ESSAYS IN REBELLION

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

NEIGHBOURS OF OURS: Scenes of East End Life.
IN THE VALLEY OF TOPHET: Scenes of Black Country Life.
THE THIRTY DAYS' WAR: Scenes in the Greek and Turkish War of 1897.
LADYSMITH: a Diary of the Siege.
CLASSIC GREEK LANDSCAPE AND ARCHITECTURE: Text to John Fulleylove's Pictures of Greece.
THE PLEA OF PAN.
BETWEEN THE ACTS: Scenes in the Author's Experience.
ON THE OLD ROAD THROUGH FRANCE TO FLORENCE: French Chapters to Hallam Murray's Pictures.
BOOKS AND PERSONALITIES: a volume of Criticism.
A MODERN SLAVERY: an Investigation of the Slave System in Angola and the Islands of San Thomé and Principe.
THE DAWN IN RUSSIA: Scenes in the Revolution of 1905-1906.
THE NEW SPIRIT IN INDIA: Scenes during the Unrest of 1907-1908.
ESSAYS IN FREEDOM.
THE GROWTH OF FREEDOM: a Summary of the History of Democracy.

ESSAYS IN REBELLION

PREFACE

When writers are so different, it is queer that every age should have a distinguishing spirit. Each writer is as different in "style" as in look, and his words reveal him just as the body reveals the soul, blazoning its past or its future without possibility of concealment. Paint a face, no matter how delicately or how thick; the very paint—the very choice of colours red or white—betrays the nature lurking beneath it, and no amount of artifice or imitation in a writer can obscure the secret of self. Artifice and imitation reveal the finikin or uncertain soul as surely as deliberate bareness reveals a conscious austerity. Except, perhaps, in mathematics, there seems no escape from this revelation. I am told that even in the "exact sciences" there is no escape; even in physics the exposition is a matter of imagination, of personality, of "style."

Next to mathematics and the exact sciences, I suppose, Bluebooks and leading articles are taken as representing truth in the most absolute and impersonal manner. We appeal to Bluebooks as confidently as to astronomers, assuming that their statements will be impersonally true, just as the curve of a comet will be the same for the Opposition as for the Government, for Anarchists as for Fabians. Yet what a difference may be detected in Bluebooks on the selfsame subject, and what an exciting hide-and-seek for souls we may there enjoy! Behind one we catch sight of the cautiously official mind, obsequious to established power, observant of accepted fictions, contemptuous of zeal, apprehensive of trouble, solicitous for the path of least resistance. Behind another we feel the stirring spirit that no promotion will subdue, pitiless to abomination, untouched by smooth excuses, regardless of official sensibilities, and untamed to comfortable routine, which, in his case, will probably be short.

Or take the leading article: hardly any form of words would appear less personal. It is the abstract product of what the editor wants, what the proprietor wants, what the Party wants, and what the readers want, just flavoured sometimes with the very smallest suspicion of what the writer wants. And yet, in leaders upon the same subject and in the same paper, what a difference, again! Peruse leaders for a week, and in the week following, with as much certainty as if you saw the animals emerging from the Ark, you will be able to say, "Here comes the laboured Ox, here the Wild Ass prances, here trips the Antelope with fairy footfall, here the Dromedary froths beneath his hump; there soars the Crested Screamer, there bolts the circuitous Hare, there old Behemoth wallows in the ooze, and there the swivel-eyed Chameleon clings along the fence."

If even the writers of Bluebooks and leading articles are thus as distinguishable as the animals which Noah had no difficulty in sorting into couples, such writers as poets, essayists, and novelists, who have no limit imposed upon their distinction, are likely to be still more distinct. Indeed, we find it so, for their work needs no signature, since the "style"—their way of looking at things—reveals it. And yet, though it is only the sum of all these separate personalities so diverse and distinct, each age or generation possesses a certain "style" of its own, unconsciously revealing a kind of general personality. Everyone knows it is as unnecessary to date a book as a church or a candlestick, since church and candlestick and book always bear the date written on the face. The literature of the last three or four generations, for instance, has been distinguished by Rebellion as a "style." Rebellion has been the characteristic expression of its most vital self.

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