the presence of glory with the absence of honour. When the new
aristocracy had become normal to the nation, in the next few
generations, it produced personal types not only of aristocracy but of
chivalry. The Revolution reduced us to a country wholly governed by
gentlemen; the popular universities and schools of the Middle Ages, like
their guilds and abbeys, had been seized and turned into what they
are--factories of gentlemen, when they are not merely factories of
snobs. It is hard now to realize that what we call the Public Schools
were once undoubtedly public. By the Revolution they were already
becoming as private as they are now. But at least in the eighteenth
century there were great gentlemen in the generous, perhaps too
generous, sense now given to the title. Types not merely honest, but
rash and romantic in their honesty, remain in the record with the names
of Nelson or of Fox. We have already seen that the later reformers
defaced from fanaticism the churches which the first reformers had
defaced simply from avarice. Rather in the same way the
eighteenth-century Whigs often praised, in a spirit of pure magnanimity,
what the seventeenth-century Whigs had done in a spirit of pure
meanness. How mean was that meanness can only be estimated by realizing
that a great military hero had not even the ordinary military virtues
of loyalty to his flag or obedience to his superior officers, that he
picked his way through campaigns that have made him immortal with the
watchful spirit of a thieving camp-follower. When William landed at
Torbay on the invitation of the other Whig nobles, Churchill, as if to
add something ideal to his imitation of Iscariot, went to James with
wanton professions of love and loyalty, went forth in arms as if to
defend the country from invasion, and then calmly handed the army over
to the invader. To the finish of this work of art but few could aspire,
but in their degree all the politicians of the Revolution were upon this
ethical pattern. While they surrounded the throne of James, there was
scarcely one of them who was not in correspondence with William. When
they afterwards surrounded the throne of William, there was not one of
them who was not still in correspondence with James. It was such men who
defeated Irish Jacobitism by the treason of Limerick; it was such men
who defeated Scotch Jacobitism by the treason of Glencoe.
Thus the strange yet splendid story of eighteenth-century England is one
of greatness founded on smallness, a pyramid standing on a point. Or, to
vary the metaphor, the new mercantile oligarchy might be symbolized even
in the externals of its great sister, the mercantile oligarchy of
Venice. The solidity was all in the superstructure; the fluctuation had
been all in the foundations. The great temple of Chatham and Warren
Hastings was reared in its origins on things as unstable as water and as
fugitive as foam. It is only a fancy, of course, to connect the unstable
element with something restless and even shifty in the lords of the sea.
But there was certainly in the genesis, if not in the later generations
of our mercantile aristocracy, a thing only too mercantile; something
which had also been urged against a yet older example of that polity,
something called _Punica fides_. The great Royalist Strafford, going
disillusioned to death, had said, "Put not your trust in princes." The
great Royalist Bolingbroke may well be said to have retorted, "And least
of all in merchant princes."
Bolingbroke stands for a whole body of conviction which bulked very big
in English history, but which with the recent winding of the course of
history has gone out of sight. Yet without grasping it we cannot
understand our past, nor, I will add, our future. Curiously enough, the
best English books of the eighteenth century are crammed with it, yet
modern culture cannot see it when it is there. Dr. Johnson is full of
it; it is what he meant when he denounced minority rule in Ireland, as
well as when he said that the devil was the first Whig. Goldsmith is
full of it; it is the whole point of that fine poem "The Deserted
Village," and is set out theoretically with great lucidity and spirit in
"The Vicar of Wakefield." Swift is full of it; and found in it an
intellectual brotherhood-in-arms with Bolingbroke himself. In the time
of Queen Anne it was probably the opinion of the majority of people in
England. But it was not only in Ireland that the minority had begun to
rule.
This conviction, as brilliantly expounded by Bolingbroke, had many
aspects; perhaps the most practical was the point that one of the
virtues of a despot is distance. It is "the little tyrant of the fields"
that poisons human life. The thesis involved the truism that a good king
is not only a good thing, but perhaps the best thing. But it also
involved the paradox that even a bad king is a good king, for his
oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure on the
populace. If he is a tyrant he chiefly tortures the torturers; and
though Nero's murder of his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his
soul, it was no great loss to his empire. Bolingbroke had thus a wholly
rationalistic theory of Jacobitism. He was, in other respects, a fine
and typical eighteenth-century intellect, a free-thinking Deist, a clear
and classic writer of English. But he was also a man of adventurous
spirit and splendid political courage, and he made one last throw for
the Stuarts. It was defeated by the great Whig nobles who formed the
committee of the new regime of the gentry. And considering who it was
who defeated it, it is almost unnecessary to say that it was defeated by
a trick.
The small German prince ascended the throne, or rather was hoisted into
it like a dummy, and the great English Royalist went into exile. Twenty
years afterwards he reappears and reasserts his living and logical faith
in a popular monarchy. But it is typical of the whole detachment and
distinction of his mind that for this abstract ideal he was willing to
strengthen the heir of the king whom he had tried to exclude. He was
always a Royalist, but never a Jacobite. What he cared for was not a
royal family, but a royal office. He celebrated it in his great book
"The Patriot King," written in exile; and when he thought that George's
great-grandson was enough of a patriot, he only wished that he might be
more of a king. He made in his old age yet another attempt, with such
unpromising instruments as George III. and Lord Bute; and when these
broke in his hand he died with all the dignity of the _sed victa
Catoni_. The great commercial aristocracy grew on to its full stature.
But if we wish to realize the good and ill of its growth, there is no
better summary than this section from the first to the last of the
foiled _coups d'etat_ of Bolingbroke. In the first his policy made peace
with France, and broke the connection with Austria. In the second his
policy again made peace with France, and broke the connection with
Prussia. For in that interval the seed of the money-lending squires of
Brandenburg had waxed mighty, and had already become that prodigy which
has become so enormous a problem in Europe. By the end of this epoch
Chatham, who incarnated and even created, at least in a representative
sense, all that we call the British Empire, was at the height of his
own and his country's glory. He summarized the new England of the
Revolution in everything, especially in everything in which that
movement seems to many to be intrinsically contradictory and yet was
most corporately consistent. Thus he was a Whig, and even in some ways
what we should call a Liberal, like his son after him; but he was also
an Imperialist and what we should call a Jingo; and the Whig party was
consistently the Jingo party. He was an aristocrat, in the sense that
all our public men were then aristocrats; but he was very emphatically
what may be called a commercialist--one might almost say Carthaginian.
In this connection he has the characteristic which perhaps humanized but
was not allowed to hamper the aristocratic plan; I mean that he could
use the middle classes. It was a young soldier of middle rank, James
Wolfe, who fell gloriously driving the French out of Quebec; it was a
young clerk of the East India Company, Robert Clive, who threw open to
the English the golden gates of India. But it was precisely one of the
strong points of this eighteenth-century aristocracy that it wielded
without friction the wealthier _bourgeoisie_; it was not there that the
social cleavage was to come. He was an eloquent parliamentary orator,
and though Parliament was as narrow as a senate, it was one of great
senators. The very word recalls the roll of those noble Roman phrases
they often used, which we are right in calling classic, but wrong in
calling cold. In some ways nothing could be further from all this fine
if florid scholarship, all this princely and patrician geniality, all
this air of freedom and adventure on the sea, than the little inland
state of the stingy drill-sergeants of Potsdam, hammering mere savages
into mere soldiers. And yet the great chief of these was in some ways
like a shadow of Chatham flung across the world--the sort of shadow that
is at once an enlargement and a caricature. The English lords, whose
paganism was ennobled by patriotism, saw here something drawn out long
and thin out of their own theories. What was paganism in Chatham was
atheism in Frederick the Great. And what was in the first patriotism was
in the second something with no name but Prussianism. The cannibal
theory of a commonwealth, that it can of its nature eat other
commonwealths, had entered Christendom. Its autocracy and our own
aristocracy drew indirectly nearer together, and seemed for a time to be
wedded; but not before the great Bolingbroke had made a dying gesture,
as if to forbid the banns.
XV
THE WAR WITH THE GREAT REPUBLICS
We cannot understand the eighteenth century so long as we suppose that
rhetoric is artificial because it is artistic. We do not fall into this
folly about any of the other arts. We talk of a man picking out notes
arranged in ivory on a wooden piano "with much feeling," or of his
pouring out his soul by scraping on cat-gut after a training as careful
as an acrobat's. But we are still haunted with a prejudice that verbal
form and verbal effect must somehow be hypocritical when they are the
link between things so living as a man and a mob. We doubt the feeling
of the old-fashioned orator, because his periods are so rounded and
pointed as to convey his feeling. Now before any criticism of the
eighteenth-century worthies must be put the proviso of their perfect
artistic sincerity. Their oratory was unrhymed poetry, and it had the
humanity of poetry. It was not even unmetrical poetry; that century is
full of great phrases, often spoken on the spur of great moments, which
have in them the throb and recurrence of song, as of a man thinking to
a tune. Nelson's "In honour I gained them, in honour I will die with
them," has more rhythm than much that is called _vers libres_. Patrick
Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" might be a great line in Walt
Whitman.
It is one of the many quaint perversities of the English to pretend to
be bad speakers; but in fact the most English eighteenth-century epoch
blazed with brilliant speakers. There may have been finer writing in
France; there was no such fine speaking as in England. The Parliament
had faults enough, but it was sincere enough to be rhetorical. The
Parliament was corrupt, as it is now; though the examples of corruption
were then often really made examples, in the sense of warnings, where
they are now examples only in the sense of patterns. The Parliament was
indifferent to the constituencies, as it is now; though perhaps the
constituencies were less indifferent to the Parliament. The Parliament
was snobbish, as it is now, though perhaps more respectful to mere rank
and less to mere wealth. But the Parliament was a Parliament; it did
fulfil its name and duty by talking, and trying to talk well. It did not
merely do things because they do not bear talking about--as it does now.
It was then, to the eternal glory of our country, a great
"talking-shop," not a mere buying and selling shop for financial tips
and official places. And as with any other artist, the care the
eighteenth-century man expended on oratory is a proof of his sincerity,
not a disproof of it. An enthusiastic eulogium by Burke is as rich and
elaborate as a lover's sonnet; but it is because Burke is really
enthusiastic, like the lover. An angry sentence by Junius is as
carefully compounded as a Renascence poison; but it is because Junius is
really angry--like the poisoner. Now, nobody who has realized this
psychological truth can doubt for a moment that many of the English
aristocrats of the eighteenth century had a real enthusiasm for liberty;
their voices lift like trumpets upon the very word. Whatever their
immediate forbears may have meant, these men meant what they said when
they talked of the high memory of Hampden or the majesty of Magna Carta.
Those Patriots whom Walpole called the Boys included many who really
were patriots--or better still, who really were boys. If we prefer to
put it so, among the Whig aristocrats were many who really were Whigs;
Whigs by all the ideal definitions which identified the party with a
defence of law against tyrants and courtiers. But if anybody deduces,
from the fact that the Whig aristocrats were Whigs, any doubt about
whether the Whig aristocrats were aristocrats, there is one practical
test and reply. It might be tested in many ways: by the game laws and
enclosure laws they passed, or by the strict code of the duel and the
definition of honour on which they all insisted. But if it be really
questioned whether I am right in calling their whole world an
aristocracy, and the very reverse of it a democracy, the true historical
test is this: that when republicanism really entered the world, they
instantly waged two great wars with it--or (if the view be preferred) it
instantly waged two great wars with them. America and France revealed
the real nature of the English Parliament. Ice may sparkle, but a real
spark will show it is only ice. So when the red fire of the Revolution
touched the frosty splendours of the Whigs, there was instantly a
hissing and a strife; a strife of the flame to melt the ice, of the
water to quench the flame.
It has been noted that one of the virtues of the aristocrats was
liberty, especially liberty among themselves. It might even be said that
one of the virtues of the aristocrats was cynicism. They were not
stuffed with our fashionable fiction, with its stiff and wooden figures
of a good man named Washington and a bad man named Boney. They at least
were aware that Washington's cause was not so obviously white nor
Napoleon's so obviously black as most books in general circulation would
indicate. They had a natural admiration for the military genius of
Washington and Napoleon; they had the most unmixed contempt for the
German Royal Family. But they were, as a class, not only against both
Washington and Napoleon, but against them both for the same reason. And
it was that they both stood for democracy.
Great injustice is done to the English aristocratic government of the
time through a failure to realize this fundamental difference,
especially in the case of America. There is a wrong-headed humour about
the English which appears especially in this, that while they often (as
in the case of Ireland) make themselves out right where they were
entirely wrong, they are easily persuaded (as in the case of America) to
make themselves out entirely wrong where there is at least a case for
their having been more or less right. George III.'s Government laid
certain taxes on the colonial community on the eastern seaboard of
America. It was certainly not self-evident, in the sense of law and
precedent, that the imperial government could not lay taxes on such
colonists. Nor were the taxes themselves of that practically oppressive
sort which rightly raise everywhere the common casuistry of revolution.
The Whig oligarchs had their faults, but utter lack of sympathy with
liberty, especially local liberty, and with their adventurous kindred
beyond the seas, was by no means one of their faults. Chatham, the great
chief of the new and very national _noblesse_, was typical of them in
being free from the faintest illiberality and irritation against the
colonies as such. He would have made them free and even favoured
colonies, if only he could have kept them as colonies. Burke, who was
then the eloquent voice of Whiggism, and was destined later to show how
wholly it was a voice of aristocracy, went of course even further. Even
North compromised; and though George III., being a fool, might himself
have refused to compromise, he had already failed to effect the
Bolingbroke scheme of the restitution of the royal power. The case for
the Americans, the real reason for calling them right in the quarrel,
was something much deeper than the quarrel. They were at issue, not with
a dead monarchy, but with a living aristocracy; they declared war on
something much finer and more formidable than poor old George.
Nevertheless, the popular tradition, especially in America, has pictured
it primarily as a duel of George III. and George Washington; and, as we
have noticed more than once, such pictures though figurative are seldom
false. King George's head was not much more useful on the throne than it
was on the sign-board of a tavern; nevertheless, the sign-board was
really a sign, and a sign of the times. It stood for a tavern that sold
not English but German beer. It stood for that side of the Whig policy
which Chatham showed when he was tolerant to America alone, but
intolerant of America when allied with France. That very wooden sign
stood, in short, for the same thing as the juncture with Frederick the
Great; it stood for that Anglo-German alliance which, at a very much
later time in history, was to turn into the world-old Teutonic Race.
Roughly and frankly speaking, we may say that America forced the
quarrel. She wished to be separate, which was to her but another phrase
for wishing to be free. She was not thinking of her wrongs as a colony,
but already of her rights as a republic. The negative effect of so small
a difference could never have changed the world, without the positive
effect of a great ideal, one may say of a great new religion. The real
case for the colonists is that they felt they could be something, which
they also felt, and justly, that England would not help them to be.
England would probably have allowed the colonists all sorts of
concessions and constitutional privileges; but England could not allow
the colonists equality: I do not mean equality with her, but even with
each other. Chatham might have compromised with Washington, because
Washington was a gentleman; but Chatham could hardly have conceived a
country not governed by gentlemen. Burke was apparently ready to grant
everything to America; but he would not have been ready to grant what
America eventually gained. If he had seen American democracy, he would
have been as much appalled by it as he was by French democracy, and
would always have been by any democracy. In a word, the Whigs were
liberal and even generous aristocrats, but they were aristocrats; that
is why their concessions were as vain as their conquests. We talk, with
a humiliation too rare with us, about our dubious part in the secession
of America. Whether it increase or decrease the humiliation I do not
know; but I strongly suspect that we had very little to do with it. I
believe we counted for uncommonly little in the case. We did not really
drive away the American colonists, nor were they driven. They were led
on by a light that went before.
That light came from France, like the armies of Lafayette that came to
the help of Washington. France was already in travail with the
tremendous spiritual revolution which was soon to reshape the world. Her
doctrine, disruptive and creative, was widely misunderstood at the time,
and is much misunderstood still, despite the splendid clarity of style
in which it was stated by Rousseau in the "Contrat Social," and by
Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence. Say the very word
"equality" in many modern countries, and four hundred fools will leap to
their feet at once to explain that some men can be found, on careful
examination, to be taller or handsomer than others. As if Danton had not
noticed that he was taller than Robespierre, or as if Washington was not
well aware that he was handsomer than Franklin. This is no place to
expound a philosophy; it will be enough to say in passing, by way of a
parable, that when we say that all pennies are equal, we do not mean
that they all look exactly the same. We mean that they are absolutely
equal in their one absolute character, in the most important thing about
them. It may be put practically by saying that they are coins of a
certain value, twelve of which go to a shilling. It may be put
symbolically, and even mystically, by saying that they all bear the
image of the King. And, though the most mystical, it is also the most
practical summary of equality that all men bear the image of the King of
Kings. Indeed, it is of course true that this idea had long underlain
all Christianity, even in institutions less popular in form than were,
for instance, the mob of mediaeval republics in Italy. A dogma of equal
duties implies that of equal rights. I know of no Christian authority
that would not admit that it is as wicked to murder a poor man as a rich
man, or as bad to burgle an inelegantly furnished house as a tastefully
furnished one. But the world had wandered further and further from these
truisms, and nobody in the world was further from them than the group of
the great English aristocrats. The idea of the equality of men is in
substance simply the idea of the importance of man. But it was precisely
the notion of the importance of a mere man which seemed startling and
indecent to a society whose whole romance and religion now consisted of
the importance of a gentleman. It was as if a man had walked naked into
Parliament. There is not space here to develop the moral issue in full,
but this will suffice to show that the critics concerned about the
difference in human types or talents are considerably wasting their
time. If they can understand how two coins can count the same though one
is bright and the other brown, they might perhaps understand how two men
can vote the same though one is bright and the other dull. If, however,
they are still satisfied with their solid objection that some men are
dull, I can only gravely agree with them, that some men are very dull.