AND SOMETHING OF RICHARD ROCKNEY
Meanwhile India, our lubber giant, had ceased to kick a leg, and
Ireland, our fever-invalid, wore the aspect of an opiate slumber. The
volcano we couch on was quiet, the gritty morsel unabsorbed within us at
an armistice with the gastric juices. Once more the personification of
the country's prosperity had returned to the humming state of roundness.
Trade whipped him merrily, and he spun.
A fuller sketch of the figure of this remarkable emanation of us
and object of our worship, Bull, is required that we may breathe the
atmosphere of a story dealing with such very different views of the
idol, and learn to tolerate plain-speaking about him.
Fancy yourself delayed by stress of weather at an inn or an excursion,
and snapped up by some gossip drone of the district, who hearing whither
you are bound, recounts the history and nature of the place, to
your ultimate advantage, though you groan for the outer downpour to
abate.--Of Bull, then: our image, before the world: our lord and tyrant,
ourself in short--the lower part of us. Coldly worshipped on the whole,
he can create an enthusiasm when his roast-beef influence mounts up to
peaceful skies and the domestic English world spins with him. What
he does not like will then be the forbidding law of a most governable
people, what he does like the consenting. If it is declared that
argument will be inefficacious to move him, he is adored in the form of
post. A hint of his willingness in any direction, causes a perilous
rush of his devotees. Nor is there reason to suppose we have drawn the
fanatical subserviency from the example of our subject India. We may
deem it native; perhaps of its origin Aryan, but we have made it our
own. Some have been so venturesome as to trace the lordliness of Bull to
the protecting smiles of the good Neptune, whose arms are about him to
encourage the development of a wanton eccentricity. Certain weeds of
the human bosom are prompt to flourish where safeness would seem to be
guaranteed. Men, for instance, of stoutly independent incomes are prone
to the same sort of wilfulness as Bull's, the salve abject submission to
it which we behold in his tidal bodies of supporters. Neptune has done
something. One thinks he has done much, at a rumour of his inefficiency
to do the utmost. Spy you insecurity?--a possibility of invasion? Then
indeed the colossal creature, inaccessible to every argument, is open to
any suggestion: the oak-like is a reed, the bull a deer. But as there is
no attack on his shores, there is no proof that they are invulnerable.
Neptune is appealed to and replies by mouth of the latest passenger
across the Channel on a windy night:--Take heart, son John! They will
have poor stomachs for blows who intrude upon you. The testification to
the Sea-God's watchfulness restores his darling who is immediately
as horny to argument as before. Neptune shall have his share of the
honours.
Ideal of his country Bull has none--he hates the word; it smells of
heresy, opposition to his image. It is an exercise of imagination to
accept an ideal, and his digestive organs reject it, after the manner
of the most beautiful likeness of him conjurable to the mind--that
flowering stomach, the sea-anemone, which opens to anything and speedily
casts out what it cannot consume. He is a positive shape, a practical
corporation, and the best he can see is the mirror held up to him by
his bards of the Press and his jester Frank Guffaw. There, begirt
by laughing ocean-waves, manifestly blest, he glorifies his handsome
roundness, like that other Foam-Born, whom the decorative Graces
robed in vestments not so wonderful as printed sheets. Rounder at each
inspection, he preaches to mankind from the text of a finger curved upon
the pattern spectacles. Your Frenchmen are revolutionising, wagering
on tentative politics; your Germans ploughing in philosophy, thumbing
classics, composing music of a novel order: both are marching,
evolutionising, learning how to kill. Ridiculous Germans! capricious
Frenchmen! We want nothing new in musical composition and abstract
speculation of an indecent mythology, or political contrivances and
schemes of Government, and we do not want war. Peace is the Goddess we
court for the hand of her daughter Plenty, and we have won that jolly
girl, and you are welcome to the marriage-feast; but avaunt new-fangled
theories and howlings: old tunes, tried systems, for us, my worthy
friends.
Roundness admiring the growth of its globe may address majestic
invitation to the leaner kine. It can exhibit to the world that Peace
is a most desirable mother-in-law; and it is tempted to dream of capping
the pinnacle of wisdom when it squats on a fundamental truth. Bull's
perusal of the Horatian carpe diem is acute as that of the cattle in fat
meads; he walks like lusty Autumn carrying his garner to drum on, for
a sign of his diligent wisdom in seizing the day. He can read the page
fronting him; and let it be of dining, drinking, toasting, he will
vociferously confute the wiseacre bookworms who would have us believe
there is no such thing as a present hour for man.
In sad fact, the member for England is often intoxicate. Often do we
have him whirling his rotundity like a Mussulman dervish inflated by the
spirit to agitate the shanks, until pangs of a commercial crisis awaken
him to perceive an infructuous past and an unsown future, without
one bit of tracery on its black breast other than that which his
apprehensions project. As for a present hour, it swims, it vanishes,
thinner than the phantom banquets of recollection. What has he done
for the growth of his globe of brains?--the lesser, but in our rightful
posture the upper, and justly the directing globe, through whose
directions we do, by feeding on the past to sow the future, create a
sensible present composed of both--the present of the good using of
our powers. What can he show in the Arts? What in Arms? His
bards--O faithless! but they are men--his bards accuse him of sheer
cattle-contentedness in the mead, of sterility of brain, drowsihood,
mid-noddyism, downright carcase-dulness. They question him to deafen him
of our defences, our intellectual eminence, our material achievements,
our poetry, our science; they sneer at his trust in Neptune, doubt the
scaly invulnerability of the God. They point over to the foreigner, the
clean-stepping, braced, self-confident foreigner, good at arms, good
at the arts, and eclipsing us in industriousness manual and mental, and
some dare to say, in splendour of verse=-our supreme accomplishment.
Then with one big fellow, the collapse of pursiness, he abandons his
pedestal of universal critic; prostrate he falls to the foreigner; he
is down, he is roaring; he is washing his hands of English performances,
lends ear to foreign airs, patronises foreign actors, browses on reports
from camps of foreign armies. He drops his head like a smitten ox to all
great foreign names, moaning 'Shakespeare!' internally for a sustaining
apostrophe. He well-nigh loves his poets, can almost understand what
poetry means. If it does not pay, it brings him fame, respectfulness
in times of reverse. Brains, he is reduced to apprehend, brains are
the generators of the conquering energies. He is now for brains at
all costs, he has gained a conception of them. He is ready to knock
knighthood on the heads of men of brains--even literary brains.
They shall be knights, an ornamental body. To make them peers, and a
legislative, has not struck him, for he has not yet imagined them a
stable body. They require petting, to persuade them to flourish and
bring him esteem.
This is Mr. Bull, our image before the world, whose pranks are passed
as though the vivid display of them had no bad effect on the nation.
Doubtless the perpetual mirror, the slavish mirror, is to blame, but his
nakedness does not shrink from the mirror, he likes it and he is proud
of it. Beneath these exhibitions the sober strong spirit of the country,
unfortunately not a prescient one, nor an attractively loveable, albeit
of a righteous benevolence, labours on, doing the hourly duties for
the sake of conscience, little for prospective security, little to win
affection. Behold it as the donkey of a tipsy costermonger, obedient to
go without the gift of expression. Its behaviour is honourable under
a discerning heaven, and there is ever something pathetic in a toilful
speechlessness; but it is of dogged attitude in the face of men. Salt is
in it to keep our fleshly grass from putrefaction; poets might proclaim
its virtues. They will not; they are averse. The only voice it has is
the Puritan bray, upon which one must philosophise asinically to unveil
the charm. So the world is pleased to let it be obscured by the paunch
of Bull. We have, however, isolated groups, individuals in all classes,
by no means delighting in his representation of them. When such is felt
to be the case among a sufficient number, his bards blow him away as
a vapour; we hear that he is a piece of our English humour--we enjoy
grotesques and never should agree to paint ourselves handsome: our
subtle conceit insists on the reverse. Nevertheless, no sooner are the
hours auspicious to fatness than Bull is back on us; he is our family
goat, ancestral ghost, the genius of our comfortable sluggishness. And
he is at times a mad Bull: a foaming, lashing, trampling, horn-driving,
excessive, very parlous Bull. It is in his history that frenzies catch
him, when to be yoked to him is to suffer frightful shakings, not to
mention a shattering of our timbers. It is but in days of the rousing
of the under-spirit of the country, days of storm imprudent to pray the
advent of, that we are well rid of him for a while. In the interim he
does mischief, serious mischief; he does worse than when, a juvenile, he
paid the Dannegelt for peace. Englishmen of feeling do not relish
him. For men with Irish and Cambrian blood in their veins the rubicund
grotesque, with his unimpressionable front and his noisy benevolence of
the pocket, his fits of horned ferocity and lapses of hardheartedness,
is a shame and a loathing. You attach small importance to images and
symbols; yet if they seem representative, and they sicken numbers of
us, they are important. The hat we wear, though it is not a part of
the head, stamps the character of our appearance and has a positive
influence on our bearing. Symbolical decorations will stimulate the
vacant-minded to act up to them, they encircle and solidify the mass;
they are a sword of division between Celts and Saxons if they are
abhorrent to one section. And the Celtic brotherhood are not invariably
fools in their sensitiveness. They serve you on the field of Mars, and
on other fields to which the world has given glory. These execrate him
as the full-grown Golden Calf of heathenish worship. And they are so
restive because they are so patriotic. Think a little upon the ideas of
unpatriotic Celts regarding him. You have heard them. You tell us
they are you: accurately, they affirm, succinctly they see you in his
crescent outlines, tame bulk, spasms of alarm and foot on the weaker;
his imperviousness to whatsoever does not confront the sensual eye of
him with a cake or a fist, his religious veneration of his habitual
indulgences, his peculiar forms of nightmare. They swear to his
perfect personification of your moods, your Saxon moods, which their
inconsiderate spleen would have us take for unmixedly Saxon. They are
unjust, but many of them speak with a sense of the foot on their necks,
and they are of a blood demanding a worshipworthy idea. And they dislike
Bull's bellow of disrespect for their religion, much bruited in the
meadows during his periods of Arcadia. They dislike it, cannot forget
the sound: it hangs on the afflicted drum of the ear when they are in
another land, perhaps when the old devotion to their priest has expired.
For this, as well as for material reasons, they hug the hatred they
packed up among their bundles of necessaries and relics, in the flight
from home, and they instruct their children to keep it burning. They
transmit the sentiment of the loathing of Bull, as assuredly they would
be incapable of doing, even with the will, were a splendid fire-eyed
motherly Britannia the figure sitting in the minds of men for our
image--a palpitating figure, alive to change, penetrable to thought,
and not a stolid concrete of our traditional old yeoman characteristic.
Verily he lives for the present, all for the present, will be taught
in sorrow that there is no life for him but of past and future: his
delusion of the existence of a present hour for man will not outlast
the season of his eating and drinking abundantly in security. He will
perceive that it was no more than the spark shot out from the clash
of those two meeting forces; and penitently will he gaze back on that
misleading spark-the spectral planet it bids wink to his unreceptive
stars--acknowledging him the bare machine for those two to drive,
no instrument of enjoyment. He lives by reading rearward and seeing
vanward. He has no actual life save in power of imagination. He has to
learn this fact, the great lesson of all men. Furthermore there may be a
future closed to him if he has thrown too extreme a task of repairing on
that bare machine of his. The sight of a broken-down plough is mournful,
but the one thing to do with it is to remove it from the field.
Among the patriotic of stout English substance, who blew in the trumpet
of the country, and were not bards of Bull to celebrate his firmness and
vindicate his shiftings, Richard Rockney takes front rank. A journalist
altogether given up to his craft, considering the audience he had
gained, he was a man of forethought besides being a trenchant writer,
and he was profoundly, not less than eminently, the lover of Great
Britain. He had a manner of utterance quite in the tone of the familiar
of the antechamber for proof of his knowing himself to be this person.
He did not so much write articles upon the health of his mistress as
deliver Orphic sentences. He was in one her physician, her spiritual
director, her man-at-arms. Public allusions to her were greeted with his
emphatic assent in a measured pitch of the voice, or an instantaneous
flourish of the rapier; and the flourish was no vain show. He meant hard
steel to defend the pill he had prescribed for her constitutional state,
and the monition for her soul's welfare. Nor did he pretend to special
privileges in assuming his militant stand, but simply that he had
studied her case, was intimate with her resources, and loved her hotly,
not to say inspiredly. Love her as well, you had his cordial hand; as
wisely, then all his weapons to back you. There were occasions when
distinguished officials and Parliamentary speakers received the impetus
of Rockney's approval and not hesitatingly he stepped behind them to
bestow it. The act, in whatever fashion it may have been esteemed by the
objects propelled, was a sign of his willingness to let the shadow of
any man adopting his course obscure him, and of the simplicity of
his attachment. If a bitter experience showed that frequently, indeed
generally, they travelled scarce a tottering stagger farther than they
were precipitated, the wretched consolation afforded by a side glance at
a more enlightened passion, solitary in its depth, was Rockney's. Others
perchance might equal his love, none the wisdom of it; actually none the
vigilant circumspection, the shaping forethought. That clear knowledge
of the right thing for the country was grasped but by fits by others.
Enough to profit them this way and yonder as one best can! You know the
newspaper Press is a mighty engine. Still he had no delight in shuffling
a puppetry; he would have preferred automatic figures. His calls for
them resounded through the wilderness of the wooden.
Any solid conviction of a capable head of a certainty impressed upon the
world, and thus his changes of view were not attributed to a fluctuating
devotion; they passed out of the range of criticism upon inconsistency,
notwithstanding that the commencement of his journalistic career smelt
of sources entirely opposed to the conclusions upon which it broadened.
One secret of the belief in his love of his country was the readiness
of Rockney's pen to support our nobler patriotic impulses, his relish of
the bluff besides. His eye was on our commerce, on our courts of Law, on
our streets and alleys, our army and navy, our colonies, the vaster than
the island England, and still he would be busy picking up needles and
threads in the island. Deeds of valour were noted by him, lapses of
cowardice: how one man stood against a host for law or humanity,
how crowds looked on at the beating of a woman, how a good fight
was maintained in some sly ring between two of equal brawn: and
manufacturers were warned of the consequences of their iniquities,
Government was lashed for sleeping upon shaky ordinances, colonists were
gibbeted for the maltreating of natives: the ring and fervour of
the notes on daily events told of Rockney's hand upon the national
heart--with a faint, an enforced, reluctant indication of our not being
the men we were.
But after all, the main secret was his art of writing round English,
instead of laborious Latinised periods: and the secret of the art was
his meaning what he said. It was the personal throb. The fire of a mind
was translucent in Press columns where our public had been accustomed
to the rhetoric of primed scribes. He did away with the Biscay billow
of the leading article--Bull's favourite prose--bardic construction
of sentences that roll to the antithetical climax, whose foamy top is
offered and gulped as equivalent to an idea. Writing of such a kind as
Rockney's was new to a land where the political opinions of Joint Stock
Companies had rattled Jovian thunders obedient to the nod of Bull.
Though not alone in working the change, he was the foremost. And he was
not devoid of style. Fervidness is the core of style. He was a tough
opponent for his betters in education, struck forcibly, dexterously, was
always alert for debate. An encounter between Swift and Johnson, were it
imaginable, would present us probably the most prodigious Gigantomachy
in literary polemics. It is not imaginable among comparative pygmies.
But Rockney's combat with his fellow-politicians of the Press partook
of the Swiftian against the Johnsonian in form. He was a steam ram that
drove straight at the bulky broadside of the enemy.
Premiers of parties might be Captains of the State for Rockney: Rockney
was the premier's pilot, or woe to him. Woe to the country as well,
if Rockney's directions for steering were unheeded. He was a man of
forethought, the lover of Great Britain: he shouted his directions in
the voice of the lover of his mistress, urged to rebuke, sometimes to
command, the captain by the prophetic intimations of a holier alliance,
a more illumined prescience. Reefs here, shallows there, yonder a foul
course: this is the way for you! The refusal of the captain to go this
way caused Rockney sincerely to discredit the sobriety of his intellect.
It was a drunken captain. Or how if a traitorous? We point out the
danger to him, and if he will run the country on to it, we proclaim him
guilty either of inebriety or of treason--the alternatives are named:
one or the other has him. Simple unfitness can scarcely be conceived of
a captain having our common senses and a warranted pilot at his elbow.
Had not Rockney been given to a high expression of opinion, plain in
fervour, he would often have been exposed bare to hostile shafts. Style
cast her aegis over him. He wore an armour in which he could walk, run
and leap-a natural style. The ardour of his temperament suffused the
directness of his intelligence to produce it, and the two qualities made
his weakness and strength. Feeling the nerve of strength, the weakness
was masked to him, while his opponents were equally insensible to the
weakness under the force of his blows. Thus there was nothing to teach
him, or reveal him, except Time, whose trick is to turn corners of
unanticipated sharpness, and leave the directly seeing and ardent to
dash at walls.
How rigidly should the man of forethought govern himself, question
himself! how constantly wrestle with himself! And if he be a writer
ebullient by the hour, how snappishly suspect himself, that he may feel
in conscience worthy of a hearing and have perpetually a conscience in
his charge! For on what is his forethought founded? Does he try the ring
of it with our changed conditions? Bus a man of forethought who has to
be one of our geysers ebullient by the hour must live days of fever. His
apprehensions distemper his blood; the scrawl of them on the dark of
the undeveloped dazzles his brain. He sees in time little else; his
very sincereness twists him awry. Such a man has the stuff of the born
journalist, and journalism is the food of the age. Ask him, however,
midway in his running, what he thinks of quick breathing: he will
answer that to be a shepherd on the downs is to be more a man. As to the
gobbling age, it really thinks better of him than he of it.
After a term of prolonged preachification he is compelled to lash
that he may less despise the age. He has to do it for his own sake.
O gobbling age! swallowing all, digesting nought, us too you have
swallowed, O insensate mechanism! and we will let you know you have a
stomach. Furiously we disagree with you. We are in you to lead you or
work you pangs!
Rockney could not be a mild sermoniser commenting on events. Rather no
journalism at all for him! He thought the office of the ordinary daily
preacher cowlike. His gadfly stung him to warn, dictate, prognosticate;
he was the oracle and martyr of superior vision: and as in affairs of
business and the weighing of men he was of singularly cool
sagacity, hard on the downright, open to the humours of the distinct
discrimination of things in their roughness, the knowledge of the
firmly-based materialism of his nature caused him thoroughly to trust to
his voice when he delivered it in ardour--circumstance coming to be of
daily recurrence. Great love creates forethoughtfulness, without which
incessant journalism is a gabble. He was sure of his love, but who gave
ear to his prescience? Few: the echo of the country now and then, the
Government not often. And, dear me! those jog-trot sermonisers, mere
commentators upon events, manage somehow to keep up the sale of their
journals: advertisements do not flow and ebb with them as under the
influence of a capricious moon. Ah, what a public! Serve it honourably,
you are in peril of collapsing: show it nothing but the likeness of its
dull animal face, you are steadily inflated. These reflections within
us! Might not one almost say that the retreat for the prophet is the
wilderness, far from the hustled editor's desk; and annual should be the
uplifting of his voice instead of diurnal, if only to spare his blood
the distemper? A fund of gout was in Rockney's, and he had begun to
churn it. Between gouty blood and luminous brain the strife had set
in which does not conduce to unwavering sobriety of mind, though ideas
remain closely consecutive and the utterance resonant.
Never had he been an adulator of Bull. His defects as well as his
advantages as a politician preserved to him this virtue. Insisting on a
future, he could not do homage to the belying simulacrum of the present.
In the season of prosperity Rockney lashed the old fellow with the
crisis he was breeding for us; and when prostration ensued no English
tongue was loftier in preaching dignity and the means of recovery. Our
monumental image of the Misuse of Peace he pointed out unceasingly as at
a despot constructed by freemen out of the meanest in their natures
to mock the gift of liberty. His articles of foregone years were an
extraordinary record of events or conditions foreseen: seductive in the
review of them by a writer who has to be still foreseeing: nevertheless,
that none of them were bardic of Bull, and that our sound man would have
acted wisely in heeding some of the prescriptions, constituted their
essential merit, consolatory to think of, though painful. The country
has gone the wrong road, but it may yet cross over to the right one,
when it perceives that we were prophetic.
Compared with the bolts discharged at Bull by Rockney's artillery,
Captain Con O'Donnell's were popgun-pellets. Only Rockney fired to
chasten, Con O'Donnell for a diversion, to appease an animus. The
revolutionist in English journalism was too devoutly patriotic to
belabour even a pantomime mask that was taken as representative of us
for the disdainful fun of it. Behind the plethoric lamp, now blown
with the fleshpots, now gasping puffs of panic, he saw the well-minded
valorous people, issue of glorious grandsires; a nation under a
monstrous defacement, stupefied by the contemplation of the mask: his
vision was of the great of old, the possibly great in the graver strife
ahead, respecters of life, despisers of death, the real English whereas
an alienated Celtic satirist, through his vivid fancy and his disesteem,
saw the country incarnate in Bull, at most a roguish screw-kneed clown
to be whipped out of him. Celt and Saxon are much inmixed with us, but
the prevalence of Saxon blood is evinced by the public disregard of any
Celtic conception of the honourable and the loveable; so that the Celt
anxious to admire is rebutted, and the hatred of a Celt, quick as he is
to catch at images, has a figure of hugeous animalism supplied to his
malign contempt. Rockney's historic England, and the living heroic
England to slip from that dull hide in a time of trial, whether of war
or social suffering, he cannot see, nor a people hardening to Spartan
lineaments in the fire, iron men to meet disaster, worshippers of a
discerned God of Laws, and just men too, thinking to do justice; he
has Bull on the eye, the alternately braggart and poltroon, sweating in
labour that he may gorge the fruits, graceless to a scoffer. And this is
the creature to whose tail he is tied! Hereditary hatred is approved by
critical disgust. Some spirited brilliancy, some persistent generosity
(other than the guzzle's flash of it), might soften him; something
sweeter than the slow animal well-meaningness his placable brethren
point his attention to. It is not seen, and though he can understand the
perils of a severance, he prefers to rub the rawness of his wound and be
ready to pitch his cap in the air for it, out of sheer bloodloathing of
a connection that offers him nothing to admire, nothing to hug to his
heart. Both below and above the blind mass of discontent in his island,
the repressed sentiment of admiration-or passion of fealty and thirst
to give himself to a visible brighter--is an element of the division:
meditative young Patrick O'Donnell early in his reflections had noted
that:--and it is partly a result of our daily habit of tossing the straw
to the monetary world and doting on ourselves in the mirror, until
our habitual doings are viewed in a bemused complacency by us, and the
scum-surface of the country is flashed about as its vital being. A man
of forethought using the Press to spur Parliament to fitly represent the
people, and writing on his daily topics with strenuous original vigour,
even though, like Rockney, he sets the teeth of the Celt gnashing at
him, goes a step nearer to the bourne of pacification than Press and
Parliament reflecting the popular opinion that law must be passed to
temper Ireland's eruptiveness; for that man can be admired, and the
Celt, in combating him, will like an able and gallant enemy better than
a grudgingly just, lumbersome, dull, politic friend. The material points
in a division are always the stronger, but the sentimental are here
very strong. Pass the laws; they may put an extinguisher on the Irish
Vesuvian; yet to be loved you must be a little perceptibly admirable.
You may be so self-satisfied as to dispense with an ideal: your
yoke-fellow is not; it is his particular form of strength to require one
for his proper blooming, and he does bloom beautifully in the rays he
courts.
Ah then, seek to be loved, and banish Bull. Believe in a future
and banish that gross obscuration of you. Decline to let that
old-yeoman-turned alderman stand any longer for the national man.
Speaking to the brain of the country, one is sure of the power of a
resolute sign from it to dismiss the brainless. Banish him your revels
and your debatings, prohibit him your Christmas, lend no ear either to
his panics or his testiness, especially none to his rages; do not
report him at all, and he will soon subside into his domestic, varied by
pothouse, privacy. The brain should lead, if there be a brain. Once free
of him, you will know that for half a century you have appeared bottom
upward to mankind. And you have wondered at the absence of love for you
under so astounding a presentation. Even in a Bull, beneficent as he can
dream of being, when his notions are in a similar state of inversion,
should be sheepish in hope for love.
He too, whom you call the Welshman, and deride for his delight in
songful gatherings, harps to wild Wales, his Cambrian highlands, and
not to England. You have not yet, though he is orderly and serviceable,
allured his imagination to the idea of England. Despite the passion for
his mountains and the boon of your raising of the interdict (within a
hundred years) upon his pastors to harangue him in his native tongue, he
gladly ships himself across the waters traversed by his Prince Madoc of
tradition, and becomes contentedly a transatlantic citizen, a member
of strange sects--he so inveterate in faithfulness to the hoar and the
legendary!--Anything rather than Anglican. The Cymry bear you no hatred;
their affection likewise is undefined. But there is reason to think
that America has caught the imagination of the Cambrian Celt: names of
Welshmen are numerous in the small army of the States of the Union; and
where men take soldier-service they are usually fixed, they and their
children. Here is one, not very deeply injured within a century, of
ardent temperament, given to be songful and loving; he leaves you and
forgets you. Be certain that the material grounds of division are not
all. To pronounce it his childishness provokes the retort upon your
presented shape. He cannot admire it. Gaelic Scots wind the same note of
repulsion.
And your poets are in a like predicament. Your poets are the most
persuasive of springs to a lively general patriotism. They are in the
Celtic dilemma of standing at variance with Bull; they return him
his hearty antipathy, are unable to be epical or lyrical of him, are
condemned to expend their genius upon the abstract, the quaint,
the picturesque. Nature they read spiritually or sensually, always
shrinkingly apart from him. They swell to a resemblance of their patron
if they stoop to woo his purse. He has, on hearing how that poets bring
praise to nations, as in fact he can now understand his Shakespeare
to have done, been seen to thump the midriff and rally them for their
shyness of it, telling them he doubts them true poets while they abstain
from singing him to the world-him, and the things refreshing the centre
of him. Ineffectual is that encouragement. Were he in the fire, melting
to the iron man, the backbone of him, it would be different. At his
pleasures he is anti-hymnic, repellent to song. He has perceived the
virtues of Peace, without the brother eye for the need of virtuousness
to make good use of them and inspire the poet. His own enrolled
unrhythmical bardic troops (humorous mercenaries when Celts) do his
trumpeting best, and offend not the Pierides.
This interlude, or rather inter-drone, repulsive to write, can hardly be
excluded from a theme dramatising Celtic views, and treating of a blood,
to which the idea of country must shine resplendently if we would have
it running at full tide through the arteries. Preserve your worship, if
the object fills your optics. Better worship that than nothing, as it is
better for flames to be blown out than not to ascend, otherwise it will
wreak circular mischief instead of illumining. You are requested simply
to recollect that there is another beside you who sees the object
obliquely, and then you will not be surprised by his irreverence.
What if, in the end, you were conducted to a like point of view?
Self-worship, it has been said, is preferable to no trimming of the
faculty, but worship does not necessarily cease with the extinction of
this of the voraciously carnal. An ideal of country, of Great Britain,
is conceivable that will be to the taste of Celt and Saxon in common,
to wave as a standard over their fraternal marching. Let Bull boo his
drumliest at such talk: it is, I protest, the thing we want and can
have. He is the obstruction, not the country; and against him, not
against the country, the shots are aimed which seem so malignant. Him
the gay manipulators propitiate who look at him through Literature
and the Press, and across the pulpit-cushions, like airy Macheath at
Society, as carrion to batten on. May plumpness be their portion, and
they never hanged for it! But the flattering, tickling, pleasantly
pinching of Bull is one of those offices which the simple starveling
piper regards with afresh access of appetite for the well-picked bone of
his virtue. That ghastly apparition of the fleshly present is revealed
to him as a dead whale, having the harpoon of the inevitable slayer of
the merely fleshly in his oils. To humour him, and be his piper for his
gifts, is to descend to a carnival deep underneath. While he reigns,
thinks this poor starveling, Rome burns, or the explosive powders are
being secretly laid. He and his thousand Macheaths are dancing the
country the giddy pace, and there will, the wretch dreads, be many
a crater of scoria in the island, before he stretches his inanimate
length, his parasites upon him. The theme is chosen and must be treated
as a piper involved in his virtue conceives it: that is, realistically;
not with Bull's notion of the realism of the butcher's shop and the
pendent legs of mutton and blocks of beef painted raw and glaring
in their streaks, but with the realism of the active brain and heart
conjoined. The reasons for the division of Celt and Saxon, what they
think and say of one another, often without knowing that they are
divided, and the wherefore of our abusing of ourselves, brave England,
our England of the ancient fortitude and the future incarnation,
can afford to hear. Why not in a tale? It is he, your all for animal
pleasure in the holiday he devours and cannot enjoy, whose example
teaches you to shun the plaguey tale that carries fright: and so you
find him sour at business and sick of his relaxings, hating both because
he harnesses himself in turn bestially to each, growling at the smallest
admixture of them, when, if he would but chirp a little over his work,
and allow his pleasures to inspire a dose of thoughtfulness, he would
be happier, and--who knows?-become a brighter fellow, one to be rescued
from the pole-axe.
Now the rain is over, your carriage is at the door, the country smiles
and the wet highway waves a beckoning hand. We have worn through a
cloud with cloudy discourses, but we are in a land of shifting weathers,
'coelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum,' not every chapter can be
sunshine.