The Celt and Saxon, v2
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George Meredith >> The Celt and Saxon, v2
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Here was one which tickled the ladies and formed a text for discussion.
'Women must take the fate of market-fruit till they earn their own
pennies, and then they 'll regulate the market. It is a tussle for money
with them as with us, meaning power. They'd do it as little by oratory
as they have done by millinery, for their oratory, just like their
millinery, appeals to a sentiment, and to a weaker; and nothing solid
comes of a sentiment. Power is built on work.'
To this was appended: 'The better for mankind in the developing process,
ay, and a bad day for us, boys, when study masks the charming eyes in
gig-lamps, and there is no pretty flying before us. Good-night to Cupid,
I fear. May be I am not seeing far enough, and am asking for the devil
to have the loveliest women as of old. Retro S. M.'
The youthful eye on their sex, the Irish voice, and the perceptible moral
earnestness in the background, made up a quaint mixture.
CHAPTER XVI
OF THE GREAT MR. BULL AND THE CELTIC AND SAXON VIEW OF HIM: AND SOMETHING
OF RICHARD ROCKNEY
Meanwhile India, our lubber giant, had ceased to kick a leg, and Ireland,
our fever-invalid, wore the aspect of an opiate slumber. The volcano we
couch on was quiet, the gritty morsel unabsorbed within us at an
armistice with the gastric juices. Once more the personification of the
country's prosperity had returned to the humming state of roundness.
Trade whipped him merrily, and he spun.
A fuller sketch of the figure of this remarkable emanation of us and
object of our worship, Bull, is required that we may breathe the
atmosphere of a story dealing with such very different views of the idol,
and learn to tolerate plain-speaking about him.
Fancy yourself delayed by stress of weather at an inn or an excursion,
and snapped up by some gossip drone of the district, who hearing whither
you are bound, recounts the history and nature of the place, to your
ultimate advantage, though you groan for the outer downpour to abate.--
Of Bull, then: our image, before the world: our lord and tyrant, ourself
in short--the lower part of us. Coldly worshipped on the whole, he can
create an enthusiasm when his roast-beef influence mounts up to peaceful
skies and the domestic English world spins with him. What he does not
like will then be the forbidding law of a most governable people, what
he does like the consenting. If it is declared that argument will be
inefficacious to move him, he is adored in the form of post. A hint of
his willingness in any direction, causes a perilous rush of his devotees.
Nor is there reason to suppose we have drawn the fanatical subserviency
from the example of our subject India. We may deem it native; perhaps
of its origin Aryan, but we have made it our own. Some have been so
venturesome as to trace the lordliness of Bull to the protecting
smiles of the good Neptune, whose arms are about him to encourage the
development of a wanton eccentricity. Certain weeds of the human bosom
are prompt to flourish where safeness would seem to be guaranteed. Men,
for instance, of stoutly independent incomes are prone to the same sort
of wilfulness as Bull's, the salve abject submission to it which we
behold in his tidal bodies of supporters. Neptune has done something.
One thinks he has done much, at a rumour of his inefficiency to do the
utmost. Spy you insecurity?--a possibility of invasion? Then indeed the
colossal creature, inaccessible to every argument, is open to any
suggestion: the oak-like is a reed, the bull a deer. But as there is no
attack on his shores, there is no proof that they are invulnerable.
Neptune is appealed to and replies by mouth of the latest passenger
across the Channel on a windy night:--Take heart, son John! They will
have poor stomachs for blows who intrude upon you. The testification to
the Sea-God's watchfulness restores his darling who is immediately as
horny to argument as before. Neptune shall have his share of the
honours.
Ideal of his country Bull has none--he hates the word; it smells of
heresy, opposition to his image. It is an exercise of imagination to
accept an ideal, and his digestive organs reject it, after the manner of
the most beautiful likeness of him conjurable to the mind--that flowering
stomach, the sea-anemone, which opens to anything and speedily casts out
what it cannot consume. He is a positive shape, a practical corporation,
and the best he can see is the mirror held up to him by his bards of the
Press and his jester Frank Guffaw. There, begirt by laughing ocean-
waves, manifestly blest, he glorifies his handsome roundness, like that
other Foam-Born, whom the decorative Graces robed in vestments not so
wonderful as printed sheets. Rounder at each inspection, he preaches to
mankind from the text of a finger curved upon the pattern spectacles.
Your Frenchmen are revolutionising, wagering on tentative politics; your
Germans ploughing in philosophy, thumbing classics, composing music of a
novel order: both are marching, evolutionising, learning how to kill.
Ridiculous Germans! capricious Frenchmen! We want nothing new in
musical composition and abstract speculation of an indecent mythology,
or political contrivances and schemes of Government, and we do not want
war. Peace is the Goddess we court for the hand of her daughter Plenty,
and we have won that jolly girl, and you are welcome to the marriage-
feast; but avaunt new-fangled theories and howlings: old tunes, tried
systems, for us, my worthy friends.
Roundness admiring the growth of its globe may address majestic
invitation to the leaner kine. It can exhibit to the world that Peace is
a most desirable mother-in-law; and it is tempted to dream of capping the
pinnacle of wisdom when it squats on a fundamental truth. Bull's perusal
of the Horatian carpe diem is acute as that of the cattle in fat meads;
he walks like lusty Autumn carrying his garner to drum on, for a sign of
his diligent wisdom in seizing the day. He can read the page fronting
him; and let it be of dining, drinking, toasting, he will vociferously
confute the wiseacre bookworms who would have us believe there is no such
thing as a present hour for man.
In sad fact, the member for England is often intoxicate. Often do we
have him whirling his rotundity like a Mussulman dervish inflated by the
spirit to agitate the shanks, until pangs of a commercial crisis awaken
him to perceive an infructuous past and an unsown future, without one bit
of tracery on its black breast other than that which his apprehensions
project. As for a present hour, it swims, it vanishes, thinner than the
phantom banquets of recollection. What has he done for the growth of his
globe of brains?--the lesser, but in our rightful posture the upper, and
justly the directing globe, through whose directions we do, by feeding on
the past to sow the future, create a sensible present composed of both--
the present of the good using of our powers. What can he show in the
Arts? What in Arms? His bards--O faithless! but they are men--his
bards accuse him of sheer cattle-contentedness in the mead, of sterility
of brain, drowsihood, mid-noddyism, downright carcase-dulness. They
question him to deafen him of our defences, our intellectual eminence,
our material achievements, our poetry, our science; they sneer at his
trust in Neptune, doubt the scaly invulnerability of the God. They
point over to the foreigner, the clean-stepping, braced, self-confident
foreigner, good at arms, good at the arts, and eclipsing us in
industriousness manual and mental, and some dare to say, in splendour
of verse=-our supreme accomplishment.
Then with one big fellow, the collapse of pursiness, he abandons his
pedestal of universal critic; prostrate he falls to the foreigner; he is
down, he is roaring; he is washing his hands of English performances,
lends ear to foreign airs, patronises foreign actors, browses on reports
from camps of foreign armies. He drops his head like a smitten ox to all
great foreign names, moaning 'Shakespeare!' internally for a sustaining
apostrophe. He well-nigh loves his poets, can almost understand what
poetry means. If it does not pay, it brings him fame, respectfulness in
times of reverse. Brains, he is reduced to apprehend, brains are the
generators of the conquering energies. He is now for brains at all
costs, he has gained a conception of them. He is ready to knock
knighthood on the heads of men of brains--even literary brains. They
shall be knights, an ornamental body. To make them peers, and a
legislative, has not struck him, for he has not yet imagined them a
stable body. They require petting, to persuade them to flourish and
bring him esteem.
This is Mr. Bull, our image before the world, whose pranks are passed as
though the vivid display of them had no bad effect on the nation.
Doubtless the perpetual mirror, the slavish mirror, is to blame, but his
nakedness does not shrink from the mirror, he likes it and he is proud of
it. Beneath these exhibitions the sober strong spirit of the country,
unfortunately not a prescient one, nor an attractively loveable, albeit
of a righteous benevolence, labours on, doing the hourly duties for the
sake of conscience, little for prospective security, little to win
affection. Behold it as the donkey of a tipsy costermonger, obedient to
go without the gift of expression. Its behaviour is honourable under a
discerning heaven, and there is ever something pathetic in a toilful
speechlessness; but it is of dogged attitude in the face of men. Salt is
in it to keep our fleshly grass from putrefaction; poets might proclaim
its virtues. They will not; they are averse. The only voice it has is
the Puritan bray, upon which one must philosophise asinically to unveil
the charm. So the world is pleased to let it be obscured by the paunch
of Bull. We have, however, isolated groups, individuals in all classes,
by no means delighting in his representation of them. When such is felt
to be the case among a sufficient number, his bards blow him away as a
vapour; we hear that he is a piece of our English humour--we enjoy
grotesques and never should agree to paint ourselves handsome: our subtle
conceit insists on the reverse. Nevertheless, no sooner are the hours
auspicious to fatness than Bull is back on us; he is our family goat,
ancestral ghost, the genius of our comfortable sluggishness. And he is
at times a mad Bull: a foaming, lashing, trampling, horn-driving,
excessive, very parlous Bull. It is in his history that frenzies catch
him, when to be yoked to him is to suffer frightful shakings, not to
mention a shattering of our timbers. It is but in days of the rousing of
the under-spirit of the country, days of storm imprudent to pray the
advent of, that we are well rid of him for a while. In the interim he
does mischief, serious mischief; he does worse than when, a juvenile, he
paid the Dannegelt for peace. Englishmen of feeling do not relish him.
For men with Irish and Cambrian blood in their veins the rubicund
grotesque, with his unimpressionable front and his noisy benevolence of
the pocket, his fits of horned ferocity and lapses of hardheartedness, is
a shame and a loathing. You attach small importance to images and
symbols; yet if they seem representative, and they sicken numbers of us,
they are important. The hat we wear, though it is not a part of the
head, stamps the character of our appearance and has a positive influence
on our bearing. Symbolical decorations will stimulate the vacant-minded
to act up to them, they encircle and solidify the mass; they are a sword
of division between Celts and Saxons if they are abhorrent to one
section. And the Celtic brotherhood are not invariably fools in their
sensitiveness. They serve you on the field of Mars, and on other fields
to which the world has given glory. These execrate him as the full-grown
Golden Calf of heathenish worship. And they are so restive because they
are so patriotic. Think a little upon the ideas of unpatriotic Celts
regarding him. You have heard them. You tell us they are you:
accurately, they affirm, succinctly they see you in his crescent
outlines, tame bulk, spasms of alarm and foot on the weaker; his
imperviousness to whatsoever does not confront the sensual eye of
him with a cake or a fist, his religious veneration of his habitual
indulgences, his peculiar forms of nightmare. They swear to his
perfect personification of your moods, your Saxon moods, which their
inconsiderate spleen would have us take for unmixedly Saxon. They are
unjust, but many of them speak with a sense of the foot on their necks,
and they are of a blood demanding a worshipworthy idea. And they dislike
Bull's bellow of disrespect for their religion, much bruited in the
meadows during his periods of Arcadia. They dislike it, cannot forget
the sound: it hangs on the afflicted drum of the ear when they are in
another land, perhaps when the old devotion to their priest has expired.
For this, as well as for material reasons, they hug the hatred they
packed up among their bundles of necessaries and relics, in the flight
from home, and they instruct their children to keep it burning. They
transmit the sentiment of the loathing of Bull, as assuredly they would
be incapable of doing, even with the will, were a splendid fire-eyed
motherly Britannia the figure sitting in the minds of men for our image
--a palpitating figure, alive to change, penetrable to thought, and not a
stolid concrete of our traditional old yeoman characteristic. Verily he
lives for the present, all for the present, will be taught in sorrow that
there is no life for him but of past and future: his delusion of the
existence of a present hour for man will not outlast the season of his
eating and drinking abundantly in security. He will perceive that it was
no more than the spark shot out from the clash of those two meeting
forces; and penitently will he gaze back on that misleading spark-the
spectral planet it bids wink to his unreceptive stars--acknowledging him
the bare machine for those two to drive, no instrument of enjoyment. He
lives by reading rearward and seeing vanward. He has no actual life save
in power of imagination. He has to learn this fact, the great lesson of
all men. Furthermore there may be a future closed to him if he has
thrown too extreme a task of repairing on that bare machine of his. The
sight of a broken-down plough is mournful, but the one thing to do with
it is to remove it from the field.
Among the patriotic of stout English substance, who blew in the trumpet
of the country, and were not bards of Bull to celebrate his firmness and
vindicate his shiftings, Richard Rockney takes front rank. A journalist
altogether given up to his craft, considering the audience he had gained,
he was a man of forethought besides being a trenchant writer, and he
was profoundly, not less than eminently, the lover of Great Britain.
He had a manner of utterance quite in the tone of the familiar of the
antechamber for proof of his knowing himself to be this person. He did
not so much write articles upon the health of his mistress as deliver
Orphic sentences. He was in one her physician, her spiritual director,
her man-at-arms. Public allusions to her were greeted with his emphatic
assent in a measured pitch of the voice, or an instantaneous flourish of
the rapier; and the flourish was no vain show. He meant hard steel to
defend the pill he had prescribed for her constitutional state, and
the monition for her soul's welfare. Nor did he pretend to special
privileges in assuming his militant stand, but simply that he had studied
her case, was intimate with her resources, and loved her hotly, not to
say inspiredly. Love her as well, you had his cordial hand; as wisely,
then all his weapons to back you. There were occasions when
distinguished officials and Parliamentary speakers received the impetus
of Rockney's approval and not hesitatingly he stepped behind them to
bestow it. The act, in whatever fashion it may have been esteemed by the
objects propelled, was a sign of his willingness to let the shadow of any
man adopting his course obscure him, and of the simplicity of his
attachment. If a bitter experience showed that frequently, indeed
generally, they travelled scarce a tottering stagger farther than they
were precipitated, the wretched consolation afforded by a side glance at
a more enlightened passion, solitary in its depth, was Rockney's. Others
perchance might equal his love, none the wisdom of it; actually none the
vigilant circumspection, the shaping forethought. That clear knowledge
of the right thing for the country was grasped but by fits by others.
Enough to profit them this way and yonder as one best can! You know the
newspaper Press is a mighty engine. Still he had no delight in shuffling
a puppetry; he would have preferred automatic figures. His calls for
them resounded through the wilderness of the wooden.
Any solid conviction of a capable head of a certainty impressed upon the
world, and thus his changes of view were not attributed to a fluctuating
devotion; they passed out of the range of criticism upon inconsistency,
notwithstanding that the commencement of his journalistic career smelt
of sources entirely opposed to the conclusions upon which it broadened.
One secret of the belief in his love of his country was the readiness of
Rockney's pen to support our nobler patriotic impulses, his relish of the
bluff besides. His eye was on our commerce, on our courts of Law, on our
streets and alleys, our army and navy, our colonies, the vaster than the
island England, and still he would be busy picking up needles and threads
in the island. Deeds of valour were noted by him, lapses of cowardice:
how one man stood against a host for law or humanity, how crowds looked
on at the beating of a woman, how a good fight was maintained in some sly
ring between two of equal brawn: and manufacturers were warned of the
consequences of their iniquities, Government was lashed for sleeping upon
shaky ordinances, colonists were gibbeted for the maltreating of natives:
the ring and fervour of the notes on daily events told of Rockney's hand
upon the national heart--with a faint, an enforced, reluctant indication
of our not being the men we were.
But after all, the main secret was his art of writing round English,
instead of laborious Latinised periods: and the secret of the art was his
meaning what he said. It was the personal throb. The fire of a mind was
translucent in Press columns where our public had been accustomed to the
rhetoric of primed scribes. He did away with the Biscay billow of the
leading article--Bull's favourite prose--bardic construction of sentences
that roll to the antithetical climax, whose foamy top is offered and
gulped as equivalent to an idea. Writing of such a kind as Rockney's was
new to a land where the political opinions of Joint Stock Companies had
rattled Jovian thunders obedient to the nod of Bull. Though not alone in
working the change, he was the foremost. And he was not devoid of style.
Fervidness is the core of style. He was a tough opponent for his betters
in education, struck forcibly, dexterously, was always alert for debate.
An encounter between Swift and Johnson, were it imaginable, would present
us probably the most prodigious Gigantomachy in literary polemics. It is
not imaginable among comparative pygmies. But Rockney's combat with his
fellow-politicians of the Press partook of the Swiftian against the
Johnsonian in form. He was a steam ram that drove straight at the bulky
broadside of the enemy.
Premiers of parties might be Captains of the State for Rockney: Rockney
was the premier's pilot, or woe to him. Woe to the country as well,
if Rockney's directions for steering were unheeded. He was a man of
forethought, the lover of Great Britain: he shouted his directions in
the voice of the lover of his mistress, urged to rebuke, sometimes to
command, the captain by the prophetic intimations of a holier alliance,
a more illumined prescience. Reefs here, shallows there, yonder a foul
course: this is the way for you! The refusal of the captain to go this
way caused Rockney sincerely to discredit the sobriety of his intellect.
It was a drunken captain. Or how if a traitorous? We point out the
danger to him, and if he will run the country on to it, we proclaim him
guilty either of inebriety or of treason--the alternatives are named:
one or the other has him. Simple unfitness can scarcely be conceived
of a captain having our common senses and a warranted pilot at his elbow.
Had not Rockney been given to a high expression of opinion, plain in
fervour, he would often have been exposed bare to hostile shafts. Style
cast her aegis over him. He wore an armour in which he could walk, run
and leap-a natural style. The ardour of his temperament suffused the
directness of his intelligence to produce it, and the two qualities made
his weakness and strength. Feeling the nerve of strength, the weakness
was masked to him, while his opponents were equally insensible to the
weakness under the force of his blows. Thus there was nothing to teach
him, or reveal him, except Time, whose trick is to turn corners of
unanticipated sharpness, and leave the directly seeing and ardent to dash
at walls.
How rigidly should the man of forethought govern himself, question
himself! how constantly wrestle with himself! And if he be a writer
ebullient by the hour, how snappishly suspect himself, that he may feel
in conscience worthy of a hearing and have perpetually a conscience in
his charge! For on what is his forethought founded? Does he try the
ring of it with our changed conditions? Bus a man of forethought who has
to be one of our geysers ebullient by the hour must live days of fever.
His apprehensions distemper his blood; the scrawl of them on the dark of
the undeveloped dazzles his brain. He sees in time little else; his very
sincereness twists him awry. Such a man has the stuff of the born
journalist, and journalism is the food of the age. Ask him, however,
midway in his running, what he thinks of quick breathing: he will answer
that to be a shepherd on the downs is to be more a man. As to the
gobbling age, it really thinks better of him than he of it.
After a term of prolonged preachification he is compelled to lash that he
may less despise the age. He has to do it for his own sake. O gobbling
age! swallowing all, digesting nought, us too you have swallowed,
O insensate mechanism! and we will let you know you have a stomach.
Furiously we disagree with you. We are in you to lead you or work you
pangs!
Rockney could not be a mild sermoniser commenting on events. Rather no
journalism at all for him! He thought the office of the ordinary daily
preacher cowlike. His gadfly stung him to warn, dictate, prognosticate;
he was the oracle and martyr of superior vision: and as in affairs of
business and the weighing of men he was of singularly cool sagacity, hard
on the downright, open to the humours of the distinct discrimination of
things in their roughness, the knowledge of the firmly-based materialism
of his nature caused him. thoroughly to trust to his voice when he
delivered it in ardour--circumstance coming to be of daily recurrence.
Great love creates forethoughtfulness, without-which incessant journalism
is a gabble. He was sure of his love, but who gave ear to his
prescience? Few: the echo of the country now and then, the Government
not often. And, dear me! those jog-trot sermonisers, mere commentators
upon events, manage somehow to keep up the sale of their journals:
advertisements do not flow and ebb with them as under the influence of a
capricious moon. Ah, what a public! Serve it honourably, you are in
peril of collapsing: show it nothing but the likeness of its dull animal
face, you are steadily inflated. These reflections within us! Might not
one almost say that the retreat for the prophet is the wilderness, far
from the hustled editor's desk; and annual should be the uplifting of his
voice instead of diurnal, if only to spare his blood the distemper?
A fund of gout was in Rockney's, and he had begun to churn it. Between
gouty blood and luminous brain the strife had set in which does not
conduce to unwavering sobriety of mind, though ideas remain closely
consecutive and the utterance resonant.
Never had he been an adulator of Bull. His defects as well as his
advantages as a politician preserved to him this virtue. Insisting on a
future, he could not do homage to the belying simulacrum of the present.
In the season of prosperity Rockney lashed the old fellow with the crisis
he was breeding for us; and when prostration ensued no English tongue was
loftier in preaching dignity and the means of recovery. Our monumental
image of the Misuse of Peace he pointed out unceasingly as at a despot
constructed by freemen out of the meanest in their natures to mock the
gift of liberty. His articles of foregone years were an extraordinary
record of events or conditions foreseen: seductive in the review of them
by a writer who has to be still foreseeing: nevertheless, that none of
them were bardic of Bull, and that our sound man would have acted wisely
in heeding some of the prescriptions, constituted their essential merit,
consolatory to think of, though painful. The country has gone the wrong
road, but it may yet cross over to the right one, when it perceives that
we were prophetic.
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