Essays in Rebellion

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

It has been an age of rebels in letters as in life. Of course, acquiescent writers have existed as well, just as in the Ark (to keep up the illustration) vegetarians stood side by side with carnivors, and hoofs were intermixed with claws. The great majority have, as usual, supported traditional order, have eulogised the past or present, and been, not only at ease in their generation, but enraptured at the vision of its beneficent prosperity. Such were the writers and orators whom their contemporaries hailed as the distinctive spokesmen of a happy and glorious time, leaping and bounding with income and population. But, on looking back, we see their contemporaries were entirely mistaken. The people of vital power and prolonged, far-reaching influence—the "dynamic" people—have been the rebels. Wordsworth (it may seem strange to include that venerable figure among rebels, but so long as he was more poetic than venerable he stood in perpetual rebellion against the motives, pursuits, and satisfactions of his time)—Wordsworth till he was forty-five, Byron all his short life, Newman, Carlyle, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin—among English writers those have proved themselves the dynamic people. There are many others, and many later; but we need recall only these few great names, far enough distant to be clearly visible. It was they who moved the country, shaking its torpor like successive earthquakes. Risen against the conceit of riches, and the hypocrisies of Society, against unimpassioned and unimaginative religion, against ignoble success and the complacent economics that hewed mankind into statistics to fit their abstractions—one and all, in spite of their variety or mutual hostility, they were rebels, and their personality expressed itself in rebellion. That was the common characteristic of their "style."

In other parts of Europe, from Faust, which opened the nineteenth century, onward through Les Miserables to The Doll's House and Resurrection, it was the same. As, in political action, Russia hardly ceased to rebel, France freed herself three times, Ireland gave us the line of rebels from Robert Emmet to Michael Davitt, and all rebellion culminated in Garibaldi, so the most vital spirits in every literature of Europe were rebels. Perhaps it is so in all the greatest periods of word and deed. For examples, one could point rapidly to Euripides, Dante, Rabelais, Milton, Swift, Rousseau—men who have few attributes in common except greatness and rebellion. But, to limit ourselves to the familiar period of the last three or four generations, the words, thoughts, and actions most pregnant with dynamic energy have been marked with one mark. Rebellion has been the expression of a century's personality.

Of course, it is very lamentable. Otium divos—the rebel, like the storm-swept sailor, cries to heaven for tranquillity. It is not the hardened warrior, but only the elegant writer who, having never seen bloodshed, clamours to shed blood. All rebels long for a peace in which it would be possible to acquiesce, while they cultivated their minds and their gardens, employing the shining hour upon industry and intellectual pursuits. "I can say in the presence of God," cried Cromwell, in the last of his speeches, "I can say in the presence of God, in comparison with whom we are but poor creeping ants upon the earth,—I would have been glad to have lived under my woodside, to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than undertaken such a Government as this." Every rebel is a Quietist at heart, seeking peace and ensuing it, willing to let the stream of time glide past without his stir, dreading the onset of indignation's claws, stopping his ears to the trumpet-call of action, and always tempted to leave vengeance to Him who has promised to repay. If reason alone were his guide, undisturbed by rage he would enjoy such pleasure as he could clutch, or sit like a Fakir in blissful isolation, contemplating the aspect of eternity under which the difference between a mouse and a man becomes imperceptible. But the age has grown a skin too sensitive for such happiness. "For myself," said Goethe, in a passage I quote again later in this book, "For myself, I am happy enough. Joy comes streaming in upon me from every side. Only, for others, I am not happy." So it is that the Hound of another's Hell gives us no rest, and we are pursued by Furies not our own.

In spite of the longing for tranquillity, then, we cannot confidently hope that rebellion will be less the characteristic of the present generation than of the past. It is true, we are told that, in this country at all events, the necessity for active and political rebellion is past. However much a man may detest the Government, he is now, in a sense, governed with his own consent, since he is free to persuade his fellow-citizens that the Government is detestable, and, as far as his vote goes, to dismiss his paid servants in the Ministry and to appoint others. Such securities for freedom are thought to have made active and political rebellion obsolete. This appears to be proved even by the increasingly rebellious movement among women, as unenfranchised people, excluded from citizenship and governed without consent. For women are in rebellion only because they possess none of those securities, and the moment that the securities are ensured them, their rebellion ceases. It has only arisen because they are compelled to pay for the upkeep of the State (including the upkeep of the statesmen) and to obey laws which interfere increasingly more and more with their daily life, while they are allowed no voice in the expenditure or the legislation. Whence have originated, not only tangible and obvious hardships, but those feelings of degradation, as of beings excluded from privileges owing to some inferiority supposed inherent—those feelings of subjection, impotence, and degradation which, more even than actual hardships, kindle the spirit to the white-hot point of rebellion.

This democratic rising against a masculine oligarchy ceases when the cause is removed, and the cause is simple. Similarly, the revolts of nationalism against Imperial power, though the motives are more complicated, usually cease at the concession of self-government. But even if these political and fairly simple motives to rebellion are likely soon to become obsolete in our country and Empire, other and vaguer rebellious forms, neither nationalist nor directly political, appear to stand close in front of us, and no one is yet sure what line of action they will follow. Their line of action is still obscure, though both England and Europe have felt the touch of general or sympathetic strikes, and of "sabotage," or wilful destruction of property rather than life—the method advocated by Syndicalists and Suffragettes to rouse the sleepy world from indifference to their wrongs. In this collection of essays, contributed during the last year or two, as occasion arose, to the Nation and other periodicals, I have included some descriptions of the causes likely to incite people to rebellion of this kind. Such causes, I mean, as the inequality that comes from poverty alone—the physical unfitness or lack of mental opportunity that is due only to poverty. Those things make happiness impossible, for they frustrate the active exercise of vital powers, and give life no scope. During a generation or so, people have looked to the Government to mitigate the oppression of poverty, but some different appeal now seems probable. For many despair of the goodwill or the power of the State, finding little in it but hurried politicians, inhuman officials, and the "experts" who docket and label the poor for "institutional treatment," with results shown in my example of a workhouse school.