PAST AND PRESENT T II OMAS C A II L Y L E . SntiSt iet »a* icbcit. Schiller BOHTOiN : CHARLES C. LITTLE A XL JAMES BROWN, MDCCCXlilll. DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Treasure %oom mt ?y \V & PAST AND PRESENT BY THOMAS CARLYLE. grnst i$t fc>a£ iebeu. Schiller. BOSTON: CHARLES C. LITTLE AND JAMES BROWN. MDCCCXLIII. boston: printed by freeman axd bolles, WASHINGTON STREET. C236PA AMERICAN EDITOR'S NOTICE. This book is printed from a private copy, partly in manuscript, sent by the author to his friends in this country, and is published for his benefit. I hope this notice that the profits of the sale of this edition are secured to Mr. Carlyle, will persuade every well dis- posed publisher to respect his property in his own book. R. W. Emerson. Concord, Mass. ) May 1, 1843. 1 CONTENTS BOOK I. -r- Proem. PAGE Chap. I. Midas 1 II. The Sphinx 7 III. Manchester Insurrection 14 IV. Morrison's Pill 22 V. Aristocracy of Talent 2d VI. Hero-Worship . 32 BOOK II. — The Ancient Monk. Chap. I. Jocelin of Brakelond 39 II. St. Edmundsbury 46 III. Landlord Edmund 50 IV. Abbot Hugo 57 V. Twelfth Century 62 VI. Monk Samson 66 VII. The Canvassing 73 VIII. The Election ~ . 76 IX. Abbot Samson S3 X. Government . 89 XI. The Abbot's Ways 93 XII. The Abbot's Troubles 99 XIII. In Parliament 104 XIV. Henry of Essex 106 XV. Practical-Devotional 110 XVI. St. Edmund . 117 XVII. The Beginnings 125 VI CONTENTS. BOOK III. — The Modern Worker. Chap. I. Phenomena . . * II. Gospel of Mammonism III. Gospel of Dilletantism IV. 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 PAGE 137 145 151 154 159 167 171 175 183 188 196 201 209 221 225 BOOK IV. — Horoscope. Chap.- I. Aristocracies 239 II. Bribery Committee • 251 III. The One Institution- 256 IV. Captains of Industry 268 V. Permanence 275 VI. The Landed 281 VII. The Gifted 287 VIII. The Didactic . 292 BOOK I PROEM. CHAPTER I. The condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on in every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world.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, sup- ply for human want in every kind ; yet England is dying of inani- tion. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows ; waving with yellow harvests ; thick-studded with work- shops, 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 Enchant- ment has gone forth, saying, "Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master-idlers ; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it ; this is enchanted fruit ! " On the poor workers such fiat falls first, in its rudest shape ; but on the rich master-workers too it falls ; neither can the rich master-idlers, nor any richest or highest man escape, but all are like to be brought low with it, and made ' poor ' enough, in the money-sense or a far fataller one. Of these successful skilful workers some two millions, it is now counted, sit in Workhouses, Poor-law Prisons ; or have ' out- door relief ' flung over the wall to them, — the workhouse Bastille being filled to bursting, and the strong Poor-law broken asunder by a stronger.* They sit there, these many months now ; their hope of deliverance as yet small. In workhouses, pleasantly so * The Return of Paupers for England and Wales, at Ladyday, 1842, is, 1 In-door 221,687, Out-door 1,207,402, Total 1, 429,089.' {Official Report.) 1 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 impris- oned and enchanted, that they may not perish starved. The picturesque Tourist, in a sunny autumn day, through this boun- teous realm of England, descries the Union Workhouse on his path. ' Passing by the Workhouse of St. Ives in Huntingdon- ' shire, on a bright day last autumn,' says the picturesque Tour- ist, ' I saw sitting on wooden benches, in front of their Bastille ' and within their ring-wall and its railings, some half-hundred ' or more of these men. Tall robust figures, young mostly or of ' middle age ; of honest countenance, many of them thoughtful ' and even intelligent-looking men. Theysat there, near by one 1 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 1 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 for- ' bidden to obey. It is impossible, they tell us!". There was 1 something that reminded me of Dante's Hell in the look of all ' this ; and I rode swiftly away.' So many hundred thousands sit in workhouses : and other hun- dred 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 deso- lation, 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 MIDAS. 3 are not of this year, or of last year, have no reference to our pre- sent 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 con- dition 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-Laborer 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. A't 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 3/. 85. 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 pro- fessing 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 them- selves, What shall we do to escape starvation? We are deep sunk here, in our dark cellar; and help is far. — Yes, in the Ugolino Hunger-tower stern things happen ; best-loved little Gaddo fallen dead on Ms Father's knees! — The Stockport Mother and Father think and hint : Our poor little standing 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 de- graded 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 suc- cessful 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 pur- chase nothing good with them. In Poor and Rich, instead of no- ble 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 MIDAS. 5 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 in- crease 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 dis- cordantly, 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 1 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 futili- ties, 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 argu- ments for it are of a kind to strike men too literally dumb. To whom, then, is this wealth of England wealth? Who is it that it blesses ; makes happier, wiser, 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, 6 PROEM. 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 god- dess, 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 1 Of each man she asks daily, in mild voice, yet with a terrible signifi- cance, " 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 preci- pices, 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 8 PROEM. 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 Shamtrue. 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 preach- ing for one thing, to remind thee of such a fact ; which all man- ner 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 bot- tom, 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, THE SPHINX. « of redtape philosophy, of expediencies, clubroom moralities, Par- liamentary majorities to the mind's eye, thou beautifully rollest : but knowest thou whitherward 1 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 ig- noblest, his inertia ; whatsoever of noble and ignoble Conserva- tism there is in men and Nations, strongest always in the strong- est men and Nations : all this is as a road to thee, paved smooth through the abyss, — till all this end. Till men's bitter necessi- ties 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 tome ; 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 venera- blest, nor the greatest, nor the strongest ! Acts of Parliament are venerable ; but if they correspond not with the writing on the ' xldamant Tablet,' what are they 1 Properly their one ele- ment of venerableness, of strength or greatness, is, that they at all times correspond therewith as near as by human possi- bility 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 ! Honour- able Gentlemen may find this worth considering, in times like ours. And truly, the din of triumphant Law-logic, and all shak- ing of horse-hair wigs and learned-sergeant gowns having com- fortably 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 10 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 modifiea" tion, for reversal with costs. Dost thou know that Court ; hast thou had any Law-practice there 1 What, didst thou never enter ; never file any petition of redress, reclaimer, disclaimer or demur- rer, written as in thy heart's blood, for thy own behoof or anoth- er's ; and silently await the issue ? Thou knowest not such a Court 1 Hast merely heard of it by faint tradition as a thing that was or had been 1 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 withbut horse-hair, what sane man will not reverence these 1 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, can- not make unjust just. The grand question still remains, Was the judgment just 1 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 statut- ing, 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 ever- lasting 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, w T ith its wild- whirling eddies and mad foam-oceans, w r here 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 THE SPHINX. II 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 un- just 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 1 If the thing is unjust, thou hast not suc- ceeded ; 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 shew 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 rebound- ings ; whereupon some blockhead shall be heard jubilating, " See, your Heaviest ascends ! " — but at all moments it is moving cen- treward, 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 12 PROEM. 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 light 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 Scot- land 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 lightest 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 THE SPHINX. 13 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 jest- ing Pilate asking, What is truth 1 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 West- minster Hall, with penalties, parchments, tipstaves, is very visible. But the wnembodied Justice, whereof that other is either an em- blem, or else is a fearful indescribability, is not so visible ! For the unembodied Justice is of Heaven ; a Spirit, and Divinity of Heaven, — mvisible 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 Insur- rection, 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 mil- lion-headed hydra, and tread it down, without the smallest ap- peasement 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 suc- ceeded 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 1 Their wrongs and griefs were bitter, in- supportable, their rage against the same was just : but who are they that cause these wrongs, who that will honestly make effort to redress them 1 Our enemies are we know not who or what ; our friends are we know not where ! How shall we attack any MANCHESTER INSURRECTION. 15 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 Behe- moth 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 Val- our ! How can there be any remedy in insurrection 1 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 flour- 16 PROEM. rishing, 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 balan- ced, 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 suc- cess possible for it. And this was w T hat 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 1 " 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 ex- pect 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 honor the poor Manchester Insurrection, and augur well of it. A deep un- spoken sense lies in these strong men, — inconsiderable, almost MANCHESTER INSURRECTION. 17 stupid, as all they can articulate of it is. Amid all violent stupid- ity 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, inar- ticulately 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 1 And expect that we are to remain quietly unled, and in a composed manner perish of starva- tion 1 What is it you expect of us 1 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 multipli- cation-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-look- ing stillness and paralysis ; times definable as shewing two quali- ties, Dilettantism and Mammonism ; — most intricate obstructed times ! Nay, if there were not a Heaven's radiance of Justice, prophetic, clearly of Heaven, discernible behind all these confused world-wide entanglements, of Landlord interests, Manufacturing 13 interests, Tory-Whig interests, and who knows what other in- terests, expediencies, vested interesls, established possessions, inveterate Dilettantisms, Midas-eared Mammonisms, — it would seem to every one a flat impossibility, which all wise men might as well at once abandon. If you do not know eternal Justice from momentary Expediency, and understand in your heart of hearts how Justice, radiant, beneficent, as the all-victorious Light-ele- ment, is also in essence, if need be, an all-victorious Fire-e\ement, 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 docu- mentary of a whole world of such, ever since human history be- gan. Oliver Cromwell quitted his farming ; undertook a Hercu- les' Labour and lifelong wrestle with that Lernean Hydra-coil, wide as England, hissing heaven-high through its thousand crowned, coroneted, shovel-hatted quackheads ; and he did wres- tle 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 MANCHESTER INSURRECTION. 19 and insincere persons ; an everlasting encouragement, new me- mento, 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 Fran- chisers ; 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 1 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 foith, answer we ; true enough ! And yet withal we have to remark, that imperfect Hu- man 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 ! 20 PROEM. They as yet clamour for no more ; the rest, still inarticulate, can- not 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 approxi- mation they would rest patient with, That by their work they might be kept alive to work more ! — This once grown unattaina- ble, I think, your approximation may consider itself to have reached the insupportable stage ; and may prepare, with what- ever 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 Aa/irfworker 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 so- lution 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 ; use- less 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, MANCHESTER INSURRECTION. 21 to yield shirts if you will spin and weave in it, did the mere man- ual two-handed worker (however it might fare with other work- ers) 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 impos- sible. 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 impos- sible. 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 befal. 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 re- store it once for all to the Jotuns, Mud-giants, Frost-giants and Chaotic Brute-gods of the Beginning 1 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 an awful omen ; to all of us, and to your- selves first of all. CHAPTER IV. Morrison's pill. What is to be done, what would you have us do 1 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 ques- tion, and such rejoinder, is worth reflecting on. It seems to be taken for granted, by these interrogative philoso- phers, 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 reme- dial 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 1 Brothers, I am sorry I have got no Morrison's Pill for curing the maladies of Society. It were infi- nitely 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 mis- chiefs ! 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 agonizing divorce between you and your chime- ras, luxuries and falsities, take place ; a most toilsome, all but ' im- possible ' return to Nature, and her veracities, and her integrities, take place : that so the inner fountains of life may again begin, Morrison's pill. 23 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 discover- able ! 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 com- manded 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 awhile, may almost in a manner disappear, — the wise an- swering 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 1 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 24 PROEM. attempt doing ; which it were better for you to have a millstone tied round your neck, and be cast into the sea, than concern your- self with doing ! — Brothers, it will not be a Morrison's Pill, or remedial measure, that will bring all this about for us. And yet, very literally, till, in some shape or other, it be brought about, we remain cureless ; till it begin to be brought about, the cure does not begin. For Nature and Fact, not Redtape and Semblance, are to this hour the basis of man's life ; and on those, through never such strata of these, man and his life and all his interests do, sooner or later, infallibly come to rest, — and to be supported or be swallowed according as they agree with those. The question is asked of them, not, How do you agree with Downing-street and accredited Semblance ? but, How do you agree with God's Universe and the actual Reality of things ? This Universe has its Laws. If we walk according to the Law, the Law-Maker will befriend us ; if not, not. Alas, by no Re- form 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 alem- bic 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 1 ' 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 1 allow me to reply : By thee, for the present, almost nothing. Thou there, the thing for thee to do is, if possi- ble, 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 Morrison's pills. 25 then there can be nothing done ! brother, we must if possible resuscitate some soul and conscience in us, exchange our dilet- tantisms 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 our- selves 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 blas- phemy, 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 swallow- ing 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, objur- gation'? Not so at all ; the reverse of so. All moralists advise him not to complain of any person or of any thing, but of him- self 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 signi- ficance 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 Sem- blance, 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 never- theless 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 ARISTOCRACY OF TALENT. 27 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 un- happy. 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 there- fore 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 misguided : 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 them- selves, 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 1 brass at all, but alive and miraculous, celestial-infernal, with an 1 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 1 Reform Bill proves to be a failure ; Benthamee Radicalism, the gospel of ' Enlightened Selfishness,' dies out, or dwindles into Five-point Chartism, amid the tears and hootings of men : what next are we to hope or try? Five-point Charter, Free-trade ; Church-extension, Sliding-scale ; what, in Heaven's name, are we next to attempt, that we sink not in inane Chimera, and be devoured of Chaos ? — The case is pressing, and one of the most complicated in the world. A God's-message never came to thicker-skinned people ; never had a God's-mes- sage to pierce through thicker integuments, into heavier ears. It is Fact, speaking once more, in miraculous thunder-voice, from out of the centre of the world ; — how unknown its language to the deaf and foolish many ; how distinct, undeniable, terrible and yet beneficent, to the hearing few : Behold, ye shall grow wiser, or ye shall die ! Truer to Nature's Fact, or inane Chimera will swallow you ; in whirlwinds of fire, you and your Mammonisms, Dilettantisms, your Midas-eared philosophies, double-barrelled Aristocracies, shall disappear ! — Such is the God's-message to us, once more, in these modern days. We must have more Wisdom to govern us, we must be gov- erned by the Wisest, w T e must have an Aristocracy of Talent ! cry many. True, most true ; but how to get if? 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 mere- ' ly which took the wages of governing, and could not with all ' our industry be kept from misgoverning, corn-lawing, and play- • ing 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 1 expect, my friends, that your indispensable Aristocracy of Talent ' is to be enlisted straightway, by some sort of recruitment afore- ' thought, out of the general population ; arranged in supreme ' regimental order ; and set to rule over us 1 That it will be got ; sifted, like wheat out of chaff, from the Twenty-seven Million 1 British subjects ; that any Ballot-box, Reform Bill, or other Po- 4 litical Machine, with Force of Public Opinion never so active on 1 it, is likely to perform said process of sifting 1 Would to Heaven ARISTOCRACY OF TALENT. 29 e 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 sift- 1 ing-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 1 Is it to talent, intrinsic ' manly worth of any kind, you unfortunate Bobus 1 The man- ' liest 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 1 Talent ! I understand you ' to be able to worship the fame of talent, the power, cash, cele- ' brity or other success of talent ; but the talent itself is a thing 1 you never saw with eyes. Nay what is it in yourself that you i are proudest of, that you take most pleasure in surveying medi- ' tatively in thoughtful moments 1 Speak now, is it the bare Bo- ' bus 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 respect- ' abilities, 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 1 finite, — measurable by the degree of currency, and conquest of ' praise or pudding, it has brought you to 1 Bobus, you are in a 3* 30 PROEM. i vicious circle, rounder than one of your own sausages ; and will c 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 befal : 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, im- measurablest, — 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 Unwis- doms, 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 Wis- dom, — and make your utmost Collective Wisdom, were it col- lected and elected by Rhadamanthus, iEacus 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 1 As well wash Thames mud, by improved methods, to find more gold in it. Truly, the first condition is indispensable, That Wisdom be ARISTOCRACY OF TALENT. 31 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, be- cause 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, 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 re- spect to the means of realising it. He thinks that we have at once missed realising it, and come to need it so pressingly, by de- parting fai from the inner eternal Laws and taking up with the temporary outer semblances of Laws. He thinks that ' enlight- ened Egoism,' never so luminous, is not the rule by which man's life can be led. That 'Laissez-faire,' ' Supply-and-demand,' ' Cash-payment for the sole nexus,' and so forth, were not, are not, and will never be, a practicable Law of Union for a Society of Men. That Poor and Rich, that Governed and Governing, cannot long live together on any such Law of Union. Alas, he thinks that man has a soul in him, different from the stomach in any sense of this word ; that if said soul be asphyxied, and lie quietly forgotten, the man and his affairs are in a bad way. He thinks that said soul will have to be resuscitated from its asphyxia ; that if it prove irresuscitable, the man is not long for this world. In brief, that Midas-eared Mammonism, double-barrelled Dilettan- tism, 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 Heav- en, 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. HERO-WORSHIP. 33 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, in- formed 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 awaken- ing 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 Flunkey- ism, 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 Char- ity, 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 34 PROEM. 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 block- headisms 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 Var- restation des coquins et des laches.'''' ' Arrestment of the knaves and dastards : ' ah, we know what a work that is ; how long it will be before they are all or mostly got ' arrested : ' — but here is one ; arrest him, in God's name ; it is one fewer ! We will, in all practicable ways, by word and silence, by act and refusal to act, energetically demand that arrestment, — "je demande cette arrestation-la ! " — and by degrees infallibly attain it. Infallibly : for light spreads ; all human souls, never so bedarkened, love light; light once kindled spreads, till all is luminous ; — till the cry, " Arrest your knaves and dastards " rises imperative from millions of hearts, and rings and reigns from sea to sea. Nay, how many of them may we not ' arrest ' with our own hands, even now ; we ! Do not countenance them, thou there : turn away from their lackered sumptuosities, their belauded sophistries, their serpent graciosities, their spoken and acted cant, with a sa- cred 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 HERO-WORSHIP. 35 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 constitu- tion and existence from the very centre of it ; a new body to be got, with resuscitated soul, — not without convulsive travail- throes ; as all birth and new-birth presupposes travail ! This is sad news to a disconsolate discerning Public, hoping to have got off by some Morrison's Pill, some Saint-John's corrosive mixture and perhaps a little blister y friction on the back ! — We were pre- pared to part with our Corn-Law, with various Laws and Unlaws : but this, what is this 1 ? 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 divert- ed 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 36 PROEM. Heroic Promised Land ; under that Heaven' s-light, my brethren, bloom the Happy Isles, — there, O there ! Thither will we ; 1 There dwells the great Achilles whom we knew.' * 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 .Apo/Zo-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 endeavor 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-trek 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 ! * Tennyson's Poems (Ulysses). BOOK II. THE ANCIENT MONK. CHAPTER I. JOCELIN OF BRAKELOND. We will, in this Second Portion of our Work, strive to penetrate a little, by means of certain confused Papers, printed and other, into a somewhat remote Century ; and to look face to face on it, in hope of perhaps illustrating our own poor Century thereby. It seems a circuitous way ; but it may prove a way nevertheless. For man has even 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 elu- cidation. 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 what- soever ! 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 desig- nation art thou called ; in what wig and black triangle dost thou walk abroad? Heavens, I know thy destination and black triangle well enough ! But, in God's name, what art thou % Not No- thing, 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. 40 THE ANCIENT MONK. 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 Joce- lin, 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 foi us in the Elysian Fields of Memory, is domestic in comparison. And then the ideas, life-furniture, whole workings and ways of this worthy Jocelin ; covered deeper than Pompeii with the lava-ashes and inarticulate wreck of seven hundred years ! Jocelin of Brakelond cannot be called a conspicuous literary character ; indeed few mortals that have left so visible a work, or footmark, behind them can be more obscure. One other of those vanished Existences, whose work has not yet vanished ; — almost a pathetic phenomenon, were not the whole world full of such ! The builders of Stonehenge, for example : — or alas, what say we, Stonehenge and builders? The writers of the Universal Re- view and Ho?ner , s Iliad ; the paviers of London streets ; — sooner or later, the entire Posterity of Adam ! It is a pathetic phenom- enon ; 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, Brake- lend being the known old name of a street or quarter in that vener- able Town. Then farther, sure enough, our Jocelin was a Monk of St. Edmundsbury Convent ; held some ' obediential 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 * Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda, de rebus g-estis Samsonis Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Edmundi : nunc primum typis mandata, curante Jo- hanne Gage Rokewood. (Camden Society, London, 1840.) JOCELIN OF BRAKELOND. 41 present Book, and of the chief meaning it has for us now. He was, as we have hinted, a kind of born Bosivell, though an in- finitesimally small one ; neither did he altogether want his John- son even there and then. Johnsons are rare ; yet, as has been asserted, Boswells perhaps still rarer, — the more is the pity on both sides ! This Jocelin, as we can discern well, was an inge- nious and ingenuous, a cheery-hearted, innocent, yet withal shrewd, noticing, quick-witted man ; and from under his monk's cowl has looked out on that narrow section of the world in a really human manner ; not in any simial, canine, ovine, or otherwise in- human manner, — afflictive to all that have humanity ! The man is of patient, peaceable, loving, clear-smiling nature ; open for this and that. A wise simplicity is in him ; much natural sense ; a veracity that goes deeper than words. Veracity : it is the basis of all ; and, some say, means genius itself; the prime essence of all genius whatsoever. Our Jocelin, for the rest, has read his classical manuscripts, his Virgilius, his Flaccus, Ovidius Naso ; of course still more, his Homilies and Breviaries, and if not the Bible, considerable extracts of the Bible. Then also he has a pleasant wit ; and loves a timely joke, though in mild subdued manner : very amiable to see. A learned grown man, yet with the heart as of a good child ; whose whole life indeed has been that of a child, — St. Edmundsbury Monastery a larger kind of cradle for him, in which his whole prescribed duty was to sleep kindly, and love his mother well ! This is the Biography of Jocelin ; ' a man of excellent religion,' says one of his contempo- rary Brother Monks, ' eximice 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 no- tablest 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 inno- cent 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 Crom- well, the Dissolution of Monasteries, and all accidents of malice 4# 42 THE ANCIENT MONK. and neglect for six centuries or so, it got into the Harleian Collec- tion — 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 Man- uscript 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 comforta- ble 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 : some- times 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 Jocclin is, as it professes to be, unwrapped from its thick cerements, and fairly brought forth into 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 bre- viaries, with their shaven crowns, hair-cilices, and vows of pover- ty, 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 JOCELIN OF BRAKELOND. 43 magical speculum, much gone to rust indeed, yet in fragments still clear ; wherein the marvellous image of his existence does still shadow itself, though fitfully, and as with an intermittent light ! Will not the reader peep with us into this singular camera lucida, where an extinct species, though fitfully, can still be seen alive? Extinct species, we say; for the live specimens which still go about under that character are too evidently to be classed as spurious in Natural History : the Gospel of Richard Arkvvright 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 unfortu- nately, 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 ; other- wise 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 neigh- bourly 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 hun- dred 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 Fcedera, 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 for- tunes. Cloth was woven and worn ; ditches were dug, furrow- fields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle 44 THE ANCIENT MONK. 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 Fcedera at all ! Cceur-de-Lion was not a theatrical popinjay with greaves and steel-cap on it, but a man living upon victuals, — not imported by Peel's Tariff. Cceur-de-Lion came palpably athwart this Jocelin at St. Edmunds- bury ; 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, palpa- ble to the very fingers of our Jocelin : 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 w r ay, 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,' 1 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 JOCELIN OF BRAKELOND. 45 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 Joce- lin ; 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. EDMUXDSBURY. The Burg, Bury, or ' Berry' as they call it, of St. Emund 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 Dilet- tantism ; 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 Dilet- tantism. Giant Pedantry also will step in, with its huge Dugdale and other enormous Monasticons under its arm, and cheerfully ap- prise 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 ST. EDMUNDSBURY. 47 was built by &c. &c. — Till human nature can stand no more of it ; till human nature desperately take refuge in forgetful n ess, al- most 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 chiselling, first saw the sun as walls, long ago. Gauge not, with thy dilettante compasses, with that placid dilettante simper, the Heaven's-Watch- tower of our Fathers, the fallen God's-Houses, the Golgotha of true Souls departed ! Their architecture, belfries, land-car ucates 1 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 sou!, — 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 1 ? Yes, a most poor platitude ; and even, if thou wilt, an idolatry and blasphemy, should any one persuade thee to be- lieve 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 befal ! 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 48 THE ANCIENT MONK. 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 fool- ishly. But at lowest, 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 gi- gantic Life lies buried there ! It is dead now, and dumb ; hut 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 ! Joeelin is weak and garrulous, but he is human. Through the thin watery ST. EDMUNDSBURY. 49 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 ! Beauti- fully, 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 innu- merable 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 twi- light, 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.' 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 quarrelled 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 * 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 peopft, 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 peopSan equivalent to the German werden, means to g-roic, 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, ' Wo worth the hour.' (Wo befal 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 groicn to, What a man has grown to, How much he amounts to, — by the Threadneedle-street stand- ard or another ! LANDLORD EDMUND. 51 army of Flemings. Returns, to the coast of Suffolk ; to Fram- lingham Castle, where he is welcomed ; westward towards St. Edmundsbury and Fornham Church, where he is met by the con- stituted 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. Cop- per 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 revolu- tion, — 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. Like the St. Edmund's Monastery itself! Who can doubt, after what we have said, that there was a Monastery here at one time 1 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. * Lyttelton's History of Henry II. (2nd Edition), v. 169, &c. 52 THE ANCIENT MONK. 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 beatify- ing 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 My thus : though, undeniably enough, it was once a prose Fact, as our poor lives are ; and even a very rugged un- manageable 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 in- stance, 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 LANDLORD EDMUND. 53 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 1 Much in this Edmund's Life is myste- rious. 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 battle- axes ; and proposing mere Heathenism, confiscation, spoliation, and fire and sword, — Edmund answered that he would oppose to the utmost such savagery. They took him prisoner ; again re- quired his sanction to said proposals. Edmund again refused. Cannot we kill you? cried they. -v- Cannot I die 1 ? answered he. My life, I think, is my own to do what I like with ! And he died, under barbarous tortures, refusing to the last breath ; and the Ultra-Chartist Danes lost their propositions ; — and went with their 'points' and other apparatus, as is supposed, to the Devil, the Father of them. Some say, indeed, these Danes were not Ultra-Chartists, but Ultra-Tories, demanding to reap where they had not sown, and live in this world without working, though all the world should starve for it ; which likewise seems a possible hypothesis. Be what they might, they went, as we say, to the Devil : and Edmund doing what he liked with his own, the Earth was got cleared of them. Another version is, that Edmund on this and the like occasions stood by his order ; the oldest, and indeed only true order of No- bility known under the stars, that of Just Men and Sons of God, in opposition to Unjust and Sons of Belial, — which latter indeed are second-oldest, but yet a very unvenerable order. This, truly, seems the likeliest hypothesis of all. Names and appearances alter so strangely, in some half-score centuries ; and all fluctuates 5* 54 THE ANCIENT MONK. chameleon-like, taking now this hue, now that. Thus much is very plain, and does not change hue: Landlord Edmund was seen and felt by all men to have done verily a man's part in this life-pilgrimage of his ; and benedictions, and outflowing love and admiration from the universal heart, were his meed. Well-done ! Well-done ! cried the hearts of all men. They raised his slain and martyred body ; washed its wounds with fast-flowing univer- sal tears ; tears of endless pity, and yet of a sacred joy and triumph. The beautifullest kind of tears, — indeed perhaps the beautifullest kind of thing : like a sky all flashing diamonds and prismatic radiance ; all weeping, yet shone on by the everlasting Sun: — and this is not a sky, it is a Soul and living Face! Nothing liker the Temple of the Highest, bright with some real effulgence of the Highest, is seen in this world. O, if all Yankee-land follow a small good ■ Schniispel the dis- tinguished Novelist ' with blazing torches, dinner-invitations, uni- versal hep-hep-hurrah, feeling that he, though small, is some- thing ; how might all Angle-land once follow a hero-martyr and great true Son of Heaven ! It is the very joy of man's heart to admire, where he can ; nothing so lifts him from all his mean imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration. Thus it has been said, ' all men, especially all women, are born wor- shippers;' and will worship, if it be but possible. Possible to worship a Something, even a small one ; not so possible a mere loud-blaring Nothing ! What sight is more pathetic than that of poor multitudes of persons met to gaze at King's Progresses, Lord Mayor's Shews, and other gilt-gingerbread phenomena of the worshipful sort, in these times ; each so eager to worship ; each, with a dim fatal sense of disappointment, finding that he cannot rightly here ! These be thy gods, O Israel 1 And thou art so willing to worship, — poor Israel ! In this manner, however, did the men of the Eastern Counties take up the slain body of their Edmund, where it lay cast forth in the village of Hoxne ; seek out the severed head, and reverently reunite the same. They embalmed him with myrrh and sweet spices, with love, pity, and all high and awful thoughts ; conse- crating him with a very storm of melodious adoring admiration, and sun-dyed showers of tears ; — joyfully, yet with awe (as all LANDLORD EDMUND. 55 deep joy has something- of the awful in it), commemorating ]iis noble deeds and godlike walk and conversation while on Earth. Till, at length, the very Pope and Cardinals at Rome were forced to hear of it ; and they, summing up as correctly as they well could, with Advocatus-Diaboli pleadings and their other forms of process, the general verdict of mankind, declared : That he had, in very fact, led a hero's life in this world ; and being now gone, was gone as they conceived to God above, and reaping his reward there. Such, they said, was the best judgment they could form of the case; — and truly not a bad judgment. Acquiesced in, zealously adopted, with full assent of ' private judgment,' by all mortals. The rest of St. Edmund's history, for the reader sees he has now become a Saint, is easily conceivable. Pious munificence provided him a loculus, a feretrum or shrine ; built for him a wooden chapel, a stone temple, ever widening and growing by new pious gifts ; — such the overflowing heart feels it a blessedness to solace itself by giving. St. Edmund's Shrine glitters now w T ith diamond flowerages, with a plating of wrought gold. The wooden chapel, as we say, has become a stone temple. Stately masonries, long-drawn arches, cloisters, sounding aisles buttress it, begirdle it far and wide. Regimented companies of men, of whom our Jocelin is one, devote themselves, in every generation, to meditate here on man's Nobleness and Awfulness, and celebrate and shew forth the same, as they best can, — thinking they will do it better here, in presence of God the Maker, and of the so Awful and so Noble made by Him. In one word, St. Edmund's Body has raised a Monastery round it. To such length, in such manner, has the Spirit of the Time visibly taken body, and crystallised itself here. New gifts, houses, farms, katalla * — come ever in. King Knut. whom men call Canute, whom the Ocean-tide would not be forbidden to wet, — we heard already of this wise King, with his crown and gifts; but of many others, Kings, Queens, wise men and noble loyal women, let Dryasdust and divine Silence * Goods, properties ; what we now call chattels, and still more singularly cattle, says my erudite friend ! 56 THE ANCIENT MONK. be the record ! Beodric's- Worth has become St. Edmund's Bury ; — and lasts visible to this hour. All this that thou now seest, and namest Bury Town, is properly the Funeral Monument of Saint or Landlord Edmund. The present respectable Mayor of Bury may be said, like a Fakeer (little as he thinks of it), to have his dwelling in the extensive, many-sculptured Tombstone of St. Edmund ; in one of the brick niches thereof dwells the present respectable Mayor of Bury. Certain Times do crystallise themselves in a magnificent man- ner ; and others, perhaps, are like to do it in rather a shabby one ! — But Richard Arkwright too will have his Monument, a thousand years hence : all Lancashire and Yorkshire, and how many other shires and countries, with their machineries and industries, for his monument! A true jtw/ramid or '^/fame-mountain,' flaming with steam fires and useful labour over wide continents, usefully towards the Stars, to a certain height; — how much grander than your foolish Cheops Pyramids or Sakhara clay ones ! Let us withal be hopeful, be content or patient. CHAPTER IV. ABBOT HUGO. It is true, all things have two faces, a light one and a dark. It is true, in three centuries much imperfection accumulates ; many an Ideal, monastic or other, shooting forth into practice as it can, grows to a strange enough Reality ; and we have to ask with amazement, Is this your Ideal ! For, alas, the Ideal always has to grow in the Real, and to seek out its bed and board there, often in a very sorry way. No beautifullest Poet is a Bird-of-Paradise, living on perfumes ; sleeping" in the aether with outspread wings. The Heroic, independent of bed and board, is found in Drury-Lane Theatre only ; to avoid disappointments, let us bear this in mind. By the law of Nature, too, all manner of Ideals have their fatal limits and lot ; their appointed periods, of youth, of maturity or perfection, of decline, degradation, and final death and disappear- ance. There is nothing born but has to die. Ideal monasteries, once grown real, do seek bed and board in this world ; do find it more and more successfully ; do get at length too intent on find- ing it, exclusively intent on that. They are then like diseased corpulent bodies fallen idiotic, which merely eat and sleep ; ready for ' dissolution,' by a Henry the Eighth or some other. Joce- lin's St. Edmundsbury is still far from this last dreadful state : but here too the reader will prepare himself to see an Ideal not sleeping in the eether like a bird-of-paradise, but roosting as the common woodfowl do, in an imperfect, uncomfortable, more or less contemptible manner ! — Abbot Hugo, as Jocelin, breaking at once into the heart of the business, apprises us, had in those days grown old, grown rather blind, and his eyes were somewhat darkened, aliquantulum cali- gaverunt oculi ejus. He dwelt apart very much, in his Talamus 58 THE ANClEx\T MONK. or peculiar Chamber ; got into the hands of flatterers, a set of mealy-mouthed persons who strove to make the passing hour easy for him, — for him easy, and for themselves profitable ; accumu- lating in the distance mere mountains of confusion. Old Dominus Hugo sat inaccessible in this way, far in the interior, wrapt in his warm flannels and delusions ; inaccessible to all voice of Fact ; and bad grew ever worse with us. Not that our worthy old Dominus Abbas was inattentive to the divine offices, or to the maintenance of a devout spirit in us or in himself; but the Ac- count-Books of the Convent fell into the frightfullest state, and Hugo's annual Budget grew yearly emptier, or filled with futile expectations, fatal deficit, wind and debts ! His one worldly care was to raise ready money ; sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. And how he raised it : From usurious insatiable Jews ; every fresh Jew sticking on him like a fresh horseleech, sucking his and our life out ; crying continually, Give, Give ! Take one example instead of scores. Our Camera having fallen into ruin, William the Sacristan received charge to repair it ; strict charge, but no money ; Abbot Hugo would, and indeed could, give him no fraction of money. The Camera in ruins, and Hugo penniless and inaccessible, Willelmus Sacrista borrowed Forty Marcs (some Seven-and-twenty Pounds) of Benedict the Jew, and patched up our Camera again. But the means of repay- ing him ? There were no means. Hardly could Sacrista, Cellera- rius, or any public officer \ get ends to meet, on the indispen- sablest scale, with their shrunk allowances : ready money had vanished. Benedict's Twenty-seven pounds grew rapidly at compound- interest ; and at length, when it had amounted to One hundred pounds, he, on a day of settlement, presents the account to Hugo himself. Hugo already owed him another One hundred of his own ; and so here it has become Two hundred ! Hugo, in a fine frenzy, threatens to depose the Sacristan, to do this and do that ; but, in the mean while, How to quiet your insatiable Jew ? Hugo, for this couple of hundreds, grants the Jew his bond for Four hundred payable at the end of four years. At the end of four years there is, of course, still no money ; and the Jew now gets a bond for Eight hundred and eighty pounds, to be paid by instal- ABBOT HUGO. 59 merits, Four-score pounds every year. Here was a way of doing business ! Neither yet is this insatiable Jew satisfied or settled with : he had papers against us of ' small debts fourteen years old ; ' his modest claim amounts finally to ' Twelve hundred pounds besides interest ; ' — and one hopes he never got satisfied in this world ; one almost hopes he was one of those beleaguered Jews who hanged themselves in York Castle shortly afterwards, and had his usances and quittances and horseleech papers summarily set fire to ! For approximate justice will strive to accomplish itself ; if not in one way, then in another. Jews, and also Christians and Heathens, who accumulate in this manner, though furnished with never so many parchments, do, at times, ' get their grinder- teeth successively pulled out of their head, each day a new grind- er,' till they consent to disgorge again. A sad fact, — worth re- flecting on. Jocelin, we see, is not without secularity : Our Dominus Ab- bas was intent enough on the divine offices ; but then his Account Books — ? — One of the things that strike us most, throughout, in Jocelin's Chronicle, and indeed in Eadmer's A?iselm, and other old monastic Books, written evidently by pious men, is this, That there is almost no mention whatever of ' personal religion ' in them ; that the whole gist of their thinking and speculation seems to be the ' privileges of our order,' ' strict exaction of our dues,' 1 God's honour ' (meaning the honour of our Saint), and so forth. Is not this singular? A body of men, set apart for perfecting and purifying their own souls, do not seem disturbed about that in any measure : the ' Ideal ' says nothing about its idea ; says much about finding bed and board for itself! How is this ? Why, for one thing, bed and board are a matter very apt to come to speech : it is much easier to speak of them than of ideas ; and they are sometimes much more pressing with some ! Nay, for another thing, may not this religious reticence, in these devout good souls, be perhaps a merit, and sign of health in them ? Jo- celin, Eadmer, and such religious men, have as yet nothing of ' Methodism ; ' no Doubt or even root of Doubt. Religion is not a diseased self-introspection, an agonising inquiry : their duties 60 THE ANCIENT MONK. are clear to them, the way of supreme good plain, indisputable, and they are travelling on it. Religion lies over them like an all- embracing heavenly canopy, like an atmosphere and life-element, which is not spoken of, which in all things is presupposed with- out speech. Is not serene or complete Religion the highest aspect of human nature ; as serene Cant, or complete No-religion, is the lowest and miserablest ? Between which two, all manner of earnest Methodisms, introspections, agonising inquiries, never so morbid, shall play their respective parts, not without approbation. But let any reader fancy himself one of the Brethren in St. Edmundsbury Monastery under such circumstances ! How can a Lord Abbot, all stuck over with horseleeches of this nature, front the world ? He is fast losing his life-blood, and the Convent will be as one of Pharaoh's lean kine. Old monks of experience draw their hoods deeper down ; careful what they say : the monk's first duty is obedience. Our Lord the King, hearing of such work, sends down his Almoner to make investigations : but what boots it? Abbot Hugo assembles us in Chapter; asks, " If there is any complaint ? " Not a soul of us dare answer, "Yes, thou- sands ! " but we all stand silent, and the Prior even says that things are in a very comfortable condition. Whereupon old Abbot Hugo, turning to the royal messenger, says, " You see ! " — and the business terminates in that way. I, as a briskeyed, no- ticing youth and novice, could not help asking of the elders, ask- ing of Magister Samson in particular : Why he, well-instructed and a knowing man, had not spoken out, and brought matters to a bearing? Magister Samson was Teacher of the Novices, ap- pointed to breed us up to the rules, and I loved him well. " Fill mi" answered Samson, "the burnt child shuns the fire. Dost thou not know, our Lord the Abbot sent me once to Acre in Nor- folk, to solitary confinement and bread and water, already? The Hinghams, Hugo and Robert, have just got home from banish- ment for speaking. This is the hour of darkness : the hour when flatterers rule and are believed. Vidcat Dominus, let the Lord see, and judge." In very truth what could poor old Abbot Hugo do ? A frail old man; and the Philistines were upon him, — that is to say, the ABBOT HUGO. 61 Hebrews. He had nothing for it but to shrink away from them ; get back into his warm flannels, into his warm delusions again. Happily before it was quite too late, he bethought him of pilgrim- ing to St. Thomas of Canterbury. He set out, with a fit train, in the autumn days of the year 1180 ; near Rochester City, his mule threw him, dislocated his poor kneepan, raised incurable in- flammatory fever ; and the poor old man got his dismissal from the whole coil at once. St. Thomas a Becket, though in a circu- itous way, had brought deliverance ! Neither Jew usurers, nor grumbling monks, nor other importunate despicability of men or mud-elements afflicted Abbot Hugo more ; but he dropt his rosa- ries, closed his account-books, closed his old eyes, and lay down into the long sleep. Heavy-laden hoary old Dominus Hugo, fare thee well. One thing we cannot mention without a due thrill of horror : namely, that, in the empty exchequer of Dominus Hugo, there was not found one penny to distribute to the Poor that they might pray for his soul ! By a kind of godsend, Fifty shillings did, in the very nick of time, fall due, or seem to fall due, from one of his Farmers (the Firmarius de Palegrava) , and he paid it, and the Poor had it ; though, alas, this too only seemed to fall due, and we had it to pay again afterwards. Dominus Hugo's apartments were plundered by his servants, to the last portable stool, in a few minutes after the breath was out of his body. Forlorn old Hugo, fare thee well forever. CHAPTER V. TWELFTH CENTURY. Our Abbot being dead, the Dominus Rex, Henry II., or Ranulf de Glanvill Justiciarius of England for him, set Inspectors or Cus- todiars over us ; — not in any breathless haste to appoint a new Abbot, our revenues coming into his own Scaccarium, or royal Exchequer, in the meanwhile. They proceeded with some rigour, these Custodiars ; took written inventories, clapt-on seals, exacted everywhere strict tale and measure : but wherefore should a living monk complain 1 The living monk has to do his devotional drill- exercise ; consume his allotted pitantia, what we call pittance, or ration of victual ; and possess his soul in patience. Dim, as through a long vista of Seven Centuries, dim and very strange looks that monk-life to us ; the ever-surprising circum- stance this, That it is a fact and no dream, that we see it there, and gaze into the very eyes of it ! Smoke rises daily from those culinary chimney -throats ; there are living human beings there, who chant, loud-braying, their matins, nones, vespers ; awakening echoes, not to the bodily ear alone. St. Edmund's Shrine, per- petually illuminated, glows ruddy through the Night, and through the Night of Centuries withal ; St. Edmundsbury Town paying yearly Forty pounds for that express end. Bells clang out ; on great occasions, all the bells. We have Processions, Preachings, Festivals, Christmas Plays, Mysteries shewn in the Churchyard, at which latter the Townsfolk sometimes quarrel. Time was, Time is, as Friar Bacon's Bass Head* remarked; and withal Time will be. There are three Tenses, Tempora, or Times ; and there is one Eternity ; and as for us, We are such stuff as Dreams are made of ! * Brass Head, I suppose 1 TWELFTH CENTURY. 63 Indisputable, though very dim to modern vision, rests on its hill-slope that same Bury, Stoic, or Town of St. Edmund ; already a considerable place, not without traffic, nay manufactures, would Jocelin only tell us what. Jocelin is totally careless of telling : but, through dim fitful apertures, we can see Fullones, ' Fullers,' see cloth-making ; looms dimly going, dye-vats, and old women spinning yarn. We have Fairs too, NundincB, in due course ; and the Londoners give us much trouble, pretending that they, as a metropolitan people, are exempt from toll. Besides there is Field-husbandry, with perplexed settlement of Convent rents : corn-ricks pile themselves within burgh, in their season ; and cattle depart and enter ; and even the poor weaver has his cow, — ' dungheaps ' lying quiet at most doors (anteforas, says the incidental Jocelin), for the Town has yet no improved police. Watch and ward nevertheless we do keep, and have Gates, — as what Town must not ; thieves so abounding ; war, iverra, such a frequent thing ! Our thieves, at the Abbot's judgment bar, deny ; claim wager of battle ; fight, are beaten, and then hanged. f Ketel, the thief,' took this course ; and it did nothing for him, — merely brought us, and indeed himself, new trouble ! Every way a most foreign Time. What difficulty, for example, has our Cellerarius to collect the repselver, ' reaping silver,' or penny, which each householder is by law bound to pay for cutting down the Convent grain ! Richer people pretend that it is com- muted, that it is this and the other ; that, in short, they will not pay it. Our Cellerarius gives up calling on the rich. In the houses of the poor, our Cellerarius finding, in like manner, neither penny nor good promise, snatches, without ceremony, what vadium (pledge, wad) he can come at : a joint-stool, kettle, nay the very house-door, ' hostium ; ' and old women, thus exposed to the unfeeling gaze of the public, rush out after him with their distaffs and the angriest shrieks : ' vetulce exibant cum colis suis? says Jocelin, ' minantes et exprobrantes .' What a historical picture, glowing visible, as St. Edmund's Shrine by night, after Seven long Centuries or so ! Vetulce cum colis : My venerable ancient spinning grandmothers, — ah, and ye too have to shriek, and rush out with your distaffs ; and become Female Chartists, and scold all evening with void doorway ; — ■ 64 THE ANCIENT MONK. and in old Saxon, as we in modern, would fain demand some Five-point Charter, could it be fallen in with, the Earth being too tyrannous ! — Wise Lord Abbots, hearing of such phenomena, did in time abolish or commute the reap-penny, and one nuisance was abated. But the image of these justly offended old women, in their old wool costumes, with their angry features, and spindles brandished, lives forever in the historical memory. Thanks to thee, Jocelin Boswell. Jerusalem was taken by the Crusaders, and again lost by them ; and Richard Coeur-de-Lion ' veiled his face ' as he passed in sight of it : but how many other things went on, the while ! Thus, too, our trouble with the Lakenheath eels is very great. King Knut, namely, or rather his Queen who also did herself honour by honouring St. Edmund, decreed by authentic deed yet extant on parchment, that the Holders of the Town Fields, once Beodric's, should, for one thing, go yearly and catch us four thousand eels in the marsh-pools of Lakenheath. Well, they went, they continued to go ; but, in later times, got into the way of returning with a most short account of eels. Not the due six- score apiece; no, Here are two-score, Here are twenty, ten, — sometimes, Here are none at all ; Heaven help us, we could catch no more, they were not there ! What is a distressed Cellerarius to do ? We agree that each Holder of so many acres shall pay one penny yearly, and let go the eels as too slippery. But alas, neither is this quite effectual : the Fields, in my time, have got divided among so many hands, there is no catching of them either ; I have known our Cellarer get seven and twenty pence formerly, and now it is much if he get ten pence farthing (vix decern dena- rios et obolum.) And then their sheep, which they are bound to fold nightly in our pens, for the manure's sake ; and, I fear, do not always fold : and their aver-pennies, and their avragiums, and their foder-corns, and mill-and-market dues ! Thus, in its undeniable but dim manner, does old St. Edmundsbury spin and till, and laboriously keep its pot boiling, and St. Edmund's Shrine lighted, under such conditions and averages as it can. How much is still alive in England ; how much has not yet come into life ! A Feudal Aristocracy is still alive, in the prime TWELFTH CENTURY. 65 of life ; superintending the cultivation of the land, and less con- sciously the distribution of the produce of the land, the adjust- ment of the quarrels of the land ; judging, soldiering, adjusting ; everywhere governing the people, — so that even a Gurth born thrall of Cedric lacks not his due parings of the pigs he tends. Governing ; — and, alas, also game-preserving, so that a Robert Hood, a William Scarlet and others have, in these days, put on Lincoln coats, and taken to living, in some universal-suffrage manner, under the greenwood tree ! How silent, on the other hand, lie all Cotton-trades and such like ; not a steeple-chimney yet got on end from sea to sea ! North of the Humber, a stern Willelmus Conquestor burnt the Country, finding it unruly, into very stern repose. Wild fowl scream in those ancient silences, wild cattle roam in those ancient solitudes ; the scanty sulky Norse-bred population all coerced into silence, — feeling that, under these new Norman Governors, their history has probably as good as ended. Men and Northum- brian Norse populations know little what has ended, what is but beginning! The Ribble and the Aire roll down, as yet unpol- luted by dyers' chemistry ; tenanted by merry trouts and pisca- tory otters ; the sunbeam and the vacant wind's-blast alone tra- versing those moors. Side by side sleep the coal-strata and the iron-strata for so many ages ; no Steam-Demon has yet risen smoking into being. Saint Mungo rules in Glasgow ; James Watt still slumbering in the deep of Time. Mancunium, Man- ceaster, what we now call Manchester, spins no cotton, — if it be not wool ' cottons,' clipped from the backs of mountain sheep. The Creek of the Mersey gurgles, twice in the four-and-twenty hours, with eddying brine, clangorous with sea- fowl ; and is a Lither-P oo\, a lazy or sullen Pool, no monstrous pitchy City, and Seahaven of the world ! The Centuries are big ; and the birth- hour is coming, not yet come. Tempusferacc, tempus edax rerum. 6* CHAPTER VI. MONK SAMSON. Within doors, down at the hill-foot, in our Convent here, we are a peculiar people, — hardly conceivable in the Arkwright Corn-Law ages, of mere Spinning-Mills and Joe-Mantons ! There is yet no Methodism among us, and we speak much of Seculari- ties : no Methodism ; our Religion is not yet a horrible restless Doubt, still less a far horribler composed Cant ; but a great hea- ven-high Unquestionability, encompassing, interpenetrating the whole of Life. Imperfect as we may be, we are here, with our litanies, shaven crowns, vows of poverty, to testify incessantly and indisputably to every heart, That this Earthly Life, and its riches and possessions, and good and evil hap, are not intrinsically a leal- ity at all, but are a shadow of realities eternal, infinite ; that this Time-world, as an air-image, fearfully emblematic, plays and flick- ers in the grand still mirror of Eternity ; and man's little Life has Duties that are great, that are alone great, and go up to Heaven and down to Hell. This, with our poor litanies, we testify and struggle to testify. Which, testified or not, remembered by all men, or forgotten by all men, does verily remain the fact, even in Arkwright Joe- Manton ages ! But it is incalculable, when litanies have grown obsolete ; when foder corns, avragiums, and all human dues and reciprocities have been fully changed into one great due of cash payment ; and man's duty to man reduces itself to handing him certain metal coins, or covenanted money-wages, and then shoving him out of doors ; and man's duty to God becomes a cant, a doubt, a dim inanity, a ' pleasure of virtue ' or such like ; and the thing a man does infinitely fear (the real Hell of a man) is ' that he do not make money and advance himself,' — I say, it is incalculable what a change has introduced itself everywhere into human af- fairs ! How human affairs shall now circulate everywhere not MONK SAMSON. 67 healthy life-blood in them, but, as it were, a detestable copperas banker's ink ; and all is grown acrid, divisive, threatening dissolu- tion ; and the huge tumultuous Life of Society is galvanic, devil- ridden, too truly possessed by a devil ! For, in short, Mammon is not a god at all ; but a devil, and even a very despicable devil. Follow the Devil faithfully, you are sure enough to go to the Devil : whither else can you go 1 — In such situations, men look back with a kind of mournful recognition even on poor limited Monk-figures, with their poor litanies ; and reflect, with Ben Jon- son, that soul is indispensable, some degree of soul, even to save you the expense of salt ! — For the rest, it must be owned, we Monks of St. Edmundsbury are but a limited class of creatures, and seem to have a somewhat dull life of it. Much given to idle gossip ; having indeed no other work, when our chanting is over. Listless gossip, for most part, and a mitigated slander ; the fruit of idleness, not of spleen. We are dull, insipid men, many of us ; easy-minded ; whom prayer and digestion of food will avail for a life. We have to receive all strangers in our Convent, and lodge them gratis ; such and such sorts go by rule to the Lord Abbot and his special revenues ; such and' such to us and our poor Cellarer, however straitened. Jews themselves send their wives and little ones hither in war-time, into our Pitanceria ; where they abide safe, with due pittances, — for a consideration. We have the fairest chances for collecting news. Some of us have a turn for reading Books ; for medita- tion, silence ; at times we even write Books. Some of us can preach, in English-Saxon, in Norman French, and even in Monk- Latin ; others cannot in any language or jargon, being stupid. Failing all else, what gossip about one another ! This is a pe- rennial resource. How one hooded head applies itself to the ear of another, and whispers — tacenda. Willelmus Sacrista, for in- stance, what does he nightly, over in that Sacristry of his 1 Fre- quent bibations, ' frequentes bibationes et qucedam tacenda,' — eheu ! We have ' tempora minutionis ,' stated seasons of blood- letting, when we are all let blood together ; and then there is a general free-conference, a sanhedrim of clatter. For all our vow of poverty, we can by rule amass to the extent of ' two shillings ; ' but it is to be given to our necessitous kindred, or in charity. 68 THE ANCIENT MONK. Poor Monks ! Thus too a certain Canterbury Monk was in the habit of ' slipping, clanculo from his sleeve,' five shillings into the hand of his mother, when she came to see him, at the divine of- fices, every two months. Once, slipping the money clandestinely, just in the act of taking leave, he slipt it not into her hand but on the floor, and another had it ; whereupon the poor Monk, coming to know it, looked mere despair for some days ; till Lanfranc the noble Archbishop, questioning his secret from him, nobly made the sum seven shillings,* and said, Never mind ! One Monk of a taciturn nature distinguishes himself among these babbling ones : the name of him Samson ; he that answered Jocelin, " Fill mi, a burnt child shuns the fire." They call him ' Norfolk Barrator ,' or litigious person ; for indeed, being of grave taciturn ways, he is not universally a favourite ; he has been in trouble more than once. The reader is desired to mark this Monk. A personable man of seven-aud-forty ; stout-made, stands erect as a pillar ; with bushy eyebrows, the eyes of him beaming into you in a really strange way; the face massive, grave, with ' a very eminent nose ;' his head almost bald, its auburn remnants of hair, and the copious ruddy beard, getting slightly streaked with grey. This is Brother Samson ; a man worth looking at. He is from Norfolk, as the nickname indicates ; from Totting- ton in Norfolk, as we guess ; the son of poor parents there. He has told me, Jocelin, for I loved him much, That once in his ninth year he had an alarming dream ; — as indeed we are all some- what given to dreaming here. Little Samson, lying uneasily in his crib at Tottington, dreamed that he saw the Arch Enemy in person, just alighted in front of some grand building, with out- spread bat-wings, and stretching forth detestable clawed hands to grip him, little Samson, and fly off with him : whereupon the little dreamer shrieked desperate to St. Edmund for help, shrieked and again shrieked ; and St. Edmund, a reverend heavenly figure, did come, — and indeed poor little Samson's mother, awakened by his shrieking, did come ; and the Devil and the Dream both * Eadmeri Hist. 8. MONK SAMSON. 69 fled away fruitless. On the morrow, his mother, pondering such an awful dream, thought it were good to take him over to St. Edmund's own Shrine, and pray with him there. See, said little Samson at sight of the Abbey-Gate ; see, mother, this is the building I dreamed of! His poor mother dedicated him to St. Edmund, — left him there with prayers and tears : what better could she do? The exposition of the dream, Brother Samson used to say, was this : Diabolus with outspread bat-wings shad- owed forth the pleasures of this world, volwptates hujus sceculi, which were about to snatch and fly away with me, had not St. Edmund flung his arms round me, that is to say, made me a monk of his. A monk, accordingly, Brother Samson is ; and here to this day where his mother left him. A learned man, of devout grave nature ; has studied at Paris, has taught in the Town Schools here, and done much else ; can preach in three languages, and, like Dr. Caius, ' has had losses ' in his time.* A thought- ful, firm-standing man ; much loved by some, not loved by all ; his clear eyes flashing into you, in an almost inconvenient way ! Abbot Hugo, as we said, had his own difficulties with him; Abbot Hugo had him in prison once, to teach him what authority was, and how to dread the fire in future. For Brother Samson, in the time of the Antipopes, had been sent to Rome on business ; and, returning successful, was too late, — the business had all misgone in the interim ! As tours to Eome are still frequent with us English, perhaps the reader will not giudge to look at the method of travelling thither in those remote ages. We happily have, in small compass, a personal narrative of it. Through the clear eyes and memory of Brother Samson, one peeps direct into the very bosom of that Twelfth Century, and finds it rather curious. The actual Papa, Father, or universal President of Christendom, as yet not grown chimerical, sat there; think of that only! Brother Samson went to Rome as to the real Light-fountain of this lower world ; we now — ? — But let us hear Brother Samson, as to his mode of travelling : * Is this Dr. Caius iu the Merry Wives of Windsor? I do not recollect that anything is said about his having had losses. This is what Dogberry says of himself in Much Ado About Nothing. 70 THE ANCIENT MONK. ' You know what trouble I had for that Church of Woolpit ; ' how I was despatched to Rome in the time of the Schism between 1 Pope Alexander and Octavian ; and passed through Italy at that ' season, when all clergy carrying letters for our Lord Pope Alex- ' ander were laid hold of, and some were clapt in prison, some ' hanged ; and some, with nose and lips cut off, were sent forward ' to our Lord the Pope, for the disgrace and confusion of him {in * dedecus et confusionem ejus). I, however, pretended to be Scotch, ' and putting on the garb of a Scotchman, and taking the gesture 'of one, walked along; and when anybody mocked at me, I t would brandish my staff in the manner of that weapon they call ' gaveloc* uttering comminatory words after the way of the ' Scotch. To those that met and questioned me who I was, I 'made no answer but: Ride, ride Rome; turne Canticereberei.] ' Thus did I, to conceal myself and my errand, and get safer to ' Rome under the guise of a Scotchman. ' Having at last obtained a Letter from our Lord the Pope ac- ' cording to my wishes, I turned homewards again. I had to pass ' through a certain strong town on my road ; and lo, the soldiers ' thereof surrounded me, seizing me, and saying : " This vagabond f {iste solivagus), who pretends to be Scotch, is either a spy, or ' has Letters from the false Pope Alexander." And whilst they ' examined every stitch and rag of me, my leggings {caligas) , ' breeches, and even the old shoes that I carried over my shoulder 'in the way of the Scotch, — I put my hand into the leather ' scrip I wore, wherein our Lord the Pope's Letter lay, close by ' a little jug (ciffus) I had for drinking out of; and the Lord God ' so pleasing, and St. Edmund, I got out both the Letter and the ' jug together ; in such a way that, extending my arm aloft, I ' held the Letter hidden between jug and hand : they saw the jug, ' but the Letter they saw not. And thus I escaped out of their ' hands in the name of the Lord. Whatever money I had they ' took from me ; wherefore I had to beg from door to door, with- * Javelin, missile pike. Gaveloc is still the Scotch name for crowbar. i Does this mean, " Rome forever ; Canterbury not " (which claims an unjust Supremacy 'over us) ! Mr. Rokewood is silent. Dryasdust would perhaps explain it, — in the course of a week or two of talking ; did one dare to question him ! MONK SAMSON. 71 ' out any payment (sine omni expensa) till I came to England ' again. But hearing that the Woolpit Church was already given 1 to Geoffry Ridell, my soul was struck with sorrow because I had ' laboured in vain. Coming home, therefore, I sat me down 'secretly under the Shrine of St. Edmund, fearing lest our Lord ' Abbot should seize and imprison me, though I had done no mis- 1 chief; nor was there a monk who durst speak to me, nor a laic c who durst bring me food except by stealth.' * Such resting and welcoming found Brother Samson, with his worn soles, and strong heart ! He sits silent, revolving many thoughts, at the foot of St. Edmund's Shrine. In the wide Earth, if it be not Saint Edmund, what friend or refuge has he? Our Lord Abbot, hearing of him, sent the proper officer to lead him down to prison, clap ' foot-gyves on him ' there. Another poor official furtively brought him a cup of wine ; bade him "be comforted in the Lord." Samson utters no complaint; obeys in silence. ' Our Lord Abbot, taking counsel of it, banished me to ' Acre, and there I had to stay long.' Our Lord Abbot next tried Samson with promotions ; made him Subsacristan, made him Librarian, which he liked best of all, being passionately fond of Books: Samson, with many thoughts in him, again obeyed in silence ; discharged his offices to perfec- tion, but never thanked our Lord Abbot, — seemed rather as if looking into him, with those clear eyes of his. Whereupon Abbot Hugo said, Se nunquam vidisse, he had never seen such a man ; whom no severity would break to complain, and no kind- ness soften into smiles or thanks : — a questionable kind of man ! In this way, not without troubles, but still in an erect clear- standing manner, has Brother Samson reached his forty-seventh year; and his ruddy beard is getting slightly grizzled. He is en- deavouring, in these days, to have various broken things thatched in ; nay perhaps to have the Choir itself completed, for he can bear nothing ruinous. He has gathered ' heaps of lime and sand ;' has masons, slaters working, he and Warinus monachus noster, who are joint keepers of the Shrine ; paying , out the money * Jocelini Chronica, p. 36. 72 THE ANCIENT MONK. duly, — furnished by charitable burghers of St. Edmundsbury, they say. Charitable burghers of St. Edmundsbury? To me Jocelin it seems rather, Samson and Warinus, whom he leads, have privily hoarded the oblations at the Shrine itself, in these late years of indolent dilapidation, while Abbot Hugo sat wrapt inaccessible ; and are struggling, in this prudent way, to have the rain kept out!* — Under what conditions, sometimes, has Wis- dom to struggle with Folly ; get Folly persuaded to so much as thatch out the rain from itself! For, indeed, if the Infant govern the Nurse, what dexterous practice on the Nurse's part will not be necessary ! It is a new regret to us that, in these circumstances, our Lord the King's Custodiars, interfering, prohibited all building or thatching from whatever source ; and no Choir shall be completed, and Rain and Time, for the present, shall have their way. Willel- mus Sacrista, he of ' the frequent bibations and some things not to be spoken of;' he, with his red nose, I am of opinion, had made complaint to the Custodiars ; wishing to do Samson an ill turn: — Samson his Sw#-sacristan, with those clear eyes, could not be a prime favourite of his ! Samson again obeys in silence. * Jocelini Chronica, p. 7. CHAPTER VII. THE CANVASSING. Now, however, come great news to St. Edmundsbury : That there is to be an Abbot elected ; that our interlunar obscuration is to cease ; St. Edmund's Convent no more to be a doleful widow, but joyous and once again a bride ! Often in our widowed state had we prayed to the Lord and St. Edmund, singing weekly a matter of ' one-and-twenty penitential Psalms, on our knees in the Choir,' that a fit Pastor might be vouchsafed us. And, says Jocelin, had some known what Abbot we were to get, they had not been so devout, I believe ! — Bozzy Jocelin opens to mankind the floodgates of authentic Convent gossip ; we listen, as in a Dionysius' Ear, to the inanest hubbub, like the voices at Virgil's Horn-Gate of Dreams. Even gossip, seven centuries off, has sig- nificance. List, list, how like men are to one another in all cen- turies : ' Dixit quidam de quodam, A certain person said of a certain ' person, " He, that Frater, is a good monk, probabilis persona; 1 knows much of the order and customs of the church ; and though ' not so perfect a philosopher as some others, would make a very 1 good Abbot. Old Abbot Ording, still famed among us, knew 1 little of letters. Besides, as we read in Fables, it is better to 1 choose a log for king, than a serpent, never so wise, that will ' venomously hiss and bite his subjects." — "Impossible!" an- ' swered the other : " How can such a man make a sermon in the ' chapter, or to the people on festival days, when he is without ' letters? How can he have the skill to bind and to loose, he who ' does not understand the Scriptures ? How — ? " ' And then ' another said of another, alius de alio, " That Frater 1 is a homo lifrratus, eloquent, sagacious ; vigorous in discipline ; 7 74 THE ANCIENT MONK. 1 loves the Convent much, has suffered much for its sake." To ' which a third party answers, " From all your great clerks good ' Lord deliver us ! From Norfolk barrators, and surly persons, * That it would please thee to preserve us, We beseech thee to 1 hear us, good Lord ! " ' Then another quid am said of another 1 quo dam, " That Frater is a good manager (husebondus) ;" but ' was swiftly answered, " God forbid that a man who can neither ' read nor chant, nor celebrate the divine offices, an unjust person 1 withal, and grinder of the faces of the poor, should ever be ' Abbot ! " ' One man, it appears, is nice in his victuals. An- other is indeed wise ; but apt to slight inferiors ; hardly at the pains to answer, if they argue with him too foolishly. And so each aliquis concerning his aliquo, — through whole pages of elec- tioneering babble. ' For,' says Jocelin, ' So many men, as many minds.' Our Monks ' at time of blood-letting, tempore minutionisf holding their sanhedrim of babble, would talk in this manner : Brother Samson, I remarked, never said anything ; sat silent, sometimes smiling ; but he took good note of what others said, and would bring it up, on occasion, twenty years after. As for me Jocelin, I was of opinion that ' some skill in Dialectics, to distinguish true from false,' would be good in an Abbot. I spake, as a rash Novice in those days, some conscientious words of a certain benefactor of mine ; ' and behold, one of those sons of Belial ' ran and reported them to him, so that he never after looked at me with the same face again ! Poor Bozzy ! — Such is the buzz and frothy simmering ferment of the general mind and no-mind ; struggling to ' make itself up,' as the phrase is, or ascertain what it does really want : no easy matter, in most cases. St. Edmundsbury, in that Candlemas season of the year 1182, is a busily fermenting place. The very clothmakers sit meditative at their looms; asking, Who shall be Abbot? The sochemanni speak of it, driving their ox-teams afield ; the old wo- men with their spindles : and none^yet knows what the days will bring forth. The Prior, however, as our interim chief, must proceed to work ; get ready ' Twelve Monks,' and set off with them to his Majesty at Waltham, there shall the election be made. An elec- THE CANVASSING. 75 tion, whether managed directly by ballot-box on public hustings, or indirectly by force of public opinion, or were it even by open alehouses, landlords' coercion, popular club-law, or whatever elec- toral methods, is always an interesting phenomenon. A moun- tain tumbling in great travail, throwing up dustclouds and absurd noises, is visibly there ; uncertain yet what mouse or monster it will give birth to. Besides it is a most important social act ; nay, at bottom, the one important social act. Given the men a People choose, the People itself, in its exact worth and worthlessness, is given. A heroic people chooses heroes, and is happy ; a valet or flunkey people chooses sham-heroes, what are called quacks, thinking them heroes, and is not happy. The grand summary of a man's spiritual condition, what brings out all his herohood and insight, or all his flunkeyhood and horn-eyed dimness, is this question put to him, What man dost thou honour ! Which is thy ideal of a man ; or nearest that 1 So too of a people : for a People too, every People, speaks its choice, — were it only by silently obey- ing, and not revolting, — in the course of a century or so. Nor are electoral methods, Reform Bills and such like, unimportant. A People's electoral methods are, in the long-run, the express image of its electoral talent ; tending and gravitating perpetually, irresistibly, to a conformity with that : and are, at all stages, very significant of the People. Judicious readers, of these times, are not disinclined to see how Monks elect their Abbot in the Twelfth Century : how the St. Edmundsbury mountain manages its mid- wifery ; and what mouse or man the outcome is. CHAPTER VIII. THE ELECTION. Accordingly our Prior assembles us in Chapter ; and, we adjur- ing him before God to do justly, nominates, not by our selection, yet with our assent, Twelve Monks, moderately satisfactory. Of whom are Hugo Third-Prior, Brother Dennis a venerable man, Walter the Medicus, Samson Subsacrista, and other esteemed characters, — though Willelmus Sacrista, of the red nose, too is one. These shall proceed straightway to Waltham ; elect the Abbot as they may or can. Monks are sworn to obedience ; must not speak too loud, under penalty of foot-gyves, limbo, and bread and water : yet monks luu uuuld know what it is they are obey- ing. The St. Edmundsbury Community has no hustings, ballot- box, indeed no' open voting : yet by various vague manipulations, pulse-feelings, we struggle to ascertain what its virtual aim is, and succeed better or worse. This question, however, rises ; alas, a quite preliminary ques- tion : Will the Dominus Rex allow us to choose freely ? It is to be hoped ! Well, if so, we agree to choose one of our own Con- vent. If not, if the Dominus Rex will force a stranger on us, we decide on demurring, the Prior and his Twelve shall demur : we can appeal, plead, remonstrate : appeal even to the Pope, but trust it will not be necessary. Then there is this other question, raised by Brother Samson : What if the Thirteen should not themselves be able to agree 1 Brother Samson Subsacrista, one remarks, is ready oftenest with some question, some suggestion, that has wisdom in it. Though a servant of servants, and saying little, his words all tell, having sense in them ; it seems by his light mainly that we steer ourselves in this great dimness. What if the Thirteen should not themselves be able to agree ? THE ELECTION. 77 Speak, Samson, and advise. — Could not, hints Samson, Six of our venerablest elders be chosen by us, a kind of electoral com- mittee, here and now : of these, ' with their hand on the Gospels, with their eye on the Sacrosancta,' we take oath that they will do faithfully ; let these, in secret and as before God, agree on Three whom they reckon fittest ; write their names in a Paper, and de- liver the same sealed, forthwith, to the Thirteen : one of those Three the Thirteen shall fix on, if permitted. If not permitted, that is to say, if the Dominus Rex force us to demur, — the Paper shall be brought back unopened, and publicly burned, that no man's secret bring him into trouble. So Samson advises, so we act ; wisely, in this and in other crises of the business. Our electoral committee, its eye on the Sacrosancta, is soon named, soon sworn ; and we striking up the Fifth Psalm, ' Verba mea, ' Give ear unto my words, O Lord, My meditation weigh,' march out chanting, and leave the Six to their work in the Chap- ter here. Their work, before long, they announce as finished : they, with their eye on the Sacrosancta, imprecating the Lord to weigh and witness their meditation, have fixed on Three Names, and written them in this Sealed Paper. Let Samson Subsacrista, general servant of the party, take charge of it. On the morrow morning, our Prior and his Twelve will be ready to get under way. This then is the ballot-box and electoral winnowing-machine they have at St. Edmundsbury ; a mind fixed on the Thrice Holy, an appeal to God on high to witness their meditation : by far the best, and indeed the only good electoral winnowing-machine, — if men have souls in them. Totally worthless, it is true, and even hideous and poisonous, if men have no souls. But without soul, alas what winnowing-machine in human elections, can be of avail ? We cannot get along without soul ; we stick fast, the mournfullest spectacle ; and salt itself will not save us ! On the morrow morning, accordingly, our Thirteen set forth ; or rather our Prior and Eleven ; for Samson, as general servant 7 # 78 THE ANCIENT MONK. of the party, has to linger, settling many things. At length he too gets upon the road : and, ' carrying the sealed Paper in a ' leather pouch hung round his neck ; and froccum bajulans in ' ulnis ' (thanks to thee Bozzy Jocelin), 'his frock-skirts looped ' over his elbow,' shewing substantial stern- works, tramps stoutly along. Away across the Heath, not yet of Newmarket and horse- jockeying ; across your Fleam-dike and Devil' s-dike, no longer useful as a Mercian East- Anglian boundary or bulwark : contin- ually towards Waltham, and the Bishop of Winchester's House there, for his Majesty is in that. Brother Samson, as purse- bearer, has the reckoning always, when there is one, to pay ; ' delays are numerous,' progress none of the swiftest. But, in the solitude of the Convent, Destiny thus big and in her birthtime, what gossiping, what babbling, what dreaming of dreams ! The secret of the Three our electoral elders alone know : some Abbot we shall have to govern us ; but which Ab- bot, O which ! One Monk discerns in a vision of the night- watches, that we shall get an Abbot of our own body, without needing to demur : a prophet appeared to him clad all in white, and said, " Ye shall have one of yours, and he will rage among you like a wolf, seeviel ut lupus." Verily ! — then which of ours? Another Monk now dreams : he has seen clearly which ; a cer- tain Figure taller by head and shoulders than the other two, dressed in alb and pallium, and with the attitude of one about to fight ; — which tall Figure a wise Editor would rather not name at this stage of the business ? Enough that the vision is true : that Saint Edmund himself, pale and awful, seemed to rise from his Shrine, with naked feet, and say audibly, " He, ille, shall veil my feet ; " which part of the vision also proves true. Such guessing, visioning, dim perscrutation of the momentous future : the very clothmakers, old women, all townsfolk speak of it, ' and ' more than once it is reported in St. Edmundsbury, This one is ' elected ; and then, This one and That other.' Who knows? But now, sure enough, at Waltham ' on the Second Sunday of Quadragesima,' which Dryasdust declares to mean the 22d day of February, year 1182, Thirteen St. Edmundsbury Monks are, at last, seen processioning towards the Winchester Manorhouse ; THE ELECTION. 79 and in some high Presence-chamber, and Hall of State, get ac- cess to Henry II. in all his glory. What a Hall, — not imaginary in the least, but entirely real and indisputable, though so ex- tremely dim to us ; sunk in the deep distances of Night ! The Winchester Manorhouse has fled bodily, like a Dream of the old Night ; not Dryasdust himself can show a wreck of it. House and people, royal and episcopal, lords and varlets, where are they 1 Why there, I say, Seven Centuries off ; sunk so far in the Night, there they are; peep through the blankets of the old Night, and thou wilt see ! King Henry himself is visibly there, a vivid, noble-looking man, with grizzled beard, in glittering un- certain costume ; with earls round him, and bishops and dignita- ries, in the like. The Hall is large, and has for one thing an altar near it, — chapel and altar adjoining it ; but what gilt seats, carved tables, carpeting of rush-cloth, what arras-hangings, and a huge fire of logs : — alas, it has Human Life in it ; and is not that the grand miracle, in what hangings or costume soever 1 — The Dominus Rex, benignantly receiving our Thirteen with their obeisance, and graciously declaring that he will strive to act for God's honour, and the Church's good, commands, ' by the Bishop of Winchester and Geoffrey the Chancellor,' — Galfridus Cancellarius , Henry's and the Fair Rosamond's authentic Son present here! — commands, "That they, the said Thirteen, do now withdraw, and fix upon Three from their own Monastery." A work soon done ; the Three hanging ready round Samson's neck, in that leather pouch of his. Breaking the seal, we find the names, — what think ye of it, ye higher dignitaries, thou indo- lent Prior, thou Willelmus Sacrist a with the red bottle-nose 1 ? — the names, in this order : of Samson Subsacrisla, of Roger the distressed Cellarer, of Hugo Tertius-Prior. The higher dignitaries, all omitted here, ' flush suddenly red in the face ; ' but have nothing to say. One curious fact and ques- tion certainly is, How Hugo Third-Prior, who was of the electral committee, came to nominate himself as one of the Three ! A curious fact, which Hugo Third-Prior has never yet entirely explained, that I know of! — However, we return, and report to the King our Three names ; merely altering the order ; putting Samson last, as lowest of all. The King, at recitation of our 80 THE ANCIENT MONK. Three, asks us; "Who are they? Were they born in my do- main 1 Totally unknown to me 1 You must nominate three others." "Whereupon Willelmus Sacrista says, " Our Prior must be named, quia caput nostrum est, being already our head." And the Prior responds, "Willelmus Sacrista is a fit man, bonus vir est," — for all his red nose. Tickle me Toby, and I'll tickle thee ! Venerable Dennis too is named ; none in his conscience can say nay. There are now Six on our List. "Well," said the King, " they have done it swiftly they ! Deus est cum eis." The Monks withdraw again ; and Majesty revolves, for a little, with his Pares and Episcopi, Lords or ' Law-wards ' and Soul- Overseers, the thoughts of the royal breast. The Monks wait silent in an outer room. In short while, they are next ordered, To add yet another three ; but not from their own Convent ; from other Convents, " for the honour of my kingdom." Here, — what is to be done here 1 ? We will demur, if need be ! We do name three, how- ever, for the nonce : the Prior of St. Faith's, a good Monk of St. Neot's, a good Monk of St. Alban's; good men all ; all made abbots and dignitaries since, at this hour. There are now Nine upon our List. What the thoughts of the Dominus Rex may be farther] The Dominus Rex, thanking graciously, sends out word that we shall now strike off three. The three strangers are instantly struck off. Willelmus Sacrista adds, that he will of his own accord decline, — a touch of grace and respect for the Sacrosancta, even in Willelmus ! The King then orders us to strike off a couple more ; then yet one more : Hugo Third-Prior goes, and Roger Cellerarius, and venerable Monk Dennis ; — and now there remain on our List two only, Samson Subsacrista and the Prior. Which of these two 1 It were hard to say, — by Monks who may get themselves foot-gyved and thrown into limbo, for speak- ing ! We humbly request that the Bishop of Winchester and Geoffrey the Chancellor may again enter, and help us to decide. "Which do you want?" asks the Bishop. Venerable Dennis made a speech, ' commending the persons of the Prior and Sam- ' son ; but always in the corner of his discourse, in angulo sui c sermonis, brought Samson in.' "I see!" said the Bishop: THE ELECTION. 81 " We are to understand that your Prior is somewhat remiss ; that you want to have him you call Samson for Abbot." " Either of them is good," said venerable Dennis, almost trembling; "but we would have the better, if it pleased God." " Which of the two do you want? " inquires the Bishop pointedly. " Samson ! " answered Dennis ; " Samson ! " echoed all of the rest that durst speak or echo anything : and Samson is reported to the King accordingly. His Majesty, advising of it for a moment, orders that Samson be brought in with the other Twelve. The King's Majesty, looking at us somewhat sternly, then says : " You present to me Samson ; I do not know him : had it been your Prior, whom I do know, I should have accepted him : however, I will now do as you wish. But have a care of your- selves. By the true eyes of God, per veros oculos Dei, if you manage badly, I will be upon you ! " Samson, therefore, steps forward, kisses the King's feet ; but swiftly rises erect again, swiftly turns towards the altar, uplifting with the other Twelve, in clear tenor-note, the Fifty-first Psalm, ' Miserere mei Deus, c After thy loving kindness, Lord, Have mercy upon me ; 5 with firm voice, firm step and head, no change in his countenance whatever. " By God's eyes," said the King, " that one, I think, will govern the Abbey well." By the same oath (charged to your Majesty's account), I too am precisely of that opinion ! It is somewhile since I fell in with a likelier man anywhere than this new Abbot Samson. Long life to him, and may the Lord have mercy on him as Abbot ! Thus, then, have the St. Edmundsbury Monks, without express ballot-box or other good winnowing-machine, contrived to accom- plish the most important social feat a body of men can do, to winnow out the man that is to govern them : and truly one sees not that, by any winnowing-machine whatever, they could have done it better. O ye kind Heavens, there is in every Nation and Community a fittest, a wisest, bravest, best ; whom could we find and make King over us, all were in very truth well ; — the best 82 THE ANCIENT MONK. that God and Nature had permitted us to make it ! By what art discover him ? Will the Heavens in their pity teach us no art ; for our need of him is great ! Ballot-boxes, Reform Bills, winnowing-machines : all these are good, or are not so good ; — alas, brethren, how can these, I say, be other than inadequate, be other than failures, melancholy to behold ! Dim all souls of men to the divine, the high and awful meaning of Human Worth and Truth, we shall never, by all the machinery in Birmingham, discover the True and Worthy. It is written, 'if we are ourselves valets, there shall 1 exist no hero for us ; we shall not know the hero when we see him ; ' — we shall take the quack for a hero ; and cry, audibly through all ballot-boxes and machinery whatsoever, Thou art he ; be thou King over us ! What boots it? Seek only deceitful Speciosity, money with gilt carriages, ' fame ' with newspaper paragraphs, whatever name it bear, you will find only deceitful Speciosity ; godlike Reality will be forever far from you. The Quack shall be legiti- mate inevitable King of you ; no earthly machinery able to ex- clude the Quack. Ye shall be born thralls of the Quack, and suffer under him, till your hearts are near broken, and no French Revolution or Manchester Insurrection, or partial or universal vol- canic combustions and explosions, never so many, can do more than ' change the figure of your Quack ; ' the essence of him remaining, for a time and times. — " How long, O Prophet?" say some, with a rather melancholy sneer. Alas, ye wnprophetic, ever till this come about : Till deep misery, if nothing softer will, have driven you out of your Speciosities into your Sincerities ; and you find that there either is a Godlike in the world, or else ye are an unintelligible madness ; that there is a God, as well as a Mammon and a Devil, and a Genius of Luxuries and canting Dilettantisms and Vain Shows ! How long that will be, con> pute for yourselves. My unhappy brothers ! — CHAPTER IX. ABBOT SAMSON. So then the bells of St. Edmundsbury clang out one and all, and in church and chapel the organs go : Convent and Town, and all the west side of Suffolk, are in gala ; knights, viscounts, weavers, spinners, the entire population, male and female, young and old, the very sockmen with their chubby infants, — out to have a holi- day, and see the Lord Abbot arrive ! And there is ' stripping barefoot ' of the Lord Abbot at the Gate, and solemn leading of him in to the High Altar and Shrine ; with sudden ' silence of all the bells and organs,' as we kneel in deep prayer there ; and again with outburst of all the bells and organs, and loud Te Deum from the general human windpipe ; and speeches by the leading vis- count, and giving of the kiss of brotherhood ; the whole wound up with popular games, and dinner within doors of more than a thousand strong, plus quam mille comedentibus in gaudio magno. In such manner is the selfsame Samson once again returning to us, welcomed on this occasion. He that went away with his frock- skirts looped over his arm, comes back riding high ; sud- denly made one of the dignitaries of this world. Reflective readers will admit that here was a trial for a man. Yesterday a poor mendicant, allowed to possess not above two shillings of money, and without authority to bid a dog run for him, this man today finds himself a Dominus Abbas, mitred Peer of Parliament, Lord of manorhouses, farms, manors, and wide lands ; a man with ' Fifty Knights under him,' and dependent swiftly obedient multi- tudes of men. It is a change greater than Napoleon's ; so sudden withal. As if one of the Chandos day-drudges had, on awaken- ing some morning, found that he overnight was become Duke ! Let Samson with his clear-beaming eyes see into that, and discern 84 THE ANCIENT MONK. it if he can. We shall now get the measure of him by a new scale of inches, considerably more rigorous than the former was. For if a noble soul is rendered tenfold beautifuller by victory and prosperity, springing now radiant as into his own due element and sun-throne ; an ignoble one is rendered tenfold and hundred- fold uglier, pitifuller. Whatsoever vices, whatsoever weaknesses were in the man, the parvenu will shew us them enlarged, as in the solar microscope, into frightful distortion. Nay, how many mere seminal principles of vice, hitherto all wholesomely kept latent, may we now see unfolded, as in the solar hot-house, into growth, into huge universally-conspicuous luxuriance and devel- opment ! But is not this, at any rate, a singular aspect of what political and social capabilities, nay let us say what depth and opulence of true social vitality, lay in those old barbarous ages, That the fit Governor could be met with under such disguises, could be recog- nised and laid hold of under such 1 Here he is discovered with a maximum of two shillings in his pocket, and a leather scrip round his neck ; trudging along the highway, his frock-skirts looped over his arm. They think this is he nevertheless, the true Gov- ernor ; and he proves to be so. Brethren, have we no need of discovering true Governors, but will sham ones forever do for us ? These were absurd superstitious blockheads of Monks ; and we are enlightened Tenpound Franchisers, without taxes on knowl- edge ! Where, I say, are our superior, are our similar or at all comparable discoveries'? We also have eyes, or ought to have ; we have hustings, telescopes ; we have lights, link-lights and rush-lights of an enlightened free Press, burning and dancing everywhere, as in a universal torch-dance ; singeing your whisk- ers as you traverse the public thoroughfares in town and country. Great souls, true Governors, go about under all manner of dis- guises now as then. Such telescopes, such enlightenment, — and such discovery ! How comes it, I say ; how comes it ! Is it not lamentable ; is it not even, in some sense, amazing? Alas, the defect, as we must often urge and again urge, is less a defect of telescopes than of some eyesight. Those superstitious blockheads of the Twelth Century had no telescopes, but they ABBOT SAMSON. 85 had still an eye : not ballot-boxes ; only reverence for Worth, abhorrence of Unworth. It is the way with all barbarians. Thus Mr. Sale informs me, the old Arab Tribes would gather in liveli- est gaudeamus, and sing, and kindle bonfires, and wreathe crowns of honour, and solemnly thank the gods that, in their Tribe too, a Poet had shewn himself. As indeed they well might ; for what usefuller, I say not nobler and heavenlier thing could the gods, doing their very kindest, send to any Tribe or Nation, in any time or circumstances 1 I declare to thee, my afflicted quack- ridden brother, in spite of thy astonishment, it is very lamentable ! We English find a Poet, as brave a man as has been made for a hundred years or so anywhere under the Sun ; and do we kindle bonfires, thank the gods? Not at all. We, taking due counsel of it, set the man to gauge ale-barrels in the Burgh of Dumfries ; and pique ourselves on our ' patronage of genius.' Genius, Poet : do we know what these words mean 1 An in- spired Soul once more vouchsafed us, direct from Nature's own great fire-heart, to see the Truth, and speak it, and do it ; Na- ture's own sacred voice heard once more athwart the dreary boundless element of hearsaying and canting, of twaddle and pol- troonery, in which the bewildered Earth, nigh perishing, has lost its way. Hear once more, ye bewildered benighted mortals ; lis- ten once again to a voice from the inner Light-sea and Flame-sea, Nature's and Truth's own heart ; know the Fact of your Exist- ence what it is, put away the Cant of it which it is not; and knowing, do, and let it be well with you ! — George the Third is Defender of something we call ' the Faith ' in those years ; George the Third is head charioteer of the Desti- nies of England, to guide them through the gulf of French Revo- lutions, American Independences ; and Robert Burns is Gauger of ale in Dumfries. It is an Iliad in a nutshell. The physiognomy of a world now verging towards dissolution, reduced now to spasms and death- throes, lies pictured in that one fact, — which astonishes nobody, except at me for being astonished at it. The fruit of long ages of confirmed Valethood, entirely confirmed as into a Law of Nature ; cloth-worship and quack-worship : entirely confirmed Valethood, — which will have to wnconfirm itself again ; God knows, with difficulty enough ! — 8 86 THE ANCIENT MONK. Abbot Samson had found a Convent all in dilapidation ; rain beating through it, material rain and metaphorical, from all quar- ters of the compass. Willelmus Sacrista sits drinking nightly, and doing mere taceiida. Our larders are reduced to leanness, Jew Harpies and unclean creatures our purveyors ; in our basket is no bread. Old women with their distaffs rush out. on a dis- tressed Cellarer in shrill Chartism. ' You cannot stir abroad but Jews and Christians pounce upon you with unsettled bonds ; ' debts boundless seemingly as the National Debt of England. For four years our new Lord Abbot never went abroad but Jew credi- tors and Christian, and all manner of creditors, were about him; driving him to very despair. Our Prior is remiss ; our Cellarers, officials are remiss, our monks are remiss : what man is not re- miss 1 Front this, Samson, thou alone art there to front it ; it is thy task to front and fight this, and to die or kill it. May the Lord have mercy on thee ! To our antiquarian interest in poor Jocelin and his Convent, where the whole aspect of existence, the whole dialect, of thought, of speech, of activity, is so obsolete, strange, long-vanished, there now superadds itself a mild glow of human interest for Abbot Samson ; a real pleasure, as at sight of man's work, especially of governing, which is man's highest work, done well. Abbot Samson had no experience in governing ; had served no appren- ticeship to the trade of governing, — alas, only the hardest ap- prenticeship to that of obeying. He had never in any court given vadium or plegium, says Jocelin ; hardly ever seen a court, when he was set to preside in one. But it is astonishing, continues Jocelin, how soon he learned the ways of business ; and, in all sort of affairs, became expert beyond others. Of the many per- sons offering him their service ' he retained one Knight skilled in taking vadia and plegia; ' and within the year was himself well skilled. Nay, by and by, the Pope appoints him Justiciary in certain causes ; the King one of his new Circuit Judges : official Osbert is heard saying, " That Abbot is one of your shrewd ones, dispulator est ; if he go on as he begins, he will cut out every lawyer of us! "* * Jocelini Chronica, p. 25. ABBOT SAMSON. 87 Why not? What is to hinder this Samson from governing'? There is in him what far transcends all apprenticeships ; in the man himself there exists a model of governing, something to go- vern by ! There exists in him a heart-abhorrence of whatever is incoherent, pusillanimous, unveracious, — that is to say, chaotic, ungoxemed ; of the Devil, not of God. A man of this kind can- not help governing ! He has the living ideal of a governor in him ; and the incessant necessity of struggling to unfold the same out of him. Not the Devil or Chaos, for any wages, will he serve ; no, this man is the born servant of Another than them. Alas, how little avail all apprenticeships, when there is, in your governor himself what we may well call nothing to govern by : nothing ; — a general grey twilight, looming with shapes of ex- pediences, parliamentary traditions, division-lists, election-funds, leading-articles ; this, with what of vulpine alertness and adroit- ness soever, is not much ! But indeed what say we, apprenticeship? Had not this Sam- son served, in his way, a right good apprenticeship to governing ; namely, the harshest slave-apprenticeship to obeying ! Walk this world with no friend in it but God and St. Edmund, you will either fall into the ditch, or learn a good many things. To learn obeying is the fundamental art of governing. How much would many a Serene Highness have learned, had he travelled through the world with water-jug and empty wallet, sine omni expensa; and, at his victorious return, sat down not to newspaper-para- graphs and city-illuminations, but at the foot of St. Edmund's Shrine to shackles and bread and water ! He that cannot be ser- vant of many, will never be master, true guide and deliverer of many; — that is the meaning of true mastership. Had not the Monk-life extraordinary ' political capabilities ' in it •, if not imita- ble by us, yet enviable? Heavens, had a Duke of Logwood, now rolling sumptuously to his place in the Collective Wisdom, but himself happened to plough daily, at one time, on seven-and-six- pence a week, with no out-door relief, — what a light, unquench- able by logic and statistic and arithmetic, would it have thrown on several things for him ! In all cases, therefore, we will agree with the judicious Mrs. Glass : ' First catch your hare ! ' First get your man ; all is 88 THE ANCIENT MONK. got : he can learn to do all things, from making boots, to decree- ing judgments, governing communities ; and will do them like a man. Catch your no-man, — alas, have you not caught the terriblest Tartar in the world ! Perhaps all the terribler, the quieter and gentler he looks. For the mischief that one block- head, that every blockhead does, in a world so feracious, teeming with endless results as ours, no ciphering will sum up. The quack bootmaker is considerable ; as corn-cutters can testify, and desperate men reduced to buckskin and list-shoes. But the quack priest, quack high-priest, the quack king ! Why do not all just citizens rush, half-frantic, to stop him, as they would a conflagration'? Surely a just citizen is admonished by God and his own Soul, by all silent and articulate voices of this Universe, to do what in him lies towards relief of this poor blockhead-quack, and of a world that groans under him. Run swiftly; relieve him, — were it even by extinguishing him ! For all things have grown so old, tinder-dry, combustible ; and he is more ruinous than conflagration. Sweep him doiirn, at least ; keep him strictly within the hearth : he will then cease to be conflagration ; he will then become useful, more or less, as culinary fire. Fire is the best of servants ; but what a master ! This poor blockhead too is born for uses : why, elevating him to mastership, will you make a conflagration, a parish-curse or world-curse of him? CHAPTER X. GOVERNMENT. How Abbot Samson, giving his new subjects seriatim the kiss of fatherhood in the St. Edmundsbury chapterhouse, proceeded with cautious energy to set about reforming their disjointed distracted way of life ; how he managed with his Fifty rough Milites (Feu- dal Knights), with his lazy Farmers, remiss refractory Monks, with Pope's Legates, Viscounts, Bishops, Kings ; how on all sides he laid about him like a man, and putting consequence on premiss, and everywhere the saddle on the right horse, struggled incessantly to educe organic method out of lazily fermenting wreck, — the careful reader will discern, not without true inter- est, in these pages of Jocelin Boswell. In most antiquarian quaint costume, not of garments alone, but of thought, word, action, outlook and position, the substantial figure of a man with eminent nose, bushy brows and clear-flashing eyes, his russet beard grow- ing daily greyer, is visible, engaged in true governing of men. It is beautiful how the chrysalis governing-soul, shaking off its dusty slough and prison, starts forth winged, a true royal soul! Our new Abbot has a right honest unconscious feeling, without insolence as without fear or flutter, of what he is and what others are. A courage to quell the proudest, an honest pity to encour- age the humblest. Withal there is a noble reticence in this Lord Abbot : much vain unreason he hears ; lays up without response. He is not there to expect reason and nobleness of others ; he is there to give them of his own reason and nobleness. Is he not their servant, as we said, who can suffer from them, and for them ; bear the burden their poor spindle-limbs totter and stagger under ; and in virtue thereof govern them, lead them out of weakness into strength, out of defeat into victory ! 8* 90 THE ANCIENT MONK. One of the first Herculean Labours Abbot Samson undertook, or the very first, was to institute a strenuous review and radical reform of his economics. It is the first labour of every govern- ing man, from Paterfamilias to Dominus Bex. To get the rain thatched out from you is the preliminary of whatever farther, in the way of speculation or of action, you may mean to do. Old Abbot Hugo's budget, as we saw, had become empty, filled with deficit and wind. To see his account-books clear, be delivered from those ravening flights of Jew and Christian creditors, pounc- ing on him like obscene harpies wherever he shewed face, was a necessity for Abbot Samson. On the morrow after his instalment, he brings in a load of money-bonds, all duly stamped, sealed with this or the other Convent Seal: frightful, unmanageable, a bottomless confusion of Convent finance. There they are ; — but there at least they all are ; all that shall be of them. Our Lord Abbot demands that all the official seals in use among us be now produced and delivered to him. Three-and-thirty seals turn up ; are straightway broken, and shall seal no more : the Abbot only, and those duly author- ised by him shall seal any bond. There are but two ways of pay- ing debt ; increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying it out. With iron energy, in slow but steady unde- viating perseverance, Abbot Samson sets to work in both direc- tions. His troubles are manifold : cunning milites, unjust bailiffs, lazy sockmen, he an inexperienced Abbot ; relaxed lazy monks, not disinclined to mutiny in mass : but continued vigilance, rigor- ous method, what we call ' the eye of the master,' work wonders. The clear -beaming eyesight of Abbot Samson, steadfast, severe, all-penetrating, — it is like Fiat lux in that inorganic waste whirl- pool ; penetrates gradually to all nooks, and of the chaos makes a kosmos or ordered world ! He arranges everywhere, struggles unweariedly to arrange, and place on some intelligible footing, the ' affairs and dues, res ac reddititse of his dominion. The Lakenheath eels cease to breed squabbles between human beings ; the penny of reap-silver to explode into the streets the Female Chartism of St. Edmunds- bury. These and innumerable greater things. Wheresoever Disorder may stand or lie, let it have a care ; here is the man that GOVERNMENT. 91 has declared war with it, that never will make peace with it. Man is the Missionary of Order ; he is the servant not of the Devil and Chaos, but of God and the Universe ! Let all slug- gards and cowards, remiss, false-spoken, unjust, and otherwise diabolic persons have a care : this is a dangerous man for them. He has a mild grave face ; a thoughtful sternness, a sorrowful pity : but there is a terrible flash of anger in him too ; lazy monks often have to murmur, " Scevit ut lupus, He rages like a wolf; was not our Dream true !" ' To repress and hold-in such sudden anger he was continually careful,' and succeeded well : — right, Samson ; that it may become in thee as noble central heat, fruitful, strong, beneficent ; not blaze out, or the seldomest pos- sible blaze out, as wasteful volcanoism to scorch and consume ! " We must first creep, and gradually learn to walk," had Ab- bot Samson said of himself, at starting. In four years he has become a great walker ; striding prosperously along ; driving much before him. In less than four years, says Jocelin, the Con- vent Debts were all liquidated : the harpy Jews not only settled with, but banished, bag and baggage, out of the Bannaleuca (Lib- erties, Banlieue) of St. Edmundsbury, — so has the King's Ma- jesty been persuaded to permit. Farewell to you, at any rate ; let us, in no extremity, apply again to you ! Armed men march them over the borders, dismiss them under stern penalties, — sentence of excommunication on all that shall again harbour them here : there were many dry eyes at their departure. New life enters everywhere, springs up beneficent, the Incubus of Debt once rolled away. Samson hastes not ; but neither does he pause to rest. This of the Finance is a life-long business with him ; — Jocelin 's anecdotes are filled to weariness with it. As indeed to Jocelin it was of very primary interest. But we have to record also, with a lively satisfaction, that spiritual rubbish is as little tolerated in Samson's Monastery as material. With due rigour, Willelmus Sacrista, and his bibations and tacenda are, at the earliest opportunity, softly, yet irrevocably put an end to. The bibations, namely, had to end ; even the building where they used to be carried on was razed from the soil of St. Edmundsbury, and ' on its place grow rows of beans :' 92 THE ANCIENT MONK. Willelmus himself, deposed from the Sacristry and all offices, retires into obscurity, into absolute taciturnity unbroken thence- forth to this hour. Whether the poor Willelmus did not still, by secret channels, occasionally get some slight wetting of vinous or alcoholic liquor, — now grown, in a manner, indispensable to the poor man ? Jocelin hints not ; one knows not how to hope, what to hope ! But if he did, it was in silence and darkness ; with an ever-present feeling that teetotalism was his only true course. Drunken dissolute Monks are a class of persons who had better keep out of Abbot Samson's way. Stevit ut lupus ; was not the Dream true ! murmured many a Monk. Nay Ranulf de Glanville, Justiciary in Chief, took umbrage at him, seeing these strict ways ; and watched farther with suspicion : but discerned gradually that there was nothing wrong, that there was much the opposite of wrong. CHAPTER XL THE ABBOTS WAYS. Abbot Samson shewed no extraordinary favour to the Monks who had been his familiars of old ; did not promote them to of- fices, — nisi essent idonei, unless they chanced to be fit men ! Whence great discontent among certain of these, who had con- tributed to make him Abbot : reproaches, open and secret, of his being ' ungrateful, hard-tempered, unsocial, a Norfolk barrator and paltenerius.' Indeed, except it were for idonei, l fit men,' in all kinds, it was hard to say for whom Abbot Samson had much favour. He loved his kindred well, and tenderly enough acknowledged the poor part of them ; with the rich part, who in old days had never ac- knowledged him, he totally refused to have any business. But even the former he did not promote into offices ; finding none of them idonei. ' Some whom he thought suitable he put into situ- ' ations in his own household, or made keepers of his country ' places : if they behaved ill, he dismissed them without hope of ' return.' In his promotions, nay almost in his benefits, you would have said there was a certain impartiality. ' The official 1 person who had, by Abbot Hugo's order, put the fetters on him ' at his return from Italy, was now supported with food and ' clothes to the end of his days at Abbot Samson's expense.' Yet he did not forget benefits : far the reverse, when an oppor- tunity occurred of paying them at his own cost. How pay them at the public cost ; — how, above all, by setting fire to the public, as we said ; clapping ' conflagrations ' on the public, which the services of blockheads, non-idonei, intrinsically are ! He was right willing to remember friends, when it could be done. Take these instances : ' A certain chaplain who had maintained him at 94 THE ANCIENT MONK. 1 the Schools of Paris by the sale of holy water, quastu aqua ' benedictce ; — to this good chaplain he did give a vicarage, ade- 1 quate to the comfortable sustenance of him.' 'The Son of 1 Elias, too, that is, of old Abbot Hugo's Cupbearer, coming to 1 do homage for his Father's land, our Lord Abbot said to him in 1 full court : "I have, for these seven years, put off taking thy ' homage for the land which Abbot Hugo gave thy Father, be- ' cause that gift was to the damage of Elmswell, and a question- 1 able one : but now I must profess myself overcome ; mindful of ' the kindness thy Father did me when I was in bonds ; because ' he sent me a cup of the very wine his master had been drinking, 1 and bade me be comforted in God." ' ' To Magister Walter, son of Magister William de Dice, who ' wanted the vicarage of Chevington, he answered : "Thy Fa- ' ther was Master of the Schools ; and when I was an indigent 1 clericus, he granted me freely and in charity an entrance to his ' School, and opportunity of learning ; wherefore I now, for the ' sake of God, grant to thee what thou askest." ' Or lastly, take this good instance, — and a glimpse, along with it, into long-obso- lete times : ' Two Milites of Risby, Willelm and Norman, being 1 adjudged in Court to come under his mercy, in miser icordia ejus, 3 for a certain very considerable fine of twenty shillings, ' he thus ' addressed them publicly on the spot : " When I was a Cloister- ' monk, I was once sent to Durham on business of our Church ; 1 and coming home again, the dark night caught me at Risby, ' and I had to beg a lodging there. I went to Dominus Norman's, 1 and he gave me a flat refusal. Going then to Dominus Wil- 1 lelm's, and begging hospitality, I was by him honourably re- ' ceived. The twenty shillings therefore of mercy, I, without ' mercy, will exact from Dominus Norman ; to Dominus Willelm, ' on the other hand, I, with thanks, will wholly remit the said ' sum." ' Men know not always to whom they refuse lodgings ; men have lodged Angels unawares ! — It is clear Abbot Samson had a talent ; he had learned to judge better than Lawyers, to manage better than bred Bailiffs : — a talent shining out indisputable, on whatever side you took him. 1 An eloquent man he was,' says Jocelin, ' both in French and the abbot's ways. 95 ' Latin ; but intent more on the substance and method of what ' was to be said, than on the ornamental way of saying it. He ' could read English Manuscripts very elegantly, elegantissime : 1 he was wont to preach to the people in the English tongue, ' though according to the dialect of Norfolk, where he had been ' brought up ; wherefore indeed he had caused a Pulpit to be ' erected in our Church both for ornament of the same, and for ' the use of his audiences.' There preached he, according to the dialect of Norfolk : a man worth going to hear. That he was a just clear-hearted man, this, as the basis of all true talent, is presupposed. How can a man, without clear vision in his heart first of all, have any clear vision in the head? It is impossible ! Abbot Samson was one of the justest of judges ; insisted on understanding the case to the bottom, and then swiftly decided without feud or favour. For which reason, indeed, the Dominus Rex, searching for such men, as for hidden treasure and healing to his distressed realm, had made him one of the new Itinerant Judges, — such as continue to this day. " My curse on that Abbot's court," a suitor was heard imprecating, " Maledicta sit curia istius Abbatis, where neither gold nor silver can help me to confound my enemy ! ' ' And old friendships and all connexions forgotten, when you go to seek an office from him ! "A kinless loon," as the Scotch said of Cromwell's new judges, — intent on mere indifferent fair-play ! Eloquence in three languages is good ; but it is not the best. To us, as already hinted, the Lord Abbott's eloquence is less admirable than his ^eloquence, his great invaluable ' talent of silence ! ' ' " Deus, Deus" said the Lord Abbot to me once, when ' he heard the Convent were murmuring at some act of his, " I ' have much need to remember that. Dream they had of me, that I ' was to rage among them like a wolf. Above all earthly things ' I dread their driving me to do it. How much do I hold in, and ' wink at : raging and shuddering in my own secret mind, and ' not outwardly at all ! " He would boast to me at other times : ' " This and that I have seen, this and that I have heard ; yet ' patiently stood it." He had this way, too, which I have never 1 seen in any other man, that he affectionately loved many persons 1 to whom he never or hardly ever shewed a countenance of love. 96 THE ANCIENT MONK. ' Once on my venturing to expostulate with him on the subject, ' he reminded me of Solomon : " Many sons I have ; it is not fit ' that I should smile on them." He would sutler faults, damage ' from his servants, and know what he suffered, and not speak of ' it ; but I think the reason was, he waited a good time for speak- 1 ing of it, and in a wise way amending it. He intimated, openly ' in chapter to us all, that he would have no eavesdropping : " Let ' none," said he, " come to me secretly accusing another, unless ' he will publicly stand to the same ; if he come otherwise, I will ' openly proclaim the name of him. I wish, too, that every Monk ' of you have free access to me, to speak of your needs or griev- ' ances when you will." ' The kinds of people Abbot Samson liked worst were these three : ' Me?idaces, ebriosi, verbosi, Liars, drunkards, and wordy or windy persons ; ' — not good kinds, any of them ! He also much condemned ' persons given to murmur at their meat or drink, ' especially Monks of that disposition.' We remark, from the very first, his strict anxious order to his servants to provide hand- somely for hospitality, to guard ' above all things that there be ' no shabbiness in the matter of meat and drink ; no look of mean ' parsimony, in novitate mea, at the beginning of my Abbotship ; ' and to the last he maintains a due opulence of table and equipment for others : but he is himself in the highest degree indifferent to all such things. ' Sweet milk, honey, and other naturally sweet kinds of food, 1 were what he preferred to eat : but he had this virtue,' says Jocelin, 'he never changed the dish (ferculum) you set before ' him, be what it might. Once when I, still a novice, happened ' to be waiting table in the refectory, it came into my head ' (rogue that I was!) ' to try if this were true ; and I thought I ' would place before him a ferculum that would have displeased 1 any other person, the very platter being black and broken. But ' he, seeing it, was as one that saw it not : and now some little 1 delay taking place, my heart smote me that I had done this ; ' and so, snatching up the platter (discus), I changed both it and ' its contents for a better, and put down that instead ; which ' emendation he was angry at, and rebuked me for,' — the stoical monastic man ! ' For the first seven years he had commonly four the abbot's ways. 97 ' sorts of dishes on his table ; afterwards only three, except it ' might be presents, or venison from his own parks, or fishes from 'his ponds. And if, at any time, he had guests living in his ' house at the request of some great person, or of some friend, or 'had public messengers, or had harpers (citharcedos) , or any one ' of that sort, he took the first opportunity of shifting to another of ' his Manor-houses, and so got rid of such superfluous individ- ' uals,' * — very prudently, I think. As to his parks, of these, in the general repair of buildings, general improvement and adornment of the St. Edmund Domains, ' he had laid out several, and stocked them with animals, retaining ' a proper huntsman with hounds : and, if any guest of great ' quality were there, our Lord Abbot with his Monks would sit in ' some opening of the woods, and see the dogs run ; but he him- ' self never meddled with hunting, that I saw.' f ' In an opening of the woods ;' — for the country was still dark with wood in those days ; and Scotland itself still rustled shaggy and leafy, like a damp black American Forest, with cleared spots and spaces here and there. Dryasdust advances several absurd hypotheses as to the insensible but almost total disappearance of these woods ; the thick wreck of which now lies as peat, sometimes with huge heart-of-oak timber logs imbedded in it, on many a height and hollow. The simplest reason doubtless is, that by increase of husbandry, there was increase of cattle ; increase of hunger for green spring food ; and so, more and more, the new seedlings got yearly eaten out in April ; and the old trees, having only a certain length of life in them, died gradually, no man heeding it, and disappeared into peat. A sorrowful waste of noble wood and umbrage ! Yes, — but a very common one ; the course of most things in this world. Monachism itself, so rich and fruitful once, is now all rotted into peat; lies sleek and buried, — and a most feeble bog-grass of Dilettantism all the crop we reap from it ! That also was fright- ful waste ; perhaps among the saddest our England ever saw. Why will men destroy noble Forests, even when in part a nui- * Jocelini Chronica, p. 31. t Jocelini Chronica, p. 21. 9 98 THE ANCIENT MONK. sance, in such reckless manner ; turning loose four-footed cattle and Henry-the-Eighths into them ! The fifth part of our English soil, Dryasdust computes, lay consecrated to ' spiritual uses,' bet- ter or worse : solemnly set apart to foster spiritual growth and culture of the soul, by the methods then known : and now — it too, like the four-fifths, fosters what? Gentle shepherd, tell me what! CHAPTER XII. THE ABBOT'S TROUBLES. The troubles of Abbot Samson, as he went along- in this abstemi- ous, reticent, rigorous way, were more than tongue can tell. The Abbot's mitre once set on his head, he knew rest no more. Dou- ble, double, toil and trouble ; that is the life of all governors that really govern : not the spoil of victory, only the glorious toil of battle can be theirs. Abbot Samson found all men more or less headstrong, irrational, prone to disorder ; continually threatening to prove wwgovernable. His lazy Monks gave him most trouble. ' My heart is tortured,' said he, ' till we get out of debt, cor meum cruciatum est.'' Your heart, indeed ; — but not altogether ours ! By no devisable meth- od, or none of three or four that he devised, could Abbot Samson get these Monks of his to keep their accounts straight ; but al- ways, do as he might, the Cellerarius at the end of the term is in a coil, in a flat deficit, — verging again towards debt and Jews. The Lord Abbot at last declares sternly he will keep our accounts too himself; will appoint an officer of his own to see our Cellera- rius keep them. Murmurs thereupon among us : Was the like ever heard 1 Our Cellerarius a cipher ; the very Townsfolk know it : subsannatio et derisio sumus, we have become a laughingstock to mankind. The Norfolk barrator and paltener ! And consider, if the Abbot found such difficulty in the mere economic department, how much in more complex ones, in spiritual ones perhaps ! He wears a stern calm face ; raging and gnashing teeth, fremens and frendens, many times, in the secret of his mind. Withal, however, there is a noble slow perseverance in him ; a strength of ' subdued rage ' calculated to subdue most things : always, in the long-run, he contrives to gain his point. 100 THE ANCIENT MONK. Murmurs from the Monks, meanwhile, cannot fail ; ever deeper murmurs, new grudges accumulating. At one time, on slight cause, some drop making the cup run over, they burst into open mutiny : the Cellarer will not obey, prefers arrest on bread and water to obeying ; the Monks thereupon strike work ; refuse to do the regular chanting of the day, at least the younger part of them with loud clamour and uproar refuse : — Abbot Samson has with- drawn to another residence, acting only by messengers : the awful report circulates through St. Edmundsbury that the Abbot is in danger of being murdered by the Monks with their knives ! How wilt thou appease this, Abbot Samson ? Return ; for the Monas- tery seems near catching fire ! Abbot Samson returns ; sits in his Thalamus or inner room, hurls out a bolt or two of excommunication : lo, one disobedient Monk sits in limbo, excommunicated, with foot-shackles on him, all day ; and three more our Abbot has gyved ' with the lesser sentence, to strike fear into the others ! ' Let the others think with whom they have to do. The others think ; and fear enters into them. ' On the morrow morning we decide on humbling our- 1 selves before the Abbot, by word and gesture, in order to miti- ' gate his mind. And so accordingly was done. He, on the ' other side, replying with much humility, yet always alleging his ' own justice and turning the blame on us, when he saw that we ' were conquered, became himself conquered. And bursting into ' tears, perfusus lachrymis, he swore that he had never grieved so 1 much for anything in the world as for this, first on his own ac- 1 count, and then secondly and chiefly for the public scandal which ' had gone abroad, that St. Edmund's Monks were going to kill ' their Abbot. And when he had narrated how he went away on ' purpose till his anger should cool, repeating this word of the ' philosopher, " I would have taken vengeance on thee, had not I ' been angry," he arose weeping, and embraced each and all of ' us with the kiss of peace. He wept ; we all wept : ' # — what a picture ! Behave better, ye remiss Monks, and thank Heaven for such an Abbot ; or know at least that ye must and shall obey him. * Jocelini Chronica, p. 85. THE ABBOT'S TROUBLES. 101 Worn down in this manner, with incessant toil and tribulation, Abbot Samson had a sore time of it ; his grizzled hair and beard grew daily greyer. Those Jews, in the first four years, had ' visi- bly emaciated him : ' Time, Jews, and the task of Governing, will make a man's beard very grey ! ' In twelve years,' says Jocelin, ' our Lord Abbot had grown wholly white as snow, tolus efficitur alius sicut nix.'' White, atop, like the granite mountains : — but his clear-beaming eyes still look out, in their stern clear- ness, in their sorrow and pity ; the heart within him remains un- conquered. Nay sometimes there are gleams of hilarity too ; little snatches of encouragement granted even to a Governor. ' Once my Lord ' Abbot and I, coming down from London through the Forest, I ' inquired of an old woman whom we came up to, Whose wood ' this was, and of what manor ; who the master, who the ' keeper? ' — All this I knew very well beforehand, and my Lord Abbot too, Bozzy that I was ! But ' the old woman answered, ' The wood belonged to the new Abbot of St. Edmund's, was of 1 the manor of Harlow, and the keeper of it was one Arnald. ' How did he behave to the people of the manor? I asked farther. ' She answered that, he used to be a devil incarnate, dcemonvivus, 1 an enemy of God, and flayer of the peasants' skins,' — skinning them like live eels, as the manner of some is : ' but that now he ' dreads the new Abbot, knowing him to be a wise and sharp ' man, and so treats the people reasonably, tractat homines paci- 1 jiceS Whereat the Lord Abbot f actus est hilaris, — could not but take a triumphant laugh for himself; and determines to leave that Harlow manor yet unmeddled with, for a while.* A brave man, strenuously fighting, fails not of a little triumph, now and then, to keep him in heart. Everywhere we try at least to give the adversary as good as he brings ; and, with swift force or slow watchful manoeuvre, extinguish this and the other solecism, leave one solecism less in God's Creation ; and so pro- ceed with our battle, not slacken or surrender in it ! The Fifty feudal Knights, for example, were of unjust greedy temper, and cheated us, in the Installation-day, of ten knights'-fees : — but * Jocelini Chronica, p. 24. 9* 102 THE ANCIENT MONK. they know now whether that has profited them aught, and I Joce- lin know. Our Lord Abbot for the moment had to endure it, and say nothing ; but he watched his time. Look also how my Lord of Clare, coming to claim his wndue 1 debt ' in the Court at Witham, with barons and apparatus, gets a Rowland for his Oliver ! Jocelin shall report : 'The Earl, ' crowded round (constipatas) with many barons and men at arms, ' Earl Alberic and others standing by him, said, " That his bail- 1 iffs had given him to understand they were wont annually to ' receive' for his behoof, from the Hundred of Risebridge and the ' bailiffs thereof, a sum of five shillings, which sum was now ' unjustly held back ; " and he alleged farther that his predeces- 1 sors had been infeft, at the Conquest, in the lands of Alfric son ' of Wisgar, who was Lord of that Hundred, as may be read in 1 Domesday Book by all persons. — The Abbot, reflecting for a 'moment, without stirring from his place, made answer: "A 'wonderful deficit, my Lord Earl, this that thou mentionest! ' King Edward gave to St. Edmund that entire Hundred, and 'confirmed the same with his Charter ; nor is there any mention ' there of those five shillings. It will behove thee to say, for what ' service, or on what ground, thou exactest those five shillings." ' Whereupon the Earl, consulting with his followers, replied, ' That he had to carry the Banner of St. Edmund in war-time, ' and for this duty the five shillings were his. To which the ' Abbot : " Certainly, it seems inglorious, if so great a man, Earl ' of Clare no less, receive so small a gift for such a service. To ' the Abbot of St. Edmund's it is no unbearable burden to give ' five shillings. But Roger Earl Bigot holds himself duly seised, ' and asserts that he by such seisin has the office of carrying St. ' Edmund's Banner ; and he did carry it when the Earl of Leices- ' ter and his Flemings were beaten at Fornham. Then again ' Thomas de Mendham says that the right is his. When you ' have made out with one another, that this right is thine, come ' then and claim the five shillings, and I will promptly pay ' them ! " Whereupon the Earl said, He would speak with Earl ' Roger his relative ; and so the matter cepit delationemj and lies undecided to the end of the world. Abbot Samson answers by word or act, in this or the like pregnant manner, having justice on the abbot's troubles. 103 his side, innumerable persons : Pope's Legates, King's Viscounts, Canterbury Archbishops, Cellarers, Sochemanni ; — and leaves many a solecism extinguished. On the whole, however, it is and remains sore work. ' One ' time, during my chaplaincy, I ventured to say to him : " Domi- ' ne, I heard thee, this night after matins, wakeful, and sighing ' deeply, valde suspirantem, contrary to thy usual wont." He an- ' swered ; " No wonder. Thou, son Jocelin, sharest in my good ' things, in food and drink, in riding and such like ; but thou little ' thinkest concerning the management of House and Family, the ' various and arduous businesses of the Pastoral Care, which ha- ' rass me, and make my soul to sigh and be anxious." Whereto ' I, lifting up my hands to Heaven : " From such anxiety, Om- ' nipotent Merciful Lord deliver me ! " — I have heard the Abbot ' say, If he had been as he was before he became a Monk, and ' could have anywhere got five or six marcs of income,' some three pound ten of yearly revenue, ' whereby to support himself ' in the schools, he would never have been Monk nor Abbot. ' Another time he said with an oath, If he had known what a ' business it was to govern the Abbey, he would rather have been ' Almoner, how much rather Keeper of the Books, than Abbot ' and Lord. That latter office he said he had always longed for, ' beyond any other. Quis talia crederet,' concludes Jocelin, ' Who ' can believe such things ? ' Three pound ten, and a life of Literature, especially of quiet Literature, without copyright, or world-celebrity of literary- gazettes, — yes, thou 'brave Abbot Samson, for thyself it had been better, easier, perhaps also nobler ! But then, for thy diso- bedient Monks, unjust Viscounts ; for a Domain of St. Edmund overgrown with Solecisms, human and other, it had not been so well. Nay neither could thy Literature, never so quiet, have been easy. Literature, when noble, is not easy ; but only when igno- ble. Literature too is a quarrel, and internecine duel, with the whole World of Darkness that lies without one and within one ; — rather a hard fight at times, even with the three pound ten se- cure. Thou, there where thou art, wrestle and duel along, cheer- fully to the end ; and make no remarks ! CHAPTER XIII. IN PARLIAMENT. Of Abbot Samson's public business we say little, though that also was great. He had to judge the people as Justice Errant, to decide in weighty arbitrations and public controversies ; to equip his milites, send them duly in war-time to the King ; — strive every way that the Commonweal, in his quarter of it, take no damage. Once, in the confused days of Lackland's usurpation, while Cceur- de-Lion was away, our brave Abbot took helmet himself, having first excommunicated all that should favour Lackland ; and led his men in person to the siege of Wmdleshora, what we now call Windsor ; where Lackland had entrenched himself, the centre of infinite confusions ; some Reform Bill, then as now, being greatly needed. There did Abbot Samson ' fight the battle of reform,' — with other ammunition, one hopes, then ' tremendous cheering ' and such like ! For these things he was called ' the magnanimous Abbot.' He also attended duly in his place in Parliament de arduis regni; attended especially, as in arduissimo , when ' the news reached London that King Richard was a captive in Germany.' Here ' while all the barons sat to consult,' and many of them looked blank enough, ' the Abbot started forth, prosiliit coram omnibus, ' in his place in Parliament, and said, That he was ready to go and 1 seek his Lord the King, either clandestinely by subterfuge {in 1 tapinagio), or by any other method ; and search till he found 1 him, and got certain notice of him ; he for one ! By which 1 word,' says Jocelin, ' he acquired great praise for himself,' — unfeigned commendation from the Able Editors of that age. By which word ; — and also by which deed: for the Abbot ac- IN PARLIAMENT. 105 tually went ' with rich gifts to the King in Germany ;'* Usurper Lackland being first rooted out from Windsor, and the King's peace somewhat settled. As to these ' rich gifts,' however, we have to note one thing : In all England, as appeared to the Collective Wisdom, there was not like to be treasure enough for ransoming King Richard ; in which extremity certain Lords of the Treasury, Jusliciarii ad Scaccarium, suggested that St. Edmund's Shrine, covered with thick gold, was still untouched. Could not it, in this extremity, be peeled off, at least in part ; under condition, of course, of its being replaced, when times mended 1 The Abbot, starting plumb up, se erigens, answered : " Know ye for certain, that I will in no wise do this thing ; nor is there any man who could force me to consent thereto. But I will open the doors of the Church : Let him that likes enter ; let him that dares come forward !" Emphatic words, which created a sensation round the woolsack. For the Justiciaries of the Scaccarium answered, ' with oaths, ' each for himself: " I won't come forward, for my share ; nor ' will I, nor I ! The distant and absent who offended him, Saint 1 Edmund has been known to punish fearfully ; much more will ' he those close by, who lay violent hands on his coat, and would 1 strip it off!" These things being said, the Shrine was not med- ' died with, nor any ransom levied for it.' f For Lords of the Treasury have in all times their impassable limits, be it by ' force of public opinion ' or otherwise ; and in those days a Heavenly Awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought and must, all earthly Business whatsoever. * Jocelini Chronica, pp. 39, 40. t Jocelini Chronica, p. 71. CHAPTER XIV. HENRY OF ESSEX. Of St. Edmund's fearful avengements have they not the remark- ablest instance still before their eyes 1 He that will go to Reading Monastery may find there, now tonsured into a mournful penitent Monk, the once proud Henry Earl of Essex ; and discern how St. Edmund punishes terribly, yet with mercy ! This Narrative is too significant to be omitted as a document of the Time. Our Lord Abbot, once on a visit at Reading, heard the particulars from Henry's own mouth ; and thereupon charged one of his monks to write it down ; — as accordingly the Monk has done, in ambitious rhetorical Latin ; inserting the same, as episode, among Jocelin's garrulous leaves. Read it here ; with ancient yet with modern eyes. Henry Earl of Essex, standard-bearer of England, had high places and emoluments ; had a haughty high soul, yet with vari- ous flaws, or rather with one many-branched flaw and crack, run- ning through the texture of it. For example, did he not treat Gilbert de Cereville in the most shocking manner 1 He cast Gil- bert into prison ; and, with chains and slow torments, wore the life out of him there. And Gilbert's crime was understood to be only that of innocent Joseph : the Lady Essex was a Potiphar's Wife, and had accused poor Gilbert ! Other cracks, and branches of that widespread flaw in the Standard-bearer's soul we could point out ; but indeed the main stem and trunk of all is too visible in this, That he had no right reverence for the Heavenly in Man, — that far from shewing due reverence to St. Edmund, he did not even shew him common justice. While others in the Eastern Counties were adorning and enlarging with rich gifts St. Ed- mund's resting place, which had become a city of refuge for many things, this Earl of Essex flatly defrauded him, by violence or HENRY OF ESSEX. 107 quirk of law, of five shillings yearly, and converted said sum to his own poor uses ! Nay, in another case of litigation, the unjust Standard-bearer, for his own profit, asserting that the cause be- longed not to St. Edmund's Court, but to his in Lailand Hundred, ' involved us in travellings and innumerable expenses, vexing,4he ' servants of St. Edmund for a long tract of time.' In short he is without reverence for the Heavenly, this Standard-bearer ; reveres only the Earthly, Gold-coined ; and has a most morbid lamentable flaw in the texture of him. It cannot come to good. Accordingly, the same flaw, or St. -Vitus' tic, manifests itself ere long in another way. In the year 1157, he went with his Standard to attend King Henry, our blessed Sovereign (whom we saw afterwards at Waltham), in his War with the Welsh. A somewhat disastrous War ; in which while King Henry and his force were struggling to retreat Parthian-like, endless clouds of exasperated Welshmen hemming them in, and now we had come to the ' difficult pass of Coleshill,' and as it were to the nick of destruction, — Henry Earl of Essex shrieks out on a sudden (blinded doubtless by his inner flaw, or ' evil genius ' as some name it), That King Henry is killed, That all is lost, — and flings down his Standard to shift for itself there ! And, certainly enough, all had been lost, had all men been as he ; — had not brave men, without such miserable jerking tic douloureux in the souls of them, come dashing up, with blazing swords and looks, and asserted That nothing was lost yet, that all must be regained yet. In this manner King Henry and his force got safely retreat- ed, Parthian-like, from the pass of Coleshill and the Welsh War,* But, once home again, Earl Robert de Montfort, a kinsman of this Standard-bearer's, rises up in the King's Assembly to de- clare openly that such a man is unfit for bearing English Stand- ards, being in fact either a special traitor, or something almost worse, a coward namely, or universal traitor. Wager of Battle in consequence ; solemn Duel, by the King's appointment, ' in a ' certain Island of the Thames-stream at Reading, apud Radingas, 1 short way from the Abbey there.' King, Peers, and an immense multitude of people, on such scaffoldings and heights as they can * See Lyttelton's Henry II., ii. 384. 108 THE ANCIENT MONK. come at, are gathered round, to see what issue the business will take. The business takes this bad issue, in our Monk's own words, faithfully rendered : ' And it came to pass, while Robert de Montfort thundered on ' him manfully (virilitcr intonasset) with hard and frequent strokes, ' and a valiant beginning promised the fruit of victory, Henry of ' Essex, rather giving way, glanced round on all sides; and lo, at ' the rim of the horizon, on the confines of the River and land, he ' discerned the glorious King and Martyr Edmund, in shining ' armour, and as if hovering in the air ; looking towards him with ' severe countenance, nodding his head with a mien and motion of ' austere anger. At St. Edmund's hand there stood also another ' Knight, Gilbert de Cereville, whose armour was not so splendid, ' whose stature was less gigantic ; casting vengeful looks at him. ' This he seeing with his eyes, remembered that old crime brings ' new shame. And now wholly desperate, and changing reason 1 into violence, he took the part of one blindly attacking, not skil- ' fully defending. Who while he struck fiercely was more fiercely ' struck ; and so, in short, fell down vanquished, and it was ' thought, slain. As he lay there for dead, his kinsmen, Mag- 1 nates of England, besought the King, that the Monks of Read- ' ing might have leave to bury him. However, he proved not to 1 be dead, but got well again among them ; and now, with re- ' covered health, assuming the Regular Habit, he strove to wipe ' out the stain of his former life, to cleanse the long week of his ' dissolute history by at least a purifying sabbath, and cultivate 1 the studies of Virtue into fruits of eternal Felicity.' * Thus does the Conscience of man project itself athwart what- soever of knowledge or surmise, of imagination, understanding, faculty, acquirement, or natural disposition he has in him : and, like light through coloured glass, paint strange pictures ■ on the rim of the horizon ' and elsewhere ! Truly, this same ' sense of the Infinite nature of Duty ' is the central part of all with us ; a ray as of Eternity and Immortality, immured in dusky many- coloured Time, and its deaths and births. Your ' coloured glass ' * Jocelini Chronici, p. 52. HENRY OF ESSEX. 109 varies so much from century to century ; — and, in certain money- making, game-preserving centuries, it gets so terribly opaque ! Not a Heaven with cherubim surrounds you then, but a kind of vacant leaden-coloured Hell. One day it will again cease to be opaque, this ' coloured glass.' Nay, may it not become at once translucent and wncoloured? Painting no Pictures more for us, but only the everlasting Azure itself? That will be a right glo- rious consummation ! — Saint Edmund from the horizon's edge, in shining armour, threatening the misdoer in his hour of extreme need : it is beauti- ful, it is great and true. So old, yet so modern, actual ; true yet for every one of us, as for Henry the Earl and Monk ! A glimpse as of the Deepest in Man's Destiny, which is the same for all times and ages. Yes, Henry my brother, there in thy extreme need, thy soul is lamed; and behold thou canst not so much as fight ! For Justice and Reverence are the everlasting central Law of this Universe ; and to forget them, and have all the Universe against one, God and one's own Self for enemies, and only the Devil and the Dragons for friends, is not that a ' lameness ' like few? That some shining armed St. Edmund hang minatory on thy horizon, that infinite sulphur-lakes hang minatory, or do not now hang, — this alters no whit the eternal fact of the thing. I say, thy soul is lamed, and the God and all Godlike in it marred : lamed, paralytic, tending towards baleful eternal death, whether thou know it or not ; — nay hadst thou never known it, that surely had been worst of all ! — Thus, at any rate, by the heavenly Awe that overshadows earthly Business, does Samson, readily in those days, save St. Edmund's Shrine, and innumerable still more precious things. 10 CHAPTER XV. PRACTICAL-DEVOTIONAL. Here indeed, perhaps, by rule of antagonisms, may be the place to mention that, after King Richard's return, there was a liberty of tourneying given to the fighting men of England : that a Tour- nament was proclaimed in the Abbot's domain, ' between Thet- ford and St. Edmundsbury,' — perhaps in the Euston region, on Fakenham Heights, midway between these two localities : that it was publicly prohibited by- our Lord Abbot ; and nevertheless was held in spite of him, — and by the parties, as would seem, considered ' a gentle and free passage of arms.' Nay, next year, there came to the same spot four-and-twenty young men, sons of Nobles, for another passage of arms ; who, having completed the same, all rode into St. Edmundsbury to lodge for the night. Here is modesty ! Our Lord Abbot being instructed of it, ordered the Gates to be closed ; the whole party shut in. The morrow was the Vigil of the Apostles Peter and Paul ; no outgate on the morrow. Giving their promise not to depart without permission, those four-and-twenty young bloods dieted all that day (manducaverunt) with the Lord Abbot, waiting for trial on the morrow. 'But after dinner,' — mark it, pos- terity ! — ' the Lord Abbot retiring into his Thalamus, they all ' started up, and began carolling and singing (carolare etcantare); 1 sending into the Town for wine ; drinking, and afterwards howl- 1 ing (ulul antes) ; — totally depriving the Abbot and Convent of ' their afternoon's nap ; doing all this in derision of the Lord Ab- * bot, and spending in such fashion the whole day till evening, ' nor would they desist at the Lord Abbot's order ! Night coming ' on, they broke the bolts of the Town-Gates, and went off by PRACTICAL-DEVOTIONAL. Ill ' violence ! ' * Was the like ever heard of? The roysterous young dogs ; carolling, howling, breaking the Lord Abbot's sleep ; — after that sinful chivalry cock-fight of theirs ! They too are a feature of distant centuries, as of near ones. St. Ed- mund on the edge of your horizon, or whatever else there, young scamps, in the dandy state, whether cased in iron or in whale- bone, begin to caper and carol on the green Earth ! Our Lord Abbot excommunicated most of them ; and they gradually came in for repentance. Excommunication is a great recipe with our Lord Abbot ; the prevailing purifier in those ages. Thus when the Townsfolk and Monks-menials quarrelled once at the Christmas Mysteries in St. Edmund's Churchyard, and 'from words it came to cuffs, and from cuffs to cuttings and the effusion of blood,' — our Lord Abbot excommunicates sixty of the rioters, with bell, book and candle (accensis candelis), at one stroke.* Whereupon they all come suppliant, indeed nearly naked, ' nothing on but their breeches, ' omnino nudi prater femoralia, and prostrate themselves at the ' Church-door.' Figure that ! In fact, by excommunication or persuasion, by impetuosity of driving or adroitness in leading, this Abbot, it is now becoming plain everywhere, is a man that generally remains master at last. He tempers his medicine to the malady, now hot, now cool ; pru- dent though fiery, an eminently practical man. Nay sometimes in his adroit practice there are swift turns almost of a surprising nature ! Once, for example, it chanced that Geoffrey Riddell Bishop of Ely, a Prelate rather troublesome to our Abbot, made a request of him for timber from his woods towards certain edifices going on at Glemsford. The Abbot, a great builder himself, dis- liked the request ; could not however give it a negative. While he lay, therefore, at his Manorhouse of Melford not long after, there comes to him one of the Lord Bishop's men or monks, with a message from his Lordship, " That he now begged permission to cut down the requisite trees in Elmswell Wood," — so said the monk : Elmsw;e//, where there are no trees but scrubs and shrubs, instead oiYAmset, our true nemus, and high-towering oak- * Jocelini Chronica, p. 40. t Ibid. p. 63. 112 THE ANCIENT MONK. wood, here on Melford Manor ! Elms well ? The Lord Abbot, in surprise, inquires privily of Richard his Forester ; Richard an- swers that my Lord of Ely has already had his carpentarii in Elmse^, and marked out for his own use all the best trees in the compass of it. Abbot Samson thereupon answers the monk : "Elmswell? Yes surely, be it as my Lord Bishop wishes." The successful monk, on the morrow morning, hastens home to Ely; but, on the morrow morning, ' directly after mass,' Abbot Samson too was busy ! The successful monk, arriving at Ely, is rated for a goose and an owl ; is ordered back to say that Elmset was the place meant. Alas, on arriving at Elmset, he finds the Bishop's trees, they ' and a hundred more,' all felled and piled, and the stamp of St. Edmund's Monastery burnt into them, — for roofing of the great tower we are building there ! Your impor- tunate Bishop must seek wood for Glemsford edifices in some other nanus than this. A practical Abbot ! We said withal there was a terrible flash of anger in him : wit- ness his address to old Herbert the Dean, who in a too thrifty manner has erected a wind-mill for himself on his glebe-lands at Haberdon. On the morrow, after mass, our Lord Abbot orders the Cellerarius to send off his carpenters to demolish the said structure brevi manu, and lay up the wood in safe keeping. Old Dean Herbert, hearing what was toward, comes tottering along hither, to plead humbly for himself and his mill. The Abbot answers : "lam obliged to thee as if thou hadst cut off both my feet ! By God's face, per os Dei, I will not eat bread till that fabric be torn in pieces. Thou art an old man, and shouldst have known that neither the King nor his Justiciary dare change aught within the Liberties, without consent of Abbot and Convent ; and thou hast presumed on such a thing 1 I tell thee, it will not be without damage to my mills ; for the Townsfolk will go to thy mill, and grind their corn (bladum suum) at their own good pleas- ure ; nor can I hinder them, since they are free men. I will allow no new mills on such principle. Away, away ; before thou gettest home again, thou wilt see what thy mill has grown to ! "* — The very reverend, the old Dean totters home again, * Joceliui Chronica, p. 43. PRACTICAL-DEVOTIONAL. 113 in all haste ; tears the mill in pieces by his own carpentarii, to save at least the timber ; and Abbot Samson's workmen, coming up, find the ground already clear of it. Easy to bully down poor old rural Deans, and blow their wind- mills away : but who is the man that dare abide King Richard's anger ; cross the Lion in his path, and take him by the whiskers ! Abbot Samson too; he is that man, with justice on his side. The case was this. Adam de Cokefield, one of the chief feuda- tories of St. Edmund, and a principal man in the Eastern Coun- ties, died, leaving large possessions, and for heiress a daughter of three months ; who by clear law, as all men know, became thus Abbot Samson's ward ; whom accordingly he proceeded to dispose of to such person as seemed fittest. But now King Rich- ard has another person in view, to whom the little ward and her great possessions were a suitable thing. He, by letter, requests that Abbot Samson will have the goodness to give her to this person. Abbot Samson, with deep humility, replies that she is already given. New letters from Richard, of severer tenor ; an- swered with new deep humilities, with gifts and entreaties, with no promise of obedience. Kind Richard's ire is kindled ; mes- sengers arrive at St. Edmundsbury, with emphatic message to obey or tremble ! Abbot Samson, wisely silent as to the King's threats, makes answer : " The King can send if he will, and seize the ward : force and power he has to do his pleasure, and abolish the whole Abbey. I never can be bent to wish this that he seeks, nor shall it by me be ever done. For there is danger lest such things be made a precedent of, to the prejudice of my successors. Videat Altissirnus, Let the Most High look on it. Whatsoever thing shall befall* I will patiently endure." Such was Abbot Samson's deliberate decision. Why not? Cceur-de-Lion is very dreadful, but not the dreadfulest. Videat Altissirnus. I reverence Cceur-de-Lion to the marrow of my bones, and will in all right things be homo suus; but it is not, properly speaking, with terror, with any fear at all. On the whole, have I not looked on the face of ' Satan with outspread wings ; ' steadily into Hellfire these seven-and-forty years ; — 10* 114 THE ANCIENT MONK. and was not melted into terror even at that, such the Lord's good- ness to me ? Cceur-de-Lion ! Richard swore tornado oaths, worse than our armies in Flan- ders, To be revenged on that proud Priest. But in the end he discovered that the Priest was right ; and forgave him, and even loved him. 'King Richard wrote, soon after, to Abbot Samson, ' That he wanted one or two of the St. Edmundsbury dogs, ' which he heard were good.' Abbot Samson sent him dogs of the best ; Richard replied by the present of a ring, which Pope Innocent the Third had given him. Thou brave Richard, thou brave Samson ! Richard too, I suppose, ' loved a man,' and knew one when he saw him. No one will accuse our Lord Abbot of wanting worldly wis- dom, due interest in worldly things. A skilful man ; full of cun- ning insight, lively interests ; always discerning the road to his object, be it circuit, be it short-cut, and victoriously travelling for- ward thereon. Nay rather it might seem, from Jocelin's Narra- tive, as if he had his eye all but exclusively directed on terrestrial matters, and was much too secular for a devout man. But this too, if we examine it, was right. For it is in the world that a man, devout or other, has his life to lead, his work waiting to be done. The basis of Abbot Samson's, we shall discover, was truly religion, after all. Returning from his dusty pilgrimage, with such welcome as we saw, ' he sat down at the foot of St. Ed- mund's Shrine.' Not a talking theory that ; no, a silent practice : Thou St. Edmund with what lies in thee, thou now must help me, or none will ! This also is a significant fact : the zealous interest our Abbot took in the Crusades. To all noble Christian hearts of that era, what earthly enterprise so noble? 'When Henry II., having ' taken the cross, came to St. Edmund's, to pay his devotions be- ' fore setting out, the Abbot secretly made for himself a cross of ' linen cloth : and, holding this in one hand and a threaded needle 1 in the other, asked leave of the King to assume it ! ' The King could not spare Samson out of England ; — the King himself in- deed never went. But the Abbot's eye was set on the Holy Sepulchre, as on the spot of this Earth where the true cause of PRACTICAL-DEVOTIONAL. 115 Heaven was deciding itself. ' At the retaking of Jerusalem by 4 the Pagans, Abbot Samson put on a cilice and hair-shirt, and ' wore under-garments of hair-cloth ever after ; he abstained also ' from flesh and flesh-meats (came et camels) thenceforth to the ' end of his life.' Like a dark cloud eclipsing the hopes of Christendom, those tidings cast their shadow over St. Edmunds- bury too : Shall Samson Abbas take pleasure while Christ's Tomb is in the hands t)f the Infidel 1 ? Samson, in pain of body, shall daily be reminded of it, admonished to grieve for it. The great antique heart : how like a child's in its simplicity, like a man's in its earnest solemnity and depth ! Heaven lies over him wheresoever he goes or stands on the Earth ; making all the Earth a mystic Temple to him, the Earth's business all a kind of worship. Glimpses of bright creatures flash in the common sun- light ; angels yet hover doing God's messages among men : that rainbow was set in the clouds by the hand of God ! Wonder, miracle encompass the man ; he lives in an element of miracle ; Heaven's splendour over his head, Hell's darkness under his feet. A great Law of Duty, high as these two Infinitudes, dwarfing all else, annihilating all else, — making royal Richard as small as peasant Samson, smaller if need be ! — The ' imaginative facul- ties I ' ' Rude poetic ages ? ' The ' primeval poetic element 1 ' O for God's sake, good reader, talk no more of all that ! It was not a Dilettantism this of Abbot Samson. It was a Reality, and it is one. The garment only of it is dead ; the essence of it lives through all Time and all Eternity ! — And truly, as we said above, is not this comparative silence of Abbot Samson as to his religion, precisely the healthiest sign of him and of it 1 ? 5 The Unconscious is the alone Complete.' Abbot Samson all along a busy working man, as all men are bound to be, his religion, his worship was like his daily bread to him ; — which he did not take the trouble to talk much about ; which he merely ate at stated intervals, and lived and did his work upon ! This is Abbot Samson's Catholicism of the Twelfth Century ; — something like the Ism of all true men in all true centuries, I fancy ! Alas, compared with any of the Isms current in these poor days, what a thing ! Compared with the respectablest, 116 THE ANCIENT MONK. morbid, struggling Methodism, never so earnest ; with the re- spectablest, ghastly, dead or galvanised Dilettantism, never so spasmodic ! Methodism with its eye forever turned on its own navel ; asking itself with torturing anxiety of Hope and Fear, "Ami right, am J wrong ? Shall I be saved, shall I not be damned ? " — what is this, at bottom, but a new phasis of Egoism, stretched out into the Infinite ; not always the heavenlier for its infinitude ! Brother, so soon as possible, endeavour to rise above all that. " Thou art wrong ; thou art like to be damned :" consider that as the fact, reconcile thyself even to that, if thou be a man ; — then first is the devouring Universe subdued under thee, and from the black murk of midnight and noise of greedy Acheron, dawn as of an everlasting morning, how far above all Hope and all Fear, springs for thee, enlightening thy steep path, awakening in thy heart celes- tial Memnon's music ! But of our Dilettantisms, and galvanised Dilettantisms ; of Puseyism — Heavens, what shall we say of Paseyism, in com- parison to Twelfth-Century Catholicism ? Little or nothing ; for indeed it is a matter to strike one dumb. The Builder of this Universe was wise, He plann'd all souls, all systems, planets, particles : The Plan He shap'd His Worlds aud iEons by Was Heavens ! — Was thy small Nine-and-thirty Articles ? That certain human souls, living on this practical Earth, should think to save themselves and a ruined world by noisy theoretic demonstrations and laudations of the Church, instead of some un- nois)'", unconscious, but practical, total, heart-and-soul demonstra- tion of a Church : this, in the circle of revolving ages, this also was a thing we were to see. A kind of penultimate thing, pre- cursor of very strange consummations ; last thing but one 1 If there is no atmosphere, what will it serve a man to demonstrate the excellence of lungs 1 How much profitabler when you can, like Abbot Samson, breathe ; and go along your way ! CHAPTER XVI. ST. EDMUND. Abbot Samson built many useful, many pious edifices ; human dwellings, churches, church-steeples, barns ; — alj. fallen now and vanished, but useful while they stood. He built and endowed 1 the Hospital of Babwell ; ' built ' fit houses for the St. Ed- mundsbury Schools.' Many are the roofs once 'thatched with reeds ' which he ' caused to be covered with tiles ; ' or if they were churches, probably ' with lead.' For all ruinous incomplete things, buildings or other, were an eye-sorrow to the man. We saw his ' great tower of St. Edmund's ; ' or at least the roof- timbers of it, lying cut and stamped in Elmset Wood. To change combustible decaying reed-thatch into tile or lead, and material, still more, moral wreck into rain-tight order, what a comfort to Samson ! One of the things he could not in any wise but rebuild was the great Altar, aloft on which stood the Shrine itself; the great Altar, which had been damaged by fire, by the careless rubbish and careless candle of two somnolent Monks, one night, — the Shrine escaping almost as if by miracle ! Abbot Samson read his Monks a severe lecture : "A Dream one of us had, that he saw St. Edmund naked and in lamentable plight. Know ye the interpretation of that Dream 1 St. Edmund proclaims himself naked, because ye defraud the naked Poor of your old clothes, and give with reluctance what ye are bound to give them of meat and drink : the idleness moreover and negligence of the Sacristan, and his people is too evident from the late misfortune by fire. Well might our Holy Martyr seem to lie cast out from his Shrine, and say with groans that he was stript of his garments, and wasted with hunger and thirst ! " 118 THE ANCIENT MONK. This is Abbot Samson's interpretation of the Dream ; — dia- metrically the reverse of that given by the Monks themselves, who scruple not to say privily, "It is we that are the naked and famished limbs of the Martyr ; we whom the Abbot curtails of all our privileges, setting his own official to control our very Cel- larer!" Abbot Samson adds, that this judgment by fire has fallen upon them for murmuring about their meat and drink. Clearly enough, meanwhile, the Altar, whatever the burning of it mean or foreshadow, must needs be reedified. Abbot Samson reedifies it, all of polished marble ; with the highest stretch of art and sumptuosity, reembellishes the Shrine for which it is to serve as pediment. Nay farther, as had ever been among his prayers, he enjoys, he sinner, a glimpse of the glorious Martyr's very Body in the process ; having solemnly opened the Loculus, Chest or sacred Coffin, for that purpose. It is the culminating moment of Abbot Samson's life Bozzy Jocelin himself rises into a kind of Psalmist solemnity on this occasion ; the laziest monk ' weeps ' warm tears, as Te Deum is sung. • Very strange ; — how far vanished from us in these unworship- ping ages of ours ! The Patriot Hampden, best beatified man we have, had lain in like manner some two centuries in his narrow home, when certain dignitaries of us, ' and twelve grave-diggers with pulleys,' raised him also up, under cloud of night; cut off his arm with penknives, pulled the scalp off his head, — and other- wise worshipped our Hero Saint in the most amazing manner ! * Let the modern eye look earnestly on that old midnight hour in St. Edmundsbury Church, shining yet on us, ruddy-bright, through the depths of seven hundred years ; and consider mourn- fully what our Hero-worship once was, and what it now is ! We translate with all the fidelity we can : ' The Festival of St. Edmund now approaching, the marble ' blocks are polished, and all things are in readiness for lifting of ' the Shrine to its new place. A fast of three days was held by ' all the people, the cause and meaning thereof being publicly set ' forth to them. The Abbot announces to the Convent that all ' must prepare themselves for transferring of the Shrine, and ap- * Annual Register (year 1828, Chronicle, p. 93), Gentleman's Magazine, &c. &c. ST. EDMUND. 119 ' points time and way for the work. Coming therefore that night ' to matins, we found the great Shrine {feretrum magnum) raised ' upon the Altar, but empty ; covered all over with white doeskin ' leather, fixed to the wood with silver nails ; bat one pannel of ' the Shrine was left down below, and resting thereon, beside it3 ' old column of the Church, the Loculus with the Sacred Body ' yet lay where it was wont. Praises being sung, we all proceed- 1 ed to commence our disciplines {ad disciplinas suscipiendas) . ' These finished, the Abbot and certain with him are clothed in ' their albs ; and, approaching reverently, set about uncovering ' the Loculus. There was an outer cloth of linen, enwrapping ' the Loculus and all ; this we found tied on the upper side with ' strings of its own : within this was a cloth of silk, and then ' another linen cloth, and then a third ; and so at last the Loculus ' was uncovered, and seen resting on a little tray of wood, that the ' bottom of it might not be injured by the stone. Over the breast ' of the Martyr, there lay, fixed to the surface of the Loculus, a ' Golden Angel about the length of a human foot ; holding in one ' hand a golden sword, and in the other a banner : under this there ' was a hole in the lid of the Loculus, on which the ancient ser- ' vants of the Martyr had been wont to lay their hands for touch- 1 ing the Sacred Body. And over the figure of the Angel was ' this verse inscribed : ' Martiris ecce zoma servat Mlchaelis agahna* 1 At the head and foot of the Loculus were iron rings whereby it ' could be lifted.' ' Lifting the Loculus and Body, therefore, they carried it to the ' Altar ; and I put-to my sinful hand to help in carrying, though ' the Abbot had commanded that none should approach except ' called. And the Loculus was placed in the Shrine ; and the ' pannel it had stood on was put in its place, and the Shrine for ' the present closed. We all thought that the Abbot would shew ' the Loculus to the people ; and bring out the Sacred Body ' again, at a certain period of the Festival. But in this we were 1 wofully mistaken, as the sequel shews. * This is the Martyr's Garment, which Michael's Image guards. 120 THE ANCIENT MONK. ' For in the fourth holiday of the Festival, while the Convent ' were all singing Completorium, our Lord Abbot spoke privily with ' the Sacristan and Walter the Medicus ; and order was taken ' that twelve of the Brethren should be appointed against mid- ' night, who were strong for carrying the pannel-planks of the ' Shrine, and skilful in unfixing them, and putting them together ' again. The Abbot then said that it was among his prayers to ' look once upon the Body of his Patron ; and that he wished the ' Sacristan and Walter the Medicus to be with him. The Twelve ' appointed Brethren were these : The Abbot's two Chaplains, ' the two Keepers of the Shrine, the two Masters of the Vestry ; ' and six more, namely, the Sacristan Hugo, Walter the Medicus, ' Augustin, William of Dice, Robert, and Richard. I, alas, was 1 not of the number. ' The Convent therefore being all asleep, these Twelve, clothed ' in their albs, with the Abbot, assembled at the Altar ; and open- ' ing a pannel of the Shrine, they took out. the Loculus ; laid it ' on a table, near where the Shrine used to be ; and made ready ' for unfastening the lid, which was joined and fixed to the Locu- ' lus with sixteen very long nails. Which when, with difficulty, ' they had done, all except the two forenamed associates are or- ' dered to draw back. The Abbot and they two were alone pri- ' vileged to look in. The Loculus was so filled with the Sacred ' Body that you could scarcely put a needle between the head and ' the wood, or between the feet and the wood : the head lay united 1 to the body, a little raised with a small pillow. But the Abbot, • looking close, found now a silk cloth veiling the whole Body, ' and then a linen cloth of wondrous whiteness ; and upon the ' head was spread a small linen cloth, and then another small and ' most fine silk cloth, as if it were the veil of a nun. These cov- 1 erings being lifted off, they found now the Sacred Body all wrapt ' in linen ; and so at length the lineaments of the same appeared. ' But here the Abbot stopped ; saying he durst not proceed far- ' ther, or look at the sacred flesh naked. Taking the head between ' his hands, he thus spake groaning : " Glorious Martyr, holy ' Edmund, blessed be the hour when thou wert born. Glorious ' Martyr, turn it not to my perdition that I have so dared to touch ' thee, I miserable and sinful ; thou knowest my devout love, and ST. EDMUND. 121 1 the intention of my mind." And proceeding, he touched the * eyes ; and the nose, which was very massive and prominent ' (valde grossum et valde eminentem) ; and then he touched the ' breast and arms ; and raising the left arm he touched the fingers, ' and placed his own ringers between the sacred fingers. And ' proceeding he found the feet standing stiff up, like the feet of a ' man dead yesterday ; and he touched the toes, and counted ' them {tangendo numeravit). 1 And now it was agreed that the other Brethren should be • called forward to see the miracles ; and accordingly those ten ' now advanced, and along with them six others who had stolen ' in without the Abbot's assent, namely, Walter of St. Alban's, 1 Hugh the Infirmirarius, Gilbert brother of the Prior, Richard of ' Henham, Jocellus our Cellarer, and Turstan the Little ; and all ' these saw the Sacred Body, but Turstan alone of them put forth ' his hand, and touched the Saint's knees and feet. And that ' there might be abundance of witnesses, one of our Brethren, ' John of Dice, sitting on the roof of the Church, with the ser- ' vants of the Vestry, and looking through, clearly saw all these ' things.' What a scene ; shining luminous effulgent, as the lamps of St. Edmund do, through the dark Night ; John of Dice, with vestry- men, clambering on the roof to look through ; the Convent all asleep, and the Earth all asleep, — and since then, Seven Centu- ries of Time mostly gone to sleep ! Yes, there, sure enough, is the martyred Body of Edmund landlord of the Eastern Counties, who, nobly doing what he liked with his own, was slain three hundred years ago : and a noble awe surrounds the memory of him, symbol and promoter of many other right noble things. Have not we now advanced to strange new stages of Hero-wor- ship, now in the little Church of Hampden, with our penknives out, and twelve grave-diggers with pulleys? The manner of men's Hero-worship, verily it is the innermost fact of their exist- ence, and determines all the rest, — at public hustings, in private drawing-rooms, in church, in market, and wherever else. Have true reverence, and what indeed is inseparable therefrom, rever- ence the right man, all is well ; have sham-reverence, and what 11 1Q2 THE ANCIENT MONK. also follows, greet with it the wrong man, then all is ill, and there is nothing well. Alas, if Hero-worship become Dilettantism, and all except Mammonism be a vain grimace, how much, in this most earnest Earth, has gone and is evermore going to fatal destruction, and lies wasting in quiet lazy ruin, no man regarding it ! Till at length no heavenly Ism any longer coming down upon us, Isms from the other quarter have to mount up. For the Earth, I say, is an earnest place ; Life is no grimace, but a most serious fact. And so, under universal Dilettantism much having been stript bare, not the souls of men only, but their very bodies and bread-cup- boards having been stript bare, and life now no longer possible, — all is reduced to desperation, to the iron law of Necessity and very Fact again ; and to temper Dilettantism, and astonish it, and burn it up with infernal fire, arises Chartism, Bare-bach-ism, Sansculot- tism so-called ! May the gods, and what of unworshipped heroes still remain among us, avert the omen. — But however this may be, St. Edmund's Loculus, we find, has the veils of silk and linen reverently replaced, the lid fastened down again with its sixteen ancient nails ; is wrapt in a new costly covering of silk, the gift of Hubert Archbishop of Canterbury : and through the sky-window John of Dice sees it lifted to its place in the Shrine, the pannels of this latter duly refixed, fit parchment documents being introduced withal : — and now John and his ves- trymen can slide down from the roof, for all is over, and the Con- vent wholly awakens to matins. ' When we assembled to sing ' matins,' says Jocelin, ' and understood what had been done, ' grief took hold of all that had not seen these things, each saying 'to himself, " Alas, I was deceived." Matins over, the Abbot 1 called the Convent to the great Altar ; and briefly recounting the ' matter, alleged that it had not been in his power, nor was it per- ' missible or fit, to invite us all to the sight of such things. At ' hearing of which, we all wept, and with tears sang Te Deum lau- 1 damns; and hastened to toll the bells in the Choir.' Stupid blockheads, to reverence their St. Edmund's dead Body in this manner? Yes, brother ; — and yet, on the whole, who knows how to reverence the Body of a Man ? It is the most reve- rend phenomenon under this Sun. For the Highest God dwells ST. EDMUND. 123 visible in that mystic unfathomable Visibility, which calls itself " I" on the Earth. ' Bending before men,' says Novalis, is a ' reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Hea- ' ven when we lay our hand on a human Body.' And the Body of one Dead ; — a temple where the Hero-soul once was and now is not : Oh, all mystery, all pity, all mute awe and wonder ; Su- jsernaturaiism brought home to the very dullest ; Eternity laid open, and the nether Darkness and the upper Light-Kingdoms ; — do conjoin there, or exist nowhere ! Sauerteig used to say to me, in his peculiar way: "A Chancery Lawsuit; justice, nay justice in mere money, denied a man, for all his pleading, till twenty, till forty years of his Life are gone seeking it : and a Cockney Funeral, Death reverenced by hatchments, horsehair, brass-lacker, and unconcerned bipeds carrying long poles and bags of black silk: — are not these two reverences, this reverence for Death and that reverence for Life, a notable pair of reverences among you English 1 " Abbot Samson, at this culminating point of his existence, may, and indeed must, be left to vanish with his Life-scenery from the eyes of modern men. He had to run into France, to settle with King Richard for the military service there of his St. Edmunds- bury Knights ; and with great labour got it done. He had to de- cide on the dilapidated Coventry Monks ; and with great labour, and much pleading and journeying, got them reinstated ; dined with them all, and with the ' Masters of the Schools of Oxne- ford,' — the veritable Oxford Caput sitting there at dinner, in a dim but undeniable manner, in the City of Peeping Tom ! He had, not without labour, to controvert the intrusive Bishop of Ely, the intrusive Abbot of Cluny. Magnanimous Samson, his life is but a labour and a journey ; a bustling and a justling, till the still Night come. He is sent for again, over sea, to advise King Richard touching certain Peers of England, who had taken the Cross, but never followed it to Palestine, whom the Pope is inquiring after. The magnanimous Abbot makes preparation for departure ; departs, and And Jocelin's Boswellean Narra- tive, suddenly shorn through by the scissors of Destiny, ends. There are no words more ; but a black line, and leaves of blank 124 THE ANCIENT MONK. paper. Irremediable : the miraculous hand that held all this the- atric-machinery suddenly quits hold ; impenetrable Time-Curtains rush down : in the mind's eye all is again dark, void ; with loud dinning in the mind's ear, our real-phantasmagory of St. Edmunds- bury plunges into the bosom of the Twelfth Century again, and all is over. Monks, Abbot, Hero-worship, Government, Obedi- ence, Coeur-de-Lion and St. Edmund's Shrine, vanish like Mirza's Vision ; and there is nothing left but a mutilated black Ruin amid green botanic expanses, and oxen, sheep and dilettanti pasturing in their places. CHAPTER XVII. THE BEGINNINGS. What a singular shape of a Man, shape of a Time, have we in this Abbot Samson and his history ; how strangely do modes, creeds, formularies, and the date and place of a man's birth, mo- dify the figure of the man ! Formulas too, as we call them, have a reality in Human Life. They are real as the very skin and muscular tissue of a Man's Life ; and a most blessed indispensable thing, so long as they have vitality withal, and are a living skin and tissue to him ! No man, or man's life, can go abroad and do business in the world without skin and tissues. No ; first of all, these have to fashion them- selves, — as indeed they spontaneously and inevitably do. Foam itself, and this is worth thinking of, can harden into oyster-shell ; all living objects do by necessity form to themselves a skin. And yet, again, when a man's Formulas become dead ; as all Formulas, in the progress of living growth, are very sure to do ! When the poor man's integuments, no longer nourished from within, become dead skin, mere adscititious leather and callosity, wearing thicker and thicker, uglier and uglier ; till no heart any longer can be felt beating through them, so thick, callous, calci- fied are they ; and all over it has now grown mere calcified oys- ter-shell, or were it polished mother-of-pearl, inwards almost to the very heart of the poor man : — yes then, you may say, his usefulness once more is quite obstructed : once more, he cannot go abroad and do business in the world ; it is time that he take to bed, and prepare for departure, which cannot now be distant ! Ubi homines sunt modi sunt. Habit is the deepest law of hu- man nature. It is our supreme strength; if also, in certain cir- cumstances, our miserablest weakness. — From Stoke to Stowe 11* 126 THE ANCIENT MONK. is as yet a field, all pathless, untrodden : from Stoke where I live, to Stowe where I have to make my merchandises, perform my businesses, consult my heavenly oracles, there is as yet no path or human footprint ; and I, impelled by such necessities, must nevertheless undertake the journey. Let me go once, scan- ning my way with any earnestness of outlook, and successfully arriving, my footprints are an invitation to me a second time to go by the same way. It is easier than any other way : the industry of ' scanning ' lies already invested in it for me ; I can go this time with less of scanning, or without scanning at all. Nay the very sight of my footprints, what a comfort for me ; and in a de- gree, for all my brethren of mankind ! The footprints are trodden and retrodden ; the path wears ever broader, smoother, into a broad highway, where even wheels can run ; and many travel it ; — till — till the Town of Stowe disappear from that locality (as towns have been known to do), or no merchandising, heavenly oracle, or real business any longer exist for one there : then why should anybody travel the way 1 — Habit is our primal, funda- mental law ; Habit and Imitation, there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all Working and all Apprenticeship, of all Practice and all Learning, in this world. Yes, the wise man too speaks, and acts, in Formulas ; all men do so. In general the more completely cased with Formulas a man may be, the safer, happier is it for him. Thou who, in an All of rotten Formulas, seemest to stand nigh bare, having indig- nantly shaken off the superannuated rags and unsound callosities of Formulas, — consider how thou too art still clothed ! This English Nationality, whatsoever from uncounted ages is genuine and a fact among thy native People, and their words and ways : all this, has it not made for thee a skin or second-skin, adhesive ac- tually as thy natural skin] This thou hast not stript off, this thou wilt never strip off: the humour that thy mother gave thee has to shew itself through this. A common, or it may be an un- common Englishman thou art ; but good Heavens, what sort of Arab, Chinaman, Jew-Clothesman, Turk, Hindoo, African Man- dingo, wouldst thou have been, thou with those mother-qualities of thine ! THE BEGINNINGS. 127 It strikes me dumb to look over the long series of faces, such as any full Church, Courthouse, London-Tavern Meeting, or mis- cellany of men will shew them. Some score or two of years ago, all these were little red-coloured pulpy infants ; each of them capable of being kneaded, baked into any social form you chose : yet see now how they are fixed and hardened, — into artisans, artists, clergy, gentry, learned sergeants, unlearned dandies, and can and shall now be nothing else henceforth ! Mark on that nose the colour left by too copious port and viands ; to which the profuse cravat with exorbitant breastpin, and the fixed, forward, and as it were menacing glance of the eyes correspond. That is a ' Man of Business ; ' prosperous manufac- turer, house-contractor, engineer, law-manager ; his eye, nose, cravat have, in such work and fortune, got such a character : deny him not thy praise, thy pity. Pity him too, the Hard-handed, with bony brow, rudely combed hair, eyes looking out as in labour, in difficulty and uncertainty ; rude mouth, the lips coarse, loose, as in hard toil and lifelong fatigue they have got the habit of hanging : — hast thou seen aught more touching than the rude intelligence, so cramped, yet energetic, unsubduable, true, which looks out of that marred visage? Alas, and his poor wife, with her own hands, washed that cotton neckcloth for him, buttoned that coarse shirt, sent him forth creditably trimmed as she could. In such imprisonment lives he, for his part ; man cannot now deliver him : the red pulpy infant has been baked and fash- ioned so. Or what kind of baking was it that this other brother-mortal got, which has baked him into the genus Dandy 1 Elegant Vacuum ; serenely looking down upon all Plenums and Entities, as low and poor to his serene Chimeraship and iVowentity labori- ously attained ! Heroic Vacuum ; inexpugnable, while purse and present condition of society hold out ; curable by no hellebore. The doom of Fate was, Be thou a Dandy ! Have thy eye-glasses, opera-glasses, thy Long-Acre cabs with white-breeched tiger, thy yawning impassivities, pococurantisms ; ^ thyself in Dandyhood, undeliverable ; it is thy doom. And all these, we say, were red-coloured infants ; of the same pulp and stuff, few years ago ; now irretrievably shaped and 128 THE ANCIENT MONK. kneaded as we see ! Formulas ? There is no mortal extant, out of the depths of Bedlam, but lives all skinned, thatched, covered over with Formulas ; and is, as it were, held in from delirium and the Inane by his Formulas ! They are withal the most beneficent, indispensable of human equipments : blessed he who has a skin and tissues, so it be a living one, and the heart-pulse everywhere discernible through it. Monachism, Feudalism, with a real King Plantagenet, with real Abbots Samson, and their other living realities, how blessed ! — Not without a mournful interest have we surveyed this authen- tic image of a Time now wholly swallowed. Mournful reflections crowd on us ; and yet consolatory. How many brave men have lived before Agamemnon ! Here is a brave governor Samson, a man fearing God, and fearing nothing else ; of whom as First Lord of the Treasury, as King, Chief Editor, High Priest, we could be so glad and proud ; of whom nevertheless Fame has altogether forgotten to make mention ! The faint image of him, revived in this hour, is found in the gossip of one poor Monk, and in Nature nowhere else. Oblivion had so nigh swallowed him altogether, even to the echo of his ever having existed. What regi- ments and hosts and generations of such has Oblivion already swallowed ! Their crumbled dust makes up the soil our life-fruit grows on. Said I not, as my old Norse Fathers taught me, The Life-tree Igdrasil, which waves round thee in this hour, whereof thou in this hour art portion, has its roots down deep in the oldest Death-Kingdoms ; and grows ; the Three Nomas, or Times, Past, Present, Future, watering it from the Sacred Well ! For example, who taught thee to speak ? From the day when two hairy-naked or fig-leaved Human Figures began, as uncom- fortable dummies, anxious no longer to be dumb, but to impart themselves to one another ; and endeavoured, with gaspings, ges- turings, with unsyllabled cries, with painful pantomime and inter- jections, in a very unsuccessful manner, — up to the writing of this present copyright Book, which also is not very successful ! Between that day and this, I say, there has been a pretty space of time ; a pretty spell of work, which somebody has done ! Think- est thou there were no poets till Dan Chaucer ? No heart burning THE BEGINNINGS. 129 with a thought, which it could not hold, and had no word for ; and needed to shape and coin a word for, — what thou callest a meta- phor, trope, or the like 1 For every word we have, there was such a man and poet. The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor, and bold questionable originality. ' Thy very atten- tion, does it not mean an attentio, a stretching-to ? ' Fancy that act of the mind, which all were conscious of, which none had yet named, — when this new 'poet' first felt bound and driven to name it ! His questionable originality, and new glowing meta- phor, was found adoptable, intelligible ; and remains our name for it to this day. Literature : — and look at Paul's Cathedral, and the Masonries and Worships and Quasi-Worships that are there ; not to speak of Westminster Hall and its wigs ! Men had not a hammer to begin with, not a syllabled articulation : they had it all to make ; — and they have made it. What thousand thousand articulate, semi-articulate, earnest-stammering Prayers ascending up to Heaven, from hut and cell, in many lands, in many centuries, from the fervent kindled souls of innumerable men, each struggling to pour itself forth incompletely as it might, before the incompletest Liturgy could be compiled ! The Liturgy, or adoptable and gen- erally adopted Set of Prayers and Prayer-Method, was what we can call the Select Adoptabilities, ' Select Beauties ' well-edited (by (Ecumenic Councils and other Useful-Knowledge Societies) from that wide waste imbroglio of Prayers already extant and ac- cumulated, good and bad. The good were found adoptable by men ; were gradually got together, well-edited, accredited : the bad, found inappropriate, unadoptable, were gradually forgotten, disused and burnt. It is the way with human things. The first man who, looking with opened soul on this august Heaven and Earth, this Beautiful and Awful, which we name Nature, Uni- verse and such like, the essence of which remains forever Un- nameable ; he who first, gazing into this, fell on his knees awe- struck, in silence as is likeliest, — he, driven by inner necessity, the ' audacious original ' that he was, had done a thing, too, which all thoughtful hearts saw straightway to be an expressive, altogether adoptable thing ! To bow the knee was ever since the attitude of supplication. Earlier than any spoken Prayers, Lita- 130 THE ANCIENT MONK. nias, or Leitourgias ; the beginning of all Worship, — which needed but a beginning, so rational was it. What a poet he ! Yes, this bold original was a successful one withal. The wellhead this one, hidden in the primeval dusks and distances, from whom as from a Nile-source all Forms of Worship flow : — such a Nile- river (somewhat muddy and malarious now !) of Forms of Wor- ship sprang there, and flowed, and flows, down to Puseyism, Rotatory Calabash, Archbishop Laud at St. Catherine Creed's, and perhaps lower ! Things rise, I say, in that way. The Iliad Poem, and indeed most other poetic, especially epic things, have risen as the Lit- urgy did. The great Iliad in Greece, and the small Robin Hood's Garland in England, are each, as I understand, the well-edited i Select Beauties ' of an immeasurable waste imbroglio of Heroic Ballads in their respective centuries and countries. Think what strumming of the seven-stringed heroic lyre, torturing of the less heroic fiddle-catgut, in Hellenic Kings' Courts, and English way- side Public Houses ; and beating of the studious Poetic brain, and gasping here too in the semi-articulate windpipe of Poetic men, before the Wrath of a Divine Achilles, the Prowess of a Will Scarlet or Wakefield Pinder, could be adequately sung ! Honour to you, ye nameless great and greatest ones, ye long-for- gotten brave ! Nor was the Statute Be Tallagio non concedendo, nor any Stat- ute, Law-method, Lawyer's-wig, much less were the Statute- Book and Four Courts, with Coke upon Lyttleton and Three Estates of Parliament in the rear of them, got together without human labour, — mostly forgotten now ! From the time of Cain's slaying Abel by swift head-breakage, to this time of killing your man in Chancery by inches, and slow heart-break for forty years, — there too is an interval ! Venerable Justice herself began by Wild- Justice ; all Law is as a tamed furrowfield, slowly worked out, and rendered arable, from the waste jungle of Club-Law. Valiant Wisdom tilling and draining ; escorted by owl-eyed Pe- dantry, by owlish and vulturish and many other forms of Folly ; — the valiant husbandman assiduously tilling ; the blind greedy ene- my too assiduously sowing tares ! It is because there is yet in venerable wigged Justice some wisdom, amid such mountains of THE BEGINNINGS. 131 wiggeries and folly, that men have not cast her into the River ; that she still sits there, like Dry den's Head in the Battle of the Books, — a huge helmet, a huge mountain of greased parchment, of unclean horsehair, first striking the eye ; and then in the inner- most corner, visible at last, in size as a hazelnut, a real fraction of God's Justice, perhaps not yet unattainable to some, surely still indispensable to all ; — and men know not what to do with her ! Lawyers were not all pedants, voluminous voracious persons ; Lawyers too were poets, were heroes, — or their Law had been past the Nore long before this time. Their Owlisms, Vulturisms, to an incredible extent, will disappear by and by, their Heroisms only remaining, and the Helmet be reduced to something like the size of the head, we hope ! — It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed, articu- late-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World. The hands of forgotten brave men have made it a World for us ; they, — honour to them ; they, in spite of the idle and the dastard. This English Land, here and now, is the summary of what was found of wise, and noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the generations of English Men. Our English Speech is speakable because there were Hero-Poets of our blood and lineage ; speakable in propor- tion to the number of these. This Land of England has its con- querors, possessors, which change from epoch to epoch, from day to day ; but its real conquerors, creators, and eternal proprietors are these following, and their representatives if you can find them : All the Heroic souls that ever were in England, each in their degree ; all the men that ever cut a thistle, drained a puddle out of England, contrived a wise scheme in England, did or said a true and valiant thing in England. I tell thee, they had not a hammer to begin with ; and yet Wren built St. Paul's : not an ar- ticulated syllable ; and yet there have come English Literatures, Elizabethan Literatures, Satanic-School, Cockney-School and other Literatures ; — once more, as in the old time of the Leitour- gia, a most waste imbroglio, and world-wide jungle and jumble ; waiting terribly to be ' well-edited,' and ' well-burnt ! ' Arachne started with forefinger and thumb, and had not even a distaff; yet thou seest Manchester, and Cotton Cloth, which will shelter naked backs, at two-pence an ell. 132 THE ANCIENT MONK. Work? The quantity of done and forgotten work that lies silent under my feet in this world, and escorts and attends me, and sup- ports and keeps me alive, wheresoever I walk or stand, whatsoever I think or do, gives rise to reflections ! Is it not enough, at any rate, to strike the thing called ' Fame ' into total silence for a wise man ? For fools and unreflective persons, she is and will be very noisy, this ' Fame,' and talks of her ' immortals ' and so forth : but if you will consider it, what is she ? Abbot Samson was not nothing because nobody said anything of him. Or think- est thou, the Right Honourable Sir Jabesh Windbag can be made something by Parliamentary Majorities and Leading Articles? Her ' immortals ! ' Scarcely two hundred years back can Fame recollect articulately at all ; and there she but maunders and mumbles. She manages to recollect a Shakspeare or so ; and prates, considerably like a goose, about him ; — and in the rear of that, onwards to the birth of Theuth, to Hengst's Invasion, and the bosom of Eternity, it was all blank ; and the respectable Teu- tonic Languages, Teutonic Practices, Existences all came of their own accord, as the grass springs, as the trees grow ; no Poet, no work from the inspired heart of a Man needed there ; and Fame has not an articulate word to say about it ! Or ask her, What, with all conceivable appliances and mnemonics, including apotheo- sis and human sacrifices among the number, she carries in her head with regard to a Wodan, even a Moses, or other such? She begins to be uncertain as to what they were, whether spirits or men of mould, — gods, charlatans; begins sometimes to have a misgiving that they were mere symbols, ideas of the mind ; per- haps nonentities, and Letters of the Alphabet ! She is the noisiest, inarticulately babbling, hissing, screaming, foolishest, unmusicalest of fowls that fly; and needs no ' trumpet,' I think, but her own enormous goose-throat, — measuring several degrees of celestial latitude, so to speak. Her 'wings,' in these days, have grown far swifter than ever ; but her goose-throat hitherto seems only larger, louder and foolisher than ever. She is tran- sitory, futile, a goose-goddess : — if she were not transitory, what would become of us ! It is a chief comfort that she forgets us all ; all, even to the very Wodans ; and grows to consider us, at last, as probably nonentities and Letters of the Alphabet. THE BEGINNINGS. 133 Yes, a noble Abbot Samson resigns himself to Oblivion too ; feels it no hardship, but a comfort ; counts it as a still resting- place, from much sick fret and fever and stupidity, which in the night-watches often made his strong heart sigh. Your most sweet voices, making one enormous goose-voice, Bobus and Company, how can they be a guidance for any Son of Adam? In silence of you and the like of you, the ' small still voices ' will speak to him better ; in which does lie guidance. My friend, all speech and rumour is shortlived, foolish, untrue. Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eter- nal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself. Stand thou by that ; and let ' Fame ' and the rest of it go prating. ' Heard are the Voices, Voice of the Sages, The Worlds and the Ages : " Choose well, your choice is Brief and yet endless ; Here eyes do regard you, In Eternity's stillness ; Here is all fulness, Ye brave, to reward you; Work, and despair not." ' * * Goethe. 12 BOOK III. THE MODERN WORKER. CHAPTER I. PHENOMENA. But, it is said, our religion is gone : we no longer believe in St. Edmund, no longer see the figure of him ' on the rim of the sky,' minatory or confirmatory ! God's absolute Laws, sanctioned by an eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell, have become Moral Phi- losophies, sanctioned by able computations of Profit and Loss, by weak considerations of Pleasures of Virtue and the Moral Sublime. It is even so. To speak in the ancient dialect, we ' have for- gotten God ;' — in the most modern dialect and very truth of the matter, we have taken up the Fact of this Universe as it is not. We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal Substance of things, and opened them only to the Shews and Shams of things. We quietly believe this Universe to be intrinsically a great unin- telligible Perhaps ; extrinsically, clear enough, it is a great, most extensive Cattlefold and Workhouse, with most extensive Kitchen-ranges, Dining-tables, — whereat he is wise who can find a place ! All the Truth of this Universe is uncertain ; only the profit and loss of it, the pudding and praise of it, are and lemain very visible to the practical man. There is no longer any God for us ! God's Laws are become a Greatest-Happiness Principle, a Parliamentary Expediency : the Heavens overarch us only as an Astronomical Time-keeper ; a butt for Herschel-telescopes to shoot science at, to shoot sentimen- talities at : — in our and old Jonson's dialect, man has lost the soul out of him ; and now, after the due period, — begins to find the want of it ! This is verily the plague-spot ; centre of the uni- versal Social Gangrene, threatening all modern things with fright- ful death. To him that will consider it, here is the stem, with its roots and taproot, with its world-wide upas-boughs and ac- cursed poison-exudations, under which the world lies writhing in 19* 133 THE MODERN WORKER. atrophy and agony. You touch the focal-centre of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this. There is no religion ; there is no God ; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt. Vainly : in killing Kings, in passing Reform Bills, in French Revolutions, Manchester Insur- rections, is found no remedy. The foul elephantine leprosy, alleviated for an hour, reappears in new force and desperateness next hour. For actually this is not the real fact of the world ; the world is not made so, but otherwise! — Truly, any Society setting out from this No-God hypothesis will arrive at a result or two. The ZThveracities, escorted, each Unveracity of them by its corres- ponding Misery and Penalty ; the Phantasms, and Fatuities, and ten-years Corn-Law Debatings, that shall walk the Earth at noon- day, — must needs be numerous ! The Universe being intrinsic- ally a Perhaps, being too probably an ' infinite Humbug,' why should any minor Humbug astonish us? It is all according to the order of Nature ; and Phantasms riding with huge clatter along the streets, from end to end of our existence, astonish nobody. Enchanted St. Ives ? Workhouses and Joe-Manton Aris- tocracies ; giant Working Mammonism near strangled in the par- tridge-nets of giant-looking Idle Dilettantism, — this, in all its branches, in its thousand thousand modes and figures, is a sight familiar to us. The Popish Religion, we are told, flourishes extremely in these years ; and is the most vivacious-looking religion to be met with at present. " Elk a trois cents ans dans le ventre" counts M. Jouffrov : " c'est pourqnoi je la respecte!" — The old Pope of Rome, finding it laborious to kneel so long while they cart him through the streets to bless the people on Corpus- Christi Day, complains of rheumatism ; whereupon his Cardinals consult ; — construct him, after some study, a stuffed cloaked figure, of iron and wood, with wool or baked hair ; and place it in a kneeling posture. Stuffed figure, or rump of a figure ; to this stuffed rump he, sitting at his ease on a lower level, joins, by the aid of cloaks and drapery, his living head and outspread hands : the rump with its cloaks kneels, the Pope looks, and holds his hands PHENOMENA. 139 spread ; and so the two in concert bless the Roman population on Corpus- Christi Day, as well as they can. I have considered this amphibious Pope, with the wool-and- iron back, with the flesh head and hands ; and endeavoured to calculate his horoscope. I reckon him the remarkablest Pontiff that has darkened God's daylight, or painted himself in the hu- man retina, for these several thousand years. Nay, since Chaos first shivered, and ' sneezed,' as the Arabs say, with the first shaft of sunlight shot through it, what stranger product was there of Nature and Art working together? Here is a Supreme Priest who believes God to be — What in the name of God does he be- •lieve God to be 1 — and discerns that all worship of God is a scenic phantasmagory of wax-candles, organ-blasts, Gregorian Chants, mass-brayings, purple monsignori, wool-and-iron rumps, artistically spread out, — to save the ignorant from worse. O reader, I say not who are Belial's elect. This poor amphibi- ous Pope too gives loaves to the Poor ; has in him more good latent than he is himself aware of. His poor Jesuits, in the late Italian Cholera, were, with a few German Doctors, the only creatures whom dastard terror had not driven mad : they de- scended fearless into all gulfs and bedlams ; watched over the pillow of the dying, with help, with counsel and hope ; shone as luminous fixed stars, when all else had gone out in chactic night : honour to them ! This poor Pope, — who knows what good is in him ? In a Time otherwise too prone to forget, he keeps up the mournfulest ghastly memorial of the Highest, Blessedest, which once was ; which, in new fit forms, will again partly have to be. Is he not as a perpetual death's-head and cross-bones, with their Resurgam, on the grave of a Universal Heroism, — grave of a Christianity? Such Noblenesses, purchased by the world's best heart's-blood, must not be lost ; we cannot afford to lose them, in what confusions soever. To all of us the day will come, to a few of us it has already come, when no mortal, with his heart yearn- ing for a ' Divine Humility,' or other ' Highest form of Valour,' will need to look for it in death's-heads, but will see it round him in here and there a beautiful living head. Besides, there is in this poor Pope, and his practice of the Scenic Theory of Worship, a frankness which I rather honour. 140 THE MODERN WORKER. Not half and half, but with undivided heart does he set about wor- shipping by stage-machinery ; as if there were now, and could again be, in Nature no other. He will ask you, What other? Under this my Gregorian Chant, and beautiful wax-light Phantas- magory, kindly hidden from you is an Abyss, of black Doubt, Scepticism, nay Sansculottic Jacobinism ; an Orcus that has no bottom. Think of that. ' Groby Pool is thatched with pan- cakes,' — as Jeannie Deans's Innkeeper defied it to be ! The Bot- tomless of Scepticism, Atheism, Jacobinism, behold, it is thatched over, hidden from your despair, by stage-properties judiciously arranged. This stuffed rump of mine saves not me only from rheumatism, but you also from what other isms! In this your. Life-pilgrimage Nowhither, a fine Squallacci marching-music, and Gregorian Chant, accompanies you, and the hollow Night of Orcus is well hid ! Yes truly, few men that worship by the rotatory Calabash of the Calmucks do it in half so great, frank or effectual a way. Drury-lane, it is said, and that is saying much, may learn from him in the dressing of parts, in the arrangement of lights and shadows. He is the greatest Play-actor that at present draws sal- ary in this world. Poor Pope ; and I am told he is fast growing bankrupt too ; and will, in a measurable term of years (a great way within the ' three hundred'), not have a penny to make his pot boil ? His old rheumatic back will then get to rest ; and him- self and his stage-properties sleep well in Chaos forevermore. Or, alas, why go to Rome for Phantasms walking the streets ? Phantasms, «ghosts, in this midnight hour, hold jubilee, and screech and jabber ; and the question rather were, What high Reality anywhere is yet awake ? Aristocracy has become Phan- tasm-Aristocracy, no longer able to do its work, not in the least conscious that it has any work longer to do. Unable, totally care- less to do its work ; careful only to clamour for the ivages of do- ing its work, — nay for higher, and palpably undue wages, and Corn-Laws and increase of rents ; the old rate of wages not being adequate now ! In hydra-wrestle, giant ' Millocr&cy ' so called, a real giant, though as yet a blind one and but half-awake, wres- tles and wrings in choking nightmare, ' like to be strangled in the PHENOMENA. 141 partridge-nets of Phantasm -Aristocracy,' as we said, which fan- cies itself still to be a giant. Wrestles, as under nightmare, till it do awaken ; and gasps and struggles thousandfold, we may- say, in a truly painful manner, through all fibres of our English Existence, in these hours and years ! Is our poor English Ex- istence wholly becoming a Nightmare ; full of mere Phan- tasms ? — The Champion of England, cased in iron or tin, rides into Westminster Hall, ' being lifted into his saddle with little assist- ance,' and there asks, If in the four quarters of the world, under the cope of Heaven, is any man or demon that dare question the right of this King 1 Under the cope of Heaven no man makes intelligible answer, — as several men ought already to have done. Does not this Champion too know the world ; that it is a huge Imposture, and bottomless Inanity, thatched over with bright cloth and other ingenious tissues'? Him let us leave there, ques- tioning all men and demons. Him we have left to his destiny ; but whom else have we found 1 From this the highest apex of things, downwards through all strata and breadths, how many fully awakened Realities have we fallen in with : — alas, on the contrary, what troops and popu- lations of Phantasms, not God-Veracities but Devil-Falsities, down to the very lowest stratum, — which now, by such superincumbent weight of Unveracities, lies enchanted in St. Ives' Workhouses, broad enough, helpless enough ! You will walk in no public thoroughfare or remotest byway of English Existence but you will meet a man, an interest of men, that has given up hope in the Everlasting, True, and placed its hope in the Temporary, half or wholly False. The Honourable Member complains un- musically that there is ' devil' s-dust ' in Yorkshire cloth. York- shire cloth, — why, the very Paper I now write on is made, it seems, partly of plaster-lime well-smoothed, and obstructs my writing ! You are lucky if you can find now any good Paper, — any work really done; search where you will, from highest Phantasm apex to lowest Enchanted basis ! Consider, for example, that great Hat seven-feet high, which now perambulates London Streets : which my Friend Sauerteig xegarded justly as one of our English notabilities ; "the topmost 142 THE MODERN WORKER. point as yet," said he, " would it were your culminating and re- turning point, to which English Puffery has been observed to reach!" — The Hatter in the Strand of London, instead of making better felt-hats than another, mounts a huge lath-and- plaster Hat, seven-feet high, upon wheels ; sends a man to drive it through the streets ; hoping to be saved thereby. He has not attempted to make better hats, as he was appointed by the Uni- verse to do, and as with this ingenuity of his he could very pro- bably have done ; but his whole industry is turned to persuade us that he has made such ! He too knows that the Quack has be- come God. Laugh not at him, O reader ; or do not laugh only. He has ceased to be comic ; he is fast becoming tragic. To me this all-deafening blast of Puffery, of poor Falsehood grown necessitous, of poor Heart- Atheism fallen now into Enchanted Workhouses, sounds too surely like a Doom's-blast ! I have to say to myself in old dialect : " God's blessing is not written on all this; His curse is written on all this!" Unless perhaps the Universe be a chimera ; — some old totally deranged eightday clock, dead as brass ; which the Maker, if there ever was any Maker, has long ceased to meddle with? — To my Friend Sauer- teig this poor seven-feet Hat-manufacturer, as the topstone of English Puffery, was very notable. Alas, that we natives note him little, that we view him as a thing of course, is the very burden of the misery. We take it for granted, the most rigorous of us, that all men who have made anything are expected and entitled to make the loudest possible proclamation of it ; call on a discerning public to reward them for it. Every man his own trumpeter ; that is, to a really alarming extent, the accepted rule. Make loudest possible proclamation of your Hat : true proclamation if that will do ; if that will not do, then false proclamation, — to such extent of falsity as will serve your purpose ; as will not seem too false to be credible ! — I an- swer, once for all, that the fact is not so. Nature requires no man to make proclamation of his doings and hat-makings ; Nature forbids all men to make such. There is not a man or hat-maker born into the world but feels, at first, that he is degrading himself if he speak of his excellencies and prowesses, and supremacy in his craft: his inmost heart says to him, "Leave thy friends to PHENOMENA. 143 speak of these ; if possible, thy enemies to speak of these ; but at all events, thy friends!" He feels that he is already a poor braggart ; fast hastening to be a falsity and speaker of the Un- truth. Nature's Laws, I must repeat, are eternal : her small still voice, speaking from the inmost heart of us, shall not, under ter- rible penalties, be disregarded. No one man can depart from the truth without damage to himself; no one million of men ; no Twenty-seven Millions of men. Shew me a Nation fallen every- where into this course, so that each expects it, permits it to others and himself, I will shew you a Nation travelling with one assent on the broad way. The broad way, however many Banks of England, Cotton-Mills and Duke's Palaces it may have ! Not at happy Elysian fields, and everlasting crowns of victory, earned by silent Valour, will this Nation arrive ; but at precipices, de- vouring gulfs, if it pause not. Nature has appointed happy fields, victorious laurel-crowns ; but only to the brave and true ; ZJnnature, what we call Chaos, holds nothing in it but vacuities, devouring gulfs. What are Twenty-seven Millions, and their unanimity'? Believe them not: the Worlds and the Ages, God and Nature and All Men say otherwise. ' Rhetoric all this? ' No, my brother, very singular to say, it is Fact all this. Cocker's Arithmetic is not truer. Forgotten in these days, it is old as the foundations of the Universe, and will endure till the Universe cease. It is forgotten now ; and the first mention of it puckers thy sweet countenance into a sneer : but it will be brought to mind again, — unless indeed the Law of Gra- vitation chance to cease, and men find that they can walk on va- cancy. Unanimity of the Twenty-Seven Millions will do nothing : walk not thou with them ; fly from them as for thy life. Twenty- seven Millions travelling on such courses, with gold jingling in every pocket, with vivats heaven-high, are incessantly advancing, let me again remind thee, towards the firm-land' s end, — towards the end and extinction of what Faithfulness, Veracity, real Worth, was in their way of life. Their noble ancestors have fashioned for them a ' life-road ; ' — in how many thousand senses, this ! There is not an old wise Proverb on their tongue, an honest Prin- ciple articulated in their hearts into utterance, a wise true method 144 THE MODERN WORKER. of doing and despatching any work or commerce of men, but helps yet to carry them forward. Life is still possible to them, because all is not yet Puffery, Falsity, Mammon-worship and Un- nature ; because somewhat is yet Faithfulness, Veracity and Valour. With a certain very considerable finite quantity of Un- veracity and Phantasm, social life is still possible ; not with an infinite quantity ! Exceed your certain quantity, the seven-feet Hat, and all things upwards to the very Champion cased in tin, begin to reel and flounder, — in Manchester Insurrections, Chart- isms, Sliding-scales ; the Law of Gravitation not forgetting to act. You advance incessantly towards the land's end ; you are, literally enough, ' consuming the way.' Step after step, Twenty-seven Million unconscious men ; — till you are at the land's end; till there is not Faithfulness enough among you any more : and the next step now is lifted not over land, but into air, over ocean-deeps and roaring abysses : — unless perhaps the Law of Gravitation have forgotten to act ? O, it is frightful, when a whole Nation, as our Fathers used to say, has 'forgotten God;' has remembered only Mammon, and what Mammon leads to ! When your self-trumpeting Hatmaker is the emblem of almost all makers, and workers, and men, that make anything, — from soul-overseerships, body-overseerships, epic poems, acts of parliament, to hats and shoe-blacking ! Not one false man but does uncountable mischief: how much, in a generation or two, will Twenty-seven Millions, mostly false, manage to accumulate 1 The sum of it, visible in every street, market-place, senate-house, circulating-library, cathedral, cotton- mill, and union- workhouse, fills one not with a comic feeling ! CHAPTER II. GOSPEL OF MAMMONISM. Reader, even Christian Reader as thy title goes, hast thou any notion of Heaven and Hell? I rather apprehend, not. Often as the words are on our tongue, they have got a fabulous or semi- fabulous character for most of us, and pass on like a kind of tran- sient similitude, like a sound signifying little. Yet it is well worth while for us to know, once and always, that they are not a similitude, nor a fable nor semi-fable ; that they are an everlasting highest fact ! " No Lake of Sicilian or other sulphur burns now anywhere in these ages," sayest thou? Well, and if there did not ! Believe that there does not ; believe it if thou wilt, nay hold by it as a real increase, a rise to higher stages, to wider horizons and empires. All this has vanished, or has not vanished ; believe as thou wilt as to all this. But that an Infinite of Practical Importance, speaking with strict arithmetical exact- ness, an Infinite, has vanished or can vanish from the Life of any Man : this thou shalt not believe ! O brother, the Infinite of Terror, of Hope, of Pity, did it not at any moment disclose itself to thee, indubitable, unnameable? Came it never, like the gleam of preternatural eternal Oceans, like the voice of old Eternities, far-sounding through thy heart of hearts? Never? Alas, it was not thy Liberalism then ; it was thy Animalism ! The Infinite is more sure than any other fact. But only men can discern it ; mere building beavers, spinning arachnes, much more the preda- tory vulturous and vulpine species, do not discern it well ! — ' The word Hell,' says Sauerteig, ' is still frequently in use 1 among the English People : but I could not without difficulty ' ascertain what they meant by it. Hell generally signifies the 1 Infinite Terror, the thing a man is infinitely afraid of, and shud- 13 146 THE MODERN WORKER. ' ders and shrinks from, struggling with his whole soul to escape 1 from it. There is a Hell, therefore, if you will consider, which ' accompanies man, in all stages of his history, and religious or 1 other development : but the Hells of men and Peoples differ 1 notably. With Christians it is the infinite terror of being found ' guilty before the Just Judge. With old Romans, I conjecture, ' it was the terror not of Pluto, for whom probably they cared 1 little, but of doing unworthily, doing unvirtuously, which was 1 their word for un;?? an fully. And now what is it, if \ou pierce 1 through his Cants, his oft-repeated Hearsays, what he calls his 1 Worships and so forth, — what is it that the modern English ' soul does, in very truth, dread infinitely, and contemplate with ' entire despair ? What is his Hell ; after all these reputable, c oft-repeated Hearsays, what is it? With hesitation, with aston- • ishment, I pronounce it to be : The terror of " Not succeeding ;" ' of not making money, fame, or some other figure in the world, ' — chiefly of not making money ! Is not that a somewhat singu- lar Hell? ' Yes, Sauerteig, it is very singular. If we do not ' succeed,' where is the use of us? We had better never have been born. "Tremble intensely," as our friend the Emperor of China says; there is the black Bottomless of Terror : what Sauerteig calls the ' Hell of the English ! ' — But indeed this Hell belongs naturally to the Gospel of Mammonism, which also has its corresponding Heaven. For there is one Reality among so many Phantasms ; about one thing we are entirely in earnest : The making of money. Working Mammonism does divide the world with idle game-pre- serving Dilettantism : — thank Heaven that there is even a Mam- monism, anything we are in earnest about ! Idleness alone is without hope : work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at almost all things. There is endless hope in work, were it even work at making money. True, it must be owned, we for the present, with our Mam- mon-Gospel, have come to strange conclusions. We call it a Society ; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness ; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named 'fair competition' and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere GOSPEL OF MAMMONISH. 147 that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings ; we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and liquidates all en- gagements of man. "My starving workers?" answers the rich Mill-owner : " Did not I hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?" — Verily Mammon-wor- ship is a melancholy creed. When Cain, for his own behoof, had killed Abel, and was questioned, " Where is thy brother?" he too made answer, " Am I my brother's keeper!" Did I not pay my brother his wages, the thing he had merited from me. ' O sumptuous Merchant-Prince, illustrious game-preserving Duke, is there no way of ' killing ' thy brother but Cain's rude way ! ' A good man by the very look of him, by his very ' presence with us as a fellow wayfarer in this Life -pilgrimage, 1 promises so much :' wo to him if he forget all such promises, if he never know that they were given ! To a deadened soul, seared with the brute Idolatry of Sense, to whom going to Hell is equivalent to not making money, all ' promises,' and moral duties, that cannot be pleaded for in Courts of Requests, address themselves in vain. Money he can be ordered to pay, but nothing more. I have not heard in all Past History, and expect not to hear in all Future History, of any Society anywhere under God's Heaven supporting itself on such Philosophy. The Universe is not made so ; it is made otherwise than so. The man or nation of men that thinks it is made so, marches forward nothing doubt- ing, step after step ; but marches — whither we know ! In these last two centuries of Atheistic Government (near two centuries now, since the blessed restoration of his Sacred Majesty, and Defender of the Faith, Charles Second), I reckon that we have pretty well exhausted what of ' firm earth ' there was for us to march on ; — and are now, very ominously, shuddering, reeling, and let us hope trying to recoil, on the cliff's edge ! — For out of this that we call Atheism come so many other isms and falsities, each falsity with its misery at its heels ! — A soul is not like wind (spiritus, or breath) contained within a capsule ; the Almighty Maker is not like a Clockmaker that once, in old immemorial ages, having made his Horologe of a Universe, sits ever since and sees it go ! Not at all. Hence comes Atheism ; 148 THE MODERN WORKER. come, as we say, many other isms ; and as the sum of all, comes Yaletism, the reverse of Heroism : sad root of all woes what- soever. For indeed, as no man ever saw the above-said wind- element enclosed within its capsule, and finds it at bottom more deniable than conceivable ; so too he finds, in spite of Bridge- water Bequests, your Clockmaker Almighty an entirely question- able affair, a deniable affair ; — and accordingly denies it, and along with it so much else. Alas, one knows not what and how much else ! For the faith in an Invisible, Unnameable, Godlike, present everywhere in all that we see and work and suffer, is the essence of all faith whatsoever ; and that once denied, or still worse, asserted with lips only, and out of bound prayerbooks only, what Other thing remains believable ? That Cant well-ordered is marketable Cant ; that Heroism means gas- lighted Histrionism ; that seen with ' clear eyes ' (as they call Valet-eyes), no man is a Hero, or ever was a Hero, but all men are Valets and Varlets. The accursed practical quintessence of all sorts of Unbelief! For if there be now no Hero, and the Histrio himself begin to be seen into, what hope is there for the seed of Adam here below 1 We are the doomed everlasting prey of the Quack ; who, now in this guise, now in that, is to filch us, to pluck and eat us, by such modes as are convenient for him. For the modes and guises I care little. The Quack once inevit- able, let him come swiftly, let him pluck and eat me ; — swiftly, that I may at least have done with him ; for in his Quack-world I can have no wish to linger. Though he slay me, yet will I despise him. Though he conquer nations, and have all the Flunkeys of the Universe shouting at his heels, yet will I know well that he is an Inanity ; that for him and his there is no con- tinuance appointed, save only in Gehenna and the Pool. Alas, the Atheist world, from its utmost summits of Heaven and West- minster Hall, downwards through poor seven-feet Hats and ' Un- veracities fallen hungry,' down to the lowest cellars and neglected hunger-dens of it, is very wretched. One of Dr. Allison's Scotch facts struck us much.* A poor Irish Widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of * Observations on the Management of the Poor in Scotland : By Wil- liam Pulteney Alison, M. D. (Edinburgh, 1840.) GOSPEL OF MAMMONISM. 149 Edinburgh, went forth with her three children, bare of all resource, to solicit help from the Charitable Establishments of that City. At this Charitable Establishment and then at that she was refused ; referred from one to the other, helped by none ; — till she had exhausted them all ; till her strength and heart failed her : she sank down in typhus fever ; died, and infected her Lane with fever, so that ' seventeen other persons ' died of fever there in consequence. The humane Physician asks thereupon, as with a heart too full for speaking, Would it not have been economy to help this poor Widow'? She took typhus-fever, and killed seven- teen of you! — Yery curious. The forlorn Irish Widow applies to her fellow creatures, as if saying, " Behold I am sinking, bare of help : ye must help me ! I am your sister, bone of your bone ; one God made us : ye must help me! " They answer, " No; impossible : thou art no sister of ours." But she proves her sis- terhood ; her typhus-fever kills them : they actually were her brothers, though denying it ! Had man ever to go lower for a proof? For, as indeed was very natural in such case, all government of the Poor by the Rich has long ago been given over to Supply- and-demand, Laissez-faire and such like, and universally declared to be ' impossible.' " You are no sister of ours ; what shadow of proof is there'? Here are our parchments, our padlocks, proving indisputably our money-safes to be ours, and you to have no busi- ness with them. Depart! It is impossible!" — Nay, what wouldst thou thyself have us do 1 cry indignant readers. No- thing, my friends, — till you have got a soul for yourselves again. Till then all things are ' impossible.' Till then I cannot even bid you buy, as the old Spartans would have done, two-pence worth of powder and lead, and compendiously shoot to death this poor Irish Widow : even that is ' impossible ' for you. Nothing is left but that she prove her sisterhood by dying, and infecting you with typhus. Seventeen of you lying dead will not deny such proof that she ivas flesh of your flesh ; and perhaps some of the living may lay it to heart. { Impossible : ' of a certain two-legged animal with feathers, it is said if you draw a distinct chalk-circle round him, he sits 13* 150 THE MODERN WORKER. imprisoned, as if girt with the iron ring of Fate ; and will die there, though within sight of victuals, — or sit in sick misery- there, and be fatted to death. The name of this poor two-legged animal is — Goose ; and they make of him, when well fattened, Pate defoie gras, much prized by some ! CHAPTER in. GOSPEL OF DILETTANTISM. But after all, the Gospel of Dilettantism, producing a Governing Class who do not govern, nor understand in the least that they are bound or expected to govern, is still mournfuler than that of Mam- monism. Mammonism, as we said, at least works ; this goes idle. Mammonism has seized some portion of the message of Nature to man ; and seizing that, and following it, will seize and appropriate more and more of Nature's message : but Dilettant- ism has missed it wholly. ' Make money : ' that will mean with- al, 'Do work in order to make money.' But ' Go gracefully idle in Mayfair,' what does or can that mean? An idle, game-pre- serving and even corn-lawing Aristocracy, in such an England as ours : has the world, if we take thought of it, ever seen such a phenomenon till very lately 1 Can it long continue to see such 1 Accordingly the impotent, insolent Donothingism in Practice, and Saynothingism in Speech, which we have to witness on that side of our affairs, is altogether amazing. A Corn-Law demon- strating itself openly, for ten years or more, with ' arguments ' to make the angels, and some other classes of creatures, weep ! For men are not ashamed to rise in Parliament and elsewhere, and speak the things they do not think. ' Expediency,' ' Necessities of Party, 5 &c. &c. ! It is not known that the Tongue of Man is a sacred organ ; that Man himself is definable in Philosophy as an ' Incarnate Word; the Word not there, you have no Man there either, but a Phantasm instead ! In this way it is that Absurdi- ties may live long enough, — still walking, and talking for them- selves, years and decades after the brains are quite out ! How are ' the knaves and dastards ' ever to be got ' arrested ' at that rate ! — 152 THE MODERN WORKER. " No man in this fashionable London of yours," friend Sauer- teig would say, " speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to be something more than plain ; to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me ; — per- haps (this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the better ! Such grinning in- anity is very sad to the soul of man. Human faces should not grin on one like masks ; they should look on one like faces ! I love honest laughter as I do sunlight ; but not dishonest : most kinds of dancing too ; but the St. -Vitus kind not at all ! A fash- ionable wit, ach Himmel, if you ask, Which, he or a Death's- head, will be the cheerier company for me ? pray send not him!" Insincere Speech, truly, is the prime material of insincere Ac- tion. Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in Speech, in Thought whereof Speech is the shadow ; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of Speech in a man betokens the kind of Action you will get from him. Our Speech, in these modern days, has be- come amazing. Johnson complained, " Nobody speaks in earnest, Sir; there is no serious conversation." To us all serious speech of men, as that of Seventeenth-Century Puritans, Twelfth-Cen- tury Catholics, German Poets of this Century, has become jargon, more or less insane. Cromwell was mad and a quack ; Anselm, Becket, Goethe, ditto ditto. Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology are more sig- nificant than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same Asphaltic Lake ; and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities and outer semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions, — verging indeed towards a certain far deeper Lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the Prophet Moses, with an instructive word of warning, out of which might have sprung ' remedial measures ' not a few But no : the men of the Dead Sea dis- covered, as the valet-species always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses ; listened with real tedium to Moses, with GOSPEL OF DILETTANTISM. 153 light grinning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn ; and signified, in short, that they found him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid theory these men of the Asphalt Lake formed to themselves of Moses, That probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore. Moses withdrew ; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them, were all ' changed into Apes ;' * sitting on the trees there, grinning now in the most wnaffected manner ; gibbering and chattering complete nonsense ; finding the whole Universe now a most indisputable Humbug ! The Universe has become a Humbug to these Apes who thought it one ! There they sit and chatter, to this hour : only, I think, every Sabbath there returns to them a bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence ; and they sit, with their wizzened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of supreme tragicality as Apes may ; looking out, through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk of Things ; wholly an Uncertainty, Unintelligibility, they and it ; and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter or mew : — truest, tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of man or ape ! They made no use of their souls ; and so have lost them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with unmusical screeches, and half-remember that they had souls. Didst thou never, Traveller, fall in with parties of this tribe ? Meseems they are grown somewhat numerous in our day. * Sale's Koran {Introduction). CHAPTER IV. All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble ; work is alone noble : be that here said and asserted once more. And in like manner too all dignity is painful ; a life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god. The life of all gods figures itself to us as a Sublime Sadness — earnestness of Infinite Battle against Infinite Labour. Our highest religion is named the ' Worship of Sorrow.' For the son of man there is no noble crown, well worn, or even ill worn, but is a crown of thorns ! — These things, in spoken words, or still better, in felt instincts alive in every heart, were once well known. Does not the whole wretchedness, the whole Atheism as I call it, of man's ways, in these generations, shadow itself for us in that unspeakable Life-philosophy of his : The pretension to be what he calls ' happy ? ' Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has his head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all human and divine laws ought to be, ' happy.' His wishes, the pitifulest whipster's, are to be fulfilled for him ; his days, the pitifulest whipster's, are to flow on in ever-gentle current of enjoyment, impossible even for the gods. The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be happy ; thou shalt love pleasant things, and find them. The people clamour, Why have we not found pleas- ant things 1 We construct our theory of Human Duties, not on any Great- est-Nobleness Principle, never so mistaken ; no, but on a Great- est-Happiness Principle. ' The word Soul with us, as in some Slavonic dialects, seems to be synonymous with Stomach.'' We plead and speak, in our Parliaments and elsewhere, not as from the Soul, but from the Stomach ; — wherefore, indeed, our HAPPY. 155 pleadings are so slow to profit. We plead not for God's Justice ; we are not ashamed to stand clamouring and pleading for our own * interests,' our own rents and trade-profits ; we say, They are the ' interests ' of so many ; there is such an intense desire for them in us ! We demand Free-Trade, with much just vociferation and benevolence, That the poorer classes, who are terribly ill-ofF at present, may have cheaper New-Orleans bacon. Men ask on Free-trade platforms, How can the indomitable spirit of English- men be kept up without plenty of bacon ? We shall become a ruined Nation ! — Surely, my friends, plenty of bacon is good and indispensable : but, I doubt, you will never get even bacon by aiming only at that. You are men, not animals of prey, well used or ill-used ! Your Greatest-Happiness Principle seems to me fast becoming a rather unhappy one. — What if we should cease bab- bling about ' happiness,' and leave it resting on its own basis, as it used to do ! A gifted Byron rises in his wrath ; and feeling too surely that he for his part is not * happy,' declares the same in very violent language, as a piece of news that may be interesting. It evidently has surprised him much. One dislikes to see a man and poet re- duced to proclaim on the streets such tidings : but on the whole, as matters go, that is not the most dislikable. Byron speaks the truth in this matter. Byron's large audience indicates how true it is felt to be. 'Happy,' my brother? First of all, what difference is it whether thou art happy or not ! Today becomes Yesterday so fast, all Tomorrows become Yesterdays ; and then there is no question whatever of the ' happiness,' but quite another question. Nay, thou hast such a sacred pity left at least for thyself, thy very pains once gone over into Yesterday become joys to thee. Besides, thou knowest not what heavenly blessedness and indis- pensable sanative virtue was in them ; thou shalt only know it after many days, when thou art wiser ! — A benevolent old Sur- geon sat once in our company, with a Patient fallen sick by gour- mandising, whom he had just, too briefly in the Patient's judg- ment, been examining. The foolish Patient still at intervals con- tinued to break in on our discourse, which rather promised to take a philosophic turn: "But I have lost my appetite," said he, 156 THE MODERN WORKER. objurgatively, with a tone of irritated pathos ; "I have no appe- tite ; I can't eat! " — " My dear fellow," answered the Doctor in mildest tone, " it isn't of the slightest consequence ; " — and continued his philosophical discoursings with us ! Or does the reader not know the history of that Scottish iron Misanthrope 1 The inmates of some town-mansion, in those Northern parts, were thrown into the fearfulest alarm by indu- bitable symptoms of a ghost inhabiting the next house, or per- haps even the partition-wall ! Ever at a certain hour, with pre- ternatural gnarring, growling and screeching, which attended as running bass, there began, in a horrid, semi-articulate, unearthly voice, this song : " Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now I'm miserable ! Clack-clack-clack, gnarr-r-r, whuz-z : Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now I'm mees-erable ! " — Rest, rest, per- turbed spirit ; — or indeed, as the good old Doctor said : My dear fellow, it isn't of the slighest consequence ! But no ; the per- turbed spirit could not rest; and to the neighbours, fretted, affrighted, or at least insufferably bored by him, it icas of such consequence that they had to go and examine in his haunted chamber. In his haunted chamber, they find that the perturbed spirit is an unfortunate — Imitator of Byron? No, is an unfor- tunate rusty Meatjack, gnarring and creaking with rust and work ; and this, in Scottish dialect, is its Byronian musical Life-philoso- phy, sung according to ability ! Truly, I think the man who goes about pothering and uproar- ing for his ' happiness,' — pothering, and were it ballot-boxing, poem-making, or in what way soever fussing and exerting him- self, — he is not the man that will help to ' get our knaves and dastards arrested ! ' No ; he rather is on the way to increase the number, — by at least one unit and his tail ! Observe, too, that this is all a modern affair ; belongs not to the old heroic times, but to these dastard new times. ' Happiness our being's end and aim ' is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world. The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done. Not " I can't eat ! " but " I can't work ! ? ' that was the burden HAPPY. 157 of all wise complaining among men. It is, after all, the one un- happiness of a man. That he cannot work ; that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the day is passing swiftly over, our life is passing swiftly over ; and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness, — it is all abolished ; vanished, clean gone ; a thing that has been : ' not of the slightest consequence ' whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds, as musical Byron with Giaours and sensibilities of the heart ; as the unmusical Meat-jack with hard labour and rust ? But our work, — behold that is not abol- ished, that has not vanished : our work, behold, it remains, or the want of it remains ; — for endless Times and Eternities, re- mains ; and that is now the sole question with us forevermore ! Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper- crowns tinsel-gilt, is gone ; and divine everlasting Night, with her star-diadems, with her silences and her veracities, is come ! What hast thou done, and how ? Happiness, unhappiness : all that was but the wages thou hadst ; thou hast spent all that, in sustaining thyself hitherward ; not a coin of it remains with thee, it is all spent, eaten: and now thy work, where is thy work? Swift, out with it, let us see thy work ! Of a truth, if man were not a poor hungry dastard, and even much of a blockhead withal, he would cease criticising his victuals to such extent ; and criticise himself rather, what he does with his victuals ! 14 CHAPTER V. THE ENGLISH. And yet, with all thy theoretic platitudes, what a depth of prac- tical sense in thee, great England ! A depth of sense, of justice, and courage ; in which, under all emergencies and world-bewilder- ments, and under this most complex of emergencies we now live in, there is still hope, there is still assurance ! The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them. Like the old Romans, and some few others, their Epic Poem is written on the Earth's surface : England her Mark ! It is complained that they have no artists : one Shaks- peare indeed ; but for Raphael only a Reynolds ; for Mozart nothing but a Mr. Bishop : not a picture, not a song. And yet they did produce one Shakspeare : consider how the element of Shakspearean melody does lie imprisoned in their nature ; re- duced to unfold itself in mere Cotton-mills, Constitutional Govern- ments, and such like; — all the more interesting when it does become visible, as even in such unexpected shapes it succeeds in doing ! Goethe spoke of the Horse, how impressive, almost af- fecting it was that an animal of such qualities should stand ob- structed so ; its speech nothing but an inarticulate neighing, its handinessmere hoof 'iness, the fingers all constricted, tied together, the finger-nails coagulated into a mere hoof, shod with iron. The more significant, thinks he, are those eye-flashings of the generous noble quadruped ; those prancings, curvings of the neck clothed with thunder. A Dog of Knowledge has free utterance ; but the Warhorse is almost mute, very far from free ! It is even so. Truly, your freest utterances are not by any means always the best : they are the worst rather ; the feeblest, trivialest .; their meaning prompt, THE ENGLISH. 159 but small, ephemeral. Commend me to the silent English, to the silent Romans. Nay, the silent Russians too I believe to be worth something : are they not even now drilling, under much obloquy, an immense semi-barbarous half- world from Finland to Kamtschatka, into rule, subordination, civilisation, — really in an old Roman fashion ; speaking no word about it ; quietly hearing all manner of vituperative Able Editors speak ! While your ever-talking, ever-gesticulating French, for example, what are they at this moment drilling 1 — Nay, of all animals, the freest of utterance, I should judge, is the genus Simla : go into the Indian woods, say all Travellers, and look what a brisk, adroit, unrest- ing Ape-population it is ! The spoken "Word, the written Poem, is said to be an epitome of the man ; how much more the done Work. Whatsoever of morality and of intelligence ; what of patience, perseverance, faithfulness, of method, insight, ingenuity, energy ; in a word, whatsoever of Strength the man had in him will lie written in the Work he does. To work : why, it is to try himself against Na- ture, and her everlasting unerring Laws : these will tell a true verdict as to the man. So much of virtue and of faculty did we find in him ; so much and no more ! He had such capacity of harmonising himself with me and my unalterable ever-veracious Laws ; of cooperating and working as I bade him ; — and has prospered, and has not prospered, as you see ! — Working as great Nature bade him : does not that mean virtue of a kind ; nay, of all kinds'? Cotton can be spun and sold, Lancashire ope- ratives can be got to spin it, and at length one has the woven webs and sells them, by following Nature's regulations in that matter : by not following Nature's regulations, you have them not. You have them not ; — there is no Cotton-web to sell : Na- ture finds a bill against you ; your ' Strength ' is not Strength, but Futility ! Let faculty be honoured, so far as it is faculty. A man that can succeed in working is to me always a man. How one loves to see the burly figure of him, this thick-skinned, seemingly opaque, perhaps sulky, almost stupid Man of Practice, pitted against some light adroit Man of Theory, all equipt with clear logic, and able anywhere to give you Why for Wherefore ! 160 THE MODERN WORKER. The adroit Man of Theory, so light of movement, clear of utter- ance, with his bow full-bent and quiver full of arrow-arguments, — surely he will strike down the game, transfix everywhere the heart of the matter ; triumph everywhere, as he proves that he shall and must do ! To your astonishment, it turns out oftenest No. The cloudy-browed, thick-soled, opaque Practicality, with no logic-utterance, in silence mainly, with here and there a low grunt or growl, has in him what transcends all logic utterance : a Congruity with the Unuttered ! The Speakable, which lies atop, as a superficial film, or outer skin, is his or is not his : but the Doable, which reaches down to the World's centre, you find him there ! The rugged Brindley has little to say for himself ; the rugged Brindley, when difficulties accumulate on him, retires silent, 1 generally to his bed ;' retires ' sometimes for three days together to his bed, that he may be in perfect privacy there,' and ascertain in his rough head how the difficulties can be overcome. The in- eloquent Brindley, behold he has chained seas together; his ships do visibly float over valleys, invisibly through the hearts of moun- tains ; the Mersey and the Thames, the Humber and the Severn have shaken hands : Nature most audibly answers, Yea ! The man of Theory twangs his full-bent bow : Nature's Fact ought to fall stricken, but does not : his logic-arrow glances from it as from a scaly dragon, and the obstinate Fact keeps walking its way. How singular ! At bottom, you will have to grapple closer with the dragon ; take it home to you, by real faculty, not by seeming faculty ; try whether you are stronger or it is stronger. Close with it, wrestle it : sheer obstinate toughness of muscle ; but much more, what we call toughness of heart, which will mean persistance hopeful and even desperate, unsubduable patience, composed candid openness, clearness of mind : all this shall be ' strength ' in wrestling your dragon ; the whole man's real strength is in this work, we shall get the measure of him here. Of all the Nations in the world at present we English are the stupidest in speech, the wisest in action. As good as a ' dumb ' Nation, I say, who cannot speak, and have never yet spoken, — spite of the Shakspeares and Miltons who shew us what possibil- ities there are ! — O Mr. Bull, I look in that surly face of thine THE ENGLISH. 161 with a mixture of pity and laughter, yet also with wonder and veneration. Thou complainest not, my illustrious friend ; and yet I believe the heart of thee is full of sorrow, of unspoken sadness, seriousness, — profound melancholy (as some have said) the basis of thy being. Unconsciously, for thou speakest of nothing, this great Universe is great to thee. Not by levity of floating, but by stubborn force of swimming, shalt thou make thy way. The Fates sing of thee that thou shalt many times be thought an ass and a dull ox, and shalt with a godlike indifference believe it. My friend, — and it is all untrue, nothing ever falser in point of fact ! Thou art of those great ones whose greatness the small passer-by does not discern. Thy very stupidity is wiser than their wisdom. A grand vis inertia, is in thee ; how many grand qualities unknown to small men ! Nature alone knows thee, ac- knowledges the bulk and strength of thee : thy Epic, unsung in words, is written in huge characters on the face of this Planet, — sea-moles, cotton-trades, railways, fleets and cities, Indian Em- pires, Americas, New-Hollands ; legible throughout the Solar ei;< Systi But the dumb Russians too, as I said, they, drilling all wild Asia and wild Europe into military rank and file, a terrible yet hitherto a prospering enterprise, are still dumber. The old Ro- mans also could not sp ak, for many centuries : — not till the world was theirs ; and so many speaking Greekdoms, their logic- arrows all spent, had been absorbed and abolished. The logic- arrows, how they glanced futile from obdurate thick-skinned Facts ; Facts to be wrestled down only by the real vigour of Ro- man thews ! — As for me, I honour, in these loud-babbling days, all the Silent rather. A grand Silence that of Romans ; — nay the grandest of all, is it not that of the gods ! Even Triviality, Imbecility, that can sit silent, how respectable is it in comparison ! The ' talent of silence ' is our fundamental one. Great honour to him whose Epic is a melodious hexameter Iliad ; not a jingling Sham-Iliad, nothing true in it but the hexameters and forms merely. But still greater honour, if his Epic be a mighty Empire slowly built together, a mighty Series of Heroic Deeds, — a mighty Conquest over Chaos ; which Epic the ' Eternal Melodies ' have, and must have, informed and dwelt in, as it sung itself! 14* 162 THE MODERN WORKER. There is no mistaking that latter Epic. Deeds are greater than Words. Deeds have such a life, mute but undeniable, and grow as living trees and fruit-trees do ; they people the vacuity of Time, and make it green and worthy. Why should the oak prove logi- cally that it ought to grow, and will grow 1 Plant it, try it ; what gifts of diligent judicious assimilation and secretion it has, of progress and resistance, of force to grow, will then declare them- selves. My much-honoured, illustrious, extremely inarticulate Mr. Bull! — Ask Bull his spoken opinion of any matter, — oftentimes the force of dulness can no farther go. You stand silent, incredulous, as over a platitude that borders on the Infinite. The man's Churchisms, Dissenterisms, Puseyisms, Benthamisms, College Philosophies, Fashionable Literatures, are unexampled in this world. Fate's prophecy is fulfilled ; you call the man an ox and an ass. But set him once to work, — respectable man ! His spoken sense is next to nothing, nine-tenths of it palpable non- sense ; but his unspoken sense, his inner silent feeling of what is true, what does agree with fact, what is doable and what is not doable, — this seeks its fellow in the world. A terrible worker ; irresistible against marshes, mountains, impediments, disorder, incivilisation ; everywhere vanquishing disorder, leaving it behind him as method and order. He ' retires to his bed three days,' and considers ! Nay withal, stupid as he is, our dear John, — ever, after infi- nite tumblings, and spoken platitudes innumerable from barrel- heads and parliament-benches, he does settle down somewhere about the just conclusion ; you are certain that his jumblings and tumblings will end, after years or centuries, in the stable equili- brium. Stable equilibrium, I say ; centre-of-gravity lowest ; — not the unstable, with centre-of-gravity highest, as I have known it done by quicker people ! For indeed, do but jumble and tum- ble sufficiently, you avoid that worst fault, of settling with your centre-of-gravity highest ; your centre-of-gravity is certain to come lowest, and to stay there. If slowness, what we in our impatience call ' stupidity,' be the price of stable equilibrium over unstable, shall we grudge a little slowness ? Not the least admirable quality of Bull is, after all, that of remaining insensible THE ENGLISH. 163 to logic ; holding out for considerable periods, ten years or more, as in this of the Corn-Laws, after all arguments and shadow of arguments have faded away from him, till the very urchins on the street titter at the arguments he brings. Logic, — Aoyixrj y the ' Art of Speech,' — does indeed speak so and so : clear enough : nevertheless Bull still shakes his head ; will see whether nothing else illogical, not yet ' spoken,' not yet able to be ' spoken,' do not lie in the business, as there so often does ! — My firm belief is, that, finding himself now enchanted, hand-shackled, foot- shackled, in Poor-Law Bastilles and elsewhere, he will retire three days to his bed, and arrive at a conclusion or two ! His three-years ' total stagnation of trade,' alas, is not that a painful enough ' lying in bed to consider himself? ' Poor Bull ! Bull is a born Conservative ; for this too I inexpressibly honour him. All great Peoples are conservative ; slow to believe in nov- elties ; patient of much error in actualities ; deeply and forever certain of the greatness that is in Law, in Custom once solemnly- established, and now long recognised as just and final. — True, O Radical Reformer, there is no Custom that can, properly speak- ing, be final ; none. And yet thou seest Customs which, in all civilised countries, are accounted final ; nay, under the Old-Roman name of Mores, are accounted Morality, Virtue, Laws of God Himself. Such, I assure thee, not a few of them are ; such al- most all of them once were. And greatly do I respect the solid character, — a blockhead, thou wilt say; yes, but a well-condi- tioned blockhead, and the best-condition, — who esteems all ' Cus- toms once solemnly acknowledged ' to be ultimate, divine, and the rule for a man to walk by, nothing doubting, not inquiring farther. What a time of it had we, were all men's life and trade still, in all parts of it, a problem, a hypothetic seeking, to be set- tled by painful Logics and Baconian Inductions ! The Clerk in Eastcheap cannot spend the day in verifying his Ready-Reckoner ; he must take it as verified, true and indisputable ; or his Book- keeping by Double Entry will stand still. " Where is your Posted Ledger?" asks the Master at night. — "Sir," answers the other, " I was verifying my Ready-Reckoner, and find some errors. The Ledger is — ! " — Fancy such a thing ! True, all turns on your Ready-Reckoner being moderately cor- 164 THE MODERN WORKER. rect, — being not insupportably incorrect ! A Ready-Reckoner which has led to distinct entries in your Ledger such as these : ' Creditor an English People by fifteen hundred years of good ' Labour ; and Debtor to lodging in enchanted Poor-Law Bastilles : ' Creditor by conquering the largest Empire the Sun ever saw ; ' and Debtor to Donothingism and ' ' Impossible ' ' written on all ' departments of the government thereof : Creditor by mountains ' of gold ingots earned ; and Debtor to No Bread purchasable by ' them : ' — such Ready-Reckoner, methinks, is beginning to be suspect; nay is ceasing, and has ceased to be suspect! Such Ready-Reckoner is a Solecism in Eastcheap ; and must, whatever be the press of business, and will and shall be rectified a little. Business can go on no longer with it. The most Conservative English People, thickest-skinned, most patient of Peoples, is driven alike by its Logic and its Unlogic, by things ' spoken,' and by things not yet spoken or very speakable, but only felt and very unendurable, to be wholly a Reforming People. Their Life as it is has ceased to be longer possible for them. Urge not this noble silent People ; rouse not the Berserkir-rage that lies in them ! Do you know their Cromwells, Hampdens, their Pyms and Bradshaws 1 Men very peaceable, but men that can be made very terrible ! Men who, like their old Teutsch Fathers in Agrippa's days, ' have a soul that despises death ; ' to whom ' death,' compared with falsehoods and injustices, is light ; — ' in whom there is a rage unconquerable by the immortal gods ! ' Before this, the English People have taken very preter- natural-looking Spectres by the beard; saying virtually : "And if thou wert ' preternatural 1 ' Thou with thy ' divine-rights ' grown diabolic wrongs ? Thou, — not even ' natural ; ' decapita- ble ; totally extinguishable ! " Yes, just so godlike as this People's patience was, even so godlike will and must its impa- tience be. Away, ye scandalous Practical Solecisms, children actually of the Prince of Darkness ; ye have near broken our hearts ; we can and will endure you no longer. Begone, we say ; depart, while the play is good ! By the Most High God, whose sons and born missionaries true men are, ye shall not con- tinue here ! You and we have become incompatible ; can inhabit one house no longer. Either you must go, or we. Are ye ambi- tious to try which it shall be ? THE ENGLISH. 165 O my Conservative friends, who still specially name and strug- gle to approve yourselves ' Conservative,' would to Heaven I could persuade you of this world-old fact, than which Fate is not surer, That Truth and Justice alone are capable of being ' con- served ' and preserved ! The thing which is unjust, which is not according to God's Law, will you, in a God's Universe, try to conserve that 1 It is so old, say you 1 Yes, and the hotter haste ought you, of all others, to be in to let it grow no older ! If but the faintest whisper in your hearts intimate to you that it is not fair, — hasten, for the sake of Conservatism itself, to probe it rigorously, to cast it forth at once and forever if guilty. How will or can you preserve it, the thing that is not fair? ' Impossi- bility ' a thousandfold is marked on that. And ye call yourselves Conservatives, Aristocracies : — ought not honour and nobleness of mind, if they had departed from all the Earth elsewhere, to find their last refuge with you ? Ye unfortunate ! The bough that is dead shall be cut away, for the sake of the tree itself. Old? Yes, it is too old. Many a weary winter has it swung and creaked there, and gnawed and fretted, with its dead wood, the organic substance and still living fibre of this good tree ; many a long summer has its ugly naked brown defaced the fair green umbrage ; every day it has done mischief, and that only : off with it, for the tree's sake, if for nothing more ; let the Con- servatism that would preserve cut it away. Did no wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead root left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous ; is as a dead iron spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living substance ; — nay is far worse ; for in every windstorm (' commercial crisis' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts itself to and fro, and cannot lie quiet as your dead iron spike would ! If I were the Conservative Party of England (which is another bold figure of speech), I would not for a hundred thousand pounds an hour allow those Corn-Laws to continue ! Potosi and Golconda put together would not purchase my assent to them. Do you count what treasuries of bitter indignation they are laying up for you in every just English heart 1 Do you know what questions, not as to Corn -prices and Sliding-scales alone, they are forcing every reflective Englishman to ask himself? Questions insoluble, or 166 THE MODERN WORKER. hitherto unsolved ; deeper than any of our Logic-plummets hith- erto will sound: questions deep enough, — which it were better that we did not name even in thought ! You are forcing us to think of them, to begin uttering them. The utterance of them is began ; and where will it be ended, think you 1 When two mil- lions of one's brother-men sit in Workhouses, and five millions, as is insolently said, ' rejoice in potatoes,' there are various things that must be begun, let them end where they can. CHAPTER VI. TWO CENTURIES. The Settlement effected by our ' Healing Parliament ' in the Year of Grace 1660, though accomplished under universal acclamations from the four corners of the British Dominions, turns out to have been one of the mournfulest that ever took place in this land of ours. It called and thought itself a Settlement of brightest hope and fulfilment, bright as the blaze of universal tar-barrels and bon- fires could make it: and we find it now, on looking back on it with the insight which trial has yielded, a Settlement as of de- spair. Considered well, it was a settlement to govern henceforth without God, with only some decent Pretence of God. Governing by the Christian Law of God had been found a thing of battle, convulsion, confusion, an infinitely difficult thing : where- fore let us now abandon it, and govern only by so much of God's Christian Law as — as may prove quiet and convenient for us. What is the end of Government 1 To guide men in the way wherein they should go ; towards their true good in this life, the portal of infinite good in a life to come 1 To guide men in such way, and ourselves in such way, as the Maker of men, whose eye is upon us, will sanction at the Great Day ? — Or alas, perhaps at bottom is there no Great Day, no sure outlook of any life to come ; but only this poor life, and what of taxes, felicities, Nell- Gwyns and entertainments, we can manage to muster here 1 ? In that case, the end of Government will be, To suppress all noise and disturbance, whether of Puritan preaching, Cameronian psalm- singing, thieves'-riot, murder, arson, or what noise soever, and — be careful that supplies do not fail! A very notable conclusion, if we will think of it ; and not without an abundance of fruits for us. Oliver Cromwell's body hung on the Tyburn-gallows, as 168 THE MODERN WORKER. the type of Puritanism found futile, inexecutable, execrable, — yes, that gallows-tree has been a fingerpost into very strange country indeed. Let earnest Puritanism die ; let decent Formal- ism, whatsoever cant it be or grow to, live ! We have had a pleasant journey in that direction ; and are — arriving at our inn 1 To support the Four Pleas of the Crown, and keep Taxes coming in : in very sad seriousness, has not this been, ever since, even in the best times, almost the one admitted end and aim of Government? Religion, Christian Church, Moral Duty; the fact that man had a soul at all ; that in man's life there was any eternal truth or justice at all, — has been as good as left quietly out of sight. Church indeed, — alas, the endless talk and strug- gle we have had of High-Church, Low-Church, Church-Exten- sion, Church-in-D anger : we invite the Christian reader to think whether it has not been a too miserable screech-owl phantasm of talk and struggle, as for a ' Church,' — which one had rather not define at present ! But now in these godless two centuries, looking at England and her efforts and doings, if we ask, What of England's doings the Law of Nature had accepted, Nature's King had actually fur- thered and pronounced to have truth in them, — where is our an- swer? Neither the ' Church ' of Hurd and Warburton, nor the Anti-church of Hume and Paine ; not in any shape the Spiritual- ism of England : all this is already seen, or beginning to be seen, for what it is ; a thing that Nature does not own. On the one side is dreary Cant, with a reminiscence of things noble and di- vine ; on the other is but acrid Candour, with a prophecy of things brutal, infernal. Hurd and Warburton are sunk into the sere and yellow leaf; no considerable body of true-seeing men looks thith- erward for healing : the Paine-and-Hume Atheistic theory, of 'things well let alone,' with Liberty, Equality and the like, is also in these days declaring itself naught, unable to keep the world from taking fire. The theories and speculations of both these parties, and, we may say, of all intermediate parties and persons, prove to be things which the Eternal Veracity did not accept ; things superficial, ephemeral, which already a near Posterity, finding them already dead and brown-leafed, is about to suppress and forget. The TWO CENTURIES. 169 Spiritualism of England, for those godless years, is, as it were, all forgettable. Much has been written : but the perennial Scrip- tures of Mankind have had small accession : from all English Books, in rhyme or prose, in leather binding or in paper wrappage, how many verses have been added to these ! Our most melodious Singers have sung as from the throat outwards : from the inner Heart of Man, from the great Heart of Nature, through no Pope or Phillips, has there come any tone. The Oracles have been dumb. In brief, the Spoken Word of England has not been true. The Spoken Word of England turns out to have been trivial ; of short endurance ; not valuable, not available as a Word, except for the passing day. It has been accordant with transitory Sem- blance ; discordant with eternal Fact. It has been unfortunately not a Word, but a Cant ; a helpless involuntary Cant, nay too often a cunning voluntary one : either way, a very mournful Cant ; the Voice not of Nature and Fact, but of something other than these. With all its miserable shortcomings, with its wars, controver- sies, with its trades-unions, famine-insurrections, — it is her Prac- tical Material Work alone that England has to shew for herself ! This, and hitherto almost nothing more ; yet actually this. The grim inarticulate veracity of the English People, unable to speak its meaning in words, has turned itself silently on things ; and the dark powers of Material Nature have answered : Yes, this at least is true, this is not false ! So answers Nature. Waste desert-shrubs of the Tropical swamps have become Cotton-trees ; and here, under my furtherance, are verily woven shirts, — hang- ing unsold, undistributed, but capable to be distributed, capable to cover the bare backs of my children of men. Mountains, old as the Creation, I have permitted to be bored through : bituminous fuel-stores, the wreck of forests that were green a million years ago, — I have opened them from my secret rock-chambers, and they are yours, ye English. Your huge fleets, steamships, do sail the sea : huge Indias do obey you ; from huge New Englands and Antipodal Australias, comes profit and traffic to this Old England of mine ! So answers Nature. The Practical Labour of England is not a chimerical Triviality : it is a Fact, acknowl- edged by all the Worlds ; which no man and no demon will con- 15 170 THE MODERN WORKER. tradict. It is, very audibly, though very inarticulately as yet, the one God's Voice we have heard in these two atheistic cen- turies. And now to observe with what bewildering obscurations and impediments all this as yet stands entangled, and is yet intelligible to no man ! How, with our gross Atheism, we hear it not to be the Voice of God to us, but regard it merely as a Voice of earthly Profit-and-Loss. And have a Hell in England, — the Hell of not making money. And coldly see the all-conquering valiant Sons of Toil sit enchanted, by the million, in their Poor-Law Bastille, as if this were Nature's Law ; — mumbling to ourselves some vague janglement of Laissez-faire, Supply-and-demand, Cash-pay- ment the one nexus of man to man : Free-trade, Competition, and Devil take the hindmost, our latest Gospel yet preached ! As if, in truth, there were no God of Labour ; as if godlike Labour and brutal Mammonism were convertible terms. A se- rious, most earnest Mammonism grown Midas-eared ; an unserious Dilettantism, earnest about nothing, grinning with inarticulate incredulous incredible jargon about all things, as the enchanted Dilettanti do by the Dead Sea ! It is mournful enough, for the present hour ; were there not an endless hope in it withal. Giant Labour, truest emblem there is of God the World-Worker, Demiurgus, and Eternal Maker ; noble Labour, which is yet to be the King of this Earth, and sit on the highest throne, — stag- gering hitherto like a blind irrational giant, hardly allowed to have his common place on the street-pavements ; idle Dilet- tantism, Dead-Sea Apism, crying out, "Down with him, he is dangerous ! " Labour must become a seeing rational giant, with a soul in the body of him, and take his place on the throne of things, — leav- ing his Mammonism, and several other adjuncts, on the lower steps of said throne. CHAPTER VII. OVER-PRODUCTION. But what will reflective readers say of a Governing Class, such as ours, addressing its Workers with an indictment of • Over- production ! ' Over-production : runs it not so 1 "Ye miscella- neous, ignoble manufacturing individuals, ye have produced too much ! We accuse you of making above two-hundred thousand shirts for the bare backs of mankind. Your trousers too, which you have made, of fustian, of cassimere, of Scotch-plaid, of jane, nankeen and woollen broadcloth, are they not manifold'? Of hats for the human head, of shoes for the human foot, of stools to sit on, spoons to eat with — Nay, what say we hats or shoes ? You produce gold-watches, jewelleries, silver-forks and epergnes, com- modes, chiffoniers, stuffed sofas — Heavens, the Commercial Ba- zaar and multitudinous Howel-and-Jameses cannot contain you. You have produced, produced ; — he that seeks your indictment, let him look around. Millions of shirts, and empty pairs of breeches, hang there in judgment against you. We accuse you of over-producing : you are criminally guilty of producing shirts, breeches, hats, shoes and commodities, in a frightful over-abun- dance. And now there is a glut, and your operatives cannot be fed!" Never surely, against an earnest Working Mammonism was there brought, by Game-preserving aristocratic Dilettantism, a stranger accusation, since this world began. My lords and gen- tlemen, — why, it was you that were appointed, by the fact and by the theory of your position on the Earth, to ' make and admin- ister Laws,' — that is to say, in a world such as ours, to guard against ' gluts ; ' against honest operatives, who had done their work, remaining unfed ! I say, you were appointed to preside 172 THE MODERN WORKER. over the Distribution and Apportionment of the Wages of Work done ; and to see well that there went no labourer without his hire, were it of money-coins, were it of hemp gallows-ropes : that function was yours, and from immemorial time has been ; yours, and as yet no other's. These poor shirt-spinners have forgotten much, which by the virtual unwritten law of their position they should have remembered : but by any written recognised law of their position, what have they forgotten? They were set to make shirts. The Community with all its voices commanded them, saying " Make shirts ; " — and there the shirts are ! Too many shirts? Well, that is a novelty, in this intemperate Earth, with its nine-hundred millions of bare backs ! But the Community commanded you, saying, " See that the shirts are well appor- tioned, that our Human Laws be emblem of God's Laws ; " — and where is the apportionment? Two million shirtless or ill— shirted workers sit enchanted in Work-house Bastilles, five mil- lion more (according to some) in Ugolino Hunger-cellars ; and for remedy, you say, — what say you ? — " Raise our rents ! " I have not in my time heard any stranger speech, not even on the Shores of the Dead Sea. You continue addressing those poor shirt-spinners, and over-producers, in really a too triumphant manner : " Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse us of over-pro- duction ? We take the Heavens and the Earth to witness that we have produced nothing at all. Not from us proceeds this frightful overplus of shirts. In the wide domains of created Nature, circu- lates no shirt or thing of our producing. Certain fox-brushes nailed upon our stable-door, the fruit of fair audacity at Melton Mowbray ; these we have produced, and they are openly nailed up there. He that accuses us of producing, let him shew himself, let him name what and when. We are innocent of producing ; — ye ungrateful, what mountains of things have we not, on the con- trary, had to ' consume,' and make away with ! Mountains of those your heaped manufactures, wheresoever edible or wearable, have they not disappeared before us, as if we had the talent of ostriches, of cormorants, and a kind of divine faculty to eat? Ye ungrateful ! — and did you not grow under the shadow of our wings? Are not your filthy mills built on these fields of ours ; OVER-PRODUCTION. 173 on this soil of England, which belongs to — whom think you ? And we shall not offer you our own wheat at the price that pleases us, but that partly pleases you? A precious notion! What would become of you, if we chose, at any time, to decide on growing no wheat more? " Yes, truly, here is the ultimate rock-basis of all Corn-Law3 ; whereon, at the bottom of much arguing, they rest, as securely as they can : What would become of you, if we decided, some day, on growing no more wheat at all ? If we chose to grow only partridges henceforth, and a modicum of wheat for our own uses ? Cannot we do what we like with our own? — Yes, indeed ! For my share, if I could melt Gneiss Rock, and create Law of Gavita- tion ; if I could stride out to the Doggerbank, some morning, and striking down my trident there into the mud-waves, say, "Be land, be fields, meadows, mountains and fresh-rolling streams ! " by Heaven, I should incline to have the letting of that land in per- petuity, and sell the wheat of it, or burn the wheat of it, accord- ing to my own good judgment ! My Corn-Lawing friends, you affright me. To the ' Millo-cracy ' so-called, to the Working Aristocracy, steeped too deep in mere ignoble Mammonism, and as yet all un- conscious of its noble destinies, as yet but an irrational or semi- rational giant, struggling to awake some soul in itself, — the world will have much to say, reproachfully, reprovingly, admon- ishingly. But to the Idle Aristocracy, what will the world have to say ? Things painful and not pleasant ! To the man who works, who attempts, in never so ungracious barbarous a way, to get forward with some work, you will hasten out with furtherances, with encouragements, corrections ; you will say to him : " Welcome, thou art ours ; our care shall be of thee." To the idler, again, never so gracefully going idle, com- ing forward w T ith never so many parchments, you will not hasten out ; you will sit still, and be disincline^ to rise. You will say to him : " Not welcome, O complex Anomaly ; would thou hadst staid out of doors : for who of mortals knows what to do with thee ? Thy parchments : yes, they are old, of venerable yellow- ness ; and we too honour parchment, old-established settlements, 15* 174 THE MODERN WORKRR. and venerable use and wont. Old parchments in very truth : — yet on the whole, if thou wilt remark, they are young to the Granite Rocks, to the Groundplan of God's Universe ! We ad- vise thee to put up thy parchments ; to go home to thy place, and make no needless noise whatever. Our heart's wish is to save thee : yet there as thou art, hapless Anomaly, with nothing but thy yellow parchments, noisy futilities, and shotbelts and fox- brushes, who of gods or men can avert dark Fate ? Be coun- selled, ascertain if no work exist for thee on God's Earth ; if thou find no commanded-duty there but that of going gracefully idle ? Ask, inquire earnestly, with a half-frantic earnestness ; for the answer means Existence or Annihilation to thee. We apprise thee of the world-old fact, becoming sternly disclosed again in these days, That he who cannot work in this Universe cannot get existed in it : had he parchments to thatch the face of the world, these, combustible fallible sheepskin, cannot avail him. Home, thou unfortunate ; and let us have at least no noise from thee ! ' ' Suppose the unfortunate Idle Aristocracy, as the unfortunate Working one has done, were to ' retire three days to its bed,' and consider itself there, what o'clock it had become 1 — How have we to regret not only that men have ' no religion,' but that they have next to no reflection : and go about with heads full of mere extraneous noises, with eyes wide-open but vision- less, — for most part, in the somnambulist state ! CHAPTER VIIL UNWORKING ARISTOCRACY. It is well said, ' Land is the right basis of an Aristocracy ;' who- ever possesses the Land, he, more emphatically than any other, is the Governor, Viceking of the people on the Land. It is in these days as it was in those of Henry Plantagenet and Abbot Samson ; as it will in all days be. The Land is Mother of us all ; nourishes, shelters, gladdens, lovingly enriches us all ; in how many ways, from our first wakening to our last sleep on her blessed mother- bosom, does she, as with blessed mother-arms, enfold us all ! The Hill I first saw the Sun rise over, when the Sun and I and all things were yet in their auroral hour, who can divorce me from it 1 ? Mystic, deep as the world's centre, are the roots I have struck into my Native Soil ; no tree that grows is rooted so. From noblest Patriotism to humblest industrial Mechanism ; from highest dying for your country, to lowest quarrying and coal-boring for it, a Nation's Life depends upon its Land. Again and again we have to say, there can be no true Aristocracy but must possess the Land. Men talk of ' selling ' Land. Land, it is true, like Epic Poems and even higher things, in such a trading world, has to be pre- sented in the market for what it will bring, and as we say be 1 sold :' but the notion of ' selling,' for certain bits of metal, the Iliad of Homer, how much more the Land of the World -Creator, is a ridiculous impossibility ! We buy what is saleable of it ; no- thing more was ever buyable. Who can, or could, sell it to us 1 Properly speaking, the Land belongs to these two : To the Al- mighty God ; and to all His Children of Men that have ever worked well on it, or that shall ever work well on it. No generation of men can or could, with never such solemnity and effort, sell Land 176 THE MODERN WORKER. on any other principle : it is not the property of any generation, we say, but that of all the past generations that have worked on it, and of all the future ones that shall work on it. Again, we hear it said, The soil of England, or of any country, is properly worth nothing, except ' the labour bestowed on it.' This, speaking even in the language of Eastcheap, is not correct. The rudest space of country equal in extent to England, could a whole English Nation, with all their habitudes, arrangements, skills, with whatsoever they do carry within the skins of them, and cannot be stript of, suddenly take wing, and alight on it, — would be worth a very considerable thing ! Swiftly, within year and day, this English Nation, with its multiplex talents of plough- ing, spinning, hammering, mining, road-making and trafficking, would bring a handsome value out of such a space of country. On the other hand, fancy what an English Nation, once ' on the wing,' could have done with itself, had there been simply no soil, not even an inarable one, to alight on ? Vain all its talents for ploughing, hammering, and whatever else ; there is no Earth-room for this Nation with its talents : this Nation will have to lerp hovering on the wing, dolefully shrieking to and fro ; and perish piecemeal ; burying itself, down to the last soul of it, in the waste unnrmamented seas. Ah yes, soil, with or without ploughing, is the gift of God. The soil of all countries belongs evermore, in a very considerable degree, to the Almighty Maker ! The last stroke of labour bestowed on it is not the making of its value, but only the increasing thereof. It is very strange, the degree to which these truisms are forgot- ten in our days ; how, in the ever-whirling chaos of Formulas, we have quietly lost sight of Fact, — which it is so perilous not to keep forever in sight ! Fact, if w T e do not see it, will make us feel it by and by ! — From much loud controversy and Corn-Law debating there rises, loud though inarticulate, once more in these years, this very question among others. Who made the Land of England? Who made it, this respectable English Land, wheat- growing, metalliferous, carboniferous, which will let readily hand over head for seventy millions or upwards, as it here lies : who did make it? — "We!" answer the much-consuming Aristoc- racy; " We ! " as they ride in, moist with the sweat of Melton UNWORKING ARISTOCRACY. 177 Mowbray : "It is we that made it ; or are the heirs, assigns and representatives of those who did ! " — My brothers, You 1 Ever- lasting honour to you, then ; and Corn-Laws as many as you will, till your own deep stomachs cry Enough, or some voice of human pity for our famine bids you Hold ! Ye are as gods, that can create soil. Soil-creating gods there is no withstanding. They have the might to sell wheat at what price they list ; and the right, to all lengths, and famine-lengths, — if they be pitiless in- fernal gods ! Celestial gods, I think, would stop short of the famine-price ; but no infernal nor any kind of god can be bidden stop ! Infatuated mortals, into what questions are you driving every thinking man in England 1 I say, you did not make the Land of England ; and, by the pos- session of it, you are bound to furnish guidance and governance to England ! That is the law of your position on this God's-Earth ; an everlasting act of Heaven's Parliament, not repealable in St. Stephen's or elsewhere ! True government and guidance ; not no-government and Laissez-faire ; how much less, mzsgovernment and Corn-Law ! There is not an imprisoned Worker looking out from these Bastilles but appeals, very audibly in Heaven's High Courts, against you, and me, and every one who is not imprison- ed, " Why am I here? " His appeal is audible in Heaven ; and will become audible enough on Earth too, if it remain unheeded here. His appeal is against you, foremost of all ; you stand in the front-rank of the accused ; you, by the very place you hold, have first of all to answer him and Heaven ! What looks maddest, miserablest in these mad and miserable Corn-Laws is independent altogether of their ' effect on wages,' their effect on ' increase of trade,' or any other such effect : it is the continual maddening proof they protrude into the faces of all men, that our Governing Class, called by God and Nature and the inflexible law of Fact, either to do something towards governing, or to die and be abolished, — have not yet learned even to sit still, and do no mischief! For no Anti-Corn-Law League yet asks more of them than this ; — Nature and Fact, very imperatively, asking so much more of them. Anti-Corn-Law League asks not, Do something : but, Cease your destructive misdoing, Do ye nothing ! 178 THE MODERN WORKER. Nature's message will have itself obeyed : messages of mere Free-Trade, Anti-Corn-Law League and Laissez-faire, will then need small obeying ! — Ye fools, in name of Heaven, work, work, at the Ark of Deliverance for yourselves and us, while hours are still granted you ! No : instead of working at the Ark, they say, "We cannot get our hands kept rightly warm; " and sit obstinately burning the planks. No madder spectacle at present exhibits itself under this Sun. The Working Aristocracy ; Mill-owners, Manufacturers, Com- manders of Working Men : alas, against them also much shall be brought in accusation ; much, — and the freest Trade in Corn, total abolition of Tariffs, and uttermost ' Increase of Manufac- tures ' and ' Prosperity of Commerce,' will permanently mend no jot of it. The Working Aristocracy must strike into a new path ; must understand that money alone is not the representative either of man's success in the world, or of man's duties to man ; and reform their own selves from top to bottom, if they wish Eng- land reformed. England will not be habitable long, unreformed. The Working Aristocracy — Yes, but on the threshold of all this, it is again and again to be asked, What of the Idle Aristoc- racy? Again and again, what shall we say of the Idle Aristoc- racy, the Owners of the Soil of England ; whose recognised function is that of handsomely consuming the rents of England, shooting the partridges of England, and as an agreeable amuse- ment (if the purchase-money and other conveniences serve), dilet- tante-ing in Parliament and Quarter-Sessions for England ? We will say mournfully, in the presence of Heaven and Earth, — that we stand speechless, stupent, and know not what to say ! That a class of men entitled to live sumptuously on the marrow of the earth ; permitted simply, nay entreated, and as yet entreated in vain, to do nothing at all in return, was never heretofore seen on the face of this Planet. That such a class is transitory, exceptional, and, unless Nature's Laws fall dead, cannot continue. That it has continued now a moderate while ; has, for the last fifty years, been rapidly attaining its state of perfection. That it will have to find its duties and do them ; or else that it must and will cease to be seen on the face of this Planet, which is a Working one, not an Idle one. UNWORKING ARISTOCRACY. 179 Alas, alas, the Working Aristocracy, admonished by Trades- unions, Chartist conflagrations, above all by their own shrewd sense kept in perpetual communion with the fact of things, will assuredly reform themselves, and a working world will still be possible : — but the fate of the Idle Aristocracy, as one reads its horoscope hitherto in Corn-Laws and such like, is an abyss that fills one with despair. Yes, my rosy fox-hunting brothers, a ter- rible Hippocratic look reveals itself (God knows, not to my joy) through those fresh buxom countenances of yours Through your Corn-Law Majorities, Sliding-Scales, Protecting-Duties, Bribery-Elections and triumphant Kentish-fire, a thinking eye discerns ghastly images of ruin, too ghastly for words ; a hand- writing as of Mene, Mene. Men and brothers, on your Sliding- scale you seem sliding , and to have slid, — you little know whither ! Good God ! did not a French Donothing Aristocracy, hardly above half a century- ago, declare in like manner, and in its featherhead believe in like manner, " We cannot exist, and continue to dress and parade ourselves, on the just rent of the soil of France ; but we must have farther payment than rent of the soil, we must be exempted from taxes too," — we must have a Corn-Law to ex- tend our rent 1 This was in 1789 : in four years more — Did you look into the Tanneries of Meudon, and the long-naked making for themselves breeches of human skins ! May the merciful Heavens avert the omen ; may we be wiser, that so we be less wretched. A High Class without duties to do is like a tree planted on precipices ; from the roots of which all the earth has been crum- bling. Nature owns no man who is not a Martyr withal. Is there a man who pretends to live luxuriously housed up ; screened from all work, from want, danger, hardship, the victory over which is what we name work ; — he himself to sit serene, amid down-bolsters and appliances, and have all his work and battling done by other men? And such man calls himsel f a wo&Ze-man 1 His fathers worked for him, he says ; or successfully gambled for him : here he sits ; professes, not in sorrow but in pride, that he and his have done no work, time out of mind. It is the law of the land, and is thought to be the law of the Universe, that he, 180 THE MODERN WORKER. alone of recorded men, shall have no task laid on him, except that of eating his cooked victuals, and not flinging himself out of window. Once more I will say, there was no stranger specta- cle ever shewn under this Sun. A veritable fact in our England of the Nineteenth Century. His victuals he does eat : but as for keeping in the inside of the window, — have not his friends, like me, enough to do ? Truly, looking at his Corn-Laws, Game- Laws, Chandos-Clauses, Bribery-Elections and much else, you do shudder over the tumbling and plunging he makes, held back by the lappelles and coatskirts ; only a thin fence of window-glass before him, — and in the street mere horrid iron spikes! My sick brother, as in hospital maladies men do, thou dreamest of Paradises and Eldorados, which are far from thee. ' Cannot I do what I like with my own ! ' Gracious Heaven, my brother, this that thou seest with those sick eyes is no firm Eldorado, and Corn-Law Paradise of Donothings, but a dream of thy own fevered brain. It is a glass-window, I tell thee, so many stories from the street ; where are iron spikes and the law of gravitation ! What is the meaning of nobleness, if this be ' noble? ' In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie. The chief of men is he who stands in the van of men ; fronting the peril which frightens back all others ; which, if it be not vanquished, will devour the others. Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a crown of thorns. The Pagan Hercules, why was he accounted a hero ? Because he had slain Nemean Lions, cleansed Augean Stables, undergone Twelve Labours only not too heavy for a god. In modern, as in ancient and all societies, the Aristocracy, they that assume the functions of an Aristocracy, doing them" or not, have taken the post of honour ; which is the post of difficulty, the post of danger, — of death, if the difficulty be not overcome. II faut payer de savie. Why was our life given us, if not that we should manfully give it? Descend, O Donothing Pomp ; quit thy down- cushions ; expose thyself to learn what wretches feel, and how to cure it ! The Czar of Russia became a dusty toiling ship- wright ; worked with his axe in the docks of Saardam ; and his aim was small to thine. Descend thou : undertake this hor- rid ' living chaos of Ignorance and Hunger ' weltering round thy UNWORKING ARISTOCRACY. 181 feet ; say, " I will heal it, or behold I will die foremost in it." Such is verily the law. Everywhere and everywhen a man has to ' pay with his life ; ' to do his work, as a soldier does, at the expense of life. In no Piepowder earthly Court can you sue an Aristocracy to do its work, at this moment : but in the Higher Court, which even it calls ' Court of Honour,' and which is the Court of Necessity withal, and the eternal Court of the Universe, in which all Fact comes to plead, and every Human Soul is an apparitor, — the Aristocracy is answerable, and even now answer- ing, there. Parchments 1 Parchments are venerable : but they ought at all times to represent, as near as they by possibility can, the writing of the Adamant Tablets ; otherwise they are not so venerable ! Benedict the Jew in vain pleaded parchments ; his usuries were too many. The King said, " Go to, for all thy parchments, thou shalt pay just debt ; down with thy dust, or observe this tooth- forceps ! " Nature, a far juster Sovereign, has far terribler for- ceps. Aristocracies, actual and imaginary, reach a time when parchment pleading does not avail them. " Go to, for all thy parchments, thou shalt pay due debt ! " shouts the Universe to them, in an emphatic manner. They refuse to pay, confidently pleading parchment : their best grinder-tooth, with horrible ago- ny, goes out of their jaw. Wilt thou pay now 1 A second grind- er, again in horrible agony, goes : a second, and a third, and if need be, all the teeth and grinders, and the life itself with them ; — and then there is free payment, and an anatomist-subject into the bargain ! Reform Bills, Corn-Law Abrogation Bills, and then Land-Tax Bill, Property-Tax Bill, and still dimmer list of etceteras ; grinder after grinder : — my lords and gentlemen, it were better for you to arise, and begin doing your work, than sit there and plead parchments ! We write no Chapter on the Corn-Laws, in this place ; the Corn-Laws are too mad to have a Chapter. There is a certain immorality, when there is not a necessity, in speaking about things finished ; in chopping into small pieces the already slashed 16 182 THE MODERN WORKER. and slain. When the brains are out, why does not a Solecism die ! It is at its own peril if it refuse to die ; it ought to make all conceivable haste to die, and get itself buried ! The trade of Anti-Corn Law Lecturer in these days, still an indispensable, is a highly tragic one. The Corn-Laws will go, and even soon go : would we were all as sure of the Millennium as they are of going ! They go swiftly in these present months ; with an increase of velocity, an ever- deepening, ever-widening sweep of momentum, truly notable. It is at the Aristocracy's own damage and peril, still more than at any other's whatsoever, that the Aristocracy maintains them ; — at a damage, say only, as above computed, of a 'hundred thou- sand pounds an hour ! ' The Corn-Laws keep all the air hot : fostered by their fever-warmth, much that is evil, but much also, how much that is good and indispensable, is rapidly coming to life among us ! CHAPTER IX. WORKING ARISTOCRACY. A poor Working Mammonism getting itself ' strangled in the partridge-nets of an TJnworking Dilettantism,' and bellowing dread- fully, and already black in the face, is surely a disastrous specta- cle ! But of a Midas-eared Mammonism, which indeed at bottom all pure Mammonisms are, what better can you expect? No better ; — if not this, then something other equally disastrous, if not still more disastrous. Mammonisms, grown asinine, have to become human again, and rational ; they have, on the whole, to cease to be Mammonisms, were it even on compulsion, and pres- sure of the hemp round their neck! — My friends of the Working Aristocracy, there are now a great many things which you also, in your extreme need, will have to consider, The Continental people, it would seem, are ' exporting our ' machinery, beginning to spin cotton and manufacture for them- ' selves, to cut us out of this market and then out of that ! ' Sad news indeed ; but irremediable ; — by no means the saddest news. The saddest news is, that we should find our National Existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling manufactured cot- ton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other People. A most narrow stand for a great Nation to base itself on ! A stand which, with all the Corn-Law Abrogations conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring. My friends, suppose we quitted that stand ; suppose we came honestly down from it, and said : "This is our minimum of cotton- prices. We care not, for the present, to make cotton any cheaper. Do you, if it seem so blessed to you, make cotton cheaper. Fill your lungs with cotton-fuz, your hearts with copperas-fumes, 184 THE MODERN WORKER. with rage and mutiny; become ye the general gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp ! " — I admire a Nation which fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other Nations, to the end of the world. Brothers, we will cease to undersell them ; we will be content to equal-sell them ; to be happy, selling equally with them ! I do not see the use of underselling them. Cotton-cloth is already two- pence a yard or lower ; and yet bare backs were never more nu- merous among us. Let inventive men cease to spend their exist- ence incessantly contriving how cotton can be made cheaper ; and try to invent, a little, how cotton at its present cheapness could be somewhat justlier divided among us ! Let inventive men consider, Whether the Secret of this Universe, and of Man's Life there, does, after all, as we rashly fancy it, consist in making money? There is One God, just, supreme, almighty : but is Mammon the name of him ? — With a Hell which means ' Failing to make money,' I do not think there is any Heaven possible that would suit one well ; nor so much as an Earth that can be habitable long! In brief, all this Mammon- Gospel of Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached on Earth ; or alto- gether the shabbiest. Even with Dilettante partridge-nets, and at a horrible expenditure of pain, who shall regret to see the entirely transient, and at best somewhat despicable life strangled out of it? At the best, as we say, a somewhat despicable, unvenerable thing, this same ' Laissez-faire ;' and now, at the ivorst, fast growing an altogether detestable one ! " But what is to be done with our manufacturing population, with our agricultural, with our ever-increasing population? " cry many. — Aye, what 1 Many things can be done with them, a hundred things, and a thousand things, — had we once got a soul, and begun to try. This one thing, of doing for them by ' under- selling all people,' and filling our own bursten pockets and appe- tites by the road ; and turning over all care for any ' population,' or human or divine consideration except cash only, to the winds, with a " Laissez-faire" and the rest of it : this is evidently not the thing. ' Farthing cheaper per yard : ' no great Nation can stand on the apex of such a pyramid ; screwing itself higher and higher ; balancing itself on its great-toe ! Can England not sub- WORKING ARISTOCRACY. 185 sist without being above all people in working 1 England never deliberately purposed such a thing. If England work better than all people, it shall be well. England, like an honest worker, will work as well as she can ; and hope the gods may allow her to live on that basis. Laissez-faire and much else being once well dead, how many ' impossibles ' will become possible ! They are ' impossible,' as cotton-cloth at two-pence an ell was — till men set about making it. The inventive genius of great England will not forever sit patient with mere wheels and pinions, bobbins, straps and billy-rollers whirring in the head of it. The inventive genius of England is not a Beaver's, or a Spinner's or Spider's genius : it is a Man's genius, I hope, with a God over him ! Supply-and-demand? One begins to be weary of such work. Leave all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause : — it is the Gospel of Despair ! Man is a Patent-Di- gester, then : only give him Free Trade, Free digestirg-room ; and each of us digest what he can come at, leaving the rest to Fate ! My unhappy brethren of the Working Mammonism, my unhappier brethren of the Idle Dilettantism, no world was ever held together in that way for long. A world of mere Patent-Di- gesters will soon have nothing to digest ; such world ends, and by Law of Nature must end, in ' over-population ; ' in howling universal famine, ' impossibility,' and suicidal madness, as of end- less dog-kennels run rabid. Supply-and-demand shall do its full part, and Free Trade shall be free as air ; — thou of the shotbelts, see thou forbid it not, with those paltry, worse than ' Mammonish ' swindleries and Sliding-scales of thine, which are seen to be swin- dleries for all thy canting, which in times like ours are very scan- dalous to see ! And Trade never so well freed, and all Tariffs settled or abolished, and Supply-and-demand in full operation, — let us all know that we have yet done nothing ; that we have merely cleared the ground for doing. Yes, were the Corn-Laws ended tomorrow, there is nothing yet ended ; there is only room made for all manner of things begin- ning. The Corn-Laws gone, and Trade made free, it is as good as certain this paralysis of industry will pass away. We shall have another period of commercial enterprise, of victory and pros- perity ; during which, it is likely, much money will again be 16* 186 THE MODERN WORKER. made, and all the people may, by the extant methods, still for a space of years, be kept alive and physically fed. The strangling band of Famine will be loosened from onr necks ; we shall have room again to breathe ; time to bethink ourselves, to repent and consider ! A precious and thrice-precious space of years ; wherein to struggle as for life in reforming our foul ways ; in alleviating, instructing, regulating our people ; seeking, as for life, that some- thing like spiritual food be imparted them, some real governance and guidance be provided them ! It will be a priceless time. For our new period or paroxysm of commercial prosperity will and can, on the old methods of ' Competition and Devil take the hindmost,' prove but a paroxysm: a new paroxysm, — likely enough, if we do not use it better, to be our last. In this, of itself, is no salvation. If our Trade in twenty years, ' flourishing ' as never Trade nourished, could double itself ; yet then also, by the old Laissez-faire method, our Population is doubled : we shall then be as we are, only twice as many of us, twice and ten times as unmanageable ! All this dire misery, therefore ; all this of our poor Workhouse Workmen, of our Chartisms, Trades-strikes, Corn-Laws, Tory- isms, and the general down-break of Laissez-faire in these days, — may we not regard it as a voice from the dumb bosom of Na- ture, saying to us : Behold ! Supply-and-demand is not the one Law of Nature ; Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man, — how far from it! Deep, far deeper than Supply-and- demand, are Laws, Obligations sacred as Man's Life itself: these also, if you will continue to do work, you shall now learn and obey. He that will learn them, behold Nature is on his side, he shall yet work and prosper with noble rewards. He that will not learn them, Nature is against him : he shall not be able to do work in Nature's empire, — not in hers. Perpetual mutiny, con- tention, hatred, isolation, execration shall wait on his footsteps, till all men discern that the thing which he attains, however golden it look or be, is not success, but the want of success. Supply-and-demand, — alas ! For what noble work was there ever yet any audible ' demand ' in that poor sense 1 The man of Macedonia, speaking in vision to an Apostle Paul, ' ; Come over Working aristocracy. 187 and help us," did not specify what rate of wages he would give ! Or was the Christian Religion itself accomplished by Prize-Essays, Bridgewater Bequests, and a ' minimum of Four thousand five hundred a year? ' No demand that I heard of was made then, audible in any Labour-market, Manchester Chamber of Commerce, or other the like emporium and hiring establishment ; silent were all these from any whisper of such demand ; — powerless were all these to ' supply ' it, had the demand been in thunder and earth- quake, with gold Eldorados and Mahometan Paradises for the re- ward. Ah me, into what waste latitudes, in this Time- Voyage, have we wandered ; like adventurous Sindbads ; — where the men go about as if by galvanism, with meaningless glaring eyes, and have no soul, but only a heaver-faculty and stomach ! The hag- gard despair of Cotton-factory, Coal-mine operatives, Chandos Farm-labourers, in these days, is painful to behold ; but not so painful, hideous to the inner sense, as that brutish godforgetting Proflt-and-Loss Philosophy, and Life-theory, which we hear jangled on all hands of us, in senate-houses, spouting-clubs, lead- ing-articles, pulpits and platforms, everywhere as the Ultimate Gospel and candid Plain-English of Man's Life, from the throats and pens and thoughts of all but all men ! — Enlightened Philosophies, like Moliere Doctors, will tell you : " Enthusiasms, Self-sacrifice, Heaven, Hell and such like : yes, all that was true enough for old stupid times ; all that used to be true : but we have changed all that, nous avons change tout cela ! " Well ; if the heart be got round now into the right side, and the liver to the left ; if man have no heroism in him deeper than the wish to eat, and in his soul there dwell now no Infinite of Hope and Awe, and no divine Silence can become imperative because it is not Sinai Thunder, and no tie will bind if it be not that of Ty- burn gallows-ropes, — then verily you have changed all that; and for it, and for you, and for me, behold the Abyss and nameless Annihilation is ready. So scandalous a beggarly Universe de- serves indeed nothing else ; I cannot say I would save it from Annihilation. Vacuum, and the serene Blue, will be much hand- somer ; easier too for all of us. I, for one, decline living as a Pa- tent-Digester. Patent-Digester, Spinning-Mule, Mayfair Clothes- Horse : many thanks, but your Chaosships will have the goodness to excuse me ! CHAPTER X. PLUGSON OF UNDERSHOT. One thing I do know : Never, on this Earth, was the relation of man to man long carried on by Cash-payment alone. If, at any time, a philosophy of Laissez-faire, Competition and Supply-and- demand, start up as the exponent of human relations, expect that it will soon end. Such philosophies will arise : for man's philosophies are usually the ' supplement of his practice ,' some ornamental Logic-varnish, some outer skin of Articulate Intelligence, with which he strives to render his dumb Instinctive Doings presentable when they are done. Such philosophies will arise ; be preached as Mammon- Gospels, the ultimate Evangel of the World; be believed, with what is called belief, with much superficial bluster, with a kind of shallow satisfaction real in its way: — but they are ominous gospels ! They are the sure, and even swift, forerunner of great changes. Expect that the old System of Society is done, is dy- ing and fallen into dotage, when it begins to rave in that fashion. Most Systems that I have watched the death of, for the last three thousand years, have gone just so. The Ideal, the True and Noble that was in them having faded out, and nothing now re- maining but naked Egoism, vulturous Greediness, they cannot live ; they are bound and inexorably ordained by the oldest Des- tinies, Mothers of the Universe, to die. Curious enough : they thereupon, as I have pretty generally noticed, devise some light comfortable kind of ' wine -and walnuts philosophy ' for them- selves, this of Supply-and -demand or another ; and keep saying, during hours of mastication and rumination, which they call hours of meditation : " Soul, take thy ease, it is all well that thou art a PLUGSON OF UNDERSHOT. 189 vulture-soul ;" — and pangs of dissolution come upon them, often- est before they are aware ! Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another ; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world. I invite his Grace of Castle- Rackrent to reflect on this ; — does he think that a Land Aris- tocracy when it becomes a Land Auctioneership can have long to live'? Or that Sliding-scales will increase the vital stamina of it 1 ? The indomitable Plugson too, of the respected Firm of Plugson, Hunks and Company, in St. Dolly Undershot, is invited to reflect on this ; for to him also it will be new, perhaps even newer. Book-keeping by double entry is admirable, and records several things in an exact manner. But the Mother-Destinies also keep their Tablets ; in Heaven's Chancery also there goes on a record- ing ; and things, as my Moslem friends say, are ' written on the iron leaf.' Your Grace and Plugson, it is like, go to Church occasionally : did you never in vacant moments, with perhaps a dull parson droning to you, glance into your New Testament, and the cash- account stated four times over, by a kind of quadruple entry, — in the Four Gospels there ? I consider that a cash-account, and balance-statement of work done and wages paid, worth attending to. Precisely such, though on a smaller scale, go on at all mo- ments under this Sun ; and the statement and balance of them in the Plugson Ledgers and on the Tablets of Heaven's Chancery are discrepant exceedingly ; — which ought really to teach, and to have long since taught, an indomitable common-sense Plugson of Undershot, much more an unattackable w/icommon-sense Grace Gf Rackrent, a thing or two ! — In brief, we shall have to dismiss the Cash-Gospel rigorously into its own place ; we shall have to know, on the threshold, that either there is some infinitely deeper Gospel, subsidiary, explanatory and daily and hourly corrective, to the Cash one ; or else that the Cash one itself and all others are fast travelling ! For all human things do require to have an Ideal in them ; to have some Soul in them, as we said, were it only to keep the 190 THE MODERN WORKER. Body unputrefied. And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul, place it in what ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body with its own nobleness ; will gradually, incessantly, mould, modify, new-form or reform said ugliest Body, and make it at last beautiful, and to a certain degree divine ! — O, if you could de- throne that Brute-god Mammon, and put a Spirit-god in his place I One way or other, he must and will have to be dethroned. Fighting, for example, as I often say to myself, Fighting with steel murder-tools is surely a much uglier operation than Work- ing, take it how you will. Yet even of Fighting, in religious Abbot Samson's days, see what a Feudalism there had grown, — a ■ glorious Chivalry,' much besung down to the present day. Was not that one of the ' impossiblest ' things ? Under the sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with clenched teeth, and hell- fire eyes, hacking one another's flesh ; converting precious living bodies, and priceless living souls, into nameless masses of putres- cence, useful only for turnip-manure. How did a Chivalry ever come out of that ; how anything that was not hideous, scanda- lous, infernal 1 It will be a question worth considering by and by. I remark, for the present, only two things : first, that the Fighting itself was not, as we rashly suppose it, a Fighting with- out cause, but more or less with cause. Man is created to fight ; he is perhaps best of all definable as a born soldier ; his life ' a battle and a march,' under the right General. It is forever indis- pensable for a man to fight : now with Necessity, with Barren- ness, Scarcity, with Puddles, Bogs, tangled Forests, unkempt Cotton ; — now also with the hallucinations of his poor fellow Men. Hallucinatory visions rise in the head of my poor fel- low man ; make him claim over me rights which are not his. All Fighting, as we noticed long ago, is the dusty conflict of strengths each thinking itself the strongest, or, in other words, the justest ; — of Mights which do in the long-run, and forever will in this just Universe in the long-run, mean Rights. In conflict the per- ishable part of them, beaten sufficiently, flies off into dust : this process ended, appears the imperishable, the true and exact. And now let us remark a second thing : how, in these baleful operations, a noble devout-hearted Chevalier will comfort himself, PLUGSON OF UNDERSHOT. 191 and an ignoble godless Bucanier and Chactaw Indian. Victory is the aim of each. But deep in the heart of the noble man it lies forever legible, that, as an Invisible Just God made him, so will and must God's Justice and this only, were it never so invisible, ultimately prosper in all controversies and enterprises and battles whatsoever. What an Influence; ever-present, — like a Soul in the rudest Caliban of a body ; like a ray of Heaven, and illumin- ative creative Fiat-Lux, in the wastest terrestrial Chaos ! Blessed divine Influence, traceable even in the horror of Battlefields and garments rolled in blood : how it ennobles even the Battlefield ; and, in place of a Chactaw Massacre, makes it a Field of Honour ! A Battlefield too is great. Considered well, it is a kind of Quin- tessence of Labour ; Labour distilled into its utmost concentration ; the significance of years of it compressed into an hour. Here too thou shalt be strong, and not in muscle only, if thou wouldst pre- vail. Here too thou shalt be strong of heart, noble of soul ; thou shalt dread no pain or death, thou shalt not love ease or life ; in rage, thou shalt remember mercy, justice; — thou shalt be a Knight and not a Chactaw, if thou wouldst prevail ! It is the rule of all battles, against hallucinating fellow Men, against un- kempt Cotton, or whatsoever battles they may be which a man in this world has to fight. Howel Davies dyes the West Indian Seas with blood, piles his decks with plunder , approves himself the expertest Seaman, the daringest Seafighter : but he gains no lasting victory, lasting victory is not possible for him. Not, had he fleets larger than the combined British Navy all united with him in bucaniering. He, once for all, cannot prosper in his duel. He strikes down his man: yes; but his man, or his man's representative, has no notion to lie struck down ; neither, though slain ten times, will he keep so lying ; — nor has the Universe any notion to keep him so lying ! On the contrary, the Universe and he have, at all mo- ments, all manner of motives to start up again, and desperately fight again. Your Napoleon is flung out, at last, to St. Helena ; the latter end of him sternly compensating the beginning. The Bucanier strikes down a man, a hundred or a million men : bat what profits it 1 He has one enemy never to be struck down ; nay two enemies : Mankind and the Maker of Men. On the great 192 THE MODERN WORKER. scale or on the small, in fighting of men or fighting of difficulties, I will not embark my venture with Howel Davies : it is not the Bucanier, it is the Hero only that can gain victory, that can do more than seem to succeed. These things will deserve meditating ; for they apply to all battle and soldiership, all struggle and effort whatsoever in this Fig-lit of Life. It is a poor Gospel, Cash-Gos- pel or whatever name it have, that does not, with clear tone, un- contradictable, carrying conviction to all hearts, forever keep men in mind of these things. Unhappily, my indomitable friend Plugson of Undershot has, in a great degree, forgotten them ; — as, alas, all the world has ; as, alas, our very Dukes and Soul-Overseers have, whose special trade it was to remember them ! Hence these tears, — Plugson, who has indomitably spun Cotton merely to gain thousands of pounds, I have to call as yet a Bucanier and Chactaw ; till there come something better, still more indomitable from him. His hundred Thousand-pound Notes, if there be nothing other, are to me but as the hundred Scalps in a Chactaw wigwam. The blind Plugson : he was a Captain of Industry, born member of the Ultimate genuine Aristocracy of this Universe, could he have known it ! These thousand men that span and toiled round him, they were a regiment whom he had enlisted, man by man ; to make war on a very genuine enemy : Barenness of back, and dis- obedient Cotton-fibre, which will not, unless forced to it, consent to cover bare backs. Here is a most genuine enemy ; over whom all creatures will wish him victory. He enlisted his thousand men ; said to them, " Come, brothers, let us have a dash at Cot- ton ! " They follow with cheerful shout; they gain such a victory over Cotton as the Earth has to admire and clap hands at : but, alas, it is yet only of the Bucanier or Chactaw sort, — as good as no victory ! Foolish Plugson of St. Dorcas Undershot : does he hope to become illustrious by hanging up the scalps in his wigwam, the hundred thousands at his banker's, and saying, Behold my scalps ? Why, Plugson, even thy own host is all in mutiny : Cotton is conquered ; but the ' bare backs ' — are worse covered than ever ! Indomitable Plugson, thou must cease to be a Chactaw ; thou and others ; thou thyself, if no other ! Did William the Norman Bastard, or any of his Taillefers, PLUGSON OF UNDERSHOT. 193 Jroncutters, manage so? Ironcutter, at the end of the campaign, did not turn off his thousand fighters, but said to them : " Noble fighters, this is the land we have gained ; be I Lord in it, — what we will call Law-ward, maintainer and keeper of Heaven's Laws : be I Law-ward, or in brief orthoepy Lord in it, and be ye Loyal Men around me in it ; and we will stand by one another, as sol- diers round a captain, for again we shall have need of one an- other ! " Plugson, bucanier-like, says to them: " Noble spin- ners, this is the Hundred Thousand we have gained, wherein I mean to dwell and plant vineyards ; the hundred thousand is mine, the three and sixpence daily was yours : adieu, noble spinners ; drink my health with this groat each, whicli I give you over and above ! " The entirely unjust Captain of Industry, say I ; not Chevalier, but Bucanier ! ' Commercial Law ' does indeed acquit him, asks, with wide eyes, What else? So too Howel Davies asks, Was it not according to the strictest Bucanier Custom? Did I depart in any jot or tittle from the Laws of the Bucaniers ? After all, money, as they say, is miraculous. Plugson wanted victory ; as Chevaliers and Bucaniers, and all men alike do. He found money recognised, by the whole world with one assent, as the true symbol, exact equivalent and synonym of victory ; — and here we have him, a grimbrowed, indomitable Bucanier, coming home to us with a ' victory,' which the whole world is ceasing to clap hands at ! The whole world, taught somewhat impressively, is beginning to recognise that such victory is but half a victory ; and that now, if it please the Powers, we must — have the other half ! Money is miraculous. What miraculous facilities has it yielded, will it yield us ; but also what never-imagined confusions, obscur- ations has it brought in ; down almost to total extinction of the moral-sense in large masses of mankind ! ' Protection of pro- perty,' of what is ' mme,' means with most men protection of money, — the thing which, had I a thousand padlocks over it, is least of all mine ; is, in a manner, scarcely worth calling mine ! The symbol shall be held sacred, defended everywhere with tip- staves, ropes and gibbets ; the thing signified shall be composedly cast to the dogs. A human being who has worked with human beings clears all scores with them, cuts himself with triumphant 17 194 THE MODERN WORKER. completeness forever loose from them, by paying down certain shillings and pounds. Was it not the wages I promised you? There they are, to the last sixpence, — according to the Laws of the Bucaniers ! — Yes, indeed ; — and, at such times, it becomes imperatively necessary to ask all persons, bucaniers and others, Whether these same respectable Laws of the Bucaniers are writ- ten on God's eternal Heavens at all, on the inner Heart of Man at all ; or on the respectable Bucanier Logbook merely, for the convenience of bucaniering merely'? What a question ; — whereat Westminster Hall shudders to its driest parchment ; and on the dead wigs each particular horsehair stands on end ! The Laws of Laissez-faire, O Westminster, the laws of industrial Captain and industrial Soldier, how much more of idle Captain and industrial Soldier, will need to be remodelled, and modified, and rec- tified in a hundred and a hundred ways, — and not in the Sliding- scale direction , but in the totally opposite one ! With two million in- dustrial Soldiers already sitting in Bastilles, and five million pining on potatoes, methinks Westminster cannot begin too soon ! — A man has other obligations laid on him, in God's Universe, than the payment of cash : these also Westminster, if it will continue to exist and have board-wages, must contrive to take some charge of: — by Westminster or by another, they must and will be taken charge of; be, with whatever difficulty, got articulated, got en- forced, and to a certain approximate extent, put in practice. And, as I say, it cannot be too soon ! For Mammonism, left to itself, has become Midas-eared ; and with all its gold mountains sits starving for want of bread : and Dilettantism with its partridge- nets, in this extremely earnest Universe of ours, is playing some- what too high a game. ' A man by the very look of him prom- ises so much : ' yes ; and by the rent-roll of him does he promise nothing ? — Alas, what a business will this be, which our Continental friends, groping this long while somewhat absurdly about it and about it, call ' Organisation of Labour , ' — which must be taken out of the hands of absurd windy persons, and put into the hands of wise, laborious, modest and valiant men, to begin with it straight- way : to proceed with it and succeed in it more and more, if Eu- PLUGSON OF UNDERSHOT. 195 rope, at any rate if England, is to continue habitable much longer. Looking at the kind of most noble Corn-Law Dukes or Practical Duces we have, and also of right reverend Soul-Overseers, Christ- ian Spiritual Duces ' on a minimum of four thousand five hundred,' one's hopes are a little chilled. Courage, nevertheless ; there are many brave men in England ! My indomitable Plugson, — nay is there not even in thee some hope 1 Thou art hitherto a Bucanier, as it was written and prescribed for thee by an evil world : but in that grim brow, in that indomitable heart which can conquer Cotton, do there not perhaps lie other ten times no- bler conquests ? CHAPTER XI. LABOUR. For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works : in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair. Work, never so Mam- monish, mean is in communication with Nature ; the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments and regulations, which are truth. The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. 1 Know thyself:' long enough has that poor c self of thine tor- mented thee ; thou wilt never get to ' know ' it, I believe ! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual : know what thou canst work at ; and work at it, like a Hercules ! That will be thy better plan. It has been written, ' an endless significance lies in Work ;' a man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seedfields rise instead, and stately cities ; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work ! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like hell- dogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor dayworker, as of every man : but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labour in him, is it not as purifying fire wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed flame! LABOUR. 197 Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating- us. A formless chaos, once set it revolving, grows round and ever rounder ; ranges itself, by mere force of gravity, into strata, spher- ical courses ; is no longer a chaos but a round compacted World. What would become of the earth did she cease to revolve 1 In the poor old Earth, so long as she revolves, all inequalities, irreg- ularities disperse themselves ; all irregularities are incessantly becoming regular. Hast thou looked on the Potter's wheel ; — one of the venerablest objects ; old as the prophet Ezekiel and far older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes. And fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his wheel ; reduced to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneeding and baking ! Even such a Potter were Destiny with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work and spin ! Of an idle unrevoking man, the kindest Destiny, like the most assiduous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch ; — let her spend on him what expensive colouring, what gilding and enameling she will, he is but a botch. Not a dish ; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint-cornered amorphous botch, — a mere enameled vessel of dishonour ! Let the idle think of this. Blessed is he who has found his work ; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a Life-purpose ; he has found it, and will follow it ! How as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an ever deepening river there, it runs and flows ; — draining off the sour festering water, gradually from the root of the re- motest grass-blade ; making instead of pestilential swamp a green fruitful meadow, with its clear-flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small ! Labour is Life ; from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his god-given Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God ; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness, — to all knowledge, ' self-knowledge' and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge? The Knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that ; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no 17* 198 THE MODERN WORKER. other knowledge but what thou hast got by working : the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge, a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we try it and fix it. ' Doubt of whatever kind can be ended by Action alone.' And again hast thou valued Patience, Courage, Perseverance, Openness to light ; readiness to own thyself mistaken, to do better next time ? All these, all virtues, in wrestling with the dim brute powers of Fact, in ordering of thy fellows in such wrestle, there and elsewhere not at all, thou wilt continually learn. Set down a brave Sir Christopher in the middle of black ruined Stoneheaps, of foolish unarchitectural Bishops, redtape Officials, idle Nell- Gwyn Defenders of the Faith ; and see whether he will ever raise a Paul's Cathedral out of all that, yea or no ! Rough, rude, contradictory are all things and persons, from the mutinous ma- sons and Irish hodmen, up to the idle Nell-Gwyn Defenders, to blustering redtape Officials, foolish unarchitectural Bishops. All these things and persons are there not for Christopher's sake and his Cathedral's ; they are there for their own sake mainly ! Christopher will have to conquer and constrain all these, —if he be able. All these are against him. Equitable Nature herself, who carries her mathematics and architectonics not on the face of her, but deep in the hidden heart of her, — Nature herself, is but partially for him ; will be wholly against him, if he constrain her not! His very money, where is it to come from? The pious munificence of England lies far-scattered distant, unable to speak, and say "lam here ; " — must be spoken to before it can speak. Pious munificence, and all help, is so silent, invisible, like the gods ; impediment, contradictions manifold are so loud and near ! O brave Sir Christopher, trust thou in those notwithstanding, and front all these; understand all these, by valiant patience, noble effort, insight, by man's-strength, vanquish and compel all these, — and, on the whole, strike down victoriously the last topstone of that Paul's Edifice ; thy monument for certain centuries, the stamp ' Great Man ' impressed very legibly on Portland-stone there ! — Yes, all manner of help, and pious response from Men or Na- 199 ture, is always what we call silent ; cannot speak or come to light, till it be seen, till it be spoken to. Every noble work is at first ' impossible.' In very truth, for every noble work the possibilities will lie diffused through Immensity ; inarticulate, undiscoverable except to faith. Like Gideon thou shalt spread out thy fleece at the door of thy tent ; see whether under the wide arch of Heaven there be any bounteous moisture, or none. Thy heart and life- purpose shall be as a miraculous Gideon's fleece spread out in silent appeal to Heaven ; and from the kind Immensities, what from the poor unkind Localities and town and country Parishes there never could, blessed dew-moisture to suffice thee shall have fallen ! Work is of a religious nature : — work is of a brave nature ; which it is the aim of all religion to be. ' All work of man is as the swimmer's : a waste ocean threatens to devour him ; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word. By incessant wise defi- ances of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how it loyally supports him, bears him as its conqueror along. ' It is so,' says Goethe, ' with all things that man undertakes in this world.' Brave Sea-Captain, Norse Sea-King, — Columbus, my hero, royallest Sea-King of all ! it is no friendly environment this of thine in the waste deep waters ; around thee mutinous discouraged souls, behind thee disgrace and ruin, before thee the unpenetrated veil of Night. Brother, these wild Water-Mountains, bounding from their deep bases (ten miles deep, I am told), are not entirely there on thy behalf! Meseems they have other work than float- ing thee forward : — and the huge Winds, that sweep from Ursa Major to the Tropics and Equators, dancing their giant-waltz through the Kingdoms of Chaos and Immensity, they care little about filling rightly or filling wrongly the small shoulder-of-mutton sails in this cockle skiff of thine ! Thou art not among articu- late-speaking friends, my brother ; thou art among immeasurable dumb monsters, tumbling, howling wide as the w T orld here. Se- cret, far off, invisible to all hearts but thine, there lies a help in them : see how thou wilt get at that. Patiently thou wilt wait till the mad Southwester spend itself, saving thyself by dexterous science of defence, the while ; valiantly, with swift decision, wilt thou strike in, when the favouring East, the Possible, springs up. 200 THE MODERN WORKER. Mutiny of men thou wilt sternly repress ; weakness, despond- ency, thou wilt cheerily encourage : thou wilt swallow down complaint, unreason, weariness, weakness of others and thyself; — how much wilt thou swallow down ! There shall be a depth of Silence in thee, deeper than this Sea, which is but ten miles deep : a Silence unsoundable ; known to God only. Thou shalt be a Great Man. Yes, my World-Soldier, thou of the World Marine-Service, — thou wilt have to be greater than this tumult- uous unmeasured world here round thee is : thou, in thy strong soul, as with wrestler's arms, shalt embrace it, harness it down ; and make it bear thee on, — to New Americas, or whither God wills ! CHAPTER XII. REWARD. 1 Religion,' I said, for properly speaking all true Work is Re- ligion ; and whatsoever Religion is not work may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes, or where it will ; with me it shall have no harbour. Admirable was that of the old Monks, ' Laborare est Orare, Work is Worship.' Older than all preached Gospels was this unpreached, inarticu- late, but ineradicable, forever-enduring Gospel : Work, and therein have well-being. Man, Son of Earth and of Heaven, lies there not, in the innermost heart of thee, a spirit of active Method, a Force for work; — and burns like a painfully smoul- dering fire, giving thee no rest till thou unfold it, till thou write it down in beneficent Facts around thee ! What is immethodic, waste, thou shalt make methodic, regulated, arable ; obedient and productive to thee. Wheresoever thou findest Disorder, there is thy eternal enemy ; attack him swiftly, subdue him, make Order of him, the subject not of Chaos, but of Intelligence, Divinity, and Thee ! The thistle that grows in thy path, dig it out, that a blade of useful grass, a drop of nourishing milk, may grow there instead. The waste Cotton-shrub, gather its waste white down, spin it, weave it ; that in place of idle litter, there may be folded webs, and the naked skin of man be covered. But above all, when thou findest Ignorance, Stupidity, Brute- mindedness, — yes, there, with or without Church-tithes and shovel hat, with or without Talfourd-Mahon Copyrights, or were it with mere dungeons and gibbets and crosses, attack it, I say, smite it wisely, unweariedly, and rest not while thou livest and it lives, but smite, smite, in the name of God ! The highest God, as I understand it, does audibly so command thee ; still audibly, 202 THE MODERN WORKER. if thou have ears to hear. He, even He, with his w?ispoken voice, awfuller than any Sinai thunders or syllabled speech of Whirlwinds ; for the Silence of deep Eternities, of Worlds from beyond the morning-stars, does it not speak to thee? The unborn Ages ; the old Graves with their long-mouldering dust, the very tears that wetted it now all dry, — do not these speak to thee, what ear hath not heard 1 The deep Death-kingdoms, the stars in their never-resting courses, all Space and all Time, proclaims it to thee in continual silent admonition. Thou too, if ever man should, shalt work while it is called To-day. For the Night cometh wherein no man can work. All true work is sacred ; in all true Work, were it but true hand-labour, there is something of divineness. Labour, wide as the Earth, has its summit in Heaven. Sweat of the brow ; and up from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart, which in- cludes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all Sciences, all spoken Epics, all acted Heroisms, Martyrdoms, — up to that ' Agony of bloody sweat,' which all men have called divine ! O brother, if this is not ' worship,' then I say, the more piety for worship ; for this is the noblest thing yet discovered under God's sky. Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil ? Com- plain not. Look up, my wearied brother ; see thy fellow Work- men there, in God's Eternity ; surviving there, they alone surviv- ing : sacred Band of the Immortals, celestial Body-guard of the Empire of Mankind. Even in the weak Human Memory they survive so long, as saints, as heroes, as gods ; they alone surviv- ing ; peopling, they alone, the unmeasured solitudes of Time ? To thee Heaven, though severe, is not unkind; Heaven is kind, — as a noble mother ; as that Spartan mother, saying while she gave her son his shield, "With it, my son, or upon it ! " Thou too shalt return home in honour, — to thy far distant home, in hon- our ; doubt it not, — if in the battle thou keep thy shield ! Thou, in the Eternities and deepest Death-kingdoms, art not an alien ; thou everywhere art a denizen ! Complain not ; the very Spar- tans did not complain. And who art thou that braggest of thy Life of Idleness ; com- placently shewest thy bright gilt equipages ; sumptuous cushions ; appliances for folding of the hands to mere sleep ? Looking up, 203 looking down, around, behind or before, discernest thou, if it be not in Mayfair alone, any idle hero, saint, god, or even devil? Not a vestige of one. In the Heavens, in the Earth, in the waters under the Earth, is none like unto thee. Thou art an original figure in this creation ; a denizen in Mayfair alone, in this extra- ordinary Century or Half-century alone ! One monster there is in the world : the idle man. What is his ' religion 1 ' That Na- ture is a Phantasm, where cunning beggary or thievery may sometimes find good victual. That God is a lie ; and that Man and his Life are a lie. Alas, alas, who of us is there that can say, I have worked 1 The faithfullest of us are unprofitable ser- vants ; the faithfullest of us know that best. The faithfullest of us may say, with sad and true old Samuel, " Much of my life has been trifled away ! " But he that has, and except ' on public oc- casions,' professes to have, no function but that of going idle in a graceful or graceless manner, and of begetting sons to go idle ; and to address Chief Spinners and Diggers, who at least are spin- ning and digging, " Ye scandalous persons who produce too much " — My Corn-Law friends, on what imaginary still richer Eldorados, and true iron-spikes with law of Gravitation, are ye rushing ! As to the Wages of work there might innumerable things be said ; there will and must yet innumerable things be said and spoken, in St. Stephen's and out of St. Stephen's ; and gradually not a few things be ascertained and written, on Law-paichment, concerning this very matter : — ' Fair day's-wages for a fair day's- work ' is the most unrefusable demand ! Money-wages ' to the extent of keeping your worker alive that he may work more ; ' these, unless you mean to dismiss him straightway out of this world, are indispensable alike to the noblest worker and to the least noble ! One thing only I will say here, in special reference to the for- mer class, the noble and noblest ; but throwing light on all the other classes and their arrangements of this difficult matter : The wages of every noble work do yet lie in Heaven or else Nowhere. Not in Bank-of-England bills, in Owen's Labour-bank, or any the most improved establishment of banking and money-changing, needst thou, heroic soul, present thy account of earnings. Hu- 204 THE MODERN WORKER. man banks, and labour banks know thee not ; or know thee after generations and centuries have passed away, and thou art clean gone from 'rewarding,' — all manner of bank-drafts, shop-tills, and Downing-street Exchequers lying very invisible, so far from thee ! Nay, at bottom, dost thou need any reward ? Was it thy aim and life-purpose to be filled with good things for thy heroism, to have a life of pomp and ease, and be what men call ' happy ' in this world, or in any other world? I answer for thee delibe- rately, No. The whole spiritual secret of the new epoch lies in this, that thou canst answer for thyself, with thy whole clearness of head and heart, deliberately, No ! My brother, the brave man has to give his life away. Give it, I advise thee ; — thou dost not expect to sell thy Life in an ade- quate manner? What price, for example, w r ould content thee? The just price of thy Life to thee, — w*hy, God's entire Creation to thyself, the whole Universe of Space, the whole Eternity of Time, and what they hold : that is the price which w r ould con- tent thee ; that, and if thou wilt be candid, nothing short of that! It is thy all ; and for it thou w r ouldst have all. Thou art an un- reasonable mortal ; — or rather thou art a poor infinite mortal, who, in thy narrow clay-prison here, seemest so unreasonable ! Thou wilt never sell thy Life, or any part of thy Life, in a satis- factory manner. Give it, like a royal heart ; let the price be Nothing : thou hast then in a certain sense, got all for it ! The heroic man, — and is not every man, God be thanked, a potential hero? — has to do so, in all times and circumstances. In the most heroic age, as in the most unheroic, he wdll have to say, as Burns said proudly and humbly of his little Scottish Songs, little dew drops of celestial Melody in an age when so much was un- melodious : "By Heaven, they shall either be invaluable or of no value ; I do not need your guineas for them ! " It is an element which should and must enter deeply into all settlements of wages here below, They never will be ' satisfactory ' otherwise ; they cannot, O Mammon Gospel, they never can ! Money for my lit- tle piece of work ' to the extent that will allow me to keep work- ing ; ' yes, this, — unless you mean that I shall go my ways before the work is all taken out of me : but as to ' wages ' — ! — On the whole, we do entirely agree with those old Monks, La- 205 borare est Orare ; in a thousand senses, from one end of it to the other, true Works's Worship. He that works, whatsoever be his work, he bodies forth the form of Things Unseen ; a small Poet every worker is. The idea, were it but of his poor Delf Platter, how much more of his Epic Poem, is as yet 'seen,' half-seen, only by himself; to all others it is a thing unseen, impossible ; to Nature herself it is a thing unseen, a thing which never hith- erto was ; — very ' impossible,' for it is as yet a No-thing ! The Unseen Powers had need to watch over such a man ; he works in and for the Unseen. Alas, if he look to the Seen Powers only, he may as well quit the business ; his No-thing will never rightly issue as a Thing, but as a Deseeptivity, a Sham-thing, — which it had better not do ! Thy No-thing of an Intended Poem, O Poet who hast looked merely to reviewers, copy rights, booksellers, popularities, behold it has not yet become a thing, — for the truth is not in it ! Though printed, hotpressed, reviewed, celebrated, sold to the twentieth edition: what is all that ? The thing, in philosophical, uncom- mercial language, is still a No-thing, mostly semblance and de- ceptive of the right; — benign Oblivion incessantly gnawing at it, impatient till Chaos to which it belongs do reabsorb it ! — He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech. Thou must descend to the Mothers, to the Manes, and Hercules-like long suffer and labour there, wouldst thou emerge with victory into the Sunlight. As in battle and the shock of war, — for is not this a battle? thou too shalt fear no pain or death, shalt love no ease of life ; the voice of festive Lubberlands, the noise of Greedy Acheron shall alike lie silent under thy victorious feet. Thy work like Dante's, shall ' make thee lean for many years.' The world and its wa- ges, its criticisms, counsel, helps, impediments, shall be as a waste ocean flood ; the chaos through which thou art to swim and sail. Not the waste waves and their weedy gulf-streams, shalt thou take for guidance : thy star alone, — Se tu segui tua stetta! Thy star alone, now clear-beaming over Chaos, nay now by fits gone out, disastrously eclipsed : thus only shalt thou strive to follow. 0, it is a business, as I fancy, that of weltering your way through Chaos and the murk of Hell ! Green-eyed dragons 18 206 THE MODERN WORKER. watching you, three headed Cerberuses, — not without sympathy of their sort! " Eccovi Tuom ch'e stato aJV Inferno." For in fine, as Poet Dryden says, you do walk hand in hand with sheer Madness, all the way, — who is by no means pleasant company ! you look fixedly into Madness, and her undiscovered, boundless, bottomless Night-Empire ; that you may extort new Wisdom out of it, as an Eurydice from Tartarus. The higher the Wis- dom the closer was its neighbourhood and kindred with mere In- sanity ; literally so ; — and thou wilt, with a speechless feeling, observe how highest Wisdom, struggling up into this world, has oftentimes carried such tinctures and adhesions of Insanity still cleaving to it hither ! All works, each in their degree, are a making of Madness sane ; — truly enough a religious operation ; which cannot be carried on without religion. You have not work otherwise ; you have eye- service, greedy grasping of wages, swift and ever swifter manu- facture of semblances to get hold of wages. Instead of better felt-hats to cover your head, you have bigger lath-and-plaster hats set travelling the streets on wheels. Instead of heavenly and earthly Guidance for the souls of men, you have ' Black or White Surplice ' Controversies, stuffed hair-and-leather Popes ; terres- trial Law-wards, Lords and Law-bringers, ' organising Labour ' in these years, by passing Corn-Laws. With all which, alas, this distracted Earth is now full, — nigh to bursting. Semblances most smooth to the touch and eye ; most accursed nevertheless to body and soul. Semblances, be they of Sham-woven cloth or of Dilettante Legislation, which are not real wool or substance, but Devils-dust accursed of God and Man ! No man has worked, or can work, except religiously ; not even the poor day-labourer, the weaver of your coat, the sewer of your shoes. All men, if they work not as in a Great Taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, work unhappily for themselves and you. Industrial Work, still under bondage to Mammon, the rational soul of it not yet awakened, is a tragic spectacle. Men in the rapidest motion and self motion ; restless, with convulsive energy, as if driven by Galvanism, as if possessed by a Devil ; tearing asunder mountains, — to no purpose, for Mammonism is always 207 Midas-eared ! This is sad, on the face of it. Yet courage : the beneficent Destinies, kind in their sternness, are apprising us that this cannot continue. Labour is not a devil, even while encased in Mammonism ; Labour is ever an imprisoned god, writhing un- consciously or consciously to escape out of Mammonism ! Plug- son of Undershot, like Taillefer of Normandy, wants victory ; how much happier will even Plugson be to have a Chivalrous victory than a Chactaw one ? The unredeemed ugliness is that of a slothful People. Shew me a People energetically busy ; heav- ing, struggling, all shoulders at the wheel ; their heart pulsing, every muscle swelling with man's energy and will ; — I shew you a People of whom great good is already predicable, to whom all manner of good is yet certain if their energy endure. By very working, they will learn ; they have Antaeus-like, their foot on Mother Fact : how can they but learn 1 The vulgarest Plugson of a Master-worker, who can command workers and yet work out of them, is already a considerable man. Blessed and thrice-blessed symptoms I discern of Master-Workers who are not vulgar men ; who are Nobles, and begin to feel that they must act as such : all speed to these, they are England's hope at present ! But in this Plugson himself, conscious of al- most no nobleness whatever, how much is there ! Not without man's faculty, insight, courage, hard energy, is this rugged figure. His words none of the wisest ; but his actings cannot be altogether foolish. Think, how were it, stoodst thou suddenly in his shoes ! He has to command a thousand men. And not imaginary com- manding ; no, it is real, incessantly practical. The evil passions of so many men (with the Devil in them, as in all of us) he has to vanquish ; by manifold force of speech and of silence, to repress or evade. What a force of silence, to say nothing of the others, is in Plugson ! For these his thousand men he has to provide raw-material, machinery, arrangement, house room ; and ever at the week's end, wages by due sale. No Civil-List, or Gouldburn- Baring Budget has he to fall back upon, for paying of his regi- ment ; he has to pick his supplies from the confused face of the whole Earth and Contemporaneous History, by his own dexterity alone. There will be dry eyes if he fail to do it ! — He ex- claims, at present, ' black in the face,' near strangled with Dilet- 208 THE MODERN WORKER. tante Legislation : " Let me have elbow-room, throat -room, and I will not fail ! No, I will spin yet, and conquer like a giant : what ' sinews of war ' lie in me, untold resources towards the Conquest of this Planet, if instead of hanging me, you husband them, und help me! " — My indomitable friend, it is true; and thou shalt and must be helped. This is not a man I would kill and strangle by Corn-Laws, even if I could ! No, I would fling my Corn-Laws and Shot- belts to the Devil ; and try to help this man. I w T ould teach him by noble precept, and law-precept, by noble example most of all, that Mammonism was not the essence of his or of my station in God's Universe ; but the adsciticious excrescence of it ; the gross terrene, godless embodiment of it ; which would have to become, more or less, a godlike one ! By noble real legislation, by true node's- work, by unwearied, valiant, and were it wage- less effort, in my Parliament and in my Parish, I would aid, constrain, en- courage him to effect more or less this blessed change. I should know that it would have to be effected ; that unless it were in some measure effected, he and I and all of us, I first and soonest of all, were doomed to perdition ! — Effected it will be ; unless it were a Demon that made this Universe ; which I, for my own part, do at no moment, under no form, in the least believe. May it please your Serene Highnesses, your Majesties, Lord- ships, and Law-wardships, the proper Epic of this world is not now ' Arms and the Man,' — how much less ' shirt-frills and the Man : ' No, it is now ' Tools and the Man : ' that henceforth to all time is now our Epic ; — and you, first of all others, I think were wise to take note of that ! CHAPTER XIII. DEMOCRACY. If the Serene Highnesses and Majesties do not take note of that, then, as I perceive, ' that ? will take note of itself! The time for levity, insincerity, and idle babble and play-acting, in all kinds, is gone by ; it is a serious, grave time. Old long-vexed questions, not yet solved in logical words or parliamentary laws, are fast solving themselves in facts, somewhat unblessed to be- hold ! This largest of questions, this question of Work and Wages, which ought, had we heeded Heaven's voice, to have begun two generations ago or more, cannot be delayed longer without hearing Earth's voice. ' Labour ' will verily need to be somewhat l organized,' as they say, — God knows with what diffi- culty. Man will actually need to have his debts and earnings a little better paid by man ; which, let Parliament speak of them or be silent of them, are eternally his due from man, and cannot, without penalty and at length not without death penalty, be with- held. How much ought to cease among us straightway ; how much ought to begin straightway, while the hours yet are ! Truly they are strange results to which this of leaving all to ' Cash ; ' of quietly shutting up the God's Temple, and gradually opening wide-open the Mammon's Temple, ' Laissez-faire,' and Every man for himself! — have led us in these days ! We have Upper, speaking classes, who indeed do ' speak ' as never man spake before ; the withered flimsiness, the godless baseness and barrenness of whose speech might of itself indicate what kind of Doing and practical Governing went on under it ! For Speech is the gaseous element out of which most kinds of Practice and Per- formance especially all kinds of moral Performance, condense themselves, and take shape ; as the one is, so will the other be. 18* 210 THE MODERN WORKER. Descending, accordingly, into the Dumb Class in its Stockport Cellars and Poor-Law Bastilles, have we not to announce that they also are hitherto unexampled in the History of Adam's Pos- terity 1 Life was never a May-game for men ; in all times the lot of the dumb-millions born to toil was defaced with manifold suffer- ings, injustices, heavy burdens, avoidable and unavoidable ; not play at all, but hard work that made the sinews sore, and the heart sore. As bond slaves, villa?ii, bordarii, sochemanni, nay indeed as dukes, earls, and Kings, men were oftentimes made weary of their life ; and had to say, in the sweat of their brow and of their soul, Behold it is not sport, it is grim earnest, and our back can bear no more ! Who knows not what massacrings and harryings there have been ; grinding, long-continuing, unbearable injustices, till the heart had to rise in madness, and some " Eu Sachsen nimith euer Sachses, You Saxons, out with your Gully-Knives then." You Saxons, some ' arrestment,' partial ' arrestment of the Knaves and Dastards ' has become indis- pensable ! The page of Dryasdust is heavy with such details. And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched ; many men have^ied ; all men must die ; — the last exit of us all is in a Fire Chariot of Pain. But it is to live miserable we know not why ; to work sore and yet gain nothing ; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt in with a cold universal Laissez-faire : it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead Infinite Injustice, — as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris Bull ! This is and remains forever intol- erable to all men whom God has made. Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms Revolts of Three Days ? The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled. Never before did I hear of an Irish Widow reduced to prove her sisterhood by dying of typhus-fever and infecting ' seventeen per- sons,' — saying in such undeniable way, "You see, I was your sister ! " Sisterhood, Brotherhood was often forgotten, but not till the rise of the ultimate Mammon and Shotbelt Gospels, did I DEMOCRACY. 211 ever see it so expressly denied. If no pious Lord, or Law-ward would remember" it, always some pious Lady (' Hlaf-digJ Bene- factress, ' Loaf-giveress,' they say she is, — blessings on her beautiful heart !) was there, with mild mother voice and hand, to remember it ; some pious thoughtful Elder, what we now call 1 Prester,' Presbyter or ' Priest,' was there to put all men in mind of it, in the name of the God who had made all. Not even in Black Dahomy was it ever, I think, forgotten to the typhus-fever length. Mungo Park, resourceless had sunk down to die under the Negro Village-Tree; a horrible white object in the eyes of all. But in the poor Black Woman, and her daughter who stood aghast at him, whose earthly wealth and funded capital consisted of one small calabash of rice, there lived a heart richer than ' Laissez-faire :' they, with a royal munificence, boiled their rice for him ; they sang all night to him, spinning assiduous on their cotton distaffs, as he lay to sleep : " Let us pity the poor white man ; no mother has he to fetch him milk, no sister to grind him corn !" Thou poor black Noble One, — thou Lady too : did not a God make thee too ; was there not in thee too something of a God ! Gurth, born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, has been greatly pitied by Dryasdust and others. Gurth with the brass collar round his neck, tending Cedric's pigs in the glades of the wood, is not what I call an exemplar of human felicity : but Gurth, with the sky above him, with the free air and tinted boscage and umbrage round him, and in him at least the certainty of supper and social lodging when he came home, — Gurth to me seems happy in comparison with many a Lancashire and Buckinghamshire man of these days not born thrall of any body ! GurtrTs brass collar did not gall him ; Cedric deserved to be his Master. The pigs were Cedric's, but Gurth too would get his parings of them? Gurth had the inexpressible satisfaction of feeling himself related indissolubly, though in a rude brass-collar way, to his fellow mortals in this earth. He had superiors, inferiors, equals. — Gurth is now ' emancipated ' long since ; has what we call * Lib- erty.' Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. Liberty, when it becomes the liberty to die by starvation is not so divine ! 212 THE MODERN WORKER. Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and to walk therein. To learn or to be taught what woik he ac- tually was able for, and then by permission, persuasion and even compulsion, to set about doing of the same ! That is his true blessedness, honour, liberty and maximum of well-being : if lib- erty be not that, I, for one, have small care about liberty. You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices ; you vio- late his liberty, you that are wise ; and keep him, were it in strait- waistcoats, away from the precipices ! Every stupid, every cow- ardly and foolish man is but a less palpable madman : his true liberty were that a wiser man, that any and every wiser man, could by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharper way, lay hold of him when he was going wrong, and order and compel him to go a little righter. O if thou really art my Senior, Seig- neur, my Elder, Presbyter or Priest — if thou art in very deed my Wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to ' con- quer ' me, to command me ! If thou do know better than I what is good and right, I conjure thee in the name of God, force me to do it ; were it by never such brass collars, whips and hand-cuffs, leave me not to walk over precipices ! That I have been called by all the Newspapers a ' free man ' will avail me little, if my pilgrimage have ended in death and wreck. O that the News- papers had called me slave, coward, fool, or what it pleased their sweet voices to name me, and I had attained not death but life ! Liberty requires new definitions. A conscious abhorrence and intolerance of Folly, of Baseness, Stupidity, Poltroonery and all that brood of things, dwells deep in some men : still deeper in others an wnconscious abhorrence, and intolerance, clothed moreover by the beneficent Supreme Powers in what stout appetites, energies, egoisms so called, are suitable to it ; — these latter are your Conquerors, Romans, Nor- mans, Russians, Indo-English ; Founders of what we call Aris- tocracies. Which indeed have they not the most 'divine right' to found ; being themselves very truly ' Aqiaxoi, Bravest, Best ; and conquering generally a confused rabble of Worst, or at low- est, clearly enough, of Worse 1 ? I think their 'divine right,' tried, with affirmating verdict, in the greatest Law-Court known DEMOCRACY. 213 to me, was good ! A class of men who are dreadfully exclaimed against by Dryasdust ; of whom nevertheless beneficent Nature has oftentimes had need, — and may alas, again have need. Whom across the hundredfold poor scepticisms, trivialities and constitutional cobwebberies of Dryasdust, you catch any glimpse of a William the Conqueror, a Tancred of Hauteville or such like, — do you riot discern veritably some rude outline of a true God-made King ; whom not the Champion of England cased in tin, but all Nature and the Universe were calling to the throne 1 ? It is absolutely necessary that he get thither. Nature does not mean her poor Saxon children to perish, of obesity, stupor or other malady, as yet : a stern Ruler therefore and Line of Rulers is called in, — a stern but most beneficent Perpetual House-Sur- geon is called in, — by Nature, and even the appropriate fees are provided for him ! Dryasdust talks lamentably about Here- ward and the Fen Counties, fate of Earl Walthcof, Yorkshire and the North reduced to ashes ; all which is undoubtedly lament- able. But even Dryasdust apprises me of one fact : ' a child, in this William's reign, might have carried a purse of gold from end to end of England.' My erudite friend, it is a fact which out- weighs a thousand ! Sweep away thy constitutional, sentimental and other cobwebberies ; look eye to eye, if thou still have any eye, in the face of this big burly William Bastard : thou wilt see a fellow of most flashing discernment, of most strong lion-heart ; — in whom, as it were, within a frame of oak and iron, the gods have planted the soul of ' a man of genius ' ! Dost thou call that nothing 1 I call it an immense thing ! — Rage enough was in this Willelmus Conquestor, rage enough for his occasions ; — and yet the essential element of him, as of all such men, is not scorch- ing fire but shining illuminative light. Fire and light are strangely interchangeable ; nay at bottom, I have found them different forms of the same most godlike elementary substance in our world : — > a thing worth stating in these days. The essential element of Conquestor is, first of all, the most sun-eyed perception of what is really what on this God's-Earth ; — which, thou wilt find, does mean at bottom ' Justice,' and virtues not a few : conformity to what the Maker has seen good to make ; that, I suppose, will mean Justice and a Virtue or two 1 — 214 THE MODERN WORKER. Dost thou think Willelmus Conquestor would have tolerated ten years' jargon, one hour's jargon, on the propriety of killing Cetton-manufacturers by partridge Corn-Laws ? I fancy, this was not the man to knock out of his night's-rest with nothing but a noisy bedlamism in your mouth ! " Assist us still better to bush the partridges ; strangle Plugson who spins the shirts? " — " Par la splendeur de Dieu! " Dost thou think Willelmus Conquestor, in this new Time, with Steam-engine Captains of Industry on one hand of him, and Joe-Manton Captains of Idle- ness on the other, would have doubted which icas really the Best ; which did deserve strangling, and which not? I have a certain indestructible regard for Willelmus Conquestor. A resident House-Surgeon, provided by Nature for her beloved English People, and even furnished with the requisite 'fees,' as I said, — for he by no means felt himself doing Nature's work, this Willelmus, but his own work exclusively. And his own work withal it was : ' Par la splendeur de Dieu.'' — I say it is ne- cessary to get the work out of such a man however harsh that be ! When a w r orld not yet doomed for death, is rushing dow T n to ever deeper Baseness and confusion, it is a dire Necessity of Nature's to bring in her Aristocracies, her Best, even by forcible me- thods. When their descendants or representatives cease entirely to be the Best, Nature's poor world will very soon rush down again to Baseness, — and it becomes a dire Necessity of Nature's to cast them out ! Hence French Revolutions, Five-point Char- ters, Democracies, and a mournful list of Etceteras in these our afflicted times. To what extent Democracy has now reached, how it advances irresistible with ominous, ever-increasing speed, he that will open his eyes on any province of human affairs may discern. Democ- racy is everywhere the inexorable demand of these ages, swiftly fulfilling itself. From the thunder of Napoleon battles, to the jabbering of open-vestry in St. Mary Axe, all things announce Democracy. A distinguished man, whom some of my readers will hear again with pleasure, thus writes to me what in these days he notes from the Wahngasse of Weissnichtwo, where our London fashions seem to be in full vogue Let us hear the Herr Teufelsdrbckh again, were it but the smallest word ! DEMOCRACY. 215 1 Democracy, which means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them, — alas, thou too, mein Lieber, seest well how close it is of Kin to Atheism, and other sad Is/ns : he who discovers no God what- ever, how shall he discover Heroes the visible Temples of God 1 — Strange enough meanwhile it is, to observe with what thought- lessness, here in our rigidly Conservative Country, men rush into Democracy with full cry. Beyond doubt, his Excellenz the Titular-Herr Ritter Kauderwalsch von Pferdefuss-Quacksalber, he our distinguished Conservative Premier himself, and all but the thicker-headed of his Party, discern Democracy to be inevit- able as Death, and are even desperate of delaying it much ! ' You cannot walk the streets without beholding Democracy announce itself: the very Tailor has become, if not properly Sansculottic, which to him would be ruinous, yet a Tailor uncon- sciously symbolising, and prophesying with his scissors, the reign of Equality. What now is our fashionable coat 1 A thing of superfinest texture, of deeply meditated cut ; with Malinnes-lace cuffs ; quilted with gold ; so that a man can carry, without diffi- culty, an estate of land on his back? Keineswegs, by no manner of means ! The Sumptuary Laws have fallen into such a state of desuetude as was never before seen. Our fashionable coat is an amphibium between barn-sack and drayman's doublet. The cloth of it is studiously coarse ; the colour a speckled soot-black or rust-brown grey ; — the nearest approach to a Peasant's. And for shape, — thou shouldst see it! The last consummation of the year now passing over us is definable as Three Bags : a big bag for the body, two small bags for the arms, and by way of collar a hem ! The first Antique Cheruscan who, of felt-cloth or bear's hide, with bone or metal needle, set about making himself a coat, before Tailors had yet awakened out of Nothing, — did not he make it even so 1 A loose wide poke for body, with two holes to let out the arms ; this was his original coat ; to which holes it was soon visible that two small loose pokes, or sleeves, easily appended, would be an improvement. ' Thus has the Tailor-art, so to speak, overset itself, like most other things ; changed its centre-of-gravity, whirled suddenly over from zenith to nadir. Your Stutz, with huge somerset, 216 THE MODERN WORKER. vaults from his high shop-board down to the depths of primeval savagery, — carrying much along with him ! For I will invite thee to reflect that the Tailor, as topmost ultimate froth of Hu- man Society, is indeed swift-passing, evanescent, slippery to de- cipher ; yet significant of much, nay of all. Topmost evanescent froth, he is churned up from the very lees, and from all interme- diate regions of the liquor. The general outcome he, visible to the eye ; of what men aimed to do, and were obliged and enabled to do, in this one public department of symbolising themselves to each other by covering of their skins. A smack of all Human Life lies in the Tailor : its wild struggles towards beauty, dignity, freedom, victory; and how, hemmed in by Sedan, and Hudders- field, by Nescience, Dulness, Prurience, and other sad necessities and laws of Nature, it has attained just to this : Grey Savagery of Three Sacks with a hem ! ' "When the very Tailor verges towards Sansculottism, is it not ominous 1 The last Divinity of poor Mankind dethroning him- self; sinking Ins taper too, flame downmost, like the Genius of Sleep or of Death ; admonitory that Tailor-time shall be no more ! — For, little as one could advise Sumptuary Laws at the present epoch, yet nothing is clearer than that when ranks do ac- tually exist, strict division of costumes will also be enforced ; that if we ever have a new Hierarchy and Aristocracy, acknowledged veritably as such, for which I daily pray Heaven, the Tailor will re-awaken ; and be, by volunteering and appointment, consciously and unconsciously, a safeguard of that same.' — Certain farther observations, from the same invaluable pen, on our never-ending changes of mode, our ' perpetual Nomadic and even Ape-like appetite for change and mere change,' in all the equipments of our existence, and the ' fatal revolutionary character ' thereby manifested, we suppress for the present. It may be admitted that Democracy, in all meanings of the word, is in full career ; irre- sistible by any Ritter Kauderwiilsch or other son of Adam as times go. Liberty is a thing men are determined to have. But truly, as we have meanwhile to remark, ' the liberty of not being oppressed by your fellow men ' is an indispensable, yet one of the most insignificant fractional parts of Human Liberty. No DEMOCRACY. 217 man oppresses thee, can bid thee fetch or carry, come or go, with- out reason shewn. True ; from all men thou art emancipated : but from Thyself and from the Devil? — No men, wiser, or un- wiser, can make thee come or go : but thy own futilities, bewil- derments, thy false appetites for Money, Windsor Georges and such like 1 No man oppresses thee, free and independent Franchiser : but does not this stupid Porter-pot oppress thee ? No son of Adam can bid thee come or go ; but this absurd Pot of Heavy-wet, this can and does ! Thou art the thrall not of Cedric the Saxon, but of thy own brutal appetites, and this scoured dish of liquor. And thou pratest of thy ' liberty 1 ' Thou entire blockhead ! Heavy-wet and gin : alas, these are not the only kinds of thral- dom. Thou who walkest in a vain shew, looking out with orna- mental dilettante sniff and serene supremacy, at all Life and all Death ; and amblest jauntily ; perking up thy poor talk into crochets, thy poor conduct into fatuous somnambulisms ; — and art as an ' enchanted Ape ' under God's sky, where thou mightest have been a man, had proper Schoolmasters and Conquerors, and Constables with cat-o'-nine-tails, been vouchsafed thee : dost thou call that ' liberty 1 ? ' Or your unreposing Mammon-worshipper, again, driven as if by Galvanisms, by Devils and Fixed-Ideas, who rises early and sits late chasing the impossible ; straining every faculty to ' fill himself with the east wind,' — how merciful were it, could you, by mild persuasion or by the severest tyranny so-called, check him in his mad path, turn him into a wiser one ! All painful tyranny, in that case again, were but ' mild surgery ; ' the pain of it cheap, as health and life, instead of galvanism and fixed-idea, is cheap at any price. Sure enough, Of all paths a man could strike into there is at any given moment a best path for every man ; a thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do ; — which could he be but led or driven to do, he were then doing ' like a man,' as we phrase it ; all men and gods agreeing with him, the whole Universe Virtually exclaiming Well-done to him ! His success, in such case, were complete ; his felicity a maximum. This path, to find this path and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him. Whatsoever forwards him in that, let it come to him even in the 19 218 ' THE MODERN WORKER. shape of blows and spurnings, is liberty : whatsoever hinders him, were it wardmotes, open-vestries, pollbooths, tremendous cheers, rivers of heavy-wet, is slavery. The notion that a man's liberty consists in giving his vote at election-hustings, and saying, " Behold now I too have my twenty- thousandth part of a Talker in our National Palaver ; will not all the gods be good to me!" — is one of the pleasantest ! Nature nevertheless is kind at present ; and puts it into heads of many, almost of all. The liberty especially which has to purchase itself by social isolation, and each man standing separate from the other, having ' no business with him ' but a cash-account : this is such a liberty as the Earth seldom saw ; — as the Earth will not long put up with, recommend it how you may. This liberty turns out, before it have long continued in action, with all men flinging up their caps round it, to be, for the Working Millions a liberty to die by want of food ; for the Idle Thousands and Units, alas a still more fatal liberty to live in want of work ; to have no earnest duty to do in this God's-world an}' more. What becomes of a man in such predicament? Earth's Laws are silent; and Heaven's speak in a voice which is not heard. No work, and the ineradicable need of work, give rise to new very wondrous life-philosophies, new very wondrous life-practices! Dilettantism, Pococurantism, Beau Brummelism, with perhaps an occasional half-mad, protesting burst of Byronism, establish themselves : at the end of a certain period, — if you go back to 'the Dead Sea,' there is, say our Moslem friends, a very strange ' Sabbath-day' transacting itself there! — Brethren, we know but imperfectly yet, after ages of Constitutional Government, what liberty is and Slavery is. Democracy, the chase of Liberty in that direction, shall go its full course ; unrestrainable by him of Pferdefuss-Quacksalber, or any of his household. The Toiling Millions of Mankind, in most vital need and passionate instinctive desire of Guidance, shall cast away False-Guidance; and hope, for an hour, that No-Guidance will suffice them : but it can be for an hour only. The smallest item of human Slavery is the oppression of man by his Mock- Superiors ; the palpablest, but I say, at bottom the smallest. Let him shake ofT such oppression, trample it indignantly under his DEMOCRACY. 219 feet ; I blame him not, I pity and commend him. But oppression by your Mock-Superiors well shaken off, the grand problem yet remains to solve : That of finding government by your Real-Su- periors ! Alas, how shall we ever learn the solution of that, benighted, bewildered, sniffing, sneering, god-forgetting unfortu- nates as we are 1 It is a work for centuries ; to be taught us by tribulations, confusions, insurrections, obstructions ; who knows if not by conflagration and despair ! It is a lesson inclusive of all other lessons ; the hardest of all lessons to learn. One thing I do know : Those Apes chattering on the branches by the Dead Sea never got it learned ; but chatter there to this day. To them no Moses need come a second time ; a thousand Moseses would be but so many painted Phantasms, interesting Fellow-apes of new stiange aspect, — whom they would 'invite to dinner,' be glad to meet with in Lion-Soirees. To them the voice of Prophecy, of heavenly monition is quite ended. They chatter there, all Heaven shut to them, to the end of the world. The unfortunates ! 0, what is dying of hunger, with honest tools in your hand, with a manful purpose in your heart, and much real labour lying round you done, in comparison 1 You honestly quit your tools ; quit a most muddy confused coil of sore work, short rations, of sorrows, dispiritments and contradictions, having now honestly done with it all ; — and await, not entirely in a distracted manner, what the Supreme Powers, and the Silences and the Eternities may have to say to you. A second thing I know, this lesson will have to be learned, — under penalties ! England will either learn it, or England will also cease to exist among Nations. England will either learn to reverence its heroes, and discriminate them from its Sham-Heroes and Valets, and gaslighted Histrios ; and to prize them as the audible God's-voice amid all inane jargons and temporary market- cries, and say to them with heart-loyalty, "Be ye King and Priest and Gospel and Guidance for us : " or else England will continue to worship new and ever new forms of Quackhood, — and so, with what resiliences and reboundings matters little, go down to the Father of Quacks ! Can I dread such things of Eng- land 1 Wretched thick-eyed, gross-hearted mortals, why will ye worship Lies, and ' stuffed clothes-suits created by the ninth-parts 220 THE MODERN WORKER. of men ! ' It is not your purses that suffer ; your farm-rents, your commerces, your mill-revenues, loud as ye lament over these ; no, it is not these alone, but a far deeper than these : it is your Souls that lie dead, crushed down under despicable Night- mares, Atheisms, Brain-fumes ; and are not Souls at all, but mere succedanea for salt to keep your bodies and their appetites from putrefying ! Your Cotton-spinning and thrice miraculous me- chanism, what is this too, by itself, but a larger kind of Animal- ism? Spiders can spin, Beavers can build and shew contrivance ; the Ant lays up accumulation of capital, and has, for aught I know, a Bank of Antland. If there is no soul in man higher than all that, did it reach to sailing on the cloud-rack and spinning sea- sand ; then I say, man is but an animal, a more cunning kind of brute : he has no soul, but only a succedaneum for salt. Where- fore, seeing himself to be truly of the beasts that perish, — he ought to admit it, I think ; and also straightway universally kill himself; and so, in a man-like manner, at least end, and wave these brute-worlds his dignified farewell ! — CHAPTER XIV. SIR JABESH WINDBAG. Oliver Cromwell, whose body they hung on their Tyburn Gallows because he had found the Christian Religion inexecutable in this country, remains to me by far the remarkablest Governor we have had here for the last five centuries or so. For the last five centuries there has been no Governor among us with anything like similar talent ; and for the last two centuries, no Governor, we may say, with the possibility of similar talent, — with an idea in the heart of him, capable of inspiring similar talent, capable of coexisting therewith. When you consider that Oliver believed in a God, the difference between Oliver's position and that of any subsequent Governor of this country becomes, the more you reflect on it, the more immeasurable ! Oliver, no volunteer in Public Life, but plainly a balloted sol- dier strictly ordered thither, enters upon Public Life, comports himself there like a man who carried his own life itself in his hand ; like a man whose Great Commander's eye was always on him. Not without results. Oliver, well advanced in years, finds now, by Destiny and his own Deservings, or as he himself better phrased it, by wondrous successive ' Births of Providence,' the Government of England put into his hands. In senate-house and battle-field, in counsel and in action, in private and in public, this man had proved himself a man : England and the voice of God, through waste awful whirlwinds and environments, speaking to his great heart, summon him to assert formally, in the way of solemn Public Fact and as a new piece of English Law, what in- formally and by Nature's eternal Law needed no asserting, That he, Oliver, was the Ablest-Man of England, the King of England ; that he, Oliver, would undertake governing England. His way 19* 222 THE MODERN WORKER. of making this same ' assertion,' the one way he had of making it, has given rise to immense criticism : but the assertion itself in what way soever ' made,' is it not somewhat of a solemn one, somewhat of a tremendous one ! And now do but contrast this Oliver with my right honourable friend Sir Jabesh Windbag, Mr. Facing-both-ways, Viscount Mealy mouth, Earl of Windlestraw, or what other Cagliostro, Cagliostiino, Cagliostraccio, the course of Fortune, and Par- liamentary Majorities has constitutionally guided to that dignity, any time during these last sorrowful hundred and fifty years ! Windbag, weak in the faith of a God. which he believes only at church on Sundays, if even then; strong only in the faith that Paragraphs and Plausibilities bring votes : that Force of Public Opinion, as he calls it, is the primal Necessity of Things, and highest God we have: — Windbag, if we will consider him, has a problem set before him which may be ranged in the impossible class. He is a Columbus minded to sail to the indistinct country of Nowhere, to the indistinct country of Whitherward, by the friendship of those same waste-tumbling Water- Alps and howling waltz of all the Winds ; — not by conquest of them and in spite of them, but by friendship of them, when once they have made up their mind ! He is the most original Columbus I ever saw. Nay, his problem is not an impossible one : he will infallibly arrive at that same country of Nowhere ; his indistinct Whither- ward will be a Thither-\xa.rd ! In the ocean abysses and locker of Davy Jones, — there certainly enough do he and his ship's com- pany, and all their cargo and navigatings, at last find lodge- ment. Oliver knew that his America lay There, Westward Ho, — and it was not entirely by friendship of the Water- Alps and yeasty insane Froth-Oceans that he meant to get thither ! He sailed ac- cordingly ; had compass-card and rules of Navigation, — older and greater than these Froth-Oceans, old as the Eternal God ! Or again, do but think of this. Windbag, in these his probable five years of office, has to prosper and get Paragraphs ; the Paragraphs of these five years must be his salvation, or he is a lost man ; re- demption nowhere in the Worlds or in the Times discoverable for him. Oliver too would like his Paragraphs, Successes, Popular- SIR JAEESH WINDBAG. Wd ities in these five years are not undesirable to him : but mark, I say, this enormous circumstance : after these Five Years are gone and done, comes an Eternity for Oliver ! Oliver has to appear before the Most High Judge : the utmost flow of Paragraphs, the utmost ebb of them is now in strictest arithmetic, verily no matter at all ; its exact value zero ; an account altogether erased ! Enormous ; — which a man in these days hardly fancies with an effort ! Oliver's Paragraphs are all done, his Battles, Division- lists, successes all summed : and now in that awful unerring Court of Review, the real question first rises, Whether he has succeeded at all ; whether he has not been defeated miserably forevermore. Let him come with world-wide Io-Pseans, these avail him not. Let him come covered over with the world's execrations, gashed with ignominious death- wounds, the gallows-rope about his neck : what avails that? The word is, come thou brave and faithful; the word is, Depart thou quack and accursed ! O Windbag, my right honourable friend, in very truth I pity thee. I say these Paragraphs, and low or loud votings of thy poor fellow-blockheads of mankind, will never guide thee in any enterprise at all. Govern a country on such guidance? Thou canst not make a pair of shoes, sell a pennyworth of tape, on such. No, thy shoes are vamped up falsely to meet the market ; behold, the leather only seemed to be tanned ; thy shoes melt under me to rubbishy pulp, and are not veritable mud-defying shoes, but plausible vendible similitudes of shoes, — thou unfortunate, and I ! O my right honourable friend, when the Paragraphs flowed in, who was like Sir Jabesh ? On the swelling tide he mounted ; higher, higher, triumphant, heaven-high. But the Paragraphs again ebbed out, as unwise Paragraphs needs must : Sir Jabesh lies stranded, sunk and for ever sinking in ignominious ooze ; the Mud-Nymphs and ever-deepening bottomless Oblivion his portion to eternal time. ' Posterity? ' thou appealest to Posterity, thou? My right honourable friend, what will Posterity do for thee ! The voting of Posterity, were it continued through centuries in thy favour, will be quite inaudible, extra-forensic, without any effect whatever. Posterity can do simply nothing for a man ; — nor even seem to do much, if the man be not brainsick. Besides to tell thee truth, the bets are a thousand to one, Posterity will 22-4 THE MODERN WORKER. not hear of thee, my right honourable friend ! Posterity, I have found, has generally his own Windbags, sufficiently trumpeted in all market places, and no leisure to attend to ours. Posterity, which has made of Norse Odin a similitude, and of Norman Wil- liam a brute monster, what will or can it make of English Jabesh 1 O Heavens, 'Posterity!' — "These poor persecuted Scotch Covenanters," said I to my inquiring Frenchman, in such stinted French as stood at command, " ils s'en appelaient a — " " A la Posterite ! " interrupted he, helping me out. — " O que non, they appealed to the Eternal God ; not to Posterity at all ! Cetait different." CHAPTER XV. MORRISON AGAIN. Nevertheless, O Advanced Liberal, one cannot promise thee any ' new Religion,' for some time; to say truth, I do not think we have the smallest chance of any ! Will the candid reader, by way of closing this Book Third, listen to a few transient remarks on that subject. Candid readers have not lately met with any man who had less notion to interfere with their Thirty -nine or other Church Arti- cles ; wherewith, very helplessly as is like, they may have strug- gled to form for themselves some not inconceivable hypothesis about this Universe, and their own existence there. Superstition, my friend, is far from me ; Fanaticism, for any Fanum likely to arise soon on this Earth, is far. A man's Church-Articles are surely articles of price to him ; and in these times one has to be tolerant of many strange ' Articles,' and of many still stranger 'No-articles,' which go about placarding themselves in a very distracted manner, — the numerous long placard-poles, and ques- tionable infirm paste-pots, interfering with one's peaceable tho- roughfare sometimes ! Fancy a man, moreover, recommending his fellow men to be- lieve in God, that so Chartism may abate, and the Manchester Operatives be got to spin peaceably ! The idea is more distracted than any placard-pole seen hitherto in a public thoroughfare of men ! My friend, if thou ever do come to believe in God, thou wilt find all Chartism, Manchester-riot, Parliamentary incompe- tence, Ministries of Windbag, and the wildest social Dissolutions, and the burning up of this entire Planet, a most small matter in comparison. Brother, this Planet, I find, is but an inconsiderable sandgrain in the continents of Being : this Planet's poor tempo- 226 THE MODERN WORKER. rary interests, thy interests and my interests there, when I look fixedly into that eternal Light-Sea and Flame-Sea with its eternal interests, dwindle literally into Nothing; my Speech of it is — Silence for the while. I will as soon think of making Galaxies and Star-Systems to guide little herring vessels by, as of preach- ing Religion that the Constable may continue possible. O my Advanced Liberal friend, this new second progress, of proceeding ' to invent God,' is a very strange one ! Jacobinism unfolded into Saint Simonism bodes innumerable blessed things; but the thing itself might draw tears from a Stoic ! -— As for me, some twelve or thirteen New Religions, heavy Packets, most of them un- franked, having arrived here from various parts of the world, in a space of six calendar months, I have instructed my invaluable friend the Stamped Postman to introduce no more of them, if the charge exceed one penny. Henry of Essex, dwelling' in that Thames Island, ' near to Reading Abbey ' had a religion. But was it in virtue of his see- ing armed Phantasms of St. Edmund ' on the rim of the horizon,' looking minatory on him? Had that, intrinsically, anything to do with his religion at all? Henry of Essex's religion was the Inner Light or moral Conscience, of his own Soul ; such as is vouch- safed still to all souls of men ; — which Inner Light shone here ' through such intellectual and other media ' as then w T ere ; pro- ducing ' Phantasms ' Kircherean visual-spectra, according to cir- cumstances ! It is so with all men. The clearer my Inner Light may shine, through the less turbid media ; the fewer Phantasms it may produce, — the gladder surely shall I be, and not the sorrier ! Hast thou reflected, serious reader, Advanced-Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, use of all religion past, present and to come, was this only : to keep that same moral conscience or In- ner Light of our's alive and shining ; — which certainly the ' Phantasms ' and the ' turbid media ' were not essential for ! All religion was here to remind us, better or worse, of what we already know better or worse, of the quite infinite difference there is between a Good man and a Bad ; to bid us love infinitely the one, abhor and avoid infinitely the other, — strive infinitely to be the one, and not to be the other ! ' All religion issues in due MORRISON AGAIN. 227 Practical Hero-Worship.' He that has a soul unasphyxied will never want a religion ; he that has a soul asphyxied, reduced to a succedaneum for salt, will never find any religion, though you rose from the dead to preach him one. But indeed when men and reformers ask for ' a religion,' it is analogous to their asking, ' What would you have us do ? ' and such like. They fancy that their religion too shall be a kind of Morrison's Pill, which they have only to swallow once, and all will be well. Resolutely once gulp down your religion, your Morrison's Pill, you have it all plain sailing now ; you can follow your affairs, your no-affairs, go along money-hunting, pleasure- hunting, dilettanteing, dangling, and miming and chattering like a Dead-Sea Ape : your Morrison will do your business for you. Men's notions are very strange ! Brother, I say, there is not, was not, nor will ever be, in the wide circle of Nature, any Pill or Religion of that character. Man cannot afford thee such ; for the very gods it is impossible. I advise thee to renounce Morri- son ; once for all, quit hope of the Universal Pill. For body, for soul, for individual, or society, there has not any such article been made. Non extat. In created Nature it is not, was not, will not be. In the void imbroglios of Chaos only and realms of Bedlam, does some shadow of it hover, to bewilder and bemock the poor inhabitants there. Rituals, Liturgies, Creeds, Hierarchies : all this is not religion ; all this, were it dead as Odinism, as Fetishism, does not kill reli- gion at all ! It is Stupidity alone, with never so many rituals, that kills religion. Is not this still a World? Spinning Cotton under Arkwright and Adam Smith ; founding cities by the Foun- tain of Juturna on the Janiculum mount ; tilling Canaans under Prophet Samuel and Psalmist David, man is ever man ; the mis- sionary of Unseen Powers ; and great and victorious, while he continues true to his mission ; mean, miserable, foiled, and at last annihilated and trodden out of sight and memory, when he proves untrue. Brother, thou art a man, I think ; thou art not a mere building Beaver or two-legged Cotton-Spider ; thou hast verily a soul in thee, asphyxied or otherwise ! Sooty Manchester, it too is built on the infinite Abysses, overspanned by the skyey Firma- ments ; and there is birth in it, and death in it ; — and it is every 228 THE MODERN WORKER. whit as wonderful, as fearful, unimaginable, as the oldest Salem or Prophetic City. Go or stand, in what time in what place we will, are there not Immensities, Eternities over us, around us, in us : ! Solemn before us, Veiled, the dark Portal, Goal of all mortal : — Stars silent rest o'er us, Graves under us silent ! ' Between these two great silences, the hum of all our spinning cylinders, Trades Unions, Anti-Corn-Law Leagues and Carlton Clubs goes on. Stupidity itself ought to pause a little, and con- sider that. I tell thee, through all thy Ledgers, Supply-and-demand Philosophies, and daily most modern melancholy Business and Cant, there does shine the presence of a Primeval Unspeakable, — and thou wert wise to recognise, not with lips only, that same ! The Maker's Laws, whether they are promulgated in Sinai Thunder, to the ear or imagination, or quite otherwise promul- gated, are the Laws of God ; transcendent, everlasting, impera- tively demanding obedience from all men. This, without any thunder, or with never so much thunder, thou, if there be any soul left in thee, canst know of a truth. The Universe, I say, is made by Law ; the great soul of the world is just and not unjust. Look thou, if thou have eyes or soul left, into this great shoreless Incomprehensible : in the heart of its tumultuous Appearances, Embroilments, and mad Time-vortexes, is there not. silent, eter- nal, an All-just, an All-beautiful sole Reality and ultimate con- trolling Power of the whole ? This is not a figure of speech ; this is a fact. The Fact of Gravitation, known to all animals, is not surer than this inner Fact, which may be known to all men. He who knows this, it will sink, silent, awful unspeakable into his heart. He will say with Faust : " Who dare name Him ? " Most rituals or ' namings ' he will fall in with at present, are like to be 1 namings ' — which shall be nameless ! In silence, in the Eternal Temple, let him worship, if there be no fit word. Such knowl- edge, the crown of his whole spiritual being, the life of his life, let him keep and sacredly walk by. He has a religion. Hourly and daily, for himself and for the whole world, a faithful, un- MORRISON AGAIN. 229 spoken but not ineffectual prayer rises, " Thy will be done." His whole work on Earth is an emblematic spoken or acted prayer, Be the will of God done on Earth ; — not the Devil's will, or any of the Devil's servants' wills ! He has a religion, this man ; an everlasting loadstar, that beams the brighter in the Heavens, the darker here on Earth grows the night around him. Thou, if thou know not this, what are all rituals, liturgies, mythologies, mass- chauntings, turnings of the rotatory Calabash ? They are as nothing ; in a good many respects, they are less. Divorced from this, getting half-divorced from this, they are a thing to fill one with a kind of horror ; with a sacred inexpressible pity and fear. The most tragical thing a human eye can look on. It was said to the Prophet " Behold, I will shew thee worse things than these : women weeping to Thammuz." That was the acme of the Prophet's vision, — then as now. Rituals, Liturgies, Credos, Sinai Thunder : I know more or less the history of these ; the rise, progress, decline and fall of these. Can Thunder from all the thirty-two azimuths, repeated daily for centuries of years, make God's Laws more godlike to me 1 Brother, No. Perhaps I am grown to be a man now ; and do not need the thunder and the terror any longer ! Perhaps I am above being frightened ; perhaps it is not Fear but Reverence alone that shall now lead me ! — Revelations, Inspirations 1 Yes : and thy own godcreated Soul ; dost thou not call that a ' revela- tion ? ' Who made thee? Where diust thou come from? The Voice of Eternity, if thou be not a blasphemer and poor asphyx- ied mute, speaks with that tongue of thine ! Thou art the latest Birth of Nature ; it is ' the inspiration of the Almighty ' that giveth thee understanding ! My brother, my brother ! — Under baleful Atheism, Mammonisms, Joe-Manton Dilettan- tisms, with their appropriate Cants and Idolisms, and whatsoever scandalous rubbish obscures and all but extinguishes the soul of Man, — religion now is ; its Laws, written if not on Stone Ta- bles, yet on the Azure of Infinitude, in the inner heart of God's Creation, certain as Life, certain as Death ! I say the Laws are there, and thou shalt not disobey them. It were better for thee not. Better a hundred deaths than yes. Terrible ' penalties ' withal, if thou still need ' penalties,' are there for disobeying. 20 230 THE MODERN WORKER. Dost thou observe. redtape Politician, that fiery infernal Phe- nomenon, which men name French Revolution, sailing, un- looked-for unbidden, through thy inane Protocol Dominion ; — far- seen, with splendour not of Heaven ? Ten centuries will see it. There were Tanneries at Meudon for human skins. And Hell, very truly Hell, had power over God's upper Earth for a season. The cruellest Portent that has risen into created space these ten centuries : let us hail it, with awestruck repentant hearts, as the voice once more of a God, though of one in wrath. Blessed be the God*s voice ; for it is true, and Falsehoods have to cease before it ! But for that same preternatural quasi-infernal Portent, one could not know what to make of this wretched world in these days at all. The deplorablest quack-ridden, and now hunger-rid- den, downtrodden Despicability and Thbile ludibrium of redtape Protocols, rotatory Calabashes, Poor Law Bastilles : who is there that could think of its being fated to continue ? — Penalties enough, my brother ! This penalty inclusive of all : al Death to thy own hapless Self, if thou heed no other. Eternal Death, I say, — with many meanings old and new, of which let this single one suffice us here : The eternal impossibil- ity for thee to be aught but a Chimera, and swift-vanishing decep- tive Phantasm, in God's Creation; — swift-vanishing, never to reappear : why should it reappear ! Thou hadst one chance, thou wilt never have another. Everlasting ages will roll on, and no other be given thee. The foolishest articulate-speaking soul now extant, may not he say to himself: "A whole Eternity I d to be born ; and now I have a whole Eternity waiting to see what I will do when born ! " This is not Theology, this is Arithmetic. And thou but half-discernest this; thou but half- believest it ? Alas, on the shores of the Dead Sea on Sabbath, there goes on a tragedv ' — But we will leave this of Religion ; ? of which, to say truth, it is chiefly profitable, in these unspeakable days, to keep silence. Thou needest no * Xew Religion ; ' nor art thou like to get any. Thou hast already more ' religion ' than thou makest use of. This day, thou knowest ten commanded duties, seest in thy mind ten things which should be done, for one that thou doest ! Do one of them ; this of itself will shew thee ten others which can MORRISON AGAIN. 231 and shall be done. "But my future fate?" Yes, thy future fate, indeed ! Thy future fate, while thou makest it the chief question, seems to me — extremely questionable ! I do not think it can be good. Norse Odin, immemorial centuries ago, did not he, though a poor Heathen, in the dawn of Time teach us that, for the Dastard, there was and could be no good fate, — no har- bour anywhere save down with Hela, in the pool of Night ! Dastards, knaves, are they that lust for Pleasure, that tremble at Pain. For this world and for the next, Dastards are a class of creatures made to be ' arrested ; ' they are good for nothing else, can look for nothing else. A greater than Odin has been here. A greater than Odin has taught us — not a greater Dastardism, I hope ! My brother, thou must pray for a soul: struggle, as with life and death energy, to get back thy soul ! Know that ' religion ' is no Morrison's Pill from without, but a reawakening of thy own Self from "within : — and above all leave me alone of thy ' reli- gions ' and ' new religions ' here and elsewhere ! I am weary of this sick croaking for a Morrison' s-Pill religion ; for any and for every such. I want none such ; and discern all such to be im- possible. The resuscitation of old liturgies fallen dead ; much more the manufacture of new liturgies that will never be alive : how hopeless ! Stylitisms, eremite fanaticisms, and fakeerisms ; spasmodic agonistic posture-makings, and narrow, cramped, mor- bid, if forever noble wrestlings : all this is not a thing desirable to me. It is a thing the world has done once, — when its beard was not grown as now ! And yet there is, at worst, one Liturgy which does remain forever unexceptionable : that of Praying (as the old monks did withal) by Working. And indeed the Prayer which accomplish- ed itself in special chapels at stated hours, and went not with a man, rising up from all his Work and Action, at all moments sancti- fying the same, — what was it ever good for? ' Work is Wor- ship ' : yes, in a highly considerable sense, — which, in the pres- ent state of all ' worship,' who is there that can unfold ! He that understands it well, understands the Prophecy of the whole Fu- ture ; the last Evangel, which has included all others. Its Cathe- dral the Dome of Immensity, — hast thou seen it : coped with 232 THE MODERN WORKER. star-galaxies ; paved with the green mosaic of Land and Ocean ; and for altar, verily the star-throne of the Eternal ! Its Litany and psalmody the noble acts, the heroic work and suffering, and true heart-utterance of all the Valiant of the Sons of Men. Its choir-music the ancient winds and oceans, and deep-toned, inartic- ulate, but most speaking voices of Destiny and History, supernal ever as of old. Between two great Silences ' Stars silent rest o'er us, Graves under us silent.' Between which two great Silences, do not, as we said, all human Noises, in the naturalest times, most prefer naturally march and roll? — I will insert this also, in a lower strain, from Sauerteig's JSsthe- tische Springwiirzel. l Worship ' says he : ' Before that inane tu- tumult of Hearsay filled men's heads, while the world lay yet silent, and the heart true and open, many things were worship ! To the primeval man whatsoever good cause, descended on him (as in mere fact, it ever does) direct from God ; whatsoever duty lay visible for him, this a Supreme God had prescribed. To the present hour I ask thee, Who else ? For the primeval man, in whom dwelt Thought, this Universe was all a Temple ; Life everywhere a Worship. ' What worship, for example, is there not in mere washing ! Perhaps one of the most moral things a man, ia common cases, has it in his power to do. Strip thyself, go into the bath, or were it into limpid pool and running brook, and there wash and be clean, — thou wilt step out again a purer and a better man. This consciousness of perfect outer pureness, that to thy skin there now adheres no foreign speck of imperfection, how it radiates in on thee, with cunning symbolic influences to thy very soul ! Thou hast an increase of tendency towards all good things whatsoever. The oldest Eastern Sages, with joy and holy gratitude, had felt it so, — and that it was the Maker's gift and will. Whose else is it? It remains a religious duty, from oldest times, in the East. — Nor could Herr Professor Strauss, when I put the question, deny that for us at present it is still such here in the West ! To that dingy fuliginous operative, emerging from his soot-mill, what is MORRISON AGAIN. 233 the first duty I will prescribe, and offer help towards? That he clean the skin of him. Can he pray, by any ascertained method'? One knows not entirely: — but with soap and a sufficiency of water, he can wash. Even the dull English feel something- of this ; they have a saying " Cleanliness is near of kin to Godli- ness : " — yet never, in any country, saw I operative men work washed, and, in a climate drenched with the softest cloud-water, such a scarcity of baths !" ' — Alas, Sauerteig, our 'operative men ' are at present short even of potatoes : what ' duty ' can you prescribe to them ! Or let us give a glance at China. Our new friend, the Emperor there, is Pontiff of three hundred million men ; who do all live and work, these many centuries now, authentically patronized by Heaven so far ; and therefore must have some ' religion ' of a kind. This Emperor-Pontiff has, in fact, a religious belief of certain Laws, Laws of Heaven ; observes with a religious rigour his 'three thousand punctualities,' — given out by men of insight, some sixty generations since, as a legible transcript of the same, — the Heavens do seem to say, not totally an incorrect one. He has not much of a ritual, this Pontiff-Emperor ; believes, it is like, with the old Monks, that ' Labour is Worship.' His most public Act of Worship, it appears, is the drawing solemnly at a certain day, on the green bosom of our Mother Earth, when the Heav- ens, after dead black winter, have again with their vernal radi- ances awakened her, a distinct red Furrow with the Plough, — signal that all the Ploughs of China are to begin ploughing and worshipping ! It is notable enough. He, in sight of the Seen and Unseen Powers, draws his distinct red Furrow there, — say- ing, and praying, in mute symbolism, so many most eloquent things ! If you ask this Pontiff "Who made him? what is to become of him and us?" he maintains a dignified reserve, — waves his hand and pontiff-eyes over the unfathomable deep of Heaven, the ' Tsien' the azure kingdoms of Infinitude ; as if asking, " Is it doubtful that we are right well made ? Can aught that is wrong become of us ? " — He and his three hundred millions, it is their chief ' punctuality,' visit yearly the Tombs of their Fathers ; each man the Tomb of his Father and his Mother : alone there, 20* 234 THE MODERN WORKER, in silence, with what of ' worship ' or other thought there may be, pauses solemnly each man ; the dhine skies all silent over him ; the divine Graves, and this divinest Grave, all silent under him, — the pulsings of his own soul, if he have any soul, alone audible. Truly it may be a kind of worship ! Truly, if a man cannot get some glimpse into the Eternities, looking through this portal, — through what other need he try it ! Our friend the PonthT Emperor permits cheerfully, though with contempt, all manner of Buddists, Bonzes, Talapoins and such like, to build brick Temples, on the voluntary principle ; to wor- ship with what of chauntings, paper-lanterns and tumultuous brayings pleases them, and make night hideous, — since they find some comfort in it. Cheerfully, though with contempt. He is a wiser Pontiff than many persons think ! He is as yet the one Chief Potentate or Priest in this Earth who has made a distinct systematic attempt at what we call the ultimate result of all reli- gion, Practical Hero-worship : he does incessantly, with true anxiety, in such way as he can, search and sift (it would appear) his whole enormous population for the Wisest born among them ; by which Wisest, as by born kings, these three hundred million men are governed. The Heavens, to a certain extent, do appear to countenance him. These Three hundred millions actually make porcelain, Souchong tea, with innumerable other things ; and fight, under Heaven's flag against Necessity ; — and have fewer Seven-years' Wars, Thirty-years' Wars, French Revolu- tion Wars, and infernal fightings with each other, than certain millions elsewhere have ! Nay in our poor distracted Europe itself, in these newest times, have there not religious voices risen, — with a religion new and yet the oldest; entirely indisputable to all hearts of men? Some I do know, who did not call or think themselves ' Prophets,' far enough from that ; but who w T ere, in very truth, melodious Voices from the eternal Heart of Nature once again ; souls forever vene- rable to all that have a soul. A French Revolution is one phe- nomenon ; as complement and spiritual exponent thereof, a Poet Goethe and German Literature is to me another. The old Secu- lar or Practical World, so to speak, having gone up in fire, is not MORRISON AGAIN. 235 here the prophecy and dawn of a new Spiritual World, parent of far nobler, wider new Practical worlds 1 A life of Antique de- voutness, Antique veracity and heroism, has again become possible, is again seen actual there for the most modern man. A phenom- enon, as quiet as it is, comparable for greatness to no other ! ' The great Event for the world is, now as always, the arrival in it of a new Wise Man.' Touches there are, be the Heavens ever thanked, of new Sphere-melody ; audible once more in the infi- nite jargoning discords and poor scrannel-pipings of the thing called Literature, — priceless there, as the voice of new Heavenly Psalms ! Literature, like the old Prayer-collections of the first centuries, were it ' well selected from and burnt,' has precious things! For Literature, with all its printing-presses, puffing-en- gines and shoreless deafening triviality, is yet ' the Thought of Thinking Souls.' A sacred ' religion,' if you like the name, does live in the heart of that strange froth-ocean, not wholly froth, what we call Literature ; and will more and more disclose itself therefrom : — not now as scorching fire : the red smoky scorching fire has purified itself into white sunny Light. Is not Light grander than Fire 1 It is the same element in a state of purity. My candid readers, we will march out of this Third Book with a rythmic word of Goethe's on our tongue ; a word which perhaps has already sung itself, in dark hours and in bright, through many a heart. To me, finding it devout yet whole, cred- ible and veritable, full of piety yet free of cant ; to me joyfully finding much in it, and joyfully missing so much in it, this little snatch of music by the greatest German Man, sounds like a stanza in the grand Road-Song and Marching-Song of our great Teu- tonic kindred wending, wending, valiant and victorious, through the undiscovered Deeps of Time ! He calls it Mason Lodge, — not Psalm or Hymn : ' The Mason's ways are A type of Existence, And his persistance Is as the days are Of Men in this world. 236 THE MODERN WORKER. The Future hides in it Good hap and sorrow; We press still thorow, Nought that abides in it Daunting us, — onward. And solemn before us, Veiled, the dark Portal, Goal of all mortal : — Stars silent rest o'er us, Graves under us silent. But heard are the Voices, Voice of the Sages, The Worlds and the Ages : " Choose well, your choice is Brief and yet endless ; Here eyes do regard you, Iu Eternity's stillness ; Here is all fulness, Ye brave, to reward you ; Work and despair not."' BOOK IV. HOROSCOPE, CHAPTER I. ARISTOCRACIES. To predict the Future, to manage the Present, would not be so impossible, had not the Past been so sacrilegiously mishandled ; effaced, and what is worse, defaced ! The Past cannot be seen ; the Past, looked at through the medium of ' Philosophical History ' in these times, cannot even be not seen : it is misseen ; affirmed to have existed, — and to have been a godless Impossibility. Your Norman Conquerors, true royal souls, crowned kings as such, were vulturous irrational Tyrants : your Becket was a noisy Egoist and Hypocrite ; getting his brains spilt on the floor of Canterbury Cathedral, to secure the main chance, — somewhat uncertain how! " Enthusiasm " and even "honest Enthusi- asm," — yes, of course : { The Dog, to gain his private ends, Went mad ; and bit the man ! ' — For in truth, the eye sees in all things what it brought with it the means of seeing. A godless century, looking back on centuries that were godly, produces portraitures, more miraculous than any other. All was inane discord in the Past ; brute force bore rule everywhere; Stupidity, savage unreason, fitter for Bedlam than for a human world ! Whereby indeed it becomes sufficiently natural that the like qualities, in new sleeker habiliments, should continue in our own time to rule. Millions enchanted in Bastille Workhouses ; Irish widows proving their relationship by typhus fever : what would you have 1 ? It was ever so, or worse. Man's History, was it not always even this : The cookery and eating up of imbecile Dupedom by successful Quackhood ; the bat- 240 HOROSCOPE. tie, with various weapons, of vulturous Quack and Tyrant against vulturous Tyrant and Quack ! No God was in the Past Time ; nothing but Mechanisms and chaotic Brute Gods : — how shall the poor ' Philosophic Historian,' to whom his own century is all godless, see any God in other centuries ? — Men believe in Bibles, and disbelieve in them : but of all Bibles the frightfullest to disbelieve in, is this ' Bible of Universal His- tory.' This is the Eternal Bible and God's Book, ' which every born man,' till once the soul and eyesight are extinguished in him, ' can and must see with his own eyes the God's-Finger writing? ' To discredit this is an infidelity like no other. Such infidelity you would punish, if not by fire and fagot, which are difficult to manage in our times, yet by the most peremptory order, to hold its peace till it got something wiser to say. Why should the blessed Silence be broken into noises to communicate only the like of this? If the Past have no God's-Eeason in it, nothing but Devil's-Unreason, let the Past be eternally forgotten : mention it no more ; — we whose ancestors were all hanged, why should we talk of ropes ! It is, in brief, not true that men ever lived by Delirium, Hypo- crisy, Injustice, or any form of Unreason, since they came to inhabit this Planet. It is not true that they ever did, or ever will, live except by the reverse of these. Men will again be taught this. Their acted History will then again be a Heroism ; their written History, what it once was, an Epic. Nay forever it is either such; or else it virtually is — Nothing. Were it written in a thousand volumes, the unheroism of such volumes hastens incessantly to be forgotten ; the net content of an Alexandrian Library of Unheroics is, and will ultimately shew itself to be, zero. What man is interested to remember it ; have not all men, at all times, the liveliest interest to forget it? — ' Revelations,' if not celestial then infernal, will teach us that God is ; we shall then, if needful, discern without difficulty that He has always been ! The Dryasdust Philosophisms and enlightened Scepticisms of the Eighteenth Century, historical and other, will have to sur- vive for a while with the Physiologists, — as a memorable Night- mare Dream. All this haggard epoch with its ghastly Doctrines, and death's head Philosophies ' teaching by example ' or other- ARISTOCRACIES. 241 wise, will one day have become, what to our Moslem friends their godless ages are, the ' Period of Ignorance.' If the convulsive struggles of the last Half-century have taught poor struggling convulsed Europe any truth, it may perhaps be this as the extreme of innumerable others : That Europe requires a real Aristocracy, a real Priesthood, or it cannot continue to exist. Huge French Revolutions, Napoleonisms, then Bourbon- isms with their corollary of Three Days, finishing in very unfinal Louis-Phillipisms : all this ought to be didactic ! All this may have taught us, that False Aristocracies are insupportable ; that No- Aristocracies, Liberty-aud-Equalities are impossible ; that true Aristocracies are at once indispensable and not easily at- tained ! Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing Class and a Teaching Class : these two, sometimes separate, and endeavouring to har- monize themselves, sometimes conjoined as one, and the King a Pontiff-King : — then did no society exist without these two vital elements, then will none exist. It lies in the very nature of man : you will visit no remotest village in the most republican country of the world, where, virtually or actually you do not find these two powers at work. Man, little as he may suppose it, is necessitated to obey superiors. He is a social being in virtue of this neces- sity ; nay he could not be gregarious otherwise. He obeys those whom he esteems better than himself, wiser, braver ; and will for- ever obey such, and even be ready and delighted to do it. The Wiser, Braver : these, a Virtual Aristocracy everywhere and every when, do in all societies that reach any articulate shape, develope themselves into a ruling class, an Actual Aristocracy, with settled modes of operating, what are called laws and even private-laws or privileges, and so forth ; very notable to look upon in this world. — Aristocracy and Priesthood, we say, are some- times united. For indeed the Wiser and the Braver are properly but one class ; no wise man but needed first of all to be a brave man, or he never had been wise. The noble Priest was always a noble Aristos to begin with, and something more to end with. Your Luther, your Knox, your Anselm, Becket, Abbot Samson, Samuel Johnson, if they had not been brave enough, by what 21 242 HOROSCOPE. possibility could they ever have been wise ? — If, from accident or forethought, this your Actual Aristocracy have got discriminated into two classes, there can be no doubt but the Priest class is the more dignified ; supreme over the other, as governing head is over active hand. And yet in practice again, it is likeliest the reverse will be found arranged ; — a sign that the arrangement is already vitiated ; that a split is introduced into it, which will widen and widen till the whole be rent asunder. In England, in Europe generally, we may say that these two Yirtualities have unfolded themselves into Actualities, in by far the noblest and richest manner any region of the world ever saw. A spiritual Guideship, a practical Governorship, fruit of the grand conscious endeavours, say rather of the immeasurable unconscious instincts and necessities of men, have established themselves ; very strange to behold. Everywhere, while so much has been forgot- ten, you find the King's Palace, and the Vice-King's Castle, Mansion, Manor-house ; till there is not an inch of ground from sea to sea but has both its King and Vice-King, long due series of Vice-Kings, its Squire, Earl, Duke, or whatever the title of him, — to whom you have given the land that he may govern you in it. More touching still, there is not a hamlet where poor peasants congregate but by one means and another a Church-Apparatus has been got together, — roofed edifice with revenues and belfries ; pulpit, reading-desk, with Books and Methods : possibility, in short, and strict presciiption, that a man stand there and speak of spiritual things to men. It is beautiful ; — even in its great obscu- ration and decadence, it is among the beautifullest, most touching objects one sees on the earth. This speaking Man has indeed, in these times wandered terribly from the point ; has, alas ! as it were totally lost sight of the point : yet, at bottom, whom have we to compare with him ? Of all public functionaries boarded and lodged on the Industry of Modern Europe, is there one worthier of the board he has ? A man even professing, and never so lan- guidly making still some endeavours, to save the souls of men : con- trast him with a man professing to do little but shoot the partridges of men ! I wish he could find the point again, this speaking one : and stick to it with tenacity, with deadly energy, — for there is ARISTOCRACIES. 243 need of him yet ! The speaking Function, this of Truth coming to us with a living voice, nay in a living shape and as a concrete practical Exemplar : this with all our Writing and Printing Func- tions, has a perennial place. Could he but find the point again, — take the old spectacles off his nose, and looking up discover, al- most in contact with him, what the real Satanas, and soul-devour- ing, world-devouring Devil, now is ! Original Sin and such like are bad enough, I doubt not : but distilled Gin, dark Ignorance, Stupidity, dark Corn-Law, Bastille and Company, what are they ! Will he discover our new real Satan, whom he has to fight ; or go on droning through his old nose-spectacles about old extinct Satans, — and never see the real one, till he feel him at his own throat and ours 1 That is a question for the world ! Let us not intermeddle with it here. Sorrowful, phantasmal as this same Double Aristocracy of Teachers and Governors now looks, it is worth all men's while to know that the purport of it is and remains noble and most real. Dryasdust, looking merely at the surface, is greatly in error as to those ancient Kings. William Conqueror, William Rufus or Redbeard, Stephen Curthose himself, much more Hen- ry Beauclerc and our brave Plantagenet Henry : the life of these men was not a vulturous Fighting ; it was a valorous Governing, to which occasionally Fighting did, and alas must yet, though far seldomer now, superadd itself as an accident, a distressing im- pedimental adjunct. The Fighting too was indispensable, for as- certaining who had the might over whom, — the right over whom. By much hard fighting, as we once said, ' the unrealities, beaten into dust, flew gradually off,' and left the plain reality and fact, " thou stronger than I ; thou wiser than I ; thou king, and sub- ject I," in a somewhat clearer condition ! Truly we cannot enough admire, in those Abbot-Samson and William-Conqueror times, the arrangement they had made of their Governing Classes. Highly interesting to observe how the sincere insight, on their part, into what did of primary necessity behove to be accomplished, had led them to the way of accom- plishing it ; and in the course of time, to get it accomplished !• No imaginary Aristocracy would serve their turn ; and accord- 244 HOROSCOPE. ingly they attained a real one. The Bravest men, who it is ever to be repeated and remembered, are also on the whole the Wisest, Strongest, every way Best, had, here, with a respectable degree of accuracy, been got selected ; seated each on his piece of terri- tory, which was lent him, then gradually given him, that he might govern it. These Vice-Kings, each on his portion of the com- mon soil of England, with a Head King over all, were a ' Vir- tually perfected into an Actuality ' really to an astonishing extent. For those were rugged stalwart ages ; full of earnestness, of a rude GodVtruth : — nay, at any rate, their quilting was so un- speakably thinner than ours ; Fact came swiftly on them, if at any time they had yielded to Phantasm ! ' The Knaves and Das- tards ' had to be ' arrested ' in some measure ; or the world, almost within year and day, found that it could not live. The Knaves and Dastards accordingly were got arrested. Dastards upon the very throne had to be got arrested, and taken off the throne, — by such methods as then were ; by the roughest me- thod, if there chance to be no smoother one. Doubtless there was much harshness of operation, much severity ; as indeed gov- ernment and surgery are often somewhat severe. Gurth,~born thrall of Cedric, it is like, got cuffs as often as pork -parings, if he misdemeaned himself : but Gurth did belong to Cedric : no hu- man creature then went about connected with nobody ; left to go his ways into Bastilles or worse, under Laissez-faire; reduced to prove his relationship by dying of typhus fever ! — Days come when there is no King in Israel, but every man is his own king, doing that which is right in his own eyes ; — and tar barrels are burnt to ' Liberty,' Ten Pound Franchise and the like, with con- siderable effect in various ways ! — That Feudal Aristocracy, I say, was no imaginary one. To a "respectable degree, its larls, what we now call Earls, were Strong Ones in fact as well as etymology ; its Dukes Leaders ; its Lords Law-ivards. They did all the Soldiering and Police of the Country, all the Judging, Law-making, even the Church- Extension ; whatsoever in the way of Governing, of Guiding and Protecting could be done. It was a Land Aristocracy ; it man- aged the Governing of this English People, and had the reaping of the soil of England in return. It is, in, many senses, the Law ARISTOCRACIES. 245 of Nature, this same Law of Feudalism ; — no right Aristocracy but a Land one ! The curious are invited to meditate upon it in these days. Soldiering, Police and Judging, Church Extension, nay real Governance and Guidance, all this was actually done by the Holders of the Land in return for the Land. How much of it is now done by them, — done by anybody ! Good Heavens, "Laissez-faire, Do ye nothing, eat your wages and sleep," is everywhere the passionate half-wise cry of this time ; and they will not so much as do nothing, but must do more Corn-Laws ! We raise Fifty-two millions from the general mass of us, to get our Governing done, — or, alas, to get ourselves persuaded that it is done : and the ' peculiar burden of the Land ' is to pay, not all this, but to pay, as I learn, one twenty-fourth part of all this. Our first Chartist Parliament, or Oliver Redivivus, you would say, will know where to lay the new taxes of England ! — Or, alas, taxes? Ifw r emade the Holders of the Land pay every shilling still of the expense of Governing the Land, what were all that 1 The Land by mere hired Governors, cannot be got governed. You cannot hire men to govern the Land ; it is by a mission not contracted for in the Stock-Exchange, but felt in their own hearts as coming out of Heaven, that men can govern a Land. The mission of a Land Aristocracy is a sacred one, in both the senses of that old word. The footing it stands on, at present, might give rise to thoughts, other than of Corn-Laws [ But truly a ' splendour of God,' as in William Conqueror's rough oath, did dwell in those old rude veracious ages ; did in- form, more and more, with a heavenly nobleness, all departments of their work and life. Phantasms could not yet walk abroad in mere Cloth Tailorage ; they were at least Phantasms ' on the rim of the Horizon,' pencilled there by an eternal Light-beam from within. A most ' practical' Hero-worship went on, uncon- sciously or half-consciously everywhere. A monk Samson, with a maximum of two shillings in his pocket, could, without ballot- box, be made a Vice-king of, being seen to be worthy. The dif- ference between a good man and a bad man was as yet, felt to be, what it forever is, an immeasurable one. W T ho durst have elected a Pandarus Dogdraught, Esq. in those days, to any office, Carlton Club, Senatorship, or place whatsoever"? It was felt that the 21* 246 HOROSCOPE. arch Satanas and no other had a clear right of property in Pan. dams ; that it were better for you to have no hand in Pandarus, to keep out of Pandarus his neighbourhood ! Which is to this hour the mere fact ; though for the present, alas, the forgotten fact. I think they were comparatively blessed times, those, in their way! "Violence," "war," "disorder:" well, what is war, and death itself, to such a perpetual-life-in-death, and ' peace, peace where there is no peace ! ' Unless some Hero- worship, in its new appropriate form, can return, this world does not promise to be very habitable long. Old Anselm, exiled Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the purest-minded ' men of genius,' was travelling to make his appeal to Rome, against King Rufus, — a man of rough ways, in whom the inner Lightbeam shone very fitfully. It is beautiful to read in Monk Eadmer, how the continental populations welcomed and venerated this Anselm, as no French population now venerated a Jean-Jacques or giant-killing Voltaire ; as not even an American population now venerates a Schniispel the distinguished Novelist ! They had, by phantasy and true insight, the intensest conviction that a God's-Blessing dwelt in this Anselm, — as it is my con- viction too. They crowded round with bent knees and enkindled hearts, to receive his blessing, to hear his voice, to see the light of his face. My blessings on them and on him ! — But the nota- blest was a certain necessitous or covetous Duke of Burgundy, in straitened circumstances we shall hope, — who reflected that in all likelihood this English Archbishop, going towards Rome to appeal, must have taken store of cash with him to bribe the Car- dinals. Wherefore he of Burgundy for his part, decided to lie in wait and rob him. ' In an open space of a wood ' some ' wood ' then green and growing, eight centuries ago, in Burgundian land, — this fierce Duke, with fierce steel-followers, «haggy, savage, as the Russian Bear, dashes out on the weak old Anselm, riding along there on his small quiet-going pony ; escorted only by Eadmer and another poor monk on ponies ; and, except some small modicum of road-money, not a gold coin in his possession. The steel-clad Russian Bear emerges, glaring : the old white- bearded man starts not, — paces on unmoved, looking into it with his clear old earnest eyes, with his venerable, sorrowful, ARISTOCRACIES. 247 time-worn face ; of whom no thing- need be afraid, and who also is afraid of no created thing. The fierce eyes of his Burgundian Grace meet these clear eye-glances, convey them swift to his heart : he bethinks him that probably this feeble, fearless, hoary Figure, has in it something of the Most High God ; that probably he shall be damned if he meddle with it, — that, on the whole, he had better not. Pie plunges, the rough savage, off his warhorse, down to his knees , embraces the feet of old Anselm : he too begs his blessing — orders men to escort him from being robbed, and under dread penalties see him safe on his way ! Per os Dei, as his majesty was wont to ejaculate ! Neither is this quarrel of Rufus and Anselm, of Henry and Becket, uninstructive to us. It was, at bottom, a great quarrel. For, admitting that Anselm was full of Divine Blessing, he, by no means, included in him all forms of Divine Blessing: — there were far other forms withal, which he little dreamed of; and William Redbeard was unconsciously the representative and spokesman of these ! In truth, could your divine Anselm, your divine Pope Gregory have had their way, the results had been very notable. Our Western World had all become a European Thibet, with one Grand Lama sitting at Rome ; our one honoura- ble business that of singing mass all day and all night. Which would not in the least have suited us ! The Supreme Powers willed it not so. It was as if King Redbeard unconsciously, addressing Anselm, Becket and the others had said : " Right Reverend, your theory of the Universe is indisputable by man or devil, to the core of our heart we feel that this divine thing which you call Mother Church does fill the whole world hitherto known, and is and shall be all our sal- vation and all our desire. And yet — and yet — Behold, though it is an unspoken secret, the world is wider than any of us think, right Reverend ! Behold, there are yet other unmeasurable sa- crednesses in this that you call Heathenism, Secularity ! On the whole I, in an obscure, but most rooted manner, feel that I cannot comply with you. Western Thibet and perpetual mass-chaunt- ing — No. I am, so to speak, in the family way ; with child, of I know not what, — certainly of something far different from 248 HOROSCOPE. this! I have — Per os Dei, I have Manchester Cotton-trades, Bromwicham Iron-trades, American Commonwealths, Indian Em- pires, Steam Mechanisms and Shakspeare Dramas, in my belly ; and cannot do it, right Reverend ! " — So accordingly it was de- cided : and Saxon Becket spilt his life in Canterbury Cathedral, as Scottish Wallace did on Tower-Hill, and as generally a noble man and martyr has to do, — not for nothing ; no, but for a di- vine something, other than he had altogether calculated. We will now quit this of the hard organic, but limited Feudal ages ; and glance timidly into the immense Industrial Ages, as yet all inor- ganic, and in a quite pulpy condition, requiring desperately to har- den themselves into some organism ! Our Epic having now become Tools and the Man, it is more than usually impossible to prophesy the Future. The boundless Future does lie there, predestined, nay already extant though un- seen ; hiding, in its continents of Darkness ' Good hap and sor- row ; ' but the supremest intelligence of man cannot prefigure much of it : — the united intelligence and effort of All Men in all coming generations, this alone will gradually prefigure it, and figure and form it into a seen fact ! Straining our eyes hitherto, the utmost effort of intelligence sheds but some most glimmering dawn a little way into its dark enormous Deeps : only huge outlines loom un- certain on the sight ; and the ray of prophesy, at a short distance expires. But may we not say, here as always, Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof! To shape the whole Future is not our problem ; but only to shape faithfully a small part of it, according to rules already known. It is perhaps possible for each of us, who will with due earnestness inquire, to ascertain clearly what he, for his own part, ought to do : this let him, with true heart, do, and continue doing. The general issue will, as it has always done, rest well with a Higher Intelligence than ours. One grand ' outline,' or even two, many earnest readers may perhaps, at this stage of the business, be able to prefigure for themselves, — and draw some guidance from. One prediction or even two are already possible. For the Lifetree Igdrasil in all its new developements, is the self-same world-old Lifetree, having found an element or elements there, running from the very roots ARISTOCRACIES. 249 of it, in Hela's Realms, in the Well of Miner and of the Three Noimas or Times, up to this present hour of it in our own hearts, we conclude that such will have to continue. A man has, in his own soul, an Eternal ; can read something of the Eternal there, if he will look ! He already knows w T hat will continue ; what cannot, by any means of appliance whatsoever, be made to con- tinue ! One wide and widest ' outline ' ought really, in all ways, to be becoming clear to us ; this, namely : That a ■ Splendour of God,' in one form or other, will have to unfold itself from the heart of these our Industrial Ages too ; or they will never get themselves 'organised;' but continue chaotic, distressed, distracted, ever more, and have to perish in frantic suicidal dissolution. A second ' outline ' or prophecy narrower, but also wide enough, seems not less certain : That there will again be a king in Israel ; a system of Order and Government ; and every man shall, in some meas- ure, see himself constrained to do that which is right in the King's eyes ! This too we may call a sure element of the Future ; for this too is of the Eternal ; — this too is of the Present, though hidden from most ; and without it no fibre of the Past ever was. An actual new Sovereignty, Industrial Aristocracy, is indispensa- ble and indubitable for us. But what an Aristocracy ; on what new, far more complex and cunningly devised conditions than that old Feudal fighting one ! For we are to bethink us that the Epic verily is not Arms and the Man, but Tools and the Man, — an infinitely wider kind of Epic. And again we are to bethink us that we cannot now be bound to men.by brass collars — not at all : that this brass-collar method, in all figures of it, has vanished out of Europe forevermore ! Huge Democracy, walking the streets everywhere in its Sack Coat, has asserted so much, irrevocably, brooking no reply ! True enough, man is forever the ' born thrall ' of certain men born master of certain other men, born equal of certain others, let him acknowledge the fact or not. It is unblessed for him when he cannot acknowledge this fact ; he is in the chaotic state, ready to perish, till he do get the fact acknowledged. But no man is, or can henceforth be, the brass-collar thrall of any man ; you will have to bind him by other, far nobler and cunninger methods. 250 HOROSCOPE. Once for all, he is to be loose of the brass-collar, to have a scope as wide as his faculties now are : — will he not be all the usefuller to you, in that new state ? Let him go abroad as a trusted one, as a free one ; and return home to you with rich earnings at night ! Gurth could only tend pigs ; this one will build cities, conquer waste worlds. — How, in conjunction with inevitable Democracy, indispensable Sovereignty is to exist : certainly it is the hugest question ever heretofore propounded to mankind ! The solution of which is work for long years and centuries. Years and cen- turies of one knows not what complexion ; — blessed or unblessed, according as they shall with earnest valiant effort, make progress therein, or in slothful unveracity and dilettantism only talk of making progress. For either progress therein, or swift and ever swifter progress towards dissolution, is henceforth a necessity. It is of importance that this grand reformation were begun ; that Corn-Law Debatings and other jargon, little less than de- lirious in such a time, had fled far away, and left us room to begin ! For the evil has grown practical, extremely conspicuous ; if it be not seen and provided for, the blindest fool will have to feel it ere long. There is much that can wait ; but there is something also that cannot wait. With millions of eager Working men impris- oned in ' Impossibility ' and Poor-Law Bastilles, it is time that some means of dealing with them were trying to become ' pos- sible ' ! Of the Government of England, of all articulate-speaking functionaries, real and imaginary Aristocracies, of me and of thee, it is imperatively demanded, " How t do you mean to manage these men 1 Where are they to find a supportable existence ? What is to become of them, — and of you !" CHAPTER II. BRIBERY COMMITTEE. In the case of the late Bribery Committee, it seemed to be the conclusion of the soundest practical minds that Bribery could not be put down ; that Pure Election was a thing we had seen the last of, and must now go on without, as we best could. A con- clusion not a little startling ; to which, it requires a practical mind of some seasoning to reconcile yourself at once ! It seems, then, we are henceforth to get ourselves constituted Legislators not according to what merit we may have, or even what merit we may seem to have, but according to the length of our purse, and our frankness, impudence and dexterity in laying out the contents of the same. Our theory written down in all books and law-books, spouted forth from all barrel-heads, is perfect purity of ten-pound franchise, absolute sincerity of question put and answer given ; — and our practice is irremediable bribery ; irremediable, unpunish- able, which you will do more harm than good by attempting to punish ! Once more, a very startling conclusion indeed ; which, whatever the soundest practical minds in Parliament may think of it, invites all British men to meditations of various kinds. A Parliament, one would say, which proclaims itself elected and eligible by bribery, tells the Nation that is governed by it a piece of very singular news. Bribery : have we reflected what bribery is? Bribery means not only length of purse, which is neither qualification nor the contrary for legislating well ; but it means dishonesty, and even impudent dishonesty ; — brazen in- sensibility to lying and to making others lie ; total oblivion, and flinging overboard for the nonce, of any real thing you can call veracity, morality ; with dextrous putting on the cast-clothes of that real thing, and strutting about in them ! What Legislating 252 HOROSCOPE. can you get out of a man in that fatal situation ? None that will profit much, one would think ! A Legislator who has left his veracity lying on the door- threshold, he, why surely he — ought to be sent out to seek it again ! Heavens, what an improvement, were there once fairly, in Downing-Street, an Election-Office opened, with a Tariff of Boroughs ! Such and such a population, amount of property- tax, ground-rental, extent-of-trade ; returns two Members, returns one Member, for so much money down : Ipswich so many thou- sands, Nottingham so many, -*■ as they happened, one by one, to fall into this new Downing-Street Schedule A ! An incalculable improvement, in comparison : for now at least you have it fairly by length of purse, and leave the dishonesty, the impudence, the unveracity all handsomely aside. Length of purse and desire to be a Legislator ought to get a man into Parliament, not with] but if possible without the unveracity, the impudence and the dishon- esty ! Length of purse and desire, these are, as intrinsic qualifi- cations, correctly equal to zero ; but they are not yet less than zero, as the smallest addition of that latter sort will make them ! And is it come to this ? And does our venerable Parliament announce itself elected and eligible in this manner? Surely such a parliament promulgates strange horoscopes of itself. What is to become of a Parliament elected or eligible in this manner ? Unless Belial and Beelzebub have got possession of the throne of this Universe, such Parliament is preparing itself for new reform- bills'. We shall have to try it by Chartism, or any conceivable- ism, rather than put up with this ! There is already in England ' religion ' enough to get six-hundred and fifty-eight Consulting Men brought together who do not begin with a lie in their mouth. Our poor old Parliament, thousands of years old, is still good for something, for several things : — though many are beginning to ask, with ominous anxiety, in these days : ' For what thing ? ' But for whatever thing and things Parliament be good, indisputa- bly it must start with other than a lie in its mouth ! On the whole, a Parliament working with a lie in its mouth, will have to take itself away. To no Parliament or thing that one has heard of, did this Universe ever long yield harbour on that footing. At all hours of the day and night, some Chartism is advancing, some BRIBERY COMMITTEE. 253 armed Cromwell is advancing-, to apprise such Parliament : "Ye are no Parliament. In the name of God, — go ! " In sad truth j once more, how is our whole existence, in these present days, built on Cant, Speciosity, False-hood, Dilettant- ism ; with this one serious veracity in it : Mammonism ! Dig down where you will, through the Parliament floor or elsewhere, how infallibly do you at spade's depth below the surface, come upon this universal Zzar's-rock Substratum? Much else is orna- mental ; true on barrel-heads, in pulpits, hustings, Parliamentary benches ; but this is forever true and truest : " money does bring money's worth ; Put money in your purse." Here if nowhere else, is the human soul still in thorough earnest ; sincere with a prophet's sincerity : and ' the Hell of the English,' as Sauerteig said, ■ is the infinite terror of Not getting on, especially of not making money.' With results ! To many persons the horoscope of Parliament is more interest- ing than to me : but surely all men with souls must admit that sending members to Parliament by bribery is an infamous sole- cism ; an act entirely immoral, which no man can have to do with, more or less, but he will soil his fingers more or less. No Carl- ton Clubs, Reform Clubs, nor any sort of clubs or creatures, or of accredited opinions or practices, can make a Lie Truth, can make Bribery a Propriety. The Parliament should really either punish and put away Bribery, or legalize it by some office in Downing- ing-Streef? As I read the Apocalypses, a Parliament that can do neither of these things is not in a good way. — And yet, alas, what of Parliaments and their Elections 1 Parliamentary Elec- tions are but the topmost ultimate outcome of an electioneering which goes on at all hours in all places, in every meeting of two or more men. It is we that vote wrong, and teach the poor rag- ged Freemen of Boroughs to vote wrong. We pay respect to those worthy of no respect. Is not Pandarus Dogdraught a member of select clubs, and ad- mitted into the drawingrooms of men ? Visibly to all persons he is of the offal of Creation ; but he carries money in his purse, due lacker on his dog-visage, and it is believed will not steal spoons. The human species does not with one voice, like the Hebrew 22 254 HOROSCOPE. Psalmist, ' shun to sit ' with Dogdraught, refuse totally to dine with Dogdraught ; men called of honour are willing enough to dine with him, his talk being lively — and his champagne excel- lent. We say to ourselves, " The man is in good society," — others have already voted for him ; why should not 1 ? We for- get the indefeasible right of property that Satan has in Dog- draught, — we are not afraid to be near Dogdraught ! It is we that vote wrong, blindly, nay with falsity prepense ! It is we that no longer know the difference between human Worth and human Unworth ; or feel that the one is admirable, and alone ad- mirable, the other detestable, damnable ! How shall we find out a Hero and Vice-king Samson with a maximum of two shillings in his pocket ? We have no chance to do such a thing. We have got out of the Ages of Heroism, deep into the Ages of Flunkey- ism, — and must return or die. What a noble set of mortals are we, who, because there is no Saint Edmund threatening us at the rim of the horizon, are not afraid to be whatever, for the day and hour, is smoothest for us ! And now, in good sooth, why should an indigent discerning Freeman give his vote without bribes ? Let us rather honour the poor man that he does discern clearly wherein lies for him the true kernel of the matter. What is it to the ragged grimy Free- man of a Tenpound Franchise Borough whether Aristides Rigma- role Esquire, of the Destructive, or the Hon. Alcides Dolittle of the Conservative Party be sent to Parliament ; — much more, whether the two thousandth part of them be sent, for that is the amount of his faculty in it? Destructive or Conservative, what will either of thein destroy or conserve of vital moment to this Freeman? Has he found either of them care, at bottom, a six- pence for him or his interests, or those of his class, or of his cause, or of any class or cause, that is of much value to God or to man 1 Rigmarole and Dolittle Lave alike cared for themselves hitherto, and for their own clique, and self-conceited crotchets, — their greasy dishonest interests of pudding, or windy dishonest interests of praise ; and not very perceptibly for any other interest what- ever. Neither Rigmarole nor Dolittle will accomplish any good or any evil for this grimy Freeman, like giving him a five-pound note, or refusing to give it him. It will be smoothest to vote ac- BRIBERY COMMITTEE. 255 cording to value received. That is the veritable fact, and the indi- gent, like others that are not indigent, acts conformably. Why reader, truly if they asked thee or me ' which way we meant to vote?' — were it not our likeliest answer : "Neither way ! " I, as a Tenpound Franchiser, will receive no bribe; but also I will not vote for either of these men. Neither Rigmarole nor Dolittle shall, by furtherance of mine, go and make laws for this country. I will have no hand in such a mission. How dare I ! If other men cannot be got in England, a totally other sort of men, different as light is from dark, as star-fire is from street-mud, what is the use of votings or of Parliaments in England 1 England ought to resign herself; there is no hope or possibility for Eng- land. If England cannot get her Knaves and Dastards ' arrested ' in some degree, but only get them ' elected,' what is to become of England ? I conclude with all confidence that England will verily have to put an end to briberies, on her Election Hustings and elsewhere, at what cost soever ; — and likewise that we, Electors and Eligi- bles, one and all of us, for our own behoof and hers, cannot too soon begin, at what cost soever, to put an end to bribeabilitics in our- selves. The death-leprosy, attacked in this manner, by purify- ing lotions from without, and by rallying of the vital energies and purities from within, will probably abate somewhat ! It has other- wise no chance to abate. CHAPTER III. THE ONE INSTITUTION. What our Government can do in this grand Problem of the Working Classes of England 1 Yes, supposing the insane Corn- Laws totally abolished, all speech of them ended, and ' from ten to twenty years of new possibility to live and find wages ' conceded us in consequence : what the English Government might be ex- pected to accomplish or attempt towards rendering the existence of our labouring millions somewhat less anomalous, somewhat less impossible, in the years that are to follow those ' ten or twenty,' if either ' ten ' or ' twenty ' there be ? It is the most momentous question. For all this of the Corn- Law abrogation, and what can follow therefrom, is but as the shadow on King Hezekiah's Dial : the shadow has gone back twenty years ; but will again, in spite of Free-Trades and Abro- gations, travel forward its old fated way. With our present sys- tem of individual Mammonism and Government by Laissez-faire, this Nation cannot live. And if in the priceless interim, some new life and healing be not found, there is no second respite to be counted on. The shadow on the Dial advances thenceforth without pausing. What can Government do 1 This that they call ' organising of Labour ' is, if well understood, the Problem of the whole Future, for all' who will in future pretend to govern men. But our first preliminary stage of it, How to deal with the actual Labouring Millions of England 1 this is the imperatively pressing Problem of the Present, pressing with a truly fearful in- tensity and imminence in these very years and days. No Govern- ment can longer neglect it : once more, what can our Government do in it ? THE ONE INSTITUTION. 257 Governments are of very various degrees of activity : some al- together lazy Governments, in ' free countries ' as they are called, seem in these times almost to profess to do, if not nothing, one knows not at first what. To debate in Parliament, and gain ma- jorities ; and ascertain who shall be, with a toil hardly second to Ixion's, the Prime speaker and spoke-holder, and keep the Ixion's wheel going, if not forward, yet round? Not altogether so : — much, to the experienced eye, is not what it seems ! Chancery and certain other Law-Courts seem nothing ; yet in fact, they are, the worst of them, something : chimnies for the devilry and contention of men to escape by ; — a very considerable something ! Parliament too has its tasks, if thou will look ; fit to wear out the lives of toughest men. The celebrated Kilkenny Cats, through their tumultuous congress, cleaving the ear of Night, could they be said to do nothing? Hadst thou been of them, thou hadst seen ! The feline beast laboured, as with steam up — to the burst ing point ; and death-doing energy nerved every muscle : they had a work then ; and did it ! On the morrow, two tails were found left, and peaceable annihilation : the neighbourhood deliver- ed from despair. Again, are not Spinning Dervishes an eloquent emblem, signi- ficant of much? Hast thou noticed him, that solemn-visaged Turk, the eyes shut ; dingy wool mantle circularly hiding his figure ; — bell-shaped ; like a dingy bell set spinning on the tongue of it? By centrifugal force the dingy wool mantle heaves itself; spreads more and more, like upturned cup widening into upturned saucer : thus spins he, to the praise of Allah and advantage of his country, fast and faster, till collapse ensue, and sometimes death ! — A Government such as ours, consisting of from seven to eight hundred Parliamentary Talkers, with their escort of able Editors and Public Opinion ; and for head, certain Lords and servants of the Treasury, and Chief Secretaries and others, who find them selves at once Chiefs and No-Chiefs, and often commanded rather than commanding, — is doubtless a most complicate entity and none of the alertest for getting on with business ! Clearly enough, if the Chiefs be not self-motive and what we call men, but mere patient lay-figures without self-motive principle, the Government 22* 258 HOROSCOPE. will not move any whither ; it will tumble disastrously, and jumble, round its own axis, as for many years past we have seen it do. — And yet a self-motive man who is not a lay-figure, place him in the heart of what entity you may, will make it move more or less ! The absurdest in Nature he will make a little less ab- surd ; he. The unwieldliest he will make to move ; — that is the use of his existing then. He will at least have the manfulness to depart out of it, if not ; to say, " I cannot move in thee, and be a man ; like a wretched drift-log dressed in man's clothes and minister's clothes, doomed to a lot baser than belongs to man, I will not continue with thee, tumbling aimless on the Mother of Dead Dogs here : — adieu ! " For on the whole it is the lot of Chiefs everywhere, this same. No Chief in the most despotic country but was a servant withal ; at once an absolute commanding General, and a poor Orderly- Serjeant, ordered by the very men in the ranks, — obliged to col- lect the vote of the ranks too, in some articulate or inarticulate shape, and weigh well the same. The proper name of all kings is minister, Servant. In no conceivable Government can a lay- figure get forward ! This Worker, surely he above all others, has to spread out his Gideon Fleece, and collect the monitions of Immensity; the poor Localities, as we said, and Parishes of Palace-yard or elsewhere, having no due monition in them. A Prime Minister even here in England, who shall dare believe the heavenly omens, and address himself like a man and hero to the great dumb-struggling heart of England : and speak out foi it, and act out for it. the God's-Justice it is writhing to get uttered, and perishing for want of, — yes, he too will see awaken round him, in passionate burning all defiant loyalty, the heart of Eng- land, and such a ' support ' as no Division-List or Parliamentary Majority was ever yet known to yield a man ! Here as there, now as then, he who can and dare trust the Heavenly Immen- sities, all earthly Localities are subject to him. We will pray for such a man and First-Lord; — yes, and far better, we will strive and incessantly make ready, each of us, to be worthy to serve and second such a First-Lord ! We shall then be as good as sure of his arriving ; — sure of many things, let him arrive or not. THE ONE INSTITUTION. 259 Who can despair of Governments that passes a soldier's guard- house, meets a red-coated man on the streets ! That a body of men could be got together to kill other men when you bade them : this, a priori, does it not seem one of the impossiblest things'? Yet look, behold it : in the stolidest of Donothing Governments that impossibility is a thins - done. See it there, with buff belts, red coats on its back ; walking sentry at guard-houses, brushing white breeches in barracks ; an indisputable palpable fact. Out of grey Antiquity, amid all finance difficulties, Scaccarium Tal- lies, ship-monies, coat-and-conduct monies, and vicissitudes of chance and time, there down to the present blessed hour it is. Often in these painfully decadent and nascent Times, with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings and ' impossibilities ; ' meeting a tall Life Guardsman in his snow-white trowsers, or seeing those two statuesque Life Guardsmen in their frowning bearskins, pipe- clayed buckskins, on their coal-black, sleek, fiery quadrupeds, riding sentry at the Horse Guards, — it strikes one with a kind of mourn- ful interest, how, in such universal down-rushing and wrecked impotence of almost all old institutions, this oldest Fighting Insti- tution is still so young. Fresh complexioned, firm-limbed, six Teet by the standard, this fighting man has verily been got up, and can fight. While so much has not yet got into being ; while so much has gone gradually out of it and become an empty sem- blance or clothes-suit ; and highest Kings'-cloaks, mere chimeras parading under them so long, are getting unsightly to the earnest eye, unsightly, almost offensive, like a costlier kind of scare-crow's blanket, — here still is a realty ! The man in horsehair wig advances, promising that he will get me 'justice: ' he takes me into Chancery-Law-Courts, into de- cades, half centuries of hubbub, of distracted jargon ; and does get me disappointment, almost desperation ; and one refuge : that of dismissing him and his ' justice ' altogether out of my head. For I have work to do ; I cannot spend my decades in mere argu- ing with other men about the exact wages of my work : I will work cheerfully with no wages, sooner than with a ten-years' gangrene or Chancery Law-suit in my heart ! He of the horse- hair wig is a sort of failure ; no substance, but a fond imagination of the mind. He of the shovel-hat, again, who comes forward 260 HOROSCOPE. professing that he will save my soul, — O ye Eternities, of him, in this place be absolute silence ! — But he of the red coat, I say is a success and no failure ! He will veritably, if he get orders, draw out a long sword and kill me. No mistake there. He is a fact and not a shadow. Alive in this year, Forty-three, able and willing to do his work. In dim old centuries, with William Rufus, William of Ipres, or far earlier, he began ; and has come down safe so far. Catapult has given place to cannon, pike has given place to musket, iron mail-shirt to coat of red cloth, saltpetre rope-match to percussion cap ; equipments, circumstances have all changed, and again changed : but the human battle-engine, in the inside of any or each of these, ready still to do battle, stands there, six feet in standard size. There are Pay Offices, Woolwich Arsenals ; there is a Horse-Guards, War-Office, Captain-General ; persuasive Serjeants, with tap of drum, recruit in market towns and villages ; — and, on the whole, I say, here is your actual drilled fighting-man ; here are your actual Ninety-thousand of such ; ready to go into any quarter of the world and fight ! Strange, interesting, and yet most mournful to reflect on. Was this, then, of all the things mankind had some talent for, the one thing important to learn well, and bring to perfection : this of successfully killing one another ? Truly you have learned it well, and carried the business to a high perfection. It is incalculable what, by arranging, commanding, and regimenting, you can make of men. Three thousand straight-standing firm-set individuals, who shoulder arms, who march, wheel, advance, retreat, and are, for your behoof, a magazine charged with fiery death, in the most perfect condition of potential activity ; few months ago till the persuasive sergeant came, what were they 1 Multiform ragged losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers, thievish valets ; an entirely broken population, — fast tending towards the treadmill. But the persuasive serjeant came ; by tap of drum enlisted, or found lists of them, took heartily to drilling them ; — and he and you have made them this ! Most potent, effectual for all work whatsoever, is wise planning, firm combining and commanding among men. Let no man despair of Governments who looks on these two sentries at the Horse-Guards, and our United-Service Clubs ! I could conceive an Emigration Service, a Teaching Ser- THE ONE INSTITUTION. 261 vice, considerable varieties of United and Separate Services, of the due thousands strong, all effective as this Fighting Service is ; all doing their work, like it ; — which work, much more than Fighting, is henceforth the necessity of these New Ages we are got into ! Much lies among us, convulsively, nigh desperately struggling to be born. But mean Governments, as mean-limited individuals do, have stood by the physically indispensable ; have realized that and nothing more. The soldier is perhaps one of the most difficult things to realize ; but Governments had they not realized him, could not have existed : accordingly he is heie. O Heavens, if we saw an army ninety thousand strong, maintained and fully equipt, in continual real action and battle against Human Starva- tion, against Chaos, Necessity, Stupidity, and our real 'natural enemies,' what a business were it ! Fighting and molesting not ' the French,' who, poor men, have a hard enough battle of their own in the like kind, and need no additional molesting from us, — but fighting and incessantly spearing down and destroying False- hood, Nescience, Delusion, Disorder, and the Devil and his Angels ! Thou thyself, cultivated reader, hast done something in that alone true warfare ; but, alas, under what circumstances was it? Thee no beneficent drill-sergeant, with any effectiveness, would rank in line beside thy fellows ; train, like a true didactic artist, by the wit of all past experience to do thy soldiering ; en- courage thee when right, punish thee when wrong, and every- where with wise word-of-command say, Forward on this hand, Forward on that ! Ah, no : thou hadst to learn .thy small-sword and platoon exercise where and how thou couldst ; to all mortals but thyself it was indifferent whether thou shouldst ever learn it. And the rations, and shilling a-day, were they provided thee, — reduced as I have known brave Jean-Pauls, learning their exer- cise, to live on 'water wifliout the bread?' The rations; or any furtherance of promotion to Corporalship, Lance-Corporal- ship, or due cat-o '-nine-tails, with the slightest reference to thy deserts, were not provided. Forethought even as of a pipe- clayed drill-serjeant, did not preside over thee. To Corporalship, Lance-Corporalship, thou didst attain ; alas, also to the halberts and cat . but thy rewarder and punisher seemed blind as the 262 HOROSCOPE. Deluge : neither lance-corporalship, nor even drummer's cat, because both appeared delirious, brought thee due profit ! It was well, all this, we know ; — and yet it was not well ! Forty soldiers, I am told, will disperse the largest Spitalfields mob : forty to ten thousand, that is the proportion between drilled and undrilled. Much there is which cannot yet be organized in this world; but somewhat also which can, somewhat also which must. When one thinks, for example, what Books are become and becoming for us, what Operative Lancashires are become ; what a Fourth Estate and innumerable Virtualities not yet got to be Actualities are become and becoming, — one sees organisms enough in the dim huge Future ; and ' united services ' quite other than the red coat one; and much, even in these years, struggling to be born. Of Time-Bill, Factory-Bill and other such Bills the present Editor has no authority to speak. He knows not (it is for other than he to know) in what specific ways it may be feasible to inter- fere, with Legislation, between the Workers and the Master Workers ; — knows only and sees, what all men are beginning to see, that Legislative interference, and interferences not a few are indispensable ; that as a lawless anarchy of supply-and-demand, on market wages alone, this province of things cannot longer be left. Nay, interference has begun : there are already Factory Inspectors, who seem to have no lack of work. Perhaps there might be Mine-Inspectors too : — might there not be Furrow- field Inspectors withal, and ascertain for us how T on seven and six- pence a week a human family does live ! Interference has begun, must continue, must extensively enlarge itself, deepen and sharpen itself. Such things cannot longer be idly lapped in darkness, and suffered to go on unseen : the Heavens do see them ; the curse, not the blessing of the Heavens is on an Earth that refuses to see them. Again, are not Sanitary Regulations possible for a Legislature? The old Romans had their ^Ediles, who would, I think, in direct contravention to supply-and-demand, have rigorously seen rammed up into total Abolition many a foul cellar in our Southwarks, Saint-Gileses, and dark poison-lanes ; saying sternly " Shall a THE ONE INSTITUTION. 263 Roman Man dwell there? " The Legislature at whatever cost of consequences, would have had to answer, " God forbid ! ' ! — The Legislature, even as it now is, could order all dingy Manufacturing Towns to cease from their soot and darkness, to let in the blessed sunlight, the blue of Heaven, and become clear and clean ; to burn their coal smoke namely, and make flame of it. Baths, free air, a wholesome temperature, ceilings twenty feet high, might be or- dained by Act of Parliament, in all Establishments licensed as Mills. There are such Mills already extant; — honour to the builders of them ! The Legislature can say to others ; Go ye and do likewise ; better if you can. Every toiling Manchester, its smoke and soot all burnt, ought it not among so many world-wide conquests, to have a hundred acres or so of free greenfield with trees on it, conquered for its little children to disport in ; for its all-conquering workers to take a breath of twilight air in 1 You would say so ? A willing Leg- islature could say so with effect. A willing Legislature could say very many things ! And to whatsoever ' vested interest ' or such like stood up, gainsaying merely, ' I shall lose profits ! ' — the willing Legislature would answer, ' Yes, but my sons and daughters, will gain health, life, and a soul.' — ' What is to become of our Cotton-trade 1 ' cried certain Spinners, when the Factory- Bill was proposed, ' What is to become of our invaluable Cot- ton-trade 1 ' The Humanity of England answered steadfastly . " Deliver me those rickety perishing souls of infants, and let your Cotton-trade take its chance. God himself commands the one thing ; not God especially the other thing. We cannot have pros- perous Cotton-trades at the expense of keeping the Devil a part- ner in them ! " — Bills enough, were the Corn-Law Abrogation Bill once passed, and a Legislature willing ! Nay, this one Bill, which lies yet unenacted, a right Education Bill, is not this of itself the sure parent of innumerable wise Bills, — wise regulations, practical methods and proposals, gradually ripening towards the state of Bills? To irradiate with intelligence, that is to say, with order, arrangement and all blessedness, the Chaotic, Unintelligent ; how, except by educating, can you accomplish this 1 That thought, reflection, articulate utterance and understanding be awakened in 264 HOROSCOPE. these individual million heads, which are the atoms of your Chaos ; there is no other way of illuminating any Chaos ! The sum-total of intelligence that is found in it, determines the extent of order that is possible for your Chaos, — the feasibility and rationality of what your Chaos will dimly demand from you, will gladly obey when proposed by you ! It is an exact equation : the one accu- rately measures the other. — If the whole English People, during these ' twenty years of respite,' be not educated, with at least schoolmaster's educating, a tremendous responsibility before God and men will rest somewhere ! How dare any man, especially a man calling himself minister of God, stand up in any Parliament or place, under any pretext or delusion, and for a day or an hour, forbid God's light to come into the world, and bid the Devil's Darkness continue in it one hour more ! For all light and science, under all shapes, in all degrees of perfection is of God ; all dark- ness, all nescience, is of the Enemy of God. The schoolmaster's creed is somewhat awry ? Yes, I have found few creeds, entirely correct ; few light-beams shining white, pure of admixture : but of all creeds and religions now or ever before known, was not that of thoughtless, thriftless Animalism, of Distilled Gin, and Stupor and Despair, unspeakably the least orthodox ? We will exchange il even with Paganism, with Fetishism ; and, on the whole, must exchange it with something. An effective ' Teaching Service ' I do consider that there must be, some Education-Secretary, Captain-General of Teachers, who will actually contrive to get us taught. Then again, why should there not be an • Emigration Service,' and Secretary, with ad- juncts, with funds, forces, idle Navy-ships, and ever-increasing apparatus ; in fine an effective System of Emigration, — so that, at length, before our twenty years of respite ended, every honest willing workman who found England too strait, and the ' Organ- isation of Labour ' not yet sufficiently advanced, might find like- wise a bridge built to carry him into new Western Lands, there to organise with more elbow-room some Labour for himself? There to be a real blessing, raising new corn for us, purchasing new webs and hatchets from us , leaving us at least in peace , — instead of staying here to be a Physical-force Chartist, unblessed and no blessing ! Is it not scandalous to consider that a Prime THE ONE INSTITUTION. 265 Minister could raise within the year, as I have seen it done, a Hundred and Twenty Millions Sterling to shoot the French ; and we are stopt short for want of the hundredth part of that to keep the English living? The bodies of the English living; and the souls of the English living : — these two ' Services,' an Education Service and an Emigration Service, these with others will actually have to be organised ! A free bridge for Emigrants : why, we should then be on a par with America itself, the most favoured of all lands that have no Government; and we should have, besides, so many traditions and mementos of priceless things which America has cast away. We could proceed deliberately to ' organise Labour,' not doomed to perish unless we effected it within year and day ; — every willing Worker that proved superfluous, finding a bridge ready for him. This verily will have to be done ; the Time is big with this. Our little Isle is grown too narrow for us, but the world is wide enough yet for another Six thousand Years. England's sure markets will be among new Colonies of English-men in all quarters of the Globe. All men trade with all men, when mutu- ally convenient, and are bound to do it by the Maker of Men ; our friends of China who guiltily refused to trade, in these circum- stances, — had we not to argue with them, in cannon shot at last, and convince them that they ought to trade ! ' Hostile Tariffs ' will rise, to shut us out; and then again will fall, to let us in: but the Sons of England speakers of the English language were it nothing more, will in all times have the ineradicable predisposi- tion to trade with England. Mycale was the Pan-Ionion, ren- dezvous of all the Tribes of Ion, for old Greece : why should not London long continue the All-Saxon home, rendezvous of all the ' Children of the Harz-Rock ' arriving in select samples, from the Antipodes and elsewhere, by steam and otherwise, to the ' season ' here ! — What a Future ; wide as the world, if we have the heart and heroism for it, — which, by God's blessing, we shall : Keep not standing fixed and rooted, Briskly venture, briskly roam ; Head and hand, where'er thou foot it, And stout heart are still at home. 23 266 HOROSCOPE. In what laud the sun does visit, Yarely we, whate'er betide ! To give space for wandering is it That the world was made so wide.* Fourteen hundred years ago it was by a considerable ' Emigration Service,' never doubt it, by much enlistment, discussion and appa- ratus, that we ourselves arrived in this remarkable Island, — and got into our present difficulties among others ! It is true the English Legislature, like the English People, is of slow temper ; essentially conservative. In our wildest periods of reform, in the long Parliament itself, you notice always the in- vincible instinct to hold fast by the Old ; to admit the minimum of New ; to expand, if it be possible, some old habit or method, already found fruitful, into new growth for the new need. It is an instinct worthy of all honour ; akin to all strength and all wisdom. The Future hereby is not dissevered from the Past, but based continuously on it ; grows with all the vitalities of the Past, and is rooted down deep into the beginnings of us. The English Legislature is entirely repugnant to believe in ' new epochs.' The English Legislature does not occupy itself with epochs ; has in- deed, other bu^ness to do than looking at the Time Horologe and hearing it tick ! Nevertheless new epochs do actually come ; and with them new imperious peremptory necessities, — so that even an English Legislature has to look up, and admit, though with reluctance, that the hour has struck. The hour having struck, let us not say "impossible:" — it will have to be possible! " Contrary to the habits of Parliament, the habits of Govern- ment 1 " Yes : but did any Parliament or Government ever sit in a year Forty-three before 1 One of the most original unexampled Years and Epochs ; in several important respects, totally unlike any other ! For Time, all-edacious and all-feracious, does move on : and the Seven Sleepers, awakening hungry after a hundred years, find that it is not their old nurses who can now give them suck ! For the rest, let not any Parliament, Aristocracy, Millocracy, * Goethe, Wilhclm Meister. THE ONE INSTITUTION. 267 or member of the Governing Class, condemn with much triumph this small specimen of ' remedial measures ; ' or ask again, with the least anger, of this Editor : What is to be done, How that alarming problem of the Working Classes is to be managed ? Editors are not here, foremost of all, to say How. A certain Editor thanks the gods that nobody pays him three hundred thou- sand a year : two hundred thousand, twenty thousand, or any similar sum of cash, for saying How ; — that his wages are very different, his work somewhat fitter for him. An Editor's stipu lated work is to apprise thee that it must be done. The ' way to do it,' is to try it, knowing that thou shalt die if it be not done. There is the bare back, there is the web of cloth ; thou shalt cut me a coat to cover the bare back, those whose trade it is. ' Impos- sible? ' Hapless Fraction, dost thou discern Fate then, half un- veiling herself in the gloom of the future, with her gibbet-cords, her steel-whips, and very authentic Tailor's Hell ; waiting to see whether it is ' possible 1 ' Out with thy scissors, and cut that cloth or thy own windpipe ! CHAPTER IV. CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY, If I believed that Mammonism with its adjuncts was to continue henceforth the one serious principle of our existence, I should reckon it idle to solicit remedial measures from any Government, the disease being insusceptible of remedy. Government can do much, but it can in no wise do all. Government, as the most con- spicuous object in Society, is called upon to give signal of what shall be done ; and, in many ways, preside over, further, and command the doing of it. But the Government cannot do, by all its signalling and commanding, what the Society is radically in- disposed to do ! In the long run every Government is the exact symbol of its People with their wisdom and unwisdom ; we have to say, Like People like Government. — The main substance of this immense Problem of Organising Labour, and first of all of Managing the Working Classes, will, it is very clear, have to be solved by those who stand practically in the middle of it, — by those who themselves work and preside over work. Of all that can be enacted by any Parliament in regard to it the germs must already lie potentially extant in those two classes, who are to obey such enactment. A Human Chaos in which there is no light yon vainly attempt to irradiate by light shed on it : order never can arise there. But it is my firm conviction that the ' Hell of England ' will cease to be that of ' not making money ; ' that we shall get a nobler Hell and a nobler Heaven ! I anticipate light in the Human Chaos, glimmering, shining more and more ; under manifold true signals from without, That light shall shine. Our deity no longer being Mammon, — O Heavens, each man will then say to himself: " Why such deadly haste to make money? I shall not go to CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY. 269 Hell, even if I do not make money ! There is another Hell, I am told ! " Competition, at railway speed, in all branches of commerce and work will then abate : — good felt hats for the head, in every sense, instead of seven-feet lath-and-plaster hats on wheels, will then be discoverable ! Bubble periods with their panics and commercial crises will again become infrequent ; steady modest industry will take the place of gambling speculation. To be a noble Master, among noble Workers, will again be the first ambi- tion with some few, — to be a rich Master only the second. How the inventive Genius of England, with the whirr of its bobbins and billy-rollers shoved somewhat into the backgrounds of the brain, will contrive and devise, not cheaper produce exclusively, but fairer distribution of the produce at its present cheapness ! By degrees we shall again have a Society with something of He- roism in it, something of Heaven's Blessing on it ; we shall have, as my German friend asserts, ' instead of Mammon-Feudalism with unsold cotton-shirts and Reservation of the Game, noble just Industrialism and Government by the "Wisest ! ' It is with the hope of awakening here and there a British man to know himself for a man and divine soul, that a few words of parting admonition, to all persons to whom the Heavenly Powers have lent Power of any kind in this land, may now be addressed. And first to those same Master Workers, Leaders of Industry ; who stand nearest, and in fact powerfullest, though not most prominent, being as yet in too many senses a Virtuality rather than an Actuality. The Leaders of Industry, if Industry is ever to be led, are vir- tually the Captains of the World ; if there be no nobleness in them, there will never be an Aristocracy more. But let the Cap- tains of Industry consider : once again, are they born of other clay than the old Captains of Slaughter ; doomed forever to be no Chivalry but a mere gold-plated Doggery, — what the French well name Canaille, ' Doggery ' with more or less gold carrion at its disposal? Captains of Industry are the true Fighters, hence- forth recognisable as the only true ones : Fighters against Chaos, Necessity and the Devils and Jotuns ; and lead on Mankind in that great, and alone true, and universal warfare ; the stars in 23* 270 HOROSCOPE. their courses fighting for them, and all Heaven and all Earth say- ing audibly, Well done ! Let the Captains of Industry retire into their own hearts, and ask solemnly, if there is nothing but vul- turous hunger for fine wines, valet reputation and gilt carriages, discoverable there 1 Of hearts made by the Almighty God I will not believe such a thing. Deep-hidden under wretchedest god- forgetting Cants, Epicurisms, Dead-Sea Apisms : forgotten as under foulest fat Lethe mud and weeds, there is yet in all hearts born into this God's-World a spark of the Godlike slumbering. Awake, O nightmare sleepers. Awake, arise, or be forever fallen ! This is not playhouse poetry ; it is sober fact. Our Eng- land, our world cannot live as it is. It will connect itself with a God again, or go down with nameless throes and fire-consumma- tion to the Devils. Thou who feelest aught of such a Godlike stirring in thee, any faintest intimation of it as through heavy- laden dreams, follow it, I conjure thee. Arise, save thyself, be one of those that save thy country. Bucaniers, Chactaw Indians, whose supreme aim in fighting is that they may get the scalps, the money, that they may amass scalps and money : out of such came no chivalry, and never will ! Out of such came only gore and wreck, infernal rage and misery ; desperation quenched in annihilation. Behold it, I bid thee, be- hold there, and consider : What is it that thou have a hundred thousand-pound bills laid up in thy strong room, a hundred scalps hung up in thy wigwam ? I value not them or thee. Thy scalps and thy thousand-pound bills are as yet nothing, if no nobleness from within irradiate them ; if no chivalry in action, or in embryo ever struggling towards birth and action be there. Love of men cannot be bought by cash-payment ; and without love men cannot endure to be together. You cannot lead a Fight- ing World without having it regimented, chivalried : the thing in a day becomes impossible ; all men in it, the highest at first, the very lowest at last, discern consciously or by a noble instinct, this necessity. And can you any more continue to lead a Working World unregimented, anarchic 1 I answer, and the Heavens and Earth are now answering, No ! The thing becomes not in a day impossible ; but in some two generations it does. Yes, when fathers and mothers, in Stockport hunger-cellars, begin to eat CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY. 271 their children, and Irish Widows have to prove their relationship by dying of typhus-fever ; and amid Governing ' Corporations of the Best and Bravest' busy to preserve their gain by 'bushing,' dark millions of God's human creatures start up in mad Chart- isms, impracticable Sacred-Mouths, and Manchester Insurrec- tions ; — and there is a virtual Industrial Aristocracy only half- alive, spell-bound amid money bags and ledgers ; and an actual Idle Aristocracy seemingly near dead in somnolent delusions, in trespasses and double-barrels ; ' sliding,' as on inclined planes, which every new year they soap with new Hansard's-jargon un- der God's sky, and so on sliding ever faster towards a ' scale ' and balance-scale whereon is written, Thou art found wanting ; — in such days, after a generation or two, I say, it does become even to the low and simple, very palpably impossible ! No Working World, any more than a Fighting World, can be led on without a noble chivalry of Work, and laws and fixed rules which follow out of that, — far nobler than any chivalry of Fighting was. As an anarchic multitude on mere supply-and-demand, it is becoming inevitable that we dwindle in blind suicidal convulsion, and self- abrasion, frightful to the imagination, into Chactaw Workers. With wigwam and scalps, — with palaces and thousand-pound bills ; with savagery, depopulation, chaotic desolation ! Good Heavens, will not one French Revolution and Reign of Terror suffice us, but must there be two 1 There will be two if needed, there will be twenty if needed ; there will be precisely as many as are needed. The Laws of Nature will have themselves ful- filled. That is a thing certain to me. Your gallant battle-hosts and work-hosts, as the others did, will need to be made loyally yours ; they must and will be regulated, methodically secured in their just share of conquest under you ; joined with you in veritable brotherhood, sonhood, by quite other and deeper ties than those of temporary day's wages ! How would mere red-coated regiments, to say nothing of chivalrous, fight for you, if you could discharge them on the evening of the battle on payment of the stipulated shillings, — and they dis- charge you on the morning of it ! Chelsea Hospitals, pensions, promotions, rigorous lasting covenant on the one side and on the other, are indispensable even for a hired fighter. The Feudal 272 HOROSCOPE. Baron, much more, — how could he subsist with mere temporary mercenaries round him, at sixpence a day ; ready to go over to the other side, if seven-pence were offered 1 He could not have subsisted ; — and his noble instinct saved him from the necessity of even trying ! The Feudal Baron had a man's soul in him ; to which anarchy, mutiny, and the other fruits of temporary mer- cenaries, were intolerable ; he had never been a Baron otherwise, but had continued a Chactaw and Bucanier. He felt it precious, and at last it became habitual, and his fruitful enlarged existence included it as a necessity, to have men round him who in heart loved him ; whose life he watched over with rigour yet with love, who were prepared to give their life for him if need came. It was beautiful ; it was human ! Man lives not otherwise, nor can live contented, anywhere or any when. Isolation is the sum-total of wretchedness to man. To be cut off, to be left solitary ; to have a world alien, not your world ; all a hostile camp for you; not a home at all, of hearts and faces who are yours, whose you are ! It is the frightfullest enchantment ; too truly a work of the Evil One. To have neither superior, nor inferior, nor equal, united manlike to you. Without father, without child, without brother. Man knows no sadder destiny. ' How is each of us,' exclaims Jean Paul ' so lonely in the wide bosom of the All ? ' Encased each of us as in his transparent ' ice palace ; ' our brother visible in his, making signals and gesticulations to us ; — visible, but forever unattainable : on his bosom we shall never rest, nor he on ours. It was not a God that did this ; no ! Awake ye noble Workers, warriors in the one true war : all this must be remedied. It is you who are already half-alive, whom I will welcome into life , whom I will conjure in God's name to shake off your enchanted sleep, and live wholly ! Cease to count scalps, gold-purses ; not in these lies your or our salvation. Even these, if you count only these, will not long be left. Let bucaniering be put far from you ; alter, speedily abrogate all laws of the bucaniers, if you would gain any victory that shall endure. Let God's justice, let pity, nobleness and manly valour, with more gold purses or with fewer, testify themselves in this your brief Life-transit to all the Eternities, the Gods and Silences. It is to you I call ; for ye are not dead, ya are already half- alive : CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY. 273 there is in you a sleepless dauntless energy, the prime-matter of all nobleness in man. Honour to you in your kind. It is to you I call ; ye know at least this, That the mandate of God to His creature man is : Work ! The future Epic of the world rests not with those that are near dead, but with those that are alive, and those that are coming into life. Look around you, Your world-hosts are all in Mutiny, in con- fusion, destitution ; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you on the sixpence a-day-and-supply- and-demand principle : they will not ; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. To order, to just subordination ; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad ; let yours be sane and ever saner. Not as a bewildered bewildering mob ; but as a firm regimented mass, with real Captains over them, will these men march any more. All human interests, combined human endeavours, and social growths in this world, have, at a certain stage of their developement, required organising : and Work, the grandest of human interests, does now require it. God knows, the task will be hard : but no noble task was ever easy. This task will wear away your lives, and the lives of your sons and grandsons : but for what purpose, if not for tasks like this, were lives given to men 1 Ye shall cease to count your thousand-pound scalps, the noble of you shall cease ! Nay the very scalps, as I say, will not long be left if you count only these. Ye shall cease wholly to be barbarous, vulturous Chactaws, and become noble European Nineteenth-Century Men. Ye shall know that Mammon, in never such gigs and flunkey ' respectabil- ities,' is not the alone God; that of himself he is but a Devil, and even a Brute-god. Difficult 1 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 conquer- ed 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 ; ^Egir the Sea-demon himself stretches his back 274 HOROSCOPE. for a sleek highway, to you, and on Firehorses and Wind-horses 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 Wilderness, hitherward from the grey Dawn of Time ! Ye are Sons of the JoYzm-land ; the land of Difficulties Conquered. Difficult 1 You must try this thing. Once try it with the under- standing, that it will and shall have to be done. Try it as ye try the much 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 : when so much has not yet come even to the rudimental state, and all speech of positive enactments were hazardous 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 grownup 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 red- coated fighter by the day, but by the score of years ! Permanence, persistence is the first conditon of all fruitfulness in the ways of men. The ' tendency to persevere ' to persist in spite of hindran- ces, discouragements and ' impossibilities : ' it is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak ; the civilized 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 abridge itself, give place to a better. The civilised man lives not in wheeled houses. He builds stone castles, plants lands, makes Life-long marriage-contracts ; — has long-dated hundredfold possessions, not to be valued in the money- market ; has pedigrees, libraries, law-codes, has memories and 276 HOROSCOPE. hopes even for this Earth that reach our thousands of years. Life-long marriage-contracts : how much preferable were year- long or monthlong — 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 sub- stance 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 in- stinct 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 yel- low-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 emancipationings, and thy twenty-millionings and long-eared clamourings, thou, like Robespierre with his pasteboard Eire Su- preme, threatenest to become a bore to us, Avec ton Eire-Supreme tu commences m'embeter ! — PERMANENCE. 277 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 Educa- tion on working men in respect of their value as mere workers 1 ' the present Editor, reading with satisfaction a decisive unani- mous verdict as to Education, leads with inexpressible interest this special remark, put in by way of marginal incidental note, from a practical manufacturing Quaker, whom, as he is anony- mous, we will call friend Prudence. Prudence keeps a thousand workmen ; has striven in all ways to attach them to him ; has provided conversational soirees ; play grounds, 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 shortsighted Blank ; pilfer- ing from him, wasting and idling for him, omitting and commit- ting for him. " I would not," says Friend Prudence, " exchange my workers for his with seven thousand pounds to boot. ' ' * 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 world ! 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 rock- ledge of a universal rock-foundation, deep once more as the cen- tre 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 sways and insecurely hovers as if ready to be swallowed ! * Report on the training of Pauper Children (1841), p. 18. 24 278 HOROSCOPE. Some Permanence of Contract is already almost possible ; the principle of Permanence, year by year enlarged, 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, 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 travelling of human feet, will form themselves. Not a diffi- culty 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.* O unwise mortals that forever change and shift, and say, Yon- * Lockhart's Life of Scott. PERMANENCE. 279 der not Here ! Wealth richer than both the Indies lies every- where 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 Uni- versal Being. Vagrant Sam-Slicks who rove over the Earth doing 'strokes of trade,' what wealth have they 1 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 1 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 1 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 these too : Free- dom, not nomad's or Ape's Freedom, but man's Freedom ; this is indispensable. We must have it, and will have it ! To recon- cile Despotism with Freedom ; — well, is that such a mystery? Do you not, already know the way 1 It is to make your Despot- 280 HOROSCOPE. ism 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 in 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 seems, 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 hun- dred thousand pounds ; what have you realised to us with that?" He answers, in indignant surprise, " Done with it? W^ho are you that ask"? I have eaten it, I and my flunkies, 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 apprehen- sion, with foreshadows of despair. stolid use-and-worst 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 Aristocratic 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-rnillion men shot dead, have already been expended in that business ; and it is yet far from done. This man too is some- 24* 282 HOROSCOPE. thing ; 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 ele- ments 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 simpli- cities, — 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 Ig- navia, Hearsay, Speech without meaning, — had not Cant, thou- sandfold 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 thickheaded ignorant boors ; lazy, enslaved farmers, weedy lands? Lands! Has he not weary heavy-laden ploughers of land ; immortal souls of men, ploughing, ditching, day-drudg- ing, 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 ; lionize 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 THE LANDED. 283 this, makes river-embankments, maintains not soldiers only but Universities and Institutions; — and in his Court were there 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 short- comings, 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 excep- tions. 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 de- struction ! These are they who will, if not save their Order, postpone the wreck of it ; — by whom, under blessing of the Up- per Powers, ' a quiet euthanasia spread over generations, instead 284 HOROSCOPE. of a swift torture -death concentered 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 fate- ful battle-field 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 rever- ence 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 scoun- drel 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 bu- siness ' 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 be- come, for both parties, a home and peopled garden. Men 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 every when. In this world there is one THE LANDED. 285 godlike thing, the essence of all that was or ever will be of god- like 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 innu- merable sham-superiors, tailor-made : honour to him, entire suc- cess 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? Re- bel against these also 1 Pass by with minatory eagle-glance, with calm-sniffing mockery, or even without any mockery or sniff, when these present themselves 1 The lion-hearted will never dream of such a thing. Forever far be it from him ! His mina- tory eagle-glance will veil itself in softness of the dove : his lion- heart will become a lamb's ; all its 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 his 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 Tailor-made ones ; order them, under penalties, to vanish, to make ready for vanishing ! Nay, what is best of all, he cannot rebel if he would. Supe- riors 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 286 HOROSCOPE. 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 with- draw ! " And so accordingly it is : thickest-quilted Grand-Turks and all their progeny, to this hour, obey that man in the remark- ablest 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. ' Shew ' the dullest clodpole,' says my invaluable German Friend, ' shew 1 the haughtiest featherhead, that a soul higher than himself is 1 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-god 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, world-wide possibilities of work and traffic ; and applaud and ad- mire them. Mammon is like Fire ; the usefullest of all servants, if the frightfullest 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 discovera- able 1 To these alone of Men, shall there forever be no blessed- ness 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 addi- tion of half a million guineas, shall be better? Heaven's blessed- ness not there ; Hell's cursedness, and your half-million bits of metal a substitute for that ! Is there no profit in diffusing Hea- 288 HOROSCOPE. ven's blessedness, but only in gaining gold ? — If so I apprise the Mill-owner and Millionaire, that he too must prepare for vanish- ing ; that neither is he born to be of the sovereigns of this world ; bat to be trampled and chained down, in whatever terrible meth- ods, and brass-collared safe, among the born thralls of this world ! 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 avari- cious 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 cham- pions, strong men, and liber atory 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 predoom 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, muti- nous 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 THE GIFTED. 289 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 by killing him; the case of Anaxarchus thou canst kill ; but not the self of Anaxarchus, the word or act of Anaxarchus. 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 choial Muses and the rosy Hours : it is a stern pilgrim- age 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 Arch- demons 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 Eter- nities. Deep calls for him un'to Deep. Thou, O world, how wilt thou secure thyself against this man"? Thou canst not hire him by thy guineas ; not 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 un- friend ; 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 pru- nella under the sky can save thee from him. Hardest thickskinned Mammon-world, ruggedest Caliban, shall obey him, or become not Caliban but a cramp. O, if in this man, whose eyes can flash Heaven's Lightning, and make all Calibans into a cramp, there 25 290 HOROSCOPE. dwelt not, as the essence of his very being, a God's Justice, hu- man 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 Mecamas Tvviddledee, 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 centu- ries 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 God- hoods, Apotheoses edge gilt ; the Crown of Thorns made into a poor jewel-room Crown, fit for the head of blockheads ; the bear- ing of the Cross changed to a riding in the Long-Acre Gig ! Pause in thy mass-chauntings, in thy litanyings, and Calmuch prayings by machinery ; and pray, if noisily, at least in a more human manner. How with thy rubrics and dalmatics, and cloth- webs and cobwebs, and with thy stupidities and grovelling base- heartedness, hast thou hidden the Holiest into all but invisi- bility ! — ' Man of Genius : ' O Mecaenas Tvviddledee, 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 THE GIFTED. 291 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 ' Chival- ry,' an actual instead of a virtual Priesthood, with result immeas- urable, — so soon as there is nobleness in themselves for that, and to a certainty, not sooner ! Of intrinsic Valetisms you can- not, with whole Parliaments to help you, make a Heroism. Dog- geries 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 Till. THE DIDACTIC. Certainly it were a fond imagination to expect that any preach- ing of mine could abate Mammonism ; that Bobus of Houndsditch will love his guineas less, or his poor soul more, for any preach- ing 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 conclu- sion will by degrees, become that of all rational practical men whatsoever. 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-word, 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 con- spicuous, 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 Life-blood : but the honour? I am encircled with squalor, with hunger, rage, and sooty desperation. Not hon- THE DIDACTIC. 293 oured, 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 bankers- 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-wor- shippers, 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 1 " 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 thou- sand five hundred in its pocket. Cease to regard money 1 That will be at Doomsday in the afternoon ! " 0, Bobus, my opinion is somewhat different. My opinion is that the Upper Powers have not yet determined on destroying this Lower World. A respect- able, 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 some- thing better that can. Thou wilt not join our small minority, thou 1 Not till Doomsday in the afternoon ? Well ; then, at least, thou wilt join it, thou and the majority in mass ! — 294 HOROSCOPE. 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 Transcendal friends announce there, in a distinct though somewhat lankhaired ungainly manner, that the Demiurgus Dollar is dethroned ; that new unheard-of Demiur- gusships, Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Growths and Destructions, are already visible in the grey of coming Time. Chronos is de- throned by Jove; Odin by St. Olaf: the Dollar cannot rule in Heaven for ever. 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 Dy- nasties 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 strug- gles, 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 ivill, why do we pray to Heaven without setting our own shoulder to the wheel] The Present, if it will have the Future accom- plish, shall itself commence. Thou who prophesiest, who be- lievest, 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 1 Put forth thy hand, in God's name; know that ' impossible,' where Truth and Mercy and the everlasting Voice THE DIDACTIC. 295 of Nature order, has no place in the brave man's dictionary. That when all men have said " Impossible," and tumbled noisily else- whither, 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 possi- bility 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 the soul's travail, bring it into clear being. That loud inane Actuali- ty, 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 iVonentity, 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 May fair's drawingrooms ! Not in vic- tory over poor brother French or Phrygians ; but in victory over Frost-jotuns, Marsh-giants, over demons of Discord, Idleness, In- justice, 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 Aris- tocracies, 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 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, 296 HOROSCOPE. wide-spread 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 great- ness. To make some nook of God's Creation a little fruitfuller, better, more worthy of God ; to make some human hearts a little wiser, manfuller, 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 o'erspanning it too, and its cunning mecha- nisms 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 aw T hile. The Future hides in it Good hap and sorrow ; We press still thorow, Naught that abides in it Daunting us, — onward. THE END. ^ *,..;,-. -tssj,-., ' . .