Thus the "moral-sense" is transmitted through the prophetic narrator of Past and Present to the new captains of industry, transcendental authority moving downward and outward, converting anarchy into a new social order.
The dialogues of book 4 consequently pit reformed captains of industry against unreformed Bobuses rather than Carlyle against his contemporaries Instead of defending the status quo, the speakers for this new class seek to reform England, prodding the government to act, rejecting the claims of vested interests, and denouncing the belief that "there is nothing but vulturous hunger, for fine wines, valet reputation and gilt carriages" ; see , , Past and Present succeeds where Chartism had failed because it does not attempt to frame its argument within the discourse of political economy but employs the rhetoric of religion to create an opposing discourse of value.
Rather than simply providing a critique of' contemporary society, Carlyle is able to create a vision of an alternative social order. He understood that his audience had allowed its religious beliefs to be separated from its everyday life in the world of industry, and Past and Present was his most effective piece of social criticism precisely because it created a powerful and relatively coherent ethical discourse that drew on the religious rhetoric with which his audience was familiar and applied it to the circumstances of their everyday lives.
Yet Past and Present only partially succeeds in reuniting the domains of religion and economy, for it envisions an escape from the commercial world into the transcendental idyll.
It succeeds in part by making ethical discourse more powerful than the discourse of economy, but it remains powerful only in its visionary mode. At those moments when Carlyle presents his vision as a social and historical process, he turns to political force rather than religious beliefin order to achieve the transcendental idyll. Past and Present privileges material production over cultural production, the "done Work" over the "spoken Word" The "old Epics" written on paper are no "longer possible," so the English epic must be "written on the Earth's surface" , ; see ; CME , When Carlyle refers ambiguously to "[tlhis English Land," the connotations of nation and culture elide with the connotations of physical land and agriculture Instead of an expression of belief that transfuses the world and makes it an idyll, the idyll is a product of labor that literally builds a "green flowery world.
Throughout Past and Present and Carlyle's later writings, land reclamation and agriculture are the privileged forms of labor, coterminous with the aboriginal creative act, God's creation of the world in Genesis esp. The parallel with Genesis suggests that labor as creative activity continues the process through which the material world is infused with the transcendental order see PP , In the chapter entitled "Labour," Carlyle typically represents work as the transformation of a "pestilential swamp" where land and water mingle in "a green fruitful meadow with its clear-flowing stream" 0 These metaphors imply that the productions of agricultural labor-arable land-are permanent, while the productions of cultural labor — religious or literary texts — are ephemeral.
Carlyle's representations of the "Captain of Industry" owe a great deal to his enthusiasm for the men who were leading "poor starving drudges" out to found new colonies, to settle new lands CL , His support for emigration and colonization projects in Chartism and Past and Present is intimately linked to his vision of creation as the colonization of wasteland.
Drawing on his depiction of creative work as bridge-building, he describes emigration as a "bridge" to the new world, a bridge that functions as a link between the earthly and the transcendental PP , ; see CL , His writings distinguish two types of emigration, the transformation of wasteland into a paradise and the discovery of an El Dorado at the end of one's journey. The former is preferable because the process of seeking the idyll, labor, creates the idyll, whereas, in the latter case, the process of journeying only serves to defer achievement of that goal.
Discovering that their "America" is "here or nowhere," both turn to the creation of the idyll by working at "the duty which is nearest" SR, ; see WM , 2: Carlyle, who was increasingly inclined to associate writing with the endless search for the established El Dorado, contemplated going out himself to produce "bread" in one of the "waste places of However, Carlyle's depiction of the physical struggle of laborers who work to make land arable becomes subtly transformed into an argument for physically coercing laborers to engage in this activity.
The shift from cultural to agricultural production in Past and Present , like the shift from belief to the law, entails a transition from compelling belief to compelling obedience. So long as Carlyle employs the metaphor of battle only to depict the struggle of the nation as a whole to create social order, it does not imply coercion or compulsion, but when he treats it more literally as the conquest of new lands, he begins to legitimate imperialist suppression and the very commercial motivations he intended to exclude.
As Carlyle's metaphors make clear, he conceives of the captains of industry primarily as military captains fighting "the one true war" against social "anarchy" ; see Like critics of the new order from Coleridge to Tennyson, he insists that the apparent prosperity of the nation conceals the negation of a just social order, the reality of social warfare in which commerce cries, "Peace, Peace, where there is no Peace.
The captain is a "Brave Sea- captain " like Christopher Columbus who "sternly repress[es]" his mutinous crew in order to discover an idyllic America, or an architect recall the masonry metaphor like Christopher Wren who organizes "mutinous masons and Irish hodmen" , ; emphasis added. In the final analysis, the captain of industry does not resemble the medieval cleric Abbot Samson so much as the Puritan general Oliver Cromwell, whom Carlyle was to call "a strong great Captain" OCLS , - One can see in retrospect that even Samson's success depended on the use of force; rowdy knights and recalcitrant monks obeyed him not because they shared his beliefs, but because he threatened them with "bolts" of "excommunication" PP , Even these, if you count only these, will not long be left.
Let bucaniering be put far from you; alter, speedily abrogate all laws of the bucaniers, if you would gain any victory that shall endure. Let God's justice, let pity, nobleness and manly valour, with more gold-purses or with fewer, testify themselves in this your brief Life-transit to all the Eternities, the Gods and Silences. It is to you I call; for ye are not dead, ye are already half-alive: there is in you a sleepless dauntless energy, the prime-matter of all nobleness in man.
Honour to you in your kind. The future Epic of the World rests not with those that are near dead, but with those that are alive, and those that are coming into life. Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-and-demand principle: they will not; nor ought they, nor can they.
Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. To order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner. Not as a bewildered bewildering mob; but as a firm regimented mass, with real captains over them, will these men march any more. All human interests, combined human endeavours, and social growths in this world, have, at a certain stage of their development, required organising: and Work, the grandest of human interests, does now require it.
God knows, the task will be hard: but no noble task was ever easy. This task will wear away your lives, and the lives of your sons and grandsons: but for what purpose, if not for tasks like this, were lives given to men? Ye shall cease to count your thousand-pound scalps, the noble of you shall cease! Nay the very scalps, as I say, will not long be left if you count only these. Ye shall cease wholly to be barbarous vulturous Chactaws, and become noble European Nineteenth-Century Men.
Ye shall know that Mammon, in never such gigs and flunky 'respectabilities,' is not the alone God; that of himself he is but a Devil, and even a Brute-god. Yes, it will be difficult. The short-fibre cotton; that too was difficult. The waste cotton-shrub, long useless, disobedient, as the thistle by the wayside,--have ye not conquered it; made it into beautiful bandana webs; white woven shirts for men; bright-tinted air-garments wherein flit goddesses? Ye have shivered mountains asunder, made the hard iron pliant to you as soft putty: the Forest-giants, Marsh- jotuns bear sheaves of golden grain; Aegir the Sea-demon himself stretches his back for a sleek highway to you, and on Firehorses and Windhorses ye career.
Ye are most strong. Thor red-bearded, with his blue sun-eyes, with his cheery heart and strong thunder- hammer, he and you have prevailed.
Ye are most strong, ye Sons of the icy North, of the far East,--far marching from your rugged Eastern Wildernesses, hitherward from the grey Dawn of Time! Joel J. Books Journals. Disciplines History Historiography. Brattin Text , D. Past and present First published in Subjects Social problems , Social conditions , Social history , Great britain, social conditions , Literature, history and criticism. Places Great Britain. Times 19th century.
Edition Notes "Printed from a private copy, partly in manuscript, sent by the author to his friends in this country. Classifications Library of Congress HN Community Reviews 0 Feedback? Loading Related Books. Milford in English.
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