Past and Present Part 15

'Religion,' I said; for, properly speaking, all true Work is Religion: and whatsoever Religion is not Work may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes, or where it will; with me it shall have no harbour. Admirable was that of the old Monks, '_Laborare est Orare_, Work is Wors.h.i.+p.'

Older than all preached Gospels was this unpreached, inarticulate, but ineradicable, forever-enduring Gospel: Work, and therein have wellbeing. Man, Son of Earth and of Heaven, lies there not, in the innermost heart of thee, a Spirit of active Method, a Force for Work;--and burns like a painfully-smouldering fire, giving thee no rest till thou unfold it, till thou write it down in beneficent Facts around thee! What is immethodic, waste, thou shalt make methodic, regulated, arable; obedient and productive to thee. Wheresoever thou findest Disorder, there is thy eternal enemy; attack him swiftly, subdue him; make Order of him, the subject not of Chaos, but of Intelligence, Divinity and Thee! The thistle that grows in thy path, dig it out, that a blade of useful gra.s.s, a drop of nouris.h.i.+ng milk, may grow there instead. The waste cotton-shrub, gather its waste white down, spin it, weave it; that, in place of idle litter, there may be folded webs, and the naked skin of man be covered.

But above all, where thou findest Ignorance, Stupidity, Brute-mindedness,--yes, there, with or without Church-t.i.thes and Shovel-hat, with or without Talfourd-Mahon Copyrights, or were it with mere dungeons and gibbets and crosses, attack it, I say; smite it wisely, unweariedly, and rest not while thou livest and it lives; but smite, smite, in the name of G.o.d! The Highest G.o.d, as I understand it, does audibly so command thee; still audibly, if thou have ears to hear. He, even He, with his _un_spoken voice, awfuler than any Sinai thunders or syllabled speech of Whirlwinds; for the Silence of deep Eternities, of Worlds from beyond the morning-stars, does it not speak to thee? The unborn Ages; the old Graves, with their long-mouldering dust, the very tears that wetted it now all dry,--do not these speak to thee, what ear hath not heard? The deep Death-kingdoms, the Stars in their never-resting courses, all s.p.a.ce and all Time, proclaim it to thee in continual silent admonition. Thou too, if ever man should, shalt work while it is called Today. For the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.

All true Work is sacred; in all true Work, were it but true hand-labour, there is something of divineness. Labour, wide as the Earth, has its summit in Heaven. Sweat of the brow; and up from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart; which includes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all Sciences, all spoken Epics, all acted Heroisms, Martyrdoms,--up to that 'Agony of b.l.o.o.d.y sweat,' which all men have called divine! O brother, if this is not 'wors.h.i.+p,' then I say, the more pity for wors.h.i.+p; for this is the n.o.blest thing yet discovered under G.o.d's sky. Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil? Complain not. Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow Workmen there, in G.o.d's Eternity: surviving there, they alone surviving: sacred Band of the Immortals, celestial Bodyguard of the Empire of Mankind. Even in the weak Human Memory they survive so long, as saints, as heroes, as G.o.ds; they alone surviving; peopling, they alone, the unmeasured solitudes of Time! To thee Heaven, though severe, is _not_ unkind; Heaven is kind,--as a n.o.ble Mother; as that Spartan Mother, saying while she gave her son his s.h.i.+eld, "With it, my son, or upon it!" Thou too shalt return _home_ in honour; to thy far-distant Home, in honour; doubt it not,--if in the battle thou keep thy s.h.i.+eld! Thou, in the Eternities and deepest Death-kingdoms, art not an alien; thou everywhere art a denizen! Complain not; the very Spartans did not _complain_.

And who art thou that braggest of thy life of Idleness; complacently showest thy bright gilt equipages; sumptuous cus.h.i.+ons; appliances for folding of the hands to mere sleep? Looking up, looking down, around, behind or before, discernest thou, if it be not in Mayfair alone, any _idle_ hero, saint, G.o.d, or even devil? Not a vestige of one. In the Heavens, in the Earth, in the Waters under the Earth, is none like unto thee. Thou art an original figure in this Creation; a denizen in Mayfair alone, in this extraordinary Century or Half-Century alone!

One monster there is in the world: the idle man. What is his 'Religion'? That Nature is a Phantasm, where cunning beggary or thievery may sometimes find good victual. That G.o.d is a lie; and that Man and his Life are a lie.--Alas, alas, who of us _is_ there that can say, I have worked? The faithfulest of us are unprofitable servants; the faithfulest of us know that best. The faithfulest of us may say, with sad and true old Samuel, "Much of my life has been trifled away!"

But he that has, and except 'on public occasions' professes to have, no function but that of going idle in a graceful or graceless manner; and of begetting sons to go idle; and to address Chief Spinners and Diggers, who at least _are_ spinning and digging, "Ye scandalous persons who produce too much"--My Corn-Law friends, on what imaginary still richer Eldorados, and true iron-spikes with law of gravitation, are ye rus.h.i.+ng!

As to the Wages of Work there might innumerable things be said; there will and must yet innumerable things be said and spoken, in St.

Stephen's and out of St. Stephen's; and gradually not a few things be ascertained and written, on Law-parchment, concerning this very matter:--'Fair day's-wages for a fair day's-work' is the most unrefusable demand! Money-wages 'to the extent of keeping your worker alive that he may work more;' these, unless you mean to dismiss him straightway out of this world, are indispensable alike to the n.o.blest Worker and to the least n.o.ble!

One thing only I will say here, in special reference to the former cla.s.s, the n.o.ble and n.o.blest; but throwing light on all the other cla.s.ses and their arrangements of this difficult matter: The 'wages'

of every n.o.ble Work do yet lie in Heaven or else Nowhere. Not in Bank-of-England bills, in Owen's Labour-bank, or any the most improved establishment of banking and money-changing, needest thou, heroic soul, present thy account of earnings. Human banks and labour-banks know thee not; or know thee after generations and centuries have pa.s.sed away, and thou art clean gone from 'rewarding,'--all manner of bank-drafts, shop-tills, and Downing-street Exchequers lying very invisible, so far from thee! Nay, at bottom, dost thou need any reward? Was it thy aim and life-purpose to be filled with good things for thy heroism; to have a life of pomp and ease, and be what men call 'happy,' in this world, or in any other world? I answer for thee deliberately, No. The whole spiritual secret of the new epoch lies in this, that thou canst answer for thyself, with thy whole clearness of head and heart, deliberately, No!

My brother, the brave man has to give his Life away. Give it, I advise thee;--thou dost not expect to _sell_ thy Life in an adequate manner?

What price, for example, would content thee? The just price of thy Life to thee,--why, G.o.d's entire Creation to thyself, the whole Universe of s.p.a.ce, the whole Eternity of Time, and what they hold: that is the price which would content thee; that, and if thou wilt be candid, nothing short of that! It is thy all; and for it thou wouldst have all. Thou art an unreasonable mortal;--or rather thou art a poor _infinite_ mortal, who, in thy narrow clay-prison here, _seemest_ so unreasonable! Thou wilt never sell thy Life, or any part of thy Life, in a satisfactory manner. Give it, like a royal heart; let the price be Nothing: thou _hast_ then, in a certain sense, got All for it! The heroic man,--and is not every man, G.o.d be thanked, a potential hero?--has to do so, in all times and circ.u.mstances. In the most heroic age, as in the most unheroic, he will have to say, as Burns said proudly and humbly of his little Scottish Songs, little dewdrops of Celestial Melody in an age when so much was unmelodious: "By Heaven, they shall either be invaluable or of no value; I do not need your guineas for them!" It is an element which should, and must, enter deeply into all settlements of wages here below. They never will be 'satisfactory' otherwise; they cannot, O Mammon Gospel, they never can! Money for my little piece of work 'to the extent that will allow me to keep working;' yes, this,--unless you mean that I shall go my ways _before_ the work is all taken out of me: but as to 'wages'--!--

On the whole, we do entirely agree with those old Monks, _Laborare est Orare_. In a thousand senses, from one end of it to the other, true Work _is_ Wors.h.i.+p. He that works, whatsoever be his work, he bodies forth the form of Things Unseen; a small Poet every Worker is.

The idea, were it but of his poor Delf Platter, how much more of his Epic Poem, is as yet 'seen,' half-seen, only by himself; to all others it is a thing unseen, impossible; to Nature herself it is a thing unseen, a thing which never hitherto was;--very 'impossible,' for it is as yet a No-thing! The Unseen Powers had need to watch over such a man; he works in and for the Unseen. Alas, if he look to the Seen Powers only, he may as well quit the business; his No-thing will never rightly issue as a Thing, but as a Deceptivity, a Sham-thing,--which it had better not do!

Thy No-thing of an Intended Poem, O Poet who hast looked merely to reviewers, copyrights, booksellers, popularities, behold it has not yet become a Thing; for the truth is not in it! Though printed, hotpressed, reviewed, celebrated, sold to the twentieth edition: what is all that? The Thing, in philosophical uncommercial language, is still a No-thing, mostly semblance, and deception of the sight;--benign Oblivion incessantly gnawing at it, impatient till Chaos, to which it belongs, do reabsorb it!--

He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech. Thou must descend to the _Mothers_, to the _Manes_, and Hercules-like long suffer and labour there, wouldst thou emerge with victory into the sunlight. As in battle and the shock of war,--for is not this a battle?--thou too shalt fear no pain or death, shalt love no ease or life; the voice of festive Lubberlands, the noise of greedy Acheron shall alike lie silent under thy victorious feet. Thy work, like Dante's, shall 'make thee lean for many years.' The world and its wages, its criticisms, counsels, helps, impediments, shall be as a waste ocean-flood; the chaos through which thou art to swim and sail. Not the waste waves and their weedy gulf-streams, shalt thou take for guidance: thy star alone,--'_Se tu segui tua stella!_' Thy star alone, now clear-beaming over Chaos, nay now by fits gone out, disastrously eclipsed: this only shalt thou strive to follow. O, it is a business, as I fancy, that of weltering your way through Chaos and the murk of h.e.l.l! Green-eyed dragons watching you, three-headed Cerberuses,--not without sympathy of _their_ sort! "_Eccovi l' uom ch' e stato all' Inferno._" For in fine, as Poet Dryden says, you do walk hand in hand with sheer Madness, all the way,--who is by no means pleasant company! You look fixedly into Madness, and _her_ undiscovered, boundless, bottomless Night-empire; that you may extort new Wisdom out of it, as an Eurydice from Tartarus. The higher the Wisdom, the closer was its neighbourhood and kindred with mere Insanity; literally so;--and thou wilt, with a speechless feeling, observe how highest Wisdom, struggling up into this world, has oftentimes carried such tinctures and adhesions of Insanity still cleaving to it hither!

All Works, each in their degree, are a making of Madness sane;--truly enough a religious operation; which cannot be carried on without religion. You have not work otherwise; you have eye-service, greedy grasping of wages, swift and ever swifter manufacture of semblances to get hold of wages. Instead of better felt-hats to cover your head, you have bigger lath-and-plaster hats set travelling the streets on wheels. Instead of heavenly and earthly Guidance for the souls of men, you have 'Black or White Surplice' Controversies, stuffed hair-and-leather Popes;--terrestrial _Law-wards_, Lords and Law-bringers, 'organising Labour' in these years, by pa.s.sing Corn-Laws. With all which, alas, this distracted Earth is now full, nigh to bursting. Semblances most smooth to the touch and eye; most accursed, nevertheless, to body and soul. Semblances, be they of Sham-woven Cloth or of Dilettante Legislation, which are _not_ real wool or substance, but Devil's-dust, accursed of G.o.d and man! No man has worked, or can work, except religiously; not even the poor day-labourer, the weaver of your coat, the sewer of your shoes. All men, if they work not as in a Great Taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, work unhappily for themselves and you.

Industrial work, still under bondage to Mammon, the rational soul of it not yet awakened, is a tragic spectacle. Men in the rapidest motion and self-motion; restless, with convulsive energy, as if driven by Galvanism, as if possessed by a Devil; tearing asunder mountains,--to no purpose, for Mammonism is always Midas-eared! This is sad, on the face of it. Yet courage: the beneficent Destinies, kind in their sternness, are apprising us that this cannot continue. Labour is not a devil, even while encased in Mammonism; Labour is ever an imprisoned G.o.d, writhing unconsciously or consciously to escape out of Mammonism!

Plugson of Undershot, like Taillefer of Normandy, wants victory; how much happier will even Plugson be to have a Chivalrous victory than a Chactaw one! The unredeemed ugliness is that of a slothful People.

Show me a People energetically busy; heaving, struggling, all shoulders at the wheel; their heart pulsing, every muscle swelling, with man's energy and will;--I show you a People of whom great good is already predicable; to whom all manner of good is yet certain, if their energy endure. By very working, they will learn; they have, Antaeus-like, their foot on Mother Fact: how can they but learn?

The vulgarest Plugson of a Master-Worker, who can command Workers, and get work out of them, is already a considerable man. Blessed and thrice-blessed symptoms I discern of Master-Workers who are not vulgar men; who are n.o.bles, and begin to feel that they must act as such: all speed to these, they are England's hope at present! But in this Plugson himself, conscious of almost no n.o.bleness whatever, how much is there! Not without man's faculty, insight, courage, hard energy, is this rugged figure. His words none of the wisest; but his actings cannot be altogether foolish. Think, how were it, stoodst thou suddenly in his shoes! He has to command a thousand men. And not imaginary commanding; no, it is real, incessantly practical. The evil pa.s.sions of so many men (with the Devil in them, as in all of us) he has to vanquish; by manifold force of speech and of silence, to repress or evade. What a force of silence, to say nothing of the others, is in Plugson! For these his thousand men he has to provide raw-material, machinery, arrangement, houseroom; and ever at the week's end, wages by due sale. No Civil-List, or Goulburn-Baring Budget has he to fall back upon, for paying of his regiment; he has to pick his supplies from the confused face of the whole Earth and Contemporaneous History, by his dexterity alone. There will be dry eyes if he fail to do it!--He exclaims, at present, 'black in the face,' near strangled with Dilettante Legislation: "Let me have elbow-room, throat-room, and I will not fail! No, I will spin yet, and conquer like a giant: what 'sinews of war' lie in me, untold resources towards the Conquest of this Planet, if instead of hanging me, you husband them, and help me!"--My indomitable friend, it is _true_; and thou shalt and must be helped.

This is not a man I would kill and strangle by Corn-Laws, even if I could! No, I would fling my Corn-Laws and s...o...b..lts to the Devil; and try to help this man. I would teach him, by n.o.ble precept and law-precept, by n.o.ble example most of all, that Mammonism was not the essence of his or of my station in G.o.d's Universe; but the adscit.i.tious excrescence of it; the gross, terrene, G.o.dless embodiment of it; which would have to become, more or less, a G.o.dlike one. By n.o.ble _real_ legislation, by true _n.o.ble's_-work, by unwearied, valiant, and were it wageless effort, in my Parliament and in my Parish, I would aid, constrain, encourage him to effect more or less this blessed change. I should know that it would have to be effected; that unless it were in some measure effected, he and I and all of us, I first and soonest of all, were doomed to perdition!--Effected it will be; unless it were a Demon that made this Universe; which I, for my own part, do at no moment, under no form, in the least believe.

May it please your Serene Highnesses, your Majesties, Lords.h.i.+ps and Law-wards.h.i.+ps, the proper Epic of this world is not now 'Arms and the Man;' how much less, 's.h.i.+rt-frills and the Man:' no, it is now 'Tools and the Man:' that, henceforth to all time, is now our Epic;--and you, first of all others, I think, were wise to take note of that!

CHAPTER XIII.

DEMOCRACY.

If the Serene Highnesses and Majesties do not take note of that, then, as I perceive, _that_ will take note of itself! The time for levity, insincerity, and idle babble and play-acting, in all kinds, is gone by; it is a serious, grave time. Old long-vexed questions, not yet solved in logical words or parliamentary laws, are fast solving themselves in facts, somewhat unblessed to behold! This largest of questions, this question of Work and Wages, which ought, had we heeded Heaven's voice, to have begun two generations ago or more, cannot be delayed longer without hearing Earth's voice. 'Labour' will verily need to be somewhat 'organised,' as they say,--G.o.d knows with what difficulty. Man will actually need to have his debts and earnings a little better paid by man; which, let Parliaments speak of them or be silent of them, are eternally his due from man, and cannot, without penalty and at length not without death-penalty, be withheld. How much ought to cease among us straightway; how much ought to begin straightway, while the hours yet are!

Truly they are strange results to which this of leaving all to 'Cash;'

of quietly shutting-up the G.o.d's Temple, and gradually opening wide-open the Mammon's Temple, with 'Laissez-faire, and Every man for himself,'--have led us in these days! We have Upper, speaking Cla.s.ses, who indeed do 'speak' as never man spake before; the withered flimsiness, the G.o.dless baseness and barrenness of whose Speech might of itself indicate what kind of Doing and practical Governing went on under it! For Speech is the gaseous element out of which most kinds of Practice and Performance, especially all kinds of moral Performance, condense themselves, and take shape; as the one is, so will the other be. Descending, accordingly, into the Dumb Cla.s.s in its Stockport Cellars and Poor-Law Bastilles, have we not to announce that they also are hitherto unexampled in the History of Adam's Posterity?

Life was never a May-game for men: in all times the lot of the dumb millions born to toil was defaced with manifold sufferings, injustices, heavy burdens, avoidable and unavoidable; not play at all, but hard work that made the sinews sore and the heart sore. As bond-slaves, _villani_, _bordarii_, _sochemanni_, nay indeed as dukes, earls and kings, men were oftentimes made weary of their life; and had to say, in the sweat of their brow and of their soul, Behold, it is not sport, it is grim earnest, and our back can bear no more! Who knows not what ma.s.sacrings and harryings there have been; grinding, long-continuing, unbearable injustices,--till the heart had to rise in madness, and some "_Eu Sachsen, nimith euer sachses_, You Saxons, out with your gully-knives, then!" You Saxons, some 'arrestment,' partial 'arrestment of the Knaves and Dastards' has become indispensable!--The page of Dryasdust is heavy with such details.

And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now pa.s.sing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must die,--the last exit of us all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain. But it is to live miserable we know not why: to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt-in with a cold-universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull!

This is and remains forever intolerable to all men whom G.o.d has made.

Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days?

The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled.

Never before did I hear of an Irish Widow reduced to 'prove her sisterhood by dying of typhus-fever and infecting seventeen persons,'--saying in such undeniable way, "You _see_ I was your sister!" Sisterhood, brotherhood, was often forgotten; but not till the rise of these ultimate Mammon and s...o...b..lt Gospels did I ever see it so expressly denied. If no pious Lord or _Law-ward_ would remember it, always some pious Lady ('_Hlaf-dig_,' Benefactress, '_Loaf-giveress_,' they say she is,--blessings on her beautiful heart!) was there, with mild mother-voice and hand, to remember it; some pious thoughtful _Elder_, what we now call 'Prester,' _Presbyter_ or 'Priest,' was there to put all men in mind of it, in the name of the G.o.d who had made all.

Not even in Black Dahomey was it ever, I think, forgotten to the typhus-fever length. Mungo Park, resourceless, had sunk down to die under the Negro Village-Tree, a horrible White object in the eyes of all. But in the poor Black Woman, and her daughter who stood aghast at him, whose earthly wealth and funded capital consisted of one small calabash of rice, there lived a heart richer than _Laissez-faire_: they, with a royal munificence, boiled their rice for him; they sang all night to him, spinning a.s.siduous on their cotton distaffs, as he lay to sleep: "Let us pity the poor white man; no mother has he to fetch him milk, no sister to grind him corn!" Thou poor black n.o.ble One,--thou _Lady_ too: did not a G.o.d make thee too; was there not in thee too something of a G.o.d!--

Gurth, born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, has been greatly pitied by Dryasdust and others. Gurth, with the bra.s.s collar round his neck, tending Cedric's pigs in the glades of the wood, is not what I call an exemplar of human felicity: but Gurth, with the sky above him, with the free air and tinted boscage and umbrage round him, and in him at least the certainty of supper and social lodging when he came home; Gurth to me seems happy, in comparison with many a Lancas.h.i.+re and Buckinghams.h.i.+re man of these days, not born thrall of anybody! Gurth's bra.s.s collar did not gall him: Cedric _deserved_ to be his master. The pigs were Cedric's, but Gurth too would get his parings of them. Gurth had the inexpressible satisfaction of feeling himself related indissolubly, though in a rude bra.s.s-collar way, to his fellow-mortals in this Earth. He had superiors, inferiors, equals.--Gurth is now 'emanc.i.p.ated' long since; has what we call 'Liberty.' Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. Liberty when it becomes the 'Liberty to die by starvation' is not so divine!

Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and to walk thereon. To learn, or to be taught, what work he actually was able for; and then by permission, persuasion, and even compulsion, to set about doing of the same! That is his true blessedness, honour, 'liberty' and maximum of wellbeing: if liberty be not that, I for one have small care about liberty. You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices; you violate his liberty, you that are wise; and keep him, were it in strait-waistcoats, away from the precipices!

Every stupid, every cowardly and foolish man is but a less palpable madman: his true liberty were that a wiser man, that any and every wiser man, could, by bra.s.s collars, or in whatever milder or sharper way, lay hold of him when he was going wrong, and order and compel him to go a little righter. O, if thou really art my _Senior_, Seigneur, my _Elder_, Presbyter or Priest,--if thou art in very deed my _Wiser_, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to 'conquer' me, to command me! If thou do know better than I what is good and right, I conjure thee in the name of G.o.d, force me to do it; were it by never such bra.s.s collars, whips and handcuffs, leave me not to walk over precipices! That I have been called, by all the Newspapers, a 'free man' will avail me little, if my pilgrimage have ended in death and wreck. O that the Newspapers had called me slave, coward, fool, or what it pleased their sweet voices to name me, and I had attained not death, but life!--Liberty requires new definitions.

A conscious abhorrence and intolerance of Folly, of Baseness, Stupidity, Poltroonery and all that brood of things, dwells deep in some men: still deeper in others an _un_conscious abhorrence and intolerance, clothed moreover by the beneficent Supreme Powers in what stout appet.i.tes, energies, egoisms so-called, are suitable to it;--these latter are your Conquerors, Romans, Normans, Russians, Indo-English; Founders of what we call Aristocracies. Which indeed have they not the most 'divine right' to found;--being themselves very truly [Greek: Aristoi], Bravest, Best; and conquering generally a confused rabble of Worst, or at lowest, clearly enough, of Worse? I think their divine right, tried, with affirmatory verdict, in the greatest Law-Court known to me, was good! A cla.s.s of men who are dreadfully exclaimed against by Dryasdust; of whom nevertheless beneficent Nature has oftentimes had need; and may, alas, again have need.

When, across the hundredfold poor scepticisms, trivialisms, and const.i.tutional cobwebberies of Dryasdust, you catch any glimpse of a William the Conqueror, a Tancred of Hauteville or suchlike,--do you not discern veritably some rude outline of a true G.o.d-made King; whom not the Champion of England cased in tin, but all Nature and the Universe were calling to the throne? It is absolutely necessary that he get thither. Nature does not mean her poor Saxon children to perish, of obesity, stupor or other malady, as yet: a stern Ruler and Line of Rulers therefore is called in,--a stern but most beneficent _perpetual House-Surgeon_ is by Nature herself called in, and even the appropriate _fees_ are provided for him! Dryasdust talks lamentably about Hereward and the Fen Counties; fate of Earl Waltheof; Yorks.h.i.+re and the North reduced to ashes: all which is undoubtedly lamentable.

But even Dryasdust apprises me of one fact: 'A child, in this William's reign, might have carried a purse of gold from end to end of England.' My erudite friend, it is a fact which outweighs a thousand!

Sweep away thy const.i.tutional, sentimental and other cobwebberies; look eye to eye, if thou still have any eye, in the face of this big burly William b.a.s.t.a.r.d: thou wilt see a fellow of most flas.h.i.+ng discernment, of most strong lion-heart;--in whom, as it were, within a frame of oak and iron, the G.o.ds have planted the soul of 'a man of genius'! Dost thou call that nothing? I call it an immense thing!--Rage enough was in this Willelmus Conquaestor, rage enough for his occasions;--and yet the essential element of him, as of all such men, is not scorching _fire_, but s.h.i.+ning illuminative _light_. Fire and light are strangely interchangeable; nay, at bottom, I have found them different forms of the same most G.o.dlike 'elementary substance'

in our world: a thing worth stating in these days. The essential element of this Conquaestor is, first of all, the most sun-eyed perception of what _is_ really what on this G.o.d's-Earth;--which, thou wilt find, does mean at bottom 'Justice,' and 'Virtues' not a few: _Conformity_ to what the Maker has seen good to make; that, I suppose, will mean Justice and a Virtue or two?--

Dost thou think Willelmus Conquaestor would have tolerated ten years' jargon, one hour's jargon, on the propriety of killing Cotton-manufactures by partridge Corn-Laws? I fancy, this was not the man to knock out of his night's-rest with nothing but a noisy bedlamism in your mouth! "a.s.sist us still better to bush the partridges; strangle Plugson who spins the s.h.i.+rts?"--"_Par la Splendeur de Dieu!_"----Dost thou think Willelmus Conquaestor, in this new time, with Steamengine Captains of Industry on one hand of him, and Joe-Manton Captains of Idleness on the other, would have doubted which _was_ really the Best; which did deserve strangling, and which not?

I have a certain indestructible regard for Willelmus Conquaestor. A resident House-Surgeon, provided by Nature for her beloved English People, and even furnished with the requisite fees, as I said; for he by no means felt himself doing Nature's work, this Willelmus, but his own work exclusively! And his own work withal it was; informed '_par la Splendeur de Dieu_.'--I say, it is necessary to get the work out of such a man, however harsh that be! When a world, not yet doomed for death, is rus.h.i.+ng down to ever-deeper Baseness and Confusion, it is a dire necessity of Nature's to bring in her Aristocracies, her Best, even by forcible methods. When their descendants or representatives cease entirely to _be_ the Best, Nature's poor world will very soon rush down again to Baseness; and it becomes a dire necessity of Nature's to cast them out. Hence French Revolutions, Five-point Charters, Democracies, and a mournful list of _Etceteras_, in these our afflicted times.

To what extent Democracy has now reached, how it advances irresistible with ominous, ever-increasing speed, he that will open his eyes on any province of human affairs may discern. Democracy is everywhere the inexorable demand of these ages, swiftly fulfilling itself. From the thunder of Napoleon battles, to the jabbering of Open-vestry in St.

Mary Axe, all things announce Democracy. A distinguished man, whom some of my readers will hear again with pleasure, thus writes to me what in these days he notes from the Wahnga.s.se of Weissnichtwo, where our London fas.h.i.+ons seem to be in full vogue. Let us hear the Herr Teufelsdrockh again, were it but the smallest word!

'Democracy, which means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you, and contented putting-up with the want of them,--alas, thou too, _mein Lieber_, seest well how close it is of kin to _Atheism_, and other sad _Isms_: he who discovers no G.o.d whatever, how shall he discover Heroes, the visible Temples of G.o.d?--Strange enough meanwhile it is, to observe with what thoughtlessness, here in our rigidly Conservative Country, men rush into Democracy with full cry. Beyond doubt, his Excellenz the t.i.tular-Herr Ritter Kauderwalsch von Pferdefuss-Quacksalber, he our distinguished Conservative Premier himself, and all but the thicker-headed of his Party, discern Democracy to be inevitable as death, and are even desperate of delaying it much!

'You cannot walk the streets without beholding Democracy announce itself: the very Tailor has become, if not properly Sansculottic, which to him would be ruinous, yet a Tailor unconsciously symbolising, and prophesying with his scissors, the reign of Equality. What now is our fas.h.i.+onable coat? A thing of superfinest texture, of deeply meditated cut; with Malines-lace cuffs; quilted with gold; so that a man can carry, without difficulty, an estate of land on his back?

_Keineswegs_, By no manner of means! The Sumptuary Laws have fallen into such a state of desuetude as was never before seen. Our fas.h.i.+onable coat is an amphibium between barn-sack and drayman's doublet. The cloth of it is studiously coa.r.s.e; the colour a speckled soot-black or rust-brown gray; the nearest approach to a Peasant's.

And for shape,--thou shouldst see it! The last consummation of the year now pa.s.sing over us is definable as Three Bags; a big bag for the body, two small bags for the arms, and by way of collar a hem! The first Antique Cheruscan who, of felt-cloth or bear's-hide, with bone or metal needle, set about making himself a coat, before Tailors had yet awakened out of Nothing,--did not he make it even so? A loose wide poke for body, with two holes to let out the arms; this was his original coat: to which holes it was soon visible that two small loose pokes, or sleeves, easily appended, would be an improvement.

'Thus has the Tailor-art, so to speak, overset itself, like most other things; changed its centre-of-gravity; whirled suddenly over from zenith to nadir. Your Stulz, with huge somerset, vaults from his high s...o...b..ard down to the depths of primal savagery,--carrying much along with him! For I will invite thee to reflect that the Tailor, as topmost ultimate froth of Human Society, is indeed swift-pa.s.sing, evanescent, slippery to decipher; yet significant of much, nay of all.

Topmost evanescent froth, he is churned-up from the very lees, and from all intermediate regions of the liquor. The general outcome he, visible to the eye, of what men aimed to do, and were obliged and enabled to do, in this one public department of symbolising themselves to each other by covering of their skins. A smack of all Human Life lies in the Tailor: its wild struggles towards beauty, dignity, freedom, victory; and how, hemmed-in by Sedan and Huddersfield, by Nescience, Dulness, Prurience, and other sad necessities and laws of Nature, it has attained just to this: Gray savagery of Three Sacks with a hem!