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Title: The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain
Nineteenth Century Europe
Author: J. A. Cramb
Release Date: December 19, 2009 [EBook #30710]
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]"
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[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, as his
recorded actions approve, was not less sensitive than Tolstoi to the
pity of human life, to the "tears of things" as Virgil would say; but
are there not in every city, in every town, hospitals, wounds, mangled
limbs, fevers, that make of every day of this sad earth of ours a day
after Borodino? The life that pants out its spirit, exultant on the
battlefield, knows but its own suffering; it is the eye of the onlooker
which discovers the united agony. It was a profounder vision, a wider
outlook, not a harder heart, which made Carlyle[6] apparently blind to
that side of war which alone rivets the attention of Tolstoi--the
pathological. And yet Tolstoi and his house have for generations been
loyal to the Czars; he has proved that loyalty on the battlefield as
his fathers before him have done. Tolstoi has no system to crown, like
Auguste Comte or Mr. Herbert Spencer, with the coping-stone of
universal peace and a world all sunk in bovine content. Whither then
shall we turn for an explanation of his arraignment of war?
§ 4. COUNT TOLSTOI AS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SLAVONIC GENIUS
Considering Tolstoi as a world-ruler, as Goethe was, as Voltaire was, a
characteristic differentiating him from such men at once betrays
itself. The nimble spirit of Voltaire in its airy imaginings seems a
native, or at least a charming visitant, of every clime, of every
epoch; Goethe, impelled more by his innate disposition than by any plan
of culture, draws strength and inspiration from a circuit even wider
than Voltaire's--Greece, Rome, Persia, Italy, the Middle Age, Mediaeval
Germany; Carlyle's work made him, at least in spirit, a native of
France for three or four years, and for twelve a German; even Dr.
Henrik Ibsen in his hot youth essayed a _Catiline_, and in later life
seeks the subject of what is perhaps his masterpiece, the _Emperor and
Galilean_, in the Rome of the fourth century. But in Russia Tolstoi
begins, and in Russia he ends. As volume after volume proceeds from
his prolific pen--essays, treatises theological or social, tales,
novels, diaries, or confessions--all alike are Russian in scenery,
Russian in character, Russian in temperament, Russian in their
aspirations, their hopes, or their despairs. Nowhere is there a trace
of Hellas, Rome does not exist for him, the Middle Age which allured
Hugo has for Tolstoi no glamour. In this he but resembles the Russian
writers from Krilov to the present day. It is equally true of Gogol,
of Poushkine, of Tourgenieff, of Herzen, of Lermontoff, of Dostoievsky.
If Tourgenieff has placed the scene of one of his four longer works at
Baden, yet it is in the Russian coterie that the tragedy of Irene
Pavlovna unfolds itself. Thus confined in his range, and in his
inspiration, to his own race, the work of a Russian artist, or thinker,
springs straight from the heart of the race itself. When therefore
Tolstoi speaks on war, he voices not his own judgment merely but the
judgment of the race. In his conception of war the force of the
Slavonic race behind him masters his own individual genius. Capacity
in a race for war is distinct from valour. Amongst the Aryan peoples,
the Slav, the Hindoo, the Celt display valour, contempt for life
unsurpassed, but unlike the Roman or the Teuton they have never by war
sought the achievement of a great political design, or subordinated the
other claims of existence, whether of the nation or the individual, for
the realization of a great political ideal. Thus the history of the
two western divisions of the Slavonic race, Poland and Bohemia, reads
like the history of Ireland. It is studded with combats, but there is
no war. The downfall of Bohemia, the surrender of Prague, the
Weissenberg, are but an illustration of this thesis. And three
centuries earlier Ottokar and his flaunting chivalry go down before the
charge of Rudolf of Hapsburg, like Vercingetorix before Caius Julius.
Ziska's cry of havoc to all the earth is not redeemed by fanaticism and
has no intelligible end. And the noblest figure in Czech history,
George of Podiebrad, whose portrait Palacky[7] has etched with
laborious care and unerring insight, is essentially a statesman, not a
warrior.
Similarly the history of the Russian Slav has marked organic
resemblances with that of the Poles and the Czechs. His sombre
courage, his enduring fortitude, are a commonplace. Eyiau and
Friedland attested this, and many a later field, and the chronicle of
his recent wars, from Potiamkin to Skobeleff, from Kutusov to Todleben,
illustrate the justice of Napoleon's verdict, "unparalleled heroism in
defence." And yet out of the sword the Slav has never forged an
instrument for the perfection of a great political ideal. War has
served the oppression, the ambition of his governments, not the
aspirations of his race. Conceived as the effort within the life of
the State towards a higher self-realization, the Slav knows not war.
He has used war for defence in a manner memorable for ever to men, or
for cold and pitiless aggression, but in the service of a constructive
ideal, stretched across generations or across centuries, he has never
used it. Even the conquest of Siberia, from the first advance of the
Novgorod merchants in the eleventh century, through the wars of Ivan
IV, and his successors, attests this. The Don Cossacks destroy the
last remnant of the mighty Mongol dynasty, a fragment flung off from
the convulsion of the thirteenth century, ruled by a descendant of
Ginghis. The government of the Czars astutely annexes the fruits of
Cossack valour, but in the administration of its first remarkable
conquest the irremediable defect of the Slavonic race declares itself.
The innate energy, the determining genius for constructive politics
which marks races destined for empire, everywhere is wanting. Indeed
the very despotism of the Czars, alien in blood, foreign in character,
derives its present security, as once its origin, from the immovable
languor, the unconquerable tendency of the Slav towards political
indifferentism. Nihilism, the tortured revolt against a secular wrong,
is but a morbid expression of emotions and aspirations that have marked
the Slav throughout history. Catherine the Great felt this. Its
spirit baulked her enterprise in the very hour when Voltaire urged that
now if ever was the opportunity to recover Constantinople from "the
fanaticism of the Moslem." The impressive designs of Nicholas I left
the heart of the race untouched, and in recent times the cynicism which
has occasionally startled or revolted Europe is but a
pseudo-Machiavellianism. It does not originate, like the policy which
a Polybius or a Machiavelli, a Richelieu or a Mirabeau have described
or practised, in the pursuit of a majestic design before whose ends all
must yield, but from the absence of such design, betraying the
_camerilla_ which has neither race nor nation, people nor city, behind
it. Russia's mightiest adversary, Napoleon, knew the character of the
race more intimately than its idol, Napoleon's adroit flatterer and
false friend, the Czar Alexander, knew it; yet the enthusiast of
_Valérie_, supple and calculating even in his mysticism, is still the
noblest representative of the oppressive policy of two hundred years.[8]
Such is the light which the temperament of his race and its history
throw upon Count Tolstoi's arraignment of war. The government
perceives in the solitary thinker its adversary, but an adversary who,
unlike a Bakounine, a Nekrasoff, or a Herzen, gives form and utterance
not to the theories, the social or political doctrines of an individual
or a party, but to the universal instincts of the whole Slavonic
people. Therefore he will not die in exile. The bigotry of a priest
may deny his remains a hallowed resting-place, but the government,
instructed by the craft of Nicholas I, and the fate of Alexander III,
will allow the creator of Anna Karenina, of Natascha, and of Ivan
Illyitch, to breathe to the last the air of the steppes.
§ 5. THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST AND WAR
There remains an aspect of this question, frequently dealt with in the
writings of Tolstoi, but by no means confined to these writings, to
which I must allude briefly. There are many men within these islands,
if I mistake not, who regard with pride and emotion the acts of England
in this great crisis, but nevertheless are oppressed with a vague
consciousness that war, for whatever cause waged, is, as Tolstoi
declares, directly hostile to the commands, to the authority of Christ.
This is a subject which I approach with reluctance, with reverence,
more for the sake of those amongst you upon whom such conviction may
have weighed, than from any value I attach to the suggestions I have
now to offer.
First of all, as we have seen from this brief survey of the wars of the
past, the most religious of the great races of the world, and the most
religious amongst the divisions of those races--the Hebrews, the
Romans, the Teutons, the Saracens, the Osmanii--have been the most
warlike and have pursued in war the loftiest political ends. This fact
is significant, because war, like religion and like language,
represents not the individual but the race, the city, or the nation.
In a work of art, the _Phaedrus_ of Plato or the _Bacchus and Ariadne_
of Titian, the genius of the individual is, in appearance at least,
sovereign and despotic. But as a language represents the happy moments
of inspiration of myriads of unremembered poets, who divined the fit
sound, the perfect word, harmonious or harsh, to embody for ever, and
to all succeeding generations of the race, its recurring moods of
desire or delight, of pain, or sorrow, or fear; and as in a religion
the heart-aspirations towards the Divine of a long series of
generations converge, by genius or fortune, into a flame-like intensity
in a Zerdusht, a Mohammed, or a Gautama Buddha; so war represents the
action, the deed, not of the individual but of the race. Religion
incarnates the thought, language the imagination, war the resolution,
the _will_, of a race. Reflecting then on the part which war has
played in the history of the most deeply religious races, and of those
States in which the attributes of awe, of reverence are salient
features, it is surely idle enough to essay an arraignment of war as
opposed to religion in general?
Secondly, with regard to a particular religion, the Christian, it is
remarkable that Count Tolstoi, who has striven so nobly to reach the
faith beyond the creeds, and in his volume entitled _My Religion_ has
thrown out several illuminating ideas upon the teachings of Christ as
distinct from those of later creeds or sects, should not have
perceived, or should have ignored the circumstance that in the actual
utterances of Christ there is not to be found one word, not one
syllable, condemnatory of war between nation and nation, between State
and State. The _locus classicus_, "All that take the sword," etc., is
aimed at the impetuosity of the person addressed, or at its outmost
range against civic revolt. It is only by wrenching the words from
their context that it becomes possible to extend their application to
the relations of one State to another. The organic unity, named a
State, is not identical with the units which compose it, nor is it a
mere aggregate of those units. If there is a lesson which history
enforces it is this lesson. And upon the laws which regulate those
unities named States, Christ nowhere breathes a word. The violence of
faction or enthusiasm have indeed forced such decision from his
utterances. Camille Desmoulins, in a moment of rash and unreasoning
rhetoric, styled Him "le bon sans-culotte," and in the days of the
_Internationale_, Michel Bakounine traced the beginnings of Nihilism to
Galilee; just as in recent times the Anarchist, the Socialist have in
His sanction sought the justification of their crimes or their
fantasies. But in His whole teaching there is nothing that affects the
politics of State and State. Ethics and metaphysics were outlined in
His utterances, but not politics. His solitary reference to war as
such contains no reprobation; a perverse ingenuity might even twist it
into a maxim of prudence, a tacit assent to war. And the peace upon
which Christ dwells in one great phrase after another is not the amity
of States, but a profounder, a more intimate thing. It is the peace on
which the Hebrew and the Arab poets insist, the peace which arises
within the soul, ineffable, wondrous, from a sense of reconciliation,
of harmony with the Divine, a peace which may, which does, exist on the
battlefield as in the hermit's cell, in the fury of the onset as deep
and tranquil as in the heart of him who rides alone in the desert
beneath the midnight stars. Tolstoi's criticism here arises from his
extension to the more complex and intricate unity of the State of the
same laws which regulate the simpler unity of the individuals who
compose the State. And of such a war as this in which Britain is now
engaged, a war in its origin and course determined by that ideal which
in these lectures I have sketched, a war whose end is the larger
freedom, the higher justice, a war whose aim is not merely peace, but
the full, the living development of those conditions of man's being
without which peace is but an empty name, a war whose end is to deepen
the life not only of the conquering, but of the conquered State--who
shall assert, in the face of Christ's reserve, that such a war is
contrary to the teachings of Galilee?
Finally, as the complement of this condemnation of war as the enemy of
religion, men are exhorted, by the refusal of military service or other
means, to strive as for the attainment of some fair vision towards the
establishment of the empire of perpetual peace. The advent of this new
era, it is announced, is at hand.
§ 6. THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE
Now the origins of this ideal are clear. It is ancient as life, and
before man was, it was. It is the transference to the sphere of States
of the deepest instinctive yearning of all being, from the rock to the
soul of man, the yearning towards peace, towards the rest, the immortal
leisure which, to apply the phrase of Aristotle, the soul shall know in
death, the deeper vision, the unending contemplation, the _theôria_ of
eternity. The error of its enthusiasts, from Saint-Pierre and
Vauvenargues to Herbart and Count Tolstoi, lies in the interpretation
of this cosmic desire, deep as the wells of existence itself, and in
the extension to the Conditioned of a phase of the Unconditioned.
Will War then never cease? Will universal peace be for ever but a
dream? Upon this question, a consideration of the ideal itself, of the
forms in which at various epochs it has presented itself, and of the
crises at which, appearing or reappearing, it most profoundly engages
the imagination of a race, is instructive.
In Hebrew history, for instance, it arises in the hour of defeat, in
the consternation of a great race struck by irretrievable disaster.
"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth
good tidings, that publisheth peace!" In this and in other splendid
pages of Isaiah we possess the first distinct enunciation of this ideal
in world-history, and with what a transforming radiance it is invested!
In what a majesty of light and insufferable glory it is uplifted! But
it is a vision of the future, to be accomplished in ages undreamed of
yet. It is the throb of the Hebrew soul beyond this earthly sphere and
beyond this temporal dominion, to the immortal spheres of being,
inviolate of Time. Yet even this vision, though co-terminous with the
world, centres in Judaea--in the triumph of the Hebrew race and the
overthrow of all its adversaries.
Similarly, to Plato and to Isocrates, to Aristotle and to Aeschines, if
peace is to be extended to all the earth "like a river," Hellas is the
fountain from which it must flow. It is an imperial peace bounded by
Hellenic civilization, culture, laws. It is a peace forged upon war.
Rome with her genius for actuality discovers this.
"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee.
Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces. For my
brethren and companions' sakes, I will now say, 'Peace be within
thee.'" Substituting Hellas for Jerusalem, this is the prayer of a
Greek of the age of Isocrates, of Cleanthes, and of Alexander.
Rome by war ends war, and establishes the _Pax Romana_ within her
dominions, Spain, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Syria, Egypt. Disregarding the
dying counsels of Augustus, Rome remains at truceless war with the
world outside those limits. St. Just's proud resignation, "For the
revolutionist there is no rest but the grave," is for ever true of
those races dowered with the high and tragic doom of empire. To pause
is disaster; to recede, destruction. Rome understood this, and her
history is its great comment.
To Islam the point at which she can bestow her peace upon men is not
less clear, fixed by a power not less unalterable and high. Neither
Haroun nor Al-Maimoun could, with all their authority and statecraft,
stay the steep course of Islam; for the wisdom of a race is wiser than
the wisdom of a man, and the sword which, in Abu Bekr's phrase, the
Lord has drawn, Islam sheathes but on the Day of Judgment. Then and
then only shall the Holy War end.
The Peace of Islam, _Shalom_, which is its designation, is the serenity
of soul of the warriors of God whose life is a warfare unending. And
Virgil--in that early masterpiece, which in the Middle Age won for all
his works the felicity or the misfortune attached to the suspicion of
an inspiration other than Castalian, and drew to his grave pilgrims
fired by an enthusiasm whose fountain was neither the ballad-burthen
music of the _Georgics_, nor the measureless pathos and pity for things
human of the _Aeneid_--has sung the tranquil beauty of the Saturnian
age; yet the peace which suggests his prophetic memory or hope is but
the peace of Octavianus, the end of civil discord, of the
proscriptions, the conflicts of Pharsalia, Philippi, Actium, a moment's
respite to a war-fatigued world.
Passing from the ancient world to the modern, we encounter in the
Middle Age within Europe that which is known amongst mediaeval
Latinists as the _Treva_ or _Treuga Dei_. This "Truce of God" was a
decree promulgated throughout Europe for the cessation at certain
sacred times of that feudal strife, that war of one noble against
another which darkens our early history. It is the mediaeval
equivalent of the Pax Romana and is but dimly related to any ideal of
Universal Peace. Hildebrand, who gave this Truce of God more support
than any other Pope in the Middle Age, lights the fire of the crusades,
giving to war one of the greatest consecrations that war has ever
received. And the attitude of Mediaeval Europe towards eternal peace
is the attitude of Judaea, of Hellas, and of Rome.[9] This is
conspicuous in Saint Bernard, the last of the Fathers, and three
centuries later in Pius II, the last of the crusading Pontiffs, the
desire of whose life was to go even in his old age upon a crusade.
This desire uplifts and bears him to his last resting-place in Ancona,
where the old man, in his dying dreams, hears the tramp of legions that
never came, sees upon the Adriatic the sails of galleys that were to
bear the crusaders to Palestine--yet there were neither armies nor
ships, it was but the fever of his dream.
During the Reformation the ideal of Universal Peace is unregarded. The
wars of religion, the world's debate, become the war of creeds. "I am
not come to bring peace among you, but a sword." Luther, for instance,
declares war against the revolted peasants of Germany with all the
ardour and fury with which Innocent III denounced war against the
Albigenses. War in the language and thoughts of Calvin is what it
became to Oliver Cromwell, to the Huguenots, and to the Scottish
Covenanters, to Jean Chevallier and the insurgents of the Cevennes. As
Luther in the sixteenth century represents the religious side of the
Reformation, so Grotius in the seventeenth century represents the
position of the legists of the Reformation. In his work, _De Jure
Belli ac Pacis_, Universal Peace as an object of practical politics is
altogether set aside. War is accepted as existent between nation and
nation, State and State, and Grotius lays down the laws which regulate
it. Similar attempts had been made in the religious councils of
Greece, and when the first great Saracen army was starting upon its
conquests, the first of the Khalifs delivered to that army instructions
which in their humanity have never been surpassed; the utmost
observances of chivalry or modern times are there anticipated. But the
treatise of Grotius is the first elaboration of the subject in the
method of his contemporary, Verulam--the method of the science of the
future.
In the eighteenth century the singular work of the mild and amiable
enthusiast, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre,[10] made a profound impression
upon the thought not only of his own but of succeeding generations.
Kings, princes, philosophers, sat in informal conference debating the
same argument as has recently occupied the dignitaries at The Hague.
It inspired some of the most earnest pages of D'Alembert and of the
Encyclopédie. It drew from Voltaire some happy invective, affording
the opportunity of airing once more his well-loved but worthless
paradox on the trivial causes from which the great actions of history
arise. Saint-Pierre's ideal informs the early chapters of Gibbon's
History, but its influence disappears as the work advances. It charmed
the fancy of Rousseau, and, by a curious irony, he inflamed by his
impassioned argument that war for freedom which is to the undying glory
of France.[11]
Frederick the Great in his extreme age wrote to Voltaire: "Running over
the pages of history I see that ten years never pass without a war.
This intermittent fever may have moments of respite, but cease, never!"
This is the last word of the eighteenth century upon the dream of
Universal Peace--a word spoken by one of the greatest of kings, looking
out with dying eyes upon a world about to close in one of the deadliest
yet most heroic and memorable conflicts set down in the annals of our
race. The Hundred Days are its epilogue--the war of twenty-five years
ending in that great manner! Then, like a pallid dawn, the ideal once
more arises. Congress after congress meets in ornamental debate, till
six can be reckoned, or even seven, culminating in the recent
conference at The Hague. Its derisive results, closing the debate of
the nineteenth, as Frederick's words sum the debate of the eighteenth
century, are too fresh in all men's memories to require a syllable of
comment.
Thus then it appears from a glance at its history that this ideal of
Universal Peace has stirred the imagination most deeply, first of all
in the ages when an empire, whether Persian, Hebraic, Hellenic, or
Roman, conterminous with earth, wide as the inhabited world, was still
in appearance realizable; or, again, in periods of defeat, or of civil
strife, as in the closing age of the Roman oligarchy; or in the moments
of exhaustion following upon long-continued and desolating war, as in
Modern Europe after the last phases of the Reformation conflict, the
wars of Tilly and Wallenstein, of Marlborough and Eugène, and of
Frederick. The familiar poetry in praise of peace, and the Utopias,
the composition of which has amused the indolence of scholars or the
leisure of statesmen, originate in such hours or in such moods. On the
other hand, the criticism of war, scornful or ironic, of the great
thinkers and speculative writers of modern times, when it is not merely
the phantom of their logic, an _eidôlon specus_ created by their
system, arises in the most impressive instances less from admiration or
desire or hope of perpetual peace than from the arraignment of all
life, and all the ideals, activities, and purposes of men.
Hence the question whether war be a permanent condition of human life
is answered by implication. For the history of the ideal of Universal
Peace but re-enforces that definition of war set forth above, as a
manifestation of the world-spirit, co-extensive with being, and as
such, inseparable from man's life here and now. In all these great
wars which we have touched upon, the conflict of two ideas, in the
Platonic sense of the word, unveils itself, but both ideas are
ultimately phases of one Idea. It is by conflict alone that life
realizes itself. That is the be-all and end-all of life as such, of
Being as such. From the least developed forms of structural or organic
nature to the highest form in which the world-force realizes itself,
the will and imagination of Man, this law is absolute. The very magic
of the stars, their influence upon the human heart, derives something
of its potency, one sometimes fancies, from the vast, the silent,
mighty strife, the victorious energy, which brings their rays across
the abysses and orbits of the worlds.
What is the art of Hellas but the conquest of the rock, the marble, and
the fixing there in perennial beauty, perennial calm, the thought born
from the travail of the sculptor's brain, or from the unrecorded
struggle of dark forces in the past, which emerge now in a vision of
transcendent rapture and light? By this conflict, multiplex or simple,
the conquering energy of the form, the defeated energy of the material,
the serenity of the statues of Phidias, of the tragedies of Sophocles,
is attained. They are the symbol, the visible embodiment of the moment
of deepest vision, and of the deepest agony now at rest there, a
loveliness for ever. And as the aeons recede, as the intensity of the
idea of the Divine within man increases, so does this conflict, this
_agonia_ increase. It is in the heart of the tempest that the deepest
peace dwells.
The power, the place of conflict, thus great in Art, is in the region
of emotional, of intellectual and of moral life, admittedly supreme.
Doubt, contrition of soul, and the other modes of spiritual _agonia_,
are not these equivalent with the life, not death, of the soul?
And those moments of serenest peace, when the desire of the heart is
one with the desire of the world-soul, are not these attained by
conflict? In the life of the State, the soul of the State, as composed
of such monads, such constituent forms and organic elements, each
penetrated and impelled by the divine, self-realizing, omnipresent
_nisus_, how vain to hope, to desire, to pray, that _there_ this mystic
all-pervading Force, this onward-striving, this conflict, which is as
it were the very essence and necessary law of being, should pause and
have an end! War may change its shape, the struggle here intensifying,
there abating; it may be uplifted by ever loftier purposes and nobler
causes--but cease? How shall it cease?
Indeed, in the light of History, universal peace appears less as a
dream than as a nightmare which shall be realized only when the ice has
crept to the heart of the sun, and the stars, left black and trackless,
start from their orbits.
§ 7. IMPERIALISM AND WAR
If war then be a permanent factor in the life of States, how, it may be
asked, will it be affected by Imperialism and by such an ideal as this
of Imperial Britain? The effects upon war, will, I should say, be
somewhat of this nature. It will greaten and exalt the character of
war. Not only in constitutional, but in foreign politics, the roots of
the present lie deep in the past. In the wars of an imperial State the
ideals of all the wars of the past still live, adding a fuller life to
the life of the present. From the earliest tribal forays, slowly
broadening through the struggles of feudalism and Plantagenet kings to
the wars of the nation, one creative purpose, one informing principle
links century to century, developing itself at last in the wars of
empire, wars for the larger freedom, the higher justice. And this
ideal differs from the ideal of primitive times as the vast complexity
of races, peoples, religions, climates, traditions, literatures, arts,
manners, laws, which the word "Britain" now conceals, differs from the
'companies' and 'hundreds' of daring warriors who followed the fortunes
of a Cerdic or an Uffa. For the State which by conquest or submission
is merged in the life of another State does not thereby evade that law
of conflict of which I have spoken, but becomes subject to that law in
the life of the greater State, national or imperial, of which it now
forms a constituent and organic part. And looming already on the
horizon, the wars of races rise portentous, which will touch to
purposes yet higher and more mystic the wars of empires--as these have
greatened the wars of nationalities, these again the wars of feudal
kings, of principalities, of cities, of tribes or clans.
Secondly, this ideal of Imperial Britain will greaten and exalt the
action of the soldier, hallowing the death on the battlefield with the
attributes at once of the hero and the martyr. Thus, when M. Bloch and
similar writers delineate war as robbed by modern inventions of its
pomp and circumstance, when they expatiate upon the isolation resulting
from a battle-line extended across leagues, and upon the "zone of
death" separating the opposing hosts, one asks in perplexity, to what
end does M. Bloch consider that war was waged in the past? For the
sake of such emotional excitement or parade as are now by smokeless
powder, maxims, long-range rifles, and machine guns abolished? These
are but the trappings, the outward vesture of war; the cause, the
sacred cause, is by this transformation in the methods of war all
untouched. Was there then no "zone of death" between the armies at
Eyiau or at Gravelotte? Let but the cause be high, and men will find
means to cross that zone, now as then--by the sapper's art if by no
other! And as the pride and ostentation of battle are effaced, its
inner glory and dread sanctity are the more evinced. The battlefield
is an altar; the sacrifice the most awful that the human eye can
contemplate or the imagination with all its efforts invent. "The
drum," says a French moralist, "is the music of battle, because it
deadens thought." But in modern warfare the faculties are awake.
Solitude is the touchstone of valour, and the modern soldier cast in
upon himself, undazzled, unblinded, faces death singly. Fighting for
ideal ends, he dies for men and things that are not yet; he dies,
knowing in his heart that they may never be at all. Courage and
self-renunciation have attained their height.
Nor have strategy and the mechanical appliances of modern warfare
turned the soldier into a machine, an automaton, devoid of will and
self-directing energy. Contemporary history makes it daily clearer
that in modern battles brain and nerve count as heavily as they ever
did in the combats by the Scamander or the Simois. Another genius and
another epic style than those of Homer may be requisite fitly to
celebrate them, but the theme assuredly is not less lofty, the heroism
less heroic, the triumph or defeat less impressive.
Twice, and twice only, is man inevitably alone--in the hour of death
and the hour of his birth. Man, alone always, is then supremely alone.
In that final solitude what are pomp and circumstance to the heart?
That which strengthens a man then, whether on the battlefield or at the
stake or in life's unrecorded martyrdoms, is not the cry of present
onlookers nor the hope of remembering fame, but the faith for which he
has striven, or his conception of the purposes, the ends in which the
nation for which he is dying, lives and moves and has its being. Made
strong by this, he endures the ordeal, the hazard of death, in the full
splendour of the war, or at its sullen, dragging close, or in the
battle's onset, or on patrol, the test of the dauntless, surrendering
the sight of the sun, the coming of spring, and all that the arts and
various wisdom of the centuries have added of charm or depth to
nature's day. And in the great hour, whatever his past hours have
been, consecrate to duty or to ease, to the loftiest or to the
least-erected aims, whether he is borne on triumphant to the dread
pause, the vigil which is the night after a battle, or falling he sinks
by a fatal touch, and the noise of victory is hushed in the coming of
the great silence, and the darkness swoons around him, and the cry
"Press on!" stirs no pulsation any longer--in that great hour he is
lifted to the heights of the highest, the prophet's rapt vision, the
poet's moment of serenest inspiration, or what else magnifies or makes
approximate to the Divine this mortal life of ours.
War thus greatened in character by its ideal, the phrase of the Greek
orator, let me repeat, is no longer an empty sound, but vibrates with
its original life--"How fortunate the dead who have fallen in battle!
And how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so glorious a shape!"
An added solemnity invests the resolutions of senates, and the prayer
on the battlefield, "Through death to life," acquires a sincerity more
moving and a simplicity more heroic. And these, I imagine, will be the
results of Imperialism and of this deepening consciousness of its
destiny in Imperial Britain, whether in war which is the act of the
State as a whole, or in the career of the soldier which receives its
consummation there in the death on the battlefield.
[1] The sea and the invincible might of Athens on the waves formed the
connecting ideas of the three dramas, _Phineus, Persae, Glaucus_. The
trilogy was produced in 473 or 472 B.C., whilst the memory of Salamis
was still fresh in every heart. The Phoenissae, the "Women of Sidon,"
a tragedy on the same theme by Phrynichus, had been acted five years
earlier. The distinction of these works lay in the presentation to the
conquering State of a great victory as a tragedy in the life of the
vanquished. The cry in the _Persae_, "+ôpaides hellénôíte+", still
echoes with singular fidelity across 3,000 years in the war-song of
_modern_ Greece: "+deúte paides ton hellénôn+."
[2] Thus in speaking of the ancient life of the Teutonic peoples: "Doch
alles das (Neigung zum Kampf mit den Nachbarn und zu kriegerischen
Zügen in die Ferne) hat nicht gehindert, dass, wo die Deutschen sich
niederliessen, alsbald bestimmte Ordnungen des öffentlichen und
rechtlichen Lebens begründet wurden."--_Verfassungsgeschichte_, 3rd
ed., i, p. 19; _cf._ also i, pp. 416-17: "Es hat nicht eigene
Kriegsvölker gegeben, gebildet durch und für den Krieg, nicht
Kriegsstaaten in solchem Sinn, dass alles ganz und allein für den Krieg
berechnet gewesen wäre, nicht einmal auf die Dauer Kriegsfürsten, deren
Herrschaft nur in Kriegführung und Heeresmacht ihren Grund gehabt."
[3] The lapse of ages, enthusiasm, or carelessness, tribal jealousies
or the accidental predilections of an individual poet or historian,
combine to render the early history of the Arabs, so far as precision
in dates, the definite order and mutual relations of events,
characters, and localities are concerned, perplexing and insecure, or
tantalizing by the wealth of detail, impressive indeed, but eluding the
test of historical criticism. Their tactics and the composition of
their armies make the precise share of this or that general in
determining the result of a battle or a campaign difficult to estimate.
Yet by (he concord of authorities the glory of the overthrow of the
Empire of the Sassanides seems to be the portion, first of Mothanna,
who sustained the fortunes of Islam at a most critical hour, A.H.
13-14, and by his victory at Boawib just warded off a great disaster;
and secondly of Saad, the victor of Kadesia, A.H. 15, A.D. 636-7, the
conqueror and first administrator of Irak. The claims of Amr, or
Amrou, to the conquest of Egypt, Pelusium, Memphis, Alexandria, A.D.
638, admit of hardly a doubt; whilst the distinction of Khalid, "the
Sword of God," in the Syrian War at the storming of Damascus and in the
crushing defeat of Heraclius at the Yermuk, August, A.D. 634, may
justly entitle him to the designation--if that description can be
applied to any one of the devoted band--of "Conqueror of Syria."
[4] "The twelve years of their military command (_i.e._, of Nicephorus
and Zimisces) form the most splendid period of the Byzantine annals.
The sieges of Mopsuestia and Tarsus in Silicia first exercised the
skill and perseverance of their troops, on whom at this moment I shall
not hesitate to bestow the name of Romans."--Gibbon, chap. lii. The
reign of Zimisces, A.D. 969-76, forms the subject of the opening
chapters, pp. 1-326, of Schlumberger's massive work, _L'épopée
Byzantine à la fin du dixième siècle_, Paris, 1896, which exhausts
every resource of modern research into this period. Zimisces' rise to
power, and the career of the other heroic figure of the tenth century
in Byzantine history are dealt with not less exhaustively in
Schlumberger's earlier volume, _Un Empereur byzantin_, Paris, 1890.
[5] Carlyle was in his seventy-seventh year when he completed the
_Early Kings of Norway_. "Finished yesterday that long rigmarole upon
the Norse kings" is the comment in his Journal under date February
15th, 1872.--Froude, _Carlyle's Life in London_, vol. ii, p. 411.
[6] Mr. Herbert Spencer's characterization of Carlyle as a
devil-worshipper (_Data of Ethics_, § 14) must be regarded less as an
effort in serious criticism than as the retort, perhaps the just
retort, of the injured evolutionist and utilitarian to the Pig
Philosophy of the eighth of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_.
[7] The Revolution of 1848 made the appearance of Palacky's work in the
native language of Bohemia possible. Two volumes had already been
issued in German. If ever the work of a scholar and an historian had
the effect of a national song, this virtue may be ascribed to the Czech
version of Palacky's _Geschichte Böhmens_. After two centuries of
subjection to the Hapsburgs and apparent oblivion of her past, Bohemia
awoke and discovered that she had a history. Of the seven volumes of
the German edition, the period dominated by the personality of George
of Podiebrad forms the subject of the fourth (Prague, 1857-60).
[8] France has given the world the Revolution; Germany, the
Reformation; Italy, modern Art; but Russia? "We," Tourgenieff once
said, "we have given the samovar." But that poet's own works, the
symphonies of Tschaikowsky, the one novel of Dostoievsky, have changed
all this.
[9] Nevertheless the Truce of God is one of the noblest efforts of
mediaeval Europe. It drew its origins from southern France, arising
partly from the misery of the people oppressed by the constant and
bloody strife of feudal princes and barons, heightened at that time by
the fury of a pestilence, partly also from a widespread and often fixed
and controlling persuasion that with the close of the century the
thousand years of the Apocalypse would be fulfilled, and that with the
year A.D. 1000 the Day of Judgment would dawn. Ducange has collected
the evidence bearing on the use of the Latin term, and Semichon's
admirable work, _La Paix et la Trève de Dieu, première édition_, 1857,
_deuxième édition revue et augmentée_, 1869, sketches the growth of the
movement. With the eleventh century, though the social misery is
unaltered, the force of the mystic impulse is lost; at the synod of
Tuluges in 1027 the days of the week on which the Truce must be
observed are limited to two. But towards the close of the century the
rising power of Hildebrand and the crusading enthusiasm gave the
movement new life, and the days during which all war was forbidden were
extended to four of the seven days of the week, those sacred to the
Last Supper, Death, Sepulture, and Resurrection. With the decline of
the crusading spirit and the rise of monarchical principles the
influence and use of the Treuga waned. The verses of the troubadour,
Bertrand le Born, are celebrated--"Peace is not for me, but war, war
alone! What to me are Mondays and Tuesdays? And the weeks, months,
and years, all are alike to me." The stanza fitly expresses the way in
which the Truce had come to be regarded by feudal society towards the
close of the twelfth century.
[10] St.-Pierre's work appeared in 1712, three years after Malplaquet,
the most sanguinary struggle of the Marlborough wars. It is thus
synchronous with the last gloomy years of Louis XIV, when France, and
her king also, seemed sinking into the mortal lethargy of Jesuitism.
St.-Simon in his early volumes has written the history of these years.
Voltaire accuses St.-Pierre of originating or encouraging the false
impression that he had derived his theory from the Dauphin, the pupil
of Fenelon and the Marcellus of the French Monarchy. An English
translation of St.-Pierre's treatise was published in 1714 with the
following characteristic title-page: "A Project for settling an
Everlasting Peace in Europe, first proposed by Henry IV of France, and
approved of by Queen Elizabeth and most of the Princes of Europe, and
now discussed at large and made practicable by the Abbot St. Pierre of
the French Academy."
[11] As late as 1791 we find Priestley looking to the French Revolution
as the precursor of the era of Universal Peace. In a discourse
delivered at "the Meeting House in the Old-Jewry, 27th April, 1791," he
describes the "glorious enthusiasm which has for its objects the
flourishing of science and the extinction of wars." France, he
declares, "has ensured peace to itself and to other nations at the same
time, cutting off almost every possible cause of war," and enables us
"to prognosticate the approach of the happy times in which the sure
prophecies of Scripture inform us that wars shall cease and universal
peace and harmony take place."
LECTURE VI
THE VICISSITUDES OF STATES AND EMPIRES
[_Tuesday, July_ 3_rd_, 1900]
Having considered in the first lecture a definition of Imperialism, and
traced in the second and third the development in religion and in
politics of the ideal of Imperial Britain, and having afterwards
examined the relations of this ideal to the supreme questions of War
and Peace, an inquiry not less momentous, but from its intangible and
even mystic character less capable of definite resolution, now demands
attention. How is this ideal of the Imperialistic State related to
that from which all States originally derive? How is it related to the
Divine? From the consideration of this problem two others arise, that
of the vicissitudes of States and Empires, and that of the destiny of
this Empire of Imperial Britain.
From the analogy of the Past is it possible to apprehend even dimly the
curve which this Empire, moved by a new ideal, and impelled by the
deepening consciousness of its destiny, will describe amongst the
nations and the peoples of the earth?
Empire, we have seen, is the highest expression of the soul of the
State; it is the complete, the final consummation of the life of the
State. But the State, the soul of the State, is in itself but a unity
that is created from the units, the individuals which compose it.
Nevertheless the unity of the State which results from those units is
not the same unity, nor is it subject to, or governed by, the same laws
as regulate the life of the individual. Not only the arraignment of
the maxims of statesmen as immoral, but the theories, fantastic or
profound, of the rise and fall of States, are marred or rendered idle
utterly by the initial confusion of the organic unity of the State with
the unity of the individual. But though no composite unity is governed
by the same laws as govern its constituent atoms, nevertheless that
unity must partake of the nature of its constituent atoms, change as
they change, mutually transforming and transformed. So is this unity
of the State influenced by the units which compose it, which are the
souls of men.
§ I. THE METAPHYSICAL ORIGIN OF THE STATE
Consider then, first of all, in relation to the consciousness which is
the attribute of the life of the State, the consciousness which is the
soul of man. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as we have seen,
the saintly ideal which had hitherto controlled man's life dies to the
higher thought of Europe. The saint gives place to the crusader and
scholastic, and the imagination of the time acknowledges the spell of
oriental paganism and oriental culture.
Certain of the most remarkable minds of that epoch, men like
Berengarius of Tours, for instance, or St. Victor, and Amalrich, are
profoundly troubled by a problem of the following nature. How shall
the justice of God be reconciled with the destiny He assigns to the
souls of men? They are sent forth from their rest in the Divine to
dwell in habitations of mortal flesh, incurring reprobation and exile
everlasting, or after a season returning, according as they are
appointed to a life dark to the sacrifice on Calvary, or to a life by
that Blood redeemed. By what law or criterion of right does God send
forth those souls, emanations of His divinity, to a doom of misery or
bliss, according as they are attached to a body north of the
Mediterranean, or southward of that sea, within the sway of the falsest
of false prophets, Mohammed? This trouble in the heart of the eleventh
century arose from the insight which compassion gives; the European
imagination, at rest with regard to its own safety, is for the first
time perplexed by the fate of men of an alien race and faith, whose
heroism it has nevertheless learnt to revere, as in after-times it was
perplexed in pondering the fate of Greece and Rome, whose art and
thought it vainly strove to imitate. Underlying this trouble in their
hearts is the assumption to which Plato and certain of his sect have
leanings, that within the Divine there is as it were a treasury of
souls from which individual essences are sped hither, to dwell within
each mortal body immediately on its birth.
Now in an earlier age than the age of Berengarius and St. Victor, there
arose within Alexandria one whose thought in its range, in the sweep of
its orbit, was perhaps the widest and most distant amongst the children
of men. In the most remarkable and sublime of his six _Enneads_,
another theory upon the same subject occurs.[1] The fate of the soul
in passing from its home with the Everlasting is like the fate of a
child which in infancy has been removed from its parents and reared in
a foreign land. The child forgets its country and its kindred as the
soul forgets in the joy of its freedom the felicity it knew when one
with the Divine. But after the lapse of years if the child return
amongst its kindred, at first indeed it shall not know them, but now a
word, now a gesture, or again a trick of the hand, a cadence of the
voice, will come to it like the murmur of forgotten seas by whose
shores it once had dwelt, awaking within it strange memories, and
gradually by the accumulation of these the truth will at last flash in
upon the child--"Behold my father and my brethren!" So the soul of
man, though knowing not whence it came, is by the teachings of Divine
wisdom, and by inspired thinkers, quickened to a remembrance of its
heavenly origin, and its life henceforth becomes an ever-increasing,
ever more vivid memory of the tranced peace, the bliss that it knew
there within the Everlasting.
Let me attempt to apply this thought of the Egyptian mystic to the
problem before us. Disregarding the theory of an infinite series of
successive incarnations from the inexhaustible treasury of the Divine,
permit me to recall the observations made in an earlier lecture on the
contrast between the limited range of man's consciousness, and the
measureless past stretching behind him, the infinite spaces around him.
Judged by the perfect ideal of knowledge, the universe is necessary to
the understanding of a flower, and the dateless past to the
intelligence of the history of a day. But as the beam of light never
severs itself from its fountain, as the faintest ray that falls within
the caverns of the sea remains united with the orb whence it sprang, so
the soul of man has grown old along with nature, and acquainted from
its foundations with the fabric of the universe.
Therefore when it confronts some simple object of sense or emotion, or
the more intricate movements and events of history, or the rushing
storm of the present, the soul has about it strange intimacies, it has
within it preparations drawn from that fellowship with nature
throughout the aeons, the abysses of Eternity. And as the aeons
advance, the soul grows ever more conscious of the end of all its
striving, and its serenity deepens as the certainty of the ultimate
attainment of that end increases.
Baulked of its knowledge of an hour by its ignorance of Eternity, it
attains its rest in the Infinite, which seeking it shall find, piercing
through every moment of the transient to the Eternal. What are the
spaces and the labyrinthian dance of the worlds to the soul which is
ever more profoundly absorbed, remembering, knowing, or in vision made
prescient of its identity with the soul of the universe? And as the
ages recede, the immanence of the Divine becomes more consciously, more
pervadingly present. Earth deepens in mystery; premonitions of its
destiny visit the soul, falling manifold as the shadows of twilight, or
in mysterious tones far-borne and deep as the chords struck by the
sweeping orbs in space.
The soul thus neglects the finite save as an avenue to the infinite,
and holds knowledge in light esteem unless as a path to the wonder, the
ecstasy, and the wisdom which are beyond knowledge. The past is dead,
the present is a dream, the future is not yet, but in the Eternal NOW
the soul is one with that Reality of which the remotest pasts, the
farthest presents, the most distant futures, are but changing phases.
If then we regard the soul, its origin and its destiny, in this manner,
what a wonder of light invests its history within Time! Banished from
its primal abode beyond the crystal walls of space, with what
achievements has not the exile graced the earth, its habitation!
Wondrous indeed is man's course across the earth, and with what shall
the works of his soul be compared? From those first uncertainties,
those faltering elations, the Vision, dimly discerned as yet, lures him
with tremulous ecstasies to eternise the fleeting, and in columned
enclosure and fretted canopy to uprear an image which he can control of
the arch of heaven and the unsustained architecture of the stars.
These out-reach his mortal grasp, outwearying his scrutiny, blinding
his intelligence; but, master of the image, his soul knows again by
reflection the felicity which it knew when one with the Shaper of the
worlds.
And thus the soul mounts, steep above steep, from the rudely hewn
granite to the breathing marbles of the Parthenon, to the hues of
Titian, to the forests in stone, the domes and minarets, and the gemmed
splendour of later races, to the drifted snows of the Taj-Mahal,
iridescent with diamond and pearl.
Yea, from those first imaginings, caught from the brooding rocks, and
moulded in the substance of the rocks, still it climbs, instructed by
the winds, the ocean's tidal rhythm, and the tumultuous transports of
the human voice, its raptures, sorrows, or despairs, to the newer
wonder, the numbered cadences of poetry, the verse of Homer, Sophocles,
and Shakespeare.
And at the last, lessoned by those ancient instructors, winds and
tides, and the ever-moving spheres of heaven, how does the soul attain
its glory, and in Music, the art of arts, the form of forms, poise on
the starry battlements of God's dread sanctuary, tranced in prayer, in
wonder ineffable, at the long pilgrimage accomplished at last--in the
_adagio_ of the great Concerto, in the _Requiem_, or those later
strains of transhuman sadness and serenity trans-human, in which the
soul hears again the song sung by the first star that ever left the
shaping hands of God and took its way alone through the lonely spaces,
pursuing an untried path across the dark, the silent abysses--how dark,
how silent!--a moving harmony, foreboding even then in its first
separate delight and sorrow of estrangement all the anguish and all the
ecstasy that the unborn universes of which it is the herald and
precursor yet shall know!
Aristotle indeed affirms that in the universe there are many things
more excellent than man, the planets, for instance. He is thinking of
the mighty yet perfect curve which they describe, though with all the
keenness of his analytic perception, he is in this judgment not
unaffected by the fancy, current in his time, that those planets are
living things each with its attendant soul, which shapes its orbit and
that fixed path athwart the night. How much higher a will that
steadfast motion argues than the wavering purposes, the unstable
desires of human life. But we know that the planet with all its mighty
curve is but as the stage to the piece enacted thereon; it is the
moving theatre on which the drama of life, from its first dark
unconscious motions to the freest energy of the soul in its airy
imaginings, is accomplished. And the thought of Pascal which might be
a rejoinder to this of Aristotle is well known, that though the
universe rise up against man to destroy him, yet man is greater than
the universe, because he knows that he dies, but of its power to
destroy the universe knows nothing.
If this then be the origin of the individual soul, and if its recorded
and unrecorded history and action in the universe be of this height, it
is not astonishing that the laws and operations of the soul of the
State, which is of an order yet more complex and mysterious, should
baffle investigation, and foil the most assiduous efforts to reduce
them to a system, and compel speculation to have recourse to such false
analogies and misleading resemblances as those to which reference has
in these lectures more than once been made.
§ 2. THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART
Thus we trace the unity of the State to the unity of the individual
soul, and thence to the Divine unity. The soul of the State is the
higher, the more complex unity, and it is not merely in the actions of
the individual in relation to or as an organic part of the State that
we must seek for the entire influence of the State upon individual
life, or for the perfect expression of the abstract energy of the State
in itself and by itself. Man in such relations does often merit the
reprobation of Rousseau, and his theory of the deteriorating effects of
a complex unity upon the single unity of the individual soul seems
often to find justification. Similarly, the exclusive admiration of
many unwitting disciples of Rousseau for the deeds of the individual as
opposed to the deeds of the State, for art as opposed to politics,
discovers in a first study of these relations strong support. But the
artist is not isolated and self-dependent. If the supreme act of a
race is war, if its supreme thought is its religion, and its supreme
poems, its language--deeds, thoughts, and poems to which the whole race
has contributed--so in manifold, potent, if unperceived ways the State
affects those energizings in art and thought which seem most
independent of the State. The sentence of Aristotle is familiar, "The
solitary man is either a brute or a god," but the solitariness whether
of the Thebaid or of Fonte Avellano, of Romualdo, Damiani, or of that
Yogi, who, to exhibit his hate and scorn of life, flung himself into
the flames in the presence of Alexander, is yet indebted and bound by
ties invisible, mystic, innumerable, to the State, to the race, for the
structural design of the soul itself, for that very pride, that
isolating power which seems most to sever it from the State.[2] And
who shall determine the limits of the unconscious life which in that
lonely contemplation or that lonelier scorn, the soul receives from the
State? For from the same source the component and the composite, the
constituent and the constituted unity alike arise, and the Immanence
that is in each is One. "Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? or
whither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven,
Thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there. If I
take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the
sea; even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold
me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall
be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee; but the
night shineth as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to
Thee."
The everyday topic which makes man "the creature of his time" derives
whatever truth it possesses from this unity, but Sophocles did not
write the _Ajax_ because Miltiades fought at Marathon, nor Tirso, _El
Condennado_ because Cortez defeated Montezuma. Whatever law connect
greatness in art and greatness in action, it is not the law of cause
and effect, of necessary succession in time. They are the mutually
dependent manifestations of the same immortal energy which uplifts the
whole State, whose motions arise from beyond Time, the roots of whose
being are beyond the region of cause and effect.
Consider now as an illustration of the interdependence of the soul of
the individual and of the State, and of the immanence in each of the
Divine, the relation which world-history reveals as existing between
the higher manifestations of the life of the individual and of the
State. The greatest achievements of individual men, whether in action,
or in art, or in thought, are, it will generally be found, coincident
with, and synchronous with, the highest form which in its development
the State assumes, that is, with some form or mode of empire. For it
is not merely the art of Phidias, of Sophocles, that springs from the
energy aroused by the Persian invasions; the energy which finds
expression in the Empire of Athens is to be traced thither, empire and
art arising from the same exaltation of the State and of the
individual. But they are not related as cause and effect, nor is the
art of Sophocles _caused_ by Marathon; but the _Agamemnon_ and Salamis,
the Parthenon and the _Ajax_, are incarnations in words, in deeds, or
in marble of the divine Idea immanent in the whole race of the
Hellenes. A race capable of empire, the civic form of imperialism,
thus arises simultaneously with its greatest achievements in art.
Similarly in the civic State of mediaeval Florence, the age of Leonardo
and of Savonarola is also the age of Lorenzo, when in politics Florence
competes with Venice and the Borgias for the hegemony of Italy, and the
actual bounds of her civic empire are at their widest. So in Venetian
history empire and art reach their height together, and the age which
succeeds that of Giorgione and of Titian is an end not only to the
painting but to the political greatness of Venice.
As in civic so in national empires. In Spain, Charles V and the
Philips are the tyrants of the greatest single military power and of
the first nation of the earth, and have as their subjects Rojas and
Tirso, Lope and Cervantes, Calderon and Velasquez. Racine and Molière
serve _le grand Monarque_, as Apelles served Alexander. The mariners
who sketched the bounds of this empire, which is at last attaining to
the full consciousness of its mighty destinies, were the contemporaries
of Marlowe and Webster, of Beaumont and Ford.
Napoleon's fretful impatience that its victories should have as their
literary accompaniments only the wan tragedies of Joseph Chénier and
the unleavened odes of Millevoye was just. An empire so glorious, if
based on the people's will, should not have found in the genius of the
age its sworn antagonist. This stamped his empire as spurious.
But these simultaneous phenomena, these supreme attainments at once in
action and in art, are not connected as cause and effect. For the
roots of their identity we must search deeper. The transcendent deed
and the work of art alike have their origin in the _élan_ of the soul,
the diviner vision or the diviner desire. The will which becomes the
deed, the vision which becomes the poem or the picture, are here as yet
one; and this _élan_, this energy of the soul, what is it but the
energy of the infinite within the finite, of the eternal within time?
Art in whatever perfection it attains is but an illustration,
imperfect, of the spirit of man. The greatest books that ever were
written, the most exquisite sculptures that ever were carved, the most
delicate temples that ever were reared, the richest paintings that ever
came from Titian are all in themselves ultimately but the dust of the
soul of him who composes them, builds them, carves them. The
unrevealed and the unrevealable is the soul itself that in such works
is dimly adumbrated. The most perfect statue is but an imperfect
semblance of the beauty which the sculptor beheld, though intensifying
and reacting upon, and even in a sense consummating, that inward
vision; and the sublimest energy of imperial Rome derives its tragic
height from the degree to which it realizes the energy of the race.
In the Islam of Omar this law displays itself supremely, and with a
flame-like vividness. There the divine origin of the State which in
the Athens of Pericles is hidden or revealed in the myriad forms of
art, plastic or poetic, in the Rome of Sulla or Caesar in tragic
action, displays itself in naked purity and in majesty unadorned. If
artistic loveliness marks the age of Sophocles, tragic grandeur the
Rome of Augustus, mystic sublimity is the feature of the Islam of Omar.
The thought and the deed, +lógos kaì poíêsis+, here are one.
§ 3. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION
We have now reached the final stage of our inquiry. Is there any law
by which the vicissitudes of the States, whose origin has been traced
through the individual to a remoter and more awful source, are fixed
and directed? And can the decay of empires, those supreme forms in the
development of States, be resolved into its determining causes, or do
we here confront a movement which is beyond the sphere ruled by cause
and effect?
In Western Europe a broken arch and some fragments of stone are often
all that mark the place where stood some perfect achievement of
mediaeval architecture, a feudal stronghold or an abbey. But on the
lower plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, a ruin hardly more
conspicuous may denote the seat of an empire. Such a region, fronting
the desert, formed a fit theatre for man's first speculations upon his
own destiny and that of the nations. Those two inquiries have
proceeded together. His vision of the universe, original or accepted,
inevitably shapes and transforms the poet's, the prophet's, or the
historian's vision of any portion of that universe, however limited in
time and space.
Hebrew literature, affected by the revolutions of Assyria, Chaldaea,
Media, and Egypt, already discloses two theories which, modified or
applied, mould man's thought when bent to this problem down to the
present hour. Round one or other of these conceptions the speculations
of over two thousand years naturally group themselves.
The first of these theories, which may be styled the Theory of
Retribution, attributes the decay of empires to the visitation of a
divine vengeance. The fall of an empire is the punishment of sin and
of wrong-doing. The pride and iniquity of the few, or the corruption
and ethical degeneration of the mass, involves the ruin of the State.
Regardless of the contradictions to this law in the life of the
individual, its supremacy in the life of empires has throughout man's
history been decreed and proclaimed. Hebrew thought was perplexed and
amazed from the remotest periods at the felicity of the oppressor and
the unjust man, and the misery of the good. But the sublime and
inspired rhetoric of Isaiah rests upon the assumption that the
punishment of wrong, uncertain amongst men, is sure amongst nations and
States.
In a more ethical form this conception is easily traced throughout
Greek and Roman thought. In St. Augustine it reappears in its original
shape, and invested with the dignity, the fulness, and the precision of
an historical argument. A Roman by birth, culture, and youthful
sympathies, loving the sad cadences of Virgil like a passion, admitted
by Cicero to an intimacy with Hellenic thought, he is, later in life,
attracted, fascinated, and finally subdued by the ideal of the
Nazarene, and by the poetry and history behind it. He sees Rome fall;
and what the fate of Babylon was to the Hebrew prophet the fate of Rome
becomes to Augustinus--the symbol of divine wrath, the punishment of
her pride, her idolatry, and her sin. Rome falls as Babylon, as
Assyria fell; but in the _De Civitate_, to which he devotes some
fifteen years of his life, is delineated the city which shall not pass
away.[3] The destruction of Rome, limited in time and space, coalesces
with the wider thought of the Stoics, the destruction of the world.
So to the Middle Age the fall of Rome was but an argument for the theme
of the passing away of earth itself and all earthly things like a
scroll. Before its imagination, as along a highroad, moved a
procession of empires--Assyria, Media, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Persia,
and at the last, as a shadowy dream of all these, the Empire of
Charlemagne and of the Othos. Their successive falls point to man's
obstinacy in sin, and the recurrence of the event to the nearness of
the Judgment.
The treatises of Damiani, Otho of Freisingen,[4] and of the Cardinal
Lothar, formulate the argument, and as late as the seventeenth century
Bossuet dedicates to this same theme an eloquence not less impressive
and finished than that of Augustine himself. In recent times this
theory influences strongly the historical conceptions of Ruskin and
Carlyle. It is the informing thought of Ruskin's greatest work, _The
Stones of Venice_. The value of that work is imperishable, because the
documents upon which it is based are by the wasting force of wind and
sun and sea daily passing beyond scrutiny or comparison. Yet its
philosophy is but an echo of the philosophy of Carlyle's second period,
and as ever, the disciple exaggerates the teachings of the master. The
bent of Carlyle's genius was nearer that of Rousseau than he ever
permitted himself to imagine. In the Cromwelliad Carlyle elaborates
the fancy that the one great and heroic period of English history is
that of Cromwell, and that in a return to the principles of that era
lies the salvation of England. Similarly Ruskin allots to Venice its
great and heroic period, ascribing that greatness to the fidelity of
the people of Venice to the standard of St. Mark and the ideal of
Christianism of which that standard was the emblem. But in the
sixteenth century Venice swerved from this ideal, and her fall is the
consequence.
In all such speculations a method has been applied to the State
identical with that indicated in the second lecture. They exhibit the
effort of the human mind to discover in the universe the evolution of a
design in harmony with its own conception of what individual life is or
ought to be. Genius, beauty, virtue, the breast consecrated to lofty
aims, are still the dearest target to disaster, and to the blind
assaults of fate and man. In individual life, therefore, the primitive
conception has been modified, but in the wider and more intricate life
of a State the endless variety of incidents, characters, fortunes, the
succession of centuries, and of modes of thought, literatures, arts,
creeds, the revolutions in political ideals, offer so complex a mass of
phenomena that the breakdown of the theory, patent at once in the
narrower sphere of observation, is here obscured and shielded from
detection. Man's intellect is easily the dupe of the heart's desire,
and in the brief span of human life willingly carries a fiction to the
grave. And he who defends a pleasing dream is necessarily honoured
amongst men more than the visionary whose course is towards the glacier
heights and the icy solitudes of thought.
§ 4. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE CYCLIC THEORY
The second theory is that of a cycle in human affairs, which controls
the rise and fall of empires by a law similar to that of the seasons
and the revolutions of the heavenly bodies. This theory varies little;
the metaphors, the figures by which it is darkened or made clearer
change, but the essential idea remains one in the great myth of Plato
or in the Indian epics, in the rigid steel-clasped system of Vico, or
in the sentimental musings of Volney. The vicissitudes are no more
determined by the neglect or performance of religious rites or certain
ethical rules. Man's life is regarded as part of the universal scheme
of things, and the fate of empires as subject to natural laws. The
mode in which this theory originates thus connects itself at once with
the mode of the Chaldean astrology and modern evolution.
It appears late in the development of Hebrew thought, and finds its
most remarkable expression in the fragment, the writer of which is now
not unfrequently spoken of as "Khoëleth."[5] "One generation passeth
away and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever.
The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place,
where he arose. The wind goeth towards the south and turneth about
unto the north, it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth
again according to his circuits. The thing that hath been, it is that
which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done,
and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof it
may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which
was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall
there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that
shall come after."
The writings of Machiavelli reveal a mind based on the same deeps as
Khoëleth, brooding on the same world-wide things. Like him, he looks
out into the black and eyeless storm, the ceaseless drift of atoms;
like him, he surveys the States and Empires of the past, and sees in
their history, their revolutions, their rise and decline, but the
history of the wind which, in the Hebrew phrase, goes circling in its
circles, _sov[)a]v sov[=e]v_, and returneth to the place whence it
came, and universal darkness awaits the world, and oblivion universal
the tedious story of man. In work after work of Machiavelli, letters,
tales, dramas, historical and political treatises, this conception
recurs. It is the central and informing thought of his life as a
philosophical thinker. But unlike Vico, Machiavelli avoids becoming
the slave of a theory. He shadows forth this system of some dim cycle
in human affairs as a conception in which his own mind finds quiescence
if not rest. Its precise character he nowhere describes.
Amongst philosophical historians Tacitus occupies a unique position.
He rivals Dante in the cumulative effect of sombre detail and in the
gloomy energy which hate supplies. In depth and variety of creative
insight he approaches Balzac,[6] whilst in his peculiar province, the
psychology of death, he stands alone. His is the most profoundly
imaginative nature that Rome produced. Three centuries before the fall
of Rome he appears to apprehend or to forbode that event, and he turns
to a consideration of the customs of the Teutonic race as if already in
the first century he discerned the very manner of the cataclysm of the
fourth. Both his great works, the _Histories_ and the _Annals_, read
at moments like variations and developments of the same tragic theme,
the "wrath of the gods against Rome," the _deûm ira in rem Romanam_ of
the _Annals_; whilst in the _Histories_ the theory of retribution
appears in the reflection, _non esse curae deis securitatem nostrum,
esse ultionem_, with which he closes his preliminary survey of the
havoc and civil fury of the times of Galba--"Not our preservation, but
their own vengeance, do the gods desire." It is as if, transported in
imagination far into the future, Tacitus looked back and pronounced the
judgment of Rome in a spirit not dissimilar from that of Saint
Augustine. Yet the Rome of Trajan and of the Antonines, of Severus and
of Aurelian, was to come, and, as if distrusting his rancour and the
wounded pride of an oligarch, Tacitus betrays in other passages habits
of thought and speculation of a widely different bearing. His
sympathies with the Stoic sect were instinctive, but in his reserve and
deep reticence he resembles, not Seneca, but Machiavelli or Thucydides.
A passage in the _Annals_ may fitly represent the impression of reserve
which these three mighty spirits, Tacitus, Thucydides, and Machiavelli,
at moments convey. "Sed mihi haec ac talia audienti in incerto
judicium est, fatone res mortalium et necessitate immutabili an forte
volvantur; quippe sapientissimos veterum, quique sectam eorum
aemulantur, diversos reperias, ac multis insitam opinionem non initia
nostri, non finem, non denique homines dis curae; ideo creberrime
tristia in bonos, laeta apud deteriores esse; contra alii fatum quidem
congruere rebus putant, sed non e vagis stellis, verum apud principia
et nexus naturalium causarum; ac tamen electionem vitae nobis
relinquunt, quam ubi elegeris, certum imminentium ordinem; neque mala
vel bona quae vulgus putet."[7]
And yet the theory of retribution had not been without its influence
upon Thucydides. It even forces the structure of his later books into
the regularity of a tragedy, in which Athens is the protagonist, and a
verse of Sophocles the theme. But his earlier and greater manner
prevails, and from the study of his work the mind passes easily to the
contemplation of the doom which awaited the destroyers of Athens, the
monstrous tyrannies in Syracuse, and Lacedaemon's swift ruin.
Another phase of the position of Tacitus deserves attention. It was a
habit of writers of the eighteenth century, in treating of the
vicissitudes of empires, to state one problem and solve another. The
question asked was, "Is there a law regulating the fall of empires?";
but the question answered, satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily, was, "Is
there a remedy?" Like the elder Cato, Tacitus seems in places to refer
the ruin which he anticipated to Rome's departure from the austerity
and simplicity of the early centuries. In the luxury of the Caesars he
discerns but another condemnation of the policy of Caius Julius.
The use which Gibbon has made of this argument is celebrated. In
Gibbon's life, indeed, regret for the Empire, for the Rome of Trajan
and of Marcus, exercises as strong a sway, artistically, as regret for
the Republic exercises over the art and thought of Tacitus. Both
desiderate a world which is not now, musing with fierce bitterness or
cold resignation upon that which was once but is no longer. Both
ponder the question, "How could the disaster have been averted? How
could the decline of Rome have been stayed?" Tacitus is the greater
poet--more penetrating in vision, a greater master of his medium,
profounder in his insight into the human heart. But a common
atmosphere of elegy pervades the work of both, and if Gibbon again and
again forgets the inquiry with which he set out, the charm of his work
gains thereby. A pensive melancholy akin to that of Petrarch's
_Trionfi_, or the _Antiquités de Rome_ of Joachim du Bellay, redeems
from monotony, by the emotion it communicates, the over-stately march
of many a balanced period.[8] But it were as vain to seek in Tasso for
a philosophic theory of the Crusades as seek in Gibbon a philosophic
theory of the decline of empires.
His artistic purpose was strengthened to something like a prophetic
purpose by the environment of his age, the incidents of his life, and
the bent of his own intellect. He combats the same enemy as Voltaire
waged truceless war upon--the subtle, intangible, omnipresent spirit of
insincerity, hypocrisy, and superstition, from which the bigotry and
religious oppression of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
derived their power. And Gibbon's indebtedness to Voltaire is amazing.
There is scarcely a living conception in the _Decline and Fall_ which
cannot be traced to that nimble, varied, and all-illuminating spirit.
Even the ironic method of the two renowned chapters was prompted by a
section in the _Essai sur les Moeurs_.
Thus to the theory of Tacitus, the departure from the ancient
simplicity of life, Gibbon adds the theory of Zosimus.[9] With Zosimus
he affirms that the triumph of Christianism sealed the fate of Rome,
and in the Emperor Julian Gibbon finds the same heroic but ill-starred
defender of the past, as Tacitus found in the unfortunate Germanicus.
This conception informs Gibbon's work throughout, prompting alike the
furtive, malignant, or tasteless sketches of the great Pontiffs and the
great Caesars, and the finish, the studied care, the vivid detail
lavished upon the portraits of their enemies. Half-seriously,
half-smiling at his own enthusiasm, he seems to discern in Mohammed, in
Saladin, and the Ottoman power, the avengers of Julian and the Rome of
the Antonines.
And thus Ruskin, inspired by a mood of his great teacher, traces the
decline of Venice to its abandonment of Christianism, and Gibbon,
influenced by Voltaire and the environment of his age, traces the fall
of Rome to the adoption of Christianism.
§ 5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE "FALL OF AN EMPIRE"?
Underlying both these classes of theories, the retributive and the
cyclic, and underlying much of the speculation both of the eighteenth
and of the nineteenth century upon the subject, is the assumption that
the decay of empires is accidental, or arises from causes that can be
averted, or from the operation of forces that can be modified. The
mediaeval conception of one empire upon the earth, which yet shall
endure forever in righteousness, influences even the mind of Gibbon.
He had studied Polybius, and Rome's indefeasible right to the
government of the world was the faith which Polybius had announced.
And in the hour of Judaea's humiliation and ruin her prophets had still
proclaimed a similar hope of everlasting dominion to Israel.
But, as the centuries advance, it grows ever clearer that regret or
surprise at the passing of empires is like regret or surprise at the
passing of youth. Man might as well start once more to discover the
elixir of life and alchemy's secrets as hope to found an empire that
shall not pass away.
To ponder too curiously the question why a State declines is like
pondering too curiously the question why a man dies. In the
vicissitudes of States we are on the threshold of the same Mystery as
in the vicissitudes of nature and of human life. The tracts and
regions governed by cause and effect are behind us. An empire, like a
work of art, is an end in itself, but duration in the former is an
integral portion or phase of that end. From the concept, "Empire,"
duration is inseparable, and the extent of that duration is involved in
the concept itself. Duration and modes, religious or ethical, are
alike determined from within, from the divine thought realizing itself
through the individual in the State. The curve of an empire's history
is directed by no self-existent, isolated causes. It is a portion of
the universe, evading analysis as the beauty of a statue evades
analysis, lost in the vastness of nature, in the labyrinths of the soul
which created and of the soul which contemplates its perfection.
Therefore regret for the fall of an empire, unless, as in the works of
a Gibbon or a Tacitus, it aids in transforming the present nearer to
the heart's desire, is vain enough. The Eros of Praxiteles and the
Athênê of Scopas, like the Cena of Leonardo and the Martyr of Titian,
are beyond our reach, and with all our industry we shall hardly recover
the ninety tragedies of Aeschylus. But the moment within the soul of
the artist which these works enshrined, which by their inception and
completion they did but strengthen and prolong, that moment of vision
has not passed away. It has become part of the eternal, as the
aspirations, fortitudes, heroisms, endurances, great aims which Rome or
Hellas impersonates have become part of the eternal. Man, born into a
world which was not made for him, is perplexed, until in such moments
the end for which he was himself fashioned is revealed. The artist,
the hero, and the prophet give of their peace unto the world. Yet is
this gift but a secondary thing, and subject to cause, and time, and
change.
In the consummation of the life of a State the world-soul realizes
itself in a moment analogous to this moment in art. The form perishes,
nation, city, empire; but the creative thought, the soul of the State,
endures. As the marble or poem represents the supreme hour in the
individual life, the ideal long pursued imaged there, perfect or
imperfect, so the State represents the ideal pursued by the race. It
is the embodiment in living immaterial substance of the creative
purpose of the race, of the individual, and ultimately of the Divine.
The State is immaterial; no visible form betrays it. Athênê or Roma
are but the arbitrary emblems of an invisible, ever changing life, most
subtle, most complex, yet indivisibly one, woven each day anew from
myriads of aspirations, designs, ideals, recorded or unrecorded. Those
heroic personalities, a Hildebrand, a Napoleon, a Cromwell, a
Richelieu, who usurp the attributes of the State, do but interpret the
State to itself, rudely or faultlessly. Philip and Alexander, Baber
and Akbar, are the men who respond to, who feel more profoundly than
other men, the ideal, the impulse which beats at the heart of the race.
The divine thought is in them more immanent than in other men. To
Akbar the vision of the continent from Himalaya to either sea, all
brought to the feet of Mohammed, of Islam, impersonated in himself, is
an ethereal vision like that which leads Alexander eastward beyond the
Tigris to spread far the name of Hellas. Akbar started as his
grandfather had started, and Baber's faith was not less sincere.[10]
But the contact with other races and other creeds diverted or
heightened this first purpose of the Mongol, and at the pinnacle of
earthly power, Akbar met and yielded to the temptation, which dazzled
for a moment even the steady gaze of Napoleon. Apprehending the unity
beneath the diversity of the religions of his various subjects, Hindoo,
Persian, Mohammedan, Christian, Akbar dared the lofty enterprise and
essayed to extract the common truth of all, selecting, as Julian had
done, twelve centuries before him, the sun as the symbol of universal
beneficence, and truth, and life. He failed, but failed greatly.
The distinctions of a great State, art, action, empire, supremacy in
thought, supremacy in deed, supremacy in conception of the ideal of
humanity, like rays emanating from the same divine centre, thither
converge again. Any attempt to explain their succession and decay in
terms of a mechanical law must thus lead either to the reserve of
Machiavelli, to the outworn fantasies of Bossuet, or to such formulas
as those of Ruskin and Gibbon, in which synchronous phenomena are woven
into a chain of causes and effects.
Even in the sphere of individual existence death is but a mode of human
thought, a name which has no counterpart in the frame of things. As
life is but a mode of the divine thought, so death is but a mode of
human thought, a creation of the intellect the more vividly to realize
itself and life. Every effect is in turn a cause. Therefore every
cause is eternal, an infinite series, existing at once successive and
simultaneous; for the effect is not the death of, but the continued
life of the cause. Universes and the soul of man are but
self-transformations of the first last Cause, the One, the Cause within
Cause immortal, effect within effect unending. "Man," it has been
said, "is the inventor of Nothingness. Nature and the Universe know it
not." The past wields over the present a power which could never be
derived from Death and Nothingness. No age, as was pointed out in the
first lecture, has felt this power so intimately as the present. As if
we had a thousand lives to live, we consume the present in the study of
the past, and sink from sight ourselves while still contemplating the
scenes designed for other eyes. Even our most living impulses we
interpret as if they were sacred runes carved by long-vanished hands,
so that it seems as if the dead alone lived, and the living alone were
dead.
But the soul unifies all things, and is then most in the present when
most deeply absorbed in the past. The soul of man is the true Logos of
the universe. It is the contemporary of all the ages, and to none of
the aeons is it a stranger. It heard the informing voice which
instructed the planets in their paths, which moulded the rocks, the
bones of the earth, and cast the sea and the far-stretched plains and
the hills about them like a covering of flesh. Therefore time and
death and nothingness are but shadows, which the intellect of man sets
over against the substance which lives and is eternally.
And thus in the vicissitudes of States, even more impressively than
elsewhere in the universal process of transformation which Nature is,
the daring metaphor of the Hebrew, "As a vesture shalt Thou change
them, and they shall be changed," seems realized. The death of a
State, the fall of an empire, are but phases in their history, by which
a complete self-realization is attained, or the perpetuation of their
ideals under other forms, as Egypt in Hellas, Hellas in Rome, is
secured.
In Portugal's short span of empire, her day of brief and troubled
splendour, her monarchs realize, even at the hazard of a temporary
eclipse of the nation's independence, the aspirations of the race,
which slowly arising, and growing in force and intensity, had become
the fixed, tyrannous desire of a people, until, in Camoens' terse
phrase of Manuel, "from that one great thought it never swerved."
Another policy and other aims than those which her monarchs
pursued--tolerance instead of fanaticism, prudence instead of heroism,
national patriotism instead of imperial, homely common sense instead of
glorious wisdom--all or any of these might have warded off the doom of
Portugal and of the house of Avis. Bur these things were not in the
blood of Lusitania, nor would this have been the nation of Vasco da
Gama and Camoens, of Alboquerque and Cabral. It is as vain to seek in
depopulation for the causes of the fall of Portugal as in the
Inquisition or the Papal power. Even Buckle, that mighty statistician,
would hardly risk the determining of the ratio which may not be
overstepped between the bounds of an empire and the extent of the
nation which creates it. If her yeomen forsook the fields and left the
soil of Portugal unfilled, if her chivalry forsook their estates, the
question confronts us: What is the character, the heart of a race which
acts in this manner? What is the ideal powerful enough to make the
hazard of a nation's death preferable to the abandonment of that ideal?
The nation which sent its bravest to die at Al-Kasr al Kebir[11] is not
a nation of adventurers. Nor do the instances of Phocaea, of the
Cimbri, or the Ostrogoths afford any analogy here. Dom Sebastian's
device fits not only his own career but the history of the race of
which at that epoch he was at once the king and the ideal hero--"A
glorious death makes the whole life glorious." And the genius of the
nation sanctioned his life and his heroic death. To Portugal Dom
Sebastian became such a figure as Frederick Barbarossa, dead on the
far-off crusade, had been to the Middle Age, and for two centuries,
whenever night thickened around the fortunes of the race, the spirit of
Dom Sebastian returned to illumine the gloom, showing himself to a few
faithful ones; and in very truth the spirit of his deeds and of their
fathers never died in the hearts of the Portuguese, inspiring whatever
is memorable in their later history.
Spain completes in the expulsion of the Moors the warfare, the Crusade,
which began with Pelayo and the remnant of the Visigoths. Spain, as
Spain, could not act otherwise, could not act as Germany acted, as
England acted. Venice, so far from abandoning the faith of the
Nazarene, as Ruskin fancied, barred of her commerce, seeing her power
pass to Portugal, did yet, solitary and unaided, face the Ottoman, and
for two generations made the Crusades live again. It is another
Venice, yet religion is not the cause of that otherness. She defies
Paul V in the name of freedom, in the days of Sarpi,[12] as she had
defied Innocent III in the name of empire in the days of Dandolo.
Hellas still lives, still forms an element, vitalizing and omnipresent,
in the life of States and in human destiny. Roman grandeur is not dead
whilst Sulla, Tacitus, Montesquieu, Machiavelli survive. To Petrarch
the Rome of the Scipios is more present than the Rome of the Colonnas,
and it numbers among its citizens Byron, Goethe, and Leopardi.
For like all great empires Rome strove not for herself but for
humanity, and dying, had yet strength, by her laws, her religion, her
language, to impart her spirit and the secret of her peace to other
races and to other times. In the world's _palaestra_ she had thrown
the _discus_ to a point which the empires that come after, dowered as
Rome was dowered, and by kindred ideals fired, must struggle to
surpass, or in this divine antagonism be broken.
For what does the fall of Rome mean, and what are its relations to this
Empire of Britain? In an earlier lecture I illustrated my conception
of the Rome of the fifth century in the similitude of a Goth bending
over a dead Roman, and by the flare of a torch seeking to read on the
still brow the secret of his own destiny. Rome does not die there.
Her genius lives on in the Gothic race, deep, penetrating, and
all-informing, and in the picked valour of that race, which for six
hundred years spends itself in forging England, it is deepest, most
penetrating, and all-informing. Roman definiteness of thought and act
were in that nation touched by mysticism to reverie and compassion.
From the ashes of the dead ideal of concrete justice, imaginative
justice is born. Right becomes righteousness, but the living genius
which was Rome still pulses within it. By the energy of feudalism the
ancient subjection of the individual to the State is challenged.
Freedom is born, but like some winged glory hovering aloft, rivets the
famished eyes of men, till at last, descending by the Rhine, it fills
with its radiance a darkened world. Religious oppression is stayed,
but, Phoenix-like, yet another ideal arises, and generations later,
what a temple is reared for it by the Seine! And now in this era, and
at this latest time, behold in England the glory has once more
alighted, as once for a brief space by the Rhine and Seine, but surely
to make here its lasting mansionry. For in very truth, in all that
freedom and all that justice possess of power towards good amongst men,
is not England as it were earth's central shrine and this race the
vanguard of humanity?
Rome was the synthesis of the empires of the past, of Hellas, of Egypt,
of Assyria. In her purposes their purposes lived. Mediaeval
imperialism strove not to rival Rome but to be Rome. In Britain the
spirit of Empire receives a new incarnation. The form decays, the
divine idea remains, the creative spirit gliding from this to that,
indestructible. And thus the destiny of empires involves the
consideration of the destiny of man.
[1] In Volkmann's edition of Plotinus, the sole attempt at a critical
text worthy of the name that has yet been made, the passage runs as
follows:
[Illustration: Greek text]
[2] Spinoza's answer to the "melancholici qui laudat vitam incultem et
agrestem" (iv Prop., 35, note), that men can provide for their needs
better by society than by solitude, hardly meets the higher criticism
of the State. Yet it anticipates Fichte's retort to Rousseau.
Spinoza, if this were written _circa_ 1665, has in view, perhaps, the
Trappists, then reorganized by Bossuet's friend, and perhaps also Port
Royal aux Champs.
[3] The writings of St. Augustine by their extraordinary variety, vast
intellectual range, and the impression of a distinct personal utterance
which flows from every page at which they are opened, exercise upon the
imagination an effect like that which the works of Diderot or Goethe
alone of moderns have the power to reproduce. The _De Civitate_ is his
greatest and most sustained effort, and though controversial in
intention it reaches again and again an epic sublimity both in imagery
and diction. The peoples and empires of the world are the heroes, and
the part which Augustine assigns to the God of all the earth has
curious reminiscences of the parts played by the deities in pagan
poetry. Over the style the influence of Virgil is supreme. Criticism
indeed offers few more alluring tasks than the attempt to gauge the
comparative effects of the Virgilian cadences upon the styles of the
men of after times who loved them most--Tacitus and St. Augustine,
Dante, Racine, and Flaubert.
[4] The _World-History_ of Otho of Freisingen was modelled upon the _De
Civitate_ of St. Augustine. He styles it the "Book of the Two Cities,"
_i.e._, Babylon and Jerusalem, and sketches from the mediaeval
standpoint the course of human life from the origin of the world to the
year A.D. 1146. His work on the Apocalypse and his impression of the
Last Judgment are a fitting close to the whole. He is uncritical in
the use of his materials, but conveys a distinct impression of his
habits of thought; and something of the brooding calm of a mediaeval
monastery invests the work. In the following year he started on the
crusade of Konrad III, his half-brother; but returning in safety, wrote
his admirable annals of the early deeds of the hero of the age, the
emperor Barbarossa.
[5] The origin, the meaning, the number, and even the gender of this
word have all been disputed. Thus the use of the original is
convenient as it avoids committal to any one of the numerous theories
of theologians or Hebraists. Delitzsch has sifted the evidence with
scrupulous care and impartiality, whilst Renan's monograph possesses
both erudition and charm.
[6] What figures from the _Comédie Humaine_ of Roman society of the
first century throng the pages of Tacitus--Sejanus, Arruntius, Piso,
Otho, Bassus, Caecina, Tigellinus, Lucanus, Petronius, Seneca, Corbulo,
Burrus, Silius, Drusus, Pallas, and Narcissus; and those tragic women
of the _Annals_--imperious, recklessly daring, beautiful or
loyal--Livia, Messalina, Vipsania, the two Agrippinas, mothers of
Caligula and of Nero, Urgulania, Sabina Poppaea, Epicharis, Lollia
Paulina, Lepida, Calpurnia, Pontia, Servilia, and Acte!
[7] In Richard Greneway's translation, London, 1598, one of the
earliest renderings of Tacitus into English, this passage stands as
follows:
"When I heare of these and the like things, I can give no certaine
judgement, whether the affaires of mortall men are governed by fate and
immutable necessitie; or have their course and change by chaunce and
fortune. For thou shalt finde, that as well those which were accounted
wise in auncient times, as such as were imitators of their sect, do
varie and disagree therein; some do resolutlie beleeve that the gods
have no care of man's beginning or ending; no, not of man at all.
Whereof it proceedeth that the vertuous are tossed and afflicted with
so many miseries; and the vitious (vicious) and bad triumphe with so
great prosperities. Contrarilie, others are of opinion that fate and
destinie may well stand with the course of our actions: yet nothing at
all depend of the planets or stars, but proceede from a connexion of
naturall causes as from their beginning. And these graunt withall,
that we have free choise and election what life to follow; which being
once chosen, we are guided after, by a certain order of causes unto our
end. Neither do they esteeme those things to be good or bad which the
vulgar do so call."
Murphy's frequent looseness of phraseology, false elegance, and futile
commentary, are nowhere more conspicuous than in his version of the
sixth book of the Annals and of this paragraph in particular.
[8] Life, Love, Fame, and Death are themes of Petrarch's _Triumphs_.
The same profound sense of the transiency of things, which meets us in
the studied pages of his confessional--the Latin treatise _De Contemptu
Mundi_--pervades these exquisite poems. Du Bellay's _Antiquities_,
which Spenser's translation under the title of _The Ruines of Rome_ has
made familiar, were written after a visit to Rome in attendance upon
the Cardinal du Bellay, and first published in 1558. The beautiful
_Songe sur Rome_ accompanied them. Two years later Du Bellay, then in
his thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, died. The preciousness of these
poems is enhanced rather than diminished if we imagine that the friend
of Ronsard endeavoured to wed the music of Villon's _Ballades_ to the
passing of empires and of Rome.
[9] In the generation succeeding that of St. Augustine, the fall of
Rome formed the subject of a work in six books by Zosimus, an official
of high rank at Constantinople. The fifth and sixth books deal with
the period between the death of Theodosius and the capture of the city
by Alaric (A.D. 395-410). Zosimus ascribes the disaster to the
revolution effected in the life and conduct of the Romans by the new
religion. The tone of the whole history is evidently inspired by the
brilliant but irregular works of the Syrian Eunapius whom hero-worship
and the regret for a lost cause blinded to all gave the imposing
designs of the Emperor Julian.
[10] Baber's own memoirs, _Memoirs of Zehir-ed-din Muhammed Baber,
emperor of Hindustan_, one of the priceless documents of history, show
the manner in which he conceived his mission. Here is his account of
the supreme incident in his spiritual life; "In January, 1527,
messengers came from Mehdi Khwajeh to announce that Sanka, the Rana of
Mewar, and Hassan Khan Mewati, were on their march from the west. On
February 11th I went forth to the Holy War. On the 25th I mounted to
survey my posts, and during the ride I was struck with the reflection
that I had always resolved to make an effectual repentance at some
period of my life. I now spoke with myself thus--'O my soul, how long
wilt thou continue to take pleasure in sin? Not bitter is repentance:
then taste it thou! Since the day wherein thou didst set forth on a
Holy War, thou hast seen Death before thine eyes for thy salvation.
And he who sacrificeth his life to save his soul shall attain that
exalted state thou wottest of.' Then I sent for the gold and the
silver goblets, and broke them, and drank wine no more, and purified my
heart. And having thus heard from the Voice that errs not, the tidings
of peace, and being now for the first time a Mussulman indeed, I
commanded that the Holy War shall begin with the grand war against the
evil in our hearts." Such was the mood in which, on the 24th of the
first Jemadi, A.H. 933, Baber proceeded to found the Mogul Empire.
[11] The battle of Al-Kasr al Kebir, in Morocco, about fifty miles
south of Tangiers, was fought on August 4th, 1578. The king, Dom
Sebastian, and the flower of the Portuguese nobility died on the field.
As in Scotland after Flodden, there was not a house of name in Portugal
which had not its dead to mourn.
[12] The genius of this great thinker, patriot, scholar, and historian,
along with the heroism of the war of Candia, "the longest and most
memorable siege on record," as Voltaire designates it, throw a dying
lustre over the Venice of the seventeenth century, which in painting
has then but such names as those of Podovanino and the younger
Cagliari. Sarpi's defence of Venice against Paul V, an attorney in the
seat of Hildebrand, occurred in 1605. It consists of two works--the
_Tractate_ and the _Considerations_--and probably of a third drawn up
for the secret use of the Council of Ten. Like Voltaire, Sarpi seems
to have lived with a pen in his hand. His manuscripts in the Venice
archives fill twenty-nine folio volumes. The first collected edition
of his works was published, not unfitly, in the year of the fall of the
Bastille.
LECTURE VII
THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN AND THE DESTINY OF MAN
[_Tuesday, July_ 10_th_, 1900]
Though life itself and all its modes are transient, but shadows cast
through the richly-tinted veil of Maya upon the everlasting deep of
things, yet such dreams as those of perpetual peace and of empires
exempt from degeneration and decay, like the illusion of perpetual
happiness, the prayer of Spinoza for some one "supreme, continuous,
unending bliss," have mocked man from the beginning of recorded history
to the present hour. They are ancient as the rocks and their musings
from eternity, inextinguishable as the _élan_ of the soul imprisoned in
time towards that which is beyond time.
And yet the effect of these, as of all false illusions, is but to
render the value of Reality--I had almost said of the real
Illusion--more poignant. Indeed, "false" and "unreal" at all times are
mere designations we apply to the hours of dim and uncertain vision[1]
when tested by the standard which the moments of perfect insight afford.
Nothing is more tedious, yet nothing is more instructive, than the
study of the formulated ideals, the imagings of what life might be or
life ought to be, of poets or of systematic philosophers. Nothing so
instantly reconciles us to war as the delineations of humanity under
"meek-eyed Peace"; and to the passing of visible things, empires,
states, arts, laws, and this universal frame of things, as such
attempts as have been made to stay time and change, and abrogate the
ordinances of the world.
Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht.
Why shapest thou the world? 'twas shapen long ago.[2]
Nor does this result in the mood of Candide. The effort unconquered
and unending to behold the visible and the passing as in very truth it
is, leads to a deeper vision of the Unseen and of the Eternal as in
very truth it is.
Thus we are prepared to consider the following question. Given that
death is nothing, and the decline of empires but a change of form, will
this empire of Imperial Britain also decline and fall? Will the form
it now enshrines pass away, as the forms of Persia, Rome, the Empire of
Akbar, have passed away? The question resolves itself into two
parts--in what does the youth of a race or of an empire consist? And,
secondly, is it possible by any analogy from the past to measure or
gauge the possible or probable duration of Imperial Britain, to
determine to what era, say in the history of such an empire as Rome or
Islam, the present era in the history of Imperial Britain corresponds?
§1. THE PRESENT STAGE IN THE HISTORY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
First of all with regard to the former question. Recent studies in
ethnology have made it clear that youth, and all that this term implies
of latent or realized energies, mental, physical, intellectual, is not
the inevitable attribute and exclusive possession of uncivilized or of
recently civilized races. Yet this assumption still underlies much of
the current speculation on the subject. Last century it was received
as an axiomatic truth. Thus in the time of Louis XV, when a romantic
interest first invested the American Indians, French writers saw in
them the prototypes of the Germans described by Tacitus. Not only
Voltaire and Rousseau, but Montesquieu himself, regard them curiously,
as if in the backwoods dwelt the future dominators of the world.
Comparisons were drawn between their manners, their religion, their
customs, and those of the Goths and the Franks, and _littérateurs_
indulged the fancy that in delineating the Hurons of the Mississippi
they were preparing for posterity a literary surprise and a document
lasting as the _Germania_. Such comparisons are still at times made,
but they are like the comparison between a rising and a receding tide;
both trace the same line along the sands, but it is the same tide only
in appearance. It is the contrast between the simplicity of childhood
and of senility, between the simplicity of a race dowered with
many-sided genius and of a race dowered with but one-sided genius. It
is neither in the absence of civilization, nor in its newness, that the
youth of a race consists; nor does the old age of a race consist in
refinement, nor capacity for the arts necessarily imply decline of
political energy. The victories of the Germans in 1870 were like
Fate's ironic comment upon the inferences drawn from their love of
philosophy. Abstract thought had not unfitted the race for war, nor
"Wertherism" for the battlefield.
But, as in the life of the individual, so in the life of a race, youth
consists in capacity for enthusiasm for a great ideal, capacity to
frame, resolution to pursue, devotion to sacrifice all to a great
political end. Russia, for instance, has only recently come within the
influence of European culture, but this does not make the Slav a
youthful race. The Slavonic is indeed perhaps the oldest people in
Europe. Its literature, its art, its music, the characteristics of its
society alike attest this. Superstition is not youth, else we might
look to the hut of the Samoyede even with more confidence than to the
cabin of the Moujik for the imperial race of the future. And
prolificness in a race does as surely denote resignation to be
governed, as the genius to govern others.
And the Slav, as we have seen, has at no period of his history shown
that "youth" which consists in capacity for a great political ideal,
either in Poland, or amongst the Czechs, or in Russia.
The present German empire assuredly exhibits in nothing the qualities
of ancient lineage; yet the race which composes it is the same race as
was once united under Hapsburg, under Luxemburg, under Hohenstauffen,
and under Franconian, as now under the Hohenzollern dynasty.
The United States as a nation bear the same relation to Britain as the
Moorish kingdom in Spain bore to the Saracenic empire of Bagdad. It is
a fragment, a colossal fragment torn from the central mass; but not
only in its language, its literature, its religion and its laws, but in
individual and national peculiarities, at least in the deeper moments
of history and of life, the original stock asserts itself. The State
is young; but the race is precisely of the same remoteness as Britain
and the Greater Britain.
Passing to the second point--at what epoch do we now stand as compared
with Rome or Islam? It is not unusual to speak of Britain as an aged
empire, but such estimates or descriptions commonly rest upon a
misapprehension, first, of the period in which the Nation of England
strictly speaking arises, and secondly, of the period in which the
Empire of Britain arises.
The traditional date of the landing of Hengist does not indicate a
moment analogous to the moment in the history of Rome marked by the
traditional date of the foundation of the city. The date 776 B.C.
marks the close of a process of transformation and slow revolving unity
extending over centuries, so that the era of Romulus and the early
kings, Numa, Ancus, and Servius, may be regarded as an epoch in Rome's
history analogous to the period in England's history between Senlac and
the constitutional struggle of the thirteenth century. The former is
the period in which the civic unity of Rome is completed. The latter
is the period in which the national unity of England is completed.
Rome is now finally conscious to itself of its career as a city, _urbs
Roma_, as England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is finally
conscious to itself of its career as a nation. Magna Carta and the
constitutional struggle which followed may be said to determine the
course of the national and political life of England as much as the
Servian Code founded the civic unity and determined the character of
the constitutional life of Rome.
And, as was pointed out in an earlier lecture, already in Rome and in
England there are premonitions, foreshadowings of the future. The
design of the city on the seven hills is the design of the eternal
city, and the devotion of the _gens Fabia_ announces the Roman legion.
And in those wars of Creçy and Poitiers, the constancy, the dauntless
heart, and the steady hand of the English archers, which broke the
chivalry of France, what is it but the constancy of Waterloo, the
squares, the charge, the Duke's words, spoken quietly as the words of
fate, decreeing an empire's fall, "Stand up, Guards!"? And in 1381,
the tramp of the feet of the hurrying peasants, sons and grandsons of
the archers of Creçy, in the great Revolt, indignant at ingratitude and
wrong, what is it but the prelude to the supremacy of the People of
England, to the Petition of Right, to Cromwell's Ironsides, to Chartism
and Reform Acts, and the Democracy, self-governing, imperial and
warlike of the present hour? So that even as a nation, about eighteen
generations may be said to sum England's life, whilst, as we have seen,
Britain's conscious life as an empire extends backwards but to three
generations or to four. Thus if the question were asked, With what
period in the history of Rome does the present age correspond? I
should say, roughly speaking, it corresponds with the period of Titus
and Vespasian, when Rome has still a course of three hundred years to
run; and in the history of Islam, with the period of the early
Abbassides, when the fall of the Saracenic dominion is still some four
centuries removed.
Does this justify us in inferring that the course which England has to
run will extend still over three centuries and that then England too
will pass away, as Rome, as the Saracenic empire, have passed away? So
far as the determination of the eras in our history which correspond in
development to eras in the history of Rome or of Islam is concerned,
the inference from analogy possesses a certain validity. And the
accidental or fixed resemblances between the empires of Islam,[3] Rome,
and Imperial Britain are numerous and striking enough to render such
comparisons of real significance to speculative politics. But the
similarity in structural expansion or in environment which can be
traced throughout the completed dramas of Rome and Islam is to be found
only in the initial stages of Imperial Britain. Then the argument from
analogy fails, and our judgment is at a stand.
Assuming that each imperial race starts its career dowered with a vital
capacity of definite range, and allowing for the necessary divergences
in their course between a civic and a national state. Imperial
Britain, regarded from its past, may be said in the present era to have
reached a stage represented by the era of Vespasian and Titus; but to
proceed further is perilous, so momentous is the distinction that now
arises between the circumstances of the two empires. During the
present century the vast transformations which have been effected by
science in the surroundings of man's physical life make all speculation
upon the duration of Imperial Britain by analogies drawn from the
duration either of Rome or of other empires, indecisive or rash.
The growth of the idea of freedom, and the modern interpretation of
that idea in the spirit of Condorcet, have, within the bounds of the
English nation itself, increased the intercourse between ranks to a
degree unparalleled in the ancient world. The self-recuperative powers
of the race have been strengthened by the course of its political and
religious history. Fresh blood adds new energy to effete stocks. The
effect of this restorative power from within is heightened in manifold
ways by such a circumstance as the enormous facilities of locomotion
which have arisen during the past two generations.
In the age of the first conscious beginnings of Imperial Britain, the
communication between the regions of the empire was as difficult as in
the Rome of Sulla; but the development of that consciousness has been
synchronous, not only with increased intercourse between the ranks of
the same nation, but with increased intercourse between all the various
climes of an empire upon which the sun never sets. From city to city,
from town to town, from province to province, from colony to colony,
emigration and immigration, change and interchange of vast masses of
the population are incessant. This increased intercommunication
between the various members of the race, the influences of the change
of climate upon the individual, aided by such imperceptible but
many-sided forces as spring from the diffusion of knowledge and
culture, mark a revolution in the vital resources and the environment
in the British, as distinguished from the Saracenic or Roman race, so
extraordinary that all analogy beyond the point which we have indicated
is impossible, or so guarded by intricate hypotheses as to be useless
or misleading.
Nature seems pondering some vast and new experiment, and an empire has
arisen whose future course, whether we consider its political or its
economic, its physical or its mental resources, leaves conjecture
behind. The world-stage is set as for the opening of a drama which, at
least in the magnitude of its incidents and the imposing circumstance
of its action, will make the former achievements of men dwindle and
seem of little account.
§ 2. THE DESTINY OF MAN
At this point we may fitly close our survey, and these "Reflections,"
by endeavouring to determine, not the remote future of Imperial
Britain, but its immediate task, Fate's mandate to the present, and as
we have considered Imperial Britain in its relations to the destiny of
past empires, pause for a moment in conclusion upon its relations to
the destiny of man.
To the ancient world, man in his march across the deserts of Time had
left felicity and the golden age far beyond him, and Rousseau's vision
of Humanity as starting upon a wrong track, and drifting ever farther
from the path of its peace, had charmed the melancholy or the despair
of Virgil and his great master in verse and speculation, Titus
Lucretius.
This conception of man's destiny as an infinite retrogression, Eden
receding behind Eden, lost Paradise behind lost Paradise, in the
dateless past, encounters us, now as a myth, now as a religious or
philosophic tenet, throughout the earlier history of humanity from the
Baltic to the Indian Sea, from the furthest Orient to the Western
Isles. Besides this radiant past even the vision of the abode which
awaits the soul at death seems dusky and repellent, a land of twilight,
as in the Etruscan legend, or that dominion over the shades which
Achilles loathed beyond any mortal misery.
But the memory or the imagination of this land far behind, upon which
Heaven's light for ever falls, the Asgard of the Goths, the Akkadian
dream of Sin-land ruled by the Yellow Emperor, the reign of Saturn and
of Ops, diminishes in power and living energy as the ages advance, and,
perishing at last, is embalmed in the cold and crystal loveliness of
poetry. In its place bright mansions, elysian groves, await the soul
at death. Heaven closes around earth like a protecting smile, and from
this hope of a recovered Paradise and new Edens amongst the stars,
which to Dante and his time are but the earth's appanage, man advances
swiftly to the desire, the hope, the certainty of a terrestrial
Paradise waiting his race in the near or remote future. Thus, as the
immanence of the Divine within the soul of man has deepened, and the
desire of his heart has grown nearer the desire of the world-soul, so
has the power of memory decreased and been transformed into hope. Man,
tossed from illusion to illusion, has grown sensitive to the least
intimations of Reality.
But these visions of Eden, whether located in a remote past, or in the
interstellar spaces, or in the near future, have certain
characteristics in common. From far behind to far in front the dream
has shifted, as if the Northern Lights had moved from horizon to
horizon, but it remains one dream. The earthly Paradise of the social
reformer, a Saint-Simon or a Fourier, of a world free from war and
devoted to agriculture and commerce, or of the philosophic
evolutionist, of a world peopled by myriads of happy altruists bounding
from bath to breakfast-room, illumined and illumining by their healthy
and mutual smiles, differs from the earlier fancies of Asgard and the
Isles of the Blest, not in heightened nobility and reasonableness, but
in diminished beauty and poetry. The dream of unending progress is
vain as the dream of unending regress.[4]
Critics of literature and philosophy have often remarked how sterile
are the efforts to delineate a state of perfect and long-continued
bliss, even when a Dante or a Milton undertakes the task, compared with
delineations of torment and endless woe. And Aeschylus has remarked,
and La Rochefoucauld and Helvétius bear him out, how much easier a man
finds the effort to sympathize with another's misery than to rejoice in
his joy.
Such contrasts are due, not to a faltering imagination, nor to the
depravity of the human heart. They are the recognition by the dark
Unconscious, which in sincerity of vision ever transcends the
Conscious, that in man's life truth dwells not with felicity, that to
the soul imprisoned in Time and Space, whether amongst the stars or on
this earth, perfect peace is a mockery. But in Time, misery is the
soul's familiar, anguish is the gate of truth, and the highest moments
of bliss are, as the Socrates of Plato affirms, negative. They are the
moments of oblivion, when the manacles of Time fall off, whether from
stress of agony or delight or mere weariness. Therefore with
stammering lips man congratulates joy, but the response of grief to
grief is quick and from the heart, sanctioned by the Unconscious;
therefore in the portraiture of Heaven art fails, but in that of Hell
succeeds.
It is not in Time that the eternal can find rest, nor in Space that the
infinite can find repose, and as illusion follows lost illusion, the
soul of man does but the more completely realize the wonder ineffable
of the only reality, the Eternal Now.
§ 3. THE FOUR PERIODS OF MODERN HISTORY AND THEIR IDEALS
The deepening of this conception of man's destiny as beginning in the
Infinite and in the Infinite ending, is one of the profoundest and most
significant features of the present age. Its dominion over art,
literature, religion, can no longer escape us. It is the dominant note
of the last of the four great ages or epochs into which the history of
the thought of modern Europe, in an ever-ascending scale, divides
itself. A brief review of these four epochs will best prepare us for a
consideration of the present position of Britain, and of the relations
of its empire to the actual conditions of Europe and humanity.
The First Age is controlled by the Saintly Ideal. The European of that
age is a visionary. The unseen world is to him more real than the
seen, and art and poetry exist but to decorate the pilgrimage of the
soul from earth to heaven. The new Jerusalem which Tertullian saw
night by night descend in the sunset; the city of God, whose shining
battlements Saint Augustine beheld gleam through the smoke of the
world-conflagration of the era of Alaric and Attila, of Vandal and
Goth, Frank and Hun; the Day of Wrath and Judgment which later times
looked forward to as certainly as to the coming of spring, are but
phases of one pervading aspiration, one passioning cry of the soul.
But the illusion which lures on that age fades when the ascetic zeal of
the saint is frustrated by the joy of life, and the crusader's valour
is broken on the Moslem lances, and the scholastic's indefatigable
pursuit of a harmonizing, a reconciling word of reason and of faith,
his ardour not less lofty than the crusader's to pierce the
ever-thickening host of doubts, discords, fears, fall all in ruins, in
accepted defeat or in formulated despair.
With the Second Age a new illusion arises, the _Wahn_ of religious
freedom. The ideal which Rome taught the world, upon which saint,
crusader, and scholar built their hopes, turned to ashes--but shall not
the human soul find the haven of its rest in freedom from Rome, in the
pure faith of primitive times? When the last of the scholastics was
being silenced by a papal edict and the consciousness of a hopeless
task, the first of the new scholars was ushering in the world-drama of
four centuries.
The world-historic significance of the Reformation lies in the effort
of the European mind to pierce, at least in the sphere of Religion,
nearer to the truth. The successive phases of this struggle may be
compared to a vast tetralogy, with a Prelude of which the actors and
setting are Huss and Jerome, the Council of Constance and Sigismund,
the traitor of traitors, who gave John Huss "the word of a king," and
Huss, solitary at the stake, when the flames wrapped him around,
learned the value of the word of a king. Martin Luther is the
protagonist of the first of the four great dramas that follow. Its
theme is the consecration of man to sincerity in his relations to God.
There, even at the hazard of death, the tongue shall utter what the
heart thinks.
The second drama is named _Ignatius Loyola_; the theme is not less
absorbing--"Art thou then so sure of the truth and of thy sincerity, O
my brother?" Whatever his followers may have become, Don Inigo remains
one of the most baffling enigmas that historical psychology offers.
From his grave he rules the Council, and the Tridentine Decrees are the
acknowledgment of his unseen sovereignty.
What tragic shapes arise and crowd the stage of the third drama--Thurn,
Ferdinand, Tilly, Wallenstein, Richelieu, Gustavus, Condé, Oxenstiern!
And when the last actors of the fourth drama, the conflict between
moribund Jesuitism and Protestantism grown arrogant and prosperous, lay
aside their masks in the world's great tiring-room of death, a new Age
in world-history has begun.
As religious freedom is the _Wahn_ of the Reformation drama, so it is
in political freedom that the Eternal Illusion now incarnates itself.
Let man be free, let man throughout the earth attain the unfettered use
of all his faculties, and heaven's light will once more fill all the
dark places of the world! This is the new avatar, this the glad
tidings which announce the French Revolution and the Third Age. Of
this ideal, the faith in which the French Girondins die is the most
perfect expression. What is this faith for which Condorcet and his
party perish, some by poison, some by the sword, some by the
guillotine, some in battle, but all by violent deaths--Vergniaud,
Roland, Barbaroux, Brissot, Barnave, Gensonné, Pétion, Buzot, Isnard?
"Oh Liberty, what crimes are done in thy name!" was not a reproach,
but, in the gladness of the martyr's death which consecrated all the
life, it was the wonder, the disquiet of a moment yet sure of its peace
in some deeper reconcilement. Behold how strong is their faith! Marie
Antoinette has her faith, the injunction of her priest, "When in doubt
or in affliction, think of Calvary." Yet the hair of the Queen
whitens, her spirit despairs. The Girondinist queen climbing the
scaffold, not less a lover of love and of life than Marie
Antoinette--what nerves her? It is the star of the future and the
memory of Vergniaud's phrase, "Posterity? What have we to do with
posterity? Perish our memory, but let France be free!"
How free are their souls, what nobility shines in the eyes of these
men, light-stepping to their doom, immortally serene, these martyrs,
witnesses to an ideal not less pure, not less lofty than those other
two for which saint and reformer died! And their battle-march, which
is also their hymn of death, Shelley has composed it, the choral chant,
the vision of the future of the world, which closes _Hellas_.
This faith, in which the Girondins live and die is the hope, the faith
that slowly arises in Europe through the eighteenth century, in
political freedom as the regenerator, as the salvation of the world.
Voltaire announces the coming of the Third Age--"Blessed are the young,
for their eyes shall behold it"--and upon the ruins of the Bastille
Charles James Fox sees it arise. "By how much," he writes to a friend,
"is not this the greatest event in the history of the world!" Its
presence shakes the steadfast heart of Goethe like a reed. Wordsworth,
Schiller, Chateaubriand pledge themselves its hierophants--for a time!
The _Wahn_ of freedom, the eternal illusion, the dream of the human
heart! First to France, then to Europe, then to all the earth--Freedom!
This is the faith for which the Girondins perish, and in dying bequeath
to the nineteenth century the theory of man's destiny which informs its
poetry, its speculative science, its systematic philosophy. It is the
faith of Shelley and of Fichte, of Herbart and of Comte, of John Stuart
Mill, Lassaulx, Quinet, not less than of Tennyson, last of the
Girondins. For the ideal of the Third Age, freedom, knowledge, the
federation of the world, passes as the ideals of the First and of the
Second Age pass. Not in political any more than in religious freedom
could man's unrest find a panacea. The new heavens and the new earth
which Voltaire proclaimed vanished like the city which Tertullian saw
beyond the sunset.
And knowledge--of what avail is knowledge?--or to scan the abysses of
space and search the depths of time? If the utmost dreams of science,
and all the moral and political aims of Girondinism were realized, if
the foundations of life and of being were laid bare, if the curve of
every star were traced, its laws determined, and its structure
analysed, if the revolutions of this globe from its first hour, and the
annals of all the systems that wheel in space, were by some miracle
brought within our scrutiny--it still would leave the spirit
unsatisfied as when these crystal walls did first environ its
infinitude.
The defects, the nobility, and the beauty of the ideal of the Third Age
are conspicuous in the great last work of Condorcet. As Mirabeau, the
intellectual Catiline of his age, is the protagonist of Rebellion, that
principle which has drawn the deepest utterances from the world-soul,
from Job to Prometheus and Farinata, so Condorcet, whose countenance in
its high and gentle benevolence seems the very expression of that
_bienfaisance_ which the Abbé de Saint-Pierre made fashionable, may be
styled the high-priest of Girondinism, and he carries his faith beyond
the grave, hallowing the altar of Freedom with his blood. In over a
hundred pamphlets during the four years of his life as a Revolutionist,
Condorcet disseminates his ideas--fortnightly pamphlets, many of them
even now worth reading, lighting up now this, now that aspect of his
faith--kingship, slavery, the destiny of man, two Houses, assignats,
education of the people, finance, the rights of man, economics, free
trade, the rights of women, the Progress of the Human Mind. It is in
this last, written with the shadow of death upon him, that the central
thought of his system is developed. He may have derived it from
Turgot,[5] his master, and the subject of one of his noblest
biographies, but he gave it a consecration of his own, and later
writers have done little more than elaborate, vary, or reduce to
scientific rule and line his living thought. Where they most are
faithful, there his followers are greatest.
In the theory of evolution Condorcet's principles appear to find
scientific expression and warrant, but it is pathetic to observe the
speculative science of a modern systematizer advancing through volume
after volume with the cumbrous but massive force of a traction-engine,
only to find rest at last in a vision of Utopia some centuries hence,
tedious as the Paradise of mediaeval poets or the fabulous Edens of
earlier times.
Indeed, the conception of the infinite perfectibility of man, and of an
eternal progress, carried its own doom in the familiar observation that
there where progress can be traced, there the divine is least immanent.
A distinguished statesman and writer, and a believer in evolution,
recently avowed his perplexity that an age like the present, which has
invented steam, electricity, and the kinematograph, should in painting
and poetry not surpass the Renaissance, nor in sculpture the age of
Phidias. In such perplexity is it not as if one heard again the threat
of Mummius, charging his crew to give good heed to the statues of
Praxiteles, on the peril of replacing them if broken!
Goethe, as the wrecks of his drama on Liberty prove, felt the might of
the ideal of the Third Age with all the vibrating emotion which genius
imparts.[6] But he was the first to discover its hollowness, and bade
the world, in epigram or in prose tale, in lyric or in drama, to seek
its peace where he himself had found it, in Art. So the labour of the
scientific theorist, negatively beneficent by the impulsion of man's
spirit beyond science, brings also a reward of its own to the devotee.
The sun of Art falls in a kind of twilight upon his soul, working
obscurely in words, and then does he most know the Unknowable when, in
the passion of self-imposed ignorance, he rises to a kind of eloquence
in proclaiming its unknowableness. Glimmerings from the Eternal visit
the obscure study where the soul in travail records patiently the
incidents of Time, and elaborates a theory of man's history as if it
were framed to end like an Adelphi melodrama or a three-volume novel.
§ 4. THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE
But from those very failures, those dissatisfactions, the ideal of the
Fourth Age is born, and the law of a greater progress divined. For the
soul, revolting at last against the fleeting illusions of time, the
deceiving Edens of saint, reformer, and revolutionist, freedom from the
body, freedom from religious, or freedom from political oppression,
sets steadily towards the lodestar of its being, whose rising is not in
Time nor its going down in Space. Nor is it in knowledge, whether of
the causes of things, or of the achievements of statesmen, warriors,
legislators, that the peace of the infinite is to be found, but in a
vision of that which was when Time and Cause were not. Then
instruction and the massed treasures of knowledge, established or
theoretic, concerning the past and the future of the planet on which
man plays his part, or of other planets on which other forms of being
play their parts, do indeed dissolve and are rolled together like a
scroll. The Timeless, the Infinite, like a burst of clear ether, an
azure expanse washed of clouds, lures on the delighted spirit, tranced
in ecstasy.
For the symbol of this universe and of man's destiny is not the
prolongation of a line, nor of groups of lines organically co-ordinate,
but, as it were, a sphere shapen from within and moulded by that
Presence whose immanence, ever intensifying, is the Thought which time
realizes as the Deed. Man looks to the future and the coming of
Eternity. How shall the Eternal come or the Infinite be far off?
Behold, the Eternal is _now_, and the Infinite is _here_. And if the
high-upreared architecture of the stars, and the changing fabric of the
worlds, be but shadows, and the pageantry of time but a dream, yet the
dreamer and the dream are God.
If all be Illusion, yet this faith that all is Illusion can be none.
There the realm of Illusion ends, here Reality begins. And thus the
spirit of man, having touched the mother-abyss, arises victorious in
defeat to fix its gaze at last, steadfast and calm, upon the Eternal.
Such is the distinction of the Fourth Age, whose light is all about us,
flooding in from the eastern windows yonder like a great dawn. Man's
spirit, tutored by lost illusion after lost illusion, advances to an
ever deeper reality. The race, too, like the individual and the
nation, is subject to the Law of Tragedy. Once more, in the way of a
thousand years, it knows that it is not in time, nor in any cunning
manipulation or extension of the things of time, that Man the Timeless
can find the word which sums his destiny, and spurning at the phantoms
of space, save as they grant access to the Spaceless, casts itself back
upon God, and in art, thought, and action pierces to the Infinite
through the finite.
This mystic attribute, this _élan_ of the soul, discovers a fellowship
in thinkers wide apart in circumstance and mental environment. It is,
for instance, the trait which Schopenhauer, Tourgenieff,[7] Flaubert,
and Carlyle possess in common[8]. These men are not as others of their
time, but prophet voices that announce the Fourth, the latest Age,
whose dawn has laid its hand upon the eastern hills.
The restless imagination of Flaubert, fused from the blood of the
Norsemen, plunges into one period after another, Carthage, the Rome of
the Caesars, Syria, Egypt, and Galilee, the unchanging East, and the
monotony in change of the West, pursuing the one Vision in many forms,
the Vision which leads on Carlyle from stage to stage of a course
curiously similar. Flaubert has a wider range and more varied
sympathies than Carlyle, and in intensity of vision occasionally
surpasses him. Both are mystics, visionaries, from their youth; but in
ethics Flaubert seems to attain at a bound the point of view which the
dragging years alone revealed to Carlyle.
The chapter on the death of Frederick the Great reads like a passage
from the _Correspondance_ of Flaubert in his first manhood. In Saint
Antoine, Flaubert found the secret of the same mystic inspiration as
Carlyle found in Cromwell. To the brooding soul of the hermit, as to
that of the warrior of Jehovah, what is earth, what are the shapes of
time? Man's path is to the Eternal--_dem Grabe hinan_--and from the
study of the Revolution of 1848 Flaubert arises with the same
embittered insight as marks the close of "Frederick the Great."
And if, in such later works as Flaubert's _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ and the
_Latter-Day Pamphlets_ of Carlyle, only the difference between the two
minds is apparent, the difference is, after all, but a difference in
temperament. It is the contrast between the impassive aloofness of the
artist, and the personal and intrusive vehemence of the prophet.
The structural thought, the essential emotion of the two works are the
same--the revolt of a soul whose impulses are ever beyond the finite
and the transient, against a world immersed in the finite and the
transient. Hence the derision, the bitter scorn, or the laughter with
which they cover the pretensions, the hypocrisies, the loud claims of
modern science and mechanical invention. But whether surveyed with
contemplative calm, or proclaimed with passionate remonstrance to an
unheeding generation, the life vision of these two men is one and the
same--"the eternities, the immensities."[9]
And this same passion for the infinite is the informing thought of
Wagner's tone-dramas and Tschaikowsky's symphonies. Love's mystery is
deepened by the mystery of death, and its splendour has an added touch
by the breath of the grave. The desire of the infinite greatens the
beauty of the finite and lights its sanctuary with a supernatural
radiance. All knowledge there becomes wonder. Truth is not known, but
the soul is there in very deed possessed by the Truth, and is one with
it eternally.
Ibsen's protest against limited horizons, against theorists,
formulists, social codes, conventions, derives its justice from the
worthlessness of those conventions, codes, theories, in the light of
the infinite. The achievements in art most distinctive of the present
age--the paintings of Courbet, Whistler, Degas, for instance--proclaim
the same creative principle, the unsubstantiality of substance, the
immateriality of matter, the mutability of all that seems most fixed,
the unreality of all things, save that which was once the emblem of
unreality, the play of line and colour, and their impression upon the
retina of the eye. "If I live to be a hundred, I shall be able to draw
a line," said Hokousai. It was as if he had said, "I shall be able to
create a world."
The pressing effects of Imperialism in such an environment, its swift
influences upon the life of an age thus conditioned, thus sharply
defined from all preceding ages, are of an import which it would be
hard to over-estimate. The nation undowered with such an ideal,
menaced with extinction or with a gradual depression to the rank of a
protected nationality, passes easily, as in France and Holland and in
the higher grades of Russian society, to the side of political and
commercial indifferentism, of artistic or literary cosmopolitanism.
But to a race dowered with the genius for empire, it rescues politics
from the taint of local or transient designs, and imparts to public
affairs and the things of State that elevation which was their
characteristic in the Rome of Virgil and the England of Cromwell. For
not only the life of the individual, but the life of States, is by this
conception robed in something of its initial wonder. These, the
individual and the State, as we have seen, are but separate phases,
aspects of one thought, that thought which in the Universe is realized.
And the transformations in man's conception of his relations to the
divine are in turn fraught with consequence to the ideal of imperialism
itself. Life is greatened. The ardour of the periods of history most
memorable awakens again in man, the reverence of the Middle Age, the
energy of the Renaissance. A higher mood than that of the England of
Cromwell has arisen upon the England of to-day. Man's true peace is
not in the finite, but in the infinite; yet in the finite there is a
work to be done, with the high disregard of a race which looks, not to
the judgment of men, but of angels, whose appeal is not to the opinion
of the world, but of God.
Here at the close of a century, side by side existing are two ideals,
one political, the other religious, "a divine philosophy of the mind,"
in Algernon Sidney's phrase--how can the issue and event be other than
auspicious to this empire and to this generation of men? As Puritanism
seemed born for the ideal of Constitutional England, so this ideal of
the Fourth Epoch seems born to be the faith of Imperial England.
Behind Cromwell's armies was the faith of Calvin, the philosophy of the
"Institutes"; behind the French Revolution the thought of Rousseau and
Voltaire; but in this ideal, a thought, a speculative vision, deeper,
wider in range than Calvin's or Rousseau's, is, with every hour that
passes, adding a serener life, an energy more profound.
§ 5. THE "ACT" AND THE "THOUGHT"
Carlyle's exaltation of the "deed" above the "word," of action above
speech, does not exhaust its meaning in setting the man of deeds, the
soldier or the politician, above the thinker or the artist. It is an
affirmation of the glory of the sole Actor, the Dramatist of the World,
the _Demiourgos_, whose actions are at once the deeds and the thoughts
of men. "Im Anfang war die That." The "deed" is nearer the eternal
fountain than the "word"; though, on the other hand, in this or that
work of art there may converge more rays from the primal source than in
this or that deed. In painting, that impressionism which loves the
line for the line's sake, the tint for the tint's sake, owes its
emotion, sincere or affected, to the same energy of the same divine
thought as that from which the baser enthusiasm of the subject-painter
flows. A consciousness of the same truth reveals itself in Wagner's
lifelong struggle, splendidly heroic, to weld the art of arts into
living, pulsing union with the "deed," the action and its setting, from
which, in such a work as _Tristan_, or as _Parsifal_, that art's
ecstasy or mystery derives.
In the great crises of the world the preliminary actions have always
been indefinite, hesitating, or obscure. Indefiniteness is far from
proving the insincerity or transiency of Imperialism as an ideal. "A
man," says Oliver Cromwell, "never goes so far as when he does not know
whither he is going." What Cromwell meant was that, in the great hours
of life, the supernatural, the illimitable, thrusts itself between man
and the limited, precise ends of common days. Upon such a subject
Cromwell has the right to speak. Great himself, he was the cause of
the greatness that was in others. But in all things it was still
Jehovah that worked in him. Deeply penetrated with this belief,
Cromwell had the gift of making his armies live his life, think his
thought. Each soldier, horse or foot, was a warrior of God.
Man's severing, isolating intelligence is in these moments merged in
the divine intelligence; but in subjection, then is it most free. The
conscious is lost in the unconscious force which works behind the
world. The individual will stands aside. The Will of the universe
advances. Precision of design and purpose are shrouded in that dark
background of Greek tragedy, on which the forms of gods and heroes, in
mortal or immortal beauty, were sketched, subject in all their doings
to this high, dread, and austere power.
So of empires, of races, and of nations. A race never goes so far as
when it knows not whither it is going, when, rising in the
consciousness of its destiny at last, and seeing as yet but a little
way in front, it advances, performs that task as if it were its final
task, as if no other task was reserved for it by time or by nature.
Consciousness of destiny is the consciousness of the will of God and of
the divine purposes. It is the identity of the desire of the race with
the desire of the world-soul, and it moves towards its goal with the
motion of tides and of planets.
Therefore when in thought we summon up remembrance of those empires of
the past, Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, Hellas, Rome, and Islam, or those
empires of nearer times, Charles's, Napoleon's, Akbar's, when we throw
ourselves back in imagination across the night of time, endeavouring to
live through their revolutions, and front with each in turn the black
portals of the future--what image is this which of itself starts within
the mind? Is it not the procession of the gladiators and the
amphitheatre of Rome?
Rome beyond all races had the instinct of tragic grandeur in state and
public life, and by that instinct even her cruelty is at times elevated
through the pageantry or impressive circumstance amid which it is
enacted. Does not this vault then, arching above us, appear but as a
vast amphitheatre? And towards the mortal arena the empires of the
world, one by one, defile past the high-upreared, dark, and awful
throne where sits Destiny--the phalanx of Macedon, the Roman legion,
the black banner of the Abbassides, the jewelled mail of Akbar's
chivalry, and the Ottoman's crescent moon. And their resolution,
serene, implacable, sublime, is the resolution of the gladiators, "Ave,
imperator, morituri te salutant! Hail, Caesar, those about to die
salute thee!"
And when the vision sinks, dissolving, and night has once more within
its keeping cuirass and spear and the caparisons of war, the oppressed
mind is beset as by a heavy sound, gathering up from the abysses,
deeper, more dread and mysterious than the death-march of heroes--the
funeral march of the empires of the world, the requiem of faiths, dead
yet not dead, of creeds, institutions, religions, governments,
laws--till through Time's shadows the Eternal breaks, in silence
sweeter than all music, in a darkness beyond all light.
§ 6. BRITAIN'S WORLD-MISSION: THE WITNESS OF THE DEAD TO THE MANDATE
OF THE PRESENT
Yet with a resolution as deep-hearted as the gladiator's it is for
another cause and unto other ends that the empires of the world have
striven, fulfilled their destiny and disappeared, that this Empire of
Britain now strives, fulfilling its destiny. Fixed in her resolve, the
will of God behind her, whither is her immediate course? The narrow
space of the path in front of her that is discernible even
dimly--whither does it tend or appear to tend?
Empires are successive incarnations of the Divine ideas, and by a
principle which, in its universality and omnipotence in the frame of
Nature, seems itself an attribute of the Divine, the principle of
conflict, these ideas realize their ends in and through conflict. The
scientific form which it assumes in the hypothesis of evolution is but
the pragmatic expression of this mystery. Here is the metaphysical
basis of the Law of Tragedy, the profoundest law in human life, in
human art, in human action. And thus that law, which, as I pointed
out, throws a vivid light upon the first essential transformation in
the life-history of a State dowered with empire, offers us its aid in
interpreting the last transformation of all.
The higher freedom of man in the world of action, and reverie in the
domain of thought, are but two aspects of the idea which Imperial
Britain incarnates, just as Greek freedom and beauty were aspects of
the idea incarnate in Hellas.
The spaces of the past are strewn with the wrecks of dead empires, as
the abysses where the stars wander are strewn with the dust of vanished
systems, sunk without a sound in the havoc of the aeons. But the
Divine presses on to ever deeper realizations, alike through vanished
races and through vanished universes.
Britain is laying the foundations of States unborn, civilizations
undreamed till now, as Rome in the days of Tacitus was laying the
foundations of States and civilizations unknown, and by him darkly
imagined. For Justice men turn to the State in which Justice has no
altar,[10] Freedom no temple; but a higher than Justice, and a greater
than Freedom, has in that State its everlasting seat. Throughout her
bounds, in the city or on the open plain, in the forest or in the
village, under the tropic or in the frozen zone, her subjects shall
find Justice and Freedom as the liberal air, so that enfranchised thus,
and the unfettered use of all his faculties secured, each may fulfil
his being's supreme law.
The highest-mounted thought, the soul's complete attainment, like the
summits of the hills, can be the possession only of the few, but the
paths that lead thither this empire shall open to the daring climber.
Humanity has left the Calvinist and Jacobin behind. And thus Britain
shall become the name of an ideal as well as the designation of a race,
the description of an attitude of mind as well as of traits of blood.
Europe has passed from the conception of an outwardly composed unity of
religion and government to the conception of the inner unity which is
compatible with outward variations in creeds, in manners, in religions,
in social institutions. Harmony, not uniformity, is Nature's end.
Dante, as the years advanced and the poet within him thrust aside the
Ghibelline politician, the author of the _De Monarchia_, discerned this
ever more clearly. Contemplating the empires of the past, he felt the
Divine mystery there incarnate as profoundly as Polybius. In the
fourteenth century he dares to see in the Roman people a race not less
divinely missioned than the Hebrew. Though contemporary of the
generation whose fathers had seen the Inquisition founded, yet like an
Arab _soufi_, Dante, the poet of mediaevalism, points to the spot of
light far-off, insufferably radiant, yet infinitely minute, the source
and centre of all faiths, all creeds, all religions, of this universe
itself, and all the desires of men. In an age which silenced the
scholastics he founded Hell in the _Ethics_ of Aristotle, as on a
traced plan, and he who in his childhood had heard the story of the
great defeat, and of the last of the crusading kings borne homewards on
his bier, dares crest his Paradise with the dearest images of Arab
poetry, the loveliness of flame and the sweetness of the rose.
What does this import, unless that already the mutual harmonies of the
wide earth and of the stars had touched his listening soul, that
already he who stayed to hear Casella sing heard far off a diviner
music, the tones of the everlasting symphony played by the great
Musician of the World, the chords whereof are the deeds of empires, the
achievements of the heroes of humanity, and its most mysterious
cadences are the thoughts, the faiths, the loftiest utterances of the
mind of man?
And to the present age, what an exhortation is implicit in this thought
of Dante's! No unity, no bond amongst men is so strong as that which
is based on religion. Patriotism, class prejudices, ties of affection,
all break before its presence. What a light is cast upon the deeper
places of the human heart by the history of Jesuitism in the
seventeenth century! Genius for religion is rare as other forms of
genius are rare, yet both in the life of the individual and of the
State its rank is primary. In the soul, religion marks the meridian of
the divine. By its remoteness from or nearness to this the value of
all else in life is tested. And there is nothing which a race will not
more willingly surrender than its religion. The race which changes its
religion is either very young, quick to reverence a greater race, and
ardent for all experiment, or very old, made indifferent by experience
or neglectful by despair.
In the conception at which she has at last arrived, and in her present
attitude towards this force, Britain may justly claim to represent
humanity. She combines the utmost reverence for her own faith with
sympathetic intelligence for the faiths of others. And confronting her
at this hour of the world's history is a task higher than the task of
Akbar, and more auspicious. Akbar's design was indeed lofty, and
worthy of that great spirit; but it was a hopeless design. The forms,
the creeds which have been imposed from without upon a religion are no
integral part of that religion's life. Even when by the progress of
the years they have become transfused by the formative influences which
time and the sufferings or the hopes of men supply, they change or are
cast aside without organic convulsion or menace to the life itself.
But the forms and embodiments which a divine thought in the process of
its own irresistible and mighty growth assumes--these are beyond the
touch of outer things, and evade the shaping hand of man. Inseparable
from the thought which they, as it were, reincarnate, their life
changes but with its life, and together they recede into the divine
whence they came. The effort to extract the inmost truth, tearing away
the form which by an obscure yet inviolate process has crystallized
around it, is like breaking a statue to discover the loveliness of its
loveliness. Akbar would have as quickly reached the creative thought,
the _idea_ enshrined in the Athênê of Phidias, the immortal cause of
its power, by destroying the form, as have severed the divine thought
immanent in the Magian or Hindoo faiths from their integral embodiments.
But a greater task awaits Britain. Among the races of the earth whose
fate is already dependent, or within a brief period will be dependent
upon Europe, what empire is to aid them, moving with nature, to attain
that harmony which Dante discerned? What empire, disregarding the
mediaeval ideal, the effort to impose upon them systems, rites,
institutions, creeds, to which they are by nature, by their history, by
inherited pride in the traditions of the past, hostile or invincibly
opposed, will adventure the new, the loftier enterprise of developing
all that is permanent and divine within their own civilizations,
institutions, rites, and creeds? Nature and the dead shall lend their
unseen but mighty alliance to such purposes! Thus will Britain turn to
the uses of humanity the valour or the fortune which has brought the
religions of India and the power of Islam beneath her sway.
The continents of the world no longer contain isolated races severed
from each other by the barriers of nature, mutual ignorance, or the
artifices of man, but vast masses, moving into ever-deepening
intimacies, imitations, mutually influenced and influencing. Man grows
conscious to himself as one, and to represent this consciousness on the
round earth, as Rome did once represent it on this half the world, to
be amongst the races of all the earth what Hildebrand dreamed the
Normans might be amongst the nations of Europe, is not this a task
exalted enough to quicken the most sluggish zeal, the most retrograde
"patriotism"? For without such mediation, misunderstanding, envy,
hate, mistrust still erect barriers between the races of mankind more
impassable than continents or seas or the great wall of Ch'in Chi.
This is a part not for the future merely, it is one to which Britain is
already by her past committed. The task is great, for between
civilization and barbarism, the vanguard and the rearguard of humanity,
suspicion, rivalry, and war are undying. From this the Greek division
of mankind into Hellenes and Barbarians derives whatever justice it
possesses.
In those directions and towards those high endeavours amongst the
subjects within her own dominion, and thence amongst the races and
religions of the world, the short space that is illumined of the path
in front of Britain does unmistakably lead. Every year, every month
that passes, is fraught with import of the high and singular destiny
which awaits this realm, this empire, and this race. The actions, the
purposes of other empires and races, seem but to illustrate the
actions, the purposes of this empire, and the distinction of its
relations to Humanity.
Faithful to her past, in conflict for this high cause, if Britain fall,
it will at least be as that hero of the _Iliad_ fell, "doing some
memorable thing." Were not this nobler than by overmuch wisdom to
incur the taunt, _propter vitam vivendi perdere causas_, or that cast
by Dante at him who to fate's summons returned "the great refusal," _a
Dio spiacenti ed a'nemici sui_, "hateful to God and to the enemies of
God"? The nations of the earth ponder our action at this crisis, and
by our vacillation or resolution they are uplifted or dejected; whilst,
in their invisible abodes, the spirits of the dead of our race are in
suspense till the hazard be made and the glorious meed be secured, in
triumph or defeat, to eternity.
There are crises in history when it is not merely fitting to remember
the dead. Their deeds live with us continually, and are not so much
things remembered, as integral parts of our life, moulding the thought
of every hour. In such crises a Senate of the dead were the truest
counsellors of the living, for they alone could with convincing
eloquence plead the cause of the past and of the generations that are
not yet. Warriors, crusaders, patriots, statesmen-soldiers or
statesmen-martyrs, it was for things which are not yet that they died,
and to an end which, though strongly trusting, they but dimly discerned
that they laid the foundations of this Empire. Masters of their own
fates, possessors of their own lives, they gave them lightly as pledges
unredeemed, and for men and things of which they were not masters or
possessors. But they set higher store on glory than on life, and
valued great deeds above length of days. They loved their country,
dying for it, yet did it seem as if it were less for England than for
that which is the excellence of man's life and the very emergence of
the divine within such life, that they fought and fell. And this great
inheritance of fame and of valour is but ours on trust, the fief
inalienable of the dead and of the generations to come.
And now, behold from their martyr graves Russell, Sidney, Eliot arise,
and with phantom fingers beckon England on! From the fields of their
fate and their renown, see Talbot and Falkland, Wolfe and de Montfort
arise, regardful of England and her action at this hour. And lo!
gathering up from the elder centuries, a sound like a trumpet-call,
clear-piercing, far-borne, mystic, ineffable, the call to battle of
hosts invisible, the mustering armies of the dead, the great of other
wars--Brunanburh and Senlac, Creçy, Flodden, Blenheim and Trafalgar.
_Their_ battle-cries await our answer--the chivalry's at Agincourt,
"Heaven for Harry, England and St. George!", Cromwell's war-shout,
which was a prayer, at Dunbar, "The Lord of Hosts! The Lord of
Hosts!"--these await our answer, that response which by this war we at
last send ringing down the ages, "God for Britain, Justice and Freedom
to the world!"
Such witness of the dead is both a challenge and a consolation; a
challenge, to guard this heritage of the past with the chivalry of the
future, nor bate one jot of the ancient spirit and resolution of our
race; a consolation, in the reflection that from a valour at once so
remote and so near a degenerate race can hardly spring.
With us, let me repeat, the decision rests, with us and with this
generation. Never since on Sinai God spoke in thunder has mandate more
imperative been issued to any race, city, or nation than now to this
nation and to this people. And, again, if we should hesitate, or 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 and the
despair of the living, of the inarticulate myriads who have trusted to
us, it is the arraigning eyes of the unborn.
[1] I am aware of Spinoza's distinction of the "clara et distincta
idea" and the "inadequat[oe] idea"; but the distinction above flows
from a conception of the universe and of man's destiny which is not
Spinoza's nor Spinozistic.
[2] Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht;
Der Herr der Schöpfung hat alles bedacht.
Dein Loos ist gefallen, verfolge die Weise,
Der Weg ist begonnen, vollende die Reise.
GOETHE, _West-östlicher Divan, Buch der Sprüche_.
[3] Recent investigation has made it clear that the history of Islamic
Arabia is not severed by any violent convulsion from pre-Mohammedan
Arabia. "The times of ignorance" were not the desolate waste which
Tabari, "the Livy of the Arabs," paints, and down to the close of the
eighteenth century the comparison between England, Rome, and Islam
offers a fair field for speculative politics.
[4] Yet the scientific conception of the _destruction_ or _decay_ of
this whole star-system by fire or ice does of itself turn progress into
a mockery. (See Prof. C. A. Young, _Manual of Astronomy_, p. 571, and
Prof. F. R. Moulton, _Introduction to Astronomy_, p. 486.)
[5] Condorcet's biography (1786) of his master is one of the noblest
works of its class in French literature. Turgot's was one of those
minds that like Chamfort's or Villiers de L'Isle Adam's scatter
bounteously the ideas which others use or misuse. The fogs and mists
of Comte's portentous tomes are all derived, it has often been pointed
out, from a few paragraphs of Turgot. And a fragment written by Turgot
in his youth inspired something of the substance and even of the title
of Condorcet's great _Esquisse_.
[6] References to the power over his mind of the French Revolutionary
principles abound in Goethe's writings. The violence of the first
impression, which began with the affair of the necklace, had reached a
climax in '90 and '91, and this, along with the ineffaceable memories
of the _Werther_ and _Goetz_ period, which his heart remembered when in
his intellectual development he had left it far behind, accounts in a
large measure for his yielding temporarily at least to the spell of
Napoleon's genius, and for the studied but unaffected indifference to
German politics and to the War of Liberation. Even of 1809, the year
of Eckmühl, Essling, and Wagram, and the darkest hour of German
freedom, Goethe can write: "This year, considering the beautiful
returns it brought me, shall ever remain dear and precious to memory,"
and when the final uprising against the French was imminent, he sought
quietude in oriental poetry--Firdusi, Hafiz, and Nisami.
[7] Of his _Contes_ Taine said: "Depuis les Grecs aucun artiste n'a
taillé un camée littéraire avec autant de relief, avec une aussi
rigoureuse perfection de forme."
[8] It is remarkable that Carlyle and Schopenhauer should have lived
through four decades together yet neither know in any complete way of
the other's work. Carlyle nowhere mentions the name of Schopenhauer.
Indeed _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, though read by a few, was
practically an unknown book both in Germany and England until a date
when Carlyle was growing old, solitary, and from the present ever more
detached, and new books and new writers had become, as they were to
Goethe in his age, distasteful or a weariness. Schopenhauer, on the
other hand, already in the "thirties," had been attracted by Carlyle's
essays on German literature in the _Edinburgh_, and though ignorant as
yet of the writer's name he was all his life too diligent a reader of
English newspapers and magazines to be unaware of Carlyle's later fame.
But he has left no criticism, nor any distinct references to Carlyle's
teaching, although in his later and miscellaneous writings the
opportunity often presents itself. Wagner, it is known, was a student
both of Schopenhauer and Carlyle. Schopenhauer's proud injunction,
indeed, that he who would understand his writings should prepare
himself by a preliminary study of Plato or Kant, or of the divine
wisdom of the Upanishads, indicates also paths that lead to the higher
teaching of Wagner, and--though in a less degree--of Carlyle.
[9] The friendship of Tourgenieff and Flaubert rested upon speculative
rather than on artistic sympathy. The Russian indeed never quite
understood Flaubert's "rage for the word." Yet the deep inner concord
of the two natures reveals itself in their correspondence. It was the
supreme friendship of Flaubert's later manhood as that with Bouilhet
was the friendship of his earlier years. Yet they met seldom, and
their meetings often resembled those of Thoreau and Emerson, as
described by the former, or those of Carlyle and Tennyson, when after
some three hours' smoking, interrupted by a word or two, the evening
would end with Carlyle's good-night: "Weel, we hae had a grand nicht,
Alfred." It is in one of Tourgenieff's own prose-poems that the
dialogue of the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn across the centuries is
darkly shadowed. The evening of the world falls upon spirits sensitive
to its intimations as the diurnal twilight falls upon the hearts of
travellers descending a broad stream near the Ocean and the haven of
its unending rest.
[10] Cf. Philostratus, _Life of Appollonius_. I. 28.
NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
NOTE.
"Nineteenth Century Europe" was written by Mr. Cramb for the _Daily
News_ Special Number for December 31st, 1900. In it he presents a
survey of the political events and tendencies throughout Europe during
the nineteenth century. He outlines the development of the New German
Empire from the war against Napoleon down to the days of Bismarck and
Wilhelm II, and shows how the Russian general Skobeleff, the hero of
Plevna and the Schipka Pass, foretold over thirty years ago the present
death-struggle between Teuton and Slav in Eastern Europe. The future
_rôles_ of France, Italy, and Spain are also clearly indicated by the
author.
NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE
I
DOMINION OF THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY
In Europe, as the year 1800 dragged to its bloody close, and the fury
of the conflict between the Monarchies and the Revolution was for a
time stilled on the fields of Marengo and Hohenlinden, men then, as
now, discussed the problems of the relation of a century's end to the
determining forces of human history; then, as now, men remarked half
regretfully, half mockingly, how pallid had grown the light which once
fell from the years of Jubilee of mediaeval or Hebrew times; and then,
as now, critics of a lighter or more positive vein debated the question
whether the coming year were the first or second of the new century,
pointing out that between the last year of a century and man's destiny
there could be no intimate connection, that all the eras were equally
arbitrary, equally determined by local or accidental calculations, that
the century which was closing over the Christian world had but run half
its course to the Mohammedan. Yet in one deep enough matter the mood
of the Europe of 1800 differs significantly from the mood of the Europe
of 1900. Whatever the division in men's minds as to the relation
between the close of the century and a race's history, and the precise
moment at which the old century ends and the new begins, one thing in
1800 was radiantly clear to all men--the glory and the wonder, the
endless peace and felicity not less endless, which the opening century
and the new age dimly portended or securely promised to humanity. The
desert march of eighteen hundred years was ended; the promised land was
in sight. The poet's voice from the Cumberland hills, "Bliss was it in
that dawn to be alive" traversed the North Sea, and beyond the Rhine
was swelled by a song more majestic and not less triumphant:
Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen,
Durch des Himmels prächt'gen Plan,
Wandelt, Brüder, eure Bahn,
Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen,
and, passing the Alps and the Vistula, died in a tumultuous hymn of
victory long hoped for, of joy long desired, of freedom long despaired
of, in the cities of Italy, the valleys of Greece, the plains of
Poland, and the Russian steppes. Since those days three generations
have arisen, looked their last upon the sun, and passed to their rest,
and in what another mood does Europe now confront the opening century
and the long vista of its years! Man presents himself no more as he
was delineated by the poets of 1800. Not now does man appear to the
poet's vision as mild by suffering and by freedom strong, rising like
some stately palm on the century's verge; but to the highest-mounted
minds in Russia, Germany, France, Norway, Italy, man presents himself
like some blasted pine, a thunder-riven trunk, tottering on the brink
of the abyss, whilst far below rave the darkness and the storm-drift of
the worlds. From what causes and by the operation of what laws has the
great disillusion fallen upon the heart of Europe? Whither are
vanished the glorious hopes with which the century opened? Is it final
despair, this mood in which it closes, or is it but the temporary
eclipse which hides some mightier hope, a new incarnation of the spirit
of the world, some yet serener endeavour, radiant and more enduring,
wider in its range and in its influences profounder than that of 1789,
of 1793, or of the year of Hohenlinden and Marengo?
In the year 1800, from the Volga to the Irish Sea, from the sunlit
valleys of Calabria to the tormented Norwegian fiords, there was in
every European heart capable of interests other than egoistical and
personal one word, one hope, ardent and unconquerable. That word was
"Freedom"--freedom to the serf from the fury of the boyard, to the
thralls who toiled and suffered throughout the network of
principalities, kingdoms, and duchies, named "Germany"; freedom to the
negro slave; freedom to the newer slaves whom factories were creating;
freedom to Spain from the Inquisition, from the tyranny and shame of
Charles IV and Godoy; freedom to Greece from the yoke of the Ottoman;
to Italy from the slow, unrelenting oppression of the Austrian; freedom
to all men from the feudal State and the feudal Church, from civic
injustice and political disfranchisement, from the immeasurable wrongs
of the elder centuries! A new religion, heralded by a new evangel,
that of Diderot and Montesquieu, Lessing, Beccaria, and Voltaire, and
sanctified by the blood of new martyrs, the Girondins, offered itself
to the world. But as if man, schooled by disillusionment, and deceived
in the fifteenth and in the seventeenth centuries, trembled now lest
this new hope should vanish like the old, he sought a concrete symbol
and a reasoned basis for the intoxicating dream. Therefore, he spoke
the word "Liberty" like a challenge, and as sentinel answers sentinel,
straight there came the response, whispered in his own breast, or
boldly uttered--"France and Bonaparte." Since the death of Mohammed,
no single life had so centred upon itself the deepest hopes and
aspirations of men of every type of genius, intellect, and character.
Chateaubriand, returning from exile, offers him homage, and in the
first year of the century dedicates to him his _Génie du
Christianisme_, that work which, after _La Nouvelle Héloïse_, most
deeply moulded the thought of France in the generation which followed.
And in that year, Beethoven throws upon paper, under the name
"Bonaparte," the first sketches of his mighty symphony, the serenest
achievement in art, save the _Prometheus_ of Shelley, that the
Revolutionary epoch has yet inspired. In that year, at Weimar,
Schiller, at the height of his enthusiasm, is repelled, as he had been
in the first ardour of their friendship, by the aloofness or the
disdain of the greater poet. Yet Goethe did most assuredly feel even
then the spell of Napoleon's name. And in that year, the greatest of
English orators, Charles James Fox, joined with the Russian Czar, Paul,
with Canova, the most exquisite of Italian sculptors, and with Hegel,
the most brilliant of German metaphysicians, in offering the heart's
allegiance to this sole man for the hopes his name had kindled in
Europe and in the world. To the calmer devotion of genius was added
the idolatrous enthusiasm of the peoples of France, Italy, Germany.
And, indeed, since Mohammed, no single mind had united within itself
capacities so various in their power over the imaginations of men--an
energy of will, swift, sudden, terrifying as the eagle's swoop; the
prestige of deeds which in his thirtieth year recalled the youth of
Alexander and the maturer actions of Hannibal and Caesar; an
imaginative language which found for his ideas words that came as from
a distance, like those of Shakespeare or Racine; and within his own
heart a mystic faith, deep-anchored, immutable, tranquil, when all
around was trouble and disarray--the calm of a spirit habituated to the
Infinite, and familiar with the deep places of man's thought from his
youth upwards. Yes, Mirabeau was long dead, and Danton, Marat, and
Saint-Just, and but three years ago the heroic Lazare Hoche, richly
gifted in politics as in war, had been struck down in the noontide of
his years; but now a greater than Mirabeau, Hoche, or Danton was here.
If the December sun of Hohenlinden diverted men's minds to Moreau, the
victor, it was but for a moment. In the universal horror and joy with
which on Christmas Day, 1800, the rumour of the explosion and failure
of the infernal machine in the Rue St. Nicaise spread over Europe, men
felt more intimately, more consciously, the hopes, the fears, bound up
inextricably with the name, the actions, and the life of the new
world-deliverer, the Consul Bonaparte.
The history of the nineteenth century centres in the successive
transformations of this ideal so highly-pitched. In the gradual
declension of the cause which was then a religion, and to mankind the
warrant of a new era, into a local or party-cry, a watch-word
travestied and degraded, lies the origin of the intellectual despair or
solicitude which marks the closing years of the century. The first
disillusionment came swiftly. Fifteen years pass, years of war and
convulsion unexampled in Europe since the cataclysm of the fifth
century, the century of Alaric and Attila--and within that space, those
fifteen years, what a revolution in all the sentiments, the hopes, the
aspirations of men! The Consul Bonaparte has become the Emperor
Napoleon, the arch-enemy of Liberty and of the human race. France, the
world's forlorn hope in 1800, is, in 1815, the gathering place of the
armies of Europe, risen in arms against her! Emperors and kings,
nations, cities, and principalities, statesmen like Stein, philosophers
like Fichte, poets like Arndt and Körner, warriors like Kutusov,
Blücher, and Schwartzenberg, the peoples of Europe and the governments
of Europe, the oppressed and the oppressors, the embittered enmities
and the wrongs of a thousand years forgotten, had leagued together in
this vast enterprise, whose end was the destruction of one nation and
one sole man--the world-deliverer of but fifteen years ago!
What tragedy of a lost leader equals this of Napoleon? What marvel
that it still troubles the minds of men more profoundly than any other
of modern ages. Yet Napoleon did not betray Liberty, nor was France
false to the Revolution. Man's action at its highest is, like his art,
symbolic. To Camille Desmoulins and the mob behind him the capture of
a disused fortress and the liberation of a handful of men made the fall
of the Bastille the symbol and the watchword of Liberty. To the Europe
of Napoleon, the monarchs of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Spain, the
princes of Germany and Italy, the Papal power, "the stone thrust into
the side of Italy to keep the wound open"--these were like the Bastille
to the France of Desmoulins, a symbol of oppression and wrong,
injustice and tyranny. And in Bonaparte, whether as Consul or Emperor,
the peoples of Europe for a time beheld the hero who led against the
tyrants the hosts of the free. What were his own despotisms, his own
rigour, his cruelty, the spy-system of Fouché, the stifled Press, the
_guet-apens_ of Bayonne, the oppression of Prussia, and one sanguinary
war followed by another--what were these things but the discipline, the
necessary sacrifice, the martyrdom of a generation for the triumph and
felicity of the centuries to come? Napoleon at the height of Imperial
power, with thirty millions of devoted subjects behind him, and legions
unequalled since those of Rome, did but make Rousseau's experiment.
"The emotions of men," Rousseau argued, "have by seventeen hundred
years of asceticism and Christianism been so disciplined, that they can
now be trusted to their own guidance." The hour of his death, whether
by a pistol bullet or by poison, or from sheer weariness, was also the
hour of Rousseau's deepest insight into the human heart. That hour of
penetrating vision into the eternal mystery made him glad to rush into
the silence and the darkness. Napoleon, trusting to the word and to
the ideal Liberty, to man's unstable desires and to his own most fixed
star, yokes France in 1800 to his chariot wheels. But at the outset he
has to compromise with the past of France, with the ineradicable traits
of the Celtic race, its passion for the figures on the veil of Maya,
its rancours, and the meditated vengeance for old defeats. Yet it is
in the name of Liberty rather than of France that he greets the sun of
Austerlitz, breaks the ramrod despotism of Prussia, and meets the awful
resistance of the Slav at Eyiau and Friedland. Then, turning to the
West, it is in the name of Liberty that he sends Junot, Marmont, Soult,
and Massena across the Pyrenees to restore honour and law to Spain,
and, as he had ended the mediaeval Empire of the Hapsburgs, to end
there in Madrid the Inquisition and the priestly domination. The
Inquisition, which in 300 years had claimed 300,000 victims, is indeed
suppressed, but Spain, to his amazement, is in arms to a man against
its liberators! But Napoleon cannot pause, his fate, like Hamlet's,
calling out, and whilst his Marshals are still baffled by the lines of
Torres Vedras, he musters his hosts, and, conquering the new Austrian
Empire at Wagram, marches Attila-like across a subjugated Europe
against the Empire and capital of the White Czar.
Napoleon's fall made the purpose of his destiny clear even to the most
ardent of French Royalists, and to the most contented of the servants
of Francis II or Frederick William III. At Vienna the gaily-plumaged
diplomatists undid in a month all that the fifteen years of
unparalleled action and suffering unparalleled had achieved; whilst the
most matter-of-fact of all British Cabinets invested the prison of the
fallen conqueror with a tragic poetry which made the rock in the
Atlantic but too fitting an emblem of the peak in the Caucasus and the
lingering anguish of Prometheus. And if not one man of supreme genius
then living or in after ages has condemned Napoleon, if the poets of
that time, Goethe and Manzoni, Poushkine, Byron, and Lermontoff, made
themselves votaries of his fame, it was because they felt already what
two generations have made a commonplace, that his hopes had been their
hopes, his disillusion their disillusion; that in political freedom no
more than in religious freedom can the peace of the world be found;
that Girondinism was no final evangel; that to man's soul freedom can
never be an end in itself, but only the means to an end.
The history of Europe for the thirty-three years following the
abdication at the Elysée is a conflict between the two principles of
Absolutism and Liberty, represented now by the cry for
constitutionalism and the Nation, now by a return to Girondinism and
the watchword of Humanity. In theory the divine right of peoples was
arrayed against the divine right of kings. The conflict was waged
bitterly; yet it was a conflict without a battle. The dungeon, the
torture chamber, the Siberian mine, the fortresses of Spandau or
Spielberg, which Silvio Pellico has made remembered--these were the
weapons of the tyrants. The secret society, the Marianne, the
Carbonari, the offshoots of the Tugendbund, the ineffectual rising or
transient revolution, always bloodily repressed, whether in Italy,
Spain, Russia, Austria, or Poland--these were the sole weapons left to
Liberty, which had once at its summons the legions of Napoleon. And in
this singular conflict, what leaders! In Spain, the heroic Juan
Martin, the brilliant Riego; in Germany, Görres, the morning-star of
political journalism, Rodbertus or Borne; in France, Saint-Simon, and
the malcontents who still believed in the Bonapartist cause. It was
not an army, but a crowd, without unity of purpose and without the
possibility of united action. Opposed to these were the united
purposes, moved, for a time at least, by a single aim--the repression
of the common enemy, "Revolution," in every State of Europe, in the
great monarchies of Austria, France, Russia, as in the smaller
principalities of Germany, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Tuscany,
Piedmont, Venetia, and Modena. To this war against Liberty the Czar
Alexander, the white angel who, in Madame de Krüdener's phrase, had
struck down the black angel Napoleon, added something of the sanctity
of a crusade. From God alone was the sovereign power of the princes of
the earth derived, and it was the task of the Holy Alliance to compel
the peoples to submit to this divinely-appointed and righteous
despotism.
In this crusade Austria and Metternich occupy in Europe till 1848 the
place which France and Bonaparte had occupied in the earlier crusade.
"I was born," says Metternich in the fragment of his autobiography, "to
be the enemy of the Revolution." Nature, indeed, and the environment
of his youth had formed him to act the part of the genius of Reaction.
Beneath the fine, empty, meaningless mask of the Austrian noble lay a
heart which had never quivered with any profound emotion, or beat high
with any generous impulse. He was hostile to nobility of thought,
action, and art, for he had intelligence enough to discern in these a
living satire upon himself, his life, his aims. He despised history,
for history is the tragedy of Humanity; and he mocked at philosophy.
But he patronized Schlegel, for his watery volumes were easy reading,
and made rebellion seem uncultured and submission the mark of a
thoughtful mind. Metternich's handsome figure, fine manners, and
interminable _billets-doux_ written between sentences of death, exile,
the solitary dungeon, distinguish his appearance and habits from Philip
II of Spain, but, like him, he governed Europe from his bureau, guiding
the movements of a standing army of 300,000 men, and a police and
espionage department never surpassed and seldom rivalled in the western
world. There was nothing in him that was great. But he was
indisputable master of Europe for thirty-three years. Nesselrode,
Hardenberg, Talleyrand even--whose Memoirs seem the work of genius
beside the beaten level of mediocrity of Metternich's--found their
designs checked whenever they crossed the Austrian's policy. Congress
after Congress--Vienna, Carlsbad, Troppau, Laybach, Verona--exhibited
his triumph to Europe. At Laybach, in 1821, the Emperor's address to
the professors there, and thence to all the professors throughout the
Empire, was dictated by Metternich--"Hold fast by what is old, for that
alone is good. If our forefathers found in this the true path, why
should we seek another? New ideas have arisen amongst you, principles
which I, your Emperor, have not sanctioned, and never will sanction.
Beware of such ideas! It is not scholars I stand in need of, but of
loyal subjects to my Crown, and you, you are here to train up loyal
subjects to me. See that you fulfil this task!" Is there in human
history a document more blasting to the reputation for political wisdom
or foresight of him who penned it? It were an insult to the great
Florentine to style such piteous ineptitudes Machiavellian. Yet they
succeeded. The new evangel had lost its power; the freedom of Humanity
was the dream of a few ideologues; the positive ideals of later times
had not yet arisen. Well might men ask themselves: Has then Voltaire
lived in vain, and the Girondins died in vain? Has all the blood from
Lodi and Arcola to Austerlitz and the Borodino been shed in vain? Hard
on the address to the universities there crept silently across Europe
the message that Napoleon was dead. "It is not an event," said
Talleyrand, "but a piece of news." The remark was just. Europe seemed
now one vast Sainte Hélène, and men's hearts a sepulchre in which all
hope or desire for Liberty was vanquished. The solitary grave at
Longwood, the iron railings, the stunted willow, were emblems of a
cause for ever lost.
The Revolution of July lit the gloom with a moment's radiance. Heine's
letters still preserve the electric thrill which the glorious Three
Days awakened. "Lafayette, the tricolour, the _Marseillaise_!" he
writes to Varnhagen, when the "sunbeams wrapped in printer's ink"
reached him in Heligoland, "I am a child of the Revolution, and seize
again the sacred weapons. Bring flowers! I will crown my head for the
fight of death. Give me the lyre that I may sing a song of battle,
words like fiery stars which shoot from Heaven and burn up palaces and
illumine the cabins of the poor." But when Lafayette presented to
France that best of all possible Republics, the fat smile and cotton
umbrella of Louis Philippe; when throughout Italy, Sicily, Spain,
Germany, insurrection was repressed still more coldly and cruelly; when
Paskievitch established order in Warsaw, and Czartoryski resigned the
struggle--then the transient character of the outbreak was visible.
France herself was weary of the illusion. "We had need of a sword," a
Polish patriot wrote, "and France sent us her tears." The taunt was as
foolish as it was unjust. France assuredly had done her part in the
war for Liberty. The hour had come for the States of Europe to work
out their own salvation, or resign themselves to autocracy, Jesuitism,
a gagged Press, the omnipresent spy, the Troubetskoi ravelin, Spandau,
and Metternich.
Eighteen years were to pass before action, but it was action for a more
limited and less glorious, if more practical, ideal than the freedom of
the world. Other despots died--Alexander I in 1825, the two
Ferdinands, of Sicily and of Spain, Francis II himself in 1835, and
Frederick William III in 1840. Gentz, too, was dead, Talleyrand,
Hardenberg, and Pozzo di Borgo; but Metternich lived on--"the gods," as
Sophocles avers, "give long lives to the dastard and the dog-hearted."
The Revolution of July seemed but a test of the stability of the fabric
he had reared. From Guizot and his master he found but little
resistance. The new Czar Nicholas fell at once into the Austrian
system; and, with Gerlach as Minister, Prussia offered as little
resistance as the France of Guizot. Meanwhile, in 1840, by the motion
of Thiers, Napoleon had returned from Saint Helena, and the advance of
his coffin across the seas struck a deeper trouble into the despots of
Europe than the march of an army.
II
NATIONALITY AND MODERN REPUBLICANISM
In the political as in the religious ideals of men transformation is
endless and unresting. The moment of collision between an old and a
new principle of human action is a revolution. Such a turning-point is
the movement which finds its climax in Europe in the year 1848. Two
forces there present themselves, hostile to each other, yet
indissolubly united in their determining power upon modern as opposed
to ancient Republicanism--the principle of Nationality and the
principle of the organization of Labour against Capital, which under
various appellations is one of the most profoundly significant forces
of the present age. The freedom of the nation was the form into which
the older ideal of the freedom of man had dwindled. Saint-Simonianism
preserved for a time the old tradition. But the devotees of
Saint-Simon's greatest work, _Le Nouveau Christianisme_, after
anticipating in their banquets, graced sometimes by the presence of
Malibran, the glories of the coming era, quarrelled amongst themselves,
and, returning to common life, became zealous workers not for humanity,
but for France, for Germany, or for Italy. Patriotism was taking the
place of Humanism.
To Lamartine, indeed, and to Victor Hugo, as to cultured Liberalism
throughout Europe, the incidents in Paris of February, 1848, and the
astounding rapidity with which the spirit of Revolutions sped from the
Seine to the Vistula, to the Danube and the frontiers of the Czar--the
barricades in the streets of Vienna and Berlin, the flight of the
Emperor and the hated Metternich, the Congress at Prague, and all
Hungary arming at the summons of Kossuth, the daring proclamation of
the party of Roumanian unity--appeared as a glorious continuance, or
even as an expansion, of the ideals of 1789 and 1792. Louis Napoleon,
entering like the cut-purse King in _Hamlet_, who stole a crown and put
it in his pocket, the flight of Kossuth, the surrender or the treason
of Gorgei, the _coup d'état_ of December, 1851, shattered these airy
imaginings. Yet Napoleon III understood at least one aspect of the
change which the years had brought better than the rhetorician of the
_Girondins_ or the poet of _Hernani_. For the principle of
Nationality, which in 1848 they ignored, became the foundation of the
second French Empire, of the unity of Italy, and of that new German
Empire which, since 1870, has affected the State system of Europe more
potently and continuously than any other single event since the sudden
unity of Spain under Ferdinand at the close of the fifteenth century.
It was his dexterous and lofty appeal to this same principle which gave
the volumes of Palacky's _History of Bohemia_ a power like that of a
war-song. Nationality did not die in Vienna before the bands of
Windischgratz and Jellachlich, and from his exile Kossuth guided its
course in Hungary to a glorious close--the Magyar nation. Even in
Russia, then its bitter enemy, this principle quickened the ardour of
Pan-Slavism, which the war of 1878--the Schipka Pass, Plevna, the
dazzling heroism of Skobeleff--has made memorable. In the triumph of
this same principle lies the future hope of Spain. Spain has been
exhausted by revolution after revolution, by Carlist intrigue, by the
arrogance of successive dictators, and by the bloody reprisals of
faction; she has lost the last of her great colonies; but to Alphonso
XIII fate seems to reserve the task of completing again by mutual
resignation that union with Portugal of which Castelar indicated the
basis--a common blood and language, the common graves which are their
ancient battle-fields, and the common wars against the Moslem, which
are their glory.
With the names of Marx and Lassalle is associated the second great
principle which, in 1848, definitely takes its place on the front of
the European stage. This is the principle whose votaries confronted
Lamartine at the Hôtel-de-Ville on the afternoon of the 25th February.
The famous sentence, fortunate as Danton's call to arms, yet by its
touch of sentimentality marking the distinction between September,
1792, and February, 1848, "The tricolour has made the tour of the
world; the red flag but the tour of the Champ de Mars," has been turned
into derision by subsequent events. The red flag has made the tour of
the world as effectively as the tricolour and the eagles of Bonaparte.
The origins of Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, Nihilism--for all four,
however diverging or antagonistic in the ends they immediately pursue,
spring from a common root--have been variously ascribed in France to
the work of Louis Blanc, Fourier, Proudhon, or in Germany to Engels,
Stirner, and Rodbertus, or to the countless secret societies which
arose in Spain, Italy, Austria, and Russia, as a protest against the
broken pledges of kings and governments after the Congress of Vienna.
But the principle which informs alike the writings of individual
thinkers and agitators, though deriving a peculiar force in the first
half of the century from the doctrines and teachings of Fichte and
Schleiermacher, is but the principle to which in all ages suffering and
wrong have made their vain appeal--the responsibility of all for the
misery of the many and the enduring tyranny of the few. Indignant at
the spectacle, the Nihilist in orthodox Russia applies his destructive
criticism to all institutions, civil, religious, political, and finding
all hollow, seeks to overwhelm all in one common ruin. The
Emancipation of 1861 was to the Nihilist but the act of Tyranny veiling
itself as Justice. It left the serf, brutalized by centuries of
oppression, even more completely than before to the mercy of the boyard
and the exploiters of human souls. Michel Bakounine, Kropotkine,
Stepniak, Michaelov, and Sophia Perovskaya, whose handkerchief gave the
signal to the assassins of Alexander II, were but actualisations of
Tourgenieff's imaginary hero Bazaroff, and for a time, indeed,
Bazaroffism was in literary jargon the equivalent of Nihilism. If at
intervals in recent years a shudder passes across Europe at some new
crime, attempted or successful, of Anarchy, if Europe notes the
singular regularity with which the crime is traced to Italy, and is
perplexed at the absence of all the usual characteristics of conspiracy
against society--for what known motives of human action, vanity or
fear, hope or the gratification of revenge, can explain the silence of
the confederates of Malatesta, and the blind obedience of the agents of
his will?--if Europe is perplexed at this apparition of a terror
unknown to the ancient world, the Italian sees in it but the operation
of the law of responsibility. To the nameless sufferings of Italy he
ascribes the temper which leads to the mania of the anarchist; and the
sufferings of Italy in their morbid stage he can trace to the betrayal
of Italy by Europe in 1816, in 1821, in 1831, in 1848, and supremely in
1856. As Europe has grown more conscious of its essential unity as one
State system, diplomacy has wandered from such conceptions as the
Balance of Power, through Gortschakoff's ironic appeal to the equality
of kings, to the derisive theory of the Concert of Europe. But
Communism and Anarchism have afforded a proof of the unity of Europe
more convincing and more terrible, and full of sinister presage to the
future.
A third aspect of this revolt of misery is Socialism. Karl Marx may be
regarded as the chief exponent, if not the founder, of cosmopolitan or
international Socialism, and Lassalle as the actual founder of the
national or Democratic Socialism of Germany. Marx, whose countenance
with its curious resemblance to that of the dwarf of Velasquez,
Sebastian de Morra, seems to single him out as the apostle and avenger
of human degradation and human suffering, published the first sketch of
his principles in 1847, but more completely in the manifesto adopted by
the Paris Commune in 1849. As the Revolution of 1789 is to be traced
to the oppression of the peasantry by feudal insolence, never weary in
wrong-doing, as described by Boisguilbert and Mirabeau _père_, so the
new revolutionary movement of the close of the nineteenth century has
its origin in the oppression of the artisan class by the new
aristocracy, the _bourgeoisie_. Factory owners and millionaires have
taken the place of the _noblesse_ of last century. And the sufferings
of the proletariat, peasant and artisan alike, have increased with
their numbers. Freedom has taught the myriads of workers new desires.
Heightened intelligence has given them the power to contrast their own
wretchedness with the seeming happiness of others, and a standard by
which to measure their own degradation, and to sound the depths of
their own despair.
Marx's greatest work, _Das Kapital_, published in 1867, was to the new
revolution just such an inspiration and guide as the _Contrat Social_
of Rousseau was to the revolution of '89. The brilliant genius of
Lassalle yielded to the sway of the principle of Nationality, and
ultimately of Empire, as strongly as the narrower and gloomier nature
of Marx was repelled by these principles. It was this trait in his
writings, as well as the fiery energy of his soul and his faith in the
Prussian peasant and the Prussian artisan, that attracted for a time
the interest of Bismarck. Even a State such as Austria Lassalle
regarded as higher than any federal union whatever. The image of
Lassalle's character, his philosophy, and too swift career, may be
found in his earliest work, _Heracleitus_, the god-gifted statesman
whom Plato delineated, seeking not his own, but realizing his life in
that of others, toiling ceaselessly for the oppressed, the dumb,
helpless, leaderless masses who suffer silently, yet know not why they
suffer. A monarchy resting upon the support of the artisan-myriads
against the arrogance of the _bourgeois_, as the Tudor monarchy rested
upon the support of the yeomen and the towns against the arrogance of
the feudal barons--this, in the most effective period of his career,
was Lassalle's ideal State. And it is his remarkable pamphlet in reply
to the deputation from Leipsic in 1863 that has fitly been
characterized as the charter of the whole movement of democratic
socialism in Germany down to the present hour.
The Revolution of 1848 revealed to European Liberalism a more
formidable adversary than Metternich. The youth of Nicholas I had been
formed by the same tutors as that of his elder brother, the Czar
Alexander. The Princess Lieven and his mother, Maria Federovna, the
friend of Stein, and the implacable enemy of Napoleon, had found in him
a pupil at once devoted, imaginative, and unwearied. A resolute will,
dauntless courage, a love of the beautiful in nature and in art, a
high-souled enthusiasm for his country, made him seem the
fate-appointed leader of Russia's awakening energies. The Teuton in
his blood effaced the Slav, and the fixed, the unrelenting pursuit of
one sole purpose gives his career something of the tragic unity of
Napoleon's, and leaves him still the supreme type of the Russian
autocrat. One God, one law, one Church, one State, Russian in
language, Russian in creed, Russian in all the labyrinthine grades of
its civic, military, and municipal life--this was the dream to the
realization of which the thirty crowded years of his reign were
consecrated. There is grandeur as well as swiftness of decision in the
manner in which he encounters and quells the insurrection of the 26th
December. Then, true to the immemorial example of tyrants, he found
employment for sedition in war. He tore from Persia in a single
campaign two rich provinces and an indemnity of 20,000,000 roubles.
The mystic Liberalism of Alexander was abandoned. The free
constitution of Poland, the eyesore of the boyards and the old Russian
party, was overthrown, and a Russian, as distinct from a German, policy
was welcomed with surprise and tumultuous delight. "Despotism," he
declared, "is the principle of my government; my people desires no
other." Yet he endeavoured to win young Russia by flattery, as he had
conquered old Russia by reaction. He encouraged the movement in poetry
against the tasteless imitation of Western models, and in society
against the dominance of the French language. In the first years of
his reign French ceases to be a medium of literary expression, and
Russian prose and Russian verse acquire their own cadences. Yet
liberty is the life-blood of art; and liberty he could not grant. The
freedom of the Press was interdicted; liberty of speech forbidden, and
a strict censorship, exercised by the dullest of officials, stifled
literature. "How unfortunate is this Bonaparte!" a wit remarked when
Pichegru was found strangled on the floor of his dungeon, "all his
prisoners die on his hands." How unfortunate was the Czar Nicholas!
All his men of genius died by violent deaths. Lermontoff and Poushkine
fell in duels before antagonists who represented the _tchinovnik_
class. Rileyev died on the scaffold; Griboiédov was assassinated at
Teheran.
His foreign policy was a return to that of Catherine the Great--the
restoration of the Byzantine Empire. Making admirable use of the
Hellenic enthusiasm of Canning, he destroyed the Turkish fleet at
Navarino. Thus popular at home and abroad, regarded by the Liberals of
Europe as the restorer of Greek freedom, and by the Legitimists as a
stronger successor to Alexander, he was able to crush the Poles.
Enthusiastic Berlin students carried the effigies of Polish leaders in
triumph; but not a sword was drawn. England, France, Austria looked on
silent at the work of Diebitch and Paskievitch, "my two mastiffs," as
the Czar styled them, and the true "_finis Poloniae_" had come. A
Russian Army marching against Kossuth, and the Czar's demand for the
extradition of the heroic Magyar, unmasked the despot. Yet his
European triumph was complete, and the war in the Crimea seemed his
crowning chance--the humiliating of the two Powers which in his eyes
represented Liberty and the Revolution. Every force that personal
rancour, and the devotion of years to one sole end, every measure that
reason and State policy could dictate, lent their aid to stimulate the
efforts of the monarch in this enterprise. The disaster was sudden,
overwhelming, irremediable. Yet in one thing his life was a success,
and that a great one--he had Russianised Russia.
The Crimean War marks a turning-point in the History of Europe only
less significant than the Revolution of 1848. The isolating force of
religion was annulled, and the slowly increasing influence of the East
upon the West affected even the routine of diplomacy. The hopes of the
Carlists and the Jesuits in Spain were frustrated, and Austria,
deprived of the reward of her neutrality, could look no more to the
Muscovite for aid in crushing Italian freedom, as she had crushed
Hungary. From his deep chagrin at the treason of the Powers, Cavour
seemed to gather new strength and a political wisdom which sets his
name with those of the greatest constructive statesmen of all time.
The defeat at Novara was avenged, the policy of Villafranca, and the
designs of that singular saviour of society, Louis Napoleon, were
checked. Venetia was recovered, and when in 1870 the lines around Metz
and Sedan withdrew the French bayonets which hedged in Pio Nono, Victor
Emmanuel entered Rome as King of Italy. Thirty years have passed since
the 20th September, and the burdens of taxation and military sacrifices
which Italy has borne, with the prisoner in the Vatican like a
conspirator on her own hearth, can be compared only with the burdens
which Prussia endured for the sake of glory and her kings before and
after Rossbach. But instead of a Rossbach, Italy has had an Adowa;
instead of justice, a corrupt official class and an army of judges who
make justice a mockery, anarchism in her towns, a superstitious
peasantry, an aristocracy dead to the future and to the memory of the
past. This heroic patriotism, steadfast patience, and fortitude in
disaster have their roots in the noblest hearts of Italy herself, but
there is not one which in the trial hour has not felt its own strength
made stronger, its own resolution made loftier, by the genius and
example of a single man--Giuseppe Mazzini. To modern Republicanism,
not only of Italy, but of Europe, Mazzini gave a higher faith and a
watchword that is great as the watchwords of the world. Equal rights
mean equal duties. The Rights of Man imply the Duties of Man. He
taught the millions of workers in Italy that their life-purpose lay not
in the extortion of privileges, but in making themselves worthy of
those privileges; that it was not in conquering capitalists that the
path of victory lay, but in all classes of Italians striving side by
side towards a common end, the beauty and freedom of Italy, by
establishing freedom and beauty in the soul.
The movement towards unity in Germany is old as the war of Liberation
against Napoleon, old as Luther's appeal to the German Princes in 1520.
The years following Leipsic were consumed by German Liberalism in
efforts to invent a constitution like that of England. It was the
happy period of the doctrinaire, of the pedant, and of the student of
1688 and the pupils of Siéyès. Heine's bitter address to Germany,
"Dream on, thou son of Folly, dream on!" sprang from a chagrin which
every sincere German, Prussian, Bavarian, Würtemberger, or Rheinlander
felt not less deeply. The Revolution of 1848, the blood spilt at the
barricades in the streets of Vienna and Berlin, did not end this; but
it roused the better spirits amongst the opposition to deeper
perception of the aspiration of all Germany. Which of the multifarious
kingdoms and duchies could form the centre of a new union, federal or
imperial? Austria, with her long line of Hapsburg monarchs, her
tyranny, her obscurantism, her tenacious hold upon the past, had been
the enemy or the oppressor of every State in turn. The Danubian
principalities, Bohemia, Hungary, pointed out to Vienna a task in the
future calculated to try her declining energy to the utmost. Prussia
alone possessed the heroic past, the memory of Frederick, of Blücher,
of Stein, Scharnhorst, and Yorck; and, if politically despotic, she was
essentially Protestant in religion, and Protestantism offered the hope
of religious tolerance. After Austria's defeat in Italy, the issue
north of the Alps was inevitable. The question was how and in what
shape the end would realize itself. Montesquieu insists that, even
without Caius Julius, the fall of the oligarchy and the establishment
of the Roman Empire was fixed as by a law of fate. Yet, with data
before us, it is hard to imagine the creation of the new German Empire
without Bismarck. His downright Prussianism rises like a rock through
the mists, amid the vaporous Liberalism of the pre-Revolutionary
period. His unbroken resolution gave strength to the wavering purpose
of Frederick William IV. His diplomacy led to Königgrätz, and the
manipulated telegram from Ems turned, as Moltke said, a retreat into a
call to battle. And in front of Metz his wisdom kept the Bavarian
legions in the field. From his first definite entry into a State
career in 1848 to the dismissal of 1887, his deep religion, wisdom, and
simplicity of nature are as distinctly Prussian as the glancing ardour
of Skobeleff is distinctly Russian. From the Hohenzollern he looked
for no gratitude. His loyalty was loyalty to the kingship, not to the
individual. He had early studied the career of Strafford, and knew the
value of the word of a King. False or true to all men else, he was
unwaveringly true to Prussia, which to Bismarck meant being true to
himself, true to God. He could not bequeath his secret to those who
came after him any more than Leonardo could bequeath his secret to
Luini. But the Empire he built up has the elements of endurance. It
possesses in the Middle Age common traditions, deep and penetrating, a
common language, and the recent memory of a marvellous triumph.
Protestantism and the Prussian temper ensure religious freedom to
Bavaria. Even in 1870 the old principles of the Seven Years' War,
Protestantism and the neo-Romanism of Pius IX, reappear in the opposing
ranks at Gravelotte and Sedan. The new Empire, whether it be to Europe
a warrant of peace or of war, is at least a bulwark against
Ultramontanism.
The change in French political life finds its expression in the Russian
alliance. Time has atoned for the disasters at the Alma and Inkermann.
Would one discover the secret at the close of the century of the
alliance of Russia and France, freedom's forlorn hope when the century
began? It is contained in the speech of Skobeleff which once startled
Europe: "The struggle between the Slav and the Teuton no human power
can avert. Even now it is near, and the struggle will be long,
terrible, and bloody; but this alone can liberate Russia and the whole
Slavonic race from the tyranny of the intruder. No man's home is a
home till the German has been expelled, and the rush to the East, the
'_Drang nach Osten_' turned back for ever."
III
THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE
In modern Europe political revolutions have invariably been preceded or
accompanied by revolutions in thought or religion. The nineteenth
century, which has been convulsed by thirty-three revolutions, the
overthrow of dynasties, and the assassination of kings, has also been
characterized by the range and daring of its speculative inquiry.
Every system of thought which has perplexed or enthralled the
imagination of man, every faith that has exalted or debased his
intelligence, has had in this age its adherents. The Papacy in each
successive decade has gained by this tumult and mental disquietude.
Thought is anguish to the masses of men, any drug is precious, and to
escape from its misery the soul conspires against her own excellence
and the perfection of Nature. Even in 1802 Napoleon in his Hamlet-like
musings in the Tuileries despaired of Liberty as the safety of the
world, and in his tragic course this despair adds a metaphysical touch
to his doom. Five Popes have succeeded him who anointed Bonaparte, and
the very era of Darwin and Strauss has been illustrated or derided by
the bull, "_Ineffabilis Deus_," the Council of the Vatican, the
thronged pilgrimages to Lourdes, and the neo-Romanism of French
_littérateurs_. The Hellenism of Goethe was a protest against this
movement, at once in its intellectual and its literary forms, the
Romanticism of Tieck and Novalis, the cultured pietism of Lammenais and
Chateaubriand. Yet in _Faust_ Goethe attempted a reconciliation of
Hellas and the Middle Age, and the work is not only the supreme
literary achievement of the century, but its greatest prophetic book.
Then science became the ally of poetry and speculative thought in the
war against Obscurantism, Ultramontanism, and Jesuitism in all its
forms. Geology flung back the aeons of the past till they receded
beyond imagination's wing. Astronomy peopled with a myriad suns the
infinite solitudes of space. The theory of evolution stirred the
common heart of Europe to a fury of debate upon questions confined till
then to the studious calm of the few. The ardour to know all, to be
all, to do all, here upon earth and now, which the nineteenth century
had inherited from the Renaissance, quickened every inventive faculty
of man, and surprise has followed surprise. The aspirations of the
Revolutionary epoch towards some ideal of universal humanity, its
sympathy with the ideals of all the past, Hellas, Islam, the Middle
Age, received from the theories of science, and from increased
facilities of communication and locomotion, a various and most living
impulse. As man to the European imagination became isolated in space,
and the earth a point lost in the sounding vastness of the atom-shower
of the worlds, he also became conscious to himself as one. The bounds
of the earth, his habitation, drew nearer as the stars receded, and
surveying the past, his history seemed less a withdrawal from the
Divine than an ever-deepening of the presence of the Divine within the
soul.
That which in speculation pre-eminently distinguishes the Europe of the
nineteenth century from preceding centuries--the gradually
increasing dominion of Oriental thought, art, and action--has
strengthened this impression. An age mystic in its religion, symbolic
in its art, and in its politics apathetic or absolutist, succeeds an
age of formal religion, conventional art, and Republican enthusiasm.
Goethe in 1809, from the overthrow of dynasties and the crash of
thrones, turned to the East and found peace. What were the armies of
Napoleon and the ruin of Europe's dream to Háfiz and Sádi, and to the
calm of the trackless centuries far behind? The mood of Goethe has
become the characteristic of the art, the poetry, the speculation of
the century's end. The _bizarre_ genius of Nietzsche, whose whole
position is implicit in Goethe's _Divan_, popularized it in Germany.
The youngest of literatures, Norway and Russia, reveal its power as
vividly as the oldest, Italy and France. It controls the meditative
depth of Leopardi, the melancholy of Tourgenieff, the nobler of Ibsen's
dramas, and the cadenced prose of Flaubert. It informs the teaching of
Tolstoi and the greater art of Tschaikowsky. Goethe, at the beginning
of the century, moulded into one the ideals of the Middle Age and of
Hellas, and so Wagner at the close, in _Tristan_ and in _Parsifal_, has
woven the Oriental and the mediaeval spirit, thought, and passion, the
Minnesinger's lays and the mystic vision of the _Upanishads_ into a
rainbow torrent of harmony, which, with its rivals, the masterpieces of
Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Tschaikowsky, make this century the
Periclean age of Music as the fifteenth was the Periclean age of
painting, and the sixteenth of poetry.
What a vision of the new age thus opens before the gaze! The ideal of
Liberty and all its hopes have turned to ashes; but out of the ruins
Europe, tireless in the pursuit of the Ideal, ponders even now some
profounder mystery, some mightier destiny. More than any race known to
history the Teuton has the power of making other religions, other
thoughts, other arts his own, and sealing them with the impress of his
own spirit. The poetry of Shakespeare, of Goethe, the tone-dramas of
Wagner attest this. Out of the thought and faith of Judaea and Hellas,
of Egypt and Rome, the Teutonic imagination has carved the present.
Their ideals have passed into his life imperishably. But the purple
fringe of another dawn is on the horizon. Teutonic heroism and
resolution in action, transformed by the centuries behind and the
ideals of the elder races, confront now, creative, the East, its mighty
calm, its resignation, its scorn of action and the familiar aims of
men, its inward vision, its deep disdain of realized ends. What vistas
arise before the mind which seeks to penetrate the future of this
union! The eighteenth century at its close coincided with an
accomplished hope clearly defined. The last sun of the dying century
goes down upon a world brooding over an unsolved enigma, pursuing an
ideal it but darkly discerns.
GARDEN CITY PRESS LIMITED, PRINTERS, LETCHWORTH.
Popular Edition, in Paper Covers, 1s. net.
TREITSCHKE BERNHARDI
EXPOUNDED EXPLAINED
GERMANY AND ENGLAND
By Professor Cramb.
With a Preface by A. C. Bradley and an Introduction by the Hon. Joseph
Choate.
LORD ROBERTS said: "I hope that everyone who wishes to understand the
present crisis will read this book. There are in it things which will
cause surprise and pain, but nowhere else are the forces which led to
the war so clearly set forth."
MR. CHOATE says: "Worthy to be placed among English Classics for its
clearness of thought and expression, its restrained eloquence, and its
broad historical knowledge ... it explains very lucidly, not the
occasion, but the cause (the deep-seated cause) of the present war."
The _Times_ says: "A book of warning and enlightenment, written with
all a man's strength and sincerity, for which we must be profoundly
grateful."
The _Spectator_ says: "Let our readers buy this little book and see for
themselves what the nature of the inspiration is at the back of the
German Imperialism. They will learn in the smallest possible space
what Germany is fighting for and what Britain is resisting."
Three Important Works
THE GERMAN WAR BOOK
Being "The Usages of War on Land" issued by the Great General Staff of
the German Army.
Translated, with a Critical Introduction, by J. H. MORGAN, M.A.
Professor of Constitutional Law at University College, London; late
Scholar of Balliol College, Oxford; Joint Author of "War; Its Conduct
and its Legal Results."
_Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net._
This official and amazingly cynical War Book of the Prussian General
Staff lays down the rules to be followed by German officers in the
conduct of War in the field, e.g., as to non-combatants, forced levies,
neutrals, hostages. Its importance and interest cannot be exaggerated.
FRANCE IN DANGER
By PAUL VERGNET. Translated by BEATRICE BARSTOW.
_Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net._
Monsieur Paul Vergnet in this book did for the French Public what
Professor Cramb did for England. After a careful study of the
Political Movements In Germany, and of German literature, he warned his
countrymen that War was imminent. His aspect of the question has never
been fully discussed in England, and the translation of this book ought
to have a very special interest and value for all students of the Great
War.
WAR, ITS CONDUCT AND ITS LEGAL RESULTS
Including a critical examination of the whole of the emergency
legislation (with a chapter on Martial Law); a chapter on the
Neutrality of Belgium; a survey of the Rules as to the Conduct of War
on Land and Sea, and a complete study of the Effect of War on
Commercial Relations.
By THOMAS BATY, LL.D., D.C.L., and Professor J. H. MORGAN.
_Crown 8vo._
IN WESTERN CANADA BEFORE THE WAR
A STUDY OF COMMUNITIES
By E. B. MITCHELL.
_With Map. Crown 8vo._
This is an attempt to describe truly the social and economic state of
things in the Prairie Provinces of the Dominion in the years 1913-14,
at the end of the great rush. The writer, who is neither a summer
visitor nor a professional advertiser, nor a disappointed immigrant,
had unusual opportunities for the study of life in a small prairie city
and among the real prairie people on the farms; the picture drawn is
neither all gloom nor all brightness. At the present time, when the
War has made the whole Empire realize its unity anew, such a
disinterested study of Western communities is specially useful and
timely.
LONDON: JOHN MURRAY
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