Part 1 (1/2)
Sh.e.l.ley, G.o.dwin and Their Circle.
by H. N. Brailsford.
CHAPTER I
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND
The history of the French Revolution in England begins with a sermon and ends with a poem. Between that famous discourse by Dr. Richard Price on the love of our country, delivered in the first excitement that followed the fall of the Bastille, and the publication of Sh.e.l.ley's _h.e.l.las_ there stretched a period of thirty-two years. It covered the dawn, the clouding and the unearthly sunset of a hope. It begins with the grave but enthusiastic prose of a divine justly respected by earnest men, who with a limited horizon fulfilled their daily duties in the city. It ends in the rapt vision, the magical music of a singer, who seemed as he sang to soar beyond the range of human ears. The hope pa.s.ses from the confident expectation of instant change, through the sobrieties of disillusionment and the recantations of despair, to the iridescent dreams of a future which has taken wing and made its home in a fairy world.
In 1789 when Dr. Price preached to his ardent congregation of Nonconformist Radicals in the meeting-house at the Old Jewry, the prospect was definite and the place of the millennium was merely the England over which George III. ruled. The hope was a robust but pedestrian ”mental traveller,” and its limbs wore the precise garments of political formulae. It looked for honest Parliaments and manhood suffrage, for the triumph of democracy and the abolition of war. Its scene as Wordsworth put it, was
Not in Utopia, subterraneous fields, Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where, But in the very world which is the world Of all of us, the place where in the end We find our happiness, or not at all.
The impetus of its own aspiration carried it swiftly beyond the prosaic demand for Parliamentary Reform. It evolved its programme for the reconstruction of all human inst.i.tutions, and projected the amendment of human nature itself. America had made an end of kings and France was in the full tide of revolution. Nothing was too mighty for this new-begotten hope, and the path to human perfectibility stretched as plain as the narrow road to Bunyan's Heavenly City.
There followed the phase when persecution from alarmed defenders of things as they are, disgust at the failures of the revolution in France, and contempt for the futilities of the revolution at home, drove the new movement into as many refuges as its votaries had temperaments. For some there was cynicism, for others recantation. ”The French Revolution” as Hazlitt put it, ”was the only match that ever took place between philosophy and experience; and waking from the trance of theory we hear the words Truth, Reason, Virtue, Liberty, with the same indifference or contempt that a cynic who has married a jilt or a termagant listens to the rhapsodies of lovers.” G.o.dwin found his own alluring by-way, and turning away at once from political repression and political agitation, became the pioneer of philosophic anarchism. To Sh.e.l.ley at the end of this marvellous thirty years of ardour, speculation, and despair, the hope became winged. She had her place no longer in ”the very world which is the world of all of us.” She had moved to
Kingless continents, sinless as Eden Around mountains and islands inviolably Prankt on the sapphire sea.
It requires no inordinate effort for us who live in an equable political climate to realise the atmosphere of Dr. Price's Old Jewry sermon. The lapse of a century indeed has made him a more intelligible figure than he could have seemed to the generation which immediately followed him.
He was temperate in his rationalism and thrifty in his philanthropy. He tended to Unitarianism in his theology, but was a st.u.r.dy defender of Free Will. He had written a widely-read apology for the Colonial side in the American Civil War. A stout individualist in his political theory, inspired, as were nearly all the English progressive thinkers of his day, by an extreme jealousy of State action, he yet guarded himself carefully against anarchical conclusions, and followed Saint Paul in teaching obedience to magistrates. He had written a treatise on ethics which on some points antic.i.p.ated Kant. But his most characteristic pre-occupation was a study of finance in the interests of national thrift and social benevolence. This cold moralist, who despised the emotional aspects of human nature and found no place for the affections in his scheme of the virtues, lapsed into pa.s.sion when he attacked the National Debt, and developed an arithmetical enthusiasm when he explained his plan for providing through voluntary insurance for the old age of the worthy poor. He was not quite the first of the philosophers to dream of the abolition of war, and to plan an international tribunal for the settlement of disputes between nations. In that he followed Leibnitz, as he antic.i.p.ated Kant.
It was such an essentially cold and calculating intellect as this which in that age of ferment could launch the new doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Modern readers know the Rev. Dr. Price only from the fulminations of Burke, in whose pages he figures now as an incendiary and again as a fool. He was in point of fact the soul of sobriety and the mirror of all the respectabilities in his serious dissenting world. It is worth while to note that he was also, with his friend Priestley, perhaps the only English Nonconformist preacher who has ever enjoyed a European reputation. No less a man than Condorcet refers to him as one of the formative minds of the century.
Dr. Price's sermon is worth a glance, not merely because it was the goad which provoked Burke to eloquent fury, but still more because it is a doc.u.ment which records for us the mood in which even the older and graver progressives of his generation greeted the French Revolution. It was an official discourse delivered before the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain. This typically English club claimed to have met annually since 1688 for a dinner and a sermon. The centenary of our own Revolution and the events in France gave it for a moment a central place on the political stage. It was an eminently respectable society, mainly composed of middle-cla.s.s Nonconformists, with four Doctors of Divinity on its Committee, an entrance fee of half-a-guinea, and a radical peer, Earl Stanhope, for its Chairman. At its annual meeting in November, 1789, Dr. Price ”disdaining national partialities and rejoicing in every triumph of liberty and justice over arbitrary power,” had moved an address congratulating the French National a.s.sembly on ”the Revolution in that country and on the prospect it gives to the two first kingdoms in the world of a common partic.i.p.ation in the blessings of civil and religious liberty.” The sermon was an eloquent expansion of this address.
It opens with a defence of the cosmopolitan att.i.tude which could rejoice at an improvement in the prospects of our hereditary rival. Christ taught not patriotism, but universal benevolence, as the parable of the Good Samaritan shows. ”My neighbour” is he to whom I can do most good, whether foreigner or fellow-citizen. We should love our country ”ardently but not exclusively,” considering ourselves ”citizens of the world,” and taking care ”to maintain a just regard to the rights of other countries.” Patriotism had been in history a scourge of mankind.
It was among the Romans no better than ”a principle holding together a band of robbers in their attempts to crush all liberty but their own.”
The aim of those who love their kind can be only to spread Truth, Virtue and Liberty. To make mankind happy and free, it should suffice to instruct them. ”Ignorance is the parent of bigotry, intolerance, persecution and slavery. Inform and instruct mankind and these evils will be excluded.” There follow some rambling remarks on the need for a revisal of the Liturgy and the Articles, a complaint of the servility shown in a recent address to King George, who ought to consider himself rather the servant than the sovereign of his people, and a prediction that France and England, each delivered from despotism by a happy revolution, will now ”not merely refrain from engaging in wars with one another, but unite in preventing wars everywhere.” As for our own Revolution of 1688, it was a great but not a perfect work. It had left religious toleration incomplete and the Parliamentary franchise unequal.
We must continue to enforce its principles, especially in the matter of removing the disabilities that still weigh upon dissenters. Those principles are briefly (1) Liberty of Conscience, (2) The right to resist power when it is abused, and (3) The right to choose our own governors, to cas.h.i.+er them for misconduct and to frame a government for ourselves. There follows a curious little moral exhortation which shows how far the good Dr. Price was from forgetting his duties as a preacher.
He had been distressed by the lax morals of some of his colleagues in the agitation for Reform, and he pauses to deplore that ”not all who are zealous in this cause are as conspicuous for purity of morals as for ability.” He cannot reconcile himself to the idea of an immoral patriot, and begs that they will at least hide their vices. The old man finds his peroration in Simeon's prayer. He had seen the great salvation. ”I have lived to see thirty millions of people indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice, their king led in triumph and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects. And now methinks I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading, a general amendment beginning in human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.”
The world remembers the scholar Salmasius only because he provoked Milton to a learned outbreak of bad manners. There is something immortal even in the ill-temper of great men, and Dr. Price lives in modern memory chiefly because he moved Burke to declamatory rage. His _Reflections on the French Revolution_ was an answer to the Old Jewry sermon, which, eloquent itself, was to beget much eloquence in others.
For four years the mighty debate went on, and it became as the disputants conversed across the echoes of the Terror, rather a dialogue between the past and the future, than a discussion between human voices.
Burke answered Dr. Price, and to Burke in turn replied Tom Paine with the brilliant, confident, hard-hitting logic of a pamphlet (_The Rights of Man_) which for all the efforts of Pitt to suppress it, is still read and circulated to-day. Two notable answers were ephemeral, one from Mary Wollstonecraft, and another (_Vindiciae Gallicae_) from Mackintosh, who afterwards recanted his own opinions and lived to be known as Sir James.
To lift the discussion to the height of a philosophical argument was reserved for William G.o.dwin, a mind steeped in the French and English speculation of his century, gifted with rare powers of a.n.a.lysis, and inspired with a faith in human reason in general and his own logical capacity in particular, which no English mind before him or after him has approached. In spite of a lucid style and a certain cold eloquence which illumines if it does not warm, G.o.dwin's _Political Justice_ was dead before its author, while Burke lives and was never more widely read than to-day.
The ghosts of great men have an erratic habit in walking. It is pa.s.sion rather than any mere intellectual momentum which drives them from the tomb. There is, moreover, in Burke a variety and a humanity which appeals in some one of its phases and moods to all of us in turn. The great store-house of his emotions and his phrases has the catholicity of the Bible. Each man can find in it what he seeks. He is like the luminous phantom which walked in _Faust_ through the witcheries of the Brocken. Each man saw in her his own first love. He has been hero and prophet to Whigs and Tories, and in our own generation we have seen him bequeath an equal inspiration to a Cecil and a Morley. It is no part of our task to attempt even the briefest exposition of his philosophy; we are concerned with him here chiefly as an influence which helped by its vehemence and its superb rhetorical exaggerations to drive the revolutionary thinkers who answered him to parallel exaggerations and opposite extremes. Inspired himself with a distrust of generalisation, and a hatred of philosophers, he none the less evolved a philosophy as he talked. Against his will he was forced into the upper air in his furious pursuit of the ”political aeronauts.” His was a volcanic intellect which flung up principles in its moments of eruption, and poured them forth pell-mell with the vituperations and the exaltations.
No logical dissection can reach the inner truth of Burke. Every statement of a principle in an orator or a pamphleteer is coloured by the occasion, the emotion, and the mood of an audience to whom it is addressed. Burke spoke amid the angers and alarms inspired first by the subversive energy, and then by the doctrinaire cruelty of the French Revolution. It was in the process of ”diffusing the Terror” that most of his philosophical _obiter dicta_ were uttered. The real nerve of the thinking of a mind so vehement, so pa.s.sionate, so essentially dramatic is to be sought not in some principle which was the major premise of his syllogisms, but in some pervading emotion. f.a.n.n.y Burney said of him that when he spoke of the Revolution his face immediately a.s.sumed ”the expression of a man who is going to defend himself against murderers.”
That is exactly the tone of all his later utterances. His mission was to spread panic because he felt it. By no other reading can one explain or excuse the rage of his denunciation of the excellent Dr. Price.
If his was philosophy it was philosophy seeing red. He predicted the Terror before it occurred, and by his work in stirring Europe to the coalition against France, he did much to realise his own forebodings.
But, to do Burke justice, his was a disinterested fear, and it would be fairer to call it a hatred of cruelty. Burke was not a man to take fire because he thought a principle false. His was rather the practical logic which found a principle false because it led to evil; and the evil which caused his mind to blaze was nearly always cruelty. He hated the French philosophers because in the groves of their Academy ”at the end of every vista you see nothing but the gallows.” He pursued Rousseau and Dr.
Price because their teaching, on his reading of cause and effect, had set the tumbrils rolling and weighted the guillotine for Marie Antoinette. It was precisely the same impulse which had caused him to pursue Warren Hastings for his cruelties towards the Begums of Oude. The spring of all this speculation was a nerve which twitched with a maddening sensitiveness at the sight of suffering.