Part 9 (2/2)
America, though--I hear you say!--America, for whom he fought and laboured and sacrificed himself: she surely appreciated his efforts?
Listen. On his return from Europe, America disfranchised him, ostracised him and repudiated him, refusing, among other indignities, to let him ride in public coaches.
So be it. He is not the first great man who has found the world thankless. Oddly enough, it troubled him little in comparison with the satisfaction he felt in seeing his exalted projects meet with success.
So that good things were effectually accomplished, he cared not a whit who got the credit.
In reference to the charges against him of being ”an infidel,” or guilty of ”infidelity,” he himself, with that straightforward and happy confidence which made some men call him a braggart, wrote:
”They have not yet accused Providence of Infidelity. Yet, according to their outrageous piety, she (Providence) must be as bad as Thomas Paine; she has protected him in all his dangers, patronised him in all his undertakings, encouraged him in all his ways....”
It is true, as Mr. van der Weyde points out in an article in _The Truth Seeker_ (N.Y.), that a most extraordinary and beneficent luck,--or was it rather a guardian angel?--stood guard over Paine. His narrow escapes from death would make a small book in themselves. I will only mention one here.
During his imprisonment in the Luxembourg Prison in Paris, Thomas Paine was one of the many who were sentenced to be guillotined at that period when the moral temperature of France was many degrees above the normal mark, and men doled out death more freely than _sous_. It was the custom among the jailers to make a chalk mark upon the door of each cell that held a man condemned. Paine was one of a ”consignment” of one hundred and sixty-eight prisoners sentenced to be beheaded at dawn, and the jailer made the fateful chalk mark upon his door along with the others, that the guards would know he was destined for the tumbrel that rolled away from the prison hour by hour all through the night. _But his door chanced to be open_, so that the mark, hastily made, turned out to be on the wrong side! When the door was closed it was inside, and no one knew of it; so the guard pa.s.sed on, and Paine lived.
It is interesting but difficult to write about Thomas Paine.
The trouble about him is that his personality is too overwhelming to be cut and measured in proper lengths by any writer. He does not lend himself, like lesser historical figures, to continuous or disinterested narrative. The authors who have been rash enough to try to tell something about him can no more pick and choose the incidents of his career that will make the most effective ”stuff” than they could reduce the phenomena of a cyclone or the aurora borealis to a consistent narrative form.
Thus: One starts to speak of Paine's experiences in Paris, and brings up in New Roch.e.l.le; one endeavours to anchor him in Greenwich, only to find oneself trailing his weary but stubborn footsteps in the war! And always and forever, Paine himself persists in crowding out the legitimate sequence of his adventures. No one can soberly write the story of his life; one can, at best, only achieve a diatribe or an apotheosis!
Said he:
”The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness.”
This quotation might almost serve as a text for the life of Paine, might it not? And yet--there are people in the world who wear smoked gla.s.ses, through which, I imagine, the sun himself looks not unlike a muddy splash of yellow paint upon the heavens!
This is a book about Greenwich Village and not a defence of Thomas Paine. Yet, since the reader has come with me thus far, I am going to take advantage of his courteous attention for just another moment of digression. Here is my promise: that it shall take up a small, small s.p.a.ce.
Small insects sting dangerously; and on occasion, a very trivial and ill-considered word or phrase will cling closer and longer than a serious or thoughtful judgment. When Theodore Roosevelt called Thomas Paine ”a filthy little Atheist” (or was the adjective ”dirty”? I really forget!) he was very young,--only twenty-eight,--and doubtless had accepted his viewpoint of the great reformer-patriot from that ”hearsay upon hearsay” against which Paine himself has so urgently warned us. Of course Mr. Roosevelt, who is both intellectual and broad-minded, knows better than that today. But it is astonis.h.i.+ng how that ridiculous and unsuitable epithet--(a ”trinity of lies” as one historian has styled it)--has stuck to a memory which I am sure is sacred to any angels who may be in heaven!
”Atheist” is a word which could be applied to few men less suitably than to Paine. From first to last, he preached the goodness of G.o.d, the power of G.o.d, the justice and mercy and infallibility of G.o.d; and he lived in a profound trust in and love for G.o.d, and a hopeful and courageous effort to carry out such principles of moral and national right-doing as he believed to be the will of his beloved Creator.
”If this,” as one indignant enthusiast exclaimed, ”is to be an Atheist, then Jesus Christ must have been an Atheist!”
As incongruous as anything else, in the judgment of Paine, is the fact that he has, apparently, been adopted by the pacifists. The pacifists and--Paine!--Paine who never in all his seventy years was out of a sc.r.a.p! They could scarcely have chosen a less singularly unfit guiding star, for Paine was a confirmed fighter for anything and everything he held right. And his militancy was not merely of action but of the soul, not only of policy or necessity but of spiritual conviction.
When even Was.h.i.+ngton was inclined to submit patiently a bit longer, it was Paine who lashed America into righteous war. He fought for the freedom of the country, for the abolition of slavery, for the rights of women; he fought for old-age pensions, for free public schools, for the protection of dumb animals, for international copyright; for a hundred and one ideals of equity and humanity which today are legislature. And he fought with his body and his brain; with his ”flaming eloquence” and also with a gun! Once let him perceive the cause to be a just one, and--I know of no more magnificently belligerent a figure in all history.
And yet note here the splendid, the illuminating paradox: Paine abhorred war. Every truly great fighter has abhorred war, else he were not truly great. In 1778, in the very thick of the Revolution, he wrote solemnly:
”If there is a sin superior to every other, it is that of wilful and offensive war.... He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of h.e.l.l, and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.” (A copy of this, together with the President's recent message, might advantageously be sent to a certain well-known address on the other side of the world!) Yet did Paine, with this solemn horror of war, suggest that the United States stop fighting? No more than he had suggested that they keep out of trouble in the first place. Paine hated war in itself; but he held war a proper and righteous means to n.o.ble ends.
Consistency is not only the bugbear of little minds; it is also the trade-mark of them. Paine also detested monarchies. ”Some talent is required to be a simple workman,” he wrote; ”to be a king there is need to have only the human shape.” Of Burke, he said: ”Mr. Burke's mind is above the homely sorrows of the vulgar. He can feel only for a king or a queen.... He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.”
Yet when he was a member of that French a.s.sembly that voted King Louis to death, he fought the others fiercely,--even though unable to speak French,--persistently opposing them, with a pa.s.sionate determination and courage which came near to costing him his life.
For, as Brailsford says, ”The Terror made mercy a traitor.”
Are these things truly paradoxes, or are they rather manifestations of that G.o.d-given reason which can clearly see things as they are as well as things as they should be, and see both to good and helpful purpose?
In 1802 Paine returned to America, just sixty-five years old. He had suffered terribly, had rendered great services and it was at least reasonable that he should expect a welcome. What happened is tersely told by Rufus Rockwell Wilson:
<script>