Part First of his Britannic Majesty's Sorrows, the Britannic or Domestic
Part, is now perhaps conceivable to readers. But as to the Second,
the Germanic or Pragmatic Part,--articulate History, after much
consideration, is content to renounce attempting these; feels that these
will remain forever inconceivable to mankind in the now altered times.
So small a gentleman; and he feels, dismally though with heroism, that
he has got the axis of the world on his shoulder. Poor Majesty! His
eyes, proud as Jove's, are nothing like so perspicacious; a pair of the
poorest eyes: and he has to scan with them, and unriddle under pain of
death, such a waste of insoluble intricacies, troubles and world-perils
as seldom was,--even in Dreams. In fact, it is of the nature of a long
Nightmare Dream, all this of the Pragmatic, to his poor Majesty and
Nation; and wakeful History must not spend herself upon it, beyond the
essential.
May 12th, betimes this Year, his Majesty got across to Hanover,
Harrington with him; anxious to contemplate near at hand that Camp of
the Old Dessauer's at Gottin, and the other fearful phenomena, French,
Prussian and other, in that Country. His Majesty, as natural, was much
in Germany in those Years; scanning the phenomena; a long while not
knowing what in the world to make of them. Bully Belleisle having stept
into the ring, it is evident, clear as the sun, that one must act, and
act at once; but it is a perfect sphinx-enigma to say How. Seldom
was Sovereign or man so spurred, and goaded on, by the highest
considerations; and then so held down, and chained to his place, by an
imbroglio of counter-considerations and sphinx-riddles! Thrice over, at
different dates (which shall be given), the first of them this Year, he
starts up as in spasm, determined to draw sword, and plunge in; twice
he is crushed down again, with sword half drawn; and only the third time
(in 1743) does he get sword out, and brandish it in a surprising though
useless manner. After which he feels better. But up to that crisis, his
case is really tragical,--had idle readers any bowels for him; which
they have not! One or two Fractions, snatched from the circumambient
Paper Vortex, must suffice us for the indispensable in this place:--
CUNCTATIONS, YET INCESSANT AND UBIQUITOUS ENDEAVORINGS, OF HIS BRITANNIC
MAJESTY (1741-1743).
... After the wonderful Russian Partition-Treaty, which his English
Walpoles would not hear of,--and which has produced the Camp of Gottin,
see, your Majesty!--George does nothing rashly. Far from it: indeed,
except it be paying money, he becomes again a miracle of cunctations;
and staggers about for years to come, like the--Shall we say, like the
White Hanover Horse amid half a dozen sieves of beans? Alas, no, like
the Hanover Horse with the shadows of half a dozen Damocles'-swords
dangling into the eyes of it;--enough to drive any Horse to its wit's
end!--
"To do, to dare," thinks the Britannic Majesty;--yes, and of daring
there is a plenty: but, "In which direction? What, How?" these are
questions for a fussy little gentleman called to take the world on
his shoulders. We suppose it was by Walpole's advice that he gave her
Hungarian Majesty that 200,000 pounds of Secret-Service Money;--advice
sufficiently Walpolean: "Russian Partition-Treaties; horrible to think
of;--beware of these again! Give her Majesty that cash; can be done;
it will keep matters afloat, and spoil nothing!" That, till the late
Subsidy payable within year and day hence, was all of tangible his
Majesty had yet done;--truly that is all her Hungarian Majesty has yet
got by hawking the world, Pragmatic Sanction in hand. And if that were
the bit of generosity which enabled Neipperg to climb the Mountains and
be beaten at Mollwitz, that has helped little! Very big generosities, to
a frightful cipher of Millions Sterling through the coming years, will
go the same road; and amount also to zero, even for the receiving party,
not to speak of the giving! For men and kings are wise creatures.
But wise or unwise, how great are his Britannic Majesty's activities
in this Pragmatic Business! We may say, they are prodigious, incessant,
ubiquitous. They are forgotten now, fallen wholly to the spiders and
the dust-bins;--though Friedrich himself was not a busier King in those
days, if perhaps a better directed. It is a thing wonderful to us, but
sorrowful and undeniable. We perceive the Britannic Majesty's own little
mind pulsing with this Pragmatic Matter, as the biggest volcano would
do;--shooting forth dust and smoke (subsidies, diplomatic emissaries,
treaties, offers of treaty, plans, foolish futile exertions), at an
immense rate. When the Celestial Balances are canting, a man ought
to exert himself. But as to this of saving the House of Austria from
France,--surely, your Britannic Majesty, the shortest way to that, if
that is so indispensable, were: That the House of Austria should consent
to give up its stolen goods, better late than never; and to make this
King of Prussia its friend, as he offers to be! Joined with this King,
it would manage to give account of France and its balloon projects, by
and by. Could your Britannic Majesty but take Mr. Viner's hint; and,
in the interim, mind your OWN business!--His Britannic Majesty intends
immediate fighting; and, both in England and Hanover, is making
preparation loud and great. Nay, he will in his own person fight, if
necessary, and rather likes the thought of it: he saw Oudenarde in his
young days; and, I am told, traces in himself a talent for Generalship.
Were the Britannic Majesty to draw his own puissant sword!-His own
puissant purse he has already drawn; and is subsidizing to right and
left; knocking at all doors with money in hand, and the question, "Any
fighting done here?" In England itself there goes on much drilling,
enlisting; camping, proposing to camp; which is noisy enough in the
British Newspapers, much more in the Foreign. One actual Camp there was
"on Lexden Heath near Colchester," from May till October of this 1741,
[Manifold but insignificant details about it, in the old Newspapers of
those Months.]--Camp waiting always to be shipped across to the scene
of action, but never was:--this actual Camp, and several imaginary ones
here, which were alarming to the Continental Gazetteer. In England his
Majesty is busy that way; still more among his Hanoverians, now under
his own royal eye; and among his Danes and Hessians, whom he has
now brought over into Hanover, to combine with the others. Danes and
Hessians, 6,000 of each kind, he for some time keeps back in stall, upon
subsidy, ready for such an occasion. Their "Camp at Hameln," "Camp at
Nienburg" (will, with the Hanoverians, be 30,000 odd); their swashing
and blaring about, intending to encamp at Hameln, at Nienburg, and other
places, but never doing it, or doing it with any result: this, with the
alarming English Camps at Lexden and in Dreamland, which also were void
of practical issue, filled Europe with rumor this Summer.--Eager enough
to fight; a noble martial ardor in our little Hercules-Atlas! But there
lie such enormous difficulties on the threshold; especially these Two,
which are insuperable or nearly so.
Difficulty FIRST, is that of the laggard Dutch; a People apt to be heavy
in the stern-works. They are quite languid about Pragmatic Sanction,
these Dutch; they answer his Britannic Majesty's enthusiasm with an
obese torpidity; and hope always they will drift through, in some way;
buoyant in their own fat, well ballasted astern; and not need such
swimming for life. "What a laggard notion," thinks his Majesty; "notion
in ten pair of breeches, so to speak!" This stirring up of the Dutch,
which lasts year on year, and almost beats Lord Stair, Lord Carteret,
and our chief Artists, is itself a thing like few! One of his Britannic
Majesty's great difficulties;--insuperable he never could admit it to
be. "Surely you are a Sea-Power, ye valiant Dutch; the OTHER Sea-Power?
Bound by Barrier Treaty, Treaty of Vienna, and Law of Nature itself, to
rise with us against the fatal designs of France; fatal to your Dutch
Barrier, first of all; if the Liberties of Mankind were indifferent
to you! How is it that you will not?" The Dutch cannot say how. France
rocks them in security, by oily-mouthed Diplomatists, Fenelon and
others: "Would not touch a stone of your Barrier, for the world, ye
admirable Dutch neighbors: on our honor, thrice and four times, No!"
They have an eloquent Van Hoey of their own at Paris; renowned in
Newspapers: "Nothing but friendship here!" reports Van Hoey always;
and the Dutch answer his Britannic Majesty: "Hm, rise? Well then, if we
must!"--but sit always still.
Nowhere in Political Mechanics have I seen such a Problem as this
of hoisting to their feet the heavy-bottomed Dutch. The cunningest
leverage, every sort of Diplomatic block-and-tackle, Carteret and Stair
themselves running over to help in critical seasons, is applied; to
almost no purpose. Pull long, pull strong, pull all together,--see, the
heavy Dutch do stir; some four inches of daylight fairly visible below
them: bear a hand, oh, bear a hand!--Pooh, the Dutch flap down again, as
low as ever. As low,--unless (by Diplomatic art) you have WEDGED them at
the four inches higher; which, after the first time or two, is generally
done. At the long last, partially in 1743 (upon which his Britannic
Majesty drew sword), completely in 1747, the Dutch were got to their
feet;--unfortunately good for nothing when they were! Without them his
Britannic Majesty durst not venture. Hidden in those dust-bins, there
is nothing so absurd, or which would be so wearisome, did it not at last
become slightly ludicrous, as this of hoisting the Dutch.
Difficulty SECOND, which in enormity of magnitude might be reckoned
first, as in order of time it ranks both first and last, is: The case
of dear Hanover; case involved in mere insolubilities. Our own dear
Hanover, which (were there nothing more in it) is liable, from that Camp
at Gottin, to be slit in pieces at a moment's warning! No drawing sword
against a nefarious Prussia, on those terms. The Camp at Gottin holds
George in checkmate. And then finally, in this same Autumn, 1741, when
a Maillebois with his 40 or 50,000 French (the Leftward or western of
those Two Belleisle Armies), threatening our Hanover from another side,
crossed the Lower Rhine--But let us not anticipate. The case of Hanover,
which everybody saw to be his Majesty's vulnerable point, was the
constant open door of France and her machinations, and a never-ending
theme of angry eloquences in the English Parliament as well.
So that the case of Hanover proved insoluble throughout, and was like
a perpetual running sore. Oh the pamphleteerings, the denouncings,
the complainings, satirical and elegiac, which grounded themselves
on Hanover, the CASE OF THE HANOVER FORCES, and innumerable other
Hanoverian cases, griefs and difficulties! So pungently vital to
somnambulant mankind at that epoch; to us fallen dead as carrion, and
unendurable to think of. My friends, if you send for Gentlemen from
Hanover, you must take them with Hanover adhering more or less; and
ought not to quarrel with your bargain, which you reckoned so divine!
No doubt, it is singular to see a Britannic Majesty neglecting his own
Spanish War, the one real business he has at present; and running about
over all the world; busy, soul, body and breeches-pocket, in other
people's wars; egging on other fighting, whispering every likely fellow
he can meet, "Won't you perhaps fight? Here is for you, if so!"--hand to
breeches-pocket accompanying the word. But it must be said, and ought to
be better known than in our day it is, His Majesty's Ministers, and the
English State-Doctors generally, were precisely of the same mind. TO
them too the Austrian Quarrel was everything, their own poor Spanish
Quarrel nothing; and the complaint they make of his Majesty is rather
that he does not rush rapidly enough, with brandished sword, as well
as with guineas raining from him, into this one indispensable business.
"Owing to his fears for Hanover!" say they, with indignation, with no
end of suspicion, angry pamphleteering and covert eloquence, "within
those walls" and without.
The suspicion of Hanover's checking his Majesty's Pragmatic velocity is
altogether well founded; and there need no more be said on that Hanover
score. Be it well understood and admitted, Hanover was the Britannic
Majesty's beloved son; and the British Empire his opulent milk-cow.
Richest of milk-cows; staff of one's life, for grand purposes and
small; beautiful big animal, not to be provoked; but to be stroked and
milked:--Friends, if you will do a Glorious Revolution of that kind, and
burn such an amount of tar upon it, why eat sour herbs for an inevitable
corollary therefrom! And let my present readers understand, at any
rate, that,--except in Wapping, Bristol and among the simple
instinctive classes (with whom, it is true, go Pitt and some illustrious
figures),--political England generally, whatever of England had
Parliamentary discourse of reason, and did Pamphlets, Despatches,
Harangues, went greatly along with his Majesty in that Pragmatic
Business. And be the blame of delirium laid on the right back, where it
ought to lie, not on the wrong, which has enough to bear of its own. And
go not into that dust-whirlwind of extinct stupidities, O reader:--what
reader would, except for didactic objects? Know only that it does of a
truth whirl there; and fancy always, if you can, that certain things and
Human Figures, a Friedrich, a Chatham and some others, have it for their
Life-Element. Which, I often think, is their principal misfortune
with Posterity; said Life-Element having gone to such an unutterable
condition for gods and men.
"One other thing surprises us in those Old Pamphlets," says my
Constitutional Friend: "How the phrase, 'Cause of Liberty' ever and anon
turns up, with great though extinct emphasis, evidently sincere. After
groping, one is astonished to find it means Support of the House of
Austria; keeping of the Hapsburgs entire in their old Possessions
among mankind! That, to our great-grandfathers, was the 'Cause of
Liberty;'--said 'Cause' being, with us again, Electoral Suffrage and
other things; a notably different definition, perhaps still wider of the
mark.
"Our great-grandfathers lived in perpetual terror that they would be
devoured by France; that French ambition would overset the Celestial
Balance, and proceed next to eat the British Nation. Stand upon your
guard then, one would have said: Look to your ships, to your defences,
to your industries; to your virtues first of all,--your VIRTUTES,
manhoods, conformities to the Divine Law appointed you; which are
the great and indeed sole strength to any Man or Nation! Discipline
yourselves, wisely, in all kinds; more and more, till there be no
anarchic fibre left in you. Unanarchic, disciplined at all points, you
might then, I should say, with supreme composure, let France, and the
whole World at its back, try what they could do upon you and the unique
little Island you are so lucky as to live in?--Foolish mortals: what
Potentiality of Battle, think you (not against France only, but against
Satanas and the Ministers of Chaos generally), would a poor Friedrich
Wilhelm, not to speak of better, have got out of such a Possession, had
it been his to put in drill! And drill is not of soldiers only; though
perhaps of soldiers first and most indispensably of all; since 'without
Being,' as my Friend Oliver was wont to say, 'Well-being is not
possible.' There is military drill; there is industrial, economic,
spiritual; gradually there are all kinds of drill, of wise discipline,
of peremptory mandate become effective everywhere, 'OBEY the Laws of
Heaven, or else disappear from these latitudes!' Ah me, if one dealt in
day-dreams, and prophecies of an England grown celestial,--celestial she
should be, not in gold nuggets, continents all of beef, and seas all
of beer, Abolition of Pain, and Paradise to All and Sundry, but in
that quite different fashion; and there, I should say, THERE were the
magnificent Hope to indulge in! That were to me the 'Cause of Liberty;'
and any the smallest contribution towards that kind of 'Liberty' were a
sacred thing!--
"Belleisle again may, if he pleases, call his the Cause of Sovereignty.
A Sovereign Louis, it would appear, has not governing enough to do
within his own French borders, but feels called to undertake Germany as
well;--a gentleman with an immense governing faculty, it would appear?
Truly, good reader, I am sick of heart, contemplating those empty
sovereign mountebanks, and empty antagonist ditto, with their Causes of
Liberty and Causes of Anti-Liberty; and cannot but wish that we had got
the ashes of that World-Explosion, of 1789, well riddled and smelted,
and the poor World were quit of a great many things!"--
My Constitutional Historian of England, musing on Belleisle and his
Anti-Pragmatic industries and grandiosities,--"how Chief-Bully Belleisle
stept down into the ring as a gay Volunteer, and foolish Chief-Defender
George had to follow dismally heroic, as a Conscript of Fate,"--drops
these words: in regard to the Wages they respectively had:--
"Nations that go into War without business there, are sure of
getting business as they proceed; and if the beginning were
phantasms,--especially phantasms of the hoping, self-conceited
kind,--the results for them are apt to be extremely real! As was the
case with the French in this War, and those following, in which his
Britannic Majesty played chief counter-tenor. From 1741, in King
Friedrich's First War, onwards to Friedrich's Third War, 1756-1763,
the volunteer French found a great deal of work lying ready for
them,--gratuitous on their part, from the beginning. And the results to
them came out, first completely visible, in the World-Miracles of 1789,
and the years following!
"Nations, again, may be driven upon War by phantasm TERRORS, and go into
it, in sorrow of heart, not gayety of heart; and that is a shade
better. And one always pities a poor Nation, in such case;--as the
very Destinies rather do, and judge it more mercifully. Nay, the poor
bewildered Nation may, among its brain-phantasms, have something of
reality and sanity inarticulately stirring it withal. It may have a real
ordinance of Heaven to accomplish on those terms:--and IF so, it will
sometimes, in the most chaotic circuitous ways, through endless hazards,
at a hundred or a hundred thousand times the natural expense, ultimately
get it done! This was the case of the poor English in those Wars.
"They were Wars extraneous to England little less than to France;
neither Nation had real business in them; and they seem to us now a
very mad object on the part of both. But they were not gratuitously gone
into, on the part of England; far from that. England undertook them,
with its big heart very sorrowful, strange spectralities bewildering
it; and managed them (as men do sleep-walking) with a gloomy solidity of
purpose, with a heavy-laden energy, and, on the whole, with a depth
of stupidity, which were very great. Yet look at the respective net
results. France lies down to rot into grand Spontaneous-Combustion,
Apotheosis of Sansculottism, and much else; which still lasts, to her
own great peril, and the great affliction of neighbors. Poor England,
after such enormous stumbling among the chimney-pots, and somnambulism
over all the world for twenty years, finds on awakening, that she is
arrived, after all, where she wished to be, and a good deal farther!
Finds that her own important little errand is somehow or other,
done;--and, in short, that 'Jenkins's Ear [as she named the thing] HAS
been avenged,' and the Ocean Highways 'opened' and a good deal more, in
a most signal way! For the Eternal Providences--little as poor Dryasdust
now knows of it, mumbling and maundering that sad stuff of his--do rule;
and the great soul of the world, I assure you once more, is JUST. And
always for a Nation, as for a man, it is very behooveful to be honest,
to be modest, however stupid!"--
By this time, however,--Mollwitz having fallen out, and Belleisle being
evidently on the steps,--his Britannic Majesty recognizes clearly,
and insists upon it, strengthened by his Harringtons and everybody of
discernment, That, nefarious or not, this Friedrich will require to be
bargained with. That, far from breaking in upon him, and partitioning
him (how far from it!), there is no conceivable method of saving the
Celestial Balances till HE be satisfied, in some way. This is the
one step his Britannic Majesty has yet made, out of these his choking
imbroglios; and truly this is one. Hyndford, his best negotiator, is on
the road for Friedrich's Camp; Robinson at Vienna, has been directed to
say and insist, "Bargain with that man; he must be bargained with, if
our Cause of Liberty is to be saved at all?"--
And now, having opened the dust-bin so far, that the reader's fancy
might be stirred without affliction to his lungs and eyes, let us shut
it down again,--might we but hope forever! That is too fond a hope. But
the background or sustaining element made imaginable, the few events
deserving memory may surely go on at a much swifter pace.