THE LONG IMPRISONMENT
Ralegh's efforts to avert complete ruin—True greatness—Keeps in touch with life—First two years—The history—The first sentence—Reasons for incompleteness—James's dislike of the work—Its greatness.
Such things happened in actual life at the beginning of the seventeenth century. There was the same fantastic blending in life of melodrama and farce and poetry as was shown upon the stage. Beaumont and Fletcher, wild and exaggerated as they often appear, gave as faithful a picture of the life around them as Bernard Shaw gives of modern life; and in some ways they gave a more faithful picture, for they had no principle which they desired to inculcate, and a principle, though it is a fine stimulant, is apt to be a sad distortioner. There exactly lies the salient point of contrast between that century and modern times. Life then was confined and intense—with limitless possibilities. The pageant passed compact, and yet in gorgeous disarray. Art was informed by its positive spirit; glowed with animation at its touch. Life has become vast and voluminous; its horizon seems limited, as though for a time it had outgrown its strength, and was sprawling. The pageant crawls by in its interminable length, and yet in dully determined order. Art lives by battling against its dreadful hold—the hold that slowly fastens and stifles with its long, persistent tentacles. The apathy of convention gradually settled, like an obscuring mist, but new knowledge is scattering the mist like a wind, and knowledge brings new responsibilities and fresh life and fresh light. The sun peers through the clouds, and the sun will lend warmth and colour to the pageant.
But such things happened at the beginning of the seventeenth century in actual life. That farce at the scaffold was the first manifestation that King James gave in England of his royal power.
Ralegh was taken from Winchester to the Tower on December 16. His future life was now dreadfully apparent to him. His lot was confinement. But not yet was his indomitable spirit of life dead. Crushed he felt and pinioned, but still he was obliged to strain every nerve to force all that could be forced from the life that henceforward awaited him. He could not submit in proud, becoming silence, as a fabled hero would undoubtedly have done, and as the code of present honour would have him submit—a code which, it is well to remember, is considerably assisted in its conduct by the press.
The only possibility of living with any pretence of decency lay in the favour of other men, who must on no account be permitted to forget him. It is unwise to praise the work which he accomplished in captivity, and to censure him for employing the only possible means in his power to get that work accomplished.
Again he put all his strength into the only task left him, and he succeeded in saving something from the ruin of his estates and the complete curtailment of his liberty, by renewed supplication. Being a man of vivid imagination, he entered so completely into the part which was forced upon him—the part of supplicator—that his letters are the letters of the broken man that he wished to appear, and that his future work proved conclusively he was not. How little his spirit was broken is seen from the tremendous work which he undertook, and from the personal influence which he continued to exercise, and which his imprisonment did not seem to lessen. The scope of his activity was limited, but his activity did not abate.
His letters of supplication throw a light upon the nature of a great man. They show something of that strange quality which men call greatness. Ralegh was not a little man magnified by position or circumstances. He was a great man. Not in success is greatness apparent, not in attainment, but in effort, in vitality, in power of feeling and in control—but essentially in power of feeling. That power broke even the barrier of Ralegh's immense self-control—for a time only.
A great man does not walk exalted, like some demi-god to whom all things are easy; he knows dismay, he knows weakness, and all the legion of infirmities, but in spite of all, he wrests from life what life must yield him.
Ralegh had lost the Governorship of Jersey, the Patent of the Wine Office, the Wardenship of the Stannaries, the Rangership of Gillingham Forest, and the Lieutenancy of Portland Castle, from which together he drew an income of £3000 a year; men to whom he owed money fastened upon his estate at Sherborne. It was to save Sherborne from them that he did his utmost. Lord Cecil came to his assistance: "A secound effect of your Lordship's great favor was the preservation of my moveabells, which the ravenus Sherifs were in hand to have seised, and att my gates to have rifled, if your Lordship's letters had not then cum to have countermanded it; which it also pleased yow, soon after, to procure me."