But what concerns us most is the circumstance that here too the demand is,Vocables,still vocables.In all appointed courses of activity and paved careers for human genius,and in this unpaved,unappointed,broadest career of Literature,broad way that leadeth to destruction for so many,the one duty laid upon you is still,Talk,talk.Talk well with pen or tongue,and it shall be well with you;do talk well,it shall be ill with you.To wag the tongue with dexterous acceptability,there is for human worth and faculty,in our England of the Nineteenth Century,that one method of emergence and other.Silence,you would say,means annihilation for the Englishman of the Nineteenth Century.The worth that has spoken itself,is ;or is potentially only,and as if it were .Vox is the God of this Universe.If you have human intellect,it avails hing unless you either make it into beaverism,or talk with it.Make it into beaverism,and gather money;or else make talk with it,and gather what you can.Such is everywhere the demand for talk among us:to which,of course,the supply is proportionate.
From dinners up to woolsacks and divine mitres,here in England,much may be gathered by talk;without talk,of the human sort hing.Is Society become wholly a bag of wind,then,ballasted by guineas?Are our interests in it as a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal?--In Army or Navy,when unhappily we have war on hand,there is,almost against our will,some kind of demand for certain of the silent talents.But in peace,that too passes into mere demand of the ostentations,of the pipeclays and the blank cartridges;and,--except that Naval men are occasionally,on long voyages,forced to hold their tongue,and converse with the dumb elements,and illimitable oceans,that moan and rave there without you and within you,which is a great advantage to the Naval man,--our poor United Services have to make conversational windbags and ostentational paper-lanterns of themselves,or do worse,even as the others.
My friends,must I assert,then,what surely all men k,though all men seem to have forgotten it,That in the learned professions as in the unlearned,and in human things throughout,in every place and in every time,the true function of intellect is that of talking,but of understanding and discerning with a view to performing!An intellect may easily talk too much,and perform too little.Gradually,if it get into the ious habit of talk,there will less and less performance come of it,talk being so delightfully handy in comparison with work;and at last there will work,or thought of work,be got from it at all.
Talk,except as the preparation for work,is worth almost hing;--sometimes it is worth infinitely less than hing;and becomes,little conscious of playing such a fatal part,the general summary of pretentious hingnesses,and the chief of all the curses the Posterity of Adam are liable to in this sublunary world!Would you discover the Atropos of Human Virtue;the sure Destroyer,"by painless extinction,"of Human Veracities,Performances,and Capabilities to perform or to be veracious,--it is this,you have it here.
Unwise talk is matchless in unwisdom.Unwise work,if it but persist,is everywhere struggling towards correction,and restoration to health;for it is still in contact with Nature,and all Nature incessantly contradicts it,and will heal it or annihilate it:so with unwise talk,which addresses itself,regardless of veridical Nature,to the universal suffrages;and can if it be dexterous,find harbor there till all the suffrages are bankrupt and gone to Houndsditch,Nature interfering with her protest till then.False speech,definable as the acme of unwise speech,is capable,as we already said,of becoming the falsest of all things.Falsest of all things:--and whither will the general deluge of that,in Parliament and Synagogue,in Book and Broadside,carry you and your affairs,my friend,when once they are embarked on it as ?
Parliament,Parliamentum ,is by express appointment the Talking Apparatus;yet in Parliament either is the essential function,by any means,talk.to speak your opinion well,but to have a good and just opinion worth speaking,--for every Parliament,as for every man,this latter is the point.Contrive to have a true opinion,you will get it told in some way,better or worse;and it will be a blessing to all creatures.Have a false opinion,and tell it with the tongue of Angels,what can that profit?The better you tell it,the worse it will be!
In Parliament and out of Parliament,and everywhere in this Universe,your one salvation is,That you can discern with just insight,and follow with le valor,what the law of the case before you is,what the appointment of the Maker in regard to it has been.Get this out of one man,you are saved;fail to get this out of the most August Parliament wrapt in the sheepskins of a thousand years,you are lost,--your Parliament,and you,and all your sheepskins are lost.Beautiful talk is by means the most pressing want in Parliament!We have had some reasonable modicum of talk in Parliament!What talk has done for us in Parliament,and is doing,the dullest of us at length begins to see!
Much has been said of Parliament's breeding men to business;of the training an Official Man gets in this school of argument and talk.He is here inured to patience,tolerance;sees what is what in the Nation and in the Nation's Government attains official kledge,official courtesy and manners--in short,is polished at all points into official articulation,and here better than elsewhere qualifies himself to be a Gover of men.
