republic in America he was flung over his own frontiers for resisting
the foundation of a republic in France. So furious was the onward stride
of this new spirit that the republican of the new world lived to be the
reactionary of the old. For when France passed from theory to practice,
the question was put to the world in a way not thinkable in connection
with the prefatory experiment of a thin population on a colonial coast.
The mightiest of human monarchies, like some monstrous immeasurable idol
of iron, was melted down in a furnace barely bigger than itself, and
recast in a size equally colossal, but in a shape men could not
understand. Many, at least, could not understand it, and least of all
the liberal aristocracy of England. There were, of course, practical
reasons for a continuous foreign policy against France, whether royal or
republican. There was primarily the desire to keep any foreigner from
menacing us from the Flemish coast; there was, to a much lesser extent,
the colonial rivalry in which so much English glory had been gained by
the statesmanship of Chatham and the arms of Wolfe and of Clive. The
former reason has returned on us with a singular irony; for in order to
keep the French out of Flanders we flung ourselves with increasing
enthusiasm into a fraternity with the Germans. We purposely fed and
pampered the power which was destined in the future to devour Belgium as
France would never have devoured it, and threaten us across the sea
with terrors of which no Frenchman would ever dream. But indeed much
deeper things unified our attitude towards France before and after the
Revolution. It is but one stride from despotism to democracy, in logic
as well as in history; and oligarchy is equally remote from both. The
Bastille fell, and it seemed to an Englishman merely that a despot had
turned into a demos. The young Bonaparte rose, and it seemed to an
Englishman merely that a demos had once more turned into a despot. He
was not wrong in thinking these allotropic forms of the same alien
thing; and that thing was equality. For when millions are equally
subject to one law, it makes little difference if they are also subject
to one lawgiver; the general social life is a level. The one thing that
the English have never understood about Napoleon, in all their myriad
studies of his mysterious personality, is how impersonal he was. I had
almost said how unimportant he was. He said himself, "I shall go down to
history with my code in my hand;" but in practical effects, as distinct
from mere name and renown, it would be even truer to say that his code
will go down to history with his hand set to it in signature--somewhat
illegibly. Thus his testamentary law has broken up big estates and
encouraged contented peasants in places where his name is cursed, in
places where his name is almost unknown. In his lifetime, of course, it
was natural that the annihilating splendour of his military strokes
should rivet the eye like flashes of lightning; but his rain fell more
silently, and its refreshment remained. It is needless to repeat here
that after bursting one world-coalition after another by battles that
are the masterpieces of the military art, he was finally worn down by
two comparatively popular causes, the resistance of Russia and the
resistance of Spain. The former was largely, like so much that is
Russian, religious; but in the latter appeared most conspicuously that
which concerns us here, the valour, vigilance and high national spirit
of England in the eighteenth century. The long Spanish campaign tried
and made triumphant the great Irish soldier, afterwards known as
Wellington; who has become all the more symbolic since he was finally
confronted with Napoleon in the last defeat of the latter at Waterloo.
Wellington, though too logical to be at all English, was in many ways
typical of the aristocracy; he had irony and independence of mind. But
if we wish to realize how rigidly such men remained limited by their
class, how little they really knew what was happening in their time, it
is enough to note that Wellington seems to have thought he had dismissed
Napoleon by saying he was not really a gentleman. If an acute and
experienced Chinaman were to say of Chinese Gordon, "He is not actually
a Mandarin," we should think that the Chinese system deserved its
reputation for being both rigid and remote.
But the very name of Wellington is enough to suggest another, and with
it the reminder that this, though true, is inadequate. There was some
truth in the idea that the Englishman was never so English as when he
was outside England, and never smacked so much of the soil as when he
was on the sea. There has run through the national psychology something
that has never had a name except the eccentric and indeed extraordinary
name of Robinson Crusoe; which is all the more English for being quite
undiscoverable in England. It may be doubted if a French or German boy
especially wishes that his cornland or vineland were a desert; but many
an English boy has wished that his island were a desert island. But we
might even say that the Englishman was too insular for an island. He
awoke most to life when his island was sundered from the foundations of
the world, when it hung like a planet and flew like a bird. And, by a
contradiction, the real British army was in the navy; the boldest of the
islanders were scattered over the moving archipelago of a great fleet.
There still lay on it, like an increasing light, the legend of the
Armada; it was a great fleet full of the glory of having once been a
small one. Long before Wellington ever saw Waterloo the ships had done
their work, and shattered the French navy in the Spanish seas, leaving
like a light upon the sea the life and death of Nelson, who died with
his stars on his bosom and his heart upon his sleeve. There is no word
for the memory of Nelson except to call him mythical. The very hour of
his death, the very name of his ship, are touched with that epic
completeness which critics call the long arm of coincidence and prophets
the hand of God. His very faults and failures were heroic, not in a
loose but in a classic sense; in that he fell only like the legendary
heroes, weakened by a woman, not foiled by any foe among men. And he
remains the incarnation of a spirit in the English that is purely
poetic; so poetic that it fancies itself a thousand things, and
sometimes even fancies itself prosaic. At a recent date, in an age of
reason, in a country already calling itself dull and business-like, with
top-hats and factory chimneys already beginning to rise like towers of
funereal efficiency, this country clergyman's son moved to the last in a
luminous cloud, and acted a fairy tale. He shall remain as a lesson to
those who do not understand England, and a mystery to those who think
they do. In outward action he led his ships to victory and died upon a
foreign sea; but symbolically he established something indescribable and
intimate, something that sounds like a native proverb; he was the man
who burnt his ships, and who for ever set the Thames on fire.
XVI
ARISTOCRACY AND THE DISCONTENTS
It is the pathos of many hackneyed things that they are intrinsically
delicate and are only mechanically made dull. Any one who has seen the
first white light, when it comes in by a window, knows that daylight is
not only as beautiful but as mysterious as moonlight. It is the subtlety
of the colour of sunshine that seems to be colourless. So patriotism,
and especially English patriotism, which is vulgarized with volumes of
verbal fog and gas, is still in itself something as tenuous and tender
as a climate. The name of Nelson, with which the last chapter ended,
might very well summarize the matter; for his name is banged and beaten
about like an old tin can, while his soul had something in it of a fine
and fragile eighteenth-century vase. And it will be found that the most
threadbare things contemporary and connected with him have a real truth
to the tone and meaning of his life and time, though for us they have
too often degenerated into dead jokes. The expression "hearts of oak,"
for instance, is no unhappy phrase for the finer side of that England
of which he was the best expression. Even as a material metaphor it
covers much of what I mean; oak was by no means only made into
bludgeons, nor even only into battle-ships; and the English gentry did
not think it business-like to pretend to be mere brutes. The mere name
of oak calls back like a dream those dark but genial interiors of
colleges and country houses, in which great gentlemen, not degenerate,
almost made Latin an English language and port an English wine. Some
part of that world at least will not perish; for its autumnal glow
passed into the brush of the great English portrait-painters, who, more
than any other men, were given the power to commemorate the large
humanity of their own land; immortalizing a mood as broad and soft as
their own brush-work. Come naturally, at the right emotional angle, upon
a canvass of Gainsborough, who painted ladies like landscapes, as great
and as unconscious with repose, and you will note how subtly the artist
gives to a dress flowing in the foreground something of the divine
quality of distance. Then you will understand another faded phrase and
words spoken far away upon the sea; there will rise up quite fresh
before you and be borne upon a bar of music, like words you have never
heard before: "For England, home, and beauty."
When I think of these things, I have no temptation to mere grumbling at
the great gentry that waged the great war of our fathers. But indeed the
difficulty about it was something much deeper than could be dealt with
by any grumbling. It was an exclusive class, but not an exclusive life;
it was interested in all things, though not for all men. Or rather those
things it failed to include, through the limitations of this rationalist
interval between mediaeval and modern mysticism, were at least not of the
sort to shock us with superficial inhumanity. The greatest gap in their
souls, for those who think it a gap, was their complete and complacent
paganism. All their very decencies assumed that the old faith was dead;
those who held it still, like the great Johnson, were considered
eccentrics. The French Revolution was a riot that broke up the very
formal funeral of Christianity; and was followed by various other
complications, including the corpse coming to life. But the scepticism
was no mere oligarchic orgy; it was not confined to the Hell-Fire Club;
which might in virtue of its vivid name be regarded as relatively
orthodox. It is present in the mildest middle-class atmosphere; as in
the middle-class masterpiece about "Northanger Abbey," where we actually
remember it is an antiquity, without ever remembering it is an abbey.
Indeed there is no clearer case of it than what can only be called the
atheism of Jane Austen.
Unfortunately it could truly be said of the English gentleman, as of
another gallant and gracious individual, that his honour stood rooted in
dishonour. He was, indeed, somewhat in the position of such an
aristocrat in a romance, whose splendour has the dark spot of a secret
and a sort of blackmail. There was, to begin with, an uncomfortable
paradox in the tale of his pedigree. Many heroes have claimed to be
descended from the gods, from beings greater than themselves; but he
himself was far more heroic than his ancestors. His glory did not come
from the Crusades but from the Great Pillage. His fathers had not come
over with William the Conqueror, but only assisted, in a somewhat
shuffling manner, at the coming over of William of Orange. His own
exploits were often really romantic, in the cities of the Indian sultans
or the war of the wooden ships; it was the exploits of the far-off
founders of his family that were painfully realistic. In this the great
gentry were more in the position of Napoleonic marshals than of Norman
knights, but their position was worse; for the marshals might be
descended from peasants and shopkeepers; but the oligarchs were
descended from usurers and thieves. That, for good or evil, was the
paradox of England; the typical aristocrat was the typical upstart.
But the secret was worse; not only was such a family founded on
stealing, but the family was stealing still. It is a grim truth that all
through the eighteenth century, all through the great Whig speeches
about liberty, all through the great Tory speeches about patriotism,
through the period of Wandewash and Plassy, through the period of
Trafalgar and Waterloo, one process was steadily going on in the central
senate of the nation. Parliament was passing bill after bill for the
enclosure, by the great landlords, of such of the common lands as had
survived out of the great communal system of the Middle Ages. It is much
more than a pun, it is the prime political irony of our history, that
the Commons were destroying the commons. The very word "common," as we
have before noted, lost its great moral meaning, and became a mere
topographical term for some remaining scrap of scrub or heath that was
not worth stealing. In the eighteenth century these last and lingering
commons were connected only with stories about highwaymen, which still
linger in our literature. The romance of them was a romance of robbers;
but not of the real robbers.
This was the mysterious sin of the English squires, that they remained
human, and yet ruined humanity all around them. Their own ideal, nay
their own reality of life, was really more generous and genial than the
stiff savagery of Puritan captains and Prussian nobles; but the land
withered under their smile as under an alien frown. Being still at least
English, they were still in their way good-natured; but their position
was false, and a false position forces the good-natured into brutality.
The French Revolution was the challenge that really revealed to the
Whigs that they must make up their minds to be really democrats or admit
that they were really aristocrats. They decided, as in the case of their
philosophic exponent Burke, to be really aristocrats; and the result
was the White Terror, the period of Anti-Jacobin repression which
revealed the real side of their sympathies more than any stricken fields
in foreign lands. Cobbett, the last and greatest of the yeomen, of the
small farming class which the great estates were devouring daily, was
thrown into prison merely for protesting against the flogging of English
soldiers by German mercenaries. In that savage dispersal of a peaceful
meeting which was called the Massacre of Peterloo, English soldiers were
indeed employed, though much more in the spirit of German ones. And it
is one of the bitter satires that cling to the very continuity of our
history, that such suppression of the old yeoman spirit was the work of
soldiers who still bore the title of the Yeomanry.
The name of Cobbett is very important here; indeed it is generally
ignored because it is important. Cobbett was the one man who saw the
tendency of the time as a whole, and challenged it as a whole;
consequently he went without support. It is a mark of our whole modern
history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet
by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this
time that the Party System has been popular only in the same sense that
a football match is popular. The division in Cobbett's time was slightly
more sincere, but almost as superficial; it was a difference of
sentiment about externals which divided the old agricultural gentry of
the eighteenth century from the new mercantile gentry of the
nineteenth. Through the first half of the nineteenth century there were
some real disputes between the squire and the merchant. The merchant
became converted to the important economic thesis of Free Trade, and
accused the squire of starving the poor by dear bread to keep up his
agrarian privilege. Later the squire retorted not ineffectively by
accusing the merchant of brutalizing the poor by overworking them in his
factories to keep up his commercial success. The passing of the Factory
Acts was a confession of the cruelty that underlay the new industrial
experiments, just as the Repeal of the Corn Laws was a confession of the
comparative weakness and unpopularity of the squires, who had destroyed
the last remnants of any peasantry that might have defended the field
against the factory. These relatively real disputes would bring us to
the middle of the Victorian era. But long before the beginning of the
Victorian era, Cobbett had seen and said that the disputes were only
relatively real. Or rather he would have said, in his more robust
fashion, that they were not real at all. He would have said that the
agricultural pot and the industrial kettle were calling each other
black, when they had both been blackened in the same kitchen. And he
would have been substantially right; for the great industrial disciple
of the kettle, James Watt (who learnt from it the lesson of the steam
engine), was typical of the age in this, that he found the old Trade
Guilds too fallen, unfashionable and out of touch with the times to help
his discovery, so that he had recourse to the rich minority which had
warred on and weakened those Guilds since the Reformation. There was no
prosperous peasant's pot, such as Henry of Navarre invoked, to enter
into alliance with the kettle. In other words, there was in the strict
sense of the word no commonwealth, because wealth, though more and more
wealthy, was less and less common. Whether it be a credit or discredit,
industrial science and enterprise were in bulk a new experiment of the
old oligarchy; and the old oligarchy had always been ready for new
experiments--beginning with the Reformation. And it is characteristic of
the clear mind which was hidden from many by the hot temper of Cobbett,
that he did see the Reformation as the root of both squirearchy and
industrialism, and called on the people to break away from both. The
people made more effort to do so than is commonly realized. There are
many silences in our somewhat snobbish history; and when the educated
class can easily suppress a revolt, they can still more easily suppress
the record of it. It was so with some of the chief features of that
great mediaeval revolution the failure of which, or rather the betrayal
of which, was the real turning-point of our history. It was so with the
revolts against the religious policy of Henry VIII.; and it was so with
the rick-burning and frame-breaking riots of Cobbett's epoch. The real
mob reappeared for a moment in our history, for just long enough to show
one of the immortal marks of the real mob--ritualism. There is nothing
that strikes the undemocratic doctrinaire so sharply about direct
democratic action as the vanity or mummery of the things done seriously
in the daylight; they astonish him by being as unpractical as a poem or
a prayer. The French Revolutionists stormed an empty prison merely
because it was large and solid and difficult to storm, and therefore
symbolic of the mighty monarchical machinery of which it had been but
the shed. The English rioters laboriously broke in pieces a parish
grindstone, merely because it was large and solid and difficult to
break, and therefore symbolic of the mighty oligarchical machinery which
perpetually ground the faces of the poor. They also put the oppressive
agent of some landlord in a cart and escorted him round the county,
merely to exhibit his horrible personality to heaven and earth.
Afterwards they let him go, which marks perhaps, for good or evil, a
certain national modification of the movement. There is something very
typical of an English revolution in having the tumbril without the
guillotine.
Anyhow, these embers of the revolutionary epoch were trodden out very
brutally; the grindstone continued (and continues) to grind in the
scriptural fashion above referred to, and, in most political crises
since, it is the crowd that has found itself in the cart. But, of
course, both the riot and repression in England were but shadows of the
awful revolt and vengeance which crowned the parallel process in
Ireland. Here the terrorism, which was but a temporary and desperate
tool of the aristocrats in England (not being, to do them justice, at
all consonant to their temperament, which had neither the cruelty and
morbidity nor the logic and fixity of terrorism), became in a more
spiritual atmosphere a flaming sword of religious and racial insanity.
Pitt, the son of Chatham, was quite unfit to fill his father's place,
unfit indeed (I cannot but think) to fill the place commonly given him
in history. But if he was wholly worthy of his immortality, his Irish
expedients, even if considered as immediately defensible, have not been
worthy of _their_ immortality. He was sincerely convinced of the
national need to raise coalition after coalition against Napoleon, by
pouring the commercial wealth then rather peculiar to England upon her
poorer Allies, and he did this with indubitable talent and pertinacity.
He was at the same time faced with a hostile Irish rebellion and a
partly or potentially hostile Irish Parliament. He broke the latter by
the most indecent bribery and the former by the most indecent brutality,
but he may well have thought himself entitled to the tyrant's plea. But
not only were his expedients those of panic, or at any rate of peril,
but (what is less clearly realized) it is the only real defence of them
that they were those of panic and peril. He was ready to emancipate
Catholics as such, for religious bigotry was not the vice of the
oligarchy; but he was not ready to emancipate Irishmen as such. He did
not really want to enlist Ireland like a recruit, but simply to disarm
Ireland like an enemy. Hence his settlement was from the first in a
false position for settling anything. The Union may have been a
necessity, but the Union was not a Union. It was not intended to be one,
and nobody has ever treated it as one. We have not only never succeeded
in making Ireland English, as Burgundy has been made French, but we have
never tried. Burgundy could boast of Corneille, though Corneille was a
Norman, but we should smile if Ireland boasted of Shakespeare. Our
vanity has involved us in a mere contradiction; we have tried to combine
identification with superiority. It is simply weak-minded to sneer at an
Irishman if he figures as an Englishman, and rail at him if he figures
as an Irishman. So the Union has never even applied English laws to
Ireland, but only coercions and concessions both specially designed for
Ireland. From Pitt's time to our own this tottering alternation has
continued; from the time when the great O'Connell, with his monster
meetings, forced our government to listen to Catholic Emancipation to
the time when the great Parnell, with his obstruction, forced it to
listen to Home Rule, our staggering equilibrium has been maintained by
blows from without. In the later nineteenth century the better sort of
special treatment began on the whole to increase. Gladstone, an
idealistic though inconsistent Liberal, rather belatedly realized that
the freedom he loved in Greece and Italy had its rights nearer home, and
may be said to have found a second youth in the gateway of the grave,
in the eloquence and emphasis of his conversion. And a statesman wearing
the opposite label (for what that is worth) had the spiritual insight to
see that Ireland, if resolved to be a nation, was even more resolved to
be a peasantry. George Wyndham, generous, imaginative, a man among
politicians, insisted that the agrarian agony of evictions, shootings,
and rack-rentings should end with the individual Irish getting, as
Parnell had put it, a grip on their farms. In more ways than one his
work rounds off almost romantically the tragedy of the rebellion against
Pitt, for Wyndham himself was of the blood of the leader of the rebels,
and he wrought the only reparation yet made for all the blood,
shamefully shed, that flowed around the fall of FitzGerald.