In this
clanging clashing universal Sword-dance that the European
world now dances for the last half-century, Voltaire is but one
choragus, where Richard Arkwright is another.
clanging clashing universal Sword-dance that the European
world now dances for the last half-century, Voltaire is but one
choragus, where Richard Arkwright is another.
Thomas Carlyle
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213
accordingly, not without pain to the bisons, make good the
same. He had a better right to that piece of God's land;
namely a better might to turn it to use;--a might to settle
himself there, at least, and try what use he could turn it to.
The bisons disappeared; the Celts took possession, and tilled.
Forever, was it to be? Alas, Forever is not a category that
can establish itself in this world of Time. A world of Time,
by the very definition of it, is a world of mortality and
mutability, of Beginning and Ending. No property is eternal
but God the Maker's: whom Heaven permits to take posses-
sion, his is the right; Heaven's sanction is such permission,--
while it lasts: nothing more can be said. Why does that
hyssop grow there, in the chink of the wall? Because the
whole Universe, sufficiently occupied otherwise, could not
hitherto prevent its growing! It has the might and the right.
By the same great law do Roman Empires establish them-
selves, Christian Religions promulgate themselves, and all
extant Powers bear rule. The strong thing is the just thing:
this thou wilt find throughout in our world;--as indeed was
God and Truth the Maker of our world, or was Satan and
Falsehood?
"One proposition widely current as to this Norman Con-
quest is of a Physiologic sort: That the conquerors and con-
quered here were of different races; nay that the Nobility of
England is still, to this hour, of a somewhat different blood
? from the commonalty, their fine Norman features contrasting
so pleasantly with the coarse Saxon ones of the others. God
knows, there are coarse enough features to be seen among the
commonalty of that country; but if the Nobility's be finer, it
is not their Normanhood that can be the reason. Does the
above Physiologist reflect who those same Normans, North-
men, originally were? Baltic Saxons, and what other mis-
cellany of Lurdanes, Jutes and Deutsch Pirates from the
East-sea marshes would join them in plunder of France! If
living three centuries longer in Heathenism, sea-robbery, and
the unlucrative fishing of amber could ennoble them beyond
the others, then were they ennobled. The Normans were
Saxons who had learned to speak French. No: by Thor and
Wodan, the Saxons were all as noble as needful;--shaped,
says the Mythus,' from the rock of the Harzgebirge;' brother-
tribes being made of clay, wood, water, or what other material
might be going! A stubborn, taciturn, sulky, indomitable
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? 214 Carlyle's Essays
rock-made race of men; as the figure they cut in all quarters,
in the cane-brake of Arkansas, in the Ghauts of the Himma-
laya, no less than in London City, in Warwick or Lancaster
County, does still abundantly manifest. "
"To this English People in World-History, there have been,
shall I prophesy, Two grand tasks assigned? Huge-looming
through the dim tumult of the always incommensurable
Present Time, outlines of two tasks disclose themselves: the
grand Industrial task of conquering some half or more of this
Terraqueous Planet for the use of man; then secondly, the
grand Constitutional task of sharing, in some pacific endurable
manner, the fruit of said conquest, and showing all people
how it might be done. These I will call their two tasks,
discernible hitherto in World-History: in both of these they
have made respectable though unequal progress. Steam-
engines, ploughshares, pickaxes; what is meant by conquering
this Planet, they partly know. Elective franchise, ballot-
box, representative assembly; how to accomplish sharing
of that conquest, they do not so well know. Europe knows
not; Europe vehemently asks in these days, but receives no
answer, no credible answer. For as to the partial Delolmish,
Benthamee, or other French or English answers, current in
the proper quarters, and highly beneficial and indispensable
there, thy disbelief in them as final answers, I take it, is
complete. "
"Succession of rebellions? Successive clippings away of
the Supreme Authority; class after class rising in revolt to
say, ' We will no more be governed so '? That is not the
history of the English Constitution; not altogether that.
Rebellion is the means, but it is not the motive cause. The
motive cause, and true secret of the matter, were always this:
The necessity there was for rebelling?
"Rights I will permit thee to call everywhere ' correctly-
articulated mights' A dreadful business to articulate cor-
rectly! Consider those Barons of Runnymede; consider all
manner of successfully revolting men! Your Great Charter
has to be experimented on, by battle and debate, for a
hundred-and-fifty years; is then found to be correct; and
stands as true Magna Charta,--nigh cut in pieces by a tailor,
short of measure, in later generations. Mights, I say, are a
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dreadful business to articulate correctly! Yet articulated
they have to be; the time comes for it, the need comes for
it, and with enormous difficulty and experimenting it is got
done. Call it not succession of rebellions; call it rather
succession of expansions, of enlightenments, gift of articulate
utterance descending ever lower. Class after class acquires
faculty of utterance,--Necessity teaching and compelling;
as the dumb man, seeing the knife at his father's throat,
suddenly acquired speech! Consider too how class after
class not only acquires faculty of articulating what its might
is, but likewise grows in might, acquires might or loses might;
so that always, after a space, there is not only new gift
of articulating, but there is something new to articulate.
Constitutional epochs will never cease among men. "
"And so now, the Barons all settled and satisfied, a new
class hitherto silent had begun to speak: the Middle Class,
namely. In the time of James First, not only Knights of the
Shire but Parliamentary Burgesses assemble, to assert, to
complain and propose; a real House of Commons has come
decisively into play,--much to the astonishment of James
First. We call it a growth of mights, if also of necessities; a
growth of power to articulate mights, and make rights of them.
"In those past silent centuries, among those silent classes,
much had been going on. Not only had red-deer in the New
and other Forests been got preserved and shot; and treach-
eries of Simon de Montfort, wars of Red and White Roses,
Battles of Crecy, Battles of Bosworth, and many other battles
been got transacted and adjusted; but England wholly, not
without sore toil and aching bones to the millions of sires
and the millions of sons these eighteen generations, had been
got drained and tilled, covered with yellow harvests, beautiful
and rich possessions; the mud-wooden Caesters and Chesters-
had become steepled tile-roofed compact Towns. Sheffield
had taken to the manufacture of Sheffield whittles; Worstead
could from wool spin yarn, and knit or weave the same into
stockings or breeches for men. England had property valu-
able to the auctioneer; but the accumulate manufacturing,
commercial, economic skill which lay impalpably warehoused
in English hands and heads, what auctioneer could estimate?
"Hardly an Englishman to be met with but could do some-
ching; some cunninger thing than break his fellow-creature's .
I
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? 216 Carlyle's Essays
head with battle-axes. The seven incorporated trades, with
their million guild-brethren, with their hammers, their shuttles
and tools, what an army;--fit to conquer that land of Eng-
land, as we say, and to hold it conquered! Nay, strangest
of all, the English people had acquired the faculty and habit
of thinking,--even of believing: individual conscience had
unfolded itself among them; Conscience, and Intelligence its
handmaid. Ideas of innumerable kinds were circulating
among these men: witness one Shakspeare, a woolcomber,
poacher, or whatever else at Stratford in Warwickshire, who
happened to write books! The finest human figure, as I
apprehend, that Nature has hitherto seen fit to make of
our widely diffused Teutonic clay. Saxon, Norman, Celt or
Sarmat, I find no human soul so beautiful, these fifteen-
hundred known years;--our supreme modern European man.
Him England had contrived to realise: were there not ideas?
"Ideas poetic and also Puritanic,--that had to seek utter-
ance in the notablest way! England had got her Shakspeare;
but was now about to get her Milton and Oliver Cromwell.
This too we will call a new expansion, hard as it might be to
articulate and adjust; this, that a man could actually have a
Conscience for his own behoof, and not for his Priest's only;
that his Priest, be who he might, would henceforth have to
take that fact along with him. One of the hardest things to
adjust! It is not adjusted down to this hour. It lasts on-
wards to the time they call ' Glorious Revolution ' before so
much as a reasonable truce can be made, and the war proceed
by logic mainly. And still it is war, and no peace, unless we
call waste vacancy peace. But it needed to be adjusted, as
the others had done, as still others will do. Nobility at Runny-
mede cannot endure foul-play grown palpable; no more can
Gentry in Long Parliament; no more can Commonalty in
Parliament they name Reformed. Prynne's bloody ears were
as a testimony and question to all England: 'Englishmen, is
this fair? ' England no longer continent of herself, answered,
bellowing as with the voice of lions: 'No, it is not fair! '"
"But now on the Industrial side, while this great Consti-
tutional controversy, and revolt of the Middle Class had not
ended, had yet but begun, what a shoot was that that England,
carelessly, in quest of other objects, struck out across the
Ocean, into the waste land which it named New England!
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Hail to thee, poor little ship Mayflower, of Delft-Haven:
* poor common-looking ship, hired by common charterparty
for coined dollars; caulked with mere oakum and tar; pro-
visioned with vulgarest biscuit and bacon;--yet what ship
Argo, or miraculous epic ship built by the Sea-Gods, was
other than a foolish bumbarge in comparison! Golden
fleeces or the like these sailed for, with or without effect;
thou little Mayflower hadst in thee a veritable Promethean
spark; life-spark of the largest Nation on our Earth,--so we
may already name the Transatlantic Saxon Nation. They
went seeking leave to hear sermon in their own method, these
Mayflower Puritans; a most honest indispensable search:
and yet like Saul the son of Kish, seeking a small thing, they
found this unexpected great thing! Honour to the brave
and true; they verily, we say, carry fire from Heaven, and
have a power that themselves dream not of. Let all men
'honour Puritanism, since God has so honoured it. Islam
itself, with its wild heartfelt 'Allah akbar, God is great,'
was it not honoured? There is but one thing without honour;
smitten with eternal barrenness, inability to do or be:
Insincerity, Unbelief. He who believes no thing, who be-
lieves only the shows of things, is not in relation with Nature
and Fact at all. Nature denies him; orders him at his
earliest convenience to disappear. Let him disappear from
her domains,--into those of Chaos, Hypothesis and Simula-
crum, or wherever else his parish may be. "
"As to the Third Constitutional controversy, that of the
Working Classes, which now debates itself everywhere these
fifty years, in France specifically since 1789, in England too
since 1831, it is doubtless the hardest of all to get articulated:
finis of peace, or even reasonable truce on this, is a thing I
have little prospect of for several generations. Dark, wild-
weltering, dreary, boundless; nothing heard on it yet but
ballot-boxes, Parliamentary arguing; not to speak of much
far worse arguing, by steel and lead, from Valmy to Waterloo,
to Peterloo! "--
"And yet of Representative Assemblies may not this
good be said: That contending parties in a country do thereby
ascertain one another's strength? They fight there, since
fight they must, by petition, Parliamentary eloquence, not
by sword, bayonet and bursts of military cannon. Why
11 t<h p
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? 218 Carlyle's Essays
do men fight at all, if it be not that they are yet tmacquainted
with one another's strength, and must fight and ascertain
it? Knowing that thou art stronger than I, that thou canst
compel me, I will submit to thee: unless I chance to prefer
extermination, and slightly circuitous suicide, there is no
other course for me. That in England, by public meetings,
by petitions, by elections, leading-articles, and other jangling
hubbub and tongue-fence which perpetually goes on every-
where in that country, people ascertain one another's strength,
and the most obdurate House of Lords has to yield and give-
in before it come to cannonading and guillotinement: this
is a saving characteristic of England. Nay, at bottom, is not
this the celebrated English Constitution itself? This un-
spoken Constitution whereof Privilege of Parliament, Money-
Bill, Mutiny-Bill, and all that could be spoken and enacted
hitherto, is not the essence and body, but only the shape
and skin? Such Constitution is, in our times, verily
invaluable. "
"Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter
chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of
summer does come. So long the tree stood naked; angry
wiry naked boughs moaning and creaking in the wind: you
would say, Cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground? Not
so; we must wait; all things will have their time. --Of the
man Shakspeare, and his Elizabethan Era, with its Sydneys,
Raleighs, Bacons, what could we say? That it was a
spiritual flower-time. Suddenly, as with the breath of June,
your rude naked tree is touched; bursts into leaves and
flowers, such leaves and flowers. The past long ages of
nakedness, and wintry fermentation and elaboration, have
done their part, though seeming to do nothing. The past
silence has got a voice, all the more significant the longer it
had continued silent. In trees, men, institutions, creeds,
nations, in all things extant and growing in this Universe, we
may note such vicissitudes and budding-times. Moreover
there are spiritual budding-times; and then also there are
physical, appointed to nations.
"Thus in the middle of that poor calumniated Eighteenth
Century, see once more! Long winter again past, the dead-
seeming tree proves to be living, to have been always living;
after motionless times, every bough shoots forth on the
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sudden, very strangely:--it now turns out that this favoured
England was not only to have had her Shakspeares, Bacons,
Sydneys, but to have her Watts, Arkwrights, Brindleys! We
will honour greatness in all kinds. The Prospero evoked the
singing of Ariel, and took captive the world with those
melodies: the same Prospero can send his Fire-demons
panting across all oceans; shooting with the speed of meteors,
on cunning highways, from end to end of kingdoms; and
make Iron his missionary, preaching its evangel to the brute
Primeval Powers, which listen and obey: neither is this small.
Manchester, with its cotton-fuzz, its smoke and dust, its
tumult and contentious squalor, is hideous to thee? Think
not so: a precious substance, beautiful as magic dreams, and
yet no dream but a reality, lies hidden in that noisome
wrappage;--a wrappage struggling indeed (look at Chartisms
and suchlike) to cast itself off, and leave the beauty free and
visible there! Hast thou heard, with sound ears, the awaken-
ing of a Manchester, on Monday morning, at half-past five
by the clock; the rushing-off of its thousand mills, like the
boom of an Atlantic tide, ten-thousand times ten-thousand
spools and spindles all set humming there,--it is perhaps, if
thou knew it well, sublime as a Niagara, or more so. Cotton-
spinning is the clothing of the naked in its result; the triumph
of man over matter in its means. Soot and despair are not
the essence of it; they are divisible from it,--at this hour, are
they not crying fiercely to be divided? The great Goethe,
looking at cotton Switzerland, declared it, I am told, to be
of all things that he had seen in this world the most poetical.
Whereat friend Kanzler von Miiller, in search of the palpable
picturesque, could not but stare wide-eyed. Nevertheless
our World-Poet knew well what he was saying. "
"Richard Arkwright, it would seem, was not a beautiful
man; no romance-hero with haughty eyes, Apollo-lip, and
gesture like the herald Mercury; a plain almost gross, bag-
cheeked, potbellied Lancashire man, with an air of painful
reflection, yet also of copious free digestion;--a man stationed
by the community to shave certain dusty beards, in the
Northern parts of England, at a halfpenny each. To such end,
we say, by forethought, oversight, accident and arrangement,
had Richard Arkwright been, by the community of England
and his own consent, set apart. Nevertheless, in strapping
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? 22o Carlyle's Essays
of razors, in lathering of dusty beards, and the contradictions
and confusions attendant thereon, the man had notions in
that rough head of his; spindles, shuttles, wheels and con-
trivances plying ideally within the same: rather hopeless-
looking; which, however, he did at last bring to bear. Not
without difficulty! His townsfolk rose in mob round him,
for threatening to shorten labour, to shorten wages; so that
he had to fly, with broken wash-pots, scattered household,
and seek refuge elsewhere. Nay his wife too, as I learn,
rebelled; burnt his wooden model of his spinning-wheel;
resolute that he should stick to his razors rather;--for which,
however, he decisively, as thou wilt rejoice to understand,
packed her out of doors. O reader, what a Historical
Phenomenon is that bag-cheeked, potbellied, much-enduring,
much-inventing barber! French Revolutions were a-brewing
to resist the same in any measure, imperial Kaisers were
impotent without the cotton and cloth of England; and it
was this man that had to give England the power of cotton. "
"Neither had Watt of the Steamengine a heroic origin,
any kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of
this world were shooting their partridges; noisily, in Parlia-
ment or elsewhere, solving the question, Head or tail? while
this man with blackened fingers, with grim brow, was search-
ing out, in his workshop, the Fire-secret; or, having found it,
was painfully wending to and fro in quest of a "moneyed
man," as indispensable man-midwife of the same. Reader,
thou shalt admire what is admirable, not what is dressed in
admirable; learn to know the British lion even when he is not
throne-supporter, and also the British jackass in lion's skin
even when he is. Ah, couldst thou always, what a world
were it! But has the Berlin Royal Academy or any English
Useful-Knowledge Society discovered, for instance, who it
was that first scratched earth with a stick; and threw corns,
the biggest he could find, into it; seedgrains of a certain
grass, which he named while or wheat? Again, what is
the whole Tees-water and other breeding-world to him who
stole home from the forests the first bison-calf, and bred it up
to be a tame bison, a milk-cow? No machine of all they
showed me in Birmingham can be put in comparison for
ingenuity with that figure of the wedge named knife, of
the wedges named saw, of the lever named hammer:--nay
is it not with the hammer-knife, named sword, that men fight,
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and maintain any semblance of constituted authority that
yet survives among us? The steamengine I call fire-demon
and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire. Prome-
theus, Tubalcain, Triptolemus! Are not our greatest men
as good as lost? The men that walk daily among us, clothing
us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, mere
mythic men.
"It is said, ideas produce revolutions; and truly so they
do; not spiritual ideas only, but even mechanical.
In this
clanging clashing universal Sword-dance that the European
world now dances for the last half-century, Voltaire is but one
choragus, where Richard Arkwright is another. Let it dance
itself out. When Arkwright shall have become mythic like
Arachne, we shall still spin in peaceable profit by him; and
the Sword-dance, with all its sorrowful shufflings, Waterloo
waltzes, Moscow gallopades, how forgotten will that be! "
"On the whole, were not all these things most unexpected,
unforeseen? As indeed what thing is foreseen; especially
what man, the parent of things! Robert Clive in that same
time went out, with a developed gift of penmanship, as writer
or superior book-keeper to a trading factory established in
the distant East. With gift of penmanship developed; with
other gifts not yet developed, which the calls of the case did
by and by develop. Not fit for book-keeping alone, the man
was found fit for conquering Nawaubs, founding kingdoms,
Indian Empires! In a questionable manner, Indian Empire
from the other hemisphere took up its abode in Leadenhall
Street, in the City of London.
"Accidental all these things and persons look, unexpected
every one of them to man. Yet inevitable every one of
them; foreseen, not unexpected, by Supreme Power; pre-
pared, appointed from afar. Advancing always through all
centuries, in the middle of the eighteenth they arrived. The
Saxon kindred burst forth into cotton - spinning, cloth-
cropping, iron - forging, steamengineing, railwaying, com-
mercing and careering towards all the winds of Heaven,--
in this inexplicable noisy manner; the noise of which, in
Power-mills, in progress-of-the-species Magazines, still deafens
us somewhat. Most noisy, sudden! The Staffordshire coal-
strata lay side by side with iron-strata, quiet since the creation
of the world. Water flowed in Lancashire and Lanarkshire;
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? 222 ? Carlyle's Essays
bituminous fire lay bedded in rocks there too,--over which
how many fighting Stanleys, black Douglases, and other the
like contentious persons, had fought out their bickerings and
broils, not without result, we will hope! But God said, Let
the iron missionaries be; and they were. Coal and iron, so long
close unregardful neighbours,are wedded together; Birming-
ham and Wolverhampton, and the hundred Stygian forges,
with their fire-throats and never-resting sledge-hammers, rose
into day. Wet Manconium stretched out her hand towards
Carolina and the torrid zone, and plucked cotton there; who
could forbid her, that had the skill to weave it? Fish fled
thereupon from the Mersey River, vexed with innumerable
keels. England, I say, dug out her bitumen-fire, and bade
it work: towns rose, and steeple-chimneys;--Chartisms also,
and Parliaments they name Reformed. "
Such, figuratively given, are some prominent points, chief
mountain-summits, of our English History past and present,
according to the Author of this strange untranslated Work,
whom we think we recognise to be an old acquaintance.
CHAPTER IX
PARLIAMENTARY RADICALISM
To us, looking at these matters somewhat in the same light,
Reform-Bills, French Revolutions, Louis-Philippes, Chartisms,
Revolts of Three Days, and what not, are no longer inexplic-
able. Where the great mass of men is tolerably right, all is
right; where they are not right, all is wrong. The speaking
classes speak and debate, each for itself; the great dumb,
deep-buried class lies like an Enceladus, who in his pain, if he
will complain of it, has to produce earthquakes! Everywhere,
in these countries, in these times, the central fact worthy of all
consideration forces itself on us in this shape: the claim of
the Free Working-man to be raised to a level, we may say,
with the Working Slave; his anger and cureless discontent
till that be done. Food, shelter, due guidance, in return for
his labour: candidly interpreted, Chartism and all such isms
mean that; and the madder they are, do they not the more
emphatically mean, " See what guidance you have given us!
What delirium we are brought to talk and project, guided by
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nobody! " Laissez-faire on the part of the Governing Classes,
'we repeat again and again, will, with whatever difficulty,
have to cease; pacific mutual division of the spoil, and a
world well let alone, will no longer suffice. A Do-nothing
Guidance; and it is a Do-something World! Would to God
our Ducal Duces would become Leaders indeed; our Aristo-
cracies and Priesthoods discover in some suitable degree
what the world expected of them, what the world could no
longer do without getting of them! Nameless unmeasured
confusions, misery to themselves and us, might so be spared.
But that too will be as God has appointed. If they learn, it
will be well and happy: if not they, then others instead of
them will and must, and once more, though after a long sad
circuit, it will be well and happy.
Neither is the history of Chartism mysterious in these
times; especially if that of Radicalism be looked at. All
along, for the last five-and-twentv years, it was curious to
note how the internal discontent of England struggled to find
vent for itself through any orifice: the poor patient, all sick
from the centre to surface, complains now of this member,
now of that;--corn-laws, currency-laws, free-trade, protection,
want of free-trade: the poor patient tossing from side to side,
seeking a sound side to lie on, finds none. This Doctor says,
it is the liver; that other, it is the lungs, the head, the heart,
defective transpiration in the skin. A thoroughgoing Doctor
of eminence said, it was rotten boroughs; the want of ex-
tended suffrage to destroy rotten boroughs. From of old,
the English patient himself had a continually recurring
notion that this was it. The English people are used to
suffrage; it is their panacea for all that goes wrong with them;
they have a fixed-idea of suffrage. Singular enough: one's
right to vote for a Member of Parliament, to send one's
"twenty-thousandth part of a master of tongue-fence to
National Palaver,"--the Doctors asserted that this was Free-
dom, this and no other. It seemed credible to many men,
of high degree and of low. The persuasion of remedy grew,
the evil was pressing; Swing's ricks were on fire. Some
nine years ago, a State-surgeon rose, and in peculiar circum-
stances said: Let there be extension of the suffrage; let
the great Doctor's nostrum, the patient's old passionate
prayer be fulfilled!
Parliamentary Radicalism, while it gave articulate utter-
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? 224 Carlyle's Essays
ance to the discontent of the English people, could not by its
worst enemy be said to be without a function. If it is in the
natural order of things that there must be discontent, no less
so is it that such discontent should have an outlet, a Parlia-
mentary voice. Here the matter is debated of, demonstrated,
contradicted, qualified, reduced to feasibility;--can at least
solace itself with hope, and die gently, convinced of wwfeasi-
bility. The New, Untried ascertains how it will fit itself
into the arrangements of the Old; whether the Old can be
compelled to admit it; how in that case it may, with the
minimum of violence, be admitted. Nor let us count it an
easy one, this function of Radicalism; it was one of the most
difficult. The pain-stricken patient does, indeed, without
effort groan and complain; but not without effort does the
physician ascertain what it is that has gone wrong with him,
how some remedy may be devised for him. And above all,
if your patient is not one sick man, but a whole sick nation!
Dingy dumb millions, grimed with dust and sweat, with
darkness, rage and sorrow, stood round these men, saying, or
struggling as they could to say: "Behold, our lot is unfair;
our life is not whole but sick; we cannot live under injustice;
go ye and get us justice! " For whether the poor operative
clamoured for Time-bill, Factory-bill, Corn-bill, for or against
whatever bill, this was what he meant. All bills plausibly
presented might have some look of hope in them, might get
some clamour of approval from him; as, for the man wholly
sick, there is no disease in the Nosology but he can trace in
himself some symptoms of it. Such was the mission of
Parliamentary Radicalism.
How Parliamentary Radicalism has fulfilled this mission,
intrusted to its management these eight years now, is known
to all men. The expectant millions have sat at a feast of
the Barmecide; been bidden fill themselves with the imagina-
tion of meat. What thing has Radicalism obtained for them;
what other than shadows of things has it so much as asked
for them? Cheap Justice, Justice to Ireland, Irish Appropria-
tion-Clause, Rate-paying Clause, Poor-Rate, Church-Rate,
Household Suffrage, Ballot - Question "open" or shut:
not things but shadows of things; Benthamee formulas;
barren as the east-wind! An Ultra-radical, not seemingly of
the Benthamee species, is forced to exclaim: "The people are
at last wearied. They say, Why should we be ruined in our
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shops, thrown out of our farms, voting for these men?
Ministerial majorities decline; this Ministry has become impo-
tent, had it even the will to do good. They have called long
to us,' We are a Reform Ministry; will ye not support us? '
We have supported them; borne them forward indignantly on
our shoulders, time after time, fall after fall, when they had
been hurled out into the street; and lay prostrate, helpless,like
dead luggage. It is the fact of a Reform Ministry, not the
name of one that we would support! Languor, sickness of
hope deferred pervades the public mind; the public mind
says at last, Why all this struggle for the name of a Reform
Ministry? Let the Tories be Ministry if they will; let at
least some living reality be Ministry! A rearing horse that
will only run backward, he is not the horse one would choose
to travel on: yet of all conceivable horses the worst is the
dead horse. Mounted on a rearing horse, you may back
him, spur him, check him, make a little way even backwards:
but seated astride of your dead horse, what chance is there
for you in the chapter of possibilities? You sit motionless,
hopeless, a spectacle to gods and men. "
There is a class of revolutionists named Girondins, whose
fate in history is remarkable enough! Men who rebel, and
urge the Lower Classes to rebel, ought to have other than
Formulas to go upon. Men who discern in the misery of the
toiling complaining millions not misery, but only a raw-
material which can be wrought upon and traded in, for one's
own poor hidebound theories and egoisms; to whom millions
of living fellow-creatures, with beating hearts in their bosoms,
beating, suffering, hoping, are "masses," mere "explosive
masses for blowing-down Bastilles with," for voting at hust-
ings for us: such men are of the questionable species! No
man is justified in resisting by word or deed the Authority
he lives under, for a light cause, be such Authority what it
may. Obedience, little as many may consider that side of
the matter, is the primary duty of man. No man but is
bound indefeasibly, with all force of obligation, to obey.
Parents, teachers, superiors, leaders, these all creatures
recognise as deserving obedience. Recognised or not recog-
nised, a man has his superiors, a regular hierarchy above
him; extending up, degree above degree, to Heaven itself
and God the Maker, who made His world not for anarchy but
for rule and order! It is not a light matter when the just
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? 226 Carlyle's Essays
man can recognise in the powers set over him no longer
anything that is divine; when resistance against such
becomes a deeper law of order than obedience to them;
when the just man sees himself in the tragical position of a
stirrer-up of strife! Rebel without due and most due cause,
is the ugliest of words; the first rebel was Satan. --
But now in these circumstances shall we blame the un-
voting disappointed millions that they turn away with horror
from this name of a Reform Ministry, name of a Parliamentary
Radicalism, and demand a fact and reality thereof? That
they too, having still faith in what so many had faith in, still
count " extension of the suffrage" the one thing needful;
and say, in such manner as they can, Let the suffrage be still
extended, then all will be well? It is the ancient British
faith; promulgated in these ages by prophets and evangelists;
preached forth from barrel-heads by all manner of men. He
who is free and blessed has his twenty-thousandth part of a
master of tongue-fence in National Palaver; whosoever is not
blessed but unhappy, the ailment of him is that he has it not.
Ought he not to have it, then? By the law of God and of
men, yea;--and will have it withal! Chartism, with its
"five points," borne aloft on pikeheads and torchlight
meetings, is there. Chartism is one of the most natural
phenomena in England. Not that Chartism now exists should
provoke wonder; but that the invited hungry people should
have sat eight years at such table of the Barmecide, patiently
expecting somewhat from the Name of a Reform Ministry,
and not till after eight years have grown hopeless, this is
the respectable side of the miracle.
CHAPTER X
IMPOSSIBLE
"But what are we to do? " exclaims the practical man,
impatiently on every side: "Descend from speculation and
the safe pulpit, down into the rough market-place, and say
what can be done I" -- O practical man, there seem very
many things which practice and true manlike effort, in
Parliament and out of it, might actually avail to do. But
the first of all things, as already said, is to gird thyself up
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for actual doing; to know that thou actually either must do,
or, as the Irish say, " come out of that! "
It is not a lucky word this same impossible: no good
comes of those that have it so often in their mouth. Who
is he that says always, There is a lion in the way? Sluggard,
thou must slay the lion, then; the way has to be travelled!
In Art, in Practice, innumerable critics will demonstrate that
most things are henceforth impossible; that we are got, once
for all, into the region of perennial commonplace, and must
contentedly continue there. Let such critics demonstrate;
it is the nature of them: what harm is in it? Poetry once
well demonstrated to be impossible, arises the Burns, arises
the Goethe. Unheroic commonplace being now clearly all
we have to look for, comes the Napoleon, comes the con-
quest of the world. It was proved by fluxionary calculus,
that steamships could never get across the farthest point
of Ireland to the nearest of Newfoundland: impelling force,
resisting force, maximum here, minimum there; by law of
Nature, and geometric demonstration:--what could be done?
The Great Western could weigh anchor from Bristol Port;
that could be done. The Great Western, bounding safe
through the gullets of the Hudson, threw her cable out on the
capstan of New York, and left our still moist paper-demon-
stration to dry itself at leisure. "Impossible? " cried
Mirabeau to his secretary, " Ne me dites jamais ce bete de mot,
Never name to me that blockhead of a word! "
There is a phenomenon which one might call Paralytic
Radicalism, in these days; which gauges with Statistic
measuring-reed, sounds with Philosophic Politico-Economic
plummet the deep dark sea of troubles; and having taught
us rightly what an infinite sea of troubles it is, sums-up with
the practical inference, and use of consolation, That nothing
whatever can be done in it by man, who has simply to sit still,
and look wistfully to " time and general laws: " and there-
upon, without so much as recommending suicide, coldly
takes its leave of us. Most paralytic, uninstructive; unpro-
ductive of any comfort to one! They are an unreasonable
class who cry, " Peace, peace," when there is no peace. But
what kind of class are they who cry, " Peace, peace, have I
not told you that there is no peace! " Paralytic Radicalism,
frequent among those Statistic friends of ours, is one of the
most afflictive phenomena the mind of man can be called to
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? 228 Carlyle's Essays
contemplate. One prays that it at least might cease. Let
Paralysis retire into secret places, and dormitories proper
for it; the public highways ought not to be occupied by people
demonstrating that motion is impossible. Paralytic;--and
also, thank Heaven,' entirely false! Listen to a thinker
of another sort: "All evil, and this evil too, is as a nightmare;
the instant you begin to stir under it, the evil is, properly
speaking, gone. " Consider, O reader, whether it be not
actually so? Evil, once manfully fronted, ceases to be evil;
there is generous battle-hope in place of dead passive misery;
the evil itself has become a kind of good.
To the practical man, therefore, we will repeat that he has,
as the first thing he can " do," to gird himself up for actual
doing; to know well that he is either there to do, or not there
at all. Once rightly girded up, how many things will present
themselves as doable which now are not attemptable! Two
things, great things, dwell, for the last ten years, in all think-
ing heads in England; and are hovering, of late, even on the
tongues of not a few. With a word on each of these, we will
dismiss the practical man, and right gladly take ourselves into
obscurity and silence again. Universal Education is the first
great thing we mean; general Emigration is the second.
Who would suppose that Education were a thing which
had to be advocated on the ground of local expediency, or in-
deed on any ground? As if it stood not on the basis of ever-
lasting duty, as a prime necessity of man. It is a thing that
should need no advocating; much as it does actually need.
To impart the gift of thinking to those who cannot think, and
yet who could in that case think: this, one would imagine,
was the first function a government had to set about dis-
charging. Were it not a cruel thing to see, in any province
of an empire, the inhabitants living all mutilated in their
limbs, each strong man with his right arm lamed? How
much cruder to find the strong soul, with its eyes still sealed,
its eyes extinct so that it sees not! Light has come into the
world, but to this poor peasant it has come in vain. For
six thousand years the Sons of Adam, in sleepless effort, have
been devising, doing, discovering; in mysterious infinite
indissoluble communion, warring, a little band of brothers,
against the great black empire of Necessity and Night; they
have accomplished such a conauest and conquests: and to
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this man it is all as if it had not been. The four-and-twenty
letters of the Alphabet are still Runic enigmas to him. He
passes by on the other side; and that great Spiritual King-
dom, the toilwom conquest of his own brothers, all that his
brothers have conquered, is a thing non-extant for him. An
invisible empire; he knows it not, suspects it not. And is
it not his withal; the conquest of his own brothers, the
lawfully acquired possession of all men? Baleful enchant-
ment lies over him, from generation to generation; he knows
not that such an empire is his, that such an empire is at all.
O, what are bills of rights, emancipations of black slaves into
black apprentices, lawsuits in chancery for some short usu-
fruct of a bit of land? The grand " seedfield of Time " is this
man's, and you give it him not. Time's seedfield, which
includes the Earth and all her seedfields and pearl-oceans,
nay her sowers too and pearl-divers, all that was wise and
heroic and victorious here below; of which the Earth's
centuries are but as furrows, for it stretches forth from the
Beginning onward even into this Day!
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213
accordingly, not without pain to the bisons, make good the
same. He had a better right to that piece of God's land;
namely a better might to turn it to use;--a might to settle
himself there, at least, and try what use he could turn it to.
The bisons disappeared; the Celts took possession, and tilled.
Forever, was it to be? Alas, Forever is not a category that
can establish itself in this world of Time. A world of Time,
by the very definition of it, is a world of mortality and
mutability, of Beginning and Ending. No property is eternal
but God the Maker's: whom Heaven permits to take posses-
sion, his is the right; Heaven's sanction is such permission,--
while it lasts: nothing more can be said. Why does that
hyssop grow there, in the chink of the wall? Because the
whole Universe, sufficiently occupied otherwise, could not
hitherto prevent its growing! It has the might and the right.
By the same great law do Roman Empires establish them-
selves, Christian Religions promulgate themselves, and all
extant Powers bear rule. The strong thing is the just thing:
this thou wilt find throughout in our world;--as indeed was
God and Truth the Maker of our world, or was Satan and
Falsehood?
"One proposition widely current as to this Norman Con-
quest is of a Physiologic sort: That the conquerors and con-
quered here were of different races; nay that the Nobility of
England is still, to this hour, of a somewhat different blood
? from the commonalty, their fine Norman features contrasting
so pleasantly with the coarse Saxon ones of the others. God
knows, there are coarse enough features to be seen among the
commonalty of that country; but if the Nobility's be finer, it
is not their Normanhood that can be the reason. Does the
above Physiologist reflect who those same Normans, North-
men, originally were? Baltic Saxons, and what other mis-
cellany of Lurdanes, Jutes and Deutsch Pirates from the
East-sea marshes would join them in plunder of France! If
living three centuries longer in Heathenism, sea-robbery, and
the unlucrative fishing of amber could ennoble them beyond
the others, then were they ennobled. The Normans were
Saxons who had learned to speak French. No: by Thor and
Wodan, the Saxons were all as noble as needful;--shaped,
says the Mythus,' from the rock of the Harzgebirge;' brother-
tribes being made of clay, wood, water, or what other material
might be going! A stubborn, taciturn, sulky, indomitable
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? 214 Carlyle's Essays
rock-made race of men; as the figure they cut in all quarters,
in the cane-brake of Arkansas, in the Ghauts of the Himma-
laya, no less than in London City, in Warwick or Lancaster
County, does still abundantly manifest. "
"To this English People in World-History, there have been,
shall I prophesy, Two grand tasks assigned? Huge-looming
through the dim tumult of the always incommensurable
Present Time, outlines of two tasks disclose themselves: the
grand Industrial task of conquering some half or more of this
Terraqueous Planet for the use of man; then secondly, the
grand Constitutional task of sharing, in some pacific endurable
manner, the fruit of said conquest, and showing all people
how it might be done. These I will call their two tasks,
discernible hitherto in World-History: in both of these they
have made respectable though unequal progress. Steam-
engines, ploughshares, pickaxes; what is meant by conquering
this Planet, they partly know. Elective franchise, ballot-
box, representative assembly; how to accomplish sharing
of that conquest, they do not so well know. Europe knows
not; Europe vehemently asks in these days, but receives no
answer, no credible answer. For as to the partial Delolmish,
Benthamee, or other French or English answers, current in
the proper quarters, and highly beneficial and indispensable
there, thy disbelief in them as final answers, I take it, is
complete. "
"Succession of rebellions? Successive clippings away of
the Supreme Authority; class after class rising in revolt to
say, ' We will no more be governed so '? That is not the
history of the English Constitution; not altogether that.
Rebellion is the means, but it is not the motive cause. The
motive cause, and true secret of the matter, were always this:
The necessity there was for rebelling?
"Rights I will permit thee to call everywhere ' correctly-
articulated mights' A dreadful business to articulate cor-
rectly! Consider those Barons of Runnymede; consider all
manner of successfully revolting men! Your Great Charter
has to be experimented on, by battle and debate, for a
hundred-and-fifty years; is then found to be correct; and
stands as true Magna Charta,--nigh cut in pieces by a tailor,
short of measure, in later generations. Mights, I say, are a
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dreadful business to articulate correctly! Yet articulated
they have to be; the time comes for it, the need comes for
it, and with enormous difficulty and experimenting it is got
done. Call it not succession of rebellions; call it rather
succession of expansions, of enlightenments, gift of articulate
utterance descending ever lower. Class after class acquires
faculty of utterance,--Necessity teaching and compelling;
as the dumb man, seeing the knife at his father's throat,
suddenly acquired speech! Consider too how class after
class not only acquires faculty of articulating what its might
is, but likewise grows in might, acquires might or loses might;
so that always, after a space, there is not only new gift
of articulating, but there is something new to articulate.
Constitutional epochs will never cease among men. "
"And so now, the Barons all settled and satisfied, a new
class hitherto silent had begun to speak: the Middle Class,
namely. In the time of James First, not only Knights of the
Shire but Parliamentary Burgesses assemble, to assert, to
complain and propose; a real House of Commons has come
decisively into play,--much to the astonishment of James
First. We call it a growth of mights, if also of necessities; a
growth of power to articulate mights, and make rights of them.
"In those past silent centuries, among those silent classes,
much had been going on. Not only had red-deer in the New
and other Forests been got preserved and shot; and treach-
eries of Simon de Montfort, wars of Red and White Roses,
Battles of Crecy, Battles of Bosworth, and many other battles
been got transacted and adjusted; but England wholly, not
without sore toil and aching bones to the millions of sires
and the millions of sons these eighteen generations, had been
got drained and tilled, covered with yellow harvests, beautiful
and rich possessions; the mud-wooden Caesters and Chesters-
had become steepled tile-roofed compact Towns. Sheffield
had taken to the manufacture of Sheffield whittles; Worstead
could from wool spin yarn, and knit or weave the same into
stockings or breeches for men. England had property valu-
able to the auctioneer; but the accumulate manufacturing,
commercial, economic skill which lay impalpably warehoused
in English hands and heads, what auctioneer could estimate?
"Hardly an Englishman to be met with but could do some-
ching; some cunninger thing than break his fellow-creature's .
I
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? 216 Carlyle's Essays
head with battle-axes. The seven incorporated trades, with
their million guild-brethren, with their hammers, their shuttles
and tools, what an army;--fit to conquer that land of Eng-
land, as we say, and to hold it conquered! Nay, strangest
of all, the English people had acquired the faculty and habit
of thinking,--even of believing: individual conscience had
unfolded itself among them; Conscience, and Intelligence its
handmaid. Ideas of innumerable kinds were circulating
among these men: witness one Shakspeare, a woolcomber,
poacher, or whatever else at Stratford in Warwickshire, who
happened to write books! The finest human figure, as I
apprehend, that Nature has hitherto seen fit to make of
our widely diffused Teutonic clay. Saxon, Norman, Celt or
Sarmat, I find no human soul so beautiful, these fifteen-
hundred known years;--our supreme modern European man.
Him England had contrived to realise: were there not ideas?
"Ideas poetic and also Puritanic,--that had to seek utter-
ance in the notablest way! England had got her Shakspeare;
but was now about to get her Milton and Oliver Cromwell.
This too we will call a new expansion, hard as it might be to
articulate and adjust; this, that a man could actually have a
Conscience for his own behoof, and not for his Priest's only;
that his Priest, be who he might, would henceforth have to
take that fact along with him. One of the hardest things to
adjust! It is not adjusted down to this hour. It lasts on-
wards to the time they call ' Glorious Revolution ' before so
much as a reasonable truce can be made, and the war proceed
by logic mainly. And still it is war, and no peace, unless we
call waste vacancy peace. But it needed to be adjusted, as
the others had done, as still others will do. Nobility at Runny-
mede cannot endure foul-play grown palpable; no more can
Gentry in Long Parliament; no more can Commonalty in
Parliament they name Reformed. Prynne's bloody ears were
as a testimony and question to all England: 'Englishmen, is
this fair? ' England no longer continent of herself, answered,
bellowing as with the voice of lions: 'No, it is not fair! '"
"But now on the Industrial side, while this great Consti-
tutional controversy, and revolt of the Middle Class had not
ended, had yet but begun, what a shoot was that that England,
carelessly, in quest of other objects, struck out across the
Ocean, into the waste land which it named New England!
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Hail to thee, poor little ship Mayflower, of Delft-Haven:
* poor common-looking ship, hired by common charterparty
for coined dollars; caulked with mere oakum and tar; pro-
visioned with vulgarest biscuit and bacon;--yet what ship
Argo, or miraculous epic ship built by the Sea-Gods, was
other than a foolish bumbarge in comparison! Golden
fleeces or the like these sailed for, with or without effect;
thou little Mayflower hadst in thee a veritable Promethean
spark; life-spark of the largest Nation on our Earth,--so we
may already name the Transatlantic Saxon Nation. They
went seeking leave to hear sermon in their own method, these
Mayflower Puritans; a most honest indispensable search:
and yet like Saul the son of Kish, seeking a small thing, they
found this unexpected great thing! Honour to the brave
and true; they verily, we say, carry fire from Heaven, and
have a power that themselves dream not of. Let all men
'honour Puritanism, since God has so honoured it. Islam
itself, with its wild heartfelt 'Allah akbar, God is great,'
was it not honoured? There is but one thing without honour;
smitten with eternal barrenness, inability to do or be:
Insincerity, Unbelief. He who believes no thing, who be-
lieves only the shows of things, is not in relation with Nature
and Fact at all. Nature denies him; orders him at his
earliest convenience to disappear. Let him disappear from
her domains,--into those of Chaos, Hypothesis and Simula-
crum, or wherever else his parish may be. "
"As to the Third Constitutional controversy, that of the
Working Classes, which now debates itself everywhere these
fifty years, in France specifically since 1789, in England too
since 1831, it is doubtless the hardest of all to get articulated:
finis of peace, or even reasonable truce on this, is a thing I
have little prospect of for several generations. Dark, wild-
weltering, dreary, boundless; nothing heard on it yet but
ballot-boxes, Parliamentary arguing; not to speak of much
far worse arguing, by steel and lead, from Valmy to Waterloo,
to Peterloo! "--
"And yet of Representative Assemblies may not this
good be said: That contending parties in a country do thereby
ascertain one another's strength? They fight there, since
fight they must, by petition, Parliamentary eloquence, not
by sword, bayonet and bursts of military cannon. Why
11 t<h p
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? 218 Carlyle's Essays
do men fight at all, if it be not that they are yet tmacquainted
with one another's strength, and must fight and ascertain
it? Knowing that thou art stronger than I, that thou canst
compel me, I will submit to thee: unless I chance to prefer
extermination, and slightly circuitous suicide, there is no
other course for me. That in England, by public meetings,
by petitions, by elections, leading-articles, and other jangling
hubbub and tongue-fence which perpetually goes on every-
where in that country, people ascertain one another's strength,
and the most obdurate House of Lords has to yield and give-
in before it come to cannonading and guillotinement: this
is a saving characteristic of England. Nay, at bottom, is not
this the celebrated English Constitution itself? This un-
spoken Constitution whereof Privilege of Parliament, Money-
Bill, Mutiny-Bill, and all that could be spoken and enacted
hitherto, is not the essence and body, but only the shape
and skin? Such Constitution is, in our times, verily
invaluable. "
"Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter
chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of
summer does come. So long the tree stood naked; angry
wiry naked boughs moaning and creaking in the wind: you
would say, Cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground? Not
so; we must wait; all things will have their time. --Of the
man Shakspeare, and his Elizabethan Era, with its Sydneys,
Raleighs, Bacons, what could we say? That it was a
spiritual flower-time. Suddenly, as with the breath of June,
your rude naked tree is touched; bursts into leaves and
flowers, such leaves and flowers. The past long ages of
nakedness, and wintry fermentation and elaboration, have
done their part, though seeming to do nothing. The past
silence has got a voice, all the more significant the longer it
had continued silent. In trees, men, institutions, creeds,
nations, in all things extant and growing in this Universe, we
may note such vicissitudes and budding-times. Moreover
there are spiritual budding-times; and then also there are
physical, appointed to nations.
"Thus in the middle of that poor calumniated Eighteenth
Century, see once more! Long winter again past, the dead-
seeming tree proves to be living, to have been always living;
after motionless times, every bough shoots forth on the
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sudden, very strangely:--it now turns out that this favoured
England was not only to have had her Shakspeares, Bacons,
Sydneys, but to have her Watts, Arkwrights, Brindleys! We
will honour greatness in all kinds. The Prospero evoked the
singing of Ariel, and took captive the world with those
melodies: the same Prospero can send his Fire-demons
panting across all oceans; shooting with the speed of meteors,
on cunning highways, from end to end of kingdoms; and
make Iron his missionary, preaching its evangel to the brute
Primeval Powers, which listen and obey: neither is this small.
Manchester, with its cotton-fuzz, its smoke and dust, its
tumult and contentious squalor, is hideous to thee? Think
not so: a precious substance, beautiful as magic dreams, and
yet no dream but a reality, lies hidden in that noisome
wrappage;--a wrappage struggling indeed (look at Chartisms
and suchlike) to cast itself off, and leave the beauty free and
visible there! Hast thou heard, with sound ears, the awaken-
ing of a Manchester, on Monday morning, at half-past five
by the clock; the rushing-off of its thousand mills, like the
boom of an Atlantic tide, ten-thousand times ten-thousand
spools and spindles all set humming there,--it is perhaps, if
thou knew it well, sublime as a Niagara, or more so. Cotton-
spinning is the clothing of the naked in its result; the triumph
of man over matter in its means. Soot and despair are not
the essence of it; they are divisible from it,--at this hour, are
they not crying fiercely to be divided? The great Goethe,
looking at cotton Switzerland, declared it, I am told, to be
of all things that he had seen in this world the most poetical.
Whereat friend Kanzler von Miiller, in search of the palpable
picturesque, could not but stare wide-eyed. Nevertheless
our World-Poet knew well what he was saying. "
"Richard Arkwright, it would seem, was not a beautiful
man; no romance-hero with haughty eyes, Apollo-lip, and
gesture like the herald Mercury; a plain almost gross, bag-
cheeked, potbellied Lancashire man, with an air of painful
reflection, yet also of copious free digestion;--a man stationed
by the community to shave certain dusty beards, in the
Northern parts of England, at a halfpenny each. To such end,
we say, by forethought, oversight, accident and arrangement,
had Richard Arkwright been, by the community of England
and his own consent, set apart. Nevertheless, in strapping
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? 22o Carlyle's Essays
of razors, in lathering of dusty beards, and the contradictions
and confusions attendant thereon, the man had notions in
that rough head of his; spindles, shuttles, wheels and con-
trivances plying ideally within the same: rather hopeless-
looking; which, however, he did at last bring to bear. Not
without difficulty! His townsfolk rose in mob round him,
for threatening to shorten labour, to shorten wages; so that
he had to fly, with broken wash-pots, scattered household,
and seek refuge elsewhere. Nay his wife too, as I learn,
rebelled; burnt his wooden model of his spinning-wheel;
resolute that he should stick to his razors rather;--for which,
however, he decisively, as thou wilt rejoice to understand,
packed her out of doors. O reader, what a Historical
Phenomenon is that bag-cheeked, potbellied, much-enduring,
much-inventing barber! French Revolutions were a-brewing
to resist the same in any measure, imperial Kaisers were
impotent without the cotton and cloth of England; and it
was this man that had to give England the power of cotton. "
"Neither had Watt of the Steamengine a heroic origin,
any kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of
this world were shooting their partridges; noisily, in Parlia-
ment or elsewhere, solving the question, Head or tail? while
this man with blackened fingers, with grim brow, was search-
ing out, in his workshop, the Fire-secret; or, having found it,
was painfully wending to and fro in quest of a "moneyed
man," as indispensable man-midwife of the same. Reader,
thou shalt admire what is admirable, not what is dressed in
admirable; learn to know the British lion even when he is not
throne-supporter, and also the British jackass in lion's skin
even when he is. Ah, couldst thou always, what a world
were it! But has the Berlin Royal Academy or any English
Useful-Knowledge Society discovered, for instance, who it
was that first scratched earth with a stick; and threw corns,
the biggest he could find, into it; seedgrains of a certain
grass, which he named while or wheat? Again, what is
the whole Tees-water and other breeding-world to him who
stole home from the forests the first bison-calf, and bred it up
to be a tame bison, a milk-cow? No machine of all they
showed me in Birmingham can be put in comparison for
ingenuity with that figure of the wedge named knife, of
the wedges named saw, of the lever named hammer:--nay
is it not with the hammer-knife, named sword, that men fight,
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and maintain any semblance of constituted authority that
yet survives among us? The steamengine I call fire-demon
and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire. Prome-
theus, Tubalcain, Triptolemus! Are not our greatest men
as good as lost? The men that walk daily among us, clothing
us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, mere
mythic men.
"It is said, ideas produce revolutions; and truly so they
do; not spiritual ideas only, but even mechanical.
In this
clanging clashing universal Sword-dance that the European
world now dances for the last half-century, Voltaire is but one
choragus, where Richard Arkwright is another. Let it dance
itself out. When Arkwright shall have become mythic like
Arachne, we shall still spin in peaceable profit by him; and
the Sword-dance, with all its sorrowful shufflings, Waterloo
waltzes, Moscow gallopades, how forgotten will that be! "
"On the whole, were not all these things most unexpected,
unforeseen? As indeed what thing is foreseen; especially
what man, the parent of things! Robert Clive in that same
time went out, with a developed gift of penmanship, as writer
or superior book-keeper to a trading factory established in
the distant East. With gift of penmanship developed; with
other gifts not yet developed, which the calls of the case did
by and by develop. Not fit for book-keeping alone, the man
was found fit for conquering Nawaubs, founding kingdoms,
Indian Empires! In a questionable manner, Indian Empire
from the other hemisphere took up its abode in Leadenhall
Street, in the City of London.
"Accidental all these things and persons look, unexpected
every one of them to man. Yet inevitable every one of
them; foreseen, not unexpected, by Supreme Power; pre-
pared, appointed from afar. Advancing always through all
centuries, in the middle of the eighteenth they arrived. The
Saxon kindred burst forth into cotton - spinning, cloth-
cropping, iron - forging, steamengineing, railwaying, com-
mercing and careering towards all the winds of Heaven,--
in this inexplicable noisy manner; the noise of which, in
Power-mills, in progress-of-the-species Magazines, still deafens
us somewhat. Most noisy, sudden! The Staffordshire coal-
strata lay side by side with iron-strata, quiet since the creation
of the world. Water flowed in Lancashire and Lanarkshire;
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? 222 ? Carlyle's Essays
bituminous fire lay bedded in rocks there too,--over which
how many fighting Stanleys, black Douglases, and other the
like contentious persons, had fought out their bickerings and
broils, not without result, we will hope! But God said, Let
the iron missionaries be; and they were. Coal and iron, so long
close unregardful neighbours,are wedded together; Birming-
ham and Wolverhampton, and the hundred Stygian forges,
with their fire-throats and never-resting sledge-hammers, rose
into day. Wet Manconium stretched out her hand towards
Carolina and the torrid zone, and plucked cotton there; who
could forbid her, that had the skill to weave it? Fish fled
thereupon from the Mersey River, vexed with innumerable
keels. England, I say, dug out her bitumen-fire, and bade
it work: towns rose, and steeple-chimneys;--Chartisms also,
and Parliaments they name Reformed. "
Such, figuratively given, are some prominent points, chief
mountain-summits, of our English History past and present,
according to the Author of this strange untranslated Work,
whom we think we recognise to be an old acquaintance.
CHAPTER IX
PARLIAMENTARY RADICALISM
To us, looking at these matters somewhat in the same light,
Reform-Bills, French Revolutions, Louis-Philippes, Chartisms,
Revolts of Three Days, and what not, are no longer inexplic-
able. Where the great mass of men is tolerably right, all is
right; where they are not right, all is wrong. The speaking
classes speak and debate, each for itself; the great dumb,
deep-buried class lies like an Enceladus, who in his pain, if he
will complain of it, has to produce earthquakes! Everywhere,
in these countries, in these times, the central fact worthy of all
consideration forces itself on us in this shape: the claim of
the Free Working-man to be raised to a level, we may say,
with the Working Slave; his anger and cureless discontent
till that be done. Food, shelter, due guidance, in return for
his labour: candidly interpreted, Chartism and all such isms
mean that; and the madder they are, do they not the more
emphatically mean, " See what guidance you have given us!
What delirium we are brought to talk and project, guided by
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nobody! " Laissez-faire on the part of the Governing Classes,
'we repeat again and again, will, with whatever difficulty,
have to cease; pacific mutual division of the spoil, and a
world well let alone, will no longer suffice. A Do-nothing
Guidance; and it is a Do-something World! Would to God
our Ducal Duces would become Leaders indeed; our Aristo-
cracies and Priesthoods discover in some suitable degree
what the world expected of them, what the world could no
longer do without getting of them! Nameless unmeasured
confusions, misery to themselves and us, might so be spared.
But that too will be as God has appointed. If they learn, it
will be well and happy: if not they, then others instead of
them will and must, and once more, though after a long sad
circuit, it will be well and happy.
Neither is the history of Chartism mysterious in these
times; especially if that of Radicalism be looked at. All
along, for the last five-and-twentv years, it was curious to
note how the internal discontent of England struggled to find
vent for itself through any orifice: the poor patient, all sick
from the centre to surface, complains now of this member,
now of that;--corn-laws, currency-laws, free-trade, protection,
want of free-trade: the poor patient tossing from side to side,
seeking a sound side to lie on, finds none. This Doctor says,
it is the liver; that other, it is the lungs, the head, the heart,
defective transpiration in the skin. A thoroughgoing Doctor
of eminence said, it was rotten boroughs; the want of ex-
tended suffrage to destroy rotten boroughs. From of old,
the English patient himself had a continually recurring
notion that this was it. The English people are used to
suffrage; it is their panacea for all that goes wrong with them;
they have a fixed-idea of suffrage. Singular enough: one's
right to vote for a Member of Parliament, to send one's
"twenty-thousandth part of a master of tongue-fence to
National Palaver,"--the Doctors asserted that this was Free-
dom, this and no other. It seemed credible to many men,
of high degree and of low. The persuasion of remedy grew,
the evil was pressing; Swing's ricks were on fire. Some
nine years ago, a State-surgeon rose, and in peculiar circum-
stances said: Let there be extension of the suffrage; let
the great Doctor's nostrum, the patient's old passionate
prayer be fulfilled!
Parliamentary Radicalism, while it gave articulate utter-
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? 224 Carlyle's Essays
ance to the discontent of the English people, could not by its
worst enemy be said to be without a function. If it is in the
natural order of things that there must be discontent, no less
so is it that such discontent should have an outlet, a Parlia-
mentary voice. Here the matter is debated of, demonstrated,
contradicted, qualified, reduced to feasibility;--can at least
solace itself with hope, and die gently, convinced of wwfeasi-
bility. The New, Untried ascertains how it will fit itself
into the arrangements of the Old; whether the Old can be
compelled to admit it; how in that case it may, with the
minimum of violence, be admitted. Nor let us count it an
easy one, this function of Radicalism; it was one of the most
difficult. The pain-stricken patient does, indeed, without
effort groan and complain; but not without effort does the
physician ascertain what it is that has gone wrong with him,
how some remedy may be devised for him. And above all,
if your patient is not one sick man, but a whole sick nation!
Dingy dumb millions, grimed with dust and sweat, with
darkness, rage and sorrow, stood round these men, saying, or
struggling as they could to say: "Behold, our lot is unfair;
our life is not whole but sick; we cannot live under injustice;
go ye and get us justice! " For whether the poor operative
clamoured for Time-bill, Factory-bill, Corn-bill, for or against
whatever bill, this was what he meant. All bills plausibly
presented might have some look of hope in them, might get
some clamour of approval from him; as, for the man wholly
sick, there is no disease in the Nosology but he can trace in
himself some symptoms of it. Such was the mission of
Parliamentary Radicalism.
How Parliamentary Radicalism has fulfilled this mission,
intrusted to its management these eight years now, is known
to all men. The expectant millions have sat at a feast of
the Barmecide; been bidden fill themselves with the imagina-
tion of meat. What thing has Radicalism obtained for them;
what other than shadows of things has it so much as asked
for them? Cheap Justice, Justice to Ireland, Irish Appropria-
tion-Clause, Rate-paying Clause, Poor-Rate, Church-Rate,
Household Suffrage, Ballot - Question "open" or shut:
not things but shadows of things; Benthamee formulas;
barren as the east-wind! An Ultra-radical, not seemingly of
the Benthamee species, is forced to exclaim: "The people are
at last wearied. They say, Why should we be ruined in our
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shops, thrown out of our farms, voting for these men?
Ministerial majorities decline; this Ministry has become impo-
tent, had it even the will to do good. They have called long
to us,' We are a Reform Ministry; will ye not support us? '
We have supported them; borne them forward indignantly on
our shoulders, time after time, fall after fall, when they had
been hurled out into the street; and lay prostrate, helpless,like
dead luggage. It is the fact of a Reform Ministry, not the
name of one that we would support! Languor, sickness of
hope deferred pervades the public mind; the public mind
says at last, Why all this struggle for the name of a Reform
Ministry? Let the Tories be Ministry if they will; let at
least some living reality be Ministry! A rearing horse that
will only run backward, he is not the horse one would choose
to travel on: yet of all conceivable horses the worst is the
dead horse. Mounted on a rearing horse, you may back
him, spur him, check him, make a little way even backwards:
but seated astride of your dead horse, what chance is there
for you in the chapter of possibilities? You sit motionless,
hopeless, a spectacle to gods and men. "
There is a class of revolutionists named Girondins, whose
fate in history is remarkable enough! Men who rebel, and
urge the Lower Classes to rebel, ought to have other than
Formulas to go upon. Men who discern in the misery of the
toiling complaining millions not misery, but only a raw-
material which can be wrought upon and traded in, for one's
own poor hidebound theories and egoisms; to whom millions
of living fellow-creatures, with beating hearts in their bosoms,
beating, suffering, hoping, are "masses," mere "explosive
masses for blowing-down Bastilles with," for voting at hust-
ings for us: such men are of the questionable species! No
man is justified in resisting by word or deed the Authority
he lives under, for a light cause, be such Authority what it
may. Obedience, little as many may consider that side of
the matter, is the primary duty of man. No man but is
bound indefeasibly, with all force of obligation, to obey.
Parents, teachers, superiors, leaders, these all creatures
recognise as deserving obedience. Recognised or not recog-
nised, a man has his superiors, a regular hierarchy above
him; extending up, degree above degree, to Heaven itself
and God the Maker, who made His world not for anarchy but
for rule and order! It is not a light matter when the just
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? 226 Carlyle's Essays
man can recognise in the powers set over him no longer
anything that is divine; when resistance against such
becomes a deeper law of order than obedience to them;
when the just man sees himself in the tragical position of a
stirrer-up of strife! Rebel without due and most due cause,
is the ugliest of words; the first rebel was Satan. --
But now in these circumstances shall we blame the un-
voting disappointed millions that they turn away with horror
from this name of a Reform Ministry, name of a Parliamentary
Radicalism, and demand a fact and reality thereof? That
they too, having still faith in what so many had faith in, still
count " extension of the suffrage" the one thing needful;
and say, in such manner as they can, Let the suffrage be still
extended, then all will be well? It is the ancient British
faith; promulgated in these ages by prophets and evangelists;
preached forth from barrel-heads by all manner of men. He
who is free and blessed has his twenty-thousandth part of a
master of tongue-fence in National Palaver; whosoever is not
blessed but unhappy, the ailment of him is that he has it not.
Ought he not to have it, then? By the law of God and of
men, yea;--and will have it withal! Chartism, with its
"five points," borne aloft on pikeheads and torchlight
meetings, is there. Chartism is one of the most natural
phenomena in England. Not that Chartism now exists should
provoke wonder; but that the invited hungry people should
have sat eight years at such table of the Barmecide, patiently
expecting somewhat from the Name of a Reform Ministry,
and not till after eight years have grown hopeless, this is
the respectable side of the miracle.
CHAPTER X
IMPOSSIBLE
"But what are we to do? " exclaims the practical man,
impatiently on every side: "Descend from speculation and
the safe pulpit, down into the rough market-place, and say
what can be done I" -- O practical man, there seem very
many things which practice and true manlike effort, in
Parliament and out of it, might actually avail to do. But
the first of all things, as already said, is to gird thyself up
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for actual doing; to know that thou actually either must do,
or, as the Irish say, " come out of that! "
It is not a lucky word this same impossible: no good
comes of those that have it so often in their mouth. Who
is he that says always, There is a lion in the way? Sluggard,
thou must slay the lion, then; the way has to be travelled!
In Art, in Practice, innumerable critics will demonstrate that
most things are henceforth impossible; that we are got, once
for all, into the region of perennial commonplace, and must
contentedly continue there. Let such critics demonstrate;
it is the nature of them: what harm is in it? Poetry once
well demonstrated to be impossible, arises the Burns, arises
the Goethe. Unheroic commonplace being now clearly all
we have to look for, comes the Napoleon, comes the con-
quest of the world. It was proved by fluxionary calculus,
that steamships could never get across the farthest point
of Ireland to the nearest of Newfoundland: impelling force,
resisting force, maximum here, minimum there; by law of
Nature, and geometric demonstration:--what could be done?
The Great Western could weigh anchor from Bristol Port;
that could be done. The Great Western, bounding safe
through the gullets of the Hudson, threw her cable out on the
capstan of New York, and left our still moist paper-demon-
stration to dry itself at leisure. "Impossible? " cried
Mirabeau to his secretary, " Ne me dites jamais ce bete de mot,
Never name to me that blockhead of a word! "
There is a phenomenon which one might call Paralytic
Radicalism, in these days; which gauges with Statistic
measuring-reed, sounds with Philosophic Politico-Economic
plummet the deep dark sea of troubles; and having taught
us rightly what an infinite sea of troubles it is, sums-up with
the practical inference, and use of consolation, That nothing
whatever can be done in it by man, who has simply to sit still,
and look wistfully to " time and general laws: " and there-
upon, without so much as recommending suicide, coldly
takes its leave of us. Most paralytic, uninstructive; unpro-
ductive of any comfort to one! They are an unreasonable
class who cry, " Peace, peace," when there is no peace. But
what kind of class are they who cry, " Peace, peace, have I
not told you that there is no peace! " Paralytic Radicalism,
frequent among those Statistic friends of ours, is one of the
most afflictive phenomena the mind of man can be called to
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? 228 Carlyle's Essays
contemplate. One prays that it at least might cease. Let
Paralysis retire into secret places, and dormitories proper
for it; the public highways ought not to be occupied by people
demonstrating that motion is impossible. Paralytic;--and
also, thank Heaven,' entirely false! Listen to a thinker
of another sort: "All evil, and this evil too, is as a nightmare;
the instant you begin to stir under it, the evil is, properly
speaking, gone. " Consider, O reader, whether it be not
actually so? Evil, once manfully fronted, ceases to be evil;
there is generous battle-hope in place of dead passive misery;
the evil itself has become a kind of good.
To the practical man, therefore, we will repeat that he has,
as the first thing he can " do," to gird himself up for actual
doing; to know well that he is either there to do, or not there
at all. Once rightly girded up, how many things will present
themselves as doable which now are not attemptable! Two
things, great things, dwell, for the last ten years, in all think-
ing heads in England; and are hovering, of late, even on the
tongues of not a few. With a word on each of these, we will
dismiss the practical man, and right gladly take ourselves into
obscurity and silence again. Universal Education is the first
great thing we mean; general Emigration is the second.
Who would suppose that Education were a thing which
had to be advocated on the ground of local expediency, or in-
deed on any ground? As if it stood not on the basis of ever-
lasting duty, as a prime necessity of man. It is a thing that
should need no advocating; much as it does actually need.
To impart the gift of thinking to those who cannot think, and
yet who could in that case think: this, one would imagine,
was the first function a government had to set about dis-
charging. Were it not a cruel thing to see, in any province
of an empire, the inhabitants living all mutilated in their
limbs, each strong man with his right arm lamed? How
much cruder to find the strong soul, with its eyes still sealed,
its eyes extinct so that it sees not! Light has come into the
world, but to this poor peasant it has come in vain. For
six thousand years the Sons of Adam, in sleepless effort, have
been devising, doing, discovering; in mysterious infinite
indissoluble communion, warring, a little band of brothers,
against the great black empire of Necessity and Night; they
have accomplished such a conauest and conquests: and to
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this man it is all as if it had not been. The four-and-twenty
letters of the Alphabet are still Runic enigmas to him. He
passes by on the other side; and that great Spiritual King-
dom, the toilwom conquest of his own brothers, all that his
brothers have conquered, is a thing non-extant for him. An
invisible empire; he knows it not, suspects it not. And is
it not his withal; the conquest of his own brothers, the
lawfully acquired possession of all men? Baleful enchant-
ment lies over him, from generation to generation; he knows
not that such an empire is his, that such an empire is at all.
O, what are bills of rights, emancipations of black slaves into
black apprentices, lawsuits in chancery for some short usu-
fruct of a bit of land? The grand " seedfield of Time " is this
man's, and you give it him not. Time's seedfield, which
includes the Earth and all her seedfields and pearl-oceans,
nay her sowers too and pearl-divers, all that was wise and
heroic and victorious here below; of which the Earth's
centuries are but as furrows, for it stretches forth from the
Beginning onward even into this Day!
