THE DIDACTIC.
Certainly it were a fond imagination
to expect that any preaching of mine could abate Mammonism;
that Bobus of Houndsditch will love his guineas less,
or his poor soul more, for any preaching of mine!
But there is one Preacher who does preach with effect,
and gradually persuade all persons: his name
is Destiny, is Divine Providence, and his Sermon the
inflexible Course of Things. Experience does take
dreadfully high school-wages; but he teaches like no
other!
I revert to Friend Prudence the good
Quaker’s refusal of ’seven thousand pounds
to boot.’ Friend Prudence’s practical
conclusion will, by degrees, become that of all rational
practical men whatsoever. On the present scheme
and principle, Work cannot continue. Trades’
Strikes, Trades’ Unions, Chartisms; mutiny, squalor,
rage and desperate revolt, growing ever more desperate,
will go on their way. As dark misery settles
down on us, and our refuges of lies fall in pieces
one after one, the hearts of men, now at last serious,
will turn to refuges of truth. The eternal stars
shine out again, so soon as it is dark enough.
Begirt with desperate Trades’
Unionism and Anarchic Mutiny, many an Industrial Law-ward,
by and by, who has neglected to make laws and keep
them, will be heard saying to himself: “Why
have I realised five hundred thousand pounds?
I rose early and sat late, I toiled and moiled, and
in the sweat of my brow and of my soul I strove to
gain this money, that I might become conspicuous,
and have some honour among my fellow-creatures.
I wanted them to honour me, to love me. The money
is here, earned with my best lifeblood: but the
honour? I am encircled with squalor, with hunger,
rage, and sooty desperation. Not honoured, hardly
even envied; only fools and the flunky-species so
much as envy me. I am conspicuous, as
a mark for curses and brickbats. What good is
it? My five hundred scalps hang here in my wigwam:
would to Heaven I had sought something else than the
scalps; would to Heaven I had been a Christian Fighter,
not a Chactaw one! To have ruled and fought not
in a Mammonish but in a Godlike spirit; to have had
the hearts of the people bless me, as a true ruler
and captain of my people; to have felt my own heart
bless me, and that God above instead of Mammon below
was blessing me, this had been something.
Out of my sight, ye beggarly five hundred scalps of
banker’s-thousands: I will try for something
other, or account my life a tragical futility!”
Friend Prudence’s ‘rock-ledge,’
as we called it, will gradually disclose itself to
many a man; to all men. Gradually, assaulted from
beneath and from above, the Stygian mud-deluge of Laissez-faire,
Supply-and-demand, Cash-payment the one Duty, will
abate on all hands; and the everlasting mountain-tops,
and secure rock-foundations that reach to the centre
of the world, and rest on Nature’s self, will
again emerge, to found on, and to build on. When
Mammon-worshippers here and there begin to be God-worshippers,
and bipeds-of-prey become men, and there is a Soul
felt once more in the huge-pulsing elephantine mechanic
Animalism of this Earth, it will be again a blessed
Earth.
“Men cease to regard money?”
cries Bobus of Houndsditch: “What else
do all men strive for? The very Bishop informs
me that Christianity cannot get on without a minimum
of Four thousand five hundred in its pocket.
Cease to regard money? That will be at Doomsday
in the afternoon!” O Bobus, my opinion
is somewhat different. My opinion is, that the
Upper Powers have not yet determined on destroying
this Lower World. A respectable, ever-increasing
minority, who do strive for something higher than
money, I with confidence anticipate; ever-increasing,
till there be a sprinkling of them found in all quarters,
as salt of the Earth once more. The Christianity
that cannot get on without a minimum of Four thousand
five hundred, will give place to something better
that can. Thou wilt not join our small minority,
thou? Not till Doomsday in the afternoon?
Well; then, at least, thou wilt join it, thou
and the majority in mass!
But truly it is beautiful to see the
brutish empire of Mammon cracking everywhere; giving
sure promise of dying, or of being changed. A
strange, chill, almost ghastly dayspring strikes up
in Yankeeland itself: my Transcendental friends
announce there, in a distinct, though somewhat lankhaired,
ungainly manner, that the Demiurgus Dollar is
dethroned; that new unheard-of Demiurgusships, Priesthoods,
Aristocracies, Growths and Destructions, are already
visible in the gray of coming Time. Chronos is
dethroned by Jove; Odin by St. Olaf: the Dollar
cannot rule in Heaven forever. No; I reckon, not.
Socinian Preachers quit their pulpits in Yankeeland,
saying, “Friends, this is all gone to coloured
cobweb, we regret to say!” and retire
into the fields to cultivate onion-beds, and live
frugally on vegetables. It is very notable.
Old godlike Calvinism declares that its old body is
now fallen to tatters, and done; and its mournful
ghost, disembodied, seeking new embodiment, pipes
again in the winds; a ghost and spirit
as yet, but heralding new Spirit-worlds, and better
Dynasties than the Dollar one.
Yes, here as there, light is coming
into the world; men love not darkness, they do love
light. A deep feeling of the eternal nature of
Justice looks out among us everywhere, even
through the dull eyes of Exeter Hall; an unspeakable
religiousness struggles, in the most helpless manner,
to speak itself, in Puseyisms and the like. Of
our Cant, all condemnable, how much is not condemnable
without pity; we had almost said, without respect!
The inarticulate worth and truth that is in
England goes down yet to the Foundations.
Some ‘Chivalry of Labour,’
some noble Humanity and practical Divineness of Labour,
will yet be realised on this Earth. Or why will;
why do we pray to Heaven, without setting our own shoulder
to the wheel? The Present, if it will have the
Future accomplish, shall itself commence. Thou
who prophesiest, who believest, begin thou to fulfil.
Here or nowhere, now equally as at any time! That
outcast help-needing thing or person, trampled down
under vulgar feet or hoofs, no help ‘possible’
for it, no prize offered for the saving of it, canst
not thou save it, then, without prize? Put forth
thy hand, in God’s name; know that ‘impossible,’
where Truth and Mercy and the everlasting Voice of
Nature order, has no place in the brave man’s
dictionary. That when all men have said “Impossible,”
and tumbled noisily elsewhither, and thou alone art
left, then first thy time and possibility have come.
It is for thee now; do thou that, and ask no man’s
counsel, but thy own only, and God’s. Brother,
thou hast possibility in thee for much: the possibility
of writing on the eternal skies the record of a heroic
life. That noble downfallen or yet unborn ‘Impossibility,’
thou canst lift it up, thou canst, by thy soul’s
travail, bring it into clear being. That loud
inane Actuality, with millions in its pocket, too
‘possible’ that, which rolls along there,
with quilted trumpeters blaring round it, and all the
world escorting it as mute or vocal flunky, escort
it not thou; say to it, either nothing, or else deeply
in thy heart: “Loud-blaring Nonentity,
no force of trumpets, cash, Long-acre art, or universal
flunkyhood of men, makes thee an Entity; thou art
a Nonentity, and deceptive Simulacrum, more
accursed than thou seemest. Pass on in the Devil’s
name, unworshipped by at least one man, and leave the
thoroughfare clear!”
Not on Ilion’s or Latium’s
plains; on far other plains and places henceforth
can noble deeds be now done. Not on Ilion’s
plains; how much less in Mayfair’s drawingrooms!
Not in victory over poor brother French or Phrygians;
but in victory over Frost-joetuns, Marsh-giants, over
demons of Discord, Idleness, Injustice, Unreason, and
Chaos come again. None of the old Epics is longer
possible. The Epic of French and Phrygians was
comparatively a small Epic: but that of Flirts
and Fribbles, what is that? A thing that vanishes
at cock-crowing, that already begins to
scent the morning air! Game-preserving Aristocracies,
let them ‘bush’ never so effectually, cannot
escape the Subtle Fowler. Game seasons will be
excellent, and again will be indifferent, and by and
by they will not be at all. The Last Partridge
of England, of an England where millions of men can
get no corn to eat, will be shot and ended. Aristocracies
with beards on their chins will find other work to
do than amuse themselves with trundling-hoops.
But it is to you, ye Workers, who
do already work, and are as grown men, noble and honourable
in a sort, that the whole world calls for new work
and nobleness. Subdue mutiny, discord, wide-spread
despair, by manfulness, justice, mercy and wisdom.
Chaos is dark, deep as Hell; let light be, and there
is instead a green flowery World. Oh, it is great,
and there is no other greatness. To make some
nook of God’s Creation a little fruitfuller,
better, more worthy of God; to make some human hearts
a little wiser, manfuler, happier, more
blessed, less accursed! It is work for a God.
Sooty Hell of mutiny and savagery and despair can,
by man’s energy, be made a kind of Heaven; cleared
of its soot, of its mutiny, of its need to mutiny;
the everlasting arch of Heaven’s azure overspanning
it too, and its cunning mechanisms and tall
chimney-steeples, as a birth of Heaven; God and all
men looking on it well pleased.
Unstained by wasteful deformities,
by wasted tears or heart’s-blood of men, or
any defacement of the Pit, noble fruitful Labour, growing
ever nobler, will come forth, the grand
sole miracle of Man; whereby Man has risen from the
low places of this Earth, very literally, into divine
Heavens. Ploughers, Spinners, Builders; Prophets,
Poets, Kings; Brindleys and Goethes, Odins and
Arkwrights; all martyrs, and noble men, and gods are
of one grand Host; immeasurable; marching ever forward
since the beginnings of the World. The enormous,
all-conquering, flame-crowned Host, noble every soldier
in it; sacred, and alone noble. Let him who is
not of it hide himself; let him tremble for himself.
Stars at every button cannot make him noble; sheaves
of Bath-garters, nor bushels of Georges; nor any other
contrivance but manfully enlisting in it, valiantly
taking place and step in it. O Heavens, will
he not bethink himself; he too is so needed in the
Host! It were so blessed, thrice-blessed, for
himself and for us all! In hope of the Last Partridge,
and some Duke of Weimar among our English Dukes, we
will be patient yet a while.
’The Future hides in
it
Gladness and sorrow;
We press still thorow,
Nought that abides in it
Daunting us, onward.’