The Glory of English Prose Part 12

"Hence it is that it is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarra.s.sed action of those about him; and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them.

"The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast; all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make everyone at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation and never wearisome.

"He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort; he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets everything for the best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend. He has too much sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries, and too indolent to bear malice.

"He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain because it is inevitable, to bereavement because it is irreparable, and to death because it is his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering discourtesy of better, perhaps, but less educated minds, who, like blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake the point in argument, waste their strength in trifles, misconceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved than they find it. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed to be unjust, he is as simple as he is forcible, and as brief as he is decisive.

"Nowhere shall we find greater candour, consideration, indulgence; he throws himself into the minds of his opponents, he accounts for their mistakes. He knows the weakness of human reason as well as its strength, its province, and its limits. If he be an unbeliever he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule religion or to act against it; he is too wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic in his infidelity. He respects piety and devotion; he even supports inst.i.tutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to which he does not a.s.sent; he honours the ministers of religion, and it contents him to decline its mysteries without a.s.sailing or denouncing them.

He is a friend of religious toleration, and that, not only because his philosophy has taught him to look on all forms of faith with an impartial eye, but also from the gentleness and effeminacy of feeling which is the attendant on civilisation.

"Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own way, even when he is not a Christian. In that case his religion is one of imagination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, without which there can be no large philosophy. Sometimes he acknowledges the Being of G.o.d, sometimes he invests an unknown principle or quality with the attributes of perfection. And this deduction of his reason, or creation of his fancy, he makes the occasion of such excellent thoughts, and the starting-point of so varied and systematic a teaching, that he even seems like a disciple of Christianity itself. From the very accuracy and steadiness of his logical powers, he is able to see what sentiments are consistent in those who hold any religious doctrine at all, and he appears to others to feel and to hold a whole circle of theological truths, which exist in his mind no otherwise than as a number of deductions.

"Such are the lineaments of the ethical character which the cultivated intellect will form apart from religious principle."

Surely this is a wonderful utterance from a Cardinal of the Church of Rome, full of urbanity and the wisdom of the world.

Your loving old G.P.

[Footnote 1: Pp. 52-57.]

26

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I have in a former letter quoted a short but n.o.ble pa.s.sage from Lord Macaulay on the great Lord Chatham.

But I feel that the writer who was perhaps the greatest essayist that England has ever produced must not in these letters be fobbed off with so slight a notice and quotation.

What has always seemed to me the supremest pa.s.sage that flowed from his wonderful pen is to be found in his paper on Warren Hastings which appeared originally in the _Edinburgh Review_.

His description in that essay of the opening of the great impeachment, has given all succeeding generations a vision of one of the most majestic scenes in the whole history of man.

"There have been spectacles more dazzling to the eye, more gorgeous with jewellery and cloth of gold, more attractive to grown-up children, than that which was then exhibited at Westminster; but, perhaps, there never was a spectacle so well calculated to strike a highly cultivated, a reflecting, an imaginative mind. All the various kinds of interest which belong to the near and to the distant, to the present and to the past, were collected on one spot and in one hour. All the talents and all the accomplishments which are developed by liberty and civilisation were now displayed, with every advantage that could be derived both from co-operation and from contrast. Every step in the proceedings carried the mind either backward, through many troubled centuries, to the days when the foundations of our const.i.tution were laid; or far away, over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars, worshipping strange G.o.ds, and writing strange characters from right to left.

The High Court of Parliament was to sit, according to forms handed down from the days of the Plantagenets, on an Englishman accused of exercising tyranny over the lord of the holy city of Benares, and over the ladies of the princely house of Oude.

"The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of William Rufus, the hall which had resounded with acclamations at the inauguration of thirty kings, the hall which had witnessed the just sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers, the hall where the eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted a victorious party inflamed with just resentment, the hall where Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the placid courage which has half redeemed his fame. Neither military nor civil pomp was wanting. The avenues were lined with grenadiers.

The streets were kept clear by cavalry. The peers, robed in gold and ermine, were marshalled by the heralds under Garter King-at-Arms. The judges in their vestments of state attended to give advice on points of law. Near a hundred and seventy lords, three-fourths of the Upper House as the Upper House then was, walked in solemn order from their usual place of a.s.sembling to the tribunal. The junior Baron present led the way, George Eliot, Lord Heathfield, recently enn.o.bled for his memorable defence of Gibraltar against the fleets and armies of France and Spain. The long procession was closed by the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of the realm, by the great dignitaries, and by the brothers and sons of the King. Last of all came the Prince of Wales, conspicuous by his fine person and n.o.ble bearing. The grey old walls were hung with scarlet. The long galleries were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited the fears or the emulation of an orator.

There were gathered together, from all parts of a great, free, enlightened, and prosperous empire, grace and female loveliness, wit and learning, the representatives of every science and of every art. There were seated round the Queen the fair-haired young daughters of the House of Brunswick. There the Amba.s.sadors of great Kings and Commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no other country in the world could present. There Siddons, in the prime of her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a scene surpa.s.sing all the imitations of the stage. There the historian of the Roman Empire thought of the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen, side by side, the greatest painter and the greatest scholar of the age.

The spectacle had allured Reynolds from that easel which has preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many n.o.ble matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his labours in that dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast treasure of erudition, a treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still precious, ma.s.sive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous charms of her to whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted his faith.

There too was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the Saint Cecilia, whose delicate features, lighted up by love and music, art has rescued from the common decay. There were the members of that brilliant society which quoted, criticised, and exchanged repartees, under the rich peac.o.c.k hangings of Mrs.

Montague. And there the ladies whose lips, more persuasive than those of Fox himself, had carried the Westminster election against palace and treasury, shone round Georgiana, d.u.c.h.ess of Devonshire.

"The Serjeants made proclamation. Hastings advanced to the bar, and bent his knee. The culprit was indeed not unworthy of that great presence. He had ruled an extensive and populous country, had made laws and treaties, had sent forth armies, had set up and pulled down princes. And in his high place he had so borne himself, that all had feared him, that most had loved him, and that hatred itself could deny him no t.i.tle to glory, except virtue. He looked like a great man, and not like a bad man. A person small and emaciated, yet deriving dignity from a carriage which, while it indicated deference to the court, indicated also habitual self-possession and self-respect, a high and intellectual forehead, a brow pensive, but not gloomy, a mouth of inflexible decision, a face pale and worn, but serene, on which was written, as legibly as under the picture in the council-chamber at Calcutta, _Mens aequa in arduis_; such was the aspect with which the great Proconsul presented himself to his judges."

Such a scene can only find its appropriate enactment at the centre of a great empire and amid a people with an august history behind them, conscious of present magnificence and confident of future glory.

We are now far into the second century since that memorable spectacle filled to the walls the great Hall of Westminster.

What was an oligarchy permeated by a fine spirit of liberty and adorned by the sacred principle of personal freedom, has been superseded by a socialistic democracy under which personal freedom suffers frequent curtailments, and liberty is severely abridged by the mandates of trade unions, the prohibitions of urban potentates, and the usurpations of medicine men.

Under these cramping and crippling deprivations we have lost the collective sense of greatness as a race that infused every partic.i.p.ator in the splendid pageant of such an event as the Impeachment of Warren Hastings. One has but to imagine an impeachment to-day with the dominant personages in it chosen from the strike leaders and labour delegates of the proletariat, a.s.sisted by promoted railway porters and enn.o.bled grocers, to perceive what a distance, and down what a declivity we have travelled since those days when it was impossible for any great public function to take place without its becoming naturally and without conscious effort the occasion for a manifestation of the pomp, circ.u.mstance, and splendour inseparable from the solemn acts of a great people performed by their greatest men.

But I am one, Antony, who look forward with steadfast hope and belief to a reaction from our present vulgarity, and to a reascension of England to a greater dignity, honour, and n.o.bleness both in its public and private life than is observable to-day.

Your loving old G.P.

27

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I have not in my letters to you travelled beyond our own islands in search of great English prose, but I propose now to make one divergence from this rule and quote a very great and deservedly far-famed speech, uttered on a memorable occasion, of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States.

At the present time, I think, the name of Lincoln lies closer to the hearts of the American people than that of any other, not even excepting Washington and Hamilton. The latter, though they established American independence, remained in a personal sense English gentlemen till their death. Lincoln was born in the backwoods in rude poverty, received no education but what he acquired by his own unaided efforts, and lived and died a man of the people, the ideal type of native-born American.

He rose from the lowest to the highest position in the State, borne upwards by the simple n.o.bility of his character, by the stainless purity of his actions, and the splendid motive of all his endeavours. His speeches and writings derive their power and distinction from no tricks of oratory, felicity of diction, or nimbleness of mind. They are the vocal results of the beatings of his great heart.

He led his people to war in the manner of a prophet of Israel; with an awful austerity, majestic, invincible, and with hand uplifted in sure appeal to the G.o.d of battles. On the field of Gettysburg, where was waged the most tremendous of all combats of the war, he came to dedicate a cemetery to the innumerable dead, and these were his few and n.o.ble words:--

"Fourscore-and-seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

"But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add of detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so n.o.bly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under G.o.d, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Few are the opportunities in the history of the world when the time, the place, the occasion, and the words spoken, have combined so poignantly to move the hearts of men.

One can imagine the vast concourse standing awestruck and uncovered before the solemn splendour of this n.o.ble dedication, every phrase of which will remain for generations a treasured and sacred memory in countless thousands of homes of the great continent in the West.

Your loving old G.P.

28

MY DEAR ANTONY,

The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of an entirely new style of English prose. The ancient and universal restraints were swept away, the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries was abandoned, and there arose a band of writers, to whom De Quincey and Ruskin were the leaders, who withdrew all veils from their emotions, threw away all the shackles of reserve, and poured their sobs and ecstasies upon us, in soaring periods of impa.s.sioned prose, glittering with decorative alliterations, and adorned with euphonious harmonies of vowel sounds.

This flamboyant style seems to have synchronised with the general decline of reserve and ceremony in English life, and with the rise of the modern familiar intimacy that leaves no privacy even to our thoughts.

Our grandfathers would have hesitated to have discussed at the dinner-table, even after the ladies had withdrawn, what is now set down for free debate at ladies' clubs, and canva.s.sed in the correct columns of the _Guardian_.