 CHAPTER XIX The Excerpts by Thomas Carlisle Labour from past and present For there is a perennial nobleness and even sacredness in work, where he never so benighted forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works. In idleness alone is their perpetual despair. Work, never so mannish, mean, is in communication with nature. The real desire to get work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to nature's appointments and regulations which are truth. The latest gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. Know thy self long enough as that poor self of thine tormented thee, thou wilt never get to know it, I believe. Make it not thy business, this of knowing thy self. Thou art an unknowable individual. Know what thou canst work at, and work at it like a Hercules, that will be thy better plan. It has been written, an endless significance lies in work. A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead in stately cities, and with all the man himself first ceases to be jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how even in the meanest sorts of labour the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work. Doubt, desire, sorrow, remorse, indignation, despair itself, all these like hell-dogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker as of every man, but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are spilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of labour in him is it not his purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and a sour smoke itself there is made bright, blessed flame. Destiny on the whole has no other way of cultivating us. A formless chaos, once set it revolving, grows round and ever rounder, ranges itself by mere force of gravity into strata-spherical courses, is no longer a chaos but a round compacted world. What would become of the earth did she cease to revolve? In the poor old earth, so long as she revolves, all inequalities irregularities disperse themselves, all irregularities are incessantly becoming regular. Has thou looked on the potter's wheel, one of the venerableest objects, old as the prophet Ezekiel and far older, rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up by mere quick whirling into beautiful circular dishes, and fancy the most assiduous potter but without his wheel, reduced to make dishes or rather amorphous botches by mere kneading and baking, even such a potter were destiny, with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work and spin. Of an idle, unrevolving man, the kindest destiny, like the most assiduous potter without wheel, can bake and need nothing other than a botch. Let her spend on him what expensive colouring, what gilding and enamelling she will, he is but a botch, not a dish. No, a bulging, needed, crooked, shambling, squint-cornered, amorphous botch, a mere enameled vessel of dishonour. Let the idle think of this. Blessed is he who has found his work, let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose, he has found it, and will follow it. How, as a free-flowing channel dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows, draining off the sour festering water gradually from the root of the remotest grass-blade, making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green, fruitful meadow with its clear flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small. From the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God. From his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness, to all knowledge, self-knowledge, and much else, so soon as work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that, for nature herself accredits that, says ye to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge, but what thou hast got by working, the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge, a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic vortices, till we try and fix it. Doubt of whatever kind can be ended by action alone. And again, hast thou valued patience, courage, perseverance, openness to light, readiness to own thy self-mistaken, to do better next time? All these, all virtues, in wrestling with the dim, brute powers of fact, in ordering of thy fellows in such wrestle, there and elsewhere not at all, thou wilt continually learn. Get down, a brave Sir Christopher, in the middle of black-ruined stone heaps of foolish unarchitectural bishops, red-tape officials, idle, knell, guine defenders of the faith, and see whether he will ever raise a Paul's cathedral out of all that, yea or no. Rough, rude, contradictory are all things and persons, from the mutinous masons and Irish hodmen up to the idle knell, guine defenders, to blustering red-tape officials, foolish unarchitectural bishops. All these things and persons are there not for Christopher's sake and his cathedrals, they are there for their own sake, mainly. Christopher will have to conquer and constrain all these if he be able. All these are against him. Equitable nature herself, who carries her mathematics and architectonics, not on the face of her, but deep in the hidden heart of her, nature herself is but partially for him, will be wholly against him if he constrain her not. His very money, where is it to come from? The pious munificence of England lies far scattered, distant, unable to speak and say I am here, must be spoken to before it can speak. Pious munificence and all help is so silent, invisible like the gods. Impediments, contradictions, manifold, are so loud and near. O brave Sir Christopher, trust thou in those notwithstanding and front all these. Understand all these, by valiant patience, real effort, insight, by man's strength, vanquish and compel all these. And on the whole strike down victoriously the last topstone of that Paul's edifice, thy monument for certain centuries, the stamp, great man, impressed very legibly on Portland stone there. Yes, all manner of help and pious response from men of nature is always what we call silent. Cannot speak or come to light till it be seen, till it be spoken to. Every noble work is at first impossible. In very truth for every noble work the possibilities will lie diffused through immensity, inarticulate, undiscoverable, except to faith. Like Gideon thou shall spread out thy fleece at the door of thy tent, see whether under the wide arch of heaven there be any bounteous moisture or none. Thy heart and life purpose shall be as a miraculous Gideon's fleece spread out in silent appeal to heaven. And from the kind immensities what from the poor unkind localities and town and country parishes there never could, blessed do moisture to suffice thee shall have fallen. Work is of a religious nature, work is of a brave nature, which it is the aim of all religion to be. All work of man is as the swimmers, a waste ocean threatens to devour him. If he front it not bravely it will keep its word. By incessant wise defiance of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how it loyally supports him, bears him as its conqueror along. It is so, says Guta, with all things that man undertakes in this world. Thief sea-captain, Norse sea-king, Columbus, my hero, royalist sea-king of all, it is no friendly environment, this of thine in the waste-deep waters, around the mutinous discouraged souls, behind the disgrace and ruin, before thee the equal unpenetrated veil of night. Brother these wild water-mountains bounding from their deep basin ten miles deep, I am told, are not entirely there on thy behalf. Me seems they have other work than floating thee forward, and the huge winds that sweep from Ursa Major to the tropics and equators, dancing their giant waltz through the kingdoms of chaos and immensity, they care little about filling rightly or filling wrongly the small shoulder of mutton sails in this cockle skiff of thine. Thou art not among articulate-speaking friends, my brother, thou art among immeasurable dumb monsters, tumbling, howling, wide as the world here. Secret, far-off, invisible to all hearts but thine, there lies a help in them. See how thou wilt get at that. Patiently thou wilt wait till the mad southwester spend itself, saving thyself by dexterous science of defence the while. Fallently, with swift decision, wilt thou strike in, when the favouring east the possible springs up. Mutiny of men thou wilt sternly repress, weakness despondency, thou wilt cheerily encourage, thou wilt swallow down, complaint unreason, weariness, weakness of others and thyself. How much wilt thou swallow down? There shall be a depth of silence in thee, deeper than this sea, which is but ten miles deep, a silence unsoundable, known to God only. Thou shalt be a great man. Yes, my world soldier, thou of the world marine thou wilt have to be greater than this tumultuous unmeasured world here round thee is. Thou in thy strong soul, as with wrestlers' arms, shalt embrace it, harness it down, and make it bear thee on, to new Americas, or wither God-wills. The world in clothes, from Sartre Rissartus. As Montesquieu wrote a spirit of laws, observes our professor, so could I write a spirit of clothes. Thus, with an esprit de l'oie, properly an esprit de coutume, we should have an esprit de costume. For neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere accident, but the hand is ever guided on by mysterious operations of the mind. In all his modes and habilitory endeavours, an architectural idea will be found lurking. His body and the cloth are the sight and materials whereon and whereby his beautified edifice of a person is to be built. Whether he flow gracefully out in folded mantles, based on light sandals, tower up in high head gear from amid peaks, spangles and bell girdles, swell out in starched ruffs, buckram-stuffings and monstrous tuberosities, or girth himself into separate sections and front the world and agglomeration of four limbs, will depend on the nature of such architectural idea, whether Grecian, Gothic, later Gothic, or altogether modern and Parisian or Anglo-Dandiacal. Again, what meaning lies in color? From the soberest drab to the high flaming scarlet, spiritual idiosyncrasies unfold themselves in choice of color. If the cut be token intellect and talent, so does the color be token temper and heart. In all which, among nations as among individuals, there is an incessant indubitable, though infinitely complex, working of cause and effect. Every snip of the scissors has been regulated and prescribed by ever-active influences which doubtless to intelligences of a superior order are neither invisible nor illegible. For such superior intelligences a cause and effect philosophy of clothes, as of laws, were probably a comfortable winter-evening entertainment. Nevertheless, for inferior intelligences, like men, such philosophies have always seemed to me uninstructive enough. Nay, what is your Montesquieu himself but a clever infant spelling letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic book, the lexicon of which lies in eternity, in heaven? Let any cause and effect philosopher explain not why I wear such and such a garment, obey such and such a law, but even why I am here to wear and obey anything. Much therefore, if not the whole of that same spirit of clothes, I shall suppress as hypothetical, ineffectual, and even impertinent, naked facts and deductions drawn therefrom in quite another than that omniscient style, are my humbler and proper province. Acting on which prudent restriction, Twelfelstruck has nevertheless contrived to take in a well-nigh boundless extent of field, at least the boundaries too often lie quite beyond our horizon. Selection being indispensable, we shall hear glance over his first part only in the most cursory manner. This first part is no doubt distinguished by omnivorous learning and utmost patience and fairness. At the same time, in its results and delineations, it is much more likely to interest the compilers of some library of general entertaining useful or even useless knowledge than the miscellaneous readers of these pages. Was it this part of the book which Hoishrecker had in view when he recommended us to that joint-stock vehicle of publication at present the glory of British literature? If so, the library editors are welcome to dig in it for their own behoof. To the first chapter, which turns on paradise and fig-leaves and leads us into interminable disquisitions of a mythological, metaphorical, cabalistical sartorial, and quite antediluvian cast, we shall content ourselves with giving an unconcerned approval. Still less have we to do with Lilas, Adam's first wife, whom, according to the Talmudists, he had before Eve and whom bore him in that wedlock the whole progeny of aerial aquatic and terrestrial devils, very needlessly we think. On this portion of the work, with its profound glances into the Adam Cadman, or primeval element, here strangely brought into relation with the Nephal and Muspal darkness and light of the antique north, it may be enough to say that its correctness of deduction and depth of Talmudic and rabbinical lore have filled perhaps not the worst hybraist in Britain with something like astonishment. But quitting this twilight region, Twelfelstruck hastens from the tower of Babel to follow the dispersion of mankind over the whole habitable and habillable globe. Walking by the light of Oriental, Pulaskiq, Scandinavian, Egyptian, Otehetean, ancient and modern researches of every conceivable kind, he strives to give us in compressed shape, as the Nurembergers give an Orbis Pictus, an Orbis Westetus, or view of the costumes of all mankind in all countries in all times. It is here that to the antiquarian, to the historian, we can triumphantly say, fall to here is learning, an irregular treasury, if you will, but inexhaustible as the horde of King Nibelung, which twelve wagons in twelve days at the rate of three journeys a day could not carry off. Sheepskin cloaks and wampum belts, phylacteries, stoles, albs, calamities, togas, Chinese silks, afghan shawls, trunk hose, leather breeches, Celtic filibigs, though breeches, as the name Galea Bracata indicates, are the more ancient. Hussar cloaks, van dyke tippets, roughs, fartinggales, are brought vividly before us. Even the Kilmarnak nightcap is not forgotten. For most part, too, we must admit that the learning, heterogeneous as it is, and tumbled down quite palmel, is true, concentrated and purified learning, the drossy parts smelted out and thrown aside. Philosophical reflections intervene, and sometimes touching pictures of human life. Of this sort the following has surprised us. The first purpose of clothes, as our professor imagines, was not warmth or decency, but ornament. Miserable indeed, says he, was the condition of the aboriginal savage glaring fiercely from under his fleece of hair, which with the beard reached down to his loins and hung round him like a matted cloak, the rest of his body sheeted in its thick natural fowl. He loitered in the sunny glades of the forest, living on wild fruits, or, as the ancient Caledonian, squatted himself in morasses, lurking for his bestial or human prey. Without implements, without arms, saved the ball of heavy flint, to which, that his sole possession and defence might not be lost, he had attached a long cord of plated thongs, thereby recovering as well as hurling it with deadly unerring skill. Nevertheless, the pains of hunger and revenge once satisfied, his next care was not comfort, but decoration, puts. Warmth he found in the toils of the chase, or amid dried leaves in his hollow tree, in his barked shed or natural grotto, but for decoration he must have clothes. Nay, among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration, as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries. Reader, the heaven-inspired melodious singer, loftiest serene highness, nay, thy own amber-locked snow-and-rose-blue maiden, worthy to glide, silt-like, almost on air, whom now lovest, worship-ist as a divine presence, which indeed symbolically taken she is, has descended, like thyself, from that same hair-mantled, flint-hurling, aboriginal anthropophagus. Out of the eater cometh forth meat, out of the strong cometh forth sweetness, what changes are wrought, not by time, yet in time? For not mankind only, but all that mankind does or beholds, is in continual growth, re-genesis, and self-perfecting vitality. Cast forth thy act, thy word, into the ever-living, ever-working universe. It is a seed-grain that cannot die. Unnoticed to-day, says one, it will be found flourishing as a banyan grove, perhaps alas, as a hemlock forest, after a thousand years. He who first shortened the labour of copyists by device of movable types, was disbanding hired armies and cashiering most kings and creating a whole new democratic world. He had invented the art of printing. The first ground-handful of knighter, sulphur, and charcoal drove monk-shorts' pestle through the ceiling. What will the last do? Achieve the final undisputed prostration of force under thought, of animal courage, under spiritual. A simple invention it was in the old-world grazier, sick of lugging his slow ox about the country till he got it bartered for corn or oil, to take a piece of leather, and thereon scratch or stamp the mere figure of an ox, or pecus, put it in his pocket, and call it pecunia, money. Yet hereby did barter grow sail. The leather money is now golden and paper, and all miracles have been out-miracled, for there are wraths-childs and English national debts, and whoso has sixpence is sovereign to the length of sixpence over all men, commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him, to the length of sixpence. Clothes, too, which began in foolishest love of ornament, what have they not become? Increased security and pleasurable heat soon followed, but what have these? Shame, divine shame, sham modesty, as yet a stranger to the anthropophagus bosom arose there mysteriously under clothes, a mystic grove encircled shrine for the holy in man. Clothes gave us individuality, distinction, social polity. Clothes have made men of us. They are threatening to make clothes screens of us. But on the whole, continues our eloquent professor, man is a tool using animal, hand tirandis tir. Weak in himself, and of small stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the flattest soul of some half square foot, insecurely enough, has to straddle out his legs, lest the very wind supplant him, feeblest of bipeds. Three quintals are a crushing load for him. The steer of the meadow tosses him aloft like a waste rag. Nevertheless, he can use tools, can devise tools. With these, the granite mountain melts into light dust before him. He needs glowing iron as if it were soft paste. Seas are his smooth highway. Winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without tools. Without tools he is nothing. With tools he is all. Here may we not for a moment interrupt the stream of oratory with a remark that this definition of the tool using animal appears to us of all that animal sort, considerably the precisest and best. Man is called a laughing animal, but do not the apes also laugh or attempt to do it? And is the manliest man the greatest and oftenest laugher? Twifles drove himself, as we said, laughed only once. Still less do we make of that other French definition of the cooking animal, which indeed for rigorous scientific purposes is as good as useless. Can a tartar be said to cook when he only readies his steak by riding on it? Again, what cookery does the Greenlander use beyond stowing up his whale-blover as a marmot in the light case might do? Or how would Monsieur Oudet prosper among those Orinoco Indians who, according to Humboldt, lodge in crow nests on the branches of trees, and for half the year have no vitals but pipe clay, the whole country being under water? But, on the other hand, show us the human being of any period or climate without his tools. Those very Caledonians, as we saw, had their flint ball and thong to it, such as no brute has or can have. Man is a tool using animal, concludes Twifles Druck in his abrupt way, of which truth clothes are but one example, and surely if we consider the interval between the first wooden dibble fashioned by man and those Liverpool steam carriages, or the British House of Commons, we shall note what progress he has made. He digs up certain black stones from the bosom of the earth and says to them, Transport me and this luggage at the rate of five and thirty miles an hour, and they do it. He collects, apparently by lot, six hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous individuals, and says to them, Make this nation toil for us, bleed for us, hunger and sorrow and sin for us, and they do it. End of Section 19 Section 20 of Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Volume 8 This is LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Bruce Peary. Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Volume 8, Section 20 Dante from Heroes and Hero Worship by Thomas Carlyle Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and his book, yet on the whole with no great result. His biography is, as it were, irrefacably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering, sorrow-stricken man, not much note was taken of him while he lived, and the most of that has vanished in the long space that now intervenes. It is five centuries since he ceased writing and living here. After all commentaries, the book itself is mainly what we know of him. The book, and one might add that portrait, commonly attributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face, perhaps of all faces that I know the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, with the simple laurel wound round it, the deathless sorrow and pain, the known victory which is also deathless, significant of the whole history of Dante. I think it is the mournfulest face that ever was painted from reality, an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face. There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle affection as of a child. But all this is as if congealed into sharp contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud, hopeless pain. A soft ethereal soul, looking out so stern, implacable, grim, trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice. With all it is a silent paint, too, a silent, scornful one. The lip is curled in a kind of godlike disdain of the thing that is eating out his heart, as if it were with all a mean, insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest and lifelong, unsurrendering battle against the world, affection all converted into indignation, an implacable indignation, slow, equitable, silent, like that of a god. The eye, too, it looks out in a kind of surprise, a kind of inquiry, why the world was of such a sort. This is Dante, so he looks, this voice of ten silent centuries, and sings us his mystic, unfathomable song. The little that we know of Dante's life corresponds well enough with this portrait and this book. He was born at Florence, in the upper class of society, in the year 1265. His education was the best then going, much school divinity, Aristotelian logic, some Latin classics, no inconsiderable insight into certain provinces of things, and Dante, with his earnest, intelligent nature, we need not doubt, learned better than most all that was learnable. He has a clear, cultivated understanding and great subtlety, this best fruit of education he had contrived to realize from these scholastics. He knows accurately and well what lies close to him, but in such a time without printed books or free intercourse, he could not know well what was distant. The small, clear light, most luminous for what is near, breaks itself into singular chiaroscuro, striking on what is far off. This was Dante's learning from the schools. In life he had gone through the usual destinies, been twice out campaigning as a soldier for the Florentine State, been on embassy, had in his thirty-fifth year, by natural gradation of talent and service, become one of the chief magistrates of Florence. He had met, in Boyhood, a certain Beatrice Portenare, a beautiful little girl of his own age and rank, and grown up henceforth in partial sight of her in some distant intercourse with her. All readers know his graceful affecting account of this, and then of their being parted, of her being wedded to another, and of her death soon after. She makes a great figure in Dante's poem, seems to have made a great figure in his life. Of all beings it might seem as if she, held apart from him, far apart at last in the dim eternity, were the only one he had ever with his whole strength of affection loved. She died. Dante himself was wedded, but it seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy the rigorous earnest man with his keen excitabilities was not altogether easy to make happy. We will not complain of Dante's miseries. Had all gone right with him, as he wished it, he might have been prior, Podesta, or whatsoever they call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbours, and the world had wanted, one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor, and the ten dumb centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries, for there will be ten of them and more, had no divina commigia to hear. We will complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante, and he, struggling like a man led towards death and crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it. Give him the choice of his happiness. He knew not, more than we do, what was really happy, what was really miserable. In Dante's prior ship, the Guelph-Gibbelline Bianchinaire, or some other confused disturbances, rose to such a height that Dante, whose party had seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast unexpectedly forth into banishment, doomed, thenceforth, to a life of woe and wandering. His property was all confiscated and more. He had the fiercest feeling that it was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight of God and man. He tried what was in him to get reinstated, tried even by war-like surprise with arms in his hand, but it would not do. Bad only had become worse. There is a record, I believe, still extant in the Florence Archives, dooming this Dante, where so ever caught, to be burnt alive. Burnt alive, so it stands, they say, a very curious civic document. Another curious document, some considerable number of years later, is a letter of Dante's to the Florentine magistrates, written in answer to a milder proposal of theirs, that he should return on condition of apologizing and paying a fine. He answers, with fixed stern pride, if I cannot return without calling myself guilty, I will never return, nonquam brauerlar. For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wandered from patron to patron, from place to place, proving in his own bitter words, how hard is the path, com'e eduro cal'e? The wretched are not cheerful company. Dante, poor and banished with his proud earnest nature, with his moody humours, was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch reports of him that, being at Candela Scala's court and blamed one day for his gloom and taciturnity, he answered in no courtier-like way. Dela Scala stood among his courtiers with mimes and buffoons, nebelones aquistriones, making him heartily merry. When turning to Dante he said, is it not strange now that this poor fool should make himself so entertaining, while you, a wise man, sit there day after day and have nothing to amuse us with at all? Dante answered bitterly, No, not strange. Your highness is to recollect the proverb like to like. Given the amuser the amusee must also be given. Such a man with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and sorrows, was not made to succeed at court. By degrees it came to be evident to him that he had no longer any resting place or hope of benefit in this earth. The earthly world had cast him forth to wander, wander, no living heart to love him now, for his sore miseries there was no solace here. The deeper naturally would the eternal world impress itself on him, that awful reality over which, after all, this time-world with its florenses and banishments only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence thou shalt never see, but hell and purgatory and heaven thou shalt surely see. What is Florence candela scala and the world and life altogether? Eternity, thither of a truth not elsewhere, art thou and all things bound. The great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made its home more and more in that awful other world. Naturally his thoughts brooded on that, as on the one fact important for him. Bodied or bodiless it is the one fact important for all men, but to Dante in that age it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape. He no more doubted of that malibul jupul that it all lay there with its gloomy circles, with its altiguai, and that he himself should see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into mystic unfathomable song, and this, his divine comedy, the most remarkable of all modern books, is the result. It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see, a proud thought for him at times, that he, here in exile, could do this work, that no Florence nor no man or men could hinder him from doing it, or even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that it was great, the greatest a man could do. If thou follow thy star, say to Segri to Estella, so could the hero in his forsakenness, in his extreme need, still say to himself, follow thou thy star, thou shalt not fail of a glorious haven. The labour of writing, we find, and indeed could know otherwise, was great and painful for him. He says, this book which has made me lean for many years. Ah, yes, it was one, all of it, with pain and sore toil, not in sport, but in grim earnest. His book, as indeed most good books are, has been written in many senses with his heart's blood. It is his whole history, this book. He died after finishing it, not yet very old, at the age of fifty-six. Broken-hearted, rather, as is said. He lives buried in his death-city, Ravenna. Hic Claudor Dante's Patrice Xtoris Aboris. The Florentines begged back his body in a century after. The Ravenna people would not give it. Here I am, Dante, laid shut out from my native shores. I said Dante's poem was a song. It is Teak who calls it a mystic unfathomable song, and such is literally the character of it. Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere that wherever you find a sentence musically worded of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning, too. For body and soul, word and idea go strangely together here, as everywhere. Song. We said before it was the heroic of speech. All old poems, homers and the rest, are authentically songs. I would say in strictness that all right poems are, that whatsoever is not sung is properly no poem but a piece of prose cramped into jingling lines, to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part. What we want to get at is the thought the man had, if he had any. Why should he twist it into jingle if he could speak it out plainly? It is only when the heart of him is wrapped into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth, and music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme and sing, that we call him a poet, and listen to him as the heroic of speakers, whose speech is song. Pretenders to this are many, and to an earnest reader, I doubt it is for the most part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business, that of reading rhyme. Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be rhymed, it ought to have told us plainly, without any jingle, what it was aiming at. I would advise all men who can speak their thought, not to sing it, to understand that in a serious time, among serious men, there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely as we love the true song, and are charmed by it as by something divine, so shall we hate the false song, and account it a mere wooden noise, a thing hollow, superfluous, altogether an insincere and offensive thing. I give Dante my highest praise, when I say of his divine comedy, that it is, in all senses, genuinely a song. In the very sound of it there is a cantofermo, it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his simple terzorima, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along naturally with a sort of lilt, but I add that it could not be otherwise, for the essence and material of the work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion, and sincerity makes it musical. Go deep enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it, proportionates it all, architectural, which also partakes of the character of music. The three kingdoms, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, look out on one another, like compartments of a great edifice, a great supernatural world cathedral, piled up there, stern, solemn, awful. Dante's world of souls. It is at bottom the sincerest of all poems. Sincerity, here too, we find to be the measure of worth. It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts, and it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, Eccovilum chestato all inferno. See, there is the man that was in hell. Ah, yes, he had been in hell, in hell enough, in long severe sorrow and struggle, as the like of him is pretty sure to have been. Comedias that come out divine are not accomplished otherwise. Thought, true labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind, true effort, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself, that is thought. In all ways we are to become perfect through suffering. But as I say, no work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has all been as if molten in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made him lean for many years. Not the general whole only, every compartment of it is worked out with intense earnestness, into truth, into clear visuality. Each answers to the other, each fits in its place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is the soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the Middle Ages rendered forever rhythmically visible there. No light task, a right intense one, but a task which is done. Perhaps one would say intensity, with the much that depends on it, is the prevailing character of Dante's genius. Dante does not come before us as a large Catholic mind, rather as a narrow and even sectarian mind. It is partly the fruit of his age and position, but partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentred itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world great, not because he is world wide, but because he is world deep. Through all objects he pierces, as it were, down into the heart of being. I know nothing so intense as Dante. Consider, for example, to begin with the outermost development of his intensity. Consider how he paints. He has a great power of vision, seizes the very type of a thing, presents that and nothing more. You remember that first view he gets of the Hall of Dite, red pinnacle, red hot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of gloom, so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and forever. It is as an emblem of the whole genius of Dante. There is a brevity, an abrupt precision in him. Tacitus is not briefer, more condensed, and then in Dante it seems a natural condensation, spontaneous to the man. One smiting word and then there is silence, nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent than words. It is strange with what a sharp, decisive grace he snatches the true likeness of a matter, cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the blustering giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke. It is, as the sails sink, the mast being suddenly broken. Or that poor brunette Latini with the cotto aspetto, face baked, parched brown and lean, and the fiery snow that falls on them there, a fiery snow without wind, slow, deliberate, never-ending. Or the lids of those tombs square sarcophaguses in that silent, dim, burning hall, each with its soul in torment. The lids laid open there. They are to be shut at the day of judgment through eternity. And how Faryonata rises, and how Cavalcante falls, at hearing of his son, and the past tense fuwa. The very movements in Dante have something brief, swift, decisive, almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his genius, this sort of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent, passionate, with its quick, abrupt movements, its silent pale rages, speaks itself in these things. For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a man, it comes, like all else, from the essential faculty of him. It is physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a likeness, you have found a man worth something, mark his manner of doing it as very characteristic of him. In the first place he could not have discerned the object at all or seen the vital type of it unless he had what we may call sympathized with it, had sympathy in him to bestow on objects. He must have been sincere about it too, sincere and sympathetic. A man without worth cannot give you the likeness of any object. He dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay about all objects. And indeed may we not say that intellect altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning what an object is. Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may have will come out here. Is it even of business a matter to be done? The gifted man is he who sees the essential point and leaves all the rest aside as surplusage. It is his faculty too, the man of business's faculty, that he discerned the true likeness, not the false superficial one, of the thing he has got to work in. And how much of morality is in the kind of insight we get of anything, the eye seeing in all things what it brought with it the faculty of seeing. To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced eye they are yellow. Raphael, the painter's talus, is the best of all portrait painters with all. No most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with him. Then his painting is not graphic only, brief, true and of a vividness as of fire in dark night. Taken on the wider scale, it is every way noble and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her lover, what qualities in that? A thing woven as out of rainbows on a ground of eternal black. A small flute voice of infinite whale speaks there into our very heart of hearts, a touch of womanhood in it too. De la bella persona, que mi futolta. And how, even in the pit of woe, it is a solace that he will never part from her. Saddest tragedy in these alte guay. And the racking winds in that air Bruno whirl them away again to whale forever. Strange to think Dante was the friend of this poor Francesca's father, Francesca herself may have sat upon the poet's knee as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, it also infinite rigor of law. It is so nature is made, it is so Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his divine comedies being a poor, splenetic, impotent, terrestrial libel, putting those into hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth. I suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's, was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigor cannot pity either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic, sentimentality or little better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that of Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling longing, pitying love, like the whale of Iolian harps, soft, soft, like a child's young heart. And then that stern, sore, saddened heart. These longings of his towards his Beatrice, their meeting together in the Paradiso, his gazing in her pure transfiguradise, hers that had been purified by death so long, separated from him so far, one likens it to the song of angels. It is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the very purest that ever came out of a human soul. For the intense Dante is intense in all things. He has got into the essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion too as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity. Morally great, above all, we must call him, it is the beginning of all. His scorn, his grief, are as transcendent as his love, as indeed what are they but the inverse or converse of his love. Adios piacente, eid anemici sui, hateful to God and to the enemies of God. Loth descorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion. Non ragionam dilor, we will not speak of them, look only and pass. Or think of this, they have not the hope to die, non han speranza dimorta. One day it had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of Dante, that he, wretched, never resting, worn as he was, would full surely die, that destiny itself could not doom him not to die. Such words are in this man. For rigor, earnestness, and depth, he is not to be paralleled in the modern world. To seek his parallel we must go into the Hebrew Bible and live with the antique prophets there. I do not agree with much modern criticism in greatly preferring the inferno to the two other parts of the Divina Comedia. Such preference belongs, I imagine, to our general byrunism of taste and is like to be a transient feeling. The purgatorio and paradiso, especially the former one would almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing that purgatorio, mountain of purification, an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If sin is so fatal, and hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in repentance too is man purified. Repentance is the grand Christian act. It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The tremola del onda, that trembling of the ocean ways under the first pure gleam of mourning, dawning afar on the wandering two, is as the type of an altered mood. Hope has now dawned, never dying hope, if in company still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of demons and reprobates is underfoot, a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher to the throne of mercy itself. Pray for me, the denizens of that mount of pain all say to him, Tell my Giovanna to pray for me, my daughter Giovanna, I think her mother loves me no more. They toil painfully up by that winding steep, bent down like corbels of the building, some of them crushed together so for the sin of pride, yet nevertheless in years, in ages, and eons, they shall have reached the top, which is heaven's gate, and by mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too of all, when one has prevailed, the whole mountain shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises when one soul has perfected repentance and got its sin and misery left behind. I call all this a noble embodiment of a true noble thought. But indeed the three compartments mutually support one another, are indispensable to one another. The Paradiso, a kind of inarticulate music to me, is the redeeming side of the Inferno, the Inferno without it, were untrue. All three make up the true unseen world as figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages, a thing forever memorable, forever true in the essence of it to all men. It was perhaps delineated in no human soul with such depth of veracity as in this of Dante's, a man sent to sing it, to keep it long memorable. Very notable with what brief simplicity he passes out of the everyday reality into the invisible one, and in the second or third stanza we find ourselves in the world of spirits and dwell there as among things palpable, indubitable. To Dante they were so, the real world, as it is called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely higher fact of a world. At bottom the one was as preternatural as the other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a spirit, but is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible fact. He believes it, sees it, is the poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say again, is the saving merit now as always. Dante's hell, purgatory, paradise, are a symbol with all, an emblematic representation of his belief about this universe. Some critic in a future age, like some Scandinavian once the other day, who has ceased altogether to think as Dante did, may find this too all an allegory, perhaps an idle allegory. It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of the soul of Christianity. It expresses as in huge worldwide architectural emblems how the Christian Dante felt good and evil to be the two polar elements of this creation on which it all turns, that these two differ not by preferability of one to the other, but by incompatibility, absolute and infinite, that the one is excellent and high as light and heaven, the other hideous, black as Gehenna and the pit of hell. Everlasting justice, yet with penitence, with everlasting pity, all Christianism as Dante in the Middle Ages had it, is emblemed here. Emblemed, and yet, as I urged the other day, with what entire truth of purpose, how unconscious of any embleming. Hell, purgatory, paradise, these things were not fashioned as emblems. Was there in our modern European mind any thought at all of their being emblems, were they not indubitable, awful facts, the whole heart of man taking them for practically true, all nature everywhere confirming them? So it is always in these things. Men do not believe an allegory. The future critic, whatever his new thought may be, who considers this of Dante to have been all gut up as an allegory, will commit one sore mistake. Paganism, we recognize as a voracious expression of the earnest, awestruck feeling of man towards the universe. Voracious, true, once, and still not without worth for us. But mark here the difference of paganism and Christianism. One great difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the operations of nature, the destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and man in this world. Christianism emblemed the law of human duty, the moral law of man. One was for the sensuous nature, a rude helpless utterance of the first thought of men, the chief recognized virtue, courage, superiority to fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature but for the moral. What a progress is here if in that one respect only. And so, in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries in a very strange way found a voice. The Divina Comedia is of Dante's writing, yet in truth it belongs to ten Christian centuries, only the finishing of it is Dante's. So always, the craftsman there, the smith with that metal of his with these tools with these cunning methods, how little of all he does is properly his work. All past inventive men work there with him, as indeed with all of us in all things. Dante is the spokesman of the Middle Ages. The thought they lived by stands here in everlasting music. CHAPTER XXI Cromwell From Heroes and Hero Worship by Thomas Carlyle Poor Cromwell. Great Cromwell. The inarticulate prophet, prophet who could not speak, rude, confused, struggling to utter himself with his savage depth with his wild sincerity. And he looked so strange among the elegant euphemisms, dainty little Falklands, didactic Chillingworths, diplomatic Clarendon's. Consider him. An outer hall of chaotic confusion, visions of the devil, nervous dreams, almost semi-madness, and yet such a clear, determinate man's energy working in the heart of that. A kind of chaotic man. The ray, as of pure starlight and fire, working in such an element of boundless hypochondria, unformed black of darkness. And yet with all this hypochondria, what was it but the very greatness of the man? The depth and tenderness of his wild affections, the quantity of sympathy he had with things, the quantity of insight he would yet get into the heart of things, the mastery he would yet get over things. This was his hypochondria. The man's misery, as man's misery always does, came of his greatness. Samuel Johnson, too, is that kind of man. Sorostrican, half-distracted, the wide element of mournful black enveloping him, wide as the world. It is the character of a prophetic man, a man with his whole soul seeing and struggling to see. On this ground, too, I explained to myself Cromwell's reputed confusion of speech. To himself the internal meaning was sun-clear, but the material with which he was to clothe it in utterance was not there. He had lived silent, a great unnamed sea of thought round him all his days, and in his way of life little call to attempt naming or uttering that. With his sharp power of vision, resolute power of action, I doubt not he could have learned to write books with all and speak fluently enough. He did harder things than writing of books. This kind of man is precisely he who is fit for doing manfully all things you will set him on doing. Intellect is not speaking and logicizing, it is seeing and ascertaining. Virtue, Virtus, manhood, herohood is not fair-spoken immaculate regularity. It is, first of all, what the Germans well name it, Tugend, Talgen, Doeing, or Dotiness. Courage and the faculty to do this basis of the matter Cromwell had in him. One understands moreover how, though he could not speak in Parliament, he might preach, rhapsodic preaching. Above all, how he might be great in extempore prayer. These are the free outpouring utterances of what is in the heart. Method is not required in them. Warmth, depth, sincerity are all that is required. Cromwell's habit of prayer is a notable feature of him. All his great enterprises were commenced with prayer. In dark inextricable-looking difficulties his officers and he used to assemble and pray alternately for hours, for days, till some definite resolution rose among them, some door of hope, as they would name it, disclosed itself. Consider that. In tears, in fervent prayers, and cries to the great God to have pity on them, to make his light shine before them. They, armed soldiers of Christ as they felt themselves to be, a little band of Christian brothers who had drawn the sword against the great black devouring world, not Christian, but Mamanish, devilish. They cried to God in their straits, in their extreme need, not to forsake the cause that was his. The light which now rose upon them, how could a human soul by any means at all get better light, was not the purpose so formed like to be precisely the best, wisest, the one to be followed without hesitation any more. To them it was as the shining of heaven's own splendor in the waist-howling darkness, the pillar of fire by night that was to guide them on their desolate, perilous way. Was it not such? Can a man's soul, to this hour, get guidance by any other method than intrinsically by that same? Devout prostration of the earnest struggling soul before the highest, the giver of all light. Be such prayer a spoken, articulate, or be it a voiceless, inarticulate one. There is no other method. Hypocrisy? One begins to be weary of all that. They who call it so have no right to speak on such matters. They never formed a purpose, what one can call a purpose. They went about balancing expediencies, plausibilities, gathering votes, advices. They never were alone with the truth of a thing at all. Cromwell's prayers were likely to be eloquent and much more than that. His was the heart of a man who could pray. But indeed his actual speeches, I apprehend, were not nearly so inelegant, incondite as they look. We find he was, what all speakers aim to be, an impressive speaker, even in Parliament, one who from the first had weight. With that rude, passionate voice of his, he was always understood to mean something, and men wished to know what. He disregarded eloquence, nay, despised and disliked it, spoke always without premeditation of the words he was to use. The reporters, too, in those days, seem to have been singularly candid and to have given the printer precisely what they found on their own note paper. And with all what a strange proof is it of Cromwell's being the premeditative, ever-calculating hypocrite acting a play before the world, that, to the last, he took no more charge of his speeches. How came he not to study his words a little before flinging them out to the public? If the words were true words, they could be left to shift for themselves. But with regard to Cromwell's lying, we will make one remark. This, I suppose, or something like this, to have been the nature of it. All parties found themselves deceived in him. Each party understood him to be meaning this, heard him even say so, and, behold, he turns out to have been meaning that. He was, cry they, the chief of liars. But now, intrinsically, is not all this the inevitable fortune not of a false man in such times, but simply of a superior man. Such a man must have reticences in him. If he walk wearing his heart upon his sleeve for Dawes to peck at, his journey will not extend far. There is no use for any man's taking up his abode in a house built of glass. A man always is to be, himself, the judge, how much of his mind he will show to other men, even to those he would have worked along with him. There are impertinent inquiries made. Your rule is to leave the inquirer uninformed on that matter. Not if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he was. This, could one hit the right phrase of response, is what the wise and faithful man would aim to answer in such a case. Cromwell, no doubt of it, spoke often in the dialect of small subaltern parties, uttered to them a part of his mind. Each little party thought him all its own, hence their rage one and all, to find him not of their party, but of his own party. Was it his blame? At all seasons of his history he must have felt, among such people, how, if he explained to them the deeper insight he had, they must either have shuddered aghast at it, or, believing it, their own little compact hypothesis must have gone wholly to wreck. They could not have worked in his province any more, nay, perhaps they could not have now worked in their own province. It is the inevitable position of a great man, among small men. Small men, most active, useful, are to be seen everywhere, whose whole activity depends on some conviction which to you is palpably a limited one. Imperfect, what we call an error. But would it be a kindness always? Is it a duty always or often to disturb them in that? Many a man doing loud work in the world stands only on some thin traditionality, conventionality, to him indubitable, to you incredible. Break that beneath him, he sinks to endless depths. I might have my hand full of truth, said Fontanelle, and open only my little finger. And if this be the fact even in matters of doctrine, how much more in all departments of practice, he that cannot with all keep his mind to himself, cannot practice any considerable thing whatever. And we call it dissimulation, all this? What would you think of calling the general of an army, a dissimilar, because he did not tell every corporal and private soldier who pleased to put the question what his thoughts were about everything? Cromwell, I should rather say, managed all this in a manner we must admire for its perfection. An endless vortex of such questioning corporals rolled confusedly round him through his whole course, whom he did answer. It must have been as a great true-seeing man that he managed this, too. Not one proved falsehood, as I said, not one. Of what man that ever wound himself through such a coil of things will you say so much? But in fact there are two errors, widely prevalent, which pervert to the very basis our judgments formed about such men as Cromwell, about their ambition, falsity, and such like. The first is what I might call substituting the goal of their career for the course and starting point of it. The vulgar historian of a Cromwell fancies that he had determined on being protector of England at the time when he was plowing the marshlands of Cambridgeshire. His career lay all mapped out, a programme of the whole drama which he then step by step dramatically unfolded with all manner of cunning, deceptive dramaturgy as he went on, the hollow scheming, Greek epocrates, or play actor that he was. This is a radical perversion, all but universal in such cases, and think for an instant how different the fact is. How much does one of us foresee of his own life? Short way ahead of us is all dim, an unwound skein of possibilities, of apprehensions, attemptabilities, vague looming hopes. This Cromwell had not his life lying all in that fashion of programme which he needed then with that unfathomable cunning of his only to enact dramatically, scene after scene. Not so. We see it so, but to him it was in no measure so. What absurdities would fall away of themselves were this one undeniable fact kept honestly in view by history. Historians indeed will tell you that they do keep it in view, but look whether such is practically the fact. Vulgar history, as in this Cromwell's case, omits it altogether. Even the best kinds of history only remember it now and then. To remember it truly with rigorous perfection, as in the fact it stood, requires indeed a rare faculty, rare nay impossible. A very Shakespeare for faculty, or more than Shakespeare, who could enact a brother man's biography, see with the brother man's eyes at all points of his course what things he saw. In short, know his course and him as few historians are like to do. Half or more of all the thick-plied perversions which distort our image of Cromwell will disappear if we honestly so much as try to represent them so, in sequence as they were, not in the lump as they are thrown down before us. But a second error which I think the generality commit refers to this same ambition itself. We exaggerate the ambition of great men. We mistake what the nature of it is. Great men are not ambitious in that sense. He is a small, poor man that is ambitious so. Examine the man who lives in misery because he does not shine above other men, who goes about producing himself pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims, struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man and set him over the heads of men. Such a creature is among the wretchedest sights seen under this sun. A great man? A poor, morbid, prurient, empty man, fitter for the ward of a hospital than for a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths. Unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the emptiness of the man, not his greatness. Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would find something in him. In good truth I believe no great man, not so much as a genuine man who had health and real substance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented in this way. Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be noticed by noisy crowds of people? God, his Maker, already noticed him. He, Cromwell, was already there. No notice would make him other than he already was. Till his hair was grown grey and life from the downhill slope was all seemed to be limited, not infinite but finite, and all immeasurable matter how it went, he had been content to plow the ground and read his Bible. He in his old days could not support it any longer without selling himself to falsehood that he might ride in guilt carriages to White Hall and have clerks with bundles of papers haunting him, decide this, decide that, which in utmost sorrow of heart no man can perfectly decide. What could guilt carriages do for this man? From of old was there not in his life a weight of meaning, a terror and a splendour as of heaven itself. His existence there as man set him beyond the need of gilding. Death, judgment, and eternity these already lay as the background of whatsoever he thought or did. All his life lay begirt as in a sea of nameless thoughts which no speech of immortal could name. God's word, as the Puritan prophets of that time had read it, this was great and all else was little to him. To call such a man ambitious, to figure him as the prurient windbag described above, seems to me the poorest solicism. Such a man will say, keep your guilt carriages and huzzahing mobs, keep your red tape clerks, your influential realities, your important businesses, leave me alone, leave me alone, there is too much of life in me already. Old Samuel Johnson, the greatest soul in England in his day, was not ambitious. Corsica Boswell flaunted at public shows with printed ribbons around his hat, but the great old Samuel stayed at home, the world-wide soul wrapped up in its thoughts, in its sorrows, what could paradings and ribbons in the hat do for it? Ah yes, I will say again, the great silent men. Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great empire of silence. The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his own department, silently thinking, silently working, whom no morning newspaper makes mention of, they are the salt of the earth. A country that has none or few of these is in a bad way, like a forest which had no roots, which had all turned into leaves and boughs, which must soon wither and be no forest. Woe for us if we had nothing but what we can show or speak. Silence, the great empire of silence, higher than the stars, deeper than the kingdoms of death. It alone is great, all else is small. I hope we English will long maintain our grand talent pour le silence. Let others that cannot do without standing on barrel heads to spout and be seen of all the marketplace, cultivate speech exclusively, become a most green forest without roots. Solomon says there is a time to speak, but also a time to keep silence. Of some great silent Samuel, not urged to writing, as old Samuel Johnson says he was, by want of money and nothing other, one might ask, why do not you two get up and speak, promulgate your system, found your sect? Truly, he will answer, I am continent of my thought hitherto. Happily I have yet had the ability to keep it in me, no compulsion strong enough to speak it. My system is not for promulgation, first of all, it is for serving myself to live by. That is the great purpose of it to me. And then the honor? Alas, yes, but as Cato said of the statue, so many statues in that forum of yours, may it not be better if they ask, where is Cato's statue? But now, by way of counterpoys to this of silence, let me say that there are two kinds of ambition, one wholly blameable, the other laudable and inevitable. Nature has provided that the great silent Samuel shall not be silent too long. The selfish wish to shine over others, let it be accounted altogether poor and miserable. Seekest thou great things, seek them not, this is most true. And yet I say there is an irrepressible tendency in every man to develop himself according to the magnitude which nature has made him of, to speak out, to act out what nature has laid in him. This is proper, fit, inevitable. Nay, it is a duty, and even the summary of duties for a man. The meaning of life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this to unfold yourself, to work what thing you have the faculty for. It is a necessity for the human being, the first law of our existence. Coleridge beautifully remarks that the infant learns to speak by this necessity it feels. We will say therefore, to decide about ambition, whether it is bad or not, you have two things to take into view. Not the coveting of the place alone, but the fitness for the man of the place with all. That is the question. Perhaps the place was his. Perhaps he had a natural right and even obligation to seek the place. Mirobo's ambition to be prime minister. How shall we blame it if he were the only man in France that could have done any good there? Hopefuler, perhaps, had he not so clearly felt how much good he could do. But a poor necker, who could do no good and had even felt that he could do none, yet sitting broken-hearted because they had flung him out and he was now quit of it, well might give in mourn over him. Nature, I say, has provided amply that the silent, great man shall strive to speak with all. Too amply, rather. Fancy, for example, you had revealed to the brave old Samuel Johnson in his shrouded-up existence that it was possible for him to do priceless divine work for his country and the whole world, that the perfect heavenly law might be made law on this earth, that the prayer he prayed daily, thy kingdom come, was at length to be fulfilled. If you had convinced his judgment of this, that it was possible, practicable, that he, the mournful silent Samuel, was called to take a part in it, would not the whole soul of the man have flamed up into a divine clearness, into noble utterance and determination to act, casting all sorrows and misgivings under his feet, counting all affliction and contradiction small, the whole dark element of his existence blazing into articulate radiance of light and lightning, it were a true ambition, this. And think now how it actually was with Cromwell. From of old the sufferings of God's church, true zealous preachers of the truth flung into dungeons, whipped, set on pillories, their ears cropped off, God's gospel cause trod an underfoot of the unrivy, all this had lain heavy on his soul. Long years he had looked upon it in silence, in prayer, seeing no remedy on earth, trusting well that a remedy in heaven's goodness would come, that such a course was false, unjust and could not last forever, and now behold the dawn of it. After twelve years silent waiting, all England stirs itself, there is to be once more a parliament, the right will get a voice for itself, inexpressible well-grounded hope has come again into the earth, was not such a parliament worth being a member of. Cromwell threw down his plow and hastened thither. He spoke there, rugged bursts of earnestness of a self-seemed truth where we get a glimpse of them. He worked there, he fought and strove like a strong true giant of a man, through cannon to molt and all else, on and on till the cause triumphed, it's once so formidable enemies all swept from before it, and the dawn of hope had become clear light of victory and certainty, that he stood there as the strongest soul in England, the undisputed hero of all England. What of this? It was possible that the law of Christ's gospel could now establish itself in the world. The theocracy which John Knox and his pulpit might dream of as a devout imagination, this practical man, experienced in the whole chaos of most rough practice, dared to consider as capable of being realized. Those that were highest in Christ's church, the devoutest wisest men, were to rule the land. In some considerable degree it might be so and should be so. Was it not true, God's truth? And if true, was it not then the very thing to do? The strongest practical intellect in England dared to answer, yes. This I call a noble true purpose. Is it not, in its own dialect, the noblest that could enter into the heart of a statesman or man? For a Knox to take it up was something, but for a Cromwell with his great sound sense and experience of what our world was, history, I think, shows it only this once in such a degree. I account it the culminating point of Protestantism, the most heroic faces that faith in the Bible was appointed to exhibit here below. Fancy it, that it were made manifest to one of us how we could make the right, supremely victorious over wrong, and all that we had longed and prayed for as the highest good to England and all lands, an attainable fact. Well, I must say, the vulpine intellect with its knowingness, its alertness and expertness in detecting hypocrites, seems to me a rather sorry business. We have had but one such statesman in England, one man that I can get sight of, who ever had in the heart of him any such purpose at all, one man in the course of fifteen hundred years, and this was his welcome. He had adherents by the hundred or the ten, opponents by the million. Had England rallied all round him, why then England might have been a Christian land? As it is, vulpine knowingness sits yet at its hopeless problem, given a world of knaves to educe and honesty from their united action. How cumbersome a problem you may see in chancery law courts and some other places, till at length by heaven's just anger but also by heaven's great grace, the matter begins to stagnate, and this problem is becoming to all men a palpably hopeless one. End of section 21