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Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays




In the Civil War Falkland was always "ingeminating _Peace, Peace_".
Our hearts are with him, but it was of no use. It is an unhappy part of
civil wars that there can be no real peace till one party has succumbed:
compromise only leads to a renewal of the conflict. There is sense as
well as dignity in the deliberate though mournful acceptance of
necessity, and the determination to play out the part which could not be
declined, expressed in the letter written at the outbreak of the
conflict by the Parliamentarian, Sir William Waller, to a personal
friend in the other camp:

"My affections to you are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot
violate my friendship to your person; but I must be true to the cause
wherein I serve. The great God, who is the searcher of my heart, knows
with what reluctance I go upon this service, and with what perfect
hatred I look upon a war without an enemy. The God of peace, in His good
time, sent us peace, and in the meantime fit us to receive it! We are
both on the stage, and we must act the parts that are assigned us in
this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal
animosities."

A man in this frame of mind, we submit, was likely to get to the end of
a civil war more speedily than a man in the mood, amiable as it was, of
Falkland.

Perhaps, after all, the failure, the inevitable failure of Falkland's
passionate pleadings for peace may have saved him from a worse doom than
death on the field even of civil war. In the case of the Five Members,
the King had shown how little regard he had, at least how little regard
the mistress of his councils had, for the honour of his advisers. The
pair might have used Falkland to lure by the pledge of his high
character the leaders of the Parliament into the acceptance of a treaty?
which the King, with his notions of divine right, and the Queen with her
passionate love of absolute power, would, there can be little doubt,
have violated as soon as the army of the Parliament had been disbanded,
and the power of the sword had returned into the King's hands. Falkland
might have even seen the scaffold erected, through the prostitution of
his own honour, for the men whose ardent associate he had been in the
overthrow of government by prerogative and in the impeachment of
Strafford.

Flinging epithets at Cromwell is a very harmless indulgence of
sentiment. His memory has passed unscathed even through the burning
eloquence which, from the pulpit of the Restoration, denounced him as
"wearing a bad hat, and that not paid for." Since research has placed
him before us as he really was, the opinion has been gaining ground that
he was about the greatest human force ever directed to a moral purpose;
and in that sense, about the greatest man, take him all in all, that
ever trod the scene of history. If his entire devotion to his cause, his
valour, his magnanimity, his clemency, his fidelity to the public
service, his domestic excellence and tenderness are not "conduct," all
we can say is, so much the worse for "conduct." The type to which his
character belonged, in common with the whole series of historic types,
had in it something that was special and transitory, combined with much
that, so far as we see, was universal and will endure for ever. It is in
failing to note the special and transitory element, and the limitations
which it imposed on the hero's greatness, that Carlyle's noble biography
runs into poetry, and departs from historic truth. To supply this defect
is the proper work of rational criticism; but the criticism which begins
with "Philistine" is not likely to be very rational.

The objection urged by Bolingbroke against Cromwell's foreign policy, on
the ground that to unite with France, which was gaining strength,
against Spain, which was beginning to decline, was not the way to
maintain the balance of power in Europe, is once more reproduced as
though it had not been often brought forward and answered. Cromwell was
not bound to trouble his head about such a figment of a special
diplomacy as the balance of power any more than Shakespeare was bound to
trouble his head about Voltaire's rules for the drama. He was the chief
and the defender of Protestantism, and as such he was naturally led to
ally himself with France, which was comparatively liberal, against
Spain, which was the great organ of the Catholic reaction. An alliance
with Spain was a thing impossible for a Puritan. Looking to the narrower
interest of England, much more was to be gained by a war with Spain than
by a war with France, because by a war with Spain an entrance was forced
for English enterprise through the barriers which Spanish monopoly had
raised against commercial enterprise in America. The security of England
appears, in Cromwell's judgment, to have depended on her intrinsic
strength, which no one can doubt that, under extraordinary
disadvantages, he immensely increased, rather than on the maintenance of
a European equilibrium which, as the number of the powers increased,
became palpably impracticable. It may be added, that the incipient
decline of the double-headed House of Austria, if it is visible to our
eyes as we trace back the course of events, can hardly have been visible
to any eye at that time, and, what is still more to the purpose, that
the dangerous ascendency of Louis XIV. resulted in great measure from
the betrayal of England by Charles II., and would have been impossible
had, we will not say a second Cromwell, but a Protestant or patriotic
monarch, sat on the Protector's throne.

Bolingbroke suggests, and Mr. Arnold embraces the suggestion, that
Charles I., by making war on France, showed himself more sagacious with
regard to foreign policy than Cromwell. But Mr. Arnold, in recommending
Bolingbroke's philosophy to a generation which he thinks has too much
neglected it, has discreetly warned us to let his history alone. Charles
I., or rather Buckingham, in whose hands Charles was a puppet, made war
on Spain, though in the most incapable manner, and with a most
ignominious result: he at one time lent the French Government English
ships to be used against the Protestants of Rochelle, whose resistance,
apart from the religious question, was the one great obstacle to the
concentration of the French power; and though he subsequently quarrelled
with France, few will believe--assuredly Clarendon did not believe--that
among the motives for the change, policy of any kind predominated over
the passions and the vanity of the favourite. That Cromwell would have
lent a steady and effective support to the Protestants, and thus have
prevented the concentration of the French power, is as certain as any
unfulfilled contingency can be.

Mr. Arnold is evidently anxious to bring Bolingbroke into fashion. "Hear
Bolingbroke upon the success of Puritanism." Hear Lovelace on Dr.
Johnson; one critic would be about as edifying as the other.
Bolingbroke, a sceptical writer and a scoffer at Anglican doctrine, to
say nothing about his morals, allied himself for party purposes with the
fanatical clergy of the Anglican Establishment, well represented by
Sacheverel, and, to gratify his allies, passed as Minister persecuting
laws, about the last of the series, against Nonconformists. This,
perhaps, is a proof in a certain way, of philosophic largeness of view.
But if Bolingbroke is to be commended to ingenuous youth as a guide
superior to party narrowness or bias, it may be well to remember the
passage of his letter to Sir William Wyndham, in which he very frankly
describes his own aims, and those of his confederates on their accession
to office, admitting that "the principal spring of their actions was to
have the government of the State in their hands, and that their
principal views were the conservation of this power, great employments
to themselves, and great opportunities of rewarding those who had helped
to raise them, and of hurting those who stood in opposition to them;"
though he has the grace to add that with these considerations of party
and private interest were intermingled some which had for their object
the public good. In another place he avows that he and his party
designed "to fill the employments of the kingdom down to the meanest
with Tories," by which they would have anticipated, and, indeed, by
anticipation outdone, the vilest and most noxious proceeding of the
coarsest demagogue who ever climbed to power on the shoulders of faction
in the United States. It may be instructive to compare with this the
principles upon which public employments were distributed by Cromwell.

It would be out of place to discuss the whole question of the
Protector's administration by way of reply to a passing thrust of
antipathy. But when judgment is pronounced on his external policy, his
critics ought not to leave out of consideration the Union of Scotland
and Ireland with England, successfully accomplished by him, repealed by
the Restoration, and, like not a few of his other measures, revived and
ratified by posterity, after a delay fraught with calamitous
consequences in both cases, and which, in the case of Ireland, may
perhaps even yet prove fatal.

We cannot help remarking, however, that the ecclesiastical policy of the
Protectorate was one which it would be most inconsistent on the part of
Mr. Arnold and those who hold the same view with him to decry. It was a
national church (to prevent the hasty abolition of which, seems to have
been Cromwell's main reason for dissolving the Barebones Parliament)
with the largest possible measure of comprehension. To us the weak
points of such a policy appear manifest enough, but by Mr. Arnold and
those of his way of thinking it ought, if we mistake not, to be
respected as an anticipation of their own deal.

Of one great and irretrievable error Cromwell was guilty--he died before
his hour. That his government was taking root is clear from the bearing
of Mazarin and Don Lewis De Haro, sufficiently cool judges, towards the
Stuart Pretender. The Restoration was a reaction not against the
Protectorate but against the military anarchy which ensued. Had Cromwell
lived ten years longer, or had his marshals been true to his successor,
to his cause, and to their own fortunes, there would have been an end of
the struggle against Stuart prerogative, the spirit of Laud would have
been laid for ever; the temporal power of ecclesiastics would have
troubled no more; the Union with Scotland and Ireland would have
remained unbroken; and the genuine representation of the people embodied
in the Instrument of Government would have continued to exist, in the
place of rotten boroughs, the sources of oligarchy and corruption, of
class government and class wars. Let us philosophize about general
causes as much as we will, untoward accidents occur: the loss of Pym and
Hampden in the early part of the Revolution, and that of Cromwell at its
close, may be fairly reckoned as accidents, and they were untoward in
the highest degree.

No doubt, while Falkland fits perfectly into the line of English
progress and takes his place with obvious propriety among the Saints of
Constitutionalism in the vestibule of the House of Commons, while even
Hampden finds admission as the opponent of ship-money, the kind veil of
oblivion being drawn over the part he played as a leader in the
Revolution, Cromwell, though his hold over the hearts of the English
people is growing all the time, remains in an uncovenanted condition.
The problem of his statue is still, and, so far as England is concerned,
seems likely long to be, unsolved. Put him high or low, in the line of
kings or out of it, he is hopelessly incongruous, incommensurable, and
out of place. He is in fact the man of the New World; his institutions
in the main embody the organic principles of New World society: at
Washington, not at Westminster should be his statue.

What Puritanism did for England, and what credit is due to it as an
element of English character, are questions which cannot be settled by
mere assertion, on our side at least. In its highest development, and at
the period of its greatest men, it was militant, and everything militant
is sure to bear evil traces of the battle. For that reason Christianity
has always been in favour of peace and goodwill; let the Regius
Professor of Theology at Oxford, in his Christian philosophy of war, be
as ingenious and as admirable as he may. But sometimes it is necessary
to accept the arbitrament of the sword. It was necessary at Marathon, on
the plain of Tours, on the waters which bore the Armada, at Lutzen, at
Marston, at Leipsic, at Gettysburg. Darius, the Moors, Philip II.,
Wallenstein, Prince Rupert, Bonaparte, the Slave-owners, did not offer
you the opportunity which you would so gladly have embraced, of a
tranquil and amicable discussion among lime-trees and violets. On each
occasion the cause of human progress drew along with it plenty of mud
and slime, nevertheless it was the cause of human progress. On each
occasion the wrong side no doubt had its Falklands, nevertheless it was
the wrong side.

In the beginning of the seventeenth century the Reformation was brought
to the verge of destruction. When Wallenstein sat down before Stralsund
everything was gone but England, Holland, Sweden, and some cantons of
Switzerland. In England the stream of reaction was running strong;
Holland could not have stood by herself; Sweden was nothing as a power,
though it turned out that she had a man. Fortunately the Lambeth Popedom
and the Royal Supremacy prevented the English division of the army of
Reaction from getting into line with the other divisions and compelled
it to accept decisive battle on a separate field against the most
formidable soldiers of the Reformation. These soldiers saved
Protestantism, which was their first object, and they saved English
liberty into the bargain. We who have come after can stand by the
battlefield, pouncet-box in hand, and sniff and sneer as much as we
will.

Great Tew was an anticipation, for ever beautiful and memorable, of the
time when all swords shall be sheathed, and the world shall have entered
into final peace. But in its philosophy there were, as the world then
was, two defects; it did not reach the people, and it was incapable of
protecting its own existence. Laud himself did not care to crush it; he
was an ecclesiastical despot rather than a theological bigot; he had a
genuine respect for learned men; he preferred winning them by gracious
words and preferment to coercing them with the pillory and the shears.
But had Laud's system prevailed, there would soon have been an end of
the philosophy of Great Tew. Mr. Arnold points to the free thought of
Bacon. Nobody in those days scented mischief in the inductive
philosophy, while in politics and religion Bacon was scrupulously
orthodox. Cromwell's faith was a narrower and coarser thing by far than
that of the inmates of the "college in a purer air;" but it brought
religion and morality--not the most genial or rational morality, but
still morality--into the cottage as well as into the manor-house, and it
was able to protect its own existence When it had mounted to power in
the person of its chief, the opinions of Great Tew, and all opinions
that would abstain from trying to overthrow the Government and restore
the tyranny, enjoyed practically larger and more assured liberty than
they had ever enjoyed in England before or were destined to enjoy for
many a year to come. Falkland, says Mr. Arnold, was in the grasp of
_fatality, hence the transcendent interest that attaches to him_.
Cromwell, happily for his cause and for his country, was, or felt
himself to be, not in the grasp of fatality but in the hand of God.

Might we not have done just as well without Puritanism? Might not some
other way have been found of preserving the serious element in English
character and saving English liberty from those who were conspiring for
its destruction? Such questions as these may be asked without end, and
they may be answered by any one who is endowed with a knowledge of men
who were never born, and of events that have never happened. Might not a
way have been found of rescuing the great interests of humanity without
Greek resistance to Persian invasion, or German resistance to the
tyranny of Bonaparte? Suppose in place of the Puritan chiefs there had
been raised up by miracle a set of men at once consummate soldiers and
perfect philosophers, who would have fought and won the battle without
being heated by the conflict. Suppose, to prevent the necessity of any
conflict at all, Charles, Strafford, and Laud had voluntarily abandoned
their designs. As it was, Puritanism did, and alone could do, the work.
What the Renaissance would have been without Puritan morality we can
pretty well guess from the experience of Italy. It would have probably
been like the life of Lorenzo--vice, filthy vice, decorated with art and
with elegant philosophy; an academy under the same roof with a brothel.
There were ages before morality, and there have been ages between the
moralities. There was, in England, an age between the decline of the
Catholic morality and the rise of the Puritan, marked by a laxity of
conduct, public and private, which was partly redeemed but not
neutralized by Elizabethan genius and enterprise. No doubt when the
revival came, there was a High Church as well as a Puritan morality, and
that fact ought always to be borne in mind; but the High Church morality
was inextricably bound up with sacerdotal superstition and with absolute
government; it had no hold on the people; and it found itself
suspiciously at home in the Court of James, in the households of
Somerset and Buckingham, and in the tribunal which lent itself to the
divorce of Essex.

That the Puritan Revolution was followed by a sacerdotal and sensualist
reaction is too true: all revolutions are followed by reactions; it is
one great reason for avoiding them. But let it be remembered, first,
that the disbanded soldiers of the Commonwealth and the other relics of
the Puritan party still remained the most moral and respectable element
in the country; and secondly, that the period of lassitude which follows
great efforts, whether of men or nations, is not altogether the
condemnation of the effort, but partly the weakness of humanity. Nations
as well as men, if they aim high, must sometimes overstrain themselves,
and weariness must ensue. Nor did the Commonwealth of England come to
nothing, though in a society not half emancipated from feudalism it was
premature, and therefore, at the time, a failure. It opened a glimpse of
a new order of things: it was the first example of a great national
republic, the republics of antiquity having been at once city republics
and republics of slave-owners: it not only heralded but, to some extent,
prepared the American and even the French Revolution. In its sublime
death-song, chanted by the great Puritan poet, our ears catch the
accents of a hope that did not die.

The Restoration was the end of the Puritan party, which thenceforth
separated into two portions, the high political element taking the form
of Whiggism, while the more religious element was represented in
subsequent history by the Nonconformists. Under the Marian reaction
Protestantism had been saved, and the errors which it had committed in
its hour of ascendency had been redeemed by the champions, drawn mostly
from the humbler classes, who suffered for it at the stake. Under the
Restoration it was again saved, and the errors which it had once more
committed in the hour of political triumph were once more redeemed by
martyrs of the same class, whose sufferings in the noisome and
pestilential prisons of that day were probably not much less severe than
the pangs of those who died by fire. Both in the Marian and in the
Restoration martyrs of Protestantism there was no doubt much that was
irrational and unattractive; yet the record of their services to
humanity remains, and will remain; let the free-thought of modern times,
for which their self-devoting loyalty to such truth as they knew made
way, be grateful or ungrateful to them as it will.

The relations of Nonconformity, with which we must couple Scotch
Presbyterianism, its partner in fundamental doctrine, its constant ally
in the conflict, and fellow-sufferer in the hour of adversity, to
English religion, morality, industry, education, philanthropy, science,
and to the English civilization in general, would be a most important
and instructive chapter in English history, but we are hardly called
upon to attempt to write it in refutation of jocose charges of
"hideousness" and "immense ennui." A sufficient answer to such quips and
cranks will be found, we believe, within the same covers with Mr.
Arnold's "Falkland," in the shape of an article on the Pulpit, by Mr.
Baldwin Brown, which in tone and culture appears to us a fit companion
for any other paper in the journal.

That Nonconformity has been political is true. Fortunately for the
liberties of England it has had to struggle for civil right in order to
obtain religious freedom. No doubt in the course of the conflict it has
contracted a certain gloominess of character, and shown an unamiable
side. Treat men with persistent and insolent injustice, strip them of
their rights as citizens, put on them a social brand, compel them to pay
for the maintenance of the pulpits from which their religion is
assailed, and you will run a very great risk of souring their tempers.
But without rehearsing disagreeable details, we may say generally that
whoever should undertake to prove that the Established Church had not
been, from the hour of her birth down to the last general election, at
least as political as the Free Churches, and at least as responsible for
the evils which political religion has brought upon the nation, would
show considerable confidence in his powers of dealing with history.
Could he find a parallel on the side of the Established Church to the
magnanimous loyalty to national interests shown by Nonconformists, in
rejecting the bribe offered them by James II., and supporting their
persecutors against an illegal toleration? Could he find a parallel on
the side of the Nonconformists to the conduct of the Established Church,
in turning round, the moment the victory had been won by Nonconformist
aid, and recommencing the persecution of the Nonconformists?

We fully agree with Mr. Arnold, however, in thinking that political
Nonconformity is an evil. There are two known modes of getting rid of
it--the Spanish Inquisition and religious equality. Mr. Arnold seems to
think that there is yet a third--general submission, in matters
theological and ecclesiastical, to the gentle sway of Beau Nash.

Religious equality in the United States may not be perfect unity, it may
not be the height of culture or of grace, but at all events it is peace.
Ultramontanism there, as everywhere else, is aggressive, and a source of
disturbance; and, on the other hand, in the struggle against slavery,
political and religious elements were inevitably intermingled, but as a
rule politics are kept perfectly clear of religion. Saving in the case
of Roman Catholicism, we cannot call to mind a single instance of a
serious appeal in an election to sectarian feeling. Much as we have
heard of the two candidates for the Presidency, we could not at this
moment tell to what Church either of them belongs. Where no Church is
privileged, there can be no cause for jealousy. The Churches dwell side
by side, without disturbing the State with any quarrels; they are all
alike loyal to the government; they unite in supporting a system of
popular education which generally includes a certain element of
unsectarian religion, they combine for social and philanthropic objects;
they testify, by their common celebration of national thanksgivings and
fasts their unity at all events as portions of the same Christian
nation. So far as we know, controversy between them is very rare; there
is more of it within the several Churches between their own more
orthodox and more liberal members. In none does it rage more violently
than in the Episcopal Church, though, under religious equality,
irreconcilable disagreement on religious questions leads to seccession,
not to mutual lawsuits and imprisonments.

Mr. Arnold says in praise of Falkland that "he was profoundly serious."
We presume he means not only that Falkland treated great questions in a
serious way, without unseasonable quizzing, but that he was, in the
words quoted from Clarendon in the next sentence, "a precise lover of
truth, and superior to all possible temptations for its violation." The
temptations, we presume, would have included those of taste or fancy, as
well as those of the more obvious kind; and Falkland's paramount regard
for truth would have extended to all his fellow-men as well as to
himself and his own intellectual circle. He would never, we are
confident, have advised any human being to separate religion from truth,
he would never have suffered himself to intimate that truth was the
property of a select circle, while "poetry" was good enough for the
common people, he would never have encouraged thousands of clergymen,
educated men with sensitive consciences, to go on preaching to their
flocks from the pulpit, on grounds of social convenience, doctrines
which they repudiated in the study, and derided in the company of
cultivated men, he would never have exhorted people to enter from
aesthetic considerations a spiritual society of which, in the same
breath, he proclaimed the creeds to be figments, the priesthood to be an
illusion, the sacred narratives to be myths, and the Triune God to be a
caricature of Lord Shaftesbury multiplied by three. If he had done so,
and if his propagandism had been successful, we suspect he would soon
have produced an anarchy, not only religious but social, compared with
which the most chaotic periods of the Revolution would have been harmony
and order. In the days of the Antonines, to which Gibbon looks back so
wistfully, opinion had little influence; the organic forces of society
were of a more primitive and a coarser kind. In modern times if a writer
could succeed in separating truth from religion, he would shake the
pillars of the moral and social as well as the intellectual world.