The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain
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Title: The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain
Author: J. A. Cramb
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Language: English
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[Transcriber's note: transliterated Greek is surrounded by plus signs,
e.g. "+agôníai+". Italicized text is surrounded by _underscores_. In
the phrase "_sov[)a]v sov[=e]v_", "[)a]" represents a-breve, "[=e]"
represents e-macron. "[oe]" represents the oe-ligature pair.]
[Frontispiece: J. A. Cramb]
THE
ORIGINS AND DESTINY
OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
BY THE LATE
J. A. CRAMB, M.A.
PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY, QUEEN'S COLLEGE, LONDON
WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE AND PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR
LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1915
_All rights reserved_
[Illustration: Greek text]
"For the noveltie and strangenesse of the matter which I determine and
deliberate to entreat upon, is of efficacie and force enough to draw
the mindes both of young and olde to the diligent reading and digesting
of these labours. For what man is there so despising knowledge, or any
so idle and slothfull to be found, which will eschew or avoide by what
policies or by what kinde of government the most part of nations in the
universall world were vanquished, subdued and made subject unto the one
empire of the Romanes, which before that time was never seen or heard?
Or who is there that hath such earnest affection to other discipline or
studie, that he suposeth any kind of knowledge to be of more value or
worthy to be esteemed before this?"
_The Histories of the most famous Chronographer_, POLYBIUS.
(Englished by C. W., and imprinted at London, Anno 1568).
PREFACE
The following pages are a reprint of a course of lectures delivered in
May, June, and July, 1900. Their immediate inspiration was the war in
South Africa (two of the lectures deal directly with that war), but in
these pages, written fifteen years ago, will be found foreshadowed the
ideals and deeds of the present hour. When the book first appeared,
Mr. Cramb wrote that he "had been induced to publish these reflections
by the belief or the hope that at the present grave crisis they might
not be without service to his country." In the same hope his lectures
are now reprinted.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
John Adam Cramb was born at Denny, in Scotland, on the 4th of May,
1862. On leaving school he went to Glasgow University, where he
graduated in 1885, taking 1st Class Honours in Classics. In the same
year he was appointed to the Luke Fellowship in English Literature. He
also studied at Bonn University. He subsequently travelled on the
Continent, and in 1887 married the third daughter of the late Mr.
Edward W. Selby Lowndes of Winslow, and left one son. From 1888 to
1890 he was Lecturer in Modern History at Queen Margaret College,
Glasgow. Settling in London in 1890 he contributed several articles to
the _Dictionary of National Biography_, and also occasional reviews to
periodicals. For many years he was an examiner for the Civil Service
Commission. In 1892 he was appointed Lecturer and in 1893 Professor of
Modern History at Queen's College, London, where he lectured until his
death. He was also an occasional lecturer on military history at the
Staff College, Camberley, and at York, Chatham, and other centres. In
London he gave private courses on history, literature, and philosophy.
His last series of lectures was delivered in February and March, 1913,
the subject being the relations between England and Germany. In
response to many requests he was engaged in preparing these lectures
for publication when, in October, 1913, he died.
CONTENTS
PART I
THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST
LECTURE I
SECTION
WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?
1. THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HISTORY
2. ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM
3. THE MANDATE OF DESTINY
LECTURE II
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL IDEAL
1. OF THE ACTION OF STATES AND OF INDIVIDUALS
2. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY AS APPLIED TO HISTORY
3. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT
LECTURE III
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL
1. RELIGION AND IMPERIALISM
2. THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY
3. DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS
4. WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
5. THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST: A FINAL CONSIDERATION
PART II
THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
LECTURE IV
THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
1. HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
2. NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM
3. THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY
4. COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM
5. MILITARISM
LECTURE V
WHAT IS WAR?
1. THE PLACE OF WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY
2. DEFINITION OF WAR
3. COUNT TOLSTOI AND CARLYLE UPON WAR
4. COUNT TOLSTOI AS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SLAVONIC GENIUS
5. THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST AND WAR
6. THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE
7. IMPERIALISM AND WAR
LECTURE VI
THE VICISSITUDES OF STATES AND EMPIRES
1. THE METAPHYSICAL ORIGIN OF THE STATE
2. THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART
3. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION
4. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE CYCLIC THEORY
5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE "FALL OF AN EMPIRE"?
LECTURE VII
THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN AND THE DESTINY OF MAN
1. THE PRESENT STAGE IN THE HISTORY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
2. THE DESTINY OF MAN
3. THE FOUR PERIODS OF MODERN HISTORY
4. THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE
5. THE "ACT" AND THE "THOUGHT"
6. BRITAIN'S WORLD-MISSION: THE WITNESS OF THE DEAD TO THE
MANDATE OF THE PRESENT
NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
1. DOMINION OF THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY
2. NATIONALITY AND MODERN REPUBLICANISM
3. THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE
PART I
THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST
REFLECTIONS ON THE
ORIGINS AND DESTINY OF
IMPERIAL BRITAIN
LECTURE I
WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?
[_Tuesday, May_ 8_th_, 1900]
The present age has rewritten the annals of the world, and set its own
impress on the traditions of humanity. In no period has the burden of
the past weighed so heavily upon the present, or the interpretation of
its speculative import troubled the heart so profoundly, so intimately,
so monotonously.
How remote we stand from the times when Raleigh could sit down in the
Tower, and with less anxiety about his documents, State records, or
stone monuments than would now be imperative in compiling the history
of a county, proceed to write the History of the World! And in
speculation it is the Tale, the _fabula_, the procession of impressive
incidents and personages, which enthralls him, and with perfect fitness
he closes his work with the noblest Invocation to Death that literature
possesses. But beneath the variety or pathos of the Tale the present
age ever apprehends a deeper meaning, or is oppressed by a sense of
mystery, of wonder, or of sorrow unrevealed, which defies tears.
This revolution in our conception of History, this boundless industry
which in Germany, France, England, Italy, has led to the printing of
mountains of forgotten memoirs, correspondences, State papers, this
endless sifting of evidence, this treasuring above riches of the slight
results slowly and patiently drawn, is neither accident, nor transient
caprice, nor antiquarian frenzy, but a phase of the guiding impulse,
the supreme instinct of this age--the ardour to know all, to experience
all, to be all, to suffer all, in a word, to know the Truth of
things--if haply there come with it immortal life, even if there come
with it silence and utter death. The deepened significance of history
springs thus from the deepened significance of life, and the passion of
our interest in the past from the passion of our interest in the
present. The half-effaced image on a coin, the illuminated margin of a
mediaeval manuscript, the smile on a fading picture--if these have
become, as it were, fountains of unstable reveries, perpetuating the
Wonder which is greater than Knowledge, it is a power from the present
that invests them with this magic. Life has become more
self-conscious; not of the narrow self merely, but of that deeper Self,
the mystic Presence which works behind the veil.
World-history is no more the fairy tale whose end is death, but laden
with eternal meanings, significances, intimations, swift gleams of the
Timeless manifesting itself in Time. And the distinguishing function
of History as a science lies in its ceaseless effort not only to lay
bare, to crystallize the moments of all these manifestations, but to
discover their connecting bond, the ties that unite them to each other
and to the One, the hidden source of these varied manifestations,
whether revealed as transcendent thought, art, or action.
Hence, as in prosecuting elsewhere our inquiry into the origin of the
French Monarchy or the decline of oligarchic Venice, we examined not
only the characters, incidents, policies immediately connected with the
subject, but attempted an answer to the question--What is the place of
these incidents in the universal scheme of things? so in the treatment
of the theme now before us, the origins of Imperial Britain, pursuing a
similar plan, we have to consider not merely the relations of Imperial
Britain to the England and Scotland of earlier times, but its relations
to mediaeval Europe, and to determine so far as is possible its place
amongst the world-empires of the past. I use the phrase "Imperial
Britain," and not "British Empire," because from the latter territorial
associations are inseparable. It designates India, Canada, Egypt, and
the like. But by "Imperial Britain" I wish to indicate the informing
spirit, the unseen force from within the race itself, which in the past
has shapen and in the present continues to shape this outward, this
material frame of empire. With the rise of this spirit, this
consciousness within the British race of its destiny as an imperial
people, no event in recent history can fitly be compared. The unity of
Germany under the Hohenzollern is an imposing, a far-reaching
achievement. The aspirations of the period of the
_Aufklärung_--Lessing, Schiller, Arndt, and Fichte--find in this
edifice their political realization. But the incident is not
unprecedented. Even the writings of Friedrich Gentz are not by it made
obsolete. It has affected the European State-system as the sudden
unity of Spain under Ferdinand or the completion of the French Monarchy
under Louis XIV affected it. But in this unobserved, this silent
growth of Imperial Britain--so unobserved that it presents itself even
now as an unreal, a transient thing--a force intrudes into the
State-systems of the world which, whether we view it in its effects
upon the present age or seek to gauge its significance to the future,
has few, if any, parallels in history.
§ I. THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HISTORY
What is the nature of this Consciousness? What is its historical
basis? Is it possible to trace the process by which it has emerged?
In the history of every conscious organism, a race, a State, or an
individual, there is a certain moment when the Unconscious desire,
purpose, or ideal passes into the Conscious. Life's end is then
manifest. The ideal unsuspected hitherto, or dimly discerned, now
becomes the fixed law of existence. Such moments inevitably are
difficult to localize. Bonaparte in 1793 fascinates the younger
Robespierre--"He has so much of the future in his mind." But it is
neither Toulon, nor Vendémiaire, nor Lodi, but the marshes of Arcola,
two years after Robespierre has fallen on the scaffold, that reveal
Napoleon to himself. So Diderot perceives the true bent of Rousseau's
genius long before the Dijon essay reveals it to the latter himself and
to France. Polybius discovers in the war of Regulus and of Mylae the
beginning of Rome's imperial career, but a juster instinct leads Livy
to devote his most splendid paragraphs to the heroism in defeat of
Thrasymene and Cannae. It was the singular fate of Camoens to voice
the ideal of his race, to witness its glory, and to survive its fall.
The prose of Osorius[1] does but prolong the echoes of Camoens' mighty
line. Within a single generation, Portugal traces the bounds of a
world-empire, great and impressive; the next can hardly discover the
traces. But to the limning of that sketch all the past of Portugal was
necessary, though then it emerged for the first time from the
Unconscious to the Conscious. Similarly in the England of the
seventeenth century the conscious deliberate resolve to be itself the
master of its fate takes complete possession of the nation. This is
the ideal which gives essential meaning to the Petition of Right, to
the Grand Remonstrance, to the return at the Restoration to the
"principles of 1640"; it is this which gives a common purpose to the
lives of Eliot, Pym, Shaftesbury, and Somers. It is the unifying
motive of the politics of the whole seventeenth century. The
eighteenth expands or curtails this, but originates nothing. An ideal
from the past controls the genius of the greatest statesmen of the
eighteenth century. But from the closing years of the century to the
present hour another ideal, at first existing unperceived side by side
with the former, has slowly but insensibly advanced, obscure in its
origins and little regarded in its first developments, but now
impressing the whole earth by its majesty--the Ideal of Imperial
Britain.
It is vain or misleading for the most part to fix precisely the first
beginnings of great movements in history. Nevertheless it is often
convenient to select for special study even arbitrarily some incident
or character in which that movement first conspicuously displays
itself. And if the question were asked--When does monarchical or
constitutional England first distinctively pass into Imperial Britain?
I should point to the close of the eighteenth century, to the heroic
patience with which the twenty-two years' war against France was borne,
hard upon the disaster of Yorktown and the loss of an empire; and
further, if you proceeded to search in speculative politics or actual
speeches for a deliberate expression of this transition, I should
select as a conspicuous instance Edmund Burke's great impeachment of
Warren Hastings. There this first awakening consciousness of an
Imperial destiny declares itself in a very dramatic and pronounced form
indeed. Yet Burke's range in speculative politics, compared with that
of such a writer as Montesquieu, is narrow. His conception of history
at its highest is but an anticipation of the picturesque but pragmatic
school of which Macaulay is coryphaeus. In religion he revered the
traditions, and acquiesced in the commonplaces of his time. His
literary sympathies were less varied, his taste less sure than those of
Charles James Fox. In constitutional politics he clung obstinately to
the ideals of the past; to Parliamentary reform he was hostile or
indifferent. As Pitt was the first great statesman of the nineteenth
century, so Burke was the last of the great statesmen of the
seventeenth century; for it is to the era of Pym and of Shaftesbury
that, in his constitutional theories, Burke strictly belongs. But if
his range was narrow, he is master there. "Within that circle none
durst walk but he." No cause in world-history has inspired a nobler
rhetoric, a mightier language. And if he is a reactionary in
constitutional politics, in his impeachment of Hastings he is the
prophet of a new era, the annunciator of an ideal which the later
nineteenth century slowly endeavours to realize--an empire resting not
on violence, but on justice and freedom. This ideal influences the
action, the policy, of statesmen earlier in the century; but in Chatham
its precise character, that which differentiates the ideal of Britain
from that, say, of Rome, is less clear than in Burke. And in the
seventeenth century, unless in a latent _unconscious_ form, it can
hardly be traced at all. In the speculative politics of that century
we encounter it again and again; but in practical politics it has no
part. I could not agree with Lord Rosebery when in an address he spoke
of Cromwell as "a great Briton." Cromwell is a great Englishman, but
neither in his actions nor in his policy, neither in his letters, nor
in any recorded utterance, public or private, does he evince definite
sympathy with, or clear consciousness of the distinctive ideal of
Imperial Britain. His work indeed leads towards this end, as the work
of Raleigh, of the elder Essex, or of Grenville, leads towards it, but
not consciously, not deliberately.
In Burke, however, and in his younger contemporaries, the conscious
influence, the formative power of a higher ideal, of wider aspirations
than moulded the actual statesmanship of the past, can no longer escape
us. The Empire is being formed, its material bounds marked out, here
definitely, there lost in receding vistas. On the battlefield or in
the senate-house, or at the counter of merchant adventurers, this work
is slowly elaborating itself. And within the nation at large the ideal
which is to be the spirit, the life of the Empire is rising into ever
clearer consciousness. Its influence throws a light upon the last
speeches of the younger Pitt. If the Impeachment be Burke's _chef
d'oeuvre_, Pitt never reached a mightier close than in the speech which
ended as the first grey light touched the eastern windows of
Westminster, suggesting on the instant one of the happiest and most
pathetic quotations ever made within those walls.[2] The ideal makes
great the life of Wilberforce; it exalts Canning; and Clarkson,
Romilly, Cobbett, Bentham is each in his way its exponent. "The Cry of
the Children" derived an added poignancy from the wider pity which,
after errors and failures more terrible than crimes, extended itself to
the suffering in the Indian village, in the African forest, or by the
Nile. The Chartist demanded the Rights of Englishmen, and found the
strength of his demand not diminished, but heightened, by the elder
battle-cry of the "Rights of Man." Thus has this ideal, grown
conscious, gradually penetrated every phase of our public life. It
removes the disabilities of religion; enfranchises the millions, that
they by being free may bring freedom to others. In the great
renunciation of 1846 it borrows a page from Roman annals, and sets the
name of Peel with that of Caius Gracchus. It imparts to modern
politics an inspiration and a high-erected effort, the power to falter
at no sacrifice, dread no responsibility.
Thus, then, as in the seventeenth century the ideal of national and
constituted freedom takes complete possession of the English people, so
in the nineteenth this ideal of Imperial Britain, risen at last from
the sphere of the Unconscious to the Conscious, has gradually taken
possession of all the avenues and passages of the Empire's life, till
at the century's close there is not a man capable of sympathies beyond
his individual walk whom it does not strengthen and uplift.
§ 2. ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM
Definitions are perilous, yet we must now attempt to define this ideal,
to frame an answer to the question--What is the nature of this ideal
which has thus arisen, of this Imperialism which is insensibly but
surely taking the place of the narrower patriotism of England, of
Scotland, and of Ireland? Imperialism, I should say, is patriotism
transfigured by a light from the aspirations of universal humanity; it
is the passion of Marathon, of Flodden or Trafalgar, the ardour of a de
Montfort or a Grenville, intensified to a serener flame by the ideals
of a Condorcet, a Shelley, or a Fichte. This is the ideal, and in the
resolution deliberate and conscious to realize this ideal throughout
its dominions, from bound to bound, in the voluntary submission to this
as to the primal law of its being, lies what may be named the destiny
of Imperial Britain.
As the artist by the very law of his being is compelled to body forth
his conceptions in colour, in words, or in marble, so the race dowered
with the genius for empire is compelled to dare all, to suffer all, to
sacrifice all for the fulfilment of its fate-appointed task. This is
the distinction, this the characteristic of the empires, the imperial
races of the past, of the remote, the shadowy empires of Media, of
Assyria, of the nearer empires of Persia, Macedon, and Rome. To spread
the name, and with the name the attributes, the civilizing power of
Hellas, throughout the world is the ideal of Macedon. Similarly of
Rome: to subdue the world, to establish there her peace, governing all
in justice, marks the Rome of Julius, of Vespasian, of Trajan. And in
this measureless devotion to a cause, in this surplus energy, and the
necessity of realizing its ideals in other races, in other peoples,
lies the distinction of the Imperial State, whether city or nation.
The origin of these characteristics in British Imperialism we shall
examine in a later lecture.
Let me now endeavour to set the distinctive ideal of Britain before you
in a clearer light. Observe, first of all, that it is essentially
British. It is not Roman, not Hellenic. The Roman ideal moulds every
form of Imperialism in Europe, and even to a certain degree in the
East, down to the eighteenth century. The theory of the mediaeval
empire derives immediately from Rome. The Roman justice disguised as
righteousness easily warrants persecution, papal or imperial. The
Revocation of the Edict of Passau by a Hapsburg, and the Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes by a Bourbon, trace their origin without a break to
that emperor to whom Dante assigns so great a part in the
_Paradiso_.[3] Lord Beaconsfield, with the levity in matters of
scholarship which he sometimes displayed, once ascribed the phrase
_imperium ac libertas_ to a Roman historian. The voluntary or
accidental error is nothing; but the conception of Roman Imperialism
which it popularized is worth considering. It is false to the genius
of Rome. It is not that the phrase nowhere occurs in a Roman
historian; but no statesman, no Roman historian, not Sulla, not Caesar,
nor Marcus, could ever have bracketed these words. _Imperium ac
justitia_ he might have said; but he could never have used together the
conceptions of Empire and Freedom. The peoples subdued by Rome--Spain,
Gaul, Africa--received from Rome justice, and for this gift blessed
Rome's name, deifying her genius. But the ideal of Freedom, the
freedom that allows or secures for every soul the power to move in the
highest path of its being, this is no pre-occupation of a Roman
statesman! Yet it is in this ideal of freedom that the distinction, or
at least a distinction of Modern, as opposed to Roman or Hellenic,
Europe consists; in the effort, that is to say, to spiritualize the
conception of outward justice, of outward freedom, to rescue individual
life from the incubus of the State, transfiguring the State itself by
the larger freedom, the higher justice, which Sophocles seeks in vain
throughout Hellas, which Virgil in Rome can nowhere find. The common
traits in the Kreon of tragedy and the Kritias of history, in the hero
of the _Aeneid_ and the triumvir Octavianus, are not accident, but
arise from the revolt of the higher freedom of Art, conscious or
unconscious, against the essential egoism of the wrong masking as right
of the ancient State. And it is in the Empire of Britain that this
effort of Modern Europe is realized, not only in the highest, but in
the most original and varied forms. The power of the Roman ideal, on
the other hand, saps the preceding empires of Modern Europe down to the
seventeenth century, the empire of the German Caesars, the Papacy
itself, Venice, Spain, Bourbon France. Consider how completely the
ideals of these States are enshrined in the _De Monarchia_, and how
closely the _De Monarchia_ knits itself to Caesarian and to consular
Rome!
The political history of Venice, stripped of its tinsel and melodrama,
is tedious as a twice-told tale. Her art, her palaces, are her own
eternally, a treasury inexhaustible as the light and mystery of the
waters upon which she rests like a lily, the changeful element
multiplying her structured loveliness and the opalescent hues of her
sky. But in politics Venice has not enriched the world with a single
inspiring thought which Rome had not centuries earlier illustrated more
grandly, more simply, and with yet profounder meanings.
Spain falls, not as Carlyle imagines, because it "rejects the Faith
proffered by the visiting angel"--a Protestant Spain is impossible--but
because Spain seeks to stifle in the Netherlands, in Europe at large,
that freedom which modern Europe had come to regard as dearer than
life--freedom to worship God after the manner nearest to its heart.
But disaster taught Spain nothing--
[Illustration: Greek text]
Alas, for mortal history! In happy fortune
A shadow might overturn its height; whilst of disaster
A wet sponge at a stroke effaces the lesson;
And 'tis this last I deem life's greater woe.
The embittered wisdom of Aeschylus finds in all history no more shining
comment than the decline of Spain.[4]
The gloomy resolution of the Austrian Ferdinand II, the internecine war
of thirty years which he provokes, sullenly pursues, and in dying
bequeaths to his son, are visited upon his house at Leuthen, Marengo,
Austerlitz, and in the overthrow of the empire devised ten centuries
before by Leo III and Charlemagne.
And with the Revocation, with Le Tellier and the Bull _Unigenitus_, the
procession of the French kings begins, which ends in the Place de la
Révolution:--"Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven."
From this thraldom to the past, to the ideal of Rome, Imperial Britain,
first amongst modern empires, completely breaks. For it is a new
empire which Imperial Britain presents to our scrutiny, a new empire
moulded by a new ideal.
Let me illustrate this by a contrast--a contrast between two armies and
what each brings to the vanquished.
Who that has read the historian of Alva can forget the march of his
army through the summer months some three hundred and thirty years ago?
That army, the most perfect that any captain had led since the Roman
legions left the world, defies from the gorges of Savoy, and division
behind division advances through the passes and across the plains of
Burgundy and Lorraine. One simile leaps to the pen of every historian
who narrates that march, the approach of some vast serpent, the
glancing of its coils unwinding still visible through the June foliage,
fateful, stealthy, casting upon its victim the torpor of its
irresistible strength. And to the Netherlands what does that army
bring? Death comes with it--death in the shape most calculated to
break the resolution of the most dauntless--the rack, the solitary
dungeon, the awful apparel of the Inquisition torture-chamber, the
_auto-da-fé_, and upon the evening air that odour of the burning flesh
of men wherewith Philip of Spain hallowed his second bridals. These
things accompany the march of Alva. And that army of ours which day by
day advances not less irresistibly across the veldt of Africa, what
does that army portend? That army brings with it not the rack, nor the
dungeon, nor the dread _auto-da-fé_; it brings with it, and not to one
people only but to the vast complexity of peoples within her bounds,
the assurance of England's unbroken might, of her devotion to that
ideal which has exercised a conscious sway over the minds of three
generations of her sons, and quickened in the blood of the unreckoned
generations of the past--an ideal, shall I say, akin to that of the
prophet of the French Revolution, Diderot, "_élargissez Dieu!_"--to
liberate God within men's hearts, so that man's life shall be free, of
itself and in itself, to set towards the lodestar of its being, harmony
with the Divine. And it brings to the peoples of Africa, to whom the
coming of this army is for good or evil so eventful, so fraught with
consequences to the future ages of their race, some assurance from the
designs, the purposes which this island has in early or recent times
pursued, that the same or yet loftier purposes shall guide us still;
whilst to the nations whose eyes are fastened upon that army it offers
some cause for gratulation or relief, that in this problem, whose vast
issues, vista receding behind vista, men so wide apart as Napoleon I.
and Victor Hugo pondered spell-bound; that in this arena where
conflicts await us beside which, in renunciation, triumph, or despair,
this of to-day seems but a toy; that in this crisis, a crisis in which
the whole earth is concerned, the Empire has intervened, definitely and
for all time, which more than any other known to history represents
humanity, and in its dealings with race distinctions and religious
distinctions does more than any other represent the principle that "God
has made of one blood all the nations of the earth."
§ 3. THE MANDATE OF DESTINY
In these two armies then, and in what each brings to the vanquished,
the contrast between two forms of Imperialism outlines itself sharply.
The earlier, that of the ancient world, little modified by mediaeval
experiments, limits itself to concrete, to external justice, imparted
to subject peoples from above, from some beneficent monarch or tyrant;
the later, the Imperialism of the modern world, the Imperialism of
Britain, has for its end the larger freedom, the higher justice whose
root is in the soul not of the ruler but of the race. The former
nowhere looks beyond justice; this sees in justice but a means to an
end. It aims through freedom to secure that men shall find justice,
not as a gift from Britain, but as they find the air around them, a
natural presence. Justice so conceived is not an end in itself, but a
condition of man's being. In the ancient world, government ever tends
to identify itself with the State, even when, as in Rome or Persia,
that State is imperial. In the modern, government with concrete
justice, civic freedom as its aims, ever tends to become but a function
of the State whose ideal is higher.
The vision of the _De Monarchia_--one God, one law, one creed, one
emperor, semi-divine, far-off, immaculate, guiding the round world in
justice, the crowning expression of Rome's ideal by a great poet whose
imagination was on fire with the memory of Rome's grandeur--does but
describe after all an exterior justice, a justice showered down upon
men by a beneficent tyrant, a Frederick I, inspired by the sagas of
Siegfried and of Charlemagne, or the second Frederick, the "Wonder of
the World" to the thirteenth century, and ever alluring, yet ever
eluding, the curiosity of the nineteenth; or a Henry VII, ineffectual
and melancholic. Such "justice" passes easily by its own excess into
the injustice which dispatches Alva's army or finds bizarre expression
in the phrase of "le Roi soleil,"--"The State? I am the State." The
ideal of modern life, the ideal of which Britain is the supreme
representative amongst existing empires, starting not from justice but
from freedom, may be traced beyond the French Revolution and the
Reformation, back even to the command "Render unto Caesar." That word
thrust itself like a wedge into the ancient unity of the State and God.
It carried with it not merely the doom of the Roman Empire, but of the
whole fabric of the ancient relations of State and Individual. Yet
Sophocles felt the injustice of this justice four centuries before, as
strongly as Tertullian, the Marat of dying Rome, felt it two centuries
after that command was uttered.
Such then is the character of the ideal. And in the resolution as a
people, for the furtherance of its great ends, to do all, to suffer
all, as Rome resolved, lies what may be described as the destiny of
Imperial Britain. None more impressive, none loftier has ever arisen
within the consciousness of a people. And to England through all her
territories and seas the moment for that resolution is now. If ever
there came to any city, race, or nation, clear and high through the
twilight spaces, across the abysses where the stars wander, the call of
its fate, it is NOW! There is an Arab fable of the white steed of
Destiny, with the thunder mane and the hoofs of lightning, that to
every man, as to every people, comes _once_. Glory to that man, to
that race, who dares to mount it! And that steed, is it not nearing
England now? Hark! the ringing of its hoofs is borne to our ears on
the blast!
Temptations to fly from this decision, to shrink from the great
resolve, to temporize, to waver, have at such moments ever presented
themselves to men and to nations. Even now they present themselves,
manifold, subtly disguised, insidiously persuasive, as exhortations to
humility, for instance, as appeals to the deference due to the opinion
of other States. But in the faith, the undying faith, that it, and it
alone, can perform the fate-appointed task, dwells the virtue of every
imperial race that History knows. How shall any empire, any state,
conscious of its destiny, imitate the self-effacement prescribed to the
individual--"In honour preferring one another"? This in an imperial
State were the premonition of decay, the presage of death.
But there is one great pledge, a solemn warrant of her resolve to
swerve not, to blench not, which England has already offered. That
pledge is Elandslaagte, it is Enslin, the Modder, and the bloody agony
of Magersfontein. For it grows ever clearer as month succeeds month
that it is by the invincible force of this ideal, this of Imperial
Britain, that we have waged this war and fought these battles in South
Africa. If it be not for this cause, it is for a cause so false to all
the past, from Agincourt to Balaklava, that it has but to be named to
carry with it its own refutation. There is a kind of tragic elevation
in the very horror of the march of Attila, of Ginghis Khan, or of
Timour. But to assemble a host from all the quarters of this wide
Empire, to make Africa, as it were, the rendezvous of the earth, for
the sake of a few gold, a few diamond mines, what language can equal a
design thus base, ambition thus sordid? And if we call to memory the
dead who have fallen in this war, those who at its beginning were with
us in the radiance of their manhood, but now, still in the grave, all
traces of life's majesty not yet gone from their brow, and if those
dead lips ask us, "Why are we thus? And in what cause have we died?"
were it not a hard thing for Britain, for Europe, indeed for all the
world, if the only answer we could make to the question should be, "It
is for the mines, it is for the mines!" No man can believe that; no
man, save him whose soul faction has sealed in impenetrable night! The
imagination recoils revolted, terror-struck. Great enterprises have
ever attracted some base adherents, and these by their very presence
seem to sully every achievement recorded of nations or cities. But to
arraign the fountain and the end of the high action because of this
baser alloy? To impeach on this account all the valour, all the wisdom
long approved? Reply is impossible; the thing simply is not British.
Indeed, in very deed, it is for another cause, and for another
ideal--an ideal that, gathering to itself down the ages the ardour of
their battle-cries, falls in all the splendour of a new hope about the
path of England now. For this these men have died, from the first
battle of the war to that fought yesterday. And it is this knowledge,
this certainty, which gives us heart to acquiesce, as each of us is
compelled to acquiesce, in the presence of that army in South Africa.
They have fallen, fighting for all that has made our race great in the
past, for this, the mandate of destiny to our race in the future. They
have fallen, those youths, self-devoted to death, with a courage so
impetuous, casting their youth away as if it were a thing of no
account, a careless trifle, life and all its promises! But yesterday
in the flush of strength and beauty; to-night the winds from tropic
seas stir the grass above their graves, the southern stars look down
upon the place of their rest. For this ideal they have died--"in their
youth," to borrow the phrase of a Greek orator, "torn from us like the
spring from the year."
Fallen in this cause, in battle for this ideal, behold them advance to
greet the great dead who fell in the old wars! See, through the mists
of time, Valhalla, its towers and battlements, uplift themselves, and
from their places the phantoms of the mighty heroes of all ages rise to
greet these English youths who enter smiling, the blood yet trickling
from their wounds! Behold, Achilles turns, unbending from his deep
disdain; Rustum, Timoleon, Hannibal, and those of later days who fell
at Brunanburh, Senlac, and Trafalgar, turn to welcome the dead whom we
have sent thither as the _avant-garde_ of our faith, that in this cause
is our destiny in this the mandate of our fate.
[1] The Latin work of Osorius, _De rebus gestis Emmanuelis regis
Lusitaniae_, appeared in 1574, two years later than _Os Lusiadas_. The
twelve books of Osorius cover the twenty-six years between 1495 and
1521, thus traversing parts of the same ground as Camoens. But the
hero of Osorius is Alboquerque. His affectation of Ciceronianism, the
literary vice of the age, casts a suspicion upon the sincerity of many
of his epithets and paragraphs, yet the work as a whole is composed
with his eyes upon his subject. Seven years after the Latin, a French
translation, a beautifully printed folio from Estienne's press, was
published, containing eight additional books, by Lopez de Castanedo and
others, bringing the history down to 1529.
[2] The first of Pitt's two remarkable speeches in the great debate of
April, 1792, on the Abolition of the Slave-trade was made on April and
Pitt, according to a pamphlet report printed by Phillips immediately
afterwards, rose after an all-night sitting to speak at four o'clock on
Tuesday morning (April 3rd). The close of the speech is thus reported:
"If we listen to the voice of reason and duty, and pursue this night
the line of conduct which they prescribe, some of us may live to see a
reverse of that picture, from which we now turn our eyes with pain and
regret. We may live to behold the natives of Africa engaged in the
calm occupations of industry, in the pursuits of a just and legitimate
commerce. We may behold the beams of science and philosophy breaking
in upon their land, which at some happy period in still later times may
blaze with full lustre, and joining their influence to that of pure
religion, may illumine and invigorate the most distant extremities of
that immense continent. Then may we hope that even Africa, though last
of all the quarters of the globe, shall enjoy at length, in the evening
of her days, those blessings which have descended so plentifully upon
us in a much earlier period of the world. Then also will Europe,
participating in her improvements and prosperity, receive an ample
recompense for the tardy kindness (if kindness it can be called) of no
longer hindering that continent from extricating herself out of the
darkness which in other more fortunate regions has been so much more
speedily dispelled--
Non primus equis oriens afflavit anhelis,
illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.
Then, Sir, may be applied to Africa those words, originally indeed used
with a different view--
His demum exactis--
devenere locos laetos, et amoena vireta
fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas;
largior hie campos aether, et lumine vestit
purpureo."
Pitt's second speech, of which only a brief impassioned fragment
remains, was delivered on April 27th (_Parl. Hist._ xxix, pp. 1134-88).
[3] Justinian not only in his policy but in his laws sums the history
of the three preceding centuries, and determines the history of the
centuries which follow. To Dante he represents at once the subtleties
of Jurisprudence and Theology. The Eagle's hymn in the _Paradiso_
(Cantos xix, xx) defines the limitations and the glory of Roman and
Mediaeval Imperialism. The essence of the entire treatise _De
Monarchia_ is in these cantos; and Canto vi, where Justinian in person
speaks, is informed by the same spirit.
[4] Portugal in the first half of the sixteenth century presents a
further instance of an empire actuated by the same ideals as those of
Spain. Within a single century, almost within the memory of a single
life, Portugal appears successively as a strong united nation, an
empire of great and far-stretched renown, and then, by a revolution in
fortune of which there are few examples, as a vanquished and subject
State. Her merchants were princes, her monarchs, John II, Emmanuel,
John III, and Sebastian, were in riches kings of the kings of Europe.
But during the brief period of Portugal's glory, tyranny and bigotry
went hand in hand. To the pride of her conquistadores was added the
fanaticism of Xavier and his retinue, and in the very years when within
the same region Baber and Akbar were raising the wise and tolerant
administration of the first Moguls, the Inquisition, with its priests,
incantations, and torture-chambers, was established at Goa. The
resemblance in feature, bearing, and in character between the Gilberts,
the Grenvilles, and the Alboquerques and Almeidas is indisputable; but
certain ineffaceable and intrinsic distinctions ultimately force
themselves upon the mind. And these distinctions mark the divergence
between the fate and the designs of England and the fate and the
designs of Lusitania, between the empire of Portugal and that of
Britain. Indeed, upon the spirit of mediaeval imperialism the work of
Osorius is hardly less illuminating than the deliberate treatise of
Dante.
LECTURE II
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL IDEAL
[_Tuesday, May_ 15_th_, 1900]
Man's path lies between the living and the dead, and History seems to
move between two hemispheres that everywhere touch yet unite nowhere,
the Past, shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each moment ends, the
Future not less shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each moment begins.
The question, "What is History?" is but the question, "What is Life?"
transferred from the domain of the Present to the domain of the Past.
To understand the whorl of a shell would require an intelligence that
has grasped the universe, and for the knowledge of the history of an
hour the aeons of the fathomless past were not excessive as a
preliminary study. Massillon's injunction, "Look thou within," does
but discover to our view in nerve-centres, in emotional or in
instinctive tendencies, hieroglyphics graven by long vanished ancestral
generations. But Nature, to guard man from despair, has fashioned him
a contemporary of the remotest ages. The beam of light, however far
into space it travel, yet remains unsevered from the orb whence it
sprang, and Man, the youngest-born of Time, is yet one with the source
whence he came. As age flies past after age, the immanence of the
Divine grows more, not less insistent. Each moment indeed is rooted in
the dateless past inextricably; but to its interpretation the soul
comes, a wanderer from aeons not less distant, laden with the presaging
memories, experiences, innumerable auxiliaries unseen, which the past
itself has supplied for its own conquest or that of the present.
Trusting to these, man is unmoved at the narrowness of his conscious
sovereignty, as the eye is unmoved at the narrow bounds that hedge its
vision, and finds peace where he would otherwise have found but despair.
Those affinities, those intimate relations of the past and present, are
the basis of speculative politics. A judgment upon a movement in the
present, an opinion hazarded upon the curve which a state, a nation, or
an empire will describe in the future, is of little value unless from a
wide enough survey the clear sanction of the past can be alleged in its
support.
Assuming therefore that in the ideal delineated above we have the ideal
of a race destined to Empire, and at last across the centuries grown
conscious of that destiny, the question confronts us--is it possible
out of the past, not surveying it from the vantage-ground of the
present merely, but as it were living into the present from the past,
to foreshadow the rise of this consciousness? Or turning back in the
light of this consciousness to the past, is there offered by the past a
justification of this interpretation of the present, of this movement
styled "Imperialism"?
The heart of the matter lies in the transformation of mediaeval
patriotism into modern imperialism, in the evolution or development
which out of the Englishman of the earlier centuries has produced the
Englishman of the present, moved by other and higher political ends.
Is there any incident or series of incidents in our history, of
magnitude enough profoundly to affect the national consciousness, to
which we may look for the causes, or for the formative spirit, of this
change? And in their effect upon the national consciousness of Britain
have these incidents followed any law traceable in other nations or
empires?
§ I. OF THE ACTION OF STATES AND OF INDIVIDUALS
There is a kind of criticism directed against politics which, year by
year or month by month, makes the discovery that between the code which
regulates the action of States and the code which regulates the actions
of individuals divergencies or contradictions are constantly arising.
War violates the ordinances of religion; diplomacy, the ordinances of
truth; expediency, those of justice. And the conclusion is drawn that
whatever be the softening influences of civilization upon the relations
of private life, within the sphere of politics, barbarism, brutally
aggressive or craftily obsequious, reigns undisturbed. Era succeeds
era, faiths rise and set, statesmen and thinkers, prophets and martyrs,
act, speak, suffer, die, and are seen no more; but, scornful of all
their strivings, the great Anarch still stands sullen and unaltered by
the centuries. And these critics, undeterred by Burke's hesitation to
"draw up an indictment against a whole nation," make bold to arraign
Humanity itself, charging alike the present and the past with perpetual
self-contradiction, an hypocrisy that never dies.
Underlying this impeachment of Nations and States in their relations to
each other the assumption at once reveals itself, that every State,
whether civic, national, or imperial, is but an aggregate of the
individuals that compose it, and should accordingly be regulated in its
actions by the same laws, the same principles of conduct, as control
the actions of individuals. And he therefore is the greatest statesman
who constrains the State as nearly as possible into the line prescribed
to the individual--whatever ruin and disaster attend the rash
adventure! The perplexity is old as the embassy of Carneades, young as
the self-communings of Mazzini.
Yet certain terms, current enough amongst those who deliver or at least
acquiesce in this indictment (such as "Organism" or "Organic Unity" as
applied to the State), might of themselves suggest a reconsideration of
the axiom that the State is but an aggregate of individuals. The unity
of an organism, though arising from the constituent parts, is yet
distinct from the unity of those parts. Even in chemistry the laws
which regulate the molecule are not the laws which regulate the
constituent atoms. And in that highest and most complex of all
unities, the State, we find, as we might expect to find, laws of
another range, and a remoter purport, obscurer to us in their origins,
more mysterious in their tendencies, than the laws which meet us in the
unities which compose it. In the region in which States act and
interact, whether with Plato we regard it as more divine, or as
Rousseau passionately insists, as lower, the laws which are valid must
at least be _other_ than the laws valid amongst individuals. The orbit
described by the life of the State is of a wider, a mightier sweep than
the orbit of the separate life. The life which the individual
surrenders to the State is not one with the life which he receives in
return; yet even of this interchange no analysis has yet laid bare the
conditions.
These considerations are not designed to imply that in the relations
between States the code of individual ethics is necessarily annulled;
but to suggest that the laws which regulate the actions or the
suffering of States, as such, have too peremptorily been assumed to be,
by nature and the ground-plan of the universe, identical with the laws
of individual life, its actions or its sufferings, and that it is
something of a _petitio principii_, in the present stage of our
knowledge, to judge the one by the standards applicable only to the
other.
The profoundest students of the actions of States have in all times
been aware, not of the fixed antagonism, but of the essential
distinction, between the two codes. Every principle of Machiavelli is
implicit in Thucydides, and Sulla, whom Montesquieu selects as the
supreme type of Roman grandeur, does but follow principles which
reappear in the politics of an Innocent III or a Richelieu, a Cromwell
or an Oxenstiern.[1] The loss of Sulla's _Commentaries_[2] is
irreparable as the loss of the fifth book of the _Annals_ of Tacitus or
the burnt _Memoirs_ of Shaftesbury; in the literature of politics it is
a disaster without a parallel. What Sulla felt as a first, most living
impulse appears in later times as a colder, a critical judgment. It is
thus that it presents itself to Machiavelli, not the writer of that
_jeu d'esprit_, _Il Principe_, perplexing as _Hamlet_, and as variously
interpreted, but the author of the stately periods of the _Istorie_ and
the _Discorsi_, the haughtiest of speculators, and in politics the
profoundest of modern thinkers. M. Sorel encounters little difficulty
in proving that the diplomacy of Europe in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries is but an exposition of the principles of the
_Discorsi_; Frederick the Great, who started his literary activity by
the refutation of the _Prince_, began and ended his political career as
if his one aim were to illustrate the maxims that in the rashness of
inexperience he had condemned; and within living memory, the vindicator
of Oliver Cromwell found in the composition of the same Frederick's
history the solace and the torment of his last and greatest years.
To press this inquiry further would be foreign to the present subject;
enough has been said to indicate that from whatever deep unity they may
spring, the laws which determine the life of a State, as displayed in
History, are not identical with the laws of individual life. The
region of Art, however, seems to offer a neutral territory, where it is
possible to obtain some perception, or _Ahnung_ as a German would say,
of the operation in the life of States of a law which bears directly
upon the problem before us.
§ 2. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY AS APPLIED TO HISTORY
In the history of past empires, their rise and decline, in the history
of this Empire of Britain from the coming of Cerdic and Cynric to the
present momentous crisis, there reveals itself a force, an influence,
not without analogy to the influence ascribed by Aristotle to Attic
Tragedy. The function of Tragedy he defined as the purification of the
soul by Compassion and by Terror--+di eléou kaì phóbou kátharsis+.[3]
Critics and commentators still debate the precise meaning of the
definition; but my interpretation, or application of it to the present
inquiry is this, that by compassion and terror the soul is exalted
above compassion and terror, is lifted above the touch of pity or of
fear, attaining to a state like that portrayed by Dante--
Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce, tale,
Che la vostra miseria non mi tange
Ne fiamma d' esto incendio non m' assale.[4]
In the tragic hour the soul is thus vouchsafed a deeper vision,
discerns a remoter, serener, mightier ideal which henceforth it pursues
unalterably, undeviatingly, as if swept on by a law of Nature itself.
Sorrow, thus conceived, is the divinest thought within the Divine mind,
and when manifested in that most complex of unities, the consciousness
of a State, the soul of a race, it assumes proportions that by their
very vagueness inspire but a deeper awe, presenting a study the
loftiest that can engage the human intellect.
Genius for empire in a race supplies that impressiveness with which a
heroic or royal origin invests the protagonist of a tragedy, an
Agamemnon or a Theseus. Hence, though traceable in all, the operation
of this law, analogous to the law of Tragedy, displays itself in the
history of imperial cities or nations in grander and more imposing
dimensions. Nowhere, for instance, are its effects exhibited in a more
impressive manner than in the fall of Imperial Athens--most poignantly
perhaps in that hour of her history which transforms the character of
Athenian politics, when amid the happy tumult of the autumn vintage,
the choric song, the procession, the revel of the Oschophoria, there
came a rumour of the disaster at Syracuse, which, swiftly silenced,
started to life again, a wild surmise, then panic, and the dread
certainty of ruin. That hour was but the essential agony of a
soul-conflict which, affecting a generation, marks the transformation
of the Athens of Kimon and Ephialtes, of Kleon and Kritias, into the
Athens[5] of Plato and Isocrates, of Demosthenes and Phocion. In the
writings of such men, in their speculations upon politics, one
pervading desire encounters us, alike in the grave serenity of the
Laws, the impassioned vehemence of the _Crown_, in the measured
cadences of the _Panegyric_, the effort to lead Athens towards some
higher enterprise, to secure for Athens and for Hellas some uniting
power, civic or imperial, another empire than that which fell in
Sicily, and moved by a loftier ideal. The serious admiration of
Thucydides for Sparta, the ironic admiration of Socrates, Plato's
appeals to Crete and to ancient Lacedsemon, these are not renegadism,
not disloyalty to Athens, but fidelity to another Athens than that of
Kleon or of Kritias. History never again beheld such a band of
pamphleteers![6]
In the history of Rome, during the second war against Carthage, a
similar moment occurs. After Cannae, Rome lies faint from haemorrhage,
but rises a new city. The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus is greater
than the Rome of the Decemvirs. It is not the inevitable change which
centuries bring; another, a higher purpose has implanted itself within
Rome's life as a State. The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus announces
Imperial Rome, the Rome of the Caesars.
So in the history of Islam, from the anguish and struggles of the
eighth century, the Islam of Haroun and Mutasim arises, imparting even
to dying Persia, as it were, a second prime, by the wisdom and
imaginative justice of its sway.
In the development of Imperial Britain, the conflict which in the
life-history of these two States, Athens and Rome, has its essential
agony at Cannae or at Syracuse, the conflict which affects the national
consciousness as the hour of tragic insight affects the individual
life, finds its parallel in the fifteenth century. After the
short-lived glory of Agincourt and the vain coronation at Paris,
humiliation follows humiliation, calamity follows calamity. The empire
purchased by the war of a century is lost in a day; and England's
chivalry, as if stung to madness by the magnitude of the disaster,
turns its mutilating swords, like Paris after Sedan, against itself.
The havoc of civil war prolongs the rancour and the shame of foreign
defeat, so that Rheims, Chatillon, Wakefield, Barnet, and Tewkesbury,
with other less remembered woes, seem like moments in one long tempest
of fiery misery that breaks over England, stilled at last in the
desperate lists at Bosworth.
This period neglected, perhaps wisely neglected, by the political
historian, is yet the period to which we must turn for the secret
sources of that revolution in its political character which, furthered
by the incidents that fortune reserved for her, has gradually fashioned
out of the England of the Angevins the Imperial Britain of to-day.
In England it is possible to trace the operation of this transforming
power, which I have compared to the transforming power of tragedy, in a
very complete manner. It reveals itself, for instance, in two
different modes or aspects, which, for the sake of clearness, may be
dealt with separately. In the first of these aspects, deeply and
permanently affecting the national consciousness, which as we have seen
is distinct from the sum of the units composing it, the law of tragedy
appears as the influence of suffering, of "terror" in the mystic
transcendental sense of the word, of reverent fear, yet with it, serene
and dauntless courage. This influence now makes itself felt in English
politics, in English religion, in English civic life.
If we consider the history of England prior to this epoch, it might at
first sight appear as if here were a race emphatically not destined for
empire. Not in her dealings with conquered France, not in Ireland, not
in Scotland, does England betray, in her national consciousness, any
sympathy even with that aspiration towards concrete justice which marks
the imperial character of Persia and of Rome. England seems fated to
add but one record more to the tedious story of unintelligent tyrant
States, illustrating the theme--+húbris phyteúei tyrannón+--"insolence
begets the tyrant!" Even to her contemporary, Venice, the mind turns
from England with relief; whilst in the government of Khorassan by the
earlier Abbassides we encounter an administration singularly free from
the defects that vitiate Imperial Rome at its zenith. And now in the
days of the first Tudors all England's efforts at empire have come to
nothing. Knut's empire sinks with him; Norman and Plantagenet follow;
but of their imperial policy the dying words of Mary Tudor, "Calais
will be found graven on my heart," form the epitaph. It was not merely
the loss of Calais that oppressed the dying Queen, but she felt
instinctively, obscurely, prophetically that here was an end to the
empire which her house had inherited from Norman and Plantagenet.
But in the national consciousness, the consciousness of the State, a
change is now apparent. As Athens rose from Syracuse, a new Athens, as
Rome rose from Cannae, a new city, to conquer by being conquered, so
from the lost dreams of empire over France, over Scotland, England
arises a new nation. This declares itself in the altered course of her
policy alike in France, Ireland, and Scotland. In Ireland, for
instance, an incomplete yet serious and high-purposed effort is made to
bring, if not justice, at least law to the hapless populations beyond
the Pale. Henry VIII again, like Edward I, is a masterful king. In
politics, in constructive genius, he even surpasses Edward I. He
abandons the folly of an empire in France, and though against Scotland
he achieves a triumph signal as that of Edward, he has no thought of
reverting to the Plantagenet policy. He defeats the Scots at Flodden;
but he has the power of seeing that in spite of his victory they are
not defeated at all. King James IV lies dead there, with all his earls
around him, like a Berserker warrior, his chiefs slain around him,
"companions," _comites_ indeed, in that title's original meaning. But
the spirit of the nation is quickened, not broken, and Henry VIII,
recognising this, steadily pursues the policy which leads to 1603, when
these two peoples, by a mutual renunciation, both schooled in misery,
and with the Hebrew phrase, "Well versed in suffering, and in sorrow
deeply skilled," working so to speak in their very blood, are united.
The Puritan wars, and the struggle for an ideal higher than that of
nationality, cement the union.
In the development of the life of a State, the distance in time between
causes and their visible effects often makes the sequence obscure or
sink from sight altogether. As in geology the century is useless as a
unit to measure the periods with which that science deals, and as in
astronomy the mile is useless as a standard for the interstellar
spaces; so in history, in tracing the organic changes within the
conscious life of a State, the lustrum, the dekaetis, or even the
generation, would sometimes be a less misleading unit than the year.
The England of Elizabeth drew the first outline of the Empire of the
future; but five generations were to pass before the Britain of
Chatham[7] could apply itself with a single-hearted resolution to fill
that outline in, and yet three other generations before this people as
a whole was to become completely conscious of its high destiny.
Freedom of religion and constitutional liberty had to be placed beyond
the peril of encroachment or overthrow, before the imperial enterprise
could be unreservedly pursued; but the deferment of the task has nerved
rather than weakened the energy of her resolve. Had England fallen in
the Maryborough wars, she would have left a name hardly more memorable
than that of Venice or Carthage, illustrious indeed, but without a
claim to original or creative Imperialism. But if she were to perish
now, it would be in the pursuance of a design which has no example in
the recorded annals of man.
Similarly in Rome, two centuries sever the Rome which rose from Cannae
from the Rome which administered Egypt and Hispania. And in Islam four
generations languish in misery before the true policy of the Abbassides
displays itself, striking into the path which it never abandoned.
In England then the influence of this epoch of tragic insight, and of
its transforming force, advances imperceptibly, unnoted across two
generations, yet the true sequence of cause and effect is
unquestionable. The England which, towards the close of the eighteenth
century, presents itself like a fate amongst the peoples of India,
bears within itself the wisdom which in the long run will save it from
the errors, and turn it from the path, which the England of the
Plantagenets followed in Ireland and in France. The national
consciousness of England, stirred to its depths by its own suffering,
its own defeats, its own humiliations, comes there in India within the
influence of that which in the life of a State, however little it may
affect the individual life as such, is the deepest of all suffering.
England stands then in the presence of a race whose life is in the
memories of its past; its literature, its arts, its empires that rise
and dissolve like dreams; its religions, its faiths, with all their
strange analogies, dim suggestions, mysterious as a sea cavern full of
sounds. Hard upon this experience in India comes that of the farther
East, comes that of Egypt, that of Africa in the nineteenth century.
How can such a fortune fail to change the heart, the consciousness of a
race, imparting to it forces from these wider horizons, deepening its
own life by the contact with this manifold environment? He who might
have been a de Montfort, a Grenville, or a Raleigh, is now by these
presences uplifted to other ideals, and by these varied and complex
influences of suffering, and the presence of suffering, raised from the
sphere of concrete freedom and concrete justice to the higher realm
ruled by imaginative freedom, imaginative justice, which Sophocles, in
the choral ode of the _Oedipus_, delineates, "the laws of sublimer
range, whose home is the pure ether, whose origin is God alone."
§ 3. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT
The second mode or aspect in which the Law of Tragedy as applied to
history reveals itself in the life of a State, corresponds to the
moment of intenser vision in the individual life, when the soul,
exalted by "compassion and terror," discerns the deeper truth, the
serener ideal which henceforth it pursues as if impelled by the fixed
law of its being. There is a word coined by Aristotle which comes down
the ages to us, bringing with it as it were the sound of the griding of
the Spartan swords as they leapt from their scabbards on the morning of
Thermopylae, the +enérgeia tês psychês+--the energy of the soul. This
energy of the soul in Aristotle is the _vertù_ of Machiavelli, the
spring of political wisdom, the foundation of the greatness of a State.
It is the immortal energy which arises within the consciousness of a
nation, or in the soul of an individual, as the result of that hour of
insight, of pity, of anguish, or contrition. It is the heroism which
adverse fortune greatens, which antagonism but excites to yet sublimer
daring.
In Rome this displays itself, both in policy and in war, in the
centuries that immediately succeed Cannae. Nothing in history is more
worthy of attention than the impression which Rome in this epoch of her
history made upon the minds of men, above all, upon the mind of Hellas.
Its expression in Polybius is remarkable.
Polybius, if not one of the greatest of thinkers on politics, has a
place with the greatest political historians for all time. It was his
work which Chatham placed in the hands of his son, the younger Pitt, as
the supreme guide in political history. Polybius has every inducement
to abhor Rome, to judge her actions with jealous and unfriendly eyes.
His father was the companion of Philopoemen, the heroic leader of the
Achaean league, sometimes styled "the last of the Greeks," the
Kosciusko of the old world. Polybius himself is a hostage in Rome, the
representative of a defeated race, a lost cause; and yet after years of
study of his conquerors, possessing every means for a just estimate of
their actions and motives in the senate, on the battlefield, in the
intimacies of private life, the conviction of his heart becomes that
there in Rome is a people divinely appointed to the government, not of
Hellas merely, but of the whole earth. The message of his history,
composed with scrupulous care, and a critical method rare in that age,
is that the very stars in their courses fight for Rome, whether she
wages war against Greek or against Barbarian, that hers is the
domination of the earth, the empire of the world, and it is to the
eternal honour of Greece that it accepted this message. The
Romano-Hellenic empire is born. Other men arise both to the east and
to the west of the Adriatic, in whom the Greek and Roman genius are
fused, who pursue the ideal and amplify or adorn the thought which
Polybius was the first to express immortally. It inspires the rhetoric
of Cicero; and falls with a kind of glory on the verse of Virgil--
Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,
credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus,
orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus
describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos Romane memento;
hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.
The tutor of Hadrian makes it the informing idea of his parallel
"Lives," and gives form and feature to a grandeur that else were
incredible. It appears in the duller work of the industrious Dion
Cassius, and in the fourth century forges some of the noblest verse of
Claudian. And as we have seen, it is enshrined nine centuries after
Claudian in the splendid eloquence of the _De Monarchia_, and yields
such spent, such senile life as they possess, to the empires of
Hapsburg and Bourbon. Thus this divine energy, which after Cannae
uplifts Rome, riveting the sympathies of Polybius, outlives Rome
itself, still controlling the imaginations of men, until its last
flicker in the eighteenth century.
Where in the history of England, in the life of England as a State,
does this energy, exalted by the hour of tragic vision, manifest
itself? Recollect our problem; it is by analysis, comparison, and
contrast, to discover what is the testimony of the past to Britain's
title-deeds of empire.
Great races, like great individuals, resemble the giants in the old
myth, the _gigantes_, the earth-born, sons of Gaia, who, thrown in the
wrestle, touched her bosom, and rose stronger than before defeat.
England stood this test in the sixteenth century, rising from that long
humiliating war with France, that not less humiliating war with
Scotland, greater than before her defeat. This energy of the soul,
quickened by tragic insight, displays itself not merely in the Armada
struggle but before that struggle, under various forms in pre-Armada
England.
The spirit of the sea-wolves of early times, of the sailors who in the
fourteenth century fought at Sluys, and made the Levant an English
lake, lives again in the Tudor mariners. But it has been transformed,
and sets towards other and greater endeavours, planning a mightier
enterprise. These adventurers make it plain that on the high seas is
the path of England's peace; that the old policy of the Plantagenet
kings, with all its heroism and indisputable greatness, had been a
false policy; that England's empire was not to be sought on the plains
of France; that Gilbert, Drake, Raleigh, and Frobisher have found the
way to the empire which the Plantagenets blindly groped after.
As Camoens in Portugal invents a noble utterance for the genius of his
nation, for the times of Vasco da Gama and of Emmanuel the Great, so
this spirit of pre-Armada England, of England which as yet has but the
memory of battles gained and lost wars, finds triumphant expression in
Marlowe and his elder contemporaries. Marlowe's[8] great dialect seems
to fall naturally from the lips of the heroes of Hakluyt's _Voyages_,
that work which still impresses the imagination like the fragments of
some rude but mighty epic, and in their company the exaggeration, the
emphasis of _Tamburlaine_ are hardly perceptible. In Martin Frobisher,
for instance, how the purpose which determines his career illumines for
us the England of the first years of Elizabeth! Frobisher in early
manhood torments his heart with the resentful reflection, "What a
blockish thing it has been on the part of England to permit the
Genovese Columbus to discover America!" That task was clearly
England's! "And now there being nothing great left to be done," the
sole work Frobisher finds worth attempting is the discovery of the
northwest passage to Cathay. Upon this he spends the pith of his
manhood year by year, and the result of all the labours of this
sea-Hercules, well! it is perhaps to be sought in those dim beings,
"half-man, half-fish," whom he brings back from some voyage, those
forlorn Esquimaux who, seen in London streets, and long remembered,
suggested to the dreaming soul of Shakespeare Caliban and his island.
Frobisher's watchword on the high seas is memorable. In the northern
latitudes, under the spectral stars, the sentinel of the _Michael_
gives the challenge "For God the Lord," and sentinel replies, "And
Christ His Sonne."
The repulse of Spain is but the culminating achievement of this energy
of the soul which greatens the life of England already in pre-Armada
times. And simultaneously with the conflict against Spain this same
energy attests its presence in a form assuredly not less divine within
the souls of those who rear that unseen empire, whose foundations are
laid eternally in the thoughts of men, the empire reared by
Shakespeare, Webster, Beaumont, and Milton.
In the seventeenth century it inspires the statesmen of England not
only with the ardour for constitutional freedom, but engages them in
ceaseless and not unavailing efforts towards a deeper conception of
justice and of liberty, foreshadowing unconsciously the ideals of later
times. If the Thirty Years' War did nothing else for England it
implanted in her great statesmen a profound distrust of the imperial
systems of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs. Eliot, for instance, in the
work entitled _The Monarchy of Man_, lofty in its form as in its
thought, written in his prison, though studying Plato and the older
ideals of empire, is yet obscurely searching after a new ideal. We
encounter a similar effort in the great Montrose, capable of that
Scottish campaign, and of writing one of the finest love-songs in the
language, capable also of some very vivid thoughts on statesmanship.
In natures like Eliot and Montrose, the height of the ideal determines
the steadfastness of the action. And that ideal, I repeat, is distinct
from Plato's, distinct from Dante's, and from that of the Bourbon and
Hapsburg empires, in which Dante's conception is but rudely or
imperfectly developed. The ideal of these English statesmen is framed
upon another conception of justice, another conception of freedom,
equally sublime, and more catholic and humane. Whatever its immediate
influence upon certain of their contemporaries, over their own hearts
it was all-powerful. The very vividness with which they conceive the
ideal, and the noble constancy with which they pursue it, link the high
purposes of these two men to the purposes of Milton, of Cromwell, of
Selden, and of Falkland. The perfect State, the scope of its laws,
government, religion, to each is manifest, though the path that leads
thither may seem now through Monarchy, now through a Republic, or at
other times indistinct, or lost altogether in the bewildering maze of
adverse interests. From the remote nature of their quest arises much
of the apparent inconsistency in the political life of that era. The
parting of Pym and Strafford acquires an added, a tragic poignancy from
the consciousness in the heart of each that the star which leads him on
is the star of England's destiny.
Hence, too, the suspicion attached to men like Selden and Falkland of
being mere theoricians in advance of their time,--an accusation fatal
to statesmanship. But the advent of that age was marked by so much
that was novel in religion,[9] in State, in foreign and domestic
policy, the new direction of imperial enterprise, the unity of two
nations, ancient and apparently irreconcilable foes, the jarring
creeds, convulsing the life of both these nations, for both were deeply
religious, that it were rash to accuse of rashness any actor in those
times. But it is the adventurous daring of their spirits, the swift
glance searching the horizons of the future, it is that very energy of
the soul of which I have spoken which render these statesmen obnoxious
to the suspicion of theory. The temper of Selden, indeed, in harmony
with the thoughtful and melancholy cast of his features, disposed him
to subtlety and niceness of argument, and with a division pending,
often deprived his words of a force which homelier orators could
command. And yet his career is a presage of the future. Toleration in
religion, freedom of the press, the supremacy of the seas, the _habeas
corpus_, are all lines along which his thought moves, not so much
distancing as leading the practical statesmen of his generation. And
there is a curious fitness in the dedication to him in 1649 of Edward
Pococke's Arabic studies, which nearly a century and a half later were
to form the basis of Gibbon's great chapters. But the year of _Mare
Clausum_ is at once the greatest in Selden's life, and the last months
of greatness in the life of his royal master.[10]
But theory is a charge which has ever been urged against
revolutionists. Revolution is the child of speculation. The men of
the seventeenth century are discoverers in politics. Their mark is a
wider empire than that of Vasco da Gama and his king, a realm more
wondrous than that of Aeëtes. But Da Gama did not steer forthright to
the Indies, nor Jason to the Colchian strand, though each knew clearly
the goal he sought, just as Wentworth and Selden, Falkland and
Montrose, Eliot and Milton, knew the State they were steering for,
though each may have wavered in his own mind as to the course, and at
last parted fatally from his companions. Practical does not always
mean commonplace, and in the light of their deeds it seems superfluous
to discuss whether the writer of _Defensio pro Populo Anglicano_, the
destroyer of the Campbells, or the accuser of Buckingham, were
practical politicians. In their lives, in the shaping of their
careers, the visionary is actualized, the ideal real, in that fidelity
of soul which leaves one dead on the battlefield, another on the
gibbet, thirty feet high, "honoured thus in death," as he remarked
pleasantly, a third to the dreary martyrdom of the Tower, a fourth to
that dread visitation, endured with stoic grandeur, and yet at times
forcing from his lips the cry of anguish which thrills the verse of
_Samson Agonistes_--
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse,
Without all hope of day.
But not in vain. The tireless centuries have accomplished the task
these men initiated, have travelled the path they set forth in, have
completed the journey which they began.
We find the same pre-occupation with some wider conception of justice,
empire, and freedom in the younger Barclay, the author of _Argenis_,
written in Latin but read in many languages, studied by Richelieu and
moulding his later, wiser policy towards the Huguenots, read, above
all, by Fenelon, who rises from it to write _Télémaque_. It meets us
in the last work of Algernon Sidney, which, like Eliot's treatise,
bears about it the air of a martyr's cell. We find it again explicitly
in the _Oceana_ of Harrington, in the fragmentary writings of
Shaftesbury, and in actual politics it finds triumphant expression at
last in the eloquence that was like a battle-cry, in the energy that at
moments seems superhuman, the wisdom, the penetrating foresight, of the
mightiest of all England's statesmen-orators, the elder Pitt. It burns
in clear flame in the men who come after him, in his own son, only less
great than his great sire; in Charles James Fox and in Windham, who in
the great debate[11] of 1801 fought obstinately to save the Cape when
Nelson and St. Vincent would have flung it away; in Canning,
Wilberforce, in Romilly; in poets like Shelley, and thinkers like John
Stuart Mill.
The revolution in parliamentary representation during the present
century, a revolution which, extending over more than fifty years, from
1831 to 1884, may even be compared in its momentous consequences with
the revolution of 1640-88, though constitutional in design, yet forms
an integral part of the wider movement whose course across the
centuries we have indicated. The leaders in this revolution, men like
Russell and Grey, complete the work which Eliot, Wentworth, and Pym
began. They ask the question, else unasked, they answer the question,
else unanswered--How shall a people, not itself free, a people
disqualified and disfranchised, become the harbinger of a new era to
other peoples, or the herald of the higher freedom to the ancient races
of India--Aryans, of like blood with our own, moving forever as in a
twilight air, woven of the pride, the pathos, all the sombre yet
undecaying memories of their fabulous past--to the Moslem populations
whose "Book" proclaimed the political equality of men twelve centuries
before Mirabeau spoke or the Bastille fell?
This, then, is the testimony of the Past, and the witness of the Dead
is this. Thus it has arisen, this ideal, the ideal of Britain as
distinct from the ideal of Rome, of Islam, or of Persia--thus it has
arisen, this Empire, unexampled in present and without a precedent in
former times; for Athens under Pericles was but a masked despotism, and
the republic-empire of Islam passed swifter than a dream. Thus it has
arisen, this Imperial Britain, from the dark Unconscious emerging to
the Conscious, not like an empire of mist uprising under the wands of
magic-working architects, but based on heroisms, endurances, lofty
ideals frustrate yet imperishable, patient thought slowly elaborating
itself through the ages--the sea-wolves' battle fury, the splendour of
chivalry, the crusader's dazzling hope, the immortal ardour of Norman
and Plantagenet kings, baffled, foiled, but still in other forms
returning to uplift the spirit of succeeding times, the unconquered
hearts of Tudor mariners rejoicing in the battle onset and the storm,
the strung thought, the intense vision of statesmen of the later
centuries, Eliot, Chatham, Canning, and at the last, deep-toned,
far-echoing as the murmur of forests and cataracts, the sanctioning
voices of enfranchised millions accepting their destiny, resolute!
This is the achievement of the ages, this the greatest birth of Time.
For in the empires of the past there is not an ideal, not a structural
design which these warriors, monarchs, statesmen have not, deliberately
or unconsciously, rejected, or, as in an alembic, transmuted to finer
purposes and to nobler ends.
[1] Goethe asserts that Spinozism transmuted into a creed by analytic
reflection is simply Machiavelism.
[2] The twenty-two books of Sulla's Memoirs, _rerum suarum gestarum
commentarii_, were dedicated to his friend Lucullus; they were still in
existence in the time of Tacitus and Plutarch, though the fragments
which now remain serve but to mock us with regret for the loss. Of
Sulla's verses--like many cultured Romans of that age, the conqueror of
Caius Marius amused his leisure with writing Greek epigrams--exactly so
much has survived as of the troubadour songs of Richard I of England,
or of Frederick II of Jerusalem and Sicily. Sulla's remark on the
young Caesar is for the youth of Caius Julius as illuminating as
Richelieu's on Condé or as Pasquale Paoli's on Bonaparte.
[3] Aristotle refers only to the effect on the spectators; but the
continued existence of the State makes it at once actor and spectator
in the tragedy. The transforming power is thus more intimate and
profound.
[4] "God in His mercy such created me
"That misery of yours attains me not,
"Nor any flame assails me of this burning."
[5] In illustration of this position a contrast might be drawn between
the policy of Athens in Melos, as set forth by Thucydides in the
singular dialogue of the fifth book, and the part assigned to Justice
by a writer equally impersonal, grave, and unimpassioned--the author of
the _Politics_--in the recurrence throughout that work of such phrases
as "The State which is founded on Justice alone can stand." "Man when
perfected (+teleôthén+) is the noblest thing that lives, but separated
from justice (+chôristhèn nómou kaì díkês+) the basest of all."
"Virtue cannot be the ruin of those who possess it, nor Justice the
destruction of a City." The tragedies of Sophocles that are of a later
date than 413 B.C. betray an attitude towards political life distinct
from that which characterizes his earlier works. The shading-in of the
life of the State into that of the individual defies analysis, and it
were hazardous to affirm what traits of thought ought to be referred to
the genius of the State as distinct from the individual; but it appears
as difficult to imagine _before_ Syracuse, the vehement insistence upon
Justice, the impassioned idealization which characterize Plato,
Socrates, and Demosthenes, as it is difficult _after_ Syracuse to
imagine the political temper of a Pericles or an Anaxagoras.
[6] The Greek orators and philosophers of the fourth century B.C. had
before them a problem not without resemblances to that which confronted
the Hebrew prophets of Judaea in the seventh. Even their most
speculative writings had a practical end, a goal which they considered
attainable by Hellas, or by Athens. The disappearance of Socrates from
the _Laws_, the increased seriousness of the treatment of Sparta and of
Crete, the original and paragon of Lacedaemon, may indicate a
concession to the prejudices of a generation which had grown up since
Aegospotami, and a last effort by Plato to bring his teaching home to
the common life of Athens and of Hellas. So in the England of the
seventeenth century the political writings of Bacon and Hobbes, of
Milton and Harrington, though speculative in form, are most practical
in their aims. Hobbes' first literary effort indeed, his version of
Thucydides, is planned as a warning to England against civil discord
and its ills. This was in 1628--fatal date!
[7] The elder Pitt may be regarded as the first great minister of the
English _people_ as distinguished from men like Thomas Cromwell,
Stratford, or Clarendon, who strictly were ministers of the king. "It
rains gold-boxes," Horace Walpole writes when, in April, 1757. Pitt
was dismissed, and it was these tokens of his popularity with the
merchants of England, not the recognition of his genius by the king,
which led to his return to office in June. The events of the period of
four years and ten months during which this man was dictator of the
House of Commons and of England are so graven on all hearts that a mere
enumeration in order of time suffices to recall moving incidents,
characters, and scenes of epic grandeur:--December 17th, 1756,
Pitt-Devonshire ministry formed, Highland regiments raised, national
militia organized. 1757, CLIVE'S victory at Plassey, June 23rd, and
conquest of Bengal. 1758, June 3rd, destruction of forts at Cherbourg,
three ships of war, 150 privateers burned to the sea-line; November
25th, Fort Duquesne captured; December 29th, conquest of Goree. 1759,
"year of victories"; February 16th, POCOCK relieves Madras; May 1st,
capture of Guadaloupe; July 4th, R. RODNEY at Havre destroys the
flat-bottomed Armada; July 31st, WOLFE'S repulse at Beaufort; August
19th, BOSCAWEN destroys French fleet in Lagos Bay; September 2nd,
POCOCK defeats D'Aché; September 9th, WOLFE'S last letter to Pitt;
September 13th, 10 a.m., Plains of Abraham and conquest of Canada;
November 20th, HAWKE defeats Conflans in Quiberon Bay, "Lay me
alongside the French Admiral." 1760, January 22nd, EYRE-COOTE defeats
Lally at Wandewash, conquest of Carnatic. 1761, January 16th, English
enter Pondicherry; Bellisle citadel reduced, "Quebec over again," June
7th; October 5th, PITT resigns. It is doubtful whether, since the
eleventh century and Hildebrand and William the Conqueror, the European
stage has been occupied simultaneously by two such men as Chatham and
the king of Prussia.
[8] The same delight in power, the same glory in dominion, pulsate in
the Lusiads and in the dramas of Marlowe, but Marlowe was by far the
wider in his intellectual range. Worlds were open to his glance beyond
the Indies and Cathay that were shut to Camoens. Yet Camoens is a
heroic figure. He found it easy to delineate Vasco da Gama; he had but
to speak with his own voice, and utter simply his own heart's desires,
hates, musings, and Vasco da Gama's sister would have turned to listen,
thinking she heard the accents, the trick, the very manner that
betrayed the hero.
[9] Burnet is incredibly vain, unredeemed by Boswell's hero-worship;
yet his book reflects the medley, the fervour, the vehemence, crimes,
hopes of this time. In one sentence nineteen religions are named as
co-existing in Scotland.
[10] The _Mare Clausum_ was framed as an answer to Grotius' _Mare
Liberum_, which had been printed, perhaps without Grotius' consent, in
1610. Selden's tract, printed in November, 1635, is a folio of 304
pages, in which, setting forth precedent on precedent, he claims for
England, as by law and ancient custom established, that same supremacy
over the high seas as the Portuguese had exercised over the eastern
waters, and Venice over the Adriatic. The King's enthusiasm was
kindled. The work was issued with all the circumstance of a State
paper, and it came upon foreign courts like a declaration of policy,
the resolve at length to enforce the time-honoured and indefeasible
rights of England. Copies were with due ceremony deposited in the
Exchequer and at the Admiralty. A fleet was equipped, and as an
atonement for the wrongs done to the elder Northumberland, the King
gave the command to his son, whose portrait as Admiral forms one of the
noblest of Vandyck's canvases. But Northumberland, though brave to a
fault, was no seaman, and the whole enterprise threatened to end in
ridicule. Stung to the quick, Charles again turned to the nation. But
in the nine intervening years since 1628 the nation's heart had left
him. To his demand for supplies to strengthen the fleet came Hampden's
refusal. The trial was the prelude to the Grand Remonstrance, to
Naseby, and to Whitehall, where, as if swept thither by the crowded
events of some fantastic dream, he awoke from his visions of England's
greatness and the empire of the seas, alone on a scaffold, surrounded
by a ring of English eyes, looking hate, sullen indifference, or cold
resolution.
Leave him still loftier than the world suspects,
Living or dying.
After all he was a king, and in his veins the blood of Mary Stuart
still beat. An English version of Selden's treatise appeared in the
time of Cromwell. The translator was Marchamont Nedham. The
dedication to the Supreme Authority of the Nation, the Parliament of
the Commonwealth of England, is dated November 19th, 1652.
[11] The preliminaries to the Peace of Amiens were signed on October
1st, 1801. Parliament opened on October 29th, and after the King's
speech, Windham compared his position amid the general rejoicings of
the House at the prospect of an end to the war, to Hamlet's at the
wedding-feast of Claudius. In the debate of November 3rd, Pitt
declared himself resigned to the loss of the Cape by the retention of
Ceylon, while the opinion of Fox was, that by this surrender we should
have the benefit of the colony without its expenses. Nelson, with the
glory of his victory at Copenhagen just six months old, maintained that
in the days when Indiamen were heavy ships the Cape had its uses, but
now that they were coppered, and sailed well, the Cape was a mere
tavern that served to delay the voyage. The opening of Windham's
speech on the 4th, "We are a conquered nation, England gives all,
France nothing," defines his position (_Parl. Hist._ xxxvi, pp. 1-191).
Windham was one of the few statesmen who, even before the consulate had
passed into the Empire, understood the gravity of our relations to
France. Every month added proof of the accuracy of his presentiments,
but once understood by England there was no faltering. Prussia,
Austria, the Czar, all acknowledged the new Empire, and made peace or
alliance with its despot, but from the rupture of the Peace of Amiens
England waged a war without truce till Elba and Ste. Hélène.
LECTURE III
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL
[_Tuesday, May_ 22_nd_, 1900]
In the history of the religion of an imperial race, it is not only the
development of the ideal within the consciousness of the race itself
that we have to consider, but the advance or decline in its conceptions
of the religions of the peoples within the zone of its influence or
dominion. For such a study the materials are only in appearance less
satisfactory than for the study of the political ideal of a race. It
is penetratingly observed by La Rochefoucauld that the history of the
Fronde can never be accurately written, because the persons in that
drama were actuated by motives so base that even in the height of
performance each actor of the deeds was striving to make a record of
them impossible. The reflection might be extended to other political
revolutions, and to other incidents than the Fronde. Ranke's
indefatigable zeal, his anxiety "in history always to see the thing as
in very deed it enacted itself," never carried him nearer his object
than the impression of an impression. No State papers, no documents,
the most authentic, can take us further.
But in this very strife, this zeal for the True for ever baffled yet
for ever renewed, one of the noblest attributes of the present age
discovers itself. Indisputable facts are often the sepulchres of
thought, and truth after all, not certainty, is the historian's goal.
It might even be urged that the records of religion, the martyr's
resolution, the saint's fervour, the reformer's aspiration, the
prophet's faith, offer a surer hope of attaining this goal than the
records of politics.
§ 1. RELIGION AND IMPERIALISM
Religion forms an integral part of a nation's life, and in the
development of the ideal of Imperial Britain on its religious side, the
same transforming forces, the same energy of the soul, the operation of
the same law analogous to the law of tragedy already described, which
manifest themselves in politics, are here apparent. The persecuting
intolerant England of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after
passing through the Puritan struggle of the seventeenth, the scepticism
or indifference of later times, appears at last in the closing years of
the nineteenth century as the supreme representative, if not the
creator, of an ideal hardly less humane than that of the Humanists
themselves--who recognized in every cry of the heart a prayer, silent
or spoken, to the God of all the earth, of all peoples, and of all
times. The Rome of the Antonines had even in this sphere no loftier
ideal, no fairer vision, than that which now seems to float before
Imperial Britain, no wider sympathy, not merely with the sects of its
own faith, but with the religions of other races within its dominions,
once hostile to its own. By slow degrees England has arisen, first to
the perception of the truth in other sects, and then to a perception of
the truth in other faiths. In lesser creeds, and amongst decaying
races, tolerance is sometimes the equivalent of irreligion, but the
effort to recognize so far as possible the principle, implicit in
Montesquieu, that a man is born of this religion or of that, has, in
all ages, been the stamp of imperial races. Upon the character of the
race and the character of its religion, depend the answer to the
question whether by empire the religion of the imperial race shall be
exalted or debased.
As in politics so in religion it is to the fifteenth century--the
tragic insight born of defeat, disaster, and soul-anguish--that we must
turn for the causes, for the origins of that transformation in the life
of the nation which has resulted in the conscious ideal of the Britain
of to-day. The "separation" from Rome fifty years after Bosworth had
no conscious imperial purpose, but it rescued the rising empire of
England from the taint of medievalism which sapped the empires of
Spain, of the Bourbons, and of the Hapsburgs. The Reformation in
England owes much of its character amongst the people at large, apart
from the government, above all in the heroic age of the Reformation in
England--the Puritan wars--to that earlier convulsion in the nation's
consciousness, to the period of anguish and defeat of which we have
spoken at some length already. But for the remoter origins and causes
of the whole movement styled "the English Reformation" we must search
not in any one period or occurrence, but in the character of the race
itself. The English Reformation does not begin with Henry VIII any
more than the Scottish Reformation begins with John Knox: it springs
from the heart of the race, from the intensity, the tragic earnestness
with which in all periods England has conceived the supreme questions
of man's destiny, man's relation to the Divine, the "Whence?" and the
"Whither?" of human life. And it is the seriousness with which England
regards its own religion, and the imaginative sympathy which gives it
the power of recognizing the sincerity of other religions beneath its
sway, which distinguish Imperial Britain from the empires of the past.
§ 2. THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY
In the Roman Empire, for instance, the tolerance of the Republic passes
swiftly into the disregard of the Caesars of the Julian line, into the
capricious or ineffectual persecution of later dynasties. Rome never
endeavours in this sphere to lead its subject peoples to any higher
vision. When that effort is made, Rome itself is dying. Alaric and
the fifth century have come. For Rome the drama of a thousand years is
ended: Rome is moribund and has but strength to die greatly,
tragically. Would you see the end of Rome as in a figure darkly? Over
a dead Roman a Goth bends, and by the flare of a torch seeks to read on
the still brow the secret of his own destiny.
In the Empire of Persia and the great days of the Sassanides, in
Kurush, who destroys the Median Empire, and spreads wider the religion
of the vanquished, the religion of Zerdusht, the symbolic worship of
flame, loveliest of inanimate things--even there no sustained, no
deliberate effort towards an ideal amongst the peoples beneath the
Persian sway can be discovered. Islam starts with religious
aspirations, the most lofty, the most beneficent, but the purity of her
ideals dies with Ali. At Damascus and at Bagdad an autocratic system
warped by contact with Rome infects the religious; the result is a
theocracy in which the purposes of Mohammed, at least on their
political side, are abandoned, lost at last in the gloomy and often
ferocious despotism of the Ottoman Turks.
Consider in contrast with these empires the question--What is the
distinction in this phase of human life of the Empire of Britain, of
its history? Steadily growing from its first beginnings--shall I say,
from that great battle of the Winwaed, where three Kings are in
conflict and the slayer of two lies dead--steadily growing, on to the
present hour, as in politics so in religion, the effort sometimes
conscious, sometimes unconscious, but persistent, continuous, towards
an ever purer, higher, nobler conception of man's relations to the
Divine. From this effort arises the Reformation, from this effort
arises in the way of a thousand years the Empire based on the higher
justice, the imaginative justice, the higher freedom, the imaginative
freedom.
Thus even in the earliest periods of our history, during the struggle
between Christianism and the religion of Thor and Woden, England shows
far more violence, more earnestness, more fury on both sides, than is
found anywhere else in Europe. Glance, for instance, at this struggle
in Germany. Witikind[1] the Saxon arises as the champion of the old
gods against Christianity. Charlemagne with his Frankish cavalry comes
down amongst the Saxons. His march surpasses the march of Caesar, or
of Constantine against Rome. Witikind does rise to the heights of
heroism against Charlemagne twice; but in the end he surrenders, gives
in, and dies a hanger-on at the court of his conqueror. Mercia, the
kingdom of the mid-English, that too produces its champion of the old
gods against the religion of Christ--Penda. There is no surrender
here; two kings, I repeat, he slays, and grown old in war, he rouses
himself like a hoary old lion of the forest to fight his last battle.
An _intransigeant_, an irreconcilable, this King Penda, fighting his
last battle against this new and hated thing, this Christianism! He
lies dead there--he becomes no hanger-on. There you have the spirit of
the race. It displays itself in a form not less impressive in the
well-known incident in the very era of Penda, described by Bede.
King Eadwine sits in council to discuss the message of Christ, the
mansions that await the soul of man, the promise of a life beyond
death; and Coifi, one of the councillors, rising, speaks thus: "So
seemeth to me the life of man, O King, as when in winter-tide, seated
with your thanes around you, out of the storm that rages without a
sparrow flies into the hall, and fluttering hither and thither a
little, in the warmth and light, passes out again into the storm and
darkness. Such is man's life, but whence it cometh and whither it
goeth we know not." "We ne kunnen," as Alfred the Great, its first
translator, ends the passage. Who does not see--notwithstanding the
difference of time, place, character, and all stage circumstance--who
does not see rise before him the judgment-hall of Socrates, hear the
solemn last words to his judges: "I go to death, and you to life, but
which of us goeth to the better is known to God alone--+adêlon pantì
plén é tô theô+"?
Such is the stern and high manner in which this conflict in England
between the religions of Woden and Christ is conducted. There in the
seventh century is the depth of heart, the energy of soul, the pity and
the insight which appear in other forms in after ages. The roll of
English names in the _Acta Sanctorum_ is the living witness of the
sincerity, the intensity with which the same men who fought to the
death for Woden at the Winwaed, or speculated with Coifi on the eternal
mystery, accepted the faith which Rome taught, the ideal from Galilee
transmuted by Roman imagination, Roman statesmanship. The Saintly
Ideal lay on them like a spell: earth existed but to die in, life was
given but to pray for death. Rome taught the Saxon and the Jute that
all they had hitherto prayed for, glory in battle, earthly power and
splendour, must be renounced, and become but as the sound of bells from
a city buried deep beneath the ocean. Instead of defiance, Rome taught
them reverence; instead of pride, self-abasement; instead of the
worship of delight, the worship of sorrow. In this faith the Saxon and
the Jute strove with tragic seriousness to live. But the old faith
died hard, or lived on side by side with the new, far into the Middle
Age. Literature reflects the inner struggles of the period: the
war-song of Brunanburh, the mystic light which hangs upon the verses of
Caedmon, the melancholy of Cynewulf's lyrics. Yet what a contrast is
the England delineated by Bede with Visigothic Spain, with Lombard
Italy, or Frankish Gaul, as delineated by Gregory of Tours!
Thus these Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, slowly disciplining themselves to
the new ideal--to them in the ninth century come the Vikings. They are
not less conspicuous in valour, nor less profoundly sensitive to the
wonder and mystery of life, the poets in other lands of the Eddas and
of the Northern Myths. England as we know it is not yet formed.
Amongst the formative influences of English religion and English
freedom, and ultimately of this ideal of modern times, must be reckoned
the Viking and the Norseman, the followers of Guthrum, of Ivar, of
Hrolf, not less than the followers of Cerdic and of Cymric. To the
religious consciousness of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons, the Vikings
bring a religious consciousness as deep and serious. The struggle
against the Danes and Normans is not a struggle of English against
foreigners; it is a conflict for political supremacy amongst men of the
same race, who ultimately grow together into the England of the
fourteenth century. In the light of the future, the struggle of the
ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries does but continue the conflicts of
the Heptarchic kings. To this land of England the Vikings have the
right which the followers of Cerdic and Cynric had--the right of
supremacy, the right which the _will_ to possess it and the resolution
to die for that will, confers.
§ 3. DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS
The religion of the Vikings was the converse of their courage.
Aristotle remarks profoundly that the race which cannot quit itself
like a man in war cannot do any great thing in philosophy. Religion is
the philosophy of the warrior. And the scanty records of the Vikings,
the character of Knut, for instance, or that of the Conqueror, attest
the principle that the thoughts of the valiant about God penetrate more
deeply than the thoughts of the dastard. The Normans, who close the
English _Welt-wanderung_, who close the merely formative period of
England, illustrate this conspicuously. If the sombre fury of the
Winwaed displays the stern depths of religious conviction in the
vanguard of our race, if the Eddas and Myths argue a religious
earnestness not less deep in the Vikings, the high seriousness of the
religious emotion of the Norseman is not less clearly attested. Europe
of the eleventh century holds three men, each of heroic proportions,
each a Teuton in blood--Hildebrand, Robert Guiscard, and William the
Conqueror. In intellectual vision, in spiritual insight, Hildebrand
has few parallels in history. He is the founder of the Mediaeval
Papacy, realizing in its orders of monks, priests, and crusaders a
State not without singular resemblances to that which Plato pondered.
Like Napoleon and like Buonarroti, Hildebrand had the power, during the
execution of one gigantic design, of producing others of not less
astonishing vastness, to reinforce or supplant the first should it
fail. One of his designs originated in the impression which Norman
genius made upon him. It was to transform this race, the tyrants of
the Baltic and the English seas, the dominators of the Mediterranean
and the Aegean, into omnipresent emissaries and soldiers of the
theocratic State whose centre was Rome. But the vastness of his
original design broke even the mighty will of Hildebrand; his purpose
with regard to the Norseman remains like some abandoned sketch by
Buonarroti or Tintoretto. Yet no ruler of men had a profounder
knowledge of character, and with the Viking nature circumstance had
rendered him peculiarly familiar. The judgment of Orderic and of
William of Malmesbury confirms the impression of Hildebrand. But the
Normans have been their own witnesses, the cathedrals which they raised
from the Seine to the Tyne are epics in stone, inspired by no earthly
muse, fit emblems of the rock-like endurance and soaring valour of our
race.
There is a way of writing the history of Senlac which Voltaire,
Thierry, Michelet, and Guizot dote upon, infecting certain English
historians with their complacency, as if the Norse Vikings were the
descendants of Chlodovech, and the conquest of England were the glory
of France. The absurdity was crowned in 1804, when Napoleon turned the
attention of his subjects to the history of 1066, as an auspicious
study for the partners of his great enterprise against the England of
Pitt! How many Franks, one asks, followed the red banner of the
Bastard to Senlac, or, leaning on their shields, watched the coronation
at Westminster? Nor was it in the valley of the Seine that the
Norsemen acquired their genius for religion, for government, for art.
To the followers of Hrolf the empire of Charlemagne had the halo which
the Empire of Rome had to the followers of Alaric, and in that spirit
they adopted its language and turned its laws to their own purposes.
But Jutes and Angles and Saxons, Ostmen and Danes, were, if less
assiduous, not less earnest pupils in the same school as the Norsemen:
to all alike, the remnant of the Frankish realm of Charles lay nearest,
representing Rome and the glory of the Caesars. Nature and her
affinities drew the Normans to the West, across the salt plains whither
for six hundred years the most adventurous of their own blood had
preceded them. They closed the movement towards the sunset which Jute
and Saxon began; they are the last, the youngest, and in politics the
most richly gifted; yet in other departments of human activity not more
richly gifted than their kindred who produced Cynewulf and Caedmon,
Aidan and Bede, Coifi and Dunstan. And who shall affirm from what
branch of the stock the architects of the sky-searching cathedrals
sprang?
Senlac is thus in the line of Heptarchic battles; it is the last
struggle for the political supremacy over all England amongst those
various sections of the Northern races who in the way of six hundred
years make England, and who in their religious and political character
lay the unseen foundations of Imperial Britain.
Two traits of the Norman character impress the greatest of their
contemporary historians, William of Malmesbury--the Norman love of
battle and the Norman love of God. Upon these two ideas the history of
the Middle Age turns. The crusader, the monk, the troubadour, the
priest, the mystic, the dreamer and the saint, the wandering scholar
and the scholastic philosopher, all derive thence. Chivalry is born.
The knight beholds in his lady's face on earth the image of Our Lady in
Heaven, the Virgin-Mother of the Redeemer of men. From the grave of
his dead mistress Ramon Lull withdraws to a hermit's cell to ponder the
beauty that is imperishable; and over the grave of Beatrice, Dante
rears a shrine, a temple more awful, more sublime than any which even
that age has carved in stone.
Into this theatre of tossing life, the nation which the followers of
Cerdic and Knut and of William the Conqueror have formed enters
greatly. In thought, in action, in art, something of the mighty rôle
which the future centuries reserve for her is portended. The immortal
energy, the love of war, the deep religious fervour of England find in
the Crusades, as by God's own assignment, the task of her heart's
desire. We have but to turn to the churches of England, to study the
Templars carved upon their sepulchres, to know that in that great
tournament of the world the part of the Franks, if the noisier and more
continuous, was not more earnest. How singular is the chance, if it be
chance, which confronts the followers of the new faith with a Penda,
and the followers of the crescent with a Richard Lion-heart! Upon the
shifting Arabic imagination he alone of the infidels exercises enduring
sway. The hero of Tasso has no place in Arab history, but the memory
of Richard is there imperishably. Richard's services to England are
not the theme of common praise, yet, if we estimate the greatness of a
king by another standard than roods of conquered earth, or roods of
parchment blackened with unregarded statutes, Richard I, crusader and
poet, must be reckoned amongst the greatest of his great line, and his
name to the Europe of the Middle Age was like the blast of a trumpet
announcing the England of the years to come.
§ 4. WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
The crusader of the twelfth century follows the saint of an earlier
age, and in the thirteenth, England, made one in political and
constitutional ideals, attains a source of profounder religious unity.
The consciousness that not to Rome, but to Galilee itself she may turn
for the way, the truth, the light, has arisen. In the steady
development, in the ever-deepening power of this consciousness, lies
the unwritten history of the English Reformation. The race resolves no
more to trust to other witness, but with its own eyes to look upon the
truth.
Political history has its effect upon the growth of this conviction.
In the fourteenth century, for instance, the Papacy is at Avignon.
Edward I in the beginning of that century withstands Boniface VIII, the
last great pontiff in whom the temper and resolution of Hildebrand
appear, as William the Conqueror had withstood Gregory VII. The
statute of _praemunire_, a generation later, prepares the way for
Wyclif. The Papacy is now but an appanage of the Valois monarchs. How
shall England, conqueror of those monarchs at Creçy and on other
fields, reverence Rome, the dependent of a defeated antagonist?
The same bright energy of the soul, the same awe, rooted in the blood
of our race, which manifest themselves in the early and Middle Ages,
determine the character of the religious history of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. In the fifteenth century, suffering and the
presence of suffering, the law of tragedy of which we have spoken, add
their transforming power to spiritual life. As in political life the
sympathy with the wrongs of others grows into imaginative justice, so
sympathy with the faiths of others, which springs from the
consciousness of the first great illusion lost, and sorrow for a
vanished ideal, grows into tolerance for the creeds and religions of
others. For only a race deep-centred in its own faith, yet sensitive
to the faith that is in others, can understand the religion of others;
only such a race can found an empire characterized at once by freedom
and by faith.
The very ardour of the belief of the race in the ideal from Rome--a
Semitic ideal, transmuted by Roman genius and policy--swept the
Teutonic imagination beyond the ideal, seeking its sources where Rome
herself had sought them. This is the impulse which binds the whole
English Reformation, the whole movement of English religious thought
from Wyclif to Cromwell and Milton, to Wordsworth and Carlyle. It is
this common impulse of the race which Henry VIII relies upon, and
because he is in this their leader the English people forgets his
absolutism, his cruel anger, his bloody revenges.
The character of the English Reformation after the first tumultuous
conflicts, the fierce essays of royal theocracy and Jesuit reactionism,
set steadily towards Liberty of Conscience.
This spirit is glorified in Puritanism, the true heroic age of the
Reformation. It appears, for example, in Oliver Cromwell himself.
Cromwell is one of the disputed figures in our history, and every
English historian has drawn his own Cromwell. But to foreign
historians we may look for a judgment less partial, less personal. Dr.
Döllinger, for instance, to whom wide sympathy and long and profound
study of history have given the right, which can only be acquired by
vigil and fasting, to speak about the characters of the past--he who by
his position as Romanist is no pledged admirer, describes Cromwell as
the "prophet of Liberty of Conscience."[2] This is the deliberate
judgment of Döllinger. It was the judgment of the peasants of the
Vaudois two hundred and fifty years ago! Somewhat the same impression
was made by Cromwell upon Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Guizot.
Again in the seventeenth century, in the _Irene_ of Drummond, and in
the remarkable work of Barclay, the _Argenis_,[3] in its whole
conception of the religious {72} life, of monasticism, as in its
idealization of the character of the great Henri Quatre, you find the
same desire for a wider ideal, not less in religion than in politics.
We encounter it later in Shaftesbury and in Locke. It is the essential
thought of the work of Thomas Hobbes. It is supremely and beautifully
expressed in Algernon Sidney, the martyr of constitutional freedom and
of tolerance.
And what is the faith of Algernon Sidney? One who knew him well,
though opposed to his party, said of him, "He regards Christianity as a
kind of divine philosophy of the mind." Community of religious not
less than of political aims binds closer the friendship of Locke and
Shaftesbury. In the preparation of a constitution for the Carolinas
they found the opportunity which Corsica offered to Rousseau. In the
_Letters on Toleration_[4] Locke did but expand the principles upon
which, with Shaftesbury's aid, he elaborated the government of the new
State. The Record Office has no more precious document than the
draught of that work, the margins covered with corrections in the
handwriting of these two men, the one the greatest of the Restoration
statesmen, the other ranking amongst the greatest speculative thinkers
of his own or any age. One suggested formula after another is
traceable there, till at length the decision is made, that from the
citizens of the new State shall be exacted, not adherence to this creed
or to that, but simply the declaration, "There is a God." Algernon
Sidney aids Penn in performing a similar task for Pennsylvania, and
their joint work is informed by the same spirit as the "Constitutions"
of Locke and Shaftesbury.
Thus in religion the men of the seventeenth century occupy a position
analogous to their position in politics, already delineated. In
politics, as we have seen, they establish a constitutional government,
and make sure the path to the wider freedom of the future. In religion
they fix the principles of that philosophic tolerance which the later
centuries develop and apply. Both in politics and in religion they
turn aside from the mediaeval imperialism of Bourbon and Hapsburg,
consciously or unconsciously preparing the foundations of the
Imperialism of to-day.
If the divines, scholars, poets, and wits who met and talked under the
roof of the young Lord Falkland at Tew represent in their religious and
civil perplexities the spirit of the seventeenth century, within the
intersecting circles of Pope and Bolingbroke, Swift and Addison, may be
found in one form or another all the varied impulses of the
eighteenth--intellectual, political, scientific, literary, or
religious. England had succeeded to the place which Holland filled in
the days of Descartes and Spinoza--the refuge of the oppressed, the
home of political and religious freedom, the study of Montesquieu, the
asylum of Voltaire.[5] Yet between the England of the eighteenth and
the England of the seventeenth century there is no such deep gulf fixed
as Carlyle at one period of his literary activity imagined. The one is
the organic inevitable growth of the other. The England which fought
at Blenheim, Fontenoy, and Quebec is the same England as fought at
Marston Moor and Dunbar. Chatham rescued it from a deeper abasement
than that into which it had fallen in the days of the Cavalier
parliaments, and it followed him to heights unrecked of by Cromwell.
Nor is the religious character of the century less profound, less
earnestly reverent, when rightly studied. Even its scepticism, its
fiery denials, or vehement inquiry--a Woolston's, for instance, or a
Cudworth's, like a Shelley's or a James Thomson's[6] long
afterwards--spring from no love of darkness, but from the immortal
ardour for the light, for Truth, even if there come with it silence and
utter death. And from this same ardour arises that extraordinary
outburst of varied intellectual and religious effort, critical or
constructive, which makes the Revolutionary and the Georgian eras
comparable in energy, if not in height of speculative inquiry, to the
great period of the _Aufklärung_ in Germany. Kant acknowledged his
indebtedness to Hume. Rousseau, Voltaire, Condillac, and Helvetius are
in philosophic theory but pupils of Locke.
Towards the close of the century appeared Gibbon's great work, the
_Decline and Fall_, a prose epic in seventy-one books, upon the last
victories, the last triumphs, and the long, reluctant death-struggles
of the Roman Empire, the insidious advance of inner decay, the
ever-renewed assaults of foreign violence, the Goth, the Saracen, the
Mongol, and at the close, the leaguering lines of Mahomet, the farewell
to the Greeks of the last of the Constantines, the Ottomans in the
palaces of the Caesars, and the melancholy musings of an Italian
scholar over the ruins on the Seven Hills. An epic in prose--and every
one of its books might be compared to the gem-encrusted hilt of a
sword, and each wonderfully wrought jewel is a sentence; but the point
of the sword, like that of the cherubim, is everywhere turned against
superstition, bigotry, and religious wrong.
David Hume's philosophy was more read[7] in France than in Scotland or
England, but Hume wrote one book here widely read, his _History of
England_. It has been superseded, but it did what it aimed at doing.
There are certain books which, when they have done their work, are
forgotten, the _Dialectique_ of Ramus, for instance. This is not to be
regretted. Hume's _History of England_ is one of these books. For
nearly four generations it was the only History of England that English
men and women read. It was impossible that a man like Hume, the
central principle of whose life was the same as that of Locke,
Shaftesbury, Gibbon--the desire for a larger freedom for man's
thought--it was impossible for him to write without saturating every
page with that purpose, and it was impossible that three generations
could read that _History_ without being insensibly, unconsciously
transformed, their aspirations elevated, their judgments moulded by
contact with such a mind as that of Hume.
Recently the work of the great intellects of these two centuries bears
fruit in our changed attitude towards Ireland, in the emancipation of
the Catholics there; in our changed attitude towards the Jews, towards
the peoples of India, towards Islam. Edward Gibbon and Hume laid the
foundation of that college which is rising at Khartoum for the teaching
of Mohammedanism under the Queen. It was not only Lord Kitchener who
built it; John Locke, John Milton built it.
The saint, the crusader, the monk, reformer, puritan, and nonjuror lead
in unbroken succession to the critic, the speculative thinker, the
analytic or synthetic philosopher of the eighteenth and the nineteenth
century, these representing Imperial Britain, as the former represent
national or feudal England. Erigena in the ninth century surveying all
things as from a tall rock, Dunstan, Roger Bacon wasting in a prison
"through the incurable stupidity of the world," as he briefly explains
it, Michael Scott, Hooker, Bacon, Glanvil, Milton, and Locke, formed by
England, these men have in turn guided or informed the highest
aspirations, the very heart of the race. The greatest empire in the
annals of mankind is at once the most earnestly religious and the most
tolerant. Her power is deep-based as the foundations of the rocks, her
glance wide as the boundaries of the world, far-searching as the aeons
of time.
Yet it is not only from within, but from without, that this
transformation in the spirit of England has been effected; not only
from within by the work of a Sidney, a Gibbon, but from without by the
influence, imperceptible yet sure, of the faiths and creeds of the
Oriental peoples she conquers. The work of the Arabists of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such men as the Pocockes,[8]
father and son, Ockley and Sale, supplements or expands the teaching of
Locke and of Hume. The industry of Ross, the enthusiastic studies of
Sir William Jones, brought the power of Persian and Indian thought to
bear upon the English mind, and the efforts of all these men seem to
converge in one of the greatest literary monuments of the present
century--_The Sacred Books of the East_.
Thus then we have seen this immortal "energy of the soul" in religion
and thought, as in politics, manifest itself in like aspirations
towards imaginative freedom, the higher freedom and the higher justice,
summed in the phrase "Elargissez Dieu," that man's soul, dowered with
the unfettered use of all its faculties, may set towards the lodestar
of its being, harmony with the Divine, whether it be through freedom in
religious life or in political life or in any other form of life. For
all life, all being, is organic, ceaselessly transformed, ceaselessly
transforming, ceaseless action and interaction, like that vision of
Goethe's of the golden chalices ascending and descending perpetually
between heaven and this dark earth of ours.
§ 5. THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST: A FINAL CONSIDERATION
Before leaving this part of our subject, the testimony of the past,
there is one more question to consider, though with brevity. The great
empires or imperial races of the past, Hellas, Rome, Egypt, Persia,
Islam, represent each a distinct ideal--in each a separate aspect of
the human soul, as the characterizing attribute of the race, seems
incarnate. In Hellas, for example, it is Beauty, +tò kalón+; in Rome,
it is Power; in Egypt, Mystery, as embodied in her temples,
half-underground, or in the Sphinx that guards the sepulchres of her
kings; whilst in Persia, Beauty and Aspiration seem to unite in that
mystic curiosity which is the feature at once of her religion, her
architecture, her laws, of Magian ritual and Gnostic theurgy. Other
races possess these qualities, love of beauty, the sense of mystery;
but in Hellas and in Egypt they differentiate the race and all the
sections of the race.
What characteristic, then, common to the whole Teutonic race, does this
Empire of Britain represent? Apart altogether from its individual
ideal, political or religious, what attribute of the race,
distinguishing it from other races, the Hellenic, the Roman, the
Persian, does it eminently possess?
Compare, first of all, the beginnings of the people of England with the
beginnings of the Hellenic people, or better, perhaps, with the
beginnings of Rome. Who founded the Roman State? There is one fact
about which the most recent authorities agree with the most ancient,
that Rome was founded much as Athens was founded, by desperate men from
every city, district, region, in Italy. The outlaw, the refugee from
justice or from private vengeance, the landless man and the homeless
man--these gathered in the "Broad Plain," or migrated together to the
Seven Hills, and by the very extent of the walk which they traced
marked the plan which the Rome of the Caesars filled in. This process
may have extended over a century--over two centuries; Rome drawing to
itself ever new bands of adventurers, desperate in valour and in
fortune as the first. Who are the founders of England, of Imperial
Britain? They are those "co-seekers," _conqu[oe]stores_, I have spoken
of, who came with Cerdic and with Cynric, the chosen men, that is to
say, the most adventurous, most daring, most reckless--the fittest men
of the whole Teutonic kindred; and not for two centuries merely, but
for six centuries, this "land of the Angles," stretching from the Forth
and Clyde to the Channel, from Eadwine's Burgh to Andredeswald, draws
to itself, and is gradually ever peopled closer and closer with,
Vikings and Danes, Norsemen and Ostmen, followers of Guthrum, and
followers of Hrolf, followers of Ivar and followers of William I. They
come in "hundreds," they come in thousands. Into England, as into some
vast crucible, the valour of the earth pours itself for six hundred
years, till, molten and fused together, it arises at last one and
undivided, the English Nation. Such was the foundation, such the
building of the Empire, and these are the title-deeds which even in its
first beginnings this land can show.
And of the inner race character as representative of the whole Teutonic
kindred, the testimony is not less sure. What a heaven of light falls
upon the Hellas of the Isles, that period of its history which does not
begin, but ends with the Iliad and with the Odyssey--works that sum up
an old civilization! Already is born that beauty which, whether in
religion, or in art, or in life, Hellas made its own for ever. And it
is not difficult to trace back the descent of the ideal of Virgil and
of Cicero to the shepherds and outlaws of the Seven Hills. The
infinite curiosity of Persia, the worshipper of flame, is anticipated
on its earliest monuments, and the mystery of Egypt is coeval with its
first appearance in history. But of England and the Teutonic race what
shall one say? A characteristic universal in Teutonic history is the
extent to which the speculative or metaphysical pervades the practical,
the political, and social conditions of life. Freedom and deathless
courage are its inheritance; but these throughout its history are
accompanied by certain vaguer tendencies of thought and aspiration, the
touch of things unseen, those impulses beyond the finite towards the
Infinite, which display themselves so conspicuously in later ages. In
the united power of these two worlds, the visible and the invisible,
upon the Teutonic imagination, in this alternate sway of Reality and
Illusion, must be sought the characteristic of this race. In the Faust
legend, which, in one form or another, the race has made its own, it
attains a supreme embodiment. In the Oriental imagination the sense of
the transiency of life passes swiftly into a disdain for life itself,
and displays itself in a courage which arises less from hope than from
apathy or despair. But the death-defiant courage of the Viking springs
from no disdain of life, but from the scorn of death, hazarding life
rather than the hope upon which his life is set.
This characteristic can be traced throughout the range of Teutonic art
and Teutonic literature, and even in action. The spirit which
originates the _Völker-wanderung_, for instance, reappears in the
half-unconscious impulses, the instinctive bent of the race, which lead
the brave of Europe generation by generation for two hundred years to
the crusades. They found the grave empty, but the craving of the heart
was stayed, the yearning towards Asgard, the sun-bright eastern land,
where were Balder and the Anses, and the rivers and meadows unfading,
whence ages ago their race had journeyed to the forest-gloom and mists
by the Danube and the Rhine, by the Elbe and the Thames.
Thus, then, as Beauty is impersonated in Hellas, Mystery in Egypt, so
this attribute which we may name Reverie is impersonated in the
Teutonic race.
And in the Anglo-Saxon branch of the great Teutonic kindred, this
attribute, this Reverie, the divided sway of the actual and of the
dream-world, attests its presence and its power from the earliest
epochs. It has left its impress, its melancholy, its restlessness, its
infinite regret, upon the verse of Cynewulf and Caedmon, whilst in the
devotion of the saint, the scholar, the hermit, and of much of the
common life of the time to the ideal of Calvary, its presence falls
like a mystic light upon the turbulence and battle-fury of the eighth
and ninth centuries. It adds the glamour as from a distant and
enchanted past to chivalrous romance and to the crusader's and the
pilgrim's high endeavour. It cast its spell upon the Tudor mariners
and made the ocean their inheritance. In later times it reappears as
the world-impulse which has made our race a native of every climate,
yet jealous of its traditions, proud of its birth, unsubdued by its
environment.
If in the circuit they marked out for the walls of early Rome its first
founders seemed to anticipate the eternal city, so on the high seas the
founders of England, Jute, Viking, and Norseman seem to foreshadow the
Empire of the World, and by the surge or in the forest solitude,
already to meditate the terror, the sorrow, and the mystery, and the
coming harmonies, of _Faustus_ and _Lear_, of _Hamlet_ and _Adonais_.
[1] I have retained the familiar spelling of the Saxon hero's name.
Giesebrecht, who discovers in the stand against Charlemagne something
of the spirit of Arminius, _etwas vom Geiste Armins_ (_D.K.I._, p.
112), uses the form "Widukind," and the same form has the sanction of
Waitz (_Verfassungsgeschichte_, iii, p. 120). Yet the form Widu-kind
is probably no more than a chronicler's theory of the derivation of the
name.
[2] Döllinger's characterization of Cromwell is remarkable--"Aber er
(_i.e._, Cromwell) hat, zuerst unter den Mächtigen, ein religiöses
Princip aufgestellt und, soweit sein Arm reichte, zur Geltung gebracht,
welches, im Gegensatz gegen die grossen historischen Kirchen und gegen
den Islam, Keim und Stoff zu einer abgesonderten Religion in sich
trug:--das Princip der Gewissensfreiheit, der Verwerfung alles
religiösen Zwanges." Proceeding to expand this idea, Döllinger again
describes Cromwell as the annunciator of the doctrine of the
inviolability of conscience, so vast in its significance to the modern
world, and adds: "Es war damals von weittragender Bedeutung, dass der
Beherrscher eines mächtigen Reiches diese neue Lehre verkündete, die
dann noch fast anderthalb Jahrhunderte brauchte, bis sie in der
öffentlichen Meinung so erstarkte, dass auch ihre noch immer
zahlreichen Gegner sich vor ihr beugen müssen. Die Evangelische Union,
welche jetzt zwei Welttheile umfasst und ein früher unbekanntes und für
unmöglich gehaltenes Princip der Einigung verschiedener Kirchen
glücklich verwirklicht hat, darf wohl Cromwell als ihren Propheten und
vorbereitenden Gründer betrachten."--_Akademische Vorträge_, 1891, vol.
iii, pp. 55, 56.
[3] The _Argenis_ was published in 1621; but amongst the ideas on
religion, carefully elaborated or obscurely suggested, which throng its
pages, we find curious anticipations of the position of Locke and even
of Hume, just as in politics, in the remarks on elective monarchy put
in the lips of the Cardinal Ubaldini, or in the conceptions of justice
and law, Barclay reveals a sympathy with principles which appealed to
Algernon Sidney or were long afterwards developed by Beccaria. In the
motion of the stars Barclay sees the proof of the existence of God, and
requires no other. The _Argenis_, unfortunately for English
literature, was written at a time when men still wavered between the
vernacular and Latin as a medium of expression.
[4] The spirit and tendency of Locke's work appear in the short preface
to the English version of the Latin _Epistola de Tolerantia_, which had
already met with a general approbation in France and Holland (1689).
"This narrowness of spirit on all sides has undoubtedly been the
principal occasion of our miseries and confusions. But whatever has
been the occasion, it is now high time to seek for a thorough cure. We
have need of more generous remedies than what have yet been made use of
in our distemper. It is neither declarations of indulgence, nor acts
of comprehension, such as have yet been practised, or projected amongst
us, that can do the work. The first will but palliate, the second
increase our evil. Absolute Liberty, just and true Liberty, equal and
impartial Liberty, is the thing that we stand in need of." The second
Letter, styled "A Second Letter concerning Toleration," is dated May
27th, 1690--the year of the publication of his _Essay on the Human
Understanding_; the third, the longest, and in some respects the most
eloquent, "A Third Letter for Toleration," bears the date June 20th,
1693.
[5] Voltaire ridiculed certain peculiarities of Shakespeare when
mediocre French writers and critics began to find in his "barbarities"
an excuse for irreverence at the expense of Racine, but he never tires
of reiterating his admiration for the country of Locke and Hume, of
Bolingbroke and Newton. A hundred phrases could be gathered from his
correspondence extending over half a century, in which this finds
serious or extravagant utterance. Even in the last decades of his
life, when he sees the France of the future arising, he writes to
Madame Du Deffand: "How trivial we are compared with the Greeks, the
Romans, and the English"; and to Helvétius, about the same period
(1765), he admits the profound debts which France and Europe owe to the
adventurous thought of England. He even forces Frederick the Great
into reluctant but definite acquiescence with his enthusiasm--"Yes, you
are right; you French have grace, the English have the depth, and we
Germans, we have caution."
[6] James Thomson, who distinguished himself from the author of the
_Seasons_, and defined his own literary aims by the initials B. V.,
_i.e._, Bysshe Vonalis (Novalis), though possessing neither the wide
scholarship nor the depth of thought of Leopardi, occasionally equals
the great Italian in felicity of phrase and in the poignant expression
of the world-sorrow. Several of the more violent pamphlets on
religious themes ascribed to him are of doubtful authenticity. He died
in 1882, the year after the death of Carlyle.
[7] Hume's disappointment at the reception accorded to the first quarto
of his _History of England_ must be measured by the standard of the
hopes he had formed. Conscious of genius, and not without ambition, he
had reached middle life nameless, and save in a narrow circle
unacknowledged. But the appearance of his _History_, two years later
than his _Political Discourses_, was synchronous with the darkest hours
in English annals since 1667. An English fleet had to quit the Channel
before the combined navies of France and Spain; Braddock was defeated
at Fort Duquesne; Minorca was lost. At this period the tide of
ill-feeling between the Scotch and the English ran bitter and high.
The taunts of individuals were but the explosions of a resentment
deep-seated and strong. London had not yet forgotten the panic which
the march of the Pretender had roused. To the Scottish nation the
massacre at Culloden seemed an act of revenge--savage, pre-meditated,
and impolitic. The ministry of Chatham changed all this. He raised an
army from the clans who ten years before had marched to the heart of
England; ended the privileges of the coterie of Whig families,
bestowing the posts of danger and power not upon the fearless but
frequently incapable sons of the great houses, but upon the talent bred
in the ranks of English merchants. Hume's work was thus caught in the
stream of Chatham's victories, and a ray from the glory of the nation
was reflected upon its historian. The general verdict was ratified by
the concord of the best judgments. Gibbon despaired of rivalling its
faultless lucidity; Burke turned from a projected History to write in
Hume's manner the events of the passing years, founding the _Annual
Register_. Its outspoken Toryism was welcome to a generation weary of
the "Venetian oligarchy," this epoch, if any, meriting Beaconsfield's
epithet. The work had the fortune which Gibbon and Montesquieu craved
for their own--it was read in the boudoir as much as in the study. Nor
did its power diminish. It contained the best writing, the deepest
thought, the most vivid portraiture, devoted to men and things English,
over a continuous period, until the works of Carlyle and Macaulay.
[8] The significance of these men's work may be estimated by the
ignorance even of scholars and tolerant thinkers. Spinoza, for
instance, in 1675, describes Islam as a faith that has known no schism;
and twenty years earlier Pascal brands Mohammed as forbidding all study!
PART II
THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
LECTURE IV
THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
[_Tuesday, May_ 29_th_, 1900]
Hitherto we have been engaged with the past, with the slow growth
across the centuries of those political or religious ideals which now
control the destinies of this Empire, a movement towards an ever higher
conception of man's relations towards the Divine, towards other men,
and towards the State. To-day a subject of more pressing interest
confronts us, but a subject more involved also in the prejudices and
sympathies which the violence of pity or anger, surprise or alarm,
arouses, woven more closely to the living hopes, regrets, and fears
which compose the instant of man's life. We are in the thick of the
deed--how are we to judge it? How conjure the phantoms inimical to
truth, which Tacitus found besetting his path as he prepared to narrate
the civil struggles of Galba and Otho thirty years after the event?
Yet one aspect of the subject seems free and accessible, and to this
aspect I propose to direct your attention. The separate incidents of
the war, and the actions of individuals, statesmen, soldiers,
politicians, journalists, and officials, civil or military, the wisdom
or the rashness, the energy or the sloth, the wavering or the
resolution, ancient experience grown half prophetic with the years,
alert vigour, quick to perceive, unremitting in pursuit, or ingenuous
surprise tardily awaking from the dream of a world which is not
this--all these will fall within the domain of History some centuries
hence when what men saw has been sifted from what they merely desired
to see or imagined they saw.
But the place of the war in the general life of this State, and the
purely psychological question, how is the idea of this war, in Plato's
sense of that word, related to the idea of Imperial Britain?--these it
is possible even now to consider, _sine ira et studio_. What is its
historical significance compared with the wars of the past, what is the
presage of this great war--if it be a great war--for the future?
§ I. THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
Now the magnitude of a war does not depend upon the numbers, relative
or absolute, of the opposing forces. Fewer men fell at Salamis than at
Towton, and in the battle of Bedr[1] the total force engaged did not
exceed two thousand, yet Mohammed's victory changed the history of the
world. The followers of Andreas Hofer were but a handful compared with
the army which marched with de Saxe to Toumay, but the achievement of
the Tyrolese is enduring as Fontenoy. War is the supreme act in the
life of a State, and it is the motives which impel, the ideal which is
pursued, that determine the greatness or insignificance of that act.
It is the cause, the principles in collision which make it for ever
glorious, or swiftly forgotten. What, then, are the principles at
issue in the present war?
The war in South Africa, as we saw in the opening lecture, is the first
event or series of events upon a great scale, the genesis of which lies
in this force named Imperialism. It is the first conspicuous
expression of this ideal in the world of action--of heroic action,
which now as always implies heroic suffering. No other war in our
history is in its origins and its aims so evidently the realization, so
exclusively the result of this imperial ideal. Whatever may have been
the passing designs of the Government, lofty or trivial, whatever the
motives of individual politicians, this is the cause and this the ideal
by which, consciously or unconsciously, the decision of the State has
been prescribed and controlled. But the present war is not merely a
war for an idea, which of itself would be enough to make the war, in M.
Thiers' refrain, _digue de l'attention des hommes_; but, like the wars
of the sixteenth century or the French Revolutionary Wars, it is a war
between two ideals, between two principles that strike deep into the
life-history of modern States.
In the religious wars of the sixteenth century the principle of freedom
was arrayed against the principle of authority. The conflict rolled
hither and thither for two centuries, and was illustrated by the valour
and genius of Europe, by characters and incidents of imposing grandeur,
sublime devotion, or moving pity. So in the war of the French
Revolution the dying principle of Monarchism was arrayed against the
principle of Democracy, and the tragic heroism with which the
combatants represented these principles, whether Austria, Russia,
Spain, England, Germany, or France, makes that war one of the most
precious memories of mankind.
In the tragedies of art, in stage-drama, the conflict, the struggle is
between two principles, two forces, one base, the other exalted. But
in the world-drama a conflict of a profounder kind reveals itself, the
conflict between heroism and heroism, between ideal and ideal, often
equally lofty, equally impressive.
Such is the eternal contrast between the tragic in Art and the tragic
in History, and this characteristic of these two great conflicts of the
sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries reappears in the present war.
There also two principles equally lofty and impressive are at
strife--the dying principle of Nationality, and the principle which,
for weal or woe, is that of the future, the principle of Imperialism.
These are the forces contending against each other on the sterile
veldt; this is the first act of the drama whose _dénouement_--who dare
foretell? What distant generation shall behold _that_ curtain?
§ 2. NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM
In political life, in the life-history of states, as in religious, as
in intellectual and social history, change and growth, or what we now
name Evolution, are perpetual, continuous, unresting. The empire which
has ceased to advance has begun to recede. Motion is the law of its
being, if not towards a fuller life, motion toward death. Thus in a
race dowered with the genius for empire, as Rome was, as Britain is,
Imperialism is the supreme, the crowning form, which in this process of
evolution it attains. The civic, the feudal, or the oligarchic State
passes into the national, the national into the imperial, by slow or
swift gradations, but irresistibly, as by a fixed law of nature. No
great statesman is ever in advance of, or ever behind, his age. The
patriot is he who is most faithful to the highest form, to the
actualized ideal of his time. Eliot in the seventeenth century died
for the constitutional rights of a nation; in the thirteenth he would
have stood with the feudal lords at Runnymede; in the nineteenth he
would have added his great name to imperialism.
The national is thus but a phase in the onward movement of an imperial
State, of a race destined to empire. In such a State, Nationality has
no peculiar sanctity, no fixed, immutable influence, no absolute sway.
The term National, indeed, has recently acquired in politics and in
literature something of the halo which in the beginning of the century
belonged to the idea of liberty alone. The part which it has played in
Bohemia and Hungary, Belgium and Holland, Servia and Bulgaria, and,
above all, in the unity of Italy and the realization after four
centuries of Machiavelli's dream, is a living witness of its power. In
the Middle Age the two ideas, nationality and independence, were
inseparable, but with the completion of the State system of Europe, the
rise of Prussia and the transformation of the half-oriental Muscovy
into the Empire of the Czars, and with the growth in European politics
of the Balance-of-Power[2] theory, a disruption occurred between these
ideas, and a series of protected nationalities arose.
Indeed, as we recede from the event, the Revolution of 1848 presents
itself ever more definitely as it appeared to certain of its actors,
and to a few of the more speculative onlookers, as but an aftermath of
1789 and 1793, as the net return, the practical result to France and to
Europe of the glorious sacrifices and hopes of the revolutionary era.
Nationality was the occasion and the excuse of 1848; but the ideal was
a shadow from the past. The men of that time do not differ more widely
from the men of 1789 than Somers and Halifax differ from the great
figures of the earlier revolution, Pym, Strafford, and Cromwell.[3]
The amazing confusion which attends the efforts of French and German
publicists to expand the concept of the Nation supports the evidence of
history that the great _rôle_ which it has played is transient and
accidental, and that it is not the final and definite form towards
which the life of a State moves. It is one thing to exalt the grandeur
of this ideal for Italy or for France, but it is another to assume that
it has final and equal grandeur in every land and to every State.
Nor are the endeavours of such writers as Mancini or Bluntschli to
trace the principle of Nationality to the deepest impulses of man's
life more auspicious. Not to Humanity, but to Imperial Rome, must be
ascribed the origin of nationality as the prevailing form in the State
system of modern Europe. For Roman policy was, so to speak, a Destiny,
not merely to the present, but to the future world. Rome effaced the
distinctions, the fretting discords of Celtic tribes, and traced the
bounds of that Gallia which Meerwing and Karling, Capet and Bourbon,
made it their ambition to reach, and their glory to maintain. To the
cities of the Italian allies Rome granted immunities, privileges, of
municipal independence; and from the gift, as from a seed of hate, grew
the interminable strife, the petty wars of the Middle Age. For this,
Machiavelli, in many a bitter paragraph, has execrated the Papacy--"the
stone thrust into the side of Italy to keep the wound open"--but the
political creed of the great Ghibellines, Farinata, or Dante himself,
shows that Italian republicanism, like French nationality, derives not
from papal, but from imperial Rome.
The study of Holland, of the history of Denmark, of Prussia, of Sweden,
of Scotland, does but illustrate the observation that in the principle
of Nationality, whether in its origin or its ends, no ideal wide as
humanity is involved, nothing that is not transient, local, or derived.
Poetry and heroism have in the past clothed it with undying fame; but
recent history, by instance and by argument from Europe and from other
continents, has proved that a young nation may be old in corruption,
and a small State great in oppression, that right is not always on the
side of weakness, nor injustice with the strong.
Not for the first time in history are these two principles, Nationality
and Imperialism, or principles strikingly analogous, arrayed against
each other. Modern Europe, as we have seen, is a complexus of States,
of which the Nation is the constituent unit. Ancient Hellas presents a
similar complexus of States, of which the unit was not the Nation but
the City. There, after the Persian Wars, these communities present a
conflict of principles similar to this which now confronts us, a
conflict between the ideals of civic independence and civic
imperialism. And the conflict is attended by similar phenomena, covert
hostility, jealous execration, and finally, universal war. The issue
is known.
The defeat of Athens at Syracuse, involving inevitably the fall of her
empire, was a disaster to humanity. The spring of Athenian energy was
broken, and the one State which Hellas ever produced capable at once of
government and of a lofty ideal, intellectual and political, was a
ruin. Neither Sparta nor Macedon could take its place, and after the
lingering degradation of two centuries Hellas succumbs to Rome.
A disaster in South Africa would have been just such a disaster as
this, but on a wider and more terrible scale.
For this empire is built upon a design more liberal even than that of
Athens or the Rome of the Antonines. Britain conquers, but by the
testimony of men of all races who have found refuge within her
confines, she conquers less for herself than for humanity. "The earth
is Man's" might be her watchword, and, as if she had caught the Ocean's
secret, her empire is the highway of nations. That province, that
territory, that state which is added to her sway, seems thereby
redeemed for humanity rather than conquered for her own sons.
This, then, is the first characteristic of the war, a conflict between
the two principles, the moribund principle of Nationality--in the
Transvaal an oppressive, an artificial nationality--and the vital
principle of the future.
§ 3. THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY
But the war in South Africa has a second characteristic not less
significant. It is the first great war waged by the completely
constituted democracy of 1884. In the third Reform Bill, as we have
seen, the efforts of six centuries of constitutional history find their
realization. The heroic action and the heroic insight, the energy, the
fortitude, the suffering, from the days of Langton and de Montfort,
Bigod and Morton, to those of Canning and Peel, Russell and Bright,
attain in this Act their consummation and their end. The wars waged by
the unreformed or partially reformed constituencies continue in their
constitutional character the wars waged by the Monarchy or by the Whig
or Tory oligarchies of last century. But in the present conflict a
democracy, at once imperial, self-governing and warlike, and actuated
by the loftiest ideals, confronts the world.
Twice and twice only in recorded history have these qualities appeared
together and simultaneously in one people, in the Athens of Pericles
and the Islam of Omar.[4]
Revolutionary France was inspired by a dazzling dream, an exalted
purpose, but its imperialism was the creation of the genius or the
ambition of the individual; it was not rooted in the heart of the race.
It was not Clive merely who gained India for England. French
incapacity for the government of others, for empire, in a word, fought
on our side. Napoleon knew this. What a study are those bulletins of
his! After Austerlitz, after Jena, Eyiau, Friedland, one iteration,
assurance and reassurance, "This is the last, the very last campaign!"
and so on till Waterloo. His Corsican intensity, the superhuman power
of that mighty will, transformed the character of the French race, but
not for ever. The Celtic element was too strong for him, and in the
French noblesse he found an index to the whole nation. The sarcasm,
which if he did not utter he certainly prompted, has not lost its
edge--"I showed them the path to glory and they refused to tread it; I
opened my drawing-room doors and they rushed in, in crowds." There is
nothing more tragic in history than the spectacle of this man of
unparalleled administrative and political genius, fettered by the past,
and at length grown desperate, abandoning himself to his weird. The
march into Russia is the return upon the daimonic spirit of its
primitive instincts. The beneficent ruler is merged once more in the
visionary of earlier times, dreaming by the Nile, or asleep on the heel
of a cannon on board the _Muiron_.[5] Napoleon was fighting for a dead
ideal with the strength of the men who had overthrown that ideal--how
should he prosper? Conquest of England, Spain, Austria, the Rhine
frontier, Holland, Belgium, point by point his policy repeats Bourbon
policy, the policy that led Louis XVI to the scaffold and himself to
Ste Hélène. Yet his first battles were for liberty, and his last made
the return of mediaeval despotism impossible. Dying, he bequeaths
imperialism to France as Euphorion leaves his vesture in the hands of
Faust and Helena. How fatal was that gift of a spurious imperialism
Metz, Sedan, and Paris made clear to all men.
The Rome of the Caesars presents successively a veiled despotism, a
capricious military tyranny, or an oriental absolutism. The "Serrar
del Consiglio" made Venice and her empire the paragon of oligarchic
States.
The rise of the empire of Spain seems in its national enthusiasm to
offer a closer parallel to this of Britain. But a ruthless fanaticism,
religious and political, stains from the outset the devotion of the
Spanish people to their Hapsburg monarchs. Spain fought with grandeur,
heroism, and with chivalrous resolution; but her dark purpose, the
suppression throughout Europe of freedom of the soul, made her valour
frustrate and her devotion vain. She warred against the light, and the
enemies of Spain were the friends of humanity, the benefactors of races
and generations unborn. What criterion of truth, what principle even
of party politics, can then incite a statesman and an historian to
assert and to re-assert that in our war in South Africa we are acting
as the Spanish acted against the ancestors of the Dutch, and that our
fate and our retribution will be as the fate and the retribution of
Spain? England's ideal is not the ideal of Spain, nor are her methods
the methods of Spain. The war in Africa--is it then a war waged for
the destruction of religious freedom throughout the world, or will the
triumph of England establish the Inquisition in Pretoria? But, it is
urged, "the Dutch have never been conquered, they are of the same
stubborn, unyielding stock as our own." In the sense that they are
Teutons, the Dutch are of the same stock as the English; but the
characteristics of the Batavian are not those of the Jute, the Viking,
and the Norseman. The best blood of the Teutonic race for six
centuries went to the making of England. At the period when the
Batavians were the contented dependents of Burgundy or Flanders, the
English nation was being schooled by struggle and by suffering for the
empire of the future. As for the former clause of the assertion, it is
accurate of no race, no nation. The history of the United Provinces
does not close with John de Witt and William III. Can those critics of
the war who still point to William the Silent, and to the broken dykes,
and to Leyden, have reviewed, even in Schlosser, the history of Holland
in the eighteenth century, the part of the Dutch in Frederick's wars,
the turpitudes of the Peace of 1783, unequalled in modern history, and
in world-history never surpassed, or of the surrender of Namur to
Joseph II, or of the braggadocio patriotism which that monarch tested
by sending his ship down the Scheldt, or of the capitulation of
Amsterdam to Brunswick?
The heroic period of the United Provinces in action, art, and
literature began and ended in the deep-hearted resolution of the race
to perish rather than forgo the right to worship God in their own way.
In the history of this State, from Philip II to Louis XIV, religious
oppression seems to play a part almost like that of individual genius
in Macedon or in modern France. When that force is withdrawn, there is
an end to the greatness of Holland, as when a Charlemagne, an
Alexander, or a Napoleon dies, the greatness of their empires dies
also. In the passion for political greatness as such, the Dutch have
never found the spur, the incitement to heroic action or to heroic
self-renunciation which religion for a time supplied.
From false judgments false deeds follow, else it were but harsh
ingratitude to recall, or even to remember, the decay, the humiliations
of the land within whose borders Rembrandt and Spinoza, Vondel and
Grotius, Cornelius and John de Witt lived, worked, and suffered.
But in the empire which fell at Syracuse we encounter resemblances to
the democratic Empire of Britain, deeper and more organic, and of an
impressive and even tragic significance. For though the stage on which
Athens acts her part is narrower, the idea which informs the action is
not less elevated and serene. A purpose yet more exultant, a hope as
living, and an impulse yet more mystic and transcendent, sweeps the
warriors of Islam beyond the Euphrates eastward to the Indus, then
through Syria, beyond the Nile to Carthage and the Western Sea, tracing
within the quarter of a century dominated by the genius of Omar the
bounds of an empire which Rome scarce attains in two hundred years.
But this empire-republic, the Islam of Omar, passes swifter than a
dream; the tyranny and the crimes of the palaces of Damascus and Bagdad
succeed.
And now after twelve centuries a democratic Empire, raised up and
exalted for ends as mystic and sublime as those of Athens and the Islam
of Omar, appears upon the world-stage, and the question of questions to
every student of speculative politics at the present hour is--Whither
will this portent direct its energies? Will it press onward towards
some yet mightier endeavour, or, mastered by some hereditary taint,
sink torpid and neglectful, leaving its vast, its practically
inexhaustible forces to waste unused?
The deeds on the battlefield, the spirit which fires the men from every
region of that empire and from every section of that society of
nations, the attitude which has marked that people and that race
towards the present war, are not without deep significance. Now at
last the name English People is co-extensive and of equal meaning with
the English race. The distinctions of rank, of intellectual or social
environment, of birth, of political or religious creeds, professions,
are all in that great act forgotten and are as if they were not.
Rivals in valour, emulous in self-renunciation, contending for the
place of danger, hardship, trial, they seem as if every man felt within
his heart the emotion of Aeschines seeing the glory of Macedon--"Our
life scarce seemed that of mortals, nor the achievements of our time."
Contemplating this spectacle, this Empire thrilled throughout its vast
bulk, from bound to bound of its far-stretched greatness, with one
hope, one energy, one aspiration and one fear, one sorrow and one joy,
is not this some warrant, is not this some presage of the future, and
of the course which this people will pursue?
Let us pause here for a moment upon the transformation which this word
English People has undergone. When Froissart, for instance, in the
fourteenth century, speaks of the English People, he sees before him
the chivalrous nobles of the type of Chandos or Talbot, the Black
Prince or de Bohun. The work of the archers at Creçy and Poitiers
extended the term to English yeomen, and with the rise of towns and the
spread of maritime adventure the merchant and the trader are included
under the same great designation as feudal knight and baron.
Puritanism and the Civil Wars widened the term still further, but as
late as the time of Chatham its general use is restricted to the ranks
which it covered in the sixteenth century. Thus when Chatham or Burke
speaks of the English People, it is the merchants of a town like
Bristol, as opposed to the English nobles, that he has in view. And
Wellington declared that Eton and Harrow bred the spirit which overcame
Napoleon, which stormed Badajoz, and led the charge at Waterloo. The
Duke's hostility to Reform, his reluctance to extend the term, with its
responsibilities and its privileges, its burdens and its glory, to the
whole race, is intelligible enough. But in this point the admirers of
the Duke were wiser or more reckless than their hero, and the followers
of Pitt than the followers of Chatham. The hazard of enfranchising the
millions, of extending the word People to include every man of British
blood, was a great, a breathless hazard. Might not a mob arise like
that which gathered round the Jacobins, or by their fury and their rage
added another horror to the horror of the victim on the tumbril, making
the guillotine a welcome release?
But the hazard has been made, the enfranchisement is complete, and it
is a winning hazard. To Eton and Harrow, as nurseries of valour, the
Duke would now require to add every national, every village school,
from Bethnal Green to Ballycroy! _Populus Anglicanus_--it has risen in
its might, and sent forth its sons, and not a man of them but seems on
fire to rival the gallantry, the renunciation of Chandos and Talbot, of
Sidney and Wolfe. Has not the present war given a harvest of
instances? The soldier after Spion Kop, his jaw torn off, death
threatening him, signs for paper and pencil to write, not a farewell
message to wife or kin, but Wolfe's question on the Plains of
Abraham--"Have we won?" Another, his side raked by a hideous wound,
dying, breathes out the undying resolution of his heart, "Roll me
aside, men, and go on!" Nor less heroic that sergeant, ambushed and
summoned at great odds to surrender. "Never!" was the brief imperative
response, and made tranquil by that word and that defiance, shot
through the heart, he falls dead. This is the spirit of the ranks,
this the bearing in death, this the faith in England's ideal of the
enfranchised masses.
Nor has the spirit of Eton and Harrow abated. Neither the Peninsular
nor the Marlborough wars, conspicuous by their examples of daring,
exhibit anything that within a brief space quite equals the
self-immolating valour displayed in the disastrous openings of this war
by those youths, the _gens Fabia_ of modern days, prodigal of their
blood, rushing into the Mauser hailstorm, as if in jest each man had
sworn to make the sterile veldt blossom like the rose, fertilizing it
with the rich drops of his heart, since the rain is powerless!
§ 4. COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM
Nor is this heroism, and the devotion which inspires it, shut within
the tented field or confined to the battle-line. The eyes of the race
are upon that drama, and the heart of the race beats within the breasts
of the actors. There is something Roman in the nation's unmoved
purpose, the concentration of its whole force upon one fixed mark,
disregarding the judgment of men, realizing, however bitter the wisdom,
that the Empire which the sword and the death-defiant valour of the
past have upraised can be maintained only by the sword and a valour not
less death-defiant, a self-renunciation not less heroic. Such
manifestations of heroism and of a zealous ardour, unexampled in its
extent and its intensity, offer assuredly, I repeat, some augury, some
earnest of that which is to come, some pledge to the new century rising
like a planet tremulous on the horizon's verge.
But a widespread error still confounds this imperial patriotism with
Cosmopolitanism, this resolution of a great people with Jingoism. Now
what is Cosmopolitanism? It is an attitude of mind purely negative; it
is a characteristic of protected nationalities, and of decayed races.
It passes easily into political indifference, political apathy. It is
the negation of patriotism; but it offers no constructive ideal in its
stead. Imperialism is active, is constructive.[6] It is the passion
of Marathon and Trafalgar, it is the patriotism of a de Montfort or a
Grenville, at once intensified and heightened by the aspirations of
humanity, by the ideals of a Shelley, a Wilberforce, or a Canning. But
between mere war-fever, Jingoism, and such free, unfettered enthusiasm,
a nation's unaltering loyalty in defeat or in triumph to an ideal born
of its past, and its joy in the actions in which this ideal is
realized, the gulf is wide. Napoleon knew this. Nothing in history is
more illuminating than the bitter remark with which he turned away from
the sight of the enthusiasm with which Vienna welcomed its defeated
sovereign, Francis II. All his victories could not purchase him _that_!
Would the critics of "music-hall madness" prefer to see a city stand
sullen, silent, indifferent, cursing in the bitterness of its heart the
government, the army, the empire? Or would they have it like the Roman
mob of the first Caesars, cluster in crowds, careless of empire,
battles, or the glory of Rome's name, shouting for a loaf of bread and
a circus ticket? Between the cries, the laughter, the tears of a mob
and the speech or the silence of a statesman there is a great space;
but it were rash to assume that the dissonant clamour of the crowds is
but an ignorant or a transient frenzy. In religion itself have we not
similar variety of expression? Those faces gathered under the trees or
in a public thoroughfare--the expression of emotion there is not that
which we witness, say, in Santa Croce, at prime, when the first light
falls through the windows on Giotto's frescoes, Herod and Francis, St.
Louis and the Soldan, and on the few, the still worshippers--but dare
we assert that this alone is sincere, the other unfelt because loud?
§ 5. MILITARISM
And yet beneath this joy, the tumultuous joy of this hour of respite
from a hope that in the end became harder to endure than despair, there
is perhaps not a single heart in this Empire which does not at moments
start as at some menacing, some sinister sound, a foreboding of evil
which it endeavours to shake off but cannot, for it returns, louder and
more insistent, tyrannously demanding the attention of the most
reluctant. Once more on this old earth of ours is witnessed the
spectacle of a vast people stirred by one ideal impulse, prepared for
all sacrifices for that ideal, prepared to face war, and the outcry of
a misunderstanding or envious antagonism. Whither is this impulse to
be directed? What minister or parliament is to dare the responsibility
of turning this movement, this great and spontaneous movement, to this
people's salvation, to this Empire's high purposes? How shall its
bounds be made secure against encroachment, its own shores from
coalesced foes?
Let me approach this matter from the standpoint of history, the sole
standpoint from which I have the right--to use a current phrase--to
speak as an expert. First of all let me say, that an axiom or maxim
which appears to guide the utterances if not the actions of statesmen,
the maxim that the British people will under no circumstances tolerate
any form of compulsory service for war, is unjustified by history. It
has no foundation in history at all. Nothing in the past justifies the
ascription of such a limit to the devotion of this people. Of an
ancient lineage, but young in empire, proud, loving freedom, not
disdainful of glory, perfectly fearless--who shall assign bounds to its
devotion or determine the limits of its endurance? I go further, I
affirm that the records of the past, the heroic sacrifices which
England made in the sixteenth, in the seventeenth century, and in later
times, justify the contrary assumption, justify the assumption that at
this crisis--this grave and momentous crisis, a crisis such as I think
no council of men has had to face for many centuries, perhaps not since
the embassy of the Goths to the Emperor Valens--the ministry or cabinet
which but dares, dares to trust this people's resolution, will find
that this enthusiasm is not that of men overwrought with war-fever, but
the deep-seated purpose of a people strong to defend the heritage of
its fathers, and not to swerve from the path which fate itself has
marked out for it amongst the empires of the earth. This, I maintain,
is the verdict of history upon the matter.
There is a second prominent argument against compulsory service, an
argument drawn by analogy from the circumstances of other nations. Men
point to Rennes, to the petty tyrannies of military upstarts over
civilians in Germany, and cry, "Behold what awaits you from
conscription!" Such arguments have precisely the same value as the
arguments against Parliamentary Reform fifty years ago, based on the
terror of Jacobinism. We might as well condemn all free institutions
because of Tammany Hall, as condemn compulsory service because of its
abuses in other countries. And an appeal to the Pretorians of Rome or
to the Janizzaries of the Ottoman empire would be as relevant as an
appeal for warning to the major-generals of Oliver Cromwell. Nor is
there any fixed and necessary hostility between militarism and art,
between militarism and culture, as the Athens of Plato and of
Sophocles, a military State, attests.
All institutions are transfigured by the ideal which calls them into
being. And this ideal of Imperial Britain--to bring to the peoples of
the earth beneath her sway the larger freedom and the higher
justice--the world has known none fairer, none more exalted, since that
for which Godfrey and Richard fought, for which Barbarossa and St.
Louis died. There is nothing in our annals which warrants evil presage
from the spread of militarism, nothing which precludes the hope, the
just confidence that our very blood and the ineffaceable character of
our race will save us from any mischief that militarism may have
brought to others, and that in the future another chivalry may arise
which shall be to other armies and other systems what the Imperial
Parliament is to the parliaments of the world--a paragon and an example.
With us the decision rests. If we should decide wrongly--it is not the
loss of prestige, it is not the narrowed bounds we have to fear, it is
the judgment of the dead, the despair of the living, of the
inarticulate myriads who have trusted to us, it is the arraigning eyes
of the unborn. Who can confront this unappalled?
[1] The battle of Bedr was fought in the second year of the Hegira,
A.D. 624, in a valley near the Red Sea, between Mecca and Medina. The
victory sealed the faith not only of his followers but of Mohammed
himself in his divine mission. Mohammed refers to this triumph in
surah after surah of the Koran, as Napoleon lingers over the memory of
Arcola, of Lodi, or Toulon.
[2] Gentz' work on the Balance of Power, _Fragmente aus der neuesten
Geschichte des politischen Gleichgevaichtes in Europa_, Dresden, 1806,
is still, not only from its environment, but from its conviction, the
classic on this subject. It gained him the friendship of Metternich,
and henceforth he became the constant and often reckless and violent
exponent of Austrian principles. But he was sincere. To the charge of
being the Aretino of the Holy Alliance, Gentz could retort with
Mirabeau that he was paid, not bought. The friendship of Rahel and
Varnhagen von Ense acquits him of suspicion. Nor is his undying
hostility to the Revolution more surprising than that of Burke, whom he
translated, or of Rivarol, whose elusive but studied grace of style he
not unsuccessfully imitated. Gentz, who was in his twelfth year at
Bunker's Hill, in his twenty-sixth when the Bastille fell, lived just
long enough to see the Revolution of 1830 and the flight of Charles X.
But the shock of the Revolution of July seemed but a test of the
strength of the fabric which he had aided Metternich to rear. So that
as life closed Gentz could look around on a completed task. Napoleon
slept at St. Helena, his child, _le fils de l'homme_, was in a
seclusion that would shortly end in the grave, Canning was dead and
Byron, Heine was in exile, Chateaubriand, a peer; _quotusquisque
reliquus qui rempublicam vidisset_? who was there any longer to
remember Marengo and Austerlitz, Wagram, and Schönbrunn? And yet
exactly seven months and nineteen days after Gentz breathed his last,
the first reformed parliament met at Westminster, January 29th, 1833,
announcing the advent to power of a democracy even mightier than that
of 1789.
[3] It is hardly necessary to indicate that allusions to the "glorious
but bloodless" revolution of 1688 are unwarranted and pointless when
designed to tarnish, by the contrast they imply, the French Revolution
of 1789. It was the bloody struggle of 1642-51 that made 1688
possible. The true comparison--if any comparison be possible between
revolutions so widely different in their aims and results, though
following each other closely in the outward sequence of incident and
character--would be between the Puritan struggle and the first
revolutionary period in France, and between 1688 and the flight of
James II, and 1830 and the abdication of Charles X. Both Guizot, whose
memoirs of the English Revolution had appeared in 1826, and his master
Louis Philippe intended that France should draw this comparison--the
latter by the title "King of the French" adroitly touching the
imagination or the vanity, whilst deceiving the intelligence, of the
nation.
[4] I have employed the phrase "Islam of Omar" throughout the present
work as a means of designating the period of nine-and-twenty years
between the death of Mohammed, 12th Rabi I. 11 A.H., June 8th, A.D.
632, and the assassination of Ali, 17th Hamzan, 40 A.H., January 27th,
A.D. 661. Even in the lifetime of Mohammed the genius and personality
of Omar made themselves distinctly felt. During the caliphate of Abu
Bekr the power of Omar was analogous to that of Hildebrand during the
two pontificates which immediately precede his own. Omar's is the
determining force, the will, and throughout his own, and the caliphates
of Osman and Ali which follow, that force and that will impart its
distinction and its direction to the course of the political life of
Islam. The nature and extent of the sway of this extraordinary mind
mark an epoch in world-history not less memorable than the Rome of
Sulla or the Athens of Pericles. From the Arab historians a portrait
that is fairly convincing can be arranged, and the threat or promise
with which he is said to have announced the purpose for which he
undertook the caliphate is consonant with the impression of his
appearance and manners which tradition has preserved--"He that is
weakest among you shall be, in my sight, as the strongest until I have
made good his rights unto him; but he that is strongest shall I deal
with like the weakest until he submit himself to the Law."
[5] Thwarted in his schemes of world-conquest in the East by Nelson and
Sir Sidney Smith, Bonaparte returned to pursue in Europe the same
visionary but mighty designs. In Napoleon's career the voyage on the
frigate _Muiron_ marks the moment analogous to Caesar's return from
Gaul, January, 49 B.C. But Caius Julius crossed the Rubicon at the
head of fifty thousand men. Bonaparte returned from Egypt alone. The
best soldiers of his staff indeed accompanied him, Lannes, the "Roland"
of the battles of the Empire, Murat, Bessières, Marmont, Lavalette, but
to a resolute government this would but have blackened his desertion of
Kleber and the army of the Pyramids. The adventure appears more
desperate than Caesar's; but speculation, anxiety, even hope, awaited
Napoleon at Paris. Moreau was no Pompey. The sequence of dates is
interesting. On the night of August 22nd, 1799, Bonaparte went on
board the frigate; five weeks later, having just missed Nelson, he
reached Ajaccio; on October 9th he lands at Fréjus, on the 16th he is
at Paris, and resumes his residence in rue de la Victoire. Three weeks
later, on November 9th, occurs the incident known to history as 18th
Brumaire.
[6] The Empire of Rome, of Alexander, of Britain, is not even the
antagonist of what is essential in Cosmopolitanism. Rome, Hellas,
Britain possess by God or Fate the power to govern to a _more
excellent_ degree than other States--Imperialism is the realization of
this power. Cosmopolitanism's _laissez-faire_ is anarchism or it is
the betrayal of humanity.
LECTURE V
WHAT IS WAR?
[_Tuesday, June_ 12_th_, 1900]
Assuming then that the imperialistic is the supreme form in the
political development of the national as of the civic State, and that
to the empires of the world belongs the government of the world in the
future, and that in Britain a mode of imperialism which may be
described as democratic displays itself--a mode which in human history
is rarely encountered, and never save at crises and fraught with
consequences memorable to all time--the problem meets us, will this
form of government make for peace or for war, considering peace and war
not as mutual contradictories but as alternatives in the life of a
State? Even a partial solution of this problem requires a
consideration of the question "What is War?"
§ 1. THE PLACE OF WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY
The question "What is War?" has been variously answered, according as
the aim of the writer is to illustrate its methods historically, or
from the operations of the wars of the past to deduce precepts for the
tactics or the strategy of the present, or as in the writings of
Aristotle and Grotius, of Montesquieu and Bluntschli, to assign the
limits of its fury, or fix the basis of its ethics, its distinction as
just or unjust. But another aspect of the question concerns us
here--What is War in itself and by itself? And what is its place in
the life-history of a State considered as an entity, an organic unity,
distinct from the unities which compose it? Is war a fixed or a
transient condition of the political life of man, and if permanent,
does its relation to the world-force admit of description and
definition?
If we were to adopt the method by which Aristotle endeavoured to arrive
at a correct conception of the nature of a State, and review the part
which war has played in world-history, and, disregarding the mechanical
enumeration of causes and effects, if we were to examine the motives,
impulses, or ideals embodied in the great conflicts of world-history,
the question whether war be a necessary evil, an infliction to which
humanity must resign itself, would be seen to emerge in another
shape--whether war be an evil at all; whether in the life-history of a
State it be not an attestation of the self-devotion of that State to
the supreme end of its being, even of its power of consecration to the
Highest Good?
Every great war known to history resolves itself ultimately into the
conflict of two ideals. The Cavalier fights in triumph or defeat in a
cause not less exalted than that of the Puritan, and Salamis acquires a
profounder significance when considered, not from the standpoint of
Athens and Themistocles merely, but from the camp of Xerxes, and the
ruins of the mighty designs of Cyrus and Hystaspes, an incident which
Aeschylus found tragic enough to form a theme for one of his loftiest
trilogies.[1] The wars against Pisa and Venice light with intermittent
gleams the else sordid annals of Genoa; and through the grandeur and
ferocity of a century of war Rome moves to world-empire, and Carthage
to a death which throws a lustre over her history, making its least
details memorable, investing its merchants with an interest beyond that
of princes, and bequeathing to mankind the names of Hamilcar and
Hannibal as a strong argument of man's greatness if all other records
were to perish. _Qui habet tenam habet bellum_ is but a half-truth.
No war was ever waged for material ends only. Territory is a trophy of
battle, but the origin of war is rooted in the character, the political
genius, the imagination of the race. One of the profoundest of modern
investigators in mediaeval history, Dr. Georg Waitz, insists on the
attachment of the Teutonic kindred to the soil, and on the measures by
which in the primitive constitutions the war-instinct was checked.[2]
The observation of Waitz is just, but a change in environment develops
the latent qualities of a race. The restless and melancholy surge, the
wide and desolate expanse of the North Sea exalted the imagination of
the Viking as the desert the imagination of the Arab. Not the cry of
"New lands" merely, but the adventurous heart of his race, lured on by
the magic of the sea, its receding horizons, its danger and its change,
spread the fame and the terror of the Norsemen from the basilicas, the
marbles, and the thronging palaces of Byzantium to the solitary
homestead set in the English forest-clearing, or in the wastes of
Ireland which the zeal of her monasteries was slowly reclaiming. To
the glamour of war for its own sake the Crusades brought the
transforming power of a new ideal. The cry "_Deus vult!_" at Clermont
marks for the whole Teutonic race the final transition from the type of
Alaric and Chlodovech, of Cerdic and Hrolf, to that of Godfrey and
Tancred, Richard Lion-heart and Saint Louis, from the sagas and the
war-songs of the northern skalds to the chivalrous verse of the
troubadours, a Bertrand or a Rudel, to the epic narrative of the
crusades which transfigures at moments the prose of William of Tyre or
of Orderic, of Geoffrey de Vinsauf or of Joinville.
The wide acceptance of the territorial theory of the origin of war as
an explanation of war, and the enumeration by historians of causes and
results in territory or taxation, can be ascribed only to that
indolence of the human mind, the subtle inertia which, as Tacitus
affirms, lies in wait to mar all high endeavour--"Subit quippe etiam
ipsius inertiae dulcedo, et invisa primo desidia postremo amatur."
The wars of the Hebrews, if territorial in their apparent origin,
reveal in their course their true origin in the heart of the race, the
consciousness of the high destiny reserved for it amongst the Semitic
kindred, amongst the nations of the earth. If ever there were a race
which seemed destined to found a world-empire by the sword it is the
Hebrew. They make war with Roman relentlessness and with more than
Roman ideality, the Lord God of Hosts guiding their march or their
retreat by day and by night ceaselessly. Every battle is a Lake
Regillus, and for the great Twin Brethren it is Jehovah Sabaoth that
nerves the right arm of his faithful. The forms of Gideon and Joshua,
though on a narrower stage, have a place with those other captains of
their race--Hannibal, Bar-Cochab, Khalid, Amr, Saad,[3] and Mothanna.
The very spirit of war seems to shape their poetry from the first chant
for the defeat of Egypt to that last song of constancy in overthrow, of
unconquerable resolve and sure vengeance, a march music befitting Judas
Maccabaeus and his men, beside which all other war-songs, even the
"Marseillaise," appear of no account--the _Al Naharoth Babel_--"Let my
sword-hand forget, if I forget thee, O Jerusalem"--passing from the
mood of pity through words that are like the flash of spears to a
rapture of revenge known only to the injured spirits of the great when
baulked of their God-appointed fate. Yet on the shores of the Western
Sea the career of this race abruptly ends, as if in Palestine they
found a Capua, as the Crusaders long afterwards, Templars and
Hospitallers, found in that languid air, the Syrian clime, a Capua.
Thus the Hebrews missed the world-empire which the Arabs gained, but
even out of their despair created another empire, the empire of
thought; and the power to found this empire, whether expressed in the
character of their warriors, or in that unparalleled conviction which
marks the Hebrew in the remotest lands and most distant centuries, the
certainty of his return, the refusal, unyielding, to believe that he
has missed the great meed which, there in Palestine, there in the Capua
of his race, seemed within his grasp, but attests further that it is in
no lust for territory that these wars originate.
In the historical and speculative literature of Hellas and Rome war
occupies a position essentially identical with that which it occupies
in the Hebrew. It is the assertion of right by violence, or it is the
pursuit of a fate-appointed end. Aristotle, with his inveterate habit
of subjecting all things--art, statesmanship, poetry--to ethics,
regards war as a valuable discipline to the State, a protection against
the enervating influence of peace. As the life of the individual is
divided between business and leisure, so, according to Aristotle, the
life of the State is divided between war and peace. But to greatness
in peace, greatness in war is a primal condition. The State which
cannot quit itself greatly in war will achieve nothing great in peace.
"The slave," he bitterly remarks, "knows no leisure, and the State
which sets peace above war is in the condition of a slave." Aristotle
does not mean that the slave is perpetually at work, or that war is the
sole duty of a great State, but as the soul destined to slavery is
incapable even in leisure of the contemplations of the soul destined to
freedom, so to the nation which shrinks from war the greatness that
belongs to peace can never come. Courage, Plato defines as "the
knowledge of the things that a man should fear and that he should not
fear," and in a state, a city, or an empire courage consists in the
unfaltering pursuit of its being's end against all odds, when once that
end is manifest. This ideal element, this formative principle,
underlies the Hellenic conception of war throughout its history, from
its first glorification in Achilles to the last combats of the Achaean
League--from the divine beauty of the youthful Achilles, dazzling as
the lightning and like the lightning pitiless, yet redeemed to pathos
by the certainty of the quick doom that awaits him, on to the last
bright forms which fall at Leuctra, Mantinea, and Ipsus. It requires a
steadfast gaze not to turn aside revolted from the destroying fury of
Greeks against Greeks--Athens, Thebes, Sparta, Corinth, and
Macedon--and yet even their claim to live, their greatness, did in this
consist, that for so light yet so immortal a cause they were content to
resign the sweet air and the sight of the sun, and of this wondrous
fabric of a world in which their presence, theirs, the children of
Hellas, was the divinest wonder of all.
Of the grandeur and elevation which Rome imparted to war and to man's
nature it is superfluous to speak. As in statesmanship, so in war, he
who would greatly praise another describes his excellence as Roman, and
thinks that all is said. The silver eagle which Caius Marius gave as
an ensign to the legions is for once in history the fit emblem of the
race that bore it to victory and world-dominion. History by fate or
chance added a touch of the supernatural to the action of Marius. The
silver eagle announced the empire of the Caesars; the substitution of
the _Labarum_ by Constantine heralded its decline. With the emblem of
humiliation and peace, the might of Rome sinks, yet throughout the
centuries that follow, returns of galvanic life, recollections of its
ancient valour--as in Stilicho, Belisarius, Heraclius, and
Zimisces[4]--bear far into the Middle Age the dread name of the Roman
legion, though the circuit of the eagle's flight, once wide as the
ambient air, is then narrowed to a league or two on either side of the
Bosphorus.
§ 2. DEFINITION OF WAR
To push the survey further would but add to the instances, without
deepening the impression, of the measureless power of the ideal element
in war, alike in the history of the great races of the past and of the
present. Even the wars which seem most arbitrary and, to the judgment
of their contemporaries, purposeless, acquire, upon a deeper scrutiny
and in after ages, a profound enough significance. Behind the
immediate occasion, trivial or capricious, sordid or grandiose, the
destiny of the race, like the Nemesis of Greek Tragedy, advancing
relentlessly, pursuing its own far-off and lofty ends, constantly
reveals itself.
War, therefore, I would define as a phase in the life-effort of the
State towards completer self-realization, a phase of the eternal nisus,
the perpetual omnipresent strife of all being towards self-fulfilment.
Destruction is not its aim, but the intensification of the life,
whether of the conquering or of the conquered State. War is thus a
manifestation of the world-spirit in the form the most sublime and
awful that can enthrall the contemplation of man. It is an action
radiating from the same source as the heroisms, the essential agonies,
+agôníai+, conflicts, of all life. "In this theatre of a world," as
Calderon avers, "all are actors, _todos son representantes_." There
too the State enacts its tragedy. Nation, city, or empire, it too is a
_representante_. Though the stage is of more imposing dimensions, the
Force of which each wears the mask is one with the Force which sets the
stars their path and guides the soul of man to its appointed goal. A
war then is in the development of the consciousness of the State
analogous to those moments in the individual career when, in Hamlet's
phrase, his fate "crying out," death is preferable to a disregard of
the Summoner. The state, the nation, or the empire hazards death, is
content to resign existence itself, if so be it fulfil but its destiny,
and swerve not from its being's law. Not to be envied is that man who,
in the solemn prayer of two embattled hosts, can discern but an
organized hypocrisy, a mockery, an insult to God! God is the God of
all the earth, but dark are the ways, obscure and tangled the
forest-paths, in which He makes His children walk. A mockery? That
cry for guidance in the dread ordeal, that prayer by the hosts, which
is but the formulated utterance of the still, the unwhispered prayer in
the heart of each man on the tented field--"Through death to life, even
through death to life, as my country fares on its great path through
the thickening shadows to the greater light, to the higher
freedom!"--is this a mockery? Yet such is the prayer of armies. War
so considered ceases to be an action continually to be deplored,
regretted, or forgiven, ceases to be the offspring of human weakness or
human crime, and the sentence of the Greek orator recovers its living
and consoling power--"Of the dead who have fallen in battle the wide
earth itself is the sepulchre; their tomb is not the grave in which
they are laid, but the undying memory of the generations that come
after them. They perish, snatched in a moment, in the height of
achievement, not from their fear, but from their renown. Fortunate!
And you who have lost them, you, who as mortal have been born subject
unto disaster, how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so
glorious a shape!"
Thus the great part which war has played in human history, in art, in
poetry, is not, as Rousseau maintains, an arraignment of the human
heart, not necessarily the blazon of human depravity, but a testimony
to man's limitless capacity for devotion to other ends than existence
for existence' sake--his pursuit of an ideal, perpetually.
§ 3. COUNT TOLSTOI AND CARLYLE UPON WAR
Those critics of the relations of State to State, of nation to nation,
to whom I have more than once referred, have recently found in their
condemnation of diplomacy and war a remarkable and powerful ally.
Amongst the rulers of thought, the sceptred sovereigns of the modern
mind, Count Tolstoi occupies, in the beginning of the twentieth
century, a unique position, not without exterior resemblance to that of
Goethe in the beginning of the nineteenth, or to that of Voltaire in
the great days of Louis XV. In the gray and neutral region where the
spheres of religion and ethics meet and blend, his words, almost as
soon as spoken, rivet the attention, quicken the energies, or provoke
the hostility of one-half the world--when he speaks, he speaks not to
Russia merely, but to Europe, to America, and to the wide but undefined
limits of Greater Britain. Of no other living writer can this be said.
Carlyle had no such extended sway in his lifetime, nor had Hugo so
instantly a universal hearing.
How then does Tolstoi regard War? For on this high matter the judgment
of such a man cannot but claim earnest scrutiny. Examining his
writings, even from _The Cossacks_, through such a masterpiece as _War
and Peace_, colossal at once in design and in execution, on to his
latest philosophical pamphlets or paragraphs, one phase at least of his
thought reveals itself--gradually increasing vehemence in the
expression of his abhorrence of all war as the instrument of
oppression, the enemy of man's advance to the ideal state, forbidden by
God, forbidden above all by Christ, and by its continued existence
turning our professed faith in Christ into a derision. This general
impression is deepened by his treatment of individual incidents and
characters. Has Count Tolstoi a campaign to narrate, or a battle, say
the Borodino, to describe? That which rivets his attention, absorbs
his energies, is the fatuity of all the generals indiscriminately, even
of Kutusov; it is the supremacy of Hazard; and in the hour of battle
itself he sees no heroisms, no devotions, or he turns aside from such
spectacles to fasten his gaze upon the shuddering heart, the blanched
countenance, the agonizing effort of the combatants to conquer their
own terror, their own dismay; and to close the scene he throws wide the
hospital, and points to the wounds, the mutilated bodies, the amputated
limbs yet quivering, to the fever, and the revel of death. Has he the
enigma of modern times to solve, Napoleon I? In Napoleon, who in the
sphere of action is to Modern History what Shakespeare is in the sphere
of art, Tolstoi sees no more than the clerical harlequin, Abbé de
Pradt, sees, a stage conqueror, a charlatan devoured by vanity, without
greatness, dignity, without genius for war yet impatient of peace,
shallow of intellect, tricking and tricked by all around him, dooming
myriads to death for the amusement of an hour, yet on the dread morning
of Borodino anxious only about the quality of the eau de Cologne with
which he lavishly sprinkles his handkerchief, vest, and coat. And the
campaigns of Napoleon, republican, consular, imperial? Lodi, Arcola,
Marengo, Austerlitz, Eyiau, Friedland, Wagram, Borodino, Leipzig,
Champaubert, and Montmirail? These all are the deeds of Chance, of
happy Chance, the guide that is no guide, of the eyeless, brutal, dark,
unthinking force resident in masses of men. This is Tolstoi's
conception of the man who is to the Aryan race what Hannibal is to the
Semitic--its crowning glory in war.
Consider in contrast with this the attitude towards war of a thinker, a
visionary, not less great than Tolstoi--Carlyle. Like Tolstoi, Carlyle
is above all things a prophet, that is to say, he feels as the Hebrew
prophet felt deeply and with resentful passionateness, the contrast
between what his race, nation, or people is, and what, by God's
decrees, it is meant to be. Yet what is Carlyle's judgment upon war?
His work is the witness. After the brief period of Goethe-worship,
from 1834 on through forty years of monastic seclusion and labour not
monastic, but as of a literary Hercules, the shaping thought of his
work, tyrannous and all-pervading, is that of the might, the majesty,
and the mystery of war. One flame-picture after another sets this
principle forth. What a contrast are his battle-paintings to those of
Tolstoi! Consider the long array of them from the first engagements of
the French Revolutionary chiefs at Valmy and Jemappes. These represent
Carlyle in the flush of manhood. His fiftieth year ushers in the
battle-pictures of the Civil War--Marston Moor, Naseby, and Dunbar,
when Cromwell defeats the men of Carlyle's own nation. The greatest
epoch of Carlyle's life, the epoch of the writing of _Frederick_, is
also that of the mightiest series of his battle-paintings. And
finally, when his course is nearly run, he rouses himself to write the
last of all his battles, yet at once in characterization and vividness
of heroic vision one of his finest, the death of the great Berserker,
Olaf Tryggvason, the old Norse king. In the last sea-fight of Olaf
there flames up within Carlyle's spirit, now in extreme age,[5] the
same glory and delight in war as in the days of his early manhood when
he wrote Valmy and Jemappes. Since the heroic age there are no such
battle-pictures as these. The spirit of war that leaps and laughs
within these pages is the spirit of Homer and Firdusi, of _Beowulf_ and
the _Song of Roland_, and when it sank, it was like the going down of a
sun. The breath that blows through the _Iliad_ stirs the pages of
_Cromwell_ and of _Frederick_; Mollwitz, Rossbach, Leuthen, Zorndorf,
Leignitz, and Torgau, these are to the delineation, the exposition of
modern warfare, the warfare of strategy and of tactics, what the
combats drawn by Homer are to the warfare of earlier times.
Now in a mind not less profoundly religious than that of Tolstoi, not
less fixedly conscious of the Eternal behind the transient, of the
Presence unseen that shapes all this visible universe, whence comes
this exaltation of war, this life-long pre-occupation with the
circumstance of war? To Carlyle, nineteen centuries after Christ, as
to Thucydides, four centuries before Christ, war is the supreme
expression of the energy of a State as such, the supreme, the tragic
hour, in the life-history of the city, the nation, as such. To Carlyle
war is therefore neither anti-religious nor inhuman, but the evidence
in the life of a State of a self-consecration to an ideal end; it is
that manifestation of the world-spirit of which I have spoken above--a
race, a nation, an empire, conscious of its destiny, hazarding all upon
the fortunes of the stricken field! Carlyle, as his writings,
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