Ch. 1 - The Victorian Compromise and its Enemies - Page 2

once shamefaced
and rowdy. If the matter be emotional, it must somehow be also broad,
common and comic, as "Wapping Old Stairs" and "Sally in Our Alley." If
it be patriotic, it must somehow be openly bombastic and, as it were,
indefensible, like "Rule Britannia" or like that superb song (I never
knew its name, if it has one) that records the number of leagues from
Ushant to the Scilly Isles. Also there is a tender love-lyric called "O
Tarry Trousers" which is even more English than the heart of _The
Midsummer Night's Dream_. But our greatest bards and sages have often
shown a tendency to rant it and roar it like true British sailors; to
employ an extravagance that is half conscious and therefore half
humorous. Compare, for example, the rants of Shakespeare with the rants
of Victor Hugo. A piece of Hugo's eloquence is either a serious triumph
or a serious collapse: one feels the poet is offended at a smile. But
Shakespeare seems rather proud of talking nonsense: I never can read
that rousing and mounting description of the storm, where it comes to--

"Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads, and _hanging_ them
With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds."

without seeing an immense balloon rising from the ground, with
Shakespeare grinning over the edge of the car, and saying, "You can't
stop me: I am above reason now." That is the nearest we can get to the
general national spirit, which we have now to follow through one brief
and curious but very national episode.

Three years before the young queen was crowned, William Cobbett was
buried at Farnham. It may seem strange to begin with this great
neglected name, rather than the old age of Wordsworth or the young death
of Shelley. But to any one who feels literature as human, the empty
chair of Cobbett is more solemn and significant than the throne. With
him died the sort of democracy that was a return to Nature, and which
only poets and mobs can understand. After him Radicalism is urban--and
Toryism suburban. Going through green Warwickshire, Cobbett might have
thought of the crops and Shelley of the clouds. But Shelley would have
called Birmingham what Cobbett called it--a hell-hole. Cobbett was one
with after Liberals in the ideal of Man under an equal law, a citizen of
no mean city. He differed from after Liberals in strongly affirming that
Liverpool and Leeds are mean cities.

It is no idle Hibernianism to say that towards the end of the eighteenth
century the most important event in English history happened in France.
It would seem still more perverse, yet it would be still more precise,
to say that the most important event in English history was the