The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain Part 12

In the conception at which she has at last arrived, and in her present att.i.tude towards this force, Britain may justly claim to represent humanity. She combines the utmost reverence for her own faith with sympathetic intelligence for the faiths of others. And confronting her at this hour of the world's history is a task higher than the task of Akbar, and more auspicious. Akbar's design was indeed lofty, and worthy of that great spirit; but it was a hopeless design. The forms, the creeds which have been imposed from without upon a religion are no integral part of that religion's life. Even when by the progress of the years they have become transfused by the formative influences which time and the sufferings or the hopes of men supply, they change or are cast aside without organic convulsion or menace to the life itself.

But the forms and embodiments which a divine thought in the process of its own irresistible and mighty growth a.s.sumes--these are beyond the touch of outer things, and evade the shaping hand of man. Inseparable from the thought which they, as it were, reincarnate, their life changes but with its life, and together they recede into the divine whence they came. The effort to extract the inmost truth, tearing away the form which by an obscure yet inviolate process has crystallized around it, is like breaking a statue to discover the loveliness of its loveliness. Akbar would have as quickly reached the creative thought, the _idea_ enshrined in the Athene of Phidias, the immortal cause of its power, by destroying the form, as have severed the divine thought immanent in the Magian or Hindoo faiths from their integral embodiments.

But a greater task awaits Britain. Among the races of the earth whose fate is already dependent, or within a brief period will be dependent upon Europe, what empire is to aid them, moving with nature, to attain that harmony which Dante discerned? What empire, disregarding the mediaeval ideal, the effort to impose upon them systems, rites, inst.i.tutions, creeds, to which they are by nature, by their history, by inherited pride in the traditions of the past, hostile or invincibly opposed, will adventure the new, the loftier enterprise of developing all that is permanent and divine within their own civilizations, inst.i.tutions, rites, and creeds? Nature and the dead shall lend their unseen but mighty alliance to such purposes! Thus will Britain turn to the uses of humanity the valour or the fortune which has brought the religions of India and the power of Islam beneath her sway.

The continents of the world no longer contain isolated races severed from each other by the barriers of nature, mutual ignorance, or the artifices of man, but vast ma.s.ses, moving into ever-deepening intimacies, imitations, mutually influenced and influencing. Man grows conscious to himself as one, and to represent this consciousness on the round earth, as Rome did once represent it on this half the world, to be amongst the races of all the earth what Hildebrand dreamed the Normans might be amongst the nations of Europe, is not this a task exalted enough to quicken the most sluggish zeal, the most retrograde "patriotism"? For without such mediation, misunderstanding, envy, hate, mistrust still erect barriers between the races of mankind more impa.s.sable than continents or seas or the great wall of Ch'in Chi.

This is a part not for the future merely, it is one to which Britain is already by her past committed. The task is great, for between civilization and barbarism, the vanguard and the rearguard of humanity, suspicion, rivalry, and war are undying. From this the Greek division of mankind into h.e.l.lenes and Barbarians derives whatever justice it possesses.

In those directions and towards those high endeavours amongst the subjects within her own dominion, and thence amongst the races and religions of the world, the short s.p.a.ce that is illumined of the path in front of Britain does unmistakably lead. Every year, every month that pa.s.ses, is fraught with import of the high and singular destiny which awaits this realm, this empire, and this race. The actions, the purposes of other empires and races, seem but to ill.u.s.trate the actions, the purposes of this empire, and the distinction of its relations to Humanity.

Faithful to her past, in conflict for this high cause, if Britain fall, it will at least be as that hero of the _Iliad_ fell, "doing some memorable thing." Were not this n.o.bler than by overmuch wisdom to incur the taunt, _propter vitam vivendi perdere causas_, or that cast by Dante at him who to fate's summons returned "the great refusal," _a Dio spiacenti ed a'nemici sui_, "hateful to G.o.d and to the enemies of G.o.d"? The nations of the earth ponder our action at this crisis, and by our vacillation or resolution they are uplifted or dejected; whilst, in their invisible abodes, the spirits of the dead of our race are in suspense till the hazard be made and the glorious meed be secured, in triumph or defeat, to eternity.

There are crises in history when it is not merely fitting to remember the dead. Their deeds live with us continually, and are not so much things remembered, as integral parts of our life, moulding the thought of every hour. In such crises a Senate of the dead were the truest counsellors of the living, for they alone could with convincing eloquence plead the cause of the past and of the generations that are not yet. Warriors, crusaders, patriots, statesmen-soldiers or statesmen-martyrs, it was for things which are not yet that they died, and to an end which, though strongly trusting, they but dimly discerned that they laid the foundations of this Empire. Masters of their own fates, possessors of their own lives, they gave them lightly as pledges unredeemed, and for men and things of which they were not masters or possessors. But they set higher store on glory than on life, and valued great deeds above length of days. They loved their country, dying for it, yet did it seem as if it were less for England than for that which is the excellence of man's life and the very emergence of the divine within such life, that they fought and fell. And this great inheritance of fame and of valour is but ours on trust, the fief inalienable of the dead and of the generations to come.

And now, behold from their martyr graves Russell, Sidney, Eliot arise, and with phantom fingers beckon England on! From the fields of their fate and their renown, see Talbot and Falkland, Wolfe and de Montfort arise, regardful of England and her action at this hour. And lo!

gathering up from the elder centuries, a sound like a trumpet-call, clear-piercing, far-borne, mystic, ineffable, the call to battle of hosts invisible, the mustering armies of the dead, the great of other wars--Brunanburh and Senlac, Crecy, Flodden, Blenheim and Trafalgar.

_Their_ battle-cries await our answer--the chivalry's at Agincourt, "Heaven for Harry, England and St. George!", Cromwell's war-shout, which was a prayer, at Dunbar, "The Lord of Hosts! The Lord of Hosts!"--these await our answer, that response which by this war we at last send ringing down the ages, "G.o.d for Britain, Justice and Freedom to the world!"

Such witness of the dead is both a challenge and a consolation; a challenge, to guard this heritage of the past with the chivalry of the future, nor bate one jot of the ancient spirit and resolution of our race; a consolation, in the reflection that from a valour at once so remote and so near a degenerate race can hardly spring.

With us, let me repeat, the decision rests, with us and with this generation. Never since on Sinai G.o.d spoke in thunder has mandate more imperative been issued to any race, city, or nation than now to this nation and to this people. And, again, if we should hesitate, or if we should decide wrongly, it is not the loss of prestige, it is not the narrowed bounds we have to fear, it is the judgment of the dead and the despair of the living, of the inarticulate myriads who have trusted to us, it is the arraigning eyes of the unborn.

[1] I am aware of Spinoza's distinction of the "clara et distincta idea" and the "inadequat[oe] idea"; but the distinction above flows from a conception of the universe and of man's destiny which is not Spinoza's nor Spinozistic.

[2] Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht; Der Herr der Schopfung hat alles bedacht.

Dein Loos ist gefallen, verfolge die Weise, Der Weg ist begonnen, vollende die Reise.

GOETHE, _West-ostlicher Divan, Buch der Spruche_.

[3] Recent investigation has made it clear that the history of Islamic Arabia is not severed by any violent convulsion from pre-Mohammedan Arabia. "The times of ignorance" were not the desolate waste which Tabari, "the Livy of the Arabs," paints, and down to the close of the eighteenth century the comparison between England, Rome, and Islam offers a fair field for speculative politics.

[4] Yet the scientific conception of the _destruction_ or _decay_ of this whole star-system by fire or ice does of itself turn progress into a mockery. (See Prof. C. A. Young, _Manual of Astronomy_, p. 571, and Prof. F. R. Moulton, _Introduction to Astronomy_, p. 486.)

[5] Condorcet's biography (1786) of his master is one of the n.o.blest works of its cla.s.s in French literature. Turgot's was one of those minds that like Chamfort's or Villiers de L'Isle Adam's scatter bounteously the ideas which others use or misuse. The fogs and mists of Comte's portentous tomes are all derived, it has often been pointed out, from a few paragraphs of Turgot. And a fragment written by Turgot in his youth inspired something of the substance and even of the t.i.tle of Condorcet's great _Esquisse_.

[6] References to the power over his mind of the French Revolutionary principles abound in Goethe's writings. The violence of the first impression, which began with the affair of the necklace, had reached a climax in '90 and '91, and this, along with the ineffaceable memories of the _Werther_ and _Goetz_ period, which his heart remembered when in his intellectual development he had left it far behind, accounts in a large measure for his yielding temporarily at least to the spell of Napoleon's genius, and for the studied but unaffected indifference to German politics and to the War of Liberation. Even of 1809, the year of Eckmuhl, Essling, and Wagram, and the darkest hour of German freedom, Goethe can write: "This year, considering the beautiful returns it brought me, shall ever remain dear and precious to memory,"

and when the final uprising against the French was imminent, he sought quietude in oriental poetry--Firdusi, Hafiz, and Nisami.

[7] Of his _Contes_ Taine said: "Depuis les Grecs aucun artiste n'a taille un camee litteraire avec autant de relief, avec une aussi rigoureuse perfection de forme."

[8] It is remarkable that Carlyle and Schopenhauer should have lived through four decades together yet neither know in any complete way of the other's work. Carlyle nowhere mentions the name of Schopenhauer.

Indeed _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, though read by a few, was practically an unknown book both in Germany and England until a date when Carlyle was growing old, solitary, and from the present ever more detached, and new books and new writers had become, as they were to Goethe in his age, distasteful or a weariness. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, already in the "thirties," had been attracted by Carlyle's essays on German literature in the _Edinburgh_, and though ignorant as yet of the writer's name he was all his life too diligent a reader of English newspapers and magazines to be unaware of Carlyle's later fame.

But he has left no criticism, nor any distinct references to Carlyle's teaching, although in his later and miscellaneous writings the opportunity often presents itself. Wagner, it is known, was a student both of Schopenhauer and Carlyle. Schopenhauer's proud injunction, indeed, that he who would understand his writings should prepare himself by a preliminary study of Plato or Kant, or of the divine wisdom of the Upanishads, indicates also paths that lead to the higher teaching of Wagner, and--though in a less degree--of Carlyle.

[9] The friends.h.i.+p of Tourgenieff and Flaubert rested upon speculative rather than on artistic sympathy. The Russian indeed never quite understood Flaubert's "rage for the word." Yet the deep inner concord of the two natures reveals itself in their correspondence. It was the supreme friends.h.i.+p of Flaubert's later manhood as that with Bouilhet was the friends.h.i.+p of his earlier years. Yet they met seldom, and their meetings often resembled those of Th.o.r.eau and Emerson, as described by the former, or those of Carlyle and Tennyson, when after some three hours' smoking, interrupted by a word or two, the evening would end with Carlyle's good-night: "Weel, we hae had a grand nicht, Alfred." It is in one of Tourgenieff's own prose-poems that the dialogue of the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn across the centuries is darkly shadowed. The evening of the world falls upon spirits sensitive to its intimations as the diurnal twilight falls upon the hearts of travellers descending a broad stream near the Ocean and the haven of its unending rest.

[10] Cf. Philostratus, _Life of Appollonius_. I. 28.

NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE

NOTE.

"Nineteenth Century Europe" was written by Mr. Cramb for the _Daily News_ Special Number for December 31st, 1900. In it he presents a survey of the political events and tendencies throughout Europe during the nineteenth century. He outlines the development of the New German Empire from the war against Napoleon down to the days of Bismarck and Wilhelm II, and shows how the Russian general Skobeleff, the hero of Plevna and the Schipka Pa.s.s, foretold over thirty years ago the present death-struggle between Teuton and Slav in Eastern Europe. The future _roles_ of France, Italy, and Spain are also clearly indicated by the author.

NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE

I

DOMINION OF THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY

In Europe, as the year 1800 dragged to its b.l.o.o.d.y close, and the fury of the conflict between the Monarchies and the Revolution was for a time stilled on the fields of Marengo and Hohenlinden, men then, as now, discussed the problems of the relation of a century's end to the determining forces of human history; then, as now, men remarked half regretfully, half mockingly, how pallid had grown the light which once fell from the years of Jubilee of mediaeval or Hebrew times; and then, as now, critics of a lighter or more positive vein debated the question whether the coming year were the first or second of the new century, pointing out that between the last year of a century and man's destiny there could be no intimate connection, that all the eras were equally arbitrary, equally determined by local or accidental calculations, that the century which was closing over the Christian world had but run half its course to the Mohammedan. Yet in one deep enough matter the mood of the Europe of 1800 differs significantly from the mood of the Europe of 1900. Whatever the division in men's minds as to the relation between the close of the century and a race's history, and the precise moment at which the old century ends and the new begins, one thing in 1800 was radiantly clear to all men--the glory and the wonder, the endless peace and felicity not less endless, which the opening century and the new age dimly portended or securely promised to humanity. The desert march of eighteen hundred years was ended; the promised land was in sight. The poet's voice from the c.u.mberland hills, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" traversed the North Sea, and beyond the Rhine was swelled by a song more majestic and not less triumphant:

Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen, Durch des Himmels pracht'gen Plan, Wandelt, Bruder, eure Bahn, Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen,

and, pa.s.sing the Alps and the Vistula, died in a tumultuous hymn of victory long hoped for, of joy long desired, of freedom long despaired of, in the cities of Italy, the valleys of Greece, the plains of Poland, and the Russian steppes. Since those days three generations have arisen, looked their last upon the sun, and pa.s.sed to their rest, and in what another mood does Europe now confront the opening century and the long vista of its years! Man presents himself no more as he was delineated by the poets of 1800. Not now does man appear to the poet's vision as mild by suffering and by freedom strong, rising like some stately palm on the century's verge; but to the highest-mounted minds in Russia, Germany, France, Norway, Italy, man presents himself like some blasted pine, a thunder-riven trunk, tottering on the brink of the abyss, whilst far below rave the darkness and the storm-drift of the worlds. From what causes and by the operation of what laws has the great disillusion fallen upon the heart of Europe? Whither are vanished the glorious hopes with which the century opened? Is it final despair, this mood in which it closes, or is it but the temporary eclipse which hides some mightier hope, a new incarnation of the spirit of the world, some yet serener endeavour, radiant and more enduring, wider in its range and in its influences profounder than that of 1789, of 1793, or of the year of Hohenlinden and Marengo?

In the year 1800, from the Volga to the Irish Sea, from the sunlit valleys of Calabria to the tormented Norwegian fiords, there was in every European heart capable of interests other than egoistical and personal one word, one hope, ardent and unconquerable. That word was "Freedom"--freedom to the serf from the fury of the boyard, to the thralls who toiled and suffered throughout the network of princ.i.p.alities, kingdoms, and duchies, named "Germany"; freedom to the negro slave; freedom to the newer slaves whom factories were creating; freedom to Spain from the Inquisition, from the tyranny and shame of Charles IV and G.o.doy; freedom to Greece from the yoke of the Ottoman; to Italy from the slow, unrelenting oppression of the Austrian; freedom to all men from the feudal State and the feudal Church, from civic injustice and political disfranchis.e.m.e.nt, from the immeasurable wrongs of the elder centuries! A new religion, heralded by a new evangel, that of Diderot and Montesquieu, Lessing, Beccaria, and Voltaire, and sanctified by the blood of new martyrs, the Girondins, offered itself to the world. But as if man, schooled by disillusionment, and deceived in the fifteenth and in the seventeenth centuries, trembled now lest this new hope should vanish like the old, he sought a concrete symbol and a reasoned basis for the intoxicating dream. Therefore, he spoke the word "Liberty" like a challenge, and as sentinel answers sentinel, straight there came the response, whispered in his own breast, or boldly uttered--"France and Bonaparte." Since the death of Mohammed, no single life had so centred upon itself the deepest hopes and aspirations of men of every type of genius, intellect, and character.

Chateaubriand, returning from exile, offers him homage, and in the first year of the century dedicates to him his _Genie du Christianisme_, that work which, after _La Nouvelle Helose_, most deeply moulded the thought of France in the generation which followed.

And in that year, Beethoven throws upon paper, under the name "Bonaparte," the first sketches of his mighty symphony, the serenest achievement in art, save the _Prometheus_ of Sh.e.l.ley, that the Revolutionary epoch has yet inspired. In that year, at Weimar, Schiller, at the height of his enthusiasm, is repelled, as he had been in the first ardour of their friends.h.i.+p, by the aloofness or the disdain of the greater poet. Yet Goethe did most a.s.suredly feel even then the spell of Napoleon's name. And in that year, the greatest of English orators, Charles James Fox, joined with the Russian Czar, Paul, with Canova, the most exquisite of Italian sculptors, and with Hegel, the most brilliant of German metaphysicians, in offering the heart's allegiance to this sole man for the hopes his name had kindled in Europe and in the world. To the calmer devotion of genius was added the idolatrous enthusiasm of the peoples of France, Italy, Germany.

And, indeed, since Mohammed, no single mind had united within itself capacities so various in their power over the imaginations of men--an energy of will, swift, sudden, terrifying as the eagle's swoop; the prestige of deeds which in his thirtieth year recalled the youth of Alexander and the maturer actions of Hannibal and Caesar; an imaginative language which found for his ideas words that came as from a distance, like those of Shakespeare or Racine; and within his own heart a mystic faith, deep-anch.o.r.ed, immutable, tranquil, when all around was trouble and disarray--the calm of a spirit habituated to the Infinite, and familiar with the deep places of man's thought from his youth upwards. Yes, Mirabeau was long dead, and Danton, Marat, and Saint-Just, and but three years ago the heroic Lazare Hoche, richly gifted in politics as in war, had been struck down in the noontide of his years; but now a greater than Mirabeau, Hoche, or Danton was here.

If the December sun of Hohenlinden diverted men's minds to Moreau, the victor, it was but for a moment. In the universal horror and joy with which on Christmas Day, 1800, the rumour of the explosion and failure of the infernal machine in the Rue St. Nicaise spread over Europe, men felt more intimately, more consciously, the hopes, the fears, bound up inextricably with the name, the actions, and the life of the new world-deliverer, the Consul Bonaparte.

The history of the nineteenth century centres in the successive transformations of this ideal so highly-pitched. In the gradual declension of the cause which was then a religion, and to mankind the warrant of a new era, into a local or party-cry, a watch-word travestied and degraded, lies the origin of the intellectual despair or solicitude which marks the closing years of the century. The first disillusionment came swiftly. Fifteen years pa.s.s, years of war and convulsion unexampled in Europe since the cataclysm of the fifth century, the century of Alaric and Attila--and within that s.p.a.ce, those fifteen years, what a revolution in all the sentiments, the hopes, the aspirations of men! The Consul Bonaparte has become the Emperor Napoleon, the arch-enemy of Liberty and of the human race. France, the world's forlorn hope in 1800, is, in 1815, the gathering place of the armies of Europe, risen in arms against her! Emperors and kings, nations, cities, and princ.i.p.alities, statesmen like Stein, philosophers like Fichte, poets like Arndt and Korner, warriors like Kutusov, Blucher, and Schwartzenberg, the peoples of Europe and the governments of Europe, the oppressed and the oppressors, the embittered enmities and the wrongs of a thousand years forgotten, had leagued together in this vast enterprise, whose end was the destruction of one nation and one sole man--the world-deliverer of but fifteen years ago!

What tragedy of a lost leader equals this of Napoleon? What marvel that it still troubles the minds of men more profoundly than any other of modern ages. Yet Napoleon did not betray Liberty, nor was France false to the Revolution. Man's action at its highest is, like his art, symbolic. To Camille Desmoulins and the mob behind him the capture of a disused fortress and the liberation of a handful of men made the fall of the Bastille the symbol and the watchword of Liberty. To the Europe of Napoleon, the monarchs of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Spain, the princes of Germany and Italy, the Papal power, "the stone thrust into the side of Italy to keep the wound open"--these were like the Bastille to the France of Desmoulins, a symbol of oppression and wrong, injustice and tyranny. And in Bonaparte, whether as Consul or Emperor, the peoples of Europe for a time beheld the hero who led against the tyrants the hosts of the free. What were his own despotisms, his own rigour, his cruelty, the spy-system of Fouche, the stifled Press, the _guet-apens_ of Bayonne, the oppression of Prussia, and one sanguinary war followed by another--what were these things but the discipline, the necessary sacrifice, the martyrdom of a generation for the triumph and felicity of the centuries to come? Napoleon at the height of Imperial power, with thirty millions of devoted subjects behind him, and legions unequalled since those of Rome, did but make Rousseau's experiment.

"The emotions of men," Rousseau argued, "have by seventeen hundred years of asceticism and Christianism been so disciplined, that they can now be trusted to their own guidance." The hour of his death, whether by a pistol bullet or by poison, or from sheer weariness, was also the hour of Rousseau's deepest insight into the human heart. That hour of penetrating vision into the eternal mystery made him glad to rush into the silence and the darkness. Napoleon, trusting to the word and to the ideal Liberty, to man's unstable desires and to his own most fixed star, yokes France in 1800 to his chariot wheels. But at the outset he has to compromise with the past of France, with the ineradicable traits of the Celtic race, its pa.s.sion for the figures on the veil of Maya, its rancours, and the meditated vengeance for old defeats. Yet it is in the name of Liberty rather than of France that he greets the sun of Austerlitz, breaks the ramrod despotism of Prussia, and meets the awful resistance of the Slav at Eyiau and Friedland. Then, turning to the West, it is in the name of Liberty that he sends Junot, Marmont, Soult, and Ma.s.sena across the Pyrenees to restore honour and law to Spain, and, as he had ended the mediaeval Empire of the Hapsburgs, to end there in Madrid the Inquisition and the priestly domination. The Inquisition, which in 300 years had claimed 300,000 victims, is indeed suppressed, but Spain, to his amazement, is in arms to a man against its liberators! But Napoleon cannot pause, his fate, like Hamlet's, calling out, and whilst his Marshals are still baffled by the lines of Torres Vedras, he musters his hosts, and, conquering the new Austrian Empire at Wagram, marches Attila-like across a subjugated Europe against the Empire and capital of the White Czar.

Napoleon's fall made the purpose of his destiny clear even to the most ardent of French Royalists, and to the most contented of the servants of Francis II or Frederick William III. At Vienna the gaily-plumaged diplomatists undid in a month all that the fifteen years of unparalleled action and suffering unparalleled had achieved; whilst the most matter-of-fact of all British Cabinets invested the prison of the fallen conqueror with a tragic poetry which made the rock in the Atlantic but too fitting an emblem of the peak in the Caucasus and the lingering anguish of Prometheus. And if not one man of supreme genius then living or in after ages has condemned Napoleon, if the poets of that time, Goethe and Manzoni, Poushkine, Byron, and Lermontoff, made themselves votaries of his fame, it was because they felt already what two generations have made a commonplace, that his hopes had been their hopes, his disillusion their disillusion; that in political freedom no more than in religious freedom can the peace of the world be found; that Girondinism was no final evangel; that to man's soul freedom can never be an end in itself, but only the means to an end.

The history of Europe for the thirty-three years following the abdication at the Elysee is a conflict between the two principles of Absolutism and Liberty, represented now by the cry for const.i.tutionalism and the Nation, now by a return to Girondinism and the watchword of Humanity. In theory the divine right of peoples was arrayed against the divine right of kings. The conflict was waged bitterly; yet it was a conflict without a battle. The dungeon, the torture chamber, the Siberian mine, the fortresses of Spandau or Spielberg, which Silvio Pellico has made remembered--these were the weapons of the tyrants. The secret society, the Marianne, the Carbonari, the offshoots of the Tugendbund, the ineffectual rising or transient revolution, always bloodily repressed, whether in Italy, Spain, Russia, Austria, or Poland--these were the sole weapons left to Liberty, which had once at its summons the legions of Napoleon. And in this singular conflict, what leaders! In Spain, the heroic Juan Martin, the brilliant Riego; in Germany, Gorres, the morning-star of political journalism, Rodbertus or Borne; in France, Saint-Simon, and the malcontents who still believed in the Bonapartist cause. It was not an army, but a crowd, without unity of purpose and without the possibility of united action. Opposed to these were the united purposes, moved, for a time at least, by a single aim--the repression of the common enemy, "Revolution," in every State of Europe, in the great monarchies of Austria, France, Russia, as in the smaller princ.i.p.alities of Germany, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Tuscany, Piedmont, Venetia, and Modena. To this war against Liberty the Czar Alexander, the white angel who, in Madame de Krudener's phrase, had struck down the black angel Napoleon, added something of the sanct.i.ty of a crusade. From G.o.d alone was the sovereign power of the princes of the earth derived, and it was the task of the Holy Alliance to compel the peoples to submit to this divinely-appointed and righteous despotism.

In this crusade Austria and Metternich occupy in Europe till 1848 the place which France and Bonaparte had occupied in the earlier crusade.

"I was born," says Metternich in the fragment of his autobiography, "to be the enemy of the Revolution." Nature, indeed, and the environment of his youth had formed him to act the part of the genius of Reaction.

Beneath the fine, empty, meaningless mask of the Austrian n.o.ble lay a heart which had never quivered with any profound emotion, or beat high with any generous impulse. He was hostile to n.o.bility of thought, action, and art, for he had intelligence enough to discern in these a living satire upon himself, his life, his aims. He despised history, for history is the tragedy of Humanity; and he mocked at philosophy.

But he patronized Schlegel, for his watery volumes were easy reading, and made rebellion seem uncultured and submission the mark of a thoughtful mind. Metternich's handsome figure, fine manners, and interminable _billets-doux_ written between sentences of death, exile, the solitary dungeon, distinguish his appearance and habits from Philip II of Spain, but, like him, he governed Europe from his bureau, guiding the movements of a standing army of 300,000 men, and a police and espionage department never surpa.s.sed and seldom rivalled in the western world. There was nothing in him that was great. But he was indisputable master of Europe for thirty-three years. Nesselrode, Hardenberg, Talleyrand even--whose Memoirs seem the work of genius beside the beaten level of mediocrity of Metternich's--found their designs checked whenever they crossed the Austrian's policy. Congress after Congress--Vienna, Carlsbad, Troppau, Laybach, Verona--exhibited his triumph to Europe. At Laybach, in 1821, the Emperor's address to the professors there, and thence to all the professors throughout the Empire, was dictated by Metternich--"Hold fast by what is old, for that alone is good. If our forefathers found in this the true path, why should we seek another? New ideas have arisen amongst you, principles which I, your Emperor, have not sanctioned, and never will sanction.

Beware of such ideas! It is not scholars I stand in need of, but of loyal subjects to my Crown, and you, you are here to train up loyal subjects to me. See that you fulfil this task!" Is there in human history a doc.u.ment more blasting to the reputation for political wisdom or foresight of him who penned it? It were an insult to the great Florentine to style such piteous inept.i.tudes Machiavellian. Yet they succeeded. The new evangel had lost its power; the freedom of Humanity was the dream of a few ideologues; the positive ideals of later times had not yet arisen. Well might men ask themselves: Has then Voltaire lived in vain, and the Girondins died in vain? Has all the blood from Lodi and Arcola to Austerlitz and the Borodino been shed in vain? Hard on the address to the universities there crept silently across Europe the message that Napoleon was dead. "It is not an event," said Talleyrand, "but a piece of news." The remark was just. Europe seemed now one vast Sainte Helene, and men's hearts a sepulchre in which all hope or desire for Liberty was vanquished. The solitary grave at Longwood, the iron railings, the stunted willow, were emblems of a cause for ever lost.

The Revolution of July lit the gloom with a moment's radiance. Heine's letters still preserve the electric thrill which the glorious Three Days awakened. "Lafayette, the tricolour, the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_!" he writes to Varnhagen, when the "sunbeams wrapped in printer's ink"

reached him in Heligoland, "I am a child of the Revolution, and seize again the sacred weapons. Bring flowers! I will crown my head for the fight of death. Give me the lyre that I may sing a song of battle, words like fiery stars which shoot from Heaven and burn up palaces and illumine the cabins of the poor." But when Lafayette presented to France that best of all possible Republics, the fat smile and cotton umbrella of Louis Philippe; when throughout Italy, Sicily, Spain, Germany, insurrection was repressed still more coldly and cruelly; when Paskievitch established order in Warsaw, and Czartoryski resigned the struggle--then the transient character of the outbreak was visible.