Latter Day Pamphlets
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Thomas Carlyle >> Latter Day Pamphlets
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Ingenuous souls, unless forced to it, do now much shudder at the
threshold of both these careers, and not a few desperately turn
back into the wilderness rather, to front a very rude fortune,
and be devoured by wild beasts as is likeliest. But as to
Parliament, again, and its eligibility if attainable, there is
yet no question anywhere; the ingenuous soul, if possessed of
money-capital enough, is predestined by the parental and all
manner of monitors to that career of talk; and accepts it with
alacrity and clearness of heart, doubtful only whether he shall
be _able_ to make a speech. Courage, my brave young fellow. If
you can climb a soaped pole of any kind, you will certainly be
able to make a speech. All mortals have a tongue; and carry on
some jumble, if not of thought, yet of stuff which they could
talk. The weakest of animals has got a cry in it, and can give
voice before dying. If you are tough enough, bent upon it
desperately enough, I engage you shall make a speech;--but
whether that will be the way to Heaven for you, I do not engage.
These, then, are our two careers for genius: mute
Industrialism, which can seldom become very human, but remains
beaverish mainly: and the three Professions named learned,--that
is to say, able to talk. For the heroic or higher kinds of human
intellect, in the silent state, there is not the smallest inquiry
anywhere; apparently a thing not wanted in this country at
present. What the supply may be, I cannot inform M'Croudy; but
the market-demand, he may himself see, is _nil_. These are our
three professions that require human intellect in part or whole,
not able to do with mere beaverish; and such a part does the gift
of talk play in one and all of them. Whatsoever is not beaverish
seems to go forth in the shape of talk. To such length is human
intellect wasted or suppressed in this world!
If the young aspirant is not rich enough for Parliament, and is
deterred by the basilisks or otherwise from entering on Law or
Church, and cannot altogether reduce his human intellect to the
beaverish condition, or satisfy himself with the prospect of
making money,--what becomes of him in such case, which is
naturally the case of very many, and ever of more? In such case
there remains but one outlet for him, and notably enough that too
is a talking one: the outlet of Literature, of trying to write
Books. Since, owing to preliminary basilisks, want of cash, or
superiority to cash, he cannot mount aloft by eloquent talking,
let him try it by dexterous eloquent writing. Here happily,
having three fingers, and capital to buy a quire of paper, he can
try it to all lengths and in spite of all mortals: in this
career there is happily no public impediment that can turn him
back; nothing but private starvation--which is itself a _finis_
or kind of goal--can pretend to hinder a British man from
prosecuting Literature to the very utmost, and wringing the final
secret from her: "A talent is in thee; No talent is in thee."
To the British subject who fancies genius may be lodged in him,
this liberty remains; and truly it is, if well computed, almost
the only one he has.
A crowded portal this of Literature, accordingly! The haven of
expatriated spiritualisms, and alas also of expatriated vanities
and prurient imbecilities: here do the windy aspirations, foiled
activities, foolish ambitions, and frustrate human energies
reduced to the vocable condition, fly as to the one refuge left;
and the Republic of Letters increases in population at a faster
rate than even the Republic of America. The strangest regiment
in her Majesty's service, this of the Soldiers of
Literature:--would your Lordship much like to march through
Coventry with them? The immortal gods are there (quite
irrecognizable under these disguises), and also the lowest broken
valets;--an extremely miscellaneous regiment. In fact the
regiment, superficially viewed, looks like an immeasurable motley
flood of discharged play-actors, funambulists, false prophets,
drunken ballad-singers; and marches not as a regiment, but as a
boundless canaille,--without drill, uniform, captaincy or billet;
with huge over-proportion of drummers; you would say, a regiment
gone wholly to the drum, with hardly a good musket to be seen in
it,--more a canaille than a regiment. Canaille of all the
loud-sounding levities, and general winnowings of Chaos, marching
through the world in a most ominous manner; proclaiming, audibly
if you have ears: "Twelfth hour of the Night; ancient graves
yawning; pale clammy Puseyisms screeching in their
winding-sheets; owls busy in the City regions; many goblins
abroad! Awake ye living; dream no more; arise to judgment!
Chaos and Gehenna are broken loose; the Devil with his Bedlams
must be flung in chains again, and the Last of the Days is about
to dawn!" Such is Literature to the reflective soul at this
moment.
But what now concerns us most is the circumstance that here too
the demand is, Vocables, still vocables. In all appointed
courses of activity and paved careers for human genius, and in
this unpaved, unappointed, broadest career of Literature, broad
way that leadeth to destruction for so many, the one duty laid
upon you is still, Talk, talk. Talk well with pen or tongue, and
it shall be well with you; do not talk well, it shall be ill with
you. To wag the tongue with dexterous acceptability, there is
for human worth and faculty, in our England of the Nineteenth
Century, that one method of emergence and no other. Silence, you
would say, means annihilation for the Englishman of the
Nineteenth Century. The worth that has not spoken itself, is
not; or is potentially only, and as if it were not. Vox is the
God of this Universe. If you have human intellect, it avails
nothing unless you either make it into beaverism, or talk with
it. Make it into beaverism, and gather money; or else make talk
with it, and gather what you can. Such is everywhere the demand
for talk among us: to which, of course, the supply is
proportionate.
From dinners up to woolsacks and divine mitres, here in England,
much may be gathered by talk; without talk, of the human sort
nothing. Is Society become wholly a bag of wind, then, ballasted
by guineas? Are our interests in it as a sounding brass and a
tinkling cymbal?--In Army or Navy, when unhappily we have war on
hand, there is, almost against our will, some kind of demand for
certain of the silent talents. But in peace, that too passes
into mere demand of the ostentations, of the pipeclays and the
blank cartridges; and,--except that Naval men are occasionally,
on long voyages, forced to hold their tongue, and converse with
the dumb elements, and illimitable oceans, that moan and rave
there without you and within you, which is a great advantage to
the Naval man,--our poor United Services have to make
conversational windbags and ostentational paper-lanterns of
themselves, or do worse, even as the others.
My friends, must I assert, then, what surely all men know, though
all men seem to have forgotten it, That in the learned
professions as in the unlearned, and in human things throughout,
in every place and in every time, the true function of intellect
is not that of talking, but of understanding and discerning with
a view to performing! An intellect may easily talk too much, and
perform too little. Gradually, if it get into the noxious habit
of talk, there will less and less performance come of it, talk
being so delightfully handy in comparison with work; and at last
there will no work, or thought of work, be got from it at all.
Talk, except as the preparation for work, is worth almost
nothing;--sometimes it is worth infinitely less than nothing; and
becomes, little conscious of playing such a fatal part, the
general summary of pretentious nothingnesses, and the chief of
all the curses the Posterity of Adam are liable to in this
sublunary world! Would you discover the Atropos of Human
Virtue; the sure Destroyer, "by painless extinction," of Human
Veracities, Performances, and Capabilities to perform or to be
veracious,--it is this, you have it here.
Unwise talk is matchless in unwisdom. Unwise work, if it but
persist, is everywhere struggling towards correction, and
restoration to health; for it is still in contact with Nature,
and all Nature incessantly contradicts it, and will heal it or
annihilate it: not so with unwise talk, which addresses itself,
regardless of veridical Nature, to the universal suffrages; and
can if it be dexterous, find harbor there till all the suffrages
are bankrupt and gone to Houndsditch, Nature not interfering with
her protest till then. False speech, definable as the acme of
unwise speech, is capable, as we already said, of becoming the
falsest of all things. Falsest of all things:--and whither will
the general deluge of that, in Parliament and Synagogue, in Book
and Broadside, carry you and your affairs, my friend, when once
they are embarked on it as now?
Parliament, _Parliamentum_, is by express appointment the Talking
Apparatus; yet not in Parliament either is the essential
function, by any means, talk. Not to speak your opinion well,
but to have a good and just opinion worth speaking,--for every
Parliament, as for every man, this latter is the point. Contrive
to have a true opinion, you will get it told in some way, better
or worse; and it will be a blessing to all creatures. Have a
false opinion, and tell it with the tongue of Angels, what can
that profit? The better you tell it, the worse it will be!
In Parliament and out of Parliament, and everywhere in this
Universe, your one salvation is, That you can discern with just
insight, and follow with noble valor, what the law of the case
before you is, what the appointment of the Maker in regard to it
has been. Get this out of one man, you are saved; fail to get
this out of the most August Parliament wrapt in the sheepskins of
a thousand years, you are lost,--your Parliament, and you, and
all your sheepskins are lost. Beautiful talk is by no means the
most pressing want in Parliament! We have had some reasonable
modicum of talk in Parliament! What talk has done for us in
Parliament, and is now doing, the dullest of us at length begins
to see!
Much has been said of Parliament's breeding men to business; of
the training an Official Man gets in this school of argument and
talk. He is here inured to patience, tolerance; sees what is
what in the Nation and in the Nation's Government attains
official knowledge, official courtesy and manners--in short, is
polished at all points into official articulation, and here
better than elsewhere qualifies himself to be a Governor of men.
So it is said.--Doubtless, I think, he will see and suffer much
in Parliament, and inure himself to several things;--he will,
with what eyes he has, gradually _see_ Parliament itself, for one
thing; what a high-soaring, helplessly floundering, ever-babbling
yet inarticulate dark dumb Entity it is (certainly one of the
strangest under the sun just now): which doubtless, if he have in
view to get measures voted there one day, will be an important
acquisition for him. But as to breeding himself for a Doer of
Work, much more for a King, or Chief of Doers, here in this
element of talk; as to that I confess the fatalest doubts, or
rather, alas, I have no doubt! Alas, it is our fatalest misery
just now, not easily alterable, and yet urgently requiring to be
altered, That no British man can attain to be a Statesman, or
Chief of _Workers_, till he has first proved himself a Chief of
_Talkers_: which mode of trial for a Worker, is it not
precisely, of all the trials you could set him upon, the falsest
and unfairest?
Nay, I doubt much you are not likely ever to meet the fittest
material for a Statesman, or Chief of Workers, in such an element
as that. Your Potential Chief of Workers, will he come there at
all, to try whether he can talk? Your poor tenpound franchisers
and electoral world generally, in love with eloquent talk, are
they the likeliest to discern what man it is that has worlds of
silent work in him? No. Or is such a man, even if born in the
due rank for it, the likeliest to present himself, and court
their most sweet voices? Again, no.
The Age that admires talk so much can have little discernment for
inarticulate work, or for anything that is deep and genuine.
Nobody, or hardly anybody, having in himself an earnest sense for
truth, how can anybody recognize an inarticulate Veracity, or
Nature-fact of any kind; a Human _Doer_ especially, who is the
most complex, profound, and inarticulate of all Nature's Facts?
Nobody can recognize him: till once he is patented, get some
public stamp of authenticity, and has been articulately
proclaimed, and asserted to be a Doer. To the worshipper of
talk, such a one is a sealed book. An excellent human soul,
direct from Heaven,--how shall any excellence of man become
recognizable to this unfortunate? Not except by announcing and
placarding itself as excellent,--which, I reckon, it above other
things will probably be in no great haste to do.
Wisdom, the divine message which every soul of man brings into
this world; the divine prophecy of what the new man has got the
new and peculiar capability to do, is intrinsically of silent
nature. It cannot at once, or completely at all, be read off in
words; for it is written in abstruse facts, of endowment,
position, desire, opportunity, granted to the man;--interprets
itself in presentiments, vague struggles, passionate endeavors
and is only legible in whole when his work is _done_. Not by the
noble monitions of Nature, but by the ignoble, is a man much
tempted to publish the secret of his soul in words. Words, if he
have a secret, will be forever inadequate to it. Words do but
disturb the real answer of fact which could be given to it;
disturb, obstruct, and will in the end abolish, and render
impossible, said answer. No grand Doer in this world can be a
copious speaker about his doings. William the Silent spoke
himself best in a country liberated; Oliver Cromwell did not
shine in rhetoric; Goethe, when he had but a book in view, found
that he must say nothing even of that, if it was to succeed with
him.
Then as to politeness, and breeding to business. An official man
must be bred to business; of course he must: and not for essence
only, but even for the manners of office he requires breeding.
Besides his intrinsic faculty, whatever that may be, he must be
cautious, vigilant, discreet,--above all things, he must be
reticent, patient, polite. Certain of these qualities are by
nature imposed upon men of station; and they are trained from
birth to some exercise of them: this constitutes their one
intrinsic qualification for office;--this is their one advantage
in the New Downing Street projected for this New Era; and it will
not go for much in that Institution. One advantage, or temporary
advantage; against which there are so many counterbalances. It
is the indispensable preliminary for office, but by no means the
complete outfit,--a miserable outfit where there is nothing
farther.
Will your Lordship give me leave to say that, practically, the
intrinsic qualities will presuppose these preliminaries too, but
by no means _vice versa_. That, on the whole, if you have got
the intrinsic qualities, you have got everything, and the
preliminaries will prove attainable; but that if you have got
only the preliminaries, you have yet got nothing. A man of real
dignity will not find it impossible to bear himself in a
dignified manner; a man of real understanding and insight will
get to know, as the fruit of his very first study, what the laws
of his situation are, and will conform to these. Rough old
Samuel Johnson, blustering Boreas and rugged Arctic Bear as he
often was, defined himself, justly withal, as a polite man: a
noble manful attitude of soul is his; a clear, true and loyal
sense of what others are, and what he himself is, shines through
the rugged coating of him; comes out as grave deep rhythmus when
his King honors him, and he will not "bandy compliments with his
King;"--is traceable too in his indignant trampling down of the
Chesterfield patronages, tailor-made insolences, and
contradictions of sinners; which may be called his
_revolutionary_ movements, hard and peremptory by the law of
them; these could not be soft like his _constitutional_ ones,
when men and kings took him for somewhat like the thing he was.
Given a noble man, I think your Lordship may expect by and by a
polite man. No "politer" man was to be found in Britain than the
rustic Robert Burns: high duchesses were captivated with the
chivalrous ways of the man; recognized that here was the true
chivalry, and divine nobleness of bearing,--as indeed they well
might, now when the Peasant God and Norse Thor had come down
among them again! Chivalry this, if not as they do chivalry in
Drury Lane or West-End drawing-rooms, yet as they do it in
Valhalla and the General Assembly of the Gods.
For indeed, who _invented_ chivalry, politeness, or anything that
is noble and melodious and beautiful among us, except precisely
the like of Johnson and of Burns? The select few who in the
generations of this world were wise and valiant, they, in spite
of all the tremendous majority of blockheads and slothful
belly-worshippers, and noisy ugly persons, have devised
whatsoever is noble in the manners of man to man. I expect they
will learn to be polite, your Lordship, when you give them a
chance!--Nor is it as a school of human culture, for this or for
any other grace or gift, that Parliament will be found first-rate
or indispensable. As experience in the river is indispensable to
the ferryman, so is knowledge of his Parliament to the British
Peel or Chatham;--so was knowledge of the OEil-de-Boeuf to the
French Choiseul. Where and how said river, whether Parliament
with Wilkeses, or OEil-de-Boeuf with Pompadours, can be waded,
boated, swum; how the miscellaneous cargoes, "measures" so
called, can be got across it, according to their kinds, and
landed alive on the hither side as facts:--we have all of us our
_ferries_ in this world; and must know the river and its ways, or
get drowned some day! In that sense, practice in Parliament is
indispensable to the British Statesman; but not in any other
sense.
A school, too, of manners and of several other things, the
Parliament will doubtless be to the aspirant Statesman; a school
better or worse;--as the OEil-de-Boeuf likewise was, and as all
scenes where men work or live are sure to be. Especially where
many men work together, the very rubbing against one another will
grind and polish off their angularities into roundness, into
"politeness" after a sort; and the official man, place him how
you may, will never want for schooling, of extremely various
kinds. A first-rate school one cannot call this Parliament for
him;--I fear to say what rate at present! In so far as it
teaches him vigilance, patience, courage, toughness of lungs or
of soul, and skill in any kind of swimming, it is a good school.
In so far as it forces him to speak where Nature orders silence;
and even, lest all the world should learn his secret (which often
enough would kill his secret, and little profit the world),
forces him to speak falsities, vague ambiguities, and the
froth-dialect usual in Parliaments in these times, it may be
considered one of the worst schools ever devised by man; and, I
think, may almost challenge the OEil-de-Boeuf to match it in
badness.
Parliament will train your men to the manners required of a
statesman; but in a much less degree to the intrinsic functions
of one. To these latter, it is capable of mistraining as nothing
else can. Parliament will train you to talk; and above all
things to hear, with patience, unlimited quantities of foolish
talk. To tell a good story for yourself, and to make it _appear_
that you have done your work: this, especially in constitutional
countries, is something;--and yet in all countries,
constitutional ones too, it is intrinsically nothing, probably
even less. For it is not the function of any mortal, in Downing
Street or elsewhere here below, to wag the tongue of him, and
make it appear that he has done work; but to wag some quite other
organs of him, and to do work; there is no danger of his work's
appearing by and by. Such an accomplishment, even in
constitutional countries, I grieve to say, may become much less
than nothing. Have you at all computed how much less? The human
creature who has once given way to satisfying himself with
"appearances," to seeking his salvation in "appearances," the
moral life of such human creature is rapidly bleeding out of him.
Depend upon it, Beelzebub, Satan, or however you may name the too
authentic Genius of Eternal Death, has got that human creature in
his claws. By and by you will have a dead parliamentary bagpipe,
and your living man fled away without return!
Such parliamentary bagpipes I myself have heard play tunes, much
to the satisfaction of the people. Every tune lies within their
compass; and their mind (for they still call it _mind_) is ready
as a hurdy-gurdy on turning of the handle: "My Lords, this
question now before the House"--Ye Heavens, O ye divine Silences,
was there in the womb of Chaos, then, such a product, liable to
be evoked by human art, as that same? While the galleries were
all applausive of heart, and the Fourth Estate looked with eyes
enlightened, as if you had touched its lips with a staff dipped
in honey,--I have sat with reflections too ghastly to be uttered.
A poor human creature and learned friend, once possessed of many
fine gifts, possessed of intellect, veracity, and manful
conviction on a variety of objects, has he now lost all
that;--converted all that into a glistering phosphorescence which
can show itself on the outside; while within, all is dead,
chaotic, dark; a painted sepulchre full of dead-men's bones!
Discernment, knowledge, intellect, in the human sense of the
words, this man has now none. His opinion you do not ask on any
matter: on the _matter_ he has no opinion, judgment, or insight;
only on what may be said about the matter, how it may be argued
of, what tune may be played upon it to enlighten the eyes of the
Fourth Estate.
Such a soul, though to the eye he still keeps tumbling about in
the Parliamentary element, and makes "motions," and passes bills,
for aught I know,--are we to define him as a _living_ one, or as
a dead? Partridge the Almanac-Maker, whose "Publications" still
regularly appear, is known to be dead! The dog that was drowned
last summer, and that floats up and down the Thames with ebb and
flood ever since,--is it not dead? Alas, in the hot months, you
meet here and there such a floating dog; and at length, if you
often use the river steamers, get to know him by sight. "There
he is again, still astir there in his quasi-stygian element!" you
dejectedly exclaim (perhaps reading your Morning Newspaper at the
moment); and reflect, with a painful oppression of nose and
imagination, on certain completed professors of parliamentary
eloquence in modern times. Dead long since, but _not_ resting;
daily doing motions in that Westminster region still,--daily from
Vauxhall to Blackfriars, and back again; and cannot get away at
all! Daily (from Newspaper or river steamer) you may see him at
some point of his fated course, hovering in the eddies, stranded
in the ooze, or rapidly progressing with flood or ebb; and daily
the odor of him is getting more intolerable: daily the condition
of him appeals more tragically to gods and men.
Nature admits no lie; most men profess to be aware of this, but
few in any measure lay it to heart. Except in the departments of
mere material manipulation, it seems to be taken practically as
if this grand truth were merely a polite flourish of rhetoric.
What is a lie? The question is worth asking, once and away, by
the practical English mind.
A voluntary spoken divergence from the fact as it stands, as it
has occurred and will proceed to develop itself: this clearly,
if adopted by any man, will so far forth mislead him in all
practical dealing with the fact; till he cast that statement out
of him, and reject it as an unclean poisonous thing, he can have
no success in dealing with the fact. If such spoken divergence
from the truth be involuntary, we lament it as a misfortune; and
are entitled, at least the speaker of it is, to lament it
extremely as the most palpable of all misfortunes, as the
indubitablest losing of his way, and turning aside from the goal
instead of pressing towards it, in the race set before him. If
the divergence is voluntary,--there superadds itself to our
sorrow a just indignation: we call the voluntary spoken
divergence a lie, and justly abhor it as the essence of human
treason and baseness, the desertion of a man to the Enemy of men
against himself and his brethren. A lost deserter; who has gone
over to the Enemy, called Satan; and cannot _but_ be lost in the
adventure! Such is every liar with the tongue; and such in all
nations is he, at all epochs, considered. Men pull his nose, and
kick him out of doors; and by peremptory expressive methods
signify that they can and will have no trade with him. Such is
spoken divergence from the fact; so fares it with the practiser
of that sad art.
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