The Works of Thomas Carlyle/Volume 6/Anti-Dryasdust
INTRODUCTION
ANTI-DRYASDUST
What and how great are the interests which connect themselves with the hope that England may yet attain to some practical belief and understanding of its History during the Seventeenth Century, need not be insisted on at present; such hope being still very distant, very uncertain. We have wandered far away from the ideas which guided us in that Century, and indeed which had guided us in all preceding Centuries, but of which that Century was the ultimate manifestation: we have wandered very far; and must endeavour to return, and connect ourselves therewith again! It is with other feelings than those of poor peddling Dilettantism, other aims than the writing of successful or unsuccessful Publications, that an earnest man occupies himself in those dreary provinces of the dead and buried. The last glimpse of the Godlike vanishing from this England; conviction and veracity giving place to hollow cant and formulism,—antique ‘Reign of God,’ which all true men in their several dialects and modes have always striven for, giving place to modern Reign of the No-God, whom men name Devil: this, in its multitudinous meanings and results, is a sight to create reflections in the earnest man! One wishes there were a History of English Puritanism, the last of all our Heroisms; but sees small prospect of such a thing at present.
‘Few nobler Heroisms,’ says a well-known Writer long occupied on this subject, ‘at bottom perhaps no nobler Heroism, ever transacted itself on this Earth; and it lies as good as lost to us; overwhelmed under such an avalanche of Human Stupidities as no Heroism before ever did. Intrinsically and extrinsically it may be considered inaccessible to these generations. Intrinsically, the spiritual purport of it has become inconceivable, incredible to the modern mind. Extrinsically, the documents and records of it, scattered waste as a shoreless chaos, are not legible. They lie there, printed, written, to the extent of tons and square miles, as shot-rubbish; unedited, unsorted, not so much as indexed; full of every conceivable confusion;—yielding light to very few; yielding darkness, in several sorts, to very many. Dull Pedantry, conceited idle Dilettantism,—prurient Stupidity in what shape soever,—is darkness and not light! There are from Thirty to Fifty Thousand unread Pamphlets of the Civil War in the British Museum alone: huge piles of mouldering wreck, wherein, at the rate of perhaps one pennyweight per ton, lie things memorable. They lie preserved there, waiting happier days; under present conditions they cannot, except for idle purposes, for dilettante excerpts and suchlike, be got examined. The Rushworths, Whitlockes, Nalsons, Thurloes; enormous folios, these and many others have been printed, and some of them again printed, but never yet edited,—edited as you edit wagonloads of broken bricks and dry mortar, simply by tumbling up the wagon! Not one of those monstrous old volumes has so much as an available Index. It is the general rule of editing on this matter. If your editor correct the press, it is an honourable distinction to him.
‘Those dreary old records, they were compiled at first by Human Insight, in part; and in great part, by Human Stupidity withal;—but then it was by Stupidity in a laudable diligent state, and doing its best; which was something:—and, alas, they have been successively elaborated by Human Stupidity in the idle state, falling idler and idler, and only pretending to be diligent; whereby now, for us, in these late days, they have grown very dim indeed! To Dryasdust Printing-Societies, and suchlike, they afford a sorrowful kind of pabulum; but for all serious purposes, they are as if non-extant; might as well, if matters are to rest as they are, not have been written or printed at all. The sound of them is not a voice, conveying knowledge or memorial of any earthly or heavenly thing; it is a wide-spread inarticulate slumberous mumblement, issuing as if from the lake of Eternal Sleep. Craving for oblivion, for abolition and honest silence, as a blessing in comparison!—
‘This then,’ continues our impatient friend, ‘is the Elysium we English have provided for our Heroes! The Rushworthian Elysium. Dreariest continent of shot-rubbish the eye ever saw. Confusion piled on confusion to your utmost horizon’s edge: obscure, in lurid twilight as of the shadow of Death; trackless, without index, without finger-post, or mark of any human foregoer;—where your human footstep, if you are still human, echoes bodeful through the gaunt solitude, peopled only by somnambulant Pedants, Dilettants, and doleful creatures, by Phantasms, errors, inconceivabilities, by Nightmares, pasteboard Norroys, griffins, wiverns, and chimeras dire! There, all vanquished, overwhelmed under such waste lumber-mountains, the wreck and dead ashes of some six unbelieving generations, does the Age of Cromwell and his Puritans lie hidden from us. This is what we, for our share, have been able to accomplish towards keeping our Heroic Ones in memory. By way of sacred poet they have found voluminous Dryasdust, and his Collections and Philosophical Histories.
‘To Dryasdust, who wishes merely to compile torpedo Histories of the philosophical or other sorts, and gain immortal laurels for himself by writing about it and about it, all this is sport; but to us who struggle piously, passionately, to behold, if but in glimpses, the faces of our vanished Fathers, it is death!—O Dryasdust, my voluminous friend, had Human Stupidity continued in the diligent state, think you it had ever come to this? Surely at least you might have made an Index for these huge books! Even your genius, had you been faithful, was adequate to that. Those thirty thousand or fifty thousand old Newspapers and Pamphlets of the King’s Library, it is you, my voluminous friend, that should have sifted them, many long years ago. Instead of droning out these melancholy scepticisms, constitutional philosophies, torpedo narratives, you should have sifted those old stacks of pamphlet-matter for us, and have had the metal grains lying here accessible, and the dross-heaps lying there avoidable; you had done the human memory a service thereby; some human remembrance of this matter had been more possible!’
Certainly this description does not want for emphasis: but all ingenuous inquirers into the Past will say there is too much truth in it. Nay, in addition to the sad state of our Historical Books, and what indeed is fundamentally the cause and origin of that, our common spiritual notions, if any notion of ours may still deserve to be called spiritual, are fatal to a right understanding of that Seventeenth Century. The Christian Doctrines which then dwelt alive in every heart, have now in a manner died out of all hearts,—very mournful to behold; and are not the guidance of this world any more. Nay worse still, the Cant of them does yet dwell alive with us, little doubting that it is Cant;—in which fatal intermediate state the Eternal Sacredness of this Universe itself, of this Human Life itself, has fallen dark to the most of us, and we think that too a Cant and a Creed. Thus the old names suggest new things to us,—not august and divine, but hypocritical, pitiable, detestable. The old names and similitudes of belief still circulate from tongue to tongue, though now in such a ghastly condition: not as commandments of the Living God, which we must do, or perish eternally; alas, no, as something very different from that! Here properly lies the grand unintelligibility of the Seventeenth Century for us. From this source has proceeded our maltreatment of it, our miseditings, miswritings, and all the other ‘avalanche of Human Stupidity, wherewith, as our impatient friend com- plains, we have allowed it to be overwhelmed. We have allowed some other things to be overwhelmed! Would to Heaven that were the worst fruit we had gathered from our Unbelief and our Cant of Belief!—Our impatient friend continues:
‘I have known Nations altogether destitute of printer’s-- types and learned appliances, with nothing better than old songs, monumental stoneheaps and Quipo-thrums to keep record by, who had truer memory of their memorable things than this! Truer memory, I say: for at least the voice of their Past Heroisms, if indistinct, and all awry as to dates and statistics, was still melodious to those Nations. The body of it might be dead enough; but the soul of it, partly harmonised, put in real accordance with the “Eternal Melodies,” was alive to all hearts, and could not die. The memory of their ancient Brave Ones did not rise like a hideous huge leaden vapour, an amorphous emanation of Chaos, like a petrifying Medusa Spectre, on those poor Nations: no, but like a Heaven’s Apparition, which it was, it still stood radiant beneficent before all hearts, calling all hearts to emulate it, and the recognition of it was a Psalm and Song. These things will require to be practically meditated by and by. Is human Writing, then, the art of burying Heroisms and highest Facts in Chaos; so that no man shall henceforth contemplate them without horror and aversion, and danger of locked-jaw? What does Dryasdust consider that he was born for; that paper and ink were made for?
‘It is very notable, and leads to endless reflections, how the Greeks had their living Iliad, where we have such a deadly indescribable Cromwelliad. The old Pantheon, home of all the gods, has become a Peerage-Book,—with black and white surplice-controversies superadded, not unsuitably. The Greeks had their Homers, Hesiods, where we have our Rymers, Rush- worths, our Norroys, Garter-Kings, and Bishops Cobweb. Very notable, I say. By the genius, wants and instincts and opportunities of the one People, striving to keep themselves in mind of what was memorable, there had fashioned itself, in the effort of successive centuries, a Homer’s Iliad: by those of the other People, in successive centuries, a Collins’s Peerage improved by Sir Egerton Brydges. By their Pantheons ye shall know them! Have not we English a talent for Silence? Our very Speech and Printed-Speech, such a force of torpor dwelling in it, is properly a higher power of Silence. There is no Silence like the Speech you cannot listen to without danger of locked-jaw! Given a divine Heroism, to smother it well in human Dulness, to touch it with the mace of Death, so that no human soul shall henceforth recognise it for a Heroism, but all souls shall fly from it as from a chaotic Torpor, an Insanity and Horror,—I will back our English genius against the world in such a problem!
‘Truly we have done great things in that sort; down from Norman William all the way, and earlier: and to the English mind at this hour, the past History of England is little other than a dull dismal labyrinth, in which the English mind, if candid, will confess that it has found of knowable (meaning even conceivable), of lovable, or memorable,—next to nothing. As if we had done no brave thing at all in this Earth;—as if not Men but Nightmares had written of our History! The English, one can discern withal, have been perhaps as brave a People as their neighbours; perhaps, for Valour of Action and true hard labour in this Earth, since brave Peoples were first made in it, there has been none braver anywhere or anywhen:—but, also, it must be owned, in Stupidity of Speech they have no fellow! What can poor English Heroisms do in such case, but fall torpid into the domain of the Nightmares? For of a truth, Stupidity is strong, most strong. As the Poet Schiller sings: “Against Stupidity the very gods fight unvictorious.” There is in it an opulence of murky stagnancy, an inexhaustibility, a calm infinitude, which will baffle even the gods,—which will say calmly, “Yes, try all your lightnings here; see whether my dark belly cannot hold them!”
“Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.”
Has our impatient friend forgotten that it is Destiny withal as well as ‘Stupidity’; that such is the case more or less with Human History always? By very nature it is a labyrinth and chaos, this that we call Human History; an abatis of trees and brushwood, a world-wide jungle, at once growing and dying. Under the green foliage and blossoming fruit-trees of Today, there lie, rotting slower or faster, the forests of all other Years and Days. Some have rotted fast, plants of annual growth, and are long since quite gone to inorganic mould; others are like the aloe, growths that last a thousand or three thousand years. You will find them in all stages of decay and preservation; down deep to the beginnings of the History of Man. Think where our Alphabetic Letters came from, where our Speech itself came from; the Cookeries we live by, the Masonries we lodge under! You will find fibrous roots of this day’s Occurrences among the dust of Cadmus and Trismegistus, of Tubalcain and Triptolemus; the tap-roots of them are with Father Adam himself and the cinders of Eve’s first fire! At bottom, there is no perfect History; there is none such conceivable.
All past Centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet, even as that Seventeenth is now threatening to do. Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul! For the leafy blossoming Present Time springs from the whole Past, remembered and unrememberable, so confusedly as we say:—and truly the Art of History, the grand difference between a Dryasdust and a sacred Poet, is very much even this: To distinguish well what does still reach to the surface, and is alive and frondent for us; and what reaches no longer to the surface, but moulders safe underground, never to send forth leaves or fruit for mankind any more: of the former we shall rejoice to hear; to hear of the latter will be an affliction to us; of the latter only Pedants and Dullards, and disastrous malefactors to the world, will find good to speak. By wise memory and by wise oblivion: it lies all there! Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past: when both are foolish, and the general soul is overclouded with confusions, with unveracities and discords, there is a Rushworthian chaos.’ Let Dryasdust be blamed, beaten with stripes if you will; but let it be with pity, with blame to Fate chiefly. Alas, when sacred Priests are arguing about ‘black and white surplices’; and sacred Poets have long professedly deserted Truth, and gone a woolgathering after ‘Ideals’ and suchlike, what can you expect of poor secular Pedants? ‘The labyrinth of History must grow ever darker, more intricate and dismal; vacant cargoes of ‘Ideals’ will arrive yearly, to be cast into the oven; and noble Heroisms of Fact, given up to Dryasdust, will be buried in a very disastrous manner!—
But the thing we had to say and repeat was this, That Puritanism is not of the Nineteenth Century, but of the Seventeenth; that the grand unintelligibility for us lies there. The Fast-day Sermons of St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, in spite of printers, are all grown dumb! In long rows of little dumpy quartos, gathered from the bookstalls, they indeed stand here bodily before us: by human volition they can be read, but not by any human memory remembered. We forget them as soon as read; they have become a weariness to the soul of man. They are dead and gone, they and what they shadowed; the human soul, got into other latitudes, cannot now give harbour to them. Alas, and did not the honourable Houses of Parliament listen to them with rapt earnestness, as to an indisputable message from Heaven itself ? Learned and painful Dr. Owen, learned and painful Dr. Burgess; Stephen Marshall, Mr. Spurstow, Adoniram Byfield, Hugh Peters, Philip Nye: the Printer has done for them what he could, and Mr. Speaker gave them the thanks of the House: —and no most astonishing Review-Article, or tenth-edition Pamphlet, of our day can have half such ‘brilliancy,’ such ‘spirit, ‘eloquence,’—such virtue to produce belief, which is the highest and in reality the only literary success,—as these poor little dumpy quartos once had. And behold, they are become inarticulate quartos; spectral; and instead of speak- ing, do but screech and gibber! All Puritanism has grown inarticulate; its fervent preachings, prayings, pamphleteerings are sunk into one indiscriminate moaning hum, mournful as the voice of subterranean winds. So much falls silent: human Speech, unless by rare chance it touch on the ‘Eternal Melodies,’ and harmonise with them; human Action, Interest, if divorced from the Eternal Melodies, sinks all silent. The fashion of this world passeth away.
The Age of the Puritans is not extinct only and gone away from us, but it is as if fallen beyond the capabilities of Memory herself; it is grown unintelligible, what we may call incredible. Its earnest Purport awakens now no resonance in our frivolous hearts. We understand not even in imagination, one of a thousand of us, what it ever could have meant. It seems delirious, delusive; the sound of it has become tedious as a tale of past stupidities. Not the body of heroic Puritan- ism only, which was bound to die, but the soul of it also, which was and should have been, and yet shall be immortal, has for the present passed away. As Harrison said of his Banner, and Lion of the ‘Tribe of Judah: ‘Who shall rouse him up?’—
‘For indisputably,’ exclaims the above-cited Author in his vehement way, ‘this too was a Heroism; and the soul of it remains part of the eternal soul of things! Here, of our own land and lineage, in practical English shape, were Heroes on the Earth once more. Who knew in every fibre, and with heroic daring laid to heart, That an Almighty Justice does verily rule this world; that it is good to fight on God’s side, and bad to fight on the Devil’s side! The essence of all Heroisms and Veracities that have been, or that will be.—Perhaps it was among the nobler and noblest Human Heroisms, this Puritanism of ours: but English Dryasdust could not discern it for a Heroism at all;—as the Heaven’s lightning, born of its black tempest, and destructive to pestilential Mud-giants, is mere horror and terror to the Pedant species everywhere; which, like the owl in any sudden brightness, has to shut its eyes,—or hastily procure smoked-spectacles on an improved principle. Heaven’s brightness would be intolerable otherwise. Only your eagle dares look direct into the fire-radiance; only your Schiller climbs aloft “to discover whence the lightning is coming.” “Godlike men love lightning,” says one. Our old Norse fathers called it a God; the sunny blue-eyed Thor, with his all-conquering thunderhammer,—who again, in calmer season, is beneficent Summer-heat. Godless men love it not; shriek murder when they see it; shutting their eyes, and hastily procuring smoked-spectacles. O Dryasdust, thou art great and thrice-great!’— —
‘But, alas,’ exclaims he elsewhere, getting his eye on the real nodus of the matter, ‘what is it, all this Rushworthian inarticulate rubbish-continent, in its ghastly dim twilight, with its haggard wrecks and pale shadows; what is it, but the common Kingdom of Death? This is what we call Death, this mouldering dumb wilderness of things once alive. Behold here the final evanescence of Formed human things; they had form, but they are changing into sheer formlessness;—ancient human speech itself has sunk into unintelligible maundering. This is the collapse,—the etiolation of human features into mouldy blank; dissolution; progress towards utter silence and disappearance; disastrous ever-deepening Dusk of Gods and Men!— —Why has the living ventured thither, down from the cheerful light, across the Lethe-swamps and Tartarean Phlegethons, onwards to these baleful halls of Dis and the three-headed Dog? Some Destiny drives him. It is his sins, I suppose:—perhaps it is his love, strong as that of Orpheus for the lost Eurydice, and likely to have no better issue!’—
Well, it would seem the resuscitation of a Heroism from the Past Time is no easy enterprise. Our impatient friend seems really getting sad! We can well believe him, there needs pious love in any ‘Orpheus’ that will risk descending to the Gloomy Halls;—descending, it may be, and fronting Cerberus and Dis, to no purpose! For it oftenest proves so; nay, as the Mythologists would teach us, always. Here is another Mythus. Balder the white Sungod, say our Norse Skalds, Balder, beautiful as the summer-dawn, loved of Gods and men, was dead. His Brother Hermoder, urged by his Mother’s tears and the tears of the Universe, went forth to seek him. He rode through gloomy winding valleys, of a dismal leaden colour, full of howling winds and subterranean torrents; nine days; ever deeper, down towards Hela’s Death-realm: at Lonesome Bridge, which, with its gold gate, spans the River of Moaning, he found the Portress, an ancient woman, called Modgudr, ‘the Vexer of Minds,’ keeping watch as usual: Modgudr answered him, ‘Yes, Balder passed this way; but he is not here; he is down yonder,—far, still far to the North, within Hela’s Gates yonder.’ Hermoder rode on, still dauntless, on his horse, named ‘Swiftness’ or ‘Mane of Gold’; reached Hela’s Gates; leapt sheer over them, mounted as he was; saw Balder, the very Balder, with his eyes:—but could not bring him back! The Nornas were inexorable; Balder was never to come back. Balder beckoned him mournfully a still adieu; Nanna, Balder’s Wife, sent ‘a thimble’ to her mother as a memorial: Balder never could return!— —Is not this an emblem? Old Portress Modgudr, I take it, is Dryasdust in Norse petticoat and hood; a most unlovely beldame, the ‘Vexer of Minds’!
We will here take final leave of our impatient friend, occupied in this almost desperate enterprise of his; we will wish him, which it is very easy to do, more patience, and better success than he seems to hope. And now to our own small enterprise, and solid despatch of business in plain prose!