G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England, 1917.
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I— Introduction
II— The Province of Britain
III— The Age of Legends
IV— The Defeat of the Barbarians
V— St Edward and the Norman Kings
VI— The Age of the Crusades
VII— The Problem of the Plantagenets
VIII— The Meaning of Merry England
IX— Nationality and the French Wars
X— The War of the Usurpers
XI— The Rebellion of the Rich
XII— Spain and the Schism of Nations
XIII— The Age of the Puritans
XIV— The Triumph of the Whigs
XV— The War with the Great Republics
XVI— Aristocracy and the Discontents
XVII— The Return of the Barbarian
XVIII— Conclusion
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A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND
I
INTRODUCTION
It will be very reasonably asked why I should consent, though upon a sort of challenge, to write even a popular essay in English history, who make no pretence to particular scholarship and am merely a member of the public. The answer is that I know just enough to know one thing: that a history from the standpoint of a member of the public has not been written. What we call the popular histories should rather be called the anti-popular histories. They are all, nearly without exception, written against the people; and in them, the populace is either ignored or elaborately proved to have been wrong. It is true that Green called his book “A Short History of the English People”; but he seems to have thought it too short for the people to be properly mentioned. For instance, he calls one very large part of his story “Puritan England.” But England never was Puritan. It would have been almost as unfair to call the rise of Henry of Navarre “Puritan France.” And some of our extreme Whig historians would have been pretty nearly capable of calling the campaign of Wexford and Drogheda “Puritan Ireland.”
But it is especially in the matter of the Middle Ages that the popular histories trample upon the popular traditions. In this respect there is an almost comic contrast between the general information provided about England in the last two or three centuries, in which its present industrial system, was being built up, and the general information given about the preceding centuries, which we call broadly mediaeval. Of the sort of waxwork history which is thought sufficient for the side-show of the age of abbots and crusaders, a small instance will be sufficient. A popular Encyclopaedia appeared some years ago, professing among other things to teach English History to the masses; and in this I came upon a series of pictures of the English kings. No one could expect them to be all authentic; but the interest attached to those that were necessarily imaginary. There is much vivid material in contemporary literature for portraits of men like Henry II or Edward I; but this did not seem to have been found, or even sought. And wandering to the image that stood for Stephen of Blois, my eye was staggered by a gentleman with one of those helmets with steel brims curved like a crescent, which went with the age of ruffs and trunk-hose. I am tempted to suspect that the head was that of a halberdier at some such scene as the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. But he had a helmet; and helmets were mediaeval; and any old helmet was good enough for Stephen.
Now suppose the readers of that work of reference had looked for the portrait of Charles I and found the head of a policeman. Suppose it had been taken, modern helmet and all, out of some snapshot in the Daily Sketch of the arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst. I think we may go so far as to say that the readers would have refused to accept it as a lifelike portrait of Charles I. They would have formed the opinion that there must be some mistake. Yet the time that elapsed between Stephen and Mary was much longer than the time that has elapsed between Charles and ourselves. The revolution in human society between the first of the Crusades and the last of the Tudors was immeasurably more colossal and complete than any change between Charles and ourselves. And, above all, that revolution should be the first thing and the final thing in anything calling itself a popular history. For it is the story of how our populace gained great things, but to-day has lost everything.
Now I will modestly maintain that I know more about English history than this; and that I have as much right to make a popular summary of it as the gentleman who made the crusader and the halberdier change hats. But the curious and arresting thing about the neglect, one might say the omission, of mediaeval civilization in such histories as this, lies in the fact I have already noted. It is exactly the popular story that is left out of the popular history. For instance, even a working man, a carpenter or cooper or bricklayer, has been taught about the Great Charter, as something like the Great Auk, save that its almost monstrous solitude came from being before its time instead of after. He was not taught that the whole stuff of the Middle Ages was stiff with the parchment of charters; that society was once a system of charters, and of a kind much more interesting to him. The carpenter heard of one charter given to barons, and chiefly in the interest of barons; the carpenter did not hear of any of the charters given to carpenter, to coopers, to all the people like himself. Or, to take another instance, the boy and girl reading the stock simplified histories of the schools practically never heard of such a thing as a burgher, until he appears in a shirt with a noose round his neck. They certainly do not imagine anything of what he meant in the Middle Ages. And Victorian shopkeepers did not conceive themselves as taking part in any such romance as the adventure of Coutrai, where the mediaeval shopkeepers more than won their spurs— for they won the spurs of their enemies.
I have a very simple motive and excuse for telling the little I know of this true tale. I have met in my wanderings a man brought up in the lower quarters of a great house, fed mainly on its leavings and burdened mostly with its labours. I know that his complaints are stilled, and his status justified, by a story that is told to him. It is about how his grandfather was a chimpanzee and his father a wild man of the woods, caught by hunters and tamed into something like intelligence. In the light of this, he may well be thankful for the almost human life that he enjoys; and may be content of leaving behind him a yet more evolved animal. Strangely enough, the calling of this story by the sacred name of Progress ceased to satisfy me when I began to suspect (and to discover) that it is not true. I know by now enough at least of his origin to know that he was not evolved, but simply disinherited. His family tree is not a monkey tree, save in the sense that no monkey could have climbed it; rather it is like that tree torn up by the roots and names “Dedischado,” on the shield of the unknown knight.
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II
THE PROVINCE OF ENGLAND
The land on which we live once had the highly poetic privilege of being the end of the world. Its extremity was ultima Thule, the other end of nowhere. When these islands, lost in a night of northern seas, were lit up at last by the long searchlights of Rome, it was felt that the remotest remnant of things had been touched; and more for pride than possession.
The sentiment was not unsuitable, even in geography. About these realms upon the edge of everything there was really something that can only be called edgy. Britain is not so much an island as an archipelago; it is at least a labyrinth of peninsulas. In few of the kindred countries can one so easily and so strangely find sea in the fields or fields in the sea. The great rivers seem not only to meet in the ocean, but barely to miss each other in the hills: the whole land, though low as a whole, leans towards the west in shouldering mountains; and a prehistoric tradition has taught it to look towards the sunset for islands yet dreamier than its own. The islanders are of a kind with their islands. Different as are the nations into which they are now divided, the Scots, the English, the Irish, the Welsh of the western uplands, have something altogether different from the humdrum docility of the inland Germans, or from the bon sens français which can be at will trenchant or trite. There is something common to all the Britons, which even Acts of Union have not torn asunder. The nearest name for it is insecurity, something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge of things. Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humour without wit, perplex their critics and perplex themselves. Their souls are fretted like their coasts. They have an embarrassment, noted by all foreigners: it is expressed, perhaps, in the Irish by a confusion of speech and in the English by a confusion of thought. For the Irish bull is a licence with the symbol of language. But Bull’s own bull, the English bull, is “a dumb ox of thought”; a standing mystification in the mind. There is something double in the thoughts as of the soul mirrored in many waters. Of all peoples they are least attached to the purely classical; the imperial plainness which the French do finely and the Germans coarsely, but the Britons hardly at all. They are constantly colonists and emigrants; they have the name of being at home in every country. But they are torn between love of home and love of something else; of which the sea may be the explanation or may be only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme which is the finest line English literature and the dumb refrain of all English poems—“Over the hills and far away.”
The greatest rationalist hero who first conquered Britain, whether or no he was the detached demi-god of “Caesar and Cleopatra,” was certainly a Latin of the Latins, and described these islands when he found them with all the curt positivism of his pen of steel. But even Julius Caesar’s brief account of the Britons leaves on us something of this mystery, which is more than ignorance of fact. They were apparently ruled by that terrible thing, a pagan priesthood. Stones now shapeless yet arranged in symbolic shapes bear witness to the order and labour of those that lifted them. Their worship was probably Nature-worship; and while such a basis may count for something in the elemental quality that has always soaked the island arts, the collision between it and the tolerant Empire suggests the presence of something which generally grows out of nature-worship— I mean the unnatural. But upon nearly all the matters of modern controversy Caesar is silent. He is silent about whether the language was “Celtic”; and some of the place-names have even given rise to a suggestion that, in parts at least, it was already Teutonic. I am not capable of pronouncing upon the truth of such speculations, but I am of pronouncing upon their importance; at least, to my one very simple purpose. And indeed their importance has been very exaggerated. Caesar professed to give no more than the glimpse of a traveller; but, when, some considerable time after, the Romans returned and turned Britain into a Roman province, they continued to display a singular indifference to questions that have excited so many professors. What they cared about was getting and giving in Britain what they had got and given in Gaul. We do not know whether the Britons then, or for that matter the Britons now, were Iberian or Cymric or Teutonic. We do know that in a short time they were Roman.
Every now and then there is discovered in modern England some fragment such as a Roman pavement. Such Roman antiquities rather diminish than increase the Roman reality. They make something seem distant which is still very near, and something seem dead that is still alive. It is like writing a man’s epitaph on his front door. The epitaph would probably be a compliment, but hardly a personal introduction. The important thing about France and England is not that they have Roman remains. They are Roman remains. In truth they are not so much remains as relics; for they are still working miracles. A row of poplars is a more Roman relic than a row of pillars. Nearly all that we call the works of nature have but grown like fungoids upon this original work of man, and our woods are mosses on the bones of a giant. Under the seed of our harvest and the roots of our trees is a foundation of which the fragments of tile and brick are but emblems; and under the colours of our wildest flowers are the colours of a Roman pavement.
Britain was directly Roman for fully four hundred years; longer than she has been Protestant, and very much longer than she has been industrial. What was meant by being Roman it is necessary in a few lines to say, or no sense can be made of what happened after, especially of what happened immediately after. Being Roman did not mean being subject, in the sense that one savage tribe will enslave another, or in the sense that the cynical politicians of recent times watched with a horrible hopefulness for the evanescence of the Irish. Both conquerors and conquered were heathen, and both had the institutions which seem to us to give an inhumanity to heathenism: the triumph, the slave-market, the lack of all the sensitive nationalism of modern history. But the Roman Empire did not destroy nations; if anything, it created them. Britons were not originally proud of being Britons; but they were proud of being Romans. The Roman steel was at least as much a magnet as a sword. In truth it was rather a round mirror of steel, in which every people came to see itself. For Rome as Rome the very smallness of the civic origin was a warrant for the largeness of the civic experiment. Rome itself obviously could not rule the world, any more than Rutland. I mean it could not rule the other races as the Spartans ruled the Helots or the Americans ruled the negroes. A machine so huge had to be human; it had to have a handle that fitted any man’s hand. The Roman Empire necessarily became less Roman as it became more of an Empire; until not very long after Rome gave conquerors to Britain, Britain was giving emperors to Rome. Out of Britain, as the Britons boasted, came at length the great Empress Helena, who was the mother of Constantine. And it was Constantine, as all men know, who first nailed up that proclamation which all after generations have in truth been struggling either to protect or to tear down.
About that revolution no man has ever been able to be impartial. The present writer will make no idle pretence of being so. That it was the most revolutionary of all revolutions, since it identified the dead body on a servile gibbet with the fatherhood in the skies, has long been a commonplace without ceasing to be a paradox. But there is another historic element that must also be realized. Without saying anything more of its tremendous essence, it is very necessary to note why even pre-Christian Rome was regarded as something mystical for long afterwards by all European men. The extreme view of it was held, perhaps, by Dante; but it pervaded mediaevalism, and therefore still haunts modernity. Rome was regarded as Man, mighty, though fallen, because it was the utmost that Man had done. It was divinely necessary that the Roman Empire should succeed—if only that it might fail. Hence the school of Dante implied the paradox that the Roman soldiers killed Christ, not only by right, but even by divine right. That mere law might fail at its highest test it had to be real law, and not mere military lawlessness. Therefore God worked by Pilate as by Peter. Therefore the mediaeval poet is eager to show that Roman government was simply good government, and not a usurpation. For it was the whole point of the Christian revolution to maintain that in this, good government was as bad as bad. Even good government was not good enough to know God among the thieves. This is not only generally important as involving a colossal change in the conscience; the loss of the whole heathen repose in the complete sufficiency of the city or the state. It made a sort of eternal rule enclosing an eternal rebellion. It must be incessantly remembered through the first half of English history; for it is the whole meaning in the quarrel of the priests and kings.
The double rule of the civilization and the religion in one sense remained for centuries; and before its first misfortunes came it must be conceived as substantially the same everywhere. And however it began it largely ended in equality. Slavery certainly existed, as it had in the most democratic states of ancient times. Harsh officialism certainly existed, as it exists in the most democratic states of modern times. But there was nothing of what we mean in modern times by aristocracy, still less of what we mean by racial domination. In so far as any change was passing over that society with its two levels of equal citizens and equal slaves, it was only the slow growth of the power of the Church at the expense of the power of the Empire. Now it is important to grasp that the great exception to equality, the institution of Slavery, was slowly modified by both causes. It was weakened both by the weakening of the Empire and by the strengthening of the Church.
Slavery was for the Church not a difficulty of doctrine, but a strain on the imagination. Aristotle and the pagan sages who had defined the servile or “useful” arts, had regarded the slave as a tool, an axe to cut wood or whatever wanted cutting. The Church did not denounce the cutting; but she felt as if she was cutting glass with a diamond. She was haunted by the memory that the diamond is so much more precious than the glass. So Christianity could not settle down into the pagan simplicity that the man was made for the work, when the work was so much less immortally momentous than the man. At about this stage of a history of England there is generally told the anecdote of a pun of Gregory the Great; and this is perhaps the true point of it. By the Roman theory the barbarian bondmen were meant to be useful. The saint’s mysticism was moved at finding them ornamental; and “Non Angli sed Angeli” meant more nearly “Not slaves, but souls.” It is to the point, in passing, to note that in the modern country most collectively Christian, Russia, the serfs were always referred to as “souls”. The great Pope’s phrase, hackneyed as it is, is perhaps the first glimpse of the golden halos in the best Christian Art. Thus the Church, with whatever other faults, worked of her own nature towards greater social equality; and it is a historical error to suppose that the Church hierarchy worked with aristocracies, or was of a kind with them. It was an inversion of aristocracy; in the ideal of it, at least, the last were to be first. The Irish bull that “One man is as good as another and a great deal better” contains a truth, like many contradictions; a truth that was the link between Christianity and citizenship. Alone of all superiors, the saint does not depress the human dignity of others. He is not conscious of his superiority to them; but only more conscious of his inferiority than they are.
But while a million little priests and monks like mice were already nibbling at the bonds of the ancient servitude, another process was going on, which has here been called the weakening of the Empire. It is a process which is to this day very difficult to explain. But it affected all the institutions of all the provinces, especially the institution of Slavery. But of all the provinces its effect was heaviest in Britain, which lay on or beyond the borders. The case of Britain, however, cannot possibly be considered alone. The first half of English history has been made quite unmeaning in the schools by the attempt to tell it without reference to the corporate Christendom in which it took part and pride. I fully accept the truth of Mr. Kipling’s question of “What can they know of England who only England know?” and merely differ from the view that they will best broaden their minds by the study of Wagga-Wagga and Timbuctoo. It is therefore necessary, though very difficult, to frame in few words some idea of what happened to the whole European race.
Rome itself, which had made all that strong world, was the weakest thing in it. The centre had been growing fainter and fainter, and now the centre disappeared. Rome had as much freed the world as ruled it, and now she could rule no more. Save for the presence of the Pope and his constantly increasing supernatural prestige, the eternal city became like one of her own provincial towns. A loose localism was the result rather than any conscious intellectual unity. There was anarchy, but there was no rebellion. For rebellion must have a principle, and therefore (for those who can think) an authority. Gibbon called his great pageant of prose “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” The Empire did decline, but it did not fall. It remains to this hour.
By a process very much more indirect even than that of the Church, this decentralization and drift also worked against the slave-state of antiquity. The localism did indeed produce that choice of territorial chieftains which came to be called Feudalism, and of which we shall speak later. But the direct possession of man by man the same localism tended to destroy; though this negative influence upon it bears no kind of proportion to the positive influence of the Catholic Church. The later pagan slavery, like our own industrial labour which increasingly resembles it, was worked on a larger and larger scale; and it was at last too large to control. The bondman found the visible Lord more distant than the new invisible one. The slave became the serf; that is, he could be shut in, but not shut out. When once he belonged to the land, it could not be long before the land belonged to him. Even in the old and rather fictitious language of chattel slavery, there is here a difference. It is the difference between a man being a chair and a man being a house. Canute might call for his throne; but if he wanted his throne-room he must go and get it himself. Similarly, he could tell his slave to run, but he could only tell his serf to stay. Thus the two slow changes of the time both tended to transform the tool into a man. His status began to have roots; and whatever has roots will have rights.
What the decline did involve everywhere was decivilization; the loss of letter, of laws, of roads and means of communication, the exaggeration of local colour into caprice. But on the edges of the Empire this decivilization became a definite barbarism, owing to the nearness of wild neighbours who were ready to destroy as deafly and blindly as things are destroyed by fire. Save for the lurid and apocalyptic locust-flight of the Huns, it is perhaps an exaggeration to talk, even in those darkest ages, of a deluge of the barbarians; at least when we are speaking of the old civilization as a whole. But a deluge of barbarians is not entirely an exaggeration of what happened on some of the borders of the Empire; of such edges of the known world as we began by describing in these pages. And on the extreme edge of the world lay Britain.
It may be true, though there is little proof of it, that the Roman civilization itself was thinner in Britain than in the other provinces; but it was a very civilized civilization. It gathered round the great cities like York and Chester and London; for the cities are older than the counties, and indeed older even than the countries. These were connected by a skeleton of great roads which were and are the bones of Britain. But with the weakening of Rome the bones began to break under barbarian pressure, coming at first from the north; from the Picts who lay beyond Agricola’s boundary in what is now the Scotch Lowlands. The whole of this bewildering time is full of temporary tribal alliances, generally mercenary; of barbarians paid to come on or barbarians paid to go away. It seems certain that in this welter Roman Britain bought help from ruder races living about the neck of Denmark where is now the duchy of Schleswig. Having been chosen only to fight somebody they naturally fought anybody; and a century of fighting followed, under the trampling of which the Roman pavement was broken into yet smaller pieces. It is perhaps permissible to disagree with the historian Green when he says that no spot should be more sacred to modern Englishmen than the neighbourhood of Ramsgate, where the Schleswig people are supposed to have landed; or when he suggests that their appearance is the real beginning of our island story. It would be rather more true to say that it was nearly, though prematurely, the end of it.
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III
THE AGE OF LEGENDS
We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale. We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in Cranford, after tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick. Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen’s young ladies who had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon. Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do with rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment and engineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite modern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and then all of a sudden we are reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier of civilization is no longer fighting with Goths but with goblins; the land becomes a labyrinth of faërie towns unknown to history; and scholars can suggest but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain towers up in the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur. The scientific age comes first and the mythological age after it. One working example, the echoes of which lingered till very late in English literature, may serve to sum up the contrast. The British state which was found by Caesar was long believed to have been founded by Brutus. The contrast between the one very dry discovery and the other very fantastic foundation has something decidedly comic about it; as if Caesar’s ‘Et tu, Brute,’ might be translated, ‘What, you here?’ But in one respect the fable is quite as important as the fact. They both testify to the reality of the Roman foundation of our insular society, and show that even the stories that seem prehistoric are seldom pre-Roman. When England is Elfland, the elves are not the Angles. All the phrases that can be used as clues through that tangle of traditions are more or less Latin phrases. And in all our speech there was no word more Roman than ‘romance’.
The Roman legions left Britain in the fourth century. This did not mean that the Roman civilization left it; but it did mean that the civilization lay far more open both to admixture and attack. Christianity had almost certainly come to Britain, not indeed otherwise than by the routes established by Rome, but certainly long before the official Roman mission of Gregory the Great. It had certainly been largely swamped by later heathen invasions of the undefended coasts. It may then rationally be urged that the hold both of the Empire and its new religion were here weaker than elsewhere, and that the description of the general civilization in the last chapter is proportionately irrelevant. This, however, is not the chief truth of the matter.
There is one fundamental fact which must be understood of the whole of this period. Yet a modern man must very nearly turn his mind upside down to understand it. Almost every modern man has in his head an association between freedom and the future. The whole culture of our time has been full of the notion of ‘A Good Time Coming.’ Now the whole culture of the Dark Ages was full of the notion of ‘A Good Time Going.’ They looked backwards to old enlightenment and forwards to new prejudices. In our time there has come a quarrel between faith and hope—which perhaps must be healed by charity. But they were situated otherwise. They hoped—but it may be said that they hoped for yesterday. All the motives that make a man a progressive now made a man a conservative then. The more he could keep of the past the more he had a fair law and a free state; the more he gave way to the future the more he must endure of ignorance and privilege. All we call reason was one with all we call reaction. And this is the clue which we must carry with us through the lives of all the great men of the Dark Ages; of Alfred, of Bede, of Dunstan. If the most extreme modern Republican were put back in that period he would be an equally extreme Papist or even Imperialist. For the Pope was what was left of the Empire; and the Empire what was left of the Republic.
We may compare the man of that time, therefore, to one who has left free cities and even free fields behind him, and is forced to advance towards a forest. And the forest is the fittest metaphor, not only because it was really that wild European growth cloven here and there by the Roman roads, but also because there has always been associated with forests another idea which increased as the Roman order decayed. The idea of the forests was the idea of enchantment. There was a notion of things being double or different from themselves, of beasts behaving like men and not merely, as modern wits would say, of men behaving like beasts. But it is precisely here that it is most necessary to remember that an age of reason had preceded the age of magic. The central pillar which has sustained the storied house of our imagination ever since has been the idea of the civilized knight amid the savage enchantments; the adventures of a man still sane in a world gone mad.
The next thing to note in the matter is this: that in this barbaric time none of the heroes are barbaric. They are only heroes if they are antibarbaric. Men real or mythical, or more probably both, became omnipresent like gods among the people, and forced themselves into the faintest memory and the shortest record, exactly in proportion as they had mastered the heathen madness of the time and preserved the Christian rationality that had come from Rome. Arthur has his name because he killed the heathen; the heathen who killed him have no names at all. Englishmen who know nothing of English history, but less than nothing of Irish history, have heard somehow or other of Brian Boru, though they spell it Boroo and seem to be under the impression that it is a joke. It is a joke the subtlety of which they would never have been able to enjoy, if King Brian had not broken the heathen in Ireland at the great Battle of Clontarf. The ordinary English reader would never have heard of Olaf of Norway if he had not ‘preached the Gospel with his sword’; or the Cid if he had not fought against the Crescent. And though Alfred the Great seems to have deserved his title even as a personality, he was not so great as the work he had to do.
But the paradox remains that Arthur is more real than Alfred. For the age is the age of legends. Towards these legends most men adopt by instinct a sane attitude; and, of the two, credulity is certainly much more sane than incredulity. It does not much matter whether most of the stories are true; and (as in such cases as Bacon and Shakespeare) to realize that the question does not matter is the first step towards answering it correctly. But before the reader dismisses anything like an attempt to tell the earlier history of the country by its legends, he will do well to keep two principles in mind, both of them tending to correct the crude and very thoughtless scepticism which has made this part of the story so sterile. The nineteenth-century historians went on the curious principle of dismissing all people of whom tales are told, and concentrating upon people of whom nothing is told. Thus, Arthur is made utterly impersonal because all legends are lies, but somebody of the type of Hengist is made quite an important personality, merely because nobody thought him important enough to lie about. Now this is the reverse of all common sense. A great many witty sayings are attributed to Talleyrand which were really said by somebody else. But they would not be so attributed if Talleyrand had been a fool, still less if he had been a fable. That fictitious stories are told about a person is, nine times out of ten, extremely good evidence that there was somebody to tell them about. Indeed some allow that marvellous things were done, and that there may have been a man named Arthur at the time in which they were done; but here, so far as I am concerned, the distinction becomes rather dim. I do not understand the attitude which holds that there was an Ark and a man named Noah, but cannot believe in the existence of Noah’s Ark.
The other fact to be remembered is that scientific research for the last few years has worked steadily in the direction of confirming and not dissipating the legends of the populace. To take only the obvious instance, modern excavators with modern spades have found a solid stone labyrinth in Crete, like that associated with the Minatour, which was conceived as being as cloudy a fable as the Chimera. To most people this would have seemed quite as frantic as finding the roots of Jack’s Beanstalk or the skeletons in Bluebeard’s cupboard, yet it is simply the fact. Finally, a truth to be remembered which scarcely ever is remembered in estimating the past. It is the paradox that the past is always present: yet it is not what was, but whatever seems to have been; for all the past is part of faith. What did they believe of their fathers? In this matter new discoveries are useless because they are new. We may find men wrong in what they thought they were, but we cannot find them wrong in what they thought they thought. It is therefore very practical to put in a few words, if possible, something of what a man of these islands in the Dark Ages would have said about his ancestors and his inheritance. I will attempt here to put some of the simpler things in their order of importance as he would have seen them; and if we are to understand our father who first made this country anything like itself, it is most important that we should remember that if this was not their real past, it was their real memory.
After that blessed crime, as the wit of mystics called it, which was for these men hardly second to the creation of the world, St. Joseph of Arimathea, one of the few followers of the new religion who seem to have been wealthy, set sail as a missionary, and after long voyages came to that litter of little islands which seemed to the men of the Mediterranean something like the last clouds of the sunset. He came up upon the western and wilder side of that wild and western land, and made his way to a valley which through all the oldest records is called Avalon. Something of rich rains and warmth in its westland meadows, or something in some lost pagan traditions about it, made it persistently regarded as a kind of Earthly Paradise. Arthur, after being slain at Lyonesse, is carried here, as if to heaven. Here the pilgrim planted his staff in the soil; and it took root as a tree that blossoms on Christmas Day.
A mystical materialism marked Christianity from its birth; the very soul of it was a body. Among the stoical philosophies and oriental negations that were its first foes it fought fiercely and particularly for a supernatural freedom to cure concrete maladies by concrete substances. Hence the scattering of relics was everywhere like the scattering of seed. All who took their mission from the divine tragedy bore tangible fragments which became the gems of churches and cities. St. Joseph carried the cup which held the wine of the Last Supper and the blood of the Crucifixion to that shrine in Avalon which we now call Glastonbury; and it became the heart of a whole universe of legends and romances, not only for Britain but for Europe. Throughout this tremendous and branching tradition it is called the Holy Grail. The vision of it was especially the reward of that ring of powerful paladins whom King Arthur feasted at a Round Table, a symbol imitated or invented by mediaeval knighthood. Both the cup and the table are of vast importance emblematically in the psychology of the chivalric experiment. The idea of a round table is not merely universality but equality. It has in it, modified of course, by other tendencies to differentiation, the same idea that exists in the very word ‘peers,’ as given to the knights of Charlemagne. In this the Round Table is as Roman as the round arch, which might also serve as a type; for instead of being one barbaric rock merely rolled on the others, the king was rather the keystone of an arch. But to this tradition of a level of dignity was added something unearthly that was from Rome, but not of it; the privilege that inverted all privileges; the glimpse of heaven which seemed almost as capricious as fairyland; the flying chalice which was veiled from the highest of all the heroes, and which appeared to one knight who was hardly more than a child.
Rightly or wrongly, this romance established Britain for after centuries as a country with a chivalrous past. Britain had been a mirror of universal knighthood. This fact, or fancy, is of colossal import in all ensuing affairs, especially the affairs of barbarians. These and numberless other local legends are indeed for us buried by the forests of popular fancies that have grown out of them. It is all the harder for the serious modern mind because our fathers felt at home with these tales, and therefore took liberties with them. Probably the rhyme which runs,
‘When good King Arthur ruled this land He was a noble king, He stole three pecks of barley meal,’
is much nearer the true mediaeval note than the aristocratic stateliness of Tennyson. But about all these grotesques of the popular fancy there is one last thing to be remembered. It must especially be remembered by those who would dwell exclusively on documents, and take no note of tradition at all. Wild as would be the results of credulity concerning all the old wives’ tales, it would not be so wild as the errors that can arise from trusting to written evidence when there is not enough of it. Now the whole written evidence for the first parts of our history would go into a small book. A very few details are mentioned, and none are explained. A fact thus standing alone, without the key of contemporary thought, may be very much more misleading than any fable. To know what word an archaic scribe wrote without being sure of what thing he meant, may produce a result that is literally mad. Thus, for instance, it would be unwise to accept literally the tale that St. Helena was not only a native of Colchester, but was a daughter of Old King Cole. But it would not be very unwise; not so unwise as some things that are deduced from documents. The natives of Colchester certainly did honour to St. Helena, and might have had a king named Cole. According to the more serious story, the saint’s father was an inn-keeper; and the only recorded action of Cole is well within the resources of that calling. It would not be nearly so unwise as to deduce from the written word, as some critic of the future may do, that the natives of Colchester were oysters.
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IV
THE DEFEAT OF THE BARBARIANS
It is a quaint accident that we employ the word ‘short-sighted’ as a condemnation; but not the word ‘long-sighted,’ which we should probably use, if at all, as a compliment. Yet the one is as much a malady of vision as the other. We rightly say, in rebuke of a small-minded modernity, that it is very short-sighted to be indifferent to all this is historic. But it is as disastrously long-sighted to be interested only in what is prehistoric. And this disaster has befallen a large proportion of the learned who grope in the darkness of unrecorded epochs for the roots of their favourite race or races. The wars, the enslavements, the primitive marriage customs, the colossal migrations and massacres upon which their theories repose, are no part of history or even of legend. And rather than trust with entire simplicity to these it would be infinitely wiser to trust to legend of the loosest and most local sort. In any case, it is well to record even so simple a conclusion as that what is prehistoric is unhistorical.
But there is another way in which common sense can be brought to the criticism of some prodigious racial theories. To employ the same figure, suppose the scientific historians explain the historic centuries in terms of a prehistoric division between short-sighted and long-sighted men. They could cite their instances and illustrations. They would certainly explain the curiosity of language I mentioned first, as showing that the short-sighted were the conquered race, and their name therefore a term of contempt. They could give us very graphic pictures of the rude tribal war. They could show how the long-sighted people were always cut to pieces in hand-to-hand struggles with axe and knife; until, with the invention of bows and arrows, the advantage veered to the long-sighted, and their enemies were shot down in droves. I could easily write a ruthless romance about it, and still more easily a ruthless anthropological theory. According to that thesis which refers all moral to material changes, they could explain the tradition that old people grow conservative in politics by the well-known fact that old people grow more long-sighted. But I think there might be one thing about this theory which would stump us, and might even, if it be possible, stump them. Suppose it were pointed out that through all the three thousand years of recorded history, abounding in literature of every conceivable kind, there was not so much as a mention of the oculist question for which all had been dared and done. Suppose not one of the living or dead languages of mankind had so much as a word for ‘long-sighted’ or ‘short-sighted.’ Suppose, in short, the question that had torn the whole world in two was never even asked at all, until some spectacle-maker suggested it somewhere about 1750. In that case I think we should find it hard to believe that this physical difference had really played so fundamental a part in human history. And that is exactly the case with the physical difference between the Celts, the Teutons and the Latins.
I know of no way in which fair-haired people can be prevented from falling in love with dark-haired people; and I do not believe that whether a man was long-headed or round-headed ever made much difference to any one who felt inclined to break his head. To all mortal appearance, in all mortal records and experience, people seem to have killed or spared, married or refrained from marriage, made kings or made slaves, with reference to almost any other consideration except this one. There was the love of a valley or a village, a site or a family; there were enthusiasms for a prince and his hereditary office; there were passions rooted in locality, special emotions about sea-fold or mountain-fold; there were historic memories of a cause or an alliance; there was, more than all, the tremendous test of religion. But of a cause like that of the Celts or Teutons, covering half the earth, there was little or nothing. Race was not only never at any given moment a motive, but it was never even an excuse. The Teutons never had a creed; they never had a cause; and it was only a few years ago that they began even to have a cant.
The orthodox modern historian, notably Green, remarks on the singularity of Britain in being alone of all Roman provinces wholly cleared and repeopled by a Germanic race. He does not entertain, as an escape from the singularity of this even, the possibility that it never happened. In the same spirit he deals with the little that can be quoted of the Teutonic society. His ideal picture of it is completed in small touches which even an amateur can detect as dubious. Thus he will touch on the Teuton with a phrase like ‘the basis of their society was the free man’; and on the Roman with a phrase like ‘the mines, if worked by forced labour, must have been a source of endless oppression.’ The simple fact being that the Roman and the Teuton both had slaves, he treats the Teuton free man as the only thing to be considered, not only then but now; and then goes out of his way to say that if the Roman treated his slaves badly, the slaves were badly treated. He expresses a ‘strange disappointment’ that Gildas, the only British chronicler, does not describe the great Teutonic system. In the opinion of Gildas, a modification of that of Gregory, it was a case of non Angli sed diaboli. The modern Teutonist is ‘disappointed’ that the contemporary authority saw nothing in his Teutons except wolves, dogs, and whelps from the kennel of barbarism. But it is at least faintly tenable that there was nothing else to be seen.
In any case when St. Augustine came to the largely barbarized land, with what may be called the second of the three great southern visitations which civilized these islands, he did not see any ethnological problems, whatever there may have been to be seen. With him or his converts the chain of literary testimony is taken up again; and we must look at the world as they saw it. He found a king ruling in Kent, beyond whose borders lay other kingdoms of about the same size, the kings of which were all apparently heathen. The names of these kings were mostly what we call Teutonic names; but those who write the almost entirely hagiological records did not say, and apparently did not ask, whether the populations were in this sense of unmixed blood. It is at least possible that, as on the Continent, the kings and courts were almost the only Teutonic element. The Christians found converts, they found patrons, they found persecutors; but they did not find Ancient Britons because they did not look for them; and if they moved among pure Anglo-Saxons they had not the gratification of knowing it. There was, indeed, what all history attests, a marked change of feeling towards the marches of Wales. But all history also attests that this is always found, apart from any difference in race, in the transition from the lowlands to the mountain country. But of all the things they found the thing that counts most in English history is this: that some of the kingdoms at least did correspond to genuine human divisions, which not only existed then but which exist now. Northumbria is still a truer thing than Northumberland. Sussex is still Sussex; Essex is still Essex. And that third Saxon kingdom whose name is not even to be found upon the map, the kingdom of Wessex, is called the West Country and is to-day the most real of them all.
The last of the heathen kingdoms to accept the cross was Mercia, which corresponds very roughly to what we call the Midlands. The unbaptized king, Penda, has even achieved a certain picturesqueness through this fact, and through the forays and furious ambitions which constituted the rest of his reputation; so much so that the other day one of those mystics who will believe anything but Christianity proposed to “continue the work of Penda” in Ealing: fortunately not on any large scale. What that prince believed or disbelieved it is now impossible and perhaps unnecessary to discover; but the last stand of his central kingdom is not insignificant. The isolation of the Mercian was perhaps due to the fact that Christianity grew from the eastern and western coasts. The eastern growth was, of course, the Augustinian mission, which had already made Canterbury the spiritual capital of the island. The western grew from whatever was left of the British Christianity. The two clashed, not in creed but in customs; and the Augustinians ultimately prevailed. But the work from the west had already been enormous. It is possible that some prestige went with the possession of Glastonbury, which was like a piece of the Holy Land; but behind Glastonbury there was an even grander and more impressive power. There irradiated to all Europe at that time the glory of the golden age of Ireland. There the Celts were the classics of Christian art, opened in the Book of Kells four hundred years before its time. There the baptism of the whole people had been a spontaneous popular festival which reads almost like a picnic; and thence came crowds of enthusiasts for the Gospel almost literally like men running with good news. This must be remembered through the development of that dark dual destiny that has bound us to Ireland: for doubts have been thrown on a national unity which was not from the first a political unity. But if Ireland was not one kingdom it was in reality one bishopric. Ireland was not converted but created by Christianity, as a stone church is created; and all its elements were gathered as under a garment, under the genius of St. Patrick. It was the more individual because the religion was mere religion, without the secular conveniences. Ireland was never Roman, and it was always Romanist.
But indeed this is, in a lesser degree, true of our more immediate subject. It is the paradox of this time that only the unworldly things had any worldly success. The politics are a nightmare; the kings are unstable and the kingdoms shifting; and we are really never on solid ground except on consecrated ground. The material ambitions are not always unfruitful but nearly always unfulfilled. The castles are all castles in the air; it is only the churches that are built on the ground. The visionaries are the only practical men, as in that extraordinary thing, the monastery, which was, in many ways, to be the key of our history. The time was to come when it was to be rooted out of our country with a curious and careful violence; and the modern English reader has therefore a very feeble idea of it and hence of the ages in which it worked. Even in these pages a word or two about its primary nature is therefore quite indispensable.
In the tremendous testament of our religion there are present certain ideals that seem wilder than impieties, which have in later times produced wild sects professing an almost inhuman perfection on certain points; as in the Quakers who renounce the right of self-defence, or the Communists who refuse any personal possessions. Rightly or wrongly, the Christian Church had from the first dealt with these visions as being special spiritual adventures which were to the adventurous. She reconciled them with natural human life by calling them specially good, without admitting that the neglect of them was necessarily bad. She took the view that it takes all sorts to make a world, even the religious world, and used the man who chose to go without arms, family, or property as a sort of exception that proved the rule. Now the interesting fact is that he really did prove it. This madman who would not mind his own business becomes the business man of the age. The very word “monk” is a revolution, for it means solitude and came to mean community—one might call it sociability. What happened was that this communal life became a sort of reserve and refuge behind the individual life; a hospital for every kind of hospitality. We shall see later how this same function of the common life was given to the common land. It is hard to find an image for it in individualist times; but in private life we most of us know the friend of the family who helps it by being outside, like a fairy godmother. It is not merely flippant to say that monks and nuns stood to mankind as a sort of sanctified league of aunts and uncles. It is a commonplace that they did everything that nobody else would do; that the abbeys kept the world’s diary, faced the plagues of all flesh, taught the first technical arts, preserved the pagan literature, and, above all, kept the poor from the most distant sight of their modern despair. We still find it necessary to have a reserve of philanthropists, but we trust it to men who have made themselves rich, not to men who have made themselves poor. Finally, the abbots and abbesses were elective. They introduced representative government, unknown to ancient democracy, and in itself a semi-sacramental idea. If we could look from the outside at our own institutions, we should see that the very notion of turning a thousand men into one large man walking to Westminster is not only an act of faith, but a fairy tale. The fruitful and effective history of Anglo-Saxon England would be almost entirely a history of its monasteries. Mile by mile, and almost man by man, they taught and enriched the land. And then, about the beginning of the ninth century, there came a turn, as of the twinkling of an eye, and it seemed that all their work was in vain.
The outer world of universal anarchy that lay beyond Christendom heaved another of its colossal and almost cosmic waves and swept everything away. Through all the eastern gates, left open, as it were, by the first barbarian auxiliaries, burst a plague of seafaring savages from Denmark and Scandinavia; and the recently baptized barbarians were again flooded by the unbaptized. All this time, it must be remembered, the actual central mechanism of Roman government had been running down like a click. It was really a race between the driving energy of the missionaries on the edges of the Empire and the galloping paralysis of the city at the centre. In the ninth century the heart had stopped before the hands could bring help to it. All the monastic civilization which had grown up in Britain under a vague Roman protection perished unprotected. The toy kingdoms of the quarrelling Saxons were smashed like sticks; Guthrum, the pirate chief, slew St. Edmund, assumed the crown of East England, took tribute from the panic of Mercia, and towered in menace over Wessex, the last of the Christian lands. The story that follows, page after page, is only the story of its despair and its destruction. The story is a string of Christian defeats alternated with victories so vain as to be more desolate than defeats. It is only in one of these, the fine but fruitless victory at Ashdown, that we first see in the dim struggle, in a desperate and secondary part, the figure who has given his title to the ultimate turning of the tide. For the victor was not then the king, but only the king’s younger brother. There is, from the first, something humble and even accidental about Alfred. He was a great understudy. The interest of his daily life lies in this: that he combined an almost commonplace coolness, and readiness for the ceaseless small bargains and shifting combinations of all that period, with the flaming patience of saints in times of persecution. While he would dare anything for the faith, he would bargain in anything except the faith. He was a conqueror, with no ambition; an author only too glad to be a translator; a simple, concentrated, wary man, watching the fortunes of one thing, which he piloted both boldly and cautiously, and which he saved at last.
He had disappeared after what appeared to be the final heathen triumph and settlement, and is supposed to have lurked like an outlaw in a lonely islet in the impenetrable marshlands of the Parret; towards those wild western lands to which aboriginal races are held to have been driven by fate itself. But Alfred, as he himself wrote in words that are his challenge to the period, held that a Christian man was unconcerned with fate. He began once more to draw to him the bows and spears of the broken levies of the western shires, especially the men of Somerset; and in the spring of 878 he flung them at the lines before the fenced camp of the victorious Danes at Ethandune. His sudden assault was as successful as that at Ashdown, and it was followed by a siege which was successful in a different and very definite sense. Guthrum, the conqueror of England, and all his important supports, were here penned behind their palisades, and when at last they surrendered the Danish conquest had come to an end. Guthrum was baptized, and the Treaty of Wedmore secured the clearance of Wessex. The modern reader will smile at the baptism, and turn with great interest to the terms of the treaty. In this acute attitude the modern reader will be vitally and hopelessly wrong. He must support the tedium of frequent references to the religious element in this part of English history, for without it there would never have been any English history at all. And nothing could clinch this truth more than the case of the Danes. In all the facts that followed, the baptism of Guthrum is really much more important than the Treaty of Wedmore. The treaty itself was a compromise, and even as such did not endure; a century afterwards a Danish king like Canute was really ruling in England. But though the Dane got the crown, he did not get rid of the cross. It was precisely Alfred’s religious exaction that remained unalterable. And Canute himself is actually now only remembered by men as a witness to the futility of merely pagan power; as the king who put his crown upon the image of Christ, and solemnly surrendered to heaven the Scandinavian empire of the sea.
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V
ST. EDWARD AND THE NORMAN KINGS
The reader may be surprised at the disproportionate importance given to the name which stands first in the title of this chapter. I put it there as the best way of emphasizing, at the beginning of what we may call the practical part of our history, an elusive and rather strange thing. It can only be described as the strength of the weak kings.
It is sometimes valuable to have enough imagination to unlearn as well as to learn. I would ask the reader to forget his reading and everything that he learnt at school, and consider the English monarchy as it would then appear to him. Let him suppose that his acquaintance with the ancient kings has only come to him as it came to most men in simpler times, from nursery tales, from the names of places, from the dedications of churches and charities, from the tales in the tavern, and the tombs in the churchyard. Let us suppose such a person going upon some open and ordinary English way, such as the Thames valley to Windsor, or visiting some old seats of culture, such as Oxford or Cambridge. One of the first things, for instance, he would find would be Eton, a place transformed, indeed, by modern aristocracy, but still enjoying its mediaeval wealth and remembering its mediaeval origin. If he asked about that origin, it is probable that even a public schoolboy would know enough history to tell him that it was founded by Henry VI. If he went to Cambridge and looked with his own eyes for the college chapel which artistically towers above all others like a cathedral, he would probably ask about it, and be told it was King’s College. If he asked which king, he would again be told Henry VI. If he then went into the library and looked up Henry VI in an encyclopaedia, he would find that the legendary giant, who had left these gigantic works behind him, was in history an almost invisible pigmy. Amid the varying and contending numbers of a great national quarrel, he is the only cipher. The contending factions carry him about like a bale of goods. His desires do not seem to be even ascertained, far less satisfied. And yet his real desires are satisfied in stone and marble, in oak and gold, and remain through all the maddest revolutions of modern England, while all the ambitions of those who dictated to him have gone away like dust upon the wind.
Edward the Confessor, like Henry VI, was not only an invalid but almost an idiot. It is said that he was wan like an albino, and that the awe men had of him was partly that which is felt for a monster of mental deficiency. His Christian charity was of the kind that borders on anarchism, and the stories about him recall the Christian fools in the great anarchic novels of Russia. Thus he is reported to have covered the retreat of a common thief upon the naked plea that the thief needed things more than he did. Such a story is in strange contrast to the claims made for other kings, that theft was impossible in their dominions. Yet the two types of king are afterwards praised by the same people; and the really arresting fact is that the incompetent king is praised the more highly of the two. And exactly as in the case of the last Lancastrian, we find that the praise has really a very practical meaning in the long run. When we turn from the destructive to the constructive side of the Middle Ages we find that the village idiot is the inspiration of cities and civic systems. We find his seal upon the sacred foundations of Westminster Abbey. We find the Norman victors in the hour of victory bowing before his very ghost. In the Tapestry of Bayeux, woven by Norman hands to justify the Norman cause and glorify the Norman triumph, nothing is claimed for the Conqueror beyond his conquest and the plain personal tale that excuses it, and the story abruptly ends with the breaking of the Saxon line at Battle. But over the bier of the decrepit zany, who died without striking a blow, over this and this alone, is shown a hand coming out of heaven, and declaring the true approval of the power that rules the world.
The Confessor, therefore, is a paradox in many ways, and in none more than in the false reputation for the “English” of that day. As I have indicated, there is some unreality in talking about the Anglo-Saxon at all. The Anglo-Saxon is a mythical and straddling giant, who has presumably left one footprint in England and the other in Saxony. But there was a community, or rather group of communities, living in Britain before the Conquest under what we call Saxon names, and of a blood probably more Germanic and certainly less French than the same communities after the Conquest. And they have a modern reputation which is exactly the reverse of their real one. The value of the Anglo-Saxon is exaggerated, and yet his virtues are ignored. Our Anglo-Saxon blood is supposed to be the practical part of us; but as a fact the Anglo-Saxons were more hopelessly unpractical than any Celt. Their racial influence is supposed to be healthy, or, what many think the same thing, heathen. But as a fact these “Teutons” were the mystics. The Anglo-Saxons did one thing, and one thing only, thoroughly well, as they were fitted to do it thoroughly well. They christened England. Indeed, they christened it before it was born. The one thing the Angles obviously and certainly could not manage to do was to become English. But they did become Christians, and indeed showed a particular disposition to becomes monks. Moderns who talk vaguely of them as our hardy ancestors never do justice to the real good they did us, by thus opening our history, as it were, with the fable of an age of innocence, and beginning all our chronicles, as so many chronicles began, with the golden initial of a saint. By becoming monks they served us in many very valuable and special capacities, but not notably, perhaps, in the capacity of ancestors.
Along the northern coast of France, where the Confessor had passed his early life, lay the lands of one of the most powerful of the French king’s vassals, the Duke of Normandy. He and his people, who constitute one of the most picturesque and curious elements in European history, are confused for most of us by irrelevant controversies which would have been entirely unintelligible to them. The worst of these is the inane fiction which gives the name of Norman to the English aristocracy during its great period of the last three hundred years. Tennyson informed a lady of the name of Vere de Vere that simple faith was more valuable than Norman blood. But the historical student who can believe in Lady Clara as the possessor of the Norman blood must be himself a large possessor of the simple faith. As a matter of fact, as we shall see also when we come to the political scheme of the Normans, the notion is the negation of their real importance in history. The fashionable fancy misses what was best in the Normans, exactly as we have found it missing what was best in the Saxons. One does not know whether to thank the Normans more for appearing or for disappearing. Few philanthropists ever became so rapidly anonymous. It is the great glory of the Norman adventurer that he threw himself heartily into his chance position; and had faith not only in his comrades, but in his subjects, and even in his enemies. He was loyal to the kingdom he had not yet made. Thus the Norman Bruce becomes a Scott thus the descendant of the Norman Strongbow becomes an Irishman. No men less than Normans can be conceived as remaining as a superior caste until the present time. But this alien and adventurous loyalty in the Norman, which appears in these other national histories, appears most strongly of all in the history we have here to follow. The Duke of Normandy does become a real King of England; his claim through the Confessor, his election by the Council, even his symbolic handfuls of the soil of Sussex, these are not altogether empty forms. And though both phrases would be inaccurate, it is very much nearer the truth to call William the first of the English than to call Harold the last of them.
An indeterminate debate touching the dim races that mixed without record in that dim epoch, has made much of the fact that the Norman edges of France, like the East Anglian edges of England, were deeply penetrated by the Norse invasions of the ninth century; and that the ducal house of Normandy, with what other families we know not, can be traced back to a Scandinavian seed. The unquestionable power of captaincy and creative legislation which belonged to the Normans, whoever they were, may be connected reasonably enough with some infusion of fresh blood. But if the racial theorists press the point to a comparison of races, it can obviously only be answered by a study of the two types in separation. And it must surely be manifest that more civilizing power has since been shown by the French when untouched by Scandinavian blood than by the Scandinavians when untouched by French blood. As much fighting (and more ruling) was done by the Crusaders who were never Vikings as by the Vikings who were never Crusaders. But in truth there is no need of such invidious analysis; we may willingly allow a real value to the Scandinavian contribution to the French as to the English nationality, so long as we firmly understand the ultimate historic fact that the duchy of Normandy was as Scandinavian as the town of Norwich. But the debate has another danger, in that it tends to exaggerate even the personal importance of the Norman. Many as were his talents as a master, he is in history the servant of other and wider things. The landing of Lanfranc is perhaps more of a date than the landing of William. And Lanfranc was an Italian—like Julius Caesar. The Norman is not in history a mere wall, the rather brutal boundary of a mere empire. The Norman is a gate. He is like one of those gates which still remain as he made them, with round arch and rude pattern and stout supporting columns; and what entered by that gate was civilization. William of Falaise has in history a title much higher than that of Duke of Normandy or King of England. He was what Julius Caesar was, and what St. Augustine was: he was the ambassador of Europe to Britain.
William asserted that the Confessor, in the course of that connection which followed naturally from his Norman education, had promised the English crown to the holder of the Norman dukedom. Whether he did or not we shall probably never know: it is not intrinsically impossible or even improbable. To blame the promise as unpatriotic, even if it was given, is to read duties defined at a much later date into the first feudal chaos; to make such blame positive and personal is like expecting the Ancient Britons to sing “Rule Britannia”. William further clinched his case by declaring that Harold, the principal Saxon noble and the most probable claimant, had, while enjoying the Duke’s hospitality after a shipwreck, sworn upon sacred relics not to dispute the Duke’s claim. About this episode also we must agree that we do not know; yet we shall be quite out of touch with the time if we say that we do not care. The element of sacrilege in the alleged perjury of Harold probably affected the Pope when he blessed a banner for William’s army; but it did not affect the Pope much more than it would have affected the people; and Harold’s people quite as much as William’s. Harold’s people presumably denied the fact; and their denial is probably the motive of the very marked and almost eager emphasis with which the Bayeux Tapestry asserts and reasserts the reality of the personal betrayal. There is here a rather arresting fact to be noted. A great part of this celebrated pictorial record is not concerned at all with the well-known historical events which we have only to note rapidly here. It does, indeed, dwell a little on the death of Edward; it depicts the difficulties of William’s enterprise in the felling of forests for shipbuilding, in the crossing of the Channel, and especially in the charge up the hill at Hastings, in which full justice is done to the destructive resistance of Harold’s army. But it was really after Duke William had disembarked and defeated Harold on the Sussex coast, that he did what is historically worthy to be called the Conquest. It is not until these later operations that we have the note of the new and scientific militarism from the Continent. Instead of marching upon London he marched round it; and crossing the Thames at Wallingford cut off the city from the rest of the country and compelled its surrender. He had himself elected king with all the forms that would have accompanied a peaceful succession to the Confessor, and after a brief return to Normandy took up the work of war again to bring all England under his crown. Marching through the snow, he laid waste the northern counties, seized Chester, and made rather than won a kingdom. These things are the foundations of historical England; but of these things the pictures woven in honour of his house tell us nothing. The Bayeux Tapestry may almost be said to stop before the Norman Conquest. But it tells in great detail the tale of some trivial raid into Brittany solely that Harold and William may appear as brothers in arms; and especially that William may be depicted in the very act of giving arms to Harold. And here again there is much more significance than a modern reader may fancy, in its bearing upon the new birth of that time and the ancient symbolism of arms. I have said that Duke William was a vassal of the King of France; and that phrase in its use and abuse is the key to the secular side of this epoch. William was indeed a most mutinous vassal, and a vein of such mutiny runs through his family fortunes: his sons Rufus and Henry I. disturbed him with internal ambitions antagonistic to his own. But it would be a blunder to allow such personal broils to obscure the system, which had indeed existed here before the Conquest, which clarified and confirmed it. That system we call Feudalism.
That Feudalism was the main mark of the Middle Ages is a commonplace of fashionable information; but it is of the sort that seeks the past rather in Wardour Street than Watling Street. For that matter, the very term “mediaeval” is used for almost anything from Early English to Early Victorian. An eminent Socialist applied it to our armaments, which is like applying it to our aeroplanes. Similarly the just description of Feudalism, and of how far it was a part and how far rather an impediment in the main mediaeval movement, is confused by current debates about quite modern things— especially that modern thing, the English squirearchy. Feudalism was very nearly the opposite of squirearchy. For it is the whole point of the squire that his ownership is absolute and is pacific. And it is the very definition of Feudalism that it was a tenure, and a tenure by military service. Men paid their rent in steel instead of gold, in spears and arrows against the enemies of their landlord. But even these landlords were not landlords in the modern sense; every one was practically as well as theoretically a tenant of the King; and even he often fell into a feudal inferiority to a Pope or an Emperor. To call it mere tenure by soldiering may seem a simplification; but indeed it is precisely here that it was not so simple as it seems. It is precisely a certain knot or enigma in the nature of Feudalism which makes half the struggle of European history, but especially English history.
There was a certain unique type of state and culture which we call mediaeval, for want of a better word, which we see in the Gothic or the great Schoolmen. This thing in itself was above all things logical. Its very cult of authority was a thing of reason, as all men who can reason themselves instantly recognize, even if, like Huxley, they deny its premises or dislike its fruits. Being logical, it was very exact about who had the authority. Now Feudalism was not quite logical, and was never quite exact about who had the authority. Feudalism already flourished before the mediaeval renascence began. It was, if not the forest the mediaevals had to clear, at least the rude timber with which they had to build. Feudalism was a fighting growth of the Dark Ages before the Middle Ages; the age of barbarians resisted by semi-barbarians. I do not say this in disparagement of it. Feudalism was mostly a very human thing; the nearest contemporary name for it was homage, a word which almost means humanity. On the other hand, mediaeval logic, never quite reconciled to it, could become in its extremes inhuman. It was often mere prejudice that protected men, and pure reason that burned them. The feudal units grew through the lively localism of the Dark Ages, when hills without roads shut in a valley like a garrison. Patriotism had to be parochial; for men had no country, but only a countryside. In such cases the lord grew larger than the king; but it bred not only a local lordship but a kind of local liberty. And it would be very inadvisable to ignore the freer element in Feudalism in English history. For it is the one kind of freedom that the English have had and held.
The knot in the system was something like this. In theory the King owned everything, like an earthly providence; and that made for despotism and “divine right,” which meant in substance a natural authority. In one aspect the King was simply the one lord anointed by the Church, that is recognized by the ethics of the age. But while there was more royalty in theory, there could be more rebellion in practice. Fighting was much more equal than in our age of munitions, and the various groups could arm almost instantly with bows from the forest or spears from the smith. Where men are military there is no militarism. But it is more vital that while the kingdom was in this sense one territorial army, the regiments of it were also kingdoms. The sub-units were also sub-loyalties. Hence the loyalist to his lord might be a rebel to his king; or the king be a demagogue delivering him from the lord. This tangle is responsible for the tragic passions about betrayal, as in the case of William and Harold; the alleged traitor who is always found to be recurrent, yet always felt to be exceptional. To break the tie was at once easy and terrible. Treason in the sense of rebellion was then really felt as treason in the sense of treachery, since it was desertion on a perpetual battlefield. Now, there was even more of this civil war in English than in other history, and the more local and less logical energy on the whole prevailed. Whether there was something in those island idiosyncrasies, shapeless as sea-mists, with which this story began, or whether the Roman imprint had really been lighter than in Gaul, the feudal undergrowth prevented even a full attempt to build the Civitas Dei, or ideal mediaeval state. What emerged was a compromise, which men long afterwards amused themselves by calling a constitution.
There are paradoxes permissible for the redressing of a bad balance in criticism, and which may safely even be emphasized so long as they are not isolated. One of these I have called at the beginning of this chapter the strength of the weak kings. And there is a complement of it, even in this crisis of the Norman mastery, which might well be called the weakness of the strong kings. William of Normandy succeeded immediately, he did not quite succeed ultimately; there was in his huge success a secret of failure that only bore fruit long after his death. It was certainly his single aim to simplify England into a popular autocracy, like that growing up in France; with that aim he scattered the feudal holdings in scraps, demanded a direct vow from the sub-vassals to himself, and used any tool against the barony, from the highest culture of the foreign ecclesiastics to the rudest relics of Saxon custom. But the very parallel of France makes the paradox startlingly apparent. It is a proverb that the first French kings were puppets; that the mayor of the palace was quite insolently the king of the king. Yet it is certain that the puppet became an idol; a popular idol of unparalleled power, before which all mayors and nobles bent or were broken. In France arose absolute government, the more because it was not precisely personal government. The King was already a thing—like the Republic. Indeed the mediaeval Republics were rigid with divine right. In Norman England, perhaps, the government was too personal to be absolute. Anyhow, there is a real though recondite sense in which William the Conqueror was William the Conquered. When his two sons were dead, the whole country fell into a feudal chaos almost like that before the Conquest. In France the princes who had been slaves became something exceptional like priests; and one of them became a saint. But somehow our greatest kings were still barons; and by that very energy our barons became our kings.
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VI
THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES
The last chapter began, in an apparent irrelevance, with the name of St. Edward; and this one might very well begin with the name of St. George. His first appearance, it is said, as a patron of our people, occurred at the instance of Richard Coeur de Lion during his campaign in Palestine; and this, as we shall see, really stands for a new England which might well have a new saint. But the Confessor is a character in English history; whereas St. George, apart from his place in martyrology as a Roman soldier, can hardly be said to be a character in any history. And if we wish to understand the noblest and most neglected of human revolutions, we can hardly get closer to it than by considering this paradox, of how much progress and enlightenment was represented by thus passing from a chronicle to a romance.
In any intellectual corner of modernity can be found such a phrase as I have just read in a newspaper controversy: “Salvation, like other good things, must not come from outside.” To call a spiritual thing external and not internal is the chief mode of modernist excommunication. But if our subject of study is mediaeval and not modern, we must pit against this apparent platitude the very opposite idea. We must put ourselves in the posture of men who thought that almost every good thing came from outside—like good news. I confess that I am not impartial in my sympathies here; and that the newspaper phrase I quoted strikes me as a blunder about the very nature of life. I do not, in my private capacity, believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb; nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking his soul, and denying its dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness double by wonder. But this faith in receptiveness, and in respect for things outside oneself, need here do no more than help me in explaining what any version of this epoch ought in any case to explain. In nothing is the modern German more modern, or more mad, than in his dream of finding a German name for everything; eating his language, or in other words biting his tongue. And in nothing were the mediaevals more free and sane than in their acceptance of names and emblems from outside their most beloved limits. The monastery would often not only take in the stranger but almost canonize him. A mere adventurer like Bruce was enthroned and thanked as if he had really come as a knight errant. And a passionately patriotic community more often than not had a foreigner for a patron saint. Thus crowds of saints were Irishmen, but St. Patrick was not an Irishman. Thus as the English gradually became a nation, they left the numberless Saxon saints in a sense behind them, passed over by comparison not only the sanctity of Edward but the solid fame of Alfred, and invoked a half mythical hero, striving in an eastern desert against an impossible monster.
That transition and that symbol stand for the Crusades. In their romance and reality they were the first English experience of learning, not only from the external, but the remote. England, like every Christian thing, had thriven on outer things without shame. From the roads of Caesar to the churches of Lanfranc, it had sought its meat from God. But now the eagles were on the wing, scenting a more distant slaughter; they were seeking the strange things instead of receiving them. The English had stepped from acceptance to adventure, and the epic of their ships had begun. The scope of the great religious movement which swept England along with all the West would distend a book like this into huge disproportion, yet it would be much better to do so than to dismiss it in the distant and frigid fashion common in such short summaries. The inadequacy of our insular method in popular history is perfectly shown in the treatment of Richard Coeur de Lion. His tale is told with the implication that his departure for the Crusade was something like the escapade of a schoolboy running away to sea. It was, in this view, a pardonable or lovable prank; whereas in truth it was more like a responsible Englishman now going to the Front. Christendom was nearly one nation, and the Front was the Holy Land. That Richard himself was of an adventurous and even romantic temper is true, though it is not unreasonably romantic for a born soldier to do the work he does best. But the point of the argument against insular history is particularly illustrated here by the absence of a continental comparison. In this case we have only to step across the Straits of Dover to find the fallacy. Philip Augustus, Richard’s contemporary in France, had the name of a particularly cautious and coldly public-spirited statesman; yet Philip Augustus went on the same Crusade. The reason was, of course, that the Crusades were, for all thoughtful Europeans, things for the highest statesmanship and the purest public spirit.
Some six hundred years after Christianity sprang up in the East and swept westwards, another great faith arose in almost the same eastern lands and followed it like its gigantic shadow. Like a shadow, it was at once a copy and a contrary. We call it Islam, or the creed of the Moslems; and perhaps its most explanatory description is that it was the final flaming up of the accumulated Orientalisms, perhaps of the accumulated Hebraisms, gradually rejected as the Church grew more European, or as Christianity turned into Christendom. It highest motive was a hatred of idols, and in its view Incarnation was itself an idolatry. The two things it persecuted were the idea of God being made flesh and of His being afterwards made wood or stone. A study of the questions smouldering in the track of the prairie fire of the Christian conversion favours the suggestion that this fanaticism against art or mythology was at once a development and a reaction from that conversion, a sort of minority report of the Hebraists. In this sense Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul. And the Greek Iconoclasts had poured into Italy, breaking the popular statues and denouncing the idolatry of the Pope, until routed, in a style sufficiently symbolic, by the sword of the father of Charlemagne. It was all these disappointed negations that took fire from the genius of Mahomet, and launched out of the burning lands a cavalry charge that nearly conquered the world. And if it be suggested that a note on such Oriental origins is rather remote from a history of England, the answer is that this book may, alas! contain many digressions, but that this is not a digression. It is quite peculiarly necessary to keep in mind that this Semite god haunted Christianity like a ghost; to remember it in every European corner, but especially in our corner. If any one doubts the necessity, let him take a walk to all the parish churches in England within a radius of thirty miles, and ask why this stone virgin is headless or that coloured glass is gone. He will soon learn that it was lately, and in his own lanes and homesteads, that the ecstasy of the deserts returned, and his bleak northern island was filled with the fury of the Iconoclasts.
It was an element in this sublime and yet sinister simplicity of Islam that it knew no boundaries. Its very home was homeless. For it was born in a sandy waste among nomads, and it went everywhere because it came from nowhere. But in the Saracens of the early Middle Ages this nomadic quality in Islam was masked by a high civilization, more scientific if less creatively artistic than that of contemporary Christendom. The Moslem monotheism was, or appeared to be, the more rationalist religion of the two. This rootless refinement was characteristically advanced in abstract things, of which a memory remains in the very name of algebra. In comparison the Christian civilization was still largely instinctive, but its instincts were very strong and very much the other way. It was full of local affections, which found form in that system of fences which runs like a pattern through everything mediaeval, from heraldry to the holding of land. There was a shape and colour in all their customs and statutes which can be seen in all their tabards and escutcheons; something at once strict and gay. This is not a departure from the interest in external things, but rather a part of it. The very welcome they would often give to a stranger from beyond the wall was a recognition of the wall. Those who think their own life all-sufficient do not see its limit as a wall, but as the end of the world. The Chinese called the white man a “sky-breaker.” The mediaeval spirit loves its part in life as a part, not a whole; its charter for it came from something else. There is a joke about a Benedictine monk who used the common grace of Benedictus benedicat, whereupon the unlettered Franciscan triumphantly retorted Franciscus Franciscat. It is something of a parable of mediaeval history; for if there were a verb Franciscare it would be an approximate description of what St. Francis afterwards did. But that more individual mysticism was only approaching its birth, and Benedictus benedicat is very precisely the motto of the earliest mediaevalism. I mean that everything is blessed from beyond, by something which has in its turn been blessed from beyond again; only the blessed bless. But the point which is the clue to the Crusades is this: that for them the beyond was not the infinite, as in a modern religion. Every beyond was a place. The mystery of locality, with all its hold on the human heart, was as much present in the most ethereal things of Christendom as it was absent from the most practical things of Islam. England would derive a thing from France, France from Italy, Italy from Greece, Greece from Palestine, Palestine from Paradise. It was not merely that a yeoman of Kent would have his house hallowed by the priest of the parish church, which was confirmed by Canterbury, which was confirmed by Rome. Rome herself did not worship herself, as in the pagan age. Rome herself looked eastward to the mysterious cradle of her creed, to a land of which the very earth was called holy. And when she looked eastward for it she saw the face of Mahound. She saw standing in the place that was her earthly heaven a devouring giant out of the deserts, to whom all places were the same.
It has been necessary thus to pause upon the inner emotions of the Crusade, because the modern English reader is widely cut off from these particular feelings of his fathers; and the real quarrel of Christendom and Islam, the fire-baptism of the young nations, could not otherwise be seized in its unique character. It was nothing so simple as a quarrel between two men who both wanted Jerusalem. It was the much deadlier quarrel between one man who wanted it and another man who could not see why it was wanted. The Moslem, of course, had his own holy places; but he has never felt about them as Westerns can feel about a field or a roof-tree; he thought of the holiness as holy, not of places as places. The austerity which forbade him imagery, the wandering war that forbade him rest, shut him off from all that was breaking out and blossoming in our local patriotisms; just as it has given the Turks an empire without ever giving them a nation.
Now, the effect of this adventure against a mighty and mysterious enemy was simply enormous in the transformation of England, as of all the nations that were developing side by side with England. Firstly, we learnt enormously from what the Saracen did. Secondly, we learnt yet more enormously from what the Saracen did not do. Touching some of the good things which we lacked, we were fortunately able to follow him. But in all the good things which he lacked, we were confirmed like adamant to defy him. It may be said that Christians never knew how right they were till they went to war with Moslems. At once the most obvious and the most representative reaction was the reaction which produced the best of what we call Christian Art; and especially those grotesques of Gothic architecture, which are not only alive but kicking. The East as an environment, as an impersonal glamour, certainly stimulated the Western mind, but stimulated it rather to break the Moslem commandment than to keep it. It was as if the Christian were impelled, like a caricaturist, to cover all that faceless ornament with faces; to give heads to all those headless serpents and birds to all those lifeless trees. Statuary quickened and came to life under the veto of the enemy as under a benediction. The image, merely because it was called an idol, became not only an ensign but a weapon. A hundredfold host of stone sprang up all over the shrines and streets of Europe. The Iconoclasts made more statues than they destroyed.
The place of Coeur de Lion in popular fable and gossip is far more like his place in true history than the place of the mere denationalized ne’er-do-weel given him in our utilitarian school books. Indeed the vulgar rumour is nearly always much nearer the historical truth than the “educated” opinion of to-day; for tradition is truer than fashion. King Richard, as the typical Crusader, did make a momentous difference to England by gaining glory in the East, instead of devoting himself conscientiously to domestic politics in the exemplary manner of King John. The accident of his military genius and prestige gave England something which it kept for four hundred years, and without which it is incomprehensible throughout that period— the reputation of being in the very vanguard of chivalry. The great romances of the Round Table, the attachment of knighthood to the name of a British king, belong to this period. Richard was not only a knight but a troubadour; and culture and courtesy were linked up with the idea of English valour. The mediaeval Englishman was even proud of being polite; which is at least no worse than being proud of money and bad manners, which is what many Englishmen in our later centuries have meant by their common sense.
Chivalry might be called the baptism of Feudalism. It was an attempt to bring the justice and even the logic of the Catholic creed into a military system which already existed; to turn its discipline into an initiation and its inequalities into a hierarchy. To the comparative grace of the new period belongs, of course, that considerable cultus of the dignity of woman, to which the word “chivalry” is often narrowed, or perhaps exalted. This also was a revolt against one of the worst gaps in the more polished civilization of the Saracens. The Moslems naturally suffered from the older Oriental sentiment about women; and were, of course, without the special inspiration given by the cult of the Virgin. It is false to say that the chivalric view of women was merely an affectation, except in the sense in which there must always be an affectation where there is an ideal. It is the worst sort of superficiality not to see the pressure of a general sentiment merely because it is always broken up by events; the Crusade itself, for example is more present and potent as a frame even than as a reality. From the first Plantagenet to the last Lancastrian it haunts the minds of English kings, giving as a background to their battles a mirage of Palestine. So a devotion like that of Edward I to his queen was quite a real motive in the lives of multitudes of his contemporaries. When crowds of enlightened tourists, setting forth to sneer at the superstitions of the continent, are taking tickets and labelling luggage at the large railway station at the west end of the Strand, I do not know whether they all speak to their wives with a more flowing courtesy than their fathers in Edward’s time, or whether they pause to meditate on the legend of a husband’s sorrow, to be found in the very name of Charing Cross.
But it is a huge historical error to suppose that the Crusades concerned only that crust of society for which heraldry was an art and chivalry an etiquette. The direct contrary is the fact. The First Crusade especially was much more an unanimous popular rising than most that are called riots and revolutions. The Guilds, the great democratic systems of the time, often owed their increasing power to corporate fighting for the Cross; but I shall deal with such things later. Often it was not so much a levy of men as a trek of whole families, like new gipsies moving eastwards. And it has passed into a proverb that children by themselves often organized a crusade as they now organize a charade. But we shall best realize the fact by fancying every Crusade as a Children’s Crusade. They were full of all that the modern world worships in children, because it has crushed it out of men. Their lives were full, as the rudest remains of their vulgarest arts are full, of something that we all saw out of the nursery window. It can best be seen later, for instance, but it is ubiquitous in the older and more unconscious contemporary art; something that domesticated distant lands and made the horizon at home. They fitted into the corners of small houses the ends of the earth and the edges of the sky. Their perspective is rude and crazy, but it is perspective; it is not the decorative flatness of orientalism. In a word, their world, like a child’s, is full of foreshortening, as of a short cut to fairyland. Their maps are more provocative than picture. Their half-fabulous animals are monsters, and yet are pets. It is impossible to state verbally this very vivid atmosphere; but it was an atmosphere as well as an adventure. It was precisely these outlandish visions that truly came home to everybody; it was the royal councils and feudal quarrels that were comparatively remote. The Holy Land was much nearer to a plain man’s house than Westminster, and immeasurably nearer than Runymede. To give a list of English kings and parliaments, without pausing a moment upon this prodigious presence of a religious transfiguration in common life, is something the folly of which can but faintly be conveyed by a modern parallel, with secularity and religion reversed. It is as if some Clericalist or Royalist writer should give a list of the Archbishops of Paris from 1750 to 1850, noting how one dies of small-pox, another of old age, another by a curious accident of decapitation and throughout all his record should never once mention the nature, or even the name, of the French Revolution.
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VII
THE PROBLEM OF THE PLANTAGENETS
It is a point of prestige with what is called the Higher Criticism in all branches to proclaim that certain popular texts and authorities are “late”, and therefore apparently worthless. Two similar events are always the same event, and the later alone is even credible. This fanaticism is often in mere fact mistaken; it ignores the most common coincidences of human life: and some future critic will probably say that the tale of the Tower of Babel cannot be older than the Eiffel Tower, because there was certainly a confusion of tongues at the Paris Exhibition. Most of the mediaeval remains familiar to the modern reader are necessarily “late”, such as Chaucer or the Robin Hood ballads; but they are none the less, to a wiser criticism, worthy of attention and even trust. That which lingers after an epoch is generally that which lived most luxuriantly in it. It is an excellent habit to read history backwards. It is far wiser for a modern man to read the Middle Ages backwards from Shakespeare, whom he can judge for himself, and who yet is crammed with the Middle Ages, than to attempt to read them forwards from Caedmon, of whom he can know nothing, and of whom even the authorities he must trust know very little. If this be true of Shakespeare, it is even truer, of course, of Chaucer. If we really want to know what was strongest in the twelfth century, it is no bad way to ask what remained of it in the fourteenth. When the average reader turns to the “Canterbury Tales,” which are still as amusing as Dickens yet as mediaeval as Durham Cathedral, what is the very first question to be asked? Why, for instance, are they called Canterbury Tales; and what were the pilgrims doing in the road to Canterbury? They were, of course, taking part in a popular festival like a modern public holiday, though perhaps more genial and leisurely. Nor are we, perhaps, prepared to accept it as a self-evident step in progress that their holidays were derived from saints, while ours are dictated by bankers.
It is almost necessary to say nowadays that a saint means a very good man. The notion of an eminence merely moral, consistent with complete stupidity or unsuccess, is a revolutionary image grown unfamiliar by it very familiarity, and needing, as do many things of this older society, some almost preposterous modern parallel to give its original freshness and point. If we entered a foreign town and found a pillar like the Nelson Column, we should be surprised to learn the hero on the top of it had been famous for his politeness and hilarity during a chronic toothache. If a procession came down the street with a brass band and a hero on a white horse, we should think it odd to be told that he had been very patient with a half-witted maiden aunt. Yet some such pantomime impossibility is the only measure of the innovation of the Christian idea of a popular and recognized saint. It must especially be realized that while this kind of glory was the highest, it was also in a sense the lowest. The materials of it were almost the same as those of labour and domesticity: it did not need the sword or sceptre, but rather the staff or spade. It was the ambition of poverty. All this must be approximately visualized before we catch a glimpse of the great effects of the story which lay behind the Canterbury Pilgrimage.
The first few lines of Chaucer’s poem, to say nothing of thousands in the course of it, make it instantly plain that it was no case of secular revels still linked by a slight ritual to the name of some forgotten god, as may have happened in the pagan decline. Chaucer and his friends did think about St. Thomas, at least more frequently than a clerk at Margate things about St. Lubbock. They did definitely believe in the bodily cures wrought for them through St. Thomas, at least as firmly as the most enlightened and progressive modern can believe in those of Mrs. Eddy. Who was St. Thomas, to whose shrine the whole of that society is thus seen in the act of moving: and why was he so important? If there be a streak of sincerity in the claim to teach social and democratic society, instead of a string of kings and battles, this is the obvious and open gate by which to approach the figure which disputed England with the first Plantagenet. A real popular history should think more of his popularity even than his policy. And unquestionably thousands of ploughmen, carpenters, cooks, and yeomen, as in the motley crowd of Chaucer, knew a great deal about St. Thomas why they had never even heard of Becket.
It would be easy to detail what followed the Conquest as the feudal tangle that it was, till a prince from Anjou repeated the unifying effort of the Conqueror. It is found equally easy to write of the Red King’s hunting instead of his building, which has lasted longer, and which he probably loved much more. It is easy to catalogue the questions he disputed with Anselm— leaving out the question Anselm cared most about, and which he asked with explosive simplicity, as “Why was God a man?” All this is as simple as saying that a king died of eating lampreys, from which, however, there is little to learn nowadays, unless it be that when a modern monarch perishes of gluttony the newspapers seldom say so. But if we want to know what really happened to England in this dim epoch, I think it can be dimly but truly traced in the story of St. Thomas of Canterbury.
Henry of Anjou, who brought fresh French blood into the monarchy, brought also a refreshment of the idea for which the French have always stood: the idea in the Roman Law of something impersonal and omnipresent. It is the thing we smile at even in a small French detective story; when Justice opens a hand bag or Justice runs after a cab. Henry II really produced this impression of being a police force in person; a contemporary priest compared his restless vigilance to the bird and the fish of scripture whose way no man knoweth. Kinghood, however, meant law and not caprice; its ideal at least was a justice cheap and obvious as daylight, an atmosphere which lingers only in popular phrases about the King’s English or the King’s highway. But though it tended to be egalitarian it did not, of itself, tend to be humanitarian. In modern France, as in ancient Rome, the other name of Justice has sometimes been Terror. The Frenchman especially is always a Revolutionist—and never an Anarchist. Now this effort of kings like Henry II to rebuild on a plan like that of the Roman Law was not only, of course, crossed and entangled by countless feudal fancies and feelings in themselves as well as others, it was also conditioned by what was the corner-stone of the whole civilization. It had to happen not only with but within the Church. For a Church was to these men rather a world they lived in than a building to which they went. Without the Church the Middle Ages would have had no law, as without the Church the Reformation would have had no Bible. Many priests expounded and embellished the Roman Law, and many priests supported Henry II. And yet there was another element in the Church, stored in its first foundations like dynamite, and destined in every age to destroy and renew the world. An idealism akin to impossibilism ran down the ages parallel to all its political compromises. Monasticism itself was the throwing off of innumerable Utopias, without posterity yet with perpetuity. It had, as was proved recurrently after corrupt epochs, a strange secret of getting poor quickly; a mushroom magnificence of destitution. This wind of revolution in the crusading time caught Francis in Assisi and stripped him of his rich garments in the street. The same wind of revolution suddenly smote Thomas Becket, King Henry’s brilliant and luxurious Chancellor, and drove him on to an unearthly glory and bloody end.
Becket was a type of those historic times in which it is really very practical to be impracticable. The quarrel which tore him from his friend’s side cannot be appreciated in the light of those legal and constitutional debates which the misfortunes of the seventeenth century have made so much of in more recent history. To convict St. Thomas of illegality and clerical intrigue, when he set the law of the Church against that of the State, is about as adequate as to convict St. Francis of bad heraldry when he said he was the brother of the sun and the moon. There may have been heralds stupid enough to say so even in that much more logical age, but it is no sufficient way of dealing with visions or with revolutions. St. Thomas of Canterbury was a great visionary and a great revolutionist, but so far as England was concerned his revolution failed and his vision was not fulfilled. We are therefore told in the text-books little more than that he wrangled with the King about certain regulations; the most crucial being whether “criminous clerks” should be punished by the State or the Church. And this was indeed the chief text of the dispute; but to realise it we must reiterate what is hardest for modern England to understand— the nature of the Catholic Church when it was itself a government, and the permanent sense in which it was itself a revolution.
It is always the first fact that escapes notice; and the first fact about the Church was that it created a machinery of pardon, where the State could only work with a machinery of punishment. It claimed to be a divine detective who helped the criminal to escape by a plea of guilty. It was, therefore, in the very nature of the institution, that when it did punish materially it punished more lightly. If any modern man were put back in the Becket quarrel, his sympathies would certainly be torn in two; for the King’s scheme was the more rational, the Archbishop’s was the more humane. And despite the horrors that darkened religious disputes long afterwards, this character was certainly in the bulk the historic character of Church government. It is admitted, for instance, that things like eviction, or the harsh treatment of tenants, were practically unknown wherever the Church was landlord. The principle lingered into more evil days in the form by which the Church authorities handed over culprits to the secular arm to be killed, even for religious offences. In modern romances this is treated as a mere hypocrisy; but the man who treats every human inconsistency as a hypocrisy is himself a hypocrite about his own inconsistencies.
Our world, then, cannot understand St. Thomas, any more than St. Francis, without accepting very simply a flaming and even fantastic charity, by which the great Archbishop undoubtedly stands for the victims of this world, where the wheel of fortune grinds the faces of the poor. He may well have been too idealistic; he wished to protect the Church as a sort of earthly paradise, of which the rules might seem to him as paternal as those of heaven, but might well seem to the King as capricious as those of fairyland. But if the priest was too idealistic, the King was really too practical; it is intrinsically true to say he was too practical to succeed in practice. There re-enters here, and runs, I think, through all English history, the rather indescribable truth I have suggested about the Conqueror; that perhaps he was hardly impersonal enough for a pure despot. The real moral of our mediaeval story is, I think, subtly contrary to Carlyle’s vision of a stormy strong man to hammer and weld the state like a smith. Our strong men were too strong for us, and too strong for themselves. They were too strong for their own aim of a just and equal monarchy. The smith broke upon the anvil the sword of state that he was hammering for himself. Whether or no this will serve as a key to the very complicated story of our kings and barons, it is the exact posture of Henry II to his rival. He became lawless out of sheer love of law. He also stood, though in a colder and more remote manner, for the whole people against feudal oppression; and if his policy had succeeded in its purity, it would at least have made impossible the privilege and capitalism of later times. But that bodily restlessness which stamped and spurned the furniture was a symbol of him; it was some such things that prevented him and his heirs from sitting as quietly on their throne as the heirs of St. Louis. He thrust again at the tough intangibility of the priests’ Utopianism like a man fighting a ghost; he answered transcendental defiances with baser material persecutions; and at last, on a dark and, I think, decisive day in English history, his word sent four feudal murderers into the cloisters of Canterbury, who went there to destroy a traitor and who created a saint.
At the grave of the dead man broke forth what can only be called an epidemic of healing. For miracles so narrated there is the same evidence as for half of the facts of history; and any one denying them must deny them upon a dogma. But something followed which would seem to modern civilization even more monstrous than a miracle. If the reader can imagine Mr. Cecil Rhodes submitting to be horsewhipped by a Boer in St. Paul’s Cathedral, as an apology for some indefensible death incidental to the Jameson Raid, he will form but a faint idea of what was meant when Henry II was beaten by monks at the tomb of his vassal and enemy. The modern parallel called up is comic, but the truth is that mediaeval actualities have a violence that does seem comic to our conventions. The Catholics of that age were driven by two dominant thoughts: the all-importance of penitence as an answer to sin, and the all-importance of vivid and evident external acts as a proof of penitence. Extravagant humiliation after extravagant pride for them restored the balance of sanity. The point is worth stressing, because without it moderns make neither head nor tail of the period. Green gravely suggests, for instance, of Henry’s ancestor Fulk of Anjou, that his tyrannies and frauds were further blackened by “low superstition,” which led him to be dragged in a halter round a shrine, scourged and screaming for the mercy of God. Mediaevals would simply have said that such a man might well scream for it, but his scream was the only logical comment he could make. But they would have quite refused to see why the scream should be added to the sins and not subtracted from them. They would have thought it simply muddle-headed to have the same horror at a man being horribly sinful and for being horribly sorry.
But it may be suggested, I think, though with the doubt proper to ignorance, that the Angevin ideal of the King’s Justice lost more by the death of St. Thomas than was instantly apparent in the horror of Christendom, the canonization of the victim and the public penance of the tyrant. These things indeed were in a sense temporary; the King recovered the power to judge clerics, and many later kings and justiciars continued the monarchical plan. But I would suggest, as a possible clue to puzzling after events, that here and by this murderous stroke the crown lost what should have been the silent and massive support of its whole policy. I mean that it lost the people.
It need not be repeated that the case for despotism is democratic. As a rule its cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak. An autocrat cannot be judged as a historical character by his relations with other historical characters. His true applause comes not from the few actors on the lighted stage of aristocracy, but from that enormous audience which must always sit in darkness throughout the drama. The king who helps numberless helps nameless men, and when he flings his widest largesse he is a Christian doing good by stealth. This sort of monarchy was certainly a mediaeval ideal, nor need it necessarily fail as a reality. French kings were never so merciful to the people as when they were merciless to the peers; and it is probably true that a Czar who was a great lord to his intimates was often a little father in innumerable homes. It is overwhelmingly probable that such a central power, though it might at last have deserved destruction in England as in France have prevented the few from seizing and holding all the wealth and power to this day. But in England it broke off short, through something of which the slaying of St. Thomas may well have been the supreme example. It was something overstrained and startling and against the instincts of the people. And of what was meant in the Middle Ages by the very powerful and rather peculiar thing, the people, I shall speak in the next chapter.
In any case this conjecture finds support in the ensuing events. It is not merely that, just as the great but personal plan of the Conqueror collapsed after all into the chaos of the Stephen transition, so the great but personal plan of the first Plantagenet collapsed into the chaos of the Barons’ Wars. When all allowance is made for constitutional fictions and afterthoughts, it does seem likely that here for the first time some moral strength deserted the monarchy. The character of Henry’s second son John (for Richard belongs rather to the last chapter) stamped it with something accidental yet symbolic. It was not that John was a mere black blot on the pure gold of the Plantagenets, the texture was much more mixed and continuous; but he really was a discredited Plantagenet, and as it were a damaged Plantagenet. It was not that he was much more of a bad man than many opposed to him, but he was the kind of bad man whom bad men and good do combine to oppose. In a sense subtler than that of the legal and parliamentary logic-chopping invented long afterwards, he certainly managed to put the Crown in the wrong. Nobody suggested that the barons of Stephen’s time starved men in dungeons to promote political liberty, or hung them up by the heels as a symbolic request for a free parliament. In the reign of John and his son it was still the barons, and not in the least the people, who seized the power; but there did begin to appear a case for their seizing it, for contemporaries as well as constitutional historians afterwards. John, in one of his diplomatic doublings, had put England into the papal care, as an estate is put in Chancery. And unluckily the Pope, whose counsels had generally been mild and liberal, was then in his death-grapple with the Germanic Emperor and wanted every penny he could get to win. His winning was a blessing to Europe, but a curse to England, for he used the island as a mere treasury for this foreign war. In this and other matters the baronial party began to have something like a principle, which is the backbone of a policy. Much conventional history that connects their councils with a thing like our House of Commons is as far-fetched as it would be to say that the Speaker wields a Mace like those which the barons brandished in battle. Simon de Montfort was not an enthusiast for the Whig theory of the British Constitution, but he was an enthusiast for something. He founded a parliament in a fit of considerable absence of mind, in the responsible and even religious sense which had made his father so savage a Crusader against heretics, that he laid about him with his great sword before he fell at Evesham.
Magna Carta was not a step towards democracy, but it was a step away from despotism. If we hold that double truth firmly, we have something like a key to the rest of English history. A rather loose aristocracy not only gained but often deserved the name of liberty. And the history of the English can be most briefly summarized by taking the French motto of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” and noting that the English have sincerely loved the first and lost the other two.
In the contemporary complication much could be urged both for the Crown and the new and more national rally of the nobility. But it was a complication, whereas a miracle is a plain matter that any man can understand. The possibilities or impossibilities of St. Thomas Becket were left a riddle for history; the white flame of his audacious theory was frustrated, and his work cut short like a fairy tale left untold. But his memory passed into the care of the common people, and with them he was more active dead than alive—yes, even more busy. In the next chapter we shall consider what was meant in the Middle Ages by the common people, and how uncommon we should think it to-day. And in the last chapter we have already seen how in the Crusading age the strangest things grew homily, and men fed on traveller’s tales when there were no national newspapers. A many-coloured pageant of martyrology on numberless walls and windows had familiarized the most ignorant with alien cruelties in many climes; with a bishop flayed by Danes or a virgin burned by Saracens, with one saint stoned by Jews and another hewn in pieces by negroes. I cannot think it was a small matter that among these images one of the most magnificent had met his death but lately at the hands of an English monarch. There was at least something akin to the primitive and epical romances of that period in the tale of those two mighty friends, one of whom struck too hard and slew the other. It may even have been so early as this that something was judged in silence; and for the multitude rested on the Crown a mysterious seal of insecurity like that of Cain, and of exile on the English kings.
—/—
VIII
THE MEANING OF MERRY ENGLAND
THE mental trick by which the first half of English history has been wholly dwarfed and dehumanised is a very simple one. It consists in telling only the story of the professional destroyers and then complaining that the whole story is one of destruction. A king is at the best a sort of crowned executioner; all government is an ugly necessity; and if it was then uglier it was for the most part merely because it was more difficult. What we call the Judges’ circuits were first rather the King’s raids. For a time the criminal class was so strong that ordinary civil government was conducted by a sort of civil war. When the social enemy was caught at all he was killed or savagely maimed. The King could not take Pentonville Prison about with him on wheels. I am far from denying that there was a real element of cruelty in the Middle Ages; but the point here is that it was concerned with one side of life, which is cruel at the best; and that this involved more cruelty for the same reason that it involved more courage. When we think of our ancestors as the men who inflicted tortures, we ought sometimes to think of them as the men who defied them. But the modern critic of mediaevalism commonly looks only at these crooked shadows and not at the common daylight of the Middle Ages. When he has got over his indignant astonishment at the fact that fighters fought and that hangmen hanged; he assumes that any other ideas there may have been were ineffectual and fruitless. He despises the monk for avoiding the very same activities which he despises the warrior for cultivating. And he insists that the arts of war were sterile, without men admitting the possibility that the arts of peace were productive. But the truth is that it is precisely in the arts of peace, and in the type of production, that the Middle Ages stand singular and unique. This is not eulogy but history; an informed man must recognise this productive peculiarity even if he happens to hate it. The melodramatic things currently called mediaeval are much older and more universal; such as the sport of tournament or the use of torture. The tournament was indeed a Christian and liberal advance on the gladiatorial show, since the lords risked themselves and not merely their slaves. Torture, so far from being peculiarly mediaeval, was copied from pagan Rome and its most rationalist political science; and its application to others besides slaves was really part of the slow mediaeval extinction of slavery. Torture, indeed, is a logical thing common in states innocent of fanaticism, as in the great agnostic empire of China. What was really arresting and remarkable about the Middle Ages, as the Spartan discipline was peculiar to Sparta, or the Russian communes typical of Russia, was precisely its positive social scheme of production, of the making, building and growing of all the good things of life.
For the tale told in a book like this cannot really touch on mediaeval England at all. The dynasties and the parliaments passed like a changing cloud and across a stable and fruitful landscape. The institutions which affected the masses can be compared to corn or fruit trees in one practical sense at least, that they grew upwards from below. There may have been better societies, and assuredly we have not to look far for worse; but it is doubtful if there was ever so spontaneous a society. We cannot do justice, for instance, to the local government of that epoch, even where it was very faulty and fragmentary, by any comparisons with the plans of local government laid down to-day. Modern local government always comes from above; it is at best granted; it is more often merely imposed. The modern English oligarchy, the modern German Empire, are necessarily more efficient in making municipalities upon a plan, or rather a pattern. The mediaevals not only had self-government, but their self-government was self-made. They did indeed, as the central powers of the national monarchies grew stronger, seek and procure the stamp of state approval; but it was approval of a popular fact already in existence. Men banded together in guilds and parishes long before Local Government Acts were dreamed of. Like charity, which was worked in the same way, their Home Rule began at home. The reactions of recent centuries have left most educated men bankrupt of the corporate imagination required even to imagine this. They only think of a mob as a thing that breaks things—even if they admit it is right to break them. But the mob made these things. An artist mocked as many-headed, an artist with many eyes and hands, created these masterpieces. And if the modern sceptic in his detestation of the democratic ideal, complains of my calling them masterpieces, a simple answer will for the moment serve. It is enough to reply that the very word “masterpiece” is borrowed from the terminology of the mediaeval craftsmen. But such points in the Guild System can be considered a little later; here we are only concerned with the quite spontaneous springing upwards of all these social institutions, such as they were. They rose in the streets like a silent rebellion; like a still and statuesque riot. In modern constitutional countries there are practically no political institutions thus given by the people; all are received by the people. There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trades Unions.
In agriculture, what had happened to the land was like a universal landslide. But by a prodigy beyond the catastrophes of geology it may be said that the land had slid uphill. Rural civilisation was on a wholly new and much higher level; yet there was no great social convulsions or apparently even great social campaigns to explain it. It is possibly a solitary instance in history of men thus falling upwards; at least of outcasts falling on their feet or vagrants straying into the promised land. Such a thing could not be and was not a mere accident; yet, if we go by conscious political plans, it was something like a miracle. There had appeared, like a subterranean race cast up to the sun, something unknown to the august civilisation of the Roman Empire— a peasantry. At the beginning of the Dark Ages the great pagan cosmopolitan society now grown Christian was as much a slave state as old South Carolina. By the fourteenth century it was almost as much a state of peasant proprietors as modern France. No laws had been passed against slavery; no dogmas even had condemned it by definition; no war had been waged against it, no new race or ruling caste had repudiated it; but it was gone. This startling and silent transformation is perhaps the best measure of the pressure of popular life in the Middle Ages, of how fast it was making new things in its spiritual factory. Like everything else in the mediaeval revolution, from its cathedrals to its ballads, it was as anonymous as it was enormous. It is admitted that the conscious and active emancipators everywhere were the parish priests and the religious brotherhoods; but no name among them has survived and no man of them has reaped his reward in this world. Countless Clarksons and innumerable Wilberforces, without political machinery or public fame, worked at death-beds and confessionals in all the villages of Europe; and the vast system of slavery vanished. It was probably the widest work ever done which was voluntary on both sides; and the Middle Ages was in this and other things the age of volunteers. It is possible enough to state roughly the stages through which the thing passed; but such a statement does not explain the loosening of the grip of the great slave-owners; and it cannot be explained except psychologically. The Catholic type of Christianity was not merely an element, it was a climate; and in that climate the slave would not grow. I have already suggested, touching that transformation of the Roman Empire which was the background of all these centuries, how a mystical view of man’s dignity must have this effect. A table that walked and talked, or a stool that flew with wings out of window, would be about as workable a thing as an immortal chattel. But though here as everywhere the spirit explains the processes, and the processes cannot even plausibly explain the spirit, these processes involve two very practical points, without which we cannot understand how this great popular civilisation was created— or how it was destroyed.
What we call the manors were originally the villae of the pagan lords, each with its population of slaves. Under this process, however it be explained, what had occurred was the diminishment of the lords’ claim to the whole profit of a slave estate, by which it became a claim to the profit of part of it, and dwindled at last to certain dues or customary payments to the lord, having paid which the slave could enjoy not only the use of the land but the profit of it. It must be remembered that over a great part, and especially very important parts, of the whole territory, the lords were abbots, magistrates elected by a mystical communism and themselves often of peasant birth. Men not only obtained a fair amount of justice under their care, but a fair amount of freedom even from their carelessness. But two details of the development are very vital. First, as has been hinted elsewhere, the slave was long in the intermediate status of a serf. This meant that while the land was entitled to the services of the man, he was equally entitled to the support of the land. He could not be evicted; he could not even, in the modern fashion, have his rent raised. At the beginning it was merely that the slave was owned, but at least he could not be disowned. At the end he had really become a small landlord, merely because it was not the lord that owned him, but the land. It is hardly unsafe to suggest that in this (by one of the paradoxes of this extraordinary period) the very fixity of serfdom was a service to freedom. The new peasant inherited something of the stability of the slave. He did not come to life in a competitive scramble where everybody was trying to snatch his freedom from him. He found himself among neighbours who already regarded his presence as normal and his frontiers as natural frontiers, and among whom all-powerful customs crushed all experiments in competition. By a trick or overturn no romancer has dared to put in a tale, this prisoner had become the governor of his own prison. For a little time it was almost true that an Englishman’s house was his castle, because it had been built strong enough to be his dungeon.
The other notable element was this: that when the produce of the land began by custom to be cut up and only partially transmitted to the lord, the remainder was generally subdivided into two types of property. One the serfs enjoyed severally, in private patches, while the other they enjoyed in common, and generally in common with the lord. Thus arose the momentously important mediaeval institutions of the Common Land, owned side by side with private land. It was an alternative and a refuge. The mediaevals, except when they were monks, were none of them Communists; but they were all, as it were, potential Communists. It is typical of the dark and dehumanised picture now drawn of the period that our romances constantly describe a broken man as falling back on the forests and the outlaws den, but never describe him as falling back on the common land, which was a much more common incident. Mediaevalism believed in mending its broken men; and as the idea existed in the communal life for monks, it existed in the communal land for peasants. It was their great green hospital, their free and airy workhouse. A Common was not a naked and negative thing like the scrub or heath we call a Common on the edges of the suburbs. It was a reserve of wealth like a reserve of grain in a barn; it was deliberately kept back as a balance, as we talk of a balance at the bank. Now these provisions for a healthier distribution of property would by themselves show any man of imagination that a real moral effort had been made towards social justice; that it could not have been mere evolutionary accident that slowly turned the slave into a serf, and the serf into a peasant proprietor. But if anybody still thinks that mere blind luck, without any groping for the light, had somehow brought about the peasant condition in place of the agrarian slave estate, he has only to turn to what was happening in all the other callings and affairs of humanity. Then he will cease to doubt. For he will find the same mediaeval men busy upon a social scheme which points as plainly in effect to pity and a craving for equality. And it is a system which could no more be produced by accident than one of their cathedrals could be built by an earthquake.
Most work beyond the primary work of agriculture was guarded by the egalitarian vigilance of the Guilds. It is hard to find any term to measure the distance between this system and modern society; one can only approach it first by the faint traces it has left. Our daily life is littered with a debris of the Middle Ages, especially of dead words which no longer carry their meaning. I have already suggested one example. We hardly call up the picture of a return to Christian Communism whenever we mention Wimbledon Common. This truth descends to such trifles as the titles which we write on letters and postcards. The puzzling and truncated monosyllable “Esq.” is a pathetic relic of a remote evolution from chivalry to snobbery. No two historic things could well be more different than an esquire and a squire. The first was above all things an incomplete and probationary position—the tadpole of knighthood; the second is above all things a complete and assured position— the status of the owners and rulers of rural England throughout recent centuries. Our esquires did not win their estates till they had given up any particular fancy for winning their spurs. Esquire does not mean squire, and esq. does not mean anything. But it remains on our letters a little wriggle in pen and ink and an indecipherable hieroglyph twisted by the strange turns of our history which have turned a military discipline into a pacific oligarchy, and that into a mere plutocracy at last. And there are similar historic riddles to be unpicked in the similar forms of social address. There is something singularly forlorn about the modern word “Mister.” Even in sound it has a simpering feebleness which marks the shrivelling of the strong word from which it came. Nor, indeed, is the symbol of the mere sound inaccurate. I remember seeing a German story of Samson in which he bore the unassuming name of Simson, which surely shows Samson very much shorn. There is something of the same dismal diminuendo in the evolution of a Master into a Mister.
The very vital importance of the word “Master” is this. A Guild was, very broadly speaking, a Trade Union in which every man was his own employer. That is, a man could not work at any trade unless he would join the league and accept the laws of that trade; but he worked in his own shop with his own tools, and the whole profit went to himself. But the word “employer” marks a modern deficiency which makes the modern use of the word “Master” quite inexact. A master meant something quite other and greater than a “boss.” It meant a master of the work, where it now means only a master of the workmen. It is an elementary character of Capitalism that a shipowner need not know the right end of a ship, or a landowner have even seen the landscape, that the owner of a gold mine may be interested in nothing but old pewter, or the owner of a railway travel exclusively in balloons. He may be a more successful capitalist if he has a hobby of his own business; he is often a more successful capitalist if he has the sense to leave it to a manager; but economically he can control the business because he is a capitalist, not because he has any kind of hobby or any kind of sense. The highest grade in the Guild system was a Master, and it meant a mastery of the business. To take the term created by the colleges in the same epoch, all the mediaeval bosses were Masters of Arts. The other grades were the journeyman and the apprentice; but like the corresponding degrees at the universities, they were grades through which every common man could pass. They were not social classes; they were degrees and not castes. This is the whole point of the recurrent romance about the apprentice marrying his master’s daughter. The master would not be surprised at such a thing, any more than an M.A. would swell with aristocratic indignation when his daughter married a B.A.
When we pass from the strictly educational hierarchy to the strictly egalitarian ideal, we find again that the remains of the thing to-day are so distorted and disconnected as to be comic. There are City Companies which inherit the coats of arms and the immense relative wealth of the old Guilds, and inherit nothing else. Even what is good about them is not what was good about the Guilds. On one case we shall find something like a Worshipful Company of Bricklayers, in which, it is unnecessary to say, there is not a single bricklayer or anybody who has ever known a bricklayer, but in which the senior partners of a few big businesses in the City, with a few faded military men with a taste in cookery, tell each other in after-dinner speeches that it has been the glory of their lives to make allegorical bricks without straw. In another case we shall find a Worshipful Company of Whitewashers who do deserve their name, in the sense that many of them employ a large number of other people to whitewash. These Companies support large charities and often doubtless very valuable charities; but their object is quite different from that of the old charities of the Guilds. The aim of the Guild charities was the same as the aim of the Common Land. It was to resist inequality—or, as some earnest old gentlemen of the last generation would probably put it, to resist evolution. It was to ensure, not only that bricklaying should survive and succeed, but that every bricklayer should survive and succeed. It sought to rebuild the ruins of any bricklayer, and to give any faded whitewasher a new white coat. It was the whole aim of the Guilds to cobble their cobblers like their shoes and clout their clothiers with their clothes; to strengthen the weakest link, or go after the hundredth sheep; in short, to keep the row of little shops unbroken like a line of battle. It resisted the growth of a big shop like the growth of a dragon. Now even the whitewashers of the Whitewashers Company will not pretend that it exists to prevent a small shop being swallowed by a big shop, or that it has done anything whatever to prevent it. At the best the kindness it would show to a bankrupt whitewasher would be a kind of compensation; it would not be reinstatement; it would not be the restoration of status in an industrial system. So careful of the type it seems, so careless of the single life; and by that very modern evolutionary philosophy the type itself has been destroyed. The old Guilds, with the same object of equality, of course, insisted peremptorily upon the same level system of payment and treatment which is a point of complaint against the modern Trades Unions. But they insisted also, as the Trades Unions cannot do, upon a high standard of craftsmanship, which still astonishes the world in the corners of perishing buildings or the colours of broken glass. There is no artist or art critic who will not concede, however distant his own style from the Gothic school, that there was in this time a nameless but universal artistic touch in the moulding of the very tools of life. Accident has preserved the rudest sticks and stools and pots and pans which have suggestive shapes as if they were possessed not by devils but by elves. For they were, indeed, as compared with subsequent systems, produced in the incredible fairyland of a free country.
That the most mediaeval of modern institutions, the Trades Unions, do not fight for the same ideal of aesthetic finish is true and certainly tragic; but to make it a matter of blame is wholly to misunderstand the tragedy. The Trades Unions are confederations of men without property, seeking to balance its absence by numbers and the necessary character of their labour. The Guilds were confederations of men with property, seeking to ensure each man in the possession of that property. This is, of course, the only condition of affairs in which property can properly be said to exist at all. We should not speak of a negro community in which most men were white, but the rare negroes were giants. We should not conceive a married community in which most men were bachelors, and three men had harems. A married community means a community where most people are married; not a community where one or two people are very much married. A propertied community means a community where most people have property; not a community where there are a few capitalists. But in fact the Guildsmen (as also, for that matter, the serfs, semi-serfs and peasants) were much richer than can be realized even from the fact that the Guilds protected the possession of houses, tools, and just payment. The surplus is self-evident upon any just study of the prices of the period, when all deductions have been made, of course, for the different value of the actual coinage. When a man could get a goose or a gallon of ale for one or two of the smallest and commonest coins, the matter is in no way affected by the name of those coins. Even where the individual wealth was severely limited, the collective wealth was very large—the wealth of the Guilds, of the parishes, and especially of the monastic estates. It is important to remember this fact in the subsequent history of England.
The next fact to note is that the local government grew out of things like the Guild system, and not the system from the government. In sketching the sound principles of this lost society, I shall not, of course, be supposed by any sane person to be describing a moral paradise, or to be implying that it was free from the faults and fights and sorrows that harass human life in all times, and certainly not least in our own time. There was a fair amount of rioting and fighting in connection with the Guilds; and there was especially for some time a combative rivalry between the guilds of merchants who sold things and those of craftsmen who made them, a conflict in which the craftsmen on the whole prevailed. But whichever party may have been predominant, it was the heads of the Guild who became the heads of the town, and not vice versa. The stiff survivals of this once very spontaneous uprising can again be seen in the now anomalous constitution of the Lord Mayor and the Livery of the City of London. We are told so monotonously that the government of our fathers reposed upon arms, that it is valid to insist that this, their most intimate and everyday sort of government, was wholly based upon tools; a government in which the workman’s tool became the sceptre. Blake, in one of his symbolic fantasies, suggests that in the Golden Age the gold and gems should be taken from the hilt of the sword and put upon the handle of the plough. But something very like this did happen in the interlude of this mediaeval democracy, fermenting under the crust of mediaeval monarchy and aristocracy; where productive implements often took on the pomp of heraldry. The Guilds often exhibited emblems and pageantry so compact of their most prosaic uses, that we can only parallel them by imagining armorial tabards, or even religious vestments, woven out of a navvy’s corduroys or a coster’s pearl buttons.
Two more points must be briefly added; and the rough sketch of this now foreign and even fantastic state will be as complete as it can be made here. Both refer to the links between this popular life and the politics which are conventionally the whole of history. The first, and for that age the most evident, is the Charter. To recur once more to the parallel of Trades Unions, as convenient for the casual reader of to-day, the Charter of a Guild roughly corresponded to that “recognition” for which the railwaymen and other trades unionists asked some years ago, without success. By this they had the authority of the King, the central or national government; and this was of great moral weight with mediaevals, who always conceived of freedom as a positive status, not as a negative escape: they had none of the modern romanticism which makes liberty akin to loneliness. Their view remains in the phrase about giving a man the freedom of a city: they had no desire to give him the freedom of a wilderness. To say that they had also the authority of the Church is something of an understatement; for religion ran like a rich thread through the rude tapestry of these popular things while they were still merely popular; and many a trade society must have had a patron saint long before it had a royal seal. The other point is that it was from these municipal groups already in existence that the first men were chosen for the largest and perhaps the last of the great mediaeval experiments: the Parliament.
We have all read at school that Simon de Montfort and Edward I, when they first summoned Commons to council, chiefly as advisers on local taxation, called “two burgesses” from every town. If we had read a little more closely, those simple words would have given away the whole secret of the lost medieval civilisation. We had only to ask what burgesses were, and whether they grew on trees. We should immediately have discovered that England was full of little parliaments, out of which the great parliament was made. And if it be a matter of wonder that the great council (still called in quaint archaism by its old title of the House of Commons) is the only one of these popular or elective corporations of which we hear much in our books of history, the explanation, I fear, is simple and a little sad. It is that the Parliament was the one among these mediaeval creations which ultimately consented to betray and to destroy the rest.
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IX
NATIONALITY AND THE FRENCH WARS
If any one wishes to know what we mean when we say that Christendom was and is one culture, or one civilization, there is a rough but plain way of putting it. It is by asking what is the most common, or rather the most commonplace, of all the uses of the word “Christian.” There is, of course, the highest use of all; but it has nowadays many other uses. Sometimes a Christian means an Evangelical. Sometimes, and more recently, a Christian means a Quaker. Sometimes a Christian means a modest person who believes that he bears a resemblance to Christ. But it has long had one meaning in casual speech among common people, and it means a culture or a civilization. Ben Gunn on Treasure Island did not actually say to Jim Hawkins, “I feel myself out of touch with a certain type of civilization”; but he did say, “I haven’t tasted Christian food.” The old wives in a village looking at a lady with short hair and trousers do not indeed say, “We perceive divergence between her culture and our own”; but they do say, “Why can’t she dress like a Christian?” That the sentiment has thus soaked down to the simplest and even stupidest daily talk is but one evidence that Christendom was a very real thing. But it was also, as we have seen, a very localized thing, especially in the Middle Ages. And that very lively localism the Christian faith and affections encouraged led at last to an excessive and exclusive parochialism. There were rival shrines of the same saint, and a sort of duel between two statues of the same divinity. By a process it is now our difficult duty to follow, a real estrangement between European peoples began. Men began to feel that foreigners did not eat or drink like Christians, and even, when the philosophic schism came, to doubt if they were Christians.
There was, indeed, much more than this involved. While the internal structure of mediaevalism was thus parochial and largely popular, in the greater affairs, and especially the external affairs, such as peace and war, most (though by no means all) of what was mediaeval was monarchical. To see what the kings came to mean we must glance back at the great background, as of darkness and daybreak, against which the first figures of our history have already appeared. That background was the war with the barbarians. While it lasted Christendom was not only one nation but more like one city— and a besieged city. Wessex was but one wall or Paris one tower of it; and in one tongue and spirit Bede might have chronicled the siege of Paris or Abbo sung the song of Alfred. What followed was a conquest and a conversion; all the end of the Dark Ages and the dawn of mediaevalism is full of the evangelizing of barbarism. And it is the paradox of the Crusades that though the Saracen was superficially more civilized than the Christian, it was a sound instinct which saw him also to be in spirit a destroyer. In the simpler case of northern heathenry the civilization spread with a simpler progress. But it was not till the end of the Middle Ages, and close on the Reformation, that the people of Prussia, the wild land lying beyond Germany, were baptized at all. A flippant person, if he permitted himself a profane confusion with vaccination, might almost be inclined to suggest that for some reason it didn’t “take” even then.
The barbarian peril was thus brought under bit by bit, and even in the case of Islam the alien power which could not be crushed was evidently curbed. The Crusades became hopeless, but they also became needless. As these fears faded the princes of Europe, who had come together to face them, were left facing each other. They had more leisure to find that their own captaincies clashed; but this would easily have been overruled, or would have produced a petty riot, had not the true creative spontaneity, of which we have spoken in the local life, tended to real variety. Royalties found they were representatives almost without knowing it; and many a king insisting on a genealogical tree or a title-deed found he spoke for the forests and the songs of a whole country-side. In England especially the transition is typified in the accident which raised to the throne one of the noblest men of the Middle Ages.
Edward I came clad in all the splendours of his epoch. He had taken the Cross and fought the Saracens; he had been the only worthy foe of Simon de Montfort in these baronial wars which, as we have seen, were the first sign (however faint) of a serious theory that England should be ruled by its barons rather than its kings. He proceeded, like Simon de Montfort, and more solidly, to develop the great mediaeval institution of a parliament. As has been said, it was superimposed on the existing parish democracies, and was first merely the summoning of local representatives to advise on local taxation. Indeed its rise was one with the rise of what we now call taxation; and there is thus a thread of theory leading to its latter claims to have the sole right of taxing. But in the beginning it was an instrument of the most equitable kings, and notably an instrument of Edward I. He often quarrelled with his parliaments and may sometimes have displeased his people (which has never been at all the same thing), but on the whole he was supremely the representative sovereign. In this connection one curious and difficult question may be considered here, though it marks the end of a story that began with the Norman Conquest. It is pretty certain that he was never more truly a representative king, one might say a republican king, than in the fact that he expelled the Jews. The problem is so much misunderstood and mixed with notions of a stupid spite against a gifted and historic race as such, that we must pause for a paragraph upon it.
The Jews in the Middle Ages were as powerful as they were unpopular. They were the capitalists of the age, the men with wealth banked ready for use. It is very tenable that in this way they were useful; it is certain that in this way they were used. It is also quite fair to say that in this way they were ill-used. The ill-usage was not indeed that suggested at random in romances, which mostly revolve on the one idea that their teeth were pulled out. Those who know this as a story about King John generally do not know the rather important fact that it was a story against King John. It is probably doubtful; it was only insisted on as exceptional; and it was, by that very insistence, obviously regarded as disreputable. But the real unfairness of the Jews’ position was deeper and more distressing to a sensitive and highly civilized people. They might reasonably say that Christian kings and nobles, and even Christian popes and bishops, used for Christian purposes (such as the Crusades and the cathedrals) the money that could only be accumulated in such mountains by a usury they inconsistently denounced as unchristian; and then, when worse times came, gave up the Jew to the fury of the poor, whom that useful usury had ruined. That was the real case for the Jew; and no doubt he really felt himself oppressed. Unfortunately it was the case for the Christians that they, with at least equal reason, felt him as the oppressor; and that mutual charge of tyranny is the Semitic trouble in all times. It is certain that in popular sentiment, this Anti-Semitism was not excused as uncharitableness, but simply regarded as charity. Chaucer puts his curse on Hebrew cruelty into the mouth of the soft-hearted prioress, who wept when she saw a mouse in a trap; and it was when Edward, breaking the rule by which the rulers had hitherto fostered their bankers’ wealth, flung the alien financiers out of the land, that his people probably saw him most plainly at once as a knight errant and a tender father of his people.
Whatever the merits of this question, such a portrait of Edward was far from false. He was the most just and conscientious type of mediaeval monarch; and it is exactly this fact that brings into relief the new force which was to cross his path and in strife with which he died. While he was just, he was also eminently legal. And it must be remembered, if we would not merely read back ourselves into the past, that much of the dispute of the time was legal; the adjustment of dynastic and feudal differences not yet felt to be anything else. In this spirit Edward was asked to arbitrate by the rival claimants to the Scottish crown; and in this sense he seems to have arbitrated quite honestly. But his legal, or, as some would say, pedantic mind made the proviso that the Scottish king as such was already under his suzerainty and he probably never understood the spirit he called up against him; for that spirit had as yet no name. We call it to-day Nationalism. Scotland resisted; and the adventures of an outlawed knight named Wallace soon furnished it with one of those legends which are more important than history. In a way that was then at least equally practical, the Catholic priests of Scotland became especially the patriotic and Anti-English party; as indeed they remained even throughout the Reformation. Wallace was defeated and executed; but the heather was already on fire; and the espousal of the new national cause by one of Edward’s own knights named Bruce, seemed to the old king a mere betrayal of feudal equity. He died in a final fury at the head of a new invasion upon the very border of Scotland. With his last words the great king commanded that his bones should be borne in front of the battle; and the bones, which were of gigantic size, were eventually buried with the epitaph, “Here lies Edward the Tall, who was the hammer of the Scots.” It was a true epitaph, but in a sense exactly opposite to its intention. He was their hammer, but he did not break but make them; for he smote them on an anvil and he forged them into a sword.
That coincidence or course of events, which must often be remarked in this story, by which (for whatever reason) our most powerful kings did not somehow leave their power secure, showed itself in the next reign, when the baronial quarrels were resumed and the northern kingdom, under Bruce, cut itself finally free by the stroke of Bannockburn. Otherwise the reign is a mere interlude, and it is with the succeeding one that we find the new national tendency yet further developed. The great French wars, in which England won so much glory, were opened by Edward III, and grew more and more nationalist. But even to feel the transition of the time we must first realize that the third Edward made as strictly legal and dynastic a claim to France as the first Edward had made to Scotland; the claim was far weaker in substance, but it was equally conventional in form. He thought, or said, he had a claim on a kingdom as a squire might say he had a claim on an estate; superficially it was an affair for the English and French lawyers. To read into this that the people were sheep bought and sold is to misunderstand all mediaeval history; sheep have no trade union. The English arms owed much of their force to the class of the free yeomen; and the success of the infantry, especially of the archery, largely stood for that popular element which had already unhorsed the high French chivalry at Courtrai. But the point is this; that while the lawyers were talking about the Salic Law, the soldiers, who would once have been talking about guild law or glebe law, were already talking about English law and French law. The French were first in this tendency to see something outside the township, the trade brotherhood, the feudal dues, or the village common. The whole history of the change can be seen in the fact that the French had early begun to call the nation the Greater Land. France was the first of nations and has remained the norm of nations, the only one which is a nation and nothing else. But in the collision the English grew equally corporate; and a true patriotic applause probably hailed the victories of Crecy and Poitiers, as it certainly hailed the later victory of Agincourt. The latter did not indeed occur until after an interval of internal revolutions in England, which will be considered on a later page; but as regards the growth of nationalism, the French wars were continuous. And the English tradition that followed after Agincourt was continuous also. It is embodied in rude and spirited ballads before the great Elizabethans. The Henry V of Shakespeare is not indeed the Henry V of history; yet he is more historic. He is not only a saner and more genial but a more important person. For the tradition of the whole adventure was not that of Henry, but of the populace who turned Henry into Harry. There were a thousand Harries in the army at Agincourt, and not one. For the figure that Shakespeare framed out of the legends of the great victory is largely the figure that all men saw as the Englishman of the Middle Ages. He did not really talk in poetry, like Shakespeare’s hero, but he would have liked to. Not being able to do so, he sang; and the English people principally appear in contemporary impressions as the singing people. They were evidently not only expansive but exaggerative; and perhaps it was not only in battle that they drew the long bow. That fine farcical imagery, which has descended to tell comic songs and common speech of the English poor even to-day, had its happy infancy when England thus became a nation; though the modern poor, under the pressure of economic progress, have partly lost the gaiety and kept only the humour. But in that early April of patriotism the new unity of the State still sat lightly upon them; and a cobbler in Henry’s army, who would at home have thought first that it was the day of St. Crispin of the Cobblers, might truly as well as sincerely have hailed the splintering of the French lances in a storm of arrows, and cried, “St. George for Merry England.”
Human things are uncomfortably complex, and while it was the April of patriotism it was the Autumn of mediaeval society. In the next chapter I shall try to trace the forces that were disintegrating the civilization; and even here, after the first victories, it is necessary to insist on the bitterness and barren ambition that showed itself more and more in the later stages, as the long French wars dragged on. France was at the time far less happy than England— wasted by the treason of its nobles and the weakness of its kings almost as much as by the invasion of the islanders. And yet it was this very despair and humiliation that seemed at last to rend the sky, and let in the light of what it is hard for the coldest historian to call anything but a miracle.
It may be this apparent miracle that has apparently made Nationalism eternal. It may be conjectured, though the question is too difficult to be developed here, that there was something in the great moral change which turned the Roman Empire into Christendom, by which each great thing, to which it afterwards gave birth, was baptized into a promise, or at least into a hope of permanence. It may be that each of its ideas was, as it were, mixed with immortality. Certainly something of this kind can be seen in the conception which turned marriage from a contract into a sacrament. But whatever the cause, it is certain that even for the most secular types of our own time their relation to their native land has become not contractual but sacramental. We may say that flags are rags, that frontiers are fictions, but the very men who have said it for half their lives are dying for a rag, and being rent in pieces for a fiction even as I write. When the battle-trumpet blew in 1914 modern humanity had grouped itself into nations almost before it knew what it had done. If the same sound is heard a thousand years hence, there is no sign in the world to suggest to any rational man that humanity will not do exactly the same thing. But even if this great and strange development be not enduring, the point is that it is felt as enduring, it is hard to give a definition of loyalty, but perhaps we come near it if we call it the thing which operates where an obligation is felt to be unlimited. And the minimum of duty or even decency asked of a patriot is the maximum that is asked by the most miraculous view of marriage. The recognized reality of patriotism is not mere citizenship. The recognized reality of patriotism is for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, in national growth and glory and in national disgrace and decline; it is not to travel in the ship of state as a passenger, but if need be to go down with the ship.
It is needless to tell here again the tale of that earthquake episode in which a clearance in the earth and sky, above the confusion and abasement of the crowns, showed the commanding figure of a woman of the people. She was, in her own living loneliness, a French Revolution. She was the proof that a certain power was not in the French kings or in the French knights, but in the French. But the fact that she saw something above her that was other than the sky, the fact that she lived the life of a saint and died the death of a martyr, probably stamped the new national sentiment with a sacred seal. And the fact that she fought for a defeated country, and, even though it was victorious, was herself ultimately defeated, defines that darker element of devotion of which I spoke above, which makes even pessimism consistent with patriotism. It is more appropriate in this place to consider the ultimate reaction of this sacrifice upon the romance and the realities of England.
I have never counted it a patriotic part to plaster my own country with conventional and unconvincing compliments; but no one can understand England who does not understand that such an episode as this, in which she was so clearly in the wrong, has yet been ultimately linked up with a curious quality in which she is rather unusually in the right. No one candidly comparing us with other countries can say we have specially failed to build the sepulchres of the prophets we stoned, or even the prophets who stoned us. The English historical tradition has at least a loose large-mindedness which always finally falls into the praise not only of great foreigners but great foes. Often along with much injustice it has an illogical generosity; and while it will dismiss a great people with mere ignorance, it treats a great personality with hearty hero-worship. There are more examples than one even in this chapter, for our books may well make out Wallace a better man than he was, as they afterwards assigned to Washington an even better cause than he had. Thackeray smiled at Miss Jane Porter’s picture of Wallace, going into war weeping with a cambric pocket-handkerchief; but her attitude was more English and not less accurate. For her idealization was, if anything, nearer the truth than Thackeray’s own notion of a mediaevalism of hypocritical hogs-in-armour. Edward, who figures as a tyrant, could weep with compassion; and it is probable enough that Wallace wept, with or without a pocket-handkerchief. Moreover, her romance was a reality, the reality of nationalism; and she knew much more about the Scottish patriots ages before her time than Thackeray did about the Irish patriots immediately under his nose. Thackeray was a great man; but in that matter he was a very small man, and indeed an invisible one. The cases of Wallace and Washington and many others are here only mentioned, however, to suggest an eccentric magnanimity which surely balances some of our prejudices. We have done many foolish things, but we have at least done one fine thing; we have whitewashed our worst enemies. If we have done this for a bold Scottish raider and a vigorous Virginian slave-holder, it may at least show that we are not likely to fail in our final appreciation of the one white figure in the motley processions of war. I believe there to be in modern England something like a universal enthusiasm on this subject. We have seen a great English critic write a book about this heroine, in opposition to a great French critic, solely in order to blame him for not having praised her enough. And I do not believe there lives an Englishman now, who if he had the offer of being an Englishman then, would not discard his chance of riding as the crowned conqueror at the head of all the spears of Agincourt, if he could be that English common soldier of whom tradition tells that he broke his spear asunder to bind it into a cross for Joan of Arc.
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X
THE WAR OF THE USURPERS
THE poet Pope, though a friend of the greatest of Tory Democrats, Bolingbroke, necessarily lived in a world in which even Toryism was Whiggish. And the Whig as a wit never expressed his political point more clearly than in Pope’s line which ran: “The right divine of kings to govern wrong.” It will be apparent, when I deal with that period, that I do not palliate the real unreason in divine right as Filmer and some of the pedantic cavaliers construed it. They professed the impossible ideal of “non-resistance” to any national and legitimate power; though I cannot see that even that was so servile and superstitious as the mere modern ideal of “non-resistance” even to a foreign and lawless power. But the seventeenth century was an age of sects, that is of fads; and the Filmerites made a fad of divine right. Its roots were older, equally religious but much more realistic; and though tangled with many other and even opposite things of the Middle Ages, ramify through all the changes we have now to consider. The connection can hardly be stated better than by taking Pope’s easy epigram and pointing out that it is, after all, very weak in philosophy. “The right divine of kings to govern wrong,” considered as a sneer, really evades all that we mean by “a right.” To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it. What Pope says satirically about a divine right is what we all say quite seriously about a human right. If a man has a right to vote, has he not a right to vote wrong? If a man has a right to choose his wife, has he not a right to choose wrong? I have a right to express the opinion which I am now setting down; but I should hesitate to make the controversial claim that this proves the opinion to be right.
Now mediaeval monarchy, though only one aspect of mediaeval rule, was roughly represented in the idea that the ruler had a right to rule as a voter has a right to vote. He might govern wrong, but unless he governed horribly and extravagantly wrong, he retained his position of right; as a private man retains his right to marriage and locomotion unless he goes horribly and extravagantly off his head. It was not really even so simple as this; for the Middle Ages were not, as it is often the fashion to fancy, under a single and steely discipline. They were very controversial and therefore very complex; and it is easy, by isolating items whether about jus divinum or primus inter pares, to maintain that the mediaevals were almost anything; it has been seriously maintained that they were all Germans. But it is true that the influence of the Church, though by no means of all the great churchmen, encouraged the sense of a sort of sacrament of government, which was meant to make the monarch terrible and therefore often made the man tyrannical. The disadvantage of such despotism is obvious enough. The precise nature of its advantage must be better understood than it is, not for its own sake so much as for the story we have now to tell.
The advantage of “divine right,” or irremovable legitimacy, is this; that there is a limit to the ambitions of the rich. “Roi ne puis”, the royal power, whether it was or was not the power of heaven, was in one respect like the power of heaven. It was not for sale. Constitutional moralists have often implied that a tyrant and a rabble have the same vices. It has perhaps been less noticed that a tyrant and a rabble most emphatically have the same virtues. And one virtue which they very markedly share is that neither tyrants nor rabbles are snobs; they do not care a button what they do to wealthy people. It is true that tyranny was sometimes treated as coming from the heavens almost in the lesser and more literal sense of coming from the sky; a man no more expected to be the king than to be the west wind or the morning star. But at least no wicked miller can chain the wind to turn only his own mill; no pedantic scholar can trim the morning star to be his own reading-lamp. Yet something very like this is what really happened to England in the later Middle Ages; and the first sign of it, I fancy was the fall of Richard II.
Shakespeare’s historical plays are something truer than historical; they are traditional; the living memory of many things lingered, though the memory of others was lost. He is right in making Richard II incarnate the claim to divine right; and Bolingbroke the baronial ambition which ultimately broke up the old mediaeval order. But divine right had become at once drier and more fantastic by the time of the Tudors. Shakespeare could not recover the fresh and popular part of the thing; for he came at a later stage in a process of stiffening which is the main thing to be studied in later mediaevalism. Richard himself was possibly a wayward and exasperating prince; it might well be the weak link that snapped in the strong chain of the Plantagenets. There may have been a real case against the coup d’état which he effected in 1397 and his kinsman Henry of Bolingbroke may have had strong sections of disappointed opinion on his side when he effected in 1399 the first true usurpation in English history. But if we wish to understand that larger tradition which even Shakespeare had lost, we must glance back at something which befell Richard even in the first years of his reign. It was certainly the greatest event of his reign; and it was possibly the greatest event of all the reigns which are rapidly considered in this book. The real English people, the men who work with their hands, lifted their hands to strike their masters, probably for the first and certainly for the last time in history.
Pagan slavery had slowly perished, not so much by decaying as by developing into something better. In one sense it did not die, but rather came to life. The slave-owner was like a man who should set up a row of sticks for a fence, and then find they had struck root and were budding into small trees. They would be at once more valuable and less manageable, especially less portable; and such a difference between a stick and a tree was precisely the difference between P. slave and a serf— or even the free peasant which the serf seemed rapidly tending to become. It was, in the best sense of a battered phrase, a social evolution, and it had the great evil of one. The evil was that while it was essentially orderly, it was still literally lawless. That is, the emancipation of the commons had already advanced very far, but it had not yet advanced far enough to be embodied in a law. The custom was “unwritten,” like the British Constitution, and (like that evolutionary, not to say evasive entity) could always be overridden by the rich, who now drive their great coaches through Acts of Parliament. The new peasant was still legally a slave, and was to learn it by one of those turns of fortune which confound a foolish faith in the common sense of unwritten constitutions. The French Wars gradually grew to be almost as much of a scourge to England as they were to France. England was despoiled by her own victories; luxury and poverty increased at the extremes of society; and, by a process more proper to an ensuing chapter, the balance of the better mediaevalism was lost. Finally, a furious plague, called the Black Death, burst like a blast on the land, thinning the population and throwing the work of the world into ruin. There was a shortage of labour; a difficulty of getting luxuries; and the great lords did what one would expect them to do. They became lawyers, and upholders of the letter of the law. They appealed to a rule already nearly obsolete, to drive the serf back to the more direct servitude of the Dark Ages. They announced their decision to the people, and the people rose in arms.
The two dramatic stories which connect Wat Tyler, doubtfully with the beginning, and definitely with the end of the revolt, are far from unimportant, despite the desire of our present prosaic historians to pretend that all dramatic stories are unimportant. The tale of Tyler’s first blow is significant in the sense that it is not only dramatic but domestic. It avenged an insult to the family, and made the legend of the whole riot, whatever its incidental indecencies, a sort of demonstration on behalf of decency. This is important; for the dignity of the poor is almost unmeaning in modern debates; and an inspector need only bring a printed form and a few long words to do the same thing without having his head broken. The occasion of the protest, and the form which the feudal reaction had first taken, was a Poll Tax; but this was but a part of a general process of pressing the population to servile labour, which fully explains the ferocious language held by the government after the rising had failed; the language in which it threatened to make the state of the serf more servile than before. The facts attending the failure in question are less in dispute. The mediaeval populace showed considerable military energy and co-operation, stormed its way to London, and was met outside the city by a company containing the King and the Lord Mayor, who were forced to consent to a parley. The treacherous stabbing of Tyler by the Mayor gave the signal for battle and massacre on the spot. The peasants closed in roaring, “They have killed our leader”, when a strange thing happened; something which gives us a fleeting and a final glimpse of the crowned sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For one wild moment divine right was divine.
The King was no more than a boy; his very voice must have rung out to that multitude almost like the voice of a child. But the power of his fathers and the great Christendom from which he came fell in some strange fashion upon him; and riding out alone before the people, he cried out, “I am your leader”; and himself promised to grant them all they asked. That promise was afterwards broken; but those who see in the breach of it the mere fickleness of the young and frivolous king, are not only shallow but utterly ignorant interpreters of the whole trend of that time. The point that must be seized, if subsequent things are to be seen as they are, is that Parliament certainly encouraged, and Parliament almost certainly obliged, the King to repudiate the people. For when, after the rejoicing revolutionists had disarmed and were betrayed, the King urged a humane compromise on the Parliament, the Parliament furiously refused it. Already Parliament is not merely a governing body but a governing class. Parliament was as contemptuous of the peasants in the fourteenth as of the Chartists in the nineteenth century. This council, first summoned by the king like juries and many other things, to get from plain men rather reluctant evidence about taxation, has already become an object of ambition, and is, therefore, an aristocracy. There is already war, in this case literally to the knife, between the Commons with a large C and the commons with a small one. Talking about the knife, it is notable that the murderer of Tyler was not a mere noble but an elective magistrate of the mercantile oligarchy of London; though there is probably no truth in the tale that his blood-stained dagger figures on the arms of the City of London. The mediaeval Londoners were quite capable of assassinating a man, but not of sticking so dirty a knife into the neighbourhood of the cross of their Redeemer, in the place which is really occupied by the sword of St. Paul.
It is remarked above that Parliament was now an aristocracy, being an object of ambition. The truth is, perhaps, more subtle than this; but if ever men yearn to serve on juries we may probably guess that juries are no longer popular. Anyhow, this must be kept in mind, as against the opposite idea of the jus divinum or fixed authority, if we would appreciate the fall of Richard. If the thing which dethroned him was a rebellion, it was a rebellion of the parliament, of the thing that had just proved much more pitiless than he towards a rebellion of the people. But this is not the main point. The point is that by the removal of Richard, a step above the parliament became possible for the first time. The transition was tremendous; the crown became an object of ambition. That which one could snatch another could snatch from him; that which the House of Lancaster held merely by force the House of York could take from it by force. The spell of an undethronable thing seated out of reach was broken, and for three unhappy generations adventurers strove and stumbled on a stairway slippery with blood, above which was something new in the mediaeval imagination; an empty throne.
It is obvious that the insecurity of the Lancastrian usurper, largely because he was a usurper, is the clue to many things, some of which we should now call good, some bad, all of which we should probably call good or bad with the excessive facility with which we dismiss distant things. It led the Lancastrian House to lean on Parliament, which was the mixed matter we have already seen. It may have been in some ways good for the monarchy, to be checked and challenged by an institution which at least kept something of the old freshness and freedom of speech. It was almost certainly bad for the parliament, making it yet more the ally of the mere ambitious noble, of which we shall see much later. It also led the Lancastrian House to lean on patriotism, which was perhaps more popular; to make English the tongue of the court for the first time, and to reopen the French wars with the fine flag-waving of Agincourt. It led it again to lean on the Church, or rather, perhaps, on the higher clergy, and that in the least worthy aspect of clericalism. A certain morbidity which more and more darkened the end of mediaevalism showed itself in new and more careful cruelties against the last crop of heresies. A slight knowledge of the philosophy of these heresies will lend little support to the notion that they were in themselves prophetic of the Reformation. It is hard to see how anybody can call Wycliffe a Protestant unless he calls Palagius or Arius a Protestant; and if John Ball was a Reformer, Latimer was not a Reformer. But though the new heresies did not even hint at the beginning of English Protestantism, they did, perhaps, hint at the end of English Catholicism. Cobham did not light a candle to be handed on to Nonconformist chapels; but Arundel did light a torch and put it to his own church. Such real unpopularity as did in time attach to the old religious system, and which afterwards became a true national tradition against Mary was doubtless started by the diseased energy of these fifteenth-century bishops. Persecution can be a philosophy, and a defensible philosophy, but with some of these men persecution was rather a perversion. Across the channel, one of them was presiding at the trial of Joan of Arc.
But this perversion, this diseased energy, is the power in all the epoch that follows the fall of Richard II, and especially in those feuds that found so ironic an imagery in English roses—and thorns. The foreshortening of such a backward glance as this book can alone claim to be, forbids any entrance into the military mazes of the wars of York and Lancaster, or any attempt to follow the thrilling recoveries and revenges which filled the lives of Warwick the Kingmaker and the warlike widow of Henry V. The rivals were not, indeed, as is sometimes exaggeratively implied, fighting for nothing, or even (like the lion and the unicorn) merely fighting for the crown. The shadow of a moral difference can still be traced even in that stormy twilight of a heroic time. But when we have said that Lancaster stood, on the whole, for the new notion of a king propped by parliaments and powerful bishops, and York, on the whole, for the remains of the older idea of a king who permits nothing to come between him and his people, we have said everything of permanent political interest that could be traced by counting all the bows of Barnet or all the lances of Tewkesbury. But this truth, that there was something which can only vaguely be called Tory about the Yorkists, has at least one interest, that it lends a justifiable romance to the last and most remarkable figure of the fighting House of York, with whose fall the Wars of the Roses ended.
If we desire at all to catch the strange colours of the sunset of the Middle Ages, to see what had changed yet not wholly killed chivalry there is no better study than the riddle of Richard III. Of course, scarcely a line of him was like the caricature with which his much meaner successor placarded the world when he was dead. He was not even a hunchback; he had one shoulder slightly higher than the other, probably the effect of his furious swordsmanship on a naturally slender and sensitive frame. Yet his soul, if not his body, haunts us somehow as the crooked shadow of a straight knight of better days. He was not an ogre shedding rivers of blood; some of the men he executed deserved it as much as any men of that wicked time; and even the tale of his murdered nephews is not certain, as it is told by those who also tell us he was born with tusks and was originally covered with hair. Yet a crimson cloud cannot be dispelled from his memory, and, so tainted is the very air of that time with carnage, that we cannot say he was incapable even of the things of which he may have been innocent. Whether or no he was a good man, he was apparently a good king and even a popular one; yet we think of him vaguely, and not, I fancy, untruly, as on sufferance. He anticipated the Renascence in an abnormal enthusiasm for art and music, and he seems to have held to the old path of religion and charity. He did not pluck perpetually at his sword and dagger because his only pleasure was in cutting throats; he probably did it because he was nervous. It was the age of our first portrait-painting, and a fine contemporary portrait of him throws a more plausible light on this particular detail. For it shows him touching, and probably twisting, a ring on his finger, the very act of a high-strung personality who would also fidget with a dagger. And in his face, as there painted, we can study all that has made it worth while to pause so long upon his name; an atmosphere very different from everything before and after. The face was a remarkable intellectual beauty; but there is something else on the face that is hardly in itself either good or evil, and that thing is death; the death of an epoch, the death of a great civilization, the death of something which once sang to the sun in the canticle of St. Francis and sailed to the ends of the earth in the ships of the First Crusade, but which in peace wearied and turned its weapons inwards, wounded its own brethren, broke its own loyalties, gambled for the crown, and grew feverish even about the creed, and has this one grace among its dying virtues, that its valour is the last to die.
But whatever else may have been bad or good about Richard of Gloucester, there was a touch about him which makes him truly the last of the mediaeval kings. It is expressed in the one word which he cried aloud as he struck down foe after foe in the last charge at Bosworth—treason. For him, as for the first Norman kings, treason was the same as treachery; and in this case at least it was the same as treachery. When his nobles deserted him before the battle, he did not regard it as a new political combination, but as the sin of false friends and faithless servants. Using his own voice like the trumpet of a herald, he challenged his rival to a fight as personal as that of two paladins of Charlemagne. His rival did not reply, and was not likely to reply. The modern world had begun. The call echoed unanswered down the ages; for since that day no English king has fought after that fashion. Having slain many, he was himself slain and his diminished force destroyed. So ended the war of the usurpers; and the last and most doubtful of all the usurpers, a wanderer from the Welsh marches, a knight from nowhere, found the crown of England under a bush of thorn.
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XI
THE REBELLION OF THE RICH
SIR THOMAS MORE, apart from any arguments about the more mystical meshes in which he was ultimately caught and killed, will be hailed by all as a hero of the New Learning; that great dawn of a more rational daylight which for so many made mediaevalism seem a mere darkness. Whatever we think of his appreciation of the Reformation, there will be no dispute about his appreciation of the Renascence. He was above all things a Humanist and a very human one. He was even in many ways very modern, which some rather erroneously suppose to be the same as being human; he was also humane, in the sense of humanitarian. He sketched an ideal, or rather perhaps a fanciful social system, with something of the ingenuity of Mr. H. G. Wells, but essentially with much more than the flippancy attributed to Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is not fair to charge the Utopian notions upon his morality; but their subjects and suggestions mark what (for want of a better word) we can only call his modernism. Thus the immortality of animals is the sort of transcendentalism which savours of evolution, and the grosser jest about the preliminaries of marriage might be taken quite seriously by the students of Eugenics. He suggested a sort of pacifism— though the Utopians had a quaint way of achieving it. In short, while he was, with his friend Erasmus, a satirist of mediaeval abuses, few would now deny that Protestantism would be too narrow rather than too broad for him. If he was obviously not a Protestant, there are few Protestants who would deny him the name of a Reformer. But he was an innovator in things more alluring to modern minds than theology; he was partly what we should call a Neo-Pagan. His friend Colet summed up that escape from mediaevalism which might be called the passage from bad Latin to good Greek. In our loose modern debates they are lumped together; but Greek learning was the growth of this time; there had always been a popular Latin, if a dog Latin. It would be nearer the truth to call the mediaevals bi-lingual than to call their Latin a dead language. Greek never, of course, became so general a possession; but for the man who got it, it is not too much to say that he felt as if he were in the open air for the first time. Much of this Greek spirit was reflected in More; its universality, its urbanity, its balance of buoyant reason and cool curiosity. It is even probable that he shared some of the excesses and errors of taste which inevitably infected the splendid intellectualism of the reaction against the Middle Ages; we can imagine him thinking gargoyles Gothic, in the sense of barbaric or even failing to be stirred, as Sydney was, by the trumpet of “Chevy Chase.” The wealth of the ancient heathen world, in wit, loveliness, and civic heroism, had so recently been revealed to that generation in its dazzling profusion and perfection, that it might seem a trifle if they did here and there an injustice to the relics of the Dark Ages. When, therefore, we look at the world with the eyes of More we are looking from the widest windows of that time; looking over an English landscape seen for the first time very equally, in the level light of the sun at morning. For what he saw was England of the Renascence; England passing from the mediaeval to the modern. Thus he looked forth, and saw many things and said many things, they were all worthy and many witty; but he noted one thing which is at once a horrible fancy and a homely and practical fact. He who looked over that landscape said: “Sheep are eating men.”
This singular summary of the great epoch of our emancipation and enlightenment is not the fact usually put first in such very curt historical accounts of it. It has nothing to do with the translation of the Bible, or the character of Henry VIII, or the characters of Henry VIII’s wives, or the triangular debates between Henry and Luther and the Pope. It was not Popish sheep who were eating Protestant men, or vice versa; nor did Henry, at any period of his own brief and rather bewildering papacy, have martyrs eaten by lambs as the heathen had them eaten by lions. What was meant, of course, by this picturesque expression, was that an intensive type of agriculture was giving way to a very extensive type of pasture. Great spaces of England which had hitherto been cut up into the commonwealth of a number of farmers were being laid under the sovereignty of a solitary shepherd. The point has been put, by a touch of epigram rather in the manner of More himself, by Mr. J. Stephen, in a striking essay now, I think, only to be found in the back files of The New Witness. He enunciated the paradox that the very much admired individual, who made two blades of grass grow instead of one was a murderer. In the same article, Mr. Stephen traced the true moral origins of this movement, which led to the growing of so much grass and the murder, or at any rate the destruction, of so much humanity. He traced it, and every true record of that transformation traces it, to the growth of a new refinement, in a sense a more rational refinement, in the governing class. The mediaeval lord had been, by comparison, a coarse fellow; he had merely lived in the largest kind of farm-house after the fashion of the largest kind of farmer. He drank wine when he could, but he was quite ready to drink ale; and science had not yet smoothed his paths with petrol. At a time later than this, one of the greatest ladies of England writes to her husband that she cannot come to him because her carriage horses are pulling the plough. In the true Middle Ages the greatest men were even more rudely hampered, but in the time of Henry VIII the transformation was beginning. In the next generation a phrase was common which is one of the keys of the time, and is very much the key to these more ambitious territorial schemes. This or that great lord was said to be “Italianate.” It meant subtler shapes of beauty, delicate and ductile glass, gold and silver not treated as barbaric stones but rather as stems and wreaths of molten metal, mirrors, cards and such trinkets bearing a load of beauty; it meant the perfection of trifles. It was not, as in popular Gothic craftsmanship, the almost unconscious touch of art upon all necessary things: rather it was the pouring of the whole soul of passionately conscious art especially into unnecessary things. Luxury was made alive with a soul. We must remember this real thirst for beauty; for it is an explanation— and an excuse.
The old barony had indeed been thinned by the civil wars that closed at Bosworth, and curtailed by the economical and crafty policy of that unkingly king, Henry VII. He was himself a “new man,” and we shall see the barons largely give place to a whole nobility of new men. But even the older families already had their faces set in the newer direction. Some of them, the Howards, for instance, may be said to have figured both as old and new families. In any case the spirit of the whole upper class can be described as increasingly new. The English aristocracy which is the chief creation of the Reformation, is undeniably entitled to a certain praise, which is now almost universally regarded as very high praise. It was always progressive. Aristocrats are accused of being proud of their ancestors; it can truly be said that English aristocrats have rather been proud of their descendants. For their descendants they planned huge foundations and piled mountains of wealth; for their descendants they fought for a higher and higher place in the government of the state; for their descendants, above all, they nourished every new science or scheme of social philosophy. They seized the vast economic chances of pasturage; but they also drained the fens. They swept away the priests, but they condescended to the philosophers. As the new Tudor house passes through its generations a new and more rationalist civilization is being made; scholars are criticizing authentic texts; sceptics are discrediting not only popish saints but pagan philosophers; specialists are analyzing and rationalizing traditions, and sheep are eating men.
We have seen that in the fourteenth century in England there was a real revolution of the poor. It very nearly succeeded; and I need not conceal the conviction that it would have been the best possible thing for all of us if it had entirely succeeded. If Richard II had really sprung into the saddle of Wat Tyler, or rather if his parliament had not unhorsed him when he had got there, if he had confirmed the fact of the new peasant freedom by some form of royal authority, as it was already common to confirm the fact of the Trade Unions by the form of a royal charter, our country would probably have had as happy a history as is possible to human nature. The Renascence, when it came, would have come as popular education and not the culture of a club of aesthetics. The New Learning might have been as democratic as the old learning in the old days of mediaeval Paris and Oxford. The exquisite artistry of the school of Cellini might have been but the highest grade of the craft of a guild. The Shakespearean drama might have been acted by workmen on wooden stages set up in the street like Punch and Judy, the finer fulfilment of the miracle play as it was acted by a guild. The players need not have been “the king’s servants,” but their own masters. The great Renascence might have been liberal with its liberal education. If this be a fancy, it is at least one that cannot be disproved; the mediaeval revolution was too unsuccessful at the beginning for any one to show that it need have been unsuccessful in the end. The feudal parliament prevailed, and pushed back the peasants at least into their dubious and half-developed status. More than this it would be exaggerative to say, and a mere anticipation of the really decisive events afterwards. When Henry VIII came to the throne the guilds were perhaps checked but apparently unchanged, and even the peasants had probably regained ground; many were still theoretically serfs, but largely under the easy landlordism of the abbots; the mediaeval system still stood. It might, for all we know, have begun to grow again; but all such speculations are swamped in new and very strange things. The failure of the revolution of the poor was ultimately followed by a counter-revolution; a successful revolution of the rich.
The apparent pivot of it was in certain events, political and even personal. They roughly resolve themselves into two: the marriages of Henry VIII and the affair of the monasteries. The marriages of Henry VIII have long been a popular and even a stale joke; and there is a truth of tradition in the joke, as there is in almost any joke if it is sufficiently popular, and indeed if it is sufficiently stale. A jocular thing never lives to be stale unless it is also serious. Henry was popular in his first days, and even foreign contemporaries give us quite a glorious picture of a young prince of the Renascence, radiant with all the new accomplishments. In his last days he was something very like a maniac; he no longer inspired love, and even when he inspired fear, it was rather the fear of a mad dog than of a watch-dog. In this change doubtless the inconsistency and even ignominy of his Bluebeard weddings played a great part. And it is but just to him to say that, perhaps with the exception of the first and the last, he was almost as unlucky in his wives as they were in their husband. But it was undoubtedly the affair of the first divorce that broke the back of his honour, and incidentally broke a very large number of other more valuable and universal things. To feel the meaning of his fury we must realize that he did not regard himself as the enemy but rather as the friend of the Pope; there is a shadow of the old story of Becket. He had defended the Pope in diplomacy and the Church in controversy; and when he wearied of his queen and took a passionate fancy to one of her ladies, Anne Boleyn, he vaguely felt that a rather cynical concession, in that age of cynical concessions, might very well be made to him by a friend. But it is part of that high inconsistency which is the fate of the Christian faith in human hands, that no man knows when the higher side of it will really be uppermost, if only for an instant; and that the worst ages of the Church will not do or say something, as if by accident, that is worthy of the best. Anyhow, for whatever reason, Henry sought to lean upon the cushions of Leo and found he had struck his arm upon the rock of Peter. The Pope denied the new marriage; and Henry, in a storm and darkness of anger, dissolved all the old relations with the Papacy. It is probable that he did not clearly know how much he was doing then; and it is very tenable that we do not know it now. He certainly did not think he was Anti-Catholic; and, in one rather ridiculous sense, we can hardly say that he thought he was anti-papal, since he apparently thought he was a pope. From this day really dates something that played a certain part in history, the more modern doctrine of the divine right of kings, widely different from the mediaeval one. It is a matter which further embarrasses the open question about the continuity of Catholic things in Anglicanism, for it was a new note and yet one struck by the older party. The supremacy of the King over the English national church was not, unfortunately, merely a fad of the King, but became partly, and for one period, a fad of the church. But apart from all controverted questions, there is at least a human and historic sense in which the continuity of our past is broken perilously at this point. Henry not only cut off England from Europe, but what was even more important, he cuts off England from England.
The great divorce brought down Wolsey, the mighty minister who had held the scales between the Empire and the French Monarchy, and made the modern balance of power in Europe. He is often described under the dictum of Ego et Rex Meus; but he marks a stage in the English story rather because he suffered for it than because he said it. Ego et Rex Meus might be the motto of any modern Prime Minister; for we have forgotten the very fact that the word minister merely means servant. Wolsey was the last great servant who could be, and was, simply dismissed; the mark of a monarchy still absolute; the English were amazed at it in modern Germany, when Bismarck was turned away like a butler. A more awful act proved the new force was already inhuman; it struck down the noblest of the Humanists. Thomas More, who seemed sometimes like an Epicurean under Augustus, died the death of a saint under Diocletian. He died gloriously jesting; and the death has naturally drawn out for us rather the sacred savours of his soul; his tenderness and his trust in the truth of God. But for Humanism it must have seemed a monstrous sacrifice; it was somehow as if Montaigne were a martyr. And that is indeed the note; something truly to be called unnatural had already entered the naturalism of the Renascence; and the soul of the great Christian rose against it. He pointed to the sun, saying “I shall be above that fellow” with Franciscan familiarity, which can love nature because it will not worship her. So he left to his king the sun, which for so many weary days and years was to go down only on his wrath.
But the more impersonal process which More himself had observed (as noted at the beginning of this chapter) is more clearly defined, and less clouded with controversies, in the second of the two parts of Henry’s policy. There is indeed a controversy about the monasteries; but it is one that is clarifying and settling every day. Now it is true that the Church, by the Renascence period, had reached a considerable corruption; but the real proofs of it are utterly different both from the contemporary despotic pretence and from the common Protestant story. It is wildly unfair, for instance, to quote the letters of bishops and such authorities denouncing the sins of monastic life, violent as they often are. They cannot possibly be more violent than the letters of St. Paul to the purest and most primitive churches; the apostle was there writing to those Early Christians whom all churches idealize; and he talks to them as to cut-throats and thieves. The explanation, for those concerned for such subtleties, may possibly be found in the fact that Christianity is not a creed for good men, but for men. Such letters had been written in all centuries; and even in the sixteenth century they do not prove so much that there were bad abbots as that there were good bishops. However, even those who profess that the monks were profligates dare not profess that they were oppressors; there is truth in Cobbett’s point that where monks were landlords, they did not become rack-renting landlords, and could not become absentee landlords. Nevertheless, there was a weakness in the good institutions as well as a mere strength in the bad ones; and that weakness partakes of the worst element of the time. In the fall of good things there is almost always a touch of betrayal from within; and the abbots were destroyed more easily because they did not stand together. They did not stand together because the spirit of the age (which is very often the worst enemy of the age) was the increasing division between rich and poor; and it had partly divided even the rich and poor clergy. And the betrayal came, as it nearly always comes, from that servant of Christ who holds the bag.
To take a modern attack on liberty, on a much lower plane, we are familiar with the picture of a politician going to the great brewers, or even the great hotel proprietors, and pointing out the uselessness of a litter of little public houses. That is what the Tudor politicians did first with the monasteries. They went to the heads of the great houses and proposed the extinction of the small ones. The great monastic lords did not resist, or, at any rate, did not resist enough; and the sack of the religious houses began. But if the lord abbots acted for a moment as lords, that could not excuse them, in the eyes of much greater lords, for having frequently acted as abbots. A momentary rally to the cause of the rich did not wipe out the disgrace of a thousand petty interferences which had told only to the advantage of the poor; and they were soon to learn that it was no epoch for their easy rule and their careless hospitality. The great houses, now isolated, were themselves brought down one by one; and the beggar, whom the monastery had served as a sort of sacred tavern, came to it at evening and found it a ruin. For a new and wide philosophy was in the world, which still rules our society. By this creed most of the mystical virtues of the old monks have simply been turned into great sins; and the greatest of these is charity.
But the populace which had risen under Richard II was not yet disarmed. It was trained in the rude discipline of bow and bill, and organized into local groups of town and guild and manor. Over half the counties of England the people rose, and fought one final battle for the vision of the Middle Ages. The chief tool of the new tyranny, a dirty fellow named Thomas Cromwell, was specially singled out as the tyrant, and he was indeed rapidly turning all government into a nightmare. The popular movement was put down partly by force; and there is the new note of modern militarism in the fact that it was put down by cynical professional troops, actually brought in from foreign countries, who destroyed English religion for hire. But, like the old popular rising, it was even more put down by fraud. Like the old rising, it was sufficiently triumphant to force the government to a parley; and the government had to resort to the simple expedient of calming the people with promises, and then proceeding to break first the promises and then the people, after the fashion made familiar to us by the modern politicians in their attitude towards the great strikes. The revolt bore the name of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and its programme was practically the restoration of the old religion. In connection with the fancy about the fate of England if Tyler had triumphed, it proves, I think, one thing; that his triumph, while it might or might not have led to something that could be called a reform, would have rendered quite impossible everything that we now know as the Reformation.
The reign of terror established by Thomas Cromwell became an Inquisition of the blackest and most unbearable sort. Historians, who have no shadow of sympathy with the old religion, are agreed that it was uprooted by means more horrible than have ever, perhaps, been employed in England before or since. It was a government by torturers rendered ubiquitous by spies. The spoliation of the monasteries especially was carried out, not only with a violence which recalled barbarism, but with a minuteness for which there is no other word but meanness. It was as if the Dane had returned in the character of a detective. The inconsistency of the King’s personal attitude to Catholicism did indeed complicate the conspiracy with new brutalities towards Protestants; but such reaction as there was in this was wholly theological. Cromwell lost that fitful favour and was executed, but the terrorism went on the more terribly for being simplified to the single vision of the wrath of the King. It culminated in a strange act which rounds off symbolically the story told on an earlier page. For the despot revenged himself on a rebel whose defiance seemed to him to ring down three centuries. He laid waste the most popular shrine of the English, the shrine to which Chaucer had once ridden singing, because it was also the shrine where King Henry had knelt to repent. For three centuries the Church and the people had called Becket a saint, when Henry Tudor arose and called him a traitor. This might well be thought the topmost point of autocracy; and yet it was not really so.
For then rose to its supreme height of self-revelation that still stranger something of which we have, perhaps fancifully, found hints before in this history. The strong king was weak. He was immeasurably weaker than the strong kings of the Middle Ages; and whether or no his failure had been foreshadowed, he failed. The breach he had made in the dyke of the ancient doctrines let in a flood that may almost be said to have washed him away. In a sense he disappeared before he died; for the drama that filled his last days is no longer the drama of his own character. We may put the matter most practically by saying that it is unpractical to discuss whether Froude finds any justification for Henry’s crimes in the desire to create a strong national monarchy. For whether or no it was desired, it was not created. Least of all our princes did the Tudors leave behind them a secure central government, and the time when monarchy was at its worst comes only one or two generations before the time when it was weakest. But a few years afterwards, as history goes, the relations of the Crown and its new servants were to be reversed on a high stage so as to horrify the world; and the axe which had been sanctified with the blood of More and soiled with the blood of Cromwell was, at the signal of one of that slave’s own descendants, to fall and to kill an English king.
The tide which thus burst through the breach and overwhelmed the King as well as the Church was the revolt of the rich, and especially of the new rich. They used the King’s name, and could not have prevailed without his power, but the ultimate effect was rather as if they had plundered the King after he had plundered the monasteries. Amazingly little of the wealth, considering the name and theory of the thing, actually remained in royal hands. The chaos was increased, no doubt, by the fact that Edward VI succeeded to the throne as a mere boy, but the deeper truth can be seen in the difficulty of drawing any real line between the two reigns. By marrying into the Seymour family, and thus providing himself with a son, Henry had also provided the country with the very type of powerful family which was to rule merely by pillage. An enormous and unnatural tragedy, the execution of one of the Seymours by his own brother, was enacted during the impotence of the childish king, and the successful Seymour figured as Lord Protector, though even he would have found it hard to say what he was protecting, since it was not even his own family. Anyhow, it is hardly too much to say that every human thing was left unprotected from the greed of such cannibal protectors. We talk of the dissolution of the monasteries, but what occurred was the dissolution of the whole of the old civilization. Lawyers and lackeys and money lenders, the meanest of lucky men, looted the art and economics of the Middle Ages like thieves robbing a church. Their names (when they did not change them) became the names of the great dukes and marquises of our own day. But if we look back and forth in our history, perhaps the most fundamental act of destruction occurred when the armed men of the Seymours and their sort passed from the sacking of the Monasteries to the sacking of the Guilds. The mediaeval Trade Unions were struck down, their buildings broken into by the soldiery, and their funds seized by the new nobility. And this simple incident takes all its common meaning out of the assertion (in itself plausible enough) that the Guilds, like everything else at that time, were probably not at their best. Proportion is the only practical thing; and it may be true that Caesar was not feeling well on the morning of the Ides of March. But simply to say that the Guilds declined, is about as true as saying that Caesar quietly decayed from purely natural causes at the foot of the statue of Pompey.
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XII
SPAIN AND THE SCHISM OF NATIONS
THE revolution that arose out of what is called the Renascence, and ended in some countries in what is called the Reformation, did in the internal politics of England one drastic and definite thing. That thing was destroying the institutions of the poor. It was not the only thing it did, but it was much the most practical. It was the basis of all the problems now connected with Capital and Labour. How much the theological theories of the time had to do with it is a perfectly fair matter for difference of opinion. But neither party, if educated about the facts, will deny that the same time and temper which produced the religious schism also produced this new lawlessness in the rich. The most extreme Protestant will probably be content to say that Protestantism was not the motive, but the mask. The most extreme Catholic will probably be content to admit that Protestantism was not the sin, but rather the punishment. The most sweeping and shameless part of the process was not complete, indeed, until the end of the eighteenth century, when Protestantism was already passing into scepticism. Indeed a very decent case could be made out for the paradox that Puritanism was first and last a veneer on Paganism; that the thing began in the inordinate thirst for new things in the noblesse of the Renascence and ended in the Hell-Fire Club. Anyhow, what was first founded at the Reformation was a new and abnormally powerful aristocracy, and what was destroyed, in an ever increasing degree, was everything that could be held, directly or indirectly, by the people in spite of such an aristocracy. This fact has filled all the subsequent history of our country; but the next particular point in that history concerns the position of the Crown. The King, in reality, had already been elbowed aside by the courtiers who had crowded behind him just before the bursting of the door. The King is left behind in the rush for wealth, and already can do nothing alone. And of this fact the next reign, after the chaos of Edward VI’s, affords a very arresting proof.
Mary Tudor, daughter of the divorced Queen Katherine, has a bad name even in popular history; and popular prejudice is generally more worthy of study than scholarly sophistry. Her enemies were indeed largely wrong about her character, but they were not wrong about her effect. She was, in the limited sense, a good woman, convinced, conscientious, rather morbid. But it is true that she was a bad queen; bad for many things, but especially bad for her own most beloved cause. It is true, when all is said, that she set herself to burn out “No Popery” and managed to burn it in. The concentration of her fanaticism into cruelty, especially its concentration in particular places and in a short time, did remain like something red-hot in the public memory. It was the first of the series of great historical accidents that separated a real, if not universal public opinion from the old régime. It has been summarized in the death by fire of the three famous martyrs at Oxford; for one of them at least, Latimer, was a reformer of the more robust and human type, though another of them, Cranmer, had been so smooth a snob and coward in the councils of Henry VIII as to make Thomas Cromwell seem by comparison a man. But of what may be called the Latimer tradition, the saner and more genuine Protestantism, I shall speak later. At the time even the Oxford Martyrs probably produced less pity and revulsion than the massacre in the flames of many more obscure enthusiasts, whose very ignorance and poverty made their cause seem more popular than it really was. But this last ugly feature was brought into sharper relief, and produced more conscious or unconscious bitterness, because of that other great fact of which I spoke above, which is the determining test of this time of transition.
What made all the difference was this: that even in this Catholic reign the property of the Catholic Church could not be restored. The very fact that Mary was a fanatic, and yet this act of justice was beyond the wildest dreams of fanaticism—that is the point. The very fact that she was angry enough to commit wrongs for the Church, and yet not bold enough to ask for the rights of the Church— that is the test of the time. She was allowed to deprive small men of their lives, she was not allowed to deprive great men of their property—or rather of other people’s property. She could punish heresy, she could not punish sacrilege. She was forced into the false position of killing men who had not gone to church, and sparing men who had gone there to steal the church ornaments. What forced her into it? Not certainly her own religious attitude, which was almost maniacally sincere; not public opinion, which had naturally much more sympathy for the religious humanities which she did not restore than for the religious inhumanities which she did. The force came, of course, from the new nobility and the new wealth they refused to surrender; and the success of this early pressure proves that the nobility was already stronger than the Crown. The sceptre had only been used as a crowbar to break open the door of a treasure-house, and was itself broken, or at least bent, with the blow.
There is a truth also in the popular insistence on the story of Mary having “Calais” written on her heart, when the last relic of the mediaeval conquests reverted to France. Mary had the solitary and heroic half-virtue of the Tudors: she was a patriot. But patriots are often pathetically behind the times; for the very fact that they dwell on old enemies often blinds them to new ones. In a later generation Cromwell exhibited the same error reversed, and continued to keep a hostile eye on Spain when he should have kept it on France. In our own time the Jingoes of Fashoda kept it on France when they ought already to have had it on Germany. With no particular anti-national intention, Mary nevertheless got herself into an anti-national position towards the most tremendous international problem of her people. It is the second of the coincidences that confirmed the sixteenth-century change, and the name of it was Spain. The daughter of a Spanish queen, she married a Spanish prince, and probably saw no more in such an alliance than her father had done. But by the time she was succeeded by her sister Elizabeth, who was more cut off from the old religion (though very tenuously attached to the new one), and by the time the project of a similar Spanish marriage for Elizabeth herself had fallen through, something had matured which was wider and mightier than the plots of princes. The Englishman, standing on his little island as on a lonely boat, had already felt falling across him the shadow of a tall ship.
Wooden clichés about the birth of the British Empire and the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth have not merely obscured but contradicted the crucial truth. From such phrases one would fancy that England, in some imperial fashion, now first realized that she was great. It would be far truer to say that she now first realized that she was small. The great poet of the spacious days does not praise her as spacious, but only as small, like a jewel. The vision of universal expansion was wholly veiled until the eighteenth century; and even when it came it was far less vivid and vital than what came in the sixteenth. What came then was not Imperialism; it was Anti-Imperialism. England achieved, at the beginning of her modern history, that one thing human imagination will always find heroic— the story of a small nationality. The business of the Armada was to her what Bannockburn was to the Scots or Majuba to the Boers—a victory that astonished even the victors. What was opposed to them was Imperialism in its complete and colossal sense, a thing unthinkable since Rome. It was, in no overstrained sense, civilization itself. It was the greatness of Spain that was the glory of England. It is only when we realize that the English were, by comparison, as dingy, as undeveloped, as petty and provincial as Boers, that we can appreciate the height of their defiance or the splendour of their escape. We can only grasp it by grasping that for a great part of Europe the cause of the Armada had almost the cosmopolitan common sense of a crusade. The Pope had declared Elizabeth illegitimate—logically, it is hard to see what else he could say, having declared her mother’s marriage invalid; but the fact was another and perhaps a final stroke sundering England from the elder world. Meanwhile those picturesque English privateers who had plagued the Spanish Empire of the New World were spoken of in the South simply as pirates, and technically the description was true; only technical assaults by the weaker party are in retrospect rightly judged with some generous weakness. Then, as if to stamp the contrast in an imperishable image, Spain, or rather the empire with Spain for its centre, put forth all its strength, and seemed to cover the sea with a navy like the legendary navy of Xerxes. It bore down on the doomed island with the weight and solemnity of a day of judgement; sailors or pirates struck at it with small ships staggering under large cannon, fought it with mere masses of flaming rubbish, and in that last hour of grapple a great storm arose out of the sea and swept round the island, and the gigantic fleet was seen no more. The uncanny completeness and abrupt silence that swallowed this prodigy touched a nerve that has never ceased to vibrate. The hope of England dates from that hopeless hour, for there is no real hope that has not once been a forlorn hope. The breaking of that vast naval net remained like a sign that the small thing which escaped would survive the greatness. And yet there is truly a sense in which we may never be so small or so great again.
For the splendour of the Elizabethan age, which is always spoken of as a sunrise, was in many ways a sunset. Whether we regard it as the end of the Renascence or the end of the old mediaeval civilization, no candid critic can deny that its chief glories ended with it. Let the reader ask himself what strikes him specially in the Elizabethan magnificence, and he will generally find it is something of which there were at least traces in mediaeval times, and far fewer traces in modern times. The Elizabethan drama is like one of its own tragedies— its tempestuous torch was soon to be trodden out by the Puritans. It is needless to say that the chief tragedy was the cutting short of the comedy; for the comedy that came to England after the Restoration was by comparison both foreign and frigid. At the best it is comedy in the sense of being humorous, but not in the sense of being happy. It may be noted that the givers of good news and good luck in the Shakespearean love-stories nearly all belong to a world which was passing, whether they are friars or fairies. It is the same with the chief Elizabethan ideals, often embodied in the Elizabethan drama. The national devotion to the Virgin Queen must not be wholly discredited by its incongruity with the coarse and crafty character of the historical Elizabeth. Her critics might indeed reasonably say that in replacing the Virgin Mary by the Virgin Queen, the English reformers merely exchanged a true Virgin for a false one. But this truth does not dispose of a true, though limited, contemporary cult. Whatever we think of that particular Virgin Queen, the tragic heroines of the time offer us a whole procession of virgin queens. And it is certain that the mediaevals would have understood much better than the moderns the martyrdom of Measure for Measure. And as with the title of Virgin, so with the title of Queen. The mystical monarchy glorified in Richard II was soon to be dethroned much more ruinously than in Richard II. The same Puritans who tore off the pasteboard crowns of the stage players were also to tear off the real crowns of the kings whose parts they played. All mummery was to be forbidden and all monarchy to be called mummery.
Shakespeare died upon St. George’s day, and much of what St. George had meant died with him. I do not mean that the patriotism of Shakespeare or of England died; that remained and even rose steadily, to be the noblest pride of the coming times. But much more than patriotism had been involved in that image of St. George to whom the Lion Heart had dedicated England long ago in the deserts of Palestine. The conception of a patron saint had carried from the Middle Ages one very unique and as yet unreplaced idea. It was the idea of variation without antagonism. The Seven Champions of Christendom were multiplied by seventy times seven in the patrons of towns, trades and social types; but the very idea that they were all saints excluded the possibility of ultimate rivalry in the fact that they were all patrons. The Guild of the Shoemakers and the Guild of the Skinners, carrying the badges of St. Crispin and St. Bartholomew, might fight each other in the streets; but they did not believe that St. Crispin and St. Bartholomew were fighting each other in the skies. Similarly the English would cry in battle on St. George and the French on St. Denis; but they did not seriously believe that St. George hated St. Denis or even those who cried upon St. Denis. Joan of Arc, who was on the point of patriotism what many modern people would call very fanatical, was yet upon this point what most modern people would call very enlightened. Now, with the religious schism, it cannot be denied, a deeper and more inhuman division appeared. It was no longer a scrap between the followers of saints who were themselves at peace, but a war between the followers of gods who were themselves at war. That the great Spanish ships were named after St. Francis or St. Philip was already beginning to mean little to the new England; soon it was to mean something almost comically conflicting, as if they were named after BaaI or Thor. These are indeed mere symbols, but the process of which they are symbols was very practical and must be seriously followed. There entered with the religious wars the idea which modern science applies to racial wars; the idea of natural wars, not arising from a special quarrel but from the nature of the people quarrelling. The shadow of racial fatalism first fell across our path, and far away in distance and darkness something moved that men had almost forgotten.
Beyond the frontiers of the fading Empire lay that outer land, as loose and drifting as a sea, which had boiled over in the barbarian wars. Most of it was not formally Christian, but barely civilized; a faint awe of the culture of the south and west lay on its wild forces like a light frost. This semi-civilized world had long been asleep; but it had begun to dream. In the generation before Elizabeth a great man who, with all his violence, was vitally a dreamer, Martin Luther, had cried out in his sleep in a voice like thunder, partly against the place of bad customs, but largely also against the place of good works in the Christian scheme. In the generation after Elizabeth the spread of the new wild doctrines in the old wild lands had sucked Central Europe into a cyclic war of creeds. In this the house which stood for the legend of the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, the Germanic partner of Spain, fought for the old religion against a league of other Germans fighting for the new. The continental conditions were indeed complicated, and grew more and more complicated as the dream of restoring religious unity receded. They were complicated by the firm determination of France to be a nation in the full modern sense; to stand free and foursquare from all combinations; a purpose which led her, while hating her own Protestants at home, to give diplomatic support to many Protestants abroad, simply because it preserved the balance of power against the gigantic confederation of Spaniards and Austrians. It is complicated by the rise of a Calvinistic and commercial power in the Netherlands, logical, defiant, defending its own independence valiantly against Spain. But on the whole we shall be right if we see the first throes of the modern international problems in what is called the Thirty Years’ War; whether we call it the revolt of half-heathens against the Holy Roman Empire, or whether we call it the coming of new sciences, new philosophies, and new ethics from the north. Sweden took a hand in the struggle, and sent a military hero to the help of the newer Germany. But the sort of military heroism everywhere exhibited offered a strange combination of more and more complex strategic science with the most naked and cannibal cruelty. Other forces besides Sweden found a career in the carnage. Far away to the north-east, in a sterile land of fens, a small ambitious family of money-lenders who had become squires, vigilant, thrifty, thoroughly selfish, rather thinly adopted the theories of Luther, and began to lend their almost savage hinds as soldiers on the Protestant side. They were well paid for it by step after step of promotion; but at this time their principality was only the old Mark of Brandenburg. Their own name was Hohenzollern.
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XIII
THE AGE OF THE PURITANS
We should be very much bored if we had to read an account of the most exciting argument or string of adventures in which unmeaning words such as “snark” or “boojum” were systematically substituted for the names of the chief characters or objects in dispute; if we were told that a king was given the alternative of becoming a snark or finally surrendering the boojum, or that a mob was roused to fury by the public exhibition of a boojum, which was inevitably regarded as a gross reflection on the snark. Yet something very like this situation is created by most modern attempts to tell the tale of the theological troubles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while deferring to the fashionable distaste for theology in this generation—or rather in the last generation. Thus the Puritans, as their name implies, were primarily enthusiastic for what they thought was pure religion; frequently they wanted to impose it on others; sometimes they only wanted to be free to practise it themselves; but in no case can justice be done to what was finest in their characters, as well as first in their thoughts, if we never by any chance ask what “it” was that they wanted to impose or to practise. Now, there was a great deal that was very fine about many of the Puritans, which is almost entirely missed by the modern admirers of the Puritans. They are praised for things which they either regarded with indifference or more often detested with frenzy—such as religious liberty. And yet they are quite insufficiently understood, and are even undervalued, in their logical case for the things they really did care about— such as Calvinism. We make the Puritans picturesque in a way they would violently repudiate, in novels and plays they would have publicly burnt. We are interested in everything about them, except the only thing in which they were interested at all.
We have seen that in the first instance the new doctrines in England were simply an excuse for a plutocratic pillage, and that is the only truth to be told about the matter. But it was far otherwise with the individuals a generation or two after, to which the wreck of the Armada was already a legend of national deliverance from Popery, as miraculous and almost as remote as the divilerances of which they read so realistically in the Hebrew Books now laid open to them. The august accident of that Spanish defeat may perhaps have coincided only too well with their concentration on the non-Christian parts of Scripture. It may have satisfied a certain Old Testament sentiment of the election of the English being announced in the stormy oracles of air and sea, which was easily turned into that heresy of a tribal pride that took even heavier hold upon the Germans. It is by such things that a civilized state may fall from being a Christian nation to being a Chosen People. But even if their nationalism was of a kind that has ultimately proved perilous to the comity of nations, it still was nationalism. From first to last the Puritans were patriots, a point in which they had a marked superiority over the French Huguenots. Politically, they were indeed at first but one wing of the new wealthy class which had despoiled the Church and were proceeding to despoil the Crown. But while they were all merely the creatures of the great spoliation, many of them were the unconscious creatures of it. They were strongly represented in the aristocracy, but a great number were of the middle classes, though almost wholly the middle classes of the towns. By the poor agricultural population, which was still by far the largest part of the population, they were simply derided and detested. It may be noted, for instance, that, while they led the nation in many of its higher departments, they could produce nothing having the atmosphere of what is rather priggishly called folklore. All the popular tradition there is, as in songs, toasts, rhymes, or proverbs, is all Royalist. About the Puritans we can find no great legend. We must put up as best we can with great literature.
All these things, however, are simply things that other people might have noticed about them; they are not the most important things, and certainly not the things they thought about themselves. The soul of the movement was in two conceptions, or rather in two steps, the first being the moral process by which they arrived at their chief conclusion, and the second the chief conclusion they arrived at. We will begin with the first, especially as it was this which determined all that external social attitude which struck the eye of contemporaries. The honest Puritan, growing up in youth in a world swept bare by the great pillage, possessed himself of a first principle which is one of the three or four alternative first principles which are possible to the mind of man. It was the principle that the mind of man can alone directly deal with the mind of God. It may shortly be called the anti-sacramental principle; but it really applies, and he really applied it, to many things besides the sacraments of the Church. It equally applies, and he equally applied it, to art, to letters, to the love of locality, to music, and even to good manners. The phrase about no priest coming between a man and his Creator is but an impoverished fragment of the full philosophic doctrine; the true Puritan was equally clear that no singer or story-teller or fiddler must translate the voice of God to him into the tongues of terrestrial beauty. It is notable that the one Puritan man of genius in modern times, Tolstoy, did accept this full conclusion; denounced all music as a mere drug, and forbade his own admirers to read his own admirable novels. Now, the English Puritans were not only Puritans but Englishmen, and therefore did not always shine in clearness of head; as we shall see, true Puritanism was rather a Scotch than an English thing. But this was the driving power and the direction; and the doctrine is quite tenable if a trifle insane. Intellectual truth was the only tribute fit for the highest truth of the universe; and the next step in such a study is to observe what the Puritan thought was the truth about that truth. His individual reason, cut loose from instinct as well as tradition, taught him a concept of the omnipotence of God which meant simply the impotence of man. In Luther, the earlier and milder form of the Protestant process only went so far as to say that nothing a man did could help him except his confession of Christ; with Calvin it took the last logical step and said that even this could not help him, since Omnipotence must have disposed of all his destiny before hand; that men must be created to be lost and saved. In the purer types of whom I speak this logic was white-hot, and we must read the formula into all their parliamentary and legal formulae. When we read, “The Puritan party demanded reforms in the church,” we must understand, “The Puritan party demanded fuller and clearer affirmation that men are created to be lost and saved.” When we read, “The Army selected persons for their godliness” we must understand, “The Army selected those persons who seemed most convinced that men were created to be lost and saved.” It should be added that this terrible trend was not confined even to Protestant countries; some great Romanists doubtfully followed it until stopped by Rome. It was the spirit of the age, and should be a permanent warning against mistaking the spirit of the age for the immortal spirit of man. For there are now few Christians or non-Christians who can look back at the Calvinism which nearly captured Canterbury and even Rome by the genius and heroism of Pascal or Milton, without crying out, like the lady in Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play, “How splendid! How glorious! …and oh what an escape!”
The next thing to note is that their conception of church-government was in a true sense self-government; and yet, for a particular reason, turned out to be a rather selfish self-government. It was equal and yet it was exclusive. Internally the synod or conventicle tended to be a small republic, but unfortunately to be a very small republic. In relation to the street outside the conventicle was not a republic but an aristocracy. It was the most awful of all aristocracies, that of the elect; for it was not a right of birth but a right before birth, and alone of all nobilities it was not laid level in the dust. Hence we have, on the one hand, in the simpler Puritans a ring of real republican virtue; a defiance of tyrants, an assertion of human dignity, but above all an appeal to that first of all republican virtues—publicity. One of the Regicides, on trial for his life, struck the note which all the unnaturalness of his school cannot deprive of nobility: “This thing was not done in a corner.” But their most drastic idealism did nothing to recover a ray of the light that at once lightened every man that came into the world, the assumption of a brotherhood in all baptized people. They were, indeed, very like that dreadful scaffold at which the Regicide was not afraid to point. They were certainly public, they may have been public-spirited, they were never popular; and it seems never to have crossed their minds that there was any need to be popular. England was never so little of a democracy as during the short time when she was a republic.
The struggle with the Stuarts, which is the next passage in our history, arose from an alliance, which some may think an accidental alliance, between two things. The first was this intellectual fashion of Calvinism which affected the cultured world as did our recent intellectual fashion of Collectivism. The second was the older thing which had made that creed and perhaps that cultured world possible—the aristocratic revolt under the last Tudors. It was, we might say, the story of a father and a son dragging down the same golden image, but the younger really from hatred of idolatry, and the older solely from love of gold. It is at once the tragedy and the paradox of England that it was the eternal passion that passed, and the transient or terrestrial passion that remained. This was true of England; it was far less true of Scotland; and that is the meaning of the Scotch and English war that ended at Worcester. The first change had indeed been much the same materialist matter in both countries—a mere brigandage of barons; and even John Knox, though he has become a national hero, was an extremely anti-national politician. The patriot party in Scotland was that of Cardinal Beaton and Mary Stuart. Nevertheless the new creed did become popular in the Lowlands in a positive sense, not even yet known in our own land. Hence in Scotland Puritanism was the main thing, and was mixed with Parliamentary and other oligarchies. In England Parliamentary oligarchy was the main thing, and was mixed with Puritanism. When the storm began to rise against Charles I, after the more or less transitional time of his father, the Scotch successor of Elizabeth, the instances commonly cited mark all the difference between democratic religion and aristocratic politics. The Scotch legend is that of Jenny Geddes, the poor woman who threw a stool at the priest. The English legend is that of John Hampden, the great squire who raised a county against the King. The Parliamentary movement in England was, indeed, almost wholly a thing of squires, with their new allies the merchants. They were squires who may well have regarded themselves as the real and natural leaders of the English; but they were leaders who allowed no mutiny among their followers. There was certainly no Village Hampden in Hampden Village.
The Stuarts, it may be suspected, brought from Scotland a more mediaeval and therefore more logical view of their own function; for the note of their nation was logic. It is a proverb that James I was a Scot and a pedant; it is hardly sufficiently noted that Charles I also was not a little of a pedant, being very much of a Scot. He had also the virtues of a Scot, courage, and a quite natural dignity and an appetite for the things of the mind. Being somewhat Scottish, he was very un-English, and could not manage a compromise: he tried instead to split hairs, and seemed merely to break promises. Yet he might safely have been far more inconsistent if he had been a little hearty and hazy; but he was of the sort that sees everything in black and white; and it is therefore remembered—especially the black. From the first he fenced with his Parliament as with a mere foe; perhaps he almost felt it as a foreigner. The issue is familiar, and we need not be so careful as the gentleman who wished to finish the chapter in order to find not what happened to Charles I. His minister, the great Strafford, was foiled in an attempt to make him strong in the fashion of a French king, and perished on the scaffold, a frustrated Richelieu. The Parliament claiming the power of the purse, Charles appealed to the power of the sword, and at first carried all before him; but success passed to the wealth of the Parliamentary class, the discipline of the new army, and the patience and genius of Cromwell, and Charles died the same death as his great servant.
Historically, the quarrel resolved itself; through ramifications generally followed perhaps in more detail than they deserve, into the great modern query of whether a king can raise taxes without the consent of his Parliament. The test case was that of Hampden, the great Buckingham shire magnate, who challenged the legality of a tax which Charles imposed, professedly for a national navy. As even innovators always of necessity seek for sanctity in the past, the Puritan squires made a legend of the mediaeval Magna Carta; and they were so far in a true tradition that the concession of John had really been, as we have already noted, anti-despotic without being democratic. These two truths cover two parts of the problem of the Stuart fall, which are of very different certainty, and should be considered separately.
For the first point about democracy, no candid person, in face of the facts, can really consider it at all. It is quite possible to hold that the seventeenth-century Parliament was fighting for the truth; it is not possible to hold that it was fighting for the populace. After the autumn of the Middle Ages Parliament was always actively aristocratic and actively anti-popular. The institution which forbade Charles I to raise Ship Money was the same institution which previously forbade Richard II to free the serfs. The group which claimed coal and minerals from Charles I was the same which afterward claimed the common lands from the village communities. It was the same institution which only two generations before had eagerly helped to destroy, not merely things of popular sentiment like the monasteries, but all the things of popular utility like the guilds and parishes, the local governments of towns and trades. The work of the great lords may have had, indeed it certainly had, another more patriotic and creative side; but it was exclusively the work of the great lords that was done by Parliament. The House of Commons has itself been a House of Lords.
But when we turn to the other or anti-despotic aspect of the campaign against the Stuarts, we come to something much more difficult to dismiss and much more easy to justify. While the stupidest things are said against the Stuarts, the real contemporary case for their enemies is little realized; for it is connected with what our insular history most neglects, the condition of the Continent. It should be remembered that though the Stuarts failed in England they fought for things that succeeded in Europe. These were roughly, first, the effects of the Counter-Reformation, which made the sincere Protestant see Stuart Catholicism not at all as the last flicker of an old flame, but as the spread of a conflagration. Charles II, for instance, was a man of strong, sceptical, and almost irritably humorous intellect, and he was quite certainly, and even reluctantly, convinced of Catholicism as a philosophy. The other and more important matter here was the almost awful plutocracy that was being built up in France like a Bastille. It was more logical, and in many ways more equal and even equitable than the English oligarchy, but it really became a tyranny in case of rebellion or even resistance. There were none of the rough English safeguards of juries and good customs of the old common law; there was lettre de cachet as unanswerable as magic. The English who defied the law were better off than the French; a French satirist would probably have retorted that it was the English who obeyed the law who were worse off than the French. The ordering of men’s normal lives was with the squire; but he was, if anything, more limited where he was the magistrate. He was stronger as master of the village, but actually weaker as agent of the King. In defending this state of things, in short, the Whigs were certainly not defending democracy, but they were in a real sense defending liberty. They were even defending some remains of mediaeval liberty, though not the best; the jury though not the guild. Even feudalism had involved a localism not without liberal elements, which lingered in the aristocratic system. Those who loved such things might well be alarmed at the Leviathan of the State, which for Hobbes was a single monster and for France a single man.
As to the mere facts, it must be said again that in so far as Puritanism was pure, it was unfortunately passing. And the very type of the transition by which it passed can be found in that extraordinary man who is popularly credited with making it predominate. Oliver Cromwell is in history much less the leader of Puritanism than the tamer of Puritanism. He was undoubtedly possessed, certainly in his youth, possibly all his life, by the rather sombre religious passions of his period; but as he emerges into importance, he stands more and more for the Positivism of the English as compared with the Puritanism of the Scotch. He is one of the Puritan squires; but he is steadily more of the squire and less of the Puritan; and he points to the process by which the squirearchy became at last merely pagan. This is the key to most of what is praised and most of what is blamed in him; the key to the comparative sanity, toleration and modern efficiency of many of his departures; the key to the comparative coarseness, earthiness, cynicism, and lack of sympathy in many others. He was the reverse of an idealist; and he cannot without absurdity be held up as an ideal; but he was, like most of the squires, a type genuinely English; not without public spirit, certainly not without patriotism. His seizure of personal power, which destroyed an impersonal and ideal government, had something English in its very unreason. The act of killing the King, I fancy, was not primarily his, and certainly not characteristically his. It was a concession to the high inhuman ideals of the tiny group of true Puritans, with whom he had to compromise but with whom he afterwards collided. It was logic rather than cruelty in the act that was not Cromwellian; for he treated with bestial cruelty the native Irish, whom the new spiritual exclusiveness regarded as beasts— or as the modern euphemism would put it, as aborigines. But his practical temper was more akin to such human slaughter on what seemed to him the edges of civilization, than to a sort of human sacrifice in the very centre and forum of it; he is not a representative regicide. In a sense that piece of headsmanship was rather above his head. The real regicides did it in a sort of trance or vision; and he was not troubled with visions. But the true collision between the religious and rational sides of the seventeenth-century movement came symbolically on that day of driving storm at Dunbar, when the raving Scotch preachers overruled Leslie and forced him down into the valley to be the victim of the Cromwellian common sense. Cromwell said that God had delivered them into his hand; but it was their own God who delivered them, the dark unnatural God of the Calvinist dreams, as overpowering as a nightmare— and as passing.
It was the Whig rather than the Puritan that triumphed on that day, it was the Englishman with his aristocratic compromise; and even what followed Cromwell’s death, the Restoration, was an aristocratic compromise, and even a Whig compromise. The mob might cheer as for a mediaeval king; but the Protectorate and the Restoration were more of a piece than the mob understood. Even in the superficial things where there seemed to be a rescue it was ultimately a respite. Thus the Puritan régime had risen chiefly by one thing unknown to mediaevalism—militarism. Picked professional troops, harshly drilled but highly paid, were the new and alien instrument by which the Puritans became masters. These were disbanded and their return resisted by Tories and Whigs; but their return seemed always imminent, because it was in the spirit of the new stern world of the Thirty Years’ War. A discovery is an incurable disease; and it had been discovered that a crowd could he turned into an iron centipede, crushing larger and looser crowds. Similarly the remains of Christmas were rescued from the Puritans; but they had eventually to be rescued again by Dickens from the Utilitarians, and may yet have to be rescued by somebody from the vegetarians and teetotallers. The strange army passed and vanished almost like a Moslem invasion; but it had made the difference that armed valour and victory always make, if it was but a negative difference. It was the final break in our history; it was a breaker of many things, and perhaps of popular rebellion in our land. It is something of a verbal symbol that these men founded New England in America, for indeed they tried to found it here. By a paradox, there was something prehistoric in the very nakedness of their novelty. Even the old and savage things they invoked became more savage in becoming more new. In observing what is called their Jewish Sabbath, they would have had to stone the strictest Jew. And they (and indeed their age generally) turned witch-burning from an episode to an epidemic. The destroyers and the things destroyed disappeared together; but they remain as something nobler than the nibbling legalism of some of the Whig cynics who continued their work. They were above all things anti-historic, like the Futurists in Italy; and there was this unconscious greatness about them, that their very sacrilege was public and solemn like a sacrament; and they were ritualists even as iconoclasts. It was, properly considered, but a very secondary example of their strange and violent simplicity that one of them, before a mighty mob at Whitehall, cut off the anointed head of the sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For another, far away in the western shires, cut down the thorn of Glastonbury, from which had grown the whole story of Britain.
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XIV
THE TRlUMPH OF THE WHIGS
WHETHER or no we believe that the Reformation really reformed, there can be little doubt that the Restoration did not really restore. Charles II was never in the old sense a King; he was a Leader of the Opposition to his own Ministers. Because he was a clever politician he kept his official post, and because his brother and successor was an incredibly stupid politician, he lost it; but the throne was already only one of the official posts. In some ways, indeed, Charles II was fitted for the more modern world then beginning; he was rather an eighteenth century than a seventeenth-century man. He was as witty as a character in a comedy; and it was already the comedy of Sheridan and not of Shakespeare. He was more modern yet when he enjoyed the pure experimentalism of the Royal Society, and bent eagerly over the toys that were to grow into the terrible engines of science. He and his brother, however, had two links with what was in England the losing side; and by the strain on these their dynastic cause was lost. The first, which lessened in its practical pressure as time passed, was, of course, the hatred felt for their religion. The second, which grew as it neared the next century, was their tie with the French Monarchy. We will deal with the religious quarrel before passing on to a much more irreligious age; but the truth about it is tangled and far from easy to trace.
The Tudors had begun to persecute the old religion before they had ceased to belong to it. That is one of the transitional complexities that can only be conveyed by such contradictions. A person of the type and time of Elizabeth would feel fundamentally, and even fiercely, that priests should be celibate, while racking and rending anybody caught talking to the only celibate priests. This mystery, which may be very variously explained, covered the Church of England, and in a great degree the people of England. Whether it be called the Catholic continuity of Anglicanism or merely the slow extirpation of Catholicism, there can be no doubt that a parson like Herrick, for instance, as late as the Civil War, was stuffed with “superstitions” which were Catholic in the extreme sense we should now call Continental. Yet many similar parsons had already a parallel and opposite passion, and thought of Continental Catholicism not even as the errant Church of Christ, but as the consistent Church of Antichrist. It is, therefore, very hard now to guess the proportion of Protestantism; but there is no doubt about its presence, especially its presence in centres of importance like London. By the time of Charles II, after the purge of the Puritan Terror, it had become something at least more inherent and human than the mere exclusiveness of Calvinist creeds or the craft of Tudor nobles. The Monmouth rebellion showed that it had a popular, though an insufficiently popular, backing. The “No Popery” force became the crowd if it never became the people. It was, perhaps, increasingly an urban crowd, and was subject to those epidemics of detailed delusion with which sensational journalism plays on the urban crowds of to-day. One of these scares and scoops (not to add the less technical name of lies) was the Popish Plot, a storm weathered warily by Charles II. Another was the Tale of the Warming Pan, or the bogus heir to the throne, a storm that finally swept away James II.
The last blow, however, could hardly have fallen but for one of those illogical but almost lovable localisms to which the English temperament is prone. The debate about the Church of England, then and now, differs from most debates in one vital point. It is not a debate about what an institution ought to do, or whether that institution ought to alter, but about what that institution actually is. One party, then as now, only cared for it because it was Catholic, and the other only cared for it because it was Protestant. Now, something had certainly happened to the English quite inconceivable to the Scotch or the Irish. Masses of common people loved the Church of England without having even decided what it was. It had a hold different indeed from that of the mediaeval Church, but also very different from the barren prestige of gentility which clung to it in the succeeding century. Macaulay, with a widely different purpose in mind, devotes some pages to proving that an Anglican clergyman was socially a mere upper servant in the seventeenth century. He is probably right; but he does not guess that this was but the degenerate continuity of the more democratic priesthood of the Middle Ages. A priest was not treated as a gentleman; but a peasant was treated as a priest. And in England then, as in Europe now, many entertained the fancy that priesthood was a higher thing than gentility. In short, the national church was then at least really national, in a fashion that was emotionally vivid though intellectually vague. When, therefore, James II seemed to menace this practising communion, he aroused something at least more popular than the mere priggishness of the Whig lords. To this must be added a fact generally forgotten. I mean the fact that the influence then called Popish was then in a real sense regarded as revolutionary. The Jesuit seemed to the English not merely a conspirator but a sort of anarchist. There is something appalling about abstract speculations to many Englishmen; and the abstract speculations of Jesuits like Suarez dealt with extreme democracy and things undreamed of here. The last Stuart proposals for toleration seemed thus to many as vast and empty as atheism. The only seventeenth-century Englishmen who had something of this transcendental abstraction were the Quakers, and the cosy English compromise shuddered when the two things shook hands. For it was something much more than a Stuart intrigue which made these philosophical extremes meet, merely because they were philosophical; and which brought the weary but humorous mind of Charles II into alliance with the subtle and detached spirit of William Penn.
Much of England, then, was really alarmed at the Stuart scheme of toleration, sincere or insincere, because it seemed theoretical and therefore fanciful. It was in advance of its age or (to use a more intelligent language) too thin and ethereal for its atmosphere. And to this affection for the actual in the English moderates must be added (in what proportion we know not) a persecuting hatred of Popery almost maniacal but quite sincere. The State had long, as we have seen, been turned to an engine of torture against priests and the friends of priests. Men talk of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; but the English persecutors never had so tolerant an edict to revoke. But at least by this time the English, like the French, persecutors were oppressing a minority. Unfortunately there was another province of government in which they were still more madly persecuting the majority. For it was here that came to its climax and took on its terrific character that lingering crime that was called the government of Ireland. It would take too long to detail the close network of unnatural laws by which that country was covered till towards the end of the eighteenth century; it is enough to say here that the whole attitude to the Irish was tragically typified, and tied up with our expulsion of the Stuarts, in one of those acts that are remembered for ever. James II, fleeing from the opinion of London, perhaps of England, eventually found refuge in Ireland, which took arms in his favour. The Prince of Orange, whom the aristocracy had summoned to the throne, landed in that country with an English and Dutch army, won the Battle of the Boyne, but saw his army successfully arrested before Limerick by the military genius of Patrick Sarsfield. The check was so complete that peace could only be restored by promising complete religious liberty to the Irish, in return for the surrender of Limerick. The new English Government occupied the town and immediately broke the promise. It is not a matter on which there is much more to be said. It was a tragic necessity that the Irish should remember it; but it was far more tragic that the English forgot it. For he who has forgotten his sin is repeating it incessantly for ever.
But here again the Stuart position was much more vulnerable on the side of secular policy, and especially of foreign policy. The aristocrats to whom power passed finally at the Revolution were already ceasing to have any supernatural faith in Protestantism as against Catholicism; but they had a very natural faith in England as against France; and even, in a certain sense, in English institutions as against French institutions. And just as these men, the most unmediaeval of mankind, could yet boast about some mediaeval liberties, Magna Carta, the Parliament and the Jury, so they could appeal to a true mediaeval legend in the matter of a war with France. A typical eighteenth-century oligarch like Horace Walpole could complain that the cicerone in an old church troubled him with traces of an irrelevant person named St. Somebody, when he was looking for the remains of John of Gaunt. He could say it with all the naïveté of scepticism, and never dream how far away from John of Gaunt he was really wandering in saying so. But though their notion of mediaeval history was a mere masquerade ball, it was one in which men fighting the French could still, in an ornamental way, put on the armour of the Black Prince or the crown of Henry of Monmouth. In this matter, in short, it is probable enough that the aristocrats were popular as patriots will always be popular. It is true that the last Stuarts were themselves far from unpatriotic; and James II in particular may well be called the founder of the British Navy. But their sympathies were with France, among other foreign countries; they took refuge in France, the elder before and the younger after his period of rule; and France aided the later Jacobite efforts to restore their line. And for the new England, especially the new English nobility, France was the enemy.
The transformation through which the external relations of England passed at the end of the seventeenth century is symbolized by two very separate and definite steps; the first the accession of a Dutch king and the second the accession of a German king. In the first were present all the features that can partially make an unnatural thing natural. In the second we have the condition in which even those effecting it can hardly call it natural, but only call it necessary. William of Orange was like a gun dragged into the breach of a wall; a foreign gun indeed, and one fired in a quarrel more foreign than English, but still a quarrel in which the English, and especially the English aristocrats, could play a great part. George of Hanover was simply something stuffed into a hole in the wall by English aristocrats, who practically admitted that they were simply stopping it with rubbish. In many ways William, cynical as he was, carried on the legend of the greater and grimmer Puritanism. He was in private conviction a Calvinist; and nobody knew or cared what George was except that he was not a Catholic. He was at home the partly republican magistrate of what had once been a purely republican experiment, and among the cleaner if colder ideals of the seventeenth century. George was when he was at home pretty much what the King of the Cannibal Islands was when he was at home—a savage personal ruler scarcely logical enough to be called a despot. William was a man of acute if narrow intelligence; George was a man of no intelligence. Above all, touching the immediate effect produced, William was married to a Stuart, and ascended the throne hand-in-hand with a Stuart; he was a familiar figure, and already a part of our royal family. With George there entered England something that had scarcely been seen there before; something hardly mentioned in mediaeval or Renascence writing, except as one mentions a Hottentot— the barbarian from beyond the Rhine.
The reign of Queen Anne, which covers the period between these two foreign kings, is therefore the true time of transition. It is the bridge between the time when the aristocrats were at least weak enough to call in a strong man to help them, and the time when they were strong enough deliberately to call in a weak man who would allow them to help themselves. To symbolize is always to simplify, and to simplify too much; but the whole may be well symbolized as the struggle of two great figures, both gentlemen and men of genius, both courageous and clear about their own aims, and in everything else a violent contrast at every point. One of them was Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke; the other was John Churchill, the famous and infamous Duke of Marlborough. The story of Churchill is primarily the story of the Revolution and how it succeeded; the story of Bolingbroke is the story of the Counter-Revolution and how it failed.
Churchill is a type of the extraordinary time in this, that he combines the presence of glory with the absence of honour. When the new aristocracy had become normal to the nation, in the next few generations, it produced personal types not only of aristocracy but of chivalry. The Revolution reduced us to a country wholly governed by gentlemen; the popular universities and schools of the Middle Ages, like their guilds and abbeys, had been seized and turned into what they are—factories of gentlemen, when they are not merely factories of snobs. It is hard now to realize that what we call the Public Schools were once undoubtedly public. By the Revolution they were already becoming as private as they are now. But at least in the eighteenth century there were great gentlemen in the generous, perhaps too generous, sense now given to the title. Types not merely honest, but rash and romantic in their honesty, remain in the record with the names of Nelson or of Fox. We have already seen that the later reformers defaced from fanaticism the churches which the first reformers had defaced simply from avarice. Rather in the same way the eighteenth-century Whigs often praised, in a spirit of pure magnanimity, what the seventeenth-century Whigs had done in a spirit of pure meanness. How mean was that meanness can only be estimated by realizing that a great military hero had not even the ordinary military virtues of loyalty to his flag or obedience to his superior officers, that he picked his way through campaigns that have made him immortal with the watchful spirit of a thieving camp follower. When William landed at Torbay on the invitation of the other Whig nobles, Churchill, as if to add something ideal to his imitation of Iscariot, went to James with wanton professions of love and loyalty, went forth in arms as if to defend the country from invasion, and then calmly handed the army over to the invader. To the finish of this work of art but few could aspire, but in their degree all the politicians of the Revolution were upon this ethical pattern. While they surrounded the throne of James, there was scarcely one of them who was not in correspondence with William. When they afterwards surrounded the throne of William, there was not one of them who was not still in correspondence with James. It was such men who defeated Irish Jacobitism by the treason of Limerick; it was such men who defeated Scotch Jacobitism by the treason of Glencoe.
Thus the strange yet splendid story of eighteenth-century England is one of greatness founded on smallness, a pyramid standing on a point. Or, to vary the metaphor, the new mercantile oligarchy might be symbolized even in the externals of its great sister, the mercantile oligarchy of Venice. The solidity was all in the superstructure; the fluctuation had been all in the foundations. The great temple of Chatham and Warren Hastings was reared in its origins on things as unstable as water and as fugitive as foam. It is only a fancy, of course, to connect the unstable element with something restless and even shifty in the lords of the sea. But there was certainly in the genesis, if not in the later generations of our mercantile aristocracy, a thing only too mercantile; something which had also been urged against a yet older example of that polity, something called Punica fides. The great Royalist Strafford, going disillusioned to death, had said, “Put not your trust in princes.” The great Royalist Bolingbroke may well be said to have retorted, “And least of all in merchant princes.”
Bolingbroke stands for a whole body of conviction which bulked very big in English history, but which with the recent winding of the course of history has gone out of sight. Yet without grasping it we cannot understand our past, nor, I will add, our future. Curiously enough, the best English books of the eighteenth century are crammed with it, yet modern culture cannot see it when it is there. Dr. Johnson is full of it; it is what he meant when he denounced minority rule in Ireland, as well as when he said that the devil was the first Whig. Goldsmith is full of it; it is the whole point of that fine poem “The Deserted Village,” and is set out theoretically with great lucidity and spirit in “The Vicar of Wakefield.” Swift is full of it; and found in it an intellectual brotherhood-in-arms with Bolingbroke himself. In the time of Queen Anne it was probably the opinion of the majority of people in England. But it was not only in Ireland that the minority had begun to rule.
This conviction, as brilliantly expounded by Bolingbroke, had many aspects; perhaps the most practical was the point that one of the virtues of a despot is distance. It is “the little tyrant of the fields” that poisons human life. The thesis involved the truism that a good king is not only a good thing, but perhaps the best thing. But it also involved the paradox that even a bad king is a good king, for his oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure on the populace. If he is a tyrant he chiefly tortures the torturers; and though Nero’s murder of his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his soul, it was no great loss to his empire. Bolingbroke had thus a wholly rationalistic theory of Jacobitism. He was, in other respects, a fine and typical eighteenth-century intellect, a free-thinking Deist, a clear and classic writer of English. But he was also a man of adventurous spirit and splendid political courage, and he made one last throw for the Stuarts. He was defeated by the great Whig nobles who formed the committee of the new regime of the gentry. And considering who it was who defeated it, it is almost unnecessary to say that it was defeated by a trick.
The small German prince ascended the throne, or rather was hoisted into it like a dummy, and the great English Royalist went into exile. Twenty years afterwards he reappears and reasserts his living and logical faith in a popular monarchy. But it is typical of the whole detachment and distinction of his mind that for this abstract ideal he was willing to strengthen the heir of the king whom he had tried to exclude. He was always a Royalist, but never a Jacobite. What he cared for was not a royal family but a royal office. He celebrated it in his great book “The Patriot King,” written in exile; and when he thought that George’s great-grandson was enough of a patriot, he only wished that he might be more of a king. He made in his old age yet another attempt, with such unpromising instruments as George III and Lord Bute; and when these broke in his hand he died with all the dignity of the sed victa Catoni. The great commercial aristocracy grew on to its full stature. But if we wish to realize the good and ill of its growth, there is no better summary than this section from the first to the last of the foiled coup d’état of Bolingbroke. In the first his policy made peace with France, and broke the connection with Austria. In the second his policy again made peace with France, and broke the connection with Prussia. For in that interval the seed of the money-lending squires of Brandenburg had waxed mighty, and had already become that prodigy which has become so enormous a problem in Europe. By the end of this epoch Chatham, who incarnated and even created, at least in a representative sense, all that we call the British Empire, was at the height of his own and his country’s glory. He summarized the new England of the Revolution in everything, especially in everything in which that movement seems to many to be intrinsically contradictory and yet was most corporately consistent. Thus he was a Whig, and even in some ways what we should call a Liberal, like his son after him; but he was also an Imperialist and what we should call a Jingo; and the Whig party was consistently the Jingo party. He was an aristocrat, in the sense that all our public men were then aristocrats; but he was very emphatically what may be called a commercialist—one might almost say Carthaginian. In this connection he has the characteristic which perhaps humanized but was not allowed to hamper the aristocratic plan; I mean that he could use the middle classes. It was a young soldier of middle rank, James Wolfe, who fell gloriously driving the French out of Quebec; it was a young clerk of the East India Company, Robert Clive, who threw open to the English the golden gates of India. But it was precisely one of the strong points of this eighteenth-century aristocracy that it wielded without friction the wealthier bourgeoisie; it was not there that the social cleavage was to come. He was an eloquent parliamentary orator, and though Parliament was as narrow as a senate, it was one of great senators. The very word recalls the roll of those noble Roman phrases they often used, which we are right in calling classic, but wrong in calling cold. In some ways nothing could be further from all this fine if florid scholarship, all this princely and patrician geniality, all this air of freedom and adventure on the sea, than the little inland state of the stingy drill-sergeants of Potsdam, hammering mere savages into mere soldiers. And yet the great chief of these was in some ways like a shadow of Chatham flung across the world— the sort of shadow that is at once an enlargement and a caricature. The English lords, whose paganism was ennobled by patriotism, saw here something drawn out long and thin out of their own theories. What was paganism in Chatham was atheism in Frederick the Great. And what was in the first patriotism was in the second something with no name but Prussianism. The cannibal theory of a commonwealth, that it can of its nature eat other commonwealths, had entered Christendom. Its autocracy and our own aristocracy drew indirectly nearer together, and seemed for a time to be wedded; but not before the great Bolingbroke had made a dying gesture, as if to forbid the banns.
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XV
THE WAR WITH THE GREAT REPUBLlCS
We cannot understand the eighteenth century so long as we suppose that rhetoric is artificial because it is artistic. We do not fall into this folly about any of the other arts. We talk of a man picking out notes arranged in ivory on a wooden piano “with much feeling,” or of his pouring out his soul by scraping on cat-gut after a training as careful as an acrobat’s. But we are still haunted with a prejudice that verbal form and verbal effect must somehow be hypocritical when they are the link between things so living as a man and a mob. We doubt the feeling of the old-fashioned orator, because his periods are so rounded and pointed as to convey his feeling. Now before any criticism of the eighteenth-century worthies must be put the proviso of their perfect artistic sincerity. Their oratory was unrhymed poetry, and it had the humanity of poetry. It was not even unmetrical poetry; that century is full of great phrases, often spoken on the spur of great moments, which have in them the throb and recurrence of song, as of a man thinking to a tune. Nelson’s “In honour I gained them, in honour I will die with them,” has more rhythm than much that is called vers libres. Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” might be a great line in Walt Whitman.
It is one of the many quaint perversities of the English to pretend to be bad speakers; but in fact the most English eighteenth-century epoch blazed with brilliant speakers. There may have been finer writing in France; there was no such fine speaking as in England. The Parliament had faults enough, but it was sincere enough to be rhetorical. The Parliament was corrupt, as it is now; though the examples of corruption were then often really made examples, in the sense of warnings, where they are now examples only in the sense of patterns. The Parliament was indifferent to the constituencies, as it is now; though perhaps the constituencies were less indifferent to the Parliament. The Parliament was snobbish, as it is now, though perhaps more respectful to mere rank and less to mere wealth. But the Parliament was a Parliament; it did fulfil its name and duty by talking, and trying to talk well. It did not merely do things because they do not bear talking about—as it does now. It was then, to the eternal glory of our country, a great “talking-shop,” not a mere buying and selling shop for financial tips and official places. And as with any other artist, the care the eighteenth century man expended on oratory is a proof of his sincerity not a disproof of it. An enthusiastic eulogium by Burke is as rich and elaborate as a lover’s sonnet; but it is because Burke is really enthusiastic, like the lover. An angry sentence by Junius is as carefully compounded as a Renascence poison; but it is because Junius is really angry— like the poisoner. Now, nobody who has realized this psychological truth can doubt for a moment that many of the English aristocrats of the eighteenth century had a real enthusiasm for liberty; their voices lift like trumpets upon the very word. Whatever their immediate forbears may have meant, these men meant what they said when they talked of the high memory of Hampden or the majesty of Magna Carta. Those Patriots whom Walpole called the Boys included many who really were patriots—or better still, who really were boys. If we prefer to put it so, among the Whig aristocrats were many who really were Whigs; Whigs by all the ideal definitions which identified the party with a defence of law against tyrants and courtiers. But if anybody deduces, from the fact that the Whig aristocrats were Whigs, any doubt about whether the Whig aristocrats were aristocrats, there is one practical test and reply. It might be tested in many ways: by the game laws and enclosure laws they passed, or by the strict code of the duel and the definition of honour on which they all insisted. But if it be really questioned whether I am right in calling their whole world an aristocracy, and the very reverse of it a democracy, the true historical test is this: that when republicanism really entered the world, they instantly waged two great wars with it—or (if the view be preferred) it instantly waged two great wars with them. America and France revealed the real nature of the English Parliament. Ice may sparkle, but a real spark will show it is only ice. So when the red fire of the Revolution touched the frosty splendours of the Whigs, there was instantly a hissing and a strife; a strife of the flame to melt the ice, of the water to quench the flame.
It has been noted that one of the virtues of the aristocrats was liberty, especially liberty among themselves. It might even be said that one of the virtues of the aristocrats was cynicism. They were not stuffed with our fashionable fiction, with its stiff and wooden figures of a good man named Washington and a bad man named Boney. They at least were aware that Washington’s cause was not so obviously white nor Napoleon’s so obviously black as most books in general circulation would indicate. They had a natural admiration for the military genius of Washington and Napoleon; they had the most unmixed contempt for the German Royal Family. But they were, as a class, not only against both Washington and Napoleon, but against them both for the same reason. And it was that they both stood for democracy.
Great injustice is done to the English aristocratic government of the time through a failure to realize this fundamental difference, especially in the case of America. There is a wrong-headed humour about the English which appears especially in this, that while they often (as in the case of Ireland) make themselves out right where they were entirely wrong, they are easily persuaded (as in the case of America) to make themselves out entirely wrong where there is at least a case for their having been more or less right. George III’s government laid certain taxes on the colonial community on the eastern seaboard of America. It was certainly not self-evident, in the sense of law and precedent, that the imperial government could not lay taxes on such colonists. Nor were the taxes themselves of that practically oppressive sort which rightly raise everywhere the common casuistry of revolution. The Whig oligarchs had their faults, but utter lack of sympathy with liberty, especially local liberty, and with their adventurous kindred beyond the seas, was by no means one of their faults. Chatham, the great chief of the new and very national noblesse, was typical of them in being free from the faintest illiberality and irritation against the colonies as such. He would have made them free and even favoured colonies, if only he could have kept them as colonies. Burke, who was then the eloquent voice of Whiggism, and was destined later to show how wholly it was a voice of aristocracy, went of course even further. Even North compromised; and though George III, being a fool, might himself have refused to compromise, he had already failed to effect the Bolingbroke scheme of the restitution of the royal power. The case for the Americans, the real reason for calling them right in the quarrel, was something much deeper than the quarrel. They were at issue, not with a dead monarchy, but with a living aristocracy; they declared war on something much finer and more formidable than poor old George. Nevertheless, the popular tradition, especially in America, has pictured it primarily as a duel of George III and George Washington; and, as we have noticed more than once, such pictures though figurative are seldom false. King George’s head was not much more useful on the throne than it was on the sign-board of a tavern; nevertheless, the sign-board was really a sign, and a sign of the times. It stood for a tavern that sold not English but German beer. It stood for that side of the Whig policy which Chatham showed when he was tolerant to America alone, but intolerant of America when allied with France. That very wooden sign stood, in short, for the same thing as the juncture with Frederick the Great; it stood for that Anglo-German alliance which, at a very much later time in history, was to turn into the world-old Teutonic Race.
Roughly and frankly speaking, we may say that America forced the quarrel. She wished to be separate, which was to her but another phrase for wishing to be free. She was not thinking of her wrongs as a colony, but already of her rights as a republic. The negative effect of so small a difference could never have changed the world. Without the positive effect of a great ideal, one may say of a great new religion. The real case for the colonists is that they felt they could be something, which they also felt, and justly, that England would not help them to be. England would probably have allowed the colonists all sorts of concessions and constitutional privileges, but England could not allow the colonists equality: I do not mean equality with her, but even with each other. Chatham might have compromised with Washington, because Washington was a gentleman; but Chatham could hardly have conceived a country not governed by gentlemen. Burke was apparently ready to grant everything to America; but he would not have been ready to grant what America eventually gained. If he had seen American democracy, he would have been as much appalled by it as he was by French democracy, and would always have been by any democracy. In a word the Whigs were liberal and even generous aristocrats, but they were aristocrats; that is why their concessions were as vain as their conquests. We talk, with a humiliation too rare with us, about our dubious part in the secession of America. Whether it increase or decrease the humiliation I do not know; but I strongly suspect that we had very little to do with it. I believe we counted for uncommonly little in the case. We did not really drive away the American colonists, nor were they driven. They were led on by a light that went before.
That light came from France, like the armies of Lafayette that came to the help of Washington. France was already in travail with the tremendous spiritual revolution which was soon to reshape the world. Her doctrine, disruptive and creative, was widely misunderstood at the time, and is much misunderstood still, despite the splendid clarity of style in which it was stated by Rousseau in the “Contrat Social,” and by Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence. Say the very word “equality” in many modern countries, and four hundred fools will leap to their feet at once to explain that some men can be found, on careful examination, to be taller or handsomer than others. As if Danton had not noticed that he was taller than Robespierre, or as if Washington was not well aware that he was handsomer than Franklin. This is no place to expound a philosophy; it will be enough to say in passing, by way of a parable, that when we say that all pennies are equal, we do not mean that they all look exactly the same. We mean that they are absolutely equal in their one absolute character, in the most important thing about them. It may be put practically by saying that they are coins of a certain value, twelve of which go to a shilling. It may be put symbolically, and even mystically, by saying that they all bear the image of the King. And, though the most mystical, it is also the most practical summary of equality that all men bear the image of the King of Kings. Indeed, it is of course true that this idea had long underlain all Christianity, even in institutions less popular in form than were, for instance, the mob of mediaeval republics in Italy. A dogma of equal duties implies that of equal rights. I know of no Christian authority that would not admit that it is as wicked to murder a poor man as a rich man, or as bad to burgle an inelegantly furnished house as a tastefully furnished one. But the world had wandered further and further from these truisms, and nobody in the world was further from them than the group of the great English aristocrats. The idea of the equality of men is in substance simply the idea of the importance of man. But it was precisely the notion of the importance of a mere man which seemed startling and indecent to a society whose whole romance and religion now consisted of the importance of a gentleman. It was as if a man had walked naked into Parliament. There is not space here to develop the moral issue in full, but this will suffice to show that the critics concerned about the difference in human types or talents are considerably wasting their time. If they can understand how two coins can count the same though one is bright and the other brown, they might perhaps understand how two men can vote the same though one is bright and the other dull. If, however, they are still satisfied with their solid objection that some men are dull, I can only gravely agree with them, that some men are very dull.
But a few years after Lafayette had returned from helping to found a republic in America he was flung over his own frontiers for resisting the foundation of a republic in France. So furious was the onward stride of this new spirit that the republican of the new world lived to be the reactionary of the old. For when France passed from theory to practice, the question was put to the world in a way not thinkable in connection with the prefatory experiment of a thin population on a colonial coast. The mightiest of human monarchies, like some monstrous immeasurable idol of iron, was melted down in a furnace barely bigger than itself, and recast in a side equally colossal, but in a shape men could not understand. Many, at least, could not understand it, and least of all the liberal aristocracy of England. There were, of course, practical reasons for a continuous foreign policy against France, whether royal or republican. There was primarily the desire to keep any foreigner from menacing us from the Flemish coast; there was, to a much lesser extent, the colonial rivalry in which so much English glory had been gained by the statesmanship of Chatham and the arms of Wolfe and of Clive. The former reason has returned on us with a singular irony; for in order to keep the French out of Flanders we flung ourselves with increasing enthusiasm into a fraternity with the Germans. We purposely fed and pampered the power which was destined in the future to devour Belgium as France could never have devoured it, and threaten us across the sea with terrors of which no Frenchman would ever dream. But indeed much deeper things unified our attitude towards France before and after the Revolution. It is but one stride from despotism to democracy, in logic as well as in history; and oligarchy is equally remote from both. The Bastille fell, and it seemed to an Englishman merely that a despot had turned into a demos. The young Bonaparte rose, and it seemed to an Englishman merely that a demos had once more turned into a despot. He was not wrong in thinking these allotropic forms of the same alien thing; and that thing was equality. For when millions are equally subject to one law, it makes little difference if they are also subject to one lawgiver; the general social life is a level. The one thing that the English have never understood about Napoleon, in all their myriad studies of his mysterious personality, is how impersonal he was. I had almost said how unimportant he was. He said himself, “I shall go down to history with my code in my hand;” but in practical effects, as distinct from mere name and renown, it would be even truer to say that his code will go down to history with his hand set to it in signature—somewhat illegibly. Thus his testamentary law has broken up big estates and encouraged contented peasants in places where his name is cursed, in places where his name is almost unknown. In his lifetime, of course, it was natural that the annihilating splendour of his military strokes should rivet the eye like flashes of lightning; but his rain fell more silently, and its refreshment remained. It is needless to repeat here that after bursting one world-coalition after another by battles that are the masterpieces of the military art, he was finally worn down by two comparatively popular causes, the resistance of Russia and the resistance of Spain. The former was largely, like so much that is Russian, religious; but in the latter appeared most conspicuously that which concerns us here, the valour, vigilance and high national spirit of England in the eighteenth century. The long Spanish campaign tried and made triumphant the great Irish soldier, afterwards known as Wellington; who has become all the more symbolic since he was finally confronted with Napoleon in the last defeat of the latter at Waterloo. Wellington, though too logical to be at all English, was in many ways typical of the aristocracy; he had irony and independence of mind. But if we wish to realize how rigidly such men remained limited by their class, how little they really knew what was happening in their time, it is enough to note that Wellington seems to have thought he had dismissed Napoleon by saying he was not really a gentleman. If an acute and experienced Chinaman were to say of Chinese Gordon, “He is not actually a Mandarin,” we should think that the Chinese system deserved its reputation for being both rigid and remote.
But the very name of Wellington is enough to suggest another, and with it the reminder that this, though true, is inadequate. There was some truth in the idea that the Englishman was never so English as when he was outside England, and never smacked so much of the soil as when he was on the sea. There has run through the national psychology something that has never had a name except the eccentric and indeed extraordinary name of Robinson Crusoe; which is all the more English for being quite undiscoverable in England. It may be doubted if a French or German boy especially wishes that his cornland or wineland were a desert; but many an English boy has wished that his island were a desert island. But we might even say that the Englishman was too insular for an island. He awoke most to life when his island was sundered from the foundations of the world, when it hung like a planet and flew like a bird. And, by a contradiction, the real British army was in the navy; the boldest of the islanders were scattered over the moving archipelago of a great fleet. There still lay on it, like an increasing light, the legend of the Armada; it was a great fleet full of the glory of having once been a small one. Long before Wellington ever saw Waterloo the ships had done their work, and shattered the French navy in the Spanish seas, leaving like a light upon the sea the life and death of Nelson, who died with his stars on his bosom and his heart upon his sleeve. There is no word for the memory of Nelson except to call him mythical. The very hour of his death, the very name of his ship, are touched with that epic completeness which critics call the long arm of coincidence and prophets the hand of God. His very faults and failures were heroic, not in a loose but in a classic sense; in that he fell only like the legendary heroes, weakened by a woman, not foiled by any foe among men. And he remains the incarnation of a spirit in the English that is purely poetic; so poetic that it fancies itself a thousand things, and sometimes even fancies itself prosaic. At a recent date, in an age of reason, in a country already calling itself dull and business-like, with top-hats and factory chimneys already beginning to rise like towers of funereal efficiency, this country clergyman’s son moved to the last in a luminous cloud, and acted a fairy tale. He shall remain as a lesson to those who do not understand England, and a mystery to those who think they do. In outward action he led his ships to victory and died upon a foreign sea; but symbolically he established something indescribable and intimate, something that sounds like a native proverb; he was the man who burnt his ships, and who for ever set the Thames on fire.
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XVI
ARISTOCRACY AND THE DISCONTENTS
It is the pathos of many hackneyed things that they are intrinsically delicate and are only mechanically made dull. Any one who has seen the first white light, when it comes in by a window, knows that daylight is not only as beautiful but as mysterious as moonlight. It is the subtlety of the colour of sunshine that seems to be colourless. So patriotism, and especially English patriotism, which is vulgarized with volumes of verbal fog and gas, is still in itself something as tenuous and tender as a climate. The name of Nelson, with which the last chapter ended, might very well summarize the matter; for his name is banged and beaten about like an old tin can, while his soul had something in it of a fine and fragile eighteenth-century vase. And it will be found that the most threadbare things contemporary and connected with him have a real truth to the tone and meaning of his life and time, though for us they have too often degenerated into dead jokes. The expression “hearts of oak,” for instance, is no unhappy phrase for the finer side of that England of which he was the best expression. Even as a material metaphor it covers much of what I mean; oak was by no means only made into bludgeons, nor even only into battle-ships; and the English gentry did not think it business-like to pretend to be mere brutes. The mere name of oak calls back like a dream those dark but genial interiors of colleges and country houses, in which great gentlemen, not degenerate, almost made Latin an English language and port an English wine. Some part of that world at least will not perish; for its autumnal glow passed into the brush of the great English portrait-painters, who, more than any other men, were given the power to commemorate the large humanity of their own land; immortalizing a mood as broad and soft as their own brush-work. Come naturally, at the right emotional angle, upon a canvass of Gainsborough, who painted ladies like landscapes, as great and as unconscious with repose, and you will note how subtly the artist gives to a dress flowing in the foreground something of the divine quality of distance. Then you will understand another faded phrase and words spoken far away upon the sea; there will rise up quite fresh before you and be borne upon a bar of music, like words you have never heard before: “For England, home, and beauty.”
When I think of these things, I have no temptation to mere grumbling at the great gentry that waged the great war of our fathers. But indeed the difficulty about it was something much deeper than could be dealt with by any grumbling. It was an exclusive class, but not an exclusive life; it was interested in all things, though not for all men. Or rather those things it failed to include, through the limitations of this rationalist interval between mediaeval and modern mysticism, were at least not of the sort to shock us with superficial inhumanity. The greatest gap in their souls, for those who think it a gap, was their complete and complacent paganism. All their very decencies assumed that the old faith was dead; those who held it still, like the great Johnson, were considered eccentrics. The French Revolution was a riot that broke up the very formal funeral of Christianity; and was followed by various other complications, including the corpse coming to life. But the scepticism was no mere oligarchic orgy; it was not confined to the Hell-Fire Club; which might in virtue of its vivid name be regarded as relatively orthodox. It is present in the mildest middle-class atmosphere; as in the middle-class masterpiece about “Northanger Abbey,” where we actually remember it is an antiquity, without ever remembering it is an abbey. Indeed there is no clearer case of it than what can only be called the atheism of Jane Austen.
Unfortunately it could truly be said of the English gentleman, as of another gallant and gracious individual, that his honour stood rooted in dishonour. He was, indeed, somewhat in the position of such an aristocrat in a romance, whose splendour has the dark spot of a secret and a sort of blackmail. There was, to begin with, an uncomfortable paradox in the tale of his pedigree. Many heroes have claimed to be descended from the gods, from beings greater than themselves; but he himself was far more heroic than his ancestors. His glory did not come from the Crusades but from the Great Pillage. His fathers had not come over with William the Conqueror, but only assisted in a somewhat shuffling manner, at the coming over of William of Orange. His own exploits were often really romantic, in the cities of the Indian sultans or the war of the wooden ships; it was the exploits of the far-off founders of his family that were painfully realistic. In this the great gentry were more in the position of Napoleonic marshals than of Norman knights, but their position was worse; for the marshals might be descended from peasants and shopkeepers; but the oligarchs were descended from usurers and thieves. That, for good or evil, was the paradox of England; the typical aristocrat was the typical upstart.
But the secret was worse; not only was such a family founded on stealing, but the family was stealing still. It is a grim truth that all through the eighteenth century, all through the great Whig speeches about liberty, all through the great Tory speeches about patriotism, through the period of Wandewash and Plassy, through the period of Trafalgar and Waterloo, one process was steadily going on in the central senate of the nation. Parliament was passing bill after bill for the enclosure, by the great landlords, of such of the common lands as had survived out of the great communal system of the Middle Ages. It is much more than a pun, it is the prime political irony of our history, that the Commons were destroying the commons. The very word “common,” as we have before noted, lost its great moral meaning, and became a mere topographical term for some remaining scrap of scrub or heath that was not worth stealing. In the eighteenth century these last and lingering commons were connected only with stories about highwaymen, which still linger in our literature. The romance of them was a romance of robbers; but not of the real robbers.
This was the mysterious sin of the English squires, that they remained human, and yet ruined humanity all around them. Their own ideal, nay their own reality of life, was really more generous and genial than the stiff savagery of Puritan captains and Prussian nobles; but the land withered under their smile as under an alien frown. Being still at least English, they were still in their way good-natured; but their position was false, and a false position forces the good-natured into brutality. The French Revolution was the challenge that really revealed to the Whigs that they must make up their minds to be really democrats or admit that they were really aristocrats. They decided, as in the case of their philosophic exponent Burke, to be really aristocrats; and the result was the White Terror, the period of Anti-Jacobin repression which revealed the real side of their sympathies more than any stricken fields in foreign lands. Cobbett, the last and greatest of the yeomen, of the small farming class which the great estates were devouring daily, was thrown into prison merely for protesting against the flogging of English soldiers by German mercenaries. In that savage dispersal of a peaceful meeting which was called the Massacre of Peterloo, English soldiers were indeed employed, though much more in the spirit of German ones. And it is one of the bitter satires that cling to the very continuity of our history, that such suppression of the old yeoman spirit was the work of soldiers who still bore the title of the Yeomanry.
The name of Cobbett is very important here; indeed it is generally ignored because it is important. Cobbett was the one man who saw the tendency of the time as a whole, and challenged it as a whole; consequently he went without support. It is a mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the same sense that a football match is popular. The division in Cobbett’s time was slightly more sincere, but almost as superficial; it was a difference of sentiment about externals which divided the old agricultural gentry of the eighteenth century from the new mercantile gentry of the nineteenth. Through the first half of the nineteenth century there were some real disputes between the squire and the merchant. The merchant became converted to the important economic thesis of Free Trade, and accused the squire of starving the poor by dear bread to keep up his agrarian privilege. Later the squire retorted not ineffectively by accusing the merchant of brutalizing the poor by overworking them in his factories to keep up his commercial success. The passing of the Factory Acts was a confession of the cruelty that underlay the new industrial experiments, just as the Repeal of the Corn Laws was a confession of the comparative weakness and unpopularity of the squires, who had destroyed the last remnants of any peasantry that might have defended the field against the factory. These relatively real disputes would bring us to the middle of the Victorian era. But long before the beginning of the Victorian era, Cobbett had seen and said that the disputes were only relatively real. Or rather he would have said, in his more robust fashion, that they were not real at all. He would have said that the agricultural pot and the industrial kettle were calling each other black, when they had both been blackened in the same kitchen. And he would have been substantially right; for the great industrial disciple of the kettle, James Watt (who learnt from it the lesson of the steam engine), was typical of the age in this, that he found the old Trade Guilds too fallen, unfashionable and out of touch with the times to help his discovery, so that he had recourse to the rich minority which had warred on and weakened those Guilds since the Reformation. There was no prosperous peasant’s pot, such as Henry of Navarre invoked, to enter into alliance with the kettle. In other words, there was in the strict sense of the word no commonwealth, because wealth, though more and more wealthy, was less and less common. Whether it be a credit or discredit, industrial science and enterprise were in bulk a new experiment of the old oligarchy; and the old oligarchy had always been ready for new experiments—beginning with the Reformation. And it is characteristic of the clear mind which was hidden from many by the hot temper of Cobbett, that he did see the Reformation as the root of both squirearchy and industrialism, and called on the people to break away from both. The people made more effort to do so than is commonly realized. There are many silences in our somewhat snobbish history; and when the educated class can easily suppress a revolt, they can still more easily suppress the record of it. It was so with some of the chief features of that great mediaeval revolution the failure of which, or rather the betrayal of which, was the real turning point of our history. It was so with the revolts against the religious policy of Henry VIII; and it was so with the rick-burning and frame-breaking riots of Cobbett’s epoch. The real mob reappeared for a moment in our history, for just long enough to show one of the immortal marks of the real mob-ritualism. There is nothing that strikes the undemocratic doctrinaire so sharply about direct democratic action as the vanity or mummery of the things done seriously in the daylight; they astonish him by being as unpractical as a poem or a prayer. The French Revolutionists stormed an empty prison merely because it was large and solid and difficult to storm, and therefore symbolic of the mighty monarchical machinery of which it had been but the shed. The English rioters laboriously broke in pieces a parish grindstone, merely because it was large and solid and difficult to break, and therefore symbolic of the mighty oligarchical machinery which perpetually ground the faces of the poor. They also put the oppressive agent of some landlord in a cart and escorted him round the county, merely to exhibit his horrible personality to heaven and earth. Afterwards they let him go, which marks perhaps, for good or evil, a certain national modification of the movement. There is something very typical of an English revolution in having the tumbril without the guillotine.
Anyhow, these embers of the revolutionary epoch were trodden out very brutally; the grindstone continued (and continues) to grind in the scriptural fashion above referred to, and, in most political crises since, it is the crowd that has found itself in the cart. But, of course, both the riot and repression in England were but shadows of the awful revolt and vengeance which crowned the parallel process in Ireland. Here the terrorism, which was but a temporary and desperate tool of the aristocrats in England (not being, to do them justice, at all consonant to their temperament, which had neither the cruelty and morbidity nor the logic and fixity of terrorism), became in a more spiritual atmosphere a flaming sword of religious and racial insanity. Pitt, the son of Chatham, was quite unfit to fill his father’s place, unfit indeed (I cannot but think) to fill the place commonly given him in history. But if he was wholly worthy of his immortality, his Irish expedients, even if considered as immediately defensible, have not been worthy of their immortality. He was sincerely convinced of the national need to raise coalition after coalition against Napoleon, by pouring the commercial wealth then rather peculiar to England upon her poorer Allies, and he did this with indubitable talent and pertinacity. He was at the same time faced with a hostile Irish rebellion and a partly or potentially hostile Irish Parliament. He broke the latter by the most indecent bribery and the former by the most indecent brutality, but he may well have thought himself entitled to the tyrant’s plea. But not only were his expedients those of panic, or at any rate of peril, but (what is less clearly realized) it is the only real defence of them that they were those of panic and peril. He was ready to emancipate Catholics as such, for religious bigotry was not the vice of the oligarchy; but he was not ready to emancipate Irishmen as such. He did not really want to enlist Ireland like a recruit, but simply to disarm Ireland like an enemy. Hence his settlement was from the first in a false position for settling anything. The Union may have been a necessity, but the Union was not a Union. It was not intended to be one, and nobody has ever treated it as one. We have not only never succeeded in making Ireland English, as Burgundy has been made French, but we have never tried. Burgundy could boast of Corneille, though Corneille was a Norman, but we should smile if Ireland boasted of Shakespeare. Our vanity has involved us in a mere contradiction; we have tried to combine identification with superiority. It is simply weak-minded to sneer at an Irishman if he figures as an Englishman, and rail at him if he figures as an Irishman. So the Union has never even applied English laws to Ireland, but only coercions and concessions both specially designed for Ireland. From Pitt’s time to our own this tottering alternation has continued; from the time when the great O’Connell, with his monster meetings, forced our government to listen to Catholic Emancipation to the time when the great Parnell, with his obstruction, forced it to listen to Home Rule, our staggering equilibrium has been maintained by blows from without. In the later nineteenth century the better sort of special treatment began on the whole to increase. Gladstone, an idealistic though inconsistent Liberal, rather belatedly realized that the freedom he loved in Greece and Italy had its rights nearer home, and may be said to have found a second youth in the gateway of the grave, in the eloquence and emphasis of his conversion. And a statesman wearing the opposite label (for what that is worth) had the spiritual insight to see that Ireland, if resolved to be a nation, was even more resolved to be a peasantry. George Wyndham, generous, imaginative, a man among politicians, insisted that the agrarian agony of evictions, shootings, and rack-rentings should end with the individual Irish getting, as Parnell had put it, a grip on their farms. In more ways than one his work rounds off almost romantically the tragedy of the rebellion against Pitt, for Wyndham himself was of the blood of the leader of the rebels, and he wrought the only reparation yet made for all the blood, shamefully shed, that flowed around the fall of FitzGerald.
The effect on England was less tragic; indeed, in a sense it was comic. Wellington, himself an Irishman though of the narrower party, was pre-eminently a realist, and, like many Irishmen, was especially a realist about Englishmen. He said the army he commanded was the scum of the earth; and the remark is none the less valuable because that army proved itself useful enough to be called the salt of the earth. But in truth it was in this something of a national symbol and the guardian, as it were, of a national secret. There is a paradox about the English, even as distinct from the Irish or the Scotch, which makes any formal version of their plans and principles inevitably unjust to them. England not only makes her ramparts out of rubbish, but she finds ramparts in what she has herself cast away as rubbish. If it be a tribute to a thing to say that even its failures have been successes, there is truth in that tribute. Some of the best colonies were convict settlements, and might be called abandoned convict settlements. The army was largely an army of gaol-birds, raised by gaol-delivery; but it was a good army of bad men; nay, it was a gay army of unfortunate men. This is the colour and the character that has run through the realities of English history, and it can hardly be put in a book, least of all a historical book. It has its flashes in our fantastic fiction and in the songs of the street, but its true medium is conversation. It has no name but incongruity. An illogical laughter survives everything in the English soul. It survived, perhaps, with only too much patience, the time of terrorism in which the more serious Irish rose in revolt. That time was full of a quite topsy-turvey tyranny, and the English humorist stood on his head to suit it. Indeed, he often receives a quite irrational sentence in a police court by saying he will do it on his head. So, under Pitt’s coercionist regime, a man was sent to prison for saying that George IV was fat; but we feel he must have been partly sustained in prison by the artistic contemplation of how fat he was. That sort of liberty, that sort of humanity and it is no mean sort, did indeed survive all the drift and downward eddy of an evil economic system, as well as the dragooning of a reactionary epoch and the drearier menace of materialistic social science, as embodied in the new Puritans, who have purified themselves even of religion. Under this long process, the worst that can be said is that the English humorist has been slowly driven downwards in the social scale. Falstaff was a knight, Sam Weller was a gentleman’s servant, and some of our recent restrictions seem designed to drive Sam Weller to the status of the Artful Dodger. But well it was for us that some such trampled tradition and dark memory of Merry England survived; well for us, as we shall see, that all our social science failed and all our statesmanship broke down before it. For there was to come the noise of a trumpet and a dreadful day of visitation, in which all the daily workers of a dull civilization were to be called out of their houses and their holes like a resurrection of the dead, and left naked under a strange sun with no religion but a sense of humour. And men might know of what nation Shakespeare was, who broke into puns and practical jokes in the darkest passion of his tragedies, if they had only heard those boys in France and Flanders who called out “Early Doors!” themselves in a theatrical memory, as they went so early in their youth to break down the doors of death.
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XVII
THE RETURN OF THE BARBARIAN
THE only way to write a popular history as we have already remarked, would be to write it backwards. It would be to take common objects of our own street and tell the tale of how each of them came to be in the street at all. And for my immediate purpose it is really convenient to take two objects we have known all our lives as features of fashion or respectability. One, which has grown rarer recently, is what we call a top hat; the other, which is still a customary formality is a pair of trousers. The history of these humorous objects really does give a clue to what has happened in England for the last hundred years. It is not necessary to be an aesthete in order to regard both objects as the reverse of beautiful, as tested by what may be called the rational side of beauty. The lines of human limbs can be beautiful, and so can the lines of loose drapery, but not cylinders too loose to be the first and too tight to be the second. Nor is a subtle sense of harmony needed to see that while there are hundreds of differently proportioned hats, a hat that actually grows larger towards the top is somewhat top-heavy. But what is largely forgotten is this, that these two fantastic objects which now strike the eye as unconscious freaks, were originally conscious freaks. Our ancestors, to do them justice, did not think them casual or commonplace; they thought them, if not ridiculous, at least rococo. The top-hat was the topmost point of a riot of Regency dandyism, and bucks wore trousers while business men were still wearing knee-breeches. It will not be fanciful to see a certain oriental touch in trousers, which the later Romans also regarded as effeminately oriental; it was an oriental touch found in many florid things of the time—in Byron’s poems or Brighton Pavilion. Now, the interesting point is that for a whole serious century these instantaneous fantasies have remained like fossils. In the carnival of the Regency a few fools got into fancy dress, and we have all remained in fancy dress. At least, we have remained in the dress, though we have lost the fancy.
I say this is typical of the most important thing that happened in the Victorian time. For the most important thing was that nothing happened. The very fuss that was made about minor modifications brings into relief the rigidity with which the main lines of social life were left as they were at the French Revolution. We talk of the French Revolution as something that changed the world; but its most important relation to England is that it did not change England. A student of our history is concerned rather with the effect it did not have than the effect it did. If it be a splendid fate to have survived the Flood, the English oligarchy had that added splendour. But even for the countries in which the Revolution was a convulsion, it was the last convulsion—until that which shakes the world to-day. It gave their character to all the commonwealths, which all talked about progress, and were occupied in marking time. Frenchmen, under all superficial reactions, remained republican in spirit, as they had been when they first wore top-hats. Englishmen, under all superficial reforms, remained oligarchical in spirit, as they had been when they first wore trousers. Only one power might be said to be growing, and that in a plodding and prosaic fashion— the power in the North East whose name was Prussia. And the English were more and more learning that this growth need cause them no alarm, since the North Germans were their cousins in blood and their brothers in spirit.
The first thing to note, then, about the nineteenth century is that Europe remained herself as compared with the Europe of the great war, and that England especially remained herself as compared even with the rest of Europe. Granted this, we may give their proper importance to the cautious internal changes in this country, the small conscious and the large unconscious changes. Most of the conscious ones were much upon the model of an early one, the great Reform Bill of 1832, and can be considered in the light of it. First, from the standpoint of most real reformers, the chief thing about the Reform Bill was that it did not reform. It had a huge tide of popular enthusiasm behind it, which wholly disappeared when the people found themselves in front of it. It enfranchised large masses of the middle classes; it disfranchised very definite bodies of the working classes; and it so struck the balance between the conservative and the dangerous elements in the commonwealth that the governing class was rather stronger than before. The date, however, is important, not at all because it was the beginning of democracy, but because it was the beginning of the best way ever discovered of evading and postponing democracy. Here enters the homeopathic treatment of revolution, since so often successful. Well into the next generation Disraeli, the brilliant Jewish adventurer who was the symbol of the English aristocracy being no longer genuine, extended the franchise to the artisans, partly, indeed, as a party move against his great rival, Gladstone, but more as the method by which the old popular pressure was first tired out and then toned down. The politicians said the working-class was now strong enough to be allowed votes. It would be truer to say it was now weak enough to be allowed votes. So in more recent times Payment of Members, which would once have been regarded (and resisted) as an inrush of popular forces, was passed quietly and without resistance, and regarded merely as an extension of parliamentary privileges. The truth is that the old parliamentary oligarchy abandoned their first line of trenches because they had by that time constructed a second line of defence. It consisted in the concentration of colossal political funds in the private and irresponsible power of the politicians, collected by the sale of peerages and more important things, and expended on the jerrymandering of the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this inner obstacle a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket when there is a permanent block on the line. The facade and outward form of this new secret government is the merely mechanical application of what is called the Party System. The Party System does not consist, as some suppose, of two parties, but of one. If there were two real parties, there could be no system.
But if this was the evolution of parliamentary reform, as represented by the first Reform Bill, we can see the other side of it in the social reform attacked immediately after the first Reform Bill. It is a truth that should be a tower and a landmark, that one of the first things done by the Reform Parliament was to establish those harsh and dehumanised workhouses which both honest Radicals and honest Tories branded with the black title of the New Bastille. This bitter name lingers in our literature, and can be found by the curious in the works of Carlyle and Hood, but it is doubtless interesting rather as a note of contemporary indignation than as a correct comparison. It is easy to imagine the logicians and legal orators of the parliamentary school of progress finding many points of differentiation and even of contrast. The Bastille was one central institution; the workhouses have been many, and have everywhere transformed local life with what ever they have to give of social sympathy and inspiration. Men of high rank and great wealth were frequently sent to the Bastille; but no such mistake has ever been made by the more business administration of the workhouse. Over the most capricious operations of the lettres de cachet there still hovered some hazy traditional idea that a man is put in prison to punish him for something. It was the discovery of a later social science that men who cannot be punished can still be imprisoned. But the deepest and most decisive difference lies in the better fortune of the New Bastille; for no mob has ever dared to storm it, and it never fell.
The New Poor Law was indeed not wholly new in the sense that it was the culmination and clear enunciation of a principle foreshadowed in the earlier Poor Law of Elizabeth, which was one of the many anti-popular effects of the Great Pillage. When the monasteries were swept away and the mediaeval system of hospitality destroyed, tramps and beggars became a problem, the solution of which has always tended towards slavery, even when the question of slavery been cleared of the irrelevant question of cruelty. It is obvious that a desperate man might find Mr. Bumble and the Board of Guardians less cruel than cold weather and the bare ground—even if he were allowed to sleep on the ground, which (by a veritable nightmare of nonsense and injustice) he is not. He is actually punished for sleeping under a bush on the specific and stated ground that he cannot afford a bed. It is obvious, however, that he may find his best physical good by going into the workhouse, as he often found it in pagan times by selling himself into slavery. The point is that the solution remains servile, even when Mr. Bumble and the Board of Guardians ceased to be in a common sense cruel. The pagan might have the luck to sell himself to a kind master. The principle of the New Poor Law, which has so far proved permanent in our society, is that the man lost all his civic rights and lost them solely through poverty. There is a touch of irony, though hardly of mere hypocrisy, in the fact that the Parliament which effected this reform had just been abolishing black slavery by buying out the slave-owners in the British colonies. The slave-owners were bought out at a price big enough to be called blackmail; but it would be misunderstanding the national mentality to deny the sincerity of the sentiment. Wilberforce represented in this the real wave of Wesleyan religion which had made a humane reaction against Calvinism, and was in no mean sense philanthropic. But there is something romantic in the English mind which can always see what is remote. It is the strongest example of what men lose by being long-sighted. It is fair to say that they gain many things also, the poems that are like adventures and the adventures that are like poems. It is a national savour, and therefore in itself neither good nor evil; and it depends on the application whether we find a scriptural text for it in the wish to take the wings of the morning and abide in the uttermost parts of the sea, or merely in the saying that the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth.
Anyhow, the unconscious nineteenth-century movement, so slow that it seems stationary, was altogether in this direction, of which workhouse philanthropy is the type. Nevertheless, it had one national institution to combat and overcome; one institution all the more intensely national because it was not official, and in a sense not even political. The modern Trade Union was the inspiration and creation of the English; it is still largely known throughout Europe by its English name. It was the English expression of the European effort to resist the tendency of Capitalism to reach its natural culmination in slavery. In this it has an almost weird psychological interest, for it is a return to the past by men ignorant of the past, like the subconscious action of some man who has lost his memory. We say that history repeats itself, and it is even more interesting when it unconsciously repeats itself. No man on earth is kept so ignorant of the Middle Ages as the British workman, except perhaps the British business man who employs him. Yet all who know even a little of the Middle Ages can see that the modern Trade Union is a groping for the ancient Guild. It is true that those who look to the Trade Union, and even those clear-sighted enough to call it the Guild, are often without the faintest tinge of mediaeval mysticism, or even of mediaeval morality. But this fact is itself the most striking and even staggering tribute to mediaeval morality. It has all the clinching logic of coincidence. If large numbers of the most hard-headed atheists had evolved, out of their own inner consciousness, the notion that a number of bachelors or spinsters ought to live together in celibate groups for the good of the poor, or the observation of certain hours and offices, it would be a very strong point in favour of the monasteries. It would be all the stronger if the atheists had never heard of monasteries; it would be strongest of all if they hated the very name of monasteries. And it is all the stronger because the man who puts his trust in Trades Unions does not call himself a Catholic or even a Christian, if he does call himself a Guild Socialist.
The Trade Union movement passed through many perils, including a ludicrous attempt of certain lawyers to condemn as a criminal conspiracy that Trade Union solidarity, of which their own profession is the strongest and most startling example in the world. The struggle culminated in gigantic strikes which split the country in every direction in the earlier part of the twentieth century. But another process, with much more power at its back, was also in operation. The principle represented by the New Poor Law proceeded on its course, and in one important respect altered its course, though it can hardly be said to have altered its object. It can most correctly be stated by saying that the employers themselves, who already organized business, began to organize social reform. It was more picturesquely expressed by a cynical aristocrat in Parliament who said, “We are all Socialists now.” The Socialists, a body of completely sincere men led by several conspicuously brilliant men, had long hammered into men’s heads the hopeless sterility of mere non-interference in exchange. The Socialists proposed that the State should not merely interfere in business but should take over the business, and pay all men as equal wage-earners, or at any rate as wage-earners. The employers were not willing to surrender their own position to the State, and this project has largely faded from politics. But the wiser of them were willing to pay better wages, and they were specially willing to bestow various other benefits so long as they were bestowed after the manner of wages. Thus we had a series of social reforms which, for good or evil, all tended in the same direction; the permission to employees to claim certain advantages as employees, and as something permanently different from employers. Of these the obvious examples were Employers’ Liability, Old Age Pensions, and, as marking another and more decisive stride in the process, the Insurance Act.
The latter in particular, and the whole plan of the social reform in general, were modelled upon Germany. Indeed the whole English life of this period was overshadowed by Germany. We had now reached, for good or evil, the final fulfilment of that gathering influence which began to grow on us in the seventeenth century, which was solidified by the military alliances of the eighteenth century, and which in the nineteenth century had been turned into a philosophy—not to say a mythology. German metaphysics had thinned our theology, so that many a man’s most solemn conviction about Good Friday was that Friday was named after Freya. German history had simply annexed English history, so that it was almost counted the duty of any patriotic Englishman to be proud of being a German. The genius of Carlyle, the culture preached by Matthew Arnold, would not, persuasive as they were, have alone produced this effect but for an external phenomenon of great force. Our internal policy was transformed by our foreign policy; and foreign policy was dominated by the more and more drastic steps which the Prussian, now clearly the prince of all the German tribes, was taking to extend the German influence in the world. Denmark was robbed of two provinces; France was robbed of two provinces; and though the fall of Paris was felt almost everywhere as the fall of the capital of civilization, a thing like the sacking of Rome by the Goths, many of the most influential people in England still saw nothing in it but the solid success of our kinsmen and old allies of Waterloo. The moral methods which achieved it, the juggling with the Augustenburg claim, the forgery of the Ems telegram, were either successfully concealed or were but cloudily appreciated. The Higher Criticism had entered into our ethics as well as our theology. Our view of Europe was also distorted and made disproportionate by the accident of a natural concern for Constantinople and our route to India, which led Palmerston and later Premiers to support the Turk and see Russia as the only enemy. This somewhat cynical reaction was summed up in the strange figure of Disraeli, who made a pro-Turkish settlement full of his native indifference to the Christian subjects of Turkey, and sealed it at Berlin in the presence of Bismarck. Disraeli was not without insight into the inconsistencies and illusions of the English; he said many sagacious things about them, and one especially when he told the Manchester School that their motto was “Peace and Plenty, amid a starving people, and with the world in arms.” But what he said about Peace and Plenty might well be parodied as a comment on what he himself said about Peace with Honour. Returning from that Berlin Conference he should have said, “I bring you Peace with Honour, peace with the seeds of the most horrible war of history; and honour as the dupes and victims of the old bully in Berlin.”
But it was, as we have seen, especially in social reform that Germany was believed to be leading the way, and to have found the secret of dealing with the economic evil. In the case of Insurance, which was the test case she was applauded for obliging all her workmen to set apart a portion of their wages for any time of sickness; and numerous other provisions, both in Germany and England, pursued the same ideal, which was that of protecting the poor against themselves. It everywhere involved an external power having a finger in the family pie; but little attention was paid to any friction thus caused, for all prejudices against the process were supposed to be the growth of ignorance. And that ignorance was already being attacked by what was called education— an enterprise also inspired largely by the example, and partly by the commercial competition of Germany. It was pointed out that in Germany governments and great employers thought it well worth their while to apply the grandest scale of organization and the minutest inquisition of detail to the instruction of the whole German race. The government was the stronger for training its scholars as it trained its soldiers; the big businesses were the stronger for manufacturing mind as they manufactured material. English education was made compulsory; it was made free; many good, earnest, and enthusiastic men laboured to create a ladder of standards and examinations, which would connect the cleverest of the poor with the culture of the English universities and the current teaching in history or philosophy. But it cannot be said that the connection was very complete, or the achievement so thorough as the German achievement. For whatever reason, the poor Englishman remained in many things much as his fathers had been, and seemed to think the Higher Criticism too high for him even to criticize.
And then a day came, and if we were wise, we thanked God that we had failed. Education, if it had ever really been in question, would doubtless have been a noble gift; education in the sense of the central tradition of history, with its freedom, its family honour, its chivalry which is the flower of Christendom. But what would our populace, in our epoch, have actually learned if they had learned all that our schools and universities had to teach? That England was but a little branch on a large Teutonic tree; that an unfathomable spiritual sympathy, all-encircling like the sea had always made us the natural allies of the great folk by the flowing Rhine; that all light came from Luther and Lutheran Germany, whose science was still purging Christianity of its Greek and Roman accretions; that Germany was a forest fated to grow; that France was a dung-heap fated to decay—a dung-heap with a crowing cock on it. What would the ladder of education have led to, except a platform on which a posturing professor proved that a cousin german was the same as a German cousin? What would the guttersnipe have learnt as a graduate, except to embrace a Saxon because he was the other half of an Anglo-Saxon? The day came, and the ignorant fellow found he had other things to learn. And he was quicker than his educated countrymen, for he had nothing to unlearn.
He in whose honour all had been said and sung stirred, and stepped across the border of Belgium. Then were spread out before men’s eyes all the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of his organization; then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what light we had followed and after what image we had laboured to refashion ourselves. Nor in any story of mankind has the irony of God chosen the foolish things so catastrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowd of poor and ignorant Englishmen, because they only knew that they were Englishmen, burst through the filthy cob webs of four hundred years and stood where their fathers stood when they knew that they were Christian men. The English poor, broken in every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long despoiled of property, and now being despoiled of liberty, entered history with a noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two years into one of the iron armies of the world. And when the critic of politics and literature, feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks around him to find the hero, he can point to nothing but a mob.
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XVIII
CONCLUSION
In so small a book on so large a matter, finished hastily enough amid the necessities of an enormous national crisis, it would be absurd to pretend to have achieved proportion; but I will confess to some attempt to correct a disproportion. We talk of historical perspective, but I rather fancy there is too much perspective in history; for perspective makes a giant a pigmy and a pigmy a giant. The past is a giant foreshortened with his feet towards us; and sometimes the feet are of clay. We see too much merely the sunset of the Middle Ages, even when we admire its colours; and the study of a man like Napoleon is too often that of “The Last Phase.” So there is a spirit that thinks it reasonable to deal in detail with Old Sarum, and would think it ridiculous to deal in detail with the Use of Sarum; or which erects in Kensington Gardens a golden monument to Albert larger than anybody has ever erected to Alfred. English history is misread especially, I think, because the crisis is missed. It is usually put about the period of the Stuarts; and many of the memorials of our past seem to suffer from the same visitation as the memorial of Mr. Dick. But though the story of the Stuarts was a tragedy, I think it was also an epilogue.
I make the guess, for it can be no more, that the change really came with the fall of Richard II, following on his failure to use mediaeval despotism in the interests of mediaeval democracy. England, like the other nations of Christendom, had been created not so much by the death of the ancient civilization as by its escape from death, or by its refusal to die. Mediaeval civilization had arisen out of the resistance to the barbarians, to the naked barbarism from the North and the more subtle barbarism from the East. It increased in liberties and local government under kings who controlled the wider things of war and taxation; and in the peasant war of the fourteenth century in England, the king and the populace came for a moment into conscious alliance. They both found that a third thing was already too strong for them. That third thing was the aristocracy; and it captured and called itself the Parliament. The House of Commons, as its name implies, had primarily consisted of plain men summoned by the King like jury men; but it soon became a very special jury. It became, for good or evil, a great organ of government, surviving the Church, the monarchy and the mob; it did many great and not a few good things. It created what we call the British Empire; it created something which was really far more valuable, a new and natural sort of aristocracy, more humane and even humanitarian than most of the aristocracies of the world. It had sufficient sense of the instincts of the people, at least until lately, to respect the liberty and especially the laughter that had become almost the religion of the race. But in doing all this, it deliberately did two other things, which it thought a natural part of its policy; it took the side of the Protestants, and then (partly as a consequence) it took the side of the Germans. Until very lately most intelligent Englishmen were quite honestly convinced that in both it was taking the side of progress against decay. The question which many of them are now inevitably asking themselves, and would ask whether I asked it or no, is whether it did not rather take the side of barbarism against civilization.
At least, if there be anything valid in my own vision of these things, we have returned to an origin and we are back in the war with the barbarians. It falls as naturally for me that the Englishman and the Frenchman should be on the same side as that Alfred and Abbo should be on the same side, in that black century when the barbarians wasted Wessex and besieged Paris. But there are now, perhaps, less certain tests of the spiritual as distinct from the material victory of civilization. Ideas are more mixed, are complicated by fine shades or covered by fine names. And whether the retreating savage leaves behind him the soul of savagery, like a sickness in the air, I myself should judge primarily by one political and moral test. The soul of savagery is slavery. Under all its mask of machinery and instruction, the German regimentation of the poor was the relapse of barbarians into slavery. I can see no escape from it for ourselves in the ruts of our present reforms, but only by doing what the mediaevals did after the other barbarian defeat: beginning, by guilds and small independent groups, gradually to restore the personal property of the poor and the personal freedom of the family. If the English really attempt that, the English have at least shown in the war, to any one who doubted it, that they have not lost the courage and capacity of their fathers, and can carry it through if they will. If they do not do so, if they continue to move only with the dead momentum of the social discipline which we learnt from Germany, there is nothing before us but what Mr. Belloc, the discoverer of this great sociological drift, has called the Servile Sate. And there are moods in which a man, considering that conclusion of our story, is half inclined to wish that the wave of Teutonic barbarism had washed out us and our armies together; and that the world should never know anything more of the last of the English, except that they died for liberty.
I
INTRODUCTION
It will be very reasonably asked why I should consent, though upon a sort of challenge, to write even a popular essay in English history, who make no pretence to particular scholarship and am merely a member of the public. The answer is that I know just enough to know one thing: that a history from the standpoint of a member of the public has not been written. What we call the popular histories should rather be called the anti-popular histories. They are all, nearly without exception, written against the people; and in them, the populace is either ignored or elaborately proved to have been wrong. It is true that Green called his book “A Short History of the English People”; but he seems to have thought it too short for the people to be properly mentioned. For instance, he calls one very large part of his story “Puritan England.” But England never was Puritan. It would have been almost as unfair to call the rise of Henry of Navarre “Puritan France.” And some of our extreme Whig historians would have been pretty nearly capable of calling the campaign of Wexford and Drogheda “Puritan Ireland.”
But it is especially in the matter of the Middle Ages that the popular histories trample upon the popular traditions. In this respect there is an almost comic contrast between the general information provided about England in the last two or three centuries, in which its present industrial system, was being built up, and the general information given about the preceding centuries, which we call broadly mediaeval. Of the sort of waxwork history which is thought sufficient for the side-show of the age of abbots and crusaders, a small instance will be sufficient. A popular Encyclopaedia appeared some years ago, professing among other things to teach English History to the masses; and in this I came upon a series of pictures of the English kings. No one could expect them to be all authentic; but the interest attached to those that were necessarily imaginary. There is much vivid material in contemporary literature for portraits of men like Henry II or Edward I; but this did not seem to have been found, or even sought. And wandering to the image that stood for Stephen of Blois, my eye was staggered by a gentleman with one of those helmets with steel brims curved like a crescent, which went with the age of ruffs and trunk-hose. I am tempted to suspect that the head was that of a halberdier at some such scene as the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. But he had a helmet; and helmets were mediaeval; and any old helmet was good enough for Stephen.
Now suppose the readers of that work of reference had looked for the portrait of Charles I and found the head of a policeman. Suppose it had been taken, modern helmet and all, out of some snapshot in the Daily Sketch of the arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst. I think we may go so far as to say that the readers would have refused to accept it as a lifelike portrait of Charles I. They would have formed the opinion that there must be some mistake. Yet the time that elapsed between Stephen and Mary was much longer than the time that has elapsed between Charles and ourselves. The revolution in human society between the first of the Crusades and the last of the Tudors was immeasurably more colossal and complete than any change between Charles and ourselves. And, above all, that revolution should be the first thing and the final thing in anything calling itself a popular history. For it is the story of how our populace gained great things, but to-day has lost everything.
Now I will modestly maintain that I know more about English history than this; and that I have as much right to make a popular summary of it as the gentleman who made the crusader and the halberdier change hats. But the curious and arresting thing about the neglect, one might say the omission, of mediaeval civilization in such histories as this, lies in the fact I have already noted. It is exactly the popular story that is left out of the popular history. For instance, even a working man, a carpenter or cooper or bricklayer, has been taught about the Great Charter, as something like the Great Auk, save that its almost monstrous solitude came from being before its time instead of after. He was not taught that the whole stuff of the Middle Ages was stiff with the parchment of charters; that society was once a system of charters, and of a kind much more interesting to him. The carpenter heard of one charter given to barons, and chiefly in the interest of barons; the carpenter did not hear of any of the charters given to carpenter, to coopers, to all the people like himself. Or, to take another instance, the boy and girl reading the stock simplified histories of the schools practically never heard of such a thing as a burgher, until he appears in a shirt with a noose round his neck. They certainly do not imagine anything of what he meant in the Middle Ages. And Victorian shopkeepers did not conceive themselves as taking part in any such romance as the adventure of Coutrai, where the mediaeval shopkeepers more than won their spurs— for they won the spurs of their enemies.
I have a very simple motive and excuse for telling the little I know of this true tale. I have met in my wanderings a man brought up in the lower quarters of a great house, fed mainly on its leavings and burdened mostly with its labours. I know that his complaints are stilled, and his status justified, by a story that is told to him. It is about how his grandfather was a chimpanzee and his father a wild man of the woods, caught by hunters and tamed into something like intelligence. In the light of this, he may well be thankful for the almost human life that he enjoys; and may be content of leaving behind him a yet more evolved animal. Strangely enough, the calling of this story by the sacred name of Progress ceased to satisfy me when I began to suspect (and to discover) that it is not true. I know by now enough at least of his origin to know that he was not evolved, but simply disinherited. His family tree is not a monkey tree, save in the sense that no monkey could have climbed it; rather it is like that tree torn up by the roots and names “Dedischado,” on the shield of the unknown knight.
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I
INTRODUZIONE
Assai ragionevolmente ci si chiederà perché io abbia acconsentito, sia pure per una specie di sfida, a scrivere anche solo un saggio divulgativo di storia inglese, io che non ho pretesa alcuna di particolare erudizione e sono soltanto un membro del pubblico. La risposta è che ne so quel tanto che basta per sapere una cosa: che una storia scritta dal punto di vista di un membro del pubblico non è mai stata scritta. Quelle che chiamiamo storie popolari andrebbero piuttosto chiamate storie antipopolari. Sono tutte, quasi senza eccezione, scritte contro il popolo; e in esse la moltitudine è ignorata oppure minuziosamente provata essere stata dalla parte del torto. È vero che Green intitolò il suo libro “Breve Storia del Popolo Inglese”; ma pare che l’abbia ritenuta troppo breve perché il popolo vi fosse debitamente menzionato. Per esempio, chiama una parte assai vasta del suo racconto “L’Inghilterra Puritana.” Ma l’Inghilterra non fu mai puritana. Sarebbe stato quasi altrettanto ingiusto chiamare l’ascesa di Enrico di Navarra “la Francia Puritana.” E qualcuno dei nostri più estremi storici Whig sarebbe stato quasi capace di chiamare la campagna di Wexford e Drogheda “l’Irlanda Puritana.”
Ma è soprattutto in materia di Medioevo che le storie popolari calpestano le tradizioni popolari. A questo riguardo esiste un contrasto quasi comico tra le informazioni generali fornite sull’Inghilterra degli ultimi due o tre secoli, in cui il suo attuale sistema industriale veniva edificato, e le informazioni generali date sui secoli precedenti, che chiamiamo genericamente medievali. Di quella sorta di storia da museo delle cere che si ritiene sufficiente per la baracca da fiera dell’età degli abati e dei crociati, basterà un piccolo esempio. Alcuni anni or sono comparve una Enciclopedia popolare, che si proponeva tra l’altro di insegnare alle masse la Storia inglese; e in essa mi imbattei in una serie di ritratti dei re d’Inghilterra. Nessuno poteva aspettarsi che fossero tutti autentici; ma l’interesse si legava a quelli che erano necessariamente immaginari. Vi è nella letteratura contemporanea molto materiale vivido per i ritratti di uomini come Enrico II o Edoardo I; ma non pareva che lo si fosse trovato, né tanto meno cercato. E, vagando fino all’immagine che rappresentava Stefano di Blois, il mio occhio fu sconcertato da un signore con uno di quegli elmi dalla tesa d’acciaio curvata a mezzaluna, propri dell’età delle gorgiere e delle brache a sbuffo. Sono tentato di sospettare che la testa fosse quella di un alabardiere in qualche scena come l’esecuzione di Maria regina di Scozia. Ma aveva un elmo; e gli elmi erano medievali; e un elmo vecchio qualsiasi era abbastanza buono per Stefano.
Ora si supponga che i lettori di quell’opera di consultazione avessero cercato il ritratto di Carlo I e vi avessero trovato la testa di un poliziotto. Si supponga che fosse stata presa, elmetto moderno e tutto, da qualche istantanea del Daily Sketch dell’arresto della signora Pankhurst. Credo che possiamo spingerci fino a dire che i lettori avrebbero rifiutato di accettarla come ritratto somigliante di Carlo I. Si sarebbero formati l’opinione che dovesse esserci qualche errore. Eppure il tempo trascorso tra Stefano e Maria fu assai più lungo del tempo trascorso tra Carlo e noi. La rivoluzione della società umana tra la prima delle Crociate e l’ultimo dei Tudor fu incommensurabilmente più colossale e completa di qualunque mutamento tra Carlo e noi. E, soprattutto, quella rivoluzione dovrebbe essere la prima cosa e l’ultima cosa in qualunque opera che si dica una storia popolare. Poiché è la storia di come il nostro popolo conquistò grandi cose, ma oggi ha perduto ogni cosa.
Ora sosterrò modestamente di sapere di storia inglese più di questo; e di avere altrettanto diritto di farne un riassunto popolare quanto quel signore che fece scambiare il cappello al crociato e all’alabardiere. Ma la cosa curiosa e sorprendente riguardo alla trascuratezza, si potrebbe dire l’omissione, della civiltà medievale in storie come questa, sta nel fatto che ho già rilevato. È proprio la storia popolare a essere lasciata fuori dalla storia popolare. Per esempio, perfino un operaio, un falegname o un bottaio o un muratore, ha imparato qualcosa sulla Magna Charta, come di qualcosa simile all’alca impenne, salvo che la sua quasi mostruosa solitudine veniva dall’essere prima del suo tempo anziché dopo. Non gli fu insegnato che tutta la materia del Medioevo era irrigidita dalla pergamena delle carte; che la società fu un tempo un sistema di carte, e d’una specie assai più interessante per lui. Il falegname udì d’una sola carta concessa ai baroni, e principalmente nell’interesse dei baroni; il falegname non udì di alcuna delle carte concesse ai falegnami, ai bottai, a tutta la gente come lui. Oppure, per prendere un altro esempio, il ragazzo e la ragazza che leggono le solite storie semplificate delle scuole non udirono praticamente mai parlare di una cosa come un borghese, finché egli non compare in camicia con un cappio al collo. Certamente non immaginano nulla di ciò che egli significò nel Medioevo. E i bottegai vittoriani non concepivano se stessi come partecipi di una qualche avventura romanzesca come l’impresa di Courtrai, dove i bottegai medievali più che guadagnarsi gli speroni— si guadagnarono gli speroni dei loro nemici.
Ho un movente e una scusa assai semplici per raccontare il poco che so di questa storia veritiera. Ho incontrato nei miei vagabondaggi un uomo cresciuto nei quartieri bassi di una grande casa, nutrito per lo più dei suoi avanzi e gravato per lo più delle sue fatiche. So che le sue lagnanze sono acquietate, e la sua condizione giustificata, da una storia che gli viene raccontata. Riguarda come suo nonno fosse uno scimpanzé e suo padre un uomo selvaggio dei boschi, catturato dai cacciatori e ammansito in qualcosa di simile all’intelligenza. Alla luce di ciò, egli può bene essere grato per la vita quasi umana di cui gode; e può accontentarsi di lasciare dietro di sé un animale ancor più evoluto. Stranamente, il chiamare questa storia col sacro nome di Progresso cessò di soddisfarmi quando cominciai a sospettare (e a scoprire) che non è vera. So ormai abbastanza almeno della sua origine per sapere che egli non fu evoluto, ma semplicemente diseredato. Il suo albero genealogico non è un albero di scimmie, se non nel senso che nessuna scimmia avrebbe potuto arrampicarvisi; è piuttosto simile a quell’albero divelto dalle radici e nominato “Dedischado,” sullo scudo del cavaliere sconosciuto.
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II
THE PROVINCE OF ENGLAND
The land on which we live once had the highly poetic privilege of being the end of the world. Its extremity was ultima Thule, the other end of nowhere. When these islands, lost in a night of northern seas, were lit up at last by the long searchlights of Rome, it was felt that the remotest remnant of things had been touched; and more for pride than possession.
The sentiment was not unsuitable, even in geography. About these realms upon the edge of everything there was really something that can only be called edgy. Britain is not so much an island as an archipelago; it is at least a labyrinth of peninsulas. In few of the kindred countries can one so easily and so strangely find sea in the fields or fields in the sea. The great rivers seem not only to meet in the ocean, but barely to miss each other in the hills: the whole land, though low as a whole, leans towards the west in shouldering mountains; and a prehistoric tradition has taught it to look towards the sunset for islands yet dreamier than its own. The islanders are of a kind with their islands. Different as are the nations into which they are now divided, the Scots, the English, the Irish, the Welsh of the western uplands, have something altogether different from the humdrum docility of the inland Germans, or from the bon sens français which can be at will trenchant or trite. There is something common to all the Britons, which even Acts of Union have not torn asunder. The nearest name for it is insecurity, something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge of things. Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humour without wit, perplex their critics and perplex themselves. Their souls are fretted like their coasts. They have an embarrassment, noted by all foreigners: it is expressed, perhaps, in the Irish by a confusion of speech and in the English by a confusion of thought. For the Irish bull is a licence with the symbol of language. But Bull’s own bull, the English bull, is “a dumb ox of thought”; a standing mystification in the mind. There is something double in the thoughts as of the soul mirrored in many waters. Of all peoples they are least attached to the purely classical; the imperial plainness which the French do finely and the Germans coarsely, but the Britons hardly at all. They are constantly colonists and emigrants; they have the name of being at home in every country. But they are torn between love of home and love of something else; of which the sea may be the explanation or may be only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme which is the finest line English literature and the dumb refrain of all English poems—“Over the hills and far away.”
The greatest rationalist hero who first conquered Britain, whether or no he was the detached demi-god of “Caesar and Cleopatra,” was certainly a Latin of the Latins, and described these islands when he found them with all the curt positivism of his pen of steel. But even Julius Caesar’s brief account of the Britons leaves on us something of this mystery, which is more than ignorance of fact. They were apparently ruled by that terrible thing, a pagan priesthood. Stones now shapeless yet arranged in symbolic shapes bear witness to the order and labour of those that lifted them. Their worship was probably Nature-worship; and while such a basis may count for something in the elemental quality that has always soaked the island arts, the collision between it and the tolerant Empire suggests the presence of something which generally grows out of nature-worship— I mean the unnatural. But upon nearly all the matters of modern controversy Caesar is silent. He is silent about whether the language was “Celtic”; and some of the place-names have even given rise to a suggestion that, in parts at least, it was already Teutonic. I am not capable of pronouncing upon the truth of such speculations, but I am of pronouncing upon their importance; at least, to my one very simple purpose. And indeed their importance has been very exaggerated. Caesar professed to give no more than the glimpse of a traveller; but, when, some considerable time after, the Romans returned and turned Britain into a Roman province, they continued to display a singular indifference to questions that have excited so many professors. What they cared about was getting and giving in Britain what they had got and given in Gaul. We do not know whether the Britons then, or for that matter the Britons now, were Iberian or Cymric or Teutonic. We do know that in a short time they were Roman.
Every now and then there is discovered in modern England some fragment such as a Roman pavement. Such Roman antiquities rather diminish than increase the Roman reality. They make something seem distant which is still very near, and something seem dead that is still alive. It is like writing a man’s epitaph on his front door. The epitaph would probably be a compliment, but hardly a personal introduction. The important thing about France and England is not that they have Roman remains. They are Roman remains. In truth they are not so much remains as relics; for they are still working miracles. A row of poplars is a more Roman relic than a row of pillars. Nearly all that we call the works of nature have but grown like fungoids upon this original work of man, and our woods are mosses on the bones of a giant. Under the seed of our harvest and the roots of our trees is a foundation of which the fragments of tile and brick are but emblems; and under the colours of our wildest flowers are the colours of a Roman pavement.
Britain was directly Roman for fully four hundred years; longer than she has been Protestant, and very much longer than she has been industrial. What was meant by being Roman it is necessary in a few lines to say, or no sense can be made of what happened after, especially of what happened immediately after. Being Roman did not mean being subject, in the sense that one savage tribe will enslave another, or in the sense that the cynical politicians of recent times watched with a horrible hopefulness for the evanescence of the Irish. Both conquerors and conquered were heathen, and both had the institutions which seem to us to give an inhumanity to heathenism: the triumph, the slave-market, the lack of all the sensitive nationalism of modern history. But the Roman Empire did not destroy nations; if anything, it created them. Britons were not originally proud of being Britons; but they were proud of being Romans. The Roman steel was at least as much a magnet as a sword. In truth it was rather a round mirror of steel, in which every people came to see itself. For Rome as Rome the very smallness of the civic origin was a warrant for the largeness of the civic experiment. Rome itself obviously could not rule the world, any more than Rutland. I mean it could not rule the other races as the Spartans ruled the Helots or the Americans ruled the negroes. A machine so huge had to be human; it had to have a handle that fitted any man’s hand. The Roman Empire necessarily became less Roman as it became more of an Empire; until not very long after Rome gave conquerors to Britain, Britain was giving emperors to Rome. Out of Britain, as the Britons boasted, came at length the great Empress Helena, who was the mother of Constantine. And it was Constantine, as all men know, who first nailed up that proclamation which all after generations have in truth been struggling either to protect or to tear down.
II
LA PROVINCIA D’INGHILTERRA
La terra su cui viviamo ebbe un tempo il privilegio altamente poetico di essere la fine del mondo. La sua estremità era l’ultima Thule, l’altra parte del nulla. Quando queste isole, perdute in una notte di mari settentrionali, furono finalmente illuminate dai lunghi fari di Roma, si ebbe la sensazione che fosse stato toccato il più remoto frammento delle cose; e più per orgoglio che per possesso.
Il sentimento non era del tutto fuori luogo, nemmeno in geografia. Questi regni ai margini di ogni cosa avevano davvero qualcosa che si può chiamare solo “marginale”. La Gran Bretagna è un arcipelago più che un’isola; è almeno un labirinto di penisole. In pochi dei paesi affini si possono trovare così facilmente e stranamente il mare nei campi o i campi nel mare. I grandi fiumi sembrano non solo incontrarsi nell’oceano, ma quasi mancarsi nelle colline: tutta la terra, sebbene bassa nella sua interezza, si inclina verso l’ovest con le spalle che appoggiano sulle montagne; e una tradizione preistorica ha insegnato a guardare verso il tramonto in cerca di isole ancora più sognanti della propria. Gli isolani sono simili alle loro isole. Diversi come sono le nazioni nelle quali ora si dividono, gli scozzesi, gli inglesi, gli irlandesi, i gallesi delle alture occidentali hanno qualcosa di completamente diverso dalla monotona docilità dei tedeschi dell’entroterra o dal bon sens français che può essere a piacere incisivo o banale. C’è qualcosa che accomuna tutti i britannici e che nemmeno gli Atti di Unione hanno strappato. Il nome più vicino è insicurezza, qualcosa che si addice agli uomini che camminano su scogliere e sul bordo delle cose. Avventura, un gusto solitario per la libertà, un umorismo senza arguzia, confondono i loro critici e li confondono anche loro stessi. Le loro anime sono tormentate come le loro coste. Hanno un imbarazzo notato da tutti gli stranieri: si esprime forse in irlandese con una confusione di parole e in inglese con una confusione di pensiero. Perché il bue irlandese è una licenza con il simbolo del linguaggio. Ma il bue di Bull, il bue inglese, è “un bue muto del pensiero”; un’misterificazione permanente nella mente. C’è qualcosa di doppio nei pensieri come dell’anima riflessa in molte acque. Di tutti i popoli sono quelli meno attaccati al puramente classico; alla semplicità imperiale che i francesi fanno con eleganza e i tedeschi con rozzezza, ma i britannici quasi per niente. Sono costantemente colonizzatori ed emigranti; hanno la fama di essere a casa in ogni paese. Ma sono divisi tra l’amore della casa e l’amore per qualcos’altro; di cui il mare può essere la spiegazione o solo il simbolo. Si trova anche in una filastrocca senza nome che è la più bella riga della letteratura inglese e il ritornello muto di tutte le poesie inglesi: “Oltre le colline e lontano.”
Il più grande eroe razionalista che conquistò per primo la Britannia, fosse o non fosse il demigio distaccato di “Caesar and Cleopatra,” era certamente un latino tra i latini, e descrisse queste isole quando le trovò con tutto il positivismo brusco della sua penna d’acciaio. Ma anche la breve relazione di Giulio Cesare sui Britanni lascia in noi qualcosa di questo mistero, che è più che ignoranza dei fatti. Era evidente che erano governati da quella cosa terribile, un sacerdozio pagano. Pietre ora informi ma disposte in forme simboliche testimoniano l’ordine e il lavoro di coloro che le sollevarono. Il loro culto era probabilmente un culto della Natura; e sebbene una base del genere possa contare qualcosa nella qualità elementare che ha sempre impregnato le arti insulari, la collisione tra questa e l’Impero tollerante suggerisce la presenza di qualcosa che generalmente nasce dal culto della natura— intendo dire il non naturale. Ma su quasi tutte le questioni della moderna controversia Cesare è silenzioso. È silenzioso sul fatto se la lingua fosse “Celtica”; e alcuni dei nomi di luogo hanno anche dato origine a un suggerimento che, almeno in alcune parti, fosse già Teutonica. Non sono capace di pronunciarmi sulla verità di tali speculazioni, ma lo sono sul loro valore; almeno, per il mio unico scopo molto semplice. E infatti la loro importanza è stata molto esagerata. Cesare si dichiarò disposto a dare non più che uno sguardo da viaggiatore; ma quando, dopo un tempo considerevole, i Romani tornarono e trasformarono la Britannia in una provincia romana, continuarono a mostrare una singolare indifferenza verso questioni che hanno eccitato così tanti professori. Ciò di cui si preoccupavano era ottenere e dare in Britannia ciò che avevano ottenuto e dato in Gallia. Non sappiamo se i Britanni allora, o per quel che riguarda i Britanni ora, fossero Iberici o Cimrici o Teutonici. Sappiamo che in breve tempo divennero Romani.
Di tanto in tanto, nella moderna Inghilterra si scopre qualche frammento come un lastricato romano. Antichità romane del genere diminuiscono più che aumentare la realtà romana. Fanno sembrare lontana una cosa che è ancora molto vicina, e fanno sembrare morta una cosa che è ancora viva. È come scrivere l’epitaffio di un uomo sulla sua porta d’ingresso. L’epitaffio sarebbe probabilmente un complimento, ma difficilmente un’introduzione personale. La cosa importante della Francia e dell’Inghilterra non è che esse abbiano resti romani. Sono i resti romani. In verità non sono tanto resti quanto reliquie; perché stanno ancora compiendo miracoli. Una fila di pioppi è una reliquia romana più di una fila di pilastri. Quasi tutto ciò che chiamiamo opere della natura non ha fatto altro che crescere come funghi su quest’opera originaria dell’uomo, e i nostri boschi sono muschi sulle ossa di un gigante. Sotto il seme del nostro raccolto e le radici dei nostri alberi c’è una fondazione di cui i frammenti di tegole e mattoni non sono che emblemi; e sotto i colori dei nostri fiori più selvaggi ci sono i colori di un lastricato romano.
La Gran Bretagna fu direttamente romana per ben quattrocento anni; più a lungo di quanto sia stata protestante, e molto più a lungo di quanto sia stata industriale. È necessario spiegare in poche righe cosa si intendesse per essere romani, altrimenti non si può capire quello che accadde dopo, specialmente quello che accadde subito dopo. Essere romani non significava essere sudditi, nel senso che una tribù selvaggia assoggetterà un’altra, o nel senso in cui i politici cinici dei tempi recenti osservavano con orribile speranza l’evanescenza degli irlandesi. Sia conquistatori che conquistati erano pagani, e avevano entrambi le istituzioni che a noi sembrano conferire un’inhumanità al paganesimo: il trionfo, il mercato degli schiavi, la mancanza di tutto il sensibile nazionalismo della moderna storia. Ma l’impero romano non distrusse le nazioni; se mai, le creò. I britanni in origine non erano orgogliosi di essere britanni; ma lo erano di essere romani. L’acciaio romano era almeno tanto un magnete quanto una spada. In verità era piuttosto uno specchio rotondo d’acciaio, in cui ogni popolo veniva a vedersi. Per Roma come Roma la stessa piccolezza dell’origine civica era una garanzia per l’ampiezza dell’esperimento civico. Roma stessa ovviamente non poteva governare il mondo più di quanto potesse farlo Rutland. Voglio dire che non poteva governare le altre razze come gli Spartani governavano gli Iloti o gli americani i negri. Una macchina così enorme doveva essere umana; doveva avere un manico che si adattasse alla mano di qualsiasi uomo. L’impero romano divenne necessariamente meno romano man mano che diventava più imperiale; fino a quando, non molto tempo dopo che Roma diede conquistatori alla Britannia, la Britannia stessa diede imperatori a Roma. Fu dalla Britannia, come i britanni si vantavano, che alla fine venne l’imperatrice Elena, che fu madre di Costantino. E fu Costantino, come tutti sanno, il primo ad appendere quella proclamazione per la quale tutte le generazioni successive hanno in verità faticato o a proteggerla o ad abbatterla.
About that revolution no man has ever been able to be impartial. The present writer will make no idle pretence of being so. That it was the most revolutionary of all revolutions, since it identified the dead body on a servile gibbet with the fatherhood in the skies, has long been a commonplace without ceasing to be a paradox. But there is another historic element that must also be realized. Without saying anything more of its tremendous essence, it is very necessary to note why even pre-Christian Rome was regarded as something mystical for long afterwards by all European men. The extreme view of it was held, perhaps, by Dante; but it pervaded mediaevalism, and therefore still haunts modernity. Rome was regarded as Man, mighty, though fallen, because it was the utmost that Man had done. It was divinely necessary that the Roman Empire should succeed—if only that it might fail. Hence the school of Dante implied the paradox that the Roman soldiers killed Christ, not only by right, but even by divine right. That mere law might fail at its highest test it had to be real law, and not mere military lawlessness. Therefore God worked by Pilate as by Peter. Therefore the mediaeval poet is eager to show that Roman government was simply good government, and not a usurpation. For it was the whole point of the Christian revolution to maintain that in this, good government was as bad as bad. Even good government was not good enough to know God among the thieves. This is not only generally important as involving a colossal change in the conscience; the loss of the whole heathen repose in the complete sufficiency of the city or the state. It made a sort of eternal rule enclosing an eternal rebellion. It must be incessantly remembered through the first half of English history; for it is the whole meaning in the quarrel of the priests and kings.
The double rule of the civilization and the religion in one sense remained for centuries; and before its first misfortunes came it must be conceived as substantially the same everywhere. And however it began it largely ended in equality. Slavery certainly existed, as it had in the most democratic states of ancient times. Harsh officialism certainly existed, as it exists in the most democratic states of modern times. But there was nothing of what we mean in modern times by aristocracy, still less of what we mean by racial domination. In so far as any change was passing over that society with its two levels of equal citizens and equal slaves, it was only the slow growth of the power of the Church at the expense of the power of the Empire. Now it is important to grasp that the great exception to equality, the institution of Slavery, was slowly modified by both causes. It was weakened both by the weakening of the Empire and by the strengthening of the Church.
Slavery was for the Church not a difficulty of doctrine, but a strain on the imagination. Aristotle and the pagan sages who had defined the servile or “useful” arts, had regarded the slave as a tool, an axe to cut wood or whatever wanted cutting. The Church did not denounce the cutting; but she felt as if she was cutting glass with a diamond. She was haunted by the memory that the diamond is so much more precious than the glass. So Christianity could not settle down into the pagan simplicity that the man was made for the work, when the work was so much less immortally momentous than the man. At about this stage of a history of England there is generally told the anecdote of a pun of Gregory the Great; and this is perhaps the true point of it. By the Roman theory the barbarian bondmen were meant to be useful. The saint’s mysticism was moved at finding them ornamental; and “Non Angli sed Angeli” meant more nearly “Not slaves, but souls.” It is to the point, in passing, to note that in the modern country most collectively Christian, Russia, the serfs were always referred to as “souls”. The great Pope’s phrase, hackneyed as it is, is perhaps the first glimpse of the golden halos in the best Christian Art. Thus the Church, with whatever other faults, worked of her own nature towards greater social equality; and it is a historical error to suppose that the Church hierarchy worked with aristocracies, or was of a kind with them. It was an inversion of aristocracy; in the ideal of it, at least, the last were to be first. The Irish bull that “One man is as good as another and a great deal better” contains a truth, like many contradictions; a truth that was the link between Christianity and citizenship. Alone of all superiors, the saint does not depress the human dignity of others. He is not conscious of his superiority to them; but only more conscious of his inferiority than they are.
But while a million little priests and monks like mice were already nibbling at the bonds of the ancient servitude, another process was going on, which has here been called the weakening of the Empire. It is a process which is to this day very difficult to explain. But it affected all the institutions of all the provinces, especially the institution of Slavery. But of all the provinces its effect was heaviest in Britain, which lay on or beyond the borders. The case of Britain, however, cannot possibly be considered alone. The first half of English history has been made quite unmeaning in the schools by the attempt to tell it without reference to the corporate Christendom in which it took part and pride. I fully accept the truth of Mr. Kipling’s question of “What can they know of England who only England know?” and merely differ from the view that they will best broaden their minds by the study of Wagga-Wagga and Timbuctoo. It is therefore necessary, though very difficult, to frame in few words some idea of what happened to the whole European race.
Rome itself, which had made all that strong world, was the weakest thing in it. The centre had been growing fainter and fainter, and now the centre disappeared. Rome had as much freed the world as ruled it, and now she could rule no more. Save for the presence of the Pope and his constantly increasing supernatural prestige, the eternal city became like one of her own provincial towns. A loose localism was the result rather than any conscious intellectual unity. There was anarchy, but there was no rebellion. For rebellion must have a principle, and therefore (for those who can think) an authority. Gibbon called his great pageant of prose “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” The Empire did decline, but it did not fall. It remains to this hour.
By a process very much more indirect even than that of the Church, this decentralization and drift also worked against the slave-state of antiquity. The localism did indeed produce that choice of territorial chieftains which came to be called Feudalism, and of which we shall speak later. But the direct possession of man by man the same localism tended to destroy; though this negative influence upon it bears no kind of proportion to the positive influence of the Catholic Church. The later pagan slavery, like our own industrial labour which increasingly resembles it, was worked on a larger and larger scale; and it was at last too large to control. The bondman found the visible Lord more distant than the new invisible one. The slave became the serf; that is, he could be shut in, but not shut out. When once he belonged to the land, it could not be long before the land belonged to him. Even in the old and rather fictitious language of chattel slavery, there is here a difference. It is the difference between a man being a chair and a man being a house. Canute might call for his throne; but if he wanted his throne-room he must go and get it himself. Similarly, he could tell his slave to run, but he could only tell his serf to stay. Thus the two slow changes of the time both tended to transform the tool into a man. His status began to have roots; and whatever has roots will have rights.
What the decline did involve everywhere was decivilization; the loss of letter, of laws, of roads and means of communication, the exaggeration of local colour into caprice. But on the edges of the Empire this decivilization became a definite barbarism, owing to the nearness of wild neighbours who were ready to destroy as deafly and blindly as things are destroyed by fire. Save for the lurid and apocalyptic locust-flight of the Huns, it is perhaps an exaggeration to talk, even in those darkest ages, of a deluge of the barbarians; at least when we are speaking of the old civilization as a whole. But a deluge of barbarians is not entirely an exaggeration of what happened on some of the borders of the Empire; of such edges of the known world as we began by describing in these pages. And on the extreme edge of the world lay Britain.
It may be true, though there is little proof of it, that the Roman civilization itself was thinner in Britain than in the other provinces; but it was a very civilized civilization. It gathered round the great cities like York and Chester and London; for the cities are older than the counties, and indeed older even than the countries. These were connected by a skeleton of great roads which were and are the bones of Britain. But with the weakening of Rome the bones began to break under barbarian pressure, coming at first from the north; from the Picts who lay beyond Agricola’s boundary in what is now the Scotch Lowlands. The whole of this bewildering time is full of temporary tribal alliances, generally mercenary; of barbarians paid to come on or barbarians paid to go away. It seems certain that in this welter Roman Britain bought help from ruder races living about the neck of Denmark where is now the duchy of Schleswig. Having been chosen only to fight somebody they naturally fought anybody; and a century of fighting followed, under the trampling of which the Roman pavement was broken into yet smaller pieces. It is perhaps permissible to disagree with the historian Green when he says that no spot should be more sacred to modern Englishmen than the neighbourhood of Ramsgate, where the Schleswig people are supposed to have landed; or when he suggests that their appearance is the real beginning of our island story. It would be rather more true to say that it was nearly, though prematurely, the end of it.
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Roma stessa, che aveva plasmato tutto quel mondo poderoso, ne era la cosa più debole. Il centro era andato affievolendosi sempre più, e ora il centro scompariva. Roma aveva liberato il mondo tanto quanto lo aveva governato, e ora non poteva più governarlo. Salvo che per la presenza del Papa e del suo prestigio soprannaturale in costante crescita, la città eterna divenne simile a una delle sue città di provincia. Ne risultò un localismo confuso più che una qualche unità intellettuale consapevole. C’era anarchia, ma non c’era ribellione. Perché la ribellione deve avere un principio, e dunque (per chi sa pensare) un’autorità. Gibbon intitolò la sua grande sfilata di prosa “Declino e caduta dell’Impero romano.” L’Impero declinò, ma non cadde. Rimane fino a quest’ora.
Con un processo assai più indiretto persino di quello della Chiesa, questo decentramento e questa deriva operarono anche contro lo stato schiavista dell’antichità. Il localismo produsse invero quella scelta di capi territoriali che venne poi chiamata Feudalesimo, e di cui parleremo più avanti. Ma il possesso diretto dell’uomo da parte dell’uomo lo stesso localismo tendeva a distruggerlo; benché questo influsso negativo su di esso non abbia proporzione alcuna con l’influsso positivo della Chiesa cattolica. La schiavitù pagana più tarda, come il nostro stesso lavoro industriale che sempre più le somiglia, era condotta su scala sempre più vasta; e alla fine era troppo vasta per essere controllata. Il servo trovò il Signore visibile più lontano di quello nuovo e invisibile. Lo schiavo divenne il servo della gleba; vale a dire, poteva essere rinchiuso dentro, ma non chiuso fuori. Una volta che apparteneva alla terra, non poteva passare molto prima che la terra appartenesse a lui. Persino nell’antico e piuttosto fittizio linguaggio della schiavitù come proprietà di beni, c’è qui una differenza. È la differenza tra un uomo che è una sedia e un uomo che è una casa. Canuto poteva far chiamare il suo trono; ma se voleva la sua sala del trono doveva andarsela a prendere da sé. Allo stesso modo, poteva ordinare al suo schiavo di correre, ma poteva ordinare al suo servo solo di restare. Così i due lenti mutamenti del tempo tendevano entrambi a trasformare lo strumento in un uomo. Il suo stato cominciò ad avere radici; e tutto ciò che ha radici avrà diritti.
Ciò che il declino comportò ovunque fu la decivilizzazione; la perdita delle lettere, delle leggi, delle strade e dei mezzi di comunicazione, l’esagerazione del colore locale fino al capriccio. Ma ai margini dell’Impero questa decivilizzazione divenne una vera e propria barbarie, a causa della vicinanza di vicini selvaggi pronti a distruggere sordamente e ciecamente come le cose vengono distrutte dal fuoco. Salvo che per il fosco e apocalittico volo di locuste degli Unni, è forse un’esagerazione parlare, persino in quei secoli oscurissimi, di un diluvio di barbari; almeno quando parliamo dell’antica civiltà nel suo insieme. Ma un diluvio di barbari non è affatto un’esagerazione di ciò che accadde su alcune delle frontiere dell’Impero; su quei margini del mondo conosciuto da cui abbiamo preso le mosse in queste pagine. E sull’estremo margine del mondo giaceva la Britannia.
Può darsi che sia vero, benché ve ne sia scarsa prova, che la civiltà romana stessa fosse più sottile in Britannia che nelle altre province; ma era una civiltà molto civile. Si raccoglieva attorno alle grandi città come York e Chester e Londra; poiché le città sono più antiche delle contee, e invero più antiche persino delle nazioni. Queste erano collegate da uno scheletro di grandi strade che erano e sono le ossa della Britannia. Ma con l’indebolimento di Roma le ossa cominciarono a spezzarsi sotto la pressione barbarica, che veniva dapprima da nord; dai Pitti che stavano oltre il confine di Agricola in quelle che sono ora le Lowlands scozzesi. L’intera confusione di questo tempo sconcertante è colma di alleanze tribali temporanee, per lo più mercenarie; di barbari pagati per venire avanti o di barbari pagati per andarsene. Sembra certo che in questo caos la Britannia romana comprò aiuto da stirpi più rozze che vivevano intorno all’istmo della Danimarca dove è ora il ducato dello Schleswig. Essendo stati scelti solo per combattere qualcuno, naturalmente combatterono chiunque; e ne seguì un secolo di battaglie, sotto il calpestio delle quali il selciato romano fu frantumato in pezzi ancora più piccoli. È forse lecito dissentire dallo storico Green quando dice che nessun luogo dovrebbe essere più sacro agli inglesi moderni dei dintorni di Ramsgate, dove si suppone che la gente dello Schleswig sia sbarcata; o quando suggerisce che la loro comparsa sia il vero inizio della storia della nostra isola. Sarebbe piuttosto più vero dire che ne fu quasi, benché prematuramente, la fine.
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III
THE AGE OF LEGENDS
We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale. We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in Cranford, after tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick. Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen’s young ladies who had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon. Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do with rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment and engineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite modern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and then all of a sudden we are reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier of civilization is no longer fighting with Goths but with goblins; the land becomes a labyrinth of faërie towns unknown to history; and scholars can suggest but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain towers up in the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur. The scientific age comes first and the mythological age after it. One working example, the echoes of which lingered till very late in English literature, may serve to sum up the contrast. The British state which was found by Caesar was long believed to have been founded by Brutus. The contrast between the one very dry discovery and the other very fantastic foundation has something decidedly comic about it; as if Caesar’s ‘Et tu, Brute,’ might be translated, ‘What, you here?’ But in one respect the fable is quite as important as the fact. They both testify to the reality of the Roman foundation of our insular society, and show that even the stories that seem prehistoric are seldom pre-Roman. When England is Elfland, the elves are not the Angles. All the phrases that can be used as clues through that tangle of traditions are more or less Latin phrases. And in all our speech there was no word more Roman than ‘romance’.
The Roman legions left Britain in the fourth century. This did not mean that the Roman civilization left it; but it did mean that the civilization lay far more open both to admixture and attack. Christianity had almost certainly come to Britain, not indeed otherwise than by the routes established by Rome, but certainly long before the official Roman mission of Gregory the Great. It had certainly been largely swamped by later heathen invasions of the undefended coasts. It may then rationally be urged that the hold both of the Empire and its new religion were here weaker than elsewhere, and that the description of the general civilization in the last chapter is proportionately irrelevant. This, however, is not the chief truth of the matter.
There is one fundamental fact which must be understood of the whole of this period. Yet a modern man must very nearly turn his mind upside down to understand it. Almost every modern man has in his head an association between freedom and the future. The whole culture of our time has been full of the notion of ‘A Good Time Coming.’ Now the whole culture of the Dark Ages was full of the notion of ‘A Good Time Going.’ They looked backwards to old enlightenment and forwards to new prejudices. In our time there has come a quarrel between faith and hope—which perhaps must be healed by charity. But they were situated otherwise. They hoped—but it may be said that they hoped for yesterday. All the motives that make a man a progressive now made a man a conservative then. The more he could keep of the past the more he had a fair law and a free state; the more he gave way to the future the more he must endure of ignorance and privilege. All we call reason was one with all we call reaction. And this is the clue which we must carry with us through the lives of all the great men of the Dark Ages; of Alfred, of Bede, of Dunstan. If the most extreme modern Republican were put back in that period he would be an equally extreme Papist or even Imperialist. For the Pope was what was left of the Empire; and the Empire what was left of the Republic.
We may compare the man of that time, therefore, to one who has left free cities and even free fields behind him, and is forced to advance towards a forest. And the forest is the fittest metaphor, not only because it was really that wild European growth cloven here and there by the Roman roads, but also because there has always been associated with forests another idea which increased as the Roman order decayed. The idea of the forests was the idea of enchantment. There was a notion of things being double or different from themselves, of beasts behaving like men and not merely, as modern wits would say, of men behaving like beasts. But it is precisely here that it is most necessary to remember that an age of reason had preceded the age of magic. The central pillar which has sustained the storied house of our imagination ever since has been the idea of the civilized knight amid the savage enchantments; the adventures of a man still sane in a world gone mad.
The next thing to note in the matter is this: that in this barbaric time none of the heroes are barbaric. They are only heroes if they are antibarbaric. Men real or mythical, or more probably both, became omnipresent like gods among the people, and forced themselves into the faintest memory and the shortest record, exactly in proportion as they had mastered the heathen madness of the time and preserved the Christian rationality that had come from Rome. Arthur has his name because he killed the heathen; the heathen who killed him have no names at all. Englishmen who know nothing of English history, but less than nothing of Irish history, have heard somehow or other of Brian Boru, though they spell it Boroo and seem to be under the impression that it is a joke. It is a joke the subtlety of which they would never have been able to enjoy, if King Brian had not broken the heathen in Ireland at the great Battle of Clontarf. The ordinary English reader would never have heard of Olaf of Norway if he had not ‘preached the Gospel with his sword’; or the Cid if he had not fought against the Crescent. And though Alfred the Great seems to have deserved his title even as a personality, he was not so great as the work he had to do.
III
L’ETÀ DELLE LEGGENDE
Resteremmo trasaliti se, leggendo tranquillamente un prosaico romanzo moderno, a un certo punto nel mezzo esso si trasformasse senza preavviso in una fiaba. Ci sorprenderemmo se una delle zitelle di Cranford, dopo aver ordinatamente spazzato la stanza con una scopa, volasse via a cavallo di quella scopa. La nostra attenzione sarebbe arrestata se una delle giovani dame di Jane Austen, appena imbattutasi in un dragone di cavalleria, camminando un poco oltre s’imbattesse in un drago. Eppure qualcosa di molto simile a questa straordinaria transizione accade nella storia britannica al termine del periodo puramente romano. Abbiamo a che fare con resoconti razionali e quasi meccanici di accampamenti e di opere d’ingegneria, di una laboriosa burocrazia e di occasionali guerre di frontiera, del tutto moderni nella loro efficienza e inefficienza; e poi tutt’a un tratto ci ritroviamo a leggere di campane erranti e di lance stregate, di guerre contro uomini alti come alberi o bassi come funghi. Il soldato della civiltà non combatte più contro i Goti ma contro i folletti; la terra diventa un labirinto di città fatate ignote alla storia; e gli studiosi possono suggerire ma non spiegare come un governatore romano o un capo gallese si erga nel crepuscolo come il terribile e non generato Artù. L’età scientifica viene prima e l’età mitologica dopo di essa. Un solo esempio concreto, la cui eco si prolungò fino a tempi assai tardi nella letteratura inglese, può servire a riassumere il contrasto. Si credette a lungo che lo Stato britannico trovato da Cesare fosse stato fondato da Bruto. Il contrasto fra la scoperta tanto arida da un lato e la fondazione tanto fantastica dall’altro ha in sé qualcosa di decisamente comico; come se l’‘Et tu, Brute,’ di Cesare potesse tradursi con ‘Come, tu qui?’ Ma sotto un aspetto la favola è altrettanto importante quanto il fatto. Entrambe testimoniano la realtà della fondazione romana della nostra società insulare, e mostrano che perfino le storie che sembrano preistoriche sono di rado pre-romane. Quando l’Inghilterra è il Paese degli Elfi, gli elfi non sono gli Angli. Tutte le espressioni che si possono usare come fili conduttori attraverso quel groviglio di tradizioni sono più o meno espressioni latine. E in tutta la nostra lingua non vi era parola più romana di ‘romance’, romanzo.
Le legioni romane lasciarono la Britannia nel quarto secolo. Ciò non significava che la civiltà romana la lasciasse; ma significava che tale civiltà rimaneva assai più esposta sia alla contaminazione sia all’attacco. Il cristianesimo era quasi certamente giunto in Britannia, non per altre vie invero che quelle stabilite da Roma, ma di sicuro molto prima della missione romana ufficiale di Gregorio Magno. Esso era stato di certo in gran parte sommerso dalle successive invasioni pagane delle coste indifese. Si può allora ragionevolmente sostenere che qui la presa tanto dell’Impero quanto della sua nuova religione fosse più debole che altrove, e che la descrizione della civiltà generale fatta nel capitolo precedente sia proporzionalmente irrilevante. Questa, tuttavia, non è la verità principale della questione.
Vi è un fatto fondamentale che occorre comprendere riguardo all’intero di questo periodo. Eppure un uomo moderno deve quasi capovolgere la propria mente per intenderlo. Quasi ogni uomo moderno ha nella testa un’associazione fra la libertà e il futuro. L’intera cultura del nostro tempo è stata piena della nozione di un ‘Buon Tempo che Viene.’ Ora, l’intera cultura dei Secoli Bui era piena della nozione di un ‘Buon Tempo che Se ne Va.’ Essi guardavano indietro a un antico illuminismo e in avanti a nuovi pregiudizi. Nel nostro tempo è sorta una lite fra la fede e la speranza — che forse dev’essere sanata dalla carità. Ma essi si trovavano in altra condizione. Speravano — ma si può dire che speravano nel ieri. Tutti i moventi che oggi fanno di un uomo un progressista, allora facevano di un uomo un conservatore. Quanto più egli poteva serbare del passato, tanto più aveva una legge equa e uno Stato libero; quanto più cedeva al futuro, tanto più doveva sopportare ignoranza e privilegio. Tutto ciò che chiamiamo ragione era tutt’uno con tutto ciò che chiamiamo reazione. E questo è il filo che dobbiamo portare con noi attraverso le vite di tutti i grandi uomini dei Secoli Bui: di Alfredo, di Beda, di Dunstano. Se il più estremo repubblicano moderno fosse ricollocato in quel periodo, sarebbe un papista o addirittura un imperialista altrettanto estremo. Poiché il Papa era ciò che restava dell’Impero; e l’Impero ciò che restava della Repubblica.
Possiamo dunque paragonare l’uomo di quel tempo a colui che si è lasciato alle spalle libere città e persino liberi campi, ed è costretto ad avanzare verso una foresta. E la foresta è la metafora più calzante, non solo perché era davvero quella selvaggia vegetazione europea fessa qua e là dalle strade romane, ma anche perché alle foreste è stata sempre associata un’altra idea, che crebbe man mano che l’ordine romano si disgregava. L’idea delle foreste era l’idea dell’incantesimo. Vi era una nozione di cose che sono duplici o diverse da sé stesse, di bestie che si comportano come uomini e non semplicemente, come direbbero gli spiriti arguti moderni, di uomini che si comportano come bestie. Ma è proprio qui che è più necessario ricordare che un’età della ragione aveva preceduto l’età della magia. Il pilastro centrale che ha sostenuto da allora la casa favolosa della nostra immaginazione è stato l’idea del cavaliere civilizzato tra i selvaggi incantesimi; le avventure di un uomo ancora sano di mente in un mondo impazzito.
La cosa successiva da notare in questa materia è la seguente: che in questo tempo barbarico nessuno degli eroi è barbarico. Sono eroi soltanto se sono antibarbarici. Uomini reali o mitici, o più probabilmente entrambe le cose, divennero onnipresenti come dèi in mezzo al popolo, e s’imposero nella più fioca memoria e nel più breve annale, esattamente in proporzione a quanto avevano domato la follia pagana del tempo e conservato la razionalità cristiana che era venuta da Roma. Artù ha il suo nome perché uccise i pagani; i pagani che uccisero lui non hanno nome alcuno. Inglesi che non sanno nulla della storia inglese, ma meno che nulla della storia irlandese, hanno pur sentito in un modo o nell’altro parlare di Brian Boru, benché lo scrivano Boroo e sembrino avere l’impressione che sia una freddura. È una freddura la cui sottigliezza non avrebbero mai potuto gustare, se re Brian non avesse spezzato i pagani in Irlanda nella grande Battaglia di Clontarf. Il comune lettore inglese non avrebbe mai sentito parlare di Olaf di Norvegia se costui non avesse ‘predicato il Vangelo con la spada’; né del Cid se questi non avesse combattuto contro la Mezzaluna. E sebbene Alfredo il Grande sembri aver meritato il suo titolo anche come personalità, egli non fu tanto grande quanto l’opera che aveva da compiere.
But the paradox remains that Arthur is more real than Alfred. For the age is the age of legends. Towards these legends most men adopt by instinct a sane attitude; and, of the two, credulity is certainly much more sane than incredulity. It does not much matter whether most of the stories are true; and (as in such cases as Bacon and Shakespeare) to realize that the question does not matter is the first step towards answering it correctly. But before the reader dismisses anything like an attempt to tell the earlier history of the country by its legends, he will do well to keep two principles in mind, both of them tending to correct the crude and very thoughtless scepticism which has made this part of the story so sterile. The nineteenth-century historians went on the curious principle of dismissing all people of whom tales are told, and concentrating upon people of whom nothing is told. Thus, Arthur is made utterly impersonal because all legends are lies, but somebody of the type of Hengist is made quite an important personality, merely because nobody thought him important enough to lie about. Now this is the reverse of all common sense. A great many witty sayings are attributed to Talleyrand which were really said by somebody else. But they would not be so attributed if Talleyrand had been a fool, still less if he had been a fable. That fictitious stories are told about a person is, nine times out of ten, extremely good evidence that there was somebody to tell them about. Indeed some allow that marvellous things were done, and that there may have been a man named Arthur at the time in which they were done; but here, so far as I am concerned, the distinction becomes rather dim. I do not understand the attitude which holds that there was an Ark and a man named Noah, but cannot believe in the existence of Noah’s Ark.
The other fact to be remembered is that scientific research for the last few years has worked steadily in the direction of confirming and not dissipating the legends of the populace. To take only the obvious instance, modern excavators with modern spades have found a solid stone labyrinth in Crete, like that associated with the Minatour, which was conceived as being as cloudy a fable as the Chimera. To most people this would have seemed quite as frantic as finding the roots of Jack’s Beanstalk or the skeletons in Bluebeard’s cupboard, yet it is simply the fact. Finally, a truth to be remembered which scarcely ever is remembered in estimating the past. It is the paradox that the past is always present: yet it is not what was, but whatever seems to have been; for all the past is part of faith. What did they believe of their fathers? In this matter new discoveries are useless because they are new. We may find men wrong in what they thought they were, but we cannot find them wrong in what they thought they thought. It is therefore very practical to put in a few words, if possible, something of what a man of these islands in the Dark Ages would have said about his ancestors and his inheritance. I will attempt here to put some of the simpler things in their order of importance as he would have seen them; and if we are to understand our father who first made this country anything like itself, it is most important that we should remember that if this was not their real past, it was their real memory.
After that blessed crime, as the wit of mystics called it, which was for these men hardly second to the creation of the world, St. Joseph of Arimathea, one of the few followers of the new religion who seem to have been wealthy, set sail as a missionary, and after long voyages came to that litter of little islands which seemed to the men of the Mediterranean something like the last clouds of the sunset. He came up upon the western and wilder side of that wild and western land, and made his way to a valley which through all the oldest records is called Avalon. Something of rich rains and warmth in its westland meadows, or something in some lost pagan traditions about it, made it persistently regarded as a kind of Earthly Paradise. Arthur, after being slain at Lyonesse, is carried here, as if to heaven. Here the pilgrim planted his staff in the soil; and it took root as a tree that blossoms on Christmas Day.
A mystical materialism marked Christianity from its birth; the very soul of it was a body. Among the stoical philosophies and oriental negations that were its first foes it fought fiercely and particularly for a supernatural freedom to cure concrete maladies by concrete substances. Hence the scattering of relics was everywhere like the scattering of seed. All who took their mission from the divine tragedy bore tangible fragments which became the gems of churches and cities. St. Joseph carried the cup which held the wine of the Last Supper and the blood of the Crucifixion to that shrine in Avalon which we now call Glastonbury; and it became the heart of a whole universe of legends and romances, not only for Britain but for Europe. Throughout this tremendous and branching tradition it is called the Holy Grail. The vision of it was especially the reward of that ring of powerful paladins whom King Arthur feasted at a Round Table, a symbol imitated or invented by mediaeval knighthood. Both the cup and the table are of vast importance emblematically in the psychology of the chivalric experiment. The idea of a round table is not merely universality but equality. It has in it, modified of course, by other tendencies to differentiation, the same idea that exists in the very word ‘peers,’ as given to the knights of Charlemagne. In this the Round Table is as Roman as the round arch, which might also serve as a type; for instead of being one barbaric rock merely rolled on the others, the king was rather the keystone of an arch. But to this tradition of a level of dignity was added something unearthly that was from Rome, but not of it; the privilege that inverted all privileges; the glimpse of heaven which seemed almost as capricious as fairyland; the flying chalice which was veiled from the highest of all the heroes, and which appeared to one knight who was hardly more than a child.
Rightly or wrongly, this romance established Britain for after centuries as a country with a chivalrous past. Britain had been a mirror of universal knighthood. This fact, or fancy, is of colossal import in all ensuing affairs, especially the affairs of barbarians. These and numberless other local legends are indeed for us buried by the forests of popular fancies that have grown out of them. It is all the harder for the serious modern mind because our fathers felt at home with these tales, and therefore took liberties with them. Probably the rhyme which runs,
‘When good King Arthur ruled this land He was a noble king, He stole three pecks of barley meal,’
is much nearer the true mediaeval note than the aristocratic stateliness of Tennyson. But about all these grotesques of the popular fancy there is one last thing to be remembered. It must especially be remembered by those who would dwell exclusively on documents, and take no note of tradition at all. Wild as would be the results of credulity concerning all the old wives’ tales, it would not be so wild as the errors that can arise from trusting to written evidence when there is not enough of it. Now the whole written evidence for the first parts of our history would go into a small book. A very few details are mentioned, and none are explained. A fact thus standing alone, without the key of contemporary thought, may be very much more misleading than any fable. To know what word an archaic scribe wrote without being sure of what thing he meant, may produce a result that is literally mad. Thus, for instance, it would be unwise to accept literally the tale that St. Helena was not only a native of Colchester, but was a daughter of Old King Cole. But it would not be very unwise; not so unwise as some things that are deduced from documents. The natives of Colchester certainly did honour to St. Helena, and might have had a king named Cole. According to the more serious story, the saint’s father was an inn-keeper; and the only recorded action of Cole is well within the resources of that calling. It would not be nearly so unwise as to deduce from the written word, as some critic of the future may do, that the natives of Colchester were oysters.
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Ma resta il paradosso che Artù sia più reale di Alfredo. Poiché l’epoca è l’epoca delle leggende. Verso queste leggende la maggior parte degli uomini assume per istinto un atteggiamento sano; e, delle due, la credulità è certo assai più sana dell’incredulità. Non importa molto se la maggior parte delle storie siano vere; e (come in casi quali Bacone e Shakespeare) rendersi conto che la questione non importa è il primo passo verso il risponderle correttamente. Ma prima che il lettore respinga qualcosa come un tentativo di raccontare la più antica storia del paese attraverso le sue leggende, farà bene a tenere a mente due princìpi, entrambi tendenti a correggere lo scetticismo rozzo e assai sconsiderato che ha reso questa parte della storia tanto sterile. Gli storici dell’Ottocento procedettero secondo il curioso principio di respingere tutte le persone di cui si narrano racconti, e di concentrarsi su persone di cui nulla si narra. Così, Artù è reso del tutto impersonale perché tutte le leggende sono menzogne, ma qualcuno del tipo di Hengist è reso un personaggio piuttosto importante, semplicemente perché nessuno lo ritenne abbastanza importante da mentire sul suo conto. Ora questo è il rovescio di ogni buon senso. Moltissimi detti spiritosi sono attribuiti a Talleyrand che in realtà furono pronunciati da qualcun altro. Ma non gli sarebbero attribuiti se Talleyrand fosse stato uno sciocco, e ancor meno se fosse stato una favola. Che si raccontino storie fittizie su una persona è, nove volte su dieci, un’ottima prova che vi era qualcuno di cui raccontarle. Anzi, alcuni ammettono che furono compiute cose meravigliose, e che vi possa essere stato un uomo di nome Artù nel tempo in cui furono compiute; ma qui, per quanto mi riguarda, la distinzione diviene piuttosto sfumata. Non comprendo l’atteggiamento di chi sostiene che vi fu un’Arca e un uomo di nome Noè, ma non riesce a credere all’esistenza dell’Arca di Noè.
L’altro fatto da ricordare è che la ricerca scientifica negli ultimi anni ha operato costantemente nella direzione di confermare, e non di dissipare, le leggende del popolo. Per prendere soltanto l’esempio più ovvio, moderni scavatori con moderne vanghe hanno trovato a Creta un solido labirinto di pietra, simile a quello associato al Minotauro, che era stato immaginato come una favola tanto nebulosa quanto la Chimera. Alla maggior parte della gente ciò sarebbe parso altrettanto folle che trovare le radici del Fagiolo Magico di Jack o gli scheletri nell’armadio di Barbablù, eppure è semplicemente un fatto. Infine, una verità da ricordare che quasi mai si ricorda nel giudicare il passato. È il paradosso che il passato è sempre presente: eppure non è ciò che fu, ma ciò che sembra essere stato; poiché tutto il passato è parte della fede. Che cosa credevano dei loro padri? In questa materia le nuove scoperte sono inutili proprio perché sono nuove. Possiamo scoprire che gli uomini si sbagliavano su ciò che pensavano di essere, ma non possiamo scoprire che si sbagliavano su ciò che pensavano di pensare. È perciò assai pratico esprimere in poche parole, se possibile, qualcosa di ciò che un uomo di queste isole nei Secoli Bui avrebbe detto dei suoi antenati e della sua eredità. Tenterò qui di disporre alcune delle cose più semplici nel loro ordine d’importanza come egli le avrebbe viste; e se vogliamo comprendere il nostro padre che per primo rese questo paese qualcosa di simile a se stesso, è di somma importanza che ricordiamo che, se questo non fu il loro passato reale, fu la loro reale memoria.
Dopo quel benedetto delitto, come lo chiamò l’arguzia dei mistici, che per questi uomini era di poco inferiore alla creazione del mondo, san Giuseppe d’Arimatea, uno dei pochi seguaci della nuova religione che paiono essere stati ricchi, salpò come missionario, e dopo lunghi viaggi giunse a quella nidiata di piccole isole che agli uomini del Mediterraneo parevano qualcosa come le ultime nubi del tramonto. Approdò sul lato occidentale e più selvaggio di quella terra selvaggia e occidentale, e si diresse verso una valle che in tutti i più antichi documenti è chiamata Avalon. Qualcosa di ricche piogge e di tepore nei suoi prati d’occidente, o qualcosa in certe perdute tradizioni pagane a suo riguardo, fece sì che fosse costantemente considerata una specie di Paradiso Terrestre. Artù, dopo essere stato ucciso a Lyonesse, vi è portato, come in cielo. Qui il pellegrino piantò il suo bastone nel suolo; ed esso mise radici come un albero che fiorisce il giorno di Natale.
Un materialismo mistico contrassegnò il Cristianesimo fin dalla nascita; la sua stessa anima era un corpo. Tra le filosofie stoiche e le negazioni orientali che furono i suoi primi nemici esso combatté fieramente e in particolare per una soprannaturale libertà di guarire mali concreti con sostanze concrete. Di qui lo spargersi delle reliquie ovunque come lo spargersi del seme. Tutti coloro che presero la loro missione dalla divina tragedia recarono tangibili frammenti che divennero le gemme di chiese e città. San Giuseppe portò la coppa che aveva contenuto il vino dell’Ultima Cena e il sangue della Crocifissione a quel santuario in Avalon che ora chiamiamo Glastonbury; ed essa divenne il cuore di un intero universo di leggende e romanzi, non solo per la Britannia ma per l’Europa. In tutta questa immensa e ramificata tradizione essa è chiamata il Santo Graal. La visione di esso era specialmente la ricompensa di quella cerchia di potenti paladini che Re Artù convitava a una Tavola Rotonda, un simbolo imitato o inventato dalla cavalleria medievale. Sia la coppa sia la tavola sono di vastissima importanza emblematica nella psicologia dell’esperimento cavalleresco. L’idea di una tavola rotonda non è soltanto universalità ma uguaglianza. Vi è in essa, modificata s’intende da altre tendenze alla differenziazione, la stessa idea che esiste nella parola stessa ‘pari,’ quale data ai cavalieri di Carlo Magno. In ciò la Tavola Rotonda è romana quanto l’arco a tutto sesto, che potrebbe anch’esso servire da tipo; poiché, invece di essere una sola roccia barbarica semplicemente rotolata sulle altre, il re era piuttosto la chiave di volta di un arco. Ma a questa tradizione di un livello di dignità si aggiunse qualcosa di ultraterreno che veniva da Roma, ma non era di Roma; il privilegio che rovesciava tutti i privilegi; il barlume di cielo che pareva quasi capriccioso come il regno delle fate; il calice volante che era velato al più alto di tutti gli eroi, e che apparve a un cavaliere che era poco più che un fanciullo.
Giustamente o a torto, questo romanzo consacrò la Britannia per i secoli a venire come un paese dal passato cavalleresco. La Britannia era stata uno specchio della cavalleria universale. Questo fatto, o fantasia, è di colossale importanza in tutte le vicende seguenti, specialmente le vicende dei barbari. Queste e innumerevoli altre leggende locali sono in verità per noi sepolte dalle foreste di fantasie popolari che ne sono cresciute. Tanto più è arduo per la seria mente moderna in quanto i nostri padri si sentivano a proprio agio con questi racconti, e perciò si prendevano libertà con essi. Probabilmente la filastrocca che recita,
‘Quando il buon Re Artù governava questa terra Era un nobile re, Rubò tre stai di farina d’orzo,’
è assai più vicina alla vera nota medievale che non la solennità aristocratica di Tennyson. Ma su tutte queste grottesche della fantasia popolare vi è un’ultima cosa da ricordare. Deve essere ricordata specialmente da coloro che vorrebbero soffermarsi esclusivamente sui documenti, e non tener conto affatto della tradizione. Per quanto sfrenati sarebbero i risultati della credulità riguardo a tutte le favole delle vecchie comari, non sarebbero tanto sfrenati quanto gli errori che possono sorgere dal fidarsi della prova scritta quando non ve n’è abbastanza. Ora, l’intera prova scritta per le prime parti della nostra storia entrerebbe in un piccolo libro. Pochissimi dettagli sono menzionati, e nessuno è spiegato. Un fatto che sta così solo, senza la chiave del pensiero contemporaneo, può essere assai più fuorviante di qualsiasi favola. Sapere quale parola scrisse un arcaico scriba senza essere certi di che cosa intendesse, può produrre un risultato che è letteralmente folle. Così, per esempio, sarebbe imprudente accettare alla lettera il racconto che sant’Elena non fosse soltanto nativa di Colchester, ma fosse figlia del vecchio Re Cole. Ma non sarebbe molto imprudente; non tanto imprudente quanto certe cose che si deducono dai documenti. I nativi di Colchester certamente resero onore a sant’Elena, e potrebbero aver avuto un re di nome Cole. Secondo la più seria versione, il padre della santa era un locandiere; e la sola azione registrata di Cole rientra bene nelle risorse di quel mestiere. Non sarebbe affatto tanto imprudente quanto dedurre dalla parola scritta, come potrà fare qualche critico del futuro, che i nativi di Colchester fossero ostriche.
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IV
THE DEFEAT OF THE BARBARIANS
It is a quaint accident that we employ the word ‘short-sighted’ as a condemnation; but not the word ‘long-sighted,’ which we should probably use, if at all, as a compliment. Yet the one is as much a malady of vision as the other. We rightly say, in rebuke of a small-minded modernity, that it is very short-sighted to be indifferent to all this is historic. But it is as disastrously long-sighted to be interested only in what is prehistoric. And this disaster has befallen a large proportion of the learned who grope in the darkness of unrecorded epochs for the roots of their favourite race or races. The wars, the enslavements, the primitive marriage customs, the colossal migrations and massacres upon which their theories repose, are no part of history or even of legend. And rather than trust with entire simplicity to these it would be infinitely wiser to trust to legend of the loosest and most local sort. In any case, it is well to record even so simple a conclusion as that what is prehistoric is unhistorical.
But there is another way in which common sense can be brought to the criticism of some prodigious racial theories. To employ the same figure, suppose the scientific historians explain the historic centuries in terms of a prehistoric division between short-sighted and long-sighted men. They could cite their instances and illustrations. They would certainly explain the curiosity of language I mentioned first, as showing that the short-sighted were the conquered race, and their name therefore a term of contempt. They could give us very graphic pictures of the rude tribal war. They could show how the long-sighted people were always cut to pieces in hand-to-hand struggles with axe and knife; until, with the invention of bows and arrows, the advantage veered to the long-sighted, and their enemies were shot down in droves. I could easily write a ruthless romance about it, and still more easily a ruthless anthropological theory. According to that thesis which refers all moral to material changes, they could explain the tradition that old people grow conservative in politics by the well-known fact that old people grow more long-sighted. But I think there might be one thing about this theory which would stump us, and might even, if it be possible, stump them. Suppose it were pointed out that through all the three thousand years of recorded history, abounding in literature of every conceivable kind, there was not so much as a mention of the oculist question for which all had been dared and done. Suppose not one of the living or dead languages of mankind had so much as a word for ‘long-sighted’ or ‘short-sighted.’ Suppose, in short, the question that had torn the whole world in two was never even asked at all, until some spectacle-maker suggested it somewhere about 1750. In that case I think we should find it hard to believe that this physical difference had really played so fundamental a part in human history. And that is exactly the case with the physical difference between the Celts, the Teutons and the Latins.
I know of no way in which fair-haired people can be prevented from falling in love with dark-haired people; and I do not believe that whether a man was long-headed or round-headed ever made much difference to any one who felt inclined to break his head. To all mortal appearance, in all mortal records and experience, people seem to have killed or spared, married or refrained from marriage, made kings or made slaves, with reference to almost any other consideration except this one. There was the love of a valley or a village, a site or a family; there were enthusiasms for a prince and his hereditary office; there were passions rooted in locality, special emotions about sea-fold or mountain-fold; there were historic memories of a cause or an alliance; there was, more than all, the tremendous test of religion. But of a cause like that of the Celts or Teutons, covering half the earth, there was little or nothing. Race was not only never at any given moment a motive, but it was never even an excuse. The Teutons never had a creed; they never had a cause; and it was only a few years ago that they began even to have a cant.
The orthodox modern historian, notably Green, remarks on the singularity of Britain in being alone of all Roman provinces wholly cleared and repeopled by a Germanic race. He does not entertain, as an escape from the singularity of this even, the possibility that it never happened. In the same spirit he deals with the little that can be quoted of the Teutonic society. His ideal picture of it is completed in small touches which even an amateur can detect as dubious. Thus he will touch on the Teuton with a phrase like ‘the basis of their society was the free man’; and on the Roman with a phrase like ‘the mines, if worked by forced labour, must have been a source of endless oppression.’ The simple fact being that the Roman and the Teuton both had slaves, he treats the Teuton free man as the only thing to be considered, not only then but now; and then goes out of his way to say that if the Roman treated his slaves badly, the slaves were badly treated. He expresses a ‘strange disappointment’ that Gildas, the only British chronicler, does not describe the great Teutonic system. In the opinion of Gildas, a modification of that of Gregory, it was a case of non Angli sed diaboli. The modern Teutonist is ‘disappointed’ that the contemporary authority saw nothing in his Teutons except wolves, dogs, and whelps from the kennel of barbarism. But it is at least faintly tenable that there was nothing else to be seen.
In any case when St. Augustine came to the largely barbarized land, with what may be called the second of the three great southern visitations which civilized these islands, he did not see any ethnological problems, whatever there may have been to be seen. With him or his converts the chain of literary testimony is taken up again; and we must look at the world as they saw it. He found a king ruling in Kent, beyond whose borders lay other kingdoms of about the same size, the kings of which were all apparently heathen. The names of these kings were mostly what we call Teutonic names; but those who write the almost entirely hagiological records did not say, and apparently did not ask, whether the populations were in this sense of unmixed blood. It is at least possible that, as on the Continent, the kings and courts were almost the only Teutonic element. The Christians found converts, they found patrons, they found persecutors; but they did not find Ancient Britons because they did not look for them; and if they moved among pure Anglo-Saxons they had not the gratification of knowing it. There was, indeed, what all history attests, a marked change of feeling towards the marches of Wales. But all history also attests that this is always found, apart from any difference in race, in the transition from the lowlands to the mountain country. But of all the things they found the thing that counts most in English history is this: that some of the kingdoms at least did correspond to genuine human divisions, which not only existed then but which exist now. Northumbria is still a truer thing than Northumberland. Sussex is still Sussex; Essex is still Essex. And that third Saxon kingdom whose name is not even to be found upon the map, the kingdom of Wessex, is called the West Country and is to-day the most real of them all.
IV
LA SCONFITTA DEI BARBARI
È un curioso caso che noi usiamo la parola «miopia» come condanna; ma non la parola «ipermetropia», che probabilmente useremmo, se mai, come complimento. Eppure l’una è tanto quanto l’altra una malattia della vista. Abbiamo ragione di dire, in rimprovero a una modernità di piccola veduta, che è molto miope essere indifferenti a tutto ciò che è storico. Ma è disastrosamente ipermetrope interessarsi solo a ciò che è preistorico. E questo disastro è capitato a un’ampia proporzione dei dotti che brancolano nelle tenebre delle epoche non registrate per trovare le radici della loro razza o razze preferite. Le guerre, gli schiavizzamenti, i primitivi costumi del matrimonio, le colossali migrazioni e massacri su cui si basano le loro teorie, non fanno parte della storia o neppure della leggenda. E piuttosto che fidarsi con intera semplicità di queste cose sarebbe infinitamente più saggio fidarsi delle leggende del tipo più libero e locale. In ogni caso è bene registrare anche una conclusione così semplice come quella che ciò che è preistorico è non storico.
Ma c’è un altro modo di applicare il buon senso alla critica di alcune teorie razziali prodigiose. Per usare la stessa figura retorica, supponiamo che gli storici scientifici spieghino i secoli storici in termini di una divisione preistorica tra uomini miopi e ipermetropi. Potrebbero citare esempi ed illustrazioni. Spiegherebbero certamente la curiosità linguistica a cui ho accennato prima, come prova che i miopi erano la razza conquistata, e il loro nome quindi un termine di disprezzo. Ci potrebbero dare descrizioni molto vivide della guerra tribale selvaggia. Potrebbero mostrare come gli ipermetropi fossero sempre fatti a pezzi nelle lotte corpo a corpo con asce e coltelli; fino a quando, con l’invenzione di archi e frecce, il vantaggio cambiò a favore degli ipermetropi, e i loro nemici furono abbattuti a centinaia. Potrei facilmente scrivere un romanzo spietato su questo tema, e ancora più facilmente una teoria antropologica spietata. Secondo quella tesi che riferisce tutto il morale ai cambiamenti materiali, potrebbero spiegare la tradizione che i vecchi diventano conservatori in politica con la nota ben nota che gli anziani diventano più ipermetropi. Ma penso che ci possa essere una cosa riguardo a questa teoria che ci lascerebbe di stucco, e potrebbe anche, se possibile, lasciarli di stucco loro. Supponiamo che si facesse notare che attraverso tutti i tremila anni di storia registrata, abbondante in letteratura di ogni tipo concepibile, non ci fosse neanche un accenno alla questione oculistica per la quale tutto era stato osato e fatto. Supponiamo che nessuna delle lingue vive o morte dell’umanità avesse neanche una parola per “ipermetrope” o “miopia”. In breve, supponiamo che la questione che aveva diviso il mondo intero in due non fosse mai stata posta affatto, fino a quando qualche fabbricante di occhiali non l’avesse suggerita da qualche parte intorno al 1750. In tal caso penso che troveremmo difficile credere che questa differenza fisica abbia davvero giocato un ruolo così fondamentale nella storia umana. E questo è esattamente il caso con la differenza fisica tra i Celti, i Teutoni e i Latini.
Non conosco alcun modo per impedire alle persone dai capelli chiari di innamorarsi di quelle dai capelli scuri; e non credo che il fatto che un uomo avesse la testa allungata o rotonda abbia mai fatto molta differenza a chiunque si sentisse incline a rompergliela. A quanto sembra, in tutti i documenti e le esperienze umane, le persone hanno ucciso o risparmiato, sposato o astenuto dal matrimonio, fatto re o reso schiavi, facendo riferimento a quasi ogni altra considerazione tranne questa. C’era l’amore per una valle o un villaggio, un luogo o una famiglia; c’erano entusiasmi per un principe e il suo ufficio ereditario; c’erano passioni radicate nella località, emozioni speciali riguardo alla piega del mare o della montagna; c’erano ricordi storici di una causa o di un’alleanza; c’era, più di tutto, la tremenda prova della religione. Ma per quanto riguarda una causa come quella dei Celti o dei Tedeschi, che copriva metà del mondo, non c’era nulla o quasi. La razza non fu mai in alcun momento un motivo, né tantomeno una scusa. I Tedeschi non ebbero mai una credenza; non ebbero mai una causa; e solo pochi anni fa iniziarono ad avere anche un gergo.
Lo storico moderno ortodosso, in particolare Green, osserva la singolarità della Gran Bretagna per essere l’unica di tutte le province romane completamente ripopolata da una razza germanica. Non prende in considerazione, come via d’uscita dalla singolarità di questo evento, la possibilità che non sia mai accaduto. Nello stesso spirito tratta il poco che si può citare della società teutonica. Il suo quadro ideale è completato da piccoli tocchi che anche un dilettante può riconoscere come dubbi. Così tocca il Teutone con una frase del tipo “la base della loro società era l’uomo libero”; e sul Romano con una frase del tipo “le miniere, se lavorate con manodopera forzata, dovevano essere fonte di oppressione infinita.” Il fatto semplice è che sia i Romani che i Teutoni avevano schiavi, tratta l’uomo libero teutonico come l’unica cosa da considerare, non solo allora ma anche ora; e poi si spinge a dire che se il Romano trattava male i suoi schiavi, gli schiavi erano maltrattati. Esprime una “strana delusione” per il fatto che Gildas, l’unico cronista britannico, non descriva il grande sistema teutonico. Secondo Gildas, in una versione modificata di quella di Gregorio, era un caso di non Angli sed diaboli. Il moderno germanista è “deluso” che l’autorità contemporanea non vedesse nulla nei suoi Teutoni se non lupi, cani, e cuccioli del canile della barbarie. Ma è almeno vagamente sostenibile che non ci fosse altro da vedere.
In ogni caso, quando Sant’Agostino giunse in quella terra in gran parte barbarizzata, con quella che si può chiamare la seconda delle tre grandi visite meridionali che civilizzarono queste isole, non vide alcun problema etnologico, qualunque cosa ci fosse da vedere. Con lui o con i suoi convertiti la catena della testimonianza letteraria è ripresa; e dobbiamo guardare il mondo come lo vedevano loro. Trovò un re che regnava nel Kent, oltre i cui confini si trovavano altri regni di dimensioni simili, i cui re erano tutti apparentemente pagani. I nomi di questi re erano per lo più quelli che noi chiamiamo nomi teutonici; ma coloro che scrivevano le registrazioni quasi interamente agiologiche non dicevano, e apparentemente non chiedevano, se le popolazioni fossero in questo senso di sangue puro. È almeno possibile che, come nel Continente, i re e le corti fossero quasi l’unico elemento teutonico. I cristiani trovarono convertiti, trovarono protettori, trovarono persecutori; ma non trovarono antichi britanni perché non li cercavano; e se si muovevano tra puri anglosassoni non avevano la soddisfazione di saperlo. C’era, infatti, ciò che tutta la storia attesta, un marcato cambiamento di sentimento verso i confini del Galles. Ma tutta la storia attesta anche che questo si trova sempre, indipendentemente da qualsiasi differenza di razza, nella transizione dalle pianure alla zona montuosa. Ma di tutte le cose che trovarono quella che conta di più nella storia inglese è questa: che almeno alcuni dei regni corrispondevano a vere divisioni umane, che non solo esistevano allora ma che esistono ancora oggi. La Northumbria è ancora una cosa più vera del Northumberland. Il Sussex è ancora il Sussex; l’Essex è ancora l’Essex. E quel terzo regno sassone il cui nome non si trova nemmeno sulla mappa, il regno di Wessex, è chiamato West Country ed è oggi il più reale di tutti.
The last of the heathen kingdoms to accept the cross was Mercia, which corresponds very roughly to what we call the Midlands. The unbaptized king, Penda, has even achieved a certain picturesqueness through this fact, and through the forays and furious ambitions which constituted the rest of his reputation; so much so that the other day one of those mystics who will believe anything but Christianity proposed to “continue the work of Penda” in Ealing: fortunately not on any large scale. What that prince believed or disbelieved it is now impossible and perhaps unnecessary to discover; but the last stand of his central kingdom is not insignificant. The isolation of the Mercian was perhaps due to the fact that Christianity grew from the eastern and western coasts. The eastern growth was, of course, the Augustinian mission, which had already made Canterbury the spiritual capital of the island. The western grew from whatever was left of the British Christianity. The two clashed, not in creed but in customs; and the Augustinians ultimately prevailed. But the work from the west had already been enormous. It is possible that some prestige went with the possession of Glastonbury, which was like a piece of the Holy Land; but behind Glastonbury there was an even grander and more impressive power. There irradiated to all Europe at that time the glory of the golden age of Ireland. There the Celts were the classics of Christian art, opened in the Book of Kells four hundred years before its time. There the baptism of the whole people had been a spontaneous popular festival which reads almost like a picnic; and thence came crowds of enthusiasts for the Gospel almost literally like men running with good news. This must be remembered through the development of that dark dual destiny that has bound us to Ireland: for doubts have been thrown on a national unity which was not from the first a political unity. But if Ireland was not one kingdom it was in reality one bishopric. Ireland was not converted but created by Christianity, as a stone church is created; and all its elements were gathered as under a garment, under the genius of St. Patrick. It was the more individual because the religion was mere religion, without the secular conveniences. Ireland was never Roman, and it was always Romanist.
But indeed this is, in a lesser degree, true of our more immediate subject. It is the paradox of this time that only the unworldly things had any worldly success. The politics are a nightmare; the kings are unstable and the kingdoms shifting; and we are really never on solid ground except on consecrated ground. The material ambitions are not always unfruitful but nearly always unfulfilled. The castles are all castles in the air; it is only the churches that are built on the ground. The visionaries are the only practical men, as in that extraordinary thing, the monastery, which was, in many ways, to be the key of our history. The time was to come when it was to be rooted out of our country with a curious and careful violence; and the modern English reader has therefore a very feeble idea of it and hence of the ages in which it worked. Even in these pages a word or two about its primary nature is therefore quite indispensable.
In the tremendous testament of our religion there are present certain ideals that seem wilder than impieties, which have in later times produced wild sects professing an almost inhuman perfection on certain points; as in the Quakers who renounce the right of self-defence, or the Communists who refuse any personal possessions. Rightly or wrongly, the Christian Church had from the first dealt with these visions as being special spiritual adventures which were to the adventurous. She reconciled them with natural human life by calling them specially good, without admitting that the neglect of them was necessarily bad. She took the view that it takes all sorts to make a world, even the religious world, and used the man who chose to go without arms, family, or property as a sort of exception that proved the rule. Now the interesting fact is that he really did prove it. This madman who would not mind his own business becomes the business man of the age. The very word “monk” is a revolution, for it means solitude and came to mean community—one might call it sociability. What happened was that this communal life became a sort of reserve and refuge behind the individual life; a hospital for every kind of hospitality. We shall see later how this same function of the common life was given to the common land. It is hard to find an image for it in individualist times; but in private life we most of us know the friend of the family who helps it by being outside, like a fairy godmother. It is not merely flippant to say that monks and nuns stood to mankind as a sort of sanctified league of aunts and uncles. It is a commonplace that they did everything that nobody else would do; that the abbeys kept the world’s diary, faced the plagues of all flesh, taught the first technical arts, preserved the pagan literature, and, above all, kept the poor from the most distant sight of their modern despair. We still find it necessary to have a reserve of philanthropists, but we trust it to men who have made themselves rich, not to men who have made themselves poor. Finally, the abbots and abbesses were elective. They introduced representative government, unknown to ancient democracy, and in itself a semi-sacramental idea. If we could look from the outside at our own institutions, we should see that the very notion of turning a thousand men into one large man walking to Westminster is not only an act of faith, but a fairy tale. The fruitful and effective history of Anglo-Saxon England would be almost entirely a history of its monasteries. Mile by mile, and almost man by man, they taught and enriched the land. And then, about the beginning of the ninth century, there came a turn, as of the twinkling of an eye, and it seemed that all their work was in vain.
L’ultimo dei regni pagani ad accettare la croce fu la Mercia, che corrisponde assai approssimativamente a ciò che noi chiamiamo le Midlands. Il re non battezzato, Penda, ha perfino acquistato una certa pittoresca fama grazie a questo fatto, e alle scorrerie e alle furiose ambizioni che costituirono il resto della sua reputazione; a tal punto che l’altro giorno uno di quei mistici disposti a credere a qualunque cosa fuorché al cristianesimo si propose di “continuare l’opera di Penda” a Ealing: per fortuna non su vasta scala. Ciò in cui quel principe credesse o non credesse è ormai impossibile e forse superfluo scoprire; ma l’ultima resistenza del suo regno centrale non è priva di significato. L’isolamento del Merciano fu forse dovuto al fatto che il cristianesimo crebbe dalle coste orientali e occidentali. La crescita orientale fu, naturalmente, la missione agostiniana, che aveva già fatto di Canterbury la capitale spirituale dell’isola. Quella occidentale crebbe da ciò che restava del cristianesimo britannico. I due si scontrarono, non nel credo ma nelle consuetudini; e gli Agostiniani alla fine prevalsero. Ma l’opera venuta dall’occidente era già stata enorme. È possibile che un certo prestigio accompagnasse il possesso di Glastonbury, che era come un lembo della Terra Santa; ma dietro Glastonbury vi era una potenza ancora più grande e più imponente. Di là s’irradiava a tutta l’Europa in quel tempo la gloria dell’età aurea dell’Irlanda. Là i Celti furono i classici dell’arte cristiana, schiusa nel Libro di Kells quattrocento anni prima del suo tempo. Là il battesimo di un intero popolo era stato una spontanea festa popolare che si legge quasi come una scampagnata; e di là venivano folle di entusiasti del Vangelo quasi letteralmente come uomini che corrono recando buone notizie. Ciò va ricordato lungo lo svolgersi di quel tenebroso duplice destino che ci ha legati all’Irlanda: poiché sono stati gettati dubbi su un’unità nazionale che fin da principio non fu un’unità politica. Ma se l’Irlanda non era un solo regno, in realtà era un solo vescovado. L’Irlanda non fu convertita ma creata dal cristianesimo, come si crea una chiesa di pietra; e tutti i suoi elementi furono raccolti come sotto una veste, sotto il genio di San Patrizio. Fu tanto più individuale in quanto la religione era mera religione, senza le comodità secolari. L’Irlanda non fu mai romana, e fu sempre romanista.
Ma in verità ciò è, in grado minore, vero anche del nostro soggetto più immediato. È il paradosso di questo tempo che solo le cose ultraterrene avessero un qualche successo terreno. La politica è un incubo; i re sono instabili e i regni mutevoli; e non siamo mai davvero su terreno saldo se non su terreno consacrato. Le ambizioni materiali non sono sempre infruttuose, ma quasi sempre incompiute. I castelli sono tutti castelli in aria; sono soltanto le chiese a essere costruite sul suolo. I visionari sono gli unici uomini pratici, come in quella straordinaria cosa che è il monastero, il quale doveva essere, per molti versi, la chiave della nostra storia. Doveva venire il tempo in cui esso sarebbe stato estirpato dal nostro paese con una violenza curiosa e minuziosa; e il lettore inglese moderno ha perciò un’idea assai fioca di esso e quindi delle epoche in cui operò. Anche in queste pagine una parola o due sulla sua natura primaria è dunque del tutto indispensabile.
Nel formidabile testamento della nostra religione sono presenti certi ideali che sembrano più folli delle empietà, i quali hanno in tempi più tardi prodotto sette esaltate che professano una perfezione quasi disumana su determinati punti; come nei Quaccheri che rinunciano al diritto all’autodifesa, o nei Comunisti che rifiutano qualunque possesso personale. A torto o a ragione, la Chiesa cristiana aveva fin da principio trattato queste visioni come speciali avventure spirituali riservate agli avventurosi. Essa le riconciliava con la vita umana naturale definendole particolarmente buone, senza ammettere che trascurarle fosse necessariamente cattivo. Adottava la veduta che ci vuole di tutto per fare un mondo, persino il mondo religioso, e si serviva dell’uomo che sceglieva di andare senz’armi, famiglia o proprietà come di una sorta di eccezione che confermava la regola. Ora, il fatto interessante è che egli davvero la confermò. Questo folle che non voleva badare ai propri affari diventa l’uomo d’affari dell’epoca. La parola stessa “monaco” è una rivoluzione, poiché significa solitudine e giunse a significare comunità—si potrebbe dire socievolezza. Ciò che accadde fu che questa vita comunitaria divenne una sorta di riserva e di rifugio dietro la vita individuale; un ospedale per ogni specie di ospitalità. Vedremo più avanti come questa stessa funzione della vita comune fu attribuita alla terra comune. È difficile trovarne un’immagine in tempi individualisti; ma nella vita privata quasi tutti conosciamo l’amico di famiglia che l’aiuta stando al di fuori, come una fata madrina. Non è meramente frivolo dire che i monaci e le monache stavano all’umanità come una sorta di lega santificata di zii e zie. È un luogo comune che facessero tutto ciò che nessun altro voleva fare; che le abbazie tenessero il diario del mondo, affrontassero le pestilenze di ogni carne, insegnassero le prime arti tecniche, preservassero la letteratura pagana e, soprattutto, tenessero i poveri lontani anche dalla più remota vista della loro moderna disperazione. Troviamo ancora necessario avere una riserva di filantropi, ma la affidiamo a uomini che si sono fatti ricchi, non a uomini che si sono fatti poveri. Infine, gli abati e le badesse erano elettivi. Introdussero il governo rappresentativo, ignoto all’antica democrazia, e in sé un’idea semi-sacramentale. Se potessimo guardare dall’esterno le nostre stesse istituzioni, vedremmo che la nozione stessa di trasformare mille uomini in un solo grande uomo che cammina verso Westminster non è soltanto un atto di fede, ma una fiaba. La feconda ed efficace storia dell’Inghilterra anglosassone sarebbe quasi interamente una storia dei suoi monasteri. Miglio per miglio, e quasi uomo per uomo, essi istruirono e arricchirono la terra. E poi, verso l’inizio del nono secolo, sopraggiunse una svolta, come in un batter d’occhio, e parve che tutta la loro opera fosse vana.
The outer world of universal anarchy that lay beyond Christendom heaved another of its colossal and almost cosmic waves and swept everything away. Through all the eastern gates, left open, as it were, by the first barbarian auxiliaries, burst a plague of seafaring savages from Denmark and Scandinavia; and the recently baptized barbarians were again flooded by the unbaptized. All this time, it must be remembered, the actual central mechanism of Roman government had been running down like a click. It was really a race between the driving energy of the missionaries on the edges of the Empire and the galloping paralysis of the city at the centre. In the ninth century the heart had stopped before the hands could bring help to it. All the monastic civilization which had grown up in Britain under a vague Roman protection perished unprotected. The toy kingdoms of the quarrelling Saxons were smashed like sticks; Guthrum, the pirate chief, slew St. Edmund, assumed the crown of East England, took tribute from the panic of Mercia, and towered in menace over Wessex, the last of the Christian lands. The story that follows, page after page, is only the story of its despair and its destruction. The story is a string of Christian defeats alternated with victories so vain as to be more desolate than defeats. It is only in one of these, the fine but fruitless victory at Ashdown, that we first see in the dim struggle, in a desperate and secondary part, the figure who has given his title to the ultimate turning of the tide. For the victor was not then the king, but only the king’s younger brother. There is, from the first, something humble and even accidental about Alfred. He was a great understudy. The interest of his daily life lies in this: that he combined an almost commonplace coolness, and readiness for the ceaseless small bargains and shifting combinations of all that period, with the flaming patience of saints in times of persecution. While he would dare anything for the faith, he would bargain in anything except the faith. He was a conqueror, with no ambition; an author only too glad to be a translator; a simple, concentrated, wary man, watching the fortunes of one thing, which he piloted both boldly and cautiously, and which he saved at last.
He had disappeared after what appeared to be the final heathen triumph and settlement, and is supposed to have lurked like an outlaw in a lonely islet in the impenetrable marshlands of the Parret; towards those wild western lands to which aboriginal races are held to have been driven by fate itself. But Alfred, as he himself wrote in words that are his challenge to the period, held that a Christian man was unconcerned with fate. He began once more to draw to him the bows and spears of the broken levies of the western shires, especially the men of Somerset; and in the spring of 878 he flung them at the lines before the fenced camp of the victorious Danes at Ethandune. His sudden assault was as successful as that at Ashdown, and it was followed by a siege which was successful in a different and very definite sense. Guthrum, the conqueror of England, and all his important supports, were here penned behind their palisades, and when at last they surrendered the Danish conquest had come to an end. Guthrum was baptized, and the Treaty of Wedmore secured the clearance of Wessex. The modern reader will smile at the baptism, and turn with great interest to the terms of the treaty. In this acute attitude the modern reader will be vitally and hopelessly wrong. He must support the tedium of frequent references to the religious element in this part of English history, for without it there would never have been any English history at all. And nothing could clinch this truth more than the case of the Danes. In all the facts that followed, the baptism of Guthrum is really much more important than the Treaty of Wedmore. The treaty itself was a compromise, and even as such did not endure; a century afterwards a Danish king like Canute was really ruling in England. But though the Dane got the crown, he did not get rid of the cross. It was precisely Alfred’s religious exaction that remained unalterable. And Canute himself is actually now only remembered by men as a witness to the futility of merely pagan power; as the king who put his crown upon the image of Christ, and solemnly surrendered to heaven the Scandinavian empire of the sea.
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Il mondo esterno dell’anarchia universale che si stendeva oltre la Cristianità sollevò un’altra delle sue colossali e quasi cosmiche ondate e travolse ogni cosa. Attraverso tutte le porte orientali, lasciate aperte, per così dire, dai primi ausiliari barbari, irruppe una piaga di selvaggi navigatori venuti dalla Danimarca e dalla Scandinavia; e i barbari da poco battezzati furono di nuovo sommersi da quelli non battezzati. Per tutto questo tempo, bisogna ricordarlo, l’effettivo meccanismo centrale del governo romano si era andato scaricando come una molla che si svolge. Era in realtà una corsa tra l’energia motrice dei missionari ai margini dell’Impero e la paralisi galoppante della città al centro. Nel nono secolo il cuore si era fermato prima che le mani potessero recargli soccorso. Tutta la civiltà monastica che era cresciuta in Britannia sotto una vaga protezione romana perì senza protezione. I regni giocattolo dei litigiosi Sassoni furono spezzati come fuscelli; Guthrum, il capo pirata, uccise sant’Edmondo, assunse la corona dell’Anglia orientale, riscosse tributo dal panico della Mercia, e torreggiò minaccioso sopra il Wessex, l’ultima delle terre cristiane. La storia che segue, pagina dopo pagina, è soltanto la storia della sua disperazione e della sua distruzione. La storia è una sequela di sconfitte cristiane alternate a vittorie così vane da risultare più desolate delle sconfitte. È soltanto in una di queste, la bella ma sterile vittoria di Ashdown, che scorgiamo per la prima volta nella lotta oscura, in una parte disperata e secondaria, la figura che ha dato il proprio nome all’estremo mutare della marea. Poiché il vincitore non era allora il re, ma soltanto il fratello minore del re. C’è, fin dal principio, qualcosa di umile e persino di accidentale in Alfredo. Egli fu un grande sostituto. L’interesse della sua vita quotidiana sta in questo: che egli univa una freddezza quasi ordinaria, e una prontezza per gli incessanti piccoli patteggiamenti e le combinazioni mutevoli di tutto quel periodo, alla fiammeggiante pazienza dei santi nei tempi di persecuzione. Mentre avrebbe osato ogni cosa per la fede, non avrebbe mercanteggiato su nulla tranne che sulla fede. Era un conquistatore senza ambizione; un autore fin troppo lieto di essere un traduttore; un uomo semplice, concentrato, cauto, che vegliava sulle sorti di una sola cosa, che egli guidò a un tempo con audacia e con prudenza, e che infine salvò.
Egli era scomparso dopo quello che sembrava essere il trionfo e l’insediamento pagano definitivo, e si ritiene che si fosse nascosto come un fuorilegge in un solitario isolotto tra le impenetrabili paludi del Parret; verso quelle selvagge terre occidentali in cui si suppone che le stirpi aborigene siano state sospinte dal destino stesso. Ma Alfredo, come egli stesso scrisse in parole che sono la sua sfida a quell’epoca, riteneva che un uomo cristiano nulla avesse a che fare col destino. Ricominciò ancora una volta a raccogliere intorno a sé gli archi e le lance delle disfatte milizie delle contee occidentali, specialmente gli uomini del Somerset; e nella primavera dell’878 li scagliò contro le linee poste dinanzi all’accampamento fortificato dei vittoriosi Danesi a Ethandune. Il suo improvviso assalto ebbe lo stesso successo di quello di Ashdown, e fu seguito da un assedio che riuscì in un senso diverso e ben più definito. Guthrum, il conquistatore d’Inghilterra, e tutti i suoi appoggi importanti, furono qui rinchiusi dietro le loro palizzate, e quando alla fine si arresero la conquista danese era giunta al suo termine. Guthrum fu battezzato, e il Trattato di Wedmore assicurò lo sgombero del Wessex. Il lettore moderno sorriderà del battesimo, e si volgerà con grande interesse ai termini del trattato. In questo atteggiamento acuto il lettore moderno avrà torto in modo vitale e irrimediabile. Egli deve sopportare la noia dei frequenti riferimenti all’elemento religioso in questa parte della storia inglese, poiché senza di esso non ci sarebbe mai stata alcuna storia inglese. E nulla potrebbe suggellare questa verità più del caso dei Danesi. In tutti i fatti che seguirono, il battesimo di Guthrum è in realtà assai più importante del Trattato di Wedmore. Il trattato stesso fu un compromesso, e anche come tale non durò; un secolo più tardi un re danese come Canuto governava davvero in Inghilterra. Ma sebbene il Danese ottenesse la corona, non si liberò della croce. Fu precisamente l’esazione religiosa di Alfredo a rimanere inalterabile. E lo stesso Canuto è ora in realtà ricordato dagli uomini soltanto come testimone della futilità del potere meramente pagano; come il re che pose la sua corona sull’immagine di Cristo, e solennemente consegnò al cielo l’impero scandinavo del mare.
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V
ST. EDWARD AND THE NORMAN KINGS
The reader may be surprised at the disproportionate importance given to the name which stands first in the title of this chapter. I put it there as the best way of emphasizing, at the beginning of what we may call the practical part of our history, an elusive and rather strange thing. It can only be described as the strength of the weak kings.
It is sometimes valuable to have enough imagination to unlearn as well as to learn. I would ask the reader to forget his reading and everything that he learnt at school, and consider the English monarchy as it would then appear to him. Let him suppose that his acquaintance with the ancient kings has only come to him as it came to most men in simpler times, from nursery tales, from the names of places, from the dedications of churches and charities, from the tales in the tavern, and the tombs in the churchyard. Let us suppose such a person going upon some open and ordinary English way, such as the Thames valley to Windsor, or visiting some old seats of culture, such as Oxford or Cambridge. One of the first things, for instance, he would find would be Eton, a place transformed, indeed, by modern aristocracy, but still enjoying its mediaeval wealth and remembering its mediaeval origin. If he asked about that origin, it is probable that even a public schoolboy would know enough history to tell him that it was founded by Henry VI. If he went to Cambridge and looked with his own eyes for the college chapel which artistically towers above all others like a cathedral, he would probably ask about it, and be told it was King’s College. If he asked which king, he would again be told Henry VI. If he then went into the library and looked up Henry VI in an encyclopaedia, he would find that the legendary giant, who had left these gigantic works behind him, was in history an almost invisible pigmy. Amid the varying and contending numbers of a great national quarrel, he is the only cipher. The contending factions carry him about like a bale of goods. His desires do not seem to be even ascertained, far less satisfied. And yet his real desires are satisfied in stone and marble, in oak and gold, and remain through all the maddest revolutions of modern England, while all the ambitions of those who dictated to him have gone away like dust upon the wind.
Edward the Confessor, like Henry VI, was not only an invalid but almost an idiot. It is said that he was wan like an albino, and that the awe men had of him was partly that which is felt for a monster of mental deficiency. His Christian charity was of the kind that borders on anarchism, and the stories about him recall the Christian fools in the great anarchic novels of Russia. Thus he is reported to have covered the retreat of a common thief upon the naked plea that the thief needed things more than he did. Such a story is in strange contrast to the claims made for other kings, that theft was impossible in their dominions. Yet the two types of king are afterwards praised by the same people; and the really arresting fact is that the incompetent king is praised the more highly of the two. And exactly as in the case of the last Lancastrian, we find that the praise has really a very practical meaning in the long run. When we turn from the destructive to the constructive side of the Middle Ages we find that the village idiot is the inspiration of cities and civic systems. We find his seal upon the sacred foundations of Westminster Abbey. We find the Norman victors in the hour of victory bowing before his very ghost. In the Tapestry of Bayeux, woven by Norman hands to justify the Norman cause and glorify the Norman triumph, nothing is claimed for the Conqueror beyond his conquest and the plain personal tale that excuses it, and the story abruptly ends with the breaking of the Saxon line at Battle. But over the bier of the decrepit zany, who died without striking a blow, over this and this alone, is shown a hand coming out of heaven, and declaring the true approval of the power that rules the world.
The Confessor, therefore, is a paradox in many ways, and in none more than in the false reputation for the “English” of that day. As I have indicated, there is some unreality in talking about the Anglo-Saxon at all. The Anglo-Saxon is a mythical and straddling giant, who has presumably left one footprint in England and the other in Saxony. But there was a community, or rather group of communities, living in Britain before the Conquest under what we call Saxon names, and of a blood probably more Germanic and certainly less French than the same communities after the Conquest. And they have a modern reputation which is exactly the reverse of their real one. The value of the Anglo-Saxon is exaggerated, and yet his virtues are ignored. Our Anglo-Saxon blood is supposed to be the practical part of us; but as a fact the Anglo-Saxons were more hopelessly unpractical than any Celt. Their racial influence is supposed to be healthy, or, what many think the same thing, heathen. But as a fact these “Teutons” were the mystics. The Anglo-Saxons did one thing, and one thing only, thoroughly well, as they were fitted to do it thoroughly well. They christened England. Indeed, they christened it before it was born. The one thing the Angles obviously and certainly could not manage to do was to become English. But they did become Christians, and indeed showed a particular disposition to becomes monks. Moderns who talk vaguely of them as our hardy ancestors never do justice to the real good they did us, by thus opening our history, as it were, with the fable of an age of innocence, and beginning all our chronicles, as so many chronicles began, with the golden initial of a saint. By becoming monks they served us in many very valuable and special capacities, but not notably, perhaps, in the capacity of ancestors.
V
SANT’EDOARDO E I RE NORMANNI
Il lettore potrà stupirsi dell’importanza sproporzionata attribuita al nome che sta per primo nel titolo di questo capitolo. Lo colloco qui come il modo migliore per mettere in risalto, all’inizio di quella che possiamo chiamare la parte pratica della nostra storia, una cosa sfuggente e piuttosto strana. Non la si può descrivere se non come la forza dei re deboli.
È talvolta prezioso avere abbastanza immaginazione per disimparare non meno che per imparare. Chiederei al lettore di dimenticare le sue letture e tutto ciò che ha appreso a scuola, e di considerare la monarchia inglese quale allora gli apparirebbe. Immagini che la sua conoscenza degli antichi re gli sia giunta soltanto come giunse alla maggior parte degli uomini in tempi più semplici: dalle fiabe dell’infanzia, dai nomi dei luoghi, dalle dediche di chiese e opere pie, dai racconti nelle taverne, e dalle tombe nei cimiteri. Supponiamo che una tale persona s’incammini per qualche strada inglese aperta e comune, come la valle del Tamigi verso Windsor, o visiti qualche antica sede di cultura, come Oxford o Cambridge. Una delle prime cose, per esempio, che troverebbe sarebbe Eton, un luogo trasformato, invero, dall’aristocrazia moderna, ma che ancora gode delle sue ricchezze medievali e ricorda la sua origine medievale. Se domandasse di quell’origine, è probabile che perfino uno scolaro di public school saprebbe abbastanza storia da dirgli che fu fondato da Enrico VI. Se andasse a Cambridge e cercasse coi propri occhi la cappella del collegio che artisticamente s’innalza sopra tutte le altre come una cattedrale, probabilmente ne domanderebbe, e gli si direbbe che era il King’s College. Se domandasse quale re, gli si direbbe di nuovo Enrico VI. Se poi entrasse nella biblioteca e cercasse Enrico VI in un’enciclopedia, troverebbe che il gigante leggendario, che si era lasciato dietro queste opere gigantesche, era nella storia un pigmeo quasi invisibile. Fra i numeri mutevoli e contendenti di una grande contesa nazionale, egli è l’unico zero. Le fazioni in lotta lo portano qua e là come una balla di merci. I suoi desideri non paiono neppure accertati, tanto meno appagati. Eppure i suoi desideri veri sono appagati nella pietra e nel marmo, nella quercia e nell’oro, e permangono attraverso tutte le più folli rivoluzioni dell’Inghilterra moderna, mentre tutte le ambizioni di coloro che gli dettavano legge se ne sono andate come polvere al vento.
Edoardo il Confessore, come Enrico VI, non era soltanto un infermo ma quasi un idiota. Si dice che fosse pallido come un albino, e che la soggezione che gli uomini provavano di fronte a lui fosse in parte quella che si prova per un mostro di deficienza mentale. La sua carità cristiana era di quel genere che sconfina nell’anarchismo, e le storie su di lui richiamano gli stolti cristiani dei grandi romanzi anarchici della Russia. Così si racconta che coprì la fuga di un ladro qualunque sulla nuda motivazione che il ladro aveva più bisogno di quelle cose di lui. Una tale storia contrasta stranamente con i vanti attribuiti ad altri re, secondo cui il furto era impossibile nei loro domini. Eppure i due tipi di re sono in seguito lodati dalle stesse persone; e il fatto davvero sorprendente è che il re incapace è lodato più altamente dei due. Ed esattamente come nel caso dell’ultimo Lancaster, troviamo che la lode ha davvero un significato assai pratico alla lunga. Quando passiamo dal lato distruttivo a quello costruttivo del Medioevo, troviamo che l’idiota del villaggio è l’ispirazione di città e ordinamenti civici. Troviamo il suo sigillo sulle sacre fondamenta dell’Abbazia di Westminster. Troviamo i vincitori normanni nell’ora della vittoria inchinarsi dinanzi al suo stesso fantasma. Nell’Arazzo di Bayeux, tessuto da mani normanne per giustificare la causa normanna e glorificare il trionfo normanno, nulla si rivendica per il Conquistatore oltre alla sua conquista e alla schietta vicenda personale che la scusa, e la storia finisce bruscamente con l’infrangersi della stirpe sassone a Battle. Ma sopra il feretro del decrepito buffone, che morì senza vibrare un colpo, sopra questo e questo soltanto, si mostra una mano che esce dal cielo, e dichiara la vera approvazione della potenza che governa il mondo.
Il Confessore, dunque, è un paradosso sotto molti aspetti, e sotto nessuno più che nella falsa reputazione degli “Inglesi” di quel tempo. Come ho accennato, c’è una certa irrealtà nel parlare affatto dell’ anglosassone. L’anglosassone è un gigante mitico e a cavalcioni, che ha presumibilmente lasciato un’orma in Inghilterra e l’altra in Sassonia. Ma c’era una comunità, o piuttosto un gruppo di comunità, che viveva in Britannia prima della Conquista sotto quelli che chiamiamo nomi sassoni, e di un sangue probabilmente più germanico e certamente meno francese delle medesime comunità dopo la Conquista. Ed esse hanno una moderna reputazione che è esattamente l’opposto di quella reale. Il valore dell’anglosassone è esagerato, eppure le sue virtù sono ignorate. Il nostro sangue anglosassone si suppone sia la parte pratica di noi; ma di fatto gli anglosassoni erano più irrimediabilmente impratici di qualunque celta. Si suppone che il loro influsso razziale sia sano, o, ciò che molti ritengono la stessa cosa, pagano. Ma di fatto questi “Teutoni” erano i mistici. Gli anglosassoni fecero una cosa, e una cosa soltanto, a fondo bene, come erano fatti per farla a fondo bene. Battezzarono l’Inghilterra. Anzi, la battezzarono prima che nascesse. L’unica cosa che gli Angli evidentemente e certamente non riuscirono a fare fu diventare inglesi. Ma diventarono cristiani, e in verità mostrarono una particolare disposizione a diventare monaci. I moderni che parlano vagamente di loro come dei nostri robusti antenati non rendono mai giustizia al vero bene che ci fecero, aprendo così la nostra storia, per così dire, con la favola di un’età dell’innocenza, e cominciando tutte le nostre cronache, come tante cronache cominciarono, con l’aurea iniziale di un santo. Diventando monaci ci servirono in molte capacità assai preziose e speciali, ma non notevolmente, forse, nella capacità di antenati.
Along the northern coast of France, where the Confessor had passed his early life, lay the lands of one of the most powerful of the French king’s vassals, the Duke of Normandy. He and his people, who constitute one of the most picturesque and curious elements in European history, are confused for most of us by irrelevant controversies which would have been entirely unintelligible to them. The worst of these is the inane fiction which gives the name of Norman to the English aristocracy during its great period of the last three hundred years. Tennyson informed a lady of the name of Vere de Vere that simple faith was more valuable than Norman blood. But the historical student who can believe in Lady Clara as the possessor of the Norman blood must be himself a large possessor of the simple faith. As a matter of fact, as we shall see also when we come to the political scheme of the Normans, the notion is the negation of their real importance in history. The fashionable fancy misses what was best in the Normans, exactly as we have found it missing what was best in the Saxons. One does not know whether to thank the Normans more for appearing or for disappearing. Few philanthropists ever became so rapidly anonymous. It is the great glory of the Norman adventurer that he threw himself heartily into his chance position; and had faith not only in his comrades, but in his subjects, and even in his enemies. He was loyal to the kingdom he had not yet made. Thus the Norman Bruce becomes a Scott thus the descendant of the Norman Strongbow becomes an Irishman. No men less than Normans can be conceived as remaining as a superior caste until the present time. But this alien and adventurous loyalty in the Norman, which appears in these other national histories, appears most strongly of all in the history we have here to follow. The Duke of Normandy does become a real King of England; his claim through the Confessor, his election by the Council, even his symbolic handfuls of the soil of Sussex, these are not altogether empty forms. And though both phrases would be inaccurate, it is very much nearer the truth to call William the first of the English than to call Harold the last of them.
An indeterminate debate touching the dim races that mixed without record in that dim epoch, has made much of the fact that the Norman edges of France, like the East Anglian edges of England, were deeply penetrated by the Norse invasions of the ninth century; and that the ducal house of Normandy, with what other families we know not, can be traced back to a Scandinavian seed. The unquestionable power of captaincy and creative legislation which belonged to the Normans, whoever they were, may be connected reasonably enough with some infusion of fresh blood. But if the racial theorists press the point to a comparison of races, it can obviously only be answered by a study of the two types in separation. And it must surely be manifest that more civilizing power has since been shown by the French when untouched by Scandinavian blood than by the Scandinavians when untouched by French blood. As much fighting (and more ruling) was done by the Crusaders who were never Vikings as by the Vikings who were never Crusaders. But in truth there is no need of such invidious analysis; we may willingly allow a real value to the Scandinavian contribution to the French as to the English nationality, so long as we firmly understand the ultimate historic fact that the duchy of Normandy was as Scandinavian as the town of Norwich. But the debate has another danger, in that it tends to exaggerate even the personal importance of the Norman. Many as were his talents as a master, he is in history the servant of other and wider things. The landing of Lanfranc is perhaps more of a date than the landing of William. And Lanfranc was an Italian—like Julius Caesar. The Norman is not in history a mere wall, the rather brutal boundary of a mere empire. The Norman is a gate. He is like one of those gates which still remain as he made them, with round arch and rude pattern and stout supporting columns; and what entered by that gate was civilization. William of Falaise has in history a title much higher than that of Duke of Normandy or King of England. He was what Julius Caesar was, and what St. Augustine was: he was the ambassador of Europe to Britain.
William asserted that the Confessor, in the course of that connection which followed naturally from his Norman education, had promised the English crown to the holder of the Norman dukedom. Whether he did or not we shall probably never know: it is not intrinsically impossible or even improbable. To blame the promise as unpatriotic, even if it was given, is to read duties defined at a much later date into the first feudal chaos; to make such blame positive and personal is like expecting the Ancient Britons to sing “Rule Britannia”. William further clinched his case by declaring that Harold, the principal Saxon noble and the most probable claimant, had, while enjoying the Duke’s hospitality after a shipwreck, sworn upon sacred relics not to dispute the Duke’s claim. About this episode also we must agree that we do not know; yet we shall be quite out of touch with the time if we say that we do not care. The element of sacrilege in the alleged perjury of Harold probably affected the Pope when he blessed a banner for William’s army; but it did not affect the Pope much more than it would have affected the people; and Harold’s people quite as much as William’s. Harold’s people presumably denied the fact; and their denial is probably the motive of the very marked and almost eager emphasis with which the Bayeux Tapestry asserts and reasserts the reality of the personal betrayal. There is here a rather arresting fact to be noted. A great part of this celebrated pictorial record is not concerned at all with the well-known historical events which we have only to note rapidly here. It does, indeed, dwell a little on the death of Edward; it depicts the difficulties of William’s enterprise in the felling of forests for shipbuilding, in the crossing of the Channel, and especially in the charge up the hill at Hastings, in which full justice is done to the destructive resistance of Harold’s army. But it was really after Duke William had disembarked and defeated Harold on the Sussex coast, that he did what is historically worthy to be called the Conquest. It is not until these later operations that we have the note of the new and scientific militarism from the Continent. Instead of marching upon London he marched round it; and crossing the Thames at Wallingford cut off the city from the rest of the country and compelled its surrender. He had himself elected king with all the forms that would have accompanied a peaceful succession to the Confessor, and after a brief return to Normandy took up the work of war again to bring all England under his crown. Marching through the snow, he laid waste the northern counties, seized Chester, and made rather than won a kingdom. These things are the foundations of historical England; but of these things the pictures woven in honour of his house tell us nothing. The Bayeux Tapestry may almost be said to stop before the Norman Conquest. But it tells in great detail the tale of some trivial raid into Brittany solely that Harold and William may appear as brothers in arms; and especially that William may be depicted in the very act of giving arms to Harold. And here again there is much more significance than a modern reader may fancy, in its bearing upon the new birth of that time and the ancient symbolism of arms. I have said that Duke William was a vassal of the King of France; and that phrase in its use and abuse is the key to the secular side of this epoch. William was indeed a most mutinous vassal, and a vein of such mutiny runs through his family fortunes: his sons Rufus and Henry I. disturbed him with internal ambitions antagonistic to his own. But it would be a blunder to allow such personal broils to obscure the system, which had indeed existed here before the Conquest, which clarified and confirmed it. That system we call Feudalism.
Lungo la costa settentrionale della Francia, dove il Confessore aveva trascorso la sua prima giovinezza, si stendevano le terre di uno dei più potenti vassalli del re di Francia, il Duca di Normandia. Egli e il suo popolo, che costituiscono uno degli elementi più pittoreschi e curiosi della storia europea, sono per la maggior parte di noi resi confusi da controversie irrilevanti che sarebbero state del tutto incomprensibili a loro. La peggiore di queste è l’insulsa finzione che attribuisce il nome di Normanni all’aristocrazia inglese durante il suo grande periodo degli ultimi trecento anni. Tennyson informò una dama di nome Vere de Vere che la semplice fede valeva più del sangue normanno. Ma lo studioso di storia che sappia credere in Lady Clara come possessora del sangue normanno dev’essere egli stesso un grande possessore della semplice fede. In realtà, come vedremo anche quando giungeremo allo schema politico dei Normanni, tale nozione è la negazione della loro vera importanza nella storia. La fantasia alla moda manca di cogliere ciò che vi era di meglio nei Normanni, esattamente come l’abbiamo trovata mancare di ciò che vi era di meglio nei Sassoni. Non si sa se ringraziare i Normanni più per essere apparsi o per essere scomparsi. Pochi filantropi divennero mai così rapidamente anonimi. È la grande gloria dell’avventuriero normanno l’essersi gettato di gran cuore nella posizione che il caso gli offriva; e l’aver avuto fede non solo nei suoi compagni, ma nei suoi sudditi, e perfino nei suoi nemici. Egli fu leale al regno che non aveva ancora creato. Così il normanno Bruce diviene uno Scott, così il discendente del normanno Strongbow diviene un irlandese. Non si possono concepire uomini meno dei Normanni come rimasti quale casta superiore fino al tempo presente. Ma questa lealtà aliena e avventurosa nel Normanno, che appare in queste altre storie nazionali, appare più forte che mai nella storia che qui dobbiamo seguire. Il Duca di Normandia diviene davvero un vero re d’Inghilterra; la sua pretesa attraverso il Confessore, la sua elezione da parte del Consiglio, perfino le sue simboliche manciate del suolo del Sussex, non sono forme del tutto vuote. E benché entrambe le espressioni sarebbero inesatte, si è molto più vicini alla verità chiamando Guglielmo il primo degli Inglesi che chiamando Harold l’ultimo di essi.
Un dibattito indeterminato, che tocca le oscure razze mescolatesi senza documenti in quell’oscura epoca, ha fatto gran caso del fatto che i margini normanni della Francia, come i margini dell’Anglia orientale in Inghilterra, furono profondamente penetrati dalle invasioni norrene del nono secolo; e che il casato ducale di Normandia, con quali altre famiglie non sappiamo, può essere fatto risalire a un seme scandinavo. L’indiscutibile potenza di comando e di legislazione creativa che apparteneva ai Normanni, chiunque essi fossero, può ragionevolmente essere collegata a qualche infusione di sangue fresco. Ma se i teorici della razza spingono il punto fino a un confronto tra razze, la risposta può ovviamente venire solo da uno studio dei due tipi presi separatamente. E dev’essere certo manifesto che maggiore potere civilizzatore è stato da allora mostrato dai Francesi non toccati dal sangue scandinavo che dagli Scandinavi non toccati dal sangue francese. Altrettante battaglie (e più governo) furono compiute dai Crociati che non furono mai Vichinghi quante dai Vichinghi che non furono mai Crociati. Ma in verità non c’è bisogno di un’analisi così odiosa; possiamo volentieri riconoscere un valore reale al contributo scandinavo alla nazionalità francese come a quella inglese, purché comprendiamo fermamente l’ultimo fatto storico, che il ducato di Normandia era scandinavo tanto quanto la città di Norwich. Ma il dibattito ha un altro pericolo, in quanto tende a esagerare perfino l’importanza personale del Normanno. Per quanto grandi fossero i suoi talenti di padrone, egli è nella storia il servitore di altre e più vaste cose. Lo sbarco di Lanfranco è forse più una data che lo sbarco di Guglielmo. E Lanfranco era un italiano — come Giulio Cesare. Il Normanno non è nella storia un semplice muro, il confine piuttosto brutale di un mero impero. Il Normanno è una porta. È come una di quelle porte che ancora rimangono così come egli le fece, con arco a tutto sesto e rozzo motivo e robuste colonne di sostegno; e ciò che entrò per quella porta fu la civiltà. Guglielmo di Falaise ha nella storia un titolo assai più alto di quello di Duca di Normandia o di re d’Inghilterra. Egli fu ciò che Giulio Cesare fu, e ciò che Sant’Agostino fu: fu l’ambasciatore dell’Europa presso la Britannia.
Guglielmo affermava che il Confessore, nel corso di quella relazione che seguì naturalmente dalla sua educazione normanna, avesse promesso la corona inglese al detentore del ducato normanno. Se lo abbia fatto o no probabilmente non lo sapremo mai: la cosa non è intrinsecamente impossibile né perfino improbabile. Biasimare la promessa come antipatriottica, ammesso pure che sia stata data, significa leggere doveri definiti in un’epoca assai posteriore dentro il primo caos feudale; rendere tale biasimo positivo e personale è come aspettarsi che gli antichi Britanni cantino “Rule Britannia”. Guglielmo rincarava ulteriormente la sua tesi dichiarando che Harold, il principale nobile sassone e il più probabile pretendente, aveva, mentre godeva dell’ospitalità del Duca dopo un naufragio, giurato su sacre reliquie di non contestare la pretesa del Duca. Anche di questo episodio dobbiamo convenire che non sappiamo nulla; eppure saremo del tutto fuori sintonia col tempo se diremo che non ce ne importa. L’elemento di sacrilegio nel presunto spergiuro di Harold probabilmente influì sul Papa quando benedisse un vessillo per l’esercito di Guglielmo; ma non influì sul Papa molto più di quanto avrebbe influito sul popolo; e sul popolo di Harold tanto quanto su quello di Guglielmo. Il popolo di Harold presumibilmente negava il fatto; e la loro negazione è probabilmente il movente della assai marcata e quasi impaziente enfasi con cui l’Arazzo di Bayeux afferma e riafferma la realtà del tradimento personale. Vi è qui un fatto piuttosto notevole da rilevare. Gran parte di questo celebre documento pittorico non si occupa affatto dei ben noti eventi storici che qui abbiamo soltanto da annotare rapidamente. Esso indugia, in verità, un poco sulla morte di Edoardo; raffigura le difficoltà dell’impresa di Guglielmo nell’abbattimento di foreste per la costruzione delle navi, nella traversata della Manica, e specialmente nella carica su per la collina a Hastings, nella quale piena giustizia è resa alla resistenza distruttiva dell’esercito di Harold. Ma fu in realtà dopo che il Duca Guglielmo ebbe sbarcato e sconfitto Harold sulla costa del Sussex, che egli compì ciò che storicamente merita di essere chiamato la Conquista. Non è che in queste operazioni posteriori che troviamo la nota del nuovo e scientifico militarismo venuto dal Continente. Invece di marciare su Londra le marciò intorno; e attraversando il Tamigi a Wallingford tagliò fuori la città dal resto del paese e ne impose la resa. Si fece eleggere re con tutte le forme che avrebbero accompagnato una pacifica successione al Confessore, e dopo un breve ritorno in Normandia riprese l’opera di guerra per portare tutta l’Inghilterra sotto la sua corona. Marciando attraverso la neve, devastò le contee settentrionali, s’impadronì di Chester, e fece più che conquistare un regno. Queste cose sono le fondamenta dell’Inghilterra storica; ma di queste cose le immagini tessute in onore del suo casato non ci dicono nulla. Si può quasi dire che l’Arazzo di Bayeux si arresti prima della Conquista normanna. Ma esso narra con gran dettaglio la storia di qualche insignificante incursione in Bretagna, unicamente affinché Harold e Guglielmo possano apparire come fratelli d’arme; e specialmente affinché Guglielmo possa essere raffigurato nell’atto stesso di conferire le armi a Harold. E anche qui vi è molto più significato di quanto un lettore moderno possa immaginare, nella sua attinenza alla nuova nascita di quel tempo e all’antico simbolismo delle armi. Ho detto che il Duca Guglielmo era un vassallo del Re di Francia; e quella frase, nel suo uso e nel suo abuso, è la chiave del lato secolare di quest’epoca. Guglielmo era in verità un vassallo assai ribelle, e una vena di tale ribellione percorre le fortune della sua famiglia: i suoi figli Rufus ed Enrico I lo turbarono con ambizioni interne antagoniste alle sue. Ma sarebbe un errore lasciare che tali risse personali oscurino il sistema, che invero esisteva qui già prima della Conquista, la quale lo chiarì e lo confermò. Quel sistema noi lo chiamiamo Feudalesimo.
That Feudalism was the main mark of the Middle Ages is a commonplace of fashionable information; but it is of the sort that seeks the past rather in Wardour Street than Watling Street. For that matter, the very term “mediaeval” is used for almost anything from Early English to Early Victorian. An eminent Socialist applied it to our armaments, which is like applying it to our aeroplanes. Similarly the just description of Feudalism, and of how far it was a part and how far rather an impediment in the main mediaeval movement, is confused by current debates about quite modern things— especially that modern thing, the English squirearchy. Feudalism was very nearly the opposite of squirearchy. For it is the whole point of the squire that his ownership is absolute and is pacific. And it is the very definition of Feudalism that it was a tenure, and a tenure by military service. Men paid their rent in steel instead of gold, in spears and arrows against the enemies of their landlord. But even these landlords were not landlords in the modern sense; every one was practically as well as theoretically a tenant of the King; and even he often fell into a feudal inferiority to a Pope or an Emperor. To call it mere tenure by soldiering may seem a simplification; but indeed it is precisely here that it was not so simple as it seems. It is precisely a certain knot or enigma in the nature of Feudalism which makes half the struggle of European history, but especially English history.
There was a certain unique type of state and culture which we call mediaeval, for want of a better word, which we see in the Gothic or the great Schoolmen. This thing in itself was above all things logical. Its very cult of authority was a thing of reason, as all men who can reason themselves instantly recognize, even if, like Huxley, they deny its premises or dislike its fruits. Being logical, it was very exact about who had the authority. Now Feudalism was not quite logical, and was never quite exact about who had the authority. Feudalism already flourished before the mediaeval renascence began. It was, if not the forest the mediaevals had to clear, at least the rude timber with which they had to build. Feudalism was a fighting growth of the Dark Ages before the Middle Ages; the age of barbarians resisted by semi-barbarians. I do not say this in disparagement of it. Feudalism was mostly a very human thing; the nearest contemporary name for it was homage, a word which almost means humanity. On the other hand, mediaeval logic, never quite reconciled to it, could become in its extremes inhuman. It was often mere prejudice that protected men, and pure reason that burned them. The feudal units grew through the lively localism of the Dark Ages, when hills without roads shut in a valley like a garrison. Patriotism had to be parochial; for men had no country, but only a countryside. In such cases the lord grew larger than the king; but it bred not only a local lordship but a kind of local liberty. And it would be very inadvisable to ignore the freer element in Feudalism in English history. For it is the one kind of freedom that the English have had and held.
The knot in the system was something like this. In theory the King owned everything, like an earthly providence; and that made for despotism and “divine right,” which meant in substance a natural authority. In one aspect the King was simply the one lord anointed by the Church, that is recognized by the ethics of the age. But while there was more royalty in theory, there could be more rebellion in practice. Fighting was much more equal than in our age of munitions, and the various groups could arm almost instantly with bows from the forest or spears from the smith. Where men are military there is no militarism. But it is more vital that while the kingdom was in this sense one territorial army, the regiments of it were also kingdoms. The sub-units were also sub-loyalties. Hence the loyalist to his lord might be a rebel to his king; or the king be a demagogue delivering him from the lord. This tangle is responsible for the tragic passions about betrayal, as in the case of William and Harold; the alleged traitor who is always found to be recurrent, yet always felt to be exceptional. To break the tie was at once easy and terrible. Treason in the sense of rebellion was then really felt as treason in the sense of treachery, since it was desertion on a perpetual battlefield. Now, there was even more of this civil war in English than in other history, and the more local and less logical energy on the whole prevailed. Whether there was something in those island idiosyncrasies, shapeless as sea-mists, with which this story began, or whether the Roman imprint had really been lighter than in Gaul, the feudal undergrowth prevented even a full attempt to build the Civitas Dei, or ideal mediaeval state. What emerged was a compromise, which men long afterwards amused themselves by calling a constitution.
There are paradoxes permissible for the redressing of a bad balance in criticism, and which may safely even be emphasized so long as they are not isolated. One of these I have called at the beginning of this chapter the strength of the weak kings. And there is a complement of it, even in this crisis of the Norman mastery, which might well be called the weakness of the strong kings. William of Normandy succeeded immediately, he did not quite succeed ultimately; there was in his huge success a secret of failure that only bore fruit long after his death. It was certainly his single aim to simplify England into a popular autocracy, like that growing up in France; with that aim he scattered the feudal holdings in scraps, demanded a direct vow from the sub-vassals to himself, and used any tool against the barony, from the highest culture of the foreign ecclesiastics to the rudest relics of Saxon custom. But the very parallel of France makes the paradox startlingly apparent. It is a proverb that the first French kings were puppets; that the mayor of the palace was quite insolently the king of the king. Yet it is certain that the puppet became an idol; a popular idol of unparalleled power, before which all mayors and nobles bent or were broken. In France arose absolute government, the more because it was not precisely personal government. The King was already a thing—like the Republic. Indeed the mediaeval Republics were rigid with divine right. In Norman England, perhaps, the government was too personal to be absolute. Anyhow, there is a real though recondite sense in which William the Conqueror was William the Conquered. When his two sons were dead, the whole country fell into a feudal chaos almost like that before the Conquest. In France the princes who had been slaves became something exceptional like priests; and one of them became a saint. But somehow our greatest kings were still barons; and by that very energy our barons became our kings.
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Che il feudalesimo fosse la caratteristica principale del Medioevo è un luogo comune dell’informazione di moda; ma è di quel tipo che cerca il passato più in Wardour Street che in Watling Street. Del resto, il termine stesso “medievale” viene usato per quasi qualsiasi cosa dall’inglese antico all’epoca vittoriana. Un eminente socialista lo applicò ai nostri armamenti, il che è come applicarlo ai nostri aerei. Allo stesso modo la giusta descrizione del feudalesimo e di quanto esso fosse parte o piuttosto un ostacolo nel principale movimento medievale, viene confusa dai dibattiti attuali su cose assolutamente moderne — specialmente quella cosa moderna che è l’aristocrazia terriera inglese. Il feudalesimo era quasi l’esatto opposto della squires. Perché il punto cruciale dello squires sta nel fatto che la sua proprietà è assoluta e pacifica. E la definizione stessa del feudalesimo è che esso fosse un possesso, e un possesso per servizio militare. Gli uomini pagavano l’affitto in acciaio anziché in oro, con lance e frecce contro i nemici del loro padrone di casa. Ma anche questi proprietari terrieri non erano tali nel senso moderno; tutti erano praticamente, oltre che teoricamente, inquilini del Re; e persino lui spesso cadeva in una inferiorità feudale nei confronti di un Papa o di un Imperatore. Chiamarlo semplice possesso per servizio militare può sembrare una semplificazione; ma infatti è proprio qui che non era così semplice come sembra. È precisamente un certo nodo o enigma nella natura del feudalesimo ciò che rende metà della lotta della storia europea, ma specialmente della storia inglese.
Esisteva un certo tipo di stato e cultura unico nel suo genere, che chiamiamo medievale, per mancanza di una parola migliore, e che vediamo nell’arte gotica o nei grandi scolastici. Questa cosa in sé era soprattutto logica. Il suo stesso culto dell’autorità era una questione di ragione, come tutti gli uomini che sanno ragionare riconoscono immediatamente, anche se, come Huxley, negano i suoi presupposti o non amano i suoi frutti. Essendo logica, era molto precisa su chi detenesse l’autorità. Ora il feudalesimo non era del tutto logico e non fu mai del tutto preciso su chi detenesse l’autorità. Il feudalesimo già fioriva prima che iniziasse la rinascita medievale. Fu, se non la foresta che i medievali dovettero sgomberare, almeno il grezzo legname con cui dovettero costruire. Il feudalesimo fu una crescita combattuta dei secoli bui prima del Medioevo; l’età dei barbari resistiti da semi-barbari. Non lo dico per sminuirlo. Il feudalesimo era in gran parte una cosa molto umana; il nome più vicino contemporaneo era omaggio, una parola che significa quasi umanità. D’altra parte la logica medievale, mai del tutto riconciliata con essa, poteva diventare nei suoi estremi disumana. Spesso era solo pregiudizio a proteggere gli uomini e pura ragione ad arderli. Le unità feudali crebbero attraverso il vivace localismo dei secoli bui, quando colline senza strade chiudevano una valle come un presidio. Il patriottismo doveva essere parrocchiale; perché gli uomini non avevano una patria, ma solo un paesaggio. In tali casi il signore diventava più grande del re; ma ciò generò non solo un dominio locale ma anche una sorta di libertà locale. E sarebbe molto sconsigliabile ignorare l’elemento più libero nel feudalesimo nella storia inglese. Perché è l’unica specie di libertà che gli inglesi abbiano avuto e mantenuto.
Il nodo del sistema era qualcosa di simile a questo. In teoria il Re possedeva tutto, come una providenza terrena; e ciò portava al dispotismo e al “diritto divino”, che significava in sostanza un’autorità naturale. In un aspetto il Re era semplicemente l’unico signore unto dalla Chiesa, cioè riconosciuto dall’etica dell’epoca. Ma mentre c’era più regalità nella teoria, poteva esserci più ribellione nella pratica. Combattere era molto più paritario che nella nostra epoca di munizioni, e i vari gruppi potevano armarsi quasi istantaneamente con archi dalla foresta o lance dal fabbro. Dove gli uomini sono militari non c’è militarismo. Ma è più vitale che mentre il regno era in questo senso un’unica armata territoriale, i suoi reggimenti erano anche regni. Le sottounità erano anche sottomissioni. Quindi il lealista verso il suo signore poteva essere un ribelle verso il suo re; o il re potrebbe essere un demagogo che lo liberava dal signore. Questo groviglio è responsabile delle tragiche passioni per il tradimento, come nel caso di Guglielmo e Aroldo; l’allegato traditore che si scopre sempre ricorrente, eppure sempre sentito come eccezionale. Rompere il legame era allo stesso tempo facile e terribile. Il tradimento nel senso di ribellione era allora davvero percepito come tradimento nel senso di slealtà, poiché era diserzione su un campo di battaglia perpetuo. Ora, c’era ancora più di questa guerra civile nella storia inglese che in altre storie, e l’energia più locale e meno logica prevalse nel complesso. Che ci fosse qualcosa in quelle idiosincrasie insulari, informi come nebbie marine, con cui questa storia è iniziata, o se l’impronta romana fosse stata davvero più leggera che in Gallia, il sottobosco feudale impedì anche un tentativo completo di costruire la Civitas Dei, o lo stato medievale ideale. Ciò che emerse fu un compromesso, che molto tempo dopo gli uomini si divertirono a chiamare una costituzione.
Ci sono paradossi ammissibili per ristabilire un cattivo equilibrio nella critica, e che possono essere enfatizzati senza rischi finché non vengono isolati. Uno di questi l’ho chiamato all’inizio di questo capitolo la forza dei re deboli. E vi è un suo complemento, anche in questa crisi del dominio normanno, che potrebbe ben essere chiamata la debolezza dei re forti. Guglielmo il Normanno ebbe successo immediatamente, ma non riuscì pienamente alla fine; nel suo enorme successo c’era un segreto di fallimento che portò i suoi frutti molto tempo dopo la sua morte. Era certamente il suo unico scopo quello di semplificare l’Inghilterra in una popolare autocrazia, come quella che stava crescendo in Francia; con questo obiettivo sparse i possedimenti feudali in frammenti, chiese un voto diretto dai sub-vassalli a se stesso e usò qualsiasi strumento contro la baronia, dalla più alta cultura degli ecclesiastici stranieri alle più rozze reliquie della consuetudine sassone. Ma proprio il parallelo con la Francia rende lo paradosso sorprendentemente evidente. È un proverbio che i primi re francesi fossero burattini; che il maggiordomo del palazzo fosse in modo assolutamente insolente il re del re. Eppure è certo che il burattino divenne un idolo; un popolare idolo di potere senza pari, davanti al quale tutti i maggiordomi e i nobili si piegarono o furono spezzati. In Francia sorse un governo governo assoluto, tanto più perché non era precisamente un governo personale. Il Re era già una cosa—come la Repubblica. Infatti le repubbliche medievali erano rigide con il diritto divino. Nell’Inghilterra normanna, forse, il governo era troppo personale per essere assoluto. Comunque sia, c’è un senso reale sebbene oscuro in cui Guglielmo il Conquistatore fu Guglielmo il Vinto. Quando i suoi due figli furono morti, l’intero paese cadde in un caos feudale quasi come quello prima della Conquista. In Francia i principi che erano stati schiavi divennero qualcosa di eccezionale come sacerdoti; e uno di loro divenne un santo. Ma per qualche motivo i nostri più grandi re furono ancora baroni; e con quella stessa energia i nostri baroni divennero i nostri re.
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VI
THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES
The last chapter began, in an apparent irrelevance, with the name of St. Edward; and this one might very well begin with the name of St. George. His first appearance, it is said, as a patron of our people, occurred at the instance of Richard Coeur de Lion during his campaign in Palestine; and this, as we shall see, really stands for a new England which might well have a new saint. But the Confessor is a character in English history; whereas St. George, apart from his place in martyrology as a Roman soldier, can hardly be said to be a character in any history. And if we wish to understand the noblest and most neglected of human revolutions, we can hardly get closer to it than by considering this paradox, of how much progress and enlightenment was represented by thus passing from a chronicle to a romance.
In any intellectual corner of modernity can be found such a phrase as I have just read in a newspaper controversy: “Salvation, like other good things, must not come from outside.” To call a spiritual thing external and not internal is the chief mode of modernist excommunication. But if our subject of study is mediaeval and not modern, we must pit against this apparent platitude the very opposite idea. We must put ourselves in the posture of men who thought that almost every good thing came from outside—like good news. I confess that I am not impartial in my sympathies here; and that the newspaper phrase I quoted strikes me as a blunder about the very nature of life. I do not, in my private capacity, believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb; nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking his soul, and denying its dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness double by wonder. But this faith in receptiveness, and in respect for things outside oneself, need here do no more than help me in explaining what any version of this epoch ought in any case to explain. In nothing is the modern German more modern, or more mad, than in his dream of finding a German name for everything; eating his language, or in other words biting his tongue. And in nothing were the mediaevals more free and sane than in their acceptance of names and emblems from outside their most beloved limits. The monastery would often not only take in the stranger but almost canonize him. A mere adventurer like Bruce was enthroned and thanked as if he had really come as a knight errant. And a passionately patriotic community more often than not had a foreigner for a patron saint. Thus crowds of saints were Irishmen, but St. Patrick was not an Irishman. Thus as the English gradually became a nation, they left the numberless Saxon saints in a sense behind them, passed over by comparison not only the sanctity of Edward but the solid fame of Alfred, and invoked a half mythical hero, striving in an eastern desert against an impossible monster.
That transition and that symbol stand for the Crusades. In their romance and reality they were the first English experience of learning, not only from the external, but the remote. England, like every Christian thing, had thriven on outer things without shame. From the roads of Caesar to the churches of Lanfranc, it had sought its meat from God. But now the eagles were on the wing, scenting a more distant slaughter; they were seeking the strange things instead of receiving them. The English had stepped from acceptance to adventure, and the epic of their ships had begun. The scope of the great religious movement which swept England along with all the West would distend a book like this into huge disproportion, yet it would be much better to do so than to dismiss it in the distant and frigid fashion common in such short summaries. The inadequacy of our insular method in popular history is perfectly shown in the treatment of Richard Coeur de Lion. His tale is told with the implication that his departure for the Crusade was something like the escapade of a schoolboy running away to sea. It was, in this view, a pardonable or lovable prank; whereas in truth it was more like a responsible Englishman now going to the Front. Christendom was nearly one nation, and the Front was the Holy Land. That Richard himself was of an adventurous and even romantic temper is true, though it is not unreasonably romantic for a born soldier to do the work he does best. But the point of the argument against insular history is particularly illustrated here by the absence of a continental comparison. In this case we have only to step across the Straits of Dover to find the fallacy. Philip Augustus, Richard’s contemporary in France, had the name of a particularly cautious and coldly public-spirited statesman; yet Philip Augustus went on the same Crusade. The reason was, of course, that the Crusades were, for all thoughtful Europeans, things for the highest statesmanship and the purest public spirit.
Some six hundred years after Christianity sprang up in the East and swept westwards, another great faith arose in almost the same eastern lands and followed it like its gigantic shadow. Like a shadow, it was at once a copy and a contrary. We call it Islam, or the creed of the Moslems; and perhaps its most explanatory description is that it was the final flaming up of the accumulated Orientalisms, perhaps of the accumulated Hebraisms, gradually rejected as the Church grew more European, or as Christianity turned into Christendom. It highest motive was a hatred of idols, and in its view Incarnation was itself an idolatry. The two things it persecuted were the idea of God being made flesh and of His being afterwards made wood or stone. A study of the questions smouldering in the track of the prairie fire of the Christian conversion favours the suggestion that this fanaticism against art or mythology was at once a development and a reaction from that conversion, a sort of minority report of the Hebraists. In this sense Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul. And the Greek Iconoclasts had poured into Italy, breaking the popular statues and denouncing the idolatry of the Pope, until routed, in a style sufficiently symbolic, by the sword of the father of Charlemagne. It was all these disappointed negations that took fire from the genius of Mahomet, and launched out of the burning lands a cavalry charge that nearly conquered the world. And if it be suggested that a note on such Oriental origins is rather remote from a history of England, the answer is that this book may, alas! contain many digressions, but that this is not a digression. It is quite peculiarly necessary to keep in mind that this Semite god haunted Christianity like a ghost; to remember it in every European corner, but especially in our corner. If any one doubts the necessity, let him take a walk to all the parish churches in England within a radius of thirty miles, and ask why this stone virgin is headless or that coloured glass is gone. He will soon learn that it was lately, and in his own lanes and homesteads, that the ecstasy of the deserts returned, and his bleak northern island was filled with the fury of the Iconoclasts.
VI
L’EPOCA DELLE CROCIATE
L’ultimo capitolo è iniziato, apparentemente senza motivo, col nome di San Edoardo; e questo potrebbe benissimo cominciare col nome di San Giorgio. Si dice che la sua prima apparizione come patrono del nostro popolo sia avvenuta su richiesta di Riccardo Cuor di Leone durante la sua campagna in Palestina; e questo, come vedremo, rappresenta veramente una nuova Inghilterra che potrebbe benissimo avere un nuovo santo. Ma il Confessore è un personaggio della storia inglese; mentre San Giorgio, a parte il suo posto nella martirologia come soldato romano, non può certo dirsi un personaggio di alcuna storia. E se vogliamo comprendere la più nobile e trascurata delle rivoluzioni umane, difficilmente possiamo avvicinarci a essa meglio che considerando questo paradosso, di quanto progresso e illuminazione fossero rappresentati passando così da una cronaca a un romanzo.
In qualsiasi angolo intellettuale della modernità si può trovare una frase come quella che ho appena letto in una controversia giornalistica: “La salvezza, come altre cose buone, non deve venire dall’esterno.” Chiamare una cosa spirituale esterna e non interna è il principale modo di scomunica modernista. Ma se l’oggetto del nostro studio è medievale e non moderno, dobbiamo contrapporre a questa apparente banalità un’idea completamente opposta. Dobbiamo metterci nella posizione di uomini che pensavano che quasi ogni cosa buona venisse dall’esterno - come le buone notizie. Confesso di non essere imparziale nelle mie simpatie; e che la frase giornalistica che ho citato mi sembra un errore riguardo alla stessa natura della vita. Non credo, in quanto privato cittadino, che un bambino ottenga il suo miglior nutrimento fisico succhiandosi il pollice; né che un uomo ottenga il suo miglior nutrimento morale succhiando la sua anima, e negando la sua dipendenza da Dio o da altre cose buone. Sostengo che i ringraziamenti sono la forma più alta di pensiero; e che la gratitudine è felicità doppiata dal meraviglia. Ma questa fede nella ricettività, e nel rispetto per le cose al di fuori di sé stessi, qui non deve fare altro che aiutarmi a spiegare ciò che qualsiasi versione di questo periodo dovrebbe comunque spiegare. In nulla il moderno tedesco è più moderno, o più pazzo, che nel suo sogno di trovare un nome tedesco per tutto; mangiando la sua lingua, o in altre parole mordendosi la lingua. E in nulla i medievali erano più liberi e sani che nell’accettare nomi ed emblemi dall’esterno dei loro limiti più amati. Il monastero spesso non solo accoglieva lo straniero, ma quasi lo canonizzava. Un semplice avventuriero come Bruce veniva innalzato al trono e ringraziato come se fosse davvero arrivato come un cavaliere errante. E una comunità appassionatamente patriottica più spesso che no aveva uno straniero per santo patrono. Così, tra le folle di santi irlandesi, San Patrizio non era un irlandese. Così, mentre gli inglesi gradualmente diventavano una nazione, lasciavano i numerosi santi sassoni in un certo senso alle loro spalle, superando per confronto non solo la santità di Edoardo ma anche la solida fama di Alfredo, e invocavano un eroe mezzo mitico, che lottava in un deserto orientale contro un mostro impossibile.
Quella transizione e quel simbolo rappresentano le crociate. Nel loro romanzo e nella realtà furono la prima esperienza inglese di apprendimento, non solo dall’esterno, ma dal lontano. L’Inghilterra, come ogni cosa cristiana, aveva prosperato grazie alle cose esterne senza vergogna. Dalle strade di Cesare alle chiese di Lanfranc, aveva cercato il suo nutrimento in Dio. Ma ora gli aquili erano in volo, fiutando un massacro più lontano; stavano cercando le cose strane invece di riceverle. Gli inglesi erano passati dall’accettazione all’avventura, e l’epica delle loro navi era iniziata. L’ampiezza del grande movimento religioso che travolse l’Inghilterra insieme a tutto l’Occidente distenderebbe un libro come questo in una sproporzione enorme, eppure sarebbe molto meglio farlo piuttosto che liquidarlo nel modo distante e frigido comune in tali brevi riassunti. L’inadeguatezza del nostro metodo insulare nella storia popolare è perfettamente dimostrata nel trattamento di Riccardo Cuor di Leone. La sua storia viene raccontata con l’implicazione che la sua partenza per la crociata fosse qualcosa come la scappatella di un scolaretto che fugge in mare. Era, da questo punto di vista, una bravata perdonabile o amabile; mentre nella verità era più simile a quello di un responsabile inglese che ora va al Fronte. La cristianità era quasi una nazione, e il Fronte era la Terra Santa. Che lo stesso Riccardo fosse di temperamento avventuroso e persino romantico è vero, anche se non è irragionevolmente romantico per un soldato di nascita fare il lavoro che fa meglio. Ma il punto dell’argomentazione contro la storia insulare è particolarmente illustrato qui dall’ assenza di un confronto continentale. In questo caso dobbiamo solo attraversare lo Stretto di Dover per trovare l’errore. Filippo Augusto, contemporaneo di Riccardo in Francia, aveva la reputazione di uno statista particolarmente cauto e freddamente dedito al bene pubblico; eppure Filippo Augusto partì per la stessa crociata. La ragione era, naturalmente, che le crociate erano, per tutti gli europei riflessivi, cose degne del più alto statismo e dello spirito pubblico più puro.
Circa seicento anni dopo che il cristianesimo nacque in Oriente e si diffuse verso occidente, un’altra grande fede sorse quasi nelle stesse terre orientali e la seguì come una sua gigantesca ombra. Come un’ombra, era allo stesso tempo una copia e il suo contrario. La chiamiamo Islam, o la fede dei musulmani; e forse la descrizione più esplicativa è che fu l’ultimo grande sorgere degli orientalismi accumulati, forse degli ebraismi accumulati, gradualmente rifiutati man mano che la Chiesa diventava più europea, o il cristianesimo si trasformava in cristianità. Il suo movente più alto era l’odio per gli idoli, e nella sua visione l’Incarnazione era essa stessa un’idolatria. Le due cose che perseguiva erano l’idea che Dio fosse divenuto carne e che poi fosse stato trasformato in legno o pietra. Uno studio delle questioni che bruciano sulle tracce dell’incendio della prateria della fiamma della conversione cristiana favorisce il suggerimento che questo fanatismo contro l’arte o la mitologia fosse allo stesso tempo uno sviluppo e una reazione a quella conversione, una sorta di rapporto di minoranza degli ebraisti. In questo senso, l’Islam era qualcosa come una cristiana eresia. Le prime eresie erano piene di folli capovolgimenti ed elusioni dell’Incarnazione, salvando il loro Gesù dalla realtà del suo corpo anche a spese della sincerità della sua anima. E gli Iconoclasti greci erano affluiti in Italia, distruggendo le statue popolari e denunciando l’idolatria del Papa, fino a quando furono sconfitti, in uno stile abbastanza simbolico, dalla spada del padre di Carlo Magno. Erano tutte queste negazioni deluse che presero fuoco dal genio di Maometto e lanciarono dalle terre ardenti una carica di cavalleria che quasi conquistò il mondo. E se si suggerisce che una nota su tali origini orientali sia piuttosto lontana da una storia dell’Inghilterra, la risposta è che questo libro può, ahimè! contenere molte digressioni, ma questa non è una digressione. È assolutamente necessario tenere a mente che questo dio semita perseguitò il cristianesimo come un fantasma; ricordarlo in ogni angolo europeo, ma specialmente nel nostro. Se qualcuno dubita della necessità, faccia una passeggiata a tutte le chiese parrocchiali dell’Inghilterra entro un raggio di trenta miglia e chieda perché questa vergine di pietra è senza testa o quel vetro colorato è sparito. Ben presto saprà che fu recentemente, nelle sue stesse strade e case, che l’estasi dei deserti tornò, e la sua isola settentrionale desolata si riempì della furia degli Iconoclasti.
It was an element in this sublime and yet sinister simplicity of Islam that it knew no boundaries. Its very home was homeless. For it was born in a sandy waste among nomads, and it went everywhere because it came from nowhere. But in the Saracens of the early Middle Ages this nomadic quality in Islam was masked by a high civilization, more scientific if less creatively artistic than that of contemporary Christendom. The Moslem monotheism was, or appeared to be, the more rationalist religion of the two. This rootless refinement was characteristically advanced in abstract things, of which a memory remains in the very name of algebra. In comparison the Christian civilization was still largely instinctive, but its instincts were very strong and very much the other way. It was full of local affections, which found form in that system of fences which runs like a pattern through everything mediaeval, from heraldry to the holding of land. There was a shape and colour in all their customs and statutes which can be seen in all their tabards and escutcheons; something at once strict and gay. This is not a departure from the interest in external things, but rather a part of it. The very welcome they would often give to a stranger from beyond the wall was a recognition of the wall. Those who think their own life all-sufficient do not see its limit as a wall, but as the end of the world. The Chinese called the white man a “sky-breaker.” The mediaeval spirit loves its part in life as a part, not a whole; its charter for it came from something else. There is a joke about a Benedictine monk who used the common grace of Benedictus benedicat, whereupon the unlettered Franciscan triumphantly retorted Franciscus Franciscat. It is something of a parable of mediaeval history; for if there were a verb Franciscare it would be an approximate description of what St. Francis afterwards did. But that more individual mysticism was only approaching its birth, and Benedictus benedicat is very precisely the motto of the earliest mediaevalism. I mean that everything is blessed from beyond, by something which has in its turn been blessed from beyond again; only the blessed bless. But the point which is the clue to the Crusades is this: that for them the beyond was not the infinite, as in a modern religion. Every beyond was a place. The mystery of locality, with all its hold on the human heart, was as much present in the most ethereal things of Christendom as it was absent from the most practical things of Islam. England would derive a thing from France, France from Italy, Italy from Greece, Greece from Palestine, Palestine from Paradise. It was not merely that a yeoman of Kent would have his house hallowed by the priest of the parish church, which was confirmed by Canterbury, which was confirmed by Rome. Rome herself did not worship herself, as in the pagan age. Rome herself looked eastward to the mysterious cradle of her creed, to a land of which the very earth was called holy. And when she looked eastward for it she saw the face of Mahound. She saw standing in the place that was her earthly heaven a devouring giant out of the deserts, to whom all places were the same.
It has been necessary thus to pause upon the inner emotions of the Crusade, because the modern English reader is widely cut off from these particular feelings of his fathers; and the real quarrel of Christendom and Islam, the fire-baptism of the young nations, could not otherwise be seized in its unique character. It was nothing so simple as a quarrel between two men who both wanted Jerusalem. It was the much deadlier quarrel between one man who wanted it and another man who could not see why it was wanted. The Moslem, of course, had his own holy places; but he has never felt about them as Westerns can feel about a field or a roof-tree; he thought of the holiness as holy, not of places as places. The austerity which forbade him imagery, the wandering war that forbade him rest, shut him off from all that was breaking out and blossoming in our local patriotisms; just as it has given the Turks an empire without ever giving them a nation.
Now, the effect of this adventure against a mighty and mysterious enemy was simply enormous in the transformation of England, as of all the nations that were developing side by side with England. Firstly, we learnt enormously from what the Saracen did. Secondly, we learnt yet more enormously from what the Saracen did not do. Touching some of the good things which we lacked, we were fortunately able to follow him. But in all the good things which he lacked, we were confirmed like adamant to defy him. It may be said that Christians never knew how right they were till they went to war with Moslems. At once the most obvious and the most representative reaction was the reaction which produced the best of what we call Christian Art; and especially those grotesques of Gothic architecture, which are not only alive but kicking. The East as an environment, as an impersonal glamour, certainly stimulated the Western mind, but stimulated it rather to break the Moslem commandment than to keep it. It was as if the Christian were impelled, like a caricaturist, to cover all that faceless ornament with faces; to give heads to all those headless serpents and birds to all those lifeless trees. Statuary quickened and came to life under the veto of the enemy as under a benediction. The image, merely because it was called an idol, became not only an ensign but a weapon. A hundredfold host of stone sprang up all over the shrines and streets of Europe. The Iconoclasts made more statues than they destroyed.
The place of Coeur de Lion in popular fable and gossip is far more like his place in true history than the place of the mere denationalized ne’er-do-weel given him in our utilitarian school books. Indeed the vulgar rumour is nearly always much nearer the historical truth than the “educated” opinion of to-day; for tradition is truer than fashion. King Richard, as the typical Crusader, did make a momentous difference to England by gaining glory in the East, instead of devoting himself conscientiously to domestic politics in the exemplary manner of King John. The accident of his military genius and prestige gave England something which it kept for four hundred years, and without which it is incomprehensible throughout that period— the reputation of being in the very vanguard of chivalry. The great romances of the Round Table, the attachment of knighthood to the name of a British king, belong to this period. Richard was not only a knight but a troubadour; and culture and courtesy were linked up with the idea of English valour. The mediaeval Englishman was even proud of being polite; which is at least no worse than being proud of money and bad manners, which is what many Englishmen in our later centuries have meant by their common sense.
Era un elemento di questa sublime e tuttavia sinistra semplicità dell’Islam il fatto che esso non conoscesse confini. La sua stessa dimora era priva di dimora. Poiché nacque in un deserto di sabbia tra i nomadi, e andò dappertutto perché veniva da nessun luogo. Ma nei Saraceni dell’alto Medioevo questa qualità nomade dell’Islam era mascherata da un’alta civiltà, più scientifica anche se meno creativamente artistica di quella della cristianità contemporanea. Il monoteismo musulmano era, o sembrava essere, la più razionalista delle due religioni. Questa raffinatezza senza radici era caratteristicamente avanzata nelle cose astratte, di cui una memoria rimane nel nome stesso dell’algebra. Al confronto la civiltà cristiana era ancora in gran parte istintiva, ma i suoi istinti erano assai forti e assai volti in tutt’altra direzione. Era piena di affetti locali, che trovavano forma in quel sistema di recinti che percorre come un disegno tutto ciò che è medievale, dall’araldica al possesso della terra. C’era una forma e un colore in tutte le loro usanze e statuti che si può vedere in tutte le loro casacche e i loro stemmi; qualcosa insieme severo e gaio. Questo non è un allontanamento dall’interesse per le cose esterne, ma piuttosto una parte di esso. La stessa accoglienza che spesso riservavano a uno straniero venuto da oltre il muro era un riconoscimento del muro. Coloro che ritengono la propria vita del tutto sufficiente non vedono il suo limite come un muro, ma come la fine del mondo. I Cinesi chiamavano l’uomo bianco un «rompi-cielo». Lo spirito medievale ama la sua parte nella vita come una parte, non come un tutto; la sua investitura per essa veniva da qualcos’altro. C’è una facezia su un monaco benedettino che usò la comune grazia del Benedictus benedicat, al che l’illetterato francescano ribatté trionfante Franciscus Franciscat. È una sorta di parabola della storia medievale; poiché se esistesse un verbo Franciscare esso sarebbe una descrizione approssimativa di ciò che san Francesco fece in seguito. Ma quel più individuale misticismo stava solo avvicinandosi alla sua nascita, e Benedictus benedicat è assai precisamente il motto del primo medievalismo. Voglio dire che ogni cosa è benedetta dall’aldilà, da qualcosa che a sua volta è stato benedetto ancora dall’aldilà; solo il benedetto benedice. Ma il punto che è la chiave delle Crociate è questo: che per loro l’aldilà non era l’infinito, come in una religione moderna. Ogni aldilà era un luogo. Il mistero della località, con tutta la sua presa sul cuore umano, era presente nelle cose più eteree della cristianità tanto quanto era assente dalle cose più pratiche dell’Islam. L’Inghilterra faceva derivare una cosa dalla Francia, la Francia dall’Italia, l’Italia dalla Grecia, la Grecia dalla Palestina, la Palestina dal Paradiso. Non era solo che un piccolo proprietario del Kent avrebbe avuto la sua casa consacrata dal prete della chiesa parrocchiale, che era confermata da Canterbury, che era confermata da Roma. Roma stessa non adorava se stessa, come nell’età pagana. Roma stessa guardava a oriente, verso la misteriosa culla del suo credo, verso una terra la cui stessa terra era detta santa. E quando guardava a oriente per cercarla vedeva il volto di Maometto. Vedeva ergersi nel luogo che era il suo cielo terreno un gigante divoratore uscito dai deserti, per il quale tutti i luoghi erano uguali.
È stato così necessario soffermarsi sulle emozioni interiori della Crociata, perché il lettore inglese moderno è largamente tagliato fuori da questi particolari sentimenti dei suoi padri; e la vera contesa fra la cristianità e l’Islam, il battesimo di fuoco delle giovani nazioni, non potrebbe altrimenti essere colta nel suo carattere unico. Non era nulla di così semplice come una contesa fra due uomini che entrambi volevano Gerusalemme. Era la ben più mortale contesa fra un uomo che la voleva e un altro uomo che non riusciva a capire perché la si volesse. Il Musulmano, certo, aveva i propri luoghi santi; ma non ha mai provato per essi ciò che gli Occidentali possono provare per un campo o per il tetto di casa; egli pensava alla santità come santa, non ai luoghi come luoghi. L’austerità che gli proibiva le immagini, la guerra errante che gli proibiva il riposo, lo tagliavano fuori da tutto ciò che stava sbocciando e fiorendo nei nostri patriottismi locali; proprio come ha dato ai Turchi un impero senza mai dar loro una nazione.
Ora, l’effetto di questa avventura contro un nemico possente e misterioso fu semplicemente enorme nella trasformazione dell’Inghilterra, come di tutte le nazioni che si andavano sviluppando fianco a fianco con l’Inghilterra. In primo luogo, imparammo enormemente da ciò che il Saraceno fece. In secondo luogo, imparammo ancor più enormemente da ciò che il Saraceno non fece. Quanto ad alcune delle cose buone che ci mancavano, fummo fortunatamente in grado di seguirlo. Ma in tutte le cose buone che a lui mancavano, fummo saldi come adamante nello sfidarlo. Si può dire che i Cristiani non seppero mai quanta ragione avessero finché non andarono in guerra con i Musulmani. Subito la reazione più ovvia e più rappresentativa fu la reazione che produsse il meglio di ciò che chiamiamo Arte cristiana; e specialmente quelle grottesche dell’architettura gotica, che non solo sono vive ma scalcianti. L’Oriente come ambiente, come fascino impersonale, stimolò certamente la mente occidentale, ma la stimolò piuttosto a infrangere il comandamento musulmano che a osservarlo. Era come se il Cristiano fosse spinto, al pari di un caricaturista, a coprire tutto quell’ornamento senza volto con dei volti; a dare teste a tutti quei serpenti senza testa e uccelli a tutti quegli alberi senza vita. La statuaria si ravvivò e prese vita sotto il veto del nemico come sotto una benedizione. L’immagine, proprio perché era chiamata idolo, divenne non solo un’insegna ma un’arma. Un esercito centuplicato di pietra sorse dovunque per i santuari e le strade d’Europa. Gli Iconoclasti fecero più statue di quante ne distrussero.
Il posto di Cuor di Leone nella favola e nel pettegolezzo popolari è assai più simile al suo posto nella vera storia che non il posto di mero perdigiorno snazionalizzato attribuitogli nei nostri utilitaristici libri di scuola. In verità la voce popolare è quasi sempre assai più vicina alla verità storica che l’opinione «colta» d’oggi; poiché la tradizione è più veritiera della moda. Re Riccardo, quale tipico Crociato, fece davvero una differenza decisiva per l’Inghilterra conquistando gloria in Oriente, invece di dedicarsi coscienziosamente alla politica interna nella maniera esemplare di Re Giovanni. Il caso del suo genio e prestigio militare diede all’Inghilterra qualcosa che essa conservò per quattrocento anni, e senza cui è incomprensibile per tutto quel periodo: la fama di essere nella vera avanguardia della cavalleria. I grandi romanzi della Tavola Rotonda, l’attaccamento della cavalleria al nome di un re britannico, appartengono a questo periodo. Riccardo non era solo un cavaliere ma un trovatore; e la cultura e la cortesia si collegavano all’idea del valore inglese. L’Inglese medievale era perfino orgoglioso di essere cortese; il che è quanto meno non peggio dell’essere orgogliosi del denaro e delle cattive maniere, che è ciò che molti Inglesi nei nostri secoli più recenti hanno inteso col loro buon senso.
Chivalry might be called the baptism of Feudalism. It was an attempt to bring the justice and even the logic of the Catholic creed into a military system which already existed; to turn its discipline into an initiation and its inequalities into a hierarchy. To the comparative grace of the new period belongs, of course, that considerable cultus of the dignity of woman, to which the word “chivalry” is often narrowed, or perhaps exalted. This also was a revolt against one of the worst gaps in the more polished civilization of the Saracens. The Moslems naturally suffered from the older Oriental sentiment about women; and were, of course, without the special inspiration given by the cult of the Virgin. It is false to say that the chivalric view of women was merely an affectation, except in the sense in which there must always be an affectation where there is an ideal. It is the worst sort of superficiality not to see the pressure of a general sentiment merely because it is always broken up by events; the Crusade itself, for example is more present and potent as a frame even than as a reality. From the first Plantagenet to the last Lancastrian it haunts the minds of English kings, giving as a background to their battles a mirage of Palestine. So a devotion like that of Edward I to his queen was quite a real motive in the lives of multitudes of his contemporaries. When crowds of enlightened tourists, setting forth to sneer at the superstitions of the continent, are taking tickets and labelling luggage at the large railway station at the west end of the Strand, I do not know whether they all speak to their wives with a more flowing courtesy than their fathers in Edward’s time, or whether they pause to meditate on the legend of a husband’s sorrow, to be found in the very name of Charing Cross.
But it is a huge historical error to suppose that the Crusades concerned only that crust of society for which heraldry was an art and chivalry an etiquette. The direct contrary is the fact. The First Crusade especially was much more an unanimous popular rising than most that are called riots and revolutions. The Guilds, the great democratic systems of the time, often owed their increasing power to corporate fighting for the Cross; but I shall deal with such things later. Often it was not so much a levy of men as a trek of whole families, like new gipsies moving eastwards. And it has passed into a proverb that children by themselves often organized a crusade as they now organize a charade. But we shall best realize the fact by fancying every Crusade as a Children’s Crusade. They were full of all that the modern world worships in children, because it has crushed it out of men. Their lives were full, as the rudest remains of their vulgarest arts are full, of something that we all saw out of the nursery window. It can best be seen later, for instance, but it is ubiquitous in the older and more unconscious contemporary art; something that domesticated distant lands and made the horizon at home. They fitted into the corners of small houses the ends of the earth and the edges of the sky. Their perspective is rude and crazy, but it is perspective; it is not the decorative flatness of orientalism. In a word, their world, like a child’s, is full of foreshortening, as of a short cut to fairyland. Their maps are more provocative than picture. Their half-fabulous animals are monsters, and yet are pets. It is impossible to state verbally this very vivid atmosphere; but it was an atmosphere as well as an adventure. It was precisely these outlandish visions that truly came home to everybody; it was the royal councils and feudal quarrels that were comparatively remote. The Holy Land was much nearer to a plain man’s house than Westminster, and immeasurably nearer than Runymede. To give a list of English kings and parliaments, without pausing a moment upon this prodigious presence of a religious transfiguration in common life, is something the folly of which can but faintly be conveyed by a modern parallel, with secularity and religion reversed. It is as if some Clericalist or Royalist writer should give a list of the Archbishops of Paris from 1750 to 1850, noting how one dies of small-pox, another of old age, another by a curious accident of decapitation and throughout all his record should never once mention the nature, or even the name, of the French Revolution.
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La cavalleria potrebbe dirsi il battesimo del Feudalesimo. Fu un tentativo di portare la giustizia e perfino la logica del credo cattolico entro un sistema militare che già esisteva; di mutare la sua disciplina in un’iniziazione e le sue disuguaglianze in una gerarchia. Alla relativa grazia del nuovo periodo appartiene, naturalmente, quel considerevole culto della dignità della donna, a cui la parola «cavalleria» è spesso ristretta, o forse esaltata. Anche questo fu una rivolta contro una delle peggiori lacune nella più raffinata civiltà dei Saraceni. I Musulmani soffrivano naturalmente dell’antico sentimento orientale riguardo alle donne; ed erano, naturalmente, privi della speciale ispirazione data dal culto della Vergine. È falso dire che la visione cavalleresca della donna fosse una mera affettazione, se non nel senso in cui deve sempre esserci un’affettazione dove c’è un ideale. È la peggior sorta di superficialità non vedere la pressione di un sentimento generale solo perché è sempre spezzato dagli eventi; la Crociata stessa, per esempio, è più presente e potente come cornice che non come realtà. Dal primo Plantageneto all’ultimo Lancaster essa infesta le menti dei re inglesi, dando come sfondo alle loro battaglie un miraggio di Palestina. Così una devozione come quella di Edoardo I per la sua regina era del tutto un movente reale nelle vite di moltitudini di suoi contemporanei. Quando folle di turisti illuminati, partendo per schernire le superstizioni del continente, fanno i biglietti ed etichettano i bagagli alla grande stazione ferroviaria all’estremità occidentale dello Strand, non so se tutti parlino alle loro mogli con una cortesia più fluente dei loro padri al tempo di Edoardo, o se si fermino a meditare sulla leggenda del dolore di un marito, che si trova nel nome stesso di Charing Cross.
Ma è un enorme errore storico supporre che le Crociate riguardassero solo quella crosta della società per cui l’araldica era un’arte e la cavalleria un’etichetta. È vero l’esatto contrario. La Prima Crociata specialmente fu assai più una unanime sollevazione popolare della maggior parte di quelle che si chiamano rivolte e rivoluzioni. Le Corporazioni, i grandi sistemi democratici del tempo, dovettero spesso il loro crescente potere al combattere in corpo per la Croce; ma tratterò di tali cose più avanti. Spesso non era tanto una leva d’uomini quanto una migrazione di intere famiglie, come nuovi zingari che si muovevano verso oriente. Ed è passato in proverbio che i bambini da soli organizzavano spesso una crociata come ora organizzano una sciarada. Ma comprenderemo meglio il fatto immaginando ogni Crociata come una Crociata dei Fanciulli. Erano pieni di tutto ciò che il mondo moderno adora nei bambini, perché lo ha schiacciato fuori dagli uomini. Le loro vite erano piene, come i più rozzi resti delle loro arti più volgari sono pieni, di qualcosa che tutti scorgevamo dalla finestra della stanza dei bambini. Lo si potrà vedere meglio più avanti, per esempio, ma è ubiquo nell’arte contemporanea più antica e più inconsapevole; qualcosa che addomesticava le terre lontane e portava l’orizzonte a casa. Facevano entrare negli angoli di piccole case i confini della terra e i margini del cielo. La loro prospettiva è rozza e folle, ma è prospettiva; non è la piattezza decorativa dell’orientalismo. In una parola, il loro mondo, come quello di un fanciullo, è pieno di scorci, come di una scorciatoia verso il paese delle fate. Le loro carte sono più suggestive di un dipinto. I loro animali mezzo favolosi sono mostri, eppure sono animali domestici. È impossibile esprimere a parole questa atmosfera così viva; ma era un’atmosfera oltre che un’avventura. Erano precisamente queste visioni stravaganti a giungere davvero fino a casa di tutti; erano i consigli reali e le contese feudali a essere relativamente remoti. La Terra Santa era assai più vicina alla casa di un uomo comune che non Westminster, e incommensurabilmente più vicina di Runnymede. Dare un elenco di re e parlamenti inglesi, senza soffermarsi un momento su questa prodigiosa presenza di una trasfigurazione religiosa nella vita comune, è qualcosa la cui follia può essere solo debolmente resa da un parallelo moderno, con la secolarità e la religione invertite. È come se qualche scrittore clericale o realista dovesse dare un elenco degli Arcivescovi di Parigi dal 1750 al 1850, notando come uno muoia di vaiolo, un altro di vecchiaia, un altro per un curioso incidente di decapitazione, e in tutto il suo resoconto non menzionasse mai neppure una volta la natura, o perfino il nome, della Rivoluzione francese.
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VII
THE PROBLEM OF THE PLANTAGENETS
It is a point of prestige with what is called the Higher Criticism in all branches to proclaim that certain popular texts and authorities are “late”, and therefore apparently worthless. Two similar events are always the same event, and the later alone is even credible. This fanaticism is often in mere fact mistaken; it ignores the most common coincidences of human life: and some future critic will probably say that the tale of the Tower of Babel cannot be older than the Eiffel Tower, because there was certainly a confusion of tongues at the Paris Exhibition. Most of the mediaeval remains familiar to the modern reader are necessarily “late”, such as Chaucer or the Robin Hood ballads; but they are none the less, to a wiser criticism, worthy of attention and even trust. That which lingers after an epoch is generally that which lived most luxuriantly in it. It is an excellent habit to read history backwards. It is far wiser for a modern man to read the Middle Ages backwards from Shakespeare, whom he can judge for himself, and who yet is crammed with the Middle Ages, than to attempt to read them forwards from Caedmon, of whom he can know nothing, and of whom even the authorities he must trust know very little. If this be true of Shakespeare, it is even truer, of course, of Chaucer. If we really want to know what was strongest in the twelfth century, it is no bad way to ask what remained of it in the fourteenth. When the average reader turns to the “Canterbury Tales,” which are still as amusing as Dickens yet as mediaeval as Durham Cathedral, what is the very first question to be asked? Why, for instance, are they called Canterbury Tales; and what were the pilgrims doing in the road to Canterbury? They were, of course, taking part in a popular festival like a modern public holiday, though perhaps more genial and leisurely. Nor are we, perhaps, prepared to accept it as a self-evident step in progress that their holidays were derived from saints, while ours are dictated by bankers.
It is almost necessary to say nowadays that a saint means a very good man. The notion of an eminence merely moral, consistent with complete stupidity or unsuccess, is a revolutionary image grown unfamiliar by it very familiarity, and needing, as do many things of this older society, some almost preposterous modern parallel to give its original freshness and point. If we entered a foreign town and found a pillar like the Nelson Column, we should be surprised to learn the hero on the top of it had been famous for his politeness and hilarity during a chronic toothache. If a procession came down the street with a brass band and a hero on a white horse, we should think it odd to be told that he had been very patient with a half-witted maiden aunt. Yet some such pantomime impossibility is the only measure of the innovation of the Christian idea of a popular and recognized saint. It must especially be realized that while this kind of glory was the highest, it was also in a sense the lowest. The materials of it were almost the same as those of labour and domesticity: it did not need the sword or sceptre, but rather the staff or spade. It was the ambition of poverty. All this must be approximately visualized before we catch a glimpse of the great effects of the story which lay behind the Canterbury Pilgrimage.
The first few lines of Chaucer’s poem, to say nothing of thousands in the course of it, make it instantly plain that it was no case of secular revels still linked by a slight ritual to the name of some forgotten god, as may have happened in the pagan decline. Chaucer and his friends did think about St. Thomas, at least more frequently than a clerk at Margate things about St. Lubbock. They did definitely believe in the bodily cures wrought for them through St. Thomas, at least as firmly as the most enlightened and progressive modern can believe in those of Mrs. Eddy. Who was St. Thomas, to whose shrine the whole of that society is thus seen in the act of moving: and why was he so important? If there be a streak of sincerity in the claim to teach social and democratic society, instead of a string of kings and battles, this is the obvious and open gate by which to approach the figure which disputed England with the first Plantagenet. A real popular history should think more of his popularity even than his policy. And unquestionably thousands of ploughmen, carpenters, cooks, and yeomen, as in the motley crowd of Chaucer, knew a great deal about St. Thomas why they had never even heard of Becket.
It would be easy to detail what followed the Conquest as the feudal tangle that it was, till a prince from Anjou repeated the unifying effort of the Conqueror. It is found equally easy to write of the Red King’s hunting instead of his building, which has lasted longer, and which he probably loved much more. It is easy to catalogue the questions he disputed with Anselm— leaving out the question Anselm cared most about, and which he asked with explosive simplicity, as “Why was God a man?” All this is as simple as saying that a king died of eating lampreys, from which, however, there is little to learn nowadays, unless it be that when a modern monarch perishes of gluttony the newspapers seldom say so. But if we want to know what really happened to England in this dim epoch, I think it can be dimly but truly traced in the story of St. Thomas of Canterbury.
Henry of Anjou, who brought fresh French blood into the monarchy, brought also a refreshment of the idea for which the French have always stood: the idea in the Roman Law of something impersonal and omnipresent. It is the thing we smile at even in a small French detective story; when Justice opens a hand bag or Justice runs after a cab. Henry II really produced this impression of being a police force in person; a contemporary priest compared his restless vigilance to the bird and the fish of scripture whose way no man knoweth. Kinghood, however, meant law and not caprice; its ideal at least was a justice cheap and obvious as daylight, an atmosphere which lingers only in popular phrases about the King’s English or the King’s highway. But though it tended to be egalitarian it did not, of itself, tend to be humanitarian. In modern France, as in ancient Rome, the other name of Justice has sometimes been Terror. The Frenchman especially is always a Revolutionist—and never an Anarchist. Now this effort of kings like Henry II to rebuild on a plan like that of the Roman Law was not only, of course, crossed and entangled by countless feudal fancies and feelings in themselves as well as others, it was also conditioned by what was the corner-stone of the whole civilization. It had to happen not only with but within the Church. For a Church was to these men rather a world they lived in than a building to which they went. Without the Church the Middle Ages would have had no law, as without the Church the Reformation would have had no Bible. Many priests expounded and embellished the Roman Law, and many priests supported Henry II. And yet there was another element in the Church, stored in its first foundations like dynamite, and destined in every age to destroy and renew the world. An idealism akin to impossibilism ran down the ages parallel to all its political compromises. Monasticism itself was the throwing off of innumerable Utopias, without posterity yet with perpetuity. It had, as was proved recurrently after corrupt epochs, a strange secret of getting poor quickly; a mushroom magnificence of destitution. This wind of revolution in the crusading time caught Francis in Assisi and stripped him of his rich garments in the street. The same wind of revolution suddenly smote Thomas Becket, King Henry’s brilliant and luxurious Chancellor, and drove him on to an unearthly glory and bloody end.
VII
IL PROBLEMA DEI PLANTAGENETI
È un punto di prestigio per ciò che si chiama Alta Critica in tutti i suoi rami proclamare che certi testi e certe autorità popolari sono «tardi», e perciò apparentemente privi di valore. Due eventi simili sono sempre lo stesso evento, e il posteriore soltanto è perfino credibile. Questo fanatismo è spesso, di mero fatto, errato; ignora le più comuni coincidenze della vita umana: e qualche critico futuro dirà probabilmente che il racconto della Torre di Babele non può essere più antico della Torre Eiffel, perché ci fu certamente una confusione di lingue all’Esposizione di Parigi. La maggior parte dei resti medievali familiari al lettore moderno sono necessariamente «tardi», come Chaucer o le ballate di Robin Hood; ma non sono per questo, a una critica più saggia, meno degni di attenzione e persino di fiducia. Ciò che indugia dopo un’epoca è generalmente ciò che in essa visse più rigogliosamente. È un’eccellente abitudine leggere la storia a ritroso. È assai più saggio per un uomo moderno leggere il Medioevo a ritroso da Shakespeare, che può giudicare da sé, e che pure è colmo di Medioevo, che tentare di leggerlo in avanti da Caedmon, del quale non può sapere nulla, e del quale perfino le autorità in cui deve fidarsi sanno assai poco. Se ciò è vero di Shakespeare, è ancor più vero, naturalmente, di Chaucer. Se vogliamo davvero sapere cosa vi fosse di più forte nel dodicesimo secolo, non è un cattivo metodo chiedersi cosa ne rimanesse nel quattordicesimo. Quando il lettore medio si volge ai «Racconti di Canterbury», che sono ancora divertenti come Dickens eppure medievali come la Cattedrale di Durham, qual è la prima domanda da porsi? Perché, per esempio, sono chiamati Racconti di Canterbury; e cosa facevano i pellegrini sulla strada per Canterbury? Prendevano parte, naturalmente, a una festa popolare come una moderna festività pubblica, benché forse più cordiale e tranquilla. Né siamo, forse, disposti ad accettare come un passo evidente di per sé nel progresso il fatto che le loro festività derivassero dai santi, mentre le nostre sono dettate dai banchieri.
È quasi necessario dire oggigiorno che un santo significa un uomo assai buono. La nozione di un’eminenza meramente morale, compatibile con una completa stupidità o con l’insuccesso, è un’immagine rivoluzionaria divenuta estranea per la sua stessa familiarità, e bisognosa, come molte cose di questa società più antica, di qualche parallelo moderno quasi assurdo per ridarle la sua freschezza e il suo mordente originari. Se entrassimo in una città straniera e trovassimo una colonna come la Colonna di Nelson, saremmo sorpresi di apprendere che l’eroe in cima ad essa era stato famoso per la sua cortesia e la sua ilarità durante un cronico mal di denti. Se una processione scendesse per la strada con una banda di ottoni e un eroe su un cavallo bianco, ci parrebbe strano sentirci dire che era stato assai paziente con una zia zitella mezzo scema. Eppure una qualche impossibilità da pantomima come questa è l’unica misura dell’ innovazione dell’idea cristiana di un santo popolare e riconosciuto. Bisogna specialmente rendersi conto che, mentre questa sorta di gloria era la più alta, era anche in un certo senso la più bassa. I materiali di essa erano quasi gli stessi di quelli del lavoro e della vita domestica: non richiedeva la spada o lo scettro, ma piuttosto il bastone o la vanga. Era l’ambizione della povertà. Tutto questo deve essere approssimativamente visualizzato prima che possiamo cogliere uno scorcio dei grandi effetti della storia che stava dietro il Pellegrinaggio di Canterbury.
Le prime righe del poema di Chaucer, per non dire di migliaia nel suo corso, rendono immediatamente chiaro che non si trattava affatto di baldorie profane ancora legate da un lieve rituale al nome di qualche dio dimenticato, come può essere accaduto nel declino pagano. Chaucer e i suoi amici pensavano davvero a san Tommaso, quanto meno più di frequente di quanto un impiegato a Margate pensi a san Lubbock. Credevano decisamente nelle guarigioni corporali operate per loro tramite san Tommaso, almeno con la stessa fermezza con cui il più illuminato e progressista dei moderni può credere in quelle della signora Eddy. Chi era san Tommaso, al cui santuario tutta quella società si vede così in atto di muoversi: e perché era tanto importante? Se c’è una vena di sincerità nella pretesa di insegnare la storia sociale e democratica, invece di una sfilza di re e battaglie, questa è l’ovvia e aperta porta per cui accostarsi alla figura che contese l’Inghilterra al primo Plantageneto. Una vera storia popolare dovrebbe pensare più alla sua popolarità che alla sua politica. E indubbiamente migliaia di aratori, falegnami, cuochi e piccoli proprietari, come nella variopinta folla di Chaucer, sapevano moltissimo di san Tommaso pur non avendo mai neppure sentito parlare di Becket.
Sarebbe facile esporre ciò che seguì la Conquista come il groviglio feudale che fu, finché un principe d’Angiò ripeté lo sforzo unificatore del Conquistatore. Si trova del pari facile scrivere della caccia del Re Rosso invece che delle sue costruzioni, che sono durate più a lungo, e che egli probabilmente amava assai di più. È facile catalogare le questioni che egli disputò con Anselmo, tralasciando la questione che ad Anselmo stava più a cuore, e che egli poneva con esplosiva semplicità, come «Perché Dio si fece uomo?». Tutto questo è semplice quanto dire che un re morì per aver mangiato lamprede, dal che, tuttavia, c’è poco da imparare oggigiorno, se non che quando un monarca moderno perisce di gola i giornali di rado lo dicono. Ma se vogliamo sapere cosa realmente accadde all’Inghilterra in quest’epoca oscura, credo che lo si possa oscuramente ma veracemente tracciare nella storia di san Tommaso di Canterbury.
Enrico d’Angiò, che portò fresco sangue francese nella monarchia, portò anche un rinvigorimento dell’idea per cui i Francesi si sono sempre battuti: l’idea, presente nel Diritto Romano, di qualcosa di impersonale e onnipresente. È la cosa a cui sorridiamo perfino in un piccolo racconto poliziesco francese; quando la Giustizia apre una borsetta o la Giustizia corre dietro a una carrozza. Enrico II produsse davvero questa impressione di essere una forza di polizia in persona; un prete contemporaneo paragonò la sua inquieta vigilanza all’uccello e al pesce della Scrittura la cui via nessun uomo conosce. La regalità, tuttavia, significava legge e non capriccio; il suo ideale almeno era una giustizia a buon mercato e ovvia come la luce del giorno, un’atmosfera che indugia solo in frasi popolari sull’inglese del re o sulla strada maestra del re. Ma benché tendesse a essere egualitaria non tendeva, di per sé, a essere umanitaria. Nella Francia moderna, come nell’antica Roma, l’altro nome della Giustizia è stato talvolta Terrore. Il Francese specialmente è sempre un Rivoluzionario, e mai un Anarchico. Ora, questo sforzo di re come Enrico II di ricostruire su un piano simile a quello del Diritto Romano non solo fu, naturalmente, attraversato e intricato da innumerevoli fantasie e sentimenti feudali in se stessi al pari che in altri, ma fu anche condizionato da ciò che era la pietra angolare dell’intera civiltà. Doveva avvenire non solo con la Chiesa ma dentro la Chiesa. Poiché una Chiesa era per questi uomini piuttosto un mondo in cui vivevano che un edificio in cui andavano. Senza la Chiesa il Medioevo non avrebbe avuto legge, così come senza la Chiesa la Riforma non avrebbe avuto Bibbia. Molti preti esposero e abbellirono il Diritto Romano, e molti preti sostennero Enrico II. Eppure c’era un altro elemento nella Chiesa, riposto nelle sue prime fondamenta come dinamite, e destinato in ogni età a distruggere e rinnovare il mondo. Un idealismo affine all’impossibilismo percorreva i secoli parallelo a tutti i suoi compromessi politici. Il monachesimo stesso era il germogliare di innumerevoli Utopie, senza posterità eppure con perpetuità. Aveva, come si provò ricorrentemente dopo le epoche corrotte, uno strano segreto per impoverirsi in fretta; una magnificenza da fungo della miseria. Questo vento di rivoluzione nel tempo delle crociate colse Francesco ad Assisi e lo spogliò delle sue ricche vesti per strada. Lo stesso vento di rivoluzione colpì all’improvviso Tommaso Becket, il brillante e fastoso Cancelliere del re Enrico, e lo spinse verso una gloria ultraterrena e una sanguinosa fine.
Becket was a type of those historic times in which it is really very practical to be impracticable. The quarrel which tore him from his friend’s side cannot be appreciated in the light of those legal and constitutional debates which the misfortunes of the seventeenth century have made so much of in more recent history. To convict St. Thomas of illegality and clerical intrigue, when he set the law of the Church against that of the State, is about as adequate as to convict St. Francis of bad heraldry when he said he was the brother of the sun and the moon. There may have been heralds stupid enough to say so even in that much more logical age, but it is no sufficient way of dealing with visions or with revolutions. St. Thomas of Canterbury was a great visionary and a great revolutionist, but so far as England was concerned his revolution failed and his vision was not fulfilled. We are therefore told in the text-books little more than that he wrangled with the King about certain regulations; the most crucial being whether “criminous clerks” should be punished by the State or the Church. And this was indeed the chief text of the dispute; but to realise it we must reiterate what is hardest for modern England to understand— the nature of the Catholic Church when it was itself a government, and the permanent sense in which it was itself a revolution.
It is always the first fact that escapes notice; and the first fact about the Church was that it created a machinery of pardon, where the State could only work with a machinery of punishment. It claimed to be a divine detective who helped the criminal to escape by a plea of guilty. It was, therefore, in the very nature of the institution, that when it did punish materially it punished more lightly. If any modern man were put back in the Becket quarrel, his sympathies would certainly be torn in two; for the King’s scheme was the more rational, the Archbishop’s was the more humane. And despite the horrors that darkened religious disputes long afterwards, this character was certainly in the bulk the historic character of Church government. It is admitted, for instance, that things like eviction, or the harsh treatment of tenants, were practically unknown wherever the Church was landlord. The principle lingered into more evil days in the form by which the Church authorities handed over culprits to the secular arm to be killed, even for religious offences. In modern romances this is treated as a mere hypocrisy; but the man who treats every human inconsistency as a hypocrisy is himself a hypocrite about his own inconsistencies.
Our world, then, cannot understand St. Thomas, any more than St. Francis, without accepting very simply a flaming and even fantastic charity, by which the great Archbishop undoubtedly stands for the victims of this world, where the wheel of fortune grinds the faces of the poor. He may well have been too idealistic; he wished to protect the Church as a sort of earthly paradise, of which the rules might seem to him as paternal as those of heaven, but might well seem to the King as capricious as those of fairyland. But if the priest was too idealistic, the King was really too practical; it is intrinsically true to say he was too practical to succeed in practice. There re-enters here, and runs, I think, through all English history, the rather indescribable truth I have suggested about the Conqueror; that perhaps he was hardly impersonal enough for a pure despot. The real moral of our mediaeval story is, I think, subtly contrary to Carlyle’s vision of a stormy strong man to hammer and weld the state like a smith. Our strong men were too strong for us, and too strong for themselves. They were too strong for their own aim of a just and equal monarchy. The smith broke upon the anvil the sword of state that he was hammering for himself. Whether or no this will serve as a key to the very complicated story of our kings and barons, it is the exact posture of Henry II to his rival. He became lawless out of sheer love of law. He also stood, though in a colder and more remote manner, for the whole people against feudal oppression; and if his policy had succeeded in its purity, it would at least have made impossible the privilege and capitalism of later times. But that bodily restlessness which stamped and spurned the furniture was a symbol of him; it was some such things that prevented him and his heirs from sitting as quietly on their throne as the heirs of St. Louis. He thrust again at the tough intangibility of the priests’ Utopianism like a man fighting a ghost; he answered transcendental defiances with baser material persecutions; and at last, on a dark and, I think, decisive day in English history, his word sent four feudal murderers into the cloisters of Canterbury, who went there to destroy a traitor and who created a saint.
At the grave of the dead man broke forth what can only be called an epidemic of healing. For miracles so narrated there is the same evidence as for half of the facts of history; and any one denying them must deny them upon a dogma. But something followed which would seem to modern civilization even more monstrous than a miracle. If the reader can imagine Mr. Cecil Rhodes submitting to be horsewhipped by a Boer in St. Paul’s Cathedral, as an apology for some indefensible death incidental to the Jameson Raid, he will form but a faint idea of what was meant when Henry II was beaten by monks at the tomb of his vassal and enemy. The modern parallel called up is comic, but the truth is that mediaeval actualities have a violence that does seem comic to our conventions. The Catholics of that age were driven by two dominant thoughts: the all-importance of penitence as an answer to sin, and the all-importance of vivid and evident external acts as a proof of penitence. Extravagant humiliation after extravagant pride for them restored the balance of sanity. The point is worth stressing, because without it moderns make neither head nor tail of the period. Green gravely suggests, for instance, of Henry’s ancestor Fulk of Anjou, that his tyrannies and frauds were further blackened by “low superstition,” which led him to be dragged in a halter round a shrine, scourged and screaming for the mercy of God. Mediaevals would simply have said that such a man might well scream for it, but his scream was the only logical comment he could make. But they would have quite refused to see why the scream should be added to the sins and not subtracted from them. They would have thought it simply muddle-headed to have the same horror at a man being horribly sinful and for being horribly sorry.
Becket era un tipo di quei tempi storici in cui è davvero assai pratico essere impraticabili. La contesa che lo strappò dal fianco del suo amico non può essere valutata alla luce di quei dibattiti legali e costituzionali di cui le sventure del diciassettesimo secolo hanno fatto tanto conto nella più recente storia. Convincere san Tommaso di illegalità e di intrigo clericale, quando egli oppose la legge della Chiesa a quella dello Stato, è più o meno adeguato quanto convincere san Francesco di cattiva araldica quando disse di essere il fratello del sole e della luna. Possono esserci stati araldi abbastanza stupidi da dirlo perfino in quell’ età assai più logica, ma non è un modo sufficiente di trattare le visioni o le rivoluzioni. San Tommaso di Canterbury fu un grande visionario e un grande rivoluzionario, ma per quanto l’Inghilterra fosse coinvolta la sua rivoluzione fallì e la sua visione non si compì. Ci viene perciò detto nei manuali poco più che egli disputò col re su certi regolamenti; il più cruciale essendo se i «chierici criminosi» dovessero essere puniti dallo Stato o dalla Chiesa. E questo fu in effetti il tema principale della disputa; ma per comprenderlo dobbiamo ribadire ciò che è più arduo da capire per l’Inghilterra moderna: la natura della Chiesa cattolica quando essa stessa era un governo, e il senso permanente in cui essa stessa era una rivoluzione.
È sempre il primo fatto a sfuggire all’attenzione; e il primo fatto riguardo alla Chiesa fu che essa creò una macchina del perdono, là dove lo Stato poteva operare solo con una macchina del castigo. Pretendeva di essere un investigatore divino che aiutava il criminale a sfuggire mediante una dichiarazione di colpevolezza. Era perciò, nella natura stessa dell’istituzione, che quando puniva materialmente puniva più lievemente. Se un uomo moderno fosse riportato indietro nella contesa di Becket, le sue simpatie sarebbero certamente lacerate in due; poiché il disegno del re era il più razionale, quello dell’Arcivescovo il più umano. E malgrado gli orrori che oscurarono assai più tardi le dispute religiose, questo carattere fu certamente, nel complesso, il carattere storico del governo della Chiesa. È ammesso, per esempio, che cose come lo sfratto, o il trattamento duro dei fittavoli, erano praticamente sconosciute dovunque la Chiesa fosse proprietaria terriera. Il principio indugiò in giorni più malvagi nella forma per cui le autorità ecclesiastiche consegnavano i colpevoli al braccio secolare perché fossero uccisi, anche per colpe religiose. Nei romanzi moderni questo è trattato come una mera ipocrisia; ma l’uomo che tratta ogni incoerenza umana come un’ipocrisia è egli stesso un ipocrita riguardo alle proprie incoerenze.
Il nostro mondo, dunque, non può comprendere san Tommaso, non più di san Francesco, senza accettare assai semplicemente una fiammeggiante e persino fantastica carità, per la quale il grande Arcivescovo indubbiamente si erge a difesa delle vittime di questo mondo, dove la ruota della fortuna macina i volti dei poveri. Può ben essere stato troppo idealista; desiderava proteggere la Chiesa come una sorta di paradiso terreno, le cui regole potevano sembrargli paterne quanto quelle del cielo, ma potevano ben sembrare al re capricciose quanto quelle del paese delle fate. Ma se il prete era troppo idealista, il re era davvero troppo pratico; è intrinsecamente vero dire che era troppo pratico per riuscire nella pratica. Rientra qui, e percorre, credo, tutta la storia inglese, la verità piuttosto indescrivibile che ho suggerito riguardo al Conquistatore; che forse egli non era abbastanza impersonale per essere un puro despota. La vera morale della nostra vicenda medievale è, credo, sottilmente contraria alla visione di Carlyle di un uomo forte e tempestoso che martella e salda lo Stato come un fabbro. I nostri uomini forti erano troppo forti per noi, e troppo forti per se stessi. Erano troppo forti per il loro stesso scopo di una monarchia giusta ed equa. Il fabbro spezzò sull’incudine la spada dello Stato che stava forgiando per sé. Che questo serva o no da chiave alla assai complicata vicenda dei nostri re e baroni, è l’esatta posizione di Enrico II rispetto al suo rivale. Divenne senza legge per puro amore della legge. Egli si ergeva anche, benché in maniera più fredda e più remota, per l’intero popolo contro l’oppressione feudale; e se la sua politica fosse riuscita nella sua purezza, avrebbe quanto meno reso impossibili il privilegio e il capitalismo dei tempi successivi. Ma quella irrequietezza corporea che pestava e scalciava i mobili era un simbolo di lui; fu qualcosa di simile a impedire a lui e ai suoi eredi di sedere con la stessa quiete sul loro trono degli eredi di san Luigi. Egli si avventò di nuovo contro la tenace intangibilità dell’utopismo dei preti come un uomo che combatte un fantasma; rispose a sfide trascendentali con più vili persecuzioni materiali; e infine, in un giorno oscuro e, credo, decisivo della storia inglese, la sua parola mandò quattro assassini feudali nei chiostri di Canterbury, che vi andarono per distruggere un traditore e che crearono un santo.
Presso la tomba dell’uomo morto proruppe ciò che può solo essere chiamato un’epidemia di guarigioni. Per i miracoli così narrati c’è la stessa evidenza che per metà dei fatti della storia; e chiunque li neghi deve negarli in base a un dogma. Ma seguì qualcosa che alla civiltà moderna parrebbe ancor più mostruoso di un miracolo. Se il lettore può immaginare il signor Cecil Rhodes che si sottomette a essere frustato da un Boero nella Cattedrale di San Paolo, come scusa per qualche indifendibile morte incidentale al Jameson Raid, si farà solo una debole idea di ciò che si intese quando Enrico II fu battuto dai monaci alla tomba del suo vassallo e nemico. Il parallelo moderno evocato è comico, ma la verità è che le realtà medievali hanno una violenza che alle nostre convenzioni pare davvero comica. I Cattolici di quell’età erano mossi da due pensieri dominanti: la somma importanza della penitenza come risposta al peccato, e la somma importanza di atti esterni vividi ed evidenti come prova della penitenza. Un’umiliazione stravagante dopo un orgoglio stravagante ripristinava per loro l’equilibrio della sanità mentale. Il punto merita di essere sottolineato, perché senza di esso i moderni non riescono a raccapezzarsi del periodo. Green suggerisce gravemente, per esempio, riguardo a Fulco d’Angiò, antenato di Enrico, che le sue tirannie e frodi furono ulteriormente annerite dalla «bassa superstizione», che lo indusse a farsi trascinare con un capestro attorno a un santuario, flagellato e urlante per la misericordia di Dio. I medievali avrebbero semplicemente detto che un tale uomo poteva ben urlare per essa, ma il suo urlo era l’unico commento logico che potesse fare. Ma si sarebbero del tutto rifiutati di capire perché l’urlo dovesse essere aggiunto ai peccati e non sottratto ad essi. Avrebbero ritenuto semplicemente confuso l’avere lo stesso orrore per un uomo che è orribilmente peccatore e per uno che è orribilmente pentito.
But it may be suggested, I think, though with the doubt proper to ignorance, that the Angevin ideal of the King’s Justice lost more by the death of St. Thomas than was instantly apparent in the horror of Christendom, the canonization of the victim and the public penance of the tyrant. These things indeed were in a sense temporary; the King recovered the power to judge clerics, and many later kings and justiciars continued the monarchical plan. But I would suggest, as a possible clue to puzzling after events, that here and by this murderous stroke the crown lost what should have been the silent and massive support of its whole policy. I mean that it lost the people.
It need not be repeated that the case for despotism is democratic. As a rule its cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak. An autocrat cannot be judged as a historical character by his relations with other historical characters. His true applause comes not from the few actors on the lighted stage of aristocracy, but from that enormous audience which must always sit in darkness throughout the drama. The king who helps numberless helps nameless men, and when he flings his widest largesse he is a Christian doing good by stealth. This sort of monarchy was certainly a mediaeval ideal, nor need it necessarily fail as a reality. French kings were never so merciful to the people as when they were merciless to the peers; and it is probably true that a Czar who was a great lord to his intimates was often a little father in innumerable homes. It is overwhelmingly probable that such a central power, though it might at last have deserved destruction in England as in France have prevented the few from seizing and holding all the wealth and power to this day. But in England it broke off short, through something of which the slaying of St. Thomas may well have been the supreme example. It was something overstrained and startling and against the instincts of the people. And of what was meant in the Middle Ages by the very powerful and rather peculiar thing, the people, I shall speak in the next chapter.
In any case this conjecture finds support in the ensuing events. It is not merely that, just as the great but personal plan of the Conqueror collapsed after all into the chaos of the Stephen transition, so the great but personal plan of the first Plantagenet collapsed into the chaos of the Barons’ Wars. When all allowance is made for constitutional fictions and afterthoughts, it does seem likely that here for the first time some moral strength deserted the monarchy. The character of Henry’s second son John (for Richard belongs rather to the last chapter) stamped it with something accidental yet symbolic. It was not that John was a mere black blot on the pure gold of the Plantagenets, the texture was much more mixed and continuous; but he really was a discredited Plantagenet, and as it were a damaged Plantagenet. It was not that he was much more of a bad man than many opposed to him, but he was the kind of bad man whom bad men and good do combine to oppose. In a sense subtler than that of the legal and parliamentary logic-chopping invented long afterwards, he certainly managed to put the Crown in the wrong. Nobody suggested that the barons of Stephen’s time starved men in dungeons to promote political liberty, or hung them up by the heels as a symbolic request for a free parliament. In the reign of John and his son it was still the barons, and not in the least the people, who seized the power; but there did begin to appear a case for their seizing it, for contemporaries as well as constitutional historians afterwards. John, in one of his diplomatic doublings, had put England into the papal care, as an estate is put in Chancery. And unluckily the Pope, whose counsels had generally been mild and liberal, was then in his death-grapple with the Germanic Emperor and wanted every penny he could get to win. His winning was a blessing to Europe, but a curse to England, for he used the island as a mere treasury for this foreign war. In this and other matters the baronial party began to have something like a principle, which is the backbone of a policy. Much conventional history that connects their councils with a thing like our House of Commons is as far-fetched as it would be to say that the Speaker wields a Mace like those which the barons brandished in battle. Simon de Montfort was not an enthusiast for the Whig theory of the British Constitution, but he was an enthusiast for something. He founded a parliament in a fit of considerable absence of mind, in the responsible and even religious sense which had made his father so savage a Crusader against heretics, that he laid about him with his great sword before he fell at Evesham.
Magna Carta was not a step towards democracy, but it was a step away from despotism. If we hold that double truth firmly, we have something like a key to the rest of English history. A rather loose aristocracy not only gained but often deserved the name of liberty. And the history of the English can be most briefly summarized by taking the French motto of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” and noting that the English have sincerely loved the first and lost the other two.
In the contemporary complication much could be urged both for the Crown and the new and more national rally of the nobility. But it was a complication, whereas a miracle is a plain matter that any man can understand. The possibilities or impossibilities of St. Thomas Becket were left a riddle for history; the white flame of his audacious theory was frustrated, and his work cut short like a fairy tale left untold. But his memory passed into the care of the common people, and with them he was more active dead than alive—yes, even more busy. In the next chapter we shall consider what was meant in the Middle Ages by the common people, and how uncommon we should think it to-day. And in the last chapter we have already seen how in the Crusading age the strangest things grew homily, and men fed on traveller’s tales when there were no national newspapers. A many-coloured pageant of martyrology on numberless walls and windows had familiarized the most ignorant with alien cruelties in many climes; with a bishop flayed by Danes or a virgin burned by Saracens, with one saint stoned by Jews and another hewn in pieces by negroes. I cannot think it was a small matter that among these images one of the most magnificent had met his death but lately at the hands of an English monarch. There was at least something akin to the primitive and epical romances of that period in the tale of those two mighty friends, one of whom struck too hard and slew the other. It may even have been so early as this that something was judged in silence; and for the multitude rested on the Crown a mysterious seal of insecurity like that of Cain, and of exile on the English kings.
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Ma si potrebbe suggerire, credo, sebbene con il dubbio dovuto all’ignoranza, che l’ideale angioino della Giustizia del Re abbia perso più di quanto fosse immediatamente evidente nella morte di San Tommaso nell’orrore della cristianità, nella canonizzazione della vittima e nel pentimento pubblico del tiranno. Queste cose erano in un certo senso temporanee; il Re riacquistò il potere di giudicare i chierici, e molti re e giustizieri successivi continuarono il piano monarchico. Ma vorrei suggerire, come possibile chiave per eventi posteriori sconcertanti, che qui e con questo colpo assassino la corona abbia perso ciò che avrebbe dovuto essere il sostegno silenzioso e massiccio di tutta la sua politica. Intendo dire che ha perso il popolo.
Non è necessario ripetere che il caso a favore del dispotismo è democratico. Di norma la sua crudeltà verso i forti è gentilezza verso i deboli. Un’autorità non può essere giudicata come un personaggio storico in base alle sue relazioni con altri personaggi storici. Il suo vero applauso non proviene dai pochi attori sul palcoscenico illuminato dell’aristocrazia, ma da quell’enorme pubblico che deve sempre sedere al buio durante il dramma. Il re che aiuta innumerevoli uomini senza nome, e quando lancia la sua più ampia elemosina è un cristiano che fa del bene di nascosto. Questo tipo di monarchia era certamente un ideale medievale, né necessariamente deve fallire come realtà. I re francesi non furono mai così pietosi verso il popolo come quando erano implacabili verso i pari; ed è probabilmente vero che uno zar che era un grande signore per i suoi intimi era spesso un piccolo padre in innumerevoli case. È estremamente probabile che un tale potere centrale, anche se alla fine avrebbe meritato la distruzione in Inghilterra come in Francia, abbia impedito ai pochi di impossessarsi e mantenere tutta la ricchezza e il potere fino ad oggi. Ma in Inghilterra si è interrotto bruscamente, a causa di qualcosa di cui l’uccisione di San Tommaso può ben essere stato l’esempio supremo. Era qualcosa di esagerato e sorprendente, contro gli istinti del popolo. E di ciò che si intendeva nel Medioevo per quella cosa molto potente e piuttosto peculiare, il popolo, ne parlerò nel prossimo capitolo.
In ogni caso questa congettura trova sostegno negli eventi successivi. Non è solo che, proprio come il grande ma personale piano del Conquistatore crollò infine nel caos della transizione di Stefano, così il grande ma personale piano del primo Plantageneto crollò nel caos delle guerre dei baroni. Quando si tengono presenti tutte le finzioni e i ripensamenti costituzionali, sembra probabile che qui per la prima volta qualche forza morale abbandonasse la monarchia. Il carattere del secondo figlio di Enrico, Giovanni (perché Riccardo appartiene piuttosto all’ultimo capitolo) lo ha marchiato con qualcosa di accidentale ma simbolico. Non è che Giovanni fosse una semplice macchia nera sull’oro puro dei Plantageneti; il tessuto era molto più misto e continuo, ma lui era davvero un Plantageneto screditato, per così dire danneggiato. Non è che fosse molto più cattivo di molti suoi oppositori, ma era il tipo di uomo cattivo contro cui uomini buoni e cattivi si uniscono a combattere. In un senso più sottile di quello della logica giuridica e parlamentare inventata molto tempo dopo, riuscì certamente a mettere la Corona nel torto. Nessuno suggerì che i baroni del tempo di Stefano lasciassero morire di fame gli uomini nelle segrete per promuovere la libertà politica, o li appendessero per le caviglie come richiesta simbolica di un parlamento libero. Nel regno di Giovanni e di suo figlio erano ancora i baroni, e non affatto il popolo, a prendere il potere; ma cominciò ad apparire una ragione per cui lo prendessero, sia per i contemporanei che per gli storici costituzionali in seguito. Giovanni, in uno dei suoi doppi giochi diplomatici, aveva messo l’Inghilterra sotto la tutela papale, come si mette un patrimonio in cancelleria. E sfortunatamente il Papa, le cui decisioni erano state generalmente miti e liberali, era allora nella sua agonia contro l’imperatore germanico e voleva ogni soldo che poteva ottenere per vincere. La sua vittoria fu una benedizione per l’Europa, ma una maledizione per l’Inghilterra, perché usò l’isola come un semplice tesoro per questa guerra straniera. Su questo e altri argomenti il partito baronale cominciò ad avere qualcosa di simile a un principio, che è la spina dorsale di una politica. Gran parte della storia convenzionale che collega i loro consigli con qualcosa come la nostra Camera dei Comuni è altrettanto infondata quanto dire che il presidente brandisce un mazza come quelli che i baroni sventolavano in battaglia. Simon de Montfort non era un entusiasta della teoria whig della costituzione britannica, ma era un entusiasta di qualcosa. Fondò un parlamento in uno stato d’animo di notevole distrazione, nel senso responsabile e persino religioso che aveva reso suo padre così feroce crociato contro gli eretici, tanto da brandire la sua grande spada prima di cadere ad Evesham.
La Magna Carta non fu un passo verso la democrazia, ma fu un passo lontano dal dispotismo. Se teniamo saldamente questa duplice verità, abbiamo qualcosa di simile a una chiave per il resto della storia inglese. Un’aristocrazia piuttosto libera non solo ottenne, ma spesso meritò il nome di libertà. E la storia degli inglesi può essere riassunta brevemente prendendo il motto francese “Libertà, Uguaglianza e Fratellanza” e notando che gli inglesi hanno sinceramente amato la prima e perso le altre due.
Nella complicata situazione contemporanea si poteva sostenere molto sia per la Corona che per il nuovo e più nazionale raduno della nobiltà. Ma era una complicazione, mentre un miracolo è una cosa semplice che chiunque può capire. Le possibilità o impossibilità di San Tommaso Becket furono lasciate come un enigma per la storia; la bianca fiamma della sua audace teoria fu frustrata, e il suo lavoro interrotto come una fiaba rimasta inascoltata. Ma la sua memoria passò nelle mani del popolo comune, e con esso egli fu più attivo da morto che da vivo — sì, anche più operoso. Nel prossimo capitolo considereremo cosa si intendesse nel Medioevo per “popolo comune”, e quanto insolito ci sembrerebbe oggi. E nell’ultimo capitolo abbiamo già visto come nell’età delle Crociate le cose più strane diventassero familiari, e gli uomini si nutrissero di racconti di viaggio quando non c’erano giornali nazionali. Uno spettacolo multicolore di martirologio su innumerevoli muri e finestre aveva familiarizzato i più ignoranti con crudeltà straniere in molti climi; con un vescovo scorticato dai Danesi o una vergine bruciata dai Saraceni, con un santo lapidato dagli Ebrei e un altro fatto a pezzi da negri. Non posso pensare che fosse cosa da poco che tra queste immagini uno dei più magnifici avesse incontrato la sua morte poco prima per mano di un monarca inglese. C’era almeno qualcosa di affine alle primitive e epiche romance di quel periodo nella storia di quei due potenti amici, uno dei quali colpì troppo forte e uccise l’altro. Potrebbe anche essere stato così presto che qualcosa fu giudicato nel silenzio; e per la moltitudine riposava sulla Corona un misterioso sigillo di insicurezza come quello di Caino, e di esilio sui re inglesi.
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VIII
THE MEANING OF MERRY ENGLAND
THE mental trick by which the first half of English history has been wholly dwarfed and dehumanised is a very simple one. It consists in telling only the story of the professional destroyers and then complaining that the whole story is one of destruction. A king is at the best a sort of crowned executioner; all government is an ugly necessity; and if it was then uglier it was for the most part merely because it was more difficult. What we call the Judges’ circuits were first rather the King’s raids. For a time the criminal class was so strong that ordinary civil government was conducted by a sort of civil war. When the social enemy was caught at all he was killed or savagely maimed. The King could not take Pentonville Prison about with him on wheels. I am far from denying that there was a real element of cruelty in the Middle Ages; but the point here is that it was concerned with one side of life, which is cruel at the best; and that this involved more cruelty for the same reason that it involved more courage. When we think of our ancestors as the men who inflicted tortures, we ought sometimes to think of them as the men who defied them. But the modern critic of mediaevalism commonly looks only at these crooked shadows and not at the common daylight of the Middle Ages. When he has got over his indignant astonishment at the fact that fighters fought and that hangmen hanged; he assumes that any other ideas there may have been were ineffectual and fruitless. He despises the monk for avoiding the very same activities which he despises the warrior for cultivating. And he insists that the arts of war were sterile, without men admitting the possibility that the arts of peace were productive. But the truth is that it is precisely in the arts of peace, and in the type of production, that the Middle Ages stand singular and unique. This is not eulogy but history; an informed man must recognise this productive peculiarity even if he happens to hate it. The melodramatic things currently called mediaeval are much older and more universal; such as the sport of tournament or the use of torture. The tournament was indeed a Christian and liberal advance on the gladiatorial show, since the lords risked themselves and not merely their slaves. Torture, so far from being peculiarly mediaeval, was copied from pagan Rome and its most rationalist political science; and its application to others besides slaves was really part of the slow mediaeval extinction of slavery. Torture, indeed, is a logical thing common in states innocent of fanaticism, as in the great agnostic empire of China. What was really arresting and remarkable about the Middle Ages, as the Spartan discipline was peculiar to Sparta, or the Russian communes typical of Russia, was precisely its positive social scheme of production, of the making, building and growing of all the good things of life.
For the tale told in a book like this cannot really touch on mediaeval England at all. The dynasties and the parliaments passed like a changing cloud and across a stable and fruitful landscape. The institutions which affected the masses can be compared to corn or fruit trees in one practical sense at least, that they grew upwards from below. There may have been better societies, and assuredly we have not to look far for worse; but it is doubtful if there was ever so spontaneous a society. We cannot do justice, for instance, to the local government of that epoch, even where it was very faulty and fragmentary, by any comparisons with the plans of local government laid down to-day. Modern local government always comes from above; it is at best granted; it is more often merely imposed. The modern English oligarchy, the modern German Empire, are necessarily more efficient in making municipalities upon a plan, or rather a pattern. The mediaevals not only had self-government, but their self-government was self-made. They did indeed, as the central powers of the national monarchies grew stronger, seek and procure the stamp of state approval; but it was approval of a popular fact already in existence. Men banded together in guilds and parishes long before Local Government Acts were dreamed of. Like charity, which was worked in the same way, their Home Rule began at home. The reactions of recent centuries have left most educated men bankrupt of the corporate imagination required even to imagine this. They only think of a mob as a thing that breaks things—even if they admit it is right to break them. But the mob made these things. An artist mocked as many-headed, an artist with many eyes and hands, created these masterpieces. And if the modern sceptic in his detestation of the democratic ideal, complains of my calling them masterpieces, a simple answer will for the moment serve. It is enough to reply that the very word “masterpiece” is borrowed from the terminology of the mediaeval craftsmen. But such points in the Guild System can be considered a little later; here we are only concerned with the quite spontaneous springing upwards of all these social institutions, such as they were. They rose in the streets like a silent rebellion; like a still and statuesque riot. In modern constitutional countries there are practically no political institutions thus given by the people; all are received by the people. There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trades Unions.
In agriculture, what had happened to the land was like a universal landslide. But by a prodigy beyond the catastrophes of geology it may be said that the land had slid uphill. Rural civilisation was on a wholly new and much higher level; yet there was no great social convulsions or apparently even great social campaigns to explain it. It is possibly a solitary instance in history of men thus falling upwards; at least of outcasts falling on their feet or vagrants straying into the promised land. Such a thing could not be and was not a mere accident; yet, if we go by conscious political plans, it was something like a miracle. There had appeared, like a subterranean race cast up to the sun, something unknown to the august civilisation of the Roman Empire— a peasantry. At the beginning of the Dark Ages the great pagan cosmopolitan society now grown Christian was as much a slave state as old South Carolina. By the fourteenth century it was almost as much a state of peasant proprietors as modern France. No laws had been passed against slavery; no dogmas even had condemned it by definition; no war had been waged against it, no new race or ruling caste had repudiated it; but it was gone. This startling and silent transformation is perhaps the best measure of the pressure of popular life in the Middle Ages, of how fast it was making new things in its spiritual factory. Like everything else in the mediaeval revolution, from its cathedrals to its ballads, it was as anonymous as it was enormous. It is admitted that the conscious and active emancipators everywhere were the parish priests and the religious brotherhoods; but no name among them has survived and no man of them has reaped his reward in this world. Countless Clarksons and innumerable Wilberforces, without political machinery or public fame, worked at death-beds and confessionals in all the villages of Europe; and the vast system of slavery vanished. It was probably the widest work ever done which was voluntary on both sides; and the Middle Ages was in this and other things the age of volunteers. It is possible enough to state roughly the stages through which the thing passed; but such a statement does not explain the loosening of the grip of the great slave-owners; and it cannot be explained except psychologically. The Catholic type of Christianity was not merely an element, it was a climate; and in that climate the slave would not grow. I have already suggested, touching that transformation of the Roman Empire which was the background of all these centuries, how a mystical view of man’s dignity must have this effect. A table that walked and talked, or a stool that flew with wings out of window, would be about as workable a thing as an immortal chattel. But though here as everywhere the spirit explains the processes, and the processes cannot even plausibly explain the spirit, these processes involve two very practical points, without which we cannot understand how this great popular civilisation was created— or how it was destroyed.
VIII
IL SIGNIFICATO DELL’ALLEGRA INGHILTERRA
Il trucco mentale con cui la prima metà della storia inglese è stata interamente rimpicciolita e disumanizzata è assai semplice. Consiste nel raccontare solo la storia dei distruttori di professione e poi lamentarsi che l’intera storia sia una storia di distruzione. Un re è, nel migliore dei casi, una sorta di boia coronato; ogni governo è una brutta necessità; e se allora era più brutto era per lo più semplicemente perché era più difficile. Ciò che chiamiamo i circuiti dei Giudici furono dapprima piuttosto le razzie del re. Per un tempo la classe criminale fu così forte che l’ordinario governo civile era condotto da una sorta di guerra civile. Quando il nemico sociale veniva catturato, egli veniva ucciso o selvaggiamente mutilato. Il re non poteva portarsi dietro su ruote il carcere di Pentonville. Sono lungi dal negare che vi fosse un reale elemento di crudeltà nel Medioevo; ma il punto qui è che esso riguardava un solo lato della vita, che è crudele nel migliore dei casi; e che questo comportava più crudeltà per la stessa ragione per cui comportava più coraggio. Quando pensiamo ai nostri antenati come agli uomini che infliggevano torture, dovremmo talvolta pensarli come agli uomini che le sfidavano. Ma il critico moderno del medievalismo comunemente guarda solo a queste ombre storte e non alla comune luce del giorno del Medioevo. Quando ha superato il suo indignato stupore per il fatto che i combattenti combattevano e che i boia impiccavano, presume che qualunque altra idea vi possa essere stata fosse inefficace e sterile. Disprezza il monaco per aver evitato le medesime attività per cui disprezza il guerriero per averle coltivate. E insiste che le arti della guerra erano sterili, senza ammettere la possibilità che le arti della pace fossero produttive. Ma la verità è che è precisamente nelle arti della pace, e nel tipo di produzione, che il Medioevo si erge singolare e unico. Questo non è elogio ma storia; un uomo informato deve riconoscere questa peculiarità produttiva anche se per caso la detesta. Le cose melodrammatiche comunemente dette medievali sono assai più antiche e più universali; come lo sport del torneo o l’uso della tortura. Il torneo fu in verità un progresso cristiano e liberale rispetto allo spettacolo dei gladiatori, poiché i signori rischiavano se stessi e non semplicemente i loro schiavi. La tortura, lungi dall’ essere peculiarmente medievale, fu copiata dalla Roma pagana e dalla sua più razionalista scienza politica; e la sua applicazione ad altri oltre agli schiavi fu davvero parte della lenta estinzione medievale della schiavitù. La tortura, in verità, è una cosa logica comune in stati innocenti di fanatismo, come nel grande impero agnostico della Cina. Ciò che era davvero notevole e ragguardevole nel Medioevo, come la disciplina spartana era peculiare di Sparta, o le comuni russe tipiche della Russia, era precisamente il suo positivo schema sociale di produzione, del fare, costruire e coltivare tutte le cose buone della vita.
Poiché il racconto narrato in un libro come questo non può in realtà toccare affatto l’Inghilterra medievale. Le dinastie e i parlamenti passavano come una nube mutevole attraverso un paesaggio stabile e fruttuoso. Le istituzioni che influivano sulle masse possono essere paragonate al grano o agli alberi da frutto almeno in un senso pratico: che crescevano verso l’alto dal basso. Possono esserci state società migliori, e di certo non dobbiamo cercare lontano per trovarne di peggiori; ma è dubbio se ci sia mai stata una società così spontanea. Non possiamo rendere giustizia, per esempio, al governo locale di quell’epoca, anche là dov’era assai difettoso e frammentario, con alcun paragone coi piani di governo locale stabiliti oggi. Il moderno governo locale viene sempre dall’alto; nel migliore dei casi è concesso; più spesso è semplicemente imposto. La moderna oligarchia inglese, il moderno Impero tedesco, sono necessariamente più efficienti nel fare municipalità secondo un piano, o piuttosto un modello. I medievali non solo avevano l’auto-governo, ma il loro auto-governo era auto-prodotto. Essi in verità, man mano che i poteri centrali delle monarchie nazionali si rafforzavano, cercarono e ottennero il sigillo dell’approvazione statale; ma era l’approvazione di un fatto popolare già esistente. Gli uomini si unirono in corporazioni e parrocchie assai prima che si sognassero gli Atti sul Governo Locale. Come la carità, che operava nello stesso modo, la loro autonomia cominciava in casa. Le reazioni dei secoli recenti hanno lasciato la maggior parte degli uomini colti sprovvisti dell’immaginazione collettiva necessaria anche solo a concepire tutto ciò. Essi pensano a una folla solo come a una cosa che spezza le cose, anche se ammettono che sia giusto spezzarle. Ma fu la folla a fare queste cose. Un artista deriso come dalle molte teste, un artista con molti occhi e mani, creò questi capolavori. E se il moderno scettico, nella sua detestazione dell’ideale democratico, si lamenta che io li chiami capolavori, una semplice risposta servirà per il momento. Basti replicare che la parola stessa «capolavoro» è presa in prestito dalla terminologia degli artigiani medievali. Ma tali punti nel Sistema delle Corporazioni possono essere considerati un poco più avanti; qui ci occupiamo solo del tutto spontaneo germogliare verso l’alto di tutte queste istituzioni sociali, quali che fossero. Sorsero nelle strade come una silenziosa ribellione; come una rivolta immobile e statuaria. Nei moderni paesi costituzionali non ci sono praticamente istituzioni politiche così date dal popolo; tutte sono ricevute dal popolo. C’è una sola cosa che sta in mezzo a noi, attenuata e minacciata, ma pure intronizzata in qualche potere come un fantasma del Medioevo: i Sindacati.
Nell’agricoltura, ciò che era accaduto alla terra fu come una frana universale. Ma per un prodigio al di là delle catastrofi della geologia si può dire che la terra fosse scivolata in salita. La civiltà rurale si trovava su un livello del tutto nuovo e assai più alto; eppure non vi furono grandi convulsioni sociali né, a quanto pare, neppure grandi campagne sociali a spiegarlo. È forse un caso solitario nella storia di uomini che cadono così verso l’alto; almeno di reietti che cadono in piedi o di vagabondi che si smarriscono nella terra promessa. Una cosa simile non poteva essere e non fu un mero accidente; eppure, se andiamo per piani politici consapevoli, fu qualcosa come un miracolo. Era apparso, come una razza sotterranea rigettata al sole, qualcosa di ignoto all’augusta civiltà dell’Impero Romano: un contadiname. All’inizio dell’Alto Medioevo la grande società pagana e cosmopolita ormai divenuta cristiana era uno stato schiavista tanto quanto la vecchia Carolina del Sud. Nel quattordicesimo secolo era uno stato di piccoli proprietari contadini quasi tanto quanto la Francia moderna. Nessuna legge era stata approvata contro la schiavitù; nessun dogma l’aveva neppure condannata per definizione; nessuna guerra le era stata mossa, nessuna nuova razza o casta dominante l’aveva ripudiata; ma essa era scomparsa. Questa sorprendente e silenziosa trasformazione è forse la miglior misura della pressione della vita popolare nel Medioevo, di quanto in fretta essa andasse creando cose nuove nella sua fabbrica spirituale. Come ogni altra cosa nella rivoluzione medievale, dalle sue cattedrali alle sue ballate, essa fu tanto anonima quanto enorme. È ammesso che gli emancipatori consapevoli e attivi furono dappertutto i parroci e le confraternite religiose; ma nessun nome tra loro è sopravvissuto e nessuno di loro ha mietuto la sua ricompensa in questo mondo. Innumerevoli Clarkson e infiniti Wilberforce, senza macchina politica né fama pubblica, operarono presso i letti di morte e nei confessionali in tutti i villaggi d’Europa; e il vasto sistema della schiavitù svanì. Fu probabilmente l’opera più ampia mai compiuta che fosse volontaria da entrambe le parti; e il Medioevo fu in questo e in altre cose l’età dei volontari. È possibile enunciare approssimativamente le tappe attraverso cui la cosa passò; ma un tale enunciato non spiega l’allentarsi della presa dei grandi proprietari di schiavi; ed esso non può essere spiegato se non psicologicamente. Il tipo cattolico di Cristianesimo non era semplicemente un elemento, era un clima; e in quel clima lo schiavo non poteva crescere. Ho già suggerito, a proposito di quella trasformazione dell’ Impero Romano che fu lo sfondo di tutti questi secoli, come una visione mistica della dignità dell’uomo debba avere questo effetto. Un tavolo che camminasse e parlasse, o uno sgabello che volasse con le ali fuori dalla finestra, sarebbe una cosa altrettanto praticabile di un bene mobile immortale. Ma benché qui come dovunque lo spirito spieghi i processi, e i processi non possano neppure plausibilmente spiegare lo spirito, questi processi implicano due punti assai pratici, senza i quali non possiamo comprendere come questa grande civiltà popolare sia stata creata, o come sia stata distrutta.
What we call the manors were originally the villae of the pagan lords, each with its population of slaves. Under this process, however it be explained, what had occurred was the diminishment of the lords’ claim to the whole profit of a slave estate, by which it became a claim to the profit of part of it, and dwindled at last to certain dues or customary payments to the lord, having paid which the slave could enjoy not only the use of the land but the profit of it. It must be remembered that over a great part, and especially very important parts, of the whole territory, the lords were abbots, magistrates elected by a mystical communism and themselves often of peasant birth. Men not only obtained a fair amount of justice under their care, but a fair amount of freedom even from their carelessness. But two details of the development are very vital. First, as has been hinted elsewhere, the slave was long in the intermediate status of a serf. This meant that while the land was entitled to the services of the man, he was equally entitled to the support of the land. He could not be evicted; he could not even, in the modern fashion, have his rent raised. At the beginning it was merely that the slave was owned, but at least he could not be disowned. At the end he had really become a small landlord, merely because it was not the lord that owned him, but the land. It is hardly unsafe to suggest that in this (by one of the paradoxes of this extraordinary period) the very fixity of serfdom was a service to freedom. The new peasant inherited something of the stability of the slave. He did not come to life in a competitive scramble where everybody was trying to snatch his freedom from him. He found himself among neighbours who already regarded his presence as normal and his frontiers as natural frontiers, and among whom all-powerful customs crushed all experiments in competition. By a trick or overturn no romancer has dared to put in a tale, this prisoner had become the governor of his own prison. For a little time it was almost true that an Englishman’s house was his castle, because it had been built strong enough to be his dungeon.
The other notable element was this: that when the produce of the land began by custom to be cut up and only partially transmitted to the lord, the remainder was generally subdivided into two types of property. One the serfs enjoyed severally, in private patches, while the other they enjoyed in common, and generally in common with the lord. Thus arose the momentously important mediaeval institutions of the Common Land, owned side by side with private land. It was an alternative and a refuge. The mediaevals, except when they were monks, were none of them Communists; but they were all, as it were, potential Communists. It is typical of the dark and dehumanised picture now drawn of the period that our romances constantly describe a broken man as falling back on the forests and the outlaws den, but never describe him as falling back on the common land, which was a much more common incident. Mediaevalism believed in mending its broken men; and as the idea existed in the communal life for monks, it existed in the communal land for peasants. It was their great green hospital, their free and airy workhouse. A Common was not a naked and negative thing like the scrub or heath we call a Common on the edges of the suburbs. It was a reserve of wealth like a reserve of grain in a barn; it was deliberately kept back as a balance, as we talk of a balance at the bank. Now these provisions for a healthier distribution of property would by themselves show any man of imagination that a real moral effort had been made towards social justice; that it could not have been mere evolutionary accident that slowly turned the slave into a serf, and the serf into a peasant proprietor. But if anybody still thinks that mere blind luck, without any groping for the light, had somehow brought about the peasant condition in place of the agrarian slave estate, he has only to turn to what was happening in all the other callings and affairs of humanity. Then he will cease to doubt. For he will find the same mediaeval men busy upon a social scheme which points as plainly in effect to pity and a craving for equality. And it is a system which could no more be produced by accident than one of their cathedrals could be built by an earthquake.
Most work beyond the primary work of agriculture was guarded by the egalitarian vigilance of the Guilds. It is hard to find any term to measure the distance between this system and modern society; one can only approach it first by the faint traces it has left. Our daily life is littered with a debris of the Middle Ages, especially of dead words which no longer carry their meaning. I have already suggested one example. We hardly call up the picture of a return to Christian Communism whenever we mention Wimbledon Common. This truth descends to such trifles as the titles which we write on letters and postcards. The puzzling and truncated monosyllable “Esq.” is a pathetic relic of a remote evolution from chivalry to snobbery. No two historic things could well be more different than an esquire and a squire. The first was above all things an incomplete and probationary position—the tadpole of knighthood; the second is above all things a complete and assured position— the status of the owners and rulers of rural England throughout recent centuries. Our esquires did not win their estates till they had given up any particular fancy for winning their spurs. Esquire does not mean squire, and esq. does not mean anything. But it remains on our letters a little wriggle in pen and ink and an indecipherable hieroglyph twisted by the strange turns of our history which have turned a military discipline into a pacific oligarchy, and that into a mere plutocracy at last. And there are similar historic riddles to be unpicked in the similar forms of social address. There is something singularly forlorn about the modern word “Mister.” Even in sound it has a simpering feebleness which marks the shrivelling of the strong word from which it came. Nor, indeed, is the symbol of the mere sound inaccurate. I remember seeing a German story of Samson in which he bore the unassuming name of Simson, which surely shows Samson very much shorn. There is something of the same dismal diminuendo in the evolution of a Master into a Mister.
Ciò che chiamiamo manieri erano originariamente le villae dei signori pagani, ciascuna con la sua popolazione di schiavi. In virtù di questo processo, comunque lo si spieghi, ciò che era accaduto era la diminuzione della pretesa dei signori sull’intero profitto di una tenuta schiavile, per cui essa divenne una pretesa sul profitto di una parte di essa, e si ridusse infine a certe imposte o pagamenti consuetudinari al signore, versati i quali lo schiavo poteva godere non solo dell’uso della terra ma del suo profitto. Bisogna ricordare che su gran parte, e specialmente su parti assai importanti, dell’intero territorio, i signori erano abati, magistrati eletti da un comunismo mistico ed essi stessi spesso di nascita contadina. Gli uomini ottenevano sotto la loro cura non solo una discreta quantità di giustizia, ma una discreta quantità di libertà anche dalla loro incuria. Ma due particolari dello sviluppo sono assai vitali. Primo, come è stato accennato altrove, lo schiavo rimase a lungo nello stato intermedio di servo della gleba. Ciò significava che, mentre la terra aveva diritto ai servigi dell’uomo, egli aveva del pari diritto al sostegno della terra. Non poteva essere sfrattato; non poteva neppure, alla maniera moderna, vedersi aumentare l’affitto. All’inizio era semplicemente che lo schiavo era posseduto, ma almeno non poteva essere ripudiato. Alla fine era davvero divenuto un piccolo proprietario terriero, semplicemente perché non era il signore a possederlo, ma la terra. Non è quasi azzardato suggerire che in questo (per uno dei paradossi di questo straordinario periodo) la fissità stessa della servitù della gleba fosse un servizio reso alla libertà. Il nuovo contadino ereditò qualcosa della stabilità dello schiavo. Non venne alla vita in una mischia competitiva dove ognuno cercava di strappargli la sua libertà. Si trovò tra vicini che già consideravano la sua presenza come normale e i suoi confini come confini naturali, e tra i quali usanze onnipotenti schiacciavano ogni esperimento di competizione. Per un’astuzia o un rovesciamento che nessun romanziere ha osato mettere in un racconto, questo prigioniero era divenuto il governatore della sua stessa prigione. Per un breve tempo fu quasi vero che la casa di un Inglese era il suo castello, perché era stata costruita abbastanza solida da essere la sua segreta.
L’altro elemento notevole era questo: che quando il prodotto della terra cominciò per consuetudine a essere suddiviso e trasmesso solo in parte al signore, il rimanente veniva generalmente ripartito in due tipi di proprietà. L’uno i servi lo godevano separatamente, in appezzamenti privati, mentre l’altro lo godevano in comune, e generalmente in comune col signore. Sorsero così le istituzioni medievali di enorme importanza della Terra Comune, posseduta fianco a fianco con la terra privata. Era un’alternativa e un rifugio. I medievali, tranne quando erano monaci, non erano affatto Comunisti; ma erano tutti, per così dire, Comunisti in potenza. È tipico del quadro tetro e disumanizzato ora tracciato del periodo che i nostri romanzi descrivano costantemente un uomo rovinato come uno che ripiega sulle foreste e sul covo dei fuorilegge, ma non lo descrivano mai come uno che ripiega sulla terra comune, il che era un’evenienza assai più comune. Il medievalismo credeva nel riparare i suoi uomini spezzati; e come l’idea esisteva nella vita comunitaria per i monaci, così esisteva nella terra comune per i contadini. Era il loro grande ospedale verde, il loro ospizio libero e arioso. Un Comune non era una cosa nuda e negativa come la boscaglia o la brughiera che chiamiamo Comune ai margini dei sobborghi. Era una riserva di ricchezza come una riserva di grano in un granaio; era deliberatamente tenuto da parte come una riserva, come parliamo di un saldo alla banca. Ora, queste provvidenze per una più sana distribuzione della proprietà mostrerebbero da sole a qualunque uomo d’immaginazione che un reale sforzo morale era stato compiuto verso la giustizia sociale; che non poteva essere stato un mero accidente evolutivo a mutare lentamente lo schiavo in servo della gleba, e il servo della gleba in piccolo proprietario contadino. Ma se qualcuno pensa ancora che la mera cieca fortuna, senza alcun brancolare verso la luce, avesse in qualche modo prodotto la condizione contadina in luogo della tenuta agraria schiavile, non ha che da volgersi a ciò che accadeva in tutte le altre occupazioni e faccende dell’umanità. Allora cesserà di dubitare. Poiché troverà gli stessi uomini medievali intenti a uno schema sociale che indica del pari chiaramente, nei suoi effetti, la pietà e un anelito all’uguaglianza. Ed è un sistema che non potrebbe essere prodotto dal caso più di quanto una delle loro cattedrali potrebbe essere edificata da un terremoto.
La maggior parte del lavoro oltre il lavoro primario dell’agricoltura era protetta dalla vigilanza egualitaria delle Corporazioni. È difficile trovare un termine per misurare la distanza tra questo sistema e la società moderna; ci si può accostare ad esso solo dapprima attraverso le deboli tracce che ha lasciato. La nostra vita quotidiana è disseminata di detriti del Medioevo, specialmente di parole morte che non recano più il loro significato. Ne ho già suggerito un esempio. Difficilmente evochiamo l’immagine di un ritorno al Comunismo cristiano ogni volta che nominiamo Wimbledon Common. Questa verità discende a tali inezie come i titoli che scriviamo su lettere e cartoline. L’enigmatico e tronco monosillabo «Esq.» è una patetica reliquia di una remota evoluzione dalla cavalleria allo snobismo. Due cose storiche non potrebbero ben essere più diverse di uno scudiero (esquire) e di uno squire. Il primo era soprattutto una posizione incompleta e in prova: il girino della cavalleria; il secondo è soprattutto una posizione completa e assicurata: lo status dei proprietari e signori dell’Inghilterra rurale per tutti i secoli recenti. I nostri esquire non conquistarono le loro tenute finché non ebbero rinunciato a ogni particolare capriccio di conquistare i loro speroni. Esquire non significa squire, ed esq. non significa nulla. Ma resta sulle nostre lettere un piccolo ghirigoro di penna e inchiostro e un indecifrabile geroglifico contorto dalle strane svolte della nostra storia che hanno mutato una disciplina militare in un’oligarchia pacifica, e questa infine in una mera plutocrazia. E ci sono simili enigmi storici da districare nelle simili forme di allocuzione sociale. C’è qualcosa di singolarmente sconsolato nella moderna parola «Mister». Perfino nel suono ha una leziosa fiacchezza che segna il raggrinzirsi della parola forte da cui provenne. Né, in verità, il simbolo del mero suono è inesatto. Ricordo di aver visto una storia tedesca di Sansone in cui egli portava il modesto nome di Simson, il che mostra certamente Sansone assai tosato. C’è qualcosa dello stesso lugubre diminuendo nell’evoluzione di un Master in un Mister.
The very vital importance of the word “Master” is this. A Guild was, very broadly speaking, a Trade Union in which every man was his own employer. That is, a man could not work at any trade unless he would join the league and accept the laws of that trade; but he worked in his own shop with his own tools, and the whole profit went to himself. But the word “employer” marks a modern deficiency which makes the modern use of the word “Master” quite inexact. A master meant something quite other and greater than a “boss.” It meant a master of the work, where it now means only a master of the workmen. It is an elementary character of Capitalism that a shipowner need not know the right end of a ship, or a landowner have even seen the landscape, that the owner of a gold mine may be interested in nothing but old pewter, or the owner of a railway travel exclusively in balloons. He may be a more successful capitalist if he has a hobby of his own business; he is often a more successful capitalist if he has the sense to leave it to a manager; but economically he can control the business because he is a capitalist, not because he has any kind of hobby or any kind of sense. The highest grade in the Guild system was a Master, and it meant a mastery of the business. To take the term created by the colleges in the same epoch, all the mediaeval bosses were Masters of Arts. The other grades were the journeyman and the apprentice; but like the corresponding degrees at the universities, they were grades through which every common man could pass. They were not social classes; they were degrees and not castes. This is the whole point of the recurrent romance about the apprentice marrying his master’s daughter. The master would not be surprised at such a thing, any more than an M.A. would swell with aristocratic indignation when his daughter married a B.A.
When we pass from the strictly educational hierarchy to the strictly egalitarian ideal, we find again that the remains of the thing to-day are so distorted and disconnected as to be comic. There are City Companies which inherit the coats of arms and the immense relative wealth of the old Guilds, and inherit nothing else. Even what is good about them is not what was good about the Guilds. On one case we shall find something like a Worshipful Company of Bricklayers, in which, it is unnecessary to say, there is not a single bricklayer or anybody who has ever known a bricklayer, but in which the senior partners of a few big businesses in the City, with a few faded military men with a taste in cookery, tell each other in after-dinner speeches that it has been the glory of their lives to make allegorical bricks without straw. In another case we shall find a Worshipful Company of Whitewashers who do deserve their name, in the sense that many of them employ a large number of other people to whitewash. These Companies support large charities and often doubtless very valuable charities; but their object is quite different from that of the old charities of the Guilds. The aim of the Guild charities was the same as the aim of the Common Land. It was to resist inequality—or, as some earnest old gentlemen of the last generation would probably put it, to resist evolution. It was to ensure, not only that bricklaying should survive and succeed, but that every bricklayer should survive and succeed. It sought to rebuild the ruins of any bricklayer, and to give any faded whitewasher a new white coat. It was the whole aim of the Guilds to cobble their cobblers like their shoes and clout their clothiers with their clothes; to strengthen the weakest link, or go after the hundredth sheep; in short, to keep the row of little shops unbroken like a line of battle. It resisted the growth of a big shop like the growth of a dragon. Now even the whitewashers of the Whitewashers Company will not pretend that it exists to prevent a small shop being swallowed by a big shop, or that it has done anything whatever to prevent it. At the best the kindness it would show to a bankrupt whitewasher would be a kind of compensation; it would not be reinstatement; it would not be the restoration of status in an industrial system. So careful of the type it seems, so careless of the single life; and by that very modern evolutionary philosophy the type itself has been destroyed. The old Guilds, with the same object of equality, of course, insisted peremptorily upon the same level system of payment and treatment which is a point of complaint against the modern Trades Unions. But they insisted also, as the Trades Unions cannot do, upon a high standard of craftsmanship, which still astonishes the world in the corners of perishing buildings or the colours of broken glass. There is no artist or art critic who will not concede, however distant his own style from the Gothic school, that there was in this time a nameless but universal artistic touch in the moulding of the very tools of life. Accident has preserved the rudest sticks and stools and pots and pans which have suggestive shapes as if they were possessed not by devils but by elves. For they were, indeed, as compared with subsequent systems, produced in the incredible fairyland of a free country.
That the most mediaeval of modern institutions, the Trades Unions, do not fight for the same ideal of aesthetic finish is true and certainly tragic; but to make it a matter of blame is wholly to misunderstand the tragedy. The Trades Unions are confederations of men without property, seeking to balance its absence by numbers and the necessary character of their labour. The Guilds were confederations of men with property, seeking to ensure each man in the possession of that property. This is, of course, the only condition of affairs in which property can properly be said to exist at all. We should not speak of a negro community in which most men were white, but the rare negroes were giants. We should not conceive a married community in which most men were bachelors, and three men had harems. A married community means a community where most people are married; not a community where one or two people are very much married. A propertied community means a community where most people have property; not a community where there are a few capitalists. But in fact the Guildsmen (as also, for that matter, the serfs, semi-serfs and peasants) were much richer than can be realized even from the fact that the Guilds protected the possession of houses, tools, and just payment. The surplus is self-evident upon any just study of the prices of the period, when all deductions have been made, of course, for the different value of the actual coinage. When a man could get a goose or a gallon of ale for one or two of the smallest and commonest coins, the matter is in no way affected by the name of those coins. Even where the individual wealth was severely limited, the collective wealth was very large—the wealth of the Guilds, of the parishes, and especially of the monastic estates. It is important to remember this fact in the subsequent history of England.
L’importanza vitale della parola “Maestro” è questa. Un’Arte era, in senso molto ampio, un Sindacato nel quale ogni uomo era il proprio datore di lavoro. Cioè, un uomo non poteva lavorare in alcun mestiere a meno che non si fosse unito alla lega e accettasse le leggi di quel mestiere; ma lavorava nella propria bottega con i propri strumenti, e tutto il profitto andava a lui. Ma la parola “datore” segnala una carenza moderna che rende l’uso moderno della parola “Maestro” del tutto inesatto. Un Maestro significava qualcosa di completamente diverso e più grande di un “capo”. Significava padrone dell’arte, mentre ora significa solo capo degli artigiani. È una caratteristica elementare del Capitalismo che il proprietario di una nave non debba conoscere la prua della nave, o che un terriero abbia anche solo visto il paesaggio; che il proprietario di una miniera d’oro possa interessarsi a nient’altro che vecchi piatti, o il proprietario di una ferrovia viaggiare esclusivamente in mongolfiera. Può essere un capitalista più riuscito se ha una passione per la propria attività; spesso è un capitalista più riuscito se ha il buon senso di lasciarla a un amministratore; ma economicamente può controllare l’attività perché è un capitalista, non perché abbia alcuna passione o qualsiasi tipo di buonsenso. Il grado più alto nel sistema delle Arti era quello di Maestro, e significava padronanza dell’arte. Per usare il termine creato dai collegi nello stesso periodo, tutti i capi medievali erano Dottori in Arti Libere. Gli altri gradi erano quelli dello specializzando e del praticante; ma come i corrispondenti titoli nelle università, erano gradi attraverso cui ogni uomo comune poteva passare. Non erano classi sociali; erano gradi, non caste. Questo è il punto centrale della ricorrente romanza in cui il praticante sposa la figlia del suo maestro. Il Maestro non sarebbe sorpreso di una cosa simile, più di quanto un Dottore in Arti Libere si gonfi d’indignazione aristocratica quando sua figlia sposa uno specializzato.
Quando passiamo dalla gerarchia strettamente educativa all’ideale strettamente egualitario, troviamo di nuovo che i resti della cosa oggi sono così distorti e disconnessi da essere comici. Ci sono Compagnie della Città che ereditano gli stemmi e l’immenso patrimonio relativo delle vecchie Corporazioni, senza ereditare nulla altro. Anche ciò che è buono in esse non è ciò che era buono nelle Corporazioni. In un caso troveremo qualcosa come una Rispettabile Compagnia di Muratori, nella quale, è superfluo dirlo, non c’è neppure un muratore o chiunque abbia mai conosciuto un muratore, ma nella quale i soci anziani di alcune grandi imprese della Città, insieme a qualche militare in pensione con una passione per la cucina, si dicono nei discorsi dopo cena che è stata la gloria delle loro vite fare mattoni allegorici senza paglia. In un altro caso troveremo una Rispettabile Compagnia di Calcestandoli che meritano il loro nome, nel senso che molti di loro impiegano un gran numero di altre persone per calcestarare. Queste Compagnie sostengono grandi opere pie e spesso senza dubbio molto preziose; ma il loro obiettivo è del tutto diverso da quello delle vecchie opere pie delle Corporazioni. Lo scopo delle opere pie delle Corporazioni era lo stesso dello scopo della Terra Comune. Era resistere alla disuguaglianza—o, come probabilmente direbbero alcuni seri signori anziani dell’ultima generazione, resistere all’evoluzione. Era assicurare non solo che il mestiere del muratore sopravvivesse e prosperasse, ma che ogni muratore sopravvivesse e avesse successo. Cercava di ricostruire le rovine di qualsiasi muratore e di dare a qualsiasi calcestandolo in pensione un nuovo abito bianco. Era l’intero scopo delle Corporazioni rattoppare i loro calzolai come le loro scarpe e vestire i loro sarti con i loro vestiti; rafforzare il collegamento più debole, o andare dietro alla centesima pecora; in breve, mantenere la fila dei piccoli negozi indivisa come una linea di battaglia. Resisteva alla crescita di un grande negozio come si resiste alla crescita di un drago. Ora anche i calcestandoli della Compagnia dei Calcestandoli non pretenderanno che esista per impedire a un piccolo negozio di essere inghiottito da un grande negozio, o che abbia fatto qualcosa per impedirlo. Nel migliore dei casi la gentilezza che mostrerebbe verso un calcestandolo fallito sarebbe una sorta di risarcimento; non sarebbe reintegrazione; non sarebbe il ripristino dello status in un sistema industriale. Così attenta al tipo, così disinteressata della singola vita; e con quella filosofia evolutiva modernissima il tipo stesso è stato distrutto. Le vecchie Corporazioni, con lo stesso obiettivo di uguaglianza, naturalmente, insistevano perentoriamente sullo stesso sistema uniforme di pagamento e trattamento che è un punto di lamento contro i moderni Sindacati. Ma insistevano anche, come i Sindacati non possono fare, su un alto standard di artigianato, che ancora stupisce il mondo negli angoli degli edifici morenti o nei colori del vetro rotto. Non c’è artista o critico d’arte che non conceda, per quanto lontano sia il suo stile dalla scuola gotica, che in questo tempo ci fosse un tocco artistico senza nome ma universale nella modellazione degli strumenti della vita. L’incidente ha preservato i più rozzi bastoni e sgabelli e pentole e padelle che hanno forme suggestive come se fossero posseduti non da diavoli ma da folletti. Perché erano, infatti, rispetto ai sistemi successivi, prodotti nell’incredibile paese delle fate di un paese libero.
È vero e certamente tragico che i sindacati, la più medievale delle istituzioni moderne, non lottino per lo stesso ideale di finitura estetica; ma attribuire loro una colpa è del tutto fraintendere la tragedia. I sindacati sono confederazioni di uomini senza proprietà che cercano di compensarne l’assenza con il numero e con il carattere necessario del loro lavoro. Le corporazioni erano invece confederazioni di uomini con proprietà, che cercavano di garantire a ciascuno la conservazione della sua proprietà. Questa è naturalmente l’unica condizione in cui si può dire che esista veramente una proprietà. Non parleremmo di una comunità negra nella quale la maggior parte degli uomini fossero bianchi e i rari neri fossero giganti; né concepiremmo una comunità sposata nella quale la maggior parte degli uomini fosse celibe e tre soli avessero harem. Una comunità sposata significa una comunità in cui la maggioranza delle persone è sposata, non una comunità dove uno o due sono molto sposati. Una comunità proprietaria significa una comunità in cui la maggioranza delle persone possiede proprietà; non una comunità con pochi capitalisti. In realtà i membri delle corporazioni (come anche, del resto, servi della gleba, semi-servi e contadini) erano molto più ricchi di quanto si possa immaginare, anche solo considerando il fatto che le corporazioni proteggevano la proprietà di case, strumenti e un giusto compenso. Il surplus è autoevidente a chiunque studi con equità i prezzi del periodo, naturalmente dopo aver sottratto il diverso valore della moneta effettiva. Quando un uomo poteva comprare un’oca o una gallina per uno o due dei più piccoli e comuni pezzi di moneta, la questione non è affatto influenzata dal nome di quelle monete. Anche dove la ricchezza individuale era severamente limitata, quella collettiva era molto grande: la ricchezza delle corporazioni, delle parrocchie e specialmente dei beni monastici. È importante ricordare questo fatto nella successiva storia d’Inghilterra.
The next fact to note is that the local government grew out of things like the Guild system, and not the system from the government. In sketching the sound principles of this lost society, I shall not, of course, be supposed by any sane person to be describing a moral paradise, or to be implying that it was free from the faults and fights and sorrows that harass human life in all times, and certainly not least in our own time. There was a fair amount of rioting and fighting in connection with the Guilds; and there was especially for some time a combative rivalry between the guilds of merchants who sold things and those of craftsmen who made them, a conflict in which the craftsmen on the whole prevailed. But whichever party may have been predominant, it was the heads of the Guild who became the heads of the town, and not vice versa. The stiff survivals of this once very spontaneous uprising can again be seen in the now anomalous constitution of the Lord Mayor and the Livery of the City of London. We are told so monotonously that the government of our fathers reposed upon arms, that it is valid to insist that this, their most intimate and everyday sort of government, was wholly based upon tools; a government in which the workman’s tool became the sceptre. Blake, in one of his symbolic fantasies, suggests that in the Golden Age the gold and gems should be taken from the hilt of the sword and put upon the handle of the plough. But something very like this did happen in the interlude of this mediaeval democracy, fermenting under the crust of mediaeval monarchy and aristocracy; where productive implements often took on the pomp of heraldry. The Guilds often exhibited emblems and pageantry so compact of their most prosaic uses, that we can only parallel them by imagining armorial tabards, or even religious vestments, woven out of a navvy’s corduroys or a coster’s pearl buttons.
Two more points must be briefly added; and the rough sketch of this now foreign and even fantastic state will be as complete as it can be made here. Both refer to the links between this popular life and the politics which are conventionally the whole of history. The first, and for that age the most evident, is the Charter. To recur once more to the parallel of Trades Unions, as convenient for the casual reader of to-day, the Charter of a Guild roughly corresponded to that “recognition” for which the railwaymen and other trades unionists asked some years ago, without success. By this they had the authority of the King, the central or national government; and this was of great moral weight with mediaevals, who always conceived of freedom as a positive status, not as a negative escape: they had none of the modern romanticism which makes liberty akin to loneliness. Their view remains in the phrase about giving a man the freedom of a city: they had no desire to give him the freedom of a wilderness. To say that they had also the authority of the Church is something of an understatement; for religion ran like a rich thread through the rude tapestry of these popular things while they were still merely popular; and many a trade society must have had a patron saint long before it had a royal seal. The other point is that it was from these municipal groups already in existence that the first men were chosen for the largest and perhaps the last of the great mediaeval experiments: the Parliament.
We have all read at school that Simon de Montfort and Edward I, when they first summoned Commons to council, chiefly as advisers on local taxation, called “two burgesses” from every town. If we had read a little more closely, those simple words would have given away the whole secret of the lost medieval civilisation. We had only to ask what burgesses were, and whether they grew on trees. We should immediately have discovered that England was full of little parliaments, out of which the great parliament was made. And if it be a matter of wonder that the great council (still called in quaint archaism by its old title of the House of Commons) is the only one of these popular or elective corporations of which we hear much in our books of history, the explanation, I fear, is simple and a little sad. It is that the Parliament was the one among these mediaeval creations which ultimately consented to betray and to destroy the rest.
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Il fatto successivo da notare è che il governo locale nacque da cose come il sistema delle Corporazioni, e non il sistema dal governo. Nel tracciare i sani principi di questa società perduta, non sarò, naturalmente, ritenuto da alcuna persona assennata intento a descrivere un paradiso morale, o a sottintendere che essa fosse libera dai difetti, dalle lotte e dai dolori che affliggono la vita umana in tutti i tempi, e certamente non meno nel nostro stesso tempo. C’era una discreta quantità di sommosse e di lotte in connessione con le Corporazioni; e ci fu specialmente per qualche tempo una combattiva rivalità tra le corporazioni dei mercanti che vendevano le cose e quelle degli artigiani che le facevano, un conflitto in cui gli artigiani nel complesso prevalsero. Ma quale che fosse il partito predominante, furono i capi della Corporazione a divenire i capi della città, e non viceversa. Le rigide sopravvivenze di questa un tempo assai spontanea sollevazione possono di nuovo vedersi nell’ora anomala costituzione del Lord Mayor e della Livery della City di Londra. Ci viene detto così monotonamente che il governo dei nostri padri riposava sulle armi, che è lecito insistere sul fatto che questa, la loro più intima e quotidiana sorta di governo, si fondava interamente sugli utensili; un governo in cui l’utensile dell’operaio divenne lo scettro. Blake, in una delle sue fantasie simboliche, suggerisce che nell’Età dell’oro l’oro e le gemme dovrebbero essere tolti dall’elsa della spada e posti sul manico dell’aratro. Ma qualcosa di assai simile a questo accadde davvero nell’interludio di questa democrazia medievale, che fermentava sotto la crosta della monarchia e dell’aristocrazia medievali; dove gli strumenti produttivi assumevano spesso la pompa dell’araldica. Le Corporazioni esibivano spesso emblemi e sfarzo così compatti dei loro usi più prosaici, che possiamo eguagliarli solo immaginando casacche araldiche, o perfino paramenti religiosi, tessuti col fustagno di uno sterratore o coi bottoni di madreperla di un venditore ambulante.
Due altri punti devono essere brevemente aggiunti; e il rozzo schizzo di questo stato ormai estraneo e persino fantastico sarà completo per quanto lo si possa rendere qui. Entrambi si riferiscono ai legami tra questa vita popolare e la politica che è convenzionalmente l’intera storia. Il primo, e per quell’età il più evidente, è la Carta. Per ricorrere ancora una volta al parallelo dei Sindacati, comodo per il lettore casuale d’oggi, la Carta di una Corporazione corrispondeva grosso modo a quel «riconoscimento» che i ferrovieri e altri sindacalisti chiesero alcuni anni fa, senza successo. Per mezzo di essa avevano l’autorità del re, il governo centrale o nazionale; e questo aveva grande peso morale presso i medievali, che concepivano sempre la libertà come uno status positivo, non come una fuga negativa: non avevano nulla del moderno romanticismo che rende la libertà affine alla solitudine. La loro visione permane nella frase sul dare a un uomo la libertà di una città: non avevano alcun desiderio di dargli la libertà di un deserto. Dire che avevano anche l’autorità della Chiesa è una sorta di eufemismo; poiché la religione correva come un ricco filo attraverso il rozzo arazzo di queste cose popolari mentre erano ancora meramente popolari; e più di una società di mestiere deve aver avuto un santo patrono assai prima di avere un sigillo reale. L’altro punto è che fu da questi gruppi municipali già esistenti che furono scelti i primi uomini per il più grande e forse l’ultimo dei grandi esperimenti medievali: il Parlamento.
Tutti abbiamo letto a scuola che Simone di Montfort ed Edoardo I, quando convocarono per la prima volta i Comuni a consiglio, principalmente come consiglieri sulla tassazione locale, chiamarono «due borghesi» da ogni città. Se avessimo letto un poco più attentamente, quelle semplici parole avrebbero svelato l’intero segreto della perduta civiltà medievale. Non avevamo che da chiederci cosa fossero i borghesi, e se crescessero sugli alberi. Avremmo immediatamente scoperto che l’Inghilterra era piena di piccoli parlamenti, dai quali fu fatto il grande parlamento. E se è materia di meraviglia che il gran consiglio (ancora chiamato con bizzarro arcaismo col suo antico titolo di Camera dei Comuni) sia l’unica di queste corporazioni popolari o elettive di cui sentiamo parlare molto nei nostri libri di storia, la spiegazione, temo, è semplice e un poco triste. È che il Parlamento fu l’unica tra queste creazioni medievali che alla fine acconsentì a tradire e a distruggere le altre.
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IX
NATIONALITY AND THE FRENCH WARS
If any one wishes to know what we mean when we say that Christendom was and is one culture, or one civilization, there is a rough but plain way of putting it. It is by asking what is the most common, or rather the most commonplace, of all the uses of the word “Christian.” There is, of course, the highest use of all; but it has nowadays many other uses. Sometimes a Christian means an Evangelical. Sometimes, and more recently, a Christian means a Quaker. Sometimes a Christian means a modest person who believes that he bears a resemblance to Christ. But it has long had one meaning in casual speech among common people, and it means a culture or a civilization. Ben Gunn on Treasure Island did not actually say to Jim Hawkins, “I feel myself out of touch with a certain type of civilization”; but he did say, “I haven’t tasted Christian food.” The old wives in a village looking at a lady with short hair and trousers do not indeed say, “We perceive divergence between her culture and our own”; but they do say, “Why can’t she dress like a Christian?” That the sentiment has thus soaked down to the simplest and even stupidest daily talk is but one evidence that Christendom was a very real thing. But it was also, as we have seen, a very localized thing, especially in the Middle Ages. And that very lively localism the Christian faith and affections encouraged led at last to an excessive and exclusive parochialism. There were rival shrines of the same saint, and a sort of duel between two statues of the same divinity. By a process it is now our difficult duty to follow, a real estrangement between European peoples began. Men began to feel that foreigners did not eat or drink like Christians, and even, when the philosophic schism came, to doubt if they were Christians.
There was, indeed, much more than this involved. While the internal structure of mediaevalism was thus parochial and largely popular, in the greater affairs, and especially the external affairs, such as peace and war, most (though by no means all) of what was mediaeval was monarchical. To see what the kings came to mean we must glance back at the great background, as of darkness and daybreak, against which the first figures of our history have already appeared. That background was the war with the barbarians. While it lasted Christendom was not only one nation but more like one city— and a besieged city. Wessex was but one wall or Paris one tower of it; and in one tongue and spirit Bede might have chronicled the siege of Paris or Abbo sung the song of Alfred. What followed was a conquest and a conversion; all the end of the Dark Ages and the dawn of mediaevalism is full of the evangelizing of barbarism. And it is the paradox of the Crusades that though the Saracen was superficially more civilized than the Christian, it was a sound instinct which saw him also to be in spirit a destroyer. In the simpler case of northern heathenry the civilization spread with a simpler progress. But it was not till the end of the Middle Ages, and close on the Reformation, that the people of Prussia, the wild land lying beyond Germany, were baptized at all. A flippant person, if he permitted himself a profane confusion with vaccination, might almost be inclined to suggest that for some reason it didn’t “take” even then.
The barbarian peril was thus brought under bit by bit, and even in the case of Islam the alien power which could not be crushed was evidently curbed. The Crusades became hopeless, but they also became needless. As these fears faded the princes of Europe, who had come together to face them, were left facing each other. They had more leisure to find that their own captaincies clashed; but this would easily have been overruled, or would have produced a petty riot, had not the true creative spontaneity, of which we have spoken in the local life, tended to real variety. Royalties found they were representatives almost without knowing it; and many a king insisting on a genealogical tree or a title-deed found he spoke for the forests and the songs of a whole country-side. In England especially the transition is typified in the accident which raised to the throne one of the noblest men of the Middle Ages.
Edward I came clad in all the splendours of his epoch. He had taken the Cross and fought the Saracens; he had been the only worthy foe of Simon de Montfort in these baronial wars which, as we have seen, were the first sign (however faint) of a serious theory that England should be ruled by its barons rather than its kings. He proceeded, like Simon de Montfort, and more solidly, to develop the great mediaeval institution of a parliament. As has been said, it was superimposed on the existing parish democracies, and was first merely the summoning of local representatives to advise on local taxation. Indeed its rise was one with the rise of what we now call taxation; and there is thus a thread of theory leading to its latter claims to have the sole right of taxing. But in the beginning it was an instrument of the most equitable kings, and notably an instrument of Edward I. He often quarrelled with his parliaments and may sometimes have displeased his people (which has never been at all the same thing), but on the whole he was supremely the representative sovereign. In this connection one curious and difficult question may be considered here, though it marks the end of a story that began with the Norman Conquest. It is pretty certain that he was never more truly a representative king, one might say a republican king, than in the fact that he expelled the Jews. The problem is so much misunderstood and mixed with notions of a stupid spite against a gifted and historic race as such, that we must pause for a paragraph upon it.
The Jews in the Middle Ages were as powerful as they were unpopular. They were the capitalists of the age, the men with wealth banked ready for use. It is very tenable that in this way they were useful; it is certain that in this way they were used. It is also quite fair to say that in this way they were ill-used. The ill-usage was not indeed that suggested at random in romances, which mostly revolve on the one idea that their teeth were pulled out. Those who know this as a story about King John generally do not know the rather important fact that it was a story against King John. It is probably doubtful; it was only insisted on as exceptional; and it was, by that very insistence, obviously regarded as disreputable. But the real unfairness of the Jews’ position was deeper and more distressing to a sensitive and highly civilized people. They might reasonably say that Christian kings and nobles, and even Christian popes and bishops, used for Christian purposes (such as the Crusades and the cathedrals) the money that could only be accumulated in such mountains by a usury they inconsistently denounced as unchristian; and then, when worse times came, gave up the Jew to the fury of the poor, whom that useful usury had ruined. That was the real case for the Jew; and no doubt he really felt himself oppressed. Unfortunately it was the case for the Christians that they, with at least equal reason, felt him as the oppressor; and that mutual charge of tyranny is the Semitic trouble in all times. It is certain that in popular sentiment, this Anti-Semitism was not excused as uncharitableness, but simply regarded as charity. Chaucer puts his curse on Hebrew cruelty into the mouth of the soft-hearted prioress, who wept when she saw a mouse in a trap; and it was when Edward, breaking the rule by which the rulers had hitherto fostered their bankers’ wealth, flung the alien financiers out of the land, that his people probably saw him most plainly at once as a knight errant and a tender father of his people.
IX
LA NAZIONALITÀ E LE GUERRE FRANCESI
Se qualcuno desidera sapere che cosa intendiamo quando diciamo che la Cristianità era ed è una sola cultura, o una sola civiltà, esiste un modo rozzo ma limpido di esprimerlo. Consiste nel chiedersi quale sia l’uso più comune, o meglio più corrente, di tutti gli usi della parola “cristiano.” Vi è, certo, l’uso più alto di tutti; ma oggi essa ha molti altri usi. Talvolta cristiano significa evangelico. Talvolta, e più di recente, cristiano significa quacchero. Talvolta cristiano significa una persona modesta che crede di portare una somiglianza con Cristo. Ma da lungo tempo ha avuto un significato nel parlare comune della gente semplice, e significa una cultura o una civiltà. Ben Gunn sull’Isola del Tesoro non disse davvero a Jim Hawkins: “Mi sento fuori contatto con un certo tipo di civiltà”; ma disse: “Non ho più assaggiato cibo cristiano.” Le vecchie comari di un villaggio, guardando una signora dai capelli corti e in pantaloni, non dicono certo: “Percepiamo una divergenza fra la sua cultura e la nostra”; ma dicono: “Perché non può vestirsi come una cristiana?” Che il sentimento sia così filtrato fin dentro il discorso quotidiano più semplice e persino più sciocco è soltanto una prova che la Cristianità era una cosa quanto mai reale. Ma era anche, come abbiamo visto, una cosa quanto mai localizzata, specialmente nel Medioevo. E quel vivacissimo localismo che la fede e gli affetti cristiani incoraggiavano condusse alla fine a un eccessivo ed esclusivo campanilismo. Vi erano santuari rivali dello stesso santo, e una sorta di duello fra due statue della stessa divinità. Per un processo che è ora nostro arduo dovere seguire, cominciò un vero estraniamento fra i popoli europei. Gli uomini presero a sentire che gli stranieri non mangiavano né bevevano da cristiani, e persino, quando venne lo scisma filosofico, a dubitare che fossero cristiani.
Vi era, in verità, ben più di questo in gioco. Mentre la struttura interna del medievalismo era così campanilistica e in gran parte popolare, nelle faccende maggiori, e specialmente in quelle esterne, come la pace e la guerra, gran parte (benché per nulla la totalità) di ciò che era medievale era monarchica. Per vedere che cosa i re giunsero a significare dobbiamo volgere lo sguardo al grande sfondo, come di tenebra e di primo giorno, contro il quale le prime figure della nostra storia sono già apparse. Quello sfondo era la guerra con i barbari. Finché durò, la Cristianità non era soltanto una nazione ma più simile a una sola città—e a una città assediata. Il Wessex non era che una muraglia o Parigi una torre di essa; e in un’unica lingua e con un unico spirito Beda avrebbe potuto narrare l’assedio di Parigi o Abbone cantare il canto di Alfredo. Ciò che seguì fu una conquista e una conversione; tutta la fine dei Secoli Bui e l’alba del medievalismo è colma dell’evangelizzazione della barbarie. Ed è il paradosso delle Crociate che, benché il Saraceno fosse superficialmente più civile del cristiano, fu un sano istinto quello che vide anche in lui, nello spirito, un distruttore. Nel caso più semplice del paganesimo settentrionale la civiltà si diffuse con un cammino più semplice. Ma fu solo alla fine del Medioevo, e ormai prossimi alla Riforma, che il popolo della Prussia, la terra selvaggia che si stende oltre la Germania, fu finalmente battezzato. Una persona faceta, se si concedesse una profana confusione con la vaccinazione, potrebbe quasi essere incline a suggerire che, per qualche ragione, non “attecchì” nemmeno allora.
Il pericolo barbarico fu così soggiogato a poco a poco, e persino nel caso dell’Islam la potenza aliena che non poteva essere schiacciata fu evidentemente tenuta a freno. Le Crociate divennero senza speranza, ma divennero anche superflue. Man mano che questi timori svanivano, i principi d’Europa, che si erano riuniti per affrontarli, si ritrovarono a fronteggiarsi l’un l’altro. Avevano più agio per scoprire che i loro comandi cozzavano fra loro; ma ciò sarebbe stato facilmente composto, o avrebbe prodotto una meschina rissa, se la vera spontaneità creatrice, di cui abbiamo parlato nella vita locale, non avesse teso a una reale varietà. Le case regnanti scoprirono di essere rappresentanti quasi senza saperlo; e più di un re, insistendo su un albero genealogico o su un titolo di proprietà, scoprì di parlare per le foreste e i canti di un’intera contrada. In Inghilterra specialmente la transizione è simboleggiata nell’evento fortuito che innalzò al trono uno dei più nobili uomini del Medioevo.
Edoardo I venne rivestito di tutti gli splendori della sua epoca. Aveva preso la croce e combattuto i Saraceni; era stato l’unico degno avversario di Simon de Montfort in quelle guerre baronali che, come abbiamo visto, furono il primo segno (per quanto tenue) di una teoria seria secondo cui l’Inghilterra dovesse essere governata dai suoi baroni piuttosto che dai suoi re. Egli procedette, come Simon de Montfort, e più solidamente, a sviluppare la grande istituzione medievale del parlamento. Come si è detto, esso fu sovrapposto alle democrazie parrocchiali già esistenti, e fu dapprima soltanto la convocazione di rappresentanti locali perché consigliassero sulla tassazione locale. Anzi, il suo sorgere fu tutt’uno con il sorgere di ciò che ora chiamiamo tassazione; e vi è così un filo di teoria che conduce alle sue ultime pretese di avere il diritto esclusivo di tassare. Ma agli inizi esso fu uno strumento dei re più equanimi, e in particolare uno strumento di Edoardo I. Egli litigò spesso con i suoi parlamenti e talvolta può aver dispiaciuto al suo popolo (il che non è mai stata affatto la stessa cosa), ma nel complesso egli fu supremamente il sovrano rappresentativo. A questo proposito si può qui considerare una questione curiosa e difficile, benché essa segni la fine di una storia che cominciò con la Conquista normanna. È abbastanza certo che egli non fu mai più veramente un re rappresentativo, si potrebbe dire un re repubblicano, che nel fatto di aver espulso gli ebrei. Il problema è talmente frainteso e mescolato a nozioni di uno stupido rancore contro una razza dotata e storica in quanto tale, che dobbiamo indugiare un paragrafo su di esso.
Gli ebrei nel Medioevo erano tanto potenti quanto impopolari. Erano i capitalisti dell’epoca, gli uomini con la ricchezza depositata pronta all’uso. È assai sostenibile che in tal modo essi fossero utili; è certo che in tal modo essi furono usati. È anche del tutto giusto dire che in tal modo essi furono maltrattati. Il maltrattamento non fu invero quello suggerito a casaccio nei romanzi, che per lo più ruotano sull’unica idea che venissero loro strappati i denti. Coloro che conoscono questo come un racconto su re Giovanni generalmente ignorano il fatto piuttosto importante che era un racconto contro re Giovanni. È probabilmente dubbio; vi si insisteva soltanto come su un’eccezione; ed era, proprio per quell’insistenza, evidentemente ritenuto disonorevole. Ma la vera ingiustizia della condizione degli ebrei era più profonda e più angosciosa per un popolo sensibile e altamente civile. Essi potevano ragionevolmente dire che re e nobili cristiani, e persino papi e vescovi cristiani, usavano per scopi cristiani (come le Crociate e le cattedrali) il denaro che poteva accumularsi in simili montagne solo mediante un’usura che essi incoerentemente denunciavano come non cristiana; e poi, quando venivano tempi peggiori, abbandonavano l’ebreo al furore dei poveri, che quella utile usura aveva rovinato. Questa era la vera causa dell’ebreo; e senza dubbio egli si sentiva realmente oppresso. Sfortunatamente la causa dei cristiani era che essi, con almeno uguale ragione, lo sentivano come l’oppressore; e quella reciproca accusa di tirannia è il travaglio semitico di ogni tempo. È certo che nel sentimento popolare questo antisemitismo non era scusato come mancanza di carità, ma semplicemente considerato carità. Chaucer pone la sua maledizione contro la crudeltà ebraica in bocca alla tenera priora, che piangeva quando vedeva un topo in trappola; e fu quando Edoardo, infrangendo la regola per cui i governanti avevano fino allora favorito la ricchezza dei loro banchieri, scacciò i finanzieri stranieri fuori dal paese, che il suo popolo lo vide probabilmente nel modo più limpido, a un tempo come un cavaliere errante e un tenero padre del suo popolo.
Whatever the merits of this question, such a portrait of Edward was far from false. He was the most just and conscientious type of mediaeval monarch; and it is exactly this fact that brings into relief the new force which was to cross his path and in strife with which he died. While he was just, he was also eminently legal. And it must be remembered, if we would not merely read back ourselves into the past, that much of the dispute of the time was legal; the adjustment of dynastic and feudal differences not yet felt to be anything else. In this spirit Edward was asked to arbitrate by the rival claimants to the Scottish crown; and in this sense he seems to have arbitrated quite honestly. But his legal, or, as some would say, pedantic mind made the proviso that the Scottish king as such was already under his suzerainty and he probably never understood the spirit he called up against him; for that spirit had as yet no name. We call it to-day Nationalism. Scotland resisted; and the adventures of an outlawed knight named Wallace soon furnished it with one of those legends which are more important than history. In a way that was then at least equally practical, the Catholic priests of Scotland became especially the patriotic and Anti-English party; as indeed they remained even throughout the Reformation. Wallace was defeated and executed; but the heather was already on fire; and the espousal of the new national cause by one of Edward’s own knights named Bruce, seemed to the old king a mere betrayal of feudal equity. He died in a final fury at the head of a new invasion upon the very border of Scotland. With his last words the great king commanded that his bones should be borne in front of the battle; and the bones, which were of gigantic size, were eventually buried with the epitaph, “Here lies Edward the Tall, who was the hammer of the Scots.” It was a true epitaph, but in a sense exactly opposite to its intention. He was their hammer, but he did not break but make them; for he smote them on an anvil and he forged them into a sword.
That coincidence or course of events, which must often be remarked in this story, by which (for whatever reason) our most powerful kings did not somehow leave their power secure, showed itself in the next reign, when the baronial quarrels were resumed and the northern kingdom, under Bruce, cut itself finally free by the stroke of Bannockburn. Otherwise the reign is a mere interlude, and it is with the succeeding one that we find the new national tendency yet further developed. The great French wars, in which England won so much glory, were opened by Edward III, and grew more and more nationalist. But even to feel the transition of the time we must first realize that the third Edward made as strictly legal and dynastic a claim to France as the first Edward had made to Scotland; the claim was far weaker in substance, but it was equally conventional in form. He thought, or said, he had a claim on a kingdom as a squire might say he had a claim on an estate; superficially it was an affair for the English and French lawyers. To read into this that the people were sheep bought and sold is to misunderstand all mediaeval history; sheep have no trade union. The English arms owed much of their force to the class of the free yeomen; and the success of the infantry, especially of the archery, largely stood for that popular element which had already unhorsed the high French chivalry at Courtrai. But the point is this; that while the lawyers were talking about the Salic Law, the soldiers, who would once have been talking about guild law or glebe law, were already talking about English law and French law. The French were first in this tendency to see something outside the township, the trade brotherhood, the feudal dues, or the village common. The whole history of the change can be seen in the fact that the French had early begun to call the nation the Greater Land. France was the first of nations and has remained the norm of nations, the only one which is a nation and nothing else. But in the collision the English grew equally corporate; and a true patriotic applause probably hailed the victories of Crecy and Poitiers, as it certainly hailed the later victory of Agincourt. The latter did not indeed occur until after an interval of internal revolutions in England, which will be considered on a later page; but as regards the growth of nationalism, the French wars were continuous. And the English tradition that followed after Agincourt was continuous also. It is embodied in rude and spirited ballads before the great Elizabethans. The Henry V of Shakespeare is not indeed the Henry V of history; yet he is more historic. He is not only a saner and more genial but a more important person. For the tradition of the whole adventure was not that of Henry, but of the populace who turned Henry into Harry. There were a thousand Harries in the army at Agincourt, and not one. For the figure that Shakespeare framed out of the legends of the great victory is largely the figure that all men saw as the Englishman of the Middle Ages. He did not really talk in poetry, like Shakespeare’s hero, but he would have liked to. Not being able to do so, he sang; and the English people principally appear in contemporary impressions as the singing people. They were evidently not only expansive but exaggerative; and perhaps it was not only in battle that they drew the long bow. That fine farcical imagery, which has descended to tell comic songs and common speech of the English poor even to-day, had its happy infancy when England thus became a nation; though the modern poor, under the pressure of economic progress, have partly lost the gaiety and kept only the humour. But in that early April of patriotism the new unity of the State still sat lightly upon them; and a cobbler in Henry’s army, who would at home have thought first that it was the day of St. Crispin of the Cobblers, might truly as well as sincerely have hailed the splintering of the French lances in a storm of arrows, and cried, “St. George for Merry England.”
Quali che siano i meriti di questa questione, un tale ritratto di Edoardo era ben lungi dall’essere falso. Egli era il tipo più giusto e coscienzioso di monarca medievale; ed è proprio questo fatto che pone in risalto la nuova forza che stava per attraversare il suo cammino e nella lotta con la quale egli morì. Se era giusto, era anche eminentemente legalista. E occorre ricordare, se non vogliamo semplicemente proiettare noi stessi nel passato, che gran parte delle dispute del tempo era di natura legale; l’aggiustamento delle differenze dinastiche e feudali non era ancora sentito come qualcosa d’altro. In questo spirito Edoardo fu invitato ad arbitrare dai pretendenti rivali alla corona scozzese; e in questo senso pare che abbia arbitrato con tutta onestà. Ma la sua mente legalista, o, come alcuni direbbero, pedantesca, pose la clausola che il re scozzese in quanto tale era già sotto la sua sovranità, ed egli probabilmente non comprese mai lo spirito che evocava contro di sé; poiché quello spirito non aveva ancora un nome. Oggi lo chiamiamo Nazionalismo. La Scozia resistette; e le avventure di un cavaliere bandito di nome Wallace le fornirono ben presto una di quelle leggende che sono più importanti della storia. In un modo che era allora almeno altrettanto pratico, i preti cattolici di Scozia divennero in special modo il partito patriottico e antinglese; come infatti rimasero anche per tutta la Riforma. Wallace fu sconfitto e giustiziato; ma l’erica era già in fiamme; e l’abbraccio della nuova causa nazionale da parte di uno degli stessi cavalieri di Edoardo, di nome Bruce, parve al vecchio re un puro tradimento dell’equità feudale. Egli morì in un ultimo furore alla testa di una nuova invasione proprio sul confine di Scozia. Con le sue ultime parole il grande re comandò che le sue ossa fossero portate davanti alla battaglia; e le ossa, che erano di gigantesca mole, furono infine sepolte con l’epitaffio: “Qui giace Edoardo il Lungo, che fu il martello degli Scozzesi.” Era un vero epitaffio, ma in un senso esattamente opposto alla sua intenzione. Egli fu il loro martello, ma non li spezzò bensì li plasmò; poiché li batté su un’incudine e li forgiò in una spada.
Quella coincidenza, o corso di eventi, che spesso va rilevato in questa storia, per cui (per qualunque ragione) i nostri re più potenti in qualche modo non lasciarono sicuro il loro potere, si manifestò nel regno successivo, quando le contese baronali furono riprese e il regno del nord, sotto Bruce, si tagliò via infine libero con il colpo di Bannockburn. Per il resto quel regno è un mero interludio, ed è con quello che gli succede che troviamo la nuova tendenza nazionale ancor più sviluppata. Le grandi guerre francesi, in cui l’Inghilterra conquistò tanta gloria, furono aperte da Edoardo III, e divennero sempre più nazionaliste. Ma anche solo per cogliere la transizione del tempo dobbiamo dapprima renderci conto che il terzo Edoardo avanzò sulla Francia una pretesa tanto rigorosamente legale e dinastica quanto il primo Edoardo aveva avanzato sulla Scozia; la pretesa era assai più debole nella sostanza, ma era ugualmente convenzionale nella forma. Egli pensava, o diceva, di avere un diritto su un regno come uno scudiero potrebbe dire di avere un diritto su una tenuta; superficialmente era una faccenda per gli avvocati inglesi e francesi. Leggere in questo che il popolo fosse un gregge comprato e venduto significa fraintendere tutta la storia medievale; le pecore non hanno sindacato. Le armi inglesi dovettero molta della loro forza alla classe dei liberi piccoli proprietari; e il successo della fanteria, specialmente degli arcieri, rappresentò in gran parte quell’elemento popolare che aveva già disarcionato l’alta cavalleria francese a Courtrai. Ma il punto è questo: che mentre gli avvocati discutevano della Legge Salica, i soldati, che un tempo avrebbero discusso della legge di gilda o della legge del beneficio ecclesiastico, discutevano già di legge inglese e di legge francese. I francesi furono i primi in questa tendenza a vedere qualcosa al di là del borgo, della fratellanza di mestiere, dei tributi feudali, o del bene comunale del villaggio. Tutta la storia del cambiamento si può scorgere nel fatto che i francesi avevano cominciato per tempo a chiamare la nazione la Terra Maggiore. La Francia fu la prima delle nazioni ed è rimasta la norma delle nazioni, l’unica che è una nazione e nient’altro. Ma nell’urto gli inglesi si fecero ugualmente corporativi; e un vero applauso patriottico salutò probabilmente le vittorie di Crécy e di Poitiers, come certamente salutò la successiva vittoria di Azincourt. Quest’ultima non avvenne invero se non dopo un intervallo di rivoluzioni interne in Inghilterra, che saranno considerate in una pagina più avanti; ma per quanto riguarda la crescita del nazionalismo, le guerre francesi furono continue. E la tradizione inglese che seguì dopo Azincourt fu continua del pari. Essa è incarnata in ballate rozze e animose prima dei grandi Elisabettiani. L’Enrico V di Shakespeare non è invero l’Enrico V della storia; eppure è più storico. Egli non è soltanto una persona più sana e più cordiale ma più importante. Poiché la tradizione dell’intera avventura non fu quella di Henry, ma del popolino che trasformò Henry in Harry. Vi erano mille Harry nell’esercito ad Azincourt, e non uno solo. Poiché la figura che Shakespeare plasmò dalle leggende della grande vittoria è in gran parte la figura che tutti gli uomini videro come l’inglese del Medioevo. Egli non parlava davvero in poesia, come l’eroe di Shakespeare, ma gli sarebbe piaciuto. Non potendo far ciò, cantava; e il popolo inglese appare principalmente nelle impressioni contemporanee come il popolo che canta. Erano evidentemente non solo espansivi ma esagerati; e forse non fu solo in battaglia che tesero l’arco lungo. Quella bella immaginazione farsesca, che è discesa fino a colorare le canzoni comiche e il parlare comune dei poveri inglesi ancor oggi, ebbe la sua felice infanzia quando l’Inghilterra divenne così una nazione; benché i poveri moderni, sotto la pressione del progresso economico, abbiano in parte perduto la gaiezza e conservato soltanto l’umorismo. Ma in quel primo aprile del patriottismo la nuova unità dello Stato posava ancora leggera su di loro; e un ciabattino nell’esercito di Henry, che a casa avrebbe pensato per prima cosa che era il giorno di San Crispino dei Ciabattini, poteva davvero, tanto a ragione quanto sinceramente, aver salutato lo schiantarsi delle lance francesi in una tempesta di frecce, gridando: “San Giorgio per l’allegra Inghilterra.”
Human things are uncomfortably complex, and while it was the April of patriotism it was the Autumn of mediaeval society. In the next chapter I shall try to trace the forces that were disintegrating the civilization; and even here, after the first victories, it is necessary to insist on the bitterness and barren ambition that showed itself more and more in the later stages, as the long French wars dragged on. France was at the time far less happy than England— wasted by the treason of its nobles and the weakness of its kings almost as much as by the invasion of the islanders. And yet it was this very despair and humiliation that seemed at last to rend the sky, and let in the light of what it is hard for the coldest historian to call anything but a miracle.
It may be this apparent miracle that has apparently made Nationalism eternal. It may be conjectured, though the question is too difficult to be developed here, that there was something in the great moral change which turned the Roman Empire into Christendom, by which each great thing, to which it afterwards gave birth, was baptized into a promise, or at least into a hope of permanence. It may be that each of its ideas was, as it were, mixed with immortality. Certainly something of this kind can be seen in the conception which turned marriage from a contract into a sacrament. But whatever the cause, it is certain that even for the most secular types of our own time their relation to their native land has become not contractual but sacramental. We may say that flags are rags, that frontiers are fictions, but the very men who have said it for half their lives are dying for a rag, and being rent in pieces for a fiction even as I write. When the battle-trumpet blew in 1914 modern humanity had grouped itself into nations almost before it knew what it had done. If the same sound is heard a thousand years hence, there is no sign in the world to suggest to any rational man that humanity will not do exactly the same thing. But even if this great and strange development be not enduring, the point is that it is felt as enduring, it is hard to give a definition of loyalty, but perhaps we come near it if we call it the thing which operates where an obligation is felt to be unlimited. And the minimum of duty or even decency asked of a patriot is the maximum that is asked by the most miraculous view of marriage. The recognized reality of patriotism is not mere citizenship. The recognized reality of patriotism is for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, in national growth and glory and in national disgrace and decline; it is not to travel in the ship of state as a passenger, but if need be to go down with the ship.
It is needless to tell here again the tale of that earthquake episode in which a clearance in the earth and sky, above the confusion and abasement of the crowns, showed the commanding figure of a woman of the people. She was, in her own living loneliness, a French Revolution. She was the proof that a certain power was not in the French kings or in the French knights, but in the French. But the fact that she saw something above her that was other than the sky, the fact that she lived the life of a saint and died the death of a martyr, probably stamped the new national sentiment with a sacred seal. And the fact that she fought for a defeated country, and, even though it was victorious, was herself ultimately defeated, defines that darker element of devotion of which I spoke above, which makes even pessimism consistent with patriotism. It is more appropriate in this place to consider the ultimate reaction of this sacrifice upon the romance and the realities of England.
I have never counted it a patriotic part to plaster my own country with conventional and unconvincing compliments; but no one can understand England who does not understand that such an episode as this, in which she was so clearly in the wrong, has yet been ultimately linked up with a curious quality in which she is rather unusually in the right. No one candidly comparing us with other countries can say we have specially failed to build the sepulchres of the prophets we stoned, or even the prophets who stoned us. The English historical tradition has at least a loose large-mindedness which always finally falls into the praise not only of great foreigners but great foes. Often along with much injustice it has an illogical generosity; and while it will dismiss a great people with mere ignorance, it treats a great personality with hearty hero-worship. There are more examples than one even in this chapter, for our books may well make out Wallace a better man than he was, as they afterwards assigned to Washington an even better cause than he had. Thackeray smiled at Miss Jane Porter’s picture of Wallace, going into war weeping with a cambric pocket-handkerchief; but her attitude was more English and not less accurate. For her idealization was, if anything, nearer the truth than Thackeray’s own notion of a mediaevalism of hypocritical hogs-in-armour. Edward, who figures as a tyrant, could weep with compassion; and it is probable enough that Wallace wept, with or without a pocket-handkerchief. Moreover, her romance was a reality, the reality of nationalism; and she knew much more about the Scottish patriots ages before her time than Thackeray did about the Irish patriots immediately under his nose. Thackeray was a great man; but in that matter he was a very small man, and indeed an invisible one. The cases of Wallace and Washington and many others are here only mentioned, however, to suggest an eccentric magnanimity which surely balances some of our prejudices. We have done many foolish things, but we have at least done one fine thing; we have whitewashed our worst enemies. If we have done this for a bold Scottish raider and a vigorous Virginian slave-holder, it may at least show that we are not likely to fail in our final appreciation of the one white figure in the motley processions of war. I believe there to be in modern England something like a universal enthusiasm on this subject. We have seen a great English critic write a book about this heroine, in opposition to a great French critic, solely in order to blame him for not having praised her enough. And I do not believe there lives an Englishman now, who if he had the offer of being an Englishman then, would not discard his chance of riding as the crowned conqueror at the head of all the spears of Agincourt, if he could be that English common soldier of whom tradition tells that he broke his spear asunder to bind it into a cross for Joan of Arc.
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Le cose umane sono scomodamente complesse, e mentre era l’aprile del patriottismo era l’autunno della società medievale. Nel capitolo seguente cercherò di tracciare le forze che stavano disgregando la civiltà; e anche qui, dopo le prime vittorie, è necessario insistere sull’amarezza e sulla sterile ambizione che si manifestarono sempre più nelle fasi ulteriori, man mano che le lunghe guerre francesi si trascinavano. La Francia era in quel tempo assai meno felice dell’Inghilterra—devastata dal tradimento dei suoi nobili e dalla debolezza dei suoi re quasi quanto dall’invasione degli isolani. Eppure fu proprio questa disperazione e umiliazione che parve alla fine squarciare il cielo, e lasciar entrare la luce di ciò che è difficile per lo storico più freddo chiamare altrimenti che un miracolo.
Può darsi che sia questo apparente miracolo ad aver reso, a quanto pare, eterno il Nazionalismo. Si può congetturare, benché la questione sia troppo difficile per essere qui svolta, che vi fosse qualcosa nel grande mutamento morale che trasformò l’Impero romano in Cristianità, per cui ogni grande cosa, a cui esso in seguito diede vita, veniva battezzata in una promessa, o almeno in una speranza di permanenza. Può darsi che ciascuna delle sue idee fosse, per così dire, mescolata all’immortalità. Certamente qualcosa di questo genere si può scorgere nella concezione che mutò il matrimonio da contratto in sacramento. Ma qualunque ne sia la causa, è certo che persino per i tipi più secolari del nostro stesso tempo il loro rapporto con la terra natia è divenuto non contrattuale ma sacramentale. Possiamo dire che le bandiere sono stracci, che le frontiere sono finzioni, ma proprio gli uomini che l’hanno detto per metà della loro vita stanno morendo per uno straccio, ed essendo fatti a pezzi per una finzione proprio mentre scrivo. Quando la tromba di battaglia suonò nel 1914 l’umanità moderna si era raggruppata in nazioni quasi prima di sapere ciò che aveva fatto. Se lo stesso suono sarà udito fra mille anni, non vi è alcun segno al mondo che suggerisca a un uomo razionale che l’umanità non farà esattamente la stessa cosa. Ma anche se questo grande e strano sviluppo non fosse duraturo, il punto è che è sentito come duraturo; è difficile dare una definizione di lealtà, ma forse ci avviciniamo a essa se la chiamiamo la cosa che opera là dove un obbligo è sentito come illimitato. E il minimo di dovere o persino di decenza chiesto a un patriota è il massimo che è chiesto dalla più miracolosa concezione del matrimonio. La realtà riconosciuta del patriottismo non è la mera cittadinanza. La realtà riconosciuta del patriottismo è nel bene e nel male, nella ricchezza e nella povertà, in salute e in malattia, nella crescita e nella gloria nazionale e nella vergogna e nel declino nazionale; non è viaggiare nella nave dello Stato come passeggero, ma, se necessario, affondare con la nave.
È superfluo raccontare qui di nuovo il racconto di quell’episodio da terremoto in cui uno squarcio nella terra e nel cielo, sopra la confusione e l’abbassamento delle corone, mostrò la figura imperante di una donna del popolo. Ella era, nella sua stessa viva solitudine, una Rivoluzione francese. Era la prova che una certa potenza non era nei re francesi né nei cavalieri francesi, ma nei francesi. Ma il fatto che ella vedesse qualcosa al di sopra di sé che era altro dal cielo, il fatto che vivesse la vita di una santa e morisse la morte di una martire, impresse probabilmente sul nuovo sentimento nazionale un sacro sigillo. E il fatto che ella combattesse per un paese sconfitto, e, benché esso fosse vittorioso, fosse lei stessa alla fine sconfitta, definisce quell’elemento più oscuro di devozione di cui ho parlato sopra, che rende persino il pessimismo coerente con il patriottismo. È più appropriato in questo luogo considerare la reazione ultima di questo sacrificio sul romanzesco e sulle realtà dell’Inghilterra.
Non ho mai ritenuto compito patriottico intonacare il mio stesso paese di complimenti convenzionali e poco convincenti; ma nessuno può comprendere l’Inghilterra se non comprende che un episodio come questo, in cui essa fu così chiaramente dalla parte del torto, è stato pur alla fine collegato a una curiosa qualità in cui essa è piuttosto insolitamente dalla parte della ragione. Nessuno che ci confronti candidamente con altri paesi può dire che abbiamo particolarmente mancato di edificare i sepolcri dei profeti che lapidammo, o persino dei profeti che lapidarono noi. La tradizione storica inglese ha almeno una larga e vaga magnanimità che finisce sempre per cadere nella lode non solo dei grandi stranieri ma dei grandi nemici. Spesso, insieme a molta ingiustizia, essa ha una generosità illogica; e mentre liquida un grande popolo con mera ignoranza, tratta una grande personalità con un cordiale culto dell’eroe. Vi è più di un esempio persino in questo capitolo, poiché i nostri libri ben possono fare di Wallace un uomo migliore di quel che era, come poi assegnarono a Washington una causa persino migliore di quella che aveva. Thackeray sorrise del ritratto di Wallace fatto da Miss Jane Porter, che andava in guerra piangendo con un fazzoletto di batista; ma il suo atteggiamento era più inglese e non meno accurato. Poiché la sua idealizzazione era, semmai, più vicina alla verità della nozione di Thackeray stesso di un medievalismo di ipocriti porci in armatura. Edoardo, che figura come un tiranno, sapeva piangere di compassione; ed è abbastanza probabile che Wallace piangesse, con o senza fazzoletto. Inoltre, il suo romanzo era una realtà, la realtà del nazionalismo; ed ella sapeva molto di più sui patrioti scozzesi vissuti secoli prima del suo tempo di quanto Thackeray sapesse sui patrioti irlandesi che aveva proprio sotto il naso. Thackeray era un grande uomo; ma in quella faccenda fu un uomo assai piccolo, anzi invisibile. I casi di Wallace e di Washington e di molti altri sono qui menzionati, tuttavia, solo per suggerire un’eccentrica magnanimità che sicuramente bilancia alcuni dei nostri pregiudizi. Abbiamo fatto molte cose sciocche, ma abbiamo almeno fatto una cosa bella; abbiamo imbiancato i nostri peggiori nemici. Se abbiamo fatto questo per un ardito predone scozzese e per un vigoroso schiavista virginiano, ciò può almeno mostrare che non è probabile che manchiamo nel nostro apprezzamento finale dell’unica figura candida nei variopinti cortei della guerra. Credo che vi sia nell’Inghilterra moderna qualcosa come un entusiasmo universale su questo tema. Abbiamo visto un grande critico inglese scrivere un libro su questa eroina, in opposizione a un grande critico francese, unicamente allo scopo di rimproverargli di non averla lodata abbastanza. E non credo che viva oggi un inglese il quale, se avesse l’offerta di essere un inglese di allora, non rinuncerebbe alla sua occasione di cavalcare come conquistatore incoronato alla testa di tutte le lance di Azincourt, se potesse essere quel comune soldato inglese di cui la tradizione racconta che spezzò la sua lancia per legarla in una croce per Giovanna d’Arco.
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X
THE WAR OF THE USURPERS
THE poet Pope, though a friend of the greatest of Tory Democrats, Bolingbroke, necessarily lived in a world in which even Toryism was Whiggish. And the Whig as a wit never expressed his political point more clearly than in Pope’s line which ran: “The right divine of kings to govern wrong.” It will be apparent, when I deal with that period, that I do not palliate the real unreason in divine right as Filmer and some of the pedantic cavaliers construed it. They professed the impossible ideal of “non-resistance” to any national and legitimate power; though I cannot see that even that was so servile and superstitious as the mere modern ideal of “non-resistance” even to a foreign and lawless power. But the seventeenth century was an age of sects, that is of fads; and the Filmerites made a fad of divine right. Its roots were older, equally religious but much more realistic; and though tangled with many other and even opposite things of the Middle Ages, ramify through all the changes we have now to consider. The connection can hardly be stated better than by taking Pope’s easy epigram and pointing out that it is, after all, very weak in philosophy. “The right divine of kings to govern wrong,” considered as a sneer, really evades all that we mean by “a right.” To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it. What Pope says satirically about a divine right is what we all say quite seriously about a human right. If a man has a right to vote, has he not a right to vote wrong? If a man has a right to choose his wife, has he not a right to choose wrong? I have a right to express the opinion which I am now setting down; but I should hesitate to make the controversial claim that this proves the opinion to be right.
Now mediaeval monarchy, though only one aspect of mediaeval rule, was roughly represented in the idea that the ruler had a right to rule as a voter has a right to vote. He might govern wrong, but unless he governed horribly and extravagantly wrong, he retained his position of right; as a private man retains his right to marriage and locomotion unless he goes horribly and extravagantly off his head. It was not really even so simple as this; for the Middle Ages were not, as it is often the fashion to fancy, under a single and steely discipline. They were very controversial and therefore very complex; and it is easy, by isolating items whether about jus divinum or primus inter pares, to maintain that the mediaevals were almost anything; it has been seriously maintained that they were all Germans. But it is true that the influence of the Church, though by no means of all the great churchmen, encouraged the sense of a sort of sacrament of government, which was meant to make the monarch terrible and therefore often made the man tyrannical. The disadvantage of such despotism is obvious enough. The precise nature of its advantage must be better understood than it is, not for its own sake so much as for the story we have now to tell.
The advantage of “divine right,” or irremovable legitimacy, is this; that there is a limit to the ambitions of the rich. “Roi ne puis”, the royal power, whether it was or was not the power of heaven, was in one respect like the power of heaven. It was not for sale. Constitutional moralists have often implied that a tyrant and a rabble have the same vices. It has perhaps been less noticed that a tyrant and a rabble most emphatically have the same virtues. And one virtue which they very markedly share is that neither tyrants nor rabbles are snobs; they do not care a button what they do to wealthy people. It is true that tyranny was sometimes treated as coming from the heavens almost in the lesser and more literal sense of coming from the sky; a man no more expected to be the king than to be the west wind or the morning star. But at least no wicked miller can chain the wind to turn only his own mill; no pedantic scholar can trim the morning star to be his own reading-lamp. Yet something very like this is what really happened to England in the later Middle Ages; and the first sign of it, I fancy was the fall of Richard II.
Shakespeare’s historical plays are something truer than historical; they are traditional; the living memory of many things lingered, though the memory of others was lost. He is right in making Richard II incarnate the claim to divine right; and Bolingbroke the baronial ambition which ultimately broke up the old mediaeval order. But divine right had become at once drier and more fantastic by the time of the Tudors. Shakespeare could not recover the fresh and popular part of the thing; for he came at a later stage in a process of stiffening which is the main thing to be studied in later mediaevalism. Richard himself was possibly a wayward and exasperating prince; it might well be the weak link that snapped in the strong chain of the Plantagenets. There may have been a real case against the coup d’état which he effected in 1397 and his kinsman Henry of Bolingbroke may have had strong sections of disappointed opinion on his side when he effected in 1399 the first true usurpation in English history. But if we wish to understand that larger tradition which even Shakespeare had lost, we must glance back at something which befell Richard even in the first years of his reign. It was certainly the greatest event of his reign; and it was possibly the greatest event of all the reigns which are rapidly considered in this book. The real English people, the men who work with their hands, lifted their hands to strike their masters, probably for the first and certainly for the last time in history.
Pagan slavery had slowly perished, not so much by decaying as by developing into something better. In one sense it did not die, but rather came to life. The slave-owner was like a man who should set up a row of sticks for a fence, and then find they had struck root and were budding into small trees. They would be at once more valuable and less manageable, especially less portable; and such a difference between a stick and a tree was precisely the difference between P. slave and a serf— or even the free peasant which the serf seemed rapidly tending to become. It was, in the best sense of a battered phrase, a social evolution, and it had the great evil of one. The evil was that while it was essentially orderly, it was still literally lawless. That is, the emancipation of the commons had already advanced very far, but it had not yet advanced far enough to be embodied in a law. The custom was “unwritten,” like the British Constitution, and (like that evolutionary, not to say evasive entity) could always be overridden by the rich, who now drive their great coaches through Acts of Parliament. The new peasant was still legally a slave, and was to learn it by one of those turns of fortune which confound a foolish faith in the common sense of unwritten constitutions. The French Wars gradually grew to be almost as much of a scourge to England as they were to France. England was despoiled by her own victories; luxury and poverty increased at the extremes of society; and, by a process more proper to an ensuing chapter, the balance of the better mediaevalism was lost. Finally, a furious plague, called the Black Death, burst like a blast on the land, thinning the population and throwing the work of the world into ruin. There was a shortage of labour; a difficulty of getting luxuries; and the great lords did what one would expect them to do. They became lawyers, and upholders of the letter of the law. They appealed to a rule already nearly obsolete, to drive the serf back to the more direct servitude of the Dark Ages. They announced their decision to the people, and the people rose in arms.
X
LA GUERRA DEGLI USURPATORI
Il poeta Pope, benché amico del più grande dei Tory Democratici, Bolingbroke, viveva necessariamente in un mondo in cui persino il Toryismo era Whig. E il Whig, in quanto arguto, non espresse mai il suo punto politico più chiaramente che nel verso di Pope che suonava: “Il diritto divino dei re di governare male.” Sarà evidente, quando tratterò di quel periodo, che io non attenuo la reale irragionevolezza insita nel diritto divino come lo interpretarono Filmer e certi pedanti cavalieri. Essi professavano l’impossibile ideale della “non resistenza” a qualsiasi potere nazionale e legittimo; benché io non riesca a vedere che neppure ciò fosse così servile e superstizioso quanto il puro e moderno ideale della “non resistenza” persino a un potere straniero e senza legge. Ma il diciassettesimo secolo fu un’età di sette, cioè di fisime; e i Filmeriti fecero del diritto divino una fisima. Le sue radici erano più antiche, ugualmente religiose ma molto più realistiche; e benché intrecciate con molte altre e persino opposte cose del Medioevo, si ramificano attraverso tutti i mutamenti che ora dobbiamo considerare. Il legame non può essere enunciato meglio che prendendo il facile epigramma di Pope e osservando che esso è, dopo tutto, assai debole in filosofia. “Il diritto divino dei re di governare male,” considerato come uno scherno, elude in realtà tutto ciò che intendiamo con “un diritto.” Avere il diritto di fare una cosa non è affatto lo stesso che aver ragione nel farla. Ciò che Pope dice satiricamente di un diritto divino è ciò che tutti diciamo assai seriamente di un diritto umano. Se un uomo ha il diritto di votare, non ha forse il diritto di votar male? Se un uomo ha il diritto di scegliersi la moglie, non ha forse il diritto di sceglier male? Io ho il diritto di esprimere l’opinione che sto ora mettendo per iscritto; ma esiterei ad avanzare la pretesa controversa che ciò dimostri che l’opinione è giusta.
Ora la monarchia medievale, benché solo un aspetto del governo medievale, era grossolanamente rappresentata nell’idea che il sovrano avesse il diritto di governare come un elettore ha il diritto di votare. Egli poteva governare male, ma a meno che non governasse in modo orribile e smisuratamente sbagliato, conservava la sua posizione di diritto; come un privato conserva il suo diritto al matrimonio e al movimento a meno che non esca orribilmente e smisuratamente di senno. Non era in realtà neppure così semplice; poiché il Medioevo non era, come spesso è di moda immaginare, sotto un’unica e ferrea disciplina. Era assai polemico e perciò assai complesso; ed è facile, isolando singoli elementi, sia riguardo al jus divinum sia al primus inter pares, sostenere che i medievali erano quasi qualsiasi cosa; si è seriamente sostenuto che erano tutti tedeschi. Ma è vero che l’influenza della Chiesa, benché per nulla di tutti i grandi ecclesiastici, incoraggiava il senso di una sorta di sacramento del governo, che era inteso a rendere il monarca terribile e perciò spesso rendeva l’uomo tirannico. Lo svantaggio di un simile dispotismo è abbastanza ovvio. La precisa natura del suo vantaggio deve essere compresa meglio di quanto lo sia, non tanto per se stessa quanto per la storia che ora dobbiamo raccontare.
Il vantaggio del “diritto divino,” o della legittimità inamovibile, è questo: che vi è un limite alle ambizioni dei ricchi. “Roi ne puis”, il potere regale, fosse o non fosse il potere del cielo, era per un aspetto simile al potere del cielo. Non era in vendita. I moralisti costituzionali hanno spesso lasciato intendere che un tiranno e una plebaglia abbiano gli stessi vizi. Si è forse notato meno che un tiranno e una plebaglia hanno con la massima evidenza le stesse virtù. E una virtù che essi molto marcatamente condividono è che né i tiranni né le plebaglie sono snob; non si curano un fico secco di ciò che fanno alle persone ricche. È vero che la tirannia era talvolta considerata come proveniente dai cieli quasi nel senso minore e più letterale di provenire dal cielo; un uomo non si aspettava di essere il re più di quanto si aspettasse di essere il vento d’occidente o la stella del mattino. Ma almeno nessun malvagio mugnaio può incatenare il vento perché faccia girare soltanto il proprio mulino; nessun pedante studioso può regolare la stella del mattino perché sia la propria lampada da lettura. Eppure qualcosa di assai simile a questo è ciò che accadde realmente all’Inghilterra nel tardo Medioevo; e il primo segno di ciò, immagino, fu la caduta di Riccardo II.
Le opere storiche di Shakespeare sono qualcosa di più vero dello storico; sono tradizionali; la viva memoria di molte cose indugiava, benché la memoria di altre fosse perduta. Egli ha ragione nel fare di Riccardo II l’incarnazione della pretesa al diritto divino; e di Bolingbroke l’ambizione baronale che infine mandò in pezzi il vecchio ordine medievale. Ma il diritto divino era divenuto a un tempo più arido e più fantastico al tempo dei Tudor. Shakespeare non poteva recuperare la parte fresca e popolare della cosa; poiché egli giunse a uno stadio più tardo in un processo di irrigidimento che è la cosa principale da studiare nel medievalismo più tardo. Riccardo stesso era forse un principe capriccioso ed esasperante; poteva ben essere l’anello debole che si spezzò nella forte catena dei Plantageneti. Può darsi che vi fosse un vero motivo contro il colpo di Stato che egli effettuò nel 1397, e il suo parente Enrico di Bolingbroke può aver avuto forti settori di opinione delusa dalla sua parte quando effettuò nel 1399 la prima vera usurpazione nella storia inglese. Ma se vogliamo comprendere quella più ampia tradizione che persino Shakespeare aveva perduto, dobbiamo volgere lo sguardo a qualcosa che capitò a Riccardo persino nei primi anni del suo regno. Fu certamente il più grande evento del suo regno; e fu forse il più grande evento di tutti i regni che sono rapidamente considerati in questo libro. Il vero popolo inglese, gli uomini che lavorano con le mani, levarono le mani per colpire i loro padroni, probabilmente per la prima e certamente per l’ultima volta nella storia.
La schiavitù pagana era lentamente perita, non tanto decadendo quanto sviluppandosi in qualcosa di migliore. In un senso essa non morì, ma piuttosto prese vita. Il proprietario di schiavi era come un uomo che dovesse piantare una fila di paletti per una staccionata, e poi scoprisse che avevano messo radici e gemmavano in piccoli alberi. Sarebbero stati a un tempo più preziosi e meno maneggevoli, specialmente meno trasportabili; e una tale differenza fra un paletto e un albero era precisamente la differenza fra uno schiavo e un servo della gleba—o persino il libero contadino che il servo pareva rapidamente tendere a diventare. Fu, nel senso migliore di una frase logora, un’evoluzione sociale, e ne ebbe il grande male. Il male era che, pur essendo essenzialmente ordinata, era ancora letteralmente senza legge. Vale a dire, l’emancipazione dei comuni era già avanzata assai, ma non era ancora avanzata abbastanza da essere incarnata in una legge. La consuetudine era “non scritta,” come la Costituzione britannica, e (come quell’entità evolutiva, per non dire evasiva) poteva sempre essere scavalcata dai ricchi, che ora spingono le loro grandi carrozze attraverso gli Atti del Parlamento. Il nuovo contadino era ancora legalmente uno schiavo, e doveva impararlo per uno di quei rivolgimenti della fortuna che confondono una sciocca fede nel buon senso delle costituzioni non scritte. Le Guerre Francesi divennero a poco a poco quasi altrettanto un flagello per l’Inghilterra quanto lo erano per la Francia. L’Inghilterra fu spogliata dalle sue stesse vittorie; il lusso e la povertà crebbero agli estremi della società; e, per un processo più proprio di un capitolo successivo, l’equilibrio del miglior medievalismo andò perduto. Infine, una peste furiosa, chiamata la Morte Nera, scoppiò come una raffica sulla terra, diradando la popolazione e gettando in rovina il lavoro del mondo. Vi fu una carenza di manodopera; una difficoltà a procurarsi beni di lusso; e i grandi signori fecero ciò che ci si aspetterebbe che facessero. Divennero avvocati, e sostenitori della lettera della legge. Si appellarono a una norma già quasi obsoleta, per ricacciare il servo nella più diretta servitù dei Secoli Bui. Annunciarono la loro decisione al popolo, e il popolo insorse in armi.
The two dramatic stories which connect Wat Tyler, doubtfully with the beginning, and definitely with the end of the revolt, are far from unimportant, despite the desire of our present prosaic historians to pretend that all dramatic stories are unimportant. The tale of Tyler’s first blow is significant in the sense that it is not only dramatic but domestic. It avenged an insult to the family, and made the legend of the whole riot, whatever its incidental indecencies, a sort of demonstration on behalf of decency. This is important; for the dignity of the poor is almost unmeaning in modern debates; and an inspector need only bring a printed form and a few long words to do the same thing without having his head broken. The occasion of the protest, and the form which the feudal reaction had first taken, was a Poll Tax; but this was but a part of a general process of pressing the population to servile labour, which fully explains the ferocious language held by the government after the rising had failed; the language in which it threatened to make the state of the serf more servile than before. The facts attending the failure in question are less in dispute. The mediaeval populace showed considerable military energy and co-operation, stormed its way to London, and was met outside the city by a company containing the King and the Lord Mayor, who were forced to consent to a parley. The treacherous stabbing of Tyler by the Mayor gave the signal for battle and massacre on the spot. The peasants closed in roaring, “They have killed our leader”, when a strange thing happened; something which gives us a fleeting and a final glimpse of the crowned sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For one wild moment divine right was divine.
The King was no more than a boy; his very voice must have rung out to that multitude almost like the voice of a child. But the power of his fathers and the great Christendom from which he came fell in some strange fashion upon him; and riding out alone before the people, he cried out, “I am your leader”; and himself promised to grant them all they asked. That promise was afterwards broken; but those who see in the breach of it the mere fickleness of the young and frivolous king, are not only shallow but utterly ignorant interpreters of the whole trend of that time. The point that must be seized, if subsequent things are to be seen as they are, is that Parliament certainly encouraged, and Parliament almost certainly obliged, the King to repudiate the people. For when, after the rejoicing revolutionists had disarmed and were betrayed, the King urged a humane compromise on the Parliament, the Parliament furiously refused it. Already Parliament is not merely a governing body but a governing class. Parliament was as contemptuous of the peasants in the fourteenth as of the Chartists in the nineteenth century. This council, first summoned by the king like juries and many other things, to get from plain men rather reluctant evidence about taxation, has already become an object of ambition, and is, therefore, an aristocracy. There is already war, in this case literally to the knife, between the Commons with a large C and the commons with a small one. Talking about the knife, it is notable that the murderer of Tyler was not a mere noble but an elective magistrate of the mercantile oligarchy of London; though there is probably no truth in the tale that his blood-stained dagger figures on the arms of the City of London. The mediaeval Londoners were quite capable of assassinating a man, but not of sticking so dirty a knife into the neighbourhood of the cross of their Redeemer, in the place which is really occupied by the sword of St. Paul.
It is remarked above that Parliament was now an aristocracy, being an object of ambition. The truth is, perhaps, more subtle than this; but if ever men yearn to serve on juries we may probably guess that juries are no longer popular. Anyhow, this must be kept in mind, as against the opposite idea of the jus divinum or fixed authority, if we would appreciate the fall of Richard. If the thing which dethroned him was a rebellion, it was a rebellion of the parliament, of the thing that had just proved much more pitiless than he towards a rebellion of the people. But this is not the main point. The point is that by the removal of Richard, a step above the parliament became possible for the first time. The transition was tremendous; the crown became an object of ambition. That which one could snatch another could snatch from him; that which the House of Lancaster held merely by force the House of York could take from it by force. The spell of an undethronable thing seated out of reach was broken, and for three unhappy generations adventurers strove and stumbled on a stairway slippery with blood, above which was something new in the mediaeval imagination; an empty throne.
It is obvious that the insecurity of the Lancastrian usurper, largely because he was a usurper, is the clue to many things, some of which we should now call good, some bad, all of which we should probably call good or bad with the excessive facility with which we dismiss distant things. It led the Lancastrian House to lean on Parliament, which was the mixed matter we have already seen. It may have been in some ways good for the monarchy, to be checked and challenged by an institution which at least kept something of the old freshness and freedom of speech. It was almost certainly bad for the parliament, making it yet more the ally of the mere ambitious noble, of which we shall see much later. It also led the Lancastrian House to lean on patriotism, which was perhaps more popular; to make English the tongue of the court for the first time, and to reopen the French wars with the fine flag-waving of Agincourt. It led it again to lean on the Church, or rather, perhaps, on the higher clergy, and that in the least worthy aspect of clericalism. A certain morbidity which more and more darkened the end of mediaevalism showed itself in new and more careful cruelties against the last crop of heresies. A slight knowledge of the philosophy of these heresies will lend little support to the notion that they were in themselves prophetic of the Reformation. It is hard to see how anybody can call Wycliffe a Protestant unless he calls Palagius or Arius a Protestant; and if John Ball was a Reformer, Latimer was not a Reformer. But though the new heresies did not even hint at the beginning of English Protestantism, they did, perhaps, hint at the end of English Catholicism. Cobham did not light a candle to be handed on to Nonconformist chapels; but Arundel did light a torch and put it to his own church. Such real unpopularity as did in time attach to the old religious system, and which afterwards became a true national tradition against Mary was doubtless started by the diseased energy of these fifteenth-century bishops. Persecution can be a philosophy, and a defensible philosophy, but with some of these men persecution was rather a perversion. Across the channel, one of them was presiding at the trial of Joan of Arc.
Le due drammatiche vicende che collegano Wat Tyler, dubbiosamente con l’inizio, e con certezza con la fine della rivolta, sono ben lungi dall’essere trascurabili, malgrado il desiderio dei nostri odierni storici prosaici di fingere che tutte le vicende drammatiche siano trascurabili. Il racconto del primo colpo di Tyler è significativo nel senso che non è solo drammatico ma domestico. Vendicava un’offesa alla famiglia, e fece della leggenda dell’intera sommossa, quali che fossero le sue incidentali indecenze, una sorta di manifestazione a favore della decenza. Questo è importante; poiché la dignità dei poveri è quasi priva di senso nei dibattiti moderni; e a un ispettore basta portare un modulo stampato e qualche parola altisonante per fare la stessa cosa senza avere la testa rotta. L’occasione della protesta, e la forma che la reazione feudale aveva dapprima assunto, fu una Tassa Testatica; ma questa non era che una parte di un processo generale di costringere la popolazione al lavoro servile, il che spiega appieno il linguaggio feroce tenuto dal governo dopo che l’insurrezione era fallita; il linguaggio in cui minacciava di rendere la condizione del servo più servile di prima. I fatti che accompagnano il fallimento in questione sono meno controversi. Il popolino medievale mostrò considerevole energia militare e cooperazione, si aprì la strada con la forza fino a Londra, e fu affrontato fuori della città da una compagnia che comprendeva il re e il Lord Mayor, i quali furono costretti ad acconsentire a un parlamento. Il proditorio pugnalamento di Tyler da parte del Mayor diede il segnale della battaglia e del massacro sul posto. I contadini si serrarono ruggendo: “Hanno ucciso il nostro capo”, quando accadde una cosa strana; qualcosa che ci offre un fuggevole e definitivo scorcio dell’uomo incoronato e sacramentale del Medioevo. Per un istante folle il diritto divino fu divino.
Il re non era che un ragazzo; la sua stessa voce dovette risuonare a quella moltitudine quasi come la voce di un bambino. Ma il potere dei suoi padri e la grande Cristianità da cui proveniva calò in qualche strana maniera su di lui; e cavalcando fuori da solo davanti al popolo, gridò: “Io sono il vostro capo”; e promise egli stesso di concedere loro tutto ciò che chiedevano. Quella promessa fu poi infranta; ma coloro che vedono nella sua rottura la mera volubilità del giovane e frivolo re, sono non solo superficiali ma del tutto ignoranti interpreti dell’intera tendenza di quel tempo. Il punto che va afferrato, se le cose successive devono essere viste come sono, è che il Parlamento certamente incoraggiò, e quasi certamente costrinse, il re a rinnegare il popolo. Poiché quando, dopo che i rivoluzionari esultanti si erano disarmati ed erano stati traditi, il re sollecitò un umano compromesso al Parlamento, il Parlamento lo rifiutò con furore. Già il Parlamento non è soltanto un corpo governante ma una classe governante. Il Parlamento fu tanto sprezzante verso i contadini nel quattordicesimo secolo quanto verso i Cartisti nel diciannovesimo. Questo consiglio, dapprima convocato dal re come le giurie e molte altre cose, per ottenere da uomini semplici una testimonianza piuttosto riluttante sulla tassazione, è già divenuto un oggetto di ambizione, ed è, perciò, un’aristocrazia. Vi è già guerra, in questo caso letteralmente all’arma bianca, fra i Comuni con la C maiuscola e i comuni con la c minuscola. A proposito di coltello, è notevole che l’assassino di Tyler non fosse un semplice nobile ma un magistrato elettivo dell’oligarchia mercantile di Londra; benché non vi sia probabilmente alcuna verità nel racconto che il suo pugnale macchiato di sangue figuri sullo stemma della City di Londra. I londinesi medievali erano ben capaci di assassinare un uomo, ma non di conficcare un coltello così sudicio nelle vicinanze della croce del loro Redentore, nel luogo che è realmente occupato dalla spada di San Paolo.
Si è osservato sopra che il Parlamento era ormai un’aristocrazia, essendo un oggetto di ambizione. La verità è, forse, più sottile di così; ma se mai gli uomini bramano di servire nelle giurie possiamo probabilmente indovinare che le giurie non sono più popolari. In ogni caso, questo va tenuto a mente, contro l’idea opposta del jus divinum o dell’autorità fissa, se vogliamo apprezzare la caduta di Riccardo. Se la cosa che lo detronizzò fu una ribellione, fu una ribellione del parlamento, di quella cosa che si era appena dimostrata assai più spietata di lui verso una ribellione del popolo. Ma non è questo il punto principale. Il punto è che con la rimozione di Riccardo un gradino al di sopra del parlamento divenne possibile per la prima volta. La transizione fu tremenda; la corona divenne un oggetto di ambizione. Ciò che uno poteva ghermire un altro poteva ghermirglielo; ciò che la Casa di Lancaster teneva soltanto con la forza la Casa di York poteva toglierglielo con la forza. L’incantesimo di una cosa indetronizzabile assisa fuori portata era spezzato, e per tre infelici generazioni gli avventurieri lottarono e inciamparono su una scala sdrucciolevole di sangue, al di sopra della quale vi era qualcosa di nuovo nell’immaginazione medievale: un trono vuoto.
È ovvio che l’insicurezza dell’usurpatore lancastriano, in gran parte perché era un usurpatore, è la chiave di molte cose, alcune delle quali ora chiameremmo buone, altre cattive, tutte le quali probabilmente chiameremmo buone o cattive con l’eccessiva facilità con cui liquidiamo le cose lontane. Indusse la Casa lancastriana ad appoggiarsi al Parlamento, che era la faccenda mista che abbiamo già visto. Può essere stato per certi versi un bene per la monarchia essere controllata e sfidata da un’istituzione che almeno conservava qualcosa dell’antica freschezza e libertà di parola. Fu quasi certamente un male per il parlamento, rendendolo ancor più l’alleato del semplice nobile ambizioso, del quale vedremo molto più avanti. Indusse anche la Casa lancastriana ad appoggiarsi al patriottismo, che era forse più popolare; a fare dell’inglese la lingua della corte per la prima volta, e a riaprire le guerre francesi con il bel bandiere-sventolio di Azincourt. La indusse di nuovo ad appoggiarsi alla Chiesa, o piuttosto, forse, all’alto clero, e ciò nell’aspetto meno degno del clericalismo. Una certa morbosità che sempre più oscurava la fine del medievalismo si manifestò in nuove e più accurate crudeltà contro l’ultimo raccolto di eresie. Una lieve conoscenza della filosofia di queste eresie darà scarso sostegno all’idea che esse fossero in se stesse profetiche della Riforma. È difficile vedere come chiunque possa chiamare Wycliffe un protestante a meno che non chiami protestante Pelagio o Ario; e se John Ball era un Riformatore, Latimer non era un Riformatore. Ma benché le nuove eresie non alludessero neppure all’inizio del protestantesimo inglese, esse alludevano, forse, alla fine del cattolicesimo inglese. Cobham non accese una candela da tramandare alle cappelle anticonformiste; ma Arundel accese davvero una torcia e la mise alla sua stessa chiesa. Quella reale impopolarità che col tempo si legò effettivamente al vecchio sistema religioso, e che poi divenne una vera tradizione nazionale contro Maria, fu senza dubbio avviata dall’energia malata di questi vescovi del quindicesimo secolo. La persecuzione può essere una filosofia, e una filosofia difendibile, ma con alcuni di questi uomini la persecuzione era piuttosto una perversione. Al di là della Manica, uno di essi presiedeva il processo di Giovanna d’Arco.
But this perversion, this diseased energy, is the power in all the epoch that follows the fall of Richard II, and especially in those feuds that found so ironic an imagery in English roses—and thorns. The foreshortening of such a backward glance as this book can alone claim to be, forbids any entrance into the military mazes of the wars of York and Lancaster, or any attempt to follow the thrilling recoveries and revenges which filled the lives of Warwick the Kingmaker and the warlike widow of Henry V. The rivals were not, indeed, as is sometimes exaggeratively implied, fighting for nothing, or even (like the lion and the unicorn) merely fighting for the crown. The shadow of a moral difference can still be traced even in that stormy twilight of a heroic time. But when we have said that Lancaster stood, on the whole, for the new notion of a king propped by parliaments and powerful bishops, and York, on the whole, for the remains of the older idea of a king who permits nothing to come between him and his people, we have said everything of permanent political interest that could be traced by counting all the bows of Barnet or all the lances of Tewkesbury. But this truth, that there was something which can only vaguely be called Tory about the Yorkists, has at least one interest, that it lends a justifiable romance to the last and most remarkable figure of the fighting House of York, with whose fall the Wars of the Roses ended.
If we desire at all to catch the strange colours of the sunset of the Middle Ages, to see what had changed yet not wholly killed chivalry there is no better study than the riddle of Richard III. Of course, scarcely a line of him was like the caricature with which his much meaner successor placarded the world when he was dead. He was not even a hunchback; he had one shoulder slightly higher than the other, probably the effect of his furious swordsmanship on a naturally slender and sensitive frame. Yet his soul, if not his body, haunts us somehow as the crooked shadow of a straight knight of better days. He was not an ogre shedding rivers of blood; some of the men he executed deserved it as much as any men of that wicked time; and even the tale of his murdered nephews is not certain, as it is told by those who also tell us he was born with tusks and was originally covered with hair. Yet a crimson cloud cannot be dispelled from his memory, and, so tainted is the very air of that time with carnage, that we cannot say he was incapable even of the things of which he may have been innocent. Whether or no he was a good man, he was apparently a good king and even a popular one; yet we think of him vaguely, and not, I fancy, untruly, as on sufferance. He anticipated the Renascence in an abnormal enthusiasm for art and music, and he seems to have held to the old path of religion and charity. He did not pluck perpetually at his sword and dagger because his only pleasure was in cutting throats; he probably did it because he was nervous. It was the age of our first portrait-painting, and a fine contemporary portrait of him throws a more plausible light on this particular detail. For it shows him touching, and probably twisting, a ring on his finger, the very act of a high-strung personality who would also fidget with a dagger. And in his face, as there painted, we can study all that has made it worth while to pause so long upon his name; an atmosphere very different from everything before and after. The face was a remarkable intellectual beauty; but there is something else on the face that is hardly in itself either good or evil, and that thing is death; the death of an epoch, the death of a great civilization, the death of something which once sang to the sun in the canticle of St. Francis and sailed to the ends of the earth in the ships of the First Crusade, but which in peace wearied and turned its weapons inwards, wounded its own brethren, broke its own loyalties, gambled for the crown, and grew feverish even about the creed, and has this one grace among its dying virtues, that its valour is the last to die.
But whatever else may have been bad or good about Richard of Gloucester, there was a touch about him which makes him truly the last of the mediaeval kings. It is expressed in the one word which he cried aloud as he struck down foe after foe in the last charge at Bosworth—treason. For him, as for the first Norman kings, treason was the same as treachery; and in this case at least it was the same as treachery. When his nobles deserted him before the battle, he did not regard it as a new political combination, but as the sin of false friends and faithless servants. Using his own voice like the trumpet of a herald, he challenged his rival to a fight as personal as that of two paladins of Charlemagne. His rival did not reply, and was not likely to reply. The modern world had begun. The call echoed unanswered down the ages; for since that day no English king has fought after that fashion. Having slain many, he was himself slain and his diminished force destroyed. So ended the war of the usurpers; and the last and most doubtful of all the usurpers, a wanderer from the Welsh marches, a knight from nowhere, found the crown of England under a bush of thorn.
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Ma questa perversione, questa energia malata, è la potenza in tutta l’epoca che segue la caduta di Riccardo II, e specialmente in quelle faide che trovarono un’immagine così ironica nelle rose inglesi—e nelle spine. Lo scorcio prospettico di uno sguardo retrospettivo quale questo libro può soltanto pretendere di essere, vieta ogni ingresso nei labirinti militari delle guerre di York e Lancaster, o ogni tentativo di seguire le emozionanti riscosse e vendette che colmarono le vite di Warwick il Fabbricatore di Re e della bellicosa vedova di Enrico V. I rivali non stavano, in verità, come talora si lascia intendere con esagerazione, combattendo per nulla, o persino (come il leone e l’unicorno) combattendo semplicemente per la corona. L’ombra di una differenza morale può ancora essere rintracciata persino in quel tempestoso crepuscolo di un’età eroica. Ma quando abbiamo detto che Lancaster stava, nel complesso, per la nuova nozione di un re sorretto da parlamenti e da potenti vescovi, e York, nel complesso, per i resti della più antica idea di un re che non permette a nulla di frapporsi fra sé e il suo popolo, abbiamo detto tutto ciò che di permanente interesse politico potesse essere rintracciato contando tutti gli archi di Barnet o tutte le lance di Tewkesbury. Ma questa verità, che vi era qualcosa che si può soltanto vagamente chiamare Tory negli Yorkisti, ha almeno un interesse, quello di conferire un giustificabile romanticismo all’ultima e più notevole figura della battagliera Casa di York, con la cui caduta ebbero fine le Guerre delle Rose.
Se desideriamo affatto cogliere gli strani colori del tramonto del Medioevo, vedere ciò che aveva mutato ma non del tutto ucciso la cavalleria, non vi è studio migliore dell’enigma di Riccardo III. Naturalmente, quasi nessun tratto di lui era simile alla caricatura con cui il suo assai più meschino successore lo affisse al mondo quando egli era morto. Non era neppure un gobbo; aveva una spalla leggermente più alta dell’altra, probabilmente l’effetto della sua furiosa maestria di spada su una struttura naturalmente snella e sensibile. Eppure la sua anima, se non il suo corpo, in qualche modo ci perseguita come l’ombra storta di un retto cavaliere di giorni migliori. Non era un orco che versava fiumi di sangue; alcuni degli uomini che giustiziò lo meritavano quanto qualsiasi uomo di quel malvagio tempo; e persino il racconto dei suoi nipoti assassinati non è certo, poiché è narrato da coloro che ci dicono anche che nacque con le zanne e che in origine era coperto di peli. Eppure una nube cremisi non può essere dissipata dalla sua memoria, e, tanto è contaminata la stessa aria di quel tempo dalla carneficina, che non possiamo dire che egli fosse incapace persino delle cose di cui può essere stato innocente. Che fosse o no un uomo buono, egli fu a quanto pare un buon re e persino uno popolare; eppure noi pensiamo a lui vagamente, e non, immagino, senza verità, come a uno tollerato per grazia. Anticipò il Rinascimento in un anormale entusiasmo per l’arte e la musica, e pare si tenesse all’antico sentiero della religione e della carità. Non impugnava di continuo la spada e il pugnale perché il suo unico piacere fosse tagliare gole; probabilmente lo faceva perché era nervoso. Fu l’età della nostra prima ritrattistica, e un bel ritratto coevo di lui getta una luce più plausibile su questo particolare dettaglio. Poiché lo mostra mentre tocca, e probabilmente gira, un anello sul dito, proprio l’atto di una personalità tesa che tormenterebbe del pari un pugnale. E nel suo volto, come lì dipinto, possiamo studiare tutto ciò che ha reso degno di indugiare così a lungo sul suo nome; un’atmosfera assai diversa da tutto ciò che venne prima e dopo. Il volto era di una notevole bellezza intellettuale; ma vi è qualcos’altro su quel volto che di per sé non è propriamente né buono né cattivo, e quella cosa è la morte; la morte di un’epoca, la morte di una grande civiltà, la morte di qualcosa che un tempo cantava al sole nel cantico di San Francesco e navigava ai confini della terra sulle navi della Prima Crociata, ma che in pace si stancò e rivolse le armi verso l’interno, ferì i propri fratelli, ruppe le proprie fedeltà, giocò d’azzardo per la corona, e si fece febbrile persino riguardo al credo, e ha questa sola grazia fra le sue virtù morenti, che il suo valore è l’ultimo a morire.
Ma qualunque altra cosa possa esserci stata di cattivo o di buono in Riccardo di Gloucester, vi era in lui un tocco che lo rende veramente l’ultimo dei re medievali. Esso è espresso nell’unica parola che egli gridò a gran voce mentre abbatteva nemico dopo nemico nell’ultima carica a Bosworth—tradimento. Per lui, come per i primi re normanni, tradimento era lo stesso che slealtà; e in questo caso almeno era lo stesso che slealtà. Quando i suoi nobili lo abbandonarono prima della battaglia, egli non lo considerò come una nuova combinazione politica, ma come il peccato di falsi amici e di servi infedeli. Usando la propria voce come la tromba di un araldo, sfidò il suo rivale a un combattimento tanto personale quanto quello di due paladini di Carlomagno. Il suo rivale non rispose, e non era probabile che rispondesse. Il mondo moderno aveva avuto inizio. Il grido echeggiò senza risposta giù per i secoli; poiché da quel giorno nessun re inglese ha più combattuto in quel modo. Avendone uccisi molti, egli stesso fu ucciso e la sua diminuita schiera distrutta. Così ebbe fine la guerra degli usurpatori; e l’ultimo e più dubbio di tutti gli usurpatori, un vagabondo dalle marche gallesi, un cavaliere venuto dal nulla, trovò la corona d’Inghilterra sotto un cespuglio di spine.
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XI
THE REBELLION OF THE RICH
SIR THOMAS MORE, apart from any arguments about the more mystical meshes in which he was ultimately caught and killed, will be hailed by all as a hero of the New Learning; that great dawn of a more rational daylight which for so many made mediaevalism seem a mere darkness. Whatever we think of his appreciation of the Reformation, there will be no dispute about his appreciation of the Renascence. He was above all things a Humanist and a very human one. He was even in many ways very modern, which some rather erroneously suppose to be the same as being human; he was also humane, in the sense of humanitarian. He sketched an ideal, or rather perhaps a fanciful social system, with something of the ingenuity of Mr. H. G. Wells, but essentially with much more than the flippancy attributed to Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is not fair to charge the Utopian notions upon his morality; but their subjects and suggestions mark what (for want of a better word) we can only call his modernism. Thus the immortality of animals is the sort of transcendentalism which savours of evolution, and the grosser jest about the preliminaries of marriage might be taken quite seriously by the students of Eugenics. He suggested a sort of pacifism— though the Utopians had a quaint way of achieving it. In short, while he was, with his friend Erasmus, a satirist of mediaeval abuses, few would now deny that Protestantism would be too narrow rather than too broad for him. If he was obviously not a Protestant, there are few Protestants who would deny him the name of a Reformer. But he was an innovator in things more alluring to modern minds than theology; he was partly what we should call a Neo-Pagan. His friend Colet summed up that escape from mediaevalism which might be called the passage from bad Latin to good Greek. In our loose modern debates they are lumped together; but Greek learning was the growth of this time; there had always been a popular Latin, if a dog Latin. It would be nearer the truth to call the mediaevals bi-lingual than to call their Latin a dead language. Greek never, of course, became so general a possession; but for the man who got it, it is not too much to say that he felt as if he were in the open air for the first time. Much of this Greek spirit was reflected in More; its universality, its urbanity, its balance of buoyant reason and cool curiosity. It is even probable that he shared some of the excesses and errors of taste which inevitably infected the splendid intellectualism of the reaction against the Middle Ages; we can imagine him thinking gargoyles Gothic, in the sense of barbaric or even failing to be stirred, as Sydney was, by the trumpet of “Chevy Chase.” The wealth of the ancient heathen world, in wit, loveliness, and civic heroism, had so recently been revealed to that generation in its dazzling profusion and perfection, that it might seem a trifle if they did here and there an injustice to the relics of the Dark Ages. When, therefore, we look at the world with the eyes of More we are looking from the widest windows of that time; looking over an English landscape seen for the first time very equally, in the level light of the sun at morning. For what he saw was England of the Renascence; England passing from the mediaeval to the modern. Thus he looked forth, and saw many things and said many things, they were all worthy and many witty; but he noted one thing which is at once a horrible fancy and a homely and practical fact. He who looked over that landscape said: “Sheep are eating men.”
This singular summary of the great epoch of our emancipation and enlightenment is not the fact usually put first in such very curt historical accounts of it. It has nothing to do with the translation of the Bible, or the character of Henry VIII, or the characters of Henry VIII’s wives, or the triangular debates between Henry and Luther and the Pope. It was not Popish sheep who were eating Protestant men, or vice versa; nor did Henry, at any period of his own brief and rather bewildering papacy, have martyrs eaten by lambs as the heathen had them eaten by lions. What was meant, of course, by this picturesque expression, was that an intensive type of agriculture was giving way to a very extensive type of pasture. Great spaces of England which had hitherto been cut up into the commonwealth of a number of farmers were being laid under the sovereignty of a solitary shepherd. The point has been put, by a touch of epigram rather in the manner of More himself, by Mr. J. Stephen, in a striking essay now, I think, only to be found in the back files of The New Witness. He enunciated the paradox that the very much admired individual, who made two blades of grass grow instead of one was a murderer. In the same article, Mr. Stephen traced the true moral origins of this movement, which led to the growing of so much grass and the murder, or at any rate the destruction, of so much humanity. He traced it, and every true record of that transformation traces it, to the growth of a new refinement, in a sense a more rational refinement, in the governing class. The mediaeval lord had been, by comparison, a coarse fellow; he had merely lived in the largest kind of farm-house after the fashion of the largest kind of farmer. He drank wine when he could, but he was quite ready to drink ale; and science had not yet smoothed his paths with petrol. At a time later than this, one of the greatest ladies of England writes to her husband that she cannot come to him because her carriage horses are pulling the plough. In the true Middle Ages the greatest men were even more rudely hampered, but in the time of Henry VIII the transformation was beginning. In the next generation a phrase was common which is one of the keys of the time, and is very much the key to these more ambitious territorial schemes. This or that great lord was said to be “Italianate.” It meant subtler shapes of beauty, delicate and ductile glass, gold and silver not treated as barbaric stones but rather as stems and wreaths of molten metal, mirrors, cards and such trinkets bearing a load of beauty; it meant the perfection of trifles. It was not, as in popular Gothic craftsmanship, the almost unconscious touch of art upon all necessary things: rather it was the pouring of the whole soul of passionately conscious art especially into unnecessary things. Luxury was made alive with a soul. We must remember this real thirst for beauty; for it is an explanation— and an excuse.
XI
LA RIBELLIONE DEI RICCHI
SIR TOMMASO MORO, a prescindere da ogni discussione sulle maglie più mistiche in cui fu infine irretito e ucciso, sarà acclamato da tutti come un eroe della Nuova Cultura; quella grande alba di una luce più razionale che a tanti fece parere il medievalismo una mera tenebra. Qualunque cosa pensiamo del suo apprezzamento della Riforma, non vi sarà disputa sul suo apprezzamento del Rinascimento. Egli fu soprattutto un umanista, e un umanista assai umano. Fu persino, per molti versi, assai moderno, il che alcuni suppongono piuttosto erroneamente essere la stessa cosa che essere umano; fu anche umano, nel senso di umanitario. Abbozzò un ideale, o piuttosto forse un fantasioso sistema sociale, con qualcosa dell’ingegnosità del signor H. G. Wells, ma essenzialmente con molto più della frivolezza attribuita al signor Bernard Shaw. Non è giusto imputare le nozioni utopistiche alla sua moralità; ma i loro temi e le loro suggestioni segnano ciò che (in mancanza di una parola migliore) possiamo soltanto chiamare il suo modernismo. Così l’immortalità degli animali è quel genere di trascendentalismo che sa di evoluzione, e lo scherzo più grossolano sui preliminari del matrimonio potrebbe essere preso assai sul serio dagli studiosi di Eugenetica. Egli suggerì una sorta di pacifismo—benché gli Utopiani avessero un curioso modo di realizzarlo. In breve, mentre egli era, insieme al suo amico Erasmo, un satirico degli abusi medievali, pochi negherebbero ora che il protestantesimo sarebbe stato per lui troppo angusto piuttosto che troppo ampio. Se egli evidentemente non era un protestante, vi sono pochi protestanti che gli negherebbero il nome di Riformatore. Ma egli fu un innovatore in cose più allettanti per le menti moderne della teologia; fu in parte ciò che chiameremmo un neopagano. Il suo amico Colet riassunse quella fuga dal medievalismo che potrebbe chiamarsi il passaggio dal cattivo latino al buon greco. Nei nostri vaghi dibattiti moderni essi vengono confusi insieme; ma la cultura greca fu la crescita di questo tempo; vi era sempre stato un latino popolare, sia pure un latino da cani. Sarebbe più vicino alla verità chiamare bilingui i medievali che chiamare il loro latino una lingua morta. Il greco non divenne mai, certo, un possesso così generale; ma per l’uomo che lo acquisiva, non è troppo dire che egli si sentiva come se fosse all’aria aperta per la prima volta. Molto di questo spirito greco si rifletté in Moro; la sua universalità, la sua urbanità, il suo equilibrio di ragione esuberante e fredda curiosità. È persino probabile che egli condividesse alcuni degli eccessi e degli errori di gusto che inevitabilmente infettarono il magnifico intellettualismo della reazione contro il Medioevo; possiamo immaginarlo mentre giudica gotiche le gargolle, nel senso di barbariche, o persino mentre non si commuove, come si commuoveva Sydney, alla tromba di “Chevy Chase.” La ricchezza dell’antico mondo pagano, in arguzia, avvenenza ed eroismo civico, era stata rivelata così di recente a quella generazione nella sua abbagliante profusione e perfezione, che poteva sembrare una bagatella se essa commetteva qua e là un’ingiustizia verso le reliquie dei Secoli Bui. Quando, dunque, guardiamo il mondo con gli occhi di Moro guardiamo dalle più ampie finestre di quel tempo; guardiamo su un paesaggio inglese visto per la prima volta in modo assai uniforme, nella luce radente del sole al mattino. Poiché ciò che egli vide era l’Inghilterra del Rinascimento; l’Inghilterra che passava dal medievale al moderno. Così egli guardò fuori, e vide molte cose e disse molte cose, tutte degne e molte argute; ma notò una cosa che è a un tempo una fantasia orribile e un fatto casalingo e pratico. Egli, che contemplava quel paesaggio, disse: “Le pecore stanno mangiando gli uomini.”
Questo singolare compendio della grande epoca della nostra emancipazione e illuminazione non è il fatto solitamente posto per primo in resoconti storici così assai laconici di essa. Non ha nulla a che vedere con la traduzione della Bibbia, o con il carattere di Enrico VIII, o con i caratteri delle mogli di Enrico VIII, o con i dibattiti triangolari fra Enrico e Lutero e il Papa. Non erano pecore papiste che mangiavano uomini protestanti, o viceversa; né Enrico, in alcun periodo del suo pur breve e piuttosto sconcertante papato, ebbe martiri mangiati dagli agnelli come i pagani li avevano fatti mangiare dai leoni. Ciò che si intendeva, naturalmente, con questa pittoresca espressione, era che un tipo intensivo di agricoltura stava cedendo il passo a un tipo assai estensivo di pascolo. Grandi distese d’Inghilterra che fino allora erano state suddivise nella comunità di un certo numero di agricoltori venivano poste sotto la sovranità di un solitario pastore. Il punto è stato espresso, con un tocco di epigramma piuttosto alla maniera dello stesso Moro, dal signor J. Stephen, in un notevole saggio ora, credo, reperibile solo negli arretrati di The New Witness. Egli enunciò il paradosso che l’individuo tanto ammirato, che faceva crescere due fili d’erba invece di uno, era un assassino. Nello stesso articolo, il signor Stephen tracciò le vere origini morali di questo movimento, che condusse alla crescita di tanta erba e all’assassinio, o quantomeno alla distruzione, di tanta umanità. Lo fece risalire, e ogni vero resoconto di quella trasformazione lo fa risalire, alla crescita di una nuova raffinatezza, in un certo senso una raffinatezza più razionale, nella classe dirigente. Il signore medievale era stato, in confronto, un tipo rozzo; aveva semplicemente vissuto nel più grande tipo di casa colonica alla maniera del più grande tipo di agricoltore. Beveva vino quando poteva, ma era pronto a bere birra; e la scienza non aveva ancora lisciato i suoi sentieri con la benzina. In un tempo più tardo di questo, una delle più grandi dame d’Inghilterra scrive al marito che non può raggiungerlo perché i cavalli della sua carrozza stanno tirando l’aratro. Nel vero Medioevo i più grandi uomini erano ancor più rozzamente impacciati, ma nel tempo di Enrico VIII la trasformazione cominciava. Nella generazione successiva era comune una frase che è una delle chiavi del tempo, ed è assai la chiave di questi più ambiziosi disegni territoriali. Questo o quel gran signore veniva detto “Italianizzato.” Significava forme più sottili di bellezza, vetro delicato e duttile, oro e argento trattati non come pietre barbariche ma piuttosto come steli e ghirlande di metallo fuso, specchi, carte e simili ninnoli che recavano un carico di bellezza; significava la perfezione delle bagatelle. Non era, come nell’artigianato gotico popolare, il tocco quasi inconscio dell’arte su tutte le cose necessarie: era piuttosto il riversare l’intera anima dell’arte appassionatamente consapevole soprattutto nelle cose non necessarie. Il lusso fu reso vivo con un’anima. Dobbiamo ricordare questa reale sete di bellezza; poiché essa è una spiegazione—e una scusa.
The old barony had indeed been thinned by the civil wars that closed at Bosworth, and curtailed by the economical and crafty policy of that unkingly king, Henry VII. He was himself a “new man,” and we shall see the barons largely give place to a whole nobility of new men. But even the older families already had their faces set in the newer direction. Some of them, the Howards, for instance, may be said to have figured both as old and new families. In any case the spirit of the whole upper class can be described as increasingly new. The English aristocracy which is the chief creation of the Reformation, is undeniably entitled to a certain praise, which is now almost universally regarded as very high praise. It was always progressive. Aristocrats are accused of being proud of their ancestors; it can truly be said that English aristocrats have rather been proud of their descendants. For their descendants they planned huge foundations and piled mountains of wealth; for their descendants they fought for a higher and higher place in the government of the state; for their descendants, above all, they nourished every new science or scheme of social philosophy. They seized the vast economic chances of pasturage; but they also drained the fens. They swept away the priests, but they condescended to the philosophers. As the new Tudor house passes through its generations a new and more rationalist civilization is being made; scholars are criticizing authentic texts; sceptics are discrediting not only popish saints but pagan philosophers; specialists are analyzing and rationalizing traditions, and sheep are eating men.
We have seen that in the fourteenth century in England there was a real revolution of the poor. It very nearly succeeded; and I need not conceal the conviction that it would have been the best possible thing for all of us if it had entirely succeeded. If Richard II had really sprung into the saddle of Wat Tyler, or rather if his parliament had not unhorsed him when he had got there, if he had confirmed the fact of the new peasant freedom by some form of royal authority, as it was already common to confirm the fact of the Trade Unions by the form of a royal charter, our country would probably have had as happy a history as is possible to human nature. The Renascence, when it came, would have come as popular education and not the culture of a club of aesthetics. The New Learning might have been as democratic as the old learning in the old days of mediaeval Paris and Oxford. The exquisite artistry of the school of Cellini might have been but the highest grade of the craft of a guild. The Shakespearean drama might have been acted by workmen on wooden stages set up in the street like Punch and Judy, the finer fulfilment of the miracle play as it was acted by a guild. The players need not have been “the king’s servants,” but their own masters. The great Renascence might have been liberal with its liberal education. If this be a fancy, it is at least one that cannot be disproved; the mediaeval revolution was too unsuccessful at the beginning for any one to show that it need have been unsuccessful in the end. The feudal parliament prevailed, and pushed back the peasants at least into their dubious and half-developed status. More than this it would be exaggerative to say, and a mere anticipation of the really decisive events afterwards. When Henry VIII came to the throne the guilds were perhaps checked but apparently unchanged, and even the peasants had probably regained ground; many were still theoretically serfs, but largely under the easy landlordism of the abbots; the mediaeval system still stood. It might, for all we know, have begun to grow again; but all such speculations are swamped in new and very strange things. The failure of the revolution of the poor was ultimately followed by a counter-revolution; a successful revolution of the rich.
The apparent pivot of it was in certain events, political and even personal. They roughly resolve themselves into two: the marriages of Henry VIII and the affair of the monasteries. The marriages of Henry VIII have long been a popular and even a stale joke; and there is a truth of tradition in the joke, as there is in almost any joke if it is sufficiently popular, and indeed if it is sufficiently stale. A jocular thing never lives to be stale unless it is also serious. Henry was popular in his first days, and even foreign contemporaries give us quite a glorious picture of a young prince of the Renascence, radiant with all the new accomplishments. In his last days he was something very like a maniac; he no longer inspired love, and even when he inspired fear, it was rather the fear of a mad dog than of a watch-dog. In this change doubtless the inconsistency and even ignominy of his Bluebeard weddings played a great part. And it is but just to him to say that, perhaps with the exception of the first and the last, he was almost as unlucky in his wives as they were in their husband. But it was undoubtedly the affair of the first divorce that broke the back of his honour, and incidentally broke a very large number of other more valuable and universal things. To feel the meaning of his fury we must realize that he did not regard himself as the enemy but rather as the friend of the Pope; there is a shadow of the old story of Becket. He had defended the Pope in diplomacy and the Church in controversy; and when he wearied of his queen and took a passionate fancy to one of her ladies, Anne Boleyn, he vaguely felt that a rather cynical concession, in that age of cynical concessions, might very well be made to him by a friend. But it is part of that high inconsistency which is the fate of the Christian faith in human hands, that no man knows when the higher side of it will really be uppermost, if only for an instant; and that the worst ages of the Church will not do or say something, as if by accident, that is worthy of the best. Anyhow, for whatever reason, Henry sought to lean upon the cushions of Leo and found he had struck his arm upon the rock of Peter. The Pope denied the new marriage; and Henry, in a storm and darkness of anger, dissolved all the old relations with the Papacy. It is probable that he did not clearly know how much he was doing then; and it is very tenable that we do not know it now. He certainly did not think he was Anti-Catholic; and, in one rather ridiculous sense, we can hardly say that he thought he was anti-papal, since he apparently thought he was a pope. From this day really dates something that played a certain part in history, the more modern doctrine of the divine right of kings, widely different from the mediaeval one. It is a matter which further embarrasses the open question about the continuity of Catholic things in Anglicanism, for it was a new note and yet one struck by the older party. The supremacy of the King over the English national church was not, unfortunately, merely a fad of the King, but became partly, and for one period, a fad of the church. But apart from all controverted questions, there is at least a human and historic sense in which the continuity of our past is broken perilously at this point. Henry not only cut off England from Europe, but what was even more important, he cuts off England from England.
L’antica baronia era stata in verità assottigliata dalle guerre civili che si chiusero a Bosworth, e ridotta dalla politica parsimoniosa e astuta di quel re così poco regale, Enrico VII. Egli stesso era un «uomo nuovo», e vedremo i baroni cedere in gran parte il posto a un’intera nobiltà di uomini nuovi. Ma già le famiglie più antiche avevano il volto rivolto nella direzione più nuova. Alcune di esse, gli Howard, per esempio, si può dire che figurassero al tempo stesso come famiglie vecchie e nuove. In ogni caso lo spirito dell’intera classe superiore può essere descritto come sempre più nuovo. L’aristocrazia inglese, che è la creazione principale della Riforma, ha innegabilmente diritto a un certo elogio, che oggi è quasi universalmente considerato un elogio altissimo. Fu sempre progressista. Si accusano gli aristocratici di essere orgogliosi dei loro antenati; si può dire con verità che gli aristocratici inglesi sono stati piuttosto orgogliosi dei loro discendenti. Per i loro discendenti progettarono immense fondazioni e ammassarono montagne di ricchezza; per i loro discendenti lottarono per un posto sempre più alto nel governo dello Stato; per i loro discendenti, soprattutto, alimentarono ogni nuova scienza o disegno di filosofia sociale. Colsero le vaste occasioni economiche del pascolo; ma prosciugarono anche le paludi. Spazzarono via i preti, ma si degnarono di accogliere i filosofi. Man mano che la nuova casata Tudor attraversa le sue generazioni, si va formando una civiltà nuova e più razionalista; gli eruditi criticano i testi autentici; gli scettici screditano non solo i santi papisti ma anche i filosofi pagani; gli specialisti analizzano e razionalizzano le tradizioni, e le pecore divorano gli uomini.
Abbiamo visto che nel quattordicesimo secolo in Inghilterra vi fu una vera rivoluzione dei poveri. Andò assai vicina al successo; e non ho bisogno di nascondere la convinzione che sarebbe stata la cosa migliore possibile per tutti noi se fosse pienamente riuscita. Se Riccardo II fosse davvero balzato in sella al posto di Wat Tyler, o meglio se il suo parlamento non l’avesse disarcionato quando vi era giunto, se avesse confermato il fatto della nuova libertà contadina con qualche forma di autorità regia, come già era comune confermare il fatto delle Trade Unions con la forma di una carta regia, il nostro paese avrebbe probabilmente avuto una storia tanto felice quanto è possibile alla natura umana. Il Rinascimento, quando venne, sarebbe venuto come educazione popolare e non come cultura di un circolo di esteti. Il Nuovo Sapere avrebbe potuto essere democratico quanto l’antico sapere degli antichi giorni della Parigi e della Oxford medievali. La squisita arte della scuola di Cellini avrebbe potuto essere soltanto il grado più alto del mestiere di una corporazione. Il dramma shakespeariano avrebbe potuto essere recitato da operai su palchi di legno eretti per strada come Pulcinella, il più fine compimento del dramma sacro quale veniva recitato da una corporazione. Gli attori non avrebbero avuto bisogno di essere «i servi del re», ma padroni di sé stessi. Il grande Rinascimento avrebbe potuto essere liberale con la sua liberale educazione. Se questa è una fantasia, è almeno una di quelle che non si possono confutare; la rivoluzione medievale fu troppo poco riuscita al principio perché alcuno possa mostrare che avrebbe dovuto essere altrettanto poco riuscita alla fine. Il parlamento feudale prevalse, e ricacciò i contadini almeno nel loro status dubbio e semisviluppato. Dire più di questo sarebbe esagerato, e un mero anticipare gli eventi veramente decisivi che seguirono. Quando Enrico VIII salì al trono le corporazioni erano forse frenate ma apparentemente immutate, e persino i contadini avevano probabilmente riguadagnato terreno; molti erano ancora teoricamente servi della gleba, ma in gran parte sotto il mite dominio fondiario degli abati; il sistema medievale reggeva ancora. Avrebbe potuto, per quel che ne sappiamo, cominciare a crescere di nuovo; ma tutte queste congetture sono travolte da cose nuove e assai strane. Il fallimento della rivoluzione dei poveri fu alla fine seguito da una controrivoluzione; una riuscita rivoluzione dei ricchi.
Il perno apparente di essa fu in certi eventi, politici e persino personali. Si riducono grosso modo a due: i matrimoni di Enrico VIII e la faccenda dei monasteri. I matrimoni di Enrico VIII sono da tempo una barzelletta popolare e persino trita; e vi è una verità di tradizione nella barzelletta, come vi è in quasi ogni barzelletta se è abbastanza popolare, e in verità se è abbastanza trita. Una cosa scherzosa non vive tanto da diventare trita se non è anche seria. Enrico fu popolare nei suoi primi giorni, e persino i contemporanei stranieri ci danno un quadro davvero glorioso di un giovane principe del Rinascimento, raggiante di tutte le nuove doti. Nei suoi ultimi giorni era qualcosa di molto simile a un maniaco; non ispirava più amore, e persino quando ispirava paura, era piuttosto la paura di un cane rabbioso che di un cane da guardia. In questo mutamento senza dubbio ebbero gran parte l’incoerenza e persino l’ignominia delle sue nozze da Barbablù. Ed è giusto verso di lui dire che, forse con l’eccezione della prima e dell’ultima, egli fu quasi altrettanto sfortunato nelle sue mogli quanto esse lo furono nel loro marito. Ma fu senza dubbio la faccenda del primo divorzio che spezzò le reni al suo onore, e per inciso spezzò un gran numero di altre cose ben più preziose e universali. Per cogliere il senso della sua furia dobbiamo comprendere che egli non si considerava il nemico ma piuttosto l’amico del Papa; vi è un’ombra della vecchia storia di Becket. Aveva difeso il Papa nella diplomazia e la Chiesa nella controversia; e quando si stancò della sua regina e s’invaghì appassionatamente di una delle sue dame, Anna Bolena, sentì vagamente che una concessione piuttosto cinica, in quell’età di ciniche concessioni, avrebbe ben potuto essergli fatta da un amico. Ma è parte di quell’alta incoerenza che è il destino della fede cristiana nelle mani umane, che nessun uomo sa quando il lato più alto di essa sarà davvero in cima, non fosse che per un istante; e che le peggiori epoche della Chiesa non mancheranno di fare o dire qualcosa, come per caso, che è degno delle migliori. Comunque sia, per qualunque ragione, Enrico cercò di appoggiarsi ai cuscini di Leone e trovò di aver urtato il braccio contro la roccia di Pietro. Il Papa negò il nuovo matrimonio; ed Enrico, in una tempesta e in un buio d’ira, sciolse tutte le antiche relazioni col Papato. È probabile che allora non sapesse chiaramente quanto stava facendo; ed è assai sostenibile che non lo sappiamo neppure ora. Certamente non pensava di essere anti-cattolico; e, in un senso piuttosto ridicolo, difficilmente possiamo dire che pensasse di essere anti-papale, poiché a quanto pare pensava di essere lui stesso un papa. Da questo giorno data davvero qualcosa che ebbe una certa parte nella storia, la più moderna dottrina del diritto divino dei re, assai diversa da quella medievale. È una faccenda che imbarazza ulteriormente la questione aperta sulla continuità delle cose cattoliche nell’anglicanesimo, poiché fu una nota nuova eppure suonata dal partito più antico. La supremazia del re sulla chiesa nazionale inglese non fu, purtroppo, un mero capriccio del re, ma divenne in parte, e per un periodo, un capriccio della chiesa. Ma a prescindere da tutte le questioni controverse, vi è almeno un senso umano e storico in cui la continuità del nostro passato è pericolosamente spezzata a questo punto. Enrico non solo tagliò fuori l’Inghilterra dall’Europa, ma, cosa ancor più importante, taglia fuori l’Inghilterra dall’Inghilterra.
The great divorce brought down Wolsey, the mighty minister who had held the scales between the Empire and the French Monarchy, and made the modern balance of power in Europe. He is often described under the dictum of Ego et Rex Meus; but he marks a stage in the English story rather because he suffered for it than because he said it. Ego et Rex Meus might be the motto of any modern Prime Minister; for we have forgotten the very fact that the word minister merely means servant. Wolsey was the last great servant who could be, and was, simply dismissed; the mark of a monarchy still absolute; the English were amazed at it in modern Germany, when Bismarck was turned away like a butler. A more awful act proved the new force was already inhuman; it struck down the noblest of the Humanists. Thomas More, who seemed sometimes like an Epicurean under Augustus, died the death of a saint under Diocletian. He died gloriously jesting; and the death has naturally drawn out for us rather the sacred savours of his soul; his tenderness and his trust in the truth of God. But for Humanism it must have seemed a monstrous sacrifice; it was somehow as if Montaigne were a martyr. And that is indeed the note; something truly to be called unnatural had already entered the naturalism of the Renascence; and the soul of the great Christian rose against it. He pointed to the sun, saying “I shall be above that fellow” with Franciscan familiarity, which can love nature because it will not worship her. So he left to his king the sun, which for so many weary days and years was to go down only on his wrath.
But the more impersonal process which More himself had observed (as noted at the beginning of this chapter) is more clearly defined, and less clouded with controversies, in the second of the two parts of Henry’s policy. There is indeed a controversy about the monasteries; but it is one that is clarifying and settling every day. Now it is true that the Church, by the Renascence period, had reached a considerable corruption; but the real proofs of it are utterly different both from the contemporary despotic pretence and from the common Protestant story. It is wildly unfair, for instance, to quote the letters of bishops and such authorities denouncing the sins of monastic life, violent as they often are. They cannot possibly be more violent than the letters of St. Paul to the purest and most primitive churches; the apostle was there writing to those Early Christians whom all churches idealize; and he talks to them as to cut-throats and thieves. The explanation, for those concerned for such subtleties, may possibly be found in the fact that Christianity is not a creed for good men, but for men. Such letters had been written in all centuries; and even in the sixteenth century they do not prove so much that there were bad abbots as that there were good bishops. However, even those who profess that the monks were profligates dare not profess that they were oppressors; there is truth in Cobbett’s point that where monks were landlords, they did not become rack-renting landlords, and could not become absentee landlords. Nevertheless, there was a weakness in the good institutions as well as a mere strength in the bad ones; and that weakness partakes of the worst element of the time. In the fall of good things there is almost always a touch of betrayal from within; and the abbots were destroyed more easily because they did not stand together. They did not stand together because the spirit of the age (which is very often the worst enemy of the age) was the increasing division between rich and poor; and it had partly divided even the rich and poor clergy. And the betrayal came, as it nearly always comes, from that servant of Christ who holds the bag.
To take a modern attack on liberty, on a much lower plane, we are familiar with the picture of a politician going to the great brewers, or even the great hotel proprietors, and pointing out the uselessness of a litter of little public houses. That is what the Tudor politicians did first with the monasteries. They went to the heads of the great houses and proposed the extinction of the small ones. The great monastic lords did not resist, or, at any rate, did not resist enough; and the sack of the religious houses began. But if the lord abbots acted for a moment as lords, that could not excuse them, in the eyes of much greater lords, for having frequently acted as abbots. A momentary rally to the cause of the rich did not wipe out the disgrace of a thousand petty interferences which had told only to the advantage of the poor; and they were soon to learn that it was no epoch for their easy rule and their careless hospitality. The great houses, now isolated, were themselves brought down one by one; and the beggar, whom the monastery had served as a sort of sacred tavern, came to it at evening and found it a ruin. For a new and wide philosophy was in the world, which still rules our society. By this creed most of the mystical virtues of the old monks have simply been turned into great sins; and the greatest of these is charity.
But the populace which had risen under Richard II was not yet disarmed. It was trained in the rude discipline of bow and bill, and organized into local groups of town and guild and manor. Over half the counties of England the people rose, and fought one final battle for the vision of the Middle Ages. The chief tool of the new tyranny, a dirty fellow named Thomas Cromwell, was specially singled out as the tyrant, and he was indeed rapidly turning all government into a nightmare. The popular movement was put down partly by force; and there is the new note of modern militarism in the fact that it was put down by cynical professional troops, actually brought in from foreign countries, who destroyed English religion for hire. But, like the old popular rising, it was even more put down by fraud. Like the old rising, it was sufficiently triumphant to force the government to a parley; and the government had to resort to the simple expedient of calming the people with promises, and then proceeding to break first the promises and then the people, after the fashion made familiar to us by the modern politicians in their attitude towards the great strikes. The revolt bore the name of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and its programme was practically the restoration of the old religion. In connection with the fancy about the fate of England if Tyler had triumphed, it proves, I think, one thing; that his triumph, while it might or might not have led to something that could be called a reform, would have rendered quite impossible everything that we now know as the Reformation.
Il grande divorzio fece cadere Wolsey, il potente ministro che aveva tenuto in equilibrio la bilancia tra l’Impero e la Monarchia francese, e aveva creato il moderno equilibrio di potere in Europa. Viene spesso descritto sotto il motto di Ego et Rex Meus; ma egli segna una tappa nella vicenda inglese piuttosto perché ne soffrì che perché lo disse. Ego et Rex Meus potrebbe essere il motto di qualsiasi moderno Primo Ministro; poiché abbiamo dimenticato il fatto stesso che la parola ministro significa semplicemente servo. Wolsey fu l’ultimo grande servo che poté essere, e fu, semplicemente congedato; il segno di una monarchia ancora assoluta; gli inglesi ne furono stupiti nella moderna Germania, quando Bismarck fu allontanato come un maggiordomo. Un atto più tremendo dimostrò che la nuova forza era già inumana; abbatté il più nobile degli Umanisti. Tommaso Moro, che talvolta pareva un epicureo sotto Augusto, morì la morte di un santo sotto Diocleziano. Morì scherzando gloriosamente; e la morte ha naturalmente fatto emergere per noi piuttosto i sacri profumi della sua anima; la sua tenerezza e la sua fiducia nella verità di Dio. Ma per l’Umanesimo dev’essere parso un sacrificio mostruoso; fu in qualche modo come se Montaigne fosse un martire. E questa è davvero la nota; qualcosa che si può veramente chiamare innaturale era già entrato nel naturalismo del Rinascimento; e l’anima del grande cristiano insorse contro di esso. Egli indicò il sole, dicendo «Io sarò al di sopra di quel tale» con familiarità francescana, che sa amare la natura perché non vuole adorarla. Così lasciò al suo re il sole, che per tanti giorni e anni stanchi doveva tramontare solo sulla sua ira.
Ma il processo più impersonale che Moro stesso aveva osservato (come notato all’inizio di questo capitolo) è definito più chiaramente, e meno annebbiato da controversie, nella seconda delle due parti della politica di Enrico. Vi è invero una controversia sui monasteri; ma è una di quelle che si chiariscono e si assestano ogni giorno. Ora è vero che la Chiesa, all’epoca del Rinascimento, aveva raggiunto una considerevole corruzione; ma le vere prove di ciò sono del tutto diverse sia dalla pretesa dispotica contemporanea sia dalla comune storia protestante. È follemente ingiusto, per esempio, citare le lettere di vescovi e simili autorità che denunciano i peccati della vita monastica, per quanto violente esse siano spesso. Non possono essere più violente delle lettere di san Paolo alle più pure e primitive delle chiese; l’apostolo scriveva là a quei primi cristiani che tutte le chiese idealizzano; e parla loro come a tagliagole e ladri. La spiegazione, per chi si interessa di simili sottigliezze, si può forse trovare nel fatto che il Cristianesimo non è un credo per uomini buoni, ma per uomini. Lettere simili erano state scritte in tutti i secoli; e persino nel sedicesimo secolo esse non provano tanto che vi fossero cattivi abati quanto che vi fossero buoni vescovi. Tuttavia, persino coloro che professano che i monaci fossero dissoluti non osano professare che fossero oppressori; vi è verità nell’osservazione di Cobbett che là dove i monaci erano proprietari terrieri, non diventavano proprietari da affitti esosi, e non potevano diventare proprietari assenteisti. Ciò nondimeno, vi era una debolezza nelle buone istituzioni tanto bene quanto una mera forza nelle cattive; e quella debolezza partecipa del peggior elemento del tempo. Nella caduta delle cose buone vi è quasi sempre un tocco di tradimento dall’interno; e gli abati furono distrutti più facilmente perché non fecero fronte comune. Non fecero fronte comune perché lo spirito dell’epoca (che è assai spesso il peggior nemico dell’epoca) era la crescente divisione tra ricchi e poveri; ed essa aveva in parte diviso persino il clero ricco e povero. E il tradimento venne, come quasi sempre viene, da quel servo di Cristo che tiene la borsa.
Per prendere un moderno attacco alla libertà, su un piano assai più basso, ci è familiare l’immagine di un politico che va dai grandi birrai, o persino dai grandi proprietari d’alberghi, e fa notare l’inutilità di una nidiata di piccole osterie. Questo è ciò che i politici Tudor fecero dapprima con i monasteri. Andarono dai capi delle grandi case e proposero l’estinzione delle piccole. I grandi signori monastici non resistettero, o, in ogni caso, non resistettero abbastanza; e il saccheggio delle case religiose cominciò. Ma se i signori abati agirono per un momento da signori, ciò non poteva scusarli, agli occhi di signori assai più grandi, per aver frequentemente agito da abati. Un momentaneo schierarsi con la causa dei ricchi non cancellò l’onta di mille piccole ingerenze che erano tornate solo a vantaggio dei poveri; e presto avrebbero appreso che non era un’epoca per il loro comodo governo e la loro noncurante ospitalità. Le grandi case, ora isolate, furono a loro volta abbattute una a una; e il mendicante, cui il monastero aveva servito da sorta di sacra taverna, vi giunse a sera e la trovò in rovina. Poiché una filosofia nuova e vasta era nel mondo, che ancora governa la nostra società. Secondo questo credo la maggior parte delle mistiche virtù degli antichi monaci è stata semplicemente tramutata in grandi peccati; e la più grande di queste è la carità.
Ma il popolo che era insorto sotto Riccardo II non era ancora disarmato. Era addestrato nella rude disciplina dell’arco e della picca, e organizzato in gruppi locali di città, corporazione e maniero. In più della metà delle contee d’Inghilterra il popolo insorse, e combatté un’ultima battaglia per la visione del Medioevo. Il principale strumento della nuova tirannia, un individuo sordido di nome Thomas Cromwell, fu additato in particolare come il tiranno, ed egli stava in effetti rapidamente trasformando ogni governo in un incubo. Il moto popolare fu represso in parte con la forza; e vi è la nuova nota del moderno militarismo nel fatto che fu represso da cinici soldati di professione, effettivamente fatti venire da paesi stranieri, che distrussero la religione inglese per denaro. Ma, come l’antica rivolta popolare, fu ancor più represso con la frode. Come l’antica rivolta, fu abbastanza trionfante da costringere il governo a un negoziato; e il governo dovette ricorrere al semplice espediente di calmare il popolo con promesse, e poi procedere a rompere prima le promesse e poi il popolo, secondo la maniera resaci familiare dai moderni politici nel loro atteggiamento verso i grandi scioperi. La rivolta portò il nome di Pellegrinaggio della Grazia, e il suo programma era praticamente la restaurazione dell’antica religione. In connessione con la fantasia sul destino dell’Inghilterra se Tyler avesse trionfato, essa prova, credo, una cosa; che il suo trionfo, mentre avrebbe potuto o meno condurre a qualcosa che si potesse chiamare una riforma, avrebbe reso del tutto impossibile tutto ciò che oggi conosciamo come la Riforma.
The reign of terror established by Thomas Cromwell became an Inquisition of the blackest and most unbearable sort. Historians, who have no shadow of sympathy with the old religion, are agreed that it was uprooted by means more horrible than have ever, perhaps, been employed in England before or since. It was a government by torturers rendered ubiquitous by spies. The spoliation of the monasteries especially was carried out, not only with a violence which recalled barbarism, but with a minuteness for which there is no other word but meanness. It was as if the Dane had returned in the character of a detective. The inconsistency of the King’s personal attitude to Catholicism did indeed complicate the conspiracy with new brutalities towards Protestants; but such reaction as there was in this was wholly theological. Cromwell lost that fitful favour and was executed, but the terrorism went on the more terribly for being simplified to the single vision of the wrath of the King. It culminated in a strange act which rounds off symbolically the story told on an earlier page. For the despot revenged himself on a rebel whose defiance seemed to him to ring down three centuries. He laid waste the most popular shrine of the English, the shrine to which Chaucer had once ridden singing, because it was also the shrine where King Henry had knelt to repent. For three centuries the Church and the people had called Becket a saint, when Henry Tudor arose and called him a traitor. This might well be thought the topmost point of autocracy; and yet it was not really so.
For then rose to its supreme height of self-revelation that still stranger something of which we have, perhaps fancifully, found hints before in this history. The strong king was weak. He was immeasurably weaker than the strong kings of the Middle Ages; and whether or no his failure had been foreshadowed, he failed. The breach he had made in the dyke of the ancient doctrines let in a flood that may almost be said to have washed him away. In a sense he disappeared before he died; for the drama that filled his last days is no longer the drama of his own character. We may put the matter most practically by saying that it is unpractical to discuss whether Froude finds any justification for Henry’s crimes in the desire to create a strong national monarchy. For whether or no it was desired, it was not created. Least of all our princes did the Tudors leave behind them a secure central government, and the time when monarchy was at its worst comes only one or two generations before the time when it was weakest. But a few years afterwards, as history goes, the relations of the Crown and its new servants were to be reversed on a high stage so as to horrify the world; and the axe which had been sanctified with the blood of More and soiled with the blood of Cromwell was, at the signal of one of that slave’s own descendants, to fall and to kill an English king.
The tide which thus burst through the breach and overwhelmed the King as well as the Church was the revolt of the rich, and especially of the new rich. They used the King’s name, and could not have prevailed without his power, but the ultimate effect was rather as if they had plundered the King after he had plundered the monasteries. Amazingly little of the wealth, considering the name and theory of the thing, actually remained in royal hands. The chaos was increased, no doubt, by the fact that Edward VI succeeded to the throne as a mere boy, but the deeper truth can be seen in the difficulty of drawing any real line between the two reigns. By marrying into the Seymour family, and thus providing himself with a son, Henry had also provided the country with the very type of powerful family which was to rule merely by pillage. An enormous and unnatural tragedy, the execution of one of the Seymours by his own brother, was enacted during the impotence of the childish king, and the successful Seymour figured as Lord Protector, though even he would have found it hard to say what he was protecting, since it was not even his own family. Anyhow, it is hardly too much to say that every human thing was left unprotected from the greed of such cannibal protectors. We talk of the dissolution of the monasteries, but what occurred was the dissolution of the whole of the old civilization. Lawyers and lackeys and money lenders, the meanest of lucky men, looted the art and economics of the Middle Ages like thieves robbing a church. Their names (when they did not change them) became the names of the great dukes and marquises of our own day. But if we look back and forth in our history, perhaps the most fundamental act of destruction occurred when the armed men of the Seymours and their sort passed from the sacking of the Monasteries to the sacking of the Guilds. The mediaeval Trade Unions were struck down, their buildings broken into by the soldiery, and their funds seized by the new nobility. And this simple incident takes all its common meaning out of the assertion (in itself plausible enough) that the Guilds, like everything else at that time, were probably not at their best. Proportion is the only practical thing; and it may be true that Caesar was not feeling well on the morning of the Ides of March. But simply to say that the Guilds declined, is about as true as saying that Caesar quietly decayed from purely natural causes at the foot of the statue of Pompey.
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Il regime di terrore instaurato da Thomas Cromwell divenne un’Inquisizione della specie più nera e insopportabile. Gli storici, che non hanno ombra di simpatia per l’antica religione, concordano che essa fu sradicata con mezzi più orribili di quanti forse ne siano mai stati impiegati in Inghilterra prima o dopo. Fu un governo di torturatori reso onnipresente dalle spie. La spoliazione dei monasteri in particolare fu compiuta non solo con una violenza che richiamava la barbarie, ma con una minuzia per la quale non vi è altra parola se non meschinità. Era come se il danese fosse tornato nei panni di un detective. L’incoerenza dell’atteggiamento personale del re verso il cattolicesimo complicò invero la congiura con nuove brutalità verso i protestanti; ma quella reazione che vi fu in ciò era interamente teologica. Cromwell perse quel favore incostante e fu giustiziato, ma il terrorismo proseguì tanto più terribilmente per essere semplificato all’unica visione dell’ira del re. Culminò in un atto strano che chiude simbolicamente la storia narrata in una pagina precedente. Poiché il despota si vendicò su un ribelle la cui sfida gli pareva risuonare attraverso tre secoli. Devastò il più popolare santuario degli inglesi, il santuario verso cui Chaucer aveva un tempo cavalcato cantando, perché era anche il santuario dove il re Enrico si era inginocchiato a pentirsi. Per tre secoli la Chiesa e il popolo avevano chiamato Becket un santo, quando Enrico Tudor sorse e lo chiamò un traditore. Questo ben potrebbe essere ritenuto il punto più alto dell’autocrazia; eppure non lo era davvero.
Poiché allora s’innalzò alla sua suprema altezza di rivelazione di sé quel qualcosa ancora più strano di cui, forse fantasiosamente, abbiamo trovato accenni prima in questa storia. Il forte re era debole. Era incommensurabilmente più debole dei re forti del Medioevo; e sia o no che il suo fallimento fosse stato presagito, egli fallì. La breccia che aveva aperto nell’argine delle antiche dottrine lasciò entrare un’inondazione che si può quasi dire lo abbia spazzato via. In un certo senso egli scomparve prima di morire; poiché il dramma che riempì i suoi ultimi giorni non è più il dramma del suo stesso carattere. Possiamo porre la questione nel modo più pratico dicendo che è impratico discutere se Froude trovi qualche giustificazione per i delitti di Enrico nel desiderio di creare una forte monarchia nazionale. Poiché sia o no che fosse desiderata, essa non fu creata. Meno di tutti i nostri principi i Tudor lasciarono dietro di sé un sicuro governo centrale, e il tempo in cui la monarchia era al suo peggio viene solo una o due generazioni prima del tempo in cui era più debole. Ma pochi anni dopo, per come va la storia, le relazioni tra la Corona e i suoi nuovi servi dovevano essere rovesciate su un alto palcoscenico così da inorridire il mondo; e la scure che era stata santificata col sangue di Moro e insozzata col sangue di Cromwell doveva, al segnale di uno dei discendenti di quello stesso servo, cadere e uccidere un re inglese.
La marea che così irruppe attraverso la breccia e travolse il re non meno della Chiesa fu la rivolta dei ricchi, e specialmente dei nuovi ricchi. Usarono il nome del re, e non avrebbero potuto prevalere senza il suo potere, ma l’effetto ultimo fu piuttosto come se avessero saccheggiato il re dopo che egli aveva saccheggiato i monasteri. Sorprendentemente poco della ricchezza, considerando il nome e la teoria della cosa, rimase davvero in mani regie. Il caos fu accresciuto, senza dubbio, dal fatto che Edoardo VI succedette al trono da semplice fanciullo, ma la verità più profonda si può vedere nella difficoltà di tracciare una qualsiasi vera linea tra i due regni. Sposandosi nella famiglia Seymour, e procurandosi così un figlio, Enrico aveva anche procurato al paese proprio il tipo di famiglia potente che doveva governare unicamente col saccheggio. Un’enorme e innaturale tragedia, l’esecuzione di uno dei Seymour da parte del proprio fratello, fu inscenata durante l’impotenza del fanciullo re, e il Seymour vincente figurò come Lord Protettore, benché persino egli avrebbe trovato difficile dire cosa stesse proteggendo, poiché non era neppure la propria famiglia. Comunque sia, non è troppo dire che ogni cosa umana fu lasciata indifesa dall’avidità di simili protettori cannibali. Parliamo della dissoluzione dei monasteri, ma ciò che avvenne fu la dissoluzione dell’intera vecchia civiltà. Avvocati e lacchè e usurai, i più meschini degli uomini fortunati, saccheggiarono l’arte e l’economia del Medioevo come ladri che derubano una chiesa. I loro nomi (quando non li cambiarono) divennero i nomi dei grandi duchi e marchesi dei nostri giorni. Ma se guardiamo avanti e indietro nella nostra storia, forse l’atto più fondamentale di distruzione avvenne quando gli uomini armati dei Seymour e dei loro simili passarono dal saccheggio dei Monasteri al saccheggio delle Corporazioni. Le Trade Unions medievali furono abbattute, i loro edifici sfondati dalla soldataglia, e i loro fondi sequestrati dalla nuova nobiltà. E questo semplice episodio toglie ogni comune significato all’asserzione (in sé abbastanza plausibile) che le Corporazioni, come ogni altra cosa a quel tempo, probabilmente non erano al loro meglio. La proporzione è l’unica cosa pratica; e può essere vero che Cesare non si sentisse bene la mattina delle Idi di marzo. Ma dire semplicemente che le Corporazioni declinarono è vero press’a poco quanto dire che Cesare tranquillamente decadde per cause puramente naturali ai piedi della statua di Pompeo.
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XII
SPAIN AND THE SCHISM OF NATIONS
THE revolution that arose out of what is called the Renascence, and ended in some countries in what is called the Reformation, did in the internal politics of England one drastic and definite thing. That thing was destroying the institutions of the poor. It was not the only thing it did, but it was much the most practical. It was the basis of all the problems now connected with Capital and Labour. How much the theological theories of the time had to do with it is a perfectly fair matter for difference of opinion. But neither party, if educated about the facts, will deny that the same time and temper which produced the religious schism also produced this new lawlessness in the rich. The most extreme Protestant will probably be content to say that Protestantism was not the motive, but the mask. The most extreme Catholic will probably be content to admit that Protestantism was not the sin, but rather the punishment. The most sweeping and shameless part of the process was not complete, indeed, until the end of the eighteenth century, when Protestantism was already passing into scepticism. Indeed a very decent case could be made out for the paradox that Puritanism was first and last a veneer on Paganism; that the thing began in the inordinate thirst for new things in the noblesse of the Renascence and ended in the Hell-Fire Club. Anyhow, what was first founded at the Reformation was a new and abnormally powerful aristocracy, and what was destroyed, in an ever increasing degree, was everything that could be held, directly or indirectly, by the people in spite of such an aristocracy. This fact has filled all the subsequent history of our country; but the next particular point in that history concerns the position of the Crown. The King, in reality, had already been elbowed aside by the courtiers who had crowded behind him just before the bursting of the door. The King is left behind in the rush for wealth, and already can do nothing alone. And of this fact the next reign, after the chaos of Edward VI’s, affords a very arresting proof.
Mary Tudor, daughter of the divorced Queen Katherine, has a bad name even in popular history; and popular prejudice is generally more worthy of study than scholarly sophistry. Her enemies were indeed largely wrong about her character, but they were not wrong about her effect. She was, in the limited sense, a good woman, convinced, conscientious, rather morbid. But it is true that she was a bad queen; bad for many things, but especially bad for her own most beloved cause. It is true, when all is said, that she set herself to burn out “No Popery” and managed to burn it in. The concentration of her fanaticism into cruelty, especially its concentration in particular places and in a short time, did remain like something red-hot in the public memory. It was the first of the series of great historical accidents that separated a real, if not universal public opinion from the old régime. It has been summarized in the death by fire of the three famous martyrs at Oxford; for one of them at least, Latimer, was a reformer of the more robust and human type, though another of them, Cranmer, had been so smooth a snob and coward in the councils of Henry VIII as to make Thomas Cromwell seem by comparison a man. But of what may be called the Latimer tradition, the saner and more genuine Protestantism, I shall speak later. At the time even the Oxford Martyrs probably produced less pity and revulsion than the massacre in the flames of many more obscure enthusiasts, whose very ignorance and poverty made their cause seem more popular than it really was. But this last ugly feature was brought into sharper relief, and produced more conscious or unconscious bitterness, because of that other great fact of which I spoke above, which is the determining test of this time of transition.
What made all the difference was this: that even in this Catholic reign the property of the Catholic Church could not be restored. The very fact that Mary was a fanatic, and yet this act of justice was beyond the wildest dreams of fanaticism—that is the point. The very fact that she was angry enough to commit wrongs for the Church, and yet not bold enough to ask for the rights of the Church— that is the test of the time. She was allowed to deprive small men of their lives, she was not allowed to deprive great men of their property—or rather of other people’s property. She could punish heresy, she could not punish sacrilege. She was forced into the false position of killing men who had not gone to church, and sparing men who had gone there to steal the church ornaments. What forced her into it? Not certainly her own religious attitude, which was almost maniacally sincere; not public opinion, which had naturally much more sympathy for the religious humanities which she did not restore than for the religious inhumanities which she did. The force came, of course, from the new nobility and the new wealth they refused to surrender; and the success of this early pressure proves that the nobility was already stronger than the Crown. The sceptre had only been used as a crowbar to break open the door of a treasure-house, and was itself broken, or at least bent, with the blow.
There is a truth also in the popular insistence on the story of Mary having “Calais” written on her heart, when the last relic of the mediaeval conquests reverted to France. Mary had the solitary and heroic half-virtue of the Tudors: she was a patriot. But patriots are often pathetically behind the times; for the very fact that they dwell on old enemies often blinds them to new ones. In a later generation Cromwell exhibited the same error reversed, and continued to keep a hostile eye on Spain when he should have kept it on France. In our own time the Jingoes of Fashoda kept it on France when they ought already to have had it on Germany. With no particular anti-national intention, Mary nevertheless got herself into an anti-national position towards the most tremendous international problem of her people. It is the second of the coincidences that confirmed the sixteenth-century change, and the name of it was Spain. The daughter of a Spanish queen, she married a Spanish prince, and probably saw no more in such an alliance than her father had done. But by the time she was succeeded by her sister Elizabeth, who was more cut off from the old religion (though very tenuously attached to the new one), and by the time the project of a similar Spanish marriage for Elizabeth herself had fallen through, something had matured which was wider and mightier than the plots of princes. The Englishman, standing on his little island as on a lonely boat, had already felt falling across him the shadow of a tall ship.
XII
SPAGNA E LO SCISMA DELLE NAZIONI
LA rivoluzione che nacque da ciò che si chiama il Rinascimento, e finì in alcuni paesi in ciò che si chiama la Riforma, fece nella politica interna dell’Inghilterra una cosa drastica e precisa. Quella cosa fu la distruzione delle istituzioni dei poveri. Non fu l’unica cosa che fece, ma fu di gran lunga la più pratica. Fu la base di tutti i problemi ora connessi con il Capitale e il Lavoro. Quanto le teorie teologiche del tempo vi abbiano avuto a che fare è una questione perfettamente aperta a diversità d’opinione. Ma nessuno dei due partiti, se istruito sui fatti, negherà che lo stesso tempo e temperamento che produsse lo scisma religioso produsse anche questa nuova illegalità nei ricchi. Il protestante più estremo sarà probabilmente contento di dire che il protestantesimo non fu il movente, ma la maschera. Il cattolico più estremo sarà probabilmente contento di ammettere che il protestantesimo non fu il peccato, ma piuttosto il castigo. La parte più radicale e sfrontata del processo non fu completa, invero, fino alla fine del diciottesimo secolo, quando il protestantesimo stava già passando nello scetticismo. Anzi, si potrebbe costruire un caso assai decoroso a favore del paradosso che il Puritanesimo fosse dal principio alla fine una vernice sul Paganesimo; che la cosa cominciò nella smodata sete di cose nuove nella nobiltà del Rinascimento e finì nell’Hell-Fire Club. Comunque sia, ciò che fu prima fondato alla Riforma fu una nuova e anormalmente potente aristocrazia, e ciò che fu distrutto, in misura sempre crescente, fu tutto ciò che poteva essere posseduto, direttamente o indirettamente, dal popolo a dispetto di una tale aristocrazia. Questo fatto ha riempito tutta la successiva storia del nostro paese; ma il prossimo punto particolare in quella storia riguarda la posizione della Corona. Il re, in realtà, era già stato spinto da parte a gomitate dai cortigiani che si erano accalcati dietro di lui proprio prima che la porta cedesse. Il re è lasciato indietro nella corsa alla ricchezza, e già non può far nulla da solo. E di questo fatto il regno successivo, dopo il caos di quello di Edoardo VI, offre una prova assai impressionante.
Maria Tudor, figlia della ripudiata regina Caterina, ha cattiva fama persino nella storia popolare; e il pregiudizio popolare è generalmente più degno di studio del sofisma dotto. I suoi nemici sbagliavano invero in gran parte sul suo carattere, ma non sbagliavano sul suo effetto. Era, nel senso limitato, una buona donna, convinta, coscienziosa, piuttosto morbosa. Ma è vero che fu una cattiva regina; cattiva per molte cose, ma specialmente cattiva per la sua stessa causa più amata. È vero, a conti fatti, che si accinse a estirpare con il fuoco il «No al Papismo» e riuscì invece a imprimerlo con il fuoco. La concentrazione del suo fanatismo nella crudeltà, specialmente la sua concentrazione in luoghi particolari e in un breve tempo, rimase invero come qualcosa di rovente nella memoria pubblica. Fu il primo della serie di grandi incidenti storici che separarono un’opinione pubblica reale, se non universale, dall’antico regime. Esso è stato riassunto nella morte per fuoco dei tre famosi martiri a Oxford; poiché uno di essi almeno, Latimer, era un riformatore del tipo più robusto e umano, benché un altro di essi, Cranmer, fosse stato uno snob e un vigliacco tanto insinuante nei consigli di Enrico VIII da far sembrare Thomas Cromwell, al confronto, un uomo. Ma di ciò che si può chiamare la tradizione di Latimer, il protestantesimo più sano e più genuino, parlerò più avanti. All’epoca persino i Martiri di Oxford produssero probabilmente meno pietà e ripugnanza del massacro tra le fiamme di molti più oscuri entusiasti, la cui stessa ignoranza e povertà faceva sembrare la loro causa più popolare di quanto realmente fosse. Ma quest’ultimo brutto tratto fu portato in più netto rilievo, e produsse più consapevole o inconsapevole amarezza, a causa di quell’altro grande fatto di cui ho parlato sopra, che è la prova determinante di questo tempo di transizione.
Ciò che fece tutta la differenza fu questo: che persino in questo regno cattolico la proprietà della Chiesa cattolica non poté essere restituita. Il fatto stesso che Maria fosse una fanatica, e tuttavia questo atto di giustizia fosse al di là dei più sfrenati sogni del fanatismo—questo è il punto. Il fatto stesso che fosse abbastanza irata da commettere torti per la Chiesa, e tuttavia non abbastanza audace da chiedere i diritti della Chiesa—questo è la prova del tempo. Le fu permesso di privare piccoli uomini della loro vita, non le fu permesso di privare grandi uomini della loro proprietà—o piuttosto della proprietà altrui. Poté punire l’eresia, non poté punire il sacrilegio. Fu costretta nella falsa posizione di uccidere uomini che non erano andati in chiesa, e di risparmiare uomini che vi erano andati per rubare gli ornamenti della chiesa. Cosa la costrinse a ciò? Non certo il suo stesso atteggiamento religioso, che era quasi maniacalmente sincero; non l’opinione pubblica, che naturalmente aveva assai più simpatia per le umanità religiose che ella non restituì che per le disumanità religiose che ella compì. La forza venne, naturalmente, dalla nuova nobiltà e dalla nuova ricchezza che essi rifiutavano di cedere; e il successo di questa precoce pressione prova che la nobiltà era già più forte della Corona. Lo scettro era stato usato solo come un piede di porco per scardinare la porta di una casa del tesoro, e fu esso stesso spezzato, o almeno piegato, dal colpo.
Vi è una verità anche nell’insistenza popolare sulla storia di Maria che aveva «Calais» scritto nel cuore, quando l’ultima reliquia delle conquiste medievali tornò alla Francia. Maria ebbe la solitaria ed eroica mezza-virtù dei Tudor: era una patriota. Ma i patrioti sono spesso pateticamente indietro coi tempi; poiché il fatto stesso che si soffermino sui vecchi nemici spesso li acceca ai nuovi. In una generazione successiva Cromwell esibì lo stesso errore rovesciato, e continuò a tenere un occhio ostile sulla Spagna quando avrebbe dovuto tenerlo sulla Francia. Nel nostro stesso tempo i Jingoes di Fashoda lo tennero sulla Francia quando avrebbero già dovuto tenerlo sulla Germania. Senza alcuna particolare intenzione anti-nazionale, Maria si mise nondimeno in una posizione anti-nazionale verso il più tremendo problema internazionale del suo popolo. È la seconda delle coincidenze che confermarono il mutamento del sedicesimo secolo, e il suo nome era Spagna. Figlia di una regina spagnola, sposò un principe spagnolo, e probabilmente non vide in una tale alleanza più di quanto vi avesse visto suo padre. Ma quando le succedette sua sorella Elisabetta, che era più tagliata fuori dall’antica religione (benché assai tenuamente legata alla nuova), e quando il progetto di un simile matrimonio spagnolo per Elisabetta stessa era fallito, qualcosa era maturato che era più ampio e più possente degli intrighi dei principi. L’inglese, ritto sulla sua piccola isola come su una barca solitaria, aveva già sentito calare su di sé l’ombra di un’alta nave.
Wooden clichés about the birth of the British Empire and the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth have not merely obscured but contradicted the crucial truth. From such phrases one would fancy that England, in some imperial fashion, now first realized that she was great. It would be far truer to say that she now first realized that she was small. The great poet of the spacious days does not praise her as spacious, but only as small, like a jewel. The vision of universal expansion was wholly veiled until the eighteenth century; and even when it came it was far less vivid and vital than what came in the sixteenth. What came then was not Imperialism; it was Anti-Imperialism. England achieved, at the beginning of her modern history, that one thing human imagination will always find heroic— the story of a small nationality. The business of the Armada was to her what Bannockburn was to the Scots or Majuba to the Boers—a victory that astonished even the victors. What was opposed to them was Imperialism in its complete and colossal sense, a thing unthinkable since Rome. It was, in no overstrained sense, civilization itself. It was the greatness of Spain that was the glory of England. It is only when we realize that the English were, by comparison, as dingy, as undeveloped, as petty and provincial as Boers, that we can appreciate the height of their defiance or the splendour of their escape. We can only grasp it by grasping that for a great part of Europe the cause of the Armada had almost the cosmopolitan common sense of a crusade. The Pope had declared Elizabeth illegitimate—logically, it is hard to see what else he could say, having declared her mother’s marriage invalid; but the fact was another and perhaps a final stroke sundering England from the elder world. Meanwhile those picturesque English privateers who had plagued the Spanish Empire of the New World were spoken of in the South simply as pirates, and technically the description was true; only technical assaults by the weaker party are in retrospect rightly judged with some generous weakness. Then, as if to stamp the contrast in an imperishable image, Spain, or rather the empire with Spain for its centre, put forth all its strength, and seemed to cover the sea with a navy like the legendary navy of Xerxes. It bore down on the doomed island with the weight and solemnity of a day of judgement; sailors or pirates struck at it with small ships staggering under large cannon, fought it with mere masses of flaming rubbish, and in that last hour of grapple a great storm arose out of the sea and swept round the island, and the gigantic fleet was seen no more. The uncanny completeness and abrupt silence that swallowed this prodigy touched a nerve that has never ceased to vibrate. The hope of England dates from that hopeless hour, for there is no real hope that has not once been a forlorn hope. The breaking of that vast naval net remained like a sign that the small thing which escaped would survive the greatness. And yet there is truly a sense in which we may never be so small or so great again.
For the splendour of the Elizabethan age, which is always spoken of as a sunrise, was in many ways a sunset. Whether we regard it as the end of the Renascence or the end of the old mediaeval civilization, no candid critic can deny that its chief glories ended with it. Let the reader ask himself what strikes him specially in the Elizabethan magnificence, and he will generally find it is something of which there were at least traces in mediaeval times, and far fewer traces in modern times. The Elizabethan drama is like one of its own tragedies— its tempestuous torch was soon to be trodden out by the Puritans. It is needless to say that the chief tragedy was the cutting short of the comedy; for the comedy that came to England after the Restoration was by comparison both foreign and frigid. At the best it is comedy in the sense of being humorous, but not in the sense of being happy. It may be noted that the givers of good news and good luck in the Shakespearean love-stories nearly all belong to a world which was passing, whether they are friars or fairies. It is the same with the chief Elizabethan ideals, often embodied in the Elizabethan drama. The national devotion to the Virgin Queen must not be wholly discredited by its incongruity with the coarse and crafty character of the historical Elizabeth. Her critics might indeed reasonably say that in replacing the Virgin Mary by the Virgin Queen, the English reformers merely exchanged a true Virgin for a false one. But this truth does not dispose of a true, though limited, contemporary cult. Whatever we think of that particular Virgin Queen, the tragic heroines of the time offer us a whole procession of virgin queens. And it is certain that the mediaevals would have understood much better than the moderns the martyrdom of Measure for Measure. And as with the title of Virgin, so with the title of Queen. The mystical monarchy glorified in Richard II was soon to be dethroned much more ruinously than in Richard II. The same Puritans who tore off the pasteboard crowns of the stage players were also to tear off the real crowns of the kings whose parts they played. All mummery was to be forbidden and all monarchy to be called mummery.
Shakespeare died upon St. George’s day, and much of what St. George had meant died with him. I do not mean that the patriotism of Shakespeare or of England died; that remained and even rose steadily, to be the noblest pride of the coming times. But much more than patriotism had been involved in that image of St. George to whom the Lion Heart had dedicated England long ago in the deserts of Palestine. The conception of a patron saint had carried from the Middle Ages one very unique and as yet unreplaced idea. It was the idea of variation without antagonism. The Seven Champions of Christendom were multiplied by seventy times seven in the patrons of towns, trades and social types; but the very idea that they were all saints excluded the possibility of ultimate rivalry in the fact that they were all patrons. The Guild of the Shoemakers and the Guild of the Skinners, carrying the badges of St. Crispin and St. Bartholomew, might fight each other in the streets; but they did not believe that St. Crispin and St. Bartholomew were fighting each other in the skies. Similarly the English would cry in battle on St. George and the French on St. Denis; but they did not seriously believe that St. George hated St. Denis or even those who cried upon St. Denis. Joan of Arc, who was on the point of patriotism what many modern people would call very fanatical, was yet upon this point what most modern people would call very enlightened. Now, with the religious schism, it cannot be denied, a deeper and more inhuman division appeared. It was no longer a scrap between the followers of saints who were themselves at peace, but a war between the followers of gods who were themselves at war. That the great Spanish ships were named after St. Francis or St. Philip was already beginning to mean little to the new England; soon it was to mean something almost comically conflicting, as if they were named after BaaI or Thor. These are indeed mere symbols, but the process of which they are symbols was very practical and must be seriously followed. There entered with the religious wars the idea which modern science applies to racial wars; the idea of natural wars, not arising from a special quarrel but from the nature of the people quarrelling. The shadow of racial fatalism first fell across our path, and far away in distance and darkness something moved that men had almost forgotten.
Luoghi comuni di legno sulla nascita dell’Impero Britannico e sui giorni spaziosi della regina Elisabetta non hanno soltanto oscurato ma contraddetto la cruciale verità. Da simili frasi si immaginerebbe che l’Inghilterra, in qualche modo imperiale, ora si rendesse conto per la prima volta di essere grande. Sarebbe assai più vero dire che ora si rendeva conto per la prima volta di essere piccola. Il grande poeta dei giorni spaziosi non la loda come spaziosa, ma solo come piccola, come un gioiello. La visione dell’espansione universale rimase interamente velata fino al diciottesimo secolo; e persino quando venne fu assai meno vivida e vitale di ciò che venne nel sedicesimo. Ciò che venne allora non fu Imperialismo; fu Anti-Imperialismo. L’Inghilterra conseguì, all’inizio della sua storia moderna, quell’unica cosa che l’immaginazione umana troverà sempre eroica—la storia di una piccola nazionalità. La faccenda dell’Armata fu per lei ciò che Bannockburn fu per gli scozzesi o Majuba per i boeri—una vittoria che stupì persino i vincitori. Ciò che le si opponeva era l’Imperialismo nel suo senso completo e colossale, una cosa impensabile dopo Roma. Era, in nessun senso forzato, la civiltà stessa. Fu la grandezza della Spagna a essere la gloria dell’Inghilterra. È solo quando comprendiamo che gli inglesi erano, al confronto, tanto squallidi, tanto poco sviluppati, tanto meschini e provinciali quanto i boeri, che possiamo apprezzare l’altezza della loro sfida o lo splendore della loro salvezza. Possiamo coglierlo solo cogliendo che per gran parte dell’Europa la causa dell’Armata aveva quasi il cosmopolita buon senso di una crociata. Il Papa aveva dichiarato Elisabetta illegittima—logicamente, è difficile vedere cos’altro potesse dire, avendo dichiarato invalido il matrimonio di sua madre; ma il fatto fu un altro e forse un ultimo colpo che scisse l’Inghilterra dal mondo più antico. Nel frattempo quei pittoreschi corsari inglesi che avevano flagellato l’Impero spagnolo del Nuovo Mondo erano nominati nel Sud semplicemente come pirati, e tecnicamente la descrizione era vera; solo che gli assalti tecnici della parte più debole sono, in retrospettiva, giustamente giudicati con qualche generosa indulgenza. Poi, come per imprimere il contrasto in un’immagine imperitura, la Spagna, o piuttosto l’impero con la Spagna per centro, mise in campo tutta la sua forza, e parve coprire il mare con una flotta simile alla leggendaria flotta di Serse. Piombò sull’isola condannata col peso e la solennità di un giorno del giudizio; marinai o pirati la colpirono con piccole navi vacillanti sotto grandi cannoni, la combatterono con mere masse di detriti fiammeggianti, e in quell’ultima ora di corpo a corpo una grande tempesta sorse dal mare e spazzò attorno all’isola, e la gigantesca flotta non fu vista mai più. La perturbante compiutezza e l’improvviso silenzio che inghiottirono questo prodigio toccarono un nervo che non ha mai cessato di vibrare. La speranza dell’Inghilterra data da quell’ora senza speranza, poiché non vi è vera speranza che non sia stata una volta una speranza disperata. Lo squarciarsi di quella vasta rete navale rimase come un segno che la piccola cosa che sfuggì sarebbe sopravvissuta alla grandezza. Eppure vi è davvero un senso in cui non potremo mai più essere così piccoli o così grandi.
Poiché lo splendore dell’età elisabettiana, di cui si parla sempre come di un’alba, fu per molti versi un tramonto. Sia che lo consideriamo come la fine del Rinascimento o come la fine dell’antica civiltà medievale, nessun critico candido può negare che le sue glorie principali finirono con esso. Il lettore si chieda che cosa lo colpisca in particolare nella magnificenza elisabettiana, e generalmente troverà che è qualcosa di cui vi erano almeno tracce nei tempi medievali, e assai meno tracce nei tempi moderni. Il dramma elisabettiano è come una delle sue stesse tragedie—la sua torcia tempestosa doveva presto essere calpestata e spenta dai Puritani. È inutile dire che la tragedia principale fu il troncamento della commedia; poiché la commedia che venne in Inghilterra dopo la Restaurazione era, al confronto, tanto straniera quanto gelida. Al meglio è commedia nel senso di essere spiritosa, ma non nel senso di essere felice. Si può notare che i portatori di buone nuove e di buona sorte nelle storie d’amore shakespeariane appartengono quasi tutti a un mondo che stava passando, siano essi frati o fate. Lo stesso vale per i principali ideali elisabettiani, spesso incarnati nel dramma elisabettiano. La devozione nazionale alla Regina Vergine non deve essere del tutto screditata dalla sua incongruità col carattere rozzo e astuto della storica Elisabetta. I suoi critici potrebbero invero ragionevolmente dire che, nel sostituire la Vergine Maria con la Regina Vergine, i riformatori inglesi scambiarono semplicemente una vera Vergine con una falsa. Ma questa verità non liquida un vero, benché limitato, culto contemporaneo. Qualunque cosa pensiamo di quella particolare Regina Vergine, le eroine tragiche del tempo ci offrono un’intera processione di regine vergini. Ed è certo che i medievali avrebbero compreso assai meglio dei moderni il martirio di Misura per misura. E come col titolo di Vergine, così col titolo di Regina. La mistica monarchia glorificata in Riccardo II doveva presto essere detronizzata assai più rovinosamente che in Riccardo II. Gli stessi Puritani che strapparono le corone di cartone degli attori di teatro dovevano anche strappare le vere corone dei re le cui parti recitavano. Ogni finzione doveva essere proibita e ogni monarchia doveva essere chiamata finzione.
Shakespeare morì nel giorno di san Giorgio, e molto di ciò che san Giorgio aveva significato morì con lui. Non intendo dire che il patriottismo di Shakespeare o dell’Inghilterra morì; quello rimase e persino s’innalzò costantemente, per essere il più nobile orgoglio dei tempi a venire. Ma assai più del patriottismo era stato coinvolto in quell’immagine di san Giorgio a cui il Cuor di Leone aveva dedicato l’Inghilterra tanto tempo fa nei deserti di Palestina. La concezione di un santo patrono aveva portato dal Medioevo un’idea assai singolare e ancora insostituita. Era l’idea della variazione senza antagonismo. I Sette Campioni della Cristianità furono moltiplicati per settanta volte sette nei patroni di città, mestieri e tipi sociali; ma la stessa idea che fossero tutti santi escludeva la possibilità di un’ultima rivalità nel fatto che fossero tutti patroni. La Corporazione dei Calzolai e la Corporazione dei Conciatori, recando i distintivi di san Crispino e san Bartolomeo, potevano battersi tra loro per le strade; ma non credevano che san Crispino e san Bartolomeo si battessero tra loro nei cieli. Similmente gli inglesi gridavano in battaglia su san Giorgio e i francesi su san Dionigi; ma non credevano seriamente che san Giorgio odiasse san Dionigi o persino coloro che gridavano su san Dionigi. Giovanna d’Arco, che sul punto del patriottismo era ciò che molti moderni chiamerebbero assai fanatica, era tuttavia su questo punto ciò che la maggior parte dei moderni chiamerebbe assai illuminata. Ora, con lo scisma religioso, non si può negare, apparve una divisione più profonda e più inumana. Non era più una zuffa tra i seguaci di santi che erano essi stessi in pace, ma una guerra tra i seguaci di dèi che erano essi stessi in guerra. Che le grandi navi spagnole fossero chiamate col nome di san Francesco o san Filippo cominciava già a significare poco per la nuova Inghilterra; presto doveva significare qualcosa di quasi comicamente contraddittorio, come se fossero chiamate col nome di Baal o di Thor. Questi sono invero meri simboli, ma il processo di cui sono simboli era assai pratico e deve essere seguito seriamente. Entrò con le guerre di religione l’idea che la scienza moderna applica alle guerre razziali; l’idea delle guerre naturali, non nascenti da una particolare contesa ma dalla natura del popolo in contesa. L’ombra del fatalismo razziale cadde per la prima volta attraverso il nostro cammino, e lontano nella distanza e nell’oscurità qualcosa si mosse che gli uomini avevano quasi dimenticato.
Beyond the frontiers of the fading Empire lay that outer land, as loose and drifting as a sea, which had boiled over in the barbarian wars. Most of it was not formally Christian, but barely civilized; a faint awe of the culture of the south and west lay on its wild forces like a light frost. This semi-civilized world had long been asleep; but it had begun to dream. In the generation before Elizabeth a great man who, with all his violence, was vitally a dreamer, Martin Luther, had cried out in his sleep in a voice like thunder, partly against the place of bad customs, but largely also against the place of good works in the Christian scheme. In the generation after Elizabeth the spread of the new wild doctrines in the old wild lands had sucked Central Europe into a cyclic war of creeds. In this the house which stood for the legend of the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, the Germanic partner of Spain, fought for the old religion against a league of other Germans fighting for the new. The continental conditions were indeed complicated, and grew more and more complicated as the dream of restoring religious unity receded. They were complicated by the firm determination of France to be a nation in the full modern sense; to stand free and foursquare from all combinations; a purpose which led her, while hating her own Protestants at home, to give diplomatic support to many Protestants abroad, simply because it preserved the balance of power against the gigantic confederation of Spaniards and Austrians. It is complicated by the rise of a Calvinistic and commercial power in the Netherlands, logical, defiant, defending its own independence valiantly against Spain. But on the whole we shall be right if we see the first throes of the modern international problems in what is called the Thirty Years’ War; whether we call it the revolt of half-heathens against the Holy Roman Empire, or whether we call it the coming of new sciences, new philosophies, and new ethics from the north. Sweden took a hand in the struggle, and sent a military hero to the help of the newer Germany. But the sort of military heroism everywhere exhibited offered a strange combination of more and more complex strategic science with the most naked and cannibal cruelty. Other forces besides Sweden found a career in the carnage. Far away to the north-east, in a sterile land of fens, a small ambitious family of money-lenders who had become squires, vigilant, thrifty, thoroughly selfish, rather thinly adopted the theories of Luther, and began to lend their almost savage hinds as soldiers on the Protestant side. They were well paid for it by step after step of promotion; but at this time their principality was only the old Mark of Brandenburg. Their own name was Hohenzollern.
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Oltre le frontiere dell’Impero che ormai sbiadiva si stendeva quella terra esterna, sciolta e vagante come un mare, che era traboccata nelle guerre barbariche. Per la maggior parte non era formalmente cristiana, ma appena civilizzata; un vago timore reverenziale per la cultura del sud e dell’ovest posava sulle sue forze selvagge come una leggera brina. Questo mondo semicivilizzato aveva dormito a lungo; ma aveva cominciato a sognare. Nella generazione prima di Elisabetta un grand’uomo che, con tutta la sua violenza, era nel profondo un sognatore, Martin Lutero, aveva gridato nel sonno con voce simile al tuono, in parte contro il posto delle cattive consuetudini, ma in larga parte anche contro il posto delle buone opere nel disegno cristiano. Nella generazione dopo Elisabetta il diffondersi delle nuove dottrine selvagge nelle antiche terre selvagge aveva risucchiato l’Europa centrale in una guerra ciclica di credi. In essa la casa che rappresentava la leggenda del Sacro Romano Impero, l’Austria, la socia germanica della Spagna, combatté per l’antica religione contro una lega di altri Germani che combattevano per la nuova. Le condizioni continentali erano invero complicate, e si facevano sempre più complicate a mano a mano che il sogno di ricostituire l’unità religiosa si allontanava. Erano complicate dalla ferma determinazione della Francia di essere una nazione nel pieno senso moderno; di stare libera e ben salda da ogni combinazione; un proposito che la portò, mentre odiava i propri protestanti in patria, a dare sostegno diplomatico a molti protestanti all’estero, semplicemente perché ciò conservava l’equilibrio di potere contro la gigantesca confederazione di Spagnoli e Austriaci. È complicata dall’ascesa di una potenza calvinista e commerciale nei Paesi Bassi, logica, sfidante, che difendeva valorosamente la propria indipendenza contro la Spagna. Ma nel complesso saremo nel giusto se scorgiamo le prime doglie dei moderni problemi internazionali in ciò che si chiama la Guerra dei Trent’anni; sia che la chiamiamo la rivolta dei semipagani contro il Sacro Romano Impero, sia che la chiamiamo il sopraggiungere di nuove scienze, nuove filosofie e nuove etiche dal nord. La Svezia prese parte alla lotta, e mandò un eroe militare in aiuto della più nuova Germania. Ma la sorta di eroismo militare ovunque esibita offriva una strana combinazione di scienza strategica sempre più complessa con la più nuda e cannibalesca crudeltà. Altre forze oltre la Svezia trovarono una carriera nella carneficina. Lontano a nord-est, in una terra sterile di paludi, una piccola ambiziosa famiglia di prestatori di denaro divenuti signorotti, vigile, parsimoniosa, del tutto egoista, adottò piuttosto tiepidamente le teorie di Lutero, e cominciò a prestare i suoi contadini quasi selvaggi come soldati dalla parte protestante. Ne furono ben ripagati, promozione dopo promozione; ma a quel tempo il loro principato era soltanto la vecchia Marca di Brandeburgo. Il loro nome era Hohenzollern.
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XIII
THE AGE OF THE PURITANS
We should be very much bored if we had to read an account of the most exciting argument or string of adventures in which unmeaning words such as “snark” or “boojum” were systematically substituted for the names of the chief characters or objects in dispute; if we were told that a king was given the alternative of becoming a snark or finally surrendering the boojum, or that a mob was roused to fury by the public exhibition of a boojum, which was inevitably regarded as a gross reflection on the snark. Yet something very like this situation is created by most modern attempts to tell the tale of the theological troubles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while deferring to the fashionable distaste for theology in this generation—or rather in the last generation. Thus the Puritans, as their name implies, were primarily enthusiastic for what they thought was pure religion; frequently they wanted to impose it on others; sometimes they only wanted to be free to practise it themselves; but in no case can justice be done to what was finest in their characters, as well as first in their thoughts, if we never by any chance ask what “it” was that they wanted to impose or to practise. Now, there was a great deal that was very fine about many of the Puritans, which is almost entirely missed by the modern admirers of the Puritans. They are praised for things which they either regarded with indifference or more often detested with frenzy—such as religious liberty. And yet they are quite insufficiently understood, and are even undervalued, in their logical case for the things they really did care about— such as Calvinism. We make the Puritans picturesque in a way they would violently repudiate, in novels and plays they would have publicly burnt. We are interested in everything about them, except the only thing in which they were interested at all.
We have seen that in the first instance the new doctrines in England were simply an excuse for a plutocratic pillage, and that is the only truth to be told about the matter. But it was far otherwise with the individuals a generation or two after, to which the wreck of the Armada was already a legend of national deliverance from Popery, as miraculous and almost as remote as the divilerances of which they read so realistically in the Hebrew Books now laid open to them. The august accident of that Spanish defeat may perhaps have coincided only too well with their concentration on the non-Christian parts of Scripture. It may have satisfied a certain Old Testament sentiment of the election of the English being announced in the stormy oracles of air and sea, which was easily turned into that heresy of a tribal pride that took even heavier hold upon the Germans. It is by such things that a civilized state may fall from being a Christian nation to being a Chosen People. But even if their nationalism was of a kind that has ultimately proved perilous to the comity of nations, it still was nationalism. From first to last the Puritans were patriots, a point in which they had a marked superiority over the French Huguenots. Politically, they were indeed at first but one wing of the new wealthy class which had despoiled the Church and were proceeding to despoil the Crown. But while they were all merely the creatures of the great spoliation, many of them were the unconscious creatures of it. They were strongly represented in the aristocracy, but a great number were of the middle classes, though almost wholly the middle classes of the towns. By the poor agricultural population, which was still by far the largest part of the population, they were simply derided and detested. It may be noted, for instance, that, while they led the nation in many of its higher departments, they could produce nothing having the atmosphere of what is rather priggishly called folklore. All the popular tradition there is, as in songs, toasts, rhymes, or proverbs, is all Royalist. About the Puritans we can find no great legend. We must put up as best we can with great literature.
All these things, however, are simply things that other people might have noticed about them; they are not the most important things, and certainly not the things they thought about themselves. The soul of the movement was in two conceptions, or rather in two steps, the first being the moral process by which they arrived at their chief conclusion, and the second the chief conclusion they arrived at. We will begin with the first, especially as it was this which determined all that external social attitude which struck the eye of contemporaries. The honest Puritan, growing up in youth in a world swept bare by the great pillage, possessed himself of a first principle which is one of the three or four alternative first principles which are possible to the mind of man. It was the principle that the mind of man can alone directly deal with the mind of God. It may shortly be called the anti-sacramental principle; but it really applies, and he really applied it, to many things besides the sacraments of the Church. It equally applies, and he equally applied it, to art, to letters, to the love of locality, to music, and even to good manners. The phrase about no priest coming between a man and his Creator is but an impoverished fragment of the full philosophic doctrine; the true Puritan was equally clear that no singer or story-teller or fiddler must translate the voice of God to him into the tongues of terrestrial beauty. It is notable that the one Puritan man of genius in modern times, Tolstoy, did accept this full conclusion; denounced all music as a mere drug, and forbade his own admirers to read his own admirable novels. Now, the English Puritans were not only Puritans but Englishmen, and therefore did not always shine in clearness of head; as we shall see, true Puritanism was rather a Scotch than an English thing. But this was the driving power and the direction; and the doctrine is quite tenable if a trifle insane. Intellectual truth was the only tribute fit for the highest truth of the universe; and the next step in such a study is to observe what the Puritan thought was the truth about that truth. His individual reason, cut loose from instinct as well as tradition, taught him a concept of the omnipotence of God which meant simply the impotence of man. In Luther, the earlier and milder form of the Protestant process only went so far as to say that nothing a man did could help him except his confession of Christ; with Calvin it took the last logical step and said that even this could not help him, since Omnipotence must have disposed of all his destiny before hand; that men must be created to be lost and saved. In the purer types of whom I speak this logic was white-hot, and we must read the formula into all their parliamentary and legal formulae. When we read, “The Puritan party demanded reforms in the church,” we must understand, “The Puritan party demanded fuller and clearer affirmation that men are created to be lost and saved.” When we read, “The Army selected persons for their godliness” we must understand, “The Army selected those persons who seemed most convinced that men were created to be lost and saved.” It should be added that this terrible trend was not confined even to Protestant countries; some great Romanists doubtfully followed it until stopped by Rome. It was the spirit of the age, and should be a permanent warning against mistaking the spirit of the age for the immortal spirit of man. For there are now few Christians or non-Christians who can look back at the Calvinism which nearly captured Canterbury and even Rome by the genius and heroism of Pascal or Milton, without crying out, like the lady in Mr. Bernard Shaw’s play, “How splendid! How glorious! …and oh what an escape!”
XIII
L’ETÀ DEI PURITANI
Ci annoieremmo assai se dovessimo leggere il resoconto della più eccitante discussione o serie di avventure in cui parole prive di senso come «snark» o «boojum» fossero sistematicamente sostituite ai nomi dei principali personaggi o oggetti in questione; se ci venisse detto che a un re fu data l’alternativa di diventare uno snark o di rinunciare definitivamente al boojum, o che una folla fu incitata al furore dalla pubblica esibizione di un boojum, che era inevitabilmente considerata una grossolana offesa allo snark. Eppure qualcosa di assai simile a questa situazione è creato dalla maggior parte dei moderni tentativi di raccontare la vicenda dei travagli teologici del sedicesimo e diciassettesimo secolo, mentre ci si inchina alla moda del disgusto per la teologia in questa generazione—o piuttosto nell’ultima generazione. Così i Puritani, come il loro nome implica, erano anzitutto entusiasti di ciò che ritenevano fosse pura religione; frequentemente volevano imporla ad altri; talvolta volevano solo essere liberi di praticarla essi stessi; ma in nessun caso si può rendere giustizia a ciò che vi era di più fine nei loro caratteri, come pure di primo nei loro pensieri, se non ci chiediamo mai, per caso, quale fosse quell’«essa» che volevano imporre o praticare. Ora, vi era moltissimo di assai fine in molti dei Puritani, che è quasi interamente mancato dai moderni ammiratori dei Puritani. Sono lodati per cose che essi o consideravano con indifferenza o più spesso detestavano con frenesia—come la libertà religiosa. Eppure sono compresi in modo del tutto insufficiente, e sono persino sottovalutati, nella loro logica difesa delle cose a cui davvero tenevano—come il Calvinismo. Rendiamo i Puritani pittoreschi in un modo che essi violentemente ripudierebbero, in romanzi e drammi che avrebbero pubblicamente bruciato. Ci interessa tutto di loro, tranne l’unica cosa a cui essi affatto s’interessavano.
Abbiamo visto che in prima istanza le nuove dottrine in Inghilterra furono semplicemente un pretesto per un saccheggio plutocratico, e questa è l’unica verità da dire sulla faccenda. Ma fu ben altrimenti per gli individui una generazione o due dopo, per i quali il naufragio dell’Armata era già una leggenda di nazionale liberazione dal Papismo, tanto miracolosa e quasi tanto remota quanto le liberazioni di cui leggevano così realisticamente nei Libri ebraici ora dispiegati davanti a loro. L’augusto accidente di quella sconfitta spagnola può forse aver coinciso solo troppo bene con la loro concentrazione sulle parti non cristiane della Scrittura. Può aver soddisfatto un certo sentimento vetero-testamentario dell’elezione degli inglesi annunciata nei tempestosi oracoli dell’aria e del mare, che fu facilmente tramutato in quell’eresia di un orgoglio tribale che prese anche più pesante presa sui tedeschi. È per cose simili che uno stato civilizzato può decadere dall’essere una nazione cristiana all’essere un Popolo Eletto. Ma anche se il loro nazionalismo era di una specie che si è alla fine rivelata perigliosa per la concordia delle nazioni, era pur sempre nazionalismo. Dal principio alla fine i Puritani furono patrioti, un punto in cui avevano una marcata superiorità sugli Ugonotti francesi. Politicamente, erano invero dapprima solo un’ala della nuova classe ricca che aveva spogliato la Chiesa e stava procedendo a spogliare la Corona. Ma mentre erano tutti meramente le creature della grande spoliazione, molti di essi ne erano le creature inconsapevoli. Erano fortemente rappresentati nell’aristocrazia, ma un gran numero era delle classi medie, benché quasi interamente le classi medie delle città. Dalla povera popolazione agricola, che era ancora di gran lunga la parte più grande della popolazione, erano semplicemente derisi e detestati. Si può notare, per esempio, che, mentre guidavano la nazione in molti dei suoi dipartimenti più elevati, non potevano produrre nulla che avesse l’atmosfera di ciò che si chiama piuttosto affettatamente folclore. Tutta la tradizione popolare che esiste, come nelle canzoni, nei brindisi, nelle rime o nei proverbi, è tutta Realista. Sui Puritani non possiamo trovare alcuna grande leggenda. Dobbiamo accontentarci come meglio possiamo della grande letteratura.
Tutte queste cose, tuttavia, sono semplicemente cose che altri avrebbero potuto notare di loro; non sono le cose più importanti, e certamente non le cose che essi pensavano di sé stessi. L’anima del movimento era in due concezioni, o piuttosto in due passi, il primo essendo il processo morale con cui giunsero alla loro principale conclusione, e il secondo la principale conclusione a cui giunsero. Cominceremo dal primo, tanto più che fu questo a determinare tutto quell’atteggiamento sociale esteriore che colpì l’occhio dei contemporanei. L’onesto Puritano, cresciuto nella giovinezza in un mondo spazzato nudo dalla grande razzia, si impossessò di un primo principio che è uno dei tre o quattro primi principi alternativi che sono possibili alla mente dell’uomo. Era il principio che la mente dell’uomo può da sola trattare direttamente con la mente di Dio. Lo si può brevemente chiamare il principio anti-sacramentale; ma esso si applica realmente, ed egli lo applicava realmente, a molte cose oltre ai sacramenti della Chiesa. Si applica egualmente, ed egli lo applicava egualmente, all’arte, alle lettere, all’amore del luogo natio, alla musica, e persino alle buone maniere. La frase sul fatto che nessun prete si frapponga tra un uomo e il suo Creatore non è che un impoverito frammento della piena dottrina filosofica; il vero Puritano era egualmente chiaro sul fatto che nessun cantore o narratore o suonatore dovesse tradurgli la voce di Dio nelle lingue della bellezza terrestre. È notevole che l’unico Puritano uomo di genio dei tempi moderni, Tolstoy, accettò questa piena conclusione; denunciò tutta la musica come una mera droga, e proibì ai suoi stessi ammiratori di leggere i suoi stessi ammirevoli romanzi. Ora, i Puritani inglesi non erano solo Puritani ma inglesi, e perciò non brillavano sempre per chiarezza di testa; come vedremo, il vero Puritanesimo fu piuttosto una cosa scozzese che inglese. Ma questa era la forza propulsiva e la direzione; e la dottrina è del tutto sostenibile se un tantino folle. La verità intellettuale era l’unico tributo degno della più alta verità dell’universo; e il passo successivo in tale studio è osservare ciò che il Puritano riteneva fosse la verità su quella verità. La sua ragione individuale, recisa dall’istinto come pure dalla tradizione, gli insegnò un concetto dell’onnipotenza di Dio che significava semplicemente l’impotenza dell’uomo. In Lutero, la forma più antica e più mite del processo protestante andò solo fino a dire che nulla di ciò che un uomo faceva poteva aiutarlo tranne la sua confessione di Cristo; con Calvino compì l’ultimo passo logico e disse che neppure questo poteva aiutarlo, poiché l’Onnipotenza doveva aver disposto di tutto il suo destino in anticipo; che gli uomini dovevano essere creati per essere perduti e salvati. Nei tipi più puri di cui parlo questa logica era incandescente, e dobbiamo leggere la formula in tutte le loro formule parlamentari e legali. Quando leggiamo «Il partito Puritano chiese riforme nella chiesa», dobbiamo intendere «Il partito Puritano chiese una più piena e chiara affermazione che gli uomini sono creati per essere perduti e salvati». Quando leggiamo «L’Esercito selezionava persone per la loro devozione» dobbiamo intendere «L’Esercito selezionava quelle persone che sembravano più convinte che gli uomini fossero creati per essere perduti e salvati». Si dovrebbe aggiungere che questa terribile tendenza non era confinata neppure ai paesi protestanti; alcuni grandi cattolici romani la seguirono esitanti finché non furono fermati da Roma. Era lo spirito dell’epoca, e dovrebbe essere un permanente avvertimento contro lo scambiare lo spirito dell’epoca per l’immortale spirito dell’uomo. Poiché vi sono ora pochi cristiani o non cristiani che possano guardare indietro al Calvinismo che quasi catturò Canterbury e persino Roma per il genio e l’eroismo di Pascal o di Milton, senza esclamare, come la dama nel dramma del signor Bernard Shaw, «Che splendido! Che glorioso!… e oh che scampo!».
The next thing to note is that their conception of church-government was in a true sense self-government; and yet, for a particular reason, turned out to be a rather selfish self-government. It was equal and yet it was exclusive. Internally the synod or conventicle tended to be a small republic, but unfortunately to be a very small republic. In relation to the street outside the conventicle was not a republic but an aristocracy. It was the most awful of all aristocracies, that of the elect; for it was not a right of birth but a right before birth, and alone of all nobilities it was not laid level in the dust. Hence we have, on the one hand, in the simpler Puritans a ring of real republican virtue; a defiance of tyrants, an assertion of human dignity, but above all an appeal to that first of all republican virtues—publicity. One of the Regicides, on trial for his life, struck the note which all the unnaturalness of his school cannot deprive of nobility: “This thing was not done in a corner.” But their most drastic idealism did nothing to recover a ray of the light that at once lightened every man that came into the world, the assumption of a brotherhood in all baptized people. They were, indeed, very like that dreadful scaffold at which the Regicide was not afraid to point. They were certainly public, they may have been public-spirited, they were never popular; and it seems never to have crossed their minds that there was any need to be popular. England was never so little of a democracy as during the short time when she was a republic.
The struggle with the Stuarts, which is the next passage in our history, arose from an alliance, which some may think an accidental alliance, between two things. The first was this intellectual fashion of Calvinism which affected the cultured world as did our recent intellectual fashion of Collectivism. The second was the older thing which had made that creed and perhaps that cultured world possible—the aristocratic revolt under the last Tudors. It was, we might say, the story of a father and a son dragging down the same golden image, but the younger really from hatred of idolatry, and the older solely from love of gold. It is at once the tragedy and the paradox of England that it was the eternal passion that passed, and the transient or terrestrial passion that remained. This was true of England; it was far less true of Scotland; and that is the meaning of the Scotch and English war that ended at Worcester. The first change had indeed been much the same materialist matter in both countries—a mere brigandage of barons; and even John Knox, though he has become a national hero, was an extremely anti-national politician. The patriot party in Scotland was that of Cardinal Beaton and Mary Stuart. Nevertheless the new creed did become popular in the Lowlands in a positive sense, not even yet known in our own land. Hence in Scotland Puritanism was the main thing, and was mixed with Parliamentary and other oligarchies. In England Parliamentary oligarchy was the main thing, and was mixed with Puritanism. When the storm began to rise against Charles I, after the more or less transitional time of his father, the Scotch successor of Elizabeth, the instances commonly cited mark all the difference between democratic religion and aristocratic politics. The Scotch legend is that of Jenny Geddes, the poor woman who threw a stool at the priest. The English legend is that of John Hampden, the great squire who raised a county against the King. The Parliamentary movement in England was, indeed, almost wholly a thing of squires, with their new allies the merchants. They were squires who may well have regarded themselves as the real and natural leaders of the English; but they were leaders who allowed no mutiny among their followers. There was certainly no Village Hampden in Hampden Village.
The Stuarts, it may be suspected, brought from Scotland a more mediaeval and therefore more logical view of their own function; for the note of their nation was logic. It is a proverb that James I was a Scot and a pedant; it is hardly sufficiently noted that Charles I also was not a little of a pedant, being very much of a Scot. He had also the virtues of a Scot, courage, and a quite natural dignity and an appetite for the things of the mind. Being somewhat Scottish, he was very un-English, and could not manage a compromise: he tried instead to split hairs, and seemed merely to break promises. Yet he might safely have been far more inconsistent if he had been a little hearty and hazy; but he was of the sort that sees everything in black and white; and it is therefore remembered—especially the black. From the first he fenced with his Parliament as with a mere foe; perhaps he almost felt it as a foreigner. The issue is familiar, and we need not be so careful as the gentleman who wished to finish the chapter in order to find not what happened to Charles I. His minister, the great Strafford, was foiled in an attempt to make him strong in the fashion of a French king, and perished on the scaffold, a frustrated Richelieu. The Parliament claiming the power of the purse, Charles appealed to the power of the sword, and at first carried all before him; but success passed to the wealth of the Parliamentary class, the discipline of the new army, and the patience and genius of Cromwell, and Charles died the same death as his great servant.
Historically, the quarrel resolved itself; through ramifications generally followed perhaps in more detail than they deserve, into the great modern query of whether a king can raise taxes without the consent of his Parliament. The test case was that of Hampden, the great Buckingham shire magnate, who challenged the legality of a tax which Charles imposed, professedly for a national navy. As even innovators always of necessity seek for sanctity in the past, the Puritan squires made a legend of the mediaeval Magna Carta; and they were so far in a true tradition that the concession of John had really been, as we have already noted, anti-despotic without being democratic. These two truths cover two parts of the problem of the Stuart fall, which are of very different certainty, and should be considered separately.
La cosa successiva da notare è che la loro concezione del governo della chiesa era in un vero senso autogoverno; eppure, per una ragione particolare, risultò essere un piuttosto egoistico autogoverno. Era paritario eppure era esclusivo. Internamente il sinodo o conventicola tendeva a essere una piccola repubblica, ma sfortunatamente a essere una repubblica assai piccola. In relazione alla strada esterna la conventicola non era una repubblica ma un’aristocrazia. Era la più tremenda di tutte le aristocrazie, quella degli eletti; poiché non era un diritto di nascita ma un diritto anteriore alla nascita, e sola fra tutte le nobiltà non era spianata nella polvere. Di qui abbiamo, da un lato, nei Puritani più semplici un suono di vera virtù repubblicana; una sfida ai tiranni, un’affermazione della dignità umana, ma soprattutto un appello a quella prima fra tutte le virtù repubblicane—la pubblicità. Uno dei Regicidi, sotto processo per la sua vita, colpì la nota che tutta l’innaturalezza della sua scuola non può privare di nobiltà: «Questa cosa non fu fatta in un angolo». Ma il loro più drastico idealismo non fece nulla per recuperare un raggio della luce che ad un tempo illuminava ogni uomo che veniva al mondo, l’assunzione di una fratellanza in tutte le persone battezzate. Erano, invero, assai simili a quel terribile patibolo verso cui il Regicida non aveva paura di puntare. Erano certamente pubblici, possono essere stati animati da spirito pubblico, non furono mai popolari; e sembra non aver mai attraversato le loro menti che vi fosse alcun bisogno di essere popolari. L’Inghilterra non fu mai così poco una democrazia come durante il breve tempo in cui fu una repubblica.
La lotta con gli Stuart, che è il passaggio successivo nella nostra storia, nacque da un’alleanza, che alcuni possono ritenere un’alleanza accidentale, tra due cose. La prima fu questa moda intellettuale del Calvinismo che influì sul mondo colto come fece la nostra recente moda intellettuale del Collettivismo. La seconda fu la cosa più antica che aveva reso possibile quel credo e forse quel mondo colto—la rivolta aristocratica sotto gli ultimi Tudor. Fu, potremmo dire, la storia di un padre e di un figlio che abbattono la stessa immagine dorata, ma il più giovane davvero per odio dell’idolatria, e il più vecchio unicamente per amore dell’oro. È ad un tempo la tragedia e il paradosso dell’Inghilterra che fu la passione eterna a passare, e la passione transitoria o terrena a rimanere. Questo fu vero dell’Inghilterra; fu assai meno vero della Scozia; ed è questo il significato della guerra scozzese e inglese che si chiuse a Worcester. Il primo mutamento era stato invero press’a poco la stessa faccenda materialistica in entrambi i paesi—un mero brigantaggio di baroni; e persino John Knox, benché sia diventato un eroe nazionale, fu un politico estremamente anti-nazionale. Il partito patriota in Scozia era quello del Cardinale Beaton e di Maria Stuart. Ciò nondimeno il nuovo credo divenne davvero popolare nelle Lowlands in un senso positivo, non ancora nemmeno conosciuto nel nostro proprio paese. Di qui in Scozia il Puritanesimo fu la cosa principale, e fu mescolato con oligarchie parlamentari e d’altro genere. In Inghilterra l’oligarchia parlamentare fu la cosa principale, e fu mescolata col Puritanesimo. Quando la tempesta cominciò a levarsi contro Carlo I, dopo il tempo più o meno transitorio di suo padre, il successore scozzese di Elisabetta, gli esempi comunemente citati segnano tutta la differenza tra religione democratica e politica aristocratica. La leggenda scozzese è quella di Jenny Geddes, la povera donna che scagliò uno sgabello contro il prete. La leggenda inglese è quella di John Hampden, il grande possidente che sollevò una contea contro il re. Il movimento parlamentare in Inghilterra fu, invero, quasi interamente una cosa di possidenti, con i loro nuovi alleati i mercanti. Erano possidenti che ben potevano considerarsi i veri e naturali capi degli inglesi; ma erano capi che non permettevano alcun ammutinamento tra i loro seguaci. Non vi fu certamente alcun Hampden di villaggio nel villaggio di Hampden.
Gli Stuart, si può sospettare, portarono dalla Scozia una visione più medievale e perciò più logica della loro propria funzione; poiché la nota della loro nazione era la logica. È un proverbio che Giacomo I fosse uno scozzese e un pedante; non si nota abbastanza che anche Carlo I era non poco un pedante, essendo molto uno scozzese. Aveva anche le virtù di uno scozzese, il coraggio, e una dignità del tutto naturale e un appetito per le cose della mente. Essendo alquanto scozzese, era assai poco inglese, e non sapeva gestire un compromesso: cercava invece di spaccare il capello in quattro, e sembrava semplicemente rompere le promesse. Eppure avrebbe potuto senza pericolo essere assai più incoerente se fosse stato un po’ cordiale e nebuloso; ma era del tipo che vede tutto in bianco e nero; e perciò è ricordato—specialmente il nero. Fin dal principio schermì col suo Parlamento come con un mero nemico; forse quasi lo sentiva come uno straniero. La questione è ben nota, e non abbiamo bisogno di essere così cauti come il gentiluomo che desiderava finire il capitolo per scoprire non cosa accadde a Carlo I. Il suo ministro, il grande Strafford, fu sventato in un tentativo di renderlo forte alla maniera di un re francese, e perì sul patibolo, un frustrato Richelieu. Rivendicando il Parlamento il potere della borsa, Carlo si appellò al potere della spada, e dapprima ebbe la meglio su tutto; ma il successo passò alla ricchezza della classe parlamentare, alla disciplina del nuovo esercito, e alla pazienza e al genio di Cromwell, e Carlo morì la stessa morte del suo grande servo.
Storicamente, la contesa si risolse; attraverso ramificazioni generalmente seguite forse in più dettaglio di quanto meritino, nel grande quesito moderno se un re possa imporre tasse senza il consenso del suo Parlamento. Il caso di prova fu quello di Hampden, il grande magnate del Buckinghamshire, che contestò la legalità di una tassa che Carlo impose, dichiaratamente per una marina nazionale. Poiché anche gli innovatori sempre di necessità cercano santità nel passato, i possidenti Puritani fecero una leggenda della medievale Magna Carta; ed erano finora in una vera tradizione poiché la concessione di Giovanni era stata realmente, come abbiamo già notato, anti-dispotica senza essere democratica. Queste due verità coprono due parti del problema della caduta degli Stuart, che sono di assai diversa certezza, e dovrebbero essere considerate separatamente.
For the first point about democracy, no candid person, in face of the facts, can really consider it at all. It is quite possible to hold that the seventeenth-century Parliament was fighting for the truth; it is not possible to hold that it was fighting for the populace. After the autumn of the Middle Ages Parliament was always actively aristocratic and actively anti-popular. The institution which forbade Charles I to raise Ship Money was the same institution which previously forbade Richard II to free the serfs. The group which claimed coal and minerals from Charles I was the same which afterward claimed the common lands from the village communities. It was the same institution which only two generations before had eagerly helped to destroy, not merely things of popular sentiment like the monasteries, but all the things of popular utility like the guilds and parishes, the local governments of towns and trades. The work of the great lords may have had, indeed it certainly had, another more patriotic and creative side; but it was exclusively the work of the great lords that was done by Parliament. The House of Commons has itself been a House of Lords.
But when we turn to the other or anti-despotic aspect of the campaign against the Stuarts, we come to something much more difficult to dismiss and much more easy to justify. While the stupidest things are said against the Stuarts, the real contemporary case for their enemies is little realized; for it is connected with what our insular history most neglects, the condition of the Continent. It should be remembered that though the Stuarts failed in England they fought for things that succeeded in Europe. These were roughly, first, the effects of the Counter-Reformation, which made the sincere Protestant see Stuart Catholicism not at all as the last flicker of an old flame, but as the spread of a conflagration. Charles II, for instance, was a man of strong, sceptical, and almost irritably humorous intellect, and he was quite certainly, and even reluctantly, convinced of Catholicism as a philosophy. The other and more important matter here was the almost awful plutocracy that was being built up in France like a Bastille. It was more logical, and in many ways more equal and even equitable than the English oligarchy, but it really became a tyranny in case of rebellion or even resistance. There were none of the rough English safeguards of juries and good customs of the old common law; there was lettre de cachet as unanswerable as magic. The English who defied the law were better off than the French; a French satirist would probably have retorted that it was the English who obeyed the law who were worse off than the French. The ordering of men’s normal lives was with the squire; but he was, if anything, more limited where he was the magistrate. He was stronger as master of the village, but actually weaker as agent of the King. In defending this state of things, in short, the Whigs were certainly not defending democracy, but they were in a real sense defending liberty. They were even defending some remains of mediaeval liberty, though not the best; the jury though not the guild. Even feudalism had involved a localism not without liberal elements, which lingered in the aristocratic system. Those who loved such things might well be alarmed at the Leviathan of the State, which for Hobbes was a single monster and for France a single man.
As to the mere facts, it must be said again that in so far as Puritanism was pure, it was unfortunately passing. And the very type of the transition by which it passed can be found in that extraordinary man who is popularly credited with making it predominate. Oliver Cromwell is in history much less the leader of Puritanism than the tamer of Puritanism. He was undoubtedly possessed, certainly in his youth, possibly all his life, by the rather sombre religious passions of his period; but as he emerges into importance, he stands more and more for the Positivism of the English as compared with the Puritanism of the Scotch. He is one of the Puritan squires; but he is steadily more of the squire and less of the Puritan; and he points to the process by which the squirearchy became at last merely pagan. This is the key to most of what is praised and most of what is blamed in him; the key to the comparative sanity, toleration and modern efficiency of many of his departures; the key to the comparative coarseness, earthiness, cynicism, and lack of sympathy in many others. He was the reverse of an idealist; and he cannot without absurdity be held up as an ideal; but he was, like most of the squires, a type genuinely English; not without public spirit, certainly not without patriotism. His seizure of personal power, which destroyed an impersonal and ideal government, had something English in its very unreason. The act of killing the King, I fancy, was not primarily his, and certainly not characteristically his. It was a concession to the high inhuman ideals of the tiny group of true Puritans, with whom he had to compromise but with whom he afterwards collided. It was logic rather than cruelty in the act that was not Cromwellian; for he treated with bestial cruelty the native Irish, whom the new spiritual exclusiveness regarded as beasts— or as the modern euphemism would put it, as aborigines. But his practical temper was more akin to such human slaughter on what seemed to him the edges of civilization, than to a sort of human sacrifice in the very centre and forum of it; he is not a representative regicide. In a sense that piece of headsmanship was rather above his head. The real regicides did it in a sort of trance or vision; and he was not troubled with visions. But the true collision between the religious and rational sides of the seventeenth-century movement came symbolically on that day of driving storm at Dunbar, when the raving Scotch preachers overruled Leslie and forced him down into the valley to be the victim of the Cromwellian common sense. Cromwell said that God had delivered them into his hand; but it was their own God who delivered them, the dark unnatural God of the Calvinist dreams, as overpowering as a nightmare— and as passing.
Quanto al primo punto sulla democrazia, nessuna persona schietta, di fronte ai fatti, può davvero prenderla in considerazione. È perfettamente possibile sostenere che il Parlamento del Seicento combattesse per la verità; non è possibile sostenere che combattesse per il popolo minuto. Dopo l’autunno del Medioevo il Parlamento fu sempre attivamente aristocratico e attivamente antipopolare. L’istituzione che proibì a Carlo I di riscuotere la Ship Money era la stessa istituzione che in precedenza aveva proibito a Riccardo II di liberare i servi. Il gruppo che rivendicò carbone e minerali a Carlo I era lo stesso che in seguito rivendicò le terre comuni alle comunità di villaggio. Era la stessa istituzione che solo due generazioni prima aveva avidamente contribuito a distruggere non soltanto cose di sentimento popolare come i monasteri, ma tutte le cose di pubblica utilità come le corporazioni e le parrocchie, i governi locali delle città e dei mestieri. L’opera dei grandi signori può avere avuto, e certamente ebbe, un altro lato più patriottico e creativo; ma fu esclusivamente l’opera dei grandi signori quella che fu compiuta dal Parlamento. La Camera dei Comuni è stata essa stessa una Camera dei Lord.
Ma quando ci volgiamo all’altro aspetto, o aspetto anti-dispotico, della campagna contro gli Stuart, giungiamo a qualcosa di assai più difficile da liquidare e assai più facile da giustificare. Mentre si dicono le cose più stupide contro gli Stuart, il vero argomento contemporaneo a favore dei loro nemici è poco compreso; perché è connesso con ciò che la nostra storia insulare più trascura, la condizione del Continente. Si dovrebbe ricordare che sebbene gli Stuart fallissero in Inghilterra, essi combatterono per cose che riuscirono in Europa. Erano, all’ingrosso, in primo luogo gli effetti della Controriforma, che facevano vedere al sincero protestante il cattolicismo degli Stuart non affatto come l’ultimo guizzo di una vecchia fiamma, ma come il propagarsi di un incendio. Carlo II, per esempio, era un uomo di intelletto forte, scettico e quasi irritabilmente umoristico, ed era del tutto certamente, e persino a malincuore, convinto del cattolicismo come filosofia. L’altra e più importante questione qui era la quasi spaventosa plutocrazia che si stava edificando in Francia come una Bastiglia. Era più logica, e per molti versi più eguale e persino più equa dell’oligarchia inglese, ma diventava davvero una tirannia in caso di ribellione o persino di resistenza. Non vi era nessuna delle rozze salvaguardie inglesi delle giurie e delle buone consuetudini dell’antica common law; vi era la lettre de cachet, inappellabile come la magia. Gli inglesi che sfidavano la legge stavano meglio dei francesi; un satirico francese avrebbe probabilmente ribattuto che erano gli inglesi che obbedivano alla legge a stare peggio dei francesi. L’ordinamento della vita quotidiana degli uomini spettava allo squire; ma egli era, semmai, più limitato là dove era magistrato. Era più forte come padrone del villaggio, ma in realtà più debole come agente del Re. Nel difendere questo stato di cose, in breve, i Whig non stavano certo difendendo la democrazia, ma in un senso reale stavano difendendo la libertà. Difendevano persino alcuni resti della libertà medievale, sebbene non i migliori; la giuria sebbene non la corporazione. Persino il feudalesimo aveva comportato un localismo non privo di elementi liberali, che perdurava nel sistema aristocratico. Coloro che amavano simili cose potevano ben allarmarsi per il Leviatano dello Stato, che per Hobbes era un unico mostro e per la Francia un unico uomo.
Quanto ai meri fatti, va detto ancora una volta che nella misura in cui il Puritanesimo fu puro, esso stava purtroppo tramontando. E il tipo stesso della transizione con cui tramontò si può ritrovare in quell’uomo straordinario che è popolarmente accreditato di averlo fatto prevalere. Oliver Cromwell è nella storia assai meno il capo del Puritanesimo che il domatore del Puritanesimo. Fu senza dubbio posseduto, certamente in gioventù, forse per tutta la vita, dalle passioni religiose piuttosto cupe della sua epoca; ma man mano che emerge alla ribalta, egli sta sempre più per il Positivismo degli inglesi in confronto al Puritanesimo degli scozzesi. È uno degli squire puritani; ma è costantemente più squire e meno puritano; ed egli indica il processo per cui la squirearchia divenne alla fine meramente pagana. Questa è la chiave della maggior parte di ciò che si loda e della maggior parte di ciò che si biasima in lui; la chiave della relativa sanità mentale, tolleranza e moderna efficienza di molti dei suoi allontanamenti; la chiave della relativa rozzezza, terrestrità, cinismo e mancanza di simpatia in molti altri. Egli era l’opposto di un idealista; e non lo si può senza assurdità additare come un ideale; ma egli fu, come la maggior parte degli squire, un tipo genuinamente inglese; non privo di spirito pubblico, certamente non privo di patriottismo. La sua presa del potere personale, che distrusse un governo impersonale e ideale, aveva qualcosa di inglese nella sua stessa irragionevolezza. L’atto di uccidere il Re, immagino, non fu primariamente suo, e certamente non caratteristicamente suo. Fu una concessione agli alti e disumani ideali del minuscolo gruppo dei veri puritani, con i quali dovette scendere a compromessi ma con i quali in seguito si scontrò. Fu la logica più che la crudeltà nell’atto a non essere cromwelliana; poiché egli trattò con bestiale crudeltà gli irlandesi nativi, che la nuova esclusività spirituale considerava bestie— o, come direbbe l’eufemismo moderno, aborigeni. Ma il suo temperamento pratico era più affine a un simile massacro umano su quelli che gli parevano i margini della civiltà, che a una sorta di sacrificio umano nel centro stesso e nel foro di essa; egli non è un regicida rappresentativo. In un certo senso quell’opera di boia era piuttosto al di sopra della sua testa. I veri regicidi lo fecero in una sorta di trance o di visione; ed egli non era turbato da visioni. Ma il vero scontro tra i lati religioso e razionale del movimento del Seicento giunse simbolicamente in quel giorno di incalzante tempesta a Dunbar, quando i deliranti predicatori scozzesi scavalcarono Leslie e lo costrinsero a scendere nella valle per essere la vittima del buon senso cromwelliano. Cromwell disse che Dio li aveva consegnati nelle sue mani; ma fu il loro stesso Dio a consegnarli, l’oscuro e innaturale Dio dei sogni calvinisti, opprimente come un incubo— e come esso passeggero.
It was the Whig rather than the Puritan that triumphed on that day, it was the Englishman with his aristocratic compromise; and even what followed Cromwell’s death, the Restoration, was an aristocratic compromise, and even a Whig compromise. The mob might cheer as for a mediaeval king; but the Protectorate and the Restoration were more of a piece than the mob understood. Even in the superficial things where there seemed to be a rescue it was ultimately a respite. Thus the Puritan régime had risen chiefly by one thing unknown to mediaevalism—militarism. Picked professional troops, harshly drilled but highly paid, were the new and alien instrument by which the Puritans became masters. These were disbanded and their return resisted by Tories and Whigs; but their return seemed always imminent, because it was in the spirit of the new stern world of the Thirty Years’ War. A discovery is an incurable disease; and it had been discovered that a crowd could he turned into an iron centipede, crushing larger and looser crowds. Similarly the remains of Christmas were rescued from the Puritans; but they had eventually to be rescued again by Dickens from the Utilitarians, and may yet have to be rescued by somebody from the vegetarians and teetotallers. The strange army passed and vanished almost like a Moslem invasion; but it had made the difference that armed valour and victory always make, if it was but a negative difference. It was the final break in our history; it was a breaker of many things, and perhaps of popular rebellion in our land. It is something of a verbal symbol that these men founded New England in America, for indeed they tried to found it here. By a paradox, there was something prehistoric in the very nakedness of their novelty. Even the old and savage things they invoked became more savage in becoming more new. In observing what is called their Jewish Sabbath, they would have had to stone the strictest Jew. And they (and indeed their age generally) turned witch-burning from an episode to an epidemic. The destroyers and the things destroyed disappeared together; but they remain as something nobler than the nibbling legalism of some of the Whig cynics who continued their work. They were above all things anti-historic, like the Futurists in Italy; and there was this unconscious greatness about them, that their very sacrilege was public and solemn like a sacrament; and they were ritualists even as iconoclasts. It was, properly considered, but a very secondary example of their strange and violent simplicity that one of them, before a mighty mob at Whitehall, cut off the anointed head of the sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For another, far away in the western shires, cut down the thorn of Glastonbury, from which had grown the whole story of Britain.
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Fu il Whig più che il Puritano a trionfare in quel giorno, fu l’inglese col suo compromesso aristocratico; e perfino ciò che seguì la morte di Cromwell, la Restaurazione, fu un compromesso aristocratico, e persino un compromesso whig. La folla poteva acclamare come per un re medievale; ma il Protettorato e la Restaurazione erano più d’un sol pezzo di quanto la folla capisse. Perfino nelle cose superficiali dove pareva esservi un riscatto si trattava in ultima analisi d’una tregua. Così il regime puritano era sorto principalmente per una cosa ignota al medievalismo: il militarismo. Truppe professionali scelte, addestrate con durezza ma pagate profumatamente, furono il nuovo e alieno strumento per cui i Puritani si fecero padroni. Furono sciolte e il loro ritorno fu osteggiato da Tories e Whigs; ma il loro ritorno pareva sempre imminente, perché era nello spirito del nuovo, arcigno mondo della Thirty Years’ War. Una scoperta è una malattia inguaribile; e si era scoperto che una folla poteva essere trasformata in un millepiedi di ferro, che schiacciava folle più grandi e più sciolte. Similmente i resti del Natale furono strappati ai Puritani; ma dovettero infine essere strappati di nuovo da Dickens agli Utilitaristi, e potrebbero ancora dover essere strappati da qualcuno ai vegetariani e agli astemi. Lo strano esercito passò e svanì quasi come un’invasione mussulmana; ma aveva fatto la differenza che il valore in armi e la vittoria fanno sempre, quand’anche fosse solo una differenza negativa. Fu la rottura finale nella nostra storia; fu il frangitore di molte cose, e forse della ribellione popolare nella nostra terra. È in certo modo un simbolo verbale che questi uomini fondassero la Nuova Inghilterra in America, poiché in verità cercarono di fondarla qui. Per un paradosso, vi era qualcosa di preistorico nella stessa nudità della loro novità. Persino le cose antiche e selvagge che invocavano diventavano più selvagge nel diventare più nuove. Nell’osservare quello che chiamavano il loro Sabato ebraico, avrebbero dovuto lapidare il più rigoroso degli ebrei. Ed essi (e invero la loro epoca in genere) trasformarono il rogo delle streghe da episodio in epidemia. I distruttori e le cose distrutte scomparvero insieme; ma restano come qualcosa di più nobile del legalismo rosicchiante di certi cinici whig che continuarono la loro opera. Erano soprattutto anti-storici, come i Futuristi in Italia; e vi era in loro questa inconsapevole grandezza, che il loro stesso sacrilegio era pubblico e solenne come un sacramento; ed erano ritualisti perfino da iconoclasti. Fu, a ben considerare, solo un esempio assai secondario della loro strana e violenta semplicità che uno di essi, davanti a una possente folla a Whitehall, mozzasse il capo unto dell’uomo sacramentale del Medioevo. Poiché un altro, lontano nelle contee occidentali, abbatté il biancospino di Glastonbury, da cui era cresciuta tutta la storia della Britannia.
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XIV
THE TRlUMPH OF THE WHIGS
WHETHER or no we believe that the Reformation really reformed, there can be little doubt that the Restoration did not really restore. Charles II was never in the old sense a King; he was a Leader of the Opposition to his own Ministers. Because he was a clever politician he kept his official post, and because his brother and successor was an incredibly stupid politician, he lost it; but the throne was already only one of the official posts. In some ways, indeed, Charles II was fitted for the more modern world then beginning; he was rather an eighteenth century than a seventeenth-century man. He was as witty as a character in a comedy; and it was already the comedy of Sheridan and not of Shakespeare. He was more modern yet when he enjoyed the pure experimentalism of the Royal Society, and bent eagerly over the toys that were to grow into the terrible engines of science. He and his brother, however, had two links with what was in England the losing side; and by the strain on these their dynastic cause was lost. The first, which lessened in its practical pressure as time passed, was, of course, the hatred felt for their religion. The second, which grew as it neared the next century, was their tie with the French Monarchy. We will deal with the religious quarrel before passing on to a much more irreligious age; but the truth about it is tangled and far from easy to trace.
The Tudors had begun to persecute the old religion before they had ceased to belong to it. That is one of the transitional complexities that can only be conveyed by such contradictions. A person of the type and time of Elizabeth would feel fundamentally, and even fiercely, that priests should be celibate, while racking and rending anybody caught talking to the only celibate priests. This mystery, which may be very variously explained, covered the Church of England, and in a great degree the people of England. Whether it be called the Catholic continuity of Anglicanism or merely the slow extirpation of Catholicism, there can be no doubt that a parson like Herrick, for instance, as late as the Civil War, was stuffed with “superstitions” which were Catholic in the extreme sense we should now call Continental. Yet many similar parsons had already a parallel and opposite passion, and thought of Continental Catholicism not even as the errant Church of Christ, but as the consistent Church of Antichrist. It is, therefore, very hard now to guess the proportion of Protestantism; but there is no doubt about its presence, especially its presence in centres of importance like London. By the time of Charles II, after the purge of the Puritan Terror, it had become something at least more inherent and human than the mere exclusiveness of Calvinist creeds or the craft of Tudor nobles. The Monmouth rebellion showed that it had a popular, though an insufficiently popular, backing. The “No Popery” force became the crowd if it never became the people. It was, perhaps, increasingly an urban crowd, and was subject to those epidemics of detailed delusion with which sensational journalism plays on the urban crowds of to-day. One of these scares and scoops (not to add the less technical name of lies) was the Popish Plot, a storm weathered warily by Charles II. Another was the Tale of the Warming Pan, or the bogus heir to the throne, a storm that finally swept away James II.
The last blow, however, could hardly have fallen but for one of those illogical but almost lovable localisms to which the English temperament is prone. The debate about the Church of England, then and now, differs from most debates in one vital point. It is not a debate about what an institution ought to do, or whether that institution ought to alter, but about what that institution actually is. One party, then as now, only cared for it because it was Catholic, and the other only cared for it because it was Protestant. Now, something had certainly happened to the English quite inconceivable to the Scotch or the Irish. Masses of common people loved the Church of England without having even decided what it was. It had a hold different indeed from that of the mediaeval Church, but also very different from the barren prestige of gentility which clung to it in the succeeding century. Macaulay, with a widely different purpose in mind, devotes some pages to proving that an Anglican clergyman was socially a mere upper servant in the seventeenth century. He is probably right; but he does not guess that this was but the degenerate continuity of the more democratic priesthood of the Middle Ages. A priest was not treated as a gentleman; but a peasant was treated as a priest. And in England then, as in Europe now, many entertained the fancy that priesthood was a higher thing than gentility. In short, the national church was then at least really national, in a fashion that was emotionally vivid though intellectually vague. When, therefore, James II seemed to menace this practising communion, he aroused something at least more popular than the mere priggishness of the Whig lords. To this must be added a fact generally forgotten. I mean the fact that the influence then called Popish was then in a real sense regarded as revolutionary. The Jesuit seemed to the English not merely a conspirator but a sort of anarchist. There is something appalling about abstract speculations to many Englishmen; and the abstract speculations of Jesuits like Suarez dealt with extreme democracy and things undreamed of here. The last Stuart proposals for toleration seemed thus to many as vast and empty as atheism. The only seventeenth-century Englishmen who had something of this transcendental abstraction were the Quakers, and the cosy English compromise shuddered when the two things shook hands. For it was something much more than a Stuart intrigue which made these philosophical extremes meet, merely because they were philosophical; and which brought the weary but humorous mind of Charles II into alliance with the subtle and detached spirit of William Penn.
XIV
IL TRIONFO DEI WHIG
CHE crediamo o no che la Riforma abbia davvero riformato, vi può essere poco dubbio che la Restaurazione non abbia davvero restaurato. Carlo II non fu mai nel vecchio senso un Re; egli fu un Capo dell’Opposizione ai suoi stessi Ministri. Poiché era un abile politico mantenne la sua carica ufficiale, e poiché suo fratello e successore fu un politico incredibilmente sciocco, la perse; ma il trono era già soltanto una delle cariche ufficiali. Per certi versi, in verità, Carlo II era fatto per il mondo più moderno che allora cominciava; egli era piuttosto un uomo del Settecento che del Seicento. Era arguto come un personaggio in una commedia; ed era già la commedia di Sheridan e non di Shakespeare. Era ancora più moderno quando si dilettava del puro sperimentalismo della Royal Society, e si chinava avidamente sui giocattoli che erano destinati a crescere fino a divenire i terribili motori della scienza. Egli e suo fratello, tuttavia, avevano due legami con quella che in Inghilterra era la parte perdente; e per la tensione su questi la loro causa dinastica fu perduta. Il primo, che diminuiva nella sua pressione pratica col passare del tempo, era, naturalmente, l’odio provato per la loro religione. Il secondo, che cresceva man mano che si avvicinava il secolo successivo, era il loro legame con la Monarchia francese. Tratteremo della disputa religiosa prima di passare a un’epoca assai più irreligiosa; ma la verità al riguardo è intricata e tutt’altro che facile da rintracciare.
I Tudor avevano cominciato a perseguitare l’antica religione prima di aver cessato di appartenervi. Questa è una delle complessità di transizione che possono essere trasmesse solo con simili contraddizioni. Una persona del tipo e del tempo di Elisabetta sentiva fondamentalmente, e persino ferocemente, che i preti dovessero essere celibi, mentre torturava e squartava chiunque fosse colto a parlare con gli unici preti celibi. Questo mistero, che può essere spiegato in modi assai vari, copriva la Chiesa d’Inghilterra, e in gran misura il popolo d’Inghilterra. Che lo si chiami la continuità cattolica dell’anglicanesimo o meramente la lenta estirpazione del cattolicismo, non vi può essere dubbio che un parroco come Herrick, per esempio, ancora al tempo della Guerra Civile, fosse imbottito di “superstizioni” che erano cattoliche nel senso estremo che oggi chiameremmo continentale. Eppure molti parroci simili avevano già una passione parallela e opposta, e pensavano al cattolicismo continentale non nemmeno come alla errante Chiesa di Cristo, ma come alla coerente Chiesa dell’Anticristo. È, dunque, assai difficile ora indovinare la proporzione del protestantesimo; ma non vi è dubbio sulla sua presenza, specialmente sulla sua presenza in centri di rilievo come Londra. Al tempo di Carlo II, dopo l’epurazione del Terrore puritano, esso era divenuto qualcosa almeno di più insito e umano della mera esclusività dei credi calvinisti o dell’astuzia dei nobili Tudor. La ribellione di Monmouth mostrò che aveva un sostegno popolare, sebbene insufficientemente popolare. La forza del “No Popery” divenne la folla anche se non divenne mai il popolo. Era, forse, sempre più una folla urbana, ed era soggetta a quelle epidemie di dettagliata illusione con cui il giornalismo sensazionalistico gioca sulle folle urbane di oggi. Uno di questi allarmi e scoop (per non aggiungere il nome meno tecnico di menzogne) fu il Complotto Papista, una tempesta affrontata con prudenza da Carlo II. Un altro fu la Storia dello Scaldaletto, ovvero il falso erede al trono, una tempesta che infine spazzò via Giacomo II.
L’ultimo colpo, tuttavia, non avrebbe potuto cadere se non fosse stato per uno di quei localismi illogici ma quasi amabili a cui il temperamento inglese è incline. Il dibattito sulla Chiesa d’Inghilterra, allora e oggi, differisce dalla maggior parte dei dibattiti in un punto vitale. Non è un dibattito su ciò che un’istituzione dovrebbe fare, o se quell’istituzione dovrebbe mutare, ma su ciò che quell’istituzione effettivamente è. Un partito, allora come oggi, si curava di essa soltanto perché era cattolica, e l’altro se ne curava soltanto perché era protestante. Ora, qualcosa era certamente accaduto agli inglesi del tutto inconcepibile per gli scozzesi o gli irlandesi. Masse di gente comune amavano la Chiesa d’Inghilterra senza aver nemmeno deciso cosa fosse. Aveva una presa ben diversa da quella della Chiesa medievale, ma anche assai diversa dallo sterile prestigio di nobiltà che le si aggrappò nel secolo seguente. Macaulay, con uno scopo assai diverso in mente, dedica alcune pagine a dimostrare che un ecclesiastico anglicano era socialmente un mero servitore di rango nel Seicento. Egli ha probabilmente ragione; ma non intuisce che questa non era che la degenerata continuità del sacerdozio più democratico del Medioevo. Un prete non era trattato come un gentiluomo; ma un contadino era trattato come un prete. E in Inghilterra allora, come in Europa oggi, molti coltivavano la fantasia che il sacerdozio fosse cosa più alta della nobiltà. In breve, la chiesa nazionale era allora almeno davvero nazionale, in un modo che era emotivamente vivido benché intellettualmente vago. Quando, dunque, Giacomo II parve minacciare questa comunione praticante, egli suscitò qualcosa almeno di più popolare della mera saccenteria dei lord Whig. A ciò si deve aggiungere un fatto generalmente dimenticato. Intendo il fatto che l’influenza allora chiamata papista era allora in un senso reale considerata rivoluzionaria. Il gesuita sembrava agli inglesi non semplicemente un cospiratore ma una sorta di anarchico. C’è qualcosa di spaventoso nelle speculazioni astratte per molti inglesi; e le speculazioni astratte di gesuiti come Suarez trattavano di estrema democrazia e di cose qui insognate. Le ultime proposte di tolleranza degli Stuart parvero così a molti tanto vaste e vuote quanto l’ateismo. Gli unici inglesi del Seicento che avevano qualcosa di questa trascendentale astrazione erano i Quaccheri, e il comodo compromesso inglese rabbrividì quando le due cose si strinsero la mano. Poiché fu qualcosa di assai più che un intrigo degli Stuart a far incontrare questi estremi filosofici, semplicemente perché erano filosofici; e a portare la mente stanca ma umoristica di Carlo II in alleanza con lo spirito sottile e distaccato di William Penn.
Much of England, then, was really alarmed at the Stuart scheme of toleration, sincere or insincere, because it seemed theoretical and therefore fanciful. It was in advance of its age or (to use a more intelligent language) too thin and ethereal for its atmosphere. And to this affection for the actual in the English moderates must be added (in what proportion we know not) a persecuting hatred of Popery almost maniacal but quite sincere. The State had long, as we have seen, been turned to an engine of torture against priests and the friends of priests. Men talk of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; but the English persecutors never had so tolerant an edict to revoke. But at least by this time the English, like the French, persecutors were oppressing a minority. Unfortunately there was another province of government in which they were still more madly persecuting the majority. For it was here that came to its climax and took on its terrific character that lingering crime that was called the government of Ireland. It would take too long to detail the close network of unnatural laws by which that country was covered till towards the end of the eighteenth century; it is enough to say here that the whole attitude to the Irish was tragically typified, and tied up with our expulsion of the Stuarts, in one of those acts that are remembered for ever. James II, fleeing from the opinion of London, perhaps of England, eventually found refuge in Ireland, which took arms in his favour. The Prince of Orange, whom the aristocracy had summoned to the throne, landed in that country with an English and Dutch army, won the Battle of the Boyne, but saw his army successfully arrested before Limerick by the military genius of Patrick Sarsfield. The check was so complete that peace could only be restored by promising complete religious liberty to the Irish, in return for the surrender of Limerick. The new English Government occupied the town and immediately broke the promise. It is not a matter on which there is much more to be said. It was a tragic necessity that the Irish should remember it; but it was far more tragic that the English forgot it. For he who has forgotten his sin is repeating it incessantly for ever.
But here again the Stuart position was much more vulnerable on the side of secular policy, and especially of foreign policy. The aristocrats to whom power passed finally at the Revolution were already ceasing to have any supernatural faith in Protestantism as against Catholicism; but they had a very natural faith in England as against France; and even, in a certain sense, in English institutions as against French institutions. And just as these men, the most unmediaeval of mankind, could yet boast about some mediaeval liberties, Magna Carta, the Parliament and the Jury, so they could appeal to a true mediaeval legend in the matter of a war with France. A typical eighteenth-century oligarch like Horace Walpole could complain that the cicerone in an old church troubled him with traces of an irrelevant person named St. Somebody, when he was looking for the remains of John of Gaunt. He could say it with all the naïveté of scepticism, and never dream how far away from John of Gaunt he was really wandering in saying so. But though their notion of mediaeval history was a mere masquerade ball, it was one in which men fighting the French could still, in an ornamental way, put on the armour of the Black Prince or the crown of Henry of Monmouth. In this matter, in short, it is probable enough that the aristocrats were popular as patriots will always be popular. It is true that the last Stuarts were themselves far from unpatriotic; and James II in particular may well be called the founder of the British Navy. But their sympathies were with France, among other foreign countries; they took refuge in France, the elder before and the younger after his period of rule; and France aided the later Jacobite efforts to restore their line. And for the new England, especially the new English nobility, France was the enemy.
The transformation through which the external relations of England passed at the end of the seventeenth century is symbolized by two very separate and definite steps; the first the accession of a Dutch king and the second the accession of a German king. In the first were present all the features that can partially make an unnatural thing natural. In the second we have the condition in which even those effecting it can hardly call it natural, but only call it necessary. William of Orange was like a gun dragged into the breach of a wall; a foreign gun indeed, and one fired in a quarrel more foreign than English, but still a quarrel in which the English, and especially the English aristocrats, could play a great part. George of Hanover was simply something stuffed into a hole in the wall by English aristocrats, who practically admitted that they were simply stopping it with rubbish. In many ways William, cynical as he was, carried on the legend of the greater and grimmer Puritanism. He was in private conviction a Calvinist; and nobody knew or cared what George was except that he was not a Catholic. He was at home the partly republican magistrate of what had once been a purely republican experiment, and among the cleaner if colder ideals of the seventeenth century. George was when he was at home pretty much what the King of the Cannibal Islands was when he was at home—a savage personal ruler scarcely logical enough to be called a despot. William was a man of acute if narrow intelligence; George was a man of no intelligence. Above all, touching the immediate effect produced, William was married to a Stuart, and ascended the throne hand-in-hand with a Stuart; he was a familiar figure, and already a part of our royal family. With George there entered England something that had scarcely been seen there before; something hardly mentioned in mediaeval or Renascence writing, except as one mentions a Hottentot— the barbarian from beyond the Rhine.
Gran parte dell’Inghilterra, dunque, era davvero allarmata dallo schema di tolleranza degli Stuart, sincero o non sincero, perché sembrava teorico e quindi fantasioso. Era in anticipo sui tempi o (per usare un linguaggio più intelligente) troppo sottile ed etereo per la sua atmosfera. E a questo affetto per l’effettivo nei moderati inglesi deve essere aggiunto (in quale proporzione non lo sappiamo) un odio persecutorio del Papato quasi maniacale ma assai sincero. Lo Stato era da tempo, come abbiamo visto, stato trasformato in una macchina di tortura contro i preti e gli amici dei preti. Si parla della Revoca dell’Editto di Nantes; ma i persecutori inglesi non avevano mai avuto un editto così tollerante da revocare. Ma almeno a questo tempo gli inglesi, come i francesi, erano oppressori di una minoranza. Sfortunatamente c’era un’altra provincia del governo in cui perseguitavano ancora più follemente la maggioranza. Perché fu qui che giunse al suo culmine e assunse il suo terrificante carattere quel crimine persistente chiamato il governo dell’Irlanda. Sarebbe troppo lungo dettagliare la fitta rete di leggi innaturali con cui quel paese fu coperto fino verso la fine del diciottesimo secolo; qui basta dire che l’intero atteggiamento verso gli irlandesi fu tragicamente tipificato, e collegato alla nostra espulsione degli Stuart, in uno di quegli atti che sono ricordati per sempre. Giacomo II, fuggendo dall’opinione di Londra, forse dell’Inghilterra, alla fine trovò rifugio in Irlanda, che prese le armi a suo favore. Il Principe d’Orange, che l’aristocrazia aveva convocato sul trono, sbarcò in quel paese con un esercito inglese e olandese, vinse la Battaglia del Boyne, ma vide il suo esercito fermarsi con successo davanti a Limerick dal genio militare di Patrick Sarsfield. Lo stop fu così completo che la pace poteva essere ripristinata solo promettendo completa libertà religiosa agli irlandesi, in cambio della resa di Limerick. Il nuovo governo inglese occupò la città e immediatamente ruppe la promessa. Non c’è molto altro da dire al riguardo. Fu una tragica necessità che gli irlandesi se lo ricordassero; ma fu assai più tragico che gli inglesi lo dimenticarono. Perché chi ha dimenticato il suo peccato lo ripete incessantemente per sempre.
Ma anche qui la posizione degli Stuart era molto più vulnerabile sul lato della politica secolare, e in particolare della politica estera. Gli aristocratici ai quali il potere passò infine alla Rivoluzione stavano già smettendo di avere una sovrannaturale fede nel protestantesimo contro il cattolicismo; ma avevano una fede molto naturale nell’Inghilterra contro la Francia; e anche, in un certo senso, nelle istituzioni inglesi contro le istituzioni francesi. E proprio come questi uomini, i più non medievali dell’umanità, potevano ancora vantarsi di alcune libertà medievali, Magna Carta, il Parlamento e la Giuria, così potevano appellarsi a una vera leggenda medievale nella questione della guerra con la Francia. Un tipico oligarca del diciottesimo secolo come Horace Walpole poteva lamentarsi che il cicerone in una vecchia chiesa lo disturbasse con tracce di una persona irrilevante di nome San Qualcuno, quando stava cercando i resti di Giovanni di Ghent. Poteva dirlo con tutta la naïveté dello scetticismo, e non sognare mai quanto lontano da Giovanni di Ghent si stesse realmente allontanando dicendo così. Ma sebbene la loro nozione di storia medievale fosse un semplice ballo in maschera, era uno in cui gli uomini che combattevano contro i francesi potevano ancora, in modo ornamentale, indossare l’armatura del Principe Nero o la corona di Enrico di Monmouth. In questa questione, insomma, è abbastanza probabile che gli aristocratici fossero popolari come i patrioti saranno sempre popolari. È vero che gli ultimi Stuart erano ben lungi dall’essere impatriottici; e Giacomo II in particolare può ben essere chiamato il fondatore della Marina Britannica. Ma le loro simpatie erano con la Francia, tra gli altri paesi stranieri; si rifugiarono in Francia, il maggiore prima e il minore dopo il suo periodo di regno; e la Francia aiutò i successivi sforzi giacobiti per restaurare la loro linea. E per la nuova Inghilterra, specialmente la nuova nobiltà inglese, la Francia era il nemico.
La trasformazione attraverso cui passarono le relazioni esterne dell’Inghilterra alla fine del diciassettesimo secolo è simboleggiata da due passi molto distinti e definitivi; il primo l’ascesa di un re olandese e il secondo l’ascesa di un re tedesco. Nel primo erano presenti tutte le caratteristiche che possono parzialmente rendere naturale una cosa innaturale. Nel secondo abbiamo la condizione in cui anche coloro che la effettuano a malapena possono chiamarla naturale, ma solo necessaria. Guglielmo d’Orange era come un cannone trainato nella breccia di un muro; un cannone straniero, certo, e uno sparato in una disputa più straniera che inglese, ma pur sempre una disputa in cui gli inglesi, e specialmente gli aristocratici inglesi, potevano giocare un ruolo importante. Giorgio di Hannover era semplicemente qualcosa infilato in un buco nel muro dagli aristocratici inglesi, che praticamente ammettevano di starlo semplicemente tappando con la spazzatura. In molti modi Guglielmo, cinico com’era, portò avanti la leggenda del Puritanesimo più grande e più cupo. Era per convinzione privata un calvinista; e nessuno sapeva o gli importava di cosa fosse Giorgio se non che non era cattolico. Era a casa il magistrato in parte repubblicano di quello che una volta era stato un esperimento puramente repubblicano, e tra gli ideali più puliti sebbene più freddi del diciassettesimo secolo. Giorgio era quando era a casa pressappoco ciò che il Re delle Isole Cannibali era quando era a casa — un sovrano personale selvaggio, appena abbastanza logico da essere chiamato despota. Guglielmo era un uomo di intelligenza acuta sebbene ristretta; Giorgio era un uomo senza intelligenza. Soprattutto per quanto riguarda l’effetto immediato prodotto, Guglielmo era sposato con una Stuart, e salì al trono mano nella mano con una Stuart; era una figura familiare, e già parte della nostra famiglia reale. Con Giorgio entrò in Inghilterra qualcosa che vi era stato appena visto prima; qualcosa a malapena menzionato nelle scritture medievali o rinascimentali, se non come si menziona un Hottentotto — il barbaro oltre il Reno.
The reign of Queen Anne, which covers the period between these two foreign kings, is therefore the true time of transition. It is the bridge between the time when the aristocrats were at least weak enough to call in a strong man to help them, and the time when they were strong enough deliberately to call in a weak man who would allow them to help themselves. To symbolize is always to simplify, and to simplify too much; but the whole may be well symbolized as the struggle of two great figures, both gentlemen and men of genius, both courageous and clear about their own aims, and in everything else a violent contrast at every point. One of them was Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke; the other was John Churchill, the famous and infamous Duke of Marlborough. The story of Churchill is primarily the story of the Revolution and how it succeeded; the story of Bolingbroke is the story of the Counter-Revolution and how it failed.
Churchill is a type of the extraordinary time in this, that he combines the presence of glory with the absence of honour. When the new aristocracy had become normal to the nation, in the next few generations, it produced personal types not only of aristocracy but of chivalry. The Revolution reduced us to a country wholly governed by gentlemen; the popular universities and schools of the Middle Ages, like their guilds and abbeys, had been seized and turned into what they are—factories of gentlemen, when they are not merely factories of snobs. It is hard now to realize that what we call the Public Schools were once undoubtedly public. By the Revolution they were already becoming as private as they are now. But at least in the eighteenth century there were great gentlemen in the generous, perhaps too generous, sense now given to the title. Types not merely honest, but rash and romantic in their honesty, remain in the record with the names of Nelson or of Fox. We have already seen that the later reformers defaced from fanaticism the churches which the first reformers had defaced simply from avarice. Rather in the same way the eighteenth-century Whigs often praised, in a spirit of pure magnanimity, what the seventeenth-century Whigs had done in a spirit of pure meanness. How mean was that meanness can only be estimated by realizing that a great military hero had not even the ordinary military virtues of loyalty to his flag or obedience to his superior officers, that he picked his way through campaigns that have made him immortal with the watchful spirit of a thieving camp follower. When William landed at Torbay on the invitation of the other Whig nobles, Churchill, as if to add something ideal to his imitation of Iscariot, went to James with wanton professions of love and loyalty, went forth in arms as if to defend the country from invasion, and then calmly handed the army over to the invader. To the finish of this work of art but few could aspire, but in their degree all the politicians of the Revolution were upon this ethical pattern. While they surrounded the throne of James, there was scarcely one of them who was not in correspondence with William. When they afterwards surrounded the throne of William, there was not one of them who was not still in correspondence with James. It was such men who defeated Irish Jacobitism by the treason of Limerick; it was such men who defeated Scotch Jacobitism by the treason of Glencoe.
Thus the strange yet splendid story of eighteenth-century England is one of greatness founded on smallness, a pyramid standing on a point. Or, to vary the metaphor, the new mercantile oligarchy might be symbolized even in the externals of its great sister, the mercantile oligarchy of Venice. The solidity was all in the superstructure; the fluctuation had been all in the foundations. The great temple of Chatham and Warren Hastings was reared in its origins on things as unstable as water and as fugitive as foam. It is only a fancy, of course, to connect the unstable element with something restless and even shifty in the lords of the sea. But there was certainly in the genesis, if not in the later generations of our mercantile aristocracy, a thing only too mercantile; something which had also been urged against a yet older example of that polity, something called Punica fides. The great Royalist Strafford, going disillusioned to death, had said, “Put not your trust in princes.” The great Royalist Bolingbroke may well be said to have retorted, “And least of all in merchant princes.”
Bolingbroke stands for a whole body of conviction which bulked very big in English history, but which with the recent winding of the course of history has gone out of sight. Yet without grasping it we cannot understand our past, nor, I will add, our future. Curiously enough, the best English books of the eighteenth century are crammed with it, yet modern culture cannot see it when it is there. Dr. Johnson is full of it; it is what he meant when he denounced minority rule in Ireland, as well as when he said that the devil was the first Whig. Goldsmith is full of it; it is the whole point of that fine poem “The Deserted Village,” and is set out theoretically with great lucidity and spirit in “The Vicar of Wakefield.” Swift is full of it; and found in it an intellectual brotherhood-in-arms with Bolingbroke himself. In the time of Queen Anne it was probably the opinion of the majority of people in England. But it was not only in Ireland that the minority had begun to rule.
This conviction, as brilliantly expounded by Bolingbroke, had many aspects; perhaps the most practical was the point that one of the virtues of a despot is distance. It is “the little tyrant of the fields” that poisons human life. The thesis involved the truism that a good king is not only a good thing, but perhaps the best thing. But it also involved the paradox that even a bad king is a good king, for his oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure on the populace. If he is a tyrant he chiefly tortures the torturers; and though Nero’s murder of his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his soul, it was no great loss to his empire. Bolingbroke had thus a wholly rationalistic theory of Jacobitism. He was, in other respects, a fine and typical eighteenth-century intellect, a free-thinking Deist, a clear and classic writer of English. But he was also a man of adventurous spirit and splendid political courage, and he made one last throw for the Stuarts. He was defeated by the great Whig nobles who formed the committee of the new regime of the gentry. And considering who it was who defeated it, it is almost unnecessary to say that it was defeated by a trick.
Il regno della Regina Anna, che copre il periodo tra questi due re stranieri, è dunque il vero tempo di transizione. È il ponte tra il tempo in cui gli aristocratici erano almeno abbastanza deboli da chiamare un uomo forte ad aiutarli, e il tempo in cui erano abbastanza forti da chiamare deliberatamente un uomo debole che avrebbe permesso loro di aiutare se stessi. Simboleggiare è sempre semplificare, e semplificare troppo; ma il tutto può ben essere simboleggiato come la lotta di due grandi figure, entrambi gentiluomini e uomini di genio, entrambi coraggiosi e chiari riguardo ai propri fini, e in ogni altra cosa un violento contrasto in ogni punto. Uno di essi era Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke; l’altro era John Churchill, il famoso e famigerato Duca di Marlborough. La storia di Churchill è primariamente la storia della Rivoluzione e di come essa riuscì; la storia di Bolingbroke è la storia della Controrivoluzione e di come essa fallì.
Churchill è un tipo del tempo straordinario in questo, che egli combina la presenza della gloria con l’assenza dell’onore. Quando la nuova aristocrazia fu divenuta normale per la nazione, nelle poche generazioni successive, essa produsse tipi personali non solo di aristocrazia ma di cavalleria. La Rivoluzione ci ridusse a un paese interamente governato da gentiluomini; le università e le scuole popolari del Medioevo, come le loro corporazioni e abbazie, erano state confiscate e trasformate in ciò che sono—fabbriche di gentiluomini, quando non sono meramente fabbriche di snob. È difficile ora rendersi conto che ciò che chiamiamo Public Schools furono un tempo indubbiamente pubbliche. Al tempo della Rivoluzione stavano già divenendo private come lo sono ora. Ma almeno nel Settecento c’erano grandi gentiluomini nel senso generoso, forse troppo generoso, ora dato al titolo. Tipi non solo onesti, ma avventati e romantici nella loro onestà, rimangono negli annali con i nomi di Nelson o di Fox. Abbiamo già visto che i riformatori posteriori sfregiarono per fanatismo le chiese che i primi riformatori avevano sfregiato semplicemente per avarizia. Piuttosto allo stesso modo i Whig del Settecento lodavano spesso, in uno spirito di pura magnanimità, ciò che i Whig del Seicento avevano fatto in uno spirito di pura meschinità. Quanto meschina fosse quella meschinità può essere valutato solo rendendosi conto che un grande eroe militare non aveva nemmeno le ordinarie virtù militari di lealtà alla sua bandiera o di obbedienza ai suoi ufficiali superiori, che egli si aprì la strada attraverso campagne che lo hanno reso immortale con lo spirito vigile di un ladresco vivandiere. Quando Guglielmo sbarcò a Torbay su invito degli altri nobili Whig, Churchill, come per aggiungere qualcosa di ideale alla sua imitazione dell’Iscariota, andò da Giacomo con sfrenate professioni di amore e lealtà, uscì in armi come per difendere il paese dall’invasione, e poi consegnò tranquillamente l’esercito all’invasore. Al culmine di quest’opera d’arte pochi potevano aspirare, ma nel loro grado tutti i politici della Rivoluzione erano su questo schema etico. Mentre circondavano il trono di Giacomo, non ce n’era quasi uno che non fosse in corrispondenza con Guglielmo. Quando in seguito circondarono il trono di Guglielmo, non ce n’era uno che non fosse ancora in corrispondenza con Giacomo. Furono tali uomini a sconfiggere il giacobitismo irlandese con il tradimento di Limerick; furono tali uomini a sconfiggere il giacobitismo scozzese con il tradimento di Glencoe.
Così la strana ma splendida storia dell’Inghilterra del Settecento è una storia di grandezza fondata sulla piccolezza, una piramide poggiata su una punta. O, per variare la metafora, la nuova oligarchia mercantile potrebbe essere simboleggiata anche negli aspetti esteriori della sua grande sorella, l’oligarchia mercantile di Venezia. La solidità era tutta nella sovrastruttura; la fluttuazione era stata tutta nelle fondamenta. Il grande tempio di Chatham e Warren Hastings fu eretto nelle sue origini su cose instabili come l’acqua e fuggevoli come la schiuma. È soltanto una fantasia, naturalmente, collegare l’elemento instabile con qualcosa di irrequieto e persino sfuggente nei signori del mare. Ma vi era certamente nella genesi, se non nelle generazioni successive della nostra aristocrazia mercantile, una cosa fin troppo mercantile; qualcosa che era stato anche imputato a un esempio ancora più antico di quella politica, qualcosa chiamato Punica fides. Il grande realista Strafford, andando disilluso alla morte, aveva detto: “Non riponete la vostra fiducia nei principi.” Del grande realista Bolingbroke si può ben dire che ribatté: “E meno di tutto nei principi mercanti.”
Bolingbroke sta per un intero corpo di convinzioni che occupava un posto assai grande nella storia inglese, ma che con il recente sinuoso corso della storia è scomparso dalla vista. Eppure senza afferrarlo non possiamo comprendere il nostro passato, né, aggiungerò, il nostro futuro. Cosa abbastanza curiosa, i migliori libri inglesi del Settecento ne sono zeppi, eppure la cultura moderna non riesce a vederlo quando è lì. Il dottor Johnson ne è pieno; è ciò che egli intendeva quando denunciava il dominio della minoranza in Irlanda, così come quando disse che il diavolo fu il primo Whig. Goldsmith ne è pieno; è tutto il senso di quel bel poema “Il villaggio abbandonato”, ed è esposto teoricamente con grande lucidità e spirito ne “Il vicario di Wakefield”. Swift ne è pieno; e vi trovò una fratellanza d’armi intellettuale con lo stesso Bolingbroke. Al tempo della Regina Anna esso era probabilmente l’opinione della maggioranza della gente in Inghilterra. Ma non era solo in Irlanda che la minoranza aveva cominciato a dominare.
Questa convinzione, come brillantemente esposta da Bolingbroke, aveva molti aspetti; forse il più pratico era il punto che una delle virtù di un despota è la distanza. È “il piccolo tiranno dei campi” che avvelena la vita umana. La tesi implicava il truismo che un buon re non è soltanto una buona cosa, ma forse la migliore cosa. Ma implicava anche il paradosso che persino un cattivo re è un buon re, perché la sua oppressione indebolisce la nobiltà e allevia la pressione sul popolo minuto. Se è un tiranno egli tortura principalmente i torturatori; e sebbene l’assassinio di Nerone della propria madre fosse forse difficilmente un guadagno per la sua anima, non fu una grande perdita per il suo impero. Bolingbroke aveva così una teoria del giacobitismo del tutto razionalistica. Egli era, sotto altri aspetti, un intelletto fine e tipico del Settecento, un deista libero pensatore, uno scrittore chiaro e classico d’inglese. Ma era anche un uomo di spirito avventuroso e splendido coraggio politico, e fece un ultimo tentativo per gli Stuart. Fu sconfitto dai grandi nobili Whig che formavano il comitato del nuovo regime della gentry. E considerando chi fu a sconfiggerlo, è quasi superfluo dire che fu sconfitto con un inganno.
The small German prince ascended the throne, or rather was hoisted into it like a dummy, and the great English Royalist went into exile. Twenty years afterwards he reappears and reasserts his living and logical faith in a popular monarchy. But it is typical of the whole detachment and distinction of his mind that for this abstract ideal he was willing to strengthen the heir of the king whom he had tried to exclude. He was always a Royalist, but never a Jacobite. What he cared for was not a royal family but a royal office. He celebrated it in his great book “The Patriot King,” written in exile; and when he thought that George’s great-grandson was enough of a patriot, he only wished that he might be more of a king. He made in his old age yet another attempt, with such unpromising instruments as George III and Lord Bute; and when these broke in his hand he died with all the dignity of the sed victa Catoni. The great commercial aristocracy grew on to its full stature. But if we wish to realize the good and ill of its growth, there is no better summary than this section from the first to the last of the foiled coup d’état of Bolingbroke. In the first his policy made peace with France, and broke the connection with Austria. In the second his policy again made peace with France, and broke the connection with Prussia. For in that interval the seed of the money-lending squires of Brandenburg had waxed mighty, and had already become that prodigy which has become so enormous a problem in Europe. By the end of this epoch Chatham, who incarnated and even created, at least in a representative sense, all that we call the British Empire, was at the height of his own and his country’s glory. He summarized the new England of the Revolution in everything, especially in everything in which that movement seems to many to be intrinsically contradictory and yet was most corporately consistent. Thus he was a Whig, and even in some ways what we should call a Liberal, like his son after him; but he was also an Imperialist and what we should call a Jingo; and the Whig party was consistently the Jingo party. He was an aristocrat, in the sense that all our public men were then aristocrats; but he was very emphatically what may be called a commercialist—one might almost say Carthaginian. In this connection he has the characteristic which perhaps humanized but was not allowed to hamper the aristocratic plan; I mean that he could use the middle classes. It was a young soldier of middle rank, James Wolfe, who fell gloriously driving the French out of Quebec; it was a young clerk of the East India Company, Robert Clive, who threw open to the English the golden gates of India. But it was precisely one of the strong points of this eighteenth-century aristocracy that it wielded without friction the wealthier bourgeoisie; it was not there that the social cleavage was to come. He was an eloquent parliamentary orator, and though Parliament was as narrow as a senate, it was one of great senators. The very word recalls the roll of those noble Roman phrases they often used, which we are right in calling classic, but wrong in calling cold. In some ways nothing could be further from all this fine if florid scholarship, all this princely and patrician geniality, all this air of freedom and adventure on the sea, than the little inland state of the stingy drill-sergeants of Potsdam, hammering mere savages into mere soldiers. And yet the great chief of these was in some ways like a shadow of Chatham flung across the world— the sort of shadow that is at once an enlargement and a caricature. The English lords, whose paganism was ennobled by patriotism, saw here something drawn out long and thin out of their own theories. What was paganism in Chatham was atheism in Frederick the Great. And what was in the first patriotism was in the second something with no name but Prussianism. The cannibal theory of a commonwealth, that it can of its nature eat other commonwealths, had entered Christendom. Its autocracy and our own aristocracy drew indirectly nearer together, and seemed for a time to be wedded; but not before the great Bolingbroke had made a dying gesture, as if to forbid the banns.
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Il piccolo principe tedesco salì al trono, o piuttosto vi fu issato come un fantoccio, e il grande realista inglese andò in esilio. Vent’anni dopo egli riappare e riafferma la sua viva e logica fede in una monarchia popolare. Ma è tipico di tutto il distacco e la distinzione della sua mente che per questo ideale astratto egli fosse disposto a rafforzare l’erede del re che aveva cercato di escludere. Egli fu sempre un realista, ma mai un giacobita. Ciò a cui teneva non era una famiglia reale ma una carica reale. La celebrò nel suo grande libro “Il Re Patriota”, scritto in esilio; e quando ritenne che il pronipote di Giorgio fosse abbastanza patriota, desiderò soltanto che egli fosse più re. Fece in vecchiaia un ulteriore tentativo, con strumenti così poco promettenti come Giorgio III e Lord Bute; e quando questi gli si spezzarono in mano egli morì con tutta la dignità del sed victa Catoni. La grande aristocrazia commerciale crebbe fino alla sua piena statura. Ma se vogliamo renderci conto del bene e del male della sua crescita, non c’è sommario migliore di questa sezione dal primo all’ultimo fallito colpo di stato di Bolingbroke. Nel primo la sua politica fece la pace con la Francia, e ruppe il legame con l’Austria. Nel secondo la sua politica di nuovo fece la pace con la Francia, e ruppe il legame con la Prussia. Poiché in quell’intervallo il seme degli squire usurai del Brandeburgo si era fatto potente, ed era già divenuto quel prodigio che è divenuto un problema così enorme in Europa. Alla fine di questa epoca Chatham, che incarnava e persino creava, almeno in senso rappresentativo, tutto ciò che chiamiamo l’Impero Britannico, era all’apice della propria gloria e di quella del suo paese. Egli riassumeva la nuova Inghilterra della Rivoluzione in ogni cosa, specialmente in ogni cosa in cui quel movimento sembra a molti essere intrinsecamente contraddittorio eppure era più corporativamente coerente. Così egli era un Whig, e persino per certi versi ciò che chiameremmo un Liberale, come suo figlio dopo di lui; ma era anche un Imperialista e ciò che chiameremmo un Jingo; e il partito Whig era coerentemente il partito Jingo. Egli era un aristocratico, nel senso che tutti i nostri uomini pubblici erano allora aristocratici; ma era assai enfaticamente ciò che si può chiamare un commercialista—si potrebbe quasi dire cartaginese. A questo proposito egli ha la caratteristica che forse umanizzò ma non fu lasciata intralciare il piano aristocratico; intendo che egli poteva usare le classi medie. Fu un giovane soldato di medio rango, James Wolfe, a cadere gloriosamente cacciando i francesi dal Quebec; fu un giovane impiegato della Compagnia delle Indie Orientali, Robert Clive, a spalancare agli inglesi le porte dorate dell’India. Ma fu precisamente uno dei punti di forza di questa aristocrazia del Settecento che essa maneggiava senza attrito la borghesia più ricca; non fu lì che sarebbe venuta la frattura sociale. Egli era un eloquente oratore parlamentare, e sebbene il Parlamento fosse angusto come un senato, era uno di grandi senatori. La parola stessa richiama il rullo di quelle nobili frasi romane che essi usavano spesso, che abbiamo ragione di chiamare classiche, ma torto di chiamare fredde. Per certi versi nulla poteva essere più lontano da tutta questa fine sebbene florida erudizione, da tutta questa principesca e patrizia gioviale cordialità, da tutta questa aria di libertà e avventura sul mare, del piccolo stato interno degli avari sergenti istruttori di Potsdam, che martellavano meri selvaggi trasformandoli in meri soldati. Eppure il grande capo di questi era per certi versi come un’ombra di Chatham proiettata attraverso il mondo— il tipo di ombra che è al tempo stesso un ingrandimento e una caricatura. I lord inglesi, il cui paganesimo era nobilitato dal patriottismo, vedevano qui qualcosa di tirato in lungo e in sottile fuori dalle loro stesse teorie. Ciò che era paganesimo in Chatham era ateismo in Federico il Grande. E ciò che nel primo era patriottismo era nel secondo qualcosa senza nome se non Prussianesimo. La teoria cannibalesca di uno stato, che esso possa per sua natura mangiare altri stati, era entrata nella Cristianità. La sua autocrazia e la nostra stessa aristocrazia si avvicinarono indirettamente, e sembrarono per un tempo essere sposate; ma non prima che il grande Bolingbroke avesse fatto un gesto morente, come per proibire le nozze.
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XV
THE WAR WITH THE GREAT REPUBLlCS
We cannot understand the eighteenth century so long as we suppose that rhetoric is artificial because it is artistic. We do not fall into this folly about any of the other arts. We talk of a man picking out notes arranged in ivory on a wooden piano “with much feeling,” or of his pouring out his soul by scraping on cat-gut after a training as careful as an acrobat’s. But we are still haunted with a prejudice that verbal form and verbal effect must somehow be hypocritical when they are the link between things so living as a man and a mob. We doubt the feeling of the old-fashioned orator, because his periods are so rounded and pointed as to convey his feeling. Now before any criticism of the eighteenth-century worthies must be put the proviso of their perfect artistic sincerity. Their oratory was unrhymed poetry, and it had the humanity of poetry. It was not even unmetrical poetry; that century is full of great phrases, often spoken on the spur of great moments, which have in them the throb and recurrence of song, as of a man thinking to a tune. Nelson’s “In honour I gained them, in honour I will die with them,” has more rhythm than much that is called vers libres. Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” might be a great line in Walt Whitman.
It is one of the many quaint perversities of the English to pretend to be bad speakers; but in fact the most English eighteenth-century epoch blazed with brilliant speakers. There may have been finer writing in France; there was no such fine speaking as in England. The Parliament had faults enough, but it was sincere enough to be rhetorical. The Parliament was corrupt, as it is now; though the examples of corruption were then often really made examples, in the sense of warnings, where they are now examples only in the sense of patterns. The Parliament was indifferent to the constituencies, as it is now; though perhaps the constituencies were less indifferent to the Parliament. The Parliament was snobbish, as it is now, though perhaps more respectful to mere rank and less to mere wealth. But the Parliament was a Parliament; it did fulfil its name and duty by talking, and trying to talk well. It did not merely do things because they do not bear talking about—as it does now. It was then, to the eternal glory of our country, a great “talking-shop,” not a mere buying and selling shop for financial tips and official places. And as with any other artist, the care the eighteenth century man expended on oratory is a proof of his sincerity not a disproof of it. An enthusiastic eulogium by Burke is as rich and elaborate as a lover’s sonnet; but it is because Burke is really enthusiastic, like the lover. An angry sentence by Junius is as carefully compounded as a Renascence poison; but it is because Junius is really angry— like the poisoner. Now, nobody who has realized this psychological truth can doubt for a moment that many of the English aristocrats of the eighteenth century had a real enthusiasm for liberty; their voices lift like trumpets upon the very word. Whatever their immediate forbears may have meant, these men meant what they said when they talked of the high memory of Hampden or the majesty of Magna Carta. Those Patriots whom Walpole called the Boys included many who really were patriots—or better still, who really were boys. If we prefer to put it so, among the Whig aristocrats were many who really were Whigs; Whigs by all the ideal definitions which identified the party with a defence of law against tyrants and courtiers. But if anybody deduces, from the fact that the Whig aristocrats were Whigs, any doubt about whether the Whig aristocrats were aristocrats, there is one practical test and reply. It might be tested in many ways: by the game laws and enclosure laws they passed, or by the strict code of the duel and the definition of honour on which they all insisted. But if it be really questioned whether I am right in calling their whole world an aristocracy, and the very reverse of it a democracy, the true historical test is this: that when republicanism really entered the world, they instantly waged two great wars with it—or (if the view be preferred) it instantly waged two great wars with them. America and France revealed the real nature of the English Parliament. Ice may sparkle, but a real spark will show it is only ice. So when the red fire of the Revolution touched the frosty splendours of the Whigs, there was instantly a hissing and a strife; a strife of the flame to melt the ice, of the water to quench the flame.
It has been noted that one of the virtues of the aristocrats was liberty, especially liberty among themselves. It might even be said that one of the virtues of the aristocrats was cynicism. They were not stuffed with our fashionable fiction, with its stiff and wooden figures of a good man named Washington and a bad man named Boney. They at least were aware that Washington’s cause was not so obviously white nor Napoleon’s so obviously black as most books in general circulation would indicate. They had a natural admiration for the military genius of Washington and Napoleon; they had the most unmixed contempt for the German Royal Family. But they were, as a class, not only against both Washington and Napoleon, but against them both for the same reason. And it was that they both stood for democracy.
Great injustice is done to the English aristocratic government of the time through a failure to realize this fundamental difference, especially in the case of America. There is a wrong-headed humour about the English which appears especially in this, that while they often (as in the case of Ireland) make themselves out right where they were entirely wrong, they are easily persuaded (as in the case of America) to make themselves out entirely wrong where there is at least a case for their having been more or less right. George III’s government laid certain taxes on the colonial community on the eastern seaboard of America. It was certainly not self-evident, in the sense of law and precedent, that the imperial government could not lay taxes on such colonists. Nor were the taxes themselves of that practically oppressive sort which rightly raise everywhere the common casuistry of revolution. The Whig oligarchs had their faults, but utter lack of sympathy with liberty, especially local liberty, and with their adventurous kindred beyond the seas, was by no means one of their faults. Chatham, the great chief of the new and very national noblesse, was typical of them in being free from the faintest illiberality and irritation against the colonies as such. He would have made them free and even favoured colonies, if only he could have kept them as colonies. Burke, who was then the eloquent voice of Whiggism, and was destined later to show how wholly it was a voice of aristocracy, went of course even further. Even North compromised; and though George III, being a fool, might himself have refused to compromise, he had already failed to effect the Bolingbroke scheme of the restitution of the royal power. The case for the Americans, the real reason for calling them right in the quarrel, was something much deeper than the quarrel. They were at issue, not with a dead monarchy, but with a living aristocracy; they declared war on something much finer and more formidable than poor old George. Nevertheless, the popular tradition, especially in America, has pictured it primarily as a duel of George III and George Washington; and, as we have noticed more than once, such pictures though figurative are seldom false. King George’s head was not much more useful on the throne than it was on the sign-board of a tavern; nevertheless, the sign-board was really a sign, and a sign of the times. It stood for a tavern that sold not English but German beer. It stood for that side of the Whig policy which Chatham showed when he was tolerant to America alone, but intolerant of America when allied with France. That very wooden sign stood, in short, for the same thing as the juncture with Frederick the Great; it stood for that Anglo-German alliance which, at a very much later time in history, was to turn into the world-old Teutonic Race.
XV
LA GUERRA CON LE GRANDI REPUBBLICHE
Non possiamo comprendere il Settecento finché supponiamo che la retorica sia artificiale perché è artistica. Non cadiamo in questa follia riguardo a nessuna delle altre arti. Parliamo di un uomo che sceglie note disposte nell’avorio su un pianoforte di legno “con molto sentimento”, o che riversa la sua anima raschiando budella di gatto dopo un addestramento accurato come quello di un acrobata. Ma siamo ancora perseguitati dal pregiudizio che la forma verbale e l’effetto verbale debbano in qualche modo essere ipocriti quando sono il legame tra cose così vive come un uomo e una folla. Dubitiamo del sentimento del vecchio oratore all’antica, perché i suoi periodi sono così arrotondati e appuntiti da trasmettere il suo sentimento. Ora, prima di qualsiasi critica ai grandi uomini del Settecento deve essere posta la clausola della loro perfetta sincerità artistica. La loro oratoria era poesia senza rima, e aveva l’umanità della poesia. Non era nemmeno poesia senza metro; quel secolo è pieno di grandi frasi, spesso pronunciate d’impulso in grandi momenti, che hanno in sé il palpito e il ricorso del canto, come di un uomo che pensa a un motivo. Il “Nell’onore le ho conquistate, nell’onore morirò con esse” di Nelson, ha più ritmo di molto ciò che si chiama vers libres. Il “Datemi la libertà o datemi la morte” di Patrick Henry potrebbe essere un grande verso in Walt Whitman.
È una delle molte bizzarre perversità degli inglesi fingere di essere cattivi oratori; ma di fatto l’epoca del Settecento più inglese sfolgorò di brillanti oratori. Vi può essere stata una scrittura più fine in Francia; non vi fu un’oratoria così fine come in Inghilterra. Il Parlamento aveva difetti a sufficienza, ma era abbastanza sincero da essere retorico. Il Parlamento era corrotto, come lo è ora; sebbene gli esempi di corruzione fossero allora spesso davvero resi esempi, nel senso di ammonimenti, dove ora sono esempi solo nel senso di modelli. Il Parlamento era indifferente ai collegi elettorali, come lo è ora; sebbene forse i collegi elettorali fossero meno indifferenti al Parlamento. Il Parlamento era snob, come lo è ora, sebbene forse più rispettoso del mero rango e meno della mera ricchezza. Ma il Parlamento era un Parlamento; adempiva davvero al suo nome e dovere parlando, e cercando di parlare bene. Non faceva semplicemente le cose perché esse non sopportano di essere discusse—come fa ora. Era allora, a eterna gloria del nostro paese, un grande “negozio di chiacchiere”, non un mero negozio di compravendita per soffiate finanziarie e cariche ufficiali. E come con qualsiasi altro artista, la cura che l’uomo del Settecento profondeva nell’oratoria è una prova della sua sincerità, non una sua smentita. Un entusiastico elogio di Burke è ricco ed elaborato quanto il sonetto di un amante; ma è perché Burke è realmente entusiasta, come l’amante. Una frase adirata di Junius è compilata con tanta cura quanto un veleno rinascimentale; ma è perché Junius è realmente adirato— come l’avvelenatore. Ora, nessuno che abbia compreso questa psicologica verità può dubitare per un momento che molti degli aristocratici inglesi del Settecento avessero un reale entusiasmo per la libertà; le loro voci si levano come trombe alla parola stessa. Qualunque cosa i loro immediati antenati possano aver inteso, questi uomini intendevano ciò che dicevano quando parlavano dell’alta memoria di Hampden o della maestà della Magna Carta. Quei Patrioti che Walpole chiamava i Ragazzi includevano molti che davvero erano patrioti—o meglio ancora, che davvero erano ragazzi. Se preferiamo dirla così, tra gli aristocratici Whig ce n’erano molti che davvero erano Whig; Whig secondo tutte le definizioni ideali che identificavano il partito con una difesa della legge contro i tiranni e i cortigiani. Ma se qualcuno deduce, dal fatto che gli aristocratici Whig fossero Whig, un qualche dubbio sul fatto che gli aristocratici Whig fossero aristocratici, c’è una prova pratica e una risposta. Potrebbe essere provato in molti modi: dalle leggi sulla caccia e sulle recinzioni che approvarono, o dal severo codice del duello e dalla definizione dell’onore su cui tutti insistevano. Ma se si mette davvero in questione se io abbia ragione nel chiamare il loro intero mondo un’aristocrazia, e il suo esatto contrario una democrazia, la vera prova storica è questa: che quando il repubblicanesimo entrò davvero nel mondo, essi immediatamente mossero due grandi guerre contro di esso—o (se si preferisce questa visione) esso immediatamente mosse due grandi guerre contro di loro. L’America e la Francia rivelarono la vera natura del Parlamento inglese. Il ghiaccio può scintillare, ma una vera scintilla mostrerà che è solo ghiaccio. Così quando il rosso fuoco della Rivoluzione toccò i gelidi splendori dei Whig, vi fu immediatamente un sibilo e un contrasto; un contrasto della fiamma per sciogliere il ghiaccio, dell’acqua per spegnere la fiamma.
È stato notato che una delle virtù degli aristocratici era la libertà, specialmente la libertà tra loro stessi. Si potrebbe persino dire che una delle virtù degli aristocratici era il cinismo. Non erano imbottiti della nostra alla moda finzione, con le sue rigide e legnose figure di un uomo buono chiamato Washington e di un uomo cattivo chiamato Boney. Essi almeno erano consapevoli che la causa di Washington non era così ovviamente bianca né quella di Napoleone così ovviamente nera come la maggior parte dei libri in generale circolazione lascerebbero intendere. Avevano una naturale ammirazione per il genio militare di Washington e di Napoleone; avevano il più assoluto disprezzo per la Famiglia Reale tedesca. Ma essi erano, come classe, non soltanto contro sia Washington sia Napoleone, ma contro entrambi per la stessa ragione. Ed era che entrambi stavano per la democrazia.
Grande ingiustizia è fatta al governo aristocratico inglese del tempo a causa di un mancato riconoscimento di questa fondamentale differenza, specialmente nel caso dell’America. C’è un ostinato umorismo negli inglesi che appare specialmente in questo, che mentre spesso (come nel caso dell’Irlanda) si fanno passare per giusti là dove erano interamente in torto, sono facilmente persuasi (come nel caso dell’America) a farsi passare per interamente in torto là dove c’è almeno un argomento per il loro essere stati più o meno nel giusto. Il governo di Giorgio III impose certe tasse alla comunità coloniale sulla costa orientale dell’America. Non era certo autoevidente, nel senso della legge e del precedente, che il governo imperiale non potesse imporre tasse su tali coloni. Né le tasse stesse erano di quella sorta praticamente oppressiva che giustamente solleva ovunque la comune casistica della rivoluzione. Gli oligarchi Whig avevano i loro difetti, ma la totale mancanza di simpatia per la libertà, specialmente la libertà locale, e per i loro avventurosi consanguinei oltre i mari, non era affatto uno dei loro difetti. Chatham, il grande capo della nuova e assai nazionale noblesse, era tipico di loro nell’essere libero dalla più debole illiberalità e irritazione contro le colonie in quanto tali. Egli le avrebbe rese colonie libere e persino favorite, se solo avesse potuto tenerle come colonie. Burke, che era allora l’eloquente voce del Whiggismo, ed era destinato più tardi a mostrare quanto interamente essa fosse una voce dell’aristocrazia, andò naturalmente ancora oltre. Persino North scese a compromessi; e sebbene Giorgio III, essendo uno sciocco, potesse egli stesso aver rifiutato di scendere a compromessi, aveva già fallito nel realizzare il piano di Bolingbroke della restituzione del potere regale. L’argomento a favore degli americani, la vera ragione per chiamarli nel giusto nella disputa, era qualcosa di assai più profondo della disputa. Essi erano in contrasto, non con una monarchia morta, ma con un’aristocrazia viva; dichiararono guerra a qualcosa di assai più fine e più formidabile del povero vecchio Giorgio. Nondimeno, la tradizione popolare, specialmente in America, l’ha raffigurata primariamente come un duello tra Giorgio III e George Washington; e, come abbiamo notato più di una volta, tali raffigurazioni, benché figurate, di rado sono false. La testa di Re Giorgio non era molto più utile sul trono di quanto lo fosse sull’insegna di una taverna; nondimeno, l’insegna era davvero un segno, e un segno dei tempi. Stava per una taverna che vendeva non birra inglese ma tedesca. Stava per quel lato della politica Whig che Chatham mostrò quando fu tollerante verso l’America da sola, ma intollerante dell’America quando alleata alla Francia. Quella stessa insegna di legno stava, in breve, per la stessa cosa della congiunzione con Federico il Grande; stava per quell’alleanza anglo-tedesca che, in un tempo assai più tardo nella storia, sarebbe diventata l’antichissima Razza Teutonica.
Roughly and frankly speaking, we may say that America forced the quarrel. She wished to be separate, which was to her but another phrase for wishing to be free. She was not thinking of her wrongs as a colony, but already of her rights as a republic. The negative effect of so small a difference could never have changed the world. Without the positive effect of a great ideal, one may say of a great new religion. The real case for the colonists is that they felt they could be something, which they also felt, and justly, that England would not help them to be. England would probably have allowed the colonists all sorts of concessions and constitutional privileges, but England could not allow the colonists equality: I do not mean equality with her, but even with each other. Chatham might have compromised with Washington, because Washington was a gentleman; but Chatham could hardly have conceived a country not governed by gentlemen. Burke was apparently ready to grant everything to America; but he would not have been ready to grant what America eventually gained. If he had seen American democracy, he would have been as much appalled by it as he was by French democracy, and would always have been by any democracy. In a word the Whigs were liberal and even generous aristocrats, but they were aristocrats; that is why their concessions were as vain as their conquests. We talk, with a humiliation too rare with us, about our dubious part in the secession of America. Whether it increase or decrease the humiliation I do not know; but I strongly suspect that we had very little to do with it. I believe we counted for uncommonly little in the case. We did not really drive away the American colonists, nor were they driven. They were led on by a light that went before.
That light came from France, like the armies of Lafayette that came to the help of Washington. France was already in travail with the tremendous spiritual revolution which was soon to reshape the world. Her doctrine, disruptive and creative, was widely misunderstood at the time, and is much misunderstood still, despite the splendid clarity of style in which it was stated by Rousseau in the “Contrat Social,” and by Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence. Say the very word “equality” in many modern countries, and four hundred fools will leap to their feet at once to explain that some men can be found, on careful examination, to be taller or handsomer than others. As if Danton had not noticed that he was taller than Robespierre, or as if Washington was not well aware that he was handsomer than Franklin. This is no place to expound a philosophy; it will be enough to say in passing, by way of a parable, that when we say that all pennies are equal, we do not mean that they all look exactly the same. We mean that they are absolutely equal in their one absolute character, in the most important thing about them. It may be put practically by saying that they are coins of a certain value, twelve of which go to a shilling. It may be put symbolically, and even mystically, by saying that they all bear the image of the King. And, though the most mystical, it is also the most practical summary of equality that all men bear the image of the King of Kings. Indeed, it is of course true that this idea had long underlain all Christianity, even in institutions less popular in form than were, for instance, the mob of mediaeval republics in Italy. A dogma of equal duties implies that of equal rights. I know of no Christian authority that would not admit that it is as wicked to murder a poor man as a rich man, or as bad to burgle an inelegantly furnished house as a tastefully furnished one. But the world had wandered further and further from these truisms, and nobody in the world was further from them than the group of the great English aristocrats. The idea of the equality of men is in substance simply the idea of the importance of man. But it was precisely the notion of the importance of a mere man which seemed startling and indecent to a society whose whole romance and religion now consisted of the importance of a gentleman. It was as if a man had walked naked into Parliament. There is not space here to develop the moral issue in full, but this will suffice to show that the critics concerned about the difference in human types or talents are considerably wasting their time. If they can understand how two coins can count the same though one is bright and the other brown, they might perhaps understand how two men can vote the same though one is bright and the other dull. If, however, they are still satisfied with their solid objection that some men are dull, I can only gravely agree with them, that some men are very dull.
But a few years after Lafayette had returned from helping to found a republic in America he was flung over his own frontiers for resisting the foundation of a republic in France. So furious was the onward stride of this new spirit that the republican of the new world lived to be the reactionary of the old. For when France passed from theory to practice, the question was put to the world in a way not thinkable in connection with the prefatory experiment of a thin population on a colonial coast. The mightiest of human monarchies, like some monstrous immeasurable idol of iron, was melted down in a furnace barely bigger than itself, and recast in a side equally colossal, but in a shape men could not understand. Many, at least, could not understand it, and least of all the liberal aristocracy of England. There were, of course, practical reasons for a continuous foreign policy against France, whether royal or republican. There was primarily the desire to keep any foreigner from menacing us from the Flemish coast; there was, to a much lesser extent, the colonial rivalry in which so much English glory had been gained by the statesmanship of Chatham and the arms of Wolfe and of Clive. The former reason has returned on us with a singular irony; for in order to keep the French out of Flanders we flung ourselves with increasing enthusiasm into a fraternity with the Germans. We purposely fed and pampered the power which was destined in the future to devour Belgium as France could never have devoured it, and threaten us across the sea with terrors of which no Frenchman would ever dream. But indeed much deeper things unified our attitude towards France before and after the Revolution. It is but one stride from despotism to democracy, in logic as well as in history; and oligarchy is equally remote from both. The Bastille fell, and it seemed to an Englishman merely that a despot had turned into a demos. The young Bonaparte rose, and it seemed to an Englishman merely that a demos had once more turned into a despot. He was not wrong in thinking these allotropic forms of the same alien thing; and that thing was equality. For when millions are equally subject to one law, it makes little difference if they are also subject to one lawgiver; the general social life is a level. The one thing that the English have never understood about Napoleon, in all their myriad studies of his mysterious personality, is how impersonal he was. I had almost said how unimportant he was. He said himself, “I shall go down to history with my code in my hand;” but in practical effects, as distinct from mere name and renown, it would be even truer to say that his code will go down to history with his hand set to it in signature—somewhat illegibly. Thus his testamentary law has broken up big estates and encouraged contented peasants in places where his name is cursed, in places where his name is almost unknown. In his lifetime, of course, it was natural that the annihilating splendour of his military strokes should rivet the eye like flashes of lightning; but his rain fell more silently, and its refreshment remained. It is needless to repeat here that after bursting one world-coalition after another by battles that are the masterpieces of the military art, he was finally worn down by two comparatively popular causes, the resistance of Russia and the resistance of Spain. The former was largely, like so much that is Russian, religious; but in the latter appeared most conspicuously that which concerns us here, the valour, vigilance and high national spirit of England in the eighteenth century. The long Spanish campaign tried and made triumphant the great Irish soldier, afterwards known as Wellington; who has become all the more symbolic since he was finally confronted with Napoleon in the last defeat of the latter at Waterloo. Wellington, though too logical to be at all English, was in many ways typical of the aristocracy; he had irony and independence of mind. But if we wish to realize how rigidly such men remained limited by their class, how little they really knew what was happening in their time, it is enough to note that Wellington seems to have thought he had dismissed Napoleon by saying he was not really a gentleman. If an acute and experienced Chinaman were to say of Chinese Gordon, “He is not actually a Mandarin,” we should think that the Chinese system deserved its reputation for being both rigid and remote.
Parlando in modo approssimativo e schietto, possiamo dire che America ha provocato la lite. Desiderava essere separata, il che per lei era un altro modo di dire che desiderava essere libera. Non pensava ai suoi torti come colonia, ma già ai suoi diritti come repubblica. L’effetto negativo di una differenza così piccola non avrebbe mai potuto cambiare il mondo. Senza l’effetto positivo di un grande ideale, si può dire di una nuova grande religione. La vera ragione dei coloni è che sentivano di poter essere qualcosa, e sentivano anche, e giustamente, che l’Inghilterra non li avrebbe aiutati a esserlo. L’Inghilterra probabilmente avrebbe concesso ai coloni ogni sorta di concessione e privilegi costituzionali, ma non poteva concedere loro l’uguaglianza: non intendo uguaglianza con lei, ma anche tra loro. Chatham avrebbe potuto fare un compromesso con Washington, perché Washington era un gentiluomo; ma Chatham difficilmente avrebbe potuto concepire un paese non governato da gentiluomini. Burke sembrava pronto a concedere tutto all’America; ma non sarebbe stato pronto a concederle ciò che l’America alla fine ottenne. Se avesse visto la democrazia americana, ne sarebbe stato altrettanto sgomento come lo fu della democrazia francese e sempre lo sarebbe stato di qualsiasi democrazia. In una parola i Whigs erano aristocratici liberali e persino generosi, ma erano aristocratici; ecco perché le loro concessioni furono altrettanto vane delle loro conquiste. Parliamo, con un’umiliazione troppo rara per noi, della nostra dubbiosa parte nella secessione dell’America. Non so se aumenti o diminuisca l’umiliazione; ma sospetto fortemente che non c’entriamo molto. Credo che il nostro peso nel caso sia stato eccezionalmente scarso. Non abbiamo davvero allontanato i coloni americani, né furono allontanati. Furono guidati da una luce che li precedeva.
Quella luce veniva dalla Francia, come gli eserciti di Lafayette che accorsero in aiuto a Washington. La Francia era già travagliata dalla tremenda rivoluzione spirituale che avrebbe presto rimodellato il mondo. La sua dottrina, disgregatrice e creatrice, fu ampiamente fraintesa all’epoca, ed è ancora oggi molto fraintesa, nonostante la splendida chiarezza di stile con cui venne enunciata da Rousseau nel “Contratto sociale” e da Jefferson nella Dichiarazione d’Indipendenza. Basti pronunciare la parola “uguaglianza” in molti paesi moderni perché quattrocento imbecilli si alzino subito in piedi per spiegare che alcuni uomini possono risultare, se osservati attentamente, più alti o più belli di altri. Come se Danton non avesse notato di essere più alto di Robespierre, o come se Washington non fosse ben consapevole di essere più bello di Franklin. Non è questo il luogo per esporre una filosofia; sarà sufficiente dire di sfuggita, a mo’ di parabola, che quando diciamo che tutte le monete da un penny sono uguali, non intendiamo che siano tutte esattamente identiche. Intendiamo che sono assolutamente uguali nel loro carattere assoluto, nella cosa più importante in esse contenuta. Si può dire praticamente che sono monete di un certo valore, dodici delle quali equivalgono a uno scellino. Si può dire simbolicamente, e persino misticamente, che portano tutte l’effige del Re. E sebbene sia la più mistica, è anche la sintesi più pratica dell’uguaglianza il fatto che tutti gli uomini portino l’effige del Re dei Re. In effetti, è ovviamente vero che questa idea era da tempo alla base di tutta la cristianità, anche nelle istituzioni meno popolari nella forma rispetto alle folle delle repubbliche medievali in Italia. Un dogma di doveri uguali implica quello di diritti uguali. Non conosco alcuna autorità cristiana che non ammetta che è altrettanto malvagio uccidere un povero quanto un ricco, o altrettanto grave scassinare una casa modestamente arredata quanto una raffinatamente arredata. Ma il mondo si era allontanato sempre più da questi luoghi comuni, e nessuno al mondo ne era più lontano del gruppo dei grandi aristocratici inglesi. L’idea dell’uguaglianza degli uomini è in sostanza semplicemente l’idea dell’importanza dell’uomo. Ma fu proprio la nozione dell’importanza di un semplice uomo che sembrò sconcertante e indecente a una società la cui intera romantica avventura e religione consistevano ormai nell’importanza del gentiluomo. Fu come se un uomo fosse entrato nudo al Parlamento. Non c’è spazio qui per sviluppare appieno l’aspetto morale, ma questo basterà a dimostrare che i critici preoccupati della differenza tra tipi o talenti umani stanno perdendo notevolmente il loro tempo. Se possono capire come due monete possano valere lo stesso anche se una è lucida e l’altra opaca, forse potranno capire come due uomini possano votare allo stesso modo anche se uno è intelligente e l’altro no. Tuttavia, se sono ancora soddisfatti della loro solida obiezione che alcuni uomini siano ottusi, posso solo concordare con gravità con loro: alcuni uomini sono davvero molto ottusi.
Ma pochi anni dopo che Lafayette era tornato dall’aiutare a fondare una repubblica in America fu scacciato oltre i suoi stessi confini per aver resistito alla fondazione di una repubblica in Francia. Tanto furioso era l’avanzata di questo nuovo spirito che il repubblicano del Nuovo Mondo visse abbastanza da diventare il reazionario del Vecchio. Quando la Francia passò dalla teoria alla pratica, la questione fu posta al mondo in un modo impensabile in relazione all’esperimento preliminare di una popolazione esigua su una costa coloniale. La più possente delle monarchie umane, come qualche mostruoso idolo immane di ferro, fu fusa in un forno a malapena più grande di essa stessa, e ricastata in una forma altrettanto colossale, ma che gli uomini non potevano comprendere. Molti, almeno, non potevano comprenderla, e meno di tutti la liberal aristocrazia d’Inghilterra. C’erano, naturalmente, ragioni pratiche per una politica estera continua contro la Francia, sia essa reale o repubblicana. C’era in primo luogo il desiderio di tenere lontani gli stranieri dal minacciarci dalla costa fiamminga; c’era, in misura molto minore, la rivalità coloniale nella quale tanto orgoglio inglese era stato guadagnato dallo statista Chatham e dalle armi di Wolfe e Clive. La prima ragione ci si è rivoltata contro con una singolare ironia; perché, per tenere i francesi fuori dai Paesi Bassi, ci siamo lanciati con crescente entusiasmo in un’amicizia con i tedeschi. Abbiamo volutamente nutrito e viziato il potere che era destinato a divorare la Belgio nel futuro come la Francia non avrebbe mai potuto fare, e minacciarci attraverso il mare con terrore di cui nessun francese avrebbe mai sognato. Ma in effetti cose molto più profonde unificarono il nostro atteggiamento verso la Francia prima e dopo la Rivoluzione. È solo un passo dal dispotismo alla democrazia, nella logica come well che nella history; e l’oligarchia è ugualmente distante da entrambe. La Bastiglia cadde, e sembrò a un inglese che semplicemente un dispotico si fosse trasformato in una democrazia. Il giovane Bonaparte rose, e sembrò a un inglese che semplicemente una democrazia si fosse nuovamente trasformata in un dispotismo. Non aveva torto nel pensare queste forme allotropiche della stessa cosa aliena; e quella cosa era l’uguaglianza. Perché quando milioni sono ugualmente soggetti a una legge, fa poca differenza se sono anche soggetti a un legislatore; la vita sociale generale è livellata. L’unica cosa che gli inglesi non hanno mai capito di Napoleone, in tutti i loro miriadi studi della sua misteriosa personalità, è quanto fosse impersonale. Ero quasi sul punto di dire quanto fosse insignificante. Disse lui stesso, “Scenderò nella history con il mio codice in mano;” ma per gli effetti pratici, distinti dal semplice nome e rinomanza, sarebbe ancora più vero dire che il suo codice scenderà nella history con la sua firma apposta - piuttosto illeggibile. Così la sua legge testamentaria ha frantumato grandi proprietà e incoraggiato contadini contenti in luoghi dove il suo nome è maledetto, in luoghi dove il suo nome è quasi sconosciuto. Nella sua vita, naturalmente, era naturale che lo splendore annientante dei suoi colpi militari attirasse l’occhio come lampi di lightning; ma la sua pioggia cadeva più silenziosamente, e il suo ristoro rimaneva. È inutile ripetere qui che dopo aver infranto una coalizione mondiale dopo l’altra con battaglie che sono capolavori dell’arte militare, fu infine consumato da due cause relativamente popolari, la resistenza della Russia e la resistenza di Spagna. La prima fu in gran parte, come tanto di ciò che è russo, religiosa; ma nella seconda apparve più spiccata quella che ci riguarda qui, il valore, la vigilanza e lo spirito nazionale elevato dell’Inghilterra nel diciottesimo secolo. La lunga campagna spagnola mise alla prova e rese trionfale il grande soldato irlandese, in seguito noto come Wellington; che è diventato ancora più simbolico da quando fu infine confrontato con Napoleone nell’ultima sconfitta di quest’ultimo a Waterloo. Wellington, sebbene troppo logico per essere affatto inglese, era in molti modi tipico dell’aristocrazia; aveva ironia e indipendenza di mente. Ma se vogliamo renderci conto di quanto rigidamente tali uomini rimasero limitati dalla loro classe, quanto poco sapessero realmente cosa stava accadendo nel loro time, basta notare che Wellington sembra aver pensato di aver liquidato Napoleone dicendo che non era veramente un gentiluomo. Se un cinese acuto ed esperto dicesse del generale Gordon, “Non è in realtà un Mandarino,” penseremmo che il sistema cinese meritasse la sua reputazione di essere sia rigido che remoto.
But the very name of Wellington is enough to suggest another, and with it the reminder that this, though true, is inadequate. There was some truth in the idea that the Englishman was never so English as when he was outside England, and never smacked so much of the soil as when he was on the sea. There has run through the national psychology something that has never had a name except the eccentric and indeed extraordinary name of Robinson Crusoe; which is all the more English for being quite undiscoverable in England. It may be doubted if a French or German boy especially wishes that his cornland or wineland were a desert; but many an English boy has wished that his island were a desert island. But we might even say that the Englishman was too insular for an island. He awoke most to life when his island was sundered from the foundations of the world, when it hung like a planet and flew like a bird. And, by a contradiction, the real British army was in the navy; the boldest of the islanders were scattered over the moving archipelago of a great fleet. There still lay on it, like an increasing light, the legend of the Armada; it was a great fleet full of the glory of having once been a small one. Long before Wellington ever saw Waterloo the ships had done their work, and shattered the French navy in the Spanish seas, leaving like a light upon the sea the life and death of Nelson, who died with his stars on his bosom and his heart upon his sleeve. There is no word for the memory of Nelson except to call him mythical. The very hour of his death, the very name of his ship, are touched with that epic completeness which critics call the long arm of coincidence and prophets the hand of God. His very faults and failures were heroic, not in a loose but in a classic sense; in that he fell only like the legendary heroes, weakened by a woman, not foiled by any foe among men. And he remains the incarnation of a spirit in the English that is purely poetic; so poetic that it fancies itself a thousand things, and sometimes even fancies itself prosaic. At a recent date, in an age of reason, in a country already calling itself dull and business-like, with top-hats and factory chimneys already beginning to rise like towers of funereal efficiency, this country clergyman’s son moved to the last in a luminous cloud, and acted a fairy tale. He shall remain as a lesson to those who do not understand England, and a mystery to those who think they do. In outward action he led his ships to victory and died upon a foreign sea; but symbolically he established something indescribable and intimate, something that sounds like a native proverb; he was the man who burnt his ships, and who for ever set the Thames on fire.
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Ma il nome stesso di Wellington basta a evocarne un altro, e con esso il richiamo al fatto che questo, per quanto vero, è insufficiente. C’era una parte di verità nell’idea che l’inglese non fosse mai tanto inglese come quando si trovava fuori dall’Inghilterra, e non sapesse mai tanto di terra come quando era sul mare. Attraverso la psicologia nazionale è corso qualcosa che non ha mai avuto altro nome se non quello eccentrico e davvero straordinario di Robinson Crusoe; tanto più inglese in quanto del tutto introvabile in Inghilterra. Si può dubitare che un ragazzo francese o tedesco desideri davvero che le sue terre da grano o da vino fossero un deserto; ma più d’un ragazzo inglese ha desiderato che la sua isola fosse un’isola deserta. Anzi potremmo dire che l’inglese fosse troppo insulare per un’isola. Si destava massimamente alla vita quando la sua isola era divelta dalle fondamenta del mondo, quando pendeva come un pianeta e volava come un uccello. E, per una contraddizione, il vero esercito britannico stava nella marina; i più audaci degli isolani erano sparsi sul mobile arcipelago di una grande flotta. Vi giaceva ancora, come una luce crescente, la leggenda dell’Armada; era una grande flotta colma della gloria d’essere stata un tempo piccola. Molto prima che Wellington vedesse mai Waterloo le navi avevano compiuto la loro opera, e frantumato la marina francese nei mari di Spagna, lasciando come una luce sul mare la vita e la morte di Nelson, che morì con le sue stelle sul petto e il cuore sulla manica. Non c’è parola per la memoria di Nelson se non chiamarlo mitico. L’ora stessa della sua morte, il nome stesso della sua nave, sono tocchi di quella compiutezza epica che i critici chiamano il lungo braccio della coincidenza e i profeti la mano di Dio. Le sue stesse colpe e i suoi stessi fallimenti furono eroici, non in senso vago ma in senso classico; poiché cadde solo come gli eroi leggendari, indebolito da una donna, non sconfitto da alcun nemico tra gli uomini. Ed egli resta l’incarnazione di uno spirito dell’inglese che è puramente poetico; tanto poetico da immaginarsi mille cose, e talvolta persino da immaginarsi prosaico. In tempi recenti, in un’epoca di ragione, in un paese che già si diceva grigio e affaristico, con cilindri e ciminiere che già cominciavano a levarsi come torri di funerea efficienza, questo figlio di un pievano di campagna si mosse fino all’ultimo in una nube luminosa, e recitò una fiaba. Egli resterà come una lezione per chi non comprende l’Inghilterra, e un mistero per chi crede di comprenderla. Nell’azione esteriore condusse le sue navi alla vittoria e morì su un mare straniero; ma simbolicamente stabilì qualcosa d’indescrivibile e d’intimo, qualcosa che suona come un proverbio nativo; fu l’uomo che bruciò le proprie navi, e che per sempre diede fuoco al Tamigi.
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XVI
ARISTOCRACY AND THE DISCONTENTS
It is the pathos of many hackneyed things that they are intrinsically delicate and are only mechanically made dull. Any one who has seen the first white light, when it comes in by a window, knows that daylight is not only as beautiful but as mysterious as moonlight. It is the subtlety of the colour of sunshine that seems to be colourless. So patriotism, and especially English patriotism, which is vulgarized with volumes of verbal fog and gas, is still in itself something as tenuous and tender as a climate. The name of Nelson, with which the last chapter ended, might very well summarize the matter; for his name is banged and beaten about like an old tin can, while his soul had something in it of a fine and fragile eighteenth-century vase. And it will be found that the most threadbare things contemporary and connected with him have a real truth to the tone and meaning of his life and time, though for us they have too often degenerated into dead jokes. The expression “hearts of oak,” for instance, is no unhappy phrase for the finer side of that England of which he was the best expression. Even as a material metaphor it covers much of what I mean; oak was by no means only made into bludgeons, nor even only into battle-ships; and the English gentry did not think it business-like to pretend to be mere brutes. The mere name of oak calls back like a dream those dark but genial interiors of colleges and country houses, in which great gentlemen, not degenerate, almost made Latin an English language and port an English wine. Some part of that world at least will not perish; for its autumnal glow passed into the brush of the great English portrait-painters, who, more than any other men, were given the power to commemorate the large humanity of their own land; immortalizing a mood as broad and soft as their own brush-work. Come naturally, at the right emotional angle, upon a canvass of Gainsborough, who painted ladies like landscapes, as great and as unconscious with repose, and you will note how subtly the artist gives to a dress flowing in the foreground something of the divine quality of distance. Then you will understand another faded phrase and words spoken far away upon the sea; there will rise up quite fresh before you and be borne upon a bar of music, like words you have never heard before: “For England, home, and beauty.”
When I think of these things, I have no temptation to mere grumbling at the great gentry that waged the great war of our fathers. But indeed the difficulty about it was something much deeper than could be dealt with by any grumbling. It was an exclusive class, but not an exclusive life; it was interested in all things, though not for all men. Or rather those things it failed to include, through the limitations of this rationalist interval between mediaeval and modern mysticism, were at least not of the sort to shock us with superficial inhumanity. The greatest gap in their souls, for those who think it a gap, was their complete and complacent paganism. All their very decencies assumed that the old faith was dead; those who held it still, like the great Johnson, were considered eccentrics. The French Revolution was a riot that broke up the very formal funeral of Christianity; and was followed by various other complications, including the corpse coming to life. But the scepticism was no mere oligarchic orgy; it was not confined to the Hell-Fire Club; which might in virtue of its vivid name be regarded as relatively orthodox. It is present in the mildest middle-class atmosphere; as in the middle-class masterpiece about “Northanger Abbey,” where we actually remember it is an antiquity, without ever remembering it is an abbey. Indeed there is no clearer case of it than what can only be called the atheism of Jane Austen.
Unfortunately it could truly be said of the English gentleman, as of another gallant and gracious individual, that his honour stood rooted in dishonour. He was, indeed, somewhat in the position of such an aristocrat in a romance, whose splendour has the dark spot of a secret and a sort of blackmail. There was, to begin with, an uncomfortable paradox in the tale of his pedigree. Many heroes have claimed to be descended from the gods, from beings greater than themselves; but he himself was far more heroic than his ancestors. His glory did not come from the Crusades but from the Great Pillage. His fathers had not come over with William the Conqueror, but only assisted in a somewhat shuffling manner, at the coming over of William of Orange. His own exploits were often really romantic, in the cities of the Indian sultans or the war of the wooden ships; it was the exploits of the far-off founders of his family that were painfully realistic. In this the great gentry were more in the position of Napoleonic marshals than of Norman knights, but their position was worse; for the marshals might be descended from peasants and shopkeepers; but the oligarchs were descended from usurers and thieves. That, for good or evil, was the paradox of England; the typical aristocrat was the typical upstart.
But the secret was worse; not only was such a family founded on stealing, but the family was stealing still. It is a grim truth that all through the eighteenth century, all through the great Whig speeches about liberty, all through the great Tory speeches about patriotism, through the period of Wandewash and Plassy, through the period of Trafalgar and Waterloo, one process was steadily going on in the central senate of the nation. Parliament was passing bill after bill for the enclosure, by the great landlords, of such of the common lands as had survived out of the great communal system of the Middle Ages. It is much more than a pun, it is the prime political irony of our history, that the Commons were destroying the commons. The very word “common,” as we have before noted, lost its great moral meaning, and became a mere topographical term for some remaining scrap of scrub or heath that was not worth stealing. In the eighteenth century these last and lingering commons were connected only with stories about highwaymen, which still linger in our literature. The romance of them was a romance of robbers; but not of the real robbers.
XVI
L’ARISTOCRAZIA E I MALCONTENTI
È il pathos di molte cose trite che esse sono intrinsecamente delicate e sono solo meccanicamente rese insulse. Chiunque abbia visto la prima luce bianca, quando entra da una finestra, sa che la luce del giorno non è soltanto bella quanto la luce lunare, ma altrettanto misteriosa. È la sottigliezza del colore della luce solare che sembra essere incolore. Così il patriottismo, e specialmente il patriottismo inglese, che è volgarizzato con volumi di nebbia e fumo verbale, è ancora in se stesso qualcosa di tenue e tenero come un clima. Il nome di Nelson, con il quale si è concluso l’ultimo capitolo, potrebbe assai bene riassumere la questione; poiché il suo nome è sballottato e percosso come un vecchio barattolo di latta, mentre la sua anima aveva in sé qualcosa di un fine e fragile vaso del Settecento. E si scoprirà che le cose più logore contemporanee e connesse con lui hanno una reale verità rispetto al tono e al significato della sua vita e del suo tempo, sebbene per noi troppo spesso siano degenerate in scherzi morti. L’espressione “cuori di quercia”, per esempio, non è una frase infelice per il lato più fine di quell’Inghilterra di cui egli fu la migliore espressione. Persino come metafora materiale essa copre molto di ciò che intendo; la quercia era tutt’altro che ricavata solo in randelli, né nemmeno solo in navi da battaglia; e la gentry inglese non riteneva professionale fingere di essere meri bruti. Il solo nome della quercia richiama come un sogno quegli scuri ma geniali interni di collegi e case di campagna, in cui grandi gentiluomini, non degenerati, resero quasi il latino una lingua inglese e il porto un vino inglese. Qualche parte di quel mondo almeno non perirà; poiché il suo bagliore autunnale passò nel pennello dei grandi ritrattisti inglesi, ai quali, più di ogni altro uomo, fu dato il potere di commemorare la vasta umanità della propria terra; immortalando uno stato d’animo ampio e morbido quanto la loro stessa pennellata. Giungi naturalmente, al giusto angolo emotivo, su una tela di Gainsborough, che dipingeva le dame come paesaggi, tanto grandi e tanto inconsapevoli nel loro riposo, e noterai quanto sottilmente l’artista dia a un abito che fluttua in primo piano qualcosa della divina qualità della distanza. Allora comprenderai un’altra frase sbiadita e parole pronunciate lontano sul mare; sorgeranno del tutto fresche davanti a te e saranno portate su una battuta di musica, come parole che non hai mai udito prima: “Per l’Inghilterra, la casa e la bellezza.”
Quando penso a queste cose, non ho alcuna tentazione a mero brontolamento contro la grande gentry che condusse la grande guerra dei nostri padri. Ma in verità la difficoltà al riguardo era qualcosa di assai più profondo di quanto potesse essere affrontato con qualsiasi brontolamento. Era una classe esclusiva, ma non una vita esclusiva; era interessata a tutte le cose, sebbene non per tutti gli uomini. O piuttosto quelle cose che mancava di includere, per via delle limitazioni di questo intervallo razionalista tra il misticismo medievale e quello moderno, non erano almeno del genere da scioccarci con superficiale disumanità. La più grande lacuna nelle loro anime, per coloro che la ritengono una lacuna, era il loro completo e compiaciuto paganesimo. Tutte le loro stesse decenze presupponevano che l’antica fede fosse morta; coloro che la tenevano ancora, come il grande Johnson, erano considerati eccentrici. La Rivoluzione francese fu un tumulto che interruppe il assai formale funerale del Cristianesimo; e fu seguita da varie altre complicazioni, tra cui il cadavere che tornava in vita. Ma lo scetticismo non fu una mera orgia oligarchica; non era confinato all’Hell-Fire Club; il quale poteva in virtù del suo vivido nome essere considerato relativamente ortodosso. È presente nella più mite atmosfera borghese; come nel capolavoro borghese su “Northanger Abbey”, dove effettivamente ci ricordiamo che è un’antichità, senza mai ricordare che è un’abbazia. In verità non c’è caso più chiaro di esso di ciò che può solo essere chiamato l’ateismo di Jane Austen.
Sfortunatamente si potrebbe davvero dire del gentiluomo inglese, come di un altro individuo galante e grazioso, che il suo onore stava radicato nel disonore. Egli era, in verità, alquanto nella posizione di un tale aristocratico in un romanzo, il cui splendore ha la macchia scura di un segreto e di una sorta di ricatto. C’era, per cominciare, uno scomodo paradosso nel racconto del suo lignaggio. Molti eroi hanno preteso di discendere dagli dèi, da esseri più grandi di loro stessi; ma egli stesso era assai più eroico dei suoi antenati. La sua gloria non veniva dalle Crociate ma dal Grande Saccheggio. I suoi padri non erano giunti con Guglielmo il Conquistatore, ma avevano soltanto assistito in un modo alquanto ambiguo, alla venuta di Guglielmo d’Orange. Le sue proprie imprese erano spesso davvero romantiche, nelle città dei sultani indiani o nella guerra delle navi di legno; erano le imprese dei lontani fondatori della sua famiglia a essere penosamente realistiche. In questo la grande gentry era più nella posizione di marescialli napoleonici che di cavalieri normanni, ma la loro posizione era peggiore; poiché i marescialli potevano discendere da contadini e bottegai; ma gli oligarchi discendevano da usurai e ladri. Quello, nel bene o nel male, era il paradosso dell’Inghilterra; l’aristocratico tipico era il tipico arrampicatore sociale.
Ma il segreto era peggiore; non solo una tale famiglia era fondata sul rubare, ma la famiglia stava rubando ancora. È una cupa verità che per tutto il Settecento, per tutti i grandi discorsi Whig sulla libertà, per tutti i grandi discorsi Tory sul patriottismo, attraverso il periodo di Wandewash e Plassy, attraverso il periodo di Trafalgar e Waterloo, un processo procedeva costantemente nel senato centrale della nazione. Il Parlamento approvava legge dopo legge per la recinzione, da parte dei grandi proprietari terrieri, di quelle terre comuni che erano sopravvissute dal grande sistema comunitario del Medioevo. È assai più di un gioco di parole, è la prima ironia politica della nostra storia, che i Comuni distruggessero le terre comuni. La parola stessa “comune”, come abbiamo notato in precedenza, perse il suo grande significato morale, e divenne un mero termine topografico per qualche avanzo di boscaglia o brughiera che non valeva la pena rubare. Nel Settecento queste ultime e persistenti terre comuni erano connesse solo con storie di banditi di strada, che ancora indugiano nella nostra letteratura. Il romanticismo di esse era un romanticismo di ladri; ma non dei veri ladri.
This was the mysterious sin of the English squires, that they remained human, and yet ruined humanity all around them. Their own ideal, nay their own reality of life, was really more generous and genial than the stiff savagery of Puritan captains and Prussian nobles; but the land withered under their smile as under an alien frown. Being still at least English, they were still in their way good-natured; but their position was false, and a false position forces the good-natured into brutality. The French Revolution was the challenge that really revealed to the Whigs that they must make up their minds to be really democrats or admit that they were really aristocrats. They decided, as in the case of their philosophic exponent Burke, to be really aristocrats; and the result was the White Terror, the period of Anti-Jacobin repression which revealed the real side of their sympathies more than any stricken fields in foreign lands. Cobbett, the last and greatest of the yeomen, of the small farming class which the great estates were devouring daily, was thrown into prison merely for protesting against the flogging of English soldiers by German mercenaries. In that savage dispersal of a peaceful meeting which was called the Massacre of Peterloo, English soldiers were indeed employed, though much more in the spirit of German ones. And it is one of the bitter satires that cling to the very continuity of our history, that such suppression of the old yeoman spirit was the work of soldiers who still bore the title of the Yeomanry.
The name of Cobbett is very important here; indeed it is generally ignored because it is important. Cobbett was the one man who saw the tendency of the time as a whole, and challenged it as a whole; consequently he went without support. It is a mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the same sense that a football match is popular. The division in Cobbett’s time was slightly more sincere, but almost as superficial; it was a difference of sentiment about externals which divided the old agricultural gentry of the eighteenth century from the new mercantile gentry of the nineteenth. Through the first half of the nineteenth century there were some real disputes between the squire and the merchant. The merchant became converted to the important economic thesis of Free Trade, and accused the squire of starving the poor by dear bread to keep up his agrarian privilege. Later the squire retorted not ineffectively by accusing the merchant of brutalizing the poor by overworking them in his factories to keep up his commercial success. The passing of the Factory Acts was a confession of the cruelty that underlay the new industrial experiments, just as the Repeal of the Corn Laws was a confession of the comparative weakness and unpopularity of the squires, who had destroyed the last remnants of any peasantry that might have defended the field against the factory. These relatively real disputes would bring us to the middle of the Victorian era. But long before the beginning of the Victorian era, Cobbett had seen and said that the disputes were only relatively real. Or rather he would have said, in his more robust fashion, that they were not real at all. He would have said that the agricultural pot and the industrial kettle were calling each other black, when they had both been blackened in the same kitchen. And he would have been substantially right; for the great industrial disciple of the kettle, James Watt (who learnt from it the lesson of the steam engine), was typical of the age in this, that he found the old Trade Guilds too fallen, unfashionable and out of touch with the times to help his discovery, so that he had recourse to the rich minority which had warred on and weakened those Guilds since the Reformation. There was no prosperous peasant’s pot, such as Henry of Navarre invoked, to enter into alliance with the kettle. In other words, there was in the strict sense of the word no commonwealth, because wealth, though more and more wealthy, was less and less common. Whether it be a credit or discredit, industrial science and enterprise were in bulk a new experiment of the old oligarchy; and the old oligarchy had always been ready for new experiments—beginning with the Reformation. And it is characteristic of the clear mind which was hidden from many by the hot temper of Cobbett, that he did see the Reformation as the root of both squirearchy and industrialism, and called on the people to break away from both. The people made more effort to do so than is commonly realized. There are many silences in our somewhat snobbish history; and when the educated class can easily suppress a revolt, they can still more easily suppress the record of it. It was so with some of the chief features of that great mediaeval revolution the failure of which, or rather the betrayal of which, was the real turning point of our history. It was so with the revolts against the religious policy of Henry VIII; and it was so with the rick-burning and frame-breaking riots of Cobbett’s epoch. The real mob reappeared for a moment in our history, for just long enough to show one of the immortal marks of the real mob-ritualism. There is nothing that strikes the undemocratic doctrinaire so sharply about direct democratic action as the vanity or mummery of the things done seriously in the daylight; they astonish him by being as unpractical as a poem or a prayer. The French Revolutionists stormed an empty prison merely because it was large and solid and difficult to storm, and therefore symbolic of the mighty monarchical machinery of which it had been but the shed. The English rioters laboriously broke in pieces a parish grindstone, merely because it was large and solid and difficult to break, and therefore symbolic of the mighty oligarchical machinery which perpetually ground the faces of the poor. They also put the oppressive agent of some landlord in a cart and escorted him round the county, merely to exhibit his horrible personality to heaven and earth. Afterwards they let him go, which marks perhaps, for good or evil, a certain national modification of the movement. There is something very typical of an English revolution in having the tumbril without the guillotine.
Questo era il misterioso peccato degli squire inglesi, che essi rimanevano umani, eppure rovinavano l’umanità tutt’intorno a loro. Il loro stesso ideale, anzi la loro stessa realtà di vita, era davvero più generoso e geniale della rigida ferocia dei capitani puritani e dei nobili prussiani; ma la terra appassiva sotto il loro sorriso come sotto un cipiglio estraneo. Essendo ancora almeno inglesi, erano ancora a modo loro di buon carattere; ma la loro posizione era falsa, e una falsa posizione spinge i buoni di carattere nella brutalità. La Rivoluzione francese fu la sfida che davvero rivelò ai Whig che dovevano decidersi a essere davvero democratici o ad ammettere di essere davvero aristocratici. Essi decisero, come nel caso del loro esponente filosofico Burke, di essere davvero aristocratici; e il risultato fu il Terrore Bianco, il periodo di repressione antigiacobina che rivelò il vero lato delle loro simpatie più di qualsiasi campo insanguinato in terre straniere. Cobbett, l’ultimo e il più grande degli yeoman, della piccola classe agricola che le grandi tenute stavano divorando quotidianamente, fu gettato in prigione semplicemente per aver protestato contro la fustigazione dei soldati inglesi da parte di mercenari tedeschi. In quella selvaggia dispersione di una riunione pacifica che fu chiamata il Massacro di Peterloo, furono impiegati soldati inglesi, in verità, sebbene assai più nello spirito di quelli tedeschi. Ed è una delle amare satire che si aggrappano alla continuità stessa della nostra storia, che tale soppressione dell’antico spirito yeoman fosse l’opera di soldati che portavano ancora il titolo di Yeomanry.
Il nome di Cobbett è assai importante qui; anzi è generalmente ignorato perché è importante. Cobbett fu l’unico uomo che vide la tendenza del tempo nel suo insieme, e la sfidò nel suo insieme; di conseguenza rimase senza sostegno. È un segno di tutta la nostra moderna storia che le masse siano tenute tranquille con una lotta. Sono tenute tranquille dalla lotta perché è una finta lotta; così la maggior parte di noi sa ormai a questo tempo che il Sistema dei Partiti è stato popolare solo nello stesso senso in cui una partita di calcio è popolare. La divisione al tempo di Cobbett era leggermente più sincera, ma quasi altrettanto superficiale; era una differenza di sentimento riguardo agli esterni che divideva l’antica gentry agricola del Settecento dalla nuova gentry mercantile dell’Ottocento. Per tutta la prima metà dell’Ottocento vi furono alcune reali dispute tra lo squire e il mercante. Il mercante si convertì all’importante tesi economica del Libero Scambio, e accusò lo squire di affamare i poveri con il pane caro per mantenere il suo privilegio agrario. Più tardi lo squire ribatté non inefficacemente accusando il mercante di abbrutire i poveri sfruttandoli oltre misura nelle sue fabbriche per mantenere il suo successo commerciale. L’approvazione delle Leggi sulle Fabbriche fu una confessione della crudeltà che sottostava ai nuovi esperimenti industriali, proprio come la Abrogazione delle Leggi sul Grano fu una confessione della relativa debolezza e impopolarità degli squire, che avevano distrutto gli ultimi resti di qualsiasi contadinanza che avrebbe potuto difendere il campo contro la fabbrica. Queste dispute relativamente reali ci porterebbero alla metà dell’era vittoriana. Ma molto prima dell’inizio dell’era vittoriana, Cobbett aveva visto e detto che le dispute erano solo relativamente reali. O piuttosto avrebbe detto, nel suo modo più robusto, che esse non erano affatto reali. Avrebbe detto che la pentola agricola e il paiolo industriale si davano l’un l’altro del nero, quando erano stati entrambi anneriti nella stessa cucina. E avrebbe avuto sostanzialmente ragione; poiché il grande discepolo industriale del paiolo, James Watt (che apprese da esso la lezione della macchina a vapore), era tipico dell’epoca in questo, che egli trovò le antiche Corporazioni di Mestiere troppo decadute, fuori moda e fuori contatto con i tempi per aiutare la sua scoperta, sicché egli fece ricorso alla ricca minoranza che aveva combattuto e indebolito quelle Corporazioni fin dalla Riforma. Non c’era la pentola del contadino prospero, quale Enrico di Navarra invocò, per entrare in alleanza con il paiolo. In altre parole, non c’era nel senso stretto della parola alcuno stato, perché la ricchezza, benché sempre più ricca, era sempre meno comune. Che sia un merito o un demerito, la scienza e l’impresa industriali erano nel complesso un nuovo esperimento dell’antica oligarchia; e l’antica oligarchia era sempre stata pronta a nuovi esperimenti—a cominciare dalla Riforma. Ed è caratteristico della mente lucida che era nascosta a molti dal temperamento focoso di Cobbett, che egli vide davvero la Riforma come la radice sia della squirearchia sia dell’industrialismo, e chiamò il popolo a rompere con entrambi. Il popolo fece più sforzi per farlo di quanto comunemente si creda. Ci sono molti silenzi nella nostra alquanto snob storia; e quando la classe istruita può facilmente reprimere una rivolta, può ancora più facilmente reprimere il resoconto di essa. Fu così con alcuni dei principali tratti di quella grande rivoluzione medievale il cui fallimento, o piuttosto il cui tradimento, fu il vero punto di svolta della nostra storia. Fu così con le rivolte contro la politica religiosa di Enrico VIII; e fu così con i tumulti dell’incendio dei covoni e della rottura dei telai dell’epoca di Cobbett. La vera plebe riapparve per un momento nella nostra storia, per appena abbastanza a lungo da mostrare uno dei segni immortali del vero ritualismo plebeo. Non c’è nulla che colpisca il dottrinario antidemocratico così acutamente riguardo all’azione democratica diretta come la vanità o la buffonata delle cose fatte seriamente alla luce del giorno; esse lo stupiscono per l’essere impratiche come un poema o una preghiera. I rivoluzionari francesi presero d’assalto una prigione vuota semplicemente perché era grande e solida e difficile da espugnare, e perciò simbolica della possente macchina monarchica di cui essa non era stata che il capannone. I rivoltosi inglesi laboriosamente fecero a pezzi una macina parrocchiale, semplicemente perché era grande e solida e difficile da rompere, e perciò simbolica della possente macchina oligarchica che perpetuamente macinava i volti dei poveri. Misero anche l’oppressivo agente di qualche proprietario terriero in un carro e lo scortarono per la contea, soltanto per esibirne l’orribile personalità al cielo e alla terra. Poi lo lasciarono andare, il che segna forse, nel bene o nel male, una certa modificazione nazionale del movimento. C’è qualcosa di assai tipico di una rivoluzione inglese nell’avere il carro del boia senza la ghigliottina.
Anyhow, these embers of the revolutionary epoch were trodden out very brutally; the grindstone continued (and continues) to grind in the scriptural fashion above referred to, and, in most political crises since, it is the crowd that has found itself in the cart. But, of course, both the riot and repression in England were but shadows of the awful revolt and vengeance which crowned the parallel process in Ireland. Here the terrorism, which was but a temporary and desperate tool of the aristocrats in England (not being, to do them justice, at all consonant to their temperament, which had neither the cruelty and morbidity nor the logic and fixity of terrorism), became in a more spiritual atmosphere a flaming sword of religious and racial insanity. Pitt, the son of Chatham, was quite unfit to fill his father’s place, unfit indeed (I cannot but think) to fill the place commonly given him in history. But if he was wholly worthy of his immortality, his Irish expedients, even if considered as immediately defensible, have not been worthy of their immortality. He was sincerely convinced of the national need to raise coalition after coalition against Napoleon, by pouring the commercial wealth then rather peculiar to England upon her poorer Allies, and he did this with indubitable talent and pertinacity. He was at the same time faced with a hostile Irish rebellion and a partly or potentially hostile Irish Parliament. He broke the latter by the most indecent bribery and the former by the most indecent brutality, but he may well have thought himself entitled to the tyrant’s plea. But not only were his expedients those of panic, or at any rate of peril, but (what is less clearly realized) it is the only real defence of them that they were those of panic and peril. He was ready to emancipate Catholics as such, for religious bigotry was not the vice of the oligarchy; but he was not ready to emancipate Irishmen as such. He did not really want to enlist Ireland like a recruit, but simply to disarm Ireland like an enemy. Hence his settlement was from the first in a false position for settling anything. The Union may have been a necessity, but the Union was not a Union. It was not intended to be one, and nobody has ever treated it as one. We have not only never succeeded in making Ireland English, as Burgundy has been made French, but we have never tried. Burgundy could boast of Corneille, though Corneille was a Norman, but we should smile if Ireland boasted of Shakespeare. Our vanity has involved us in a mere contradiction; we have tried to combine identification with superiority. It is simply weak-minded to sneer at an Irishman if he figures as an Englishman, and rail at him if he figures as an Irishman. So the Union has never even applied English laws to Ireland, but only coercions and concessions both specially designed for Ireland. From Pitt’s time to our own this tottering alternation has continued; from the time when the great O’Connell, with his monster meetings, forced our government to listen to Catholic Emancipation to the time when the great Parnell, with his obstruction, forced it to listen to Home Rule, our staggering equilibrium has been maintained by blows from without. In the later nineteenth century the better sort of special treatment began on the whole to increase. Gladstone, an idealistic though inconsistent Liberal, rather belatedly realized that the freedom he loved in Greece and Italy had its rights nearer home, and may be said to have found a second youth in the gateway of the grave, in the eloquence and emphasis of his conversion. And a statesman wearing the opposite label (for what that is worth) had the spiritual insight to see that Ireland, if resolved to be a nation, was even more resolved to be a peasantry. George Wyndham, generous, imaginative, a man among politicians, insisted that the agrarian agony of evictions, shootings, and rack-rentings should end with the individual Irish getting, as Parnell had put it, a grip on their farms. In more ways than one his work rounds off almost romantically the tragedy of the rebellion against Pitt, for Wyndham himself was of the blood of the leader of the rebels, and he wrought the only reparation yet made for all the blood, shamefully shed, that flowed around the fall of FitzGerald.
The effect on England was less tragic; indeed, in a sense it was comic. Wellington, himself an Irishman though of the narrower party, was pre-eminently a realist, and, like many Irishmen, was especially a realist about Englishmen. He said the army he commanded was the scum of the earth; and the remark is none the less valuable because that army proved itself useful enough to be called the salt of the earth. But in truth it was in this something of a national symbol and the guardian, as it were, of a national secret. There is a paradox about the English, even as distinct from the Irish or the Scotch, which makes any formal version of their plans and principles inevitably unjust to them. England not only makes her ramparts out of rubbish, but she finds ramparts in what she has herself cast away as rubbish. If it be a tribute to a thing to say that even its failures have been successes, there is truth in that tribute. Some of the best colonies were convict settlements, and might be called abandoned convict settlements. The army was largely an army of gaol-birds, raised by gaol-delivery; but it was a good army of bad men; nay, it was a gay army of unfortunate men. This is the colour and the character that has run through the realities of English history, and it can hardly be put in a book, least of all a historical book. It has its flashes in our fantastic fiction and in the songs of the street, but its true medium is conversation. It has no name but incongruity. An illogical laughter survives everything in the English soul. It survived, perhaps, with only too much patience, the time of terrorism in which the more serious Irish rose in revolt. That time was full of a quite topsy-turvey tyranny, and the English humorist stood on his head to suit it. Indeed, he often receives a quite irrational sentence in a police court by saying he will do it on his head. So, under Pitt’s coercionist regime, a man was sent to prison for saying that George IV was fat; but we feel he must have been partly sustained in prison by the artistic contemplation of how fat he was. That sort of liberty, that sort of humanity and it is no mean sort, did indeed survive all the drift and downward eddy of an evil economic system, as well as the dragooning of a reactionary epoch and the drearier menace of materialistic social science, as embodied in the new Puritans, who have purified themselves even of religion. Under this long process, the worst that can be said is that the English humorist has been slowly driven downwards in the social scale. Falstaff was a knight, Sam Weller was a gentleman’s servant, and some of our recent restrictions seem designed to drive Sam Weller to the status of the Artful Dodger. But well it was for us that some such trampled tradition and dark memory of Merry England survived; well for us, as we shall see, that all our social science failed and all our statesmanship broke down before it. For there was to come the noise of a trumpet and a dreadful day of visitation, in which all the daily workers of a dull civilization were to be called out of their houses and their holes like a resurrection of the dead, and left naked under a strange sun with no religion but a sense of humour. And men might know of what nation Shakespeare was, who broke into puns and practical jokes in the darkest passion of his tragedies, if they had only heard those boys in France and Flanders who called out “Early Doors!” themselves in a theatrical memory, as they went so early in their youth to break down the doors of death.
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Comunque sia, questi tizzoni dell’epoca rivoluzionaria furono calpestati con grande brutalità; la mola continuò (e continua) a macinare nel modo scritturale sopra ricordato, e, nella maggior parte delle crisi politiche da allora, è la folla che si è ritrovata nel carro del boia. Ma, naturalmente, tanto la sommossa quanto la repressione in Inghilterra non furono che ombre della terribile rivolta e vendetta che coronarono il processo parallelo in Irlanda. Qui il terrorismo, che in Inghilterra non fu che uno strumento temporaneo e disperato degli aristocratici (non essendo, a render loro giustizia, per nulla consono al loro temperamento, che non aveva né la crudeltà e la morbosità né la logica e la fissità del terrorismo), divenne in un’atmosfera più spirituale una fiammeggiante spada di follia religiosa e razziale. Pitt, il figlio di Chatham, era del tutto inadatto a occupare il posto di suo padre, inadatto davvero (non posso non pensarlo) a occupare il posto che comunemente gli si assegna nella storia. Ma se fu pienamente degno della sua immortalità, i suoi espedienti irlandesi, anche se considerati come immediatamente difendibili, non sono stati degni della loro immortalità. Egli era sinceramente convinto della necessità nazionale di sollevare coalizione dopo coalizione contro Napoleone, riversando la ricchezza commerciale allora piuttosto peculiare all’Inghilterra sui suoi Alleati più poveri, e fece questo con indubbio talento e pertinacia. Al medesimo tempo si trovava di fronte a una ostile ribellione irlandese e a un Parlamento irlandese in parte o potenzialmente ostile. Egli spezzò quest’ultimo con la più indecente corruzione e la prima con la più indecente brutalità, ma può ben essersi creduto autorizzato all’appello del tiranno. Ma non solo i suoi espedienti furono quelli del panico, o in ogni caso del pericolo, ma (ciò che meno chiaramente si comprende) l’unica loro reale difesa è proprio che furono quelli del panico e del pericolo. Egli era pronto a emancipare i cattolici in quanto tali, poiché il fanatismo religioso non era il vizio dell’oligarchia; ma non era pronto a emancipare gli irlandesi in quanto tali. Non voleva realmente arruolare l’Irlanda come una recluta, ma semplicemente disarmare l’Irlanda come un nemico. Perciò il suo assetto fu fin dall’inizio in una falsa posizione per assestare qualsiasi cosa. L’Unione può essere stata una necessità, ma l’Unione non era un’Unione. Non era stata pensata per esserlo, e nessuno l’ha mai trattata come tale. Non solo non siamo mai riusciti a rendere inglese l’Irlanda, come la Borgogna è stata resa francese, ma non ci abbiamo mai provato. La Borgogna poteva vantarsi di Corneille, benché Corneille fosse un normanno, ma noi sorrideremmo se l’Irlanda si vantasse di Shakespeare. La nostra vanità ci ha coinvolto in una mera contraddizione; abbiamo cercato di combinare l’identificazione con la superiorità. È semplicemente ottuso schernire un irlandese se figura come inglese, e inveire contro di lui se figura come irlandese. Così l’Unione non ha mai neppure applicato le leggi inglesi all’Irlanda, ma soltanto coercizioni e concessioni entrambe appositamente concepite per l’Irlanda. Dal tempo di Pitt fino al nostro questa vacillante alternanza è continuata; dal tempo in cui il grande O’Connell, con i suoi mostruosi raduni, costrinse il nostro governo ad ascoltare l’Emancipazione cattolica, al tempo in cui il grande Parnell, con la sua ostruzione, lo costrinse ad ascoltare l’Autonomia irlandese (Home Rule), il nostro barcollante equilibrio è stato mantenuto da colpi venuti dall’esterno. Nel tardo diciannovesimo secolo la specie migliore di trattamento speciale cominciò nel complesso ad aumentare. Gladstone, un liberale idealista benché incoerente, si rese conto piuttosto tardivamente che la libertà che amava nella Grecia e in Italia aveva i suoi diritti più vicino a casa, e si può dire abbia trovato una seconda giovinezza sulla soglia della tomba, nell’eloquenza e nell’enfasi della sua conversione. E uno statista che portava l’etichetta opposta (per quel che vale) ebbe l’intuizione spirituale di vedere che l’Irlanda, se risoluta a essere una nazione, era ancor più risoluta a essere un contadinato. George Wyndham, generoso, fantasioso, un uomo tra i politici, insistette perché l’agonia agraria degli sfratti, delle fucilazioni e degli affitti da strozzino finisse con il singolo irlandese che, come Parnell aveva detto, mettesse una salda presa sulle proprie fattorie. In più di un modo la sua opera conclude quasi romanticamente la tragedia della ribellione contro Pitt, poiché Wyndham stesso era del sangue del capo dei ribelli, e compì l’unica riparazione finora fatta per tutto il sangue, vergognosamente versato, che scorse intorno alla caduta di FitzGerald.
L’effetto sull’Inghilterra fu meno tragico; anzi, in un certo senso fu comico. Wellington, egli stesso un irlandese benché del partito più angusto, era eminentemente un realista, e, come molti irlandesi, era specialmente un realista riguardo agli inglesi. Diceva che l’esercito da lui comandato era la feccia della terra; e l’osservazione non è meno preziosa perché quell’esercito si dimostrò abbastanza utile da poter essere chiamato il sale della terra. Ma in verità esso era in questo qualcosa di un simbolo nazionale e il custode, per così dire, di un segreto nazionale. C’è un paradosso riguardo agli inglesi, persino distinti dagli irlandesi o dagli scozzesi, che rende qualsiasi versione formale dei loro piani e principii inevitabilmente ingiusta verso di loro. L’Inghilterra non solo fa i suoi bastioni con i rifiuti, ma trova bastioni in ciò che lei stessa ha gettato via come rifiuto. Se sia un omaggio a una cosa dire che persino i suoi fallimenti sono stati successi, c’è verità in quell’omaggio. Alcune delle migliori colonie furono insediamenti penali, e potrebbero essere chiamate insediamenti penali abbandonati. L’esercito era in gran parte un esercito di avanzi di galera, levato con la liberazione dalle prigioni; ma era un buon esercito di uomini cattivi; anzi, era un allegro esercito di uomini sventurati. Questo è il colore e il carattere che è corso attraverso le realtà della storia inglese, e difficilmente può essere messo in un libro, tanto meno in un libro di storia. Ha i suoi bagliori nella nostra fantastica narrativa e nelle canzoni di strada, ma il suo vero mezzo è la conversazione. Non ha nome se non incongruità. Una risata illogica sopravvive a tutto nell’anima inglese. Sopravvisse, forse, con anche troppa pazienza, al tempo di terrorismo in cui gli irlandesi più seri insorsero in rivolta. Quel tempo era pieno di una tirannia del tutto a rovescio, e l’umorista inglese si mise a testa in giù per adattarvisi. Difatti egli riceve spesso una sentenza del tutto irrazionale in un tribunale (corte) di polizia dicendo che la farà a testa in giù. Così, sotto il regime coercitivo di Pitt, un uomo fu mandato in prigione per aver detto che Giorgio IV era grasso; ma sentiamo che deve essere stato in parte sostenuto in prigione dalla contemplazione artistica di quanto grasso egli fosse. Quella specie di libertà, quella specie di umanità — e non è una specie da poco — sopravvisse davvero a tutta la deriva e al vortice discendente di un sistema economico malvagio, così come alla soldatesca disciplina di un’epoca reazionaria e alla più tetra minaccia della scienza sociale materialistica, incarnata nei nuovi Puritani, che si sono purificati persino della religione. Sotto questo lungo processo, il peggio che si possa dire è che l’umorista inglese è stato lentamente sospinto verso il basso nella scala sociale. Falstaff era un cavaliere, Sam Weller era il servo di un gentiluomo, e alcune delle nostre recenti restrizioni sembrano concepite per spingere Sam Weller allo stato del Furbacchione. Ma per fortuna nostra qualche simile tradizione calpestata e oscura memoria dell’Allegra Inghilterra sopravvisse; per fortuna nostra, come vedremo, che tutta la nostra scienza sociale fallì e tutta la nostra arte di governo crollò dinanzi ad essa. Poiché doveva venire il suono di una tromba e un tremendo giorno di visitazione, in cui tutti i lavoratori quotidiani di una grigia civiltà dovevano essere chiamati fuori dalle loro case e dalle loro tane come una resurrezione dei morti, e lasciati nudi sotto uno strano sole senza altra religione che il senso dell’umorismo. E gli uomini potrebbero sapere di quale nazione fosse Shakespeare, che prorompeva in giochi di parole e burle nella più cupa passione delle sue tragedie, se solo avessero udito quei ragazzi in Francia e nelle Fiandre che gridavano “Early Doors!” essi stessi in una memoria teatrale, mentre andavano così presto, nella loro giovinezza, ad abbattere le porte della morte.
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XVII
THE RETURN OF THE BARBARIAN
THE only way to write a popular history as we have already remarked, would be to write it backwards. It would be to take common objects of our own street and tell the tale of how each of them came to be in the street at all. And for my immediate purpose it is really convenient to take two objects we have known all our lives as features of fashion or respectability. One, which has grown rarer recently, is what we call a top hat; the other, which is still a customary formality is a pair of trousers. The history of these humorous objects really does give a clue to what has happened in England for the last hundred years. It is not necessary to be an aesthete in order to regard both objects as the reverse of beautiful, as tested by what may be called the rational side of beauty. The lines of human limbs can be beautiful, and so can the lines of loose drapery, but not cylinders too loose to be the first and too tight to be the second. Nor is a subtle sense of harmony needed to see that while there are hundreds of differently proportioned hats, a hat that actually grows larger towards the top is somewhat top-heavy. But what is largely forgotten is this, that these two fantastic objects which now strike the eye as unconscious freaks, were originally conscious freaks. Our ancestors, to do them justice, did not think them casual or commonplace; they thought them, if not ridiculous, at least rococo. The top-hat was the topmost point of a riot of Regency dandyism, and bucks wore trousers while business men were still wearing knee-breeches. It will not be fanciful to see a certain oriental touch in trousers, which the later Romans also regarded as effeminately oriental; it was an oriental touch found in many florid things of the time—in Byron’s poems or Brighton Pavilion. Now, the interesting point is that for a whole serious century these instantaneous fantasies have remained like fossils. In the carnival of the Regency a few fools got into fancy dress, and we have all remained in fancy dress. At least, we have remained in the dress, though we have lost the fancy.
I say this is typical of the most important thing that happened in the Victorian time. For the most important thing was that nothing happened. The very fuss that was made about minor modifications brings into relief the rigidity with which the main lines of social life were left as they were at the French Revolution. We talk of the French Revolution as something that changed the world; but its most important relation to England is that it did not change England. A student of our history is concerned rather with the effect it did not have than the effect it did. If it be a splendid fate to have survived the Flood, the English oligarchy had that added splendour. But even for the countries in which the Revolution was a convulsion, it was the last convulsion—until that which shakes the world to-day. It gave their character to all the commonwealths, which all talked about progress, and were occupied in marking time. Frenchmen, under all superficial reactions, remained republican in spirit, as they had been when they first wore top-hats. Englishmen, under all superficial reforms, remained oligarchical in spirit, as they had been when they first wore trousers. Only one power might be said to be growing, and that in a plodding and prosaic fashion— the power in the North East whose name was Prussia. And the English were more and more learning that this growth need cause them no alarm, since the North Germans were their cousins in blood and their brothers in spirit.
The first thing to note, then, about the nineteenth century is that Europe remained herself as compared with the Europe of the great war, and that England especially remained herself as compared even with the rest of Europe. Granted this, we may give their proper importance to the cautious internal changes in this country, the small conscious and the large unconscious changes. Most of the conscious ones were much upon the model of an early one, the great Reform Bill of 1832, and can be considered in the light of it. First, from the standpoint of most real reformers, the chief thing about the Reform Bill was that it did not reform. It had a huge tide of popular enthusiasm behind it, which wholly disappeared when the people found themselves in front of it. It enfranchised large masses of the middle classes; it disfranchised very definite bodies of the working classes; and it so struck the balance between the conservative and the dangerous elements in the commonwealth that the governing class was rather stronger than before. The date, however, is important, not at all because it was the beginning of democracy, but because it was the beginning of the best way ever discovered of evading and postponing democracy. Here enters the homeopathic treatment of revolution, since so often successful. Well into the next generation Disraeli, the brilliant Jewish adventurer who was the symbol of the English aristocracy being no longer genuine, extended the franchise to the artisans, partly, indeed, as a party move against his great rival, Gladstone, but more as the method by which the old popular pressure was first tired out and then toned down. The politicians said the working-class was now strong enough to be allowed votes. It would be truer to say it was now weak enough to be allowed votes. So in more recent times Payment of Members, which would once have been regarded (and resisted) as an inrush of popular forces, was passed quietly and without resistance, and regarded merely as an extension of parliamentary privileges. The truth is that the old parliamentary oligarchy abandoned their first line of trenches because they had by that time constructed a second line of defence. It consisted in the concentration of colossal political funds in the private and irresponsible power of the politicians, collected by the sale of peerages and more important things, and expended on the jerrymandering of the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this inner obstacle a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket when there is a permanent block on the line. The facade and outward form of this new secret government is the merely mechanical application of what is called the Party System. The Party System does not consist, as some suppose, of two parties, but of one. If there were two real parties, there could be no system.
XVII
IL RITORNO DEL BARBARO
L’unico modo di scrivere una storia popolare, come abbiamo già osservato, sarebbe di scriverla a rovescio. Sarebbe di prendere gli oggetti comuni della nostra strada e raccontare la vicenda di come ciascuno di essi sia mai finito lì, nella strada. E per il mio scopo immediato è davvero comodo prendere due oggetti che abbiamo conosciuto per tutta la vita come tratti di moda o di rispettabilità. Uno, divenuto più raro di recente, è ciò che chiamiamo cappello a cilindro; l’altro, che è ancora una formalità consueta, è un paio di pantaloni. La storia di questi oggetti umoristici dà davvero una chiave di ciò che è accaduto in Inghilterra negli ultimi cento anni. Non è necessario essere un esteta per considerare entrambi gli oggetti il rovescio del bello, come li mette alla prova ciò che si potrebbe chiamare il lato razionale della bellezza. Le linee delle membra umane possono essere belle, e così possono esserlo le linee di un panneggio sciolto, ma non cilindri troppo larghi per essere le prime e troppo stretti per essere il secondo. Né occorre un senso sottile dell’armonia per vedere che, mentre vi sono centinaia di cappelli di diverse proporzioni, un cappello che effettivamente cresce verso l’alto è alquanto sbilanciato in cima. Ma ciò che in gran parte si dimentica è questo, che questi due fantastici oggetti che ora colpiscono l’occhio come inconsapevoli stramberie erano in origine consapevoli stramberie. I nostri antenati, a render loro giustizia, non li ritenevano casuali o comuni; li ritenevano, se non ridicoli, almeno rococò. Il cappello a cilindro era il punto più alto di un tripudio di dandismo della Reggenza, e i bellimbusti portavano pantaloni mentre gli uomini d’affari indossavano ancora le brache al ginocchio. Non sarà fantasioso scorgere un certo tocco orientale nei pantaloni, che anche i Romani più tardi consideravano effeminatamente orientali; era un tocco orientale che si ritrovava in molte cose fiorite del tempo—nei poemi di Byron o nel Padiglione di Brighton. Ora, il punto interessante è che per un intero secolo serio queste fantasie istantanee sono rimaste come fossili. Nel carnevale della Reggenza qualche sciocco si mise in costume, e noi tutti siamo rimasti in costume. Almeno, siamo rimasti nell’abito, benché ne abbiamo perduto la fantasia.
Dico che questo è tipico della cosa più importante che accadde nell’epoca (tempo) vittoriana. Poiché la cosa più importante fu che nulla accadde. Il gran clamore che si fece attorno a modifiche minori mette in rilievo la rigidità con cui le linee principali della vita sociale furono lasciate come erano alla Rivoluzione francese. Parliamo della Rivoluzione francese come di qualcosa che cambiò il mondo; ma la sua relazione più importante con l’Inghilterra è che non cambiò l’Inghilterra. Uno studioso della nostra storia si occupa piuttosto dell’effetto che essa non ebbe che dell’effetto che ebbe. Se sia un fato splendido essere sopravvissuti al Diluvio, l’oligarchia inglese ebbe quello splendore aggiunto. Ma persino per i paesi in cui la Rivoluzione fu una convulsione, essa fu l’ultima convulsione—fino a quella che scuote il mondo oggi. Diede il loro carattere a tutte le repubbliche, che parlavano tutte di progresso, ed erano occupate a segnare il passo (tempo). I francesi, sotto tutte le reazioni superficiali, rimasero repubblicani nello spirito, come erano stati quando indossarono per primi i cappelli a cilindro. Gli inglesi, sotto tutte le riforme superficiali, rimasero oligarchici nello spirito, come erano stati quando indossarono per primi i pantaloni. Solo una potenza si poteva dire crescesse, e questo in un modo laborioso e prosaico—la potenza nel Nord-Est il cui nome era la Prussia. E gli inglesi imparavano sempre più che questa crescita non doveva causar loro alcun allarme, poiché i tedeschi del Nord erano loro cugini nel sangue e loro fratelli nello spirito.
La prima cosa da notare, dunque, riguardo al diciannovesimo secolo è che l’Europa rimase sé stessa in confronto all’Europa della grande guerra, e che l’Inghilterra specialmente rimase sé stessa in confronto persino al resto d’Europa. Ammesso questo, possiamo dare la loro giusta importanza ai cauti mutamenti interni in questo paese, i piccoli mutamenti consapevoli e i grandi mutamenti inconsapevoli. La maggior parte di quelli consapevoli furono molto sul modello di uno dei primi, la grande Legge di Riforma del 1832, e possono essere considerati alla luce di essa. Anzitutto, dal punto di vista della maggior parte dei veri riformatori, la cosa principale riguardo alla Legge di Riforma fu che essa non riformò. Aveva alle spalle un’enorme marea di entusiasmo popolare, che scomparve del tutto quando il popolo si trovò dinanzi ad essa. Diede il voto a larghe masse delle classi medie; lo tolse a corpi ben definiti delle classi lavoratrici; e bilanciò talmente gli elementi conservatori e pericolosi nella repubblica che la classe dirigente ne uscì piuttosto più forte di prima. La data, tuttavia, è importante, non affatto perché fu l’inizio della democrazia, ma perché fu l’inizio del miglior modo mai scoperto di eludere e rimandare la democrazia. Qui entra il trattamento omeopatico della rivoluzione, tanto spesso riuscito. Ben addentro nella generazione successiva Disraeli, il brillante avventuriero ebreo che era il simbolo dell’aristocrazia inglese non più genuina, estese il diritto di voto agli artigiani, in parte, invero, come mossa di partito contro il suo grande rivale, Gladstone, ma più come il metodo con cui l’antica pressione popolare fu prima sfiancata e poi smorzata. I politici dicevano che la classe lavoratrice era ormai abbastanza forte per essere ammessa al voto. Sarebbe più vero dire che era ormai abbastanza debole per essere ammessa al voto. Così in tempi più recenti il Pagamento dei Deputati, che un tempo sarebbe stato considerato (e osteggiato) come un’irruzione di forze popolari, fu approvato tranquillamente e senza resistenza, e considerato solo come un’estensione dei privilegi parlamentari. La verità è che la vecchia oligarchia parlamentare abbandonò la sua prima linea di trincee perché aveva ormai a quel tempo costruito una seconda linea di difesa. Essa consisteva nella concentrazione di colossali fondi politici nel potere privato e irresponsabile dei politici, raccolti con la vendita di titoli nobiliari e di cose più importanti, e spesi nei brogli delle elezioni enormemente costose. In presenza di questo ostacolo interno un voto diventava valido press’a poco quanto un biglietto ferroviario quando c’è un blocco permanente sulla linea. La facciata e la forma esteriore di questo nuovo governo segreto è la mera applicazione meccanica di ciò che si chiama il Sistema dei Partiti. Il Sistema dei Partiti non consiste, come alcuni suppongono, di due partiti, ma di uno. Se ci fossero due partiti reali, non potrebbe esserci sistema.
But if this was the evolution of parliamentary reform, as represented by the first Reform Bill, we can see the other side of it in the social reform attacked immediately after the first Reform Bill. It is a truth that should be a tower and a landmark, that one of the first things done by the Reform Parliament was to establish those harsh and dehumanised workhouses which both honest Radicals and honest Tories branded with the black title of the New Bastille. This bitter name lingers in our literature, and can be found by the curious in the works of Carlyle and Hood, but it is doubtless interesting rather as a note of contemporary indignation than as a correct comparison. It is easy to imagine the logicians and legal orators of the parliamentary school of progress finding many points of differentiation and even of contrast. The Bastille was one central institution; the workhouses have been many, and have everywhere transformed local life with what ever they have to give of social sympathy and inspiration. Men of high rank and great wealth were frequently sent to the Bastille; but no such mistake has ever been made by the more business administration of the workhouse. Over the most capricious operations of the lettres de cachet there still hovered some hazy traditional idea that a man is put in prison to punish him for something. It was the discovery of a later social science that men who cannot be punished can still be imprisoned. But the deepest and most decisive difference lies in the better fortune of the New Bastille; for no mob has ever dared to storm it, and it never fell.
The New Poor Law was indeed not wholly new in the sense that it was the culmination and clear enunciation of a principle foreshadowed in the earlier Poor Law of Elizabeth, which was one of the many anti-popular effects of the Great Pillage. When the monasteries were swept away and the mediaeval system of hospitality destroyed, tramps and beggars became a problem, the solution of which has always tended towards slavery, even when the question of slavery been cleared of the irrelevant question of cruelty. It is obvious that a desperate man might find Mr. Bumble and the Board of Guardians less cruel than cold weather and the bare ground—even if he were allowed to sleep on the ground, which (by a veritable nightmare of nonsense and injustice) he is not. He is actually punished for sleeping under a bush on the specific and stated ground that he cannot afford a bed. It is obvious, however, that he may find his best physical good by going into the workhouse, as he often found it in pagan times by selling himself into slavery. The point is that the solution remains servile, even when Mr. Bumble and the Board of Guardians ceased to be in a common sense cruel. The pagan might have the luck to sell himself to a kind master. The principle of the New Poor Law, which has so far proved permanent in our society, is that the man lost all his civic rights and lost them solely through poverty. There is a touch of irony, though hardly of mere hypocrisy, in the fact that the Parliament which effected this reform had just been abolishing black slavery by buying out the slave-owners in the British colonies. The slave-owners were bought out at a price big enough to be called blackmail; but it would be misunderstanding the national mentality to deny the sincerity of the sentiment. Wilberforce represented in this the real wave of Wesleyan religion which had made a humane reaction against Calvinism, and was in no mean sense philanthropic. But there is something romantic in the English mind which can always see what is remote. It is the strongest example of what men lose by being long-sighted. It is fair to say that they gain many things also, the poems that are like adventures and the adventures that are like poems. It is a national savour, and therefore in itself neither good nor evil; and it depends on the application whether we find a scriptural text for it in the wish to take the wings of the morning and abide in the uttermost parts of the sea, or merely in the saying that the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth.
Anyhow, the unconscious nineteenth-century movement, so slow that it seems stationary, was altogether in this direction, of which workhouse philanthropy is the type. Nevertheless, it had one national institution to combat and overcome; one institution all the more intensely national because it was not official, and in a sense not even political. The modern Trade Union was the inspiration and creation of the English; it is still largely known throughout Europe by its English name. It was the English expression of the European effort to resist the tendency of Capitalism to reach its natural culmination in slavery. In this it has an almost weird psychological interest, for it is a return to the past by men ignorant of the past, like the subconscious action of some man who has lost his memory. We say that history repeats itself, and it is even more interesting when it unconsciously repeats itself. No man on earth is kept so ignorant of the Middle Ages as the British workman, except perhaps the British business man who employs him. Yet all who know even a little of the Middle Ages can see that the modern Trade Union is a groping for the ancient Guild. It is true that those who look to the Trade Union, and even those clear-sighted enough to call it the Guild, are often without the faintest tinge of mediaeval mysticism, or even of mediaeval morality. But this fact is itself the most striking and even staggering tribute to mediaeval morality. It has all the clinching logic of coincidence. If large numbers of the most hard-headed atheists had evolved, out of their own inner consciousness, the notion that a number of bachelors or spinsters ought to live together in celibate groups for the good of the poor, or the observation of certain hours and offices, it would be a very strong point in favour of the monasteries. It would be all the stronger if the atheists had never heard of monasteries; it would be strongest of all if they hated the very name of monasteries. And it is all the stronger because the man who puts his trust in Trades Unions does not call himself a Catholic or even a Christian, if he does call himself a Guild Socialist.
Ma se questa fu l’evoluzione della Riforma parlamentare, rappresentata dalla prima Legge di Riforma, possiamo vederne l’altro lato nella Riforma sociale affrontata immediatamente dopo la prima Legge di Riforma. È una verità che dovrebbe essere una torre e un caposaldo, che una delle prime cose fatte dal Parlamento della Riforma fu di istituire quelle dure e disumanizzate case di lavoro che tanto gli onesti Radicali quanto gli onesti Tory marchiarono con il nero titolo di Nuova Bastiglia. Questo amaro nome indugia nella nostra letteratura, e può essere trovato dal curioso nelle opere di Carlyle e di Hood, ma è senza dubbio interessante piuttosto come nota di indignazione contemporanea che come esatto paragone. È facile immaginare i logici e gli oratori legali della scuola parlamentare del progresso trovare molti punti di differenziazione e persino di contrasto. La Bastiglia era una sola istituzione centrale; le case di lavoro sono state molte, e ovunque hanno trasformato la vita locale con quel che di simpatia sociale e d’ispirazione hanno da offrire. Uomini di alto rango e di grande ricchezza venivano di frequente mandati alla Bastiglia; ma nessun simile errore è mai stato commesso dall’amministrazione più affaristica della casa di lavoro. Sulle operazioni più capricciose delle lettres de cachet aleggiava ancora una qualche nebulosa idea tradizionale che un uomo è messo in prigione per punirlo di qualcosa. Fu la scoperta di una scienza sociale più tarda che gli uomini che non possono essere puniti possono comunque essere imprigionati. Ma la differenza più profonda e decisiva sta nella migliore fortuna della Nuova Bastiglia; poiché nessuna folla ha mai osato darle l’assalto, ed essa non cadde mai.
La Nuova Legge sui Poveri non era invero del tutto nuova, nel senso che era il culmine e la chiara enunciazione di un principio prefigurato nella precedente Legge sui Poveri di Elisabetta, che fu uno dei molti effetti antipopolari del Grande Saccheggio. Quando i monasteri furono spazzati via e il sistema medievale dell’ospitalità distrutto, i vagabondi e i mendicanti divennero un problema, la cui soluzione ha sempre teso verso la schiavitù, anche quando la questione della schiavitù sia stata sgombrata dalla irrilevante questione della crudeltà. È ovvio che un uomo disperato potrebbe trovare il signor Bumble e il Consiglio dei Tutori meno crudeli del freddo e della nuda terra—anche se gli fosse permesso di dormire per terra, cosa che (per un vero e proprio incubo di insensatezza e ingiustizia) non gli è concesso. Egli viene in effetti punito per aver dormito sotto un cespuglio con la specifica e dichiarata motivazione che non può permettersi un letto. È ovvio, tuttavia, che egli può trovare il suo miglior bene fisico entrando nella casa di lavoro, come lo trovava spesso in tempi pagani vendendo sé stesso in schiavitù. Il punto è che la soluzione resta servile, anche quando il signor Bumble e il Consiglio dei Tutori cessarono di essere crudeli in senso comune. Il pagano poteva avere la fortuna di vendersi a un padrone gentile. Il principio della Nuova Legge sui Poveri, che finora si è dimostrato permanente nella nostra società, è che l’uomo perdeva tutti i suoi diritti civici e li perdeva unicamente per povertà. C’è un tocco di ironia, benché difficilmente di mera ipocrisia, nel fatto che il Parlamento che attuò questa riforma avesse appena abolito la nera schiavitù riscattando i proprietari di schiavi nelle colonie britanniche. I proprietari di schiavi furono riscattati a un prezzo abbastanza grande da poter essere chiamato ricatto; ma sarebbe fraintendere la mentalità nazionale negare la sincerità del sentimento. Wilberforce rappresentava in questo la vera ondata della religione wesleyana che aveva prodotto una umana reazione contro il calvinismo, e non fu filantropico in senso da poco. Ma c’è qualcosa di romantico nella mente inglese che sa sempre vedere ciò che è remoto. È l’esempio più forte di ciò che gli uomini perdono per il vedere lontano. È giusto dire che essi guadagnano anche molte cose, i poemi che sono come avventure e le avventure che sono come poemi. È un sapore nazionale, e perciò in sé né buono né cattivo; e dipende dall’applicazione se troviamo per esso un testo scritturale nel desiderio di prendere le ali dell’aurora e dimorare nelle parti più remote del mare, o soltanto nel detto che gli occhi dello stolto sono ai confini della terra.
Comunque sia, il moto inconsapevole del diciannovesimo secolo, così lento da sembrare immobile, andava tutto in questa direzione, di cui la filantropia della casa di lavoro è il tipo. Nondimeno, esso aveva una istituzione nazionale da combattere e sopraffare; una istituzione tanto più intensamente nazionale in quanto non era ufficiale, e in un certo senso neppure politica. Il moderno Sindacato (Trade Union) fu l’ispirazione e la creazione degli inglesi; è ancora largamente conosciuto in tutta Europa con il suo nome inglese. Fu l’espressione inglese dello sforzo europeo di resistere alla tendenza del Capitalismo a raggiungere il suo naturale culmine nella schiavitù. In ciò esso ha un interesse psicologico quasi misterioso, poiché è un ritorno al passato da parte di uomini ignari del passato, come l’azione subconscia di un uomo che ha perduto la memoria. Diciamo che la storia si ripete, ed è ancor più interessante quando inconsapevolmente si ripete. Nessun uomo sulla terra è tenuto tanto ignaro del Medioevo quanto l’operaio britannico, tranne forse l’uomo d’affari britannico che lo impiega. Eppure tutti coloro che sanno anche solo un poco del Medioevo possono vedere che il moderno Sindacato (Trade Union) è un brancolare verso l’antica Corporazione. È vero che coloro che guardano al Sindacato (Trade Union), e persino quelli abbastanza lungimiranti da chiamarlo la Corporazione, sono spesso privi della più tenue sfumatura di misticismo medievale, o persino di moralità medievale. Ma questo fatto è esso stesso il più impressionante e persino sbalorditivo omaggio alla moralità medievale. Ha tutta la stringente logica della coincidenza. Se un gran numero degli atei più duri di testa avesse evoluto, dalla propria intima coscienza, l’idea che un certo numero di scapoli o di zitelle debbano vivere insieme in gruppi celibi per il bene dei poveri, o per l’osservanza di certe ore e uffici, sarebbe un fortissimo punto a favore dei monasteri. Sarebbe tanto più forte se gli atei non avessero mai sentito parlare di monasteri; sarebbe fortissimo se essi odiassero il nome stesso di monasteri. Ed è tanto più forte perché l’uomo che ripone la sua fiducia nei Sindacati non si dice cattolico e neppure cristiano, se pure si dice Socialista Corporativo (Guild Socialist).
The Trade Union movement passed through many perils, including a ludicrous attempt of certain lawyers to condemn as a criminal conspiracy that Trade Union solidarity, of which their own profession is the strongest and most startling example in the world. The struggle culminated in gigantic strikes which split the country in every direction in the earlier part of the twentieth century. But another process, with much more power at its back, was also in operation. The principle represented by the New Poor Law proceeded on its course, and in one important respect altered its course, though it can hardly be said to have altered its object. It can most correctly be stated by saying that the employers themselves, who already organized business, began to organize social reform. It was more picturesquely expressed by a cynical aristocrat in Parliament who said, “We are all Socialists now.” The Socialists, a body of completely sincere men led by several conspicuously brilliant men, had long hammered into men’s heads the hopeless sterility of mere non-interference in exchange. The Socialists proposed that the State should not merely interfere in business but should take over the business, and pay all men as equal wage-earners, or at any rate as wage-earners. The employers were not willing to surrender their own position to the State, and this project has largely faded from politics. But the wiser of them were willing to pay better wages, and they were specially willing to bestow various other benefits so long as they were bestowed after the manner of wages. Thus we had a series of social reforms which, for good or evil, all tended in the same direction; the permission to employees to claim certain advantages as employees, and as something permanently different from employers. Of these the obvious examples were Employers’ Liability, Old Age Pensions, and, as marking another and more decisive stride in the process, the Insurance Act.
The latter in particular, and the whole plan of the social reform in general, were modelled upon Germany. Indeed the whole English life of this period was overshadowed by Germany. We had now reached, for good or evil, the final fulfilment of that gathering influence which began to grow on us in the seventeenth century, which was solidified by the military alliances of the eighteenth century, and which in the nineteenth century had been turned into a philosophy—not to say a mythology. German metaphysics had thinned our theology, so that many a man’s most solemn conviction about Good Friday was that Friday was named after Freya. German history had simply annexed English history, so that it was almost counted the duty of any patriotic Englishman to be proud of being a German. The genius of Carlyle, the culture preached by Matthew Arnold, would not, persuasive as they were, have alone produced this effect but for an external phenomenon of great force. Our internal policy was transformed by our foreign policy; and foreign policy was dominated by the more and more drastic steps which the Prussian, now clearly the prince of all the German tribes, was taking to extend the German influence in the world. Denmark was robbed of two provinces; France was robbed of two provinces; and though the fall of Paris was felt almost everywhere as the fall of the capital of civilization, a thing like the sacking of Rome by the Goths, many of the most influential people in England still saw nothing in it but the solid success of our kinsmen and old allies of Waterloo. The moral methods which achieved it, the juggling with the Augustenburg claim, the forgery of the Ems telegram, were either successfully concealed or were but cloudily appreciated. The Higher Criticism had entered into our ethics as well as our theology. Our view of Europe was also distorted and made disproportionate by the accident of a natural concern for Constantinople and our route to India, which led Palmerston and later Premiers to support the Turk and see Russia as the only enemy. This somewhat cynical reaction was summed up in the strange figure of Disraeli, who made a pro-Turkish settlement full of his native indifference to the Christian subjects of Turkey, and sealed it at Berlin in the presence of Bismarck. Disraeli was not without insight into the inconsistencies and illusions of the English; he said many sagacious things about them, and one especially when he told the Manchester School that their motto was “Peace and Plenty, amid a starving people, and with the world in arms.” But what he said about Peace and Plenty might well be parodied as a comment on what he himself said about Peace with Honour. Returning from that Berlin Conference he should have said, “I bring you Peace with Honour, peace with the seeds of the most horrible war of history; and honour as the dupes and victims of the old bully in Berlin.”
But it was, as we have seen, especially in social reform that Germany was believed to be leading the way, and to have found the secret of dealing with the economic evil. In the case of Insurance, which was the test case she was applauded for obliging all her workmen to set apart a portion of their wages for any time of sickness; and numerous other provisions, both in Germany and England, pursued the same ideal, which was that of protecting the poor against themselves. It everywhere involved an external power having a finger in the family pie; but little attention was paid to any friction thus caused, for all prejudices against the process were supposed to be the growth of ignorance. And that ignorance was already being attacked by what was called education— an enterprise also inspired largely by the example, and partly by the commercial competition of Germany. It was pointed out that in Germany governments and great employers thought it well worth their while to apply the grandest scale of organization and the minutest inquisition of detail to the instruction of the whole German race. The government was the stronger for training its scholars as it trained its soldiers; the big businesses were the stronger for manufacturing mind as they manufactured material. English education was made compulsory; it was made free; many good, earnest, and enthusiastic men laboured to create a ladder of standards and examinations, which would connect the cleverest of the poor with the culture of the English universities and the current teaching in history or philosophy. But it cannot be said that the connection was very complete, or the achievement so thorough as the German achievement. For whatever reason, the poor Englishman remained in many things much as his fathers had been, and seemed to think the Higher Criticism too high for him even to criticize.
Il movimento del Sindacato (Trade Union) attraversò molti pericoli, incluso un ridicolo tentativo di certi avvocati di condannare come cospirazione criminale quella solidarietà del Sindacato (Trade Union), di cui la loro stessa professione è l’esempio più forte e sorprendente al mondo. La lotta culminò in giganteschi scioperi che spaccarono il paese in ogni direzione nella prima parte del ventesimo secolo. Ma un altro processo, con molto più potere alle spalle, era anch’esso all’opera. Il principio rappresentato dalla Nuova Legge sui Poveri proseguì nel suo corso, e in un aspetto importante alterò il suo corso, benché si possa a stento dire che alterasse il suo scopo. Lo si può enunciare nel modo più corretto dicendo che i datori di lavoro stessi, che già organizzavano gli affari, cominciarono a organizzare la Riforma sociale. Fu espresso più pittorescamente da un cinico aristocratico in Parlamento che disse: “Adesso siamo tutti Socialisti.” I Socialisti, un corpo di uomini del tutto sinceri guidati da parecchi uomini cospicuamente brillanti, avevano a lungo martellato nella testa della gente la disperata sterilità del mero non-intervento nello scambio. I Socialisti proponevano che lo Stato non solo intervenisse negli affari ma prendesse in mano gli affari, e pagasse tutti gli uomini come uguali salariati, o in ogni caso come salariati. I datori di lavoro non erano disposti a cedere la propria posizione allo Stato, e questo progetto è in gran parte svanito dalla politica. Ma i più saggi tra loro erano disposti a pagare salari migliori, ed erano specialmente disposti a concedere vari altri benefici purché fossero concessi alla maniera dei salari. Così avemmo una serie di riforme sociali che, nel bene o nel male, tendevano tutte nella stessa direzione; il permesso ai dipendenti di rivendicare certi vantaggi in quanto dipendenti, e in quanto qualcosa di permanentemente diverso dai datori di lavoro. Di queste gli esempi ovvii furono la Responsabilità dei Datori di Lavoro, le Pensioni di Vecchiaia, e, a segnare un altro e più decisivo passo nel processo, la Legge sull’Assicurazione.
Quest’ultima in particolare, e l’intero disegno della Riforma sociale in generale, furono modellati sulla Germania. Anzi tutta la vita inglese di questo periodo fu adombrata dalla Germania. Avevamo ora raggiunto, nel bene o nel male, il compimento finale di quell’influenza crescente che cominciò a montare su di noi nel diciassettesimo secolo, che fu consolidata dalle alleanze militari del diciottesimo secolo, e che nel diciannovesimo secolo era stata trasformata in una filosofia—per non dire in una mitologia. La metafisica tedesca aveva diluito la nostra teologia, sicché per più d’uno la più solenne convinzione riguardo al Venerdì Santo era che il Venerdì (Friday) prendesse nome da Freya. La storia tedesca aveva semplicemente annesso la storia inglese, sicché si contava quasi dovere di ogni inglese patriottico essere orgoglioso di essere un tedesco. Il genio di Carlyle, la cultura predicata da Matthew Arnold, non avrebbero, per persuasivi che fossero, prodotto da soli questo effetto, se non fosse stato per un fenomeno esterno di grande forza. La nostra politica interna fu trasformata dalla nostra politica estera; e la politica estera era dominata dai passi sempre più drastici che il Prussiano, ormai chiaramente il principe di tutte le tribù tedesche, andava compiendo per estendere l’influenza tedesca nel mondo. La Danimarca fu derubata di due province; la Francia fu derubata di due province; e benché la caduta di Parigi fosse sentita quasi ovunque come la caduta della capitale della civiltà, una cosa simile al sacco di Roma da parte dei Goti, molte delle persone più influenti in Inghilterra ancora non vi videro nient’altro che il solido successo dei nostri consanguinei e vecchi alleati di Waterloo. I metodi morali che lo ottennero, i giochi di prestigio con la pretesa di Augustenburg, la falsificazione del telegramma di Ems, furono o abilmente celati o solo nebulosamente apprezzati. La Critica Superiore era entrata nella nostra etica così come nella nostra teologia. La nostra visione dell’Europa fu anche distorta e resa sproporzionata dall’accidente di una naturale preoccupazione per Costantinopoli e per la nostra via verso l’India, che indusse Palmerston e i successivi Primi Ministri a sostenere il Turco e a vedere la Russia come l’unico nemico. Questa reazione alquanto cinica fu riassunta nella strana figura di Disraeli, che concluse un accordo filo-turco pieno della sua nativa indifferenza verso i sudditi cristiani della Turchia, e lo suggellò a Berlino alla presenza di Bismarck. Disraeli non era privo di intuizione sulle incoerenze e le illusioni degli inglesi; disse molte cose sagaci su di loro, e una specialmente quando disse alla Scuola di Manchester che il loro motto era “Pace e Abbondanza, in mezzo a un popolo affamato, e con il mondo in armi.” Ma ciò che disse su Pace e Abbondanza potrebbe bene essere parodiato come commento a ciò che egli stesso disse su Pace con Onore. Di ritorno da quella Conferenza di Berlino avrebbe dovuto dire: “Vi porto Pace con Onore, pace con i semi della più orribile guerra della storia; e onore come gli zimbelli e le vittime del vecchio prepotente di Berlino.”
Ma fu, come abbiamo visto, specialmente nella Riforma sociale che si credeva la Germania indicasse la via, e avesse trovato il segreto per trattare il male economico. Nel caso dell’Assicurazione, che fu il caso di prova, essa fu applaudita per aver obbligato tutti i suoi operai a mettere da parte una porzione dei loro salari per ogni tempo di malattia; e numerose altre disposizioni, tanto in Germania quanto in Inghilterra, perseguirono il medesimo ideale, che era quello di proteggere i poveri contro sé stessi. Esso comportava ovunque una potenza esterna che ficcava il dito nel piatto di famiglia; ma poca attenzione fu prestata a qualsiasi attrito così causato, poiché si supponeva che tutti i pregiudizi contro il processo fossero il germoglio dell’ignoranza. E quell’ignoranza era già attaccata da ciò che si chiamava educazione—un’impresa anch’essa ispirata in gran parte dall’esempio, e in parte dalla concorrenza commerciale della Germania. Si faceva notare che in Germania i governi e i grandi datori di lavoro ritenevano ben degno del loro conto applicare la più grandiosa scala di organizzazione e la più minuziosa inquisizione del dettaglio all’istruzione dell’intera razza tedesca. Il governo era più forte per l’addestramento dei suoi scolari come addestrava i suoi soldati; le grandi imprese erano più forti per la fabbricazione della mente come fabbricavano la materia. L’educazione inglese fu resa obbligatoria; fu resa gratuita; molti uomini buoni, seri ed entusiasti si adoperarono per creare una scala di livelli ed esami, che collegasse i più intelligenti tra i poveri con la cultura delle università inglesi e con l’insegnamento corrente di storia o di filosofia. Ma non si può dire che il collegamento fosse molto completo, o la realizzazione così accurata come la realizzazione tedesca. Per una qualche ragione, il povero inglese rimase in molte cose press’a poco come erano stati i suoi padri, e sembrava ritenere la Critica Superiore troppo alta persino perché la criticasse.
And then a day came, and if we were wise, we thanked God that we had failed. Education, if it had ever really been in question, would doubtless have been a noble gift; education in the sense of the central tradition of history, with its freedom, its family honour, its chivalry which is the flower of Christendom. But what would our populace, in our epoch, have actually learned if they had learned all that our schools and universities had to teach? That England was but a little branch on a large Teutonic tree; that an unfathomable spiritual sympathy, all-encircling like the sea had always made us the natural allies of the great folk by the flowing Rhine; that all light came from Luther and Lutheran Germany, whose science was still purging Christianity of its Greek and Roman accretions; that Germany was a forest fated to grow; that France was a dung-heap fated to decay—a dung-heap with a crowing cock on it. What would the ladder of education have led to, except a platform on which a posturing professor proved that a cousin german was the same as a German cousin? What would the guttersnipe have learnt as a graduate, except to embrace a Saxon because he was the other half of an Anglo-Saxon? The day came, and the ignorant fellow found he had other things to learn. And he was quicker than his educated countrymen, for he had nothing to unlearn.
He in whose honour all had been said and sung stirred, and stepped across the border of Belgium. Then were spread out before men’s eyes all the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of his organization; then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what light we had followed and after what image we had laboured to refashion ourselves. Nor in any story of mankind has the irony of God chosen the foolish things so catastrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowd of poor and ignorant Englishmen, because they only knew that they were Englishmen, burst through the filthy cob webs of four hundred years and stood where their fathers stood when they knew that they were Christian men. The English poor, broken in every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long despoiled of property, and now being despoiled of liberty, entered history with a noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two years into one of the iron armies of the world. And when the critic of politics and literature, feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks around him to find the hero, he can point to nothing but a mob.
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E poi venne un giorno, e se eravamo saggi, ringraziammo Dio di aver fallito. L’istruzione, se davvero fosse mai stata in gioco, sarebbe stata senza dubbio un nobile dono; l’istruzione nel senso della tradizione centrale della storia, con la sua libertà, il suo onore familiare, la sua cavalleria che è il fiore della cristianità. Ma che cosa avrebbe davvero imparato il nostro popolino, nella nostra epoca, se avesse imparato tutto ciò che le nostre scuole e università avevano da insegnare? Che l’Inghilterra non era che un ramoscello di un grande albero teutonico; che un’insondabile simpatia spirituale, avvolgente come il mare, ci aveva sempre resi gli alleati naturali del grande popolo lungo il Reno che scorre; che ogni luce veniva da Lutero e dalla Germania luterana, la cui scienza andava ancora depurando il Cristianesimo dalle sue incrostazioni greche e romane; che la Germania fosse una foresta destinata a crescere; che la Francia fosse un letamaio destinato a marcire—un letamaio con sopra un gallo che canta. A che cosa avrebbe condotto la scala dell’istruzione, se non a una pedana su cui un professore in posa dimostrava che un cugino germano era la stessa cosa di un cugino germanico? Che cosa avrebbe imparato da laureato il monello dei bassifondi, se non ad abbracciare un Sassone perché era l’altra metà di un Anglo-Sassone? Venne il giorno, e l’ignorante scoprì di avere altre cose da imparare. E fu più svelto dei suoi connazionali istruiti, perché non aveva nulla da disimparare.
Colui in onore del quale tutto era stato detto e cantato si mosse, e varcò il confine del Belgio. Allora si dispiegarono davanti agli occhi degli uomini tutte le bellezze della sua cultura e tutti i benefici della sua organizzazione; allora scorgemmo sotto un’alba che si levava quale luce avevamo seguito e a immagine di che cosa ci eravamo affannati a rifoggiarci. Né in alcuna storia dell’umanità l’ironia di Dio ha scelto le cose stolte per confondere così catastroficamente i sapienti. Poiché la folla comune di Inglesi poveri e ignoranti, giacché sapevano soltanto di essere Inglesi, ruppe le luride ragnatele di quattrocento anni e si ergette là dove i loro padri si erano eretti quando sapevano di essere uomini cristiani. I poveri d’Inghilterra, spezzati in ogni rivolta, angariati da ogni moda, da tempo spogliati della proprietà, e ora spogliati della libertà, entrarono nella storia con uno squillo di trombe, e in due anni si mutarono in uno degli eserciti di ferro del mondo. E quando il critico di politica e letteratura, sentendo che questa guerra è in fondo eroica, si guarda attorno per trovare l’eroe, non può additare altro che una plebaglia.
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XVIII
CONCLUSION
In so small a book on so large a matter, finished hastily enough amid the necessities of an enormous national crisis, it would be absurd to pretend to have achieved proportion; but I will confess to some attempt to correct a disproportion. We talk of historical perspective, but I rather fancy there is too much perspective in history; for perspective makes a giant a pigmy and a pigmy a giant. The past is a giant foreshortened with his feet towards us; and sometimes the feet are of clay. We see too much merely the sunset of the Middle Ages, even when we admire its colours; and the study of a man like Napoleon is too often that of “The Last Phase.” So there is a spirit that thinks it reasonable to deal in detail with Old Sarum, and would think it ridiculous to deal in detail with the Use of Sarum; or which erects in Kensington Gardens a golden monument to Albert larger than anybody has ever erected to Alfred. English history is misread especially, I think, because the crisis is missed. It is usually put about the period of the Stuarts; and many of the memorials of our past seem to suffer from the same visitation as the memorial of Mr. Dick. But though the story of the Stuarts was a tragedy, I think it was also an epilogue.
I make the guess, for it can be no more, that the change really came with the fall of Richard II, following on his failure to use mediaeval despotism in the interests of mediaeval democracy. England, like the other nations of Christendom, had been created not so much by the death of the ancient civilization as by its escape from death, or by its refusal to die. Mediaeval civilization had arisen out of the resistance to the barbarians, to the naked barbarism from the North and the more subtle barbarism from the East. It increased in liberties and local government under kings who controlled the wider things of war and taxation; and in the peasant war of the fourteenth century in England, the king and the populace came for a moment into conscious alliance. They both found that a third thing was already too strong for them. That third thing was the aristocracy; and it captured and called itself the Parliament. The House of Commons, as its name implies, had primarily consisted of plain men summoned by the King like jury men; but it soon became a very special jury. It became, for good or evil, a great organ of government, surviving the Church, the monarchy and the mob; it did many great and not a few good things. It created what we call the British Empire; it created something which was really far more valuable, a new and natural sort of aristocracy, more humane and even humanitarian than most of the aristocracies of the world. It had sufficient sense of the instincts of the people, at least until lately, to respect the liberty and especially the laughter that had become almost the religion of the race. But in doing all this, it deliberately did two other things, which it thought a natural part of its policy; it took the side of the Protestants, and then (partly as a consequence) it took the side of the Germans. Until very lately most intelligent Englishmen were quite honestly convinced that in both it was taking the side of progress against decay. The question which many of them are now inevitably asking themselves, and would ask whether I asked it or no, is whether it did not rather take the side of barbarism against civilization.
At least, if there be anything valid in my own vision of these things, we have returned to an origin and we are back in the war with the barbarians. It falls as naturally for me that the Englishman and the Frenchman should be on the same side as that Alfred and Abbo should be on the same side, in that black century when the barbarians wasted Wessex and besieged Paris. But there are now, perhaps, less certain tests of the spiritual as distinct from the material victory of civilization. Ideas are more mixed, are complicated by fine shades or covered by fine names. And whether the retreating savage leaves behind him the soul of savagery, like a sickness in the air, I myself should judge primarily by one political and moral test. The soul of savagery is slavery. Under all its mask of machinery and instruction, the German regimentation of the poor was the relapse of barbarians into slavery. I can see no escape from it for ourselves in the ruts of our present reforms, but only by doing what the mediaevals did after the other barbarian defeat: beginning, by guilds and small independent groups, gradually to restore the personal property of the poor and the personal freedom of the family. If the English really attempt that, the English have at least shown in the war, to any one who doubted it, that they have not lost the courage and capacity of their fathers, and can carry it through if they will. If they do not do so, if they continue to move only with the dead momentum of the social discipline which we learnt from Germany, there is nothing before us but what Mr. Belloc, the discoverer of this great sociological drift, has called the Servile Sate. And there are moods in which a man, considering that conclusion of our story, is half inclined to wish that the wave of Teutonic barbarism had washed out us and our armies together; and that the world should never know anything more of the last of the English, except that they died for liberty.
XVIII
CONCLUSIONE
In un libro così piccolo su una materia così grande, terminato abbastanza in fretta tra le necessità di un’enorme crisi nazionale, sarebbe assurdo pretendere di aver raggiunto la proporzione; ma confesserò un certo tentativo di correggere una sproporzione. Parliamo di prospettiva storica, ma sospetto piuttosto che vi sia troppa prospettiva nella storia; poiché la prospettiva fa di un gigante un pigmeo e di un pigmeo un gigante. Il passato è un gigante scorciato con i piedi rivolti verso di noi; e talvolta i piedi sono d’argilla. Vediamo troppo soltanto il tramonto del Medioevo, anche quando ne ammiriamo i colori; e lo studio di un uomo come Napoleone è troppo spesso quello di “L’Ultima Fase.” Così c’è uno spirito che ritiene ragionevole trattare in dettaglio di Old Sarum, e riterrebbe ridicolo trattare in dettaglio dell’Uso di Sarum; ovvero che erige nei Kensington Gardens un monumento d’oro ad Alberto più grande di quanto nessuno abbia mai eretto ad Alfredo. La storia inglese è mal letta specialmente, io penso, perché la crisi viene mancata. Di solito la si colloca attorno al periodo degli Stuart; e molti dei memoriali del nostro passato sembrano soffrire della stessa visitazione del memoriale del signor Dick. Ma benché la storia degli Stuart fosse una tragedia, io penso che fosse anche un epilogo.
Faccio la congettura, poiché altro non può essere, che il cambiamento venne realmente con la caduta di Riccardo II, in seguito al suo fallimento nell’usare il dispotismo medievale negli interessi della democrazia medievale. L’Inghilterra, come le altre nazioni della Cristianità, era stata creata non tanto dalla morte dell’antica civiltà quanto dalla sua fuga dalla morte, ovvero dal suo rifiuto di morire. La civiltà medievale era sorta dalla resistenza ai barbari, alla nuda barbarie dal Nord e alla più sottile barbarie dall’Oriente. Crebbe in libertà e governo locale sotto re che controllavano le cose più ampie della guerra e della tassazione; e nella guerra dei contadini del quattordicesimo secolo in Inghilterra, il re e il popolo vennero per un momento in consapevole alleanza. Entrambi scoprirono che una terza cosa era già troppo forte per loro. Quella terza cosa era l’aristocrazia; ed essa si impadronì e si chiamò il Parlamento. La Camera dei Comuni, come implica il suo nome, aveva in origine consistito di uomini semplici convocati dal re come giurati; ma divenne presto una giuria assai speciale. Divenne, nel bene o nel male, un grande organo di governo, sopravvivendo alla Chiesa, alla monarchia e alla folla; fece molte grandi cose e non poche cose buone. Creò ciò che chiamiamo l’Impero Britannico; creò qualcosa che era davvero assai più prezioso, una nuova e naturale specie di aristocrazia, più umana e persino più umanitaria della maggior parte delle aristocrazie del mondo. Ebbe sufficiente senso degli istinti del popolo, almeno fino a tempi recenti, da rispettare la libertà e specialmente il riso che era divenuto quasi la religione della razza. Ma nel fare tutto questo, deliberatamente fece altre due cose, che ritenne parte naturale della sua politica; prese le parti dei protestanti, e poi (in parte come conseguenza) prese le parti dei tedeschi. Fino a tempi recentissimi la maggior parte degli inglesi intelligenti era del tutto onestamente convinta che in entrambi i casi prendesse le parti del progresso contro il Decadimento. La domanda che molti di loro ora inevitabilmente si pongono, e si porrebbero sia che io la ponessi o no, è se non avesse piuttosto preso le parti della barbarie contro la civiltà.
Almeno, se c’è qualcosa di valido nella mia stessa visione di queste cose, siamo tornati a un’origine e siamo di nuovo nella guerra con i barbari. Cade con la stessa naturalezza per me che l’inglese e il francese debbano stare dalla stessa parte come che Alfredo e Abbone debbano stare dalla stessa parte, in quel nero secolo in cui i barbari devastarono il Wessex e assediarono Parigi. Ma vi sono ora, forse, prove meno certe della vittoria spirituale, distinta da quella materiale, della civiltà. Le idee sono più mescolate, sono complicate da sfumature sottili o coperte da nomi raffinati. E se il selvaggio in ritirata si lasci dietro l’anima della barbarie, come una malattia nell’aria, io stesso giudicherei anzitutto da una prova politica e morale. L’anima della barbarie è la schiavitù. Sotto tutta la sua maschera di macchinari e istruzione, l’irreggimentazione tedesca dei poveri fu la ricaduta dei barbari nella schiavitù. Non vedo per noi alcuno scampo da essa nei solchi delle nostre presenti riforme, ma solo facendo ciò che i medievali fecero dopo l’altra sconfitta barbarica: cominciando, mediante corporazioni e piccoli gruppi indipendenti, a restaurare gradualmente la proprietà personale dei poveri e la libertà personale della famiglia. Se gli inglesi tenteranno davvero questo, gli inglesi hanno almeno mostrato nella guerra, a chiunque ne dubitasse, di non aver perduto il coraggio e la capacità dei loro padri, e di poterlo portare a compimento se vorranno. Se non lo faranno, se continueranno a muoversi solo con il morto slancio della disciplina sociale che apprendemmo dalla Germania, non c’è davanti a noi nient’altro che quello che il signor Belloc, lo scopritore di questa grande deriva sociologica, ha chiamato lo Stato Servile. E vi sono stati d’animo in cui un uomo, considerando quella conclusione della nostra storia, è quasi incline a desiderare che l’ondata della barbarie teutonica avesse spazzato via noi e i nostri eserciti insieme; e che il mondo non dovesse mai sapere nulla di più degli ultimi degli inglesi, se non che morirono per la libertà.