The Works of Thomas Carlyle/Volume 6/Of Oliver’s Letters and Speeches
OF OLIVER’S LETTERS AND SPEECHES
Letters and authentic Utterances of Oliver lie scattered, in print and manuscript, in a hundred repositories, in all varieties of condition and environment. Most of them, all the important of them, have already long since been printed and again printed; but we cannot in general say, ever read: too often it is apparent that the very editor of these poor utterances had, if reading mean understanding, never read them. They stand in their old spelling; mispunctuated, misprinted, unelucidated, unintelligible,—defaced with the dark incrustations too well known to students of that Period. The Speeches above all, as hitherto set forth in The Somers Tracts, in The Milton State-Papers, in Burton’s Diary, and other such Books, excel human belief: certainly no such agglomerate of opaque confusions, printed and reprinted; of darkness on the back of darkness, thick and threefold; is known to me elsewhere in the history of things spoken or printed by human creatures. Of these Speeches, all except one, which was published by authority at the time, I have to believe myself, not very exultingly, to be the first actual reader for nearly two Centuries past.
Nevertheless these Documents do exist, authentic though defaced; and invite everyone who would know that Period, to study them till they become intelligible again. The words of Oliver Cromwell,—the meaning they had, must be worth recovering, in that point of view. To collect these Letters and authentic Utterances, as one’s reading yielded them, was a comparatively grateful labour; to correct them, elucidate and make them legible again, was a good historical study. Surely ‘a wise memory’ would wish to preserve among men the written and spoken words of such a man;—and as for the ‘wise oblivion,’ that is already, by Time and Accident, done to our hand. Enough is already lost and destroyed; we need not, in this particular case, omit farther.
Accordingly, whatever words authentically proceeding from Oliver himself I could anywhere find yet surviving, I have here gathered; and will now, with such minimum of annotation as may suit that object, offer them to the reader. That is the purport of this Book. I have ventured to believe that, to certain patient earnest readers, these old dim Letters of a noble English Man might, as they had done to myself, become dimly legible again; might dimly present, better than all other evidence, the noble figure of the Man himself again. Certainly there is Historical instruction in these Letters:—Historical, and perhaps other and better. At least, it is with Heroes and god-inspired men that I, for my part, would far rather converse, in what dialect soever they speak! Great, ever fruitful; profitable for reproof, for encouragement, for building-up in manful purposes and works, are the words of those that in their day were men. I will advise serious persons, interested in England past or present, to try if they can read a little in these Letters of Oliver Cromwell, a man once deeply interested in the same object. Heavy as it is, and dim and obsolete, there may be worse reading, for such persons in our time.
For the rest, if each Letter look dim, and have little light, after all study;—yet let the Historical reader reflect, such light as it has cannot be disputed at all. These words, expository of that day and hour, Oliver Cromwell did see fittest to be written down. The Letter hangs there in the dark abysses of the Past: if like a star almost extinct, yet like a real star; fixed; about which there is no cavilling possible. That autograph Letter, it was once all luminous as a burning beacon, every word of it a live coal, in its time; it was once a piece of the general fire and light of Human Life, that Letter! Neither is it yet entirely extinct: well read, there is still in it light enough to exhibit its own self; nay to diffuse a faint authentic twilight some distance round it. Heaped embers which in the daylight looked black, may still look red in the utter darkness. These Letters of Oliver will convince any man that the Past did exist! By degrees the combined small twilights may produce a kind of general feeble twilight, rendering the Past credible, the Ghosts of the Past in some glimpses of them visible! Such is the effect of contemporary letters always; and I can very confidently recommend Oliver’s as good of their kind. A man intent to force for himself some path through that gloomy chaos called History of the Seventeenth Century, and to look face to face upon the same, may perhaps try it by this method as hopefully as by another. Here is an irregular row of beacon-fires, once all luminous as suns; and with a certain inextinguishable erubescence still, in the abysses of the dead deep Night. Let us look here. In shadowy outlines, in dimmer and dimmer crowding forms, the very figure of the old dead Time itself may perhaps be faintly discernible here!—
I called these Letters good,—but withal only good of their kind. No eloquence, elegance, not always even clearness of expression, is to be looked for in them. They are written with far other than literary aims; written, most of them, in the very flame and conflagration of a revolutionary struggle, and with an eye to the despatch of indispensable pressing business alone: but it will be found, I conceive, that for such end they are well written. Superfluity, as if by a natural law of the case, the writer has had to discard; whatsoever quality can be dispensed with is indifferent to him. With unwieldy movement, yet with a great solid step he presses through, towards his object; has marked out very decisively what the real steps towards it are; discriminating well the essential from the extraneous;—forming to himself, in short, a true, not an untrue picture of the business that is to be done. There is, in these Letters, as I have said above, a silence still more significant of Oliver to us than any speech they have. Dimly we discover features of an Intelligence, and Soul of a Man, greater than any speech. The Intelligence that can, with full satisfaction to itself, come out in eloquent speaking, in musical singing, is, after all, a small Intelligence. He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet. Cromwell, emblem of the dumb English, is interesting to me by the very inadequacy of his speech. Heroic insight, valour and belief, without words,—how noble is it in comparison to the adroitest flow of words without heroic insight!—
I have corrected the spelling of these Letters; I have punctuated, and divided them into paragraphs, in the modern manner. The Originals, so far as I have seen such, have in general no paragraphs: if the Letter is short, it is usually found written on the first leaf of the sheet; often with the conclusion, or some postscript, subjoined crosswise on the margin,—indicating that there was no blotting-paper in those days; that the hasty writer was loth to turn the leaf. Oliver’s spelling and pointing are of the sort common to educated persons in his time; and readers that so wish, may have specimens of him in abundance, and of all due dimness, in many printed Books: but to us, intent here to have the Letters read and understood, it seemed very proper at once and altogether to get rid of that encumbrance. Would that the rest were all as easily got rid of! Here and there, to bring out the struggling sense, I have added or rectified a word,—but taken care to point out the same; what words in the Text of the Letters are mine, the reader will find marked off by double commas: it was of course my supreme duty to avoid altering, in any respect, not only the sense, but the smallest feature in the physiognomy, of the Original. And so, ‘a minimum of annotation’ having been added, what minimum would serve the purpose,—here are the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell; of which the reader, with my best wishes, but not with any very high immediate hope of mine in that particular, is to make what he can.
Surely it is far enough from probable that these Letters of Cromwell, written originally for quite other objects, and selected not by the Genius of History, but by blind Accident which has saved them hitherto and destroyed the rest,—can illuminate for a modern man this Period of our Annals, which for all moderns, we may say, has become a gulf of bottomless darkness! Not so easily will the modern man domesticate himself in a scene of things every way so foreign to him. Nor could any measurable exposition of mine, on this present occasion, do much to illuminate the dead dark world of the Seventeenth Century, into which the reader is about to enter. He will gradually get to understand, as I have said, that the Seventeenth Century did exist; that it was not a waste rubbish-continent of Rushworth-Nalson State-papers, of Philosophical Scepticisms, Dilettantisms, Dryasdust Torpedoisms;—but an actual flesh-and-blood Fact; with colour in its cheeks, with awful august heroic thoughts in its heart, and at last with steel sword in its hand! Theoretically this is a most small postulate, conceded at once by everybody; but practically it is a very large one, seldom or never conceded; the due practical conceding of it amounts to much, indeed to the sure promise of all.—I will venture to give the reader two little pieces of advice, which, if his experience resemble mine, may prove furthersome to him in this inquiry: they include the essence of all that I have discovered respecting it.
The first is, By no means to credit the wide-spread report that these Seventeenth-Century Puritans were superstitious crack-brained persons; given up to enthusiasm, the most part of them; the minor ruling part being cunning men, who knew how to assume the dialect of the others, and thereby, as skilful Macchiavels, to dupe them. This is a wide-spread report; but an untrue one. I advise my reader to try precisely the opposite hypothesis. To consider that his Fathers, who had thought about this world very seriously indeed, and with very considerable thinking faculty indeed, were not quite so far behindhand in their conclusions respecting it. That actually their ‘enthusiasms,’ if well seen into, were not foolish but wise. That Macchiavelism, Cant, Official Jargon, whereby a man speaks openly what he does not mean, were, surprising as it may seem, much rarer then than they have ever since been. Really and truly it may in a manner be said, Cant, Parliamentary and other Jargon, were still to invent in this world. O Heavens, one could weep at the contrast! Cant was not fashionable at all; that stupendous invention of ‘Speech for the purpose of concealing Thought’ was not yet made. A man wagging the tongue of him, as if it were the clapper of a bell to be rung for economic purposes, and not so much as attempting to convey any inner thought, if thought he have, of the matter talked of,—would at that date have awakened all the horror in men’s minds, which at all dates, and at this date too, is due to him. The accursed thing! No man as yet dared to do it; all men believing that God would judge them. In the History of the Civil War far and wide, I have not fallen-in with one such phenomenon. Even Archbishop Laud and Peter Heylin meant what they say; through their words you do look direct into the scraggy conviction they have formed:—or if ‘lying Peter’ do lie, he at least knows that he is lying! Lord Clarendon, a man of sufficient unveracity of heart, to whom indeed whatsoever has direct veracity of heart is more or less horrible, speaks always in official language; a clothed, nay sometimes even quilted dialect, yet always with some considerable body in the heart of it, never with none! The use of the human tongue was then other than it now is. I counsel the reader to leave all that of Cant, Dupery, Macchiavelism, and so forth, decisively lying at the threshold. He will be wise to believe that these Puritans do mean what they say, and to try unimpeded if he can discover what that is. Gradually a very stupendous phenomenon may rise on his astonished eye. A practical world based on Belief in God;—such as many centuries had seen before, but as never any century since has been privileged to see. It was the last glimpse of it in our world, this of English Puritanism: very great, very glorious; tragical enough to all thinking hearts that look on it from these days of ours.
My second advice is, Not to imagine that it was Constitution, ‘Liberty of the people to tax themselves,’ Privilege of Parliament, Triennial or Annual Parliaments, or any modification of these sublime Privileges now waxing somewhat faint in our admirations, that mainly animated our Cromwells, Pyms, and Hampdens to the heroic efforts we still admire in retrospect. Not these very measurable ‘Privileges,’ but a far other and deeper, which could not be measured; of which these, and all grand social improvements whatsoever, are the corollary. Our ancient Puritan Reformers were, as all Reformers that will ever much benefit this Earth are always, inspired by a Heavenly Purpose. To see God’s own Law, then universally acknowledged for complete as it stood in the holy Written Book, made good in this world; to see this, or the true unwearied aim and struggle towards this: it was a thing worth living for and dying for! Eternal Justice; that God’s Will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven: corollaries enough will flow from that, if that be there; if that be not there, no corollary good for much will flow. It was the general spirit of England in the Seventeenth Century. In other somewhat sadly disfigured form we have seen the same immortal hope take practical shape in the French Revolution, and once more astonish the world. That England should all become a Church, if you like to name it so: a Church presided over not by sham-priests in ‘Four surplices at Allhallowtide,‘ but by true god-consecrated ones, whose hearts the Most High had touched and hallowed with his fire:—this was the prayer of many, it was the godlike hope and effort of some.
Our modern methods of Reform differ somewhat,—as indeed the issue testifies. I will advise my reader to forget the modern methods of Reform; not to remember that he has ever heard of a modern individual called by the name of Reformer, if he would understand what the old meaning of the word was. The Cromwells, Pyms, Hampdens, who were understood on the Royalist side to be firebrands of the Devil, have had still worse measure from the Dryasdust Philosophies, and sceptical Histories, of later times. They really did resemble firebrands of the Devil, if you looked at them through spectacles of a certain colour. For fire is always fire. But by no spectacles, only by mere blinders and wooden-eyed spectacles, can the flame-girt Heaven’s-messenger pass for a poor mouldy Pedant and Constitution-monger, such as this would make him out to be!
On the whole, say not, good reader, as is often done, ‘It was then all one as now.’ Good reader, it was considerably different then from now. Men indolently say, ‘The Ages are all alike; ever the same sorry elements over again, in new vesture; the issue of it always a melancholy farce-tragedy, in one Age as in another!’ Wherein lies very obviously a truth; but also in secret a very sad error withal. Sure enough, the highest Life touches always, by large sections of it, on the vulgar and universal: he that expects to see a Hero, or a Heroic Age, step forth into practice in yellow Drury-lane stage-boots, and speak in blank verse for itself, will look long in vain. Sure enough, in the Heroic Century as in the Unheroic, knaves and cowards, and cunning greedy persons were not wanting,—were, if you will, extremely abundant. But the question always remains, Did they lie chained, subordinate in this world’s business; coerced by steel-whips, or in whatever other effectual way, and sent whimpering into their due subterranean abodes, to beat hemp and repent; a true neverending attempt going on to handcuff, to silence and suppress them? Or did they walk openly abroad, the envy of a general valet-population, and bear sway; professing, without universal anathema, almost with general assent, that they were the Orthodox Party, that they, even they, were such men as you had right to look for?—
Reader, the Ages differ greatly, even infinitely, from one another. Considerable tracts of Ages there have been, by far the majority indeed, wherein the men, unfortunate mortals, were a set of mimetic creatures rather than men; without heart-insight as to this Universe, and its Heights and Abysses; without conviction or belief of their own regarding it, at all;—who walked merely by hearsays, traditionary cants, black and white surplices, and inane confusions;—whose whole Existence accordingly was a grimace; nothing original in it, nothing genuine or sincere but this only, Their greediness of appetite and their faculty of digestion. Such unhappy Ages, too numerous here below, the Genius of Mankind indignantly seizes, as disgraceful to the Family, and with Rhadamanthine ruthlessness—annihilates; tumbles large masses of them swiftly into Eternal Night. These are the Unheroic Ages; which cannot serve, on the general field of Existence, except as dust, as inorganic manure. The memory of such Ages fades away for ever out of the minds of all men. Why should any memory of them continue? The fashion of them has passed away; and as for genuine substance, they never had any. To no heart of a man any more can these Ages become lovely. What melodious loving heart will search into their records, will sing of them, or celebrate them? Even torpid Dryasdust is forced to give over at last, all creatures declining to hear him on that subject; whereupon ensues composure and silence, and Oblivion has her own.
Good reader, if you be wise, search not for the secret of Heroic Ages, which have done great things in this Earth, among their falsities, their greedy quackeries and unheroisms! It never lies and never will lie there. Knaves and quacks,—alas, we know they abounded: but the Age was Heroic even because it had declared war to the death with these, and would have neither truce nor treaty with these; and went forth, flame-crowned, as with bared sword, and called the Most High to witness that it would not endure these!— —But now for the Letters of Cromwell themselves.