The Ancien Regime

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But the mania was general. The high-born and the virtuous expected to
discover some panacea for their own consciences in what Voss calls, "A
multitude of symbols, which are ever increasing the farther you
penetrate, and are made to have a moral application through some
arbitrary twisting of their meaning, as if I were to attempt expounding
the chaos on my writing-desk."

A rich harvest-field was an aristocracy in such a humour, for quacks of
every kind; richer even than that of France, in that the Germans were at
once more honest and more earnest, and therefore to be robbed more
easily. The carcass was there: and the birds of prey were gathered
together.

Of Rosa, with his lodge of the Three Hammers, and his Potsdam
gold-making;--of Johnson, alias Leuchte, who passed himself off as a
Grand Prior sent from Scotland to resuscitate the order of Knights
Templars; who informed his disciples that the Grand Master Von Hund
commanded 26,000 men; that round the convent (what convent, does not
appear) a high wall was erected, which was guarded day and night; that
the English navy was in the hands of the Order; that they had MSS.
written by Hugo de Paganis (a mythic hero who often figures in these
fables); that their treasure was in only three places in the world, in
Ballenstadt, in the icy mountains of Savoy, and in China; that whosoever
drew on himself the displeasure of the Order, perished both body and
soul; who degraded his rival Rosa to the sound of military music, and
after having had, like every dog, his day, died in prison in the
Wartburg;--of the Rosicrucians, who were accused of wanting to support
and advance the Catholic religion--one would think the accusation was
very unnecessary, seeing that their actual dealings were with the
philosopher's stone, and the exorcism of spirits: and that the first
apostle of the new golden Rosicrucian order, one Schropfer, getting into
debt, and fearing exposure, finished his life in an altogether
un-catholic manner at Leipsic in 1774, by shooting himself;--of Keller
and his Urim and Thummim;--of Wollner (who caught the Crown Prince
Frederick William) with his three names of Chrysophiron, Heliconus, and
Ophiron, and his fourth name of Ormesus Magnus, under which all the
brethren were to offer up for him solemn prayers and intercessions;--of
Baron Heinrich von Ekker and Eckenhofen, gentleman of the bed-chamber and
counsellor of the Duke of Coburg Saalfeld, and his Jewish colleague
Hirschmann, with their Asiatic brethren and order named Ben Bicca,
Cabalistic and Talmudic; of the Illuminati, and poor Adam Weisshaupt,
Professor of Canon and National Law at Ingoldstadt in Bavaria, who set up
what he considered an Anti-Jesuitical order on a Jesuit model, with some
vague hope, according to his own showing, of "perfecting the reasoning
powers interesting to mankind, spreading the knowledge of sentiments both
humane and social, checking wicked inclinations, standing up for
oppressed and suffering virtue against all wrong, promoting the
advancement of men of merit, and in every way facilitating the
acquirement of knowledge and science;"--of this honest silly man, and his
attempts to carry out all his fine projects by calling himself Spartacus,
Bavaria Achaia, Austria Egypt, Vienna Rome, and so forth;--of Knigge, who
picked his honest brains, quarrelled with him, and then made money and
fame out of his plans, for as long as they lasted;--of Bode, the knight
of the lilies of the valley, who, having caught Duke Ernest of Saxe
Gotha, was himself caught by Knigge, and his eight, nine, or more
ascending orders of unwisdom;--and finally of the Jesuits who, really
with considerable excuses for their severity, fell upon these poor
foolish Illuminati in 1784 throughout Bavaria, and had them exiled or
imprisoned;--of all this you may read in the pages of Dr. Findel, and in
many another book. For, forgotten as they are now, they made noise
enough in their time.

And so it befell, that this eighteenth century, which is usually held to
be the most "materialistic" of epochs, was, in fact, a most
"spiritualistic" one; in which ghosts, demons, quacks, philosophers'
stones, enchanters' wands, mysteries and mummeries, were as
fashionable--as they will probably be again some day.

You have all heard of Cagliostro--"pupil of the sage Althotas, foster-
child of the Scheriff of Mecca, probable son of the last king of
Trebizond; named also Acharat, and 'Unfortunate child of Nature;' by
profession healer of diseases, abolisher of wrinkles, friend of the poor
and impotent; grand-master of the Egyptian Mason-lodge of High Science,
spirit-summoner, gold-cook, Grand-Cophta, prophet, priest, Thaumaturgic
moralist, and swindler"--born Giuseppe Balsamo of Palermo;--of him, and
of his lovely Countess Seraphina--nee Lorenza Feliciani? You have read
what Goethe--and still more important, what Mr. Carlyle has written on
him, as on one of the most significant personages of the age? Remember,
then, that Cagliostro was no isolated phenomenon; that his success--nay,
his having even conceived the possibility of success in the brain that
lay within that "brass-faced, bull-necked, thick-lipped" head--was made
possible by public opinion. Had Cagliostro lived in our time, public
opinion would have pointed out to him other roads to honour--on which he
would doubtless have fared as well. For when the silly dace try to be
caught and hope to be caught, he is a foolish pike who cannot gorge them.
But the method most easy for a pike-nature like Cagliostro's, was in the
eighteenth century, as it may be in the latter half of the nineteenth, to
trade, in a materialist age, on the unsatisfied spiritual cravings of
mankind. For what do all these phantasms betoken, but a generation
ashamed of its own materialism, sensuality, insincerity, ignorance, and
striving to escape therefrom by any and every mad superstition which
seemed likely to give an answer to the awful questions--What are we, and
where? and to lay to rest those instincts of the unseen and infinite
around it, which tormented it like ghosts by day and night: a sight
ludicrous or pathetic, according as it is looked on by a cynical or a
human spirit.

It is easy to call such a phenomenon absurd, improbable. It is rather
rational, probable, say certain to happen. Rational, I say; for the
reason of man tells him, and has always told him, that he is a
supernatural being, if by nature is meant that which is cognisable by his
five senses: that his coming into this world, his relation to it, his
exit from it--which are the three most important facts about him--are
supernatural, not to be explained by any deductions from the impressions
of his senses. And I make bold to say, that the recent discoveries of
physical science--notably those of embryology--go only to justify that
old and general belief of man. If man be told that the microscope and
scalpel show no difference, in the first stage of visible existence,
between him and the lower mammals, then he has a right to answer--as he
will answer--So much the worse for the microscope and scalpel: so much
the better for my old belief, that there is beneath my birth, life,
death, a substratum of supernatural causes, imponderable, invisible,
unknowable by any physical science whatsoever. If you cannot render me a
reason how I came hither, and what I am, I must go to those who will
render me one. And if that craving be not satisfied by a rational theory
of life, it will demand satisfaction from some magical theory; as did the
mind of the eighteenth century when, revolting from materialism, it fled
to magic, to explain the ever-astounding miracle of life.

The old Regime. Will our age, in its turn, ever be spoken of as an old
Regime? Will it ever be spoken of as a Regime at all; as an organised,
orderly system of society and polity; and not merely as a chaos, an
anarchy, a transitory struggle, of which the money-lender has been the
real guide and lord?

But at least it will be spoken of as an age of progress, of rapid
developments, of astonishing discoveries.

Are you so sure of that? There was an age of progress once. But what is
our age--what is all which has befallen since 1815--save after-swells of
that great storm, which are weakening and lulling into heavy calm? Are
we on the eve of stagnation? Of a long check to the human intellect? Of
a new Byzantine era, in which little men will discuss, and ape, the deeds
which great men did in their forefathers' days?

What progress--it is a question which some will receive with almost angry
surprise--what progress has the human mind made since 1815?

If the thought be startling, do me the great honour of taking it home,
and verifying for yourselves its truth or its falsehood. I do not say
that it is altogether true. No proposition concerning human things,
stated so broadly, can be. But see for yourselves, whether it is not at
least more true than false; whether the ideas, the discoveries, of which
we boast most in the nineteenth century, are not really due to the end of
the eighteenth. Whether other men did not labour, and we have only
entered into their labours. Whether our positivist spirit, our content
with the collecting of facts, our dread of vast theories, is not a
symptom--wholesome, prudent, modest, but still a symptom--of our
consciousness that we are not as our grandfathers were; that we can no
longer conceive great ideas, which illumine, for good or evil, the whole
mind and heart of man, and drive him on to dare and suffer desperately.

Railroads? Electric telegraphs? All honour to them in their place: but
they are not progress; they are only the fruits of past progress. No
outward and material thing is progress; no machinery causes progress; it
merely spreads and makes popular the results of progress. Progress is
inward, of the soul. And, therefore, improved constitutions, and
improved book instruction--now miscalled education--are not progress:
they are at best only fruits and signs thereof. For they are outward,
material; and progress, I say, is inward. The self-help and
self-determination of the independent soul--that is the root of progress;
and the more human beings who have that, the more progress there is in
the world. Give me a man who, though he can neither read nor write, yet
dares think for himself, and do the thing he believes: that man will help
forward the human race more than any thousand men who have read, or
written either, a thousand books apiece, but have not dared to think for
themselves. And better for his race, and better, I believe, in the sight
of God, the confusions and mistakes of that one sincere brave man, than
the second-hand and cowardly correctness of all the thousand.

As for the "triumphs of science," let us honour, with astonishment and
awe, the genius of those who invented them; but let us remember that the
things themselves are as a gun or a sword, with which we can kill our
enemy, but with which also our enemy can kill us. Like all outward and
material things, they are equally fit for good and for evil. In England
here--they have been as yet, as far as I can see, nothing but blessings:
but I have my very serious doubts whether they are likely to be blessings
to the whole human race, for many an age to come. I can conceive
them--may God avert the omen!--the instruments of a more crushing
executive centralisation, of a more utter oppression of the bodies and
souls of men, than the world has yet seen. I can conceive--may God avert
the omen!--centuries hence, some future world-ruler sitting at the
junction of all railroads, at the centre of all telegraph-wires--a world-
spider in the omphalos of his world-wide web; and smiting from thence
everything that dared to lift its head, or utter a cry of pain, with a
swiftness and surety to which the craft of a Justinian or a Philip II.
were but clumsy and impotent.

All, all outward things, be sure of it, are good or evil, exactly as far
as they are in the hands of good men or of bad.

Moreover, paradoxical as it may seem, railroads and telegraphs, instead
of inaugurating an era of progress, may possibly only retard it. "Rester
sur un grand succes," which was Rossini's advice to a young singer who
had achieved a triumph, is a maxim which the world often follows, not
only from prudence, but from necessity. They have done so much that it
seems neither prudent nor possible to do more. They will rest and be
thankful.

Thus, gunpowder and printing made rapid changes enough; but those changes
had no farther development. The new art of war, the new art of
literature, remained stationary, or rather receded and degenerated, till
the end of the eighteenth century.

And so it may be with our means of locomotion and intercommunion, and
what depends on them. The vast and unprecedented amount of capital, of
social interest, of actual human intellect invested--I may say locked
up--in these railroads, and telegraphs, and other triumphs of industry
and science, will not enter into competition against themselves. They
will not set themselves free to seek new discoveries in directions which
are often actually opposed to their own, always foreign to it. If the
money of thousands are locked up in these great works, the brains of
hundreds of thousands, and of the very shrewdest too, are equally locked
up therein likewise; and are to be subtracted from the gross material of
social development, and added (without personal fault of their owners,
who may be very good men) to the dead weight of vested selfishness,
ignorance, and dislike of change.

Yes. A Byzantine and stationary age is possible yet. Perhaps we are now
entering upon it; an age in which mankind shall be satisfied with the
"triumphs of science," and shall look merely to the greatest comfort
(call it not happiness) of the greatest number; and like the debased Jews
of old, "having found the life of their hand, be therewith content," no
matter in what mud-hole of slavery and superstition.

But one hope there is, and more than a hope--one certainty, that however
satisfied enlightened public opinion may become with the results of
science, and the progress of the human race, there will be always a more
enlightened private opinion or opinions, which will not be satisfied
therewith at all; a few men of genius, a few children of light, it may be
a few persecuted, and a few martyrs for new truths, who will wish the
world not to rest and be thankful, but to be discontented with itself,
ashamed of itself, striving and toiling upward, without present hope of
gain, till it has reached that unknown goal which Bacon saw afar off, and
like all other heroes, died in faith, not having received the promises,
but seeking still a polity which has foundations, whose builder and maker
is God.

These will be the men of science, whether physical or spiritual. Not
merely the men who utilise and apply that which is known (useful as they
plainly are), but the men who themselves discover that which was unknown,
and are generally deemed useless, if not hurtful, to their race. They
will keep the sacred lamp burning unobserved in quiet studies, while all
the world is gazing only at the gaslights flaring in the street. They
will pass that lamp on from hand to hand, modestly, almost stealthily,
till the day comes round again, when the obscure student shall be
discovered once more to be, as he has always been, the strongest man on
earth. For they follow a mistress whose footsteps may often slip, yet
never fall; for she walks forward on the eternal facts of Nature, which
are the acted will of God. A giantess she is; young indeed, but humble
as yet: cautious and modest beyond her years. She is accused of trying
to scale Olympus, by some who fancy that they have already scaled it
themselves, and will, of course, brook no rival in their fancied monopoly
of wisdom.

The accusation, I believe, is unjust. And yet science may scale Olympus
after all. Without intending it, almost without knowing it, she may find
herself hereafter upon a summit of which she never dreamed; surveying the
universe of God in the light of Him who made it and her, and remakes them
both for ever and ever. On that summit she may stand hereafter, if only
she goes on, as she goes now, in humility and in patience; doing the duty
which lies nearest her; lured along the upward road, not by ambition,
vanity, or greed, but by reverent curiosity for every new pebble, and
flower, and child, and savage, around her feet.




FOOTNOTES


{1} Mr. H. Reeve's translation of De Tocqueville's "France before the
Revolution of 1789." p. 280.