Essays in Rebellion Part 2

Present grandeur is always hard to realise. The past and the distant are easily perceived. Like a far-off mountain, their glory is conspicuous, and the iridescent vapours of romance quickly gather round it. The main outline of a distant peak is clear, for rival heights are plainly surpa.s.sed, and sordid details, being invisible, cannot detract from it or confuse. The comfortable spectator may contemplate it in peace. It does not exact from him quick decisions or disquieting activity. The storms that sweep over it contribute to his admiration without wetting his feet, and his high estimate of its beauty and greatness may be enjoyed without apprehension of an avalanche. So the historian is like a picturesque spectator cultivating his sense of the sublime upon a distant prospect of the Himalayas. It is easy for him to admire, and the appreciation of a far-off heroic movement gives him quite a pleasant time. At his leisure he may descant with enthusiasm upon the forlorn courage of sacrificed patriots, and hymn, amidst general applause, the battles of freedom long since lost or won.

But in the thick of present life it is different. The air is obscured by murky doubt, and unaccustomed shapes stand along the path, indistinguishable under the light malign. Uncertain hope scarcely glimmers, nor can the termination of the struggle be divined.

Tranquillity, giving time for thought, and the security that leaves the judgment clear, have both gone, and may never return. The ears are haunted with the laughter of vulgarity, and the judicious discouragement of prudence. Is there not as much to be said for taking one line as another? If there is talk of conflict, were it not better to leave the issue in the discriminating hands of One whose judgment is indisputable?

Yet in the very midst of hesitations, mockery, and good advice, the next step must be taken, the decision must be swift, the choice is brief but eternal. There is no clear evidence of heroism around. The lighters do not differ much from the grotesque, the foolish, and the braggart ruck of men. No wonder that culture smiles and pa.s.ses aloof upon its pellucid and elevating course. Culture smiles; the valet de chambre lurking in most hearts sniffs at the name of hero; hideous applause comes from securely sheltered crowds who hound victims to the combat, bloodthirsty as spectators at a bull-fight. In the sweat and twilight and crudity of the actual event, when so much is merely ludicrous and discomforting, and all is enveloped in the element of fear, it is rare to perceive a glory s.h.i.+ning, or to distinguish greatness amid the mud of contumely and commonplace.

Take the story of Italy's revival--the "Resurrection," as Italians call it. In the summer of 1911, Italy was celebrating her jubilee of national rebellion, and English writers who spend their years, day by day or week by week, sneering at freedom, betraying nationality, and demanding vengeance on rebels, burst into ecstatic rhapsodies about that glorious but distant uprising. They raised the old war-cry of liberty over battle-fields long silent; they extolled to heaven the renown of the rebellious dead; their very periods glowed with Garibaldian red, white, and green; and rising to Byronic exaltation they concluded their nationalist effusions by adjuring freedom's weather-beaten flag:

"Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying, Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind!"

So they cried, echoing the voice of n.o.ble ghosts. But where in the scenes of present life around them have they hailed that torn but flying banner? What have they said or done for freedom's emblem in Persia, or in Morocco, or in Turkey? What support have they given it in Finland, or in the Caucasus, or in the Baltic Provinces? To come within our own sphere, what ecstatic rhapsodies have they composed to greet the rising nationalism of Ireland, or of India, or of Egypt? Or, in this country herself, what movement of men or of women striving to be free have they welcomed with their paeans of joy? Not once have they perceived a glory in liberty's cause to-day. Wherever a rag of that torn banner fluttered, they have denounced and stamped it down, declaring it should fly no more. Their admiration and enthusiasm are reserved for a buried past, and over triumphant rebellion they will sentimentalise for pages, provided it is securely bestowed in some historic age that can trouble them no more.

Leaving them to their peace, let us approach a great name among our English singers of liberty. Swinburne stands in the foremost rank. In a collection of "English Songs of Italian Freedom," edited by Mr. George Trevelyan, who himself has so finely narrated the epic of Italy's redemption--in that collection Swinburne occupies a place among the very highest. No one has paid n.o.bler tribute to the heroes of that amazing revolution. No one has told the sorrow of their failures with more sympathetic rage, or has poured so burning a scorn and so deep an obloquy upon their oppressors, whether in treacherous Church or alien State. It is magnificent, but alas! it was not war. By the time he wrote, the war was over, the victory won. By that time, not only the British crowd, but even people of rank, office, and culture could hardly fail to applaud. The thing had become definite and conspicuous. It was finished. It stood in quite visible splendour at a safe and comfortable distance. Ridicule had fallen impotent. Hesitation could now put down its foot. Superiority could smile, not in doubt, but in welcome. The element of fear was dissipated. The coward could shout, "I was your friend all along!" If a man wrote odes at all, he could write them to freedom then.

"By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, Remembering Thee, That for ages of agony hast endured and slept, And would'st not see."

How superb! But when that was written the weeping and agony were over, the sleeper had awakened, the eyes saw. It was easy then to sing the heroism of rebellious sorrow. But afterwards, while an issue was still doubtful, while the cry of freedom was rising amid the obscurity, the dust, and uncertainty of actual combat, with how blind a scorn did that great poet of freedom pour upon Irishman and Boer a poison as virulent as he had once poured upon the priests and kings of Italy!

Let us emerge from the depression of such common blindness, and recall the memory of one whose vision never failed even in the midst of present gloom to detect the spark of freedom. A few great names stand beside his. Sh.e.l.ley, Landor, the Brownings, all gave the cause of Italy great and, in one case, the most exquisite verse, while the conflict was uncertain still. Even the distracted and hesitating soul of Clough, amid the dilettante contemplation of the arts in Rome, was rightly stirred.

The poem that declared, "'Tis better to have fought and lost than never to have fought at all," displayed in him a rare decision, while, even among his hideous hexameters, we find the great satiric line--fit motto for spectators at the bull-fights of freedom--"So that I 'list not, hurrah for the glorious army of martyrs!" But the name of Byron rises above them all, not merely that he alone showed himself capable of deed, but that the deed gave to his words a solidity and concrete power such as deeds always give. First of Englishmen, as Mr. Trevelyan says, Byron perceived that a living Italy was struggling beneath the outward semblance of Metternich's "order"; and as early as 1821 he prepared to join the Carbonari of Naples in their revolt for Italian liberty:

"I suppose that they consider me," he wrote, "as a depot to be sacrificed, in case of accidents. It is no great matter, supposing that Italy would he liberated, who or what is sacrificed.

It is a grand object--the very _poetry_ of politics. Only think--a free Italy!"

That was written in freedom's darkest age, between Waterloo and the appearance of Mazzini, and that grand object was not to be reached for forty years. In the meantime, true to his guiding principle:

"Then battle for freedom whenever you can, And, if not shot or hang'd, you'll get knighted,"

Byron had sacrificed himself for Greece as n.o.bly as he was prepared to sacrifice himself for Italy. It was a time of darkness hardly visible.

In the very year when Byron witnessed the collapse of the Carbonari rebellion, Leopardi, as Mr. Trevelyan tells us, wrote to his sister on her marriage: "The children you will have must be either cowards or unhappy; choose the unhappy." The hope of freedom appeared extinct.

Tyrants, as Byron wrote, could be conquered but by tyrants, and freedom found no champion. The Italians themselves were merged in the slime of despairing satisfaction, and he watched them creeping, "crouching, and crab-like," along their streets. But through that dark gate of unhappiness which Leopardi named as the one choice for all but cowards, led the thin path that freedom must always take. Great as were Mazzini's services to all Europe, his greatest service to his countrymen lay in arousing them from the slough of contentment to a life of hards.h.i.+p, sacrifice, and unhappiness. When, after the loss of Rome in 1849, Garibaldi called for volunteers to accompany his hazardous retreat, he said to them: "I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, and death." Swinburne himself may have had those words in mind when, writing also of Garibaldi, he said of freedom:

"She, without shelter or station, She, beyond limit or bar, Urges to slumberless speed Armies that famish, that bleed, Sowing their lives for her seed, That their dust may rebuild her a nation, That their souls may relight her a star."

"Happy are all they that follow her," he continued, and in a sense we may well deem their fate happiness. But it is in the sense of what Carlyle in a memorable pa.s.sage called the allurements to action. "It is a calumny on men," he wrote, "to say they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, reward in this world or the next. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man." Under the spell and with the reward of those grim allurements the battles of freedom, so visible in the resurrection of Italy, so unrecognised in freedom's recurrent and contemporary conflicts, must invariably be fought. We may justly talk, if we please, of the joy in such conflicts, but Thermopylae was a charnel, though, as Byron said, it was a proud one; and it is always against the wind that the banner of freedom streams.

IV

DEEDS NOT WORDS

As he wrote--as he wrote his best, while the shafts of the spirit lightened in his brain--Heine would sometimes feel a mysterious figure standing behind him, m.u.f.fled in a cloak, and holding, beneath the cloak, something that gleamed now and then like an executioner's axe. For a long while he had not perceived that strange figure, when, on visiting Germany, after fourteen years' exile in Paris, as he crossed the Cathedral Square in Cologne one moonlight night, he became aware that it was following him again. Turning impatiently, he asked who he was, why he followed him, and what he was hiding under his cloak. In reply, the figure, with ironic coolness, urged him not to get excited, nor to give way to eloquent exorcism:

"I am no antiquated ghost," he continued. "I'm quite a practical person, always silent and calm. But I must tell you, the thoughts conceived in your soul--I carry them out, I bring them to pa.s.s.

"And though years may go by, I take no rest until I transform your thoughts into reality. You think; I act.

"You are the judge, I am the gaoler, and, like an obedient servant, I fulfil the sentence which you have ordained, even if it is unjust.

"In Rome of ancient days they carried an axe before the Consul. You also have your Lictor, but the axe is carried behind you.

"I am your Lictor, and I walk perpetually with bare executioner's axe behind you--I am the deed of your thought."

No artist--no poet or writer, at all events--could enjoy a more consolatory vision. The powerlessness of the word is the burden of writers, and "Who hath believed our report?" cry all the prophets in successive lamentation. They so naturally suppose that, when truth and reason have spoken, truth and reason will prevail, but, as the years go by, they mournfully discover that nothing of the kind occurs. Man, they discover, does not live by truth and reason: he rather resents the intrusion of such quietly argumentative forms. When they have spoken, nothing whatever is yet accomplished, and the conflict has still to begin. The dog returns to his own vomit; the soul convicted of sin continues sinning, and he that was filthy is filthy still. Thence comes the despair of all the great masters of the word. The immovable world admires them, it praises their style, it forms aesthetic circles for their perusal, and dines in their honour when they are dead. But it goes on its way immovable, grinding the poor, enslaving the slave, admiring hideousness, adulating vulgarity for its wealth and insignificance for its pedigree. Grasping, pleasure-seeking, indifferent to reason, and enamoured of the lie, so it goes on, and the masters of the word might just as well have hushed their sweet or thunderous voices. For, though they speak with the tongue of men and angels, and have not action, what are they but sounding bra.s.s and a tinkling cymbal?

To such a mood, how consolatory must be the vision of that m.u.f.fled figure, with the two-handed engine, always following close! And to Heine himself the consolation came with especial grace. He had been virulently a.s.sailed 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 Borne, acknowledged leader of German revolutionists, had scornfully written of him (I translate from Heine's own quotation, in his pamphlet on Borne):

"I can make allowance for child's-play, and for the pa.s.sions of youth. But when, on the day of b.l.o.o.d.y conflict, a boy who is chasing b.u.t.terflies on the battle-field runs between my legs; or when, on the day of our deepest need, while we are praying earnestly to G.o.d, 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 w.a.n.gel 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 Borne'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 b.u.t.terflies 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 Borne's revolutionary scorn of the mere poet, with a poet's fastidious scorn of the smudgy revolutionist. He tells us of his visit to Borne'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 a.s.sembly 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 Borne 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 h.o.r.n.y 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 pa.s.sage 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 Borne. There is no need to make light of Borne'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, m.u.f.fled 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 compa.s.sion, we suppose our prophets would grow quite cheerful at last. But to justice and compa.s.sion 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, a.s.serted 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 antic.i.p.ated, 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 pa.s.sions 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 a.s.sertive 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 n.o.ble 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.