The task of modern idealists indeed is made much too easy for them by
the fact that they are always taught that if a thing has been defeated
it has been disproved. Logically, the case is quite clearly the other
way. The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world.
If a man says that the Young Pretender would have made England happy,
it is hard to answer him. If anyone says that the Georges made England
happy, I hope we all know what to answer. That which was prevented is
always impregnable; and the only perfect King of England was he who
was smothered. Exactly be cause Jacobitism failed we cannot call it
a failure. Precisely because the Commune collapsed as a rebellion we
cannot say that it collapsed as a system. But such outbursts were brief
or incidental. Few people realize how many of the largest efforts, the
facts that will fill history, were frustrated in their full design and
come down to us as gigantic cripples. I have only space to allude to the
two largest facts of modern history: the Catholic Church and that modern
growth rooted in the French Revolution.
When four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of
Canterbury, it was not only a sign of anger but of a sort of black
admiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for his
brains. Such a blow will remain forever unintelligible unless we realise
what the brains of St. Thomas were thinking about just before they were
distributed over the floor. They were thinking about the great mediaeval
conception that the church is the judge of the world. Becket objected to
a priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Justice. And his reason was
simple: because the Lord Chief Justice was being tried by the priest.
The judiciary was itself sub judice. The kings were themselves in the
dock. The idea was to create an invisible kingdom, without armies or
prisons, but with complete freedom to condemn publicly all the kingdoms
of the earth. Whether such a supreme church would have cured society we
cannot affirm definitely; because the church never was a supreme church.
We only know that in England at any rate the princes conquered the
saints. What the world wanted we see before us; and some of us call it
a failure. But we cannot call what the church wanted a failure, simply
because the church failed. Tracy struck a little too soon. England had
not yet made the great Protestant discovery that the king can do no
wrong. The king was whipped in the cathedral; a performance which I
recommend to those who regret the unpopularity of church-going. But the
discovery was made; and Henry VIII scattered Becket’s bones as easily as
Tracy had scattered his brains.
Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried; plenty of Catholics
were tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not tire
of the church’s ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not
for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity
was unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of
Christians. Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the
churchmen. But at the same time hostile elements had certainly begun to
end it long before it could have done its work. In the nature of
things it needed a common scheme of life and thought in Europe. Yet
the mediaeval system began to be broken to pieces intellectually, long
before it showed the slightest hint of falling to pieces morally. The
huge early heresies, like the Albigenses, had not the faintest excuse in
moral superiority. And it is actually true that the Reformation began
to tear Europe apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pull
it together. The Prussians, for instance, were not converted to
Christianity at all until quite close to the Reformation. The poor
creatures hardly had time to become Catholics before they were told
to become Protestants. This explains a great deal of their subsequent
conduct. But I have only taken this as the first and most evident case
of the general truth: that the great ideals of the past failed not by
being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived
enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind
has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian
ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult;
and left untried.
It is, of course, the same in the case of the French Revolution. A great
part of our present perplexity arises from the fact that the French
Revolution has half succeeded and half failed. In one sense, Valmy was
the decisive battle of the West, and in another Trafalgar. We have,
indeed, destroyed the largest territorial tyrannies, and created a free
peasantry in almost all Christian countries except England; of which we
shall say more anon. But representative government, the one universal
relic, is a very poor fragment of the full republican idea. The theory
of the French Revolution presupposed two things in government, things
which it achieved at the time, but which it has certainly not bequeathed
to its imitators in England, Germany, and America. The first of these
was the idea of honorable poverty; that a statesman must be something of
a stoic; the second was the idea of extreme publicity. Many imaginative
English writers, including Carlyle, seem quite unable to imagine how it
was that men like Robespierre and Marat were ardently admired. The best
answer is that they were admired for being poor--poor when they might
have been rich.
No one will pretend that this ideal exists at all in the haute politique
of this country. Our national claim to political incorruptibility is
actually based on exactly the opposite argument; it is based on the
theory that wealthy men in assured positions will have no temptation to
financial trickery. Whether the history of the English aristocracy,
from the spoliation of the monasteries to the annexation of the mines,
entirely supports this theory I am not now inquiring; but certainly
it is our theory, that wealth will be a protection against political
corruption. The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He is born
with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be
found with the silver spoons in his pocket. So strong is our faith in
this protection by plutocracy, that we are more and more trusting our
empire in the hands of families which inherit wealth without either
blood or manners. Some of our political houses are parvenue by pedigree;
they hand on vulgarity like a coat of-arms. In the case of many a modern
statesman to say that he is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, is
at once inadequate and excessive. He is born with a silver knife in his
mouth. But all this only illustrates the English theory that poverty is
perilous for a politician.
It will be the same if we compare the conditions that have come about
with the Revolution legend touching publicity. The old democratic
doctrine was that the more light that was let in to all departments of
State, the easier it was for a righteous indignation to move promptly
against wrong. In other words, monarchs were to live in glass houses,
that mobs might throw stones. Again, no admirer of existing English
politics (if there is any admirer of existing English politics) will
really pretend that this ideal of publicity is exhausted, or even
attempted. Obviously public life grows more private every day. The
French have, indeed, continued the tradition of revealing secrets and
making scandals; hence they are more flagrant and palpable than we, not
in sin but in the confession of sin. The first trial of Dreyfus might
have happened in England; it is exactly the second trial that would have
been legally impossible. But, indeed, if we wish to realise how far we
fall short of the original republican outline, the sharpest way to test
it is to note how far we fall short even of the republican element
in the older regime. Not only are we less democratic than Danton and
Condorcet, but we are in many ways less democratic than Choiseul and
Marie Antoinette. The richest nobles before the revolt were needy
middle-class people compared with our Rothschilds and Roseberys. And
in the matter of publicity the old French monarchy was infinitely more
democratic than any of the monarchies of today. Practically anybody
who chose could walk into the palace and see the king playing with his
children, or paring his nails. The people possessed the monarch, as the
people possess Primrose Hill; that is, they cannot move it, but they can
sprawl all over it. The old French monarchy was founded on the excellent
principle that a cat may look at a king. But nowadays a cat may not look
at a king; unless it is a very tame cat. Even where the press is free
for criticism it is only used for adulation. The substantial difference
comes to something uncommonly like this: Eighteenth century tyranny
meant that you could say “The K__ of Br__rd is a profligate.” Twentieth
century liberty really means that you are allowed to say “The King of
Brentford is a model family man.”
But we have delayed the main argument too long for the parenthetical
purpose of showing that the great democratic dream, like the great
mediaeval dream, has in a strict and practical sense been a dream
unfulfilled. Whatever is the matter with modern England it is not
that we have carried out too literally, or achieved with disappointing
completeness, either the Catholicism of Becket or the equality of Marat.
Now I have taken these two cases merely because they are typical of
ten thousand other cases; the world is full of these unfulfilled ideas,
these uncompleted temples. History does not consist of completed and
crumbling ruins; rather it consists of half-built villas abandoned by
a bankrupt-builder. This world is more like an unfinished suburb than a
deserted cemetery.
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