Chapter 9

The most insignificant of literary contributions have a history and an origin; and the history of these contributions is short and simple enough. Carlyle with all the force of his humoristic genius had impressed upon his generation an essentially one-sided view both of the eighteenth century as a whole, and of the French thinkers of that century in particular. His essay on Diderot, his lecture on Rousseau, his chapters on Voltaire, with all their brilliance, penetration, and incomparable satire, were the high-water mark in this country of the literary reaction against the French school of Revolution. Everybody knows the famous diatribes against the Bankrupt Century and all its men and all its works. Voltaire's furies, Diderot's indigestions, Rousseau's nauseous amours, and the odd tricks and shifts of the whole of them and their company, offered ready material for the boisterous horseplay of the transcendental humourist. Then the tide began to turn. Mr. Buckle's book on the history of civilisation had something to do with it. But it was the historical chapters in Comte's Positive Philosophy that first opened the minds of many of us, who, five-and-twenty years ago, were young men, to a very different judgment of the true place of those schools in the literary and social history of Western Europe. We learnt to perceive that though much in the thought and the lives of the literary precursors of the Revolution laid them fairly open to Carlyle's banter, yet banter was not all, and even grave condemnation was not all. In essays, like mine, written from this point of view, and with the object of trying to trim the balance rather more correctly, it may well have been that the better side of the thinkers concerned was sometimes unduly dwelt upon, and their worse side unduly left in the background. It may well have been that an impression of personal adhesion was conveyed which only very partially existed, or even where it did not exist at all: that is a risk of misinterpretation which it is always hard for the historical critic to escape. There may have been a too eager tone; but to be eager is not a very bad vice at any age under the critical forty. There were some needlessly aggressive passages, and some sallies which ought to have been avoided, because they gave pain to good people. There was perhaps too much of the particular excitement of the time. It was the date when _Essays and Reviews_ was still thought a terrible explosive; when Bishop Colenso's arithmetical tests as to the flocks and herds of the children of Israel were believed to be sapping not only the inspiration of the Pentateuch but the foundations of the Faith and the Church; and when Darwin's scientific speculations were shaking the civilised world. Some excitement was to be pardoned in days like those, and I am quite sure that one side needed pardon at least as much as the other. For the substantial soundness of the general views winch I took of the French revolutionary thinkers at that time, I feel no apprehension; nor--some possible occasional phrases or sentences excepted and apart--do I see the smallest reason to shrink or to depart from any one of them. So far as one particular reference may serve to illustrate the tenour of the whole body of criticism, the following lines, which close my chapter on the "Encyclopaedia," will answer the purpose as well as any others, and I shall perhaps be excused for transcribing them:--

"An urgent social task lay before France and before Europe: it could not be postponed until the thinkers had worked out a scheme of philosophic completeness. The thinkers did not seriously make any effort after this completeness. The Encyclopaedia was the most serious attempt, and it did not wholly fail. As I replace in my shelves this mountain of volumes, 'dusky and huge, enlarging on the sight,' I have a presentiment that their pages will seldom again be disturbed by me or by others. They served a great purpose a hundred years ago. They are now a monumental ruin, clothed with all the profuse associations of history. It is no Ozymandias of Egypt, king of kings, whose wrecked shape of stone and sterile memories we contemplate. We think rather of the grey and crumbling walls of an ancient stronghold, reared by the endeavour of stout hands and faithful, whence in its own day and generation a band once went forth against barbarous hordes, to strike a blow for humanity and truth."[1]

[Footnote 1: Diderot, i. 247.]

It is gratifying to find that the same view of the work of these famous men, and of its relation to the social necessities of the time, commends itself to Mr. Lecky, who has since gone diligently and with a candid mind over the same ground.[1] Then where is the literary Jacobin?

[Footnote 1: See his vol. vi. 305 _et seq_.]

Of course, it is easy enough to fish out a sentence or a short passage here and there which, if taken by itself, may wear a very sinister look, and carry the most alarming impressions. Not many days ago a writer addressed a letter to the _Times_ which furnishes a specimen of this kind of controversy. He gave himself the ambiguous designation of "Catholicus"; but his style bore traces of the equivocally Catholic climate of Munich. His aim was the lofty and magnanimous one of importing theological prejudice into the great political dispute of the day; in the interest, strange to say, of the Irish party who have been for ages the relentless oppressors of the Church to which he belongs, and who even now hate and despise it with all the virulence of a Parisian Red. This masked assailant conveys to the mind of the reader that I applaud and sympathise with the events of the winter of 1793, and more particularly with the odious procession of the Goddess of Reason at Notre Dame. He says, moreover, that I have "the effrontery to imply that the horrible massacres of the Revolution ... were 'a very mild story compared with the atrocities of the Jews or the crimes of Catholicism.'" No really honest and competent disputant would have hit on "effrontery" as the note of the passage referred to, if he had had its whole spirit and drift before him. The reader shall, if he pleases, judge for himself. After the words just quoted, I go on to say:--

"Historical recriminations, however, are not edifying. It is perfectly fair, when Catholics talk of the atheist Terror, to rejoin that the retainers of Anjou and Montpensier slew more men and women on the first day of the Saint Bartholomew, than perished in Paris through the Years I. and II. But the retort does us no good beyond the region of dialectic. Some of the opinions of Chaumette were full of enlightenment and hope. But it would be far better to share the superstitious opinions of a virtuous and benignant priest, like the Bishop in Victor Hugo's _Misérables_, than to hold these good opinions of Chaumette, as he held them, with a rancorous intolerance, a reckless disregard of the rights and feelings of others, and a shallow forgetfulness of all that great and precious part of our nature that lies out of the domain of the logical understanding.... In every family where a mother sought to have her child baptised, or where sons and daughters sought to have the dying spirit of the old consoled by the last sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemy to the government which had closed the churches and proscribed the priests. How could a society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the solemn mysticism of the Middle Ages suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostate priests ... as they filed before the Convention, led by the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude acolytes bearing piles of the robes and the vessels of silver and gold with which they had once served their holy office."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Misc._ i 77-79.]

Where is the effrontery, the search for methods in the Reign of Terror, the applause for revolutionary models? Such inexcusable perversion of a writer's meaning for an evanescent political object--and a very shabby object too--is enough to make one think that George III. knew what he was talking about, when he once delivered himself of the saying that "Politics are a trade for a rascal, not for a gentleman."

Let me cite another more grotesque piece of irrelevancy with a similar drift. Some months ago the present writer chanced to express an opinion upon Welsh Disestablishment. Wales, at any rate, would seem to be far enough away from _Emile, Candide_, the Law of Prairial, and the Committee of Public Safety. The _Times_, however, instantly said[1] that it would be affectation to express any surprise, because my unfortunate "theories and principles, drawn from French sources and framed on French models, all tend to the disintegration of comprehensive political organisations and the encouragement of arrangements based on the minor peculiarities of race or dialect." Was there ever in the world such prodigious nonsense? What French sources, what French models? If French models point in any one direction rather than another, it is away from disintegration and straight towards centralisation. Everybody knows that this is one of the most notorious facts of French history from the days of Lewis XI. or Cardinal Richelieu down to Napoleon Bonaparte. So far from French models encouraging "arrangements based on the minor peculiarities of race and dialect," France is the first great example in modern history, for good or for evil, of a persevering process of national unification, and the firm suppression of all provincial particularismus. This is not only true of French political leaders in general: it is particularly true of the Jacobin leaders. Rousseau himself, I admit, did in one place point in the direction of confederation; but only in the sense that for freedom on the one hand, and just administration on the other, the unit should not be too large to admit of the participation of the persons concerned in the management of their own public affairs. If the Jacobins had not been overwhelmed by the necessity of keeping out the invaders, they might have developed the germ of truth in Rousseau's loose way of stating the expediency of decentralisation. As it was, above all other French schools, the Jacobins dealt most sternly with particularist pretensions. Of all men, these supposed masters, teachers, and models of mine are least to be called Separatists. To them more than to any other of the revolutionary parties the great heresy of Federalism was most odious; and if I were a faithful follower of the Jacobin model, I should have least patience with nationalist sentiment whether in Ireland, Scotland, or Wales, and should most rigorously insist on that cast-iron incorporation which, as it happens, in the case of Ireland I believe to be equally hopeless and undesirable. This explanation, therefore, of my favour for Welsh Disestablishment is as absurdly ignorant as it is far-fetched and irrelevant.

[Footnote 1: Nov. 3, 1886.]

The logical process is worth an instant's examination. The position is no less than this,--that to attempt truly to appreciate the place and the value in the history of thought and social movements of men who have been a hundred years in their graves, and to sympathise with certain sides and certain effects of their activity under the peculiar circumstances in which French society then found itself, is the same thing as binding yourself to apply their theories and to imitate their activity, under an entirely heterogeneous set of circumstances, in a different country, and in a society with wholly dissimilar requirements. That is the argument if we straighten it out. The childishness of any such contention is so obvious, that I should be ashamed of reproducing it, were it not that this very contention has made its appearance at my expense several times a month for the last two years in all sorts of important and respectable prints.

For instance, it appears that I once said somewhere that Danton looked on at the doings of his bloodier associates with "sombre acquiescence." _Argal_, it was promptly pointed out--and I espy the dark phrase constantly adorning leading articles to this day--the man who said that Danton sombrely acquiesced in the doings of Billaud, Collet, and the rest, must of necessity, being of a firm and logical mind, himself sombrely acquiesce in moonlighting and cattle-houghing in Ireland. Apart from the curious compulsion of the reasoning, what is the actual state of the case? Acquiescence is hardly a good description of the mood of a politician who scorns delights and lives laborious days in actively fighting for a vigorous policy and an effective plan which, as he believes, would found order in Ireland on a new and more hopeful base. He may be wrong, but where is the acquiescence, whether sombre or serene?

The equally misplaced name of Fatalism is sometimes substituted for acquiescence, in criticisms of this stamp. In any such sense anybody is a fatalist who believes in a relation between cause and effect. If it is fatalism to assume that, given a certain chain of social or political antecedents, they will inevitably be followed by a certain chain of consequences, then every sensible observer of any series of events is a fatalist. Catholic Emancipation, the extension of the franchise, and secret ballot, have within the last sixty years completely shifted the balance of political power in Ireland. Land legislation has revolutionised the conditions of ownership. These vast and vital changes in Ireland have been accompanied by the transfer of decisive power from aristocracy to numbers in Great Britain, and Great Britain is arbiter. Is it fatalism, or is it common sense, to perceive that one new effect of new causes so potent must be the necessity of changing the system of Irish government? To dream that you could destroy the power of the old masters without finding new, and that having invited the nation to speak you could continue to ignore the national sentiment was and is the very height of political folly, and the longer the dream is persisted in the ruder will be the awakening. Surely the stupidest fatalism is far more truly to be ascribed to those who insist that Ireland was eternally predestined to turmoil, confusion, and torment; that there alone the event defies calculation; and that, however wisely, carefully and providently you modify or extinguish causes, in Ireland, though nowhere else, effects will still survive with shape unaltered and force unabated.

No author has a right to assume that anybody has read all his books or any of them, but he may reasonably claim that he shall not be publicly classified, labelled, catalogued, and placed In the shelves, on the strength of half of his work, and that half arbitrarily selected. If it be permitted to me without excess of egotism to name the masters to whom I went to school in the days of early manhood, so far from being revolutionists and terrorists, they belonged entirely to the opposite camp. Austin's _Jurisprudence_ and Mill's _Logic_ and _Utilitarianism_ were everything, and Rousseau's _Social Contract_ was nothing. To the best of my knowledge and belief, I never said a word about "Natural Rights" in any piece of practical public business in all my life; and when that famous phrase again made its naked appearance on the platform three or four years ago, it gave me as much surprise and dismay as if I were this afternoon to meet a Deinotherium shambling down Parliament Street. Mill was the chief influence for me, as he was for most of my contemporaries in those days. Experience of life and independent use of one's mind--which he would have been the most ready of men to applaud--have since, as is natural, led to many important corrections and deductions in Mill's political and philosophical teaching. But then we were disciples, and not critics; and nobody will suppose that the admirer of Wordsworth, the author of the Essay on Coleridge, and of the treatise on Representative Government, the administrator in the most bureaucratic and authoritative of public services, was a terrorist or an unbridled democrat, or anything else but the most careful and rationalistic of political theorisers. It was Mill who first held up for my admiration the illustrious man whom Austin enthusiastically called the "godlike Turgot," and it was he who encouraged me to write a study on that great and inspiring character. I remember the suspicion and the murmurings with which Louis Blanc, then living in brave and honourable exile in London, and the good friend of so many of us, and who was really a literary Jacobin to the tips of his fingers, remonstrated against that piece of what he thought grievously misplaced glorification. Turgot was, indeed, a very singular hero with whom to open the career of literary Jacobin. So was Burke,--the author of those wise sentences that still ring in our ears: "_The question with me is, not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. Nobody shall persuade me, where a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation._" Burke, Austin, Mill, Turgot, Comte--what strange sponsors for the "theories and principles of the Terror"!

What these opinions came to, roughly speaking, was something to this effect: That the power alike of statesmen and of publicists over the course of affairs is strictly limited; that institutions and movements are not capable of immediate or indefinite modification by any amount of mere will; that political truths are always relative, and never absolute; that the test of practical, political, and social proposals is not their conformity to abstract ideals, but to convenience, utility, expediency, and occasion; that for the reformer, considerations of time and place may be paramount; and finally, as Mill himself has put it, that government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, and shall be, depends less on institutions than institutions depend upon it. If I were pressed for an illustration of these principles at work, inspiring the minds and guiding the practice of responsible statesmen in great transactions of our own day and generation, I should point to the sage, the patient, the triumphant action of Abraham Lincoln in the emancipation of the negro slaves. However that may be, contrast a creed of this kind with the abstract, absolute, geometric, unhistoric, peremptory notions and reasonings that formed the stock in trade of most, though not quite all, of the French revolutionists, alike in action and in thought. It is plain that they are the direct opposite and contradictory of one another.

To clench the matter by chapter and verse, I should like to recall what, I have said of these theories and principles in their most perfect and most important literary version. How have I described Rousseau's _Social Contract_? It placed, I said, the centre of social activity elsewhere than in careful and rational examination of social conditions, and careful and rational effort to modify them. It substituted a retrograde aspiration for direction, and emotion for the discovery of law. It overlooked the crucial difficulty--namely, how to summon new force, without destroying the sound parts of a structure which it has taken many generations to erect. Its method was geometric instead of being historic, and hence its "desperate absurdity." Its whole theory was constructed with an imperfect consideration of the qualities of human nature, and with too narrow a view of society. It ignored the great fact that government is the art of wisely dealing with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile passions, of hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces. It "gives us not the least help towards the solution of any of the problems of actual government."

Such language as all this is hardly that of a disciple to a master, in respect of theories and principles which he is making his own for the use of a lifetime. "There has been no attempt" [in these pages], I said in winding up, "to palliate either the shallowness or the practical mischievousness of the _Social Contract_. But there is another side to its influence. We should be false to our critical principle, if we do not recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically valueless." Any writer would have stamped himself as both unfit for the task that I had undertaken, and entirely below the level of the highest critical standard of the day, if he had for a moment dreamed of taking any other point of view.

As for historical hero-worship, after Carlyle's fashion, whether with Jacobin idols or any other, it is a mood of mind that must be uncongenial to anybody who had ever been at all under the influence of Mill. Without being so foolish as to disparage the part played by great men in great crises, we could have no sympathy with the barbaric and cynical school, who make greatness identical with violence, force, and mere iron will. Cromwell said, in vindication of himself, that England had need of a constable, and it was true. The constable, the soldier, the daring counsellor at the helm, are often necessities of the time. It is often a necessity of the time that the energy of a nation or of a movement should gather itself up in a resolute band or a resolute chief; as the revolutionary energy of France gathered itself up in the greater Jacobins, or that of England in Oliver Cromwell. Goethe says that nature bids us "_Take all, but pay_." Revolutions and heroes may give us all, but not without price. This is at the best, and the best is the exception. The grandiose types mostly fail. In our own day, people talk, for example, with admiration of Cromwell's government in Ireland,--as if it were a success, instead of being one of the worst chapters in the whole history of Irish failure. It was force carried to its utmost. Hundreds were put to the sword, thousands were banished to be slaves of the planters in the West Indies, and the remnant were driven miserably off into the desolate wilds of Connaught. But all this only prepared the way for further convulsions and deadlier discontent.

It is irrational to contrast Carlyle's heroes, Cromwell, Mirabeau, Frederick, Napoleon, with men like Washington or Lincoln. The circumstances were different. The conditions of public use and of personal greatness were different. But if we are to talk of ideals, heroes, and models, I, for one, should hardly look to France at all. Jefferson was no flatterer of George Washington; but his character of Washington comes far nearer to the right pattern of a great ruler than can be found in any of Carlyle's splendid dithyrambs, and it is no waste of time to recall and to transcribe it:--