thetic, and observant, as young men are,
come together and freely mix with each
other, they are sure to learn one from an-
other, even if there be no one to teach
them; the conversation of all is a series
of lectures to each, and they gain for
themselves new ideas and views, fresh
matter of thought, and distinct prin-
ciples for judging and acting, day by day.
An infant has to learn the meaning of 10
the information which its senses con-
vey to it, and this seems to be its em-
ployment. It fancies all that the eye
presents to it to be close to it, till it
actually learns the contrary, and thus by 15
practice does it ascertain the relations
and uses of those first elements of knowl-
edge which are necessary for its animal
existence. A parallel teaching is neces-
sary for our social being, and it is secured 20
by a large school or a college; and this
effect may be fairly called in its own de-
partment an enlargement of mind. It is
seeing the world on a small field with
little trouble; for the pupils or students 25
come from very different places, and with
widely different notions, and there is
much to generalize, much to adjust, much
to eliminate, there are inter-relations to
be defined, and conventional rules to be 30
established, in the process, by which the
whole assemblage is molded together, and
gains one tone and one character.

Let it be clearly understood, I repeat
it, that I am not taking into account 35
moral or religious considerations; I am
but saying that that youthful community
will constitute a whole, it will embody a
specific idea, it will represent a doctrine,
it will administer a code of conduct, and 40
it will furnish principles of thought and
action. It will give birth to a living
teaching, which in course of time will
take the shape of a self-perpetuating
tradition, or a genius loci, as it is some- 45
times called; which haunts the home
where it has been born, and which im-
bues and forms more or less, and one by
one, every individual who is successively.
brought under its shadow. Thus it is 50
that, independent of direct instruction on
the part of superiors, there is a sort of
self-education in the academic institu-
tions of protestant England; a charac-
teristic tone of thought, a recognized 55
standard of judgment is found in them,
which as developed in the individual who

is submitted to it, becomes a twofold source of strength to him, both from the distinct stamp it impresses on his mind, and from the bond of union which 5 it creates between him and others,— effects which are shared by the authorities of the place, for they themselves have been educated in it, and at all times are exposed to the influence of its ethical atmosphere. Here then is a real teaching, whatever be its standards and principles, true or false; and it at least tends towards cultivation of the intellect; it at least recognizes that knowledge is something more than a sort of passive reception of scraps and details; it is a something, and it does a something, which never will issue from the most strenuous efforts of a set of teachers, with no mutual sympathies and no intercommunion, of a set of examiners with no opinions which they dare profess, and with no common principles, who are teaching or questioning a set of youths who do not know them, and do not know each other, on a large number of subjects, different in kind, and connected by no wide philosophy, three times a week, or three times a year, or once in three years, in chill lecture-rooms or on a pompous anniversary.

Nay, self-education in any shape, in the most restricted sense, is preferable to a system of teaching which, professing so much, really does so little for the mind. Shut your college gates against the votary of knowledge, throw him back upon the searchings and the efforts of his own mind; he will gain by being spared an entrance into your babel. Few indeed there are who can dispense with the stimulus and support of instructors, or will do anything at all, if left to themselves. And fewer still (though such great minds are to be found), who will not, from such unassisted attempts, contract a self-reliance and a self-esteem, which are not only moral evils, but serious hindrances to the attainment of truth. And next to none, perhaps, or none, who will not be reminded from time to time of the disadvantage under which they lie, by their imperfect grounding, by the breaks, deficiencies, and irregularities of their knowledge, by the eccentricity of opinion and the confusion of principle which they exhibit. They will be too often ignorant of what every one

How much more profitable for the independent mind, after the mere rudiments of education, to range through a library at random, taking down books as 5 they meet him, and pursuing the trains of thought which his mother wit suggests! How much healthier to wander into the fields, and there with the exiled prince to find 'tongues in the

How much more genuine an education is that of the poor boy in the poem 1a poem, whether in conception or in execution, one of the most touching in our language — who, not in the wide world, but ranging day by day around his widowed mother's home, 'a dexterous gleaner' in a narrow field and with only such slender outfit

knows and takes for granted, of that multitude of small truths which fall upon the mind like dust, impalpable and ever accumulating; they may be unable to converse, they may argue perversely, they may pride themselves on their worst paradoxes or their grossest truisms, they may be full of their own mode of viewing things, unwilling to be put out of their way, slow to enter into the minds 10 trees, books in the running brooks!' of others; but, with these and whatever other liabilities upon their heads, they are likely to have more thought, more mind, more philosophy, more true enlargement, than those earnest but ill- 15 used persons, who are forced to load their minds with a score of subjects against an examination, who have too much on their hands to indulge themselves in thinking or investigation, who devour 20 premise and conclusion together with indiscriminate greediness, who hold whole sciences on faith, and commit demonstrations to memory, and who too often, as might be expected, when their period of education is passed, throw up all they have learned in disgust, having gained nothing really by their anxious labors, except perhaps the habit of application.

25

35

Yet such is the better specimen of the 30 fruit of that ambitious system which has of late years been making way among us: for its result on ordinary minds, and on the common run of students, is less satisfactory still; they leave their place of education simply dissipated and relaxed by the multiplicity of subjects, which they have never really mastered, and so shallow as not even to know their shallowness. How much better, I say, 40 is it for the active and thoughtful intellect, where such is to be found, to eschew the college and the university altogether, than to submitt to a drudgery

As the village school and books a few Supplied,

contrived from the beach, and the quay, and the fisher's boat, and the inn's fireside, and the tradesman's shop, and the shepherd's walk, and the smuggler's hut, and the mossy moor, and the screaming gulls, and the restless waves, to fashion for himself a philosophy and a poetry of his own!

But in a large subject, I am exceeding my necessary limits. Gentlemen, I must conclude abruptly; and postpone any summing up of my argument, should that be necessary, to another day.

(1852)

1 Crabbe's Tales of the Hall. This poem, let me say, I read on its first publication, above thirty years ago, with extreme delight, and have never lost my love of it; and on taking it up lately, found I was even more touched by it than heretofore. work which can please in youth and age, seems to fulfil (in logical language) the accidental definition of a classic. (A further course of twenty years has past, and I bear the same witness in favor of

so ignoble, a mockery so contumelious! 45 this poem.)

A

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881)

Early struggles and privations, followed by acute dyspepsia, embittered Carlyle's temper. The son of a Scottish stone-mason, he walked eighty miles from his native village of Ecclefechan to Edinburgh to study at the university and prepare himself for the ministry. This latter purpose was soon abandoned on account of unsettled religious convictions; after graduating he earned a scanty living by teaching and tried in vain to obtain various professorships. Having married Jane Baillie Welsh, a woman of brilliant wit and some property, he retired with her to the manor house of Craigenputtock, where for six years he studied German literature and philosophy and wrote essays for the reviews, among them his first great work, Sartor Resartus. Under the disguise of a translation from the papers of a German professor, it is an imaginative account of his own school and college experiences, his falling in love with Margaret Gordon of Prince Edward Island, who returned to that colony as wife of the governor, his spiritual and intellectual struggles, and his philosophy of life. It had just been published in Fraser's Magazine, when, in 1834, the Carlyles determined to risk their little all, and leave Craigenputtock for London. Carlyle chose a house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, and kept it for the rest of his life. The peculiar style of Sartor did not commend it to the public. Fraser wrote that it excited 'universal disapprobation,' and several subscribers to the magazine refused to take it any longer. Carlyle was more fortunate in his next subject, The French Revolution,' suggested by John Stuart Mill. When the manuscript of the first volume was finished, Carlyle lent it to Mill to read; Mill lent it in turn to a friend, whose housemaid found it on the table one morning and lit the fire with it. Carlyle was in despair at the loss of so much labor; he felt incapable of doing the work over again, and spent three months in reading Marryat's novels before he could bend his energies to the unwelcome task. The book was completed in 1837, and at once won the favor of both critics and public. He was also successful about this time as a lecturer, and his wife said that the public had evidently made up its mind that 'Carlyle was worth keeping alive at a moderate rate.' One of the courses he gave, that 'On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History,' when published in 1841 became one of his most popular works; it contains in the shortest and simplest form Carlyle's favorite doctrine that the history of the world is at bottom the history of its great men. After setting forth his ideas on social and political questions in Chartism and Past and Present, he returned to the study of history, and his Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell made a remarkable change in the current estimate of the great Protector. The labor of a dozen years is contained in his last historical work, Frederick the Great (published 1858-65). The year after this was completed, Mrs. Carlyle died suddenly in her carriage from the shock caused by an accident to her pet dog, which was run over when she was driving one afternoon in Hyde Park. Carlyle in heartbroken remorse determined to tell the public not only his wife's virtues but his own unkindness to her. The publication after his death of the record of their unhappy married life injured his reputation, and led to a controversy which has not yet ended, the discretion and even the good faith of J. A. Froude, who edited the papers, being attacked by Carlyle's admirers.

PAST AND PRESENT

BOOK III

CHAPTER X

PLUGSON OF UNDERSHOT

One thing I do know: Never, on this Earth, was the relation of man to man

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 5 philosophies are usually the 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

long carried on by Cash-payment alone. 10 Doings presentable when they are done. If, at any time, a philosophy of Laissez- Such philosophies will arise; be preached

as Mammon-Gospels, the ultimate Evan-
gel of the World; be believed with what
is called belief, with much superficial
bluster, and a kind of shallow satisfac-
tion real in its way; - but they are omi-
nous gospels! They are the sure and even
swift, forerunner of great changes. Ex-
pect that the old System of Society is
done, is dying and fallen into dotage,
when it begins to rave in that fashion. 10
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 15
but naked Egoism, vulturous Greediness,
they cannot live; they are bound and in-
exorably ordained by the oldest Destinies,
Mothers of the Universe, to die. Cu-
rious enough; they thereupon, as I have 20
pretty generally noticed, devised some
light comfortable kind of wine-and-
walnuts philosophy' for themselves, this
of Supply-and-demand 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 vulture-soul;'
—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

25

son 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? 5 I consider that a cash-account, 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; ceedingly; 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 30 Soul in them, as we said, were it only to keep the 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

could it, nor can it, now or henceforth 35 own nobleness; will gradually, inces

to the end of the world. I invite his
Grace of Castle-Rackrent to reflect on
this; - does he think that a Land Aris-
tocracy when it becomes a Land Auction-
eership can have long to live? Or that 40
Sliding-scales will increase the vital
stamina of it? The indomitable Plug-
son too, of the respected Firm of Plug-
son, Hunks and Company, in St. Dolly
Undershot, is invited to reflect on this; 45
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; 50
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 55 to Church occasionally: did you never in vacant moments, with perhaps a dull par

santly, 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 murdertools 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 liv

ing souls, into nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnip-manure. 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.

nificance 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 5 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 pre

hallucinating fellow Men, against unkempt Cotton, or whatsoever battles they may be, which a man in this world has to fight.

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 10 vail! It is the rule of all battles, against 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 15 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 20 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 strengths, each thinking itself the strongest, or, in other 25 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 30 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 35 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 40 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 45 the rudest Caliban of a body; like a ray of Heaven, and illuminative creative Fiat-Lux, in the wastest terrestrial Chaos! Blessed divine Influence, traceable even in the horror of Battlefields 50 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 55 of Quintessence of Labor; Labor distilled into its utmost concentration; the sig

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 small, in fighting of men or fighting of difficulties, I will not embark my venture with Howel Davies: it is not the Bucanier, it is the Hero only that can gain victory, that can do more than seem to succeed. These things will deserve meditating; for they apply to all battle. and soldiership, all struggle and effort whatsoever in this Fight of Life. It is a poor Gospel, Cash-Gospel or whatever name it have, that does not, with clear tone, uncontradictable, carrying conviction to all hearts, forever keep men in mind of these things.

Unhappily, my indomitable friend Plugson of Undershot has, in a great degree, forgotten them; - as, alas, all the