The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain Part 4

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.

-- 5. THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST: A FINAL CONSIDERATION

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, h.e.l.las, 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 h.e.l.las, for example, it is Beauty, +t kalon+; 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 h.e.l.las 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 h.e.l.lenic, the Roman, the Persian, does it eminently possess?

Compare, first of all, the beginnings of the people of England with the beginnings of the h.e.l.lenic 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," _conqu[oe]stores_, 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, Nors.e.m.e.n 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 t.i.tle-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 h.e.l.las 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, h.e.l.las 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 pa.s.ses 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 the _Volker-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 h.e.l.las, 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 antic.i.p.ate 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, of _Faustus_ and _Lear_, of _Hamlet_ and _Adonais_.

[1] I have retained the familiar spelling of the Saxon hero's name.

Giesebrecht, who discovers in the stand against Charlemagne something of the spirit of Arminius, _etwas vom Geiste Armins_ (_D.K.I._, p.

112), uses the form "Widukind," and the same form has the sanction of Waitz (_Verfa.s.sungsgeschichte_, iii, p. 120). Yet the form Widu-kind is probably no more than a chronicler's theory of the derivation of the name.

[2] Dollinger's characterization of Cromwell is remarkable--"Aber er (_i.e._, Cromwell) hat, zuerst unter den Machtigen, ein religioses Princip aufgestellt und, soweit sein Arm reichte, zur Geltung gebracht, welches, im Gegensatz gegen die grossen historischen Kirchen und gegen den Islam, Keim und Stoff zu einer abgesonderten Religion in sich trug:--das Princip der Gewissensfreiheit, der Verwerfung alles religiosen Zw.a.n.ges." Proceeding to expand this idea, Dollinger again describes Cromwell as the annunciator of the doctrine of the inviolability of conscience, so vast in its significance to the modern world, and adds: "Es war damals von weittragender Bedeutung, da.s.s der Beherrscher eines machtigen Reiches diese neue Lehre verkundete, die dann noch fast anderthalb Jahrhunderte brauchte, bis sie in der offentlichen Meinung so erstarkte, da.s.s auch ihre noch immer zahlreichen Gegner sich vor ihr beugen mussen. Die Evangelische Union, welche jetzt zwei Welttheile umfa.s.st und ein fruher unbekanntes und fur unmoglich gehaltenes Princip der Einigung verschiedener Kirchen glucklich verwirklicht hat, darf wohl Cromwell als ihren Propheten und vorbereitenden Grunder betrachten."--_Akademische Vortrage_, 1891, vol.

iii, pp. 55, 56.

[3] The _Argenis_ was published in 1621; but amongst the ideas on religion, carefully elaborated or obscurely suggested, which throng its pages, we find curious antic.i.p.ations of the position of Locke and even of Hume, just as in politics, in the remarks on elective monarchy put in the lips of the Cardinal Ubaldini, or in the conceptions of justice and law, Barclay reveals a sympathy with principles which appealed to Algernon Sidney or were long afterwards developed by Beccaria. In the motion of the stars Barclay sees the proof of the existence of G.o.d, and requires no other. The _Argenis_, unfortunately for English literature, was written at a time when men still wavered between the vernacular and Latin as a medium of expression.

[4] The spirit and tendency of Locke's work appear in the short preface to the English version of the Latin _Epistola de Tolerantia_, which had already met with a general approbation in France and Holland (1689).

"This narrowness of spirit on all sides has undoubtedly been the princ.i.p.al occasion of our miseries and confusions. But whatever has been the occasion, it is now high time to seek for a thorough cure. We have need of more generous remedies than what have yet been made use of in our distemper. It is neither declarations of indulgence, nor acts of comprehension, such as have yet been practised, or projected amongst us, that can do the work. The first will but palliate, the second increase our evil. Absolute Liberty, just and true Liberty, equal and impartial Liberty, is the thing that we stand in need of." The second Letter, styled "A Second Letter concerning Toleration," is dated May 27th, 1690--the year of the publication of his _Essay on the Human Understanding_; the third, the longest, and in some respects the most eloquent, "A Third Letter for Toleration," bears the date June 20th, 1693.

[5] Voltaire ridiculed certain peculiarities of Shakespeare when mediocre French writers and critics began to find in his "barbarities"

an excuse for irreverence at the expense of Racine, but he never tires of reiterating his admiration for the country of Locke and Hume, of Bolingbroke and Newton. A hundred phrases could be gathered from his correspondence extending over half a century, in which this finds serious or extravagant utterance. Even in the last decades of his life, when he sees the France of the future arising, he writes to Madame Du Deffand: "How trivial we are compared with the Greeks, the Romans, and the English"; and to Helvetius, about the same period (1765), he admits the profound debts which France and Europe owe to the adventurous thought of England. He even forces Frederick the Great into reluctant but definite acquiescence with his enthusiasm--"Yes, you are right; you French have grace, the English have the depth, and we Germans, we have caution."

[6] James Thomson, who distinguished himself from the author of the _Seasons_, and defined his own literary aims by the initials B. V., _i.e._, Bysshe Vonalis (Novalis), though possessing neither the wide scholarship nor the depth of thought of Leopardi, occasionally equals the great Italian in felicity of phrase and in the poignant expression of the world-sorrow. Several of the more violent pamphlets on religious themes ascribed to him are of doubtful authenticity. He died in 1882, the year after the death of Carlyle.

[7] Hume's disappointment at the reception accorded to the first quarto of his _History of England_ must be measured by the standard of the hopes he had formed. Conscious of genius, and not without ambition, he had reached middle life nameless, and save in a narrow circle unacknowledged. But the appearance of his _History_, two years later than his _Political Discourses_, was synchronous with the darkest hours in English annals since 1667. An English fleet had to quit the Channel before the combined navies of France and Spain; Braddock was defeated at Fort Duquesne; Minorca was lost. At this period the tide of ill-feeling between the Scotch and the English ran bitter and high.

The taunts of individuals were but the explosions of a resentment deep-seated and strong. London had not yet forgotten the panic which the march of the Pretender had roused. To the Scottish nation the ma.s.sacre at Culloden seemed an act of revenge--savage, pre-meditated, and impolitic. The ministry of Chatham changed all this. He raised an army from the clans who ten years before had marched to the heart of England; ended the privileges of the coterie of Whig families, bestowing the posts of danger and power not upon the fearless but frequently incapable sons of the great houses, but upon the talent bred in the ranks of English merchants. Hume's work was thus caught in the stream of Chatham's victories, and a ray from the glory of the nation was reflected upon its historian. The general verdict was ratified by the concord of the best judgments. Gibbon despaired of rivalling its faultless lucidity; Burke turned from a projected History to write in Hume's manner the events of the pa.s.sing years, founding the _Annual Register_. Its outspoken Toryism was welcome to a generation weary of the "Venetian oligarchy," this epoch, if any, meriting Beaconsfield's epithet. The work had the fortune which Gibbon and Montesquieu craved for their own--it was read in the boudoir as much as in the study. Nor did its power diminish. It contained the best writing, the deepest thought, the most vivid portraiture, devoted to men and things English, over a continuous period, until the works of Carlyle and Macaulay.

[8] The significance of these men's work may be estimated by the ignorance even of scholars and tolerant thinkers. Spinoza, for instance, in 1675, describes Islam as a faith that has known no schism; and twenty years earlier Pascal brands Mohammed as forbidding all study!

PART II

THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN

LECTURE IV

THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA

[_Tuesday, May_ 29_th_, 1900]

Hitherto we have been engaged with the past, with the slow growth across the centuries of those political or religious ideals which now control the destinies of this Empire, a movement towards an ever higher conception of man's relations towards the Divine, towards other men, and towards the State. To-day a subject of more pressing interest confronts us, but a subject more involved also in the prejudices and sympathies which the violence of pity or anger, surprise or alarm, arouses, woven more closely to the living hopes, regrets, and fears which compose the instant of man's life. We are in the thick of the deed--how are we to judge it? How conjure the phantoms inimical to truth, which Tacitus found besetting his path as he prepared to narrate the civil struggles of Galba and Otho thirty years after the event?

Yet one aspect of the subject seems free and accessible, and to this aspect I propose to direct your attention. The separate incidents of the war, and the actions of individuals, statesmen, soldiers, politicians, journalists, and officials, civil or military, the wisdom or the rashness, the energy or the sloth, the wavering or the resolution, ancient experience grown half prophetic with the years, alert vigour, quick to perceive, unremitting in pursuit, or ingenuous surprise tardily awaking from the dream of a world which is not this--all these will fall within the domain of History some centuries hence when what men saw has been sifted from what they merely desired to see or imagined they saw.

But the place of the war in the general life of this State, and the purely psychological question, how is the idea of this war, in Plato's sense of that word, related to the idea of Imperial Britain?--these it is possible even now to consider, _sine ira et studio_. What is its historical significance compared with the wars of the past, what is the presage of this great war--if it be a great war--for the future?

-- I. THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA

Now the magnitude of a war does not depend upon the numbers, relative or absolute, of the opposing forces. Fewer men fell at Salamis than at Towton, and in the battle of Bedr[1] the total force engaged did not exceed two thousand, yet Mohammed's victory changed the history of the world. The followers of Andreas Hofer were but a handful compared with the army which marched with de Saxe to Toumay, but the achievement of the Tyrolese is enduring as Fontenoy. War is the supreme act in the life of a State, and it is the motives which impel, the ideal which is pursued, that determine the greatness or insignificance of that act.

It is the cause, the principles in collision which make it for ever glorious, or swiftly forgotten. What, then, are the principles at issue in the present war?

The war in South Africa, as we saw in the opening lecture, is the first event or series of events upon a great scale, the genesis of which lies in this force named Imperialism. It is the first conspicuous expression of this ideal in the world of action--of heroic action, which now as always implies heroic suffering. No other war in our history is in its origins and its aims so evidently the realization, so exclusively the result of this imperial ideal. Whatever may have been the pa.s.sing designs of the Government, lofty or trivial, whatever the motives of individual politicians, this is the cause and this the ideal by which, consciously or unconsciously, the decision of the State has been prescribed and controlled. But the present war is not merely a war for an idea, which of itself would be enough to make the war, in M.

Thiers' refrain, _digue de l'attention des hommes_; but, like the wars of the sixteenth century or the French Revolutionary Wars, it is a war between two ideals, between two principles that strike deep into the life-history of modern States.

In the religious wars of the sixteenth century the principle of freedom was arrayed against the principle of authority. The conflict rolled hither and thither for two centuries, and was ill.u.s.trated by the valour and genius of Europe, by characters and incidents of imposing grandeur, sublime devotion, or moving pity. So in the war of the French Revolution the dying principle of Monarchism was arrayed against the principle of Democracy, and the tragic heroism with which the combatants represented these principles, whether Austria, Russia, Spain, England, Germany, or France, makes that war one of the most precious memories of mankind.

In the tragedies of art, in stage-drama, the conflict, the struggle is between two principles, two forces, one base, the other exalted. But in the world-drama a conflict of a profounder kind reveals itself, the conflict between heroism and heroism, between ideal and ideal, often equally lofty, equally impressive.

Such is the eternal contrast between the tragic in Art and the tragic in History, and this characteristic of these two great conflicts of the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries reappears in the present war.

There also two principles equally lofty and impressive are at strife--the dying principle of Nationality, and the principle which, for weal or woe, is that of the future, the principle of Imperialism.

These are the forces contending against each other on the sterile veldt; this is the first act of the drama whose _denouement_--who dare foretell? What distant generation shall behold _that_ curtain?

-- 2. NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM

In political life, in the life-history of states, as in religious, as in intellectual and social history, change and growth, or what we now name Evolution, are perpetual, continuous, unresting. The empire which has ceased to advance has begun to recede. Motion is the law of its being, if not towards a fuller life, motion toward death. Thus in a race dowered with the genius for empire, as Rome was, as Britain is, Imperialism is the supreme, the crowning form, which in this process of evolution it attains. The civic, the feudal, or the oligarchic State pa.s.ses into the national, the national into the imperial, by slow or swift gradations, but irresistibly, as by a fixed law of nature. No great statesman is ever in advance of, or ever behind, his age. The patriot is he who is most faithful to the highest form, to the actualized ideal of his time. Eliot in the seventeenth century died for the const.i.tutional rights of a nation; in the thirteenth he would have stood with the feudal lords at Runnymede; in the nineteenth he would have added his great name to imperialism.

The national is thus but a phase in the onward movement of an imperial State, of a race destined to empire. In such a State, Nationality has no peculiar sanct.i.ty, no fixed, immutable influence, no absolute sway.

The term National, indeed, has recently acquired in politics and in literature something of the halo which in the beginning of the century belonged to the idea of liberty alone. The part which it has played in Bohemia and Hungary, Belgium and Holland, Servia and Bulgaria, and, above all, in the unity of Italy and the realization after four centuries of Machiavelli's dream, is a living witness of its power. In the Middle Age the two ideas, nationality and independence, were inseparable, but with the completion of the State system of Europe, the rise of Prussia and the transformation of the half-oriental Muscovy into the Empire of the Czars, and with the growth in European politics of the Balance-of-Power[2] theory, a disruption occurred between these ideas, and a series of protected nationalities arose.

Indeed, as we recede from the event, the Revolution of 1848 presents itself ever more definitely as it appeared to certain of its actors, and to a few of the more speculative onlookers, as but an aftermath of 1789 and 1793, as the net return, the practical result to France and to Europe of the glorious sacrifices and hopes of the revolutionary era.

Nationality was the occasion and the excuse of 1848; but the ideal was a shadow from the past. The men of that time do not differ more widely from the men of 1789 than Somers and Halifax differ from the great figures of the earlier revolution, Pym, Strafford, and Cromwell.[3]

The amazing confusion which attends the efforts of French and German publicists to expand the concept of the Nation supports the evidence of history that the great _role_ which it has played is transient and accidental, and that it is not the final and definite form towards which the life of a State moves. It is one thing to exalt the grandeur of this ideal for Italy or for France, but it is another to a.s.sume that it has final and equal grandeur in every land and to every State.