Latter Day Pamphlets
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Thomas Carlyle >> Latter Day Pamphlets
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So soon as the State attacks that tremendous cloaca of Pauperism,
which will choke the world if it be not attacked, the State will
find its real functions very different indeed from what it had
long supposed them! The State is a reality, and not a
dramaturgy; it exists here to render existence possible,
existence desirable and noble, for the State's subjects. The
State, as it gets into the track of its real work, will find that
same expand into whole continents of new unexpected, most blessed
activity; as its dramatic functions, declared superfluous, more
and more fall inert, and go rushing like huge torrents of extinct
exuviae, dung and rubbish, down to the Abyss forever. O Heaven,
to see a State that knew a little why it was there, and on what
ground, in this Year 1850, it could pretend to exist, in so
extremely earnest a world as ours is growing! The British State,
if it will be the crown and keystone of our British Social
Existence, must get to recognize, with a veracity very long
unknown to it, what the real objects and indispensable
necessities of our Social Existence are. Good Heavens, it is not
prevenient grace, or the color of the Bishop's nightmare, that is
pinching us; it is the impossibility to get along any farther for
mountains of accumulated dung and falsity and horror; the total
closing-up of noble aims from every man,--of any aim at all, from
many men, except that of rotting out in Idle Workhouses an
existence below that of beasts!
Suppose the State to have fairly started its "Industrial
Regiments of the New Era," which alas, are yet only beginning to
be talked of,--what continents of new real work opened out, for
the Home and all other Public Offices among us! Suppose the Home
Office looking out, as for life and salvation, for proper men to
command these "Regiments." Suppose the announcement were
practically made to all British souls that the want of wants,
more indispensable than any jewel in the crown, was that of men
_able to command men_ in ways of industrial and moral well-doing;
that the State would give its very life for such men; that such
men _were_ the State; that the quantity of them to be found in
England lamentably small at present, was the exact measure of
England's worth,--what a new dawn of everlasting day for all
British souls! Noble British soul, to whom the gods have given
faculty and heroism, what men call genius, here at last is a
career for thee. It will not be needful now to swear fealty to
the Incredible, and traitorously cramp thyself into a cowardly
canting play-actor in God's Universe; or, solemnly forswearing
that, into a mutinous rebel and waste bandit in thy generation:
here is an aim that is clear and credible, a course fit for a
man. No need to become a tormenting and self-tormenting
mutineer, banded with rebellious souls, if thou wouldst live; no
need to rot in suicidal idleness; or take to platform preaching,
and writing in Radical Newspapers, to pull asunder the great
Falsity in which thou and all of us are choking. The great
Falsity, behold it has become, in the very heart of it, a great
Truth of Truths; and invites thee and all brave men to cooperate
with it in transforming all the body and the joints into the
noble likeness of that heart! Thrice-blessed change. The State
aims, once more, with a true aim; and has loadstars in the
eternal Heaven. Struggle faithfully for it; noble is _this_
struggle; thou too, according to thy faculty, shalt reap in due
time, if thou faint not. Thou shalt have a wise command of men,
thou shalt be wisely commanded by men,--the summary of all
blessedness for a social creature here below. The sore struggle,
never to be relaxed, and not forgiven to any son of man, is once
more a noble one; glory to the Highest, it is now once more a
true and noble one, wherein a man can afford to die! Our path is
now again Heavenward. Forward, with steady pace, with drawn
weapons, and unconquerable hearts, in the name of God that made
us all!--
Wise obedience and wise command, I foresee that the regimenting
of Pauper Banditti into Soldiers of Industry is but the beginning
of this blessed process, which will extend to the topmost heights
of our Society; and, in the course of generations, make us all
once more a Governed Commonwealth, and _Civitas Dei_, if it
please God! Waste-land Industrials succeedingt, other kinds of
Industry, as cloth-making, shoe-making, plough-making,
spade-making, house-building,--in the end, all kinds of Industry
whatsoever, will be found capable of regimenting.
Mill-operatives, all manner of free operatives, as yet
unregimented, nomadic under private masters, they, seeing such
example and its blessedness, will say: "Masters, you must
regiment us a little; make our interests with you permanent a
little, instead of temporary and nomadic; we will enlist with
the State otherwise!" This will go on, on the one hand, while
the State-operation goes on, on the other: thus will all Masters
of Workmen, private Captains of Industry, be forced to
incessantly co-operate with the State and its public Captains;
they regimenting in their way, the State in its way, with
ever-widening field; till their fields _meet_ (so to speak) and
coalesce, and there be no unregimented worker, or such only as
are fit to remain unregimented, any more.--O my friends, I
clearly perceive this horrible cloaca of Pauperism, wearing
nearly bottomless now, is the point where we must begin. Here,
in this plainly unendurable portion of the general quagmire, the
lowest point of all, and hateful even to M'Croudy, must our main
drain begin: steadily prosecuting that, tearing that along with
Herculean labor and divine fidelity, we shall gradually drain the
entire Stygian swamp, and make it all once more a fruitful
field!
For the State, I perceive, looking out with right sacred
earnestness for persons able to command, will straightway also
come upon the question: "What kind of schools and seminaries, and
teaching and also preaching establishments have I, for the
training of young souls to take command and to yield obedience?
Wise command, wise obedience: the capability of these two is the
net measure of culture, and human virtue, in every man; all good
lies in the possession of these two capabilities; all evil,
wretchedness and ill-success in the want of these. He is a good
man that can command and obey; he that cannot is a bad. If my
teachers and my preachers, with their seminaries, high schools
and cathedrals, do train men to these gifts, the thing they are
teaching and preaching must be true; if they do not, not
true!"
The State, once brought to its veracities by the thumb-screw in
this manner, what will it think of these same seminaries and
cathedrals! I foresee that our Etons and Oxfords with their
nonsense-verses, college-logics, and broken crumbs of mere
_speech_,--which is not even English or Teutonic speech, but old
Grecian and Italian speech, dead and buried and much lying out of
our way these two thousand years last past,--will be found a most
astonishing seminary for the training of young English souls to
take command in human Industries, and act a valiant part under
the sun! The State does not want vocables, but manly wisdoms and
virtues: the State, does it want parliamentary orators, first of
all, and men capable of writing books? What a rag-fair of
extinct monkeries, high-piled here in the very shrine of our
existence, fit to smite the generations with atrophy and
beggarly paralysis,--as we see it do! The Minister of Education
will not want for work, I think, in the New Downing Street!
How it will go with Souls'-Overseers, and what the _new_ kind
will be, we do not prophesy just now. Clear it is, however, that
the last finish of the State's efforts, in this operation of
regimenting, will be to get the _true_ Souls'-Overseers set over
men's souls, to regiment, as the consummate flower of all, and
constitute into some Sacred Corporation, bearing authority and
dignity in their generation, the Chosen of the Wise, of the
Spiritual and Devout-minded, the Reverent who deserve reverence,
who are as the Salt of the Earth;--that not till this is done can
the State consider its edifice to have reached the first story,
to be safe for a moment, to be other than an arch without the
keystones, and supported hitherto on mere wood. How will this be
done? Ask not; let the second or the third generation after this
begin to ask!--Alas, wise men do exist, born duly into the world
in every current generation; but the getting of _them_ regimented
is the highest pitch of human Polity, and the feat of all feats
in political engineering:--impossible for us, in this poor age,
as the building of St. Paul's would be for Canadian Beavers,
acquainted only with the architecture of fish-dams, and with no
trowel but their tail.
Literature, the strange entity so called,--that indeed is here.
If Literature continue to be the haven of expatriated
spiritualisms, and have its Johnsons, Goethes and _true_
Archbishops of the World, to show for itself as heretofore, there
may be hope in Literature. If Literature dwindle, as is
probable, into mere merry-andrewism, windy twaddle, and feats of
spiritual legerdemain, analogous to rope-dancing, opera-dancing,
and street-fiddling with a hat carried round for halfpence, or
for guineas, there will be no hope in Literature. What if our
next set of Souls'-Overseers were to be _silent_ ones very
mainly?--Alas, alas, why gaze into the blessed continents and
delectable mountains of a Future based on _truth_, while as yet
we struggle far down, nigh suffocated in a slough of lies,
uncertain whether or how we shall be able to climb at all!
Who will begin the long steep journey with us; who of living
statesmen will snatch the standard, and say, like a hero on the
forlorn-hope for his country, Forward! Or is there none; no one
that can and dare? And our lot too, then, is Anarchy by
barricade or ballot-box, and Social Death?--We will not think so.
Whether Sir Robert Peel will undertake the Reform of Downing
Street for us, or any Ministry or Reform farther, is not known.
He, they say, is getting old, does himself recoil from it, and
shudder at it; which is possible enough. The clubs and coteries
appear to have settled that he surely will not; that this
melancholy wriggling seesaw of red-tape Trojans and Protectionist
Greeks must continue its course till--what _can_ happen, my
friends, if this go on continuing?
And yet, perhaps, England has by no means so settled it. Quit
the clubs and coteries, you do not hear two rational men speak
long together upon politics, without pointing their inquiries
towards this man. A Minister that will attack the Augeas Stable
of Downing Street, and begin producing a real Management, no
longer an imaginary one, of our affairs; _he_, or else in few
years Chartist Parliament and the Deluge come: that seems the
alternative. As I read the omens, there was no man in my time
more authentically called to a post of difficulty, of danger, and
of honor than this man. The enterprise is ready for him, if he
is ready for it. He has but to lift his finger in this
enterprise, and whatsoever is wise and manful in England will
rally round him. If the faculty and heart for it be in him, he,
strangely and almost tragically if we look upon his history, is
to have leave to try it; he now, at the eleventh hour, has the
opportunity for such a feat in reform as has not, in these late
generations, been attempted by all our reformers put
together.
As for Protectionist jargon, who in these earnest days would
occupy many moments of his time with that? "A Costermonger in
this street," says Crabbe, "finding lately that his rope of
onions, which he hoped would have brought a shilling, was to go
for only sevenpence henceforth, burst forth into lamentation,
execration and the most pathetic tears. Throwing up the window,
I perceived the other costermongers preparing impatiently to pack
this one out of their company as a disgrace to it, if he would
not hold his peace and take the market-rate for his onions. I
looked better at this Costermonger. To my astonished
imagination, a star-and-garter dawned upon the dim figure of the
man; and I perceived that here was no Costermonger to be expelled
with ignominy, but a sublime goddess-born Ducal Individual, whom
I forbear to name at this moment! What an omen;--nay to my
astonished imagination, there dawned still fataler omens.
Surely, of all human trades ever heard of, the trade of Owning
Land in England ought _not_ to bully us for drink--money just
now!"
"Hansard's Debates," continues Crabbe farther on, "present many
inconsistencies of speech; lamentable unveracities uttered in
Parliament, by one and indeed by all; in which sad list Sir
Robert Peel stands for his share among others. Unveracities not
a few were spoken in Parliament: in fact, to one with a sense of
what is called God's truth, it seemed all one unveracity, a
talking from the teeth outward, not as the convictions but as
the expediencies and inward astucities directed; and, in the
sense of God's _truth_, I have heard no true word uttered in
Parliament at all. Most lamentable unveracities continually
_spoken_ in Parliament, by almost every one that had to open his
mouth there. But the largest veracity ever _done_ in Parliament
in our time, as we all know, was of this man's doing;--and that,
you will find, is a very considerable item in the
calculation!"
Yes, and I believe England in her dumb way remembers that too.
And "the Traitor Peel" can very well afford to let innumerable
Ducal Costermongers, parliamentary Adventurers, and lineal
representatives of the Impenitent Thief, say all their say about
him, and do all their do. With a virtual England at his back,
and an actual eternal sky above him, there is not much in the
total net-amount of that. When the master of the horse rides
abroad, many dogs in the village bark; but he pursues his journey
all the same.
[May 1, 1850.] No. V. STUMP-ORATOR.
It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of
educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to
consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the
faculty of eloquent speech. Our earliest schoolmasters teach us,
as the one gift of culture they have, the art of spelling and
pronouncing, the rules of correct speech; rhetorics, logics
follow, sublime mysteries of grammar, whereby we may not only
speak but write. And onward to the last of our schoolmasters in
the highest university, it is still intrinsically grammar, under
various figures grammar. To speak in various languages, on
various things, but on all of them to speak, and appropriately
deliver ourselves by tongue or pen,--this is the sublime goal
towards which all manner of beneficent preceptors and learned
professors, from the lowest hornbook upwards, are continually
urging and guiding us. Preceptor or professor, looking over his
miraculous seedplot, seminary as he well calls it, or crop of
young human souls, watches with attentive view one organ of his
delightful little seedlings growing to be men,--the tongue. He
hopes we shall all get to speak yet, if it please Heaven. "Some
of you shall be book-writers, eloquent review-writers, and
astonish mankind, my young friends: others in white neckcloths
shall do sermons by Blair and Lindley Murray, nay by Jeremy
Taylor and judicious Hooker, and be priests to guide men
heavenward by skilfully brandished handkerchief and the torch of
rhetoric. For others there is Parliament and the election
beer-barrel, and a course that leads men very high indeed; these
shall shake the senate-house, the Morning Newspapers, shake the
very spheres, and by dexterous wagging of the tongue disenthrall
mankind, and lead our afflicted country and us on the way we are
to go. The way if not where noble deeds are done, yet where
noble words are spoken,--leading us if not to the real Home of
the Gods, at least to something which shall more or less
deceptively resemble it!"
So fares it with the son of Adam, in these bewildered epochs; so,
from the first opening of his eyes in this world, to his last
closing of them, and departure hence. Speak, speak, oh
speak;--if thou have any faculty, speak it, or thou diest and it
is no faculty! So in universities, and all manner of dames' and
other schools, of the very highest class as of the very lowest;
and Society at large, when we enter there, confirms with all its
brilliant review-articles, successful publications, intellectual
tea-circles, literary gazettes, parliamentary eloquences, the
grand lesson we had. Other lesson in fact we have none, in these
times. If there be a human talent, let it get into the tongue,
and make melody with that organ. The talent that can say nothing
for itself, what is it? Nothing; or a thing that can do mere
drudgeries, and at best make money by railways.
All this is deep-rooted in our habits, in our social, educational
and other arrangements; and all this, when we look at it
impartially, is astonishing. Directly in the teeth of all this it
may be asserted that speaking is by no means the chief faculty a
human being can attain to; that his excellence therein is by no
means the best test of his general human excellence, or
availability in this world; nay that, unless we look well, it is
liable to become the very worst test ever devised for said
availability. The matter extends very far, down to the very
roots of the world, whither the British reader cannot
conveniently follow me just now; but I will venture to assert the
three following things, and invite him to consider well what
truth he can gradually find in them:--
First, that excellent speech, even speech _really_ excellent, is
not, and never was, the chief test of human faculty, or the
measure of a man's ability, for any true function whatsoever; on
the contrary, that excellent _silence_ needed always to accompany
excellent speech, and was and is a much rarer and more difficult
gift.
_Secondly_, that really excellent speech--which I, being
possessed of the Hebrew Bible or Book, as well as of other books
in my own and foreign languages, and having occasionally heard a
wise man's word among the crowd of unwise, do almost unspeakably
esteem, as a human gift--is terribly apt to get confounded with
its counterfeit, sham-excellent speech! And furthermore, that if
really excellent human speech is among the best of human things,
then sham-excellent ditto deserves to be ranked with the very
worst. False speech,--capable of becoming, as some one has said,
the falsest and basest of all human things:--put the case, one
were listening to _that_ as to the truest and noblest! Which,
little as we are conscious of it, I take to be the sad lot of
many excellent souls among us just now. So many as admire
parliamentary eloquence, divine popular literature, and such
like, are dreadfully liable to it just now: and whole nations
and generations seem as if getting themselves _asphyxiaed_,
constitutionally into their last sleep, by means of it just
now!
For alas, much as we worship speech on all hands, here is a
_third_ assertion which a man may venture to make, and invite
considerate men to reflect upon: That in these times, and for
several generations back, there has been, strictly considered, no
really excellent speech at all, but sham-excellent merely; that
is to say, false or quasi-false speech getting itself admired and
worshipped, instead of detested and suppressed. A truly
alarming predicament; and not the less so if we find it a quite
pleasant one for the time being, and welcome the advent of
asphyxia, as we would that of comfortable natural sleep;--as, in
so many senses, we are doing! Surly judges there have been who
did not much admire the "Bible of Modern Literature," or anything
you could distil from it, in contrast with the ancient Bibles;
and found that in the matter of speaking, our far best
excellence, where that could be obtained, was excellent silence,
which means endurance and exertion, and good work with lips
closed; and that our tolerablest speech was of the nature of
honest commonplace introduced where indispensable, which only set
up for being brief and true, and could not be mistaken for
excellent.
These are hard sayings for many a British reader, unconscious of
any damage, nay joyfully conscious to himself of much profit,
from that side of his possessions. Surely on this side, if on no
other, matters stood not ill with him? The ingenuous arts had
softened his manners; the parliamentary eloquences supplied him
with a succedaneum for government, the popular literatures with
the finer sensibilities of the heart: surely on this _wind_ward
side of things the British reader was not ill off?--Unhappy
British reader!
In fact, the spiritual detriment we unconsciously suffer, in
every province of our affairs, from this our prostrate respect to
power of speech is incalculable. For indeed it is the natural
consummation of an epoch such as ours. Given a general
insincerity of mind for several generations, you will certainly
find the Talker established in the place of honor; and the Doer,
hidden in the obscure crowd, with activity lamed, or working
sorrowfully forward on paths unworthy of him. All men are
devoutly prostrate, worshipping the eloquent talker; and no man
knows what a scandalous idol he is. Out of whom in the mildest
manner, like comfortable natural rest, comes mere asphyxia and
death everlasting! Probably there is not in Nature a more
distracted phantasm than your commonplace eloquent speaker, as he
is found on platforms, in parliaments, on Kentucky stumps, at
tavern-dinners, in windy, empty, insincere times like ours. The
"excellent Stump-orator," as our admiring Yankee friends define
him, he who in any occurrent set of circumstances can start
forth, mount upon his "stump," his rostrum, tribune, place in
parliament, or other ready elevation, and pour forth from him his
appropriate "excellent speech," his interpretation of the said
circumstances, in such manner as poor windy mortals round him
shall cry bravo to,--he is not an artist I can much admire, as
matters go! Alas, he is in general merely the windiest mortal
of them all; and is admired for being so, into the bargain. Not
a windy blockhead there who kept silent but is better off than
this excellent stump-orator. Better off, for a great many
reasons; for this reason, were there no other: the silent one is
not admired; the silent suspects, perhaps partly admits, that he
is a kind of blockhead, from which salutary self-knowledge the
excellent stump-orator is debarred. A mouthpiece of Chaos to
poor benighted mortals that lend ear to him as to a voice from
Cosmos, this excellent stump-orator fills me with amazement. Not
empty these musical wind-utterances of his; they are big with
prophecy; they announce, too audibly to me, that the end of many
things is drawing nigh!
Let the British reader consider it a little; he too is not a
little interested in it. Nay he, and the European reader in
general, but he chiefly in these days, will require to consider
it a great deal,--and to take important steps in consequence by
and by, if I mistake not. And in the mean while, sunk as he
himself is in that bad element, and like a jaundiced man
struggling to discriminate yellow colors,--he will have to
meditate long before he in any measure get the immense meanings
of the thing brought home to him; and discern, with
astonishment, alarm, and almost terror and despair, towards what
fatal issues, in our Collective Wisdom and elsewhere, this notion
of talent meaning eloquent speech, so obstinately entertained
this long while, has been leading us! Whosoever shall look well
into origins and issues, will find this of eloquence and the part
it now plays in our affairs, to be one of the gravest phenomena;
and the excellent stump-orator of these days to be not only a
ridiculous but still more a highly tragical personage. While the
many listen to him, the few are used to pass rapidly, with some
gust of scornful laughter, some growl of impatient malediction;
but he deserves from this latter class a much more serious
attention.
In the old Ages, when Universities and Schools were first
instituted, this function of the schoolmaster, to teach mere
speaking, was the natural one. In those healthy times, guided by
silent instincts and the monition of Nature, men had from of old
been used to teach themselves what it was essential to learn, by
the one sure method of learning anything, practical
apprenticeship to it. This was the rule for all classes; as it
now is the rule, unluckily, for only one class. The Working Man
as yet sought only to know his craft; and educated himself
sufficiently by ploughing and hammering, under the conditions
given, and in fit relation to the persons given: a course of
education, then as now and ever, really opulent in manful culture
and instruction to him; teaching him many solid virtues, and
most indubitably useful knowledges; developing in him valuable
faculties not a few both to do and to endure,--among which the
faculty of elaborate grammatical utterance, seeing he had so
little of extraordinary to utter, or to learn from spoken or
written utterances, was not bargained for; the grammar of Nature,
which he learned from his mother, being still amply sufficient
for him. This was, as it still is, the grand education of the
Working Man.
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