The Age of Elegance (61 page)

not reconcile, they could only denounce; they could not lead, they could only repress.

Because of this, Britain in the hour of victory, with as noble a material and spiritual heritage as any nation had ever had, faltered and almost failed. With the means, physical and intellectual, of solving all her problems—which were not in reality very great—she staggered like a blind man from distress to distress. Yet she was not only immensely rich, but more advanced in real civilisation than any other country. There was no land in Europe where so many were so free, and none anywhere where some had a freedom so complete and satisfying. There was none where men had such mastery over material phenomena and enjoyed such comfort, elegance and happiness. There was none where man had done so much— in home-making, the shaping of landscape and the manufacture of amenities—to adapt his environment to his nature.

But the dispossessed peasants starving in the midst of plenty, the pallid machine-minders at the closed factory gates, the poachers in the county lock-ups awaiting transportation, felt that they had no longer any part in that inheritance. "Suppose," the flash coves sang in Salford gaol after Peterloo,

"the Duke be short of men?

What would old England say?

They'd wish they had those lads again

They sent to Botany Bay!"
¹

For when the war, which had united men in sacrifice, was over, society was seen to assume a new face. The rich man in time of trouble withdrew to his castle and left the poor to fend for themselves against bewildering economic forces which made the rich still richer but engulfed the ancient communities of the humble like a flood. And the officers of the realm—princes, peers, legislators, judges, parsons, lawyers, lifeguards, bumbles—instead of endeavouring to rescue the poor from thei
r unmerited plight, behaved as
though the only purpose of the State was to preserve the wealth and property of the rich.

Yet the rich were not the oppressors the champions of the poor made out. They were seldom sadists or robbers or even tyrants. They were, for the most part, cultivated and kindly Englishmen, brought

¹
Bamford, II,
177.

up in a Christian tradition and with a sense of personal responsibility and honour. Yet, intoxicated by their good fortune—the riches, luxury, elegance and power heaped on them by the nation's triumphs—the gentlemen of England had unconsciously come to think of these as the end of their country's existence. They regretted that the poor must suffer, but when their economists told them that the wealth of the nation—that is, their own wealth—depended on the periodic unemployment, starvation and degradation of their humbler countrymen, they accepted it as an inevitable dispensation of Providence and did their best, not unsuccessfully, to banish it from their minds.

Yet Wellington and his fellow officers had not applied the principles of
laissez faire
on the battlefields of the Peninsula. Nor had they shrunk from any duty demanded of them. In war they had been ready to suffer and sacrifice everything that their country might live. Throughout its struggle against Napoleon Britain had found its leaders equal to every need. All she now needed in .peace was a reform of her financial system to harness and canalise the productive forces unloosed by her inventors, and of her laws and institutions to give renewed effect to the moral principles in which ninety-nine out of a hundred of her people believed. Those principles, founded on die Christian religion, were recognised by Englishmen of all classes. They were that a man should be free to live as he chose in his own home and follow his craft without the interference of arbitrary tyranny. They comprised a belief in the moral right of the individual to liberty, self-respect and the ownership of property. A system of society in which so many were being deprived of their traditional livelihood, of their customary standards of living and of any real freedom of choice by the action of remote economic forces over which they had no control, in which they were forced to work under conditions which robbed them of health and pride in their labour and to live in habitations which deprived them of self-respect, was a system which, by England standards, was in need of reform. It wanted the first essential of a society that could content Englishmen: it was unjust. For the broad framework of justice in which real liberty could operate was lacking.

EPILOGUE

The English Vision

"It is not to be thought of that the Flood Of British freedom, which, to the open sea Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity-Hath flowed, 'with pomp of waters, unwithstood,' Roused though it be full often to a mood Which spurns the check of salutary bands, That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands Should perish; and to evil and to good Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung Armoury of the invincible Knights of old: We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held.—In ev
erything we are sprung Of Earth’
s first blood, have titles manifold."

Wordsworth

" 'Tis well an old age is out And time to begin a new."

Dryden

T

rue
aristocracy, after true religion, is the greatest blessing a nation can enjoy. Early nineteenth-century Britain possessed an unrivalled capacity for aristocracy. Her troubles arose because she was ruled by a counterfeit instead of the real aristocracy which her institutions evolved with such profusion. The subalterns and company commanders who had created a fighting force superior to Napoleon's were relegated to half-pay or placed under the command of young popinjays who had acquired their commissions by influence and purchase. Yet the rich country which wasted natural leadership with such arrogant carelessness, continued to produce almost unlimited talent and genius. In every walk of life she threw up men who attained to the highest levels of achievement. In science and invention she towered above other nations, as she did in commerce, colonisation and discovery. Though the State applied to aspirants to public office the narrow measuring-rod of lineage and inheritance, men of enterprise in these years were creating new openings in a hundred spheres of spontaneous personal endeavour. While the Liverpools and Sidmouths were feebly governing England, their fellow countrymen, whom they regarded, except for purposes of war, as outside their pale, were policing Sicily, liberating Greece and Chile,
pacifying the warlike tribes of
Asia and civilising Malaya.

And if in Cabinet and Convocation inspiration was lacking, in the arts Britain was richer than she had ever been before. Not even in the time of Shakespeare and Milton had Britain produced such an astonishing harvest of literary genius. In the decade after Waterloo one might have met at one time or another in the London streets William and Mary Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake and Lamb, Keats, Shelley and Byron, Jane Austen and Walter Scott, Hazlitt, Landor, Southey, Moore, Crabbe, Cobbett, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, William Napier, Jeremy Bentham, Godwin, as well as a host of lesser literary figures like the elder D'Israeli, Haydon and John Nyren. And Thackeray, Dickens, Carlyle, FitzGerald, Tennyson, Borrow, Macaulay, George Eliot, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, the Brontes, Surtees and the younger Disraeli were growing up— in the nursery or on the threshold of manhood;

"Great spirits now on earth are sojourning:

He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake,

Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake,

Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing:

And other spirits there are standings apart

Upon the forehead of the age to come;

These, these will give-the world another heart,

And other pulses. . ..."

With
the exception of
Scott and Byron, none of these
men and! women were known at the time to more than a small circle of their countrymen. The blaze of genius was there, but it was a blaze in the garret; The great chandelier-lit rooms below were filled with magnificently dressed nonentities. It was her real aristocrats who, when the: nation's official spokesmen were silent, gave her the answer she. needed. The p
oets and philosophers, recalled her to the
enduring truths of her being. On the political issues of: the time, in the narrow party sense, these, great men were divided. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Southey and De Quincey were; Tories, Shelley,.

Hazlitt, Hunt and Cobbett were radicals, Byron a Whig. Keats and Lamb, though conservative in instinct, were born too far below the social salt in that extravagantly snobbish age not to resent the pretensions of the ruling classes and translate that resentment into opposition. Yet all were at one in their advocacy of the moral truths which had made Britain great and whose oblivion by those in power threatened to make her little.

The most penetrating analysis of the shallowness of the rulers of Regency England came, not from a revolutionary or radical, but from the philosophic founder of nineteenth-^century conservatism. Anticipating both the social-welfare Toryism of Disraeli and the Socialism of Ruskin, Coleridge poured scorn on the prevailing determinism of economists and statesmen. "It is a mockery," he wrote, "of our fellow creatures' wrongs to call them equal in rights, when, by the bitter compulsion of their wants, we make them inferior to us in all that can soften the heart or dignify the understanding." Distinguishing between conservatism as inertia and as a condition of organic life, he went to the root of the controversy between liberty and authority, finding the synthesis in his unvarying starting-point, the human soul. "Man must be free, or to what purpose was he made a spirit of reason and not a machine of instinct? Man must obey, or wherefore has he a conscience? The powers which create this difficulty contain its solution, for their service is perfect freedom."

The repression of Eldon and Liverpool had no part in this moralist's conservatism. "No assailant of an .error," he wrote, "can reasonably hope to be listened to by its advocates who has not proved to them that he has seen the disputed subject in the same point of view and is capable of contemplating it with the same feelings as themselves." Sunk into easy and slothful living, pottering about Hampstead Heath between meal and meal, Coleridge seemed in his latter years to have become a rather futile person—"the dear, fine, s
illy old angel,'\as Lamb called
him. Yet from "that great piece of placid marble," flowed a never-ending stream of germinating ideas that were to stir and influence the hearts of men unborn: of a living and organic conservatism, a restored Church, and a society so morally knit that the gain of one class should automatically become that of every other.

At the opposite end of the pole to the quietist of Highgate stood, or rather r
ode, the
radical pamphleteer, Cobbett. While the one had travelled from Jacobinism to Conservatism, the other had begun as a Tory and ended as a disciple of the republican Tom Paine. Yet the two men based their criticism of the ruling political philosophy on precisely the same grounds: that it was inhuman, un-Christian, and therefore un-English. Cobbett's lifelong object was to restore the yeoman England of his youth in which, or so he believed, the property of the poor had been held sacred. "Then," he wrote, "should I hope once more to see my country great and glorious, and be cheered with the prospect of being able to say to my sons, 'I leave England to you as I find it; do you the same by your children.' " He saw dying all round him, of a poverty inexplicable in the light of die growing wealth of the rich, all the things he loved—good husbandry, craftsmanship and social virtue—and threw his whole being into denouncing such poverty and those who tolerated it. For the repression of the helpless determinists in power he had nothing but a burning contempt. "I was not born under the Six Acts; nor was I born under a state of things like this. I was not born under it and I do not wish to live under it; and with God's help I will change it if I can!"

Though secular in outlook and profession, in purpose all the great English writers of the day were religious. Where the Church failed to find an answer for the problems of an evolving society, the poets, like the prophets of the Old Testament, answered for her. When Shelley wrote "atheist and philanthropist" after his name in the visitors' book at Chamonix and spoke of "that detestable religion, the Christian," it was not because he was opposed to the ideals of Christianity, but because he was so passionately in favour of their practical application that he could not bear to be classed with the hypocrites who used the Church as a cloak for selfishness and intolerance. Even Byron, writing
Don Juan
in adulterous exile on gin and water and announcing that he was going to be immoral and show things, not as they ought to be, but as they really were, helped to restore the moral currency. "Go, dine," he apostrophised the Duke of Wellington,

"from off the plate Presented by the Prince of the Brazils,

And send the sentinel before your gate

A slice or two from your luxurious meals;

He fought, but has not dined so well of late."

In his great political satire,
The Age of Bronze,
and in
Don Juan,
he weighed the world he knew so well in the scales of justice, and with urbane, malicious laughter, refined the snobbery, vulgar pride and inhuman callousness of fashionable society.

Unconsciously the poets and philosophers were setting standards of outlook which, though little regarded by the political and social leaders of their age, became, through the influence of their genius, the accepted canons of the next. The character of early Victorian England was not formed by its Prime Ministers, serving in 1822 their apprenticeship in junior Government office, or on the Opposition benches—Robert Peel, young Palmerston, Aberdeen, Lord John Russell, the future Lord Melbourne. It was profoundly influenced by the prophetic writers of the Great War and the Regency. The ideals of Thomas Arnold, creator of the Victorian public school, derived from Wordsworth, denouncing amid the luxury and display of the brief-lived peace of Amiens the luxury of English society.

"Altar, sword and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

Ok! raise us up, return to us again;

And give us manners, virtues, freedom, power."

Under the solemn dullness and pomposity of the gaunt, bony Westmorland prophet, the exclusive absorption in his own work, the huge crocodile jaw working in interminable monologue, the majesty of his poetry and doctrine worked like a leaven on the mind of the future:

"inspiration for a song that winds

Through ever-changing scenes of votive quest,

Wrongs to redress, harmonious tribute paid

To patient courage and unblemished Truth,

To firm devotion, zeal unquenchable,

And Christian meekness hallowing faithful loves."

No nation whose ruling class based its faith on Wordsworth's philosophy was likely to fail its destiny through frivolity or lack of faith.

To this renewal of the nation's moral fibre in the spiritual exhaustion after the war all the great writers of the age contributed: Shelley preaching, through the flaming lyrics of his revolutionary advocacy, that men should love one another and that no society not built on love could endure; Blake, so obscure that only a few knew him, protesting against all that was rigid, unimaginative and complacent in religion and morality and bequeathing from his rambling books of prophecy an anthem for the twentieth-century Welfare State; Keats, turning his back on a worldly age on every worldly hope in order to sustain—to the consumptive's death in the garret—his poet's creed that whatever the imagination seized on as Beauty must be truth. It was not that such men were apart from their country or possessed some superior virtue not shared by her people and rulers; on the contrary their vision sprang directly from her common faith and civilisation. Jane Austen was as organic a part of the nation as a tree, Scott as his native Tweed. Genius merely enabled them to see her true course and to check the deviation of helmsmen with shorter vision. In a country that fostered freedom of expression, they operated as a magnetic compass. Walter Scott, wrote his political opponent, Hazlitt, by emancipating the mind from petty, narrow and bigoted prejudices, and communicating to countless thousands his chivalrous and humane ideal of patriotism, was one of the greatest teachers of morality that ever lived.
¹
Jane Austen, seeing life steadily across the quiet lawn of a country rectory, was as true a delineator of female honour as Scott of male. She once defined a lady as a mixture of love, pride and delicacy, and in six great novels, never transcending the limits of human capacity, immortalised the type. Self-assertion was the cardinal sin in her calendar; the attributes she helped to perpetuate were self-discipline, moderation, a morality founded on tenderness and constancy, a readiness to shoulder the dullest and weariest burdens for those with claims of kindred and association, a quiet but unflinching opposition to everything lawless, coarse, brutal and uncontrolled. But for these there could scarcely have been a Florence Nightingale or even a profession of modern nursing.

Even the essayists, Lamb, "the frolic and the gentle," and the savage Hazlitt whom Wordsworth thought unfit for respectable society, helped to shape the outlook of the lesser professional and clerical classes on whose integrity the commercial empire of the Victorian was to rest. The one humanised and invested with poetry the common round of city life for an age in which cities continually