|I was reading just now, apropos of a new work on Burke, the estimate of
him expressed by Macaulay who declared him to be “the greatest man since
Milton.” I paused over the verdict, and the subject led me naturally
enough to ask myself who were the great Englishmen in history--for the
sake of argument, the six greatest. I found the question so exciting
that I had reached the end of my journey (I was in a bus at the time)
almost before I had reached the end of my list. I began by laying down
my premises or principles. I would not restrict the choice to men of
action. The only grievance I have against Plutarch is that he followed
that course. His incomparable “Lives,” would be still more satisfying, a
still more priceless treasury of the ancient world, if, among his crowd
of statesmen and warriors, we could make friends with Socrates and
Virgil, Archimedes and Epictetus, with the men whose work survived
them as well as with the men whose work is a memory. And I rejected the
blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I would not have in my list a mere
homicidal genius. My great man may have been a great killer of his kind,
but he must have some better claim to inclusion than the fact that he
had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On the other hand, I would not
exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to be a bad man. Henry
Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad men. “Greatness,”
he said, “consists in bringing all manner of mischief upon mankind,
and goodness in removing it from them.” And it was to satirise the
traditional view of greatness that he wrote that terrific satire
“The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great,” probably having in mind the
Marlboroughs and Fredericks of his day. But while rejecting the
traditional view, we cannot keep out the bad man because he was a bad
man. I regard Bismarck as a bad man, but it would be absurd to deny that
he was a great man. He towers over the nineteenth century like a baleful
ogre, a sort of Bluebeard, terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless,
ruthless jests, heaving with his volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent,
merciless as a tiger, but great beyond challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a
sort of mastodon of the primeval world, born as a terrific afterthought
of nature.
Nor is power alone a sufficient title to greatness. It must be power
governed by purpose, by a philosophy, good or bad, of human life, not by
mere spasms of emotion or an itch for adventure. I am sure Pericles was
a great man, but I deny the ascription to Alcibiades. I am sure about
Cæsar, but I am doubtful about Alexander, loud though his name sounds
down twenty centuries. Greatness may be moral or a-moral, but it must
have design. It must spring from deliberate thought and not from mere
accident, emotion or effrontery, however magnificent. It is measured
by its influence on the current of the world, on its extension of
the kingdom of the mind, on its contribution to the riches of living.
Applying tests like these, who are our six greatest Englishmen? For
our first choice there would be a unanimous vote. Shakespeare is the
greatest thing we have done. He is our challenger in the fists of the
world, and there is none to cross swords with him. Like Sirius, he has a
magnitude of his own. Take him away from our heavens, conceive him never
to have been born, and the imaginative wealth of fife shrinks to a
lower plane, and we are left, in Iago's phrase, “poor indeed.” There is
nothing English for which we would exchange him. “Indian Empire or
no Indian Empire,” we say with Carlyle, “we cannot do without our
Shakespeare.”
For the second place, the choice is less obvious, but I think it goes
indisputably to him who had
”... a voice whose sound was like the sea.”
Milton plays the moon to Shakespeare's sun. He breathed his mighty
harmonies into the soul of England like a god. He gave us the note of
the sublime, and his influence is like a natural element, all pervasive,
intangible, indestructible. With him stands his “chief of men”--the
“great bad man” of Burke--the one man of action in our annals capable of
measuring his stature with Bismarck for crude power, but overshadowing
Bismarck in the realm of the spirit--the man at whose name the cheek
of Mazarin turned pale, who ushered in the modern world by sounding the
death-knell of despotic monarchism, who founded the naval supremacy of
these islands and who (in spite of his own ruthlessness at Drogheda)
first made the power of England the instrument of moral law in Europe.
But there my difficulties begin. I mentally survey my candidates as
the bus lumbers along. There comes Chaucer bringing the May morning
eternally with him, and Swift with his mighty passion tearing his
soul to tatters, and Ruskin filling the empyrean with his resounding
eloquence, and Burke, the prose Milton, to whose deep well all
statesmanship goes with its pail, and Johnson rolling out of Bolt Court
in his brown wig, and Newton plumbing the ultimate secrets of this
amazing universe, and deep-browed Darwin unravelling the mystery of
life, and Wordsworth giving “to weary feet the gift of rest,” and
Dickens bringing with him a world of creative splendour only less
wonderful than that of Shakespeare. But I put these and a host of others
aside. For my fourth choice I take King Alfred. Strip him of all the
legends and improbabilities that cluster round his name, and he is still
one of the grand figures of the Middle Ages, a heroic, enlightened
man, reaching out of the darkness towards the light, the first great
Englishman in our annals. Behind him comes Bacon. At first I am not
quite sure whether it is Francis or Roger, but it turns out to be
Roger--there by virtue of precedence in time, of the encyclopaedic range
of his adventurous spirit and the black murk of superstition through
which he ploughed his lonely way to truth.
I am tempted, as the bus turns my corner, to finish my list with a
woman, Florence Nightingale, chosen, not as the romantic “lady of the
lamp,” but as the fierce warrior against ignorance and stupidity, the
adventurer into a new field, with the passion of a martyr controlled by
a will of iron, a terrific autocrat of beneficence, the most powerful
and creative woman this nation has produced.. But I reject her, not
because she is unworthy, but because she must head a companion fist of
great Englishwomen. I hurriedly summon up two candidates from among
our English saints--Sir Thomas More and John Wesley. In spite of the
intolerance (incredible to modern ears) that could jest so diabolically
at the martyrdom of the “heretic,” Sir Thomas Fittar, More holds his
place as the most fragrant flower of English culture, but if greatness
be measured by achievement and enduring influence he must yield place to
the astonishing revivalist of the eighteenth century who left a deeper
mark upon the spiritual life of England than any man in our history.
There is my list--Shakespeare, Milton, Cromwell, King Alfred, Roger
Bacon, John Wesley--and anybody can make out another who cares and
a better who can. And now that it is made I find that, quite
unintentionally, it is all English in the most limited sense. There is
not a Scotsman, an Irishman, or a Welshman in it. That will gall the
kibe of Mr Bernard Shaw. And I rejoice to find another thing.
There is no politician and no professional soldier in the half-dozen. It
contains two poets, two men of action, one scientist and one preacher.
If the representative arts have no place, it is not because greatness
cannot be associated with them. Bach and Michael Angelo cannot be left
out of any list of the world's great men. But, matchless in literature,
we are poor in art, though in any rival list I should be prepared to see
the great name of Turner.
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