Distress and Degradation. We may say, that he who has not known those

things, and learned from them the priceless lessons they have to teach, has
missed a good opportunity of schooling. To beg, and go barefoot, in coarse

woollen cloak with a rope round your loins, and be despised of all the
world, was no beautiful business;--nor an honorable one in any eye, till

the nobleness of those who did so had made it honored of some!
Begging is not in our course at the present time: but for the rest of it,

who will say that a Johnson is not perhaps the better for being poor? It
is needful for him, at all rates, to know that outward profit, that success

of any kind is _not_ the goal he has to aim at. Pride, vanity,
ill-conditioned egoism of all sorts, are bred in his heart, as in every

heart; need, above all, to be cast out of his heart,--to be, with whatever
pangs, torn out of it, cast forth from it, as a thing worthless. Byron,

born rich and noble, made out even less than Burns, poor and plebeian. Who
knows but, in that same "best possible organization" as yet far off,

Poverty may still enter as an important element? What if our Men of
Letters, men setting up to be Spiritual Heroes, were still _then_, as they

now are, a kind of "involuntary monastic order;" bound still to this same
ugly Poverty,--till they had tried what was in it too, till they had

learned to make it too do for them! Money, in truth, can do much, but it
cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there; and

even spurn it back, when it wishes to get farther.
Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season for them, the fit

assigner of them, all settled,--how is the Burns to be recognized that
merits these? He must pass through the ordeal, and prove himself. _This_

ordeal; this wild welter of a chaos which is called Literary Life: this
too is a kind of ordeal! There is clear truth in the idea that a struggle

from the lower classes of society, towards the upper regions and rewards of
society, must ever continue. Strong men are born there, who ought to stand

elsewhere than there. The manifold, inextricably complex, universal
struggle of these constitutes, and must constitute, what is called the

progress of society. For Men of Letters, as for all other sorts of men.
How to regulate that struggle? There is the whole question. To leave it

as it is, at the mercy of blind Chance; a whirl of distracted atoms, one
cancelling the other; one of the thousand arriving saved, nine hundred and

ninety-nine lost by the way; your royal Johnson languishinginactive in
garrets, or harnessed to the yoke of Printer Cave; your Burns dying

broken-hearted as a Gauger; your Rousseau driven into mad exasperation,
kindling French Revolutions by his paradoxes: this, as we said, is clearly

enough the _worst_ regulation. The _best_, alas, is far from us!
And yet there can be no doubt but it is coming; advancing on us, as yet

hidden in the bosom of centuries: this is a prophecy one can risk. For so
soon as men get to discern the importance of a thing, they do infallibly

set about arranging it, facilitating, forwarding it; and rest not till, in
some approximate degree, they have accomplished that. I say, of all

Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Governing Classes at present extant in the
world, there is no class comparable for importance to that Priesthood of

the Writers of Books. This is a fact which he who runs may read,--and draw
inferences from. "Literature will take care of itself," answered Mr. Pitt,

when applied to for some help for Burns. "Yes," adds Mr. Southey, "it will
take care of itself; _and of you too_, if you do not look to it!"

The result to individual Men of Letters is not the momentous one; they are
but individuals, an infinitesimal fraction of the great body; they can

struggle on, and live or else die, as they have been wont. But it deeply
concerns the whole society, whether it will set its _light_ on high places,

to walk thereby; or trample it under foot, and scatter it in all ways of
wild waste (not without conflagration), as heretofore! Light is the one

thing wanted for the world. Put wisdom in the head of the world, the world
will fight its battle victoriously, and be the best world man can make it.

I called this anomaly of a disorganic Literary Class the heart of all other
anomalies, at once product and parent; some good arrangement for that would

be as the _punctum saliens_ of a new vitality and just arrangement for all.
Already, in some European countries, in France, in Prussia, one traces some

beginnings of an arrangement for the Literary Class; indicating the gradual
possibility of such. I believe that it is possible; that it will have to

be possible.
By far the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese is one on which

we cannot arrive at clearness, but which excites endless curiosity even in
the dim state: this namely, that they do attempt to make their Men of

Letters their Governors! It would be rash to say, one understood how this
was done, or with what degree of success it was done. All such things must

be very unsuccessful; yet a small degree of success is precious; the very
attempt how precious! There does seem to be, all over China, a more or

less active search everywhere to discover the men of talent that grow up in
the young generation. Schools there are for every one: a foolish sort of

training, yet still a sort. The youths who distinguish themselves in the
lower school are promoted into favorable stations in the higher, that they

may still more distinguish themselves,--forward and forward: it appears to
be out of these that the Official Persons, and incipient Governors, are

taken. These are they whom they _try_ first, whether they can govern or
not. And surely with the best hope: for they are the men that have

already shown intellect. Try them: they have not governed or administered
as yet; perhaps they cannot; but there is no doubt they _have_ some

Understanding,--without which no man can! Neither is Understanding a
_tool_, as we are too apt to figure; "it is a _hand_ which can handle any

tool." Try these men: they are of all others the best worth
trying.--Surely there is no kind of government, constitution, revolution,

social apparatus or arrangement, that I know of in this world, so promising
to one's scientificcuriosity as this. The man of intellect at the top of

affairs: this is the aim of all constitutions and revolutions, if they
have any aim. For the man of true intellect, as I assert and believe

always, is the noble-hearted man withal, the true, just, humane and valiant
man. Get him for governor, all is got; fail to get him, though you had

Constitutions plentiful as blackberries, and a Parliament in every village,
there is nothing yet got!--

These things look strange, truly; and are not such as we commonly speculate
upon. But we are fallen into strange times; these things will require to

be speculated upon; to be rendered practicable, to be in some way put in
practice. These, and many others. On all hands of us, there is the

announcement, audible enough, that the old Empire of Routine has ended;
that to say a thing has long been, is no reason for its continuing to be.

The things which have been are fallen into decay, are fallen into
incompetence; large masses of mankind, in every society of our Europe, are

no longer capable of living at all by the things which have been. When
millions of men can no longer by their utmostexertion gain food for

themselves, and "the third man for thirty-six weeks each year is short of
third-rate potatoes," the things which have been must decidedly prepare to

alter themselves!--I will now quit this of the organization of Men of
Letters.

Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest on those Literary Heroes of ours was
not the want of organization for Men of Letters, but a far deeper one; out

of which, indeed, this and so many other evils for the Literary Man, and
for all men, had, as from their fountain, taken rise. That our Hero as Man

of Letters had to travel without highway, companionless, through an
inorganic chaos,--and to leave his own life and faculty lying there, as a

partial contribution towards _pushing_ some highway through it: this, had
not his faculty itself been so perverted and paralyzed, he might have put

up with, might have considered to be but the common lot of Heroes. His
fatal misery was the _spiritualparalysis_, so we may name it, of the Age

in which his life lay; whereby his life too, do what he might, was half
paralyzed! The Eighteenth was a _Sceptical_ Century; in which little word

there is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries. Scepticism means not
intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of infidelity,

insincerity, spiritualparalysis. Perhaps, in few centuries that one could
specify since the world began, was a life of Heroism more difficult for a

man. That was not an age of Faith,--an age of Heroes! The very
possibility of Heroism had been, as it were, formally abnegated in the

minds of all. Heroism was gone forever; Triviality, Formulism and
Commonplace were come forever. The "age of miracles" had been, or perhaps

had not been; but it was not any longer. An effete world; wherein Wonder,
Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell;--in one word, a godless world!

How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time,--compared not
with the Christian Shakspeares and Miltons, but with the old Pagan Skalds,

with any species of believing men! The living TREE Igdrasil, with the
melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs, deep-rooted as Hela,

has died out into the clanking of a World-MACHINE. "Tree" and "Machine:"
contrast these two things. I, for my share, declare the world to be no

machine! I say that it does _not_ go by wheel-and-pinion "motives"
self-interests, checks, balances; that there is something far other in it

than the clank of spinning-jennies, and parliamentary majorities; and, on
the whole, that it is not a machine at all!--The old Norse Heathen had a