1. in_ernet_dli_2015_172673_2015_172673_The-History-Of-English-Patriotism-vol-Ii

THE

HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH

PATRIOTISM

VOL.

II

Lord Heathfield

was a painting on the National Gallery

by Sir Joshua Reynolds

:: THE HISTORY OF ::

ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

BY ESMÉ WINGFIELD-STRATFORD

FELLOW OF KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

IN TWO VOLUMES: VOLUME II

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD

NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY

TORONTO: BELL AND COCKBURN: MCMXIII

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH

ERRATUM.

VOL. II

Page 371, line 20, "French" should read 'Trench'

CONTENTS

BOOK III

THE GREAT WAR

CHAPTER I

The Principles of the Revolution

Three periods of Romance—The French influence—The philosphes—Their rationalism and inconsistency—Voltaire—Diderot and the Encyclopædists—The benevolent despots—Hatred of religion—Human perfectibility—Rousseau—His patriotism—Loss of French prestige—A degenerate nobility—France goaded into patriotism—The doctrine of nationality

Pages 3-15

CHAPTER II

The Eve of the Struggle

Nadir of our fortunes—The younger Pitt—Character without inspiration—Intensity of his patriotism—Its limitations—His opponents abroad—His attitude towards the social problem—Charles James Fox—His unreliability—Downfall of the Whigs—Material progress—Industrial Revolution—Pitt's cautious policy—The Eden Treaty—The Triple Alliance—Pitt's triumph—Decline of imperialism—Warren Hastings—Pitt and the Opposition

16-41

CHAPTER III

England and the Revolution

Misery of the Poor—Crabbe—Comparison with France—Popularity of English Gentry—Social amenities—Dislike of foreign ideas—Early apathy towards Revolution—Burke's "Reflections"—Their permanent greatness—Final statement of Social Contract—Scorn of materialism—Sanctity of institutions—Spiritual imagination—Accuracy of Burke's predictions—His Tory philosophy—He gauges importance of Revolution—But errs in supporting the kings—Preaches a crusade—His opponents, Mackintosh—Tom Paine—Priestley—Price—Godwin—English Jacobinism—Burns—Southey—Coleridge—Wordsworth—Landor

v

42-76

vi

CONTENTS

CHAPTER IV

The Turn of the Tide

Unconsciousness of national danger—Pitt's kingcraft—Selfishness of the kings—Frenzy of revolutionary patriotism—Half-heartedness of our operations—Discontent and repression—The Opposition—Their sympathy with freedom—Their factious recklessness—Necessity for Pitt—“The pilot”—The darkest hour—Pitt's heroism—The nation roused—France invincible on land—The “Anti-Jacobin”—Canning's philippic —England and Napoleon—Prowess of British arms—Egypt —The Nile—Peace of Amiens—National unity—The Lake poets

Pages 77-107

CHAPTER V

Triumph and Isolation

Violence of Napoleon—Fox's great speech—Magnanimity of England—Napoleon's invasion scheme—Death of Pitt—Nelson—English seamen—Ardour of patriotism—Death of Fox—Conversion of Coleridge—And of Wordsworth—Wordsworth's championship of England—Ballads and cartoons—Gillray—Southey—Campbell—Scott—Exhaustion of France—Materialism of the Empire—Napoleon at his zenith —The menace of England—Mediocrity of our statesmen—Rise of Canning—Copenhagen—The Continental System—Canning's Toryism—The Tories and liberty—Failure of Whig ministry—Laodicean attitude of Whigs—Canning in the “Quarterly”—His speeches

108-137

CHAPTER VI

The Liberation of Europe

The spirit of liberty—Spain—Wordsworth's “Convention of Cintra”—His championship of European liberty—Awakening of Germany—Lessing and Herder—Sturm und Drang—Kant — Napoleon's tyranny — Fichte— Schiller — Kleist —Stein and Scharnhorst—Awakening of Austria—Sir John Moore—Walcheren—The Campaign of Wagram—Weakening of Napoleon—The Russian temperament—1812—Resurrection of Germany—Romance—Goethe—Wave of patriotism — Deliverance of Germany — English confidence —Castlereagh—Wellington—Nobility of our cause—Firmness of English diplomacy—Congress of Vienna—English disinterestedness

138-174

CONTENTS

CHAPTER VII

The Aftermath

Exhaustion of England—Effects of the war—Rural distress—The industrial population—Tory policy—The Whigs—Discontent and violence—The demagogues—Cobbett—Spencean philanthropy — Bentham — His reforming influence — His philosophy—Its inconsistency—Paradox of utilitarianism—Hostility to patriotism—The economic man—Disarmament — James Mill on Government—Ricardo and the classical economics—Contrast with List—Remoteness from life—Malthus—Utilitarianism in action

. Pages 175-200

CHAPTER VIII

Reaction and Despair

Relapse to pessimism—The Metternich system—Schopenhauer — World-weariness and lack of faith—Reflected in poetry—Shelley—His indictment of society—Nirvana and passivity—Germs of patriotism—Creative imagination—Keats—Detachment from the world—Art as a refuge—Resignation—Byron — Defiance of evil—The Byronic hero—Love of England—War for liberty—Greece—Seeds of despair

. 201-229

CHAPTER IX

The Liberation of Europe—Last Phase

Conspiracy of despots—Opposed by Castlereagh—The Spanish colonies—Vienna—Aix-la-Chapelle—Troppau, Laybach and Verona—Castlereagh and Canning —Elements of our power — Canning's triumphant policy—His ideal—Final comparison with Castlereagh

. 230-239

CHAPTER X

Patriotism in Art

Neglect of English art—The beginnings—Miniature painters—The foreign domination—Vandyck—Dobson—Lely—Kneller — Riley—Early portrait painters—Jonathan Richardson—Hudson—Hogarth—Landscape painters—Marine painting — Sir Joshua Reynolds—Gainsborough—The golden age of English portrait painting—A native landscape—Morland—Love of English countryside—Constable—Development of Turner—His dominant patriotism—Mastery of the sea—Turner's love of the soil—Bonington—Scottish art

. 240-261

viii

CONTENTS

BOOK IV

THE MODERN AGE

CHAPTER I

The Middle-class Ascendancy

Power of the middle class—Whig compromise—Cult of expediency—The Reform Bill—Material prosperity—A second Prose Age—Palmerston—Belgium and Poland—A bourgeois foreign policy—“Tory men, Whig measures”—Sir Robert Peel—Conservatism—The Eastern Question—The Crimean War—Don Pacifico debate—Palmerston's vindication—Speeches of Cockburn, Peel, Gladstone, Disraeli, and Cobden—Middle-class philosophy—Lord John Russell—Robust optimism—Robert Browning—“Why am I a Liberal?”—Browning's patriotism—His gradual detachment from England—National materialism and self-sufficiency—Macaulay—His genius and patriotism—His apotheosis of the Whig Party—His fundamental materialism—Expediency and laissez-faire—Progress—Macaulay's redeeming inconsistency—Whigs and utilitarians . . . . . Pages 265-299

CHAPTER II

The Foundations of Modern Toryism

Dogma of Liberalism—Weakness of Tories—Wellington—Alison's debased version of Toryism—The Lake poets—Southey's “Colloquies on Society”—Wordsworth and Social Reform—Coleridge—His philosophic system—Opposition to utilitarians—The idea of the Constitution—Of the State—Of the Church—Propriety and Nationality—Coleridge's patriotism—Note of foreboding . . . . . . 300-321

CHAPTER III

The Prophets

Hopes of revolution—Their disappointment—The philosophic Radicals—Economic orthodoxy—Literary reaction against materialism—Dickens—Early Victorian fiction—Carlyle—His prophetic mission—Belief in God—Hatred of utilitarians—Relation to Coleridge—Carlyle not a party man—But in principle a Tory—National well-being—Patriotism—Doctrine of Silence—Applied to England—Carlyle's philosophy of history—England's duty—Warfare—Industry—Colonies—Ruskin—Essential agreement with Carlyle—Regenerate

CONTENTS

ix

England—Early works—Attack on economists—Constructive Toryism—Ruskin's message to his countrymen—His appeal to imperial sentiment . . . Pages 322-351

CHAPTER IV

THE OXFORD MOVEMENT

The spirit of Oxford—Lukewarmness of Church—Paley—The Oxford Movement—Its anti-national tendency — Keble — Hurrell Froude—"Tracts for the Times"—Intolerance—Reforming influence—Newman—His genius—Faintness of his patriotism—Finds peace with Rome—His despair of England—Attacks Peel and Brougham—Essay on the Crimea—Newman a child of Rome—Evidences of his love for England—Newman's great defect . . . 352-367

CHAPTER V

THE LAUREATES

The function of Universities—Nineteenth-century Cambridge —The "Cambridge apostles"—The young Tennyson—Tennyson's unevenness—Lack of constructive power—His lyric beauty—His Whig optimism superficial—Evil influence of Tennyson's University training—His fundamental pessimism—Counteracted by his patriotism—His battle poems—His pattern Englishmen—Attitude towards France—His patriotism, Toryism and imperialism—Tennyson and Newman—Watts—His universality—His sadness—Patriot and imperialist—The "Minotaur"—The "Mammon"—The portraits . . . 368-389

CHAPTER VI

THE WAVERERS

Matthew Arnold—Lukewarmness of his inspiration—His despair —His gospel of culture—His dogmatism—The Zeitgeist—The new Liberalism—Satire on the middle class—Arnold a dilettante—Constructive policy—Arnold a cosmopolitan—Sneers at England—The two Mills—Handicap of John Mill's upbringing—His inconsistency—Vital admiration as regards utilitarianism—And the classical economics—Passing of the Whig ideal—John Mill's anti-patriotic phase—His patriotism—Championship of national service—And of the Empire . . . 390-409

X

CONTENTS

CHAPTER VII

FROM MANCHESTER TO KHARTOUM

The Whig domination—Triumph of Manchester school—Its burgher philosophy—Profit and philanthropy—The Corn Laws and democracy—Cobden and Bright—Their sincerity —Business morality—Bright on the Crimean War—Manchester hostility to landed interest—Influence on foreign policy—Economy at any price—Abolition of war—Manchester Christianity—Virtues and limitations of Manchester leaders—Hostility to imperialism—Growth of democratic sentiment—Socialism—Decline of Whig oligarchy—Spencer's outraged individualism—Gladstone—His literary reputation —“Oxford on surface, Liverpool below”—Grandest exponent of mid-Victorianism—Affinity with Peel—Meagre output of Social Reform—Optimism and reverence for antiquity—A symbolic figure—Breaks with Palmerstonianism—Sympathy with Manchester—Self-conscious virtue—Reckless pursuit of thrift—Napoleon III—Struggle over the fortifications—Gladstone's lifelong hostility to national defence—Homage to the Empire—Ideal of a Christian England—Qualified support of freedom—Italy—The Near East—Precept and practice of Gladstonian foreign policy—Of his naval policy — Weakness in action — Aftermath of Midlothian — In Armenia—In the Transvaal—In Egypt—Tragedy of Gordon —“The great refusal”. . . . . . Pages 410-457

CHAPTER VIII

A Science of Society

Importance of subject—Evolution—Foreshadowed by Cole-ridge and Disraeli—Materialism of the fifties—Auguste Comte—Founder of Sociology—Affinity to English utilitarians—Mind and body—Charles Darwin—Excesses of his followers—Herbert Spencer—His character and antecedents —His philosophy—The Unknowable God—A Cobdenite universe—Spencer's facts—The Data of Sociology—The In- ductions of Sociology—Military and industrial societies— Modified utilitarianism—Influence of Synthetic Philosophy —Tendency towards materialism—Hostility to patriotism and Empire—Signs of change—“Schwarmerei” of evolution —Darwinism in society—The problem insoluble—Multiplicity of attempted solutions—“Social Psychology”—Re- action against Social Sciences — Declared bankruptcy of .

xi

CONTENTS

Economics—What is Sociology?—Training ground for cosmopolitans . . . . Pages 458-499

CHAPTER IX

THE DECADENT MOVEMENT

Separation of art from life—Swinburne's first decadent phase—His humanitarianism—His love of England and the sea—The Pre-Raphaelites—Rossetti and Burne-Jones—A beauty of the surface—Pater's new hedonism—Oscar Wilde and the cult of evil—Whistler and the isolation of art—Duel with Ruskin—Whistler and Japan—Mood-painting—The four Carlyles—Whistler and his predecessors—The Second Empire—English contrasted with French decadence—The darkest hour . . . . 500-516

CHAPTER X

DISRAELI AND YOUNG ENGLAND

Disraeli under a cloud—His impetuosity—Beauty of his private life—“Vivian Grey”—“Contarini Fleming”—Disraeli's vanity—Discreditable episodes—His magnanimity—His faith in God—Anti-Semite prejudice refuted—Disraeli's hatred of Benthamism — His fundamental consistency —Reverts to principles of Toryism—Ideal of a national party—“Letter to a Noble Lord”—Disraeli political successor to Coleridge—Attacks abstract systems of politics—National personality—Fallacy of representation—Democratic Toryism—Federal principles—Disraeli and Chartism—Inevitable struggle with Peel—Young England—“Sybil”—Faith and nationality—Vision of “Tancred”—Ideal of a national Church—Doctrine of race—Can a Jew be a patriot?—Patriotism a spiritual bond—Danger of race doctrine—Waning faith in aristocracy—“Lothair”—Transition to democratic imperialism—Disraeli's Reform Bill—Disgust of reactionaries—Trust in the people—Defeat of Manchester principles . . . . 517-555

CHAPTER XI

IMPERIUM ET LIBERTAS

Imperialism the crown of Disraeli's development—“Alroy”—“Tancred”—Passage in “Contarini Fleming”—Disraeli secures the affection of the masses—Manchester Speech, 1872—Crystal Palace Speech, 1872—Classic exposition of Tory principles—Maintenance of our institutions—Social Reform—Unity of the Empire—Neglect of colonies after

xii

CONTENTS

American secession—Whig policy of weakening the connection—Lord Granville's shameful treatment of New Zealand

—First stirrings of imperialism—Froude—Seeley—Kingsley

—Tennyson—Dilke—The swelling tide—A period of preparation—Perils of Conservatism, democracy and imperial-

ism—Disraeli handicapped by his colleagues—Domestic

policy—Eastern policy upset by his successor—Armenia—

The Euphrates Valley—Macedonia—Disraeli's vital error—

A house on the sand—Brilliance of his Berlin diplomacy—

Colonial policy—Afghanistan—Disraeli's achievement and

failure—Liberty the soul of Empire . . . Pages 556-585

CHAPTER XII

The Transformation of Society

Heyday of the landed interest—Influence of the Court—And of

Sandringham—The old order—Agricultural depression—

Triumph of wealth—Disappearance of the old upper class

—Wealthy aliens—The bourgeois influence—The American

influence—Upper-class society a plutocracy—Break-up of

county society—Decay of old middle class—Rise of subur-

ban community—Discontent and monotony—Fiction as a

drug—Suburban culture—A feverish and shallow revolt—

Unrelieved emphasis—Iconoclasm—Cult of licentiousness

—Attacks on order of society—Middle-class socialism—

Patriotism undermined—Wasted genius—Long quiescence

of working class—Our commercial supremacy in the

'seventies - Influence of tariffs - Growing contempt for

authority—Unreality of party politics—Power of money—

Revolt of Labour—The old unionism and the new—Twofold

reply of governing class—Barrier between rich and poor—

Difficulties of employers—Class hatred—Criticism of British

workman—Cheap education—Monotony of labour—Senti-

mental democracy—“Militarism” versus materialism—Cos-

mopolitan tendency of finance—The socialist case—Peril of

class warfare—Signs of hope—National spirit not dead—

Colonial loyalty—Opportunity and ideal of Empire—Con-

clusion . . . . . . . . 586-627

Index to Vols. I and II . . . . . . . . 631

BOOK

III

THE

GREAT

WAR

BOOK III

THE GREAT WAR

CHAPTER I

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION

THE conception of liberty infused life into the dry bones of the eighteenth century ; year by year, the impulse had been gaining strength, and after the outbreak of the French Revolution it became the keynote of a period of emotional stress as great as that of the Armada time. The movement in England may be roughly divided into three periods, the first of which sees liberty in its Jacobin simplicity, it is the time of Paine and Priestley, of Fox and Blake. Then comes a period when, by a violent reaction against regicide and despotism, it turns against itself, and joins the forces of reaction ; when the Lake school is on the same side as Wellington, and the War of Liberation triumphs in the Metternich system. Then, when the cannon-thunder has died away, and the fever for glory is cold, hunger and misery find themselves face to face with tyranny, and the first cry for freedom is heard again, with a more intense appeal than ever. This is the period of Shelley and Byron.

In order to understand how the Revolution influenced English ideas of patriotism, we must take a glance at the band of thinkers who heralded the new era in France. These men, the so-called philosophes, exercised a considerable influence upon English thought during the second half of the eighteenth century, even though they often attracted attention rather as bogeys than as prophets. A quaint instance of the cult of Rousseau is

4

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

the pompous virtue of Thomas Day's " Sandford and Merton," perhaps the most exquisite thing ever penned by an unconscious humqrist. It was the first of a whole series of similar books, founded upon " Emile."

The views of the philosophes with regard to patriotısm have been somewhat misunderstood in England. There is a vague notion that the movement was decisively cosmopolitan. Now this is only true, with very grave qualifications. In the case of Condorçet, the love of humanity certainly does triumph over patriotism, but we doubt if this could be said of any other of the greatest among them. We have to remember that they were mostly cold thinkers, and that a low temperature of thought is more favourable to the abstract love of an abstraction than to the hot, unreasoning devotion that will pour out blood as well as ink for the Fatherland.

There is another characteristic of these men that makes it difficult to generalize about them, and that is their own frequent inconsistency. This, paradoxical as it may sound, is far more likely to occur as a defect of cold reasoning than of thought tinged by passion. The most illogical of all works are often those of the pure logicians ; because one cannot cut a limb off a living and sensitive body as one can chip the most exquisite statue. Moreover, these French thinkers were too much given to writing down anything that sounded neat, without bothering much about its profundity. They were, for the most part, rather philosophers of the salon than of the schools, and the salons were the domain of woman. The decadence of the French aristocracy had naturally gone along with a great increase of feminine influence, so that thought tended to become superficial and emotion sentimental.

The natural leader of French intellect is thus Voltaire. Brilliant in almost every sphere of thought, supreme in none ; a popular scientist, a witty philosopher, a cold poet, a correct dramatist, a conservative revolutionar y. the

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION

5

meanest, the most bitter and the kindliest of mortals; he

is the type and human embodiment of that mass of

contradictions out of which, as by some strange dialectic,

our modern democracy was brought to birth. Now

Voltaire has left us his views on patriotism in an article

in his " Philosophical Dictionary," and from this example

we may form a very fair idea of the point of view of most

of his contemporaries. We know, from his other writings,

that he looked with contempt upon most of the wars of his

time; there is the famous description in " Candide "

of the battle in which, after the slaughter of a few

thousand men, both kings claimed the victory, and sang

the Te Deum. In the correspondence with D'Alembert,

the defeats of Louis XV's armies are alluded to with

passing contempt.

Voltaire's point of view is plainly, that it is unreason-

able to be a patriot, unless you get some equivalent

advantage out of your country. " One has a country

under a good king, but not under a bad one." At the

same time, he hesitates between the patriotic and the

cosmopolitan points of view. It is a pity that to be a

good patriot one must be the enemy of other men.

He ends up with the following strange compromise :

" He who wants his country to be neither greater, nor

smaller, nor richer, nor poorer, would be the citizen of the

universe."

Diderot and the encyclopædists are just as inconclu-

sive. In the article " Nation," written by an inferior

member of the group, we find praise for the patriots of

antiquity mixed up with Addison's lines about the

patriot being one who makes the welfare of mankind

his care. Diderot himself is even more perplexing; we

find him in one place praising just institutions because

they make men love their country ; in another, explaining

how patriotism is the product of enthusiasm, and there-

fore doomed to disappear before the advance of reason.

6 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

This last sentence gives us a clue by which we may thread the maze of this so-called enlightenment of eighteenth-century France. It is remarkable that a movement, characterized by so much daring and originality of thought, should have produced hardly a single real poem. The philosophes are, almost without exception, materialists. The Prose tendency had become absolute, and unrelieved by the strains of a Gray, a Collins, or even of a Goldsmith The philosophy of Locke had passed over into France, and had there been stripped of all its respectable Whig compromises. Condillac, the leading psychologist of the time, decomposed our most complex and abstract ideas into sensations, and Helvetius, to whom Burke subsequently alludes with withering scorn, applied these doctrines to society. He reduces mind to sensation, and motive to interest; all morality consists, according to him, in calculation of interest What sort of a state Helvetius evolves out of these principles it is easy to guess. Every sort of sanction and cohesion is utterly lacking. To unite such a community is like tying up quicksilver with a piece of string, to love it is an absurdity. But there is another feature of this psychology that is of the highest importance. Helvetius, and most of his fellow-thinkers, are so averse to any sort of continuity in human affairs, that they almost ignore heredity and tend to make character entirely the result of environment. The mind is a blank sheet on which you may write anything you please. The result of these principles is the enormous importance that is assigned to the lawgiver.

A good legislator is able to make good men Such is the doctrine that recurs again and again in the writings of these authors. Diderot has a smart article about legislators in the "Encyclopédie" in which he desires them to be like the Emperors of China, and to exhort as well as to command Helvetius tells us that legislators can produce a virtuous spirit by a judicious distribution

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION

7

of honours D'Holbach would have the Government divert the selfish passions of men, to the advantage of

society, by a calculated system of rewards and punishments And that huge and diffuse collection of gossip, Montes-

quieu's " Esprit des Lois," is really an amplification of this theory, that man is a product of his environment, that is,

speaking roughly, the product of climate and laws.

Of course, there is one fatal fallacy in all this theorizing about legislators. Granted that mankind can be made

honest by laws, who is going to see to the honesty of the lawgiver ? But it is seldom that a logician can be brought

to see obvious and glaring objections to his own theory, provided that the theory is consistent within its own

limits. The objections were soon to be revealed in practice. The third quarter of the eighteenth century

was the period of the " benevolent despots," men who set out to mould the destinies of their countries by legisla-

tion. It began to be discovered that the subtlest of theory could not ensure the benevolence of a Catherine,

or the competence of a Louis XVI. When, by a lucky chance, the despot happened to be both benevolent and

competent, like Joseph II of Austria, he soon found out that the continuity of race and prejudice was not a thing

to be done away with in a moment ; and thus we find one of the noblest of European sovereigns confessing with

his last breath that he had failed in everything he had undertaken.

Along with a material philosophy naturally came a blind hatred of every sort of religion. Voltaire could see

easily enough the glaring abuses of the French Church, and any one can sympathize with the cry " Écrasez

l'infâme," but Voltaire must needs go on to sneer at Christianity because the French clergy were bad

Christians. By far the most thoroughgoing and bitter of the infidels of the eighteenth century was Baron D'Holbach.

His " System of Nature " is curiously like Haeckel's

8 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

" Riddle of the Universe," and is inspired by the same spirit of dogmatic and uncompromising materialism. He flatly denies the doctrines of a soul and of immortality, and attacks the idea of God in all its phases. This error has been the source of most of the woes and vices of mankind In all human evil, D'Holbach traces the sinister influence of priestcraft. Kings are only the servants of the people, and if they are false to their trust the duty of obedience ceases. And he states definitely that when men have got rid of their superstitious illusions, they will learn from Nature, to love and serve their country, instead of blindly obeying the tyrants who oppress it

This hatred of priests colours the idea both of present and of past affairs. Universal histories were then in fashion, and in these the priest generally figures as the villain. The most interesting is that of Condorcet, who is the latest and most cosmopolitan of all the philosophes. He believes in the infinite perfectibility of mankind, a doctrine which naturally follows from the elastic psychology of Condillac and Helvetius. Condorcet follows D'Holbach with unswerving fidelity, but his sanguine temperament and the outbreak of the Revolution lead him to push his theories to the wildest dreams of Utopia When kings and priests have been swept away, all men, even savages, will become free and equal and wise and live happy ever afterwards. War and commercial jealousy will disappear and there will be no more national animosity. Thus Prometheus will be unbound, as Shelley will put it some thirty years later.

The greatest constructive force among all the heralds of the Revolution is Jean Jacques Rousseau. He stands in sharp opposition to the philosophes, and, indeed, he managed to quarrel with most of them. He was utterly averse to their sneering cynicism, and threatened to leave the room when he heard somebody deny the existence of God He loved the fields and the mountains more than

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION

9

the heated atmosphere of the salons. And in an age of

rationalists his thought was always glowing, even

passionate Yet the chief weakness of Rousseau is upon

the emotional side. He was too often emotional in the bad

sense ; his feelings were chaotic and undisciplined ; he was

apt to mistake the form for the spirit, and rhetoric for

spiritual intensity. In fact, we find Rousseau suffering

from the same defect in the emotional sphere as we have

already noticed in the reasoning of the philosophes. He

seems to have been in the habit of writing down anything

that sounded as if it were inspired, regardless whether it

was really inspired or no. He was such an artist as we

have already met with in Shakespeare’s “ Richard II ” ; a

man who moved in an atmosphere of beauty, but who

was too unstable to attain to the supreme beauty.

Thus it is not always easy to discover whether Rousseau

would lead us Sometimes we seem to be the mere

degenerate offspring of the natural man, the noble savage ;

but then the eighth chapter of the “ Social Contract ” is

a decisive argument in favour of civilization. However,

there is no mistaking Rousseau’s dislike for luxury and

convention, and his admiration of the more manly and

simple kinds of virtue. Among these he includes patriot-

ism, which, of course, gives him a fine opportunity for

rhetoric about Rome and Sparta and Geneva. He draws

in one place a comparison between Socrates and Cato,

decidedly to the advantage of the Roman Socrates was

the wisest of men, but Cato was a god amongst men, and

this was because he was a patriot.

But then Rousseau follows Voltaire in postulating that

the patriot should derive an equivalent advantage from

the State If men are deprived of their natural rights, he

tells us, directly after his eulogy of Cato, the word country

can only have a ridiculous or odious significance. And

his ideal State is an attempt to make men submit to

authority without losing any of their natural rights.

IO

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

Thus, the citizen must give his assent to every single law, or else be outvoted upon it. His ideal State is a small republic, like that of Greece, where everybody can meet together to look after his rights and to see that his own individual will bears its proper share in the formation of the 'general will,' the absolute sovereign, and depositary of all rights.

There is a shrewd sense of fact about Rousseau that was ignored by his disciples Thus he is ready to admit that liberty is not within the reach of all peoples, and that there are as many ideal governments as there are states. Even tyranny may be best for certain kinds of people. And with true poetic insight he points out the terrible dangers that beset the State which tries to change its form of government. Should a war, a famine, or a sedition occur during such a crisis, that State will inevitably be overthrown Thus we find Rousseau himself predicting the fate which was to overtake his followers.

Condorçet and Rousseau differ, in one important respect, from the encyclopaedists. Though the standpoints of the two men were so far apart upon most questions, they were quite agreed that the Rights of Man were definite and inalienable, apart from all question of expediency. In fact, Condorçet severely criticizes the founders of the American Republic, in that their Constitution is a compromise between the different states, and not based upon abstract rights The French Constitution-framers avoided this error. Each biennial Constitution in 1791, 1793 and 1795 was prefixed by an explicit declaration of these rights. In view of the wild talk sometimes indulged in about the French Revolution being socialistıc, it may be interesting to note that, in every one of these, the 'sacred and inalienable right of property' is especially safeguarded.

It would have been difficult to predict, from the writings of Rousseau and the philosophes, whether the

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION

II

Revolution would have taken a definitely patriotic turn or not. This question was settled, not by the pen, but by the sword of the kings. The beginning of the Revolution was of a peaceful and domestic character. Napoleon, with his insight into the heart of things, perceived that the cause of the Bourbons was lost with their prestige. The proud nation had never forgotten the disgrace of an army of Frenchmen running from a third of their number of Prussians, nor the defeat of their forces, all over the world, by the English. Louis XVI and Vergennes had, indeed, done something to remedy this by their brilliant intervention during the American War. But there was not very much about this to gratify French national vanity. The troops who had gone to America had won little glory, and had come back with their heads full of republican ideas; the two most brilliant actions towards the end of the war, Rodney's battle in the West Indies, and the repulse of the assault upon Gibraltar, had been victories for the English. The war had immensely aggravated the financial difficulty under which the Government laboured, and the Court was already unpopular with the army by reason of its introduction of Prussian discipline, and by insisting that every officer should be a nobleman, with a noble pedigree of at least four generations What little prestige France gained in America was lost again in Holland, thanks to William Pitt and the Triple Alliance.

The Assembly, and even the mob of Paris, were, at first, far from being unprovokedly aggressive, even at home. The storming of the Bastille was the result of the King's concentration of troops outside Paris, and the March of the Women to Versailles was the result of the Loyalist dinner at which the National Cockade was torn down. The Assembly started by being entirely pacific as regards other nations. It passed a declaration that it desired neither conquest nor aggression, and refused, in

12

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

spite of treaty obligations, to be dragged into a war against England about the question of the Nootka Sound. The figures of the conquered nations around the statue of Louis XIV were removed, and the German princes, whose French estates had suffered some loss of feudal rights, were voted compensation. But the most effective guarantee of peace was the first Constitution. By this, almost all power was taken out of the hands of the executive, and even the right of making war rested with the legislature In fact, the object of the Constitution- framers might well have been to make the State as harm- less as possible for all purposes of aggression

The real architects of ruin were the aristocrats themselves. The aristocracy had been largely corrupted by the infusion of base blood, and emasculated by a century of impotence and courtership. The part they played in the Revolution can only be described as dis- graceful. They were for the most part neither loyal nor patriotic. Some of them had condescended to play with ideas of reform, and had taken a leading part in the early measures of the Assembly; but as a whole they were neither able to strike a blow for their King nor to serve their country The men who, under the leadership of the King's brothers, and with the support of the Queen, had intrigued against all reform and had got rid of Turgot, took to their heels at the first sign of danger. But they did worse than this, for they never ceased in their efforts to induce foreign sovereigns to invade France in order to win them back their privileges. They were even so base as to offer French territory to the foreigners as the price of their assistance Thus the French noblesse proved themselves to have not the faintest conception of patriot- ism Nor was their loyalty much greater The King looked with disfavour upon the first proceedings of the émigrés, and foresaw that they were likely to involve him, too, in ruin, if they attacked France. But they disregarded

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION

13

him, and in defiance of his express wishes, continued the intrigues, which sealed his doom.

Poor Louis himself was in a terrible dilemma. He would have rejoiced to do his utmost, even at the sacrifice of his prerogatives, for the good of his subjects, but he was weak and unsupported. It was, above all things, necessary to keep himself free from any suspicion of intriguing with his country's enemies; but his flight to Varennes had given the worst possible impression, and his hand was forced by a decree of the legislative Assembly threatening death and confiscation against the émigrés, including his own brothers. This, to his honour, he vetoed. Then, too, however innocent all his intentions, they were sure to be misrepresented by the extreme faction. Marie Antoinette, his evil influence, was in treasonable correspondence with the Emperor. To the average French citizen, the situation must have seemed somewhat as follows :

"Foreign powers are bent on coercing France into slavery; the aristocrats are traitors who will destroy their country to retain their privileges; a great foreign army is preparing to march to Paris, and the Court is doing all it dares to help it." Thus the nation was fairly goaded into patriotism, and events followed on each other with fatal precision. The camp was formed at Coblenz, then came the procession of the Black Breeches; the Duke of Brunswick's proclamation was answered by the taking of the Tuileries, the September massacres followed hard upon the fall of Longwy and Verdun, and the first outbreak in La Vendée; and when the combined powers of Europe, and two domestic insurrections, were forcing the Republic to fight, at desperate odds, for her very existence, she endured the Terror, and the rule of the Paris clubs, rather than submit to foreign tyrants When, at last, the strain was relaxed by the victories on the north-east frontier, the Terror collapsed like a house of cards, and there was no place above the ground for its incorruptible

14

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

figurehead. Thus were the principles and the practice

of the French Revolution, peaceable at first, and seeking

after domestic freedom, at last goaded into madness by

fear and indignation, by the treachery of Frenchmen and

the insolence of foreigners, and rising into an ecstasy of

patriotic fervour, articulate in the sublimity of the

" Marseillaise," and the grotesque horror of the " Ça

Ira." Out of this medley of heroism and murder was

born the doctrine of nationality, that was to exercise such

a powerful influence upon the future of Europe.

And yet, on the other side of the Channel, this very

cult of nationality was older than the Armada. Shake-

speare had voiced it; Milton, Cromwell and Chatham had

been its high priests, and the most sublime expression it

ever received was in the lines

" This England never did, nor never shall

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror."

However, the French, in the excitement of their first

triumph over foreign tyranny, were more unselfish than

this, and issued a decree, offering to support any nation

that might be struggling for freedom. This decree was

naturally resented by the English Government, so the

French explained it away. In the earliest days of

the Convention, when it was discovered that vicarious

championship of freedom might prove inconveniently

expensive, it was decided that the whole expenses of

compulsory liberation were to be borne by the liberated,

and woe to the nation that refused to shake off its chains !

This marks the beginning of the French career of

conquest, and the hollowness of such international pro-

fessions of altruism soon became apparent. The first

campaigns of Napoleon, in Italy, were a fine example of

the crimes that can be committed in the name of freedom.

Plunder was the incentive held out to his troops in his

first proclamation, his course was marked by systematic

PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION

I5

and pitiless theft, and all was done under the sanction

of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Whatever individual philosophers and Constitution-

makers may have said or written, the doctrine of nation-

ality is necessarily involved in the principles of the

Revolution, and was bound to emerge sooner or later.

It is Rousseau, the most ardent and constructive of its

precursors, who is most clearly imbued with it. It arises

out of the third of the three principles of the republican

formula, fraternity. When all the men of one State

recognize their common brotherhood, they imply the

obligation, recognized even by the most barbarous

communities, to stand up for the family honour against

aliens, to fight shoulder to shoulder in the common cause,

and to recognize an injury done to one member of the

family as affecting the whole body. We can also deduce

nationality from liberty and equality, since the assertion of

liberty on the part of the community becomes patriotism ;

and when every man has an equal stake in the common

weal, he naturally, as Voltaire saw, has a personal stake

in its safety and glory.

CHAPTER II

THE EVE OF THE STRUGGLE

FRENCH patriotism, which had grown effete, and seemed almost dying, revived in the enchanted cauldron of the Revolution. What ordinary observers imagined would be the death of

France, proved to be a resurrection into a new and more abundant life. Never, even under Louis XIV, had she been half so terrible as when she upreared her giant

limbs, and faced her banded despoilers, with a wrath as godlike as that of Odysseus when he leapt upon the great threshold of his home, and sped the bitter arrow to the

throat of Antinous. If we had been unable to vanquish Louis XVI and Vergennes, what chance could we have against the unchained fury of the Revolution, and the

all-conquering genius of Napoleon ; when the capitals of Europe were falling one after the other, and its kings were fain to do homage to a Corsican lieutenant of

artillery ?

To know by what miracle we were able to maintain our unyielding, and ultimately victorious, struggle against such an adversary, we must understand what took place in

England in the years following the American War. Our position then might well have seemed desperate. We had lost our colonies, our prestige, and an immense sum

of money, involving us in what was, according to the notions of the time, a fabulous debt. Consols touched the fifties. We had not a friend in Europe, and indeed, the

THE EVE OF THE STRUGGLE

17

friendship of England was a thing of which no power was particularly desirous. Humiliating as the peace was, we might think ourselves lucky to have got off so easily. France and Spain were still, despite our tardy successes, superior to us at sea; we were in grave danger in India, where Suffren held the seas, and where French troops were ready to co-operate with Hyder Ali. In the West, Jamaica was threatened, and even after Rodney's victory, we had not been able to take the offensive in the West Indies. British ministers, despite the three years' defence, had seriously mooted the advisability of surrendering Gibraltar. At home, if our situation had seemed desperate under the Pelhams, it was yet more alarming as Lord North's long and disastrous tenure of office drew to a close. Corruption and inefficiency had reigned supreme, and the best that could be hoped for was another dominance of the Whig Houses, of whose sway the nation had had enough experience in the past.

At this dreadful crisis, the very nadir of our fortunes, a man was found capable of appreciating the situation and saving it. Men of supreme genius seldom achieve immortality except in their own works; they are wedded to eternity, and their children are not of flesh and blood. But Chatham forms a glorious exception to this rule. He bequeathed to his country a son, so like, and yet so different from himself, who accomplished a work not less than his, and whose life is the history of England. It was as if Providence had heard that despairing cry of Cowper's :

"Once Chatham saved thee, but who saves thee now?"

and by a wonderful and unmerited act of grace, had sent to England, in the hour of her deepest humiliation, another Pitt, to do his father's work over again, and restore her to the place among nations she had twice forfeited.

II.—C

18

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

For there is surely something of the miraculous in this spectacle of a boy statesman taking his place, by sheer force of character, at the head of affairs, and piloting the ship of state, not with the heedless brilliancy of youth, but with a confidence and circumspection which a lifetime of experience could not have conferred upon another.

It is wonderful that a youth should be Prime Minister at twenty-five, but it is more than wonderful that he should have previously refused an honour so dazzling, because he knew that the hour was not ripe.

Most wonderful of all is it that the title of this man to rank as a genius, in the sense that we apply the word to his father, is seriously open to dispute.

There are those who see in the younger Pitt the paragon of talent, one who triumphed by force of character alone, in default of inspiration.

The more we consider the cautious and deliberate methods by which Pitt achieved his triumphs, and especially his inability to rise to the height of the situation created by the French Revolution, the more we shall find this estimate to be borne out by the facts.

It is vain to indulge in the eugenic futility of ticketing off Pitt as being really his mother's child, and a member of the Grenville family

Nothing could be in greater contrast than his sublime ideality, with the cold and dogged ambition of that successful and most unattractive line.

On the other hand, never did son bear more striking resemblance to a father than he to whom his country was all in all, and whose proud and conscious rectitude gave him such a hold upon the support of his countrymen.

He was all Chatham, except for the divine fire

Edmund Burke, no mean judge, declared after his first speech that he was not a chip of the old block, but the old block itself.

But the very brilliancy of Pitt's success was also his most fatal handicap

A man who holds it into the forties, has naturally little time in which

THE EVE OF THE STRUGGLE

19

to develop The claim of each hour lies heavy upon him, and his schemes must issue from his brain, like Pallas Athene, mature and in full armour. He has not the time to learn, nor, cased in responsibility, has he the suppleness to expand. If Chatham himself had stepped into the place of Walpole, at the time when he was entertaining the Cobham set with his atheistical speculations, he might not have conquered America. He had the good fortune of many reverses, and of hope deferred, he was apprenticed to his greatness for a quarter of a century. So was not his son.

How could the most transcendent genius attain to its meridian under conditions like those which confronted the younger Pitt? He was called to the most fearful task of which it is possible to conceive; to restore the fortunes of his almost perishing country, and this, not by one stroke or two, but by long years of patient effort, and husbanding resources His office may have given him the mastery of his country, but at the same time it imposed upon him a tyranny as exacting as that of a Legree over his slaves. We know that he was naturally of an engaging and sprightly disposition; when he was on circuit as a barrister, his charm of manner endeared him to his seniors, and his playful wit made him the most popular of clubmen. We know that he could black his face for a romp with children, and that one night he, and two of his Cabinet, yielded to the temptation of galloping through an open toll gate, and got a blunderbuss discharged after them by the keeper These little indications are important, as showing that the human icicle, which is the popular conception of Pitt, is but a travesty drawn from the outer shell, and that somewhere beneath that chilling exterior a heart beat warm. Perhaps the man who saw deepest was William Blake. In that wild and sombre picture in the Tate Gallery, the form of Pitt appears controlling the demons of Revolution, and the expression upon his

20

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

face is sublime, even Christlike, in its strength of innocence. Romney also, a lesser man than Blake, caught an aspect of Pitt when he painted him, not with the austere dignity that the world beheld, but with a tired pathos, almost heartrending in the wistfulness of its appeal.

We must think of Pitt as of a saint, a devotee of a cause to which he bound himself from his youth up. The mainspring, and the overmastering passion, of his career was his love of England. We miss the purely religious ecstasy of his father's later years, which brought him so close in spirit to Law and the Wesleys, but the patriotic fire descended in full measure upon the son.

The whole of Pitt's affection was lavished upon his country, to the exclusion of every other object, and this is what has made the world, which little appreciates such motives, regard him as a man naturally cold. Rather should we be inclined to describe him as one of a warm and eager heart, bowed down under an Atlantean weight of responsibility.

Slave that he was to his cause, he was bound, from the outset, to weigh every word and every action. The indulgence, the free play of the emotions, which is the right of youth, was forbidden to him; he could not afford to sow wild oats. St. Paul seems to have regarded, as the crown of his trials, the responsibility for all the Churches; and Pitt knew that upon him depended the salvation of his country.

In that most illuminating incident of his frolic with the children, we are told how the game was interrupted by the arrival of two ministers. Instantly all was changed, the statesmen were kept waiting till Pitt had changed his complexion from black to white, and then they were ushered into the presence of their frigid and solemn chief, to receive his few imperious instructions.

Pitt resembled his father in his consciousness of his high calling, and, indeed, he acquired this at a much

THE EVE OF THE STRUGGLE

21

earlier age. He could not afford to indulge in such reckless attacks, worthy of Prince Rupert, as had infuriated George II, and made Walpole wish to muzzle the terrible cornet of horse. He stepped into the political arena as one born to command, and while still practising as a junior counsel, he refused a subordinate office, as unworthy of his powers. In his maiden speech, he was bold enough to compromise his chances of promotion, by inveighing against the royal system of corruption, which was drawing to a close with Lord North's ministry.

Shortly afterwards, in support of a motion by Colonel Barré, with the object of restraining these abuses, the young statesman voices, with pathetic eloquence, his sense of the gravity of the situation, and takes his stand upon the ground of patriotic principle, which, however his methods may have changed, he was never to relinquish.

" If this commission is properly constituted, there may still remain some hopes for the prosperity of this country. . . . But if the motion is rejected . . . the freedom of the people and the independence of this House must be buried in the same grave with the power, the opulence, and the glory of the Empire "

Henceforth, one insistent note sounds through Pitt's oratory. The name of his country is ever on his lips, and he hardly makes a speech in which he does not, in one form or another, renew his profession of faith. He is like a man intoxicated with the idea of England, from that brief and dazzling period of his rise, to that last heartbroken cry, " My country, how I leave my country ! "

He regarded himself as her high priest, and he filled that office with a conscious dignity, but with an intensity of devotion that almost precluded the vice of pride. On resigning his first office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, he expressed himself with an eloquence that bears the stamp of its own sincerity. " You may take from me, Sir, the privileges and emoluments of place, but you

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

cannot, and you shall not, take from me those habitual

and warm regards for the prosperity of Great Britain,

which constitute the honour, the happiness, the pride of

my life ; and which, I trust, death alone can extinguish.

And, with this consolation, the loss of power, Sir, and the

loss of fortune, though I affect not to despise them, I hope

I shall soon be able to forget "

It is needless to multiply the evidences of a patriotism

which is revealed in almost every page of Pitt's three

volumes of speeches. But to say that Pitt believed him-

self to be the saviour of his country, and devoted himself

to the task, is not necessarily to affirm that his patriotism

was perfect at all points, and left nothing to be desired.

Perfect love is beyond the reach of any mortal, and à man

may give his body to the flames without attaining it even

in imperfection. Now that Pitt loved England, with all

his heart and mind and soul and strength, loved her as he

loved nothing and no one else, is not in any doubt. Yet

there is reason to regret that he was called to his task at

an age when the greatest mind is still immature, and

before his love had time to blossom forth in the fullness

of its beauty There is something austere, and even

formal, about his attachment, some lack of mellowness and

wisdom. " Her power, her opulence and her glory " were

the things he aimed at in the most straightforward

manner. That she should triumph in her perpetual

struggle with other nations, whether of peace or war,

that she should, in one word, be efficient, was the great

object that he set before himself. We have met with this

conception before, it is the old kingcraft of James I and

Bacon, of Clarendon and of Carteret, pursued with a

consummate and unprecedented skill. It is the doctrine

which was pushed to an extreme in Machiavelli's

" Prince "

We do not say that Pitt's notions were restricted,

absolutely, within the bounds of this conception. The

THE EVE OF THE STRUGGLE

23

greatest of all his speeches, that upon the Slave Trade, would be sufficient refutation of such a charge. But there is no doubt that there was something he might have learnt from his lifelong rival; some failure on his part to respond to, or even to understand, the spiritual forces that were shaping the drama of nations, in which he himself was to play such a prominent part. Macaulay, with his eye to the picturesque, has drawn for ever the contrast between the two halves of Pitt's career, the triumph of his policy before the great war, and his comparative failure to conduct it. But it was not in Macaulay's nature to divine the reason of this contrast Up to the outbreak of that tremendous struggle, the young statesman had had to deal with the men and system of the eighteenth century. For such opponents as greedy Hertzberg of Prussia, Emperor Joseph, a philosopher at home and a cheat abroad, his pawky successor, Leopold, the disreputable old Tsarina, Vergennes, and Florida-blanca, he was more than a match. These persons were one and all exponents of the game of kingcraft, and played it for all it was worth. The shamelessness of eighteenth-century diplomacy is almost inconceivable, and tended, if anything, to become worse as time went on. The partition of Poland, and the efforts of Austria to acquire Bavaria, make a story whose intricacy would puzzle a Dædalus, and whose morality might revolt a thieves' kitchen. Now Pitt understood every move in this game, and could play a straighter hand than the others. With only one exception, his career was a series of triumphs; till he was confronted by a power of which he had no experience, and which defied the rules of kingcraft—then, for a while, he was manifestly out of his element. He played the game in the old way, and calculated according to the old rules. The unchained fury of the Revolution did not fight by the book of arithmetic, and it needed spirit to conquer spirit.

24

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

But the patriotism of Pitt was proof against the most tremendous miscalculations. One thing he knew ; that the salvation of his country still depended upon him, and it was for him to pilot her, at all hazards, through the storm, and never to submit to a shameful peace. Ruin might stare her in the face, debt might be accumulated by hundreds of millions, but her honour was still dear and untarnished in his hands. He did not live to reap his reward ; he sank into the grave appalled and broken-hearted at the failure of his hopes ; but it was he who, even after his death, was the soul of England's resistance, and made it unthinkable that she should turn back or yield ; it was he who vindicated her cause, once and for all, in that prophetic sentence, " England has saved herself by her exertions, and will save Europe by her example."

So far we have considered Pitt's love for England, in relation to other nations ; his desire to place her first and to make her succeed. But there is another department, in which he shines less conspicuously. He has been often described as a great peace Minister, and this is emphatically true, within certain limits He raised England from being a despised and bankrupt power, to a position as strong in resources and prestige as she had filled before her rupture with her colonies. He made her fit to emerge victoriously from the severest struggle in which she had ever been engaged. To have accomplished this miracle may seem enough to expect from the most consummate statesman ; but there were other problems, pressing for solution, of a less obvious nature, but of hardly less importance. The England of Pitt was changing her social system with unprecedented rapidity, and, as many will maintain, changing it for the worse. Upon this social system must England's glory and welfare ultimately depend ; and it was all-important that things should be so ordered, that at least the old liberties should be preserved, and that, amid the increase of wealth, some check should

THE EVE OF THE STRUGGLE

25

be put on the tendency whereby to him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Pitt was by no means blind to the defects in the condition of the people; he started as a parliamentary reformer, and essayed to be a Poor Law reformer; but his attempts were timid and half-hearted, and he did not carry them to a conclusion. He was more energetic about dragooning the people into submission, than zealous for improving their condition by sympathy and constructive legislation. A strong case may, however, be urged in his defence. It is at least plausible to maintain that the more immediate requirements of the time were all that he could fulfil. So great was his task of preserving England's existence, that it might have been worse than folly to add to it that of guaranteeing her future. Continually throughout his career, we see how ready he was to sacrifice the ideally best course for what was practicable. His crushing sense of responsibility kept him from hazardous experiment, and whether it would have been possible for him to have done more with the means at his disposal, is a question upon which it would be presumptuous to dogmatize. It is something, at any rate, to have saved Europe.

Nothing is more remarkable in the history of this time than the success of Pitt, as compared with the failure of Fox. Fox's kind and genial nature forms a pleasing contrast to the unbending austerity of his opponent, and the ready sympathy he evinced with the cause of freedom will stamp him, in the judgment of many, as the greater statesman of the two All that Pitt lacked, he seemed to possess, and his breadth of outlook frequently enabled him to take an enlightened view of problems to which Pitt's intense concentration of purpose rendered him blind. Fox may have been right or wrong in hailing the capture of the Bastille as the greatest and best event that had eyer taken place, but he certainly took a

26

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

shrewder estimate of its importance than the man who regarded it as a transitory incident, of no special importance in the march of events.

The country understood, if all historians do not, what was the decisive difference that made the destinies of England safer in the hands of Pitt than in those of Fox. It was a superiority not of intellect, but of character. Fox represented an extreme phase of the Romantic movement. He was an enthusiast in a score of causes, he breathed the atmosphere of liberty, and his humanity was among his most conspicuous traits But he lacked the self-control, the all-absorbing sense of duty, that graced his rival He had been brought up to be a rake and a gambler ; whereas Pitt's continence had never been questioned even by the bitterness of his assailants, though they had railed at him as the good boy, who was nursed by his dad on a stool. The comfortable doctrine that would make sinners into supermen is not borne out by the facts of history It stands to reason that the man who is the slave of his passions is unfit to command, and the career of Fox was that of a libertine in politics. He was the prince ot debaters, and he did not mind what sort of weapon he picked up, provided he could wound his adversary. He opposed the royal power, as embodied in George III ; but when it was a question of his unspeakable son becoming regent, he went beyond the utmost claims of divine right. He once swore that he would oppose any motion whatsoever that might be brought forward by Pitt. On the other hand, Pitt's reliability was as notorious as his rival's unsteadiness. He had no skeleton in his cupboard, and he seldom acted in a manner unworthy of his high calling. He was superbly above the greed of lucre, and, poor man as he was, he rejected the emoluments of two sinecures, in the true spirit of his father He was ready to resume his practice as a barrister, if the regency had thrown him from power • In

THE EVE OF THE STRUGGLE

27

short, he was a man whom the nation could trust, and he justified their confidence.

In the short and stormy period of domestic interregnum that followed the American War, the character of Pitt triumphed decisively over the more showy qualities of Fox. The Whig magnates had at last, under the pressure of adversity, condescended to the methods of popular agitation, and had the country behind them when they took office with a programme of reform. As it was their one chance of retaining office, they displayed no extraordinary virtue in curtailing the royal power of corruption; though their reforming zeal was somewhat discounted by the fact that they themselves took care to grant pensions to their own friends before making these same pensions illegal. The months that followed saw a curiously exact repetition of the events of a century before. The King knew that Fox and his friends were implacably set against him; he regarded Fox himself as the most wicked and unscrupulous of schemers; and he employed all his powers of intrigue to drive him and his friends from office. There was but one way in which the Whigs could have maintained their power. They could have met finesse with honesty, and divine right with patriotism They could have convinced the country that they stood for purity of administration and the liberty to which Whigs had always yielded a lip homage. Against such a combination, the King, discredited and defeated as he was, must have been powerless.

But it soon became evident that the Whig professions of principle were little better than window-dressing, and that the cause for which they stood was that of the old oligarchy of magnates, which had already brought the country to the verge of ruin under Newcastle. When the Economic Reform motions, which were a necessary plank in the Whig platform, were got through in an amended form, the factiousness of the leaders became

28

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

apparent. Fox resigned office because the King refused

a preposterous request, that he should give the premiership to one of the most.incompetent of the mandarins ;

and not long afterwards, the whole nation was shocked at

the intelligence that Fox cynically proposed to resume

office by an alliance with the very man whom he had

denounced, with the most passionate eloquence, as

having brought his country to shame and disaster, and

whom he had even threatened with the fate of Strafford

In all the annals of party politics there is nothing more

cynical than this manœuvre, and it is only by a deadness

to every moral consideration that it is possible to defend

what the general sense of the country regarded as

infamous. Fox had struck a blow at his reputation from

which he was never to recover ; henceforth he was a man

not to be trusted.

The King had now the game in his hands, and he

played it without mercy He was dealing, not with the

representatives of the nation, but with a discredited

faction, and he had only to wait for them to commit

themselves beyond the possibility of recovery. Their

start had been unfortunate, for they had thrown out

Shelburne's ministry by a patently factious motion,

accepting the peace and condemning it at the same time.

It must also have been evident to Fox that, by his alliance

with North, he was postponing indefinitely the realization

of those principles of Parliamentary Reform to which he

professed allegiance But his crowning mistake was his

attempt to make his India Bill, a defensible measure, in

its main outlines, an excuse for introducing the spoils

system on a gigantic scale The bad impression created

by the Bill was intensified when it was known, that of the

Seven Commissioners to be appointed for the control of

our dependencies, four were Foxites, and three, including

North's son, Northites ; men whose only qualification for

the post was their fidelity to their party, and their con-

THE EVE OF THE STRUGGLE

29

nection with its leaders. This was the King's opportunity. With a dry humour, he had refused the champions of political purity the privilege of making their friends peers; he had snubbed them publicly by refusing to confirm their gift of a blue ribbon; and now, with admirable boldness, he put forward the whole of his influence to defeat their Bill in the Lords. Then, and not till then, did Pitt consent to take office. The defeated ministers, as if finally determined to discredit themselves and their cause, now put forward all their energies to prevent their constituents from having any voice in the dispute; and Pitt had only to stand to his guns, in the teeth of their factious opposition, to make their ruin a matter of absolute certainty. Even in Parliament, they did not fight like men who believed in their cause; the heterogeneous majority melted away; and when at last the constituencies were called upon to give their decision, the result was not only a defeat, but almost an annihilation, all the more remarkable, as showing how even the old, corrupt electorate could respond, upon occasion, to a wave of moral indignation. Henceforth it was manifest that Pitt, and Pitt alone, was the man who could be trusted to save England.

Nobly was that trust fulfilled! The next decade saw a resurrection almost incredible, when we think to what a pass England had been reduced by the American War. Yet we must not look upon Pitt as a magician, who could make gold out of lead, and who worked his spells without adjusting means to ends. Though he was faced by every apparent disadvantage, there were invisible forces working in his favour, which might restore everything, if he only knew how to avail himself of them The series of changes was beginning to take effect which was to make England the workshop of the world. Rough and obscure men had discovered the means of spinning twenty threads where one had been spun before, and of calling forth the

30

HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH

PATRIOTISM

buried energy of primeval forests to drive our machinery.

We had now arrived at that point of our commercial

development at which we could reap full profit from the

inventions of such men as Arkwright.

We read in Adam Smith that the division of labour can

only take place when there is a sufficiently large market.

It does not pay to organize industry upon a grand scale,

unless there is a reasonable prospect of selling the pro-

duct. Now, throughout the eighteenth century, England

had been steadily pushing her commerce, in all quarters

of the globe Her naval supremacy, which even the

American War had not taken from her, was a factor in

her success, and so too was the influence of the moneyed

interest upon her government. The endless and wearı-

some dynastic rivalries of the Continental states diverted

their energies into channels in every sense of the word

unproductive. The benevolent despots did indeed make

efforts to foster native industries, but their efforts were

spasmodic, and too obviously artificial to reap any

permanent success British statesmen, on the other

hand, when they were not altogether beneath contempt,

had ever a keen eye for markets. India was becoming

our preserve, and though we lost the government of the

United States, it was found that we were still able to

attract the greater part of their trade ; our African, Turkey

and South Sea companies continued their work of tapping

various sources of wealth ; and the Methuen Treaty with

Portugal long remained one of the corner-stones of our

policy. At the time of Pitt's accession to power, the

tonnage of our shipping had almost exactly doubled,

since the coming of the Hanoverian dynasty.

Again, it was a necessary preliminary to a great de-

velopment of industry that there should be enough

capital available to set it going The eighteenth century

had witnessed a steady development of capitalist industry.

Even before the invention of machines, the rich man, who

THE EVE OF THE STRUGGLE

31

could hold back his stock and study the market, had, as we have seen, a continually increasing advantage upon his less favoured competitor, and this advantage had been steadily fostered by the Government A system of credit had been gradually developing round the Bank of England, and offering money, at reasonable rates of interest, to such as chose to sink it in improving their business. In every respect, then, the time was ripe for an expansion of industry upon an unprecedented scale, and Crompton and Arkwright were only responding to an unexpressed demand for improved facilities of production.

It is beginning to be realized now, that this Industrial Revolution was by no means the blessing it seemed to our fathers, who were apt to make the mistake of judging solely by statistics of production and trade. It is at least as plausible to take the view that it was an unmitigated disaster; a social upheaval attended with infinite misery, altering permanently for the worse the relation between master and man, and marring the countryside with the growth of those hideous overgrown towns, which Cobbett used to describe as " wens." How much there is to be said for this side of the case, we shall see later; but here we would point out that, however bad may have been its ultimate effects, it is hard to see how England could have been saved, if no Industrial Revolution had provided her with the sinews of war. For just at the time when her prospects seemed at their blackest, the change was beginning to take effect; to her old staple industry of weaving, she added those of hardware on a large scale, and, above all, cotton spinning. During Pitt's administration, and before the great war, the amount of raw cotton imported annually was about trebled; the amount of pig-iron manufactured was increasing by geometrical progression, doubling itself in about ten years; and our exports advanced from an official value of some nine millions in 1781, and thirteen

32

HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH

PATRIOTISM

millions

in

1784,

to

twenty-two

millions

in

These

figures

speak

for

themselves.

At

the

most

critical

time

in

the

whole

of

her

history,

England

was

thus

coming

to

occupy

a

position

of

unique

advantage.

In

no

other

nation

were

more

than

the

first

stirrings

of

the

change

apparent.

Three

circumstances

combined

to

give

England

her

overwhelming

advantage

;

her

coal

supply,

her

security

as

an

island

sea

power,

and

the

genius

of

her

inventors.

She

was

able

to

make

the

world

her

customer,

and

to

undersell

her

rivals

in

their

own

markets.

Moreover,

her

growing

wealth

provided

her

with

a

rapidly

expanding

revenue,

and

made

her

able

to

perform

feats

of

borrowing

and

spending

such

as

would

have

staggered

the

imagination

of

a

Walpole,

or

even

a

Chatham

Pitt,

therefore,

was

in

a

more

favourable

position

than

might

have

appeared

from

the

magnitude

of

our

debt,

and

the

slump

in

Consols.

Time

was

working

in

his

favour,

and

he

had

only

to

wait

upon

events,

and

allow

the

beneficent

tendency

full

scope,

in

order

to

reap

its

profits

for

the

nation.

He

proceeded,

as

was

his

wont,

experimentally,

and

with

infinite

caution

Retrenchment

and

simplification

were

the

keynotes

of

his

policy.

The

new

conditions

operating

in

our

favour

were

putting

the

old

complex

mercantile

system

out

of

date

;

English

industry

was

attaining

such

a

position

of

superiority

that

complex

manipulation

was

superfluous,

and

its

strength

was

so

great

as

to

make

protection

more

of

a

clog

than

a

help.

But

Pitt

was

no

doctrinaire

free-trader

;

he

had

profound

admiration

for

Adam

Smith

;

but

it

was

not

his

way

to

take

his

policy

out

of

books,

he

judged

each

case

on

its

own

merits,

and

he

was

apt

to

give

the

benefit

of

any

doubt

against

innovation.

By

a

lower

and

simpler

tariff,

he

put

a

check

on

immense

leakages

in

the

customs

revenue,

and

by

perpetual

vigilance,

he

checked

corruption

and

wastefulness

of

expenditure

Above

all.

he

THE EVE OF THE STRUGGLE

33

devoted himself steadily to the reduction of the debt.

Meanwhile, the industrial revolution was proceeding

with giant strides ; the taxable capacity of the country

was increasing ; surpluses were.the order of the day, and

the funds recovered as if by magic. If Pitt had antici-

pated the coming of Armageddon, he could not have

served the nation better than by thus nursing her re-

sources during these years of grace. Perhaps it may not

be extravagant to believe that such men as Pitt have a

subconscious intuition of coming peril, though they may

not be able to formulate their premonition. In any case,

we cannot help supplementing the famous description of

him, as " the pilot who weathered the storm," by Long-

fellow's impressive stanzas :

" The captain up and down the deck

Went striding to and fro ;

Now watched the compass at the wheel,

Now lifted up his hand to feel

Which way the wind might blow.

" And now he looked up at the sails

And now upon the deep ;

In every fibre of his frame

He felt the storm before it came,

He had no thought of sleep."

His work was perpetually hampered by a factious Op-

position, and by the power of vested interests ; his own

party was not always to be depended upon, and, cautious

as he was, he could not carry out his policy to the full.

But one masterly stroke he accomplished, whose value

he himself hardly appreciated (as far as our evidence

goes), and by which, alone, he amply repaid the treacherous

advantage taken, by Louis and Vergennes, of our diffi-

culties in America. After arduous negotiations, he con-

cluded a commercial treaty with France, whose main

provision was that we should admit French wines at low

duties, in exchange for English hardware and textile

II.—D

34 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

fabrics. Such an arrangement, from the French point of view, was an act of madness, worthy of the policy which was driving France into the abyss of bankruptcy. For in the north of France, especially in Normandy, textile fabrics were also being manufactured under the protection of high tariffs. This industry was in no condition to compete with that of England, now in the first vigour of its expansion, and the inevitable result of breaking down the barriers was to flood with cheap English goods the markets hitherto preserved for the French producer. The diary of Arthur Young is full of the complaints that he heard in town after town, of the ruinous effect of the new bargain in killing industry. Even the silk manufacture, with which we could not compete directly, was hard hit by the substitution of English cotton. Distress was particularly acute in the winter of 1788–9, and recent French research has shown how the unemployed from the north were drifting into Paris, and how the mob that stormed the Bastille was largely recruited from these starving and desperate men. This is the probable explanation of the frenzied hate with which Pitt was regarded by the men of the Revolution, a hate which seems quite disproportionate when we remember how reluctantly he entered upon the war. “Pitt's gold” was a sufficient explanation for every ill sans-culotte flesh was heir to, and Pitt himself was voted an enemy to the human race, a mild and humane amendment to a motion authorizing his murder.

But this was not the only blow struck by Pitt at the Bourbon power. If by his commercial policy he ruined the industry of France, by his foreign policy he destroyed the last shreds of her prestige. Under Vergennes, she had made a remarkable recovery, though it was but a last flicker of her monarchist glory. She had humbled her old enemy, and she was on excellent terms with the rest of Europe. On the other hand, England's position. was

about as desperate as could be imagined. Burdened with debt, she had not a friend left in Europe. Old Frederick of Prussia, to whom we should most naturally have looked for alliance, had never forgiven the way in which Bute and the King had left him in the lurch, at the end of the Seven Years' War. Austria was the ally of France ; Russia had her reasons for being on good terms with Austria ; France and Spain were closely linked by the family compact. England had sunk so low that her alliance was hardly deemed worth the seeking, and it was just at this time that France resumed her old policy of dominating the Low Countries. Now this, as we know, was the ancient key of our European position, and by no man was this appreciated more keenly than by Pitt. In this case the blow was aimed directly at England, for France was to combine with Holland to challenge our supremacy in India.

This was the supreme test of Pitt's early statesmanship. It does not come within our province to trace the steps by which, without firing a shot, he transformed an apparently hopeless situation into a brilliant diplomatic victory, which wrecked the French party in Holland, restored our prestige in destroying that of our rival, and left us in the bonds of an alliance powerful enough to keep French hands off the Netherlands. Napoleon classes this defeat with Rossbach and the Diamond Necklace affair, as among the causes which paved the way for the Revolution, by discrediting the Ancien Régime. The caution by which Pitt's policy was always distinguished was never better displayed than by his refusal to take action, until he was convinced the time was ripe; though his Fabian tactics were a sore trial to our impetuous ambassador at The Hague. It is important to observe, in view of subsequent events, how, from the very first, Pitt was in the tradition of Edward III and Elizabeth, in recognizing the paramount importance of the Low Countries to England.

36

HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH

PATRIOTISM

English policy had now taken a step backward, in being mainly European. Imperialist sentiment had suffered a check, in the loss of America, that kept it in abeyance for nearly a century, and Pitt was so little moved by dreams of empire as to be blind to the importance of Australia. He did not, however, altogether neglect our colonies; for he was responsible for the division of Canada into two provinces, and he won his last triumph over the Bourbons by his firmness in preserving the west coast of Canada from Spain, in the early and peace-loving days of the National Assembly. Imperialist sentiment was, however, fully awake in respect of India, the importance of which was appreciated also by France, and which was the occasion for some of the most dramatic conflicts that have ever taken place within the walls of Parliament. To go into the rights and wrongs of the Hastings case would require a volume to itself, and it is not probable that posterity will ever come to an agreement as to whether the Governor-General was a tyrant, or a cruelly wronged man. But it affords a proof of how keen an interest was excited in English breasts by anything that concerned India; an interest which was greatly enhanced by the trial itself. If Burke’s knowledge of the Orient was not above suspicion in respect of accuracy, he at least created an India, gorgeous with tropic colouring, and rich with venerable associations, for the minds of his countrymen; and it is to him, and his fellow-managers of the impeachment, that we are, in part, indebted for that pride in our Eastern dependency, which renders it unthinkable that England will ever consent to part with it, except at the price of her own existence.

The impeachment is also evidence of the change the Romantic spirit had already wrought in the minds of Englishmen That the wrongs inflicted in a distant dependency, upon the subjects of an alien race, should have disturbed the complacency of the Walpole régime, is

THE EVE OF THE STRUGGLE

37

a thing unthinkable. It was then the highest object of

statesmanship to increase the power of the nation, and

above all, to put money in her purse; but that we should

have used this power for the benefit of mankind would

have been scouted as the last absurdity of enthusiasm.

But now we have Burke reminding the Lords that our

Saviour Himself was in sympathy with the lowest of the

people, and thereby made it a firm and ruling principle

that their welfare was the end of all government. Nor

was Sheridan less emphatic. "The omnipotence of a

British Parliament will be demonstrated by extending

protection to the helpless and weak in every quarter of

the world."

This marks a distinct step forward in the conception

of English patriotism. That nations have duties more

important than their rights; that empire is less to be

regarded as an advantage than as a burden and a heavy

responsibility, is a truth which we owe to the Romantic

spirit, and which has never ceased to exercise a profound

influence upon our thought. It might almost be de-

scribed as the touchstone of the modern imperialism, by

which we may distinguish the true metal from the sham,

and its more or less implicit recognition was one of the

main sources of our strength in the struggle with Napoleon.

It was felt that we were fighting the battle of others; that

we stood for struggling peoples against their oppressor,

and for the liberty of Europe against a tyrant. It was this

consciousness that nerved us to shrink from no effort, and

to persevere in the face of every disappointment. We

loved England, because upon her victory depended the

highest aspirations of mankind.

Important as it is, this attitude does not justify the

conduct of the impeachment. If justice is to be the motive

of our policy, it is the least that is due to a man who has

occupied a position of terrible responsibility, and has,

admittedly, performed good work in the face of peril.

38

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

No success can condone for tyranny, and the honour as well as the power of British rule has to be maintained ;

but this is not to be done by reckless or factious invective.

The spectacle of Sheridan concluding his peroration by sinking gracefully into the arms of Burke ; the attempt

to include Sir Philip Francis among the managers of the impeachment ; and the unqualified violence of the attack,

must appear the more reprehensible when we consider that the charges referred to matters of which the Opposition

leaders had no direct experience, and in appraising which the most scrupulous nicety of judgment was required.

The lot of a British proconsul is not a happy one, and one of the gravest blots on our party system is the way in

which such grave affairs, as those concerning the govern­ment of our dependencies, have been treated, not with

the awful solemnity proper to a governing race, but with the heedless violence of faction. If Hastings was to be

brought to justice, it should not have been by such methods as those of his accusers, and it is pleasing to

think that their violence ultimately defeated its own end, and turned their invectives to brilliant set pieces, cal­culated to dazzle, but not to convince.

Pitt's conduct here, as elsewhere, is distinguished from that of the Opposition by the sense of responsibility which

characterized it. Though he made no attempt to vie with the oratory of the managers, he at least did his best to

ascertain all the facts, and to judge the case on its merits.

He amazed the House by his seemingly inconsistent con­duct of acquitting Hastings on one charge, and condemn­ing him on another.

It is probable that all the majesty of Burke, and the brilliance of Sheridan, did less harm to

the defence than the plain and guarded pronouncement of the young Premier, that Hastings was culpable in the

affair of Cheyte Singh.

The contrast which we have already noticed between Pitt and the greatest of his opponents, and which had

THE EVE OF THE STRUGGLE

39

ensured his triumph over the coalition, was not at all diminished by the lapse of time. It is too much the fashion to pronounce upon the rivalry of Pitt and Fox, according as our own preconceived opinions happen to coincide with those professed by one or other of the two statesmen. But the question goes deeper. Every impartial person nowadays must admit that Pitt's ideas were in many respects limited, and that the warm heart and quick sympathies of Fox guided him into paths of truth that remained closed to his rival. The vital difference between them was not one of opinion, nor of outlook, but of character. In the reaction against morality, which is the sequel of Victorian strictness, it is apt to be overlooked that a man's private life is not separated from his public career by some system of water-tight compartments, and that one who is the slave of his passions, as a man, is ill-equipped to resist the much graver temptations that assail the statesman.

Fox must always find the readier way to the sympathies of posterity. He possessed every quality that makes a man lovable, he wore his heart upon his sleeve, and so frank and generous was his disposition, that however much men might abhor his principles, it was next to impossible to dislike him personally. A number of little incidents combine to make his figure homely and dear to our imaginations ; how, when he was nearly ruined at play, and his friends feared he would commit suicide, he was found serenely buried in his favourite Herodotus ; and how, when Burke, in his terrible anger, severed their connection forever, Fox pleaded in a voice broken with tears : " There is no loss of friendship "—in vain ! This sweetness of temperament is all the more attractive, in contrast with the chilly reserve of Pitt, who felt, indeed, but seldom allowed other men to be partakers of his emotion, and we are apt to prefer Fox for the same reason that attracts us, in ordinary moments, to the

40

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

sunny, smiling Aphrodite of Correggio, rather than the unfathomable tenderness of Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks ; a tenderness that seems of a world remote from ours, and baffles the imagination with its aloofness.

For Pitt, with all his forbidding traits, possessed that one needful thing, which was denied to Fox. He loved his country with the single-minded devotion of a saint, whereas Fox loved her indeed, but with the easy attachment of a libertine. He was possessed of that characteristic weakness of the Romantic spirit, lack of self-control, which renders it impossible to trace any continuous thread of purpose running throughout his career. Pitt was sometimes inconsistent, but with that nobler inconsistency that subordinates every minor consideration to one overmastering devotion to his country. Fox's actions are neither to be explained by devotion to England, nor to Whig principles, nor to liberty, nor to anything else. He fought, in company with Lord North, against going to the country ; he wrecked Pitt's scheme for a commercial union with Ireland ; he fought the Eden Treaty, though not on the only defensible ground ; and worst of all, during the time of our critical negotiations with Russia, the Opposition actually had an agent of their own at St. Petersburg, to hamper our diplomacy. But the worst stain upon the reputation of Fox and his friends was their connection with the Prince of Wales. Their readiness to squander public money on that most undeserving object gave the lie to all their democratic oratory, and their conduct during the King's first madness was nothing less than scandalous. It had been the excuse, and a lame one, for the coalition with North, that it was inspired by an austere zeal for curbing the royal power ; but the genuineness of such professions was not above suspicion, when it was discovered that Fox and his friends were ready to throw overboard the principles of the Revolution, and

THE EVE OF THE STRUGGLE

41

take their stand upon divine right as against the sovereignty of Parliament.

To talk of Pitt as a perfect statesman, or of his opponents as unscrupulous knaves, would be to use the language of faction.

The Opposition could boast a greater leaven of gifted and imaginative minds than the somewhat mediocre following of Pitt ;

they had visions to which his eyes were closed, and sometimes touched heights of eloquence above the scope of his wings.

But their conduct is a conclusive refutation of their claim to be treated as responsible statesmen, and the confidence the country reposed in Pitt was more than justified by events.

During these critical years of preparation, neither the big battalions which followed dubiously in the Premier's wake, nor the brilliant party of Carlton House and liberty, could conceivably have been adequate to the task of restoring England's shattered prestige and resources.

One man, by strength of character rather than genius, was able to perform the necessary work for the country he loved so dearly, and when the hour of trial came, it was found that he had not worked in vain :

"Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem."

CHAPTER III

ENGLAND AND THE REVOLUTION

It may seem strange that the cause of liberty did not make greater headway in England, considering the miserable state into which the mass of the people were drifting. The more wealth England produced, the less of it got into the pockets of the poor.

The rapid advance of mechanical invention set up an evil competition between labour and machinery. It became next to impossible for the labourer to obtain for himself an increased proportion of the national dividend, because it was usually cheaper to get a machine to do his work than to raise his wages.

He was losing all those small resources that made him independent, and gave him something to fall back upon. The enclosure of the common lands combined with the killing of domestic industry to swallow up his little plot of land.

At the same time, the price and value of his provisions were rising, and from the roast beef and plum pudding of old England, the poor man was often reduced to a diet in which meat of any kind figured as a rare luxury.

" Good God," cries Fox in 1795, " we are reduced to such a point of misery that . . . not one man in ten is able to earn sufficient bread for himself and his family !"

In the same year was started that fatal experiment in parochial socialism, by which the magistrates took upon them to supplement wages out of rates. This so-called " act," which was probably inspired by nothing worse than good-natured

42

stupidity, like so many upper-class schemes of social reform, had the effect of inflicting a real injury, under the guise of a benefit. It ended in pauperizing about a quarter of the population, and rendering the poor labourer's condition more desperate than ever. He was at the mercy of his master, at the mercy of the overseer, at the mercy of the justices. From being a man of independent rights and means, he was sinking into a condition that denied him even the pretence of freedom

How was it, then, that the English poor endured, with such wonderful patience, the strain and stress that ensued upon the French Revolution, and turned a deaf ear to every appeal to plant the tree of liberty, and join hands with their brothers across the Channel? The question is one which probably does not admit of a simple answer, but we have already hinted at some of the causes which kept Johnny Raw loyal to King and country, and prevented him from making a bonfire of the squire's mansion.

We read of riots in certain agricultural districts, but it is wonderful how few and innocuous they were, especially when we consider how intolerable must have been the hardships the poor had to sustain. If we want to see country life at its worst, we have only to peruse Crabbe's "Village." It may be argued that this case is not normal, as the community in question was demoralized by smuggling, and situated on soil of exceptional barrenness, that Crabbe's art consciously exaggerates the dreariness of life to match that of the scenery—and today one would not do well to see Wessex only through the glasses of Mr. Thomas Hardy—but the dry records of statistics show that Crabbe's picture must, in some cases at least, have come not far short of the facts.

In estimating these hardships of the poor, we must make a certain allowance for the personal equation. To judge of the extent of their sufferings by our own nervous valuations, or even by the sensibility of poets like Crabbe,

44

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

would be a mistake, though a mistake on the right side.

It is extraordinary to what an extent men may become inured to physical ills by force of habit. The instance

of the sailors is a case in point. We know how a large proportion of these gallant fellows were torn away from

peaceful employments to a life of almost inconceivable hardship, and how discipline was enforced among them

by an unsparing use of the cat, atrocious floggings, laid on, not by drummer boys, as in the army, but by lusty

boatswains. And yet, when these men mutinied at Spithead, they do not appear to have considered the

question of flogging as important enough to figure among their grievances. There is even a kind of schoolboy

pride in the Captain of the Odds Bobs song, who, after taking the Frenchman, declares :

" If you hadn't, you lubbers, I'd have flogged each mother's

son."

It is a pathetic, and not unpleasing reflection that the grievances which cause men to revolt are more often of the

mind than of the body. It has certainly been the case in England, where our two Revolutions were enacted in

times of uncommon material prosperity. In the social order, especially, is it true that there is nothing either good

or bad, but thinking makes it so. It is here that the difference lies between the English and the French

peasant systems, at the end of the eighteenth century. Historians have recently made the discovery that the

French peasants were by no means so badly off as some people have imagined, and that Arthur Young, especially,

was deceived by their notorious secretive faculty. Against Young's tale of misery is quoted the incident in

Rousseau's " Confessions," when Jean Jacques went into the cottage of a peasant, and was entertained upon

starvation diet, until his host had satisfied himself that his guest had no official connection—and then away went

ENGLAND AND THE REVOLUTION

45

the coarse herbs, and a feast was spread which would have made poor Johnny Raw's mouth water. The French peasant was well enough off, in a humble way, but he dared not reveal it, for fear of having his little wealth pounced upon by the tax-collector.

This, much more than the heartrending case of Arthur Young's poor old woman of Rezonville, was big with the possibilities of Revolution. It was not oppression, but insolence, that made these men rise and mutiny against their masters. What inducement had they to do anything else? There was no pretence of fair play, no bond of sympathy between landowner and peasant. The lord of the château was a man they seldom saw, he breathed a different atmosphere from theirs, and regarded them with undisguised contempt as “canaille,” a word for which there is fortunately no exact English equivalent.

The Government was openly against them. The taxes, which were taken off the shoulders of the rich, were laid on those of the peasant, and in addition to this he was harassed by royal and seigneurial obligations, of working on roads, or silencing frogs, which may not have been physically intolerable, but which were blatantly unreasonable, and humiliating to his pride. All this might have been atoned for, had the monarchy been as it was in the days of Le Roi Soleil, when the French nation rallied so splendidly to the appeal of a king they were proud of, in despite of defeat and destitution.

But their Government now gave them nothing to be proud of, it was both ridiculous and unsuccessful. Rossbach had robbed the Bourbons of their prestige, the Diamond Necklace of any divinity that still hedged their line. When the Ancien Régime fell, it found few friends. And loyal La Vendée, be it noted, was one of the poorest and most backward parts of France.

When the Revolution began, it is noticeable how every outbreak was provoked and intensified by some outrageous piece of insolence on the part of the governing

46 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

class. The first outbreak of actual resistance, the tennis-court oath, was preceded by a characteristic message from the Comte d'Artois, that he wanted the tennis-court, in which the States-General was assembled, for a game. The first candidate for the lamp-post was the minister, who was known to have said that the people might eat grass. The very Bastille was not a grievance, but a symbol; its use as a prison had virtually ceased, but its frowning towers represented everything that was most abhorrent to the souls of free men, a secret and monstrous tyranny. Then, too, on the night before the women had marched to Versailles, the Royalists, drunk with loyalty as well as wine, had torn down the national cockade, and openly avowed their natural hatred of the patriots and all their works :

" Français, pour nous, ah ! quel outrage !

Quel transports il doit exciter !

C'est nous qu'on ose méditer

De rendre à l'antique esclavage ! "

Though the English yokel had probably little enough to boast of, from a material point of view, the spirit in which he was governed was the very opposite of this. When Arthur Young fell under the suspicion of being a seigneur, he treated the peasants, who were throwing out hints about hanging him, to a little speech, in which he contrasted the advantages of the English country-side with their own condition under their lords. " Gentlemen, we have a great number of taxes in England which you know nothing of in France ; but the tiers état, the poor, do not pay them; they are laid on the rich ; every window in a man's house pays ; but if he has no more than six windows he pays nothing ; a Seigneur with a great estate pays the vingtièmes and tailles, but the little proprietor of a garden pays nothing ; the rich for their horses, their voitures and their servants, and even the liberty to kill their own partridges, but the poor farmer

ENGLAND AND THE REVOLUTION

47

nothing of all this, and what is more we have a tax paid by the rich for the relief of the poor . . . our English method seemed much better." So thought the crowd too, who approved of every word, and gave the speaker an ovation. Another contrast which Young notices is the instant celerity with which the least vibration of feeling or alarm is transmuted through England ; an effect of the forms and traditions of freedom, as compared with the ignorance and incapacity for combination even of the French nobility, " owing to the old government, no one can doubt." The literary cliques of the capital constitute themselves " the people," the mob burn and plunder in blind ignorance, while as for the loyalists, " they fall without a struggle and die without a blow."

We have no intention of throwing a sentimental halo round the heads of the English gentry. That they had, as a class, grievously wronged the poor, is only too apparent from the history of the eighteenth century. The wrong had been perpetrated clumsily and selfishly, but not cynically or in open defiance of justice, as in the case of exemptions from taxation. The English squire knew how to tyrannize, but he was not a cold and insolent tyrant, Johnny Raw was not " canaille."

We have already observed something of the instinctive sympathy that subsisted between the squires and their dependents. The mere fact that the average English landlord lived for the greater part of the year on his own estate, and that agriculture and field sports formed the main interest of his life, kept him from getting out of touch with his people, or altogether forfeiting their respect. Never had such an interest been taken in the improvement of land, and never had cultivation been so efficient. Arthur Young, a transparently honest man, who devoted his life to the collection of facts about agriculture, is never tired of praising our landlords. It was their zeal for improvement that had been the justifica-

48 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

tion for enclosure, and ruinous though this had been in

practice, there is evidence that every care was taken to

preserve the legal rights of those affected. Nor is it

possible to prove any widespread revolt against the

enclosures. The brilliant and gifted writer, who has

recently thrown such a vivid light upon the iniquities of

the system, has worked up his story to a dramatic climax,

by describing the agricultural revolt that broke out in

1830, but he has failed to lay due emphasis on the fact

that the nucleus of disaffection was just in those districts

where enclosure had not taken place, for the reason that

there were practically no common lands left in the

eighteenth century to enclose

There was another side of English country life than

that depicted in Crabbe's " Village." The kindliness and

hospitality with which tradition has invested the squire-

archy cannot have been entirely the creation of fiction.

In no other country is it possible to find anything to

compare with it, and we extract the following from a

villainously written jingle of 1821, the reverse of senti-

mental, which purports to narrate the career of a typical

squire :

" All the villagers met in the servants' large hall,

And concluded the revels at night with a ball ;

Where with bosoms elated and spirits quite gay,

Delighted they danced till the first peep of day ;

For the squire ever liked all around him to see

With broad happy faces, and hearts full of glee."

From the various sidelights that we get on these land-

owners, we derive the impression that, as a class, they were

more in touch with the people than their modern successors.

In a book once famous, now forgotten, the " Adventures

of Tom and Jerry," written in the 'twenties of the last

century, we read how these admired paragons of gilded

youth spent half their time in going the round of various

low haunts--coffee shops, beer vaults, and the resorts of

drunken sailors ; accommodating themselves to their

surroundings in a manner quite inconceivable in the youth of to-day. The records of the prize ring tell the same tale of easy familiarity between the professional champions and their patrons, and perhaps the most pleasing of all accounts of country life is that of the Hambledon Cricket Club. The Duke of Dorset, as Nyren relates, sent John Small, batsman and gamekeeper, the present of a violin ; whereupon Small, not to be outdone, " like a true and simple-hearted Englishman, returned the compliment by sending his Grace two bats and balls, and also paying the carriage." It is from such incidents that we may realize how it was that the English peasants stuck by their masters, while the French were hunting theirs like wild beasts. " Under our happy Constitution," says Pitt, with evident sincerity, " I believe there is no man of rank or property at this time, so negligent of his duty, and so unacquainted with his interest, as to draw a line of separation between himself and those who are below him in rank, affluence and degree. What nation in the world now exists, or has been known to exist, in which the great and the low are placed at so little distance, or so slightly separated ? "

The very cause that hurried the French Revolution to its worst excesses, prevented it from gaining a hold upon Englishmen. Just as Frenchmen were not going to tolerate the interference of foreign despots, so John Bull was not going to have liberty forced upon him by foreigners, least of all by Frenchmen. A century of intermittent war, and a hearty contempt for the half-starved, frog-eating papists, whom Hogarth had drawn for him, had not tended to make his mind a fertile soil for the propagation of Jacobin doctrine. He had a natural suspicion of abstract formulæ and sweeping changes. He had had his own revolution in England, a century ago, and of this respectable performance he was still vastly proud. Had he not constantly twitted the wretched

50 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

slaves across the Channel with the fact of his being a free-born Englishman ? And was he now going to take lessons in freedom from these very foreigners ?

Not only had he a strong belief in the merits of the Constitution, but he had no reason to be dissatisfied with the figure he cut abroad His heart had been in each of the last two wars, and if he had lost America, his pride had been salved by the victories of Rodney and Elliot.

He had at last come to appreciate his King, and when George III recovered from his madness, the country blazed with bonfires, and was wild with rejoicing. His rulers were not men who tore down the Union Jack, and told the poor to eat grass, on the contrary, Westminster Hall resounded with the praises of liberty. Even in local government, the all-powerful justice of the peace came to figure as a good-natured protector, to whom the poor man could appeal for his allowance against a brutal overseer ; the weakness of magistrates in this respect being so notorious as to call for special legislation. With all its defects, the oligarchy had deep enough roots in the affections of the people to survive the fearful strain to which it was to be subjected during the next few years.

Nothing could hinder the mental awakening from the Prose Age. The direction of the emotional current might be changed, but its force was only stimulated by the stress of the time. For, indeed, in the second half of the century, events had all been leading up to an outburst of spiritual energy, just as in the times of Elizabeth and Cromwell, England had been successively involved in two national struggles, of a nobler kind than the quarrels of the Ancien Régime. The Seven Years' War had stirred the nation to its depths, and whatever had been the merits or issue of the American struggle, at least the bulk of the people had been behind the King in wishing to subdue the colonists, and all had been united against the French, Spanish and Dutch National pride had been salved by

ENGLAND AND THE REVOLUTION

51

Rodney and Elliot ; if we had been beaten, we had at

least been beaten by our own countrymen. And these

two wars were but a prelude to the hardest-fought and

most glorious struggle in the whole of our history.

The beginning of the Revolution did not excite so much

interest in England as might have been expected. The

question of the regency was, at that time, absorbing the

nation, and men were slow to realize the import of what

was taking place. The general opinion was that France

would be grievously weakened by her internal dissensions,

and this, in the eyes of Englishmen, was an unmixed

blessing. Besides, the idea of liberty was in the air, and

to see French slaves shaking off their chains awoke a

good deal of sympathy. The power of George III had

been a source of party contention, and honest Whigs, who

had supported the motion that the power of the Crown

had increased, was increasing, and ought to be diminished,

would not object to see Louis XVI shorn of some of his

prerogatives. From this state of complacency they were

destined to a thunderous awakening.

Englishmen were ready enough to abjure Revolution

principles after they had seen its horrors ; but it was for a

political seer, himself a champion of liberty, to see these

horrors before they happened, and to warn his countrymen

of them. This man was Burke.

It is only by the keenest sympathy that we can enter

into humble and imperfect communion with one who is

beyond doubt the first political thinker of his time. There

is much to irritate, and something even to repel about

portions of his work. The charge that he gave up to

party what was meant for mankind is, unlike most neat

sayings, the literal truth as regards too much of his

earlier writings. His principles were sublime, but he

would not injure his case by pushing them to a conclusion.

His charges against Warren Hastings, and his pronounce-

ments in the American War, are a treasure-house of

52

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

wisdom, if we accept them as declarations of principle, and

do not inquire too closely about their applicability to the

facts. Burke is often wont to approach his subject in the

mood of an artist, who aims at producing a perfect piece of

work, and stamps his own personality upon the landscape

or portrait. Unrestrained subjectivity is characteristic of

the Romantic movement, of which Burke was in the van.

In his " Reflections on the French Revolution," he

came nearest to rising above this weakness. He was no

longer a party man, he had broken free from the associa-

tions of Carlton House and a too factious Opposition, the

land of which he wrote was not separated from his own

by weeks or months of travel That he was in touch with

the facts may be seen by his wizard apprehension of

coming events, and by his having divined the gravity

of the situation and its cure more surely than any other

opponent of the Revolution. His book, which first roused

England from her attitude of benevolent neutrality, as-

sailed the Revolution with a fervour equal, and a phil-

osophy superior to that of Rousseau himself. And the

point of view was characteristically English

It was worthy of the hard-headed materialism of

Buckle to carp at such a prose poem as the " Reflections

on the French Revolution." It has become the fashion

for the exponents of the New Dogma to treat rhetoric, not

as opponents, but as patients, and of course Buckle, the in-

accurate Buckle, who had nothing but praise for Burke,

as long as he remained of his own opinion, must needs

write him down a madman as soon as he ventured to

disagree with it Some consistent materialists have

carried this system to its logical conclusion, by proving

genius and madness to be synonymous But even grant-

ing genius to be mad, and Buckle sane, the fact remains

that the " Reflections " is not only Burke's masterpiece,

but one of the great books of all time. It was written at

ENGLAND AND THE REVOLUTION

53

a white heat, sometimes with tears streaming down the

author's cheeks, and the obstacles at which the hammers

of reason had tapped in vain are cleared, almost without

effort, by the wings of imagination.

Since the " Republic " of Plato, such a treatise upon

human society had surely never been written, and our

present books on politics and sociology seem, in com-

parison, but the blundering exercises of schoolboys.

To take one instance alone; for some two hundred years

the idea of a social contract had been dominant in

political theorizing, for our ancestors had their nostrums

of a social contract and a law of nature, which they could

mouth as sagely as we talk about evolution. These

theorists had always come up against the same threefold

difficulty in framing their contract; either they had to

break up the cohesion of society altogether, as the theory

of Rousseau logically tended to do; or, with Hobbes, to

make the contract an irrevocable fiction sanctioning every

sort of despotism; or finally, with Locke, to patch up some

kind of illogical compromise between the two. Burke, in

one paragraph of surpassing eloquence, settles the

controversy for ever, by taking both theories, and recon-

ciling them upon a plane to which his predecessors had

not dared to soar. " Society," he tells us, " is indeed a

contract," but he goes on to show that it is for no vulgar

or material ends, but " a partnership in all science, a

partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue, and

in all perfection." Then, having invested the contract

with a halo of sanctity, he goes on to show how it includes

not only the living, but the living, and the dead, and those

yet to be born Then we reach the triumphant conclusion

that merges all social contracts " in the great primeval

contract of eternal society." The difficulty has now

vanished, the contract remains indeed, but all transitory

selfishness has gone out of it, and when men have reached

such a conception of their country, it is beneath their

54 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

dignity to bargain about rights; even duty is no longer

a burden, but an ecstasy.

Thus Burke reveals the secret of the noblest patriotism.

It is no calculating love that we must give to our country;

all that is best in the ancestor-worship of the savage, and

the speculations of the civilized philosopher, unite to pro-

duce such a patriotism as this. The State is, to the patriot,

something awful and mysterious, not to be approached

without reverence, and above all not to be tinkered at by

every shallow or irreverent enthusiast.

It is no wonder that Burke should be misunderstood

by cold thinkers, for, indeed, he may almost be said to

have written of politics as Fra Angelico painted angels—

on his knees. The distinction that he draws between

commercial partnership, and the great partnership of the

State, is the key to a nobler and truer political phil-

osophy than that of the “sophisters, economists and

calculators.” For such men Burke has nothing but

contempt, whether they are represented by English deists,

or French philosophes. They had sought to reform the

living State, by the methods of logic and mathematics,

but Burke does not even condescend to refute them

point by point; in a few burning sentences he annihilates

them, as surely as a modern battleship would sink all the

fleet that sailed to Troy.

He even allows them to be right within their own

limits. By the principles of pure reason, a king is certainly

but a man, and a queen but a woman. But it is only a

“barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold

hearts and muddy understandings,” that cannot tran-

scend these limits, and see in the head of the State, not

the manager of a big company, but the Lord’s anointed.

For the State is built upon foundations of religion. “We

know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his

constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against,

not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot

ENGLAND AND THE REVOLUTION

55

prevail long." This is why Burke is a supporter of an

Established Church. He is not blind to the abuses and

superstitions that may impair its purity, but he is ready to

tolerate even the worst form of superstition rather than

atheism (under which term he obviously includes all that

we know nowadays as rationalism).

He is therefore not ashamed to avow himself a believer

in the claims of prejudice, as against those of reason.

There is (what Bentham and Sydney Smith scornfully

denied) a wisdom of the ages, deeper than that of any

man. Institutions are things of mysterious growth; they

come into being gradually and silently, and we cannot

understand all the forces that have been at work.

Humility is the gate of wisdom in politics, as well as in

religion. And so it comes about that Burke is no friend

to the modern mania, for submitting everything to dis-

cussion. Some things are too sacred to be touched,

except upon rare and solemn occasions, and then only

with holy reverence.

The means of political salvation are, therefore, ideal and

not material. It is not through the forms of politics, but

through the spirit behind them, that nations are made

or marred. " The decent drapery of life " is not rudely to

be torn away. Hence Burke regards chivalry as being

one of the great civilizing influences of Europe, and views

with horror its disappearance before " this new-conquering

empire of light and reason." Closely connected with

chivalry is the loyalty we pay to kings. This is a very

different thing from the narrow and selfish tenets of a

James I or Louis XIV, even when dignified by the courtly

eloquence of a Bossuet. Burke had always opposed the

encroachments of kingly power, and he was, to the end,

unwavering in his support of English Revolution prin-

ciples. But he saw that if men are to have a king, they

must treat him as being something nobler than an upper

servant of the State, to be taken on and dismissed at

56

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

pleasure. “Fear God, honour the King,” is no empty phrase in Burke's mouth.

Only less profound than his reverence for kingship is his reverence for property. He regarded it as almost blasphemous to admit, even for the sake of argument, that ownership might be made to depend upon the good or bad use of property. Parliaments have no right whatever to violate it. He clearly foresees and dreads that it may, at some future time, become the habit of one class in England to regard the other class as their prey.

There is, of course, a philosophy behind these teachings of Burke, and to a certain extent he is in formal agreement with the very men he most opposes. For he believes, like the deists, in a divine harmony of things; but his harmony is not rational, but mystic and spiritual—a thing to be worshipped, not to be analysed. Spiritual imagination, though Burke nowhere specifically formulates such a theory, is the key by which he penetrates to the secrets of society. As he discards pure reason as his means, so does he reject happiness as his goal. What he actually aimed at he would have found it difficult to define, save in some such terms as “every virtue and all perfection.” The school of thinkers, who were perpetually harping upon their abstract rights, seemed to him ignoble. Society was not a fortuitous concourse of business men, bargaining for their welfare upon business principles, each seeking to be the equal or supernor of his neighbour. From his standpoint, men are like the stones in a great temple, each of which has its special place, nor has the plainest stone of the foundation a right to envy or vie with the exquisitely carved capitals, still less a right to question the wisdom of the architect. The scheme of the universe is infinitely vaster than anything of which we can form an idea, but Burke is convinced that, by reverence and self-sacrifice, we can to some extent divine our part in it, and thus fulfil

ENGLAND AND THE REVOLUTION

57

the purpose of our being. All of which is to the ignorant

a stumbling-block, and to the cold foolishness.

But spiritual insight by no means renders a man hazy

and unpractical. The boldness and accuracy of Burke's

predictions about the Revolution were almost uncanny.

We must remember that when he wrote, he was the only

prominent man in England who had the remotest idea

how grave was the crisis. Fox saw the triumphant out-

burst of light and liberty. Pitt saw another move upon

the European chessboard. The worst horrors of the

Revolution were as yet only dimly foreshadowed, and

Burke's own natural bias was towards freedom, and the

resistance to oppression. But his prophecy of the break-

down of the Revolution reads almost as if it were an

analysis, written in the light of the accomplished fact.

He lays an unerring finger upon the weakness of the new

Constitution ; power would pass into the hands of a

corrupt oligarchy ; the most reckless and violent members

of the Assembly would prevail, by constantly outbidding

the others in violence ; the scheme of election was framed

so as to destroy every vestige of responsibility in the

elected ; the incompetence of each successive Assembly

was assured, by making the members of one ineligible for

the next ; the paper currency would pave the way to

extravagance and financial ruin ; terror and bloody

tyranny must ensue from a reckless constitutional experi-

ment. Burke saw beyond this to Napoleon ; he showed

how a crushing military despotism would sooner or later

put an end to this tragedy of liberty and pure reason, and

how, when such a despot did arrive, he would find every-

thing ready to his hands, thanks to the perverse ingenuity

of the artificers of ruin.

In his subsequent " Appeal from the New to the Old

Whigs," Burke develops a side of his theory which was

implicit already in the "Reflections." This is the

worship of the Constitution, which had already afforded

58 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

such a fruitful theme for the eloquence of Chatham. Burke approaches that venerable fabric with awful reverence. He does not believe that the ordinary mind is capable of so much as understanding a harmony whose apparent unreasonableness is the result of the subtlest adjustments that Time and the directing hand of Providence could contribute. "The British Constitution may have its advantages pointed out to wise and reflecting minds, but it is of too high an order of excellence to be adapted to those•which are common" ; and again, "Let us improve it with zeal and with fear. Let us follow our ancestors, men not without a rational, though without an exclusive confidence in themselves ; who, by respecting the reason of others, who, by looking backward as well as forward, by the modesty as well as by the energy of their minds, went on, insensibly drawing this constitution nearer and nearer to its perfection by never departing from its fundamental principles, nor introducing any amendment which had not a subsisting root in the laws, constitution, and usages of the Kingdom."

This last passage is of great importance, as showing the ultimate trend of Burke's doctrine, and its place in English thought. He had now, despite the title of his "Appeal," come to embrace the full Tory philosophy, by which we mean not the makeshift conservatism of faction, but the principles of Shakespeare and Hooker, of Coleridge and Beaconsfield. It is unfortunate that Burke's horror of the Revolution drove him to adopt an attitude of resistance to change, which has laid him open to the charge of wishing to retain a Chinese fixity in the order of society, an attitude literally conservative, but by no means Tory. Such a result does not follow from his principles, and is plainly negatived by the passages we have just quoted. It is by a devout study of constitutional principles, and not by a mulish adherence to every accidental or corrupt form, that we are to compass

ENGLAND AND THE REVOLUTION

59

the supreme end of drawing nearer and nearer to perfection.

Amid those who worshipped the Constitution, as among the early Christians, there was a party of the law, and a party of the spirit. Delolme, a naturalized foreigner, harped upon the string of his countryman Montesquieu, and tried to depict the Constitution as a very cunning arrangement of checks and balances, a good machine. It is natural that professors of this literal fidelity were often totally blind to the reality of the thing they strove to maintain. The spirit of the English Constitution is not to be arrived at by the most careful study of law books and visible forms.

Burke’s philosophy avoids this pitfall. He specifically admits the organic elasticity of the Constitution, that its property is to become, and not to stagnate. Only the spirit is constant, “ the one remains, the many change and pass.” Facile and a priori theories, the attempts of latter-day Medeas to cut the living organism to pieces, in order to rejuvenate it in some mad cauldron of revolution, these are the things against which his noblest invectives are directed. Alas, that he allowed the bitterness of conflict, and the memory of old partisan associations, to draw him away from the consequences of his doctrine, to the blind defence of rotten boroughs, to the opposition of reforms which would have restored, and not destroyed the spirit of the Constitution, and to a Whig deification of property, which, though defensible enough if properly understood, tends in practice to a golden-calf worship of its abuses ! It was Coleridge who took up Burke’s philosophy, and showed how far removed from stagnation the worship of the Constitution could be.

Burke’s theories are of all time, but his judgment on facts was all too fallible. His assault upon the French Revolution was masterly, as long as he confined himself to the operations of the revolutionaries ; but he was as

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

demonstrably wrong about the old governments of

Europe, as he was demonstrably right about the Jacobins.

And here we must draw a much-needed distinction.

To disapprove of the old régime is not necessarily to

countenance the new. There is a sort of intellectual

snobbishness, especially prevalent in this country, which

would stifle all criticism of the Jacobins as a blind

opposition to “ideas,” and which would condone the

blood-thirsty gang of Collots, Héberts, Marats, and

Barères, through some vague homage to progress. To us

it seems that English thought, even in the eighteenth

century, has nothing to fear from comparison with the

plausible and flashy philosophy of the French Enlighten-

ment, and in any case, this philosophy broke down hope-

lessly in practice. It gave birth to the preposterous

Constitution, which refused to work and was finally

smashed to pieces in the assault upon the Tuileries.

Severely practical considerations shaped the course of the

Revolution—the baser machinations of wire-pullers, the

military genius of men like Carnot, and, ultimately, of

Napoleon. The incorruptible exponent of pure theory,

the disciple of Rousseau, lived a puppet and died un-

pitied. Philosophy triumphed, in so far as it triumphed

at all, not in the Senate House nor on the battlefield, but

in the substitution of a clear-cut Roman Law for the

cumbrous barbarity of the eighteenth century. But

the horrors of the Place de la Guillotine, and the wrath

that shattered the kings, were the result, primarily, of

foreign insolence and intolerable aggression. Philosophy

had pulled down, necessity built up.

Be that as it may, the upshot of the Revolution was to

call into being a spirit so new and formidable as to upset

all the calculations of the eighteenth century. Only

Burke gauged the situation He saw, at the outset, that we

had to deal, not with a policy, but with a religion, even if,

as Burke maintained, it was inspired by the devil and all

ENGLAND AND THE REVOLUTION

61

his angels. " Atheism by establishment " is his phrase.

He was free from the typically modern fallacy, that

because something is vast and exceedingly powerful, it

must therefore be good. The efficiency of Jacobinism

never had a more generous exponent, its morality never

a sterner judge. So far as the Jacobins are concerned,

though we may dissent from Burke's verdict, we must

admit his insight to have been superior to that of his

contemporaries

Unfortunately, he was not able to stop at condemning

the Jacobins. He must needs have an Ormuz to his

Ahriman, and, by an excess of reaction, he fell into

glorification of that which the Revolution superseded.

The problem was more complicated than ever he imagined.

He would not recognize that the very faults for which he

blamed the Jacobins had been the destruction of their

enemies. He talked of atheism by establishment, not

realizing that atheism had been established, in all but

name, in the France of the old régime, that the poor

murdered King was one of the few people in the whole of

France who thought of taking religion seriously. He

appealed to the comity of nations, and ignored the fact

that the diplomacy of Europe had for years been one of

the foulest games ever played between men ; that robbery,

murder, treachery, and shame were nothing accounted

of among the fraternity of kings. God had been mocked

in Notre Dame, long before her aisles were dedicated to

Reason, and her side chapels to Lust ; mocked by Church-

men who resorted to Voltaire in secret, and persecuted

by the light of day in the name of Christ.

The error of Burke was generous, and almost inevitable.

He saw, perfectly correctly, that the ordinary methods of

statecraft were helpless against this Jacobin fury, this

" new conquering empire of light and reason." Only by

opposing spirit to spirit, the divine to the Satanic, could

Europe purge herself of her disease. He argued from the

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assumption of a family of nations. The divine harmony

of the universe, in which he believed, did not stop short

at the solemn contract between the living, the dead, and

the unborn of each state. There is the great primeval

contract of eternal society, by which not only individuals

but nations have their duties. No state is in entire

independence of the rest of the world, nor free to cut

herself off from the fellowship of Christian civilization,

and constitute herself a nuisance and a danger to her

neighbours. Jacobinism, and all that it implies, cannot be

confined by frontiers. It must destroy or be destroyed.

Therefore the nations of Europe, under their lawful and

Christian sovereigns, must combine in a holy crusade to

destroy this plague centre.

This would have been the height of wisdom, if only it

had been practicable. But Burke had reckoned without

his kings. There were the skinflint of Austria, the

numskull of Holland, the Don Quixote of Sweden, the

harlot and husband-killer of All the Russias, the com-

placent cuckold of Madrid, the bawdy feather-head of

Berlin, and a ragtag and bobtail of minor potentates,

possessing neither character nor importance, about as

sorry a crew as could conceivably have been scraped

together from the off-scourings of the human race.

These men had neither the wits to perceive their danger,

nor the virtue to combine against it. How could the

three, whose swords were reeking with the blood of

Poland, reprobate aggression? How could liars and

thieves, well acquainted with each other's principles,

unite in any common scheme which involved self-

sacrifice and mutual trust, and did not hold forth the

promise of plunder?

Yet Burke persisted in treating and appealing to these

abjects as if they were honourable and righteous men, a

band of brothers conscious of the sanctity of their office,

and living, as much as Milton himself, in their task-

master's eye He spoke like a philosopher to fools, and like a prophet to knaves. He urged them to pursue a course whose rejection they and their heirs long had reason to deplore. They must put forth their whole strength to crush the Revolution, and above all, they must make it a war of principle, solemnly abjuring any acquisition of French territory. Burke's military instincts were no less sound than his policy. He would have subordinated every consideration to the attainment of the supreme object of the campaign. He would have had England strike at the heart of France from the West, using loyal La Vendée as a base, and gathering up all the elements of royalism as she advanced towards Paris. It would have been well had this sound and brilliant policy been adopted at the advice of the philosopher, in place of the costly folly of detached expeditions, costing thousands of brave lives, and putting heart into the enemy.

Burke's appeal to his own countrymen was no less weighty than passionate. Like Milton, he was a historian, and his knowledge of the past was extensive enough to enable him to remind his countrymen of the example of their ancestors. He showed with what spirit and cheerfulness the Whig statesmen of the Revolution had sustained the contest against Louis XIV. He maintained, that only once in the last hundred years had we gone to war for the sake of material gain, and that, in the deplorable instance of Jenkins's ear. "The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar are purchased at ten times their price. The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity ; the rest is crime "

" As to war," he says, " if it be the means of wrong and

64 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

violence, it is the sole means of justice among nations. Nothing can banish it from the world." And joined with his belief in war, is a love of the patriotic associations by which " all the little, quiet, righteous war is glorified." " Riuulets that watered a humble, a contracted, but not an unfruitful field, are to be lost in the waste expanse, and the boundless barren ocean of the homicide philanthropy of France." With all his false trust in the kings, Burke appreciated the situation as no one else did. He saw what ought to be done, and it was not his fault that there was found no one capable of doing it. As events literally justified his prediction with regard to France, so, by a more gradual but not less certain process of events, his wisdom was vindicated in Europe. As long as the war was waged from selfish motives and by selfish men, so long France remained invincible. It was only when the peoples themselves rose in their wrath, and shed their blood for " their friends, their God, their country, their kind " that the tide of aggression was stemmed, and rolled back from Moscow to Paris.

This is the standpoint from which we must regard the struggle between France and the nations; it is the thread by which we may unravel the mystery of the drama that began in the Hall of the States-General, and ended on the plateau of Mont St. Jean. Everywhere it is spirit, and not matter nor strategy, that triumphs in the long run. With all the monstrous wickedness that was enacted at Paris, the French were at least fighting, and knew they were fighting, for a holy cause. Traitors and thieves threatened their motherland; the murderers of Poland would have portioned among themselves the sweet fields of France. Slaves, hired mercenaries, were swarming on the frontiers ; no fire of patriotism animated their bosoms ; no " Marseillaise " lightened their steps as they trudged, under the canes of their officers, to the sack of Paris. They were pieces on a chessboard, pushed hither and thither

ENGLAND AND THE REVOLUTION

65

knowing not what they did; and opposed to them was the wrath and frenzy of a nation at bay. It was only

the red fires of affliction that kindled, after many years,

the white radiance of patriotism. France became the

oppressor, hounded to her last fastness by the nations

she had violated. The crusade for which Burke thundered

in vain was preached from the frozen steppes of the

Caspian to the orange groves of Lisbon. Even sluggish

Austria became inspired, even Prussia caught the breath

of freedom. Against such odds, a Napoleon was as helpless

as a Coburg.

England, from the outset, occupies a peculiar and

honourable position among the opponents of the Revolu-

tion. She, alone, had maintained a comparative freedom

from the petrified tyranny of eighteenth-century Europe.

How great had been her lapses, how near she came to

passing under the domination of a close and corrupt

oligarchy, has been shown in the preceding chapters.

But the current of national life had never ceased to flow,

and since the middle of the century, patriotism was on

the increase. In her alone revolutionary France found,

from the outset, a foeman worthy of her steel. It was

with a true instinct that Napoleon devoted his sternest

energies to her destruction, that even when he overran

the Continent, it was in the hope of strangling his last

and most terrible enemy. It took some years to fan our

patriotism, the tradition of centuries, into full blaze, and

it was only when we were brought to the verge of ruin

that we realized the seriousness of the struggle. Then we

braced ourselves to grapple to the death with our old

enemy. England's method was that of the bulldog who,

having got a grip upon the throat of his opponent, holds

on in spite of punishment, and gradually shifts the grip

inwards. Burke did not live to see England rise to the

height of his ideal, but rise she did, and from her went

forth the flame that kindled Europe. But it required the

II.—F

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

cannon thunder of Austerlitz, and the chains of Tilsit, to bring Burke's lesson home to the nations. He sank into the grave, bereaved, overwearied, almost in despair ; for wisdom did not bring him happiness, and it is the largest heart that feels most keenly the intolerable mystery of human suffering.

It was around Burke's " Reflections " that the controversy about the Revolution raged with the greatest fury. The book had to sustain the fiercest attacks of the champion of liberty. The most erudite and temperate of several " counterblasts is that of the Whig Mackintosh. It is without fire or imagination ; Mackintosh sneers at Burke's " homilies of moral and religious mysticism, better adapted to the amusement than to the conviction of an incredulous age." From these words we may at once see the whole weakness of Mackintosh's position. He was as incapable of understanding his opponent, as a blind man of proving the existence of colours to one who could see.

He is one of the pioneers of politics, treated as a science. He believes that the passions can be regulated with mathematical precision, and that the principles of government are capable of precise statement, and accurate application. This is what the French Constituents have done, and he believes that they have done it very well. He triumphantly shows, in the most logical manner possible, that Burke's fear of a military despotism is absurd, that the Assembly have "forever precluded both their own despotism, and the usurpation of the army." He has much to say about the mildness and tolerance of revolutionaries, and of course is far too reasonable to have anything to do with chivalry. In fact, he is like the Duke of Galway, who drew up his troops after the most approved models, and was beaten in the most correct manner in the world. He opposed reason and political science to imagination, and turned out to be utterly,

ludicrously in the wrong. He afterwards joined the

forces of order.

But a more formidable opponent was the famous

" Tom " Paine, who was now anathema in pious circles.

With none of the scholarly dialectic of Mackintosh, he

makes his appeal to the " plain man " and his weapon is

common sense. We have noticed that he is still a name

to conjure with among the genial propagandists who

preach the dogmas of Haeckel and " Saladin " in Hyde

Park, and this because he is one of those who make a

special appeal to crowds. All that he writes is trans-

parently honest ; he scores his points with a force and

precision that would have given him an easy mastery in

any debating society ; but never does he stray into the

higher regions of thought, and it is easy to see why Burke

did not condescend to meet him with his own weapons

(an omission which naturally aggrieved Paine, who put

it down to the consciousness of defeat).

There is no thought of chivalry or courtesy towards a

great opponent in " The Age of Reason," and for this

Paine is hardly to be blamed. The issues at stake seemed

to him so enormous, and Burke's attack so provocative

and mischievous, that he regarded him as an enemy with

whom no terms were to be kept. He anticipated Buckle's

aspersion of madness. All the mysticism and subtlety

of Burke's mind were, to him, fog and moonshine ;

" chivalrous nonsense " is a characteristic expression of

his. He would make a clean sweep of royalty, priesthood

and aristocracy, and build up society afresh upon the

basis of liberty and the rights of man. The continuity of

society simply did not exist for him ; the wisdom of the

ages was noxious prejudice ; the most venerable institu-

tions were brought to the bar of individual reason, cross-

examined and bullied by the most merciless of prosecut-

ing attorneys, found guilty by a jury of " plain men," and

sentenced without reprieve or regret to instant execution.

68 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

But Paine, not to be outdone by Burke, also ventured into the dangerous field of prophecy. He did not believe that monarchy and aristocracy would continue for seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries of Europe. He also was a believer in the mildness of the revolutionaries, and accused Burke of having traduced them on this score. He subsequently, to his honour, urged counsels of mildness on the Convention, and for this, but for a miracle of good luck, he would have been guillotined. As it was, he languished for months in prison, because the President of free America would not interfere on behalf of a man who had denied certain religious tenets. His adored Lafayette had long ago fled from a French knife to an Austrian prison.

The third champion of liberty against Burke is Dr. Priestley, whose library was destroyed by the Birmingham mob, and who had to flee to America. His attitude is that of the scientist who has strayed into realms where science is powerless. He answers Burke in a series of letters, temperate and passionless, in which he upholds the supremacy of the people against the pretensions of kings, and harks back to Locke and Somers, a line of argument which afterwards proved terribly effective in the hands of Burke. He treats his opponent with a courtesy which is too bloodless to be angry, and poor Marie Antoinette with the refined brutality of a vivisector. His letters are neither very foolish nor very interesting, his readers probably found him tedious, and events certainly proved him wrong. He commits himself, if possible, more hopelessly than either Mackintosh or Paine in the matter of prophecy. He tries to show, by the analogy of America, that the French Revolution will be a peaceful and orderly affair, and he launches forth into a glowing anticipation of the coming democratic Utopia, in which swords shall be beaten into ploughshares, standing armies abolished, the very idea of distant

ENGLAND AND THE REVOLUTION

69

possessions ridiculed, and truth establish her reign by

her own evidence That time has not yet arrived.

Before we leave this controversy, it may be interesting

to glance at the sermon of Dr. Price, which aroused

Burke's bitterest invective. This turns out to be a less

terrific affair than might have been supposed. Apart

from the flamboyant and offensive peroration, it takes

the form of a treatise on the love of our country. This

sentiment Dr. Price commends, but in a rather cold

fashion. It is not to be exclusive, and it is hedged about

by many limitations ; we are to understand, by our coun-

try, our countrymen ; we are not to extol their merits above

those of other countries, and we are to eschew all idea of

conquest and aggression, though it is our duty to defend

our homes and freedom against foreign tyranny. Dr.

Price recognizes that the love of our country must come

before the love of humanity. But he is inclined to make

common cause with Voltaire, in stipulating for some

advantage to be derived in return for patriotism, and

asks how a Russian, for instance, can be said to have a

country. The duties of a patriot consist in disseminating

reason, virtue and freedom among his countrymen.

Were it not for the " Nunc Dimittis " chanted over a

captive king, and the fiery Jacobin defiance to all tyrants,

neither Burke nor any other patriot would have found

much to arouse his wrath in a treatise which, on the

whole, was a moderate and temperate statement of the

revolutionary case.

Standing apart from all these controversialists of the

hour is the man who represents most fully the spirit of

the advanced French thinkers, the father-in-law of Shelley,

William Godwin. His was a mind too abstract to be

in touch with the facts of this world, and too cold to

perceive the things of the spirit. None the less is he

interesting for the whole-hearted thoroughness with

which he pushes his theories to their most extreme and

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

absurd consequences. He sets out with a theory of

human nature A man is an infinitely perfectible

machine, and would become automatically perfectly

happy and virtuous, if he were only well enough in-

formed as to his true interests. The very notion of free

will bothers Godwin; he wants to reflect upon the moral

affairs of mankind, with " the same tranquillity as we

are accustomed to do upon the truths of geometry."

Even if free will did exist, we should have to get rid of it

as soon as possible.

Upon this basis, Godwin tries to erect a moral calculus

in which everything is to be decided by pure logic, and

even friendship and love are to be eschewed, except in so

far as they can be made matters of calculation. Punish-

ment is to be replaced by a cold-blooded mercy, far more

insulting to the criminal. Criminally constructed auto-

matons are to be reasoned out of their crimes by other

automatons. Marriage is an unjust monopoly, because

it hinders automatic freedom of choice. On the whole,

however, the automatons are so well constructed, that the

task of the automatic Government is to do as little as

possible, and let the automatons work out their own

salvation by dialectic ; until finally all government will

cease in an automatic Utopia, in which all the machinery

will work perfectly, and, the principle of perpetual motion

having been discovered, each automaton will go grind-

ing on for ever, without the disagreeable necessity of

co-operating with other automatons to turn out new

machinery.

With all these men, the love of freedom overshadows the

love of country. The very word patriot was twisted out

of its proper meaning, and in France it came to be almost

synonymous with sans-culotte, and with some justifica-

tion, for there is no doubt that it was on the side of Danton,

rather than that of D'Artois, that the balance of patriot-

ism lay We find Wordsworth, in the " Prelude," telling

ENGLAND AND THE REVOLUTION

71

us how, on his arrival in Paris, he became a patriot, meaning a republican. On the other hand, we find Coleridge

quite definitely praising Lord Stanhope, for being not a patriot, but a friend of the human race.

On the whole, the English protagonists of Revolution principles do not impress us either by their influence or

their abilities. There was something alien to our national character in the clear-cut theories and stilted terminology

of the Jacobins, and the mere fact of anything being French was a serious drawback to its reception by Englishmen. Hunger and distress were facts of the most

undeniable and pressing nature, and these would incline men to any desperate course. It was in the rising industrial centres of the north that Revolution principles

made the greatest headway. But it is surprising how inconsiderable this was. There was scant incitement to

rebel, and the only bloodshed was perpetrated by loyal mobs. The charges of high treason against the most

notorious agitators were not brought home. The great riot, in the course of which the King's coach window was

smashed, was probably less due to any abstract love of freedom than to a very concrete dislike of starvation.

The patience, and not the wrath of the English poor is the wonder of our history.

At this distance of time, we find it hard to imagine the alarm with which the governing class regarded every

symptom of English Jacobin sympathies. The elaborate reports of the secret committees, appointed by both

Houses, regarding seditious practices, singularly fail to reveal any ground for panic. The corresponding and

constitutional societies seem to have been remarkable for a nervous respectability, that is often characteristic of

poor men, who combine for the assertion of their rights. Voting approval of Tom Paine is one of their most characteristic performances; a message of sympathy to the

Convention, before the war, perhaps their boldest. In

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

contrast with such terrible associations as the Jacobins and Cordeliers of Paris, they are as a flock of patient sheep to a pack of starved wolves, and, to our modern eyes, quaint rather than formidable.

If we turn from the agitators to the poets, we shall find much early enthusiasm for Revolution principles, followed, in the most conspicuous instances, by a rapid falling off, and transition to patriotism.

Among the first of the new school was Burns. It was he who took in hand that part of the work of emancipation which Wesley had left untouched For Wesley had revealed to the common man the sacredness of his soul, but Burns was to teach him the importance of his body as well. Nothing was common or base in his sight, his muse made beautiful even the drunken beggars and their more disreputable womenfolk. There is a curious duality in his nature, which runs through his art. When he is writing in Lowland Scotch, his verse is simple, poignant, and absolutely free from the shackles of eighteenth-century convention. But when he starts to write in English, although we never entirely miss the free brave spirit of the real Burns, the old forms too often resume their sway ; similes are forced ; the music grows frigid. Burns was not sufficiently educated entirely to throw off the tyranny of educated men.

But in his best verse, the voice of liberty rings out trumpet-clear. Chatham and Burke had gone far in their advocacy of her cause, but Burns carried their teaching a step further. He found his goddess in the haunts of squalor and vice, and when he talked about the people, he meant something very different from anything that the great Commoner could even have imagined He thought of the actual concrete rogues and trollops who " had been fou tor weeks together", his standpoint was not that of a leader ot the people, but one of the people.

How much did this cult of freedom influence Burns's

patriotism ? We have here to distinguish between the patriotism of a Scotsman and that of a Briton. Burns was imbued with both one and the other, for he lived at a time when the old exclusive Scottish national feeling was just merging into the larger ideal. And thus we have " Scots wha hae," with its proud defiance of British tyranny. This Scottish patriotism, however, finds its chief expression in a wistful devotion to the cause of Prince Charlie, which, for such an apostle of freedom as Burns, is very remarkable, though he refers to it afterwards as a mere bagatelle. Then, too, he had all that passionate devotion for the soil of his country, with its beauty, its character, and its associations, that we have met already among the Elizabethans, and which we shall find in nearly all the earlier Romantics.

But it is at the crisis of the French Revolution that the character of Burns is most plainly revealed. He was an exciseman at the time and, of course, in the pay of the Government. But he was extremely injudicious in his talk, especially when under the influence of drink. He had already shocked Tory sentiment by proposing the health of Washington as a substitute for that of Pitt. The events that were occurring across the Channel filled him, at first, with ill-concealed joy. The abstract rights of man inspired him, probably, with less enthusiasm than the concrete spectacle of the common people asserting themselves against the practical tyranny of their " superiors." The Jolly Beggars were of the stuff out of which sans-culottes are made. Burns had the temerity to propose the health of the last verse of the last chapter of the last Book of Kings, and when he had captured a smuggling ship, he sent a present of some of her guns to the Convention, which was then on the verge of war with England.

This conduct naturally got him into trouble with his superiors, which led to an amazing volte-face, in the shape

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of a letter to his patron Graham This is very painful reading, and contains a grovelling appeal for protection, with a declaration of the poet's love for the King and Constitution. Burns was dreadfully alarmed, not only for himself but for his family. But that he was not altogether insincere, we have the evidence of his private diary, in which he reiterates his love of the Constitution, and his distrust of republican principles.

Upon the outbreak of the war, however, he was before Southey and Coleridge in rallying to the cause of King and country. He was one of the first to join the Dumfries Volunteers, though owing to his Whig principles the Tories did not cease to mistrust him. But all his loyalty did not make him forget his championship of liberty, and his poem, " Does haughty Gaul invasion threat ? " may be taken as typical of his later attitude. His patriotism here is definitely British, and he holds that even if there are defects in our institutions,

" Never but by British hands

Shall British wrongs be righted."

The poem concludes with this triumphant harmony of the ideals of liberty and patriotism .

" Who will not sing ' God save the King'

Shall hang as high's the steeple,

But while we sing ' God save the King '

We'll ne'er forget the people "

The three young Lake poets, Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth, were all borne along by the new spirit. It was, for them, a season of immaturity ; neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth did any of their really great work during this period, and if Southey ever accomplished any great work at all, it was certainly not then He found expression for his democratic principles in a dull play called " Wat Tyler," and a duller epic called " Joan of Arc." " Wat Tyler " is a play of the type of Schiller's " Robbers," and it is into the mouth of John Ball and of Wat

ENGLAND AND THE REVOLUTION

75

himself that most of the virtuous sentiments are put.

The King, and everybody connected with him, are atrocious tyrants, liars, murderers and cowards, a charitable theory that was orthodox among the apostles of fraternity.

The virtuous and cultured peasants are represented, not only as struggling for freedom from the upper class, but loudly objecting to the war with France, because it was not to their interest that Richard should be King of the sister realm.

This attitude is common enough among that school of democrats, to whom military and national glory are vain music.

In " Joan of Arc," unlike Shakespeare, Southey describes, with positive gusto, the discomfiture of the English ; but one is almost tempted to prefer the old Pucelle, with her train of devils and her harridan's pluck, to the respectable and didactic creature of Southey.

In the preface we read, " It has been established as a necessary rule for the epic that the subject should be national.

To this rule I have acted in direct opposition, and chosen for the subject of my poem the defeat of the English.

If there be any readers who can wish success to an unjust cause, because their country was engaged in it, I desire not their approbation."

Coleridge started by being the reverse of a patriot, and we have seen how he expressly disclaimed any such title, preferring to be the friend of humanity.

From his " Ode to France " we learn how, upon the outbreak of the war, he actually desired to see the English troops beaten.

He and Southey composed a blank-verse play about the fall of Robespierre, soon after the event had taken place, and a concluding, windy oration, delivered by that arch-scoundrel Barère, intimates that now the last tyrant is fallen, everything will go well with France.

Even more enthusiastic than Coleridge was his friend Wordsworth.

His deep and austere temperament was not so quickly aroused to revolutionary fervour, but when once the idea had got possession of him, it absorbed his whole

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

being. His residence in France, during the period of the

September massacres, was, indeed, a turning-point in his

career ; it opened his mind and broadened his sympathies.

He had not yet blossomed forth into great poetry, and

his most striking production of this period is his prose

reply to a sermon of Bishop Watson. This pamphlet re-

veals Wordsworth in an aspect which is too frequently

overlooked. The Cumberland dalesman had imbibed,

from his native mountains, something of their awful and

pitiless grandeu

r, he could be the sternest as well as the

most gentle of poets. And thus we find him calmly

defending the death of Louis XVI, and though the

September massacres aroused his horror, they did not

turn him from his enthusiasm for liberty To him, as to

Burns, man was a god, and the human mind, if it could

once break free from the bonds of privilege and prejudice,

would assert its divinity and order all things well. It was

this glorious change for which Wordsworth looked, and

it was this that made it bliss for him to be alive, and very

heaven to be young. For this he was not only ready to

sacrifice the lives of individuals, but even the fortunes of

his own country. He was " a patriot of the world," and

rejoiced in the defeat of our arms. His theories, at this

time, were those of the philosophes, but his spirit was

deeper than theirs, and would carry him further.

Of Landor, it is needless to say much. His republican-

ism seems to have consisted principally in a blind and

childish hatred of any one who was unfortunate enough

to be a king. He was less susceptible to the influences of

his time, and, indeed, his " Gebir " was published in

1798, when the enthusiasm of the other republican poets

was waxing lukewarm. This poem is an ordinary and

rather turgid Oriental romance, and, to the unsophis-

ticated reader, its political message is faint indeed.

CHAPTER IV

THE TURN OF THE TIDE

EELING in England was not whole-hearted in support of the war, during its earlier stages. There was, indeed, a widespread indignation that Louis XVI, poor fellow, should be treated in such a shabby way by his subjects, and of course the immense majority of the governing class was united in its horror of the Rights of Man, and the massacre of aristocrats. But to go to war, to put the Bourbons back upon the throne, was another matter, and there were not a few even among the staunchest Tories who would have been content to let France go to the devil in her own way. After all, there was a certain poetic justice in the fact that the aiders and abettors of American rebels should fall into their own pit. There was not yet any general sense of the seriousness of the problem. Burke had done much to open the eyes of his countrymen, but it required something more than books to awaken a whole nation. What reason was there for alarm? Our command of the sea, which the last war had put in jeopardy, was now practically unchallenged; we had the whole of Europe for our allies; our enemy was distracted by Revolution; we could plant our blows when and where we liked. Not in the Seven Years' War, nor in our struggles with Louis XIV, had we appeared to risk so little by an appeal to arms.

No one was more pathetically blind to the vital issues

77

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of the hour than the young Prime Minister. So far he

had played the game of kingcraft against kings with

masterly skill. He had at the Foreign Office, and very

much under his control, the honest and scholarly Gren-

ville, a man whose sleek, expressionless face might have

qualified him for the beau-ideal of gentlemanly officialdom,

and whose heart, if he had one, was bound up in red tape.

There was no chance that this politician could, under

any circumstances, rise to statesmanship ; while, on the

other hand, he was a fairly capable and conscientious

head of his department. The hour called for a Chatham

or a Cromwell. But the Premier and his Foreign Minister

could not understand that anything had occurred out of

the ordinary run of European diplomacy. While the

sovereigns of the Continent, drawing together warily

and with mutual distrust, were issuing their first mani-

festo against France, Pitt was complacently informing

the House that never had there been a better prospect

of fifteen years' peace, and proving the sincerity of his

words by whittling down our defences.

Without going into the long and obscure story of

Pitt's diplomacy, we may say that he played the game in

strict accordance with the rules of kingcraft, as he knew

and had practised them since his coming into office.

The broad lines upon which he acted are perfectly clear.

However much he may privately have sympathized with

the early ideals of the Revolution, and however much he

may have shrunk from its later excesses, he allowed his

policy to bear no relation to his sympathies. He did not

consider it his business to go to war because the French

chose to cut off the heads of their aristocrats, nor, on the

other hand, was he prepared to make any allowance for

the enthusiasm of a new dawn His attitude, and Gren-

ville's, was coldly correct, and there is something vastly

ludicrous in the spectacle of Grenville offering the French

representative a little chair, to signify that he was not a

THE TURN OF THE TIDE

79

proper ambassador, and of that representative upsetting

his plan by deliberately sitting down in a big one. Gren-

ville muttered something about its being very cold; and

all this pettiness and finesse was.a prelude to one of the

most fearful wars in history !

Pitt, we say, played the game with the most exemplary

correctness. The French might commit murder and even

regicide, these were self-regarding acts, necessitating

some change in diplomatic forms, and little chairs instead

of big ones. But they did two things whïch were plainly

intolerable; they offered to help all peoples against their

governments, and they opened the navigation of the

Scheldt. It is doubtful whether a mere abstract declara-

tion would have goaded Pitt into a war he would have

much liked to avoid, especially as the French showed

some disposition to put a harmless interpretation upon

their words. But the vital issue was that of the Low

Countries, and here Pitt might plead that he was acting

in accordance with the tradition of centuries, and in

direct continuity with his own previous policy. Since

the days of Cressy, the key of our European position had

been an independent Netherlands. Already during Pitt's

tenure of office, this had been threatened by French

aggression; already he had, without wasting a British

life, triumphantly withstood these machinations. Now,

the same aggression was attempted in a more aggravated

form, and to tolerate it would be to stultify not only his

own policy, but that of every respectable British states-

man.

It is easy to understand the French case. The artifices

of treaty, which the greed and intrigue of the eighteenth

century had evolved, towards maintaining the balance of

power, must have seemed an unmitigated evil to men who

aspired to make all things new. To seal up artificially a

noble river, to decree that a port which had once been

the mart of the world should be prohibited for ever

80 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

from peaceful trade, was a flagrant violation of the

Rights of Man. All this was nothing to Pitt and Gren-

ville. A treaty was a treaty, and the closing of the Scheldt

was a British interest. . The French must be stopped at

all hazards from getting control of the Low Countries.

Pitt acted just as he would have done had a Louis been

in the place of the Convention, and it is quite false to

say that he went to war to break the Revolution The

enemy had made a move, he made the correct one in

reply. That was all.

Nothing could exceed the indignation of Burke, when

he learnt that we were to fight over a miserable river.

He perceived that if we were to have any chance of

winning, the war must be one of principle, of the nature

of a crusade. He, alone, did not underestimate its

gravity. Pitt, on the other hand, entered upon the

struggle, if not with a light heart, at least with no appre-

ciation of its seriousness. It was going to be short, and

might lead to some useful acquisitions, in the way of

colonies. That it would last for nearly a generation was

a possibility that could not have suggested itself to his

wildest dreams. When he had once entered upon the

struggle, he carried it on as if we were taking part in some

new war of the Austrian succession. He did not purge

or reform our egregious system of army administration ;

he did not concentrate our energies in striking a mortal

blow, as Burke would have had us do ; but carried on the

war with the same leisurely methods as if we had to deal

with a Marshal Saxe and the gentlemen of the French

Guard, instead of a horde of enraged Jacobins There

can be no greater contrast than that between the burning

eloquence of Chatham, at the beginning of the Seven

Years' War, and the cold and formal oratory of his son

at the commencement of this. And a greater contest

had begun than that of Minden and Quebec.

It must therefore be acknowledged that we drifted into

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81

this struggle of the Revolution, rather as an unpleasant necessity, than a matter of principle. Burke's pleadings had excited, but not converted the nation. We had no particular affection for our allies, or enthusiasm for our cause, we had not the stimulus of national peril. And so we went to work in a languid and unbusinesslike way, and both in our administration and conduct of the war, muddled along like men who were not wholly set upon victory. But even at this stage, our conduct shone in comparison with that of the allies. The*conduct of the kings was without any redeeming feature. They did not even observe the maxim of honour among thieves. Austria and Prussia hated each other worse than the enemy, their forces had to be kept apart, and one allied army was actually afraid to advance, for fear the other should seize the opportunity of cutting off its line of retreat.

Russia was steadily embroiling her neighbours in the West, in order to have her own hands free for the murder of Poland Contrary to the advice, not only of Burke, but of the English Government, it soon became apparent that robbery was also the object of the allies on the side of France, the knowledge of which goaded the French into a frenzy of resistance. Finally, when it became apparent that the war was not going as well as was expected, open treason became the order of the day. The unlovely record of Prussian diplomacy has never been blacker than during that course of greed, of cowardice, and of treachery that came to a deserved close at Jena. The oldest and proudest monarchy of all cynically changed sides, and was the first to enter upon a regicide alliance. Austria, eager to join in the enslavement of Italy, must bear the disgrace of the blackest act, even of those times, for the French envoys at Rastadt were murdered, and their papers seized by Austrian hussars. Seldom, in the whole of history, are we warranted in speaking with such unmitigated disgust as that inspired

II.—G

82 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

by the proceedings of these kings. Their defenders, if such there be, may fairly be challenged to cite one word, or one action, that redounds to the credit of any one of them. Their badness was equalled by their stupidity, and the system for which they stood was too evidently in the last stages of decay. And now they were but fanning into sevenfold heat the fire that was to purge Europe.

Very different was the spirit of the nation they sought to plunder. Goaded into merciless and self-sacrificing energy, knowing that the sacred fields of their country were already portioned out, the French had become well-nigh invincible. "All Europe marches to destroy us," thundered Danton; "we hurl at their feet the head of a king!" Wild and grotesque expedients were seriously canvassed, it was even proposed to have all cannon-balls cast in the shape of the poor king's head. At the centre of affairs, inconspicuous among the gigantic figures that stalked across the stage to the guillotine, worked a silent, impassive officer of engineers, with all the wires in his hands, and the whole resources of France at his command. He it was who evoked from the soul army after army of willing patriots, and, making a consummate use of his interior lines, flung them on the mercenaries of the kings, with bewildering but calculated rapidity. Human life went for nothing, if only this officer might work out his problems freely. The guillotine went on snipping necks, and even the generals themselves knew that the choice lay between death and victory. Nay more, the commander who successfully relieved Dunkirk, and inflicted a humiliating repulse on the allies, was slain for not having done enough. To save France was the business of her officer of engineers, and he had no place for pity among his motives.

To meet this terrible energy, Pitt had only the resources of the conscientious eighteenth-century politician, and a

nation at his back which was not enthusiastic about the

war. It is not surprising that our early operations afforded

an excellent lesson in how not to fight. The Minister

directly responsible for military affairs was the coarse

and drunken Dundas, a man whose shrewdness as a

party hack was joined to woeful incompetence as an

administrator ; the commander of our chief army in the

field was the mediocre but by no means contemptible

Duke of York, whose leadership was invariably crowned

with failure, and whose monument is the eyesore of Pall

Mall. Our first operation in the field augured ill for our

prospect of victory. The one chance of the allies was to

use their veteran and greatly superior forces for an

immediate advance on Paris. It is ridiculous to maintain,

with one modern writer, that the reduction of every

frontier fortress was a necessary preliminary. The allies

had sufficient troops to mask them, and had not Marl-

borough been willing to march on Paris, with Lille in his

rear, and did not the allies, when they advanced on Paris

twenty years later, leave the fortresses of the Rhine, the

Elbe and the Vistula to be reduced by the Landwehr?

Nothing would satisfy our statesmen but the diversion

of their army from the main object to the needless and

irrelevant siege of Dunkirk. The town was an inviting

prize ; it was a nest of privateers, and had been a special

object of English diplomacy since the days of Cromwell.

But as part of the main plan for bringing France to her

knees, the operation was criminal waste of time, when

time was all-important. It was characteristic of the

selfish and dilatory policy pursued by the allies, and it

had not even the merit of success. Carnot was all

the time organizing furiously, and while Coburg dawdled

among the frontier fortresses, and York, unsupported by

the navy, sat down in front of Dunkirk, the last chances

of victory were slipping away. Again, through slackness

and want of proper co-operation, we lost a golden oppor-

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

tunity at Toulon. Had the French fleet been properly

destroyed, and a vigilant naval blockade maintained

from the first, Napoleon's campaign in Italy would have

been crippled, and his descent on Egypt rendered im-

possible.

The sound and brilliant scheme of Burke, for a stroke in

the West of France, was not much approved of by the

Government, nor was it altogether abandoned. By a

wretched compromise, a number of gallant gentlemen

were sent to their deaths, and a driblet of English troops

to do nothing in particular at Quiberon In Holland,

the failure of Dunkirk was but the prelude to a chapter of

disasters, culminating in the deliberate abandonment of

the British by their Austrian allies. Even in this cam-

paign the British troops showed themselves, man for man,

fully equal to any that could be brought against them,

but the conditions under which they fought precluded

success. Finally, Pitt and Dundas allowed themselves to

be diverted from the main issue to a selfish and worse

than useless war of plunder in the West Indies. Incredible

numbers of our troops rotted away to no purpose what-

ever, innocent victims of a policy that wages war in less

than deadly earnest. Finally, Pitt insisted on viewing

the struggle through the eyes of a Chancellor of the

Exchequer. France must certainly collapse through

bankruptcy; Pitt was well enough versed in the science

of economics to be certain of that, and he confidently

asked the House, " Is it too much to say their resources

are nearly at an end ? " Burke, who understood spiritual

forces better than he, knew that such a spirit as that of

the Revolution could never fail from lack of rascal

counters, and pointed out, in glowing phrase, how vain

it was to cherish such hopes. But Pitt actually thought

that by tinkering at San Domingo, he was doing some

vital injury to France herself

The operations of our fleet were conducted with a

slackness hardly inferior to that of the army. Men of genius were there in plenty, waiting to come to the front,

but the time was not yet, nor was there the proper determination to win, either on the flagships or at White-

hall. Our only chance of taking Dunkirk was thrown away by the absence of British ships; the failure to

destroy the Toulon fleet, even though the Spaniards were not above the suspicion of bad faith in the matter, was

culpable. Admiral Hotham's remark, after letting the French fleet escape him, " We must be contented, we

have done very well," is typical of the slack spirit that marred our operations, as it had in the days of Byng and

Matthews. Even " the glorious First of June " was what Nelson called a " Lord Howe victory "; the enemy got

away; the convoy, which was the British objective, escaped; and the glory of the day was obscured by the

conspicuous cowardice of at least one captain. Even Admiral Jervis was too well pleased with what he had

done after St. Vincent to renew the action.

As the war dragged on without success, and when some of our allies dropped out of it, the desire for peace became

very strong, and Pitt was constrained to meet the growing discontent by a series of high-handed and

arbitrary measures. His conduct in this respect follows logically from what we have already seen of his character,

and his method of conducting the war. A man of brilliant imaginative insight might have seen that the

English republican societies were alien to the disposition of the great mass of the nation. His father would

undoubtedly have thrown himself upon the loyalty of the people, and might even have listened to the

suggestion of Major Cartwright for a levée en masse. But the son, who was equally devoted to his country, had not

the instinctive sympathy with his countrymen which had been the strength of Chatham. He could not communi-

cate a fire that did not glow in his own breast, for he was

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

fighting for expediency, and not for an idea. He acted,

as he had acted in embarking upon the war, with frigid

correctness. It is easy to see now that he overrated the

danger, but the situation was alarming enough in all

conscience when a huge meeting could be held in London

under the auspices of one of the revolutionary societies,

and when a roaring mob surrounded the King’s coach

threatening his very life. A responsible Minister could

afford to run no risks at such a time.

On the other hand, the Opposition that remained with

Fox after the defection of Burke and his comrades was

far less representative of the general feeling of the country

than Pitt. Fox was certainly able to see much that was

hidden from his rival. While he reprobated the September

massacres and the other atrocities of the Terror, he did

not fail to perceive that the kings themselves had goaded

France into her irreconcilable attitude. He was also alive

to the weakness of our policy as regards both the conduct

of the war and the measures of repression at home. He

saw that to muddle along as we did, pouring out our

treasure in support of selfish and disloyal allies, and the

blood of our soldiers in a half-hearted conspiracy to foist

a hated régime on France, was something worse than

useless. Again, the subversion of the elementary rights

of the subject, in order to guard against imaginary or

grossly exaggerated dangers, was not only tyrannous,

but an insult to the character of the British nation.

Finally, whether the war was right or wrong, the ad-

ministration, which was responsible for the two Dutch

fiascos, and the death of forty thousand men in the swamps

of San Domingo, was nothing less than criminal.

Fox and Sheridan could plead in support of their policy

that they were debating for an idea, which was more than

Pitt was fighting for. They were, in fact, typical products

of the Romantic movement, and both in principle and

practice ardent disciples of liberty. “The progress of

liberty," says Fox, " is like the progress of the stream ;

it may be kept within its banks ; it is sure to fertilize the

country through which it runs ; but no power can arrest

it in its passage ; and shortsighted, as well as wicked,

must be the heart of the projector who would seek to

divert its course." He and Sheridan followed the goddess

wherever she could be found and, like true Romantics,

were not always apt to distinguish between the true

liberty of doing as one ought, and the false liberty of

license and caprice. There was an irresponsibility about

their ardour which qualified them better for critics than

statesmen. Naturally they were enamoured of the

Revolution, and like the other English supporters of its

doctrines, committed themselves to prophecies no less

rash than optimistic. As late as 1792, two years after

Burke had predicted, with such fatal accuracy, the course

of affairs in France, Fox allowed himself to speak of the

ephemeral and unworkable French Constitution as " the

most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty which

has been erected on the foundation of human integrity

in any age or country," and to declare that the French

had erected " a government from which neither insult nor

injury could be apprehended by their neighbours."

But if, in this respect, Fox must stand convicted of a

gross error of judgment, there was one respect in which he

was wiser, and even more patriotic than Burke. He

apprehended firmly the principle that nations must be

allowed to govern themselves according to their own

ideals, and that to force a particular system upon them

from the outside was the most infamous of all outrages

upon liberty. He recognized the connection, which we

have already traced, between democratic principles and

nationality. Though he did not attempt to palliate the

outrages of the sans-culottes, he saw that the kings of

Europe were just as bad, and the horrors perpetrated by

the armies of kings at Warsaw and Naples made his

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

heart bleed as much as the subjugation of Switzerland.

He knew that the Bourbons intended, and indeed professed, nothing better than to give back France, in the

words of the “ Marseillaise,” to the ancient slavery. There-

fore he considered a war, undertaken in alliance with

tyrants, and with such an object, as nothing less than a

crime, and foredoomed to failure from the outset. Thus

Fox and Sheridan came to be the champions of nationality, not only for England, but for all Europe

At the same time, it is impossible to acquit them of a

recklessness in the advocacy of their principles which

might conceivably have led to very serious consequences,

and certainly gravely qualifies their claim to be ranked as

patriots of a high order. The levity of disposition, the

worst side of the Romantic spirit, which had displayed

itself too often at Carlton House, and within the walls of

Parliament, was too much a part of their nature ever to be

thoroughly discarded. Fox spoke the truth when he

declared himself ready to oppose practically anything that

Pitt brought forward. We must not forget, in comparing

the obstinate caution of Pitt with the free invective of

his opponents, that the Minister was under a terrible

responsibility. It was easy to denounce repressive

measures in the abstract, and to scoff at the fears of

insurrection ; but Pitt, working in darkness and un-

certainty, could not afford to risk a mistake that might be

fatal. Much of the conduct of the Opposition cannot be

reconciled with any high principles whatever. Their

abstention from the House, in the time of the most

fearful peril England has ever been through, was an act

not of patriotism, but of petulance, and they stultified

their own conduct by turning up in the House whenever

it suited them to do so.

It would be false to talk of either Fox or Sheridan as

if, at any time in their careers, they were wholly the

friends of every country but their own : for Fox was

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89

always a " big navy " man, and Sheridan, at the height

of the Nore mutiny, threw party to the winds, and came

splendidly to the support of the Government, in coping

with a national peril. But their conduct is not always

so pleasant to contemplate. Their abstention from the

vote of thanks to Admiral Duncan is an instance both

of bad taste and bad citizenship Fox was not above

expressing an indecent joy at his country's misfortunes.

At the Peace of Amiens, he expresses himself to Grey thus

frankly: " The truth is, I am gone something further in

hate to the English Government than perhaps you and

the rest of my friends are, and certainly further than can

with prudence be avowed. The triumph of the French

Government over the English does in fact afford me a

degree of pleasure which it is very difficult to disguise "

Words which subordinate the national point of view so

entirely to party are unworthy of an Englishman,

especially when the despotic power of France, under

Napoleon, had reached such a pitch that Fox himself

could describe it as "truly alarming." When such

ignoble sentiments actuated the Leader of the Opposition,

sentiments which he himself shrank from avowing, it is

evident that, with all his faults, Pitt was the only man fit

to lead the nation.

Despite failure, and incompetence worse than failure,

this necessity for Pitt became every day more apparent.

He might not understand the situation, he might mis-

conceive the object of the war, but the intense love of

England, the cult to which he had dedicated himself from

his youth up, never flickered for a moment. It might as

truly have been said of him, as of the Private of the

Buffs,

" He only knows that not through him

Shall England come to shame "

It is a truly remarkable thing that despite every failure in

the administration of the war, despite the long, dreary

90 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

years when we seemed to fight as men beating the air,

the figure of Pitt only loomed larger in the eyes of men

In France, he was honoured by a hatred accorded to no

other among her adversaries ; at home, he stood in proud

isolation apart from, and above, the other politicians of

his day. As the peril intensified, his spirit rose to meet it.

At the beginning of the war, his purpose had been vague,

and his appeal lukewarm ; but when it became apparent

that this was no move in the game of kingcraft, but a

contest for England's very existence, his purpose became

firm, and his voice a rally-call to all his countrymen.

There is something peculiarly felicitous in that com-

parison of him to a pilot. His speeches are not exuberant

or flaming like those of the greatest orators, but reflect

the quiet, tight-lipped determination of the experienced

man at the wheel, guiding his ship through rocks or ice-

fields, and knowing that upon his concentration and

incessant vigilance depends the safety of every one on

board. We have often noticed, upon the faces of such

men, a settled cast of responsibility, the visible imprint of

that quality which Carlyle has called silence. In that

Carlylese sense, it is not a paradox to say that Pitt's

oratory, even in his longest speeches, was very silent.

He addressed himself to the practical issue before the

House ; he went into detail ; and when his deeper emotions

found an almost involuntary expression, they appealed

to his hearers with a strength that only such strength can

enkindle There is, moreover, a certain hardness about

this strength of Pitt's He was no longer the confident

boy who had beaten down the Coalition and seemed to

have the nation at his feet. Many a disappointment,

many a shattered illusion, had been his since that hour of

eager and triumphant dawn. He had learnt that the

greatness of his conceptions was limited by the pettiness

of his following, that though he might ride the nation, he

could not always manage it. He had seen his visions of

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91

peace and economy all dissipated by an unforseeable catastrophe. And the horror of a great loneliness seems

to have descended upon him. In that little-regarded portrait in the National Gallery, we may see, what Pitt

could never have borne to reveal, the wistful and almost heartbroken appeal of that friendless pilot, who found

refuge in the grave at the age of forty-six, an exhausted and shattered man.

He had wavered at first, when the objects of the war

seemed uncertain, and our safety assured, and he aroused

the bitter scorn of Burke by his compliant attitude to the

Directory. But soon it became apparent that the war

was not the easy thing he had believed. Perils began to

thicken around England as terrible as those which had

weakened the energies of France a few years before. Our

allies deserted or betrayed us; the first wretched coalition

began to fall to pieces. Then the alliance was revived,

which had almost brought us to our knees during the last

war; Spain and Holland joined the enemy. Next, a

flame of rebellion swept from end to end of Ireland, and

it only needed a French army to give it every prospect of

success. Our fleets were unable to parry the stroke, and

only the chance or providence of winds and waves kept

such an army from landing. Our credit, which had

hitherto enabled us to supply undeserved subsidies to all

the kings of Europe, suddenly appeared to be on the

verge of collapse—bankruptcy stared us in the face.

There was hardly one circumstance to cheer us amid the

gloom. Our operations had been almost uniformly un-

successful, unless we could derive some lukewarm comfort

from the scrambling and indecisive victory of the First

of June. Discontent was rife Such distress was known

in England as had never been experienced before, and it

was lack of bread, and not lack of liberty, that made the

crowd mob the royal coach.

To crown all this came the mutiny in our fleets. Our

92 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

first line of defence was paralysed in the moment of the gravest peril. The Spithead sailors, even when they had hoisted the red flag at the masthead, never wholly forgot their duty, and they were ready to put to sea, if the French came out of port. The trouble in Jervis's Mediterranean fleet was the work of Irish rebels, for whom a timely application of cat and rope proved an effectual cure. But the mutiny at the Nore was the most serious of all, and there was talk of handing over the fleet to the enemy, so that the Government had to remove the buoys to prevent them getting to sea. In no year of her existence did England come nearer to ruin than in 1797.

Yet Pitt never flinched. He faced the peril with a quiet and unquestioning confidence in the country he adored. He disdained to employ heroics, he took it for granted that England must be worthy of herself. All through that dark year he kept his head and his confidence, and his eloquence became grander, more convincing, because he had now no doubts about the nature of his cause, or its righteousness. Like his father, he was striving to save England. Hear him in April : " I am convinced that the more the state of the country is inquired into, the less ground there is for despondency, or the apprehension of any danger which Englishmen may not meet with the fortitude which belongs to the national character." Towards the end of the year, he is emphatic in his determination not to retire from the struggle, except upon principles consistent with our dignity. " There may be danger," he confesses, " but on the one side there is danger accompanied with honour ; on the other side there is danger with indelible shame and disgrace ; upon such an alternative Englishmen will not hesitate " And in December, speaking of the Opposition's unwillingness to grant an adequate supply, he told the House that if they refused his demands, " it would be proclaiming to France and to the world, their repentance for having

dared to stand up in defence of their laws, their religion,

and of everything that was valuable to them as English-

men."

It was this that changed the character of the war, and

raised England from her half-hearted, Laodicean attitude,

to be the example and deliverer of Europe. It was only

by passing through these white flames of affliction that

she came to realize that " our laws, our religion, every-

thing that was valuable " were at stake. That she came

safely through the trial is due, as far as it is due to any

one man, to her Prime Minister. Whatever his initial

blindness as to the object and meaning of the struggle,

the creed which he had always held kept him straight and

strong at the hour of crisis. It was no longer a question

of crushing out republican principles ; England herself

stood in peril ; England was struggling for her life against

aggressive tyranny, and it was imperative upon her to

conquer or to die.

As long as it was the object of the war simply to crush

French liberty, the great body of Englishmen were not

thoroughly roused. But gradually it began to dawn upon

us that we were fighting not to crush a free people, but

against a proud tyranny; that we were fighting on behalf

of liberty, and not only the liberty of England, but that of

all Europe. The whole problem of the Napoleonic wars

becomes simple, if we bear this dominating fact in mind .

victory lay all along, not with brilliant generalship and

skilful seamanship, but with patriotism. When a whole

people was united in the cause of an idea, no blunders on

the part of its leaders, no Schwartzenberg or Kutusoff or

Whitelock, could prevent that nation from triumphing in

the end, even against Napoleon at the head of half Europe.

The French Revolution witnessed the triumph of an

improvised army of patriots against the hired mercenaries

of kings. Of course, we must not forget that this army

was stiffened by the presence of the old soldiers of the

94 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

Monarchy, but these had been deprived of their generals and most of their officers, and the whole military system was thrown out of gear. Besides, it had been proved at Rossbach how useless even the great army of Soubise could be against a third of their number of Prussians. But the Revolution had instilled a new spirit into the troops, and, as the guillotine shore away the incompetent and the demagogues, great leaders sprang up everywhere, Hoche and Moreau and Marceau. The spirit of the nation triumphed, as spirit always will, over economic considerations. By all the laws of the study, France ought to have been beaten twenty times over, but there was that in the nation which made it impossible for her to brook defeat, and neither reckless finance, nor civil war, nor an undisciplined navy, nor an improvised army, could make the least difference, one way or another, to the final result.

Now happened exactly what Burke had foreseen. When a nation has destroyed its institutions, and is struggling for its life, the army becomes the most important part of it, and the leader of the army is bound, sooner or later, to lead the nation. What had been a struggle for existence became one for dominion. Every repulse of the invaders had whetted the thirst for glory, and encouraged the French to believe themselves invincible. The despots had dared to violate French liberty; they would now be paid back in their own coin, and a regenerate France might become the mistress of the world. The lust for glory, always latent in the French character, was roused to fever-heat; and liberty, the cult of the Jacobins and the Terror, was gradually forced into the background It was soon found that liberty, though an excellent thing for France, did not suit other nations so well, as Italy and Switzerland were to discover to their cost There arose a young general of transcendent genius, whose career was a series of dazzling victories No

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95

wonder that the nation was swept along the tide of victory, and forgot the theories of her philosophers ! Of course, the change was not accomplished without difficulty ; the reaction of Fructidor was a rally to the cause of Jacobinism ; but the defeats sustained by France in Napoleon's absence, and the reports of his victories in Egypt, precipitated the inevitable, and the seal was set on the new régime by the " crowning mercy " of Marengo. The Empire followed as a matter of course, and what Marengo was to the Consulate, Austerlitz was to the Empire.

As long as he was only face to face with the troops of the old régime, Napoleon marched from victory to victory. The stars in their courses fought against the kings. Historians have remarked that Napoleon ought to have been beaten again and again. He was beaten at Marengo, until the Austrian general went to bed. Even after his victory at Austerlitz, he was strategically in a hopeless position, with one hundred and thirty thousand Prussians on his communications, waiting for the word to strike, a word which never came. But, somehow, nothing seemed to go quite right with the allies. When they did get beaten, they collapsed ; prisoners were taken by the thousand ; great fortresses, like Magdeburg, threw open their gates to a handful of troops. The Austrians and Prussians were not cowards, but they did not fight like men who meant to win, they were fighting for pay, against men who were fighting for a cause, and so they were beaten. In short, France was a nation, her enemies were kingdoms.

In Great Britain alone, France found the enemy worthy of her steel. Even in the first years of the war, the British troops showed themselves at least equal to the French, and though they were wretchedly led, and often out-manoeuvred, they were not fairly and squarely beaten in any considerable pitched battle, except when they were

96 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

shamefully left in the lurch by their Austrian allies. As for the fleet, the mischief was not that the French beat us, but that we did not beat the French enough. The traditions of patriotism and of hatred to France were too deeply fixed in the consciousness of the nation to be eradicated, and we have seen that the worst effects of the Prose Age had tainted the upper class, rather than the mass of the people. Most of our mishaps, in the early stages of the war, were due to incompetent leadership, rather than to any shortcomings on the part of the men.

We are thus confronted with much the same situation as at the time of the Armada. England was not fairly roused until she was goaded into greatness by imminent peril ; as long as the war was one merely of conquest, the quickening fire of patriotism was lacking. It was the growing power of Napoleon that was to give us the Nelson touch and the sonnets of Wordsworth. The danger was not so dramatic as that of Medina's seven miles of galleons, it was the culminating product of the mutinies of our fleets, the failure of our armies, the defeat of our allies, the terrible distress, the breakdown of our finance, and the danger to our shores. And just as the Armada period marks the beginning of a great outburst of literary glory, so the dark hours of 1796 and 1797 were the prelude to the noonday of the Romantic movement ; for Blake, like Burke and Chatterton, is a product of the first emotional revival. And what these first dangers had begun, was finally accomplished by the Boulogne flotilla, and the long period of suspense, while the Grand Army lay within striking distance of our shores

It was late in 1797 that the young lions of the Tory Party started the " Anti-Jacobin," which was to take in hand the work that Burke had begun, and definitely to organize patriotic sentiment against France and French principles This was no ordinary party venture ; such men as Pitt and Canning were among its contributors, and

even in its funniest satires there is a note of savage intensity ; the war is war to the knife, and quarter is neither asked nor given. From a literary point of view, the practice of the contributors was to hark back to the traditions of the Prose Age ; but, whether they willed it or no, they tended, in the long run, to open the door for the new poetry, which was to render the classical tradition obsolete.

The purpose of the " Anti-Jacobin " is announced in the prospectus. It is to be eminently patriotic ; the authors are not ashamed frankly to avow their prejudice in favour of their country, and of her institutions, and here we may trace the influence of Burke. From him, too, derives their hatred of the metaphysic and cold reasoning that had inspired the philosophes.

" Reason, Philosophy, fiddledum diddledum, Peace and Fraternity, higgledy, piggledy, Higgledy piggledy, fiddledum diddledum."

Merciless fun is made of the pretensions of rhyming scientists, of the type of Erasmus Darwin, and of all the plausible systems of universal progress that were so dear to the hearts of men like Condorçet. The French mind naturally prefers clearness of generalization, and tends to ignore anything that conflicts with a neat theory, and the satire of the " Anti-Jacobin " represents the revolt of the English mind against its antithesis. There is nothing good-natured about this satire. It is intended to hurt and to kill, its contempt is as scathing as the invective of Burke. It is, above all things, an organ of gentlefolk, of educated men, whose intellect was as much revolted by facile generalization as their feelings by the slaughter of an aristocracy.

But what ennobles the " Anti-Jacobin," and lifts it above any merely class controversy, is the rally-call it sounds to the nation. What it loathes above all other vices of the English Jacobin is his treachery to his own

II.—H

98 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

country, and here he differs from his French comrade,

who at least desires the aggrandizement of France. The

effect of a French invasion is prophesied in one poem, the

plunder, the rape and the murder that will inevitably

ensue upon the triumph of the Jacobins, despite their

high-falutin speeches. Indeed, the hypocrisy of re-

publican sentiment is again and again exposed, whether

in the person of the “ friend of humanity,” who refuses

sixpence to the needy knife-grinder, or in those of the

philosophers and sentimental women who find, in the new

morality, a ready excuse for the gratification of their

lusts. The native kindliness, that probably was the

salvation of our governing class, is thus a motive of the

“ Anti-Jacobin ” ; the philanthropic agitator is not only

a shallow, but also a shabby fellow. All the essentially

English hatred of shams and humbug is enlisted on the

side of patriotism, against French principles. Every

number contained tabulated lists of the lies, misrepre-

sentations and mistakes of various apostles of freedom.

Sometimes the satirical note is dropped, and we have

more or less stirring appeals to arms :

" Let France in savage accents sing

Her bloody Revolution ;

We love our Country, prize our King,

Adore our Constitution."

But lyric poetry is not the strong point of the “ Anti-

Jacobin.” It is essentially a destructive organ, and it is

in attack and satire that its great qualities are displayed.

And herein lies its greatest blemish.

For though deriving many of its principles from Burke,

it lacked his creative imagination ; its patriotism was

intense and sincere, but it was too often red-hot rather

than white-hot. It was imbued with much of the super-

cilious spirit of our public schools and universities, which

condemns indiscriminately every kind of passionate

enthusiasm. The lofty spirit of Canning was sometimes

able to soar beyond these limits, but the " Anti-Jacobins "

also included men like Gifford, who was afterwards

dragged from his retirement to become the editor of

the " Quarterly Review." The attacks were brutal,

and never thought of allowing for any redeeming trait

in the victim. It is with somewhat of a shock that we

find, classed among " all creeping creatures, venomous

and low," such names as " Coleridge, Southey, Lloyd,

and Lamb and Co.," and that we find Goethe himself

singled out as the object of the keenest and most success-

ful satire. But there is this that distinguishes the " Anti-

Jacobin " from the Keats-killing quarterlies and Black-

woods. The " Anti-Jacobin " stood, in a time of intense

peril, for a great cause ; its authors never forgot, even in

their bitterness hate, that they were fighting for their

country, and all that their country held most dear, her

ancient institutions, her venerable religion, against the

attacks of violent and wicked men, to whom nothing was

sacred. The " Quarterly " and " Blackwood " of twenty

years later were the organs of a selfish class, and an effete

literary tradition.

The " Anti-Jacobin " accomplished one feat of political

insight which gives the lie to the doctrine that only

posterity is fit to judge the causes of events. The French,

it is observed, had hitherto had to deal with unworthy

opponents, and had depended for success even more upon

the defects of the enemy than upon their own merits.

" But they had now " (the author is speaking of the

abortive expedition of Colonel Tate) " to contend with

Britons ! men attached to their country, and resolute

in its defence. The consequence was inevitable." This

is a perfect estimate of the situation, and by bearing

it in mind we shall be able to thread the maze of the

Napoleonic tragedy.

The last number of the " Anti-Jacobin " was the great-

est. It contained Canning's poem on " The New Morality,"

100 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

in which all the hatred of Jacobins and their ways found

expression in one tremendous philippic. It is this poem

that contains the memorable description of the cosmo-

politan enthusiast :

" A steady patriot of the world alone,

The friend of every country but his own "

There is also the denunciation of the philanthropy (the

French and not the English brand) by virtue of which

" Each pert Adept disowns a Briton's part,

And plucks the name of England from his heart ";

and the poem concludes by an appeal which is, in other

words, that of Shakespeare :

" Guard we but our own hearts : with constant view

To antient morals, antient manners true "

The rise of Napoleon was watched in England with

intense interest. From the first he figured as a criminal

adventurer and an unmitigated scoundrel, in fact, the

" Boney " of popular English tradition. All his crimes,

real and imaginary, were held up to execration by

pen and pencil. He had murdered Desaix, instigated

treacherous massacres, poisoned his own troops, in short,

he was a fiend incarnate. The name of Napoleon carries

with it some glamour of greatness to the most irrecon-

cilable of modern minds, but we must remember that

to the men of those times he was a Corsican cut-throat,

citizen Bonaparte, the tool of Barras and the friend of

Augustin Robespierre. Nor did satire spare Josephine,

her charms and her virtue were alike the object of attack,

and one caricature even shows her dancing stark naked

before Barras. Refinement and chivalry were not the

most conspicuous traits of the English satirists.

Whether or no Buonaparte was as black as he was

painted, he certainly lost no time in declaring his hos-

tility to England This, the mainspring of his career, is

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101

also the burden of his tragedy. He was great enough to see what was the real bar to his ambition, and he knew that to conquer England was to conquer the world. The name of Pitt was a bogey in France even in the days of the Terror, and “Pitt’s gold” was the ready explanation of any sinister event, even in domestic politics. Certainly Pitt’s efforts were unremitting, though too often misdirected, and his agents were distributed all over Europe, ready to detect and foment anti-French feeling. The problem, as regarded the Continental monarchies, was comparatively simple for France; their armies were, in the long run, no match for hers, and their frontiers lay open to invasion. But the sea power, the wealth, and the persistent enmity of England, were a perpetual menace to French ambition, and, above all, the English were the only soldiers that the French could not beat on even terms. Whether he actually said it or no, Napoleon’s bitter exclamation, “It has been the same since Cressy,” was the simple truth.

The two great English manœuvres, of fighting in line on land, and of breaking the line at sea, were no chance caprices of tactics, but a decisive mark of superiority. The manœuvre of breaking the line was well known before Rodney’s day; the French admiral whom he defeated had even thought out a parry to it. But yet, though it was adopted again and again by the English, with brilliant success, we do not find the French learning the lesson. The fact is that, in order to break the line, the attacking fleet had to expose its foremost ships to the combined fire of a greatly superior force, and to the risk of being annihilated before the other ships could get up. Only the superior fighting force could afford to take such risks. In land war, the practice of meeting attack with thin lines of infantry was one that required the utmost steadiness and discipline, as well as bravery, on the part of the troops, and demanded far higher military qualities than

102 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

did the massive columns of the French. The line was no

tactical panacea discovered by the English. It had been

universal in the eighteenth century, and in the Revolu-

tionary wars the Prussians and Austrians had tried it,

and been soundly beaten. It was only the English soldier

who had the iron nerve necessary to oppose the huge

columns with but two thin, steadfast lines. "Such a

gallant line," says Napier of the 7th and 23rd at Albuera,

"arising from amid the smoke and rapidly separating

itself from the confused and broken multitude, startled

the enemy's heavy masses . . . they closed on their

terrible enemies, and then was seen with what a majesty

the British soldier fights. . . . No sudden burst of un-

disciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm weakened the

stability of their order, their flashing eyes were bent

on the dark columns in front, their measured tread shook

the ground, their dreadful volleys swept away the head

of every formation; their deafening shouts overpowered

the dissonant cries that broke from all parts of the

tumultuous crowd, as foot by foot, and with a horrid

carnage, it was driven by the incessant vigour of the attack

to the farthest edge of the hill." This British testimony

is borne out by the account of the French general Bugeaud,

recently quoted by Professor Oman. A French column

is attacking an English line, who await them in motionless

silence. Even at a thousand yards the assailants begin

to lose their nerve; the quick step becomes a run; the

ranks melt into one another; cries are heard; the men

begin to fire as they run; the young soldiers, especially, are

impressed by that silence of their adversaries The

English line, like a long brick wall, "seemed to take no

notice of the storm which was about to break upon it.

. . . Our ardour was growing cold. The moral influence

(irresistible in war) of a calm which seems undisturbed

(even if it be not really so), as opposed to a disorder

which intoxicates itself with vain noise, weighed on our

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103

souls. At this moment of painful expectation the English made a quarter turn—their muskets were going up to the ‘ready.’ An indefinable sensation stopped many of our men dead, they halted and began a wavering fire. The enemy’s return, delivered with simultaneous precision, absolutely blasted us. Decimated by it, we reeled together, trying to recover our equilibrium. Then three formidable hurrahs terminated the long silence of our adversaries. At the third they were upon us, pressing us into disorderly retreat.” So great and°so indisputable was the moral superiority of the British soldier, which alone enabled him to meet attack in line. Homer has depicted precisely the same contrast, between the silence of the Greeks and the noisiness of the Trojans. The merits of the two systems were first tested in 1806, when an English regiment, in line, defeated one of the crack regiments of the French army, in column. And yet the French never succeeded in adapting themselves to the methods of their enemies. At Waterloo, the 52nd, an old Peninsular regiment, made havoc of the Imperial Guard itself, and marched victoriously, and in perfect order, right across the field of battle. “ They came on,” said Wellington of the Grand Army, “ in the old way, and we beat them in the old way.”

Napoleon was sharply reminded of the reality of the English menace during his Egyptian expedition. This he had intended as a blow at our power; he was to have commanded the Republican army for the invasion of England, but he saw that this plan was not feasible, and there was another way of attacking us that gave greater promise of success. Oriental conquest always had an attraction for Napoleon, and he dreamed of striking a blow at our Indian Empire. But the hand of England was upon him; Nelson annihilated his fleet; Sir Sidney Smith drove him from Acre; and, after he had escaped to France, Abercromby disposed of the rest of his army.

104 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

It was the victory of the Nile that first awoke England to a true sense of the part she had to play. Danger is the great stimulant to energy, but there must be something of hope, something of triumph, to kindle the pure flame of national spirit. The Battle of the Nile was a triumph of which England might well be proud. Scarcely ever had a naval victory been so complete. Its results were commensurate with its brilliancy. Napoleon was a prisoner in Egypt ; England commanded the Mediterranean ; the Second Coalition was called into being. More important still, the French sailors and admirals had learnt to be afraid of us ; even the great fleet of Bruix, which might have retrieved the situation for France, was content to get back into port, after having managed to avoid the enemy for three months. So thoroughly had the French found their masters, that in the battle of the Basque Roads a French ship of the line struck to an English brig; and such was the spirit that Nelson had infused into the conduct of affairs, that in 1805 Sir Robert Calder was actually censured because he had only captured two ships of a superior fleet, and let the rest run away to Cadiz, without renewing the action.

The Nile was the turning-point of the war. The army, which had as yet had scarcely a gleam of success, and now sustained a second humiliating reverse in Holland, at last was crowned with victory in Egypt. A formidable attempt to combine the North against us was shattered, by another glorious victory at Copenhagen. The French navy and commerce had been swept from the seas, and the supremacy of British sea power was absolute. Ireland, whose semi-independence had proved a thorn in the side of England, was united to her by questionable, but necessary means. The pilot, who had guided the ship of State into safe waters, left the wheel for a while to the wretched " doctor " and his incompetent Ministry. And then came the breathing space of the Peace of Amiens.

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105

This Peace represents a genuine attempt on the part of England to let bygones be bygones, and live at peace with our neighbours, without troubling about their domestic politics. Only a short time before, Grenville had replied to Napoleon’s overtures by an official and officious sermon, calling upon France to restore the Bourbons. But in the negotiations of Amiens, we broke decisively with Burke’s policy of forcing an alien régime on France. We ceased to trouble ourselves about the divine right of the Bourbons. We went on the assumption that the cup of French ambition was now full, that the First Consul, who had attained a pinnacle of glory beyond the dreams of Louis XIV, might well be content to consolidate his power at home and leave other nations alone. We displayed an extreme moderation, handing back our conquests, even the valuable Cape of Good Hope, with reckless complaisance, and asking nothing in return. On one point, our statesmanship displayed culpable shortsightedness. No provision was made for the Netherlands, the key of our European position. None the less, a peace was concluded on honourable terms, and the nation went mad with joy.

This respite of Amiens is a landmark in the spiritual history of the struggle. We had broken once and for all with the idea of a war to crush a free people in the name of divine right. As long as this was the case, we were fighting on the wrong lines, and we could not command success. A new conception of our cause had been gaining upon us, ever since the year of extreme peril ; after the breathing space it became dominant. For it was soon apparent that we were face to face with a tyranny that left us no choice but to resist or be slaves. Napoleon meant to put us out altogether from the politics of the Continent, while his ambition grew with each fresh acquisition. He again turned greedy eyes upon Egypt, and his agents were busy countermining our influence there.

106 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

Egypt, as nobody knew better than the First Consul, was the most important stage on the road to India, and this being the case, it would have been madness for us, treaty or no treaty, to have let go Malta. Worst of all, it was too evident that Holland itself was destined to be made a French province, and that what we had fought and intrigued against for centuries was now about to become an accomplished fact. War, and that for our life, was thus inevitable The precise means by which it came about is a matter for the diplomatic historian.

Here we may content ourselves with observing the change in the realm of ideas. Now, at last, England was in the full stream of the Romantic movement; now, at last, she stood for an idea, and that idea was liberty. Her first object was to save herself, her second to save Europe, from a tyrant. For tyrant Napoleon was to her. We need not enter upon the fascinating and unsolved problem of his character ; we are writing of England, and of Napoleon as he affected England From our point of view, he had stepped into the place of Louis XIV and Philip of Spain. His ambition compassed the domination of the world, an alien and intolerable tyranny. With every fresh acquisition of strength to our enemy, the merely dynastic and selfish aims with which we had commenced the war receded into the background. The war became a Holy War.

Thus it was that the whole might of the Romantic spirit came to be enlisted on our side. At first this had not been so. Many of the greatest figures of romance had found their love of liberty pulling against their love of England Only Burke had been whole-hearted for the war, and it was not on Burke's principles that the war was to be fought to a finish. In those early years, the nation had been voiceless, save for Burke's philippics, and one or two songs of Burns. As in the early days of Elizabeth, we had fought on sadly in the dark But

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107

now liberty and patriotism were no longer out of tune; a tyranny more grinding than that of the Bourbons threatened us from Paris, a spirit as fierce as the "Marseillaise" rose to meet it One by one the waverers came to rally round the flag, and there was no more talk of sympathy with the French, no more fear of Corresponding Societies and their like England was fighting in all the pride of a good cause, and it was the nation itself, and not the calculation of politicians, that inspired the struggle

The crisis of 1797-8 is memorable in the realm of literature, as well as that of action. It saw Wordsworth and Coleridge come to the maturity of their genius, and the year of the Nile was also signalized by the appearance of the not less memorable "Lyrical Ballads." The second and greatest period of English romance had set in, and England began to sing. Both poets, though retaining all their enthusiasm for liberty, had shed their illusions about the French Revolution, and no longer desired to see our troops beaten. Poor "Spy Nosy," who kept a watch on them on behalf of a suspicious Government, might have spared his pains. Even Fox was coming nearer to his old opponents, for it was no longer possible to denounce resistance to France in the name of liberty. But for the stoutness of the old King, Pitt and Fox would have served their country as members of the same administration.

CHAPTER V

TRIUMPH AND ISOLATION

NAPOLEON'S conduct at the opening of the war displayed a notable similarity to that of Louis XIV a century before Louis had driven all England into opposition by his seizure of the Barrier towns, and his recognition of the Pretender. Equally high-handed, and even less politic, was Napoleon’s imprisonment of all King George’s subjects who happened to be in France. This cruel and unprovoked outrage, for Napoleon’s pretext was of the flimsiest, was enough to show that there was no safety from this man, save by blood and iron. It had the effect of uniting men of every shade of opinion in the common cause. The debate on the declaration of war was a memorable one. Pitt's speech, by a sad mischance, is lost for ever, but many of his hearers thought it his greatest effort, and we can imagine with what steadfast resolution the devoted patriot inspired his hearers. Of Fox's speech we know more, though not all, and on this we can certainly pronounce that the champion of liberty was never heard to better advantage.

The closing days of Fox's career are those upon which his countrymen can look back with most satisfaction. While Sheridan was declining into a pitiable state of maudlin sentiment, the character of Fox took on a firmness and nobility that had been too sadly lacking in the days of the Coalition and Warren Hastings. His con-

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tribution to this memorable debate breathes the loftiest patriotic idealism. He opposed Ministers, not because they went to war, but because, in his opinion, they went to war in a wrong spirit, as a matter of policy, and not as a crusade. He would have flung Malta to the winds, and made light of Egypt ; he preferred the strength of a pure cause to all the advantages of expert kingcraft. Opponent of the Bourbons as he had always been, he would have resisted, to the death, the impudent demand for the expulsion of that unfortunate family from our shores. If we must draw the sword, it should be on behalf of the enslaved Swissers and Dutchmen, and not for the advantage of a naval base at Valetta. In this conception of patriotism, he touches a level to which even Pitt did not attain. The ideal of a mighty nation, sans peur et sans reproche, millions of men uniting to form one champion of the oppressed all over the world, and casting aside all thought even of collective self-interest, is one of which few patriots have dared to dream. Such a nation would be irresistible.

And yet, during the terrible years that were to ensue upon Fox's speech, England came nearer to attaining this ideal than any nation before or since. Seldom has war been carried on with so little prospect of selfish aggrandizement. It was precisely in her disinterestedness that her strength lay among the greedy and intriguing kings of the Continent. It is remarkable to what an extent, after the death of her two greatest statesmen, the war passes out of the hands of statesmen. With the exception of Canning and Castlereagh, they are a shadowy and unimpressive group, with whose views and intrigues we need not concern ourselves. They do not impress their personalities upon the conflict, but are carried along with it. It is as if the soul of England, that life of untold multitudes and many ages, had become articulate and purposeful ; as if the great symbolic conflict for the de-

110 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

liverance of Spain, and the deliverance of Europe, had passed out of the control of any mortal will of three-score years and ten, and God Himself were guiding the destinies of His people.

Napoleon had now to cast about for other means of overthrowing his arch-enemy. He reverted to the plan of the Directory, and prepared to strike a great blow at England's heart. There can be small doubt that he had every intention of putting this threat into execution ; such infinite labour and minuteness of detail do not point to a blind. Nelson, who sacrificed brave lives in an almost hopeless attempt to destroy some of the Boulogne flotilla, does not seem to have thought so either. The failure of Nelson's attempt may help us to understand the failure of Napoleon.

Both men were gifted with supreme creative genius; both were forced, by circumstances, to attempt the impossible. Napoleon had not to consider how immense were the odds against him, he was positively compelled to remove England from his path, or consent to the limitation of his personality, by falling short of world-conquest, a paltry ambition, but one which dominated him. There are some wills that must expand or break ; any risk was preferable to self-denial, and Napoleon might trust to his elaborate and masterly scheme of naval strategy, or to the chapter of accidents, to give him temporary command of the Channel. The rest he and the Grand Army could do for themselves.

This was a mistake. The Grand Army, even if it had managed to enter London, would have been defeated. Mere strategy and tactics are not everything in war; though Napoleon would have found a Moore as well as a York ready to receive him. But a nation, fired with the spirit which was then abroad in England, could not by any possibility have been conquered. The recruits who broke Ney at Waterloo would have broken Murat

TRIUMPH AND ISOLATION

III

in Kent ; one can imagine a series of hard-fought, murderous battles, the English, outmanœuvred but not outfought, forced back, perhaps, step by step, until, the command of the Channel having been regained, the force of the attack spent itself in vain against the line of the North Downs, one of the most perfect defensive positions imaginable It was impossible, as Napoleon was to find later, for military skill to juggle away with moral fitness. In all his really decisive victories, at Rivoli, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, he had an overwhelming superiority in this essential element of victory, which made his manœuvres accomplish exactly what he intended, and was able to change a defeat into rout or surrender. He would not have had this advantage in Kent.

Pitt lived to see the clouds of invasion scattered, and then the strain proved too much for him, and that fragile body could no longer house its guest. Like Burke, he died miserable, but dauntless. There has been some credence attached to a story that he prophesied the final overthrow of Napoleon through the principle of nationality, and actually predicted the Peninsular War. Even if the authority were less flimsy, the story could by no possibility be true. Pitt was the priest of his country, but he was not her seer. We know, only too well, the state of his mind at the last. He had staked all his hopes on the Third Coalition ; the news of Ulm he had refused to believe ; the news of Austerlitz broke him. Yet, had he known it, his policy was even then driving Napoleon to ruin. By destroying his sea power, and blockading his coasts, he was forcing the Emperor further and further eastwards, even unto Moscow. It was necessary that the armies of the kings should be shattered, in order that the armies of the nations might come into being. The Coalition had served its purpose, but Pitt knew it not. In his last agony he was heard to ejaculate, " How I

112 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

leave my country ! " It is not on this earth that the

hero must look for his reward ; and yet what could Pitt

have asked for, more than the ultimate salvation of his

country, even though he did not see it with mortal eyes ?

If it was Pitt who gave his country iron, it was Nelson

who gave her fire. He was, like William Blake, one of

those divine children who never grow old, and like Sir

Francis Drake, he embodied the best tendencies of his

time in a spirit of buoyant patriotism that sacrificed body

and soul to England with as little thought as most men

give to the pursuit of their own interests. And with all

his downright simplicity, no greater exponent of the art

of war has ever existed. There is hardly a single action

of his that does not stamp him as a man of supreme

genius ; even his failures were splendid. And although

his mind was employed upon colossal and dazzling

schemes of victory, he was equally a master of the

minutest detail. His great victories are hardly less

remarkable than the unremitting patience with which,

in face of enormous difficulties, he maintained the

blockade of Toulon.

Nelson is the supreme product, in the realm of action,

of the English Romantic spirit. Even in his faults he

embodies it. Though he held it part of his creed to obey

orders, he was not only the most troublesome of sub-

ordinates, but he was apt to be under the control of his

own emotions. Lady Hamilton found a way of pandering

to the weakest side of his nature, and his conduct at

Naples, when under her wizardry, has left an indelible

stain upon his memory. This weakness was what

struck Wellington when the two men came into

momentary contact, and he was inclined to look on

Nelson as a sentimental declaimer. Yet Nelson's faults

fade into insignificance in the light of a genius which is

not unworthy of comparison with that of Napoleon

himself. Never was hero so manifestly inspired, or so

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113

capable of inspiring others. And never did virtue go

forth from a sweeter soul.

He idealized his subordinates, and by this means made

them ideal officers. He had that.fundamental trust in

man's nature which sees in every human form the

chrysalis of an angel, and has the power, by faith, to

bring that angel to birth. This is the noblest phase of

that worship of humanity which is of the essence of

romance. Never was man more splendidly backed by

his subordinates, never did man more richly merit their

loyalty. In this respect at any rate he was greater than

Napoleon, who made it his policy to degrade his marshals,

instead of inspiring them, who was grudging in his

appreciation of their services, and played them off against

each other. And so their dissensions largely contributed

to his downfall, and in the Peninsula they were seldom

capable of combining against Wellington. In the hour of

their master's direst need they forsook him. But under

no circumstances would Troubridge, or Hardy, or Colling-

wood have deserted Nelson.

We have heard it said of him, by the most brilliant of

journalistic cynics, that his genius, instead of producing

intellectual keenness and scrupulousness, produced mere

delirium. Would to God that all Englishmen suffered

from such delirium, a delirium for which no problem was

too vast, no detail too intricate! The child who wanted

to be kissed on his deathbed, and who could pour out all

his passionate craving for sympathy and love at the feet

of Lady Hamilton, was the conqueror whose death many

Frenchmen considered to be a good set-off for the final

disaster of Trafalgar. Let no one think to take refuge in

a sneer against the obligation that such lives as Nelson's

put upon us, to greatness of soul and devotion to England.

Nelson's naval genius is a subject that may well

exercise the admiration and ingenuity of strategists, but

to understand the spirit that inspired him, there is no

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

need to dive curiously into obscure records. When he wrote “ Down, down, down with the French ! ” it was in no narrow and ungenerous spirit—for he was the most chivalrous of opponents—but by way of expressing his utter devotion for his cause. All is summed up in his last prayer : “ May the great God, whom I worship, grant to my country, and for the benefit of Europe in general, a great and glorious victory ; and may no misconduct in any one tarnish it ; and may humanity after victory be the predominant feature in the British fleet ! ” Well might he say, with the mists of death closing upon him, “ Thank God, I have done my duty ! ”

Nelson was the greatest among the most remarkable band of seamen the world has ever seen. The Romantic spirit had unmistakably penetrated the navy, and England produced a type of sailor of quite another stamp than the burly and unemotional sea-dogs of Anson’s day. Many of them were devoutly religious, fervent Scotch Calvinists like Duncan, or with the somewhat unctuous piety of Gambier. Nowhere is the influence of the Wesleyan revival more apparent. Again, we have the other type of Romantic temperament, in the radiant and uncontrolled brilliancy of men like Cochrane and Sir Sidney Smith, the Hotspurs of the service, men who wrought miracles, but were just lacking in that stability of temperament which is the last essential of heroism. Some divine infection was abroad in the navy of Nelson’s day ; there is a perfect galaxy of character, men whose very names breathe the atmosphere of romance, Troubridge, Blackwood, Collingwood, Hardy, Riou. There were giants on the sea in those days.

Whatever may have been the case before the Peace of Amiens, there is no doubt that the Boulogne flotilla rallied the country, almost as one man, to her defence. The causes that had divided her at the beginning of the struggle were now removed. It was no longer a war

against republican principles, even when they took the repulsive form of Jacobinism.

The new Emperor did everything he could to crush the system that he had once supported, and there is no greater enemy to democracy than a parvenu royalty.

Pitt and Fox had begun to draw together, and even Fox found, at last, that Napoleon, for whom he had always evinced much sympathy, was an irreconcilable enemy to freedom.

It was his firmness in the negotiations with Napoleon that, despite all his mistakes and lukewarmness, has earned for Fox the right to be numbered among those men of whom England may be proud.

In the words of that thoroughgoing patriot, Sir Walter Scott :

"Partial feeling cast aside,

Record that Fox a Briton died !

When Europe crouched to France's yoke,

When Austria bent, and Prussia broke,

And the firm Russian's purpose brave

Was bartered by a timorous slave—

E'cr then dishonour's peace he spurned,

The sullied olive branch returned,

Stood for his country's glory fast,

And nailed her colours to the mast."

It seemed to Wordsworth, when, among his native mountains, he was hourly expecting the news of Fox's dissolution, as if a power were passing from the earth, ebbing back to the God from Whom it had flowed.

When even Fox came to deserve such praise, there were few of those stout apostles of liberty, who had formerly opposed Pitt and the war, who did not also stand wholeheartedly in the cause of England.

After the coronation in Notre Dame, and after Tilsit, the cause of England, and that of freedom, were one.

Coleridge's "Ode to Liberty" is valuable, not only as one of the greatest odes in the language, but also as a most important historical document, illustrative of the change that was taking place in the minds of a great many of his countrymen, and showing how those who rallied round

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the flag did not thereby forego their worship of Liberty,

but only raised it to a higher plane. Coleridge was never

an extreme Jacobin, he had always loved peace and

feared God, and the gentleness of his writing in " The

Watchman " is in sharp contrast with the fierce diatribes

of genuine sans-culottes. But he had adored the goddess

whom he saw riding upon the clouds, and whose breath

swayed the mountain pines ; and this made him an ardent

supporter of France. As long as she was really fighting

against oppression, he was ready to excuse even the

direst horrors, and to pray for the defeat of English arms.

But when Liberty gave place to glory, France began to

stamp out the independence of free Switzeland, and a

new truth dawned upon the mind of Coleridge. The

Liberty that he had sought was external, she must reign

in the hearts of men before she could find expression in

political institutions.

" The sensual and the dark rebel in vain,

Slaves by their own compulsion."

This Coleridge must also have realized from the ill-

success of his " Watchman." The paper started with a

cry, like Goethe's, for light, but the editor was soon to

find that the public had but little interest in the patient

pursuit of knowledge, and the paper was a failure. For

a time, Coleridge was driven back to winds and waves for

the realization of his ideal.

But this was not for long In 1798, the year after the

publication of the ode, we find him blossoming forth

definitely as a patriot. It was in the April of that year,

and there were threats of an invasion.

" Stand we forth,

Render them back on the insulted ocean ! "

he cries, and speaks of the " divine and most beauteous

island " which had been his only temple.

" There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul,

Unborrowed from my country."

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117

The patriotism of Coleridge is based, not only upon his

worship of Liberty, but also upon his hatred of atheism,

and the attachment to the soil, which is characteristic

alike of Elizabethans and of Romantics. We can see how

easily the nature-worship of the ode passes into the

affectionate solicitude, lest any foot of the dear soil of

England should be violated by the tread of an invader.

Drawing-room culture tends to be cosmopolitan, but the

white cliffs of Dover, and the lone grandeur of the

Cumbrian Mountains are, and, please God, always shall

be, the free heritage of Englishmen. This Coleridge

realized, and Wordsworth was never more inspired than

when he was giving it expression. Wordsworth could not

remain a Jacobin. He, who had desired the defeat of

English troops, was, less than ten years later, in the very

front rank of English patriots. His conception of freedom,

like that of Coleridge, had become deeper and more

spiritual, and he no longer sought the salvation of man-

kind by abusing kings and noblemen. Besides, the

conduct of France had taught him how little the Revolu-

tion had really accomplished, even for political liberty :

"Scorn and contempt forbid me to proceed,"

he writes of the excesses of the Terror, when the more

moderate spirits had been silenced, and the new movement

was at the mercy of criminals and zealots. But he had

clung, against hope, to the tottering cause, until he

perceived too plainly that France stood, not for freedom,

but for tyranny If the subjugation of Switzerland had

fired the wrath of Coleridge, even greater must have been

its effect upon the lonely mountain-child of England.

His sonnet on this liberticide is worthy to stand beside

Milton's "Massacre in Piedmont." The vast, solitary

things, types of the infinite, the mountains and the

ocean, were, to Wordsworth, the "chosen music" of

Liberty. And there is agony in the cry that

"Not a torrent murmurs heard by thee."

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If the mountains are lost to her, then must Liberty seek

her last refuge in her ocean-girt fastness of the North,

and thus Wordsworth falls into line with Pitt and Nelson,

and the cause of England becomes, in his eyes too, the

cause of Liberty.

The Puritan austerity, which had not shrunk from

justifying the death of a king, did not condescend to any

sentimental horror of war for a just cause. In a note to his

"Thanksgiving Ode" for the final overthrow of Napoleon,

Wordsworth expressly denies that he is violating the

principles, either of patriotism or of philosophy, by

encouraging a martial spirit. "Every man deserving the

name of Briton," he proudly exclaims, "adds his voice

to the chorus which extols the exploits of his country-

men." He loves his country with a passion such as few

lovers have lavished, even for an hour, upon their

mistress. With Wordsworth the love of an English

maiden and love of England are inseparably blended.

"Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,

The bowers where Lucy played,

And thine, too, was the last green field

That Lucy's eyes surveyed."

The same little poem tells us with what yearning affection,

after travelling among "unknown men," he set his foot

once again upon English soil.

It was when he was at Calais, during the transient

interval of peace, that he wrote that glorious sonnet :

"Fair star of evening, Splendour of the West,

Star of my Country !

"

which expresses the very ecstasy of love for "the dear,

dear land," for which men like Wordsworth and Shake-

speare and Nelson do not scorn to live and die.

Such love is too pure to condescend to flattery. Words-

worth is driven to the verge of distraction at the prospect

of his countrymen neglecting their great mission for the

sake of luxury, like Blake, he invokes the shade of Milton to

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119

arouse her, and when he discovers his fears to be un-

worthy, and England " a bulwark for the cause of men,"

was he to be blamed, he asks, that he once

" Felt for thee as a lover or a child ?"

He hardly ever mentions England without coupling her

with Liberty, and reminding her of her task of delivering

Europe from chains. " It is not to be thought of," he

cries, that " the flood of British Freedom " should

perish,

" We must be free or die, who speak the tongue

That Shakespeare spake ; the faith and morals hold

Which Milton held—In everything we are sprung

From Earth's first blood, have titles manifold."

He contrasts our great ancestors (characteristically

singling out for mention the Puritan friends of Milton),

with the lack of such spirits in France, which has brought

forth nothing but " perpetual emptiness," " equally a

lack of books and men "; and he marvels how one of the

meanest of mankind has been able to sway, not only

France, but the world.

It was the prospect of this man presuming to threaten

English liberty that roused Wordsworth to the height of

his genius, in an appeal to his countrymen, of all parties

and all creeds, to unite in her defence. Simple and

impassioned as these few sonnets are, they contain a

sounder political philosophy than has ever found its way

into text-books. He sees that a great cause defies finance

and arithmetic, he already predicts the inevitable doom

of the man who bases his statesmanship on the theory

that Providence fights on the side of money-bags, or of

big battalions. " These times strike monied worldlings

with dismay," he exults in his scorn ; but sound, healthy

children of God know better, and perceive

" That virtue and the faculties within

Are vital,—and that riches are akin

To fear, to change, to cowardice and death "

120 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

Wordsworth was right, even from the commercial point

of view ; England never made a better investment than

in the gold she poured recklessly forth in the cause of

European freedom. The poet laughs at " the arithmetic

of babes." Numbers, discipline and valour cannot with-

stand the shock of a great people, fighting in the cause of

God for liberty and right.

He is not blind to the faults of his countrymen. There

is a sonnet written, probably,in 1803, which strikes a note

of stern reproof ; even now, he says, if anything good

were destined for Greece, Egypt, India, or Africa,

England would step between to prevent it ; and yet, in

spite of all, the world's best hopes are all with her ! Very

different is the ringing trumpet-call to the men of Kent,

the " vanguard of Liberty," to hurl back the invader.

" No parleying now In Britain is one breath,

We all are with you now from shore to shore,

Ye men of Kent, 'tis victory or death ! "

Confidently he writes of the defeat of the invaders, as if it

had already happened, and as if they had drifted like

snow before the blast of heaven. The disasters which had

broken the steely nerve of Pitt, only served to exhilarate

Wordsworth. He holds him like a dastard, who does not

exult, at the prospect of our being the last who dare to

face the foe, thrown back upon our own resources, the

sole champions of honour and freedom in a servile

Europe.

" In order to be men," writes Coleridge a year or two

later, " we must be patriots," and, in the pages of the

" Friend," he denounces the cosmopolitanism of his

revolutionary days The true friends of mankind, he

maintains, have been patriots in the first instance, and

the indispensable condition of patriotism is national

independence

But there were many lesser men than the Lake poets,

who were ready to give voice, more or less crudely, to the

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tempestuous patriotism evoked by the threat of invasion. Mr. John Ashton has given us, in his “ English Caricature and Satire on Napoleon I,” an interesting account of the squibs and pamphlets, which probably achieved greater popularity than any of Wordsworth’s sonnets. Primitive as most of them are, they are of a more healthy brand than the average music-hall product of our own times.

" Let him come and be d—d, thus roared out John Bull, With my crabstick assured I will fracture his skull,"

or

" His [the King's] subjects are ready, all loyal and steady, To hurl this dam'd pest to the Devil,"

or

" Yet still he boldly brags, with consequence full cramm'd, On England's happy island his legions he will land, But it's O in my heart, if he does, may I be d—d,"

or

" The Gallic fleet approaches nigh, boys, Now some must conquer, some must die, boys, But this appals not you or me, For still our watchword it shall be Britons strike home, revenge your country's wrongs ! "

or to quote the lines of that very inferior poetess Mrs. Iliff :

" Let Buonaparte his legions boast, We tremble not with coward fears, Our tars shall keep the sea, our coast Be guarded by our volunteers "

The prevailing note is one of jolly defiance to little " Boney " and his skinny Frenchmen, a defiance which has in it little of real venom, and often takes the form of good-humoured patronage of the wretched foreigners who have reason for coveting the roast beef of honest John Bull. This worthy has now changed his character ; he is no longer, as in good Queen Anne's days, a shrewd cloth-merchant, but a well-fed, jolly, stupid, south-country yokel, " Johnny Bull " in fact. " Ha, my little Boney,"

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he cries, in one of Gillray’s cartoons, holding up the un-

fortunate Emperor’s head upon a pitchfork, “ what dost

think of Johnny Bull now ?

Hay ? Make French slaves of us all, hay ?—ravish all

our wives and daughters, hay ?—O Lord, help that silly

head !—to think that Johnny Bull would ever suffer those

lanthorn jaws to become King of England’s Roast Beef

and Plum-pudding !”

At other times, we have an enormous King George,

peering down • in amused astonishment upon a very

diminutive and intensely truculent “Boney”, or a French

frog parting from his anatomy, in a vain attempt to blow

himself up to the size of an English ox. Then we have

lurid pictures, as in Prince Charlie’s time, of the capture

of London and the excesses perpetrated by the captors,

pictures which were probably rather calculated to arouse

ridicule than terror. Jolly Jack tars vie with jolly

yokels in patriotic sentiment, and the nation, from the

highest to the lowest class, was thrilled with the deter-

mination to make short work of the invader, and con-

fidence in its ability to do so. This patriotism was not

of words alone, for between three and four hundred

thousand volunteers were enrolled, and a levée en masse

authorized in case of a landing.

Indeed, despite the actual misery that, we know, pre-

vailed among the English peasantry at this time, the

roast beef and plum pudding note is still as loud as ever

in patriotic poetry. In the great collection of invasion

squibs and pamphlets, recently given to the world by

Messrs. Wheeler and Broadley, we have the following

specimen, written as early as 1801, and purporting to be

a translation of a French manifesto • “ Brave French-

men ! could you but see the interior of these invaluable

towns and happy dwellings, you would find there . . .

every desirable comfort of life, even among the lowest

classes of the people (I mean compared with your own

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wretched hovels).” Alas, it was this very “ Johnny Bull ” to whom a contemporary philanthropist could seriously recommend the advantages of sleeping with cattle, lest he should die for lack of warmth !

Foremost among those who fanned e this ardour of defiance was Gillray, the caricaturist. For many years, his pencil had helped in no small degree to direct popular opinion. He united the genius of an artist with the acumen of a journalist politician, and his works are particularly helpful in enabling us to understand the political atmosphere of the time. Compare them for a moment with those of our accomplished contemporary, Sir Francis Gould. The first thing that strikes us is the venomous brutality of the Georgian, as compared with the gentle humour of the modern satirist. We can imagine Mr Balfour and Mr Chamberlain enjoying a hearty laugh over the rabbits and foxes which body forth their real or imaginary foibles. But we can hardly imagine the Lord Jersey laughing at seeing himself carrying the Prince of Wales pickaback to her ladyship's bed, nor any friend of Fox at the prospect of his leader on his deathbed, bibulously refusing the Roman Sacraments on the ground that he would not be deprived of the privilege of partaking of the cup And yet Sir Francis is more of a party man than Gillray. We never find the “ Westminster Gazette ” pouring ridicule upon the Radical leaders, and yet Gillray, the Tory and patriot, spares not Pitt, nor even royalty. The King candidly confessed that he could not understand what Gillray's cartoons meant, and if he had, we can imagine his feelings on seeing his virtuous queen figuring as Sin, in a state of hideous nudity, with Pitt standing by as the Devil. For the Opposition no insinuation was too foul, no attack too merciless. Neither the marriage-bed nor the death-bed was sacred, Gillray's enemies were liars, traitors, lechers, cuckolds and brute beasts, and their female relations no

124 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

better than they should be If this was the attitude he adopted towards his own countrymen, foreigners could scarcely expect more gentle treatment. Napoleon’s sisters appear less than decently clad (a not unintelligible jibe in the case of the fair Pauline), and Josephine herself dancing stark naked before a bestial Barras. The difference between Gillray and our modern cartoonists is to be explained, less by the increased reasonableness and humanity of our days, than by the deadly earnestness of his. Modern men, whose nerves are too jaded either to love or to hate well, cannot understand how it was that men could have taken politics seriously enough really to have detested their opponents. If we are Conservatives, we think we are pursuing the only rational Liberalism ; if we call ourselves Liberal, it is only because we are more truly conservative than the Conservatives ; in any case our opponents, apart from the trifling fact that they are ruining the country, are really the best of fellows. But with Canning and Gillray, political controversy was war to the knife, and quarter was neither asked nor given. Only when the cause was gone, the lions gave place to serpents, and fanaticism to bigotry. Toleration is virtue in an age of littleness.

Among those who added to the lustre of the time, we must not forget those direct and noble spirits, who, though they did not attain to the supreme excellence of Wordsworth, or the subtle beauty of Coleridge, are yet numbered with the immortals of English Literature. Such men were Scott, Campbell and Southey. There is little in their work that calls for elaborate analysis, but much that can be a joy for all time. These men (except Southey, in his first and least brilliant phase) were patriots to the core ; all expressed their feelings in simple and direct words, capable of being understood by the people The fervour of Southey’s Jacobinism is eclipsed by the violence with which he threw himself into the

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contest with Napoleon. His poem about the Russian campaign is pitched in a strain of brutal raillery ; his ode of 1814 is an impassioned and savage appeal to France and all Europe to take vengeance on the Emperor. The crime that seems to shock the ex-Jacobin most is the shooting of a Bourbon prince.

The two Scotsmen, Campbell and Scott, are both important, as showing the reconciliation that was being effected between Scotland and England. Jacobitism, except as a mere sentiment, had perished with the English hatred of Scotsmen, that had burned so fiercely in the days of Lord Bute. Campbell talks of the union of the thistle, the shamrock and the rose; and Scott, though a devoted admirer of the history and heroes of Scotland, is yet a staunch British patriot, and a Tory. Names like Duncan and Abercromby were in the mouth of every Englishman, and the Highland regiments speedily proved themselves worthy of the best traditions of our army. Campbell indeed came under suspicion, his papers were seized for proof of sedition, but the searchers were rewarded by discovering a manuscript copy of " Ye mariners of England," a decisive proof of patriotism, if ever there was one. Campbell was, indeed, a devoted apostle of freedom, especially that of the oppressed Poles, in whose cause he remained firm till his dying day. But this only served to enkindle his patriotism. In a vigorous but clumsy contribution to the huge mass of invasion literature, he appeals to his " fellow freemen " not to be enslaved by a foreign tyrant. And his heroes are men like Nelson, Moore, and " the gallant, good Riou."

Scott, Tory though he was, was yet a lover of freedom. That name was sacred now to the best men of both parties, and it was for freedom that the English squires and noblemen supported the struggle that finally broke Napoleon. Thus such a man as Scott could be at once

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a Tory and a keen sympathizer with every one who fought for freedom, were he Englishman, were he Scots-

man. In his famous lines,

" Breathes there a man with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land—"

he is referring to the love of a Highlander for Scotland, but his own patriotism is not Scottish but British ; a

patriotism straightforward, tolerant, and joyous, that can mourn for the clans of Culloden and yet support King

George III ; that can oppose the policy of Fox and yet record with pride that he died a Briton. Scott, like his

own Lord Howard, was a generous foe, and it gives him real pleasure to describe how, as brothers meet in a

foreign land, the Border foemen fraternize together during a truce. He is always at his best when describing

a patriot, and there are few nobler pictures than that of Lord Marmion, even in his death agony, trying to serve

his country.

In his nature descriptions, he helped to plant a love of the soil, not of Scotland alone, but of Britain ; for there are

few Englishmen who read of Scott's mountains and heaths who do not regard them as being, in a sense, their

own inheritance. We hardly think, now, of Bannockburn as an English defeat, or of Culloden as an English victory.

We love Robert the Bruce and we hate Cumberland the Butcher, and if Scotsmen and Englishmen occasionally

do pass criticisms upon each other, it is the good-natured chaff of brothers, and not the bitter taunt of enemies ;

the last Scottish survivor of Culloden even received a handsome pension from William IV—and for such a state

of things we have to thank writers like Scott, almost as much as soldiers like Abercromby.

After Trafalgar, the struggle between England and Napoleon enters upon another phase. The immediate

peril to our shores was past, but Napoleon never for a

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moment relaxed his fixed purpose of crushing England,

and the struggle was recognized, by both sides, to be one

of life or death. But it is now England that assumes the

offensive, and it is France that is struggling for life in

the grip of an implacable foe. England had saved her-

self by her exertions, she was now to save Europe by her

example.

Napoleon, with all his military genius, had but little

insight into the ultimate forces of history. He was a

materialist at heart, and made the fatal mistake of think-

ing that victory went to the general who could command

the biggest battalions. Of spiritual forces he was con-

temptuous or ignorant, and it was these very forces that

were to crush him at last. One of his chief measures, on

getting the reins of power into his hands, was to ruin the

magnificent army of the Revolution, in which he put his

trust. He put quantity before quality, and at last man-

aged to put in the field nearly a million men of divers

nations. But these were of a very different stamp from

the ragged hosts of the Revolution ; they were even ceasing

to be the glory-intoxicated Frenchmen of Marengo and

Austerlitz. They were still brave ; they were for the most

part dazzled by his genius ; but they were becoming

not patriots, but professional soldiers, such men as the

troops of Brunswick and Alvinzi. In the highest com-

mands the decay was greatest. The marshals, who had

risen from the ranks by their merit, were not patriots, but

able professional men playing for their own hands.

Many of them were sick of fighting, and wanted to enjoy

their dignities ; they were jealous of each other, and it

was seldom that one marshal would unselfishly co-operate

with another They shirked responsibility, and their

operations in command of large forces were often lacking

in energy, and even in intelligence. To this state had they

been reduced by the Emperor himself ; partly by his harsh

and rigid centralization of authority ; partly by too lavish

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rewards, which made gain and not duty their object; and partly by jealousy deliberately fomented. The great heart of France was at last beginning to beat faintly. The lust of glory had been glutted, and the strain was beginning to tell. Dogged, impregnable England hung upon her flank, and until England gave in, there could be no rest for France. English ships blockaded her coasts; English money was at the disposal of every enemy; English armies were ready to give support to every rising; and, most important of all, the spirit for which England stood was beginning to infect other nations Napoleon had led a people to the conquest of kings, he was now to lead mercenaries to struggle with peoples. In neither case could the issue be in doubt.

The weakness of France had been pointed out by Wordsworth during the Boulogne invasion time; it was her lack of ideas, "equally a want of books and men." The last of the poets, André Chénier, had lost his head during the Revolution; the painters, of whom David was the most famous, had neither the delicacy of the courtiers nor the imagination of the Romantics; philosophy was in the hands of men who, with unconscious irony, were called idéologues, who held that to think is to feel, and who pinned their faith to a cold and grovelling materialism, the heritage of the encyclopædists. True, another and nobler spirit was beginning to arise, but this was in direct opposition to revolutionary and even to imperial tendencies; Chateaubriand was calling men from the shifting sands of materialism to the eternal rock of the Catholic Church; De Maistre was sounding the trumpet of royalism and reaction in St. Petersburg; Sénancour was heralding, in plaintive strains, the Orientalism that was to become so conspicuous a feature of the new century; Mme. de Stael was opening the eyes of Frenchmen to the glories of other literatures. But the Empire was sterile; perhaps the chief figure in the literary,

as well as the political sphere was the Emperor himself,

some of whose bulletins and proclamations, notably the

one before Austerlitz, are the masterpieces of their kind.

He had risen to power upon the ideas of the Revolution,

and when these grew cold, the enormous* structure was

doomed, and the mere lust of glory was powerless to foil

such an enemy as patriotic, great-souled England.

Only those who can understand spiritual forces can

make any sense out of the last acts of the Napoleonic

tragedy. By all calculation of probabilities, it would seem

as if the Empire was secure after Tilsit. The little officer,

whose genius had triumphed again and again against

overwhelming odds, now at last controlled the whole

resources of an Empire, beside which the wildest dreams

of Louis XIV paled into insignificance. Again and again

he had shattered or annihilated the finest armies of the

Continent; even the army of the great Frederick had

scarcely been able to last for a week against him. With

every victory his resources had increased, and those of

his enemies had grown weaker. They were not even

united against him; Russia was his ally, Spain his vassal,

Prussia his slave. Only England remained to confront

him with a pride and determination equal to his own.

Blind as he was to the forces that were to destroy him,

the Emperor at least realized, that until he had ruined

England all his former work was done in vain, and that

amidst all his glory, it was really he, and not England,

that was struggling for life. His measures for our over-

throw are not those of a confident victor, but those of a

desperate gamester, who realizes that he must risk every-

thing to stave off an almost inevitable catastrophe.

Why was he not content to rest after Tilsit? Was not

a greater Empire than that of Charlemagne enough for the

artillery lieutenant of Ajaccio? But the throne of

Europe was as vain as the bed of Damocles while the

naked sword of England was poised above it. So the whole

II -- K

130 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

energies of the conqueror were now to be devoted to the removal, at any cost, of this constant menace, even if it were to lead to fresh wars and vaster labours than before. He would unite the Continent against England ; he would crush her by weight of numbers ; the whole of his genius should be employed to outwit the staid gentlemen who muddled along in London. This task, at least, could have seemed no hard one to the organizer of victory. More glaring inefficiency than characterized the plans of the English Ministry after Trafalgar, it would be hard to imagine. In Egypt, in South America, in the Dardanelles, in the Baltic, failure trod upon the heels of mismanagement. Our very allies turned against us; 'I hate the English as much as you do,' said Alexander at Tilsit. And yet nothing could damp the spirit of these islanders ; even Fox had rejected Napoleon's overtures ; Canning treated them as a good joke. One circumstance was ominous of the future course of the war. A French army was routed in Sicily by an equal number of British troops, with as much ease as the French had routed the Prussians. This was a new experience for the French, but one that was to be by no means isolated.

The need for supreme genius was not so great as it had been in the days of Nelson and Pitt. The spirit of England was raised to such an exalted pitch that even mediocrity could not baulk it of victory. Such Premiers as Grenville, Portland, Perceval and Liverpool ; such rulers as the old King and the Regent ; such generals as Chatham, York, Burrard and Dalrymple ; such admirals as Duckworth and Gambier might well be supposed capable of compassing the ruin of any nation, especially that of an isolated power, struggling against nearly the whole of Europe led by Napoleon. But neither genius on one side, nor incompetence on the other, could change the issue.

The isolation of England coincides with the temporary

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rise to power of a statesman worthy to bear the mantle of Pitt. We have already had to do with Canning as the brilliant opponent of Jacobin ideas, we now find him paralysing, by a master-stroke of genius, one of Napoleon's most comprehensive plans for our destruction, a gigantic naval combination, by which the fleets of France, Russia, Denmark, Spain and Portugal were to avenge the ruin of Trafalgar. Before the Emperor even realized that his plans were suspected, an English expedition had swooped down upon the key of his position, and his dream of conquest had vanished in the smoke of Copenhagen. Even this did not exhaust the naval ambitions of Napoleon, but his plans were becoming more and more shadowy, and at last, when one of his squadrons did break out, even the criminal incompetence of the British admiral could not prevent its defeat, at the hands of the English frigates and light craft. Cochrane had more trouble in evading the commands of his own admiral than in defeating his opponent. The French navy was useless because it was demoralized.

All that remained for Napoleon was to strangle his opponent by the Continental system. But this was to challenge a struggle of endurance, in which the advantage was on the side of England, with her rising manufactures and her immense resources. It was putting a strain upon Napoleon, too great for him to bear. In order to enforce his blockade, he had to goad the whole Continent into madness ; to embark upon reckless annexations, including that of the Duchy of Oldenburg, which mortally offended the Duke's kinsman, Alexander; and to make demands upon his allies, which finally led him to Moscow.

While the spirit of France was one of reckless materialism driving headlong to destruction, that of England was instinct with the confidence of victory, and the sense of her high mission. Even such different men as Wordsworth and Canning are at one in this respect. Canning

132 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

stands head and shoulders above the other English statesmen of his time. He represents Toryism at its best, just as the egregious "doctor" and the brutal Ellenborough represent it at its worst. He is the spiritual heir, alike of Pitt, and of Burke in his last and noblest phase. The besetting sin of the Tories was a tendency to put their class before their country, to fall back upon a dull and selfish resistance to ideas, and it has been the strength of the English landed gentry that they are, as a class, capable of rising above such pettiness. There was no selfishness and bigotry about Canning ; from the very first he had been a man of profound and generous ideas ; he had hated Jacobinism and he had loved the soul of England. But he had also the defects of his class, of the Eton and Oxford man, in a certain haughty contempt for emotional display, and an intolerance, that did not always stop short of cruelty, for those whose standpoint differed from his own. He did not scruple to be associated with the "Quarterly Review," and there is no reason to suppose that such methods as those of Keats-killing Croker met with his disapproval.

He stood for the Constitution, as interpreted by Montesquieu and Blackstone. The French Revolution had immensely strengthened the reverence with which Englishmen regarded the system that ensured them a measure of freedom, while avoiding the excesses of Jacobinism ; there was often a tendency to make the present state of things a fetish, and blindly to oppose change of any kind. Canning, however, regarded the Constitution as fundamentally unchangeable in principle, but elastic in detail. Against anything that threatened radical change, he set his face like flint ; he did not even go as far as his master Pitt, in the matter of parliamentary reform But the Constitution, in his view, was made for England, and not England for the Constitution ; and thus he succeeded in holding to Conservative principles, with-

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out the selfishness of the class advocate, or any opposition to the idea of liberty. In fact he loved liberty as much as he loved order, and he considered the two to be inseparable.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the Tory Ministries of the war were, both in theory and practice, friends of liberty, as they understood it, and this in spite of all the selfishness of the extremists. Their attitude towards the slave trade is a proof of this tendency. Fox had forced the question into the sphere of legislative achievement, but the Tories took up and loyally continued his work, and were ready to make very real and splendid sacrifices, in order to induce foreign powers to follow in their footsteps ; they were ready, for instance, to give up Trinidad, and actually did forfeit much of the influence over Spanish policy that they had earned in the Peninsular War. One of the few noble features, amid all the petty intrigue of the Vienna Congress, was the firm stand of England against the slave trade.

The French Revolution had made the Tories nervous, and they were ready to scent Jacobinism, not only in the disturbances of starving and ignorant men, but in any proposal whatever to reform or change the existing state of things. Unlike Canning, many of them were incapable of drawing any distinction between changes that were, or were not, fundamental. But, with very few exceptions, they were far from being unkindly or hard-hearted, and would have been perfectly incapable of a systematic attempt to destroy the liberties of their countrymen. Metternich, a man who really did hold such ideas, thought that he had made a convert of Castlereagh ; but this shows that Metternich was as incapable of understanding Castlereagh, as Napoleon had been of understanding Metternich. Both Castlereagh and Wellington, those Tories of the Tories, proved to be provokingly deaf to the wisest charming of the great

134 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

reactionary, who could only explain their conduct by attributing it to their cunning in hoodwinking the people at home. It is to the credit of England that she has been singularly free from that spirit which makes

" the Tribunes beard the high,

And the high grind down the low,"

the insolence which made Greek oligarchs swear to hate the people, and which does not shrink from Brunswick invasions, or September massacres. It is easy nowadays to see the futility of repressive measures taken by men who really believed they were fighting the demon of Revolution ; to quarrel with a Poor Law system whose fault lay not in its brutality, but in its foolish generosity ; or to pour invective upon an attempt to maintain British agriculture even at the cost of crushing taxes on food. Generally it was the heads, and not the hearts, of the Tories that were at fault.

And after all, these were the only men to whom our high mission of saving Europe could safely be confided. The Whigs, and especially Fox, had been more patriotic in office than in opposition, but their heart was not in the struggle, like that of the Tory aristocracy. The semi-Whig Ministry failed in almost everything it undertook ; our resources were frittered away, and our armies discomfited in petty expeditions. It failed to act up to the high ideal of its lost leader, who was great enough to have flung himself into a war for liberty. The fault of the Whigs was not that they were not patriotic, but that their patriotism was of such a complacent order, and was only too glad if it could find any plausible excuse for giving up the struggle, or for throwing cold water upon our efforts. It was for this reason that Wellington dreaded a Whig Ministry more than a French invasion.

The Laodicean attitude of the Whigs can be nowhere better studied than in the " Edinburgh Review " of April, 1807, upon " The Dangers of the Country."

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135

one of the most studiously fair and reasonable articles of

which it is possible to conceive, and one of the most

mischievous. The writer freely admits the supreme im-

portance of safeguarding England against invasion; he

admits the implacable hatred and determination of the

Emperor; he is alive to the dangers of concluding peace.

And yet, after carefully balancing all the pros and cons,

he comes to the conclusion that this is just what we ought

to do, since the main objects of the war, those of restoring

the Bourbons, of reducing France to her ancient limits,

and of retrieving the losses of our allies, " may now fairly

be given up as desperate and unattainable." Unfor-

tunately for all this fine reasoning, and very fortunately

for Europe, we did not give up.

Very different is an article that appears two years

later in the " Quarterly, " and is written by Canning him-

self. Here, in proud words that scorn logic - chopping

prudence, he appeals to England, nay, to all Europe, to

support Austria in her revolt against the tyrant. For the

reasonable nonsense of the " Edinburgh " he substitutes

the glowing insight of the true statesman, and sums up the

situation in an estimate of which almost every word has

been justified by history. He sees that the power of

Napoleon is founded less upon his own merits than upon

the dissensions and weaknesses of his opponents; that

what is needed for his final ruin is a protracted struggle,

and above all a national struggle. Napoleon has hitherto

managed to gull his enemies with the idea that he made

war on the palace, but spared the cottage; but the cottager

has now learnt, from bitter experience, that Napoleonic

rule means for him tyranny and death. Now cottage

and palace must unite in one common cause.

It is essential that there shall be no suggestion of

giving in. " In any case let us hope till events compel us

to despair." " The cause at issue is not between France

and Austria; but between Buonaparte and all mankind.

136 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

In such a cause surely we are warranted to hope." It is to sentiments like these, addressed " not only to the

Austrian nation but to all Europe : to every man who has a country and a heart," that England owed her de-

liverance and Europe her deliverer ; it is to men such as Pitt and Canning, men whom no odds could daunt,

whom neither the weariness of waiting, nor the bitterness of misfortune could turn aside, that we owe the steward-

ship of empire that God has committed into the trust of their descendants.

Canning's speeches reveal the fixity of idealism that inspired him throughout the war. In his maiden speech,

in 1794, advocating a subsidy to the King of Sardinia, he holds up to scorn the calculating prudence that would

settle the destinies of nations by a tradesman's balance of profit and loss. We are fighting to save Europe, as

well as for our own preservation ; we are opposed not only to French armies, but to French principles ; as a

great nation, it becomes us to conduct our affairs greatly. So early does he realize the high cause in which we ought

to fight. Speaking four years later against a peace, he hurls this reproach at one of his opponents, " Is his under-

standing and is his heart still impenetrable to the sense and meaning of the deliverance of Europe ? " At the

end of the Peace of Amiens, he reminds Parliament that there can be no turning back from our mission ; selfish

isolation and ignoble peace are far more dangerous than any war. " A country circumstanced as this is cannot

safely abjure a dignified policy, and abdicate its rank among nations " Every nation, he says, when Foreign

Secretary in 1808, that opposes " the common enemy of all nations " has an ally in Great Britain. And a year

later he asks whether we are to submit to the tyranny of Buonaparte as if it were a divine infliction . After the

peace of 1814 he said to his constituents, " Gentlemen, for twenty years that I have sat in Parliament. I have

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been an advocate of the war. You knew this when you did me the honour to choose me as your representative. I then told you I was an advocate of the war because I was a lover of peace ; but of a peace that should be the fruit of honourable exertion, a peace that should be worth preserving, and should be likely to endure, " and he refers to England as " that nation whose firmness and perseverance have humbled France and rescued Europe." This is the spirit of Pitt, but the disciple saw plainly where Pitt had struggled in the dark, or, at best, caught the prospect from some Pisgah height of his dying imagination.

CHAPTER VI

THE LIBERATION OF EUROPE

W

E have now come to the time when the ideas that were animating the English nation, though fully articulate only in her greatest men, had at last begun to infect the nations of the Continent. The people of Germany, of Spain, and of Russia did not borrow the idea of liberty and resistance from England ; but her example and assistance were ever at hand, to nourish the first sparks, and to fan them into flame. But for England’s help, awakening Spain must have shared the fate of awakening Austria, and Napoleon would have had a reinforcement of three hundred thousand of his best veterans to dispose of, on the Vistula in 1812, or on the Elbe in 1813. The struggle between triumphant force and awakening spirit would have been indefinitely prolonged. Conquered Napoleon must have been, because he had, in a more profound sense than that of pious moralists, rebelled against the will of God, but at what frightful cost one shudders to contemplate. Perhaps Europe would, like Samson, have been crushed in the hour of her own deliverance.

It was in Spain, among Continental nations, that Napoleon first encountered that baffling, intangible force which had hitherto been the property of England alone. We can imagine him feeling somewhat of the horror of a patient who has long suffered from a deadly complaint in one of his limbs, and marks some morning how it has begun to infect his body. Perhaps he had this idea in mind when he spoke of the Spanish ulcer.

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139

There was really no Spanish nation. When the armies

of Spain took the field, cowardice, incompetence and bad

faith were the order of the day; they were the despair,

and almost the ruin of Wellington ; they were to Napo-

leon as driftwood before the storm. We must look for

the soul of Spaniards, not in the nation itself, but in a

number of small communities ; and the fewer the defen-

ders, the greater the spirit that inspired them. With

their heritage of tradition, with their old monarchy, with

their bond of empire, they proved themselves in the hour

of need even less capable of combination than the jarring

cities of Hellas against the Persians. The old antipathies

between the provinces have never to this day been bridged

over. The bond that united the Spaniards was largely one

of religion, the world-faith of Rome, whose nature is rather

super-national than national. Besides which, there was a

heritage of prejudice and contempt for foreigners, the

darker side of patriotism, that made it intolerable for

Spaniards to give their allegiance to a Corsican upstart,

or be held down by a garrison of Frenchmen. As long as it

was merely a question of the Spanish monarchy being the

tool of Napoleon, there was no particular grievance; the

foreign policy of the whole nation aroused but a languid

interest in the breast of the individual Castilian and

Catalan ; but when the unspeakable Joseph was palpably

enthroned as his liege lord, and an insolent soldiery at his

very doors, the insult was too great to be borne Resent-

ment blazed forth, not in the ardour of great armies, but

in the resistance of towns like Saragossa, and of guerillas

who, unable to stand the shock of a pitched battle, were

yet capable of cutting off supplies, and of keeping masses

of good troops engaged in the heartbreaking task of

fighting shadows.

The unaided resistance of such a people, however

prolonged it might have been, could never have been

crowned with final victory. The Spaniards were incap-

140 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

able of combining to follow up a success, and it was possible to concentrate masses of troops to crush any unit,

without fear of substantial hindrance from the others. To drive the French out of Spain, it needed the army

not of a province, but of a nation; an army animated by a spirit equal to that of Saragossa, and led by a genius

such as Spain could not have supplied, since the days of Cortez and Alva. Such an army was the British, such a

leader was Wellington

It was the enslavement of Spain, and of her little cousin Portugal, that moved England to strike her first

great blow upon the Continent in the cause of freedom. At the outset she met with a qualified success, for though

her troops utterly defeated the French army, two foolish old generals were instrumental in concluding the disgraceful Convention of Cintra, which threw away many

of the fruits of victory. The feeling of dissatisfaction in the country was voiced by Wordsworth, in one of his

greatest and most sustained prose pieces.

This pamphlet supplies us with the evidence of a keen and honest observer, regarding the mind of the English

people. The army which fought at Vimeiro went forth, we are told, with the prayers and blessings of their countrymen. There were few fathers of families who had not

lingering regrets that they were left behind. It was a service that appealed to " all that was human in the

heart of the nation." Since the subjugation of Switzer-land, though not till then, the heart of the people had

been in the war, and they were determined to carry it through to the end Wordsworth has nothing but respect for those good men who urge peace and prudence,

but he confounds their reasoning by a remark, instinct with the quiet sagacity that is his peculiar gift " There are

promptings of wisdom from the penetralia of human nature, which a people can hear, though the wisest of

their practical statesmen be deaf towards them." The

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spirit of England during the period of waiting, and of the triumph of our enemies abroad, he describes as " a deliberate and preparatory fortitude—a sedate and stern melancholy, which had no sunshine and was only exhilarated by the lightnings of imagination." But all this was changed by the call from the Peninsula, " the contest assumed the dignity which it is not in the power of anything but hope to bestow," and England and Spain, the enemies of the past, like two ancient heroes, flung down their weapons and were reconciled in the field, allies henceforth in a glorious cause. All of which forms a profound estimate of the history of the times.

Wordsworth then goes on to cite a number of Spanish and Portuguese proclamations proving that there, too, the war is being waged by the people themselves. One of these, from Oviedo, runs, " Spain, with the energies of Liberty, has to contend with France debilitated by slavery. . . . A whole people is more powerful than disciplined armies." But Wordsworth is inclined to rate too highly the spirit of the juntas, which disgraced themselves by petty quarrels, and utter incompetence in the field. It was the Spanish people, and not their leaders, or even their armies, that acquitted themselves nobly. Their love for the English was, at the best, lukewarm. They had more natural sympathy with the French, and it was only the excesses of tyranny that drove them into the arms of England As Wellington was to find to his cost, they were worse than useless as allies in the field. There is one other blemish in Wordsworth's pamphlet, and this is owing to his lack of detailed information. He includes Wellington in the same condemnation with Burrard and Dalrymple.

But when he soars into the domain of the universal, he is most himself, and " The Convention of Cintra " is one of the few political works in our language worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with the " Reflections

142 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

on the French Revolution." It reflects little credit on

posterity that political treatises so immeasurably in-

ferior as those of Locke and Hume should be the theme

of every sciolist, while " The Convention of Cintra " has

fallen into neglect and oblivion. It is the English counter-

part to Fichte's " Address to the German People, " at once

a crusade and a philosophy. We are borne on the

wings of a faultless rhetoric to a region whither the

" men of affairs," who see but the surface of politics,

cannot soar. Indeed the ordinary politician is, accord-

ing to Wordsworth, almost necessarily blind, because he

is more or less the slave of official routine, and because

his training unfits him for understanding the real will

of a people, which has nothing in common with the

shifts and phrases of diplomatists. The politician, even

when he is Emperor of half Europe, is inclined to put

matter before spirit, to treat nations as if they were

pieces on a chessboard, and in this lies the fatal

weakness of Napoleon.

" When the people speaks loudly, it is from being

strongly possessed either by the Godhead or the Demon."

Just as Burke had shown how hard it is to bring an in-

dictment against a whole nation, so does Wordsworth

show the impossibility of riveting chains upon any people

that is determined to be free. We had tried to do this

in America, and we had failed, because while we had

trusted to arms and gold, the Americans had relied upon

the intangible, and therefore invincible, stay of a pure

cause. It is the same with Spain, once sinking to decay

amid corruption and indolence, now purged and strength-

ened by suffering, and determined to be free. And it is

for free England to come to her assistance, not grudgingly

nor counting the cost, but with the determination that,

come what may, liberty and justice shall, by the will of

God, prevail. Against such a purpose, Napoleon and all

his armies have no might at all, for despotism is but

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143

weakness, and in dead matter there is no might. Above all, we must fight strength with ideas; for it is the noblest cause, and not the biggest battalions, that wins in the long run. And we must look to it that the glamour of experimental philosophy, the details of agriculture, of commerce, of manufactures, are not allowed to dim the splendours of imagination. “ Not by bread alone is the life of man sustained, but by the fruits of the spirit, by joy and love and noble pride and patience and self-support and gratitude to God. For these blessings to exist, a nation must be free, these are at once the sanction and the consecration of perfect patriotism.” And so Wordsworth is able to address this reproof to his countrymen :

“ O sorrow ! O misery for England, the land of liberty and courage and peace ; the Land trustworthy and long approved ; the central orb to which as to a fountain the nations of the earth ought to repair and in their golden urns draw light ! O sorrow and shame for our country ; for the grass which is upon her fields and the dust which is in her graves ;—for her good men who now look upon the day ;—and her long train of defenders, her Alfred, her Sidneys, and her Milton, whose voice yet speaketh for our reproach, and whose actions survive in memory to confound us, or to redeem.”

The High Priest of Liberty, for such we may justly style Wordsworth, follows every turn of the struggle, and the voice that had been lifted on behalf of England, during the threat of invasion, is now as eloquent in expressing the sympathy of England for every struggling nation in Europe. The lesson is that of the Greek play-wrights, of the Hebrew prophets, that mere brute force is helpless against a cause that reposes upon the will of God. Perhaps the grandest of all the Spanish series of sonnets is the one beginning,

“ The power of armies is a visible thing ”

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OF

ENGLISH

PATRIOTISM

in which the power of the struggling patriots is compared

to the great forces of nature, the strong winds, and the

welling spring that finds

" In every nook a lip that it may cheer."

A sense of the awful solemnity of the struggle is ever

present with Wordsworth, and raises his work to a sus-

tained level, but little lower than that of " The Massacre

in Piedmont " The two sonnets that he composed while

he was engaged upon " The Convention of Cintra "

breathe a similar strain. No English poet has ever been

more conscious of the God Whose ways are in the sea,

and Whose paths are in the great waters, and it is a

sense of that omnipotence which enables true men to

scorn the utmost power of puppets like Napoleon. Thus

Wordsworth is able to drop his pen and listen to the

prophecy of the midnight wind,

" Which, while it makes the heart with terror shrink,

Tells also of bright calms that shall succeed."

One thinks of that other midnight storm, tearing up the

trees of Longwood, and sweeping onward far and wide

over the moaning Atlantic, upon which the soul of the

fallen Emperor went forth, breathing " Tête d'armée," to

render its account before the Lord of Hosts.

But a greater enemy than Spain was to confront

Napoleon. The deep, thoughtful soul of Germany, so

long divided against itself, and lost, as it were, in its own

dreams, was beginning to stir. Here, also, the fires of

suffering were purging away the dross of ages. All through

the eighteenth century there had been a great shaking,

as of the coming together of the dry bones that were

to stand one day upon their feet, the mighty armies of

Leipzig and Sedan. At the end of the Thirty Years'

War, Germany had touched the depths of her humilia-

tion, divided, impoverished, honeycombed with petty

tyrannies, without a literature, without a leader, her case

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145

might well have driven any solitary patriot to despair.

Her literary ideal was to imitate the smooth periods of

Racine, and in Racine's language. But though sundered

by innumerable frontiers, there was yet a spiritual bond

that bound German to German, in spite of human law ;

and it was this vague feeling of a common nationality

that found expression in the revival of the old ancestral

legends, and in the Teutonic religious fervour of Gellert's

Hymns and Klopstock's Messias, of Handel's Oratorios

and Bach's Passion Music.

Some of the feeling of impotent hopelessness was dis-

pelled by the rise of a hero upon German soil, and by the

expansion of the old Mark of Brandenburg into a military

power capable of resisting the combined forces of the

Continent. If Rossbach was the death-knell of the Bour-

bons, it was to Germany a promise and a rally-call.

Not to speak of the inferior poets, who chanted dithy-

rambs in honour of Frederick, we have evidence of this

from the work of Lessing himself, in Major von Tellheim,

the staunch, tender-hearted veteran who must fight for

a cause, but who scorns to shed blood for money alone.

In theory, Lessing is a cosmopolitan, and in his greatest

drama, " Nathan the Wise," he scorns the antipathies

of Jew and Christian and Saracen, and points to the

humanity common to them all, as the only thing that

counts. And yet we find him wrestling with Voltaire

and the French literary despotism, looking, in fact, to a

literature that shall be German and unashamed ; we

find him in admiration of such a character as Tellheim.

He was like his own Germany, an individualist feeling

after patriotism, and hampered by the chains of his

time

This is true, also, of the philosopher-historian Herder,

the essence of whose teaching is that men are not, as

the French philosopher had supposed, a concourse of

political atoms, capable of being arranged in neat pat-

II.—L

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

terns by the legislator, but members of a community,

who have inherited the form, the traditions, and the

civilization of their tribesmen or countrymen. His

" Philosophy of the History of Man " is a much greater

book in every respect, save in its style, than its French

counterpart " L'esprit des lois, " and in contrast with

the brilliant gossip of the Frenchman stands the com-

prehensive thoroughness of the German, though in his

case philosophy is free from the taint of materialism.

Herder is one of those men who can see things in

perspective and yet worship them; a great book or

poem becomes all the greater in his eyes, because he

knows the circumstances under which it was produced,

and the medium through which it is expressed. And

yet, though his philosophy would naturally lead him

to the conclusions of Edmund Burke, the circum-

stances of his time keep him from blossoming forth into

a fervent patriotism. Man is not made for the State,

he tells us; the natural ends of individuals are to be pre-

ferred to the artificial ends of the community. The hero

he considers to be of an inferior type, and he disapproves

of the military spirit. And yet nobody is more keenly

conscious of the attachment of all peoples to the country

of their birth, and of the essential unity and continuity

of nations.

The influence of England was even more powerful in

Germany than in France; for while the French had

naturally gravitated towards the bloodless theories of

Locke and Bacon, the Germans went for inspiration to

Shakespeare and Milton, and their influence was every-

where for freedom, against the tyranny of French classi-

cism. But individualism, sometimes of a lawless, some-

times of a mystical character, was abroad everywhere,

and the whole " Sturm und Drang " movement of the

'sixties and 'seventies may be taken as the vague sense of

an awakening national life, that was, as yet, unable to find

expression. It did at least voice a feeling of hatred and

revolt against the bishops and princelings, who were

hindering German unity ; it did at least snap the bonds

of Racine and Boileau. Individualism was a necessary

step upon the road to patriotism, for what patriotism

could a German have? The Holy Roman Empire was

a synonym for disunion ; and how could a man be

patriotic for the mercenary little states that supplied

food for powder in America, and grovelled to any foreign

tyrant ? Before the higher unity could be attained, it

was necessary to shake off these petty trammels, and if

Kant and Goethe and Lessing might not be citizens of a

German Empire, they at least belonged to the same city

of the soul.

Thus we find the two great political philosophers of

this time, Kant and Humboldt, both staunch individ-

ualists. The position of Kant is of especial importance,

for not only are his works the cornerstone of modern

philosophy, but he is, as it were, the Moses who led

German thought out of the bondage of French shallow-

ness and French materialism, to the very edge of the

promised land of German idealism. His " Critique of Pure

Reason " shatters, at a blow, the showy rationalism of

Hume and Condillac. The mere intellect is pulled down

from the supreme pedestal to which the philosophes had

exalted it ; it can merely look upon a forever unknowable

reality, through the coloured glasses of space and time;

with ultimate problems, such as those of God and eternity,

it is incompetent to deal, and can only involve itself in

contradiction. It is to the heart, the moral consciousness,

that God speaks ; and it is not with the rational, but with

the practical side of our being that we apprehend reality.

We feel God's presence, even when we are unable to argue

about it.

Having thus shaken to its foundations the material-

ism that was at the basis of eighteenth-century cosmo-

148 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

politan theory, we might expect Kant to have advanced

along the same lines as Shakespeare and Burke before

him, as Kleist and Fichte after him. But it was not for

the lonely philosopher of Königsberg to share the feelings

of the Englishman and the Athenian. He had, indeed,

a conception of the State, but it was sternly individual.

Every man was to be secure in the exercise of his free-

dom ; but freedom for Kant meant not license, but duty.

He was one of those who believed that, though the will

of individual men was free, the affairs of humanity, taken

in the mass, were predestined. The logical consequence is

that we must make the individual the goal of all our efforts,

for it is only in the sphere of freedom that human effort

can be of the least avail. The natural effect of such

teaching is to exalt the man at the expense of the State,

and to depress patriotism. On the other hand, Kant held

that a republic was the best form for the State to take,

and thus he was indirectly the opponent of German

disunion. He even dreamed of federating his republics,

with the object of securing a world-peace ; though he

expressly stipulated that this should not be a world-

state, but a federation of free republics Despite his

theory of collective predestination, he holds that the

dictates of eternal justice should override the expediency

of diplomatists ; “Seek ye first,” he says, “ the Kingdom

of pure practical reason and its righteousness, and the

aim of your endeavour, the blessing of eternal peace,

will be added unto you ”

Thus an attentive observer of the eighteenth century

might have perceived that Germany, so long fettered

and helpless, had begun to seethe with new life ; the dry

bones had come together, flesh and blood had covered

them, they waited but for the breath of heaven. And

this was poured into them during the agony of conquest.

The Prussian force that fought at Jena was not a national

army, but the ill-paid, ill-led, over-drilled mercenaries

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149

of the King of Prussia, and their defeat by the French nation was one of the most shameful in history. The only man to sustain the honour of the great Frederick was the staunch old patriot Blücher.

Napoleon's conduct towards Germany was that of a madman, or an atheist. His God was force, and he be-haved with the brutal insolence of the Force that nailed down Prometheus. Everything that could be done to goad a proud people into fury, he was careful to do. He violated neutral territory; shot an innocent book-seller for no crime; insulted the King of Prussia in his dispatches, and the Queen in his bulletins; annexed whatever land suited him; quartered his troops permanently on German soil; limited her armies, and even forced them into his service; exiled her greatest statesman; shot the heroes Schill and Hofer; allowed his armies to live on the country; and, in fact, goaded the already prepared spirit of Germany into a fury that was to sweep the last French army across the Rhine, never to return. Meanwhile, he was doing everything he could to engineer German unity, by smashing to pieces the old empire, a constitution almost as fatal as that of Poland, and dealing the centri-fugal state system a blow from which not even the influence of Metternich could restore it.

In thought and life alike, the change was as startling as it was profound. A new spirit of German nationality arose, transcending and supplanting the old Kantian individualism. The prophet of the new spirit was Kant's successor, the philosopher-idealist Fichte. In a series of lectures, previous to the great catastrophe, he had indeed pleaded for the merging of individual interests in the service of the State, but in spite of this, he could look with scorn upon ideas of patriotism. He heaps contempt on the " earth-born men, who recognize their Fatherland in the soil, the rivers, the mountains"; the " sunlike spirit " will pick and choose the state that happens to be

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the most cultured, " will wing its way wherever there is

light and liberty." In which cosmopolitan frame of mind,

Fichte contemplates with serenity the destinies of hu-

manity.

Very different was that mind a few years later, when

Prussia lay under an iron heel, when the terrible Davoust

lorded it over Berlin, and the least protest might mean

death. Then, at a time when Hegel, like an owl startled

from his noonday slumbers, could only blink at Napoleon

in the streets of Jena, and see a fine manifestation of the

world-spirit ; when Goethe and Wieland were smirching

their honour at Erfurt, by receiving the cross of honour

from the tyrant ; then it was that the beauty and great-

ness of Fichte's soul stood revealed. His " Addresses to

the German People," for which, by some miracle, he

escaped shooting, were the trumpet-call of a new age.

They were no ordinary appeal to arms ; the Germany of

which he dreamed was to prevail not by armies alone,

but by culture and education. Not only was a man to

live and die for his country, but, through this very service,

he was to attain the highest perfection of which he was

capable. And yet this was not to be a sacrifice, but an

ecstasy; the object of education was not to compel, but

to train the will, to see that the citizen should not even

desire to shirk his duty. And not only was a nation to

be free and powerful, but also beautiful and wise, even as

Athens of old. Fichte's nation is not, however, any petty

German state; it is Germany herself, the land of Ar-

minius and Barbarossa and Luther, to which he makes

his appeal, in the name of her forefathers, in the name of

her posterity, in the name of the whole human race,

in the name of truth, of justice, and of freedom. If

Germany falls, the whole of mankind falls with her.

We hear in this terrific call to arms, not only the prophecy

of liberation from Napoleon, but also that of the modern

Pan-German ideal, only Fichte's is a Pan-Germanism

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more enlightened and humane than that of its modern exponents. His conception of the State is but an expansion of the idea of Burke, " a partnership in all art, a partnership in all science, in every virtue and in all perfection."

Schiller had worked his way from individualism to patriotism, even before the catastrophe. Just as he had been a revolutionist before the Revolution, so he was a patriot before Jena, which, indeed, he never lived to mourn. After the turbulent republican enthusiasm of his first three plays, the heritage of the " Sturm und Drang," he gives us the ideal hero of his youthful period, the Marquis of Posa, the " citizen of the world," the friend of humanity, who confounds Philip II by an exposition of eighteenth-century French philosophy. The middle period, that of the Wallenstein trilogy, shows Schiller in transition to a larger ideal. Wallenstein is the tragedy of a mercenary, of the great leader who has no country, but fights or his own hand. This is no fault of Wallenstein's, but of his time and circumstances, and it is the explanation of his downfall. He is the lonely superman, whose power is built upon the shifting sands of selfishness and treachery, and whose God is his will. He suffers, in his isolation, from the same strange burden of the inevitable that was afterwards to weigh down Napoleon. " Russia must fulfil her destiny," had been the Emperor's words upon plunging into the war of 1812, just as Wallenstein, having ni cause to bind him to the earth, stretched forth unavailin hands towards the silent stars for guidance.

In two of the last three plays (and the " Bride of Messina "is rather an experiment in technique than a stage upon the main road of Schiller's development) we have a definite and constructive ideal of patriotism. The date of " The Maid of Orleans " is 1801, that of " William Tell " 1804. The Napoleonic tragedy had begun to develop, tyranny and military ambition had begun their

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work upon German-speaking people, and the sensitive genius of Schiller was quick to respond The " Maid of Orleans " is a disinterested enthusiast in the cause of a people who are unworthy of her. Here the lesson is taught that the true patriot must give up everything even love, to the cause. A moment's hesitation is as fatal to the maid as the shearing of his locks to Samson For his last tragedy Schiller takes those mountaineers whose wrongs had already moved the righteous indignation of Wordsworth and Coleridge. William Tell is the hero of a race that cannot brook the fetters of a tyrant ; the play represents the defeat of blind force by an idea The honest peasants who meet in their folkmoot among the mountains are not, by habit or choice, fighting men ; but they cannot conceive of their country's slavery, and just for this reason they cannot be slaves. Tell is a patriotic hero, more homely and more convincing than Joanna ; he was to come to life again in Hofer, and as the peasants of Switzerland had gloriously conquered, so the peasants of the Tyrol were gloriously to fail.

But, unlike Schiller's, the bulk of German patriotism needed the fires of defeat to call it into action. This is the case with Kleist, almost the only great literary man who was a native-born Prussian. He had, in the days before Jena, thrown up his commission in the 'russian army, and wandered into paths of lawlessness, even to the extent of contemplating service with the French. But in the time of humiliation he rises, by degrees, to the very height of patriotism. From Michael Kohlhaas, which is a vindication of every man's right to individual justice, he passes unto the patriotic fervour, now raised to its highest and fiercest pitch, of his anti-Napoleonic catechism, and the tragedy of Arminius, the first liberator of Germany But his greatest work, one of the noblest in all literature, is the " Prince von Homburg " This hero starts as an individualist, a Hotspur fighting for his

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own hand and for his own honour in the army of the Great Elector By a brilliant charge in defiance of orders, he drives the Swedes from their position at Fehrbellin before the Great Elector has had time to complete his plans for their annihilation. By this means he wins the hand of a princess and becomes the darling of the army—but a court-martial sentences him to be shot, and the stern, kindly old Elector confirms the sentence. Then all the Prince’s flashy individualism breaks down, he sees his own grave, and whines and grovels for mercy. Princess Nathalie, whose hand he has even offered to renounce, goes to plead with her father, the Elector “ My child,” says the old soldier, “ do you know what we in the camp call the Fatherland ? ” Prince Homburg, he assures her, would agree with the justness of his sentence, and poor Nathalie is silent. Instantly the Elector changes his ground, he writes a pardon, which the Prince is to sign if he thinks the sentence unfair. This calls up all that is noble in the Prince’s nature, and despite Nathalie’s passionate entreaties, he refuses to sign. “ I cannot act dishonourably to one who has acted so honourably to me.” He now recognizes that duty comes before self, and voluntarily resigns himself to death, even quelling a mutiny among the troops, who have risen in his favour. It is only in presence of the firing party that the Elector reprieves him, and Nathalie places the hero’s wreath upon his brows ; after which he resumes his command against the Swedes, purified from the taint of self, and devoted to the service of the Fatherland. All that is best in the Prussian character and in the House of Hohen-zollern, all that has made Prussia the leader of Germany, finds expression in this play.

Nor were these ideas of poets and philosophers to be lost in dreams. What Fichte and Kleist said, Stein and Scharnhorst did. The patriots of Germany rallied, as by a common instinct, round Prussia ; for scarcely one of the

154 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

men who regenerated Prussia was a Prussian. Fichte’s proposals were put into course of fulfilment. The duty of

every man, without exception, to serve the State was recognized; the University of Berlin was formed under

the auspices of Fichte himself, the machinery of government was reformed; the life of the towns was quickened;

and, lastly, a blow was dealt at Prussian Junkerdom, by the abolition of serfdom, of the privileges of the squires and

nobles, of the disabilities of burgher and peasant. In England the landed interest had, on the whole, been our

salvation; in Prussia it called for unceremonious and drastic reform at the hands of true patriots. For the

love of country is the affair of no party and no interest; these exist for the Fatherland and not the Fatherland

for them. If we look back with gratitude to our Tory Ministers and gentlemen of the Napoleonic period, it is

not in any spirit of flunkeydom, but because history forces us to recognize that, in spite of much prejudice and

many blunders, these men did, on the whole, the duty that England had a right to expect from them; because

Tory doggedness was, at that time, a nobler and better thing than Whig calculation. And there was between

the Prussian and English landed gentry the difference between a privileged caste and a class that lived as much

for as by the people.

The first effort of the German nation to cope with the tyrant was that of Austria. Stadion, the Stein of Austria,

had undertaken the herculean task of bringing ideas of freedom and nationality into touch with the Hapsburg

Government. A Landwehr was formed, the army re-organized, and the word Fatherland was heard among

the Austrian troops. These were men of a different order from the hirelings of Mack; they were fighting for their

homes and country; and they were commanded by a young, beloved leader, who knew well how to appeal to

national sentiment. “ The liberty of Europe,” says the

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Archduke Charles in his proclamation, " has taken refuge under your banners. Your victories will loosen its fetters, and your German brethren, yet in the enemy's ranks, long for their deliverance." A notable utterance from the lips of a Hapsburg Archduke. The Cabinet at Vienna did not even hesitate to enter into correspondence with German malcontents, and to foment rebellion in the Tyrol. The official Paris " Moniteur " complains that the Austrian princes have adopted the revolutionary system, and are plotting an insurrection all over Europe.

Napoleon was in Spain when the news reached him. He had designed to make short work of the scanty and ill-led Spanish armies, and indeed he had driven them everywhere in headlong rout before him. He was just about to end matters by a triumphant march to Lisbon, when his arch-enemy, England, in the shape of Sir John Moore's little army, flung herself upon his communications. Instantly the whole campaign was changed, and the Emperor, fired by the rage with which he always regarded England, hurled his choicest troops, with lightning rapidity, on the little army, which, with an address equal to his own, just slipped out of his clutches. His stroke at Spanish liberty had therefore failed, and by means of England. So he hurried off to crush the liberties of Austria.

England had now the opportunity of following up her success in Spain by a second and more brilliant stroke in Germany. Had she had a Marlborough, or even a Moore, to make a dash, with a sufficient force, upon the communications of the Grand Army, Napoleon might never have recovered from the repulse of Aspern. Germany was ripe for awakening, and the position of Napoleon on the Isle of Lobau, hundreds of miles from his base, with the Archduke Charles on his front, and England and Prussia on his rear, would have been desperate. But owing to the almost incredible stupidity of the

156 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

English statesmen and leaders, the opportunity was frittered away in the marshes of Walcheren. Truly, it was by doggedness rather than brilliance that England saved Europe.

As it was, the war brought Napoleon within an inch of ruin. He had routed Austrian armies before, and he must have fancied that his task was going to be comparatively easy. His manœuvring power was more brilliant than ever ; he easily broke the Archduke's long line, beat him soundly at Eckmuhl, and marched in triumph to Vienna.

But the Archduke's army, instead of losing morale, arrived in full strength to dispute his passage of the Danube, and after two days' desperate fighting actually drove him back to the island of Lobau. Here, for a few weeks, his position was critical, but England dawdled and Germany did not rise. Napoleon put forth the whole of his immense organizing and manœuvring power, and after outwitting the Archduke, did at last manage to drive him from the heights of Wagram. But this was far inferior to his other victories ; for hours the issue was in doubt, and when at last it was decided, the Austrians fell back, not routed nor disheartened, but in perfect order, and only feebly pursued by their exhausted enemy.

Napoleon had conquered, but he had escaped disaster by the skin of his teeth The triumphs over the kings were past ; he was now to meet the enemy in Europe who had already baffled him in England, a united people. The lesson was further emphasized in the Tyrol, where Frenchmen and Bavarians were again and again conquered by a handful of heroic peasants like those of Tell, and where only overwhelming numbers finally succeeded in stamping out resistance Even the measure of success enjoyed by Schill and his few devoted followers, was symptomatic of the turn things were taking.

England had failed to end the war at a blow, but none the less surely was she bleeding Napoleon to death One

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fatal injury she was inflicting upon his cause by accentuating the very weakness that marred his vast empire. The armies that she kept wearing down in the Peninsula were, for the most part, the picked soldiers of France, the men to whom the glamour of empire and the lust of glory were most likely to appeal. The Grand Army thus became more and more heterogeneous, and less national, just as the spirit of nationality was pervading the ranks of its opponents. The army that marched to Vienna contained a large proportion of German troops, and these, though no cowards, did not show themselves equal either to their foreign allies or to their German opponents. At the height of Napoleon’s first triumphs the Bavarians sustained a reverse at Neustadt; and an army commanded by Eugene, consisting mainly of Italians, got well beaten in the south. After Wagram occurred a curious incident —Bernadotte, who commanded the Saxons, had issued a boastful proclamation, which brought upon him a severe reprimand from Napoleon, who attributed the victory entirely to the French troops, and said that the Saxons had given way before anybody else. The big battalions were proving broken reeds in the hand of the tyrant.

Meanwhile Napoleon continued to see England as the cause of his misfortunes, and in his efforts to get rid of this constant menace, he went to extremes that made it necessary for him to fight or to humiliate the whole of the Continent. “Pitt’s gold” had been the bugbear of the early revolutionists, and English gold and English influence were still the bugbear of the Emperor. At the famous interview at Dresden, his last and bitterest taunt was, “Tell me, Metternich, how much has England given you to take part against me?”

It was his enmity for England that lured him to the catastrophe upon the plains of Russia. He quarrelled with the Tsar over the Continental system, which was weighing on Russia, besides having mortally offended

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him by dispossessing his uncle, the Duke of Olden-

burg, in order to enforce the system more strictly. He

had now to encounter a patriotism of a nature more

mysterious than that of Germany, or even of Spain. The

Russian people have always been an enigma. When much

has been expected of them, as in the Japanese, the

Crimean wars, and even during their last Turkish cam-

paign, they have signally failed to maintain their reputa-

tion ; but yet the three greatest warrior princes of modern

times have been overwhelmed with hideous, and in two

cases, fatal disaster in combat with them.

The melancholy, childlike disposition of the Slav has

only become articulate in the nineteenth century, and it

is fortunate that the greatest of Russian writers has left

us the prose epic of that supreme crisis in Russia's fate,

the war of 1812. We refer, of course, to the third and

fourth volumes of Tolstoy's “ War and Peace.” Not,

indeed, that it would be safe to accept everything in this

book as infallible, for Tolstoy, despite his theories, writes

as a Russian patriot, with a very markedly pro-Russian

bias, but because it does present us with that Slav

character, very strange to the Western temperament,

which made the march to Moscow, in the words of one

of Napoleon's recent biographers, as futile as “ a sword-

slash through a pond ”

There is something in the Russian of those vast, mourn-

ful, featureless plains that swallowed up the Grand Army

of the West. He has not the abounding joy of life, the

will to power, that is the characteristic of Western

peoples ; his strength lies in a certain sad patience, an

invincible passivity. Thus we find his greatest literary

genius unable to understand masterpieces of European

art, and expressing his ignorance with the simplicity of

a child. To Tolstoy, the passion of Lear is fatuous and

offensive, and the whole tragedy an unintelligible string

of nonsense, Falstaff is only a coarse and disgusting old

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drunkard ; Hamlet a fog. So, too, the instinct of those Russians who objected to the conscription was not to rise and mutiny, but passively to let themselves be tor-

tured and punished for refusing to serve. And now, though a few years ago all the prophets expected a revolu-

tion and the end of Tsardom, the forces of reaction have triumphed, because the great bulk of the people are

strangers to the impatience of tyranny that creates revolutions.

Thus we may expect to find that the strength of the Russian army has, with a very few exceptions (the cam-

paign of Suwarrow being the most important), lain in the defensive when opposed to disciplined troops. For

dogged obstinacy no men have ever surpassed them, and no disaster makes any appreciable difference to their

morale. It was well said that in naval war one must close with a Frenchman but outmanœuvre a Russian. Their

most brilliant feats of arms have been on the defensive : Pultowa, Kunersdorf, Eylau, Borodino, Sebastopol, Port

Arthur. On the other hand, offensive tactics have seldom succeeded with them ; they failed conspicuously at Auster-

litz, at Silistria, at Inkermann, at Plevna, at Telissu, at the Sha Ho. The Russians are in this, as in most respects,

the exact opposite of the French, whose strength lies in attack. The last war supplied abundant confirmation

of this trait. Despite the self-sacrifice and dash of the Japanese, despite their infinitely superior organization

for war, they were never able to win a decisive victory on land ; at Liao Yang, at Mukden, the Russians stood

up to be slaughtered as they had at Borodino, and after days of carnage grimly fell back upon another

position. It is doubtful whether the Japanese could have made another such effort as that of Mukden.

Napoleon's invasion was calculated to call out all that was most formidable in the Russian temperament. Of

this both he, and the foreigners who influenced the move-

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ments of his enemies, were profoundly ignorant. In

dealing with the theoretical German strategy of Phull,

Napoleon was in his own element ; in dealing with the

Russian nation he was helpless. He was at the head of

the largest and worst army he had ever commanded.

Only one-half of it consisted of Frenchmen, and it in-

cluded Prussians, who hated him, and Austrians, who had

an understanding with the enemy. His marshals were,

for the most part, sick of the whole affair ; Berthier and

Rapp admitted this to Napoleon, Murat even blurted it

out to Alexander's envoy. Besides which Napoleon

wantonlly threw away a golden opportunity of enlisting

national sentiment on his own side by refusing to en-

franchise Poland He was blinded by his worship of big

battalions, and incapable of appreciating the force of

ideas ; he had by this time come to regard himself as

the protagonist of legitimacy, and every expression of

nationality as being tainted with revolutionary prin-

ciples.

He rushed headlong upon the disaster that his enemies

knew not how to prepare for him. He outmanœuvred

Phull easily enough, but his lumbering army was in-

capable of profiting from the advantage, and the Russians

got away. And so, forcing the foe back, and losing

enormously at every day's march, he fared across the

vast plains. At length the Russians, now commanded

by a countryman of their own, turned and faced him

It was a victory of the type of Eylau ; after one of the

bloodiest battles in history, the Russians went on retreat-

ing and the Emperor found himself stranded with a mere

remnant of the Grand Army in a deserted Moscow

Alexander, like a true Russian, would not negotiate while

any Frenchman remained on his soil, and so Napoleon

had to retreat, he found the Russians entrenched on the

line he had chosen, and had to take the old, devastated

route All the while, when the French army was going

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to pieces amid the horrors of a Russian winter, the army

of Kutusoff trudged along beside it, patiently shepherding

it out of Russia, seldom and feebly attempting the offen-

sive, letting it perish of its own accord. Truly might

Alexander have said, with Elizabeth, "He blew with

His winds, and they were scattered."

Southey and Wordsworth each commemorated the

retreat after his own fashion. Southey, whose humour

had never been his strongest point, made it the subject of

a rhymed joke, brutal to its half-million of victims and

tedious to its readers, punning on the names of the Rus-

sian generals, and finding merriment where a spirit less

shallow could only have felt awe at the stroke of God, and

pity for the misery of His creatures. No such levity dis-

graced the pronouncements of Wordsworth. He saw,

in that fatal winter, the same power that had overwhelmed

Busiris beneath the Red Sea, and now spread above the

mightiest host that ever defied God :

"A soundless waste, a trackless vacancy."

Napoleon, however, congratulated himself that he had

lost so few Frenchmen in comparison with his hordes of

foreigners, remarked that from the sublime to the ridicu-

lous there was but a step, and boasted to Metternich that

he did not care about the lives of a million men.

And now, at last, Germany was aroused to action.

Wordsworth had predicted her deliverance as early as

1807, in his sonnet commencing,

"High deeds, O Germans, are to come from you,"

and anticipating the time when

"The mighty Germany,

"She of the Danube and the Northern Sea,"

should remember the name of Arminius, and, like him,

shake off the fetters of empire—the same idea which had

II.—M

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animated Kleist's " Hermannschlacht." Nobly did Words-

worth honour her heroes, Schiller and Hofer, and bitterly

did he denounce the traitor princes who made alliance

with the conqueror. Meanwhile the German muse had

not been silent*; Korner and Arndt, who sang of " the God

that made the iron grow," were the chief of a band of

patriot poets. The Romantic school, which was in its

heyday,was joining in the work of liberation, both directly

and also indirectly, by shattering the soulless reasoning

of the eighteenth century, by harking back to the days

of German faith and chivalry, of the Hohenstaufen and

of the Gothic cathedrals. Tieck and Wackenroder were

doing the same work in Germany as Chateaubriand in

France, and all these men were of one mind as regarded

Napoleon. A dim consciousness of the new idealism must

have haunted the Emperor, for, like Canute of old, he

even condescended to lecture against it at Erfurt.

One figure, the greatest of all, is conspicuously absent

from the ranks of the patriots. It must always be a

matter of regret that such a man as Goethe so strangely

failed to rise to the solemnity of a situation that was

appreciated by lesser men ; that he should have paid

court to Napoleon, and, mournful to relate, should have

stooped to utter that cowardly and contemptible sneer,

" Rattle your chains, the man is too strong for you."

The faintness of Goethe's patriotism may be attri-

buted (as indeed it was by the poet himself) to his sixty

years. His point of view was that of an earlier age, the

individualism of the revolutionary period, and he was

too old to make a fresh start now. But there is another

reason why Goethe was incapable of becoming a patriot,

and this was owing to a definite and serious limitation of

his genius. He seems to have been incapable of giving

a practical assent to his own theory, " How can a man

come to know himself ? Never by thinking, but by

doing " Goethe's most famous characters are all

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thinkers rather than doers. He had little conception of

heroism.

Werther is a love-sick suicide ; Meister, an unpractical,

irresolute youth in search of experience ; Tasso, a creature

withoutself-control; Clavigo, a cowardlyplotter; Fernando,

a sentimental bigamist. Where Goethe has to draw a

leader and a man of action, he breaks down hopelessly ;

Egmont is a talker and a theorist, and even Alva cannot

resist the pleasure of an argument before arresting him ;

Goetz von Berlichingen allows himself to be over-per-

suaded into leading an insurrection that he is powerless

to control. Finally we have Faust, the greatest of Goethe's

irresolute creations. We have only to contrast him with

Marlowe's Faustns, who despaired of the futility of his

learning because it brought him no power, and who sold

his soul for power ; or with Gounod's Faust, who frankly

sought for youth and enjoyment, and boldly summoned

the devil to procure it for him. Goethe's Faust, all through

the stupendous soliloquy of the first scene, is tormented

by an abstract, intellectual passion, the thirst for know-

ledge for its own sake, and the hopelessness of ever ob-

taining it. In his study, in Martha's garden, on the

Brocken, in the prison, he is the victim and not the master

of his fate. Even Mephistopheles has not enough will-

power to be a devil, one of the " bold, denying spirits";

he is pure rational negation, a perfect, soulless intellect,

who is unable to take even himself seriously.

Both Faust and Goethe are capable of giving a theoreti-

cal assent to the text that all things have their beginning,

not in word, or thought, or even power, but in action.

And this is the truth at which Faust at last arrives in

his second old age :

" He only gains his freedom and existence,

Who daily conquers them anew."

And he finds his ideal happiness, not in supreme know-

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ledge, or even supreme beauty, but in the proud consciousness that he can

" Stand on free soil amid a people free "

But this noble enthusiasm, which would have brought Goethe into line with Fichte and Stein and Blücher, seldom appears as an informing principle either of his art or of his life. In conversations with Eckermann, and previously with Luden, he was apologetic for his lukewarmness. He was too old to take an active part in the struggle; it was not his business to write war songs like Korner; he could best serve his country by serving mankind as a man of letters; he could not hate a great nation, like the French—as if hatred had anything to do with a great man's love for his country. And yet he loved the Germans and wished them well, and Germans loved him, and even begged him to bless their banners; , though perhaps there was no heart in the regiment that besought his benediction so cold in the struggle as that of the Zeus of Weimar.

For just where he strove to be universal was Goethe most limited. As in his dealings with women, so in his relation to the great mother of all Germans, he could never forget himself and his own development; he was a stranger to the strength and beauty that come to men who can sink themselves wholly in a cause. He could not forget himself like Shakespeare, and enter the Kingdom of Art as a little child.

But not even a Goethe could damp the ardour that fired Germany in 1813. The whole of Prussia was seething with the desire to avenge her humiliation, and Prussia infected Germany. Even the stiff old monarchist Yorck mutinied against the Emperor and his own King, and withdrew his contingent from the French alliance; the very ladies sent their ornaments to be exchanged for iron favours, bearing the inscription, " I gave gold for iron "; a great army sprang into being out of the ashes of Jena.

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The iron had entered into the soul of Germany; in a terrific simile one of her poets cried :

" God that made the iron grow,

Never willed a slave to see,

Therefore to the arm of man

Buckler, sword and shield gave He,

To wage the feud till death "

and the swan song of the young ill-fated Korner was addressed to his sword. " Come, lads," cried Blucher at the Katzbach, " let's give them a good old Prussian thrashing ! " Ever since Lübeck the veteran hussar had been in the habit of relieving his feelings by hewing and slashing at a figure of Napoleon.

Against such armies as were now opposed to him, the military genius of Napoleon went for nothing. At Lutzen, and again at Bautzen, the allies were forced out of their positions, but the position was all that Napoleon was able to gain. In vain did he urge cavalry and artillery to the pursuit after Bautzen ; " Not a gun," he cried, " not a prisoner ! These people will not leave me so much as a nail."

The campaign of Saxony and the Elbe, in 1813, was a supreme contest of military skill against the new patriotism of nations. Napoleon, at the very height of his genius, was fighting, in a chosen position, against such leaders as Schwarzenberg, Bernadotte, and the council of kings. He failed, not because his combinations were any less brilliant than before, but because his army was hopelessly inferior in morale. When, by consummate tactical skill, and the helplessness of Schwarzenberg, he gained his last great victory under the walls of Dresden, instead of destroying the allies, he merely lost an army corps among the Bohemian mountains, and the allies arrived at Prague laden with the spoils of Vandamme ; but the overthrow of Macdonald on the Katzbach, of Oudinot at Grossbeeren, of Napoleon himself at Leipzig, was crushing and decisive. Napoleon had thought, like

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the professional soldier he was, that it would be an easy

matter to brush the raw Prussian levies from his path to

Berlin. But despite the feebleness of Bernadotte, the

new regiments of Bülow fell with butt and bayonet on

the heterogeneous troops opposed to them, and routed

two successive armies. After every disaster the French

troops melted away, and their German allies went over

to the enemy, sometimes in the heat of battle. Napo-

leon could not adapt himself to the new situation ; he

conceived of great schemes that would have sufficed

to annihilate Mack or Brunswick, but which now resulted

in his leaving tens of thousands of veterans shut up in

the fortresses of the Elbe and Vistula, and in his being

crushed at Leipzig between the anvil of Schwartzenberg

and the hammer of Blücher.

Meanwhile the exertions of England had not slackened.

She had freed the hands of Russia by negotiating peace

with Sweden and Turkey ; she tied the hands of France

by keeping her best troops in Spain. For the Peninsula

armies consisted for the most part of seasoned French

veterans, and the drafts from the Peninsula were, with

the guard, the most valuable element in the Emperor's

hastily raised armies in Germany. And yet these very

veterans, commanded by the best and most scientific

of the marshals, Masséna, Marmont and Soult, were

beaten again and again, and were never able to win an

important victory over the English, whom they out-

numbered. If the spirit of the Germans was one of almost

desperate determination not to be slaves, that of the

English was one of good-humoured and unquestioning

confidence, bred of many successes, the " whack, fal-de-

lal " of Scott's dragoons, or as a later writer expressed it :

" The colonel so gaily prancing, boys,

Has a wonderful trick of advancing, boys !

When he shouts out so large,

' Fix bayonets and charge !'

He sets all the Frenchmen a-dancing, boys !"

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There is a Gargantuan felicity in the Highland general's address to his men, "Come on, ye rascals !

come on, ye fighting villains ! " These men did not need heroics to spur them to the congenial task of thrashing

Frenchmen. From Wellington down to the youngest drummer-boy there was no doubt as to who were the

better men With his Peninsula troops Wellington thought he could have won Waterloo in a couple of hours,

and when asked whether Murat could have broken his squares, he replied that twenty Murats could not have

done so " Adieu, Portugal ! " he cried, on commencing the 1813 campaign, the most fatal of all to France, for

the news of Vittoria arrived during the armistice of Pleswitz, and drove wavering Austria into the arms of

the allies.

During the last phase of the war, the two dominating personalities on the English side were the Anglo-Irishmen,

Wellington and Castlereagh. The time of supreme peril was past, and once the Peninsular War was fairly started,

we were fighting a winning battle all the time. What was required was no longer the heroic brilliancy of a

Nelson, so much as the sheer persistency of the bulldog that has fastened his grip in an opponent's throat, and

in spite of all punishment, gradually shifts it inwards towards the artery. Thus Canning falls into the back-

ground after the duel, but Castlereagh comes back to the front, and Britain is justified of all her children. He was

one of those men who are certain to be cruelly misunderstood by Englishmen, for his character had the purity

and coldness of ice, and he did not escape calumny.

Able, brave, industrious, sincere, exquisitely courteous,

he was none the less devoid of sympathy, and hence no slander was too vile, no lampoon too brutal for him.

" I met murder on the way,

He had a mask like Castlereagh,"

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wrote the apostle of love and gentleness, and Byron's

insult to his dead body is too blackguardly for repetition.

There is no place for the stoic in the hearts of English-

men, and as it was with William of Orange, so it was with

poor Castlereagh, who never did a dishonourable act,

whose views were more tolerant than those of the majority

of his colleagues, and who worked himself to the most

tragic of deaths in the service of his country. And his

work during the war, at the War Office, at the Foreign

Office, on the bullion committee, was invaluable. He was

always for a strong offensive ; he would have intervened

decisively in the campaign of 1806, he would have struck

a mortal blow at Napoleon in Holland if his colleagues and

Lord Chatham had supported him properly in the

Walcheren Expedition ; he was indefatigable in the prose-

cution of the Peninsular War, and he showed equal loyalty

and insight in his steady support of Wellington, at a time

when Whigs hated him, and even Tories had not learnt

to value him. The Creevey Papers are sufficient evidence

of the hatred with which the Whigs regarded Wellington

during the Peninsular War, and it is not pleasant to read

how the party which had abstained from thanking

Admiral Duncan a dozen years before would, had they

dared, have opposed the vote of thanks for Talavera, but

slunk away ignominiously when they found this to be

unpopular. There was even talk of impeaching Wellington.

Wellington himself was far from possessing the icy

temperament of Castlereagh. Iron-hard he was indeed,

but though he was often the object of popular disfavour,

though he even had the windows of Apsley House broken,

the English nation honoured and loved him at heart,

and this not only because of his great military reputation.

His soldierly honesty, his sportsmanship, and his keen

sense of humour were qualities that endeared him both

to his troops and to the ordinary civilian. We cannot

imagine Castlereagh interlarding his conversation with

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"damns," we cannot imagine the Duke expressing his sentiments with the grandiloquent bumbling of Castlereagh.

There is a story that during the Queen's trial, Wellington's horse was stopped by the mob, who demanded that he should cry, "God save the Queen." "God save the Queen," replied the Duke, "and may all your wives be like her!" Castlereagh, under the same circumstances, would have been coldly disgusted.

That Wellington was a man of deep feeling, there can be no doubt; he is reported to have wept after Waterloo; but he had that peculiar shyness, or hatred of shams, that made him distrust and shrink from any emotional display.

This quality, so rare in great Englishmen, he shares with Walpole, but he had none of Walpole's cynicism.

He was, in the noblest sense, a gentleman, a man without a price, whose actions were determined by causes other than selfish calculation.

What he exacted from himself he expected from others, and he did so as a matter of course, not counting it a great thing that men should sacrifice their lives and interests to their duty, and hence, perhaps, his harshness to his subordinates, and even his apparent indifference as to the fate of Marshal Ney.

"Tell him to die where he stands," was his curt message to a general who asked for reinforcements.

"He ought to be damned glad the country has kept him so long," he said of an officer who was bewailing his long, meritorious, unrewarded services.

"Don't be a damned fool, sir!" was his reply to a too effusive compliment.

It was therefore not inappropriate that the chief English actor in the last stage of the struggle should have such a man as Wellington.

The upstart, jarring marshals, the troops that lived on the country and sufferings of every nation they passed through, without restraint from their officers, and their master who defied God and man, were ill-fitted to cope with the

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quiet and steady moral force of the Duke He was the least showy of leaders, and though he was never defeated in battle, he executed no less than three retreats rather than risk the safety of his cause in the pursuit of glory. If he never obtained to the brilliancy of the Marengo and Ulm campaigns, he would never have perpetrated the folly of Moscow and the Elbe fortresses. Lord Roberts, no mean judge, places him, from a military standpoint, in a class at least equal to that of Napoleon, on account of his coolness of judgment, the first requisite of a commander; and for sheer brilliancy of conception, Torres Vedras in the strategical sphere, and Salamanca and Waterloo in the tactical, are classics of military history. He was especially jealous of the good name of his army. Outrages like those of Badajoz, committed in hot blood after the horrors of the breaches, he could not restrain; but alike in France and Spain, plunder was a capital crime-the Spanish guerillas were even sent back from France on this account-and so the inhabitants even of the enemy's country came to trust the English armies, who reaped the fruits of their forbearance in supplies and information. Nor was the Duke one to scoff at the loss of a million men; unlike Napoleon, whose first thought after the Moscow retreat was that he himself had never been in better health. Indeed, a gentleman (or more probably Creevey) who hastened to congratulate him after Waterloo, was astounded to find that the first thought of the conqueror was one of regret for the thousands of brave men who had perished Whatever may be the authenticity or literal truth of the saying about the playing fields of Eton, it is certain that what won Waterloo was the sportsmanlike spirit of devotion to the side (Napoleon cheated at games), a spirit which animated not only the English general, but gallant old Blucher, whose loyalty neither the defeat of Ligny nor the scruples of Gneisenau could shake, and who cried to his gunners, toiling in the

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mud of St. Lambert, " My children, you would not have me break my word to Wellington ! " Infinitely grander are the words and actions of those men who strove for Europe in the hour of her deliverance, Nelson's last signal, Pitt's " How I leave my country !" Wellington's " Tell him to die where he stands," than those of the band of princes and marshals who intrigued against each other, and all forsook their master and benefactor in the hour of his need. The last words of Desaix, the noblest of them all, had been of himself, " Go, tell Napoleon that I die with regret, since I have achieved nothing worthy to live in the remembrance of posterity" ; Masséna had commandeered Portuguese girls wholesale for the use of his troops, and then turned them loose to starve ; Davoust's name was cruelty ; Augereau, that virtuous republican, insulted Napoleon in his downfall, as he had cringed to him in his prosperity ; that pitiable snob and swashbuckler, Murat, had taken arms against his master in a remote hope of saving his crown ; even " the bravest of the brave," who had forsaken one master and shamefully betrayed another, who wrecked the whole Waterloo campaign by his selfishness and insubordination, by his alternate dawdling and rashness, scarcely redeems for himself a place among the heroes by exclaiming, with the desperate magnificence of physical courage, " See how a Marshal of France can die on the field of battle !" Just before the last charge of the guard, Napoleon sent an aide-de-camp along the ranks of these gallant picked veterans who were going to die for him, to tell them that Grouchy was at hand. There is something in this lie even more contemptible than the clause in Napoleon's will in which he rewarded the scoundrel who had tried to murder Wellington. The Duke, for his part, had refused to let his gunners take aim at Napoleon, even though the French were deliberately aiming among his own staff.

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The noble forbearance that England had shown during the war was never more conspicuous than during its final stages. If the nations of Europe were roused against Napoleon, her kings were little better than those who had aspired to nip the Terror in the bud nearly a generation back. Only the strange, wayward figure of Alexander, the Tsar of the Romantic movement, much attracts our sympathy. Their old hatreds were as keen as ever, and only restrained by the lively fear of a common peril. They regarded their awakened peoples with uneasy suspicion, though they were fain to make use of their enthusiasm. They were as greedy as ever for territory, and as unscrupulous in their methods of acquiring it. But England, who had sustained the struggle longer than any of them, was nobly contemptuous of reaping direct compensation for her efforts. She was even ready to give up land she had conquered, provided she could secure an honourable and safe peace

Everywhere her steady, remorseless pressure was bleeding Napoleon to death. During the Armistice of Pleswitz her influence had been steadily exerted to bind the allies in a common cause, and at last the subsidies she so lavishly expended were not thrown away. After the overthrow of Leipzig, it seemed for a moment as if the diplomacy of Metternich might let Napoleon off with the Rhine frontier. Here again England was firm. The question of the Low Countries was still vital, and Castlereagh was determined that the French should not remain in Antwerp, which Napoleon himself had described as a pistol held at the head of England When these negotiations had fallen through, and the allies had entered France, Castlereagh proceeded in person to their headquarters, and became the most powerful influence among them

This was the zenith of his career His quiet, impassive figure stands nobly apart from the jealous intriguers who

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were even then threatening to pull the alliance to pieces between them. He had the most difficult of tasks to perform, but one for which he was pre-eminently qualified. If he was prolix in debate, no one could be more persuasive in his dealings with men, and his firmness was equal to his courtesy. Now the whole of his energies were bent to keeping the allies together, and it was his diplomacy that finally brought about the Treaty of Chaumont, which bound the Powers in an indissoluble compact against Napoleonic aggression. It was his rapid decision that ended the treacherous vacillations of Bernadotte, and decided the fate of Paris by bringing up two fresh corps to reinforce the hard-pressed army of Blücher. His attitude towards France was marked by a noble forbearance. He alone would have treated with her fairly and frankly, on the basis of the Châtillon proposals, restoring her Bourbon frontiers. He had no idea of reverting to Burke's policy of forcing the old régime on an unwilling people.

He again represented us at the Congress of Vienna, that most ironic of anti-climaxes. Amid pomp and luxury, amid splendour unprecedented and copious display of royal brotherhood, the victorious sovereigns proved that they were still the men of the eighteenth century, a gang of crowned sharpers, without honour, and almost without shame. The comic spirit, in the Meredithian sense, happened to be embodied in Talleyrand, the fascinating old Revolutionist who nonplussed the whole Congress, and drove Alexander to the verge of madness by a pious and unblushing championship of divine right. There was the Tsar, grasping after the whole of Poland; the King of Prussia, seeking to appropriate the whole inheritance of his brother of Saxony; Austria, busy fastening her chains upon Italy; and the imminent prospect of another war, as bloody as the one which had just been concluded. Amid this unlovely spectacle, England may fairly con-

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gratulate herself upon the part she played, which was noble and unselfish, as befitted her own dignity and the character of her representative.

Napoleon, materialist to the last, was lost in surprise at what seemed to him “ the utter imbecility and ignorance of Lord Castlereagh.” All the other powers, he told O'Meara in his last exile, had gained by the peace, but we had actually given up colonies. Why did we not acquire Hamburg, Java, Sumatra, Martinique? Scoffers said that Castlereagh had parted with Java because he could not find it on the map. But there was a deeper wisdom behind his policy than Napoleon could understand. We had tried the selfish policy and it had brought us to the verge of ruin ; our moderation was to raise us to the first place in Europe. We had secured the key of our position by creating an independent Netherlands, though Castlereagh's plan for a united monarchy was doomed to failure. As it happened, our little-regarded acquisition of the Cape proved to be the germ of our South African Empire, and during the course of the struggle it had been rendered certain that the little-known continent of Australia should pass under our flag. We had succeeded, too, in carrying on Fox's policy, and doing something to mitigate the horrors of the slave trade, a purely unselfish action, which could bring us no material advantage. In prestige we had won the first place among European nations ; in commerce we had gained a start which the competition of generations could not overtake ; and we had laid firm, though without knowing it, the foundations of a World Empire. Well might Canning exclaim, “ Is there any man that has a heart in his bosom, who does not find, in the contemplation of this contest alone, a recompense for the struggles and sufferings of years ? ”

CHAPTER VII

THE AFTERMATH

THE strain was relaxed; after twenty-one years of almost unbroken fighting, England stood victorious, and was able to reckon up the cost of victory. The bonfires and illuminations, the rapture of victory and pride of unbroken resistance, were things of the past, and the inglorious attendants of war, hunger and squalor, and crushing taxation, were upon us in all their naked ugliness. Napoleon thought that he had left a fatal wound in the national debt, but here again he was a materialist, for never had money been more profitably invested than that which we had poured out like water in subsidies and campaigns for intangible returns. But for a few years the state of the country was parlous enough.

How much this was due to the war is not easy to compute. The whole industrial system had been thrown into the melting-pot, and it was only natural that a certain amount of distress should be the result. Perhaps the war even had its uses, in helping us to tide over the change, in stimulating certain forms of industry, and in finding occupation in the field for our unemployed youth. Our immunity from invasion allowed our manufacturing system to develop with giant strides, while the commerce and industry of all Europe were moribund, or at a standstill. Napoleon was not blind to these advantages, and made genuine though futile efforts to make the industry

175

176 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

of France independent of her rival; but while he was vainly trying to extract sugar out of beetroot, he found himself forced to clothe his troops with English cloth, and even to provide his own table with prohibited delicacies.

The weapons to which Napoleon resorted, after arms had failed, were impotent indeed to conquer us, but were capable of inflicting a vast amount of suffering. Under the Continental system trade may have offered large profits, but it was exceedingly speculative, and failures were frequent. Besides which, there was the problem of finding means for the subsistence of a rapidly increasing population, and this, when the American supply was withdrawn, when harvests were bad, and the Continental system at its height, was an almost desperate problem. Fortunately, Napoleon threw away the greatest of his opportunities, for when our food supply was almost exhausted, he had the folly to give facilities for its exportation to England.

The backbone of the country had been the landed interest, who formed the basis of the Tory Party, but even for them the war was no unmixed blessing. Farming had received a vigorous but unhealthy stimulus; the profits varied enormously from year to year; and poor land was taken into cultivation, in the delusive hope of permanent returns. Such was the condition of affairs at the end of the war, that Corn Laws had to be imposed, with the avowed object of bolstering up the landed interest, after the stimulus and partial monopoly of the war were withdrawn. Then, too, the problem of pauperism had assumed gigantic proportions; the sudden increase of population had gone along with the ruin of the old domestic industries by the competition of machinery, and the enclosure of common lands. The class of yeomanry, of the small, independent farmers, which had long been decreasing, was almost annihilated during the transition,

and the migration to the towns, which has been one of

the most serious features of the nineteenth century,

commenced. At the same time, something had to be

done with the hordes of paupers, the human wastage of

industrial progress, and the hand-to-mouth method of

supplementing wages out of rates had the effect of

pauperizing some fifth part of the population, and sapping

thrift and self-respect to an appalling extent. Crimes,

such as rick-burning and armed poaching, were never so

rife ; and it was a long period of discontent that finally

culminated in the abortive peasant revolt of 1830 in the

Southern Counties. What with the widespread distress

and the fearful severity of the penal laws, it is no wonder

that the patience even of Johnny Raw was at length

exhausted.

In point of numbers, the proportion between town and

country people was changing with great rapidity. Hither-

to it had been the object of British statesmen, under the

mercantile system, to keep a large population on the land

and on the sea. Until the Industrial Revolution, they had

been fairly successful, but since the invention of the

machines, and the pre-eminence, verging upon monopoly,

that England had obtained in the world's industry, the

centre of national gravity was shifting to the grim, smoky

towns, which were everywhere springing up like enormous

fungoid growths (so it seemed to the Tory mind) upon

the blackening face of the country-side. This transference

did not affect the lower classes alone, for the accumulation

of capital involved a corresponding increase in the number

of wealthy capitalists ; a plutocracy with traditions and

ideals widely differing from those of the landed aristo-

cracy, and who were to attain the zenith of their power

in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The working class, which was increasing with such

rapidity in the towns, was in a terrible condition. They

had very little political power ; they were without leaders.

II—N

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The replacement of hand labour by machinery, whatever might be its effects in the long run, was, for the existing generation of workmen, a great hardship. Not only was trained skill rendered of no effect, and the industry of wives and children destroyed, but, as Dr. Cunningham has pointed out, it was almost impossible to obtain any substantial rise of wages, since employers would find it more profitable, in most cases, to turn off hands and introduce fresh machinery. The new order was imperfectly understood, and the conditions of labour were too often bad in every way; the long struggle of trades unions and social reformers to better them had scarcely begun; the men were uneducated and frequently brutalized by long hours and unhealthy surroundings; and, worst of all, the youth of the nation was being sapped by the outrageous abuse of child labour. Such were the natural consequences of a too rapid change, affecting the whole order of society, of a social system which had not had time to adjust itself to new conditions. The country had, in fact, been under such urgent necessity of producing, that the problem of how the wealth was to be distributed was lost sight of. This was partly the result of the war. We had been struggling for life, not only with our arms, but with our tools. Our capacity for producing wealth had enabled us to bid defiance to Napoleon's efforts to starve or bleed us to death. As long as we were able to keep our looms humming and our granaries stored, we were at least safe against actual ruin. It might plausibly be argued that any check upon the volume of our output would have turned the scale against us, and that therefore it was impossible to interfere with the activities of capitalist and landowner. It was only natural that every facility should be given to high farming by the encouragement of enclosure, and to industry by the provision of cheap labour; above all, that order should be preserved by Draconic repression of disturbance, and even

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of combination amongst labourers. But it was serious enough that while we were delivering Europe, our own social system was taking a turn for the worse, and we were accumulating difficulties, with which we are, even at this day, still contending.

With this state of things the Tory Government was not altogether fitted to cope. William Pitt had been willing to meet the new conditions with new measures, but the governing class had been thoroughly alarmed by the Revolution, and had vague forebodings of the fate of Louis XVI and his nobles, should they ever be so rash as to introduce the thin end of the democratic wedge. They had come to worship the British Constitution with an ardour approaching to fanaticism, and were apt to forget that one of the chief advantages of this Constitution was its flexibility. Canning, indeed, had no part in merely obstructive conservatism, but the rank and file of the party were more inclined to agree with the views of Sidmouth, and of Eldon, who worshipped the law as an uneducated field preacher worships his Bible. The domestic policy of these men was to do nothing until the misery became intolerable, and then to adopt strong measures. The problem was further complicated by the necessities of the war, for when we were straining every nerve against the tyrant of Europe, it might reasonably be argued that it was not the time to introduce domestic changes on a large scale, and this argument was more or less appreciated in the country, while the war lasted. But when, after the peace, the car of State continued to lumber along the old ruts, and when Castlereagh, with his usual lack of sympathy, began to talk about "ignorant impatience of taxation," popular indignation was no longer to be restrained.

The Whig Party, on the other hand, certainly displayed a certain amount of verbal enthusiasm for reforms, but this was mainly due to the natural desire of an Opposition

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to have any stick wherewith to beat the Government out of office. Still, while the Tories had identified themselves with the liberties of England and of Europe as against France, the ideas of domestic freedom, which had been so conspicuous a feature of the later eighteenth century, had taken refuge for a while among their benches. They were a party of opportunists, of trimmers, and though they professed some vain desire to forward social amelioration, they were averse to heroic measures. They were the representatives, not of the people, but of the great Whig houses, in alliance with the upper middle class ; and they had the dislike of war and militarism that is nearly always the characteristic of a bourgeoisie. When at last they did get into office, they soon showed that they had even less sympathy with the poor than their opponents, and were naturally ready to embrace and act upon the hardest fallacies of the new Political Economy. The most brutal of squires was a kinder master than Mr. Gradgrind.

The first phase of thought after the war is one of passionate reaction against the Tory ideals that had governed its course. The last phase, that of Wellington and Castlereagh, of the Luddite riots and the Continental system, was less calculated to arouse intense emotion than the time of Nelson and the Boulogne flotilla, when our homes and women-folk were in danger, and even the great heart of Pitt broke beneath the strain. And thus the stream of thought and poesy, swollen and overflowing from the impetus of the war, finds its way into other channels, the cult of liberty again becomes individual, and rises to a fever-heat of reaction against the governing classes, who seemed responsible for, or at least callous to, so much misery. Towards the end of the war the discontent had gained considerable importance, though it was kept under by the national determination to fight to a finish, but at the peace it burst forth in full fury

Incoherent and dangerous its expression certainly was ;

the blind, pitiful resentment of men who feel that they

have a real grievance and know not how to express it;

or the windy appeals of vain demagogues, like Orator

Hunt and the Watsons, inflaming the passions of poor

fellows scarcely more ignorant than themselves. The

Spa Fields Riot and the march of the Blanketeers must

have seemed contemptible enough to the unsympathetic

eyes of a Sidmouth or an Eldon, and such attempts as

that of Thistlewood, or such moral codes as those of

Shelley and Byron, were enough to damn the whole

democratic cause, in the eyes of old Anti-Jacobins and

new Quarterly Reviewers. Principles and practices so

subversive of order and decency called for brutal repres-

sion; the Lord Chief Justice, who turned advocate upon

the bench against an undefended bookseller, and the

" deaf and viperous murderer " of Adonais were pursuing

a common policy. Even Canning supported the Six Acts.

One of many proofs of the bitterness of popular

resentment is an extract from one of Hone's pamphlets,

and appears beneath a picture of starving workmen,

with their wives and children, being cut down by yeo-

manry .

" These are the People, all tattered and torn,

Who curse the day wherein they were born,

On account of Taxation too great to be borne,

Who pray for relief from night to morn,

Who in vain petition in every form,

Who peaceably meeting to ask for reform

Were sabred by Yeomanry Cavalry. . . ."

The manifesto of the Spa Fields conspirators, four years

earlier, ran :

" Four millions in distress ! ! !

Four millions embarrassed ! ! !

One million and a half fear distress ! ! !

Half a million live in splendid luxury ! ! !

Our brothers in Ireland are in a worse state,

The climax of misery is complete—it can go no further

Death would now be a relief to millions."

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These conditions afforded peculiar scope for the activities of the demagogues, the fathers of our cheap Press. The people were grossly uneducated, and the Tory Government, owing to its connection with the Church, was particularly backward in introducing any reform that might have weakened ecclesiastical influence. The “Quarterly Review” of January, 1817, has a very interesting and temperate article on the growth of demagogues, and connects the rise of the political adventurer with the break-up of the old order of society, and the consequent discontent and competition for employment. His trade was indeed precarious, for the law of libel was very strict, and judges like Ellenborough were ready enough to bully prisoner and jury in the interests of Government. Happy was the assailant of the powers that be who did not, at some time or other, find his way to gaol.

The most prominent of all these men was Cobbett, upon whom after the Revolution fell the mantle of Wilkes. But Wilkes had been a man of wealth and culture, steeped in all the vices, and endowed with all the charms of the eighteenth-century dilettante; Cobbett was not only for the people, but of them, rude and violent, with the stern moral sense of a Puritan, and the keen sympathy with nature of a Romantic. Cobbett, too, was in his way as much a philosopher as Wilkes had been an opportunist. Above all, he was, through all his changes of party, a devoted lover of his country. He had, when a young man in the States, taken up a violently loyal attitude, and put a portrait of George III in his window, in defiance of the mob When he came to England, it was only after the threat of invasion was past that he definitely came over to the Radical camp. He did not, however, wish, like some men of much less advanced opinions, for the failure of our arms, and when he was imprisoned it was because he violently denounced the flogging of English militiamen

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by Germans. In the heyday of his Radicalism he re-proached the King for abandoning his title of King of France.

But the sufferings of the class from which he had sprung had touched Cobbett's heart. He had *been wont to boast of the happiness of the English peasants and workmen, and when experience showed him that they were often worse off than the slaves of other lands, he at once leapt to the conclusion that this must be due to the tyranny and greed of the upper class. There seemed to him to be a huge and tacit conspiracy of landowners, manufacturers, priests, lawyers and idlers, which he called " The Thing," and which exploited the woes of the country for its own selfish purposes.

To this " Thing " Cobbett therefore directed all his energies, and it was against it that he thundered in the rude philippics of his " Political Register." He had the gift, like the tinker Bunyan, of writing homely and lucid English, easily understood by the people, and the very coarseness of his mental equipment, his inability to understand subtle distinctions of fine shades of thought, told in his favour. He had one quality that more than any other endeared him to the average Englishman, he was a hard-hitting and manly fighter. Unfortunately, coarseness of thought was sometimes combined with a certain moral obtuseness, he was capable on occasion of shuffling and equivocation, and he was guilty of worse than Byronic brutality in his gloating triumph over the death of Castlereagh, and in his gross attacks upon those from whom he happened to differ. Cobbett had as little in him of Aristides, as he had of Thersites. He was a man of war from his youth up, and he had little time for dispassionate reflection.

The influence that he came to exercise was enormous; his " Register " was read all over the kingdom, and his popularity among the poor was only equalled by the hatred

184 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

he excited among the governing class. He hated the

Whigs and Whig nostrums as much as he hated the Tories.

The individualism of the middle class was as distasteful

to him, as the tyranny of the upper class. Education

seemed to him but a quack remedy, the biggest black-

guards in his regiment had often been the best educated.

The growth of the great manufacturing towns he viewed

with unqualified dislike, he nicknamed them “ wens,”

diseased growths upon the social system The emigration

from the country to the towns he saw and felt to be an

evil, he attributed it to the selfishness of the land-

owners, a class of “ reptiles,” and to the crushing incidence

of taxation. At the same time he was no bigoted opponent

of progress, and he defended the introduction of machines.

His remedies were crude, the repudiation of the debt,

and universal suffrage, which was to include even paupers,

and to exclude only madmen, criminals, women and

children.

He was always harking back to an ideal past, and he

expounded his views on this subject in a treatise on the

Reformation, a period which had afforded as keen a

subject for modern controversy as any contemporary

quarrel of parties and sects. Before the great enclosures,

and the plunder of the Church, the poor had been happy

and well looked after ; since then everything had been

going to the dogs. Cobbett was never tired of impressing

upon the poor the importance of their own personality.

That is the gist of the first twopenny number of the

“ Register,” it is this thread that runs unbroken through

all the changes of his career. Men are by nature equal ;

the pauper is just as important and respectable a member

of the State as the Duke Cobbett accepts the theory of

a social compact, and deduces therefrom certain natural

and inalienable rights that reside in every man, those of

liberty, life and property, and, above all, the right to a

vote.

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185

He is no Socialist; he believes that it is right and natural that some people should be very poor, and his reason for desiring universal suffrage is in order that people shall not be able to put their hands into each other's pockets, as they do under a limited franchise. He is an enemy to violence, and he despises the "impatient patriots" who think that the baleful tree of corruption is going to fall at the first blow. These men are selfish, and want the good things of earth for themselves; we must be content to sacrifice our own interests to those of our country, and to sow even where we may not reap. And yet, at the end of his chapter on the duties of citizens, he gives the following counsel, as the conclusion of the whole matter: "Love of one's native soil is a feeling which nature has implanted in human breasts, and that has always been peculiarly strong in the breasts of Englishmen. God has given us a country of which to be proud, and that freedom, greatness and renown, which were handed down to us by our wise and brave forefathers, bid us perish to the last man, rather than suffer the land of their graves to become a land of slavery, impotence and dishonour."

Just as in Wordsworth we have watched patriotism being driven, as it were, outward, from the civic to the national sphere, so in Cobbett we see it driven inwards, and he is more concerned, at the end of his life, to see Englishmen delivered from English than from foreign tyrants. His national patriotism is never very long dormant, however, and to his contempt for men of other countries, he added the true Johnsonian prejudice against Scotsmen, being perhaps the last prominent man who indulged this feeling, for Lamb's banter is surely too playful to be offensive.

Wilder theories than those of Cobbett were abroad. Socialism, in its crudest form, was eagerly embraced by certain of the more desperate spirits. Spencean Societies

186 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

were formed, taking their name and principles from a poor pedant who had flourished during Revolutionary times, and who had crammed his head with theories of human rights, from which he deduced the summary abolition of property in land, as the cure of all evil. With capital he in no way concerned himself. Spence was, however, a very scientific Socialist; he had found every art and science to be a perfect whole, with the exception of language and politics. These he himself reduced to order. He proposed to bring about Utopia by the distribution of little pamphlets of his own composition; a few parishes had only to turn out the land-lords, and all the rest would follow their example It would be, he modestly explains, like the Almighty saying, " Let there be light," and it was so. And a vigorous chorus, to the tune of " Sally in our Alley," serves as the reformers' pæan.

The " Spencean philanthropists " issued a manifesto of their principles, in which they maintained that the land was the people's farm, and its owners unjust stewards. Parochial partnerships in land were required for the preservation of the Rights of Mankind. This somewhat crude anticipation of Henry George went out of fashion with returning prosperity, and the red flag of Socialism passed into the more capable hands of Owen.

While neither Cobbett nor Spence gained more than insular notoriety, a third and more celebrated reformer, now an old man, was gradually achieving a European reputation, and laying the foundations of a school of English thought. Jeremy Bentham had written some of his best work before the French Revolution, but after the war he was still writing as vigorously as ever, and the utilitarian and radical doctrine was coming to be a factor of importance in English thought and politics. The prose philosophy, which had taken refuge among the philosophes and idéologues, was now returning

THE AFTERMATH

187

to the land of Locke and Walpole, and while France was inaugurating an epoch of colour and romance, the spirit of materialism was once more gaining the ascendant in England.

That Bentham was a man of extraordinary talent, no just man can deny. It was in the field of jurisprudence that his uncompromising iconoclasm showed to the best advantage. Under the régime of Eldon the state of English law was scandalous. Cruelty, obscurity, expense and delay made it the curse of its victims, and the fetish of its administrators.

The vigorous attacks and sweeping proposals of Bentham were a healthy corrective to the interested idol-worship of the lawyers and the scruples of the old Chancellor, who was notoriously unable to make up his mind about the cases of his own court, and who was equally loth to get rid of arrears of business and abuses of legislation.

Eldon, to whom everything was sacred, was thus confronted by a reformer to whom nothing was sacred, and it was largely owing to Bentham's influence that the car of justice began to go forward at all. Even here his usefulness was due to the badness of the system he was attacking, for he was the disciple of Austin, at a time when Savigny, on the Continent, was showing how the laws are the living growth of ages, and how they must of necessity vary with different times and countries.

As a philosophy, the system of Bentham is shallow in its conception, and ignoble in its results. He took up the doctrine of Helvetius, and pushed it to its logical conclusion for half a century, with a fanatical ardour that burnt froe, and made cold perform the place of heat. Bentham's life is one of countless refutations of the strange belief that cold and unimaginative men are more practical than the poets and enthusiasts they affect to despise How much more was the mystic Burke in touch with

188 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

facts than the “ hard-headed ” Bentham ; Burke, who wept as he wrote, and could yet master the plan of a campaign, or predict the course of a revolution ; Bentham, who was wont to waste infinite labour and ingenuity on the details of Schemes that could have no application to real life, was ready to devise perfect and similar constitutions for all states from China to Peru, and some of whose suggestions are so naively absurd as to stagger even an average intelligence !

He shared with Spence the idea that it was possible to reduce human affairs to an exact science, and, like Helvetius, he simplified the problem, by assuming that man, irrespective of place, race, or time, could be treated as a fairly constant unit. The sole influences that moulded his character and actions were the desire for pleasure, and the fear of pain. Happiness was the end of life, and half the means to that end ; all pleasures and pains could be calculated, like different items in the same account. The love of pushpin could be pitted against the love of poetry, the fear of God against the fear of indigestion.

To any one gifted with a spark of imagination, or even a sense of humour, the bare statement of such a case would be sufficient reason for laughing Bentham out of court. But the hard-headed philosopher is determined to drain the cup of absurdity to its last dregs. He elaborates what the jargon of our own day would call a psychology, a list of all the pleasures and pains to which man is liable, drawn up and tabulated in neat parallel columns. These consist of a number of abstract motives, whose spheres frequently overlap, and whose very existence is often a refutation of the utilitarian theory. Interests of the purse, of the heart, of the gall-bladder, of the altar, of the bottle, all jostle one another on terms of perfect equality It would be easy enough for a man of moderate ability, and a taste for conundrums, to pass the whole of his leisure in drawing up alternatives to this scheme,

all equally plausible, ringing infinite changes on headings and sub-headings, and multiplying distinctions even more subtle than those between sycophantism and " toad-eating," faint-heartedness and chicken-heartedness, vainness and vanity. On the subject of patriotism, Bentham is at his best. The springs of action are arranged, under their various " interests," in three columns, eulogistic, dyslogistic and neutral. In the first shine, as separate virtues, patriotism and the love of country ; in the second lurks the vice of nationality ; in the third hover national attachment and national zeal. Thus, in a utilitarian heaven, if the imagination can rise to such a conception, we shall find the souls of those Englishmen who have loved their country ; in hell, muttering anarchical fallacies amid conditions that yield a balance of unhappiness, languish those who have fixed their affections upon the English nation ; in purgatory, which we may imagine to be managed upon the lines of the master's projected model penitentiary, those who have forsaken alike the broad path of love for their nation, and the narrow path of love for their country, for the featureless plains of national zeal, are moulded for a higher sphere by a judicious distribution of rewards and punishments. He, therefore, that would be saved must model his conduct upon these and similar precepts ; for upon such pillars reposes the shrewdest, clearest and most practical philosophy that the world has ever known !

To attempt to build up a philosophy upon the shifting sands of happiness argues not only a coldness of heart, but narrowness of understanding. Pleasure and pain are not the supreme conflicting powers, the Ormuz and Ahriman of our universe ; they are twin guides of the blind, whose duty it is to warn us of the approach of danger, and to apprise us of the achievement of some end. They are but poor peasant guides, for despite their shrewdness and constancy, their knowledge is

190 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

limited; they can tell us when we wander from the path,

but amid a thousand paths, they know not how to choose

aright. Those who have smitten at Pain for his blunt

warnings, or besought the soft hand of Pleasure, have

ever been disappointed; for he is quick to avoid the

strokes of the blind; and she is but a peasant, and her

simple talk soon wearies—besides, the girl cares more for

the drunken clods, and even for the idiot, of her native

village, than for all the rich and learned strangers in the

world. And some, who have sought only for her love,

have sat down by the waters of Marah, and denounced

her to the world as a false and shallow coquette. But the

heroes and true men have never greatly troubled them-

selves about the love or rudeness of their guides, they

have courteously accepted their services, and diligently

sought for their advice, but their goal is far away, and

they have little time for quarrelling or dalliance upon

the road.

To attempt to order life upon any calculus of happiness,

such as Bentham would formulate, is to confuse the means

with the end. For whatever the end of life may be, it

can never be happiness, since happiness signifies a purely

transitory relation between a creature and his surround-

ings. A pig is happy on the arrival of his wash, a saint

upon the achievement of the beatific vision. The pig will

presently stretch himself, gorged, in the dirtiest part of

the sty, and go to sleep; the saint's raptures will merge

into the listlessness of Nirvana, or sink, by reaction, into

an agony of doubt and melancholy. In either case,

happiness is merely the consciousness that some end is

being attained, and ceases with the attainment of that

end. It is thus a machine that registers the speed at

which we are travelling, but tells us nothing about our

destination, and those who worship it are like motorists,

who care not whither they go, provided they are exceeding

the speed limit. It would be just as sensible if a man

THE AFTERMATH

191

were to aim at quantity, quite regardless as to whether

he accumulated a huge number of guineas, or wives, or

sentences of imprisonment, or good deeds, or devils.

Quantitarianism, to coin an equally hideous and technical

expression, is intellectually and morally on a par with

utilitarianism.

John Stuart Mill demolished the theory once and for all,

by the admission that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied

than a pig satisfied. Judged by Bentham's calculus,

Socrates is plainly the loser, since a plus quantity is always

greater than a minus. Mill, therefore, must have in his

mind, like any man of feeling or character, some standard

other than happiness, and in so far as he holds to this,

he eschews utilitarianism.

Perhaps the most bewildering feature of this intellec-

tual chaos of Benthamism is the attempt to bring the

calculus into harmony with respectable humanitarian

ideas, by the adoption of the formula, "the greatest

happiness of the greatest number." Even Bentham does

not attempt to go very minutely into the question as to

how great a proportion the bliss of Bill Sikes bears to

that of Lord Eldon, or the raptures of Shelley to those

of a drunken tinkerer, and how many shares ought to be

assigned to each, in this business of maximizing the divi-

dend of happiness. And not only does the formula elude

all efforts to assign any sense to it, but even if we assume

that it means something vaguely benevolent, there is

no particular reason why any one should bother himself

about attaining it. Mankind are, according to Bentham,

under the absolute dominion of pleasure and pain, and

pleasures and pains are different only in quantity, and

have been neatly pigeon-holed under their different

headings. Now there is no reason for giving the pleasures

of benevolence any marked preference over those of the

bottle or the purse. In the breasts of the majority of

mankind, benevolence would be fortunate indeed to obtain

192 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

the second place; in the breasts of some it is non-existent.

So the utilitarian is driven back upon the argument, that

if men were properly instructed, they would see that their

own interests were the interests of society. But on that

point, too, the calculations of selfish men may well differ;

especially in view of the fact that countless self-seekers

have managed to feather their own nests at the expense

of their country, and to grow fat upon the proceeds of

their villainy. Long before the age of Bentham it was

known that

"There is one event to the righteous,

And to the wicked,

To the good and to the clean,

And to the unclean,

To him that sacrificeth,

And to him that sacrificeth not,

As is the good, so is the sinner."

A Louis Quinze murmurs "Après moi le deluge," as he

sinks into the arms of Dubarry, and the slanderer who

winged "the shaft that flies in darkness" lives to a

respected and prosperous old age; but the crowd in the

abbey cheer as Castlereagh descends into the vault, and

Keats, in the agony of his soul, wants his name to be

writ in water; nay, the very Son of God is forced at last

to that terrible cry, "My God, My God, why hast Thou

forsaken Me?"

If the utilitarian is unable to find an unselfish reason

for doing right, it is still more hopeless for him to look

for a selfish one. Enlightened calculation may go to

make a finished scoundrel, but it will hardly make a

good or noble man. The utilitarian doctrine is atheism

in its most insidious form, an atheism that shrinks from

formulating its own conclusions, and seeks to clothe its

nakedness with the garments of verbiage and confused

thought. It cuts at the root of all that makes men or

nations great. Openly glorying in its lack of imagination

it seeks to belittle everything that it cannot understand.

THE AFTERMATH

193

and, like Vivien, leaves not Lancelot brave nor Galahad

pure.

Thus we need not be surprised to find Bentham and

his followers railing upon everything that makes for

continuity in states, that links together the present with

the past, and connects both with the future. Reverence

for the wisdom or experience of our ancestors is an

anarchical fallacy, and Bentham's admirer, Sydney Smith,

laughs at anything of the kind as only fit for the minds

of noodles. The State is a chance collection of human

units, pain and pleasure shuttlecocks, subject to certain

easily ascertained rules of the game of constitution-

mongering. The existing British Constitution is absurd,

illogical, and only fit to be smashed to pieces and re-

moulded nearer to the mind's calculations.

These calculations are a good deal simplified by assum-

ing, either openly or tacitly, the innate and absolute

selfishness of humanity. A monarchy must needs be the

worst of all governments, because the king, being a man,

will make as much profit as he can out of his business, at

the expense of everybody else. As any king will be a

tyrant, by a similar train of reasoning, any aristocracy

will be a corporation of tyrants. Similarly, universal

suffrage will ensure the government for all by all ; the

machinations of the caucus-monger, the tyranny of a

majority, and the possibility of universal corruption

leading to universal ruin, being conveniently slurred

over for purposes of simplification.

Of course, we find in the tables instances of pleasures,

like benevolence and patriotism, that are not self-

regarding, but when we begin to embark upon calculating

the actions of men in the mass, we soon realize that such

pleasures are for ornament, and not for use. Bentham is

not even ashamed to maintain that duty must and will

be subservient to interest. Utilitarianism inaugurates

the era of that unlovely fiction, the economic man, surely

II.—O

194 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

the most cynical of slanders ever perpetrated against the poor human race. Hard-headed and hard-hearted, with a shrewd eye for his own gains, he has no bias of love, or beauty, or self-sacrifice, to turn him from the supreme aim of life, that of filling his pockets and his belly. And yet, by some strange superstition that haunts the minds of Bentham and his disciples, the jarring interests of all these inhuman scoundrels are, somehow, to work together for the common good, and the best thing the State can do is to stand aside and let them fight it out as best they may. In other words, the political creed of the early utilitarians is individualistic. " To obtain the greatest portion of happiness for himself must, and will be the end of every rational being."

Bentham's views upon international policy are what we might expect from such a philosopher. Beyond the cryptic references to patriotism in the tables, it would be hard to gather from his works that either he, or any one else, was capable of a spark of affection for the land of his birth. The counsel he gives his countrymen in 1789 is something more than foolish—it is insane. He is engaged upon formulating a scheme of universal and perpetual peace, on the very eve of the greatest of European wars, and in the course of his argument he formulates a number of propositions, of whose truth, he says, reflection has convinced him. These include the discovery that we need no foreign dependencies whatever, and no navy, except a few ships to deal with pirates. We ought not to make any alliances ; though only in the previous essay, Bentham has recommended defensive confederations as a remedy against foreign schemes of conquest. Commercial treaties, secrecy in diplomacy, and " any regulations whatever of distant preparation for the augmentation or maintenance " of the navy, are likewise condemned. Bentham's argument is, that if we had no colonies, France would have no object in attacking

THE AFTERMATH

195

us—an argument that might not have appealed strongly

to the Jacobin liberators, or to Napoleon. One shudders

to think of what might have happened, if Pitt and his

colleagues had stripped their country of defence and

dominion in the face of the enemy !

It is after the war that utilitarian doctrines begin to

get really powerful. David Ricardo, the Jew banker,

and James Mill carried the master's philosophy into the

domain of economics and politics. Of the two, Ricardo

was the more influential, for Mill's theories were more

sweeping and muddle-headed than those of Bentham

himself. Mill's encyclopædia article on Government,

which did not appear till 1823, was a sort of reductio ad

absurdum of Benthamism, and need not detain us long,

since it shares, with Robert Montgomery's poems, the dis-

tinction of having been held up to immortal contempt, by

the too merciful hand of Macaulay. Too merciful, because

Macaulay, though he could and did expose with ruthless

precision the puerilities of Mill's argument and the absurd-

ity of its conclusions, was himself too much tainted with

materialism to criticize, as it deserved, the odious assump-

tion that government is an affair of selfish scoundrels,

trying to come to a business agreement for the harmoniz-

ing of their various interests. The habits of the economic

men, in Mill's universe, are such as might well bring a

blush to the cheek of a Yahoo. They will all try to get

as much power as possible, for the purpose of procuring

pleasure, and there is no form of tyranny or cruelty that

they will shrink from if unchecked in its pursuit. Mill

talks about kings and nobles like a Jacobin street orator,

and actually wishes to rule out the facts of history, be-

cause these facts have the incredible insolence to contra-

dict his theories. By such stages, Mill and his economic

men arrive at universal suffrage. The article was dull,

but it served as a sort of utilitarian manifesto, and Ben-

tham himself defended it.

196 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

Ricardo was more level-headed than either Bentham or Mill. He was a thorough utilitarian, but he was content to assume the doctrine as the basis of his calculations, and to confine himself to business matters. He had retired after making a good fortune on the Stock Exchange, and turned his undoubted abilities to building up a science of economics, which was to hold the field almost unchallenged till 1848, when John Stuart Mill took his place upon the dismal throne, and maintained the system, with certain modifications, for twenty years more. On questions of finance, Ricardo’s technical knowledge stood him and the nation in good stead, but when he strayed into wider fields, his outlook was limited and unimaginative He assumes that he is dealing with a country composed entirely of economic men, without a history, and in no way distinguishable from other nations. The object of this country is to pile up as much wealth as possible, under certain definite and fixed rules The much-abused mercantile school had at least done their best to consider economic conditions, as they affected national defence and greatness, but no such unbusinesslike considerations trouble Ricardo All the qualifications that Adam Smith had introduced into his system are simply ignored by him, he is like the cityless man of Aristotle. “ What are we to think,” says Coleridge, “of the soundness of this modern system of Political Economy the direct tendency of every rule of which is to denationalize, and to make the love of our country a foolish superstition ? ”

Ricardo falls into the same error as Bentham, by taking no account of the fact that nations are living growths, and not chance collections of economic units. He talks of land and capital and labour, as if these words meant the same thing for all nations at all times. And just as a Continental jurist had pointed out a more excellent way than Bentham, so the German List, who was Ricardo’s

contemporary, though his masterpiece did not appear till the early 'forties, showed how it was possible to substitute for the barren abstractions of the English " classical " school a method that did at least bear some relation to the facts of life.

For List bases his system upon the very thing that Ricardo ignores, the nation. Though an economist, he is not ashamed to be a patriot, and concludes his preface with a hope that the book may benefit 'his German Fatherland. He was, for instance, in favour of perpetual peace and universal free trade as ultimate ideals, but he saw that neither was possible as an aim of practical politics, and that a free-trade policy for the Continental nations was playing into the hands of England. By thus keeping in touch with national development, he avoided the fundamental error of Ricardo, that of treating transitory conditions as if they were eternal laws The mistake, for instance, of talking of wages as if they were limited by capital, because something very similar was actually the case during the Industrial Revolution.

The Ricardian system is a sweeping extension of certain doctrines of Adam Smith, shorn of all their qualifications, and with the addition of the Benthamite philosophy. What Ricardo was to Adam Smith, Ricardo's followers were to Ricardo. For the Jew banker could never quite lose touch with reality, like James Mill and Bentham ; he was often careful to qualify the harshness of abstract theories that his followers accepted absolutely. But though it would be unfair to saddle him with the responsibility for all the crudities of the classical economists, it is equally absurd to treat his slipshod and slovenly style as evidence of profundity, as do certain modern economists, who interpret his writings as Puritan divines comment upon the Song of Solomon. Certain it is that his crudities and not his qualifications went to the making

198 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

of the Ricardian or classical economy, which it was heresy

to dispute, and which was a very capitalist’s Bible in the

second quarter of the nineteenth century.

Adam Smith had erred in being always practical, and

frequently humane and patriotic. The great achieve-

ment of the classical school was to purge economics from

such amiable weaknesses, and by the adoption of a deduc-

tive method to abolish the tyranny of fact that so seri-

ously impeded the efforts of those seekers after truth,

whose object it was to reduce human affairs to an exact

science. The problem was simple: given a number of

calculating rascals called men, engaged in piling up

material wealth, in a state of unbroken and unbreakable

peace, to find out the quickest way of increasing the pile,

and how, incidentally, the proceeds will be divided be-

tween the three great fixed classes of God’s people, land-

lords, capitalists and labourers. The solution seems to

be, that the few scoundrels who represent the State shall

prevent all the other scoundrels from cutting one another’s

throats, and from the grosser forms of foul play, and keep

the ring as clear as possible. As a result of this struggle,

the labourer gets just enough to enable him to subsist

and breed (Ricardo himself admits that the standard of

subsistence may rise), and the landlord, whose interests

are opposed to all classes alike, pockets a continuously

increasing toll for the natural and indestructible pro-

perties of the soil, whatever that may mean.

The Malthusian theory of population rounded off the

system Like all the other doctrines of the classical

economists, it had a certain element of truth, and of this

Adam Smith was aware long before Malthus. But the

passion for logical consistency led its followers to talk

as if a declining birth-rate were a panacea for social ills.

It cast a blight over all efforts for the betterment of the

people The humanity and practical good sense of Smith’s

chapter on wages is in sharp contrast with the dry ab-

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199

stractions of Ricardo on the same subject, and Ricardo, who does at least admit some faint glimmering of hope, is tenderness itself, compared with certain of his disciples, who opposed Factory Acts, and amongst whom even John Bright must be included.

The economists would have made a clean sweep of all commercial or industrial regulations which were inspired by any other motive than greed. The Navigation Act, which Smith himself had admitted to be the wisest of our commercial regulations, was condemned under economic law, by a court-martial of militant materialists ; the corn duties, whose object, at least in part, was to strengthen the agricultutal interest, and to make England self-supporting, were condemned on a balance of profit and loss, in which cheap wages, rather than cheap food, formed the main argument for abolition ; colonies were treated with no more sentiment than bales of goods These men reversed the teaching of Burke, and the State was, in their eyes, on a par with an association for the production of cloth or calico.

The rise and supremacy of the classical school is typical of the evil that must ensue upon a heartless and shallow philosophy. These economists were nearly all men of ability and honour, but their outlook on life was blurred by the smoked glass of utilitarianism. Their teaching fortified the worst instincts of the capitalist class. Its exponents lent their authority to absentee landlord-ism in Ireland, to the sweating of little children at home, to slow torture or sudden death amid horrible conditions in factories and mines, to scientific starvation in workhouses. They set their faces against all that made for beauty or tenderness in life, their god was Mammon, and their Motherland the City of Dreadful Night. They were not wicked, but they lacked sympathy, and their scientific conscience was ever at hand, to choke such instincts of humanity as might find scope in their

200

HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH

PATRIOTISM

private

relations.

Such

men

were

inevitably

cosmopolitan;

for

how

can

any

one

love

by

calculation,

or

die

for

a

syllogism

?

and

why

should

one

economic

man

sacrifice

his

interests

for

those

of

a

few

million

knaves

no

better

than

himself

?

CHAPTER VIII

REACTION AND DESPAIR

HILE “ cold hearts and muddy understandings ” were building up their bourgeois philosophy of greed and guineas, there were other, and finer, spirits, to whom the England of Eldon and Castlereagh was very hell. The Romantic movement continued in full swing, but a new direction had been given to the passions of its exponents Shelley and Byron had indeed begun to write during the Peninsular War, but they had not felt the wave that swept over the country when the Grand Army lay encamped within sight of our shores, nor known the imminent peril of the Nore mutiny, nor the crowning mercy of Trafalgar. The fear of invasion was past, and the Peninsular War, glorious though it was to our arms, was being waged far away, and, as it might well seem, with scant prospect of success. The Convention of Cintra ; the apparent fiasco of Corunna ; the retreats after Talavera, Busaco, Salamanca ; the carnage of Albuera, of Ciudad Rodrigo, of Badajoz ; the grim, undemonstrative leader, who was depicted as the creature of the Tory Government—these might and did arouse enthusiasm in the breasts of men like Wordsworth and Canning, who had followed the struggle from the beginning, and appreciated their significance ; the later poets only saw misery and starvation around them, and above them a cabal of hard, and often stupid men, who seemed determined to drag the country

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202 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

through every depth of misery, for the sake of a hopeless war in a distant land.

A passionate hatred of war is a feature in the writings of all these men. This they share with the Benthamites, for another reason. War annoyed the utilitarians, because they saw in it a needless sacrifice of utility without any returns, and they could not imagine how men could have their passions aroused to such a pitch as to risk their skins. The Romantics, on the other hand, could not bear the thought of brave men being hurled out of life, or racked with agony by the thousand; brothers rending each other like brute beasts, in a cause they did not even understand. For towards the end of the war, we find a revival of the doctrine of Swift and Voltaire, that war is the affair of the rulers, and not of the people. Wordsworth knew better, and actually hailed carnage as God's daughter, for his stern Puritan spirit, which had not shrunk from the sacrifice of a king, was even as Wellington's, and disdained to reckon up the cost of duty. But then Wordsworth saw the struggle as a whole, and looked beyond the horror and carnage to the salvation of Europe.

But to the younger Romantics all this was vanity. It seemed as if the whole struggle had been undertaken, to rivet the chains of despots more firmly upon the necks of their people. Napoleon was at least a more splendid figure than that Most Christian guzzler, Louis XVIII; than the cruel coward whom we had restored to the throne of Spain, than the crowned bigot of Sicily; than the numskull Emperor of Austria, and the fox who juggled with the nations in his name. A period of deep gloom was beginning for Europe. The patriots, who had borne the brunt of the struggle, were neglected and persecuted; the banner of liberty, under which they had fought, was trampled into the mire by their ungrateful masters. For the kings were less inclined to coquette with demo-

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cracy than they had been before the Revolution, and a new philosophy had arisen that upheld the extreme doctrines of divine right, and would have delighted James I and Filmer. Men of the school of Chateaubriand and de Maistre were so indignant at the sophisms of the rationalists, and the horrors of Jacobinism and Cæsarism, that they rushed to the wildest extreme of reaction, and de Maistre actually devotes one of his St. Petersburg soirées to the glorification of the executioner. These men had but a faint conception of patriotism. Their views had been formed among the disloyal Royalists, who preferred the triumph of the Bourbons to the triumph of France, and who had borne arms against their country. The Bourbon rule was doomed, since its second restoration by foreign bayonets, and the piercing of Marshal Ney by French bullets. Many of the German Romantics, like Gentz, the confidant of Metternich, ranged themselves on the same side as the French reactionaries, and plunged into a cult of the past and the Church, that was often less sincere than sentimental.

The Metternich system operated in Germany, like the English censorship of the drama, on a vast scale. Its object was to penalize any attempt to deal with the problems of life, in a way that could be interpreted as dangerous or disagreeable to authority. Thus the only safe course, for those who wished to deal with problems in political philosophy, was to tread in the footsteps of Hegel, whose doctrine of the rational being the real, amounted to saying that whatever is, is coming right; and that all must be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and especially the Prussian Government.

Hegel had shown with what ease a principle, if pushed far enough, passes into its opposite, and there is a natural transition from his own optimism to the pessimism of his enemy, Schopenhauer. The denier of the will to live is the true philosopher of the reaction, and if the decline

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and fall of Western civilization has to be recorded, the

name of Schopenhauer will assuredly play an important

part therein For he embodies the spirit of the East, of

Omar Khayyám and the Buddha, that treats life and the

universe as a` vast blunder, a bad dream, and aims, not

at improving them, but at getting away from them alto-

gether. History is merely the record of the “ long,

heavy, confused dream of humanity,” and it offers no

hope of betterment. The ideal of happiness, that of the

Benthamites, is “ a hollow, deceptive, decaying and sad

thing,” and the only Utopia of which man can conceive is

a fat, well-governed community. That is mentioned

only to be dismissed with contempt. Neither invention

nor prayers can make things any better, these also are

vanity. Art itself is but a fleeting respite from the torture

of existence, and the only way of salvation is to deny the

will to live.

The consequences of such a system are too obvious.

The tyranny of Metternich is no worse than any other

government, in fact, it is, if anything, better, for it tends

to suppress the manifestations of the will to live, and to

produce the calm, devoutly to be wished, of stagnation

and the grave. The patriots, the heroes, the liberators,

were but poor fools chasing shadows, like Stevenson’s

youth, who killed his father and his mother, in order to

shift a gyve from the right leg to the left. There is here

none of the savage indignation of Swift ; where there is

no hope there can be no despair, and where there never

could have been hope, there is scarcely room for bitterness.

When the high gods are cruel, it behoves men to be

resigned, for there is no fighting against necessity.

The poison cloud of pessimism was not long in spreading

itself over Europe, and pervaded, to a greater or less

extent, every form of art De Musset in France, Leopardi

in Italy, Schopenhauer in Germany, all advanced it in

their different ways, and music, always the latest of the

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arts to reflect the spirit of the age, at last caught up the

strain, in the heartbreaking wistfulness of Chopin, and

the yearning for the night of Tristan and Isolde.

"La vie est telle

Que Dieu l'a fie,

Et telle quelle

Elle suffie!"

is the cry that is repeated by a thousand voices, from the

plaintive undertone of resignation to the crackling laugh

of defiance. It was as if the world were growing old,

and sick of the dreams of youth and the travail of its

prime, as if it desired nothing better than to sink back,

without a struggle and without regret, into the nothing-

ness from which it never should have emerged. Vanity

of vanities!

One of the chief tendencies of the age was the weaken-

ing of faith. The "enlighteners" of the eighteenth cen-

tury, the materialists of the nineteenth, knew not what

they did. To the dull heart of a utilitarian, it mattered

little to think that spiritually he was lower than a brute;

to the man with the muck rake the crown was a nuisance

But to those who scorned to rake together straws, the

conclusions of the rationalists, the denial of God, of free-

dom, of immortality, came as a death-knell. One beauti-

ful starlit night, the young Heine was standing at an open

window with Hegel, and called the stars the abode of the

blest. "So," sneered the philosopher, "you want a

pourboire for having supported your sick mother." Even

the defenders of faith were wavering; it is impossible to

read Chateaubriand's apology for Christianity without

sometimes feeling that the author is blowing a trumpet

very loud, to silence his own doubts Christianity was,

at least, a religion of hope and upward striving; rational-

ism, with all its talk of progress, could only offer the choice

between brutalization with Bentham, and suicide with

Schopenhauer.

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The apostles of nineteenth-century world-weariness take up an attitude towards art, that is set forth with systematic thoroughness in the pages of Schopenhauer. Hitherto, art had been the expression of what was noblest in a city or nation, it bodied forth triumphantly what a people was trying to say, or went before and pointed out heights unscaled, and heavens undreamed of ; it gave a deeper meaning to religion, it kindled a whiter flame of national consciousness, it invested common things and common lives with beauty. But now art was no longer to be the crown of life, but an escape from life's torture-house The beauty that endureth for a moment was but to lighten the misery that endureth for ever

This is the note of doom that sounds all through the work of the three leaders of English poetry in the years after Waterloo. In the case of Wordsworth, and even of Coleridge, though sorrow is intense and bitter, there is the sense of some overmastering power, some ultimate harmony of the universe, by virtue of which even sorrow has its dignity and divine sanction. One cannot read the " Ancient Mariner," or the sonnets on National Liberty and Independence, without rising with hope refreshed and courage strengthened, but the intense beauty of Keats or Shelley leaves the heart sad.

" Now more than ever seems it bliss to die To cease upon the midnight with no pain ! "

cries Adonais at the moment of supreme inspiration, and the world to him is a place

" Where e'en to think is to be full of sorrows, And leaden-eyed despairs "

Shelley would fain

" Lie down like a tired child, And weep away a life of care,"

and Byron bids us

" know whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be ! "

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Shelley was one of those exquisitely sensitive natures that feel the least touch of harshness or unreason as if it were branded with red-hot iron. He walked through the world as a stranger; for in his dreams he had another world, where everything should be free and beautiful and wise, where all fetters should be struck away, and where men and women should eat of the tree of perfect knowledge and not know that they were naked. Shelley derives his intellectual descent from Condorcet through Godwin, but the rationalist Utopia of the Grondin, and the anarchical vapourings of Shelley's egregious father-in-law, became transmuted, by the alchemy of his imagination, into the nurslings of immortality. It was the very wildness of these fantasies that made them so attractive to Shelley, for neither philosopher had seriously troubled himself about reality. But what merely bothered the spinners of theories caused agony to the poet. Shelley's temperament was sensitive to an extraordinary degree. His fine nerves rendered him acutely sensitive to pain and injustice of any kind, enabled him to feel the sorrows of the multitude as his own. Much more than a man born and bred poor was he able to feel the woes of poverty, because he naturally tended to judge of its misery by the feelings of an educated and refined nature, and what the peasant or factory hand had learnt to endure with dull resignation, and what their masters regarded with uncomprehending complacency, was torture unspeakable to the poet's soul. Add to this that Shelley's career coincided with the period of greatest distress, not only in England, but all over Europe.

The cry of the oppressed had never found a voice so eloquent and so piercing. Shelley went to lengths of which Fox, humanitarian though he was, had never dreamed, and of which even the Jacobins had stopped short. Not only the political hierarchy of nobles and kings, though he hated it from his soul, was the object of his

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attack ; but the whole structure of society, which allowed

a few men to enjoy an unlovely luxury, and condemned

millions to a fate, compared with which that of pigs and

oxen was happy. Voices had sounded before, demanding

universal suffrage and a national convention, but it was a

new thing to hear arraignments of society so unthinkably

scandalous, from the point of view of the average English

gentleman, as

" Men of England, wherefore plough

For the lords who lay ye low ?

Wherefore weave with toil and care

The rich robes your tyrants wear ? "

Shelley had put a question, which other reformers had

hardly dared to whisper, and which perhaps would have

sounded nonsense before the Industrial Revolution.

But it was the inevitable result of a social system, which

leaves the great majority of the people dispossessed,

and in a state of dependence upon wages that may in-

volve the bondage, but not the security of slaves. It was

articulate in the roar of every loom, and the frown of

every poorhouse. The country was not ready for such

a prophet ; the poor labourer had not learnt to trouble his

head with theories about the order of society ; but the

question which Shelley put has been repeated, with in-

creasing vehemence, through all the years since his death,

and is now heard throughout the length and breadth of

the country, clamorous for solution. A thousand voices

have taken up the cry,

" Arise, arise, arise !

There is blood on the earth that denies you bread ! "

The government of England Shelley holds to be an

unmitigated tyranny, and he denounces it in a sonnet

of unmeasured vehemence. Castlereagh and Sidmouth

and Eldon are, in his view, but the embodiments of Murder,

Hypocrisy and Fraud. The Constitution, which had ex-

cited such universal veneration, he contemns as only fit

for swine. He wrote a national anthem, in which Liberty

appears as the Queen of England, to raise her from her

grave of tyranny. The frightful satire of “ Swellfoot ”

was suggested originally by Burke’s phrase, “ the swinish

multitude.” “ Alas,” says the chorus of swine, “ the

pigs are an unhappy nation,” and the tyrant, the Prince

Regent, is made to say, as an excuse for an unspeakable

outrage on the sows :

“ Moral restraint, I see, has no effect,

Nor prostitution, nor our own example,

Starvation, typhus fever, war nor prison,”

and the chorus of swine expresses perfectly Shelley’s own

theory regarding the condition of the people :

“ Under your mighty ancestors, we pigs

Were bless’d as nightingales, on myrtle sprigs,

Or grasshoppers that live on noonday dew.

And sung, old annals tell, as sweetly too,

But now our sties are fallen in, we catch

The murrain and the mange, the scab and itch ;

Sometimes your royal dogs tear down our thatch,

And then we seek the shelter of a ditch.”

If there is any laughter in this satire, it is as the crackling

of thorns under pots, more bitter than tears. Shelley

saw the world, as his Prometheus saw it from the Caucasus,

under the shadow of a monstrous tyranny, a place of

unthinkable woe, and his whole soul cried aloud·

“ I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed !”

Shelley was a Romantic of the Romantics, and his

spirit, which chafed at restraints, was naturally quick to

scent oppression, and unable to abide it. But if he had

the genius, he had also, in full measure, the weakness of

the romance. He was a mass of nerves, instant in his

response to the least stimulus, but without the power

to remain steadfast and the master of his fate. As we

notice so frequently in his poetry, his muse carries him

away, and his verse dissolves into wonderful rainbow spray,

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like that of waterfalls, or evaporates into crimson and amethyst clouds. He feels the pain of life, but he has no remedy; he is powerless to console, and he would fain lie down and weep his life away. Rather than take up the cross manfully, he seeks refuge in dreams.

Between the world as it is, and the world of his longing, there is a void, that only some shadowy unimaginable Demogorgon, and no effort of man, can bridge over. He has the passion for extinction, for the very luxury of becoming nothing, that is essentially Oriental, and has come to pervade so much of Western thought. In the last twenty stanzas of “ Adonais,” it is expressed with a sustained music and splendour unsurpassed in any literature, but it is the beauty that flees from the world, and hails death as the tortured patient welcomes sleep.

The metre, the surest guide to the meaning of great poetry, tells, even more surely than the words, of the agonized, long-drawn yearning for the night, as of the violins of Tristan, as of Chopin’s wind moaning over the graves. To be made one with nature, to be merged in the song of the nightingale and the moan of the thunder, to die into the love, which somehow transcends the misery we feel and see, that is the crown of life, that is Nirvana !

Such is the only remedy that Shelley has to offer mankind, for his Utopia is but a dream. Liberty, absolute and unrestrained, is the object of his worship, but this very liberty is, by his account, a tyranny more grinding than that of the Six Acts. He bids us forsake the domination of royal and priestly masters for an Empire of Necessity that extends, with iron sway, over the minutest thought and deed of which man is capable He hymns Necessity, in “ Queen Mab,” and elaborates the theory of predestination in his prose notes Nor is this a mere form of words, for all his work is pervaded with the notion that man is the slave of his fate. His Hercules is but the shadow of a shade, and his strongest character, Beatrice

REACTION AND DESPAIR

Cenci, is a woodcock struggling in a gin, whose teeth do not relax, even with the death of her father. Prometheus sits resigned and waits for a deliverer ; Jove is not even allowed to struggle in the hour of doom.

Shelley faces the problem of evil as much with pity as with indignation. In his notes to " Queen Mab," he describes crime as madness, and Prometheus refuses even to disdain his torturer. What a shadowy and bloodless figure does he appear by the side of the chained Titan of Æschylus, who, even in the midst of his defeat and agony, never ceases to thunder back defiance at the conqueror ! Bad men are like plague and famine, mysterious and sinister scourges of nature. Count Cenci is a worse character than the Economic Man or the Devil, and this in a play where Shelley is consciously trying to sink the poet in the dramatist. Cenci says of himself :

" I do not feel as if I were a man,

But like a fiend appointed to chastise

The offences of some unremembered world."

Once, indeed, Shelley's wrath burst forth in a splendid flash of indignation, against no impersonal force, but a man, a scoundrel and a coward, the murderer of his friend Keats. But this is a solitary deviation from his rule of regarding his fellows. When he talks of Castlereagh and Eldon, he is not thinking any more of actual human beings than Blake, when he made Hayley and Schofield figure as spiritual forces in his " Jerusalem."

It is therefore not to be wondered at that he anticipates Tolstoy's doctrine of conquering violence by passivity. He thus counsels the oppressed multitude :

" And if then the tyrants dare,

Let them ride among you there,

Slash and stab and maim and hew,

What they like, that let them do "

In " Peter Bell the Third," Shelley says that the poor are damned indeed, when they take Cobbett's snuff, revenge.

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In the " Revolt of Islam," a king's army slaughters masses of unresisting people, and then runs away for no reason, whereupon the people forgive the soldiers, and all fraternize. The king, who is of course a villain of the deepest dye, gets off, on the ground that his victims, being liable to sin themselves, have no right to punish it, and soon returns with a more reliable force, which, laughing, massacres the people for several days. Royalty is then restored, with its natural accompaniment of plague, famine, religion and the Inquisition.

With such a philosophy, one would imagine that Shelley could not be a patriot. It is because we love life that we love the Giver. No flame of patriotism kindles in the breast of the pessimist or Oriental mystic, nor yet in the brain of a Godwin. But Shelley always uses the word in an honourable sense, and speaks of England with pride and affection. He is too great to be wholly consistent in his pessimism :

" Men of England, heirs of glory,

Heroes of unwritten story,

Nurselings of one mighty mother,

Heirs of her and one another ! "

is his invocation to his countrymen. Her great names are often on his lips: " Saxon Alfred's laurel-cinctured brow," Milton, " the third among the sons of light," Sir Philip Sidney, " sublimely pure, a spirit without spot."

But this is not the fervour of " Star of my country," or the " Fighting Temeraire." Shelley prefers a cloud land-scape to that of England ; he does not feel the homesickness of Wordsworth, nor long, like Browning, to be in England, instead of Italy, at the dawn of spring. To fight beneath her flag would have revolted him, for he hated fighting " Mr. Peacock," he writes in one of his early letters, " conceives that commerce is prosperity, that the glory of the British flag is the happiness of the British people.

. . . To me it appears otherwise."

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In “ Hellas ” he comes nearest to taking up a patriotic

attitude, but this is patriotism for another country.

Shelley was no Greek in spirit; there was more of the

Brahmin, or the Sufi, in his philosophy; and of all the

Greeks, he has the most affection for Plato, the Egyptian

mysticism of whose dialogues appealed to him, as it had

to the Alexandrian Neoplatonists. But the ancestry of the

Greeks, and the fact that they were struggling for freedom,

made Shelley an enthusiast in their cause, and “ Hellas ”

is the one of all his works in which he gives any counten-

ance to fighting. But even “ Hellas ” dies away in gloom ;

the Greeks are crushed, and the chief of the oppressors

is England. At the end of the play, Shelley flies back to

his dream paradise, and the final chorus closes on the note

of desolation :

“ The world is weary of the past,

Oh, might it die and rest at last ! ”

As far as Shelley holds that the world can be bettered

at all, it is through Liberty. The word is elastic, and is

capable of implying anything, from the absence of

restraint to moral and intellectual perfection. Shelley

held political freedom to be an indispensable preliminary

to any general freedom in the wider sense. When he says,

“ No, in countries that are free,

Such starvation cannot be

As in England now we see,”

he does not mean, as a modern historian has ventured to

assert, that freedom means something to eat, but that

it is necessary for mankind to break their chains before

they can hope even for physical betterment. In “ Charles

I,” he makes Hampden talk about that inheritance of

freedom, without which he cannot speak of his country,

or even of England. In one of his sonnets we read :

“ Nor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame,

Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms nor arts

Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame,”

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and he conceived of the whole creation as groaning in hopeless travail.

Shelley's poetical genius was strong enough to carry him beyond the confines of Godwin's frigid rationalism, and, by a divine inconsistency, to point him to another philosophy, which it is permissible to think he might have adopted and developed in all its implications had his life been prolonged. It was inevitable that such an artist should apprehend the importance of Blake's creative imagination, what Shelley himself hymned as Intellectual Beauty. In that marvellous essay, which may fairly be described as the Magna Carta of poetry, he attributes to this faculty all that there has ever been of good or beautiful in the history of mankind. He uses the word poetry in the widest sense ; it is thought acting at white-heat, the alchemy that turns all things, even death, to loveliness. He condemns the rising school of political economists for their neglect of the imagination ; their system only tends to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. And in this supreme faculty Shelley has found, as he finds nowhere else, the means of bridging over the gap between his dreams and reality, between the world of Zeus and that of Prometheus. He had only to follow this thread in order to understand and be mingled with the patriotism that had fired, almost without exception, those creative leaders of mankind, among whom he himself was to be enrolled. He asks, what are " virtue, love, patriotism and friendship, without the spirit of poetry to bring light and fire from those regions where owl-like calculation dare not soar ? "

Though we may not give Shelley's name a high place in the roll of English patriots, we have no hesitation in saying that he had in him all the makings of a patriot. He was an exile from his university, his family, his children, his country ; his genius was blasted before its noon. All around he saw oppression and cynicism, chains

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and suffering. Was it such a wonderful thing that he

should take refuge in the opiate bowers of pessimism ?

His genius shows most in this, that he was able, even

fitfully, to pierce the clouds of fatalism and infidelity,

and to catch glimpses of a light that might have burst

upon him in full radiance had he lived. Who shall

dispute his own inspired estimate of himself, before

which criticism must perforce be dumb ?

" A pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift,

A love in desolation masked, a power

Girt round with weakness ,—it can scarce uplift

The weight of the superincumbent hour

It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,

A breaking billow ;—even whilst we speak

Is it not broken ? "

A more thoroughgoing adherent of Schopenhauer's

theory of artistic detachment was John Keats. Not that

Keats had ever read or heard of Schopenhauer, but the

spirit that moved the two men was the same, or rather

Keats practised what Schopenhauer preached. There is

nothing in the History of Patriotism of more significance

than the almost entire absence of the very idea from the

more important work of, perhaps, the most lovable of

English poets. Oscar Wilde traces from Keats the rise

of the English Renaissance, which is, in Wilde's eyes,

his own cult of art for art's sake. And from this fountain,

that sprang almost unseen, do indeed flow those quiet

and languorous streams of decadent art, between banks

fledged with strange, passionate flowers, and breathing

silver-grey mists of death. Keats himself was far from

the decadence of the " Sphinx " or " Under the Hill," but

the germs of them are in his work, and it only needed the

logic of lesser men to push his principles to their con-

clusion.

Of his political views there is little to say. His associa-

tion with that sentimental Radical, Leigh Hunt, led him

to adopt a somewhat lukewarm Liberalism But the

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references to politics in his letters are few and casual, he does not give the impression of being really in earnest.

He was no party man; he did not believe in hot-headed Radicals like Burdett, and he pays his tribute of respect to Wellingtorf and Nelson.

In one of his letters, he launches out into a sweeping and very amateurish theory of English History, which he divides into three phases, the growth of liberty, its depression, and its subsequent resurrection.

He censures the Tory Government for its opposition to all reforms and innovations; he looks upon Napoleon as an arch-enemy to liberty; and he has, like Rousseau, a curious dread of expanding Russia.

He hopes to contribute his mite to the Liberal cause; and this is about the sum of his prose references to politics.

In one of his early sonnets, not usually printed among his works, but published by Mr. de Selincourt, he hails the coming of peace, but is haunted by fears lest peace should be the grave of freedom.

" With England's happiness," he cries, "proclaim Europe's liberty," but he counsels Europe to :

" Keep thy chains burst, and boldly say thou art free ;

Give thy Kings law, leave not uncurbed the great."

The sonnet would hardly be worth preserving, did it not show how Keats, like Shelley, Byron, Heine and Schopenhauer, felt the influence of that upas tree of pessimism, the Metternich system.

Keats started with a genuine love of his country, her soil, her art, and her great men The highest compliment that he can pay to Kosciusco is to compare him with Alfred There is noble enthusiasm in his lines.

" Muse of my native land ! loftiest Muse !

O firstborn on the mountains,"

and even when he pines for the clear skies and warm loves of Italy, he is content to see no other verdure than that of England, and to feel no other embraces than from the

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217

white·arms of English girls. He has a closer attachment

for the soil than either Shelley or Byron, who were, after

all, exiles ; closer, too, than his spiritual children of the

" English Renaissance," Rossetti and Wilde. He was an

ardent observer of natural beauty, and he loved country

folk and their ways. One of the most fascinating of poets'

letters is the " bit of doggerel " he dashed off at Teign-

mouth for his friend Haydon, and he had a child's delight

in such rhymes as :

" Over the hill, and over the dale,

And over the bourn to Dawlish,

Where ginger-bread wives have a scanty sale,

And ginger-bread nuts are smallish."

Keats's delight in scenery is different from Words-

worth's. Wordsworth loved mountains and the ocean

because they were to him the dwelling-place, and, in

part, the revelation, of " something far more deeply

interfused," the visible manifestation of the God in his

own heart. To Blake, even Wordsworth was an atheist,

for to him nature was the mundane shell, that impeded

spiritual vision. Imagination is " the real and eternal

world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint

shadow." Keats stands at the other extreme. He accepts

nature without seeking to fathom her meaning, he trains

his exquisite senses to respond to her subtlest moods ; he

is ever on the watch to snatch from her some relief from

the burden of existence.

This is the whole secret of Keats. He takes refuge in

beauty, as Omar with the Daughter of the Vine, because

he is able to forget for a while that life is cruel, and that

pleasure, aching pleasure, turns ever to poison. Pessim-

ism and world-weariness are at the root of his art ; he is

haunted by a sense of the transience and decay of things ;

he seeks to forget reality in the contemplation of forms

of eternal beauty. He hymns the Grecian Urn, because

it is able to tease him out of thought, and contrasts, in

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agonized strains, the trees and lovers of earth with the figures on the urn, the happy, happy boughs that cannot bid the spring adieu, and the happy, happy love that is for ever warm and still to be enjoyed.

Keats is more consistent than Shelley ; the same idea is repeated, again and again, throughout his more important poetry It is the burden of the “ Ode to Sorrow ” in “ Endymion,” with its plaintive commencement, rising to a climax of Bacchic frenzy, and dying away again in sorrow ; it is in “ La belle dame sans merci,” with its transient glimpse of faerie, and its ghastly awakening on the hillside ; it is in “ Lamia,” which is but a variation upon the same theme, and in the ravished joys of Isabella and Lorenzo ; it is set forth with passionate directness in “ The Nightingale ”; and in that supreme, heartbroken cry, that wonderful sonnet into which Keats seems to have thrown all the unrealized glories of his prime, he yearns for the changelessness of the great star that watches, unmoved,

“ The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round carth's human shores ”

He was no poet of the robust joy of life, like the Elizabethans. His function was rather to give expression to a feverish joy snatched from life. “ Aching ” and “ swooning ” are terms such as he is always using in connection with pleasure. Even where he consciously tries to be merry, there is generally an undertone of regret, as in his lines to Robin Hood :

“ No, those days are gone away,”

lines which only make us feel how far we are from the spirit of the time, that could inspire even an obscure poet to such a chorus as :

“ Hey, jolly Robin Hood ! Ho, jolly Robin Hood !

Love finds out me,

As well as thee,

To follow me in the greenwood ! ”

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On the cheeks of those Elizabethan songsters is the ruddy glow of health, on those of Keats is the delicate bloom of consumption.

In the latter stages of his too brief career, when he was producing his greatest masterpieces, the pessimist cult of beauty got complete possession of Keats. He withdraws from the world of reality, and pitches his tent in his own self-created kingdom of art. All references to liberty, all hints of interest in any social or political affairs, are rigorously excluded. When he does once condescend to a satire, with some obscurely political references, the result is a failure. He accepts, in its extreme form, the doctrine of art for art's sake.

Keats's dream world is not to be confounded with Blake's Kingdom of the Spirit, his Jerusalem. Blake would probably have agreed that Truth and Beauty were the same thing in the end ; but whereas Blake would have believed, by faith, that the supreme truth for which he sought must also be supremely beautiful, Keats was content to seek beauty first and only, and to accept what he found for truth. Blake, in his darkest ecstasies, was a patriot and a reformer, he hoped to build Jerusalem in England, and he cried :

" England, awake, awake, awake ! Jerusalem thy sister calls "

But Keats did not think these things worth troubling about, his fatalistic bent of mind would have made any thought of bettering the world at large seem hopeless indeed. Blake was at heart an optimist and a Christian, Keats was a pessimist and a pagan. Blake died making the rafters ring with his hymns of joy, but it was not joy that wrung from the dying Adonais those last, choking words, " Thank God it has come ! "

As early as the " Endymion," Keats had expressed his views on political ambition (and especially, as he himself

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once remarked, upon the Tory Ministers), in the beginning

of the third book :

" There are who lord it o'er their fellow-men

With most prevailing tinsel."

That he is not referring to Tories only, but to rulers in

general, is evident from the empurpled vests, crowns

and turbans with which they are endowed by blear-eyed

peoples. These men

" with not one tinge

Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight

Able to face an owl's,"

are able to glut their ridiculous vanity upon a people's

sufferings But Keats is not rebellious or coldly con-

temptuous, he merely turns away wearied from the

turmoil and the din :

" Ah, how all this hums

In wakeful ears, like uproar past and gone—

Like thunder-clouds that spoke to Babylon "

The world of his dreams is more real and serious than

that of life, he sees his country and her rulers through a

glass darkly, but Endymion and the palace under the sea

are more familiar than his own Hampstead.

If he shrank from contact with the men of action, he

had no greater love for the spinners of theories. " How

all charms fly," he cries,

" At the mere touch of cold philosophy ! "

There was even less room in his heart for Bentham than

there was for Eldon.

In the debate of the Titans, in the " Hyperion," he rises

to the summit of his powers, and here directly challenges

comparison with Milton. The comparison is significant.

The fallen angels, even in Hell, are still unconquered,

and above all, sternly determined to face the facts of the

situation They are strategists, statesmen, skilled orators.

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221

Not even the economic possibilities of Hell escape their attention. They are making an heroic attempt to grapple with the problems of a desperate situation, and the reader can scarcely refrain from joining in the applause that greets the oratory of Mammon, or waiting, in breathless expectancy, for the pronouncement of Beelzebub. Not even Omnipotence can daunt the " unconquerable will."

Warriors of a feebler stamp are the Titans. What a poor creature is the dethroned lord of the universe in comparison with the archangel fallen ! The old god feels faint, and would have sunk into apathy with the rest but for Enceladus ; he makes his followers the confidants of his grief and perplexity :

" O Heaven wide ! O unseen parent dear !

What can I ?"

Then follows Oceanus, in perhaps the most beautiful, and certainly the most profound, of all Keats's blank-verse passages. His view is that of the pure fatalist ; he thinks that the new gods were destined to succeed, and he would sooner gaze upon their beauty than fight for his empire. It is the Eternal Law that

" First in beauty should be first in might,"

but beauty is something beyond the control of either Oceanus or Jupiter. It is Kismet, and true wisdom consists in resignation.

In the hectic murmurings of Clymene, we hear the voice of Keats himself, in his final phase. She has no aid to give of counsel or action ; she is only conscious of grief that has crept into their hearts, and the mingled rapture and agony of the music heralding the new-born Apollo For the solace of beauty was all that Keats knew, and all that he cared to know.

Keats had agreed with Schopenhauer in not opposing his will to the evil of the universe. Shelley had rebelled in dreams, but it was for Byron to accept their common

222 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

doctrine of pessimism in its darkest form, and yet to endure all with head unbowed, and, even if the Powers of Darkness were omnipotent, to laugh back defiance in their faces. “ I will have nothing to do with your immortality,” he writes to Hodgson, “ we are miserable enough in this life ”. The life of Byron has much in common with a piece of music hardly less wonderful, the third movement of Tschaikowsky's “ Pathetic Symphony,” in which, out of an agony of ruin and despair, there emerges, at first faintly, and then with a proud, steady swing, a march which contains the spirit of every forlorn hope that ever failed, from the time when the Spartans died at Thermopylæ, to when General Marguerite's squadrons were swept away in their wild charge to break the Prussian ring at Sedan.

There is never the least suggestion of any end except death and failure, but the more insistent becomes the note of doom, the more defiant swells the heroic answer. So it is with Byron. The Zeus of Shelley rules his Universe, but it is like the Prometheus of Æschylus that Byron gives answer.

It is a modern fashion to belittle Byron's poetry, and it is almost a mark of culture in certain circles to deny that he was a poet at all, in the sense that Keats and Shelley were poets. Every one must admit that Byron was the most careless and fallible of the three ; he did as much bad work as Wordsworth ; but it is by his greatest, and not by his worst work, that a poet is to be judged. He doubtless never attained to the spiritual ecstasy of the “ Adonais,” nor to the delicious richness of “ St. Agnes's Eve ” ; but he has a note of his own, in which neither of his rivals could match him, a thunder-tone of sublime pride, that shook Europe from end to end, that won the admiration of Goethe, founded a school in France, and gave to Byron a fame as world-wide as that of Shakespeare.

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To pedants and bookworms, to men of petty minds, the name of Byron is as bitter as gall. These men fall down on all fours with their microscopes to detect the roughness on the face of the mountain. Men who exalt Shakespeare's " Richard II " above his " Henry V," who fancy that everything manly must necessarily be unpoetical, cannot away with Byron. The contempt he flaunted for the worms who hounded him out of England, and for their hypocrisies and respectabilities ; his unshrinking assertion of his personality in the face of God and man ; the withering sarcasm with which he crushed every attempt to crush him, are things not to be forgiven by those who, themselves unscathed, feel, by sympathy, their souls withered in the flame, and their backs scored by the lash.

Byron is a poet, and a poet of the highest order. The Waterloo and sea stanzas of " Childe Harold," lyrics such as " She walks in beauty " and " There's not a joy that youth can give," the Chillon sonnet, the opening of the " Bride of Abydos," the " Isles of Greece," the Haidée episode in Don Juan, the final poem in which he wrote his own epitaph, are sufficient answer to Byron's detractors. He has nothing to fear by comparison with his contemporaries, and we need not reverence them any the less in order to admire the man to whom Keats, and even Blake, give their tribute of praise, and whom Shelley, in his finest poem, called " The Phœbus of his age."

Byron's philosophy is simple. The world is as bad as it can be, and its inhabitants are mostly contemptible. It is a hell in which he, Lord Byron, plays the part of the Miltonic Satan, or rather, it is an immense black canvas, upon which he paints, in colours of flame, his own personality. It is a portrait which will only fade with the world itself, for with all its imperfections, upon every line there is stamped greatness. He was a king among men, and though his robe may have been crimson with guilt,

224 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

it was never tainted with pettiness. Manfred's scorn in the Court of Arimanes was no literary pose, it was natural to the man who, in imminent danger of shipwreck, went to sleep wrapped up in his cloak, and who quelled a rabble of savage mutineers upon his death-bed. Had Byron lived, he might have been King of Greece.

Great though he was, his was, for long, an imperfect greatness. He was the rebellious angel, the Marlowe of the nineteenth century. The completeness of Shakespeare was not for him. At the end of his life, he rose gloriously above the limits of a Titanic egotism, and attained to an ideal of service to which Marlowe never even approached But for the greater part of his life, he was content to be, like Tamburlaine and Guise, a splendid individuality. He was never seen to better advantage than when he was attacking his personal enemies ; he never failed so grievously as when he tried to describe any one whose outlook upon life differed from his own. It is a commonplace of criticism, and strangely enough, also quite true, that the only Byronic hero is Byron himself.

The Doge, Marino Faliero, is the Byronic hero in the political sphere. Though he is the responsible head of the State, he enters into a conspiracy to overthrow it, for no better reason than that one of his private enemies has been let off by the “ forty ” with too light a sentence. When he meets the fate he has richly deserved, he makes a dying speech, in which he gloats in anticipation over the ruin of his country. As for Lara, another revolutionary of the same stamp,

“ What cared he for the freedom of the crowd ?

He raised the humble but to bend the proud ”

The heroes of the Romances, which surpassed those of Sir Walter Scott in popular fame, are splendid partisan chiefs, but they are incapable ot rising to the dignity of patriotism. Perhaps this limitation of outlook is

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the reason why there was no great school of Romantic Drama in England. Neither Byron, nor Keats, nor Shelley, seems to have conceived of public characters as being inspired by any other than private motives. Keats's two historical dramas are among the feeblest efforts of his genius; Shelley's "Cenci," though it has achieved the distinction of being banned by the official censor, is rather suited for the study than for the stage. But the dramas of Schiller and Kleist in Germany, and those of Victor Hugo in France, are not bound by the shackles of individualism, however magnificent, and thus the English Romantics fall behind the French and German in a branch of art in which the countrymen of Shakespeare might have naturally aspired to supremacy.

Before Byron was driven from England, and even, to a diminishing extent, after it, he was capable of pride and affection towards the land of his birth. He says, indeed, in a letter to his mother, written in 1809, just as he was leaving England, that he does so without regret, or a wish to revisit anything it contains, "except yourself and your present residence," but this is not the mood of his farewell poem, "My native land, good night!" He writes of the liberation of Spain, in the first canto of "Childe Harold," in a spirit, though hardly a form, worthy of Wordsworth:

"When the Almighty lifts His fiercest scourge

'Gainst those who most transgress His high command,

With treble vengeance will His hot shafts urge

Gaul's locust host, and earth from fellest foemen purge."

Three omitted stanzas express his scorn for the Convention of Cintra, and for the general whom he was to attack, under very different circumstances, years later. Equally scathing is the censure, in one of his letters, on the Walcheren fiasco.

In the second canto he has a description of an English frigate, and the perfect discipline that makes for conquest

II—Q

226 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

and fame, and from which “ Britons rarely swerve.”

Even after his exile, the description of the night before

Waterloo, of the mustering of the Highland regiments,

and of the Ardennes weeping over the troops, is surely

not the workf of one wholly cosmopolitan. In the last

canto his language is that of solemn affection for the land

which had cast him forth :

“ Yet I was born where men were proud to be,

Not without cause ”

if he dies an exile, his spirit will return to England, it is

upon her language that he builds his hopes of fame, and

should oblivion be his fate, he can at least say of her, like

Brasidas, “ Sparta hath many a worthier son than he ! ”

Even as late as 1823 he pauses, amid the satire and

cynicism of “ Don Juan,” to address his country, not in

terms of hatred or derision, but of reproachful despair.

If she could only know how hated she is, how Europe

longs for her destruction,

“ Would she be proud, or boast herself the free

Who is the first of slaves ? ”

The system of the Holy Alliance and Metternich had

raised the cloud of gloom that darkened all Europe after

the fall of Napoleon, but Byron’s spirit was one that

quailed not before God or man. At a time when every

other voice was silent or silenced, his was thundering

forth invincible defiance, that kept the spirit of liberty

warm, and shook the thrones of despots more than an

army could have done. It is thus that Byron flings his

glove in the face of the tyrants :

“ And I will war (at least in words, and should

My chance so happen—deeds) with all who war

With Thought, and of Thought’s foes by far most rude

Tyrants and sycophants have been, and are

I know not who may conquer , if I could

Have such a prescience, it should be no bar

To this, my plain, sworn downright detestation

Of every despotism in every nation ”

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Upon the sacred heads of the monarchs themselves he heaps contempt and insult; he talks of Alexander, the pillar of legitimacy and the idol of sentimental reactionaries, as a "bald-coot bully"; he speculates as to the results of George IV being dug up; he talks of shipping the "Holy Three" off to Senegal; he ridicules the memory of George III, and he refers to Alexander's sacred grand-mother as the greatest of sovereigns and of ——s. Such words Byron alone could or dared use, and to the enchained nations they were as a trumpet-blast sounding to battle. We can understand how it was that Lamartine, who afterwards lectured Byron in terms of characteristic and insufferable priggishness, was proud beyond measure at catching so much as a glimpse of "l'homme."

Byron's hatred of English Toryism knew no bounds His language about Castlereagh was fiendish; his attack upon Wellington, though more measured, was scarcely less bitter. The name of Waterloo became odious to him, and he had more love for Napoleon than for the restored despots. This sympathy with the cause of the Emperor was shared, in some measure, by Shelley, and upon the same grounds. For the passion for Napoleon's overthrow, with which even Byron had sympathized, had been forgotten amid the petty tyrannies of the Holy Alliance; for it seemed as if one great tyrant had been overthrown only for the benefit of a rabble of petty ones. The martial glory that filled other Englishmen with pride, left Byron cold. At the same time he was an aristocrat to the core, and, with Lara, despised the mob. He defied the tyrants as he defied the universe; like Cain, he would not sacrifice to a cruel God, and still less was he going to pay homage to a stupid king.

It was the Revolt of Greece that called out the latent nobility in Byron's nature, and raised him for ever above the level of Marlowe's egotism. He flung himself into the struggle with unselfish ardour. Thus vicarious

228 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

patriotism, so different from the abstract love of humanity, was characteristic of the Metternich age. The patriotism of Byron had been less choked by his egotism than starved by ill-treatment and despair It seemed as if there were two contending parties in Europe, those who trampled and those who were trampled upon. Castlereagh and Metternich, the Sultan and George IV, were surely countrymen. The enemy against whom England had fought for the liberation of Europe was now international, and the attempt to rule the world by congresses might well be met by a determination to fight for freedom against any despotism in any nation.

Besides, Greece had a strong attraction for Byron, as it had for Shelley, on account of its associations. He had already spoken of Rome as his country, and Greece was as venerable as Rome, and crying for deliverers. Byron had, years before, talked of enlisting as a mercenary with the Turks, if he liked their manners ; but his service with the Greeks was not that of a mercenary, not even that of a Faliero or Lara, but of one who was ready to lay down his life for a cause.

His " Isles of Greece " had expressed his consuming love of Greece, and his contempt for Greeks ; incidentally also it expressed his view of the philosophy of Keats, whom even after his death he treated with some scorn. Keats had wished to fly from reality to a world of " joy and soft, delicious warmth," but Byron cries

" You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet, Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone ? Of two such lessons, why forget The nobler and the manlier one ? "

and he commits the whole dream paradise to perdition with,

" Dash down yon cup of Samian wine ! "

His last lyric breathes a spirit of heroic resignation His contempt for the Greeks has ceased, they are awake

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229

now. The world is bitter to him, his youth is gone,

nothing but gloom remains, yet this is not the time for

such thoughts, death in a noble cause can at least be his :

" If thou regrettest thy youth, why live ?

The laud of honourable death

Is here :--up to the field, and give

Away thy breath !"

The period of Eldonian Toryism was brief, but it was

long enough to make free spirits feel the chill of pessimism

that spread over Europe during the reaction. Freedom

had been the animating spirit of the war, and it seemed

as if England had defeated her own purpose and fettered

her own limbs in the attempt to liberate Europe. The

seeds of despair had been sown, and their growth was

checked, but not killed, with returning prosperity.

Benthamite greed, which came to be a popular philosophy

about this time, was also fated to survive, like some

malignant, fungoid growth, far into the nineteenth century.

But it is remarkable that while cold and shallow reasoners

like Bentham and James Mill, and human calculating

machines like Ricardo, displayed scarcely any symptoms

of patriotic feeling, the three great poets, the whole of

whose philosophy would logically have made them mere

citizens of the world, were forced, in their own despite,

into the utterance of sentiments of veneration and

affection for their Motherland, sentiments that prove that,

in spite of pessimism and rebellion, they were, at heart,

proud to be Englishmen. There is no such pride for

Germany in Schopenhauer, little even in Hegel. So

mighty is the spell that the consciousness of her past

glories, and the sense of her present greatness, could

cast over the souls of England's most wayward children !

CHAPTER IX

THE LIBERATION OF EUROPE—LAST PHASE

THE apostles of melancholy were right in their estimate of the Holy Alliance, but unjust to England, and especially to Castlereagh. It might have seemed that Europe had only exchanged one tyranny for another. The monarchs had been thoroughly alarmed by the Revolution and its sequel, and were determined that such a thing should never happen again. The crowned philosophers, the reforming despots of the eighteenth century, had had their day ; even Alexander, the pupil of La Harpe and friend of Capodistrias, dropped his liberalism upon the murder of his agent in Germany, and the disaffection of his beloved guard in Russia.

The original theory of the alliance had been that the sovereigns should combine to preserve peace, and to govern their dominions upon Christian principles. This ideal was first formulated by Alexander, who was probably as sincere as sentimentalists of his type usually are ; but it was worse than verbiage for the statesmen of greedy Prussia and crafty Austria. Alexander himself was not the man to adhere to his ideal longer than suited his vanity or convenience, and the Holy Alliance soon became a conspiracy between despots to advance their own interests and to crush out freedom everywhere.

With such principles neither the Tory Government, nor Castlereagh himself, would have anything to do At

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the very time when Shelley and Byron were denouncing

him as the arch-enemy of freedom, Castlereagh was

elaborating the policy that was destined to wreck the

schemes of the liberticides and to loosen the chains of

Europe. Another was to bring the policy to fruition and

to reap the glory; but the voice of history will, or at least

ought to record, that among the architects of European

liberty, there was none who did greater work than the

Tory Castlereagh.

Not that he was consciously a democrat; he despised

the rabble as much as they hated him; but he had the

redeeming virtue of being first of all a patriot, and he

did not forget that he was the Minister of England, and

not of the Liverpool Government. Metternich failed to

understand this, and therefore he misunderstood Castle-

reagh. He perceived the reactionary opinions of the

man, but he did not see that the gulf which divided him

from the statesman was even broader and deeper than

that between Castlereagh and Cobbett.

Mr. Webster's recent researches have thrown a new and

most important light upon one side of Castlereagh's

policy. As far back as 1812 it had been open to him to

join with Spain to suppress the new-won liberties of her

South American colonies. The Cortes actually tried to

bribe him by the offer of commercial advantages. But

Castlereagh was firm, not only that no force should be

used, but that Spain should consent to rule her depen-

dencies on what he himself calls “liberal principles,”

which he defined in 1815 as being: (1) Restriction of the

slave trade. (2) Amnesty for the rebels. (3) Equal legal

rights for South Americans and Spaniards. (4) Freedom

of commercial intercourse with a preference in favour of

Spain. These principles he adhered to steadily, and in

defiance of France and Russia, who were for making

South America another Naples. It thus appears that

Castlereagh was the steady champion of freedom in the

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

New World, and he may fairly claim to be the originator

of the policy by which Canning called that world into

existence to redress the balance of the Old.

Castlereagh had had an impressive lesson as to the true

weakness of the Holy Alliance at Vienna. Had the chiefs

of the Metternich system been sincere believers in their

own formulas, they might have succeeded in drugging

Europe with the opiate of a kindly autocracy, and the

gentlest of all deaths would have come upon her from the

throne. But the Continental diplomatists of the Restora-

tion were as grasping and selfish as those of the eighteenth

century, and there was seldom enough honour among

thieves to enable them to work together. It was the work

of a few weeks to split up the allies of Chaumont into

angry factions; Alexander was abusing Metternich like

a pickpocket, and England, France and Austria concert-

ing a plan of campaign against Prussia and Russia.

England was the only nation to pursue an unselfish and

straightforward policy amid this chaos of intrigue and

Machiavellianism.

What had at first been no more than sentiment and

verbiage was soon to be translated into a very practical

scheme of tyranny. However much they might cheat and

mistrust each other on other questions, the " Holy Three "

had a common interest in stamping out every manifesta-

tion of liberty or nationality all over Europe. It was

against this policy that Castlereagh, like Canning after

him, made a stand from the first. Metternich was anxious

to get the countenance of England for his system, and he

believed that Castlereagh was only pretending to differ

from him in order to conciliate opinion at home. But any

sort of countenance to organized reaction by force, Castle-

reagh was determined that he neither would nor ought to

give, and this as a matter not of policy, but of principle.

At the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle he gave a decisive

check to the more ambitious projects of the despots.

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233

Here he occupied a position of peculiar importance, because Metternich was almost as much afraid of Russia as he was of revolution, and was naturally ready to attach great weight to the support of England. Alexander had put forward a scheme for giving a practical turn to the visionary generalities of the alliance, by establishing a universal guarantee for the preservation of all recognized rights, in other words, for holding the combined armies of Europe in readiness to stamp out any revolution anywhere. Castlereagh, with the full support of the Cabinet, made a courteous but firm stand upon the principle of non-intervention, and thus one of the most insidious plots ever contrived against liberty ended, through the exertions of “ Derry-down-Triangle,” in verbiage Even Canning can claim no greater achievement.

Nor was this the only effort made by Castlereagh in the same cause. Against the Carlsbad decrees, that destroyed the liberties of Germany, he entered an emphatic protest. When the allies drew up, at Troppau, a definite statement of their intention to resort to forcible intervention, he refused to have anything to do with it, and criticized it in the most uncompromising terms. At both Troppau and Laybach he instructed our representative to hold aloof from the schemes of the allies, and this attitude aroused much ill-feeling against England. How ever, Alexander and Metternich had now composed their differences, and could afford to dispense with English support at a pinch. In his instructions concerning the Congress of Verona, which he never lived to attend, he outlined the policy of Canning, abstaining from intervention in Italy, discountenancing it in Spain, and foreshadowing the recognition of the belligerent rights of Greece and of the existence of the South American Republics.

It is in no spirit of disparagement to Canning that we vindicate the policy of Castlereagh. While posterity

234 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

has rightly agreed to honour the liberator of Greece, to the statesman of Chaumont and Aix-la-Chapelle it has done less than justice. Castlereagh was like Cassandra, whatever he did was fated to be misunderstood. It is characteristic of him that while he delighted Metternich, whose system he overthrew, he was hated by the nation to whom his life was devoted. Canning, on the other hand, died lamented by his countrymen, but Metternich could not conceal his delight. Castlereagh was the most un-English of English statesmen; Canning was an Englishman to the finger-tips, his methods were down-right, and he was able to justify them in phrases addressed, not only to the intellect, but to the heart. Such sentences as " I have called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old," make as vivid an appeal to the subjects of George V as they did to those of George IV; all that remains of Castlereagh's frigid periods are one or two Irish bulls.

Castlereagh's methods are more likely to appeal to the born diplomatist than those of Canning. The author of the " Needy Knife-grinder " had a faculty of exposition that makes his dispatches almost the classics of their kind. But it is not always the best policy for a Foreign Minister to score telling points, or even to produce master-pieces. To treat Napoleon's overtures with open ridicule was mere diplomatic gaucherie; to incur the hatred of half the Cabinets in Europe was, at best, a necessary evil. While Canning, like Palmerston, was somewhat too prone to display the iron fist in the face of Europe, much to the delight of his countrymen, Castlereagh was earning their dislike by conciliating the very man whom he most opposed And it is this unostentatious tact with which he cloaked a purpose as steadfast as that of Canning that stamps him as one of the world's greatest diplomatists.

It was his influence that had prevented the alliance

LIBERATION OF EUROPE—LAST PHASE 235

from falling to pieces in 1814, that had cemented the Treaty

of Chaumont, and brought decisive reinforcements to

Blücher. And after the peace he was not disposed to

quarrel with our allies for the sake of flaunting a vigorous

or striking policy. He and Canning were equally suspicious

of the Jacobin menace ; they both supported the Six Acts ;

both were opponents of parliamentary reform. Above

all, the events of the Hundred Days had shown that

France was still capable of being a danger to Europe,

and in a few years after Waterloo, it was a main object

of Castlereagh's policy to keep the machinery of Chau-

mont still ready for action in case of need. When Canning

assumed power the danger was passing away; for Napoleon

was dead, and the Bonapartist fiasco during Angoulême's

campaign had demonstrated the weakness of the cause.

The successes of Canning's policy were of a more im-

pressive nature than those of Castlereagh. Canning inter-

vened with brilliant success in Greece and Portugal, and

he preserved the New World from the aggression of the

Old. The warmest admirer of Castlereagh must admit

that he lacked the brilliance and comprehensive genius

of Canning, a genius that displays itself in almost every

sentence he wrote. But then it must be remembered

that Canning had opportunities that were denied to

Castlereagh. Historians have blamed Castlereagh for

failing to achieve the impossible; Spencer Walpole, for

instance, accuses him of standing by while Italy was en-

slaved. But it would have been criminal lunacy, during

the distressful years of Peterloo and Thistlewood's plot,

to have embarked upon a land war with the Holy Alliance,

and to have faced, in Italy, the huge battalions of Austria

and Russia. Castlereagh had nothing to do with the

crushing of Naples, and he protested against the Carlsbad

decrees. Canning himself refused to play the part of

Don Quixote, in Don Quixote's own country, after Castle-

reagh's death. But historians do not blame him for

236 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

leaving Riego and his comrades to the mercy of Ferdinand. Castlereagh had acted with decisive effect when he got the opportunity at Aix, and his services there and in 1814 were as valuable as Canning's later triumphs, though less apparent. To take up a strong policy without the power to enforce it is but feeble statesmanship, and both Napoleon and Alexander had found out already that to think of bluffing Metternich on a weak hand was to court disaster. There is a time to act and a time to wait, and these times were not unknown to Canning and Castlereagh. Had they been known to Palmerston, not to speak of more recent statesmen, it might have been better for England.

The strength of the country was twofold. Her sea power, despite perilous reductions of the fleet, was unchallenged. On purely Continental affairs, where sea power did not come directly into play, she only exercised a commanding influence through the divisions of her opponents. Her support was always sought after, but when it was not forthcoming, a united Europe, or even a united Alexander and Metternich, could afford to dispense with it. At Aix, Castlereagh had profited by their dissensions ; but when, at Troppau and Laybach, the " Holy Three " were pursuing a common policy, he was justified in prudently instructing our representative to act the part of a courteous though dissentient spectator, thus avoiding both a breach with the allies and a snub for his country.

Canning's American and Portuguese policies owe their success entirely to the fact that England commanded the high seas, and as far as America is concerned, he was only carrying out the policy that Castlereagh had suggested in his circular of 1817. In his Greek policy he made use of both sources of England's strength ; for he used the fleet to crush Ibrahim, and he acted in concert, not only with France, but with Russia, since Metternich

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237

was doing everything he could to thwart the new Tsar's

policy. Canning accomplished a masterpiece of state-

craft, for he kept Russia in check, not by opposition, but

by conciliation. The Eastern problem had first become

serious for England when William Pitt nearly went to

war about the fortress of Oczacow. To prevent Russia

getting control of the Bosphorus and access to the

Mediterranean has ever since been a main object of our

diplomacy, and it has more than once compromised our

honour by committing us to the support of Turkish mis-

rule. Canning succeeded in avoiding both the Russian

Scylla and the Turkish Charybdis

When he died he had raised his own reputation, and that

of England, to a very high level. Those who dwelt in

the darkness of tyranny had seen a great light, and the

Holy Alliance had been shaken to its foundations. At his

success in wrecking the system of congresses Canning

was jubilant, with that frank, boyish exultation that had

inspired his famous rhymed dispatch about the twenty

per cent Dutch duty. The ideal that had inspired him

throughout the war was the keynote of his later policy.

He worshipped England with the love of a Milton or a

Chatham. He was utterly scornful of the shifts and petti-

ness of party politicians. Mr. Temperley thus describes

his attitude : " Canning professed the better part of both

Tory and Whig creeds, and his great popularity in the

country was due to this fact, that he really represented

the collective national feeling better than either party."

Even this estimate falls short of the whole truth, for

Canning was one of those rare spirits, those poet-states-

men, who create the spirit they represent, whose belief

in their country is so pure as to make her worthy of it.

Many and noble have been the eulogies pronounced upon

England by her sons, and yet there is none more touching

in its devotion, or more sublime in its expression, than the

speech delivered by her Foreign Minister at that Devon

238 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

seaport, hallowed by memories of Drake and the Armada :

" Our present state is no more a proof of our inability to

act, than the state of inertness and inactivity in which I

have seen those mighty masses which float in the waters

above your town is a proof that they are devoid of strength

or incapable of being fitted for action. You well know,

gentlemen, how soon one of those stupendous masses

now reposing on their shadows in perfect stillness, how

soon, upon any call of patriotism or necessity, it would

assume the likeness of an animated thing, instinct with

life and motion ; how soon it would ruffle, as it were, its

swelling plumage ; how quickly it would put forth all

its beauty and its bravery, collect its scattered elements

of strength, and awaken its dormant thunder. Such as is

one of those magnificent machines when springing from

inaction into a display of its might, such is England her-

self, while, apparently passive and motionless, she silently

concentrates the power to be put forth on an adequate

occasion."

We now draw to the end of our comparison of Canning

with Castlereagh Such a comparison is inevitable, the

two rivals, and loyal friends, front each other upon the

stage of history, as they did long ago upon Putney Heath ;

only now it is Castlereagh who is wounded and Canning

who escapes free. Castlereagh has been treated, by his

contemporaries and by posterity, with more cruel injustice

than any other character in our history He was a great

War Minister, a great statesman, and a patriot. His

actual achievements are worthy to rank with those of

Canning. That Wellington was given a free hand in the

Peninsula, that the alliance against Napoleon held to-

gether, and that the conspiracy of despots did not, is

largely owing to him. He was in power during the most

trying period of the war and the lean years of the peace,

when there were few trophies to be gained. He played a

thankless part with dignity and success, and he outlined

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the policy of his more fortunate successor. But though we grant him all this, though we never pass his tomb at Westminster without a thrill of grateful reverence, he must for ever take rank below Canning. For while in almost every respect in which we can definitely weigh the two men in the balances, as the Dionysus of Aristophanes weighs lines of poetry, Castlereagh holds his own, he lacked the fiery genius of Canning, the intellectual beauty that made even dispatches works of art. The one accomplished all that was humanly possible, the spirit of the other was touched with something divine. His very faults as a diplomatist were the faults of genius. Not only did he worthily discharge his high office, but he had the faculty of impressing his personality upon Europe, and of making his acts not only those of the Cabinet, but of the British nation itself. It is the crowning feat of statesmanship when the acts of a Minister are felt to be in fact, and not only in name, those of the whole community.

To Mr. Temperley we are indebted for the following story. Lord John Russell was asked in his old age what was the most impressive incident he had witnessed during his long career in the House of Commons. It was, he replied, when Canning had risen to defend our dispatch of troops to Portugal. “ We go to plant the standard of England on the heights of Lisbon. Where that standard is planted, foreign dominion shall not come.” As he pronounced these words a shaft of sunlight, piercing through one of the windows, lit upon that noble forehead. It was as if, in this moment of supreme inspiration, the statesman had been transfigured. And thus transfigured let Canning dwell in our hearts, the embodiment of a love as pure and heroic as ever Englishman has cherished for England. Castlereagh was troubled about many things, but Canning chose that better part which the verdict of ages shall not take away from him.

CHAPTER X

PATRIOTISM IN ART

T is a common fallacy that there was no English art that can in any sense be called great before the days of Hogarth and Sir Joshua. Among our cultured class there has always been a tendency to look down upon the work of an Englishman as something "insular" or barbarous. Foreigners like Holbein, Vandyck, Lely and Kneller were allowed to usurp the place that should have been occupied by native artists, and posterity have too readily acquiesced in the verdict of their fathers, with the result that the Dobsons, the Rileys and the Hudsons have been allowed to sink into comparative oblivion.

Even as far back as the Middle Ages, the English character had unfolded in visible form and colour, though as yet we had no school of painting to compare with those of Italy and Germany. But the potentiality of art was there, and even in the realm of painting we have beautiful though primitive work, like the Norwich panel in the Fitzwilliam, or the almost obliterated frescoes in Cornish churches. But though as yet Englishmen had not been taught to paint, their genius for colour found glorious realization in the glowing radiance of the stained-glass window, and a visit to the British Museum will show that our countrymen were second to none in the art of illuminating manuscripts This it is that determines the form of Elizabethan art, as it takes shape beneath the

240

hands of Nicholas Hilliard, for the miniature is the child

of the manuscript.

It was only to be expected that the outburst of Eliza-

bethan joy should have broken forth in art as well as song.

It is as a painter of miniatures that this artist is best remem-

bered, and he had the example of the younger Holbein,

as well as the tradition of the manuscripts, for his instruc-

tion. We have it on the evidence of his own pen that he

was as staunch a patriot in his own art as Shakespeare

himself. In a concise and practical treatise on the " Art

of Limning," recently published in the " Transactions "

of the Walpole Society, and probably the first book of

English art criticism, he holds that England is the only

country that displays, for the artist's contemplation,

beauties equal to those of Italy, " such surely as art

must ever give place unto. I say not for the face only,

but for every part, for even the hand and the foot

excelleth all pictures that yet I ever saw. This moved a

certain Pope to say that England was rightly called

Anglia, of Angely, as the country of Angels, God grant

it."

It is this truly Shakespearean love of England, " this

land of such dear souls," that is the necessary motive

power for a school of English painting. It is the passionate

love of native beauty that induces intense contemplation,

and the desire to perpetuate and idealize. As yet their

inexpertness in technique gave English artists a restricted

scope, and they developed principally along the line of

miniature portrait painting. At first their art suffers

somewhat from the defect we have noted in so much of

the literature of this time, it is rich rather than penetrating,

Hilliard's draperies display a more consummate art

than his faces. But as time goes on, the tendency to

introspection, of which Puritanism is the supreme

manifestation, strengthens and intensifies the genius of

our limners, and it is not without its significance that

II.—R

242 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

Hilliard’s pupil, Isaac Oliver, was of Huguenot origin. From Hilliard and Oliver the progression is continuous through their respective sons and John Hoskins to Samuel Cooper, the contemporary of Milton, and perhaps the greatest painter of miniatures that ever lived. Some of the superficial delicacy of his predecessors may have been sacrificed, but, as befits his time, this is more than compensated for by a strength and an insight into the penetralia of character little inferior, in its own medium, to that of Dürer and Rembrandt in theirs.

The interest in character which was growing all through the first half of the seventeenth century craved expression also in oil painting, and now begins that foreign domination which continues unbroken for a century. Not that we may refuse to acknowledge our debt to these aliens. The education that they had to give was indispensable. The Elizabethan technique had been one of the bright light effects with little attempt at shading, a method eminently suited for the rendering of detail, but inadequate for the subtler and more profound emotions of the dawning epoch. It was appropriate, then, that our schoolmasters should come from the Low Countries, the home of Puritanism Rubens paid us a fleeting visit, Vandyck and Mytens made a home here for a number of years. And yet we feel, even of Vandyck’s portraiture, that there is something lacking that only a native artist could supply. It is beautiful, but it is not English. Vandyck had not the instinctive sympathy with his sitters to enable him to pluck out the heart of their mystery. But of one soul he had real and passionate understanding, and it is probable that the whole compass of England contained none more un-English He understood the King, and realized again and again that lofty and pathetic dignity, an Eikon Basilike on canvas, which Charles himself hardly attained in practice till that supreme hour when, alone and encompassed by his

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enemies, he so triumphed in his death as to render inevitable the restoration of his house.

But in our admiration of Vandyck we are too apt to forget the rich and gracious mastery of his pupil, Dobson, the English Tintoret as Charles I called him,°who though he was too much of a disciple to inaugurate an art definitely English, was yet by no means the slave of his teacher.

After the Restoration, the foreign influence ceases to be educative, and, from the point of view of native art, becomes almost wholly mischievous The names of Lely and Kneller, besides having attracted a wholly disproportionate amount of worship, have served to this day to outdazzle, with their gaudy brilliance, their more sober but, in one case at least, more meritorious English contemporaries. Sir Joshua himself was once reprimanded by a brother artist for not painting in the manner of Sir Godfrey. "Shakespeare in poetry, Kneller in painting, damme ! " was the final argument of his admonisher.

And yet the art of these admired foreigners had no root in the soil, and therefore no depth. Even Lely, with all his skill and sense of colour, can do little more than turn out endless reproductions of the animal lasciviousness which was the most obvious feature of the Restoration. Only very occasionally, as in the dark, powerful face of German Rupert, does he suggest greater depths. As for Sir Godfrey, he is certainly one of the most superficial artists that ever lived, and his portraits are so devoid of any penetration, or even interest in the characters of his sitters, as to attain the level of gorgeous fashion plates, turned out with unprecedented and mechanical rapidity.

In profound contrast with the vanity of Lely and Kneller, was the sensitive modesty of John Riley, a name only known to connoisseurs, and yet surely one of

244 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

the great neglected names of our art. Riley had not Sir Peter’s brilliancy of colouring, though his magnificent portrait of James II, with its inspired dash of crimson giving life to the whole, proves him a supreme master in this department also. But Riley’s greatness lies most of all in his penetration of character, a grasp and insight denied to Lely. His vision was less flattering than that of the courtier, who was content to paint voluptuous portraits for people who delighted in voluptuousness. He saw the power that lay beneath that surface of the Restoration, in all its cold and sombre rationalism, its Satanic pride of intellect. This gives to most of Riley’s portraits their indefinably wizened appearance, so different from the full, sensuous contours of Lely. Perhaps his insight into the spirit of his age was apt to carry him to an extreme, for there is hardness and cynicism even in his portrait of the great-hearted Ormonde; he endows James II with an intellectual strength that would certainly have prevented the Revolution; and in the poet Waller he sees not at all the author of “Go, lovely rose!” but the double turncoat, him who put into the mouth of our English Pegasus the bit of the rhymed couplet. Charles II showed himself a shrewd critic when, looking at his portrait, he remarked to Riley, “Is this like me? Then, oddsfish, I am an ugly fellow!” Riley was so hurt that, for a time, he gave up painting, and yet Charles could have paid his art no higher compliment. For the real Merry Monarch was the ugliest of fellows, as ugly, almost, as sin.

There was arising, during the lifetime of Kneller, a school of portraiture not only genuinely English, but in the direct line of artistic succession that stretches without a break from Riley to Lawrence. It seldom catches the glow of supreme inspiration; it is a sober and solid art, as befits a prose age; but it is informed with a strength and an understanding of its sitters that no foreigner

could be expected to possess. It is not our purpose to

revive the memory of the neglected predecessors of Sir

Joshua, to speak of Mrs. Beale, of the Gandys, of High-

more, of Knapton, of Dandridge, of Wilson. Ex uno disce

omnes, and if any one would realize of what English por-

traiture was capable, let him go to the Bodleian, and see

the portrait of William Jane, by the younger Gandy, with

its almost eerie divination of the sitter's personality.

And those who persist in believing that nothing great

can come out of England, may at least listen to the

testimony of a foreigner, Rouquet, who wrote in 1755,

just at the end of this period, his interesting and very

rare survey of our art. He is speaking of the pictures

contributed for charity to the Foundlings' Hospital,

Captain Coram's institution, which included some of the

best work of Hogarth, Hayman, Highmore and Hudson.

"This exhibition . . . has afforded the public an oppor-

tunity for judging whether the English are such indifferent

artists as the foreigners, or even the English themselves,

pretend. For it is customary with them to have their

pictures drawn at every turn, and yet to say they have

no pictures."

We will confine our attention to the main and direct

succession by pupilage from Riley; for Riley begat

Richardson, and Richardson begat Hudson, and Hudson

begat Sir Joshua. Perhaps, as an artist, Jonathan

Richardson is the least of these; his colouring is apt to be

cold and his scheme of composition formal, though his

work possesses an honest and unpretentious merit

that renders it always interesting, and, on occasion,

something more. But his main interest for us lies in the

fact that he is the first to take up the cudgels for English

art against the Dutch tyranny. The most important of

his literary works is a plea, in somewhat florid prose, for

the due recognition of art in this country. He believes

that we may yet found one of the world's greatest schools

246 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

of painting, "for the English nation is not accustomed to do things by halves."

" I have said it before," he continues, " and will venture to repeat it, notwithstanding the national vanity of some of our neighbours and our own false modesty, and partiality to foreigners (in this respect though in others we have had such demonstrations of our superiority that we have learned to be conscious of it) if ever the good taste in painting, if ever that delightful, useful and noble art does revive in the world, it is probable it will be in England." Not only was this prediction to be gloriously fulfilled, but Richardson's influence played no small part in bringing it about. He writes like the inspired precursor of the coming dawn. He appeals to his countrymen to rival in art the pre-eminence they have already attained in science, in literature, in arms.

" Let us at length disdain to be as much in subjection in this respect as in any other ; let us put forth our strength and employ our national virtue, that haughty impatience of subjection and inferiority, which seems to be the characteristic of our nation in this, as in many other illustrious occasions, and the thing will be effected ; the English school will rise and flourish."

The importance of Thomas Hudson lies in the fact that he was the first of our artists definitely to establish the supremacy of English portraiture in the general estimation. The last of our Dutch conquerors was Van Loo, whose pompous and elephantine talent made a brief conquest of the town during the last years of Walpole's supremacy. It was Hudson who unearthed the genius of Joshua Reynolds, and when the time came, he was glad to resign his supremacy into the hands of his pupil There is that about Hudson's art which renders him eminently fitted to embody what was best in the England of the first two Georges. His portraits are as unemotional as Anson and as massive as Dr. Johnson, and it is no

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wonder that Horace Walpole failed to appreciate him, for he was a lover of those stolid and beefy gentlemen whom the sensitive nerves of Sir Horace could not abide. Hudson’s portraiture is the counterpart in painting of the Chippendale furniture, a solid and workmanlike strength, and unromantic honesty, which is a source of as lasting a gratification as the more fragile and unsubstantial beauty of Versailles. Place a Chippendale chair beside one of contemporary French workmanship, or a portrait of Hudson beside one of Boucher or Nattier, and you will realise to some extent how the one civilization was swept away in the first swelling of democracy, and how the other stood firm until it had broken the might of a Napoleon.

Of Hudson’s greater contemporary, Hogarth, we have already treated in our chapter on the Jeremiads. He is the first of our artists whose supremacy has been acknowledged both in his own time and by posterity, for Hudson’s memory has been allowed to go the way of Riley’s. Those of us who know him wholly or mainly through prints are apt to forget Hogarth’s claim to rank amongst our greatest painters, in the strictest sense of the word. Whistler, the last man from whom we should naturally have expected such a judgment, called Hogarth the greatest of English artists. We suspect that it was the masterly impressionism of such a portrait as the “Shrimp Girl,” anticipating the delicacy while surpassing the strength of Whistler’s own work, that called forth this tribute of admiration.

We have noticed, in our survey of Hogarth’s subject pictures, two distinct and contradictory phases of his art. Most often he is lashing the vice of his time with a ruthless and uncompromising severity that will see no good anywhere, only the greed and cruelty and impetence that were threatening our existence during the Pelham rule. But there is another mood in which he

248 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

gives form to a frank and boisterous pride of Englishry, and shows that whatever he may have thought about our faults, it never entered into his head to doubt our superiority to Frenchmen and every other species of foreigner. It is in his portraits, his masterpieces, that this fundamental love of his countrymen is most revealed. Of how savagely he could treat a sitter we know from his Lord Lovat A more consummate old villain has never been thrown on canvas than the manifold traitor who sits counting off the clans on his fingers. What a contrast is Hogarth's treatment of his worthy and generous friend, Captain Coram! He has done what Fielding essayed, without a tithe of his success, in Squire Allworthy; he has portrayed a good man. Without the least suggestion of the Romantic sensibility, he has made the old sea-captain as lovable a figure as Sir Roger de Coverley, and there can be no higher praise.

A feat almost greater, in its way, was Hogarth's portrayal of his servants. Here he strikes out a new line in English art, one that was to prove of the highest importance. The picture is in the noblest sense democratic, the most democratic word that had been spoken in England since the 'Canterbury Tales.' As Fra Angelico painted angels, so we may almost say that Hogarth painted lackeys and kitchen sluts on his knees. We do not wonder that he was the most beloved of masters. For Hogarth does not treat these people, by the remotest implication, as inferiors; he does not look upon them from the standpoint of another class, nor sentimentalize them into creatures whose whole aspirations are bounded by his service; they have an interest and a divinity entirely their own, whether or no they perform their duty towards their employer. It was no small achievement to have executed, in an age of triumphant oligarchy, this apotheosis of the common people, and here, too, we have the

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evidence of a spirit, vocal also in Gainsborough's parish clerk and Morland's yokels, that explains why it was that, in spite of manifold injustice, there was no English storming of the Bastille nor burning of the châteaux.

Not only in practice, but in theory, was Hogarth uncompromisingly English. He carried the reaction against the Dutch to an extreme that led him to caricature Rembrandt and denounce the "black old masters." He boldly declared that, given his own time and subject, he was as good a portrait painter as Vandyck. There was, however, as in Dr. Johnson's antipathy to Scotsmen, an element of conscious exaggeration in this attitude, and he confessed as much in private conversation. He had a healthy scorn of the affectation which worships every relic of antiquity, and despises the common things and common people of England. With his great influence and popularity he may fairly be said to have completed the work of Richardson ; and finally to have established the doctrine of English art for Englishmen He is not-able for his own sake, and for all time, because he was not ashamed to be thoroughly national by choice and prejudice, to seek truth, not in a devitalized Eden Campagna, but in the very streets and slums of London.

A school of landscape painting had been springing up in the eighteenth century, but in this department, which was to be immortalized by Turner, native genius was sadly handicapped by French and Italian as well as Dutch tyranny. Our artists went for inspiration not to nature, but to

"Whate'er Lorraine light-touched with softening hue, Or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew "

The landscape of Lambert in the National Gallery, with its delicate sky colouring and the gentle light that pervades a prospect of utter tameness, shows that Lambert has caught some of Claude's secret at second-hand, but has

250 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

not even attempted to fathom the secret of the English country-side. It is the same with Wooton's landscape in

the Fitzwilliam, made respectable by the insertion of a ruin, or with any other work of these two talented artists ;

it is evident' that they did not care enough about the country to paint it with either observation or insight,

they were not great enough to fall down upon their faces, and kiss the soil of their motherland

Next we have Samuel Scott, trying to turn London into the insipid Venice of Canaletto ; and Wilson, doomed

to oscillate between Salvator Rosa, as in his Niobe, and Claude, as in most of his landscapes ; yet both of them

showing, by irrepressible flashes of genius, that the night is far spent, and that the emotional revival is working its

magic in them too. Rouquet is able to pronounce upon them, even at this early and imperfect stage, that " there

are few masters in this branch much superior to those landscape painters, who now enjoy the first reputation in

England."

The name of Scott is also associated with the sea painting in which England was, at no distant date, to lead

the world. There was quite a vogue of this style after the outbreak of war with Spain, for English naval officers

liked to have their engagements recorded, though, honest Philistines as they were, they were much more particular

about the nautical accuracy of each spar, and the proper station of each officer, than about the artistic merits of

the picture. Perhaps the most promising of these early sea painters is Brooking, who had the practical advantage

of having been bred in a dockyard. But even he could not escape the Dutch blight. Yet we may accept Rouquet's

verdict : " Marine painting, in Vanderrelde's taste, is a branch of art in which no one need be afraid to affirm that

the English excel."

Hogarth, Richardson and Hudson, by purging the land of foreign domination, had cleared the way for one who

may justly be described as the undisputed sovereign of English eighteenth-century art. Hogarth had given us sturdy and lovable English folk, but it was for Sir Joshua to immortalize a hero, the first Lord Heathfield, defender of Gibraltar. In this portrait, Ruskin, with the mid-Victorian vulgarity that too often mars even his genius, can see nothing heroic, only “ an old English gentleman obstinate about keys,” just as Zoilus might have described Achilles as “ a young Greek gentleman sulking about a wench.” And yet, could Ruskin have paid either Heathfield or Reynolds a higher compliment ? As we look at the strong, kindly, simple face in the picture, most surely we realize that into the hands of such gentlemen as this God hath committed the keys of England’s greatness, and the three corners of the world in arms have not prevailed against it. It was the task of Reynolds and the English portrait painters to depict and ennoble the country gentry who rallied to the cause of England and of Europe in the hour of need. There would have been no place for a Romney or a Lawrence during the Walpole period. It is to the credit of Reynolds and his followers that they were thoroughly English. His beautiful “ Holy Family ” is the idealization, not of spiritual ecstasy nor of Renaissance pride, but of the family life, which, despite the sneers of emasculate men and disappointed women, has made England great.

It has never been the function of great sculptors or portrait painters to anticipate the art of the photographer by producing likenesses whose excellence depends upon the fact that they are easily recognized as such by every thoughtless observer. There is a faculty of divination in colour by which the artist may be said, in a manner, to create his age, to hold before it its highest hope, and depict what it is striving to become. Compare the Pitts of Romney and Hoppner, or the Lord Heathfields of Copley and Sir Joshua, and you will find hardly

252 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

a single point of resemblance, except for a certain similarity of feature. Michelangelo succeeded in fashioning his hero and his thinker out of a pair of undistinguished princelets, and it is difficult to believe that the earliest and grandest of the chiselled Pharaohs had their counterparts in reality. All portraits are windows through which the soul of the artist looks back to ours, and his soul is but a portion of one mightier than he, of which he partakes in a measure directly proportionable to his greatness. In Sir Joshua, then, we see, as we saw in Chatham and Johnson, England at her best.

He stands midway between the eighteenth century and romance, and to some extent embodies what is best in both. He is most fond of the burly strength of men like his Keppel and Heathfield, and his colouring is like the talk of his friend Dr. Johnson, robust and decisive, heartily rejoicing in life. But when he willed to be tender, not even Romney could excel him. The Windham in the National Portrait Gallery is almost too frail, too delicately romantic, even for the disciple of Burke and the champion of distressed aristocracy. There is a portrait of a young officer at Cobham Hall which shows how Sir Joshua could rise to perfect understanding of a poet, a Shelley without a voice and out of his proper element—and here the softness of colouring and sympathy of touch are more reminiscent of Shelley's own verse than what we usually associate with Sir Joshua. When he has a weak subject, his critical faculty is as wide awake as that of Sargent, and in the flabby, indecisive face of Lord George Sackville is written, only too legibly, the burden of his failure as a soldier and a statesman

The type which Sir Joshua delights to paint, and for which he is most distinguished, is neither that of Windham nor of Sackville, but finds its fullest expression in his Admiral Keppel, and Dr. Johnson, and, above all, in his Lord Heathfield. This type is not introspective,

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nor is there any trace of the divided soul of the dawning

era, it stands four-square with a magnificent self-forget-

fulness, as solid as the stone kicked by Johnson or the

rock defended by Heathfield Perfect it is not, for it

lacks the spiritual intensity of the Sistine prophets, and

the subtlety of Raphael's Pope Julius, and the deep

introspection of Rembrandt, there is something still of

the Prose Age about it, but it is unique and immortal, a

heroism that performs its duty in silence, a moral fibre

in which is neither cowardice nor the shadow of change.

Gainsborough's heroes are as strong as those of

Reynolds, and he sometimes gives way to an almost

brutal love of burly features and violent colouring, as in

his Lord Cornwallis and General Lawrence, and most of

all in his Blackstone. Such portraits are what Horace

Walpole would have called "beefs." But what Gains-

borough is most fond of is a certain clean-cut and reserved

strength which is essentially aristocratic ; it chisels the

features of his " Blue Boy," and attains its most complete

expression in the noble, enigmatic portrait of Amherst.

It is a face which commands the respect without appealing

to the sympathy of the spectator, a greatness which

keeps aloof from the populace, and is much less demo-

cratic than that depicted by Sir Joshua. It is charac-

teristic of Gainsborough that his last words should have

been of meeting Vandyck in heaven. The blue of which

he is so fond has none of the soft warmth of Correggio's

Antiope, nor the transcendent innocence of Fra Angelico's

skies, but breathes an intense haughtiness as of the sweep

and rustle of a princess's robe. None the less there is a

virility about this pride which distinguishes it at once

from that of degenerate Versailles, with its turquoise and

apple-green, its delicacy of Sèvres and Fragonard.

Gainsborough could sympathize with the poor and

pave the way for romance in his landscape, but where he

had to do with a rich sitter he represented the spirit

254 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

which was to be that of Castlereagh. The history of his successors is that of the transition to the Romantic ideal.

The robustness and reserve give place to tenderness, and even colour changes to the feathery softness of Romney and the more serene gentleness of Lawrence.

The golden age of the English gentry is also the golden age of our portraiture, which ranges from the undiminished strength of Hoppner and Raeburn to the delicacy and introspection of the more pronounced Romantics. It was only when the Eldonian blight settled upon them that they ceased to be glorified in art.

The lower class, and the soil from which they sprang, were not to be neglected. All through the period of coldness the people had received scant attention, except from Hogarth, nor was Nature herself tolerated unclothed, or even in native garb. Artists thought it beneath them to pay much attention to the haunts of boors, beasts and cattle. The fearful and wonderful animals that do duty for cows in Lambert's National Gallery picture would disgrace a Noah's ark, and even Wilson is seldom happy unless he can dump down a certain amount of classical stage property upon an English country-side.

It is to Gainsborough and Morland that we must look for the definite break from this clogging tradition. In Gainsborough it is not yet quite complete, his heart had still " yearnings for the buried day." It was not too often that he condescended to real English landscape in his large pictures He is fondest of the long July after-noons and the blotchy park trees so dear to Watteau and his shepherds in blue silk, and these are as cosmopolitan as Claude's Campagna. Even when he is frankly depicting peasantry or animal life he often harks back to this incomplete conception, but not always At his best he can be a simple Englishman, loving English life and English scenery. He is a thorough Tory too, and the English village, squire and all, is his rustic Utopia. It

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is this conception that inspires his best landscapes, in which he is content to observe and glorify, and not to imitate. But nothing that he ever did is quite so touching and so simple as his portrait of the parish clerk. There he sits, an old man, untroubled by doubt, unruffled by discontent, a smile of perfect trustfulness lighting his face, his honest eyes conversing with heaven. Men feel before works like this, that here is a final refutation of the cynic and the pessimist ; the God or world process that can produce such work as this parish clerk—and you may find his like in many an English village even now—cannot be utterly bad.

There can be no mistake about the hearty English sentiment of that fascinating reprobate, Morland. He accepted the life and scenery around him with frank affection, and set himself to paint the everyday life of ordinary folk in the spirit of the later Dutch school. Though there is little evidence of his having been inspired by Hogarth, he is his direct successor, but there is this important difference between the two men—Morland always painted the people because he loved them, Hogarth most often because he well-nigh despaired of them, and wished to reform them. Lambert's bovine grotesques, Scott's Thames Canal, even Gainsborough's hastily drawn park backgrounds, were not for Morland. He loved rough sports and rough men, the very animals of the country-side fell within the scope of his sympathy and minute observation, and surely never has the spirit of the brute creation been so tenderly displayed to man as in those two big cart-horses and the sturdy little pony " inside of a stable." The peasant that Morland draws is the " Johnny Bull " of Gillray, a great, sturdy fellow, usually in a smock-frock, with a stupid, almost childlike expression, and yet an able man with his hands, and a contented, kindly fellow, of a stock that was to defeat the " Sacred Guard " at Waterloo. Morland was under no

256 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

sentimental illusions about Johnny, he had seen too much

of life for that ; wreckers and poachers and deserters were

no strangers to his art. But his opinion was on the whole

favourable, and he had made Hogarth’s discovery, that

modern England was more worthy of an English artist’s

love than the relics of any ancient civilization.

The period of the great war coincides with an almost

passionate cult of the English country-side, and one has

only to spend a few hours in a gallery to notice how many

landscape painters of mark begin their careers about

this time ; men as opposed in their methods as Ward,

with his huge canvases and huge cattle ; Crome, with his

dreary Norfolk solitudes ; and Cotman, with the delicate

grace which takes us back to Japan, and forward to the

Impressionists.

The use of water-colours provided a new and powerful

medium for the interpretation of landscape, especially in

its lighter and brighter moods. And as the fortunes of

England rose to victory, so the elements of laughter and

glory began to be perceived in her landscape. There had

always been something sombre and depressing about the

Dutch paintings, the long stretches of flat, monotonous

country had cast a gloom over the spirit of the inhabitants

from which not even the fleshly glories of Rubens were

altogether free ; there was heaviness in the mirth of

these men, and they saw nature through a glass darkly.

It was for Englishmen to teach the Western world how

to “ love the earth and to laugh ”

Constable is the English master whose work resembles

most that of the Dutch. His genius was formed

during the Napoleonic wars, and the essence of it is its

intense patriotism, which made him love “ every stile

and stump and lane ” in his native village, and declare

that he would never cease to paint them. For him these

things wanted no added glory, no embellishment, it was

enough to paint them in all their homeliness and sim-

plicity. He does not require serene skies and pouring

sunlight to make his Suffolk landscape beautiful, he seems

to despise such things, like companies who act Shake-

speare’s plays without scenery. He was a native of those

eastern shires, the British Low Country, which had given

birth to Cromwell and his Ironsides, and which is the

stronghold of Puritanism. The austerity of the Suffolk

painter is only equalled by that of the Norfolk painter,

Crome. These men loved their country soberly.

It was not so with the supreme genius of Turner. His

career as an artist begins just before the war, and it

blossoms with the national spirit, just as did Shake-

speare’s. For during the first dreary years his work is

comparatively formal; the glorious light effects and

glowing colour schemes are not yet. There is something

hard, almost cold, about his early work. To some critics

it will seem both fanciful and Philistian to connect the

budding of Turner’s genius with political or military

events. Yet such a connection is what we should most

naturally, almost necessarily, expect. The greatest of

men is also the most sensitive to spiritual influences, and

the English painter, who is not unworthy to be named

in the same breath with Michelangelo and Velasquez

would be the first to take the impress of the stupendous

forces that were visibly moulding the destinies of the

universe ; the greatest of Englishmen would surely feel

most keenly England’s awakening to greatness. So it

had been with Shakespeare, so it was with Turner.

Great artists can paint nothing but what they see.

This is none the less true because these men see quicker

to the soul of things, because they dwell rather upon the

inward and spiritual grace than upon the outward and

visible sign. Italian painters did not paint Jewish

Madonnas, and the Christ of Velasquez is different in

form and spirit from the Christ of Fra Angelico, even as

imperial Spain differed from medieval Italy Men have

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258 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

become great, not by breaking away from their age, but by frankly and reverently accepting its tendencies and making them divine. That is why it is so important for the artist to be born into a noble age, for a man who sees only petty, loveless things around him may indeed struggle nobly towards the light, but he starts with a crushing handicap. Turner was in this respect the most fortunate of men; he, a Londoner and a lover of ships, must have shuddered at the deadly peril when, only a few miles down the river, the English fleet was lying, cut off from the shore, in open mutiny; he certainly felt the thrill that went through England on the news of the victory of the Nile, for this is the subject of one of his pictures; he watched the body of Nelson borne up the river to lie beneath the great dome of St. Paul's, and in his mind's eye he saw the hero sinking into the darkness of the unknown amid the smoke and thunder of his last victory; he heard the cannon roar to celebrate the overthrow of the tyrant by British arms, and this, too, inspired him, but not with thoughtless joy or braggart pride. Like all eagle spirits who have not feared to gaze upon the white light of truth, he was full of the thoughtful sadness that is at the heart of things, and as the central figure of his Trafalgar is the dying conqueror, so at Waterloo he must weep, like the Iron Duke himself, over the thousands of brave fellows who lay there, heaped together, with silent, upturned faces, that their country might live. It was a noble sadness, and not the bitterness of despair or irony, that inspired this picture, for beyond that night of horror and agony, there is a wonderful light, as of that ultimate victory in which Death shall be swallowed up, and we may almost hear a voice, as of a great nation mourning for her warriors—“ Well done, good and faithful servants !”

Here was a Motherland indeed, fit for the worship of her noblest sons! Turner felt this, and felt it more and more as his genius developed. He was no bigot, and like

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all true patriots, could feel the glory and loveliness of other

lands ; but England had never so much as a rival in his

affections, she was his bride and his mother and his queen.

The greatest of his critics has already shown how, even

when the kingdoms of Europe and their glory had been

displayed before him, he still clung to English landscape ;

how he never succeeded in entering so intimately into the

spirit of other lands; and how, even into his foreign

scenery, the distinctive characteristics of his native land

are constantly intruding themselves.

Foremost amongst the distinctive traits of our art has

been the love and sympathy with the sea which we find in

such full measure in Turner. The sea had hitherto been

almost neglected, the Venetians, who might have been

expected to love it, leaving it alone as an enemy, the

Dutch stopping short at the oily calms of Vandervelde

and the fluffy storms of Cuyp and Ruysdael, and the

English, as we have seen, content to drift in their wake.

But England had long been acclaimed by her sons the

mistress of the waves ; the tradition of the Armada, of

Blake, of Hawke, of Rodney, the pride of commerce

which in the eighteenth century had sometimes over-

shadowed even the pride of power, and the bold seafaring

habits of so many Englishmen had all combined to turn

men's thoughts to the bulwark of our defence and the

highway of our prosperity. Almost without exception,

the landscape artists of the Napoleonic period are sea

painters. Morland had already set the example with those

boiling and crashing seas of “ The Wreckers ” and other

of his pictures. But here, too, Turner stands pre-eminent.

He loved the sea, and was ready to face the most extreme

peril that he might study her in her grandest moods. His

treatment of her was essentially serious; he aspired to

render the awful fury of the tempest as well as the divine

peace of the calm. That is why he sometimes fails where

inferior men would have succeeded by aiming less high.

260 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

It is hard to believe that the big waves washing against Calais pier have no element of solidity, and the confused medley of colours in at least one of his pictures in the Tate Gallery gives the idea that he is trying to express the inexpressible. But even his failures are nobler than other men's successes, for he has learnt wisdom from the sea-god Poseidon himself, while they were content to hold converse with tritons and nereids : he is master of the waves in as true a sense as Nelson.

That his spirit is as it were intoxicated with this idea of England and her power is evident from indirect as well as direct evidence. Many of his greatest non-English pictures suggest this idea in one way or another ; Dido founding Carthage, Ulysses, the seafaring adventurer, deriding Polyphenus, and that other Queen of the Waves, the favourite of all his foreign cities, Venice. Grandest of all was his farewell to the old order when, years after the struggle, the aged artist painted the fighting "Temeraire" being towed to her last resting-place.

The indescribable dignity of the gliding three-decker, and the crimson glory of sunset that streams across the unruffled water, are a fitting epilogue to a great epoch and a great career.

Turner was a child of his age in another sense ; though born and bred in London he is fondest of painting seafaring and rustic folk ; vast solitudes and happy country-sides appealed to him more than streets and slums, and his spirit was the very opposite to that of an old Kent shepherd, whom we once heard say after a visit to Lancashire, " It be a beautiful place, I could stand on a hill and count as many as two hundred chimbleys." This preference for wild life is even more marked in Turner's contemporaries, who all seem to concur in the opinion that God only made the sea and the country. It is easy to attribute this idea in an offhand manner to the Romantic influence, as if that settled the question, but in

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this country, at any rate, it seems to depend mainly upon the fact that it was especially rural England, Johnny Bull and his Squire, who maintained British honour against Napoleon.

It is remarkable how this spirit of patriotism swept into its net even Bonington, who passed most of his life and painted nearly all his pictures abroad. Yet such was his passion for the country and the sea, that he was one of those whose work first induced the French painters to follow in the footsteps of the English, and to turn their attention to landscape. There is a picture in the Wallace Collection, " Henry III of France and the English Ambassador," which shows his subconscious pride of race in another form ; the contrast between the frivolous, effeminate Frenchman and the grave, burly ambassador is just such a one as would have rejoiced the heart of Shakespeare.

Nor was Scotland neglected in art any more than in literature; not only did Turner and other Englishmen dwell lovingly upon her solemn and savage beauties, but she had her own artist in Robson. His picture of a dark mountain tarn, with the Cuchullin Mountains looming behind, is one of the most impressive of our many landscape paintings, and has a grandeur peculiarly its own ; and Scotland had her portrait painter, too, in Raeburn. The grave and deliberate strength of his interpretations, and the austerity of his colouring, with its predominant grey, are characteristic of the nation which could produce such warriors as Duncan and Abercromby. Those endless expanses of heather, and mountain solitudes still alive with the memories of Graeme and Lochiel, could at last send forth sons as rugged as their own fastnesses, to fight and die in a common cause with Englishmen. Scotland and England no man shall put asunder—alas, that neither God nor man should have joined together Great Britain and Ireland !

BOOK

IV

THE

MODERN

AGE

BOOK IV

THE MODERN AGE

CHAPTER I

THE MIDDLE-CLASS ASCENDANCY

It is Canning who bridges over the transition between the Tory régime of George III and the middle-class régime of Victoria. The change that had been taking place in social life was bound to reflect itself, sooner or later, in the distribution of political power. The Industrial Revolution was creating a plutocracy that was gaining ground every year, in numbers and influence, upon the landed class. The Mr. Millbank of " Coningsby " is typical of the best of these men, whose headquarters were in Lancashire and the manufacturing districts. Their outlook and ideals were widely different from those of the country gentry. The squires had retained many of the characteristics of their feudal ancestors ; they were essentially a fighting and governing class ; though often stupid, they were never cowards ; and though they may sometimes have been tyrants, they were not addicted to pettiness. They had an ideal of service, which made them expect obedience from those below them, but which made them the most efficient unpaid magistracy, and their sons the finest officers in Europe. They had formed a solid and unwavering support to the Government in the long war, grudging neither blood nor treasure.

But the men of business, who, with the great houses, were the main support of the Whig Party, were an essentially peace-loving and material class. They would certainly have stopped the war and starved the services

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266 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

if they had got the opportunity. It was they who had sought to impeach Wellington; who had opposed votes of thanks to our leaders; who had cavilled at the Penin-

sula campaign, and who furiously attacked the renewal of war during the Hundred Days; they were not free from

the meanness of being willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, as when they “ slunk away ” from their vote

of censure after Talavera; their Ministry of All the Talents was a curse to the country. But the Whigs were

by no means ready to adopt the sweeping doctrines of the Benthamites. They were despised by the Radicals

even more than they were disliked by the Tories. They played with social reform without the enthusiasm of

genuine reformers. They were patriots, and yet, like George Bubb Dodington, they loved their country “ not

with too intense a care.” They had the phrases of liberty on their lips, but in their hearts they despised the masses.

They were a party of trimmers, and Jeffrey, their cham-

pion of the “ Edinburgh Review,” rejoiced in the title.

We find Brougham, that most unstable orator, prostrat-

ing himself before the middle class while he proclaims his contempt for the mob. Mackintosh, the converted

vindicator of Gaul, and afterwards the embodiment of cautious and scholarly Liberalism, would have combined

the upper and middle classes against the masses, a distri-

bution of forces that the nineteenth century was destined gradually to bring about. The reforms about which the

Whigs were most sincere were political and religious, but even here they were trimmers. The Reform Bill was in-

tended by its authors to be a final settlement, and Lord John Russell earned the nickname of “ Finality John,” though

he believed it towards the end of his career. And as for religious reform, the Nonconformist community, always

Whig, were able to drop their tolerant principles at the cry of “ No Popery.”

The fundamental doctrine of the nineteenth-century

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267

Whigs was expediency. Brougham, at the beginning of a long and weary treatise on Political " Science," makes expediency the foundation of all government. It was the guiding principle of the Whig Cabinets of Melbourne and Russell. Such schemes as those of Bentham were too visionary and absolute for them. They were men of the world, Laodiceans, who were neither hot with Burke nor cold with James Mill. They aimed at being practical, which may account for the wonderful inefficiency of their administration.

But these tendencies were not confined to one party in the State The most important feature of party politics after the war is the partial capture by the middle class of the Tory Party itself. For as the rigid statesmen who had conducted the war began to drop out, they were replaced by such men as Peel and Huskisson, of bourgeois antecedents and business instincts. The Reform Bill was not so much a constitutional revolution as the formal recognition of a change that had already taken place. The usefulness of the old system of pocket boroughs and unequal representation had passed away before its destruction. During the war, it had been the means of ensuring a steady administration by the class best fitted to be in power It imposed an artificial check, not only upon the fluctuations of opinion, but upon the shifting of influence from the landed to the business class. It was therefore only natural that the Whigs should want to upset a system which worked so unfavourably to themselves. But the failure of Wellington's Ministry, the forcing of his hands over the question of Catholic Emancipation, and, finally, the majorities in an unreformed House of Commons in favour of reform, showed that the old system had ceased even to do the work its supporters had intended. The Reform Bill is therefore not the decisive break in English politics that some have imagined it to be. The legislation of the last years of Liverpool's

268 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

Government effected at least as much, in the direction of benefiting the people, as the whole record of the Grey and Melbourne administrations.

The distress that followed the war was succeeded by a period of prosperity in the early 'twenties, and this did more than anything else to dispel the gloom that had been so conspicuous a feature of the lean years. Our commercial supremacy was assured ; the tide of invention was flowing strong; and the mood of the middle class became one of optimism, coarse and robust. The man with the muck rake was delighted at the prospect of raking in an unprecedented number of straws About the golden crown he had not time to disturb himself, at any rate during weekdays. And now arose the strange modern belief in " progress," the superstition that provided you keep on moving, all roads will eventually lead to Utopia.

In fact the relaxation of the strain, and the flow of material prosperity, were combining to produce a second prose age. It may seem far-fetched to use such a term of the epoch that was to produce a Tennyson, a Browning, a Swinburne, the Rossettis, the Brontes. But these exceptions are more apparent than real. The Victorian literature is of a colder and more sedate order than the corresponding Romantic developments, and what is most poetic in it is in more or less conscious opposition to the spirit of the age. Here we shall find a similar state of things to the one we have already surveyed during the Walpole era. We find the same robust materialism, the same swaggering jingoism, the same forgetfulness of the unseen and spiritual. And we shall find just the same despair and striving against the age, on the part of its finer spirits, that we met with in the authors of the jeremiads.

Such are the parallels between the two prose ages, but the contrasts, if more subtle, are not less important.

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The process of materialization was more gradual and masked in the second case than in the first. For before the Hanoverian dynasty, England had never been quite free from dangers that visibly threatened her existence, and kept the heart of the nation from waxing fat in security. It was only between the Peace of Utrecht and the Seven Years' War that the conscious and urgent necessity for national effort was really in abeyance. But after Waterloo, it may fairly be said that the patriotism of our countrymen has never, except in India during the mutiny, been put to the supreme test. So magnificent had been the results of England's great unselfish struggle with Napoleon, that for generations afterwards her citizens had every encouragement to think themselves invincible and invulnerable. Such a period of relaxation is one of the most dangerous that a nation can experience, in the case of communities, as of single souls, the text holds good, " Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." There are more dangers to mankind in the soft skies of perpetual summer than in the driven clouds and cutting gales of a Northern shore. The materialism of the Restoration had been checked, though not destroyed, by the wars with Louis XIV, and when it did burst the barriers after the peace, it was more sudden and absolute from having been dammed up so long. But the long peace of the nineteenth century, broken only by distant and half-realized struggles, was far more gradual in its operation.

The symptoms of the second prose age were naturally less obvious than those of the Walpole era, because of the overthrow of the classic tradition. The Muse had stamped her foot, and said she would be free, and after Wordsworth, Coleridge and finally Shelley had become classics, it was impossible to revive the smooth couplets and frigid diction of Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. The sovereignty of Pope and Boileau was gone, never to be revived, and

270 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

critics were compelled to crush poetry with other weapons than those of Rapin. Even those who loved fetters had to make a pretence of being free. It was like the period of the Terror, the same tyranny as before, but all in the name of liberty. For the Romantic doctrines were themselves allowed to crystallize into dogma, and the martyrs of one age were the fetishes of another. There was to be that most monstrous of orthodoxies, an orthodoxy of heresy, a pursuit of singularity for its own sake, under penalty of critical damnation.

England may be likened to an athlete who has been victorious in a long contest, and is induced to rely upon the reputation he has gained, and to live in luxury and ease. But the soul of a nation, like the body of an athlete, is only kept strong by unremitting effort, and woe to the nation that in the hour of need has only its laurels for a defence against the sword !

The change that was taking place was as pronounced in our international policy as in the internal life of the nation. To realize its nature we have only to compare Castlereagh and Canning with their successor, the pampered hero of early and mid-Victorian Liberalism, Lord Palmerston. He had served with them both, and was one of those Canningites who passed, by an easy transition, into the ranks of Whiggism. There was never a statesman who succeeded in voicing so thoroughly the opinion of his countrymen ; his personal popularity was great enough to enable him to defy his colleagues, and even his sovereign, with impunity He passed for a genial, sportsmanlike, bluff, manly, typical Englishman (he was an Irishman), and even his opponents were fair to confess that all were proud of him. At first sight his policy is identical in method and principle with that of Canning. There is the same proud insistence upon the dignity and authority of England, the same support of freedom and nationality, the same resistance to despots, the same

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buoyant frankness. And there was no doubt that Palmerston was sincerely patriotic. But granting the utmost

that can be claimed by his warmest admirer, what an immeasurable gulf is there between Palmerston and

Canning, or between Palmerston and Castlereagh ! The greatness and dignity of the former policy have passed

away ; strength has given place to bombast, firmness to officiousness, satire to impertinence, nay, sometimes the

challenge of the deliverer to the swagger of the bully.

Castlereagh and Canning had been animated with a

common sense of their country's honour, and they were

determined that she should never be exposed to the chance

of humiliation in the eyes of Europe. Terrible she ought

to be in restraint, as well as action, like one of those stately

three-deckers " reposing on their shadows in perfect still-

ness," to which Canning had likened her. When her voice

was heard, it was to be listened to with awe, and when

her arm was raised, it was to launch and not to brandish

the spear But Palmerston scarcely knew the meaning

of restraint, either in word or deed. He wanted his voice,

which was the voice of England, to be heard everywhere

and on every subject. He was never tired of reading

lectures and giving advice to the representatives of other

countries, and he could not hold his tongue concerning

the most delicate and controversial problems in their

domestic affairs.

Had Palmerston continued as he began, there would

have been little cause for complaint in respect of his

foreign policy. When he came into office, he was con-

fronted with the two problems of Belgium and Poland.

In respect of the Low Countries, the key of our European

position, he acted with firmness and success. He had the

good sense to recognize frankly the new situation created

by the revolt of Belgium, and although a United Nether-

lands had been the creation of English policy at Vienna,

he predicted that a free Belgium, supported by national

272 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

feeling, would be a more effectual arrangement, from our

point of view, than that of 1815. The main object of his

policy, like that of Castlereagh, of Pitt, and of William

III, was to prevent the aggrandizement of France upon

her north-eastern frontier, and in this he succeeded. As

for Poland, he was wise enough to see that this was a

cause in which England was helpless to do more than

sympathize, and despite his love of oppressed nations,

he sent the Polish envoy empty away. But it was after

the revolt that his weakness first revealed itself, when he

joined with France in making representations to tri-

umphant Russia, which exposed himself and England to a

contemptuous snub.

After this, the Whig foreign policy becomes devoid of

coherence and dignity, and this not only during Palmer-

ston's tenure of the Foreign Office, but down to the day

of his death. The landed interest, with their restrained

courage and temperate firmness, had slipped from power

even before the Reform Bill, and it was the bourgeois

interest that was behind Russell and Palmerston. The

worthy merchants and capitalists liked nothing better than

a vigorous, bustling policy, they liked to hear their point

of view asserted and, if possible, attended to, they were

no niggards of advice. It was a fine thing to be a citizen

of the greatest and richest country in the world, provided

only that all this could be attained without too much

risk to skin or pocket. Loss of prestige or dignity did

not affect them to the same extent as the scions of a class

with military and aristocratic traditions. Palmerston

and Russell were aristocrats by birth and manners, but

their policy was bourgeois, and it is their influence that

gives its tone to the period between the first and second

Reform Bills, the heyday of middle-class rule

It was the one period of our history when we could

safely afford such a policy The prestige of the war and

our immense resources had made us overwhelmingly

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273

strong, and we could afford the luxury of a few gaucheries now and then in the eyes of Europe. While other nations were working out their salvation by deeds, England assumed the attitude of a well-meaning busybody, and talked without ceasing. When, as in the Italy of 1859 and 1860, events happened to move as we advised or predicted, we plumed ourselves mightily upon the deeds of MacMahon or Garibaldi; when, as in 1848, we sent Lord Minto to give his opinion, without greatly influencing the operations of Radetzky, we merely continued to talk upon other subjects. To every important country in Europe in succession, we gave public exhibitions of our ineptitude; to Spain we supplied an unwelcome and useless English legion; our ambassador was turned out of Madrid for gross impertinence; we alternately offended and cringed to France; we bullied Greece on behalf of a foreign swindler; we insulted the Emperor of Austria by ostentatious verbal patronage of rebels, and by ill-concealed official delight at the mobbing of Marshal Haynau; we drove Russia into a war that she would gladly have avoided; and we exposed ourselves to woeful humiliation over the affair of Schleswig-Holstein. No one was more conscious of the poor figure we were cutting than the Queen herself, and her dislike of Palmerston and his ways is plainly indicated in her letters, in which she complains that the honesty and dignity of her Government are being exposed in the eyes of the world by her Foreign Minister.

Nor was Palmerston consistently Liberal. To no Government did he show more favour than that of the Sultan, and he lost office by openly approving of Napoleon III's coup d'état. He was not a strong man, in the sense that Canning and Castlereagh were strong. The blusterer of Downing Street actually capitulated to the gasconade of the French colonels in the affair of Orsini, and had to resign the Premiership in consequence. He and Russell

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succeeded, during their last Ministry, in forcing their

country to eat the leek on two conspicuous occasions.

After an ineffectual attempt to influence the destinies of

Poland, they tried a fall with no less an opponent than

the Iron Chancellor, who treated their representations

with as little respect as he treated the Liberals of his

own country. And England did nothing.

The policy of Sir Robert Peel and Lord Aberdeen,

though less impressive, was more calculated to maintain

our dignity. There never was a time when a wise in-

action was so conducive to the honour and interests of

England as in the middle of the last century. No vital

interest was imperilled, our prestige was assured, the

condition of the people demanded the utmost energies

of our statesmen. Peel himself was of the middle

class, and he shared to the full their horror of war, but

he was also alive to the dangers of too openly pacific a

policy. Speaking in 1830, he urged the Government to

let there be no doubt of their determination to take up

arms in case of necessity, nor of their conviction that in so

doing they would have the ancient spirit of the country

behind them.

The second quarter of the nineteenth century was

remarkable for the same partial fusion of political parties

as had marked the middle of the eighteenth. "Tory

Whig measures" was Disraeli's scornful summary

of Conservative policy after the Reform Bill. The break-

up of the Tory landed interest began very soon after the

peace. The orthodoxy of the Eldons and Castlereaghs

was undermined within the very confines of the Ministry ;

the new members of the Liverpool Government, Peel,

Huskisson, Robinson, were themselves sprung from the

middle class, and saturated with middle-class ideas. These

new men grouped themselves round Canning, and though

some of them were eventually merged into the Whigs, it

was their policy, and not that of Wellington or Eldon, that

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moulded the Tory Party. Wellington combined with

Peel in a desperate effort to stem the tide, but his failure

was complete, and the task of adapting the old party to

the new conditions fell to Peel.

It is difficult to conceive of a man less representative

of the class that had chosen him for its leader. By birth,

by temperament, by outlook, he was a man of the middle

class. Business men trusted and esteemed him, and the

bulk of the squires ended by hating him as a traitor. He

was the most talented man of his day, without possessing

a spark of genius. He was versed in every detail of busi-

ness and finance, cautious to a degree, and rather a shrewd

adapter of other men's ideas than a constructive states-

man. His virtue, which he never forgot nor suffered

others to forget, was of that kind to which we naturally

apply the epithets " worthy " and " respectable ". There

have been few statesmen whose righteousness exceeded

that of Peel, but there have been many more attractive.

He was an admirable party leader for the dark days of

Toryism, when the policy to be pursued was the negative

one of giving as little as possible to the triumphant Whigs,

but it was for the genius of Disraeli to endow the party

with constructive principles, and a creative policy. Peel

justly prided himself upon his exertions in raising an

insignificant minority to a compact majority, and he

defined his policy to be the maintenance of our ancient

institutions of Church and State, and readiness to adopt

any change that the lapse of years and the altered cir-

cumstances of society might require. To combat the

materialism of the Whigs, some ideal was required more

inspiring than this rather vague compromise between

progress and reaction

It was under Peel that the Tory Party adopted the

style of Conservative, turning their backs upon their

own principles, and indeed upon any constructive prin-

ciples whatever, and appealing to the distrust that is

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awakened in the average man's breast at the prospect of

something new. General Johnson's tactics in front of

Atlanta, holding a series of positions until they became

untenable, and finally abandoning the town itself, may

have been justifiable from a soldier's point of view, but

they hardly lend themselves to imitation by a great

political party.

In foreign affairs, this negative aspect of Conservative

policy was especially manifest. To avoid the mounte-

bank feats of Palmerston, and to live on good terms with

our neighbours, was all that was required by the cir-

cumstances of the time, and all that Peel aimed at. Lord

Aberdeen, his Foreign Minister, was even more peaceable

than his leader, and as neither of them had the least

taste for the vicarious support of freedom without in-

curring expense, their tenure of office in the 'forties was

uneventful, as far as the rest of the world was concerned.

It was by a cruel irony that Aberdeen should have

been dragged into the most foolish war of modern times.

He had consented to form a heterogeneous Ministry, in

which Palmerston was included, and which drifted into

the Crimean adventure. It was not the first time that

Palmerston's principles had brought the country to the

brink of war over the Eastern question. As early as the

'thirties, the Russian advance in Central Asia was felt to

be a source of danger to our Indian Empire. It was of the

utmost importance that she should be prevented getting

control of the Euphrates valley, and this Palmerston

was shrewd enough to perceive. It also seemed to him,

and to Lord John, that the French had designs upon

Egypt, and that their support of the Pasha was merely

a stepping-stone to the possession of the Pashalik. But

how far they furthered this policy by co-operating with

Russia, and risking war with France, is not apparent.

Russell, before the Crimean War, was troubled with

qualms lest, if we did not fight Russia in Europe, we

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277

should have to fight her on the Indus. But the situation

in the Far East was scarcely affected one way or the

other by the campaign in the Near East.

It was another motive that was driving the country to

clamour for war. The danger to India was not under-

stood by the public, and it was assuredly not the primary

consideration with Palmerston or Stratford Canning.

The war was the natural outcome of the Whig foreign

policy. It was generally agreed that the Tsar was a

tyrant, and an active enemy of freedom all over Europe.

He had crushed Poland brutally and Hungary officiously,

and he certainly did not conduct his home affairs upon the

principles that Palmerston had taken such pains to im-

press upon weaker States. There was also a feeling that

Turkey was a little State being bullied by a big one, and

the Tsar's rather brutal frankness about the sick man

made this assumption not unreasonable. "God's just

wrath," thundered the Laureate, "shall be wreaked on

a giant liar," thus voicing the noblest element in the

desire for war. There was also the old anxiety about the

advance of Russia towards Constantinople. But we

might at least have waited until the danger had taken

a more concrete form, or at any rate have limited our

efforts to the expulsion of Russia from the Principalities,

an object in which we could have availed ourselves of the

assistance of Austria.

But the country wanted to have blood. The circum-

stances of the quarrel were in every way convenient.

The enemy were a long way off, and if the worst came to

the worst, they could not imperil the safety of our shores

or commerce. Besides, the only European Power who

might conceivably do both was our ally, to say nothing

of Turkey, and the active sympathy of Austria. We had

thus the advantage of being at least three to one, on the

offensive, and perfectly safe from retaliation. Every

effort was made in the Press to vilify Aberdeen, who was

278 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

doing his best to secure an honourable settlement, and to glorify Palmerston, who was known to be in favour of strong measures. "Punch," which succeeded with wonderful fidelity in expressing the views of the average well-to-do City man, depicted a huge and rampant British lion, being held back by a puny and contemptible Aberdeen. Again, the Premier appeared on his knees, blacking the boots of a towering Tsar, or even as a thief, remanded till next sessions. " All that remains of him," sneered another detractor, " now is pure womanly."

The nation went to war with as light a heart as the French in 1870. Palmerston, whose policy had been that of Ancient Pistol, supported it in an after-dinner speech worthy in sentiment, if not in brilliancy, of Falstaff He treated the whole affair as if it were a huge joke, as Southey had treated the retreat from Moscow. His biographer attempts to defend him, upon the ridiculous plea that it was necessary to keep up the spirits of the nation. The laughing valour of Drake, and the lofty satire of Canning, are indeed worthy of a great people, but the humour of Palmerston was the contemptible levity of a buffoon. The expedition to the Baltic, which began in froth and ended in smoke, besides provoking this outburst upon the part of Palmerston, was the inspiration of such cheerful ditties as :

" England and France will soon pull down

The Eagle and Imperial crown,

And his bearlike growls we soon will drown

With 'Let us give it to him, Charley.' "

" The people are wild about this war," writes Greville, " and besides the general confidence that we are to obtain a very signal success in our naval and military operations, there is a violent desire to force the Emperor to make a very humiliating peace, and a strong conviction that he will soon be compelled to do so " A state of things similar to this had obtained during the Spanish

280 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

house, from twilight to twilight, in rapt attention. It is

hardly possible to believe that sentiments so generous

and dignified could emanate from the vulgarian of the

Greenwich dinner. Here we have the Whig policy at its

best. Palmerston's object was twofold ; he wished to

establish once and for all the claim of every Englishman,

however remote, upon the watchful eye and strong arm

of his country, and he wished to vindicate the patronage

of freedom that was involved in Whig foreign policy.

Upon the first point he was triumphantly successful ; his

" civis Romanus sum " will live when all his other

utterances are forgotten, and he has set up a standard

for those who come after him, which may be neglected in

practice, but will not easily be disputed in theory. For

Empire is a mystical bond, by virtue of which no English-

man is too poor, or too isolated, to walk a blameless path,

without the support of fleets and armies ; and the sword

that strikes him unjustly shall, if need be, set free the

very demons of Armageddon, that the wrong may be

made right.

It is a pity that truths so noble should have been

vindicated in so base a cause. Palmerston had spoken

like a hero, but he had acted like a bully. To assert the

rights of Englishmen, it was not necessary to press, by

force of arms, the fraudulent claims of a Portuguese Jew

upon a little State, nor to quarrel with our neighbours in

so doing.

In support of freedom, Palmerston is not less impres-

sive. He complains that those who, like himself, have

stood up for temperate reform, have always been run at

as the fomenters of revolution. " They are such plausible

men," say the supporters of despotism. " Now," says

Palmerston in a burst of splendid eloquence, " there are

revolutionists of two kinds. In the first place there are

those violent, hot-headed and unthinking men, who fly

to arms, who overthrow established governments, and

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281

who recklessly, without regard to consequences, and without measuring difficulties or comparing strength, deluge their country with blood. . . . But there are revolutionists of another kind ; blind-minded men, who, animated by antiquated prejudices and daunted by ignorant apprehensions, dam up the current of human improvement, until the irresistible pressure of accumulated discontent breaks down the opposing barriers, and overthrows and levels to the earth those very institutions that a timely application of renovating means would have rendered strong and lasting."

Canning himself uttered no nobler words than these, but with Canning they would have translated themselves into a firm and steady course of action, instead of evaporating, as with Palmerston, into talk and swagger, into humiliation and a useless war. The fact is that Palmerston looked upon his interferences as a sort of luxury, and wanted England to exert her moral influence, as leader of Europe, without the inconvenience of honouring words by deeds. Palmerston was thus a Launcelot, who was determined upon no account to enter the lists, " using argument alone."

That this is no exaggeration may be seen from the speech of his most brilliant supporter in the debate, Alexander Cockburn. Cockburn somewhat naively defines the Whig policy as " a middle policy, between absolutism and republicanism, seeking to encourage constitutional government, but not interfering to establish it by force of arms, using argument alone--taking a broad attitude at the head of the free nations of the earth." " Continental nations," he cheerfully admits, " may detest us [he might have said " despise "] , but such nations as are freed will be thankful. Furthermore [and here we strike up against the inevitable Whig materialism], such a policy is essential to our commerce, our food supply, and our great manufacturing interests."

282 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

Sir Robert Peel opposed Palmerston in his last and weightiest speech. Voicing the pacific spirit which he and Aberdeen had displayed when in office, he read the Government a homily upon the need for minding their own business. Their policy was that of the French Convention offering to aid revolutions everywhere, or that of the Duke of Brunswick threatening to destroy Paris. Diplomacy was " a costly engine for maintaining peace." If it was to be used for maintaining angry correspondences with every Court in Europe, or recklessly promoting every supposed British interest, it was an instrument not only costly, but mischievous. He appealed to Castlereagh and Canning, to Pitt, Fox and Grenville, against such tactics, and solemnly warned the Government that they were incurring difficulties of which they could scarcely conceive, while not in any way helping the cause of constitutional freedom.

He had been preceded in the debate by one of his supporters, whose fame was to surpass even that of his chief—William Ewart Gladstone. How profoundly influenced was the Gladstonian foreign policy by the ideas of Peel, much more so than by those of the Whigs, is apparent in this speech. He proposes the principle of non-intervention as a definite substitute for the policy of Palmerston, and denies our right to impose even a sound policy upon other nations. As for the " Civis Romanus ", it is a title inapplicable to the citizens of a Christian State. The cosmopolitanism which Disraeli detected in Peel's later utterances finds no uncertain voice in this pronouncement of his follower, in which we catch the first notes of a national idealism, to which Disraeli did not attain, and which Gladstone could not support Disraeli spoke on the same side of the debate, but not on the same grounds. To his mind, the fault of Palmerston's policy lay in the danger it involved to England. Fourteen years earlier, in the Runnymede letters, he had said, addressing

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283

Palmerston, that if there was a war to-morrow, it would be one against English supremacy, and that we should have no allies. He now takes up the same position, and fears that the result of our diplomatic antics may take the form of some modern League of Cambray, in which England will play the rôle of Venice Moreover, he regards European problems from a standpoint almost brutally national, being ready to countenance, in the interests of England, even Austrian domination in Italy.

The last speech which we have to notice in this battle of the giants is that of Cobden, for Lord John Russell's is but a perfunctory defence of a colleague, with whose services he had just then the wish, but not the will, to dispense. Cobden stood for the best type of Northern business man, able, upright, and hungry for improvement, but somewhat deficient in grasp of the larger issues of international policy. However, his sturdy good sense was admirably calculated to pierce through the shams of orthodox Whiggism. He sees that Palmerston is no more democratic than Peel, he likes protocols and conventions, and the smaller the State, the better it suits his taste. " I believe," he says, " that the progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labours of Cabinets and Foreign Offices."

He believes that moral influence is about to replace physical force. We do not go about armed; duelling is abolished ; in domestic life, in schools, in asylums, even with animals, we see influence taking the place of coercion, and why not among nations too? The long peace may have helped to put such dreams into Cobden's mind, and it is piteous to think that he was speaking on the eve of a period which was to inscribe upon its scroll the names of Inkermann, of Cawnpore, of Solferino, of Gettysburg, of Sadowa, and of Mars la Tour. Cobden was the opposite of Cassandra, in that he prophesied smooth things, and

284 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

the event falsified them. Be these things as they may,

nothing can detract from the sincerity of this speech, and

those who dissent most passionately from the con-

clusions of the statesman must stand reverently un-

covered before the character of the man.

Such, then, was this historic debate, conducted on

more philosophical lines than, perhaps, any other debate

of an English House of Commons, and furnishing us with

the best clue to the labyrinth of mid-nineteenth-century

foreign politics. We have the Palmerstonian doctrine

of the rights of Englishmen and the moral leadership of

Europe, magnificent in precept, but shrinking in practice

to a " middle policy," enforced " by argument alone "

-except in the case of little States like Greece ; then

there is Peel, only anxious to preserve a dignified neutra-

lity and to let other nations work out their own salvation,

and Gladstone with his plain principle of non-interven-

tion ; then Disraeli, cautious and peaceable, but with a

single eye to the interests of England ; finally Cobden,

with his ideal of an industrial Utopia, in which everybody

shall lead a busy, righteous and sober life, untroubled

by dreams of national and military glory. With the

exception of Disraeli's speech, all these represent different

versions of a middle-class philosophy ; in Palmerston it

is active and militant ; in Peel it is passive, seeking only

to leave and to be left alone ; in Cobden it rises to the

ideal, the frock-coated perfection of the nineteenth-

century industrial apprentice, brought up on the teachings

of Samuel Smiles. One cannot wax ecstatic over such a

consummation, but something very similar has been the

creed of worthy burghers all over the North of Europe,

sturdy, peaceable, unimaginative men, giving God and

man their dues and not a farthing more nor less, keenly

conscious of their rights, wretched statesmen, but often

the backbone of States.

We have selected Palmerston, rather than Lord John

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285

Russell, as the representative of Whiggism in action, because Palmerston was the greater and more popular man of the two. The little dyspeptic " Johnny," to whom the most friendly pencil could never impart dignity, was in every way a less impressive figure than the burly " Pam " with the straw wagging at his mouth and his fixed expression of rakish good-humour ; blame him as you will, it is impossible not to like the man, while, however much Lord John may command our respect, he is too cold, and perhaps too mediocre a figure, to excite any warmer feeling. At this distance of time, his speeches seem formal and tedious ; they lack the spaciousness of Peel and the racy lucidity of Palmerston ; his writings are forgotten ; his Italian dispatch of 1860 is perhaps his best title to literary fame. He was endowed with the conscious and prosaic virtue that is so characteristic of his time, and his dying words, " I have made mistakes, but in all I did my object was the public good," are no more than the truth. He was of the straitest sect of the Whigs, and civil and religious liberty were the objects that he set before himself and the nation, although he was a rigid Protestant, with a hatred, that sometimes amounted to intolerance, for Rome and Ritualism. He was also a staunch, though not a dogmatic individualist, and had scant sympathy with what our own age knows as Social Reform, except perhaps in the matter of Education. He was an ideal leader for those who did not want to go the whole way with Bentham and the orthodox economists, but were on the whole desirous of as free a field as possible for competition and profits. The Radicals, who advocated the more drastic policy, formed the left wing of his party -a minority too small to govern, but sometimes large enough to make their influence felt as a goad or stimulus to the more slow-moving Whigs. It must be remembered that the word Radical has altered its meaning since the days of Roebuck; then it signified a destructive

286 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

individualist, now it is more often applied to the exponents

of a somewhat tentative social reform.

Lord John was a staunch upholder of what he conceived

to be the dignity and interests of England. He uttered

the memorable words, “Let us be Englishmen first and

economists afterwards”—which show that he was, at

least, able to estimate Ricardian principles at their

proper value. His foreign policy was fashioned after the

same model as that of Palmerston, but on a less am-

bitious scale, and, indeed, Palmerston's vagaries during

the Ministry of 'forty-six were altogether too much for

him, especially when his fussy remonstrances were put

aside with indulgent firmness, and a curt “There is a

limit to all things.” But the stronger nature of Palmer-

ston ended by dominating that of his colleague, and they

were associated in the Polish and Schleswig-Holstein

fiascos. The language of “the Nestor of European

politics,” about the subsequent policy of Gladstone, is

couched in terms of the most emphatic disapproval.

“He has tarnished the national honour, injured the

national interests, and lowered the national character.”

This terrific indictment is brought, not against an

opponent, but against Lord John's friend and colleague,

his successor in the leadership of the party. It is, more-

over, used long before the more conspicuous failures of

foreign policy associated with the name of Gladstone,

and shows the gulf that divides the statesmanship of the

Gladstonian Liberals from that of the Palmerstonian

Whigs.

There is a feature of Palmerston's rhetorical master-

piece, which we have hitherto left out of account, but

which is most important of all as expressing the spirit

of his time This is the robust optimism of his outlook

upon things in general, and upon English affairs in

particular. “This country has presented a spectacle

honourable to the people of England, and worthy of the

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287

admiration of mankind. We have shown that liberty is

compatible with order ; that individual freedom is

reconcilable with obedience to the law. We have shown

the example of a nation, in which every class of society

accepts with cheerfulness the lot which Providence has

assigned to it ; while at the same time every individual

in each class is constantly striving to raise himself in

the social scale—not by injustice and wrong, not by

violence and illegality—but by preserving good conduct,

and by the ready and energetic exertion of the moral

and intellectual faculties with which his Creator has

endowed him." And this cheerful confidence that all is

well with England, and growing better still, is echoed by

all prominent Whigs, and not a few Tories of this period.

Tennyson talks of freedom broadening down from

precedent to precedent, and speaks of England as a land

of settled government, seldom troubled by faction, where

a man may speak the things he will. Worthy Eliza Cook,

the very Pangloss of doggerel, turns her pedestrian muse

into such paths as :

" The Briton may traverse the pole or the zone,

And boldly claim his right;

For he calls such a vast domain his own,

That the sun never sets on its might,"

and there is a Palmerstonian ring in her lines on the flag :

" In the cause of the wronged may it ever be first,

When tyrants are humbled and fetters are burst,

Be ' Justice ' the war-shout, and dastard is he

Who would scruple to die 'neath the flag of the free "

It is, perhaps, too much the fashion to laugh at poetesses

like Eliza Cook and Mrs. Hemans, who were at least

healthy, readable and sincere, qualities seldom distinctive

of the Corinnas of our own day. Eliza Cook's rhymes

are superior to Young's dithyrambs about commerce,

and the Spanish War jingoism of the Walpole age ;

her John Bull is no grasping tradesman, but a good

288 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

knight, whose privilege it is to ride abroad redressing wrong.

Robert Browning is, indeed, the one example of a great poet, thoroughly on the side of the orthodox Whigs.

Macaulay could have found little to quarrel with in his few references to politics, though he would probably have found everything to censure in his style.

Browning is as bustling and optimistic as Palmerston, and his optimism goes much deeper.

Never, from Pippa's cry of cosmic rapture to the sunset hymn of Asolando—such a hymn, one fancies, as that of the dying Blake, "making the rafters ring"—does he waver for an instant from his ideal of cheerful manliness, from his belief that God and the world are very good, and that the good man is, by nature, a fighter in a winning cause.

Browning's answer, late in life, to the question "Why am I a Liberal?" is one that Lord John might have given, had he been a great man and a poet, instead of a talented mediocrity and a poetaster.

"But little do or can, the best of us :

That little is achieved through Liberty.

Who then dares hold, emancipated thus,

His fellow should continue bound? Not I,

Who live, love, labour freely, and discuss

A brother's right to freedom. That is 'Why.'"

His patriotism is as robust and unquestioning as that of the staunchest Palmerstonian.

In lyric poetry there is nothing more sublime than his few lines off Gibraltar, with Cadiz, Trafalgar, St. Vincent and the Rock itself, monuments of England's greatness, all around, and Jove's planet rising silent over Africa

"Here and here has England helped me, how can I help England, say?"

Short as this is, there is a depth of thought, and a variety of suggestion, that elevate it to the rank of a classic.

Every important word is an inspiration, a door

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289

opening out upon an infinity of suggestion. The few

touches which visualise the scene—the glory of sunset ;

the grandeur of the distant fortress ; the triumphant

pride of Trafalgar, throned on the burning water—reveal

the living presence of the Motherland, a presence only

dwarfed by that of God Himself, and the cosmic mystery

hinted at by Jove's planet, rising silent over Africa.

There are other short lyrics of his, of which patriotism

is the keynote of the inspiration ; the yearning for an

English spring, of the Englishman in Italy, with its

loving minuteness of detail, and the toast of Nelson in

good English beer. An early play, “Strafford,” is

literally intoxicated with patriotism, and achieves that

in which the English Romantics had conspicuously failed,

the ideal of an historical drama, in which the interest is

social and patriotic. Here Browning treats of the fathers

of the Whig Party, Pym, Hampden and their friends, and

depicts them as men given body and soul to their country.

Vane describes them as

“ A stealthy gathering of great-hearted men

That take up England's cause—England is here,”

and when Rudyard sneers at Hollis for lack of zeal, arising

from his brotherly affection for Strafford, Hampden

replies :

“ Time to tell him that

When he forgets the mother of us all.”

By such a spirit, the duel between Pym and Strafford

is ennobled and sanctified. Pym loves Strafford, but

he loves England more, he is prepared to sacrifice friend-

ship and remorse upon the altar of his country.

“ England, I am thy own, dost thou exact

This service ? I obey thee to the end,”

is his cry upon the eve of the final tragedy, the spilling

of a friend's blood. Browning has emphasized, what he

believed was the issue at stake at the time of the rebellion,

II — U

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the principle of personal loyalty against public spirit ; he has even exaggerated it, by making the authors of the

revolution more consciously patriotic than they really were. The last scene of the play, between the two rivals,

owes its beauty and pathos to the fact that both are lifted high above the pettiness of merely personal enmity ;

as a man, the heart of Pym yearns towards Strafford, as an Englishman, he must kill him. He hints that,

should England require it, even the life of the Lord's anointed will not be held sacred. Strafford, doomed and

defeated, also loves England after his fashion, and is above petty resentment towards the man who is sending

him to the block.

This much may fairly be conceded to the Whigs, that Browning was of them, a poet and a patriot. But it

must be remembered that his poetry was, in choice of subject, essentially un-English. His muse was seldom

brought into contact with the march of events at home, despite " The Englishman in Italy," and he loves the

vineyards of the South more than the fields of England Even the three patriotic lyrics to which we have referred

are the songs of an Englishman abroad. And after these early pieces, the note of Whig patriotism is seldom heard.

There is a passing reference to the iniquity of the Corn Laws, but this comes from Sorrento. Patriot and

Liberal Browning remained to his dying day, but after his early work, his poetry is almost entirely individual

and cosmopolitan. So that if we must regard him as an exception to the general tendency to separate poetry

from a prose age, the exception is robbed of much of its significance by the circumstances of his life.

Lord John, reviewing his long life, speaks of his age as " a period of happy progress " and like a good Whig

congratulates England on being in " the complete enjoyment of civil and religious freedom." Even John Bright,

who could be as fervent as any one in the praise

of middle-class England, finds the optimism of the orthodox Whigs too much for him: “ There is nothing for me to do but to say ‘ What a happy people we are, and how delightful it is to be under the Government of Lord Palmerston and his Whig colleagues.’ ” . Readers of Matthew Arnold’s works will remember his denunciations of the mid-Victorian bourgeois optimism of Mr Lowe and the “ Daily Telegraph.” It is certain that under the Whig régime, Englishmen allowed themselves to drift into a state of dangerous self-complacency.

That the citizens of the first nation in the world should be sensible of her greatness and conscious of their own proud responsibility is natural and noble. There is no more fatal symptom of decay than a tendency to sneer at the flag, and recklessly to decry everything national. Nobody was more conscious of his country’s high mission than Wordsworth, but it was a pride tinged with humility and the fear of God ; it disdained to boast. But the pride of middle-class ascendancy tended to become that of Nebuchadnezzar : “ Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the honour of my majesty ? ” The spirit in which we entered the Crimean War was not that in which we had faced Napoleon. The grossness of utilitarianism was making itself felt in every department of national life ; standards of value were based more and more upon material calculations ; the higher manifestations of enthusiasm were coming to be distrusted as sentimentalism ; even religion was frozen over with formality.

And it was too often the mere progress of our machinery, and the vastness of our resources, that made our mid-Victorian Pharisees thank God that we were not as other nations. The Exhibition of 1851 went a long way towards increasing the satisfaction of Englishmen with themselves. The ostensible pretext was that of promoting the brotherhood of nations, and inaugurating an era of friendly rivalry, but the spectacle of the richest nation in the

292 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

world inviting all others to a display of industries could only tend to enhance the pride of wealth, and make us in fact, as well as in satire, a nation of shopkeepers.

Conscious and heavy respectability was the order of the day. Platitude flourished to an extent never equalled before nor since; men gravely hailed Martin Tupper as an inspired prophet and boomed him through edition after edition ; while the Laureate himself confessed that his idea of King Arthur was taken from the excellent Prince Consort. At the same time, Charlotte Brontë was called to account in our foremost literary organ, upon the score of impropriety; the authors of “ Essays and Reviews ” narrowly escaped being drummed out of the Church for heresy; and the divines who hailed Paley, that Bentham of theology, as a defender of the faith, were not likely to shrink from the reckless folly of attacking biologists and geologists upon their own ground. Art had almost ceased to exist before the pre-Raphaelite revival ; colouring was without delicacy, drawing generally without grace or observation. In every department of life, we were drifting into the ice of a frozen age.

The aristocratic Whigs would probably have agreed, in taking “ civil and religious liberty ” as their ostensible watchword. But their fundamental doctrine might be more accurately described as one of compromise and expediency. The careers of these men were chapters of contradictions. Palmerston, who was agitating the Continent in the cause of liberty and progress, was ready to resign his seat in the Cabinet, rather than concede the least measure of reform ; he was as much the friend of Napoleon III and the Sultan as he was of Kossuth and Garibaldi. And Palmerston, the reactionary who chalked “ No tyranny ” on the door of Bismarck, was colleague of Wiseman—the subsequent tactics being the same in both cases. The intentions of the Whigs were excellent,

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but as long as Palmerston and Russell remained in office,

their home policy was sterile, timorous and uninspiring,

favouring capital at the expense of land, tinkering

gingerly at great problems like reform and education,

with which it lacked the courage to grapple, disliked

by the squires, distrusted by the workers, and relying

for its support upon the Mr. Gradgrind of Dickens, and

the Mr. Bottles of Matthew Arnold.

Compromise and expediency had been advocated, to a

greater or less degree, by Jeffrey, by Brougham and by

Mackintosh. But the Whig Party included in its ranks a

philosopher, or rather a danger of philosophy, whose life

was a perfect expression of the principles that inspired its

policy from 1832 to 1866. To understand Macaulay is

to understand Whiggism. His mind was just great enough

to comprehend, and to expound with unexampled

lucidity, the views of those about him, but he was not,

like Disraeli, the man to reach at truths that lay beyond

the grasp of his ablest colleagues. He was the man of his

age and party, and an exhaustive study of the spiritless

platitudes of Lord John, of the brilliant shallowness of

Brougham, and of the heavy pronouncements of Jeffrey,

is rendered unnecessary by the author, who said, so much

better than they, what they were all aiming at.

Much has been written about Macaulay's style and

methods of thought, and perhaps the tendency is to do him

somewhat less than justice. If the principles of his creed

led him logically to materialism, his temperament and

training prevented him from following them out to the

end. He was certainly a poet, and though never in the

first rank, his poetry sometimes reaches a very high level,

especially in his "Armada," and the two stanzas de-

scribing the final rout at Lake Regillus, with their thunder-

roll of names and rush of imagery. He almost shed tears

upon first entering St Peter's, and despite his Essay on

Bacon, he passed his leisure in the perusal, not of ephem-

294 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

eral treatises on physical and social science, but of the masterpieces of all time However much he might rail against the light, he could never be the dupe of such absurdities as rejouced the early utilitarians. He hardly needed to bare his arm for the dissection of “ Mill on Government.” With equal facility, he could impart to history the glow of fiction, could dust the jacket of Johnson’s biographer, quote Warburton and Chillingworth against Gladstone, and detect the rhymed plagiarisms of Robert Montgomery. As for patriotism, whether he is describing Chatham’s devotion to England or that of Horatius to the City of the Seven Hills, there is no mistaking the warmth of his sentiment, nor the singleness of his enthusiasm. His history is a very apotheosis of England and her institutions, and spread their fame far and wide over the Continent. His patriotic Utopia, the golden age of Rome, when none was for a party but all were for the State, must be the ideal of every true patriot in every age “He was,” says his biographer, “ a patriot, if ever there was one. It would be difficult to find anybody, whether great or small. who more heartily and permanently enjoyed the consciousness of being an Englishman.”

In all this Macaulay was a Whig of the Palmerstonian age. Nobody ever said finer things about England and Englishmen than the Whig chiefs. Macaulay’s Whiggism was as thoroughgoing as that of Lord John himself. “ I entered public life a Whig,” he says to his constituents, “ and a Whig I am determined to remain.” In his eyes the party is transfigured, he sees in the Melbourne Government the worthy representatives of the party which had resisted Elizabeth, overthrown Charles I, passed the Habeas Corpus Act, the Bill of Rights, and the Toleration Act, established the Hanoverian dynasty and resisted the war with revolutionary France “ While one shred of the old banner is flying,

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by that banner will I at last be found. . . . The good old cause is still the good old cause with me."

But delve beneath the surface of this brave show of enthusiasm, and we shall find upon what insecure and material foundations it reposes ; Macaulay's education should have made him an idealist, but he assimilated only too well the spirit of his surroundings and associates. Bentham himself might have applauded the Essay on Bacon, and the criticism of Southey's " Colloquies "

Macaulay's style is only too sure an index to the soul, or rather the soullessness, behind it. As clear-cut and hard-hitting as Bentham's, it is devoid of shade and delicacy, it has the efficiency of a machine, not the beauty of life. Never are we startled by the hint of some truth too deep for language, nor teased with any indefinable apprehension of loveliness, it resembles rather some gloriously appareled woman of the world, whose outward shell is divine, but whose heart is ashes.

A foolish review of a still more foolish book ends with the words, " Thus is Shakespeare brought to earth." It is Macaulay's aim to bring everything and everybody to earth. He has all the pride of practicality which induced Palmerston, during his tenure of the Home Office, to go out of his way to extol the merits of drainage above those of devotion. It is apparent to him that the age of romance is dead, and that poetry cannot breathe in an atmosphere of civilization. In an enlightened age there will be little poetry ; "Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind " " Truth, indeed, is essential to poetry, but it is the truth of madness." It is not wonderful that Macaulay failed to appreciate the poets of his own age. He propounds a theory not essentially different from that of Bentham, for whereas one had openly classed poetry with pushpin, the other treats it as a childish pleasure fit for unsound minds. That Macaulay's practice was different from

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Bentham's is due to the fact that he was no " philosophical Radical," but a scholar and a trimmer, one of

the Whig leaders.

His assault upon philosophy is even more crude than

his assault upon poetry. In the Essay on Bacon, the

bludgeon that had already settled the account of poor

Robert Montgomery falls with merciless severity upon the

heads of Plato, of Aristotle and of Seneca. It is our old

story of the man with the muck rake The philosophers

of all ages had gone astray, by looking to spirit rather than

matter, by preferring ideals to experiment, and Macaulay

would fain set this right, by making a clean sweep of

philosophy, by turning creators into inventors, and

dreamers into doctors Here he comes into line with the

rising school, whose philosophy was to deny the possi-

bility of any philosophy, and in this essay he is as uncom-

promising as Comte himself It is easy to see, reading

between the lines of his Essay on Ranke, that this is the

view he takes about religious doctrines. The human

mind may improve infinitely in scientific knowledge, but

it is subject to the same gross errors in theology as

obsessed even so clever a man as Sir Thomas More.

Neither genius, nor the growth of knowledge, is a guarantee

against gross fallacy. The obvious inference is that

theology is all vanity and vexation of spirit, a bottomless

pit of error, that wise men will avoid like philosophy or

the devil

Macaulay's idea of the State is what we should naturally

expect from his views on art and philosophy He regards

it as a business transaction, and the standards by which

its success are to be measured are, in the main, to be

derived from statistics of material prosperity In his

review of Gladstone, he falls into an error that his know-

ledge of Burke might have taught him to avoid, by

arguing upon the assumption that there is no essential

difference between politics and business The State is the

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result of a tacit agreement between its members, for the

purpose of protecting life and preserving property, the

social contract, as interpreted by that other apostle of

Whig compromise, John Locke.

Macaulay has all the Manchester distrust of State

action. His governing company ought to confine itself

strictly to the objects for which it was constituted. But

he compromises, by allowing the directors to promote these

aims indirectly, as well as directly. Thus, while he is

opposed to the principle of Church establishments, he

admits that it may be as well to continue the Church of

England upon its present footing, for utilitarian reasons.

On the question of education, one about which most of

the Whigs were ready to advance beyond their habitual

laissez-faire, he falls into inconsistency. In his Essay on

Southey, he talks of Governments as blind leaders of the

blind, and asks whether they are any more likely to lead

the people into the right way than the people are to lead

themselves. And yet, in his Essay on Gladstone, he

allows the State to instruct the people " on those prin-

ciples of morality which are common to all forms of

Christianity," in other words, on those principles to which

Macaulay himself would have subscribed, had he ever

formulated a creed. Beyond the inculcation of this

Cowper-Temple religion, the State is to remain neutral

on religious questions, and indeed, on as many other

questions as possible. Laissez-faire had almost as great

an attraction for Macaulay as it had for the classical

economists.

He is robustly confident in progress. World-weariness,

such as that of Schopenhauer, he could not even have

understood His residence in India left him insensitive to

the allurement of Buddhism, and he can see nothing evil in

the disappearance of the country-side, provided he can

justify it in terms of statistics A beautiful passage, in

which Southey had contrasted the old weather-beaten

298 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

cottages and their pretty rose-plots, with the ugly, monotonous tenements of the factory hands, he scoffs at as the merest sentimental idiocy. Why should the fields of Kent and Devonshire be preferable to the soot and chimney-forests of Salford ? Ever since the Middle Ages, the world has been getting better at an amazing rate-if you doubt it, you have the statistics of what people once ate, and what they now eat. National greatness counts for little in such computations; Macaulay points with obvious complacency to the fact that the Spain of 1830 is probably richer than the Spain of Charles V. She, like Holland, has been positively, though not relatively, " advancing "! The end of the Essay on the " Colloquies " is a very panegyric of Mammon-John Bull slapping his pockets and roaring out that all is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds. And in the true spirit of M'Culloch and James Mill, the Essay ends with an admonition to the Government to let everything, especially capital, alone, to achieve still better results.

In religion, in art, in politics, in philosophy, we are thus driven back upon materialism, unashamed if not yet naked; the army of mankind is to advance upon its stomach towards Utopia. It is now only too easy to guess the reasons that Macaulay will be likely to assign for being patriotic. He deals with the subject, incidentally, in the Essay on the Jews, and he says " The feeling of patriotism, when society is in a healthful state, springs up by a natural and inevitable association, in the minds of citizens who know that they owe all their comforts and pleasures to the bond that unites them in one community." Comforts and pleasures ! Thus are the passion of a Chatham, the sacrifice of an Horatius, brought to earth indeed ! Patriotism is a business payment for value, material value, received. This is in keeping with the doctrine which we have traced through Macaulay's works. Luckily he was a Whig, and not a logical material-

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ist; he could, on occasion, rise above statistics to poetry,

and talk of facing fearful odds, not for " comfort and

pleasure," but for

" The ashes of his fathers,

And the temples of his Gods,

And for the tender Mother

Who dandled him to rest,

And for the wife who nurses

His baby at her breast "

And he was not thinking of England as a pleasure-store

when he spoke of

" Our glorious Semper Eadem, the banner of our pride."

In unravelling the thought of Macaulay, we have at

the same time unravelled the essential principles of those

aristocratic Whigs of whom he was a type, the men

whose policy dominated England after the Reform Bill.

There is an ominous similarity about these men. All of

them had high phrases on their lips, and high ideals in

their hearts, freedom, reform, patriotism. And yet they

were all marred, to a greater or less degree, by an un-

imaginative materialism, which darkened their counsels,

and vitiated their policy. Men like Palmerston, who had

served with Canning and Castlereagh, and Russell, who

had dined with Wellington, beneath the walls of Burgos,

were not likely consciously to subscribe to the shameless

dogma of Bentham. But Bentham, and the trend of

thought of which he was the embodiment, gained ground

daily, the transition was very gradual, like the progress

of a glacier, imperceptible to the eye, but more devastat-

ing in its results than the booming onrush of an avalanche.

CHAPTER II

THE FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN TORYISM

To erect barriers against the swelling tide of "liberal" thought was, to a greater or less extent, the aim of spiritual imagination during the middle-class ascendancy. The word "liberal" is perhaps an unfortunate one, for it has come to be associated, in the average understanding, with something vaguely good and progressive, it has become a party sign, and even the members of the opposite party are constantly professing themselves to be the true Liberals. But liberal thought, as it was understood in early Victorian times, represented a very definite opinion, none the less dogmatic because its dogmas were mainly of a negative order. It included an arrogant denial of authority, and a wish to extend the empire of human reason, in the same spirit as Napoleon had extended the empire of France, beyond all hitherto recognized limits. The simile is strangely apposite, for the results were bound to be the same--war and chaos in the intellectual world, until the legions were rolled back behind the old frontiers, and a great awakening had taken place among those whose sloth and formalism, rather than the violence of their foes, had prepared their own overthrow

Newman has drawn up a detailed statement of the liberal dogma, in a series of propositions, from which the following are a selection:

"No religious tenet is important unless reason shows it to be so

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FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN TORYISM

301

" No one can believe what he does not understand.

" No theological doctrine is anything more than an opinion. . . .

" Christianity is necessarily modified by the growth of civilization.

" No revealed doctrines or precepts may reasonably stand in the way of scientific conclusions.

" There is no such thing as national or State con-

science.

" The civil power has no positive duty, in a normal state of things, to maintain religious truth.

" Utility and experience are the measure of political duty.

" The people are the legitimate source of power."

This philosophy, or rather cult, of liberalism was by no means the monopoly of the so-called Liberal Party,

nor, until the rise of Disraeli, was it from among the parliamentary ranks of the Conservatives that the Opposition was to arise. Like all parties that put their

trust in expediency, the Tories were miserably weak. Wellington was an aristocrat who was perpetually com-

promising with the bourgeoisie, Peel was essentially a Liberal compromising with the aristocracy. The result

is that when, owing to the sheer weariness of the country with the Whigs, the Conservatives were returned

victorious, their power was shattered for a generation, by the defection of their own leader.

Wellington's object was to make the best of a bad situation. He was too great a man not to tower above

most of the politicians with whom he came into contact, but he had not the constructive genius of a statesman of

the first rank. He had a greater fund of common sense than any man of his time, but not the imagination to

confront the materialism of the Whigs with a policy reposing upon definite principles. As a soldier and a

patriot, he considered it his duty to sink his own opinions

302 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

for the sake of carrying on the King's Government.

But of this policy, the statesman who was to succeed, where

Peel and Wellington failed, in leading his party out of

the wilderness, truly says, " The principle laid down by

His Grace may be an excellent principle, but it is not a

principle of the English Constitution. To be prepared

to serve a sovereign without any reference to the policy

to be pursued, or even in violation of the convictions of

the servant, is not the duty of the subject of a monarchy

modified in its operation by the co-ordinate authority of

estates of the realm. It is a direct violation of the

Parliamentary Constitution of England. . . ."

The fact is that the crabbed Eldonian Toryism, the

political creed with which Wellington was most in

sympathy, was a lost cause, by reason of its own narrow-

ness and inhumanity. Wellington's remark that Peel

had abandoned Protection because he got frightened

about a few damned rotten potatoes, is as brutally obtuse

as any doctrine of the classical economists. Perhaps the

most masterly exposition of this bastard Toryism is that

of Sir Archibald Alison, in the last chapter of his History

of Europe. Alison's chapters are as long as, and much

heavier than, the books of other men, and this is the

ninety-sixth of his History and his matured judgment

upon the lessons of the other ninety-five. It is a

strange mixture of reaction and statesmanship. He

has no sympathy whatever with nations struggling to

be free, and writes with equal disapproval of the

revolt of the South American Republics, the French

Revolution of 1830, the "perfidious" attack upon the

Emperor of Austria, in 1848, by the King of Piedmont,

and the rising of Poles and Hungarians. He is thoroughly

distrustful of the people, and believes that to put the

Government into their hands is to court ruin.

This view is derived from a philosophy of human

nature, which is as ancient as it is profound, and is the

FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN TORYISM

303

most valuable part of Alison's teaching. He consciously

accepts the Christian doctrine of original sin, and applies

it to States. He is thus able to account for the failure of

the Utopian schemes of men like Rousseau and Condorçet,

who imagine all men to be good by nature. Alison's

point of view, for the confirmation of which he appeals to

history, is the Christian doctrine that the inclinations of

mankind are naturally biassed in the direction of evil, and

that the strongest religious influence is required to turn

the scale in the right direction. Thus the voice of the

people is, under normal circumstances, likely to be the

voice of the devil.

It may seem as if this theory of human nature is no

great improvement upon that of Bentham. But there is

this difference, that while the Christian holds that there

is a definite standard of right conduct, which with God's

help it is possible to attain, the Benthamite cheerfully

accepts selfishness as the inevitable condition, and an

enlightened calculation of interests as the highest aim

of man's existence.

Alison is honest enough to admit that despots and

aristocrats are subject to the same frailties of nature as

the poorest beggar. He is particularly severe upon the

folly and selfishness of the French noblesse of the eight-

eenth century, and blames them for having brought about

the Revolution. But a variety of practical reasons go

to confirm the lesson he has learnt from history, that the

best form of government is an aristocracy. The first

and weakest of these is the argument from self-interest ;

aristocrats will be likely to uphold the rights of property

because they have great possessions themselves ; an

argument that might just as easily be useful to the

bourgeoisie as to the aristocrats, and which may be

countered by the suggestion, that however chary they

may be of their own property, they may, as in the case of

the Common Lands, make very free with that of the poor

304 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

and of the nation. Other and stronger reasons are derived from the distinctive qualities of aristocrats; they are in a position of greater public responsibility than the transient creatures of democracy ; they have fewer inducements to corruption ; they are able to make a special study of political questions ; they will exercise greater foresight than the masses ; and it requires, according to Alison, several generations to turn out a first-class statesman. Another advantage, and this was the most likely consideration of all to appeal to an early Victorian Tory, was that aristocracy tended to neutralize the undue predominance of the towns over the landed interest.

It will now be seen how Alison's conclusions differ from those of the eighteenth-century Tories. He still stands for the landed interest, and he believes in the English Constitution ; but he pays little heed to the throne ; he regards the Constitution as " the government of property, veiled under popular forms, and watched by a vigilant and fearless democracy." The practical meaning that he puts upon this plausible arrangement may be judged from the very next sentence. " The counties and rural burghs secured the influence of landed estates ; the close and venal let in by purchase the influence of colonies and commercial wealth ; a few safety-valves were preserved in the seats for great cities, for the noisy and ambitious mob." This ideal balance had, as he holds, been upset by the Reform Bill

It is not always easy to pluck the heart out of Alison's long-winded theories, but in this view of the Constitution, we have Toryism in its unloveliest and most decadent phase, shorn of sentiment, and reposing upon the selfish interests of a privileged class, the economic aristocracy of James Mill. It would be most unfair, however, to treat Alison as if he were rigidly consistent in this, or any other, political doctrine ; he is a man of large heart and deep religious feeling, and he can condemn selfish aristo-

FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN TORYISM 305

crats like those of the English Reformation, the men who had robbed the English Church, the "patrimony of the poor," and thus caused almost all the social evils under which the Britain of his own day was suffering.

Alison is, in fact, a Tory of the Peel régime. He sees the old order giving way all round him, he is dimly conscious of new and vast problems demanding solution, he is distrustful of advance, and yet unable to stand still. He lays his foundations on a rock, but he erects the house with old, crumbling bricks, and without a plan. But with the men of the past, with the heroes of the great war, he is at home. He, at least, appreciated Castlereagh, and he has written a noble panegyric upon the heroism and unselfishness of England during the war, virtues which he assigns, in part, to the Protestantism of her sons. The further he is from the present, the deeper is his understanding of events. The Tories of his own day were as sheep without a shepherd, they were waiting for a man —for a Beaconsfield.

Alison, and the leaderless Tory politicians, were not the men to offer any decisive resistance to the swelling current of Liberal ideas. The constructive opponents of materialism stand apart from contemporary politics; they are poets, divines, men of letters. Conspicuous among them are the three singers of the Revolution period, the veteran Lake Poets There is a strange fitness in the fact that these men should have survived that other brilliant trio of a younger generation, the eldest of whom died upon attaining his thirty-sixth year. Meet it was that Keats and Shelley and Byron should have died young, for they were surely, in a special sense, poets of youth, and one can hardly think of them as old men. But there was always about the Lake Poets, even in Coleridge, something of the serenity and blessedness that are the peculiar beauties of age.

All three, when the fires of youth had died down,

II —X

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OF

ENGLISH

PATRIOTISM

turned to the consideration of those social problems,

which they had once approached in such a different

spirit. The war had taught them its lesson, that it is not

by violent changes and easy formulas of rights and

progress that, freedom is best served. And yet theirs

was no selfish or unenlightened Toryism, and if Browning

meant Wordsworth to be the “ lost leader ” of his poem,

he cruelly slandered him. None of them, even Southey,

immeasurably inferior in thought and imagination to his

two friends, ever wavered from the sympathy with the

poor, and the cult of true liberty, which had inspired

them from the first The development in the case of

Wordsworth is easily traced In his early youth, he had

worshipped at the shrine of Liberty, the goddess of

Rousseau and Robespierre ; in his prime, he wrote the

sonnets to “ Liberty and Independence ” ; in his declining

years, he wrote to “ Liberty and Order ”—it was reserved

for another to introduce the even grander conception of

“ Imperium et Libertas ” Wordsworth did not forsake

Liberty, because he came to know her better as he grew

older.

Southey is one of the most unfortunate of authors, as

regards his reputation with posterity He had the mis-

fortune to incur the hostility of the two most formidable

critics of his day, Byron and Macaulay. Byron, who was

not altogether unbiassed by personal considerations,

held him up to odium in some of the greatest satire in our

language ; Macaulay gladly seized the opportunity of

pillorying a Quarterly Reviewer and blasphemer of

Whiggism. It is safe to say that nine out of ten people

who have heard of the “ Colloquies on Society ” have

derived their impression of them through Macaulay, and

are convinced that the book is a farrago of nonsense.

Such readers will be pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised

to find the book itself to be a thoughtful and interesting

survey of the state of society, written in faultless prose.

FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN TORYISM

307

It is open to the assault of a special pleader, for its weaknesses are on the surface and easy to detect Southey is unconscious of his own limitations, and apt to lose himself in the maze of finance and detail which Coleridge had threaded with success in his articles on taxation; his lack of humour prevents him from seeing the occasional clumsiness of his supernatural machinery. But, take him for all in all, he has a truer insight into his subject than Macaulay

He fixes his attention upon the vital changes that have accompanied the Industrial Revolution. The average Whig or Radical had hailed them with unmixed satisfaction, and was content to prostrate himself reverently before the fetish of progress " Keep things moving, and trust to luck and statistics," would have been no unfair summary of the bourgeois philosophy. But Southey was wise enough to perceive that mere change is not necessarily for the good, and that the increase of wealth or machinery is no criterion of national well-being. " God is above," says the spirit of Sir Thomas More in " The Colloquies," " but the devil is below . . . your notion of the improvement of the world has appeared to me to be a mere speculation, altogether inapplicable in practice, and as dangerous to weak heads and heated imaginations as it is congenial to benevolent hearts." The idea that the children of the latter days are appreciably happier than their ancestors is therefore an illusion, albeit Rousseau's cult of the savage is expressly repudiated by Southey.

The problems raised by the manufacturing system are treated with a sympathy and breadth of view that would have been unintelligible to Wellington, and would have left even Peel cold. The huge towns, the reckless pursuit of wealth, the loosening of all social and religious ties, the monstrous abuse of child labour, Southey regards with unqualified alarm. Man does not live by bread

308 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

alone, and the stunting and monotony of human lives are a heavy price to pay for commercial success

Southey does not commit himself either to optimism or pessimism. He believes in free will, and holds that the destinies of society are in its own hands, merely indicating the chief dangers that beset it, and the means of remedy He forebodes the contest of religion with impiety (and by 'impiety' Southey means much the same as Newman means by "liberal thought"), which is destined to shake all Christendom; the conflict of Papist and Protestant, which will especially affect Ireland; the levelling principle of democracy; and the manufacturing system, which will produce "a class of men aware of their numbers and their strength, experienced in all the details of combination, improvident when they are in receipt of good wages, yet feeling themselves injured when these wages, during some failure of demand, are so lowered as no longer to afford the means of comfortable subsistence; and directing against the Government and the laws of their country their resentment and indignation for the evils which have been brought upon them by competition and the spirit of rivalry in trade." A remarkable prophecy, considering that this was written in the early 'twenties.

Southey is full of solicitude for the people, and an ardent social reformer. He is even in sympathy with Owen's schemes of co-partnership, the only objection he has to urge against them is their lack of religious enthusiasm-an exceedingly practical objection, in his view, for without religion it is not even possible to get people to subscribe funds. He advocates reform of the criminal law, abolition of slavery, universal education, especially religious education, colonization, improved parochial organization, better sanitation, and the diffusion of cheap literature. He hopes to see the labouring classes, in a few generations, "within the reach of moral

and intellectual gratifications, whereby they may be rendered healthier, happier, better in all respects, an improvement which will not be more beneficial to individuals than to the whole body of the common weal."

Such are the dreams of a man whose opinions posterity has agreed to ignore, as those of a crusted reactionary.

Southey loves his country with the ardour of a man who has lived through the supreme crisis of her destinies.

Sir Thomas More explains to him that, even after his death, he can still be a patriot. " You have escaped," he says, " from the imminent danger of peace with a military tyrant, which would inevitably have led to invasion," but he holds the dangers of internal strife to be as formidable as those of war.

Southey desires to see England enlightened and reformed, but with him reform means something more than destructive, or even constructive, legislation.

Religion is, to his mind, the key to national greatness, and violent changes are likely to do more harm than good.

The life of England has its roots in the past, and it is by strengthening and quickening our old institutions that it may best be preserved.

An age that babbles evolution, and holds Bentham and James Mill to be serious thinkers, can ill afford to scoff at Southey.

Wordsworth has left us no connected treatise upon social philosophy, but there are scores of passages, both from his prose and his poetry, that show him to have been inspired by the same ideals as those of Southey.

If Southey's reputation has been tarnished by Macaulay, Wordsworth has suffered from Browning's " Lost Leader," magnificent as a poem, but an absurd caricature of Wordsworth.

How should the mountaineer, who never wavered in his passionate attachment to his native lakes and mountains, have ceased to feel sympathy for the kindred of Lucy and Ruth, of Matthew and Simon Lee, of the old leech-gatherer and of the Cumberland beggar ?

To love English folk one need not hate English

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institutions, nor does the tree of our liberties flourish on

the blood of aristocrats.

It would surprise some of our more advanced modern

thinkers could they know to what an extent Wordsworth

anticipates doctrines that even nowadays are scouted as

dangerous. He was opposed to the Whig Poor Law, that

triumph of “ scientific ” legislation, on the ground that

it failed to recognize the right of every citizen to a living.

“ It proceeds too much upon the presumption that it is a

labouring man's own fault if he be not, as the phrase is,

beforehand with the world ”—and again, “ Sights of

abject misery, frequently recurring, harden the heart of

the community.” His idea is that parochial relief will be

best administered under the care of the gentry. He is

also in favour of combination among workmen, by which

means combinations of masters to reduce wages may be

held in check. One of the noblest passages of the

“ Excursion ” is a plea for universal education, for the poet

of nature is not satisfied with nature's untamed child,

the ignorant ploughboy. “ Merry England ” and “ Old

England ” are to him not only dreams of the past, but

ideals for the future. He writes, in 1828, of

“ The beauty and the bliss

Of English liberty.”

Champion of liberty to the last, he wished to make his

country great and prosperous, not by violent change,

but by maintaining and strengthening her venerable

institutions, the Church, the Throne and the Nobility.

He was a believer in the power of the Church, and wished

to see her usefulness extended, particularly in the large

towns, some of which were almost in a state of heathenism.

As the Church existed for all, it ought to be maintained

by all, and he wished her to be responsible for educating

the masses For education, to these Lake Poets, meant

something very different from the diluted secularism that

FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN TORYISM 311

obtains to-day. The Church was, in their eyes, the

symbol and means of social continuity, a mighty force,

sanctioned by every dictate of policy, and ordained by

Christ Himself, welding together the shifting elements

of national greatness, humanizing power and uplifting

weakness, steadying throughout the ages the regard of

Albion, and fixing it upon a star.

The social theories of Southey and Wordsworth exist

rather in isolation and by suggestion than as parts of a

completed system. It was for Coleridge, who united the

imagination of an English romantic poet with the

subtlety of a German metaphysician, to gather together

these scattered stones, and fit them into their places in the

stately temple of patriot philosophy with which his name

is, or ought to be, associated. Coleridge has not escaped

the fate of his two friends, in being the victim of a great

man's unfairness; what Macaulay and Browning did to

them, was done to him by Carlyle. The snuffling sage of

Highgate, with his " ommject " and " summject," is the

figure that rises up before most of us, at the mention of

Coleridge the philosopher.

This is the more to be regretted, because of the re-

proach, so frequently brought against our countrymen,

that we are lacking in metaphysical capacity. We may

not have produced the equal of Kant or Schopenhauer, but

it is a pity that such second-rate work as that of Locke

and Bentham should be continually cited, as if it were the

best of which Englishmen were capable, while Coleridge,

a man in every respect their superior, should be tacitly

ignored. Certainly he is the most irritating of authors;

even the intricacies of the " Critique of Pure Reason " and

Hegel's " Logic " are as nothing to the endless digressions,

halting-places and false starts of the " Friend," or the

metaphysical part of "Biographia Literaria." One has to

dig deep for the treasure of Coleridge, but the mine is

rich. It is fortunate that the most complete of all his

312 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

works is a treatise upon “ Church and State,” one which it

is difficult to obtain, for Bohn’s edition, which includes

the “ Friend,” the “ Lay Sermons,” and the “ Theory

of Life,” omits, for some reason best known to its editors,

the most important and easiest work of them all

We have said that Coleridge is the superior of

Locke and Bentham, not in order to air a capricious

preference, but as a definite and demonstrable fact.

For Coleridge comprehends the instrument, the cold

rational faculty, which these men had employed in the

construction of their systems, but he sees it, as they did

not, in perspective ; he has command of other and more

potent instruments for the attainment of truths which lie

outside the Kingdom of Urizen, the calculating and

classifying realm of the scientist.

Here we are brought up against a difficulty in language.

The English tongue is far from rich in the expression of

metaphysical distinctions We do not hold up as a

model the cumbrous and specialized terminology of

certain Germans, a clumsy barbarism that only has the

effect of making good work seem obscure, and bad work

profound ; for any idea that is worth expressing is

capable, if it is grasped, of being put into as clear and

beautiful words as those of Plato ; the defect of our

language is not that we have not enough words, but that

the sense of such words as we have is so variable, and

that the same expression is liable to be used by different

authors to express divergent, or even opposite ideas

Such is the difficulty that confronts us in dealing with

the first principle of Coleridge’s philosophy, the distinc-

tion between the reason and the understanding Through-

out this book we have taken the word “ reason ” in the

usual sense, one different from that of Coleridge When

we speak of rationalist, we mean one who believes in

solving all questions that are capable of solution by the

method of the scientist, that is to say, by the forms of

logic moulding the materials of experience, by the operations of the thinking, as distinguished from the emotional or spiritual faculty. This is the means which Locke, the philosopher, and Bentham employ to the virtual exclusion of all others, and it is known to Coleridge not as “ reason,” but as “ understanding,” that which concerns itself with “ the quantities, qualities and relations of particulars in Time and Space.”

The master faculty of reason, which is capable of deciding upon the materials suggested to it by the understanding, deals with the universal ; understanding says that a thing is, or should be, reason says that it must be. “ The reason, without being either the Sense, the Understanding, or the Imagination, contains all three within itself.” Thus we travel, in an ascending scale, through sense to understanding, understanding to imagination and thence to reason We have now reached the supreme knowing faculty, the key to ultimate truths. But these sublime abstractions of universal philosophy are, by themselves, profitless and shadowy, reason, “ taken singly and exclusively, becomes mere visionariness in intellect, and indolence and hard-heartedness in morals.” The philosophy of pure reason, says Coleridge, is that of the French Revolution, the Jacobin notion of sacrificing each to the idol of All It is also the science of cosmopolitanism without country, of philanthropy without neighbourliness, or consanguunity.

We have therefore to get back from the abstract to the particular, but this does not mean that we must sacrifice the universal, and revert to the Benthamite Understanding. Rather let us rise to Religion, which considers the Individual as it exists and has its being in the Universal, and therefore unites the excellencies of the Reason and of the Understanding Religion is thus the parent of art, which is the all as seen through the medium of the one, the flower suggesting thoughts that lie too deep for tears, the

314 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

world seen in a grain of sand. It is the voice of God, the sovereign principle of our nature, the parent of the ideal.

Human nature consists in a trinity of the Religion, the sovereign ; Reason, the lawmaker ; and Will, the fighting force of the little kingdom which is Man. In unity lies their strength, Religion by itself turns into superstition ; Reason into the worship of abstract rights, humanity, and " la sainte guillotine " ; Will into the pride of a Satan, or the ambition of a Napoleon. It is Conscience that tells us when all three are working in unison, and it is the sense of this spiritual harmony that gives the " peace of God which passeth all understanding." Such, in broad outline, is Coleridge's theory of human nature

We have entered upon these somewhat abstruse paths, not only in order to show not only how Coleridge differs from, and soars above, thinkers like the utilitarians, but also as a necessary prelude to the consideration of his political views and his conception of patriotism. For the most dogmatic of materialists will hardly level the stock accusation of bigot stupidity and sentimentalism against one of the foremost philosophers of the golden age of philosophy. The old republican, the man who had once prayed for the defeat of British arms, increased in patriotism as he increased in wisdom, and came to love England as passionately as Nelson, and with as profound a philosophy as Burke.

It is, therefore, hardly surprising to find that his attitude towards the " sophisters, economists and calculators " is one of contemptuous hostility. He saw that the facile generalizations upon which they founded their systems were the phantoms of uneducated minds " What they truly state," he says of the new school of economists, " they do not truly understand in its ultimate grounds and causes," and he dismisses the whole of their teaching as " solemn humbug " With the cult of cheapness, of buying in the cheapest market to sell in the dearest, he

makes short work. You may reduce the price of an

article from 8d. to 6d in the market, " but suppose, in so

doing, you have rendered your country weaker against a

foreign foe ; suppose you have demoralized thousands

of your fellow-countrymen, and have sown discontent

between one class of society and another, your article is

tolerably dear, I take it, after all. Is not its real price

enhanced to every Christian and patriot a hundredfold ? "

To substitute, for the outlook of the Economic Man, that

of a Christian and of a patriot would have brought a

sneer to the lips of a Benthamite, but it is characteristic

of Coleridge He had looked too wisely into the nature

of man to say in his heart that there was no God.

To understand Coleridge, we must realize in what

respect his social outlook differs from that of his op-

ponents. They had endeavoured to regard human affairs

with frigid impartiality, Coleridge could hardly write a

paragraph without enthusiasm ; they deified scientific

methods, to Coleridge, Science was helpless without

Religion and Philosophy ; they would have dismissed

God from their systems, that of Coleridge is based upon the

consciousness of His presence ; they regarded England

with the impartiality of strangers, Coleridge loved her

with the devotion of a son. " Christianity " and " patriot-

ism " are no idle phrases upon his lips, they are con-

ceptions upon which his social philosophy is based ; he

wished to see his country established for ever in the

blessing of her Maker and the love of her children.

He therefore takes a standpoint that enables him to

dispense with the constitutional doctrines of lawyers

and happiness-mongers. The idea of legal sovereignty,

of the absolute omnipotence of Parliament, was one that

appealed strongly to the utilitarians, and was the founda-

tion of the Austrian theory of jurisprudence. This

fallacy was one which Burke had long ago enforced,

that of regarding government as a business arrangement

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HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

between those members of a State who happened to be

alive at any given moment, instead of a mystical compact

between the dead and the living and those yet unborn.

Accordingly, an act, passed by enormous majorities in

both Houses and with the assent of the Monarch, might

yet be unconstitutional, because the Constitution is the

heritage not of one generation, but of all.

Something similar to this had been the ideal of Canning,

for it was only natural that the first practical statesman

of his time should be of the same mind as the philosopher.

But Coleridge had little in common with Eldon and

Sidmouth, and their following of blind reactionaries.

Like Canning, he was as much a friend of improvement

as of order, and with the selfish dominance of a class he

had no sympathy. This will be apparent if we examine

more closely what he understands by the word Constitu-

tion. His method is not to consider the nation as it

appears in any particular form or period, nor yet to make

a generalization from a number of successive forms, but

rather to find out its ultimate aim, the steadfast ideal

upon which, through all its changes, its gaze is fixed.

This Coleridge calls the Idea, and the Idea of a State is

its Constitution.

We are now confronted with an ambiguity of meaning,

such as we have already encountered in the consideration

of Coleridge's philosophy. The word State is used in two

different ways. When we talked of its Constitution we

were referring to the whole nation, taken in the broadest

sense ; but there is another and more restricted meaning

we can attach to the State, by speaking of it as opposed

to the Church. For by this harmonious antithesis, this

treble and bass, as it were, of a nation's music, is its life

sustained ; by this means does the Constitution live and

move and have its being. And thus we pass to the Idea

or Constitution of the twin components of the Nation,

considered separately.

FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN TORYISM

317

The Constitution of the State, as distinct from that of

the Church, is based upon yet another antithesis, that of

Permanence and Progression. The element of Permanence

is represented by the Landed Interest, that of Progression

by the mercantile, manufacturing, distributive and pro-

gressive classes, the “Personal Interest.” Our institu-

tions are so cunningly contrived as to produce an exact

balance of these interests,

“Between whose endless jar justice resides.”

The House of Lords consists entirely of the greater

landowners, the Commons of a majority of the Personal

Interest, and a minority of representatives of the smaller

landowners, the “lesser barons,” who stand midway, in

interests and sympathy, between the great landlords and

the bourgeoisie. We must remember that this does

not purport to be an exact description of Parliament,

but rather of the ideal, more or less dimly realized, which

has justified its existence.

Thus the State reposes upon a balance of classes, and

not upon the rights of individuals, as in the Utopia of

Rousseau. Any attempt to upset the balance as it

existed before the Reform Bill, Coleridge views with

profound distrust, since it leads to the predominance of one

class rather than a harmony of all. But the democratic

principle, which is held in subordination by the Constitu-

tion of the State, finds expression in that of the Church,

which is concerned not with classes, but with men, and

in whose eyes all men are equal and brothers. The

Church is the complement of the State, and the welfare of

the one as vital to the community as that of the other.

The Church had always occupied a prominent place in

the hearts of Tory thinkers, and especially in those of

the Lake poets, but never since the days of Hooker

had she found a champion at once so devoted and

original as Coleridge. He starts by showing how the

318 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

idea of a Church is by no means necessarily connected with that of Christianity, but was inherent in the social system of our Gothic ancestors, before ever Odin and Tiusco had lost their worship, or Augustine crossed the narrow seas. It had been the custom to recognize two kinds of property, the one owned in privacy by different individuals, the other set apart to be administered by a special class for the benefit of the nation. This national property Coleridge calls the Nationalty, and the class that administers it he calls the Clerisy. This Nationalty, or Church property, cannot be alienated without the foulest wrong to the nation.

Modern Socialists will find no less food for sympathy in this doctrine, than modern Tories. For Coleridge here faces the very problem which they are trying to solve, the inadequacy of individual property to satisfy the needs of the community. But whereas the Socialist would make a more or less clean sweep of the whole institution, Coleridge would deal with it after a fashion more subtle, but less drastic. The evil lies, not in property as such, but in the undue preponderance that the Propriety, as the sum of all private property is called, has gained at the expense of the Nationalty. The Church was basely despoiled at the time of the Reformation, and hence has been prevented from fulfilling her functions. On this point Coleridge is at one with Cobbett, and indeed it is curious to note how many a prominent thinker of this time has his own theory about the Reformation, a theory often none too favourable to the bluff monarch

For Church and State, Propriety and Nationalty, are necessary to each other, and can no more prosper by themselves than the body can live apart from the head It is the function of the Church to deal with just those problems that the system of property creates and leaves unsolved For as she existed before Christianity, so now the maintenance of theology is but one of her functions

FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN TORYISM

319

She is the leaven of the nation, the alchemy that transmutes human atoms, cityless men, into the children of one dear Motherland, her citizens and defenders.

The chief functions of the Church are to educate the nation and to care for the poor. It is her duty to organize the universities, the centres of learning, and to maintain a parson and a schoolmaster in every parish. Education is to be no mere acquaintance with the three R's, with a smattering of " useful knowledge," crammed hugger-mugger into the brain of the unwilling ploughboy or guttersnipe, but a national and organized effort to " form and train up the people of the country to be obedient, free, useful, organizable subjects, citizens and patriots, living for the benefit of the State, and prepared to die for its defence." Moreover, she is to deal with the problem of poverty on the most comprehensive scale, not only by providing honourable relief for those who need and deserve it, but by furnishing a ladder up which the poorest child of genius can climb to the highest distinction.

But though the idea of a Church does not necessarily involve the acceptance of any particular creed, the religion of Christ has been a blessed godsend, and any separation of the Clerisy from Christianity would be disastrous. Coleridge points out, what was afterwards expounded in detail by Newman, that theology is the highest form of knowledge, knitting all the rest together ; the keystone of the arch of truth, whose removal would cause all the rest to fall into a shapeless pile of rubble. It is thus that the Church is able to act, not only as a department of the Government machine, but spiritually. Her system brings her into sympathetic contact, through her parish priests, with the most intimate needs of the people, and enables her, by the alleviation of distress and the inculcation of an exalted morality, to become, as it were, the Bride of the State and the Mother of Englishmen.

320 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

This ideal, for we must remember that it is an ideal and not a description, is essentially and fervidly patriotic. It is therefore necessary to find safeguards to prevent the Clerisy becoming a priestly caste, out of touch with national life, and with aspirations in conflict with those of the State. First, then, they must own no allegiance to any foreign authority ; the Bishop of Rome hath no authority in the Church of England. Again, there must be no ordinance enjoining celibacy ; for the existence of a married priesthood is the surest guarantee that the clergy shall be of, and not apart from, the people. Such, in brief, is Coleridge's vision of a great Christian nation, a united and merrie England

How entirely he loved her, how little sympathy he had with the cosmopolitan ideal, may be judged from an essay in the " Friend," written during the height of the war. " He [the patriot] knows that patriotism is a necessary link in the golden chain of our affections and virtues, and turns away with indignant scorn from the false philosophy or mistaken religion, which would persuade him that cosmopolitanism is nobler than nationality, and the human race a sublimer object of love than a people." And presently, rising into a very ecstasy of universal patriotism, he continues : " Here, where the royal crown is loved and worshipped as a glory round the sainted head of freedom ! Where the rustic at his plough whistles with equal enthusiasm 'God save the King ' and ' Britons never shall be slaves ' ; or perhaps leaves one thistle unweeded in his garden, because it is the symbol of his dear native land ! Here, from within this circle, defined as light by shade, or rather as light within light, by its intensity, here alone, and only within these magic circles, rise up the awful spirits, whose words are oracles for mankind, whose love embraces all countries, and whose voice sounds through all ages."

There is sometimes heard a foreboding note, pre-

FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN TORYISM

321

monitory of the sadness that was to overshadow the best thought of the new age, and becoming more frequent as Coleridge draws towards the grave. He says in 1834, " What between the sectarians and the political econom1sts, the English are denationalized England I see as a country, but the English nation seems obliterated. What could reintegrate us again ? Must it be another threat of foreign invasion ? " Such is the bitter cry of the idealist, who secs his ideal fading before the cheerless dawn of Whig rule and materialist philosophy.

II —Y

CHAPTER III

THE PROPHETS

AFTER the passing of the Reform Bill, it became impossible for any thinking man to be blind to the magnitude of the changes that were taking place in the order of society. Many honest folk anticipated the speedy overthrow of the established order, the Church, the Aristocracy, and the Throne itself, and on the other side there were violent spirits who delighted in such a prospect, and doubted not of the advent of a Jacobin Utopia. The more serious thinkers rejoiced or despaired at this illusion, for indeed the formidable and riotous upheaval of democratic forces was calculated to stagger the most impassive judgment. Even the fame and firmness of Wellington were not proof against the rage of the mobs who thronged the streets shouting " To stop the Duke, go for gold ! " The elections that followed the Bill almost swept the Tory party from the country, men noted with alarm that an ex-prize fighter, and even the author of the " Weekly Register," were among the members of the new Parliament The final catastrophe might well seem within measurable distance, for if these things were the first results of the new régime, what might not be expected when the mob had once got fairly into the saddle, with only a puppet monarchy, and a beaten and humiliated House of Lords, between them and Pandemonium ? Nothing is so dangerous in history as too rapid

322

generalization. Ancient institutions are hard to overthrow. It might have seemed, during the sixteenth century, as if the Papacy were to be swept from Europe, and no one would have dreamed, when Napoleon's Empire was at its height, that the Bourbons would be back in three years. Violent changes are often superficial, and men who see only the surge and foam of the tornado, know not of the silent, unfathomable spaces beneath. A few years after the Reform Bill, the Whigs were a distracted, moribund party, with a majority for which they had to thank the precipitate blunder of the King ; the Radicals were described with some plausibility, by Macaulay, as consisting of Grote and his wife ; and the more violent democrats, in their rage and disappointment at seeing all their hopes baffled, turned against Whigs and Tories alike, and took refuge under the banner of Chartism. The fate of Cobbett was typical—he had scandalized old-fashioned respectability by getting himself elected member for Oldham, and he naturally expected to wield as great an influence on the floor of the House, as in the “Twopenny Register.” Cobbett was not the man to succeed in the Commons. He had a just contempt for the shifts and subterfuges of party politics, and more than a suspicion that the real battle was between the possessing class, the “ thing,” as he called it, and the mass of the people But to advance such a view, required not only absolute fearlessness, such as Cobbett possessed, but a temperance and fairness to which he was a stranger. Before the most critical, the least sympathetic of audiences, he could not afford to be caught tripping. The House of Commons is the grave of many a reputation, and Cobbett soon found that the society of English gentlemen exacts a standard of manners unknown to the taproom and the street corner. After having en-deavoured to create an impression by his bluffness, and only succeeding in disgusting the House by his rudeness,

324 HISTORY OF ENGLISH PATRIOTISM

he provoked Peel so far, as to make himself the victim

of one of the most scathing rebukes in our parlia-

mentary history; and four members were all who

could be found to oppose the motion, that Cobbett's

very resolution should be expunged from the Journals

of the House.

But the fact that the Constitution was not smashed to

pieces by the Reform Bill, ought not to blind us to the deep

and gradual changes of which the Bill was rather a

symptom than a cause. Their nature we have already

had occasion to investigate; the shifting of power from

the landed to the middle class, and the ominous murmur

that heralded the coming of democracy. Problems were

beginning to cry for solution, about which old Whigs and

Tories had troubled themselves but little, and, along with

an attack upon everything which men had held venerable,

there arose an ever-growing demand that the condition

of the people should be investigated and improved.

Their professed friends, the philosophic Radicals, were,

of all men in the world, the least interested in any vital

reform; bitter indeed was the venom they spilled upon the

aristocracy, but while they were designing ideal ballot-

boxes and babbling of annual parliaments, the people were

perishing We must, indeed, give them credit for helping

to simplify the Criminal Law, to reform the Corporations,

and to promote sanitary legislation, but, on the other

hand, the heartless Poor Law of 1834 was a triumph of

their principles, and their “science” of middle-class

Political Economy was a worse opponent than Lord

Eldon or Lord Hertford to the claims of the dispossessed.

Those who were loudest in their praises of happiness,

sought it through the starvation of children and the

brutalization of men, through the weakening of England's

defences and the degradation of her manhood. It is

natural that these gentlemen should have found more

support among the employers than among the employed.

THE PROPHETS