Essays in Rebellion Part 3

Lord Morley thought there might be a score, or perhaps even a hundred, of such books in political literature. He himself gave two other instances beside the _Social Contract_. He mentioned _The Inst.i.tutions of the Christian Religion_, of Calvin, "whose own unconquerable will and power to meet occasion made him one of the commanding forces in the world's history." And he mentioned Tom Paine's _Common Sense_ as "the most influential political piece ever composed." I could not, offhand, give a list of seventeen other books of similar power to make up the score. I do not believe so many exist, and as to ninety-seven, the idea need not be considered. There have been books of wide and lasting political influence--Plato's _Republic_, Aristotle's _Politics_, Machiavelli's _Prince_, Hobbes's _Leviathan_, Locke's _Civil Government_, Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, Paine's _Right of Man_, Mill's _Liberty_ and _The Subjection of Women_, Green's _Political Obligation_, and many more. But these are not burning books in the sense in which the _Social Contract_ was a burning book. With the possible exception of _The Subjection of Women_, they were cool and philosophic.

With the possible exception of Machiavelli, their writers might have been professors. The effect of the books was fine and lasting, but they were not aflame. They did not rank as acts. The burning books that rank as acts and devour like purifying fire must be endowed with other qualities.

Such books appear to have been very few, though, in a rapid survey, one is likely to overlook some. In all minds there will arise at once the great memory of Swift's _Drapier's Letters_, pa.s.sionately uttering the simple but continually neglected law that "all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery." Carlyle's _French Revolution_ and _Past and Present_ burnt with similar flame; so did Ruskin's _Unto this Last_ and the series of _Fors Clavigera;_ so did Mazzini's _G.o.d and the People_, Karl Marx's _Kapital_, Henry George's _Progress and Poverty_, Tolstoy's _What shall we do?_ and so did Proudhon's _Qu'est ce que la Propriete?_ at the time of its birth. Nor from such a list could one exclude _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, by which Mrs.

Beecher Stowe antic.i.p.ated the deed of Harper's Ferry nine years before it came.

These are but few books and few authors. With Lord Morley's three thrown in, they still fall far short of a score. Readers will add other names, other books that ranked as acts and burnt like fire. To their brief but n.o.ble roll, I would also add one name, and one brief set of speeches or essays that hardly made a book, but to which Lord Morley himself, at all events, would not be likely to take exception. He mentioned Burke's famous denunciation of Rousseau, and, indeed, the natures and aspects of no two distinguished and finely-tempered men could well be more opposed.

But none the less, I believe that in Burke, before growing age and growing fears and habits chilled his blood, there kindled a fire consuming in its indignation, and driving him to words that, equally with Rousseau's, may rank among the acts of history. In support of what may appear so violent a paradox when speaking of one so often claimed as a model of Conservative moderation and const.i.tutional caution, let me recall a few actual sentences from the speech on "Conciliation with America," published three years before Rousseau's death. The grounds of Burke's imagination were not theoretic. He says nothing about abstract man born free; but, as though quietly addressing the House of Commons to-day, he remarks:

"The Colonies complain that they have not the characteristic mark and seal of British freedom. They complain that they are taxed in a Parliament in which they are not represented."

That simple complaint had roused in the Colonies, thus deprived of the mark and seal of British freedom, a spirit of turbulence and disorder.

Already, under a policy of negation and suppression, the people were driving towards the most terrible kind of war--a war between the members of the same community. Already the cry of "no concession so long as disorders continue" went up from the central Government, and, with pa.s.sionate wisdom, Burke replied:

"The question is not whether their spirit deserves blame or praise, but what, in the name of G.o.d, shall we do with it?"

Then come two brief pa.s.sages which ought to be bound as watchwords and phylacteries about the foreheads of every legislator who presumes to direct our country's destiny, and which stand as a perpetual indictment against all who endeavour to exclude the men or women of this country from const.i.tutional liberties:

"In order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavouring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them in debate without attacking some of those principles or deriding some of those feelings for which our ancestors have shed their blood."

The second pa.s.sage is finer still, and particularly apt to the present civil contest over Englishwomen's enfranchis.e.m.e.nt:

"The temper and character which prevail in our Colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. We cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition.

Your speech would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery."

It may be said that these words, unlike the words with which Rousseau kindled revolution, failed of their purpose. The Government remained deaf and blind to the demand of British freedom; a terrible war was not averted; one of the greatest disasters in our history ensued. None the less, they glow with the true fire, and the book that contains them ranks with acts, and, indeed, with battles. That we should thus be coupling Rousseau and Burke--two men of naturally violent antipathy--is but one of the common ironies of history, which in the course of years obliterates differences and soothes so many hatreds. To be accepted and honoured by the same mind, and even for similar service, the two apparent opposites must have had something in common. What they had in common was the great qualities that Maine discovered in Rousseau--the vivid imagination and the genuine love for their fellow-men; and by imagination I mean the power of realising the thoughts, feelings, and sufferings of others. Thus from these two qualities combined in the presence of oppression, cruelty, or the ordinary stupid and callous denial of freedom, there sprang that flame of indignation from which alone the burning book derives its fire. Examine those other books whose t.i.tles I have mentioned, and their origin will in every case be found the same. They are the flaming children of rage, and rage is begotten by imaginative power out of love for the common human kind.

VI

"WHERE CRUEL RAGE"

"Fret not thyself," sang the cheerful Psalmist--"fret not thyself because of evildoers." For they shall soon be cut down like the gra.s.s; they shall be rooted out; their sword shall go through their own heart; their arms shall be broken; they shall consume as the fat of lambs, and as the smoke they shall consume away; though they flourish like a green bay-tree, they shall be gone, and though we seek them, their place shall nowhere be found.

A soothing consolation lies in the thought. Why should we fl.u.s.ter ourselves, why wax so hot, when time thus brings its inevitable revenges? Composed in mind, let us pursue our own unruffled course, with calm a.s.surance that justice will at length prevail. Let us comply with the dictates of sweetness and light, in reasonable expectation that iniquity will melt away of itself, like a snail before the fire. If we have confidence that vengeance is the Lord's and He will repay, where but in that faith shall we find an outlet for our indignation at once so secure, so consolatory, and so cheap?

It was the pious answer made by Dr. Delany to Swift at the time when, torn by cruel rage, Swift was entering upon the struggle against Ireland's misery. Swift appealed to him one day "whether the corruptions and villainies of men in power did not eat his flesh and exhaust his spirits?" But Delany answered, "That in truth they did not."

"Why--why, how can you help it? How can you avoid it?" asked the indignant heart. And the judicious answer came: "Because I am commanded to the contrary; 'Fret not thyself because of the unG.o.dly.'" Under the qualities revealed in Swift and Delany by that characteristic scene, is also revealed a deeply-marked distinction between two orders of mankind, and the two speakers stand as their types. Dr. Delany we all know. He may be met in any agreeable society--himself agreeable and tolerant, unwilling to judge lest he be judged, solicitous to please, careful not to lose esteem, always welcome among his numerous acquaintances, sweetly reasonable, and devoutly confident that the tale of hideous wrong will right itself without his stir. No figure is more essential for social intercourse, or moves round the cultivated or political circle of his life with more serene success.

To the great comfort of cultivated and political circles, the type of Swift is not so frequent or so comprehensible. What place have those who fret not themselves because of evildoers--what place in their tolerant society have they for uncouth personalities, terrible with indignation?

It is true that Swift was himself accounted a valued friend among the best wits and writers of his time. Bolingbroke wrote to him: "I loved you almost twenty years ago; I thought of you as well as I do now, better was beyond the power of conception." Pope, also after twenty years of intimate friendship, could write of him: "My sincere love of that valuable, indeed incomparable, man will accompany him through life, and pursue his memory were I to live a hundred lives." Arbuthnot could write to him:

"DEAR FRIEND,--The last sentence of your letter plunged a dagger in my heart. Never repeat those sad, but tender, words, that you will try to forget me. For my part, I can never forget you--at least till I discover, which is impossible, another friend whose conversation could procure me the pleasure I have found in yours."

The friends of Swift--the men who could write like this--men like Bolingbroke, Pope, Arbuthnot, Addison, Steele, and Gay--were no sentimentalists; they rank among the shrewdest and most clear-eyed writers of our literature. And, indeed, to me at all events, the difficulty of Swift's riddle lies, not in his savagery, but in his charm. When we think of that tiger burning in the forests of the night, how shall we reconcile his fearful symmetry with eyes "azure as the heavens," which Pope describes as having a surprising archness in them?

Or when a man is reputed the most embittered misanthrope in history, how was it that his intimate friend, Sheridan, could speak of that "spirit of generosity and benevolence whose greatness, and vigour, when pent up in his own breast by poverty and dependence, served only as an evil spirit to torment him"? Of his private generosity, and his consideration for the poor, for servants, and animals, there are many instances recorded. For divergent types of womanhood, whether pa.s.sionate, witty, or intellectual, he possessed the attraction of sympathetic intimacy. A woman of peculiar charm and n.o.ble character was his livelong friend from girlhood, risking reputation, marriage, position, and all that many women most value, just for that friendship and nothing more. Another woman loved him with more tragic destiny. To Stella, in the midst of his political warfare, he could write with the playfulness that nursemaids use for children, and most men keep for their kittens or puppies. In the "Verses on his own Death," how far removed from the envy, hatred, and malice of the literary nature is the affectionate irony of those verses beginning:

"In Pope I cannot read a line, But with a sigh I wish it mine; When he can in one couplet fix More sense than I can do in six, It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, 'Plague take him and his wit.'

I grieve to be outdone by Gay In my own humorous biting way; Arbuthnot is no more my friend Who dares to irony pretend, Which I was born to introduce; Refined it first, and showed its use."

And so on down to the lines:

"If with such talents Heaven has blest 'em, Have I not reason to detest 'em?"

To d.a.m.n with faint praise is the readiest defence of envious failure; but to praise with jealous d.a.m.nation reveals a delicate generosity that few would look for in the hater of his kind. Nor let us forget that Swift was himself the inventor of the phrase "Sweetness and light."

These elements of charm and generosity have been too much overlooked, and they could not redeem the writer's savagery in popular opinion, being overshadowed by that cruel indignation which ate his flesh and exhausted his spirit. Yet it was, perhaps, just from such elements of intuitive sympathy and affectionate goodwill that the indignation sprang. Like most over-sensitive natures, he found that every new relation in life, even every new friendship that he formed, only opened a gate to new unhappiness. The sorrows of others were more to him than to themselves, and, like a man or woman that loves a child, he discovered that his affection only exposed a wider surface to pain. On the death of a lady with whom he was not very intimately acquainted, "I hate life," he cried, "when I think it exposed to such accidents: and to see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth while such as her die, makes me think G.o.d did never intend life for a blessing." It was not any spirit of hatred or cruelty, but an intensely personal sympathy with suffering, that tore his heart and kindled that furnace of indignation against the stupid, the hateful, and the cruel to whom most suffering is due; and it was a furnace in which he himself was consumed. Writing whilst he was still a youth, in _The Tale of a Tub_, he composed a terrible sentence, in which all his rage and pity and ironical bareness of style seem foretold: "Last week," he says, "I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse."

"Only a woman's hair," was found written on the packet in which the memorial of Stella was preserved, and I do not know in what elegy there breathes a prouder or more poignant sorrow.

When he wrote the _Drapier Letters_, Ireland lay before him like a woman flayed. Of the misery of Ireland it was said (I think by Sheridan):

"It fevered his blood, it broke his rest, it drove him at times half frantic with furious indignation, it sunk him at times in abysses of sullen despondency, it awoke in him emotions which in ordinary men are seldom excited save by personal injuries."

This cruel rage over the wrongs of a people whom he did not love, and whom he repeatedly disowned, drove him to the savage denunciations in which he said of England's nominee: "It is no dishonour to submit to the lion, but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of being devoured alive by a rat?" It drove him also to the great principle, still too slowly struggling into recognition in this country, that "all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery." It inspired his _Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures_, in which the advice to "burn everything that came from England except the coals and the people," might serve as the motto of the Sinn Fein movement. And it inspired also that other "Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from being a burden to their Parents and Country, and making them beneficial to the Public.

Fatten them up for the Dublin market; they will be delicious roast, baked, or boiled."

As wave after wave of indignation pa.s.sed over him, his wrath at oppression extended to all mankind. In _Gulliver's Travels_ it is the human race that lies before him, how much altered for the worse by being flayed! But it is not pity he feels for the victim now. In man he only sees the littleness, the grossness, the stupidity, or the brutal degradation of Yahoos. Unlike other satirists--unlike Juvenal or Pope or the author of _Penguin Island_, who comes nearest to his manner--he pours his contempt, not upon certain types of folly or examples of vice, but upon the race of man as a whole. "I heartily hate," he wrote to Pope soon after _Gulliver_ was published, "I heartily hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth." The philanthropist will often idealise man in the abstract and hate his neighbour at the back door, but that was not Swift's way. He has been called an inverted hypocrite, as one who makes himself out worse than he is. I should rather call him an inverted idealist, for, with high hopes and generous expectations, he entered into the world, and lacerated by rage at the cruelty, foulness, and lunacy he there discovered, he poured out his denunciations upon the crawling forms of life whose filthy minds were well housed in their apelike and corrupting flesh--a bag of loathsome carrion, animated by various l.u.s.ts.

"Noli aemulari," sang the cheerful Psalmist; "Fret not thyself because of evildoers." How easy for most of us it is to follow that comfortable counsel! How little strain it puts upon our popularity or our courage!

And how amusing it is to watch the course of human affairs with tolerant acquiescence! Yes, but, says Swift, "amus.e.m.e.nt is the happiness of those who cannot think," and may we not say that acquiescence is the cowardice of those who dare not feel? There will always be some, at least, in the world whom savage indignation, like Swift's, will continually torment.

It will eat their flesh and exhaust their spirits. They would gladly be rid of it, for, indeed, it stifles their existence, depriving them alike of pleasure, friends, and the objects of ambition--isolating them in the end as Swift was isolated. If only the causes of their indignation might cease, how gladly they would welcome the interludes of quiet! But hardly is one surmounted than another overtops them like a wave, nor have the stern victims of indignation the smallest hope of deliverance from their suffering, until they lie, as Swift has now lain for so many years, where cruel rage can tear the heart no more--"Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit."

VII

THE CHIEF OF REBELS

"It is time that I ceased to fill the world," said the dying Victor Hugo, and we recognise the truth of the saying, though with a smile. For each generation must find its own way, nor would it be a consolation to have even the greatest of ancient prophets living still. But yet there breathes from the living a more intimate influence, for which an immortality of fame cannot compensate. When men like Tolstoy die, the world is colder as well as more empty. They have pa.s.sed outside the common dangers and affections of man's warm-blooded circle, lighted by the sun and moon. Their spirit may go marching on; it may become immortal and shine with an increasing radiance, perpetual as the sweet influences of the Pleiades. But their place in the heavens is fixed. We can no longer watch how they will meet the glorious or inglorious uncertainties of the daily conflict. We can no longer make appeal for their succour against the new positions and new encroachments of the eternal adversary. The sudden splendour of action is no longer theirs, and if we would know the loss implied in that difference, let us imagine that Tolstoy had died before the summer of 1908, when he uttered his overwhelming protest against the political ma.s.sacres ordained by Russia.

In place of that protest, in place of the poignant indignation which appealed to Stolypin's hangmen to fix their well-soaped noose around his own old neck, since, if any were guilty, it was he--in place of the shame and wrath that cried, "I cannot be silent!" we should have had nothing but our own memory and regret, murmuring to ourselves, "If only Tolstoy had been living now! But perhaps, for his sake, it is better he is not."

And now that he is dead, and the world is chilled by the loss of its greatest and most fiery personality, the adversary may breathe more freely. As Tolstoy was crossing a city square--I suppose the "Red Square" in Moscow--on the day when the Holy Synod of Russia excommunicated him from the Church, he heard someone say, "Look! There goes the devil in human form!" And for the next few weeks he continued to receive letters clotted with anathemas, d.a.m.nations, threats, and filthy abuse. It was no wonder. To all thrones, dominions, princ.i.p.alities, and powers, to all priests of established religions, to the officials of every kind of government, to the Ministers, whether of parliaments or despots, to all naval and military officers, to all lawyers, judges, jurymen, policemen, gaolers, and executioners, to all tax-collectors, speculators, and financiers, Tolstoy was, indeed, the devil in human form. To them he was the gainsayer, the destroyer, the most shattering of existent forces. And, in themselves, how large and powerful a section of every modern State they are! They may almost be called the Church and State incarnate, and they seldom hesitate to call themselves so. But, against all their authorities, formulae, and traditions, Tolstoy stood in perpetual rebellion. To him their parchments and wigs, their cells and rods and hang-ropes, their mitres, chasubles, vestments, incense, chantings, services, bells, and books counted as so much trumpery. For him external law had no authority. If it conflicted with the law of the soul, it was the soul's right and duty to disregard or break it. Speaking of the law which ordained the flogging of peasants for taxes, he wrote: "There is but one thing to say--that no such law can exist; that no ukase, or insignia, or seals, or Imperial commands can make a law out of a crime." Similarly, the doctrines of the Church, her traditions, sacraments, rituals, and miracles--all that appeared to him to conflict with human intelligence and the law of his soul--he disregarded or denied. "I deny them all," he wrote in his answer to the Holy Synod's excommunication (1901); "I consider all the sacraments to be coa.r.s.e, degrading sorcery, incompatible with the idea of G.o.d or with the Christian teaching." And, as the briefest statement of the law of his soul, he added:

"I believe in this: I believe in G.o.d, whom I understand as Spirit, as Love, as the Source of all. I believe that he is in me, and I in him. I believe that the will of G.o.d is most clearly and intelligibly expressed in the teaching of the man Jesus, whom to consider as G.o.d, and pray to I esteem the greatest blasphemy. I believe that man's true welfare lies in fulfilling G.o.d's will, and his will is that men should love one another, and should consequently do to others as they wish others to do to them--of which it is said in the Gospels that this is the law and the prophets."

The world has listened to rebels against Church and State before, and still it goes shuffling along as best it can under external laws and governments, seeking from symbols, rituals, and miraculous manifestation such spiritual consolation as it may imbibe. To such rebels the world, after burning, hanging, and quartering them for several centuries, has now become fairly well accustomed, though it still shoots or hangs them now and then as a matter of habit. But Tolstoy's rebellion did not stop at Church and State. He rebelled against all the ordinary proposals and ideals of rebels themselves, and to him there was not very much to choose between the Socialism of Marxists and the despotism of Tsars.

Liberals, Radicals, Social Democrats, Social Revolutionists, and all the rest of the reforming or rebellious parties--what were they doing but struggling to re-establish external laws, external governments, officials, and authorities under different forms and different names? In the Liberal movements of the day he took no part, and he had little influence upon the course of revolution. He formed no party; no band of rebels followed the orders of the rebel-in-chief; among all the groups of the first Duma there was no Tolstoyan group, nor could there have been any. When we touch government, he would say, we touch the devil, and it is only by admitting compromise or corruption that men seek to maintain or readjust the power of officials over body and soul. "It seems to me," he wrote to the Russian Liberals in 1896,

"It seems to me now specially important to do what is right quietly and persistently, not only without asking permission from Government, but consciously avoiding partic.i.p.ation in it.... What can a Government do with a man who will not publicly lie with uplifted hand, or will not send his children to a school he thinks bad, or will not learn to kill people, or will not take part in idolatry, or in coronations, deputations, and addresses, or who says and writes what he thinks and feels?... It is only necessary for all these good, enlightened, and honest people whose strength is now wasted in Revolutionary, Socialistic, or Liberal activity (harmful to themselves and to their cause) to begin to act thus, and a nucleus of honest, enlightened, and moral people would form around them, united in the same thoughts and the same feelings.

Public opinion--the only power which subdues Governments--would become evident, demanding freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, justice, and humanity."

From a distance, the bustling politicians and reformers of happier lands might regard this quietism or wise pa.s.siveness as a mere counsel of despair, suitable enough as a shelter in the storm of Russia's tyranny, but having little significance for Western men of affairs. Yet even so they had not silenced the voice of this persistent rebel; for he rose in equal rebellion against the ideals, methods, and standards of European cities. Wealth, commerce, industrial development, inventions, luxuries, and all the complexity of civilisation were of no more account to him than the toys of kings and the tag-rag of the churches. Other rebels had preached the gospel of pleasure to the poor, and had themselves acted on their precepts. Other reformers, even religious reformers, had extolled the delights of women, wine, and song. But here was a man despising these as the things after which the Gentiles seek. Love intrigues, banquets, wealthy establishments, operas, theatres, poetry, and fashionable novels--what had they to do with the kingdom of G.o.d that is within? He touched nothing from which he did not strip the adornment. He left life bare and stern as the starry firmament, and he felt awe at nothing, not even at the starry firmament, but only at the sense of right and wrong in man. He did not summon the poor to rise against "the idle rich," but he summoned the idle rich, the well-to-do, the gentry of independent means, the comfortable annuitants, the sportsmen, the writers and dramatists of pleasure, the artists of triviality, the pretty rhymers, and the people who are too busy for thought, to rise against themselves. It was a much harder summons to obey, and generally they answered with a shrug and a mutter of "madness," "mere asceticism,"

or "a fanatic's intolerance."