Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

as was William Godwin, and Wilkes's debts were as naturally and inevitably paid by someone else as were Godwin's; but when Trevelyan alludes softly to his 'unambitious standard of solvency,' this sordid detail becomes unexpectedly pleasurable. So easily are transgressions pardoned, if they provoke the shadow of a smile.

Lord Rosebery's Napoleon: the Last Phase is a work nobly conceived and admirably executed; but its impelling motive is an austere resolve to make what amends a single Englishman can make for an ungenerous episode in English history. Its sympathy for a fallen foe bears no likeness to the sympathy which impelled Théodore de Banville, broken in health and hope by the siege of Paris, to write a lyric in memory of a young Prussian officer, a mere boy, who was found dead on the field, with a blood-stained volume of Pindar in his tunic. Lord Rosebery's book is written with a proud sadness, a stern indignation, eminently fitted to its subject; but he is not so much kind as just. Napoleon is too vast a figure to be approached with benevolence. It is true, as Mr. Wells asserts, that, had he been unselfish and conscientious, he would never have conquered Europe; but only Mr. Wells is prepared to say that a lack of these qualities won him renown. He shares the lack with Wilhelm the Second, who has had neither an Austerlitz nor a Waterloo.

II

There is a wide assortment of unpopular characters whose company it would be very instructive to keep. They belong to all ages, countries, and creeds. Spain alone offers us three splendid examples the Duke of Alva, Cardinal Ximenez, and Philip the Second. Alva, like the Corsair, possessed one virtue, which was a more valuable virtue than the Corsair's, but brings him in less

credit, because the object of his unswerving loyalty and devotion was not a guileless lady, but a sovereign, less popular, if possible, than himself. Cardinal Ximenez, soldier, statesman, scholar, priest, ascetic, author, and educator, was also Grand Inquisitor, and this fact alone seems to linger in the minds of men. That, for his day, he was a moderate, avails him little. That he made a point of protecting scholars and professors from the troublesome interference of the Inquisition ought to avail him a great deal. It might were it better known. There is a play of Sardou's in which he is represented as concentrating all the deadly powers of his office against the knowledge which he most esteemed. This is the way the drama educates.

And Philip? It would be a big piece of work to win for Philip even a partial recognition of his moderate merits. The hand of history has dealt heavily with him, and romance has preyed upon his vitals. In fact, history and romance are undistinguishable when they give free play to the moral indignation he inspires. It is not enough to accuse him of the murder of the son whom he hated (though not more heartily than George the Second hated the Prince of Wales): they would have us understand that he probably poisoned the brother whom he loved. 'Don John's ambitions had become troublesome, and he ceased to live at an opportune moment for Philip's peace of mind,' is the fashion in which Gayarré insinuates his suspicions; and Gayarré's narrative - very popular in my youth-was recommended to the American public by Bancroft, who, I am convinced, never read it. Had he penetrated to the eleventh page, where Philip is alluded to as the Christian Tiberius, or to the twentieth, where he is compared to an Indian idol, he would have known that, whatever the book might be, it was not history, and that,

as an historian, it ill became him to tell left him helpless to face the essential reinnocent Americans to read it.

But how were they to be better informed? Motley will not even allow that Philip's fanatical devotion to his church was a sincere devotion. He accuses him of hypocrisy, which is like accusing Cromwell of levity, or Burke of Jacobinism. Prescott has a fashion of turning the King's few amiabilities, as, for example, his tenderness for his third wife, Isabella of France, into a suggestion of reproach. 'Well would it be for the memory of Philip, could the historian find no heavier sin to lay to his charge than his treatment of Isabella.' Well would it be for all of us, could the recording angel lay no heavier charge to our account than our legitimate affections. The Prince of Orange, it is true, charged Philip with murdering both wife and son; but that was merely a political argument. He would as soon have charged him with the murder of his father, had the Emperor not been safely isolated at Yuste; and Philip, in return, banned the Prince of Orange - a brave and wise ruler as 'an enemy of the human race.'

Twenty-four years ago, an Englishman who was by nature distrustful of popular verdicts, and who had made careful studies of certain epochs of Spanish history, ventured to paint Philip in fresh colors. Mr. Martin Hume's monograph shows us a cultivated gentle man, with a correct taste in architecture and art, sober, abstemious, kind to petitioners, loyal and affectionate to his friends, generous to his soldiers and sailors - a man beloved by his own household, and reverenced by his subjects, to whom he brought nothing but misfortune. The book makes melancholy reading because Philip's politica! sins were also political blunders, his mad intolerance was a distortion, rather than a rejection, of conscience, and his inconceivable rigidity

adjustments of life. 'I could not do otherwise than I have done,' he said with piercing sincerity, though the world should fall in ruins around me.'

Now what befell Mr. Hume, who wrote history in this fashion, with no more liking for Philip than for Elizabeth or the Prince of Orange, but with a natural desire to get within the purlieus of truth? Certain empty honors were conferred upon him: a degree from Cambridge, membership in a few societies, the privilege of having some letters printed after his name. But the University of Glasgow and the University of Liverpool stoutly refused to give him the chairs of history and Spanish. He might know more than most men on these subjects, but they did not want their students exposed to new impressions. The good old way for them. Mr. Hume, being a reader, may have recalled in bitterness of spirit the words of the acute and unemotional Sully, who had scant regard for Catholicism (though the Huguenots tried him sorely), and none at all for Spain; but sho said, in his balanced, impersonal w that Philip's finer qualities, his pate nee piety, fortitude, and single-mindedness, were all alike 'lost on the vulgar.'

[ocr errors]

Lucrezia Borgia is less availab for our purpose, because the image ar Lucrezia, though not precisely beli, is more popular in her way than the r Lucrezia could ever hope to be. In the matter of pleasantness,' says Lufat, 'truth is far surpassed by falsehood: and never has it been more agree overshadowed than in this fragme Italian history. We really could t bear to lose the Lucrezia of romance. She has done fatigue duty along every line of iniquity. She has specialized in all of the seven deadly sins. On Rossetti's canvas, in Donizetti's opera, in Victor Hugo's play, in countless poems and stories and novels, she has erred

exhaustively for our entertainment. The idea of an attractive young woman poisoning her supper guests is one which the world will not lightly let go.

And what is offered in return? Only the dull statements of people who chanced to know the lady, and who considered her a model wife and duchess, a little over-anxious about the education of her numerous children, but kind to the poor, generous to artists, and pitiful to Jews. 'She is graceful, modest, lovable, decorous, and devout,' wrote Johannes Lucas from Rome to Ercole, the old Duke of Ferrara. 'She is beautiful and good, gentle and amiable,' echoed the Chevalier Bayard years later. Were we less avid for thrills, we might like to think of this young creature, snatched at twenty-one from the maelstrom of Rome, where she had been 'a pawn in the game of politics, and placed in a secure and splendid home. The Lucrezia of romance would have found the court of Ferrara intolerably dull. The Lucrezia of history took to dullness as a duck to water. She was a sensible, rather than a brilliant woman, fully alive to the duties and dignities of her position, and well aware that respectability is a strong card to play in a vastly disreputable world.

There was a time when Robespierre and Marat made a high bid for unpopularity. Even those who clearly understood the rehabilitation of man in the French Revolution found little to say for its chosen instruments, whose purposes were high, but whose methods were open to reproach. Of late, however, a certain weariness has been observable in men's minds when these reformers are in question, a reluctance to expand with any emotion where they are concerned. M. Lauzanne is, indeed, by way of thinking that the elemental Clemenceau closely resembles the elemental Robespierre; but this is not a serious valuation; it is letting picturesque

[blocks in formation]

The thoroughly modern point of view is that Robespierre and Marat were ineffective-not without ability in their respective lines, but unfitted for the parts they played. Marat's turn of mind was scientific (our own Benjamin Franklin found him full of promise). Robespierre's turn of mind was legal; he would have made an acute and successful lawyer. The Revolution came along and ruined both these lives, for which we are expected to be sorry. M. Lauzanne does not go so far as to say that the great war ruined Clemenceau's life. The 'Tiger' was seventy-three when the Germans marched into Belgium. Had he been content to spend all his years teaching in a girls' school, he might (though I am none too sure of it) have been a gentler and a better man. But France was surely worth the price he paid. A lifeboat is not expected to have the graceful lines of a gondola.

'Almost everybody,' says Stevenson, 'can understand and sympathize with an admiral, or a prize-fighter'; which genial sentiment is less contagious now than when it was uttered, thirty years ago. A new type of admiral has presented itself to the troubled consciousness of men, a type unknown to Nelson, unsuspected by Farragut, unsung by Newbolt. In robbing the word of its ancient glory, Tirpitz has robbed us of an emotion we can ill afford to lose. 'The traditions of sailors,' says Mr. Shane Leslie, 'have been untouched by the lowering of ideals which has invaded every other class and profession.' The truth of his words was brought home to readers by the behavior of the British merchant marine, peaceful, poorly paid men, who in the years of peril went out unflinchingly, and as a matter of course, to meet their duty and their death." Many and varied are the transgressions

of seafaring men; but we have hitherto been able to believe them sound in their nobler parts. We should like to cherish this simple faith, and, though alienated from prize-fighters by the narrowness of our civic and social code, to retain our sympathy for admirals. It cannot be that their fair fame will be forever smirched by the tactics of a man who ruined the government he served.

The function of criticism is presumably to clear our mental horizon, to get us within close range of the criticized. It recognizes moral as well as intellectual issues; but it differentiates them. When Emerson said, 'Goethe can never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to pure truth, but to truth for the sake of culture,' he implied that truth, besides being a better thing than culture, was also a more lovable thing, which is not the case. It takes temerity to love Goethe; but there are always men-young, keen, speculative, beauty loving men, to whom he is inexpressibly dear because of the vistas he opens, the thoughts he releases, the 'inward

freedom' which is all he claimed to give. It takes no less temerity to love Emerson, and he meant that it should be so, that we should climb high to reach him. He is not lovable as Lamb is lovable, and he would not have wanted to be. A man who all his life repelled unwelcome intimacies had no desire to surrender his memory to the affection of every idle reader.

It is such a sure thing to appeal from intelligence to conscience, from the trouble involved in understanding to the ease with which judgment is passed, that critics may be pardoned their frequent transcursions. Yet problems of conduct are just as puzzling as problems of intellect. That is why Mr. Stevenson pronounced a sneaking kindness to be 'instructive.' He offered it as a road to knowledge rather than as a means of enjoyment. Not that he was unaware of the pleasures which follow in its wake. He knew the world up and down well enough to be thankful that he had never lost his taste for bad company.

SOLILOQUY FOR A THIRD ACT

BY CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

WHAT is this sullen curious interval

Between the happy Thought, the languid Act?

What is this dull paralysis of Will

That lets the fatal days drift by like dreams? Of the mind's dozing splendors what remains? What is this Now I utter to you here?

This Now, for great men dead, is golden Future; For happier souls to come, conjectured Past.

Men love and praise the Past the only thing
In all the great commodity of life

That grows and grows, shining and heaping up
And endlessly compounds beneath their hands:
Richer we are in Time with every hour,

But in nought else. The Past! I love the Past -
Stand off, O Future, keep away from me!

Yet some there are, great thoughtless active souls,
Can use the volvant circle of the year

Like a child's hoop, and flog it gleefully
Along the downward slope of busy days;
But some, less lucky.

What wretch invented Time and calendars
To torture his weak wits, to probe himself
As a man tongues a tender concave tooth?
See, all men bear this secret cicatrix,
This navel mark where we were ligatured
To great Eternity; and so they have

This knot of Time-sense in their angry hearts.

So must I die, and pass to Timeless nothing?
It will not, shall not, cannot, must not be!
I'll print such absolute identity
Upon these troubled words, that finding them
In some old broken book (long, long away),
The startled reader cries, Here was a Voice
That had a meaning, and outrode the years!

« AnteriorContinua »