that Philip’s fanatical devotion to his Church was a sincere devotion.
He accuses him of hypocrisy, which is like accusing Cromwell of levity,
or Burke of Jacobinism. Prescott has a fashion of turning the King’s
few amiabilities, as, for example, his tenderness for his third wife,
Isabella of France, into a suggestion of reproach. “Well would it be
for the memory of Philip, could the historian find no heavier sin to
lay to his charge than his treatment of Isabella.” Well would it be
for all of us, could the recording angel lay no heavier charge to our
account than our legitimate affections. The Prince of Orange, it is
true, charged Philip with murdering both wife and son; but that was
merely a political argument. He would as soon have charged him with
the murder of his father, had the Emperor not been safely isolated at
Yuste; and Philip, in return, banned the Prince of Orange--a brave and
wise ruler--as “an enemy of the human race.”
Twenty-five years ago, an Englishman who was by nature distrustful of
popular verdicts, and who had made careful studies of certain epochs of
Spanish history, ventured to paint Philip in fresh colours. Mr. Martin
Hume’s monograph shows us a cultivated gentleman, with a correct taste
in architecture and art, sober, abstemious, kind to petitioners, loyal
and affectionate to his friends, generous to his soldiers and sailors;
a man beloved by his own household, and reverenced by his subjects,
to whom he brought nothing but misfortune. The book makes melancholy
reading, because Philip’s political sins were also political blunders;
his mad intolerance was a distortion, rather than a rejection, of
conscience; and his inconceivable rigidity left him helpless to face
the essential readjustments of life. “I could not do otherwise than I
have done,” he said with piercing sincerity, “though the world should
fall in ruins around me.”
Now what befell Mr. Hume who wrote history in this fashion, with
no more liking for Philip than for Elizabeth or the Prince of
Orange, but with a natural desire to get within the purlieus of
truth? Certain empty honours were conferred upon him: a degree from
Cambridge, membership in a few societies, the privilege of having
some letters printed after his name. But the University of Glasgow
and the University of Liverpool stoutly refused to give him the
chairs of history and Spanish. He might know more than most men on
these subjects; but they did not want their students exposed to new
impressions. The good old way for them. Mr. Hume, being a reader, may
have recalled in bitterness of spirit the words of the acute and
unemotional Sully, who had scant regard for Catholicism (though the
Huguenots tried him sorely), and none at all for Spain; but who said,
in his balanced, impersonal way, that Philip’s finer qualities, his
patience, piety, fortitude and single-mindedness, were all alike “lost
on the vulgar.”
Lucrezia Borgia is less available for our purpose, because the
imaginary Lucrezia, though not precisely beloved, is more popular in
her way than the real Lucrezia could ever hope to be. “In the matter
of pleasantness,” says Lucian, “truth is far surpassed by falsehood”;
and never has it been more agreeably overshadowed than in this fragment
of Italian history. We really could not bear to lose the Lucrezia of
romance. She has done fatigue duty along every line of iniquity. She
has specialized in all of the seven deadly sins. On Rossetti’s canvas,
in Donizetti’s opera, in Victor Hugo’s play, in countless poems and
stories and novels, she has erred exhaustively for our entertainment.
The image of an attractive young woman poisoning her supper guests is
one which the world will not lightly let go.
And what is offered in return? Only the dull statements of people who
chanced to know the lady, and who considered her a model wife and
duchess, a little over-anxious about the education of her numerous
children, but kind to the poor, generous to artists, and pitiful to
Jews. “She is graceful, modest, lovable, decorous and devout,” wrote
Johannes Lucas from Rome to Ercole, the old Duke of Ferrara. “She is
beautiful and good, gentle and amiable,” echoed the Chevalier Bayard
years later. Were we less avid for thrills, we might like to think
of this young creature, snatched at twenty-one from the maelstrom of
Rome, where she had been a pawn in the game of politics, and placed
in a secure and splendid home. The Lucrezia of romance would have
found the court of Ferrara intolerably dull. The Lucrezia of history
took to dullness as a duck to water. She was a sensible, rather than
a brilliant woman, fully alive to the duties and dignities of her
position, and well aware that respectability is a strong card to play
in a vastly disreputable world.
There was a time when Robespierre and Marat made a high bid for
unpopularity. Even those who clearly understood the rehabilitation
of man in the French Revolution found little to say for its chosen
instruments, whose purposes were high, but whose methods were open to
reproach. Of late, however, a certain weariness has been observable
in men’s minds when these reformers are in question, a reluctance to
expand with _any_ emotion where they are concerned. M. Lauzanne is,
indeed, by way of thinking that the elemental Clemenceau closely
resembles the elemental Robespierre; but this is not a serious
valuation; it is letting picturesqueness run away with reason--a habit
incidental to editorship.
The thoroughly modern point of view is that Robespierre and Marat
were ineffective; not without ability in their respective lines, but
unfitted for the parts they played. Marat’s turn of mind was scientific
(our own Benjamin Franklin found him full of promise). Robespierre’s
turn of mind was legal; he would have made an acute and successful
lawyer. The Revolution came along and ruined both these lives, for
which we are expected to be sorry. M. Lauzanne does not go so far
as to say that the Great War ruined Clemenceau’s life. The “Tiger”
was seventy-three when the Germans marched into Belgium. Had he been
content to spend all his years teaching in a girls’ school, he might
(though I am none too sure of it) have been a gentler and a better
man. But France was surely worth the price he paid. A lifeboat is not
expected to have the graceful lines of a gondola.
“Almost everybody,” says Stevenson, “can understand and sympathize
with an admiral, or a prize-fighter”; which genial sentiment is less
contagious now than when it was uttered, thirty years ago. A new type
of admiral has presented itself to the troubled consciousness of men,
a type unknown to Nelson, unsuspected by Farragut, unsung by Newbolt.
In robbing the word of its ancient glory, Tirpitz has robbed us of an
emotion we can ill-afford to lose. “The traditions of sailors,” says
Mr. Shane Leslie, “have been untouched by the lowering of ideals which
has invaded every other class and profession.” The truth of his words
was brought home to readers by the behaviour of the British merchant
marine, peaceful, poorly paid men, who in the years of peril went out
unflinchingly, and as a matter of course, to meet “their duty and their
death.” Many and varied are the transgressions of seafaring men; but we
have hitherto been able to believe them sound in their nobler parts.
We should like to cherish this simple faith, and, though alienated
from prize-fighters by the narrowness of our civic and social code,
to retain our sympathy for admirals. It cannot be that their fair
fame will be forever smirched by the tactics of a man who ruined the
government he served.
The function of criticism is to clear our mental horizon, to get us
within close range of the criticized. It recognizes moral as well as
intellectual issues; but it differentiates them. When Emerson said,
“Goethe can never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to pure
truth, but to truth for the sake of culture,” he implied that truth,
besides being a better thing than culture, was also a more lovable
thing, which is not the case. It takes temerity to love Goethe; but
there are always men--young, keen, speculative, beauty-loving men--to
whom he is inexpressibly dear because of the vistas he opens, the
thoughts he releases, the “inward freedom” which is all he claimed to
give. It takes no less temerity to love Emerson, and he meant that it
should be so, that we should climb high to reach him. He is not lovable
as Lamb is lovable, and he would not have wanted to be. A man who all
his life repelled unwelcome intimacies had no desire to surrender his
memory to the affection of every idle reader.
It is such a sure thing to appeal from intelligence to the moral
sense, from the trouble involved in understanding to the ease with
which judgment is passed, that critics may be pardoned their frequent
misapprehensions. Problems of conduct are just as puzzling as problems
of intellect. That is why Mr. Stevenson pronounced a sneaking kindness
to be “instructive.” He offered it as a road to knowledge rather than
as a means of enjoyment. Not that he was unaware of the pleasures which
follow in its wake. He knew the world up and down well enough to be
thankful that he had never lost his taste for bad company.
The Divineness of Discontent
When a distinguished Oxford student told Americans, through the
distinguished medium of Harvard College, that they were “speeding with
invincible optimism down the road to destruction,” they paid him the
formal compliment of listening to, and commenting upon, his words. They
did not go so far as to be disturbed by them, because it is the nature
of men to remain unmoved by prophecies. Only the Greek chorus--or
its leader--paid any heed to Cassandra; and the folly of Edgar Poe
in accepting without demur the reiterated statement of his raven
is apparent to all readers of a much-read poem. The world has been
speeding through the centuries to destruction, and the end is still
remote. Nevertheless, as it is assuredly not speeding to perfection,
the word that chills our irrational content may do us some small
service. It is never believed, and it is soon forgotten; but for a time
it gives us food for thought.
Any one born as long ago as I was must remember that the virtue most
deeply inculcated in our nurseries was content. It had no spiritual
basis to lend it dignity and grace, but was of a Victorian smugness;
though, indeed, it was not Victorian at all, but an inheritance from
those late Georgian days which were the smuggest known to fame. It was
a survival from Hannah More and Jane Taylor, ladies dissimilar in most
respects, but with an equal gift for restricting the horizon of youth.
I don’t remember who wrote the popular story of the “Discontented Cat”
that lived in a cottage on bread and milk and mice, and that made
itself unhappy because a wealthy cat of its acquaintance was given
buttered crumpets for breakfast; but either Jane Taylor or her sister
Ann was responsible for the “Discontented Pendulum,” which grew tired
of ticking in the dark, and, being reminded that it had a window to
look through, retorted very sensibly that there was no use having a
window, if it could not stop a second to look through it.
The nursery theory of content was built up on the presumption that you
were the favoured child of fortune--or of God--while other, and no less
worthy, children were objects of less kindly solicitude. Miss Taylor’s
“Little Ann” weeps because she sees richly clad ladies stepping into a
coach while she has to walk; whereupon her mother points out to her a
sick and ragged beggar child, whose
“naked feet bleed on the stones,”
and with enviable hardness of heart bids her take comfort in the sight:
“This poor little beggar is hungry and cold,
No father nor mother has she;
And while you can daily such objects behold,
You ought quite contented to be.”
Hannah More amplified this theory of content to fit all classes and
circumstances. She really did feel concern for her fellow creatures,
for the rural poor upon whom it was not the custom of Church or
State to waste sympathy or help. She refused to believe that British
labourers were “predestined to be ignorant and wicked”--which was to
her credit; but she did, apparently, believe that they were predestined
to be wretchedly poor, and that they should be content with their
poverty. She lived on the fat of the land, and left thirty thousand
pounds when she died; but she held that bare existence was sufficient
for a ploughman. She wrote twenty-four books, which were twenty-four
too many; but she told the ever-admiring Wilberforce that she permitted
“no writing for the poor.” She aspired to guide the policies and the
morals of England; but she was perturbed by the thought that under-paid
artisans should seek to be “scholars and philosophers,” though they
must have stood in more need of philosophy than she did.
It was Ruskin who jolted his English readers, and some Americans, out
of the selfish complacency which is degenerate content. It was he who
harshly told England, then so prosperous and powerful, that prosperity
and power are not virtues, that they do not indicate the sanction
of the Almighty, or warrant their possessors in assuming the moral
leadership of the world. It was he who assured the prim girlhood of my
day that it was not the petted child of Providence, and that it had
no business to be contented because it was better off than girlhood
elsewhere. “Joy in nothing that separates you, as by any strange
favour, from your fellow creatures, that exalts you through their
degradation, exempts you from their toil, or indulges you in times of
their distress.”
This was a new voice falling upon the attentive ears of youth--a fresh
challenge to its native and impetuous generosity. Perhaps the beggar’s
bare feet were not a legitimate incentive to enjoyment of our own neat
shoes and stockings. Perhaps it was a sick world we lived in, and the
beggar was a symptom of disease. Perhaps when Emerson (we read Emerson
and Carlyle as well as Ruskin) defined discontent as an infirmity of
the will, he was thinking of personal and petty discontent, as with
one’s breakfast or the weather; not with the discontent which we never
dared to call divine, but which we dimly perceived to have in it some
noble attribute of grace. That the bare existence of a moral law should
so exalt a spirit that neither sin nor sorrow could subdue its gladness
was a profundity which the immature mind could not be expected to
grasp.
Time and circumstance lent themselves with extraordinary graciousness
to Emerson’s invincible optimism. It was easier to be a transcendental
philosopher, and much easier to cherish a noble and a sweet content,
before the laying of the Atlantic cable. Emerson was over sixty when
this event took place, and, while he lived, the wires were used with
commendable economy. The morning newspaper did not bring him a detailed
account of the latest Turkish massacre. The morning mail did not
bring him photographs of starving Russian children. His temperamental
composure met with little to derange it. He abhorred slavery; but
until Lincoln forced the issue, he seldom bent his mind to its
consideration. He loved “potential America”; but he had a happy faculty
of disregarding public affairs. Passionate partisanship, which is the
basis of so much satisfaction and discontent, was alien to his soul.
He loved mankind, but not men; and his avoidance of intimacies saved
him much wear and tear. Mr. Brownell says that he did not care enough
about his friends to discriminate between them, which was the reason he
estimated Alcott so highly.
This immense power of withdrawal, this concentration upon the things
of the spirit, made possible Emerson’s intellectual life. He may have
been, as Santayana says, “impervious to the evidence of evil”; yet
there breaks from his heart an occasional sigh over the low ebb of
the world’s virtue, or an entirely human admission that the hopes
of the morning are followed by the ennui of noon. Sustained by the
supremacy of the moral law, and by a profound and majestic belief in
the invincible justice, the “loaded dice” of God, he sums up in careful
words his modest faith in man: “Hours of sanity and consideration
are always arriving to communities as to individuals, when the truth
is seen, and the martyrs are justified.” Perhaps martyrs foresee the
dawning of this day or ever they come to die; but to those who stand by
and witness their martyrdom, the night seems dark and long.
There is a species of discontent which is more fervently optimistic
than all the cheerfulness the world can boast. It is the discontent
of the passionate and unpractical reformer, who believes, as Shelley
believed, in the perfectibility of the human species, and who thinks,
as Shelley thought, that there is a remedy for every disease of
civilization. To the poet’s dreaming eyes the cure was simple and sure.
Destruction implied for him an automatic reconstruction, a miraculous
survival and rebirth. Uncrown the king, and some noble prophet or
philosopher will guide--not rule--the people. Unfrock the priest,
and the erstwhile congregation will perfect itself in the practice
of virtue. Take the arms from the soldier and the policeman, the cap
and gown from the college president, authority from the judge, and
control from the father. The nations will then be peaceful, the mobs
orderly, the students studious, the criminals virtuous, the children
well-behaved. An indifferent acquaintance with sociology, and a
comprehensive ignorance of biology, made possible these pleasing
illusions. Nor did it occur to Shelley that many men, his equals in
disinterestedness and his superiors in self-restraint, would have found
his reconstructed world an eminently undesirable dwelling-place.
Two counsels to content stand bravely out from the mass of
contradictory admonitions with which the world’s teachers have
bewildered us. Saint Paul, writing to the Philippians, says simply:
“I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content”;
and Marcus Aurelius, contemplating the mighty spectacle of life and
death, bids us pass serenely through our little space of time, and
end our journey in content. It is the meeting-point of objective and
subjective consciousness. The Apostle was having a hard time of it.
The things he disciplined himself to accept with content were tangible
things, of an admittedly disagreeable character--hunger and thirst,
stripes and imprisonment. They were not happening to somebody else;
they were happening to _him_. The Emperor, seeking refuge from action
in thought, steeled himself against the nobleness of pity no less than
against the weakness of complaint. John Stuart Mill, who did not suffer
from enervating softness of heart, pronounced the wholesale killing of
Christians in the reign of Marcus Aurelius to be one of the world’s
great tragedies. It was the outcome, not only of imperial policy, but
of sincere conviction. Therefore historians have agreed to pass it
lightly by. How can a man do better than follow the dictates of his own
conscience, or of his own judgment, or of whatever directs the mighty
ones of earth who make laws instead of obeying them? But the immensity
of pain, the long-drawn agony involved in this protracted persecution
might have disturbed even a Stoic philosopher passing serenely--though
not harmlessly--through his little space of time.
This brings me to the consideration of one prolific source of
discontent, the habit we have acquired--and cannot let go--of
distressing ourselves over the daily progress of events. The classic
world, “innocent of any essential defeat,” was a pitiless world,
too clear-eyed for illusions, too intelligent for sedatives. The
Greeks built the structure of their lives upon an almost perfect
understanding of all that it offered and denied. The Romans, running an
empire and ruling a world, had much less time for thinking; yet Horace,
observant and acquiescent, undeceived and undisturbed, is the friend of
all the ages. It is not from him, or from any classic author, that we
learn to talk about the fret and fever of living. He would have held
such a phrase to be eminently ill-bred, and unworthy of man’s estate.
The Middle Ages, immersed in heaving seas of trouble, and lifted
Heaven-ward by great spiritual emotions, had scant breathing-space
for the cultivation of nerves. Men endured life and enjoyed it. Their
endurance and their enjoyment were unimpaired by the violence of their
fellow men, or by the vision of an angry God. Cruelty, which we cannot
bear to read about, and a Hell, which we will not bear to think about,
failed signally to curb the zest with which they lived their days.
“How high the tide of human delight rose in the Middle Ages,” says Mr.
Chesterton significantly, “we know only by the colossal walls they
built to keep it within bounds.” There is no reason to suppose that
Dante, whose fervid faith compassed the redemption of mankind, disliked
his dream of Hell, or that it irked him to consign to it so many
eminent and agreeable people.
The Renaissance gave itself unreservedly to all the pleasures that
could be extracted from the business of living, though there was no
lack of troubles to damp its zeal. It is interesting and instructive
to read the history of a great Italian lady, typical of her day,
Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua. She was learned, adroit, able,
estimable, and mistress of herself though duchies fell. She danced
serenely at the ball given by the French King at Milan, after he had
ousted her brother-in-law, the Duke Ludovico, and sent him to die a
prisoner at Loches. When Cæsar Borgia snatched Urbino, she improved the
occasion by promptly begging from him two beautiful statues which she
had always coveted, and which had been the most treasured possessions
of Duke Guidobaldo, her relative, and the husband of her dearest
friend. A chilly heart had Isabella when others came to grief, but a
stout one when disaster faced her way. If the men and women who lived
through those highly coloured, harshly governed days had fretted too
persistently over the misfortunes of others, or had spent their time
questioning the moral intelligibility of life, the Renaissance would
have failed of its fruition, and the world would be a less engaging
place for us to live in now.
There is a discontent which is profoundly stimulating, and there is
a discontent which is more wearisome than complacency. Both spring
from a consciousness that the time is out of joint, and both have
a modern background of nerves. “The Education of Henry Adams” and
the “Diaries” of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt are cases in point. Blunt’s
quarrel was with his country, his world, his fellow creatures and his
God--a broad field of dissatisfaction, which was yet too narrow to
embrace himself. Nowhere does he give any token of even a moderate
self-distrust. Britain is an “engine of evil,” because his party is out
of power. “Americans” (in 1900) “are spending fifty millions a year in
slaughtering the Filipinos”--a crude estimate of work and cost. “The
Press is the most complete engine ever invented for the concealment of
historic truth.” “Patriotism is the virtue of nations in decay.” “The
whole white race is revelling openly in violence, as though it had
never pretended to be Christian. God’s equal curse be on them all.”
“The whole white race,” be it observed. For a time Blunt dreamed
fond dreams of yellow and brown and black supremacy. Europe’s
civilization he esteemed a failure. Christianity had not come up to
his expectations. There remained the civilization of the East, and
Mohammedanism--an amended Mohammedanism, innocent of sensuality and
averse to bloodshed. Filled with this happy hope, the Englishman set
off from Cairo to seek religion in the desert.
Siwah gave him a rude reception. Ragged tribes, ardent but unregenerate
followers of the Prophet, pulled down his tents, pillaged his luggage,
robbed his servants, and knocked him rudely about. Blunt’s rage at
this treatment was like the rage of “Punch’s” vegetarian who is chased
by a bull. “There is no hope to be found in Islam, and I shall go no
further,” is his conclusion. “The less religion in the world, perhaps
the better.”
Humanity and its creeds being thus disposed of, there remained only
the animals to contemplate with satisfaction. “Three quarters of man’s
misery,” says the diary, “comes from pretending to be what he is not,
a separate creation, superior to that of the beasts and birds, when in
reality they are wiser than we are, and infinitely happier.”