The Beginnings
What a singular shape of a Man; shape of a Time, have we in this
Abbot Samson and his history; how strangely do modes, creeds,
formularies, and the date and place of a man's birth, modify the
figure of the man!
Formulas too, as we call them, have a _reality_ in Human Life.
They are real as the very _skin_ and _muscular tissue_ of a Man's
Life; and a most blessed indispensable thing, so long as they
have _vitality_ withal, and are a living skin and tissue to him!
No man, or man's life, can go abroad and do business in the world
without skin and tissues. No; first of all, these have to
fashion themselves,--as indeed they spontaneously and inevitably
do. Foam itself, and this is worth thinking of, can harden into
oyster-shell; all living objects do by necessity form to
themselves a skin.
And yet, again, when a man's Formulas become _dead;_ as all
Formulas, in the progress of living growth, are very sure to do!
When the poor man's integuments, no longer nourished from within,
become dead skin, mere adscititious leather and callosity,
wearing thicker and thicker, uglier and uglier; till no _heart_
any longer can be felt beating through them, so thick, callous,
calcified are they; and all over it has now grown mere calcified
oystershell, or were it polished mother-of-pearl, inwards almost
to the very heart of the poor man:--yes then, you may say, his
usefulness once more is quite obstructed; once more, he cannot
go abroad and do business in the world; it is time that
_he_ take to bed, and prepare for departure, which cannot now
be distant!
_Ubi homines sunt modi sunt._ Habit is the deepest law of human
nature. It is our supreme strength; if also, in certain
circumstances, our miserablest weakness.--From Stoke to Stowe is
as yet a field, all pathless, untrodden: from Stoke where I
live, to Stowe where I have to make my merchandises, perform my
businesses, consult my heavenly oracles, there is as yet no path
or human footprint; and I, impelled by such necessities, must
nevertheless undertake the journey. Let me go once, scanning my
way with any earnestness of outlook, and successfully arriving,
my footprints are an invitation to me a second time to go by the
same way. It is easier than any other way: the industry of
'scanning' lies already invested in it for me; I can go this
time with less of scanning, or without scanning at all. Nay the
very sight of my footprints, what a comfort for me; and in a
degree, for all my brethren of mankind! The footprints are
trodden and retrodden; the path wears ever broader, smoother,
into a broad highway, where even wheels can run; and many travel
it;--till--till the Town of Stowe disappear from that locality
(as towns have been known to do), or no merchandising, heavenly
oracle, or real business any longer exist for one there: then
why should anybody travel the way?--Habit is our primal,
fundamental law; Habit and Imitation, there is nothing more
perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all
Working and all Apprenticeship, of all Practice and all Learning,
in this world.
Yes, the wise man too speaks, and acts, in Formulas; all men do
so. In general the more completely cased with Formulas a man may
be, the safer, happier is it for him. Thou who, in an All of
rotten Formulas, seemest to stand nigh bare, having indignantly
shaken off the superannuated rags and unsound callosities of
Formulas,--consider how thou too art still clothed! This English
Nationality, whatsoever from uncounted ages is genuine and a fact
among thy native People, and their words and ways: all this, has
it not made for thee a skin or second-skin, adhesive actually as
thy natural skin? This thou hast not stript off, this thou wilt
never strip off: the humour that thy mother gave thee has to
shew itself through this. A common, or it may be an uncommon
Englishman thou art: but good Heavens, what sort of Arab,
Chinaman, Jew-Clothesman, Turk, Hindoo, African Mandingo, wouldst
_thou_ have been, thou with those mother-qualities of thine!
It strikes me dumb to look over the long series of faces, such as
any full Church, Courthouse, London-Tavern Meeting, or miscellany
of men will shew them. Some score or two of years ago, all these
were little red-coloured pulpy infants; each of them capable of
being kneaded, baked into any social form you chose: yet see now
how they are fixed and hardened,--into artisans, artists, clergy,
gentry, learned sergeants, unlearned dandies, and can and shall
now be nothing else henceforth!
Mark on that nose the colour left by too copious port and viands;
to which the profuse cravat with exorbitant breastpin, and the
fixed, forward, and as it were menacing glance of the eyes
correspond. That is a 'Man of Business;' prosperous
manufacturer, house-contractor, engineer, law-manager; his eye,
nose, cravat have, in such work and fortune, got such a
character: deny him not thy praise, thy pity. Pity him too, the
Hard-handed, with bony brow, rudely combed hair, eyes looking out
as in labour, in difficulty and uncertainty; rude mouth, the
lips coarse, loose, as in hard toil and lifelong fatigue they
have got the habit of hanging:--hast thou seen aught more
touching than the rude intelligence, so cramped, yet energetic,
unsubduable, true, which looks out of that marred visage? Alas,
and his poor wife, with her own hands, washed that cotton
neckcloth for him, buttoned that coarse shirt, sent him forth
creditably trimmed as she could. In such imprisonment lives he,
for his part; man cannot now deliver him: the red pulpy infant
has been baked and fashioned so.
Or what kind of baking was it that this other brother-mortal got,
which has baked him into the genus Dandy? Elegant Vacuum;
serenely looking down upon all Plenums and Entities, as low and
poor to his serene Chimeraship and _Non_entity laboriously
attained! Heroic Vacuum; inexpugnable, while purse and present
condition of society hold out; curable by no hellebore. The
doom of Fate was, Be thou a Dandy! Have thy eye-glasses, opera-
glasses, thy Long-Acre cabs with white-breeched tiger, thy
yawning impassivities, pococurantisms; fix thyself in Dandyhood,
undeliverable; it is thy doom.
And all these, we say, were red-coloured infants; of the same
pulp and stuff, few years ago; now irretrievably shaped and
kneaded as we see! Formulas? There is no mortal extant, out of
the depths of Bedlam, but lives all skinned, thatched, covered
over with Formulas; and is, as it were, held in from delirium
and the Inane by his Formulas! They are withal the most
beneficent, indispensable of human equipments: blessed he who
has a skin and tissues, so it be a living one, and the heart-
pulse everywhere discernible through it. Monachism, Feudalism,
with a real King Plantagenet, with real Abbots Samson, and their
other living realities, how blessed!--
Not without a mournful interest have we surveyed this authentic
image of a Time now wholly swallowed. Mournful reflections crowd
on us; and yet consolatory. How many brave men have lived
before Agamemnon! Here is a brave governor Samson, a man fearing
God, and fearing nothing else; of whom as First Lord of the
Treasury, as King, Chief Editor, High Priest, we could be so glad
and proud; of whom nevertheless Fame has altogether forgotten to
make mention! The faint image of him, revived in this hour, is
found in the gossip of one poor Monk, and in Nature nowhere else.
Oblivion had so nigh swallowed him altogether, even to the echo
of his ever having existed. What regiments and hosts and
generations of such has Oblivion already swallowed! Their
crumbled dust makes up the soil our life-fruit grows on. Said I
not, as my old Norse Fathers taught me, The Life-tree Igdrasil,
which waves round thee in this hour, whereof thou in this hour
art portion, has its roots down deep in the oldest Death-
Kingdoms; and grows; the Three Nornas, or _Times,_ Past,
Present, Future, watering it from the Sacred Well!
For example, who taught thee to _speak?_ From the day when two
hairy-naked or fig-leaved Human Figures began, as uncomfortable
dummies, anxious no longer to be dumb, but to impart themselves
to one another; and endeavoured, with gaspings, gesturings, with
unsyllabled cries, with painful pantomime and interjections, in a
very unsuccessful manner,--up to the writing of this present
copyright Book, which also is not very successful! Between that
day and this, I say, there has been a pretty space of time; a
pretty spell of work, which _somebody_ has done! Thinkest thou
there were no poets till Dan Chaucer? No heart burning with a
thought, which it could not hold, and had no word for; and
needed to shape and coin a word for,--what thou callest a
metaphor, trope, or the like? For every word we have, there was
such a man and poet. The coldest word was once a glowing new
metaphor, and bold questionable originality. 'Thy very
ATTENTION, does it not mean an _attentio,_ a STRETCHING-TO?'
Fancy that act of the mind, which all were conscious of, which
none had yet named,--when this new 'poet' first felt bound and
driven to name it! His questionable originality, and new glowing
metaphor, was found adoptable, intelligible; and remains our
name for it to this day.
Literature:--and look at Paul's Cathedral, and the Masonries and
Worships and Quasi-Worships that are there; not to speak of
Westminster Hall and its wigs! Men had not a hammer to begin
with, not a syllabled articulation: they had it all to make;--
and they have made it. What thousand thousand articulate, semi-
articulate, earnest-stammering _Prayers_ ascending up to Heaven,
from hut and cell, in many lands, in many centuries, from the
fervent kindled souls of innumerable men, each struggling to pour
itself forth incompletely as it might, before the incompletest
_Liturgy_ could be compiled! The Liturgy, or adoptable and
generally adopted Set of Prayers and Prayer-Method, was what we
can call the Select Adoptabilities, 'Select Beauties' well-edited
(by Oecumenic Councils and other Useful-Knowledge Societies) from
that wide waste imbroglio of Prayers already extant and
accumulated, good and bad. The good were found adoptable by men;
were gradually got together, well-edited, accredited: the bad,
found inappropriate, unadoptable, were gradually forgotten,
disused and burnt. It is the way with human things. The first
man who, looking with opened soul on this August Heaven and
Earth, this Beautiful and Awful, which we name Nature, Universe
and such like, the essence of which remains forever UNNAMEABLE;
he who first, gazing into this, fell on his knees awestruck, in
silence as is likeliest,--he, driven by inner necessity, the
'audacious original' that he was, had done a thing, too, which
all thoughtful hearts saw straightway to be an expressive,
altogether adoptable thing! To bow the knee was ever since the
attitude of supplication. Earlier than any spoken Prayers,
_Litanias,_ or Leitourgias;_ the beginning of all Worship,--
which needed but a beginning, so rational was it. What a poet
he! Yes, this bold original was a successful one withal. The
wellhead this one, hidden in the primeval dusks and distances,
from whom as from a Nile-source all _Forms of Worship_ flow:--
such a Nile-river (somewhat muddy and malarious now!) of Forms of
Worship sprang there, and flowed, and flows, down to Puseyism,
Rotatory Calabash, Archbishop Laud at St. Catherine Creed's, and
perhaps lower!
Things rise, I say, in that way. The _Iliad_ Poem, and indeed
most other poetic, especially epic things, have risen as the
Liturgy did. The great _Iliad_ in Greece, and the small _Robin
Hood's Garland_ in England, are each, as I understand, the well-
edited 'Select Beauties' of an immeasurable waste imbroglio of
Heroic Ballads in their respective centuries and countries.
Think what strumming of the seven-stringed heroic lyre, torturing
of the less heroic fiddle-catgut, in Hellenic Kings' Courts, and
English wayside Public Houses; and beating of the studious
Poetic brain, and gasping here too in the semi-articulate
windpipe of Poetic men, before the Wrath of a Divine Achilles,
the Prowess of a Will Scarlet or Wakefield Pinder, could be
adequately sung! Honour to you, ye nameless great and greatest
ones, ye long-forgotten brave!
Nor was the Statute _De Tallagio non concedendo,_ nor any
Statute, Law-method, Lawyer's-wig, much less were the Statute-
Book and Four Courts, with Coke upon Lyttleton and Three Estates
of Parliament in the rear of them, got together without human
labour,--mostly forgotten now! From the time of Cain's slaying
Abel by swift head-breakage, to this time of killing your man in
Chancery by inches, and slow heart-break for forty years,--there
too is an interval! Venerable justice herself began by Wild-
justice; all Law is as a tamed furrowfield, slowly worked out,
and rendered arable, from the waste jungle of Club-Law. Valiant
Wisdom tilling and draining; escorted by owl-eyed Pedantry, by
owlish and vulturish and many other forms of Folly;--the valiant
husbandman assiduously tilling; the blind greedy enemy _too_
assiduously sowing tares! It is because there is yet in
venerable wigged justice some wisdom, amid such mountains of
wiggeries and folly, that men have not cast her into the River;
that she still sits there, like Dryden's Head in the _Battle of
the Books,_--a huge helmet, a huge mountain of greased parchment,
of unclean horsehair, first striking the eye; and then in the
innermost corner, visible at last, in size as a hazelnut, a real
fraction of God's justice, perhaps not yet unattainable to some,
surely still indispensable to all;--and men know not what to do
with her! Lawyers were not all pedants, voluminous voracious
persons; Lawyers too were poets, were heroes,--or their Law had
been past the Nore long before this time. Their Owlisms,
Vulturisms, to an incredible extent, will disappear by and by,
their Heroisms only remaining, and the helmet be reduced to
something like the size of the head, we hope!--
It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed,
articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World. The hands
of forgotten brave men have made it a World for us; they,--
honour to them; they, in _spite_ of the idle and the dastard.
This English Land, here and now, is the summary of what was found
of wise, and noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the
generations of English Men. Our English Speech is speakable
because there were Hero-Poets of our blood and lineage;
speakable in proportion to the number of these. This Land of
England has its conquerors, possessors, which change from epoch
to epoch, from day to day; but its real conquerors, creators,
and eternal proprietors are these following, and their
representatives if you can find them: All the Heroic Souls that
ever were in England, each in their degree; all the men that
ever cut a thistle, drained a puddle out of England, contrived a
wise scheme in England, did or said a true and valiant thing in
England. I tell thee, they had not a hammer to begin with; and
yet Wren built St. Paul's: not an articulated syllable; and yet
there have come English Literatures, Elizabethan Literatures,
Satanic-School, Cockney-School, and other Literatures;--once
more, as in the old time of the _Leitourgia,_ a most waste
imbroglio, and world-wide jungle and jumble; waiting terribly to
be 'well-edited,' and 'well-burnt!' Arachne started with
forefinger and thumb, and had not even a distaff; yet thou seest
Manchester, and Cotton Cloth, which will shelter naked backs, at
two-pence an ell.
Work? The quantity of done and forgotten work that lies silent
under my feet in this world, and escorts and attends me, and
supports and keeps me alive, wheresoever I walk or stand,
whatsoever I think or do, gives rise to reflections! Is it not
enough, at any rate, to strike the thing called 'Fame' into total
silence for a wise man? For fools and unreflective persons, she
is and will be very noisy, this 'Fame,' and talks of her
'immortals' and so forth: but if you will consider it, what is
she? Abbot Samson was not nothing because nobody _said_ anything
of him. Or thinkest thou, the Right Honourable Sir Jabesh
Windbag can be made something by Parliamentary Majorities and
Leading Articles? Her 'immortals!' Scarcely two hundred years
back can Fame recollect articulately at all; and there she but
maunders and mumbles. She manages to recollect a Shakspeare or
so; and prates, considerably like a goose, about him;--and in
the rear of that, onwards to the birth of Theuth, to Hengst's
Invasion, and the bosom of Eternity, it was all blank; and the
respectable Teutonic Languages, Teutonic Practices, Existences
all came of their own accord, as the grass springs, as the trees
grow; no Poet, no work from the inspired heart of a Man needed
there; and Fame has not an articulate word to say about it! Or
ask her, What, with all conceivable appliances and mnemonics,
including apotheosis and human sacrifices among the number, she
carries in her head with regard to a Wodan, even a Moses, or
other such? She begins to be uncertain as to what they were,
whether spirits or men of mould,--gods, charlatans; begins
sometimes to have a misgiving that they were mere symbols, ideas
of the mind; perhaps nonentities, and Letters of the Alphabet!
She is the noisiest, inarticulately babbling, hissing, screaming,
foolishest, unmusicalest of fowls that fly; and needs no
'trumpet,' I think, but her own enormous goose-throat,--measuring
several degrees of celestial latitude, so to speak. Her 'wings,'
in these days, have grown far swifter than ever; but her goose-
throat hitherto seems only larger; louder and foolisher than
ever. _She_ is transitory, futile, a goose-goddess:--if she were
not transitory, what would become of us! It is a chief comfort
that she forgets us all; all, even to the very Wodans; and
grows to consider us, at last, as probably nonentities and
Letters of the Alphabet.
Yes, a noble Abbot Samson resigns himself to Oblivion too; feels
it no hardship, but a comfort; counts it as a still resting-
place, from much sick fret and fever and stupidity, which in the
night-watches often made his strong heart sigh. Your most sweet
voices, making one enormous goose-voice, O Bobus and Company, how
can they be a guidance for any Son of Adam? In _silence_ of you
and the like of you, the 'small still voices' will speak to him
better; in which does lie guidance.
My friend, all speech and rumour is shortlived, foolish, untrue.
Genuine WORK alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal,
as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself. Stand thou
by that; and let 'Fame' and the rest of it go prating.
"Heard are the Voices,
Heard are the Sages,
The Worlds and the Ages:
"Choose well, your choice is
Brief and yet endless.
Here eyes do regard you,
In Eternity's stillness;
Here is all fulness,
Ye brave, to reward you;
Work, and despair not."
--Goethe