The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain Part 11

Voltaire announces the coming of the Third Age--"Blessed are the young, for their eyes shall behold it"--and upon the ruins of the Bastille Charles James Fox sees it arise. "By how much," he writes to a friend, "is not this the greatest event in the history of the world!" Its presence shakes the steadfast heart of Goethe like a reed. Wordsworth, Schiller, Chateaubriand pledge themselves its hierophants--for a time!

The _Wahn_ of freedom, the eternal illusion, the dream of the human heart! First to France, then to Europe, then to all the earth--Freedom!

This is the faith for which the Girondins perish, and in dying bequeath to the nineteenth century the theory of man's destiny which informs its poetry, its speculative science, its systematic philosophy. It is the faith of Sh.e.l.ley and of Fichte, of Herbart and of Comte, of John Stuart Mill, La.s.saulx, Quinet, not less than of Tennyson, last of the Girondins. For the ideal of the Third Age, freedom, knowledge, the federation of the world, pa.s.ses as the ideals of the First and of the Second Age pa.s.s. Not in political any more than in religious freedom could man's unrest find a panacea. The new heavens and the new earth which Voltaire proclaimed vanished like the city which Tertullian saw beyond the sunset.

And knowledge--of what avail is knowledge?--or to scan the abysses of s.p.a.ce and search the depths of time? If the utmost dreams of science, and all the moral and political aims of Girondinism were realized, if the foundations of life and of being were laid bare, if the curve of every star were traced, its laws determined, and its structure a.n.a.lysed, if the revolutions of this globe from its first hour, and the annals of all the systems that wheel in s.p.a.ce, were by some miracle brought within our scrutiny--it still would leave the spirit unsatisfied as when these crystal walls did first environ its infinitude.

The defects, the n.o.bility, and the beauty of the ideal of the Third Age are conspicuous in the great last work of Condorcet. As Mirabeau, the intellectual Catiline of his age, is the protagonist of Rebellion, that principle which has drawn the deepest utterances from the world-soul, from Job to Prometheus and Farinata, so Condorcet, whose countenance in its high and gentle benevolence seems the very expression of that _bienfaisance_ which the Abbe de Saint-Pierre made fashionable, may be styled the high-priest of Girondinism, and he carries his faith beyond the grave, hallowing the altar of Freedom with his blood. In over a hundred pamphlets during the four years of his life as a Revolutionist, Condorcet disseminates his ideas--fortnightly pamphlets, many of them even now worth reading, lighting up now this, now that aspect of his faith--kingship, slavery, the destiny of man, two Houses, a.s.signats, education of the people, finance, the rights of man, economics, free trade, the rights of women, the Progress of the Human Mind. It is in this last, written with the shadow of death upon him, that the central thought of his system is developed. He may have derived it from Turgot,[5] his master, and the subject of one of his n.o.blest biographies, but he gave it a consecration of his own, and later writers have done little more than elaborate, vary, or reduce to scientific rule and line his living thought. Where they most are faithful, there his followers are greatest.

In the theory of evolution Condorcet's principles appear to find scientific expression and warrant, but it is pathetic to observe the speculative science of a modern systematizer advancing through volume after volume with the c.u.mbrous but ma.s.sive force of a traction-engine, only to find rest at last in a vision of Utopia some centuries hence, tedious as the Paradise of mediaeval poets or the fabulous Edens of earlier times.

Indeed, the conception of the infinite perfectibility of man, and of an eternal progress, carried its own doom in the familiar observation that there where progress can be traced, there the divine is least immanent.

A distinguished statesman and writer, and a believer in evolution, recently avowed his perplexity that an age like the present, which has invented steam, electricity, and the kinematograph, should in painting and poetry not surpa.s.s the Renaissance, nor in sculpture the age of Phidias. In such perplexity is it not as if one heard again the threat of Mummius, charging his crew to give good heed to the statues of Praxiteles, on the peril of replacing them if broken!

Goethe, as the wrecks of his drama on Liberty prove, felt the might of the ideal of the Third Age with all the vibrating emotion which genius imparts.[6] But he was the first to discover its hollowness, and bade the world, in epigram or in prose tale, in lyric or in drama, to seek its peace where he himself had found it, in Art. So the labour of the scientific theorist, negatively beneficent by the impulsion of man's spirit beyond science, brings also a reward of its own to the devotee.

The sun of Art falls in a kind of twilight upon his soul, working obscurely in words, and then does he most know the Unknowable when, in the pa.s.sion of self-imposed ignorance, he rises to a kind of eloquence in proclaiming its unknowableness. Glimmerings from the Eternal visit the obscure study where the soul in travail records patiently the incidents of Time, and elaborates a theory of man's history as if it were framed to end like an Adelphi melodrama or a three-volume novel.

-- 4. THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE

But from those very failures, those dissatisfactions, the ideal of the Fourth Age is born, and the law of a greater progress divined. For the soul, revolting at last against the fleeting illusions of time, the deceiving Edens of saint, reformer, and revolutionist, freedom from the body, freedom from religious, or freedom from political oppression, sets steadily towards the lodestar of its being, whose rising is not in Time nor its going down in s.p.a.ce. Nor is it in knowledge, whether of the causes of things, or of the achievements of statesmen, warriors, legislators, that the peace of the infinite is to be found, but in a vision of that which was when Time and Cause were not. Then instruction and the ma.s.sed treasures of knowledge, established or theoretic, concerning the past and the future of the planet on which man plays his part, or of other planets on which other forms of being play their parts, do indeed dissolve and are rolled together like a scroll. The Timeless, the Infinite, like a burst of clear ether, an azure expanse washed of clouds, lures on the delighted spirit, tranced in ecstasy.

For the symbol of this universe and of man's destiny is not the prolongation of a line, nor of groups of lines organically co-ordinate, but, as it were, a sphere shapen from within and moulded by that Presence whose immanence, ever intensifying, is the Thought which time realizes as the Deed. Man looks to the future and the coming of Eternity. How shall the Eternal come or the Infinite be far off?

Behold, the Eternal is _now_, and the Infinite is _here_. And if the high-upreared architecture of the stars, and the changing fabric of the worlds, be but shadows, and the pageantry of time but a dream, yet the dreamer and the dream are G.o.d.

If all be Illusion, yet this faith that all is Illusion can be none.

There the realm of Illusion ends, here Reality begins. And thus the spirit of man, having touched the mother-abyss, arises victorious in defeat to fix its gaze at last, steadfast and calm, upon the Eternal.

Such is the distinction of the Fourth Age, whose light is all about us, flooding in from the eastern windows yonder like a great dawn. Man's spirit, tutored by lost illusion after lost illusion, advances to an ever deeper reality. The race, too, like the individual and the nation, is subject to the Law of Tragedy. Once more, in the way of a thousand years, it knows that it is not in time, nor in any cunning manipulation or extension of the things of time, that Man the Timeless can find the word which sums his destiny, and spurning at the phantoms of s.p.a.ce, save as they grant access to the s.p.a.celess, casts itself back upon G.o.d, and in art, thought, and action pierces to the Infinite through the finite.

This mystic attribute, this _elan_ of the soul, discovers a fellowship in thinkers wide apart in circ.u.mstance and mental environment. It is, for instance, the trait which Schopenhauer, Tourgenieff,[7] Flaubert, and Carlyle possess in common[8]. These men are not as others of their time, but prophet voices that announce the Fourth, the latest Age, whose dawn has laid its hand upon the eastern hills.

The restless imagination of Flaubert, fused from the blood of the Nors.e.m.e.n, plunges into one period after another, Carthage, the Rome of the Caesars, Syria, Egypt, and Galilee, the unchanging East, and the monotony in change of the West, pursuing the one Vision in many forms, the Vision which leads on Carlyle from stage to stage of a course curiously similar. Flaubert has a wider range and more varied sympathies than Carlyle, and in intensity of vision occasionally surpa.s.ses him. Both are mystics, visionaries, from their youth; but in ethics Flaubert seems to attain at a bound the point of view which the dragging years alone revealed to Carlyle.

The chapter on the death of Frederick the Great reads like a pa.s.sage from the _Correspondance_ of Flaubert in his first manhood. In Saint Antoine, Flaubert found the secret of the same mystic inspiration as Carlyle found in Cromwell. To the brooding soul of the hermit, as to that of the warrior of Jehovah, what is earth, what are the shapes of time? Man's path is to the Eternal--_dem Grabe hinan_--and from the study of the Revolution of 1848 Flaubert arises with the same embittered insight as marks the close of "Frederick the Great."

And if, in such later works as Flaubert's _Bouvard et Pecuchet_ and the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ of Carlyle, only the difference between the two minds is apparent, the difference is, after all, but a difference in temperament. It is the contrast between the impa.s.sive aloofness of the artist, and the personal and intrusive vehemence of the prophet.

The structural thought, the essential emotion of the two works are the same--the revolt of a soul whose impulses are ever beyond the finite and the transient, against a world immersed in the finite and the transient. Hence the derision, the bitter scorn, or the laughter with which they cover the pretensions, the hypocrisies, the loud claims of modern science and mechanical invention. But whether surveyed with contemplative calm, or proclaimed with pa.s.sionate remonstrance to an unheeding generation, the life vision of these two men is one and the same--"the eternities, the immensities."[9]

And this same pa.s.sion for the infinite is the informing thought of Wagner's tone-dramas and Tschaikowsky's symphonies. Love's mystery is deepened by the mystery of death, and its splendour has an added touch by the breath of the grave. The desire of the infinite greatens the beauty of the finite and lights its sanctuary with a supernatural radiance. All knowledge there becomes wonder. Truth is not known, but the soul is there in very deed possessed by the Truth, and is one with it eternally.

Ibsen's protest against limited horizons, against theorists, formulists, social codes, conventions, derives its justice from the worthlessness of those conventions, codes, theories, in the light of the infinite. The achievements in art most distinctive of the present age--the paintings of Courbet, Whistler, Degas, for instance--proclaim the same creative principle, the unsubstantiality of substance, the immateriality of matter, the mutability of all that seems most fixed, the unreality of all things, save that which was once the emblem of unreality, the play of line and colour, and their impression upon the retina of the eye. "If I live to be a hundred, I shall be able to draw a line," said Hokousai. It was as if he had said, "I shall be able to create a world."

The pressing effects of Imperialism in such an environment, its swift influences upon the life of an age thus conditioned, thus sharply defined from all preceding ages, are of an import which it would be hard to over-estimate. The nation undowered with such an ideal, menaced with extinction or with a gradual depression to the rank of a protected nationality, pa.s.ses easily, as in France and Holland and in the higher grades of Russian society, to the side of political and commercial indifferentism, of artistic or literary cosmopolitanism.

But to a race dowered with the genius for empire, it rescues politics from the taint of local or transient designs, and imparts to public affairs and the things of State that elevation which was their characteristic in the Rome of Virgil and the England of Cromwell. For not only the life of the individual, but the life of States, is by this conception robed in something of its initial wonder. These, the individual and the State, as we have seen, are but separate phases, aspects of one thought, that thought which in the Universe is realized.

And the transformations in man's conception of his relations to the divine are in turn fraught with consequence to the ideal of imperialism itself. Life is greatened. The ardour of the periods of history most memorable awakens again in man, the reverence of the Middle Age, the energy of the Renaissance. A higher mood than that of the England of Cromwell has arisen upon the England of to-day. Man's true peace is not in the finite, but in the infinite; yet in the finite there is a work to be done, with the high disregard of a race which looks, not to the judgment of men, but of angels, whose appeal is not to the opinion of the world, but of G.o.d.

Here at the close of a century, side by side existing are two ideals, one political, the other religious, "a divine philosophy of the mind,"

in Algernon Sidney's phrase--how can the issue and event be other than auspicious to this empire and to this generation of men? As Puritanism seemed born for the ideal of Const.i.tutional England, so this ideal of the Fourth Epoch seems born to be the faith of Imperial England.

Behind Cromwell's armies was the faith of Calvin, the philosophy of the "Inst.i.tutes"; behind the French Revolution the thought of Rousseau and Voltaire; but in this ideal, a thought, a speculative vision, deeper, wider in range than Calvin's or Rousseau's, is, with every hour that pa.s.ses, adding a serener life, an energy more profound.

-- 5. THE "ACT" AND THE "THOUGHT"

Carlyle's exaltation of the "deed" above the "word," of action above speech, does not exhaust its meaning in setting the man of deeds, the soldier or the politician, above the thinker or the artist. It is an affirmation of the glory of the sole Actor, the Dramatist of the World, the _Demiourgos_, whose actions are at once the deeds and the thoughts of men. "Im Anfang war die That." The "deed" is nearer the eternal fountain than the "word"; though, on the other hand, in this or that work of art there may converge more rays from the primal source than in this or that deed. In painting, that impressionism which loves the line for the line's sake, the tint for the tint's sake, owes its emotion, sincere or affected, to the same energy of the same divine thought as that from which the baser enthusiasm of the subject-painter flows. A consciousness of the same truth reveals itself in Wagner's lifelong struggle, splendidly heroic, to weld the art of arts into living, pulsing union with the "deed," the action and its setting, from which, in such a work as _Tristan_, or as _Parsifal_, that art's ecstasy or mystery derives.

In the great crises of the world the preliminary actions have always been indefinite, hesitating, or obscure. Indefiniteness is far from proving the insincerity or transiency of Imperialism as an ideal. "A man," says Oliver Cromwell, "never goes so far as when he does not know whither he is going." What Cromwell meant was that, in the great hours of life, the supernatural, the illimitable, thrusts itself between man and the limited, precise ends of common days. Upon such a subject Cromwell has the right to speak. Great himself, he was the cause of the greatness that was in others. But in all things it was still Jehovah that worked in him. Deeply penetrated with this belief, Cromwell had the gift of making his armies live his life, think his thought. Each soldier, horse or foot, was a warrior of G.o.d.

Man's severing, isolating intelligence is in these moments merged in the divine intelligence; but in subjection, then is it most free. The conscious is lost in the unconscious force which works behind the world. The individual will stands aside. The Will of the universe advances. Precision of design and purpose are shrouded in that dark background of Greek tragedy, on which the forms of G.o.ds and heroes, in mortal or immortal beauty, were sketched, subject in all their doings to this high, dread, and austere power.

So of empires, of races, and of nations. A race never goes so far as when it knows not whither it is going, when, rising in the consciousness of its destiny at last, and seeing as yet but a little way in front, it advances, performs that task as if it were its final task, as if no other task was reserved for it by time or by nature.

Consciousness of destiny is the consciousness of the will of G.o.d and of the divine purposes. It is the ident.i.ty of the desire of the race with the desire of the world-soul, and it moves towards its goal with the motion of tides and of planets.

Therefore when in thought we summon up remembrance of those empires of the past, a.s.syria, Egypt, Babylon, h.e.l.las, Rome, and Islam, or those empires of nearer times, Charles's, Napoleon's, Akbar's, when we throw ourselves back in imagination across the night of time, endeavouring to live through their revolutions, and front with each in turn the black portals of the future--what image is this which of itself starts within the mind? Is it not the procession of the gladiators and the amphitheatre of Rome?

Rome beyond all races had the instinct of tragic grandeur in state and public life, and by that instinct even her cruelty is at times elevated through the pageantry or impressive circ.u.mstance amid which it is enacted. Does not this vault then, arching above us, appear but as a vast amphitheatre? And towards the mortal arena the empires of the world, one by one, defile past the high-upreared, dark, and awful throne where sits Destiny--the phalanx of Macedon, the Roman legion, the black banner of the Abba.s.sides, the jewelled mail of Akbar's chivalry, and the Ottoman's crescent moon. And their resolution, serene, implacable, sublime, is the resolution of the gladiators, "Ave, imperator, morituri te salutant! Hail, Caesar, those about to die salute thee!"

And when the vision sinks, dissolving, and night has once more within its keeping cuira.s.s and spear and the caparisons of war, the oppressed mind is beset as by a heavy sound, gathering up from the abysses, deeper, more dread and mysterious than the death-march of heroes--the funeral march of the empires of the world, the requiem of faiths, dead yet not dead, of creeds, inst.i.tutions, religions, governments, laws--till through Time's shadows the Eternal breaks, in silence sweeter than all music, in a darkness beyond all light.

-- 6. BRITAIN'S WORLD-MISSION: THE WITNESS OF THE DEAD TO THE MANDATE OF THE PRESENT

Yet with a resolution as deep-hearted as the gladiator's it is for another cause and unto other ends that the empires of the world have striven, fulfilled their destiny and disappeared, that this Empire of Britain now strives, fulfilling its destiny. Fixed in her resolve, the will of G.o.d behind her, whither is her immediate course? The narrow s.p.a.ce of the path in front of her that is discernible even dimly--whither does it tend or appear to tend?

Empires are successive incarnations of the Divine ideas, and by a principle which, in its universality and omnipotence in the frame of Nature, seems itself an attribute of the Divine, the principle of conflict, these ideas realize their ends in and through conflict. The scientific form which it a.s.sumes in the hypothesis of evolution is but the pragmatic expression of this mystery. Here is the metaphysical basis of the Law of Tragedy, the profoundest law in human life, in human art, in human action. And thus that law, which, as I pointed out, throws a vivid light upon the first essential transformation in the life-history of a State dowered with empire, offers us its aid in interpreting the last transformation of all.

The higher freedom of man in the world of action, and reverie in the domain of thought, are but two aspects of the idea which Imperial Britain incarnates, just as Greek freedom and beauty were aspects of the idea incarnate in h.e.l.las.

The s.p.a.ces of the past are strewn with the wrecks of dead empires, as the abysses where the stars wander are strewn with the dust of vanished systems, sunk without a sound in the havoc of the aeons. But the Divine presses on to ever deeper realizations, alike through vanished races and through vanished universes.

Britain is laying the foundations of States unborn, civilizations undreamed till now, as Rome in the days of Tacitus was laying the foundations of States and civilizations unknown, and by him darkly imagined. For Justice men turn to the State in which Justice has no altar,[10] Freedom no temple; but a higher than Justice, and a greater than Freedom, has in that State its everlasting seat. Throughout her bounds, in the city or on the open plain, in the forest or in the village, under the tropic or in the frozen zone, her subjects shall find Justice and Freedom as the liberal air, so that enfranchised thus, and the unfettered use of all his faculties secured, each may fulfil his being's supreme law.

The highest-mounted thought, the soul's complete attainment, like the summits of the hills, can be the possession only of the few, but the paths that lead thither this empire shall open to the daring climber.

Humanity has left the Calvinist and Jacobin behind. And thus Britain shall become the name of an ideal as well as the designation of a race, the description of an att.i.tude of mind as well as of traits of blood.

Europe has pa.s.sed from the conception of an outwardly composed unity of religion and government to the conception of the inner unity which is compatible with outward variations in creeds, in manners, in religions, in social inst.i.tutions. Harmony, not uniformity, is Nature's end.

Dante, as the years advanced and the poet within him thrust aside the Ghibelline politician, the author of the _De Monarchia_, discerned this ever more clearly. Contemplating the empires of the past, he felt the Divine mystery there incarnate as profoundly as Polybius. In the fourteenth century he dares to see in the Roman people a race not less divinely missioned than the Hebrew. Though contemporary of the generation whose fathers had seen the Inquisition founded, yet like an Arab _soufi_, Dante, the poet of mediaevalism, points to the spot of light far-off, insufferably radiant, yet infinitely minute, the source and centre of all faiths, all creeds, all religions, of this universe itself, and all the desires of men. In an age which silenced the scholastics he founded h.e.l.l in the _Ethics_ of Aristotle, as on a traced plan, and he who in his childhood had heard the story of the great defeat, and of the last of the crusading kings borne homewards on his bier, dares crest his Paradise with the dearest images of Arab poetry, the loveliness of flame and the sweetness of the rose.

What does this import, unless that already the mutual harmonies of the wide earth and of the stars had touched his listening soul, that already he who stayed to hear Casella sing heard far off a diviner music, the tones of the everlasting symphony played by the great Musician of the World, the chords whereof are the deeds of empires, the achievements of the heroes of humanity, and its most mysterious cadences are the thoughts, the faiths, the loftiest utterances of the mind of man?

And to the present age, what an exhortation is implicit in this thought of Dante's! No unity, no bond amongst men is so strong as that which is based on religion. Patriotism, cla.s.s prejudices, ties of affection, all break before its presence. What a light is cast upon the deeper places of the human heart by the history of Jesuitism in the seventeenth century! Genius for religion is rare as other forms of genius are rare, yet both in the life of the individual and of the State its rank is primary. In the soul, religion marks the meridian of the divine. By its remoteness from or nearness to this the value of all else in life is tested. And there is nothing which a race will not more willingly surrender than its religion. The race which changes its religion is either very young, quick to reverence a greater race, and ardent for all experiment, or very old, made indifferent by experience or neglectful by despair.