The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain Part 7

Rome with her genius for actuality discovers this.

"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee.

Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces. For my brethren and companions' sakes, I will now say, 'Peace be within thee.'" Subst.i.tuting h.e.l.las for Jerusalem, this is the prayer of a Greek of the age of Isocrates, of Cleanthes, and of Alexander.

Rome by war ends war, and establishes the _Pax Romana_ within her dominions, Spain, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Syria, Egypt. Disregarding the dying counsels of Augustus, Rome remains at truceless war with the world outside those limits. St. Just's proud resignation, "For the revolutionist there is no rest but the grave," is for ever true of those races dowered with the high and tragic doom of empire. To pause is disaster; to recede, destruction. Rome understood this, and her history is its great comment.

To Islam the point at which she can bestow her peace upon men is not less clear, fixed by a power not less unalterable and high. Neither Haroun nor Al-Maimoun could, with all their authority and statecraft, stay the steep course of Islam; for the wisdom of a race is wiser than the wisdom of a man, and the sword which, in Abu Bekr's phrase, the Lord has drawn, Islam sheathes but on the Day of Judgment. Then and then only shall the Holy War end.

The Peace of Islam, _Shalom_, which is its designation, is the serenity of soul of the warriors of G.o.d whose life is a warfare unending. And Virgil--in that early masterpiece, which in the Middle Age won for all his works the felicity or the misfortune attached to the suspicion of an inspiration other than Castalian, and drew to his grave pilgrims fired by an enthusiasm whose fountain was neither the ballad-burthen music of the _Georgics_, nor the measureless pathos and pity for things human of the _Aeneid_--has sung the tranquil beauty of the Saturnian age; yet the peace which suggests his prophetic memory or hope is but the peace of Octavia.n.u.s, the end of civil discord, of the proscriptions, the conflicts of Pharsalia, Philippi, Actium, a moment's respite to a war-fatigued world.

Pa.s.sing from the ancient world to the modern, we encounter in the Middle Age within Europe that which is known amongst mediaeval Latinists as the _Treva_ or _Treuga Dei_. This "Truce of G.o.d" was a decree promulgated throughout Europe for the cessation at certain sacred times of that feudal strife, that war of one n.o.ble against another which darkens our early history. It is the mediaeval equivalent of the Pax Romana and is but dimly related to any ideal of Universal Peace. Hildebrand, who gave this Truce of G.o.d more support than any other Pope in the Middle Age, lights the fire of the crusades, giving to war one of the greatest consecrations that war has ever received. And the att.i.tude of Mediaeval Europe towards eternal peace is the att.i.tude of Judaea, of h.e.l.las, and of Rome.[9] This is conspicuous in Saint Bernard, the last of the Fathers, and three centuries later in Pius II, the last of the crusading Pontiffs, the desire of whose life was to go even in his old age upon a crusade.

This desire uplifts and bears him to his last resting-place in Ancona, where the old man, in his dying dreams, hears the tramp of legions that never came, sees upon the Adriatic the sails of galleys that were to bear the crusaders to Palestine--yet there were neither armies nor s.h.i.+ps, it was but the fever of his dream.

During the Reformation the ideal of Universal Peace is unregarded. The wars of religion, the world's debate, become the war of creeds. "I am not come to bring peace among you, but a sword." Luther, for instance, declares war against the revolted peasants of Germany with all the ardour and fury with which Innocent III denounced war against the Albigenses. War in the language and thoughts of Calvin is what it became to Oliver Cromwell, to the Huguenots, and to the Scottish Covenanters, to Jean Chevallier and the insurgents of the Cevennes. As Luther in the sixteenth century represents the religious side of the Reformation, so Grotius in the seventeenth century represents the position of the legists of the Reformation. In his work, _De Jure Belli ac Pacis_, Universal Peace as an object of practical politics is altogether set aside. War is accepted as existent between nation and nation, State and State, and Grotius lays down the laws which regulate it. Similar attempts had been made in the religious councils of Greece, and when the first great Saracen army was starting upon its conquests, the first of the Khalifs delivered to that army instructions which in their humanity have never been surpa.s.sed; the utmost observances of chivalry or modern times are there antic.i.p.ated. But the treatise of Grotius is the first elaboration of the subject in the method of his contemporary, Verulam--the method of the science of the future.

In the eighteenth century the singular work of the mild and amiable enthusiast, the Abbe de Saint-Pierre,[10] made a profound impression upon the thought not only of his own but of succeeding generations.

Kings, princes, philosophers, sat in informal conference debating the same argument as has recently occupied the dignitaries at The Hague.

It inspired some of the most earnest pages of D'Alembert and of the Encyclopedie. It drew from Voltaire some happy invective, affording the opportunity of airing once more his well-loved but worthless paradox on the trivial causes from which the great actions of history arise. Saint-Pierre's ideal informs the early chapters of Gibbon's History, but its influence disappears as the work advances. It charmed the fancy of Rousseau, and, by a curious irony, he inflamed by his impa.s.sioned argument that war for freedom which is to the undying glory of France.[11]

Frederick the Great in his extreme age wrote to Voltaire: "Running over the pages of history I see that ten years never pa.s.s without a war.

This intermittent fever may have moments of respite, but cease, never!"

This is the last word of the eighteenth century upon the dream of Universal Peace--a word spoken by one of the greatest of kings, looking out with dying eyes upon a world about to close in one of the deadliest yet most heroic and memorable conflicts set down in the annals of our race. The Hundred Days are its epilogue--the war of twenty-five years ending in that great manner! Then, like a pallid dawn, the ideal once more arises. Congress after congress meets in ornamental debate, till six can be reckoned, or even seven, culminating in the recent conference at The Hague. Its derisive results, closing the debate of the nineteenth, as Frederick's words sum the debate of the eighteenth century, are too fresh in all men's memories to require a syllable of comment.

Thus then it appears from a glance at its history that this ideal of Universal Peace has stirred the imagination most deeply, first of all in the ages when an empire, whether Persian, Hebraic, h.e.l.lenic, or Roman, conterminous with earth, wide as the inhabited world, was still in appearance realizable; or, again, in periods of defeat, or of civil strife, as in the closing age of the Roman oligarchy; or in the moments of exhaustion following upon long-continued and desolating war, as in Modern Europe after the last phases of the Reformation conflict, the wars of Tilly and Wallenstein, of Marlborough and Eugene, and of Frederick. The familiar poetry in praise of peace, and the Utopias, the composition of which has amused the indolence of scholars or the leisure of statesmen, originate in such hours or in such moods. On the other hand, the criticism of war, scornful or ironic, of the great thinkers and speculative writers of modern times, when it is not merely the phantom of their logic, an _eidolon specus_ created by their system, arises in the most impressive instances less from admiration or desire or hope of perpetual peace than from the arraignment of all life, and all the ideals, activities, and purposes of men.

Hence the question whether war be a permanent condition of human life is answered by implication. For the history of the ideal of Universal Peace but re-enforces that definition of war set forth above, as a manifestation of the world-spirit, co-extensive with being, and as such, inseparable from man's life here and now. In all these great wars which we have touched upon, the conflict of two ideas, in the Platonic sense of the word, unveils itself, but both ideas are ultimately phases of one Idea. It is by conflict alone that life realizes itself. That is the be-all and end-all of life as such, of Being as such. From the least developed forms of structural or organic nature to the highest form in which the world-force realizes itself, the will and imagination of Man, this law is absolute. The very magic of the stars, their influence upon the human heart, derives something of its potency, one sometimes fancies, from the vast, the silent, mighty strife, the victorious energy, which brings their rays across the abysses and orbits of the worlds.

What is the art of h.e.l.las but the conquest of the rock, the marble, and the fixing there in perennial beauty, perennial calm, the thought born from the travail of the sculptor's brain, or from the unrecorded struggle of dark forces in the past, which emerge now in a vision of transcendent rapture and light? By this conflict, multiplex or simple, the conquering energy of the form, the defeated energy of the material, the serenity of the statues of Phidias, of the tragedies of Sophocles, is attained. They are the symbol, the visible embodiment of the moment of deepest vision, and of the deepest agony now at rest there, a loveliness for ever. And as the aeons recede, as the intensity of the idea of the Divine within man increases, so does this conflict, this _agonia_ increase. It is in the heart of the tempest that the deepest peace dwells.

The power, the place of conflict, thus great in Art, is in the region of emotional, of intellectual and of moral life, admittedly supreme.

Doubt, contrition of soul, and the other modes of spiritual _agonia_, are not these equivalent with the life, not death, of the soul?

And those moments of serenest peace, when the desire of the heart is one with the desire of the world-soul, are not these attained by conflict? In the life of the State, the soul of the State, as composed of such monads, such const.i.tuent forms and organic elements, each penetrated and impelled by the divine, self-realizing, omnipresent _nisus_, how vain to hope, to desire, to pray, that _there_ this mystic all-pervading Force, this onward-striving, this conflict, which is as it were the very essence and necessary law of being, should pause and have an end! War may change its shape, the struggle here intensifying, there abating; it may be uplifted by ever loftier purposes and n.o.bler causes--but cease? How shall it cease?

Indeed, in the light of History, universal peace appears less as a dream than as a nightmare which shall be realized only when the ice has crept to the heart of the sun, and the stars, left black and trackless, start from their orbits.

-- 7. IMPERIALISM AND WAR

If war then be a permanent factor in the life of States, how, it may be asked, will it be affected by Imperialism and by such an ideal as this of Imperial Britain? The effects upon war, will, I should say, be somewhat of this nature. It will greaten and exalt the character of war. Not only in const.i.tutional, but in foreign politics, the roots of the present lie deep in the past. In the wars of an imperial State the ideals of all the wars of the past still live, adding a fuller life to the life of the present. From the earliest tribal forays, slowly broadening through the struggles of feudalism and Plantagenet kings to the wars of the nation, one creative purpose, one informing principle links century to century, developing itself at last in the wars of empire, wars for the larger freedom, the higher justice. And this ideal differs from the ideal of primitive times as the vast complexity of races, peoples, religions, climates, traditions, literatures, arts, manners, laws, which the word "Britain" now conceals, differs from the 'companies' and 'hundreds' of daring warriors who followed the fortunes of a Cerdic or an Uffa. For the State which by conquest or submission is merged in the life of another State does not thereby evade that law of conflict of which I have spoken, but becomes subject to that law in the life of the greater State, national or imperial, of which it now forms a const.i.tuent and organic part. And looming already on the horizon, the wars of races rise portentous, which will touch to purposes yet higher and more mystic the wars of empires--as these have greatened the wars of nationalities, these again the wars of feudal kings, of princ.i.p.alities, of cities, of tribes or clans.

Secondly, this ideal of Imperial Britain will greaten and exalt the action of the soldier, hallowing the death on the battlefield with the attributes at once of the hero and the martyr. Thus, when M. Bloch and similar writers delineate war as robbed by modern inventions of its pomp and circ.u.mstance, when they expatiate upon the isolation resulting from a battle-line extended across leagues, and upon the "zone of death" separating the opposing hosts, one asks in perplexity, to what end does M. Bloch consider that war was waged in the past? For the sake of such emotional excitement or parade as are now by smokeless powder, maxims, long-range rifles, and machine guns abolished? These are but the trappings, the outward vesture of war; the cause, the sacred cause, is by this transformation in the methods of war all untouched. Was there then no "zone of death" between the armies at Eyiau or at Gravelotte? Let but the cause be high, and men will find means to cross that zone, now as then--by the sapper's art if by no other! And as the pride and ostentation of battle are effaced, its inner glory and dread sanct.i.ty are the more evinced. The battlefield is an altar; the sacrifice the most awful that the human eye can contemplate or the imagination with all its efforts invent. "The drum," says a French moralist, "is the music of battle, because it deadens thought." But in modern warfare the faculties are awake.

Solitude is the touchstone of valour, and the modern soldier cast in upon himself, undazzled, unblinded, faces death singly. Fighting for ideal ends, he dies for men and things that are not yet; he dies, knowing in his heart that they may never be at all. Courage and self-renunciation have attained their height.

Nor have strategy and the mechanical appliances of modern warfare turned the soldier into a machine, an automaton, devoid of will and self-directing energy. Contemporary history makes it daily clearer that in modern battles brain and nerve count as heavily as they ever did in the combats by the Scamander or the Simois. Another genius and another epic style than those of Homer may be requisite fitly to celebrate them, but the theme a.s.suredly is not less lofty, the heroism less heroic, the triumph or defeat less impressive.

Twice, and twice only, is man inevitably alone--in the hour of death and the hour of his birth. Man, alone always, is then supremely alone.

In that final solitude what are pomp and circ.u.mstance to the heart?

That which strengthens a man then, whether on the battlefield or at the stake or in life's unrecorded martyrdoms, is not the cry of present onlookers nor the hope of remembering fame, but the faith for which he has striven, or his conception of the purposes, the ends in which the nation for which he is dying, lives and moves and has its being. Made strong by this, he endures the ordeal, the hazard of death, in the full splendour of the war, or at its sullen, dragging close, or in the battle's onset, or on patrol, the test of the dauntless, surrendering the sight of the sun, the coming of spring, and all that the arts and various wisdom of the centuries have added of charm or depth to nature's day. And in the great hour, whatever his past hours have been, consecrate to duty or to ease, to the loftiest or to the least-erected aims, whether he is borne on triumphant to the dread pause, the vigil which is the night after a battle, or falling he sinks by a fatal touch, and the noise of victory is hushed in the coming of the great silence, and the darkness swoons around him, and the cry "Press on!" stirs no pulsation any longer--in that great hour he is lifted to the heights of the highest, the prophet's rapt vision, the poet's moment of serenest inspiration, or what else magnifies or makes approximate to the Divine this mortal life of ours.

War thus greatened in character by its ideal, the phrase of the Greek orator, let me repeat, is no longer an empty sound, but vibrates with its original life--"How fortunate the dead who have fallen in battle!

And how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so glorious a shape!"

An added solemnity invests the resolutions of senates, and the prayer on the battlefield, "Through death to life," acquires a sincerity more moving and a simplicity more heroic. And these, I imagine, will be the results of Imperialism and of this deepening consciousness of its destiny in Imperial Britain, whether in war which is the act of the State as a whole, or in the career of the soldier which receives its consummation there in the death on the battlefield.

[1] The sea and the invincible might of Athens on the waves formed the connecting ideas of the three dramas, _Phineus, Persae, Glaucus_. The trilogy was produced in 473 or 472 B.C., whilst the memory of Salamis was still fresh in every heart. The Phoenissae, the "Women of Sidon,"

a tragedy on the same theme by Phrynichus, had been acted five years earlier. The distinction of these works lay in the presentation to the conquering State of a great victory as a tragedy in the life of the vanquished. The cry in the _Persae_, "+opaides h.e.l.lenoite+", still echoes with singular fidelity across 3,000 years in the war-song of _modern_ Greece: "+deute paides ton h.e.l.lenon+."

[2] Thus in speaking of the ancient life of the Teutonic peoples: "Doch alles das (Neigung zum Kampf mit den Nachbarn und zu kriegerischen Zugen in die Ferne) hat nicht gehindert, da.s.s, wo die Deutschen sich niederliessen, alsbald bestimmte Ordnungen des offentlichen und rechtlichen Lebens begrundet wurden."--_Verfa.s.sungsgeschichte_, 3rd ed., i, p. 19; _cf._ also i, pp. 416-17: "Es hat nicht eigene Kriegsvolker gegeben, gebildet durch und fur den Krieg, nicht Kriegsstaaten in solchem Sinn, da.s.s alles ganz und allein fur den Krieg berechnet gewesen ware, nicht einmal auf die Dauer Kriegsfursten, deren Herrschaft nur in Kriegfuhrung und Heeresmacht ihren Grund gehabt."

[3] The lapse of ages, enthusiasm, or carelessness, tribal jealousies or the accidental predilections of an individual poet or historian, combine to render the early history of the Arabs, so far as precision in dates, the definite order and mutual relations of events, characters, and localities are concerned, perplexing and insecure, or tantalizing by the wealth of detail, impressive indeed, but eluding the test of historical criticism. Their tactics and the composition of their armies make the precise share of this or that general in determining the result of a battle or a campaign difficult to estimate.

Yet by (he concord of authorities the glory of the overthrow of the Empire of the Sa.s.sanides seems to be the portion, first of Mothanna, who sustained the fortunes of Islam at a most critical hour, A.H.

13-14, and by his victory at Boawib just warded off a great disaster; and secondly of Saad, the victor of Kadesia, A.H. 15, A.D. 636-7, the conqueror and first administrator of Irak. The claims of Amr, or Amrou, to the conquest of Egypt, Pelusium, Memphis, Alexandria, A.D.

638, admit of hardly a doubt; whilst the distinction of Khalid, "the Sword of G.o.d," in the Syrian War at the storming of Damascus and in the crus.h.i.+ng defeat of Heraclius at the Yermuk, August, A.D. 634, may justly ent.i.tle him to the designation--if that description can be applied to any one of the devoted band--of "Conqueror of Syria."

[4] "The twelve years of their military command (_i.e._, of Nicephorus and Zimisces) form the most splendid period of the Byzantine annals.

The sieges of Mopsuestia and Tarsus in Silicia first exercised the skill and perseverance of their troops, on whom at this moment I shall not hesitate to bestow the name of Romans."--Gibbon, chap. lii. The reign of Zimisces, A.D. 969-76, forms the subject of the opening chapters, pp. 1-326, of Schlumberger's ma.s.sive work, _L'epopee Byzantine a la fin du dixieme siecle_, Paris, 1896, which exhausts every resource of modern research into this period. Zimisces' rise to power, and the career of the other heroic figure of the tenth century in Byzantine history are dealt with not less exhaustively in Schlumberger's earlier volume, _Un Empereur byzantin_, Paris, 1890.

[5] Carlyle was in his seventy-seventh year when he completed the _Early Kings of Norway_. "Finished yesterday that long rigmarole upon the Norse kings" is the comment in his Journal under date February 15th, 1872.--Froude, _Carlyle's Life in London_, vol. ii, p. 411.

[6] Mr. Herbert Spencer's characterization of Carlyle as a devil-wors.h.i.+pper (_Data of Ethics_, -- 14) must be regarded less as an effort in serious criticism than as the retort, perhaps the just retort, of the injured evolutionist and utilitarian to the Pig Philosophy of the eighth of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_.

[7] The Revolution of 1848 made the appearance of Palacky's work in the native language of Bohemia possible. Two volumes had already been issued in German. If ever the work of a scholar and an historian had the effect of a national song, this virtue may be ascribed to the Czech version of Palacky's _Geschichte Bohmens_. After two centuries of subjection to the Hapsburgs and apparent oblivion of her past, Bohemia awoke and discovered that she had a history. Of the seven volumes of the German edition, the period dominated by the personality of George of Podiebrad forms the subject of the fourth (Prague, 1857-60).

[8] France has given the world the Revolution; Germany, the Reformation; Italy, modern Art; but Russia? "We," Tourgenieff once said, "we have given the samovar." But that poet's own works, the symphonies of Tschaikowsky, the one novel of Dostoievsky, have changed all this.

[9] Nevertheless the Truce of G.o.d is one of the n.o.blest efforts of mediaeval Europe. It drew its origins from southern France, arising partly from the misery of the people oppressed by the constant and b.l.o.o.d.y strife of feudal princes and barons, heightened at that time by the fury of a pestilence, partly also from a widespread and often fixed and controlling persuasion that with the close of the century the thousand years of the Apocalypse would be fulfilled, and that with the year A.D. 1000 the Day of Judgment would dawn. Ducange has collected the evidence bearing on the use of the Latin term, and Semichon's admirable work, _La Paix et la Treve de Dieu, premiere edition_, 1857, _deuxieme edition revue et augmentee_, 1869, sketches the growth of the movement. With the eleventh century, though the social misery is unaltered, the force of the mystic impulse is lost; at the synod of Tuluges in 1027 the days of the week on which the Truce must be observed are limited to two. But towards the close of the century the rising power of Hildebrand and the crusading enthusiasm gave the movement new life, and the days during which all war was forbidden were extended to four of the seven days of the week, those sacred to the Last Supper, Death, Sepulture, and Resurrection. With the decline of the crusading spirit and the rise of monarchical principles the influence and use of the Treuga waned. The verses of the troubadour, Bertrand le Born, are celebrated--"Peace is not for me, but war, war alone! What to me are Mondays and Tuesdays? And the weeks, months, and years, all are alike to me." The stanza fitly expresses the way in which the Truce had come to be regarded by feudal society towards the close of the twelfth century.

[10] St.-Pierre's work appeared in 1712, three years after Malplaquet, the most sanguinary struggle of the Marlborough wars. It is thus synchronous with the last gloomy years of Louis XIV, when France, and her king also, seemed sinking into the mortal lethargy of Jesuitism.

St.-Simon in his early volumes has written the history of these years.

Voltaire accuses St.-Pierre of originating or encouraging the false impression that he had derived his theory from the Dauphin, the pupil of Fenelon and the Marcellus of the French Monarchy. An English translation of St.-Pierre's treatise was published in 1714 with the following characteristic t.i.tle-page: "A Project for settling an Everlasting Peace in Europe, first proposed by Henry IV of France, and approved of by Queen Elizabeth and most of the Princes of Europe, and now discussed at large and made practicable by the Abbot St. Pierre of the French Academy."

[11] As late as 1791 we find Priestley looking to the French Revolution as the precursor of the era of Universal Peace. In a discourse delivered at "the Meeting House in the Old-Jewry, 27th April, 1791," he describes the "glorious enthusiasm which has for its objects the flouris.h.i.+ng of science and the extinction of wars." France, he declares, "has ensured peace to itself and to other nations at the same time, cutting off almost every possible cause of war," and enables us "to prognosticate the approach of the happy times in which the sure prophecies of Scripture inform us that wars shall cease and universal peace and harmony take place."

LECTURE VI

THE VICISSITUDES OF STATES AND EMPIRES

[_Tuesday, July_ 3_rd_, 1900]

Having considered in the first lecture a definition of Imperialism, and traced in the second and third the development in religion and in politics of the ideal of Imperial Britain, and having afterwards examined the relations of this ideal to the supreme questions of War and Peace, an inquiry not less momentous, but from its intangible and even mystic character less capable of definite resolution, now demands attention. How is this ideal of the Imperialistic State related to that from which all States originally derive? How is it related to the Divine? From the consideration of this problem two others arise, that of the vicissitudes of States and Empires, and that of the destiny of this Empire of Imperial Britain.

From the a.n.a.logy of the Past is it possible to apprehend even dimly the curve which this Empire, moved by a new ideal, and impelled by the deepening consciousness of its destiny, will describe amongst the nations and the peoples of the earth?