterhood, brotherhood often forgotten, but never before so expressly denied. Mungo Park and his poor Black Benefactress. Gurth, born thrall of Cedric the Saxon: Liberty a divine thing; but 'liberty to die by starvation' not so divine. Nature's Aristocracies. William Conqueror, a resident House-Surgeon provided by nature for her beloved English People. Democracy, the despair of finding Heroes to govern us, and contented putting-up with the want of them. The very Tailor unconsciously symbolising the reign of Equality. Wherever ranks do actually exist, strict division of costumes will also be enforced. Freedom from oppression, an indispensable yet most insignificant portion of Human Liberty. A best path does exist for every man; a thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do. Mock Superiors and Real Superiors.
Chap. XIV. Sir Jabesh Windbag
Oliver Cromwell, the remarkablest Governor we have had for the last five centuries or so: No vulunteer in Public Life, but plainly a balloted soldier: The Government of England put into his hands. Windbag, weak in the faith of a God; strong only in the faith that Paragraphs and Plausibilities bring votes. Five years of popularity or unpopularity; and after those five years, an Eternity. Oliver has to appear before the Most High Judge: Windbag, appealing to 'Posterity.'
Chap. XV. Morison Again
New Religions: This new stage of progress, proceeding 'to invent God,' a very strange one indeed. Religion, the Inner Light or Moral Conscience of a man's soul. Infinite difference between a Good man and a Bad. The Great soul of the World, just and not unjust: Faithful, unspoken, but not ineffectual 'prayer.' Penalities: The French Revolution; cruelest Portent that has risen into created Space these ten centuries. Man needs no "New Religion;" nor is like to get it: spiritual Dastardism, and sick folly. One Liturgy which does remain forever unexceptionable, that of Praying by Working. Sauerteig on the symbolic influences of Washing. Chinese Pontiff-Emperor and his significant 'punctualities.' Goethe and German Literature. The great event for the world, now as always, the arrival in it of a new Wise Man. Goethe's Mason-Lodge.