The Sphinx
How true, for example, is that other old Fable of the Sphinx, who
sat by the wayside, propounding her riddle to the passengers,
which if they could not answer she destroyed them! Such a Sphinx
is this Life of ours, to all men and societies of men. Nature,
like the Sphinx, is of womanly celestial loveliness and
tenderness; the face and bosom of a goddess, but ending in claws
and the body of a lioness. There is in her a celestial beauty,--
which means celestial order, pliancy to wisdom; but there is
also a darkness, a ferocity, fatality, which are infernal.
She is a goddess, but one not yet disimprisoned; one still
half-imprisoned,--the inarticulate, lovely still encased in the
inarticulate, chaotic. How true! And does she not propound her
riddles to us? Of each man she asks daily, in mild voice, yet
with a terrible significance, "Knowest thou the meaning of this
Day? What thou canst do Today; wisely attempt to do?" Nature,
Universe, Destiny, Existence, howsoever we name this grand
unnameable Fact in the midst of which we live and struggle, is as
a heavenly bride and conquest to the wise and brave, to them who
can discern her behests and do them; a destroying fiend to them
who cannot. Answer her riddle, it is well with thee. Answer it
not, pass on regarding it not, it will answer itself; the
solution for thee is a thing of teeth and claws; Nature is a
dumb lioness, deaf to thy pleadings, fiercely devouring. Thou
art not now her victorious bridegroom; thou art her mangled
victim, scattered on the precipices, as a slave found treacherous,
recreant, ought to be and must.
With Nations it is as with individuals: Can they rede the riddle
of Destiny? This English Nation, will it get to know the meaning
of _its_ strange new Today? Is there sense enough extant,
discoverable anywhere or anyhow, in our united twenty-seven
million heads to discern the same; valour enough in our
twenty-seven million hearts to dare and do the bidding thereof?
It will be seen!--
The secret of gold Midas, which he with his long ears never could
discover, was, That he had offended the Supreme Powers;--that he
had parted company with the eternal inner Facts of this Universe,
and followed the transient outer Appearances thereof; and so was
arrived _here._ Properly it is the secret of all unhappy men and
unhappy nations. Had they known Nature's right truth, Nature's
right truth would have made them free. They have become
enchanted; stagger spell-bound, reeling on the brink of huge
peril, because they were not wise enough. They have forgotten
the right Inner True, and taken up with the Outer Sham-true.
They answer the Sphinx's question wrong. Foolish men cannot
answer it aright! Foolish men mistake transitory semblance for
eternal fact, and go astray more and more.
Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is
delayed, there is no justice, but an accidental one, here below.
Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two,
some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death!
In the centre of the world-whirlwind, verily now as in the oldest
days, dwells and speaks a God. The great soul of the world is
_just._ O brother, can it be needful now, at this late epoch of
experience, after eighteen centuries of Christian preaching for
one thing, to remind thee of such a fact; which all manner of
Mahometans, old Pagan Romans, Jews, Scythians and heathen Greeks,
and indeed more or less all men that God made, have managed at
one time to see into; nay which thou thyself, till 'redtape'
strangled the inner life of thee, hadst once some inkling of:
That there is justice here below; and even, at bottom, that
there is nothing else but justice! Forget that, thou hast
forgotten all. Success will never more attend thee: how can it
now? Thou hast the whole Universe against thee. No more
success: mere sham-success, for a day and days; rising ever
higher,--towards its Tarpeian Rock. Alas, how, in thy soft-hung
Longacre vehicle, of polished leather to the bodily eye, of
redtape philosophy, of expediencies, clubroom moralities,
Parliamentary majorities to the mind's eye, thou beautifully
rollest: but knowest thou whitherward? It is towards the
_road's end._ Old use-and-wont; established methods, habitudes,
once true and wise; man's noblest tendency, his perseverance,
and man's ignoblest, his inertia; whatsoever of noble and
ignoble Conservatism there is in men and Nations, strongest
always in the strongest men and Nations: all this is as a road
to thee, paved smooth through the abyss,--till all this _end._
Till men's bitter necessities can endure thee no more. Till
Nature's patience with thee is done; and there is no road or
footing any farther, and the abyss yawns sheer--
Parliament and the Courts of Westminster are venerable to me;
how venerable; grey with a thousand years of honourable age!
For a thousand years and more, Wisdom and faithful Valour,
struggling amid much Folly and greedy Baseness, not without most
sad distortions in the struggle, have built them up; and they
are as we see. For a thousand years, this English Nation has
found them useful or supportable; they have served this English
Nation's want; _been_ a road to it through the abyss of Time.
They are venerable, they are great and strong. And yet it is
good to remember always that they are not the venerablest, nor
the greatest, nor the strongest! Acts of Parliament are
venerable; but if they correspond not with the writing on the
Adamant Tablet, what are they? Properly their one element of
venerableness, of strength or greatness, is, that they at all
times correspond therewith as near as by human possibility they
can. They are cherishing destruction in their bosom every hour
that they continue otherwise.
Alas, how many causes that can plead well for themselves in the
Courts of Westminster; and yet in the general Court of the
Universe, and free Soul of Man, have no word to utter!
Honourable Gentlemen may find this worth considering, in times
like ours. And truly, the din of triumphant Law-logic, and all
shaking of horse-hair wigs and learned-sergeant gowns having
comfortably ended, we shall do well to ask ourselves withal, What
says that high and highest Court to the verdict? For it is the
Court of Courts, that same; where the universal soul of Fact and
very Truth sits President;--and thitherward, more and more
swiftly, with a really terrible increase of swiftness, all causes
do in these days crowd for revisal,--for confirmation, for
modification, for reversal with costs. Dost thou know that
Court; hast thou had any Law-practice there? What, didst thou
never enter; never file any petition of redress, reclaimer,
disclaimer or demurrer, written as in thy heart's blood, for thy
own behoof or another's; and silently await the issue? Thou
knowest not such a Court? Hast merely heard of it by faint
tradition as a thing that was or had been? Of thee, I think, we
shall get little benefit.
For the gowns of learned-sergeants are good: parchment records,
fixed forms, and poor terrestrial justice, with or without
horse-hair, what sane man will not reverence these? And yet,
behold, the man is not sane but insane, who considers these alone
as venerable. Oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment, and
learned-sergeant eloquence, were it continued till the learned
tongue wore itself small in the indefatigable learned mouth,
cannot make unjust just. The grand question still remains, Was
the judgment just? If unjust, it will not and cannot get harbour
for itself, or continue to have footing in this Universe, which
was made by other than One Unjust. Enforce it by never such
statuting, three readings, royal assents; blow it to the four
winds with all manner of quilted trumpeters and pursuivants, in
the rear of them never so many gibbets and hangmen, it will not
stand, it cannot stand. From all souls of men, from all ends of
Nature, from the Throne of God above, there are voices bidding
it: Away, away! Does it take no warning; does it stand, strong
in its three readings, in its gibbets and artillery-parks? The
more woe is to it, the frightfuller woe. It will continue
standing, for its day, for its year, for its century, doing
evil all the while; but it has One enemy who is Almighty:
dissolution, explosion, and the everlasting Laws of Nature
incessantly advance towards it; and the deeper its rooting, more
obstinate its continuing, the deeper also and huger will its ruin
and overturn be.
In this God's-world, with its wild-whirling eddies and mad
foam-oceans, where men and nations perish as if without law, and
judgment for an unjust thing is sternly delayed, dost thou think
that there is therefore no justice? It is what the fool hath
said in his heart. It is what the wise, in all times, were wise
because they denied, and knew forever not to be. I tell thee
again, there is nothing else but justice. One strong thing I
find here below: the just thing, the true thing. My friend, if
thou hadst all the artillery of Woolwich trundling at thy back in
support of an unjust thing; and infinite bonfires visibly
waiting ahead of thee, to blaze centuries long for thy victory on
behalf of it,--I would advise thee to call halt, to fling down
thy baton, and say, "In God's name, No!" Thy 'success?' Poor
devil, what will thy success amount to? If the thing is unjust,
thou hast not succeeded; no, not though bonfires blazed
from North to South, and bells rang, and editors wrote
leading-articles, and the just thing lay trampled out of sight,
to all mortal eyes an abolished and annihilated thing. Success?
In few years, thou wilt be dead and dark,--all cold, eyeless,
deaf; no blaze of bonfires, ding-dong of bells or leading-articles
visible or audible to thee again at all forever: What kind of
success is that!--
It is true all goes by approximation in this world; with any not
insupportable approximation we must be patient. There is a noble
Conservatism as well as an ignoble. Would to Heaven, for the
sake of Conservatism itself, the noble alone were left, and the
ignoble, by some kind severe hand, were ruthlessly lopped away,
forbidden ever more to skew itself! For it is the right and
noble alone that will have victory in this struggle; the rest is
wholly an obstruction, a postponement and fearful imperilment of
the victory. Towards an eternal centre of right and nobleness,
and of that only, is all this confusion tending. We already know
whither it is all tending; what will have victory, what will
have none! The Heaviest will reach the centre. The Heaviest,
sinking through complex fluctuating media and vortices, has its
deflexions, its obstructions, nay at times its resiliences, its
reboundings; whereupon some blockhead shall be heard jubilating,
"See, your Heaviest ascends!"--but at all moments it is moving
centreward, fast as is convenient for it; sinking, sinking; and,
by laws older than the World, old as the Maker's first Plan of
the World, it has to arrive there.
Await the issue. In all battles, if you await the issue, each
fighter has prospered according to his right. His right and his
might, at the close of the account, were one and the same. He
has fought with all his might, and in exact proportion to all his
right he has prevailed. His very death is no victory over him.
He dies indeed; but his work lives, very truly lives. A heroic
Wallace, quartered on the scaffold, cannot hinder that his
Scotland become, one day, a part of England: but he does hinder
that it become, on tyrannous unfair terms, a part of it;
commands still, as with a god's voice, from his old Valhalla and
Temple of the Brave, that there be a just real union as of
brother and brother, not a false and merely semblant one as of
slave and master. If the union with England be in fact one of
Scotland's chief blessings, we thank Wallace withal that it was
not the chief curse. Scotland is not Ireland: no, because brave
men rose there, and said, "Behold, ye must not tread us down like
slaves; and ye shall not,--and cannot!" Fight on, thou brave
true heart, and falter not, through dark fortune and through
bright. The cause thou fightest for, so far as it is true, no
farther, yet precisely so far, is very sure of victory. The
falsehood alone of it will be conquered, will be abolished, as it
ought to be: but the truth of it is part of Nature's own Laws,
cooperates with the World's eternal Tendencies, and cannot
be conquered.
The _dust_ of controversy, what is it but the _falsehood_ flying
off from all manner of conflicting true forces, and making such a
loud dust-whirlwind,--that so the truths alone may remain, and
embrace brother-like in some true resulting-force! It is ever
so. Savage fighting Heptarchies: their fighting is an
ascertainment, who has the right to rule over whom; that out of
such waste-bickering Saxondom a peacefully cooperating England
may arise. Seek through this Universe; if with other than owl's
eyes, thou wilt find nothing nourished there, nothing kept in
life, but what has right to nourishment and life. The rest, look
at it with other than owl's eyes, is not living; is all dying,
all as good as dead! Justice was ordained from the foundations
of the world; and will last with the world and longer.
From which I infer that the inner sphere of Fact, in this present
England as elsewhere, differs infinitely from the outer sphere
and spheres of Semblance. That the Temporary, here as elsewhere,
is too apt to carry it over the Eternal. That he who dwells in
the temporary Semblances, and does not penetrate into the eternal
Substance, will _not_ answer the Sphinx-riddle of Today, or of
any Day. For the substance alone is substantial; that is the
law of Fact: if you discover not that, Fact, who already knows
it, will let you also know it by and by!
What is justice? that, on the whole, is the question of the
Sphinx to us. The law of Fact is, that justice must and will be
done. The sooner the better; for the Time grows stringent,
frightfully pressing! "What is justice?" ask many, to whom cruel
Fact alone will be able to prove responsive. It is like jesting
Pilate asking, What is Truth? Jesting Pilate had not the
smallest chance to ascertain what was Truth. He could not have
known it, had a god shewn it to him. Thick serene opacity,
thicker than amaurosis, veiled those smiling eyes of his to
Truth; the inner _retina_ of them was gone paralytic, dead. He
looked at Truth; and discerned her not, there where she stood.
"What is justice?" The clothed embodied justice that sits in
Westminster Hall, with penalties, parchments, tipstaves, is very
visible. But the unembodied justice, whereof that other is
either an emblem, or else is a fearful indescribability, is not
so visible! For the unembodied Justice is of Heaven; a Spirit,
and Divinity of Heaven,--invisible to all but the noble and pure
of soul. The impure ignoble gaze with eyes, and she is not
there. They will prove it to you by logic, by endless Hansard
Debatings, by bursts of Parliamentary eloquence. It is not
consolatory to behold! For properly, as many men as there are in
a Nation who _can_ withal see Heaven's invisible Justice, and
know it to be on Earth also omnipotent, so many men are there who
stand between a Nation and perdition. So many, and no more.
Heavy-laden England, how many hast thou in this hour? The
Supreme Power sends new and ever new, all _born_ at least with
hearts of flesh and not of stone;--and heavy Misery itself, once
heavy enough, will prove didactic!--