Chapter IV: Part I: The Testimony of the Past (2)

But in the national consciousness, the consciousness of the State, a change is now apparent. As Athens rose from Syracuse, a new Athens, as Rome rose from Cannae, a new city, to conquer by being conquered, so from the lost dreams of empire over France, over Scotland, England arises a new nation. This declares itself in the altered course of her policy alike in France, Ireland, and Scotland. In Ireland, for instance, an incomplete yet serious and high-purposed effort is made to bring, if not justice, at least law to the hapless populations beyond the Pale. Henry VIII again, like Edward I, is a masterful king. In politics, in constructive genius, he even surpasses Edward I. He abandons the folly of an empire in France, and though against Scotland he achieves a triumph signal as that of Edward, he has no thought of reverting to the Plantagenet policy. He defeats the Scots at Flodden; but he has the power of seeing that in spite of his victory they are not defeated at all. King James IV lies dead there, with all his earls around him, like a Berserker warrior, his chiefs slain around him, "companions," _comites_ indeed, in that title's original meaning. But the spirit of the nation is quickened, not broken, and Henry VIII, recognising this, steadily pursues the policy which leads to 1603, when these two peoples, by a mutual renunciation, both schooled in misery, and with the Hebrew phrase, "Well versed in suffering, and in sorrow deeply skilled," working so to speak in their very blood, are united. The Puritan wars, and the struggle for an ideal higher than that of nationality, cement the union.

In the development of the life of a State, the distance in time between causes and their visible effects often makes the sequence obscure or sink from sight altogether. As in geology the century is useless as a unit to measure the periods with which that science deals, and as in astronomy the mile is useless as a standard for the interstellar spaces; so in history, in tracing the organic changes within the conscious life of a State, the lustrum, the dekaetis, or even the generation, would sometimes be a less misleading unit than the year. The England of Elizabeth drew the first outline of the Empire of the future; but five generations were to pass before the Britain of Chatham[7] could apply itself with a single-hearted resolution to fill that outline in, and yet three other generations before this people as a whole was to become completely conscious of its high destiny. Freedom of religion and constitutional liberty had to be placed beyond the peril of encroachment or overthrow, before the imperial enterprise could be unreservedly pursued; but the deferment of the task has nerved rather than weakened the energy of her resolve. Had England fallen in the Maryborough wars, she would have left a name hardly more memorable than that of Venice or Carthage, illustrious indeed, but without a claim to original or creative Imperialism. But if she were to perish now, it would be in the pursuance of a design which has no example in the recorded annals of man.

Similarly in Rome, two centuries sever the Rome which rose from Cannae from the Rome which administered Egypt and Hispania. And in Islam four generations languish in misery before the true policy of the Abbassides displays itself, striking into the path which it never abandoned.

In England then the influence of this epoch of tragic insight, and of its transforming force, advances imperceptibly, unnoted across two generations, yet the true sequence of cause and effect is unquestionable. The England which, towards the close of the eighteenth century, presents itself like a fate amongst the peoples of India, bears within itself the wisdom which in the long run will save it from the errors, and turn it from the path, which the England of the Plantagenets followed in Ireland and in France. The national consciousness of England, stirred to its depths by its own suffering, its own defeats, its own humiliations, comes there in India within the influence of that which in the life of a State, however little it may affect the individual life as such, is the deepest of all suffering. England stands then in the presence of a race whose life is in the memories of its past; its literature, its arts, its empires that rise and dissolve like dreams; its religions, its faiths, with all their strange analogies, dim suggestions, mysterious as a sea cavern full of sounds. Hard upon this experience in India comes that of the farther East, comes that of Egypt, that of Africa in the nineteenth century. How can such a fortune fail to change the heart, the consciousness of a race, imparting to it forces from these wider horizons, deepening its own life by the contact with this manifold environment? He who might have been a de Montfort, a Grenville, or a Raleigh, is now by these presences uplifted to other ideals, and by these varied and complex influences of suffering, and the presence of suffering, raised from the sphere of concrete freedom and concrete justice to the higher realm ruled by imaginative freedom, imaginative justice, which Sophocles, in the choral ode of the _Oedipus_, delineates, "the laws of sublimer range, whose home is the pure ether, whose origin is God alone."

Sec. 3. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT

The second mode or aspect in which the Law of Tragedy as applied to history reveals itself in the life of a State, corresponds to the moment of intenser vision in the individual life, when the soul, exalted by "compassion and terror," discerns the deeper truth, the serener ideal which henceforth it pursues as if impelled by the fixed law of its being. There is a word coined by Aristotle which comes down the ages to us, bringing with it as it were the sound of the griding of the Spartan swords as they leapt from their scabbards on the morning of Thermopylae, the +energeia tes psyches+--the energy of the soul. This energy of the soul in Aristotle is the _vertu_ of Machiavelli, the spring of political wisdom, the foundation of the greatness of a State. It is the immortal energy which arises within the consciousness of a nation, or in the soul of an individual, as the result of that hour of insight, of pity, of anguish, or contrition. It is the heroism which adverse fortune greatens, which antagonism but excites to yet sublimer daring.

In Rome this displays itself, both in policy and in war, in the centuries that immediately succeed Cannae. Nothing in history is more worthy of attention than the impression which Rome in this epoch of her history made upon the minds of men, above all, upon the mind of Hellas. Its expression in Polybius is remarkable.

Polybius, if not one of the greatest of thinkers on politics, has a place with the greatest political historians for all time. It was his work which Chatham placed in the hands of his son, the younger Pitt, as the supreme guide in political history. Polybius has every inducement to abhor Rome, to judge her actions with jealous and unfriendly eyes. His father was the companion of Philopoemen, the heroic leader of the Achaean league, sometimes styled "the last of the Greeks," the Kosciusko of the old world. Polybius himself is a hostage in Rome, the representative of a defeated race, a lost cause; and yet after years of study of his conquerors, possessing every means for a just estimate of their actions and motives in the senate, on the battlefield, in the intimacies of private life, the conviction of his heart becomes that there in Rome is a people divinely appointed to the government, not of Hellas merely, but of the whole earth. The message of his history, composed with scrupulous care, and a critical method rare in that age, is that the very stars in their courses fight for Rome, whether she wages war against Greek or against Barbarian, that hers is the domination of the earth, the empire of the world, and it is to the eternal honour of Greece that it accepted this message. The Romano-Hellenic empire is born. Other men arise both to the east and to the west of the Adriatic, in whom the Greek and Roman genius are fused, who pursue the ideal and amplify or adorn the thought which Polybius was the first to express immortally. It inspires the rhetoric of Cicero; and falls with a kind of glory on the verse of Virgil--

Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,
credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus,
orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus
describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos Romane memento;
hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.

The tutor of Hadrian makes it the informing idea of his parallel "Lives," and gives form and feature to a grandeur that else were incredible. It appears in the duller work of the industrious Dion Cassius, and in the fourth century forges some of the noblest verse of Claudian. And as we have seen, it is enshrined nine centuries after Claudian in the splendid eloquence of the _De Monarchia_, and yields such spent, such senile life as they possess, to the empires of Hapsburg and Bourbon. Thus this divine energy, which after Cannae uplifts Rome, riveting the sympathies of Polybius, outlives Rome itself, still controlling the imaginations of men, until its last flicker in the eighteenth century.

Where in the history of England, in the life of England as a State, does this energy, exalted by the hour of tragic vision, manifest itself? Recollect our problem; it is by analysis, comparison, and contrast, to discover what is the testimony of the past to Britain's title-deeds of empire.

Great races, like great individuals, resemble the giants in the old myth, the _gigantes_, the earth-born, sons of Gaia, who, thrown in the wrestle, touched her bosom, and rose stronger than before defeat. England stood this test in the sixteenth century, rising from that long humiliating war with France, that not less humiliating war with Scotland, greater than before her defeat. This energy of the soul, quickened by tragic insight, displays itself not merely in the Armada struggle but before that struggle, under various forms in pre-Armada England.

The spirit of the sea-wolves of early times, of the sailors who in the fourteenth century fought at Sluys, and made the Levant an English lake, lives again in the Tudor mariners. But it has been transformed, and sets towards other and greater endeavours, planning a mightier enterprise. These adventurers make it plain that on the high seas is the path of England's peace; that the old policy of the Plantagenet kings, with all its heroism and indisputable greatness, had been a false policy; that England's empire was not to be sought on the plains of France; that Gilbert, Drake, Raleigh, and Frobisher have found the way to the empire which the Plantagenets blindly groped after.

As Camoens in Portugal invents a noble utterance for the genius of his nation, for the times of Vasco da Gama and of Emmanuel the Great, so this spirit of pre-Armada England, of England which as yet has but the memory of battles gained and lost wars, finds triumphant expression in Marlowe and his elder contemporaries. Marlowe's[8] great dialect seems to fall naturally from the lips of the heroes of Hakluyt's _Voyages_, that work which still impresses the imagination like the fragments of some rude but mighty epic, and in their company the exaggeration, the emphasis of _Tamburlaine_ are hardly perceptible. In Martin Frobisher, for instance, how the purpose which determines his career illumines for us the England of the first years of Elizabeth! Frobisher in early manhood torments his heart with the resentful reflection, "What a blockish thing it has been on the part of England to permit the Genovese Columbus to discover America!" That task was clearly England's! "And now there being nothing great left to be done," the sole work Frobisher finds worth attempting is the discovery of the northwest passage to Cathay. Upon this he spends the pith of his manhood year by year, and the result of all the labours of this sea-Hercules, well! it is perhaps to be sought in those dim beings, "half-man, half-fish," whom he brings back from some voyage, those forlorn Esquimaux who, seen in London streets, and long remembered, suggested to the dreaming soul of Shakespeare Caliban and his island. Frobisher's watchword on the high seas is memorable. In the northern latitudes, under the spectral stars, the sentinel of the _Michael_ gives the challenge "For God the Lord," and sentinel replies, "And Christ His Sonne."

The repulse of Spain is but the culminating achievement of this energy of the soul which greatens the life of England already in pre-Armada times. And simultaneously with the conflict against Spain this same energy attests its presence in a form assuredly not less divine within the souls of those who rear that unseen empire, whose foundations are laid eternally in the thoughts of men, the empire reared by Shakespeare, Webster, Beaumont, and Milton.

In the seventeenth century it inspires the statesmen of England not only with the ardour for constitutional freedom, but engages them in ceaseless and not unavailing efforts towards a deeper conception of justice and of liberty, foreshadowing unconsciously the ideals of later times. If the Thirty Years' War did nothing else for England it implanted in her great statesmen a profound distrust of the imperial systems of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs. Eliot, for instance, in the work entitled _The Monarchy of Man_, lofty in its form as in its thought, written in his prison, though studying Plato and the older ideals of empire, is yet obscurely searching after a new ideal. We encounter a similar effort in the great Montrose, capable of that Scottish campaign, and of writing one of the finest love-songs in the language, capable also of some very vivid thoughts on statesmanship. In natures like Eliot and Montrose, the height of the ideal determines the steadfastness of the action. And that ideal, I repeat, is distinct from Plato's, distinct from Dante's, and from that of the Bourbon and Hapsburg empires, in which Dante's conception is but rudely or imperfectly developed. The ideal of these English statesmen is framed upon another conception of justice, another conception of freedom, equally sublime, and more catholic and humane. Whatever its immediate influence upon certain of their contemporaries, over their own hearts it was all-powerful. The very vividness with which they conceive the ideal, and the noble constancy with which they pursue it, link the high purposes of these two men to the purposes of Milton, of Cromwell, of Selden, and of Falkland. The perfect State, the scope of its laws, government, religion, to each is manifest, though the path that leads thither may seem now through Monarchy, now through a Republic, or at other times indistinct, or lost altogether in the bewildering maze of adverse interests. From the remote nature of their quest arises much of the apparent inconsistency in the political life of that era. The parting of Pym and Strafford acquires an added, a tragic poignancy from the consciousness in the heart of each that the star which leads him on is the star of England's destiny.

Hence, too, the suspicion attached to men like Selden and Falkland of being mere theoricians in advance of their time,--an accusation fatal to statesmanship. But the advent of that age was marked by so much that was novel in religion,[9] in State, in foreign and domestic policy, the new direction of imperial enterprise, the unity of two nations, ancient and apparently irreconcilable foes, the jarring creeds, convulsing the life of both these nations, for both were deeply religious, that it were rash to accuse of rashness any actor in those times. But it is the adventurous daring of their spirits, the swift glance searching the horizons of the future, it is that very energy of the soul of which I have spoken which render these statesmen obnoxious to the suspicion of theory. The temper of Selden, indeed, in harmony with the thoughtful and melancholy cast of his features, disposed him to subtlety and niceness of argument, and with a division pending, often deprived his words of a force which homelier orators could command. And yet his career is a presage of the future. Toleration in religion, freedom of the press, the supremacy of the seas, the _habeas corpus_, are all lines along which his thought moves, not so much distancing as leading the practical statesmen of his generation. And there is a curious fitness in the dedication to him in 1649 of Edward Pococke's Arabic studies, which nearly a century and a half later were to form the basis of Gibbon's great chapters. But the year of _Mare Clausum_ is at once the greatest in Selden's life, and the last months of greatness in the life of his royal master.[10]

But theory is a charge which has ever been urged against revolutionists. Revolution is the child of speculation. The men of the seventeenth century are discoverers in politics. Their mark is a wider empire than that of Vasco da Gama and his king, a realm more wondrous than that of Aeetes. But Da Gama did not steer forthright to the Indies, nor Jason to the Colchian strand, though each knew clearly the goal he sought, just as Wentworth and Selden, Falkland and Montrose, Eliot and Milton, knew the State they were steering for, though each may have wavered in his own mind as to the course, and at last parted fatally from his companions. Practical does not always mean commonplace, and in the light of their deeds it seems superfluous to discuss whether the writer of _Defensio pro Populo Anglicano_, the destroyer of the Campbells, or the accuser of Buckingham, were practical politicians. In their lives, in the shaping of their careers, the visionary is actualized, the ideal real, in that fidelity of soul which leaves one dead on the battlefield, another on the gibbet, thirty feet high, "honoured thus in death," as he remarked pleasantly, a third to the dreary martyrdom of the Tower, a fourth to that dread visitation, endured with stoic grandeur, and yet at times forcing from his lips the cry of anguish which thrills the verse of _Samson Agonistes_--

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse,
Without all hope of day.

But not in vain. The tireless centuries have accomplished the task these men initiated, have travelled the path they set forth in, have completed the journey which they began.

We find the same pre-occupation with some wider conception of justice, empire, and freedom in the younger Barclay, the author of _Argenis_, written in Latin but read in many languages, studied by Richelieu and moulding his later, wiser policy towards the Huguenots, read, above all, by Fenelon, who rises from it to write _Telemaque_. It meets us in the last work of Algernon Sidney, which, like Eliot's treatise, bears about it the air of a martyr's cell. We find it again explicitly in the _Oceana_ of Harrington, in the fragmentary writings of Shaftesbury, and in actual politics it finds triumphant expression at last in the eloquence that was like a battle-cry, in the energy that at moments seems superhuman, the wisdom, the penetrating foresight, of the mightiest of all England's statesmen-orators, the elder Pitt. It burns in clear flame in the men who come after him, in his own son, only less great than his great sire; in Charles James Fox and in Windham, who in the great debate[11] of 1801 fought obstinately to save the Cape when Nelson and St. Vincent would have flung it away; in Canning, Wilberforce, in Romilly; in poets like Shelley, and thinkers like John Stuart Mill.

The revolution in parliamentary representation during the present century, a revolution which, extending over more than fifty years, from 1831 to 1884, may even be compared in its momentous consequences with the revolution of 1640-88, though constitutional in design, yet forms an integral part of the wider movement whose course across the centuries we have indicated. The leaders in this revolution, men like Russell and Grey, complete the work which Eliot, Wentworth, and Pym began. They ask the question, else unasked, they answer the question, else unanswered--How shall a people, not itself free, a people disqualified and disfranchised, become the harbinger of a new era to other peoples, or the herald of the higher freedom to the ancient races of India--Aryans, of like blood with our own, moving forever as in a twilight air, woven of the pride, the pathos, all the sombre yet undecaying memories of their fabulous past--to the Moslem populations whose "Book" proclaimed the political equality of men twelve centuries before Mirabeau spoke or the Bastille fell?

This, then, is the testimony of the Past, and the witness of the Dead is this. Thus it has arisen, this ideal, the ideal of Britain as distinct from the ideal of Rome, of Islam, or of Persia--thus it has arisen, this Empire, unexampled in present and without a precedent in former times; for Athens under Pericles was but a masked despotism, and the republic-empire of Islam passed swifter than a dream. Thus it has arisen, this Imperial Britain, from the dark Unconscious emerging to the Conscious, not like an empire of mist uprising under the wands of magic-working architects, but based on heroisms, endurances, lofty ideals frustrate yet imperishable, patient thought slowly elaborating itself through the ages--the sea-wolves' battle fury, the splendour of chivalry, the crusader's dazzling hope, the immortal ardour of Norman and Plantagenet kings, baffled, foiled, but still in other forms returning to uplift the spirit of succeeding times, the unconquered hearts of Tudor mariners rejoicing in the battle onset and the storm, the strung thought, the intense vision of statesmen of the later centuries, Eliot, Chatham, Canning, and at the last, deep-toned, far-echoing as the murmur of forests and cataracts, the sanctioning voices of enfranchised millions accepting their destiny, resolute! This is the achievement of the ages, this the greatest birth of Time. For in the empires of the past there is not an ideal, not a structural design which these warriors, monarchs, statesmen have not, deliberately or unconsciously, rejected, or, as in an alembic, transmuted to finer purposes and to nobler ends.

[1] Goethe asserts that Spinozism transmuted into a creed by analytic reflection is simply Machiavelism.

[2] The twenty-two books of Sulla's Memoirs, _rerum suarum gestarum commentarii_, were dedicated to his friend Lucullus; they were still in existence in the time of Tacitus and Plutarch, though the fragments which now remain serve but to mock us with regret for the loss. Of Sulla's verses--like many cultured Romans of that age, the conqueror of Caius Marius amused his leisure with writing Greek epigrams--exactly so much has survived as of the troubadour songs of Richard I of England, or of Frederick II of Jerusalem and Sicily. Sulla's remark on the young Caesar is for the youth of Caius Julius as illuminating as Richelieu's on Conde or as Pasquale Paoli's on Bonaparte.

[3] Aristotle refers only to the effect on the spectators; but the continued existence of the State makes it at once actor and spectator in the tragedy. The transforming power is thus more intimate and profound.

[4] "God in His mercy such created me
"That misery of yours attains me not,
"Nor any flame assails me of this burning."

[5] In illustration of this position a contrast might be drawn between the policy of Athens in Melos, as set forth by Thucydides in the singular dialogue of the fifth book, and the part assigned to Justice by a writer equally impersonal, grave, and unimpassioned--the author of the _Politics_--in the recurrence throughout that work of such phrases as "The State which is founded on Justice alone can stand." "Man when perfected (+teleothen+) is the noblest thing that lives, but separated from justice (+choristhen nomou kai dikes+) the basest of all." "Virtue cannot be the ruin of those who possess it, nor Justice the destruction of a City." The tragedies of Sophocles that are of a later date than 413 B.C. betray an attitude towards political life distinct from that which characterizes his earlier works. The shading-in of the life of the State into that of the individual defies analysis, and it were hazardous to affirm what traits of thought ought to be referred to the genius of the State as distinct from the individual; but it appears as difficult to imagine _before_ Syracuse, the vehement insistence upon Justice, the impassioned idealization which characterize Plato, Socrates, and Demosthenes, as it is difficult _after_ Syracuse to imagine the political temper of a Pericles or an Anaxagoras.

[6] The Greek orators and philosophers of the fourth century B.C. had before them a problem not without resemblances to that which confronted the Hebrew prophets of Judaea in the seventh. Even their most speculative writings had a practical end, a goal which they considered attainable by Hellas, or by Athens. The disappearance of Socrates from the _Laws_, the increased seriousness of the treatment of Sparta and of Crete, the original and paragon of Lacedaemon, may indicate a concession to the prejudices of a generation which had grown up since Aegospotami, and a last effort by Plato to bring his teaching home to the common life of Athens and of Hellas. So in the England of the seventeenth century the political writings of Bacon and Hobbes, of Milton and Harrington, though speculative in form, are most practical in their aims. Hobbes' first literary effort indeed, his version of Thucydides, is planned as a warning to England against civil discord and its ills. This was in 1628--fatal date!

[7] The elder Pitt may be regarded as the first great minister of the English _people_ as distinguished from men like Thomas Cromwell, Stratford, or Clarendon, who strictly were ministers of the king. "It rains gold-boxes," Horace Walpole writes when, in April, 1757. Pitt was dismissed, and it was these tokens of his popularity with the merchants of England, not the recognition of his genius by the king, which led to his return to office in June. The events of the period of four years and ten months during which this man was dictator of the House of Commons and of England are so graven on all hearts that a mere enumeration in order of time suffices to recall moving incidents, characters, and scenes of epic grandeur:--December 17th, 1756, Pitt-Devonshire ministry formed, Highland regiments raised, national militia organized. 1757, CLIVE'S victory at Plassey, June 23rd, and conquest of Bengal. 1758, June 3rd, destruction of forts at Cherbourg, three ships of war, 150 privateers burned to the sea-line; November 25th, Fort Duquesne captured; December 29th, conquest of Goree. 1759, "year of victories"; February 16th, POCOCK relieves Madras; May 1st, capture of Guadaloupe; July 4th, R. RODNEY at Havre destroys the flat-bottomed Armada; July 31st, WOLFE'S repulse at Beaufort; August 19th, BOSCAWEN destroys French fleet in Lagos Bay; September 2nd, POCOCK defeats D'Ache; September 9th, WOLFE'S last letter to Pitt; September 13th, 10 a.m., Plains of Abraham and conquest of Canada; November 20th, HAWKE defeats Conflans in Quiberon Bay, "Lay me alongside the French Admiral." 1760, January 22nd, EYRE-COOTE defeats Lally at Wandewash, conquest of Carnatic. 1761, January 16th, English enter Pondicherry; Bellisle citadel reduced, "Quebec over again," June 7th; October 5th, PITT resigns. It is doubtful whether, since the eleventh century and Hildebrand and William the Conqueror, the European stage has been occupied simultaneously by two such men as Chatham and the king of Prussia.

[8] The same delight in power, the same glory in dominion, pulsate in the Lusiads and in the dramas of Marlowe, but Marlowe was by far the wider in his intellectual range. Worlds were open to his glance beyond the Indies and Cathay that were shut to Camoens. Yet Camoens is a heroic figure. He found it easy to delineate Vasco da Gama; he had but to speak with his own voice, and utter simply his own heart's desires, hates, musings, and Vasco da Gama's sister would have turned to listen, thinking she heard the accents, the trick, the very manner that betrayed the hero.

[9] Burnet is incredibly vain, unredeemed by Boswell's hero-worship; yet his book reflects the medley, the fervour, the vehemence, crimes, hopes of this time. In one sentence nineteen religions are named as co-existing in Scotland.

[10] The _Mare Clausum_ was framed as an answer to Grotius' _Mare Liberum_, which had been printed, perhaps without Grotius' consent, in 1610. Selden's tract, printed in November, 1635, is a folio of 304 pages, in which, setting forth precedent on precedent, he claims for England, as by law and ancient custom established, that same supremacy over the high seas as the Portuguese had exercised over the eastern waters, and Venice over the Adriatic. The King's enthusiasm was kindled. The work was issued with all the circumstance of a State paper, and it came upon foreign courts like a declaration of policy, the resolve at length to enforce the time-honoured and indefeasible rights of England. Copies were with due ceremony deposited in the Exchequer and at the Admiralty. A fleet was equipped, and as an atonement for the wrongs done to the elder Northumberland, the King gave the command to his son, whose portrait as Admiral forms one of the noblest of Vandyck's canvases. But Northumberland, though brave to a fault, was no seaman, and the whole enterprise threatened to end in ridicule. Stung to the quick, Charles again turned to the nation. But in the nine intervening years since 1628 the nation's heart had left him. To his demand for supplies to strengthen the fleet came Hampden's refusal. The trial was the prelude to the Grand Remonstrance, to Naseby, and to Whitehall, where, as if swept thither by the crowded events of some fantastic dream, he awoke from his visions of England's greatness and the empire of the seas, alone on a scaffold, surrounded by a ring of English eyes, looking hate, sullen indifference, or cold resolution.

Leave him still loftier than the world suspects,
Living or dying.

After all he was a king, and in his veins the blood of Mary Stuart still beat. An English version of Selden's treatise appeared in the time of Cromwell. The translator was Marchamont Nedham. The dedication to the Supreme Authority of the Nation, the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England, is dated November 19th, 1652.

[11] The preliminaries to the Peace of Amiens were signed on October 1st, 1801. Parliament opened on October 29th, and after the King's speech, Windham compared his position amid the general rejoicings of the House at the prospect of an end to the war, to Hamlet's at the wedding-feast of Claudius. In the debate of November 3rd, Pitt declared himself resigned to the loss of the Cape by the retention of Ceylon, while the opinion of Fox was, that by this surrender we should have the benefit of the colony without its expenses. Nelson, with the glory of his victory at Copenhagen just six months old, maintained that in the days when Indiamen were heavy ships the Cape had its uses, but now that they were coppered, and sailed well, the Cape was a mere tavern that served to delay the voyage. The opening of Windham's speech on the 4th, "We are a conquered nation, England gives all, France nothing," defines his position (_Parl. Hist._ xxxvi, pp. 1-191). Windham was one of the few statesmen who, even before the consulate had passed into the Empire, understood the gravity of our relations to France. Every month added proof of the accuracy of his presentiments, but once understood by England there was no faltering. Prussia, Austria, the Czar, all acknowledged the new Empire, and made peace or alliance with its despot, but from the rupture of the Peace of Amiens England waged a war without truce till Elba and Ste. Helene.

LECTURE III

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL

[_Tuesday, May_ 22_nd_, 1900]

In the history of the religion of an imperial race, it is not only the development of the ideal within the consciousness of the race itself that we have to consider, but the advance or decline in its conceptions of the religions of the peoples within the zone of its influence or dominion. For such a study the materials are only in appearance less satisfactory than for the study of the political ideal of a race. It is penetratingly observed by La Rochefoucauld that the history of the Fronde can never be accurately written, because the persons in that drama were actuated by motives so base that even in the height of performance each actor of the deeds was striving to make a record of them impossible. The reflection might be extended to other political revolutions, and to other incidents than the Fronde. Ranke's indefatigable zeal, his anxiety "in history always to see the thing as in very deed it enacted itself," never carried him nearer his object than the impression of an impression. No State papers, no documents, the most authentic, can take us further.

But in this very strife, this zeal for the True for ever baffled yet for ever renewed, one of the noblest attributes of the present age discovers itself. Indisputable facts are often the sepulchres of thought, and truth after all, not certainty, is the historian's goal. It might even be urged that the records of religion, the martyr's resolution, the saint's fervour, the reformer's aspiration, the prophet's faith, offer a surer hope of attaining this goal than the records of politics.

Sec. 1. RELIGION AND IMPERIALISM

Religion forms an integral part of a nation's life, and in the development of the ideal of Imperial Britain on its religious side, the same transforming forces, the same energy of the soul, the operation of the same law analogous to the law of tragedy already described, which manifest themselves in politics, are here apparent. The persecuting intolerant England of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after passing through the Puritan struggle of the seventeenth, the scepticism or indifference of later times, appears at last in the closing years of the nineteenth century as the supreme representative, if not the creator, of an ideal hardly less humane than that of the Humanists themselves--who recognized in every cry of the heart a prayer, silent or spoken, to the God of all the earth, of all peoples, and of all times. The Rome of the Antonines had even in this sphere no loftier ideal, no fairer vision, than that which now seems to float before Imperial Britain, no wider sympathy, not merely with the sects of its own faith, but with the religions of other races within its dominions, once hostile to its own. By slow degrees England has arisen, first to the perception of the truth in other sects, and then to a perception of the truth in other faiths. In lesser creeds, and amongst decaying races, tolerance is sometimes the equivalent of irreligion, but the effort to recognize so far as possible the principle, implicit in Montesquieu, that a man is born of this religion or of that, has, in all ages, been the stamp of imperial races. Upon the character of the race and the character of its religion, depend the answer to the question whether by empire the religion of the imperial race shall be exalted or debased.

As in politics so in religion it is to the fifteenth century--the tragic insight born of defeat, disaster, and soul-anguish--that we must turn for the causes, for the origins of that transformation in the life of the nation which has resulted in the conscious ideal of the Britain of to-day. The "separation" from Rome fifty years after Bosworth had no conscious imperial purpose, but it rescued the rising empire of England from the taint of medievalism which sapped the empires of Spain, of the Bourbons, and of the Hapsburgs. The Reformation in England owes much of its character amongst the people at large, apart from the government, above all in the heroic age of the Reformation in England--the Puritan wars--to that earlier convulsion in the nation's consciousness, to the period of anguish and defeat of which we have spoken at some length already. But for the remoter origins and causes of the whole movement styled "the English Reformation" we must search not in any one period or occurrence, but in the character of the race itself. The English Reformation does not begin with Henry VIII any more than the Scottish Reformation begins with John Knox: it springs from the heart of the race, from the intensity, the tragic earnestness with which in all periods England has conceived the supreme questions of man's destiny, man's relation to the Divine, the "Whence?" and the "Whither?" of human life. And it is the seriousness with which England regards its own religion, and the imaginative sympathy which gives it the power of recognizing the sincerity of other religions beneath its sway, which distinguish Imperial Britain from the empires of the past.

Sec. 2. THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY

In the Roman Empire, for instance, the tolerance of the Republic passes swiftly into the disregard of the Caesars of the Julian line, into the capricious or ineffectual persecution of later dynasties. Rome never endeavours in this sphere to lead its subject peoples to any higher vision. When that effort is made, Rome itself is dying. Alaric and the fifth century have come. For Rome the drama of a thousand years is ended: Rome is moribund and has but strength to die greatly, tragically. Would you see the end of Rome as in a figure darkly? Over a dead Roman a Goth bends, and by the flare of a torch seeks to read on the still brow the secret of his own destiny.

In the Empire of Persia and the great days of the Sassanides, in Kurush, who destroys the Median Empire, and spreads wider the religion of the vanquished, the religion of Zerdusht, the symbolic worship of flame, loveliest of inanimate things--even there no sustained, no deliberate effort towards an ideal amongst the peoples beneath the Persian sway can be discovered. Islam starts with religious aspirations, the most lofty, the most beneficent, but the purity of her ideals dies with Ali. At Damascus and at Bagdad an autocratic system warped by contact with Rome infects the religious; the result is a theocracy in which the purposes of Mohammed, at least on their political side, are abandoned, lost at last in the gloomy and often ferocious despotism of the Ottoman Turks.

Consider in contrast with these empires the question--What is the distinction in this phase of human life of the Empire of Britain, of its history? Steadily growing from its first beginnings--shall I say, from that great battle of the Winwaed, where three Kings are in conflict and the slayer of two lies dead--steadily growing, on to the present hour, as in politics so in religion, the effort sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, but persistent, continuous, towards an ever purer, higher, nobler conception of man's relations to the Divine. From this effort arises the Reformation, from this effort arises in the way of a thousand years the Empire based on the higher justice, the imaginative justice, the higher freedom, the imaginative freedom.

Thus even in the earliest periods of our history, during the struggle between Christianism and the religion of Thor and Woden, England shows far more violence, more earnestness, more fury on both sides, than is found anywhere else in Europe. Glance, for instance, at this struggle in Germany. Witikind[1] the Saxon arises as the champion of the old gods against Christianity. Charlemagne with his Frankish cavalry comes down amongst the Saxons. His march surpasses the march of Caesar, or of Constantine against Rome. Witikind does rise to the heights of heroism against Charlemagne twice; but in the end he surrenders, gives in, and dies a hanger-on at the court of his conqueror. Mercia, the kingdom of the mid-English, that too produces its champion of the old gods against the religion of Christ--Penda. There is no surrender here; two kings, I repeat, he slays, and grown old in war, he rouses himself like a hoary old lion of the forest to fight his last battle. An _intransigeant_, an irreconcilable, this King Penda, fighting his last battle against this new and hated thing, this Christianism! He lies dead there--he becomes no hanger-on. There you have the spirit of the race. It displays itself in a form not less impressive in the well-known incident in the very era of Penda, described by Bede.

King Eadwine sits in council to discuss the message of Christ, the mansions that await the soul of man, the promise of a life beyond death; and Coifi, one of the councillors, rising, speaks thus: "So seemeth to me the life of man, O King, as when in winter-tide, seated with your thanes around you, out of the storm that rages without a sparrow flies into the hall, and fluttering hither and thither a little, in the warmth and light, passes out again into the storm and darkness. Such is man's life, but whence it cometh and whither it goeth we know not." "We ne kunnen," as Alfred the Great, its first translator, ends the passage. Who does not see--notwithstanding the difference of time, place, character, and all stage circumstance--who does not see rise before him the judgment-hall of Socrates, hear the solemn last words to his judges: "I go to death, and you to life, but which of us goeth to the better is known to God alone--+adelon panti plen e to theo+"?

Such is the stern and high manner in which this conflict in England between the religions of Woden and Christ is conducted. There in the seventh century is the depth of heart, the energy of soul, the pity and the insight which appear in other forms in after ages. The roll of English names in the _Acta Sanctorum_ is the living witness of the sincerity, the intensity with which the same men who fought to the death for Woden at the Winwaed, or speculated with Coifi on the eternal mystery, accepted the faith which Rome taught, the ideal from Galilee transmuted by Roman imagination, Roman statesmanship. The Saintly Ideal lay on them like a spell: earth existed but to die in, life was given but to pray for death. Rome taught the Saxon and the Jute that all they had hitherto prayed for, glory in battle, earthly power and splendour, must be renounced, and become but as the sound of bells from a city buried deep beneath the ocean. Instead of defiance, Rome taught them reverence; instead of pride, self-abasement; instead of the worship of delight, the worship of sorrow. In this faith the Saxon and the Jute strove with tragic seriousness to live. But the old faith died hard, or lived on side by side with the new, far into the Middle Age. Literature reflects the inner struggles of the period: the war-song of Brunanburh, the mystic light which hangs upon the verses of Caedmon, the melancholy of Cynewulf's lyrics. Yet what a contrast is the England delineated by Bede with Visigothic Spain, with Lombard Italy, or Frankish Gaul, as delineated by Gregory of Tours!

Thus these Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, slowly disciplining themselves to the new ideal--to them in the ninth century come the Vikings. They are not less conspicuous in valour, nor less profoundly sensitive to the wonder and mystery of life, the poets in other lands of the Eddas and of the Northern Myths. England as we know it is not yet formed. Amongst the formative influences of English religion and English freedom, and ultimately of this ideal of modern times, must be reckoned the Viking and the Norseman, the followers of Guthrum, of Ivar, of Hrolf, not less than the followers of Cerdic and of Cymric. To the religious consciousness of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons, the Vikings bring a religious consciousness as deep and serious. The struggle against the Danes and Normans is not a struggle of English against foreigners; it is a conflict for political supremacy amongst men of the same race, who ultimately grow together into the England of the fourteenth century. In the light of the future, the struggle of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries does but continue the conflicts of the Heptarchic kings. To this land of England the Vikings have the right which the followers of Cerdic and Cynric had--the right of supremacy, the right which the _will_ to possess it and the resolution to die for that will, confers.

Sec. 3. DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS

The religion of the Vikings was the converse of their courage. Aristotle remarks profoundly that the race which cannot quit itself like a man in war cannot do any great thing in philosophy. Religion is the philosophy of the warrior. And the scanty records of the Vikings, the character of Knut, for instance, or that of the Conqueror, attest the principle that the thoughts of the valiant about God penetrate more deeply than the thoughts of the dastard. The Normans, who close the English _Welt-wanderung_, who close the merely formative period of England, illustrate this conspicuously. If the sombre fury of the Winwaed displays the stern depths of religious conviction in the vanguard of our race, if the Eddas and Myths argue a religious earnestness not less deep in the Vikings, the high seriousness of the religious emotion of the Norseman is not less clearly attested. Europe of the eleventh century holds three men, each of heroic proportions, each a Teuton in blood--Hildebrand, Robert Guiscard, and William the Conqueror. In intellectual vision, in spiritual insight, Hildebrand has few parallels in history. He is the founder of the Mediaeval Papacy, realizing in its orders of monks, priests, and crusaders a State not without singular resemblances to that which Plato pondered. Like Napoleon and like Buonarroti, Hildebrand had the power, during the execution of one gigantic design, of producing others of not less astonishing vastness, to reinforce or supplant the first should it fail. One of his designs originated in the impression which Norman genius made upon him. It was to transform this race, the tyrants of the Baltic and the English seas, the dominators of the Mediterranean and the Aegean, into omnipresent emissaries and soldiers of the theocratic State whose centre was Rome. But the vastness of his original design broke even the mighty will of Hildebrand; his purpose with regard to the Norseman remains like some abandoned sketch by Buonarroti or Tintoretto. Yet no ruler of men had a profounder knowledge of character, and with the Viking nature circumstance had rendered him peculiarly familiar. The judgment of Orderic and of William of Malmesbury confirms the impression of Hildebrand. But the Normans have been their own witnesses, the cathedrals which they raised from the Seine to the Tyne are epics in stone, inspired by no earthly muse, fit emblems of the rock-like endurance and soaring valour of our race.

There is a way of writing the history of Senlac which Voltaire, Thierry, Michelet, and Guizot dote upon, infecting certain English historians with their complacency, as if the Norse Vikings were the descendants of Chlodovech, and the conquest of England were the glory of France. The absurdity was crowned in 1804, when Napoleon turned the attention of his subjects to the history of 1066, as an auspicious study for the partners of his great enterprise against the England of Pitt! How many Franks, one asks, followed the red banner of the Bastard to Senlac, or, leaning on their shields, watched the coronation at Westminster? Nor was it in the valley of the Seine that the Norsemen acquired their genius for religion, for government, for art. To the followers of Hrolf the empire of Charlemagne had the halo which the Empire of Rome had to the followers of Alaric, and in that spirit they adopted its language and turned its laws to their own purposes. But Jutes and Angles and Saxons, Ostmen and Danes, were, if less assiduous, not less earnest pupils in the same school as the Norsemen: to all alike, the remnant of the Frankish realm of Charles lay nearest, representing Rome and the glory of the Caesars. Nature and her affinities drew the Normans to the West, across the salt plains whither for six hundred years the most adventurous of their own blood had preceded them. They closed the movement towards the sunset which Jute and Saxon began; they are the last, the youngest, and in politics the most richly gifted; yet in other departments of human activity not more richly gifted than their kindred who produced Cynewulf and Caedmon, Aidan and Bede, Coifi and Dunstan. And who shall affirm from what branch of the stock the architects of the sky-searching cathedrals sprang?

Senlac is thus in the line of Heptarchic battles; it is the last struggle for the political supremacy over all England amongst those various sections of the Northern races who in the way of six hundred years make England, and who in their religious and political character lay the unseen foundations of Imperial Britain.

Two traits of the Norman character impress the greatest of their contemporary historians, William of Malmesbury--the Norman love of battle and the Norman love of God. Upon these two ideas the history of the Middle Age turns. The crusader, the monk, the troubadour, the priest, the mystic, the dreamer and the saint, the wandering scholar and the scholastic philosopher, all derive thence. Chivalry is born. The knight beholds in his lady's face on earth the image of Our Lady in Heaven, the Virgin-Mother of the Redeemer of men. From the grave of his dead mistress Ramon Lull withdraws to a hermit's cell to ponder the beauty that is imperishable; and over the grave of Beatrice, Dante rears a shrine, a temple more awful, more sublime than any which even that age has carved in stone.

Into this theatre of tossing life, the nation which the followers of Cerdic and Knut and of William the Conqueror have formed enters greatly. In thought, in action, in art, something of the mighty role which the future centuries reserve for her is portended. The immortal energy, the love of war, the deep religious fervour of England find in the Crusades, as by God's own assignment, the task of her heart's desire. We have but to turn to the churches of England, to study the Templars carved upon their sepulchres, to know that in that great tournament of the world the part of the Franks, if the noisier and more continuous, was not more earnest. How singular is the chance, if it be chance, which confronts the followers of the new faith with a Penda, and the followers of the crescent with a Richard Lion-heart! Upon the shifting Arabic imagination he alone of the infidels exercises enduring sway. The hero of Tasso has no place in Arab history, but the memory of Richard is there imperishably. Richard's services to England are not the theme of common praise, yet, if we estimate the greatness of a king by another standard than roods of conquered earth, or roods of parchment blackened with unregarded statutes, Richard I, crusader and poet, must be reckoned amongst the greatest of his great line, and his name to the Europe of the Middle Age was like the blast of a trumpet announcing the England of the years to come.

Sec. 4. WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION

The crusader of the twelfth century follows the saint of an earlier age, and in the thirteenth, England, made one in political and constitutional ideals, attains a source of profounder religious unity. The consciousness that not to Rome, but to Galilee itself she may turn for the way, the truth, the light, has arisen. In the steady development, in the ever-deepening power of this consciousness, lies the unwritten history of the English Reformation. The race resolves no more to trust to other witness, but with its own eyes to look upon the truth.

Political history has its effect upon the growth of this conviction. In the fourteenth century, for instance, the Papacy is at Avignon. Edward I in the beginning of that century withstands Boniface VIII, the last great pontiff in whom the temper and resolution of Hildebrand appear, as William the Conqueror had withstood Gregory VII. The statute of _praemunire_, a generation later, prepares the way for Wyclif. The Papacy is now but an appanage of the Valois monarchs. How shall England, conqueror of those monarchs at Crecy and on other fields, reverence Rome, the dependent of a defeated antagonist?