Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 835
Now, the unconscious ingenuity of that approach is that it surprises us from the inside. The man writing it has not struck any attitudes of a demagogue or a prophet of woe; he has not set out to describe slums as a missionary to describe savages. The man reading it does not know what is coming; but when it comes it comes to him and not to some remote stranger. It is he that feels the sinking within him that comes from the withdrawal of all our, bodily supports; it is his own stomach that is hollow and his own heart that is sick with hope deferred. It will be all the better for him if it is his own brain that grows black and his own tongue bitter; if it teaches him for a moment what it must be to be a tramp walking with pain and bludgeoned by perpetual snubs and sneers and refusals. When a man has imagined that for a moment for himself, he knows for the first time what is meant by saying that men are brothers, and not merely poor relations. That is the psychological experience corresponding to the philosophical doctrine which for many remains a mystery: the equality of man.
It must also always be remembered, if we are to make any meaning of the tale, that it was this type of the very poor man, the tramp or the beggar, whom Cobbett almost unconsciously made the test of the time. He was not the man for whom it was possible to represent it as a good time. He was not the man who was being tolerated by toleration acts or enfranchised by reform bills. He was not the man who was being educated by Brougham’s popular science or equipped by Arkwright’s mechanical discoveries. He was not one of those whom the new world was making richer. As Cobbett would have put it in his bitter way, he had not the advantage of being a Jew who blasphemed Christ or a Quaker who ran away from patriotism. He was only a normal national baptized Englishman with nothing to eat. He was only a poor man; and he was quite certainly growing poorer.
Tyranny varies with temperament, especially national temperament. Some have taxed the poor, and some have enslaved the poor, and a few have massacred the poor; but the English rulers simply forgot the poor. They talked as if they did not exist; they generalised as if no such people need be included in the generalisation. They drew up reports of progress and prosperity in which the common people did not figure at all. They did not suppress the subject; by that time they simply did not think of it any more than a man shooting pheasants prides himself on killing flies or an angler counts the midges. It was said that the English founded an empire in a fit of absence of mind. It must be somewhat sadly added that they neglected a nation with the same absence of mind. Oligarchies far harsher and more arbitrary in legal form would probably have more responsibility in the sense of remembrance. A Roman official might have written in a famine, `There is still food enough for the citizens and even the slaves.’ A Victorian gentleman in the Hungry Forties simply sat down at his groaning mahogany and said, `There is enough food.’ A planter in South Carolina might well have been heard saying, `The Blockade is starving the blacks as well as ourselves,’ The merchant in Manchester was only heard saying, `There may be a slump; but with the next boom we shall completely recover ourselves.’ That is the mental blank peculiar to this mentality. They did not even look down with scorn and say, `We are all comfortable, even if these vagabonds are beggared by their own vices.’ They looked round with complete satisfaction and said, `We are all comfortable.’
This distinction is simply a fact, and should not be mixed up with moral or sentimental recriminations. It is a character of the condition called capitalism, whether we dwell on the economic dependence or the political independence of the worker under capitalism. In part, doubtless, the proletarian was forgotten because he was free. The slave was remembered because he was always under the eye of the master. But I am not now arguing about whether nineteenth century capitalism has been better or worse than slavery. I am pointing out that the whole business of hiring men and sacking men did allow of forgetting men. It allowed of it much more than the servile system of owning men. Capitalism has produced a peculiar thing, which may be called oppression by oblivion. And this negative and indirect injustice was native both to what is good and what is bad in the English temper. It is the paradox of the English that they are always being cruel through an aversion to cruelty. They dislike quite sincerely the sight of pain, and therefore shut their eyes to it; and it was not unnatural that they should prefer a system in which men were starved in slums but not scourged in slave-compounds.
Now, here again we have one of the subtleties under the superficial simplicities of Rural Rides. Cobbett, it has been often repeated, was as English as any Englishman who ever lived. He had all the English virtues: the love of loafing and of lonely adventure; the spirit of the genial eccentric; the capacity to be a hermit without being a misanthrope; the love of landscape and of roads astray; and above all, that love of the grotesque that is as brave as a broad grin. Nor, as we say, was he without that softer side, only that with him it was generally the inside. I mean that it was in his private and domestic character that we see the English aversion to what is painful and severe. He was a very gentle father and schoolmaster, not only in practice but in theory; and much that he wrote on education almost anticipates the complete amnesty of the Montessori school, He always expressed himself strongly about the stupidity of schoolmasters knocking children about, though he did it with a cheerful readiness to knock the schoolmasters about. Here he does indeed touch something in the English that is behind their dislike of a scene. Victor Hugo in his Art of being a Grandfather describes in his rather boastful fashion how he had lashed the world like Isaiah or Juvenal, and refused to descend to the bathos of slapping a child. Cobbett had lashed the world like nobody in the world but Cobbett. And he had a better right than Hugo to say truly of himself that `thunder should be mild at home.’
But when all this element in the great Englishman has been allowed for, it is still true that there was one quality in him that was not English. He was extremely provocative. He was as provocative as an. Irishman. He refused to leave people alone. He refused emphatically to let sleeping dogs lie. It is not surprising that at the end he had the whole pack in full cry after him; and that it only gave him a further opportunity for turning on them and telling them they were all curs and mongrels, not to mention mad dogs. He always trailed his coat, especially so as to make men say that he had turned his coat. He rejoiced and exulted in a scene. There is nothing more vivid than that scene on which Mr. Edward Thomas touched with great felicity, the great meeting which Cobbett had worked up to the point of a passionate enthusiasm for throwing him out. `I stood up,’ he says,’that they might see the man they had to throw out.’ That phrase is a photograph before the days of photography; the picture of that big, snorting, bellicose farmer, standing up with distended nostrils and the expression which in the prize ring is called being a glutton.
Now, the combination in Cobbett of the deepest English humours and the love and understanding of England with this quality which is rare in England, the aggressive and challenging quality, is a sort of coincidence or contradiction which gave him his whole value in our politics and history. It was exactly because he was English in everything else, and not English in this, that he did serve England, and very nearly saved England. He very nearly saved her from that oppression by oblivion, that absent-minded cruelty of the mere capitalist, which has now brought upon her such accumulated and appalling problems in the industrial world. He was capable of being candid about cruelty; and indeed of being cruel about cruelty. He would not let sleeping dogs lie; he also would not let progressive politicians lie. While a rather oily optimism was being applied like oil, lie rubbed in his pessimism like pepper. To a society that was more and more covering itself up with its own superficial success, he was always deliberately digging up the mass of submerged failure. To use a metaphor that would have appealed to him, he was always refusing to judge our society by the top-layer of apples or strawberries in the basket, and always declaring that the shopkeeper was a swindler and the fruit underneath was rotten. While the whole of that version of things afterwards called Victorian was gently pressing everybody to judge England by an idealised version of the public schoolboy and the gentleman, he delighted to pester our very imagination with beggars and tramps. While the New Poor Law was putting away such people in prisons and police institutions, he delighted to exhibit them with all their sores like the cripples on the steps of a church in Italy.
But though in this he was an exception among Englishmen, he was still an English exception among Englishmen. The distinction should be understood; somewhat in the same sense, in spite of what is said to the contrary, a man like Parnell was an exception among Irishmen, but a purely Irish exception. Cobbett represented one piece of England awake where much of England was asleep: he represented certain English things in revolt that are commonly in repose. But his way of reaching even these was very national; since it was very casual and almost entirely experimental. He did not start with theories but with things; with the things he saw. A philosophy can be deduced from his comments; but we do not feel that they were deduced from a philosophy.
Lastly, he embodied the English paradox: because he was a sort of poet whose ideal was prose. He was easily infuriated; and he would have been immensely infuriated at being called a poet; or, still more, being called a mystic. But there was much more poetry in him than he knew. There was even much more mysticism in him than he knew; for a simple man is a mystery to himself. And nothing is more notable in the great panorama of the Rural Rides than the fact that he often sees things in an epical and symbolical fashion which others saw in a very material or mechanical fashion. To take only one instance: all the books and speeches and pamphlets of the latter period of his life are full of allusions to Old Sarum. It was, of course, the outstanding, not to say outrageous example of the anomalies of the unreformed representative system; a place that had practically ceased to exist without ceasing to send legislators to make laws for England. There are any number of jokes and anecdotes and debates and diatribes about Old Sarum; but they are all concerned with it as something on a map or even in a table of figures. The joke is an abstract and arithmetical joke. The idea of anybody going to Old Sarum would seem somehow like going to the Other End of Nowhere. It is intensely characteristic of Cobbett that for him alone Old Sarum was a place; and because it happened to be a high and hilly place, it stood up in his imagination with the monstrosity of a mountain. He called it the Accursed Hill. That single title, compared with the terms used by, pamphleteers and politicians, has in it something of the palpable apocalypse. We can fancy him seeing it afar off from some terrace of hills looking over the coloured counties, as some primitive traveller might have fancied he saw afar off the peak of Purgatory, or the volcanic prison of the Titans. He hated it not as arithmetical anomalies can be hated; but as places can be hated, which is almost as persons can be hated. And in all this, as compared with the contemporary rationalism, there was more mysticism precisely because there was more materialism. There is almost in such a combination a sort of sacrament of hate. His feeling about the sin and shame of Sarum was of the same moral type as the feeling about the sanctity of the other Sarum, which might have been felt by some ardent devotee of the Use of Sarum. But in that sense Cobbett could not see the u se of Sarum.
This imaginative quality in the man is all the more interesting because it is partly unconscious and partly suppressed. In so far as he had an imaginative concept of himself, we might almost say it was the concept of not being imaginative. Even the world which has understood him so little has at least understood that he was essentially and emphatically English. But perhaps the most English thing about him was that he contrived by sheer poetry to picture himself as prosaic. He was so imaginative that he imagined himself to be merely a plain man. This is really an illusion that explains much of the history of John Bull; as indeed it explains the whole legend and ideal of John Bull. As poets dream not of a poet but of a hero, so a nation of poets has called up as its ideal the vision of a practical man. But in Cobbett’s time, and especially in Cobbett’s case, what there was of illusion in this was quite innocent; and he did not know that there was anything spiritual or elemental about him. That universe that exists in the brain of every man was then rather by way of being a buried universe; and those were few who, like Blake and Swedenborg, dived after its submerged stars. In the Age of Reason there was some tendency for the soul to become the subconsciousness. Cobbett certainly was cheerfully unconscious of having any subeonsciousness. I shudder to think what would have happened to anybody who had told him he had a complex; and indeed there was very little complex about him. In that sense he believed in reason as rigidly as Tom Paine; and the world in which he moves over downland and dale and country town is eternally in the broad daylight. But there is one passage in that practical pilgrimage in which we do get a glimpse of those deeper things, at once more dark and more illuminated. It is all the more moving because it comes quite without warning in the middle of that quiet and unpretentious narrative, and with one turn takes on the character of some terrible allegory. There is something about it mysterious and macabre, like a dark woodcut of Albert Durer.
He describes how he came in his careful wanderings to a district in which the large estates had been reorganised by new landlords of a certain kind; landlords named Ricardo and Baring and other rather foreign and financial names, whom he was wont to name very frankly. All day his heart had grown heavier with the increasing sense that the country was passing into the hands of these oriental merchants, and he was probably brooding, as he often did, on the very darkest version of their history and character, when he saw a strange object or ornament or accident standing up in those smooth and well-ordered grounds neatly fenced from the road. It was actually in the shape of a cross; `big enough and broad enough to crucify a man on.’ With something that makes his staccato style sound for the first time like broken speech, he repeats more than once, `Aye, big enough and broad enough to crucify a man on.’ And then he says that his horse, who was accustomed to the ambling trot with which he rambled about for his adventures, was startled by the spur or the gesture which urged him to sudden activity. He must have gone, he says, at a great and very uncommon pace as he got away from that place. `I think he [meaning the horse] must often have wondered what gave me wings that once and that once only.’
That curious incident is all the more impressive because Cobbett tells it with powerful restraint and saying as little as may be of its emotional side. He who flung fierce words about like a fury slinging flame, always had a rather fine instinct of sobriety and simplicity when it came to the few things, rather in the background of his mind, which he did really though vaguely reverence. But in this ease something rather more unusual and even uncanny was involved. A man has been pottering about from farm to farm and town to town on a trotting horse, inspecting crops, making notes about wages, cocking an eye at the weather and calling for a glass of ale at the inn; but all with the sense that this older England is passing away, and feeling it more and more as he comes nearer to Surrey and the suburbs, or to the great new estates run by the new gentry. Their names are strange names; and he has suspicions that even those names are not always their own. Their faces are strange faces; associated in his mind with sketches of eastern travel or with pictures in the family Bible. They are very busy; very orderly; in their own way very philanthropic. But what are they doing, what are they driving at, what is the ultimate design by which they build? There lies like a load upon him the impression that the whole world is being reformed; and it is being reformed wrong. The world’s great age begins anew; and it begins wrong. He cannot think where it will all end; what form so foreign and perhaps formless a growth is ultimately meant to take. And then he sees, standing up quite neat and new and solid in the sunlight, something that seems crude and freshly carpentered and yet frightfully familiar; not a. symbol but rather a substantial purpose; not an emblem but an end. And we know not what shock of revelation or revulsion all but unhorsed that strong rider as on the road to Damascus; something indescribable, overwhelming a plain man in a passion of subtleties, that had no outlet but a rush of flight; and far away down the darkling English lanes the throb and thunder of the flying hooves. For that unholy cross the heathen saw stood up still ugly and unsanctified; black against the daybreak of the world, the shape of shame; and saving such a strange flash of reversion, the cross no Christian will ever see.
CHAPTER VII
LAST DAYS AND DEATH
A MERE outline of the career of Cobbett has been broken or interrupted here for the sake of two studies of his literary personality. That outline left him in England after his second return from the United States. The time of his return was largely the time of his triumph; in spite of, or rather because of, the tumultuous hour in which he returned. In this period he received all the highest compliments which he was ever likely to receive. He was hailed as a democratic deliverer, not only by his own natural following among the farm-labourers of the southern shires, but by the grim and growing power of the Trades Unions of the Midlands and the North. He was given a great public banquet and toasted with tremendous enthusiasm. He was invited, in many times and places daring these later years, to stand for Parliament. He was eventually elected to Parliament. If the Reform Government had really been a Reform Government, he might have been a Minister in it or received any honour that popular government could bestow. In any case he received, in this his time of honour, the highest of all these honours. He was prosecuted by the Government for sedition.
