Very notable, I say. By the genius, wants and instincts and opportunities of the one People, striving to keep themselves in mind of what was memorable, there had fashioned itself, in the effort of successive centuries, a Homer’s Iliad: by those of the other People, in successive centuries, a Collins’s Peerage improved by Sir Egerton Brydges. By their Pantheons ye shall know them! Have not we English a talent for Silence? Our very Speech and Printed-Speech, such a force of torpor dwelling in it, is properly a higher power of Silence. There is no Silence like the Speech you cannot listen to without danger of locked-jaw! Given a divine Heroism, to smother it well in human Dulness, to touch it with the mace of Death, so that no human soul shall henceforth recognise it for a Heroism, but all souls shall fly from it as from a chaotic Torpor, an Insanity and Horror,—I will back our English genius against the world in such a problem!
‘Truly we have done great things in that sort; down from Norman William all the way, and earlier: and to the English mind at this hour, the past History of England is little other than a dull dismal labyrinth, in which the English mind, if candid, will confess that it has found of knowable (meaning even conceivable), of lovable, or memorable,—next to nothing. As if we had done no brave thing at all in this Earth;—as if not Men but Nightmares had written of our History! The English, one can discern withal, have been perhaps as brave a People as their neighbours; perhaps, for Valour of Action and true hard labour in this Earth, since brave Peoples were first made in it, there has been none braver anywhere or anywhen:—but, also, it must be owned, in Stupidity of Speech they have no fellow! What can poor English Heroisms do in such case, but fall torpid into the domain of the Nightmares? For of a truth, Stupidity is strong, most strong. As the Poet Schiller sings: “Against Stupidity the very gods fight unvictorious.” There is in it an opulence of murky stagnancy, an inexhaustibility, a calm infinitude, which will baffle even the gods,—which will say calmly, “Yes, try all
