Inevitably so. You may put him to other work if you choose; but, by
the condition you have brought him into, he will dislike the other
work as much as you would yourself. You get hold of a scavenger or a
costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate Calendar for literature, and
'Pop goes the Weasel' for music. You think you can make him like Dante
and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your lessons; but if you do, you have
made a gentleman of him:--he won't like to go back to his
coster-mongering."
And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if I had time
to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot be affected by any
vice, or weakness, without expressing it, legibly, and for ever,
either in bad art, or by want of art; and that there is no national
virtue, small or great, which is not manifestly expressed in all the
art which circumstances enable the people possessing that virtue to
produce. Take, for instance, your great English virtue of enduring and
patient courage. You have at present in England only one art of any
consequence--that is, iron-working. You know thoroughly well how to
cast and hammer iron. Now, do you think, in those masses of lava which
you build volcanic cones to melt, and which you forge at the mouths of
the Infernos you have created; do you think, on those iron plates,
your courage and endurance are not written for ever,--not merely with
an iron pen, but on iron parchment? And take also your great English
vice--European vice--vice of all the world--vice of all other worlds
that roll or shine in heaven, bearing with them yet the atmosphere of
hell--the vice of jealousy, which brings competition into your
commerce, treachery into your councils, and dishonour into your
wars--that vice which has rendered for you, and for your next
neighbouring nation, the daily occupations of existence no longer
possible, but with the mail upon your breasts and the sword loose in
its sheath; so that at last, you have realized for all the multitudes
of the two great peoples who lead the so-called civilization of the
earth,--you have realized for them all, I say, in person and in
policy, what was once true only of the rough Border riders of your
Cheviot hills--
They carved at the meal
With gloves of steel,
And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd;[204] do you
think that this national shame and dastardliness of heart are not
written as legibly on every rivet of your iron armour as the strength
of the right hands that forged it?
Friends, I know not whether this thing be the more ludicrous or the
more melancholy.
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