NEIGHBOURS OF OURS: Scenes of East End Life.
IN THE VALLEY OF TOPHET: Scenes of Black Country Life.
THE THIRTY DAYS' WAR: Scenes in the Greek and Turkish War of 1897.
LADYSMITH: a Diary of the Siege.
CLASSIC GREEK LANDSCAPE AND ARCHITECTURE: Text to John Fulleylove's Pictures of Greece.
THE PLEA OF PAN.
BETWEEN THE ACTS: Scenes in the Author's Experience.
ON THE OLD ROAD THROUGH FRANCE TO FLORENCE: French Chapters to Hallam Murray's Pictures.
BOOKS AND PERSONALITIES: a volume of Criticism.
A MODERN SLAVERY: an Investigation of the Slave System in Angola and the Islands of San Thomé and Principe.
THE DAWN IN RUSSIA: Scenes in the Revolution of 1905-1906.
THE NEW SPIRIT IN INDIA: Scenes during the Unrest of 1907-1908.
ESSAYS IN FREEDOM.
THE GROWTH OF FREEDOM: a Summary of the History of Democracy.
When writers are so different, it is queer that every age should have a distinguishing spirit. Each writer is as different in "style" as in look, and his words reveal him just as the body reveals the soul, blazoning its past or its future without possibility of concealment. Paint a face, no matter how delicately or how thick; the very paint—the very choice of colours red or white—betrays the nature lurking beneath it, and no amount of artifice or imitation in a writer can obscure the secret of self. Artifice and imitation reveal the finikin or uncertain soul as surely as deliberate bareness reveals a conscious austerity. Except, perhaps, in mathematics, there seems no escape from this revelation. I am told that even in the "exact sciences" there is no escape; even in physics the exposition is a matter of imagination, of personality, of "style."
Next to mathematics and the exact sciences, I suppose, Bluebooks and leading articles are taken as representing truth in the most absolute and impersonal manner. We appeal to Bluebooks as confidently as to astronomers, assuming that their statements will be impersonally true, just as the curve of a comet will be the same for the Opposition as for the Government, for Anarchists as for Fabians. Yet what a difference may be detected in Bluebooks on the selfsame subject, and what an exciting hide-and-seek for souls we may there enjoy! Behind one we catch sight of the cautiously official mind, obsequious to established power, observant of accepted fictions, contemptuous of zeal, apprehensive of trouble, solicitous for the path of least resistance. Behind another we feel the stirring spirit that no promotion will subdue, pitiless to abomination, untouched by smooth excuses, regardless of official sensibilities, and untamed to comfortable routine, which, in his case, will probably be short.
Or take the leading article: hardly any form of words would appear less personal. It is the abstract product of what the editor wants, what the proprietor wants, what the Party wants, and what the readers want, just flavoured sometimes with the very smallest suspicion of what the writer wants. And yet, in leaders upon the same subject and in the same paper, what a difference, again! Peruse leaders for a week, and in the week following, with as much certainty as if you saw the animals emerging from the Ark, you will be able to say, "Here comes the laboured Ox, here the Wild Ass prances, here trips the Antelope with fairy footfall, here the Dromedary froths beneath his hump; there soars the Crested Screamer, there bolts the circuitous Hare, there old Behemoth wallows in the ooze, and there the swivel-eyed Chameleon clings along the fence."
If even the writers of Bluebooks and leading articles are thus as distinguishable as the animals which Noah had no difficulty in sorting into couples, such writers as poets, essayists, and novelists, who have no limit imposed upon their distinction, are likely to be still more distinct. Indeed, we find it so, for their work needs no signature, since the "style"—their way of looking at things—reveals it. And yet, though it is only the sum of all these separate personalities so diverse and distinct, each age or generation possesses a certain "style" of its own, unconsciously revealing a kind of general personality. Everyone knows it is as unnecessary to date a book as a church or a candlestick, since church and candlestick and book always bear the date written on the face. The literature of the last three or four generations, for instance, has been distinguished by Rebellion as a "style." Rebellion has been the characteristic expression of its most vital self.
It has been an age of rebels in letters as in life. Of course, acquiescent writers have existed as well, just as in the Ark (to keep up the illustration) vegetarians stood side by side with carnivors, and hoofs were intermixed with claws. The great majority have, as usual, supported traditional order, have eulogised the past or present, and been, not only at ease in their generation, but enraptured at the vision of its beneficent prosperity. Such were the writers and orators whom their contemporaries hailed as the distinctive spokesmen of a happy and glorious time, leaping and bounding with income and population. But, on looking back, we see their contemporaries were entirely mistaken. The people of vital power and prolonged, far-reaching influence—the "dynamic" people—have been the rebels. Wordsworth (it may seem strange to include that venerable figure among rebels, but so long as he was more poetic than venerable he stood in perpetual rebellion against the motives, pursuits, and satisfactions of his time)—Wordsworth till he was forty-five, Byron all his short life, Newman, Carlyle, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin—among English writers those have proved themselves the dynamic people. There are many others, and many later; but we need recall only these few great names, far enough distant to be clearly visible. It was they who moved the country, shaking its torpor like successive earthquakes. Risen against the conceit of riches, and the hypocrisies of Society, against unimpassioned and unimaginative religion, against ignoble success and the complacent economics that hewed mankind into statistics to fit their abstractions—one and all, in spite of their variety or mutual hostility, they were rebels, and their personality expressed itself in rebellion. That was the common characteristic of their "style."
In other parts of Europe, from Faust, which opened the nineteenth century, onward through Les Miserables to The Doll's House and Resurrection, it was the same. As, in political action, Russia hardly ceased to rebel, France freed herself three times, Ireland gave us the line of rebels from Robert Emmet to Michael Davitt, and all rebellion culminated in Garibaldi, so the most vital spirits in every literature of Europe were rebels. Perhaps it is so in all the greatest periods of word and deed. For examples, one could point rapidly to Euripides, Dante, Rabelais, Milton, Swift, Rousseau—men who have few attributes in common except greatness and rebellion. But, to limit ourselves to the familiar period of the last three or four generations, the words, thoughts, and actions most pregnant with dynamic energy have been marked with one mark. Rebellion has been the expression of a century's personality.
Of course, it is very lamentable. Otium divos—the rebel, like the storm-swept sailor, cries to heaven for tranquillity. It is not the hardened warrior, but only the elegant writer who, having never seen bloodshed, clamours to shed blood. All rebels long for a peace in which it would be possible to acquiesce, while they cultivated their minds and their gardens, employing the shining hour upon industry and intellectual pursuits. "I can say in the presence of God," cried Cromwell, in the last of his speeches, "I can say in the presence of God, in comparison with whom we are but poor creeping ants upon the earth,—I would have been glad to have lived under my woodside, to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than undertaken such a Government as this." Every rebel is a Quietist at heart, seeking peace and ensuing it, willing to let the stream of time glide past without his stir, dreading the onset of indignation's claws, stopping his ears to the trumpet-call of action, and always tempted to leave vengeance to Him who has promised to repay. If reason alone were his guide, undisturbed by rage he would enjoy such pleasure as he could clutch, or sit like a Fakir in blissful isolation, contemplating the aspect of eternity under which the difference between a mouse and a man becomes imperceptible. But the age has grown a skin too sensitive for such happiness. "For myself," said Goethe, in a passage I quote again later in this book, "For myself, I am happy enough. Joy comes streaming in upon me from every side. Only, for others, I am not happy." So it is that the Hound of another's Hell gives us no rest, and we are pursued by Furies not our own.
In spite of the longing for tranquillity, then, we cannot confidently hope that rebellion will be less the characteristic of the present generation than of the past. It is true, we are told that, in this country at all events, the necessity for active and political rebellion is past. However much a man may detest the Government, he is now, in a sense, governed with his own consent, since he is free to persuade his fellow-citizens that the Government is detestable, and, as far as his vote goes, to dismiss his paid servants in the Ministry and to appoint others. Such securities for freedom are thought to have made active and political rebellion obsolete. This appears to be proved even by the increasingly rebellious movement among women, as unenfranchised people, excluded from citizenship and governed without consent. For women are in rebellion only because they possess none of those securities, and the moment that the securities are ensured them, their rebellion ceases. It has only arisen because they are compelled to pay for the upkeep of the State (including the upkeep of the statesmen) and to obey laws which interfere increasingly more and more with their daily life, while they are allowed no voice in the expenditure or the legislation. Whence have originated, not only tangible and obvious hardships, but those feelings of degradation, as of beings excluded from privileges owing to some inferiority supposed inherent—those feelings of subjection, impotence, and degradation which, more even than actual hardships, kindle the spirit to the white-hot point of rebellion.
This democratic rising against a masculine oligarchy ceases when the cause is removed, and the cause is simple. Similarly, the revolts of nationalism against Imperial power, though the motives are more complicated, usually cease at the concession of self-government. But even if these political and fairly simple motives to rebellion are likely soon to become obsolete in our country and Empire, other and vaguer rebellious forms, neither nationalist nor directly political, appear to stand close in front of us, and no one is yet sure what line of action they will follow. Their line of action is still obscure, though both England and Europe have felt the touch of general or sympathetic strikes, and of "sabotage," or wilful destruction of property rather than life—the method advocated by Syndicalists and Suffragettes to rouse the sleepy world from indifference to their wrongs. In this collection of essays, contributed during the last year or two, as occasion arose, to the Nation and other periodicals, I have included some descriptions of the causes likely to incite people to rebellion of this kind. Such causes, I mean, as the inequality that comes from poverty alone—the physical unfitness or lack of mental opportunity that is due only to poverty. Those things make happiness impossible, for they frustrate the active exercise of vital powers, and give life no scope. During a generation or so, people have looked to the Government to mitigate the oppression of poverty, but some different appeal now seems probable. For many despair of the goodwill or the power of the State, finding little in it but hurried politicians, inhuman officials, and the "experts" who docket and label the poor for "institutional treatment," with results shown in my example of a workhouse school.
The troubling and persistent alarum of rebellion calls from many sides, and as instances of its call I have introduced mention of various rebels, whether against authority or custom. I have once or twice ventured also into those twilit regions where the spirit itself stands rebellious against its limits, and questions even the ultimate insane triumph of flesh and circumstance, closing its short-lived interlude. The rebellion may appear to be vain, but when we consider the primitive elements of life from which our paragon of animals has ascended, the mere attempt at rebellion is more astonishing than the greatest recorded miracle, and since man has grown to think that he possesses a soul, there is no knowing what he may come to.
I have added a few other scenes from old times and new, just for variety, or just to remind ourselves that, in the midst of all chaos and perturbation and rage, it is possible for the world to go upon its way, preserving, in spite of all, its most excellent gift of sanity.
Before the hustling days of ice and of "cutters" rushing to and fro between Billingsgate and our fleets of steam-trawlers on the Dogger Bank, most sailing trawlers and long-line fishing-boats were built with a large tank in their holds, through which the sea flowed freely. Dutch eel-boats are built so still, and along the quays of Amsterdam and Copenhagen you may see such tanks in fishing-boats of almost every kind. Our East Coast fishermen kept them chiefly for cod. They hoped thus to bring the fish fresh and good to market, for, unless they were overcrowded, the cod lived quite as contentedly in the tanks as in the open sea. But in one respect the fishermen were disappointed. They found that the fish arrived slack, flabby, and limp, though well fed and in apparent health.
Perplexity reigned (for the value of the catch was much diminished) until some fisherman of genius conjectured that the cod lived only too contentedly in those tanks, and suffered from the atrophy of calm. The cod is by nature a lethargic, torpid, and plethoric creature, prone to inactivity, content to lie in comfort, swallowing all that comes, with cavernous mouth wide open, big enough to gulp its own body down if that could be. In the tanks the cod rotted at ease, rapidly deteriorating in their flesh. So, as a stimulating corrective, that genius among fishermen inserted one catfish into each of his tanks, and found that his cod came to market firm, brisk, and wholesome. Which result remained a mystery until his death, when the secret was published and a strange demand for catfish arose. For the catfish is the demon of the deep, and keeps things lively.
This irritating but salutary stimulant in the tank (to say nothing of the myriad catfishes in the depths of ocean!) has often reminded me of what the Lord says to Mephistopheles in the Prologue to Faust. After observing that, of all the spirits that deny, He finds a knave the least of a bore, the Lord proceeds:
Is not the parallel remarkable? Man's activity, like the cod's, turns too readily to slumber; he is much too fond of unconditioned ease; and so the Lord gives him a comrade like a catfish, to stimulate, rouse, and drive to creation, as a devil may. There sprawls man, by nature lethargic and torpid as a cod, prone to inactivity, content to lie in comfort swallowing all that comes, with wide-open mouth, big enough to gulp himself down, if that could be. There he sprawls, rotting at ease, and rapidly deteriorating in body and soul, till one little demon of the spiritual deep is inserted into his surroundings, and makes him firm, brisk, and wholesome in a trice—"in half a jiffy," as people used to say.
"Der reizt und wirkt"—the words necessarily recall a much older parable than the catfish—the parable of the little leaven inserted in a piece of dough until it leavens the whole lump by its "working," as cooks and bakers know. Goethe may have been thinking of that. Leaven is a sour, almost poisonous kind of stuff, working as though by magic, moving in a mysterious way, causing the solid and impracticable dough to upheave, to rise, expand, bubble, swell, and spout like a volcano. To all races there has been something devilish, or at least demonic, in the action of leaven. It is true that in the ancient parable the comparison lay between leaven and the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven was like a little leaven that leavens the whole lump, and Goethe says that Mephisto, one of the Princes of Evil, also works like that. But whether we call the leaven a good or evil thing makes little difference. The effect of its mysterious powers of movement and upheaval is in the end salutary. It works upon the lump just as the catfish, that demon of the deep, preserves the lumpish cod from the apathy and degeneration of comfort, and as Mephisto, that demon of the world, acts upon the lethargy of mankind working within him, stimulating, driving to production as a devil may.
"A society needs to have a ferment in it," said Professor Sumner of Yale, in his published essays. Sometimes, he said, the ferment takes the form of an enthusiastic delusion or an adventurous folly; sometimes merely of economic opportunity and hope of luxury; in other ages frequently of war. And, indeed, it was of war that he was writing, though himself a pacific man, and in all respects a thinker of obstinate caution. A society needs to have a ferment in it—a leaven, a catfish, a Mephisto, the queer, unpleasant, disturbing touch of the kingdom of heaven. Take any period of calm and rest in the life of the world or the history of the arts. Take that period which great historians have agreed to praise as the happiest of human ages—the age of the Antonines. How benign and unruffled it was! What bland and leisurely culture could be enjoyed in exquisite villas beside the Mediterranean, or in flourishing municipalities along the Rhone! Many a cultivated and comfortable man must have wished that reasonable peace to last for ever. The civilised world was bathed in the element of calm, the element of gentle acquiescence. All looked so quiet, so imperturbable; and yet all the time the little catfish of Christianity (or the little leaven, if you will) was at its work, irritating, disturbing, stimulating with salutary energy to upheaval, to rebellion, to the soul's activity that saves from bland and reasonable despair. Like a fisherman over-anxious for the peace of the cod in his tank, the philosophic Emperor tried to stamp the catfish down, and hoped to preserve a philosophic quietude by the martyrdom of Christians in those flourishing municipalities on the Rhone. Of course he failed, as even the most humane and philosophic persecutors usually fail, but had he succeeded, would not the soul of Europe have degenerated into a flabbiness, lethargy, and desperate peace?
Take history where you will, when a new driving force enters the world, it is a nuisance, a disturbing upheaval, a troubling agitation, a plaguey fish. Think how the tiresome Reformation disturbed the artists of Italy and Renaissance scholars; or how Cromwell disgusted the half-way moderates, how the Revolution jogged the sentimental theorists of France, how Kant shattered the Supreme Being of the Deists, and Byron set the conventions of art and life tottering aghast. Take it where you will, the approach of the soul's catfish is watched with apprehension and violent dislike, all the more because it saves from torpor. It saves from what Hamlet calls—
In the Futurist exhibition held in Sackville Street in 1912, one of the most notable pictures was called "Rebellion." The catalogue told us that it represented "the collision of two forces, that of the revolutionary element made up of enthusiasm and red lyricism against the force of inertia and the reactionary resistance of tradition." The picture showed a crowd of scarlet figures rushing forward in a wedge. Before them went successive wedge-shaped lines, impinging upon dull blue. They represented, we were told, the vibratory waves of the revolutionary element in motion. The force of inertia and the reactionary resistance of tradition were pictured as rows on rows of commonplace streets. The waves of the revolutionary element had knocked them all askew. Though they still stood firmly side by side to all appearance (to keep up appearances, as we say) they were all knocked aslant, "just as a boxer is bent double by receiving a blow in the wind."
We may be sure that inertia in all its monotonous streets does not like such treatment. It likes it no more than the plethoric cod likes the catfish close behind its tail. And it is no consolation either to inertia or cod to say that this disturbing element serves an ultimate good, rendering it alert, firm, and wholesome of flesh. However salutary, the catfish is far from popular among the placid residents of the tank, and it is fortunate that neither in tanks nor streets can the advisability of catfish or change be submitted to the referendum of the inert. In neither case would the necessary steps for advance in health and activity be adopted. To be sure, it is just possible to overdo the number of catfish in one tank. At present in this country, for instance, and, indeed, in the whole world, there seem to be more catfish than cod, and the resulting liveliness is perhaps a little excessive, a little "jumpy." But in the midst of all the violence, turmoil, and upheaval, it is hopeful to remember that of the deepest and most salutary change which Europe has known it was divinely foretold that it would bring not peace but a sword.
For certain crimes mankind has ordained penalties of exceptional severity, in order to emphasise a general abhorrence. In Rome, for example, a parricide, or the murderer of any near relation, was thrown into deep water, tied up in a sack together with a dog, a cock, a viper, and a monkey, which were probably symbols of his wickedness, and must have given him a lively time before death supervened. Similarly, the English law, always so careful of domestic sanctitude in women, provided that a wife who killed her husband should be dragged by a horse to the place of execution and burnt alive. We need not recall the penalties considered most suitable for the crime of religious difference—the rack, the fire, the boiling oil, the tearing pincers, the embrace of the spiky virgin, the sharpened edge of stone on which the doubter sat, with increasing weights tied to his feet, until his opinions upon heavenly mysteries should improve under the stress of pain. When we come to rebellion, the ordinance of English law was more express. In the case of a woman, the penalty was the same as for killing her husband—that crime being defined as "petty treason," since the husband is to her the sacred emblem of God and King. So a woman rebel was burnt alive as she stood, head, quarters, and all. But male rebels were specially treated, as may be seen from the sentence passed upon them until the reign of George III.[1] These were the words that Judge Jeffreys and Scroggs, for instance, used to roll out with enjoyable eloquence upon the dazed agricultural labourer before them:
"Why all this cookery?" once asked a Scottish rebel, quoted by Swift. But the sentence, with its confiding appeal to a higher Court than England's, was literally carried out upon rebels in this country for at least four and a half centuries. Every detail of it (and one still more disgusting) is recorded in the execution of Sir William Wallace, the national hero of Scotland, more generally known to the English of the time as "the man of Belial," who was executed at Tyburn in 1305.[2] The rebels of 1745 were, apparently, the last upon whom the full ritual was performed, and Elizabeth Gaunt, burnt alive at Tyburn in 1685 for sheltering a conspirator in the Rye House Plot, was the last woman up to now intentionally put to death in this country for a purely political offence. The long continuance of so savage a sentence is proof of the abhorrence in which the crime of rebellion has been held. And in many minds the abhorrence still subsists. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, for instance, one of our greatest authorities on criminal law, wrote in 1880:
Among ourselves the opinion of this high authority has slowly declined. No one supposed that Doctor Lynch, for instance, would be executed as a rebel for commanding the Irish Brigade that fought for the Boers during the South African War, though he was condemned to death by the highest Court in the kingdom. No Irish rebel has been executed for about a century, unless his offence involved some one's death. On the other hand, during the Boer War, the devastation of the country and the destruction of the farms were frequently defended on the ground that, after the Queen's proclamations annexing the two Republics, all the inhabitants were rebels; and some of the extreme newspapers even urged that for that reason no Boer with arms in his hand should be given quarter. On the strength of a passage in Scripture, Mr. Kipling, at the time, wrote a pamphlet identifying rebellion with witchcraft. A few Cape Boers who took up arms for the assistance of their race were shot without benefit of prisoners of war. And in India during 1907 and 1908 men of unblemished private character were spirited away to jail without charge or trial and kept there for months—a fate that could not have befallen any but political prisoners.
Outside our own Empire, I have myself witnessed the suppression of rebellions in Crete and Macedonia by the destruction of villages, the massacre of men, women, and children, and the violation of women and girls, many of whom disappeared into Turkish harems. And I have witnessed similar suppressions of rebellion by Russia in Moscow, in the Baltic Provinces, and the Caucasus, by the burning of villages, the slaughter of prisoners, and the violation of women. All this has happened within the last sixteen years, the worst part within nine and a half. Indeed, in Russia the punishments of exile, torture, and hanging have not ceased since 1905, though the death penalty has been long abolished there except for political offences. In the summer of 1909 I was also present during the suppression of the outbreak in Barcelona, which culminated in the execution of Señor Ferrer under a military Court.
From these recent events it is evident that Sir James Stephen's attitude towards rebellion is shared by many civilised governments. Belligerents—that is to say, subjects of one State engaged in war with another State—have now nominally secured certain rights under International Law. The first Hague Conference (1899) framed a "Convention with respect to the Laws and Customs of Wars on Land" which forbade the torture or cruel treatment of prisoners, the refusal of quarter, the destruction of private property, unless such destruction were imperatively demanded by the necessities of war, the pillage of towns taken by assault, disrespect to religion and family honour (including, I suppose, the honour of women and girls), and the infliction of penalties on the population owing to the acts of individuals for which it could not be regarded as collectively responsible.
In actual war this Convention is not invariably observed, as was seen at Tripoli in 1911, but in the case of rebellion there is no such Convention at all. I have known all those regulations broken with impunity, and in most cases without protest from the other Powers. Just as, under the old law of England, the rebel was executed with circumstances of special atrocity, so at the present time, under the name of crushing rebellion, men are tortured and flogged, no quarter is given, they are executed without trial, their private property is pillaged, their towns and villages are destroyed, their women violated, their children killed, penalties are imposed on districts owing to acts for which the population is not collectively responsible—and nothing said. That each Power is allowed to deal with its own subjects in its own way is becoming an accepted rule of international amenity. It was not the rule of Cromwell, nor of Canning, nor of Gladstone, but it has now been consecrated by the Liberal Government which came into power in 1906.
In the summer of 1909, it is true, the rule was broken. Mulai Hafid, Sultan of Morocco, was reported to be torturing his rebel prisoners according to ancestral custom, and rumours came that he had followed a French king's example in keeping the rebel leader, El Roghi, in a cage like a tame eagle, or had thrown him to the lions to be torn in pieces before the eyes of the royal concubines. Then the European Powers combined to protest in the name of humanity. It was something gained. But no great courage was required to rebuke the Sultan of Morocco, if England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, and Spain combined to do it; and his country was so desirable for its minerals, barley, and dates that a little courage in dealing with him might even prove lucrative in the end. When Russia treated her rebellious subjects with tortures and executions more horrible than anything reported from Morocco, the case was very different. Then alliances and understandings were confirmed, substantial loans were arranged in France and England, Kings and Emperors visited the Tsar, and the cannon of our fleet welcomed him to our waters amid the applause of our newspapers and the congratulations of a Liberal Government.
It is evident, then, that, in Sir James Stephen's words, subjects are in most countries still made to understand that to attack the existing state of society is equivalent to risking their own lives. Under our own rule, no matter what statesmen like Gladstone and John Morley have in past years urged in favour of the mitigation of penalties for political offences, such offences are, as a matter of fact, punished with special severity; unless, of course, the culprit is intimately connected with great riches, like Dr. Jameson, who was imprisoned as a first-class misdemeanant for the incalculable crime of making private war upon another State; or unless the culprit is intimately connected with votes, like Mr. Ginnell, the Irish cattle-driver, who was treated with similar politeness. Otherwise, until quite lately, even in this country we executed a political criminal with unusual pain. In India we recently kept political suspects imprisoned without charge or trial. And in England we have lately sentenced women to terms of imprisonment that certainly would never have been imposed for their offences on any but political offenders.
This exceptional severity springs from a primitive and natural conception of the State—- a conception most logically expressed by Hobbes of Malmesbury under the similitude of a "mortal God" or Leviathan, the almost omnipotent and unlimited source of authority.
Hobbes considered the object of this Covenant to be peace and common defence. "Without a State," he said, "the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." The preservation of the State was to him of transcendent importance.
Under such a system, it follows that rebellion is the worst of crimes. Hobbes calls it a war renewed—a renouncing of the Covenant. He was so terrified of it that he dwelt upon the danger of reading Greek and Roman history (probably having Plutarch and his praise of rebels most in mind)—"which venom," he says, "I will not doubt to compare to the biting of a mad dog." In all leaders of rebellion he found only three conditions—to be discontented with their own lot, to be eloquent speakers, and to be men of mean judgment and capacity (De Corpore Politico, II.). And as to punishment:
We may take Hobbes as the philosopher of the extreme idea of the State and the consequent iniquity of rebellion. His is the ideal of the Hive, in which the virgin workers devote their whole lives without complaint to the service of the Queen and her State-supported grubs, while the drones are mercilessly slaughtered as soon as one of them has fulfilled his rapturous but suicidal functions for the future swarm. This ideal found its highest human example in the Spartan State, which trained its men to have no private existence at all, and even to visit their own wives by stealth. But we find the ideal present in some degree among Central Africans when they bury valuable slaves and women alive with their chief; and among the Japanese when mothers kill themselves if their sons are prevented from dying for their country; and among the Germans when the drill-sergeant shouts his word of command.
In fact, all races and countries are disciples of Hobbes when they address the Head of the State as "Your Majesty" or "Your Excellence," when they decorate him with fur and feathers, and put a gold hat on his head and a gold walking-stick in his hand, and gird him with a sword that he never uses, and play him the same tune wherever he goes, and spread his platform with crimson though it is clean, and bow before him though he is dishonourable, and call him gracious though he is nasty-tempered, and august though he may be a fool. In the first instance, we go through all this make-believe because the Leviathan of the State is necessary for peace and self-defence, and without it our life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But we further endow the State with a personality we can almost see and handle, and we regard it as something that is able not only to protect our peace but to shed a reflected splendour on ourselves, giving us an importance not our own—just as schoolboys glory in their school, or Churchmen in their Church, or cricketers in their county, or fox-hunters in their pack of hounds.
It is this conception that makes rebellion so rare and so dangerous. In hives it seems never to occur. In rookeries, the rebels are pecked to death and their homes torn in pieces. In human communities we have seen how they are treated. Rebellion is the one crime for which there is no forgiveness—the one crime for which hanging is too good.
Why is it, then, that all the world loves a rebel? Provided he is distant enough in time and space, all the world loves a rebel. Who are the figures in history round whom the people's imagination has woven the fondest dreams? Are they not such rebels as Deborah and Judith[4] and Joan of Arc; as Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the Gracchi and Brutus, William Tell, William Wallace, Simon de Montfort, Rienzi, Wat Tyler, Jack Cade, Shan O'Neill, William the Silent, John Hampden and Pym, the Highlanders of the Forty-five, Robert Emmet and Wolf Tone and Parnell, Bolivar, John Brown of Harper's Ferry, Kossuth, Mazzini and Garibaldi, Danton, Victor Hugo, and the Russian revolutionists? These are haphazard figures of various magnitude, but all have the quality of rebellion in common, and all have been honoured with affectionate glory, romance, and even a mythology of worship.
So, too, the most attractive periods in history have been times of rebellion—the Reformation in Germany, the Revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, the Civil Wars in England, the War of Independence in America, the prolonged revolution in Russia. Within the last hundred years alone, how numerous the rebellions have been, as a rule how successful, and in every case how much applauded, except by the dominant authority attacked! We need only recall the French revolutions of 1832, 1848, and 1870 to 1871, including the Commune; the Greek War of Independence up to 1829; the Polish insurrections of 1830, 1863, and 1905; the liberation of the Danubian Principalities, 1858; of Bulgaria and Thessaly, 1878; of Crete, 1898; the revolution in Hungary, 1848; the restoration of Italy, 1849 to 1860; the revolution in Spain, 1868; the independence of the South American States, 1821 to 1825; the revolution in Russia, Finland, the Caucasus and Baltic Provinces, 1905; the revolution in Persia, 1907 to 1909; and the revolution of the Young Turks, 1908 to 1909. Among these we must also count the Nationalist movements in Ireland, Egypt, and India, as well as the present movement of women against the Government in our own country.
Under these various instances two distinct kinds of rebellion are obviously included—the rising of subject nationalities against a dominant power, as in Greece, Italy, the Caucasus, India, and Ireland; and the rising of subjects against their own Government, as in France, Russia, Persia, and Turkey, or in England in the case of the Suffragettes. It is difficult to say which kind is the more detested and punished with the greater severity by the central authority attacked. Was the Nationalist rising in the Caucasus or the Baltic Provinces suppressed with greater brutality than the almost simultaneous rising of Russian subjects in Moscow? I witnessed all three, and I think it was; chiefly because soldiers have less scruple in the slaughter and violation of people whose language they do not understand. Did our Government feel greater animosity towards the recent Indian movement or the Irish movement of thirty years ago than towards the rioters for the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867? I think they did. Vengeance upon external or Nationalist rebels is incited by racial antipathy. But, on the other hand, the outside world is more ready to applaud a Nationalist rebellion, especially if it succeeds, and we feel a more romantic affection for William Tell or Garibaldi than for Oliver Cromwell or Danton; I suppose because it is easier to imagine the splendour of liberty when a subject race throws off a foreign yoke.
So the history of rebellion involves us in a mesh of contradictions. Rebels have been generally regarded as deserving more terrible penalties than other criminals, yet all the world loves a rebel, at a distance. Nationalist rebellions are crushed with even greater ferocity than the internal rebellions of a State, and yet the leaders of Nationalist rebellions are regarded by the common world with a special affection of hero-worship. Obviously, we are here confronted with two different standards of conduct. On one side is the standard of Government, the States and Law, which denounces the rebel, and especially the Nationalist rebel, as the worst of sinners; on the other side we have the standard of the individual, the soul and liberty, which loves a rebel, especially a Nationalist rebel, and denies that he is a sinner at all.
Let us leave the Nationalist rebel, whose justification is now almost universally admitted (except by the dominant Power), even if he is unsuccessful, and consider only the rebel inside the State—the rebel against his own Leviathan—whose position is far more dubious. Job's Leviathan appears to have been a more fearsome and powerful beast than the elephant, but in India the elephant is taken as the symbol of wisdom, and when an Indian boy goes in for a municipal examination, he prays to the elephant-god for assistance. Now the ideal State of the elephant is the herd, and yet this herd of wisdom sometimes develops a rebel or "rogue" who seems to be striving after some fresh manner of existence and works terrible havoc among the elephantine conventions. Usually the herd combines to kill him and there is an end of the matter. Yet I sometimes think that the occasional and inexplicable appearance of the "rogue" at intervals during many thousand years may really have been the origin of that wisdom to which the Indians pray.
Similarly, mankind, which sometimes surpasses even the elephant in wisdom, has been continually torn between the idol of the Herd and the profanity of the rebel or Rogue, and it is perhaps through the rebel—the variation, as Darwin would call him—that man makes his advance. The rebel is what distinguishes our States and cities from the beehives and ant-heaps to which they are commonly compared. The progress of ants and bees appears to have been arrested. They seem to have developed a completely socialised polity thousands of years ago, perhaps before man existed, and then to have stopped—stopped dead, as we say. But mankind has never stopped. If a country's progress is arrested—if a people becomes simply conservative in habits, they may die slowly, like Egypt, or quickly, likes Sparta, but they die and disappear, unless inspired by new life, like Japan, or by revolution, like France and possibly Russia. For, as we are almost too frequently told, change is the law of human life.
And may not this be just the very reason we are seeking for—the very reason why all the world loves a rebel, at a distance? Perhaps the world unconsciously recognises in him a symbol of change, a symbol of the law of life. We may not like him very near us—not uncomfortably near, as we say. For most change is uncomfortable. When I was shut up for many weeks in a London hospital, I felt a shrinking horror of going out, as though my skin had become too tender for this rough world. After I had been shut up for four months in a siege, daily exposed to shells, bullets, fever, and starvation, I felt no relief when the relief came, but rather a dread of confronting the perils of ordinary life. So quickly does the curse of stagnation fall upon us. And in support of stagnation are always ranged the immense forces of Society, the prosperous, the well-to-do, the people who are content if to-morrow is exactly like to-day. In support of stagnation stands the power of every kind of government—the King who sticks to his inherited importance, the Lords who stick to their lands and titles, the experts who stick to their theories, the officials who stick to their incomes, routine, and leisure, the Members of Parliament who stick to their seats.
But even more powerful than all these forces in support of stagnation is the enormous host of those whose first thought is necessarily their daily bread—men and women who dare not risk a change for fear of to-morrow's hunger—people for whom the crust is too uncertain for its certainty to be questioned. We often ask why it is that the poor—the working-people—endure their poverty and perpetual toil without overwhelming revolt. The reason is that they have their eyes fixed on the evening meal, and for the life of them they dare not lose sight of it.
So the rebel need never be afraid of going too fast. The violence of inertia—the suction of the stagnant bog—is almost invincible. Like the horse, we are creatures of cast-iron habit. We abandon ourselves easily to careless acquiescence. We make much of external laws, and, like a mother bemused with torpid beer when she overlays her child, we stifle the law of the soul because its crying is such a nuisance. Like a new baby, a new thought is fractious, restless, and incalculable. It saps our strength; it gives us no peace; it exposes a wider surface to pain. There is something indecent, uncontrolled, and unconscionable about it. Our friends like it best when it is asleep, and they like us better when it is buried.
There is very little danger of rebellion going too far. The barriers confronting it are too solid, and the Idol of the Herd is too carefully enshrined. A perpetual rebellion of every one against everything would give us an insecure, though exciting, existence, and we are protected by man's disposition to obedience and his solid love of custom. Against the first vedettes of rebellion the army of routine will always muster, and it gathers to itself the indifferent, the startled cowards, the thinkers whose thought is finished, the lawyers whose laws are fixed—an innumerable host. They proceed to treat the rebels as we have seen. In all ages, rebellion has been met by the standing armies of permanence. If captured, it is put to the ordeal of fire and water, so as to try what stuff it is made of. Faith is rebellion's only inspiration and support, and a deal of faith is needed to resist the battle and the test. It was in thinking of the faith of rebels that an early Christian writer told of those who, having walked by faith, have in all ages been tortured, not accepting deliverance; and others have had trial of mockings and scourgings, and of bonds and imprisonment; they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword; they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented (of whom the world was not worthy); they wandered in deserts and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.[5] That is the test and the reward of faith. So strong is the grip of the Leviathan, so determined is mankind to allow no change in thought or life to survive if he can possibly choke it.
One of the most learned and inspiring of writers on political philosophy has said in a book published in 1910:
That sounds very simple. We should all like to agree with it. But under that apparently innocent sentence one of the most perplexing of human problems lies hidden: what are the rights of liberty, what are the limits of revolt? Only in a State of ideal anarchy can liberty be complete and revolt universal, because there would be nothing to revolt against. And anarchy, though it is the goal of every man's desire, seems still far away, being, indeed, the Kingdom of Heaven, which that God rules whose service is perfect freedom and which only angels are qualified to inhabit. For though the law of the indwelling spirit is the only law that ought to count, not many of us are so little lower than the angels as to be a law unto ourselves.