THE INHERITANCE

THOMAS CARLYLE

[From Past and Present, 1843, Book II, chapter xvii]

It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed, articulate-speaking, hightowered, wide-acred World. The hands of forgotten brave men have made it a World for us;-they,-honor 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 twopence 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 Honorable Sir Jabez Windbag can be made something bý Parliamentary Majorities and Leading Articles? Her "immortals!" Scarcely two hundred years back can Fame recoilect articulately at all; and there she but maunders and mumbles. She manages to recollect a Shakespeare 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 mold,-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 restingplace, from much sick feet and fever and stupidity, which in the night-watches often

made his strong heart sigh. Your most sweet voices, making one enormous goosevoice, 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 rumor is shortlived, foolish, untrue. Genuine WORK alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and WorldBuilder 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.

HAPPINESS AND LABOR

THOMAS CARLYLE

[Ibid., Book III, chapters iv and vi]

Truly, I think the man who goes about pothering and uproaring for his "happiness,"-pothering, and were it ballot-boxing, poem-making, or in what way soever fussing and exerting himself, he is not the man that will help us to "get our knaves and dastards arrested!" No; he rather is on the way to increase the number,-by at least one unit and his tail! Observe, too, that this is all a modern affair; belongs not to the old heroic times, but to these dastard new times. "Happiness our being's end and aim," all that very paltry speculation is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world.

The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was happiness enough to get his work done. Not "I can't eat!" but "I can't work!" that was the burden of all wise complaining among men. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man, That he cannot work; that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the day is passing swiftly over, our

life is passing swiftly over; and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness, it is all abolished; vanished, clean gone; a thing that has been: "not of the slightest consequence" whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds, as musical Byron with Giaours and sensibilities of the heart; as the unmusical Meat-jack with hard labor and rust! But our work,behold that is not abolished, that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the want of it remains;-for endless Times and Eternities, remains; and that is now the sole question with us forevermore! Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine everlasting Night, with her stardiadems, with her silences and her veracities, is come! What hast thou done, and how? Happiness, unhappiness: all that was but the wages thou hadst; thou hast spent all that, in sustaining thyself hitherward; not a coin of it remains with thee, it is all spent, eaten and now thy work, where is thy work? Swift, out with it; let us see thy work!

Of a truth, if man were not a poor hungry dastard, and even much of a blockhead withal, he would cease criticizing his victuals to such extent; and criticize himself rather, what he does with his victuals! ...

And now to observe with what bewildering obscurations and impediments all this as yet stands entangled, and is yet intelligible to no man! How, with our gross Atheism, we hear it not to be the Voice of God to us, but regard it merely as a Voice of earthly Profit-and-Loss. And have a Hell in England, the Hell of not making money. And coldly see the all-conquering valiant Sons of Toil sit enchanted, by the million, in their Poor-Law Bastille, as if this were Nature's Law;-mumbling to ourselves some vague janglement of Laissez-faire, Supply-anddemand, Cash-payment the one nexus of man to man: Free-trade, Competition, and Devil take the hindmost, our latest Gospel yet preached!

As if, in truth, there were no God of Labor; as if godlike Labor and brutal Mammonism were convertible terms. A serious, most earnest Mammonism grown Midaseared; an unserious Dilettantism, earnest about nothing, grinning with inarticulate, incredulous, incredible jargon about all things,

as the enchanted Dilettanti do by the Dead Sea! It is mournful enough, for the present hour; were there not an endless hope in it withal. Giant LABOR, truest emblem there is of God the World-Worker, Demiurgus, and Eternal Maker; noble LABOR, which is yet to be the King of this Earth, and sit on the highest throne,-staggering hitherto like a blind irrational giant, hardly allowed to have his common place on the street-pavements; idle Dilettantism, Dead-Sea Apism crying out, "Down with him; he is dangerous!"

Labor must become a seeing rational giant, with a soul in the body of him, and take his place on the throne of things, leaving his Mammonism, and several other adjuncts, on the lower steps of said throne.

PLUGSON OF UNDERSHOT

THOMAS CARLYLE

[Ibid., Book III, chapter x]

One thing I do know: Never, on this Earth, was the relation of man to man long carried on by Cash-payment alone. If, at any time, a philosophy of Laissez-faire, Competition, and Supply-and-demand, start up as the exponent of human relations, expect that it will soon end.

Such philosophies will arise: for man's philosophies are usually the "supplement of his practice"; some ornamental Logic-varnish, some outer skin of Articulate Intelligence, with which he strives to render his dumb Instinctive Doings presentable when they are done. Such philosophies will arise; be preached as Mammon-Gospels, the ultimate Evangel of the World; be believed with what is called belief, with much superficial bluster, and a kind of shallow satisfaction real in its way;-but they are ominous gospels! They are the sure and even swift, forerunner of great changes. Expect that the old System of Society is done, is dying and fallen into dotage, when it begins to rave in that fashion. Most Systems that I have watched the death of, for the last three thousand years, have gone just so. The Ideal, the True and Noble that was in them having faded out, and nothing now remaining but naked Egoism, vulturous Greediness, they cannot live; they are bound and inexorably ordained by the oldest Destinies, Mothers of the Universe, to die. Curious enough; they thereupon, as I have pretty

generally noticed, devised some light comfortable kind of "wine-and-walnuts philosophy" for themselves, this of Supply-anddemand or another; and keep saying, during hours of mastication and rumination, which they call hours of meditation: "Soul, take thy ease; it is all well that thou art a vulturesoul";-and pangs of dissolution come upon them, oftenest before they are aware!

Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world. I invite his Grace of Castle-Rackrent to reflect on this;-does he think that a Land Aristocracy when it becomes a Land Auctioneership can have long to live? Or that Sliding-scales will increase the vital stamina of it? The indomitable Plugson too, of the respected Firm of Plugson, Hunks and Company, in St. Dolly Undershot, is invited to reflect on this; for to him also it will be new, perhaps even newer. Bookkeeping by double entry is admirable, and records several things in an exact manner. But the Mother-Destinies also keep their Tablets; in Heaven's Chancery also there goes on a recording; and things, as my Moslem friends say, are "written on the iron leaf."

Your Grace and Plugson, it is like, go to Church occasionally: did you never in vacant moments, with perhaps a dull parson droning to you, glance into your New Testament, and the cash-account stated four times over, by a kind of quadruple entry,-in the Four Gospels there? I consider that a cashaccount, and balance-statement of work done and wages paid, worth attending to. Precisely such, though on a smaller scale, go on at all moments under this Sun; and the statement and balance of them in the Plugson Ledgers and on the Tablets of Heaven's Chancery are discrepant exceedingly;which ought really to teach, and to have long since taught, an indomitable common-sense Plugson of Undershot, much more an unattackable uncommon-sense Grace of Rackrent, a thing or two!-In brief, we shall have to dismiss the Cash-Gospel rigorously into its own place: we shall have to know, on the threshold, that either there is some infinitely deeper Gospel, subsidiary, explanatory, and daily and hourly corrective, to the Cash one; or else that the Cash one itself and all others are fast traveling!

For all human things do require to have

an ideal in them; to have some Soul in them, as we said, were it only to keep the Body unputrefied. And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul, place it in what ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body with its own nobleness; will gradually, incessantly, mold, modify, new-form or reform said ugliest Body, and make it at last beautiful, and to a certain degree divine! Oh, if you could dethrone that Brute-god Mammon, and put a Spirit-god in his place! One way or other, he must and will have to be dethroned.

Fighting, for example, as I often say to myself, Fighting with steel murder-tools is surely a much uglier operation than Working, take it how you will. Yet even of Fighting, in religious Abbot Samson's days, see what a Feudalism, there had grown,-a "glorious Chivalry," much besung down to the present day. Was not that one of the "impossiblest" things? Under the sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with clenched teeth, and hell-fire eyes, hacking one another's flesh, converting precious living bodies, and priceless living souls, into nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnipmanure. How did a Chivalry ever come out of that; how anything that was not hideous, scandalous, infernal? It will be a question worth considering by and by.

I remark, for the present, only two things: first, that the Fighting itself was not, as we rashly suppose it, a Fighting without cause, but more or less with cause. Man is created to fight; he is perhaps best of all definable as a born soldier; his life "a battle and a march," under the right General. It is forever indispensable for a man to fight: now with Necessity, with Barrenness, Scarcity, with Puddles, Bogs, tangled Forests, unkempt Cotton;-now also with the hallucinations of his poor fellow Men. Hallucinatory visions rise in the head of my poor fellow man; make him claim over me rights which are not his. All fighting, as we noticed long ago, is the dusty conflict of strength, each thinking itself the strongest, or, in other words, the justest;—of Mights which do in the long-run, and forever will in this just Universe in the long-run, mean Rights. In conflict the perishable part of them, beaten sufficiently, flies off into dust; this process ended, appears the imperishable, the true and exact.

And now let us remark a second thing: how, in these baleful operations, a noble

devout-hearted Chevalier will comport himself, and an ignoble godless Bucanier and Chactaw Indian. Victory is the aim of each. But deep in the heart of the noble man it lies forever legible, that as an Invisible Just God made him, so will and must God's Justice and this only, were it never so invisible, ultimately prosper in all controversies and enterprises and battles whatsoever. What an Influence; ever-present, like a Soul in the rudest Caliban of a body; like a ray of Heaven, and illuminative creative FiatLux, in the wasted terrestrial Chaos! Blessed divine Influence, traceable even in the horror of Battlefields and garments rolled in blood: how it ennobles even the Battlefield; and, in place of a Chactaw Massacre, makes it a Field of Honor! A Battlefield too, is great. Considered well, it is a kind of Quintessence of Labor; Labor distilled into its utmost concentration; the significance of years of it compressed into an hour. Here too thou shalt be strong, and not in muscle only, if thou wouldst prevail. Here too thou shalt be strong of heart, noble of soul; thou shalt dread no pain or death, thou shalt not love ease or life; in rage, thou shalt remember mercy, justice;-thou shalt be a Knight and not a Chactaw, if thou wouldst prevail! It is the rule of all battles, against hallucinating fellow Men, against unkempt Cotton, or whatsoever battles they may be, which a man in this world has to fight.

Howel Davies dyes the West-Indian Seas with blood, piles his decks with plunder; approves himself the expertest Seaman, the daringest Seafighter: but he gains no lasting victory; lasting victory is not possible for him. Not, had he fleets larger than the combined British Navy all united with him in bucaniering. He, once for all, cannot prosper in his duel. He strikes down his man: yes; but his man, or his man's representative, has no notion to lie struck down; neither, though slain ten times, will he keep so lying; nor has the Universe any notion to keep him so lying! On the contrary, the Universe and he have, at all moments, all manner of motives to start up again, and desperately fight again. Your Napoleon is flung out, at last, to St. Helena; the latter end of him sternly compensating the beginning. The Bucanier strikes down a man, a hundred or a million men: but what profits it? He has one enemy never to be struck down; nay two enemies: Mankind and the Maker of Men. On the great scale or on the