The Glory of English Prose Part 14

Much has happened since Matthew Arnold poured his scorn upon the unregenerate Philistines; but let us remember, Antony, that thousands and thousands of these contemned neglecters of sweetness and light stood unflinchingly and died upon the plains of France that our country and its freedom should survive.

Your loving old G.P.

[Footnote 1: See my _Memories_, pp. 46-52 and 55.]

31

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Like the author of the _Peninsular War_, Sir William Butler was great both as a soldier and as a writer. His autobiography sparkles with humour, irony, and felicitous diction; but it was in his _Life of Gordon of Khartoum_ that he rose to his full stature as a contributor to the glory of English prose.

The spell of Gordon seems to have, as it were, transfigured all who approached him, and raised them out of themselves. One man alone, of all those whose lives touched his, has shown that his own pinched and narrow mediocrity was proof against the radiance of Gordon's spirit, and has feebly attempted to belittle the soldier saint for his own justification. But he has failed even to project a spot upon the sun of Gordon's fame, and he is already forgotten, while the great soldier's name will endure in the hearts of his countrymen till England and its people fail.

If Sir William Butler's final n.o.ble periods, which I here reproduce, do not deeply move him who reads them, then must that reader have a heart of stone:--

"Thus fell in dark hour of defeat a man as unselfish as Sidney, of courage dauntless as Wolfe, of honour stainless as Outram, of sympathy wide-reaching as Drummond, of honesty straightforward as Napier, of faith as steadfast as More. Doubtful indeed is it if anywhere in the past we shall find figure of knight or soldier to equal him, for sometimes it is the sword of death that gives to life its real knighthood, and too often the soldier's end is unworthy of his knightly life; but with Gordon the harmony of life and death was complete, and the closing scenes seem to move to their fulfilment in solemn hush, as though an unseen power watched over the sequence of their sorrow.

"Not by the blind hazard of chance was this great tragedy consummated; not by the discord of men or from the vague opposition of physical obstacle, by fault of route or length of delay, was help denied to him. The picture of a wonderful life had to be made perfect by heroic death. The moral had to be cut deep, and written red, and hung high, so that its lesson could be seen by all men above strife and doubt and discord. Nay, the very setting of the final scenes has to be wrought out in such contrast of colour that the dullest eye shall be able to read the meaning of it all. For many a year back this soldier's life has been a protest against our most cherished teaching. Faith is weakness, we have said. He will show us it is strength. Reward is the right of service. Publicity is true fame. Let us go into action with a newspaper correspondent riding at our elbow, or sitting in the cabin of the s.h.i.+p, has been our practice. He has told us that the race should be for honour, not for 'honours,' that we should 'give away our medal,' and that courage and humility, mercy and strength, should march hand in hand together. For many a year we have had no room for him in our councils. Our armies knew him not; and it was only in semi-savage lands and in the service of remote empires he could find scope for his genius. Now our councils will be shamed in his service, and our armies will find no footing in our efforts to reach him. We have said that the Providence of G.o.d was only a calculation of chances; now for eleven months the amazing spectacle will be presented to the world of this solitary soldier standing at bay, within thirty days' travel of the centre of Empire, while the most powerful kingdom on the earth--the nation whose wealth is as the sands of the sea, whose boast is that the sun never sets upon its dominions--is unable to reach him--saving _he_ does not want--but is unable to reach him even with one message of regret for past forgetfulness.

"No; there is something more in all this than mistake of Executive, or strife of party, or error of Cabinet, or fault of men can explain. The purpose of this life that has been, the lesson of this death that must be, is vaster and deeper than these things. The decrees of G.o.d are as fixed to-day as they were two thousand years ago, but they can be worked to their conclusion by the weakness of men as well as by the strength of angels.

"There is a grey frontlet of rock far away in Strathspey--once the Gordons' home--whose name in bygone times gave a rallying-call to a kindred clan. The scattered firs and wind-swept heather on the lone summit of Craig Ellachie once whispered in Highland clansmen's ear the warcry, 'Stand fast! Craig Ellachie.' Many a year has gone by since kith of Charles Gordon last heard from Highland hilltop the signal of battle, but never in Celtic hero's long record of honour has such answer been sent back to Highland or to Lowland as when this great heart stopped its beating, and lay 'steadfast unto death' in the dawn at Khartoum. The winds that moan through the pine trees on Craig Ellachie have far-off meanings in their voices. Perhaps on that dark January night there came a breath from heaven to whisper to the old Highland rock, 'He stood fast! Craig Ellachie.'

"The dust of Gordon is not laid in English earth, nor does even the ocean, which has been named Britannia's realm, hold in 'its vast and wandering grave' the bones of her latest hero. Somewhere, far out in the immense desert whose sands so often gave him rest in life, or by the sh.o.r.es of that river which was the scene of so much of his labour, his ashes now add their wind-swept atoms to the mighty waste of the Soudan. But if England, still true to the long line of her martyrs to duty, keep his memory precious in her heart--making of him no false idol or brazen image of glory, but holding him as he was, the mirror and measure of true knighthood--then better than in effigy or epitaph will his life be written, and his nameless tomb become a citadel to his nation."

The statue of Gordon stands in n.o.ble reverie in Trafalgar Square, at the centre of the Empire for whose honour he died.

In St. Paul's Cathedral he lies in effigy, and engraven upon the cenotaph can be seen the most splendid epitaph in the world.

His true greatness has been recorded by Sir William Butler in resounding and glorious English; and his last great act of stainless n.o.bility has received a deathless tribute.

Your loving old, G.P.

32

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I have now come down, at last, to a great writer of English prose who is still with us.

Lord Morley at the present day is, I think, universally recognised as the greatest living man of letters in the British Empire; he has crowned a long record of distinguished literary achievement with his _Life of Gladstone_, which has taken its place among the n.o.blest biographies of the world, where it is destined to remain into the far future acclaimed as a masterpiece. In his description of the veteran statesman launching in the House of Commons his great project of Home Rule for Ireland, he has surprised himself out of his own reserve, and painted the scene for succeeding generations in colours that can never die:--

"No such scene has ever been beheld in the House of Commons.

Members came down at break of day to secure their places; before noon every seat was marked, and crowded benches were even arrayed on the floor of the House from the Mace to the Bar. Princes, amba.s.sadors, great peers, high prelates, thronged the lobbies. The fame of the orator, the boldness of his exploit, curiosity as to the plan, poignant anxiety as to the party result, wonder whether a wizard had at last actually arisen with a spell for casting out the baleful spirits that had for so many ages made Ireland our torment and our dishonour--all these things brought together such an a.s.semblage as no minister before had ever addressed within those world-renowned walls.

"The Parliament was new. Many of its members had fought a hard battle for their seats, and trusted they were safe in the haven for half a dozen good years to come. Those who were moved by professional ambition, those whose object was social advancement, those who thought only of upright public service, the keen party of men, the men who aspire to office, the men with a past and the men who looked for a future, all alike found themselves adrift on dark and troubled waters. The secrets of the Bill had been well kept. To-day the disquieted host were first to learn what was the great project to which they would have to say that Aye or No on which for them and for the State so much would hang.

"Of the chief comrades or rivals of the minister's own generation, the strong administrators, the eager and accomplished debaters, the sagacious leaders, the only survivor now comparable to him, in eloquence or in influence, was Mr. Bright. That ill.u.s.trious man seldom came into the House in those distracted days; and on this memorable occasion his stern and n.o.ble head was to be seen in dim obscurity.

"Various as were the emotions in other regions of the House, in one quarter rejoicing was unmixed. There, at least, was no doubt and no misgiving. There, pallid and tranquil, sat the Irish leader, whose hard insight, whose patience, energy, and spirit of command, had achieved this astounding result, and done that which he had vowed to his countrymen that he would a.s.suredly be able to do. On the benches round him genial excitement rose almost to tumult. Well it might. For the first time since the Union the Irish case was at last to be pressed in all its force and strength, in every aspect of policy and of conscience by the most powerful Englishman then alive.

"More striking than the audience was the man; more striking than the mult.i.tude of eager onlookers from the sh.o.r.e was the rescuer, with deliberate valour facing the floods ready to wash him down; the veteran Ulysses, who, after more than half a century of combat, service, toil, thought it not too late to try a further 'work of n.o.ble note,' In the hands of such a master of the instrument the theme might easily have lent itself to one of those displays of exalted pa.s.sion which the House had marvelled at in more than one of Mr. Gladstone's speeches on the Turkish question, or heard with religious reverence in his speech on the Affirmation Bill in 1883.

"What the occasion now required was that pa.s.sion should burn low, and reasoned persuasion hold up the guiding lamp. An elaborate scheme was to be unfolded, an unfamiliar policy to be explained and vindicated. Of that best kind of eloquence which dispenses with declamation this was a fine and sustained example. There was a deep, rapid, steady, onflowing volume of arguments, exposition, exhortation. Every hard or bitter stroke was avoided. Now and again a fervid note thrilled the ear and lifted all hearts. But political oratory is action, not words--action, character, will, conviction, purpose, personality. As this eager muster of men underwent the enchantment of periods exquisite in their balance and modulation, the compulsion of his flas.h.i.+ng glance and animated gesture, what stirred and commanded them was the recollection of national service, the thought of the speaker's mastering purpose, his unflagging resolution and strenuous will, his strength of thew and sinew well tried in long years of resounding war, his unquenched conviction that the just cause can never fail. Few are the heroic moments in our parliamentary politics, but this was one."

I will not trench upon politics in these letters; but I may hazard the belief that could those who rejected this n.o.ble effort, by the greatest statesman of the age, to a.s.suage the everlasting Irish conflict, have looked into the future, few of them but would have supported it with relief and thanksgiving.

It is generally perhaps a blessing that the curtain that covers the future is impenetrable; but in this case, had it been lifted for us to gaze upon the appalling future, Gladstone's last effort for the peace of his country would surely not have been permitted to miscarry.

Your loving old G.P.

33

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Two other living writers I will now commend to you, and then I shall have done.

The parents of Mr. Belloc, with a happy prevision, antic.i.p.ated by some decades the _entente cordiale_, and their brilliant son felicitously manifests in his own person many of the admirable qualities of both races. In England he is reported to be forcefully French, and it may be surmised that when in France he is engagingly British. Fortunately for our literature, it is in the language of his mother that he has found his expression. Many are the beautiful utterances scattered through his charming works: two of the most picturesque deal with the greatness of France; the subject of one is the Ancient Monarchy, and of the other the Great Napoleon:--

"So perished the French Monarchy. Its dim origins stretched out and lost themselves in Rome; it had already learnt to speak and recognised its own nature when the vaults of the Thermae echoed heavily to the slow footsteps of the Merovingian kings.

"Look up the vast valley of dead men crowned, and you may see the gigantic figure of Charlemagne, his brows level and his long white beard tangled like an undergrowth, having in his left hand the globe, and in his right the hilt of an unconquerable sword. There also are the short strong hors.e.m.e.n of the Robertian House, half hidden by their leather s.h.i.+elds, and their sons before them growing in vestment and majesty and taking on the pomp of the Middle Ages; Louis VII., all covered with iron; Philip, the Conqueror; Louis IX., who alone is surrounded with light: they stand in a widening, interminable procession, this great crowd of kings; they loose their armour, they take their ermine on, they are accompanied by their captains and their marshals; at last, in their att.i.tude and in their magnificence they sum up in themselves the pride and the achievement of the French nation.

"But Time has dissipated what it could not tarnish, and the process of a thousand years has turned these mighty figures into unsubstantial things. You may see them in the grey end of darkness, like a pageant, all standing still. You look again, but with the growing light, and with the wind that rises before morning, they have disappeared."

"There is a legend among the peasants in Russia of a certain sombre, mounted figure, unreal, only an outline and a cloud, that pa.s.sed away to Asia, to the east and to the north. They saw him move along their snows, through the long mysterious twilights of the northern autumn, in silence, with the head bent and the reins in the left hand loose, following some enduring purpose, reaching towards an ancient solitude and repose. They say it was Napoleon.

"After him there trailed for days the shadows of the soldiery, vague mists bearing faintly the forms of companies of men. It was as though the cannon smoke at Waterloo, borne on the light west wind of that June day, had received the spirits of twenty years of combat, and had drifted farther and farther during the fall of the year over the endless plains.

"But there was no voice and no order. The terrible tramp of the Guard, and the sound that Heine loved, the dance of the French drums, was extinguished; there was no echo of their songs, for the army was of ghosts and was defeated. They pa.s.sed in the silence which we can never pierce, and somewhere remote from men they sleep in bivouac round the most splendid of human swords."

Time and circ.u.mstances have changed our ancient enemies into our honoured friends, and the race that fought against us at Waterloo has cemented its friends.h.i.+p towards us with its blood; and as we look back over the century that divides us from Waterloo we can now with Mr.

Belloc salute the sombre figure of the defeated conqueror.

Your loving old G.P.