§ 6. BRITAIN'S WORLD-MISSION: THE WITNESS
OF THE DEAD TO THE MANDATE OF THE PRESENT
Yet with a resolution as deep-hearted as the gladiator's it is for another cause and unto other ends that the empires of the world have striven, fulfilled their destiny and disappeared, that this Empire of Britain now strives, fulfilling its destiny. Fixed in her resolve, the will of God behind her, whither is her immediate course? The narrow space of the path in front of her that is discernible even dimly—whither does it tend or appear to tend?
Empires are successive incarnations of the Divine ideas, and by a principle which, in its universality and omnipotence in the frame of Nature, seems itself an attribute of the Divine, the principle of conflict, these ideas realize their ends in and through conflict. The scientific form which it assumes in the hypothesis of evolution is but the pragmatic expression of this mystery. Here is the metaphysical basis of the Law of Tragedy, the profoundest law in human life, in human art, in human action. And thus that law, which, as I pointed out, throws a vivid light upon the first essential transformation in the life-history of a State dowered with empire, offers us its aid in interpreting the last transformation of all.
The higher freedom of man in the world of action, and reverie in the domain of thought, are but two aspects of the idea which Imperial Britain incarnates, just as Greek freedom and beauty were aspects of the idea incarnate in Hellas.
The spaces of the past are strewn with the wrecks of dead empires, as the abysses where the stars wander are strewn with the dust of vanished systems, sunk without a sound in the havoc of the aeons. But the Divine presses on to ever deeper realizations, alike through vanished races and through vanished universes.
Britain is laying the foundations of States unborn, civilizations undreamed till now, as Rome in the days of Tacitus was laying the foundations of States and civilizations unknown, and by him darkly imagined. For Justice men turn to the State in which Justice has no altar,[[10]] Freedom no temple; but a higher than Justice, and a greater than Freedom, has in that State its everlasting seat. Throughout her bounds, in the city or on the open plain, in the forest or in the village, under the tropic or in the frozen zone, her subjects shall find Justice and Freedom as the liberal air, so that enfranchised thus, and the unfettered use of all his faculties secured, each may fulfil his being's supreme law.
The highest-mounted thought, the soul's complete attainment, like the summits of the hills, can be the possession only of the few, but the paths that lead thither this empire shall open to the daring climber. Humanity has left the Calvinist and Jacobin behind. And thus Britain shall become the name of an ideal as well as the designation of a race, the description of an attitude of mind as well as of traits of blood.
Europe has passed from the conception of an outwardly composed unity of religion and government to the conception of the inner unity which is compatible with outward variations in creeds, in manners, in religions, in social institutions. Harmony, not uniformity, is Nature's end.
Dante, as the years advanced and the poet within him thrust aside the Ghibelline politician, the author of the De Monarchia, discerned this ever more clearly. Contemplating the empires of the past, he felt the Divine mystery there incarnate as profoundly as Polybius. In the fourteenth century he dares to see in the Roman people a race not less divinely missioned than the Hebrew. Though contemporary of the generation whose fathers had seen the Inquisition founded, yet like an Arab soufi, Dante, the poet of mediaevalism, points to the spot of light far-off, insufferably radiant, yet infinitely minute, the source and centre of all faiths, all creeds, all religions, of this universe itself, and all the desires of men. In an age which silenced the scholastics he founded Hell in the Ethics of Aristotle, as on a traced plan, and he who in his childhood had heard the story of the great defeat, and of the last of the crusading kings borne homewards on his bier, dares crest his Paradise with the dearest images of Arab poetry, the loveliness of flame and the sweetness of the rose.
What does this import, unless that already the mutual harmonies of the wide earth and of the stars had touched his listening soul, that already he who stayed to hear Casella sing heard far off a diviner music, the tones of the everlasting symphony played by the great Musician of the World, the chords whereof are the deeds of empires, the achievements of the heroes of humanity, and its most mysterious cadences are the thoughts, the faiths, the loftiest utterances of the mind of man?