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Essays in Rebellion

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Title: Essays in Rebellion

Author: Henry Woodd Nevinson


        
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #11079]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS IN REBELLION ***

ESSAYS IN REBELLION

BY

HENRY W. NEVINSON




_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

  NEIGHBOURS OF OURS: Scenes of East End Life.

  IN THE VALLEY OF TOPHET: Scenes of Black Country Life.

  THE THIRTY DAYS' WAR: Scenes in the Greek and Turkish War of 1897.

  LADYSMITH: a Diary of the Siege.

  CLASSIC GREEK LANDSCAPE AND ARCHITECTURE: Text to John Fulleylove's
  Pictures of Greece.

  THE PLEA OF PAN.

  BETWEEN THE ACTS: Scenes in the Author's Experience.

  ON THE OLD ROAD THROUGH FRANCE TO FLORENCE: French Chapters to
  Hallam Murray's Pictures.

  BOOKS AND PERSONALITIES: a volume of Criticism.

  A MODERN SLAVERY: an Investigation of the Slave System in Angola
  and the Islands of San Thomé and Principe.

  THE DAWN IN RUSSIA: Scenes in the Revolution of 1905-1906.

  THE NEW SPIRIT IN INDIA: Scenes during the Unrest of 1907-1908.

  ESSAYS IN FREEDOM.

  THE GROWTH OF FREEDOM: a Summary of the History of Democracy.


[Illustration: HENRY W. NEVINSON]




ESSAYS IN REBELLION

BY

HENRY W. NEVINSON



AUTHOR OF "ESSAYS IN FREEDOM"



LONDON

JAMES NISBET & CO., LIMITED

22 BERNERS STREET, W.

1913

_First published in_ 1913




PREFACE


When writers are so different, it is queer that every age should have a
distinguishing spirit. Each writer is as different in "style" as in
look, and his words reveal him just as the body reveals the soul,
blazoning its past or its future without possibility of concealment.
Paint a face, no matter how delicately or how thick; the very paint--the
very choice of colours red or white--betrays the nature lurking beneath
it, and no amount of artifice or imitation in a writer can obscure the
secret of self. Artifice and imitation reveal the finikin or uncertain
soul as surely as deliberate bareness reveals a conscious austerity.
Except, perhaps, in mathematics, there seems no escape from this
revelation. I am told that even in the "exact sciences" there is no
escape; even in physics the exposition is a matter of imagination, of
personality, of "style."

Next to mathematics and the exact sciences, I suppose, Bluebooks and
leading articles are taken as representing truth in the most absolute
and impersonal manner. We appeal to Bluebooks as confidently as to
astronomers, assuming that their statements will be impersonally true,
just as the curve of a comet will be the same for the Opposition as for
the Government, for Anarchists as for Fabians. Yet what a difference may
be detected in Bluebooks on the selfsame subject, and what an exciting
hide-and-seek for souls we may there enjoy! Behind one we catch sight of
the cautiously official mind, obsequious to established power,
observant of accepted fictions, contemptuous of zeal, apprehensive of
trouble, solicitous for the path of least resistance. Behind another we
feel the stirring spirit that no promotion will subdue, pitiless to
abomination, untouched by smooth excuses, regardless of official
sensibilities, and untamed to comfortable routine, which, in his case,
will probably be short.

Or take the leading article: hardly any form of words would appear less
personal. It is the abstract product of what the editor wants, what the
proprietor wants, what the Party wants, and what the readers want, just
flavoured sometimes with the very smallest suspicion of what the writer
wants. And yet, in leaders upon the same subject and in the same paper,
what a difference, again! Peruse leaders for a week, and in the week
following, with as much certainty as if you saw the animals emerging
from the Ark, you will be able to say, "Here comes the laboured Ox, here
the Wild Ass prances, here trips the Antelope with fairy footfall, here
the Dromedary froths beneath his hump; there soars the Crested Screamer,
there bolts the circuitous Hare, there old Behemoth wallows in the ooze,
and there the swivel-eyed Chameleon clings along the fence."

If even the writers of Bluebooks and leading articles are thus as
distinguishable as the animals which Noah had no difficulty in sorting
into couples, such writers as poets, essayists, and novelists, who have
no limit imposed upon their distinction, are likely to be still more
distinct. Indeed, we find it so, for their work needs no signature,
since the "style"--their way of looking at things--reveals it. And yet,
though it is only the sum of all these separate personalities so
diverse and distinct, each age or generation possesses a certain
"style" of its own, unconsciously revealing a kind of general
personality. Everyone knows it is as unnecessary to date a book as a
church or a candlestick, since church and candlestick and book always
bear the date written on the face. The literature of the last three or
four generations, for instance, has been distinguished by Rebellion as a
"style." Rebellion has been the characteristic expression of its most
vital self.

It has been an age of rebels in letters as in life. Of course,
acquiescent writers have existed as well, just as in the Ark (to keep up
the illustration) vegetarians stood side by side with carnivors, and
hoofs were intermixed with claws. The great majority have, as usual,
supported traditional order, have eulogised the past or present, and
been, not only at ease in their generation, but enraptured at the vision
of its beneficent prosperity. Such were the writers and orators whom
their contemporaries hailed as the distinctive spokesmen of a happy and
glorious time, leaping and bounding with income and population. But, on
looking back, we see their contemporaries were entirely mistaken. The
people of vital power and prolonged, far-reaching influence--the
"dynamic" people--have been the rebels. Wordsworth (it may seem strange
to include that venerable figure among rebels, but so long as he was
more poetic than venerable he stood in perpetual rebellion against the
motives, pursuits, and satisfactions of his time)--Wordsworth till he
was forty-five, Byron all his short life, Newman, Carlyle, Dickens,
Matthew Arnold, Ruskin--among English writers those have proved
themselves the dynamic people. There are many others, and many later;
but we need recall only these few great names, far enough distant to be
clearly visible. It was they who moved the country, shaking its torpor
like successive earthquakes. Risen against the conceit of riches, and
the hypocrisies of Society, against unimpassioned and unimaginative
religion, against ignoble success and the complacent economics that
hewed mankind into statistics to fit their abstractions--one and all, in
spite of their variety or mutual hostility, they were rebels, and their
personality expressed itself in rebellion. That was the common
characteristic of their "style."

In other parts of Europe, from _Faust_, which opened the nineteenth
century, onward through _Les Miserables_ to _The Doll's House_ and
_Resurrection_, it was the same. As, in political action, Russia hardly
ceased to rebel, France freed herself three times, Ireland gave us the
line of rebels from Robert Emmet to Michael Davitt, and all rebellion
culminated in Garibaldi, so the most vital spirits in every literature
of Europe were rebels. Perhaps it is so in all the greatest periods of
word and deed. For examples, one could point rapidly to Euripides,
Dante, Rabelais, Milton, Swift, Rousseau--men who have few attributes in
common except greatness and rebellion. But, to limit ourselves to the
familiar period of the last three or four generations, the words,
thoughts, and actions most pregnant with dynamic energy have been marked
with one mark. Rebellion has been the expression of a century's
personality.

Of course, it is very lamentable. _Otium divos_--the rebel, like the
storm-swept sailor, cries to heaven for tranquillity. It is not the
hardened warrior, but only the elegant writer who, having never seen
bloodshed, clamours to shed blood. All rebels long for a peace in which
it would be possible to acquiesce, while they cultivated their minds and
their gardens, employing the shining hour upon industry and intellectual
pursuits. "I can say in the presence of God," cried Cromwell, in the
last of his speeches, "I can say in the presence of God, in comparison
with whom we are but poor creeping ants upon the earth,--I would have
been glad to have lived under my woodside, to have kept a flock of
sheep, rather than undertaken such a Government as this." Every rebel is
a Quietist at heart, seeking peace and ensuing it, willing to let the
stream of time glide past without his stir, dreading the onset of
indignation's claws, stopping his ears to the trumpet-call of action,
and always tempted to leave vengeance to Him who has promised to repay.
If reason alone were his guide, undisturbed by rage he would enjoy such
pleasure as he could clutch, or sit like a Fakir in blissful isolation,
contemplating the aspect of eternity under which the difference between
a mouse and a man becomes imperceptible. But the age has grown a skin
too sensitive for such happiness. "For myself," said Goethe, in a
passage I quote again later in this book, "For myself, I am happy
enough. Joy comes streaming in upon me from every side. Only, for
others, I am not happy." So it is that the Hound of another's Hell gives
us no rest, and we are pursued by Furies not our own.

In spite of the longing for tranquillity, then, we cannot confidently
hope that rebellion will be less the characteristic of the present
generation than of the past. It is true, we are told that, in this
country at all events, the necessity for active and political rebellion
is past. However much a man may detest the Government, he is now, in a
sense, governed with his own consent, since he is free to persuade his
fellow-citizens that the Government is detestable, and, as far as his
vote goes, to dismiss his paid servants in the Ministry and to appoint
others. Such securities for freedom are thought to have made active and
political rebellion obsolete. This appears to be proved even by the
increasingly rebellious movement among women, as unenfranchised people,
excluded from citizenship and governed without consent. For women are in
rebellion only because they possess none of those securities, and the
moment that the securities are ensured them, their rebellion ceases. It
has only arisen because they are compelled to pay for the upkeep of the
State (including the upkeep of the statesmen) and to obey laws which
interfere increasingly more and more with their daily life, while they
are allowed no voice in the expenditure or the legislation. Whence have
originated, not only tangible and obvious hardships, but those feelings
of degradation, as of beings excluded from privileges owing to some
inferiority supposed inherent--those feelings of subjection, impotence,
and degradation which, more even than actual hardships, kindle the
spirit to the white-hot point of rebellion.

This democratic rising against a masculine oligarchy ceases when the
cause is removed, and the cause is simple. Similarly, the revolts of
nationalism against Imperial power, though the motives are more
complicated, usually cease at the concession of self-government. But
even if these political and fairly simple motives to rebellion are
likely soon to become obsolete in our country and Empire, other and
vaguer rebellious forms, neither nationalist nor directly political,
appear to stand close in front of us, and no one is yet sure what line
of action they will follow. Their line of action is still obscure,
though both England and Europe have felt the touch of general or
sympathetic strikes, and of "sabotage," or wilful destruction of
property rather than life--the method advocated by Syndicalists and
Suffragettes to rouse the sleepy world from indifference to their
wrongs. In this collection of essays, contributed during the last year
or two, as occasion arose, to the _Nation_ and other periodicals, I have
included some descriptions of the causes likely to incite people to
rebellion of this kind. Such causes, I mean, as the inequality that
comes from poverty alone--the physical unfitness or lack of mental
opportunity that is due only to poverty. Those things make happiness
impossible, for they frustrate the active exercise of vital powers, and
give life no scope. During a generation or so, people have looked to the
Government to mitigate the oppression of poverty, but some different
appeal now seems probable. For many despair of the goodwill or the power
of the State, finding little in it but hurried politicians, inhuman
officials, and the "experts" who docket and label the poor for
"institutional treatment," with results shown in my example of a
workhouse school.

The troubling and persistent alarum of rebellion calls from many sides,
and as instances of its call I have introduced mention of various
rebels, whether against authority or custom. I have once or twice
ventured also into those twilit regions where the spirit itself stands
rebellious against its limits, and questions even the ultimate insane
triumph of flesh and circumstance, closing its short-lived interlude.
The rebellion may appear to be vain, but when we consider the primitive
elements of life from which our paragon of animals has ascended, the
mere attempt at rebellion is more astonishing than the greatest recorded
miracle, and since man has grown to think that he possesses a soul,
there is no knowing what he may come to.

I have added a few other scenes from old times and new, just for
variety, or just to remind ourselves that, in the midst of all chaos and
perturbation and rage, it is possible for the world to go upon its way,
preserving, in spite of all, its most excellent gift of sanity.

H.W.N.

LONDON, _Easter_, 1913.




CONTENTS

  CHAP.
  I. THE CATFISH
  II. REBELLION
  III. "EITHER COWARDS OR UNHAPPY"
  IV. DEEDS NOT WORDS.
  V. THE BURNING BOOK.
  VI. "WHERE CRUEL RAGE"
  VII. THE CHIEF OF REBELS
  VIII. THE IRON CROWN
  IX. "THE IMPERIAL RACE"
  X. THE GREAT UNKNOWN
  XI. THE WORTH OF A PENNY
  XII. "FIX BAYONETS!"
  XIII. "OUR FATHERS HAVE TOLD US"
  XIV. THE GRAND JURY
  XV. A NEW CONSCRIPTION
  XVI. THE LAST OF THE RUNNYMEDES
  XVII. CHILDREN OF THE STATE.
  XVIII. THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS.
  XIX. ABDUL'S RETREAT
  XX. "NATIVES"
  XXI. UNDER THE YOKE.
  XXII. BLACK AND WHITE
  XXIII. PEACE AND WAR IN THE BALANCE
  XXIV. THE MAID
  XXV. THE HEROINE
  XXVI. THE PENALTY OF VIRTUE
  XXVII. "THE DAILY ROUND"
  XXVIII. THE CHARM OF COMMONPLACE
  XXIX. THE PRIEST OF NEMI.
  XXX. THE UNDERWORLD OF TIME.
  XXXI. MENTAL EUGENICS
  XXXII. THE MEDICINE OF THE MIND
  XXXIII. THE LAST FENCE
  XXXIV. THE ELEMENT OF CALM
  XXXV. "THE KING OF TERRORS"
  XXXVI. STRULDBRUGS
  XXXVII. "LIBERTÉ, LIBERTÉ, CHÉRIE!"
  XXXVIII. A FAREWELL TO FLEET STREET.
  INDEX



ESSAYS IN REBELLION




I


THE CATFISH

Before the hustling days of ice and of "cutters" rushing to and fro
between Billingsgate and our fleets of steam-trawlers on the Dogger
Bank, most sailing trawlers and long-line fishing-boats were built with
a large tank in their holds, through which the sea flowed freely. Dutch
eel-boats are built so still, and along the quays of Amsterdam and
Copenhagen you may see such tanks in fishing-boats of almost every kind.
Our East Coast fishermen kept them chiefly for cod. They hoped thus to
bring the fish fresh and good to market, for, unless they were
overcrowded, the cod lived quite as contentedly in the tanks as in the
open sea. But in one respect the fishermen were disappointed. They found
that the fish arrived slack, flabby, and limp, though well fed and in
apparent health.

Perplexity reigned (for the value of the catch was much diminished)
until some fisherman of genius conjectured that the cod lived only too
contentedly in those tanks, and suffered from the atrophy of calm. The
cod is by nature a lethargic, torpid, and plethoric creature, prone to
inactivity, content to lie in comfort, swallowing all that comes, with
cavernous mouth wide open, big enough to gulp its own body down if that
could be. In the tanks the cod rotted at ease, rapidly deteriorating in
their flesh. So, as a stimulating corrective, that genius among
fishermen inserted one catfish into each of his tanks, and found that
his cod came to market firm, brisk, and wholesome. Which result remained
a mystery until his death, when the secret was published and a strange
demand for catfish arose. For the catfish is the demon of the deep, and
keeps things lively.

This irritating but salutary stimulant in the tank (to say nothing of
the myriad catfishes in the depths of ocean!) has often reminded me of
what the Lord says to Mephistopheles in the Prologue to _Faust_. After
observing that, of all the spirits that deny, He finds a knave the least
of a bore, the Lord proceeds:

  "Des Menschen Thätigkeit kann allzuleicht erschlaffen,
  Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh;
  Drum geb' ich ihm gern den Gesellen zu,
  Der reizt und wirkt und muss als Teufel, schaffen."

Is not the parallel remarkable? Man's activity, like the cod's, turns
too readily to slumber; he is much too fond of unconditioned ease; and
so the Lord gives him a comrade like a catfish, to stimulate, rouse, and
drive to creation, as a devil may. There sprawls man, by nature
lethargic and torpid as a cod, prone to inactivity, content to lie in
comfort swallowing all that comes, with wide-open mouth, big enough to
gulp himself down, if that could be. There he sprawls, rotting at ease,
and rapidly deteriorating in body and soul, till one little demon of the
spiritual deep is inserted into his surroundings, and makes him firm,
brisk, and wholesome in a trice--"in half a jiffy," as people used to
say.

"Der reizt und wirkt"--the words necessarily recall a much older parable
than the catfish--the parable of the little leaven inserted in a piece
of dough until it leavens the whole lump by its "working," as cooks and
bakers know. Goethe may have been thinking of that. Leaven is a sour,
almost poisonous kind of stuff, working as though by magic, moving in a
mysterious way, causing the solid and impracticable dough to upheave, to
rise, expand, bubble, swell, and spout like a volcano. To all races
there has been something devilish, or at least demonic, in the action of
leaven. It is true that in the ancient parable the comparison lay
between leaven and the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven was like
a little leaven that leavens the whole lump, and Goethe says that
Mephisto, one of the Princes of Evil, also works like that. But whether
we call the leaven a good or evil thing makes little difference. The
effect of its mysterious powers of movement and upheaval is in the end
salutary. It works upon the lump just as the catfish, that demon of the
deep, preserves the lumpish cod from the apathy and degeneration of
comfort, and as Mephisto, that demon of the world, acts upon the
lethargy of mankind working within him, stimulating, driving to
production as a devil may.

"A society needs to have a ferment in it," said Professor Sumner of
Yale, in his published essays. Sometimes, he said, the ferment takes the
form of an enthusiastic delusion or an adventurous folly; sometimes
merely of economic opportunity and hope of luxury; in other ages
frequently of war. And, indeed, it was of war that he was writing,
though himself a pacific man, and in all respects a thinker of
obstinate caution. A society needs to have a ferment in it--a leaven, a
catfish, a Mephisto, the queer, unpleasant, disturbing touch of the
kingdom of heaven. Take any period of calm and rest in the life of the
world or the history of the arts. Take that period which great
historians have agreed to praise as the happiest of human ages--the age
of the Antonines. How benign and unruffled it was! What bland and
leisurely culture could be enjoyed in exquisite villas beside the
Mediterranean, or in flourishing municipalities along the Rhone! Many a
cultivated and comfortable man must have wished that reasonable peace to
last for ever. The civilised world was bathed in the element of calm,
the element of gentle acquiescence. All looked so quiet, so
imperturbable; and yet all the time the little catfish of Christianity
(or the little leaven, if you will) was at its work, irritating,
disturbing, stimulating with salutary energy to upheaval, to rebellion,
to the soul's activity that saves from bland and reasonable despair.
Like a fisherman over-anxious for the peace of the cod in his tank, the
philosophic Emperor tried to stamp the catfish down, and hoped to
preserve a philosophic quietude by the martyrdom of Christians in those
flourishing municipalities on the Rhone. Of course he failed, as even
the most humane and philosophic persecutors usually fail, but had he
succeeded, would not the soul of Europe have degenerated into a
flabbiness, lethargy, and desperate peace?

Take history where you will, when a new driving force enters the world,
it is a nuisance, a disturbing upheaval, a troubling agitation, a
plaguey fish. Think how the tiresome Reformation disturbed the artists
of Italy and Renaissance scholars; or how Cromwell disgusted the
half-way moderates, how the Revolution jogged the sentimental theorists
of France, how Kant shattered the Supreme Being of the Deists, and Byron
set the conventions of art and life tottering aghast. Take it where you
will, the approach of the soul's catfish is watched with apprehension
and violent dislike, all the more because it saves from torpor. It saves
from what Hamlet calls--

  "That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat--
  Of habits devil."

In the Futurist exhibition held in Sackville Street in 1912, one of the
most notable pictures was called "Rebellion." The catalogue told us that
it represented "the collision of two forces, that of the revolutionary
element made up of enthusiasm and red lyricism against the force of
inertia and the reactionary resistance of tradition." The picture showed
a crowd of scarlet figures rushing forward in a wedge. Before them went
successive wedge-shaped lines, impinging upon dull blue. They
represented, we were told, the vibratory waves of the revolutionary
element in motion. The force of inertia and the reactionary resistance
of tradition were pictured as rows on rows of commonplace streets. The
waves of the revolutionary element had knocked them all askew. Though
they still stood firmly side by side to all appearance (to keep up
appearances, as we say) they were all knocked aslant, "just as a boxer
is bent double by receiving a blow in the wind."

We may be sure that inertia in all its monotonous streets does not like
such treatment. It likes it no more than the plethoric cod likes the
catfish close behind its tail. And it is no consolation either to
inertia or cod to say that this disturbing element serves an ultimate
good, rendering it alert, firm, and wholesome of flesh. However
salutary, the catfish is far from popular among the placid residents of
the tank, and it is fortunate that neither in tanks nor streets can the
advisability of catfish or change be submitted to the referendum of the
inert. In neither case would the necessary steps for advance in health
and activity be adopted. To be sure, it is just possible to overdo the
number of catfish in one tank. At present in this country, for instance,
and, indeed, in the whole world, there seem to be more catfish than cod,
and the resulting liveliness is perhaps a little excessive, a little
"jumpy." But in the midst of all the violence, turmoil, and upheaval, it
is hopeful to remember that of the deepest and most salutary change
which Europe has known it was divinely foretold that it would bring not
peace but a sword.




II


REBELLION

For certain crimes mankind has ordained penalties of exceptional
severity, in order to emphasise a general abhorrence. In Rome, for
example, a parricide, or the murderer of any near relation, was thrown
into deep water, tied up in a sack together with a dog, a cock, a viper,
and a monkey, which were probably symbols of his wickedness, and must
have given him a lively time before death supervened. Similarly, the
English law, always so careful of domestic sanctitude in women, provided
that a wife who killed her husband should be dragged by a horse to the
place of execution and burnt alive. We need not recall the penalties
considered most suitable for the crime of religious difference--the
rack, the fire, the boiling oil, the tearing pincers, the embrace of the
spiky virgin, the sharpened edge of stone on which the doubter sat, with
increasing weights tied to his feet, until his opinions upon heavenly
mysteries should improve under the stress of pain. When we come to
rebellion, the ordinance of English law was more express. In the case of
a woman, the penalty was the same as for killing her husband--that crime
being defined as "petty treason," since the husband is to her the sacred
emblem of God and King. So a woman rebel was burnt alive as she stood,
head, quarters, and all. But male rebels were specially treated, as may
be seen from the sentence passed upon them until the reign of George
III.[1] These were the words that Judge Jeffreys and Scroggs, for
instance, used to roll out with enjoyable eloquence upon the dazed
agricultural labourer before them:

  "The sentence of the Court now is that you be conveyed
  from hence to the place from where you came, and from there
  be drawn to the place of execution upon hurdles; that you be
  hanged by the neck; that you be cut down alive; that your
  bowels be taken out and burnt in your view; that your head
  be severed from your body; that your body be divided into
  four quarters, and your quarters be at the disposition of the
  King: and may the God of infinite mercy be merciful to your
  soul. Amen."

"Why all this cookery?" once asked a Scottish rebel, quoted by Swift.
But the sentence, with its confiding appeal to a higher Court than
England's, was literally carried out upon rebels in this country for at
least four and a half centuries. Every detail of it (and one still more
disgusting) is recorded in the execution of Sir William Wallace, the
national hero of Scotland, more generally known to the English of the
time as "the man of Belial," who was executed at Tyburn in 1305.[2] The
rebels of 1745 were, apparently, the last upon whom the full ritual was
performed, and Elizabeth Gaunt, burnt alive at Tyburn in 1685 for
sheltering a conspirator in the Rye House Plot, was the last woman up to
now intentionally put to death in this country for a purely political
offence. The long continuance of so savage a sentence is proof of the
abhorrence in which the crime of rebellion has been held. And in many
minds the abhorrence still subsists. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, for
instance, one of our greatest authorities on criminal law, wrote in
1880:

  "My opinion is that we have gone too far in laying capital
  punishment aside, and that it ought to be inflicted in many
  cases not at present capital. I think, for instance, that political
  offences should in some cases be punished with death. People
  should be made to understand that to attack the existing state
  of society is equivalent to risking their own lives."[3]

Among ourselves the opinion of this high authority has slowly declined.
No one supposed that Doctor Lynch, for instance, would be executed as a
rebel for commanding the Irish Brigade that fought for the Boers during
the South African War, though he was condemned to death by the highest
Court in the kingdom. No Irish rebel has been executed for about a
century, unless his offence involved some one's death. On the other
hand, during the Boer War, the devastation of the country and the
destruction of the farms were frequently defended on the ground that,
after the Queen's proclamations annexing the two Republics, all the
inhabitants were rebels; and some of the extreme newspapers even urged
that for that reason no Boer with arms in his hand should be given
quarter. On the strength of a passage in Scripture, Mr. Kipling, at the
time, wrote a pamphlet identifying rebellion with witchcraft. A few Cape
Boers who took up arms for the assistance of their race were shot
without benefit of prisoners of war. And in India during 1907 and 1908
men of unblemished private character were spirited away to jail without
charge or trial and kept there for months--a fate that could not have
befallen any but political prisoners.

Outside our own Empire, I have myself witnessed the suppression of
rebellions in Crete and Macedonia by the destruction of villages, the
massacre of men, women, and children, and the violation of women and
girls, many of whom disappeared into Turkish harems. And I have
witnessed similar suppressions of rebellion by Russia in Moscow, in the
Baltic Provinces, and the Caucasus, by the burning of villages, the
slaughter of prisoners, and the violation of women. All this has
happened within the last sixteen years, the worst part within nine and a
half. Indeed, in Russia the punishments of exile, torture, and hanging
have not ceased since 1905, though the death penalty has been long
abolished there except for political offences. In the summer of 1909 I
was also present during the suppression of the outbreak in Barcelona,
which culminated in the execution of Señor Ferrer under a military
Court.

From these recent events it is evident that Sir James Stephen's
attitude towards rebellion is shared by many civilised governments.
Belligerents--that is to say, subjects of one State engaged in war with
another State--have now nominally secured certain rights under
International Law. The first Hague Conference (1899) framed a
"Convention with respect to the Laws and Customs of Wars on Land" which
forbade the torture or cruel treatment of prisoners, the refusal of
quarter, the destruction of private property, unless such destruction
were imperatively demanded by the necessities of war, the pillage of
towns taken by assault, disrespect to religion and family honour
(including, I suppose, the honour of women and girls), and the
infliction of penalties on the population owing to the acts of
individuals for which it could not be regarded as collectively
responsible.

In actual war this Convention is not invariably observed, as was seen at
Tripoli in 1911, but in the case of rebellion there is no such
Convention at all. I have known all those regulations broken with
impunity, and in most cases without protest from the other Powers. Just
as, under the old law of England, the rebel was executed with
circumstances of special atrocity, so at the present time, under the
name of crushing rebellion, men are tortured and flogged, no quarter is
given, they are executed without trial, their private property is
pillaged, their towns and villages are destroyed, their women violated,
their children killed, penalties are imposed on districts owing to acts
for which the population is not collectively responsible--and nothing
said. That each Power is allowed to deal with its own subjects in its
own way is becoming an accepted rule of international amenity. It was
not the rule of Cromwell, nor of Canning, nor of Gladstone, but it has
now been consecrated by the Liberal Government which came into power in
1906.

In the summer of 1909, it is true, the rule was broken. Mulai Hafid,
Sultan of Morocco, was reported to be torturing his rebel prisoners
according to ancestral custom, and rumours came that he had followed a
French king's example in keeping the rebel leader, El Roghi, in a cage
like a tame eagle, or had thrown him to the lions to be torn in pieces
before the eyes of the royal concubines. Then the European Powers
combined to protest in the name of humanity. It was something gained.
But no great courage was required to rebuke the Sultan of Morocco, if
England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, and Spain combined to do it;
and his country was so desirable for its minerals, barley, and dates
that a little courage in dealing with him might even prove lucrative in
the end. When Russia treated her rebellious subjects with tortures and
executions more horrible than anything reported from Morocco, the case
was very different. Then alliances and understandings were confirmed,
substantial loans were arranged in France and England, Kings and
Emperors visited the Tsar, and the cannon of our fleet welcomed him to
our waters amid the applause of our newspapers and the congratulations
of a Liberal Government.

It is evident, then, that, in Sir James Stephen's words, subjects are in
most countries still made to understand that to attack the existing
state of society is equivalent to risking their own lives. Under our own
rule, no matter what statesmen like Gladstone and John Morley have in
past years urged in favour of the mitigation of penalties for political
offences, such offences are, as a matter of fact, punished with special
severity; unless, of course, the culprit is intimately connected with
great riches, like Dr. Jameson, who was imprisoned as a first-class
misdemeanant for the incalculable crime of making private war upon
another State; or unless the culprit is intimately connected with votes,
like Mr. Ginnell, the Irish cattle-driver, who was treated with similar
politeness. Otherwise, until quite lately, even in this country we
executed a political criminal with unusual pain. In India we recently
kept political suspects imprisoned without charge or trial. And in
England we have lately sentenced women to terms of imprisonment that
certainly would never have been imposed for their offences on any but
political offenders.

This exceptional severity springs from a primitive and natural
conception of the State--a conception most logically expressed by
Hobbes of Malmesbury under the similitude of a "mortal God" or
Leviathan, the almost omnipotent and unlimited source of authority.

  "The Covenant of the State," says Hobbes, "is made in such
  a manner as if every man should say to every man: 'I authorise
  and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to
  this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy
  right to him and authorise all his actions in like manner.' This
  done, the multitude so united is called a Commonwealth, in
  Latin Civitas. This is the generation of that great Leviathan,
  that mortal God, to whom we owe, under the immortal God,
  our peace and defence."

Hobbes considered the object of this Covenant to be peace and common
defence. "Without a State," he said, "the life of man is solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short." The preservation of the State was to him of
transcendent importance.

  "Loss of liberty," he wrote, "is really no inconvenience, for
  it is the only means by which we have any possibility of preserving
  ourselves. For if every man were allowed the liberty
  of following his own conscience, in such differences of consciences,
  they would not live together in peace an hour."

Under such a system, it follows that rebellion is the worst of crimes.
Hobbes calls it a war renewed--a renouncing of the Covenant. He was so
terrified of it that he dwelt upon the danger of reading Greek and Roman
history (probably having Plutarch and his praise of rebels most in
mind)--"which venom," he says, "I will not doubt to compare to the
biting of a mad dog." In all leaders of rebellion he found only three
conditions--to be discontented with their own lot, to be eloquent
speakers, and to be men of mean judgment and capacity _(De Corpore
Politico_, II.). And as to punishment:

  "On rebels," he said, "vengeance is lawfully extended, not
  only to the fathers, but also to the third and fourth generations
  not yet in being, and consequently innocent of the fact for
  which they are afflicted."

We may take Hobbes as the philosopher of the extreme idea of the State
and the consequent iniquity of rebellion. His is the ideal of the Hive,
in which the virgin workers devote their whole lives without complaint
to the service of the Queen and her State-supported grubs, while the
drones are mercilessly slaughtered as soon as one of them has fulfilled
his rapturous but suicidal functions for the future swarm. This ideal
found its highest human example in the Spartan State, which trained its
men to have no private existence at all, and even to visit their own
wives by stealth. But we find the ideal present in some degree among
Central Africans when they bury valuable slaves and women alive with
their chief; and among the Japanese when mothers kill themselves if
their sons are prevented from dying for their country; and among the
Germans when the drill-sergeant shouts his word of command.

In fact, all races and countries are disciples of Hobbes when they
address the Head of the State as "Your Majesty" or "Your Excellence,"
when they decorate him with fur and feathers, and put a gold hat on his
head and a gold walking-stick in his hand, and gird him with a sword
that he never uses, and play him the same tune wherever he goes, and
spread his platform with crimson though it is clean, and bow before him
though he is dishonourable, and call him gracious though he is
nasty-tempered, and august though he may be a fool. In the first
instance, we go through all this make-believe because the Leviathan of
the State is necessary for peace and self-defence, and without it our
life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But we further
endow the State with a personality we can almost see and handle, and we
regard it as something that is able not only to protect our peace but to
shed a reflected splendour on ourselves, giving us an importance not our
own--just as schoolboys glory in their school, or Churchmen in their
Church, or cricketers in their county, or fox-hunters in their pack of
hounds.

It is this conception that makes rebellion so rare and so dangerous. In
hives it seems never to occur. In rookeries, the rebels are pecked to
death and their homes torn in pieces. In human communities we have seen
how they are treated. Rebellion is the one crime for which there is no
forgiveness--the one crime for which hanging is too good.

Why is it, then, that all the world loves a rebel? Provided he is
distant enough in time and space, all the world loves a rebel. Who are
the figures in history round whom the people's imagination has woven the
fondest dreams? Are they not such rebels as Deborah and Judith[4] and
Joan of Arc; as Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the Gracchi and Brutus,
William Tell, William Wallace, Simon de Montfort, Rienzi, Wat Tyler,
Jack Cade, Shan O'Neill, William the Silent, John Hampden and Pym, the
Highlanders of the Forty-five, Robert Emmet and Wolf Tone and Parnell,
Bolivar, John Brown of Harper's Ferry, Kossuth, Mazzini and Garibaldi,
Danton, Victor Hugo, and the Russian revolutionists? These are haphazard
figures of various magnitude, but all have the quality of rebellion in
common, and all have been honoured with affectionate glory, romance, and
even a mythology of worship.

So, too, the most attractive periods in history have been times of
rebellion--the Reformation in Germany, the Revolt of the Netherlands
from Spain, the Civil Wars in England, the War of Independence in
America, the prolonged revolution in Russia. Within the last hundred
years alone, how numerous the rebellions have been, as a rule how
successful, and in every case how much applauded, except by the dominant
authority attacked! We need only recall the French revolutions of 1832,
1848, and 1870 to 1871, including the Commune; the Greek War of
Independence up to 1829; the Polish insurrections of 1830, 1863, and
1905; the liberation of the Danubian Principalities, 1858; of Bulgaria
and Thessaly, 1878; of Crete, 1898; the revolution in Hungary, 1848; the
restoration of Italy, 1849 to 1860; the revolution in Spain, 1868; the
independence of the South American States, 1821 to 1825; the revolution
in Russia, Finland, the Caucasus and Baltic Provinces, 1905; the
revolution in Persia, 1907 to 1909; and the revolution of the Young
Turks, 1908 to 1909. Among these we must also count the Nationalist
movements in Ireland, Egypt, and India, as well as the present movement
of women against the Government in our own country.

Under these various instances two distinct kinds of rebellion are
obviously included--the rising of subject nationalities against a
dominant power, as in Greece, Italy, the Caucasus, India, and Ireland;
and the rising of subjects against their own Government, as in France,
Russia, Persia, and Turkey, or in England in the case of the
Suffragettes. It is difficult to say which kind is the more detested and
punished with the greater severity by the central authority attacked.
Was the Nationalist rising in the Caucasus or the Baltic Provinces
suppressed with greater brutality than the almost simultaneous rising of
Russian subjects in Moscow? I witnessed all three, and I think it was;
chiefly because soldiers have less scruple in the slaughter and
violation of people whose language they do not understand. Did our
Government feel greater animosity towards the recent Indian movement or
the Irish movement of thirty years ago than towards the rioters for the
Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867? I think they did. Vengeance upon
external or Nationalist rebels is incited by racial antipathy. But, on
the other hand, the outside world is more ready to applaud a Nationalist
rebellion, especially if it succeeds, and we feel a more romantic
affection for William Tell or Garibaldi than for Oliver Cromwell or
Danton; I suppose because it is easier to imagine the splendour of
liberty when a subject race throws off a foreign yoke.

So the history of rebellion involves us in a mesh of contradictions.
Rebels have been generally regarded as deserving more terrible penalties
than other criminals, yet all the world loves a rebel, at a distance.
Nationalist rebellions are crushed with even greater ferocity than the
internal rebellions of a State, and yet the leaders of Nationalist
rebellions are regarded by the common world with a special affection of
hero-worship. Obviously, we are here confronted with two different
standards of conduct. On one side is the standard of Government, the
States and Law, which denounces the rebel, and especially the
Nationalist rebel, as the worst of sinners; on the other side we have
the standard of the individual, the soul and liberty, which loves a
rebel, especially a Nationalist rebel, and denies that he is a sinner at
all.

Let us leave the Nationalist rebel, whose justification is now almost
universally admitted (except by the dominant Power), even if he is
unsuccessful, and consider only the rebel inside the State--the rebel
against his own Leviathan--whose position is far more dubious. Job's
Leviathan appears to have been a more fearsome and powerful beast than
the elephant, but in India the elephant is taken as the symbol of
wisdom, and when an Indian boy goes in for a municipal examination, he
prays to the elephant-god for assistance. Now the ideal State of the
elephant is the herd, and yet this herd of wisdom sometimes develops a
rebel or "rogue" who seems to be striving after some fresh manner of
existence and works terrible havoc among the elephantine conventions.
Usually the herd combines to kill him and there is an end of the matter.
Yet I sometimes think that the occasional and inexplicable appearance of
the "rogue" at intervals during many thousand years may really have been
the origin of that wisdom to which the Indians pray.

Similarly, mankind, which sometimes surpasses even the elephant in
wisdom, has been continually torn between the idol of the Herd and the
profanity of the rebel or Rogue, and it is perhaps through the
rebel--the variation, as Darwin would call him--that man makes his
advance. The rebel is what distinguishes our States and cities from the
beehives and ant-heaps to which they are commonly compared. The progress
of ants and bees appears to have been arrested. They seem to have
developed a completely socialised polity thousands of years ago, perhaps
before man existed, and then to have stopped--stopped _dead_, as we say.
But mankind has never stopped. If a country's progress is arrested--if a
people becomes simply conservative in habits, they may die slowly, like
Egypt, or quickly, likes Sparta, but they die and disappear, unless
inspired by new life, like Japan, or by revolution, like France and
possibly Russia. For, as we are almost too frequently told, change is
the law of human life.

And may not this be just the very reason we are seeking for--the very
reason why all the world loves a rebel, at a distance? Perhaps the world
unconsciously recognises in him a symbol of change, a symbol of the law
of life. We may not like him very near us--not uncomfortably near, as we
say. For most change is uncomfortable. When I was shut up for many weeks
in a London hospital, I felt a shrinking horror of going out, as though
my skin had become too tender for this rough world. After I had been
shut up for four months in a siege, daily exposed to shells, bullets,
fever, and starvation, I felt no relief when the relief came, but rather
a dread of confronting the perils of ordinary life. So quickly does the
curse of stagnation fall upon us. And in support of stagnation are
always ranged the immense forces of Society, the prosperous, the
well-to-do, the people who are content if to-morrow is exactly like
to-day. In support of stagnation stands the power of every kind of
government--the King who sticks to his inherited importance, the Lords
who stick to their lands and titles, the experts who stick to their
theories, the officials who stick to their incomes, routine, and
leisure, the Members of Parliament who stick to their seats.

But even more powerful than all these forces in support of stagnation is
the enormous host of those whose first thought is necessarily their
daily bread--men and women who dare not risk a change for fear of
to-morrow's hunger--people for whom the crust is too uncertain for its
certainty to be questioned. We often ask why it is that the poor--the
working-people--endure their poverty and perpetual toil without
overwhelming revolt. The reason is that they have their eyes fixed on
the evening meal, and for the life of them they dare not lose sight of
it.

So the rebel need never be afraid of going too fast. The violence of
inertia--the suction of the stagnant bog--is almost invincible. Like
the horse, we are creatures of cast-iron habit. We abandon ourselves
easily to careless acquiescence. We make much of external laws, and,
like a mother bemused with torpid beer when she overlays her child, we
stifle the law of the soul because its crying is such a nuisance. Like a
new baby, a new thought is fractious, restless, and incalculable. It
saps our strength; it gives us no peace; it exposes a wider surface to
pain. There is something indecent, uncontrolled, and unconscionable
about it. Our friends like it best when it is asleep, and they like us
better when it is buried.

There is very little danger of rebellion going too far. The barriers
confronting it are too solid, and the Idol of the Herd is too carefully
enshrined. A perpetual rebellion of every one against everything would
give us an insecure, though exciting, existence, and we are protected by
man's disposition to obedience and his solid love of custom. Against the
first vedettes of rebellion the army of routine will always muster, and
it gathers to itself the indifferent, the startled cowards, the thinkers
whose thought is finished, the lawyers whose laws are fixed--an
innumerable host. They proceed to treat the rebels as we have seen. In
all ages, rebellion has been met by the standing armies of permanence.
If captured, it is put to the ordeal of fire and water, so as to try
what stuff it is made of. Faith is rebellion's only inspiration and
support, and a deal of faith is needed to resist the battle and the
test. It was in thinking of the faith of rebels that an early Christian
writer told of those who, having walked by faith, have in all ages been
tortured, not accepting deliverance; and others have had trial of
mockings and scourgings, and of bonds and imprisonment; they were
stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword;
they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute,
afflicted, tormented (of whom the world was not worthy); they wandered
in deserts and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.[5] That
is the test and the reward of faith. So strong is the grip of the
Leviathan, so determined is mankind to allow no change in thought or
life to survive if he can possibly choke it.

One of the most learned and inspiring of writers on political philosophy
has said in a book published in 1910:

  "It is advantageous to the organism [of the Slate] that
  the rights of suggestion, protest, veto, and revolt should be
  accorded to its members."[6]

That sounds very simple. We should all like to agree with it. But under
that apparently innocent sentence one of the most perplexing of human
problems lies hidden: what are the rights of liberty, what are the
limits of revolt? Only in a State of ideal anarchy can liberty be
complete and revolt universal, because there would be nothing to revolt
against. And anarchy, though it is the goal of every man's desire, seems
still far away, being, indeed, the Kingdom of Heaven, which that God
rules whose service is perfect freedom and which only angels are
qualified to inhabit. For though the law of the indwelling spirit is the
only law that ought to count, not many of us are so little lower than
the angels as to be a law unto ourselves.

In a really democratic State, where the whole people had equal voices
in the government and all could exercise free power of persuasion,
active rebellion, I think, would be very rare and seldom justified. But
there are, I believe, only four democratic States in the world. All four
are small, and of these Finland is overshadowed by despotism, and
Australia and New Zealand have their foreign relations controlled and
protected by the mother country. Hitherto the experiment of a really
democratic government has never been tried on this planet, except since
1909 in Norway, and even there with some limitations; and though
democracy might possibly avert the necessity of rebellion, I rather
doubt whether it can be called advantageous to any State to accord to
its members the right of revolt. The State that allows revolt--that
takes no notice of it--has abdicated; it has ceased to exist. But
whether advantageous or not, no State has ever accorded that right in
matters of government; nor does mankind accord it, without a prolonged
struggle, even in religious doctrine and ordinary life. Every revolt is
tested as by fire, and we do not otherwise know the temper of the rebels
or the value of their purpose. Is it a trick? Is it a fad? Is it a plot
for contemptible ends? Is it a riot--a moment's effervescence--or a
revolution glowing from volcanic depths? We only know by the tests of
ridicule, suffering, and death. In his "Ode to France," written in 1797,
Coleridge exclaimed:

  "The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain,
  Slaves by their own compulsion."

They rebel in vain because the Sensual and the Dark cannot hold out long
against the pressure of the Herd--against the taunts of Society, against
poverty, the loss of friends, the ruin of careers, the discomforts of
prison, the misery of hunger and ill-treatment, and the terror of death.
It is only by the supreme triumph over such obstacles that revolt
vindicates its righteousness.

And so, if any one among us is driven to rebellion by an irresistible
necessity of soul, I would not have him wonder at the treatment he will
certainly receive. Such treatment is the hideous but inevitable test of
his rebellion's value, for so persecuted they the rebels that were
before him. Whether he rebels against a despotism like the Naples of
fifty years ago or the Russia of to-day; or whether he rebels against
the opinions or customs of his fellow-citizens, he will inevitably
suffer, and the success that justifies rebellion may not be of this
world. But if his cause is high, the shame of his suffering will
ultimately be attributed to the government or to the majority, never to
himself. There is a sense in which rebellion never fails. It is almost
always a symptom of intolerable wrong, for the penalties are so terrible
that it would not be attempted without terrible provocation.
"Rebellion," as Burke said, "does not arise from a desire for change,
but from the impossibility of suffering more." It concentrates attention
upon the wrong. At the worst, though it be stamped into a grave, its
spirit goes marching on, and the inspiration of all history would be
lost were it not for rebellions, no matter whether they have succeeded
or failed.

It may be said that if the State cannot accord the right of revolt, the
door is left open to all the violences, cruelty, and injustice with
which Rebellion is at present suppressed. But that does not follow. The
Liberal leaders of the last generation endeavoured to draw a
distinction whereby political offenders should be treated better than
ordinary criminals rather than worse, and, though their successors went
back from that position, we may perhaps discern a certain uneasiness
behind their appearance of cruelty, at all events in the case of titled
and distinguished offenders. In war we have lately introduced definite
rules for the exclusion of cruelty and injustice, and in some cases the
rules are observed. The same thing could be done in rebellion. I have
often urged that the rights of war, now guaranteed to belligerents,
should be extended to rebels. The chances are that a rebellion or civil
war has more justice on its side than international war, and there is no
more reason why men should be tortured and refused quarter, or why women
should be violated and have their children killed before their eyes by
the agents of their own government than by strangers. Yet these things
are habitually done, and my simple proposal appears ludicrously
impossible. Just in the same way, sixty years ago, it was thought
ludicrously impossible to deprive a man of his right to whip his slave.

But in any case, whether or not the rebel is to remain for all time an
object of special vengeance to the State and Society, he has
compensations. If he wins, the more barbarous his suppression has been,
so much the finer is his triumph, so much the sweeter the wild justice
of his revenge. It is a high reward when the slow world comes swinging
round to your despised and persecuted cause, while the defeated
persecutor whines at your feet that at heart he was with you all the
time. If the rebel fails--well, it is a terrible thing to fail in
rebellion. Bodily or social execution is almost inevitably the result.
But, if his cause has been high, whether he wins or loses, he will have
enjoyed a comradeship such as is nowhere else to be found--a
comradeship in a common service that transfigures daily life and takes
suffering and disgrace for honour. His spirit will have been illumined
by a hope and an indignation that make the usual aims and satisfactions
of the world appear trivial and fond. To him it has been granted to hand
on the torch of that impassioned movement and change by which the soul
of man appears slowly to be working out its transfiguration. And if he
dies in the race, he may still hope that some glimmer of freedom will
shine where he is buried.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: The following extract from _Drakard's Paper_ for Feb. 23,
1813, shows the attempt at reform just a century ago, and the opposition
to reform characteristic of officials: "House of Commons, Wed., Feb. 17.
Sir Samuel Romilly rose, in pursuance of his notice, to move for leave
to bring in a bill to repeal an Act of King William, making it capital
to steal property above the value of 5s. in a dwelling house, &c.....

"The next bill he proposed to introduce related to a part of the
punishment for the crime of high treason, which was not at present
carried into execution. The sentence for this crime, however, was, that
the criminal should be dragged upon a hurdle to the place of execution,
that he should be hanged by the neck, but cut down before he was dead,
that his bowels should then be taken out and burnt before his face. As
to that part of the sentence which relates to embowelling, it was never
executed now, but this omission was owing to accident, or to the mercy
of the executioner, not to the discretion of the judge.

"The Solicitor-General stated general objections to the plan of his
learned friend.

"Leave was given to bring in the bills."]

[Footnote 2: See _The History of Tyburn_, by Alfred Marks.]

[Footnote 3: _History of the Criminal Law of England_, vol. i. p. 478.]

[Footnote 4: Judith was not strictly a rebel, except that Nabuchodonosor
claimed sovereignty over all the world and was avenging himself on all
the earth. See Judith ii. 1.]

[Footnote 5: Hebrews xi. 35-38.]

[Footnote 6: _The Crisis of Liberalism_, by J.A. Hobson, p. 82.]




III


"EITHER COWARDS OR UNHAPPY"

Present grandeur is always hard to realise. The past and the distant are
easily perceived. Like a far-off mountain, their glory is conspicuous,
and the iridescent vapours of romance quickly gather round it. The main
outline of a distant peak is clear, for rival heights are plainly
surpassed, and sordid details, being invisible, cannot detract from it
or confuse. The comfortable spectator may contemplate it in peace. It
does not exact from him quick decisions or disquieting activity. The
storms that sweep over it contribute to his admiration without wetting
his feet, and his high estimate of its beauty and greatness may be
enjoyed without apprehension of an avalanche. So the historian is like a
picturesque spectator cultivating his sense of the sublime upon a
distant prospect of the Himalayas. It is easy for him to admire, and the
appreciation of a far-off heroic movement gives him quite a pleasant
time. At his leisure he may descant with enthusiasm upon the forlorn
courage of sacrificed patriots, and hymn, amidst general applause, the
battles of freedom long since lost or won.

But in the thick of present life it is different. The air is obscured by
murky doubt, and unaccustomed shapes stand along the path,
indistinguishable under the light malign. Uncertain hope scarcely
glimmers, nor can the termination of the struggle be divined.
Tranquillity, giving time for thought, and the security that leaves the
judgment clear, have both gone, and may never return. The ears are
haunted with the laughter of vulgarity, and the judicious discouragement
of prudence. Is there not as much to be said for taking one line as
another? If there is talk of conflict, were it not better to leave the
issue in the discriminating hands of One whose judgment is indisputable?
Yet in the very midst of hesitations, mockery, and good advice, the next
step must be taken, the decision must be swift, the choice is brief but
eternal. There is no clear evidence of heroism around. The lighters do
not differ much from the grotesque, the foolish, and the braggart ruck
of men. No wonder that culture smiles and passes aloof upon its pellucid
and elevating course. Culture smiles; the valet de chambre lurking in
most hearts sniffs at the name of hero; hideous applause comes from
securely sheltered crowds who hound victims to the combat, bloodthirsty
as spectators at a bull-fight. In the sweat and twilight and crudity of
the actual event, when so much is merely ludicrous and discomforting,
and all is enveloped in the element of fear, it is rare to perceive a
glory shining, or to distinguish greatness amid the mud of contumely and
commonplace.

Take the story of Italy's revival--the "Resurrection," as Italians call
it. In the summer of 1911, Italy was celebrating her jubilee of national
rebellion, and English writers who spend their years, day by day or week
by week, sneering at freedom, betraying nationality, and demanding
vengeance on rebels, burst into ecstatic rhapsodies about that glorious
but distant uprising. They raised the old war-cry of liberty over
battle-fields long silent; they extolled to heaven the renown of the
rebellious dead; their very periods glowed with Garibaldian red, white,
and green; and rising to Byronic exaltation they concluded their
nationalist effusions by adjuring freedom's weather-beaten flag:

  "Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying,
  Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind!"

So they cried, echoing the voice of noble ghosts. But where in the
scenes of present life around them have they hailed that torn but flying
banner? What have they said or done for freedom's emblem in Persia, or
in Morocco, or in Turkey? What support have they given it in Finland, or
in the Caucasus, or in the Baltic Provinces? To come within our own
sphere, what ecstatic rhapsodies have they composed to greet the rising
nationalism of Ireland, or of India, or of Egypt? Or, in this country
herself, what movement of men or of women striving to be free have they
welcomed with their paeans of joy? Not once have they perceived a glory
in liberty's cause to-day. Wherever a rag of that torn banner fluttered,
they have denounced and stamped it down, declaring it should fly no
more. Their admiration and enthusiasm are reserved for a buried past,
and over triumphant rebellion they will sentimentalise for pages,
provided it is securely bestowed in some historic age that can trouble
them no more.

Leaving them to their peace, let us approach a great name among our
English singers of liberty. Swinburne stands in the foremost rank. In a
collection of "English Songs of Italian Freedom," edited by Mr. George
Trevelyan, who himself has so finely narrated the epic of Italy's
redemption--in that collection Swinburne occupies a place among the very
highest. No one has paid nobler tribute to the heroes of that amazing
revolution. No one has told the sorrow of their failures with more
sympathetic rage, or has poured so burning a scorn and so deep an
obloquy upon their oppressors, whether in treacherous Church or alien
State. It is magnificent, but alas! it was not war. By the time he
wrote, the war was over, the victory won. By that time, not only the
British crowd, but even people of rank, office, and culture could hardly
fail to applaud. The thing had become definite and conspicuous. It was
finished. It stood in quite visible splendour at a safe and comfortable
distance. Ridicule had fallen impotent. Hesitation could now put down
its foot. Superiority could smile, not in doubt, but in welcome. The
element of fear was dissipated. The coward could shout, "I was your
friend all along!" If a man wrote odes at all, he could write them to
freedom then.

  "By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,
      Remembering Thee,
  That for ages of agony hast endured and slept,
      And would'st not see."

How superb! But when that was written the weeping and agony were over,
the sleeper had awakened, the eyes saw. It was easy then to sing the
heroism of rebellious sorrow. But afterwards, while an issue was still
doubtful, while the cry of freedom was rising amid the obscurity, the
dust, and uncertainty of actual combat, with how blind a scorn did that
great poet of freedom pour upon Irishman and Boer a poison as virulent
as he had once poured upon the priests and kings of Italy!

Let us emerge from the depression of such common blindness, and recall
the memory of one whose vision never failed even in the midst of present
gloom to detect the spark of freedom. A few great names stand beside
his. Shelley, Landor, the Brownings, all gave the cause of Italy great
and, in one case, the most exquisite verse, while the conflict was
uncertain still. Even the distracted and hesitating soul of Clough, amid
the dilettante contemplation of the arts in Rome, was rightly stirred.
The poem that declared, "'Tis better to have fought and lost than never
to have fought at all," displayed in him a rare decision, while, even
among his hideous hexameters, we find the great satiric line--fit motto
for spectators at the bull-fights of freedom--"So that I 'list not,
hurrah for the glorious army of martyrs!" But the name of Byron rises
above them all, not merely that he alone showed himself capable of deed,
but that the deed gave to his words a solidity and concrete power such
as deeds always give. First of Englishmen, as Mr. Trevelyan says, Byron
perceived that a living Italy was struggling beneath the outward
semblance of Metternich's "order"; and as early as 1821 he prepared to
join the Carbonari of Naples in their revolt for Italian liberty:

  "I suppose that they consider me," he wrote, "as a depot
  to be sacrificed, in case of accidents. It is no great matter,
  supposing that Italy would he liberated, who or what is sacrificed.
  It is a grand object--the very _poetry_ of politics. Only
  think--a free Italy!"

That was written in freedom's darkest age, between Waterloo and the
appearance of Mazzini, and that grand object was not to be reached for
forty years. In the meantime, true to his guiding principle:

  "Then battle for freedom whenever you can,
  And, if not shot or hang'd, you'll get knighted,"

Byron had sacrificed himself for Greece as nobly as he was prepared to
sacrifice himself for Italy. It was a time of darkness hardly visible.
In the very year when Byron witnessed the collapse of the Carbonari
rebellion, Leopardi, as Mr. Trevelyan tells us, wrote to his sister on
her marriage: "The children you will have must be either cowards or
unhappy; choose the unhappy." The hope of freedom appeared extinct.
Tyrants, as Byron wrote, could be conquered but by tyrants, and freedom
found no champion. The Italians themselves were merged in the slime of
despairing satisfaction, and he watched them creeping, "crouching, and
crab-like," along their streets. But through that dark gate of
unhappiness which Leopardi named as the one choice for all but cowards,
led the thin path that freedom must always take. Great as were Mazzini's
services to all Europe, his greatest service to his countrymen lay in
arousing them from the slough of contentment to a life of hardship,
sacrifice, and unhappiness. When, after the loss of Rome in 1849,
Garibaldi called for volunteers to accompany his hazardous retreat, he
said to them: "I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions; I
offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, and death." Swinburne
himself may have had those words in mind when, writing also of
Garibaldi, he said of freedom:

  "She, without shelter or station,
    She, beyond limit or bar,
  Urges to slumberless speed
  Armies that famish, that bleed,
  Sowing their lives for her seed,
  That their dust may rebuild her a nation,
    That their souls may relight her a star."

"Happy are all they that follow her," he continued, and in a sense we
may well deem their fate happiness. But it is in the sense of what
Carlyle in a memorable passage called the allurements to action. "It is
a calumny on men," he wrote, "to say they are roused to heroic action by
ease, hope of pleasure, reward in this world or the next. Difficulty,
abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart
of man." Under the spell and with the reward of those grim allurements
the battles of freedom, so visible in the resurrection of Italy, so
unrecognised in freedom's recurrent and contemporary conflicts, must
invariably be fought. We may justly talk, if we please, of the joy in
such conflicts, but Thermopylae was a charnel, though, as Byron said, it
was a proud one; and it is always against the wind that the banner of
freedom streams.




IV


DEEDS NOT WORDS

As he wrote--as he wrote his best, while the shafts of the spirit
lightened in his brain--Heine would sometimes feel a mysterious figure
standing behind him, muffled in a cloak, and holding, beneath the cloak,
something that gleamed now and then like an executioner's axe. For a
long while he had not perceived that strange figure, when, on visiting
Germany, after fourteen years' exile in Paris, as he crossed the
Cathedral Square in Cologne one moonlight night, he became aware that it
was following him again. Turning impatiently, he asked who he was, why
he followed him, and what he was hiding under his cloak. In reply, the
figure, with ironic coolness, urged him not to get excited, nor to give
way to eloquent exorcism:

  "I am no antiquated ghost," he continued. "I'm quite a
  practical person, always silent and calm. But I must tell you,
  the thoughts conceived in your soul--I carry them out, I bring
  them to pass.

  "And though years may go by, I take no rest until I transform
  your thoughts into reality. You think; I act.

  "You are the judge, I am the gaoler, and, like an obedient
  servant, I fulfil the sentence which you have ordained, even if
  it is unjust.

  "In Rome of ancient days they carried an axe before the
  Consul. You also have your Lictor, but the axe is carried
  behind you.

  "I am your Lictor, and I walk perpetually with bare executioner's
  axe behind you--I am the deed of your thought."

No artist--no poet or writer, at all events--could enjoy a more
consolatory vision. The powerlessness of the word is the burden of
writers, and "Who hath believed our report?" cry all the prophets in
successive lamentation. They so naturally suppose that, when truth and
reason have spoken, truth and reason will prevail, but, as the years go
by, they mournfully discover that nothing of the kind occurs. Man, they
discover, does not live by truth and reason: he rather resents the
intrusion of such quietly argumentative forms. When they have spoken,
nothing whatever is yet accomplished, and the conflict has still to
begin. The dog returns to his own vomit; the soul convicted of sin
continues sinning, and he that was filthy is filthy still. Thence comes
the despair of all the great masters of the word. The immovable world
admires them, it praises their style, it forms aesthetic circles for
their perusal, and dines in their honour when they are dead. But it goes
on its way immovable, grinding the poor, enslaving the slave, admiring
hideousness, adulating vulgarity for its wealth and insignificance for
its pedigree. Grasping, pleasure-seeking, indifferent to reason, and
enamoured of the lie, so it goes on, and the masters of the word might
just as well have hushed their sweet or thunderous voices. For, though
they speak with the tongue of men and angels, and have not action, what
are they but sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal?

To such a mood, how consolatory must be the vision of that muffled
figure, with the two-handed engine, always following close! And to
Heine himself the consolation came with especial grace. He had been
virulently assailed by the leaders of the party to which he regarded
himself as naturally belonging--the party for whose sake he endured the
charming exile of Paris, then at the very height of her intellectual
supremacy. The exile was charming, but unbearable dreams and memories
would come. "When I am happy in your arms," he wrote, "you must never
speak to me of Germany, I cannot bear it; I have my reasons. I implore
you, leave Germany alone. You must not plague me with these eternal
questions about home, and friends, and the way of life. I have my
reasons; I cannot bear it." All this was suffered--for a quarter of a
century it was suffered--just for an imaginary and unrealised German
revolution. And, if Heine was not to be counted as a German
revolutionist, what was the good of it all? What did the sorrows of
exile profit him, if he had no part in the cause? He might just as well
have gone on eating, drinking, and being merry on German beer. Yet
Ludwig Börne, acknowledged leader of German revolutionists, had
scornfully written of him (I translate from Heine's own quotation, in
his pamphlet on Börne):

  "I can make allowance for child's-play, and for the passions
  of youth. But when, on the day of bloody conflict, a boy who
  is chasing butterflies on the battle-field runs between my legs;
  or when, on the day of our deepest need, while we are praying
  earnestly to God, a young dandy at our side can see nothing
  in the church but the pretty girls, and keeps whispering to
  them and making eyes--then, I say, in spite of all philosophy
  and humanity, one cannot restrain one's indignation."

Much more followed, but in those words lay the sting of the scorn. It
is a scorn that many poets and writers suffer when confronted by the man
of action, or even by the man of affairs. When it comes to action, all
the finest words ever spoken, and all the most beautiful poems and books
ever written, seem so irrelevant, as Hilda Wangel said of reading. "How
beggarly all arguments appear before a defiant deed!" cried Walt
Whitman. "Every man," said Ruskin, "feels instinctively that all the
beautiful sentiments in the world count less than a single lovely
action." The powerlessness of the word--that, as I said, has been the
burden of speakers and writers. That is what drove Dante to politics,
and Byron to Greece, and Goethe to the study of bones.

But Heine laid himself open more than most to such scorn as Börne's.
There was little of the active revolutionist in his nature. About the
revolutionist hangs something Hebraic (if we may still use Heine's own
distinction, never very definite, and now worn so thin), but Heine
prided himself upon a sunlit cheerfulness that he called Greek. He loved
the garish world; he was in love with every woman; but the true
revolutionist must be the modern monk. It is no good asking the
revolutionist out to dinner; he will neither say anything amusing, nor
know the difference between chalk and cheese. But Heine's good sayings
went the round of Parisian society, and he loved the subtleties of wine
and the table. "That dish," he said once, "should be eaten on one's
knees." Only on paper, and then rarely, was his heart lacerated by
savage indignation. Except for brief periods of poverty, in the Zion of
exile he lived very much at ease, nor did the zeal of the Lord ever
consume him. Did it not seem that a true revolutionist was justified in
comparing him to a boy chasing butterflies on the battle-field? Here, if
anywhere, one might have thought, was one of those charming poets whom
the Philosopher would have honoured, and feasted, and loaded with
beautiful gifts, and then conducted, laurel-crowned, far outside the
walls of the perfect city, to the sound of flutes and soft recorders.

To such scorn Heine attempted the artist's common answer. He replied to
Börne's revolutionary scorn of the mere poet, with a poet's fastidious
scorn of the smudgy revolutionist. He tells us of his visit to Börne's
rooms, where he found such a menagerie as could hardly be seen in the
Jardin des Plantes--German polar bears, a Polish wolf, a French ape. Or
we read of the one revolutionary assembly he attended, and how up till
then he had always longed to be a popular orator, and had even practised
on oxen and sheep in the fields; but that one meeting, with its dirt,
and smells, and stifling tobacco smoke, sickened him of oratory. "I
saw," he writes,

  "I saw that the path of a German tribune is not strewn
  with roses--not with clean roses. For example, you have to
  shake hands vigorously with all your auditors, your 'dear
  brothers and cousins.' Perhaps Börne means it metaphorically
  when he says that, if a king shook him by the band, he would
  at once hold it in the fire, so as to clean it; but I mean it
  literally, and not metaphorically, when I say that, if the people
  shook me by the hand, I should at once wash it."

We all know those meetings now--the fraternal handshake, the menagerie
smell, the reek of tobacco, the indistinguishable hubbub of tongues, the
frothy violence, the bottomless inanity of abstract dissensions, that
have less concern with human realities than the curve of the hyperbola
through space. We all know that, and sometimes, perhaps, at the sight of
some artist or poet like Heine--or, shall we say? like William
Morris--in the sulphurous crater of that volcanic tumult, we may have
been tempted to exclaim, "Not here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee!"
But we had best restrain such exclamation, for we have had quite enough
of the artistic or philanthropic temperaments that talk a deal about
fighting the battle of the poor and the oppressed, but take very good
care to keep at a clean and comfortable distance from those whose battle
they are fighting, and appear more than content to live among the
tyrants and oppressors they denounce. And we remind ourselves, further,
that what keeps the memory of William Morris sweet is not his
wall-papers, his beaten work of bronze or silver, his dreamy tapestries
of interwoven silks or verse, but just that strange attempt of his,
however vain, however often deceived, to convert the phrases of liberty
into realities, and to learn something more about democracy than the
spelling of its name.

Heine's first line of defence was quite worthless. It was the cheap and
common defence of the commonplace, fastidious nature that has hardly
courage to exist outside its nest of culture. His second line was
stronger, and it is most fully set out in the preface to his _Lutetia_,
written only a year before his death. He there expresses the artist's
fear of beauty's desecration by the crowd. He dreads the horny hand laid
upon the statues he had loved. He sees the laurel groves, the lilies,
the roses--"those idle brides of nightingales"--destroyed to make room
for useful potato-patches. He sees his _Book of Songs_ taken by the
grocer to wrap up coffee and snuff for old women, in a world where the
victorious proletariat triumphs. But that line of defence he voluntarily
abandons, knowing in his heart, as he said, that the present social
order could not endure, and that all beauty it preserved was not to be
counted against its horror.

It is at the end of the same preface that the well-known passage occurs,
thus translated by Matthew Arnold:

  "I know not if I deserve that a laurel-wreath should one
  day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it,
  has always been to me but a divine plaything. I have never
  attached any great value to poetical fame; and I trouble myself
  very little whether people praise my verses or blame them.
  But lay on my coffin a _sword_; for I was a brave soldier in the
  war of liberation of humanity."

The words appear strangely paradoxical. No one questions Heine's place
among the poets of the world. As a matter of fact, he was quite as
sensitive to criticism as other poets, and his courage was not more
conspicuous than most people's. But, nevertheless, those words contain
his last and true defence against the scorn of revolutionists, or men of
affairs, like Börne. There is no need to make light of Börne's
achievement; that also has its high place in the war of liberation. But,
powerless as the word may seem, there was in Heine's word a liberating
force that is felt in our battle to this day. He did not wield the axe
himself, but behind him has moved a mysterious figure, muffled in a
cloak--a Lictor following his footsteps with an axe--the deed of Heine's
thought.




V


THE BURNING BOOK

"How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!" cried Walt
Whitman, as I quoted in the last essay. He was thinking, perhaps, of
Harper's Ferry and of John Brown hanging on the crab-apple tree, while
his soul went marching on. It is the lament of all writers and speakers
who are driven by inward compulsion to be something more than artists in
words, and who seek to jog the slow-pacing world more hurriedly forward.
How long had preachers, essayists, orators, and journalists argued
slavery round and round before the defiant deed crashed and settled it!
"Who hath believed our report?" the prophets have always cried, until
the arm of the Lord was revealed; and the melancholy of all prophetic
writers is mainly due to the conscious helplessness of their words. If
men would only listen to reason--if they would listen even to the
appeals of justice and compassion, we suppose our prophets would grow
quite cheerful at last. But to justice and compassion men listen only at
a distance, and the prophet is near.

Nevertheless, in his address as Chancellor of Manchester University in
June 1912, Lord Morley, who has himself often sounded the prophetic
note, asserted that "a score of books in political literature rank as
acts, not books." He happened to be speaking on the anniversary of
Rousseau's birth, two hundred years ago, and in no list of such books
could Rousseau's name be forgotten. "Whether a score or a hundred," Lord
Morley went on, "the _Social Contract_ was one," and, as though to rouse
his audience with a spark, he quoted once more the celebrated opening
sentence, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." That
sentence is not true either in history or in present life. It would be
truer to say that man has everywhere been born in chains and, very
slowly, in some few parts of the world, he is becoming free. The
sentence is neither scientific as historic theory nor true to present
life, and yet Lord Morley rightly called it electrifying. And the same
is true of the book which it so gloriously opens. As history and as
philosophy, it is neither original nor exact. It derived directly from
Locke, and many aspects of the world and thought since Darwin's time
confute it. But, however much anticipated, and however much exposed to
scientific ridicule, it remains one of the burning books of the
world--one of those books which, as Lord Morley said, rank as acts, not
books.

"Let us realise," he continued, "with what effulgence such a book burst
upon communities oppressed by wrong, sunk in care, inflamed by passions
of religion or of liberty, the two eternal fields of mortal struggle."
So potent an influence depends much upon the opportunity of time--the
fulfilment of the hour's need. A book so abstract, so assertive of
theory, and standing so far apart from the world's actual course, would
hardly find an audience now. But in the eighteenth century, so gaily
confident in the power of reason, so trustful of good intentions, so
ready to acclaim noble phrase and generality, and so ignorant of the
past and of the poor--in the midst of such a century the _Social
Contract_ was born at the due time. Add the vivid imagination and the
genuine love for his fellow-men, to which Lord Morley told us Maine
attributed Rousseau's ineffaceable influence on history, and we are
shown some of the qualities and reasons that now and again make words
burn with that effulgence, and give even to a book the power of a deed.

Lord Morley thought there might be a score, or perhaps even a hundred,
of such books in political literature. He himself gave two other
instances beside the _Social Contract_. He mentioned _The Institutions of
the Christian Religion_, of Calvin, "whose own unconquerable will and
power to meet occasion made him one of the commanding forces in the
world's history." And he mentioned Tom Paine's _Common Sense_ as "the
most influential political piece ever composed." I could not, offhand,
give a list of seventeen other books of similar power to make up the
score. I do not believe so many exist, and as to ninety-seven, the idea
need not be considered. There have been books of wide and lasting
political influence--Plato's _Republic_, Aristotle's _Politics_,
Machiavelli's _Prince_, Hobbes's _Leviathan_, Locke's _Civil
Government_, Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, Paine's _Right of Man_,
Mill's _Liberty_ and _The Subjection of Women_, Green's _Political
Obligation_, and many more. But these are not burning books in the sense
in which the _Social Contract_ was a burning book. With the possible
exception of _The Subjection of Women_, they were cool and philosophic.
With the possible exception of Machiavelli, their writers might have
been professors. The effect of the books was fine and lasting, but they
were not aflame. They did not rank as acts. The burning books that rank
as acts and devour like purifying fire must be endowed with other
qualities.

Such books appear to have been very few, though, in a rapid survey, one
is likely to overlook some. In all minds there will arise at once the
great memory of Swift's _Drapier's Letters_, passionately uttering the
simple but continually neglected law that "all government without the
consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery." Carlyle's
_French Revolution_ and _Past and Present_ burnt with similar flame; so
did Ruskin's _Unto this Last_ and the series of _Fors Clavigera;_ so did
Mazzini's _God and the People_, Karl Marx's _Kapital_, Henry George's
_Progress and Poverty_, Tolstoy's _What shall we do?_ and so did
Proudhon's _Qu'est ce que la Propriété?_ at the time of its birth. Nor
from such a list could one exclude _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, by which Mrs.
Beecher Stowe anticipated the deed of Harper's Ferry nine years before
it came.

These are but few books and few authors. With Lord Morley's three thrown
in, they still fall far short of a score. Readers will add other names,
other books that ranked as acts and burnt like fire. To their brief but
noble roll, I would also add one name, and one brief set of speeches or
essays that hardly made a book, but to which Lord Morley himself, at all
events, would not be likely to take exception. He mentioned Burke's
famous denunciation of Rousseau, and, indeed, the natures and aspects of
no two distinguished and finely-tempered men could well be more opposed.
But none the less, I believe that in Burke, before growing age and
growing fears and habits chilled his blood, there kindled a fire
consuming in its indignation, and driving him to words that, equally
with Rousseau's, may rank among the acts of history. In support of what
may appear so violent a paradox when speaking of one so often claimed as
a model of Conservative moderation and constitutional caution, let me
recall a few actual sentences from the speech on "Conciliation with
America," published three years before Rousseau's death. The grounds of
Burke's imagination were not theoretic. He says nothing about abstract
man born free; but, as though quietly addressing the House of Commons
to-day, he remarks:

  "The Colonies complain that they have not the characteristic
  mark and seal of British freedom. They complain that they
  are taxed in a Parliament in which they are not represented."

That simple complaint had roused in the Colonies, thus deprived of the
mark and seal of British freedom, a spirit of turbulence and disorder.
Already, under a policy of negation and suppression, the people were
driving towards the most terrible kind of war--a war between the members
of the same community. Already the cry of "no concession so long as
disorders continue" went up from the central Government, and, with
passionate wisdom, Burke replied:

  "The question is not whether their spirit deserves blame or
  praise, but what, in the name of God, shall we do with it?"

Then come two brief passages which ought to be bound as watchwords and
phylacteries about the foreheads of every legislator who presumes to
direct our country's destiny, and which stand as a perpetual indictment
against all who endeavour to exclude the men or women of this country
from constitutional liberties:

  "In order to prove that the Americans have no right to
  their liberties, we are every day endeavouring to subvert the
  maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove
  that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to
  depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to
  gain a paltry advantage over them in debate without attacking
  some of those principles or deriding some of those feelings for
  which our ancestors have shed their blood."

The second passage is finer still, and particularly apt to the present
civil contest over Englishwomen's enfranchisement:

  "The temper and character which prevail in our Colonies
  are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. We cannot,
  I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade
  them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins
  the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they
  would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition.
  Your speech would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest
  person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery."

It may be said that these words, unlike the words with which Rousseau
kindled revolution, failed of their purpose. The Government remained
deaf and blind to the demand of British freedom; a terrible war was not
averted; one of the greatest disasters in our history ensued. None the
less, they glow with the true fire, and the book that contains them
ranks with acts, and, indeed, with battles. That we should thus be
coupling Rousseau and Burke--two men of naturally violent antipathy--is
but one of the common ironies of history, which in the course of years
obliterates differences and soothes so many hatreds. To be accepted and
honoured by the same mind, and even for similar service, the two
apparent opposites must have had something in common. What they had in
common was the great qualities that Maine discovered in Rousseau--the
vivid imagination and the genuine love for their fellow-men; and by
imagination I mean the power of realising the thoughts, feelings, and
sufferings of others. Thus from these two qualities combined in the
presence of oppression, cruelty, or the ordinary stupid and callous
denial of freedom, there sprang that flame of indignation from which
alone the burning book derives its fire. Examine those other books whose
titles I have mentioned, and their origin will in every case be found
the same. They are the flaming children of rage, and rage is begotten by
imaginative power out of love for the common human kind.




VI


"WHERE CRUEL RAGE"

"Fret not thyself," sang the cheerful Psalmist--"fret not thyself
because of evildoers." For they shall soon be cut down like the grass;
they shall be rooted out; their sword shall go through their own heart;
their arms shall be broken; they shall consume as the fat of lambs, and
as the smoke they shall consume away; though they flourish like a green
bay-tree, they shall be gone, and though we seek them, their place shall
nowhere be found.

A soothing consolation lies in the thought. Why should we fluster
ourselves, why wax so hot, when time thus brings its inevitable
revenges? Composed in mind, let us pursue our own unruffled course, with
calm assurance that justice will at length prevail. Let us comply with
the dictates of sweetness and light, in reasonable expectation that
iniquity will melt away of itself, like a snail before the fire. If we
have confidence that vengeance is the Lord's and He will repay, where
but in that faith shall we find an outlet for our indignation at once so
secure, so consolatory, and so cheap?

It was the pious answer made by Dr. Delany to Swift at the time when,
torn by cruel rage, Swift was entering upon the struggle against
Ireland's misery. Swift appealed to him one day "whether the
corruptions and villainies of men in power did not eat his flesh and
exhaust his spirits?" But Delany answered, "That in truth they did not."
"Why--why, how can you help it? How can you avoid it?" asked the
indignant heart. And the judicious answer came: "Because I am commanded
to the contrary; 'Fret not thyself because of the ungodly.'" Under the
qualities revealed in Swift and Delany by that characteristic scene, is
also revealed a deeply-marked distinction between two orders of mankind,
and the two speakers stand as their types. Dr. Delany we all know. He
may be met in any agreeable society--himself agreeable and tolerant,
unwilling to judge lest he be judged, solicitous to please, careful not
to lose esteem, always welcome among his numerous acquaintances, sweetly
reasonable, and devoutly confident that the tale of hideous wrong will
right itself without his stir. No figure is more essential for social
intercourse, or moves round the cultivated or political circle of his
life with more serene success.

To the great comfort of cultivated and political circles, the type of
Swift is not so frequent or so comprehensible. What place have those who
fret not themselves because of evildoers--what place in their tolerant
society have they for uncouth personalities, terrible with indignation?
It is true that Swift was himself accounted a valued friend among the
best wits and writers of his time. Bolingbroke wrote to him: "I loved
you almost twenty years ago; I thought of you as well as I do now,
better was beyond the power of conception." Pope, also after twenty
years of intimate friendship, could write of him: "My sincere love of
that valuable, indeed incomparable, man will accompany him through life,
and pursue his memory were I to live a hundred lives." Arbuthnot could
write to him:

  "DEAR FRIEND,--The last sentence of your letter plunged
  a dagger in my heart. Never repeat those sad, but tender,
  words, that you will try to forget me. For my part, I can never
  forget you--at least till I discover, which is impossible, another
  friend whose conversation could procure me the pleasure I
  have found in yours."

The friends of Swift--the men who could write like this--men like
Bolingbroke, Pope, Arbuthnot, Addison, Steele, and Gay--were no
sentimentalists; they rank among the shrewdest and most clear-eyed
writers of our literature. And, indeed, to me at all events, the
difficulty of Swift's riddle lies, not in his savagery, but in his
charm. When we think of that tiger burning in the forests of the night,
how shall we reconcile his fearful symmetry with eyes "azure as the
heavens," which Pope describes as having a surprising archness in them?
Or when a man is reputed the most embittered misanthrope in history, how
was it that his intimate friend, Sheridan, could speak of that "spirit
of generosity and benevolence whose greatness, and vigour, when pent up
in his own breast by poverty and dependence, served only as an evil
spirit to torment him"? Of his private generosity, and his consideration
for the poor, for servants, and animals, there are many instances
recorded. For divergent types of womanhood, whether passionate, witty,
or intellectual, he possessed the attraction of sympathetic intimacy. A
woman of peculiar charm and noble character was his livelong friend from
girlhood, risking reputation, marriage, position, and all that many
women most value, just for that friendship and nothing more. Another
woman loved him with more tragic destiny. To Stella, in the midst of his
political warfare, he could write with the playfulness that nursemaids
use for children, and most men keep for their kittens or puppies. In the
"Verses on his own Death," how far removed from the envy, hatred, and
malice of the literary nature is the affectionate irony of those verses
beginning:

  "In Pope I cannot read a line,
  But with a sigh I wish it mine;
  When he can in one couplet fix
  More sense than I can do in six,
  It gives me such a jealous fit,
  I cry, 'Plague take him and his wit.'
  I grieve to be outdone by Gay
  In my own humorous biting way;
  Arbuthnot is no more my friend
  Who dares to irony pretend,
  Which I was born to introduce;
  Refined it first, and showed its use."

And so on down to the lines:

  "If with such talents Heaven has blest 'em,
  Have I not reason to detest 'em?"

To damn with faint praise is the readiest defence of envious failure;
but to praise with jealous damnation reveals a delicate generosity that
few would look for in the hater of his kind. Nor let us forget that
Swift was himself the inventor of the phrase "Sweetness and light."

These elements of charm and generosity have been too much overlooked,
and they could not redeem the writer's savagery in popular opinion,
being overshadowed by that cruel indignation which ate his flesh and
exhausted his spirit. Yet it was, perhaps, just from such elements of
intuitive sympathy and affectionate goodwill that the indignation
sprang. Like most over-sensitive natures, he found that every new
relation in life, even every new friendship that he formed, only opened
a gate to new unhappiness. The sorrows of others were more to him than
to themselves, and, like a man or woman that loves a child, he
discovered that his affection only exposed a wider surface to pain. On
the death of a lady with whom he was not very intimately acquainted, "I
hate life," he cried, "when I think it exposed to such accidents: and to
see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth while such as her die,
makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing." It was not any
spirit of hatred or cruelty, but an intensely personal sympathy with
suffering, that tore his heart and kindled that furnace of indignation
against the stupid, the hateful, and the cruel to whom most suffering is
due; and it was a furnace in which he himself was consumed. Writing
whilst he was still a youth, in _The Tale of a Tub_, he composed a
terrible sentence, in which all his rage and pity and ironical bareness
of style seem foretold: "Last week," he says, "I saw a woman flayed, and
you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse."
"Only a woman's hair," was found written on the packet in which the
memorial of Stella was preserved, and I do not know in what elegy there
breathes a prouder or more poignant sorrow.

When he wrote the _Drapier Letters_, Ireland lay before him like a woman
flayed. Of the misery of Ireland it was said (I think by Sheridan):

  "It fevered his blood, it broke his rest, it drove him at times
  half frantic with furious indignation, it sunk him at times in
  abysses of sullen despondency, it awoke in him emotions
  which in ordinary men are seldom excited save by personal
  injuries."

This cruel rage over the wrongs of a people whom he did not love, and
whom he repeatedly disowned, drove him to the savage denunciations in
which he said of England's nominee: "It is no dishonour to submit to the
lion, but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of
being devoured alive by a rat?" It drove him also to the great
principle, still too slowly struggling into recognition in this country,
that "all government without the consent of the governed is the very
definition of slavery." It inspired his _Proposal for the Universal Use
of Irish Manufactures_, in which the advice to "burn everything that
came from England except the coals and the people," might serve as the
motto of the Sinn Fein movement. And it inspired also that other "Modest
Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from being a burden to
their Parents and Country, and making them beneficial to the Public.
Fatten them up for the Dublin market; they will be delicious roast,
baked, or boiled."

As wave after wave of indignation passed over him, his wrath at
oppression extended to all mankind. In _Gulliver's Travels_ it is the
human race that lies before him, how much altered for the worse by being
flayed! But it is not pity he feels for the victim now. In man he only
sees the littleness, the grossness, the stupidity, or the brutal
degradation of Yahoos. Unlike other satirists--unlike Juvenal or Pope or
the author of _Penguin Island_, who comes nearest to his manner--he
pours his contempt, not upon certain types of folly or examples of vice,
but upon the race of man as a whole. "I heartily hate," he wrote to
Pope soon after _Gulliver_ was published, "I heartily hate and detest
that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas,
and so forth." The philanthropist will often idealise man in the
abstract and hate his neighbour at the back door, but that was not
Swift's way. He has been called an inverted hypocrite, as one who makes
himself out worse than he is. I should rather call him an inverted
idealist, for, with high hopes and generous expectations, he entered
into the world, and lacerated by rage at the cruelty, foulness, and
lunacy he there discovered, he poured out his denunciations upon the
crawling forms of life whose filthy minds were well housed in their
apelike and corrupting flesh--a bag of loathsome carrion, animated by
various lusts.

"Noli aemulari," sang the cheerful Psalmist; "Fret not thyself because
of evildoers." How easy for most of us it is to follow that comfortable
counsel! How little strain it puts upon our popularity or our courage!
And how amusing it is to watch the course of human affairs with tolerant
acquiescence! Yes, but, says Swift, "amusement is the happiness of those
who cannot think," and may we not say that acquiescence is the cowardice
of those who dare not feel? There will always be some, at least, in the
world whom savage indignation, like Swift's, will continually torment.
It will eat their flesh and exhaust their spirits. They would gladly be
rid of it, for, indeed, it stifles their existence, depriving them alike
of pleasure, friends, and the objects of ambition--isolating them in the
end as Swift was isolated. If only the causes of their indignation might
cease, how gladly they would welcome the interludes of quiet! But hardly
is one surmounted than another overtops them like a wave, nor have the
stern victims of indignation the smallest hope of deliverance from their
suffering, until they lie, as Swift has now lain for so many years,
where cruel rage can tear the heart no more--"Ubi saeva indignatio
ulterius cor lacerare nequit."




VII


THE CHIEF OF REBELS

"It is time that I ceased to fill the world," said the dying Victor
Hugo, and we recognise the truth of the saying, though with a smile. For
each generation must find its own way, nor would it be a consolation to
have even the greatest of ancient prophets living still. But yet there
breathes from the living a more intimate influence, for which an
immortality of fame cannot compensate. When men like Tolstoy die, the
world is colder as well as more empty. They have passed outside the
common dangers and affections of man's warm-blooded circle, lighted by
the sun and moon. Their spirit may go marching on; it may become
immortal and shine with an increasing radiance, perpetual as the sweet
influences of the Pleiades. But their place in the heavens is fixed. We
can no longer watch how they will meet the glorious or inglorious
uncertainties of the daily conflict. We can no longer make appeal for
their succour against the new positions and new encroachments of the
eternal adversary. The sudden splendour of action is no longer theirs,
and if we would know the loss implied in that difference, let us imagine
that Tolstoy had died before the summer of 1908, when he uttered his
overwhelming protest against the political massacres ordained by Russia.
In place of that protest, in place of the poignant indignation which
appealed to Stolypin's hangmen to fix their well-soaped noose around his
own old neck, since, if any were guilty, it was he--in place of the
shame and wrath that cried, "I cannot be silent!" we should have had
nothing but our own memory and regret, murmuring to ourselves, "If only
Tolstoy had been living now! But perhaps, for his sake, it is better he
is not."

And now that he is dead, and the world is chilled by the loss of its
greatest and most fiery personality, the adversary may breathe more
freely. As Tolstoy was crossing a city square--I suppose the "Red
Square" in Moscow--on the day when the Holy Synod of Russia
excommunicated him from the Church, he heard someone say, "Look! There
goes the devil in human form!" And for the next few weeks he continued
to receive letters clotted with anathemas, damnations, threats, and
filthy abuse. It was no wonder. To all thrones, dominions,
principalities, and powers, to all priests of established religions, to
the officials of every kind of government, to the Ministers, whether of
parliaments or despots, to all naval and military officers, to all
lawyers, judges, jurymen, policemen, gaolers, and executioners, to all
tax-collectors, speculators, and financiers, Tolstoy was, indeed, the
devil in human form. To them he was the gainsayer, the destroyer, the
most shattering of existent forces. And, in themselves, how large and
powerful a section of every modern State they are! They may almost be
called the Church and State incarnate, and they seldom hesitate to call
themselves so. But, against all their authorities, formulae, and
traditions, Tolstoy stood in perpetual rebellion. To him their
parchments and wigs, their cells and rods and hang-ropes, their mitres,
chasubles, vestments, incense, chantings, services, bells, and books
counted as so much trumpery. For him external law had no authority. If
it conflicted with the law of the soul, it was the soul's right and duty
to disregard or break it. Speaking of the law which ordained the
flogging of peasants for taxes, he wrote: "There is but one thing to
say--that no such law can exist; that no ukase, or insignia, or seals,
or Imperial commands can make a law out of a crime." Similarly, the
doctrines of the Church, her traditions, sacraments, rituals, and
miracles--all that appeared to him to conflict with human intelligence
and the law of his soul--he disregarded or denied. "I deny them all," he
wrote in his answer to the Holy Synod's excommunication (1901); "I
consider all the sacraments to be coarse, degrading sorcery,
incompatible with the idea of God or with the Christian teaching." And,
as the briefest statement of the law of his soul, he added:

  "I believe in this: I believe in God, whom I understand
  as Spirit, as Love, as the Source of all. I believe that he is
  in me, and I in him. I believe that the will of God is most
  clearly and intelligibly expressed in the teaching of the man
  Jesus, whom to consider as God, and pray to I esteem the
  greatest blasphemy. I believe that man's true welfare lies
  in fulfilling God's will, and his will is that men should love
  one another, and should consequently do to others as they wish
  others to do to them--of which it is said in the Gospels that this
  is the law and the prophets."

The world has listened to rebels against Church and State before, and
still it goes shuffling along as best it can under external laws and
governments, seeking from symbols, rituals, and miraculous manifestation
such spiritual consolation as it may imbibe. To such rebels the world,
after burning, hanging, and quartering them for several centuries, has
now become fairly well accustomed, though it still shoots or hangs them
now and then as a matter of habit. But Tolstoy's rebellion did not stop
at Church and State. He rebelled against all the ordinary proposals and
ideals of rebels themselves, and to him there was not very much to
choose between the Socialism of Marxists and the despotism of Tsars.
Liberals, Radicals, Social Democrats, Social Revolutionists, and all the
rest of the reforming or rebellious parties--what were they doing but
struggling to re-establish external laws, external governments,
officials, and authorities under different forms and different names? In
the Liberal movements of the day he took no part, and he had little
influence upon the course of revolution. He formed no party; no band of
rebels followed the orders of the rebel-in-chief; among all the groups
of the first Duma there was no Tolstoyan group, nor could there have
been any. When we touch government, he would say, we touch the devil,
and it is only by admitting compromise or corruption that men seek to
maintain or readjust the power of officials over body and soul. "It
seems to me," he wrote to the Russian Liberals in 1896,

  "It seems to me now specially important to do what is
  right quietly and persistently, not only without asking permission
  from Government, but consciously avoiding participation
  in it.... What can a Government do with a man who
  will not publicly lie with uplifted hand, or will not send his
  children to a school he thinks bad, or will not learn to kill
  people, or will not take part in idolatry, or in coronations,
  deputations, and addresses, or who says and writes what he
  thinks and feels?... It is only necessary for all these good,
  enlightened, and honest people whose strength is now wasted
  in Revolutionary, Socialistic, or Liberal activity (harmful to
  themselves and to their cause) to begin to act thus, and a nucleus
  of honest, enlightened, and moral people would form around
  them, united in the same thoughts and the same feelings.
  Public opinion--the only power which subdues Governments--would
  become evident, demanding freedom of speech, freedom
  of conscience, justice, and humanity."

From a distance, the bustling politicians and reformers of happier lands
might regard this quietism or wise passiveness as a mere counsel of
despair, suitable enough as a shelter in the storm of Russia's tyranny,
but having little significance for Western men of affairs. Yet even so
they had not silenced the voice of this persistent rebel; for he rose in
equal rebellion against the ideals, methods, and standards of European
cities. Wealth, commerce, industrial development, inventions, luxuries,
and all the complexity of civilisation were of no more account to him
than the toys of kings and the tag-rag of the churches. Other rebels had
preached the gospel of pleasure to the poor, and had themselves acted on
their precepts. Other reformers, even religious reformers, had extolled
the delights of women, wine, and song. But here was a man despising
these as the things after which the Gentiles seek. Love intrigues,
banquets, wealthy establishments, operas, theatres, poetry, and
fashionable novels--what had they to do with the kingdom of God that is
within? He touched nothing from which he did not strip the adornment. He
left life bare and stern as the starry firmament, and he felt awe at
nothing, not even at the starry firmament, but only at the sense of
right and wrong in man. He did not summon the poor to rise against "the
idle rich," but he summoned the idle rich, the well-to-do, the gentry of
independent means, the comfortable annuitants, the sportsmen, the
writers and dramatists of pleasure, the artists of triviality, the
pretty rhymers, and the people who are too busy for thought, to rise
against themselves. It was a much harder summons to obey, and generally
they answered with a shrug and a mutter of "madness," "mere asceticism,"
or "a fanatic's intolerance."

Yet they could not choose but hear. Mr. Kipling, in agreement with an
earlier prophet, once identified rebellion with the sin of witchcraft,
and about Tolstoy there was certainly a witching power, a magic or
demonic attraction, that gave the hearer no peace. Perhaps more even
than from his imaginative strength, it arose from his whole-hearted
sincerity, always looking reality straight in the face, always refusing
compromise, never hesitating to follow where reason led. Compromise and
temporise and choose the line of least resistance, as we habitually do,
there still remains in most people a fibre that vibrates to that iron
sincerity. And so it was that, from the first, Tolstoy brought with him
a disturbing and incalculable magic--an upheaving force, like leaven
stirring in the dough, or like a sword in unconditioned and unchartered
peace.

Critics have divided his life into artistic and prophetic hemispheres;
they have accused him of giving up for man what was meant for artistic
circles. But the seas of both hemispheres are the same, and there was no
division in Tolstoy's main purpose or outlook upon life from first to
last. In his greatest imaginative works (and to me they appear the
highest achievement that the human imagination has yet accomplished in
prose)--in the struggles and perplexities and final solutions of
Petroff, Nekhludoff, and Levin; in the miserable isolation of Ivan
Ilyitch; in the resurrection of the prostitute Maslova; and in the
hardly endurable tragedy of Anna Karénin herself, there runs exactly the
same deep undercurrent of thought and exactly the same solution of
life's question as in the briefer and more definite statements of the
essays and letters. The greatest men are generally all of a piece, and
of no one is this more true than of Tolstoy. Take him where you please,
it is strange if after a few lines you are not able to say, "That is the
finger of Tolstoy; there is the widely sympathetic and compassionate
heart, so loving mankind that in all his works he has drawn hardly one
human soul altogether detested or contemptible. But at the same time
there is the man whose breath is sincerity, and to whom no compromise is
possible, and no mediocrity golden."

To the philosophers of the world his own solution may appear a simple
issue, indeed, out of all his questioning, struggles, and rebellions. It
was but a return to well-worn commandments. "Do not be angry, do not
lust, do not swear obedience to external authority, do not resist evil,
but love your enemies"--these commands have a familiar, an almost
parochial, sound. Yet in obedience to such simple orders the chief of
rebels found man's only happiness, and whether we call it obedience to
the voice of the soul or the voice of God, he would not have minded
much. "He lives for his soul; he does not forget God," said one peasant
of another in Levin's hearing; and Tolstoy takes those quiet words as
Levin's revelation in the way of peace. For him the soul, though finding
its highest joy of art and pleasure only in noble communion with other
souls, stood always lonely and isolated, bare to the presence of God.
The only submission possible, and the only possible hope of peace, lay
in obedience to the self thus isolated and bare. "O that thou hadst
hearkened unto my commandments!" cried the ancient poet, uttering the
voice that speaks to the soul in loneliness; "O that thou hadst
hearkened unto my commandments! Then had thy peace been as a river."




VIII


THE IRON CROWN

When we read of a man who, for many years, wore on his left arm an iron
bracelet, with spikes on the inside which were pressed into the flesh,
we feel as though we had taken a long journey from our happy land. When
we read that the bracelet was made of steel wire, with the points
specially sharpened, and the whole so clamped on to the arm that it
could never come off, but had to be cut away after death, we might
suppose that we had reached the world where Yogi and Sanyasi wander in
the saffron robe, or sit besmeared with ashes, contemplating the eternal
verities, unmoved by outward things. Like skeletons of death they sit;
thorns tear their skin, their nails pierce into their hands, day and
night one arm is held uplifted, iron grows embedded in their flesh, like
a railing in a tree trunk, they hang in ecstasy from hooks, they count
their thousand miles of pilgrimage by the double yard-measure of head to
heel, moving like a geometer caterpillar across the burning dust. To
overcome the body so that the soul may win her freedom, to mortify--to
murder the flesh so that the spirit may reach its perfect life, to
torture sense so that the mind may dwell in peace, to obliterate the
limits of space, to silence the ticking of time, so that eternity may
speak, and vistas of infinity be revealed--that is the purport of their
existence, and in hope of attaining to that consummation they submit
themselves with deliberate resolve to the utmost anguish and abasement
that the body can endure.

Contemplating from a philosophic distance the Buddhist monasteries that
climb the roof of the world, or the indistinguishable multitudes
swarming around the shrines on India's coral strand, we think all this
sort of thing is natural enough for unhappy natives to whom life is
always poor and hard, and whose bodies, at the best, are so
insignificant and so innumerable that they may well regard them with
contempt, and suffer their torments with indifference. But the man of
whose spiky bracelet we read was not in search of Nirvana's
annihilation, nor had he ever prayed in nakedness beside the Ganges.
Cardinal Vaughan, Archbishop of Westminster, was as little like a
starveling Sanyasi as any biped descendant of the anthropoids could
possibly be. A noticeable man, singularly handsome, of conspicuous,
indeed of almost precarious, personal attraction, a Prince of the
Church, clothed, quite literally, in purple and fine linen, faring as
sumptuously as he pleased every day, welcome at the tables of the
society that is above religion, irreproachable in address, a courtier in
manner, a diplomatist in mind, moving in an entourage of state and
worldly circumstance, occupied in the arts, constructing the grandest
building of his time, learned without pedantry, agreeably cultivated in
knowledge, urbane in his judgment of mankind, a power in the councils of
his country, a voice in the destinies of the world--so we see him moving
in a large and splendid orbit, complete in fine activities, dominant in
his assured position, almost superhuman in success. And as he moves, he
presses into the flesh of his left arm those sharpened points of steel.

"Remember!" We hear again the solemn tone, warning of mortality. We see
again the mummy, drawn between tables struck silent in their revelry. We
listen to the slave whispering in the ear while the triumph blares.
"Remember!" he whispers. "Remember thou art man. Thou shalt go! Thou
shalt go! Thy triumph shall vanish as a cloud. Time's chariot hurries
behind thee. It comes quicker than thine own!" So from the iron bracelet
a voice tells of the transitory vision. All shall go; the jewelled
altars and the dim roofs fragrant with incense; the palaces, the towers,
and domed cathedrals; the refined clothing, the select surroundings, the
courteous receptions of the great; the comfortable health, the noble
presence, the satisfactory estimation of the world--all shall go. They
shall fade away; they shall be removed as a vesture, and like a garment
they shall be rolled up. Press the spikes into thy mouldering flesh.
Remember! Even while it lives, it is corrupting, and the end keeps
hurrying behind. Remember! Remember thou art man.

But below that familiar voice which warns the transient generations of
their mortality, we may find in those sharpened spikes a more profound
and nobler intention. "Remember thou art man," they say; but it is not
against overweening pride that they warn, nor do they remind only of
death's wings. "Remember thou art man," they say, "and as man thou art
but a little lower than the angels, being crowned with glory and honour.
This putrefying flesh into which we eat our way--this carrion cart of
your paltry pains and foolish pleasures--is but the rotten relic of an
animal relationship. Remember thou art man. Thou art the paragon of
animals, the slowly elaborated link between beast and god, united by
this flesh with tom-cats, swine, and hares, but united by the spirit
with those eternal things that move fresh and strong as the ancient
heavens in their courses, and know not fear. What pain of spikes and
sharpened points, what torment that this body can endure from cold or
hunger, from human torture and burning flame, what pleasure that it can
enjoy from food and wine and raiment and all the satisfactions of sense
is to be compared with the glory that may be revealed at any moment in
thy soul? Subdue that bestial and voracious body, ever seeking to
extinguish in thee the gleam of heavenly fire. Press the spikes into the
lumpish and uncouth monster of thy flesh. Remember! Remember thou art
God."

"Oh, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?" We have grown so accustomed to the cry that we hardly notice it,
and yet that the cry should ever have been raised--that it should have
arisen in all ages and in widely separated parts of the world--is the
most remarkable thing in history. Pleasure is so agreeable, and none too
common; or, if one wanted pain for salt, are there not pains enough in
life's common round? Does it not take us all our time to mitigate the
cold, the heat, and hunger; to escape the beasts and rocks and
thunderbolts that bite and break and blast us; to cure the diseases that
rack and burn and twist our poor bodies into hoops? Why should we seek
to add pain to pain, and raise a wretched life to the temperature of a
torture-room? It is the most extraordinary thing, at variance alike with
the laws of reason and moderation. Certainly, there is a kind of
self-denial--a carefulness in the selection of pleasure--which all the
wise would practise. To exercise restraint, to play the aristocrat in
fastidious choice, to guard against satiety, and allow no form of
grossness to enter the walled garden or to drink at the fountain
sealed--those are to the wise the necessary conditions of calm and
radiant pleasure, and in outward behaviour the Epicurean and the Stoic
are hardly to be distinguished. For the Epicurean knows well that
asceticism stands before the porch of happiness, and the smallest touch
of excess brings pleasure tumbling down.

But mankind seems not to trouble itself about this delicate adjustment,
this cautious selection of the more precious joy. In matters of the
soul, man shows himself unreasonable and immoderate. He forgets the laws
of health and chastened happiness. The salvation of his spirit possesses
him with a kind of frenzy, making him indifferent to loss of pleasure,
or to actual pain and bodily distress. He will seek out pain as a lover,
and use her as a secret accomplice in his conspiracy against the body's
domination. Under the stress of spiritual passion he becomes an
incalculable force, carried we know not where by his determination to
preserve his soul, to keep alight just that little spark of fire, to
save that little breath of life from stifling under the mass of
superincumbent fat. We may call him crazy, inhuman, a fanatic, a
devil-worshipper; he does not mind what we call him. His eyes are full
of a vision before which the multitude of human possessions fade. He is
engaged in a contest wherein his soul must either overcome or perish
everlastingly; and we may suppose that, even if the soul were not
immortal, it would still be worth the saving.

It is true that in this happy country examples of ascetic frenzy are
comparatively rare. There is little fear of overdoing the mortification
of the flesh. We practise a self-denial that takes the form of training
for sport, but, like the spectators at a football match, we do our
asceticism chiefly by proxy, and are fairly satisfied if the clergy do
not drink or give other cause for scandal. It is very seldom that
Englishmen have been affected by spiritual passion of any kind, and that
is why our country, of all the eastern hemisphere, has been least
productive of saints. But still, in the midst of our discreet comfort
and sanity of moderation, that spiky bracelet of steel, eating into the
flesh of the courtly and sumptuous Archbishop, may help to remind us
that, whether in war, or art, or life, it is only by the passionate
refusal of comfort and moderation that the high places of the spirit are
to be reached. "Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the
ground!" is the song of all pioneers, and if man is to be but a little
lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honour, the crown will
be made of iron or, perhaps, of thorns.




IX


"THE IMPERIAL RACE"

"The public are particularly requested not to tease the Cannibals." So
ran one of the many flaming notices outside the show. Other notices
proclaimed the unequalled opportunity of beholding "The Dahomey Warriors
of Savage South Africa; a Rare and Peculiar Race of People; all there is
Left of them"--as, indeed, it might well be. Another called on the
public "not to fail to see the Coloured Beauties of the Voluptuous
Harem," no doubt also the product of Savage South Africa. But of all the
gilded placards the most alluring, to my mind, was the request not to
tease the Cannibals. It suggested so appalling a result.

I do not know who the Cannibals were. Those I saw appeared to be
half-caste Jamaicans, but there may have been something more savage
inside, and certainly a Dahomey warrior from South Africa would have to
be ferocious indeed if his fierceness was to equal his rarity. But the
particular race did not matter. The really interesting thing was that
the English crowd was assumed to be as far superior to the African
savage as to a wild beast in a menagerie. The proportion was the same.
The English crowd was expected to extend to the barbarians the same
inquisitive patronage as to jackals and hyenas in a cage, when in front
of the cages it is written, "Do not irritate these animals. They bite."

The facile assumption of superiority recalled a paradoxical remark that
Huxley made about thirty years ago, when that apostle of evolution
suddenly scandalised progressive Liberalism by asserting that a Zulu, if
not a more advanced type than a British working man, was at all events
happier. "I should rather be a Zulu than a British workman," said Huxley
in his trenchant way, and the believers in industrialism were not
pleased. By the continual practice of war, and by generations of
infanticide, under which only the strongest babies survived, the Zulus
had certainly at that time raised themselves to high physical
excellence, traces of which still remain in spite of the degeneracy that
follows foreign subjection. I have known many African tribes between
Dahomey and Zululand too well to idealise them into "the noble savage."
I know how rapidly they are losing both their bodily health and their
native virtues under the deadly contact of European drink, clothing,
disease, and exploitation. Yet, on looking round upon the London crowds
that were particularly requested not to tease the cannibals, my first
thought was that Huxley's paradox remained true.

The crowds that swarmed the Heath were not lovely things to look at.
Newspapers estimated that nearly half a million human beings were
collected on the patch of sand that Macaulay's imagination transfigured
into "Hampstead's swarthy moor." But even if we followed the safe rule
and divided the estimated number by half, a quarter of a million was
quite enough. "Like bugs--the more, the worse," Emerson said of city
crowds, and certainly the most enthusiastic social legislator could
hardly wish to make two such men or women stand where one stood before.
Scarlet and yellow booths, gilded roundabouts, sword-swallowers in
purple fleshings, Amazons in green plush and spangles were gay enough.
Booths, roundabouts, Amazon queens, and the rest are the only chance of
colour the English people have, and no wonder they love them. But in
themselves and in mass the crowds were drab, dingy, and black. Even
"ostridges" and "pearlies," that used to break the monotony like the
exchange of men's and women's hats, are thought to be declining. America
may rival that dulness, but in no other country of Europe, to say
nothing of the East and Africa, could so colourless a crowd be seen--a
mass of people so devoid of character in costume, or of tradition and
pride in ornament.

But it was not merely the absence of colour and beauty in dress, or the
want of national character and distinction--a plainness that would
afflict even a Russian peasant from the Ukraine or a Tartar from the
further Caspian. It was the uncleanliness of the garments themselves
that would most horrify the peoples not reckoned in the foremost ranks
of time. A Hindu thinks it disgusting enough for a Sahib to put on the
same coat and trousers that he wore yesterday without washing them each
morning in the tank, as the Hindu washes his own garment. But that the
enormous majority of the Imperial race should habitually wear second,
third, and fourth-hand clothes that have been sweated through by other
people first, would appear to him incredible. If ever he comes to
England, he finds that he must believe it. It is one of the first shocks
that strike him with horror when he emerges from Charing Cross. "Can
these smudgy, dirty, evil-smelling creatures compose the dominant race?"
is the thought of even the most "loyal" Indian as he moves among the
crowd of English workpeople. And it is only the numbing power of habit
that silences the question in ourselves. Cheap as English clothing is,
second-hand it is cheaper still, and I suppose that out of that
quarter-million people on the Heath every fine Bank Holiday hardly one
per cent. wears clothes that no one has worn before him. Hence the
sickening smell that not only pervades an English crowd but hangs for
two or three days over an open space where the crowd has been. "I can
imagine a man keeping a dirty shirt on," said Nietzsche, "but I cannot
imagine him taking it off and putting it on again." He was speaking in
parables, as a philosopher should; but if he had stood among an English
working crowd, his philosophic imagination would have been terribly
strained by literal fact.

Scrubby coat and trousers, dirty shirt, scarf, and cap, socks more like
anklets for holes, and a pair of split boots; bedraggled hat, frowsy
jacket, blouse and skirt, squashy boots, and perhaps a patchy "pelerine"
or mangy "boa"--such is accepted as the natural costume for the heirs of
all the ages. Prehistoric man, roaming through desert and forest in his
own shaggy pelt, was infinitely better clad. So is the aboriginal
African with a scrap of leopard skin, or a single bead upon a cord. To
judge by clothing, we may wonder to what purpose evolution ever started
upon its long course of groaning and travailing up to now. And more than
half-concealed by that shabby clothing, what shabby forms and heads we
must divine! How stunted, puny, and ill-developed the bodies are! How
narrow-shouldered the men, how flat-breasted the women! And the faces,
how shapeless and anaemic! How deficient in forehead, nose, and jaw!
Compare them with an Afghan's face; it is like comparing a chicken with
an eagle. Writing in the _Standard_ of April 8, 1912, a well-known
clergyman assured us that "when a woman enters the political arena, the
bloom is brushed from the peach, never to be restored." That may seem a
hard saying to Primrose Dames and Liberal Women, but the thousands of
peaches that entered the arena (as peaches will) on Hampstead Heath, had
no bloom left to brush, and no political arena could brush it more.

Deficient in blood and bone, the products of stuffy air, mean food, and
casual or half-hearted parentage, often tainted with hereditary or
acquired disease, the faces are; but, worse than all, how insignificant
and indistinguishable! It is well known that a Chinaman can hardly
distinguish one Englishman from another, just as we can hardly
distinguish the Chinese. But in an English working crowd, even an
Englishman finds it difficult to distinguish face from face. Yet as a
nation we have always been reckoned conspicuous for strong and even
eccentric individuality. Our well-fed upper and middle classes--the
public school, united services, and university classes--reach a high
physical average. Perhaps, on the whole, they are still the best
specimens of civilised physique. Within thirty years the Germans have
made an astonishing advance. They are purging off their beer, and
working down their fat. But, as a rule, the well-fed and carefully
trained class in England still excels in versatility, decision, and
adventure. Unhappily, it is with few--only with a few millions of
well-to-do people, a fraction of the whole English population--and with
a few country-bred people and open-air workers, that we succeed. The
great masses of the English nation are tending to become the
insignificant, indistinguishable, unwholesome, and shabby crowd that
becomes visible at football matches and on Bank Holidays upon the Heath.

It is true that familiarity breeds respect. It is almost impossible for
the average educated man to know anything whatever about the working
classes. The educated and the workpeople move, as it were, in worlds of
different dimensions, incomprehensible to each other. Very few men and
women from our secondary schools and universities, for instance, can
long enjoy solemnly tickling the faces of passing strangers with a bunch
of feathers, or revolving on a wooden horse to a steam organ, or gazing
at a woman advertised as "a Marvel of Flesh, Fat, and Beauty." The
educated seldom appreciate such joys in themselves. If they like trying
them, it is only "in the second intention." They enjoy out of patronage,
or for literary sensation, rather than in grave reality. They are
excluded from the mind to which such things genuinely appeal. But let
not education mock, nor culture smile disdainfully at the short and
simple pleasures of the poor. If by some miracle of revelation culture
could once become familiar from the inside with one of those scrubby and
rather abhorrent families, the insignificance would be transfigured, the
faces would grow distinguishable, and all manner of admired and even
lovable characteristics would be found. How sober people are most days
of the week; how widely charitable; how self-sacrificing in hopes of
saving the pence for margarine or melted fat upon the children's bread!
They are shabby, but they have paid for every scrap of old clothing with
their toil; they are dirty, but they try to wash, and would be clean if
they could afford the horrible expense of cleanliness; they are
ignorant, but within twenty years how enormously their manners to each
other have improved! And then consider their Christian thoughtlessness
for the morrow, how superb and spiritual it is! How different from the
things after which the Gentiles of the commercial classes seek! On a
Bank Holiday I have known a mother and a daughter, hanging over the very
abyss of penury, to spend two shillings in having their fortunes told.
Could the lilies of the field or Solomon in all his glory have shown a
finer indifference to worldly cares?

Mankind, as we know, in the lump is bad, but that it is not worse
remains the everlasting wonder. It is not the squalor of such a crowd
that should astonish; it is the marvel that they are not more squalid.
For, after all, what is the root cause of all this dirt and ignorance
and shabbiness and disease? It is not drink, nor thriftlessness, nor
immorality, as the philanthropists do vainly talk; still less is it
crime. It is the "inequality" of which Canon Barnett has often
written--the inequality that Matthew Arnold said made a high
civilisation impossible. But such inequality is only another name for
poverty, and from poverty we have yet to discover the saviour who will
redeem us.




X


THE GREAT UNKNOWN

There are strange regions where the monotony of ignoble streets is
broken only by an occasional church, a Board School, or a public-house.
From the city's cathedral to every point of the compass, except the
west, they stretch almost without limit till they reach the bedraggled
fields maturing for development. They form by far the larger part of an
Empire's capital. Each of them is, in fact, a vast town, great enough,
as far as numbers go, to make the Metropolis of a powerful State. Out of
half a dozen of them, such as Islington, Bethnal Green, or Bermondsey,
the County Council could build half a score of Italian republics like
the Florence or Pisa of old days, if only it had the mind. Each
possesses a character, a peculiar flavour, or, at the worst, a separate
smell. Many of them are traversed every day by thousands of rich and
well-educated people, passing underground or overhead. Yet to nearly all
of us they remain strange and almost untrodden. We do not think of them
when we think of London. Them no pleasure-seeker counts among his
opportunities, no foreigner visits as essential for his study of the
English soul. Not even our literary men and Civil Servants, who talk so
much about architecture, discuss their architecture in the clubs. Not
one in a thousand of us has ever known a human soul among their
inhabitants. To the comfortable classes the Libyan desert is more
familiar.

At elections, even politicians remember their existence. From time to
time a philanthropist goes down there to share God's good gifts with his
poorer brethren, or to elevate the masses with tinkling sounds or
painted boards. From time to time an adventurous novelist is led round
the opium-shops, dancing-saloons, and docks, returning with copy for
tales of lust and murder that might just as well be laid in Siberia or
Timbuctoo. When we scent an East End story on its way, do we not
patiently await the battered head, the floating corpse, the dynamiter's
den, or a woman crying over her ill-begotten babe? Do we not always get
one or other of the lot? To read our story-tellers from Mr. Kipling
downward, one might suppose the East End to be inhabited by bastards
engaged in mutual murder, and the marvel is that anyone is left alive to
be the subject of a tale. You may not bring an indictment against a
whole nation, but no sensational writer hesitates to libel three million
of our fellow-citizens. Put it in Whitechapel, and you may tell what
filthy lie you please.

About once in a generation some "Bitter Cry" pierces through custom, and
the lives of "the poor" become a subject for polite conversation and
amateur solicitude. For three months, or even for six, that subject
appears as the intellectual "_rôti_" at dinner-tables; then it is found
a little heavy, and cultured interest returns to its natural courses of
plays, pictures, politics, a dancing woman, and the memorials of Kings.
It is almost time now that the poor came up again, for a quarter of a
century has gone since they were last in fashion, and men's collars and
women's skirts have run their full orbit since. Excellent books have
appeared, written with intimate knowledge of working life--books such as
Charles Booth's _London_ or Mr. Richard Free's _Seven Years Hard_, to
mention only two; but either the public mind was preoccupied with other
amusements, or it had not recovered from the lassitude of the last
philanthropic debauch. Nothing has roused that fury of charitable
curiosity which accompanies a true social revival, and leaves its
victims gasping for the next excitement. The time was, perhaps, ripe,
but no startling success awaited Mr. Alexander Paterson's book, _Across
the Bridges_. Excellent though it was, its excellence excluded it from
fashion. For it was written with the restraint of knowledge, and
contained no touch of melodrama from beginning to end. Not by knowledge
or restraint are the insensate sensations of fashion reached.

Mr. Paterson's experience lay on the south side of the river, and the
district possesses peculiarities of its own. On the whole, I think, the
riverside streets there are rather more unhealthy than those in the East
End. Many houses stand below water-level, and in digging foundations I
have sometimes seen the black sludge of old marshes squirting up through
the holes, and even bringing with it embedded reeds that perhaps were
growing when Shakespeare acted there. The population is more distinctly
English than on the north side. Where the poverty is extreme it is more
helpless. Work as a whole is rather steadier, but not so good. The smell
is different and very characteristic, partly owing to the hop-markets.
Life seems to me rather sadder and more depressing there, with less of
gaiety and independence; but that may be because I am more intimate with
the East End, and intimacy with working people nearly always improves
their aspect. It is, indeed, fortunate for our sensational novelists
that they remain so ignorant of their theme, for otherwise murders,
monsters, and mysteries would disappear from their pages, and goodness
knows how they would make a living then!

It is not crime and savagery that characterise the unknown lands where
the working classes of London chiefly live. Matthew Arnold said our
lower classes were brutalised, and he was right, but not if by brutality
he meant cruelty, violence, or active sin. What characterises them and
their streets is poverty. Poverty and her twins, unhappiness and waste.
Under unhappiness, we may include the outward conditions of
discomfort--the crowded rooms, the foul air, the pervading dirt, the
perpetual stench of the poor. In winter the five or six children in a
bed grow practised in turning over all at the same time while still
asleep, so as not to disturb each other. In a hot summer the bugs drive
the families out of the rooms to sleep on the doorstep. Cleanliness is
an expensive luxury almost as far beyond poverty's reach as diamonds.
The foul skin, the unwashed clothes, the layer of greasy smuts, the
boots that once fitted someone, and are now held on by string, the
scraps of food bought by the pennyworth, the tea, condensed milk, fried
fish, bread and "strawberry flavour," the coal bought by the
"half-hundred," the unceasing noise, the absence of peace or rest, the
misery of sickness in a crowd--all such things may be counted among the
outward conditions of unhappiness, and only people who have never known
them would call them trivial. But by the unhappiness that springs from
poverty I mean far worse than these.

The definition of happiness as "an energy of the soul along the lines
of excellence, in a fully developed life" is ancient now, but I have
never found a better. From happiness so defined, poverty excludes our
working-classes in the lump, almost without exception. For them an
energy of the soul along the lines of excellence is almost unknown, and
a fully developed life impossible. In both these respects their
condition has probably become worse within the last century. If there is
a word of truth in what historians tell us, a working-man must certainly
have had a better chance of exercising an energy of his soul before the
development of factories and machinery. What energy of the personal soul
is exercised in a mill-hand, a tea-packer, a slop-tailor, or the watcher
of a thread in a machine? How can a man or woman engaged in such labour
for ten hours a day at subsistence wage enjoy a fully developed life? It
seems likely that the old-fashioned workman who made things chiefly with
his own hands and had some opportunity of personal interest in the work,
stood a better chance of the happiness arising from an energy of the
soul. His life was also more fully developed by the variety and interest
of his working material and surroundings. This is the point to which our
prophets who pour their lamentations over advancing civilisation should
direct their main attack, as, indeed, the best of them have done. For
certainly it is an unendurable result if the enormous majority of
civilised mankind are for ever to be debarred from the highest possible
happiness.

The second offspring of poverty in these working regions of our city is
waste. And I have called waste the twin brother of unhappiness because
the two are very much alike. By waste I do not here mean the death-rate
of infants, though that stands at one in four. No one, except an
exploiter of labour, would desire a mere increase in the workpeople's
number without considering the quality of the increase. But by waste I
mean the multitudes of boys and girls who never get a chance of
fulfilling their inborn capacities. The country's greatest shame and
disaster arise from the custom which makes the line between the educated
and the uneducated follow the line between the rich and the poor, almost
without deviation. That a nature capable of high development should be
precluded by poverty from all development is the deepest of personal and
national disasters, though it happen, as it does happen, several
thousand times a year. Physical waste is bad enough--the waste of
strength and health that could easily be retained by fresh air, open
spaces, and decent food, and is so retained among well-to-do children.
This physical waste has already created such a broad distinction that
foreigners coming among us detect two species of the English people. But
the mental waste is worse. It is a subject that Mr. Paterson dwells
upon, and he speaks with authority, as one who has taught in the Board
Schools and knows the life of the people across the bridges from the
banana-box to the grave.

  "Boys who might become classical scholars," he writes,
  "stick labels on to parcels for ten years, others who have
  literary gifts clear out a brewer's vat. Real thinkers work as
  porters in metal warehouses, and after shouldering iron fittings
  for eleven hours a day, find it difficult to set their minds in
  order.... With even the average boy there is a marked waste
  of mental capital between the ages of ten and thirty, and the
  aggregate loss to the country is heavy indeed."

At fourteen, just when the "education" of well-to-do boys is beginning,
the working boy's education stops. For ten or eleven years he has been
happy at school. He has looked upon school as a place of enjoyment--of
interest, kindliness, warmth, cleanliness, and even quiet of a kind. The
school methods of education may not be the best. Mr. Paterson points out
all that is implied in the distinction between the "teachers" of the
Board Schools and the "masters" of the public schools. Too much is put
in, not enough drawn out from the child's own mind. The teacher cannot
think much of individual natures, when faced with a class of sixty. Yet
it would be difficult to overrate the service of the Board Schools as
training grounds for manners, and anyone who has known the change in our
army within twenty-five years will understand what I mean. At fourteen
the boy has often reached his highest mental and spiritual development.
When he leaves school, shades of the prison-house begin to close upon
him. He jumps at any odd job that will bring in a few shillings to the
family fund. He becomes beer-boy, barber's boy, van-boy, paper-boy, and
in a year or two he is cut out by the younger generation knocking at the
door. He has learnt nothing; he falls out of work; he wanders from place
to place. By the time he is twenty-two, just when the well-to-do are
"finishing their education," his mind is dulled, his hope and interest
gone, his only ambition is to get a bit of work and keep it. At the best
he develops into the average working-man of the regions I have called
unknown. Mr. Paterson thus describes the class:

  "These are the steady bulk of the community, insuring the
  peace of the district by their habits and opinions far more
  effectively than any vigilance of police or government. Yet,
  if they are indeed satisfactory, how low are the civic standards
  of England, how fallen the ideals and beauties of Christianity!
  No man that has dreams can rest content because the English
  worker has reached his high level of regular work and rare
  intoxication."

One does not rest content; far from it. But the perpetual wonder is, not
that "the lower classes are brutalised," but that this brutality is so
tempered with generosity and sweetness. It is not their crime that
surprises, but their virtue; not their turbulence or discontent, but
their inexplicable acquiescence. And yet there are still people who
sneer at "the mob," "the vulgar herd," "the great unwashed," as though
principles, gentility, and soap were privileges in reward of merit, and
not the accidental luck of money's chaotic distribution.




XI


THE WORTH OF A PENNY

A year or two ago, some wondered why strike had arisen out of strike;
why the whole world of British labour had suddenly and all at once begun
to heave restlessly as though with earthquake; why the streams of
workpeople had in quick succession left the grooves along which they
usually ran from childhood to the grave. "It is entirely ridiculous,"
said the _Times_, with the sneer of educated scorn, "it is entirely
ridiculous to suppose that the whole industrial community has been
patiently enduring real grievances which are simultaneously discovered
to be intolerable." But to all outside the circle of the _Times_, the
only ridiculous part of the situation was that the industrial community
should patiently have endured their grievances so long.

That working people should simultaneously discover them to be
intolerable, is nothing strange. It is all very well to lie in gaol,
from which there seems no chance of escape. Treadmill, oakum, skilly,
and the rest--one may as well go through with them quietly, for fear of
something worse. But if word goes round that one or two prisoners have
crept out of gaol, who would not burn to follow? Would not grievances
then be simultaneously discovered to be intolerable? The seamen were but
a feeble lot; their union was poor, their combination loose. They were
cooped up within the walls of a great Employers' Federation, which
laughed at their efforts to scramble out. Yet they escaped; the walls
were found to be not so very high and strong; in one place or another
they crumbled away, and the prisoners escaped. They gained what they
wanted; their grievances were no longer intolerable. What working man or
woman on hearing of it did not burn to follow, and did not feel the
grievances of life harder to be tolerated than before? If that feeble
lot could win their pennyworth of freedom, who might not expect
deliverance? People talk of "strike fever" as though it were an
infection; and so it is. It is the infection of a sudden hope.

After the sneer, the _Times_ proceeded to attribute the strikes to a
natural desire for idleness during the hot weather. Seldom has so base
an accusation been brought against our country, even by her worst
enemies. The country consists almost entirely of working people, the
other classes being a nearly negligible fraction in point of numbers.
The restlessness and discontent were felt far and wide among nearly all
the working people, and to suggest that hundreds of thousands
contemplated all the risks and miseries of stopping work because they
wanted to be idle in the shade displayed the ignorance our educated
classes often display in speaking of the poor. For I suppose the thing
was too cruel for a joke.

Hardly less pitiable than such ignorance was the nonchalant excuse of
those who pleaded: "We have our grievances too. We all want something
that we haven't got. We should all like our incomes raised. But we don't
go about striking and rioting." It reminds one of Lord Rosebery's
contention, some fifteen years ago, that in point of pleasure all men
are fairly equal, and the rich no happier than the poor. It sounds very
pretty and philosophic, but those who know what poverty is know it to be
absolutely untrue. If Lord Rosebery had ever tried poverty, he would
have known it was untrue. All the working people know it, and they know
that the grievances in which one can talk about income are never to be
compared with the grievances which hang on the turn of a penny, or the
chance of a shilling more or a shilling less per week.

To a man receiving £20 a week the difference of £2 one way or other is
important, but it is not vital. If his income drops to £18 a week he and
his family have just as much to eat and drink and wear; probably they
live in the same house as before; the only change is a different place
for the summer holiday, and, perhaps, the dress-circle instead of the
stalls at a theatre. To a man with £200 a week the loss of £20 a week
hardly makes any difference at all. He may grumble; he may drop a motor,
or a yacht, but in his ordinary daily life he feels no change. To a
docker making twenty shillings a week the difference of two shillings is
not merely important, it is vital. The addition of it may mean three
rooms for the family instead of two; it may mean nine shillings a week
instead of seven to feed five mouths; it may mean meat twice a week, or
half as much more bread and margarine than before, or a saving for
second-hand clothes, and perhaps threepenn'orth of pleasure. In full
work a docker at the old 7d. an hour would make more than twenty
shillings a week; but the full weeks are rare, and about eighteen
shillings would be all he could get on an average. The extra penny an
hour for three days' work might bring him in about half a crown. To him
and to his wife and children the difference was not merely important, it
was vital.

Or take the case of the 15,000 women who struck for a rise in South
London, and got it. We may put their average wage at nine shillings a
week. In the accounts of a woman who is keeping a family of three,
including herself, on that wage, a third of the money goes to the rent
of one room. Two shillings of the rest go for light, fuel, and soda.
That leaves four shillings a week to feed and clothe three people. Even
Lord Rosebery could hardly maintain that the opportunities for pleasure
on that amount were equal to his own. But the women jam-makers won an
advance of two shillings by their strike; the box-makers from 1_s_.
3_d_. to three shillings; even the glue and size workers got a shilling
rise. It was hardly up to Lord Rosebery's standard yet. It did not
represent the _Times_ paradise of sitting idle in the shade. But think
what it means when week by week you have jealously watched nine solid
pennies going in bread, nine more in meat, and another six in tea! Or
think what such an addition means to those working-women from the North,
who at the same time protested in Trafalgar Square against the
compulsory insurance because the payment of threepence a week would lose
them two of their dinners--twice the penn'orth of bread and ha'porth of
cheese that they always enjoyed for dinner!

When I was assisting in an inquiry into wages and expenditure some years
ago, one head of a family added as a note at the foot of his budget: "I
see that we always spend more than we earn, but as we are never in debt
I attribute this result to the thriftiness of my wife." Behind that
sentence a history of grievances patiently endured is written, but only
the _Times_ would wonder that such grievances are discovered to be
intolerable the moment a gleam of hope appears. When the _Times_, in the
same article, went on to protest that if the railwaymen struck, they
would be kicking not only against the Companies but "against the nature
of things," I have no clear idea of the meaning. The nature of things is
no doubt very terrible and strong, but for working people the most
terrible and strongest part of it is poverty. All else is sophisticated;
here is the thing itself. One remembers two sentences in Mr. Shaw's
preface to _Major Barbara_:

  "The crying need of the nation is not for better morals,
  cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of
  fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love, and
  fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And
  the evil to be attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft,
  kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence,
  nor any other of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice,
  but simply poverty."

Strikes are the children of Poverty by Hope. For a long time past the
wealth of the country has rapidly increased. Gold has poured into it
from South Africa, dividends from all the world; trade has boomed, great
fortunes have been made; luxury has redoubled; the standard of living
among the rich has risen high. The working people know all this; they
can see it with their eyes, and they refuse to be satisfied with the
rich man's blessing on the poor. What concerns them more than the
increase in the quantity of gold is the natural result in the shrinkage
of the penny. It is no good getting sevenpence an hour for your work if
it does not buy so much as the "full, round orb of the docker's
tanner," which Mr. John Burns saw rising over the dock gates more than
twenty years ago, when he stood side by side with Ben Tillett and Tom
Mann, and when Sir H. Llewellyn Smith and Mr. Vaughan Nash wrote the
story of the contest. If prosperity has increased, so have prices, and
what cost a tanner then costs eightpence now, or more than that. To keep
pace with such a change is well worth a strike, since nothing but
strikes can avail. So vital is the worth of a penny; so natural is it to
kick against the nature of things, when their nature takes the form of
steady poverty amid expanding wealth. That is the simultaneous discovery
which raised the ridicule of the _Times_--that, and the further
discovery that, in Carlyle's phrase, "the Empire of old Mammon is
everywhere breaking up." The intangible walls that resisted so
obstinately are fading away. The power of wealth is suspected. Strike
after strike secures its triumphant penny, and no return of Peterloo, or
baton charges on the Liverpool St. George's Hall, driving the silent
crowd over the edge of its steep basis "as rapidly and continually as
water down a steep rock," as was seen during the strikes of August 1911,
can now check the infection of such a hope. It was an old saying of the
men who won our political liberties that the redress of grievances must
precede supply. The working people are standing now for a different
phase of liberty, but their work is their supply, and having
simultaneously discovered their grievances to be intolerable, they are
making the same old use of the ancient precept.




XII


"FIX BAYONETS!"

"Oh, que j'aime le militaire!" sighed the old French song, no doubt with
a touch of frivolity; but the sentiment moves us all. Sages have thought
the army worth preserving for a dash of scarlet and a roll of the
kettledrum; in every State procession it is the implements of death and
the men of blood that we parade; and not to nursemaids only is the
soldier irresistible. The glamour of romance hangs round him. Terrible
with knife and spike and pellet he stalks through this puddle of a
world, disdainful of drab mankind. Multitudes may toil at keeping alive,
drudging through their scanty years for no hope but living and giving
life; he shares with very few the function of inflicting death, and
moves gaily clad and light of heart. "No doubt, some civilian
occupations are very useful," said the author of an old drill-book; I
think it was Lord Wolseley, and it was a large admission for any officer
to have made. It was certainly Lord Wolseley who wrote in his _Soldier's
Pocket-Book_ that the soldier "must believe his duties are the noblest
that fall to man's lot":

  "He must be taught to despise all those of civil life. Soldiers,
  like missionaries, must be fanatics. An army thoroughly imbued
  with fanaticism can be killed, but never suffer disgrace;
  Napoleon, in speaking of it, said, 'Il en faut pour se faire tuer.'"

And not only to get himself killed, but to kill must the soldier be
imbued with this fanaticism and self-glory. In the same spirit Mr.
Kipling and Mr. Fletcher have told us in their _History of England_ that
there is only one better trade than being a soldier, and that is being a
sailor:

  "To serve King and country in the army is the second best
  profession for Englishmen of all classes; to serve in the navy,
  I suppose we all admit, is the best."

As we all admit it, certainly it does seem very hard on all classes that
there should be anything else to do in the world besides soldiering and
sailoring. It is most deplorable that, in Lord Wolseley's words, some
civilian occupations are very useful; for, if they were not, we might
all have a fine time playing at soldiers--real soldiers, with
guns!--from a tumultuous cradle to a bloody grave. If only we could
abolish the civilian and his ignoble toil, what a rollicking life we
should all enjoy upon this earthly field of glory!

Such was the fond dream of many an innocent heart, when in August of
1911 we saw the soldiers distributed among the city stations or posted
at peaceful junctions where suburb had met suburb for years in the
morning, and parted at evening without a blow. There the sentry stood,
let us say, at a gate of Euston station. There he stood, embodying
glory, enjoying the second best profession for Englishmen of all
classes. He was dressed in clean khaki and shiny boots. On his head he
bore a huge dome of fluffy bearskin, just the thing for a fashionable
muff; oppressive in the heat, no doubt, but imparting additional
grandeur to his mien. There he stood, emblematic of splendour, and on
each side of him were encamped distressful little families, grasping
spades and buckets and seated on their corded luggage, unable to move
because of the railway strike, while behind him flared a huge
advertisement that said, "The Sea is Calling you." Along the kerbstone a
few yards in front were ranged the children of the district, row upon
row, uncombed, in rags, filthy from head to foot, but silent with joy
and admiration as they gazed upon the face of war. For many a gentle
girl and boy that Friday and Saturday were the days of all their
lives--the days on which the pretty soldiers came.

Nor was it only the charm of nice clothes and personal appearance that
attracted them. Horror added its tremulous delight. There the sentry
stood, ready to kill people at a word. His right knee was slightly bent,
and against his right foot he propped the long wooden instrument that he
killed with. In little pouches round his belt he carried the pointed
bits of metal that the instrument shoots out quicker than arrows. It was
whispered that some of them were placed already inside the gun itself,
and could be fired as fast as a teacher could count, and each would kill
a man. And at the end of the gun gleamed a knife, about as long as a
butcher's carving-knife. It would go through a fattish person's body as
through butter, and the point would stick a little way through the
clothes at his back. Down each side of the knife ran a groove to let the
blood out, so that the man might die quicker. It was a pleasure to look
at such a thing. It was better than watching the sheep and oxen driven
into the Aldgate slaughter-houses. It was almost as good as the glimpse
of the executioner driving up to Pentonville in his dog-cart the evening
before an execution.

Few have given the Home Office credit for the amount of interesting and
cheap amusement it then afforded by parcelling out the country among the
military authorities. In a period of general lassitude and holiday, it
supplied the populace with a spectacle more widely distributed than the
Coronation, and equally encouraging to loyalty. For it is not only
pleasure that the sight of the soldiers in their midst provides: it
gives every man and woman and child an opportunity of realising the
significance of uniforms. Here are soldiers, men sprung from the working
classes, speaking the same language, and having the same thoughts; men
who have been brought up in poor homes, have known hunger, and have
nearly all joined the army because they were out of work. And now that
they are dressed in a particular way, they stand there with guns and
those beautiful gleaming knives, ready, at a word, to kill people--to
kill their own class, their own friends and relations, if it so happens.
The word of command from an officer is alone required, and they would do
it. People talk about the reading of the Riot Act and the sounding of
the bugles in warning before the shooting begins; but no such warning is
necessary. Lord Mansfield laid it down in 1780 that the Riot Act was but
"a step in terrorism and of gentleness." There is no need for such
gentleness. At an officer's bare word, a man in uniform must shoot. And
all for a shilling a day, with food and lodging! To the inexperienced
intelligence of men and women, the thing seems incredible, and the
country owes a debt of gratitude to the Home Office for showing the
whole working population that it is true. Certainly, the soldiers
themselves strongly object to being put to this use. Their Red Book of
instructions insists that the primary duty of keeping order rests with
the civil power. It lays it down that soldiers should never be required
to act except in cases where the riot cannot reasonably be expected to
be quelled without resorting to the risk of inflicting death. But the
Home Office, in requiring soldiers to act throughout the whole country
at points where no riot at all was reasonably expected, gave us all
during that railway strike an object-lesson in the meaning of uniform
more impressive than the pictures on a Board School wall. Mr. Brailsford
has well said, "the discovery of tyrants is that, for a soldier's
motive, a uniform will serve as well as an idea."

Not a century has passed since the days when, as the noblest mind of
those times wrote, a million of hungry operative men rose all up, came
all out into the streets, and--stood there. "Who shall compute," he
asked:

  "Who shall compute the waste and loss, the destruction of
  every sort, that was produced in the Manchester region by
  Peterloo alone! Some thirteen unarmed men and women cut
  down--the number of the slain and maimed is very countable;
  but the treasury of rage, burning, hidden or visible, in all hearts
  ever since, more or less perverting the effort and aim of all
  hearts ever since, is of unknown extent. 'How came ye among
  us, in your cruel armed blindness, ye unspeakable County
  Yeomanry, sabres flourishing, hoofs prancing, and slashed us
  down at your brute pleasure; deaf, blind to all _our_ claims and
  woes and wrongs; of quick sight and sense to your own claims
  only! There lie poor, sallow, work-worn weavers, and complain
  no more now; women themselves are slashed and sabred;
  howling terror fills the air; and ye ride prosperous, very
  victorious--ye unspeakable: give _us_ sabres too, and then come
  on a little!' Such are Peterloos."

The parallel, if not exact, is close enough. During popular movements
in Germany and Russia, the party of freedom has sometimes hoped that the
troops would come over to their side--would "fraternise," as the
expression goes. The soldiers in those countries are even more closely
connected with the people than our own, for about one in three of the
young men pass into the army, whether they like it or not, and in two or
three years return to ordinary life. Yet the hope of "fraternisation"
has nearly always been in vain. Half a dozen here and there may stand
out to defend their brothers and their homes. But the risk is too great,
the bonds of uniform and habit too strong. Hitherto in England, we have
jealously preserved our civil liberties from the dragooning of military
districts, and the few Peterloos of our history, compared with the
suppressions in other countries, prove how justified our jealousy has
been. It may be true--we wish it were always true, that, as Carlyle
says, "if your Woolwich grapeshot be but eclipsing Divine Justice, and
the God's radiance itself gleam recognisable athwart such grapeshot,
then, yes, then, is the time coming for fighting and attacking." We all
wish that were always true, and that the people of every country would
always act upon it. But for the moment, we are grateful for the reminder
that, whether it eclipses Divine Justice or not, the grapeshot is still
there, and that a man in uniform, at a word of command, will shoot his
mother.




XIII


"OUR FATHERS HAVE TOLD US"

We have forgotten, else it would be impossible they should try to befool
us. We have forgotten the terrible years when England lay cold and
starving under the clutch of the landlords and their taxes on food.
Terror is soon forgotten, for otherwise life could not endure. Not
seventy years have gone since that clutch was loosened, but the iron
which entered into the souls of our fathers is no more remembered. How
many old labourers, old operatives, or miners are now left to recall the
wretchedness of that toiling and starving childhood before the corn-tax
was removed? Few are remaining now, and they speak little and will soon
be gone. The horror of it is scattered like the night, and we think no
more of it, nor imagine its reality. It seems very long ago, like
Waterloo or the coach to York--so long ago that we can almost hope it
was not true.

And yet our fathers have told us of it. They and their fathers lived
through it at its worst. Only six years have passed since Mrs. Cobden
Unwin collected the evidence of aged labourers up and down the country,
and issued their piteous memories in the book called _The Hungry
'Forties_. Ill-spelt, full of mistakes, the letters are stronger
documents than the historian's eloquence. In every detail of misery, one
letter agrees with the other. In one after another we read of the
quartern loaf ranging from 7_d_. to 11-1/2_d_., and heavy, sticky,
stringy bread at that; or we read of the bean porridge or grated potato
that was their chief food; or, if they were rather better off, they told
of oatmeal and a dash of red herring--one red herring among three people
was thought a luxury. And then there was the tea--sixpence an ounce, and
one ounce to last a family for a week, eked out with the scrapings of
burnt crusts to give the water a colour. One man told how his parents
went to eat raw snails in the fields. Another said the look of a
butcher's shop was all the meat they ever got. "A ungry belly makes a
man desprit," wrote one, but for poaching a pheasant the hungry man was
imprisoned fourteen years. Seven shillings to nine shillings a week was
the farm labourer's wage, and it took twenty-six shillings then to buy
the food that seven would buy now. What a vivid and heartrending picture
of cottage life under the landlord's tax is given in one old man's
memory of his childish hunger and his mother's pitiful self-denial! "We
was not allowed free speech," he writes, "so I would just pull mother's
face when at meals, and then she would say, 'Boy, I can't eat this
crust,' and O! the joy it would bring my little heart."

We have forgotten it. Wretched as is the daily life of a large part of
our working people--the only people who really count in a country's
prosperity--we can no longer realise what it was when wages were so low
and food so dear that the struggle with starvation never ceased. But in
those days there were men who saw and realised it. The poor die and
leave no record. Their labour is consumed, their bodies rot unnamed, and
their habitations are swept away. They do not tell their public secret,
and at the most their existence is recorded in the registers of the
parish, the workhouse, or the gaol. But from time to time men have
arisen with the heart to see and the gift of speech, and in the years
when the oppression of the landlords was at its worst a few such men
arose. We do not listen to them now, for no one cares to hear of misery.
And we do not listen, because most of them wrote in verse, and verse is
not liked unless it tells of love or beauty or the sticky pathos of
drawing-room songs. But it so happens that two of the first who saw and
spoke also sang of love and beauty with a power and sweetness that
compel us to listen still. And so, in turning their well-known pages, we
suddenly come upon things called "The Masque of Anarchy" or "The Age of
Bronze," and, with a moment's wonder what they are all about, we pass on
to "The Sensitive Plant," or "When We Two Parted." As we pass, we may
just glance at the verses and read:

  "What is Freedom?--ye can tell
  That which slavery is, too well--
  For its very name has grown
  To an echo of your own.
  'Tis to work and have such pay
  As just keeps life from day to day
  In your limbs....

  'Tis to see your children weak
  With their mothers pine and peak,
  When the winter winds are bleak--
  They are dying whilst I speak."

Or, turning on, perhaps, in search of the "Ode to the West Wind," we
casually notice the song beginning:

  "Men of England, wherefore plough
  For the lords who lay you low?
  Wherefore weave with toil and care
  The rich robes your tyrants wear?

  Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save,
  From the cradle to the grave,
  Those ungrateful drones who would
  Drain your sweat--nay, drink your blood?"

And so to the conclusion:

  "With plough and spade, and hoe and loom,
  Trace your grave, and build your tomb,
  And weave your winding-sheet, till fair
  England be your sepulchre."

Or else, in looking once more for that exquisite scene between Haidée
and Don Juan on the beach, we fall unawares upon these lines:

  "Year after year they voted cent. per cent.,
  Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions--why? for rent!
  They roared, they dined, they drank, they swore they meant
  To die for England--why then live?--for rent!

         *       *       *       *       *

  And will they not repay the treasures lent?
  No; down with everything, and up with rent!
  Their good, ill, health, wealth, joy, or discontent,
  Being, end, aim, religion--rent, rent, rent!"

The men who uttered such lines were driven from their class, their
homes, and their country. They were despised and hated, like all who
protest against oppression and remind the smug world of uncomfortable
things. But they were great poets. One of them was our sweetest singer,
the other was, when he wrote, the most conspicuous figure in Europe, and
the most shattering force. Even England, which cares so little for her
greatest inheritance of passionate intellect, cannot yet forget them.
But others who sang the same terrible theme she has long forgotten, or
she keeps them only on the shelves of curious and dusty investigators.
Such men, I mean, as Ebenezer Elliot, Ebenezer Jones, Ernest Jones,
Thomas Cooper, William James Linton, and Gerald Massey, who so lately
died.

They were not high-born, nor were they shining poets like the twin stars
of freedom whom I have quoted. Little scholarship was theirs, little
perfection of song. Some had taught themselves their letters at the
forge, some in the depths of the mine, some sang their most daring lines
in prison cells where they were not allowed even to write down the
words. Nearly all knew poverty and hunger at first hand; nearly all were
persecuted for righteousness' sake. For maintaining the cause of the
poor and the helpless they were mocked and reviled; scorn was their
reward. The governing classes whose comfort they disturbed wished them
dead; so did the self-righteous classes whose conscience they ruffled.
That is the common fate of any man or woman who probes a loathsome evil,
too long skimmed over. The peculiarity of these men was that, when they
were driven to speak, they spoke in lines that flew on wings through the
country. Indignation made their verse, and the burning memory of the
wrongs they had seen gave it a power beyond its own expression. Which
shall we recall of those ghostly poems, once so quick with flame? Still,
at moments of deep distress or public wrong-doing, we may hear the echo
of the Corn-law Rhymer's anthem:

  "When wilt thou save the people?
    O God of mercy! when?
  Not kings and lords, but nations!
    Not thrones and crowns, but men!"

Or if we read his first little book of rhymes, that may be had for
twopence now, we shall find the pictures of the life that was lived
under Protection--the sort of life the landlords and their theorists
invite us to enact again. From his "Black Hole of Calcutta" we take the
lines:

  "Bread-tax'd weaver, all can see
  What that tax hath done for thee,
  And thy children, vilely led,
  Singing hymns for shameful bread,
  Till the stones of every street
  Know their little naked feet."

Or let us take one verse from the lines, "O Lord, how long?"

  "Child, what hast thou with sleep to do?
    Awake, and dry thine eyes!
  Thy tiny hands must labour too;
    Our bread is tax'd--arise!
  Arise, and toil long hours twice seven,
    For pennies two or three;
  Thy woes make angels weep in Heaven--
    But England still is free."

Or we might recall "The Coming Cry," by Ebenezer Jones, with its great
refrain:

  "Perhaps it's better than starvation,--once we'll pray, and then
  We'll all go building workhouses, million, million men!"

Or we might recall Ernest Jones and his "Song of the 'Lower Classes,'"
where the first verse runs:

  "We plow and sow, we're so very, very low,
    That we delve in the dirty clay;
  Till we bless the plain with the golden grain
    And the vale with the fragrant hay.
  Our place we know, we're so very, very low,
    'Tis down at the landlord's feet;
  We're not too low the grain to grow,
    But too low the bread to eat."

Or shall we take one verse from the terrible "Easter Hymn," written by
the same true-hearted prisoner for freedom:

  "Like royal robes on the King of Jews,
  We're mocked with rights that we may not use;
  'Tis the people so long have been crucified,
  But the thieves are still wanting on either side.

  _Chorus_--Mary and Magdalen, Peter and John,
            Swell the sad burden, and bear it on."

The iteration of the idea throughout the poem is tremendous in effect,
and the idea comes close to Swinburne's ode, "Before a Crucifix":

  "O sacred head, O desecrate,
    O labour-wounded feet and hands,
  O blood poured forth in pledge to fate
    Of nameless lives in divers lands,
  O slain and spent and sacrificed
    People, the grey-grown speechless Christ."

Time would fail to tell of Linton's "Torch-Dance of Liberty," or of
Massey's "Men of Forty-eight," and there are many more--the utterance of
men who spoke from the heart, knowing in their own lives what suffering
was. But let us rather turn for a moment to the prose of a man who, also
reared in hardship's school, had learnt to succour misery. Speaking at
the time when Protection was biting and clawing the ground in the last
death-struggle, as all men but the landlords hoped, Carlyle asked this
question of the people:

  "From much loud controversy, and Corn-law debating, there
  rises, loud though inarticulate, once more in these years, this
  very question among others, Who made the Land of England?
  Who made it, this respectable English Land, wheat-growing,
  metalliferous, carboniferous, which will let readily, hand over
  hand, for seventy millions or upwards, as it here lies: who did
  make it? 'We,' answer the much-consuming Aristocracy;
  'We!' as they ride in, moist with the sweat of Melton Mowbray:
  'It is we that made it, or are the heirs, assigns and representatives
  of those who did!'--My brothers, You? Everlasting honour
  to you, then; and Corn-laws many as you will, till your own
  deep stomachs cry Enough, or some voice of Human pity for
  our famine bids you Hold!"

So our fathers have told us, and we have forgotten. It is all very long
ago, and the Protectionist says that times have changed. Certainly times
have changed, and it was deliverance from Protection that changed them
most. But if landowners have changed, if they are now more alien from
the people, and richer from other sources than land, we have no reason
to suppose them less greedy or more pitiful; nor can a nation live on
the off-chance of pity. Seventy years ago the net encompassed the land.
We have seen how the people suffered under its entanglement. In the
sight of all, landowners and speculators are now trying to spread that
net again. Are we to suppose the English people have not the hereditary
instinct of sparrows to keep them outside its meshes?




XIV


THE GRAND JURY

When Mr. Clarkson, of the Education Office, received a summons to attend
the Grand Jury, or to answer the contrary at his peril, he was glad.
"For now," he thought, "I shall share in the duties of democracy and be
brought face to face with the realities of life."

"Mrs. Wilson," he said to the landlady, as she brought in his breakfast,
"what does this summons mean by describing the Court as being in the
suburbs of the City of London? Is there a Brixton Branch?"

"O Lordy me!" cried the landlady, "I do hope, sir, as you've not got
yourself mixed up with no such things; but the Court's nigh against St.
Paul's, as I know from going there just before my poor nephew passed
into retirement, as done him no good."

"The summons," Mr. Clarkson went on, "the summons says I'm to inquire,
present, do, and execute all and singular things with which I may be
then and there enjoined. Why should only the law talk like that?"

"Begging your pardon, sir," replied the landlady, "I sometimes do think
it comes of their dressing so old-fashioned. But I'd ask it of you not
to read me no more of such like, if you'd be so obliging. For it do make
me come over all of a tremble."

"I wonder if her terror arises from the hideousness of the legal style
or from association of ideas?" thought Mr. Clarkson as he opened a
Milton, of which he always read a few lines every morning to dignify the
day.

On the appointed date, he set out eastward with an exhilarating sense of
change, and thoroughly enjoyed the drive down Holborn among the crowd of
City men. "It's rather strangely like going to the seaside," he remarked
to the man next him on the motor-'bus. The man asked him if he had come
from New Zealand to see the decorations, and arrived late. "Oh no," said
Mr. Clarkson, "I seldom think the Colonies interesting, and I distrust
decoration in every form."

It was unfortunate, but the moment he mounted the Court stairs, the
decoration struck him. There were the expected scenes, historic and
emblematic of Roman law, blindfold Justice, the Balance, the Sword, and
other encouraging symbols. But in one semicircle he especially noticed a
group of men, women, and children, dancing to the tabor's sound in naked
freedom. "Please, could you tell me," he asked of a stationary
policeman, "whether that scene symbolises the Age of Innocence, before
Law was needed, or the Age of Anarchy, when Law will be needed no
longer?"

"Couldn't rightly say," answered the policeman, looking up sideways;
"but I do wish they'd cover them people over more decent. They're a
houtrage on respectable witnesses."

"All art--" Mr. Clarkson was beginning, when the policeman said "Grand
Jury?" and pushed him through a door into a large court. A vision of
middle-age was there gathering, and a murmur of complaint filled the
room--the hurried breakfast, the heat, the interrupted business, the
reported large number of prisoners, likely to occupy two days, or even
three.

Silence was called, and four or five elderly gentlemen in
black-and-scarlet robes--"wise in their wigs, and flamboyant as
flamingoes," as a daily paper said of the judges at the Coronation--some
also decorated with gilded chains and deep fur collars, in spite of the
heat, entered from a side door and took their seats upon a raised
platform. Each carried in his hand a nosegay of flowers, screwed up
tight in a paper frill with lace-work round the edges, like the bouquets
that enthusiasts or the management throw to actresses.

"Are those flowers to cheer the prisoners?" Mr. Clarkson whispered, "or
are they the rudimentary survivals of the incense that used to
counteract the smell and infection of gaol-fever?"

"Covent Garden," was the reply, and the list of jurors was called. The
first twenty-three were sent into another room to select their foreman,
and, though Mr. Clarkson had not the slightest desire to be chosen, he
observed that the other jurors did not even look in his direction.
Finally, a foreman was elected, no one knew for what reasons, and all
went back to the Court to be "charged." A gentleman in black-and-scarlet
made an hour's speech, reviewing the principal cases with as much
solemnity as if the Grand Jury's decisions would affect the Last
Judgment, and Mr. Clarkson began to realise his responsibility so
seriously that when the jurors were dismissed to their duties, he took
his seat before a folio of paper, a pink blotting-pad, and two clean
quill pens, with a resolve to maintain the cause of justice, whatever
might befall.

"Page eight, number twenty-one," shouted the black-robed usher, who
guided the jurors as a dog guides sheep, and wore the cheerful air of
congenial labour successfully performed. Turning up the reference in the
book of cases presented to each juror, Mr. Clarkson found: "Charles
Jones, 35, clerk; forging and uttering, knowing the same to be forged, a
receipt for money, to wit, a receipt for fees on a plaint note of the
Fulham County Court, with intent to defraud."

"This threatens to be a very abstruse case," he remarked to a red-faced
juror on his right.

"A half of bitter would elucidate it wonderful to my mind," was the
answer.

But already a policeman had been sworn, and given his evidence with the
decisiveness of a gramophone.

"Any questions?" said the foreman, looking round the table. No one
spoke.

"Signify, gentlemen, signify!" cried the genial usher, and all but Mr.
Clarkson held up a hand.

"Two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve," counted the usher, totting up the
hands till he reached a majority. "True Bill, True Bill! Next case. Page
eleven, number fifty-two."

"Do you mean to tell me that is all?" asked Mr. Clarkson, turning to his
neighbour.

"Say no more, and I'll make it a quart," replied the red-faced man,
ticking off the last case and turning up the new one, in which a doctor
was already giving his evidence against a woman charged with the wilful
murder of her newly-born male child.

"Signify, gentlemen, signify!" cried the usher. "Two, four, six, eight,
ten, twelve. True Bill, True Bill! Next case. Page fourteen, number
seventy-two."

"Stop a moment," stammered Mr. Clarkson, half rising; "if you please,
stop one moment. I wish to ask if we are justified in rushing through
questions of life and death in this manner. What do we know of this
woman, for instance--her history, her distress, her state of mind?"

"Sit down!" cried some. "Oh, shut it!" cried others. All looked at him
with the amused curiosity of people in a tramcar looking at a talkative
child. The usher bustled across the room, and said in a loud and
reassuring whisper: "All them things has got nothing to do with you,
sir. Those is questions for the Judge and Petty Jury upstairs. The
magistrates have sat on all these cases already and committed them for
trial; so all you've got to do is to find a True Bill, and you can't go
wrong."

"If we can't go wrong, there's no merit in going right," protested Mr.
Clarkson.

"Next case. Page fourteen, number seventy-two," shouted the usher again,
and as the witness was a Jew, his hat was sent for. "There's a lot of
history behind that hat," said Mr. Clarkson, wishing to propitiate
public opinion.

"Wish that was all there was behind it," said the juror on his left. The
Jew finished his evidence and went away. The foreman glanced round, and
the usher had already got as far as "Signify," when a venerable juror,
prompted by Mr. Clarkson's example, interposed.

"I should like to ask that witness one further question," he said in a
fine Scottish accent, and after considerable shouting, the Jew was
recalled.

"I should like to ask you, my man," said the venerable juror, "how you
spell your name?" The name was spelt, the juror carefully inscribed it
on a blank space opposite the charge, sighed with relief, and looked
round. "Signify, gentlemen, signify!" cried the usher. "Two, four, six,
eight, ten, twelve. True Bill, True Bill! Next case. Page six, number
eleven."

Number eleven was a genuine murder case, and sensation pervaded the room
when the murdered man's wife was brought in, weeping. She sobbed out the
oath, and the foreman, wishing to be kind, said, encouragingly, "State
briefly what you know of this case."

She sobbed out her story, and was led away. The foreman glanced round
the tables.

"I think we ought to hear the doctor," said the red-faced man. The
doctor was called and described a deep incised wound, severing certain
anatomical details.

"I think we ought to hear the constable," said the red-faced man, and
there was a murmur of agreement. A policeman came in, carrying a brown
paper parcel. Having described the arrest, he unwrapped a long knife,
which was handed round the tables for inspection. When it reached the
red-faced juror, he regarded the blade closely up and down, with
gloating satisfaction. "Are those stains blood?" he asked the policeman.

"Yes, sir; them there is the poor feller's blood."

The red-faced man looked again, and suddenly turning upon Mr. Clarkson,
went through a pantomime of plunging the knife into his throat. At Mr.
Clarkson's horrified recoil he laughed himself purple.

"Well said the Preacher you may know a man by his laughter," Mr.
Clarkson murmured, while the red-faced man patted him amicably on the
back.

"No offence, I hope; no offence!" he said. "Come and have some lunch. I
always must, and I always do eat a substantial lunch. Nice, juicy cut
from the joint, and a little dry sherry? What do you say?"

"Thank you very much indeed," said Mr. Clarkson, instantly benign. "You
are most kind, but I always have coffee and a roll and butter."

"O my God!" exclaimed the red-faced man, and speaking across Mr.
Clarkson to another substantial juror, he entered into discussion on the
comparative merits of dry sherry and champagne-and-bitters.

Soon after two they both returned in the comfortable state of mind
produced by the solution of doubt. But Mr. Clarkson's doubts had not
been solved, and his state of mind was far from comfortable. All through
the lunch hour he had been tortured by uncertainty. A plain duty
confronted him, but how could he face it? He hated a scene. He abhorred
publicity as he abhorred the glaring advertisements in the streets. He
had never suffered so much since the hour before he had spoken at the
Oxford Union on the question whether the sense for beauty can be
imparted by instruction. He closed his eyes. He felt the sweat standing
on his forehead. And still the cases went on. "Two, four, six, eight,
ten, twelve. True Bill. True Bill. Two, four, six, eight...."

"Now then, sleepy!" cried the red-faced man in his ear, giving him a
genial dig with his elbow. Mr. Clarkson quivered at the touch, but he
rose.

"Gentlemen," he began, "I wish to protest against the continuation of
this farce."

The jury became suddenly alert, and his voice was drowned in chaos.
"Order, order! Chair, chair!" they shouted. "Everybody's doing it!" sang
one.

"I call that gentleman to order," said the foreman, rising with
dignity. "He has previously interrupted and delayed our proceedings,
without bringing fresh light to bear upon our investigations. After the
luncheon interval, I was pleased to observe that for one cause or
another--I repeat, for one cause or another--he was distinctly--shall I
say somnolent, gentlemen? Yes, I will say somnolent. And I wish to
inform him that the more somnolent he remains, the better we shall all
be pleased."

"Hear, hear! Quite true!" shouted the jury.

"Does it appear to you, sir, fitting to sit here wasting time?" Mr.
Clarkson continued, with diminishing timidity. "Does it seem to you a
proper task for twenty-three apparently rational beings--"

"Twenty-two! Twenty-two!" cried the red-faced man, adding up the jurors
with the end of a pen, and ostentatiously omitting Mr. Clarkson.

The jurors shook with laughter. They wiped tears from their eyes. They
rolled their heads on the pink blotting-paper in their joy. When quiet
was restored, the foreman proceeded:

"I have already ruled that gentleman out of order, and I warn him that
if he perseveres in his contumacious disregard of common decency and the
chair, I shall proceed to extremities as the law directs. We are here,
gentlemen, to fulfil a public duty as honourable British citizens, and
here we will remain until that duty is fulfilled, or we will know the
reason why."

He glanced defiantly round, assuming an aspect worthy of the last stand
at Maiwand. Looking at Mr. Clarkson as turkeys might look at a stray
canary, the jurors expressed their applause.

But the genial usher took pity, and whispered across the table to him,
"It'll all come right, sir; it'll all come right. You wait a bit. The
Grand Jury always rejects one case before it's done; sometimes two."

And sure enough, next morning, while Mr. Clarkson was reading Burke's
speeches which he had brought with him, one of the jurors objected to
the evidence in the eighty-seventh case. "We cannot be too cautious,
gentlemen," he said, "in arriving at a decision in these delicate
matters. The apprehension of blackmail in relation to females hangs over
every living man in this country."

"Delicate matters; blackmail; relation to females; great apprehension of
blackmail in these delicate matters," murmured the jury, shaking their
heads, and they threw out the Bill with the consciousness of an
independent and righteous deed.

Soon after midday, the last of the cases was finished, and having
signified a True Bill for nearly the hundredth time, the jurors were
conducted into the Court where a prisoner was standing in the dock for
his real trial. As though they had saved a tottering State, the Judge
thanked them graciously for their services, and they were discharged.

"Just a drop of something to show there's no ill-feeling?" said the
red-faced man as they passed into the street.

"Thank you very much," replied Mr. Clarkson warmly. "I assure you I have
not the slightest ill-feeling of any kind. But I seldom drink."

"Bless my soul!" said the red-faced man. "Then, what _do_ you do?"




XV


A NEW CONSCRIPTION

When the Territorial exclaims that, for his part, he would refuse to
inhabit a planet on which there was no hope of war, the peaceful
listener shudderingly charges the inventor of Territorials with
promoting a bloodthirsty mind. After all the prayers for peace in our
time--prayers in which even Territorials are expected to join on church
parade--it appears an impious folly to appraise war as a necessity for
human happiness. Or if indeed it be a blessing, however much in
disguise, why not boldly pray to have the full benefit of it in our
time, instead of passing it on, like unearned increment, for the
advantage of posterity? Such a thing is unimaginable. A prayer for war
would make people jump; it would empty a church quicker than the
collection. Nevertheless, it is probable that the great majority of
every congregation does in its heart share the Territorial's opinion,
and, if there were no possibility of war ever again anywhere in the
world, they would find life upon this planet a trifle flat.

The impulse to hostilities arises not merely from the delight in scenes
of blood enjoyed at a distance, though that is the commonest form of
military ardour, and in many a bloody battle the finest fruits of
victory are reaped over newspapers and cigars at the bar or in the back
garden. There is no such courage as glows in the citizen's bosom when he
peruses the telegrams of slaughter, just as there is no such ferocity as
he imbibes from the details of a dripping murder. "War! War! Bloody war!
North, South, East, or West!" cries the soldier in one of Mr. Kipling's
pretty tales; but in real life that cry arises rather from the
music-halls than from the soldier, and many a high-souled patriot at
home would think himself wronged if perpetual peace deprived him of his
one opportunity of displaying valour to his friends, his readers, or his
family. All these imaginative people, whose bravery may be none the less
genuine for being vicarious, must be reckoned as the natural supporters
of war, and, indeed, one can hardly conceive any form of distant
conflict for which they would not stand prepared.

But still, the widespread dislike of peace is not entirely derived from
their prowess; nor does it spring entirely from the nursemaid's love of
the red coat and martial gait, though this is on a far nobler plane, and
comes much nearer to the heart of things. The gleam of uniforms in a
drab world, the upright bearing, the rattle of a kettledrum, the boom of
a salute, the murmur of the "Dead March," the goodnight of the "Last
Post" sounding over the home-faring traffic and the quiet cradles--one
does not know by what substitutes eternal peace could exactly replace
them. For they are symbols of a spiritual protest against the
degradation of security. They perpetually re-assert the claim of a
beauty and a passion that have no concern with material advantages. They
sound defiance in the dull ears of comfort, and proclaim woe unto them
that are at ease in the city of life. Dimly the nursemaid is aware of
the protest; most people are dimly aware of it; and the few who
seriously labour for an unending reign of peace must take it into
account.

It is useless to allure mankind by promises of a pig's paradise. Much
has been rightly written about the horrors of war. Everyone knows them
to be sudden, hideous, and overwhelming; those who have seen them can
speak also of the squalor, the filthiness, the murderous swindling, and
the inconceivable absurdity of the whole monstrous performance. But the
horrors of peace, if not so obvious, come nearer to our daily life, and
we are naturally terrified at its softness, its monotony, and its
enfeebling relaxation. Of all people in the world the wealthy classes of
England and America are probably the furthest removed from danger, and
no one admires them in the least; no one in the least envies their
treadmill of successive pleasures. The most unwarlike of men are haunted
by the fear that perpetual peace would induce a general degeneration of
soul and body such as they now behold amid the rich man's sheltered
comforts. They dread the growth of a population slack of nerve, soft of
body, cruel through fear of pain, and incapable of endurance or high
endeavour. They dread the entire disappearance of that clear
decisiveness, that disregard of pleasure, that quiet devotion of self in
the face of instant death, which are to be found, now and again, in the
course of every war. Even peace, they say, may be bought too dear, and
what shall it profit a people if it gain a swill-tub of comforts and
lose its own soul?

The same argument is chosen by those who would persuade the whole
population to submit to military training, whether it is needful for the
country's defence or not. Under such training, they suppose, the
virtues that peace imperils would be maintained; a sense of equality and
comradeship would pervade all classes, and for two or three years of
life the wealthy would enjoy the realities of labour and discomfort. It
is a tempting vision, and if this were the only means of escape from
such a danger as is represe

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