THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST
REFLECTIONS ON THE
ORIGINS AND DESTINY OF
IMPERIAL BRITAIN
LECTURE I
WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?
[_Tuesday, May_ 8_th_, 1900]
The present age has rewritten the annals of the world, and set its own
impress on the traditions of humanity. In no period has the burden of
the past weighed so heavily upon the present, or the interpretation of
its speculative import troubled the heart so profoundly, so intimately,
so monotonously.
How remote we stand from the times when Raleigh could sit down in the
Tower, and with less anxiety about his documents, State records, or
stone monuments than would now be imperative in compiling the history
of a county, proceed to write the History of the World! And in
speculation it is the Tale, the _fabula_, the procession of impressive
incidents and personages, which enthralls him, and with perfect fitness
he closes his work with the noblest Invocation to Death that literature
possesses. But beneath the variety or pathos of the Tale the present
age ever apprehends a deeper meaning, or is oppressed by a sense of
mystery, of wonder, or of sorrow unrevealed, which defies tears.
This revolution in our conception of History, this boundless industry
which in Germany, France, England, Italy, has led to the printing of
mountains of forgotten memoirs, correspondences, State papers, this
endless sifting of evidence, this treasuring above riches of the slight
results slowly and patiently drawn, is neither accident, nor transient
caprice, nor antiquarian frenzy, but a phase of the guiding impulse,
the supreme instinct of this age--the ardour to know all, to experience
all, to be all, to suffer all, in a word, to know the Truth of
things--if haply there come with it immortal life, even if there come
with it silence and utter death. The deepened significance of history
springs thus from the deepened significance of life, and the passion of
our interest in the past from the passion of our interest in the
present. The half-effaced image on a coin, the illuminated margin of a
mediaeval manuscript, the smile on a fading picture--if these have
become, as it were, fountains of unstable reveries, perpetuating the
Wonder which is greater than Knowledge, it is a power from the present
that invests them with this magic. Life has become more
self-conscious; not of the narrow self merely, but of that deeper Self,
the mystic Presence which works behind the veil.
World-history is no more the fairy tale whose end is death, but laden
with eternal meanings, significances, intimations, swift gleams of the
Timeless manifesting itself in Time. And the distinguishing function
of History as a science lies in its ceaseless effort not only to lay
bare, to crystallize the moments of all these manifestations, but to
discover their connecting bond, the ties that unite them to each other
and to the One, the hidden source of these varied manifestations,
whether revealed as transcendent thought, art, or action.
Hence, as in prosecuting elsewhere our inquiry into the origin of the
French Monarchy or the decline of oligarchic Venice, we examined not
only the characters, incidents, policies immediately connected with the
subject, but attempted an answer to the question--What is the place of
these incidents in the universal scheme of things? so in the treatment
of the theme now before us, the origins of Imperial Britain, pursuing a
similar plan, we have to consider not merely the relations of Imperial
Britain to the England and Scotland of earlier times, but its relations
to mediaeval Europe, and to determine so far as is possible its place
amongst the world-empires of the past. I use the phrase "Imperial
Britain," and not "British Empire," because from the latter territorial
associations are inseparable. It designates India, Canada, Egypt, and
the like. But by "Imperial Britain" I wish to indicate the informing
spirit, the unseen force from within the race itself, which in the past
has shapen and in the present continues to shape this outward, this
material frame of empire. With the rise of this spirit, this
consciousness within the British race of its destiny as an imperial
people, no event in recent history can fitly be compared. The unity of
Germany under the Hohenzollern is an imposing, a far-reaching
achievement. The aspirations of the period of the
_Aufklaerung_--Lessing, Schiller, Arndt, and Fichte--find in this
edifice their political realization. But the incident is not
unprecedented. Even the writings of Friedrich Gentz are not by it made
obsolete. It has affected the European State-system as the sudden
unity of Spain under Ferdinand or the completion of the French Monarchy
under Louis XIV affected it. But in this unobserved, this silent
growth of Imperial Britain--so unobserved that it presents itself even
now as an unreal, a transient thing--a force intrudes into the
State-systems of the world which, whether we view it in its effects
upon the present age or seek to gauge its significance to the future,
has few, if any, parallels in history.
Sec. I. THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HISTORY
What is the nature of this Consciousness? What is its historical
basis? Is it possible to trace the process by which it has emerged?
In the history of every conscious organism, a race, a State, or an
individual, there is a certain moment when the Unconscious desire,
purpose, or ideal passes into the Conscious. Life's end is then
manifest. The ideal unsuspected hitherto, or dimly discerned, now
becomes the fixed law of existence. Such moments inevitably are
difficult to localize. Bonaparte in 1793 fascinates the younger
Robespierre--"He has so much of the future in his mind." But it is
neither Toulon, nor Vendemiaire, nor Lodi, but the marshes of Arcola,
two years after Robespierre has fallen on the scaffold, that reveal
Napoleon to himself. So Diderot perceives the true bent of Rousseau's
genius long before the Dijon essay reveals it to the latter himself and
to France. Polybius discovers in the war of Regulus and of Mylae the
beginning of Rome's imperial career, but a juster instinct leads Livy
to devote his most splendid paragraphs to the heroism in defeat of
Thrasymene and Cannae. It was the singular fate of Camoens to voice
the ideal of his race, to witness its glory, and to survive its fall.
The prose of Osorius[1] does but prolong the echoes of Camoens' mighty
line. Within a single generation, Portugal traces the bounds of a
world-empire, great and impressive; the next can hardly discover the
traces. But to the limning of that sketch all the past of Portugal was
necessary, though then it emerged for the first time from the
Unconscious to the Conscious. Similarly in the England of the
seventeenth century the conscious deliberate resolve to be itself the
master of its fate takes complete possession of the nation. This is
the ideal which gives essential meaning to the Petition of Right, to
the Grand Remonstrance, to the return at the Restoration to the
"principles of 1640"; it is this which gives a common purpose to the
lives of Eliot, Pym, Shaftesbury, and Somers. It is the unifying
motive of the politics of the whole seventeenth century. The
eighteenth expands or curtails this, but originates nothing. An ideal
from the past controls the genius of the greatest statesmen of the
eighteenth century. But from the closing years of the century to the
present hour another ideal, at first existing unperceived side by side
with the former, has slowly but insensibly advanced, obscure in its
origins and little regarded in its first developments, but now
impressing the whole earth by its majesty--the Ideal of Imperial
Britain.
It is vain or misleading for the most part to fix precisely the first
beginnings of great movements in history. Nevertheless it is often
convenient to select for special study even arbitrarily some incident
or character in which that movement first conspicuously displays
itself. And if the question were asked--When does monarchical or
constitutional England first distinctively pass into Imperial Britain?
I should point to the close of the eighteenth century, to the heroic
patience with which the twenty-two years' war against France was borne,
hard upon the disaster of Yorktown and the loss of an empire; and
further, if you proceeded to search in speculative politics or actual
speeches for a deliberate expression of this transition, I should
select as a conspicuous instance Edmund Burke's great impeachment of
Warren Hastings. There this first awakening consciousness of an
Imperial destiny declares itself in a very dramatic and pronounced form
indeed. Yet Burke's range in speculative politics, compared with that
of such a writer as Montesquieu, is narrow. His conception of history
at its highest is but an anticipation of the picturesque but pragmatic
school of which Macaulay is coryphaeus. In religion he revered the
traditions, and acquiesced in the commonplaces of his time. His
literary sympathies were less varied, his taste less sure than those of
Charles James Fox. In constitutional politics he clung obstinately to
the ideals of the past; to Parliamentary reform he was hostile or
indifferent. As Pitt was the first great statesman of the nineteenth
century, so Burke was the last of the great statesmen of the
seventeenth century; for it is to the era of Pym and of Shaftesbury
that, in his constitutional theories, Burke strictly belongs. But if
his range was narrow, he is master there. "Within that circle none
durst walk but he." No cause in world-history has inspired a nobler
rhetoric, a mightier language. And if he is a reactionary in
constitutional politics, in his impeachment of Hastings he is the
prophet of a new era, the annunciator of an ideal which the later
nineteenth century slowly endeavours to realize--an empire resting not
on violence, but on justice and freedom. This ideal influences the
action, the policy, of statesmen earlier in the century; but in Chatham
its precise character, that which differentiates the ideal of Britain
from that, say, of Rome, is less clear than in Burke. And in the
seventeenth century, unless in a latent _unconscious_ form, it can
hardly be traced at all. In the speculative politics of that century
we encounter it again and again; but in practical politics it has no
part. I could not agree with Lord Rosebery when in an address he spoke
of Cromwell as "a great Briton." Cromwell is a great Englishman, but
neither in his actions nor in his policy, neither in his letters, nor
in any recorded utterance, public or private, does he evince definite
sympathy with, or clear consciousness of the distinctive ideal of
Imperial Britain. His work indeed leads towards this end, as the work
of Raleigh, of the elder Essex, or of Grenville, leads towards it, but
not consciously, not deliberately.
In Burke, however, and in his younger contemporaries, the conscious
influence, the formative power of a higher ideal, of wider aspirations
than moulded the actual statesmanship of the past, can no longer escape
us. The Empire is being formed, its material bounds marked out, here
definitely, there lost in receding vistas. On the battlefield or in
the senate-house, or at the counter of merchant adventurers, this work
is slowly elaborating itself. And within the nation at large the ideal
which is to be the spirit, the life of the Empire is rising into ever
clearer consciousness. Its influence throws a light upon the last
speeches of the younger Pitt. If the Impeachment be Burke's _chef
d'oeuvre_, Pitt never reached a mightier close than in the speech which
ended as the first grey light touched the eastern windows of
Westminster, suggesting on the instant one of the happiest and most
pathetic quotations ever made within those walls.[2] The ideal makes
great the life of Wilberforce; it exalts Canning; and Clarkson,
Romilly, Cobbett, Bentham is each in his way its exponent. "The Cry of
the Children" derived an added poignancy from the wider pity which,
after errors and failures more terrible than crimes, extended itself to
the suffering in the Indian village, in the African forest, or by the
Nile. The Chartist demanded the Rights of Englishmen, and found the
strength of his demand not diminished, but heightened, by the elder
battle-cry of the "Rights of Man." Thus has this ideal, grown
conscious, gradually penetrated every phase of our public life. It
removes the disabilities of religion; enfranchises the millions, that
they by being free may bring freedom to others. In the great
renunciation of 1846 it borrows a page from Roman annals, and sets the
name of Peel with that of Caius Gracchus. It imparts to modern
politics an inspiration and a high-erected effort, the power to falter
at no sacrifice, dread no responsibility.
Thus, then, as in the seventeenth century the ideal of national and
constituted freedom takes complete possession of the English people, so
in the nineteenth this ideal of Imperial Britain, risen at last from
the sphere of the Unconscious to the Conscious, has gradually taken
possession of all the avenues and passages of the Empire's life, till
at the century's close there is not a man capable of sympathies beyond
his individual walk whom it does not strengthen and uplift.
Sec. 2. ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM
Definitions are perilous, yet we must now attempt to define this ideal,
to frame an answer to the question--What is the nature of this ideal
which has thus arisen, of this Imperialism which is insensibly but
surely taking the place of the narrower patriotism of England, of
Scotland, and of Ireland? Imperialism, I should say, is patriotism
transfigured by a light from the aspirations of universal humanity; it
is the passion of Marathon, of Flodden or Trafalgar, the ardour of a de
Montfort or a Grenville, intensified to a serener flame by the ideals
of a Condorcet, a Shelley, or a Fichte. This is the ideal, and in the
resolution deliberate and conscious to realize this ideal throughout
its dominions, from bound to bound, in the voluntary submission to this
as to the primal law of its being, lies what may be named the destiny
of Imperial Britain.
As the artist by the very law of his being is compelled to body forth
his conceptions in colour, in words, or in marble, so the race dowered
with the genius for empire is compelled to dare all, to suffer all, to
sacrifice all for the fulfilment of its fate-appointed task. This is
the distinction, this the characteristic of the empires, the imperial
races of the past, of the remote, the shadowy empires of Media, of
Assyria, of the nearer empires of Persia, Macedon, and Rome. To spread
the name, and with the name the attributes, the civilizing power of
Hellas, throughout the world is the ideal of Macedon. Similarly of
Rome: to subdue the world, to establish there her peace, governing all
in justice, marks the Rome of Julius, of Vespasian, of Trajan. And in
this measureless devotion to a cause, in this surplus energy, and the
necessity of realizing its ideals in other races, in other peoples,
lies the distinction of the Imperial State, whether city or nation.
The origin of these characteristics in British Imperialism we shall
examine in a later lecture.
Let me now endeavour to set the distinctive ideal of Britain before you
in a clearer light. Observe, first of all, that it is essentially
British. It is not Roman, not Hellenic. The Roman ideal moulds every
form of Imperialism in Europe, and even to a certain degree in the
East, down to the eighteenth century. The theory of the mediaeval
empire derives immediately from Rome. The Roman justice disguised as
righteousness easily warrants persecution, papal or imperial. The
Revocation of the Edict of Passau by a Hapsburg, and the Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes by a Bourbon, trace their origin without a break to
that emperor to whom Dante assigns so great a part in the
_Paradiso_.[3] Lord Beaconsfield, with the levity in matters of
scholarship which he sometimes displayed, once ascribed the phrase
_imperium ac libertas_ to a Roman historian. The voluntary or
accidental error is nothing; but the conception of Roman Imperialism
which it popularized is worth considering. It is false to the genius
of Rome. It is not that the phrase nowhere occurs in a Roman
historian; but no statesman, no Roman historian, not Sulla, not Caesar,
nor Marcus, could ever have bracketed these words. _Imperium ac
justitia_ he might have said; but he could never have used together the
conceptions of Empire and Freedom. The peoples subdued by Rome--Spain,
Gaul, Africa--received from Rome justice, and for this gift blessed
Rome's name, deifying her genius. But the ideal of Freedom, the
freedom that allows or secures for every soul the power to move in the
highest path of its being, this is no pre-occupation of a Roman
statesman! Yet it is in this ideal of freedom that the distinction, or
at least a distinction of Modern, as opposed to Roman or Hellenic,
Europe consists; in the effort, that is to say, to spiritualize the
conception of outward justice, of outward freedom, to rescue individual
life from the incubus of the State, transfiguring the State itself by
the larger freedom, the higher justice, which Sophocles seeks in vain
throughout Hellas, which Virgil in Rome can nowhere find. The common
traits in the Kreon of tragedy and the Kritias of history, in the hero
of the _Aeneid_ and the triumvir Octavianus, are not accident, but
arise from the revolt of the higher freedom of Art, conscious or
unconscious, against the essential egoism of the wrong masking as right
of the ancient State. And it is in the Empire of Britain that this
effort of Modern Europe is realized, not only in the highest, but in
the most original and varied forms. The power of the Roman ideal, on
the other hand, saps the preceding empires of Modern Europe down to the
seventeenth century, the empire of the German Caesars, the Papacy
itself, Venice, Spain, Bourbon France. Consider how completely the
ideals of these States are enshrined in the _De Monarchia_, and how
closely the _De Monarchia_ knits itself to Caesarian and to consular
Rome!
The political history of Venice, stripped of its tinsel and melodrama,
is tedious as a twice-told tale. Her art, her palaces, are her own
eternally, a treasury inexhaustible as the light and mystery of the
waters upon which she rests like a lily, the changeful element
multiplying her structured loveliness and the opalescent hues of her
sky. But in politics Venice has not enriched the world with a single
inspiring thought which Rome had not centuries earlier illustrated more
grandly, more simply, and with yet profounder meanings.
Spain falls, not as Carlyle imagines, because it "rejects the Faith
proffered by the visiting angel"--a Protestant Spain is impossible--but
because Spain seeks to stifle in the Netherlands, in Europe at large,
that freedom which modern Europe had come to regard as dearer than
life--freedom to worship God after the manner nearest to its heart.
But disaster taught Spain nothing--
[Illustration: Greek text]
Alas, for mortal history! In happy fortune
A shadow might overturn its height; whilst of disaster
A wet sponge at a stroke effaces the lesson;
And 'tis this last I deem life's greater woe.
The embittered wisdom of Aeschylus finds in all history no more shining
comment than the decline of Spain.[4]
The gloomy resolution of the Austrian Ferdinand II, the internecine war
of thirty years which he provokes, sullenly pursues, and in dying
bequeaths to his son, are visited upon his house at Leuthen, Marengo,
Austerlitz, and in the overthrow of the empire devised ten centuries
before by Leo III and Charlemagne.
And with the Revocation, with Le Tellier and the Bull _Unigenitus_, the
procession of the French kings begins, which ends in the Place de la
Revolution:--"Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven."
From this thraldom to the past, to the ideal of Rome, Imperial Britain,
first amongst modern empires, completely breaks. For it is a new
empire which Imperial Britain presents to our scrutiny, a new empire
moulded by a new ideal.
Let me illustrate this by a contrast--a contrast between two armies and
what each brings to the vanquished.
Who that has read the historian of Alva can forget the march of his
army through the summer months some three hundred and thirty years ago?
That army, the most perfect that any captain had led since the Roman
legions left the world, defies from the gorges of Savoy, and division
behind division advances through the passes and across the plains of
Burgundy and Lorraine. One simile leaps to the pen of every historian
who narrates that march, the approach of some vast serpent, the
glancing of its coils unwinding still visible through the June foliage,
fateful, stealthy, casting upon its victim the torpor of its
irresistible strength. And to the Netherlands what does that army
bring? Death comes with it--death in the shape most calculated to
break the resolution of the most dauntless--the rack, the solitary
dungeon, the awful apparel of the Inquisition torture-chamber, the
_auto-da-fe_, and upon the evening air that odour of the burning flesh
of men wherewith Philip of Spain hallowed his second bridals. These
things accompany the march of Alva. And that army of ours which day by
day advances not less irresistibly across the veldt of Africa, what
does that army portend? That army brings with it not the rack, nor the
dungeon, nor the dread _auto-da-fe_; it brings with it, and not to one
people only but to the vast complexity of peoples within her bounds,
the assurance of England's unbroken might, of her devotion to that
ideal which has exercised a conscious sway over the minds of three
generations of her sons, and quickened in the blood of the unreckoned
generations of the past--an ideal, shall I say, akin to that of the
prophet of the French Revolution, Diderot, "_elargissez Dieu!_"--to
liberate God within men's hearts, so that man's life shall be free, of
itself and in itself, to set towards the lodestar of its being, harmony
with the Divine. And it brings to the peoples of Africa, to whom the
coming of this army is for good or evil so eventful, so fraught with
consequences to the future ages of their race, some assurance from the
designs, the purposes which this island has in early or recent times
pursued, that the same or yet loftier purposes shall guide us still;
whilst to the nations whose eyes are fastened upon that army it offers
some cause for gratulation or relief, that in this problem, whose vast
issues, vista receding behind vista, men so wide apart as Napoleon I.
and Victor Hugo pondered spell-bound; that in this arena where
conflicts await us beside which, in renunciation, triumph, or despair,
this of to-day seems but a toy; that in this crisis, a crisis in which
the whole earth is concerned, the Empire has intervened, definitely and
for all time, which more than any other known to history represents
humanity, and in its dealings with race distinctions and religious
distinctions does more than any other represent the principle that "God
has made of one blood all the nations of the earth."
Sec. 3. THE MANDATE OF DESTINY
In these two armies then, and in what each brings to the vanquished,
the contrast between two forms of Imperialism outlines itself sharply.
The earlier, that of the ancient world, little modified by mediaeval
experiments, limits itself to concrete, to external justice, imparted
to subject peoples from above, from some beneficent monarch or tyrant;
the later, the Imperialism of the modern world, the Imperialism of
Britain, has for its end the larger freedom, the higher justice whose
root is in the soul not of the ruler but of the race. The former
nowhere looks beyond justice; this sees in justice but a means to an
end. It aims through freedom to secure that men shall find justice,
not as a gift from Britain, but as they find the air around them, a
natural presence. Justice so conceived is not an end in itself, but a
condition of man's being. In the ancient world, government ever tends
to identify itself with the State, even when, as in Rome or Persia,
that State is imperial. In the modern, government with concrete
justice, civic freedom as its aims, ever tends to become but a function
of the State whose ideal is higher.
The vision of the _De Monarchia_--one God, one law, one creed, one
emperor, semi-divine, far-off, immaculate, guiding the round world in
justice, the crowning expression of Rome's ideal by a great poet whose
imagination was on fire with the memory of Rome's grandeur--does but
describe after all an exterior justice, a justice showered down upon
men by a beneficent tyrant, a Frederick I, inspired by the sagas of
Siegfried and of Charlemagne, or the second Frederick, the "Wonder of
the World" to the thirteenth century, and ever alluring, yet ever
eluding, the curiosity of the nineteenth; or a Henry VII, ineffectual
and melancholic. Such "justice" passes easily by its own excess into
the injustice which dispatches Alva's army or finds bizarre expression
in the phrase of "le Roi soleil,"--"The State? I am the State." The
ideal of modern life, the ideal of which Britain is the supreme
representative amongst existing empires, starting not from justice but
from freedom, may be traced beyond the French Revolution and the
Reformation, back even to the command "Render unto Caesar." That word
thrust itself like a wedge into the ancient unity of the State and God.
It carried with it not merely the doom of the Roman Empire, but of the
whole fabric of the ancient relations of State and Individual. Yet
Sophocles felt the injustice of this justice four centuries before, as
strongly as Tertullian, the Marat of dying Rome, felt it two centuries
after that command was uttered.
Such then is the character of the ideal. And in the resolution as a
people, for the furtherance of its great ends, to do all, to suffer
all, as Rome resolved, lies what may be described as the destiny of
Imperial Britain. None more impressive, none loftier has ever arisen
within the consciousness of a people. And to England through all her
territories and seas the moment for that resolution is now. If ever
there came to any city, race, or nation, clear and high through the
twilight spaces, across the abysses where the stars wander, the call of
its fate, it is NOW! There is an Arab fable of the white steed of
Destiny, with the thunder mane and the hoofs of lightning, that to
every man, as to every people, comes _once_. Glory to that man, to
that race, who dares to mount it! And that steed, is it not nearing
England now? Hark! the ringing of its hoofs is borne to our ears on
the blast!
Temptations to fly from this decision, to shrink from the great
resolve, to temporize, to waver, have at such moments ever presented
themselves to men and to nations. Even now they present themselves,
manifold, subtly disguised, insidiously persuasive, as exhortations to
humility, for instance, as appeals to the deference due to the opinion
of other States. But in the faith, the undying faith, that it, and it
alone, can perform the fate-appointed task, dwells the virtue of every
imperial race that History knows. How shall any empire, any state,
conscious of its destiny, imitate the self-effacement prescribed to the
individual--"In honour preferring one another"? This in an imperial
State were the premonition of decay, the presage of death.
But there is one great pledge, a solemn warrant of her resolve to
swerve not, to blench not, which England has already offered. That
pledge is Elandslaagte, it is Enslin, the Modder, and the bloody agony
of Magersfontein. For it grows ever clearer as month succeeds month
that it is by the invincible force of this ideal, this of Imperial
Britain, that we have waged this war and fought these battles in South
Africa. If it be not for this cause, it is for a cause so false to all
the past, from Agincourt to Balaklava, that it has but to be named to
carry with it its own refutation. There is a kind of tragic elevation
in the very horror of the march of Attila, of Ginghis Khan, or of
Timour. But to assemble a host from all the quarters of this wide
Empire, to make Africa, as it were, the rendezvous of the earth, for
the sake of a few gold, a few diamond mines, what language can equal a
design thus base, ambition thus sordid? And if we call to memory the
dead who have fallen in this war, those who at its beginning were with
us in the radiance of their manhood, but now, still in the grave, all
traces of life's majesty not yet gone from their brow, and if those
dead lips ask us, "Why are we thus? And in what cause have we died?"
were it not a hard thing for Britain, for Europe, indeed for all the
world, if the only answer we could make to the question should be, "It
is for the mines, it is for the mines!" No man can believe that; no
man, save him whose soul faction has sealed in impenetrable night! The
imagination recoils revolted, terror-struck. Great enterprises have
ever attracted some base adherents, and these by their very presence
seem to sully every achievement recorded of nations or cities. But to
arraign the fountain and the end of the high action because of this
baser alloy? To impeach on this account all the valour, all the wisdom
long approved? Reply is impossible; the thing simply is not British.
Indeed, in very deed, it is for another cause, and for another
ideal--an ideal that, gathering to itself down the ages the ardour of
their battle-cries, falls in all the splendour of a new hope about the
path of England now. For this these men have died, from the first
battle of the war to that fought yesterday. And it is this knowledge,
this certainty, which gives us heart to acquiesce, as each of us is
compelled to acquiesce, in the presence of that army in South Africa.
They have fallen, fighting for all that has made our race great in the
past, for this, the mandate of destiny to our race in the future. They
have fallen, those youths, self-devoted to death, with a courage so
impetuous, casting their youth away as if it were a thing of no
account, a careless trifle, life and all its promises! But yesterday
in the flush of strength and beauty; to-night the winds from tropic
seas stir the grass above their graves, the southern stars look down
upon the place of their rest. For this ideal they have died--"in their
youth," to borrow the phrase of a Greek orator, "torn from us like the
spring from the year."
Fallen in this cause, in battle for this ideal, behold them advance to
greet the great dead who fell in the old wars! See, through the mists
of time, Valhalla, its towers and battlements, uplift themselves, and
from their places the phantoms of the mighty heroes of all ages rise to
greet these English youths who enter smiling, the blood yet trickling
from their wounds! Behold, Achilles turns, unbending from his deep
disdain; Rustum, Timoleon, Hannibal, and those of later days who fell
at Brunanburh, Senlac, and Trafalgar, turn to welcome the dead whom we
have sent thither as the _avant-garde_ of our faith, that in this cause
is our destiny in this the mandate of our fate.
[1] The Latin work of Osorius, _De rebus gestis Emmanuelis regis
Lusitaniae_, appeared in 1574, two years later than _Os Lusiadas_. The
twelve books of Osorius cover the twenty-six years between 1495 and
1521, thus traversing parts of the same ground as Camoens. But the
hero of Osorius is Alboquerque. His affectation of Ciceronianism, the
literary vice of the age, casts a suspicion upon the sincerity of many
of his epithets and paragraphs, yet the work as a whole is composed
with his eyes upon his subject. Seven years after the Latin, a French
translation, a beautifully printed folio from Estienne's press, was
published, containing eight additional books, by Lopez de Castanedo and
others, bringing the history down to 1529.
[2] The first of Pitt's two remarkable speeches in the great debate of
April, 1792, on the Abolition of the Slave-trade was made on April and
Pitt, according to a pamphlet report printed by Phillips immediately
afterwards, rose after an all-night sitting to speak at four o'clock on
Tuesday morning (April 3rd). The close of the speech is thus reported:
"If we listen to the voice of reason and duty, and pursue this night
the line of conduct which they prescribe, some of us may live to see a
reverse of that picture, from which we now turn our eyes with pain and
regret. We may live to behold the natives of Africa engaged in the
calm occupations of industry, in the pursuits of a just and legitimate
commerce. We may behold the beams of science and philosophy breaking
in upon their land, which at some happy period in still later times may
blaze with full lustre, and joining their influence to that of pure
religion, may illumine and invigorate the most distant extremities of
that immense continent. Then may we hope that even Africa, though last
of all the quarters of the globe, shall enjoy at length, in the evening
of her days, those blessings which have descended so plentifully upon
us in a much earlier period of the world. Then also will Europe,
participating in her improvements and prosperity, receive an ample
recompense for the tardy kindness (if kindness it can be called) of no
longer hindering that continent from extricating herself out of the
darkness which in other more fortunate regions has been so much more
speedily dispelled--
Non primus equis oriens afflavit anhelis,
illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.
Then, Sir, may be applied to Africa those words, originally indeed used
with a different view--
His demum exactis--
devenere locos laetos, et amoena vireta
fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas;
largior hie campos aether, et lumine vestit
purpureo."
Pitt's second speech, of which only a brief impassioned fragment
remains, was delivered on April 27th (_Parl. Hist._ xxix, pp. 1134-88).
[3] Justinian not only in his policy but in his laws sums the history
of the three preceding centuries, and determines the history of the
centuries which follow. To Dante he represents at once the subtleties
of Jurisprudence and Theology. The Eagle's hymn in the _Paradiso_
(Cantos xix, xx) defines the limitations and the glory of Roman and
Mediaeval Imperialism. The essence of the entire treatise _De
Monarchia_ is in these cantos; and Canto vi, where Justinian in person
speaks, is informed by the same spirit.
[4] Portugal in the first half of the sixteenth century presents a
further instance of an empire actuated by the same ideals as those of
Spain. Within a single century, almost within the memory of a single
life, Portugal appears successively as a strong united nation, an
empire of great and far-stretched renown, and then, by a revolution in
fortune of which there are few examples, as a vanquished and subject
State. Her merchants were princes, her monarchs, John II, Emmanuel,
John III, and Sebastian, were in riches kings of the kings of Europe.
But during the brief period of Portugal's glory, tyranny and bigotry
went hand in hand. To the pride of her conquistadores was added the
fanaticism of Xavier and his retinue, and in the very years when within
the same region Baber and Akbar were raising the wise and tolerant
administration of the first Moguls, the Inquisition, with its priests,
incantations, and torture-chambers, was established at Goa. The
resemblance in feature, bearing, and in character between the Gilberts,
the Grenvilles, and the Alboquerques and Almeidas is indisputable; but
certain ineffaceable and intrinsic distinctions ultimately force
themselves upon the mind. And these distinctions mark the divergence
between the fate and the designs of England and the fate and the
designs of Lusitania, between the empire of Portugal and that of
Britain. Indeed, upon the spirit of mediaeval imperialism the work of
Osorius is hardly less illuminating than the deliberate treatise of
Dante.
LECTURE II
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL IDEAL
[_Tuesday, May_ 15_th_, 1900]
Man's path lies between the living and the dead, and History seems to
move between two hemispheres that everywhere touch yet unite nowhere,
the Past, shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each moment ends, the
Future not less shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each moment begins.
The question, "What is History?" is but the question, "What is Life?"
transferred from the domain of the Present to the domain of the Past.
To understand the whorl of a shell would require an intelligence that
has grasped the universe, and for the knowledge of the history of an
hour the aeons of the fathomless past were not excessive as a
preliminary study. Massillon's injunction, "Look thou within," does
but discover to our view in nerve-centres, in emotional or in
instinctive tendencies, hieroglyphics graven by long vanished ancestral
generations. But Nature, to guard man from despair, has fashioned him
a contemporary of the remotest ages. The beam of light, however far
into space it travel, yet remains unsevered from the orb whence it
sprang, and Man, the youngest-born of Time, is yet one with the source
whence he came. As age flies past after age, the immanence of the
Divine grows more, not less insistent. Each moment indeed is rooted in
the dateless past inextricably; but to its interpretation the soul
comes, a wanderer from aeons not less distant, laden with the presaging
memories, experiences, innumerable auxiliaries unseen, which the past
itself has supplied for its own conquest or that of the present.
Trusting to these, man is unmoved at the narrowness of his conscious
sovereignty, as the eye is unmoved at the narrow bounds that hedge its
vision, and finds peace where he would otherwise have found but despair.
Those affinities, those intimate relations of the past and present, are
the basis of speculative politics. A judgment upon a movement in the
present, an opinion hazarded upon the curve which a state, a nation, or
an empire will describe in the future, is of little value unless from a
wide enough survey the clear sanction of the past can be alleged in its
support.
Assuming therefore that in the ideal delineated above we have the ideal
of a race destined to Empire, and at last across the centuries grown
conscious of that destiny, the question confronts us--is it possible
out of the past, not surveying it from the vantage-ground of the
present merely, but as it were living into the present from the past,
to foreshadow the rise of this consciousness? Or turning back in the
light of this consciousness to the past, is there offered by the past a
justification of this interpretation of the present, of this movement
styled "Imperialism"?
The heart of the matter lies in the transformation of mediaeval
patriotism into modern imperialism, in the evolution or development
which out of the Englishman of the earlier centuries has produced the
Englishman of the present, moved by other and higher political ends.
Is there any incident or series of incidents in our history, of
magnitude enough profoundly to affect the national consciousness, to
which we may look for the causes, or for the formative spirit, of this
change? And in their effect upon the national consciousness of Britain
have these incidents followed any law traceable in other nations or
empires?
Sec. I. OF THE ACTION OF STATES AND OF INDIVIDUALS
There is a kind of criticism directed against politics which, year by
year or month by month, makes the discovery that between the code which
regulates the action of States and the code which regulates the actions
of individuals divergencies or contradictions are constantly arising.
War violates the ordinances of religion; diplomacy, the ordinances of
truth; expediency, those of justice. And the conclusion is drawn that
whatever be the softening influences of civilization upon the relations
of private life, within the sphere of politics, barbarism, brutally
aggressive or craftily obsequious, reigns undisturbed. Era succeeds
era, faiths rise and set, statesmen and thinkers, prophets and martyrs,
act, speak, suffer, die, and are seen no more; but, scornful of all
their strivings, the great Anarch still stands sullen and unaltered by
the centuries. And these critics, undeterred by Burke's hesitation to
"draw up an indictment against a whole nation," make bold to arraign
Humanity itself, charging alike the present and the past with perpetual
self-contradiction, an hypocrisy that never dies.
Underlying this impeachment of Nations and States in their relations to
each other the assumption at once reveals itself, that every State,
whether civic, national, or imperial, is but an aggregate of the
individuals that compose it, and should accordingly be regulated in its
actions by the same laws, the same principles of conduct, as control
the actions of individuals. And he therefore is the greatest statesman
who constrains the State as nearly as possible into the line prescribed
to the individual--whatever ruin and disaster attend the rash
adventure! The perplexity is old as the embassy of Carneades, young as
the self-communings of Mazzini.
Yet certain terms, current enough amongst those who deliver or at least
acquiesce in this indictment (such as "Organism" or "Organic Unity" as
applied to the State), might of themselves suggest a reconsideration of
the axiom that the State is but an aggregate of individuals. The unity
of an organism, though arising from the constituent parts, is yet
distinct from the unity of those parts. Even in chemistry the laws
which regulate the molecule are not the laws which regulate the
constituent atoms. And in that highest and most complex of all
unities, the State, we find, as we might expect to find, laws of
another range, and a remoter purport, obscurer to us in their origins,
more mysterious in their tendencies, than the laws which meet us in the
unities which compose it. In the region in which States act and
interact, whether with Plato we regard it as more divine, or as
Rousseau passionately insists, as lower, the laws which are valid must
at least be _other_ than the laws valid amongst individuals. The orbit
described by the life of the State is of a wider, a mightier sweep than
the orbit of the separate life. The life which the individual
surrenders to the State is not one with the life which he receives in
return; yet even of this interchange no analysis has yet laid bare the
conditions.
These considerations are not designed to imply that in the relations
between States the code of individual ethics is necessarily annulled;
but to suggest that the laws which regulate the actions or the
suffering of States, as such, have too peremptorily been assumed to be,
by nature and the ground-plan of the universe, identical with the laws
of individual life, its actions or its sufferings, and that it is
something of a _petitio principii_, in the present stage of our
knowledge, to judge the one by the standards applicable only to the
other.
The profoundest students of the actions of States have in all times
been aware, not of the fixed antagonism, but of the essential
distinction, between the two codes. Every principle of Machiavelli is
implicit in Thucydides, and Sulla, whom Montesquieu selects as the
supreme type of Roman grandeur, does but follow principles which
reappear in the politics of an Innocent III or a Richelieu, a Cromwell
or an Oxenstiern.[1] The loss of Sulla's _Commentaries_[2] is
irreparable as the loss of the fifth book of the _Annals_ of Tacitus or
the burnt _Memoirs_ of Shaftesbury; in the literature of politics it is
a disaster without a parallel. What Sulla felt as a first, most living
impulse appears in later times as a colder, a critical judgment. It is
thus that it presents itself to Machiavelli, not the writer of that
_jeu d'esprit_, _Il Principe_, perplexing as _Hamlet_, and as variously
interpreted, but the author of the stately periods of the _Istorie_ and
the _Discorsi_, the haughtiest of speculators, and in politics the
profoundest of modern thinkers. M. Sorel encounters little difficulty
in proving that the diplomacy of Europe in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries is but an exposition of the principles of the
_Discorsi_; Frederick the Great, who started his literary activity by
the refutation of the _Prince_, began and ended his political career as
if his one aim were to illustrate the maxims that in the rashness of
inexperience he had condemned; and within living memory, the vindicator
of Oliver Cromwell found in the composition of the same Frederick's
history the solace and the torment of his last and greatest years.
To press this inquiry further would be foreign to the present subject;
enough has been said to indicate that from whatever deep unity they may
spring, the laws which determine the life of a State, as displayed in
History, are not identical with the laws of individual life. The
region of Art, however, seems to offer a neutral territory, where it is
possible to obtain some perception, or _Ahnung_ as a German would say,
of the operation in the life of States of a law which bears directly
upon the problem before us.
Sec. 2. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY AS APPLIED TO HISTORY
In the history of past empires, their rise and decline, in the history
of this Empire of Britain from the coming of Cerdic and Cynric to the
present momentous crisis, there reveals itself a force, an influence,
not without analogy to the influence ascribed by Aristotle to Attic
Tragedy. The function of Tragedy he defined as the purification of the
soul by Compassion and by Terror--+di eleou kai phobou katharsis+.[3]
Critics and commentators still debate the precise meaning of the
definition; but my interpretation, or application of it to the present
inquiry is this, that by compassion and terror the soul is exalted
above compassion and terror, is lifted above the touch of pity or of
fear, attaining to a state like that portrayed by Dante--
Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce, tale,
Che la vostra miseria non mi tange
Ne fiamma d' esto incendio non m' assale.[4]
In the tragic hour the soul is thus vouchsafed a deeper vision,
discerns a remoter, serener, mightier ideal which henceforth it pursues
unalterably, undeviatingly, as if swept on by a law of Nature itself.
Sorrow, thus conceived, is the divinest thought within the Divine mind,
and when manifested in that most complex of unities, the consciousness
of a State, the soul of a race, it assumes proportions that by their
very vagueness inspire but a deeper awe, presenting a study the
loftiest that can engage the human intellect.
Genius for empire in a race supplies that impressiveness with which a
heroic or royal origin invests the protagonist of a tragedy, an
Agamemnon or a Theseus. Hence, though traceable in all, the operation
of this law, analogous to the law of Tragedy, displays itself in the
history of imperial cities or nations in grander and more imposing
dimensions. Nowhere, for instance, are its effects exhibited in a more
impressive manner than in the fall of Imperial Athens--most poignantly
perhaps in that hour of her history which transforms the character of
Athenian politics, when amid the happy tumult of the autumn vintage,
the choric song, the procession, the revel of the Oschophoria, there
came a rumour of the disaster at Syracuse, which, swiftly silenced,
started to life again, a wild surmise, then panic, and the dread
certainty of ruin. That hour was but the essential agony of a
soul-conflict which, affecting a generation, marks the transformation
of the Athens of Kimon and Ephialtes, of Kleon and Kritias, into the
Athens[5] of Plato and Isocrates, of Demosthenes and Phocion. In the
writings of such men, in their speculations upon politics, one
pervading desire encounters us, alike in the grave serenity of the
Laws, the impassioned vehemence of the _Crown_, in the measured
cadences of the _Panegyric_, the effort to lead Athens towards some
higher enterprise, to secure for Athens and for Hellas some uniting
power, civic or imperial, another empire than that which fell in
Sicily, and moved by a loftier ideal. The serious admiration of
Thucydides for Sparta, the ironic admiration of Socrates, Plato's
appeals to Crete and to ancient Lacedsemon, these are not renegadism,
not disloyalty to Athens, but fidelity to another Athens than that of
Kleon or of Kritias. History never again beheld such a band of
pamphleteers![6]
In the history of Rome, during the second war against Carthage, a
similar moment occurs. After Cannae, Rome lies faint from haemorrhage,
but rises a new city. The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus is greater
than the Rome of the Decemvirs. It is not the inevitable change which
centuries bring; another, a higher purpose has implanted itself within
Rome's life as a State. The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus announces
Imperial Rome, the Rome of the Caesars.
So in the history of Islam, from the anguish and struggles of the
eighth century, the Islam of Haroun and Mutasim arises, imparting even
to dying Persia, as it were, a second prime, by the wisdom and
imaginative justice of its sway.
In the development of Imperial Britain, the conflict which in the
life-history of these two States, Athens and Rome, has its essential
agony at Cannae or at Syracuse, the conflict which affects the national
consciousness as the hour of tragic insight affects the individual
life, finds its parallel in the fifteenth century. After the
short-lived glory of Agincourt and the vain coronation at Paris,
humiliation follows humiliation, calamity follows calamity. The empire
purchased by the war of a century is lost in a day; and England's
chivalry, as if stung to madness by the magnitude of the disaster,
turns its mutilating swords, like Paris after Sedan, against itself.
The havoc of civil war prolongs the rancour and the shame of foreign
defeat, so that Rheims, Chatillon, Wakefield, Barnet, and Tewkesbury,
with other less remembered woes, seem like moments in one long tempest
of fiery misery that breaks over England, stilled at last in the
desperate lists at Bosworth.
This period neglected, perhaps wisely neglected, by the political
historian, is yet the period to which we must turn for the secret
sources of that revolution in its political character which, furthered
by the incidents that fortune reserved for her, has gradually fashioned
out of the England of the Angevins the Imperial Britain of to-day.
In England it is possible to trace the operation of this transforming
power, which I have compared to the transforming power of tragedy, in a
very complete manner. It reveals itself, for instance, in two
different modes or aspects, which, for the sake of clearness, may be
dealt with separately. In the first of these aspects, deeply and
permanently affecting the national consciousness, which as we have seen
is distinct from the sum of the units composing it, the law of tragedy
appears as the influence of suffering, of "terror" in the mystic
transcendental sense of the word, of reverent fear, yet with it, serene
and dauntless courage. This influence now makes itself felt in English
politics, in English religion, in English civic life.
If we consider the history of England prior to this epoch, it might at
first sight appear as if here were a race emphatically not destined for
empire. Not in her dealings with conquered France, not in Ireland, not
in Scotland, does England betray, in her national consciousness, any
sympathy even with that aspiration towards concrete justice which marks
the imperial character of Persia and of Rome. England seems fated to
add but one record more to the tedious story of unintelligent tyrant
States, illustrating the theme--+hubris phyteuei tyrannon+--"insolence
begets the tyrant!" Even to her contemporary, Venice, the mind turns
from England with relief; whilst in the government of Khorassan by the
earlier Abbassides we encounter an administration singularly free from
the defects that vitiate Imperial Rome at its zenith. And now in the
days of the first Tudors all England's efforts at empire have come to
nothing. Knut's empire sinks with him; Norman and Plantagenet follow;
but of their imperial policy the dying words of Mary Tudor, "Calais
will be found graven on my heart," form the epitaph. It was not merely
the loss of Calais that oppressed the dying Queen, but she felt
instinctively, obscurely, prophetically that here was an end to the
empire which her house had inherited from Norman and Plantagenet.
But in the national consciousness, the consciousness of the State, a
change is now apparent. As Athens rose from Syracuse, a new Athens, as
Rome rose from Cannae, a new city, to conquer by being conquered, so
from the lost dreams of empire over France, over Scotland, England
arises a new nation. This declares itself in the altered course of her
policy alike in France, Ireland, and Scotland. In Ireland, for
instance, an incomplete yet serious and high-purposed effort is made to
bring, if not justice, at least law to the hapless populations beyond
the Pale. Henry VIII again, like Edward I, is a masterful king. In
politics, in constructive genius, he even surpasses Edward I. He
abandons the folly of an empire in France, and though against Scotland
he achieves a triumph signal as that of Edward, he has no thought of
reverting to the Plantagenet policy. He defeats the Scots at Flodden;
but he has the power of seeing that in spite of his victory they are
not defeated at all. King James IV lies dead there, with all his earls
around him, like a Berserker warrior, his chiefs slain around him,
"companions," _comites_ indeed, in that title's original meaning. But
the spirit of the nation is quickened, not broken, and Henry VIII,
recognising this, steadily pursues the policy which leads to 1603, when
these two peoples, by a mutual renunciation, both schooled in misery,
and with the Hebrew phrase, "Well versed in suffering, and in sorrow
deeply skilled," working so to speak in their very blood, are united.
The Puritan wars, and the struggle for an ideal higher than that of
nationality, cement the union.
In the development of the life of a State, the distance in time between
causes and their visible effects often makes the sequence obscure or
sink from sight altogether. As in geology the century is useless as a
unit to measure the periods with which that science deals, and as in
astronomy the mile is useless as a standard for the interstellar
spaces; so in history, in tracing the organic changes within the
conscious life of a State, the lustrum, the dekaetis, or even the
generation, would sometimes be a less misleading unit than the year.
The England of Elizabeth drew the first outline of the Empire of the
future; but five generations were to pass before the Britain of
Chatham[7] could apply itself with a single-hearted resolution to fill
that outline in, and yet three other generations before this people as
a whole was to become completely conscious of its high destiny.
Freedom of religion and constitutional liberty had to be placed beyond
the peril of encroachment or overthrow, before the imperial enterprise
could be unreservedly pursued; but the deferment of the task has nerved
rather than weakened the energy of her resolve. Had England fallen in
the Maryborough wars, she would have left a name hardly more memorable
than that of Venice or Carthage, illustrious indeed, but without a
claim to original or creative Imperialism. But if she were to perish
now, it would be in the pursuance of a design which has no example in
the recorded annals of man.
Similarly in Rome, two centuries sever the Rome which rose from Cannae
from the Rome which administered Egypt and Hispania. And in Islam four
generations languish in misery before the true policy of the Abbassides
displays itself, striking into the path which it never abandoned.
In England then the influence of this epoch of tragic insight, and of
its transforming force, advances imperceptibly, unnoted across two
generations, yet the true sequence of cause and effect is
unquestionable. The England which, towards the close of the eighteenth
century, presents itself like a fate amongst the peoples of India,
bears within itself the wisdom which in the long run will save it from
the errors, and turn it from the path, which the England of the
Plantagenets followed in Ireland and in France. The national
consciousness of England, stirred to its depths by its own suffering,
its own defeats, its own humiliations, comes there in India within the
influence of that which in the life of a State, however little it may
affect the individual life as such, is the deepest of all suffering.
England stands then in the presence of a race whose life is in the
memories of its past; its literature, its arts, its empires that rise
and dissolve like dreams; its religions, its faiths, with all their
strange analogies, dim suggestions, mysterious as a sea cavern full of
sounds. Hard upon this experience in India comes that of the farther
East, comes that of Egypt, that of Africa in the nineteenth century.
How can such a fortune fail to change the heart, the consciousness of a
race, imparting to it forces from these wider horizons, deepening its
own life by the contact with this manifold environment? He who might
have been a de Montfort, a Grenville, or a Raleigh, is now by these
presences uplifted to other ideals, and by these varied and complex
influences of suffering, and the presence of suffering, raised from the
sphere of concrete freedom and concrete justice to the higher realm
ruled by imaginative freedom, imaginative justice, which Sophocles, in
the choral ode of the _Oedipus_, delineates, "the laws of sublimer
range, whose home is the pure ether, whose origin is God alone."
Sec. 3. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT
The second mode or aspect in which the Law of Tragedy as applied to
history reveals itself in the life of a State, corresponds to the
moment of intenser vision in the individual life, when the soul,
exalted by "compassion and terror," discerns the deeper truth, the
serener ideal which henceforth it pursues as if impelled by the fixed
law of its being. There is a word coined by Aristotle which comes down
the ages to us, bringing with it as it were the sound of the griding of
the Spartan swords as they leapt from their scabbards on the morning of
Thermopylae, the +energeia tes psyches+--the energy of the soul. This
energy of the soul in Aristotle is the _vertu_ of Machiavelli, the
spring of political wisdom, the foundation of the greatness of a State.
It is the immortal energy which arises within the consciousness of a
nation, or in the soul of an individual, as the result of that hour of
insight, of pity, of anguish, or contrition. It is the heroism which
adverse fortune greatens, which antagonism but excites to yet sublimer
daring.
In Rome this displays itself, both in policy and in war, in the
centuries that immediately succeed Cannae. Nothing in history is more
worthy of attention than the impression which Rome in this epoch of her
history made upon the minds of men, above all, upon the mind of Hellas.
Its expression in Polybius is remarkable.
Polybius, if not one of the greatest of thinkers on politics, has a
place with the greatest political historians for all time. It was his
work which Chatham placed in the hands of his son, the younger Pitt, as
the supreme guide in political history. Polybius has every inducement
to abhor Rome, to judge her actions with jealous and unfriendly eyes.
His father was the companion of Philopoemen, the heroic leader of the
Achaean league, sometimes styled "the last of the Greeks," the
Kosciusko of the old world. Polybius himself is a hostage in Rome, the
representative of a defeated race, a lost cause; and yet after years of
study of his conquerors, possessing every means for a just estimate of
their actions and motives in the senate, on the battlefield, in the
intimacies of private life, the conviction of his heart becomes that
there in Rome is a people divinely appointed to the government, not of
Hellas merely, but of the whole earth. The message of his history,
composed with scrupulous care, and a critical method rare in that age,
is that the very stars in their courses fight for Rome, whether she
wages war against Greek or against Barbarian, that hers is the
domination of the earth, the empire of the world, and it is to the
eternal honour of Greece that it accepted this message. The
Romano-Hellenic empire is born. Other men arise both to the east and
to the west of the Adriatic, in whom the Greek and Roman genius are
fused, who pursue the ideal and amplify or adorn the thought which
Polybius was the first to express immortally. It inspires the rhetoric
of Cicero; and falls with a kind of glory on the verse of Virgil--
Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,
credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus,
orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus
describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos Romane memento;
hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.
The tutor of Hadrian makes it the informing idea of his parallel
"Lives," and gives form and feature to a grandeur that else were
incredible. It appears in the duller work of the industrious Dion
Cassius, and in the fourth century forges some of the noblest verse of
Claudian. And as we have seen, it is enshrined nine centuries after
Claudian in the splendid eloquence of the _De Monarchia_, and yields
such spent, such senile life as they possess, to the empires of
Hapsburg and Bourbon. Thus this divine energy, which after Cannae
uplifts Rome, riveting the sympathies of Polybius, outlives Rome
itself, still controlling the imaginations of men, until its last
flicker in the eighteenth century.
Where in the history of England, in the life of England as a State,
does this energy, exalted by the hour of tragic vision, manifest
itself? Recollect our problem; it is by analysis, comparison, and
contrast, to discover what is the testimony of the past to Britain's
title-deeds of empire.
Great races, like great individuals, resemble the giants in the old
myth, the _gigantes_, the earth-born, sons of Gaia, who, thrown in the
wrestle, touched her bosom, and rose stronger than before defeat.
England stood this test in the sixteenth century, rising from that long
humiliating war with France, that not less humiliating war with
Scotland, greater than before her defeat. This energy of the soul,
quickened by tragic insight, displays itself not merely in the Armada
struggle but before that struggle, under various forms in pre-Armada
England.
The spirit of the sea-wolves of early times, of the sailors who in the
fourteenth century fought at Sluys, and made the Levant an English
lake, lives again in the Tudor mariners. But it has been transformed,
and sets towards other and greater endeavours, planning a mightier
enterprise. These adventurers make it plain that on the high seas is
the path of England's peace; that the old policy of the Plantagenet
kings, with all its heroism and indisputable greatness, had been a
false policy; that England's empire was not to be sought on the plains
of France; that Gilbert, Drake, Raleigh, and Frobisher have found the
way to the empire which the Plantagenets blindly groped after.
As Camoens in Portugal invents a noble utterance for the genius of his
nation, for the times of Vasco da Gama and of Emmanuel the Great, so
this spirit of pre-Armada England, of England which as yet has but the
memory of battles gained and lost wars, finds triumphant expression in
Marlowe and his elder contemporaries. Marlowe's[8] great dialect seems
to fall naturally from the lips of the heroes of Hakluyt's _Voyages_,
that work which still impresses the imagination like the fragments of
some rude but mighty epic, and in their company the exaggeration, the
emphasis of _Tamburlaine_ are hardly perceptible. In Martin Frobisher,
for instance, how the purpose which determines his career illumines for
us the England of the first years of Elizabeth! Frobisher in early
manhood torments his heart with the resentful reflection, "What a
blockish thing it has been on the part of England to permit the
Genovese Columbus to discover America!" That task was clearly
England's! "And now there being nothing great left to be done," the
sole work Frobisher finds worth attempting is the discovery of the
northwest passage to Cathay. Upon this he spends the pith of his
manhood year by year, and the result of all the labours of this
sea-Hercules, well! it is perhaps to be sought in those dim beings,
"half-man, half-fish," whom he brings back from some voyage, those
forlorn Esquimaux who, seen in London streets, and long remembered,
suggested to the dreaming soul of Shakespeare Caliban and his island.
Frobisher's watchword on the high seas is memorable. In the northern
latitudes, under the spectral stars, the sentinel of the _Michael_
gives the challenge "For God the Lord," and sentinel replies, "And
Christ His Sonne."