Part 3 (1/2)
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 Inst.i.tutions 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_, pa.s.sionately 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 _G.o.d 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 Propriete?_ at the time of its birth. Nor from such a list could one exclude _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, by which Mrs.
Beecher Stowe antic.i.p.ated 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 n.o.ble 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 const.i.tutional 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 pa.s.sionate wisdom, Burke replied:
”The question is not whether their spirit deserves blame or praise, but what, in the name of G.o.d, shall we do with it?”
Then come two brief pa.s.sages 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 const.i.tutional 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 pa.s.sage is finer still, and particularly apt to the present civil contest over Englishwomen's enfranchis.e.m.e.nt:
”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 t.i.tles 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 gra.s.s; 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 fl.u.s.ter ourselves, why wax so hot, when time thus brings its inevitable revenges? Composed in mind, let us pursue our own unruffled course, with calm a.s.surance 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 unG.o.dly.'” 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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.”
The friends of Swift--the men who could write like this--men like Bolingbroke, Pope, Arbuthnot, Addison, Steele, and Gay--were no sentimentalists; they rank among the shrewdest and most clear-eyed writers of our literature. And, indeed, to me at all events, the difficulty of Swift's riddle lies, not in his savagery, but in his charm. When we think of that tiger burning in the forests of the night, how shall we reconcile his fearful symmetry with eyes ”azure as the heavens,” which Pope describes as having a surprising archness in them?
Or when a man is reputed the most embittered misanthrope in history, how was it that his intimate friend, Sheridan, could speak of that ”spirit of generosity and benevolence whose greatness, and vigour, when pent up in his own breast by poverty and dependence, served only as an evil spirit to torment him”? Of his private generosity, and his consideration for the poor, for servants, and animals, there are many instances recorded. For divergent types of womanhood, whether pa.s.sionate, witty, or intellectual, he possessed the attraction of sympathetic intimacy. A woman of peculiar charm and n.o.ble character was his livelong friend from girlhood, risking reputation, marriage, position, and all that many women most value, just for that friends.h.i.+p and nothing more. Another woman loved him with more tragic destiny. To Stella, in the midst of his political warfare, he could write with the playfulness that nursemaids use for children, and most men keep for their kittens or puppies. In the ”Verses on his own Death,” how far removed from the envy, hatred, and malice of the literary nature is the affectionate irony of those verses beginning:
”In Pope I cannot read a line, But with a sigh I wish it mine; When he can in one couplet fix More sense than I can do in six, It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, 'Plague take him and his wit.'