Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/35

 Human Stupidity, wherewith, as our impatient friend com- plains, we have allowed it to be overwhelmed. We have allowed some other things to be overwhelmed! Would to Heaven that were the worst fruit we had gathered from our Unbelief and our Cant of Belief!—Our impatient friend continues:

‘I have known Nations altogether destitute of printer’s-- types and learned appliances, with nothing better than old songs, monumental stoneheaps and Quipo-thrums to keep record by, who had truer memory of their memorable things than this! Truer memory, I say: for at least the voice of their Past Heroisms, if indistinct, and all awry as to dates and statistics, was still melodious to those Nations. The body of it might be dead enough; but the soul of it, partly harmonised, put in real accordance with the “Eternal Melodies,” was alive to all hearts, and could not die. The memory of their ancient Brave Ones did not rise like a hideous huge leaden vapour, an amorphous emanation of Chaos, like a petrifying Medusa Spectre, on those poor Nations: no, but like a Heaven’s Apparition, which it was, it still stood radiant beneficent before all hearts, calling all hearts to emulate it, and the recognition of it was a Psalm and Song. These things will require to be practically meditated by and by. Is human Writing, then, the art of burying Heroisms and highest Facts in Chaos; so that no man shall henceforth contemplate them without horror and aversion, and danger of locked-jaw? What does Dryasdust consider that he was born for; that paper and ink were made for?

‘It is very notable, and leads to endless reflections, how the Greeks had their living Iliad, where we have such a deadly indescribable Cromwelliad. The old Pantheon, home of all the gods, has become a Peerage-Book,—with black and white surplice-controversies superadded, not unsuitably. The Greeks had their Homers, Hesiods, where we have our Rymers, Rush- worths, our Norroys, Garter-Kings, and Bishops Cobweb.