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LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS
LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS THOMAS CARLYLE But as yet struggles the twelfth hour of the Night. Birds of
darkness are on the wing; spectres uproar; the dead walk; the
living dream. Thou Eternal Providence wilt make the Day
dawn!--JEAN PAUL.
Then said his Lordship "Well. God mend all!"--"Nay by God
Donald we must help him to mend it!" said the other.--RUSHWORTH
(_Sir David Ramsay and Lord Rea in 1630_).
CONTENTS.
I. THE PRESENT TIME II. MODEL PRISONS III. DOWNING STREET IV.
THE NEW DOWNING STREET V. STUMP-ORATOR
[February 1 1850.] NO. I. THE PRESENT TIME.
The Present Time youngest-born of Eternity child and heir of
all the Past Times with their good and evil and parent of all
the Future is ever a "New Era" to the thinking man; and comes
with new questions and significance however commonplace it look:
to know _it_ and what it bids us do is ever the sum of
knowledge for all of us. This new Day sent us out of Heaven
this also has its heavenly omens;--amid the bustling trivialities
and loud empty noises its silent monitions which if we cannot
read and obey it will not be well with us! No;--nor is there
any sin more fearfully avenged on men and Nations than that same
which indeed includes and presupposes all manner of sins: the
sin which our old pious fathers called "judicial
blindness;"--which we with our light habits may still call
misinterpretation of the Time that now is; disloyalty to its real
meanings and monitions stupid disregard of these stupid
adherence active or passive to the counterfeits and mere current
semblances of these. This is true of all times and days.
But in the days that are now passing over us even fools are
arrested to ask the meaning of them; few of the generations of
men have seen more impressive days. Days of endless calamity
disruption dislocation confusion worse confounded: if they are
not days of endless hope too then they are days of utter
despair. For it is not a small hope that will suffice the ruin
being clearly either in action or in prospect universal. There
must be a new world if there is to be any world at all! That
human things in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry
routine and proceed with any steadiness or continuance there;
this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of
universal death must be days of universal new-birth if the ruin
is not to be total and final! It is a Time to make the dullest
man consider; and ask himself Whence _he_ came? Whither he is
bound?--A veritable "New Era" to the foolish as well as to the wise.
Not long ago the world saw with thoughtless joy which might
have been very thoughtful joy a real miracle not heretofore
considered possible or conceivable in the world--a Reforming
Pope. A simple pious creature a good country-priest invested
unexpectedly with the tiara takes up the New Testament declares
that this henceforth shall be his rule of governing. No more
finesse chicanery hypocrisy or false or foul dealing of any
kind: God's truth shall be spoken God's justice shall be done
on the throne called of St. Peter: an honest Pope Papa or
Father of Christendom shall preside there. And such a throne of
St. Peter; and such a Christendom for an honest Papa to preside
in! The European populations everywhere hailed the omen; with
shouting and rejoicing leading articles and tar-barrels; thinking
people listened with astonishment--not with sorrow if they were
faithful or wise; with awe rather as at the heralding of death
and with a joy as of victory beyond death! Something pious
grand and as if awful in that joy revealing once more the
Presence of a Divine Justice in this world. For to such men it
was very clear how this poor devoted Pope would prosper with his
New Testament in his band. An alarming business that of
governing in the throne of St. Peter by the rule of veracity! By
the rule of veracity the so-called throne of St. Peter was
openly declared above three hundred years ago to be a falsity
a huge mistake a pestilent dead carcass which this Sun was
weary of. More than three hundred years ago the throne of St.
Peter received peremptory judicial notice to quit; authentic
order registered in Heaven's chancery and since legible in the
hearts of all brave men to take itself away--to begone and let
us have no more to do with _it_ and its delusions and impious
deliriums;--and it has been sitting every day since it may
depend upon it at its own peril withal and will have to pay
exact damages yet for every day it has so sat. Law of veracity?
What this Popedom had to do by the law of veracity was to give
up its own foul galvanic life an offence to gods and men;
honestly to die and get itself buried.
Far from this was the thing the poor Pope undertook in regard to
it;--and yet on the whole it was essentially this too.
"Reforming Pope?" said one of our acquaintance often in those
weeks "Was there ever such a miracle? About to break up that
huge imposthume too by 'curing' it? Turgot and Necker were
nothing to this. God is great; and when a scandal is to end
brings some devoted man to take charge of it in hope not in
despair!"--But cannot he reform? asked many simple persons;--to
whom our friend in grim banter would reply: "Reform a
Popedom--hardly. A wretched old kettle ruined from top to
bottom and consisting mainly now of foul _grime_ and _rust_:
stop the holes of it as your antecessors have been doing with
temporary putty it may hang together yet a while; begin to
hammer at it solder at it to what you call mend and rectify
it--it will fall to sherds as sure as rust is rust; go all into
nameless dissolution--and the fat in the fire will be a thing
worth looking at poor Pope!"--So accordingly it has proved. The
poor Pope amid felicitations and tar-barrels of various kinds
went on joyfully for a season: but he had awakened he as no
other man could do the sleeping elements; mothers of the
whirlwinds conflagrations earthquakes. Questions not very
soluble at present were even sages and heroes set to solve them
began everywhere with new emphasis to be asked. Questions which
all official men wished and almost hoped to postpone till
Doomsday. Doomsday itself _had_ come; that was the terrible
truth!
For sure enough if once the law of veracity be acknowledged as
the rule for human things there will not anywhere be want of
work for the reformer; in very few places do human things adhere
quite closely to that law! Here was the Papa of Christendom
proclaiming that such was actually the case;--whereupon all over
Christendom such results as we have seen. The Sicilians I
think were the first notable body that set about applying this
new strange rule sanctioned by the general Father; they said to
themselves We do not by the law of veracity belong to Naples and
these Neapolitan Officials; we will by favor of Heaven and the
Pope be free of these. Fighting ensued; insurrection fiercely
maintained in the Sicilian Cities; with much bloodshed much
tumult and loud noise vociferation extending through all
newspapers and countries. The effect of this carried abroad by
newspapers and rumor was great in all places; greatest perhaps
in Paris which for sixty years past has been the City of
Insurrections. The French People had plumed themselves on being
whatever else they were not at least the chosen "soldiers of
liberty" who took the lead of all creatures in that pursuit at
least; and had become as their orators editors and litterateurs
diligently taught them a People whose bayonets were sacred a
kind of Messiah People saving a blind world in its own despite
and earning for themselves a terrestrial and even celestial glory
very considerable indeed. And here were the wretched
down-trodden populations of Sicily risen to rival them and
threatening to take the trade out of their hand.
No doubt of it this hearing continually of the very Pope's glory
as a Reformer of the very Sicilians fighting divinely for
liberty behind barricades--must have bitterly aggravated the
feeling of every Frenchman as he looked around him at home on
a Louis-Philippism which had become the scorn of all the world.
"_Ichabod_; is the glory departing from us? Under the sun is
nothing baser by all accounts and evidences than the system of
repression and corruption of shameless dishonesty and unbelief
in anything but human baseness that we now live under. The
Italians the very Pope have become apostles of liberty and
France is--what is France!"--We know what France suddenly became
in the end of February next; and by a clear enough genealogy we
can trace a considerable share in that event to the good simple
Pope with the New Testament in his hand. An outbreak or at
least a radical change and even inversion of affairs hardly to be
achieved without an outbreak everybody felt was inevitable in
France: but it had been universally expected that France would
as usual take the initiative in that matter; and had there been
no reforming Pope no insurrectionary Sicily France had
certainly not broken out then and so but only afterwards and
otherwise. The French explosion not anticipated by the
cunningest men there on the spot scrutinizing it burst up
unlimited complete defying computation or control.
Close following which as if by sympathetic subterranean
electricities all Europe exploded boundless uncontrollable;
and we had the year 1848 one of the most singular disastrous
amazing and on the whole humiliating years the European world
ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has
there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose
monstrous loud blatant inarticulate as the voice of Chaos.
Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare
to dogs and the profane:--Enter all the world see what kind of
Official holy it is. Kings everywhere and reigning persons
stared in sudden horror the voice of the whole world bellowing
in their ear "Begone ye imbecile hypocrites histrios not
heroes! Off with you off!" and what was peculiar and notable
in this year for the first time the Kings all made haste to go
as if exclaiming "We _are_ poor histrios we sure enough;--did
you want heroes? Don't kill us; we couldn't help it!" Not one
of them turned round and stood upon his Kingship as upon a
right he could afford to die for or to risk his skin upon; by no
manner of means. That I say is the alarming peculiarity at
present. Democracy on this new occasion finds all Kings
conscious that they are but Play-actors. The miserable mortals
enacting their High Life Below Stairs with faith only that this
Universe may perhaps be all a phantasm and hypocrisis--the
truculent Constable of the Destinies suddenly enters:
"Scandalous Phantasms what do _you_ here? Are 'solemnly
constituted Impostors' the proper Kings of men? Did you think
the Life of Man was a grimacing dance of apes? To be led always
by the squeak of your paltry fiddle? Ye miserable this Universe
is not an upholstery Puppet-play but a terrible God's Fact; and
you I think--had not you better begone!" They fled
precipitately some of them with what we may call an exquisite
ignominy--in terror of the treadmill or worse. And everywhere
the people or the populace take their own government upon
themselves; and open "kinglessness" what we call _anarchy_--how
happy if it be anarchy _plus_ a street-constable!--is everywhere
the order of the day. Such was the history from Baltic to
Mediterranean in Italy France Prussia Austria from end to
end of Europe in those March days of 1848. Since the destruction
of the old Roman Empire by inroad of the Northern Barbarians I
have known nothing similar.
And so then there remained no King in Europe; no King except
the Public Haranguer haranguing on barrel-head in leading
article; or getting himself aggregated into a National Parliament
to harangue. And for about four months all France and to a
great degree all Europe rough-ridden by every species of
delirium except happily the murderous for most part was a
weltering mob presided over by M. de Lamartine at the
Hotel-de-Ville; a most eloquent fair-spoken literary gentleman
whom thoughtless persons took for a prophet priest and
heaven-sent evangelist and whom a wise Yankee friend of mine
discerned to be properly "the first stump-orator in the world
standing too on the highest stump--for the time." A sorrowful
spectacle to men of reflection during the time he lasted that
poor M. de Lamartine; with nothing in him but melodious wind and
_soft sawder_ which he and others took for something divine and
not diabolic! Sad enough; the eloquent latest impersonation of
Chaos-come-again; able to talk for itself and declare
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Unpublished Work 
