Chapter 4

To such a mood, how consolatory must be the vision of that muffled figure, with the two-handed engine, always following close! And to Heine himself the consolation came with especial grace. He had been virulently assailed by the leaders of the party to which he regarded himself as naturally belonging--the party for whose sake he endured the charming exile of Paris, then at the very height of her intellectual supremacy. The exile was charming, but unbearable dreams and memories would come. "When I am happy in your arms," he wrote, "you must never speak to me of Germany, I cannot bear it; I have my reasons. I implore you, leave Germany alone. You must not plague me with these eternal questions about home, and friends, and the way of life. I have my reasons; I cannot bear it." All this was suffered--for a quarter of a century it was suffered--just for an imaginary and unrealised German revolution. And, if Heine was not to be counted as a German revolutionist, what was the good of it all? What did the sorrows of exile profit him, if he had no part in the cause? He might just as well have gone on eating, drinking, and being merry on German beer. Yet Ludwig Börne, acknowledged leader of German revolutionists, had scornfully written of him (I translate from Heine's own quotation, in his pamphlet on Börne):

"I can make allowance for child's-play, and for the passions of youth. But when, on the day of bloody conflict, a boy who is chasing butterflies on the battle-field runs between my legs; or when, on the day of our deepest need, while we are praying earnestly to God, a young dandy at our side can see nothing in the church but the pretty girls, and keeps whispering to them and making eyes--then, I say, in spite of all philosophy and humanity, one cannot restrain one's indignation."

Much more followed, but in those words lay the sting of the scorn. It is a scorn that many poets and writers suffer when confronted by the man of action, or even by the man of affairs. When it comes to action, all the finest words ever spoken, and all the most beautiful poems and books ever written, seem so irrelevant, as Hilda Wangel said of reading. "How beggarly all arguments appear before a defiant deed!" cried Walt Whitman. "Every man," said Ruskin, "feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world count less than a single lovely action." The powerlessness of the word--that, as I said, has been the burden of speakers and writers. That is what drove Dante to politics, and Byron to Greece, and Goethe to the study of bones.

But Heine laid himself open more than most to such scorn as Börne's. There was little of the active revolutionist in his nature. About the revolutionist hangs something Hebraic (if we may still use Heine's own distinction, never very definite, and now worn so thin), but Heine prided himself upon a sunlit cheerfulness that he called Greek. He loved the garish world; he was in love with every woman; but the true revolutionist must be the modern monk. It is no good asking the revolutionist out to dinner; he will neither say anything amusing, nor know the difference between chalk and cheese. But Heine's good sayings went the round of Parisian society, and he loved the subtleties of wine and the table. "That dish," he said once, "should be eaten on one's knees." Only on paper, and then rarely, was his heart lacerated by savage indignation. Except for brief periods of poverty, in the Zion of exile he lived very much at ease, nor did the zeal of the Lord ever consume him. Did it not seem that a true revolutionist was justified in comparing him to a boy chasing butterflies on the battle-field? Here, if anywhere, one might have thought, was one of those charming poets whom the Philosopher would have honoured, and feasted, and loaded with beautiful gifts, and then conducted, laurel-crowned, far outside the walls of the perfect city, to the sound of flutes and soft recorders.

To such scorn Heine attempted the artist's common answer. He replied to Börne's revolutionary scorn of the mere poet, with a poet's fastidious scorn of the smudgy revolutionist. He tells us of his visit to Börne's rooms, where he found such a menagerie as could hardly be seen in the Jardin des Plantes--German polar bears, a Polish wolf, a French ape. Or we read of the one revolutionary assembly he attended, and how up till then he had always longed to be a popular orator, and had even practised on oxen and sheep in the fields; but that one meeting, with its dirt, and smells, and stifling tobacco smoke, sickened him of oratory. "I saw," he writes,

"I saw that the path of a German tribune is not strewn with roses--not with clean roses. For example, you have to shake hands vigorously with all your auditors, your 'dear brothers and cousins.' Perhaps Börne means it metaphorically when he says that, if a king shook him by the band, he would at once hold it in the fire, so as to clean it; but I mean it literally, and not metaphorically, when I say that, if the people shook me by the hand, I should at once wash it."

We all know those meetings now--the fraternal handshake, the menagerie smell, the reek of tobacco, the indistinguishable hubbub of tongues, the frothy violence, the bottomless inanity of abstract dissensions, that have less concern with human realities than the curve of the hyperbola through space. We all know that, and sometimes, perhaps, at the sight of some artist or poet like Heine--or, shall we say? like William Morris--in the sulphurous crater of that volcanic tumult, we may have been tempted to exclaim, "Not here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee!" But we had best restrain such exclamation, for we have had quite enough of the artistic or philanthropic temperaments that talk a deal about fighting the battle of the poor and the oppressed, but take very good care to keep at a clean and comfortable distance from those whose battle they are fighting, and appear more than content to live among the tyrants and oppressors they denounce. And we remind ourselves, further, that what keeps the memory of William Morris sweet is not his wall-papers, his beaten work of bronze or silver, his dreamy tapestries of interwoven silks or verse, but just that strange attempt of his, however vain, however often deceived, to convert the phrases of liberty into realities, and to learn something more about democracy than the spelling of its name.

Heine's first line of defence was quite worthless. It was the cheap and common defence of the commonplace, fastidious nature that has hardly courage to exist outside its nest of culture. His second line was stronger, and it is most fully set out in the preface to his _Lutetia_, written only a year before his death. He there expresses the artist's fear of beauty's desecration by the crowd. He dreads the horny hand laid upon the statues he had loved. He sees the laurel groves, the lilies, the roses--"those idle brides of nightingales"--destroyed to make room for useful potato-patches. He sees his _Book of Songs_ taken by the grocer to wrap up coffee and snuff for old women, in a world where the victorious proletariat triumphs. But that line of defence he voluntarily abandons, knowing in his heart, as he said, that the present social order could not endure, and that all beauty it preserved was not to be counted against its horror.

It is at the end of the same preface that the well-known passage occurs, thus translated by Matthew Arnold:

"I know not if I deserve that a laurel-wreath should one day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it, has always been to me but a divine plaything. I have never attached any great value to poetical fame; and I trouble myself very little whether people praise my verses or blame them. But lay on my coffin a _sword_; for I was a brave soldier in the war of liberation of humanity."

The words appear strangely paradoxical. No one questions Heine's place among the poets of the world. As a matter of fact, he was quite as sensitive to criticism as other poets, and his courage was not more conspicuous than most people's. But, nevertheless, those words contain his last and true defence against the scorn of revolutionists, or men of affairs, like Börne. There is no need to make light of Börne's achievement; that also has its high place in the war of liberation. But, powerless as the word may seem, there was in Heine's word a liberating force that is felt in our battle to this day. He did not wield the axe himself, but behind him has moved a mysterious figure, muffled in a cloak--a Lictor following his footsteps with an axe--the deed of Heine's thought.

V

THE BURNING BOOK

"How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!" cried Walt Whitman, as I quoted in the last essay. He was thinking, perhaps, of Harper's Ferry and of John Brown hanging on the crab-apple tree, while his soul went marching on. It is the lament of all writers and speakers who are driven by inward compulsion to be something more than artists in words, and who seek to jog the slow-pacing world more hurriedly forward. How long had preachers, essayists, orators, and journalists argued slavery round and round before the defiant deed crashed and settled it! "Who hath believed our report?" the prophets have always cried, until the arm of the Lord was revealed; and the melancholy of all prophetic writers is mainly due to the conscious helplessness of their words. If men would only listen to reason--if they would listen even to the appeals of justice and compassion, we suppose our prophets would grow quite cheerful at last. But to justice and compassion men listen only at a distance, and the prophet is near.

Nevertheless, in his address as Chancellor of Manchester University in June 1912, Lord Morley, who has himself often sounded the prophetic note, asserted that "a score of books in political literature rank as acts, not books." He happened to be speaking on the anniversary of Rousseau's birth, two hundred years ago, and in no list of such books could Rousseau's name be forgotten. "Whether a score or a hundred," Lord Morley went on, "the _Social Contract_ was one," and, as though to rouse his audience with a spark, he quoted once more the celebrated opening sentence, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." That sentence is not true either in history or in present life. It would be truer to say that man has everywhere been born in chains and, very slowly, in some few parts of the world, he is becoming free. The sentence is neither scientific as historic theory nor true to present life, and yet Lord Morley rightly called it electrifying. And the same is true of the book which it so gloriously opens. As history and as philosophy, it is neither original nor exact. It derived directly from Locke, and many aspects of the world and thought since Darwin's time confute it. But, however much anticipated, and however much exposed to scientific ridicule, it remains one of the burning books of the world--one of those books which, as Lord Morley said, rank as acts, not books.

"Let us realise," he continued, "with what effulgence such a book burst upon communities oppressed by wrong, sunk in care, inflamed by passions of religion or of liberty, the two eternal fields of mortal struggle." So potent an influence depends much upon the opportunity of time--the fulfilment of the hour's need. A book so abstract, so assertive of theory, and standing so far apart from the world's actual course, would hardly find an audience now. But in the eighteenth century, so gaily confident in the power of reason, so trustful of good intentions, so ready to acclaim noble phrase and generality, and so ignorant of the past and of the poor--in the midst of such a century the _Social Contract_ was born at the due time. Add the vivid imagination and the genuine love for his fellow-men, to which Lord Morley told us Maine attributed Rousseau's ineffaceable influence on history, and we are shown some of the qualities and reasons that now and again make words burn with that effulgence, and give even to a book the power of a deed.

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 Institutions 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_, passionately 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 _God 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 Propriété?_ at the time of its birth. Nor from such a list could one exclude _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, by which Mrs. Beecher Stowe anticipated 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 noble 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 constitutional 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 passionate wisdom, Burke replied:

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

Then come two brief passages 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 constitutional 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 passage is finer still, and particularly apt to the present civil contest over Englishwomen's enfranchisement:

"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 titles 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 grass; 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 fluster ourselves, why wax so hot, when time thus brings its inevitable revenges? Composed in mind, let us pursue our own unruffled course, with calm assurance 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 ungodly.'" 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."