Essays in Rebellion

It is at the end of the same preface that the well-known passage occurs, thus translated by Matthew Arnold:

The words appear strangely paradoxical. No one questions Heine's place among the poets of the world. As a matter of fact, he was quite as sensitive to criticism as other poets, and his courage was not more conspicuous than most people's. But, nevertheless, those words contain his last and true defence against the scorn of revolutionists, or men of affairs, like Börne. There is no need to make light of Börne's achievement; that also has its high place in the war of liberation. But, powerless as the word may seem, there was in Heine's word a liberating force that is felt in our battle to this day. He did not wield the axe himself, but behind him has moved a mysterious figure, muffled in a cloak—a Lictor following his footsteps with an axe—the deed of Heine's thought.

V

"How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!" cried Walt Whitman, as I quoted in the last essay. He was thinking, perhaps, of Harper's Ferry and of John Brown hanging on the crab-apple tree, while his soul went marching on. It is the lament of all writers and speakers who are driven by inward compulsion to be something more than artists in words, and who seek to jog the slow-pacing world more hurriedly forward. How long had preachers, essayists, orators, and journalists argued slavery round and round before the defiant deed crashed and settled it! "Who hath believed our report?" the prophets have always cried, until the arm of the Lord was revealed; and the melancholy of all prophetic writers is mainly due to the conscious helplessness of their words. If men would only listen to reason—if they would listen even to the appeals of justice and compassion, we suppose our prophets would grow quite cheerful at last. But to justice and compassion men listen only at a distance, and the prophet is near.

Such books appear to have been very few, though, in a rapid survey, one is likely to overlook some. In all minds there will arise at once the great memory of Swift's Drapier's Letters, passionately uttering the simple but continually neglected law that "all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery." Carlyle's French Revolution and Past and Present burnt with similar flame; so did Ruskin's Unto this Last and the series of Fors Clavigera; so did Mazzini's God and the People, Karl Marx's Kapital, Henry George's Progress and Poverty, Tolstoy's What shall we do? and so did Proudhon's Qu'est ce que la Propriété? at the time of its birth. Nor from such a list could one exclude Uncle Tom's Cabin, by which Mrs. Beecher Stowe anticipated the deed of Harper's Ferry nine years before it came.

These are but few books and few authors. With Lord Morley's three thrown in, they still fall far short of a score. Readers will add other names, other books that ranked as acts and burnt like fire. To their brief but noble roll, I would also add one name, and one brief set of speeches or essays that hardly made a book, but to which Lord Morley himself, at all events, would not be likely to take exception. He mentioned Burke's famous denunciation of Rousseau, and, indeed, the natures and aspects of no two distinguished and finely-tempered men could well be more opposed. But none the less, I believe that in Burke, before growing age and growing fears and habits chilled his blood, there kindled a fire consuming in its indignation, and driving him to words that, equally with Rousseau's, may rank among the acts of history. In support of what may appear so violent a paradox when speaking of one so often claimed as a model of Conservative moderation and constitutional caution, let me recall a few actual sentences from the speech on "Conciliation with America," published three years before Rousseau's death. The grounds of Burke's imagination were not theoretic. He says nothing about abstract man born free; but, as though quietly addressing the House of Commons to-day, he remarks:

That simple complaint had roused in the Colonies, thus deprived of the mark and seal of British freedom, a spirit of turbulence and disorder. Already, under a policy of negation and suppression, the people were driving towards the most terrible kind of war—a war between the members of the same community. Already the cry of "no concession so long as disorders continue" went up from the central Government, and, with passionate wisdom, Burke replied:

Then come two brief passages which ought to be bound as watchwords and phylacteries about the foreheads of every legislator who presumes to direct our country's destiny, and which stand as a perpetual indictment against all who endeavour to exclude the men or women of this country from constitutional liberties:

The second passage is finer still, and particularly apt to the present civil contest over Englishwomen's enfranchisement:

It may be said that these words, unlike the words with which Rousseau kindled revolution, failed of their purpose. The Government remained deaf and blind to the demand of British freedom; a terrible war was not averted; one of the greatest disasters in our history ensued. None the less, they glow with the true fire, and the book that contains them ranks with acts, and, indeed, with battles. That we should thus be coupling Rousseau and Burke—two men of naturally violent antipathy—is but one of the common ironies of history, which in the course of years obliterates differences and soothes so many hatreds. To be accepted and honoured by the same mind, and even for similar service, the two apparent opposites must have had something in common. What they had in common was the great qualities that Maine discovered in Rousseau—the vivid imagination and the genuine love for their fellow-men; and by imagination I mean the power of realising the thoughts, feelings, and sufferings of others. Thus from these two qualities combined in the presence of oppression, cruelty, or the ordinary stupid and callous denial of freedom, there sprang that flame of indignation from which alone the burning book derives its fire. Examine those other books whose titles I have mentioned, and their origin will in every case be found the same. They are the flaming children of rage, and rage is begotten by imaginative power out of love for the common human kind.

VI

"Fret not thyself," sang the cheerful Psalmist—"fret not thyself because of evildoers." For they shall soon be cut down like the grass; they shall be rooted out; their sword shall go through their own heart; their arms shall be broken; they shall consume as the fat of lambs, and as the smoke they shall consume away; though they flourish like a green bay-tree, they shall be gone, and though we seek them, their place shall nowhere be found.

A soothing consolation lies in the thought. Why should we fluster ourselves, why wax so hot, when time thus brings its inevitable revenges? Composed in mind, let us pursue our own unruffled course, with calm assurance that justice will at length prevail. Let us comply with the dictates of sweetness and light, in reasonable expectation that iniquity will melt away of itself, like a snail before the fire. If we have confidence that vengeance is the Lord's and He will repay, where but in that faith shall we find an outlet for our indignation at once so secure, so consolatory, and so cheap?

To the great comfort of cultivated and political circles, the type of Swift is not so frequent or so comprehensible. What place have those who fret not themselves because of evildoers—what place in their tolerant society have they for uncouth personalities, terrible with indignation? It is true that Swift was himself accounted a valued friend among the best wits and writers of his time. Bolingbroke wrote to him: "I loved you almost twenty years ago; I thought of you as well as I do now, better was beyond the power of conception." Pope, also after twenty years of intimate friendship, could write of him: "My sincere love of that valuable, indeed incomparable, man will accompany him through life, and pursue his memory were I to live a hundred lives." Arbuthnot could write to him:

The friends of Swift—the men who could write like this—men like Bolingbroke, Pope, Arbuthnot, Addison, Steele, and Gay—were no sentimentalists; they rank among the shrewdest and most clear-eyed writers of our literature. And, indeed, to me at all events, the difficulty of Swift's riddle lies, not in his savagery, but in his charm. When we think of that tiger burning in the forests of the night, how shall we reconcile his fearful symmetry with eyes "azure as the heavens," which Pope describes as having a surprising archness in them? Or when a man is reputed the most embittered misanthrope in history, how was it that his intimate friend, Sheridan, could speak of that "spirit of generosity and benevolence whose greatness, and vigour, when pent up in his own breast by poverty and dependence, served only as an evil spirit to torment him"? Of his private generosity, and his consideration for the poor, for servants, and animals, there are many instances recorded. For divergent types of womanhood, whether passionate, witty, or intellectual, he possessed the attraction of sympathetic intimacy. A woman of peculiar charm and noble character was his livelong friend from girlhood, risking reputation, marriage, position, and all that many women most value, just for that friendship and nothing more. Another woman loved him with more tragic destiny. To Stella, in the midst of his political warfare, he could write with the playfulness that nursemaids use for children, and most men keep for their kittens or puppies. In the "Verses on his own Death," how far removed from the envy, hatred, and malice of the literary nature is the affectionate irony of those verses beginning:

And so on down to the lines:

To damn with faint praise is the readiest defence of envious failure; but to praise with jealous damnation reveals a delicate generosity that few would look for in the hater of his kind. Nor let us forget that Swift was himself the inventor of the phrase "Sweetness and light."

These elements of charm and generosity have been too much overlooked, and they could not redeem the writer's savagery in popular opinion, being overshadowed by that cruel indignation which ate his flesh and exhausted his spirit. Yet it was, perhaps, just from such elements of intuitive sympathy and affectionate goodwill that the indignation sprang. Like most over-sensitive natures, he found that every new relation in life, even every new friendship that he formed, only opened a gate to new unhappiness. The sorrows of others were more to him than to themselves, and, like a man or woman that loves a child, he discovered that his affection only exposed a wider surface to pain. On the death of a lady with whom he was not very intimately acquainted, "I hate life," he cried, "when I think it exposed to such accidents: and to see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth while such as her die, makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing." It was not any spirit of hatred or cruelty, but an intensely personal sympathy with suffering, that tore his heart and kindled that furnace of indignation against the stupid, the hateful, and the cruel to whom most suffering is due; and it was a furnace in which he himself was consumed. Writing whilst he was still a youth, in The Tale of a Tub, he composed a terrible sentence, in which all his rage and pity and ironical bareness of style seem foretold: "Last week," he says, "I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse." "Only a woman's hair," was found written on the packet in which the memorial of Stella was preserved, and I do not know in what elegy there breathes a prouder or more poignant sorrow.

When he wrote the Drapier Letters, Ireland lay before him like a woman flayed. Of the misery of Ireland it was said (I think by Sheridan):

As wave after wave of indignation passed over him, his wrath at oppression extended to all mankind. In Gulliver's Travels it is the human race that lies before him, how much altered for the worse by being flayed! But it is not pity he feels for the victim now. In man he only sees the littleness, the grossness, the stupidity, or the brutal degradation of Yahoos. Unlike other satirists—unlike Juvenal or Pope or the author of Penguin Island, who comes nearest to his manner—he pours his contempt, not upon certain types of folly or examples of vice, but upon the race of man as a whole. "I heartily hate," he wrote to Pope soon after Gulliver was published, "I heartily hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth." The philanthropist will often idealise man in the abstract and hate his neighbour at the back door, but that was not Swift's way. He has been called an inverted hypocrite, as one who makes himself out worse than he is. I should rather call him an inverted idealist, for, with high hopes and generous expectations, he entered into the world, and lacerated by rage at the cruelty, foulness, and lunacy he there discovered, he poured out his denunciations upon the crawling forms of life whose filthy minds were well housed in their apelike and corrupting flesh—a bag of loathsome carrion, animated by various lusts.

"Noli aemulari," sang the cheerful Psalmist; "Fret not thyself because of evildoers." How easy for most of us it is to follow that comfortable counsel! How little strain it puts upon our popularity or our courage! And how amusing it is to watch the course of human affairs with tolerant acquiescence! Yes, but, says Swift, "amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think," and may we not say that acquiescence is the cowardice of those who dare not feel? There will always be some, at least, in the world whom savage indignation, like Swift's, will continually torment. It will eat their flesh and exhaust their spirits. They would gladly be rid of it, for, indeed, it stifles their existence, depriving them alike of pleasure, friends, and the objects of ambition—isolating them in the end as Swift was isolated. If only the causes of their indignation might cease, how gladly they would welcome the interludes of quiet! But hardly is one surmounted than another overtops them like a wave, nor have the stern victims of indignation the smallest hope of deliverance from their suffering, until they lie, as Swift has now lain for so many years, where cruel rage can tear the heart no more—"Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit."

VII

And now that he is dead, and the world is chilled by the loss of its greatest and most fiery personality, the adversary may breathe more freely. As Tolstoy was crossing a city square—I suppose the "Red Square" in Moscow—on the day when the Holy Synod of Russia excommunicated him from the Church, he heard someone say, "Look! There goes the devil in human form!" And for the next few weeks he continued to receive letters clotted with anathemas, damnations, threats, and filthy abuse. It was no wonder. To all thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, to all priests of established religions, to the officials of every kind of government, to the Ministers, whether of parliaments or despots, to all naval and military officers, to all lawyers, judges, jurymen, policemen, gaolers, and executioners, to all tax-collectors, speculators, and financiers, Tolstoy was, indeed, the devil in human form. To them he was the gainsayer, the destroyer, the most shattering of existent forces. And, in themselves, how large and powerful a section of every modern State they are! They may almost be called the Church and State incarnate, and they seldom hesitate to call themselves so. But, against all their authorities, formulae, and traditions, Tolstoy stood in perpetual rebellion. To him their parchments and wigs, their cells and rods and hang-ropes, their mitres, chasubles, vestments, incense, chantings, services, bells, and books counted as so much trumpery. For him external law had no authority. If it conflicted with the law of the soul, it was the soul's right and duty to disregard or break it. Speaking of the law which ordained the flogging of peasants for taxes, he wrote: "There is but one thing to say—that no such law can exist; that no ukase, or insignia, or seals, or Imperial commands can make a law out of a crime." Similarly, the doctrines of the Church, her traditions, sacraments, rituals, and miracles—all that appeared to him to conflict with human intelligence and the law of his soul—he disregarded or denied. "I deny them all," he wrote in his answer to the Holy Synod's excommunication (1901); "I consider all the sacraments to be coarse, degrading sorcery, incompatible with the idea of God or with the Christian teaching." And, as the briefest statement of the law of his soul, he added:

The world has listened to rebels against Church and State before, and still it goes shuffling along as best it can under external laws and governments, seeking from symbols, rituals, and miraculous manifestation such spiritual consolation as it may imbibe. To such rebels the world, after burning, hanging, and quartering them for several centuries, has now become fairly well accustomed, though it still shoots or hangs them now and then as a matter of habit. But Tolstoy's rebellion did not stop at Church and State. He rebelled against all the ordinary proposals and ideals of rebels themselves, and to him there was not very much to choose between the Socialism of Marxists and the despotism of Tsars. Liberals, Radicals, Social Democrats, Social Revolutionists, and all the rest of the reforming or rebellious parties—what were they doing but struggling to re-establish external laws, external governments, officials, and authorities under different forms and different names? In the Liberal movements of the day he took no part, and he had little influence upon the course of revolution. He formed no party; no band of rebels followed the orders of the rebel-in-chief; among all the groups of the first Duma there was no Tolstoyan group, nor could there have been any. When we touch government, he would say, we touch the devil, and it is only by admitting compromise or corruption that men seek to maintain or readjust the power of officials over body and soul. "It seems to me," he wrote to the Russian Liberals in 1896,

Yet they could not choose but hear. Mr. Kipling, in agreement with an earlier prophet, once identified rebellion with the sin of witchcraft, and about Tolstoy there was certainly a witching power, a magic or demonic attraction, that gave the hearer no peace. Perhaps more even than from his imaginative strength, it arose from his whole-hearted sincerity, always looking reality straight in the face, always refusing compromise, never hesitating to follow where reason led. Compromise and temporise and choose the line of least resistance, as we habitually do, there still remains in most people a fibre that vibrates to that iron sincerity. And so it was that, from the first, Tolstoy brought with him a disturbing and incalculable magic—an upheaving force, like leaven stirring in the dough, or like a sword in unconditioned and unchartered peace.

Critics have divided his life into artistic and prophetic hemispheres; they have accused him of giving up for man what was meant for artistic circles. But the seas of both hemispheres are the same, and there was no division in Tolstoy's main purpose or outlook upon life from first to last. In his greatest imaginative works (and to me they appear the highest achievement that the human imagination has yet accomplished in prose)—in the struggles and perplexities and final solutions of Petroff, Nekhludoff, and Levin; in the miserable isolation of Ivan Ilyitch; in the resurrection of the prostitute Maslova; and in the hardly endurable tragedy of Anna Karénin herself, there runs exactly the same deep undercurrent of thought and exactly the same solution of life's question as in the briefer and more definite statements of the essays and letters. The greatest men are generally all of a piece, and of no one is this more true than of Tolstoy. Take him where you please, it is strange if after a few lines you are not able to say, "That is the finger of Tolstoy; there is the widely sympathetic and compassionate heart, so loving mankind that in all his works he has drawn hardly one human soul altogether detested or contemptible. But at the same time there is the man whose breath is sincerity, and to whom no compromise is possible, and no mediocrity golden."

To the philosophers of the world his own solution may appear a simple issue, indeed, out of all his questioning, struggles, and rebellions. It was but a return to well-worn commandments. "Do not be angry, do not lust, do not swear obedience to external authority, do not resist evil, but love your enemies"—these commands have a familiar, an almost parochial, sound. Yet in obedience to such simple orders the chief of rebels found man's only happiness, and whether we call it obedience to the voice of the soul or the voice of God, he would not have minded much. "He lives for his soul; he does not forget God," said one peasant of another in Levin's hearing; and Tolstoy takes those quiet words as Levin's revelation in the way of peace. For him the soul, though finding its highest joy of art and pleasure only in noble communion with other souls, stood always lonely and isolated, bare to the presence of God. The only submission possible, and the only possible hope of peace, lay in obedience to the self thus isolated and bare. "O that thou hadst hearkened unto my commandments!" cried the ancient poet, uttering the voice that speaks to the soul in loneliness; "O that thou hadst hearkened unto my commandments! Then had thy peace been as a river."

VIII

Contemplating from a philosophic distance the Buddhist monasteries that climb the roof of the world, or the indistinguishable multitudes swarming around the shrines on India's coral strand, we think all this sort of thing is natural enough for unhappy natives to whom life is always poor and hard, and whose bodies, at the best, are so insignificant and so innumerable that they may well regard them with contempt, and suffer their torments with indifference. But the man of whose spiky bracelet we read was not in search of Nirvana's annihilation, nor had he ever prayed in nakedness beside the Ganges. Cardinal Vaughan, Archbishop of Westminster, was as little like a starveling Sanyasi as any biped descendant of the anthropoids could possibly be. A noticeable man, singularly handsome, of conspicuous, indeed of almost precarious, personal attraction, a Prince of the Church, clothed, quite literally, in purple and fine linen, faring as sumptuously as he pleased every day, welcome at the tables of the society that is above religion, irreproachable in address, a courtier in manner, a diplomatist in mind, moving in an entourage of state and worldly circumstance, occupied in the arts, constructing the grandest building of his time, learned without pedantry, agreeably cultivated in knowledge, urbane in his judgment of mankind, a power in the councils of his country, a voice in the destinies of the world—so we see him moving in a large and splendid orbit, complete in fine activities, dominant in his assured position, almost superhuman in success. And as he moves, he presses into the flesh of his left arm those sharpened points of steel.

"Remember!" We hear again the solemn tone, warning of mortality. We see again the mummy, drawn between tables struck silent in their revelry. We listen to the slave whispering in the ear while the triumph blares. "Remember!" he whispers. "Remember thou art man. Thou shalt go! Thou shalt go! Thy triumph shall vanish as a cloud. Time's chariot hurries behind thee. It comes quicker than thine own!" So from the iron bracelet a voice tells of the transitory vision. All shall go; the jewelled altars and the dim roofs fragrant with incense; the palaces, the towers, and domed cathedrals; the refined clothing, the select surroundings, the courteous receptions of the great; the comfortable health, the noble presence, the satisfactory estimation of the world—all shall go. They shall fade away; they shall be removed as a vesture, and like a garment they shall be rolled up. Press the spikes into thy mouldering flesh. Remember! Even while it lives, it is corrupting, and the end keeps hurrying behind. Remember! Remember thou art man.

But below that familiar voice which warns the transient generations of their mortality, we may find in those sharpened spikes a more profound and nobler intention. "Remember thou art man," they say; but it is not against overweening pride that they warn, nor do they remind only of death's wings. "Remember thou art man," they say, "and as man thou art but a little lower than the angels, being crowned with glory and honour. This putrefying flesh into which we eat our way—this carrion cart of your paltry pains and foolish pleasures—is but the rotten relic of an animal relationship. Remember thou art man. Thou art the paragon of animals, the slowly elaborated link between beast and god, united by this flesh with tom-cats, swine, and hares, but united by the spirit with those eternal things that move fresh and strong as the ancient heavens in their courses, and know not fear. What pain of spikes and sharpened points, what torment that this body can endure from cold or hunger, from human torture and burning flame, what pleasure that it can enjoy from food and wine and raiment and all the satisfactions of sense is to be compared with the glory that may be revealed at any moment in thy soul? Subdue that bestial and voracious body, ever seeking to extinguish in thee the gleam of heavenly fire. Press the spikes into the lumpish and uncouth monster of thy flesh. Remember! Remember thou art God."

"Oh, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" We have grown so accustomed to the cry that we hardly notice it, and yet that the cry should ever have been raised—that it should have arisen in all ages and in widely separated parts of the world—is the most remarkable thing in history. Pleasure is so agreeable, and none too common; or, if one wanted pain for salt, are there not pains enough in life's common round? Does it not take us all our time to mitigate the cold, the heat, and hunger; to escape the beasts and rocks and thunderbolts that bite and break and blast us; to cure the diseases that rack and burn and twist our poor bodies into hoops? Why should we seek to add pain to pain, and raise a wretched life to the temperature of a torture-room? It is the most extraordinary thing, at variance alike with the laws of reason and moderation. Certainly, there is a kind of self-denial—a carefulness in the selection of pleasure—which all the wise would practise. To exercise restraint, to play the aristocrat in fastidious choice, to guard against satiety, and allow no form of grossness to enter the walled garden or to drink at the fountain sealed—those are to the wise the necessary conditions of calm and radiant pleasure, and in outward behaviour the Epicurean and the Stoic are hardly to be distinguished. For the Epicurean knows well that asceticism stands before the porch of happiness, and the smallest touch of excess brings pleasure tumbling down.

But mankind seems not to trouble itself about this delicate adjustment, this cautious selection of the more precious joy. In matters of the soul, man shows himself unreasonable and immoderate. He forgets the laws of health and chastened happiness. The salvation of his spirit possesses him with a kind of frenzy, making him indifferent to loss of pleasure, or to actual pain and bodily distress. He will seek out pain as a lover, and use her as a secret accomplice in his conspiracy against the body's domination. Under the stress of spiritual passion he becomes an incalculable force, carried we know not where by his determination to preserve his soul, to keep alight just that little spark of fire, to save that little breath of life from stifling under the mass of superincumbent fat. We may call him crazy, inhuman, a fanatic, a devil-worshipper; he does not mind what we call him. His eyes are full of a vision before which the multitude of human possessions fade. He is engaged in a contest wherein his soul must either overcome or perish everlastingly; and we may suppose that, even if the soul were not immortal, it would still be worth the saving.

It is true that in this happy country examples of ascetic frenzy are comparatively rare. There is little fear of overdoing the mortification of the flesh. We practise a self-denial that takes the form of training for sport, but, like the spectators at a football match, we do our asceticism chiefly by proxy, and are fairly satisfied if the clergy do not drink or give other cause for scandal. It is very seldom that Englishmen have been affected by spiritual passion of any kind, and that is why our country, of all the eastern hemisphere, has been least productive of saints. But still, in the midst of our discreet comfort and sanity of moderation, that spiky bracelet of steel, eating into the flesh of the courtly and sumptuous Archbishop, may help to remind us that, whether in war, or art, or life, it is only by the passionate refusal of comfort and moderation that the high places of the spirit are to be reached. "Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground!" is the song of all pioneers, and if man is to be but a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honour, the crown will be made of iron or, perhaps, of thorns.