[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 thePolitics—in the recurrence throughout that work of such phrases as "The State which is founded on Justice alone can stand." "Man when perfected (+teleôthén+) is the noblest thing that lives, but separated from justice (+chôristhèn nómou kaì díkês+) the basest of all." "Virtue cannot be the ruin of those who possess it, nor Justice the destruction of a City." The tragedies of Sophocles that are of a later date than 413 B.C. betray an attitude towards political life distinct from that which characterizes his earlier works. The shading-in of the life of the State into that of the individual defies analysis, and it were hazardous to affirm what traits of thought ought to be referred to the genius of the State as distinct from the individual; but it appears as difficult to imaginebeforeSyracuse, the vehement insistence upon Justice, the impassioned idealization which characterize Plato, Socrates, and Demosthenes, as it is difficultafterSyracuse 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 theLaws, 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 Englishpeopleas distinguished from men like Thomas Cromwell, Stratford, or Clarendon, who strictly were ministers of the king. "It rains gold-boxes," Horace Walpole writes when, in April, 1757. Pitt was dismissed, and it was these tokens of his popularity with the merchants of England, not the recognition of his genius by the king, which led to his return to office in June. The events of the period of four years and ten months during which this man was dictator of the House of Commons and of England are so graven on all hearts that a mere enumeration in order of time suffices to recall moving incidents, characters, and scenes of epic grandeur:—December 17th, 1756, Pitt-Devonshire ministry formed, Highland regiments raised, national militia organized. 1757, CLIVE'S victory at Plassey, June 23rd, and conquest of Bengal. 1758, June 3rd, destruction of forts at Cherbourg, three ships of war, 150 privateers burned to the sea-line; November 25th, Fort Duquesne captured; December 29th, conquest of Goree. 1759, "year of victories"; February 16th, POCOCK relieves Madras; May 1st, capture of Guadaloupe; July 4th, R. RODNEY at Havre destroys the flat-bottomed Armada; July 31st, WOLFE'S repulse at Beaufort; August 19th, BOSCAWEN destroys French fleet in Lagos Bay; September 2nd, POCOCK defeats D'Aché; September 9th, WOLFE'S last letter to Pitt; September 13th, 10 a.m., Plains of Abraham and conquest of Canada; November 20th, HAWKE defeats Conflans in Quiberon Bay, "Lay me alongside the French Admiral." 1760, January 22nd, EYRE-COOTE defeats Lally at Wandewash, conquest of Carnatic. 1761, January 16th, English enter Pondicherry; Bellisle citadel reduced, "Quebec over again," June 7th; October 5th, PITT resigns. It is doubtful whether, since the eleventh century and Hildebrand and William the Conqueror, the European stage has been occupied simultaneously by two such men as Chatham and the king of Prussia.
[8] The same delight in power, the same glory in dominion, pulsate in the Lusiads and in the dramas of Marlowe, but Marlowe was by far the wider in his intellectual range. Worlds were open to his glance beyond the Indies and Cathay that were shut to Camoens. Yet Camoens is a heroic figure. He found it easy to delineate Vasco da Gama; he had but to speak with his own voice, and utter simply his own heart's desires, hates, musings, and Vasco da Gama's sister would have turned to listen, thinking she heard the accents, the trick, the very manner that betrayed the hero.
[9] Burnet is incredibly vain, unredeemed by Boswell's hero-worship; yet his book reflects the medley, the fervour, the vehemence, crimes, hopes of this time. In one sentence nineteen religions are named as co-existing in Scotland.
[10] TheMare Clausumwas framed as an answer to Grotius'Mare Liberum, which had been printed, perhaps without Grotius' consent, in 1610. Selden's tract, printed in November, 1635, is a folio of 304 pages, in which, setting forth precedent on precedent, he claims for England, as by law and ancient custom established, that same supremacy over the high seas as the Portuguese had exercised over the eastern waters, and Venice over the Adriatic. The King's enthusiasm was kindled. The work was issued with all the circumstance of a State paper, and it came upon foreign courts like a declaration of policy, the resolve at length to enforce the time-honoured and indefeasible rights of England. Copies were with due ceremony deposited in the Exchequer and at the Admiralty. A fleet was equipped, and as an atonement for the wrongs done to the elder Northumberland, the King gave the command to his son, whose portrait as Admiral forms one of the noblest of Vandyck's canvases. But Northumberland, though brave to a fault, was no seaman, and the whole enterprise threatened to end in ridicule. Stung to the quick, Charles again turned to the nation. But in the nine intervening years since 1628 the nation's heart had left him. To his demand for supplies to strengthen the fleet came Hampden's refusal. The trial was the prelude to the Grand Remonstrance, to Naseby, and to Whitehall, where, as if swept thither by the crowded events of some fantastic dream, he awoke from his visions of England's greatness and the empire of the seas, alone on a scaffold, surrounded by a ring of English eyes, looking hate, sullen indifference, or cold resolution.
Leave him still loftier than the world suspects,Living or dying.
After all he was a king, and in his veins the blood of Mary Stuart still beat. An English version of Selden's treatise appeared in the time of Cromwell. The translator was Marchamont Nedham. The dedication to the Supreme Authority of the Nation, the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England, is dated November 19th, 1652.
[11] The preliminaries to the Peace of Amiens were signed on October 1st, 1801. Parliament opened on October 29th, and after the King's speech, Windham compared his position amid the general rejoicings of the House at the prospect of an end to the war, to Hamlet's at the wedding-feast of Claudius. In the debate of November 3rd, Pitt declared himself resigned to the loss of the Cape by the retention of Ceylon, while the opinion of Fox was, that by this surrender we should have the benefit of the colony without its expenses. Nelson, with the glory of his victory at Copenhagen just six months old, maintained that in the days when Indiamen were heavy ships the Cape had its uses, but now that they were coppered, and sailed well, the Cape was a mere tavern that served to delay the voyage. The opening of Windham's speech on the 4th, "We are a conquered nation, England gives all, France nothing," defines his position (Parl. Hist.xxxvi, pp. 1-191). Windham was one of the few statesmen who, even before the consulate had passed into the Empire, understood the gravity of our relations to France. Every month added proof of the accuracy of his presentiments, but once understood by England there was no faltering. Prussia, Austria, the Czar, all acknowledged the new Empire, and made peace or alliance with its despot, but from the rupture of the Peace of Amiens England waged a war without truce till Elba and Ste. Hélène.
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.
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.
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. Anintransigeant, an irreconcilable, this King Penda, fighting his last battle against this new and hated thing, this Christianism! He lies dead there—he becomes no hanger-on. There you have the spirit of the race. It displays itself in a form not less impressive in the well-known incident in the very era of Penda, described by Bede.
King Eadwine sits in council to discuss the message of Christ, the mansions that await the soul of man, the promise of a life beyond death; and Coifi, one of the councillors, rising, speaks thus: "So seemeth to me the life of man, O King, as when in winter-tide, seated with your thanes around you, out of the storm that rages without a sparrow flies into the hall, and fluttering hither and thither a little, in the warmth and light, passes out again into the storm and darkness. Such is man's life, but whence it cometh and whither it goeth we know not." "We ne kunnen," as Alfred the Great, its first translator, ends the passage. Who does not see—notwithstanding the difference of time, place, character, and all stage circumstance—who does not see rise before him the judgment-hall of Socrates, hear the solemn last words to his judges: "I go to death, and you to life, but which of us goeth to the better is known to God alone—+adêlon pantì plén é tô theô+"?
Such is the stern and high manner in which this conflict in England between the religions of Woden and Christ is conducted. There in the seventh century is the depth of heart, the energy of soul, the pity and the insight which appear in other forms in after ages. The roll of English names in theActa Sanctorumis 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 thewillto possess it and the resolution to die for that will, confers.
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 EnglishWelt-wanderung, who close the merely formative period of England, illustrate this conspicuously. If the sombre fury of the Winwaed displays the stern depths of religious conviction in the vanguard of our race, if the Eddas and Myths argue a religious earnestness not less deep in the Vikings, the high seriousness of the religious emotion of the Norseman is not less clearly attested. Europe of the eleventh century holds three men, each of heroic proportions, each a Teuton in blood—Hildebrand, Robert Guiscard, and William the Conqueror. In intellectual vision, in spiritual insight, Hildebrand has few parallels in history. He is the founder of the Mediaeval Papacy, realizing in its orders of monks, priests, and crusaders a State not without singular resemblances to that which Plato pondered. Like Napoleon and like Buonarroti, Hildebrand had the power, during the execution of one gigantic design, of producing others of not less astonishing vastness, to reinforce or supplant the first should it fail. One of his designs originated in the impression which Norman genius made upon him. It was to transform this race, the tyrants of the Baltic and the English seas, the dominators of the Mediterranean and the Aegean, into omnipresent emissaries and soldiers of the theocratic State whose centre was Rome. But the vastness of his original design broke even the mighty will of Hildebrand; his purpose with regard to the Norseman remains like some abandoned sketch by Buonarroti or Tintoretto. Yet no ruler of men had a profounder knowledge of character, and with the Viking nature circumstance had rendered him peculiarly familiar. The judgment of Orderic and of William of Malmesbury confirms the impression of Hildebrand. But the Normans have been their own witnesses, the cathedrals which they raised from the Seine to the Tyne are epics in stone, inspired by no earthly muse, fit emblems of the rock-like endurance and soaring valour of our race.
There is a way of writing the history of Senlac which Voltaire, Thierry, Michelet, and Guizot dote upon, infecting certain English historians with their complacency, as if the Norse Vikings were the descendants of Chlodovech, and the conquest of England were the glory of France. The absurdity was crowned in 1804, when Napoleon turned the attention of his subjects to the history of 1066, as an auspicious study for the partners of his great enterprise against the England of Pitt! How many Franks, one asks, followed the red banner of the Bastard to Senlac, or, leaning on their shields, watched the coronation at Westminster? Nor was it in the valley of the Seine that the Norsemen acquired their genius for religion, for government, for art. To the followers of Hrolf the empire of Charlemagne had the halo which the Empire of Rome had to the followers of Alaric, and in that spirit they adopted its language and turned its laws to their own purposes. But Jutes and Angles and Saxons, Ostmen and Danes, were, if less assiduous, not less earnest pupils in the same school as the Norsemen: to all alike, the remnant of the Frankish realm of Charles lay nearest, representing Rome and the glory of the Caesars. Nature and her affinities drew the Normans to the West, across the salt plains whither for six hundred years the most adventurous of their own blood had preceded them. They closed the movement towards the sunset which Jute and Saxon began; they are the last, the youngest, and in politics the most richly gifted; yet in other departments of human activity not more richly gifted than their kindred who produced Cynewulf and Caedmon, Aidan and Bede, Coifi and Dunstan. And who shall affirm from what branch of the stock the architects of the sky-searching cathedrals sprang?
Senlac is thus in the line of Heptarchic battles; it is the last struggle for the political supremacy over all England amongst those various sections of the Northern races who in the way of six hundred years make England, and who in their religious and political character lay the unseen foundations of Imperial Britain.
Two traits of the Norman character impress the greatest of their contemporary historians, William of Malmesbury—the Norman love of battle and the Norman love of God. Upon these two ideas the history of the Middle Age turns. The crusader, the monk, the troubadour, the priest, the mystic, the dreamer and the saint, the wandering scholar and the scholastic philosopher, all derive thence. Chivalry is born. The knight beholds in his lady's face on earth the image of Our Lady in Heaven, the Virgin-Mother of the Redeemer of men. From the grave of his dead mistress Ramon Lull withdraws to a hermit's cell to ponder the beauty that is imperishable; and over the grave of Beatrice, Dante rears a shrine, a temple more awful, more sublime than any which even that age has carved in stone.
Into this theatre of tossing life, the nation which the followers of Cerdic and Knut and of William the Conqueror have formed enters greatly. In thought, in action, in art, something of the mighty rôle which the future centuries reserve for her is portended. The immortal energy, the love of war, the deep religious fervour of England find in the Crusades, as by God's own assignment, the task of her heart's desire. We have but to turn to the churches of England, to study the Templars carved upon their sepulchres, to know that in that great tournament of the world the part of the Franks, if the noisier and more continuous, was not more earnest. How singular is the chance, if it be chance, which confronts the followers of the new faith with a Penda, and the followers of the crescent with a Richard Lion-heart! Upon the shifting Arabic imagination he alone of the infidels exercises enduring sway. The hero of Tasso has no place in Arab history, but the memory of Richard is there imperishably. Richard's services to England are not the theme of common praise, yet, if we estimate the greatness of a king by another standard than roods of conquered earth, or roods of parchment blackened with unregarded statutes, Richard I, crusader and poet, must be reckoned amongst the greatest of his great line, and his name to the Europe of the Middle Age was like the blast of a trumpet announcing the England of the years to come.
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 ofpraemunire, a generation later, prepares the way for Wyclif. The Papacy is now but an appanage of the Valois monarchs. How shall England, conqueror of those monarchs at Creçy and on other fields, reverence Rome, the dependent of a defeated antagonist?
The same bright energy of the soul, the same awe, rooted in the blood of our race, which manifest themselves in the early and Middle Ages, determine the character of the religious history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the fifteenth century, suffering and the presence of suffering, the law of tragedy of which we have spoken, add their transforming power to spiritual life. As in political life the sympathy with the wrongs of others grows into imaginative justice, so sympathy with the faiths of others, which springs from the consciousness of the first great illusion lost, and sorrow for a vanished ideal, grows into tolerance for the creeds and religions of others. For only a race deep-centred in its own faith, yet sensitive to the faith that is in others, can understand the religion of others; only such a race can found an empire characterized at once by freedom and by faith.
The very ardour of the belief of the race in the ideal from Rome—a Semitic ideal, transmuted by Roman genius and policy—swept the Teutonic imagination beyond the ideal, seeking its sources where Rome herself had sought them. This is the impulse which binds the whole English Reformation, the whole movement of English religious thought from Wyclif to Cromwell and Milton, to Wordsworth and Carlyle. It is this common impulse of the race which Henry VIII relies upon, and because he is in this their leader the English people forgets his absolutism, his cruel anger, his bloody revenges.
The character of the English Reformation after the first tumultuous conflicts, the fierce essays of royal theocracy and Jesuit reactionism, set steadily towards Liberty of Conscience.
This spirit is glorified in Puritanism, the true heroic age of the Reformation. It appears, for example, in Oliver Cromwell himself. Cromwell is one of the disputed figures in our history, and every English historian has drawn his own Cromwell. But to foreign historians we may look for a judgment less partial, less personal. Dr. Döllinger, for instance, to whom wide sympathy and long and profound study of history have given the right, which can only be acquired by vigil and fasting, to speak about the characters of the past—he who by his position as Romanist is no pledged admirer, describes Cromwell as the "prophet of Liberty of Conscience."[2] This is the deliberate judgment of Döllinger. It was the judgment of the peasants of the Vaudois two hundred and fifty years ago! Somewhat the same impression was made by Cromwell upon Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Guizot.
Again in the seventeenth century, in theIreneof Drummond, and in the remarkable work of Barclay, theArgenis,[3] in its whole conception of the religious{72}life, of monasticism, as in its idealization of the character of the great Henri Quatre, you find the same desire for a wider ideal, not less in religion than in politics. We encounter it later in Shaftesbury and in Locke. It is the essential thought of the work of Thomas Hobbes. It is supremely and beautifully expressed in Algernon Sidney, the martyr of constitutional freedom and of tolerance.
And what is the faith of Algernon Sidney? One who knew him well, though opposed to his party, said of him, "He regards Christianity as a kind of divine philosophy of the mind." Community of religious not less than of political aims binds closer the friendship of Locke and Shaftesbury. In the preparation of a constitution for the Carolinas they found the opportunity which Corsica offered to Rousseau. In theLetters on Toleration[4] Locke did but expand the principles upon which, with Shaftesbury's aid, he elaborated the government of the new State. The Record Office has no more precious document than the draught of that work, the margins covered with corrections in the handwriting of these two men, the one the greatest of the Restoration statesmen, the other ranking amongst the greatest speculative thinkers of his own or any age. One suggested formula after another is traceable there, till at length the decision is made, that from the citizens of the new State shall be exacted, not adherence to this creed or to that, but simply the declaration, "There is a God." Algernon Sidney aids Penn in performing a similar task for Pennsylvania, and their joint work is informed by the same spirit as the "Constitutions" of Locke and Shaftesbury.
Thus in religion the men of the seventeenth century occupy a position analogous to their position in politics, already delineated. In politics, as we have seen, they establish a constitutional government, and make sure the path to the wider freedom of the future. In religion they fix the principles of that philosophic tolerance which the later centuries develop and apply. Both in politics and in religion they turn aside from the mediaeval imperialism of Bourbon and Hapsburg, consciously or unconsciously preparing the foundations of the Imperialism of to-day.
If the divines, scholars, poets, and wits who met and talked under the roof of the young Lord Falkland at Tew represent in their religious and civil perplexities the spirit of the seventeenth century, within the intersecting circles of Pope and Bolingbroke, Swift and Addison, may be found in one form or another all the varied impulses of the eighteenth—intellectual, political, scientific, literary, or religious. England had succeeded to the place which Holland filled in the days of Descartes and Spinoza—the refuge of the oppressed, the home of political and religious freedom, the study of Montesquieu, the asylum of Voltaire.[5] Yet between the England of the eighteenth and the England of the seventeenth century there is no such deep gulf fixed as Carlyle at one period of his literary activity imagined. The one is the organic inevitable growth of the other. The England which fought at Blenheim, Fontenoy, and Quebec is the same England as fought at Marston Moor and Dunbar. Chatham rescued it from a deeper abasement than that into which it had fallen in the days of the Cavalier parliaments, and it followed him to heights unrecked of by Cromwell. Nor is the religious character of the century less profound, less earnestly reverent, when rightly studied. Even its scepticism, its fiery denials, or vehement inquiry—a Woolston's, for instance, or a Cudworth's, like a Shelley's or a James Thomson's[6] long afterwards—spring from no love of darkness, but from the immortal ardour for the light, for Truth, even if there come with it silence and utter death. And from this same ardour arises that extraordinary outburst of varied intellectual and religious effort, critical or constructive, which makes the Revolutionary and the Georgian eras comparable in energy, if not in height of speculative inquiry, to the great period of theAufklärungin Germany. Kant acknowledged his indebtedness to Hume. Rousseau, Voltaire, Condillac, and Helvetius are in philosophic theory but pupils of Locke.
Towards the close of the century appeared Gibbon's great work, theDecline and Fall, a prose epic in seventy-one books, upon the last victories, the last triumphs, and the long, reluctant death-struggles of the Roman Empire, the insidious advance of inner decay, the ever-renewed assaults of foreign violence, the Goth, the Saracen, the Mongol, and at the close, the leaguering lines of Mahomet, the farewell to the Greeks of the last of the Constantines, the Ottomans in the palaces of the Caesars, and the melancholy musings of an Italian scholar over the ruins on the Seven Hills. An epic in prose—and every one of its books might be compared to the gem-encrusted hilt of a sword, and each wonderfully wrought jewel is a sentence; but the point of the sword, like that of the cherubim, is everywhere turned against superstition, bigotry, and religious wrong.
David Hume's philosophy was more read[7] in France than in Scotland or England, but Hume wrote one book here widely read, hisHistory of England. It has been superseded, but it did what it aimed at doing. There are certain books which, when they have done their work, are forgotten, theDialectiqueof Ramus, for instance. This is not to be regretted. Hume'sHistory of Englandis one of these books. For nearly four generations it was the only History of England that English men and women read. It was impossible that a man like Hume, the central principle of whose life was the same as that of Locke, Shaftesbury, Gibbon—the desire for a larger freedom for man's thought—it was impossible for him to write without saturating every page with that purpose, and it was impossible that three generations could read thatHistorywithout being insensibly, unconsciously transformed, their aspirations elevated, their judgments moulded by contact with such a mind as that of Hume.
Recently the work of the great intellects of these two centuries bears fruit in our changed attitude towards Ireland, in the emancipation of the Catholics there; in our changed attitude towards the Jews, towards the peoples of India, towards Islam. Edward Gibbon and Hume laid the foundation of that college which is rising at Khartoum for the teaching of Mohammedanism under the Queen. It was not only Lord Kitchener who built it; John Locke, John Milton built it.
The saint, the crusader, the monk, reformer, puritan, and nonjuror lead in unbroken succession to the critic, the speculative thinker, the analytic or synthetic philosopher of the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, these representing Imperial Britain, as the former represent national or feudal England. Erigena in the ninth century surveying all things as from a tall rock, Dunstan, Roger Bacon wasting in a prison "through the incurable stupidity of the world," as he briefly explains it, Michael Scott, Hooker, Bacon, Glanvil, Milton, and Locke, formed by England, these men have in turn guided or informed the highest aspirations, the very heart of the race. The greatest empire in the annals of mankind is at once the most earnestly religious and the most tolerant. Her power is deep-based as the foundations of the rocks, her glance wide as the boundaries of the world, far-searching as the aeons of time.
Yet it is not only from within, but from without, that this transformation in the spirit of England has been effected; not only from within by the work of a Sidney, a Gibbon, but from without by the influence, imperceptible yet sure, of the faiths and creeds of the Oriental peoples she conquers. The work of the Arabists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such men as the Pocockes,[8] father and son, Ockley and Sale, supplements or expands the teaching of Locke and of Hume. The industry of Ross, the enthusiastic studies of Sir William Jones, brought the power of Persian and Indian thought to bear upon the English mind, and the efforts of all these men seem to converge in one of the greatest literary monuments of the present century—The Sacred Books of the East.
Thus then we have seen this immortal "energy of the soul" in religion and thought, as in politics, manifest itself in like aspirations towards imaginative freedom, the higher freedom and the higher justice, summed in the phrase "Elargissez Dieu," that man's soul, dowered with the unfettered use of all its faculties, may set towards the lodestar of its being, harmony with the Divine, whether it be through freedom in religious life or in political life or in any other form of life. For all life, all being, is organic, ceaselessly transformed, ceaselessly transforming, ceaseless action and interaction, like that vision of Goethe's of the golden chalices ascending and descending perpetually between heaven and this dark earth of ours.
Before leaving this part of our subject, the testimony of the past, there is one more question to consider, though with brevity. The great empires or imperial races of the past, Hellas, Rome, Egypt, Persia, Islam, represent each a distinct ideal—in each a separate aspect of the human soul, as the characterizing attribute of the race, seems incarnate. In Hellas, for example, it is Beauty, +tò kalón+; in Rome, it is Power; in Egypt, Mystery, as embodied in her temples, half-underground, or in the Sphinx that guards the sepulchres of her kings; whilst in Persia, Beauty and Aspiration seem to unite in that mystic curiosity which is the feature at once of her religion, her architecture, her laws, of Magian ritual and Gnostic theurgy. Other races possess these qualities, love of beauty, the sense of mystery; but in Hellas and in Egypt they differentiate the race and all the sections of the race.
What characteristic, then, common to the whole Teutonic race, does this Empire of Britain represent? Apart altogether from its individual ideal, political or religious, what attribute of the race, distinguishing it from other races, the Hellenic, the Roman, the Persian, does it eminently possess?
Compare, first of all, the beginnings of the people of England with the beginnings of the Hellenic people, or better, perhaps, with the beginnings of Rome. Who founded the Roman State? There is one fact about which the most recent authorities agree with the most ancient, that Rome was founded much as Athens was founded, by desperate men from every city, district, region, in Italy. The outlaw, the refugee from justice or from private vengeance, the landless man and the homeless man—these gathered in the "Broad Plain," or migrated together to the Seven Hills, and by the very extent of the walk which they traced marked the plan which the Rome of the Caesars filled in. This process may have extended over a century—over two centuries; Rome drawing to itself ever new bands of adventurers, desperate in valour and in fortune as the first. Who are the founders of England, of Imperial Britain? They are those "co-seekers,"conquœstores, I have spoken of, who came with Cerdic and with Cynric, the chosen men, that is to say, the most adventurous, most daring, most reckless—the fittest men of the whole Teutonic kindred; and not for two centuries merely, but for six centuries, this "land of the Angles," stretching from the Forth and Clyde to the Channel, from Eadwine's Burgh to Andredeswald, draws to itself, and is gradually ever peopled closer and closer with, Vikings and Danes, Norsemen and Ostmen, followers of Guthrum, and followers of Hrolf, followers of Ivar and followers of William I. They come in "hundreds," they come in thousands. Into England, as into some vast crucible, the valour of the earth pours itself for six hundred years, till, molten and fused together, it arises at last one and undivided, the English Nation. Such was the foundation, such the building of the Empire, and these are the title-deeds which even in its first beginnings this land can show.
And of the inner race character as representative of the whole Teutonic kindred, the testimony is not less sure. What a heaven of light falls upon the Hellas of the Isles, that period of its history which does not begin, but ends with the Iliad and with the Odyssey—works that sum up an old civilization! Already is born that beauty which, whether in religion, or in art, or in life, Hellas made its own for ever. And it is not difficult to trace back the descent of the ideal of Virgil and of Cicero to the shepherds and outlaws of the Seven Hills. The infinite curiosity of Persia, the worshipper of flame, is anticipated on its earliest monuments, and the mystery of Egypt is coeval with its first appearance in history. But of England and the Teutonic race what shall one say? A characteristic universal in Teutonic history is the extent to which the speculative or metaphysical pervades the practical, the political, and social conditions of life. Freedom and deathless courage are its inheritance; but these throughout its history are accompanied by certain vaguer tendencies of thought and aspiration, the touch of things unseen, those impulses beyond the finite towards the Infinite, which display themselves so conspicuously in later ages. In the united power of these two worlds, the visible and the invisible, upon the Teutonic imagination, in this alternate sway of Reality and Illusion, must be sought the characteristic of this race. In the Faust legend, which, in one form or another, the race has made its own, it attains a supreme embodiment. In the Oriental imagination the sense of the transiency of life passes swiftly into a disdain for life itself, and displays itself in a courage which arises less from hope than from apathy or despair. But the death-defiant courage of the Viking springs from no disdain of life, but from the scorn of death, hazarding life rather than the hope upon which his life is set.
This characteristic can be traced throughout the range of Teutonic art and Teutonic literature, and even in action. The spirit which originates theVölker-wanderung, for instance, reappears in the half-unconscious impulses, the instinctive bent of the race, which lead the brave of Europe generation by generation for two hundred years to the crusades. They found the grave empty, but the craving of the heart was stayed, the yearning towards Asgard, the sun-bright eastern land, where were Balder and the Anses, and the rivers and meadows unfading, whence ages ago their race had journeyed to the forest-gloom and mists by the Danube and the Rhine, by the Elbe and the Thames.
Thus, then, as Beauty is impersonated in Hellas, Mystery in Egypt, so this attribute which we may name Reverie is impersonated in the Teutonic race.
And in the Anglo-Saxon branch of the great Teutonic kindred, this attribute, this Reverie, the divided sway of the actual and of the dream-world, attests its presence and its power from the earliest epochs. It has left its impress, its melancholy, its restlessness, its infinite regret, upon the verse of Cynewulf and Caedmon, whilst in the devotion of the saint, the scholar, the hermit, and of much of the common life of the time to the ideal of Calvary, its presence falls like a mystic light upon the turbulence and battle-fury of the eighth and ninth centuries. It adds the glamour as from a distant and enchanted past to chivalrous romance and to the crusader's and the pilgrim's high endeavour. It cast its spell upon the Tudor mariners and made the ocean their inheritance. In later times it reappears as the world-impulse which has made our race a native of every climate, yet jealous of its traditions, proud of its birth, unsubdued by its environment.
If in the circuit they marked out for the walls of early Rome its first founders seemed to anticipate the eternal city, so on the high seas the founders of England, Jute, Viking, and Norseman seem to foreshadow the Empire of the World, and by the surge or in the forest solitude, already to meditate the terror, the sorrow, and the mystery, and the coming harmonies, ofFaustusandLear, ofHamletandAdonais.