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Latter Day Pamphlets

T >> Thomas Carlyle >> Latter Day Pamphlets




I wish Felicissimus were saddle-sick forever and a day! He is a
dreadful object, however much we are used to him. If the horse
had not been bred and broken in, for a thousand years, by real
riders and horse-subduers, perhaps the best and bravest the
world ever saw, what would have become of Felicissimus and him
long since? This horse, by second-nature, religiously respects
all fences; gallops, if never so madly, on the highways
alone;--seems to me, of late, like a desperate Sleswick
thunder-horse who had lost his way, galloping in the labyrinthic
lanes of a woody flat country; passionate to reach his goal;
unable to reach it, because in the flat leafy lanes there is no
outlook whatever, and in the bridle there is no guidance
whatever. So he gallops stormfully along, thinking it is
forward and forward; and alas, it is only round and round, out of
one old lane into the other;--nay (according to some) "he
mistakes _his own footprints_, which of course grow ever more
numerous, for the sign of a more and more frequented road;" and
his despair is hourly increasing. My impression is, he is
certain soon, such is the growth of his necessity and his
despair, to--plunge _across_ the fence, into an opener survey of
the country; and to sweep Felicissimus off his back, and comb him
away very tragically in the process! Poor Sleswicker, I wish you
were better ridden. I perceive it lies in the Fates you must now
either be better ridden, or else not long at all. This plunging
in the heavy labyrinth of over-shaded lanes, with one's stomach
getting empty, one's Ireland falling into cannibalism, and no
vestige of a goal either visible or possible, cannot
last.


Colonial Offices, Foreign, Home and other Offices, got together
under these strange circumstances, cannot well be expected to be
the best that human ingenuity could devise; the wonder rather is
to see them so good as they are. Who made them, ask me not.
Made they clearly were; for we see them here in a concrete
condition, writing despatches, and drawing salary with a view to
buy pudding. But how those Offices in Downing Street were made;
who made them, or for what kind of objects they were made, would
be hard to say at present. Dim visions and phantasmagories
gathered from the Books of Horace Walpole, Memoirs of Bubb
Doddington, Memoirs of my Lady Sundon, Lord Fanny Hervey, and
innumerable others, rise on us, beckoning fantastically towards,
not an answer, but some conceivable intimations of an answer, and
proclaiming very legibly the old text, "_Quam parva sapientia_,"
in respect of this hard-working much-subduing British Nation;
giving rise to endless reflections in a thinking Englishman of
this day. Alas, it is ever so: each generation has its task, and
does it better or worse; greatly neglecting what is not
immediately its task. Our poor grandfathers, so busy conquering
Indias, founding Colonies, inventing spinning-jennies, kindling
Lancashires and Bromwichams, took no thought about the government
of all that; left it all to be governed by Lord Fanny and the
Hanover Succession, or how the gods pleased. And now we the poor
grandchildren find that it will not stick together on these terms
any longer; that our sad, dangerous and sore task is to discover
some government for this big world which has been conquered to
us; that the red-tape Offices in Downing Street are near the end
of their rope; that if we can get nothing better, in the way of
government, it is all over with our world and us. How the
Downing-Street Offices originated, and what the meaning of them
was or is, let Dryasdust, when in some lucid moment the whim
takes him, instruct us. Enough for us to know and see clearly,
with urgent practical inference derived from such insight, That
they were not made for us or for our objects at all; that the
devouring Irish Giant is here, and that he cannot be fed with
red-tape, and will eat us if we cannot feed him.

On the whole, let us say Felicissimus made them;--or rather it
was the predecessors of Felicissimus, who were not so dreadfully
hunted, sticking to the wild and ever more desperate Sleswicker
in the leafy labyrinth of lanes, as he now is. He, I think, will
never make anything; but be combed off by the elm-boughs, and
left sprawling in the ditch. But in past time, this and the
other heavy-laden red-tape soul had withal a glow of patriotism
in him; now and then, in his whirling element, a gleam of human
ingenuity, some eye towards business that must be done. At all
events, for him and every one, Parliament needed to be persuaded
that business was done. By the contributions of many such
heavy-laden souls, driven on by necessity outward and inward,
these singular Establishments are here. Contributions--who knows
how far back they go, far beyond the reign of George the Second,
or perhaps the reign of William Conqueror. Noble and genuine
some of them were, many of them were, I need not doubt: for
there is no human edifice that stands long but has got itself
planted, here and there, upon the basis of fact; and being built,
in many respects, according to the laws of statics: no standing
edifice, especially no edifice of State, but has had the wise and
brave at work in it, contributing their lives to it; and is
"cemented," whether it know the fact or not, "by the blood of
heroes!" None; not even the Foreign Office, Home Office, still
less the National Palaver itself. William Conqueror, I find,
must have had a first-rate Home Office, for his share. The
_Domesday Book_, done in four years, and done as it is, with such
an admirable brevity, explicitness and completeness, testifies
emphatically what kind of under-secretaries and officials William
had. Silent officials and secretaries, I suppose; not wasting
themselves in parliamentary talk; reserving all their
intelligence for silent survey of the huge dumb fact, silent
consideration how they might compass the mastery of that. Happy
secretaries, happy William!

But indeed nobody knows what inarticulate traditions, remnants of
old wisdom, priceless though quite anonymous, survive in many
modern things that still have life in them. Ben Brace, with his
taciturnities, and rugged stoical ways, with his tarry breeches,
stiff as plank-breeches, I perceive is still a kind of
_Lod-brog_ (Loaded-breeks) in more senses than one; and derives,
little conscious of it, many of his excellences from the old
Sea-kings and Saxon Pirates themselves; and how many Blakes and
Nelsons since have contributed to Ben! "Things are not so false
always as they seem," said a certain Professor to me once: "of
this you will find instances in every country, and in your
England more than any--and I hope will draw lessons from them.
An English Seventy-four, if you look merely at the articulate law
and methods of it, is one of the impossiblest entities. The
captain is appointed not by preeminent merit in sailorship, but
by parliamentary connection; the men [this was spoken some years
ago] are got by impressment; a press-gang goes out, knocks men
down. on the streets of sea-towns, and drags them on board,--if
the ship were to be stranded, I have heard they would nearly all
run ashore and desert. Can anything be more unreasonable than a
Seventy-four? Articulately almost nothing. But it has
inarticulate traditions, ancient methods and habitudes in it,
stoicisms, noblenesses, _true_ rules both of sailing and of
conduct; enough to keep it afloat on Nature's veridical bosom,
after all. See; if you bid it sail to the end of the world, it
will lift anchor, go, and arrive. The raging oceans do not beat
it back; it too, as well as the raging oceans, has a relationship
to Nature, and it does not sink, but under the due conditions is
borne along. If it meet with hurricanes, it rides them out; if
it meet an Enemy's ship, it shivers it to powder; and in short,
it holds on its way, and to a wonderful extent _does_ what it
means and pretends to do. Assure yourself, my friend, there is
an immense fund of truth somewhere or other stowed in that
Seventy-four."


More important than the past history of these Offices in Downing
Street, is the question of their future history; the question,
How they are to be got mended! Truly an immense problem,
inclusive of all others whatsoever; which demands to be attacked,
and incessantly persisted in, by all good citizens, as the grand
problem of Society, and the one thing needful for the
Commonwealth! A problem in which all men, with all their wisdoms
and all their virtues, faithfully and continually co-operating at
it, will never have done _enough_, and will still only be
struggling _towards_ perfection in it. In which some men can do
much;--in which every man can do something. Every man, and thou
my present Reader canst do this: _Be_ thyself a man abler to be
governed; more reverencing the divine faculty of governing, more
sacredly detesting the diabolical semblance of said faculty in
self and others; so shalt thou, if not govern, yet actually
according to thy strength assist in real governing. And know
always, and even lay to heart with a quite unusual solemnity,
with a seriousness altogether of a religious nature, that as
"Human Stupidity" is verily the accursed parent of all this
mischief, so Human Intelligence alone, to which and to which only
is victory and blessedness appointed here below, will or can cure
it. If we knew this as devoutly as we ought to do, the evil, and
all other evils were curable;--alas, if we had from of old known
this, as all men made in God's image ought to do, the evil never
would have been! Perhaps few Nations have ever known it less
than we, for a good while back, have done. Hence these sorrows.

What a People are the poor Thibet idolaters, compared with us and
our "religions," which issue in the worship of King Hudson as our
Dalai-Lama! They, across such hulls of abject ignorance, have
seen into the heart of the matter; we, with our torches of
knowledge everywhere brandishing themselves, and such a human
enlightenment as never was before, have quite missed it.
Reverence for Human Worth, earnest devout search for it and
encouragement of it, loyal furtherance and obedience to it:
this, I say, is the outcome and essence of all true "religions,"
and was and ever will be. We have not known this. No; loud as
our tongues sometimes go in that direction, we have no true
reverence for Human Intelligence, for Human Worth and Wisdom:
none, or too little,--and I pray for a restoration of such
reverence, as for the change from Stygian darkness to Heavenly
light, as for the return of life to poor sick moribund Society
and all its interests. Human Intelligence means little for most
of us but Beaver Contrivance, which produces spinning-mules,
cheap cotton, and large fortunes. Wisdom, unless it give us
railway scrip, is not wise.

True nevertheless it forever remains that Intellect is the real
object of reverence, and of devout prayer, and zealous wish and
pursuit, among the sons of men; and even, well understood, the
one object. It is the Inspiration of the Almighty that giveth
men understanding. For it must be repeated, and ever again
repeated till poor mortals get to discern it, and awake from
their baleful paralysis, and degradation under foul enchantments,
That a man of Intellect, of real and not sham Intellect, is by
the nature of him likewise inevitably a man of nobleness, a man
of courage, rectitude, pious strength; who, even _because_ he is
and has been loyal to the Laws of this Universe, is initiated
into _discernment_ of the same; to this hour a Missioned of
Heaven; whom if men follow, it will be well with them; whom if
men do not follow, it will not be well. Human Intellect, if you
consider it well, is the exact summary of Human _Worth_; and the
essence of all worth-ships and worships is reverence for that
same. This much surprises you, friend Peter; but I assure you it
is the fact;--and I would advise you to consider it, and to try
if you too do not gradually find it so. With me it has long been
an article, not of "faith" only, but of settled insight, of
conviction as to what the ordainments of the Maker in this
Universe are. Ah, could you and the rest of us but get to know
it, and everywhere religiously act upon it,--as our _Fortieth_
Article, which includes all the other Thirty-nine, and without
which the Thirty-nine are good for almost nothing,--there might
then be some hope for us! In this world there is but one
appalling creature: the Stupid man _considered_ to be the
Missioned of Heaven, and followed by men. He is our King, men
say, he;--and they follow him, through straight or winding
courses, I for one know well whitherward.

Abler men in Downing Street, abler men to govern us: yes, that,
sure enough, would gradually remove the dung-mountains, however
high they are; that would be the way, nor is there any other way,
to remedy whatsoever has gone wrong in Downing Street and in the
wide regions, spiritual and temporal, which Downing Street
presides over! For the Able Man, meet him where you may, is
definable as the born enemy of Falsity and Anarchy, and the born
soldier of Truth and Order: into what absurdest element soever
you put him, he is there to make it a little less absurd, to
fight continually with it till it become a little sane and human
again. Peace on other terms he, for his part, cannot make with
it; not he, while he continues _able_, or possessed of real
intellect and not imaginary. There is but one man fraught with
blessings for this world, fated to diminish and successively
abolish the curses of the world; and it is he. For him make
search, him reverence and follow; know that to find him or miss
him, means victory or defeat for you, in all Downing Streets, and
establishments and enterprises here below.--I leave your Lordship
to judge whether this has been our practice hitherto; and would
humbly inquire what your Lordship thinks is likely to be the
consequence of continuing to neglect this. It ought to have been
our practice; ought, in all places and all times, to be the
practice in this world; so says the fixed law of things
forevermore:--and it must cease to be _not_ the practice, your
Lordship; and cannot too speedily do so I think!--

Much has been done in the way of reforming Parliament in late
years; but that of itself seems to avail nothing, or almost less.
The men that sit in Downing Street, governing us, are not abler
men since the Reform Bill than were those before it. Precisely
the same kind of men; obedient formerly to Tory traditions,
obedient now to Whig ditto and popular clamors. Respectable men
of office: respectably commonplace in facility,--while the
situation is becoming terribly original! Rendering their
outlooks, and ours, more ominous every day.

Indisputably enough the meaning of all reform-movement, electing
and electioneering, of popular agitation, parliamentary
eloquence, and all political effort whatsoever, is that you may
get the ten Ablest Men in England put to preside over your ten
principal departments of affairs. To sift and riddle the Nation,
so that you might extricate and sift out the true ten gold
grains, or ablest men, and of these make your Governors or Public
Officers; leaving the dross and common sandy or silty material
safely aside, as the thing to be governed, not to govern;
certainly all ballot-boxes, caucuses, Kennington-Common meetings,
Parliamentary debatings, Red Republics, Russian Despotisms, and
constitutional or unconstitutional methods of society among
mankind, are intended to achieve this one end; and some of them,
it will be owned, achieve it very ill!--If you have got your gold
grains, if the men you have got are actually the ablest, then
rejoice; with whatever astonishment, accept your Ten, and thank
the gods; under this Ten your destruction will at least be milder
than under another. But if you have _not_ got them, if you are
very far from having got them, then do not rejoice at all, then
_lament_ very much; then admit that your sublime political
constitutions and contrivances do not prove themselves sublime,
but ridiculous and contemptible; that your world's wonder of a
political mill, the envy of surrounding nations, does not yield
you real meal; yields you only powder of millstones (called
Hansard Debatings), and a detestable brown substance not unlike
the grindings of dried horse-dung or prepared street-mud, which
though sold under royal patent, and much recommended by the
trade, is quite unfit for culinary purposes!--


But the disease at least is not mysterious, whatever the remedy
be. Our disease,--alas, is it not clear as the sun, that we
suffer under what is the disease of all the miserable in this
world, _want of wisdom_; that in the Head there is no vision, and
that thereby all the members are dark and in bonds? No vision in
the head; heroism, faith, devout insight to discern what is
needful, noble courage to do it, greatly defective there: not
seeing eyes there, but spectacles constitutionally ground, which,
to the unwary, _seem_ to see. A quite fatal circumstance, had
you never so many Parliaments! How is your ship to be steered by
a Pilot with no _eyes_ but a pair of glass ones got from the
constitutional optician? He must steer by the _ear_, I think,
rather than by the eye; by the shoutings he catches from the
shore, or from the Parliamentary benches nearer hand:--one of the
frightfulest objects to see steering in a difficult sea!
Reformed Parliaments in that case, reform-leagues, outer
agitations and excitements in never such abundance, cannot
profit: all this is but the writhing, and painful blind
convulsion of the limbs that are in bonds, that are all in dark
misery till the head be delivered, till the pressure on the brain
be removed.

Or perhaps there is now no heroic wisdom left in England;
England, once the land of heroes, is itself sunk now to a dim
owlery, and habitation of doleful creatures, intent only on
money-making and other forms of catching mice, for whom the
proper gospel is the gospel of M'Croudy, and all nobler impulses
and insights are forbidden henceforth? Perhaps these present
agreeable Occupants of Downing Street, such as the parliamentary
mill has yielded them, are the _best_ the miserable soil had
grown? The most Herculean Ten Men that could be found among the
English Twenty-seven Millions, are these? There _are_ not, in
any place, under any figure, ten diviner men among us? Well; in
that case, the riddling and searching of the twenty-seven
millions has been _successful_. Here are our ten divinest men;
with these, unhappily not divine enough, we must even content
ourselves and die in peace; what help is there? No help, no
hope, in that case.

But, again, if these are _not_ our divinest men, then evidently
there always is hope, there always is possibility of help; and
ruin never is quite inevitable, till we _have_ sifted out our
actually divinest ten, and set these to try their band at
governing!--That this has been achieved; that these ten men are
the most Herculean souls the English population held within it,
is a proposition credible to no mortal. No, thank God; low as we
are sunk in many ways, this is not yet credible! Evidently the
reverse of this proposition is the fact. Ten much diviner men do
certainly exist. By some conceivable, not forever impossible,
method and methods, ten very much diviner men could be sifted
out!--Courage; let us fix our eyes on that important fact, and
strive all thitherward as towards a door of hope!


Parliaments, I think, have proved too well, in late years, that
they are not the remedy. It is not Parliaments, reformed or
other, that will ever send Herculean men to Downing Street, to
reform Downing Street for us; to diffuse therefrom a light of
Heavenly Order, instead of the murk of Stygian Anarchy, over this
sad world of ours. That function does not lie in the capacities
of Parliment. That is the function of a _King_,--if we could get
such a priceless entity, which we cannot just now! Failing
which, Statesmen, or Temporary Kings, and at the very lowest one
real Statesman, to shape the dim tendencies of Parliament, and
guide them wisely to the goal: he, I perceive, will be a primary
condition, indispensable for any progress whatsoever.

One such, perhaps, might be attained; one such might prove
discoverable among our Parliamentary populations? That one, in
such an enterprise as this of Downing Street, might be
invaluable! One noble man, at once of natural wisdom and
practical experience; one Intellect still really human, and not
red-tapish, owlish and pedantical, appearing there in that dim
chaos, with word of command; to brandish Hercules-like the divine
broom and shovel, and turn running water in upon the place, and
say as with a fiat, "Here shall be truth, and real work, and
talent to do it henceforth; I will seek for able men to work
here, as for the elixir of life to this poor place and me:"--what
might not one such man effect there!

Nay one such is not to be dispensed with anywhere. in the
affairs of men. In every ship, I say, there must be a _seeing_
pilot, not a mere hearing one! It is evident you can never get
your ship steered through the difficult straits by persons
standing ashore, on this bank and that, and shouting _their_
confused directions to you: "'Ware that Colonial
Sandbank!--Starboard now, the Nigger Question!--Larboard,
_larboard_, the Suffrage Movement! Financial Reform, your
Clothing-Colonels overboard! The Qualification Movement,
'Ware-re-re!--Helm-a-lee! Bear a hand there, will you! Hr-r-r,
lubbers, imbeciles, fitter for a tailor's shopboard than a helm
of Government, Hr-r-r!"--And so the ship wriggles and tumbles,
and, on the whole, goes as wind and current drive. No ship was
ever steered except to destruction in that manner. I
deliberately say so: no ship of a State either. If you cannot
get a real pilot on board, and put the helm into his hands, your
ship is as good as a wreck. One real pilot on board may save
you; all the bellowing from the banks that ever was, will not,
and by the nature of things cannot. Nay your pilot will have to
succeed, if he do succeed, very much in spite of said bellowing;
he will hear all that, and regard very little of it,--in a
patient mild-spoken wise manner, will regard all of it as what it
is. And I never doubt but there is in Parliament itself, in
spite of its vague palaverings which fill us with despair in
these times, a dumb instinct of inarticulate sense and stubborn
practical English insight and veracity, that would manfully
support a Statesman who could take command with really manful
notions of Reform, and as one deserving to be obeyed. Oh for one
such; even one! More precious to us than all the bullion in the
Bank, or perhaps that ever was in it, just now!

For it is Wisdom alone that can recognize wisdom: Folly or
Imbecility never can; and that is the fatalest ban it labors
under, dooming it to perpetual failure in all things. Failure
which, in Downing Street and places of _command_ is especially
accursed; cursing not one but hundreds of millions! Who is there
that can recognize real intellect, and do reverence to it; and
discriminate it well from sham intellect, which is so much more
abundant, and deserves the reverse of reverence? He that himself
has it!--One really human Intellect, invested with command, and
charged to reform Downing Street for us, would continually
attract real intellect to those regions, and with a divine
magnetism search it out from the modest corners where it lies
hid. And every new accession of intellect to Downing Street
would bring to it benefit only, and would increase such divine
attraction in it, the parent of all benefit there and
elsewhere!


"What method, then; by what method?" ask many. Method, alas! To
secure an increased supply of Human Intellect to Downing Street,
there will evidently be no quite effectual "method" but that of
increasing the supply of Human Intellect, otherwise definable as
Human Worth, in Society generally; increasing the supply of
sacred reverence for it, of loyalty to it, and of life-and-death
desire and pursuit of it, among all classes,--if we but knew such
a "method"! Alas, that were simply the method of making all
classes Servants of Heaven; and except it be devout prayer to
Heaven, I have never heard of any method! To increase the
reverence for Human Intellect or God's Light, and the detestation
of Human Stupidity or the Devil's Darkness, what method is there?
No method,--except even this, that we should each of us "pray"
for it, instead of praying for mere scrip and the like; that
Heaven would please to vouchsafe us each a little of it, one by
one! As perhaps Heaven, in its infinite bounty, by stern
methods, gradually will? Perhaps Heaven has mercy too in these
sore plagues that are oppressing us; and means to teach us
reverence for Heroism and Human Intellect, by such baleful
experience of what issue Imbecility and Parliamentary Eloquence
lead to? Such reverence, I do hope, and even discover and
observe, is silently yet extensively going on among us even in
these sad years. In which small salutary fact there burns for
us, in this black coil of universal baseness fast becoming
universal wretchedness, an inextinguishable hope; far-off but
sure, a divine "pillar of fire by night." Courage,
courage!--

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