Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches: With Elucidations

ANTI-DRYASDUST. What and how great are the interests which connect themsel es with the hope that England may yet attain to some practical belief and understanding of its History during the Seventeenth Century, need not be insisted on at present ; such hope being still very dis- tant, very uncertain. We have wandered far away from the ideas which guided us in that Century, and indeed which had guided us in all preceding Centuries, but of which that Century was the ulti- mate manifestation : we have wandered very far ; and must endea- vour to return, and connect ourselves therewith again ! It is with other feelings than those of poor peddling Dilettantism, other aims than the writing of successful or unsuccessful Publications, that an earnest man occupies himself in those dreary provinces of the dead and buried. The last glimpse of the Godlike vanishing from this England; conviction and veracity giving place to hollow cant and formulism, — antique • Reign of God,' which all true men in their several dialects and modes have always striven for, giving place to modern Reign of the No-God, whom men name Devil : this, in its multitudinous meanings and results, is a sight to create reflections in the earnest man ! One wishes there were a History of English Puritanism, the last of all our Heroisms; but sees small prospect of such a thing at present. ' Few nobler Heroisms,' says a well-known Writer long occupied on this subject, ' at bottom perhaps no nobler Heroism ever trans- * acted itself on this Earth ; and it lies as good as lost to us ; over- 1 whelmed under such an avalanche of Human Stupidities as no * Heroism before ever did. Intrinsically and extrinsically it may * be considered inaccessible to these generations. Intrinsically, tho ' spiritual purport of it has become inconceivable, incredible to the ' modern mind. Extrinsically, the documents and records of it, ' scattered waste as a shoreless chaos, are not legible. They lie * there, printed, written, to the extent of tons and square miles, as 1 shot-rubbish; unedited, unsorted, not so much as indexed; full 'of every conceivable confusion; — yielding light to very few; 4 yielding darkness, in several sorts, to veiy many. Dull Pedantry, ' conceited idle Dilettantism, — prurient Stupidity in what shape - soever, — is darkness and not light ! There are from Thirty to ' Fifty Thousand unread Pamphlets of the Civil War in the British ' Museum alone : huge piles of mouldering wreck, wherein, at the 4 rate of perhaps one pennyweight per ton, lie things memorable. 4 They lie preserved there, waiting happier days ; under present 4 conditions they cannot, except for idle purposes, for dilettante 4 excerpts and such like, be got examined. The Rushworths, 4 Whitlockes, Nalsons, Thurloes ; enormous folios, these and many ' others have been printed, and some of them again printed, but 4 never yet edited, — edited as you edit wagonloads of broken bricks 4 and dry mortar, simply by tumbling up the wagon ! Not one of those monstrous old volumes has so much as an available Index. 4 It is the general rule of editing on this matter. If your editor 4 correct the press, it is an honourable distinction to him. ' Those dreary old records, they were compiled at first by Human Insight, in part; and in great part, by Unman Stupidity withal; — but then it was by Stupidity in a, laudable diligent state, and doing its best; which was something: — and, alas, they 4 have been successively elaborated by Human Stupidity in the 4 idle state, falling idler and idler, and only pretending to be dili- 4 gent; whereby now, for us, in these late days, they have grown 'very dim indeed! To Dryasdust Printing- Societies, and such 4 like, they afford a sorrowful kind of pabulum; but for all serious 'purposes, they are as if non-extant; might as well, if matters 4 are to rest as they are, not have been written or printed at all. 4 rial of any earthly or heavenly thing; it is a wide Spread inarti- ' eulate slumberous mumblement, issuing as if from the lake of * Eternal Sleep. Craving for oblivion, for abolition and honest 1 silence, as a blessing in comparison ! — ' This then,' continues our impatient friend, ' is the Elysium * we English have provided for our Heroes ! The Rushworthian ' Elysium. Dreariest continent of shot-rubbish the eye ever saw. 1 Confusion piled on confusion to your utmost horizon's edge : ■ obscure, in lurid twilight as of the shadow of Death ; trackless, ' without index, without finger-post, or mark of any human fore- ' goer; — where your human footstep, if you are still human, echoes * bodeful through the gaunt solitude, peopled only by somnambu- 4 lant Pedants, Dilettants, and doleful creatures, by Phantasms, ? errors, inconceivabilities, by Nightmares, pasteboard Norroys, ' griffins, wiverns, and chimeras dire ! There, all vanquished, over- ' whelmed under such waste lumber-mountains, the wreck and dead 1 ashes of some six unbelieving generations, does the Age of Crom- 4 well and his Puritans lie hidden from us. This is what we, for * our share, have been able to accomplish towards keeping our 1 Heroic Ones in memory. By way of sacred poet they have found * voluminous Dryasdust, and his Collections and Philosophical * Histories. ' To Dryasdust, who wishes merely to compile torpedo Histo- ' ries of the philosophical or other sorts, and gain immortal laurels ' for himself by writing about it and about it, all this is sport ; ' but to us who struggle piously, passionately, to behold, if but in ' glimpses, the faces of our vanished Fathers, it is death ! …