Wilhelm Meister, that your 'America is here or nowhere'? The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!
'But it is with man's Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning of Creation is?Light.7 Till the eye have vision, the whole members are in bonds.8 Divine moment, when over the tempest-tost Soul, as once over the wild- weltering Chaos, it is spoken: Let there be Light! Ever to the greatest that has felt such moment, is it not miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to the simplest and least. The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the rudely-jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into separate Firmaments: deep silent rock-foundations are built beneath; and the skyey vault with its everlasting Luminaries above: instead of a dark wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile, heaven-encompassed World.
'I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin.9 Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.'1
1830-31 1833-34
From Past and Present1
From Democracy
If the Serene Highnesses and Majesties do not take note of that,2 then, as I perceive, that will take note of itself! The time for levity, insincerity, and idle
7. Cf. Genesis 1.3. 8. Cf. Matthew 6.22-23. 9. A little world, a microcosm. 1. Adapted from Ecclesiastes 9.10 and John 9.4. 1. In 1843 there were reputedly one and a half million unemployed in England (out of a population of eighteen million). The closing of factories and the reduction of wages led to severe rioting in the manufacturing districts. Bread-hungry mobs (as well as the Chartist mobs who demanded political reforms) caused many observers to dread that a large-scale revolution was imminent. Carlyle was so appalled by the plight of the industrial workers that he postponed his research into the life and times of Cromwell to air his views on the contemporary crisis. Past and Present, a book written in seven weeks, was a call for heroic leadership. Cromwell and other historic leaders are cited, but the principal example from the past is Abbot Samson, a medieval monk who established order in the monasteries under his charge. Carlyle hoped that the 'Captains of Industry' might provide a comparable leadership in 1843. He was aware that the spread of democracy was inevitable, but he had little confidence in it as a method of producing leaders. Nor did he have any confidence, at this time, in the landed aristocracy, who seemed to him preoccupied with foxhunting, preserving their game, and upholding the tariffs on grain (Corn Laws). In place of a 'Do nothing Aristocracy' there was need for a 'Working Aristocracy.' This first selection is from book 3, chap. 13.
2. The previous chapter, 'Reward,' had urged that English manufacturers needed the help of everyone and that Parliament should remove the tariffs (Corn Laws) restricting the growth of trade and industry.
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PAST AND PRESENT / 1025
babble and play-acting, in all kinds, is gone by; it is a serious, grave time. Old long-vexed questions, not yet solved in logical words or parliamentary laws, are fast solving themselves in facts, somewhat unblessed to behold! This largest of questions, this question of Work and Wages, which ought, had we heeded Heaven's voice, to have begun two generations ago or more, cannot be delayed longer without hearing Earth's voice. 'Labour' will verily need to be somewhat 'organized,' as they say,?God knows with what difficulty. Man will actually need to have his debts and earnings a little better paid by man; which, let Parliaments speak of them, or be silent of them, are eternally his due from man, and cannot, without penalty and at length not without deathpenalty, 3 be withheld. How much ought to cease among us straightway; how much ought to begin straightway, while the hours yet are!
Truly they are strange results to which this of leaving all to 'Cash'; of quietly shutting up the God's Temple, and gradually opening wide-open the Mammon's Temple, with 'Laissez-faire, and Every man for himself,'4?have led us in these days! We have Upper, speaking Classes, who indeed do 'speak' as never man spake before;5 the withered flimsiness, godless baseness and barrenness of whose Speech might of itself indicate what kind of Doing and practical Governing went on under it! For Speech is the gaseous element out of which most kinds of Practice and Performance, especially all kinds of moral Performance, condense themselves, and take shape; as the one is, so will the other be. Descending, accordingly, into the Dumb Class in its Stockport Cellars and Poor-Law Bastilles,6 have we not to announce that they are hitherto unexampled in the History of Adam's Posterity?
Life was never a May-game for men: in all times the lot of the dumb millions born to toil was defaced with manifold sufferings, injustices, heavy burdens, avoidable and unavoidable; not play at all, but hard work that made the sinews sore and the heart sore. As bond-slaves, villani, bordarii, sochemanni, nay indeed as dukes, earls and kings, men were oftentimes made weary of their life; and had to say, in the sweat of their brow7 and of their soul, Behold, it is not sport, it is grim earnest, and our back can bear no more! Who knows not what massacrings and harryings there have been; grinding, long-continuing, unbearable injustices,?till the heart had to rise in madness, and some 'Eli Sachsen, nimith euer sachses, You Saxons, out with your gully-knives, then!' You Saxons, some 'arrestment,' partial 'arrestment of the Knaves and Dastards' has become indispensable!?The page of Dryasdust8 is heavy with such details.
And yet I well venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must die,?the last exit of us all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain.9 But it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heartworn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt-in with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is
3. I.e., by the outbreak of a revolution, as in port Cellars': in a cellar in the slum district of France. Stockport, an industrial town near Manchester, 4. The pursuit of wealth (Mammon is the devil of three children were poisoned by their starving par- covetousness) according to a noninterventionist ents, who wanted to collect insurance benefits economic policy. Laissez-faire literally means 'let it from a burial society. be' (French). 7. Genesis 3.19. 5. John 7.46. 8. An imaginary author of dull histories. 6. I.e., workhouses for the unemployed. 'Stock-9. 2 Kings 2.11.
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102 6 / THOMAS CARLYLE
to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a
