Latter Day Pamphlets by Thomas Carlyle (1850)
(p.216-248) [av]
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No. VII. HUDSON'S STATUE
[1st July, 1850.]
At St. Ives in Huntingdonshire, where Oliver Cromwell farmed and resided for
some years, the people have determined to attempt some kind of memorial to that
memorable character. Other persons in other quarters seem to be, more or less
languidly, talking up the question; in Country Papers I have read emphatic
heading-articles, recommending and urging that there should be a "People's
Statue" of this great Oliver, Statue furnished by universal contribution from
the English People; and set up, if possible, in London, in Huntingdon, or
failing both these places, in St. Ives, or Naseby Field. Indeed a considerable
notion seems to exist in the English mind, that some brass or stone
acknowledgment is due to Cromwell, and ought to be paid him. So that the vexed
question, 'Shall Cromwell have a Statue?' appears to be resuscitating itself;
and the weary Public must prepare to agitate it again.
Poor English public, they really are exceedingly bewildered with Statues at
present. They would fain do honour to somebody, if they did but know whom or
how. Unfortunately they know neither whom nor how; they are, at present, the
farthest in the world from knowing! They have raised a set of the ugliest
Statues, and to the most extraordinary persons, ever seen under the sun before.
Being myself questioned, in reference to the New Houses of Parliament some years
ago, "Shall Cromwell have a Statue?" I had to answer, with sorrowful dubiety:
"Cromwell? Side by side with a sacred Charles the Second, sacred George the
Fourth, and the other sacred Charleses, Jameses, Georges, and Defenders of the
Faith, I am afraid he wouldn't like it! Let us decide provisionally, No." And
now again as to St. Ives and the People's Statue, is it not to be asked in like
manner: "Who are the 'People?' Are they a People worthy to build Statues to
Cromwell; or [p.217] worthy only of doing it to
Hudson?" This latter is a consideration that will head us into far deeper
and more momentous than sculptural inquiries; and I will request the reader's
excellent company into these for a little.
The truth is, dear Reader, nowhere, to an impartial observant person, does the
deep-sunk condition of the English mind, in these sad epochs; and how, in all
spiritual or moral provinces, it has long quitted company with fact, and ceased
to have veracity of heart, and clearness or sincerity of purpose, in regard to
such matters, more signally manifest itself, than in this affair of Public
Statues. Whom doth the king delight to honour? that is the question of questions
concerning the king's own honour. Show me the man you honour; I know by that
symptom, better than by any other, what kind of man you yourself are. For you
show me there what your ideal of manhood is; what kind of man you long
inexpressibly to be, and would thank the gods, with your whole soul, for being
if you could.
In this point of view, it was always matter of regret with me that Hudson's
Statue, among the other wonders of the present age, was not completed. The
25,000 l. subscribed, or offered as oblation, by the Hero-worshipers of
England to their Ideal of a Man, awoke many questions as to what outward figure
it could most profitably take, under the eternal canopy; questions never finally
settled; nor ever now to be settled, now when the universal Hudson ragnarφk,
or 'twilight of the gods,' has arrived, and it is too clear no statue or
cast-metal image of that Incarnation of the English Vishnu will ever be molten
now! Why was it not set up; that the whole world might see it; that our
'Religion' might be seen, mounted on some figure of a Locomotive, garnished with
Scrip-rolls proper; and raised aloft in some conspicuous place, for example,
on the other arch at Hyde-Park Corner? By all opportunities, especially
to all subscribers and pious sacrificers to the Hudson Testimonial, I have
earnestly urged: complete your Sin-Offering; buy, with the Five-and-twenty
Thousand Pounds, what utmost amount of brazen metal and reasonable sculptural
supervision it will cover, say ten tons of brass, with a tolerable sculptor:
model that, with what exactness Art can, into the enduring Brass Portrait and
Express Image of King Hudson, as he receives the grandees of this country at his
levees or soirees and couchees; mount him on the highest place [p.218]
you can discover in the most crowded thoroughfare, on what you can consider the
pinnacle of the English world: I assure you he will have beneficial effects
there. To all men who are struggling for your approbation, and fretting their
poor souls to fiddlestrings because you will not sufficiently give it, I will
say, leading them to the foot of the Hudson mount of vision:
See, my worthy Mr. Rigmarole; consider this suprising Copper Pyramid, in partly
human form: did the celestial value of men's approbation ever strike you so
forcibly before? The new Apollo Belvidere this, or Ideal of the Scrip Ages. What
do you think of it? Allah Ilallah, there is still one God, you see, in
England; and this is his Prophet. Let it be a source of healing to you, my
unhappy Mr. Rigmarole; draw from it uses of terror, as the old divines said;
uses of amazement, of new wisdom, of unattainable reflection upon the present
epoch of the world!
For, in fact, there was more of real worship in the affair of Hudson than is
usual in such. The practical English mind has its own notions as to the Supreme
Excellence; knows the real from the spurious Avatar of Vishnu; and does not
worship without its reasons. The practical English mind, contemplating its
divine Hudson, says with what remainder of reverence is in it:
Yes, you are something like the Ideal of a Man; you are he I would give my right
arm and leg, and accept a potbelly, with gout, and an appetite for
strong-waters, to be like! You out of nothing can make a world, or huge fortune
of gold. A divine intellect is in you, which Earth and Heaven, and Capel Court
itself acknowledge; at the word of which are done miracles. You find a dying
railway; you say to it, Live, blossom anew with scrip; and it lives, and
blossoms into umbrageous flowery scrip, to enrich with golden apples, surpassing
thus of the Hesperides, the hungry souls of men. Diviner miracle what god ever
did? Hudson, though I mumble about my thirty-nine articles, and the service of
other divinities, Hudson is my god, and to him I will sacrifice this
twenty-pound note: if perhaps he will be propitious to me?
Object not that there was a mixed motive in this worship of Hudson; that perhaps
it was not worship at all. Undoubtedly there were two motives mixed, but both of
them sincere, as often happens in worship. 'Transcendent admiration' is [p.219]
defined as the origin of sacrifice; but also the hope of profit joins itself. If
by sacrificing a goat, or the like trifle, to Supreme Jove, you can get Supreme
Jove's favour, will not that, for one, be a good investment? Jove is sacrificed
to, and worshiped, from transcendent admiration: but also, in part, men of
practical nature worship him as pumps are primed, give him a little water,
that you may get from him a river. O godlike Hudson, O god-recognizing England,
why was not the partly anthropomorphous Pyramid of Copper cast, then, and set
upon the pinnacle of England, that all men might have seen it, and the sooner
got to understand these things! The Twenty-five-thousand-pound oblation lay upon
the altar at the Bank; this monstrous Copper Vishnu of the Scrip Ages might have
been revealed to men, and was not. Unexpected obstacles occurred. I fact, there
rose from the general English soul, lying dumb and infinitely bewildered. but
not yet altogether dead, poor wretch, such a growth of inarticulate amazement,
at this unexpected Hudson Apotheosis, alarmed the pious worshiper and their
Copper Pyramid remains unrealized, not to be realized to all eternity now, or at
least not till Chaos come again, and the ancient mud-gods have dominion! The
Ne-plus-ultra of Statue-building was within sight; but it was not attained,
it was to be forever unattainable.
If the world were not properly anarchic, this question 'Who shall have a
Statue?' would be one of the greatest and most solemn for it. Who is to have a
Statue? means, Whom shall we consecrate and set apart as one of our sacred men?
Sacred; that all men may see him, be reminded of him, and, by new example added
to old perpetual precept, be taught what is real worth in man. Whom do you wish
us to resemble? Him you set on a high column that all men, looking on it, may be
continually apprised of the duty you expect from them. What man to set there,
and what man to refuse forevermore the leave to be set there: this, if a country
were not anarchic as we say, ruleless, given up to the rule of Chaos, in the
primordial fibres of its being, would be a great question for a country!
And to the parties themselves, lightly as they set about it, the question is
rather great. Whom shall I honour, whom shall I refuse to honour? If a man have
any precious thing in him at all, certainly the most precious of all the gifts
he can offer [p.220] is his approbation, his reverence
to another man. This is his very soul, this fealty which he swears to another:
his personality itself, with whatever it has of eternal and divine, he bends
here in reverence before another. Not lightly while a man give this, if he is
still a man. If he is no longer a man, but a greedy blind two-footed animal,
"without soul, except what saves him the expense of salt and keeps his body with
its appetites from putrefying," alas, if he is nothing now but a human
money-bag and meat-trough, it is different! In that case his "reverence" is
worth so many pounds sterling; and these, like a gentleman, he will give
willingly. Hence the British Statues, such a populace of them as we see. British
Statues, and some other more important things! Alas, of how many unveracities,
of what a world of irreverence, of sordid debasement, and death in
"trespasses and sins," is this light unveracious bestowal of one's approbation
the fatal outcome! Fatal in its origin; in its developments and thousandfold
results so fatal. It is the poison of the universal Upas-tree, under which all
human interests, in these bad ages, lie writhing as if in the last struggle of
death. Street-barricades rise for that reason, and counterfeit kings have to
shave off their whiskers, and fly like coiners, and it is a world gone mad in
misery bestowing its approbation wrong!
Give every man the meed of honour he has merited, you have the ideal world of
poets; hierarchy of beneficences, your noblest man at the summit of affairs, and
in every place the due gradation of the fittest for that place: a maximum of
wisdom works and administers, followed, as is inevitable, by a maximum of
success. It is a world such as the idle poets dream of, such as the active
poets, the heroic and the true of men, are incessantly toiling to achieve, and
more and more realize. Achieved, realized, it never can be; striven after, and
approximated to, it must forever be, woe to us if at any time it be not! Other
aim in this Earth we have none. Renounce such aim as vain and hopeless, reject
it altogether, what more have you to reject? You have renounced fealty to Nature
and its Almighty Maker; you have said practically,
We can flourish very well without minding Nature and her ordinances; perhaps
Nature and the Almighty what are they? A Phantasm of the brain of Priests, and
of some chimerical persons that write Books? "Hold!" shriek others wildly:
"You incendiary [p.221] infidels; you should be
quiet infidels, and believe! Haven't we a Church? Don't we keep a Church, this
long while; best-behaved of Churches, which meddles with nobody, assiduously
grinding its organs, reading its liturgies, homiletics, and excellent old moral
horn-books, so patiently as Church never did? Can't we doff our hat to it; even
look in upon it occasionally, on a wet Sunday; and so, at the trifling charge of
a few millions annually, serve both God and the Devil?" Fools, you should
be quiet infidels, and believe!"
To give our approval aright, alas, to do every one of us what lies in him,
that the honourable man everywhere, and he only have honour, that the able man
everywhere be put into the place which is fit for him, which is his by eternal
right: is not this the sum of all social morality for every citizen of this
world? This one duty perfectly done, what more could the world have done for it?
The world in all departments and aspects of it were a perfect world; everywhere
administered by the best wisdom discernible in it, everywhere enjoying the exact
maximum of success and felicity possible for it. Imperfectly, and not perfectly
done, we know this duty must always be. Not done at all; no longer remembered as
a thing which God and Nature and the Eternal Voices do require to be done,
alas, we see too well what kind of a world that ultimately makes for us! A world
no longer habitable for quiet persons; a world which in these sad days is
bursting into street barricades. and pretty rapidly turning out its "Honoured
Men," as intrusive dogs are turned out, with a kettle tied to their tail. To
Kings, Kaisers, Spiritual Papas and Holy Fathers, there is universal "Apage!
Depart thou; go thou to the Father of thee!" in a huge world-voice of
mob-musketry and sooty execration, uglier than any ever heard before.
Who's to have a statue? The English, at present, answer this question in a very
off-hand manner. So far as I can ascertain the method they have, it is somewhat
as follows.
Of course, among the many idle persons to whom an unfortunate world has given
money and no work to do, there must be with or without wisdom (without, for most
part), a most brisk demand for work. Work to do is very desirable, for those
that have only money and not work. "Alas, one cannot buy sleep in the
market!" said the rich Farmer-general. Alas, one [p.222]
cannot buy work there; work, which is still more indispensable. One of these
unfortunates with money and no work, whose haunts lie in the dilettante line,
among Artists' Studios, Picture-Sales, and the like regions, an inane kingdom
much frequented by the inane in these times, him it strikes, in some inspired
moment, that if a public subscription for a Statue to Somebody could be started
good results would follow. Perhaps some Artist to whom he is Maecenas, might be
got to do the Statue, at all events there would be extensive work and stir going
on, whereby the inspired dilettante, for his own share, might get upon
committees, see himself named in the newspapers; might assist in innumerable
consultations, open utterances of speech and balderdash; and on the whole, be
comfortably present, for years to come, at something of the nature of "a house
on fire:" house innocuously, nay beneficently on fire; a very Goshen to an idle
man with money in his pocket.
This is the germ of the idea, now make your idea an action. Think of a proper
Somebody. Almost anybody much heard of in the newspapers, and never yet
convicted of felony; a conspicuous commander in-chief, duke no matter whether of
Wellington or of York; successful stump-orator, political intriguer; lawyer that
has made two hundred thousand pounds; scrip-dealer that has made two hundred
thousand: anybody of a large class, we are not particular, he will be your
proper Somebody. You are then to get a brother idler or two to unite his
twenty-pound note to yours: the fire is kindled, smoke rises through the
editorial columns; the fire, if you blow it, will break into flame, and become a
comfortable house on fire for you; solacing the general idle soul, for years to
come; and issuing in a big hulk of Corinthian brass, and a notable instance of
hero-worship, by and by.
Such I take to be the origin of that extraordinary population of Brazen and
other Images which at present dominate the marketplaces of towns, and solicit
worship from the English people. The ugliest images, and to the strangest case
of persons, ever set up in this world. Do you call these demigods? England must
be dreadfully off for demigods! My friend, I will not do the smallest stroke of
worship to them. One in the thousand I will snatch out of bad company, if I ever
can, the other nine hundred and ninety-nine I will with pious joy, in the like
case, reduce to the state of broken metal again, and [p.223]
veil forever from all men. As warming-pans, as cheap brass-candlesticks, men
will get good of this metal; as devotionary Images in such form, evil only.
These are not heroes, gods, or demigods; and it is a horrible idolatry, if you
knew it, to set them up as such!
Are these your Pattern Men? Great Men? They are your lucky (or unlucky)
adventurers swollen big. Paltry Adventurers for most part; worthy of no
worship, and incapable forever of getting any, except from the soul consecrated
to flunkeyism. Will a man's soul worship that, think you? Never; if you
fashioned him of solid gold, big as Benlomond, no heart of a man would ever look
upon him except with sorrow and despair. To the flunkey-heart alone is he, was
he or can he at any time be, a thing to look upon with upturned eyes of
"transcendent admiration," worship or worthship so-called. He, you unfortunate
fools, he is not the one we want to be kept in mind of; not he at all by any
means! To him and his memory, if you had not been unfortunate and blockheads,
you would have sunk a coalshaft rather than raised a column. Deep coalshaft,
there to bury him and his memory, that men may never speak or hear of him
more; not a high column to admonish all men that they should try to resemble
him!
Of the sculptural talent manifest in these Brazen Images I say nothing, though
much were to be said. For indeed, if there is no talent displayed in them but a
perverse one, are we not to consider it a happiness, in that strange case? This
big swollen gluttonous hapless "spiritual Daniel Lambert," deserved a coalshaft
from his brother mortals: let at least his column be ugly! Nevertheless ugly
columns and images are, in themselves, a real evil. They too preach ugliness
after their sort; and have a certain effect, the whole of which is bad. They
sanction and consecrate artistic botching, pretentious futility, and the
holrible doctrine that this Universe is Cockney Nightmare, which no creature
ought for a moment to believe, or listen to! In brief, they encourage an already
ugly Population to become in a thousand ways uglier. They too, for their
ugliness, did not the infinitely deeper ugliness of the thing they commemorate
absorb all consideration of that, would deserve, and do in fact incessantly
solicit, abolition from the sight of men.
[p.224]
What good in the aesthetic, the moral, social or any human point of view, we are
ever to get of these Brazen Images now peopling our chief cities and their
market-places; it is impossible to specify. Evil enough we, consciously or
unconsciously, get of them; no soul looks upon them approvingly or even
indifferently without damage, all the deadlier the less he knows of it. Simple
souls they corrupt in the sources of their spiritual being: wise souls, obliged
to look on them, look with some feeling of anger and just abhorrence; which is
itself a mischief to a peaceable man. Good will never be got of these Brazen
Images in their present form. Of what use, till once broken up and melted into
warming-pans, they can ever be to gods or men, I own I cannot see. Gods and men
demand that this, which is their sure ultimate destiny, should so soon as
possible be realised.
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It is tragically evident to me, our first want, which includes all wants, is
that of a new real Aristocracy of fact, instead of the extinct imaginary one of
title, which the anarchic world is everywhere rebelling against: but if it is
from Popular Suffrage that we are to look for such a blessing, is not this
extraordinary populace of British Statues, which now dominates our
market-places, one of the saddest omens that ever was? Suffrage announces to us,
nothing doubting: "Here are your real demigods and heroic men, ye famous British
People; here are Brazen and other Images worthy once more of some worship; this
is the New Aristocracy I have chosen, and would choose, for you!" That is
Suffrage's opinion. To me this populace of British Statues rises aloft over the
Chaos of our affairs like the living symbol and consummate flower of said Chaos,
and silently speaks the mournfullest prophecy. Perhaps as strange a Pantheon of
brass gods as was ever got together in this world. They stand there, poor
wretches, gradually rusting in the sooty rain; black and dismal, when one
thinks of them in some haggard mood of the imagination, like a set of grisly
undertakers come to bury the dead spiritualisms of mankind. There stand they, in
all weathers, indicating to the British Population such a Heaven and such an
Earth as probably no Population ever had before. In the social, political,
religious, artistic, and other provinces of our affairs, they point towards
depths of prostrate abasement which [p.225] no man's
thought has yet sounded. Let us timidly glance thitherward a little; gaze, for
moments, into those abysses of spiritual death, which, if we cannot one day
sound them, and subdue them, will engulf us all! And first as to this recipe
of Popular Election.
Hudson the railway king, if Popular Election be the rule seems to me by far the most authentic king that has been "elected by the people" so as almost none other is or was. Hudson solicited no vote his votes were silent voluntary ones not liable to be false: he did a thing which men found, in their inarticulate hearts, to be worthy of paying money for; and they paid it. What the desire of every heart was, Hudson had or seemed to have produced: Scrip out of which profit could be made. They "voted" for him by purchasing his scrip with a profit to him. Every vote was the spontaneous product of those men's deepest insights and most practical convictions, about Hudson and themselves and this Universe: I say, it was not a spoken vote, but a silently acted one; a vote for once incapable of being insincere. What their appetites, intelligences, stupidities, and pruriences had taught these men, they authentically told you there. I beg you to mark that well. Not by all the ballot-boxes in Nature could you have hoped to get, with such exactness, from these men, what the deepest inarticulate voice of the gods and of the demons in them was, as by this their spontaneous purchase of scrip. It is the ultimate rectified quintessence of these men's "votes;" the distillation of their very souls; the sincerest sincerity that was in them. Without gratitude to Hudson, or even without thought of him, they raised Hudson to his bad eminence, not by their voice given once at some hustings under the influence of balderdash and beer, but by the thought of their heart, by the inarticulate, indisputable dictate of their whole being. Hudson inquired of England: "What precious thing can I do for you, O enlightened Countrymen; what may be the value to you, by popular election, of this stroke of work that lies in me?" Popular election, with universal, with household and other suffrage, free as air, deep as life and death, free and deep as spoken suffrage never was or could be, has answered: "Pound sterling to such and such amount; that is the apparent value of thy stroke of work to us, [p.226] blockheads as we are." Real value differs from apparent to a frightful extent in this world, try it by what suffrage you will!
Hudson's value as a demigod being what it was, his value as a maker of railways shall hardly concern us here. What Hudson's real worth to mankind the matter of railways might be, I cannot pretend to say. Fact knows it to the uttermost fraction, and will pay it him yet men differ widely in opinion, and in general do not in the least know. From my own private observation and conjecture, I should say, Trifling if any worth.
Much as we love railways, there is one thing undeniable: Railways are shifting
all Towns of Britain into new places: no Town will stand where it did, and
nobody can tell for a long while yet where it will stand. This is a unexpected
and indeed most disastrous result. I perceive, railways have set all the Towns
of Britain a-dancing. Reading is coming up to London, Basingstoke is going down
to Gosport or Southampton, Dumfries to Liverpool and Glasgow; while at Crewe,
and other points, I see new ganglions of human population establishing
themselves, and the prophecy of metallurgic cities which were not heard of
before. Reading, Basingstoke and the rest, the unfortunate Towns, subscribed
money to get railways; and it proves to be for cutting their own throats. Their
business has gone elsewhither; and they cannot stay behind their business!
They are set a-dancing, as I said; confusedly waltzing, in a state of
progressive dissolution, towards the four winds; and know not where the end of
the death-dance will be for them, in what point of space they will be allowed to
rebuild themselves. That is their sad case.
And what an affair it is in each of the shops and houses of those Towns, thus
silently bleeding to death, or what we call dancing away to other points of the
British territory: how Joplin of Reading, who had anchored himself in that
pheasant place, and fondly hoping to live by upholstery and paperhanging, had
wedded, and made friends there, awakens some morning, and finds that his trade
has flitted away! Here it is not any longer; it is gone to London, to Bristol:
whither has it gone? Joplin knows not whither; knows and sees only that gone it
is; and that he by preternatural sagacity must scent it out again, follow it
over the world, and catch it again, or else die. Sad news for Joplin: indeed I
fear, should his [p.227] sagacity be too
inconsiderable, he is not unlikely to break his heart, or take to drinking in
these inextricable circumstances! And it is the history, more or less, in every
town, house, shop and industrial dwelling place of the British Empire at this
moment; and the cipher of afflicted Joplins; and the amount of private
distress, uncertainty, discontent; and withal of "revolutionary movement"
created hereby, is tragical to think of. This is "revolutionary movement" with a
witness; revolution brought home to everybody's hearth and moneysafe and heart
and stomach. Which miserable result, with so many others from the same source,
what method was there of avoiding or indefinitely mitigating? This surely, as
the beginning of all: That you had made your railways not in haste; that,
at least, you had spread the huge process, sure to alter all men's mutual
position and relations, over a reasonable breadth of time!
For all manner of reasons, how much could one have wished that the making of our
British railways had gone on with deliberation; that these great works had made
themselves not in five years but in fifty-and-five! Hudson's "worth" to
railways, I think, will mainly resolve itself into this, That he carried them to
completion within the former short limit of time; that he got them made, in
extremely improper direction I am told, and surely with endless confusion to the
innumerable passive Joplins, and likewise to the numerous active scrip-holders,
a wide-spread class, once rich, now coinless, hastily in five years, not
deliberately in fifty-five. His worth to railways? His worth, I take it,
to English railways, much more to English men, will turn out to be extremely
inconsiderable; to be incalculable damage rather! Foolish railway people gave
him two millions, and thought it not enough without a Statue to boot. But Fact
thought, and is now audible saying, far otherwise! Rhadamanthnus, had you been
able to consult him, would in nowise have given this man twenty-five thousand
pounds for a Statue. What if Rhadamanthus doomed him rather, let us say, to ride
in Express-trains, nowhither, for twenty-five aeons, or to hang in Heaven as a
Locomotive Constellation, and be a sign forever!
Fact and Suffrage: what a discrepancy! Fact decided for some coalshaft such as
we describe. Suffrage decides for such a column. Suffrage having money in its
pocket, carries it hollow, for the moment. And so there is Rayless Majesty [p.228]
exalted far above the chimney-pots, with a potential Copper Likeness,
twenty-five thousand pounds worth of copper over and above; and a King properly
belonging only to this epoch. That there are greedy blockheads in huge
majority, in all epochs, is certain; but that any sane mortal should think of
counting their heads to ascertain who or what is to be king, this is a
little peculiar. All Democratic men, and members of the Suffrage Movement, it
appears to me, are called upon to think seriously, with a seriousness
approaching to despair, of these things.
Jefferson Brick, the American Editor, twitted me with the multifarious patented
anomalies of overgrown worthless Dukes, Bishops of Durham, &c. which poor
English Society at present labours under, and is made a solecism by. To which
what answer could I make, except, that surely our patented anomalies were some
of them extremely ugly, and yet, alas, that they were not the ugliest! I said:
"Have not you also overgrown anomalous Dukes after a sort, appointed
not by patent? Overgrown monsters of Wealth, namely; who have made money by
dealing in cotton, dealing in bacon, jobbing scrip, digging metal in California;
who are become glittering man-mountains filled with gold and preciosities;
revered by the surrounding flunkeys; invested with the real powers of
sovereignty; and placidly admitted by all men, as if Nature and Heaven had so
appointed it, to be in a sense godlike, to be royal, and fit to shine in the
firmament, though their real worth is what? Brick, do you know where human
creatures reach the supreme of ugliness in Idols? It were hard to know! We can
say only, All Idols have to tumble, and the hugest of them with the heaviest
fall: that is our chief comfort, in America as here."
"The Idol of Somnauth, a mere mass of coarse crockery not worth five shillings
of anybody's money, sat like a great staring god, with two diamonds for eyes;
worshiped by the neighbouring black populations; a terror and divine mystery to
all mortals, till its day came. Till at last, victorious in the name of Allah,
the Commander of the Faithful, riding up with grim battle-axe and heart full of
Moslem fire, took the liberty to smite once, with light force and rage, said
ugly mass of idolatrous crockery; which thereupon shivered, [p.229]
with unmelodious crash and jingle, into a heap of ugly potsherds, yielding from
its belly half a wagon-load of gold coins. You can read it in Gibbon,
probably, too, in Lord Ellenborough. The gold coins, the diamond eyes, and other
valuable extrinsic parts were carefully picked up by the Faithful; confused
jingle of intrinsic potsherds was left lying; and the Idol of Somnauth once
showing what it was, had suddenly come to a conclusion! Thus end all Idols, and
intrinsically worthless man-mountains never so illuminated with diamonds, and
filled with precious metals, and tremulously worshiped by the neighbouring
flunkey populations black or white; even thus, sooner or later, without fail;
and are shot hastily, as a heap of potsherds, into the highway, to be crunched
under wagon-wheels, and do Macadam a little service, being clearly abolished as
gods, and hidden from man's recognition, in that or other capacities,
forever and a day!"
"You do not sufficiently bethink you, my republican friend. Our ugliest
anomalies are done by universal sufferage, not by patent. The express nonsense
of old Feudalism, even now, in its dotage is as nothing to the involuntary
nonsense of modern Anarchy called 'Freedom,' 'Republicanism,' and other fine
names, which expresses itself by supply and demand! Consider it a little."
"The Bishop of our Diocese is to me an incredible man; and has, I will grant
you, very much more money than you or I would now give him for his work. One
does not even read those Charges of his; much preferring speech which is
articulate. In fact, being intent on a quiet life, you generally keep on the
other side of the hedge from him, and strictly leave him to his own fate. Not a
credible man; perhaps not quite a safe man to be concerned with? But what
think you of the 'Bobus of Houndsditch' of our parts? He, Sausage-maker on the
great scale, knows the art of cutting fat bacon, and exposing it seasoned with
gray pepper to advantage. Better than any other man he knows this art; and I
take the liberty to say it is a poor one. Well, the Bishop has an income of five
thousand pounds appointed him for his work; and Bobus, to such a length has he
now pushed the trade in sausages, gains from the universal suffrage of men's
souls and stomachs ten thousand a year by it."
[p.230]
"A poor art, this of Bobus's, I say; and worth no such recompense. For it is not
even good sausages he makes, but only extremely vendible ones; the cunning dog!
Judges pronounce his sausages bad, and at the cheap price even dear; and finer
palates, it is whispered, have detected alarming symptoms of horse-flesh, or
worse, under this cunningly devised gray-pepper spice of his; so that for the
world I would not eat one of his sausages, nor would you. You perceive he is not
an excellent honest sausage-maker, but a dishonest cunning and scandalous
sausage-maker; worth, if he could get his deserts, who shall say what? Probably
certain shillings a week, say forty; possibly (one shudders to think) a long
round in the treadmill, and stripes instead of shillings! And yet what he gets,
I tell you, from universal suffrage and the unshackled ne-plus-ultra
republican justice of mankind, is twice the income of that anomalous Bishop you
were talking of!"
"The Bishop I for my part do much prefer to Bobus. The Bishop has human sense
and breeding of various kinds; considerable knowledge of Greek, if you should
ever want the like of that; knowledge of many things; and speaks the English
language in a grammatical manner. He is bred to courtesy, to dignified
composure, as to a second nature; a gentleman every fibre of him; which of
itself is something very considerable. The Bishop does really diffuse round him
an influence of decorum, courteous patience, solid adherence to what is settled;
teaches practically the necessity of 'burning one's own smoke'; and does
practically in his own case burn said smoke, making lambent flame and mild
illumination out of it, for the good of men in several particulars. While Bobus,
for twice the annual money, brings sausages, possibly of horseflesh, cheaper
to market than another! Brick, if you will reflect, it is not "aristocratic
England," it is the united Posterity of Adam who are grown, in some essential
respects, stupider than barbers' blocks. Barbers' blocks would at least say
nothing, and not elevate, by their universal suffrages, an unfortunate
Bobus to that bad height!"
Alas, if such, not in their loose tongues, but in their hearts, is men's way of
judging about social worth, what kind of new "Aristocracy" will the
inconceivablest perfection [p.231] of spoken Suffrage
ever yield us? Suffrage, I perceive well, has quite other things in store for
us; we need not torment poor Suffrage for this thing! Our Intermittent
Friend says once: "Men do not seem to be aware that this their universal ousting
of unjust, incapable and in fact imaginary Governors, is to issue in the
attainment of Governors who have a right and a capacity to govern. Far different
from that is the issue men contemplate in their present revolutionary
operations. Their universal notion now is, that we shall henceforth do without
Governors; that we have got to a new epoch in human progress, in which Governing
is entirely a superfluity, and the attempt at doing it is an offence, think
several. By that admirable invention of the constitutional Parliament, first
struck out in England, and now at length hotly striven for and zealously
imitated in all European countries, the task of Government, any task there may
still be, is done to our hand. Perfect your Parliament, cry all men: apply the
Ballot-box and Universal Suffrage! the admirablest method ever imagined of
counting heads and gathering indubitable votes: you will thus gather the vote,
vox or voice, of all the two-legged animals without feathers in your dominion;
what they think is what the gods think, is it not? and this you shall go and
do."
"Whereby, beyond dispute, your Governor's task is immensely simplified; and
indeed the chief thing you can now require of your Governor is that he carefully
preserve his good humour, and do a handsome manner nothing, Or some pleasant
fuglemotions only. Is not this a machine marking new epochs in the progress of
discovery? Machine for doing Government too, as we now do all things by
"machinery." Only keep your free-presses, ballot-boxes, upright-shafts and
cogwork in an oiled unobstructed condition; motive-power of popular wind will do
the rest. Here verily is a mill that beats Birmingham hollow; and marks "new
epochs" with a witness. What a hopper this! Reap from all fields whatsoever you
find standing, thistledowns, dockseed, hemlockseed, wheat, rye; tumble all into
the hopper, see, in soft blissful continuous stream, meal shall daily issue
for you, and the bread of life to mankind be sure!"
The aim of all reformers parliamentary and other, is still defined by them as
"just legislation," just laws with which de- [p.232]
finition who can quarrel! They will no have "class legislation," which is a
dreadfully bad thing; but "all-classes legislation," I suppose, which is the
right thing. Sure enough, just laws are an excellent attainment, the first
condition of all prosperity for human creatures; but few reflect how extremely
difficult such attainment is! Alas, could we once get laws which were just,
that is to say, which were the clear transcript of the Divine Laws of the
Universe itself; so that each man were incessantly admonished, under strict
penalties, by all men, to walk as the Eternal Maker had prescribed; and he alone
received honour whom the Maker had made honourable, and whom the Maker had made
disgraceful, disgrace: alas, were not here the very "Aristocracy" we seek? A new
veritable, Hierarchy of Heaven, approximately such in very truth bringing
Earth nearer and nearer to the blessed Law of Heaven. Heroic me, the Sent of
Heaven, once more bore rule: and on the throne of kings there sat splendent, not
King Hudson, or King Popinjay, but the Bravest of existing Men: and on the
gibbet there swing as a tragic pendulum, admonitory to Earth in the name of
Heaven, not some insignificant, abject, necessitous outcast, who had
violently, in his extreme misery and darkness, stolen a leg of mutton, but
veritably the Supreme Scoundrel of the Commonwealth, who in his insatiable greed
and bottomless atrocity had long, hoodwinking the poor world, gone himself, and
led multitudes to go, in the ways of gilded human baseness; seeking temporary
profit (scrip, first-class claret, social honour, and the like small ware),
where only eternal loss was possible; and who now, stripped of all his gildings
and cunningly-devised speciosities, swung there an ignominious detected
scoundrel; testifying aloud to all the earth: "Be not scoundrels, not even gilt
scoundrels, any one of you; for God, and not the Devil, is verily king, and this
is where it ends, if even this be the end of it!"
O Heaven, O Earth, what an "attainment" were here, could we but hope to see it!
Reformed Parliament, People's League, Hume-Cobden agitation, tremendous cheers,
new Battles of Naseby, French Revolution, and Horrors of French Revolution,
all things were cheap and light to the attainment of this. For this were in fact
the millennium; and indeed nothing less than this can be it.
But I say it is dreadfully difficult to attain! And though [p.233]
'class legislation' is not it, yet, alas, neither is 'all-class legislation' in
the least certain to be it. All classes, if they happen not to be wise, heroic
classes how, by the cunningest jumbling of them tether, will you ever get a
wisdom or heroism out of them? Once more let me remind you, it is impossible
forever. Unwisdom, contradiction to the gods: how, from the mere vamping
together of hostile voracities and opacities, never so dexterously or copiously
combined, can or could you expect anything else? Can any man bring a clean thing
out of an unclean? No man. Voracities and opacities, blended together in never
such cunningly devised proportions, will not yield noblenesses and
illuminations; they cannot do it. Parliamentary reform, extension of the
suffrage? Good Heavens, how by the mere enlargement of your circle of
ingredients, by the mere flinging-in of new opacities and voracities, will you
have a better chance to distil a wisdom from that foul cauldron, which is merely
bigger, not by hypothesis better? You will have a better chance to distil
zero from it; evil elements from all sides, now more completely
extinguishing one another, so that mutual destruction, like that of the Kilkenny
cats, a Parliament which produces parliamentary eloquence only, and no social
guidance, either bad or good, will be the issue, as we now in these
years sorrowfully see.
Universal suffrage: what a scheme to substitute for the revelation of God's
eternal Law, the official declaration of the account of heads! It is as if men
had abdicated their right to attempt holy resignation had agreed to give it up,
and take temporary peace and good agreement as a substitute. In all departments
of our affairs it is so, literary, moral, political, social; and in all of
them it is and remains eternally wrong. In every department, literary, moral,
political, social, the man that pretends to have what is angrily called a choice
of his own, which will mean at least some remnant of a feeling in him that
Nature and Fact do still claim a choice of their own, and are like to make it
good yet, such man is felt as a kind of interloper and dissocial person, who
obstructs the harmony of affairs, and is out of keeping with the
universal-suffrage arrangement that has been entered upon. Why not decide it by
dice? Universal suffrage for your oracle is equivalent to flat despair of
answer. Set up such [p.234] oracle, you proclaim to
all men: "Friends, there is in Nature no answer to your question; and you don't
believe in dice. Try to esteem this oracle a divine one, and be thankful that
you can thereby keep the peace, and go with an answer from the shrine of chaotic
Chance."
Peace is good; but woe to the cowardly caitiff of a man, or collection of
cowardly caitiffs, styling themselves Nation, that will have "peace" on these
terms! They will save their ignoble skin at the expense of their eternal loyalty
to the highest God. Peace? Better war to the knife, war till we all die, than
such a "peace." Reject it, my friend, I advise thee; silently swear by God
above, that, on earth below, thou for thy part never wilt accept it. Be it
forever far from us, my poor scattered friends. Let us fly to the rocks rather;
and silently appealing to the Eternal Heaven, await an hour which is full surely
coming, when we too shall have grown to a respectable "company of poor men,"
authorised to rally, and with celestial lightning, and with terrestrial steel
and such good weupons as there may be, spend all our blood upon it!
After all, why was not the Hudson Testimonial completed? As Moses lifted up the
Brazen Serpent in the wilderness, why was not Hudson's Statue lifted up? Once
more I say, it might have done us good. Thither too, in a sense, poison-stricken
mortals might have looked, and found some healing! For many reasons, this
alarming populace of British Statues wanted to have its chief. The liveliest
type of choice by Suffrage ever given. The consummate flower of universal
Anarchy in the commonwealth, and in the hearts of men: was not this Statue such
a flower; or do we look for one more perfect and consummate?
__________________________________
Of social Hierarchies, and Religions the parent of these, why speak, in presence
of social Anarchy such as is here symbolised! The Apotheosis of Hudson beckons
to still deeper gulfs on the religious side of our affairs; into which one
shudders to look down. For the eye rests only on the blackness of darkness; and,
shrunk to hissing whispers, inaudible except to the finer ear, come moanings of
the everlasting tempest, and tones of alti guai. Nor is a certain vertigo
quite absent from the strongest heads; a mad impulse to take the leap,
then, and dwell with Eternal Death, since it seems to be the rule [p.235]
at present! One hurried glance or two, holding well by what parapets-there
still are; and then let us hasten to begone.
Worship, what we call human religion, has undergone various phases in the
history of mankind. To the primitive man all Forces of Nature were divine:
either for propitiation or for admiration, many things, and in a sense all
things, demanded worship from him. But especially the Noble Human Soul was
divine to him; and announced, as it ever does, with direct impressiveness the
Inspiration of the Highest; demanding worship from the primitive man. Whereby,
as has been explained elsewhere, this latter form of worship, Hero-worship
as we call it, did, among the ancient peoples, attract and subdue to itself all
other forms of human worship; irradiating them all with its own perennial worth,
which indeed is all the worth they had, or that any worship can have. Human
worship everywhere, so far as there lay any worth in it, was of the nature of a
Hero-worship; this Universe wholly, this temporary Flame-image of the Eternal,
was one beautiful and terrible Energy of Heroisms, presided over by a Divine
Nobleness or Infinite Hero. Divine Nobleness forever friendly to the noble,
forever hostile to the ignoble: all manner of "moral rules," and well
"sanctioned" too, flowed naturally out of this primeval Intuition into Nature;
which, I believe, is still the true fountain of moral rules, though a
much-forgotten one at present; and indeed it seems to be the one unchangeable,
eternally indubitable "Intuition into Nature" we have yet heard of in
these parts.
To the primitive man, whether he looked at moral rule, or even at physical fact,
there was nothing not divine. Flame was the God Loki, &c.; this visible Universe
was wholly the vesture of an Invisible Infinite; every event that occurred in it
a symbol of the immediate presence of God. Which it intrinsically is, and
forever will be, let poor stupid mortals remember or forget it! The difference
is, not that God has withdrawn; but that men's minds have fallen hebetated,
stupid, that their hearts are dead, awakening only to some life about meal-time
and cookery-time; and their eyes are grown dim, blinkard, a kind of horn-eyes
like those of owls, available chiefly for catching mice.
Most excellent Fitzsmithytrough, it is a long time since I have stopped short in
admiring your stupendous railway mir- [p.236]acles. I
was obliged to strike work, and cease admiring in that direction. Very
stupendous indeed; considerable improvement in old roadways and wheel and-axle
carriages; velocity unexpectedly great, distances attainable ditto ditto: all
this is undeniable. But, alas, all this is still small deer for me, my excellent
Fitzsmithytrough; truly nothing more than an unexpected take of mice for the
owlish part of you and me. The distances, you unfortunate Fitz? The
distances of London to Aberdeen, to Ostend, to Vienna, are still infinitely
inadequate to me! Will you teach me the winged flight through Immensity, up to
the Throne dark with excess of bright? You unfortunate, you grin as an ape would
at such a question; you do not know that unless you can reach thither in some
effectual most veritable sense, you are a lost Fitzsmithytrough, doomed to
Hela's death-realm and the Abyss where mere brutes are buried. I do not want
cheaper cotton, swifter railways; I want what Novalis calls "God, Freedom,
Immortality": will swift railways, and sacrifices to Hudson, help me towards
that?
As propitiation or as admiration, "worship" still continues among men, will
always continue; and the phase it has in ally given epoch may be taken as the
ruling phenomenon which determines all others in that epoch. If Odin, who
"invented runes," or literatures, and rhythmic logical speech, and taught men to
despise death, is worshiped in one epoch; and if Hudson, who conquered railway
directors, and taught men to become suddenly rich by scrip, is worshiped in
another, the characters of these two epochs must differ a good deal! Nay, the
worst of some epochs is, they have along with their real worship an imaginary,
and are conscious only of the latter as worship. They keep a set of gods or
fetishes, reckoned respectable to which they mumble prayers, asking themselves
and others triumphantly, " Are not these respectable gods?" and all the while
their real worship, or heart's love and admiration, which alone is worship,
concentrates itself on quite other gods and fetishes, on Hudsons and scrips,
for instance, Thus is the miserable epoch rendered twice and tenfold miserable,
and in a manner lost beyond redemption; having superadded to its stupid
Idolatries, and brutish forgettings of the true God, which are leading it down
daily towards ruin, an immense Hypocrisy which is the quintessence of all
idolatries and misbeliefs and unbeliefs, and taken refuge under that, as under
[p.237] a thing safe! Europe generally has lain there
a long time; England I think for about two hundred years, spinning certain
cottons notably the while, and thinking it all right, which it was very far
from being. But the time of accounts, slowly advancing, has arrived at last for
Europe, and is knocking at the door of England too; and it will be seen whether
universal Make-belief can be the rule in English or human things; whether
respectable Hebrew and other fetishes, combined with real worship of Yorkshire
and other scrip, will answer the purpose here below or not!
It is certain, whatever gods or fetishes a man may have about him, and pay tithes to, and mumble prayers to, the real "religion" that is in him is his practical Hero-worship. Whom or what do you in your very soul admire, and strive to imitate and emulate; is it God's servant or the Devil's? Clearly this is the whole question. There is no other religion in the man which can be of the slightest consequence in comparison. Theologies, doxologies, orthodoxies, heterodoxies, are not of moment except as subsidiary towards a good issue in this; if they help well in it, they are good; if not well or at all, they are nothing or bad.
This also is certain, Nations that do their Hero-worship well are blessed and victorious; Nations that do it ill are accursed, and in all fibres of their business grow daily more so, till their miserable afflictive and offensive situation becomes a last unendurable to Heaven and to Earth, and the so-called Nation, now an unhappy Populace of Misbelievers (miscreants was the old name) bursts into revolutionary tumult, and either reforms or else annihilates itself. How otherwise? Know whom to honour and emulate and follow, know whom to dishonour and avoid, and coerce under, hatches, as a foul rebellious thing: this is all the Law and all the Prophets. All conceivable evangels, bibles, homiletics, liturgies and litanies, and temporal and spiritual law-books for a man or a people, issue practically there. Be right in that, essentially you are not wrong in anything; you read this Universe tolerably aright, and are in the way to interpret well what the will of its Maker is. Be wrong in that, had you liturgies the recommendablest in Nature, and bodies of divinity as big as an Indiaman, it helps you not a whit; you are wrong in all things.
[p.238]
How in anything can you be right? You read this Universe in the inmost meaning
of it wrong: gross idolatrous Misbelief is what I have to recognise in you; and,
superadded, such a faith in the saving virtue of that deadliest of vices,
Hypocrisy, as no People ever had before! Beautiful recommendable liturgies? Your
liturgies, the recommendablest in Nature, are to me alarming and distressing; a
turning of the Calmuck Prayer-mill, not my way of praying. This immense
asthmatic spiritual Hurdygurdy, issuing practically in a set of demigods like
Hudson, what is the good of it; why will you keep grinding it under poor men's
windows? Since Hudson is Vishnu, let the Shasters and Vedas be conformable to
him. Why chant divine psalms which belonged to a different Dispensation, and are
now become idle and far worse? Not melodious to me, such a chant, in such a
time! The sound of it, if you are not yet quite dead to spiritual sounds,
is frightful and bodeful. I say, this litany of yours, were the wretched
populace and population never so unanimous and loud in it, is a thing no God can
hear; your miserable "religion," as you call it, is an idolatry of the name of
Mumbojumbo, and I would advise you to discontinue it rather. You are infidels,
persons without faith; not believing, what is true but what is untrue;
Miscreants, as the old fathers well called you, appointed too inevitably,
unless you can repent and alter soon (of which I see no symptoms), to a fearful
doom.
"It was always so," you indolently say? No, Friend Heavyside. it was not always
so, and even till lately was never so; and I would much recommend you to sweep
that foolish notion, which you often din at me, and always keep about you as one
of your main consolations, quite out of your head. Once the notion was my own
too; I know the notion very well! And I will invite you to ask yourself in all
ways, Whether it is not possibly a rather torpid and poisonous, and likewise an
altogether incorrect and delusive notion? capable, I assure you, of being quite
swept out of a man's head; and greatly needing to be so, if the man would do any
"reform," or other useful work, in this his day!
Till such notion go about its business, there cannot even be the attempt towards
reform. Not so much as the pulling down, and melting into warming-pans, of those
poor Brazen [p.239] Representatives of Anarchy can be
accomplished, but they will stand there prophesying as now, "Here is the
'New Aristocracy' you want; down on your knees, ye Christian souls!" O my
friend, and after Hudson and the other Idols have quite gone to
warming-pans, have you computed what agonistic centuries await us, before any
"New Aristocracy" worth calling by the name of "real," can by likelihood prove
attainable? From the stormful trampling down of Sham Human Worth, and casting
it with wrath and scorn into the meltingpot, onward to the silent sad
repentant recognition of Real Human Worth, and the capability of again doing
that some pious reverence, some reverence which were not practically
worse than none: have you measured what an interval is there? centuries of
desperate wrestle against Earth and Hell, on the part of all the brave men that
are born. Too true this, though figuratively spoken! Perilous tempestuous
struggle and pilgrimage, continual marching battle with the mud-serpents of this
Earth and the demons of the Pit centuries of such a marching fight
(continually along the edge of Red Republic, too, and the Abyss) as brave men
were not often called to in History before! And the brave men will not yet so
much as gird on their harness? They sit indolently saying, "It is already all as
it can be, as it was wont to be; and universal suffrage and tremendous cheers
will manage it!"
Collins's old Peerage-Book, a dreadfully dull production, fills one with
unspeakable reflections. Beyond doubt a most dull production, one of the darkest
in the book kind ever realiscd by Chaos and man's brain; and it is properly all
we English have for a Biographical Dictionary; nay, if you think farther of
it, for a National Bible. Friend Heavyside is much astonished; but I see what I
mean here, and have long seen. Clear away the dust from your eyes, and you will
ask this question, What is the Bible of a Nation, the practically
credited God's-Message to a Nation? Is it not, beyond all else, the authentic
Biography of its Heroic Souls? This is the real record of the Appearances of God
in the History of a Nation; this, which all men to the very marrow of their
bones can believe, and which teaches all men what the nature of the
Universe, when you go to work in it, really is [p.240]
What the Universe was thought to be in Judea and other places, this too may be
very interesting to know: but what it is in England here where we live and have
our work to do, thiat is the interesting point. "The Universe?" M'Croudy
answers. "It is a huge dull Cattle-stall and St. Catherine's Wharf; with a few
pleasant apartments upstairs for those that can make money. Make money; and
don't bother about the Universe!" That is M'Croudy's notion; reckoned a quiet,
innocent and rather wholesome notion just now; yet clearly fitter for a
reflective pig than for a man; working continual damnation, therefore, however
quiet it be; and indeed I perceive it is one of the damnablest notions that ever
came into the head of any two-legged animal without feathers in this
world. That is M'Croudy's Bible; his Apology, poor fellow, for the Want
of a Bible.
But how, among so many Shakspeares, and thinkers, and heroic singers, our
National Bible should be in such a state; and how a poor dull Bookseller should
have been left, not to write in rhythmic coherency, worthy of a Poet and of
all our, Poets, but to shovel together, or indicate, in huge rubbish mountains
incondite as Chaos, the materials for writing such a Book; of Books for England:
this is abundantly amazing to me, and I wish much it could duly amaze us all.
Literature has no nobler task; in fact it has that one task, and except it be
idle rope-dancing, no other. "The highest problem of Literature, "says Novalis,
very justly, "is the Writing of a Bible."
Nevertheless, among these dust-mountains, with their antiquarian excerpts and
sepulchral brasses, it is astonishing what strange fragments you do turn up,
miraculous talismans to a reader that will think, windows through which an old
sunk world, as yet all built upon veracity, and full of rugged nobleness,
becomes visible; to the mute wonder of the modern mind. It struck me much, that
of these ancient peerages a very great majority had visibly had authentic
"heroes" for their founders; noble men, of whose worth no clearsighted King
could be in doubt; and that, in their descendants too, there did not cease a
strain of heroism for some time, the peership generally dying out, and
disappearing, not long after that ceased. What a world, that old sunk one; Real
Governors governing in it; Shams not yet anywhere recognised as toler- [p.241]
able in it! A world whose practical president was not Chaos with ballot-boxes,
whose outcome was not Anarchy plus a street-constable. In how high and
true a sense, the Almighty with continual enforcement of his Laws still presided
there; and in all things as yet there was some degree of blessedness and
nobleness there!
One's heart is sore to think how far, how very far all this has vanished from
us; how the very tradition of it has disappeared; and it has ceased to be
credible, to seem desirable. Till the like of it return, yes, my
constitutional friend, such is the sad fact, till the like of it, in new form,
adapted to the new times, be again achieved by us; we are not properly a society
at all; we are a lost gregarious horde, with Kings of Scrip on this hand, and
Famishing Connaughts and Distressed Needlewomen on that, presided over by the
Anarch Old. A lost horde, who, in bitter feeling of the intolerable injustice
that presses upon all men, will not long be able to continue even gregarious;
but will have to split into street-barricades, and internecine battle with one
another; and to fight, if wisdom for some new real Peerage be not granted
us, till we all die, mutually butchered, and so rest, so if not otherwise!
Till the time of James the First, I find that real heroic merit more or less was
actually the origin of peerages; never, till towards the end of that bad reign
were peerages bargained for, or bestowed on men palpably of no worth except
their money or connexion. But the evil practice, once begun, spread rapidly; and
now the Peerage-Book is what we see; a thing miraculous in the other extreme.
A kind of Proteus' flock, very curious to meet upon the lofty mountains, so many
of them being natives of the deep! Our menagerie of live Peers in Parliament
is like that of our Brazen Statues in the market-place; the selection seemingly
is made much in the same way, and with the same degree of felicity, and
succcssful accuracy in choice. Our one steady regulated supply is the class
definable as Supreme Stump-Orators in the Lawyer department: the class called
Chancellors flows by something like fixed conduits towards the Peerage; the
rest, like our Brazen Statues, come by popular rule-of-thumb.
Stump-orators, supreme or other, are not beautiful to me in these days: but the
immense power of Lawyers among us is sufficiently intelligible. I perceive, it
proceeds from two[p.242] causes. First, they preside
over the management and security of "Property," which is our God at present;
they are thus properly our Pontiffs, the highest Priests we have. Then
furthermore, they possess the talent most valued, that of the Tongue; and seem
to us the most gifted of our intelligences, thereby provoking a spontaneous
loyalty and worship.
What think you of a country whose kings go by genealogy, and are the descendants
of successful Lawyers? A poor weather-worn, tanned, curried, wind-dried human
creature, called a Chancellor, all or almost all gone to horsehair and
officiality; the whole existence of him tanned, by long maceration, public
exposure, tugging and manipulation, to the toughness of Yorkshire leather,
meseems I have seen a beautifuller man! Not a leather man would I by preference
appoint to beget my kings. Not lovely to me is the leather species of men; to
whose tanned soul God's Universe has become a jangling logic-cockpit and little
other. If indeed it have not become far less and worse: for the wretched tanned
Chancellor, I am told, is usually acquainted with the art of lying too,
considerable part of his trade, as I have been informed, is the talent of lying
in a way that cannot be laid hold of; a dreadful trick to learn! Out of such a
man there cannot be expected much "revelation of the Beautiful," I should say.
O Bull, were I in your place, I would try either to get other Peers or else to
abolish the concern, which latter indeed, by your acquiescence in such
nominations, and by many other symptoms, I judge to be unconsciously your fixed
intention
You have seen many Chancellors made Peers in these late generations, Mr. Bull.
And now tell me, Which was the Chancellor you did really love or honour, to any
remarkable degree? Alas, you never within authentic memory loved any of them;
you couldn't, no man could! You lazily stared with some semblance of admiration
at the big wig, huge purse, reputation for divine talent, and sublime
proficiency in the art of tongue-fence: but to love him, that, Mr. Bull, was
once for all a thing you could not manage. Who of the seed of Adam could? From
the time of Chancellor Bacon downwards (and beyond that your Chancellors are
dark to you as the Muftis of Constantinople), I challenge you to show me one
Chancellor for whom, had the wigs, purses, reputations &c. been peeled off him,
who would have given his weight in Smithfield beef sinking offal. You [p.243]
unhappy Bull, governed by Kings you have not the smallest regard for, wandering
in an extinct world of wearisome, oppressive and expensive shadows, nothing
real in it but the Smithfield beef, nothing preternatural in it but the
Chartisms and threatened street-barricades, and this not celestial but infernal!
Sure enough, I find, O Heavyside, England once was a Hierarchy; as every Human
Society, not either dead or else hastening towards death, always is: but it has
long ceased to be so to any tolerable degree of perfection; and is now, by its
Hudson and other Testimonials, testifying in a silent way to the thoughtful,
what otherwise, by its thousandfold anarchic depravities, miseries, god-forgettings
and open devil-worships it has long loudly taught them to expect, that we are
now wending towards the culmination in this particular. That to the modern
English populations, Supreme Hero and Supreme Scoundrel are, perhaps as nearly
as is possible to human creatures, indistinguishable. That it is totally
uncertain, perhaps even the odds against you, whether the figure whom said
population mount to the place of honour, is not in Nature and Fact dishonourable;
whether the man to whom they raise a column does not deserve a coal-shaft. And
in fine, poor devils, that their universal suffrage, as spoken, as acted,
meditated, and imagined; universal suffrage, I do not say ballot-boxed and
cunningly constitutionalised, but boiled, distilled, digested, quintessenced,
till you get into the very heart's heart of it, is, to the rational soul,
except for stock-exchange, and the like very humble practical purposes, worth
express zero, or nearly so. I think probably as near zero as the
unassisted human faculties and destinies ever came, or are like to come.
Hierarchy? O Heaven! If Chaos himself sat umpire, what better could he
do? Here are a set of human demigods, as if chosen to his hand. Hierarchy with a
vengeance; if instead of God, a vulpine beggarly Beelzebub or swollen Mammon
were our Supreme Hieros or Holy, this would be a Hierarchy! I say, if you
want Chaos for your master, adopt this; if you don't, I beg you make haste to
adopt some other; for this is the broad way to him! The Eternal Anarch, with his
old waggling addlehead full of mere windy rumour, and his old insatiable paunch
full of mere hunger and indigestion tragically [p.244]
blended, and the hissing discord of all the Four Elements persuasively pleading
to him; he, set to choose, would be vote apt to vote for such a set of
demigods to you.
__________________________________
As to the Statues, I know they are but symptoms of Anarchy; it is not they, it
is the Anarchy, that one is anxious to see abated. Remedy for the Statues will
be possible; and, as a small help, undoubtedly it too, in the mean time, is
desirable. Every symptom you drive-in being a curtailment of the malady, by all
means cure this Statue-building if you can! It will be one folly and misery
less.
Government is loth to interfere with the pursuits of any class of citizens; and
oftenest looks on in silence while follies are committed. But Government does
interfere to prevent afflictive accumulations on the streets, malodorous or
other unsanitary public procedures of an extensive sort; regulates gullydrains,
cesspools; prohibits the piling-up of dungheaps, and is especially strict on the
matter of indecent exposures. Wherever the health of the citizens is concerned,
much more where their souls' health, and as it were their very salvation, is
concerned, all Governments that are not chimerical make haste to interfere.
Now if dungheaps laid on the streets, afflictive to the mere nostrils, are a
subject for interference, what, we ask, are high columns, raised by prurient
stupidity and public delusion, to blockheads whose memory does in eternal fact
deserve the sinking of a coal shaft rather? Give to every one what he deserves,
what really is his: in all scenes and situations thou shalt do that, or in
very truth woe will betide thee, as sure as thou art living, and as thy Maker
lives. Blockhead, this big adventurer swollen to the edge of bursting, he is not
"great" and honourable; he is huge and abominable! Thou shalt honour the right
man, and not honour the wrong, under penalties of an alarming nature. Honour
Barabbas the Robber, thou shalt sell old-clothes through the cities of the
world; shalt accumulate sordid moneys, with a curse on every coin of them, and
be spit upon for eighteen hundred years. Raise statues to the swollen adventurer
as if he were great, sacrifice oblations to the King of Scrip, unfortunate
mortals, you will dearly pay for it yet. Quiet as Na- [p.245]
ture's countinghouse and scrip-ledgers are, no faintest item is ever blotted out
from them, for or against; and to the last doit that account too will have to be
settled. Rigorous as Destiny; she is Destiny. Chancery or Fetter Lane
is soft to her, when the day of settlement comes. With her. in the way of
abatement, of oblivion, neither gods nor man prevail. "Abatement? That is not
our way of doing business; the time has run out, the debt it appears is due."
Will the law of gravitation "abate" for you? Gravitation acts at the rate of
sixteen feet per second, in spite of sll prayer. Were it the crash of a Solar
System, or the fall of a Yarmouth Herring, all one to gravitation.
Is the fall of a stone certain; and the fruit of an unwisdom doubtful? You
unfortunate beings! Have you forgotten it; in this immense improvement of
machinery, cheapening of cotton, and general astonishing progress of the species
lately? With such extension of journals, human cultures, universities, periodic
and other literatures, mechanics' institutes, reform of prison-discipline,
abolition of capital punishment, enfranchisement by ballot, report of
parliamentary speeches, and singing for the million? You did not know that the
Universe had laws of right and wrong; you fancied the Universe was an
oblivious greedy blockhead, like one of yourselves; attentive to scrip mainly;
and willing, where there was no practical scrip, to forget and forgive? And so,
amid such universal blossoming-forth of useful knowledges, miraculous to the
thinking editor everywhere, the soul of all "knowledge," not knowing which a
man is dark and reduced to the condition of a beaver, has been omitted by you?
You have omitted it, and you should have included it! The thinking editor never
missed it, so busy wondering and worshiping elsewhere; but it is not
here.
And alas, apart from editors, are there not men appointed specially keep you in
mind of it; solemnly set apart for that object, thousands of years ago! Crabbe,
descanting 'on the so-called Christian Clerus,' has this wild passage:
"Legions of them, in their black or other gowns, I still meet in every country;
masquerading, in strange costume of body, and still stranger of soul; mumming,
primming, grimacing, poor devils, shamming, and endeavouring not to sham: that
is the sad fact. Brave men many of them, after their sort; and in a position
which we may, admit to be wonderful and dreadful! [p.246]
On the outside of their heads some singular head gear, tulip-mitre, felt
coalscuttle, purple hat; and in the inside, I must say, such a Theory of God
Almighty's Universe as I, for my share, am right thankful to have no concern
with at all! I think, on the whole, as broken-winged, self-strangled, monstrous
a mass of incoherent incredibilities, as ever dwelt in the human brain before. O
God, giver of Light, hater of Darkness, of Hypocrisy and Cowardice, how long,
how long!"
"For two centuries now it lasts. The men whom God has made, whole nations and
generations of them, are steeped in Hypocrisy from their birth upwards; taught
that external varnish is the chief duty of man, that the vice which is the
deepest in Gehenna is the virtue highest in Heaven. Out of which, do you ask
what follows? Look round on a world all bristling with insurrectionary pikes;
Kings and Papas flying like detected coiners; and in their stead Icaria, Red
Republic, new religion of the Anti-Virgin, Literature of Desperation curiously
conjoined with Phallus-Worship, too clearly heralding centuries of bottomless
Anarchy: hitherto one in the million looking with mournful recognition on it,
silently with sad thoughts too unutterable; and to help in healing it not one
anywhere hitherto."
But as to Statues, I really think the Woods-and-Forests ought to interfere. When
a company of persons have determined to set up a Brazen Image, there decidedly
arises, besides the question of their own five-pound subscriptions, which men of
spirit and money-capital without employment, and with a prospect of seeing their
names in the Newspapers at the cheap price of five pounds, are very prompt with,
another question, not nearly so easy of solution. Namely, this quite
preliminary question: Will it permanently profit mankind to have such a Hero as
this of yours set up for their admiration, for their imitation and emulation; or
will it, so far as they do not reject and with success disregard it altogether,
unspeakably tend to damage and disprofit them? In a word, does this Hero's
memory deserve a high column; are you sure it does not deserve a deep coalshaft
rather? This is an entirely fundamental question! Till this question be answered
well in the affirmative, there ought to be a total stop of progress; the
misguided citizens ought to be admonished, and even gently constrained, to [p.247]
take back their five-pound notes; to desist from their rash deleterious
enterprise, and retire to their affairs, a repentant body of misguided citizens.
But farther still, and supposing the first question perfectly disposed of, there
comes a second, grave too, though much less peremptory: Is this Statue of yours
a worthy commemoration of a sacred man? Is it so excellent in point of Art that
we can, with credit, set it up in our market-places as a respectable approach to
the Ideal? Or, alas, is it not such an amorphous brazen sooterkin, bred of
prurient heat and darkness, as falls, if well seen into, far below the Real? The
Real, if you will stand by it, is respectable. The coarsest hob-nailed pair of
shoes, if honestly made according to the laws of fact and leather, are not ugly:
they are honest, and fit for their object; the highest eye may look on them
without displeasure, nay with a kind of satisfaction. This rude packing-case, it
is faithfully made; square to the rule, and formed with rough and ready strength
against injury; fit for its use; not a pretentious hypocrisy, but a
modest serviceable fact; whoever pleases to look upon it, will find the
image of a humble manfulness in it, and will pass on with some infinitesimal
impulse to thank the gods.
But this your "Ideal," my misguided fellow-citizens? Good Heavens, are you in
the least aware what damage, in the very sources of their existence, men get
from Cockney Sooterkins saluting, them publicly as models of Beauty? I
charitably feel you have not the smallest notion of it, or you would shriek at
the proposal! Can you, my misguided friends, think it humane to set up, in its
present uncomfortable form, this blotch of mismolten copper and zinc, out of
which good warming-pans might be made? That all men should see this; innocent
young creatures, still in arms, be taught to think this beautiful; and perhaps
women in an interesting situation look up to it as they pass? I put it to your
religious feeling. to your principles as men and fathers of families!
These questions the Woods-and-Forests, or some other Public Tribunal constituted
for the purpose, really ought to ask, in a deliberate speaking manner, on the
part of the speechless suffering Populations: it is the preliminary of all
useful Statue-building. Till both these questions are well answered, the
Woods-and Forests should refuse permission; advise the misguided citizens to go
home and repent. Really, if this [p.248] Statue-humour
go on, and grow as it has lately done, there will be such a Public-Statue Board
requisite; or the Woods-and-Forests will have to interfere with such imperfect
law as now is.
The Woods-and-Forests, or if not they, then the Commissioners of Sewers,
Sanitary Board, Scavenger Board, Cleansing Committee, or whoever holds or call
usurp a little of the aedile authority, cannot some of them, in the name of
sense and common decency, interfere at least thus far? Namely, to admonish the
misguided citizens, subscribers to the next Brazen Monster, or sad sculptural
solecism, the emblem of far sadder moral ones and exhort them, three successive
times, to make warming-pans of it and repent; or failing that, finding them
obstinate, to say with authority: "Well then, persist; set up your Brazen
Calf, ye misguided citizens, and worship it, you, since you will and can. But
observe, let it be done in secret: not in public; we say, in secret, at your
peril! You have pleased to create a new Monster into this world; but to make him
patent to public view, we for our part beg not to please. Observe, therefore.
Build a high enough brick case or joss-house for your Brazen calf; with
undiaphanous walls, and lighted by sky-windows only: put your Monster into that,
and keep him there. Thither go at your pleasure, there assemble yourselves, and
worship your bellyful, you absurd idolaters; ruin your own souls only. and leave
the poor Population alone; the poor speechless unconscious Population whom we
are bound to protect, and will!" To this extent, I think the
Woods-and-Forests might reasonably interfere.
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