Politics are not statesmanship. Mr Freeman confused the two. There rang from his successor a truer note when, as he traversed the seas that bind the links of the Empire, he penned those words that appeal to the sons of an imperial race, sunk in the strife of parties or the politics of a parish pump, to rise to the level of their high inheritance among the nations of the earth. What was the Empire, what was India—we all remember that historic phrase—to one whose ideal, it would seem, of statesmanship, was that of an orator in Hyde Park? Godwine, the ambitious, the unscrupulous agitator, is always for him 'the great deliverer'. Whether in the Sicily of the 'tyrants', or the England of Edward the Confessor, we are presented, under the guise of history, with a glorification of demagogy.
No man ever deserved a higher or a more lasting place in national gratitude than the first man who, being neither King nor Priest, stands forth in English history as endowed with all the highest attributes of the statesman. In him, in those distant times, we can revere the great minister, the unrivalled parliamentary leader, the man who could sway councils and assemblies at his will, etc., etc.[162]
We know of whom the writer was thinking, when he praised that 'irresistible tongue';[163] he had surely before him a living model, who, if not a statesman, was, no doubt, an 'unrivalled parliamentary leader'. Do we not recognize the portrait?—
The mighty voice, the speaking look and gesture of that old man eloquent, could again sway assemblies of Englishmen at his will.[164]
The voice which had so often swayed assemblies of Englishmen, was heard once more in all the fulness of its eloquence.[165]
But it was not an 'irresistible tongue', nor 'the harangue of a practised orator', of which England stood in need. Forts and soldiers, not tongues, are England's want now as then. But to the late Regius Professor, if there was one thing more hateful than 'castles', more hateful even than hereditary rule, it was a standing army. When the Franco-German war had made us look to our harness, he set himself at once, with superb blindness, to sneer at what he termed 'the panic', to suggest the application of democracy to the army, and to express his characteristic aversion to the thought of 'an officer and a gentleman'.[166] How could such a writer teach the lesson of the Norman Conquest?
'The long, long canker of peace' had done its work—'vivebatur enim tunc pene ubique in Anglia perditis moribus, et pro pacis affluentia deliciarum fervebat luxus.'[167] The land was ripe for the invader, and a saviour of Society was at hand. While our fathers were playing at democracy, watching the strife of rival houses, as men might now watch the contest of rival parties, the terrible Duke of the Normans was girding himself for war. De nobis fabula narratur.
[1] Mr T. A. Archer (Contemporary Review, March 1893, p. 336).
[2] Mr Freeman saw nothing grotesque in Orderic's description of Exeter, as 'in plano sita' (Norm. Conq., iv. 153), though its site 'sets Exeter distinctly among the hill cities' (Freeman's Exeter, p. 6).
[3] That I may not be accused of passing over any defence of Mr Freeman, I give the reference to Mr Archer's letter in Academy of November 4, 1893, arguing, as against Mr Harrison, that the story of a great 'naval engagement' in 1066 may probably be traced 'to the seaside associations of the name Hastings'. Unfortunately for him, Mr Freeman himself had quoted this wild story (iii. 729) and suggested quite a different explanation, namely, that it originated, not in the Battle of Hastings, but in some real 'naval operations'.
[4] Since this passage appeared in print my opponents themselves have written of the Battle of Hastings [sic], and Mr Archer has admitted that 'to speak of Senlac in ordinary conversation, or in ordinary writing, is a piece of pedantry' (Academy ut supra). On my own use of the word before I had examined Mr Freeman's authority, see p. [273].