Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1865)
79 The critical power is of lower rank than the creative.
80 True; but in assenting to this proposition, one or two
81 things are to be kept in mind. It is undeniable that the
82 exercise of a creative power, that a free creative activity,
83 is the true function of man; it is proved to be so by
84 man's finding in it his true happiness. But it is un85 deniable, also, that men may have the sense of exercising
86 this free creative activity in other ways than in producing
87 great works of literature or art; if it were not so, all
88 but a very few men would be shut out from the true
89 happiness of all men; they may have it in well-doing,
90 they may have it in learning, they may have it even in
91 criticising. This is one thing to be kept in mind.
92 Another is, that the exercise of the creative power in the
93 production of great works of literature or art, however
94 high this exercise of it may rank, is not at all epochs
95 and under all conditions possible; and that therefore
96 labour may be vainly spent in attempting it, which might
97 with more fruit be used in preparing for it, in rendering
98 it possible. This creative power works with elements,
99 with materials; what if it has not those materials, those
100 elements, ready for its use? In that case it must surely
101 wait till they are ready. Now in literature,--I will limit
102 myself to literature, for it is about literature that the
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103 question arises,--the elements with which the creative
104 power works are ideas; the best ideas, on every matter
105 which literature touches, current at the time; at any rate
106 we may lay it down as certain that in modern literature
107 no manifestation of the creative power not working with
108 these can be very important or fruitful. And I say
109 current at the time, not merely accessible at the time;
110 for creative literary genius does not principally show
111 itself in discovering new ideas; that is rather the business
112 of the philosopher; the grand work of literary genius is
113 a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and
114 discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily
115 inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere,
116 by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them;
117 of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in
118 the most effective and attractive combinations, making
119 beautiful works with them, in short. But it must have
120 the atmosphere, it must find itself amidst the order of
121 ideas, in order to work freely; and these it is not so
122 easy to command. This is why great creative epochs
123 in literature are so rare; this is why there is so much
124 that is unsatisfactory in the productions of many men of
125 real genius; because for the creation of a master-work
126 of literature two powers must concur, the power of the
127 man and the power of the moment, and the man is not
128 enough without the moment; the creative power has, for
129 its happy exercise, appointed elements, and those ele130 ments are not in its own control.
¶5
131 Nay, they are more within the control of the critical
132 power. It is the business of the critical power, as I said
133 in the words already quoted, "in all branches of know{{Page 6}}
134 ledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see
135 the object as in itself it really is." Thus it tends, at last,
136 to make an intellectual situation of which the creative
137 power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish
138 an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by
139 comparison with that which it displaces; to make the
140 best ideas prevail. Presently these new ideas reach
141 society, the touch of truth is the touch of life, and there
142 is a stir and growth everywhere; out of this stir and
143 growth come the creative epochs of literature.
¶6
144 Or, to narrow our range, and quit these considerations
145 of the general march of genius and of society, considera146 tions which are apt to become too abstract and impalp147 able,--every one can see that a poet, for instance, ought
148 to know life and the world before dealing with them in
149 poetry; and life and the world being, in modern times,
150 very complex things, the creation of a modern poet, to
151 be worth much, implies a great critical effort behind it;
152 else it must be a comparatively poor, barren, and short153 lived affair. This is why Byron's poetry had so little
154 endurance in it, and Goethe's so much; both Byron
155 and Goethe had a great productive power, but Goethe's
156 was nourished by a great critical effort providing the true
157 materials for it, and Byron's was not; Goethe knew life
158 and the world, the poet's necessary subjects, much more
159 comprehensively and thoroughly than Byron. He knew
160 a great deal more of them, and he knew them much more
161 as they really are.
¶7
162 It has long seemed to me that the burst of creative
163 activity in our literature, through the first quarter of this
164 century, had about it, in fact, something premature; and
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165 that from this cause its productions are doomed, most of
166 them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which accompanied
167 and do still accompany them, to prove hardly more
168 lasting than the productions of far less splendid epochs.
169 And this prematureness comes from its having proceeded
170 without having its proper data, without sufficient materials
171 to work with. In other words, the English poetry of the
172 first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty
173 of creative force, did not know enough. This makes
174 Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent, Words175 worth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in com176 pleteness and variety. Wordsworth cared little for books,
177 and disparaged Goethe. I admire Wordsworth, as he is,
178 so much that I cannot wish him different; and it is vain,
179 no doubt, to imagine such a man different from what he
180 is, to suppose that he could have been different; but
181 surely the one thing wanting to make Wordsworth an
182 even greater poet than he is,--his thought richer, and his
183 influence of wider application,--was that he should have
184 read more books, among them, no doubt, those of that
185 Goethe whom he disparaged without reading him.
¶8
186 But to speak of books and reading may easily lead to
187 a misunderstanding here. It was not really books and
188 reading that lacked to our poetry, at this epoch; Shelley
189 had plenty of reading, Coleridge had immense reading.
190 Pindar and Sophocles,--as we all say so glibly, and often
191 with so little discernment of the real import of what we
192 are saying,--had not many books; Shakspeare was no
193 deep reader. True; but in the Greece of Pindar and
194 Sophocles, in the England of Shakspeare, the poet lived
195 in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and
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196 nourishing to the creative power; society was, in the
197 fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent
198 and alive; and this state of things is the true basis for
199 the creative power's exercise, in this it finds its data, its
200 materials, truly ready for its hand; all the books and
201 reading in the world are only valuable as they are helps
202 to this. Even when this does not actually exist, books
203 and reading may enable a man to construct a kind of
204 semblance of it in his own mind, a world of knowledge
205 and intelligence in which he may live and work; this is
206 by no means an equivalent, to the artist, for the nationally
207 diffused life and thought of the epochs of Sophocles or
208 Shakspeare, but, besides that it may be a means of
209 preparation for such epochs, it does really constitute, if
210 many share in it, a quickening and sustaining atmosphere
211 of great value. Such an atmosphere the many-sided
212 learning and the long and widely-combined critical effort
213 of Germany formed for Goethe, when he lived and
214 worked. There was no national glow of life and thought
215 there, as in the Athens of Pericles, or the England of
216 Elizabeth. That was the poet's weakness. But there
217 was a sort of equivalent for it in the complete culture and
218 unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans. That
219 was his strength. In the England of the first quarter of
220 this century, there was neither a national glow of life and
221 thought, such as we had in the age of Elizabeth, nor yet
222 a culture and a force of learning and criticism, such as
223 were to be found in Germany. Therefore the creative
224 power of poetry wanted, for success in the highest sense,
225 materials and a basis; a thorough interpretation of the
226 world was necessarily denied to it.
[…]
348 is the fashion to treat Burke's writings on the French
349 Revolution as superannuated and conquered by the
350 event; as the eloquent but unphilosophical tirades of
351 bigotry and prejudice. I will not deny that they are
352 often disfigured by the violence and passion of the
353 moment, and that in some directions Burke's view was
354 bounded, and his observation therefore at fault; but on
355 the whole, and for those who can make the needful
356 corrections, what distinguishes these writings is their
357 profound, permanent, fruitful, philosophical truth; they
358 contain the true philosophy of an epoch of concentration,
359 dissipate the heavy atmosphere which its own nature
360 is apt to engender round it, and make its resistance
361 rational instead of mechanical.
¶11
362 But Burke is so great because, almost alone in England,
363 he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates
364 politics with thought; it is his accident that his ideas
365 were at the service of an epoch of concentration, not of
366 an epoch of expansion; it is his characteristic that he so
367 lived by ideas, and had such a source of them welling up
368 within him, that he could float even an epoch of con369 centration and English Tory politics with them. It does
370 not hurt him that |Dr.| Price and the Liberals were enraged
371 with him; it does not even hurt him that George the Third
372 and the Tories were enchanted with him. His greatness
373 is that he lived in a world which neither English Liberal374 ism nor English Toryism is apt to enter;--the world of
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375 ideas, not the world of catchwords and party habits. So
376 far is it from being really true of him that he "to party
377 gave up what was meant for mankind," that at the very
378 end of his fierce struggle with the French Revolution,
379 after all his invectives against its false pretensions, hollow380 ness, and madness, with his sincere conviction of its
381 mischievousness, he can close a memorandum on the
382 best means of combating it, some of the last pages
383 he ever wrote,--the Thoughts on French Affairs, in
384 December, 1791,--with these striking words:-385 "The evil is stated, in my opinion, as it exists. The
386 remedy must be where power, wisdom, and information,
387 I hope, are more united with good intentions than they
388 can be with me. I have done with this subject, I believe,
389 for ever. It has given me many anxious moments for
390 the last two years. If a great change is to be made in
391 human affairs, the minds of men be fitted to it; the
392 general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every
393 fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist
394 in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will
395 appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than
396 the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and
397 firm, but perverse and obstinate."
398 That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed
399 to me one of the finest things in English literature, or
400 indeed, in any literature. That is what I call living by
401 ideas; when one side of a question has long had your
402 earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when
403 you hear all round you no language but one, when your
404 party talks this language like a steam engine and can
405 imagine no other,--still to be able to think, still to be
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406 irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought
407 to the opposite side of the question, and, like Balaam, to
408 be unable to speak anything but what the Lord has put
409 in your mouth. I know nothing more striking, and I
410 must add that I know nothing more un-English.
¶12
411 For the Englishman in general is like my friend the
412 Member of Parliament, and believes, point-blank, that
413 for a thing to be an anomaly is absolutely no objection
414 to it whatever. He is like the Lord Auckland of Burke's
415 day, who, in a memorandum on the French Revolution,
416 talks of "certain miscreants, assuming the name of
417 philosophers, who have presumed themselves capable of
418 establishing a new system of society." The Englishman
419 has been called a political animal, and he values what is
420 political and practical so much that ideas easily become
421 objects of dislike in his eyes, and thinkers "miscreants,"
422 because ideas and thinkers have rashly meddled with
423 politics and practice. This would be all very well if
424 the dislike and neglect confined themselves to ideas
425 transported out of their own sphere, and meddling rashly
426 with practice; but they are inevitably extended to ideas
427 as such, and to the whole life of intelligence; practice is
428 everything, a free play of the mind is nothing. The
429 notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects
430 being a pleasure in itself, being an object of desire, being
431 an essential provider of elements without which a nation's
432 spirit, whatever compensations it may have for them,
433 must, in the long run, die of inanition, hardly enters into
434 an Englishman's thoughts. It {{is}} [[[it]]] noticeable that the word
435 curiosity, which in other languages is used in a good sense,
436 to mean, as a high and fine quality of man's nature, just
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437 this disinterested love of a free play of the mind on all
438 subjects, for its own sake,--it is noticeable, I say, that
439 this word has in our language no sense of the kind,
440 no sense but a rather bad and disparaging one. But
441 criticism, real criticism, is essentially the exercise of this
442 very quality; it obeys an instinct prompting it to try to
443 know the best that is known and thought in the world,
444 irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the
445 kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they
446 approach this best, without the intrusion of any other
447 considerations whatever. This is an instinct for which
448 there is, I think, little original sympathy in the practical
449 English nature, and what there was of it has undergone
450 a long benumbing period of blight and suppression in
451 the epoch of concentration which followed the French
452 Revolution.
¶13
453 But epochs of concentration cannot well endure for
454 ever; epochs of expansion, in the due course of things,
455 follow them. Such an epoch of expansion seems to be
456 opening in this country. In the first place all danger of
457 a hostile forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our
458 practice has long disappeared; like the traveller in the
459 fable, therefore, we begin to wear our cloak a little more
460 loosely. Then, with a long peace, the ideas of Europe
461 steal gradually and amicably in, and mingle, though in
462 infinitesimally small quantities at a time, with our own
463 notions. Then, too, in spite of all that is said about the
464 absorbing and brutalising influence of our passionate
465 material progress, it seems to me indisputable that this
466 progress is likely, though not certain, to lead in the end
467 to an apparition of intellectual life; and that man, after
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468 he has made himself perfectly comfortable and has now
469 to determine what to do with himself next, may begin to
470 remember that he has a mind, and that the mind may be
471 made the source of great pleasure. I grant it is mainly
472 the privilege of faith, at present, to discern this end to
473 our railways, our business, and our fortune-making; but
474 we shall see if, here as elsewhere, faith is not in the end
475 the true prophet. Our ease, our travelling, and our un476 bounded liberty to hold just as hard and securely as
477 we please to the practice to which our notions have
478 given birth, all tend to beget an inclination to deal a
479 little more freely with these notions themselves, to canvass
480 them a little, to penetrate a little into their real nature.
481 Flutterings of curiosity, in the foreign sense of the word,
482 appear amongst us, and it is in these that criticism must
483 look to find its account. Criticism first; a time of true
484 creative activity, perhaps,--which, as I have said, must
485 inevitably be preceded amongst us by a time of criticism,
486 --hereafter, when criticism has done its work.
¶14
487 It is of the last importance that English criticism
488 should clearly discern what rule for its course, in order
489 to avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to pro490 duce fruit for the future, it ought to take. The rule may
491 be summed up in one word,--disinterestedness. And how
492 is criticism to show disinterestedness? By keeping aloof
493 from practice; by resolutely following the law of its own
494 nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all
495 subjects which it touches; by steadily refusing to lend
496 itself to any of those ulterior, political, practical con497 siderations about ideas which plenty of people will be
498 sure to attach to them, which perhaps ought often to be
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499 attached to them, which in this country at any rate are
500 certain to be attached to them quite sufficiently, but
501 which criticism has really nothing to do with. Its busi502 ness is, as I have said, simply to know the best that is
503 known and thought in the world, and by in its turn
504 making this known, to create a current of true and fresh
505 ideas. Its business is to do this with inflexible honesty,
506 with due ability; but its business is to do no more, and
507 to leave alone all questions of practical consequences and
508 applications, questions which will never fail to have due
509 prominence given to them. Else criticism, besides being
510 really false to its own nature, merely continues in the old
511 rut which it has hitherto followed in this country, and
512 will certainly miss the chance now given to it. For what
513 is at present the bane of criticism in this country? It is
514 that practical considerations cling to it and stifle it; it
515 subserves interests not its own; our organs of criticism
516 are organs of men and parties having practical ends to
517 serve, and with them those practical ends are the first
518 thing and the play of mind the second; so much play of
519 mind as is compatible with the prosecution of those prac520 tical ends is all that is wanted. An organ like the Revue
521 des Deux Mondes, having for its main function to under522 stand and utter the best that is known and thought in
523 the world, existing, it may be said, as just an organ for a`
524 free play of the mind, we have not; but we have the
525 Edinburgh Review, existing as an organ of the old Whigs,
526 and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that;
527 we have the Quarterly Review, existing as an organ of
528 the Tories, and for as much play of mind as may suit its
529 being that; we have the British Quarterly Review, exist{{Page 20}}
530 ing as an organ of the political Dissenters, and for as
531 much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have
532 the Times, existing as an organ of the common, satisfied,
533 well-to-do Englishman, and for as much play of mind as
534 may suit its being that. And so on through all the
535 various fractions, political and religious, of our society;
536 every fraction has, as such, its organ of criticism, but the
537 notion of combining all fractions in the common pleasure
538 of a free disinterested play of mind meets with no favour.
539 Directly this play of mind wants to have more scope, and
540 to forget the pressure of practical considerations a little,
541 it is checked, it is made to feel the chain;
Culture and Anarchy
We have not the notion, so familiar on the Continent and to antiquity, of the State—the
nation, in its collective [56] and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for the
general advantage, and controlling individual wills in the name of an interest wider than that
of individuals. We say, what is very true, that this notion is often made instrumental to
tyranny; we say that a State is in reality made up of the individuals who compose it, and that
every individual is the best judge of his own interests. Our leading class is an aristocracy, and
no aristocracy likes the notion of a State-authority greater than itself, with a stringent
administrative machinery superseding the decorative inutilities of lord-lieutenancy, deputylieutenancy, and the posse comitatûs, which are all in its own hands. Our middle-class, the
great representative of trade and Dissent, with its maxims of every man for himself in
business, every man for himself in religion, dreads a powerful administration which might
somehow interfere with it; and besides, it has its own decorative inutilities of vestrymanship
and guardianship, which are to this class what lord-lieutenancy and the county magistracy are
to the aristocratic class, and a stringent administration might either take these functions out of
its hands, [57] or prevent its exercising them in its own comfortable, independent manner, as
at present.
Then as to our working-class. This class, pressed constantly by the hard daily compulsion of
material wants, is naturally the very centre and stronghold of our national idea, that it is man's
ideal right and felicity to do as he likes. I think I have somewhere related how Monsieur
Michelet said to me of the people of France, that it was "a nation of barbarians civilised by the
conscription." He meant that through their military service the idea of public duty and of
discipline was brought to the mind of these masses, in other respects so raw and uncultivated.
Our masses are quite as raw and uncultivated as the French; and, so far from their having the
idea of public duty and of discipline, superior to the individual's self-will, brought to their
mind by a universal obligation of military service, such as that of the conscription,—so far
from their having this, the very idea of a conscription is so at variance with our English notion
of the prime right and blessedness of doing as one likes, that I remember the manager of the
Clay Cross works in Derbyshire told me during the Crimean [58] war, when our want of
soldiers was much felt and some people were talking of a conscription, that sooner than
submit to a conscription the population of that district would flee to the mines, and lead a sort
of Robin Hood life under ground.
For a long time, as I have said, the strong feudal habits of subordination and deference
continued to tell upon the working-class. The modern spirit has now almost entirely dissolved
those habits, and the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself, of our
superstitious faith, as I say, in machinery, is becoming very manifest. More and more, because
of this our blind faith in machinery, because of our want of light to enable us to look beyond
machinery to the end for which machinery is valuable, this and that man, and this and that
body of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert and put in practice an Englishman's
right to do what he likes; his right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where
he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes. All this, I say, tends to
anarchy; and though a number of excellent people, and particularly my friends of the liberal
or progressive party, as they [59] call themselves, are kind enough to reassure us by saying
that these are trifles, that a few transient outbreaks of rowdyism signify nothing, that our
system of liberty is one which itself cures all the evils which it works, that the educated and
intelligent classes stand in overwhelming strength and majestic repose, ready, like our
military force in riots, to act at a moment's notice,—yet one finds that one's liberal friends
generally say this because they have such faith in themselves and their nostrums, when they
shall return, as the public welfare requires, to place and power. But this faith of theirs one
cannot exactly share, when one has so long had them and their nostrums at work, and sees that
they have not prevented our coming to our present embarrassed condition; and one finds, also,
that the outbreaks of rowdyism tend to become less and less of trifles, to become more
frequent rather than less frequent; and that meanwhile our educated and intelligent classes
remain in their majestic repose, and somehow or other, whatever happens, their overwhelming
strength, like our military force in riots, never does act.
How, indeed, should their overwhelming strength [60] act, when the man who gives an
inflammatory lecture, or breaks down the Park railings, or invades a Secretary of State's
office, is only following an Englishman's impulse to do as he likes; and our own conscience
tells us that we ourselves have always regarded this impulse as something primary and
sacred? Mr. Murphy lectures at Birmingham, and showers on the Catholic population of that
town "words," says Mr. Hardy, "only fit to be addressed to thieves or murderers." What then?
Mr. Murphy has his own reasons of several kinds. He suspects the Roman Catholic Church of
designs upon Mrs. Murphy; and he says, if mayors and magistrates do not care for their wives
and daughters, he does. But, above all, he is doing as he likes, or, in worthier language,
asserting his personal liberty. "I will carry out my lectures if they walk over my body as a
dead corpse; and I say to the Mayor of Birmingham that he is my servant while I am in
Birmingham, and as my servant he must do his duty and protect me." Touching and beautiful
words, which find a sympathetic chord in every British bosom! The moment it is plainly put
before us that a man is asserting his personal liberty, we are half disarmed; [61] because we
are believers in freedom, and not in some dream of a right reason to which the assertion of our
freedom is to be subordinated. Accordingly, the Secretary of State had to say that although the
lecturer's language was "only fit to be addressed to thieves or murderers," yet, "I do not think
he is to be deprived, I do not think that anything I have said could justify the inference that he
is to be deprived, of the right of protection in a place built by him for the purpose of these
lectures; because the language was not language which afforded grounds for a criminal
prosecution." No, nor to be silenced by Mayor, or Home Secretary, or any administrative
authority on earth, simply on their notion of what is discreet and reasonable! This is in perfect
consonance with our public opinion, and with our national love for the assertion of personal
liberty.
In quite another department of affairs, an experienced and distinguished Chancery Judge
relates an incident which is just to the same effect as this of Mr. Murphy. A testator
bequeathed 300£. a year, to be for ever applied as a pension to some person who had been
unsuccessful in literature, and whose duty [62] should be to support and diffuse, by his
writings, the testator's own views, as enforced in the testator's publications. This bequest was
appealed against in the Court of Chancery, on the ground of its absurdity; but, being only
absurd, it was upheld, and the so-called charity was established. Having, I say, at the bottom
of our English hearts a very strong belief in freedom, and a very weak belief in right reason,
we are soon silenced when a man pleads the prime right to do as he likes, because this is the
prime right for ourselves too; and even if we attempt now and then to mumble something
about reason, yet we have ourselves thought so little about this and so much about liberty, that
we are in conscience forced, when our brother Philistine with whom we are meddling turns
boldly round upon us and asks: Have you any light?—to shake our heads ruefully, and to let
him go his own way after all.
There are many things to be said on behalf of this exclusive attention of ours to liberty, and of
the relaxed habits of government which it has engendered. It is very easy to mistake or to
exaggerate the sort of anarchy from which we are in danger through them. We are not in
danger from [63] Fenianism, fierce and turbulent as it may show itself; for against this our
conscience is free enough to let us act resolutely and put forth our overwhelming strength the
moment there is any real need for it. In the first place, it never was any part of our creed that
the great right and blessedness of an Irishman, or, indeed, of anybody on earth except an
Englishman, is to do as he likes; and we can have no scruple at all about abridging, if
necessary, a non-Englishman's assertion of personal liberty. The British Constitution, its
checks, and its prime virtues, are for Englishmen. We may extend them to others out of love
and kindness; but we find no real divine law written on our hearts constraining us so to extend
them. And then the difference between an Irish Fenian and an English rough is so immense,
and the case, in dealing with the Fenian, so much more clear! He is so evidently desperate and
dangerous, a man of a conquered race, a Papist, with centuries of ill-usage to inflame him
against us, with an alien religion established in his country by us at his expense, with no
admiration of our institutions, no love of our virtues, no talents for our business, no turn for
our comfort! Show him our symbolical [64] Truss Manufactory on the finest site in Europe,
and tell him that British industrialism and individualism can bring a man to that, and he
remains cold! Evidently, if we deal tenderly with a sentimentalist like this, it is out of pure
philanthropy. But with the Hyde Park rioter how different!+ He is our own flesh and blood;
he is a Protestant; he is framed by nature to do as we do, hate what we hate, love what we
love; he is capable of feeling the symbolical force of the Truss Manufactory; the question of
questions, for him, is a wages' question. That beautiful sentence Sir Daniel Gooch quoted to
the Swindon workmen, and which I treasure as Mrs. Gooch's Golden Rule, or the Divine
Injunction "Be ye Perfect" done into British,—the sentence Sir Daniel Gooch's mother
repeated to him every morning when he was a boy going to work: "Ever remember, my dear
Dan, that you should look forward to being some day manager of that concern!"—this fruitful
maxim is perfectly fitted to shine forth in the heart of the Hyde Park rough also, and to be his
guiding-star through life. He has no visionary schemes of revolution and transformation,
though of course he would like his class to rule, as the aristocratic [65] class like their class to
rule, and the middle-class theirs. Meanwhile, our social machine is a little out of order; there
are a good many people in our paradisiacal centres of industrialism and individualism taking
the bread out of one another's mouths; the rioter has not yet quite found his groove and settled
down to his work, and so he is just asserting his personal liberty a little, going where he likes,
assembling where he likes, bawling as he likes, hustling as he likes. Just as the rest of us,—as
the country squires in the aristocratic class, as the political dissenters in the middle-class,—he
has no idea of a State, of the nation in its collective and corporate character controlling, as
government, the free swing of this or that one of its members in the name of the higher reason
of all of them, his own as well as that of others. He sees the rich, the aristocratic class, in
occupation of the executive government, and so if he is stopped from making Hyde Park a
bear-garden or the streets impassable, he says he is being butchered by the aristocracy.
His apparition is somewhat embarrassing, because too many cooks spoil the broth; because,
while the aristocratic and middle classes have long been doing [66] as they like with great
vigour, he has been too undeveloped and submissive hitherto to join in the game; and now,
when he does come, he comes in immense numbers, and is rather raw and rough. But he does
not break many laws, or not many at one time; and, as our laws were made for very different
circumstances from our present (but always with an eye to Englishmen doing as they like),
and as the clear letter of the law must be against our Englishman who does as he likes and not
only the spirit of the law and public policy, and as Government must neither have any
discretionary power nor act resolutely on its own interpretation of the law if any one disputes
it, it is evident our laws give our playful giant, in doing as he likes, considerable advantage.
Besides, even if he can be clearly proved to commit an illegality in doing as he likes, there is
always the resource of not putting the law in force, or of abolishing it. So he has his way, and
if he has his way he is soon satisfied for the time; however, he falls into the habit of taking it
oftener and oftener, and at last begins to create by his operations a confusion of which
mischievous people can take advantage, and which at any rate, by troubling the common
course [67] of business throughout the country, tends to cause distress, and so to increase the
sort of anarchy and social disintegration which had previously commenced. And thus that
profound sense of settled order and security, without which a society like ours cannot live and
grow at all, is beginning to threaten us with taking its departure.
Now, if culture, which simply means trying to perfect oneself, and one's mind as part of
oneself, brings us light, and if light shows us that there is nothing so very blessed in merely
doing as one likes, that the worship of the mere freedom to do as one likes is worship of
machinery, that the really blessed thing is to like what right reason ordains, and to follow her
authority, then we have got a practical benefit out of culture. We have got a much wanted
principle, a principle of authority, to counteract the tendency to anarchy which seems to be
threatening us.
But how to organise this authority, or to what hands to entrust the wielding of it? How to get
your State, summing up the right reason of the community, and giving effect to it, as
circumstances may require, with vigour? And here I think I see [68] my enemies waiting for
me with a hungry joy in their eyes. But I shall elude them.
The State, the power most representing the right reason of the nation, and most worthy,
therefore, of ruling,—of exercising, when circumstances require it, authority over us all,—is
for Mr. Carlyle the aristocracy. For Mr. Lowe, it is the middle-class with its incomparable
Parliament. For the Reform League, it is the working-class, with its "brightest powers of
sympathy and readiest powers of action." Now, culture, with its disinterested pursuit of
perfection, culture, simply trying to see things as they are, in order to seize on the best and to
make it prevail, is surely well fitted to help us to judge rightly, by all the aids of observing,
reading, and thinking, the qualifications and titles to our confidence of these three candidates
for authority, and can thus render us a practical service of no mean value.
So when Mr. Carlyle, a man of genius to whom we have all at one time or other been indebted
for refreshment and stimulus, says we should give rule to the aristocracy, mainly because of
its dignity and politeness, surely culture is useful in reminding us, [69] that in our idea of
perfection the characters of beauty and intelligence are both of them present, and sweetness
and light, the two noblest of things, are united. Allowing, therefore, with Mr. Carlyle, the
aristocratic class to possess sweetness, culture insists on the necessity of light also, and shows
us that aristocracies, being by the very nature of things inaccessible to ideas, unapt to see how
the world is going, must be somewhat wanting in light, and must therefore be, at a moment
when light is our great requisite, inadequate to our needs. Aristocracies, those children of the
established fact, are for epochs of concentration. In epochs of expansion, epochs such as that
in which we now live, epochs when always the warning voice is again heard: Now is the
judgment of this world—in such epochs aristocracies, with their natural clinging to the
established fact, their want of sense for the flux of things, for the inevitable transitoriness of
all human institutions, are bewildered and helpless. Their serenity, their high spirit, their
power of haughty resistance,—the great qualities of an aristocracy, and the secret of its
distinguished manners and dignity,—these very qualities, in an epoch of [70] expansion, turn
against their possessors. Again and again I have said how the refinement of an aristocracy
may be precious and educative to a raw nation as a kind of shadow of true refinement; how its
serenity and dignified freedom from petty cares may serve as a useful foil to set off the
vulgarity and hideousness of that type of life which a hard middle-class tends to establish, and
to help people to see this vulgarity and hideousness in their true colours. From such an
ignoble spectacle as that of poor Mrs. Lincoln,—a spectacle to vulgarise a whole nation,—
aristocracies undoubtedly preserve us. But the true grace and serenity is that of which Greece
and Greek art suggest the admirable ideals of perfection,—a serenity which comes from
having made order among ideas and harmonised them; whereas the serenity of aristocracies,
at least the peculiar serenity of aristocracies of Teutonic origin, appears to come from their
never having had any ideas to trouble them. And so, in a time of expansion like the present, a
time for ideas, one gets, perhaps, in regarding an aristocracy, even more than the idea of
serenity, the idea of futility and sterility. One has often wondered whether upon the whole
[71] earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really
going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class. Ideas he has not, and neither has
he that seriousness of our middle-class, which is, as I have often said, the great strength of this
class, and may become its salvation. Why, a man may hear a young Dives of the aristocratic
class, when the whim takes him to sing the praises of wealth and material comfort, sing them
with a cynicism from which the conscience of the veriest Philistine of our industrial middleclass would recoil in affright. And when, with the natural sympathy of aristocracies for firm
dealing with the multitude, and his uneasiness at our feeble dealing with it at home, an
unvarnished young Englishman of our aristocratic class applauds the absolute rulers on the
Continent, he in general manages completely to miss the grounds of reason and intelligence
which alone can give any colour of justification, any possibility of existence, to those rulers,
and applauds them on grounds which it would make their own hair stand on end to listen to.
And all this time, we are in an epoch of expansion; [72] and the essence of an epoch of
expansion is a movement of ideas, and the one salvation of an epoch of expansion is a
harmony of ideas. The very principle of the authority which we are seeking as a defence
against anarchy is right reason, ideas, light. The more, therefore, an aristocracy calls to its aid
its innate forces,—its impenetrability, its high spirit, its power of haughty resistance,—to deal
with an epoch of expansion, the graver is the danger, the greater the certainty of explosion, the
surer the aristocracy's defeat; for it is trying to do violence to nature instead of working along
with it. The best powers shown by the best men of an aristocracy at such an epoch are, it will
be observed, non-aristocratical powers, powers of industry, powers of intelligence; and these
powers, thus exhibited, tend really not to strengthen the aristocracy, but to take their owners
out of it, to expose them to the dissolving agencies of thought and change, to make them men
of the modern spirit and of the future. If, as sometimes happens, they add to their nonaristocratical qualities of labour and thought, a strong dose of aristocratical qualities also,—of
pride, defiance, turn for resistance—this truly aristocratical [73] side of them, so far from
adding any strength to them really neutralises their force and makes them impracticable and
ineffective.
Knowing myself to be indeed sadly to seek, as one of my many critics says, in "a philosophy
with coherent, interdependent, subordinate and derivative principles," I continually have
recourse to a plain man's expedient of trying to make what few simple notions I have, clearer,
and more intelligible to myself, by means of example and illustration. And having been
brought up at Oxford in the bad old times, when we were stuffed with Greek and Aristotle,
and thought nothing of preparing ourselves,—as after Mr. Lowe's great speech at Edinburgh
we shall do,—to fight the battle of life with the German waiters, my head is still full of a
lumber of phrases we learnt at Oxford from Aristotle, about virtue being in a mean, and about
excess and defect, and so on. Once when I had had the advantage of listening to the Reform
debates in the House of Commons, having heard a number of interesting speakers, and among
them Lord Elcho and Sir Thomas Bateson, I remember it struck me, applying Aristotle's
machinery of the [74] mean to my ideas about our aristocracy, that Lord Elcho was exactly
the perfection, or happy mean, or virtue, of aristocracy, and Sir Thomas Bateson the excess;
and I fancied that by observing these two we might see both the inadequacy of aristocracy to
supply the principle of authority needful for our present wants, and the danger of its trying to
supply it when it was not really competent for the business. On the one hand, in Lord Elcho,
showing plenty of high spirit, but remarkable, far above and beyond his gift of high spirit, for
the fine tempering of his high spirit, for ease, serenity, politeness,—the great virtues, as Mr.
Carlyle says, of aristocracy,—in this beautiful and virtuous mean, there seemed evidently
some insufficiency of light; while, on the other hand, Sir Thomas Bateson, in whom the high
spirit of aristocracy, its impenetrability, defiant courage, and pride of resistance, were
developed even in excess, was manifestly capable, if he had his way given him, of causing us
great danger, and, indeed, of throwing the whole commonwealth into confusion. Then I
reverted to that old fundamental notion of mine about the grand merit of our race being really
our honesty; and the [75] very helplessness of our aristocratic or governing class in dealing
with our perturbed social state gave me a sort of pride and satisfaction, because I saw they
were, as a whole, too honest to try and manage a business for which they did not feel
themselves capable.
Surely, now, it is no inconsiderable boon culture confers upon us, if in embarrassed times like
the present it enables us to look at the ins and the outs of things in this way, without hatred
and without partiality, and with a disposition to see the good in everybody all round. And I try
to follow just the same course with our middle-class as with our aristocracy. Mr. Lowe talks
to us of this strong middle part of the nation, of the unrivalled deeds of our liberal middleclass Parliament, of the noble, the heroic work it has performed in the last thirty years; and I
begin to ask myself if we shall not, then, find in our middle-class the principle of authority we
want, and if we had not better take administration as well as legislation away from the weak
extreme which now administers for us, and commit both to the strong middle part. I observe,
too, that the heroes of middle-class liberalism, such as we have [76] hitherto known it, speak
with a kind of prophetic anticipation of the great destiny which awaits them, and as if the
future was clearly theirs. The advanced party, the progressive party, the party in alliance with
the future, are the names they like to give themselves. "The principles which will obtain
recognition in the future," says Mr. Miall, a personage of deserved eminence among the
political Dissenters, as they are called, who have been the backbone of middle-class
liberalism—"the principles which will obtain recognition in the future are the principles for
which I have long and zealously laboured. I qualified myself for joining in the work of harvest
by doing to the best of my ability the duties of seed-time." These duties, if one is to gather
them from the works of the great liberal party in the last thirty years, are, as I have elsewhere
summed them up, the advocacy of free-trade, of parliamentary reform, of abolition of churchrates, of voluntaryism in religion and education, of non-interference of the State between
employers and employed, and of marriage with one's deceased wife's sister.
Now I know, when I object that all this is machinery, the great liberal middle-class has by this
[77] time grown cunning enough to answer, that it always meant more by these things than
meets the eye; that it has had that within which passes show, and that we are soon going to
see, in a Free Church and all manner of good things, what it was. But I have learned from
Bishop Wilson (if Mr. Frederic Harrison will forgive my again quoting that poor old
hierophant of a decayed superstition): "If we would really know our heart let us impartially
view our actions;" and I cannot help thinking that if our liberals had had so much sweetness
and light in their inner minds as they allege, more of it must have come out in their sayings
and doings. An American friend of the English liberals says, indeed, that their Dissidence of
Dissent has been a mere instrument of the political Dissenters for making reason and the will
of God prevail (and no doubt he would say the same of marriage with one's deceased wife's
sister); and that the abolition of a State Church is merely the Dissenter's means to this end,
just as culture is mine. Another American defender of theirs says just the same of their
industrialism and free-trade; indeed, this gentleman, taking the bull by the horns, proposes
that we should for the [78] future call industrialism culture, and the industrialists the men of
culture, and then of course there can be no longer any misapprehension about their true
character; and besides the pleasure of being wealthy and comfortable, they will have authentic
recognition as vessels of sweetness and light. All this is undoubtedly specious; but I must
remark that the culture of which I talked was an endeavour to come at reason and the will of
God by means of reading, observing, and thinking; and that whoever calls anything else
culture, may, indeed, call it so if he likes, but then he talks of something quite different from
what I talked of. And, again, as culture's way of working for reason and the will of God is by
directly trying to know more about them, while the Dissidence of Dissent is evidently in itself
no effort of this kind, nor is its Free Church, in fact, a church with worthier conceptions of
God and the ordering of the world than the State Church professes, but with mainly the same
conceptions of these as the State Church has, only that every man is to comport himself as he
likes in professing them,—this being so, I cannot at once accept the Nonconformity any more
than the industrialism and the other great [79] works of our liberal middle-class as proof
positive that this class is in possession of light, and that here is the true seat of authority for
which we are in search; but I must try a little further, and seek for other indications which
may enable me to make up my mind.
Why should we not do with the middle-class as we have done with the aristocratic class,—
find in it some representative men who may stand for the virtuous mean of this class, for the
perfection of its present qualities and mode of being, and also for the excess of them. Such
men must clearly not be men of genius like Mr. Bright; for, as I have formerly said, so far as a
man has genius he tends to take himself out of the category of class altogether, and to become
simply a man. Mr. Bright's brother, Mr. Jacob Bright, would, perhaps, be more to the purpose;
he seems to sum up very well in himself, without disturbing influences, the general liberal
force of the middle-class, the force by which it has done its great works of free-trade,
parliamentary reform, voluntaryism, and so on, and the spirit in which it has done them. Now
it is clear, from what has been already said, that there has been at least [80] an apparent want
of light in the force and spirit through which these great works have been done, and that the
works have worn in consequence too much a look of machinery. But this will be clearer still if
we take, as the happy mean of the middle-class, not Mr. Jacob Bright, but his colleague in the
representation of Manchester, Mr. Bazley. Mr. Bazley sums up for us, in general, the middleclass, its spirit and its works, at least as well as Mr. Jacob Bright; and he has given us,
moreover, a famous sentence, which bears directly on the resolution of our present
question,—whether there is light enough in our middle-class to make it the proper seat of the
authority we wish to establish. When there was a talk some little while ago about the state of
middle-class education, Mr. Bazley, as the representative of that class, spoke some
memorable words:—"There had been a cry that middle-class education ought to receive more
attention. He confessed himself very much surprised by the clamour that was raised. He did
not think that class need excite the sympathy either of the legislature or the public." Now this
satisfaction of Mr. Bazley with the mental state of the middle-class [81] was truly
representative, and enhances his claim (if that were necessary) to stand as the beautiful and
virtuous mean of that class. But it is obviously at variance with our definition of culture, or
the pursuit of light and perfection, which made light and perfection consist, not in resting and
being, but in growing and becoming, in a perpetual advance in beauty and wisdom. So the
middle-class is by its essence, as one may say, by its incomparable self-satisfaction decisively
expressed through its beautiful and virtuous mean, self-excluded from wielding an authority
of which light is to be the very soul.
Clear as this is, it will be made clearer still if we take some representative man as the excess
of the middle-class, and remember that the middle-class, in general, is to be conceived as a
body swaying between the qualities of its mean and of its excess, and on the whole, of course,
as human nature is constituted, inclining rather towards the excess than the mean. Of its
excess no better representative can possibly be imagined than the Rev. W. Cattle, a Dissenting
minister from Walsall, who came before the public in connection with the proceedings at [82]
Birmingham of Mr. Murphy, already mentioned. Speaking in the midst of an irritated
population of Catholics, the Rev. W. Cattle exclaimed:—"I say, then, away with the mass! It
is from the bottomless pit; and in the bottomless pit shall all liars have their part, in the lake
that burneth with fire and brimstone." And again: "When all the praties were black in Ireland,
why didn't the priests say the hocus-pocus over them, and make them all good again?" He
shared, too, Mr. Murphy's fears of some invasion of his domestic happiness: "What I wish to
say to you as Protestant husbands is, Take care of your wives!" And, finally, in the true vein
of an Englishman doing as he likes, a vein of which I have at some length pointed out the
present dangers, he recommended for imitation the example of some churchwardens at
Dublin, among whom, said he, "there was a Luther and also a Melancthon," who had made
very short work with some ritualist or other, handed him down from his pulpit, and kicked
him out of church. Now it is manifest, as I said in the case of Sir Thomas Bateson, that if we
let this excess of the sturdy English middle-class, this conscientious Protestant Dissenter, so
strong, so self- [83] reliant, so fully persuaded in his own mind, have his way, he would be
capable, with his want of light—or, to use the language of the religious world, with his zeal
without knowledge—of stirring up strife which neither he nor any one else could easily
compose.
And then comes in, as it did also with the aristocracy, the honesty of our race, and by the
voice of another middle-class man, Alderman Wilson, Alderman of the City of London and
Colonel of the City of London Militia, proclaims that it has twinges of conscience, and that it
will not attempt to cope with our social disorders, and to deal with a business which it feels to
be too high for it. Every one remembers how this virtuous Alderman-Colonel, or ColonelAlderman, led his militia through the London streets; how the bystanders gathered to see him
pass; how the London roughs, asserting an Englishman's best and most blissful right of doing
what he likes, robbed and beat the bystanders; and how the blameless warrior-magistrate
refused to let his troops interfere. "The crowd," he touchingly said afterwards, "was mostly
composed of fine healthy strong men, bent on mischief; if he had [84] allowed his soldiers to
interfere they might have been overpowered, their rifles taken from them and used against
them by the mob; a riot, in fact, might have ensued, and been attended with bloodshed,
compared with which the assaults and loss of property that actually occurred would have been
as nothing." Honest and affecting testimony of the English middle-class to its own inadequacy
for the authoritative part one's admiration would sometimes incline one to assign to it! "Who
are we," they say by the voice of their Alderman-Colonel, "that we should not be
overpowered if we attempt to cope with social anarchy, our rifles taken from us and used
against us by the mob, and we, perhaps, robbed and beaten ourselves? Or what light have we,
beyond a free-born Englishman's impulse to do as he likes, which could justify us in
preventing, at the cost of bloodshed, other free-born Englishmen from doing as they like, and
robbing and beating us as much as they please?"
This distrust of themselves as an adequate centre of authority does not mark the workingclass, as was shown by their readiness the other day in Hyde Park to take upon themselves all
the functions of [85] government. But this comes from the working-class being, as I have
often said, still an embryo, of which no one can yet quite foresee the final development; and
from its not having the same experience and self-knowledge as the aristocratic and middle
classes. Honesty it no doubt has, just like the other classes of Englishmen, but honesty in an
inchoate and untrained state; and meanwhile its powers of action, which are, as Mr. Frederic
Harrison says, exceedingly ready, easily run away with it. That it cannot at present have a
sufficiency of light which comes by culture,—that is, by reading, observing, and thinking,—is
clear from the very nature of its condition; and, indeed, we saw that Mr. Frederic Harrison, in
seeking to make a free stage for its bright powers of sympathy and ready powers of action,
had to begin by throwing overboard culture, and flouting it as only fit for a professor of belles
lettres. Still, to make it perfectly manifest that no more in the working-class than in the
aristocratic and middle classes can one find an adequate centre of authority,—that is, as
culture teaches us to conceive our required authority, of light,—let us again follow, with this
class, the method we have [86] followed with the aristocratic and middle classes, and try to
bring before our minds representative men, who may figure to us its virtue and its excess. We
must not take, of course, Colonel Dickson or Mr. Beales; because Colonel Dickson, by his
martial profession and dashing exterior, seems to belong properly, like Julius Caesar and
Mirabeau and other great popular leaders, to the aristocratic class, and to be carried into the
popular ranks only by his ambition or his genius; while Mr. Beales belongs to our solid
middle-class, and, perhaps, if he had not been a great popular leader, would have been a
Philistine. But Mr. Odger, whose speeches we have all read, and of whom his friends relate,
besides, much that is favourable, may very well stand for the beautiful and virtuous mean of
our present working-class; and I think everybody will admit that in Mr. Odger, as in Lord
Elcho, there is manifestly, with all his good points, some insufficiency of light. The excess of
the working-class, in its present state of development, is perhaps best shown in Mr.
Bradlaugh, the iconoclast, who seems to be almost for baptizing us all in blood and fire into
his new social dispensation, and to whose [87] reflections, now that I have once been set
going on Bishop Wilson's track, I cannot forbear commending this maxim of the good old
man: "Intemperance in talk makes a dreadful havoc in the heart." Mr. Bradlaugh, like Sir
Thomas Bateson and the Rev. W. Cattle, is evidently capable, if he had his head given him, of
running us all into great dangers and confusion. I conclude, therefore,—what, indeed, few of
those who do me the honour to read this disquisition are likely to dispute,—that we can as
little find in the working-class as in the aristocratic or in the middle class our much-wanted
source of authority, as culture suggests it to us.
Well, then, what if we tried to rise above the idea of class to the idea of the whole community,
the State, and to find our centre of light and authority there? Every one of us has the idea of
country, as a sentiment; hardly any one of us has the idea of the State, as a working power.
And why? Because we habitually live in our ordinary selves, which do not carry us beyond
the ideas and wishes of the class to which we happen to belong. And we are all afraid of
giving to the State too much power, because we only conceive of the State [88] as something
equivalent to the class in occupation of the executive government, and are afraid of that class
abusing power to its own purposes. If we strengthen the State with the aristocratic class in
occupation of the executive government, we imagine we are delivering ourselves up captive
to the ideas and wishes of Sir Thomas Bateson; if with the middle-class in occupation of the
executive government, to those of the Rev. W. Cattle; if with the working-class, to those of
Mr. Bradlaugh. And with much justice; owing to the exaggerated notion which we English, as
I have said, entertain of the right and blessedness of the mere doing as one likes, of the
affirming oneself, and oneself just as it is. People of the aristocratic class want to affirm their
ordinary selves, their likings and dislikings; people of the middle-class the same, people of the
working-class the same. By our everyday selves, however, we are separate, personal, at war;
we are only safe from one another's tyranny when no one has any power; and this safety, in its
turn, cannot save us from anarchy. And when, therefore, anarchy presents itself as a danger to
us, we know not where to turn.
[89] But by our best self we are united, impersonal, at harmony. We are in no peril from
giving authority to this, because it is the truest friend we all of us can have; and when anarchy
is a danger to us, to this authority we may turn with sure trust. Well, and this is the very self
which culture, or the study of perfection, seeks to develop in us; at the expense of our old
untransformed self, taking pleasure only in doing what it likes or is used to do, and exposing
us to the risk of clashing with every one else who is doing the same! So that our poor culture,
which is flouted as so unpractical, leads us to the very ideas capable of meeting the great want
of our present embarrassed times! We want an authority, and we find nothing but jealous
classes, checks, and a dead-lock; culture suggests the idea of the State. We find no basis for a
firm State-power in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our best self.
It cannot but acutely try a tender conscience to be accused, in a practical country like ours, of
keeping aloof from the work and hope of a multitude of earnest-hearted men, and of merely
toying with poetry and aesthetics. So it is with no little [90] sense of relief that I find myself
thus in the position of one who makes a contribution in aid of the practical necessities of our
times. The great thing, it will be observed, is to find our best self, and to seek to affirm
nothing but that; not,—as we English with our over-value for merely being free and busy have
been so accustomed to do,—resting satisfied with a self which comes uppermost long before
our best self, and affirming that with blind energy. In short,—to go back yet once more to
Bishop Wilson,—of these two excellent rules of Bishop Wilson's for a man's guidance:
"Firstly, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not
darkness," we English have followed with praiseworthy zeal the first rule, but we have not
given so much heed to the second.
My Last Duchess
Ferrara
That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her? I said
'Frà Pandolf' by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Frà Pandolf chanced to say 'Her mantle laps
Over my lady's wrist too much,' or, 'Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat:' such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart – how shall I say – too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace - all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men - good! but thanked
Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech - (which I have not) - to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, 'Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark' - and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
- E'en that would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
NOTES:
"My Last Duchess" puts in the mouth of a Duke of Ferrara, a typical husband and art patron
of the Renaissance, a description of his last wife, whose happy nature and universal kindliness
were a perpetual affront to his exacting self-predominance, and whose suppression, by his
command, has made the vacancy he is now, in his interview with the envoy for a new match,
taking precaution to fill more acceptably.
3. Frà Pandolf, and 56. Claus of Innsbruck, are imaginary.
My Secret
Christina Rossetti
I TELL my secret? No indeed, not I:
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows and snows,
And you're too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret's mine, and I won't tell.
Or, after all, perhaps there's none:
Suppose there is no secret after all,
But only just my fun.
Today's a nipping day, a biting day;
In which one wants a shawl,
A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:
I cannot ope to everyone who taps,
And let the draughts come whistling thro' my hall;
Come bounding and surrounding me,
Come buffeting, astounding me,
Nipping and clipping thro' my wraps and all.
I wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows
His nose to Russian snows
To be pecked at by every wind that blows?
You would not peck? I thank you for good will,
Believe, but leave the truth untested still.
Spring's an expansive time: yet I don't trust
March with its peck of dust,
Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers,
Nor even May, whose flowers
One frost may wither thro' the sunless hours.
Perhaps some languid summer day,
WHen drowsy birds sing less and less,
And golden fruit is ripening to excess,
If there's not too much sun nor too much cloud,
And the warm wind is neither still nor loud,
Perhaps my secret I may say,
Or you may guess.
Past and Present
Thomas Carlyle
From Book III. The Modern Worker: Democracy
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,'--have led us in these days! We have
Upper, speaking Classes, who indeed do 'speak' as never man spake
before; the withered flimsiness, the 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, have we not to announce that they
also 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 brow 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 _"Eu
Sachsen, nimith euer sachses,_ You Saxons, out with your gullyknives then!" You Saxons, some 'arrestment,' partial 'arrestment
of the Knaves and Dastards' has become indispensable!--The page
of Dryasdust is heavy with such details.
And yet I will 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. But
it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet
gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated,
girt in with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly
all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite
Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull!
This is and remains forever intolerable to all men whom God
has made. Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms,
Revolts of Three Days? The times, if we will consider them,
are really unexampled.
[…]
Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in
his finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and
to walk thereon. To learn, or to be taught, what work he
actually was able for; and then, by permission, persuasion, and
even compulsion, to set about doing of the same! That is his
true blessedness, honour, 'liberty' and maximum of wellbeing: if
liberty be not that, I for one have small care about liberty.
You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices; you
violate his liberty, you that are wise; and keep him, were it in
strait-waistcoats, away from the precipices! Every stupid, every
cowardly and foolish man is but a less palpable madman: his true
liberty were that a wiser man, that any and every wiser man,
could, by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharper way,
lay hold of him when he was going wrong, and order and compel him
to go a little righter. O if thou really art my _Senior,_
Seigneur, my _Elder,_ Presbyter or Priest,--if thou art in very
deed my Wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to
'conquer' me, to command me! If thou do know better than I what
is good and right, I conjure thee in the name of God, force me to
do it; were it by never such brass collars, whips and handcuffs,
leave me not to walk over precipices! That I have been called,
by all the Newspapers, a 'free man' will avail me little, if my
pilgrimage have ended in death and wreck. O that the Newspapers
had called me slave, coward, fool, or what it pleased their sweet
voices to name me, and I had attained not death, but life!-Liberty requires new definitions.
A conscious abhorrence and intolerance of Folly, of Baseness;
Stupidity, Poltroonery and all that brood of things, dwells deep
in some men: still deeper in others an unconscious abhorrence
and intolerance, clothed moreover by the beneficent Supreme
Powers in what stout appetites, energies, egoisms so-called, are
suitable to it;--these latter are your Conquerors, Romans,
Normans Russians, Indo-English; Founders of what we call
Aristocracies: Which indeed have they not the most 'divine
right' to found;--being themselves very truly [greek], BRAVEST,
BEST; and conquering generally a confused rabble of WORST, or at
lowest; clearly enough, of WORSE? I think their divine right,
tried, with affirmatory verdict, in the greatest Law-Court known
to me, was good! A class of men who are dreadfully exclaimed
against by Dryasdust; of whom nevertheless beneficent Nature has
oftentimes had need; and may, alas, again have need.
From Book IV. Horoscope. Captains of Industry
If I believed that Mammonism with its adjuncts was to continue
henceforth the one serious principle of our existence, I should
reckon it idle to solicit remedial measures from any Government,
the disease being insusceptible of remedy. Government can do
much, but it can in no wise do all. Government, as the most
conspicuous object in Society, is called upon to give signal of
what shall be done; and, in many ways, to preside over, further,
and command the doing of it. But the Government cannot do, by
all its signalling and commanding, what the Society is radically
indisposed to do.--In the long-run every Government is the exact
symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to
say, Like People like Government.--The main substance of this
immense Problem of Organising Labour, and first of all of
Managing the Working Classes, will, it is very clear, have to be
solved by those who stand practically in the middle of it; by
those who themselves work and preside over work. Of all that can
be enacted by any Parliament in regard to it, the germs must
already lie potentially extant in those two Classes, who are to
obey such enactment. A Human Chaos in which there is no light,
you vainly attempt to irradiate by light shed on it: order never
can arise there.
But it is my firm conviction that the 'Hell of England' will
_cease_ to be that of 'not making money;' that we shall get a
nobler Hell and a nobler Heaven! I anticipate light _in_ the
Human Chaos, glimmering, shining more and more; under manifold
true signals from without That light shall shine. Our deity no
longer being Mammon,--O Heavens, each man will then say to
himself: "Why such deadly haste to make money? I shall not go
to Hell, even if I do not make money! There is another Hell, I
am told!" Competition, at railway-speed, in all branches of
commerce and work will then abate:--good felt-hats for the head,
in every sense, instead of seven-feet lath-and-plaster hats on
wheels, will then be discoverable! Bubble-periods, with their
panics and commercial crises, will again become infrequent;
steady modest industry will take the place of gambling
speculation. To be a noble Master, among noble Workers, will
again be the first ambition with some few; to be a rich Master
only the second. How the Inventive Genius of England, with the
whirr of its bobbins and billy-rollers shoved somewhat into the
backgrounds of the brain, will contrive and devise, not cheaper
produce exclusively, but fairer distribution of the produce at
its present cheapness! By degrees, we shall again have a Society
with something of Heroism in it, something of Heaven's Blessing
on it; we shall again have, as my German friend asserts,
'instead of Mammon-Feudalism with unsold cotton-shirts and
Preservation of the Game, noble just Industrialism and Government
by the Wisest!'
It is with the hope of awakening here and there a British man to
know himself for a man and divine soul, that a few words of
parting admonition, to all persons to whom the Heavenly Powers
have lent power of any kind in this land, may now be addressed.
And first to those same Master-Workers, Leaders of Industry; who
stand nearest, and in fact powerfulest, though not most
prominent, being as yet in too many senses a Virtuality rather
than an Actuality.
The Leaders of Industry, if Industry is ever to be led, are
virtually the Captains of the World; if there be no nobleness in
them, there will never be an Aristocracy more. But let the
Captains of Industry consider: once again, are they born of
other clay than the old Captains of Slaughter; doomed forever to
be no Chivalry, but a mere gold-plated _Doggery,_--what the
French well name _Canaille,_ 'Doggery' with more or less gold
carrion at its disposal? Captains of Industry are the true
Fighters, henceforth recognisable as the only true ones:
Fighters against Chaos, Necessity and the Devils and Jotuns; and
lead on Mankind in that great, and alone true, and universal
warfare; the stars in their courses fighting for them, and all
Heaven and all Earth saying audibly, Well-done! Let the Captains
of Industry retire into their own hearts, and ask solemnly, If
there is nothing but vulturous hunger, for fine wines, valet
reputation and gilt carriages, discoverable there? Of hearts
made by the Almighty God.
I will not believe such a thing. Deep-hidden under wretchedest
god-forgetting Cants, Epicurisms, Dead-Sea Apisms; forgotten as
under foulest fat Lethe mud and weeds, there is yet, in all
hearts born into this God's-World, a spark of the Godlike
slumbering. Awake, O nightmare sleepers; awake, arise, or be
forever fallen! This is not playhouse poetry; it is sober fact.
Our England, our world cannot live as it is. It will connect
itself with a God again, or go down with nameless throes and
fire-consummation to the Devils. Thou who feelest aught of such
a Godlike stirring in thee, any faintest intimation of it as
through heavy-laden dreams, follow it, I conjure thee. Arise,
save thyself, be one of those that save thy country.
Bucaniers, Chactaw Indians, whose supreme aim in fighting is that
they may get the scalps, the money, that they may amass scalps
and money: out of such came no Chivalry, and never will! Out of
such came only gore and wreck, infernal rage and misery;
desperation quenched in annihilation. Behold it, I bid thee,
behold there, and consider! What is it that thou have a hundred
thousand-pound bills laid up in thy strong-room, a hundred scalps
hung up in thy wigwam? I value not them or thee. Thy scalps and
thy thousand-pound bills are as yet nothing, if no nobleness from
within irradiate them; if no Chivalry, in action, or in embryo
ever struggling towards birth and action, be there.
Love of men cannot be bought by cash-payment; and without love,
men cannot endure to be together. You cannot lead a Fighting
World without having it regimented, chivalried: the thing, in a
day, becomes impossible; all men in it, the highest at first,
the very lowest at last, discern consciously, or by a noble
instinct, this necessity. And can you any more continue to lead
a Working World unregimented, anarchic? I answer, and the
Heavens and Earth are now answering, No! The thing becomes not
'in a day' impossible; but in some two generations it does.
Yes, when fathers and mothers, in Stockport hunger-cellars, begin
to eat their children, and Irish widows have to prove their
relationship by dying of typhus-fever; and amid Governing
'Corporations of the Best and Bravest,' busy to preserve their
game by 'bushing,' dark millions of God's human creatures start
up in mad Chartisms, impracticable Sacred-Months, and Manchester
Insurrections;--and there is a virtual Industrial Aristocracy as
yet only half-alive, spellbound amid money-bags and ledgers; and
an actual Idle Aristocracy seemingly near dead in somnolent
delusions, in trespasses and double-barrels; 'sliding,' as on
inclined-planes, which every new year they _soap_ with new
Hansard's-jargon under God's sky, and so are 'sliding' ever
faster, towards a 'scale' and balance-scale whereon is written
_Thou art found Wanting:_--in such days, after a generation or
two, I say, it does become, even to the low and simple, very
palpably impossible! No Working World, any more than a Fighting
World, can be led on without a noble Chivalry of Work, and laws
and fixed rules which follow out of that,--far nobler than any
Chivalry of Fighting was. As an anarchic multitude on mere
Supply-and-demand, it is becoming inevitable that we dwindle in
horrid suicidal convulsion, and self-abrasion, frightful to the
imagination, into _Chactaw_ Workers. With wigwam and scalps,-with palaces and thousand-pound bills; with savagery,
depopulation, chaotic desolation! Good Heavens, will not one
French Revolution and Reign of Terror suffice us, but must there
be two? There will be two if needed; there will be twenty if
needed; there will be precisely as many as are needed. The Laws
of Nature will have themselves fulfilled. That is a thing
certain to me.
Your gallant battle-hosts and work-hosts, as the others did, will
need to be made loyally yours; they must and will be regulated,
methodically secured in their just share of conquest under you;-joined with you in veritable brotherhood, sonhood, by quite other
and deeper ties than those of temporary day's wages! How would
mere redcoated regiments, to say nothing of chivalries, fight for
you, if you could discharge them on the evening of the battle, on
payment of the stipulated shillings,--and they discharge you on
the morning of it! Chelsea Hospitals, pensions, promotions,
rigorous lasting covenant on the one side and on the other, are
indispensable even for a hired fighter. The Feudal Baron, much
more,--how could he subsist with mere temporary mercenaries round
him, at sixpence a day; ready to go over to the other side, if
sevenpence were offered? He could not have subsisted;--and his
noble instinct saved him from the necessity of even trying! The
Feudal Baron had a Man's Soul in him;
Sonnets from the Portuguese
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
XXII
When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curved point,--what bitter wrong
Can the earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think! In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Beloved,--where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.
XLIII
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
The Lady of Shalott (1833)
Part the First.
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro' the field the road runs by
To many-tower'd Camelot;
The yellow-leaved waterlily
The green-sheathed daffodilly
Tremble in the water chilly
Round about Shalott.
Willows whiten, aspens shiver.
The sunbeam showers break and quiver
In the stream that runneth ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.
Four gray walls, and four gray towers
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
The Lady of Shalott.
Underneath the bearded barley,
The reaper, reaping late and early,
Hears her ever chanting cheerly,
Like an angel, singing clearly,
O'er the stream of Camelot.
Piling the sheaves in furrows airy,
Beneath the moon, the reaper weary
Listening whispers, ' 'Tis the fairy,
Lady of Shalott.'
The little isle is all inrail'd
With a rose-fence, and overtrail'd
With roses: by the marge unhail'd
The shallop flitteth silken sail'd,
Skimming down to Camelot.
A pearl garland winds her head:
She leaneth on a velvet bed,
Full royally apparelled,
The Lady of Shalott.
[edit] Part the Second.
No time hath she to sport and play:
A charmed web she weaves alway.
A curse is on her, if she stay
Her weaving, either night or day,
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be;
Therefore she weaveth steadily,
Therefore no other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.
She lives with little joy or fear.
Over the water, running near,
The sheepbell tinkles in her ear.
Before her hangs a mirror clear,
Reflecting tower'd Camelot.
And as the mazy web she whirls,
She sees the surly village churls,
And the red cloaks of market girls
Pass onward from Shalott.
Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,
An abbot on an ambling pad,
Sometimes a curly shepherd lad,
Or long-hair'd page in crimson clad,
Goes by to tower'd Camelot:
And sometimes thro' the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two:
She hath no loyal knight and true,
The Lady of Shalott.
But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror's magic sights,
For often thro' the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights
And music, came from Camelot:
Or when the moon was overhead
Came two young lovers lately wed;
`I am half sick of shadows,' said
The Lady of Shalott.
[edit] Part the Third.
A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,
He rode between the barley-sheaves,
The sun came dazzling thro' the leaves,
And flam'd upon the brazen greaves
Of bold Sir Lancelot.
A red-cross knight for ever kneel'd
To a lady in his shield,
That sparkled on the yellow field,
Beside remote Shalott.
The gemmy bridle glitter'd free,
Like to some branch of stars we see
Hung in the golden Galaxy.
The bridle bells rang merrily
As he rode down from Camelot:
And from his blazon'd baldric slung
A mighty silver bugle hung,
And as he rode his arm our rung,
Beside remote Shalott.
All in the blue unclouded weather
Thick-jewell'd shone the saddle-leather,
The helmet and the helmet-feather
Burn'd like one burning flame together,
As he rode down from Camelot.
As often thro' the purple night,
Below the starry clusters bright,
Some bearded meteor, trailing light,
Moves over green Shalott.
His broad clear brow in sunlight glow'd;
On burnish'd hooves his war-horse trode;
From underneath his helmet flow'd
His coal-black curls as on he rode,
As he rode down from Camelot.
From the bank and from the river
He flash'd into the crystal mirror,
'Tirra lirra, tirra lirra:'
Sang Sir Lancelot.
She left the web, she left the loom
She made three paces thro' the room
She saw the water-flower bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look'd down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
'The curse is come upon me,' cried
The Lady of Shalott.
[edit] Part the Fourth.
In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
Over tower'd Camelot;
Outside the isle a shallow boat
Beneath a willow lay afloat,
Below the carven stern she wrote,
The Lady of Shalott.
A cloudwhite crown of pearl she dight,
All raimented in snowy white
That loosely flew (her zone in sight
Clasp'd with one blinding diamond bright)
Her wide eyes fix'd on Camelot,
Though the squally east-wind keenly
Blew, with folded arms serenely
By the water stood the queenly
Lady of Shalott.
With a steady stony glance-Like some bold seer in a trance,
Beholding all his own mischance,
Mute, with a glassy countenance-She look'd down to Camelot.
It was the closing of the day:
She loos'd the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott.
As when to sailors while they roam,
By creeks and outfalls far from home,
Rising and dropping with the foam,
From dying swans wild warblings come,
Blown shoreward; so to Camelot
Still as the boathead wound along
The willowy hills and fields among,
They heard her chanting her deathsong,
The Lady of Shalott.
A longdrawn carol, mournful, holy,
She chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her eyes were darken'd wholly,
And her smooth face sharpen'd slowly,
Turn'd to tower'd Camelot:
For ere she reach'd upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.
Under tower and balcony,
By garden wall and gallery,
A pale, pale corpse she floated by,
Deadcold, between the houses high,
Dead into tower'd Camelot.
Knight and burgher, lord and dame,
To the planked wharfage came:
Below the stern they read her name,
The Lady of Shalott.
They cross'd themselves, their stars they blest,
Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest.
There lay a parchment on her breast,
That puzzled more than all the rest,
The wellfed wits at Camelot.
'The web was woven curiously,
The charm is broken utterly,
Draw near and fear not,--this is I,
The Lady of Shalott.'
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldiers knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!