Kttfara, Nfttt fork BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENOOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 Cornell University Library PR 149.S7S43 1922 Social ideals in English letters, 3 1924 013 357 847 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013357847 ^oo&K bp QiSa D. Sntauer SOCIALISM AND CHARACTER. A LISTENER IN BABEL. THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT IN THE MOD- ERN ENGLISH POETS. SOCIAL IDEALS IN ENGLISH LETTERS. HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Boston and Nbw York SOCIAL IDEALS IN ENGLISH LETTEKS BY VIDA D. SCUDDER AUTHOB OP " THE LIFE OF THE SPIEIT IN THE MODEBN ENGLISH poets" New and Enlarged Edition BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Cije dSiibetsibt l^teee Cambtibse 1923 ^6 COPYEIGBT, 189S AND 1922, BY VIDA D. SCUDDER ALL BIliHTS RESERVED CAMBRirCB • MASSACHUSETTS PIUNTED IN THE U.S-A. TO MY MOTHBB H. L. S. AND MT PKIBITD L. H. S. CONTENTS FosEwosa • 1 PAKT I. THE ENGLAOT) OF OUR FOEEFATHEES. L WiuiiiAu LanoiiAnd and the Middle Ages . T II. Tim Utopia of Ses Thomas Mobe ... 46 m. The Age of . Jonaihai^ Swift .... 80 PART n. THE ENGLAND OF OUB FATHERS. I. OlTTLIKES 114 n. Social Pictubbs: Dickens and Thaokeeay . 128 m. The Awakening: "Sabtob Rbsaktus" . . 143 IV. The Indictment 157 V. The New Intuition 175 VT. Geobgb Eliot and the Social Conscience . 180 VII. A Glimpse op Ameeica 198 Vin. What to do: Accoeding to Cablxle . . 212 IX. What to do : Accoeding to Rcskin . . 217 X. What to do : Accobding to Aenold . . . 233 XI. Towabd Democracy 243 XII. Towaed Authobitt 261 XIII. The End op the Nineteenth Cbntuey . . 276 Conclusion: Twentieth Centuey .... 319 Index 351 SOCIAL IDEALS IN ENGLISH LETTERS FOREWOED This book is to consider English literature in its social aspect. It will study the imaginative ex- pression of some of the most interesting moments in the long struggle by which democracy and free- dom are slowly realizing themselves, and the earth is becoming in substantial sense the heritage of all the children of men. We are living to-day in one of the most dramatic periods of that great struggle. Year by year adds new episodes to its history both written and unwritten, and quickens in earnest minds the sense of the special responsibility borne by our generation toward its solution. To allow the social questions which preoccupy us to invade even our enjoyment of poetry, essays, and novels may seem uninviting and needless ; for many of us have a way of turning to books as an escape from life and its sorrows and puzzles. Yet if we are to dwell with pain and problem in considering the social bearing of some representa- tive English books, we are to dwell with beauty also. Great literature is always the record of some great struggle ; and it is wonderful testimony to life's essential blessedness that, no matter how 2 SOCIAL IDEALS IN ENGLISH LETTERS agonizing the struggle, it becomes a source of un- dying joy when translated into art. However strenuous the problems of life may be, however dark its issues, the world lingers on them with a pain that is delight, when once they are expressed by a noble artist. The fatal wrath of Achilles, the tortures of Dante's Francesca, the remorse of Macbeth, the sorrow of Lear, are records of expe- riences supremely terrible ; and they are numbered among the chief treasures of the race. Therefore we need not shrink from watching, in some few phases of our literature, the expression of social life with its anomalies, and social ideals with their wistfulness, or even, at times, of social despair. For "art sees as God sees," and is therefore always calm, blending all phases of fear and strife into a lovely whole. This it does, not from heartlessness, but from its recognition of eternal values, and also from that mysterious com- pulsion which enables, yes, forces it, through har- mony of form, to subdue all discord of subject. And so it is good to look at the questions that beset us, at the wrongs that torment us, through their reflection in art. We shall not be hardened into carelessness by so looking. The better thought of our generation, signaled as it is by the growth of a great compassion, is in slight danger of indifference, or of aesthetic frivolity. Rather, we need to preserve our recognition of true values and proportions, our real as distinguished from our morbid delicacy of feeling, — in a word, our san- ity. This larger view, this purer sense, we are at FOREWORD 3 least helped to gain by looking at things that grieve and distress us, not only directly, but as they have been felt and rendered through noble art. ^ In earlier times, the struggle which literature records is chiefly individual. We see men subdu- ing the earth, facing their human foes, wrestling with supernatural terrors, seeking the love of wo- men. This is the aspect of literature which has interested people most ; nor will it ever — needless to say — be superseded. Yet as time goes on and the race grows older, another aspect becomes more and more evident. Literature is a series of social documents. It shows the exceptional individual contending with his environment ; it also shows, more and more as time goes on, in that very envi- ronment the expression of a larger life. The in- dividual becomes the type. At first he is the type of a phase of character, as Hamlet stands for all Hamlets ; later, and this is characteristic of the literature of our own day, he becomes the type of a class, or social group. The epic, the drama, and later the novel, reveal the collective experience of the nation from age to age. The lyric, with all its intimacy, gives us not only the private heart of the singer, but also the common heart of his peo- ple and his time. When the fervor of living has abated a little, so that men can pause to consider life, criticism appears, and accents, with a sharp- ness that no one can mistake, the characteristic qualities and defects of the general civilization around it. In all this literature, humanity itself 4 SOCIAL IDEALS IN ENGLISH LETTERS is the protagonist ; and its great fortunes, spiritual and material, appeal to the trained, though not to the untrained, imagination with mighty and un- rivaled power. Moreover, great books have a double value. They show life itself under various phases, and they also show the ideals which that life generates ; the present, and that higher yet unrealized truth, which the present ever suggests, toward which it ever moves. They speak to us with " the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come." And so, rendering alike the actual and that ideal in the actual which spurs to the future, they lead us to gain a sense of the lines of progress to be gained in no other way. We get absorbed in the mood and passion of the moment. But lit- erature gives us mood after mood of the human race, related, succeeding, advancing. One cannot watch the growth of conviction in any line with- out a certain sense of fatality, a consciousness that, while each individual thought seems to play in freedom, like each bird in the mysterious migra- tions of spring and autumn, there is yet an inexo- rable impulse carrying onward the whole flock of thoughts toward a distant land. Literature makes us feel this totality of impulse. Discussion helps to form faith, action helps perhaps still more. But while in confused days both are good, it is also good to look back, and watch the tendencies mani- fest in those imaginative men who, as Wordsworth said, rejoice more intensely than other men in the spirit of life that is in them. As we follow from FOREWORD 5 one generation to another the dreamers who are the truest prophets, we shall trace the gradual awakening of a social consciousness, bringing with it the perception of social problems and the crea- tion of social ideals ; and in this consciousness we may find a continued power of selection and of persistence from which many things concerning the future may be inferred. This splendid witness of literature to the organic character of human experience has been too much ignored. No one book can do more than glance at the rich subject. And any book which tries to do even as much as this must practice severe self- restraint in its choice of material. If it wishes to watch the social aspects of the literature of one country, as for instance of England, it must rig- idly resist the strong temptation to draw upon the abundant illustrations and contrasts offered by the literatures of other lands : it may not even indulge in more than an occasional glimpse at the parallel growth of social ideals, a growth at once so like and so unlike that of England, in our own Amer- ica. It must pass over whole periods with an al- lusion, and dismiss whole art-forms undiscussed. And yet even one book may show the possibili- ties of study. It may catch the reflection of social conditions and experiences at certain great epochs ; it may signal points of primary importance in the gradual self-realization of society through the long centuries ; and, in scrutinizing the literature which lies immediately behind our generation, it may perhaps even help the more direct and strenuous 6 SOCIAL IDEALS IN ENGLISH LETTERS social speculation which so absorbs us in these closing years of the century, for it may try to dis- cover the trend of thought tentatively followed by that instinct of the seeking soul which wiU, after all, do more than any theories of the political econ- omists to determine the social forms of the future. PART I THE ENGLAND OF OUR P0REFATHER8 CHAPTER I WILLIAM LAN6LAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES Democracy entered Great Britain with the Church of Christ. A primitive people is always aristocratic ; and " Beowulf," our earliest English epic, witnesses as vividly as the Iliad, and in much the same way, to the exclusive importance of the chieftains in a half-savage society. In this pre- cious ancient poem, through which the Teutonic race sees dimly its heroic past, a village, slightly mentioned, lies to be sure somewhere in the back- ground, but eyes are fixed on noble Heorot Hall, gold-timbered, fiend-ravaged, where the heroes feast and brag. In battle, the common people hardly exist even to be slain ; in revel, the queen herself is cup-bearer, for no vulgar hand may min- ister to the princely warriors. Into this society, fiercely respectfid toward the fighter with a pedi- gree, contemptuous toward the nameless churl, tha chanting monks of Augustine, and earlier yet tha Celtic missionaries with a Christianity of more childlike type, introduced a new ideal. Instead 8 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS of a social growth formed naturally, following hu- man passion and instinct along the line of least resistance, men gained the idea of a society shaped in defiance of instinct, and in obedience to a higher power. Laying aside, with other more important matters, their princely standards and activities, the sons of the warriors rushed into the monas- teries and bowed side by side with the sons of churl and serf, not only before the altar but over the furrow. With unspeakable gentleness and fervor, Christianity wrought in these wild natures a social revolution as amazing as the spiritual, and only less noted because assumed as a natural cor- ollary of the work of grace. But surely, in one generation, to turn the haughty heroes, breathing flame against their foes, into peaceful agricultural laborers reclaiming waste lands, was not least of the miracles achieved by Holy Church. The early annals of monasticism, especially the ever-fresh and winning books of that most delightful of authors, the Venerable Bede, give us frequent glimpses of the new social attitude which the new faith swiftly fostered. Here, for instance, is the description of the monk Owini, a nobleman of rank, once prime minister of Queen Etheldrid: " As the fervor of his faith increased, resolving to renounce the world, he did not go about it sloth- fully, but so fully forsook the things of this world, that quitting all he had, clad in a plain garment, and carrying an axe and hatchet in his hand, he came to the monastery of that most reverend pre- late called Lestingau, denoting that he did not go LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 9 to the monastery to live idle, as some do, but to labour, which he also confirmed by practise ; for as he was less capable of meditating on the Holy Scriptures, he the more earnestly applied himself to the labour of his hands." ^ Here, again, is the story of the cousin of the great Benedict Biscop, the holy abbot Easterwine, in which Bede lingers lovingly on each detail of humility and gentle practical usefulness : " He was a man of noble birth ; but he did not make that, like some men, a cause of boasting and despising others, but a motive for exercising nobility of mind also, as became a servant of the Lord. . . . And indeed, though he had been an attendant on King Egfrid, and had abandoned his temporal vocation and arms, devoting himself to spiritual warfare, he re- mained so humble and like the other brethren that he towk pleasure in threshing and winnowing, milk- ing the ewes and cows, and employed himself in the bake-house, the garden, the kitchen, and all the other labours of the monastery, with readiness and submission. . . . Oftentimes, when he went forth on the business of the monastery, if he found the brethren working, he would join them, and work with them, by taking the plough-handle, or handling the smith'" hammer, or using the win- nowing-machine, or anything of like nature. For he was a young man of great strength and pleasant tone of voice, of a kind and bountiful disposition, and fair to look on." ^ 1 Bede, Ecclesiastical History, book iv. ch. v. trans., Bolm'l Universal Library. * Bede, Lives of the Holy Abbots. 10 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS These winsome stories, and many like them, ^me to us with double force when we realize that the period which they describe is not one in which barbarism had been fully conquered. Their date is that seventh century, when the wild paganism and savage impulses of our forefathers were wrestling, with result still uncertain, against the gentler ideals of the faith of Christ. Out of this century, which gives us such idyllic pictures of young monasteries crowded with humble saints, come also the dark and fearsome dreams of North- ern heathendom, — " Beowulf " and the " Story of the Volsungs," — mythic tales, full of monsters and dragons and of heroic types singularly prime- val and fierce. The social influence of the Church was felt in many ways. Much that she found, she simply subdued and adopted. The strenuous passions, the wild loyalty of comradeship in the old tribal rela- tions, were transmuted into a range of feeling wider, gentler, more subtle. Of sympathy, for in- stance, there is little or none in the heathen dreamr of Celt or Saxon ; no sooner is Christianity intro- duced than a new tenderness, exquisitely potent, a sense of fellowship with all living things, breathes like a strain of melody through the harsh tumult of existence. The very beasts and birds are in' eluded, as they were to be later by St. Francis, and later still by Burns, in this sweet democracy of feeling. The story of the sleek otters who creot up to warm the feet of St. Cuthbert, chilled by his night-long penance of standing in the cold surf, is LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 11 only one of the lovely tales which attest the near- ness of the innocent lives of the old monks, new- born into the childhood of the heavenly kingdom, to the innocence of animal life. Visions are again and again vouchsafed to these pure souls, as they plough their fields or sow their gardens ; but these visions concern the monks themselve? less often than their distant friends, to whom thej are always near in spirit. Nor is their tenderness limited to their comrades. A mystic tie binds the old saints to all the desolate, and their ministry implies a constant consciousness of the poor and humble. Thus St. Columba suspends conversation to rejoice in ecstatic contemplation of the ascent to heaven of the soul of an old blacksmith, who, hav- ing worked hard all his life, is now borne upward gently by a choir of angels : and we find the Saint constantly aware by intuition of the perils of his spiritual children, sailors on the tempestuous Northern seas. No records, indeed, show the new ideals moro vividly than the life of St. Columba, as told by his early biographer, Adamnan. The glorious poet, saint, most engaging figure of Celtic tradition, when he had renounced the warlike frenzy of his youth and become a leader in the creative arts of peace, converted men to practical usefulness as well as to supernatural hopes. Through the lovelj legends of his power over the forces of nature, wt see gleaming the no less lovely truth, that he irri- gated the land and developed the culture of fruit- trees. Settled on his barren island of lona, from 12 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS which spiritual light streamed out over all that barbarian world, he formed with his monks an agricultural community of which we have idyllic pictures. "His entire life," says Montalembert, •* bears the marks of his ardent sympathy for the laborers in the fields. From the time of his early travels as a young man in Ireland, when he furnished the ploughmen with ploughshares, and had the young men trained to the trade of blacksmith, up to the days of his old age, when he could only follow from far off the labor of his monks, his paternal tenderness never ceased to exercise on their account its salutary and bene- ficent influence. Seated in a little wooden hut which answered the purpose of a cell, he inter- rupted his studies and put down his pen, to bless the monks as they came back from the fields, the pastures, or the barns. The younger brethren, after having milked the cows of the community, knelt down with their pails full of new milk, to receive from a distance the abbot's blessing, some- times accompanied by an exhortation useful to their souls." ^ The death of the old saint was har- monious with his life. In the end of May, he was drawn, by oxen harnessed to a rude cart, to the western side of the island, where his monks were working m the fertile fields. Standing in his cart, he tenderly blessed them and their island home. On the way back, he met, embraced, and blessed his old white horse, which carried the milk from the dairy. His last message sent to his 1 Montalembert, The Monks of the West, book ix. oh. vi. LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 13 spiritual children was in the words: "Let peace and charity, a charity mutual and sincere, reign always among you." One sees from such stories the fervor with which the fraternal ideal of peace, love, and labor sought to supplant the wild glory of combat and destruc- tion. Never is the central purpose of Christianity so manifest as when we see the faith in its purity, not yet contaminated from within, contending with a dark barbarism like that of our forefathers. Its influence, when thus seen, is clearly toward social equality, toward simplification of desires, toward common, active, loving fellowship in the produc- tive arts of peace. " Brotherhood " is a term of real and normal meaning in the old monastic com- munities, and the heathen attitude which set Na- ture at defiance as a malign and hostile power is replaced by a spirit of warm and tranquil friend- liness toward the whole creation. A restored har- mony is established between man and the fertile earth, between man and his fellow-men. II Only for brief periods, can we ever trace the influence of an untainted Christianity. As the Church conquers, she falls, and no sooner is the world at her feet than it is in her heart also. Al- ready, in the naive records of the Anglo-Saxon Church, we find the Roman passion for dominion and administration reaching out from Italy to the British Isles, and prevailing, not without a dra- matic struggle, over the evangelical simplicity and 14 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS slightly organized consecration of the native Chris- tians, Celtic and Saxon. One of the first results of this victory was a loss of that social ideal of Christian poverty and simplicity which is always antagonistic to ecclesiastical aggrandizement. The monasteries soon degenerated. They became grasp- ing and tyrannical centres of the material posses- sions of the Church, the frequent resorts of lazi- ness, luxury, and ambition. Even the ninth cen- tury saw them past the pure devotion of their prime, and in the tenth they had sunk low. Yet at their worst they continued to present an exam- ple of common life for common ends, and at their best they preserved, in ideal at least, through the feudal period with its sharp class-articulations, the tradition of a pure Christian communism, vowed to democratic fellowship and to personal poverly. Every now and then, a renewed religious impulse would restore the ancient standards of unworld- liness : and monasticism would recall once more for a time the simple beauty of the community life of the first disciples. The most important of such revivals was unques- tionably the Franciscan movement of the thirteenth century. Then lived St. Francis, and wooed and won the Lady Poverty for his spiritual bride. No wonder if his lovely life, and that of his immediate followers, held an inspiration that spread rapidly over the whole of Europe. A pure and vital part of this inspiration was an impassioned revival of the social with the spiritual fervors of Christianity It was the wise provision of the saint of Assisi, MNGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 16 whom one suspects to have had more common sense than the world credits him with, that the poverty of his brethren was to be a condition, not of sentimental indolence, but of hard self-support- ing toil. He not only built a church with his own hands as first sign of his conversion, he set his spiritual children at real manual work, from cook- ing to ploughing. Like the barbarian warriors of an earlier age, the young nobles and merchant princes of Italy tested their religious consecration by their readiness for useful menial tasks. " I worked with my hands," says the precious, au- thentic will of St. Francis, " and I wish to con- tinue so to do, and I wish that aU the other bro- thers should work at some honest trade. Let those who have none learn one, not in order that they may be paid wages for their work, but to set a good example and avoid laziness. And when people will not pay us for our work, then let us have re- course to the table of the Lord, begging alms from door to door." ^ Soon, this sane and protecting provision slipped out of the Franciscan rule, and the wholesomeness of the movement, which had started as a return to nature and simplicity as well as to God, was lost in wild excesses. No similar revival followed, and the degeneration of monastic life seemed com- plete and final. By the fourteenth century, the mendicant orders, which had adopted the last sug- gestion of St. Francis in the clause just quoted, without marking its restrictions, had become an 1 Sabatier, Life of S. Francis, eh. x* 16 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS unmitigated nuisance. Their wandering throngs infested Europe with pauper laziness masquerad- ing as sanctity, and formed perhaps the largest constituent in that wide-spread anarchy and law- lessness which not even feudalism could suppress. For the later Middle Ages faced sharp contrasts. They possessed a social structure immutably fixed, but through this structure roamed hosts of ne'er- do-weels, setting at defiance its restrictions, and rejecting privileges only to prey upon the privi- leged. This constant sight was probably one rea- son why mediaBval thought embodies a deep regard for property and class distinctions; for nothing so increases the self-satisfaction of privilege as the presence of misery unwilling to work. Be the cause what it may, no more aristocratic literature exists than that of the Middle Ages. Romances of chivalry and legends of the saints agree in show- ing as fine a disregard of the commons as do the old epics of heathendom. Men turned indeed to humble life for broad jest and merry tale, but noble sentiments apparently stirred in knightly breasts alone, and only fine ladies had fine maui. ners. Chaucer is the only poet who makes com- mon folk live with a substantial personal existence ; and even Chaucer loves his Wife of Bath, his Reeve and Miller and Ploughman, with the love of an artist rather than of a brother. Nor would his characters have resented his attitude. They ac- cepted their inferior roles meekly ; parts of a feu- dal system sure of its own finality, and little likely to foster social discontent. From the eleventh LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 17 through the sixteenth century, the wide world of story-telling is uninvaded by questioning as to the divine right of the things that be. Ill Yet through the seeming solidity of mediaeval life ran from the first waves and ripples of revolt. They proceeded in largo measure from the intellec- tual proletariat, the students, lay and cleric, of the young universities. These students formed a rov- ing Bohemian class, effervescent, impudent, full of aversion to respectability and boredom. They were called " Goliards," after their absurd imagi- nary head, a Bishop Golias. Their jolly songs, written in a jumble of French and Latin, dashed in frolicsome and bitter foam against the firm au- thorities of Church and State. It is curious to pore over these Goliardic lyrics in their dead languages, and through their obsolete slang to hear mockery as fresh and social satire as keen as any socialist stu- dent in Germany or France could troll out to-day. Sometimes the followers of the good Bishop wrote in prose, and clever, scathing prose it could be, as a quotation from one of their parodies wiU prove : " The beginning of the holy gospel according to Marks of silver : At that time the Pope said to the Romans : '- When the son of man shall come to the seat of our majesty, first say. Friend, for what hast thou come? But if he should persevere in knocking without giving you anything, cast him into utter darkness.' And it came to pass, that a certain clerk came to the court of the lord the 18 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS Pope, and cried out, saying, ' Have pity on me at least, you doorkeepers of the Pope, for the hand of poverty has touched me. For I am needy and poor, and therefore I seek your assistance in my calamity and misery.' But they hearing this were highly indignant, and said to him : ' Friend, thy poverty be with thee in perdition ; get thee back- ward, Satan, for thou dost not savour of those things which have the savour of money. Verily, verily, I say unto thee. Thou shalt not enter into the joy of thy lord, until thou shalt have given thy last liarthing.' " Then the poor man went away, and sold his cloak and his gown, and all that he had, and gave it to the cardinals, and to the doorkeepers, and to the chamberlains. But they said, 'And what is this among so many ? ' And they cast him out of the gates, and going out he wept bitterly, and was without consolatioiv After him there came to the court a certain clerk who was rich, and gross, and fat, and large, and who in a tumult had committed manslaughter. He gave first to the doorkeeper, secondly to the chamberlain, third to the cardinals. But they judged among themselves that they were to receive more. " Then the lord the Pope, hearing that the cardi- nals and the officials had received many gifts from the clerk, became very sick unto death. But the rich man sent him an electuary of gold and sil- ver, and he was immediately made whole. Then the lord the Pope called before him the cardinals and officials, and said to them, ' Brethren, see that LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 19 no one deceive you with vain words. For I give you an example, that, as I take, so take ye also.' " ^ The Goliardio literature was mostly inspired by mischief. It expressed the light and reckless mood of Bohemia, a mood always present, never pro- foundly operative. Of weightier significance, as interpreting the mind of the whole people, were the great animal epics, produced chiefly in the twelfth century. These immense anonymous satir- ical works gathered as unobtrusively as clouds in the clear mediaeval air. The most comprehensive of them, " Reynard the Fox," veiled audacious and sweeping social criticism under its entertaining allegory. The different feudal personages or classes appear under the guise of animals : Noble the Lion-king, always mentioned with respect; Isengrin the baron-wolf, grim as his name ; Rey- nard the fox, in friar's habit. Among these sym- bolic beasts, nO active role is assigned to the peo- ple. They come upon the stage as the fat and innocent geese, whom Reynard always pursues, and to whom on one occasion he addresses, with sanctimonious whine, the touching words : " God is my witness how deeply I long after you all in my bowels." But, if the people are seldom on the stage, the whole enormous poem is written from their point of view. It is good-humored and ac- quiescent ; but it reveals with relentless mockery the double oppression suffered by the poor at the hands of the Church and the nobles. 1 Thomas Wright, History of Caricature and Grotesque, ch. Xi p. 172. 20 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS Neither the Goliardic poetry nor the animal epics were of high importance as literary forms. In the vast meanderings of mediaeval imagination, they disappear from sight. Moreover they were not written in English, nor as a rule did they origi- nate in England. They serve simply to suggest that even under the most rigid social surface rest- less impulses are sure to be at work. IV Such impulses, in England of the fourteenth cen- tury, gathered into a wide-spread mood of protest. Times were dark, conditions bad. The Middle Ages were dying. A brief industrial prosperity, consequent on the Black Death and the French wars, had quickened the intelligence of the Eng- lish working - classes ; harsh and unjust statutes were awakening them to a new class-consciousness, and to deep indignation against industrial wrongs. Out of a great darkness springs the first self- expression of the people ; and the social literature of England begins. A fervid, mournful, wonder- ful book inaugurates it : " The Vision of Piers the Plowman." Of the authorship we know little. Possible writers are largely conjectural, and it is mainly from convenience to-day that the long poem passes under the name of William Langland. Personality evades us in the leisurely stretches of the great work. Perhaps it is just as well; for the book is not the voice of one, but of many, of a mighty throng ; it is the voice of the people, articu- late at last. Their joys and their sorrows speak LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 21 through it; their perplexed brooding over life's inequalities, their large charity, breaking now and again into exceeding bitter cry. Its burden is one which we often think the prerogative of our own age, — the investiture of labor with a religious sig, nificance, the glorification of poverty, the conscious, unanswerable, piteous plea f Or the brotherhood of man. All this it uplifts into its Christianity, a faith mystic in fervor and simplicity, unrelated to ecclesiasticism or to temporary forms. "For our joy and our healing," says Langland, " Jesus Christ of heaven, in a poor man's apparel, pursueth us ever, and looketh on us in their likeness, and that with lovely cheer." Probably no book has ever more deeply stirred the heart and soul of the generation for which it was written, or won for the time being a more wide- spread fame. The merry charm of Chaucer's " Canterbury Tales " afforded infinite delectation to a reading public of Church and clerkdom. But it is one thing to reach the public, quite another to reach the people; and the more difficult achieve- ment was Langland's. His grave verse went straight to the heart of the still Teutonic race, indifferent to the facile French lilts of Chaucer. Serfs and laborers, seemingly inaccessible to influ- ences of culture, as they staggered along under their heavy loads, eagerly welcomed the Visions of Piers the Plowman, of Do Well, Do Better, and Do Best. They heard, pondered, and repeated, till they realized that their souls had found utter- ance at last. The central version of the great 22 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS poem — it comes to us in three distinct forms — antedated by only two or three years the Pea- sants' Revolt under Wat Tyler and John Ball This was the first largely significant prophecy ill- England of a distinct industrial movement. Its inspiration was no gentle Christian idealism, such as stirred the followers of St. Francis, but a spirit of fierce rebellion, flinging itself with awakened intelligence and destructive ardor against estab- lished law. The first note of the social revolution is heard in its confused echoes. No one can trace the thrilling story of its hope and passions, and fail to see how potent had been the poem of Langland in arousing and shaping its ideals. Phrases from the poem were used as watchwords in the uprising ; more than this, the central personage, the intensely conceived Piers the Plowman, became a spirits nal presence to the laboring classes of England. In those days before telegram or press, association was difficult ; this poem, quietly passing from lip to lip, helped bind together the scattered and voice- less workingmen of the eastern counties with a new sense of fellowship. Langland was thus a direct power, as few poets have ever been, upon an awakening national life. The revolt failed. The class-struggle, of which it was one of the first and most picturesque ex- pressions, was doomed to fail, whenever resumed, for many a century. Times passed, conditions changed. The poem of Langland was forgotten. Nor was any other destiny possible to it. Con- sciously or unconsciously, Langland rejected all LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 23 elements of the common life offered from above, from culture, learning, knighthood. His " Vis- ions " are uncouth, primitive, amorphous ; redo- lent of the soil, but heavy with it as well. He wrote in a revival of the old alliterative metre deat to his Saxon forefathers ; and the movement of his verses is that of the laborer in the field, not that of the lady in the dance : — " Dnke of this dim place, anon undo the gates, That Christ may comen in, the Mnge's son of heaven." It was a noble metre ; it had held sway over Eng- lish poetry for six hundred years, — a far longer reign than that of the heroic blank verse, its upstart successor. Splendid passions had found expres- sion in its surging, swaying lines. Yet when Lang- land chose it for his vehicle it was already doomed. Its grave inward music, its slow unrelieved majesty, were of pure Teuton strain. They could not sat- isfy the community into which was gradually filter- ing from above a new element and a new spirit. For the Norman knew what the Anglo-Saxon had never imagined, — that existence could be amusing. England was awakening to the discovery. She craved the Frenchman's wit and romance, his in- stinct for grace and ease, his courtly emphasis on manners as a good in themselves, apart from morals. What she craved, she gained. "The Canterbury Tales" are of the same half -century as " The Vision " of Langland ; and still the way- faring man may rejoice in their fresh romance and bewitching melody, while the solemn measures of Chaucer's brother-poet chant to the scholar and 24 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS the seeker alone. Art knows no classes ; and the self-expression of a class, though that class be the very heart of the nation, cannot be immortal. This is the book of the people; and the people, even when thinking, feeling, seeing aright, is yet unable, except by occasional chance, to find the inevitable word. The burden of the popular heart remains forever undelivered. This book is like all others that seek to give it. Sharing the people's sorrows, it shares also their fate : it is forgotten. Yet despite uncouthness, no sturdy lover of poe- try and humanity can afford to ignore the old book. It may not be literature, for it lacks the selective and controlling instinct of art, but it ia full to overflowing of the stuff from which liter- ature is made. Langland has the heart of the poet, and fervent imaginative conceptions struggle through his awkward form. If we have patience with him, there emerges slowly to our ken a tem- perament rare and full of interest. Dreamer and visionary like most of the men of his time, he al- most alone among mediaeval authors dreamed the dreams neither of knight nor monk, but of the peo- ple; and the people are never far from the salu- tary neighborhood of the actual. At times his solemn spiritual symbols suggest the lovely work of Giotto; at others, he shows us pictures gro- tesquely concrete as Teniers ever painted. He is both mystic and realist; for his mysticism is not of the Celtic type, nurtured on fantastic shadows, far less of that Oriental type which creates around itself a void. It is instinct with the vigorous sin- LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 25 cerity of the Teuton, observes without illusion or glamour the homeliest facts, yet charges those facts with a vision-like solemnity, and uplifts them into enduring significance. One questions whether Langland need have failed as an artist had he lived when prose was developed as a literary form ; for his work has more in common with prose than with poetry. Swift and Carlyle would have handled their material awk- wardly enough had the exigencies of their times made them write in verse ; and it is with such men as these that our bewildered spirit of the four- teenth century must be placed. His massiveness of thought, the satiric bent of his genius, his large, sad interest in the wider conditions of humanity, bring him into their ranks and separate him from the children of melodious joy. To put Langland beside Chaucer is to put Carlyle beside Tennyson. Indeed, Langland curiously resembles Carlyle. So striking is the likeness that one could almost be- lieve the stem Scotch prophet to have heard and echoed the strain dropped centuries before by the sad lips of the mediaeval sage. Each in his day paused, questioning, at a turning of the ways. As Langland stood between England Catholic and feudal and England Protestant and commercial, so Carlyle, five centuries later, stood between the individualistic period of democracy and another order, which we as yet hardly dare to formulate, but toward which we surely move. Both Carlyle and Langland were at once conservative and radi- cal ; each, longing for peace, became a destructive 26 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS power ; the work of each was deeply prophetic, and reached out among forces and tendencies which the seers themselves were able only dimly to understand. They were two voices crying aloud in two desert centuries : " Prepare ye the way of bhe Lord ; make his paths straight ; " " make vjtraight in the desert a highway for our God." The two authors share the impulse to flash their truth on the world, not as argument but as pic- ture; but the figures of speech' of the modem world were the visions of the Middle Ages, and what Carlyle saw as metaphor, Langland saw as fact. His work is a series of symbolic dreams. Only the valiant lover of books can thoroughly explore the wide wilderness of allegory in which wanders this brooding soul ; but any lover of life can discover and follow the central thread of story which is the clue to his social and spiritual faith. Rightly read, the book is a " Pilgrim's Progress " of the fourteenth century. The chief symbol, con- stantly appearing in its mazes, embodies the un- daunted quest for truth. But to set " The Vision of Piers Plowman " beside the beautiful classic of Bunyan, also a vision, is to feel the lapse of gen- erations, and to recognize a revolution in ideas. The accent of the great Puritan book is intensely individualistic; wife, children, neighbors, society are forgotten and deserted by the pilgrim in the absorbing search for personal salvation. In the Catholic pilgrimage, on the contrary, the accent is social. It is salvation for all men, not only in heaven hereafter, but on earth as in heaven, which LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 27 the dreamer urgently, plaintively seeks. The prota- gonist of the poem is no projection of his private consciousness, no individual ; but the Working- People, embodied in the sturdy figure of Piers the Plowman, the Laborer appearing for the first time upon the world's stage, not as buffoon, but as hero. Piers is the representative of the agricultural class on whom the welfare of England rested. This " Christian " has for his aim no less a task than the organization of society in accordance with the wiU of God ; and he does not rest till he leads all classes after him in the pilgrimage to the far city of truth. None of the Goliardic poetry with its clever gibes, none of the satirical animal epics, hold so subversive a suggestion as this reverent and con- servative poem, which in the ages of dominant feudalism presents the workingman as heart and centre of the social order. Let us follow the story of the Plowman. He does not appear till men are ready to receive him ; when he comes, it is to find a penitent world. In a " field full of folk " the Dreamer sees assembled a motley throng : knights, merchants, friars, min- strels, beggars, pilgrims, weavers, tailors, and other craftsmen, and cooks crying " Hot pies, hot ! go dine, go dine ' " All these people are listening to very queer sermons preached to them by Eeason and Repentance; and strange to say, the whole assembly is converted. Even the Seven Deadly Sins, so optimistic is our writer, are conscience* S8 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS stricken and seek to be shriven. Repentance, who will place no limits to the Divine Forgiveness, prays for them in words of quaint and touching beauty, his tender pleading interspersed by the cadenced pathos of Latin chants from Holy Writ ; ind at the end Hope blows a horn with high, sweet lote. "Beati quorum remisssB sunt iniquitates," while all the saints in heaven sing at once the praises of the mercy of God. And aU the sinners, crying for grace, make vow of pilgrimage, — a strange, new pilgrimage, neither to Canterbury nor Walsingham, nor Jerusalem nor even Rome ; a pilgrimage to truth. " A thousand of men then thronged together Cried upward to Christ and His clean Mother To have grace to go with them Truth to seek." ^ But the Middle Ages are not used to this pilgrim- age, despite their hosts of holy places ; and no one knows the way. The pilgrims " bluster forth as beasts over banks and hills," wandering distraught and unguided. At last they meet a Palmer, capitally described, plastered all over with holy signs. He has been in Ermonye and Alexandria, as you may see by the shells sitting on his hat ; he has walked full wide in wet and dry, seeking God's saints for his soul's health. The company eagerly ask guid- ance from him ; does he know a " Corsaint " men call Truth ? Can he tell them the way where that wight dwells ? But no ! The Palmer stares at them in surprise. Nay — so God him help — he saw never palmer with pike or staff ask after him ever, 1 B Text, Passus V. 1. 518. LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 2» till now, in this place. The pilgrim company stands irresolute and bewildered ; when suddenly a rough and cheery voice is heard. It is the voice of Piers the Plowman. He comes in with real dramatic effect, and his honest accents are excellently given. " Peter ! " says he, " I know Truth as weU as a clerk does his book. I have been his follower these fifty winters. I have sowed his seed and driven his beasts. I dig and I delve. I do whatever Truth tells me ; sometimes I sow and sometimes I thresh. In tailor's craft and tinker's craft I weave and I wind what Truth can devise. For though I say it myself, I serve him for pay. I have good hire from him. He is the promptest payer that poor men know. He is low as a lamb; moreover, and lovely of speech. And if you want to know where he lives, I shall show you the way." These hardy, homely words, breathing the good fragance of the furrow, and boldly claiming fel- lowship with Truth, are the first utterance of the workingman in English literature. They are well worth noting. The poem now devotes itself to developing Piers' ideal function in the social order; and we shoidd probably have to hasten down the centuries to the time of Tolstoi, to find any parallel to the conception broached. The pil- grims seek to hire Piers to lead them to the Truth he knows so well ; but the Plowman prefers to stick to his work, and refuses bluffly ; Truth would love him the less a long while thereafter if he took hire for such a cause. He gladly, however gives them directions, — long, delightful, allegorical direo- 30 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS tlons, quite in the manner of Bunyan, — and pro- mises them that when they come to the end of their journey, they will find " Truth sitting in thy heart in a chain of charity, as thou a child were." The people are eager to set forth, though the Cut- purse and the Apeward fear that they have no kin in Truth's country. The Pardoner — own cousin, surely, to Chaucer's pardoner with his " fire-red cherubim's face " — thinks that he also, perhaps, is not known there ! He runs off for his credentials, a box of brevets and a bull with bishop's letters. But when he returns, behold, the company has started, and he is left behind, amazed ! And so the Passus ends. The next Passus leads us further into Lang- land's social thought and economic speculation ; and extraordinary enough it is. The pilgrim company have not gone far. The way is compli- cated. They are discouraged and helpless for lack of a guide. Piers in pity has changed his mind. He wants to set out with them; but he cannot leave his work. " Had I only ploughed this half- acre, and sowed it afterwards," he cries, " I would wend with you and teach the way." Perhaps there is a modern suggestion in this emergency: the workingman, alone in a disconsolate civiliz- ation possessed of the secret of Truth, unable to share it because upon his shoulders rests the burden of the labor of the world. If so, no less modern is the hint of the way of escape and salvation. It is a fine lady who discovers it, — a lady fashionably dressed in a " sklayre " or veil. She demands to LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 31 be set to work, to hasten the waiting. The Knight follows suit. He is a delightful creation, Lang- land's Knight, charming in his way as Chaucer's, a gentleman every inch of him. He is eager to share Piers' toil. He never was taught, he says, :o guide a team, but he will do his best if Piers will set him at it ! Kedistribution of labor, Lang- land hints, is the first necessity of the converted world. But no sooner has the Laborer-Lord fairly set his community to work than he is bothered by all sorts of economic problems. Worst of all are the lazy people or leisure class, — his pet detestation, the " wastours." They sit and sing "How! trolli lolli," while he is at the plough with his pilgrims ; and when he remonstrates, they remark that they have " no limbs to labor with, thank God," " but we will pray for you. Piers, and for your plough," — a method of vicarious toil not yet out of fashion. Piers is very severe with these gentry; but he finds it hard to distinguish between them and the honestly incompetent. Poor Piers ! He is facing what in modern parlance is known as the pro- blem of the " dependent, defective, and delinquent classes." He is torn asunder between his sense of religious duty to them — " they are my bloody brethren, and God bought us all " — and his convic- tion that a little stout discipline is what they need. He tries to get the Knight to help him, but that gentle worthy is too courteous by half, and proves of no use at all. " ' I was not wont to work,' quoth Wastour, ' and now will I not begin ! ' And set light of the law and less of the knight." Piers 32 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS finally decides the matter with mingled kindliness and keenness, providing for the really infirm after a fashion that suggests latter-day philanthropy, and subduing the rest by the grim but wholesome help of Hunger. This gaunt Servitor bids him let nobody actually starve, but if able-bodied men refuse to work, Piers is to give them only " hound's bread and horse's bread " and " abate them with beans ; " and " if the men grumble, bid them go swink [labor], and they shall sup sweeter when they have deserved it." ^ Hunger has other salutary and entertaining counsels to give, and Piers faces other industrial situations with a curiously prophetic note in them. But enough has been said to make the central idea of the poem plain. It is a sufficiently notable sight, — that quaint mediaeval assembly, of mer- chants and lawyers and knights and priests and monks and jesters and ladies, enthusiastically sub- mitting itself to arduous toil, and bending over the plough at the best of its chosen guide, the Laborer. The picture would delight Buskin or Tolstoi. The whole conception of the working- man, with God's simple wisdom in his keeping, set free to serve as guide to Truth by eager voluntary sharing in his toil on the part of all converted folk, is quite in a certain modern strain. Langland tells us nothing more about the pilgrimage to Truth. Perhaps even his imagination could not fly far enough to picture the time when productive work should be in such a shape that men should 1 B Terf, PasBus VI. 1. 217. LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 33 be free for speculation. Perhaps, and one likes the thought better, the pilgrims did not need to wander far, and even as they toiled with loom and plough, were rewarded by finding Truth sitting in their hearts. VI The working-people, typified in Piers, have already been exalted in this curious poem to a position which has hardly been thought of in the most advanced democracy. Comrades and inti- mates of Truth, they have the converted world as disciples, eager to share their toil. In them is vested the chief power of social reorganization. It is striking that this radical conception, which goes in a way the whole length of modern social- ism, is handled with conservative moderation. Kespect for king and aristocracy are salient fea- tures of Langland's work, and the profound spir- itual and social revolution of which he dreams is to leave the framework of society unchanged. It is fruitless to inquire whether we have here central inconsistency or profound insight ; but we cannot' fail to ask by what right and from whose will such power is vested in the Laborer ? The poem, as it proceeds, gives at least a partial answer to this question : for the idea of Piers is not yet fully developed. So far it has been economic and social ; but Langland's thought can never long ignore the religious basis of life. His Christianity is the de- termining force of his whole work. It is Christian- ity of a curious and interesting order. He has tha 34 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS Catholic conception of the Church as an organism at once social and religious, nor was he ever a con- scious antagonist of the Church as an institution. At the same time, no authority shackles his thought. " I will seek Truth first, ere I see Eome," exclaims Langland. He has a horror of the material pos- sessions and ambitions of the Church : " Bishops shall be blamed for beggars' sakes," he says, and his bitter outcry against the gift of Constantine echoes a nobler cry in Dante. " When Constantine of his courtesy Holy Church dowered with lands and deeds, lordships and rents, an angel men heard on high at Rome cry, ' Dos ecclesise ' this day hath drunk venom, and those that have Peter's power are poisoned all." ^ It is the note constantly found in Wyclif. Langland accepts orthodox theology, but with puzzled spirit. " The more I muse therein, the mistier it seemeth," he sighs ; " the deeper I divine, the darker me it thinketh." Deed, not dogma, is heart of faith for him, and Love is all his creed, "leech of life, and next Our Lord's Self." " Learn to love," says Nature at the end of the poem, " and leave of all other." But of the old poet, Wordsworth's beautiful lines might have been written. "Love had he found in huts where poor men dwell." His Chris- tianity finds central expression, not in priest, but in Plowman. He was possessed by the idea for which Protestantism was to fight many battles, the priesthood of the laity. As the poem advances, 1 B Text, Pasaus XV. U. 519-522. See Inferno, Canto XIX n. 115-117. LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 35 his hero Piers becomes vested more and more with religious significance and authority. In the sev- enth Passus, Truth sends to him a bill of pardon ; and the Laborer becomes not only the secular but the religious Head of the community. The buU is lenient to good kings and knights, more severe on merchants and lawyers : but to honest laborers is granted full absolution. " All liring lal)oreTS that work with their hands, That truly take and truly win, And live in love and law for their low hearts Have the same absolution that was sent to Piers." ' Sufferers also are tenderly exempt. But a priest comes along and challenges Piers' pardon ; and when Piers at his prayer unfolds the buU, the poet standing behind reads simply two lines : " Et qui bona egerunt, ibunt in vitam etemam, qui vero mala, in ignem eternam." The ecclesiastical au- thority, naturally enough, is far from satisfied, " ' Peter ! ' quoth the priest, ' I can no pardon find, but do well and have well, and God shall have thy soul.' " Piers, much chagrined and a little per- plexed, enters into discussion with the priest, and with the vexed sound of the argument — not yet concluded — between ecclesiastical authority an(f moral common sense, the Dreamer awakes. The Visions, when renewed, start with the key- note just given, and seek to find what it is to Do Well. Leaving economic speculation and puzzle, they advance into ethical, metaphysical, and reli- gious thought. The figure of the PUn»n»an yiOf 1 B Text, Passus VII. 1. 62. 36 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS ishes in the mazes of the poem, and seems forgot, ten; but now and then his name, heard at some unexpected moment, brings comfort in the hour of spiritual stress, or causes the hearer to swoon for pure joy. When Piers does reappear at last, in the sixteenth Passus, he is transfigiu'ed and exalted. Always the type of a class, he has now become in the fullest sense a spiritual symbol, fraught with mean- ing ; yet what deep imaginative brooding over the life and fate of the working-people has shaped his ideal destiny ! He is the keeper of the mystic tree of Patience, whereof the fruit is Charity, which grows in the human heart. The sturdy character whom first we met as guide to Truth has become, by virtue of submission and endurance, guardian of Love also. But further glory awaits him. The strange poem advances into a symbolic render, ing of the Passion and Resurrection : and, behold, there comes riding " One semblable to the Samar- itan, and some del to Piers the Plowman," — Very Christ, the Son of David. Faith, who hails Him from a window, tells the poet in strange and mystic phrase that " Jesus shall joust in Piers' arms, in his helm and habergeon, humana natura." The Passion is accomplished : the Dreamer is in Church ', and in midst of the Mass, he suddenly sleeps and beholds in vision Piers the Plowman, coming in with a Cross before the common people, marked with bloody wounds, " and like in all limbs to Our Lord Jesus." It would be a mistake to suppose that by this extraordinary image, Langland meant exactly to LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 37 identify Piers with the Saviour of the world. To him the workingman is simply the best embodi- ment of the Christ idea. Once more the symbol changes : the glorified Lord ascends to heaven ; and now Piers becomes the entire Christian body, literally and mystically vowed to labor, and com- posed of the meek of the earth. The homely quaintness of the agricultural imagery is continued in a curious way. On Piers descends the Spirit ; his plough is drawn by the Four Evangelists, St. John being " the prize neat of Piers' plough." His barns are the Church of God, and he goes forth to sow the seed of the four cardinal virtues in the furrows of the world. The allegory leaves him defending the unity of the Church against many foes. A new story is developed, full of sorrow and foreboding ; and at the very end Conscience, sore beset, takes up his pilgrim-staff, and starts weeping to wander wide over the world, till he find Piers the Plowman. vn The exaltation of the Laborer through the latter part of the poem is of course most striking. So strong is the contrast between the uncouth work- man of the early Passus, with his rough and ready speech, and the majestic figure of the close, that some critics have supposed an abrupt change in Langland's thought and intent. Yet the more one studies the " Visions," the more one becomes con- viaeed that the development of Piers, which is very earefully wrought, was in the author's miud froBS S8 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS the beginning. His deepest convictions and his most earnest thought find expression in the beau- tiful symbol of the Plowman-lord. No intellectual theory of the state, but a spirit- ual attitude toward poverty and labor, determines Langland's social allegory. In reverence for pov- erty there was nothing strange to the mediaeval mind. The Church had never ceased to recom- mend abstention from worldly goods as a counsel of perfection to her children ; but the renunciation was to the end of contemplation rather than of useful activity, and contemplation may be dan- gerously near hysteria or idleness. What was dis- tinctive in Langland was that the special type of poverty which he revered accompanied productive toil. Sacerdotal laziness was abhorrent to him. Charity was indeed, he admits, once found in a friar's frock, " but that was long ago, in St. Fran- cis' time." He goes out of his way, in describing the Manger of the Nativity, to exclaim with naif satire, " If any friar were found there, I give thee five shillings ! " His strong distaste, evinced again and again, for communistic schemes may doubtless be traced to his contempt for the friars, the only exponents of such schemes whom he knew. But from distaste for religious beggars he turns to no comfortable respect for vested interests or private property. Seeking over the world for the likeness of his Lord, he found it, not in the artificial rags and dirt of the friars, nor yet among the respec- table well-to-do, but among the rough laborers of England. LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 39 Langland's work thrills with sorrowful con- sciousness of the difficult life of faithful working- people. He is alive to every detail of their condition : their wretched diet and shelter ; their oppression by employer, usurer, and retail-dealer; their endless fatigue in toil. The Epic of the Workers has never been written, but Langland might have written it, had the gift of art been his. All the sympathy of his great heart goes forth to those who " played full seldom : In setting and in sowing swonken ^ full hard, And won that wHoh wastours with gluttony destroyed." ^ His grieving sense of their helplessness breaks into pitiful appeal to the Divine Compassion : — " Poor people, Thy prisonei^, Lord, in the pit of mischief, Comfort Thy creatures that much care suffer Through dearth, through drought, all their days here. Woe in winter times for wanting of clothes. And in summer time seldom sup to the full ; Comfort Thy careful, Christ, in Thy ryche ' For how Thou comfortest all creatures, clerks hear witness."* Nothing but the Infinite Pity can suffice for the infinite pathos of human life. To solve the terrible problems presented by the life of the poor, Lang- land has no power. The tone of his poem is be- wildered and sad, at times all but hopeless. Yet as he broods there comes to him a great, a mys- tic thought of consolation. The laborers' service of humanity is revealed to him as a sacred thing. In labor and in poverty, honestly pursued and pa- 1 ToUed. 2 B Text,, Prologue, 11. 20-23. » Kingdom. « B Text, Passus XIV. U. 172-178. 40 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS tiently borne, he comes to feel a divine, a redeinp« tive power. The poor become in his eyes not so much victims as saviours of the very society which ignores them. And so comes to pass his investi- ture of their lives with a religious significance and a spiritual glory. In the poverty of common folk, unromantic, homely, with no mark of sacerdotal aloofness from the general human lot, our first Eng- lish social prophet beheld the likeness of Christ: — " Therefore be not abashed to bidde and be needy, Since He that wrought all the world was wilfully needy. Never none so needy and none so poor died." ^ " But well worth Poverty 1 Our Prince Jesus Poverty chose, and His apostles all, And aye the longer they lived, the less goods they had."* " Why I move this matter is mostly for the poor, For in their likeness Our Lord oft hath been known,'' — as in the walk to Emmaus, when "for His poor apparel and pilgrim weed," the disciples knew Him not: — " And all was in ensample to us sinful here That we should be low and lovely of speech, And apparel us not over proudly, for pilgrims are we all. And in the apparel of a poor man, and pilgrim's likeness, Many times God has been met among needy people, Where never sage saw Him in suit of the rich." ^ With this profoundly religious conception of poverty as an attribute of Christ Himself, it is no wonder if Langland npt only finds comfort for the poor in that example, but presses it upon all men 1 C Text, Passus XXIII. 11. 48-50. 2 C Text, Passus XIV. U. 1-3. 8 B Text, Passus XI. U. 224-237. LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 41 as the truest way to spiritual freedom. The Coun- sel of Poverty is the burden of his preaching ; but the poverty for which he pleads is no sentimental ecstasy, but a voluntary consecration to productive work. His thought is akin to that so often found in modern art, which gives us a workman-Christ in the garb of our own poor. Langland's respect for poverty springs in part from a conviction that the poor are, on the whole, likely to be better than the rich. Our modern in- stinct is rather the other way, and feels vaguely assured that poverty and vice are likely to be con- nected, and that it is more creditable to be well- to-do than poverty-stricken. Perhaps the Gospels lean a little to Langland's side. " Have mercy on these rich men, Lord, and of Thy Mercy give them grace to amend," cries the old poet, with a tender- ness that transcends class limitations. "Were there not mercy in poor men more than in the rich, many times beggars might go hungry," " The rich clothe the rich, and help them that give help in return, as one might pour water on the Thames." Langland's Christianity, full of comfort and cour- age for the poor, is severe and serious in its tone towards the prosperous : — " For the rich hath mnch to reckon, and right soft he walketh The highway heavenward, oft riches hindereth. Then the poor presseth hefore, and boldly he craveth For his poverty and patience, perpetual bliss." ^ The apostles bear witness, says Scripture to the Pilgrim, that the poor " have their heritage in heaven, and by true right, where rich men no right 1 B Text, Passus XIV. U. 209-214 42 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS can claim but by ruth and grace." The Pilgrim rejoins with good orthodox perplexity that he has understood that every baptized person is safe, be he rich or poor; but Scripture informs him that this is in extremis, among Saracens and Jews. Only to the workers of the world, only to the simple-hearted, comes peace. Their ears alone, Langland tells us in a lovely passage, are open to the angelic tidings of great joy : — " To pastours and to poets appeared that angel, And bade them go to Bethlehem, God's hirth to honor. And Sling a song of solace, Gloria in excelsis Deo. Kich men rutte ^ then, and in their rest "were, When it shone to the shepherds, a shewer of bliss." ^ Even antiquity, queerly conceived, in mediseval fashion, bears witness to the superior value of the life without possessions : — " Aristotle, Ovidins, and eleven hundred, Tullius, Ptolemsens, I cannot tell their names, Prove patient poverty prince of all virtues." ' This is really the sum and substance of Langland's teaching. The protracted poem wanders in many directions, exploring various byways of inquiry and experi- ence, meeting many quaint fancies and keen per- ceptions. One may learn from it much concerning the thoughts of men of the fourteenth century on reward and bribery, on the relations of king to commons and knighthood, on natural science, on the fate of men after death, on marriage, on all the 1 Snored. = B Text, Passus XII. 11. 150-154. » C Text, Passus XIU. U. 174-176. LANOLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 43 large primal interests which go to make up living. But however Langland circles, he always returns to the same centre. His exact thought is some- times hard to grasp, but his drift is always clear. Perplexed by life's inequalities, filled with deep compassion for suffering, he finds escape in faith, in simplicity of life, in fellowship with the hum- ble. The absence of asceticism and the stress on utility give his ideal a curiously modern note. It is poverty like that urged by Tolstoi, which draws him. For unworldliness of this homely type he constantly pleads : — "All the wise that ever were, by aught I can espy, Praise Poverty for best, if Patience it follow.' ' ' That mystical and spiritual reverence for labor and poverty as part of the Christian ideal, which is the very heart and centre of Langland's thought, probably lingered tiU long after his day. She who, to use Dante's noble phrase, had leapt with Christ upon the Cross, continued for centuries to cling in men's thought to the image of the Cruci- fied. Only when the materializing influences of the Renascence had done their perfect work, did the world cease to feel that in the highest type of Christian life riches were abjured. The reaction toward simplicity in our own day is one of the mosl marked and unexpected phases of our spiritual and social growth. To Langland — first English poet to feel the stirrings of the social conscience — the only means of social salvation lies in the volun- tary action of Christ's disciples. He has not much 1 B Text, Paasus XI. U. 247, 248. 44 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS hope that the world will ever be made over, and injustice and oppression cease. A wistful patience is the spirit of his poem. " To see much and suffer more, certes, quoth I, is to do well," he sighs. He has no wide-reaching schemes for social reconstruction, no ideals of a perfect state where freedom shall be the heritage of aU men. With the constitution of things he has no affair. It is quite possible that he would have shrunk from the part his poem was destined to play in the Peasants' Uprising, and would have denounced the Reformation. Certainly he antici- pates no sweeping change in the existent social order. The consolation he offers lies in no intel- lectual scheme nor political Utopia: but simply and solely in the enduring intuition of the heart, that God suffers and waits with His world. Says Reason, in words that strangely recall a similar strain in Browning's " Saul : " — " Why I Bn£FeT or not suffer, thyself hath nought to do ; Amend thou it if thou might : for Hy time is to ahide. SufBerance is a sovereign virtue and a swift vengeance. Who suffereth more than God ? quoth he. No man, as I live. He might amend in a minute - while all that amiss standeth, But He suffereth for some men's good, and so is our better." ^ Entering into the mystery of the divine patience, men may endure and wait. And meanwhile for aU Christ's folk Langland has a message. He looks to Christianity as the one hope for social regeneration; he is perhaps the first Englishman thoughtfully to dwell on the social power of the 1 B Text, Paasus XL U. SeS-StS. LANGLAND AND THE MIDDLE AGES 45 faith of Christ. His chief allegory relates, let us not forget, to people already converted, to the children of the Church. He calls upon them, not only to accept the word of their Lord, but to follow His example of love and labor, and to join the congregation of His poor. If obeyed, the appeal oi the old poet would result in the formation of a sort of voluntary Christian socialism in the midst of a rigid social order and an unheeding world. This appeal is the first word of the social literature of England. CHAPTER n THE UTOPIA OF SIE THOMAS MORE A LONG reach of years — nearly a century and a half — lies between the " Visions " of Langland and the "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More. A farther reach of spiritual distance separates the rude and wistful mediaeval dreamer, who saw in the laborer at his task the image of the Saviour of the world, from the cultured statesman of the Renascence. More is the representative scholar of the New Learning of the sixteenth century. His winning personality and interesting career surprise us with an almost contemporary freshness, and show that we have passed from the mystery which makes the whole tone of mediaeval life at once alluring and strange, to the modern atmosphere and the modern spirit. Nothing is more distinctive in the period of the Renascence, nothing affords more remarkable wit- ness to the individualism which it everywhere fos- tered, than the sudden appearance of distinct characters. We no longer look, as in mediaeval annals, on shining arms or drooping cowl, half fearful lest they conceal shadows ; we gaze straight into expressive faces, alert with intelligence, eager as we are eager, with the same note of question, THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 47 maybe, on the brow. This is the most marvelous effect of the art of Italy, when from the long bond- age of the Dark Ages with their immobility of type, it leaps into freedom. Character, vigorously varied, fascinating, living, glances at us from the faded canvas of Ghirlandajo, of Botticelli, insists on being recognized as contemporary, and quietly establishes, as it were, a private understanding between itself and the observer. The English renascence was widely different in type from the Italian : more ascetic, more sober, more Christian. No Borgias nor Medicis ruled in England, neither did any Kaphael adorn the courts of Henry the Eighth and his daughters. In- fluences of the Reformation blended with those of the classic revival, to enhance the native serious- ness of the Anglo-Saxon race. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, young scholars in Oxford and elsewhere were evolving a new spirit of reac- tion and intellectual freedom. They spoke not through art, but through eager speculation and learning. In the work of these men, just as in the great portraits of Italy, we feel real personali- ties, vivid, accessible, and human. If we know More, Colet, Erasmus, if we share their thought- ful schemes, listen to their jests, follow their di- verse yet united efforts to " make reason and the will of God prevail," we enter one of the most delightful intellectual companionships of history. It is a company where all sense of distance is for- gotten, in common interests, methods, and aims. Among this little group of representative schol- 48 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS ars, More was perhaps not the cleverest, but he was assuredly the most lovable. Born in 1478, he grew up in the house of Cardinal Morton, where the general social conditions were not unlike those he was to picture in his great romance. He was a boy of promise, witty, sweet-tempered, equally eager in religion and in study. Admitted to the bar, he knew rapid promotion, and became re- luctantly Vice-Chanoellor to that uncertain per- son, Henry the Eighth. He served his master well and showed keen practical sense in statesman- ship, proving, as Gladstone and many others have proved after him, that aptitude for the quiet life of the scholar is no bad preparation for a public career. Yet he found his joy, not in his political office with its cares and interests, but in an ideal domestic life, in charming colloquy with his scholar friends, above all in strenuous thinking and cease- less religious devotion. He bore with equanim- ity and sweet courage the withdrawal of the king's favor and removal from office ; steadfastly re- fused to deny his principles by ratifying the royal divorce from Catherine, or acknowledging the king as head of the Church ; and died on the block in 1535, claimed by the Church as martyr to the Catholic faith, but also recognized by a wider in- tuition as martyr to the spirit of freedom. II The " Utopia " is the book of More's youth. And so vivid and so daring is it that its name has not only adhered to all similar romances, but has be- THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 49 come a household word. In some ways doubtless it loses, from the social point of view, if compared with the "Vision of Piers the Plowman." The " Vision " speaks from the people ; the " Utopia " speaks for them. Langland has the impassioned sympathy of a comrade of the poor ; More has the disinterested thoughtfulness of the scholar states- man. He has lived at the desk, not at the furrow ; he moves among abstractions, and we infer rather than see the laborer in his work. But in com- pensation we know the author of the later book as we cannot know Langland. Through More's speculations shines a personality fuU of sweetness and light : humorous and worldly wise, yet pure and tender, swift in stern wrath, yet habitually suave. Langland's enormous book is the monu- ment of an entire civilization, the symphonic ex- pression of a mighty social class. More's short and compact work is the record of individual thought, to be accepted, criticised, discussed, on the same basis as the work of Matthew Arnold or William Morris. It is to all practical intents the book of a modern man. The " Utopia " is the first original story by a known English author. That this earliest English novel should deal with the romance, not of a private life, but of society at large, is curious enough ; it is even more curious that this first coherent conception of an ideal social state in our literature should be the outcome of the new individualism of the Renascence. But however much the author's stamp is upon it, the " Utopia," like every living book, is in closes*- 50 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS relation to its age. More is as much a dreamer in his way as Langland ; but into his dreams have passed new memories and new hopes. Langland's mediseval eyes had seen with startling distinctness the field full of jostling fourteenth-century folk, but his landscape was sharply bounded, like the back- ground of contemporary illuminations, by the tall tower of Truth on the one hand, on the other by the yawning pit of Hell. Far though clear in dis- tant space sweeps around the wide horizon of the Utopia ; it is bounded behind by the great world of antiquity, luminous with art and learning ; fronting its shores, new continents, faintly dis- cerned, wait in mystic silence to yield their secrets. The book was written in 1515 and 1516. It was a time when thought shared the audacity of action ; and while material ships were invading the startled silence of southern waters, spiritual sails sped on their way, " voyaging in strange seas of thought alone," where discoveries greater than a visible New World were waiting.^ The charming invention which forms the setting of the " Utopia " is the story of a returned traveler. Kaphael Hythloday, whose beautiful first name re- calls the traveler-archangel, is an admirably dis- tinct character. More draws him as a gentleman and a scholar. He represents a new type of un- worldliness : for he has stripped himself of wealth and renounced the world, not from any ascetic Catholic impulse, but from the desire to be free to follow the life of thought without encumbrances. 1 Compare Faerie Queene, book ii. prologue. THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 61 It is a type which from More's day to our own has now and again existed ; and if its tranquil sever- ance of ties and claims smacks at times of egotism, it has yet an appeal of its own. Its animus is assuredly that of the classic philosopher rather than that of the mediaeval saint. Yet Hythloday's character is modulated to gentleness in its way by Christian influence. The double genesis of that exploring instinct which controls him is marked at once, with his introduction : he is a student of Greek philosophy ; and he has traveled with Americus Vesputius. The first part of Raphael's discourse breathes a buoyant sense of expansion. He teUs of his jour- neyings, and airs from the land of Romance play through his descriptions ; yet soon we realize that here is no tale of marvel, like the delightful unve- racities of the old pseudo-Mandeville, but serious thought bent on grave theory, and inspired by interest in the various forms of human society. Those "wise and prudent institutions which he observed among civilized nations " claim the chief attention of Hythloday. " We asked him many questions concerning aU these things, which he answered very willingly : only we made no en- quiries ^fter monsters, than which nothing is more common ; for everywhere one may hear of raven- ing dogs, and wolves, and cruel men-eaters ; but it is not so easy to find states that are well and wisely governed." ^ If, then, the book bears an open debt to the " Voyages " of Vesputius, — in 1 Ideal Commonwealths, ed. by Henry Morley, p. 57. 62 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS which, indeed, suggestive descriptions are to be found of tribes that have all things in common and despise gold, — it is inspired even more f uUy by More's philosophical reading. Hythloday has remembered his Plato well while observing the Polylerits, the Achorians, the Zapolets, and the Utopians. The Utopians, noblest race of all, are of Greek origin, and throughout the book refer- ences to Greek thought and authorities are con- stant. Times have changed indeed since Dante chose Vergil for his guide, and in his fellowship explored the world to come. The change of reverence bespeaks in itself a new era. For the tradition of Latin conservatism, the Roman stress on organiza- tion, institution, law, which lingered dimly through the Middle Ages, was giving way: its place was taken by eager interest in fresh theory, social and metaphysical, and by the free play of an inquiring consciousness around things as they were ; in a word, by the revival of the Greek temper. The faded manuscripts from the library of Constanti- nople had quickened a new impulse toward intel- lectual liberty in the mediaeval world. The tyranny of ecclesiasticism was over ; and the secularization of thought, the intense interest in the world that now is, brought with it a courage that upheaved the foundations of faith, and reared, in dream at least, a new society. THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 63 III The second o£ the two books that make up the " Utopia " is a straightforward account of the coun- try of the Utopians. The first, which was written last, is a more direct criticism on the country of the English. This first book is of especial personal Interest, for it was written just at the period in More's life when the recluse scholar was holding reluctantly back from the allurements to office and dignity held out to him by his bluff king. The scene is laid in a quiet Dutch town, where Peter Giles, estimable citizen of Antwerp, Raphael the traveler, and More himself hold an imaginary conversation, centring in the effort to persuade Raphael to place his wide experience at the service of the state. With admirable humor More exposes the futility of the hope that a student and philoso- pher should ever, in the court of princes, make his unworldly notions prevail. There is something exquisitely urbane in Raphael's courteous annihi- lation of the earnest and reiterated arguments by which his friends seek to draw him to a life of action, and in his triumphant demonstration of the fact, " that there is no room for philosophy in the courts of princes." ^ It is probable that More was haunted, all the time that he was relieving his mind in this refreshing conversation, by a sense of its subtle selfishness ; for he himself did not follow the sage counsels of Hythloday. Besides the argument against public life, which 1 Ideal Commonwealths, p. 82. 64 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS is its connecting thread, the first book contains much enlightening criticism on the social conditions of the day. Hythloday has been in England " no„ long after the rebellion in the West Indies was suppressed, with a great slaughter of the poor peo. pie that were engaged in it." He reports a con, versation held at the table of Cardinal Morton, the friend and patron of More's youth. The point of departure is the drastic penal laws that exact capi, tal punishment for theft; despite which severity, so much had theft increased that often as many as twenty were hanging on a single gibbet. Hythlo-. day goes swiftly behind phenomena to cause. With decisive clearness, he traces the existence of this huge criminal class to industrial conditions. He points out that the great wars had drafted men o£E from honest trades, and left them, in time of peace, a burden to the country ; that the breaking-up of the vast feudal households, which was so rapidly proceeding in his day, threw upon the community throngs of idle servants, trained only to minister to the luxuries of the rich, demoralized in chai-acter, useless for purposes of productive labor ; that finally, the rapid conversion of England into a sheep-grazing country — an industry which required vast territory and few hands — was ruining trade? and agriculture, and creating vast numbers of help- less and unoccupied people. England, in a word, was confronted by the great problem of the Unem- ployed. The conditions producing such a class differed from those leading to a similar result in our own day ; but More's discussion of the situa- THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 55 tion is amazingly modern. The offhand solutiona of the difficulty were as superficial then as they are now ; it would be well if all modern thinkers had as marked a union of patience with clear decision and keen insight, as is shown by the young states- man of Henry the Eighth. He points out the great danger to the nation of a large and growing class really unable from various causes to support itself by honest work ; shows clearly the folly of trying to meet the problem by penal laws which seek to suppress the irrepressible, if unreasonable, clamor for life ; and suggests that only fundamental and wise economic provisions will ever prove adequate to meet the evil, and that penology is in last resort only a branch of industrial science. " ' There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves,' said Le, ' but it were better to make such good provisions by which every man might be put in a method how to live and so be preserved from the fatal neces- sity of stealing and of dying for it.' ' There has been care enough taken for that,' said his oppo- nent; 'there are many handicrafts, and there is husbandry, by which they may make a shift to live unless they have a greater mind to follow ill courses.' ' That will not serve your turn,' " ^ says Hythloday, and then goes on to show the absurdity of supposing that untrained and ignorant labor can be effectively applied, haphazard, at any point of the industrial system. Then after enlarging a little on certain detailed theories concerning the wise handling of crime, 1 Idtal Commonwealths, p. 61. 66 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS More rapidly passes to a deeper analysis of the evil at its very roots. In the concluding pages of this first book, he sweeps upward into a general indict, ment of the society of his day in its inward con- stitution and principle, an indictment so clear in restrained power, so uncompromising, so search- ing, that the most subversive and revolutionary modern critics could find nothing to add in the substance and little to improve in the presentation. This is the determining passage, which gives the clue to all his thought : — " To speak plainly my real sentiments, I must freely own that as long as there is any property and while money is the stand- ard of aU other things, I cannot think that a nation can be governed either justly or happily ; not justly, because the best things will fall to the share of the worst men ; nor happily, because all things will be divided among a few (and even these are not in all respects happy), the rest being left to be utterly miserable." ^ More knows well enough that in announcing such theories he will be considered either mad or a fool. He hedges his way as wisely as honesty wiU permit. He appeals to a double authority, Plato, the lord of ancient thought ; and Christ, the Lord not only of thought but of life. Keenly and clev- erly, he points out that an idea may appear absurd not from its intrinsic folly, but from the sin or ignorance of those who receive it. " If we must let alone everything as absurd or extravagant which by reason of the wicked lives of many seems ' Ideal Commonwealths, p. 85. THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 57 uncouth, we must, even among Christians, give over pressing the greatest part of those things that Christ hath taught us, though He has commanded us not to conceal them, but to proclaim on the house- tops that which He taught in secret. The greatest parts of His precepts are more opposite to the lives of the men of this age than any part of my dis- course has been." ^ Finally, he disarms criticism and obtains a hearing by the artistic device of putting his radical sentiments upon the lips of Hythloday, and presenting himself as a shocked and conservative opponent. And even Hythloday urges these views for his final excuse in refusing to bear any part in the affairs of the world. So guarded, he goes on: "Whence I am persuaded that till property is taken away there can be no equitable or just distribution of things, nor can the world be happily governed ; for as long as that is maintained, the greatest and the far best part of mankind will be stiU oppressed with a load of cares and anxieties. I confess without taking it quite away, those pres- sures that lie on a great part of mankind may be made lighter; but they can never be quite re- moved." . . . For suppose all sorts of limiting laws and provisions, civil service reform, graded income tax, etc. ..." These laws, I say, might have such good effects as good diet and care might have on a sick man, whose recovery is desperate ; they might allay and mitigate the disease, but it could never be quite healed, nor the body politic be brought again to a good habit, so long as property remains ; and ' Ideal Commonwealths, p. 83. 58 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS it will fall out as in a complication of diseases, that by applying a remedy to one sore, you will provoke another ; and that which removes the one Ul symp- tom produces others, while the strengthening one part of the body weakens the rest." ^ A reply is fairly burning on More's conservative lips; no sooner has Hythloday's breath paused than it leaps out eagerly : — Property in common? How absurd — and with what delightful ease I shall instantly confute you ! — " ' On the contrary,' " answered I, " ' it seems to me that men cannot live conveniently where all things are common : how can there be any plenty, where every man will excuse himself from labor? For as the hope of gain doth not excite him, so the confidence that he hath in other men's industry may make him sloth- ful ; if people come to be pinched with want, and yet cannot dispose of anything as their own, what can follow upon this but perpetual sedition and bloodshed, especially when the reverence and au- thority due to magistrates falls to the ground ? For I cannot imagine how that can be kept up among those that are in aU things equal to one another.' " The ancient, the modern, the main argument against Socialism ! You may hear it on the street- corner to-day, you may read it from the newspaper, in almost the very words of the conversation in the quaint Dutch town. Apart from possible truth, it has one great source of strength ; it can never be met by argument. Facts alone could disprove it. But what are we saying ? For here is Hythlo- •^ Ideal Commonwealths, p. 86. THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 59 day, smiling, quiet, eager to speak. Listen: "If you had been in Utopia with me, and had seen their laws and rules as I did, for the space of five years " — Well thought of indeed, friend Kaphael I Come, let us hoist the sails of thought and swiftly speed with you to that far, fair realm of your affections. And so, with realistic detail which makes this first of English romances also one of the most charming, More leads us to the second, or construc- tive part of the book : the description of his ideal state. The very name disarms criticism : anything may exist Nowhere; and so having cleared the way — no easy task — of his reader's instinctive prejudices and conventions, he presents his scheme to be enjoyed at our ease. IV The " Utopia " was published in the same year trith Macchiavelli's " Prince." The practical sub- tlety of the Italian renascence plays through the one, making it the most brilliant study ever written of the means by which the world taken as we find it may be used and subdued by a master-spirit. The large idealism of the English revival of letters animates the other. It is suggestive to note that although More's dream of the world as it might become is still unrealized, it makes stronger appeal to our generation than Macchiavelli's practical dis- cussion of the world as it was. For the most surprising thing in the "Utopia" is its modemness. Not only does More predict mod- 60 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS ern inventions in curious detail ; the atmosphere of his world is indescribably like that of our own day, He is thinking of men of our own race and belief, and we follow his plans for the beautiful order of their lives with the keen interest that comes from a sense of possibility. A sense of possibility is a strange phrase to asso- ciate with the " Utopia ; " for the obvious remark that this communistic state violates human nature rises to every reader's lips as readily as to those of the interlocutor of Hythloday. Yet the sanity of the tone of the book is as striking as the audacity of its ideas ; and it is curious to note how many of these ideas have been translated into fact by the centuries. More's conception of penology and his plea for religious toleration doubtless appeared to his contemporaries quite as preposterous as his industrial scheme ; yet his construction of crime and its remedies is in harmony with our advanced modern policy, and the religious freedom which seemed a chimerical vision for generations after his death has been long enjoyed. If the industrial System on which his society is founded is still con- fined to Utopia, communication between that com- monwealth and England is at least more frequent than in his day. One is inclined to suspect certain of our economists, even, of occasional trips into that land of vision ; while as for the dreamers, — Ruskin, Bellamy, Morris, Howells, — they have sojourned there long enough to bring back full reports, which differ sometimes in detail from those of Hythloday. THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 61 To say that More's communistic ideal is open to wide criticism is to acknowledge that it is human. Every scheme of social reconstruction betrays the finite limitations of its inventor, and is monoto- nous in one way if not in another. One man's fancy wiU be bewitched by the possibilities of enlarged ease and comfort to be hoped for from mechanical inventions perfected and generally shared. He will write books full of ingenious descriptions of the free life which men might know if material resources were wisely developed. Every one will read the books with delight, many hail in them the prophecy of a near future, — till sud- denly some wiseacre discovers that their thought is bourgeois, Philistine, materialistic. There you have " Looking Backward " and " Equality ; " and we all feel that our present existence, whatever its futilities, is intellectually richer than the conven- ient life Bellamy has pictured. Another man is an artist. He does not mind inconvenience, but the ugliness of modern civilization haunts him like a nightmare ; and with his mind stored with memo- ries of all that has been most beautiful in the past, he dreams a fair dream for us of a lovely future, where architecture shall be redeemed from sordid- ness to dignity, and people from vulgarity to grace. His dream is a decorative frieze, without depth or movement ; seek to penetrate below aspect to soul, and the beauty flees. We turn away bored from the monotonous charm of Morris' " News from Nowhere ; " yet the artist could create only an artistic ideal, and it is fair to put the aspect not 62 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS the soul of his society beside the society of our own day. But indeed " the best in this kind are but shadows," and no imagination of the perfect state, with personal stress on a personal ideal, whether of comfort, beauty, or freedom, can equal the imperfect but marvelous ministry to human need and growth in our rough civilization as it is. To say this is simply to say that life is greater than art ; it is not to deny that art can hold up an unattained ideal to life, a hint at a time. Our modern society is doubtless more interesting than that imagined by Bellamy, or Morris, or More ; yet their several ideals may point, each in its own line, the way toward a new and nobler state. In More, the emphasis falls on quite a different place from that in any modern Utopia ; and both the strong and weak points in his scheme are ex- actly what would be expected. Morris imagines a society whose end should be beauty, Bellamy one whose end should be ease. The quest of More is for conditions which should set men free for the life of the mind. The English renascence was preeminently inar- tistic. It produced no paintings, no sculpture. It fostered thought; and it developed the English ideal of freedom. Its stern spirit, already^ promis- ing the austerity of the Puritan, may be clearly felt in the " Utopia." The book breathes an " at- mosphere of asceticism," says William Morris, " which has a curiously blended savor of Cato the Censor and a mediaeval monk." This asceticism affects chiefly details; but unluckily the details THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 63 caught public attention, and many people continue to think that all socialistic society would be hope- lessly monotonous, because More dressed aU his people, men, women, and children alike, in clothes of one pattern. It is quite true that outward beauty and variety are almost wholly indifferent to him. If the stigma of materialism rests on some modern socialistic dreams, no one could possibly attach it to the ideals of More. His one desire is to imagine means by which preoccupation with material things may be minimized and the best force of society be free to devote itself to the inner life. The striking thing in all social Utopias, when grouped, is that, however their implied criticisms on the present differ as to symptoms, they show perfect agreement as to cause. One man is deeply convinced of the ugKness of civilization, another of its wasteful inconvenience, another of its stupidity, but all believe that false industrial conditions are the centre and source of social wrong ; and all alike feel that the special reorganization they long for must be the result of industrial reform. It is when More settles down to discuss such reform that he becomes most modem, nlost sugges- tive. He describes at first indeed, with pleasant chamj, the location of his ideal city, and its ap- pearance ; he tells us briefly of the government, a representative democracy leading upward to a Prince for life ; but it is in the section " Of their Trades and Manner of Life " that we begin really to know the surprising Utopians. We learn, to 64 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS begin with, that they all understand agriculture, having been trained in it in youth. More has a quiet, primal, unsentimental love of the country, and assurance that it should be, during early life at least, the common heritage. His feeling is like that of Vaughan : — " Fresh fields and woods ! the Earth's fair face ! God's footstool I and man's dwelling-place I I ask not why the first heliever Did lore to be a country liver ? If Eden he on Earth at all, 'T is that which we the country call." * Beside agriculture, " Every man has some pecu- liar trade to which he applies himself," ^ and at these trades each person works six hours a day. Uniformity in distribution of labor is thus the basis of Utopian society. Here, it is obvious, the thought of More touches that of Langland, only fellowship in work is no longer voluntary but com- pulsory; the statesman has a clear-cut, definite, and detailed theory to put beside the spiritual intuition of the dreamer of Malvern HUls. From the uni- versality of labor follows the shortness of the working-day. If More's thought suggests that of his quaint predecessor, it is still further in line with many social theories that were to follow, and not only with theories but with movements. The six-hour day is not yet a battle-cry in the ranks of labor ; but the eight-hour day is being eagerly claimed wherever the ten-hour day has been won. 1 Henry Vaughan, Retirement. ^ Ideal Commonwealths, p. 67. THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 65 To estimate the audacity of More's speculation, we must realize that his plan antedated by sev- eral centuries labor-saving machinery, and contem- plated an industrial condition where all needs were supplied by hand. He never watched the action of economic laws in modern civilization. He never caught the hum of these myriad machines which, reducing the old labor of days to hours, hold the vast array of workmen bending over them for as long a working-day as brute strength permits, while another army, only less vast, waits hungrily with no work at all, their greedy hands outstretched to snatch their comrades' "jobs" at the first oppor- timity. The irony of the modern situation was spared Sir Thomas More. One questions how, with the primitive conditions known to him. More ventures so to limit his work- ing-day. He gives us his answer with his accus- tomed serenity ; it is sweeping enough in sugges- tion, but it can be put into a phrase. He expects to reach his aim by two methods, — the suppres- sion of luxuries and the elimination of the lei- sure class : — " But the time appointed for labor is to be narrowly examined, otherwise you may imagine, that since there are only six hours ap- pointed for work, they may fall under a scarcity of necessary provisions. But it is so far from being true, that this time is not sufficient for supplying them with plenty of all things, either necessary or convenient ; that it is rather too much, and this you will easily apprehend if you consider how great a part of all other nations is quite idle. 66 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS First, women generally do little, who are the half of mankind ; and if some few women are diligent, their husbands are idle ; then consider the great company of idle priests, and of those that are called religious men ; add to these all rich men, chiefly those that have estates in land, who are called noblemen and gentlemen, together with their families, made up of idle persons, that are kept more for show than for use ; add to these all those strong and lusty beggars that go about pretending some disease in excuse for their begging ; and upon the whole account you will find that the number of those by whose labors mankind is supplied is much less than you perhaps imagined. Then con- sider how few of those that work are employed in labors that are of real service ; for we who measure all things by money give rise to many trades that are vain and superfluous, and serve only to support riot and luxury." ^ This plea for simplicity is a curious thing to find at the outset of that sixteenth century which was to see a sumptuous England aglow with color, ex- ulting in the pride of life. The fastidious scholar who pleaded for it well knew against what deep- seated instincts he was working. He betrays his consciousness of the force of the desires for wealth and rank, by the stringent rules which he lays down to repress them. The Utopians have to summon to their aid not only philosophy, but most ingenious devices, to help them quell their acquis- itiveness ; and there is a sad humor in More's ' Ideal Commonwealths, p. 98. THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 67 confession that the ghost of rank still lingers, an honored presence among them, though the body has long been buried. Every one remembers the clev- erness of the Utopians in attaining due contempt for precious metals by using them as material for vile utensils and the chains of slaves ; nor does one forget the pretty scene where ambassadors from a foreign land appear resplendent with gold and jewels, only to excite the laughter of the child, whom the courteous mother quiets with the re- mark, " Peace, Son ; I think these be some of the ambassadors' fools." We cannot fail to read in this vehement horror of soft living, and this sharp sarcasm, the bitter experience of one who knew the world and the lust thereof at short range. If More turns away with an almost prescient dread from permitting any luxury to his Utopians, it is not because he thinks manual labor in itself an end in life, nor because he believes in self- mortification. He is untouched by a certain latter- day cant, about labor being in itself a glory and an honor. He thinks it a wholesome thing in mod- erate amounts, but it should never mean the whole of life to any human being. His Syphogrants, or ruling class, who are exempt from labor, do indeed voluntarily share it, not for pleasure, how- ever, but for the sake of example. Life is neither to the end of self-indulgence nor of toil : life, as the friend of Colet and Erasmus conceives it, is for the cultivation of the activities of the soul. His analysis of industrial conditions completed, More's method is to give a synthetic picture of 68 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS Utopian life. The society he shows us is the most de-materialized, if a word may be coined, that any dreamer ever conceived. The impression carried away from a journey in Utopia is that of an ex- treme, though refined, simplicity of life. This follows as a matter of course from the restrictions, on luxury already mentioned ; it is also with the Utopians a matter of taste. In costume, in social forms, and almost all the outward concerns where diversity and elaboration naturally prevail, they preserve a uniform plainness of living. Would Utopia be a pleasant state to live in? Or would existence there be insufferably monoto- nous and dead ? This question is a little hard to answer because it involves a great deal. More does assuredly lose much by shutting his people off from all the varied joy to be gained from the production, to say nothing of the employment, of beautiful utilities ; and the absence of artistic glow leaves his atmosphere a little gray. So far as the decorative arts are concerned, the Utopians practice to the full the aesthetic reticence of the Japanese. Yet we must not make him more extreme than he is. Many kinds of beauty are only ignored, not excluded, by his scheme ; some he distinctly introduces. He endues his town with natural advantages, he gives it noble and awe- inspiring temples ; and the regularity of domestic architecture is at least partly atoned for by the wide, sweet gardens behind the houses. The effect of Amaurot, the chief city, would be not unlike that of the Paris of the Second Empire. THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 69 The question, however, of the charms of Uto- pian life involves more than a consideration of details. It is essentially the question always asked about socialistic schemes. To face it at all frankly, we must put ourselves at the point of view of the individual Utopian. There is no use in taking a bird's-eye view of society as a whole and announcing that the imiformity of conditions removes variety from life and makes it duU. So- cial architecture, literal or metaphorical, was not planned for men that live in the air. And men who walk the streets see not the whole, but what meets one pair of eyes. Would the average Uto- pian find life more or less stimulating than the average American? If we are to strike an average, we must remem- ber the dreary, expansive monotony of conditions that envelops to-day the wage-earning population, the appalling absence of variety in the homes they live in, the factories they work in, the pursuits they follow. The advantages of the vaunted pie- tureequeness and variety of a competitive civiliza- tion with distinctions of rank are assuredly confined to the minority ; for the monotony of the lives of the working-people is broken by little change except the fact, or fear, of unemployment. The life of the privileged would have to be intensely full of interest to-day, if the general average were to be in favor of modern conditions. But as a matter of fact, it may be doubted whether the millionaire, however hard-hearted, gets much un- alloyed pleasure from contemplating the other 70 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS extreme o£ the social scale ; just as it is doubtful whether the denizen of the East Side is roused to any special exertion by his consciousness of the remote glories of Fifth Avenue. A man's char- acter is formed by conditions within his range, not by a general intuition of society as a whole. Social conditions in More's ideal land present, ■when analyzed, considerable variety. The Utopia is not indeed a country with widely separated social extremes ; but it is not a state of social equality, — misleading phrase ! It is a state of equal social opportunity : the only approach to equality that a sane reason can entertain. Men start alike in this state ; they by no means end alike. More recognizes differences in rank : princes, graded rulers, priests, men of learning. The pro- cession of these offices is determined not by inherit- ance, but by manifested gifts ; all, except that of prince, are open to ambitious, competent, and vir- tuous citizens. The men who hold them are exempt from manual labor, and form, if they choose, a leisure class. In this theory of the equal start, the root-idea of the Utopia, More anticipates the Jacobinism of the eighteenth century and the teachings of Rousseau ; in the application of it, he is ahead of aU but the most advanced democracy of our own day. He lived at the beginning of an epoch to number its centuries ; past their dim vistas, his prophetic eyes followed the track of the dawn. Among his Utopians as a whole. More allows for much freedom of inclination and development. THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 71 Each child is to choose his trade, as with us, after the common training in country life has been received; and, we may add, with less distressful pressure of haste and fewer limitations in outlook. Work finished, the Utopians are supplied with as much variety of resource as a people so alert for abstractions could demand. More is sure that they will attend their lectures before breakfast, though he admits that exceptions to this enthusi- asm may be found. Meanwhile they have music, games, travel, domestic life, as well as study. If the fear of material need takes with it, as it van- ishes, one element of excitement, a plenty of other vicissitudes remain ; and abundant opportunities for romance exist in the vigorous ease and free- dom of the social conditions. But it is when the friend of Erasmus treats of the philosophy and religion of the Utopians that he shows most eager enthusiasm, and brings us into most curious sympathy with that singular people. In the communal life, religion plays a mighty part, as ritual, as doctrine, and as conduct. Much in his thought and plans More derives from the still Catholic civilization of England; for a larger part he depends on his own thought, and, loyal son of the Church that he is, utters words so ringing with the note of religious freedom that they can never be forgotten. Utopus " left men wholly to their liberty, that they might be free to believe as they should see cause," with one restric- tion, that men who disbelieve the immortality of the soul shall be raised to no public office; yet 72 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS even these are pitied instead of punished, for " they lay this down as a maxim," — and the Chris- tian world has barely to-day learned to agree with them, — " that a man cannot make himself believe anything he pleases." Perfect religious freedom reigning, Utopia develops as many sects as Amer- ica; with the difference that there is one state- religion, shrined in magnificent temples, where all, whatever their persuasions, meet to worship by impressive rite that Divine Essence whom all equally adore. More has thought much on the priesthood. "Their priests," he tells us with delicate irony, " are men of eminent piety, and therefore they are but few." Women are occasionally made priests, More here, as everywhere, recognizing the equality of the sexes. He plans for two orders in the priest- hood. One, celibate and aesthetic, renounces ut- terly the earth, hoping only for the joys of heaven ; theirs is the Catholic ideal. The other, "less wUling to put themselves to much toil, prefer a married state to a single one," and in the cheer- ful common-sense of their religion anticipate the standards of the Protestant clergy. " The Uto- pians," says More, " look upon these as the wiser sect, but they esteem the other as the most holy." ^ Taking into account the varying resources with which More provides his people, it is impossible to avoid the impression that we have here a sin- gularly noble picture of a social state wholesome, sweet, and sane. Life in Utopia, neither stifled 1 Ideal Commonwecdths, p. 155. THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 73 by luxury nor starved by want, could find free expression. It is in\dgorated, not by conflict with artificial conditions, but by the ceaseless normal struggle of the body to subdue the earth to fertil- ity, and of the spirit to conquer truth. A just criticism of More's thought will emphasize less the artistic omissions so easily supplied than a failure to record the ceaseless flux of social forms, a cer- tain immobility in his ideal civilization, inevitable, perhaps, in the work of a thinker who lived too soon to realize evolution. But the picture drawn by Hythloday, whatever its defects, is more charged with intellectual and spiritual suggestions than that of any social dreamer in England before or since. fiythloday is a figment, Utopia a myth. Behind ■ Kaphael the traveler lurks More the Englishman, and Utopia is but England reversed. A constant satire on the actual state of things plays through the constructive imagery of the book. Often this satire is veiled, as in the brilliant and much-mis- understood section on War ; but toward the end, it rises into direct, vigorous, sad denunciation. No more impressive arraignment of society exists than the last few pages of the " Utopia." Putting aside disguises, More here speaks out his whole great mind : — " I would gladly hear any man compare the justice that is among them with that of all other nations : among whom may I perish if I see any- 74 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS thing that looks either like justice or equity : foi what justice is there in this, that a noblemau, a goldsmith, a banker, or any other man that either does nothing at all, or at best is employed in things that are of no use to the public, should live in great luxury and splendor on what is so ill ac- quired; and a mean man, a carter, a smith, or a ploughman, that works harder even than the beasts themselves, and is employed in labors so necessary that no commonwealth could hold out a year without them, can only earn so poor a liveli- hood, and must lead so miserable a life, that the condition of the beasts is much better than theirs ? For as the beasts do not work so constantly, so they feed almost as well, and with more pleasure : and have no anxiety about what is to come, whilst these men are depressed by a barren and fruitless employment, and tormented with the apprehensions <)f want in their old age ; since that which they get by their daily labor does but maintain them at present, and is consiimed as fast as it comes in, there is no overplus left to lay up for old age. " Is not that government both unjust and un- grateful, that is so prodigal of its favors to those that are called gentlemen, or goldsmiths, or such others who are idle, or live either by flattery, or by contriving the arts of vain pleasure ; and on the other hand takes no care of those of a meaner sort, such as ploughmen, colliers, and smiths, with- out whom it could not subsist ? . . . " Therefore I must say that, as I hope for mercy, can have no other notion of all the other govern- THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 75 ments that I see or know, but that they are a con- spiracy of the rich, who on pretense of managing the public, only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out ; first that they may without danger preserve all that they have so ill acquired, and then that they may engage the poor to toil and labor for them at as low rates as possible and oppress them as much as they please. And if they can but prevail to get these contrivances established by the show of pub- lic authority, which is considered as the represent- ative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws."i These trenchant sentences have the distinct ring of the modern social democracy. They vibrate with that indignant sympathy with the working- people which underlies the serene cahn of the " Utopia." More feels, as a modern writer might, the dead- ening and materializing influence of the pursuit for money, and the expansion of higher ambitions which might instantly follow, if that great anxiety were removed. Finally, he is deeply impressed with the conviction that pride, and pride alone, is at the root of social inequalities : " For this vice does not measure happiness so much by its own conveniences, as by the miseries of others ; and would not be satisfied with being thought a god- dess, if none were left that were miserable, over whom she might insult." In these grave words, we seem to hear the sentence pronounced upon that 1 Ideal Commonwealths, p. 163. 76 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS haughty feudal civilization, with its graded honors and functions, which was just passing away ; we hear, alas ! no less a prophetic judgment upon that commercial society which, when More wrote, was rising from the old, and, like its predecessor, was to take centuries to run its course. Yet satire and invective are not the chief strength of the "Utopia;" through its irony plays an irrepressible hope. It is in vain that More ends with a wistful sigh : " There are many things in the Commonwealth of Utopia that I rather wish than hope to see practiced in our Govern- ment." We feel throughout that these are the dreams of a man full of the sense of power, confi- dent alike in the intelligence and the ability of human nature, and deeply and solemnly impressed with that mutability in human affairs which, as it may induce a mood of depression and indolence, may also in different temperaments stimulate to high and buoyant courage. The masterful instinct of the Renascence plays through the book and in- vigorates it. More has indeed no expectation of immediate change, but he sees, as Plato saw be- fore him, an entire nation living under conditions of wholesome freedom ; and so vivid is the picture that it works conviction in his mind. A new revelation must indeed have dawned on men between the work of Langland, so acquiescent with all its courage, and that of More, so revo- lutionary in spite of its statesman-like experience. To the singer of the Plowman, existing condi- tions are immutable facts : " As things have been, THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 77 they remain," and only from the self-abnegation of the Cross and its followers does a ray of light shine down the twilight of the world. Social regeneration Langland can earnestly demand, but social reconstruction lies out of the scope of his most daring speculation. In More, the age of patience has passed away, and the age of hope has arisen. Langland reveals to us the heart of the laborer ; More sets before us his picture of the perfect state. Social radicals always tend to the attitude of one of these, our first two social pro- phets. Some delight in sweeping theories, and image for themselves, with wide-reaching intellec- tual ardor, a new earth where human intelligence shall at last achieve for all men a state of justice, freedom, and peace. Others, no less ardent, can- not escape the conviction that the world wiU always go on its old way. They see the Holy City as a perpetual Becoming, ever descending, as the Seer in Patmos beheld it, from heaven to men : never quite established here below. All the more fervently do they summon individuals to become here and now citizens of that Heavenly City, to renounce the world and the lust thereof, and to give themselves to the fellowship and service that abide. The two positions are both common among us to-day : nor is there much use in discussing their relative truth or value, so long as the ideals of both remain equally unrealized. Meanwhile, we can hardly go wrong in ascrib- ing the new freedom and the widened reach of thought in the " Utopia " to the infusion of Hel' 78 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS lenism brought by the New Learning ; nor can we regret the enlargement, with its stimulating power. And yet, in placing exclusive emphasis on the formative influences of the classics over More's mind, we run danger of injustice both to his per- sonality and to his thought. Other influences, of a type wholly different from those which could emar nate from Hellas, were at work in the noble and holy character of the man who daily repeated in his private chapel the Litany and Suffrages, wore a hair-shirt next his skin, was drawn powerfully to the monastic vocation, and was to die a Catholic martyr and be sainted by the Catholic Church. The social bearings of the teaching of Christ are discerned, or at least proclaimed, with more cour- age in the " Utopia " than in the " Vision of Piers the Plowman." More strikes the Christian note at the very beginning ; he converts his Utopians to Christianity with amazing willingness through their swift perception of its communistic ideal ; and the superb conclusion of the book shows how deeply he believed that in demanding a new social order he was fulfilling the will and following the authority of Christ's commands : " Who as He was infinitely wise knew what was best, and would have drawn all the world over to the laws of the Utopians if Pride, that plague of human nature, that source of so much misery, did not hinder it." To realize how much deeper his Christianity lay than mere specific allusions, we have but to com- pare the gracious commonwealth of Utopia with its harsh and military prototype in Plato's Bepub- THE UTOPIA OF SIR THOMAS MORE 79 lie. Plato's state is sternly military. His com- munistic regulations are confined to tlie upper class, while the lower orders, presupposed, are all but ignored ; and communism is extended to the destruction of the family. In More, the spirit of love illumines that severe Justice which was the quest of the old philosopher, and the Greek and pagan dream becomes Christian and English. The truth is that More lived at a fortunate moment. The individualism of the Renascence had not yet gone so far in its enthusiasm for earth as to forget heaven, and the clash of the secular against the religious ideal was as yet unheard. With equal reverence, More could seek for wis- dom from the clear thought of antiquity or from the ardent aspirations of the Church ; and words from Christ and from Plato might rest side by side on his pages, in tranquil harmony. Such harmony could not endure : a great conflict was impending. It came in matters religious first ; and till the end of the seventeenth century, theological controversy diverted thought from the quieter dwelling on matters economic and social. But we may surely welcome this noble and melodious book, in which the free and unfettered play of thought on social questions betrays the sense of power and respon- sibility which was creating the Reformation, and prophesies a time when the Reformation should have done its perfect work, and men, free in their relations to God, could turn their whole ardor into seeking for freedom in their relations with one another. CHAPTER rn THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT The ideal of social reconstruction dominates the " Utopia ; " and intellectual achievement and religious freedom proceed as natural, incidental consequence from the industrial conditions and democratic institutions which More suggests. But the line of advance was not to be that which he dreamed. Three centuries and a half were to pass before his social ideals were to be echoed. These centuries were among the greatest in English story ; they achieved mighty gains for humanity ; but the evolution of social passion and social theory was not their task. That task was the conquest of p(j)litical and religious liberty for England. For generations after More's day, one phase or another of religious controversy absorbed all powers of speculation and many powers of life. The first phase was the struggle between Komanism and the native Anglican Church. The fires at Smithfield, which More might have lived to see, died down, and with them sank forever the supremacy of the Roman Church in England. Meanwhile, the coun- try of Elizabeth had enough to do without handling economic problems. The swift increase in mate* THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 81 rial prosperity threw such problems into the back- ground at an early point in the reign. The jolly Prentices of poem and drama led a care-free life. They had a sturdy sense of English independ- ence, but little discontent with their lot; they shared the joyousness of the times and that new national consciousness, fostered by foes without and the sense of power within, which was in itself an achievement great enough for one generation. Of social unrest the literature of this period bears little trace. In its earlier moods, to be sure, the pastoral strain sounds loud and contented and sweet : ^ — " Who can live in heart so glad As the merry country lad ? Who upon a fair green haulk May at pleasure sit and walk ? And amid the azure skies See the morning sun arise ? While he hears in every spring How the birds do chirp and sing ; Or before the hounds in cry See the hares go stealing by ; Then the bee to gather honey ; And the little black-haired coney On a bank for sunny place With her fore-feet wash her face ; Are not these worth thousands moe Than the courts of kings do know ? " But the " merry country lad," if we follow his story in " Arcadia," or the " Faerie Queene," or the " Shepherd's Calendar," proves always to be knight or poet in disguise, and his Aglaia, Philoclea, 1 Nicholas Breton, The Passionate Pilgrim. 82 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS Pastorella, is a lass of high degree, who keeps her flocks as pastime or prelude, before her dainty graces are restored to her native court. Even the drama, popular in origin and appeal, shows few popular sympathies ; one may search it almost in vain for democratic sentiments or social inspiration. The mob doth dearly love a king; and on the Elizabethan stage, high-born lords and ladies were the only people in whose fate a serious interest could be taken. The others only furnished the jokes, and Bottom, Quince, Gobbo, Dogberry, and the rest, very likely roared with laughter at the antics of their prototypes on the stage. It is true that the lightsome domestic drama of Heywood and Dekker gives us charming pictures of homely life, and suggests at times, as in Heywood's Master Shore of " King Edward the Fourth," the sense for the dignity of the mid- dle class ; but the " Foure Prentices of London," who make their jolly way to the wars and turn up at the capture of Jerusalem as crowned heroes, are the sons of a disguised earl in the good old fashion. Their adventures and the gay intrigue of Dekker's " Shoemaker's Holiday," and of that curious, rol- licking forerunner of the spirit of Burns and Gay, Richard Broome's " Merry Beggars," are in the pure style of light opera, and valuable only as wit- nessing to the growth of conventional class-types. A note of sweet compassion for the poor is struck now and again in the old drama. " It takes away the holy use of charity To examine wants," — THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 83 says Alinda, in Fletcher's " Pilgrim : " but charity itself is conventional. The social problems, fomid by the modern stage so fertile in dramatic motifs, the Elizabethans recked not of. One can hardly exaggerate the aristocratic char- acter of Elizabethan literature. It is aristocratic in a noble sense ; it proceeds from the noble court of Elizabeth, and " courtliness " is the word that expresses it best. The keynote is struck at the very outset, in that quaint, high-minded book, Lyly's " Euphues : " " Gentlemen," says a rever- end personage, accosting two young gallants, Eu- phues and Philautus, "Gentlemen — for such I perceive ye to be by your carriage, and ye can be no more, being but men." From this time to the time of Hooker and Bacon, in all literature, even to the little lyric cries that Hit with sudden sweetness through grave deliberations and patri- otic fervors, the quest is the same : the fashioning a new type of heroism, learned and peaceful, which replaces the primitive and unlettered type of the mediaeval knight. We see the hero in relation to his queen, to his country, to his churcA, to his love : in all these relations, we learn what an ideal gen- tleman should be. In persons, the age produced Sir Philip Sidney ; in poetry, Spenser's " Faerie Queene." The one lived what the other sung, — the ideal of perfect knighthood, made gentler, wider, because translated into terms of contemporary life. Spenser's poetry is the very mirror of the times at their best. Its bright and chivalrio spirit scorns money as much 84 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS as it cherislies what money brings. Listen to Sir Guyon, knight of Temperance, tempted in the cave of Mammon by piles of glistening lucre : — " Me ill Ijesits tihat in der-doing^ anues And honours' snit my Tow^d daies do spend, Unto thy bounteous baytes and pleasing' charmes, With which weake men thou witchest, to attend ; Regard of worldly mncke doth fowly blend, And low abase the high heroicke spright, That joyes for crownes and kingdomes to contend ; Faire shields, gay steedes, bright armes be my delight ; These be the riches fit for an advent'rous knight." ^ Gruyon has little to answer to Mammon's obvious retort that these attractive matters are hardly to be had without his help ; yet Spenser evidently thinks that the knight has the best of the argu- ment. The " raskeU many " intrude as seldom on the consciousness of the poet as on the ways of his wandering knights ; but a shade of haughtiness darkens his courtesy whenever social distinctions occur to him. " In brave poursnitt of honorable deed. There is I know not what great difference Betweene the vulgar and the noble seed," ' — he cries. In the fifth book, Sir Artegall, cham- pion of Justice, meets a giant of Communism who wishes to weigh the sea and land in his balances, and distribute them more evenly. " Therefore I will throw downe these mountaines hie, And make them levell with the lowly plaine ; These towring rocks, which reach unto the skie, I will thrust downe into the deepest maine, And, as they were, them equalize againe. ^ Faerie Queene., book ii. canto vii. st. z. ° Ibid., book ii. canto iv. st. i. THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 85 Tyrants, that make men subject to theb law, I will suppresse, that they no more may raine ; And Lordings curbe that commons over-aw. And all the wealth of rich men to the poore will draw.*' ^ The crowd listen to him with rapture : — " Like foolish flies about an hony-crocke ; In hope by him great benefite to gaine, And uncontrolled freedome to obtaine." ' The giant is not a dangerous foe ; the ridicule which Spenser casts at him shows that the Eliza- bethan poet felt it quite needless to put a serious construction on his antics. Sir Artegall has no trouble at all in answering his arguments ; and as with much satisfaction to himself the knight de- monstrates that equality produced to-day would be inequality to-morrow, he utters a line which shows the attitude of Spenser and of his age to all radical social changes. "All chance is perilous and all change unsound," ^ says Sir Artegall. No one can read the " Faerie Queene," no one can know the Elizabethans, and regret the pride of rank in that great period. It had a work to do : to exalt the ideal of character higher than ever before ; to raise such a standard of magnificent manhood that the English-speaking race could never be content with a vulgar average life. We in America have unconsciously higher intuitions because Sidney lived and Spenser flashed his vision of Arthur the Magnificent, of St. George, 1 Faerie Queene, book v. canto ii. st. xrrviii. ' Ibid., St. TTXYJii. ' Ibid., St. xsxvi. 86 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS and of Sir Artegall, upon the world. The work was done, and the ideal of courtliness is one which social evolution, though it develop in forms of the most advanced democracy, can never afford to lose. II The seventeenth century had a wholly different task. It witnessed the rise of the middle class, and it conquered political freedom. These great phenomena were both involved in the religious struggle and subordinate to it. That struggle had changed its aspect, but deepened if anything its intensity ; it was no longer between Romanist and Protestant, it opposed Puritanism to the widely differing ideal of the Anglican Church. For the central years of the epoch, Puritanism reigned, and reigned as a leveling power. It brought in its train a scorn of earthly kings, a contempt for vain human distinctions ; and it brought the grim deter- mination to conquer freedom and to govern Eng- land through the will of godly citizens, not through the whims of the man Charles Stuart. An immense force of democracy was latent in Puritanism. The citizen supplanted the courtier as the courtier had supplanted the knight. For once, an antithesis of Macaulay's is true : " He humbled himself in the dust before his Maker ; but he set his foot on the neck of his King." But in spite of its grim republican passion, the contribution of Puritanism to social literature is curiously slight. No Langland and no More spoke in the seventeenth century. The passion of the THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 87 time expressed itself rather in deeds than in books : Dainty songs for cavaliers and Anglican divines ; sermons, prayers, and swords for the protectors of the Commonweal. The passion for secular free- dom was purely to the end of the attainment of religious freedom; and hatred of the tyranny of kings, rather than compassion for the sufferings of the poor, was the mood of the time. The social equality which Puritanism for the first time fos- tered was not in any sense a deliberate aim, but an unconscious result of the temper which realized the nakedness of all souls before God. The double achievement of the age is clearly mirrored in the work of two great Puritans, Mil- ton and Bunyan. " The sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a Republican," wrote Shel- ley, and this is memorable and true. Yet in Mil- ton, the glorious plea for religious and political freedom is of a haughty antique strain compatible with entire disregard of the welfare of the masses. In Bunyan's beautiful book, we have a social docu- ment of the highest value, witnessing to the habits and modes of life of the new burgher-class with a vivid simplicity unsurpassed. Christian's house and the Town of Destruction, Vanity Fair with its chaffer and gossip, the talk of the pilgrims by the way, are the best pictures we possess of middle-class life in seventeenth century England. The very change of centre since our last great alle- gory, the " Faerie Queene," speaks worlds in itself : the ideal of virtue, which once found symbol in twelve courtly knights, is now gathered into one 88 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS plain burgher ; warfare has given place to pilgrinu age, and for enchanted forests, hermitages, castles, and distressed damsels, we have now a plain jour- ney across a dusty road, with stiles and wickets, modest citizen-towns, and here and there a com- fortable farm or manor house, as setting to adven- tures, and only a rare lion or giant to recall the good old days of chivalry. The rise of the middle class seems to bring with it a new emphasis on the home ; domestic life finds more beautiful expres- sion in Bunyan than anywhere in the literature of feudalism or the Eenascence, while as Christiana's family increases \n the second part, the group of pilgrims furnishes a picture of Christian commu- nity life, the loV^ly simplicity of which is hardly equaled except iili the records of the early Church. But nothing was farther from Bunyan's thought than social delineation. What was society to a man who gazed shuddering upon the soul ? Salvar tion was his quest ; the procedures of Vanity Fair were of no interest except so far as they might tempt the pilgrims to deny their Lord. The obsessiou by religious matters which marked the seventeenth century could not be more plainly seen than in Bunyan. Put Milton by the side of Bunyan, and we have suggested the whole work of the age in the inner world of mind. It was a mighty achievement. It changed the centre of interest from noble to common man ; and it up- lifted the ideal of freedom into a glorious yet visi- ble light above the heads of men, ever after ready to greet an upturned gaze. All this it d''^ «»iid THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 89 did it wholly under the Christian impetus. If it went no further, if little actual distress over the actual conditions of men disturbed it, we recognize as reasons the very purity of its idealism, on the one hand, which viewed outward conditions as matters of complete indifference ; on the other, the law by which one age can speak one stanza only in the unending poem of the world. The work of the seventeenth century seemed to be thrown away. The Restoration followed the Commonwealth ; Wycherley and Congreve were contemporaries of Bunyan. The centre of litera- ture veered back to the court ; alas, no longer to the court of Elizabeth ! Folly, frivolity, intrigue, vulgarity masked as delicatesse, wit playing in vacuity like heat-lightning in the dark, make up the Restoration drama. The lack of resources in a society that could compound such plots seems to the modern reader almost more tragic than its wickedness. In the eighteenth century, a reaction, to a certain extent, set in ; it moyed away from the ignoble, but not toward the ideal ; it moved to- ward the respectable. We have reached the age of Pope and Addison and Steele, of Arbuthnot and Clarke and Atterbury; we have reached the age of Dean Swift. Ill Approaching the eighteenth century from the centuries that lie behind it, a modern man feels for a time singularly at home in its literature. As be roams through its pleasant and neatly ordered 90 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS ways, he meets people much like himself, neithei heroic beings like the men of the sixteenth century, nor grave, if slightly grotesque, Puritans, but cul- tivated, easy, well-bred men and women, with in- terests often very similar to our own. In turning over the pages of old " Spectators " and " Tatlers," one encounters no passion, such as sears mind and heart in the mournful glory of the Jacobean drama ; people are almost as suitably reserved as to-day. Just as with us, social and literary criti- cism, discussions of social morality, and eager obser- vation of manners pass lightly from lip to lip. Yet below aU this outward likeness, the reader soon becomes aware of an inalienable difference, separating that literature from our own ; and in time this sense so grows on him that he comes to feel the eighteenth century, with its easy, superficial modemness, more remote from ourselves in essen- tial spirit, in real attitude, than the Middle Ages or the Renascence. Carlyle could clasp hands more readily with Langland than with Addison ; Matthew Arnold would be quite at ease on meet- ing More in fields Elysian, but even his elasticity would be taxed to find common ground, at least in regard to matters which may be supposed to retain interest in those regions, with the eighteenth cen- tury wit or the eighteenth century divine. The modes of thought which underlie the modes of man- ners in the age of Queen Anne and of the Georges are farther from the modern democracy than any logic-line can reach. To explain this distance were to analyze the age; THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 91 but assuredly one cause for it is found in the narrow social scope of eighteenth century literature. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the com- mon people were, to be sure, disregarded by litera- ■ ture ; but a large and free conception of humanity as a whole was, after all, the atmosphere in which Art moved and wrought. In the next century, eyes were fastened on the Town. Court, drawing- room, coffee-house, became the three centres of exist- ence. The wide, humorous background of vulgar every-day life, readily if lightly sketched by the old drama, the offhand studies in class-types of the plain people, are suspended : literature, for a brief time, belongs wholly to the sophisticated, and shows a blank oblivion of the majority of the race. Within this narrow area it develops a conscious interest in social criticism, a keen delight in obser- vation of manners ; almost it may be said to create a new art-form, social satire. This satire is at close range ; when it generalizes, it is lost. It cannot roam through the earth, watching, like Langland's grave spirit, " all manner of men, the mean and the rich, working and wandering as the world asketh." It is at home in noting the foibles, studying the eti- quette, ferreting out the animosities and intrigues, of a coterie of individuals. The last century succeeded in a difficult task. It untwined from all social connection two great interests, always before interwoven with the larger human life. The two were religion and politics. It is wholly possible to explore the intricate maze of eighteenth century statecraft, or to master the 92 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS many ponderous tomes of Anglican divinity, and find never a hint at the problems and phenomena which we to-day call social. Politics occupies itself with wars and intrigues abroad, with intrigues and personal animosities at home. It is a game, where the cleverest trickster beats, and personal ambition is supplemented by nothing nobler than party- spirit. The large output of pamphlets in the eighteenth century contains work immensely supe- rior to that of the prolific period of the Common- wealth in cleverness, terseness, effectiveness ; but from the time of Algernon Sidney to that of Burke, it holds not a breath of that larger inspiration and passion which can make a local controversy of the moment a treasure for all time. It is not unprecedented to find politics absorbed in cabals and conflicts and oblivious to the interests of the people. But what is surely almost unpre- cedented in Christendom is the attitude of the Anglican Church towards social matters. What- ever the faults of the Church, its ideal had always been clear. In the ages of feudalism it offered the only corrective to rank and the only ideal of democracy ; Langland, with all his severe strictures on the priesthood, never sought to turn elsewhere for social salvation and incentive than to the gospel of Christ with its message of sacrifice and poverty. More, at the opening of the secular age, yet sum- moned Christianity for witness, as a matter of course, to the reasonableness of abolishing private property. Through the long rise and rule of Puri- tanism, Christianity, however misconceived, was THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 93 assuredly free from worldliness ; and our own Pil- grim Fathers may suggest how great an impetus toward poverty and stern simplicity of living was held in that severe faith. In the eighteenth cen- tury, the long religious wars were seemingly over ; the Anglican Church had conquered Eomanism ; Puritanism had sunk out of sight deep into the hearts of the ignored people, whence it was to arise a mighty and refreshing stream, in the Wesleyan movement. The Church had won the day and held the field. And the first thing it did was to repudi- ate its old relationships. It sought no wedlock with poverty, such as Francis sought and Giotto painted in his great fresco. That patient Griselda was degraded to household service : a new bride took her place. Prosperity, decorously arrayed and pru- dent of mien. It is extremely difficult to understand the religion of the eighteenth century, or would be, if so much of the same type did not linger among us. To a casual reader of the gospel it seems axiomatic that the followers of Christ must, ipso facto, be the champions of liberty and of the poor ; yet here we find His followers, orthodox and sincere, deliber- ately ranking themselves as champions of estab- lished rights and of the well-to-do. The Church had become avast machine, for the patronage of moral- ity and the promotion of her own officers ; those officers speak repeatedly with a candor unmistak- able and refreshing, compared to the evasions not unknown to-day. How admirable an investment is religion! Such is the burden of their pleading. 94 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS Sure gage of respectability here and comfort here- after! To turn over the pages of their sermons is to feel the Sermon on the Mount receding into infinite space. Here is one of these excellent discourses headed " Of the Wisdom of Being Keli- gious." We read and are almost won to so courte- ous and comforting a gospel ; though perhaps some troubling recollection drifts through our minds of a faith calling to sacrifice and ending in a Cross. Not this faith surely, for — "The Principal Point of Wisdom in the Conduct of Human Life is so to use the Enjoyments of this present World as that they may not themselves shorten that Period wherein 'tis allowed us to enjoy them. . . . Temperance and Sobriety, the regular governing of our Appe- tites and Passions, the promoting Peace and Good Order in the World are, even without Regard to any Arguments of Religion, the greatest Instances of human Wisdom; because they are the most effectual Means of preserving our Being and Well- being in the World ; of prolonging the Period and enlarging the Comforts and Enjoyments of Life. Religion has added Strength to these Considera- tions ; and by annexing the Promise of God's immediate Blessing to the natural Tendency and Consequences of things, has made the Wisdom of choosing Virtue infinitely more conspicuous and the Folly of Vice more apparently absurd." ^ It would be wrong to disparage the kindly com- mon sense and entire sincerity of eighteenth century religion ; but one may be excused for finding in it 1 Clarke, Sermons, vol. ii. Sermon XVII. THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 95 few reminiscences of the Gospels. The perplexity of the honest eighteenth century divine, wrestling with the Sermon on the Mount, is entertaining and instructive. "We are not obliged," says the worthy, " to seek the Kingdom of God wholly or only in a total and absolute Exclusion of all other desires (as some melancholy weU-disposed persons may be apt to imagine), but only that we are to seek it chiefly and in the first place." And finally the whole matter of our social duty is comfortably summed up. We are required " only to retrench our vain and foolish expenses ; not to sell all and give to the poor, but to be charitable out of the superfluity of our plenty ; not to lay down our lives or even the comfortable enjoyments of life, but to forsake the unreasonable and unfruitful pleasures of sin."^ Such, amid discourses on the Installa- tion of the Lord Mayor and the Anniversary of the Death of Charles the Martyr, are the reassuring remarks of eighteenth century divinity. One would suppose that this century must have been an easy and comfortable age to live in, but its sons of greatest genius did not seem to find it such. To gather in a group the fates of the chief men of letters of this age is startling and painful. Addi- son died mildly as he had lived; but Pope, tor- mented with hysteria and neurotic woes; Collins in an asylum; Grray, subjugated by dumb melan- cholia ; Johnson, overwhelmed periodically by the same black cloud ; Cowper, in his long agony ; — do not exhaust the list of men of genius who, in a 1 Clarke, vol. i. p. 212. 96 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS period that aimed primarily at sanity and repressed all idealism and enthusiasm to the end of that achievement, succumbed to some form of mental disease. Of all these, no fate is so sorrowful as that of the greatest, saddest son of the age, most tragic personality in the long tale of English letters, — Dean Swift. IV We know many private reasons for the fierce melancholy that breathes from the great figure of Swift. His hard youth of dependence led to a disappointing career; four years of power and prosperity deepened by contrast the dreariness of a long quarter-century spent, obscure and neglected, as a practical exile in Ireland. A dark mystery shrouded the life of his affections: passionately loved by women, even unto death, he never married, but maintained a harsh remoteness from feminine ties, broken by poignant visitations of tenderness. Whether his strange attitude sprang from the sense of an impending curse and the unwillingness to perpetuate it, whether there were other secret tragic cause, we do not know, but Swift lived a lonely and disappointed man, and died, after years of encroaching misery had deepened his dreadful expectation, in the horror of great darkness, in madness of a frightful type. It is a sorrowful history. Yet the essential sadness of Swift's life lay deeper than personal experience. It was interwoven with the conditions of his age. He knew his times intimately and long: THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 97 the little world of the great, the great world of the humble, the statesman's palace, and the peasant's hut. He was a profoundly sensitive man, yet he was also matter-of-fact. His honest recognition of things as they were was mitigated by no interven- ing haze of romance, and no spiritual revelation of distant hopes. He was no mystic, like Langland, visited by visions of consolation; no philosopher, like More, able to escape the sordid present by weaving speculative schemes. He took life as he found it, with savage sincerity : he saw it steadily and saw it whole, if ever a realist can attain such vision ; and he saw it as unrelieved tragedy. In London, among the rich and the eminent, he found greed, ambition, triviality ruling; in Ireland, he witnessed the agonizing and brutalizing suffering of the poor. His was not a temperament to manu- facture ideals ; and the times had no ideals to offer. What wonder if fierce wrath filled his great, sad soul; if the worlds of politics, of society, of the great mass of men, seemed to him equally contempt- ible and pitiful ; if the only man in the eighteenth century born with something of the temperament of the prophet should have faced life with the prophet's sorrow, but nothing of the prophet's vision! The social sarcasm of Swift is unequaled in fervor of ironic power, but is also alone among the chief satires of England in the bitterness of its tone. The terrible epitaph which, by his own command, was placed over his tomb speaks of the only peace possible to him. He lies "ubi sseva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit." 98 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS Swift's satire plays in the regions he knew best : society, politics, and the life of the common people of Ireland. In the first two regions, many other writers are as much at home as he. We can still divert ourselves with the graceftd archness of the studies of fashionable life in old " Spectators " and "Tatlers," we can still smile with unfailing relish at the neat satirical turns and playful mock- ery in which the period delighted. Social criticism is the most distinctive feature of Augustan lit- erature, and the critics, as a rule, find their own age extremely pleasant. They exalt themselves as social censors; but the greatest evils they attack are the coquetry of the Belle, the ill-nature of the Wit, and the naughtiness of scandal: at worst, their most severe reproaches are directed at the practice of spending the entire day at the card- table. If this was an age of despair, neither writ- ers nor people knew it. But if an age of despair is one that has ceased to hope, to what age could the term be applied more truly ? From first to last, in its brilliant and extended social deline- ation and criticism, there is not one visiting air from a wider heaven, not one suggestion of social purpose or social discontent. The very preva- lence of the satirical tone .speaks volumes in itself : for satire waxes only as idealism wanes. There was no satire in the rendering of Elizabeth's court by the high-souled gentlemen who sung its praises ; and the lightly cynical tone of Augustan literature, sometimes conscious, sometimes instinctive, wit- nesses, as no elegies could witness, to a loss and a THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 99 lack. Satire untouched by wrath or sorrow, satire acquiescent and flippant and amused at itself, satire unburdened by the sense of outrage and of pain, is the most tragic thing in the world. But the tragedy in Swift's satire is of another type. It is conscious and deliberate. The world which he shows us is precisely the same, in man- ners and morals, that we see in " The Rape of the Lock," " The Spectator," and, later, in the novels of Richardson ; but the picture no longer affords the showman pleasure. Apart from personal ani- mosities, the irony of Addison, Pope, Steele, and the novelists is almost uniformly cheerful. There is little contact between their spirit and the spirit of deep disinterested distress in the biting work of the great Dean. Dean Swift's observations on society are scat- tered through all his writings ; but the very quin- tessence of them is found in an extraordinary little skit, called " Polite Conversation." Like much of Swift's work, this farrago of nonsense has great literary merit. Its lightness, sparkle, and gayety flash out a cold, snapping light that stings with contempt and hatred. The satire is absolutely grave; pensive, urbane, reasonable — ruthless. A Preface, as clever a bit of writing as the century can show, gives us Swift's intention. There is little reason to doubt the seriousness of his method : he deliberately and solemnly set himself to take notes of the talk and gossip he heard, with a view to holding the society of his day up to ridicule, and then arranged and presented it in this absurd 100 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS drama without a plot, in which it is hard to know which to admire more candidly, the ineptitude of the details or the flat vacuity of the whole. He tells us just the society he has in view : " Al- though this work be calculated for all persons of quality and fortune of both sexes, yet the reader may perceive that my particular view was to the officers of the army, the gentlemen of the inns of court, and of both universities; to all courtiers, male and female, but principally to the maids of honor of whom I have been personally acquainted with two and twenty sets, all excelling in this noble endowment. ... It may be objected that the publication of my book may, in a long course of time, prostitute this noble art to mean and vulgar people; but I answer that it is not so easy an acquirement as a few ignorant pretenders may imagine. A footman may swear, but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often, but can he swear with equal delicacy, propriety, and judg- ment ? No, certainly, unless he be a lad of supe- rior parts, of good memory, a diligent observer, one who has a skillful ear, some knowledge in music, and an exact taste. ... I am, therefore, not under the least apprehension that this art will ever be in danger of falling into common hands, which requires so much time, study, practice, and genius, before it arrives at perfection." With this solemn introduction, Swift leads us into the company, — - Lord Sparkish, Lady Smart, Mr. Neverout, Miss Notable, and the rest. It is a society which probably represents, with fair THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 101 accuracy, the tone of life among the fashionables of the day. It talks, in truth, an infinite deal of nothing. Col. Miss, I heard that you were out of order ; pray, how are you now ? Miss. Pretty well, Colonel, I thank you. Col. Pretty and well, Miss ! That 's two very good things. Miss. 1 mean that I am hetter than I was. Never, Why, then, 't is well you were sick. Miss. "What ! Mr. Neverout, you take me up before I 'm done. Lady Smart. Come, let 's leave off children's play, and go to push-pin. Miss. Pray, Madam, give me some more sugar in my tea. Swift gravely follows this delightful company through an entire typical day. The gentlemen meet in the morning on the mall ; go to breakfast at Lady Smart's ; linger till noon over their tea, of which the whole society consume an appalling amount ; go home for an hour ; return at three to dinner. We are treated to "the whole conversa^ tion at dinner : " — Miss. Pray, Colonel, send me some fritters. [Colonel takes them out with his hand. Col. Here, Miss ; they say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives. Lady S. Methinks this pudding is too much boiled. Lady A. Oh I Madam, they say a pudding is poison when it is too much boiled. 102 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS Neverout. Miss, shall I help you to a pigeon ? Here 'a a pigeon so finely roasted it cries, ' Come, eat me.' Spark. Why, a man may eat this though his wife lay a-dying. Etc., etc. Oysters, veal, beef, fish, pudding, venison pasty, tongue, pigeon, vegetables, fritters, soup, chicken, black-pudding, almond-pudding, ham, jellies, goose, rabbits, sweets, cheeses, — no wonder that one of the ladies sighs mournfully : " Well, this eating and drinking takes away a body's stomach." Din- ner ended, they separate, the gentlemen to hard drinking, the ladies to scandal and tea; presently the gentlemen reenter, and, after a few more cups of tea have been imbibed, the company falls to cards and silence : " A party at quadrille until three in the morning; but," Swift adds sardon- ically, " no conversation recorded." After this in- tellectual treat, they all " take leave," and very sleepily " go home. " This nonsense is entertaining enough ; but Swift does not write it because he is amused; he writes it because he is disgusted. Never was frivolity recorded with such painstaking scorn. The trivial dialogue is redolent of pure vacuity ; wit, having nothing but personality to exercise itself upon, becomes simple pertness ; in the whole course of the fashionable day sketched for us, not one idea is broached, and not one real interest is suggested. As we watch and listen, through the sardonic person of the Dean, whom that society petted and feared, we remember that the years are passing, and that a revolution draws near. THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 103 From society to politics : and politics were the most absorbing interest of the time. Men of letters were drawing near to public life in the age of Queen Anne ; and Swift's career, like that of some other contemporary writers, shows us the author and pamphleteer actually exercising influence on the course of national events, as he has continued to do in our own day. The Dean plunged into poli- tics with all the seriousness of his nature. During the four years of his influence, he labored as earnestly for the Tories to whom he transferred his allegiance, as if he had passionately believed that the welfare of the nation depended on their holding the balance of power. Perhaps he did: the interests involved do not appear small, even in perspective. But if Swift the man of affairs treated politics with a respect not accorded to society, the same cannot be said of Swift the thinker. For withdrawn into the solitude of Irish life, and looking back upon London, he wrote those famous passages about the politics of Lilli- put which scintillate in memory. As we read the grave accounts of the pygmy statesmen performing on the tight-rope, or anxiously turning somersaults to please their monarch, we seem to listen to a mocking translation of parts of the " Journal to Stella," while the controversy that shook the state, between the Big-Endians who broke their eggs at the large end, and the Little-Endians who preferred the small, was not invented by a man who put a \'ery serious construction on party differences in hia own England. It is permissible to wonder 104 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS whether Swift would have penned just these satires had he been a contemporary either of Raleigh or of Gladstone. There are causes great enough to control the natural animus of the scoffer ; Bacon in the seventeenth century, Disraeli in the nine- teenth, handled public matters without a sneer. Swift's writings bear another stamp. They pro- ceed from a period when politics ignored more completely than ever before or since the larger causes which affect the general social welfare, and acknowledge with what seems to-day almost cynical openness the triviality of its interests, the meanness of its methods, and the selfishness of its aims. Were Swift a modern, we should be amazed at the comparative absence from his virile irony of what we to-day call the distinctively social interest. The social contrasts which are the stock-in-trade of the modern satirist he never drew. They lay ready to his hand. It would have seemed natural to put against the pictures in " Polite Conversa- tion " pictures of that wretched poverty he knew so well, as Carlyle in the next century artfully opposed his study of the Dandiacal Household to that of the Poor Slaves in "Sartor Eesartus." Such a juxtaposition Swift never makes in any one book ; the dramatic connection between luxury and misery he ignores, though he gives us the means of forming it ; and it is characteristic of his age that he should do so. Industrial conditions and the sufferings of the poor find, indeed, slight recognition in his pages. His political tracts, from articles in the '^ Exam< THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 105 iner " to the " Drapier's Letters," fill many toI- umes ; his social writings would not occupy one tenth the space. But these writings make up in power what they lack in bulk. There is probably no social pamphlet in existence which leaves the reader so breathless with horror, so impelled to flee from civilization like Christian from the City of Destruction, as Swift's " Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of the Poor in Ireland from Being Burdensome, and for Making them Beneficial." Like all Swift's distinctly social work, this pamphlet was inspired by Ireland. The great Dean was one of the earliest Irish patriots. He awakened for perhaps the first time a public or national consciousness in that unhappy country ; his " Drapier's Letters," his personal service, his large and ceaseless charity his devoted ministry to the poor, rank him as a great philanthropist; he was the idolized leader of the nation for many years. But all this work only Jeepened the tragic melancholy with which he watched the increasing wretchedness of the land. It would probably be impossible to exaggerate the terrible suffering throughout Ireland in Swift's day, — suffering as great as that seen by Spenser in the sixteenth century. It is with an economic perspicacity not always found that Swift cries, " We are apt to charge the Irish with laziness, because we seldom find them employed ; but then we do not consider they have nothing to do." Brooding on this state of things, the mighty 106 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS heart of the Dean of St, Patrick's took fire. It burned with an intense, steady, colorless, and quiet flame. The heat of it scorches the reader of the "Modest Proposal" stiU. The "Proposal" is presented with an air of calmest reason. There are too many children in Ireland; there is not enough food : " I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children in the arms or on the backs or at the heels of their mo- thers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom a very great additional grievance, and therefore whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up as a preserver of the nation. . . . "There remain 120,000 children of poor parents annually born. The question therefore is, how this number shall be reared and provided for ? which as I have already said, under the present situation of affairs, is utterly impossible by all the methods hitherto proposed. For we can neither employ them in handicraft nor agriculture ; we neither build houses (I mean in the country), nor culti- vate land ; they can very seldom pick up a liveli- hood by stealing till they arrive at six years old, except where they are of towardly parts ; although I confess that they learn the rudiments much ear- lier. . . . " I have been assured by a very knowing Ameri- a of my acquaintance in London, that a young THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 107 healthy child, well nursed, is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled ; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout. " I do therefore humbly offer it to public con- sideration that of the 120,000 children already computed, 20,000 may be reserved. . . . That the remaining 100,000 may at a year old be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom ; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. . . . " I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children. . . . " Some persons of a desponding spirit are in great concern about that vast number of poor people who are aged, diseased, or maimed. . . . But I am not in the least pain upon that matter, because it is very well known that they are every day dying and rotting by cold and famine and filth and vermin as fast as can be reasonably expected. And as to the young laborers, they are now in almost as hopeful a condition ; they cannot get work, and consequently pine away for want of nourishment, to a degree that if at any time they are accidentally hired to common labor, they have not strength to perform it ; and thus the country and themselves are happily delivered from the evil to come. . . . 108 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS " I can think of no one objection that will possi« bly be raised against this proposal, unless it should be urged that the number of people will be thereby much lessened in the kingdom. This I freely own, and it was indeed one principal design in offering it to the world. . . . After all, I am not so violently bent upon my own opinion, as to reject any offer proposed by wise men which shall be found equally innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual. But ... I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food at a year old, in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a per- petual scene of oiisfortunes as they have since gone through, by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed forever." Here is truly a " check " on population more effective than any proposed by Malthus. It was a heart-broken man who penned these terrible words. Whether Swift looked at society, at poli- tics, or at the wider world of Irish life, his mind was visited by no ray of cheer or hope. He saw in society an utter absence of all ideal aims ; in politics, a scramble of personal ambition and in- trigue ; in the life of the poor, a natural, inevita> THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 109 ble, and irremediable tragedy. The testimony of Swift, let us repeat, as to eighteenth century con- ditions does not materially differ from that of other Augustan writers. But while they took their period with admiration and complacency, Swift took it with despair. Alone among the authors of the time, this great soul might have been an idealist in happier days. Idealism, suppressed and unnourished, can turn to a bitter smart ; and Swift, suffering profoundly from conditions which he accepted as inevitable and recognized as hid- eous, produced, instead of any " Utopia " in which contempt for the present might be relieved by buoyant hope for the future, sarcasm stern, dark, and fatal, upon the grievous things he saw. Swift's entire attitude is summed up and ren- lered with the terseness and charm of a brilliant imagination in the one popular book he ever wrote, " Gulliver's Travels." This book is the only one perhaps in the world to delight both child and cynic. It entertains us in youth, it depresses us in age. Simple as the underlying device is, no- thing could better reach Swift's end, show us more clearly the relativity of all greatness, or fill us with more stinging contempt for human pride. The Lilliputians bring home to us our pettiness, the inhabitants of Brobdingnag our grossness ; and either gross or petty, humankind always seemed to the miserable Dean. As we watch Gulliver wading into mid-ocean, and tying the fleet of Ble- fuscu to ropes with which he drags it ashore, how heartily we laugh at the frowning terrors of armies 110 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS and the great pretensions of national war! Aa the giant, now turned pygmy, revolts in disgust from the most delicate phases of the court-life of Brobdingnag, our own dainty refinements lose hold on our regard. Of the moral greatness which is independent of big or little, Swift gives us few hints indeed. But he did write, in the " Voyage to Laputa," an allegory elaborated with his best care and cleverness, in which he jeered as unspar- ingly at the intellectual ambitions of men as he had jeered at their practical interests in Lilliput. It is highly entertaining to travel in Laputa ; but settled existence there would be as disheartening as in Lilliput or in Brobdingnag. Are there any traces of social idealism in " Gul- liver's Travels" ? People have tried to find such traces in Brobdingnag, and have even compared this part of the " Travels " to the " Utopia." The big giant-king is indeed amiably shocked at the picture of English civilization which little Gulliver gives him, and we are left to infer from the deli- cious humor of the passage that similar vices are unknown in his bucolic state. But image of a wise social organization and of positive intelligent order in the Brobdingnagian society there is none. Not here, but among the Houyhnhnms, does the much- traveled Gulliver find the home of his heart ; here would he fain spend the rest of his days ; here is that peace, that freedom, that candor, decency, and reason, for which he has ceased to hope among men ; here, among the brutes I For the placid horses who in this queer dream have reversed qui THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 111 state, anJ. hold the degraded race of men in sub" ]ection, are but beasts after all. Beasts with the virtues of beasts, which consist chiefly in freedom from human vices ; cleanly, dignified, gentle ; with no feeling for beauty, no instincts of deep affection, and with rudimentary powers of thought. The bearing of Swift's impassioned exaltation of their stupid life can hardly be mistaken. Nor is there in the social satires of the world so fierce and fear- ful a study of humanity as his picture of the hid- eous creatures who serve the Houyhnhnms: the Yahoos (yah I ugh !), in whose filthy persons and vile habits are seen all the elements which Swift believed to be the component factors of hmnan life. Greed, quarrelsomeness, animal passion, cringing fear, he finds disguised and adorned, on his return to England, as he found them nncon- eealed among the servants of the mild good brutes he reveres. His disgust for the hated race grows not weaker but stronger when he is forced on their society; and we leave Gulliver, the much-expe- rienced Ulysses of the eighteenth century, tolerat- ing only on compulsion his fellow-beings, and able to find temporary mitigation of his lot only when he can retire to his stable and associate with his horses. The bitterest thing in all Swift's writing is the entire absence of any militant impulse to contend against the tragedy it describes. There is no hint that human effort might under any conceivable 'jircumstances render human existence less dark. For the trouble, to Swift, lies not in conditions, 112 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS but deep imbedded in man's nature itself. Of spiritual consolation, even in the crude form of belief in an hereafter, he has none to offer ; nay, the weird allegory of the Struldbrugs, the most terrible he ever invented, suggests his deliberate conviction that continued life, so innately sordid is humanity, could be only a torture and a curse. These hideous Immortals, tainted with aU vices, endued with no joys, live on forever among their descendants, a perpetual witness from generation to generation that life is essential meanness and essential pain. The man who invented the Struldbrugs, who wrote " Gulliver's Travels," was a dean of the Anglican Church. He was scrupulously honest, and entirely orthodox. He attended to every duty of his office. He defended Christianity against the attacks of deists and infidels, using his fa vorite method of satire, — strangest weapon ever employed in behalf of the religion of the Lord of love. He read the Liturgy day by day, and approved its literary style. In perfect sincerity, he thought himself a good Christian. And all the time his soul was un visited by faith in God or man. He never knew that mingled impulse of worship and compassion, that intuition, so strangely sweet, of a divine somewhat playing through human meanness and sensuality, which Christianity can bring. Of power for salvation, either individual or social, inherent in the gospel of Christ, Dean Swift had no more conception than if he had been a contemporary of Cato. THE AGE OF JONATHAN SWIFT 113 Few stranger paradoxes are to be found in literary history than this of our greatest pessimist and cynic tranquilly pursuing the priestly functions of the religion of hope and love. But the paradox of Swift was the paradox of his age ; Augustan literature had lost the social with the spiritual outlook. It dreamed no dream of progress, it lifted the banner of no ideal. It despised while it depicted humanity. It was content to analyze its own present, with scorn that turned to jest or sob, according to its mood. Perhaps no phase of civil- ization has ever been more deeply imbued with the conviction of its own finality. No trouble stirred it, nor was it, seemingly, visited by compunction, save when occasionally, of a sudden, some great soul like Swift fell into fatal despair. In France, Voltaire and Rousseau were, during the next quarter-century, to live and cry aloud : the one was to awaken in men's hearts a new passion of brotherhood, the other was to awaken in their minds a new sense of superiority to the established fact. In England itself, Hobbes and Locke had already flung thought back upon its own authority, and bidden the human reason, irrespective of trar dition, create what universe it would. Despite all appearance, the age of authority, the ftge of finality, the age of conventions, was doomed. The French Eevolution drew near ; and democracy wws ia iS* traiii. PART n THE ENGLAND OF OUR FATHERS CHAPTER I OUTLINES Less than a century passed between the woeful helplessness of Swift and Shelley's exultant cry of welcome to freedom : — " Come, Thou, but lead ont of the inmost cave Of man's deep spirit, as the morning star Beckons the sun from the Eoan wave, Wisdom." 1 A great race experience lay behind this invoca- tion. For a brief moment, men of affairs, phi- losophers, and poets had joined in one fervent song. " The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return," ^ — SO they had chanted, with triumphant assurance of victory. French wit and English thought, and the personal passion of aGenevese, had aU contributed to the most abstract of theories, that of the equal lights of men. Suddenly this abstract idea had 1 Shelley, Ode to Liberty. ^ Ibid., Chorus in Hellas. OUTLINES 115 struck itself into the actual. There it found itself reinforced by the demand of a positive need : by suffering, first pitiful, then vehement, finally, as events advanced, maddened by a new sense of power. The revolutionary spirit, which was the outcome of this union of an ideal with a craving, succeeded for the time only in overturning the things that were ; but in its failure it generated a hope that cannot die. From that day to our own, all life has been lived and all literature produced in the presence of that hope. " Une immense esperance a traversee la terre," — whatever the unrest or discouragement of modern literature, this its reader can never forget. The French Revolution introduced a disturbing force into the sphere of politics, and made dynamic a new ideal in the sphere of thought. Meanwhile another revolution was in progress ; it proceeded more quietly, but brought with it yet more impor- tant readjustments of the whole social system. This was the industrial revolution which at the end of the last century followed the introduction of machinery. It was not initiated by a dramatic display, and its effects were slow in gaining recog- nition : for they worked below the surface, reach- ing chiefly the inarticulate classes. But it meant upheaval from the depths, and the time was to come when the surface should feel the stin To ignore misery in another island, misery produced by natural, unhuman causes like famine, was one thing ; to ignore misery in the very midst of civil- ized England, misery accented if not produced by 116 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FATHERS fresh conditions of national development deliber. ately adopted, was another thing, and not so easy. Nineteenth century literature, then, is the ex- pression of a period profoundly different from any that had gone before. The times of arrest in which Swift wrote are over; the stately and simple move- ment of national expansion in the Renascence lies far in the past; the majestic immobility of the feudal system is hard for even the imagination to reproduce. In the modern world, all things waver, safeguards and protections seem to elude the hand that would grasp them, and forces both occult and obvious work in bewildering complexity, moving at once toward destruction and renewal. The greatest safeguard of true order as of true liberty — the Christian Church — is singularly little in evidence during the first half of the nine- teenth century. As we remember the role of the Church in the eighteenth century, we cannot won- der that when the time of social trial came, she should have been found pitifully wanting. Chris- tianity has factors both revolutionary and conserva^ tive: and there are crises where each is needed. But probably every one would now agree that the Church made a grievous mistake when, in the mighty upheaval of thought and life at the end of the last century, she allied herself with the con- servative forces of respectability. She could not do otherwise : her social fervors and her spiritual vitality always ebb and flow together, and that was the period of her spiritual ebb-tide. But the result was inevitable and rigjiteous, — she was given sor- OUTLINES 117 rowfuUy little share in the great onward movement of life. The spiritual ideals of any age are to be read best through its imaginative art : this art, in the England of the early nineteenth century, is not Christian ; indeed, it is barely cognizant of Chris- > tianity. Neither poetry nor prose draws its social passion from her inspiration, nor solves its social problems through her aid. It would have been a bitter thing to Langland, and even to More, to see the Christian Church least effective at the time of most heart-searching change. Thus unguided, unrelated, helpless, with founda- tions slipping away in all directions, the thought of the century began. No one man could express such a period. We can select one writer to be a fair representative of the Middle Ages, of the Renas- cence, of the eighteenth century : to gain even hints of the social moods, desires, and sorrows of mod- ern times, we must know not one author only, but many. Each author expresses not a stable state of things, but one which, whether he knows it or not, is in constant flux under his very eyes. To understand the social bearing of modern literature is then not easy, but the attempt is rewarding as well as difficult. The heirs of the Revolution were the English poets ; and to study the social ideals of our litera- ture and leave them out is almost to omit Hamlet from his play. Yet their poetry is too great to handle as a detail, and the scope of this book will uot allow a more extended treatment. Their splen- 118 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FATHERS did ideal of love and freedom, of "joy in widest commonalty spread," is part of our national inher- itance ; a little care is needed to prevent us from mistaking or minimizing its scope. From Words- worth to Byron, the poets were shaken and shaped by the political revolution, with its swift, dramatic, tragic sequence from hope to despair ; of the pro- founder industrial changes at work, they were dimly if at all conscious. Yet the aim of all their passion was social. They employed political terminology, for revolutionary thought placed what we now see to have been an over-stress on forms of government, but their political opinions were simply means to an end ; and that end was the opportunity for full life, spiritual and natural, thrown open to every son of man. In the imagination of the revolutionary period one more fact must be noted : the new seriousness with which it took itself and its function. These dreamers were probably the first English poets to believe that their visions might actually affect public thought and social achievement. To them " Not favored spots alone lint the \rhole earth, The heauty wore of promise," ^ atid they firmly believed that henceforth not only they, but all men of vision, — " Were called upon to exercise their skill, Not in Utopia, — subterranean fields, Or some secreted island. Heaven knows where, Bnt in the very world, which is the world Of all of us, — the place where in the end, We find our happiness, or not at all." 1 Wordsworth, The Prelude, book xi. OUTLINES 119 The feeling that it was a direct force to act on affairs imparted a new responsibility to art and a new earnestness to idealism. Through ridicule, contention, denial, this feeling has persevered. The poetry of the revolution did its work, bequeathed a great ideal, and passed away. By 1825, the voices of the poets were silenced. In the decade between 1830 and 1840, fresh phases of social passion sought expression through a differ- ent instrument. These phases we shall try to follow. II Poetry and prose have changed places in the Victorian Age. During the revolutionary period, great passions swayed the poets, small fancies the writers of prose; and Wordsworth and Shelley were larger men than Lamb, Hazlitt, or De Quin- cey. But as time went on, poetry turned away from the wide love for humanity and for freedom. It became preoccupied with the elaboration of form, and with meditation on the privacies of the soul ; and prose, pressing nearer to the larger life, and expressing more fully the social interests and pas- sions of men, took the lead which it still keeps, in variety, vigor, and power. The change was inevitable. For poetry subsists on visions : and visions the modern social situation has not offered. Shelley's ideal was a fleeting glory. Hardly more than one generation could cherish the simple faith that if once the powers that be are destroyed, the race will enter without 120 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FATHERS delay its happy heritage of freedom. Even while the poets were chanting paeans to Liberty, the gloomy shadow of industrial slavery, unobtrusive, unnoted, was gathering over the land. All through our own days, beneath the superficial spread of political Republicanism, the silent, mighty, agoniz- ing expansion of Democracy has been opening abysses of incertitude and dark inquiry into which men fear to gaze. Under these circumstances, we cannot wonder that poets have betaken themselves to the inner life, and have abandoned the wider enthusiasms of their forerunners, with confidence in the wisdom of their social solutions and ambi- tions. It is indeed somewhat exasperating as well as humorous to hear Swinburne, or some other yseudo-Shelley, occasionally echoing the old inspi- ration, and chanting a dithyramb against kings, or an ode to political freedom. If, as some surmise, a new and troubling ideal is astir in society, no fear but in the fullness of time the poet will come to voice it. Meanwhile, prose, the more flexible instrument, the art-form of democracy, which can solace itself with problems when faith is denied, thrills with the contemporary interest which poetry disregards. From the days of " Sartor Resartus," English prose has assumed a social attitude. Its new dig- nity, its volume, scope, and importance, are due largely, though of course not wholly, to the candor and audacity with which it has rendered the larger collective facts, the fearful questions and tentative theories, of an epoch more and more absorbed in OUTLINES 121 social problems. The novelists and essayists who have swayed the public most have had varying claims to attention ; but all with one accord have been social critics. The novelists give us their criti- cism chiefly through picture, the essayists through analysis. Consider, compare ; look at these pic- tures, study these analyses. Follow, in a word, the social aspect of the work of men of letters from 1830 to 1880. We shall trace the growth of a new factor in consciousness : the awakening and the gradual self-assertion of the social conscience. Our subject confines us to the development of the new thought in England. But we must not forget that aU over Europe the same mighty forces have been heaving, and have often stirred hearts to more dramatic outbursts of passion and desire than are found among the sober Anglo-Saxons. The magnificent social fiction of Russia, with its baffling union of the primeval and the outworn, of harsh realism and mystic fervor, begins with Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Turgenieff, to find in Tolstoi a master so compelling, that all Europe stops to hear the stories told to peasants, and to watch the shoemaker at his bench. In France, the social- istic Utopias of 1848 find semi-lyrical expression in the lovely stories of Georges Sand's social period, — " Le Meunier d'Angibault," and " Le Compagnon du Tour de France," as well as in Hugo's immeasurable and memorable dream, " Les Miserables ; " while to-day a book like Zola's " Ger- minal " shows that in modern Paris, in the midst of much that is trivial and morbid, a large social 122 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FATHERS issue can still be largely conceived. The names of Ibsen, Sudermann, and Hatiptmann suggest the keenness with which Northern nations are ana- lyzing certain phases of the social problem. All this imaginative literature, with its Slavic, Latin, or Germanic qualities, exhales a more impassioned unrest, a wUder inspiration, than the social writings of England. Through it sounds a more melan- choly wail of sorrow over the wide pain of the un- privileged. This is natural : in nineteenth century Russia the situation is far more obviously though not more profoundly dramatic than in a land where constitutional " liberty " and general suffrage im- part a delusive aspect of peace. The sweeping audacity of some of these Continental books is unsurpassed. Yet through all differences of racial situation and temperament, one subject and one impulse control the imagination of the modern world. In the significant literature of every Euro- pean nation, we may trace the growth of what we have called a new factor in the life of the race. If, turning from these wide and adventurous wanderings to the little province explored by the English, we ask which authors of the Victorian Age among those no longer living have played the most vital part in the evolution of social ideals, the answer comes clear. From 1830 to 1880 no men of pure letters so held the public ear as Carlyle, Kuskin, Arnold. Carlyle's " French Revolution," that splendid elegy of a dying world and birth- song of a world to be, won for the author a tardy fame in 1837 ; and from that day to 1860, he was OUTLINES 123 >7itliout question the greatest force among Eng- lish thinkers. After that time, his vital power waned ; but it was in 1860 that Ruskin's " Unto this Last," showing the popular art-critie in a wholly new light, first amazed, then angered his wide audience ; and from this time till well into the eighth decade of the century, the social writ- ings of Ruskin continued their passionate plead- ing. Before 1880, however, a new writer was voicing the advanced ideals of his generation, and the brilliant social criticism of Matthew Arnold expressed a fresh phase of thought, tenacious in influence. His books might be a little dishearten- ing, did they mark the end of our social literature. They were not the end : they marked simply the conclusion of an epoch. Three men of any modern nation more diverse in antecedents, temperament, interests, than these three essayists, it would perhaps be impossible to find. Carlyle, the prophet, was of peasant origin,, indifferent to beauty and to delicacy. Ruskin, the dreamer, was the son of a rich merchant, softly bom and bred. Arnold, observer, scoffer, silenced poet, sprang from the professional class, the intel- lectual elite of England. Carlyle's kinship was with Germany, Ruskin's with Italy, Arnold's with France. Carlyle's eyes were in his conscience, Ruskin's in his heart, Arnold's in the normal place, his head. Each turned away from the dominant interest of his youth, — history, art-criticism, or poetry, — to focus the most earnest thought of his prime sternly and earnestly on the social anoma- 124 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FATHERS lies and paradoxes of modern life. The common features in their social diagnosis ought assuredly to be worth noting. In the ninth decade of our century, after these men were silenced, there appeared in England a new social force. It introduced new lines of cleav- age. It put a new face on the social problem. To the recognition of this force, contemporary litera- ture has been busy in adjusting itself. The first fifty years of Victoria's reign form, then, an epoch which we may well consider by itself. It is an epoch of unmeasured significance, both actual and germinal. Before we take up this epoch in detail, we must signal the great work of the Victorian novel. For with vivid, swift development, it has pictured what the essayists discussed. It gives us a series of social documents of the highest importance ; their value to be more and more felt as the conditions it depicts become historic. At the very beginning of the period, fiction turned away from donjon and tourney, and sought for background the street, the club, the England of to-day. With occasional lapses into romanticism, it has remained insistently modern. The trend toward social interest has been only too strong, at times, for artistic freedom, From " Oliver Twist " to " Sir George Tressady," social pictures, social problems, fill the scene. Dickens and Thackeray uncovered and revealed the social layers of early Victorian England. About 1850, their simple reproductions gave place to the novel of protest and arraignment ; this in OUTLINES 125 the later decades yielded to the novel of con- structive suggestion, whether in the form of avowed literary Utopias, or of schemes for social salvation in would-be realistic garb. We have had indeed no social fiction so great as that of Russia : but we have had Dickens and Thackeray; we have had George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy ; we have had for lesser folk, Eeade, Trol- lope, Kingsley, Disraeli, Macdonald. Our social novels illustrate and supplement our social essays. With even greater clearness, they show the appear- ance of new dramatic forces upon the stage. Beneath aU this literature, with its strong social preoccupation, lies what ? A strange and contra- dictory civilization which we cannot yet interpret ; tingling with self-consciousness, yet unaware of much in its own tendencies ; decadent and infan- tile, with the mighty force of youth and the tremu- lous caution of age ; — a civilization with a fuller ideal of freedom than was ever before known for its hope, and a new form of bondage in which mUlions are held for its achievement. Our litera- ture has confronted a social situation dramatic, difficult, and complex. Many episodes of this sit- uation it expresses directly. Now, history shows Chartism, and in Carlyle's essay, in " Alton Locke," in the Correspondence of Kingsley and Maurice, we catch the appalled surprise with which intelligent England first heard the cry of the dis- possessed. Now, the beautiful and visionary ar- dors of the French Revolution of 1848 find faint reflection even in the dull Anglo-Saxon mirror. 126 THE ENGLAND OF OUR FATHERS Now, early Trades-Unionism slips furtively upon the stage, in Dickens' "Hard Times," Reade's " Put Yourself in His Place," and Mrs. Gaskell's " Mary Barton." Bead " Yeast," and the condi- tion of the agricultural poor is forced upon us ; " Daniel Deronda," and the Hebrew problem, with all its romance and mystery, captures the mind. In our own days, if we let our thought glide on to a somewhat later period, fiction and fact have drawn almost bewilderingly near. But our modern books do far more than illus- trate phases of history : through them, the higher consciousness of the age dimly feels its way. For the author — leader, critic, opposer of his genera- tion though he may be — is yet always mysteri- ously compelled to utter the age he may despise. Reading these books chronologically, we follow the unconscious changes in public sentiment : its vary- ing emphases, theories, advances, recoils. Are such changes mere bewildered fluctuations, false starts of men lost in the dark ? In the presence of the mod- ern situation, social, industrial, political, thinker after thinker relapses into helplessness. Some offer panaceas. Some take refuge in criticising these panaceas. Some betake themselves to comforting and sedative confidence in the laws of nature. What if, watching the workings of earnest minds, we find a steady trend of thought in one direction ? Retrospect is true prophecy, and we may come to recognize through all vagary and contradictory clamor the slow advance of a great idea. A mighty struggle for social salvation, not yet fully OUTLINES 127 in evidence, but inexorably preparing, lies behind all incidents of modem Ufe and art. The great social literature before 1880 reveals the gather- ing of the forces. To discover the issue was the work of that period. To face it is the work of our own. CHAPTER n SOCIAL PICTURES : DICKENS AND THACKERAY If its social interest does not preserve the early Victorian novel, what wiU ? Not the qualities for which its contemporaries hailed it. Before Dick- ens' vaunted pathos, the modern reader is likely, with Andrew Lang and Pet Marjorie, to remain " more than usual calm." His crude plots, his coarse and heavy melodrama, have lost vitality. His humor is real, and mere contagious high spirits do much to preserve him : yet humor, like salt, can keep a good thing alive, but cannot long lend interest to a poor one. In Thackeray's books, we find a far more permanent charm : yet his endless prolixity, and the affected ease of his confidences, do not delight us as they did our fathers. In characterization, the latter-day novel has advanced with startling rapidity. Dickens has no char- acters at all, properly speaking ; and though Thackeray's touch is much finer, all his famous keenness of analysis, compared with the best French or Russian work, dissects only the tissue nearest the skin. These authors are at the beginning of realistic art. They cannot individualize. What keeps them alive, and will never lose its power, is the DICKENS AND THACKERAY 129 vividness of their social delineation. The first realists to treat the modern world, they see that world as a whole. Men appear to them in social groups. They catch environments and types ; per- sons elude them. How thronged are their hooks with figures! The novelist to-day concentrates his light on one or two, or on a small group of contrast- ing characters. There are seventy-five people in " Our Mutual Friend ; " sixty in " Vanity Fair." Turn over rapidly the pages of Thackeray and Dickens : you have walked through streets, you have heen to evening parties, you have glanced at home-interiors simply to pass on, you have become slightly more intimate with club and inn and polit- , ical meeting, but deep into the soill of the individ- ual man you have never paused to look. You have passed modern society in review. The flash-light of imagination in Thackeray and Dickens falls most brightly upon London. Here the modem city makes its first appearance in art. London ! Not the delightful " town " of the eighteenth century novel, with its seductive gaye- ties, whence, nevertheless, the sedan-chair of the lovely Miss Byron reaches in a few moments the dangerous seclusion of the fields ; but London as we know it, a fevered world, including cities within cities, possessing through all its heterogeneous parts a unity almost terrible : the great ganglion quivering with the Aribrations of the whole ner- vous system of England. What a place ! Where shall we find its likeness in the scenery of the earlier imagination, classic or