' n. 
 
 50 5 
 
 4 
 
 L, 
 
 CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 THE 
 WORDSWORTH COLLECTION 
 
 ALFRED ALLETNE 
 
ENGLISH POETS 
 
 AND THE 
 
 NATIONAL IDEAL 
 
 FOUR LECTURES 
 
 BY 
 
 E. DE SELINCOURT 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 1915 
 
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK 
 
 TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY 
 
 HUMPHREY MILFORD M.A. 
 
 PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 X 
 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The four lectures which comprise this volume were 
 delivered during the winter before a familiar audience. 
 They make no pretension to scholarship, and were not 
 written with a view to pubHcation. But in the present 
 crisis the humblest citizen is anxious to contribute, as 
 best he can, to the service of his country ; and the student 
 of English literature can perhaps do no better than help 
 to set in circulation those ideas and emotions which 
 have stirred our greatest poets in periods of national 
 stress, and made them the mouthpiece of the finest 
 spirit of their times. What they wrote, each for his own 
 age, has lost little of its value ; for much as we need 
 to-day all the physical and material strength that we can 
 command, we need still more ideas and inspiration ; and 
 our patriotism will be both wiser and more devoted if 
 we learn to draw upon the immense spiritual resources of 
 our poetry, which are not the least glorious nor the least 
 precious part of our heritage as Englishmen. It is in 
 the hope that these lectures, despite their obvious limita- 
 tions, may awaken a few readers to a fuller sense of that 
 heritage and all that it implies, that I have decided 
 to publish them. 
 
 To my audiences in the University and City of Birming- 
 ham, who for the past six years have listened to me with 
 courteous and sympathetic attention, they are gratefully 
 
 dedicated. , 
 
 E. DE SELINCOURT. 
 
 Birmingham University, 
 March 1915. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 LECTURE II 
 Milton 34 
 
 LECTURE III 
 Wordsworth 61 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 English Poetry since 1815 ... 89 
 
SHAKESPEARE 
 
 A TIME like the present, when we are in the throes of 
 a great national crisis, affecting the lives of the most 
 callous and indifferent of us, affords a clear test of the 
 value that we really attach to literature, and, in particular, 
 to poetry, the highest form of literature. Do we lay it aside 
 as a pleasant pastime suitable enough for less hustling 
 days but remote from our present practical needs and 
 purposes, or do we turn to it with a keener spiritual 
 hunger, feeling that it can give us not merely a pastime, 
 but in the true sense recreation ? Are we content to 
 exist from day to day upon scant official communications 
 and upon much verbose and highly-coloured unofficial 
 rumour, or do we feel that we have all the greater need 
 to keep alive within us the love of what is more permanent 
 both in its interest and its inherent value ? The answer 
 which each one of us is able to give to questions of this 
 nature determines our real attitude to literature and the 
 place it fills in our whole mental and spiritual constitution. 
 We all run the danger of a certain morbidity of mind, of 
 falling victims to a kind of obsession by which we are 
 not only sacrificing the future to the present, but even 
 injuring our own value in the present that we seek to 
 serve ; and the more successfully we can preserve the bal- 
 ance of our normal selves and keep alive all our interests, 
 and especially the higher ones, the better we shall be able 
 to perform both our ordinary and our extraordinary duties. 
 It might be urged that for this purpose the remoter the 
 
8 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 theme from actual life, the more complete will be its benefit 
 to us. And yet, perhaps, even better than the momentary 
 abstraction from our own special problems is the trans- 
 muting of them into something higher than ourselves, so 
 that we see them with the eyes of greater and more 
 thoughtful men. There is a common fallacy abroad that 
 the poet has nothing to say to us in actual emergencies, 
 and that the practical man is only hampered by listening 
 to the ideaHst. Nothing could be further from the truth. 
 It is only the minor poet who is unpractical, only the 
 third-rate man of affairs who is not inspired by a constant 
 reference to the ideal. The poet, let us remember, is 
 ' a man speaking to men ; but a man endowed with more 
 lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who 
 has a greater knowledge of human nature and a more 
 comprehensive soul than the common man '} What he 
 has to say to us when his soul is stirred by that common 
 and wellnigh universal sentiment of patriotism can hardly 
 fail to be of value to us. In this and the following lectures, 
 therefore, I shall try to put before you the attitude taken 
 up by some of our greatest poets to the peculiar aspects 
 of the national problem by which they were confronted, 
 and at the same time to suggest the growth in the nation 
 of a fuller comprehension of its destiny. In each of them 
 is found a deep love of country and a passionate pride in 
 her achievements ; each of them has expressed the Imest 
 spirit of his age ; but the idea of patriotism has developed 
 with the progress of civilization, so that only within the last 
 century, perhaps, has its full significance been realized. 
 
 Shakespeare lived in an intensely patriotic age. The 
 country, which had long been torn by internal dissensions 
 and violent religious quarrels, had awakened to a con- 
 ^ Wordsworth : Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1 800. 
 
SHAKESPEARE 9 
 
 sciousness of her own greatness and of the place that she 
 was to take in the world. The repulse of the Spanish 
 Armada marks the period when the national spirit rose to 
 its highest point. Internally the wealth and prosperity 
 of the people had rapidly increased, and the policy of 
 expansion had begun which seemedto set no limits to the 
 future greatness of the realm. At the same time men 
 became more and more conscious of their own individual 
 power, though they saw that power inevitably bound up 
 with the prosperity of their fatherland. No man, however 
 egotistic, could avoid being a patriot, for in his country 
 he saw himself writ large. It was only natural that there 
 should be a sudden awakening of interest in past history. 
 Chronicles were written and were eagerly read. Little 
 discrimination, indeed, was shown between fact and legend. 
 It was not a critical age ; and everywhere material was 
 sought which could illustrate the growth and development 
 of the country to its present glory. As would be expected, 
 no men felt this enthusiasm more keenly than the drama- 
 tists and poets, and of the dramatists and poets none 
 more than Shakespeare. A critic has noted that ' from 
 the year of the Armada down to the end of Elizabeth's 
 reign more than a fifth of all the plays whose titles have 
 survived took their subjects from English history. Thirteen 
 of Shakespeare's (more than a third of the whole) are of 
 this sort '. In some of them, such as King Lear and 
 Cymheline, though the theme was accepted by his con- 
 temporaries as veritable record of fact, the history was to 
 Shakespeare of but secondary importance ; but the reigns 
 of more authentic monarchs, from John to Henry VIII, he 
 presents in the main with careful regard to contemporary 
 historical opinion. In many other plays, where the motive 
 is far enough removed from matters of state concern, 
 
 1801 B 
 
10 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Shakespeare contrives to give his work a political or 
 national setting. He was profoundly impressed, in a way 
 that the modern artist is seldom impressed, with the 
 essential relation of the individual to that larger society 
 which is called a nation ; and with the influence which 
 a man's feelings towards the community have upon his 
 whole life and character. Not only did Shakespeare first 
 practise the art of tragedy in subjects of clear national 
 moment, but he never treated a tragic theme, hardly ever 
 a tragi-comic one, without giving it a definitely historical 
 or quasi-historic background. Even the Comedy of Errors, 
 which he borrows from Plautus, he sets in a background 
 of international feud, and thus adds weight and dignity 
 to a plot which in the Latin was pure farce. This back- 
 ground is not perfunctorily sketched in merely to make the 
 scene effective : it exercises in each case a distinct function, 
 and without it the conception of the play would be in- 
 complete. In each case the hero's relation with his state 
 intensifies or complicates the situation. In Romeo and 
 Juliet it is the condition of the tragedy ; in Hamlet and in 
 Othello it bears directly upon it ; in the Roman tragedies 
 the relation is self-evident. It was, indeed, impossible for 
 Shakespeare, living when he did, to be blind to the fact 
 that the sphere of the individual is not bound within the 
 narrow confines of the circle of intimate friends and 
 enemies, but that there are larger issues at stake, and in 
 the conflict of the two lies the germ of many a dramatic 
 situation in life. With the growth in the size of the state, 
 in which less active demand of service has fallen on the 
 individual, and in which, as the individual has become less 
 important to the state, the state has become less important 
 to the individual, this relationship has to a great extent 
 fallen out of notice ; and that art which reflects the life of 
 
SHAKESPEARE ii 
 
 to-day gives little prominence to it. Surely our modern 
 art has been the loser by this change — the loser in dignity, 
 as also, in a sense, in universality. Our present crisis is 
 too new to have as yet affected our national literature. 
 But in so far as at no period since the Elizabethan age has 
 the consciousness of that relationship been brought home 
 to us so fully as it is to-day, may we look for some 
 renaissance of it in the near future. In the meantime we 
 turn to Shakespeare for its clearest expression. 
 
 The modern democrat, perhaps,will often find it in a form 
 which at first sight is distasteful to him. Shakespeare's 
 whole reading of history is aristocratic. He concentrates 
 the history of the nation in the doings of its leaders ; the 
 people are of small account, and seldom appear upon the 
 scene except to display their fickleness, their stupidity, or 
 their brutality. Hence we find radicals like Hazlitt turning 
 from Shakespeare's historical dramas in disgust at what 
 he concludes to be their anti-popular bias, and Walt 
 Whitman, the mouthpiece of modern democracy, speak- 
 ing of Shakespeare as the poet of a feudalism that has 
 passed away, and with it the lessons that Shakespeare 
 had to teach us. Statements of this kind show merely a 
 neglect of historical fact and a lack of historical imagina- 
 tion. In the time at which Shakespeare wrote, no other 
 presentation of fact would have been possible. The 
 people had not yet emerged into political existence, and 
 to present them as other than they were would not only 
 have been a piece of political prescience which can hardly 
 be expected even of the greatest of artists, it would have 
 been a falsification of the truth. Shakespeare was essen- 
 tially a creature of the time, and he read history with the 
 eyes of his time. He had doubtless a fuller vision and 
 a clearer, but it was his own time that he interpreted and 
 
12 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 not ours. And we ought to have enough intelligence to 
 allow us to translate his vision into terms of our own life. 
 The anti-democratic conception of national life, character- 
 istic of the whole Elizabethan era, corresponds, indeed, 
 far more closely to the Germany than to the England of 
 to-day ; and there can be no doubt that this accounts in 
 some measure for the popularity of Shakespeare among 
 Germans. They see in his Politik something that corre- 
 sponds with their present ideal of government, which we 
 regard as now three centuries out of date. And so their 
 poet Hauptmann roundly asserts that Shakespeare was in 
 truth a German ; and a performance of the Winter's Tale 
 at Leipzig, in October last, was preceded by a Prologue 
 specially written for the occasion by Ernst Hardt, of which 
 the concluding lines, as translated by The Times, ran thus : 
 
 Now this same Shakespeare hath commanded me 
 
 In solemn earnest to declare you this : 
 
 Ye unto him have been until to-day 
 
 His second home ; his first and native home 
 
 Was England; but this England of the present 
 
 Is so contrarious in her acts and feelings. 
 
 Yea, so abhorr'd of his pure majesty, 
 
 That he doth find himself quite homeless there. 
 
 A fugitive he seeks his second home. 
 
 This Germany, that loves him most of all ; 
 
 To whom before all others he gives thanks 
 
 And says : Thou wonderful and noble land, 
 
 Remain thou Shakespeare's one and only home, 
 
 So that he wanders not, uncomprehended, 
 
 Without a shelter in the barren world.^ 
 
 1 I have not seen the original of the poem, but though the 
 translation may not have done full justice to its beauty of style, 
 it is doubtless accurate enough. According to the Leipzigev 
 Neueste Nachrichten, in which the poem appeared, the play pro- 
 duced was A Winter's Tale, but as we are informed that it was 
 ' spoken by the fool in attendance upon Olivia ', the drama may 
 possibly have been Twelfth Night. 
 
SHAKESPEARE 13 
 
 Poor Shakespeare ! If you want to crystallize the 
 pathetic situation in a phrase you might call it ' Shake- 
 speare interned ' or ' Germany the snapper-up of uncon- 
 sidered trifles '. It will be my attempt to show both to 
 the German Autolycus and to the English democrat that 
 they lack imagination ; that we in England, despite the 
 obvious difference in our national and political constitu- 
 tion from that of the Elizabethan age, have still a use 
 for Shakespeare ; and that his capture by the enemy 
 has as yet no better authority than an official wireless 
 communication from Berlin. 
 
 Shakespeare was no bigoted, unreasoning supporter of 
 
 aristocracies. In All's Well that Ends Well he can even 
 
 justify the heroism of humble birth against the arrogance 
 
 of a noble blood that belies itself, uttering the truly 
 
 democratic sentiment : 
 
 From lowest place when virtuous things proceed, 
 The place is dignified by the doer's deed : 
 Where great additions swell 's, and virtue none, 
 It is a dropsied honour. . . . Honours thrive 
 When rather from our acts we them derive 
 Than our foregoers.^ 
 
 Nobility to him is in the last resort a matter of char- 
 acter rather than of descent. He insists, it is true, upon 
 obedience of word and deed to prescribed authority, and 
 that authority in his world was, as a matter of fact, vested 
 in kings and princes ; but none the less his root-principle 
 is that of noblesse oblige. He believes that the great 
 are surrounded by great temptations, but they are only 
 great when they surmount those temptations ; and when 
 they fall from their duty he is deeply impressed by the 
 tragic result. This is the tragedy of most of Shakespeare's 
 English kings, this is the tragedy of Macbeth and of 
 1 All's Well that Ends Well, 11, iii. 132-44. 
 
14 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Coriolanus. A similar study, showing at the same time 
 the dangers which a state may run both from those in 
 •authority and those under it is given us in Measure for 
 Measure. Therein Angelo, left in charge of the dukedom 
 in the absence of his master Vincentio, falls a victim to 
 that very vice which he most desired to root out of the 
 state, and in order to shield himself he grossly perverts 
 the cause of justice and betrays the trust that has been 
 reposed in him. Side by side with this motive, as though 
 to correct the impression of the general unfitness of rulers 
 for the offices to which they are called, we have the 
 continued and reiterated defence of Vincentio against 
 malicious charges which are entirely false. And at the 
 end of the play, while Angelo, deeply penitent, is forgiven 
 his treachery, the one sin unpardoned is that of slandering 
 a prince. This is not because Shakespeare thinks that 
 a ruler is above criticism and is responsible to God alone. 
 Far from it. His most fervent patriot, old John of Gaunt, 
 is not afraid to denounce the crimes of King Richard to 
 his face. But such criticisms must be based upon know- 
 ledge of the facts and not upon rumour or conjecture. Of 
 all unpatriotic crimes the baseless attack upon those in 
 authority is to him the worst and the most dangerous. 
 Surely this cannot be put down to mere aristocratic bias. 
 It is a profound criticism of the greatest peril to a state — 
 a peril which grows in proportion to the power of the people 
 over the policy of their country and the facilities by which 
 rumours may be spread and opinion moulded. It is 
 greater far to-day than ever in the Elizabethan age. For 
 if the ruler is elected by the people he needs their loyal 
 support as fully as if he were an autocrat. Many a modern 
 statesman could re-echo with conviction the words of 
 Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure : 
 
SHAKESPEARE 15 
 
 O place and greatness ! millions of false eyes 
 Are stuck upon thee : volumes of report 
 Run with these false and most contrarious quests 
 Upon thy doings : thousand escapes of wit 
 Make thee the father of their idle dream, 
 And rack thee in their fancies ! ^ 
 
 Surely if we have anything of historic imagination, we 
 can easily translate this into modern terms. If to-day 
 absolute authority has, with us at least, been superseded 
 by divided responsibility, and the people now occupy, in 
 varying degrees, the position once held by the autocrat, 
 the problem of the state is altered in form but not in 
 substance. The problem was simpler then, but it was the 
 same problem ; and from Shakespeare's delineation of 
 those in authority in their strength and their weakness, 
 their virtues and their vices, the modern reader can see 
 his own image. He can see himself in his relation to the 
 state, both as an individual and as a member of a 
 corporate class. In a democratic country of thirty-six 
 millions it may seem infinitely unimportant what one 
 individual does or thinks as compared with what in an 
 autocracy one man, and that the irresponsible ruler, does 
 or thinks ; yet the fate of the democratic country depends 
 clearly enough upon the collective effect of the views 
 and character of each one of her individual citizens ; and 
 whilst there is here less danger of a selfish policy, through 
 the obvious difficulty of combination for such an end, 
 and through the necessary conflict of interests, there is 
 more danger of apathy, through each man thinking that 
 these things are not his concern. To Shakespeare, national 
 affairs were the concern of all those whom he chooses to 
 represent ; and if we would justify our democracy on 
 national grounds we can only do so, not by saying that 
 ^ Measure for Measure, iv. i. 61-6. 
 
i6 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Shakespeare has nothing to teach us, but by applying 
 to ourselves and our position in the state the lessons 
 that he writes large in the characters and fates of his 
 kings and statesmen. 
 
 In this spirit we may interpret the character of 
 Richard II, whose folly and crimes bring tragic suffering 
 both upon himself and upon his country. In prosperity 
 Richard is entirely self-indulgent, thoughtless of the 
 interests of others, insolent when he is crossed, blinded 
 to all sense of justice by the promptings of his own 
 desires. His ears are ever open to those who flatter 
 his vanity and feed his foolish sense of security ; so that 
 he remains ignorant of the extent to which his own policy 
 is sapping the vitality of his country. Self-indulgence 
 has made him weak, and his occasional bursts of capri- 
 cious tyranny only reveal his ineffectiveness and injustice. 
 Of course he loves his country, for his country provides 
 him with all the good things that he possesses, the pleasure 
 and luxury which make up his life ; but this love is based 
 not upon what he can do for England, but upon what 
 England can do for him. He can express it beautifully, 
 because he is an educated man, with a taste for poetic 
 phrases; but it is entirely sentimental, and his expres- 
 sion of it contains no faintest suggestion that he recog- 
 nizes any duty or sacrifice from him. Thus, on his return 
 from Ireland, he says : 
 
 I weep for joy 
 To stand upon my kingdom once again. 
 Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand ; 
 
 As a long-parted mother with her child 
 Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting. 
 So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth. 
 And do thee favour with my royal hands .^ 
 
 ^ Richard II, iii. ii. 4-1 1. 
 
SHAKESPEARE 17 
 
 The relation in which he should stand to his country is 
 shown in this speech to be entirely reversed. Instead of 
 regarding himself as the son of England, England is his 
 child and plaything. And, as is natural to one who has 
 been lulled into a sense of security by the comforts and 
 the pleasures that have fallen to his lot in the past, he 
 is confident that he is in some mysterious way the 
 favoured protege of Heaven. God is certainly on his 
 side. For every man that may oppose him 
 
 God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay 
 
 A glorious angel : then, if angels fight, 
 
 Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right .^ 
 
 He has apparently never heard that wise saw which runs, 
 ' God helps those that help themselves.' He has been 
 so dilatory that he reaches England to find that the army 
 of Welshmen that long awaited his arrival has in despair 
 deserted to the enemy; and he has to fall back upon 
 the somewhat problematical support of the troop of 
 heavenly angels. And apparently his faith in them is 
 not equal to the occasion ; for from utterly unfounded 
 hopes he falls at once into unmanly, unnecessary despair. 
 He meets disaster half-way, and in panic gives up his 
 cause long before it is really lost. When he is finally 
 beaten, he wins some affection from us, partly from our 
 sense of pity, partly because there is always something 
 charmingly picturesque about his personality ; and he 
 can even show courage when he has to face death, i. e. 
 when courage has no practical but only a theatrical 
 value. But from first to last he is a living type of the 
 man whose attitude to the larger duties to his country 
 has been warped and perverted by a selfish love of ease, 
 by a total ignorance of that duty which the very existence 
 
 1 lb. 60-2. 
 
 1801 C 
 
i8 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 of a community demands from all its sons. The warning 
 of Richard's fall need not be lost to us to-day, because 
 Richard is a king, and we are a self-governed people. 
 And what the play has to teach us is by no means con- 
 fined to the study of its pathetic hero. Something can 
 be learnt from most of the leading characters, as well in 
 themselves as in their relation with the whole. Richard 
 was not, in the obvious sense, a monarch surrounded by 
 self-seeking traitors. On the contrary, the men whose 
 lives acted and re-acted upon his were all in a way intense 
 patriots. They were imbued with a genuine love of their 
 native land, and they speak of it in language not only 
 eloquent but intensely and entirely sincere. This is true 
 not only of the lovely eulogy of England that fell from 
 the dying lips of Gaunt : 
 
 This other Eden, demi-paradise, 
 
 This fortress built by Nature for herself 
 
 Against infection and the hand of war. 
 
 This happy breed of men, this little world, 
 
 This precious stone set in the silver sea, 
 
 Which serves it in the office of a wall, 
 
 Or as a moat defensive to a house. 
 
 Against the envy of less happier lands. 
 
 This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.* 
 
 But other nobles speak words almost as memorable and 
 even more touching in their devotion. Thus the pas- 
 sionate regret of banished Mowbray at the thought that 
 from henceforth he will neither hear nor speak the lan- 
 guage of his country, voices an emotion which strikes 
 deep into the hearts of all of us who have learnt to love 
 our beautiful English tongue : 
 
 My native English, now I must forego; 
 And now my tongue's use is to me no more 
 Than an unstringed viol or a harp. 
 
 ^ Richard I J, ii. i. 42-50. 
 
SHAKESPEARE 19 
 
 What is thy sentence then but speechless death, 
 Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath ? ^ 
 
 To depart from England is for Mowbray ' to dwell in 
 solemn shades of endless night '. So Bolingbroke, going 
 into a lighter punishment, speaks words that will find 
 an echo within us, if we are called to leave our country : 
 
 Then, England's ground, farewell ; sweet soil, adieu : 
 My mother, and my nurse, that bears me yet! 
 Where'er I wander, boast of this I can, 
 Though banish'd, yet a true-born Englishman.^ 
 
 This is an emotion felt equally by those who are in 
 voluntary banishment, as many of our colonists are 
 proving to-day. This same spirit of patriotic love of 
 country is found in all the nobles, in York, in North- 
 umberland, in the Bishop of Carlisle. They are patriots 
 all, and they are all ready with genuine and sincere con- 
 viction — to denounce one another as traitors. They are 
 anxious to prove their loyalty in any way but just the 
 one way needful — to be at peace with one another. And 
 so we are forced to the position that even ' patriotism 
 where there is no moral order means civil strife ',^ and 
 civil strife means ruin. The tragedy gathers, it has been 
 said, ' not only in the painful psychology of Richard, but 
 in the ominous wrangling scenes between Bolingbroke and 
 Mowbray and their exultation at the prospect of battle, 
 in Gaunt's reproaches, in the secret conversations of the 
 nobles, in the queen's nameless woe, and the misery and 
 confusion of poor old fumbling York ; in the Welsh 
 captain's omens, and Salisbury's comment; in the dis- 
 orderly scene at Westminster Hall, and the ineffectual 
 protests of Carlisle.' ^ 
 
 One does not need a keen political acumen to interpret 
 
 1 lb. I. iii. 160-73. * lb. 306-9. 
 
 ^ Introduction to Richard II, by G. S, Gordon (Clarendon Press). 
 
20 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 all this. These dangers are incident to any type of 
 government which has not the confidence of those it 
 professes to govern, and the power to control them. 
 
 Shakespeare was no subtle political theorist. He 
 looked on the present and the past of his country with 
 the eyes of an intelligent Elizabethan patriot. His 
 audience was a popular one ; his desire was to put before 
 them what seemed to him the chief basis of his country's 
 greatness and to emphasize the broad principles on 
 which it rested. And the first lesson that he read in 
 past history was the imperative need for national unity. 
 The house divided against itself cannot stand. He saw 
 that in the reigns of those kings in whose fates he traced 
 the evolution of his country, private dissensions had been 
 a greater danger than enemies from without. Her foes 
 had always been those of her own household. In only 
 one reign that he had reviewed was England free from 
 wars or rebellions at home; in only one play does he 
 show the true spirit of England in harmony with the 
 sovereign power of the realm, so that the king could 
 in any true sense be called the representative of the 
 national spirit, and that one was Henry V. Of the 
 others it has often been pointed out that the hero is not 
 the king who gives the play its title, but England ; and 
 that the reigning monarch typifies some weakness or 
 vice in the nation to which its present weakness is in 
 part to be attributed. In Richard II, as we have seen, 
 it is the love of pleasure. In Richard III it is unscrupu- 
 lous personal ambition ; in King John it is treachery 
 and the cowardly pursuit of what seems a momentary 
 advantage as against set principle ; in Henry IV, where 
 the national wreck is less complete, it is a diplomacy 
 which, joined as it is to great administrative ability and 
 
SHAKESPEARE 51 
 
 efficiency, succeeds in rescuing the state from a hopeless 
 chaos, yet is tainted with an alloy of personal selfishness 
 which renders its success only ephemeral. All these 
 vices are most dangerous when they are concentrated in 
 one autocratic monarch, but they cannot flourish among 
 a democratic people with impunity. All these things 
 breed restlessness and dissension. Only in so far as 
 they are subdued is the nation strong. Shakespeare's 
 attitude to the whole problem is summed up in the words 
 with which he closes his tragedy of King John : 
 
 This England never did, nor never shall, 
 
 Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror. 
 
 But when it first did help to wound itself. 
 
 Now these her princes are come home again, 
 
 Come the three corners of the world in arms. 
 
 And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue, 
 
 If England to itself do rest but true. 
 
 But this unity of which Shakespeare conceives does not 
 merely lie in the absence of active civil strife. The 
 state is to him a complicated human machine, in which 
 each separate part contributes its quota to the general 
 efficiency, and it may at any time be thrown out of gear 
 by the failure of one part to perform its allotted function. 
 In two notable passages Shakespeare develops this con- 
 ception. The first is from Henry V : 
 
 For government, though high and low and lower. 
 Put into parts, doth keep in one consent, 
 Congreeing in a full and natural close, 
 Like music. 
 
 Therefore doth heaven divide 
 The state of man in divers functions. 
 Setting endeavour in continual motion ; 
 To which is fixed, as an aim or butt, 
 Obedience : for so work the honey-bees. 
 Creatures that by a rule in nature teach 
 The act of order to a peopled kingdom 
 
22 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 And after an elaborate comparison of the division of 
 
 labour in the beehive to that which obtains in an ordered 
 
 commonwealth, he draws the moral that 
 
 As many fresh streams meet in one salt sea ; 
 As many lines close in the dial's centre ; 
 So may a thousand actions, once afoot, 
 End in one purpose, and be all well borne 
 Without defeat.^ 
 
 The second passage, rather more obscurely written, but 
 
 even fuller of meaning and of suggestion, is Ulysses' 
 
 speech to the disorganized leaders of Greece on the 
 
 necessity of observing what he terms ' degree ' : 
 
 The specialty of rule ^ hath been neglected : 
 
 And look, how many Grecian tents do stand 
 
 Hollow upon this plain, so many hollow factions 
 
 When that the general is not like the hive 
 
 To whom the foragers shall all repair. 
 
 What honey is expected ? Degree being vizarded, 
 
 The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask. 
 
 The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre 
 
 Observe degree, priority, and place, 
 
 Insisture, course, proportion, season, form. 
 
 Office, and custom, in all line of order : 
 
 And therefore is the glorious planet Sol 
 
 In noble eminence enthron'd and spher'd 
 
 Amidst the other ; whose med'cinable eye 
 
 Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil. 
 
 And posts, like the commandment of a king. 
 
 Sans check, to good and bad : but when the planets 
 
 In evil mixture to disorder wander, 
 
 What plagues, and what portents, what mutiny. 
 
 What raging of the sea, shaking of earth, 
 
 Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors. 
 
 Divert and crack, rend and deracinate 
 
 The unity and married calm of states 
 
 Quite from their fixure ! O ! when degree is shak'd. 
 
 Which is the ladder to all high designs, 
 
 ^ Henry V, i. ii. 180-9, 209-13. 
 
 ^ The specialty of rule, i.e. the particular rights of supreme 
 authority. 
 
SHAKESPEARE 23 
 
 The enterprise is sick. How could communities, 
 
 Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities, 
 
 Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, 
 
 The primogenitive and due of birth. 
 
 Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, 
 
 But by degree, stand in authentic place ? 
 
 Take but degree away, untune that string, 
 
 And, hark ! what discord follows ; each thing meets 
 
 In mere oppugnancy : the bounded waters 
 
 Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores. 
 
 And make a sop of all this solid globe : 
 
 Strength should be lord of imbecility, 
 
 And the rude son should strike his father dead : 
 
 Force should be right ; or rather, right and wrong — 
 
 Between whose endless jar justice resides — 
 
 Should lose their names, and so should justice too. 
 
 Then every thing includes itself in power. 
 
 Power into will, will into appetite ; 
 
 And appetite, a universal wolf, 
 
 So doubly seconded with will and power, 
 
 Must make perforce a universal prey. 
 
 And last eat up himself.^ 
 
 These two passages have just as much value for us as 
 they had for the Elizabethan audience for whom they 
 were written. They are indeed truer under a free state 
 than under an autocracy ; for the less compulsion, the 
 more the individual responsibility. When a man chooses 
 for himself the part that he will take in the national 
 organization, the more incumbent on him is it to fulfil that 
 part to the utmost ; where he has a voice in the selec- 
 tion of those who represent supreme authority, it is all 
 the more incumbent on him to obey loyally. Where 
 ' the specialty of rule ' has been neglected, the result 
 can only be disaster. In a state like the Elizabethan, 
 or like any modern military autocracy, this danger is 
 far less real; for the people are readier, as it were by 
 
 ^ Troilus and Cressida, i. iii. 78-124. 
 
24 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 instinct, to do what they are told, and are not accustomed 
 to think for themselves. But liberty has its price, like 
 all else that is worth the having ; andthat price is greater 
 risk to the state and greater responsibility to the individual. 
 Those in supreme authority can only act successfully 
 when the ' degree ' is observed. So much for the relation 
 of different degrees in the state one to another. 
 
 On the principles that should govern the corporate 
 action of the state and guide its administration, Shake- 
 speare is equally clear and decisive. That policy, he 
 holds, can only have permanent success which is strictly 
 just, and observes the same laws of conduct as should 
 actuate private individuals. Might must never be mis- 
 taken for right. The breach of moral laws, by a ruler 
 acting in the interests of community or a party, meets 
 with the same inexorable nemesis as if he were acting 
 solely for himself. The thirst for power, the promptings 
 of ambition, even of an honourable ambition, must be 
 subordinate to a sense of right. The sequence of plays 
 from Richard II to Henry V is closely knit together in 
 the working out of this idea. Richard was quite unfit 
 to rule, he betrayed his trust, and inevitable retribution 
 overtook him. Yet Bolingbroke, though the minister of 
 divine punishment, was not justified in his usurpation. 
 He had no right to the throne. His calm and states- 
 manlike intellect gave him indeed an easy conquest 
 over Richard ; but whilst Shakespeare admires his 
 efficiency, he spares no pains in censuring his ambition. 
 He is the crafty politician whose scheming can bring 
 no permanent good either to himself or to his country. 
 Henry has no joy in what he has won, and no peace in 
 his possession of it. He is haunted throughout his life 
 with the memory of the sin by which he compassed his 
 
SHAKESPEARE 25 
 
 end ; he is in constant fear of rebellion, and lives on in 
 
 gloomy anticipation that all that he has built up will 
 
 crumble into ruin as soon as his watchful eye is taken 
 
 from it. His bitter words as he reflects on the issue of his 
 
 ceaseless efforts to establish a stable rule, denote with a fatal 
 
 clearness the utter world- weariness of a disillusioned man : 
 
 O God ! that one might read the book of fate, 
 
 And see the revolutions of the times 
 
 Make mountains level, and the continent, — 
 
 Weary of soHd firmness, — melt itself 
 
 Into the sea ! and other times, to see 
 
 The beachy girdle of the ocean 
 
 Too wide for Neptune's hips ; how chances mock, 
 
 And changes fill the cup of alteration 
 
 With divers liquors ! O ! if this were seen, 
 
 The happiest youth, viewing his progress through. 
 
 What perils past, what crosses to ensue. 
 
 Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.^ 
 
 Allegiance that is won without justice and held without 
 willingness is never secure, whether the allegiance be of 
 the individual, the party, or the nation. For suspicion 
 breeds suspicion, scheming begets scheming, and force 
 begets force. Honesty is to Shakespeare the only policy 
 that can be successful in the long run. That country 
 alone can prosper whose destinies are guided and con- 
 trolled by a government that combines strength and 
 decision of purpose with integrity and justice. 
 
 Such an ideal he presents to us in his portrait of Henry V, 
 
 and the character, well known as it is, is worth our 
 
 dwelling upon. Henry has indeed some personal qualities 
 
 that are not of the finest, and, as a man, it is clear enough 
 
 that he was not among Shakespeare's favourite creations ; 
 
 but, as a ruler, Shakespeare has little but praise for him, 
 
 and he presents him to us as a model of a noble practical 
 
 success. 
 
 1 2 Henry IV, in. i. 45-56. 
 1801 D 
 
26 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 His most characteristic virtues are sincerity, simplicity, 
 and a devotion to his country which is totally devoid 
 of self-seeking. He does not hold himself aloof from his 
 people on a pedestal : he shares their privations, and moves 
 among them in the spirit of true comradeship. For the 
 shifty diplomacy of his father, the ' crafty politician 
 Bolingbroke ', he will substitute a clear straightforward 
 honesty which, as he himself admits, even oversteps the 
 bounds of reasonable prudence. For example, when 
 the French herald urges his surrender before the battle 
 of Agincourt, his reply is such as could only increase the 
 confidence of his foe : 
 
 to say the sooth, — 
 Though 'tis no wisdom to confess so much 
 Unto an enemy of craft and vantage, — 
 My people are with sickness much enfeebled. 
 My numbers lessen'd, and those few I have 
 Almost no better than so many French : 
 
 Go therefore, tell thy master here I am : 
 My ransom is this frail and worthless trunk, 
 My army but a weak and sickly guard ; 
 Yet, God before, tell him we will come on. 
 Though France himself and such another neighbour 
 Stand in our way. 
 
 The sum of all our answer is but this : 
 We would not seek a battle, as we are ; 
 Nor, as we are, we say we will not shun it : 
 So tell your master.^ 
 
 This was not a very prudent announcement ; but it was 
 at least honest. But most noticeable, perhaps, is the 
 emphasis which Shakespeare lays throughout upon 
 the deeply religious strain in Henry's character. Like 
 Richard II he regards himself as God's deputy on earth ; 
 1 Henry V, in. vi. 154-78. 
 
SHAKESPEARE 27 
 
 but that belief, instead of leading him to behave like 
 an irresponsible and capricious tyrant, who is certain of 
 God's protection, whatever he does or leaves undone, only 
 impresses on Henry a more lively sense of his obliga- 
 tions, and a more scrupulous interpretation of his duty. 
 It is not enough for him to consider what is expedient : 
 he must know what is right. He realizes the awful 
 responsibility resting upon those who make war, and will 
 not set out for France until he is satisfied that his cause 
 is just. On this vital question he appeals to the highest 
 authority he knows, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and 
 begs him justly and religiously to unfold the truth : 
 
 And God forbid, my dear and faithful lord, 
 
 That you should fashion, wrest, or bow your reading. 
 
 Or nicely charge your understanding soul 
 
 With opening titles miscreate, whose right 
 
 Suits not in native colours with the truth ; 
 
 For God doth know how many now in health 
 
 Shall drop their blood in approbation 
 
 Of what your reverence shall incite us to. 
 
 Therefore take heed how you impawn our person. 
 
 How you awake our sleeping sword of war : 
 
 We charge you, in the name of God, take heed ; 
 
 For never two such kingdoms did contend 
 
 Without much fall of blood ; whose guiltless drops 
 
 Are every one a woe, a sore complaint, 
 
 'Gainst him whose wrongs give edge unto the swords 
 
 That make such waste in brief mortality. 
 
 Under this conjuration speak, my lord. 
 
 And we will hear, note, and believe in heart. 
 
 That what you speak is in your conscience wash'd 
 
 As pure as sin with baptism.^ 
 
 It is only when the archbishop, to Henry an unim- 
 peachable authority in such matters, has replied, ' The sin 
 upon my head, dread sovereign,' and he has been urged 
 
 1 lb. I. ii. 13-32. 
 
28 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 to win what is his lawful right, that he undertakes the 
 expedition. To assume, as Hazlitt does, that Henry is 
 an insincere hypocrite, is to read into the situation 
 modern conceptions of history of which Shakespeare 
 never dreamed, and to belie his whole view of the character. 
 However flimsy Henry's claim to France may in fact 
 have been, it is clear that Shakespeare had no doubts 
 himself upon that score, and that he conceives of Henry 
 as having none either. But the conviction that his cause 
 is just does not make Henry self-righteous, nor blind his 
 eyes to the fact that his country had not always been in 
 the right. He does not bolster himself up with an inflated 
 sense of his own merits. There is a type of patriotism 
 current, if patriotism it can be called, that consists in 
 self-glorification, and holds as its inalienable creed that 
 England can do no wrong. It would present our past 
 history as an uninterrupted sequence of noble and self- 
 sacrificing acts pursued in the interests of the world atlarge. 
 We had an example of it some months ago in the action 
 of the Education Committee of a County Council which 
 severely criticized a pamphlet written by an historian 
 of distinction to explain to the children the causes of the 
 present war. The pamphlet contained a sentence to the 
 effect that in the past England's wars had not all of them 
 been just. Such a statement, it was urged, was most 
 ill-advised and would undermine the patriotism of the 
 children. And such is the common attitude of a popular 
 and irresponsible press. How few of us are prepared to 
 accept the truth, even the truth that we know. That was 
 not Henry's attitude. The greater his need the more 
 conscious he was of his own unworthiness, and he is ready 
 to do all that his religion prompts him to show his repen- 
 tance and humiliation. 
 
SHAKESPEARE 29 
 
 Not to-day, O Lord! 
 O! not to-day, think not upon the fault 
 My father made in compassing the crown. 
 I Richard's body have interred anew ; 
 And on it have bestow'd more contrite tears 
 Than from it issu'd forced drops of blood. 
 
 • ••«••••• 
 
 More will I do ; 
 Though all that I can do is nothing worth, 
 Since that my penitence comes after all. 
 Imploring pardon.^ 
 
 In this spirit he engages in the conflict. As a conse- 
 quence he is not weakened in the energy which he throws 
 into his cause, but putting his whole might into it he is 
 yet humble. He disdains to play the insolent braggart. 
 In this he is strongly contrasted with his enemies, who 
 spend the day before the battle in recounting the heroic 
 exploits that they are about to achieve. Once, indeed, 
 Henry is betrayed into the typically jingo assertion that 
 ' upon one pair of English legs did march three French- 
 men ', but he has the grace to be ashamed of himself even 
 as he says it, and to ask forgiveness for his idle boast. 
 And after the victory is won, when some swagger would 
 perhaps have been excusable, he sternly represses the 
 temptation both in himself and in his troops : 
 
 Come, go we in procession to the village : 
 And be it death proclaimed through our host 
 To boast of this or take the praise from God 
 Which is his only. 
 
 This is rather too much for his brave little Welsh 
 captain, who bursts out with the question : 
 
 Is it not lawful, an please your majesty, to tell how 
 many is killed ? 
 
 1 Henry V, iv. i. 312-25. 
 
30 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 And Henry replies, with a smile : 
 
 Yes, captain ; but with this acknowledgment, 
 That God fought for us. 
 
 Fluellen. Yes, my conscience, he did us great good.^ 
 
 And when the victorious army reach London, and the 
 lords desire that Henry should have his briiised helmet and 
 his bended sword borne before him through the city, 
 
 he forbids it. 
 Being free from vainness and self-glorious pride ; 
 Giving full trophy, signal and ostent. 
 Quite from himself, to God.^ 
 
 Such is Shakespeare's conception of the qualities of the 
 ideal ruler, whose virtues should be honoured and imitated 
 by his subjects, each in his degree. There can be little 
 doubt that when he drew the portrait his eye was firmly 
 fixed in reprobation upon another ideal current at his 
 time, which, though generally but loosely denounced by 
 his contemporaries, was exercising an indubitable influence 
 upon statesmen and politicians. That policy was Machia- 
 vellianism. Machiavelli's Prince had been the text-book 
 of Thomas Cromwell, the powerful adviser of Henry VHI ; 
 its precepts were in a measure followed by both Cecil and 
 Leicester ; much of its teaching was advocated later by 
 Lord Bacon. And Shakespeare's delineation of Henry V 
 becomes more significant when we turn to the pages of 
 Machiavelli and see the political and national teaching to 
 which Henry is, as it were, the counterblast. The prime 
 object with which Machiavelli wrote was to effect the 
 unification of Italy. Hence his idea of the state is con- 
 fined to its military and political aspects ; he ignores 
 culture, private comfort and advantage, and all religious 
 
 1 Henry V, iv. viii. 118-26. ^ lb., Chorus to v. 19-22. 
 
SHAKESPEARE 31 
 
 considerations. The ideal state to which he looked for 
 guidance was the ancient republic of Rome, founded on 
 the principles dictated by the struggle for existence 
 against neighbouring states and the gradual building up 
 of a huge and powerful empire. This, he urged, could 
 only be done by a strict recognition of the essentially 
 weak and self-interested character of individuals and 
 other states. This point of view led Machiavelli to main- 
 tain certain propositions, which exercised a fascination 
 over his Elizabethan readers even while they execrated 
 their author, and particularly over those who were 
 themselves empire-builders. The first of these is the 
 doctrine that the end justifies the means ; the second 
 that Christianity spells political and national ruin. 
 Obviously, he contended, Christianity does not encourage 
 that idea of worldly glory which is essential to the welfare, 
 nay, the existence of a state, whilst Paganism upholds 
 worldly glory as admirable. Consequently under Chris- 
 tianity the religious are at a disadvantage in all contests 
 with the irreligious, and the world must fall into the hands 
 of the wicked. The true Christian believes that his 
 kingdom is not of this world ; how, then, can he govern 
 it successfully ? He is necessarily unfitted to cope with 
 practical matters, whilst if he is a hypocrite he is merely 
 trammelled by the obligation to profess what he does not 
 believe in. But most of all did Machiavelli hate the 
 Church of Rome. For the pope, by his desire for temporal 
 rule, interfered with the spirit of nationality wherever he 
 had authority, and in particular it was his power which 
 prevented the accomplishment of Machiavelli 's cherished 
 dream, the dream of a united Italy. Now, urged 
 Machiavelli, the governor who has these great objects in 
 view must not be guided in his actions by the ordinary 
 
32 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 moral code. He must love his country more than the 
 safety of his own soul. He must be careless of the indi- 
 vidual, and consider only the glory of the community. 
 Consequently we find him telling us with care and 
 exactitude, when the prince should break his word, when 
 he should betray his servant, when he should throw over 
 an ally he is pledged to support, and so on ; and particular 
 emphasis is laid upon the use of fraud to achieve his ends, 
 for ' it behoves the ruler to be a fox as well as a lion '. 
 All this sounds horrible enough in cold blood, but no 
 student of history could affirm that Machiavelli was 
 introducing new ideas into statecraft. He was merely 
 reducing to a science, and setting the seal of political 
 philosophy upon methods which have always played 
 a large part in the policy of kings and governments, 
 Machiavelli was the Treitschke and Bernhardi of the 
 Renaissance. The novelty consisted in the codification, 
 as it were, and the justification of acts which, though often 
 practised, had been regarded hitherto as morally inde- 
 fensible. It was a clear statement of the superiority of 
 the expedient over the right, a definite and cynical denial 
 that the same laws of morality applied to the state and 
 to the individual, an assertion of the principle that 
 ' necessity knows no law '. Shakespeare's answer to this 
 view of politics is found in all his delineations of political 
 and national life. In states as in individuals he sees the 
 workings of inevitable Nemesis, slow at times but always 
 sure. There, too, he sees the sins of the fathers visited 
 upon the children. There, too, he sees the redeeming 
 power of virtue and of a consciousness of right. And 
 the model that he holds up for Englishmen to follow 
 is that of a king who loves justice and opposes crooked 
 deceit with open plain-speaking ; who is not afraid to 
 
SHAKESPEARE 33 
 
 face the truth when it is unpleasant, who has unflinching 
 bravery in the face of whatever odds, who retains his 
 cheerfulness in circumstances in which some depression 
 might be excused, who is modest in success, and who is 
 all these things because the basis of his character is a deep 
 and sincere religious feeling. The character may seem 
 in some respects a little out of date, and it is of course 
 presented in the atmosphere and with the limitations of 
 Elizabethan civilization ; but none of us should, I think, 
 be so modern that we can study it without some measure 
 of profit. It is not subtle, it is not doctrinaire. Shake- 
 speare was no professional political philosopher, he was 
 a practical dramatist and a poet, whose first interest and 
 study was human life and individual human character. 
 But like all Elizabethans he was a patriot who loved to 
 ponder over his nation's history, and this was his reading 
 of history. It stirred his first audiences at the Globe 
 Theatre to the highest pitch of enthusiasm. It has not 
 lost its value to-day. 
 
 1801 E 
 
II 
 MILTON 
 
 Many of us believe that the war in which we are now 
 engaged is a war for freedom. We fight against a tyranny 
 which, without provocation, has attempted to crush its 
 weaker neighbour, and threatens us with a Hke enslave- 
 ment ; and we view the contest as a struggle between 
 the ideals of military ambition, which recognizes no right 
 but force, and of free and unimpeded national develop- 
 ment. It is true that to Germany the war appears in 
 something of the same light. She professes that she was 
 forced into it from fear of foreign invasion, by a power 
 whom she regards as more reactionary than herself, 
 whilst she sees in the opposition of England merely the 
 treacherous and jealous action of a foe who denies her 
 free right to expand in the manner necessary for her 
 national prosperity. But we contend that there is this 
 great difference between our position and that of Germany; 
 in that whereas we in England base our appeal for national 
 freedom upon the freedom and the rights of individual 
 citizens, for whose welfare the state exists — each of whom, 
 according to his inclination and abilities, has a voice in 
 the affairs of his country, in Germany there is no such 
 thing as individual freedom in the national or political 
 sense of the term. The individual is a mere cog in the 
 wheel of a vast machine over whose direction and objec- 
 tive he has no control. The government is in the hands 
 of a small and irresponsible body. Public opinion is not 
 
MILTON 35 
 
 allowed to develop naturally, by the spontaneous and 
 healthy interchange of ideas, but is forced into those 
 channels which suit the convenience of authority ; 
 and that authority, with a marvellous thoroughness and 
 efficiency, directs the whole education of the people and 
 controls the utterances of the press, to suit its own aims. 
 The power of political thinking, like any other power, 
 only grows by exercise. The German people have never 
 exercised it. They have followed with a mute docility 
 the guidance of their rulers, so that they have never 
 acquired the faculty for forming independent judgements. 
 Their future depends upon the extent to which, after 
 this war, they can rouse themselves to throw off this 
 yoke of intellectual bondage, and, gaining a fuller control 
 of their own affairs, gain with it a true conception of 
 national and individual liberty. 
 
 If in these matters we represent a higher ideal and 
 a more advanced civilization, it is due to the influence 
 upon both our practical organization and our intellectual 
 life of those ideas which find their fullest and most 
 inspiring expression in the writings of John Milton. The 
 one passionate belief of Milton's life, which gives a unity 
 to all his work, is the belief in the necessity of liberty 
 as the essential preliminary of all development, both 
 personal and national. To Milton the problem pre- 
 sented itself in the first place in the antagonism of the 
 people to a foe within their own gates. He saw the 
 liberty of the subject threatened both in his civil rights 
 and in the rights of conscience ; and he fought the battle 
 of freedom against such tyranny ceaselessly throughout 
 his life. It is beyond my purpose to go into the progress 
 of that historic struggle. Those who are most ready to 
 regard King Charles as a martyr owe much of what they 
 
36 MILTON 
 
 hold dearest in their heritage as EngHshmen to the courage 
 and to some, at least, of the principles of those whom 
 they denounce as traitors and regicides : my business is 
 not with facts, but with ideas ; and just as in the one 
 sphere the dominating force was Cromwell, so in the 
 other Milton stands out as the grandest advocate of ideal 
 freedom, the man with the profoundest understanding 
 of its true content and significance. But Milton did not 
 speak only to his own age. His own age indeed under- 
 stood him very imperfectly, and agreed with him still less. 
 He was never in any real sense a party man. To call him 
 a Puritan, in the ideal sense of the word, is true enough : 
 to confuse him with the Puritan party because he ap- 
 proved of some of their tenets and found that some of 
 his ideals were promoted by their government, is sheer 
 ignorance. Like all great thinkers, Milton was far ahead 
 of his time ; and he is ahead of the practice if not of 
 the theory of our own. From his teaching and from 
 his example we can still learn much both concerning 
 the true meaning of individual liberty and concerning the 
 relations of the free man to the state of which he is 
 a member. It is obvious that here Milton has far more 
 to give us than Shakespeare. The problems of modern 
 life had not arisen in Elizabethan times, and Shake- 
 speare's conception was necessarily limited by the con- 
 ditions of his age. With Milton we have the beginnings 
 of modern life ; and though in his attitude to democracy, 
 as we understand the term, he is little in advance of 
 Shakespeare, he enunciates in unmistakable accents the 
 root-principles on which all true democracy must develop. 
 Shakespeare accepts the established order and points out 
 how best it may be supported and sustained. Milton 
 stands for the right to criticize authority, to carry the 
 
MILTON 37 
 
 light of the individual reason and the individual con- 
 science into every sphere of man's activity, public or 
 private. 
 
 In Milton's eyes ' all men were born free ', and no one 
 has the right to interfere with that liberty which is their 
 inalienable possession as human beings. ' The whole 
 freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty.' ^ 
 The first and most important is liberty of conscience, 
 ' which ought to all men to be the most precious ' ; ^ the 
 second, which naturally follows from it, consists ' in the 
 civil rights and advancements of every person according 
 to his merit '.^ This liberty of conscience demands the 
 right of free utterance of his convictions. ' Give me the 
 liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according 
 to conscience, above all liberties ' is the cry of his grandest 
 prose pamphlet, the Areopagitica ; and its leading ideas 
 occur and recur through all his writings, whatever form 
 of tyranny he happens at the moment to be denouncing. 
 This liberty is necessary alike for the advance of know- 
 ledge, for the growth of independent judgement, and 
 for the improvement of conduct. If we would attain 
 the good and true we must know the base and the false. 
 * Good and evil we know in the field of the world grow up 
 together almost inseparably ; and the knowledge of good 
 is involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, 
 in cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned. ... As 
 therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there 
 be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the 
 knowledge of evil ? He that can apprehend and consider 
 vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet 
 
 1 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton's Prose Works (ed. 
 Bohn), ii. 8. 
 
 2 The Ready Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, ib. ii. 133, 5. 
 
38 MILTON 
 
 abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which 
 is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian. I 
 cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised 
 and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her 
 adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that im- 
 mortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and 
 heat. . . . That which purifies us is by trial, and trial is by 
 what is contrary.' ^ Milton has thus the essential spirit 
 of the reformer — a passionate belief in the ideal and a 
 readiness to risk something in its realization. And he is 
 an example to all who work for social or political reform 
 in that his faith in the inherent goodness of human nature, 
 without which the very desire for reform is illogical folly, 
 leads him to value a little positive good above the mere 
 prevention of evil. ' And were I the chooser, a dram of 
 well-doing should be preferred before many times as much 
 forcible hindrance of evil doing. For God sure esteems 
 the growth and completing of one virtuous person more 
 than the restraint of ten vicious.' ^ The advance to 
 knowledge and truth is impossible without liberty ; and 
 freedom is of greater value than law, for where the good 
 of laws is negative, that of liberty is positive. ' If ', he 
 says in another place,^ ' you permit the free discussion 
 of truth without any hazard to the author, or any sub- 
 jection to the caprice of an individual, which is the best 
 way to make truth flourish and knowledge abound, the 
 censure of the half-learned, the envy, the pusillanimity, 
 or the prejudice which measures the discoveries of others, 
 and, in short, every degree of wisdom, by the measure 
 of its own capacity, will be prevented from doling out 
 information to us according to their own arbitrary choice. 
 
 1 Areopagitica, Prose Works, ii. 68. ^ lb. ii. 75. 
 
 ^ Second Defence of the People of England, ib. i. 194. 
 
MILTON 39 
 
 Lastly, if you dread not to hear any truth, or any false- 
 hood, whatever it may be, but if you shall least of all 
 listen to those who think that they can never be free till 
 they have the liberties of others depend on their caprice, 
 and who attempt nothing with so much zeal and vehe- 
 mence as to flatter, not only the bodies but the minds of 
 men, who labour to introduce into the state the worst 
 of all tyrannies, the tyranny of their own depraved habits 
 and pernicious opinions ; you will always be dear to those 
 who think not merely that their own sect or faction, but 
 that all citizens of all descriptions, should enjoy equal 
 rights and equal laws,' 
 
 What therefore we demand for ourselves it is necessary 
 that we should permit to others. ' Is it ', he asks, ' a fair 
 course to assert truth, by arrogating to himself the only 
 freedom of speech, and stopping the mouths of others 
 equally gifted ? ' 
 
 But this freedom desired by Milton does not amount 
 to doing as one likes, either in one's own thoughts or 
 actions, or in one's relations with the state. On the 
 contrary, it involves the deepest responsibilities. No 
 man has ever had a higher conception of what is implied 
 in liberty. ' To be free ', says Milton, ' is the same thing 
 as to be pious, to be wise, to be frugal and abstinent, to 
 be temperate and just, and lastly, to be magnanimous 
 and brave ; and to be the opposite of these is to be a 
 slave.' ^ It thus includes the duties of man to himself 
 (for it is of no avail to be free from external interference 
 if you are the slave of your own passions), his duties to 
 his country, and to his God. 
 
 Liberty to Milton has therefore a necessary foundation 
 in a deep sense of individual responsibility ; it presupposes 
 
 1 lb. i. 298, 
 
40 MILTON 
 
 a relentlessly high and exacting moral standard. And 
 so it comes about that he who has made the fullest 
 exposition of freedom has left us also the most eloquent 
 eulogy of discipline. ' There is not that thing ', he 
 writes, ' in the world of more grave and urgent impor- 
 tance throughout the whole life of man, than is discipline. 
 What need I instance ! He that hath read with judge- 
 ment of nations and commonwealths, of cities and camps, 
 of peace and war, sea and land, will readily agree that 
 the flourishing and decaying of all civil societies, all the 
 moments and turnings of human occasions are moved to 
 and fro as upon the axle of discipline. So that whatso- 
 ever power or sway in mortal things weaker men have 
 attributed to fortune, I durst with more confidence (the 
 honour of Divine Providence ever saved) ascribe either 
 to the vigour or the slackness of discipline. Nor is there 
 any sociable perfection in this life, civil or sacred, that 
 can be above discipline ; but she it is that with her 
 musical cords preserves and holds all the parts thereof 
 together. Hence in those perfect armies of Cyrus in 
 Xenophon, and Scipio in the Roman stories, the excel- 
 lence of military skill was esteemed, not by the not need- 
 ing, but by the readiest submitting to the edicts of their 
 commander. And certainly discipline is not only the 
 removal of disorder ; but, if any visible shape can be 
 given to divine things, the very visible shape and image 
 of virtue, whereby she is not only seen in the regular 
 gestures and motions of her heavenly paces as she walks, 
 but also makes the harmony of her voice audible to 
 mortal ears. Yea, the angels themselves, in whom no 
 disorder is feared, as the apostle that saw them in his 
 rapture describes, are distinguished and quaternioned 
 into their celestial princedoms and satrapies, according 
 
MILTON 41 
 
 as God himself has writ his imperial decrees through the 
 great province of heaven.' ^ 
 
 This discipline in the state, so necessary for its pros- 
 perity and, in times of stress, even for its preservation, 
 must be firmly based on the discipline which the indi- 
 vidual exercises over those of his own household and, 
 most of all, over himself. ' To come ', says Milton, 
 ' within the narrowness of household government, obser- 
 vation will show us many deep counsellors of state and 
 judges to demean themselves incorruptibly in the settled 
 course of affairs, . . . but look upon them when they are 
 left to their own disciplining at home, and you shall soon 
 perceive, for all their single knowledge and uprightness, 
 how deficient they are in the regulating of their own 
 family ; not only in what may concern the virtuous and 
 decent composure of their minds in their several places, 
 but that which is of a lower and easier performance, the 
 right possessing of the outer vessel, their body, in sick- 
 ness and health, rest or labour, diet or abstinence, whereby 
 to render it more pliant to the soul, and useful to the 
 commonwealth : which if men were but as good to disci- 
 pline themselves, as some are to tutor their horses and 
 hawks, it could not be so gross in most households.' ^ 
 
 Thus liberty is not static but dynamic, not a condition 
 but a ceaseless activity. The whole of life for each one 
 of us is a struggle against the ignorance that blinds, 
 the luxury that weakens, the licence that destroys. The 
 supreme sin against oneself and the state is the ungirt loin 
 and the unlit lamp. It was Belial, ' graceful and humane ' 
 in outward semblance, but 'in nobler deeds timorous', who 
 
 Counselled ignoble ease and peaceful sloth, 
 Not peace. ^ 
 
 ^ Reason of Church Government, &c., Prose Works, ii, 441, 2. 
 2 lb, ii, 443. 3 Paradise Lost, ii. 227. 
 
 1801 F 
 
42 MILTON 
 
 And Belial's outstanding intellectual quality was that he 
 ' could make the worse appear the better reason '. Slack- 
 ness of body and mind, often defended on the grounds 
 of freedom, is in reality freedom's deadliest foe, for 
 
 What more oft in nations grown corrupt 
 Than to love bondage more than liberty. 
 Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty ? ^ 
 
 And this is only true of the nation because in the first 
 place it is true of the individual. 
 
 Against such a bondage Milton's life and writings are 
 one splendid consistent protest. He held firmly to the 
 doctrine of the survival of the fittest ; he only differed 
 from later upholders of the doctrine in having a fuller and 
 profounder understanding of the meaning of the word 
 ' fit '. He was saved from worship of fitness as mere 
 brute force by his intellectual and spiritual idealism. He 
 was saved from that common failing of the ideahst, 
 a contempt for the body and so for the part that mere 
 physical strength must play in all progress towards the 
 attainment of higher ends, whether for the individual or 
 the state, by his belief in the intimate relation of body 
 and soul. Body and soul to him are not two distinct 
 things of which one may be mortified for the sake of the 
 other. The whole man is soul, and the soul man, an 
 animated, sensitive, and rational substance. Hence the 
 active training of the body is necessary to the effective 
 development of the soul. These ideas must have a place 
 in all effective systems of education. Milton has left us 
 his conception of what education should be ; in detail we 
 may dissent from some of it, and since it was designed 
 only for the ruling class it presents a standard impossible 
 
 ^ Samson Agonistes, 269-71. 
 
MILTON 43 
 
 of universal attainment, but the general principles which 
 it advocates will never be superseded. His very defini- 
 tion is in itself significant. ' I call therefore a complete 
 and generous education that which fits a man to perform 
 justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both 
 private and public, of peace and war.' ^ Our youth, he 
 says, are to be ' inflamed with the study of learning and 
 the admiration of virtue stirred up with high hopes of 
 living like brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God 
 and famous to all ages '. In opposition to that cramping 
 spirit of specialism which produces excellence in one small 
 branch of knowledge and leaves the whole man stunted 
 and undeveloped he advocates some measure of compre- 
 hensive training. Among other things we may specially 
 note that he asks for some attention to politics, or what 
 we should rather call citizenship, ' that they may not, in 
 a dangerous fit of the commonwealth, be such poor, shaken, 
 uncertain reeds, of such a tottering conscience, as many 
 of our great counsellors have lately shown themselves, but 
 steadfast pillars of state.' ^ He calls us to study of poetry 
 and the arts, not technically, but in order that we may 
 learn to appreciate them, and strengthen the ideal sides of 
 our nature by contact with the noblest things that have 
 been thought and uttered. What religious, glorious, and 
 magnificent use, he says, might be made of poetry ! He 
 advocates the cultivation of a love for nature, and suggests 
 the widening influence of travel — and he insists on a regular 
 and strenuous bodily training for all. ' Exercise in the exact 
 use of their weapon will keep them healthy, nimble, strong, 
 and well in breath, is also the likeliest means to make 
 them grow large and tall, and to inspire them with a gallant 
 
 1 On Education, Prose Works, iii. 467. ^ lb. 473. 
 
44 MILTON 
 
 and fearless courage, which being tempered with season- 
 able lectures and precepts to them of fortitude and true 
 patience, will turn into an heroic and native valour, and 
 make them hate the cowardice of doing wrong.' ^ And at 
 times ' they are, by a sudden alarum or watchword, to be 
 called out to their military motions, under sky or covert 
 according to the season ; that having in sport, but with 
 much exactness and daily muster, served out the rudi- 
 ments of their soldiership, they may as it were out of 
 a long war come forth renowned and perfect commanders 
 in the service of their country '.2 All their education is 
 to fit them for their life as free citizens of a free state ; it is 
 in the strict sense a liberal education. For it employs 
 the principles of liberty and discipline to develop and 
 control the full possibilities of each individual character. 
 This conception of liberty, as based upon a vigilant, 
 strenuous, and highly trained virtue, was Milton's root 
 belief. It is the leading idea in all his great imaginative 
 writings, from Comus to Samson Agonistes. 
 
 Love virtue ; she alone is free : 
 She can teach you how to climb, 
 
 is the teaching of Comus. And that sublime outburst of 
 the Lady, when her body is powerless against the spells of 
 the Enchanter : 
 
 Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind ^ 
 
 is the exultant cry of Milton's own indomitable spirit, 
 uncowed even by apparent failure in his lifelong battle 
 against oppression. Thus Samson, though for the time 
 he is sunk in impotence, the direct punishment of his 
 enslavement to a weak passion, arouses himself to an act 
 
 ^ On Education, Prose Works, iii, 475. ^ i\j ^^5^ 
 
 ^ Comus, 1020, 21 ; 663. 
 
MILTON 45 
 
 of heroic self-sacrifice by which he Hberates his people 
 
 and saves his soul. Milton's Samson is Samson Agonistes, 
 
 the wrestler, the combatant : 
 
 He to Israel 
 Honour hath left and freedom, let but them 
 Find courage to lay hold on this occasion. 
 And, which is best and happiest yet, all this 
 With God not parted from him, as was feared. 
 But favouring and assisting to the end.^ 
 
 This same conception is a motive underlying Paradise 
 Los^, though the peculiar nature of the subject has obscured 
 from some eyes Milton's true attitude towards it. Since 
 freedom, according to Milton, is based on virtue, it can only 
 be found in the service of God ; and it is God's rule, which is 
 pure goodness, that makes all earthly domination immoral 
 and unjust. Satan's rebellion is an attempt to upset that 
 order and to create the tyrannical rule of irresponsible 
 force . But , and here comes our difh culty in understanding 
 Milton, whereas in heaven, where the rule is goodness, 
 virtue means inactivity and acceptance ; on our earth, 
 where tyranny and vice are rampant, virtue means 
 strenuous activity and protest. So that certain qualities 
 which Milton most admired on earth, ' the courage never 
 to submit and yield ' and the opposition to established 
 order, he is obliged by his story to transfer to Satan, the 
 arch-enemy of the established order of heaven. 
 
 It is the same difficulty as makes the orthodox Biblical 
 heaven so great a stumbling-block to the present-day 
 Christian. To one who has fought the good fight on earth 
 an eternity of waving palms and singing Hallelujahs in 
 sublime unconcern of the misery and crimes of the earth 
 that has just been left behind does not make an irresistible 
 appeal. Even if such a prospect does not disturb us, we 
 
 1 Samson Agonistes, 1714-16, 1718-20. 
 
46 MILTON 
 
 can well believe that Milton would have been terribly ill 
 at ease in such a Zion. We may well suspect that before 
 he had been there an hour he would have been restless, 
 wanting perhaps to reorganize the processions, or to intro- 
 duce a new mode of singing in the heavenly choirs. But 
 whereas theological opinion to-day allows us our own con- 
 ception of heaven, by the seventeenth-century Christian 
 scripture was literally interpreted. Hence it comes about 
 that though Satan is fighting against liberty and against 
 virtue, the very fact that he is rebelling, as Milton on 
 earth was obliged to rebel, forces the poet into some 
 sympathy with his attitude. But it is a total delusion to 
 imagine that Milton's sympathy with Satan went any 
 farther than this. Every action that Satan commits is 
 wrong, every motive that actuates him is base. He has 
 no conception of liberty. He is the tyrant, who is fighting 
 for his own ambition at the cost of the freedom of his 
 followers. He has been led to it by a base jealousy of 
 another's just authority and from a false sense of his own 
 injured merit. As long as he is chief, he does not consider 
 the welfare of his subjects. It is true that when they have 
 been driven to heU he says : 
 
 Here at least 
 We shall be free, ... 
 
 Here may we reign secure, and in my choice 
 To reign is worth ambition, tho' in Hell.^ 
 
 But he is the ruler and they the miserable subjects ; hence 
 his words, as Milton adds, ' bear semblance of worth, not 
 substance'. His idea of freedom is very different from 
 Milton's. And there are other points in his character 
 worthy of our note. He has indeed a passionate admira- 
 tion for his army. But when he views the vast number 
 
 1 Paradise Lost, i. 259-63. 
 
MILTON 47 
 
 of his troops his heart ' distends with pride, and harden- 
 ing in his strength, glories'. The thought that his sin 
 has plunged them into ruin wrings him with momentary 
 anguish, yet it does not make him falter in his infamous 
 purpose : 
 
 Cruel his eye, but cast 
 Signs of remorse and passion to behold 
 The fellows of his crime, the followers rather, 
 (Far other once beheld in bliss) condemn'd 
 For ever now to have their lot in pain. 
 Millions of spirits for his fault amerc't 
 Of Heav'n, and from Eternal Splendours flung 
 For his revolt, yet faithful how they stood. 
 Their glory withered.^ 
 
 Satan sees, indeed, the tragedy of their noble fidelity to 
 him, their tyrannic leader ; for he knows to what depths 
 of ruin it is dragging them. So, it is said. Napoleon 
 once wept before he led his troops to destruction ; so 
 one can well imagine later commanders, repenting too 
 late of the devastation that their insensate ambition 
 has brought upon their own peoples. And we note, 
 too, that his first defeat has come from his reckless 
 confidence in the strength of his own resources ; because 
 his armies are so powerful, they seem to him invincible : 
 
 What power of mind 
 Foreseeing or presaging from the depth 
 Of knowledge past or present, could have feared 
 How such united force of Gods, how such 
 As stood like these, could ever know repulse ? ^ 
 
 But now that he has been defeated, he accuses his adversary 
 of having provoked the quarrel. It was 
 
 God's strength concealed 
 That tempted our attempt, and wrought our fall;^ 
 
 i. e. the Almighty ought to have shown His hand before. 
 
 1 lb. i. 604-12. 2 ib_ i_ 626-30. 3 lb. i. 642. 
 
48 MILTON 
 
 Satan's later methods are those of guile and fraud. He 
 acts the liar and the spy. He continues to pose as the 
 patron of liberty. But he strikes at his great foe by 
 attacking and plotting the destruction of a weak and 
 wholly innocent victim, and he excuses himself by the 
 exigencies of circumstances — by necessity — 
 
 I am no purpos'd foe 
 To you whom I could pity thus forlorn 
 
 he says to Adam and Eve. His heart bleeds as he reflects 
 upon this onslaught upon those who wronged him not. 
 But, as he says, the desire for 
 
 Honour and empire with revenge enlarg'd. 
 
 By conquering this new world, compels me now 
 
 To do what else though damn'd I should abhor. 
 
 And Milton adds the significant comment : 
 
 So spake the Fiend, and with necessity. 
 The tyrant's plea, excus'd his devihsh deeds.^ 
 
 Satan's plan, as you remember, is for the time completely 
 successful, and for the sake of his larger purpose he seduces 
 to their destruction his unprotected victims. But he is 
 himself degraded, even in his conquest, and from that 
 very conquest draws all the nearer to his final inevitable 
 defeat. His character degenerates, and with it his power 
 of courageous resistance. He is ' wicked, and thence 
 weak '.2 
 
 This is Milton's comment on the policy and the character 
 of Satan, the enemy of true liberty. 
 
 Milton's hatred of all tyranny and oppression was not 
 confined to his own country. He had an intense sympathy 
 with the struggle for liberty in whatever land it might 
 
 1 Paradise Lost, iv. 373-4,1390-4. ^ lb. iv. 856. 
 
MILTON 49 
 
 manifest itself. ' Who knows not ', he wrote, ' that there 
 is a mutual bond of amity and brotherhood between man 
 and man all over the world, neither is it the English sea 
 that can sever us from that duty and relation. ... It 
 is not distance of place that makes enmity, but enmity 
 that makes distance. He therefore that keeps peace 
 with me, near or remote, of whatsoever nation, is to 
 me, as far as all civil and humane offices, an Englishman 
 and a neighbour.' ^ His defence of English freedom 
 brought him the congratulations of those who sympathized 
 with emancipators all over Europe. To the compliments 
 addressed him by a distinguished Greek he replied : 
 ' To the writings of illustrious Athenians I am indebted 
 for all my proficiency in literature. Did I possess their 
 command of language and their force of persuasion, 
 I should feel the highest satisfaction in employing them 
 to excite our armies and our fleets to deliver Greece, 
 the parent of eloquence, from the despotism of the 
 Ottomans. But we ought besides to attempt what is, 
 I think, of the greatest moment, to inflame the present 
 Greeks with an ardent desire to emulate the virtue, the 
 industry, the patience, of their ancient progenitors ; nor 
 do I think that the Greeks should be wanting to them- 
 selves, nor that any other people should be wanting to 
 the Greeks.' ^ As Latin foreign secretary it was Milton's 
 duty to conduct the diplomatic correspondence with 
 relation to the massacres in Piedmont. In 1655 the 
 Duke of Savoy had ordered his reformed subjects in the 
 Piedmont valley to conform to the Church of Rome or 
 to quit their country, and he instituted a wholesale and 
 brutal slaughter of those who declined to submit. The 
 
 1 The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Prose Works, ii. 19. 
 
 2 Letter to the renowned Leonard Philara, the Athenian, ib. iii. 504. 
 
 1801 G 
 
50 MILTON 
 
 indignation aroused in England and the sympathy felt 
 for the innocent sufferers knew no bounds. Forty 
 thousand pounds— no small sum in those days— was 
 quickly collected for the relief of the survivors ; and letters 
 of remonstrance were written not only to the Duke of 
 Savoy, but to all the European powers who had interest 
 in the cause of freedom or were Hkely to fear and respect 
 the opinion of England. Milton's letters i are couched 
 in the dignified language of official diplomacy, which, 
 however, show indignation enough. His personal feelings 
 burst forth in his most magnificent sonnet : 
 
 Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
 Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold. 
 Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old, 
 When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones 
 Forget not ; in thy book record their groans 
 Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold 
 Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolld 
 Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans 
 The vales redoubled to the hills, and they 
 To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow 
 O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway 
 The triple tyrant ; that from these may grow 
 A hundred fold, who having learnt thy way 
 Early may fly the Babylonian woe. 
 
 As the result of England's firm remonstrance, the Duke 
 of Savoy recalled his army and reinstated the survivors 
 in their homes. Had he not done so there can be little 
 doubt as to what course England, whose power under Crom- 
 well was feared in the Continent as it was never feared 
 before, would have taken to enforce her plea for justice. 
 
 Milton, like all free men, had a deep hatred for 
 war. He saw in it all that was subversive of the higher 
 development of humanity : 
 
 1 Letters of State, Prose Works, ii. 248-64. 
 
MILTON 51 
 
 O shame to men ; devil with devil damn'd 
 Firm concord holds, men only disagree 
 Of creatures rational, though under hope 
 Of heavenly grace, and God proclaiming peace, 
 Yet live in hatred, enmity and strife 
 Among themselves, and levy cruel wars. 
 Wasting the earth, each other to destroy. 
 As if, which might induce us to accord, 
 Man had not hellish foes enow besides. 
 That day and night for his destruction wait.^ 
 
 He did not, like some modern philosophers, regard war 
 as a necessary medicine for sick humanity ; he knew 
 well enough that in the ordinary struggle of life against 
 sin and oppression there was plenty of opportunity for 
 exercising the heroism and self-sacrifice that some regard 
 as only educed by war. He had no hesitation in his 
 condemnation of all wars of conquest : 
 
 They err who count it glorious to subdue 
 By conquest far and wide, to overrun 
 Large countries, and in field great battles win. 
 Great cities by assault ; what do these worthies, 
 But rob, and spoil, burn, slaughter, and enslave 
 Peaceable nations, neighbouring or remote, 
 Made captive, yet deserving freedom more 
 Than those their conquerors, who leave behind 
 Nothing but ruin wheresoe'er they rove. 
 And all the flourishing works of peace destroy. 
 Then swell with pride, and must be titled gods. 
 Great benefactors of mankind, deliverers ? ^ 
 
 Such was Milton's view of aggressive warfare. 
 
 But his own experience in his own country's struggle 
 for liberty had shown him that in the last resort, and for 
 a just cause, there was no appeal but the appeal to arms. 
 He showed his attitude to war not by an unconditional 
 
 ^ Paradise Lost, ii, 496-505. 
 * Paradise Regained, iii. 71-82. 
 
52 MILTON 
 
 refusal of the right to fight, but in his recognition that 
 war was only the means to a just end, and that all 
 through the struggle the end must never be lost sight of. 
 For he realized that when war was over the problem was 
 not solved, but was then really most acute. In his sonnet 
 to General Fairfax, ' whose name in arms through Europe 
 rings ', he points this out clearly enough. These victories 
 of yours, he says, are indeed glorious : 
 
 But yet a nobler task awaits thy hand 
 
 (For what can war, but endless war still breed ?) 
 
 Till truth and right from violence be freed 
 
 And public faith cleared from the shameful brand 
 
 Of public fraud. 
 
 To Cromwell, ' our chief of men ', he makes a hke 
 appeal : 
 
 Much remains 
 To conquer still, peace hath her victories 
 No less renown 'd than war — 
 
 unless we labour that at the end of war liberty for our- 
 selves and others be truly secured, war will only breed 
 endless wars, and peace, whatever the success of our 
 arms, will not have her victories but the ' shameful 
 brand of public fraud '. This same idea is developed, 
 with matchless eloquence, in Milton's Second Defence of 
 the English People, in his appeal first to Cromwell and 
 then to the nation at large. The words, which primarily 
 apply to the settlement of the internal affairs of England 
 in the seventeenth century, are easily and with little 
 alteration applicable to the international settlement for 
 which we are all striving to-day. To Cromwell he says, 
 as with some obvious modifications we might say to 
 our own statesmen and generals : 
 
 * To you our country owes its liberties, nor can you 
 sustain a character at once more momentous and more 
 
MILTON 53 
 
 august than that of the author, the guardian, and the 
 preserver of our liberties. . . . Often reflect what a dear 
 pledge the beloved land of your nativity has entrusted 
 to your care. . . . Revere the fond expectations that we 
 cherish, the solicitudes of your anxious country ; revere 
 the looks and the wounds of your brave companions in 
 arms, who have so strenuously fought for liberty ; revere 
 the shades of those who perished in the contest ; revere 
 also the opinions and the hopes that foreign states 
 entertain concerning us, who promise to themselves so 
 many advantages from that liberty, which, if it be 
 suffered to vanish like a dream, will involve us in the 
 deepest abyss of shame ; and lastly revere yourself, 
 and after having endured so many sufferings and encoun- 
 tered so many perils for the sake of liberty, do not suffer 
 it either to be violated by yourself, or in one instance 
 impaired by others. You cannot be truly free unless we 
 are free too, for such is the nature of things, that he who 
 entrenches on the liberty of others, is the first to lose 
 his own and become a slave. But if you should after- 
 wards invade that liberty which you have defended, 
 your conduct must be fatally operative not only against 
 the cause of liberty, but the general interests of piety 
 and virtue. ... At once wisely and discreetly to govern, 
 to persuade people to relinquish inveterate and corrupt 
 for new and beneficial maxims and institutions, to have 
 the mind present and operative in every quarter, to 
 reject the blandishments of pleasure and the pomp and 
 power : — these are exertions compared with which the 
 labour of war is mere pastime ; which will require every 
 energy and employ every faculty that you possess, 
 which demand a man supported from above, and almost 
 instructed by immediate inspiration.' ^ 
 
 And then, turning to the people of England, he makes 
 
 this passionate appeal : 
 
 ' Unless your liberty, which is of such a kind as arms 
 can neither procure nor take away, which alone is the 
 fruit of piety, of justice, of temperance, shall have taken 
 deep roots in your minds and hearts, there will not long 
 
 ^ The Second Defence of the People of England, Prose Works, 
 i. 289-90. 
 
54 MILTON 
 
 be wanting one who will snatch from you by treachery 
 what you have acquired by arms. War has made many 
 great whom peace makes small. If after being released 
 from the toils of war, you neglect the arts of peace, if 
 your peace and your liberty be a state of warfare, if war 
 be your only virtue, the summit of your praise, you will 
 soon find peace most adverse to your interests. Your 
 peace will only be a more distressing war, and that which 
 you imagined liberty will prove the worst of slavery. . . . 
 For if you think it is a more grand, or a more beneficial, 
 or a more wise policy, to invent subtle expedients for 
 increasing the revenue, to multiply our naval and military 
 force, to rival in craft the ambassadors of foreign states, 
 to form skilful treaties and alliances, than to administer 
 unpolluted justice to the people, to redress the injured, 
 to succour the distressed, and speedily to restore to every 
 one his own, you are involved in a cloud of error, and too 
 late you will perceive, when the illusion of those mighty 
 benefits has vanished, that in neglecting these, which 
 you now think inferior considerations, you have only 
 been precipitating your own ruin and despair. The 
 fidelity of enemies and allies is frail and perishing un- 
 less it be cemented by principles of justice ; that wealth 
 and those honours which most covet, readily change 
 masters ; they forsake the idle ; they repair where 
 virtue, where industry, where patience flourish most. 
 Thus nation precipitates the downfall of nation, thus 
 the more sound subverts the more corrupt. ... I have 
 not circumscribed my defence of liberty within the petty 
 circle around me, but have made it so general and com- 
 prehensive that the justice and reasonableness of such 
 uncommon occurrences, explained and defended, both 
 among my own countrymen and among foreigners, and 
 which all good men cannot but approve, may serve to 
 exalt the glory of my country, and to excite the imita- 
 tion of posterity.'^ 
 
 Such are the glowing words in which Milton sums up 
 the struggle for liberty in which he had himself borne 
 a part, and calls upon his countrymen to be true, after 
 
 1 Second Defence of the People of England, Prose Works, i. 295-9. 
 
MILTON 55 
 
 the battle has been won, to the spirit in which it had 
 been fought. Who can read it to-day without seeing 
 that it has a lesson for our time ? Who can doubt that, 
 great as the victory at arms must be if our cause is to 
 prevail, a greater and more difficult task lies in the 
 attainment of a just and permanent peace ? Even as 
 Milton reminded Fairfax and Cromwell, whilst still on 
 the field of battle, of the causes for which they strove, 
 and the difficulties that were ahead, so we too must 
 think of the future and keep our minds in the proper 
 attitude to deal with it. When history records its final 
 verdict upon this great war and decides upon its real 
 causes, it will be influenced not so much by what we are 
 saying now, as by what we do afterwards. If we fall 
 under the spell of that very spirit of militarism and 
 selfish aggression that we execrate in others, if we imagine 
 that our own freedom can be secured at others' expense, 
 if we allow motives of recrimination, or vengeance, to 
 usurp the seat of justice, history will surely convict us 
 of hypocrisy, and place upon our brows ' the shameful 
 brand of public fraud '. If, on the other hand, we are 
 true to our professed faith, the faith which has found 
 utterance in the public words of all our great leaders, 
 we shall be worthy of Milton's proud eulogy of his country 
 as ' the mansion-house of liberty ', of liberty which is 
 ' the nurse of all great wits ', which ' hath rarify'd and 
 enlightn'd our spirits like the influence of heaven '. ^ 
 
 There is much, then, as it seems to me, in the teaching 
 of Milton that is of value for us to-day. There is still 
 more in the example of his life. The conceptions of 
 liberty and of discipline which find voice on every page 
 of his writings are illustrated in all his actions. Early 
 ^ Areopagitica, ib. ii. 91, 94. 
 
56 MILTON 
 
 in life he was destined for the English Church, but he 
 abandoned the idea on reaching full manhood, ' lest ', 
 he says, ' I should subscribe slave.' He now realized 
 that his vocation was that of a student and a poet ; 
 and he set himself resolutely to perfect himself for his 
 calling. ' What God has resolved for me ', he wrote, 
 ' I know not, but this I know, that he has instilled into 
 me a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much 
 labour is Ceres said to have sought her daughter Proser- 
 pine, as I am wont, day and night, to seek for this idea of 
 the beautiful through all the forms and faces of things ; ' ^ 
 and as he grew in years and strength he became conscious 
 that it was his mission in life to leave behind him, for the 
 honour of God and the glory of his country, some work 
 so written that men should not willingly let it die. For 
 this end, as he knew, poetic inspiration alone would not 
 avail. 'To this', he said, 'must be added industrious 
 and select reading, steady observation and insight into 
 all seemly and generous arts and affairs.' He submitted 
 himself willingly to the severest training, that he might 
 be fit for his great achievement. Though not rich, his 
 circumstances were always affluent ; but in all his 
 habits he was rigorously frugal and abstinent, and he 
 avoided every luxury and bodily self-indulgence, not only 
 as unworthy of his high calling, but as liable to unfit 
 him both in body and spirit for the attainment of it. 
 Yet he did not neglect his body, for he knew that his 
 health was essential. ' Up and stirring ', he tells us, 
 ' in winter often ere the sound of any bell awaken men 
 to labour ; in summer as oft with the bird that first 
 rouses, or not much tardier, to read with good authors, 
 and then with useful and generous labours preserving 
 1 Familiar Letters to Carlo Deodati, Prose Works, iii. 494. 
 
MILTON 57 
 
 the body's health and hardiness to render lightsome, 
 clear, and not lumpish obedience to the cause of the 
 mind, to the cause of religion, and our country's liberty, 
 when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies.' ^ He 
 was, in fact, proficient with the broadsword, and, though 
 slight in figure, had both strength and personal courage, 
 physical as well as moral. His moral courage was first 
 put to the test in his foreign travels, which occupied 
 him in his 30th and 31st years. Mixing freely among all 
 the scholars and literary men of Italy, he made many 
 friends through the bonds of common sympathies and 
 interests. But of religion, he tells us, ' I made this 
 resolution, not of my own accord to introduce conversa- 
 tion about religion, but if asked respecting the faith, 
 then, whatsoever I should suffer, to dissemble nothing.' 
 Whenever his religion was attacked he defended it 
 fearlessly; and he paid a second visit to Rome, though 
 he was warned that he was running considerable risk 
 in so doing. Then he received the news of the struggle 
 between Charles and his Parliament, and turned his 
 steps homeward, ' for I thought it disgraceful, while my 
 fellow-countrymen were fighting for liberty, that I should 
 be travelling abroad for pleasure.' ^ On his return he 
 hesitated for a time as to what service he could best 
 render, but he soon realized that it was to be his work 
 to defend the cause of liberty with his pen, and by his 
 writings to incite his countrymen to zeal and courage 
 in its pursuit. ' I saw ', he says, ' that the way was 
 opening for the establishment of real substantial liberty, 
 which is rather to be sought from within than without : 
 and whose existence depends not so much on the terror 
 
 ^ Apology for Smectymnuus, ib. iii. 112. 
 2 Second Defence of the People of England, ib. i. 256. 
 isoi H 
 
58 MILTON 
 
 of the sword, as on sobriety of conduct and integrity of 
 life. He perceived that there were three species of liberty 
 essential to the happiness of social life — religious, domes- 
 tic, and civil — and he set himself to defend each in turn.^ 
 Much of this writing alienated the sympathies of his 
 friends and brought him into public disfavour ; but he 
 was never the slave of a party or a phrase ; he was true 
 throughout to his own fearless convictions of right. It 
 must never be forgotten that all this work was uncon- 
 genial to him, that he was, as he tells us, writing it with 
 his left hand, and to do it he had to put on one side all 
 his cherished ambitions and leave undone the work 
 which he felt to be his real destiny. But when he could 
 help the immediate and pressing needs of England, his 
 personal ambition and desires counted nothing. For 
 twenty years — years that were the prime of his life — he 
 renounced all thoughts of self, and gave himself unre- 
 servedly to the service of his country. He could not 
 write poetry any more than he could travel abroad for 
 pleasure, ' in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes.* 
 Of course there were those, both at the time and after- 
 wards, who were ready to pour contempt on his achieve- 
 ment and to taunt him because he did not actually bear 
 arms in defence of his cause. But he knew that the 
 service which he performed was most suited to his genius 
 and more necessary, and none can dispute the force of 
 his reply to them : 
 
 ' Though I did not share in the toils or dangers of the 
 war, yet I was at the same time engaged in a service 
 not less hazardous to myself and more beneficial to my 
 fellow-citizens ; nor, in the adverse turns of our affairs, 
 did I ever betray any symptoms of pusillanimity or 
 dejection, or show myself more afraid than became 
 
 1 Second Defence of the People of England, Prose "Works, i. 258. 
 
MILTON 59 
 
 me of malice or of death. For since from my youth up 
 I was devoted to the pursuit of literature, and my mind 
 had always been stronger than my body, I did not court 
 the labours of a camp, in which any common person 
 would have been more service than myself, but resorted 
 to that employment in which my services were likely to 
 be of most avail. Thus with the better part of my frame 
 I contributed to the success of the glorious cause in 
 which we were engaged ; and I thought that if God willed 
 the success of such glorious achievements, that there 
 should be others by whom those achievements should 
 be recorded with dignity and elegance, and that the 
 truth, which had been defended by arms, should also be 
 defended by reason, which is the best and only legitimate 
 means of defending it.' ^ 
 
 And to that defence he gave more than the best twenty 
 
 years of his life, the prime of his manhood, for it was 
 
 then that he became totally blind. Of the risk that he 
 
 was running by incessant overwork he had been fully 
 
 warned ; but he paid no heed to the warning, and in the 
 
 summer of 1652 his eyes, ' overplied in liberty's defence,' 
 
 wholly failed him. If there is one man to whom, more 
 
 than to the student, blindness is of all calamities the 
 
 most awful, that man is the artist. Milton was student 
 
 and artist in one. A smaller man would have sunk 
 
 under the blow. Milton himself had his moments of 
 
 despair, when his mind was as dark as his bodily vision, 
 
 when his mood was that to which he gave reiterated 
 
 voice in Samson Agonistes : 
 
 Nor am I in the list of them that hope. 
 
 Hopeless are all my evils, all remediless. 
 
 This one prayer yet remains, might I be heard, 
 
 No long petition — speedy death, 
 
 The close of all my miseries and the balm.^ 
 
 But this was only a passing mood. His courage was 
 
 indomitable, and never did he work more fiercely than 
 
 ^ lb. i. 218-19. ^ Samson Agonistes, 647-51. 
 
6o MILTON 
 
 in the year after his loss of sight. Later, if his duty called 
 for no more energy, it demanded an even greater courage. 
 Under the Commonwealth, independent as his utterances 
 always were, he was in some measure at least the spokes- 
 man of the nation. On the death of Cromwell he was 
 quickly to discover that in his defence of liberty he 
 Btood practically alone. But he fought on until the 
 last unchanged 
 
 To hoarse and mute, tho' fallen on evil days. 
 On evil days tho' fallen, and evil tongues; 
 In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, 
 And solitude.! 
 
 His own attitude of fearless courage he has expressed 
 in the demeanour of the archangel Abdiel, who scorns 
 to join the rebellion of Satan : 
 
 So spake the seraph Abdiel faithful found; 
 
 Among the faithless, faithful only he ; 
 
 Among innumerable false, unmov'd, 
 
 Unshaken, unseduc'd, unterrifi'd. 
 
 His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal ; 
 
 Nor number, nor example with him wrought 
 
 To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind, 
 
 Tho' single.^ 
 
 Then at last, when no more work was left for him in 
 the sphere of public duty, he turned to the fulfilment 
 of his life's ambition ; he took up again the poet's pen ; 
 and carried into an ideal world his hopes, his ideals, 
 his disappointments, his contempt for the tyrant and the 
 traitor, his passionate heroism in the defence of liberty 
 and truth. In all the roll of heroic Englishmen there 
 is no sublimer figure, no more inspiring example, than 
 John Milton. 
 
 ^ Paradise Lost, vii. 24-8. 
 2 lb. V. 893-900. 
 
Ill 
 WORDSWORTH 
 
 No period in our history suggests a closer analogy with 
 the present than do the early years of the nineteenth 
 century, when England was standing up against the 
 aggressive militarism of Napoleon, and giving a deter- 
 mined and wellnigh united support to the cause of her 
 own freedom and of national independence, which was 
 threatened throughout the length and breadth of Europe. 
 
 It is important to remember that this struggle with 
 France had not begun as a war for freedom, nor was 
 it in its early stages supported by the body of the 
 nation. When in 1789 the Revolution was inaugurated 
 by the fall of the Bastille, the English nation was for the 
 most part enthusiastic in its cause. ' How much the 
 greatest event it is that has ever happened in the world, 
 and how much the best ! ' cried Fox, and his sentiments 
 were echoed by the majority of his countrymen, without 
 respect of class or political party. France had been the 
 mainstay of despotism in Europe. Now she stood out 
 as the pioneer of Liberty. Moreover, the first acts of the 
 Revolutionists were conceived distinctly upon consti- 
 tutional lines, an influential party in the Assembly 
 deliberately looking to the English Constitution as their 
 pattern. And though these sympathies were largely 
 estranged by the violence of the Paris mob, and feelings 
 of apprehension and anxiety as to the sequel were stimu- 
 lated by the passionate eloquence of Burke, those who 
 believed in the principle of national independence felt 
 
62 WORDSWORTH 
 
 that England had no call to interfere in the internal 
 concerns of a foreign state. The people had a right to 
 decide upon the form of government that pleased them. 
 They had as much justification in deposing Louis and 
 instituting a republic as we had in deposing the Stuarts 
 and adopting the Hanoverians. And the English Govern- 
 ment, which went to war with the French nation to 
 restore a hated and rejected dynasty, did not itself repre- 
 sent in any true sense the views of the English people, 
 whilst it only increased the antipathy of all liberal minds 
 by its reactionary home policy — a policy contrary to the 
 whole spirit of a free people — in its suspension of the Habeas 
 Corpus Act and in its violent and capricious attempts 
 to crush all sympathy with the ideas and acts of the 
 Revolutionists, This attitude of the nation towards the 
 war was changed not by the arguments of their govern- 
 ment in fa\'Our of legitimacy, but by France's renunciation 
 of her own ideal. For with the rise of Napoleon came 
 a change in the policy of France, from the just defence 
 of her rights as an independent nation to the lust for 
 conquest, and to interference with the national rights of 
 others ; and English lovers of liberty, whUe they neither 
 forgot nor forgave the government its transgressions, 
 and hated its internal reactionary policy as fervently as 
 ever, ranged themselves in its support against the more 
 dangerous tyranny of France. The war, we are told, had 
 been styled ' just and necessary ' from the first ; it was 
 not till after the subjugation of Switzerland (1798) that 
 it was 
 
 ' regarded by the body of the people as indeed both " just " 
 and " necessary " ; and this justice and necessity were by 
 none more clearly perceived, or more feelingly bewailed, 
 than by those who had most eagerly opposed the war in 
 its commencement, and who continued most bitterly to 
 
WORDSWORTH 63 
 
 regret that this nation had ever borne a part in it. Their 
 conduct was herein consistent : they proved that they 
 kept their eyes steadily fixed upon principles ; for, though 
 there was a shifting or transfer of hostility in their minds 
 as far as regarded persons, they only combated the same 
 enemy opposed to them under a different shape ; and 
 that enemy was the spirit of selfish tyranny and lawless 
 ambition. . . , This spirit, when it became undeniably 
 embodied in the French government, they wished in spite 
 of all dangers should be opposed by war ; because peace 
 could not be procured without submission, which could 
 not but be followed by a communion, of which the word 
 of greeting would be, on the one part, insult, — and on the 
 other, degradation. The people now wished for war, as 
 their rulers had done before, because open war between 
 nations is a defined and effectual partition, and the sword, 
 in the hands of the good and the virtuous, is the most in- 
 telligible symbol of abhorrence. It was in order to be pre- 
 served from spirit-breaking submissions — from the guilt 
 of seeming to approve that which they had not the power 
 to prevent, and out of a consciousness of the danger that 
 such guilt would actually steal upon them, and that 
 thus, by evil communications and participations, would be 
 weakened and finally destroyed, those moral sensibilities 
 and energies, by virtue of which alone their liberties, and 
 even their lives, could be preserved — that the people of 
 Great Britain determined to encounter all perils which 
 could follow in the train of open resistance.'^ 
 
 In these words the poet Wordsworth, writing in the later 
 years of the great struggle, summed up the feeling of the 
 better part of the English people. It was a feeling that he 
 himself entirely shared. As a young man he had been swept 
 off his feet with enthusiasm for the Revolution. His early 
 life among sturdy independent dalesmen and shepherds 
 
 1 Wordsworth : Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, 
 Spain, and Portugal, to each other, and to the Common Enemy, 
 at this Crisis ; and specially as affected by the Convention of 
 Cintra, 1809. Ed. of Prose Works of Wordsworth, by W. Knight, 
 1896, i. 116. 
 
64 WORDSWORTH 
 
 had given him that instinctive democracy of feeling 
 
 which revolts at tyranny of those who claim superiority 
 
 from birth or wealth or rank. The beauties of nature 
 
 that laid so deep a hold on his imagination — the natural 
 
 inheritance of all those who had eyes to see and hearts to 
 
 enjoy — seemed by reason of their universal appeal to 
 
 equalize in God's pure sight 
 Monarch and peasant.^ 
 
 And the easy good fellowship of life at a Cambridge 
 
 college only served to extend the same sense of equality : 
 
 we were brothers all 
 In honour, as in one community, 
 Scholars and gentlemen. ^ 
 
 And so, when he went to France and saw the liberty 
 
 and equality of the early Revolution, it seemed but the 
 
 same principle working itself out upon a larger plan. 
 
 This great upheaval which had shaken the whole civilized 
 
 world to him 
 
 Seemed nothing out of Nature's certain course, 
 A gift that was come rather late than soon.^ 
 
 His first visit to France was paid in the Long Vacation 
 
 of 1790, and he landed at Calais on July 13, the eve of the 
 
 day on which the king was to take the oath of fidelity to 
 
 the new constitution. All France was keeping holiday. 
 
 He saw 
 
 How bright a face is worn, when joy of one 
 Is joy for tens of millions.* 
 
 As he passed through the regenerated country, the cry 
 
 rose instinctively from his own responsive heart : 
 
 Honour to the patriot's zeal, 
 Glory and hope to new-born Liberty ! 
 Hail to the mighty projects of the time ! ^ 
 
 ^ The Prelude, Bk. vi. 455-6. ^ j^ jx. 227-9. 
 
 3 lb. ix. 247-8. * lb. vi. 348-9. s lb. vi. 441-3. 
 
WORDSWORTH 65 
 
 In the autumn of the next year he was once more in 
 
 France, no longer as a mere tourist but as a resident, first 
 
 at Orleans and then at Blois. He mixed freely among 
 
 the officers of the French army, many of them preparing 
 
 to flee to Germany and take up arms against their own 
 
 country to bring back the hated Bourbons and regain 
 
 their own lost privileges, but others ready to sacrifice all 
 
 for the cause of the people. Among these was the lofty 
 
 patriot Beaupuy. In his company Wordsworth set the 
 
 seal upon his devotion to the popular cause, and once 
 
 for all his heart was given to the people and his love 
 
 was theirs. Alike from Beaupuy's precept and example 
 
 he gained inspiration ; and when his friend left for the 
 
 front, where he was soon to fall in battle for his country, 
 
 Wordsworth proceeded to Paris to offer his services to 
 
 the cause of freedom. It was only the emptiness of his 
 
 purse that brought him reluctantly back to England. 
 
 Even the September massacres did not daunt his faith. 
 
 ' A time of Revolution, he wrote in the next year, is not 
 
 a season of true liberty. . . . Alas ! the obstinacy and 
 
 perversion of man is such that liberty is often obliged to 
 
 borrow the arms of despotism to overthrow him ; she 
 
 deplores such necessity, but the liberty of the people, her 
 
 supreme law, is her consolation.' ^ The excesses which 
 
 he lamented were, as it seemed to him, but a stage in the 
 
 progress towards a better state, and with the death of 
 
 Robespierre in the next year he felt that all would be 
 
 well. In the people, he said, 
 
 was my trust, 
 And in those virtues which my eyes had seen. 
 
 His heart was torn in two by the conflict in which 
 France and England were then engaged. Success to 
 
 1 Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, &c., by a Republican, 1793, 
 ed. Knight, i. 7. 
 
 1801 I 
 
66 WORDSWORTH 
 
 France would mean the ruin of his country, which he 
 loved with the passion of a poet and a lover ; success to 
 England would result in the destruction of that liberty 
 for which the Revolution had held out golden hopes, the 
 shattering of his ideals of freedom. At no Hght cost his 
 ideals triumphed ; and he tells how, in spite of all the 
 ties that bound him to his native land, nay, partly because 
 of them, he felt within him an awful exultation- in her 
 defeats and, conscious of her backslidings from her past 
 greatness of mind, ' fed on the day of vengeance yet to 
 come '.1 But his soul had not yet plumbed the depths of 
 agonized distraction that it was to experience; for no 
 sooner had he been driven to renounce his faith in his 
 own country, than France, for whose ideals he had sacri- 
 ficed her, began to play him false, and the liberty for which 
 he had staked his all was betrayed. France changed 
 a war of self-defence to one of conquest. In vain he fell back 
 upon abstract principles. They profited him nothing. It 
 was fundamental to his mind to look for some realization 
 of his ideal, not in a far-off Utopia, 
 
 But in the very world, which is the world 
 Of all of us, the place where in the end 
 We find our happiness, or not at all ! ^ 
 
 And now that France had failed him he was faced by 
 a blank, an almost utter despair. From this he was 
 rescued by the tender care of his sister Dorothy, who 
 rekindled his love for simple and homely things. 
 
 She gave me eyes, she gave me ears ; 
 And humble cares, and delicate fears ; 
 A heart, the fountain of sweet tears. 
 And love, and thought, and joy.^ 
 
 ^ Prelude, x. 299. ^ lb. x. 141-3. 
 
 ^ The Sparrow's Nest, 11. 17-20. 
 
WORDSWORTH 67 
 
 Thus his spirit was laid bare to the heahng power of 
 nature, and he learned to rebuild his hopes for man on 
 the homely facts of human life and the simplest emotions 
 of the human heart. At the same time his friendship for 
 Coleridge gave a new stimulus to his perplexed and 
 distracted intellect, enabling him to regain a reason for 
 the faith that had returned to him. Yet for a year or 
 two, though his eyes were averted from the European 
 struggle that was waging with ever-increasing ominous- 
 ness, his peace was not entirely made with his own 
 country. This peace was effected very significantly by 
 absence. In the winter of 1798-9 he was in Germany. 
 As he paced daily the snow-bound ramparts of Goslar, on 
 the edge of the Hartz forest, his mind was filled with 
 thoughts of home. Here he wrote some of his most 
 beautiful and intimate poems of English country and 
 country life, and realized at once the depths and the 
 nature of the foundations on which his love for England 
 was based. ' We are right glad to find ourselves in 
 England,' he wrote on his return, ' for we have learned 
 to know its value.' And it was at Goslar that he wrote 
 that deeply characteristic tribute to his native land : 
 
 I travelled among unknown men 
 
 In lands beyond the sea; 
 Nor, England ! did I know till then 
 
 What love I bore to thee. 
 
 'Tis past, that melancholy dream ! 
 
 Nor will I quit thy shore 
 A second time ; for still I seem 
 
 To love thee more and more. 
 
 Among thy mountains did I feel 
 
 The joy of my desire ; 
 And she I cherished turned her wheel 
 
 Beside an English fire. 
 
68 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed, 
 
 The bowers where Lucy played ; 
 And thine too is the last green field 
 
 That Lucy's eyes surveyed. 
 
 These simple lines form Wordsworth's first patriotic 
 poem, and innocent as they seem of all philosophical in- 
 tention, they are of the very essence of his conception of 
 patriotism. Its firmest roots are bedded in association, 
 in our love for the scenes and the persons that have 
 become dear to us from familiarity, in our memories, faint 
 as they may be, of incidents, impressions, sensations, 
 which, each one of them, contributed something to build 
 up the beings that we are. Wordsworth has suggestively 
 compared the active benevolence of spirit which inspires 
 the virtuous man in all his diverse relations with mankind 
 to the concentric circles of a spider's web, ' which are 
 bound together by links, and rest upon each other, making 
 one frame and capable of one tremor ; circles narrower 
 and narrower, closer and closer, as they lie more near to 
 the centre of self from which they proceeded and which 
 sustains the whole.' ^ ' Love and admiration must push 
 themselves out towards some quarters, otherwise the 
 moral man is killed,' hence the growth from love of 
 family and friends to local and then to national feeling. 
 Thus nationality to Wordsworth is simply a larger form 
 of individual human personality, and love of country is 
 only a specialized and concentrated form of love for 
 mankind. Those same rules, says Wordsworth, just, 
 courteous, and humane, which govern the intercourse 
 between individuals ' I apply to the conduct of large bodies 
 of men, or of nations towards each other, because these 
 are nothing but aggregates of individuals ; and because 
 
 ^ Convention of Cintra, &c., ed. Knight, i. 273. 
 
WORDSWORTH 69 
 
 the maxims of all just law, and the measures of all sane 
 practice, are only an enlarged or modified application of 
 those dispositions of love and those principles of reason, 
 by which the welfare of individuals,in their connexion with 
 each other, is promoted.' ^ He expresses this same truth 
 elsewhere in its converse form : 
 
 ' The man who feels no regret for the ruined honour 
 of other nations, must be poor in sympathy for the honour 
 of his own country ; and if he be wanting here towards 
 that which circumscribes the whole, he neither has, nor 
 can have, a social regard for the lesser communities which 
 country includes. Contract the circle, and bring him to 
 his family ; such a man cannot protect that with dignified 
 love. Reduce his thoughts to his own person; he may 
 defend himself, — what he deems his honour, but it is the 
 action of a brave man from the impulse of the brute, or 
 the motive of a coward.' ^ 
 
 This doctrine permeates all Wordsworth's political 
 teaching. The indispensable condition of a healthy 
 patriotism lies in the opportunities afforded to each 
 individual for a free development, independent of all 
 external restrictions that will tend to hamper his natural 
 growth, and the full exercise of all his natural functions 
 both as regards himself and in his relations with his kind. 
 His conception of social progress is governed by this 
 principle. Much of Wordsworth's conservatism can be 
 traced to his fear that changes which were hailed as an 
 advance were really enslaving the people to the tyranny 
 of wealth, that though the workman might gain in wages 
 by his rush to the towns he lost in real individual inde- 
 pendence and in the chance of developing his personality 
 in its more intimate relationships. Similarly, his admira- 
 tion for Fox was due to his feeling that Fox was the friend 
 of the poor, and that to him no man's property was so 
 ^ lb. p. 173. 2 lb. p. 258. 
 
70 WORDSWORTH 
 
 sacred as the property of the poor.i That statesman 
 alone, he urged, could be successful who realized that the 
 strength and health of the nation depended on the freedom 
 and health and strength of the units that composed it, 
 whose own love of his country had the same homely 
 foundation as inspired the humblest patriot, and who 
 devoted all his energies to fostering those conditions on 
 which that patriotism might develop . This free individual 
 life, imperfectly attained as it doubtless is, was the most 
 precious inheritance of the English people ; it was the 
 prize which the French had won from their Revolution, 
 only to lose it again to the selfish ambition of Napoleon, 
 Hence sprang Wordsworth's deep hatred of Napoleon, 
 It is significant that the first sign of his reawakening 
 interest in public affairs is the sonnet in which he lays 
 stress upon Bonaparte's complete lack of the quahties in 
 his opinion necessary for the true leader of men : 
 
 I grieved for Bonaparte with a vain 
 And an unthinking grief ! The tenderest mood 
 Of that Man's mind — what can it be ? what food 
 Fed his first hopes ? what knowledge could he gain ? 
 'Tis not in battles that from youth we train 
 , The Governor who must be wise and good. 
 And temper with the sternness of the brain 
 Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood. 
 Wisdom doth live with children round her knees : 
 Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk 
 Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk 
 Of the mind's business : these are the degrees 
 By which true Sway doth mount ; this is the stalk 
 \True Power doth grow on ; and her rights are these, 
 
 Wordsworth's conception of the ideal patriot, ' the 
 Happy Warrior ' as he calls him, is drawn in direct anti- 
 
 1 ' Letter to the Right Hon. Charles James Fox,' 1801, in 
 Memoirs of Wordsworth, 185 1, i, 166-71. 
 
WORDSWORTH 71 
 
 pathy with what seemed to him the character of Napoleon. 
 Its main features are his subordination of personal ambi- 
 tion to the general good, his high sense of honour, his 
 singleness of aim — his very prowess as a soldier springing, 
 not from a callousness to slaughter, but from a spirit of 
 self-sacrifice. 
 
 Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, 
 
 And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train ! 
 
 Turns his necessity to glorious gain ; 
 
 In face of these doth exercise a power 
 
 Which is our human nature's highest dower ; 
 
 Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves 
 
 Of their bad influence, and their good receives : 
 
 By objects, which might force the soul to abate 
 
 Her feeling, rendered more compassionate ; 
 
 Is placable — because occasions rise 
 
 So often that demand such sacrifice ; 
 
 More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure, 
 
 As tempted more ; more able to endure. 
 
 As more exposed to suffering and distress ; 
 
 Thence, also, more alive to tenderness. 
 
 Finally he is one whose strength is based, not upon 
 ambition or hatred, but upon love : 
 
 Whose powers shed round him in the common strife, 
 
 Or mild concerns of ordinary life, 
 
 A constant influence, a peculiar grace ; 
 
 But who, if he be called upon to face 
 
 Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined 
 
 Great issues, good or bad for human kind. 
 
 Is happy as a Lover ; and attired 
 
 With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired ; 
 
 And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law 
 
 In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw ; 
 
 Or if an unexpected call succeed. 
 
 Come when it will, is equal to the need : 
 
 — He who, though thus endued as with a sense 
 
 And faculty for storm and turbulence. 
 
 Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans 
 
 To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes ; 
 
72 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Sweet images ! which, wheresoe'er he be, 
 
 Are at his heart ; and such fidehty 
 
 It is his darUng passion to approve ; 
 
 More brave for this, that he hath much to love.i 
 
 In Uke manner, at the grave of Roy Roy, the Robin Hood 
 of Scotland, Wordsworth excused the lawlessness of the 
 Scottish robber chief by contrasting his motives with 
 those of Bonaparte. If Napoleon had been actuated by 
 the spirit of Rob Roy then indeed France would have 
 prospered in her quest for freedom : 
 
 For Thou, although with some wild thoughts. 
 Wild Chieftain of a savage Clan ! 
 Hadst this to boast of ; thou didst love 
 The liberty of man. 
 
 And, had it been thy lot to live 
 With us who now behold the light, 
 Thou wouldst have nobly stirred thyself, 
 And battled for the Right. 
 
 For thou wert still the poor man's stay, 
 The poor man's heart, the poor man's hand ; 
 And all the oppressed, who wanted strength, 
 Had thine at their command. 
 
 In August 1802, Wordsworth took advantage of the 
 short-lived peace of Amiens to revisit France. As with 
 many a fear for his dear country he lingered among men 
 that did not love her, absence from England served once 
 again to strengthen his patriotic fervour. It was a different 
 France from that in which, twelve years before, he had 
 witnessed the rejoicings of a too credulous day 
 
 When faith was pledged to new-born liberty.^ 
 
 Now, Napoleon was being proclaimed Consul for life, 
 
 ^ The Happy Warrior, 11, 12-26, 45-64. 
 
 2 Sonnet composed near Calais, 1802, /owes.' as from Calais, &c. 
 
WORDSWORTH 73 
 
 and the poet, whilst he viewed with scorn the crowds of 
 the rich and worldly hurrying to Paris to bend the knee 
 before the destroyer of their liberties, and noted with pity 
 the sullen indifference of the common people, turned his 
 own mind to those typical acts of tyranny against state 
 and individual by which Napoleon had been exposed in his 
 true colours. The sonnet on the extinction of the Venetian 
 RepubHc, betrayed by Bonaparte into the hand of Austria, 
 is a passionate lament for vanished liberty and greatness : 
 
 Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee ; 
 
 And was the safeguard of the west : the worth 
 
 Of Venice did not fall below her birth, 
 
 Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty. 
 
 She was a maiden City, bright and free ; 
 
 No guile seduced, no force could violate ; 
 
 And, when she took unto herself a Mate, 
 
 She must espouse the everlasting Sea. 
 
 And what if she had seen those glories fade. 
 
 Those titles vanish, and that strength decay ; 
 
 Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid 
 
 When her long life hath reached its final day : 
 
 Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade 
 
 Of that which once was great is passed away. 
 
 The imprisonment of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the negro 
 chieftain of St. Domingo who had vainly resisted Napoleon's 
 edict for re-establishing that slavery which the French 
 Convention had just abolished, stirred within him imagina- 
 tive reflections of a yet sublimer cast : 
 
 Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men ! 
 Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough 
 Within thy hearing, or thy head be now 
 Pillowed in some deep dungeon's earless den ; — 
 O miserable Chieftain ! where and when 
 Wilt thou find patience ! Yet die not ; do thou 
 Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow : 
 Though fallen thyself, never to rise again. 
 Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind 
 
 1801 K 
 
74 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Powers that will work for thee ; air, earth, and 
 
 skies ; 
 There 's not a breathing of the common wind 
 That will forget thee ; thou hast great allies ; 
 Thy friends are exultations, agonies. 
 And love, and man's unconquerable mind. 
 
 For the cause of liberty, for which Toussaint strove, is 
 firmly rooted in natural law, and all the nobler instincts 
 of humanity are responsive to its thrill. Those same 
 exultations and agonies, he urges, that same love and 
 unconquerable mind, must be potent in us if we are to 
 repel this frightful neighbourhood^ of a foe, who wars 
 not only against us but against the very principles on 
 which nature and human life are based. 
 
 If England was a great nation she owed it to her past, 
 
 to its virtue, to its courage, and to its noble independence, 
 
 working in harmony with that natural law in which 
 
 liberty and discipline were indissolubly linked : 
 
 Winds blow and waters roll 
 Strength to the brave, and Power and Deity. 
 Yet in themselves are nothing ! One decree 
 Spake laws to them, and said that by the Soul 
 Only, the Nations shall be great and free.^ 
 
 Hence Wordsworth would rouse the nation to a fuller 
 return to the ideals upon which her greatness was founded. 
 There is no trace of self-righteousness in his patriotism. 
 He does not fear to reason with the people on their faults, 
 to upbraid, even to denounce. England had fallen away 
 from her high ideals. He was conscious within his own 
 country of a love of ostentation and display which in- 
 fected her moneyed worldlings ; contrasting not only with 
 the good old times of England but even with the life of 
 their present enemy, France : 
 
 1 Sonnet, Inland, within a hollow vale, &c., 1. 4. 
 
 a lb., 11. 10-14. 
 
WORDSWORTH 75 
 
 The wealthiest man among us is the best : 
 No grandeur now in nature or in book 
 DeHghts us. Rapine, avarice, expense, 
 This is idolatry ; and these we adore : 
 Plain living and high thinking are no more : 
 The homely beauty of the good old cause 
 Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence, 
 And pure religion breathing household laws.^ 
 
 And conceiving of a nation as ' a solemn fraternity 
 gathered together under the shade of ancestral feeling ', 
 he turns naturally enough to the great pattern of English 
 patriotism in the past, the noblest expounder of her 
 liberties : 
 
 Milton ! thou shouldst be living at this hour : 
 
 England hath need of thee : she is a fen 
 
 Of stagnant waters : altar, sword, and pen. 
 
 Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower. 
 
 Have forfeited their ancient English dower 
 
 Of inward happiness. We are selfish men ; 
 
 Oh ! raise us up, return to us again ; 
 
 And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. 
 
 Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart ; 
 
 Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea : 
 
 Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free. 
 
 So didst thou travel on life's common way, 
 
 In cheerful godliness ; and yet thy heart 
 
 The lowliest duties on herself did lay. 
 
 Wordsworth owed more to Milton than to any other of 
 his predecessors, just as there is an obvious likeness in 
 the dignity and simplicity of their minds ; and it can truly 
 be said of his political utterances, that whenever he speaks 
 of liberty with passion and insight the spirit of Milton 
 may be discerned, moving upon the face of the waters. 
 
 Under the stress of present and immediate danger the 
 poet now fears, now hopes. At one moment it would 
 
 1 Sonnet: written in London, 1802, O Friend, &c., 11. 7-14. 
 
76 WORDSWORTH 
 
 seem impossible that we could prove untrue to so glorious 
 a heritage : 
 
 In our halls is hung 
 Armoury of the invincible knights of old : 
 We must be free or die, who speak the tongue 
 That Shakespeare spake ; the faith and morals hold 
 Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung 
 Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold. 
 
 Yes, but do we hold that faith ? Have we not forfeited 
 our titles to our heritage ? Come, let us confess our short- 
 comings and face the bitter truth. We have had a fair 
 seed-time but our trespasses have ruined the harvest that 
 should have followed ; even at this day we could not be 
 trusted to put the sacredness of our cause before what 
 seemed our own immediate profit. So that if ' O Eng- 
 land ', exclaims the poet, ' the wise pray for thy success, it is 
 not because of thy virtue, but because France is the more 
 ignorant, the more abject enemy of Truth and Justice : 
 
 Oh grief that Earth's best hopes rest all with Thee ! ' ^ 
 
 But these fears for his country, and his humiliation at her 
 decline are the outcome of love ; and true love, if never 
 blind as it is sometimes falsely said, is at least incapable of 
 despair. With all her shortcomings Wordsworth saw in 
 his country ' a bulwark for the cause of men '. If this had 
 not been clear before, the invasion of Switzerland in the 
 autumn of 1802 made it doubly clear. Freedom's one 
 hope lay now in England's resistance to the death ; and 
 in the greatness of her cause he saw the hope of her re- 
 generation. War broke out again in May 1803, when 
 Bonaparte was planning a descent upon England from 
 Boulogne. Wordsworth's patriotism now burst into a 
 flame. He was among the volunteers enrolled by Pitt 
 
 ^ Sonnet, England, the time is come, &c. 
 
WORDSWORTH ^^ 
 
 for the defence of the country. 'At Grasmere ', he wrote, 
 ' we have turned out almost to a man '. He saw in this 
 war for freedom not only the expression of moral virtue 
 but a great moral instrument which would rouse the nation 
 from its self-indulgent apathy, and by suffering bring 
 home to it the virtues that it had seemed to lose. To the 
 Men of Kent, who would be the first to bear the brunt of 
 an invasion, he wrote a stirring appeal, and he penned 
 a sonnet anticipating the arrival of the foe and their defeat. 
 Even in our losses for such a cause there would be matter 
 for rejoicing. 
 
 Divine must be 
 That triumph, when the very worst, the pain, 
 And even the prospect of our brethren slain. 
 Hath something in it which the heart enjoys : — 
 In glory will they sleep and endless sanctity.^ 
 
 This sentiment has often been criticized. Is indeed 
 the loss of those that are dear to us anything but a matter 
 of sorrow ? Truly it is a hard saying. Yet it comes of 
 Wordsworth's sublime faith in the invincibility of the 
 human spirit. ' The true sorrow of humanity ', he wrote, 
 ' consists in this : not that the mind of man fails ; but 
 that the course and demands of action and of life so 
 rarely correspond with the dignity and intensity of 
 human desires.' ^ Here, at least, in death for a great 
 cause, is man's glorious opportunity. It was in this 
 spirit that the great poet of Belgium wrote words to 
 which recent events have given a sublime significance : 
 
 . . . notre force est en nous et nous avons souffert 
 
 Meme notre douleur . . . devient notre orgueil.^ 
 
 ^ Sonnet, Anticipation. October i8oj. 
 
 2 Convention of Cintra, &c., p. 272. 
 
 3 Verhaeren, La Multiple Splendeur, p. 157. 
 
78 WORDSWORTH 
 
 And Wordsworth throughout the struggle with Napoleon 
 
 loved most to celebrate, not victories, but heroic men or 
 
 nations overmastered by fearful odds, yet having a spirit 
 
 undaunted by defeat, unchanged though fallen on evil days. 
 
 Such as we have seen was Toussaint L'Ouverture, such 
 
 were Hofer and Palafox, such were the gallant Tyrolese, 
 
 into whose mouth the poet puts this burning resolve : 
 
 The land we from our fathers had in trust, 
 
 And to our children will transmit, or die ; 
 
 This is our maxim, this our piety ; 
 
 And God and Nature say that it is just. 
 
 That which we would perform in arms — we must ! 
 
 We know the arduous strife, the eternal laws 
 To which the triumph of all good is given. 
 High sacrifice, and labour without pause. 
 Even to the death : — else wherefore should the eye 
 Of man converse with immortality ? ^ 
 
 As we all know, Napoleon's projected invasion of England 
 was thwarted at Trafalgar, and immediate danger passed ; 
 but his sweeping successes at Austerlitz against the 
 Austrians, and at Jena against the Germans, left England 
 almost alone. At each blow to the allied arms Words- 
 worth's courage rose. 
 
 Another year ! — another deadly blow ! 
 Another mighty Empire overthrown ! 
 And We are left, or shall be left, alone ; 
 The last that dare to struggle with the Foe. 
 'Tis well ! from this day forward we shall know 
 That in ourselves our safety must be sought ; 
 That by our own right hands it must be wrought ; 
 That we must stand unpropped, or be laid low. 
 O dastard whom such foretaste doth not cheer ! 
 We shall exult, if they who rule the land 
 Be men who hold its many blessings dear. 
 Wise, upright, valiant ; not a servile band. 
 Who are to judge of danger which they fear, 
 And honour which they do not understand. 
 
 ^ Feelings of the Tyrolese, 1-5, 24-28. 
 
WORDSWORTH 79 
 
 Then the prime interest of this gigantic struggle 
 shifted its scene to the Peninsula. Napoleon invaded 
 Spain, half terrorized and half outwitted the impotent 
 ruling dynasty, and placed his brother Joseph on the 
 throne. But where the corrupt court had yielded weakly, 
 the mass of the people rose against the foreign tyrant, 
 and struck a determined blow for national independence 
 and liberty. The cause of Spain roused England as she 
 had not been roused during the whole previous course 
 of the war ; and when Sir Arthur Wellesley landed in 
 Portugal with an expeditionary force and routed the 
 French general Junot at Vimiera, English enthusiasm 
 knew no bounds. But this joy was quickly turned to 
 a savage gloom by the announcement that Sir Hew 
 Dalrymple, who had succeeded Wellesley in command, 
 instead of following up the victory and threatening the 
 French army with almost certain annihilation, had 
 signed an agreement known as the Convention of Cintra, 
 by which (without so much as consulting his Portuguese 
 and Spanish allies) he allowed Junot to evacuate Portugal 
 with all his ill-gotten Spanish booty, and undertook to 
 convey his troops back to France in British ships. The 
 news was received in England with shame and dismay. 
 The City of London petitioned the King for an inquiry, 
 and when the House of Commons signified its approval 
 of the terms of the Convention it probably reached the 
 furthest limit of its cynical indifference to those whom 
 it professed to represent. No one felt a deeper indig- 
 nation than Wordsworth. ' Never did any event ', he 
 affirmed years later, ' cause in my mind so much sorrow.' 
 We have seen how the belief in the sanctity of the 
 principle of nationality had led him in 1793 to side 
 with France against his own country^ and when France 
 
8o WORDSWORTH 
 
 herself defied that principle he had followed the struggles 
 of Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany with a pas- 
 sionate interest. And now his enthusiasm for the cause 
 was kindled to an even higher pitch in that whereas all 
 previous opponents of Napoleon's aggression had been 
 unrepresentative governments, the Spanish rising was 
 the spontaneous outburst of a great moral impulse among 
 the people, and sprang from a noble independence of 
 individual character. The splendid courage of the 
 Spaniards at Saragossa, where for months they kept at 
 bay vastly superior numbers of highly trained French 
 troops, stirred him as the defence of Liege stirred us so 
 short a time ago. Wordsworth's trust, let us remember, 
 had ever been with the plain people, and his love was 
 theirs. Here in the action of Spain, and in England's 
 ready sympathy with Spain, was the triumphant vindi- 
 cation of his faith. In the conviction that this cause of 
 freedom had been betrayed by the English Government, 
 he penned his pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra, 
 denouncing the weakness of those in authority and ap- 
 pealing from them to the great heart of the nation, which 
 he believed, and believed rightly, was inspired with a 
 nobler ideal than its rulers. 
 
 ' For, when the people speaks loudly, it is from being 
 strongly possessed either by the Godhead or the Demon ; 
 and he, who cannot discover the true spirit from the false, 
 hath no ear for profitable communion. But in all that 
 regarded the destinies of Spain, and her own as con- 
 nected with them, the voice of Britain had the unques- 
 tionable sound of inspiration. If the gentle passions of 
 pity, love, and gratitude be porches of the temple ; if 
 the sentiments of admiration and rivalry be pillars on 
 which the structure is sustained ; if, lastly, hatred and 
 anger and vengeance be steps which, by a mystery of 
 nature, lead to the House of Sanctity ; — then was it mani- 
 
WORDSWORTH 8i 
 
 fest to what power the edifice was consecrated ; and 
 that the voice within was of Holiness and Truth. 
 
 ' Spain had risen not merely to be delivered and saved ; 
 deliverance and safety were but intermediate objects ; 
 regeneration and liberty were the end, and the means 
 by which this end was to be attained; had their own 
 value ; were determined and precious ; and could no 
 more admit of being departed from, than the end of being 
 forgotten. She had risen not merely to be free ; but, in 
 the act and process of acquiring that freedom, to recom- 
 pense herself, as it were in a moment, for all which she 
 had suffered through ages ; to levy, upon the false fame of 
 a cruel Tyrant, large contributions of true glory ; to 
 lift herself, by the conflict, as high in honour — as the 
 disgrace was deep to which her own weakness and vices, 
 and the violence and perfidy of her enemies, had sub- 
 jected her.' ^ 
 
 For worse even than the violence of the oppressor, 
 because it was a deeper insult to moral feeling, was his 
 perfidy, and his arrogant assumptions of beneficence to 
 the people whose country he was laying waste. When 
 Napoleon posed as the future benefactor of Spain, as 
 other conquerors since have advertised the blessings of 
 their culture to the people they have brutally destroyed, 
 Wordsworth voiced his sense of outrage in a noble sonnet, 
 put, with dramatic fitness, into the mouth of an indignant 
 Spaniard : 
 
 We can endure that He should waste our lands. 
 
 Despoil our temples, and by sword and flame 
 
 Return us to the dust from which we came ; 
 
 Such food a Tyrant's appetite demands ; 
 
 And we can brook the thought that by his hands 
 
 Spain may be overpowered, and he possess, 
 
 For his delight, a solemn wilderness 
 
 Where all the brave lie dead. But, when of bands 
 
 Which he will break for us he dares to speak. 
 
 Of benefits, and of a future day 
 
 1 lb. p. 205. 
 1801 L 
 
82 WORDSWORTH 
 
 When our enlightened minds shall bless his sway ; 
 Then, the strained heart of fortitude proves weak ; 
 Our groans, our blushes, our pale cheeks declare 
 That he has power to inflict what we lack strength to 
 bear.i 
 
 With pride Wordsworth recalls how in this struggle 
 for the realization of her true self Spain had turned for 
 aid to England. 
 
 ' Independence and Hberty were the blessings for which 
 the people of the Peninsula were contending— imme- 
 diate independence, which was not to be gained but by 
 modes of exertion from which liberty must ensue. Now 
 liberty, healthy, matured, time-honoured liberty— this 
 is the growth and peculiar boast of Britain, and Nature 
 herself, by encircling with the ocean the country which 
 we inhabit, has proclaimed that this mighty nation is 
 for ever to be her own ruler, and that the land is set 
 apart for the home of immortal independence.' ^ 
 
 But how, he asks, have we answered the call of Spain ? 
 
 'We had power to give a brotherly aid to our allies 
 in supporting the mighty world which their shoulders 
 had undertaken to uphold ; and, while they were ex- 
 pecting from us this aid, we undermined — without fore- 
 warning them — the ground on which they stood. The 
 evil is incalculable, and the stain will cleave to the 
 British name as long as the story of this island shall 
 endure.' 3 
 
 ' O misery for England, the land of liberty and courage 
 and peace ; the land trustworthy and long approved ; 
 the home of lofty example and benign precept ; the central 
 orb to which, as to a fountain, the nations of the earth 
 " ought to repair, and in their golden urns draw light " ; 
 — O sorrow and shame for our country ; for the grass 
 which is upon her fields, and the dust which is in her 
 graves ; — for her good men who now look upon the day ; 
 and her long train of deliverers and defenders, her Alfred, 
 her Sidneys, and her Milton ; whose voice yet speaketh 
 
 1 Cf. ib. p. 138. 2 lb. p. 192. 3 lb. p. 220. 
 
WORDSWORTH 83 
 
 for our reproach ; and whose actions survive in memory 
 to confound us, or to redeem ! ' ^ 
 
 It is to achieve this redemption that Wordsworth 
 pours forth his passionate eloquence. ' The theme is 
 justice and my voice is raised for mankind ; for us who 
 are alive and for all posterity : justice and passion ; 
 clear-sighted aspiring justice, and passion sacred as 
 vehement.' But England has only failed through the 
 weakness and folly of her rulers ; the heart of her people 
 is sound, and in spite of the attempt of her rulers to 
 stifle their just complaints, the people must insist upon 
 their demands. Our statesmen do not know the hearts 
 of the people ; immersion in intrigues, in self-seeking, in 
 place-hunting, has blinded their eyes to the pure emotions 
 that sway the hearts of the people, who see more clearly 
 because they see disinterestedly. 
 
 ' In the course of the last thirty years ', he goes on, 
 ' we have seen two wars waged against liberty — the 
 American War and the war against the French people 
 in the early stages of their Revolution. And, for what 
 more especially belongs to ourselves at this time, we may 
 affirm — that the same presumptuous irreverence of the 
 principles of Justice, and blank insensibility to the affec- 
 tions of human nature, which determined the conduct 
 of our Government in those two wars against liberty, 
 have continued to accompany its exertions in the present 
 struggle for liberty — and have rendered them fruitless. 
 The British Government deems no doubt that its inten- 
 tions are good. It must not deceive itself. Intentions, 
 thoroughly good, could not mingle with the unblessed 
 actions which we have witnessed. A disinterested and 
 pure intention is a light that guides as well as cheers, 
 and renders desperate lapses impossible. Our duty is 
 — our aim ought to be, to employ the true means of 
 liberty and virtue for the ends of liberty and virtue. 
 In such policy, thoroughly understood, there is fitness 
 
 1 lb. p. 203. 
 
^4 WORDSWORTH 
 
 and concord and rational subordination. It deserves a 
 higher name, — organization, health, and grandeur. . . . 
 Events [in Spain] have shown clearly enough that the cause 
 of the people, in dangers and difficulties issuing from 
 oppression, is safe whilst it remains not only in the bosoms 
 but in the hands of the people ; or (what amounts to the 
 same thing) in those of a Government which, being truly 
 from the people, is faithfully /or them.'^ 
 
 Let our own rulers remember this and look into their 
 own hearts. Let them deal with the people sincerely. 
 Let them have faith and courage. If they find selfish- 
 ness or slackness in individuals or sections of society, 
 let them be all the more active and vigilant themselves. 
 ' If my neighbour fails,' says the true patriot, * more 
 devolves on me.' ^ As for the immediate end in view, 
 that is clear enough. 
 
 ' The first end to be secured by Spain is riddance of 
 the enemy ; the second, permanent independence ; and 
 the third, a free constitution of government ; which will 
 give their main, though far from sole, value to the other 
 two ; and without which little more than a formal inde- 
 pendence can be secured. Humanity and honour and 
 justice, and all the sacred feelings connected with atone- 
 ment, retribution, and satisfaction ; shame that will not 
 sleep, and the sting of unperformed duty; and all the 
 powers of the mind, the memory that broods over 
 the dead and turns to the living, the understanding, the 
 imagination, and the reason; — demand and enjoin that 
 the wanton oppressor should be driven, with confusion 
 and dismay, from the country which he has so heinously 
 abused.' ^ 
 
 But Wordsworth does not underrate the power of his 
 antagonist. He realizes the strength of immense and 
 highly trained armies, ' under the control of an absolute 
 despotism, . . . acting avowedly upon the principle 
 that everything which can safely be done by the supreme 
 
 1 lb. pp. 231-44. 2 lb p_ 249. 3 lb. p. 250. 
 
WORDSWORTH 85 
 
 power of a State, may be done.' His faith in ultimate 
 
 conquest rests in the unconquerable spirit of the allied 
 
 nations, who are actuated in their resistance by impulses 
 
 deep as the springs of their nature : 
 
 The power of armies is a visible thing, 
 Formal, and circumscribed in time and space ; 
 But who the limits of that power shall trace 
 Which a brave People into light can bring 
 Or hide, at will, — for freedom combating 
 By just revenge inflamed ? ^ 
 
 And that power is alive not in Spain and England 
 only, but throughout the whole of Europe. 
 
 * It must be obvious ', he says, ' to a reflecting mind, 
 that everything which is desperately immoral, being in 
 its constitution monstrous, is of itself perishable : decay 
 it cannot escape ; and further it is liable to sudden dissolu- 
 tion. For he stands upon a hideous precipice (and it 
 will be the same with all who may succeed to him and his 
 iron sceptre) — he who has outlawed himself from society 
 by proclaiming, with word and act, that he acknowledges 
 no mastery but power. , . . For present annoyance, 
 [Napoleon's] power is, no doubt, mighty, but liberty in 
 which it originated and of which it is a depravation, is 
 far mightier, and the good in human nature is stronger 
 than the evil. If the tide of success were by any effort 
 fairly turned, occasion would be given for the discontented 
 to break out, and above all for the triumph of human 
 nature, it would then be seen whether men fighting in 
 a bad cause — men without magnanimity, honour, or 
 justice — could recover, and stand up against champions, 
 who by these virtues were carried forward in good fortune, 
 as by these virtues in adversity they have been sustained. 
 As long as guilty actions thrive, guilt is strong ; it has 
 a giddiness and transport of its own, a hardihood not 
 without superstition, as if Providence were a party to 
 its success. But disaster opens the eyes of conscience, 
 and in the minds of men who have been employed 
 in bad actions, defeat and a feeling of punishment are 
 inseparable. 
 
 ^ Sonnet, 181 1. 
 
86 WORDSWORTH 
 
 * On the other hand, the power of an unblemished 
 heart and a brave spirit is shown, in the events of war, 
 not only among unpractised citizens and peasants, but 
 among troops in the most perfect discipline. . . . This 
 paramount elhcacy of moral causes ... is indisputable.' ^ 
 
 Let us take hope also from the reflection that the 
 justice of our cause and our readiness to suffer for it, 
 unite us with the great men that have gone before us. 
 
 ' There is a spiritual community binding together the 
 living and the dead, the good, the brave, and the wise 
 of all ages. We would not be rejected from this com- 
 munity, and therefore do we hope. We look forward 
 with erect mind, thinking and feeling : it is an obligation 
 of duty ; take away the sense of it, and the moral being 
 would die within us. Among the most illustrious of that 
 fraternity, whose encouragement we participate, is an 
 Englishman who sacrificed his life in devotion to a cause 
 bearing a stronger likeness to this than any recorded 
 in history. It is the elder Sidney . . . who, treating of 
 the War in the Netherlands against Philip of Spain, 
 thus writes: "If her Majesty", says he, "were the 
 fountain, I should fear, considering what I daily find, 
 that we should wax dry. But she is but a means whom 
 God useth. And I know not whether I am deceived, 
 but I am fully persuaded that if she would withdraw 
 herself, other springs would rise to help this action. 
 For methinks, I see the great work indeed in hand against 
 the abusers of the world, wherein it is no greater fault 
 to have confidence in man's power, than it is too hastily 
 to despair of God's work." ' ^ 
 
 These short extracts do but scant justice to Words- 
 worth's noble pamphlet, which, little read as it was at 
 the time of its publication, and almost entirely neglected 
 to-day, was pronounced by Canning to be the finest piece 
 of eloquence since Burke, and claims close kinship with 
 the greatest political utterances of Milton. It is indeed 
 
 ^ Convention of Cintra, Sec, pp. 264-6. 
 ^ lb. pp. 272-3. 
 
WORDSWORTH 87 
 
 written in a style too lofty to achieve an easy popularity ; 
 yet in its magnificent assertion of high national ideals, 
 and in its recognition of the true grounds of national 
 greatness and the materials of national hope it is far 
 more than an occasional production. Who does not see 
 in the Spain of 1810 much to remind him of the Belgium 
 and the France of to-day, and in the unscrupulous aims 
 and methods of Spain's enemy no shadowy likeness of 
 their enemy and ours ? and who is so dull that he cannot 
 gain some inspiration from the principles on which 
 Wordsworth bases our resistance and by reason of which 
 he anticipates our triumph ? The chief obstacle which 
 Wordsworth had to face does not impede our path, for 
 our Government represents the people and has its con- 
 fidence ; and the issue of the conflict depends not upon 
 forcing their hand, but rather upon our readiness to sup- 
 port them in accomplishing an end which is theirs no less 
 than ours. But in other respects the two positions are 
 strangely similar, and may they have the same issue ! 
 
 Thus Wordsworth pressed for the determined prose- 
 cution of the war. But strongly as he believed in military 
 ardour as in itself at that time an instrument of the 
 moral as well as the material salvation of the people, 
 and though, indeed, he had a fuller faith in the moral 
 value of war altogether than the majority of us to-day, 
 he saw the limits of its dominion. He had no love of 
 military glory for its own sake. 
 
 ' Highly ', he said, ' as I rate the importance of military 
 power, and deeply as I feel its necessity for the protection of 
 every excellence and virtue, I rest my hopes of the emanci- 
 pation of Europe upon moral influences, and the wishes 
 and opinions of the people of the respective nations. . . . 
 Something higher than military excellence must be taught 
 as higher ; something more fundamental as fundamental.' 
 
^8 WORDSWORTH 
 
 To a friend who saw in the war a chance for aggression 
 and for extending the sphere of British arms, he wrote : 
 
 ' The _ sword, as the sword, can give no rights. . . . 
 The spirit of conquest never can confer true glory 
 and happiness upon a nation that has attained power 
 sufficient to defend itself. ... I wish to see Spain, 
 Italy, France, Germany, formed into independent nations, 
 nor have I any desire to reduce the power of France 
 further than may be necessary for that end. . . . Indefinite 
 progress undoubtedly there ought to be somewhere, but 
 let that be in knowledge, in science, in civilization, in the 
 increase of the numbers of the people and in the augmenta- 
 tion of their virtue and happiness. . . . Military policy 
 merely will not perform all that is needful, nor mere 
 
 military virtues England, as well as the rest of Europe, 
 
 requires what is more difiicult to give it, — a new course 
 of education, a higher tone of moral feeling, more of 
 the grandeur of the imaginative faculties and less of the 
 petty processes of the unfeeling and purblind understand- 
 ing, that would manage the concerns of nations in the 
 same calculating spirit with which it would set about 
 building a house. Now a state ought to be governed 
 upon calculations and from impulses similar to those 
 which give motion to the hand of a great artist when 
 he is preparing a picture, or of a mighty poet when he 
 is determining the proportions and the march of a poem ; — 
 much is to be done by rule ; the great outline is pre- 
 viously to be conceived in distinctness, but the consumma- 
 tion of the work must be trusted to resources that are 
 not tangible, though known to exist.' ^ 
 
 It is upon these spiritual resources, not tangible, though 
 known to exist, that we, like Wordsworth, must set our 
 ultimate reliance. If we place our ideal high enough and 
 show our faith in it, to be at once living and resolute, 
 we shall achieve that further end which lies beyond our 
 immediate object of military conquest, for 
 
 by the soul 
 Only, the Nations shall be great and free. 
 
 ^ Letter to Captain Pasley, March 28, 181 1, Prose Works, ed. 
 Knight, i. 308-22. 
 
IV 
 ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 In earlier lectures we have noted how Shakespeare, 
 Milton, and Wordsworth reflected the finest spirit of their 
 times, and how each one of them taught to his age that 
 lesson which it most needed for its salvation. Shake- 
 speare, writing for a nation which had just risen, after 
 facing a supreme peril from without, to a consciousness 
 of its own great destiny, laid emphasis upon the impera- 
 tive need for unity ; and whilst he gloried in the spirit of 
 enterprise and adventure which he felt in the air about 
 him, insisted that true power could only rest upon 
 a foundation of justice. 
 
 Out of this national strength grew, naturally enough, 
 the desire for fuller personal liberty ; and the significance 
 of liberty to the individual, both in his private capacity 
 and in his relations with the state, broke upon Milton in 
 the progress of the struggle between king and people, and 
 was expounded by him with insight and finality. 
 
 But in the seventeenth century civilization was not 
 yet ripe for the complete logical development of Milton's 
 creed. This only dawned upon the world with the French 
 Revolution, and it entered our poetry with the writings 
 of Wordsworth. Before this time the phrase ' national 
 independence and liberty ' would have had little meaning. 
 In very few countries was government in any sense 
 representative, in most it was entirely despotic, so that 
 peoples went to war for their kings' quarrels rather than 
 for their own. A nation might simply mean a hetero- 
 
 1801 M 
 
go ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 geneous collection of geographical areas, only bound 
 together in service to one king ; hence there was little 
 idea of nationality, as we conceive it, as a political unity 
 formed of men joined, if not by ties of race and language, 
 at least by common ideals, common sentiment, and 
 common consent. But the French Revolution introduced 
 a new idea of liberty. ' That idea ', says the historian of 
 international politics,^ ' has two forms. One is the internal 
 form, popular government ; the government of a state, 
 not by an autocrat or by a privileged class, but by the 
 mass of the nation. The other is external liberty, the 
 freedom of the state itself from control by its neighbours, 
 whether over its internal institutions or over its relations 
 with foreign states. These two forms of liberty are not 
 necessarily found together. . . . But in spite of their 
 occasional separation there is a close connexion between 
 them. The free exercise of its activities, which every 
 energetic and independent character demands, leads to 
 both ; and whenever a people endowed with such a 
 character is possessed of one of the forms of liberty, it will 
 not fail, sooner or later, to demand the other.' 
 
 In England, national independence had not been 
 seriously threatened since the days of the Armada ; but 
 in the Napoleonic wars that independence was once more 
 at stake, and the circumstances of the struggle, in which 
 she found herself fighting side by side with other nations 
 for a like cause, gave her some insight into the true 
 significance of nationality. In internal liberty she had 
 been so much in advance of other nations that she had 
 
 1 ' Introduction to International History of Europe during the 
 Nineteenth Century,' by Professor J. Westlake, LL.D., in Lectures 
 on the History of the Nineteenth Century, ed. by F. A. Kirkpatrick, 
 Cambridge, 1904, p. 33. 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 91 
 
 often been taken as their model of freedom ; but for all 
 that her government was in no real sense representative, 
 and it was only with the Revolution that the demand 
 for representative government struck root. To the French 
 mind, at death-grips with an absolute despotism, such 
 a government naturally took the form of a Republic. 
 But the name is superficial, and has often obscured the 
 true issue. 1 The real point lies in the extent of the control 
 exercised by the people over their own concerns ; and 
 what Tennyson has justly called ' our crowned republic ' 
 may answer to the ideal more fully than a nominal 
 republic in the hands of a powerful clique. Now the 
 history of Europe since 1815 is, in fact, the history of 
 the struggle after the attainment of this double ideal of 
 internal and external liberty. Wordsworth, as we have 
 seen, realized the importance of both. In his champion- 
 ship of the cause of Spain he learnt that a true patriotism 
 does not pursue selfish ambition at the cost of other 
 nations, but rather implies a sympathy with all their 
 legitimate aspirations. He learnt also, though in his 
 later years he tended to lose his grasp of it, the significance 
 of internal liberty. For internal liberty is not wholly 
 comprised in parliamentary representation — that is only 
 one means to the end: it raises at once all those social 
 problems which exercised the attention of the last century, 
 and will exercise us for the years to come. The words of 
 Coleridge, in The Friend, expressive of Wordsworth's 
 conviction no less than his own, sum up for us the whole 
 social problem : ' Those institutions of society which 
 should condemn me to the necessity of twelve hours' 
 daUy toil, would make my soul a slave, and sink the 
 
 1 As e. g. to Mazzini, and at times to our own poets, Landor 
 and Swinburne. 
 
92 ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 rational being in the mere animal. It is a mockery of 
 our fellow-creatures' wrongs to call them equal in rights, 
 when, by the bitter compulsion of their wants, we make 
 them inferior to us in all that can soften the heart or 
 dignify the understanding.' 1 
 
 It is our task to-day to see how far these two related 
 conceptions of liberty, each of them essential to an 
 intelligent patriotism, each of them, if fully understood, 
 presupposing the other, have inspired the poets of the last 
 century. 
 
 The years which followed Waterloo were a bitter 
 disappointment to the true patriot, for they showed 
 clearly enough how little those in authority appreciated 
 the significance of the struggle against Napoleon. The 
 conclusion of peace, instead of proving the beginnings of 
 a new age of reasoned liberty, was the signal for a strenuous 
 reaction against both aspects of freedom. The Holy 
 Alliance concluded between the sovereigns of Russia, 
 Prussia, and Austria, followed by the Quadruple Alliance, 
 to which Great Britain also was a party, set itself to thwart 
 the progress of liberal opinions throughout Europe, and 
 to curb, in the interest of the ruling sovereigns, any 
 nationalist aspirations on the part of the people, or any 
 desire to have a voice in their own concerns. At the same 
 time, in every country, poverty and want ran riot, and 
 were regarded with cynical indifference. Though it may 
 be that other countries suffered even worse than England, 
 in England the case was desperate enough. The national 
 resources had been drained by the war. The labour 
 market had not adjusted itself to the increasing substitu- 
 tion of machinery for hand labour ; the selfish legislation 
 of the landowners kept the price of bread high. Riots of 
 ^ The Friend, Section i, Essay xvi. 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 93 
 
 starving men were repressed with ruthless severity, and any 
 attempts at freedom of speech were visited with condign 
 punishment. Freedom of thought in matters rehgious was 
 regarded with the same hatred as hberahsm of pohtics ; and 
 orthodox Christianity, not for the first time nor the last, 
 went hand in glove with reaction and pohtical tyranny. 
 
 It was in such a world that Byron and Shelley rose to 
 manhood. Byron understood, as did few of his time, the 
 historical significance of the Revolution, and whilst he 
 perceived the causes that led to its collapse, he saw even 
 in its failures the dawn of another era : 
 
 Yet Freedom yet thy banner torn but flying 
 Streams like the thundercloud against the wind; 
 
 the seed was sown, and he could trust to a better soil and 
 better conditions to bring forth its fruit in due season. 
 Into the cause of oppressed peoples, struggling for inde- 
 pendence, he flung himself with a noble ardour. ' A free 
 Italy ' seemed to him the ' very poetry of politics ' ; and 
 when this failed him he turned to Greece, and gave to 
 Greece not only the noblest of his song, but his life. On 
 the rulers of his own land, who had helped to turn a war 
 against the tyranny of Napoleon into an opportunity 
 for reviving the thraldom of pre-revolutionary days, he 
 poured the vials of his burning scorn. To Wellington he 
 wrote, harshly perhaps, but not without some truth : 
 
 Never had mortal man such opportunity. 
 Except Napoleon, or abused it more : 
 You might have freed fallen Europe from the unity 
 Of tyrants, and been blest from shore to shore : 
 And now what is your fame ? Shall the Muse tune it ye ? 
 Now that the rabble's first vain shouts are o'er ? 
 Go ! hear it in your famished country's cries ! 
 Behold the world ! and curse your victories ! ^ 
 
 ^ Don Juan, ix. 9. 
 
94 ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 With a like withering sarcasm he exposed the selfish 
 
 oppression of the English landowner, who had seen in 
 
 the war a chance of making money out of corn land, and 
 
 bitterly complained because the peace had dropped the 
 
 price of their rents : 
 
 The landed interest — (you may understand 
 The phrase much better, leaving out the land) 
 The land self-interest groans from shore to shore, 
 For fear that plenty should attain the poor. 
 Up, up again, ye rents ! exalt your notes, 
 Or else the ministry will lose their votes. 
 
 Year after year they voted cent, per cent., 
 
 Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions — ^why ? for rent ! 
 
 They roar'd, they dined, they drank, they swore they 
 
 meant 
 To die for England — why then live ? for rent ! 
 The peace has made one general malcontent 
 Of these high-market patriots ; war was rent ! 
 Their love of country, millions all misspent. 
 How reconcile ? by reconciling rent ! 
 Their good, ill, health, wealth, joy, or discontent, 
 Being, end, aim, religion — rent, rent, rent ! ^ 
 
 To both aspects of the problem Shelley devoted his 
 beautiful idealistic nature. It is true that for the dim 
 future he had the vision of a world that should be 
 equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless, 
 in which all men should be knit together only by bonds 
 of love and mutual service ; and it is a common error to 
 suppose that he had no grip of present conditions. But he 
 knew well enough that the practical steps towards the 
 attainment of that human perfectibility after which he 
 yearned were through the internal and external liberty 
 of the state. Absorption in the ideal no more prevented 
 his understanding the immediate needs of reform than 
 1 The Age of Bronze, 598-631. 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 95 
 
 it stayed him from personal devotion to any suffering 
 that crossed his path. In the same year as he wrote 
 Prometheus Unbound, the revolution in Spain inspired 
 his sublime Ode to Liberty ; and in the Ode to Naples and 
 Hellas he celebrated the kindred struggles of Italy and 
 Greece. And he who could truly speak of himself as 
 
 a nerve o'er which do creep 
 The else unfelt oppressions of the earth 
 
 had a sympathy, far more poignant than Byron's, with 
 the miseries of the poor. ' He loved the people,' says 
 Mrs. Shelley, ' and respected them as often more virtuous, 
 and as always more suffering, and therefore more deserving 
 of sympathy, than the great. He believed that a clash 
 between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he 
 eagerly ranged himself on the people's side.' ^ When the 
 news reached him of that climax in the policy of repres- 
 sion known as ' Peterloo ' his indignation was unbounded ; 
 and he planned a series of poems to commemorate the 
 wrongs of the people and to encourage them in their 
 struggle for freedom, though urging them at the same 
 time to eschew violence and any harbouring of revenge. 
 In this spirit he writes a new version of the national 
 anthem, addressed to Liberty : 
 
 Whom Britons own to be 
 
 Immortal queen ! 
 She is thine own pure soul 
 Moulding the mighty whole, — 
 
 God save the queen ! 
 She is thine own deep love 
 Rained down from heaven above, — 
 Where'er she rest or move, 
 
 God save our queen ! 
 
 He writes a sonnet depicting the woes of England in 
 ^ Mrs. Shelley, note to Poems of 1819. 
 
96 ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 vivid colours, yet believing that as though from the grave 
 the spirit of Liberty would rise again. And in the Mask of 
 Anarchy, wherein Castlereagh, Sidmouth, and Eldon are 
 pilloried as cruelty, cunning, and hypocrisy, he exposes 
 the pitiable dependence of unorganized labour upon 
 selfish and irresponsible capital, pointing out that the 
 worst of this slavery is not the bodily ills that it suffers, 
 but the state of mind which it produces : 
 
 'Tis to be a slave in soul, 
 And to hold no strong control 
 Over your own wills, but be 
 All that others make of ye. 
 
 Freedom, he contends, lies not in luxury or the power to 
 do what we like wAih. others, it lies in a decent sufficiency 
 supported by a justice which shields alike the high and 
 the low, and allows full development for the body and 
 mind of every citizen ; and in a wisdom which allows the 
 mind to work out its own salvation unhampered by 
 priestcraft. Such Freedom indeed is Peace ; it is Love 
 ready to sacrifice all personal interests for the common 
 good. Its lamps are Science, Poetry, and Thought, and 
 its exceeding loveHness is expressed not in words but in 
 deeds. The true patriot, urged SheUey in his pamphlet 
 on Reform, is the man who recognizes it as his duty to 
 enlighten and unite the nation, to promulgate political 
 truth, to promote the open confederation of friends of 
 liberty, and at the same time to discourage the use in 
 political controversy of either secrecy or violence. The 
 teaching of Shelley, disregarded as it was, and often even 
 to-day spoken of as the vague idealism of an unpractical 
 visionary, remains a vital force in the cause of human 
 progress. 
 
 Byron and Shelley were regarded by the orthodox 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 97 
 
 opinion of their day as rebels rather than as patriots. 
 But in times of reaction, when a country repudiates 
 those principles on which its fair fame must always rest, 
 rebellion is the only form that patriotism can take ; and 
 time has justified them both. It is they who in the 
 darkest hour for English liberty kept alive the ideal ; 
 and if the blindness of insular prejudice withheld from 
 them their due meed of honour, their width of outlook 
 and their sympathy with struggling national aspiration 
 has won for them a name throughout Europe, rivalled 
 by Shakespeare alone. Their death left our song without 
 a voice of authentic ring, for the vitality of Wordsworth 
 had been spent during the very progress of the Napoleonic 
 wars. Yet the cause of freedom was not without a rough 
 but earnest singer. The agonies and the hopes of a 
 starving and down-trodden people were articulate in the 
 rh3niies of Ebenezer Elliott,^ who depicted in bold but 
 vivid colours the result of ultra-taxation, bread monopoly, 
 and what he calls ' their inevitable result — the beautiful 
 battle of ten dogs for one bone '. In championing the 
 cause of democracy Elliott was right in holding that he 
 was championing the cause of the nation. ' Nations ', 
 he said, ' are a fate to themselves, they make what they 
 call their destiny, be it for good or evil ', and that destiny 
 can only be good if the life of the masses is sound and 
 allows of their physical and moral development. Hence 
 it follows that his great People's Anthem : 
 
 When wilt thou save the people ? 
 Oh, God of mercy, when ? 
 Not kings and lords, but nations ! 
 Not thrones and crowns, but men ! 
 
 1 The Polish Fugitives and A Song in Exile show that Elliott's 
 passion for freedom was not confined to his own country. 
 1801 N 
 
98 ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 Flowers of thy heart, O God, are they ! 
 Let them not pass like weeds, away ! 
 Their heritage a sunless day, 
 God save the People ! 
 
 is not a cry of faction ; it is the fervent prayer of a true 
 patriot. 
 
 But the salvation of the people is a slow process, and 
 mere political change affects very little. The Reform 
 Bill of 1832, from which so much was hoped, left the 
 masses still unrepresented. It placed greater power in the 
 hands of a class just above the labourer, and hardly more 
 sympathetic with him than the landowner ; it did little 
 to hasten the millennium. It was his anticipation of 
 this that had made Wordsworth oppose the Reform Bill, 
 though he confessed that he had much of the spirit of 
 the Chartist in him. For this newly enfranchised class 
 had just that narrow sympathy and that belief in com- 
 mercial prosperity as the summum honum, which had 
 always seemed to him our gravest national peril. It is 
 significant, at least, that such improvements as were 
 effected during these dark years, e. g. in the Factory 
 Acts, were carried by the pressure of public opinion 
 against the official leaders of party politics. And that 
 public opinion was stimulated by contemporary verse. 
 Mrs. Browning's Cry of the Children, in particular, did 
 much to awaken the public conscience to the iniquities 
 of child labour. Hood's Song of the Shirt, and Charles 
 Kingsley's Rough Rhyme on a Rough Matter (the harsh- 
 ness of the game laws and the disgraceful housing of the 
 country labourer) exposed social evils which were in 
 different ways sapping the vital energies of the country. 
 None of this is great poetry, it is too obviously occa- 
 sional, and didactic in its tone ; but the poet, like other 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 99 
 
 men, is a citizen, and he is ready to sacrifice the best he 
 has — his art itself, if need be — to the service of his 
 country. To develop in detail the attitude of poetry 
 towards this struggle for internal liberty would take me 
 beyond my present intention ; but it is obviously no 
 unimportant aspect of my theme, and in all truly national 
 poetry it is bound to be recurrent. In the thirties and 
 forties of the last century the social problem was clearly 
 the gravest national concern, and if we do not regard it 
 now in the light of a crisis, it is only because in some 
 form or another it is continually before us. And to cope 
 with it is needed not merely the practical acumen of 
 the statesman, but the imaginative understanding and 
 sympathy of the poet. 
 
 The middle years of the nineteenth century are to most 
 English readers represented by the work of Tennyson, 
 and no poet was ever more essentially the creature of his 
 time than he. To many he has appeared as the very 
 ideal of a patriotic poet, and indeed, he had in full measure 
 certain of the essential qualifications. He had a deep 
 love of his native land based on a reverence for all that 
 was great in her history, and he delighted to celebrate 
 those of her heroes, past and present, whose lives ex- 
 pressed his ideal of courage, temperance, and an unswerv- 
 ing devotion to the call of duty. And magnificently did 
 he celebrate them. His ballad on The Revenge is, I think, 
 the finest ballad of heroic action in our language. His 
 Charges of the Light and Heavy Brigades and his Defence 
 of Lucknow are difiicult to match among our martial 
 songs. Tennyson believed, and rightly, that 
 
 The song that nerves a nation's heart 
 Is in itself a deed, 
 
 and he wrote in the spirit of his faith. Greatest of all 
 
100 ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 his patriotic poems is the Ode on the Death of the Duke 
 of Wellington. In its noblest passage he imagines the 
 meeting of Nelson with the Iron Duke, * great by land 
 as thou by sea/ and draws from their example that 
 precept that is entirely characteristic of him : 
 
 Yea, let all things good await 
 
 Him who cares not to be great 
 
 But as he saves or serves the State. 
 
 Not once or twice in our rough island story 
 
 The path of duty was the way to glory : 
 
 He that walks it, only thirsting 
 
 For the light, and learns to deaden 
 
 Love of self, before the journey closes. 
 
 He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting 
 
 Into glossy purples, which outredden 
 
 All voluptuous garden-roses. 
 
 Such is Tennyson's ideal. And there is another point 
 on which he has earned our gratitude. He was the first 
 of our poets to realize the abiding value to our country 
 of her dependencies beyond the seas. ' How strange ', 
 he wrote, ' that England cannot see her true policy lies 
 in a closer union with her colonies ! ' At a time when 
 not a few Englishmen were tending to regard them as 
 an expensive luxury rather than a source of strength, 
 Tennyson spoke out his bold words of protest : 
 
 We lately heard, 
 A strain to shame us, keep you to yourselves 
 So loyal is too costly ! friends, your love 
 Is but a burthen : loose the bond, and go. 
 Is this the tone of empire, here the faith 
 That made us rulers, this indeed the voice 
 And meaning, whom the roar of Hougemont 
 Left mightiest of all peoples under heaven ? 
 
 The loyal to their crown 
 Are loyal to their own far sons, who love 
 Our ocean empire with her boundless homes 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 loi 
 
 For ever-broadening England, and her throne 
 In our vast Orient, and one isle, one isle. 
 That knows not her own greatness ; if she knows, 
 And dreads it, we are fallen.^ 
 
 It is easy enough to sing the praises of Canada and 
 Australia to-day. It is sometimes forgotten that long 
 iDefore the days of Kipling, Tennyson, with a dignity that 
 iDefits his theme, had sounded the true imperial note. 
 
 This is a noble patriotism, and it finds in Tennyson 
 -an expression always elevated, and often highly poetic. 
 But one is bound to admit that as a whole his grasp of 
 the present was not equal to his devotion to the past. 
 In his attitude to that fuller conception of patriotism 
 which is related to ideals of liberty and progress, which 
 regards as its intimate concern the good of all classes in 
 the community, and extends an active sympathy to the 
 welfare of other states, Tennyson is found, as in his 
 attitude to wider problems of life and thought, to repre- 
 sent many of the limitations and the prejudices of ortho- 
 dox mid-Victorianism. At home he never faced the 
 social issues of his time. He wrote much of freedom, 
 but the little enthusiasm which he truly felt for it in his 
 youth was soon sobered into doubts and fears. He con- 
 templated it with satisfaction ' slowly broadening down 
 from precedent to precedent ' : he had no sympathy 
 with those who tried to force the pace — to gain for all 
 the independence that he enjoyed himself. The freedom 
 that he extols is the freedom of a comfortable middle 
 class. She is ' sober-suited ', and can be trusted not to 
 soil her clothes. He had no real love of the people, and 
 no sympathy with the modern movement towards demo- 
 cracy. ' Whoever degrades another, degrades me. By 
 
 ^ To the Queen : Epilogue to the Idylls of the King. 
 
102 ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 God ! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their 
 counterpart of on the same terms.' ^ That is a sentiment 
 that never stirred his soul. He never realized that the 
 recognition of one's own individuality presupposes the 
 recognition of the individuality of others, that freedom 
 loses its meaning unless it is regarded as the inalienable 
 right of every human being. He knew that democracy 
 was the creed of the future, and he dimly recognized its 
 justice, but he did not understand it — and he was afraid. 
 He is the veritable Balaam of progress. His hymns to 
 Liberty are solemn warnings against the dangers of ' raw 
 Haste, half-sister to Delay ', and of ' the falsehood of 
 extremes '. What he urges is true enough. Milton saw 
 as clearly as Tennyson the necessary association of free- 
 dom with discipline and with knowledge. But he saw 
 also that nothing could be gained without some sacrifice, 
 and that your devotion to a cause is partly tested by your 
 readiness to run some risk for its sake. But Tennyson 
 will take no risk. His advocacy of law and precedent 
 has just that half-truth which has given plausibility to 
 all the obstruction of all the ages. 
 
 Hence follows a certain superficiality, and a hesitancy 
 in his attitude to all the social problems that confront 
 him. He rings the bells of his village church on the 
 passing of the Reform Bill, and lives in constant dread 
 of a revolution. He admits the great social wrongs of 
 his time, and is consoled by the evolutionary reflection 
 that we are ' still in the go-cart ', and that ' there is time 
 for the race to grow '. In the meantime he views with 
 satisfaction the sacrifice of those ' great sirs ' who 
 
 Give up their parks some dozen times a year 
 
 To let the people breathe ; ^ 
 
 1 Walt Whitman, Song of Myself , § 24. _ 
 
 2 Epilogue to The Princess. 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 103 
 
 l)ut when the people show ugly signs of wishing to breathe 
 more than a dozen times a year, he is disquieted ; and in 
 their passionate and often unruly clamours for justice 
 he sees little but the mob fury of a people misled by 
 demagogues. He realized indeed the dangers of a grow- 
 ing materialism, and was disturbed by the self-centred, 
 complacent narrowness of the middle class. But the 
 only means that he can suggest by which they should 
 learn to ' feel with their native land and be one with their 
 kind ' is war, lacking the imagination to conceive of 
 other avenues for heroic service to country, and ignoring 
 the fact that war, however just and necessary it may be, 
 only increases the social wrongs and heaps sufferings on 
 the shoulders of those who least are able to bear them. 
 In all this Tennyson was too much of the spokesman 
 of his age, too little of a seer. He had not the faith nor 
 the generous enthusiasm that makes the prophet. 
 
 Love thou thy land, with love far-brought 
 From out the storied past, and used 
 Within the present, but transfused 
 Thro' future time by power of thought. 
 
 This is nobly said, and it is the ideal of every intelligent 
 patriot. But the thought to transfuse it was just what 
 Tennyson lacked. ' The truth is ', said Matthew Arnold, 
 ' that Tennyson, with all his artistic skill, is deficient in 
 intellectual power.' He lacked ideas. And further, he, no 
 more than the average Englishman of his day, attempted 
 to enrich his understanding by a sympathetic study of 
 the civilization and ideals of other nations. It is true 
 that as a young man he expressed sympathy with both 
 Spain and Poland, and that his hatred of Russia for 
 her ill-treatment of Poland and Hungary stimulated 
 his eagerness, years later, for the Crimean War. But his 
 
J04 ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 patriotism was essentially insular. His love for his own 
 country went hand in hand with an ignorance of others, 
 even a contempt of them. His attitude to France, in par- 
 ticular, was as unintelligent as that of the most typical 
 mid-Victorian. He never admitted the immense debt 
 of the whole civilized world to the genius of France, to 
 her lucidity of mind, her generous impulses, her idealism, 
 to the sacrifices that she had made for the cause of 
 freedom : 
 
 O she that made the brave appeal 
 For manhood when our time was dark, 
 And from our fetters drove the spark 
 Which was as lightning to reveal 
 New seasons, with the swifter play 
 Of pulses, and benigner day; 
 She that divinely shook the dead 
 From living man ; that stretched ahead 
 Her resolute forefinger straight, 
 And marched towards the gloomy gate 
 Of earth's Untried, gave note, and in 
 The good name of Humanity 
 Called forth the daring vision ! ^ 
 
 A memory of these things won from George Meredith 
 this sublime tribute to France in the hour of her deepest 
 humiliation ; and England, as ' the ancient home of 
 Liberty ', should have been the readiest of all nations 
 to pay her grateful homage. One of the brightest aspects 
 of our present situation is that now, though late, England 
 is learning something of the true nobility of France. 
 But Tennyson never learnt it : he could only sneer at 
 her errors and exaggerate those weaknesses that are the 
 defect of her virtues. His attitude to foreign nations 
 never showed real insight. Consequently, though he 
 loved peace, he did not ensure it. In his Golden Year, 
 1 George Meredith, France, December 1870. 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 105 
 
 indeed, he fell a victim to the comfortable fallacy, so 
 popular in the last century, that the world could be 
 bound together in brotherhood by the golden links of 
 trade, ignorant of the unquestionable fact that commer- 
 cial rivalry and ambition is the most fruitful source of 
 hatred and of war ; but for the most part he was content 
 to look forward to that distant future when the war- 
 drum should throb no longer, and there should be ' a Par- 
 liament of man, the Federation of the world '. Yet that 
 loving understanding of other races, by which alone such 
 an end may be furthered, Tennyson strove neither to 
 gain nor to promote. 
 
 For those who felt deeply the claims of nationality, 
 the most inspiring event in the nineteenth century, per- 
 haps in the history of the world, was the heroic struggle 
 of Italy for national unity and independence. Tennyson, 
 like all Englishmen, sympathized with the Italians, but 
 it is significant that Italy never inspired his verse. We 
 are forced to notice the difference between his patriotism 
 and that of Italy's inspired prophet Mazzini. ' Nation- 
 ality is sacred to me,' said Mazzini, ' because I see in it 
 the instrument of labour for the good and progress of 
 all men.' ^ Mazzini based his love of country on the 
 faith that the claims of humanity come first, and that 
 a country is false to itself if it does not keep in view the 
 good of all mankind. If it finds its strength in the weak- 
 ness of another, if it is indifferent to the cause of strug- 
 gling nations, it has no right to exist as a nation. ' National 
 life and international life should be the two manifesta- 
 tions of the same principle, the love of good.' 
 
 It is because we to-day, like Wordsworth during the 
 
 1 Cf. Life of Mazzini, by Bolton King (1912), p. 297, and the 
 whole of chap, vii (pp. 296-313). 
 1801 O 
 
io6 ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 Peninsular Wars, have gained an insight into the fact that 
 our material and spiritual welfare is bound up with the 
 destiny of others, that we turn most gratefully to the poets 
 who entered with their whole hearts into the struggles for 
 national freedom which mark the European history of 
 the last century, and who, by their sympathy with other 
 lands, lent a fuller significance to their love of home. To 
 Landor, Clough, Rossetti, the two Brownings, Swinburne, 
 Meredith, Italy became as it were a symbol of the noblest 
 conception of patriotism. From the seemingly fruitless 
 struggles of the forties, which ended for Italy in crushing 
 defeat, Clough learnt that in a noble cause 
 
 'Tis better to have fought and lost 
 Than never to have fought at all.^ 
 
 It was Browning's pride that his study of an Italian 
 patriot was read aloud by Mazzini to his brother exiles 
 in England, to show them how fully an Englishman could 
 enter into their cause ; and his brilliant gallery of portraits 
 drawn from different nationalities, helped, like Lander's 
 noble Conversations, to widen popular interest and dispel 
 insular prejudice. Mrs. Browning, in what is, perhaps, 
 her most lovely poem. The Court Lady, has expressed in 
 two lines the kernel of Mazzini's creed. 
 
 Happy are all free nations, too strong to be dispossessed. 
 But blessed are they among nations, that dare to be 
 strong for the rest. 
 
 And in defence of her Italian poems she wrote a preface 
 still further developing the same idea. ' If patriotism ', 
 she says, ' means the flattery of one's own nation in every 
 
 1 Peschiera, Alteram Partem. Clough's well-known lines. Say 
 not, the struggle nought availeth, were inspired by the same aspect 
 of the Italian struggle. 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 107 
 
 case, then the patriot is merely the courtier. . . . Nationahty 
 is excellent in its place, and the instinct of self-love is the 
 root of a man, which will develop into sacrificial virtues. 
 But all the virtues are means and uses ; and, if we hinder 
 their tendency to growth and expansion, we both destroy 
 them as virtues, and degrade them to the rankest species 
 of corruption reserved for the most noble organizations. 
 For instance, non-intervention in the affairs of neighbour- 
 ing states is a high political virtue ; but non-interference 
 does not mean passing by on the other side when your 
 neighbour falls among thieves. ... If patriotism be a 
 virtue indeed, it cannot mean an exclusive devotion to 
 our country's interests, for that is only another form of 
 devotion to personal interests, family interests, or pro- 
 vincial interests, all of which, if not driven past themselves, 
 are vulgar and immoral objects. Let us put away the 
 Little Peddlingtonism unworthy of a great nation, and too 
 prevalent among us. If the man who does not look beyond 
 this natural life is of a somewhat narrow order, what must 
 be the man who does not look beyond his own frontier or 
 his own sea ? . . . The praise of a nation should not explode 
 from within, from loud civic mouths, but come from with- 
 out, as all worthy praise must, from the alliances she has 
 fostered and the populations she has saved.' ^ 
 
 But of all our singers Swinburne was stirred by Italy 
 to noblest poetic utterance, and entered most fully alike 
 into her sufferings and into the exultation of her triumph. 
 His Songs before Sunrise, which form the most lovely and 
 most impassioned collection of Hymns to Liberty in our 
 language, have Italy as their main inspiring theme ; for the 
 cause of Italy is in his eyes the cause of progress for 
 the world ; and in those who give their lives for her he 
 1 Preface to Poems before Congress, i860. 
 
io8 ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 reads the fate and the fame of those who in all climes and 
 ages have answered the call of heroic duty : 
 
 By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, 
 
 Remembering thee, 
 That for ages of agony hast endured, and slept, 
 
 And wouldst not see. 
 By the waters of Babylon we stood up and sang, 
 
 Considering thee, 
 That a blast of deliverance in the darkness rang. 
 
 To set thee free. 
 And with trumpets and thunderings and with morning 
 song 
 
 Came up the light ; 
 And thy spirit uplifted thee to forget thy wrong 
 
 As day doth night. 
 And thy sons were dejected not any more, as then 
 
 When thou wert shamed ; 
 When thy lovers went heavily without heart, as men 
 
 Whose life was maimed. 
 In the desolate distances, with a great desire, 
 
 For thy love's sake. 
 With our hearts going back to thee, they were filled with 
 fire. 
 
 Were nigh to break. 
 
 Unto each man his handiwork, unto each his crown. 
 
 The just fate gives ; 
 Whoso takes the world's life on him and his own lays 
 down, 
 
 He, dying so, lives. 
 Whoso bears the whole heaviness of the wrong'd world's 
 weight 
 
 And puts it by. 
 It is well with him suffering, though he face man's fate ; 
 
 How should he die ? 
 Seeing death has no part in him any more, no power 
 
 Upon his head ; 
 He has bought his eternity with a little hour. 
 
 And is not dead. 
 For an hour if ye look for him, he is no more found. 
 
 For one hour's space ; 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 109 
 
 Then ye lift up your eyes to him and behold him crowned, 
 
 A deathless face. 
 On the mountains of memory, by the world's well-springs. 
 
 In all men's eyes. 
 Where the light of the life of him is on all past things. 
 
 Death only dies.^ 
 
 It can, of course, be argued that this love of other 
 countries only weakens your adherence to your own, 
 that its issue is not patriotism but cosmopolitanism. 
 Patriotism, it has been urged, is essentially selfish, and 
 nothing but a weak sentimentalism could never represent 
 it as otherwise. It is the doctrine of the survival of the 
 fittest, coupled with the faith that you are the fittest to 
 survive, and that for the sake of your development others 
 must be maimed and destroyed. But this crude mis- 
 application of Darwinism is just the theory of the state 
 against which we are fighting to-day, and its value as 
 political theory is no higher than its poetic utterances, 
 in what are called hymns of hate. If all that is noblest 
 in human nature did not revolt against such theory the 
 example of our poets might help us to repudiate it. If 
 you are sympathetic with other nations it does not for 
 a moment follow that you are less loyal to your own. It 
 simply means that you have widened your outlook, as love 
 only can widen it, and that you are able to detect with 
 keener eye the faults in your own country, and set your- 
 self to correct them. If Browning wrote 
 
 Open my heart, and you will see 
 Graven inside of it ' Italy ', 
 
 we remember also the touching simplicity of his 
 
 Here and here did England help me, how can I help 
 England ? 
 
 1 Swinburne, Songs before Sunrise, ' Super flumina Babylonis ' 
 [Poems, ii. 34). 
 
no ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 If Swinburne could exult in the Italian triumph of his 
 goddess Liberty it was from England he had learned to 
 worship her, and assuredly no poet has praised England 
 more often, or in more glowing words than he : 
 
 Where the footfall sounds of England, where the smile^ 
 
 of England shines, 
 Rings the tread and laughs the face of freedom, fair as hope 
 
 divines 
 Days to be, more brave than ours and lit by lordlier stars 
 
 for signs. 
 
 All our past proclaims our future : Shakespeare's voice 
 
 and Nelson's hand, 
 Milton's faith and Wordsworth's trust in this our chosen 
 
 and chainless land. 
 Bear us witness : come the world against her, England 
 
 yet shall stand. 
 
 Earth and sea bear England witness if he lied who said 
 
 it ; he 
 Whom the winds that ward her, waves that clasp, and 
 
 herb and flower and tree 
 Fed with English dews and sunbeams, hail as more than 
 
 man may be. 
 
 No man ever spake as he that bade our England be but 
 
 true. 
 Keep but faith with England fast and firm, and none 
 
 should bid her rue ; 
 None may speak as he : but all may know the sign that 
 
 Shakespeare knew.^ 
 
 Thus to Swinburne, as to most of our poets, love of 
 England is bound up with that love of freedom on which 
 her claim to greatness is based. In this he is the true 
 child of Milton, of Wordsworth, of Shelley ; and his 
 conception of liberty embraces all its forms, national 
 independence, the freedom of the individual mind to work 
 out its own salvation, and the freedom from slavery to 
 
 1 Swinburne, ' England : An Ode ', Poems, vi. i86. 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 iii 
 
 such social conditions as stunt and maim all spiritual 
 growth. Yet he is conscious enough that through indo- 
 lence and lethargy we are too ready to endanger that 
 freedom that we possess, and still more that through 
 selfishness and a lack of imagination we are blind to the 
 significance of our creed in its application to other nations 
 and to our own oppressed people. In A Watch in the Night 
 he depicts England's ignoble apathy to the cause of which 
 she boasts herself the champion : 
 
 England, what of the night ? 
 
 Night is for slumber and sleep. 
 
 Warm, no season to weep. 
 
 Let me alone till the day. 
 
 Sleep would I still if I might, 
 
 Who have slept for two hundred years. 
 
 Once had I honour, they say. 
 
 But slumber is sweeter than tears. 
 
 Elsewhere he represents Liberty as standing by the 
 couch where England slumbers, content with the internal 
 freedom she has already secured, and turning a deaf ear 
 to the cries of her own enslaved poor. In words of bitter 
 reproach Liberty warns the sleeper of the inevitable sequel 
 to her indifference : 
 
 No brave shame then redeems 
 Thy lusts of sloth and thy fears ? 
 Thy poor lie slain of thy hands, 
 Their starved limbs rot in thy sight : 
 As a shadow the ghost of thee stands, 
 Among men living, and lands. 
 And stirs, not leftward or right. 
 Freeman he is not, but slave 
 Who stands not out on my side ; 
 His own hand hollows his grave. 
 Nor strength is in me to save 
 Where strength is none to abide.^ 
 
 1 Swinburne, Poems, ii. 218, ' Perinde ac Cadaver.' 
 
112 ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 And in his Marching Song for those who strive to 
 "bring about a better and happier world he makes to his 
 countrymen this further appeal : 
 
 O people, O perfect nation, 
 
 O England that shall be, 
 How long till thou take station ? 
 
 How long till thralls live free ? 
 How long till all thy soul be one with all thy sea ? ^ 
 
 But the main burthen of his song for England is one 
 of pride in her past and of faith that she will be true 
 to her destiny. 
 
 For us the sun, not wholly risen 
 
 Nor equal now for all, illumes 
 
 With more of light than cloud that looms : 
 
 Of light that leads forth souls from prison 
 
 And breaks the seals of tombs. 
 
 And it is by this pride in her past that he would awaken 
 her to be true to herself. 
 
 The morning comes not, yet the night 
 Wanes, and men's eyes win strength to see 
 Where twilight is, where light shaU be 
 When conquered wrong and conquering right 
 Acclaim a world set free.^ 
 
 If Swinburne represents the enthusiasm of the modern 
 patriotism, George Meredith represents its brain. Opti- 
 mist as he is, there is nothing vague or sentimental 
 about him, his business is to grapple with hard facts. 
 His national teaching is but an extension of his deep 
 study of nature and human life, and is based on what 
 he has learnt from a close communion with mother 
 earth. Earth, he says, is the only reality we have the 
 means of knowing ; if we keep close to earth we are at 
 
 ^ Swinburne : Poems, ii. 157. 
 
 2 lb. iii. 174, ' The Commonweal ', 1887. 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 113 
 
 least in touch with the actual. The spirit of evolution 
 in nature works through struggle and through energy : 
 man, a child of nature, can only achieve by the same 
 means. But in so far as he has intellect his energy 
 must be of the head as well as of the muscles, it must be 
 directed by mind, or he falls behind in the race ; in so far 
 as he is a social animal, his energy must work through 
 fellowship and brotherhood. The life of the senses 
 keeps man apart from his fellows, imprisoned within 
 himself : by force of intellect he unites to work for the 
 common good. The dangers of civilization are that they 
 tend to draw man away from reading the facts of earth, 
 and in a measure seem to protect him from them, and so 
 to breed illusory beliefs and a false reading of human 
 conditions ; wealth, in particular, and ease blind him 
 to the struggle in which he must bear his part, for his 
 own sake no less than for his fellows ; and they may 
 easily undermine the force or warp the direction of his 
 energy. Intellect alone can save him and save the race. 
 
 Those warriors of the sighting brain 
 Give worn Humanity new youth. 
 Our song and star are they to lead 
 The tidal multitude and blind 
 From bestial to the higher breed 
 By fighting souls of love divined. 
 They scorned the ventral dream of peace 
 Unknown in nature. This they knew : 
 That life begets with fair increase 
 Beyond the flesh, if life be true.^ 
 
 But this ' sighting brain ' must not be of the few ; it 
 is potential in all, and only by freedom and independence 
 can it be developed in them : 
 
 May brain democratic be king of the host.^ 
 
 1 Meredith, The Thrush in February. ^ The Empty Purse. 
 
 1801 P 
 
114 ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 Meredith realizes as keenly as did Tennyson the dangers 
 of power placed in the hands of those as yet untrained 
 to it — ' the concrete indifferent, he calls them, faithless, 
 mean, encased in matter, contemptuous of the impalp- 
 able ' } yet he realizes too, that Greece and Rome fell, 
 as all structures must, because they were built on too 
 narrow a foundation ; and it is the patriot's task in the 
 present not vainly to attempt to crush the irresistible 
 life-force of the people, with whom lies the destiny of 
 the race, still less to be afraid of it : but to prepare the 
 soil for them, guided in our service to the present by the 
 needs of the future rather than by the traditions of 
 the past. It is a work that needs love, but love guided 
 by the untiring energy of brain. 
 
 And this same brain is needed to direct our attitude 
 to other nations. No poet ever loved England better 
 than Meredith or had a deeper insight into her faults, 
 for he had seen her from without as well as from within. 
 Educated in Germany, a correspondent in Italy during 
 the latter years of her heroic struggle,^ married to a French 
 woman, and all his life long a passionate but clear- 
 sighted lover of the genius of France, ' Mother of Reason, 
 inveterate of brain ', he was free from any taint of insu- 
 larity. ' The world ', he said, ' is being visibly univer- 
 salized. To deny us this larger citizenship is the merest 
 provinciality.' And here he saw England's weakness 
 as foreign nations have seen it, though with the eyes of 
 a loyal son rather than a jealous neighbour. England, he 
 knew, was honest, was brave, had a real love of liberty, 
 
 1 Foresight and Patience. Meredith's writings are so full of 
 national and political wisdom that this rapid summary of his 
 position is hopelessly inadequate. 
 
 2 For Meredith's sympathy with Italy see especially his novel 
 Vittoria, 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 115 
 
 was of all nations the most generous. Her danger lay 
 in intellectual sloth ; she forgot the lesson of mother 
 earth, the need for strenuous endeavour ; she was com- 
 placent, slow to learn from others, allowing her strength 
 to decline with the increase of her wealth, too ready to 
 trust to chance for her protection, where she should rely 
 upon energy to keep her strong and brain to keep her 
 efficient. In his last years he made repeated appeals to 
 her to face the facts. In particular we may note his 
 attitude to national defence. He saw in war, as all sane 
 men see in it, a reversion to the primitive and the brutal ; 
 but, he urges, it is merely unintelligent to blind our eyes 
 to the fact that the instincts which incite men to war 
 are still alive and potent : 
 
 Our cry for cradled Peace, while men are still 
 The three parts brute that smothers the divine. 
 
 Heaven answers : Guard it with forethoughtful will 
 Or buy it, all your gains from war resign.^ 
 
 If we are to keep our heritage, he urges, we must be 
 
 ' belted athletes ' ; to be weak is to be false to ourselves 
 
 and to our friends, and to offer to our foes an insidious 
 
 temptation. The poem entitled The Call, written in 
 
 1908, only a year or two before his death, reads like an 
 
 anticipation of the present crisis : 
 
 Has ever weakness won esteem ? 
 
 Or counts it as a prized ally ? 
 They who have read in History deem 
 
 It ranks among the slavish fry 
 Whose claim to live Justiciary Fates deny. 
 
 Dreading [our foe], we do him wrong ; 
 
 For fears discolour, fears invite. 
 Like him, our task is to be strong ; 
 Unlike him claiming not by might 
 To snatch an envied treasure as a right. 
 ^ II y a cent ans. 
 
ii6 ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 This Britain slumbering she is rich, 
 
 Lies placid like a cradled child, 
 At times with an uneasy twitch, 
 
 That tells of dreams unduly wild, 
 Shall she be with a foreign drug defiled ? 
 
 The grandeur of her deeds recall ; 
 
 Look on her face so kindly fair ; 
 This Britain ! and were she to fall, 
 
 Mankind would breathe a harsher air, 
 The nations miss a Hght of leading rare. 
 
 ' This Britain ', if she is to fulfil her destiny, must be 
 strong, but she must learn to guide her strength by 
 intellect, and to base it upon the simple virtues. The 
 words which Meredith spoke to France in 1870 he would 
 reiterate to his own dear country to-day : 
 
 Lo ! strength is of the plain root-virtues born. 
 Strength shall ye gain by service, prove in scorn, 
 Train by endurance, by devotion shape. 
 Strength is not won by miracle or rape. 
 It is the offspring of the modest years. 
 The gift of sire to son, through those firm laws 
 Which we name Gods : which are the righteous cause, 
 The cause of man and manhood's ministers. 
 
 Thus during the last century did our poets pass on 
 the torch which they received at the hands of Shake- 
 speare, Milton, and Wordsworth, and shed their light 
 upon those twofold aspects of freedom with which the 
 safety and honour of our country is inseparably linked. 
 At no time in our history could their inspiration be of 
 more value to us than to-day. We need to keep our 
 ideals high, our courage undaunted. And with the end 
 of the war the crisis is not over ; it only enters upon 
 a new phase. Our knowledge of human nature alike in 
 the past and in the present is enough to suggest to us 
 something of the dangers that lie ahead. We have only 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 117 
 
 to recall the prophetic warnings of Milton, which he 
 himself lived to see fulfilled, or to remember the bitter 
 reaction that followed Waterloo. He is indeed short- 
 sighted who cannot foresee that those problems of internal 
 liberty, which are as vital to our national existence as 
 our honourable relations with other states, will once 
 more become acute. 
 
 At such a time we shall do well to live in the com- 
 panionship of the poets. I do not suggest that we should 
 look to them for a practical solution of the troubles 
 that confront us — that would be to mistake their function, 
 but we can only avert disaster by meeting the future in 
 the spirit of the poet. 
 
 ' There is ', says Shelley, ' no want of knowledge 
 respecting what is wisest and best in morals, govern- 
 ment, and political economy, or at least what is wiser 
 than what men now practise and endure. . . . We want 
 the creative faculty to imagine that which we know ; 
 we want the generous impulse to act that which we 
 imagine ; we want the poetry of life. . . . Poetry compels 
 us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that 
 which we know. . . . Poetry, and the principle of Self, 
 of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God 
 and Mammon of the world.' 
 
 And inasmuch as all fruitful human action, guided as 
 it is by reason, has its roots in noble feeling, whence 
 alone it gathers strength, ' poets are the unacknowledged 
 legislators of the world '. 
 
 Our complex and troubled modern civilization has not 
 yet, perhaps, in the fullest sense found its poet. William 
 Morris, too late in his career, brought his passion for ideal 
 beauty into touch with his sense of the realities that were 
 about him ; and then, perhaps, too conscious of the 
 
ii8 ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 
 
 contrast, strove less to reveal the life and soul of the 
 people than to raise the song of battle for their deliverance. 
 Yet those parts, at least, of his Pilgrims of Hope which 
 he thought worthy of inclusion among his collected poems, 
 suggest that had he turned sooner to the task he might 
 have proved not so much the Ebenezer Elliott as the 
 Wordsworth of a new spiritual democracy. Viewed 
 simply as art. Mother and Son reaches heights unsealed 
 in The Earthly Paradise ; whilst that lovely lyric which 
 records the Message of the March Wind is not the less 
 exquisite a poem because it is a trenchant, even a practical 
 ' criticism of life ' : 
 
 Hark the March wind again of a people is telling 
 Of the life that they live there, so haggard and grim, 
 
 That if we and our love amidst them had been dwelling 
 My fondness had faltered, thy beauty grown dim. 
 
 This land we have loved in our love and our leisure 
 For them hangs in heaven, high out of their reach ; 
 
 The wide hills o'er the sea-plain for them have no pleasure, 
 The grey homes of their fathers no story to teach. 
 
 The singers have sung and the builders have builded. 
 The painters have fashioned their tales of delight ; 
 
 For what and for whom hath the world's book been gilded, 
 When all is for these but the blackness of night ? 
 
 How long, and for what is their patience abiding ? 
 
 How oft and how oft shall their story be told ? 
 While the hope that none seeketh in darkness is hiding, 
 
 And in grief and in sorrow the world groweth old ? 
 
 We are here at the root of the matter. The strength 
 of a country depends upon the happiness of all her 
 people, on the wealth of their associations with a beautiful 
 past, on the depth of their gratitude for what they owe 
 her, and on their readiness to pay their debt. But no man 
 can be grateful unless he has sometliing to be grateful for, 
 
ENGLISH POETRY SINCE 1815 119 
 
 and no man can be happy unless the conditions of his life 
 are such that he is, in the full sense of the term, free. 
 
 There is no need to elaborate further a point which 
 must be obvious to every thoughtfyl patriot. ' Peace 
 hath her victories no less renown'd than war,' and like the 
 victories of war, they are not won without a sacrifice. 
 Shall we, when the present struggle is over, sink back 
 into lethargy and indifference, satisfied that we have done 
 all that England has a right to expect of us ? or shall we 
 rather accept as a creed by which to live, in peace as in 
 war, that higher faith which inspired the patriots of 
 renascent Italy ? 
 
 Our life is but a little holding, lent 
 
 To do a mighty labour : we are one 
 With heaven and the stars when it is spent 
 
 To serve God's aim : else die we with the sun.^ 
 
 ^ Meredith, Vittoria, chap. xxi. 
 
PRINTED IN ENGLAND 
 AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS