i believe more and more that there are no trivialities but only truths neglected; but the things i myself neglect accumulate in mountains. i have made a note of one of them found in turning over the recent files of the nation. elsewhere was a reminder about a book i had long admired and enjoyed, but which had been crowded out of my mind by less pleasant things; the book of recollections about george wyndham, recently written by mr. charles gatty and published by mr. murray.[1] even now i cannot do justice to the book; but i know mr. gatty will approve of my saying a word to correct an injustice to the subject of the book.
some time ago the nation dismissed mr. gatty’s volume, not with disrespect, but with a certain distance and indifference evidently founded on a very mistaken idea. it implied that wyndham was after all an intellectual aristocrat, whose culture was that of a clique, and who did not test it enough in popular and practical politics. the point is interesting; chiefly because it is the precise reverse of the truth. if anything could narrow a man like wyndham, it was being political like the nation; what broadened him to a universal brotherhood was getting far from politics—like the nation. his private life was much larger than his public life; though that in turn was larger than most public lives in the parliamentary decline. being a politician, he had to be a parliamentarian; and being a parliamentarian, he had to be an oligarch. in so far as he did hold the aristocratic theory, it was exactly that aristocratic theory that forced him into political practice. he knew well enough, i think, that the english parliament is an aristocracy. he took the high ground of the responsibility of privilege; but he was far too sincere to deny that it was privilege. he said to a friend of mine, who thus lamented his laborious parliamentary botherations, “you see, i was born paid.” it was the aristocracy the nation reproves that necessitated the parliamentarism the nation desires or demands. personally, i should not desire either; and i think the real wyndham was in a larger world outside both. it was precisely where he was most domestic that he was most democratic. he was a poet among poets exactly as he might have been a pedestrian among pedestrians or, as he would have preferred to put it, a tramp among tramps. the sympathy with tramps might be taken literally; for i remember him defending the gipsies, when a more modern spirit wanted them taught the meaning of progress by being moved on by the police. he may have been right to work in cabinets and committees; but it was there, if anywhere, that he was in a clique. he may have been right not to follow his tastes, but it was his tastes that were popular and what many cliques would call vulgar. he may have been right not to be one of the idle rich, but he might have been even more superior to the limits of the rich, if he had been idler.
the beauty of mr. gatty’s book is that it is a brilliant scrap-book, the very variegated nature of which expresses this almost vagabond liberality. even when it merely notes down such things as single lines of shakespeare over which wyndham lingered, or reproduces corners of carving or painting which arrested his eye, the method seems to me to work rightly; it seems somehow natural to talk of every other subject besides the subject himself; as he was always ready to talk of every other subject. and this aspect, by itself, accentuates the feeling that his holidays were his most useful days. in this mood one may well wish that he had never been near what he himself called the cesspool of politics; and one might well accept the nation’s suggestion of his aloofness from its own favourite parliamentary business with a somewhat dry assent. wyndham certainly had little to do with the internal constructive legislation praised in progressive papers. he can claim none of the glory of the great social reforms of the period just before the war. he is not responsible for the permission to drag away a poor man’s child as a raving maniac, if his teacher thinks he is a little too stupid to learn, or his teacher is a little too stupid to teach him. he has not the honour of having abolished the habeas corpus act, in order to allow amateur criminologists to keep a tramp in prison until they have invented a science of criminology. he did not establish the labour exchanges, and probably did not want to establish them, any more than the labour exchanges vividly described in uncle tom’s cabin. it was not he who created by statute a servant class, of men made to spend their own wages on doctors they might never want, instead of on tools or tram-tickets they urgently wanted. he was largely detached from all this; and when reading a real record like mr. gatty’s one is moved to wish that he had been even more detached from it. considering the liberty of his philosophical friendships, one respects but regrets the loyalty of his political friendships; and is sorry that common sense must be sacrificed to practical politics.
but when a book like mr. gatty’s has moved a reviewer to this mood of mere regret for a poet wasted in politics, there returns upon him after all one answer which is itself unanswerable. judged by one ultimate test, he was after all right to remain in politics; even in the last putrefaction of parliamentary politics. at the price of nobody knows what pain and patience and contempt and concessions, he alone among modern politicians did leave not merely a name but a thing, that will remain after him as a scientific engine or a geographical discovery remains. he achieved a work which has changed the whole destiny of western europe; the resurrection of ireland. there he established the free peasant; a work organically different from all the modern reforms that are merely imposed, whether right or wrong, whether servile or socialist. it is the difference between planting a tree and building a tower; once planted, the tree lives by its own life. he and his admirers, myself among the number, might well be content to contemplate such a work without afterthoughts; if there were not laid upon us like a load of memories, and almost like a living chain, the love of england.
for england, alas! has made to-day the worst possible compromise between aristocracy and democracy. it has kept the aristocracy and lost the aristocrats. the country is still as much ruled by squires, but not so much by country gentlemen; and the reform of the house of lords seems to mean eliminating gentlemen and carefully preserving noblemen. it is as if there were a complaint of martial law; and it were met by keeping the whole machinery of militarism, but giving the arbitrary power to spies instead of soldiers. or it is as if reactionaries erected a despotism, and then called themselves reformers because they did not care what dirty fellow was despot. but remote as wyndham was from the sham gentry of the twentieth century, it would also be an error merely to merge him with the genuine gentry of the eighteenth. it would be to mark the type so as to miss the man. what distinguished him, as an individual, from good and bad squires, was something far older than squirarchy; the true sense of the squire expectant, eager to spring into the saddle of knighthood. his courage was far less static than that of a country gentleman. it was the thing in which a philologist might recognize that “courage” really means rushing; or from which a professor will probably some day prove that courage really means running away. he had that spiritual ambition which is itself the ascending flame of humility; and which has been wanting to the english since the squire grew greater than the knight. he seemed to await an adventure that never quite came to him on earth; and his life and death were swift, as if he were struck by lightning as with an accolade, or had won spurs that were wings upon the wind.
