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 poets 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, silly 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 rode, 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 cano
ns 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
1 The Spirit of the Age, 165-6.
multiplied; the other exposed, with compelling clarity, the wrongs and injustices of those without land, capital or birth. Lamb, in Ins rusty stockings and unpolished shoes, .preached the English creed of humorous and affectionate acceptance; Hazlitt, with his rapier thrusts,, cleared a way for Thackeray and the young middle-class reformers of Punch.
Nor did the English vision stop at the English sea. For thousands of patriots in his own age and for millions in the next, England was typified not by Castlereagh, whose foreign policy, as the event proved, was writ in water, but by Byron. The latter's championship of liberty and nationalism, his aristocratic disdain for every form of tyranny., and his realisation, so moving in a fastidious and sensitive man, that a nation has a right to its freedom, whatever its faults or vices, ran through the adolescent mind of European liberalism like fire. The little limping dandy who wrote The Prisoner of Chillon, threw, like a lamp on the screen of the future, the form of Gladstone's speeches and Campbell-Bannerman's policy.
The splendours of Regency society, the power and wealth of early nineteenth-century Britain seemed brassy and eternal to the men and women of the time. So did the destitution and degradation that accompanied them. To poor and rich alike they appeared to be unchangeable—part of a divine, or, as many had begun to suspect, a diabolical ordinance. The poets taught otherwise. They could not change the laws or the harsh economic phenomena of the age, or arrest the cumulative evils to which those phenomena gave rise. But they could make men want to change them. "If we are a Christian nation," wrote Coleridge, "we must learn to act nationally as well as individually as Christians.. .. Our manufacturers must consent to regulations; our gentry must concern themselves in the education of their national clients and dependants—must regard their estates as offices of trust with duties to be performed in the sight of God and their country. Let us become a better people and the reform of all the public grievances will follow of itself."
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED IN FOOTNOTES
ABERDEEN.—Lady Frances Balfour, The Life of George, Fourth Earl of Aberdeen, 1923.
ACKERMANN, Microcosm.—R. Ackermann, Microcosm of London, 1808-10.
ACKERMANN, Repository.—R. Ackermann, Repository of Arts.
ALBEMARLE.—George Thomas, Earl of Albemarle, Fifty Years of my Life, 1870.
ALINGTON.—C. A. Alington, Twenty Years, 1921.
ALISON.—Sir A. Alison, History of Europe from the Fall of Napoleon to the Accession of Louis Napoleon, 1852.
ALISON, History, 1815-52.—Sir A. Alison, History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution to the Restoration, 1850.
ALKEN.—H. Aiken, The National Sports of Great Britain (1903 ed.).
ALSOP.—Memorials of Christine Majolier (ed. M. Braithwaite), 1881.
ANDERSON.—Lt.-Col. J. A. Anderson, Recollections of a Peninsular Veteran, 1913.
ANDREADES.—Prof. Andreades, History of the Bank of England, 1935. ANGELO.—Reminiscences of Henry Angelo, 1830. Ann. Reg.—Annual Register.
ANTON.—J. Anton, Retrospect of a Military Life, 1841.
APPERLEY.—C. J. Apperley, My Life and Times (ed. E. D. Cuming), 1927. ARBUTHNOT.—The Correspondence of Charles Arbuthnot (ed. A. Aspinall), 1941.
MRS. ARBUTHNOT, Journal—Journal of Mrs. Arbuthnot (ed. F. Bamford and
Duke of Wellington).
ARGYLL.—George Douglas, Eighth Duke of Argyll, Autobiography and
Memoirs, 1906.
ARTECHE.—General Jos^ Arteche y Moro, Guerra de la Independa, Madrid, 1868-1902.
ARTZ.—F. B. Artz, Reaction and Revolution, 1814-32, 1934.
ASHTON.—John Ashton, Social England under the Regency, 1890.
ASHTON, Industrial Revolution.—T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1948.
ASPINALL, Brougham.—A. Aspinall, Lord Brougham and the Whig Party, 1927.
ASPINALL, Princess Charlotte.—A. Aspinall, Letters of Princess Charlotte, 1949.
ASSHETON SMITH.—Sir J. Eardley-Wilmo
t, Reminiscences of the late Thomas
Assheton Smith, 1860.
AUCKLAND.—Journal and Correspondence of William Lord Auckland, 1862.
AUSTEN.-—Jane Austens Letters to her sister Cassandra and others (ed. R. W.
Chapman), 1932.
AUSTEN, Works.—The Works of Jane Austen (ed. J. Bailey), 1927.
BAIN, Mill.—Alexander Bain, James Mill, 1882.
BAINES.—E. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, 1835.
BAMFORD.—S. Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical and Early Days (ed.
H. Dunkley), 1893.
BARANTE.—P. Barante, Souvenirs, Paris, 1882-9.
BARNARD LETTERS.—The Barnard Letters (ed. A. Powell), 1928.
BARRINGTON.—Sir Jonah Barrington, Personal Sketches of his own Times,
1827.
BATHURST.—Bathurst MSS. (Historical MSS. Commission), 1923.
BEAMISH.—N. L. Beamish, History of the King's German Legion, 1834-7.
BECKE.—A. G. F. Becke, Napoleon and Waterloo, 1936.
BEER.—M. Beer, History of British Socialism, 1929.
BELL.—G. Bell, Rough Notes by an Old Soldier, 1867.
BELLOC.—H. Belloc, Waterloo, 1915.
BENTHAM.—Works of Jeremy Bentham (ed. J. Bowring), 1838-43.
BERRY.—Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry (ed. T. Lewis), 1865.
BESSBOROUGH.—Lady Bessborough and her Family Circle (ed. Earl of Bessborough and A. Aspinall), 1940. BEWICK.—Memoirs of Thomas Bewick written by himself, 1924.
BIRKBECK.—M. Birkbeck, Notes on a Journey through France, 1815.
BLACKWOOD'S.—Blackwood's Magazine.
BLAKENEY.—Services, Adventures and Experiences of Captain Robert Blakeney, 1899.
BLAND-BURGESS.—Letters and Correspondence of Sir James Bland-Burgess (ed.
J. Hutton), 1885. Bonapartism.—H. A. L. Fisher, Bonapartism.
BOOTHBY.—C. Boothby, Under England's Flag, 1900.
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