Gospel of Dilettantism
But after all, the Gospel of Dilettantism, producing a Governing
Class who do not govern, nor understand in the least that they
are bound or expected to govern, is still mournfuler than that of
Mammonism. Mammonism, as we said, at least works; this goes
idle. Mammonism has seized some portion of the message of Nature
to man; and seizing that, and following it, will seize and
appropriate more and more of Nature's message: but Dilettantism
has missed it wholly. 'Make money:' that will mean withal, 'Do
work in order to make money.' But, 'Go gracefully idle in
Mayfair,' what does or can that mean? An idle, game-preserving
and even corn-Jawing Aristocracy, in such an England as ours:
has the world, if we take thought of it, ever seen such a
phenomenon till very lately? Can it long continue to see such?
Accordingly the impotent, insolent Donothingism in Practice, and
Saynothingism in Speech, which we have to witness on that side of
our affairs, is altogether amazing. A Corn-Law demonstrating
itself openly, for ten years or more, with 'arguments' to make
the angels, and some other classes of creatures, weep! For men
are not ashamed to rise in Parliament and elsewhere, and speak
the things they do _not_ think. 'Expediency,' 'Necessities of
Party,' &c. &c.! It is not known that the Tongue of Man is a
sacred organ; that Man himself is definable in Philosophy as an
'Incarnate _Word;'_ the Word not there, you have no Man there
either, but a Phantasm instead! In this way it is that
Absurdities may live long enough,--still walking, and talking for
themselves, years and decades after the brains are quite out!
How are 'the knaves and dastards' ever to be got 'arrested' at
that rate?--
"No man in this fashionable London of yours," friend Sauerteig
would say, "speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to
be something more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty,
ornamental. His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into
some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me;--perhaps
(this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its
head, that I may remember it the better! Such grinning inanity
is very sad to the soul of man. Human faces should not grin on
one like masks; they should look on one like faces! I love
honest laughter, as I do sunlight; but not dishonest: most
kinds of dancing too; but the St.-Vitus kind not at all! A
fashionable wit, ach Himmel, if you ask, Which, he or a Death's-
head, will be the cheerier company for me? pray send _not_ him!"
Insincere Speech, truly, is the prime material of insincere
Action. Action hangs, as it were, _dissolved_ in Speech, in
Thought whereof Speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself
therefrom. The kind of Speech in a man betokens the kind of
Action you will get from him. Our Speech, in these modern days,
has become amazing. Johnson complained, "Nobody speaks in
earnest, Sir; there is no serious conversation." To us all
serious speech of men, as that of Seventeenth-Century Puritans,
Twelfth-Century Catholics, German Poets of this Century, has
become jargon, more or less insane. Cromwell was mad and a
quack; Anselm, Becket, Goethe, _ditto ditto._
Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology are more
significant than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers by
the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same
Asphaltic Lake; and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to
do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities
and outer semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions,--
verging indeed towards a certain far deeper Lake. Whereupon it
pleased kind Heaven to send them the Prophet Moses, with an
instructive word of warning, out of which might have sprung
'remedial measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea
discovered, as the valet-species always does in heroes or
prophets, no comeliness in Moses; listened with real tedium to
Moses, with light grinning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers,
affecting even to yawn; and signified, in short, that they found
him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid theory these
men of the Asphalt Lake formed to themselves of Moses, That
probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore.
Moses withdrew; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not
withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit
them, were all 'changed into Apes;'* sitting on the trees there,
grinning now in the most _un_affected manner; gibbering and
chattering _complete_ nonsense; finding the whole Universe now a
most indisputable Humbug! The Universe has _become_ a Humbug to
these Apes who thought it one! There they sit and chatter, to
this hour: only, I think, every Sabbath there returns to them a
bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit,
with their wizened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of
supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking out, through those
blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest
universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk of
Things; wholly an Uncertainty, Unintelligibility, they and it;
and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter
or mew:--truest, tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of
man or ape! They made no use of their souls; and so have lost
them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with
unmusical screeches, and half-remember that they had souls.
Didst thou never, O Traveler, fall in with parties of this tribe?
Meseems they are grown somewhat numerous in our day.
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* Sale's _Koran_ (_Introduction_).