Past and Present Part 11

Yet it is well worth while for us to know, once and always, that they are not a similitude, nor a fable nor semi-fable; that they are an everlasting highest fact! "No Lake of Sicilian or other sulphur burns now anywhere in these ages," sayest thou? Well, and if there did not!

Believe that there does not; believe it if thou wilt, nay hold by it as a real increase, a rise to higher stages, to wider horizons and empires. All this has vanished, or has not vanished; believe as thou wilt as to all this. But that an Infinite of Practical Importance, speaking with strict arithmetical exactness, an _Infinite_, has vanished or can vanish from the Life of any Man: this thou shalt not believe! O brother, the Infinite of Terror, of Hope, of Pity, did it not at any moment disclose itself to thee, indubitable, un-nameable?

Came it never, like the gleam of _preter_natural eternal Oceans, like the voice of old Eternities, far-sounding through thy heart of hearts?

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

The Infinite is more sure than any other fact. But only men can discern it; mere building beavers, spinning arachnes, much more the predatory vulturous and vulpine species, do not discern it well!--

'The word h.e.l.l,' says Sauerteig, 'is still frequently in use among the English people: but I could not without difficulty ascertain what they meant by it. h.e.l.l generally signifies the Infinite Terror, the thing a man _is_ infinitely afraid of, and shudders and shrinks from, struggling with his whole soul to escape from it. There is a h.e.l.l therefore, if you will consider, which accompanies man, in all stages of his history, and religious or other development: but the h.e.l.ls of men and Peoples differ notably. With Christians it is the infinite terror of being found guilty before the Just Judge. With old Romans, I conjecture, it was the terror not of Pluto, for whom probably they cared little, but of doing unworthily, doing unvirtuously, which was their word for un_man_fully. And now what is it, if you pierce through his Cants, his oft-repeated Hearsays, what he calls his Wors.h.i.+ps 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 h.e.l.l, after all these reputable, oft-repeated Hearsays, what is it? With hesitation, with astonishment, I p.r.o.nounce it to be: The terror of "Not succeeding;" of not making money, fame, or some other figure in the world,--chiefly of not making money! Is not that a somewhat singular h.e.l.l?'

Yes, O Sauerteig, it is very singular. If we do not 'succeed,' where is the use of us? We had better never have been born. "Tremble intensely," as our friend the Emperor of China says: _there_ is the black Bottomless of Terror; what Sauerteig calls the 'h.e.l.l of the English'!--But indeed this h.e.l.l belongs naturally to the Gospel of Mammonism, which also has its corresponding Heaven. For there _is_ one Reality among so many Phantasms; about one thing we are entirely in earnest: The making of money. Working Mammonism does divide the world with idle game-preserving Dilettantism:--thank Heaven that there is even a Mammonism, _any_thing we are in earnest about! Idleness is worst, Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at almost all things. There is endless hope in work, were it even work at making money.

True, it must be owned, we for the present, with our Mammon-Gospel, have come to strange conclusions. We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named 'fair compet.i.tion' and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that _Cash-payment_ is not the sole relation of human beings; we think, nothing doubting, that _it_ absolves and liquidates all engagements of man. "My starving workers?"

answers the rich mill-owner: "Did not I hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?"--Verily Mammon-wors.h.i.+p 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, ill.u.s.trious game-preserving Duke, is there no way of 'killing' thy brother but Cain's rude way! 'A good man by the very look of him, by his very presence with us as a fellow wayfarer in this Life-pilgrimage, _promises_ so much:' woe to him if he forget all such promises, if he never know that they were given!

To a deadened soul, seared with the brute Idolatry of Sense, to whom going to h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d's Heaven supporting itself on such Philosophy. The Universe is not made so; it is made otherwise than so. The man or nation of men that thinks it is made so, marches forward nothing doubting, step after step; but marches--whither we know! In these last two centuries of Atheistic Government (near two centuries now, since the blessed restoration of his Sacred Majesty, and Defender of the Faith, Charles Second), I reckon that we have pretty well exhausted what of 'firm earth' there was for us to march on;--and are now, very ominously, shuddering, reeling, and let us hope trying to recoil, on the cliff's edge!--

For out of this that we call Atheism come so many other _isms_ and falsities, each falsity with its misery at its heels!--A soul is not like wind (_spiritus_, or breath) contained within a capsule; the Almighty Maker is not like a Clockmaker that once, in old immemorial ages, having _made_ his Horologe of a Universe, sits ever since and sees it go! Not at all. Hence comes Atheism; come, as we say, many other _isms_; and as the sum of all, comes Valetism, the _reverse_ of Heroism; sad root of all woes whatsoever. For indeed, as no man ever saw the above-said wind-element enclosed within its capsule, and finds it at bottom more deniable than conceivable; so too he finds, in spite of Bridgwater Bequests, your Clockmaker Almighty an entirely questionable affair, a deniable affair;--and accordingly denies it, and along with it so much else. Alas, one knows not what and how much else! For the faith in an Invisible, Unnameable, G.o.dlike, 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, a.s.serted with lips only, and out of bound prayerbooks only, what other thing remains believable? That Cant well-ordered is marketable Cant; that Heroism means gas-lighted Histrionism; that seen with 'clear eyes' (as they call Valet-eyes), no man is a Hero, or ever was a Hero, but all men are Valets and Varlets. The accursed practical quintessence of all sorts of Unbelief! For if there be now no Hero, and the Histrio himself begin to be seen into, what hope is there for the seed of Adam here below? We are the doomed everlasting prey of the Quack; who, now in this guise, now in that, is to filch us, to pluck and eat us, by such modes as are convenient for him. For the modes and guises I care little. The Quack once inevitable, let him come swiftly, let him pluck and eat me;--swiftly, that I may at least have done with him; for in his Quack-world I can have no wish to linger. Though he slay me, yet will I _not_ trust in him. Though he conquer nations, and have all the Flunkies of the Universe shouting at his heels, yet will I know well that _he_ is an Inanity; that for him and his there is no continuance appointed, save only in Gehenna and the Pool. Alas, the Atheist world, from its utmost summits of Heaven and Westminster-Hall, downwards through poor seven-feet Hats and 'Unveracities fallen hungry,' down to the lowest cellars and neglected hunger-dens of it, is very wretched.

One of Dr. Alison's Scotch facts struck us much.[26] A poor Irish Widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of Edinburgh, went forth with her three children, bare of all resource, to solicit help from the Charitable Establishments of that City. At this Charitable Establishment and then at that she was refused; referred from one to the other, helped by none;--till she had exhausted them all; till her strength and heart failed her: she sank down in typhus-fever; died, and infected her Lane with fever, so that 'seventeen other persons'

died of fever there in consequence. The humane Physician asks thereupon, as with a heart too full for speaking, Would it not have been _economy_ to help this poor Widow? She took typhus-fever, and killed seventeen of you!--Very curious. The forlorn Irish Widow applies to her fellow-creatures, as if saying, "Behold I am sinking, bare of help: ye must help me! I am your sister, bone of your bone; one G.o.d made us: ye must help me!" They answer, "No, impossible; thou art no sister of ours." But she proves her sisterhood; her typhus-fever kills _them_: they actually were her brothers, though denying it! Had human creature ever to go lower for a proof?

For, as indeed was very natural in such case, all government of the Poor by the Rich has long ago been given over to Supply-and-demand, Laissez-faire and suchlike, and universally declared to be 'impossible.' "You are no sister of ours; what shadow of proof is there? Here are our parchments, our padlocks, proving indisputably our money-safes to be _ours_, and you to have no business with them.

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

cry indignant readers. Nothing, my friends,--till you have got a soul for yourselves again. Till then all things are 'impossible.' Till then I cannot even bid you buy, as the old Spartans would have done, two-pence worth of powder and lead, and compendiously shoot to death this poor Irish Widow: even that is 'impossible' for you. Nothing is left but that she prove her sisterhood by dying, and infecting you with typhus. Seventeen of you lying dead will not deny such proof that she _was_ flesh of your flesh; and perhaps some of the living may lay it to heart.

'Impossible:' of a certain two-legged animal with feathers it is said, if you draw a distinct chalk-circle round him, he sits imprisoned, as if girt with the iron ring of Fate; and will die there, though within sight of victuals,--or sit in sick misery there, and be fatted to death. The name of this poor two-legged animal is--Goose; and they make of him, when well fattened, _Pate de foie gras_, much prized by some!

FOOTNOTES:

[26] _Observations on the Management of the Poor in Scotland_, by William Pulteney Alison, M.D. (Edinburgh, 1840.)

CHAPTER III.

GOSPEL OF DILETTANTISM.

But after all, the Gospel of Dilettantism, producing a Governing Cla.s.s who do not govern, nor understand in the least that they are bound or expected to govern, is still mournfuler than that of Mammonism.

Mammonism, as we said, at least works; this goes idle. Mammonism has seized some portion of the message of Nature to man; and seizing that, and following it, will seize and appropriate more and more of Nature's message: but Dilettantism has missed it wholly. 'Make money:' that will mean withal, 'Do work in order to make money.' But, 'Go gracefully idle in Mayfair,' what does or can that mean? An idle, game-preserving and even corn-lawing Aristocracy, in such an England as ours: has the world, if we take thought of it, ever seen such a phenomenon till very lately? Can it long continue to see such?

Accordingly the impotent, insolent Donothingism in Practice and Saynothingism in Speech, which we have to witness on that side of our affairs, is altogether amazing. A Corn-Law demonstrating itself openly, for ten years or more, with 'arguments' to make the angels, and some other cla.s.ses of creatures, weep! For men are not ashamed to rise in Parliament and elsewhere, and speak the things they do _not_ think. 'Expediency,' 'Necessities of Party,' &c. &c.! It is not known that the Tongue of Man is a sacred organ; that Man himself is definable in Philosophy as an 'Incarnate _Word_;' the Word not there, you have no Man there either, but a Phantasm instead! In this way it is that Absurdities may live long enough,--still walking, and talking for themselves, years and decades after the brains are quite out! How are 'the knaves and dastards' ever to be got 'arrested' at that rate?--

"No man in this fas.h.i.+onable London of yours," friend Sauerteig would say, "speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to be something more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may p.r.i.c.k into me;--perhaps (this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the better! Such grinning inanity is very sad to the soul of man. Human faces should not grin on one like masks; they should look on one like faces! I love honest laughter, as I do sunlight; but not dishonest: most kinds of dancing too; but the St. Vitus kind not at all! A fas.h.i.+onable wit, _ach Himmel_! if you ask, Which, he or a Death's-head, will be the cheerier company for me? pray send _not_ him!"

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

Action hangs, as it were, _dissolved_ in Speech, in Thought whereof Speech is the Shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of Speech in a man betokens the kind of Action you will get from him. Our Speech, in these modern days, has become amazing. Johnson complained, "n.o.body speaks in earnest, Sir; there is no serious conversation." To us all serious speech of men, as that of Seventeenth-Century Puritans, Twelfth-Century Catholics, German Poets of this Century, has become jargon, more or less insane. Cromwell was mad and a quack; Anselm, Becket, Goethe, _ditto ditto_.

Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology are more significant than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the sh.o.r.es of that same Asphaltic Lake; and having forgotten, as we are all too p.r.o.ne to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities and outer semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions,--verging indeed towards a certain far deeper Lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the Prophet Moses, with an instructive word of warning, out of which might have sprung 'remedial measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea discovered, as the valet-species always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses; listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grinning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn; and signified, in short, that they found him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid theory these men of the Asphalt Lake formed to themselves of Moses, That probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore.

Moses withdrew; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them, were all 'changed into Apes;'[27] sitting on the trees there, grinning now in the most _un_affected manner; gibbering and chattering very genuine nonsense; finding the whole Universe now a most indisputable Humbug! The Universe has _become_ a Humbug to these Apes who thought it one. There they sit and chatter, to this hour: only, I believe, every Sabbath there returns to them a bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit, with their wizened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking out through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk of Things; wholly an Uncertainty, Unintelligibility, they and it; and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter or mew:--truest, tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of man or ape! They made no use of their souls; and so have lost them. Their wors.h.i.+p on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with unmusical screeches, and half-remember that they had souls.

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

Meseems they are grown somewhat numerous in our day.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Sale's _Koran_ (Introduction).

CHAPTER IV.

HAPPY.

All work, even cotton-spinning, is n.o.ble; work is alone n.o.ble: be that here said and a.s.serted once more. And in like manner too, all dignity is painful; a life of ease is not for any man, nor for any G.o.d. The life of all G.o.ds figures itself to us as a Sublime Sadness,--earnestness of Infinite Battle against Infinite Labour. Our highest religion is named the 'Wors.h.i.+p of Sorrow.' For the son of man there is no n.o.ble 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 G.o.ds. The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be happy; thou shalt love pleasant things, and find them. The people clamour, Why have we not found pleasant things?

We construct our theory of Human Duties, not on any Greatest-n.o.bleness Principle, never so mistaken; no, but on a Greatest-Happiness Principle. 'The word _Soul_ with us, as in some Slavonic dialects, seems to be synonymous with _Stomach_.' We plead and speak, in our Parliaments and elsewhere, not as from the Soul, but from the Stomach;--wherefore indeed our pleadings are so slow to profit. We plead not for G.o.d's Justice; we are not ashamed to stand clamouring and pleading for our own 'interests,' our own rents and trade-profits; we say, They are the 'interests' of so many; there is such an intense desire in us for them! We demand Free-Trade, with much just vociferation and benevolence, That the poorer cla.s.ses, who are terribly ill-off at present, may have cheaper New-Orleans bacon. Men ask on Free-trade platforms, How can the indomitable spirit of Englishmen be kept up without plenty of bacon? We shall become a ruined Nation!--Surely, my friends, plenty of bacon is good and indispensable: but, I doubt, you will never get even bacon by aiming only at that. You are men, not animals of prey, well-used or ill-used!

Your Greatest-Happiness Principle seems to me fast becoming a rather unhappy one.--What if we should cease babbling about 'happiness,' and leave _it_ resting on its own basis, as it used to do!

A gifted Byron rises in his wrath; and feeling too surely that he for his part is not 'happy,' declares the same in very violent language, as a piece of news that may be interesting. It evidently has surprised him much. One dislikes to see a man and poet reduced to proclaim on the streets such tidings: but on the whole, as matters go, that is not the most dislikable. Byron speaks the _truth_ in this matter. Byron's large audience indicates how true it is felt to be.

'Happy,' my brother? First of all, what difference is it whether thou art happy or not! Today becomes Yesterday so fast, all Tomorrows become Yesterdays; and then there is no question whatever of the 'happiness,' but quite another question. Nay, thou hast such a sacred pity left at least for thyself, thy very pains, once gone over into Yesterday, become joys to thee. Besides, thou knowest not what heavenly blessedness and indispensable sanative virtue was in them; thou shalt only know it after many days, when thou art wiser!--A benevolent old Surgeon sat once in our company, with a Patient fallen sick by gourmandising, whom he had just, too briefly in the Patient's judgment, been examining. The foolish Patient still at intervals continued to break in on our discourse, which rather promised to take a philosophic turn: "But I have lost my appet.i.te," said he, objurgatively, with a tone of irritated pathos; "I have no appet.i.te; I can't eat!"--"My dear fellow," answered the Doctor in mildest tone, "it isn't of the slightest consequence;"--and continued his philosophical discoursings with us!

Or does the reader not know the history of that Scottish iron Misanthrope? The inmates of some town-mansion, in those Northern parts, were thrown into the fearfulest alarm by indubitable symptoms of a ghost inhabiting the next house, or perhaps even the part.i.tion-wall! Ever at a certain hour, with preternatural gnarring, growling and screeching, which attended as running ba.s.s, there began, in a horrid, semi-articulate, unearthly voice, this song: "Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now I'm _mees_erable! Clack-clack-clack, gnarr-r-r, whuz-z: Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now I'm _mees_erable!"--Rest, rest, perturbed spirit;--or indeed, as the good old Doctor said: My dear fellow, it isn't of the slightest consequence! But no; the perturbed spirit could not rest; and to the neighbours, fretted, affrighted, or at least insufferably bored by him, it _was_ of such consequence that they had to go and examine in his haunted chamber.

In his haunted chamber, they find that the perturbed spirit is an unfortunate--Imitator of Byron? No, is an unfortunate rusty Meat-jack, gnarring and creaking with rust and work; and this, in Scottish dialect, is _its_ Byronian musical Life-philosophy, sung according to ability!

Truly, I think the man who goes about pothering and uproaring for his 'happiness,'--pothering, and were it ballot-boxing, poem-making, or in what way soever fussing and exerting himself,--he is not the man that will help us to 'get our knaves and dastards arrested'! No; he rather is on the way to increase the number,--by at least one unit and his tail! Observe, too, that this is all a modern affair; belongs not to the old heroic times, but to these dastard new times. 'Happiness our being's end and aim,' all that very paltry speculation is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world.

The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done. Not "I can't eat!"

but "I can't work!" that was the burden of all wise complaining among men. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man, That he cannot work; that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the day is pa.s.sing swiftly over, our life is pa.s.sing swiftly over; and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness,--it is all abolished; vanished, clean gone; a thing that has been: 'not of the slightest consequence'

whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds, as musical Byron with Giaours and sensibilities of the heart; as the unmusical Meat-jack with hard labour and rust! But our work,--behold that is not abolished, that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the want of it remains;--for endless Times and Eternities, remains; and that is now the sole question with us forevermore! Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine everlasting Night, with her star-diadems, with her silences and her veracities, is come! What hast thou done, and how? Happiness, unhappiness: all that was but the _wages_ thou hadst; thou hast spent all that, in sustaining thyself hitherward; not a coin of it remains with thee, it is all spent, eaten: and now thy work, where is thy work? Swift, out with it; let us see thy work!

Of a truth, if man were not a poor hungry dastard, and even much of a blockhead withal, he would cease criticising his victuals to such extent; and criticise himself rather, what he does with his victuals!

CHAPTER V.