(1) SWIFT
There are few greater ironies in history than that the modern
Conservatives should be eager to claim Swift as one of themselves. One
finds even the _Morning Post_--which someone has aptly enough named the
_Morning Prussian_--cheerfully counting the author of _A Voyage to
Houyhnhnms_ in the list of sound Tories. It is undeniable that Swift wrote
pamphlets for the Tory Party of his day. A Whig, he turned from the Whigs
of Queen Anne in disgust, and carried the Tory label for the rest of his
life. If we consider realities rather than labels, however, what do we
find were the chief political ideals for which Swift stood? His politics,
as every reader of his pamphlets knows, were, above all, the politics of a
pacifist and a Home Ruler--the two things most abhorrent to the orthodox
Tories of our own time. Swift belonged to the Tory Party at one of those
rare periods at which it was a peace party. _The Conduct of the Allies_
was simply a demand for a premature peace. Worse than this, it was a
pamphlet against England's taking part in a land-war on the Continent
instead of confining herself to naval operations. "It was the kingdom's
misfortune," wrote Swift, "that the sea was not the Duke of Marlborough's
element, otherwise the whole force of the war would infallibly have been
bestowed there, infinitely to the advantage of his country." Whether Swift
and the Tories were right in their attack on Marlborough and the war is a
question into which I do not propose to enter. I merely wish to emphasize
the fact that _The Conduct of the Allies_ was, from the modern Tory point
of view, not merely a pacifist, but a treasonable, document. Were anything
like it to appear nowadays, it would be suppressed under the Defence of
the Realm Act. And that Swift was a hater of war, not merely as a party
politician, but as a philosopher, is shown by the discourse on the causes
of war which he puts into the mouth of Gulliver when the latter is trying
to convey a picture of human society to his Houyhnhnm master:
Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of
them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of
them pretends to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrelleth with
another for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war
is entered upon because the enemy is too strong, and sometimes
because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things
which we have, or have the things which we want; and we both fight
till they take ours or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable
cause of a war to invade a country after the people have been
wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence or embroiled by factions
among themselves. It is justifiable to enter into war with our
nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a
territory of land that would render our dominions round and
complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people
are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death or
make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from
their barbarous way of living.
There you have "Kultur" wars, and "white man's burden" wars, and wars for
"places of strategic importance," satirized as though by a
twentieth-century humanitarian. When the _Morning Post_ begins to write
leaders in the same strain, we shall begin to believe that Swift was a
Tory in the ordinary meaning of the word.
As for Swift's Irish politics, Mr. Charles Whibley, like other
Conservative writers, attempts to gloss over their essential Nationalism
by suggesting that Swift was merely a just man righteously indignant at
the destruction of Irish manufactures. At least, one would never gather
from the present book that Swift was practically the father of the modern
Irish demand for self-government. Swift was an Irish patriot in the sense
in which Washington was an American patriot. Like Washington, he had no
quarrel with English civilization. He was not an eighteenth-century Sinn
Feiner. He regarded himself as a colonist, and his Nationalism was
Colonial Nationalism. As such he was the forerunner of Grattan and Flood,
and also, in a measure, of Parnell and Redmond. While not a Separatist, he
had the strongest possible objection to being either ruled or ruined from
London. In his _Short View of the State of Ireland_, published in 1728, he
preached the whole gospel of Colonial Nationalism as it is accepted by
Irishmen like Sir Horace Plunkett to-day. He declared that one of the
causes of a nation's thriving--
... is by being governed only by laws made with their own consent,
for otherwise they are not a free people. And, therefore, all
appeals for justice, or applications for favour or preferment, to
another country are so many grievous impoverishments.
He said of the Irish:
We are in the condition of patients who have physic sent to them by
doctors at a distance, strangers to their constitution and the
nature of their disease.
In the _Drapier's Letters_ he denied the right of the English Parliament
to legislate for Ireland. He declared that all reason was on the side of
Ireland's being free, though power and the love of power made for
Ireland's servitude. "The arguments on both sides," he said in a passage
which sums up with perfect irony the centuries-old controversy between
England and Ireland, were "invincible":
For in reason all government without the consent of the governed is
slavery. But, in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue
one single man in his shirt.
It would be interesting to know how the modern Tory, whose gospel is the
gospel of the eleven men well armed, squares this with Swift's passionate
championship of the "one single man in his shirt." One wishes very
earnestly that the Toryism of Swift were in fact the Toryism of the modern
Conservative party. Had it been so, there would have been no such thing as
Carsonism in pre-war England; and, had there been no Carsonism, one may
infer from Mr. Gerard's recent revelations, there might have been no
European war.
Mr. Whibley, it is only fair to say, is concerned with Swift as a man of
letters and a friend, rather than with Swift as a party politician. The
present book is a reprint of the Leslie Stephen lecture which he delivered
at Cambridge a few months ago. It was bound, therefore, to be
predominantly literary in interest. At the same time, Mr. Whibley's
political bias appears both in what he says and in what he keeps silent
about. His defence of Swift against the charge of misanthropy is a defence
with which we find ourselves largely in agreement. But Mr. Whibley is too
single-minded a party politician to be able to defend the Dean without
clubbing a number of his own pet antipathies in the process. He seems to
think that the only alternative to the attitude of Dean Swift towards
humanity is the attitude of persons who, "feigning a bland and general
love of abtract humanity ... wreak a wild revenge upon individuals." He
apparently believes that it is impossible for one human being to wish well
to the human race in general, and to be affectionate to John, Peter and
Thomas in particular. Here are some of Mr. Whibley's rather wild comments
on this topic. He writes:
We know well enough whither universal philanthropy leads us. The
Friend of Man is seldom the friend of men. At his best he is
content with a moral maxim, and buttons up his pocket in the
presence of poverty. "I _give_ thee sixpence! I will see thee
damned first!" It is not for nothing that Canning's immortal words
were put in the mouth of the Friend of Humanity, who, finding that
he cannot turn the Needy Knife Grinder to political account, give
him kicks for ha'pence, and goes off in "a transport of Republican
enthusiasm." Such is the Friend of Man at his best.
"At his best" is good. It makes one realize that Mr. Whibley is merely
playing a game of make-believe, and playing it very hard. His indictment
of humanitarians has about as much, or as little, basis in fact as would
an indictment of wives or seagulls or fields of corn. One has only to
mention Shelley with his innumerable personal benevolences to set Mr.
Whibley's card-castle of abuse tumbling.
With Mr. Whibley's general view of Swift as opposed to his general view of
politics, I find myself for the most part in harmony. I doubt, however,
whether Swift has been pursued in his grave with such torrential malignity
as Mr. Whibley imagines. Thackeray's denigration, I admit, takes the
breath away. One can hardly believe that Thackeray had read either Swift's
writings or his life. Of course he had done so, but his passion for the
sentimental graces made him incapable of doing justice to a genius of
saturnine realism such as Swift's. The truth is, though Swift was among
the staunchest of friends, he is not among the most sociable of authors.
His writings are seldom in the vein either of tenderness or of merriment.
We know of the tenderness of Swift only from a rare anecdote or from the
prattle of the _Journal to Stella_. As for his laughter, as Mr. Whibley
rightly points out, Pope was talking nonsense when he wrote of Swift as
laughing and shaking in Rabelais's easy chair. Swift's humour is
essentially of the intellect. He laughs out of his own bitterness rather
than to amuse his fellow-men. As Mr. Whibley says, he is not a cynic. He
is not sufficiently indifferent for that. He is a satirist, a sort of
perverted and suffering idealist: an idealist with the cynic's vision. It
is the essential nobleness of Swift's nature which makes the voyage to the
Houyhnhnms a noble and not a disgusting piece of literature. There are
people who pretend that this section of _Gulliver's Travels_ is almost too
terrible for sensitive persons to read. This is sheer affectation. It can
only be honestly maintained by those who believe that life is too terrible
for sensitive persons to live!
(2) SHAKESPEARE
Mr. Whibley goes through history like an electioneering bill-poster. He
plasters up his election-time shrillnesses not only on Fox's House of
Commons but on Shakespeare's Theatre. He is apparently interested in men
of genius chiefly as regards their attitude to his electioneering
activities. Shakespeare, he seems to imagine, was the sort of person who
would have asked for nothing better as a frieze in his sitting-room in New
Place than a scroll bearing in huge letters some such motto as "Vote for
Podgkins and Down with the Common People" or "Vote for Podgkins and No
League of Nations." Mr. Whibley thinks Shakespeare was like that, and so
he exalts Shakespeare. He has, I do not doubt, read Shakespeare, but that
has made no difference, He would clearly have taken much the same view of
Shakespeare if he had never read him. To be great, said Emerson, is to be
misunderstood. To be great is assuredly to be misunderstood by Mr.
Whibley.
I do not think it is doing an injustice to Mr. Whibley to single out the
chapter on "Shakespeare: Patriot and Tory" as the most representative in
his volume of _Political Portraits_. It would be unjust if one were to
suggest that Mr. Whibley could write nothing better than this. His
historical portraits are often delightful as the work of a clever
illustrator, even if we cannot accept them as portraits. Those essays in
which he keeps himself out of the picture and eschews ideas most
successfully attract us as coming from the hand of a skilful writer. His
studies of Clarendon, Metternich, Napoleon and Melbourne are all of them
good entertainment. If I comment on the Shakespeare essay rather than on
these, it is because here more than anywhere else in the book the author's
skill as a portrait-painter is put to the test. Here he has to depend
almost exclusively on his imagination, intelligence, and knowledge of
human nature. Here, where there are scarcely any epigrams or anecdotes to
quote, a writer must reveal whether he is an artist and a critic, or a
pedestrian intelligence with the trick of words. Mr. Whibley, I fear,
comes badly off from the test. One does not blame him for having written
on the theme that "Shakespeare, being a patriot, was a Tory also." It
would be easy to conceive a scholarly and amusing study of Shakespeare on
these lines. Whitman maintained that there is much in Shakespeare to
offend the democratic mind; and there is no reason why an intelligent Tory
should not praise Shakespeare for what Whitman deplored in him. There is
every reason, however, why the portraiture of Shakespeare as a Tory, if it
is to be done, should be done with grace, intelligence, and sureness of
touch. Mr. Whibley throws all these qualifications to the winds,
especially the second. The proof of Shakespeare's Toryism, for instance,
which he draws from _Troilus and Cressida_, is based on a total
misunderstanding of the famous and simple speech of Ulysses about the
necessity of observing "degree, priority and place." Mr. Whibley, plunging
blindly about in Tory blinkers, imagines that in this speech Ulysses, or
rather Shakespeare, is referring to the necessity of keeping the democracy
in its place. "Might he not," he asks, "have written these prophetic lines
with his mind's eye upon France of the Terror or upon modern Russia?" Had
Mr. Whibley read the play with that small amount of self-forgetfulness
without which no man has ever yet been able to appreciate literature, he
would have discovered that it is the unruliness not of the democracy but
of the aristocracy against which Ulysses--or, if you prefer it,
Shakespeare--inveighs in this speech. The speech is aimed at the self-will
and factiousness of Achilles and his disloyalty to Agamemnon. If there are
any moderns who come under the noble lash of Ulysses, they must be sought
for not among either French or Russian revolutionists, but in the persons
of such sound Tories as Sir Edward Carson and such sound patriots as Mr.
Lloyd George. It is tolerably certain that neither Ulysses nor Shakespeare
foresaw Sir Edward Carson's escapades or Mr. Lloyd George's insurbordinate
career as a member of Mr. Asquith's Cabinet. But how admirably they sum up
all the wild statesmanship of these later days in lines which Mr. Whibley,
accountably enough, fails to quote:
They tax our policy, and call it cowardice;
Count wisdom as no member of the war;
Forestall prescience, and esteem no act
But that of hand; the still and mental parts--
That do contrive how many hands shall strike,
When fitness calls them on, and know, by measure
Of their observant toil, the enemies' weight--
Why, this hath not a finger's dignity.
They call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war:
So that the ram, that batters down the wall,
For the great swing and rudeness of his poise,
They place before his hand that made the engine,
Or those that with the fineness of their souls
By reason guide his execution.
There is not much in the moral of this speech to bring balm to the soul of
the author of the _Letters of an Englishman_.
Mr. Whibley is not content, unfortunately, with having failed to grasp the
point of _Troilus and Cressida_. He blunders with equal assiduity in
regard to _Coriolanus_. He treats this play, not as a play about
Coriolanus, but as a pamphlet in favour of Coriolanus. He has not been
initiated, it seems, into the first secret of imaginative literature,
which is that one may portray a hero sympathetically without making
believe that his vices are virtues. Shakespeare no more endorses
Coriolanus's patrician pride than he endorses Othello's jealousy or
Macbeth's murderous ambition. Shakespeare was concerned with painting
noble natures, not with pandering to their vices. He makes us sympathize
with Coriolanus in his heroism, in his sufferings, in his return to his
better nature, in his death; but from Shakespeare's point of view, as from
most men's the Nietzschean arrogance which led Coriolanus to become a
traitor to his city is a theme for sadness, not (as apparently with Mr.
Whibley) for enthusiasm. "Shakespeare," cries Mr. Whibley, as he quotes
some of Coriolanus's anti-popular speeches, "will not let the people off.
He pursues it with an irony of scorn." "There in a few lines," he writes
of some other speeches, "are expressed the external folly and shame of
democracy. Ever committed to the worse cause, the people has not even the
courage of its own opinions." It would be interesting to know whether in
Mr. Whibley's eyes Coriolanus's hatred of the people is a sufficiently
splendid virtue to cover his guilt in becoming a traitor. That good Tories
have the right to become traitors was a gospel preached often enough in
regard to the Ulster trouble before the war. It may be doubted, however,
whether Shakespeare was sufficiently a Tory to foresee the necessity of
such a gospel in _Coriolanus_. Certainly, the mother of Coriolanus, who
was far from being a Radical, or even a mild Whig, preached the very
opposite of the gospel of treason. She warned Coriolanus that his triumph
over Rome would be a traitor's triumph, that his name would be "dogg'd
with curses," and that his character would be summed up in history in one
fatal sentence:
The man was noble,
But with his last attempt he wiped it out,
Destroyed his country, and his name remains
To the ensuing age abhorr'd.
Mr. Whibley appears to loathe the mass of human beings so excessively that
he does not quite realize the enormity (from the modern point of view) of
Coriolanus's crime. It would, I agree, be foolish to judge Coriolanus too
scrupulously from a modern point of view. But Mr. Whibley has asked us to
accept the play as a tract for the times, and we must examine it as such
in order to discover what Mr. Whibley means.
But, after all, Mr. Whibley's failure as a portrait-painter is a failure
of the spirit even more than of the intellect. A narrow spirit cannot
comprehend a magnanimous spirit, and Mr. Whibley's imagination does not
move in that large Shakespearean world in which illustrious men salute
their mortal enemies in immortal sentences of praise after the manner of
He was the noblest Roman of them all.
The author who is capable of writing Mr. Whibley's character-study of Fox
does not understand enough about the splendour and the miseries of human
nature to write well on Shakespeare. Of Fox Mr. Whibley says:
He put no bounds upon his hatred of England, and he thought it not
shameful to intrigue with foreigners against the safety and credit
of the land to which he belonged. Wherever there was a foe to
England, there was a friend of Fox. America, Ireland, France, each
in turn inspired his enthusiasm. When Howe was victorious at
Brooklyn, he publicly deplored "the terrible news." After Valmy he
did not hesitate to express his joy. "No public event," he wrote,
"not excepting Yorktown and Saratoga, ever happened that gave me so
much delight. I could not allow myself to believe it for some days
for fear of disappointment."
It does not seem to occur to Mr. Whibley that in regard to America,
Ireland, and France, Fox was, according to the standard of every ideal for
which the Allies professed to fight, tremendously right, and that, were it
not for Yorktown and Valmy, America and France would not in our own time
have been great free nations fighting against the embattled Whibleys of
Germany. So far as Mr. Whibley's political philosophy goes, I see no
reason why he should not have declared himself on the side of Germany. He
believes in patriotism, it is true, but he is apparently a patriot of the
sort that loves his country and hates his fellow-countrymen (if that is
what he means by "the people," and presumably it must be). Mr. Whibley has
certainly the mind of a German professor. His vehemence against the
Germans for appreciating Shakespeare is strangely like a German
professor's vehemence against the English for not appreciating him. "Why
then," he asks,
should the Germans have attempted to lay violent hands upon our
Shakespeare? It is but part of their general policy of pillage.
Stealing comes as easy to them as it came to Bardolph and Nym, who
in Calais stole a fire-shovel. Wherever they have gone they have
cast a thievish eye upon what does not belong to them. They hit
upon the happy plan of levying tolls upon starved Belgium. It was
not enough for their greed to empty a country of food; they must
extract something from its pocket, even though it be dying of
hunger.... No doubt, if they came to these shores, they would feed
their fury by scattering Shakespeare's dust to the winds of
heaven. As they are unable to sack Stratford, they do what seems to
them the next best thing: they hoist the Jolly Roger over
Shakespeare's works.
Their arrogance is busy in vain. Shakespeare shall never be theirs.
He was an English patriot, who would always have refused to bow the
knee to an insolent alien.
This is mere foaming at the mouth--the tawdry violence of a Tory
Thersites. This passage is a measure of the good sense and imagination Mr.
Whibley brings to the study of Shakespeare. It is simply theatrical
Jolly-Rogerism.