[Footnote 1: March 1888.]
Nunquamne reponam,
Vexatus toties rauci Theseide Codri?
Historians are only too fond of insisting on the effect of the French
Revolution in checking English reform. One of the latest of them
dwells on the fatal influence of this great event in our own country,
in checking, blighting, and distorting the natural progress of things.
But for that influence, he says, the closing years of the century
would probably have seen the abolition of the English Slave Trade, the
reform of Parliament, and the repeal of the Test Act.[1] The question
of the precise degree of vitality in sectarian pride, and of tenacity
in a great material interest, a hundred years ago or at any time, is
not very easy to settle. It is quite possible that the Slave Trade
and the Test Act might have died nearly as hard, if there had been
no French Revolution. In any case, it is a curious implication that
underlies all writing in this familiar vein, that France ought to
have gone on with a bad government, in order to secure to England the
advantages of a good one.
[Footnote 1: Lecky, vi. 297.]
As to one disservice, however, there can be no doubt. The French
Revolution has furnished the enemies of each successive proposal of
reform with a boundless supply of prejudicial analogies, appalling
parallels, and ugly nicknames, which are all just as conclusive with
the unwise as if they were the aptest arguments. Sydney Smith might
well put "the awful example of a neighbouring nation" among the
standing topics of the Noodle's Oration. The abolition of rotten
boroughs brought down a thousand ominous references to noyades,
fusillades, and guillotines. When Sir Robert Peel took the duty off
corn, Croker warned him with great solemnity that he was breaking up
the old interests, dividing the great families, and beginning exactly
such a castastrophe as did the Noailles and the Montmorencis in 1789.
Cobden and Bright were promiscuously likened to Baboeuf, Chaumette,
and Anacharsis Clootz. Baboeuf, it is true, was for dividing up all
property, and Chaumette was an aggressive atheist; but these were
mere _nuances_, not material to the purposes of obloquy. Robespierre,
Danton, Marat have been mercilessly trotted forth in their sanguinary
shrouds, and treated as the counterparts and precursors of worthies so
obviously and exactly like them as Mr. Beales and Mr. Odger; while
an innocent caucus for the registration of voters recalls to some
well-known writers lurid visions of the Cordeliers and the Jacobin
Club.
A recent addition has been made to the stock of nicknames drawn from
the terrible melodrama of the last century. The Chancellor of the
Exchequer at Dublin described the present very humble writer as "the
Saint-Just of our Revolution." The description was received with
lively applause. It would be indelicate to wonder how many in a
hundred, even in that audience of the elect, had ever heard of
Saint-Just, how many in five hundred could have spelt his name, and
how many in a thousand could have told any three facts in his career.
But let us muse for a moment upon the portrait. I take down the first
picture of Saint-Just that comes to my hand, M. Taine is the artist:--
"Among these energetic nullities we see gradually rising _a young
monster_--with face handsome and tranquil--Saint-Just! A sort of
precocious Sulla, who at five-and-twenty suddenly springs from
the ranks, and _by force of atrocity wins his place!_ Six years
before, he began life by an act of domestic robbery: while on a
visit at his mother's, he ran away in the night with her plate and
jewels; for that he was locked up for six months. On his release,
he employed his leisure in the composition of an odious poem. Then
he flung himself head foremost into the revolution. Blood calcined
by study, a colossal pride, a conscience completely unhinged,
an imagination haunted by the bloody recollections of Rome and
Sparta, an intelligence falsified and twisted until it found
itself most at its ease in the practice of enormous paradox,
barefaced sophism, and murderous lying--all these perilous
ingredients, mixed in a furnace of concentrated ambition, boiled
and fermented long and silently in his breast."
It is, no doubt, hard to know ourselves. One may entertain demons
unawares, and have calcined blood without being a bit the wiser.
Still, I do not find the likeness striking. It would have done just as
well to call me Nero, Torquemada, Iago, or Bluebeard.
Whether the present writer does or does not deserve all the
compliments that history has paid to Saint-Just, is a very slight
and trivial question, with which the public will naturally not much
concern itself. But as some use is from time to time made of the
writer's imputed delinquencies to prejudice an important cause, it is
perhaps worth while to try in a page or two to give a better account
of things. It is true that he has written on revolutionists like
Robespierre, and destructive thinkers like Rousseau and Voltaire. It
is true that he believes the two latter to have been on the whole,
when all deductions are made, on the side of human progress. But what
sort of foundation in this for the inference that he "finds his models
in the heroes of the French Revolution," and "looks for his methods
in the Reign of Terror"? It would be equally logical to infer that
because I have written, not without sympathy and appreciation, of
Joseph de Maistre, I therefore find my model in a hero of the Catholic
Reaction, and look for my methods in the revived supremacy of the Holy
See over all secular and temporal authorities. It would be just
as fair to say that because I pointed out, as it was the critic's
business to do, the many admirable merits, and the important moral
influences on the society of that time, of the _New Heloïsa_,
therefore I am bound to think Saint Preux a very fine fellow,
particularly fit to be a model and a hero for young Ireland. Only on
the principle that who drives fat oxen must himself be fat, can it be
held that who writes on Danton must be himself in all circumstances a
Dantonist.
The most insignificant of literary contributions have a history and
an origin; and the history of these contributions is short and simple
enough. Carlyle with all the force of his humoristic genius had
impressed upon his generation an essentially one-sided view both of
the eighteenth century as a whole, and of the French thinkers of that
century in particular. His essay on Diderot, his lecture on Rousseau,
his chapters on Voltaire, with all their brilliance, penetration, and
incomparable satire, were the high-water mark in this country of the
literary reaction against the French school of Revolution. Everybody
knows the famous diatribes against the Bankrupt Century and all its
men and all its works. Voltaire's furies, Diderot's indigestions,
Rousseau's nauseous amours, and the odd tricks and shifts of the whole
of them and their company, offered ready material for the boisterous
horseplay of the transcendental humourist. Then the tide began to
turn. Mr. Buckle's book on the history of civilisation had something
to do with it. But it was the historical chapters in Comte's
Positive Philosophy that first opened the minds of many of us, who,
five-and-twenty years ago, were young men, to a very different
judgment of the true place of those schools in the literary and social
history of Western Europe. We learnt to perceive that though much in
the thought and the lives of the literary precursors of the Revolution
laid them fairly open to Carlyle's banter, yet banter was not all, and
even grave condemnation was not all. In essays, like mine, written
from this point of view, and with the object of trying to trim the
balance rather more correctly, it may well have been that the better
side of the thinkers concerned was sometimes unduly dwelt upon, and
their worse side unduly left in the background. It may well have been
that an impression of personal adhesion was conveyed which only very
partially existed, or even where it did not exist at all: that is a
risk of misinterpretation which it is always hard for the historical
critic to escape. There may have been a too eager tone; but to be
eager is not a very bad vice at any age under the critical forty.
There were some needlessly aggressive passages, and some sallies which
ought to have been avoided, because they gave pain to good people.
There was perhaps too much of the particular excitement of the time.
It was the date when _Essays and Reviews_ was still thought a terrible
explosive; when Bishop Colenso's arithmetical tests as to the flocks
and herds of the children of Israel were believed to be sapping not
only the inspiration of the Pentateuch but the foundations of the
Faith and the Church; and when Darwin's scientific speculations were
shaking the civilised world. Some excitement was to be pardoned in
days like those, and I am quite sure that one side needed pardon at
least as much as the other. For the substantial soundness of the
general views winch I took of the French revolutionary thinkers at
that time, I feel no apprehension; nor--some possible occasional
phrases or sentences excepted and apart--do I see the smallest reason
to shrink or to depart from any one of them. So far as one particular
reference may serve to illustrate the tenour of the whole body
of criticism, the following lines, which close my chapter on the
"Encyclopaedia," will answer the purpose as well as any others, and I
shall perhaps be excused for transcribing them:--
"An urgent social task lay before France and before Europe: it
could not be postponed until the thinkers had worked out a scheme
of philosophic completeness. The thinkers did not seriously make
any effort after this completeness. The Encyclopaedia was the most
serious attempt, and it did not wholly fail. As I replace in my
shelves this mountain of volumes, 'dusky and huge, enlarging on
the sight,' I have a presentiment that their pages will seldom
again be disturbed by me or by others. They served a great purpose
a hundred years ago. They are now a monumental ruin, clothed with
all the profuse associations of history. It is no Ozymandias of
Egypt, king of kings, whose wrecked shape of stone and sterile
memories we contemplate. We think rather of the grey and crumbling
walls of an ancient stronghold, reared by the endeavour of stout
hands and faithful, whence in its own day and generation a band
once went forth against barbarous hordes, to strike a blow for
humanity and truth."[1]
[Footnote 1: Diderot, i. 247.]
It is gratifying to find that the same view of the work of these
famous men, and of its relation to the social necessities of the time,
commends itself to Mr. Lecky, who has since gone diligently and with
a candid mind over the same ground.[1] Then where is the literary
Jacobin?
[Footnote 1: See his vol. vi. 305 _et seq_.]
Of course, it is easy enough to fish out a sentence or a short passage
here and there which, if taken by itself, may wear a very sinister
look, and carry the most alarming impressions. Not many days ago a
writer addressed a letter to the _Times_ which furnishes a specimen of
this kind of controversy. He gave himself the ambiguous designation of
"Catholicus"; but his style bore traces of the equivocally Catholic
climate of Munich. His aim was the lofty and magnanimous one of
importing theological prejudice into the great political dispute of
the day; in the interest, strange to say, of the Irish party who have
been for ages the relentless oppressors of the Church to which he
belongs, and who even now hate and despise it with all the virulence
of a Parisian Red. This masked assailant conveys to the mind of the
reader that I applaud and sympathise with the events of the winter of
1793, and more particularly with the odious procession of the
Goddess of Reason at Notre Dame. He says, moreover, that I have "the
effrontery to imply that the horrible massacres of the Revolution ...
were 'a very mild story compared with the atrocities of the Jews or
the crimes of Catholicism.'" No really honest and competent disputant
would have hit on "effrontery" as the note of the passage referred to,
if he had had its whole spirit and drift before him. The reader shall,
if he pleases, judge for himself. After the words just quoted, I go on
to say:--
"Historical recriminations, however, are not edifying. It is
perfectly fair, when Catholics talk of the atheist Terror, to
rejoin that the retainers of Anjou and Montpensier slew more men
and women on the first day of the Saint Bartholomew, than perished
in Paris through the Years I. and II. But the retort does us no
good beyond the region of dialectic. Some of the opinions of
Chaumette were full of enlightenment and hope. But it would be
far better to share the superstitious opinions of a virtuous and
benignant priest, like the Bishop in Victor Hugo's _Misérables_,
than to hold these good opinions of Chaumette, as he held them,
with a rancorous intolerance, a reckless disregard of the rights
and feelings of others, and a shallow forgetfulness of all that
great and precious part of our nature that lies out of the domain
of the logical understanding.... In every family where a mother
sought to have her child baptised, or where sons and daughters
sought to have the dying spirit of the old consoled by the last
sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemy to the government which
had closed the churches and proscribed the priests. How could a
society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the solemn
mysticism of the Middle Ages suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy
paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by
apostate priests ... as they filed before the Convention, led by
the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude acolytes bearing
piles of the robes and the vessels of silver and gold with which
they had once served their holy office."[1]
[Footnote 1: _Misc._ i 77-79.]
Where is the effrontery, the search for methods in the Reign of
Terror, the applause for revolutionary models? Such inexcusable
perversion of a writer's meaning for an evanescent political
object--and a very shabby object too--is enough to make one think that
George III. knew what he was talking about, when he once delivered
himself of the saying that "Politics are a trade for a rascal, not for
a gentleman."
Let me cite another more grotesque piece of irrelevancy with a similar
drift. Some months ago the present writer chanced to express an
opinion upon Welsh Disestablishment. Wales, at any rate, would seem to
be far enough away from _Emile, Candide_, the Law of Prairial, and the
Committee of Public Safety. The _Times_, however, instantly said[1]
that it would be affectation to express any surprise, because my
unfortunate "theories and principles, drawn from French sources
and framed on French models, all tend to the disintegration of
comprehensive political organisations and the encouragement of
arrangements based on the minor peculiarities of race or dialect." Was
there ever in the world such prodigious nonsense? What French sources,
what French models? If French models point in any one direction rather
than another, it is away from disintegration and straight towards
centralisation. Everybody knows that this is one of the most notorious
facts of French history from the days of Lewis XI. or Cardinal
Richelieu down to Napoleon Bonaparte. So far from French models
encouraging "arrangements based on the minor peculiarities of race and
dialect," France is the first great example in modern history, for
good or for evil, of a persevering process of national unification,
and the firm suppression of all provincial particularismus. This
is not only true of French political leaders in general: it is
particularly true of the Jacobin leaders. Rousseau himself, I admit,
did in one place point in the direction of confederation; but only in
the sense that for freedom on the one hand, and just administration
on the other, the unit should not be too large to admit of the
participation of the persons concerned in the management of their
own public affairs. If the Jacobins had not been overwhelmed by the
necessity of keeping out the invaders, they might have developed the
germ of truth in Rousseau's loose way of stating the expediency of
decentralisation. As it was, above all other French schools, the
Jacobins dealt most sternly with particularist pretensions. Of all
men, these supposed masters, teachers, and models of mine are least
to be called Separatists. To them more than to any other of the
revolutionary parties the great heresy of Federalism was most odious;
and if I were a faithful follower of the Jacobin model, I should
have least patience with nationalist sentiment whether in Ireland,
Scotland, or Wales, and should most rigorously insist on that
cast-iron incorporation which, as it happens, in the case of Ireland
I believe to be equally hopeless and undesirable. This explanation,
therefore, of my favour for Welsh Disestablishment is as absurdly
ignorant as it is far-fetched and irrelevant.
[Footnote 1: Nov. 3, 1886.]
The logical process is worth an instant's examination. The position is
no less than this,--that to attempt truly to appreciate the place and
the value in the history of thought and social movements of men who
have been a hundred years in their graves, and to sympathise with
certain sides and certain effects of their activity under the peculiar
circumstances in which French society then found itself, is the same
thing as binding yourself to apply their theories and to imitate their
activity, under an entirely heterogeneous set of circumstances, in
a different country, and in a society with wholly dissimilar
requirements. That is the argument if we straighten it out. The
childishness of any such contention is so obvious, that I should be
ashamed of reproducing it, were it not that this very contention has
made its appearance at my expense several times a month for the last
two years in all sorts of important and respectable prints.
For instance, it appears that I once said somewhere that Danton
looked on at the doings of his bloodier associates with "sombre
acquiescence." _Argal_, it was promptly pointed out--and I espy the
dark phrase constantly adorning leading articles to this day--the man
who said that Danton sombrely acquiesced in the doings of Billaud,
Collet, and the rest, must of necessity, being of a firm and logical
mind, himself sombrely acquiesce in moonlighting and cattle-houghing
in Ireland. Apart from the curious compulsion of the reasoning,
what is the actual state of the case? Acquiescence is hardly a good
description of the mood of a politician who scorns delights and lives
laborious days in actively fighting for a vigorous policy and an
effective plan which, as he believes, would found order in Ireland
on a new and more hopeful base. He may be wrong, but where is the
acquiescence, whether sombre or serene?
The equally misplaced name of Fatalism is sometimes substituted for
acquiescence, in criticisms of this stamp. In any such sense anybody
is a fatalist who believes in a relation between cause and effect.
If it is fatalism to assume that, given a certain chain of social or
political antecedents, they will inevitably be followed by a certain
chain of consequences, then every sensible observer of any series of
events is a fatalist. Catholic Emancipation, the extension of the
franchise, and secret ballot, have within the last sixty years
completely shifted the balance of political power in Ireland. Land
legislation has revolutionised the conditions of ownership. These vast
and vital changes in Ireland have been accompanied by the transfer of
decisive power from aristocracy to numbers in Great Britain, and Great
Britain is arbiter. Is it fatalism, or is it common sense, to perceive
that one new effect of new causes so potent must be the necessity
of changing the system of Irish government? To dream that you could
destroy the power of the old masters without finding new, and that
having invited the nation to speak you could continue to ignore the
national sentiment was and is the very height of political folly, and
the longer the dream is persisted in the ruder will be the awakening.
Surely the stupidest fatalism is far more truly to be ascribed to
those who insist that Ireland was eternally predestined to turmoil,
confusion, and torment; that there alone the event defies calculation;
and that, however wisely, carefully and providently you modify or
extinguish causes, in Ireland, though nowhere else, effects will still
survive with shape unaltered and force unabated.
No author has a right to assume that anybody has read all his books or
any of them, but he may reasonably claim that he shall not be publicly
classified, labelled, catalogued, and placed In the shelves, on the
strength of half of his work, and that half arbitrarily selected. If
it be permitted to me without excess of egotism to name the masters to
whom I went to school in the days of early manhood, so far from being
revolutionists and terrorists, they belonged entirely to the opposite
camp. Austin's _Jurisprudence_ and Mill's _Logic_ and _Utilitarianism_
were everything, and Rousseau's _Social Contract_ was nothing. To the
best of my knowledge and belief, I never said a word about "Natural
Rights" in any piece of practical public business in all my life;
and when that famous phrase again made its naked appearance on the
platform three or four years ago, it gave me as much surprise and
dismay as if I were this afternoon to meet a Deinotherium shambling
down Parliament Street. Mill was the chief influence for me, as he was
for most of my contemporaries in those days. Experience of life and
independent use of one's mind--which he would have been the most ready
of men to applaud--have since, as is natural, led to many important
corrections and deductions in Mill's political and philosophical
teaching. But then we were disciples, and not critics; and nobody will
suppose that the admirer of Wordsworth, the author of the Essay on
Coleridge, and of the treatise on Representative Government, the
administrator in the most bureaucratic and authoritative of public
services, was a terrorist or an unbridled democrat, or anything else
but the most careful and rationalistic of political theorisers. It
was Mill who first held up for my admiration the illustrious man whom
Austin enthusiastically called the "godlike Turgot," and it was he who
encouraged me to write a study on that great and inspiring character.
I remember the suspicion and the murmurings with which Louis Blanc,
then living in brave and honourable exile in London, and the good
friend of so many of us, and who was really a literary Jacobin to
the tips of his fingers, remonstrated against that piece of what he
thought grievously misplaced glorification. Turgot was, indeed, a very
singular hero with whom to open the career of literary Jacobin. So
was Burke,--the author of those wise sentences that still ring in
our ears: "_The question with me is, not whether you have a right to
render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to
make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what
humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. Nobody shall
persuade me, where a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity
are not means of conciliation._" Burke, Austin, Mill, Turgot,
Comte--what strange sponsors for the "theories and principles of the
Terror"!
What these opinions came to, roughly speaking, was something to this
effect: That the power alike of statesmen and of publicists over the
course of affairs is strictly limited; that institutions and movements
are not capable of immediate or indefinite modification by any amount
of mere will; that political truths are always relative, and never
absolute; that the test of practical, political, and social proposals
is not their conformity to abstract ideals, but to convenience,
utility, expediency, and occasion; that for the reformer,
considerations of time and place may be paramount; and finally, as
Mill himself has put it, that government is always either in the
hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power
in society, and that what this power is, and shall be, depends less on
institutions than institutions depend upon it. If I were pressed for
an illustration of these principles at work, inspiring the minds and
guiding the practice of responsible statesmen in great transactions of
our own day and generation, I should point to the sage, the patient,
the triumphant action of Abraham Lincoln in the emancipation of the
negro slaves. However that may be, contrast a creed of this kind with
the abstract, absolute, geometric, unhistoric, peremptory notions and
reasonings that formed the stock in trade of most, though not quite
all, of the French revolutionists, alike in action and in thought. It
is plain that they are the direct opposite and contradictory of one
another.
To clench the matter by chapter and verse, I should like to recall
what, I have said of these theories and principles in their most
perfect and most important literary version. How have I described
Rousseau's _Social Contract_? It placed, I said, the centre of social
activity elsewhere than in careful and rational examination of social
conditions, and careful and rational effort to modify them. It
substituted a retrograde aspiration for direction, and emotion for the
discovery of law. It overlooked the crucial difficulty--namely, how to
summon new force, without destroying the sound parts of a structure
which it has taken many generations to erect. Its method was geometric
instead of being historic, and hence its "desperate absurdity." Its
whole theory was constructed with an imperfect consideration of the
qualities of human nature, and with too narrow a view of society. It
ignored the great fact that government is the art of wisely dealing
with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile passions, of
hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces. It "gives us
not the least help towards the solution of any of the problems of
actual government."
Such language as all this is hardly that of a disciple to a master, in
respect of theories and principles which he is making his own for the
use of a lifetime. "There has been no attempt" [in these pages],
I said in winding up, "to palliate either the shallowness or the
practical mischievousness of the _Social Contract_. But there is
another side to its influence. We should be false to our critical
principle, if we do not recognise the historical effect of a
speculation scientifically valueless." Any writer would have stamped
himself as both unfit for the task that I had undertaken, and entirely
below the level of the highest critical standard of the day, if he had
for a moment dreamed of taking any other point of view.
As for historical hero-worship, after Carlyle's fashion, whether
with Jacobin idols or any other, it is a mood of mind that must be
uncongenial to anybody who had ever been at all under the influence
of Mill. Without being so foolish as to disparage the part played by
great men in great crises, we could have no sympathy with the barbaric
and cynical school, who make greatness identical with violence, force,
and mere iron will. Cromwell said, in vindication of himself, that
England had need of a constable, and it was true. The constable, the
soldier, the daring counsellor at the helm, are often necessities of
the time. It is often a necessity of the time that the energy of a
nation or of a movement should gather itself up in a resolute band
or a resolute chief; as the revolutionary energy of France gathered
itself up in the greater Jacobins, or that of England in Oliver
Cromwell. Goethe says that nature bids us "_Take all, but pay_."
Revolutions and heroes may give us all, but not without price. This is
at the best, and the best is the exception. The grandiose types mostly
fail. In our own day, people talk, for example, with admiration of
Cromwell's government in Ireland,--as if it were a success, instead of
being one of the worst chapters in the whole history of Irish failure.
It was force carried to its utmost. Hundreds were put to the sword,
thousands were banished to be slaves of the planters in the West
Indies, and the remnant were driven miserably off into the desolate
wilds of Connaught. But all this only prepared the way for further
convulsions and deadlier discontent.
It is irrational to contrast Carlyle's heroes, Cromwell, Mirabeau,
Frederick, Napoleon, with men like Washington or Lincoln. The
circumstances were different. The conditions of public use and of
personal greatness were different. But if we are to talk of ideals,
heroes, and models, I, for one, should hardly look to France at all.
Jefferson was no flatterer of George Washington; but his character of
Washington comes far nearer to the right pattern of a great ruler than
can be found in any of Carlyle's splendid dithyrambs, and it is no
waste of time to recall and to transcribe it:--
"His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first
order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a
Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was
ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by
invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion. Hence the common
remark of his officers, of the advantage he derived from councils
of war, where, hearing all suggestions, he selected whatever was
best; and certainly no general ever planned his battles more
judiciously. But if deranged during the course of the action, if
any member of his plan was dislocated by sudden circumstances,
he was slow in a readjustment. He was incapable of fear, meeting
personal dangers with the calmest unconcern. Perhaps the strongest
feature in his character was prudence, never acting until
every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed;
refraining if he saw a doubt, but when once decided, going through
with his purpose, whatever obstacles opposed. His integrity was
most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known; no
motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred,
being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, in every sense
of the word, a wise, a good, and a great man. His temper was
naturally irritable and high toned; but reflection and resolution
had obtained a firm and habitual ascendency over it."
In conclusion, the plain truth is that all parallels, analogies, and
similitudes between the French Revolution, or any part or phase of it,
and our affairs in Ireland are moonshine. For the practical politician
his problem is always individual. For his purposes history never
repeats itself. Human nature, doubtless, has a weakness for a
precedent; it is a weakness to be respected. But there is no
such thing as an essential reproduction of social and political
combinations of circumstance. To talk about Robespierre in connection
with Ireland is just as idle as it was in Robespierre to harangue
about Lycurgus and Brutus in Paris. To compare the two is to place
Ireland under a preposterous magnifying-glass of monstrous dimension.
Nor is disparity of scale the only difference, vital as that is. In
no one of the leading characteristics of a community in a state of
ferment, save the odium that surrounds the landlords, and that not
universal, does Ireland to-day really resemble the France of a
hundred years ago. Manners, ideas, beliefs, traditions, crumbling
institutions, rising aspirations, the ordering of castes and classes,
the rivalry of creeds, the relations with the governing power--all
constitute elements of such radical divergence as to make comparison
between modern Ireland and revolutionary France for any more serious
purpose than giving a conventional and familiar point to a sentence,
entirely worthless.
It is pure dilettantism, again, to seek the moral of Irish commotions
in the insurrection of La Vendée. That, as somebody has said, was like
a rising of the ancient Gauls at the voice of the Druids, and led by
their great chiefs. It will be time enough to compare La Vendée
with Ireland when the peasantry take the field against the British
Government with Beresfords, Fitzgeralds, and Bourkes at their head. If
the Vendéans had risen to drive out the Charettes, the Bonchamps, the
Larochejacquelins, the parallel would have been nearer the mark. The
report of the Devon Commission, the green pamphlet containing an
account of the famous three days' discussion between O'Connell and
Butt in the Dublin Corporation In 1843, or half a dozen of Lord
Clare's speeches between 1793 and 1800, will give a clearer insight
into the Irish problem than a bushel of books about the Vendéan or any
other episode of the Revolution.
Equally frivolous is it, for any useful purpose of practical
enlightenment, to draw parallels between the action of the Catholic
clergy in Ireland to-day and that of the French clergy on the eve of
the Revolution. There is no sort of force in the argument that because
the French clergy fared ill at the Revolution,[1] therefore the Irish
clergy will fare ill when self-government is bestowed on Ireland.
Such talk is mere ingenious guess-work at best, without any of the
foundations of a true historical analogy. The differences between the
two cases are obvious, and they go to the heart of the matter. For
instance, the men who came to the top of affairs in France were
saturated both with speculative unbelief for one thing, and with
active hatred of the Church for another. In Ireland, on the contrary,
there is no speculative unbelief, as O'Connell used so constantly to
boast; and the Church being poor, voluntary, and intensely national
and popular, has nourished none of those gross and swollen abuses
which provoked the not unreasonable animosity of revolutionary France.
In truth, it is with precisely as much or as little reason that most
of the soothsayers and prognosticators of evil take the directly
opposite line. Instead of France these persons choose, as they have an
equally good right to do, to look for precedents to Spain, Belgium, or
South America. Why not? They assure us, in their jingling phrase, that
Home Rule means Rome Rule, that the priests will be the masters, and
that Irish autonomy is only another name for the reign of bigotry,
superstition, and obscurantism. One of these two mutually destructive
predictions has just as much to say for itself as the other, and no
more. We may leave the prophets to fight it out between them while we
attend to our business, and examine facts and probabilities as
they are, without the aid of capriciously adopted precedents and
fantastical analogies.
[Footnote 1: The Church did not fare so very ill, after all. The
State, in 1790, undertook the debts of the Church to the tune of
130,000,000 livres, and assured it an annual Budget of rather more
than that amount.--Boiteau's _Etat de la France_, p. 202.]
Parallels from France, or anywhere else, may supply literary
amusement; they may furnish a weapon in the play of controversy. They
shed no light and do no service as we confront the solid facts of the
business to be done. Lewis the Fourteenth was the author of a very
useful and superior commonplace when he wrote: "No man who is badly
informed can avoid reasoning badly. I believe that whoever is rightly
instructed, and rightly persuaded of _all the facts_, would never do
anything else but what he ought." Another great French ruler, who,
even more than Lewis, had a piercing eye for men and the world
of action, said that the mind of a general ought to be like a
field-glass, and as clear; to see things exactly as they are, _et
jamais se faire des tableaux_,--never to compose the objects before
him into pictures. The same maxim is nearly as good for the man who
has to conquer difficulties in the field of government; and analogies
and parallels are one way of substituting pictures for plans and
charts. Just because the statesman's problem is individual, history
can give him little help. I am not so graceless as to depreciate
history or literature either for public or for private persons. "You
are a man," Napoleon said to Goethe; and there is no reason why
literature should prevent the reader of books from being a man; why it
should blind him to the great practical truths that the end of life
is not to think but to will; that everything in the world has its
decisive moment, which statesmen know and seize; that the genius of
politics, as a great man of letters truly wrote, has not "All or
Nothing" for its motto, but seeks on the contrary to extract the
greatest advantage from situations the most compromised, and never
flings the helve after the hatchet. Like literature the use of history
in politics is to refresh, to open, to make the mind generous and
hospitable; to enrich, to impart flexibility, to quicken and nourish
political imagination and invention, to instruct in the common
difficulties and the various experiences of government; to enable a
statesman to place himself at a general and spacious standpoint. All
this, whether it be worth much or little, and it is surely worth much,
is something wholly distinct from directly aiding a statesman in
the performance of a specific task. In such a case an analogy from
history, if he be not sharply on his guard, is actually more likely
than not to mislead him. I certainly do not mean the history of the
special problem itself. Of that he cannot possibly know too much, nor
master its past course and foregone bearings too thoroughly. Ireland
is a great standing instance. There is no more striking example of
the disastrous results of trying to overcome political difficulties
without knowing how they came into existence, and where they have
their roots. The only history that furnishes a clue in Irish questions
is the history of Ireland and the people who have lived in it or have
been driven out of it.