of the soul which greatens the life of England already in pre-Armada
times. And simultaneously with the conflict against Spain this same
energy attests its presence in a form assuredly not less divine within
the souls of those who rear that unseen empire, whose foundations are
laid eternally in the thoughts of men, the empire reared by
Shakespeare, Webster, Beaumont, and Milton.
In the seventeenth century it inspires the statesmen of England not
only with the ardour for constitutional freedom, but engages them in
ceaseless and not unavailing efforts towards a deeper conception of
justice and of liberty, foreshadowing unconsciously the ideals of later
times. If the Thirty Years' War did nothing else for England it
implanted in her great statesmen a profound distrust of the imperial
systems of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs. Eliot, for instance, in the
work entitled _The Monarchy of Man_, lofty in its form as in its
thought, written in his prison, though studying Plato and the older
ideals of empire, is yet obscurely searching after a new ideal. We
encounter a similar effort in the great Montrose, capable of that
Scottish campaign, and of writing one of the finest love-songs in the
language, capable also of some very vivid thoughts on statesmanship.
In natures like Eliot and Montrose, the height of the ideal determines
the steadfastness of the action. And that ideal, I repeat, is distinct
from Plato's, distinct from Dante's, and from that of the Bourbon and
Hapsburg empires, in which Dante's conception is but rudely or
imperfectly developed. The ideal of these English statesmen is framed
upon another conception of justice, another conception of freedom,
equally sublime, and more catholic and humane. Whatever its immediate
influence upon certain of their contemporaries, over their own hearts
it was all-powerful. The very vividness with which they conceive the
ideal, and the noble constancy with which they pursue it, link the high
purposes of these two men to the purposes of Milton, of Cromwell, of
Selden, and of Falkland. The perfect State, the scope of its laws,
government, religion, to each is manifest, though the path that leads
thither may seem now through Monarchy, now through a Republic, or at
other times indistinct, or lost altogether in the bewildering maze of
adverse interests. From the remote nature of their quest arises much
of the apparent inconsistency in the political life of that era. The
parting of Pym and Strafford acquires an added, a tragic poignancy from
the consciousness in the heart of each that the star which leads him on
is the star of England's destiny.
Hence, too, the suspicion attached to men like Selden and Falkland of
being mere theoricians in advance of their time,--an accusation fatal
to statesmanship. But the advent of that age was marked by so much
that was novel in religion,[9] in State, in foreign and domestic
policy, the new direction of imperial enterprise, the unity of two
nations, ancient and apparently irreconcilable foes, the jarring
creeds, convulsing the life of both these nations, for both were deeply
religious, that it were rash to accuse of rashness any actor in those
times. But it is the adventurous daring of their spirits, the swift
glance searching the horizons of the future, it is that very energy of
the soul of which I have spoken which render these statesmen obnoxious
to the suspicion of theory. The temper of Selden, indeed, in harmony
with the thoughtful and melancholy cast of his features, disposed him
to subtlety and niceness of argument, and with a division pending,
often deprived his words of a force which homelier orators could
command. And yet his career is a presage of the future. Toleration in
religion, freedom of the press, the supremacy of the seas, the _habeas
corpus_, are all lines along which his thought moves, not so much
distancing as leading the practical statesmen of his generation. And
there is a curious fitness in the dedication to him in 1649 of Edward
Pococke's Arabic studies, which nearly a century and a half later were
to form the basis of Gibbon's great chapters. But the year of _Mare
Clausum_ is at once the greatest in Selden's life, and the last months
of greatness in the life of his royal master.[10]
But theory is a charge which has ever been urged against
revolutionists. Revolution is the child of speculation. The men of
the seventeenth century are discoverers in politics. Their mark is a
wider empire than that of Vasco da Gama and his king, a realm more
wondrous than that of Aeetes. But Da Gama did not steer forthright to
the Indies, nor Jason to the Colchian strand, though each knew clearly
the goal he sought, just as Wentworth and Selden, Falkland and
Montrose, Eliot and Milton, knew the State they were steering for,
though each may have wavered in his own mind as to the course, and at
last parted fatally from his companions. Practical does not always
mean commonplace, and in the light of their deeds it seems superfluous
to discuss whether the writer of _Defensio pro Populo Anglicano_, the
destroyer of the Campbells, or the accuser of Buckingham, were
practical politicians. In their lives, in the shaping of their
careers, the visionary is actualized, the ideal real, in that fidelity
of soul which leaves one dead on the battlefield, another on the
gibbet, thirty feet high, "honoured thus in death," as he remarked
pleasantly, a third to the dreary martyrdom of the Tower, a fourth to
that dread visitation, endured with stoic grandeur, and yet at times
forcing from his lips the cry of anguish which thrills the verse of
_Samson Agonistes_--
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse,
Without all hope of day.
But not in vain. The tireless centuries have accomplished the task
these men initiated, have travelled the path they set forth in, have
completed the journey which they began.
We find the same pre-occupation with some wider conception of justice,
empire, and freedom in the younger Barclay, the author of _Argenis_,
written in Latin but read in many languages, studied by Richelieu and
moulding his later, wiser policy towards the Huguenots, read, above
all, by Fenelon, who rises from it to write _Telemaque_. It meets us
in the last work of Algernon Sidney, which, like Eliot's treatise,
bears about it the air of a martyr's cell. We find it again explicitly
in the _Oceana_ of Harrington, in the fragmentary writings of
Shaftesbury, and in actual politics it finds triumphant expression at
last in the eloquence that was like a battle-cry, in the energy that at
moments seems superhuman, the wisdom, the penetrating foresight, of the
mightiest of all England's statesmen-orators, the elder Pitt. It burns
in clear flame in the men who come after him, in his own son, only less
great than his great sire; in Charles James Fox and in Windham, who in
the great debate[11] of 1801 fought obstinately to save the Cape when
Nelson and St. Vincent would have flung it away; in Canning,
Wilberforce, in Romilly; in poets like Shelley, and thinkers like John
Stuart Mill.
The revolution in parliamentary representation during the present
century, a revolution which, extending over more than fifty years, from
1831 to 1884, may even be compared in its momentous consequences with
the revolution of 1640-88, though constitutional in design, yet forms
an integral part of the wider movement whose course across the
centuries we have indicated. The leaders in this revolution, men like
Russell and Grey, complete the work which Eliot, Wentworth, and Pym
began. They ask the question, else unasked, they answer the question,
else unanswered--How shall a people, not itself free, a people
disqualified and disfranchised, become the harbinger of a new era to
other peoples, or the herald of the higher freedom to the ancient races
of India--Aryans, of like blood with our own, moving forever as in a
twilight air, woven of the pride, the pathos, all the sombre yet
undecaying memories of their fabulous past--to the Moslem populations
whose "Book" proclaimed the political equality of men twelve centuries
before Mirabeau spoke or the Bastille fell?
This, then, is the testimony of the Past, and the witness of the Dead
is this. Thus it has arisen, this ideal, the ideal of Britain as
distinct from the ideal of Rome, of Islam, or of Persia--thus it has
arisen, this Empire, unexampled in present and without a precedent in
former times; for Athens under Pericles was but a masked despotism, and
the republic-empire of Islam passed swifter than a dream. Thus it has
arisen, this Imperial Britain, from the dark Unconscious emerging to
the Conscious, not like an empire of mist uprising under the wands of
magic-working architects, but based on heroisms, endurances, lofty
ideals frustrate yet imperishable, patient thought slowly elaborating
itself through the ages--the sea-wolves' battle fury, the splendour of
chivalry, the crusader's dazzling hope, the immortal ardour of Norman
and Plantagenet kings, baffled, foiled, but still in other forms
returning to uplift the spirit of succeeding times, the unconquered
hearts of Tudor mariners rejoicing in the battle onset and the storm,
the strung thought, the intense vision of statesmen of the later
centuries, Eliot, Chatham, Canning, and at the last, deep-toned,
far-echoing as the murmur of forests and cataracts, the sanctioning
voices of enfranchised millions accepting their destiny, resolute!
This is the achievement of the ages, this the greatest birth of Time.
For in the empires of the past there is not an ideal, not a structural
design which these warriors, monarchs, statesmen have not, deliberately
or unconsciously, rejected, or, as in an alembic, transmuted to finer
purposes and to nobler ends.
[1] Goethe asserts that Spinozism transmuted into a creed by analytic
reflection is simply Machiavelism.
[2] The twenty-two books of Sulla's Memoirs, _rerum suarum gestarum
commentarii_, were dedicated to his friend Lucullus; they were still in
existence in the time of Tacitus and Plutarch, though the fragments
which now remain serve but to mock us with regret for the loss. Of
Sulla's verses--like many cultured Romans of that age, the conqueror of
Caius Marius amused his leisure with writing Greek epigrams--exactly so
much has survived as of the troubadour songs of Richard I of England,
or of Frederick II of Jerusalem and Sicily. Sulla's remark on the
young Caesar is for the youth of Caius Julius as illuminating as
Richelieu's on Conde or as Pasquale Paoli's on Bonaparte.
[3] Aristotle refers only to the effect on the spectators; but the
continued existence of the State makes it at once actor and spectator
in the tragedy. The transforming power is thus more intimate and
profound.
[4] "God in His mercy such created me
"That misery of yours attains me not,
"Nor any flame assails me of this burning."
[5] In illustration of this position a contrast might be drawn between
the policy of Athens in Melos, as set forth by Thucydides in the
singular dialogue of the fifth book, and the part assigned to Justice
by a writer equally impersonal, grave, and unimpassioned--the author of
the _Politics_--in the recurrence throughout that work of such phrases
as "The State which is founded on Justice alone can stand." "Man when
perfected (+teleothen+) is the noblest thing that lives, but separated
from justice (+choristhen nomou kai dikes+) the basest of all."
"Virtue cannot be the ruin of those who possess it, nor Justice the
destruction of a City." The tragedies of Sophocles that are of a later
date than 413 B.C. betray an attitude towards political life distinct
from that which characterizes his earlier works. The shading-in of the
life of the State into that of the individual defies analysis, and it
were hazardous to affirm what traits of thought ought to be referred to
the genius of the State as distinct from the individual; but it appears
as difficult to imagine _before_ Syracuse, the vehement insistence upon
Justice, the impassioned idealization which characterize Plato,
Socrates, and Demosthenes, as it is difficult _after_ Syracuse to
imagine the political temper of a Pericles or an Anaxagoras.
[6] The Greek orators and philosophers of the fourth century B.C. had
before them a problem not without resemblances to that which confronted
the Hebrew prophets of Judaea in the seventh. Even their most
speculative writings had a practical end, a goal which they considered
attainable by Hellas, or by Athens. The disappearance of Socrates from
the _Laws_, the increased seriousness of the treatment of Sparta and of
Crete, the original and paragon of Lacedaemon, may indicate a
concession to the prejudices of a generation which had grown up since
Aegospotami, and a last effort by Plato to bring his teaching home to
the common life of Athens and of Hellas. So in the England of the
seventeenth century the political writings of Bacon and Hobbes, of
Milton and Harrington, though speculative in form, are most practical
in their aims. Hobbes' first literary effort indeed, his version of
Thucydides, is planned as a warning to England against civil discord
and its ills. This was in 1628--fatal date!
[7] The elder Pitt may be regarded as the first great minister of the
English _people_ as distinguished from men like Thomas Cromwell,
Stratford, or Clarendon, who strictly were ministers of the king. "It
rains gold-boxes," Horace Walpole writes when, in April, 1757. Pitt
was dismissed, and it was these tokens of his popularity with the
merchants of England, not the recognition of his genius by the king,
which led to his return to office in June. The events of the period of
four years and ten months during which this man was dictator of the
House of Commons and of England are so graven on all hearts that a mere
enumeration in order of time suffices to recall moving incidents,
characters, and scenes of epic grandeur:--December 17th, 1756,
Pitt-Devonshire ministry formed, Highland regiments raised, national
militia organized. 1757, CLIVE'S victory at Plassey, June 23rd, and
conquest of Bengal. 1758, June 3rd, destruction of forts at Cherbourg,
three ships of war, 150 privateers burned to the sea-line; November
25th, Fort Duquesne captured; December 29th, conquest of Goree. 1759,
"year of victories"; February 16th, POCOCK relieves Madras; May 1st,
capture of Guadaloupe; July 4th, R. RODNEY at Havre destroys the
flat-bottomed Armada; July 31st, WOLFE'S repulse at Beaufort; August
19th, BOSCAWEN destroys French fleet in Lagos Bay; September 2nd,
POCOCK defeats D'Ache; September 9th, WOLFE'S last letter to Pitt;
September 13th, 10 a.m., Plains of Abraham and conquest of Canada;
November 20th, HAWKE defeats Conflans in Quiberon Bay, "Lay me
alongside the French Admiral." 1760, January 22nd, EYRE-COOTE defeats
Lally at Wandewash, conquest of Carnatic. 1761, January 16th, English
enter Pondicherry; Bellisle citadel reduced, "Quebec over again," June
7th; October 5th, PITT resigns. It is doubtful whether, since the
eleventh century and Hildebrand and William the Conqueror, the European
stage has been occupied simultaneously by two such men as Chatham and
the king of Prussia.
[8] The same delight in power, the same glory in dominion, pulsate in
the Lusiads and in the dramas of Marlowe, but Marlowe was by far the
wider in his intellectual range. Worlds were open to his glance beyond
the Indies and Cathay that were shut to Camoens. Yet Camoens is a
heroic figure. He found it easy to delineate Vasco da Gama; he had but
to speak with his own voice, and utter simply his own heart's desires,
hates, musings, and Vasco da Gama's sister would have turned to listen,
thinking she heard the accents, the trick, the very manner that
betrayed the hero.
[9] Burnet is incredibly vain, unredeemed by Boswell's hero-worship;
yet his book reflects the medley, the fervour, the vehemence, crimes,
hopes of this time. In one sentence nineteen religions are named as
co-existing in Scotland.
[10] The _Mare Clausum_ was framed as an answer to Grotius' _Mare
Liberum_, which had been printed, perhaps without Grotius' consent, in
1610. Selden's tract, printed in November, 1635, is a folio of 304
pages, in which, setting forth precedent on precedent, he claims for
England, as by law and ancient custom established, that same supremacy
over the high seas as the Portuguese had exercised over the eastern
waters, and Venice over the Adriatic. The King's enthusiasm was
kindled. The work was issued with all the circumstance of a State
paper, and it came upon foreign courts like a declaration of policy,
the resolve at length to enforce the time-honoured and indefeasible
rights of England. Copies were with due ceremony deposited in the
Exchequer and at the Admiralty. A fleet was equipped, and as an
atonement for the wrongs done to the elder Northumberland, the King
gave the command to his son, whose portrait as Admiral forms one of the
noblest of Vandyck's canvases. But Northumberland, though brave to a
fault, was no seaman, and the whole enterprise threatened to end in
ridicule. Stung to the quick, Charles again turned to the nation. But
in the nine intervening years since 1628 the nation's heart had left
him. To his demand for supplies to strengthen the fleet came Hampden's
refusal. The trial was the prelude to the Grand Remonstrance, to
Naseby, and to Whitehall, where, as if swept thither by the crowded
events of some fantastic dream, he awoke from his visions of England's
greatness and the empire of the seas, alone on a scaffold, surrounded
by a ring of English eyes, looking hate, sullen indifference, or cold
resolution.
Leave him still loftier than the world suspects,
Living or dying.
After all he was a king, and in his veins the blood of Mary Stuart
still beat. An English version of Selden's treatise appeared in the
time of Cromwell. The translator was Marchamont Nedham. The
dedication to the Supreme Authority of the Nation, the Parliament of
the Commonwealth of England, is dated November 19th, 1652.
[11] The preliminaries to the Peace of Amiens were signed on October
1st, 1801. Parliament opened on October 29th, and after the King's
speech, Windham compared his position amid the general rejoicings of
the House at the prospect of an end to the war, to Hamlet's at the
wedding-feast of Claudius. In the debate of November 3rd, Pitt
declared himself resigned to the loss of the Cape by the retention of
Ceylon, while the opinion of Fox was, that by this surrender we should
have the benefit of the colony without its expenses. Nelson, with the
glory of his victory at Copenhagen just six months old, maintained that
in the days when Indiamen were heavy ships the Cape had its uses, but
now that they were coppered, and sailed well, the Cape was a mere
tavern that served to delay the voyage. The opening of Windham's
speech on the 4th, "We are a conquered nation, England gives all,
France nothing," defines his position (_Parl. Hist._ xxxvi, pp. 1-191).
Windham was one of the few statesmen who, even before the consulate had
passed into the Empire, understood the gravity of our relations to
France. Every month added proof of the accuracy of his presentiments,
but once understood by England there was no faltering. Prussia,
Austria, the Czar, all acknowledged the new Empire, and made peace or
alliance with its despot, but from the rupture of the Peace of Amiens
England waged a war without truce till Elba and Ste. Helene.
LECTURE III
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL
[_Tuesday, May_ 22_nd_, 1900]
In the history of the religion of an imperial race, it is not only the
development of the ideal within the consciousness of the race itself
that we have to consider, but the advance or decline in its conceptions
of the religions of the peoples within the zone of its influence or
dominion. For such a study the materials are only in appearance less
satisfactory than for the study of the political ideal of a race. It
is penetratingly observed by La Rochefoucauld that the history of the
Fronde can never be accurately written, because the persons in that
drama were actuated by motives so base that even in the height of
performance each actor of the deeds was striving to make a record of
them impossible. The reflection might be extended to other political
revolutions, and to other incidents than the Fronde. Ranke's
indefatigable zeal, his anxiety "in history always to see the thing as
in very deed it enacted itself," never carried him nearer his object
than the impression of an impression. No State papers, no documents,
the most authentic, can take us further.
But in this very strife, this zeal for the True for ever baffled yet
for ever renewed, one of the noblest attributes of the present age
discovers itself. Indisputable facts are often the sepulchres of
thought, and truth after all, not certainty, is the historian's goal.
It might even be urged that the records of religion, the martyr's
resolution, the saint's fervour, the reformer's aspiration, the
prophet's faith, offer a surer hope of attaining this goal than the
records of politics.
Sec. 1. RELIGION AND IMPERIALISM
Religion forms an integral part of a nation's life, and in the
development of the ideal of Imperial Britain on its religious side, the
same transforming forces, the same energy of the soul, the operation of
the same law analogous to the law of tragedy already described, which
manifest themselves in politics, are here apparent. The persecuting
intolerant England of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after
passing through the Puritan struggle of the seventeenth, the scepticism
or indifference of later times, appears at last in the closing years of
the nineteenth century as the supreme representative, if not the
creator, of an ideal hardly less humane than that of the Humanists
themselves--who recognized in every cry of the heart a prayer, silent
or spoken, to the God of all the earth, of all peoples, and of all
times. The Rome of the Antonines had even in this sphere no loftier
ideal, no fairer vision, than that which now seems to float before
Imperial Britain, no wider sympathy, not merely with the sects of its
own faith, but with the religions of other races within its dominions,
once hostile to its own. By slow degrees England has arisen, first to
the perception of the truth in other sects, and then to a perception of
the truth in other faiths. In lesser creeds, and amongst decaying
races, tolerance is sometimes the equivalent of irreligion, but the
effort to recognize so far as possible the principle, implicit in
Montesquieu, that a man is born of this religion or of that, has, in
all ages, been the stamp of imperial races. Upon the character of the
race and the character of its religion, depend the answer to the
question whether by empire the religion of the imperial race shall be
exalted or debased.
As in politics so in religion it is to the fifteenth century--the
tragic insight born of defeat, disaster, and soul-anguish--that we must
turn for the causes, for the origins of that transformation in the life
of the nation which has resulted in the conscious ideal of the Britain
of to-day. The "separation" from Rome fifty years after Bosworth had
no conscious imperial purpose, but it rescued the rising empire of
England from the taint of medievalism which sapped the empires of
Spain, of the Bourbons, and of the Hapsburgs. The Reformation in
England owes much of its character amongst the people at large, apart
from the government, above all in the heroic age of the Reformation in
England--the Puritan wars--to that earlier convulsion in the nation's
consciousness, to the period of anguish and defeat of which we have
spoken at some length already. But for the remoter origins and causes
of the whole movement styled "the English Reformation" we must search
not in any one period or occurrence, but in the character of the race
itself. The English Reformation does not begin with Henry VIII any
more than the Scottish Reformation begins with John Knox: it springs
from the heart of the race, from the intensity, the tragic earnestness
with which in all periods England has conceived the supreme questions
of man's destiny, man's relation to the Divine, the "Whence?" and the
"Whither?" of human life. And it is the seriousness with which England
regards its own religion, and the imaginative sympathy which gives it
the power of recognizing the sincerity of other religions beneath its
sway, which distinguish Imperial Britain from the empires of the past.
Sec. 2. THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY
In the Roman Empire, for instance, the tolerance of the Republic passes
swiftly into the disregard of the Caesars of the Julian line, into the
capricious or ineffectual persecution of later dynasties. Rome never
endeavours in this sphere to lead its subject peoples to any higher
vision. When that effort is made, Rome itself is dying. Alaric and
the fifth century have come. For Rome the drama of a thousand years is
ended: Rome is moribund and has but strength to die greatly,
tragically. Would you see the end of Rome as in a figure darkly? Over
a dead Roman a Goth bends, and by the flare of a torch seeks to read on
the still brow the secret of his own destiny.
In the Empire of Persia and the great days of the Sassanides, in
Kurush, who destroys the Median Empire, and spreads wider the religion
of the vanquished, the religion of Zerdusht, the symbolic worship of
flame, loveliest of inanimate things--even there no sustained, no
deliberate effort towards an ideal amongst the peoples beneath the
Persian sway can be discovered. Islam starts with religious
aspirations, the most lofty, the most beneficent, but the purity of her
ideals dies with Ali. At Damascus and at Bagdad an autocratic system
warped by contact with Rome infects the religious; the result is a
theocracy in which the purposes of Mohammed, at least on their
political side, are abandoned, lost at last in the gloomy and often
ferocious despotism of the Ottoman Turks.
Consider in contrast with these empires the question--What is the
distinction in this phase of human life of the Empire of Britain, of
its history? Steadily growing from its first beginnings--shall I say,
from that great battle of the Winwaed, where three Kings are in
conflict and the slayer of two lies dead--steadily growing, on to the
present hour, as in politics so in religion, the effort sometimes
conscious, sometimes unconscious, but persistent, continuous, towards
an ever purer, higher, nobler conception of man's relations to the
Divine. From this effort arises the Reformation, from this effort
arises in the way of a thousand years the Empire based on the higher
justice, the imaginative justice, the higher freedom, the imaginative
freedom.
Thus even in the earliest periods of our history, during the struggle
between Christianism and the religion of Thor and Woden, England shows
far more violence, more earnestness, more fury on both sides, than is
found anywhere else in Europe. Glance, for instance, at this struggle
in Germany. Witikind[1] the Saxon arises as the champion of the old
gods against Christianity. Charlemagne with his Frankish cavalry comes
down amongst the Saxons. His march surpasses the march of Caesar, or
of Constantine against Rome. Witikind does rise to the heights of
heroism against Charlemagne twice; but in the end he surrenders, gives
in, and dies a hanger-on at the court of his conqueror. Mercia, the
kingdom of the mid-English, that too produces its champion of the old
gods against the religion of Christ--Penda. There is no surrender
here; two kings, I repeat, he slays, and grown old in war, he rouses
himself like a hoary old lion of the forest to fight his last battle.
An _intransigeant_, an irreconcilable, this King Penda, fighting his
last battle against this new and hated thing, this Christianism! He
lies dead there--he becomes no hanger-on. There you have the spirit of
the race. It displays itself in a form not less impressive in the
well-known incident in the very era of Penda, described by Bede.
King Eadwine sits in council to discuss the message of Christ, the
mansions that await the soul of man, the promise of a life beyond
death; and Coifi, one of the councillors, rising, speaks thus: "So
seemeth to me the life of man, O King, as when in winter-tide, seated
with your thanes around you, out of the storm that rages without a
sparrow flies into the hall, and fluttering hither and thither a
little, in the warmth and light, passes out again into the storm and
darkness. Such is man's life, but whence it cometh and whither it
goeth we know not." "We ne kunnen," as Alfred the Great, its first
translator, ends the passage. Who does not see--notwithstanding the
difference of time, place, character, and all stage circumstance--who
does not see rise before him the judgment-hall of Socrates, hear the
solemn last words to his judges: "I go to death, and you to life, but
which of us goeth to the better is known to God alone--+adelon panti
plen e to theo+"?
Such is the stern and high manner in which this conflict in England
between the religions of Woden and Christ is conducted. There in the
seventh century is the depth of heart, the energy of soul, the pity and
the insight which appear in other forms in after ages. The roll of
English names in the _Acta Sanctorum_ is the living witness of the
sincerity, the intensity with which the same men who fought to the
death for Woden at the Winwaed, or speculated with Coifi on the eternal
mystery, accepted the faith which Rome taught, the ideal from Galilee
transmuted by Roman imagination, Roman statesmanship. The Saintly
Ideal lay on them like a spell: earth existed but to die in, life was
given but to pray for death. Rome taught the Saxon and the Jute that
all they had hitherto prayed for, glory in battle, earthly power and
splendour, must be renounced, and become but as the sound of bells from
a city buried deep beneath the ocean. Instead of defiance, Rome taught
them reverence; instead of pride, self-abasement; instead of the
worship of delight, the worship of sorrow. In this faith the Saxon and
the Jute strove with tragic seriousness to live. But the old faith
died hard, or lived on side by side with the new, far into the Middle
Age. Literature reflects the inner struggles of the period: the
war-song of Brunanburh, the mystic light which hangs upon the verses of
Caedmon, the melancholy of Cynewulf's lyrics. Yet what a contrast is
the England delineated by Bede with Visigothic Spain, with Lombard
Italy, or Frankish Gaul, as delineated by Gregory of Tours!
Thus these Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, slowly disciplining themselves to
the new ideal--to them in the ninth century come the Vikings. They are
not less conspicuous in valour, nor less profoundly sensitive to the
wonder and mystery of life, the poets in other lands of the Eddas and
of the Northern Myths. England as we know it is not yet formed.
Amongst the formative influences of English religion and English
freedom, and ultimately of this ideal of modern times, must be reckoned
the Viking and the Norseman, the followers of Guthrum, of Ivar, of
Hrolf, not less than the followers of Cerdic and of Cymric. To the
religious consciousness of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons, the Vikings
bring a religious consciousness as deep and serious. The struggle
against the Danes and Normans is not a struggle of English against
foreigners; it is a conflict for political supremacy amongst men of the
same race, who ultimately grow together into the England of the
fourteenth century. In the light of the future, the struggle of the
ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries does but continue the conflicts of
the Heptarchic kings. To this land of England the Vikings have the
right which the followers of Cerdic and Cynric had--the right of
supremacy, the right which the _will_ to possess it and the resolution
to die for that will, confers.
Sec. 3. DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS
The religion of the Vikings was the converse of their courage.
Aristotle remarks profoundly that the race which cannot quit itself
like a man in war cannot do any great thing in philosophy. Religion is
the philosophy of the warrior. And the scanty records of the Vikings,
the character of Knut, for instance, or that of the Conqueror, attest
the principle that the thoughts of the valiant about God penetrate more
deeply than the thoughts of the dastard. The Normans, who close the
English _Welt-wanderung_, who close the merely formative period of
England, illustrate this conspicuously. If the sombre fury of the
Winwaed displays the stern depths of religious conviction in the
vanguard of our race, if the Eddas and Myths argue a religious
earnestness not less deep in the Vikings, the high seriousness of the
religious emotion of the Norseman is not less clearly attested. Europe
of the eleventh century holds three men, each of heroic proportions,
each a Teuton in blood--Hildebrand, Robert Guiscard, and William the
Conqueror. In intellectual vision, in spiritual insight, Hildebrand
has few parallels in history. He is the founder of the Mediaeval
Papacy, realizing in its orders of monks, priests, and crusaders a
State not without singular resemblances to that which Plato pondered.
Like Napoleon and like Buonarroti, Hildebrand had the power, during the
execution of one gigantic design, of producing others of not less
astonishing vastness, to reinforce or supplant the first should it
fail. One of his designs originated in the impression which Norman
genius made upon him. It was to transform this race, the tyrants of
the Baltic and the English seas, the dominators of the Mediterranean
and the Aegean, into omnipresent emissaries and soldiers of the
theocratic State whose centre was Rome. But the vastness of his
original design broke even the mighty will of Hildebrand; his purpose
with regard to the Norseman remains like some abandoned sketch by
Buonarroti or Tintoretto. Yet no ruler of men had a profounder
knowledge of character, and with the Viking nature circumstance had
rendered him peculiarly familiar. The judgment of Orderic and of
William of Malmesbury confirms the impression of Hildebrand. But the
Normans have been their own witnesses, the cathedrals which they raised
from the Seine to the Tyne are epics in stone, inspired by no earthly
muse, fit emblems of the rock-like endurance and soaring valour of our
race.
There is a way of writing the history of Senlac which Voltaire,
Thierry, Michelet, and Guizot dote upon, infecting certain English
historians with their complacency, as if the Norse Vikings were the
descendants of Chlodovech, and the conquest of England were the glory
of France. The absurdity was crowned in 1804, when Napoleon turned the
attention of his subjects to the history of 1066, as an auspicious
study for the partners of his great enterprise against the England of
Pitt! How many Franks, one asks, followed the red banner of the
Bastard to Senlac, or, leaning on their shields, watched the coronation
at Westminster? Nor was it in the valley of the Seine that the
Norsemen acquired their genius for religion, for government, for art.
To the followers of Hrolf the empire of Charlemagne had the halo which
the Empire of Rome had to the followers of Alaric, and in that spirit
they adopted its language and turned its laws to their own purposes.
But Jutes and Angles and Saxons, Ostmen and Danes, were, if less
assiduous, not less earnest pupils in the same school as the Norsemen:
to all alike, the remnant of the Frankish realm of Charles lay nearest,
representing Rome and the glory of the Caesars. Nature and her
affinities drew the Normans to the West, across the salt plains whither
for six hundred years the most adventurous of their own blood had
preceded them. They closed the movement towards the sunset which Jute
and Saxon began; they are the last, the youngest, and in politics the
most richly gifted; yet in other departments of human activity not more
richly gifted than their kindred who produced Cynewulf and Caedmon,
Aidan and Bede, Coifi and Dunstan. And who shall affirm from what
branch of the stock the architects of the sky-searching cathedrals
sprang?
Senlac is thus in the line of Heptarchic battles; it is the last
struggle for the political supremacy over all England amongst those
various sections of the Northern races who in the way of six hundred
years make England, and who in their religious and political character
lay the unseen foundations of Imperial Britain.
Two traits of the Norman character impress the greatest of their
contemporary historians, William of Malmesbury--the Norman love of
battle and the Norman love of God. Upon these two ideas the history of
the Middle Age turns. The crusader, the monk, the troubadour, the
priest, the mystic, the dreamer and the saint, the wandering scholar
and the scholastic philosopher, all derive thence. Chivalry is born.
The knight beholds in his lady's face on earth the image of Our Lady in
Heaven, the Virgin-Mother of the Redeemer of men. From the grave of
his dead mistress Ramon Lull withdraws to a hermit's cell to ponder the
beauty that is imperishable; and over the grave of Beatrice, Dante
rears a shrine, a temple more awful, more sublime than any which even
that age has carved in stone.
Into this theatre of tossing life, the nation which the followers of
Cerdic and Knut and of William the Conqueror have formed enters
greatly. In thought, in action, in art, something of the mighty role
which the future centuries reserve for her is portended. The immortal
energy, the love of war, the deep religious fervour of England find in
the Crusades, as by God's own assignment, the task of her heart's
desire. We have but to turn to the churches of England, to study the
Templars carved upon their sepulchres, to know that in that great
tournament of the world the part of the Franks, if the noisier and more
continuous, was not more earnest. How singular is the chance, if it be
chance, which confronts the followers of the new faith with a Penda,
and the followers of the crescent with a Richard Lion-heart! Upon the
shifting Arabic imagination he alone of the infidels exercises enduring
sway. The hero of Tasso has no place in Arab history, but the memory
of Richard is there imperishably. Richard's services to England are
not the theme of common praise, yet, if we estimate the greatness of a
king by another standard than roods of conquered earth, or roods of
parchment blackened with unregarded statutes, Richard I, crusader and
poet, must be reckoned amongst the greatest of his great line, and his
name to the Europe of the Middle Age was like the blast of a trumpet
announcing the England of the years to come.
Sec. 4. WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
The crusader of the twelfth century follows the saint of an earlier
age, and in the thirteenth, England, made one in political and
constitutional ideals, attains a source of profounder religious unity.
The consciousness that not to Rome, but to Galilee itself she may turn
for the way, the truth, the light, has arisen. In the steady
development, in the ever-deepening power of this consciousness, lies
the unwritten history of the English Reformation. The race resolves no
more to trust to other witness, but with its own eyes to look upon the
truth.
Political history has its effect upon the growth of this conviction.
In the fourteenth century, for instance, the Papacy is at Avignon.
Edward I in the beginning of that century withstands Boniface VIII, the
last great pontiff in whom the temper and resolution of Hildebrand
appear, as William the Conqueror had withstood Gregory VII. The
statute of _praemunire_, a generation later, prepares the way for
Wyclif. The Papacy is now but an appanage of the Valois monarchs. How
shall England, conqueror of those monarchs at Crecy and on other
fields, reverence Rome, the dependent of a defeated antagonist?
The same bright energy of the soul, the same awe, rooted in the blood
of our race, which manifest themselves in the early and Middle Ages,
determine the character of the religious history of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. In the fifteenth century, suffering and the
presence of suffering, the law of tragedy of which we have spoken, add
their transforming power to spiritual life. As in political life the
sympathy with the wrongs of others grows into imaginative justice, so
sympathy with the faiths of others, which springs from the
consciousness of the first great illusion lost, and sorrow for a
vanished ideal, grows into tolerance for the creeds and religions of
others. For only a race deep-centred in its own faith, yet sensitive
to the faith that is in others, can understand the religion of others;
only such a race can found an empire characterized at once by freedom
and by faith.
The very ardour of the belief of the race in the ideal from Rome--a
Semitic ideal, transmuted by Roman genius and policy--swept the
Teutonic imagination beyond the ideal, seeking its sources where Rome
herself had sought them. This is the impulse which binds the whole
English Reformation, the whole movement of English religious thought
from Wyclif to Cromwell and Milton, to Wordsworth and Carlyle. It is
this common impulse of the race which Henry VIII relies upon, and
because he is in this their leader the English people forgets his
absolutism, his cruel anger, his bloody revenges.
The character of the English Reformation after the first tumultuous
conflicts, the fierce essays of royal theocracy and Jesuit reactionism,
set steadily towards Liberty of Conscience.
This spirit is glorified in Puritanism, the true heroic age of the
Reformation. It appears, for example, in Oliver Cromwell himself.
Cromwell is one of the disputed figures in our history, and every
English historian has drawn his own Cromwell. But to foreign
historians we may look for a judgment less partial, less personal. Dr.
Doellinger, for instance, to whom wide sympathy and long and profound
study of history have given the right, which can only be acquired by
vigil and fasting, to speak about the characters of the past--he who by
his position as Romanist is no pledged admirer, describes Cromwell as
the "prophet of Liberty of Conscience."[2] This is the deliberate
judgment of Doellinger. It was the judgment of the peasants of the
Vaudois two hundred and fifty years ago! Somewhat the same impression
was made by Cromwell upon Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Guizot.
Again in the seventeenth century, in the _Irene_ of Drummond, and in
the remarkable work of Barclay, the _Argenis_,[3] in its whole
conception of the religious {72} life, of monasticism, as in its
idealization of the character of the great Henri Quatre, you find the
same desire for a wider ideal, not less in religion than in politics.
We encounter it later in Shaftesbury and in Locke. It is the essential
thought of the work of Thomas Hobbes. It is supremely and beautifully
expressed in Algernon Sidney, the martyr of constitutional freedom and
of tolerance.
And what is the faith of Algernon Sidney? One who knew him well,
though opposed to his party, said of him, "He regards Christianity as a
kind of divine philosophy of the mind." Community of religious not
less than of political aims binds closer the friendship of Locke and
Shaftesbury. In the preparation of a constitution for the Carolinas
they found the opportunity which Corsica offered to Rousseau. In the
_Letters on Toleration_[4] Locke did but expand the principles upon
which, with Shaftesbury's aid, he elaborated the government of the new
State. The Record Office has no more precious document than the
draught of that work, the margins covered with corrections in the
handwriting of these two men, the one the greatest of the Restoration
statesmen, the other ranking amongst the greatest speculative thinkers
of his own or any age. One suggested formula after another is
traceable there, till at length the decision is made, that from the
citizens of the new State shall be exacted, not adherence to this creed
or to that, but simply the declaration, "There is a God." Algernon
Sidney aids Penn in performing a similar task for Pennsylvania, and
their joint work is informed by the same spirit as the "Constitutions"
of Locke and Shaftesbury.
Thus in religion the men of the seventeenth century occupy a position
analogous to their position in politics, already delineated. In
politics, as we have seen, they establish a constitutional government,
and make sure the path to the wider freedom of the future. In religion
they fix the principles of that philosophic tolerance which the later
centuries develop and apply. Both in politics and in religion they
turn aside from the mediaeval imperialism of Bourbon and Hapsburg,
consciously or unconsciously preparing the foundations of the
Imperialism of to-day.
If the divines, scholars, poets, and wits who met and talked under the
roof of the young Lord Falkland at Tew represent in their religious and
civil perplexities the spirit of the seventeenth century, within the
intersecting circles of Pope and Bolingbroke, Swift and Addison, may be
found in one form or another all the varied impulses of the
eighteenth--intellectual, political, scientific, literary, or
religious. England had succeeded to the place which Holland filled in
the days of Descartes and Spinoza--the refuge of the oppressed, the
home of political and religious freedom, the study of Montesquieu, the
asylum of Voltaire.[5] Yet between the England of the eighteenth and
the England of the seventeenth century there is no such deep gulf fixed
as Carlyle at one period of his literary activity imagined. The one is
the organic inevitable growth of the other. The England which fought
at Blenheim, Fontenoy, and Quebec is the same England as fought at
Marston Moor and Dunbar. Chatham rescued it from a deeper abasement
than that into which it had fallen in the days of the Cavalier
parliaments, and it followed him to heights unrecked of by Cromwell.
Nor is the religious character of the century less profound, less
earnestly reverent, when rightly studied. Even its scepticism, its
fiery denials, or vehement inquiry--a Woolston's, for instance, or a
Cudworth's, like a Shelley's or a James Thomson's[6] long
afterwards--spring from no love of darkness, but from the immortal
ardour for the light, for Truth, even if there come with it silence and
utter death. And from this same ardour arises that extraordinary
outburst of varied intellectual and religious effort, critical or
constructive, which makes the Revolutionary and the Georgian eras
comparable in energy, if not in height of speculative inquiry, to the
great period of the _Aufklaerung_ in Germany. Kant acknowledged his
indebtedness to Hume. Rousseau, Voltaire, Condillac, and Helvetius are
in philosophic theory but pupils of Locke.
Towards the close of the century appeared Gibbon's great work, the
_Decline and Fall_, a prose epic in seventy-one books, upon the last
victories, the last triumphs, and the long, reluctant death-struggles
of the Roman Empire, the insidious advance of inner decay, the
ever-renewed assaults of foreign violence, the Goth, the Saracen, the
Mongol, and at the close, the leaguering lines of Mahomet, the farewell
to the Greeks of the last of the Constantines, the Ottomans in the
palaces of the Caesars, and the melancholy musings of an Italian
scholar over the ruins on the Seven Hills. An epic in prose--and every
one of its books might be compared to the gem-encrusted hilt of a
sword, and each wonderfully wrought jewel is a sentence; but the point
of the sword, like that of the cherubim, is everywhere turned against
superstition, bigotry, and religious wrong.
David Hume's philosophy was more read[7] in France than in Scotland or
England, but Hume wrote one book here widely read, his _History of
England_. It has been superseded, but it did what it aimed at doing.
There are certain books which, when they have done their work, are
forgotten, the _Dialectique_ of Ramus, for instance. This is not to be
regretted. Hume's _History of England_ is one of these books. For
nearly four generations it was the only History of England that English
men and women read. It was impossible that a man like Hume, the
central principle of whose life was the same as that of Locke,
Shaftesbury, Gibbon--the desire for a larger freedom for man's
thought--it was impossible for him to write without saturating every
page with that purpose, and it was impossible that three generations
could read that _History_ without being insensibly, unconsciously
transformed, their aspirations elevated, their judgments moulded by
contact with such a mind as that of Hume.
Recently the work of the great intellects of these two centuries bears
fruit in our changed attitude towards Ireland, in the emancipation of
the Catholics there; in our changed attitude towards the Jews, towards
the peoples of India, towards Islam. Edward Gibbon and Hume laid the
foundation of that college which is rising at Khartoum for the teaching
of Mohammedanism under the Queen. It was not only Lord Kitchener who
built it; John Locke, John Milton built it.
The saint, the crusader, the monk, reformer, puritan, and nonjuror lead
in unbroken succession to the critic, the speculative thinker, the
analytic or synthetic philosopher of the eighteenth and the nineteenth
century, these representing Imperial Britain, as the former represent
national or feudal England. Erigena in the ninth century surveying all
things as from a tall rock, Dunstan, Roger Bacon wasting in a prison
"through the incurable stupidity of the world," as he briefly explains
it, Michael Scott, Hooker, Bacon, Glanvil, Milton, and Locke, formed by
England, these men have in turn guided or informed the highest
aspirations, the very heart of the race. The greatest empire in the
annals of mankind is at once the most earnestly religious and the most
tolerant. Her power is deep-based as the foundations of the rocks, her
glance wide as the boundaries of the world, far-searching as the aeons
of time.
Yet it is not only from within, but from without, that this
transformation in the spirit of England has been effected; not only
from within by the work of a Sidney, a Gibbon, but from without by the
influence, imperceptible yet sure, of the faiths and creeds of the
Oriental peoples she conquers. The work of the Arabists of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such men as the Pocockes,[8]
father and son, Ockley and Sale, supplements or expands the teaching of
Locke and of Hume. The industry of Ross, the enthusiastic studies of
Sir William Jones, brought the power of Persian and Indian thought to
bear upon the English mind, and the efforts of all these men seem to
converge in one of the greatest literary monuments of the present
century--_The Sacred Books of the East_.
Thus then we have seen this immortal "energy of the soul" in religion
and thought, as in politics, manifest itself in like aspirations
towards imaginative freedom, the higher freedom and the higher justice,
summed in the phrase "Elargissez Dieu," that man's soul, dowered with
the unfettered use of all its faculties, may set towards the lodestar
of its being, harmony with the Divine, whether it be through freedom in
religious life or in political life or in any other form of life. For
all life, all being, is organic, ceaselessly transformed, ceaselessly
transforming, ceaseless action and interaction, like that vision of
Goethe's of the golden chalices ascending and descending perpetually
between heaven and this dark earth of ours.
Sec. 5. THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST: A FINAL CONSIDERATION
Before leaving this part of our subject, the testimony of the past,
there is one more question to consider, though with brevity. The great
empires or imperial races of the past, Hellas, Rome, Egypt, Persia,
Islam, represent each a distinct ideal--in each a separate aspect of
the human soul, as the characterizing attribute of the race, seems
incarnate. In Hellas, for example, it is Beauty, +to kalon+; in Rome,
it is Power; in Egypt, Mystery, as embodied in her temples,
half-underground, or in the Sphinx that guards the sepulchres of her
kings; whilst in Persia, Beauty and Aspiration seem to unite in that
mystic curiosity which is the feature at once of her religion, her
architecture, her laws, of Magian ritual and Gnostic theurgy. Other
races possess these qualities, love of beauty, the sense of mystery;
but in Hellas and in Egypt they differentiate the race and all the
sections of the race.
What characteristic, then, common to the whole Teutonic race, does this
Empire of Britain represent? Apart altogether from its individual
ideal, political or religious, what attribute of the race,
distinguishing it from other races, the Hellenic, the Roman, the
Persian, does it eminently possess?
Compare, first of all, the beginnings of the people of England with the
beginnings of the Hellenic people, or better, perhaps, with the
beginnings of Rome. Who founded the Roman State? There is one fact
about which the most recent authorities agree with the most ancient,
that Rome was founded much as Athens was founded, by desperate men from
every city, district, region, in Italy. The outlaw, the refugee from
justice or from private vengeance, the landless man and the homeless
man--these gathered in the "Broad Plain," or migrated together to the
Seven Hills, and by the very extent of the walk which they traced
marked the plan which the Rome of the Caesars filled in. This process
may have extended over a century--over two centuries; Rome drawing to
itself ever new bands of adventurers, desperate in valour and in
fortune as the first. Who are the founders of England, of Imperial
Britain? They are those "co-seekers," _conqu[oe]stores_, I have spoken
of, who came with Cerdic and with Cynric, the chosen men, that is to
say, the most adventurous, most daring, most reckless--the fittest men
of the whole Teutonic kindred; and not for two centuries merely, but
for six centuries, this "land of the Angles," stretching from the Forth
and Clyde to the Channel, from Eadwine's Burgh to Andredeswald, draws
to itself, and is gradually ever peopled closer and closer with,
Vikings and Danes, Norsemen and Ostmen, followers of Guthrum, and
followers of Hrolf, followers of Ivar and followers of William I. They
come in "hundreds," they come in thousands. Into England, as into some
vast crucible, the valour of the earth pours itself for six hundred
years, till, molten and fused together, it arises at last one and
undivided, the English Nation. Such was the foundation, such the
building of the Empire, and these are the title-deeds which even in its
first beginnings this land can show.
And of the inner race character as representative of the whole Teutonic
kindred, the testimony is not less sure. What a heaven of light falls
upon the Hellas of the Isles, that period of its history which does not
begin, but ends with the Iliad and with the Odyssey--works that sum up
an old civilization! Already is born that beauty which, whether in
religion, or in art, or in life, Hellas made its own for ever. And it
is not difficult to trace back the descent of the ideal of Virgil and
of Cicero to the shepherds and outlaws of the Seven Hills. The
infinite curiosity of Persia, the worshipper of flame, is anticipated
on its earliest monuments, and the mystery of Egypt is coeval with its
first appearance in history. But of England and the Teutonic race what
shall one say? A characteristic universal in Teutonic history is the
extent to which the speculative or metaphysical pervades the practical,
the political, and social conditions of life. Freedom and deathless
courage are its inheritance; but these throughout its history are
accompanied by certain vaguer tendencies of thought and aspiration, the
touch of things unseen, those impulses beyond the finite towards the
Infinite, which display themselves so conspicuously in later ages. In
the united power of these two worlds, the visible and the invisible,
upon the Teutonic imagination, in this alternate sway of Reality and
Illusion, must be sought the characteristic of this race. In the Faust
legend, which, in one form or another, the race has made its own, it
attains a supreme embodiment. In the Oriental imagination the sense of
the transiency of life passes swiftly into a disdain for life itself,
and displays itself in a courage which arises less from hope than from
apathy or despair. But the death-defiant courage of the Viking springs
from no disdain of life, but from the scorn of death, hazarding life
rather than the hope upon which his life is set.
This characteristic can be traced throughout the range of Teutonic art
and Teutonic literature, and even in action. The spirit which
originates the _Voelker-wanderung_, for instance, reappears in the
half-unconscious impulses, the instinctive bent of the race, which lead
the brave of Europe generation by generation for two hundred years to
the crusades. They found the grave empty, but the craving of the heart
was stayed, the yearning towards Asgard, the sun-bright eastern land,
where were Balder and the Anses, and the rivers and meadows unfading,
whence ages ago their race had journeyed to the forest-gloom and mists
by the Danube and the Rhine, by the Elbe and the Thames.
Thus, then, as Beauty is impersonated in Hellas, Mystery in Egypt, so
this attribute which we may name Reverie is impersonated in the
Teutonic race.
And in the Anglo-Saxon branch of the great Teutonic kindred, this
attribute, this Reverie, the divided sway of the actual and of the
dream-world, attests its presence and its power from the earliest
epochs. It has left its impress, its melancholy, its restlessness, its
infinite regret, upon the verse of Cynewulf and Caedmon, whilst in the
devotion of the saint, the scholar, the hermit, and of much of the
common life of the time to the ideal of Calvary, its presence falls
like a mystic light upon the turbulence and battle-fury of the eighth
and ninth centuries. It adds the glamour as from a distant and
enchanted past to chivalrous romance and to the crusader's and the
pilgrim's high endeavour. It cast its spell upon the Tudor mariners
and made the ocean their inheritance. In later times it reappears as
the world-impulse which has made our race a native of every climate,
yet jealous of its traditions, proud of its birth, unsubdued by its
environment.
If in the circuit they marked out for the walls of early Rome its first
founders seemed to anticipate the eternal city, so on the high seas the
founders of England, Jute, Viking, and Norseman seem to foreshadow the
Empire of the World, and by the surge or in the forest solitude,
already to meditate the terror, the sorrow, and the mystery, and the
coming harmonies, of _Faustus_ and _Lear_, of _Hamlet_ and _Adonais_.
[1] I have retained the familiar spelling of the Saxon hero's name.
Giesebrecht, who discovers in the stand against Charlemagne something
of the spirit of Arminius, _etwas vom Geiste Armins_ (_D.K.I._, p.
112), uses the form "Widukind," and the same form has the sanction of
Waitz (_Verfassungsgeschichte_, iii, p. 120). Yet the form Widu-kind
is probably no more than a chronicler's theory of the derivation of the
name.
[2] Doellinger's characterization of Cromwell is remarkable--"Aber er
(_i.e._, Cromwell) hat, zuerst unter den Maechtigen, ein religioeses
Princip aufgestellt und, soweit sein Arm reichte, zur Geltung gebracht,
welches, im Gegensatz gegen die grossen historischen Kirchen und gegen
den Islam, Keim und Stoff zu einer abgesonderten Religion in sich
trug:--das Princip der Gewissensfreiheit, der Verwerfung alles
religioesen Zwanges." Proceeding to expand this idea, Doellinger again
describes Cromwell as the annunciator of the doctrine of the
inviolability of conscience, so vast in its significance to the modern
world, and adds: "Es war damals von weittragender Bedeutung, dass der
Beherrscher eines maechtigen Reiches diese neue Lehre verkuendete, die
dann noch fast anderthalb Jahrhunderte brauchte, bis sie in der
oeffentlichen Meinung so erstarkte, dass auch ihre noch immer
zahlreichen Gegner sich vor ihr beugen muessen. Die Evangelische Union,
welche jetzt zwei Welttheile umfasst und ein frueher unbekanntes und fuer
unmoeglich gehaltenes Princip der Einigung verschiedener Kirchen
gluecklich verwirklicht hat, darf wohl Cromwell als ihren Propheten und
vorbereitenden Gruender betrachten."--_Akademische Vortraege_, 1891, vol.
iii, pp. 55, 56.
[3] The _Argenis_ was published in 1621; but amongst the ideas on
religion, carefully elaborated or obscurely suggested, which throng its
pages, we find curious anticipations of the position of Locke and even
of Hume, just as in politics, in the remarks on elective monarchy put
in the lips of the Cardinal Ubaldini, or in the conceptions of justice
and law, Barclay reveals a sympathy with principles which appealed to
Algernon Sidney or were long afterwards developed by Beccaria. In the
motion of the stars Barclay sees the proof of the existence of God, and
requires no other. The _Argenis_, unfortunately for English
literature, was written at a time when men still wavered between the
vernacular and Latin as a medium of expression.
[4] The spirit and tendency of Locke's work appear in the short preface
to the English version of the Latin _Epistola de Tolerantia_, which had
already met with a general approbation in France and Holland (1689).
"This narrowness of spirit on all sides has undoubtedly been the
principal occasion of our miseries and confusions. But whatever has
been the occasion, it is now high time to seek for a thorough cure. We
have need of more generous remedies than what have yet been made use of
in our distemper. It is neither declarations of indulgence, nor acts
of comprehension, such as have yet been practised, or projected amongst
us, that can do the work. The first will but palliate, the second
increase our evil. Absolute Liberty, just and true Liberty, equal and
impartial Liberty, is the thing that we stand in need of." The second
Letter, styled "A Second Letter concerning Toleration," is dated May
27th, 1690--the year of the publication of his _Essay on the Human
Understanding_; the third, the longest, and in some respects the most
eloquent, "A Third Letter for Toleration," bears the date June 20th,
1693.
[5] Voltaire ridiculed certain peculiarities of Shakespeare when
mediocre French writers and critics began to find in his "barbarities"
an excuse for irreverence at the expense of Racine, but he never tires
of reiterating his admiration for the country of Locke and Hume, of
Bolingbroke and Newton. A hundred phrases could be gathered from his
correspondence extending over half a century, in which this finds
serious or extravagant utterance. Even in the last decades of his
life, when he sees the France of the future arising, he writes to
Madame Du Deffand: "How trivial we are compared with the Greeks, the
Romans, and the English"; and to Helvetius, about the same period
(1765), he admits the profound debts which France and Europe owe to the
adventurous thought of England. He even forces Frederick the Great
into reluctant but definite acquiescence with his enthusiasm--"Yes, you
are right; you French have grace, the English have the depth, and we
Germans, we have caution."
[6] James Thomson, who distinguished himself from the author of the
_Seasons_, and defined his own literary aims by the initials B. V.,
_i.e._, Bysshe Vonalis (Novalis), though possessing neither the wide
scholarship nor the depth of thought of Leopardi, occasionally equals
the great Italian in felicity of phrase and in the poignant expression
of the world-sorrow. Several of the more violent pamphlets on
religious themes ascribed to him are of doubtful authenticity. He died
in 1882, the year after the death of Carlyle.
[7] Hume's disappointment at the reception accorded to the first quarto
of his _History of England_ must be measured by the standard of the
hopes he had formed. Conscious of genius, and not without ambition, he
had reached middle life nameless, and save in a narrow circle
unacknowledged. But the appearance of his _History_, two years later
than his _Political Discourses_, was synchronous with the darkest hours
in English annals since 1667. An English fleet had to quit the Channel
before the combined navies of France and Spain; Braddock was defeated
at Fort Duquesne; Minorca was lost. At this period the tide of
ill-feeling between the Scotch and the English ran bitter and high.
The taunts of individuals were but the explosions of a resentment
deep-seated and strong. London had not yet forgotten the panic which
the march of the Pretender had roused. To the Scottish nation the
massacre at Culloden seemed an act of revenge--savage, pre-meditated,
and impolitic. The ministry of Chatham changed all this. He raised an
army from the clans who ten years before had marched to the heart of
England; ended the privileges of the coterie of Whig families,
bestowing the posts of danger and power not upon the fearless but
frequently incapable sons of the great houses, but upon the talent bred
in the ranks of English merchants. Hume's work was thus caught in the
stream of Chatham's victories, and a ray from the glory of the nation
was reflected upon its historian. The general verdict was ratified by
the concord of the best judgments. Gibbon despaired of rivalling its
faultless lucidity; Burke turned from a projected History to write in
Hume's manner the events of the passing years, founding the _Annual
Register_. Its outspoken Toryism was welcome to a generation weary of
the "Venetian oligarchy," this epoch, if any, meriting Beaconsfield's
epithet. The work had the fortune which Gibbon and Montesquieu craved
for their own--it was read in the boudoir as much as in the study. Nor
did its power diminish. It contained the best writing, the deepest
thought, the most vivid portraiture, devoted to men and things English,
over a continuous period, until the works of Carlyle and Macaulay.
[8] The significance of these men's work may be estimated by the
ignorance even of scholars and tolerant thinkers. Spinoza, for
instance, in 1675, describes Islam as a faith that has known no schism;
and twenty years earlier Pascal brands Mohammed as forbidding all study!