September 25, 2025 • 24 mins
In Short History of England, Gilbert Keith Chesterton offers a captivating exploration of history through the lens of human interaction, framing it as an enduring struggle between civilization and barbarism. His insightful critique reveals the stark contrast between the narratives of recent centuries and the rich tapestry of the medieval era, which is often overlooked in popular histories. Chesterton‚As sharp intellect and mastery of paradox illuminate the absurdities in conventional arguments, making his reflections both thought-provoking and entertaining. This is not just a study of dates and events; it is a profound journey that challenges modern misconceptions while remaining relevant to today‚As world. (Summary by Ray Clare)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton,
(00:25):
Chapter sixteen, Aristocracy and the Discontents. It is a pathos
of many hackneyed things, that they are intrinsically delicate, and
are only mechanically made dull. Anyone who has seen the
first white light when it comes in by a window
(00:47):
knows that daylight is not only as beautiful, but as
mysterious as moonlight. It is the subtlety of the color
of sunshine that seems to be colorless. So patriot is,
and especially English patriotism, which is vulgarized with volumes of
verbal fog and gas, is still in itself something as
(01:08):
tenuous and tender as a climate. The name of Nelson,
with which the last chapter ended, might very well summarize
the matter, where his name is banged and beaten about
like an old tin can, while his soul had something
in it of a fine and fragile eighteenth century vase.
(01:29):
And it will be found that the most threadbare things
contemporary and connected with him have a real truth to
the tone and meaning of his life and time, though
for us they have too often denigrated into dead jokes.
The expression hearts of oak, for instance, is no unhappy
phrase for the finer side of that England of which
(01:50):
he was the best expression. Even as a material metaphor,
it covers much of what I mean. Oak was by
no means only made into bludgeons, nor even only into battleships,
and the English gentry did not think it business like
to pretend to be mere brutes. The mere name of
(02:11):
oak calls back like a dream, those dark, genial interiors
of colleges and country houses, in which great gentlemen not degenerate,
almost made Latin and English language, and port and English wine.
Some part of that world at least will not perish,
for its autumnal glow passed into the brush of the
(02:34):
great English portrait painters, whom, more than any other men,
were given the power to commemorate the large humanity of
their own land, immortalizing a mood as broad and soft
as their own brushwork come naturally at the right emotional
angle upon a canvas of Gainsborough, who painted ladies like landscapes,
(02:57):
as great and as unconscious with the repose, and you
will note how subtly the artist gives to dress flowing
in the foreground, something of the divine quality of distance.
Then you will understand another faded phrase, and words spoken
far away upon the sea. There will rise up quite
fresh before you, and he borne upon a bar of
(03:18):
music like words you have never heard before, or England,
home and beauty. When I think of these things, I
have no temptation to mere grumbling at the great gentry
that waged the great War of our fathers. But indeed
the difficulty about it was something much deeper than could
be dealt with by any grumbling. It was an exclusive class,
(03:42):
but not an exclusive life. It was interested in all things,
though not for all men, or rather those things it
failed to include. Through the limitations of this, rationalists interval
between medieval and modern mysticism were at least not of
the sort to shock us with superficial inhumanity. The greatest
(04:05):
gap in their souls, for those who think it is
a gap was their complete and complacent paganism. All their
very decencies assumed that the old faith was dead. Those
who held it still, like the Great Johnson, were considered eccentrics.
The French Revolution was a riot that broke up the
very formal funeral of Christianity, and was followed by various
(04:28):
other complications, including the corpse coming to life. But the
skepticism was no mere oligarchic orgy. It was not confined
to the hell Fire Club, which might, in virtue of
its vivid name, be regarded as relatively orthodox. It is
present in the mildest middle class atmosphere, as in the
(04:50):
middle class masterpiece about Northanger Abbey, where we actually remember
it is in antiquity, without ever remembering it is an abbey. Indeed,
there is no clearer case of it than what can
only be called the atheism of Jane Austen. Unfortunately, it
(05:11):
could truly be said of the English gentleman, as of
another gallant and gracious individual, that his honor stood routud
in dishonor. He was indeed somewhat in the position of
such an aristocrat, in a romance whose splendor has the
dark spot of a secret and sort of blackmail. There
was to begin with an uncomfortable paradox in the tale
(05:33):
of his pedigree. Many heroes have claimed to be descended
from the gods, from beings greater than themselves. But he
himself was far more heroic than his ancestors. His glory
did not come from the Crusades, but from the Great Pillage.
His fathers had not come over with William the Conqueror,
but only assisted in a somewhat shuffling manner at the
(05:55):
coming over of William of Orange. His own exploits were
often really rung romantic, in the Cities of the Indian
Sultans or the War of the Wooden Ships. It was
the exploits of the far off founders of his family
that were painfully realistic. In this the great gentry were
more in the position of Napoleonic marshals than of Norman knights,
(06:17):
but their position was worse. But the marshals might be
descended from peasants and shopkeepers, but the oligarchs were descended
from usurers and thieves. That, for good or evil, was
the paradox of England. The typical aristocrat was the typical upstart,
but the secret was worse. Not only was such a
(06:40):
family founded on stealing, but the family was stealing still.
It is the grim truth that all through the eighteenth century,
all through the Great Whigs speeches about liberty, all through
the great Tory speeches about patriotism, through the period of
Wandwash and Placy, through the period of Trafalgar and Waterloo.
(07:01):
One process was steadily going on in the central Senate
of the nation. Parliament was passing bill after bill for
the enclosure by the great landlords of such of the
common lands as had survived out of the great communal
system of the Middle Ages. It is much more than
a pun that is the prime political irony of our history,
(07:24):
that the commons were destroying the commons. The very word common,
as we have before noted, lost its great moral meaning,
and became a mere topographical term for some remaining scrap
of scrub or heath that was not worth stealing. In
the eighteenth century, these last and lingering commons were connected
(07:45):
only with stories about highwaymen, which still linger in our literature.
The romance of them was a romance of robbers, not
of the real robbers. This was the mysterious sin of
the English schires, that they remain human and yet ruined
humanity all around them. Their own ideal nei, their own
(08:05):
reality of life, was really more generous and genial than
the stiff savagery of Puritan captains and Prussian nobles, but
the land withered under their smile as under an alien frown.
Being still at least English, they were still in their way,
good natured, but their position was false, and a false
position forces the good natured into brutality. The French Revolution
(08:29):
was the challenge that really revealed to the Whigs that
they must make up their minds to be really democrats
or admit that they were really aristocrats. They decided, as
in the case of their philosophic exponent Berth, to be
really aristocrats, and the result was the White Terror, the
(08:50):
period of anti Jacobin repression, which revealed the real side
of their sympathies more than any stricken fields in foreign lands.
The last and greatest of the yeomen of the small
farming classes which the great estates were devouring daily, was
thrown into prison merely for protesting against the flogging of
(09:10):
English soldiers by German mercenaries in that savage dispersal of
a peaceful meeting, which was called the Massacre of Peterloo.
The English soldiers were indeed employed, though much more in
the spirit of German ones, and it is one of
the bitter satires to cling to the very continuity of
our history, that such suppression of the old yeoman spirit
(09:34):
was the work of soldiers who still bore the title
of the yeomanry. The name of Kabot is very important here. Indeed,
it is generally ignored because it is important. Kabot was
the one man who saw the tendency of the time
as a whole and challenged it as a whole. Consequently,
(09:54):
he went without support. It is a mark of our
whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with
a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because
it is a sham fight. Thus, most of us know
by this time that the party system has been popular,
only in the same sense that a football match is popular.
(10:16):
The division in Cobbett's time was slightly more sincere, but
almost as superficial. It was a difference of sentiment about
externals which divided the old agricultural gentry of the eighteenth
century from the new mercantile gentry of the nineteenth. Through
the first half of the nineteenth century, there were some
real disputes between the squire and the merchant. The merchant
(10:38):
became converted to the important economic thesis of free trade
and accused the squire of starving the poor by dear
bread to keep up his agrarian privilege. Later, the squire
retorted not ineffectively, by accusing the merchant to brutalizing the
poor by overworking them in his factories to keep up
his commercial success. The passing of the Factory Acts was
(11:01):
a confession of the cruelty that underlay the new industrial experiments,
just as the repeal of the corn laws was a
confession of the comparative weakness and unpopularity of the squires,
who had destroyed the last remnants of any peasantry that
might have defended the field against the factory. These relatively
real disputes would bring us to the middle of the
(11:23):
Victorian era. But long before the beginning of the Victorian era,
Cobbat had seen and said that the disputes were only
relatively real. Or rather, he would have said, in his
more robust fashion, that they were not real at all.
He would have said that the agricultural pot and the
industrial kettle were calling each other black when they had
(11:45):
both been blackened in the same kitchen, and he would
have been substantially right. For the great industrial disciple of
the kettle, James Watt who learned from it. The lesson
of the steam engine was typical of the age in
this that he found the old trade guilds too fallen, unfashionable,
and out of touch with the times to help his discovery,
(12:09):
so that he had recourse to the rich minority which
had warred on and weakened those guilds. Since the Reformation.
There was no prosperous peasants pot such as Henry of
Navarre invoked to enter into alliance with the Kettle. In
other words, there was, in the strict sense of the word,
no commonwealth, because well so, more and more wealthy was
(12:31):
less and less common, whether it be a credit or discredit.
Industrial science and enterprise were in bulk a new experiment
of the old oligarchy, and the old oligarchy had always
been ready for new experiments, beginning with the Reformation, and
its characteristic of the clear mind, which was hidden from
(12:51):
many by the hot temper of Cobbot. That he did
see the Reformation as the root of both squierarchy and
industrialism and call on the people to break away from both.
The people made more effort to do so than it
is commonly realized. There are many silences in our somewhat
snobbish history. And when the educated class can easily suppress
(13:13):
her a volt, they can still more easily suppress the
record of it. It was so with some of the
chief features of that great medieval revolution, the failure of which,
or rather the betrayal of which, was the real turning
point of our history. It was so with the revolts
against the religious policy of Henry the Eighth, And it
(13:35):
was so with the rick burning and frame breaking riots
of Cobbets epic. The real mob reappeared for a moment
in our history, or just long enough to show one
of the immortal marks of the real mob ritualism. There
is nothing that strikes the undemocratic doctrinaire show sharply about
direct democratic action. As the vanity or mummery of the
(13:58):
things done seriously in the daylight. They astonish him by
being as unpractical as a poem or a prayer. The
French revolutionists stormed an empty prison merely because it was
large and solid and difficult to storm, and therefore symbolic
of the mighty monarchical machinery of which it had been
(14:19):
but the shed. The English rioters laboriously broken pieces of
parish grindstone, merely because it was large and solid and
difficult to break, and therefore symbolic of the mighty oligarchical
machinery which perpetually ground the faces of the poor. They
also put the oppressive agent of some landlord in a
(14:41):
cart and escorted him round the country, merely to exhibit
his horrible personality to heaven and earth. Afterwards they let
him go, which marks, perhaps for good or evil, a
certain national modification of the movement. There's something very typical
of an English revolution in having the a tumbril without
the guillotine. Anyhow, these embers of the revolutionary epic were
(15:07):
trodden out very brudely. The grindstone continued and continues to
grind in the scriptural fashion above referred to and in
most political crises, since it is the crowd that has
found itself in the cart. But of course, both the
riot and repression in England were but shadows of the
awful revolt and vengeance which crowned the parallel process in Ireland. Here,
(15:30):
the terrorism, which was but a temporary and desperate tool
of the aristocrats in England, not being to do them
justice at all, consonant to their temperament, which had neither
the cruelty and morbidity nor the logic and fixity of terrorism,
became in a more spiritual atmosphere a flaming sword of
religious and racial insanity. Yet the son of Chatham was
(15:52):
quite unfit to fill his father's place. Unfit, indeed, I
cannot but think to fill the place commonly given in history.
But if he was wholly worthy of his immortality, his
Irish expedients, even if considered as immediately defensible, have not
been worthy of their immortality. He was sincerely convinced of
(16:14):
the national need to raise coalition after coalition against Napoleon
by pouring the commercial wealth then rather peculiar to England
upon her poorer allies, and he did this with indubitable
talent and pertinacity. He was at the same time faced
with a hostile Irish rebellion and a partly or potentially
(16:35):
hostile Irish Parliament. He broke the latter by the most
indecent bribery, and the former by the most indecent brutality.
But he may well have sought himself entitled to the
tyrant's plea. But not only were his expedients those of
panic or at any rate of peril. But what is
less clearly realized it is the only real defense of them,
(16:58):
that they were those of panic. And he was ready
to emancipate Catholics as such, for religious bigotry was not
the vice of the oligarchy, but he was not ready
to emancipate Irishmen as such. He did not really want
to enlist Ireland like a recruit, but simply to disarm
Ireland like an enemy. Hence his settlement was from the
(17:20):
first in a false position for settling anything. The Union
may have been a necessity, but the union was not
a union. It was not intended to be one, and
nobody has ever treated it as one. We have not
only never succeeded in making Ireland English, as Burgundy has
been made French, but we have never tried. Burgundy could
(17:44):
boast of Corneille, though Corneil was an Ormond, but we
should smile if Ireland boasted of Shakespeare. Our vanity has
involved us in a mere contradiction. We have tried to
combine identification with superiority. It is simply weak minded to
sneer at an Irishman if he figures as an Englishman
(18:05):
and rail at him if he figures as an Irishman.
So the Union has never even applied English laws to Ireland,
but only coercions and concessions, both specially designed for Ireland.
From Pitt's time to our own, this tottering alternation has
continued from the time when the Great O'Connell, with his
(18:26):
monster meetings, forced our government to listen to Catholic emancipation,
to the time when the Great Parnell, with his substruction,
forced it to listen to home rule. Our staggering equilibrium
has been maintained by blows from without. In the later
nineteenth century, the better sort of special treatment began on
the whole to increase. Gladstone, an idealistic though inconsistent liberal,
(18:50):
rather relatedly realized that the freedom he loved in Greece
and Italy had its rights nearer home, and may be
said to have found a second youth in the gateway
of the Grave in the eloquence and emphasis of his conversion,
and a statesman wearing the opposite label, for what it
is worth, had the spiritual insight to see that Ireland,
(19:12):
if resolved to be a nation, was even more resolved
to be a peasantry. George Wyndham, generous, imaginative a man
among politicians, insisted that the agrarian agony of the evictions,
shootings and rack rentings should end with the individual Irish getting,
as Parnell had put it, a grip on their farms.
(19:33):
In more ways than one, his work rounds off, almost
romantically the tragedy of the rebellion against Pitt. For Wyndham
himself was of the blood of the leader of the rebels,
and he wrought the only reparation yet made for all
the blood shamefully shed that flowed round the fall of Fitzgerald.
The effect on England was less tragic. Indeed, in a
(19:57):
sense it was comic. Wellington, himself, an Irishman, though of
the narrower party, was pre eminently a realist, and like
many Irishmen, was especially a realist About Englishmen. He said
the army he commanded was the scum of the earth.
And the remark is nonetheless valuable, because that army proved
(20:18):
itself useful enough to be called the sault of the earth.
But in truth it was in this something of a
national symbol, and the Guardian, as it were, of a
national secret. There is a paradox about the English, even
as distinct from the Irish or the Scotch, which makes
any formal version of their plans and principles inevitably unjust
(20:41):
to them. England not only makes her ramparts out of rubbish,
but she finds ramparts in what she herself has cast
away as rubbish. If it be a tribute to a
thing to say that even its failures have been successes,
there is truth in that tribute. Some of the best
colonies were convict settlements, and might be called abandoned convict settlements.
(21:06):
The army was largely an army of gold birds, raised
by gold delivery. But it was a good army of
bad men. Nay, it was a gay army of unfortunate men.
This is the color and the character that has run
through the realities of English history, and it can hardly
(21:26):
be put in a book, least of all a historical book.
It has its flashes in our fantastic fiction and in
the songs of the street, but its true medium is conversation.
It has no name, but incongruity, an illogical laughter, survives
everything in the English soul. It survived, perhaps with only
(21:48):
too much patience, the time of terrorism in which the
more serious Irish rose in revolt. That time was full
of a quiet topsy turvy tyranny, and the English the
humorist stood on his head to suit it. Indeed, he
often receives a quite irrational sentence in a police court
by saying he will do it on his head. So
(22:10):
under Pitt's coerceeness regime, a man was sent to prison
for saying that George the fourth was fat. But we
feel he must have been partly sustained in prison by
the artistic contemplation of how fat he was. That sort
of liberty, that sort of humanity, and it is no
means sort did indeed survive all the drift and downward
(22:33):
eddy of an evil economic system, as well as the
dragooning of a reactionary epic, and the drearier menace of
materialistic social science, as embodied in the new Puritans, who
have purified themselves even of religion. Under this long process,
the worst that can be said is that the English
(22:55):
humorist has been slowly driven downwards in the social scale.
Falstaff was a knight, sam Weller was a gentleman servant,
and some of our recent restrictions seemed designed to drive
sam Weller to the status of the artful dodger. But
well it was for us that some such trampled tradition
and dark memory of merry England survived well for us,
(23:19):
as we shall see that all our social science failed,
and all our statesmanship broke down before it, For there
was to come the noise of a trumpet, and a
dreadful day of visitation, in which all the daily workers
of a dull civilization were to be called out of
their houses and their holds, like resurrection of the dead,
(23:42):
and left naked under a strange sun, with no religion
but a sense of humour. And men might know of
what nation Shakespeare was, who broke into puns and practical
jokes in the darkest passion of his tragedies. If they
had only heard those boys in France and Flanders who
called out early doors themselves in a theatrical memory, as
(24:06):
they went so early in their youth to break down
the doors of death. End of Chapter sixteen.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton,
(00:25):
Chapter sixteen, Aristocracy and the Discontents. It is a pathos
of many hackneyed things, that they are intrinsically delicate, and
are only mechanically made dull. Anyone who has seen the
first white light when it comes in by a window
(00:47):
knows that daylight is not only as beautiful, but as
mysterious as moonlight. It is the subtlety of the color
of sunshine that seems to be colorless. So patriot is,
and especially English patriotism, which is vulgarized with volumes of
verbal fog and gas, is still in itself something as
(01:08):
tenuous and tender as a climate. The name of Nelson,
with which the last chapter ended, might very well summarize
the matter, where his name is banged and beaten about
like an old tin can, while his soul had something
in it of a fine and fragile eighteenth century vase.
(01:29):
And it will be found that the most threadbare things
contemporary and connected with him have a real truth to
the tone and meaning of his life and time, though
for us they have too often denigrated into dead jokes.
The expression hearts of oak, for instance, is no unhappy
phrase for the finer side of that England of which
(01:50):
he was the best expression. Even as a material metaphor,
it covers much of what I mean. Oak was by
no means only made into bludgeons, nor even only into battleships,
and the English gentry did not think it business like
to pretend to be mere brutes. The mere name of
(02:11):
oak calls back like a dream, those dark, genial interiors
of colleges and country houses, in which great gentlemen not degenerate,
almost made Latin and English language, and port and English wine.
Some part of that world at least will not perish,
for its autumnal glow passed into the brush of the
(02:34):
great English portrait painters, whom, more than any other men,
were given the power to commemorate the large humanity of
their own land, immortalizing a mood as broad and soft
as their own brushwork come naturally at the right emotional
angle upon a canvas of Gainsborough, who painted ladies like landscapes,
(02:57):
as great and as unconscious with the repose, and you
will note how subtly the artist gives to dress flowing
in the foreground, something of the divine quality of distance.
Then you will understand another faded phrase, and words spoken
far away upon the sea. There will rise up quite
fresh before you, and he borne upon a bar of
(03:18):
music like words you have never heard before, or England,
home and beauty. When I think of these things, I
have no temptation to mere grumbling at the great gentry
that waged the great War of our fathers. But indeed
the difficulty about it was something much deeper than could
be dealt with by any grumbling. It was an exclusive class,
(03:42):
but not an exclusive life. It was interested in all things,
though not for all men, or rather those things it
failed to include. Through the limitations of this, rationalists interval
between medieval and modern mysticism were at least not of
the sort to shock us with superficial inhumanity. The greatest
(04:05):
gap in their souls, for those who think it is
a gap was their complete and complacent paganism. All their
very decencies assumed that the old faith was dead. Those
who held it still, like the Great Johnson, were considered eccentrics.
The French Revolution was a riot that broke up the
very formal funeral of Christianity, and was followed by various
(04:28):
other complications, including the corpse coming to life. But the
skepticism was no mere oligarchic orgy. It was not confined
to the hell Fire Club, which might, in virtue of
its vivid name, be regarded as relatively orthodox. It is
present in the mildest middle class atmosphere, as in the
(04:50):
middle class masterpiece about Northanger Abbey, where we actually remember
it is in antiquity, without ever remembering it is an abbey. Indeed,
there is no clearer case of it than what can
only be called the atheism of Jane Austen. Unfortunately, it
(05:11):
could truly be said of the English gentleman, as of
another gallant and gracious individual, that his honor stood routud
in dishonor. He was indeed somewhat in the position of
such an aristocrat, in a romance whose splendor has the
dark spot of a secret and sort of blackmail. There
was to begin with an uncomfortable paradox in the tale
(05:33):
of his pedigree. Many heroes have claimed to be descended
from the gods, from beings greater than themselves. But he
himself was far more heroic than his ancestors. His glory
did not come from the Crusades, but from the Great Pillage.
His fathers had not come over with William the Conqueror,
but only assisted in a somewhat shuffling manner at the
(05:55):
coming over of William of Orange. His own exploits were
often really rung romantic, in the Cities of the Indian
Sultans or the War of the Wooden Ships. It was
the exploits of the far off founders of his family
that were painfully realistic. In this the great gentry were
more in the position of Napoleonic marshals than of Norman knights,
(06:17):
but their position was worse. But the marshals might be
descended from peasants and shopkeepers, but the oligarchs were descended
from usurers and thieves. That, for good or evil, was
the paradox of England. The typical aristocrat was the typical upstart,
but the secret was worse. Not only was such a
(06:40):
family founded on stealing, but the family was stealing still.
It is the grim truth that all through the eighteenth century,
all through the Great Whigs speeches about liberty, all through
the great Tory speeches about patriotism, through the period of
Wandwash and Placy, through the period of Trafalgar and Waterloo.
(07:01):
One process was steadily going on in the central Senate
of the nation. Parliament was passing bill after bill for
the enclosure by the great landlords of such of the
common lands as had survived out of the great communal
system of the Middle Ages. It is much more than
a pun that is the prime political irony of our history,
(07:24):
that the commons were destroying the commons. The very word common,
as we have before noted, lost its great moral meaning,
and became a mere topographical term for some remaining scrap
of scrub or heath that was not worth stealing. In
the eighteenth century, these last and lingering commons were connected
(07:45):
only with stories about highwaymen, which still linger in our literature.
The romance of them was a romance of robbers, not
of the real robbers. This was the mysterious sin of
the English schires, that they remain human and yet ruined
humanity all around them. Their own ideal nei, their own
(08:05):
reality of life, was really more generous and genial than
the stiff savagery of Puritan captains and Prussian nobles, but
the land withered under their smile as under an alien frown.
Being still at least English, they were still in their way,
good natured, but their position was false, and a false
position forces the good natured into brutality. The French Revolution
(08:29):
was the challenge that really revealed to the Whigs that
they must make up their minds to be really democrats
or admit that they were really aristocrats. They decided, as
in the case of their philosophic exponent Berth, to be
really aristocrats, and the result was the White Terror, the
(08:50):
period of anti Jacobin repression, which revealed the real side
of their sympathies more than any stricken fields in foreign lands.
The last and greatest of the yeomen of the small
farming classes which the great estates were devouring daily, was
thrown into prison merely for protesting against the flogging of
(09:10):
English soldiers by German mercenaries in that savage dispersal of
a peaceful meeting, which was called the Massacre of Peterloo.
The English soldiers were indeed employed, though much more in
the spirit of German ones, and it is one of
the bitter satires to cling to the very continuity of
our history, that such suppression of the old yeoman spirit
(09:34):
was the work of soldiers who still bore the title
of the yeomanry. The name of Kabot is very important here. Indeed,
it is generally ignored because it is important. Kabot was
the one man who saw the tendency of the time
as a whole and challenged it as a whole. Consequently,
(09:54):
he went without support. It is a mark of our
whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with
a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because
it is a sham fight. Thus, most of us know
by this time that the party system has been popular,
only in the same sense that a football match is popular.
(10:16):
The division in Cobbett's time was slightly more sincere, but
almost as superficial. It was a difference of sentiment about
externals which divided the old agricultural gentry of the eighteenth
century from the new mercantile gentry of the nineteenth. Through
the first half of the nineteenth century, there were some
real disputes between the squire and the merchant. The merchant
(10:38):
became converted to the important economic thesis of free trade
and accused the squire of starving the poor by dear
bread to keep up his agrarian privilege. Later, the squire
retorted not ineffectively, by accusing the merchant to brutalizing the
poor by overworking them in his factories to keep up
his commercial success. The passing of the Factory Acts was
(11:01):
a confession of the cruelty that underlay the new industrial experiments,
just as the repeal of the corn laws was a
confession of the comparative weakness and unpopularity of the squires,
who had destroyed the last remnants of any peasantry that
might have defended the field against the factory. These relatively
real disputes would bring us to the middle of the
(11:23):
Victorian era. But long before the beginning of the Victorian era,
Cobbat had seen and said that the disputes were only
relatively real. Or rather, he would have said, in his
more robust fashion, that they were not real at all.
He would have said that the agricultural pot and the
industrial kettle were calling each other black when they had
(11:45):
both been blackened in the same kitchen, and he would
have been substantially right. For the great industrial disciple of
the kettle, James Watt who learned from it. The lesson
of the steam engine was typical of the age in
this that he found the old trade guilds too fallen, unfashionable,
and out of touch with the times to help his discovery,
(12:09):
so that he had recourse to the rich minority which
had warred on and weakened those guilds. Since the Reformation.
There was no prosperous peasants pot such as Henry of
Navarre invoked to enter into alliance with the Kettle. In
other words, there was, in the strict sense of the word,
no commonwealth, because well so, more and more wealthy was
(12:31):
less and less common, whether it be a credit or discredit.
Industrial science and enterprise were in bulk a new experiment
of the old oligarchy, and the old oligarchy had always
been ready for new experiments, beginning with the Reformation, and
its characteristic of the clear mind, which was hidden from
(12:51):
many by the hot temper of Cobbot. That he did
see the Reformation as the root of both squierarchy and
industrialism and call on the people to break away from both.
The people made more effort to do so than it
is commonly realized. There are many silences in our somewhat
snobbish history. And when the educated class can easily suppress
(13:13):
her a volt, they can still more easily suppress the
record of it. It was so with some of the
chief features of that great medieval revolution, the failure of which,
or rather the betrayal of which, was the real turning
point of our history. It was so with the revolts
against the religious policy of Henry the Eighth, And it
(13:35):
was so with the rick burning and frame breaking riots
of Cobbets epic. The real mob reappeared for a moment
in our history, or just long enough to show one
of the immortal marks of the real mob ritualism. There
is nothing that strikes the undemocratic doctrinaire show sharply about
direct democratic action. As the vanity or mummery of the
(13:58):
things done seriously in the daylight. They astonish him by
being as unpractical as a poem or a prayer. The
French revolutionists stormed an empty prison merely because it was
large and solid and difficult to storm, and therefore symbolic
of the mighty monarchical machinery of which it had been
(14:19):
but the shed. The English rioters laboriously broken pieces of
parish grindstone, merely because it was large and solid and
difficult to break, and therefore symbolic of the mighty oligarchical
machinery which perpetually ground the faces of the poor. They
also put the oppressive agent of some landlord in a
(14:41):
cart and escorted him round the country, merely to exhibit
his horrible personality to heaven and earth. Afterwards they let
him go, which marks, perhaps for good or evil, a
certain national modification of the movement. There's something very typical
of an English revolution in having the a tumbril without
the guillotine. Anyhow, these embers of the revolutionary epic were
(15:07):
trodden out very brudely. The grindstone continued and continues to
grind in the scriptural fashion above referred to and in
most political crises, since it is the crowd that has
found itself in the cart. But of course, both the
riot and repression in England were but shadows of the
awful revolt and vengeance which crowned the parallel process in Ireland. Here,
(15:30):
the terrorism, which was but a temporary and desperate tool
of the aristocrats in England, not being to do them
justice at all, consonant to their temperament, which had neither
the cruelty and morbidity nor the logic and fixity of terrorism,
became in a more spiritual atmosphere a flaming sword of
religious and racial insanity. Yet the son of Chatham was
(15:52):
quite unfit to fill his father's place. Unfit, indeed, I
cannot but think to fill the place commonly given in history.
But if he was wholly worthy of his immortality, his
Irish expedients, even if considered as immediately defensible, have not
been worthy of their immortality. He was sincerely convinced of
(16:14):
the national need to raise coalition after coalition against Napoleon
by pouring the commercial wealth then rather peculiar to England
upon her poorer allies, and he did this with indubitable
talent and pertinacity. He was at the same time faced
with a hostile Irish rebellion and a partly or potentially
(16:35):
hostile Irish Parliament. He broke the latter by the most
indecent bribery, and the former by the most indecent brutality.
But he may well have sought himself entitled to the
tyrant's plea. But not only were his expedients those of
panic or at any rate of peril. But what is
less clearly realized it is the only real defense of them,
(16:58):
that they were those of panic. And he was ready
to emancipate Catholics as such, for religious bigotry was not
the vice of the oligarchy, but he was not ready
to emancipate Irishmen as such. He did not really want
to enlist Ireland like a recruit, but simply to disarm
Ireland like an enemy. Hence his settlement was from the
(17:20):
first in a false position for settling anything. The Union
may have been a necessity, but the union was not
a union. It was not intended to be one, and
nobody has ever treated it as one. We have not
only never succeeded in making Ireland English, as Burgundy has
been made French, but we have never tried. Burgundy could
(17:44):
boast of Corneille, though Corneil was an Ormond, but we
should smile if Ireland boasted of Shakespeare. Our vanity has
involved us in a mere contradiction. We have tried to
combine identification with superiority. It is simply weak minded to
sneer at an Irishman if he figures as an Englishman
(18:05):
and rail at him if he figures as an Irishman.
So the Union has never even applied English laws to Ireland,
but only coercions and concessions, both specially designed for Ireland.
From Pitt's time to our own, this tottering alternation has
continued from the time when the Great O'Connell, with his
(18:26):
monster meetings, forced our government to listen to Catholic emancipation,
to the time when the Great Parnell, with his substruction,
forced it to listen to home rule. Our staggering equilibrium
has been maintained by blows from without. In the later
nineteenth century, the better sort of special treatment began on
the whole to increase. Gladstone, an idealistic though inconsistent liberal,
(18:50):
rather relatedly realized that the freedom he loved in Greece
and Italy had its rights nearer home, and may be
said to have found a second youth in the gateway
of the Grave in the eloquence and emphasis of his conversion,
and a statesman wearing the opposite label, for what it
is worth, had the spiritual insight to see that Ireland,
(19:12):
if resolved to be a nation, was even more resolved
to be a peasantry. George Wyndham, generous, imaginative a man
among politicians, insisted that the agrarian agony of the evictions,
shootings and rack rentings should end with the individual Irish getting,
as Parnell had put it, a grip on their farms.
(19:33):
In more ways than one, his work rounds off, almost
romantically the tragedy of the rebellion against Pitt. For Wyndham
himself was of the blood of the leader of the rebels,
and he wrought the only reparation yet made for all
the blood shamefully shed that flowed round the fall of Fitzgerald.
The effect on England was less tragic. Indeed, in a
(19:57):
sense it was comic. Wellington, himself, an Irishman, though of
the narrower party, was pre eminently a realist, and like
many Irishmen, was especially a realist About Englishmen. He said
the army he commanded was the scum of the earth.
And the remark is nonetheless valuable, because that army proved
(20:18):
itself useful enough to be called the sault of the earth.
But in truth it was in this something of a
national symbol, and the Guardian, as it were, of a
national secret. There is a paradox about the English, even
as distinct from the Irish or the Scotch, which makes
any formal version of their plans and principles inevitably unjust
(20:41):
to them. England not only makes her ramparts out of rubbish,
but she finds ramparts in what she herself has cast
away as rubbish. If it be a tribute to a
thing to say that even its failures have been successes,
there is truth in that tribute. Some of the best
colonies were convict settlements, and might be called abandoned convict settlements.
(21:06):
The army was largely an army of gold birds, raised
by gold delivery. But it was a good army of
bad men. Nay, it was a gay army of unfortunate men.
This is the color and the character that has run
through the realities of English history, and it can hardly
(21:26):
be put in a book, least of all a historical book.
It has its flashes in our fantastic fiction and in
the songs of the street, but its true medium is conversation.
It has no name, but incongruity, an illogical laughter, survives
everything in the English soul. It survived, perhaps with only
(21:48):
too much patience, the time of terrorism in which the
more serious Irish rose in revolt. That time was full
of a quiet topsy turvy tyranny, and the English the
humorist stood on his head to suit it. Indeed, he
often receives a quite irrational sentence in a police court
by saying he will do it on his head. So
(22:10):
under Pitt's coerceeness regime, a man was sent to prison
for saying that George the fourth was fat. But we
feel he must have been partly sustained in prison by
the artistic contemplation of how fat he was. That sort
of liberty, that sort of humanity, and it is no
means sort did indeed survive all the drift and downward
(22:33):
eddy of an evil economic system, as well as the
dragooning of a reactionary epic, and the drearier menace of
materialistic social science, as embodied in the new Puritans, who
have purified themselves even of religion. Under this long process,
the worst that can be said is that the English
(22:55):
humorist has been slowly driven downwards in the social scale.
Falstaff was a knight, sam Weller was a gentleman servant,
and some of our recent restrictions seemed designed to drive
sam Weller to the status of the artful dodger. But
well it was for us that some such trampled tradition
and dark memory of merry England survived well for us,
(23:19):
as we shall see that all our social science failed,
and all our statesmanship broke down before it, For there
was to come the noise of a trumpet, and a
dreadful day of visitation, in which all the daily workers
of a dull civilization were to be called out of
their houses and their holds, like resurrection of the dead,
(23:42):
and left naked under a strange sun, with no religion
but a sense of humour. And men might know of
what nation Shakespeare was, who broke into puns and practical
jokes in the darkest passion of his tragedies. If they
had only heard those boys in France and Flanders who
called out early doors themselves in a theatrical memory, as
(24:06):
they went so early in their youth to break down
the doors of death. End of Chapter sixteen.
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