Past and Present: Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII.Carlyle, Thomas
Philosophy
Past and Present: Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII.
Carlyle, Thomas
Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems
Things rise, I say, in that way. The _Iliad_ Poem, and indeed most
other poetic, especially epic things, have risen as the Liturgy did.
The great _Iliad_ in Greece, and the small _Robin Hood's Garland_ in
England, are each, as I understand, the well-edited 'Select Beauties'
of an immeasurable waste imbroglio of Heroic Ballads in their
respective centuries and countries. Think what strumming of the
seven-stringed heroic lyre, torturing of the less heroic
fiddle-catgut, in Hellenic Kings' Courts, and English wayside Public
Houses; and beating of the studious Poetic brain, and gasping here too
in the semi-articulate windpipe of Poetic men, before the Wrath of a
Divine Achilles, the Prowess of a Will Scarlet or Wakefield Pindar,
could be adequately sung! Honour to you, ye nameless great and
greatest ones, ye long-forgotten brave!
Nor was the Statute _De Tallagio non concedendo_, nor any Statute,
Law-method, Lawyer's-wig, much less were the Statute-Book and Four
Courts, with Coke upon Lyttelton and Three Estates of Parliament in
the rear of them, got together without human labour,--mostly forgotten
now! From the time of Cain's slaying Abel by swift head-breakage, to
this time of killing your man in Chancery by inches, and slow
heart-break for forty years,--there too is an interval! Venerable
Justice herself began by Wild-Justice; all Law is as a tamed
furrowfield, slowly worked out, and rendered arable, from the waste
jungle of Club-Law. Valiant Wisdom tilling and draining; escorted by
owl-eyed Pedantry, by owlish and vulturish and many other forms of
Folly;--the valiant husbandman assiduously tilling; the blind greedy
enemy _too_ assiduously sowing tares! It is because there is yet in
venerable wigged Justice some wisdom, amid such mountains of wiggeries
and folly, that men have not cast her into the River; that she still
sits there, like Dryden's Head in the _Battle of the Books_,--a huge
helmet, a huge mountain of greased parchment, of unclean horsehair,
first striking the eye; and then in the innermost corner, visible at
last, in size as a hazelnut, a real fraction of God's Justice, perhaps
not yet unattainable to some, surely still indispensable to all;--and
men know not what to do with her! Lawyers were not all pedants,
voluminous voracious persons; Lawyers too were poets, were heroes,--or
their Law had been past the Nore long before this time. Their Owlisms,
Vulturisms, to an incredible extent, will disappear by and by, their
Heroisms only remaining, and the helmet be reduced to something like
the size of the head, we hope!--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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