Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/48

42 could find. He thought he found it in the crown. He thought the Parliament a less available power or purchase than the crown. He thought renovation more possible by means of the triumph of the crown than by means of the triumph of the Parliament. He thought the triumph of the Parliament the greater leap into chaos. He may have been wrong. Whether a better result might have been got out of the Parliament's defeat than was got out of its triumph, we can never know. What is certain is that the Parliament's triumph did bring things to a dead-lock, that the nation reverted to the monarchy, and that the final victory was neither for Stuarts nor Puritans. And it could not be for either of them, for the cause of neither was sound. Falkland had lucidity enough to see it. He gave himself to the cause which seemed to him least unsound, and to which "honesty," he thought, bound him; but he felt that the truth was not there, any more than with the Puritans—neither the truth nor the future. This is what makes his figure and situation truly tragic. For a sound cause he could not fight; he could only fight for the least bad of two unsound ones. "Publicans and sinners on the one side," as Chillingworth said, "scribes and Pharisees on the other." And Falkland had, I say, the lucidity of mind and the largeness of temper to see it.

Shall we blame him for his lucidity of mind and largeness of temper? Shall we even pity him? By no means. They are his great title to our veneration. They are what make him ours; what link him with the nineteenth century. He and his friends, by their heroic and hopeless stand against the inadequate ideals dominant in their time, kept open their communications with the future, lived with the future. Their battle is ours too, and that we pursue it with fairer hopes of success than they did, we owe to their having waged it and fallen. To our English race, with its insularity, its profound faith in action, its contempt for dreamers and failers, inadequate ideals in life, manners, government, thought, religion, will always be a source of danger. Energetic action makes up, we think, for imperfect knowledge. We think that all is well, that a man is following "a moral impulse, if he pursues an end which he deems of supreme importance." We impose neither on him nor on ourselves the duty of discerning whether he is right in deeming it so. Hence our causes are often as small as our noise about them is great. To see people busy themselves about Ritualism, that question of not the most strong-minded portion of the clergy and laity, or to see them busy themselves about that "burning question" of the fierce and acrimonious political dissenters, the burials, leading up to the "burning question" of disestablishment, one might sometimes fancy that the whole English nation, as in Chillingworth's time it was divided into two great hosts of "Publicans and sinners on the one side, scribes and Pharisees on the other," so in ours it was going to divide itself into two vast camps of simpletons here, under the command, suppose, of Mr. Beresford Hope, and of savages there, under the command of Mr. Henry Richard. And it is so notorious that great movements are always led by aliens to the sort of people who make the mass of the movement—by gifted outsiders—that I shall not be suspected of implying that Mr. Beresford Hope is a simpleton or Mr. Henry Richard a savage. But what we have to do is to raise and multiply in this country a third host, with the conviction that the ideals both of simpletons and savages are profoundly inadequate and profoundly unedifying, and with the resolve to win victory for a better ideal than that of either of them.

Falkland and his friends had in their day a like task. On the one hand was the royalist party, with its vices, its incurable delusions; on the other, the Puritans, with their temper, their false, old-Jewish mixture of politics with an ill-understood religion. I should have been glad to say not a word against Hampden in his honorable grave. But the lovers of Hampden cannot forbear to extol him at Falkland's expense. Alas! yet with what benign disdain might not Jesus have whispered to that exemplary but somewhat Philistine Buckinghamshire squire, seeking the Lord about militia or ship-money: "Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you?"

No; if we are to find a martyr in the history of the great Civil War, let it be Falkland. He was the martyr of lucidity of mind and largeness of temper, in a strife of imperfect intelligences and tempers illiberal. Like his friend Hales of Eton, who in our century will again, he too, emerge, after having been long obscured by the Lauds and the Sheldons, by Owen the dreariest of theologians and Baxter the king of bores—like Hales, Falkland in that age of harsh and rancorous tempers was "of a nature so kind, so sweet, that it was near as easy a task for any one to become so knowing as so oblig-