Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 829
First, it must be clearly understood that Cobbett was not yet a Revolutionist; even if he was already a Radical, he was still subconsciously the Tory patriot who had made his name by waging war on all Revolutionists. He had indeed kept his English journalism independent of parties; but if he had originally had any party, it was the Tory party. In other words, his disappointment had begun, but he still had enough admiration to be disappointed. He was still sufficiently orthodox to be troubled by doubt. Then came the shameful and incredible shock of the Constitution he had once defended swinging round and knocking him silly. It was no wonder if, for the moment, it did knock him very silly. But it is reading the last lucid rage of the Radical Cobbett into the first dark and confused doubts of the Conservative Cobbett to expect him to have met his first trial in as he met his second trial in His real revolutionary spirit was not the cause of his imprisonment; it was the result of it.
The fools who put Cobbett in prison probably did believe they were crushing a Jacobin, when they were really creating one. And they were creating a Jacobin out of the best Anti-Jacobin of the age. Apart from all political labels, they were manufacturing the greatest rebel, of English history out of the most unpromising materials. Perhaps he was the only real rebel that was ever manufactured out of purely English materials. But he was all the more a furious rebel because he was a reluctant rebel. For the man who paced that cell, like a lion in a cage, had not any of the detachment given either by idealism or cynicism. He had not fully learned to expect injustice; he had not yet survived disappointment, the dark surprise of youth. The man in that cell was no Stoic, trained in the Latin logic of Condorcet or Carnot, seeing his own virtues as part of the ideal system of the Republic and his own sufferings as part of the inevitable system of the Kings. He was no Irish martyr, schooled to breathe the very air of tragedy and tyranny and vengeance, and living in a noble but unnatural exaltation of wholly spiritual hate. Like most men of a very English type, he was inordinately fond of happiness. And happiness to him was concrete and not abstract; it was his own farm, his own family, his own children. Like most men of a very masculine type, he was probably a good deal dominated by his wife. And his wife and family had evidently hung on heavily to drag him back from his political precipice. But the worst of it was that he was suffering for an idea; and as yet did not quite know what idea. That is where this great angry and bewildered Englishman differed from the French Stoics or the Irish patriots. They appealed to the gods against the kings, to the ideas against the facts; but it seemed to the Englishman that his own god and king had condemned him. They saw clear skies above a confused world; but it was upon him that his own sky had fallen. He had indeed in his mind all that volcanic amalgam of ancient loyalties and popular sympathies which puzzles the student of party labels; but it was still in his subconscious mind. He had not yet a creed as Robespierre or Jefferson or O’Connell had a creed. In fact, he was not suffering for an idea he was suffering for an instinct. But the instinct seemed to him a natural part of that natural order which had suddenly sprung on him an unnatural revenge. In so far as he had originally believed in anything, it was in the authorities that had thrown him into gaol. In so far as he had any creed, it had been the Constitution which condemned him as a felon. He had acted on a patriotic impulse; and patriotism had punished him for being patriotic. All this first transition of bewilderment must be allowed for; but when it is allowed for, something else remains. Even when his head had cleared and his creed consolidated, there remained something about him for which the reader must be prepared to make allowances; as much as when we see him swaying rather blindly under this first blow.
Cobbett was a particular human type; the very last to be fairly understood in those quiet times of which the virtue is sociability and the vice is snobbery. He was the imperfect martyr. The modern and popular way of putting it is to say that a man can really be a martyr without being by any means a saint. The more subtle truth is that he can even be a saint and still have that sort of imperfection. The first of Christian saints was in that sense a very imperfect martyr. He eventually suffered martyrdom for a Master whom he had cursed and denied. That marks the tremendous realism of our religion: its heroes had not heroic faults. They had not those Byronic vices that can pose almost as virtues. When they said they were miserable sinners, it was because they really dared to confess the miserable sins. Tradition says that the saint in question actually asked to be crucified upside-down, as if making himself a mere parody of a martyr. And there is something of the same sacred topsy-turvydom in the strange fancy by which he is haunted in all hagiological art and legend by the symbol of his failure. The crowing of a cock, which has become a phrase for insolence, has in this case actually become an emblem of meekness. Rome has lifted up the cock of Peter higher than the eagle of Caesar, not to preach pride to kings but to preach humility to pontiffs. The cock is crowing for ever that the saint may never crow.
Cobbett was a much more imperfect martyr; for he lived and died by a much more imperfect light. But this is the contradiction that explains all his contradictions. His courage was not consistent, complete, a thing working itself out by a perfectly clear principle. His heroic stature was not properly or perfectly proportioned, it was merely heroic. He sometimes fell below himself; but it was because he had a far higher and more arduous standard of manhood than most men, especially the men around him. He began tasks that he did not always finish; he took up rash positions that he sometimes found to be untenable.
More than once in his career there comes in an element of anti-climax and bathos, at which the world will find it easy to laugh. But the world will have no sort of right to laugh. In the lives of most of us there is no such anti-climax simply because there is no climax. If we do not abandon those tasks it is because we do not attempt them; and we are not crucified upside-down because we have no intention of being crucified at all. The ordinary Sophist or Sadducee, passing the grotesque crucifixion, would have no right to mock the martyr with the crowing of the cock. The ordinary politician or political writer of Cobbett’s time or ours had no right to mock the inconsistencies of Cobbett. The whole scheme and standard of his life was higher and harder than theirs, even of the best of them. Men like Bentham and Brougham were sincere reformers in the ordinary sense. Men like Macaulay and Mackintosh were good men in the normal fashion. But they served their world; they never set out to fight the whole world as Cobbett did. Good and bad alike, they are like civilians sitting at home and criticising a shattered and shell-shocked soldier. There is no particular disgrace in being a civilian; though there may be in being an ungenerous civilian.
One example may illustrate what is meant by the comparison. Cobbett got himself flung into a common gaol for protesting against the flogging of British soldiers in the middle of the Napoleonic war; he afterwards went to America to avoid being flung into prison again. Macaulay, nearly a generation later, in time of peace, when the general mood was much more humanitarian, had the ordinary official task of apologising for flagrantly savage floggings of the same sort, simply because he happened to be Secretary for War and the blustering Lord Cardigan happened to be Commander of the Forces in London. Nobody in his senses would call Macaulay a cruel man. He simply regarded himself as a good party man, making the best of a bad case, as a part of his least agreeable parliamentary duties. His biographer, Sir George Trevelyan, certainly a very liberal and humane man, expresses no particular surprise at it; and nobody felt any particular surprise at it. Most people probably regarded it as we regard the uncomfortable duty of a barrister, who has to minimise the acts of a monster who has tortured children. It was part of the routine, of the rules of the game, of the way of the world. But the man who accepts everything and defends such things is not in the same world with the man who risks everything, or even anything, to denounce them. We may well say about Macaulay what he himself said about Cranmer: `It is no great condemnation of a man to say that he did not possess heroic fortitude.’ And it is no great condemnation of him to say that he will never come within a thousand miles of the man who does possess heroic fortitude, even for a moment.
For if the common or conventional man is not to be condemned for failing to be a hero, still less is the other man to be condemned for succeeding in being half a hero or nine-tenths of a hero. The imperfect martyr may be judged by the perfect martyr, but not by anybody else; and the perfect martyr will probably have the charity as well as the patience of the perfect saint. Nobody will pretend that Cobbett had the patience of the perfect saint. He had not enough of the charity, though he had more than many might suppose, especially the people who make a point of being charitable to the rich. It is true that even his heroism was incalculable and inconsequent; but the question of proportion and even of quantity does not touch the question of quality. One moment of Cobbett’s courage is of a different quality from a lifetime of Macaulay’s common sense. Macaulay, in his life as in his logic, was nothing worse than superficial. It was the tragedy of Cobbett that he was fundamental. Of all our social critics lie was by far the most fundamental. He could not help seeing a fight of first principles deadly enough to daunt any fighter. He could not help realising an evil too large for most men to realise, let alone resist. It was as if he had been given an appalling vision, in which the whole land he looked at, dotted with peaceful houses and indifferent men, had the lines and slopes of a slow earthquake.
Macaulay, it has been noted, said about Cranmer that he could not be blamed for not being a hero and a martyr. But for all that Macaulay blamed him a good deal for being a coward and a snob. Cobbett said about Cranmer that the very thought that such a being had walked the earth on two legs was enough to make the reeling brain doubt the existence of God; but that peace and faith flow back again into the soul when we remember that he was burned alive. I quote the sentiment from memory; but that was the substance of the remark. It is a remark touched with a certain exaggeration. It is not an observation marked primarily by measure or precise proportion or the mellowing of truth with charity. Macaulay’s criticism of Cranmer is more effective for everyday purposes; as when he says that the crime of the Tudor politician was not in being too indifferent to be killed, but in killing other people for things about which he was indifferent, and enacting laws against anyone `who should do from conviction what he had done from cowardice.’ But there is a quality in that outburst of Cobbett about Cranmer which we must learn to appreciate or leave off troubling about Cobbett. There is a volume and a violence of humanity in such hatred; a hatred straight from the heart like a knockout blow straight from the shoulder. It is a blast from a furnace. And it is only in such a furnace seven times heated that men suffer for an idea-or even suffer for an impulse.
Anyhow, the only effect of the imprisonment was to turn an impulse into an idea. He may have lacked some of the virtues of a philosopher; even including the philosophy. He may not have been perfect as a hero; or even have possessed any of the qualities of a martyr except the martyrdom. But he was emphatically the sort of man with whom one cannot afford to be in the wrong. It was suicidally silly to act with such injustice to a man with such a talent for expounding justice, including intellectual justice. It would have been wiser in the governing class to have gone on their natural course and continued to harry the imbecile and to torment the dumb. Thousands of poor men have been and are persecuted quite as unjustly as Cobbett by the police and plutocracy of modern states; but a certain political instinct and practical intuition have generally and wisely guided the authorities to hit the sort of man who cannot possibly hit them back. It is impossible not to comment on the very curious carelessness, which in this case allowed the rich and the rulers to commit the customary cruelties upon a man eminently capable of telling the tale. They threw him into gaol for nothing, or for anything, or for something more or less meritorious, for all the world as if he had been his own grandfather the agricultural labourer.
Certainly if they put him in prison, they ought never to have let him out. Surely the flexible British Constitution of Pitt and Castlereagh would have been equal to the necessity of sending him to Botany Bay for life. For that Constitution was very free when it came to attacking freedom. The man who came out of that prison was not the man who went in. It is not enough to say that he came out in a rage, and may be said to have remained in a rage; to have lived in a rage for thirty years, until he died in a rage in his own place upon the hills of Surrey. There are rages and rages, and they ought to have seen in his eyes when they opened the door that they had let loose a revolution. We talk of a man being in a towering passion and that vigorous English phrase, so much in his own literary manner, is symbolic of his intellectual importance. He did indeed return in a towering passion, a passion that towered above towns and villages like a waterspout, or a cyclone visible from ten counties and crossing England like the stride of the storm. The most terrible of human tongues was loosened and went through the country like a wandering bell, of incessant anger and alarum; till men must have wondered why, when it was in their power, they had not cut it out.
CHAPTER IV
REVOLUTION AND THE BONES OF PAINE
His imprisonment destroyed in Cobbett the whole dream with which he had returned rejoicing from America. That is, it did not in the least destroy his love of his native land; but it did destroy the illusion that he would there be able to breathe quite easily a native air. He could no longer hope, as it had once seemed so natural to do, that the spontaneous and colloquial language that sprang so easily to his own lips would commend itself as easily to people in his own land; that there he would be among neighbours and would talk without an interpreter. England was not a place where they understood plain English. From the very beginning of his fresh start after imprisonment we find him, therefore, facing the fact that he will never be able to say all that he wants to say or to fulfil himself as he had meant to do. Moreover, his fresh start was one not only after imprisonment, but after ruin and practical bankruptcy; and the fresh start was not a very fortunate start. His farming was not successful, his financial difficulties became acute; and it looked as if Cobbett in England would be in every sense a failure. Hence we have to record (before coming to the crowning and decisive part of his English career) another interruption in the form of a visit to America. The visit was a shorter one; and is chiefly interesting through two or three episodes which must be taken in their turn. But we must first say a word of the conditions in his own country.
The first note of the new Cobbett who came out from captivity is the abrupt and absolute cessation of his first boyish feelings about the war with France; the feelings he probably had when he ran away to sea as a boy. He was no longer jolly enough to be a Jingo. I do not use the word in a bad sense; for indeed Cobbett’s Jingoism has never been bad enough to be called Imperialism. He had been for fighting the French on the perfectly healthy ground that he was saving his own beloved island from the French. But anyhow this simple way of looking at it became impossible after his imprisonment. He was still a patriot; he was never anything in the least like a pacifist; but he had learnt something that he could not unlearn. He who had cheered on the dogs of war with Windham for a fellow-huntsman called them off abruptly, with a sort of harsh humanitarianism. He came out positively on the side of stopping the war. That is the change that is really significant. He would waste no more time on saving England from the French. He had the huge task of saving England from the English.
Even here, however, it is easy to miss the consistency under all the inconsistencies. It is highly characteristic of him that he had refused with especial fury the proposal to stop the war at an earlier stage, when the proposal was based on the argument (still so common among commercial peacemongers) that war is bad for commerce. Cobbett was quite consistent in having an equal contempt for the Pacifist who made peace for that reason and for the Pittite who made war for that reason. But he was more and more convinced that the Pittites were only making war for that reason. The moment he concluded that only the bankers and merchants really wanted war, and the populace suffered from it without need, he was perfectly consistent in changing sides. He would have been quite inconsistent if he had not changed sides. Windham himself had said, “Perish Commerce; but let the Constitution be saved.” Cobbett had made it his motto, though now perhaps in the amended form, “Perish Commerce and Constitutions; but let the country be saved.” Only, he was more and more grimly convinced that it needed saving, and not from Napoleon. He was not less of an English patriot, but perhaps he was in one sense a little less of an Englishman, if being an Englishman means being happy and happy-go-lucky and comforted by compromises and ready to believe anything printed in the Times.
Meanwhile the war ended with Waterloo and the peace began with Peterloo. That was the only kind of peace that seemed likely to begin. It was time that somebody did something, whether or no Cobbett could do anything. The new capitalistic phase of England was coming to a crisis, especially in the North. The industrial revolution was already producing the anti-industrial revolution — which is likely to be a much more real revolution. Machines were busy and men were idle. Some men indeed were not idle; but those who were most busy were the political economists, who were busy proving on paper that the machinery that had made people poor must really have made them rich. Very soon something began to happen that anybody might have foreseen, whether he was on the side of the machines or the men, so long as he understood that men are not machines. Cobbett realised it, though he did not approve of it. The men began to destroy the machine; to destroy them as if they were dragons that had come in to destroy the paradise of innocence and liberty. Cobbett, who upon that matter was a moderate, wrote a Letter to the Luddites, urging them to desist from this method of protest; but he banded himself with the most resolute of the Radicals, with old Cartwright and Orator Hunt and Burdett, in demanding drastic democratic reforms. His Register, already popular at a shilling, was made enormously more popular by being sold for twopence, with the ironic boast of Twopenny Trash. Never in English history perhaps has one man wielded so vast and potent a popular instrument as Cobbett did. He and his friends were incessant in demanding reform, which had already begun to be spelt with a capital letter. They pointed to the dark sphinx of industrial destitution and demanded that there should be at least some answer to its riddle.
