_ Our Parliamentary Candidate--or Prospective Candidate, as we cautiously call him--has been visiting us, and invited me to sit on the platform and give the speeches my moral support. I like our candidate, who is young, ardent, good-natured, and keeps his temper when he is heckled; seems, indeed, to enjoy being heckled, and conciliates his opponents by that bright pugnacity which a true Briton loves better than anything else in politics. I appreciate, too, the compliment he pays me. But I wish he would not choose to put his ardour in competition with Sirius and the dog-days; and I heartily wish he had not brought down Mr. Blank, M.P., to address us in his support.
Mr. Blank and I have political opinions which pass, for convenience, under a common label. Yet there are few men in England whose attitude of mind towards his alleged principles I more cordially loathe. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I think him a hypocrite. But he has chosen the side which is mine, and I cannot prevent his saying a hundred things which I believe.
We will suppose that Mr. Blank is a far honester fellow than I am able to think him. Still, and at the best, he is a sort of composite photograph of your average Member of Parliament--the type of man to whom Great Britain commits the direction of her affairs and, by consequence, her well-doing and her well-being and her honour. Liberal or Conservative, are not the features pretty much the same? a solid man, well past fifty, who has spent the prime of his life in business and withdrawn from it with a good reputation and a credit balance equally satisfactory to himself and his bankers. Or it may be that he has not actually retired but has turned to politics to fill up those leisure hours which are the reward or vexation (as he chooses to look at them) of a prosperous man of business; for, as Bagehot pointed out, the life of a man of business who employs his own capital, and employs it nearly always in the same way, is by no means fully employed. "If such a man is very busy, it is a sign of something wrong. Either he is working at detail, which subordinates would do better, or he is engaged in too many speculations." In consequence our commerce abounds with men of great business ability and experience who, being short of occupation, are glad enough to fill up their time with work in Parliament, as well as proud to write M.P. after their names. For my part I can think of nothing better calculated to reassure anyone whose dreams are haunted by apprehensions of wild-cat legislative schemes, or the imminence of a Radical millennium, than five minutes' contemplation of our champions of progress as they recline together, dignified and whiskered and bland, upon the benches of St. Stephen's.
But let us proceed with our portrait, which I vow is a most pleasing one. Our typical legislator is of decent birth, or at least hopeful of acquiring what he rightly protests to be but 'the guinea stamp' by judiciously munificent contributions to his party's purse; honest and scrupulous in dealing; neither so honest nor so scrupulous in thinking; addicted to phrases and a trifle too impatient of their meaning, yet of proved carefulness in drawing the line between phrase and practice; a first-rate committeeman (and only those who have sat long in committee can sound the depths of this praise); locally admired; with much _bonhomie_ of manner, backed by a reputation for standing no nonsense; good-tempered, honestly anxious to reconcile conflicting interests and do the best for the unconflicting ones of himself and his country; but above all a man who knows where to stop. I vow (I repeat) he makes a dignified and amiable figure. One can easily understand why people like to be represented by such a man. It gives a feeling of security--a somewhat illusory one, I believe; and security is the first instinct of a state. One can understand, why the exhortations, dehortations, precepts, and instructions of parents, preachers, schoolmasters tend explicitly and implicitly to the reproduction of this admired bloom.
Yet one may whisper that it has--shall we say?--its failings; and its failings are just those which are least to be commended to the emulation of youth. It is, for instance, constitutionally timid. Violent action of any kind will stampede it in a panic, and, like the Countess in _Evan Harrington_, it "does not ruffle well." It betrays (I think) ill-breeding in its disproportionate terror whenever an anarchist bomb explodes, and in the ferocity of its terror it can be crueller than the assailant. "My good people," it provokes one to say, "by all means stamp out these dangers, but composedly, as becomes men conscious of their strength. Even allowing for the unscrupulousness of your assailant, you have still nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand of the odds in your favour; and so long as you answer the explosions of weak anarchy by cries suggestive of the rage of the sheep, you merely raise the uncomfortable suspicion that, after all, there must be something amiss with a civilisation which counts you among its most expensive products."
But in the untroubled hour of prosperity this weakness of breeding is scarcely less apparent. Our admired bloom is admired rather for not doing certain things than for doing others. His precepts are cautious and mainly negative. He does not get drunk (in public at any rate), and he expends much time and energy in preventing men from getting drunk. But he does not lead or heartily incite to noble actions, although at times-- when he has been badly frightened--he is ready to pay men handsomely to do them. He wins and loses elections on questions of veto. He had rather inculcate the passive than the active virtues. He prefers temperance and restraint to energy and resolve. He thinks more of the organisation than the practice of charity, esteems a penny saved as three halfpence gained, had liefer detect an impostor than help a deserving man. He is apt to label all generous emotions as hysterical, and in this he errs; for when a man calls the generous emotions hysterical he usually means that he would confuse them with hysterics if they happened to him.
Now the passive virtues--continence, frugality, and the like--are desirable, but shade off into mere want of pluck; while the active virtues--courage, charity, clemency, cheerfulness, helpfulness--are ever those upon which the elect and noble souls in history have laid the greater stress. I frankly detest Blank, M.P., because I believe him to be a venal person, a colourable (and no doubt self-deceiving) imitation of the type. But, supposing him to be the real thing, I still think that, if you want a model for your son, you will do better with Sir Philip Sidney. If ever a man illustrated the beauty of the active virtues in his life and in his death, that man was Sidney; but he also gave utterance in noble speech to his belief in them. In the _Apologie for Poetrie_ you will find none of your art-for-art's-sake chatter: Sidney boldly takes the line that poetry helps men, and helps them not to well-being only, but to well-doing, and again helps them to well-doing not merely by teaching (as moral philosophy does) but by inciting. For an instance--
"Who readeth AEneas carrying old Anchises on his back that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so-excellent an act?" There speaks, anticipating Zutphen, the most perfect knight in our history. Again--
"Truly I have known men that even with reading _Amadis de Gaule_ (which, God knoweth, wanteth much of a perfect poesy) have found their hearts moved to the exercise of courtesy, liberality, and especially courage."-- All active virtues be it noted. "We are not damned for doing wrong," writes Stevenson, "but for not doing right. Christ will never hear of negative morality: _Thou shalt_ was ever His word, with which He superseded _Thou shalt not_. To make our morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto. . . . In order that a man may be kind and honest it may be needful that he should become a total abstainer: let him become so then, and the next day let him forget the circumstance. Trying to be kind and honest will require all his thoughts." Yet how many times a day will we say 'don't' to our children for once that we say 'do'? But here I seem to be within reasonable distance of discussing original sin, and so I return to Mr. Blank.
I do not like Mr. Blank; and I disliked his speech the other night so heartily that it drove me to sit down when I reached home and put my reflections into verse; into a form of verse, moreover, which (I was scornfully aware) Mr. Blank would understand as little as the matter of it. He would think them both impractical. Heaven help the creature!
CHANT ROYAL OF HIGH VIRTUE.
Who lives in suit of armour pent,
And hides himself behind a wall,
For him is not the great event,
The garland, nor the Capitol.
And is God's guerdon less than they?
Nay, moral man, I tell thee Nay:
Nor shall the flaming forts be won
By sneaking negatives alone,
By Lenten fast or Ramazan,
But by the challenge proudly thrown--
_Virtue is that beseems a Man!_
God, in His Palace resident
Of Bliss, beheld our sinful ball,
And charged His own Son innocent
Us to redeem from Adam's fall.
--"Yet must it be that men Thee slay."
--"Yea, tho' it must must I obey,"
Said Christ,--and came, His royal Son,
To die, and dying to atone
For harlot and for publican.
Read on that rood He died upon--
_Virtue is that beseems a Man!_
And by that rood where He was bent
I saw the world's great captains all
Go riding to the tournament--
Cyrus the Great and Hannibal,
Caesar of Rome and Attila,
Lord Charlemagne with his array,
Lord Alisaundre of Macedon--
With flaming lance and habergeon
They passed, and to the rataplan
Of drums gave salutation--
_Virtue is that beseems a Man!_
Had tall Achilles lounged in tent
For aye, and Xanthus neigh'd in stall,
The towers of Troy had ne'er been shent,
Nor stay'd the dance in Priam's hall.
Bend o'er thy book till thou be grey,
Read, mark, perpend, digest, survey--
Instruct thee deep as Solomon--
One only chapter thou shalt con,
One lesson learn, one sentence scan,
One title and one colophon--
_Virtue is that beseems a Man!_
High Virtue's hest is eloquent
With spur and not with martingall:
Sufficeth not thou'rt continent:
BE COURTEOUS, BRAVE, AND LIBERAL.
God fashion'd thee of chosen clay
For service, nor did ever say
"Deny thee this," "Abstain from yon,"
Save to inure thee, thew and bone,
To be confirmed of the clan
That made immortal Marathon--
_Virtue is that beseems a Man!_
ENVOY.
Young Knight, the lists are set to-day:
Hereafter shall be long to pray
In sepulture with hands of stone.
Ride, then! outride the bugle blown
And gaily dinging down the van
Charge with a cheer--Set on! Set on!
_Virtue is that beseems a Man!_
A friend to whom I showed these verses remarked that Mr. Blank was indeed a person who fed his soul upon negatives; but that I possibly did him some injustice in charging so much of this to timidity, whereas the scent lay rather in the gusto with which he judged his fellow-men.
"And, by the way," said he, "is there not some gusto in the scorn with which you are judging Mr. Blank at this moment?" "Do you remember," I answered, "how that man, after voting for war the other day, went straight off to a meeting of the Peace Society and put up a florid appeal to the Prince of Peace for a time when wars should be no more? Let him be, however: I do wrong to lose my temper with him. But on this matter of national timidity I have something to say. . . ."
I have been reading John Holland's two _Discourses of the Navy_, written in 1638 and 1659, and published the other day by the Navy Records Society. The object of Mr. Holland's discourses was to reform the Navy, purge it of abuses, and strengthen it for the defence of this realm; and I have been curious to compare his methods with those of our own Navy League, which has been making such a noise for ten years or so. The first thing I observe is the attitude of mind in which he approaches his subject:--
"If either the honour of a nation, commerce or trust with all nations, peace at home, grounded upon our enemies' fear or love of us abroad, and attended with plenty of all things necessary either for the preservation of the public weal or thy private welfare, be things worthy thy esteem (though it may be beyond thy shoal conceit) then next to God and thy King give thy thanks for the same to the Navy. As for honour, who knows not (that knows anything) that in all records of late times of actions, chronicled to the everlasting fame and renown of this nation, still the naval part is the thread that runs through the whole wooft, the burden of the song, the scope of the text? . . ." He proceeds to enumerate some particular commercial advantages due to our mastery of the sea, and sums up in these words:--
"Suffice it thus far, nothing under God, who doth all, hath brought so much, so great commerce to this Kingdom as the rightly noble employments of our navy; a wheel, if truly turned, that sets to work all Christendom by its motion; a mill, if well extended, that in a sweet yet sovereign composure contracts the grist of all nations to its own dominions, and requires only the tribute of its own people, not for, but towards, its maintenance." The eloquence may be turgid, but the attitude is dignified. The man does not scold; does not terrify. He lays his stress on the benefits of a strong navy--on the renown it has won for England in the past. He assumes his readers to be intelligent men, amenable to advice which will help them to perpetuate this renown and secure these benefits in time to come. His exordium over, he settles down to an exposition of the abuses which are impairing our naval efficiency, and suggests reforms, some wisely conceived, others not so wisely, with the business-like, confident air of one who knows what he is talking about.
Now I open the prospectus in which our Navy League started out to make everyone's flesh creep, and come plump upon language of this sort:--
"It is the close, let us suppose, of our second month of war. The fleet has been neglected, and has been overwhelmed, unready and unprepared. We have been beaten twice at sea, and our enemies have established no accidental superiority, but a permanent and overwhelming one. The telegraph cables have been severed, one and all; these islands are in darkness."-- For presumably the gas-mains, as well as the cables, have been 'severed' (imposing word!)--
--"Under a heavy cloud of woe. Invasion is in the air, our armies are mustering in the south. We are cut off from the world, and can only fitfully perceive what is happening. Our liners have been captured or sunk on the high seas; our ocean tramps are in our enemies' hands; British trade is dead, killed by the wholesale ravages of the hostile cruisers. Our ports are insulted or held up to ransom, when news reaches us from India it is to the effect that the enemy is before our troops, a native insurrection behind. Malta has fallen, and our outlying positions are passing from our hands. Food is contraband, and may not be imported. Amid the jeers of Europe 'the nation of shopkeepers' is writhing in its death agony." Pretty, is it not? But let us have just a little more.
"COMMERCIAL COLLAPSE.
"And what of the internal, of the social position? Consols have fallen to nearly 30; our vast investments in India have been lost; trade no longer exists. . . . The railways have no traffic to carry. . . . Banks and companies are failing daily. . . The East End of London is clamouring for bread and peace at any price. If we fall, we fall for ever. . . . The working man has to choose whether he will have lighter taxation for the moment, starvation and irretrievable ruin for the future . . ." --And so on, till Z stands for Zero, or nothing at all. Or, as the late Mr. Lear preferred to write:--
"Z said, 'Here is a box of Zinc, Get in, my little master! We'll shut you up; we'll nail you down: we will, my little master! We think we've all heard quite enough of this your sad disaster!'" To speak as seriously as may be, the language is no longer hortatory, like Holland's, but minatory, even comminatory. It is (as its author would not deny) the language of panic deliberately employed, a calculated attempt to strengthen the _materiel_ of the navy at the cost of Englishmen's fears. Now let me define my feeling towards the Navy League. As an ordinary British citizen, I must heartily approve its aim of strengthening the navy and keeping it efficient. As an ordinary reasonable man, I must admit that its efforts, if rightly directed, may be of great national service. But language such as I have quoted must (so far as it is not merely contemptible) be merely demoralising, and anyone who works on the fears of a nation--and especially of a nation which declines conscription and its one undoubted advantage of teaching men what war means--does a harm which is none the less wicked for being incalculable. These Navy Leaguers cry incessantly for more _material_ strength. They tell us that in material strength we should at least be equal to any two other countries. A few months pass, and then, their appetite growing with the terror it feeds upon, they insist that we must be equal to any three other countries. Also "it does not appear," they sagely remark, "that Nelson and his contemporaries left any record as to what the proportion of the blockading should bear (_sic_) to one blockaded,"--a curious omission of Nelson's, to be sure! He may perhaps have held that it depended on the quality of the antagonists.
To this a few ordinary stupid Britons like myself have always answered that no amount of _materiel_ can ever replace _morale_; and that all such panic-making is a mischievous attempt to lower the breed, and the more mischievous because its mischief may for a while be imperceptible. We can see our warships growing: we cannot see the stamina decaying; yet it is our stamina on which we must rely finally in the fatal hour of trial. We said this, and we were laughed at; insulted as unpatriotic--a word of which one may say in kindness that it would not so readily leap to the lips of professional patriots if they were able to understand what it means and, by consequence, how much it hurts.
Yes, and behold, along comes Admiral Togo, and at one stroke proves that we were simply, absolutely and henceforward incontestably right! What were our little three-power experts doing on the morrow of Togo's victory? They are making irrelevant noises in the halfpenny press, explaining how Admiral Togo did it with an inferior force, and in a fashion that belies all their axioms. But I turn to _The Times_ and I read:--
"The event shows that mere material equality is but as dust in the balance when weighed in the day of battle against superiority of moral equipment." --Which, when you come to think of it, is precisely what Bacon meant when he wrote:--
"Walled Townes, stored Arcenalls and Armouries, Goodly Races of Horse, Chariots of Warre, Elephants, Ordnance, Artillery and the like: all this is but a Sheep in a Lion's skin except the Breed and disposition of the People be stout and warlike. Nay, Number (it selfe) in Armies importeth not much where the People is of weake Courage: For (as _Virgil_ saith) _it never troubles a Wolfe how many the Sheepe be_." Do our friends of the Navy League seriously believe that a principle as old as humankind can be suddenly upset by the invention of a submarine or of some novelty in guns? Even in their notions of what material strength means I hold them to be mistaken. The last resource which a nation ought to neglect is its financial credit. It was Walpole's long policy of peace which made possible Pitt's conquests. But I hold with far stronger conviction that he does wickedly who trades on a nation's cowardice to raise money for its protection. An old text, my masters! It seems a long while that some of us were preaching it in vain until Admiral Togo came along and proved it.
I observe that a Member of Parliament for a West of England constituency (a better fellow than Mr. Blank, too) has been using one of the arguments with which these precious experts attacked me; that because I sometimes write novels I cannot be supposed to think seriously on public affairs. My only wonder is that those who hold this cloistral view of the province of a man of letters consider him worthy to pay income-tax.
I pass over some tempting reflections on the queer anomaly that this prohibition should be addressed (as it so often is) by writers to writers, by newspaper writers to men who write books, and (so far as a distinction can be drawn) by men who write in a hurry to men who write deliberately. I wish to look quietly into the belief on which it rests and to inquire how that belief was come by.
There certainly was a time when such a belief would have been laughed at as scarcely reasonable enough to be worth discussing. And that time, oddly enough, was almost conterminous with the greatest era of the world's literature, the greatest era of political discovery, and the greatest era of Empire-making. The men who made Athens and the men who made Rome would have disputed (I fear somewhat contemptuously) the axiom on which my friend the West Country member builds his case. They held it for axiomatic that the artist and man of letters ought not to work in cloistral isolation, removed from public affairs, and indifferent to them; that on the contrary they are direct servants of their State, and have a peculiar call to express themselves on matters of public moment. To convince you that I am not advancing any pet theory of my own let me present it in the words of a grave and judicious student, Mr. W. J. Courthope, late Professor of Poetry at Oxford:--
"The idea of the State lay at the root of every Greek conception of art and morals. For though, in the view of the philosopher, the virtue of the good citizen was not always necessarily identical with the virtue of the individual man, and though, in the city of Athens at all events, a large amount of life was possible to the individual apart from public interests, yet it is none the less true that the life of the individual in every Greek city was in reality moulded by the customary life, tradition and character, in one intranslatable word, by the _ethos_ of the State. Out of this native soil grew that recognised, though not necessarily public, system of education (_politike paideia_ ), consisting of reading and writing, music and gymnastic, which Plato and Aristotle themselves accepted as the basis of the constitution of the State. But this preliminary education was only the threshold to a subsequent system of political training, of which, in Athens at least, every citizen had an opportunity of availing himself by his right to participate in public affairs; so that, in the view of Pericles, politics themselves were an instrument of individual refinement. 'The magistrates,' said he, in his great funeral oration, 'who discharge public trusts, fulfil their domestic duties also; the private citizen, while engaged in professional business, has competent knowledge of public affairs; for we stand alone in regarding the man who keeps aloof from these latter not as harmless, but as useless. Moreover, we always hear and pronounce on public matters when discussed by our leaders, or perhaps strike out for ourselves correct reasonings upon them; far from accounting discussion an impediment to action, we complain only if we are not told what is to be done before it becomes our duty to do it.'
"The strenuous exertion of the faculties of the individual in the service of the State, described in these eloquent words, reflects itself in the highest productions of Greek art and literature, and is the source of that 'political' spirit which every one can detect, alike in the poems of Homer and the sculpture of the Parthenon, as the inspiring cause of the noblest efforts of imitation. It prevailed most strongly through the period between the battle of Marathon and the battle of Chaeronea, and has left its monuments in such plays as the _Persae_ and _Eumeuides_ of AEschylus, the _Antigone_ of Sophocles, the _Clouds_ of Aristophanes, the History of Thucydides and the Orations of Demosthenes, its last embodiment being perhaps the famous oath of that orator on the souls of those who risked their lives at Marathon."--_History of English Poetry_, vol. i., c 2. In the most brilliant age of Greece, then, and of Greek art and letters, the civic spirit was the inspiring spirit. But as the Greek cities sank one by one before the Macedonian power and forfeited their liberties, this civic spirit died for lack of nourishment and exercise, and literature was driven to feed on itself--which is about the worst thing that can ever happen to it, and one of the worst things that can happen to a nation. The old political education gave place to an 'encyclopaedic' education. The language fell into the hands of grammarians and teachers of rhetoric, whose inventions may have a certain interest of their own, but--to quote Mr. Courthope again--no longer reflect the feelings and energies of free political life. Roman literature drives home the same, or a similar, moral. "The greatness of Rome was as entirely civic in its origin as that of any Greek city, and, like the Greek cities, Rome in the days of her freedom, and while she was still fighting for the mastery, preserved a system of political education, both in the hearth and the Senate, which was suited to her character. Cato, the Censor, according to Plutarch, 'wrote histories for his son, with his own hand, in large characters; so that without leaving his father's house he might gain a knowledge of the illustrious actions of the ancient Romans and the customs of his country': and what is of importance to observe," adds Mr. Courthope, "is that, even after the introduction of Greek culture, Cato's educational ideal was felt to be the foundation of Roman greatness by the orators and poets who adorned the golden age of Latin literature." The civic spirit was at once the motive and vitalising force of Cicero's eloquence, and still acts as its antiseptic. It breaks through the conventional forms of Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, and declares itself exultantly in such passages as the famous eulogy--
"Sed neque Medorum silvae, ditissima terra,
Nec pulcher Ganges atque auro turbidus Hermus
Laudibus Italiae certent. . . ."
It closes the last Georgic on a high political note. Avowedly it inspires the _AEneid_. It permeates all that Horace wrote. These two poets never tire of calling on their countrymen to venerate the Roman virtues, to hold fast by the old Sabine simplicity and:
"Pure religion breathing household laws." Again, when the mischief was done, and Rome had accepted the Alexandrine model of education and literary culture, Juvenal reinvoked the old spirit in his denunciation of the hundred and more trivialities which the new spirit engendered. It was a belated, despairing echo. You cannot expect quite the same shout from a man who leads a forlorn sortie, and a man who defends a proud citadel while yet it is merely threatened. But, allowing for changed circumstances, you will find that Juvenal's is just the old civic spirit turned to fierceness by despair. And he strikes out unerringly enough at the ministers of Rome's decline--at the poets who chatter and the rhetoricians who declaim on merely 'literary' topics; the rich who fritter away life on private luxuries and the pursuit of trivial aims; the debased Greek with his "smattering of encyclopaedic knowledge," but no devotion to the city in which he only hopes to make money.
Now is this civic spirit in literature (however humble its practitioners) one which England can easily afford to despise? So far as I know, it has been reserved for an age of newspapers to declare explicitly that such a spirit is merely mischievous; that a poet ought to be a man of the study, isolated amid the stir of passing events, serenely indifferent to his country's fortunes, or at least withholding his gift (allowed, with magnificent but unconscious irony, to be 'divine') from that general contribution to the public wisdom in which journalists make so brave a show. He may, if he have the singular luck to be a Laureate, be allowed to strike his lyre and sing of an _accouchement_; this being about the only event on which politicians and journalists have not yet claimed the monopoly of offering practical advice. But farther he may hardly go: and all because a silly assertion has been repeated until second-rate minds confuse it with an axiom. People of a certain class of mind seem capable of believing anything they see in print, provided they see it often. For these, the announcement that somebody's lung tonic possesses a peculiar virtue has only to be repeated at intervals along a railway line, and with each repetition the assurance becomes more convincing, until towards the journey's end it wears the imperativeness almost of a revealed truth. And yet no reasonable inducement to belief has been added by any one of these repetitions. The whole thing is a psychological trick. The moral impressiveness of the first placard beyond Westbourne Park Station depends entirely on whether you are travelling from London to Birmingham, or from Birmingham to London. A mind which yields itself to this illusion could probably, with perseverance, be convinced that pale pills are worth a guinea a box for pink people, were anyone interested in enforcing such a harmless proposition: and I have no doubt that the Man in the Street has long since accepted the reiterated axiom that a poet should hold aloof from public affairs, having no more capacity than a child for understanding their drift.
Yet, as a matter of fact, the cry is just a cant party trick, used by each party in its turn. Mr. Kipling writes "Cleared," Mr. Alfred Austin hymns "Jameson's Ride," and forthwith the Liberals lift hands and voices in horror. Mr. Watson denounces the Armenian massacres or the Boer War, and the Unionists can hardly find words to express their pained surprise. Mr. Swinburne inveighed against Irishmen, and delighted a party; inveighed against the Czar, and divided a whole Front Bench between shocked displeasure and half-humorous astonishment that a poet should have any opinions about Russia, or, having some, should find anybody to take them seriously. It is all cant, my friends--nothing but cant; and at its base lies the old dispute between principle and casuistry. If politics and statecraft rest ultimately on principles of right and wrong, then a poet has as clear a right as any man to speak upon them: as clear a right now as when Tennyson lifted his voice on behalf of the Fleet, or Wordsworth penned his 'Two Voices' sonnet, or Milton denounced the massacres at Piedmont. While this nation retains a conscience, its poets have a clear right and a clear call to be the voice of that conscience. They may err, of course; they may mistake the voice of party for the voice of conscience: 'Jameson's Ride' and 'The Year of Shame'--one or both--may misread that voice. Judge them as severely as you will by their rightness or wrongness, and again judge them by their merits or defects as literature. Only do not forbid the poet to speak and enforce the moral conviction that is in him.
If, on the other hand, politics be a mere affair of casuistry; or worse--a mere game of opportunism in which he excels who hits on the cleverest expedient for each several crisis as it occurs; then indeed you may bid the poet hush the voice of principle, and listen only to the sufficiently dissonant instruction of those specialists at the game who make play in Parliament and the press. If politics be indeed that base thing connoted by the term "_drift_ of public affairs," then the axiom rests on wisdom after all. The poet cannot be expected to understand the "drift," and had better leave it to these specialists in drifting.
But if you search, you will find that poetry--rare gift as it is, and understood by so few--has really been exerting an immense influence on public opinion all the while that we have been deluged with assertions of this unhappy axiom. Why, I dare to say that one-half of the sense of Empire which now dominates political thought in Great Britain has been the creation of her poets. The public, if it will but clear its mind of cant, is grateful enough for such poetry as Mr. Kipling's 'Flag of England' and Mr. Henley's 'England, my England'; and gratefully recognises that the spirit of these songs has passed on to thousands of men, women, and children, who have never read a line of Mr. Henley's or Mr. Kipling's composition.
As for the axiom, it is merely the complement of that 'Art for Art's sake' chatter which died a dishonoured death but a short while ago, and which it is still one of the joys of life to have outlived. You will remember how loftily we were assured that Art had nothing to do with morality: that the novelist, e.g. who composed tales of human conduct, had no concern with ethics--that is to say with the principles of human conduct: that "Art's only business was to satisfy Art," and so forth. Well, it is all over now, and packed away in the rag-bag of out-worn paradoxes; and we are left to enjoy the revived freshness of the simple truth that an artist exists to serve his art, and his art to serve men and women. _