Chapter III: Part 3

It sounds fair and square; but the fact remains that Mr. Strachey disliked Manning, despised Arnold, had little sympathy with Gordon, and no great fancy for Florence Nightingale. It must be remembered also that in three cases out of four he was dealing with persons of stubborn character and compelling will, as far removed from irreproachable excellence as from criminality. Of such, much criticism may be offered; but the only way to keep an open outlook is to ask, “What was their life’s job?” “How well did they do it?” Men and women who have a pressing job on hand (Florence Nightingale was _all_ job) cannot afford to cultivate the minor virtues. They move with an irresistible impulse to their goal. It is a curious fact that Mr. Strachey is never so illuminating as when he turns his back upon these forceful and disconcerting personages, and dallies with their more amenable contemporaries. What he writes about Gordon we should be glad to forget; what he writes about Sir Evelyn Baring and Lord Hartington we hope to remember while we live.

The popularity of “Eminent Victorians” inspired a host of followers. Critics began to look about them for other vulnerable reputations. Mr. J. A. Strahan, stepping back from Victoria to Anne, made the happy discovery that Addison had been systematically overpraised, and that every side of his character was open to assault. The result of this perspicuity is a damning denunciation of a man whom his contemporaries liked and esteemed, and concerning whom we have been content to take the word of those who knew him. He may have been, as Mr. Strahan asserts, a sot, a time-server, a toad-eater, a bad official and a worse friend; but he managed to give a different impression. Addison’s friends and neighbours found him a modest, honourable, sweet-tempered gentleman; and Steele, whom he had affronted, wrote these generous words: “You can seldom get him to the tavern; but when once he is arrived to his pint, and begins to look about him, you admire a thousand things in him which before lay buried.”

This seems to me a singularly pleasant thing to say about anybody. Were I coveting praise, this is the form I’d like the praise to take.

The pressure of disparagement, which is one result of the cooling of our blood after the fever-heat of war, is lowering our enthusiasms, thinning our sympathies, and giving us nothing very dazzling in the way of enlightenment. Americans are less critical than Englishmen, who so value their birthright of free speech that censure of public men has become a habit, a game of hazard (pulling planks out of the ship of state), at which long practice has made them perfect. “The editor of the ‘Morning Post,’” observed Mr. Maurice Hewlett wearily, “begins his day by wondering whom he shall denounce”; and opposing editors, as nimble at the fray, match outcry against outcry, and malice against malignity.

I doubt if any other than an Englishman could have written “The Mirrors of Downing Street,” and I am sure that, were an American able to write such a book (which is problematic), it would never occur to him to think of it, or to brag of it, as a duty. The public actions of public men are open to discussion; but Mr. Balfour’s personal selfishness, his parsimony, his indifference to his domestics, are not matters of general moment. To gossip about these things is to gossip with tradesmen and servants. To deny to Lord Kitchener “greatness of mind, greatness of character, and greatness of heart,” is harsh speaking of the dead; but to tell a gaping world that the woman “whom he loved hungrily and doggedly, and to whom he proposed several times, could never bring herself to marry him,” is a personality which “Town Topics” would scorn. “The Mirrors of Downing Street” aspired to a moral purpose; but taste is the guardian of morality. Its delicate and severe dictates define the terms upon which we may improve the world at the expense of our neighbour’s character.

The sneaking kindness recommended by Mr. Stevenson is much harder to come by than the “raptures of moral indignation,” of which he heard more than he wanted, and which are reverberating through the world to-day. The pages of history are heavy with moral indignation. We teach it in our schools, and there are historians like Macaulay who thunder it rapturously, with never a moment of misgiving. But here and there, as we step apprehensively into historic bypaths, we are cheered by patches of sunshine, straight glimpses into truths which put a more credible, because a more merciful, construction upon men’s actions, and lighten our burden of dispraise.

I have often wondered why, with Philippe de Commines as an avenue of approach, all writers except Scott should deal with Louis the Eleventh as with a moral monstrosity. Commines is no apologist. He has a natural desire to speak well of his master; but he reviews every side of Louis’s character with dispassionate sincerity.

First, as a Catholic: “The king was very liberal to the Church, and, in some respects, more so than was necessary, for he robbed the poor to give to the rich. But in this world no one can arrive at perfection.”

Next, as a husband: “As for ladies, he never meddled with them in my time; for when I came to his court he lost a son, at whose death he was greatly afflicted; and he made a vow to God in my presence never to have intercourse with any other woman than the queen. And though this was no more than he was bound to do by the canons of the Church, yet it was much that he should have such self-command as to persevere firmly in his resolution, considering that the queen (though an excellent lady in other respects) was not a princess in whom a man could take any great delight.”

Finally, as a ruler: “The king was naturally kind and indulgent to persons of mean estate, and hostile to all great men who had no need of him.... But this I say boldly in his commendation, that in my whole life I never knew any man so wise in his misfortunes.”

To be brave in misfortune is to be worthy of manhood; to be wise in misfortune is to conquer fate. We cannot easily or advantageously regard Louis with affection; but when Commines epitomizes history in an ejaculation, “Our good master, Louis, whom God pardon!” it rests our souls to say, “Amen!”

We cannot easily love Swift. The great “professional hater” frightens us out of the timid regard which we should like--in honour of English literature--to cherish for his memory. But there is a noble sentence of Thackeray’s which, if it does not soften our hearts, cannot fail to clarify our minds, to free us from the stupid, clogging misapprehension which we confuse with moral distaste. “Through the storms and tempests of his [Swift’s] furious mind the stars of religion and love break out in the blue, shining serenely, though hidden by the driving clouds and maddening hurricane of his life.” One clear and penetrating note (“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came”) is worth much careful auditing of accounts.

The picture of John Wilkes drawn by Sir George Otto Trevelyan in his “Early History of Charles James Fox,” and the picture of Aaron Burr drawn by Mr. Albert J. Beveridge in his “Life of John Marshall,” are happy illustrations of unpopular subjects treated with illuminating kindness. Wilkes was a demagogue and Burr a trouble-maker (the terms are not necessarily synonymous), and neither of them is a man whose history is widely or accurately known. Both historians are swayed by their political passions. An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting. To Trevelyan all Conservatives were in fault, and all Liberals in the right. Opposition to George the Third is the acid test he applies to separate gold from dross. Mr. Beveridge regards the Federalists as the strength, and the Republicans as the weakness, of the young nation. Thomas Jefferson is _his_ test, and a man hated and hounded by Jefferson necessarily wins his support.

Nevertheless, Wilkes and Burr are presented to us by their sympathizers in a cold north light which softens and conceals nothing. Men of positive quality, they look best when clearly seen. “Research and fact are ever in collision with fancy and legend,” observes Mr. Beveridge soberly; and it is to research and fact that he trusts to rescue his accomplished filibuster from those unproved charges which live by virtue of their vagueness. Writers of American school histories, remembering the duty of moral indignation, have played havoc with the reputation of Aaron Burr; and American school-children, if they know him at all, know him as a duellist and a traitor. They are sure about the duel (it was one of the few facts firmly established in my own mind after a severe struggle with American history); but concerning the treason, they are at least as ill-informed as their elders.

British children do better, perhaps, with John Wilkes. Little Londoners can gaze at the obelisk which commemorates his mayoralty, and think of him as a catless Whittington. The slogan “Wilkes and Liberty” has an attractive ring to all who are not of Madame Roland’s way of thinking. No man ever gave his partisans more to defend, or his opponents better chances to attack; and friends and foes rose repeatedly and fervently to their opportunities. A century later, Sir George Trevelyan, a friend well worth the having, reviews the case with wise sincerity, undaunted confidence, a careful art in the arrangement of his high lights, and a niceness of touch which wins halfway all readers who love the English language. Wilkes was as naturally and inevitably in debt as was William Godwin, and Wilkes’s debts were as naturally and inevitably paid by some one else as were Godwin’s; but when Trevelyan alludes softly to his “unambitious standard of solvency,” this sordid detail becomes unexpectedly pleasurable. So easily are transgressions pardoned, if they provoke the shadow of a smile.

Lord Rosebery’s “Napoleon: the Last Phase” is a work nobly conceived and admirably executed; but its impelling motive is an austere resolve to make what amends a single Englishman can make for an ungenerous episode in English history. Its sympathy for a fallen foe bears no likeness to the sympathy which impelled Théodore de Banville, broken in health and hope by the siege of Paris, to write a lyric in memory of a young Prussian officer, a mere boy, who was found dead on the field, with a blood-stained volume of Pindar in his tunic. Lord Rosebery’s book is written with a proud sadness, a stern indignation, eminently fitted to its subject; but he is not so much kind as just. Napoleon is too vast a figure to be approached with benevolence. It is true, as Mr. Wells asserts, that, had he been unselfish and conscientious, he would never have conquered Europe; but only Mr. Wells is prepared to say that a lack of these qualities won him renown. He shares the lack with Wilhelm the Second, who has had neither an Austerlitz nor a Waterloo.

There is a wide assortment of unpopular characters whose company it would be very instructive to keep. They belong to all ages, countries and creeds. Spain alone offers us three splendid examples--the Duke of Alva, Cardinal Ximenez, and Philip the Second. Alva, like the Corsair, possessed one virtue, which was a more valuable virtue than the Corsair’s, but brings him in less credit, because the object of his unswerving loyalty and devotion was not a guileless lady, but a sovereign, less popular, if possible, than himself. Cardinal Ximenez, soldier, statesman, scholar, priest, ascetic, author and educator, was also Grand Inquisitor, and this fact alone seems to linger in the minds of men. That, for his day, he was a moderate, avails him little. That he made a point of protecting scholars and professors from the pernicious interference of the Inquisition ought to avail him a great deal. It might were it better known. There is a play of Sardou’s in which he is represented as concentrating all the deadly powers of his office against the knowledge which he most esteemed. This is the way the drama educates.

And Philip? It would be a big piece of work to win for Philip even a partial recognition of his moderate merits. The hand of history has dealt heavily with him, and romance has preyed upon his vitals. In fact, history and romance are undistinguishable when they give free play to the moral indignation he inspires. It is not enough to accuse him of the murder of the son whom he hated (though not more heartily than George the Second hated the Prince of Wales): they would have us understand that he probably poisoned the brother whom he loved. “Don John’s ambitions had become troublesome, and he ceased to live at an opportune moment for Philip’s peace of mind,” is the fashion in which Gayarré insinuates his suspicions; and Gayarré’s narrative--very popular in my youth--was recommended to the American public by Bancroft, who, I am convinced, never read it. Had he penetrated to the eleventh page, where Philip is alluded to as the Christian Tiberius, or to the twentieth, where he is compared to an Indian idol, he would have known that, whatever the book might be, it was not history, and that, as an historian, it ill became him to tell innocent Americans to read it.

But how were they to be better informed? Motley will not even allow that Philip’s fanatical devotion to his Church was a sincere devotion. He accuses him of hypocrisy, which is like accusing Cromwell of levity, or Burke of Jacobinism. Prescott has a fashion of turning the King’s few amiabilities, as, for example, his tenderness for his third wife, Isabella of France, into a suggestion of reproach. “Well would it be for the memory of Philip, could the historian find no heavier sin to lay to his charge than his treatment of Isabella.” Well would it be for all of us, could the recording angel lay no heavier charge to our account than our legitimate affections. The Prince of Orange, it is true, charged Philip with murdering both wife and son; but that was merely a political argument. He would as soon have charged him with the murder of his father, had the Emperor not been safely isolated at Yuste; and Philip, in return, banned the Prince of Orange--a brave and wise ruler--as “an enemy of the human race.”

Twenty-five years ago, an Englishman who was by nature distrustful of popular verdicts, and who had made careful studies of certain epochs of Spanish history, ventured to paint Philip in fresh colours. Mr. Martin Hume’s monograph shows us a cultivated gentleman, with a correct taste in architecture and art, sober, abstemious, kind to petitioners, loyal and affectionate to his friends, generous to his soldiers and sailors; a man beloved by his own household, and reverenced by his subjects, to whom he brought nothing but misfortune. The book makes melancholy reading, because Philip’s political sins were also political blunders; his mad intolerance was a distortion, rather than a rejection, of conscience; and his inconceivable rigidity left him helpless to face the essential readjustments of life. “I could not do otherwise than I have done,” he said with piercing sincerity, “though the world should fall in ruins around me.”

Now what befell Mr. Hume who wrote history in this fashion, with no more liking for Philip than for Elizabeth or the Prince of Orange, but with a natural desire to get within the purlieus of truth? Certain empty honours were conferred upon him: a degree from Cambridge, membership in a few societies, the privilege of having some letters printed after his name. But the University of Glasgow and the University of Liverpool stoutly refused to give him the chairs of history and Spanish. He might know more than most men on these subjects; but they did not want their students exposed to new impressions. The good old way for them. Mr. Hume, being a reader, may have recalled in bitterness of spirit the words of the acute and unemotional Sully, who had scant regard for Catholicism (though the Huguenots tried him sorely), and none at all for Spain; but who said, in his balanced, impersonal way, that Philip’s finer qualities, his patience, piety, fortitude and single-mindedness, were all alike “lost on the vulgar.”

Lucrezia Borgia is less available for our purpose, because the imaginary Lucrezia, though not precisely beloved, is more popular in her way than the real Lucrezia could ever hope to be. “In the matter of pleasantness,” says Lucian, “truth is far surpassed by falsehood”; and never has it been more agreeably overshadowed than in this fragment of Italian history. We really could not bear to lose the Lucrezia of romance. She has done fatigue duty along every line of iniquity. She has specialized in all of the seven deadly sins. On Rossetti’s canvas, in Donizetti’s opera, in Victor Hugo’s play, in countless poems and stories and novels, she has erred exhaustively for our entertainment. The image of an attractive young woman poisoning her supper guests is one which the world will not lightly let go.

And what is offered in return? Only the dull statements of people who chanced to know the lady, and who considered her a model wife and duchess, a little over-anxious about the education of her numerous children, but kind to the poor, generous to artists, and pitiful to Jews. “She is graceful, modest, lovable, decorous and devout,” wrote Johannes Lucas from Rome to Ercole, the old Duke of Ferrara. “She is beautiful and good, gentle and amiable,” echoed the Chevalier Bayard years later. Were we less avid for thrills, we might like to think of this young creature, snatched at twenty-one from the maelstrom of Rome, where she had been a pawn in the game of politics, and placed in a secure and splendid home. The Lucrezia of romance would have found the court of Ferrara intolerably dull. The Lucrezia of history took to dullness as a duck to water. She was a sensible, rather than a brilliant woman, fully alive to the duties and dignities of her position, and well aware that respectability is a strong card to play in a vastly disreputable world.

There was a time when Robespierre and Marat made a high bid for unpopularity. Even those who clearly understood the rehabilitation of man in the French Revolution found little to say for its chosen instruments, whose purposes were high, but whose methods were open to reproach. Of late, however, a certain weariness has been observable in men’s minds when these reformers are in question, a reluctance to expand with _any_ emotion where they are concerned. M. Lauzanne is, indeed, by way of thinking that the elemental Clemenceau closely resembles the elemental Robespierre; but this is not a serious valuation; it is letting picturesqueness run away with reason--a habit incidental to editorship.

The thoroughly modern point of view is that Robespierre and Marat were ineffective; not without ability in their respective lines, but unfitted for the parts they played. Marat’s turn of mind was scientific (our own Benjamin Franklin found him full of promise). Robespierre’s turn of mind was legal; he would have made an acute and successful lawyer. The Revolution came along and ruined both these lives, for which we are expected to be sorry. M. Lauzanne does not go so far as to say that the Great War ruined Clemenceau’s life. The “Tiger” was seventy-three when the Germans marched into Belgium. Had he been content to spend all his years teaching in a girls’ school, he might (though I am none too sure of it) have been a gentler and a better man. But France was surely worth the price he paid. A lifeboat is not expected to have the graceful lines of a gondola.

“Almost everybody,” says Stevenson, “can understand and sympathize with an admiral, or a prize-fighter”; which genial sentiment is less contagious now than when it was uttered, thirty years ago. A new type of admiral has presented itself to the troubled consciousness of men, a type unknown to Nelson, unsuspected by Farragut, unsung by Newbolt. In robbing the word of its ancient glory, Tirpitz has robbed us of an emotion we can ill-afford to lose. “The traditions of sailors,” says Mr. Shane Leslie, “have been untouched by the lowering of ideals which has invaded every other class and profession.” The truth of his words was brought home to readers by the behaviour of the British merchant marine, peaceful, poorly paid men, who in the years of peril went out unflinchingly, and as a matter of course, to meet “their duty and their death.” Many and varied are the transgressions of seafaring men; but we have hitherto been able to believe them sound in their nobler parts. We should like to cherish this simple faith, and, though alienated from prize-fighters by the narrowness of our civic and social code, to retain our sympathy for admirals. It cannot be that their fair fame will be forever smirched by the tactics of a man who ruined the government he served.

The function of criticism is to clear our mental horizon, to get us within close range of the criticized. It recognizes moral as well as intellectual issues; but it differentiates them. When Emerson said, “Goethe can never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to pure truth, but to truth for the sake of culture,” he implied that truth, besides being a better thing than culture, was also a more lovable thing, which is not the case. It takes temerity to love Goethe; but there are always men--young, keen, speculative, beauty-loving men--to whom he is inexpressibly dear because of the vistas he opens, the thoughts he releases, the “inward freedom” which is all he claimed to give. It takes no less temerity to love Emerson, and he meant that it should be so, that we should climb high to reach him. He is not lovable as Lamb is lovable, and he would not have wanted to be. A man who all his life repelled unwelcome intimacies had no desire to surrender his memory to the affection of every idle reader.

It is such a sure thing to appeal from intelligence to the moral sense, from the trouble involved in understanding to the ease with which judgment is passed, that critics may be pardoned their frequent misapprehensions. Problems of conduct are just as puzzling as problems of intellect. That is why Mr. Stevenson pronounced a sneaking kindness to be “instructive.” He offered it as a road to knowledge rather than as a means of enjoyment. Not that he was unaware of the pleasures which follow in its wake. He knew the world up and down well enough to be thankful that he had never lost his taste for bad company.

The Divineness of Discontent

When a distinguished Oxford student told Americans, through the distinguished medium of Harvard College, that they were “speeding with invincible optimism down the road to destruction,” they paid him the formal compliment of listening to, and commenting upon, his words. They did not go so far as to be disturbed by them, because it is the nature of men to remain unmoved by prophecies. Only the Greek chorus--or its leader--paid any heed to Cassandra; and the folly of Edgar Poe in accepting without demur the reiterated statement of his raven is apparent to all readers of a much-read poem. The world has been speeding through the centuries to destruction, and the end is still remote. Nevertheless, as it is assuredly not speeding to perfection, the word that chills our irrational content may do us some small service. It is never believed, and it is soon forgotten; but for a time it gives us food for thought.

Any one born as long ago as I was must remember that the virtue most deeply inculcated in our nurseries was content. It had no spiritual basis to lend it dignity and grace, but was of a Victorian smugness; though, indeed, it was not Victorian at all, but an inheritance from those late Georgian days which were the smuggest known to fame. It was a survival from Hannah More and Jane Taylor, ladies dissimilar in most respects, but with an equal gift for restricting the horizon of youth. I don’t remember who wrote the popular story of the “Discontented Cat” that lived in a cottage on bread and milk and mice, and that made itself unhappy because a wealthy cat of its acquaintance was given buttered crumpets for breakfast; but either Jane Taylor or her sister Ann was responsible for the “Discontented Pendulum,” which grew tired of ticking in the dark, and, being reminded that it had a window to look through, retorted very sensibly that there was no use having a window, if it could not stop a second to look through it.

The nursery theory of content was built up on the presumption that you were the favoured child of fortune--or of God--while other, and no less worthy, children were objects of less kindly solicitude. Miss Taylor’s “Little Ann” weeps because she sees richly clad ladies stepping into a coach while she has to walk; whereupon her mother points out to her a sick and ragged beggar child, whose

“naked feet bleed on the stones,”

and with enviable hardness of heart bids her take comfort in the sight:

“This poor little beggar is hungry and cold,
No father nor mother has she;
And while you can daily such objects behold,
You ought quite contented to be.”

Hannah More amplified this theory of content to fit all classes and circumstances. She really did feel concern for her fellow creatures, for the rural poor upon whom it was not the custom of Church or State to waste sympathy or help. She refused to believe that British labourers were “predestined to be ignorant and wicked”--which was to her credit; but she did, apparently, believe that they were predestined to be wretchedly poor, and that they should be content with their poverty. She lived on the fat of the land, and left thirty thousand pounds when she died; but she held that bare existence was sufficient for a ploughman. She wrote twenty-four books, which were twenty-four too many; but she told the ever-admiring Wilberforce that she permitted “no writing for the poor.” She aspired to guide the policies and the morals of England; but she was perturbed by the thought that under-paid artisans should seek to be “scholars and philosophers,” though they must have stood in more need of philosophy than she did.

It was Ruskin who jolted his English readers, and some Americans, out of the selfish complacency which is degenerate content. It was he who harshly told England, then so prosperous and powerful, that prosperity and power are not virtues, that they do not indicate the sanction of the Almighty, or warrant their possessors in assuming the moral leadership of the world. It was he who assured the prim girlhood of my day that it was not the petted child of Providence, and that it had no business to be contented because it was better off than girlhood elsewhere. “Joy in nothing that separates you, as by any strange favour, from your fellow creatures, that exalts you through their degradation, exempts you from their toil, or indulges you in times of their distress.”

This was a new voice falling upon the attentive ears of youth--a fresh challenge to its native and impetuous generosity. Perhaps the beggar’s bare feet were not a legitimate incentive to enjoyment of our own neat shoes and stockings. Perhaps it was a sick world we lived in, and the beggar was a symptom of disease. Perhaps when Emerson (we read Emerson and Carlyle as well as Ruskin) defined discontent as an infirmity of the will, he was thinking of personal and petty discontent, as with one’s breakfast or the weather; not with the discontent which we never dared to call divine, but which we dimly perceived to have in it some noble attribute of grace. That the bare existence of a moral law should so exalt a spirit that neither sin nor sorrow could subdue its gladness was a profundity which the immature mind could not be expected to grasp.

Time and circumstance lent themselves with extraordinary graciousness to Emerson’s invincible optimism. It was easier to be a transcendental philosopher, and much easier to cherish a noble and a sweet content, before the laying of the Atlantic cable. Emerson was over sixty when this event took place, and, while he lived, the wires were used with commendable economy. The morning newspaper did not bring him a detailed account of the latest Turkish massacre. The morning mail did not bring him photographs of starving Russian children. His temperamental composure met with little to derange it. He abhorred slavery; but until Lincoln forced the issue, he seldom bent his mind to its consideration. He loved “potential America”; but he had a happy faculty of disregarding public affairs. Passionate partisanship, which is the basis of so much satisfaction and discontent, was alien to his soul. He loved mankind, but not men; and his avoidance of intimacies saved him much wear and tear. Mr. Brownell says that he did not care enough about his friends to discriminate between them, which was the reason he estimated Alcott so highly.

This immense power of withdrawal, this concentration upon the things of the spirit, made possible Emerson’s intellectual life. He may have been, as Santayana says, “impervious to the evidence of evil”; yet there breaks from his heart an occasional sigh over the low ebb of the world’s virtue, or an entirely human admission that the hopes of the morning are followed by the ennui of noon. Sustained by the supremacy of the moral law, and by a profound and majestic belief in the invincible justice, the “loaded dice” of God, he sums up in careful words his modest faith in man: “Hours of sanity and consideration are always arriving to communities as to individuals, when the truth is seen, and the martyrs are justified.” Perhaps martyrs foresee the dawning of this day or ever they come to die; but to those who stand by and witness their martyrdom, the night seems dark and long.

There is a species of discontent which is more fervently optimistic than all the cheerfulness the world can boast. It is the discontent of the passionate and unpractical reformer, who believes, as Shelley believed, in the perfectibility of the human species, and who thinks, as Shelley thought, that there is a remedy for every disease of civilization. To the poet’s dreaming eyes the cure was simple and sure. Destruction implied for him an automatic reconstruction, a miraculous survival and rebirth. Uncrown the king, and some noble prophet or philosopher will guide--not rule--the people. Unfrock the priest, and the erstwhile congregation will perfect itself in the practice of virtue. Take the arms from the soldier and the policeman, the cap and gown from the college president, authority from the judge, and control from the father. The nations will then be peaceful, the mobs orderly, the students studious, the criminals virtuous, the children well-behaved. An indifferent acquaintance with sociology, and a comprehensive ignorance of biology, made possible these pleasing illusions. Nor did it occur to Shelley that many men, his equals in disinterestedness and his superiors in self-restraint, would have found his reconstructed world an eminently undesirable dwelling-place.

Two counsels to content stand bravely out from the mass of contradictory admonitions with which the world’s teachers have bewildered us. Saint Paul, writing to the Philippians, says simply: “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content”; and Marcus Aurelius, contemplating the mighty spectacle of life and death, bids us pass serenely through our little space of time, and end our journey in content. It is the meeting-point of objective and subjective consciousness. The Apostle was having a hard time of it. The things he disciplined himself to accept with content were tangible things, of an admittedly disagreeable character--hunger and thirst, stripes and imprisonment. They were not happening to somebody else; they were happening to _him_. The Emperor, seeking refuge from action in thought, steeled himself against the nobleness of pity no less than against the weakness of complaint. John Stuart Mill, who did not suffer from enervating softness of heart, pronounced the wholesale killing of Christians in the reign of Marcus Aurelius to be one of the world’s great tragedies. It was the outcome, not only of imperial policy, but of sincere conviction. Therefore historians have agreed to pass it lightly by. How can a man do better than follow the dictates of his own conscience, or of his own judgment, or of whatever directs the mighty ones of earth who make laws instead of obeying them? But the immensity of pain, the long-drawn agony involved in this protracted persecution might have disturbed even a Stoic philosopher passing serenely--though not harmlessly--through his little space of time.

This brings me to the consideration of one prolific source of discontent, the habit we have acquired--and cannot let go--of distressing ourselves over the daily progress of events. The classic world, “innocent of any essential defeat,” was a pitiless world, too clear-eyed for illusions, too intelligent for sedatives. The Greeks built the structure of their lives upon an almost perfect understanding of all that it offered and denied. The Romans, running an empire and ruling a world, had much less time for thinking; yet Horace, observant and acquiescent, undeceived and undisturbed, is the friend of all the ages. It is not from him, or from any classic author, that we learn to talk about the fret and fever of living. He would have held such a phrase to be eminently ill-bred, and unworthy of man’s estate.

The Middle Ages, immersed in heaving seas of trouble, and lifted Heaven-ward by great spiritual emotions, had scant breathing-space for the cultivation of nerves. Men endured life and enjoyed it. Their endurance and their enjoyment were unimpaired by the violence of their fellow men, or by the vision of an angry God. Cruelty, which we cannot bear to read about, and a Hell, which we will not bear to think about, failed signally to curb the zest with which they lived their days. “How high the tide of human delight rose in the Middle Ages,” says Mr. Chesterton significantly, “we know only by the colossal walls they built to keep it within bounds.” There is no reason to suppose that Dante, whose fervid faith compassed the redemption of mankind, disliked his dream of Hell, or that it irked him to consign to it so many eminent and agreeable people.

The Renaissance gave itself unreservedly to all the pleasures that could be extracted from the business of living, though there was no lack of troubles to damp its zeal. It is interesting and instructive to read the history of a great Italian lady, typical of her day, Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua. She was learned, adroit, able, estimable, and mistress of herself though duchies fell. She danced serenely at the ball given by the French King at Milan, after he had ousted her brother-in-law, the Duke Ludovico, and sent him to die a prisoner at Loches. When Cæsar Borgia snatched Urbino, she improved the occasion by promptly begging from him two beautiful statues which she had always coveted, and which had been the most treasured possessions of Duke Guidobaldo, her relative, and the husband of her dearest friend. A chilly heart had Isabella when others came to grief, but a stout one when disaster faced her way. If the men and women who lived through those highly coloured, harshly governed days had fretted too persistently over the misfortunes of others, or had spent their time questioning the moral intelligibility of life, the Renaissance would have failed of its fruition, and the world would be a less engaging place for us to live in now.

There is a discontent which is profoundly stimulating, and there is a discontent which is more wearisome than complacency. Both spring from a consciousness that the time is out of joint, and both have a modern background of nerves. “The Education of Henry Adams” and the “Diaries” of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt are cases in point. Blunt’s quarrel was with his country, his world, his fellow creatures and his God--a broad field of dissatisfaction, which was yet too narrow to embrace himself. Nowhere does he give any token of even a moderate self-distrust. Britain is an “engine of evil,” because his party is out of power. “Americans” (in 1900) “are spending fifty millions a year in slaughtering the Filipinos”--a crude estimate of work and cost. “The Press is the most complete engine ever invented for the concealment of historic truth.” “Patriotism is the virtue of nations in decay.” “The whole white race is revelling openly in violence, as though it had never pretended to be Christian. God’s equal curse be on them all.”

“The whole white race,” be it observed. For a time Blunt dreamed fond dreams of yellow and brown and black supremacy. Europe’s civilization he esteemed a failure. Christianity had not come up to his expectations. There remained the civilization of the East, and Mohammedanism--an amended Mohammedanism, innocent of sensuality and averse to bloodshed. Filled with this happy hope, the Englishman set off from Cairo to seek religion in the desert.

Siwah gave him a rude reception. Ragged tribes, ardent but unregenerate followers of the Prophet, pulled down his tents, pillaged his luggage, robbed his servants, and knocked him rudely about. Blunt’s rage at this treatment was like the rage of “Punch’s” vegetarian who is chased by a bull. “There is no hope to be found in Islam, and I shall go no further,” is his conclusion. “The less religion in the world, perhaps the better.”

Humanity and its creeds being thus disposed of, there remained only the animals to contemplate with satisfaction. “Three quarters of man’s misery,” says the diary, “comes from pretending to be what he is not, a separate creation, superior to that of the beasts and birds, when in reality they are wiser than we are, and infinitely happier.”

This is the kind of thing Walt Whitman used now and then to say, though neither he nor Sir Wilfrid knew any more about the happiness of beasts and birds than do the rest of us. But that brave old hopeful, Whitman, would have laughed his loudest over Blunt’s final analysis of the situation: “All the world would be a paradise in twenty years if man could be shut out.” A paradise already imaged by Lord Holland and the poet Gray:

“Owls would have hooted in Saint Peter’s choir,
And foxes stunk and littered in Saint Paul’s.”

To turn from these pages of pettish and puerile complaint to the deep-seated discontent of Henry Adams is to reënter the world of the intellect. Mark Pattison confessed that he could not take a train without thinking how much better the time-table might have been planned. It was an unhappy twist of mind; but the Rector of Lincoln utilized his obtrusive critical faculties by applying them to his own labours, and scourging himself to greater effort. So did Henry Adams, though even the greater effort left him profoundly dissatisfied. He was unelated by success, and he could not reconcile himself to that degree of failure which is the common portion of mankind. His criticisms are lucid, balanced, enlightening, and occasionally prophetic, as when he comments on the Irishman’s political passion for obstructing even himself, and on the perilous race-inertia of Russia. “Could inertia on such a scale be broken up, or take new scale?” he asks dismayed; and we read the answer to-day. A minority ruling with iron hand; a majority accepting what comes to them, as they accept day and night and the seasons.

If there is not an understatement in the five hundred pages of the “Education,” which thereby loses the power of persuasion, there is everywhere an appeal to man’s austere equity and disciplined reason. Adams was not in love with reason. He said that the mind resorted to it for want of training, and he admitted that he had never met a perfectly trained mind. But it was the very essence of reason which made him see that friends were good to him, and the world not unkind; that the loveliness of the country about Washington gave him pleasure, even when he found “a personal grief in every tree”; and that a self-respecting man refrains from finding wordy fault with the conditions under which he lives. He did not believe, with Wordsworth, that nature is a holy and beneficent thing, or with Blake, that nature is a wicked and malevolent thing; but he knew better than to put up a quarrel with an invincible antagonist. He erred in supposing that other thoughtful men were as discontented as he was, or that disgust with the methods of Congress corroded their hours of leisure; but he expressed clearly and with moderation his unwillingness to cherish “complete and archaic deceits,” or to live in a world of illusions. His summing up is the summing up of another austere and uncompromising thinker, Santayana, when confronted by the same problem: “A spirit with any honour is not willing to live except in its own way; a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.”

As our eagerness and our reluctance are not controlling factors in the situation, it is unwise to stress them too heavily. Yet we must think, at least some of us must; and it is well to think out as clearly as we can, not the relative advantages of content and discontent--a question which briskly answers itself--but the relative rightness. Emerson believed in the essential goodness of life, in the admirable law of compensation. Santayana believes that life has evil for its condition, and is for that reason profoundly sad and equivocal. He sees in the sensuous enjoyment of the Greek, the industrial optimism of the American, only a “thin disguise for despair.” Yet Emerson and Santayana reach the same general conclusion. The first says that hours of sanity and consideration come to communities as to individuals, “when the truth is seen, and the martyrs are justified”; the second that “people in all ages sometimes achieve what they have set their hearts on,” and that, if our will and conduct were better disciplined, “contentment would be more frequent and more massive.”

It is hard to think of these years of grace as a chosen period of sanity and consideration; and the hearts of the Turk and the Muscovite are set on things which do not make for the massive contentment of the world. The orderly processes of civilization have been so wrenched and shattered that readjustment is blocked at some point in every land, in our own no less than in others. There are those who say that the World War went beyond the bounds of human endurance; and that the peculiar horror engendered by indecent methods of attack--poison-gases, high explosives and corrosive fluids--has dimmed the faith and broken the spirit of men. But Attila managed to turn a fair proportion of the civilized world into wasteland, with only man-power as a destructive force. Europe to-day is by comparison unscathed, and there are kinsfolk dwelling upon peaceful continents to whom she may legitimately call for aid.

Legitimately, unless our content is like the content extolled by Little Ann’s mother; unless our shoes and stockings are indicative of God’s meaningless partiality, and unless the contemplation of our neighbour’s bleeding feet enhances our pious satisfaction. “I doubt,” says Mr. Wells sourly, “if it would make any very serious difference for some time in the ordinary daily life of Kansas City, if all Europe were reduced to a desert in the next five years.” Why Kansas City should have been chosen as the symbol of unconcern, I do not know; but space has a deadening influence on pity as on fear. The farther we travel from the Atlantic coast, the more tepid is the sympathy for injured France. The farther we travel from the Pacific coast, the fainter is the prejudice against Japan.

It may be possible to construct a state in which men will be content with their own lot, if they be reasonable, and with their neighbours’ lot, if they be generous. It is manifestly impossible to construct a world on this principle. Therefore there will always be a latent grief in the nobler part of man’s soul. Therefore there will always be a content as impious as the discontent from which Pope prayed to be absolved.

The unbroken cheerfulness, no less than the personal neatness, of the British prisoners in the World War astounded the more temperamental Germans. Long, long ago it was said of England: “Even our condemned persons doe goe cheerfullie to their deths, for our nature is free, stout, hautie, prodigal of life and blood.” This heroic strain, tempered to an endurance which is free from the waste of emotionalism, produces the outward semblance and the inward self-respect of a content which circumstances render impossible. It keeps the soul of man immune from whatever degradation his body may be suffering. It saves the land that bred him from the stigma of defeat. It is remotely and humanly akin to the tranquillity of the great Apostle in a Roman prison. It is wholly alien to the sin of smugness which has crept in among the domestic virtues, and rendered them more distasteful than ever to austere thinkers, and to those lonely, generous souls who starve in the midst of plenty.

There is a curious and suggestive paragraph in Mr. Chesterton’s volume of loose ends, entitled “What I Saw in America.” It arrests our attention because, for once, the writer seems to be groping for a thought instead of juggling with one. He recognizes a keen and charming quality in American women, and is disturbed because he also recognizes a recoil from it in his own spirit. This is manifestly perplexing. “To complain of people for being brave and bright and kind and intelligent may not unreasonably appear unreasonable. And yet there is something in the background that can be expressed only by a symbol; something that is not shallowness, but a neglect of the subconscious, and the vaguer and slower impulses; something that can be missed amid all that laughter and light, under those starry candelabra of the ideals of the happy virtues. Sometimes it came over me in a wordless wave that I should like to see a sulky woman. How she would walk in beauty like the night, and reveal more silent spaces full of older stars! These things cannot be conveyed in their delicate proportion, even in the most large and elusive terms.”

Baudelaire has conveyed them measurably in four words:

“Sois belle! Sois triste!”

Yet neither “sulky” nor “triste” is an adjective suggesting with perfect felicity the undercurrent of discontent which lends worth to courage and charm to intelligence. Back of all our lives is the sombre setting of a world ill at ease, and beset by perils. Darkening all our days is the gathering cloud of ill-will, the ugly hatred of man for man, which is the perpetual threat to progress. We Americans may not be so invincibly optimistic as our critics think us, and we may not yet be “speeding” down the road to destruction, as our critics painfully foretell; but we are part of an endangered civilization, and cannot hold up our end, unsupported by Europe. An American woman, cautiously investing her money in government bonds, said to her man of business: “These at least are perfectly secure?” “I should not say that,” was the guarded reply; “but they will be the last things to go.”

A few years ago there was a period that saw the workingmen and working-women of the United States engaged in three hundred and sixty-five strikes--one for every day of the year--and all of them on at once. Something seems lacking in the equity of our industrial life. The “Current History” of the New York “Times” is responsible for the statement that eighty-five thousand men and women met their deaths by violence in the United States during the past decade. Something seems lacking in our programme of peace.

Can it be that Mr. Wells is right when he says that the American believes in peace, but feels under no passionate urgency to organize it? Does our notable indifference to the history of the past mean that we are unconcerned about the history of the present? Two things are sure. We cannot be nobly content with our own prosperity, unless its service to the world is made manifest; grace before meat is not enough to bless the food we eat. And we cannot be nobly content with our unbroken strength, with the sublimity of size and numbers, unless there is something correspondingly sublime in our leadership of the wounded nations. Our allies, who saved us and whom we saved, face the immediate menace of poverty and assault. They face it with a slowly gathered courage which we honour to-day, and may be compelled to emulate to-morrow. “The fact that fear is rational,” says Mr. Brownell, “is what makes fortitude divine.”

Allies

“Friendship between princes,” observed the wise Philippe de Commines, “is not of long duration.” He would have said as much of friendship between republics, had he ever conceived of representative government. What he knew was that the friendships of men, built on affection and esteem, outlast time; and that the friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests, which are always liable to deflection. He had proof, if proof were needed, in the invasion of France by Edward the Fourth under the pressure of an alliance with Charles of Burgundy. It was one of the urbane invasions common to that gentlemanly age. “Before the King of England embarked from Dover, he sent one of his heralds named Garter, a native of Normandy, to the King of France, with a letter of defiance couched in language so elegant and so polite that I can scarcely believe any Englishman wrote it.”

This was a happy beginning, and the end was no less felicitous. When Edward landed in France he found that Louis the Eleventh, who hated fighting, was all for peace; and that the Duke of Burgundy, who generally fought the wrong people at the wrong time, was in no condition for war. Therefore he patched up a profitable truce, and went back to England, a wiser and a richer man, on better terms with his enemy than with his ally. “For where our advantage lies, there also is our heart.”

The peculiar irritation engendered by what Americans discreetly designate as “entangling alliances” was forced upon my perception in early youth, when I read the letters of a British officer engaged in fighting the Ashanti. The war, if it may be so termed, was fought in 1873, and the letters were published in “Blackwood’s Magazine.” The Ashanti had invaded Fantiland, then under a British protectorate, and the troops commanded by Sir Garnet Wolseley were presumably defending their friends. This particular officer expressed his sense of the situation in a fervid hope that when the Ashanti were beaten, as they deserved to be, the English would then come to speedy terms with them, “and drive these brutes of Fanti off the map.”

It is a sentiment which repeats itself in more measured terms on every page of history. The series of “Coalitions” formed against Napoleon were rich in super-comic, no less than in super-tragic elements; and it was well for those statesmen whose reason and whose tempers were so controlled that they were able to perceive the humours of this giant game of pussy-in-the-corner. A mutual fear of France drew the Allies together; a mutual distrust of one another pulled them apart. Sir Gilbert Elliot, afterwards Lord Minto, endeavoured from the beginning to make England understand that Austria would prefer her own interests to the interests of the Coalition, and that it was not unnatural that she should do so. The situation, as he saw it, was something like this:

“Austria: ‘If I am to dance to your tune, you must pay the piper.’

“England: ‘So long as I lead the figure, and you renounce a _pas seul_.’”

Unfortunately the allurements of a _pas seul_ were too strong to be anywhere resisted. Prices grew stiffer and stiffer, armies melted away when the time for action neared. Britain, always victorious at sea, paid out large sums for small returns on land. Her position was briefly summed up by Sir Hugh Elliot--more brilliant and less astute than his brother--at the hostile Court of Prussia. Frederick the Great, overhearing the pious ejaculation with which the Englishman greeted the arrival of a satisfactory dispatch from Sir Eyre Coote, said to him acidly: “I was not aware that God was also one of your allies.” “The only one, Sire, whom we do not finance,” was the lightning retort.