the French Revolution took a character which essentially distinguished it from such movements as these. These were, in the main, disinterestedly intellectual and spiritual movements; movements in which the human spirit looked for its satisfaction in itself and in the increased
7 . Greek tragedian (ca. 496?406 B.C.E.) . Pindar man of Athens during the period of the city's most (518- 438 B.C.E.), Greek lyric poet. outstanding achievements in art, literature, and 8. Elizabeth I (1533-1603; reigned 1558-1603). politics. Pericles (ca. 495?429 B.C.E.), the leading states
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play of its own activity. The French Revolution took a political, practical character. The movement, which went on in France under the old regime, from 1700 to 1789, was far more really akin than that of the Revolution itself to the movement of the Renascence; the France of Voltaire and Rousseau9 told far more powerfully upon the mind of Europe than the France of the Revolution. Goethe reproached this last expressly with having 'thrown quiet culture back.'1 Nay, and the true key to how much in our Byron, even in our Words- worth, is this!?that they had their source in a great movement of feeling, not in a great movement of mind. The French Revolution, however?that object of so much blind love and so much blind hatred?found undoubtedly its motive power in the intelligence of men, and not in their practical sense; this is what distinguishes it from the English Revolution of Charles the First's time.2 This is what makes it a more spiritual event than our Revolution, an event of much more powerful and worldwide interest, though practically less successful; it appeals to an order of ideas which are universal, certain, permanent. 1789 asked of a thing, Is it rational? 1642 asked of a thing, Is it legal? or, when it went furthest, Is it according to conscience? This is the English fashion, a fashion to be treated, within its own sphere, with the highest respect; for its success, within its own sphere, has been prodigious. But what is law in one place is not law in another; what is law here today is not law even here tomorrow; and as for conscience, what is binding on one man's conscience is not binding on another's. The old woman who threw her stool at the head of the surpliced minister in St. Giles's Church at Edinburgh3 obeyed an impulse to which millions of the human race may be permitted to remain strangers. But the prescriptions of reason are absolute, unchanging, of universal validity; to count by tens is the easiest way of counting?that is a proposition of which everyone, from here to the Antipodes, feels the force; at least I should say so if we did not live in a country where it is not impossible that any morning we may find a letter in the Times declaring that a decimal coinage is an absurdity.4 That a whole nation should have been penetrated with an enthusiasm for pure reason, and with an ardent zeal for making its prescriptions triumph, is a very remarkable thing, when we consider how little of mind, or anything so worthy and quickening as mind, comes into the motives which alone, in general, impel great masses of men. In spite of the extravagant direction given to this enthusiasm, in spite of the crimes and follies in which it lost itself, the French Revolution derives from the force, truth, and universality of the ideas which it took for its law, and from the passion with which it could inspire a multitude for these ideas, a unique and still living power; it is?it will probably long remain?the greatest, the most animating event in history. And as no sincere passion for the things of the mind, even though it turn out in many respects an unfortunate passion, is ever quite thrown away and quite barren of good, France has reaped from hers one fruit?the natural and legit
9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Swiss-3. In 1637 rioting broke out in Scotland against a bom French philosopher and political theorist. new kind of church service prescribed by Charles Voltaire (1694?1778), pen name of the French I. The riot was started by an old woman hurling a writer Francois Marie Arouet. stool at a clergyman, whom she accused of saying 1. See 'Vier Jahreszeiten Herbst' (1796) in his Mass. Werke (1887) 1.354. 4. In 1863 a proposal in Parliament to introduce 2. Disputes between Charles I (1600-1649; the French decimal system for weights and meareigned 1625?49) and Parliament led in 1642 to sures had provoked articles in the London Times civil war and ultimately to the king's beheading. defending the English system (of ounces and (Eleven years later his son, Charles II, was recalled pounds or inches and feet) as more practical. Decfrom exile and proclaimed king.) imal coinage was finally instituted in 1971.
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imate fruit though not precisely the grand fruit she expected: she is the country
in Europe where the people is most alive. But the mania for giving an immediate political and practical application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. Here an Englishman is in his element: on this theme we can all go on for hours. And all we are in the habit of saying on it has undoubtedly a great deal of truth. Ideas cannot be too much prized in and for themselves, cannot be too much lived with; but to transport them abruptly into the world of politics and practice, violently to revolutionize this world to their bidding?that is quite another thing. There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed. A member of the House of Commons said to me the other day: 'That a thing is an anomaly, I consider to be no objection to it whatever.' I venture to think he was wrong; that a thing is an anomaly is an objection to it, but absolutely and in the sphere of ideas: it is not necessarily, under such and such circumstances, or at such and such a moment, an objection to it in the sphere of politics and practice. Joubert' has said beautifully: 'C'est la force et le droit qui reglent toutes choses dans le monde; la force en attendant le droit.'?'Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.' Force till right is ready; and till right is ready, force, the existing order of things, is justified, is the legitimate ruler. But right is something moral, and implies inward recognition, free assent of the will; we are not ready for right?right, so far as we are concerned, is not ready?until we have attained this sense of seeing it and willing it. The way in which for us it may change and transform force, the existing order of things, and become, in its turn, the legitimate ruler of the world, should depend on the way in which, when our time comes, we see it and will it. Therefore for other people enamored of their own newly discerned right, to attempt to impose it upon us as ours, and violently to substitute their right for our force, is an act of tyranny, and to be resisted. It sets at nought the second great half of our maxim, force till right is ready. This was the grand error of the French Revolution; and its movement of ideas, by quitting the intellectual sphere and rushing furiously into the political sphere, ran, indeed a prodigious and memorable course, but produced no such intellectual fruit as the movement of ideas of the Renascence, and created, in opposition to itself, what I may call an epoch of concentration. The great force of that epoch of concentration was England; and the great voice of that epoch of concentration was Burke.6 It is the fashion to treat Burke's writings on the French Revolution as superannuated and conquered by the event; as the eloquent but unphilosophical tirades of bigotry and prejudice. I will not deny that they are often disfigured by the violence and passion of the moment, and that in some directions Rurke's view was bounded, and his observation therefore at fault. But on the whole, and for those who can make the needful corrections, what distinguishes these writings is their profound, permanent, fruitful, philosophical truth, They contain the true philosophy of an epoch of concentration, dissipate the heavy atmosphere which its own nature is apt to engender round it, and make its resistance rational instead of mechanical.
But Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought
5. Joseph Joubert (1754-1824), French moralist statesman and author of Reflections on the French about whom Arnold wrote in his Essays in Criti-Revolution (1790), which expressed the conservacism. tive opposition to revolutionary theories. 6. Edmund Burke (1729?1797), prominent
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