Latter Day Pamphlets

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But have we well considered a divergence _in thought_ from what
is the fact? Have we considered the man whose very thought is a
lie to him and to us! He too is a frightful man; repeating about
this Universe on every hand what is not, and driven to repeat it;
the sure herald of ruin to all that follow him, that know with
_his_ knowledge! And would you learn how to get a mendacious
thought, there is no surer recipe than carrying a loose tongue.
The lying thought, you already either have it, or will soon get
it by that method. He who lies with his very tongue, _he_
clearly enough has long ceased to think truly in his mind. Does
he, in any sense, "think"? All his thoughts and imaginations, if
they extend beyond mere beaverisms, astucities and sensualisms,
are false, incomplete, perverse, untrue even to himself. He has
become a false mirror of this Universe; not a small mirror only,
but a crooked, bedimmed and utterly deranged one. But all loose
tongues too are akin to lying ones; are insincere at the best,
and go rattling with little meaning; the thought lying languid at
a great distance behind them, if thought there be behind them at
all. Gradually there will be none or little! How can the
thought of such a man, what he calls thought, be other than
false?

Alas, the palpable liar with his tongue does at least know that
he is lying, and has or might have some faint vestige of remorse
and chance of amendment; but the impalpable liar, whose tongue
articulates mere accepted commonplaces, cants and babblement,
which means only, "Admire me, call me an excellent
stump-orator!"--of him what hope is there? His thought, what
thought he had, lies dormant, inspired only to invent vocables
and plausibilities; while the tongue goes so glib, the thought is
absent, gone a wool-gathering; getting itself drugged with the
applausive "Hear, hear!"--what will become of such a man? His
idle thought has run all to seed, and grown false and the giver
of falsities; the inner light of his mind is gone out; all his
light is mere putridity and phosphorescence henceforth.
Whosoever is in quest of ruin, let him with assurance follow that
man; he or no one is on the right road to it.

Good Heavens, from the wisest Thought of a man to the actual
truth of a Thing as it lies in Nature, there is, one would
suppose, a sufficient interval! Consider it,--and what other
intervals we introduce! The faithfulest, most glowing word of a
man is but an imperfect image of the thought, such as it is,
that dwells within him; his best word will never but with error
convey his thought to other minds: and then between his poor
thought and Nature's Fact, which is the Thought of the Eternal,
there may be supposed to lie some discrepancies, some
shortcomings! Speak your sincerest, think your wisest, there is
still a great gulf between you and the fact. And now, do not
speak your sincerest, and what will inevitably follow out of
that, do not think your wisest, but think only your plausiblest,
your showiest for parliamentary purposes, where will you land
with that guidance?--I invite the British Parliament, and all the
Parliamentary and other Electors of Great Britain, to reflect on
this till they have well understood it; and then to ask, each of
himself, What probably the horoscopes of the British Parliament,
at this epoch of World-History, may be?--

Fail, by any sin or any misfortune, to discover what the truth of
the fact is, you are lost so far as that fact goes! If your
thought do not image truly but do image falsely the fact, you
will vainly try to work upon the fact. The fact will not obey
you, the fact will silently resist you; and ever, with silent
invincibility, will go on resisting you, till you do get to image
it truly instead of falsely. No help for you whatever, except in
attaining to a true image of the fact. Needless to vote a false
image true; vote it, revote it by overwhelming majorities, by
jubilant unanimities and universalities; read it thrice or three
hundred times, pass acts of parliament upon it till the
Statute-book can hold no more,--it helps not a whit: the thing
is not so, the thing is otherwise than so; and Adam's whole
Posterity, voting daily on it till the world finish, will not
alter it a jot. Can the sublimest sanhedrim, constitutional
parliament, or other Collective Wisdom of the world, persuade
fire not to burn, sulphuric acid to be sweet milk, or the Moon to
become green cheese? The fact is much the reverse:--and even the
Constitutional British Parliament abstains from such arduous
attempts as these latter in the voting line; and leaves the
multiplication-table, the chemical, mechanical and other
qualities of material substances to take their own course; being
aware that voting and perorating, and reporting in Hansard, will
not in the least alter any of these. Which is indisputably wise
of the British Parliament.

Unfortunately the British Parliament does not, at present, quite
know that all manner of things and relations of things, spiritual
equally with material, all manner of qualities, entities,
existences whatsoever, in this strange visible and invisible
Universe, are equally inflexible of nature; that, they will, one
and all, with precisely the same obstinacy, continue to obey
their own law, not our law; deaf as the adder to all charm of
parliamentary eloquence, and of voting never so often repeated;
silently, but inflexibly and forevermore, declining to change
themselves, even as sulphuric acid declines to become sweet milk,
though you vote so to the end of the world. This, it sometimes
seems to me, is not quite sufficiently laid hold of by the
British and other Parliaments just at present. Which surely is a
great misfortune to said Parliaments! For, it would appear, the
grand point, after all constitutional improvements, and such
wagging of wigs in Westminster as there has been, is precisely
what it was before any constitution was yet heard of, or the
first official wig had budded out of nothing: namely, to
ascertain what the truth of your question, in Nature, really is!
Verily so. In this time and place, as in all past and in all
future times and places. To-day in St. Stephen's, where
constitutional, philanthropical, and other great things lie in
the mortar-kit; even as on the Plain of Shinar long ago, where a
certain Tower, likewise of a very philanthropic nature, indeed
one of the desirablest towers I ever heard of, was to be
built,--but couldn't! My friends, I do not laugh; truly I am
more inclined to weep.

Get, by six hundred and fifty-eight votes, or by no vote at all,
by the silent intimation of your own eyesight and understanding
given you direct out of Heaven, and more sacred to you than
anything earthly, and than all things earthly,--a correct image
of the fact in question, as God and Nature have made it: that is
the one thing needful; with that it shall be well with you in
whatsoever you have to do with said fact. Get, by the sublimest
constitutional methods, belauded by all the world, an incorrect
image of the fact: so shall it be other than well with you; so
shall you have laud from able editors and vociferous masses of
mistaken human creatures; and from the Nature's Fact, continuing
quite silently the same as it was, contradiction, and that only.
What else? Will Nature change, or sulphuric acid become sweet
milk, for the noise of vociferous blockheads? Surely not.
Nature, I assure you, has not the smallest intention of doing
so.

On the contrary, Nature keeps silently a most exact
Savings-bank, and official register correct to the most
evanescent item, Debtor and Creditor, in respect to one and all
of us; silently marks down, Creditor by such and such an unseen
act of veracity and heroism; Debtor to such a loud blustery
blunder, twenty-seven million strong or one unit strong, and to
all acts and words and thoughts executed in consequence of
that,--Debtor, Debtor, Debtor, day after day, rigorously as Fate
(for this is Fate that is writing); and at the end of the account
you will have it all to pay, my friend; there is the rub! Not
the infinitesimalest fraction of a farthing but will be found
marked there, for you and against you; and with the due rate of
interest you will have to pay it, neatly, completely, as sure as
you are alive. You will have to pay it even in money if you
live:--and, poor slave, do you think there is no payment but in
money? There is a payment which Nature rigorously exacts of men,
and also of Nations, and this I think when her wrath is sternest,
in the shape of dooming you to possess money. To possess it; to
have your bloated vanities fostered into monstrosity by it, your
foul passions blown into explosion by it, your heart and perhaps
your very stomach ruined with intoxication by it; your poor life
and all its manful activities stunned into frenzy and comatose
sleep by it,--in one word, as the old Prophets said, your soul
forever lost by it. Your soul; so that, through the Eternities,
you shall have no soul, or manful trace of ever having had a
soul; but only, for certain fleeting moments, shall have had a
money-bag, and have given soul and heart and (frightfuler still)
stomach itself in fatal exchange for the same. You wretched
mortal, stumbling about in a God's Temple, and thinking it a
brutal Cookery-shop! Nature, when her scorn of a slave is
divinest, and blazes like the blinding lightning against his
slavehood, often enough flings him a bag of money, silently
saying: "That! Away; thy doom is that!"--

For no man, and for no body or biggest multitude of men, has
Nature favor, if they part company with her facts and her.
Excellent stump-orator; eloquent parliamentary dead-dog, making
motions, passing bills; reported in the Morning Newspapers, and
reputed the "best speaker going"? From the Universe of Fact he
has turned himself away; he is gone into partnership with the
Universe of Phantasm; finds it profitablest to deal in forged
notes, while the foolish shopkeepers will accept them. Nature
for such a man, and for Nations that follow such, has her
patibulary forks, and prisons of death everlasting:--dost thou
doubt it? Unhappy mortal, Nature otherwise were herself a Chaos
and no Cosmos. Nature was not made by an Impostor; not she, I
think, rife as they are!--In fact, by money or otherwise, to the
uttermost fraction of a calculable and incalculable value, we
have, each one of us, to settle the exact balance in the
above-said Savings-bank, or official register kept by Nature:
Creditor by the quantity of veracities we have done, Debtor by
the quantity of falsities and errors; there is not, by any
conceivable device, the faintest hope of escape from that issue
for one of us, nor for all of us.

This used to be a well-known fact; and daily still, in certain
edifices, steeple-houses, joss-houses, temples sacred or other,
everywhere spread over the world, we hear some dim mumblement of
an assertion that such is still, what it was always and will
forever be, the fact: but meseems it has terribly fallen out of
memory nevertheless; and, from Dan to Beersheba, one in vain
looks out for a man that really in his heart believes it. In his
heart he believes, as we perceive, that scrip will yield
dividends: but that Heaven too has an office of account, and
unerringly marks down, against us or for us, whatsoever thing we
do or say or think, and treasures up the same in regard to every
creature,--this I do not so well perceive that he believes.
Poor blockhead, no: he reckons that all payment is in money, or
approximately representable by money; finds money go a strange
course; disbelieves the parson and his Day of Judgment; discerns
not that there is any judgment except in the small or big debt
court; and lives (for the present) on that strange footing in
this Universe. The unhappy mortal, what is the use of his
"civilizations" and his "useful knowledges," if he have forgotten
that beginning of human knowledge; the earliest perception of the
awakened human soul in this world; the first dictate of Heaven's
inspiration to all men? I cannot account him a man any more; but
only a kind of human beaver, who has acquired the art of
ciphering. He lives without rushing hourly towards suicide,
because his soul, with all its noble aspirations and
imaginations, is sunk at the bottom of his stomach, and lies
torpid there, unaspiring, unimagining, unconsidering, as if it
were the vital principle of a mere _four_-footed beaver. A soul
of a man, appointed for spinning cotton and making money, or,
alas, for merely shooting grouse and gathering rent; to whom
Eternity and Immortality, and all human Noblenesses and divine
Facts that did not tell upon the stock-exchange, were meaningless
fables, empty as the inarticulate wind. He will recover out of
that persuasion one day, or be ground to powder, I
believe!--

To such a pass, by our beaverisms and our mammonisms; by canting
of "prevenient grace" everywhere, and so boarding and lodging our
poor souls upon supervenient moonshine everywhere, for centuries
long; by our sordid stupidities and our idle babblings; through
faith in the divine Stump-orator, and Constitutional Palaver, or
august Sanhedrim of Orators,-- have men and Nations been reduced,
in this sad epoch! I cannot call them happy Nations; I must call
them Nations like to perish; Nations that will either begin to
recover, or else soon die. Recovery is to be hoped;--yes, since
there is in Nature an Almighty Beneficence, and His voice,
divinely terrible, can be heard in the world-whirlwind now, even
as from of old and forevermore. Recovery, or else destruction
and annihilation, is very certain; and the crisis, too, comes
rapidly on: but by Stump-Orator and Constitutional Palaver,
however perfected, my hopes of _recovery_ have long vanished.
Not by them, I should imagine, but by something far the reverse
of them, shall we return to truth and God!--

I tell you, the ignoble intellect cannot think the _truth_, even
within its own limits, and when it seriously tries! And of the
ignoble intellect that does not seriously try, and has even
reached the "ignobleness" of seriously trying the reverse, and of
lying with its very tongue, what are we to expect? It is
frightful to consider. Sincere wise speech is but an imperfect
corollary, and insignificant outer manifestation, of sincere wise
thought. He whose very tongue utters falsities, what has his
heart long been doing? The thought of his heart is not its
wisest, not even _its_ wisest; it is its foolishest;--and even of
that we have a false and foolish copy. And it is Nature's Fact,
or the Thought of the Eternal, which we want to arrive at in
regard to the matter,--which if we do _not_ arrive at, we shall
not save the matter, we shall drive the matter into shipwreck!

The practice of modern Parliaments, with reporters sitting among
them, and twenty-seven millions mostly fools listening to them,
fills me with amazement. In regard to no _thing_, or fact as God
and Nature have made it, can you get so much as the real thought
of any honorable head,--even so far as _it_, the said honorable
head, still has capacity of thought. What the honorable
gentleman's wisest thought is or would have been, had he led from
birth a life of piety and earnest veracity and heroic virtue,
you, and he himself poor deep-sunk creature, vainly conjecture as
from immense dim distances far in the rear of what he is led to
_say_. And again, far in the rear of what his thought
is,--surely long infinitudes beyond all _he_ could ever
think,--lies the Thought of God Almighty, the Image itself of the
Fact, the thing you are in quest of, and must find or do worse!
Even his, the honorable gentleman's, actual bewildered,
falsified, vague surmise or quasi-thought, even this is not given
you; but only some falsified copy of this, such as he fancies may
suit the reporters and twenty-seven millions mostly fools. And
upon that latter you are to act;--with what success, do you
expect? That is the thought you are to take for the Thought of
the Eternal Mind,--that double-distilled falsity of a
blockheadism from one who is false even as a blockhead!

Do I make myself plain to Mr. Peter's understanding? Perhaps it
will surprise him less that parliamentary eloquence excites more
wonder than admiration in me; that the fate of countries governed
by that sublime alchemy does not appear the hopefulest just now.
Not by that method, I should apprehend, will the Heavens be
scaled and the Earth vanquished; not by that, but by another.

A benevolent man once proposed to me, but without pointing out
the methods how, this plan of reform for our benighted world: To
cut from one generation, whether the current one or the next, all
the tongues away, prohibiting Literature too; and appoint at
least one generation to pass its life in silence. "There, thou
one blessed generation, from the vain jargon of babble thou art
beneficently freed. Whatsoever of truth, traditionary or
original, thy own god-given intellect shall point out to thee as
true, that thou wilt go and do. In doing of it there will be a
verdict for thee; if a verdict of True, thou wilt hold by it, and
ever again do it; if of Untrue, thou wilt never try it more, but
be eternally delivered from it. To do aught because the vain
hearsays order thee, and the big clamors of the sanhedrim of
fools, is not thy lot,--what worlds of misery are spared thee!
Nature's voice heard in thy own inner being, and the sacred
Commandment of thy Maker: these shall be thy guidances, thou
happy tongueless generation. What is good and beautiful thou
shalt know; not merely what is said to be so. Not to talk of thy
doings, and become the envy of surrounding flunkies, but to taste
of the fruit of thy doings themselves, is thine. What the
Eternal Laws will sanction for thee, do; what the Froth Gospels
and multitudinous long-eared Hearsays never so loudly bid, all
this is already chaff for thee,--drifting rapidly along, thou
knowest whitherward, on the eternal winds."

Good Heavens, if such a plan were practicable, how the chaff
might be winnowed out of every man, and out of all human things;
and ninety-nine hundredths of our whole big Universe, spiritual
and practical, might blow itself away, as mere torrents of chaff
whole trade-winds of chaff, many miles deep, rushing continually
with the voice of whirlwinds towards a certain FIRE, which knows
how to deal with it! Ninety-nine hundredths blown away; all the
lies blown away, and some skeleton of a spiritual and practical
Universe left standing for us which were true: O Heavens, is it
forever impossible, then? By a generation that had no tongue it
really might be done; but not so easily by one that had.
Tongues, platforms, parliaments, and fourth-estates; unfettered
presses, periodical and stationary literatures: we are nearly
all gone to tongue, I think; and our fate is very questionable.

Truly, it is little known at present, and ought forthwith to
become better known, what ruin to all nobleness and fruitfulness
and blessedness in the genius of a poor mortal you generally
bring about, by ordering him to speak, to do all things with a
view to their being seen! Few good and fruitful things ever were
done, or could be done, on those terms. Silence, silence; and be
distant ye profane, with your jargonings and superficial
babblements, when a man has anything to do! Eye-service,--dost
thou know what that is, poor England?--eye-service is all the man
can do in these sad circumstances; grows to be all he has the
idea of doing, of his or any other man's ever doing, or ever
having done, in any circumstances. Sad, enough. Alas, it is our
saddest woe of all;--too sad for being spoken of at present,
while all or nearly all men consider it an imaginary sorrow on
my part!

Let the young English soul, in whatever logic-shop and
nonsense-verse establishment of an Eton, Oxford, Edinburgh,
Halle, Salamanca, or other High Finishing-School, he may be
getting his young idea taught how to speak and spout, and print
sermons and review-articles, and thereby show himself and fond
patrons that it _is_ an idea,--lay this solemnly to heart; this
is my deepest counsel to him! The idea you have once spoken, if
it even were an idea, is no longer yours; it is gone from you, so
much life and virtue is gone, and the vital circulations of your
self and your destiny and activity are henceforth deprived of it.
If you could not get it spoken, if you could still constrain it
into silence, so much the richer are you. Better keep your idea
while you can: let it still circulate in your blood, and there
fructify; inarticulately inciting you to good activities; giving
to your whole spiritual life a ruddier health. When the time
does come for speaking it, you will speak it all the more
concisely, the more expressively, appropriately; and if such a
time should never come, have you not already acted it, and
uttered it as no words can? Think of this, my young friend; for
there is nothing truer, nothing more forgotten in these shabby
gold-laced days. Incontinence is half of all the sins of man.
And among the many kinds of that base vice, I know none baser, or
at present half so fell and fatal, as that same Incontinence of
Tongue. "Public speaking," "parliamentary eloquence:" it is a
Moloch, before whom young souls are made to pass through the
fire. They enter, weeping or rejoicing, fond parents
consecrating them to the red-hot Idol, as to the Highest God:
and they come out spiritually _dead_. Dead enough; to live
thenceforth a galvanic life of mere Stump-Oratory; screeching and
gibbering, words without wisdom, without veracity, without
conviction more than skin-deep. A divine gift, that? It is a
thing admired by the vulgar, and rewarded with seats in the
Cabinet and other preciosities; but to the wise, it is a thing
not admirable, not adorable; unmelodious rather, and ghastly and
bodeful, as the speech of sheeted spectres in the streets at
midnight!

Be not a Public Orator, thou brave young British man, thou that
art now growing to be something: not a Stump-Orator, if thou
canst help it. Appeal not to the vulgar, with its long ears and
its seats in the Cabinet; not by spoken words to the vulgar;
_hate_ the profane vulgar, and bid it begone. Appeal by silent
work, by silent suffering if there be no work, to the gods, who
have nobler than seats in the Cabinet for thee! Talent for
Literature, thou hast such a talent? Believe it not, be slow to
believe it! To speak, or to write, Nature did not peremptorily
order thee; but to work she did. And know this: there never was
a talent even for real Literature, not to speak of talents lost
and damned in doing sham Literature, but was primarily a talent
for something infinitely better of the silent kind. Of
Literature, in all ways, be shy rather than otherwise, at
present! There where thou art, work, work; whatsoever thy hand
findeth to do, do it,--with the hand of a man, not of a
phantasm; be that thy unnoticed blessedness and exceeding great
reward. Thy words, let them be few, and well-ordered. Love
silence rather than speech in these tragic days, when, for very
speaking, the voice of man has fallen inarticulate to man; and
hearts, in this loud babbling, sit dark and dumb towards one
another. Witty,--above all, oh be not witty: none of us is
bound to be witty, under penalties; to be wise and true we all
are, under the terriblest penalties!

Brave young friend, dear to me, and _known_ too in a sense,
though never seen, nor to be seen by me,--you are, what I am not,
in the happy case to learn to _be_ something and to _do_
something, instead of eloquently talking about what has been and
was done and may be! The old are what they are, and will not
alter; our hope is in you. England's hope, and the world's, is
that there may once more be millions such, instead of units as
now. _Macte; i fausto pede_. And may future generations,
acquainted again with the silences, and once more cognizant of
what is noble and faithful and divine, look back on us with pity
and incredulous astonishment!

Italicized text is represented in the etext with underscores
_thusly_. Greek text has been transliterated into English, with
notation "[Gr.]" appended to it. Otherwise the etext has been
left as it was in the printed text. Footnotes have been embedded
directly into the text, with the notation [Footnote: ...].

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