WILLIAM COBBETT

by G.K.Chesterton



CONTENTS

CHAPTER III THE TRAGEDY OF THE PATRIOT

CHAPTER V THE AMATEUR HISTORIAN

CHAPTER VI THE RURAL RIDER






CHAPTER III

THE TRAGEDY OF THE PATRIOT

A book like this can be but a bare outline a life so full
as that of William Cobbett.  nevertheless an outline is needed,
and is an outline that is not often supplied.  is the advantage
of such a small scope that it can focus what often seems
formless and sprawling, through being too large to be seen.
Cobbett produced a vast and voluminous mass of work; and vast
and voluminous masses of work have been produced about Cobbett.
Most of it is interesting and much of it is true; but none
of it is the truth.  What is wanted in modern biography is
something as simple as the single line that marks the sweeping
curve or the sharp corner in a weather-chart, that yet more
simple line that runs round the nose or chin is a caricature.
There have been caricatures enough of Cobbett but they
caricatured the wrong features.  They missed the point.
The subject of Cobbett has been admirably simplified;
but when it has been simplified, it has been simplified wrong.

The story of Cobbett was a tragedy; a tragedy of a certain type.
It was the disillusionment of a patriot.  That defini­tion
covers all that is called its bewildering inconsistency.
I do not mean to imply that he lost his patriotism.
He most certainly retained it that was the tragedy.  But he began
by having the ordinary optimistic patriotism that looks outwards,
and it changed into a pessi­mistic patriotism that looked inwards.
His earlier and more cheerful attitude was one of mere defiance;
but it grew to be a much more gloomy attitude when it seriously
passed from defiance to defence.  It was like the difference between
a man blowing a trumpet and a man examining the condition of a gun.
But there was also bound up in it the whole business of the modern
economic problem; of the industrial individualism that produced
the proletarian peril; in short, the whole problem of modern England.
We may, say of Cobbett, as of more than one great man, that some of
the most important incidents in his life happened after he was dead.
But the truth to seize at this stage is the truth about this transition
from a sort of centrifugal nationalism, that was cheery and even cheeky,
to a sort of centripetal nationalism that was grave and even grim.
A modern writer, resembling Cobbett only in having proved that the highest
literary genius can be combined with publicity and popular journalism,
has called one of his books of essays An Englishman Looks at the World.
It would have fitted very well the first essays of Cobbett.
But the time came when a deeper, a darker, a more withering experience
might have carried the title:  An Englishman Looks at England.

The first fact about this first phase is that the patriotism
of Cobbett was the passionate patriotism of the exile.
He went to America while he was still quite young; so that even
his memories of England were almost memories of childhood.
They had not only the glamour of distance, but the glamour of
which Wordsworth wrote, the glory and the freshness of a dream.
The islands of the blest were supposed to lie to the west
like Atlantis; but every man who has really sailed to Atlantis
knows that the islands of the blest are left behind.
Certainly all the islanders who have ever set forth from these
islands to the modern Atlantis are at one in having that homing
imagination that wings its way backward into the sunrise.
Greatly as they have disagreed among themselves, they all agree
in that.  Perhaps the one rallying point for all Britons
is that their songs in America have been songs of exile.
The most familiar of them represents the Irishman with his bundle
bound for Philadelphia, or the Englishman whistling `Falmouth
is a fine town' as he walks down the street of Baltimore,
or the Scotsman rising to that high note not unworthy of
the waters of Babylon.

  But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
  And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

So strong is such a tradition that later generations will dream
of what they have never seen.  The nationalism is most intense where
the nation is only a name.  Irish American is more Irish than Irish.
The English colonial loyalist is more loyal than an Englishman.
The loves and hatreds harden in that hard air under those clear
skies of the western world.  They are unsoftened by all
internal doubts and criticisms that; from being on the spot.
But with Cobbett this ignorance of interior details combined
with the memories of one who had from childhood an eye
for detail, especially for the details of fields and skies.
He remembered England as a great green nursery; and felt
as homesick in America as a boy sent to a big, bare, strange,
uncomfortable boarding school.

Nowhere in the world does an Englishman feel so much a stranger
as in America.  He does not necessarily dislike America,
and Cobbett himself came to like it in the long run.
He simply feels it is a stranger place than France or Flanders
or Italy; that it is really the other side of the world
like the other side of the moon.  But if an Englishman still
feels like this, in spite of the hypnotism of the talk about
an Anglo-Saxon race and the hope of an Anglo-American alliance,
it was immeasur­ably more so when Cobbett landed in what had
quite recently been enemy territory.  He met not only an alien
atmosphere but a blast of hatred against England.

There were indeed some Americans who sympathised with
England as compared with France.  They were those grouped
around Hamilton, who being avowedly anti-popular in his
politics was not likely to be very popular in his personality.
They counted a certain number of New England Puritans; for almost
the only real resemblance between New England and Old England
was that neither of them could make head or tail of France.
But though historians divide American opinion into the French
party and the English party, I suspect that the atmosphere
of popular sympathy was far more French than English.
The whole romance of America consisted of rebellion against England;
except that part of it that consisted of rescue by France.
Nobody who knows what popular legends are like could expect the
princess suddenly to take the side of the dragon against St. George.
It was quite true, of course, that England was by no means
merely a dragon and France was by no means only a saint.
But in revolutions strong enough to over­throw all historic
authorities and create a new nationality there must be the sort
of impatient simplicity that sees characters in black and white;
and few men at that moment could persuade a real American
mob that England was not so black as she was painted.
Moreover, the men of that age did not talk about racial unity;
and they were bound to France by something like a religious unity.
To leave out the definite democratic creed in judging Jefferson and his
contemporaries is exactly like leaving Mahomedanism out of Mahomet.
England did not believe in that democratic creed; and, being honest
in those days, did not pretend to do so for a moment.
I take it that the air that Cobbett had to breathe was not only
American but Anti-English.

It is part of the picturesque combat of personalities throughout
his life that his first cockshy was, of all men in the world,
the famous Priestley, the Unitarian and friend of French or American
ideals in England.  Priestley was a type of the sort of idealist
whose ideals are pure but just a little perverse; the sort of
inter­nationalist who is specially unpopular among nationalists.
The slight superi­ority in the tone of such intellectuals
towards the popular patriotism of their hour aroused Cobbett
to a rage quite ignorant and incongruous and yet not unhealthy.
What probably made the re­fined Unitarian very annoying to the unrefined
Surrey farmer was the notion of attacking England in America.
For exile affected the Surrey farmer in quite the opposite way.
It drove him to repre­senting England as a sort of Eden from which
he and Dr. Priestley had been driven forth; only that Priestley
slan­dered that paradise and it was left for Cobbett to defend it.
In a series of furious pamphlets with the appropriate signature
of Peter Porcupine, he not only attacked the English democrats
but to a great extent the American democracy.  It is important
to note that his motive was much more patriotism than conservatism.
It is sometimes said that Cobbett began in pure conservatism;
men talk of him as a Tory from the start; but even from
the start the ease was more complex than that.  His old father
the farmer, if he was a Tory, was a Tory with ideas of his own,
for he defended the American rebels; and Cobbett had first gone
to America bearing a letter to the great Thomas Jefferson.
He did not defend England because England was monarchical and he was
a Royalist, or because England was aristocratic and he was a snob,
or because England was the home of Toryism and he was a Tory.
He defended England because England was attacked and he was
an Englishman; and his real rage was reserved for other Englishmen
who attacked her, or seemed to him not sufficiently to defend her.
For this reason he extrava­gantly abused Dr. Priestley, for this reason
he extravagantly abused Tom Paine, the author of The Age of Reason:
writing a bitter burlesque life of that author, full of innocent lies:
a story with a strange sequel.  For this reason he lectured
the wondering people of that western land about the beauty of
the British Consti­tution, of British laws, of British land­lords,
of British military policy, of almost everything, in fact,
that he was afterwards famous for rending and rolling in the mud.

Meanwhile his pamphleteering was getting better and better;
those quaint studies of English grammar in the corners of the cold
barracks at daybreak had trained him not only in language but in logic;
and the furious tenderness of exile gave him inspiration.  Towards the end
of his American visit he showed his uncontrollable fancy for having
a finger in every pie by denouncing an American doctor as a quack.
He lost his case and was cast in heavy damages so that he decided to quit
the country, leaving behind him a farewell address to the Americans,
one of the least friendly fare­wells to be found in literature.
This last American injustice, as he saw it, finally reconciled
him to his own country; and it was in a glow of romantic reaction
in favour of everything English that the exile re-entered England.
The crisis of his life came between that hour and the hour some
seventeen years later when he left it once more.

The Tories of England, waging war against Republicans
abroad and Radicals at home, naturally received the great
reactionary with a roar of welcome.  The most prominent figure
in the political group that received him was William Windham.
He was a fine specimen of the old English aristocrat;
that is, he was a Whig more Tory than the Tories.
He was a fine specimen of the cultivated gentleman and dilettante;
and therefore he was educated enough to see that the
un­educated demagogue was a genuine English man of letters.
He and his friends gave Cobbett the practical backing necessary
for the founding of the celebrated Cobbett's Register.
It may be well to remark that Cobbett's Register really was
Cobbett's. He retained his intellectual independence he made
no party compact with Windham or anybody else:  nay, he flatly
refused money from his friends in a way almost tartly honourable.
But Windham and he were at one with the enthusiasm with which
they flung their energies into the defence of Old England
against the French Revolution and its American sympathisers.
The swing and momentum of his American triumphs carried Cobbett
on like a tide, and he may well have felt that he was at the top
of his fortunes.  It was just about this time that curious
things began to happen.

All the time he had wandered on the bare baked prairies under
the hard white light of the western skies, he had remem­bered
the high green fields of his father's farm and the clouds
and the comfort of the rain.  For him even more than for Nelson,
and in another sense, there was something united and almost
interchange­able in the three terms of England, home, and beauty.
But his was no mere land­scape-painter's but a land-owner's
and a land-worker's love; and he pored more and more intently over
the practice and detail of the farming he had known in boyhood.
As he looked at crops or barns or orchards, it seemed as if the frown
on his shrewd square face became first thoughtful and then doubtful.
Things were not going well; and bit by bit he began to work out in
his own mind a notion of the cause.  For instance, it was essential
to true farming that the farmer should be secure on his farm.
If he was not legally and literally a peasant pro­prietor, he must
at least be rooted like a peasant.  At the moment peasants were
being rooted out like weeds instead of being rooted like trees.
Landlords were refusing to grant the long leases that gave a status
to a yeomanry; they were chop­ping them up into shorter terms,
and shifting and evicting for higher rents.  And when he looked for
the cause of this, he thought he had found it in the new fluctuation
of prices and even of the value of money; in the paper money that
symbolised to him such insecurity and shuffling and sharp practice.
It meant the destruction not only of the old sort of yeoman
but of the old sort of squire.  Stockbrokers and Jews and jobbers
from the town were driving out the national gentry; he would appeal
to the great leaders of the party of the gentry to save them.
He turned to his own Tory leaders, to Windham and the party of Pitt;
for they were the natural saviours of the green countryside from
this yellow fever of finance.

There is sometimes in a great comedy a scene of almost tragic irony,
when some simple character enters, eager, voluble, and full of
his subject, and pours it out quite confidently to a group of listeners.
It is long before even the spectator realises that the listeners
are very silent.  It is much longer before the speaker realises it.
It is long before even a hint leads him to look, at first with doubt
and at last with horror, at the significant and sinister smile
faintly present on all those unanswering faces.  That was the sort
of scene that occurred in history when Cobbett came rushing to his
Tory friends with his great scheme for saving English agriculture.
He did not understand that restrained smirk on the pinched face
of Pitt; that shadow of something like shame that may have rested
for a moment on the more generous face of Windham.  We could imagine
one of them looking at the ceiling and the other at the floor;
and neither answering a word.

For William Cobbett had not in fact the faintest notion of what manner
of men he served, or what sort of Govern­ment he was supporting.
If Cobbett eventually found that the Tories were not satisfactory,
it was for the very simple reason that he found that the Tories
were not Tories.  They may have had a desire to restore the old
regime in France, largely because it would mean France being less
vigorous and victorious than under the new regime of Napoleon.
But they had not the faintest desire to save the old regime in England.
Why should they?  Men like Pitt and Perceval and the rest were more
entangled with the new world than ever they were with the old; and were
in much closer touch with the stockbrokers than with the farmers.
Above a11 they had no notion of what Cobbett was talking about when
he talked of giving the farmer the stability of a yeoman.  The only laws
they could imagine as applicable to rural life were the game laws.
For that purpose perhaps it was desirable that the country should continue
to exist.  It was seldom possible to start a hare in Lombard Street,
and quite awkward to shoot a partridge in Threadneedle Street.
Otherwise there was really no reason why Lombard Street and
Threadneedle Street should not extend to the ends of the earth.
The educated class in England knew much more about preserving pheasants
than peasants:  it was an aitch they were very careful not to drop.

The biographies of Cobbett commonly say that he began life
as a Tory and after­wards changed his politics and became a sort
of Radical.  The proportions of this picture are misleading.
Cobbett was never anything that an enemy would call a turncoat
or a friend would call a brand from the burning.  There is no sharp
break in his life, breaking the very back­bone of his principles;
such as there is in the life of a penitent or the life of a traitor.
It is not true that he belonged successively to two parties:
it is much truer to say that he never belonged to any.
But in so far as there were elements of the Radical in him
at the end, there had been traces of them from the begin­ning.
And in so far as he was in one sense a Tory at the beginning,
he re­mained a Tory to the end.  The truth is that the confusion
was riot in Cobbett but in the terms Tory and Radical.
They are not exact terms; they are nothing like so exact as Cobbett was.
His general position is intrinsically quite clear and, as men go,
quite consistent.  It was the Tories who were not clear about Toryism.
It was the Radicals who were inconsistent about Radicalism.
I do not mean that he had no inconsistencies; he had a great many.
He had all those inconsistencies of mere verbal variation which are
almost invariable in a man who throws himself with equal vehemence into
the proving of many different propositions in many different connections.
But the incon­sistencies of Cobbett were very superficial;
much more superficial than the changes in most political careers.
The man who played Peter Porcupine in America did not differ so much
from the man who brought the bones of Tom Paine like holy relics
to England as the Disraeli of the Revolutionary Epick differed
from the Disraeli of the Primrose League, or the Gladstone who was
the hope of the stern and unbending Tories from the Glad­stone
who was the idol of the Radicals and Nonconformists.

Cobbett was a very consistent man, in every essential sense.
It was the parties claiming or repudiating him who were
quite inconsistent.  To understand the point it is necessary
to refer briefly to the history of those parties.  There had
once been something like a real war between Whigs and Tories.
It was the real war between aristocracy and mon­archy;
two mortal enemies who have wrestled through all history.
But in England aristocracy had won.  Formal histories tell us that
the Crown passed from the House of Stuart to the House of Brunswick.
But in fact, while the Stuarts lost it, the Brunswicks never got it.
The old original Crown the Stuarts had worn was thrown away
with the Great Seal, when James the Second fled to France.
The young George the Third had indeed tried to recover it with
the aid of a Scottish Tory; just as the young Charles Edward
had tried to recover it with the aid of the Scottish Jacobites.
But it never was recovered.  A loyalty to it lingered in
middle-class and especially literary circles; as in Johnson
and Goldsmith and many of the wisest and best indi­vidual
thinkers of the eighteenth century.  Cobbett came a little too
late in time and a little too low in the social scale to touch
this old and intelligent Tory middleclass before it died out.
I do not know whether he realised how often he visited
the Deserted Village in the course of the Rural Rides.
Johnson he regarded with one of those accidental animosities
that justified to some extent his reputation for mere spite.
Cobbett had a prejudice against Johnson; which is all the more
amusing because it was exactly the sort of prejudice that
Johnson might have had against him.  Cobbett regarded Johnson
as a mere pedantic pensioner; and Johnson would very possibly
have regarded Cobbett as he regarded Wilkes, more or less
in the abstract as a dirty demagogue.  So many things united
these two great Englishmen, and not least their instinctive
embodiment of England; they were alike in their benevolent bullying,
in something private and practical, and very much to the point
in their individual tenderness, in their surly sympathy for
the Catholic tradition, in their dark doubts of the coming time.
But above all they were united by the thing that divided them:
the most genial and humane of all forms of hatred; their passionate
and personal hatred of people they had never seen.

In any case, Cobbett was born long after the true Tory monarchy
had died, and he never quite understood its tradition.
If he grew up a Tory and in some sense remained a Tory,
it was in somewhat vaguer traditions that he was tradi­tional. He
liked old customs and the continuity of family life to be found
in the countryside; he loved England in a sense that was very real
and unfortunately very rare.  I mean that it was a positive love
that looked inwards upon the beloved; and not merely a negative
love that looked outwards for rivals or remote imitations.
If this sort of love of what is national and normal be
called conservative, certainly that character was rooted in him.
But what was called his Radicalism was equally radical.
He realised by the light of nature the last deductions of the
democratic speculators in so far as they can fairly be deduced.
But the last conclusions which the republicans could reach were only
the ancient axioms on which the monarchies had originally been founded.
They were only forgotten because they were fundamental.
Cobbett had a great faculty of not forgetting the foundations,
as most of us do forget the foundations of a house, especially if we
walk about on the roof.  He had one very virile sort of simplicity:
he was true to the truisms.  He was never ashamed of
the homely appearance of a humble and a faithful truth.
Cobbett always really believed in popular principles, though he saw
no cause to talk Greek and call them democratic principles.
He could not see that the new industrial progress had anything
to do with these principles; and he was perfectly right.
He knew that the real revolutionary song had been about
fields and furrows, and not about wheels and rails.
He knew that the Revolution had begun with bread.
He was not in the least impressed by its ending in smoke.
The man who had once been a rioter waving the red flag in a revolution
may now be a guard waving the red flag on a railway-line. But
this will not convince the realistic reformer that a railway-line
is the same as a revolution.

When Radicalism was caught up in the wheel that was the symbol
of industrialism, the opposite school tended the opposite way,
by the slight movement that makes the balance of a party system.
The Tories could pose as the agricultural party; if only a party
of squires and not of peasants.  But it was no longer a real war,
like the war between Parliament and the King, in which Parliament
had finally triumphed.  The new Whigs and Tories were only
two different shades of the same colour, like the dark blue
of the Tory University and the light blue of the Whig University.
They were at most only two different types of the same only garchy.
They were often only two different, generations of the same oligarchy.
The one was still making money in the town, while the other had
made enough money to live in the country.  That Cobbett cut
across this sort of distinction of mere sentiment and association
is not a mark of his inconsistency but of his consistency.
He knew what he wanted and the Whigs and Tories only offered
two slightly different reasons for not giving it to him.
There was no logic in the things that held them apart, or in
the things they lumped together.  There was nothing in the nature
of a rational sequence in the notion of one party standing for
aristocracy and the land, and the other for democracy and machinery.
It was as meaningless as if one party were associated with justice
and beef, while the other was wholly dedicated to mercy and mutton.
And it was as if they had joined in reviling the inconsistency
of a common-sense person, who desired the more merciful
treatment of oxen or the more just distribution of muttonchops.
Now this is why it is vital at this point to realise the true nature
of the Tory regime which extends intermittently from Pitt to Peel.
Friends and foes alike have treated it as a re­actionary regime;
but that is only because the facts about it have not been faced.
Pitt and his followers were not in the least Tory in the sense
of traditional.  They were only Tory in the sense of tyrannical.
If trying to destroy all old constitutional liberties makes
a man a conservative, then certainly Pitt and Castlereagh
were model conservatives.  But it would be hard to say what it
was they conserved.  There was not a single historic tradition,
not a single human memory of the past, for which they ever showed
the faintest sympathy.  The truth is that the whole of this passage
in history will be read wildly wrong unless we clearly under­stand
that Pitt and Peel were highly modern and purely mercantile figures,
helping to found the purely modern and mercantile world.
Thus it was Pitt who began the degradation and destruction
of a genuine gentry, by selling peerages right and left
to every pawnbroker or pork butcher who would pay for them.
If ever men were responsible for handing the country over to cads,
it was the party of gentlemen who waved the Union Jack after Waterloo.
It was so in all the more decent or defensible aspects
of commercialism.  In that sense Pitt cared nothing for the opinion
of the Country Party; or even for the opinion of the Country.
What he cared for was the opinion of the City.  His real bodyguard
was a battalion of bankers.  It has often been pointed out that
he had many of the merits of a liberal; he had also the vices
of a liberal, and especially the illiberalities of a liberal.
Pitt was the real founder of the Manchester School.  Peel only followed
the real policy of his party in eventually helping its triumph.
We talk of Peel's abrupt acceptance of Free Trade; but it would
be truer to talk of his temporary acceptance of Protection.
As a type of human being, he had always been purely commercial,
and not in the least conservative.  In a word, these men did
indeed fight democracy abroad and persecute it at home.
But they did not defend aristocracy, far less monarchy.  What they
did was to establish plutocracy; and mainly a parvenu plutocracy.
And if it be a glory to have created the modern industrial state,
they can claim a very great share in it.  Cobbett did not grudge
it to them.

Broadly speaking, if there was one man who was bound to be
the antithesis of William Cobbett it was William Pitt.
Anybody who expected anything else, merely because the two
men were at one time classed as Tories, is the person really
incapable of understanding intellectual consistency.
Cobbett had only supported Pitt because he thought the Pitt rule
stood for Old England; but it did not.  Cobbett never supported
the Pitt party after he had discovered that it did not.
It is true that as he drifted further from Pitt and the Tories
he necessarily appeared to be drifting nearer to Brougham and
the Radicals, who also did not.  But the slightest acquaintance
with what he said about Brougham and the Radicals will show that it
was almost always a movement of repulsion and not of attraction.
His preference for any party was rather too comparative
to be complimentary.  It would hardly have been flattering
to Mr. Pitt to be told that his appearance had only seemed
to be something of a relief after that of Dr. Rush,
or to Lord Brougham to say that his society seemed quite
toler­able to one fleeing from that of Lord Castlereagh.
But Cobbett's public alli­ances, as distinct from his
private affections, seldom went much further than this.
He may have come eventually almost to hate Orator Hunt;
but I doubt whether he had ever really liked him.
Windham I am inclined to think that he really liked;
and lie made earnest efforts to explain to that perplexed
Tory that there was nothing inconsistent with Toryism in his
pleas for labour and the land.  He remained in this doubtful
and nega­tive attitude, nearer to the Radicals rather than
more Radical, when something happened that changed everything;
something that broke his life in two in the middle like a blow
that breaks the backbone.

He inserted in his Register an indignant protest against the flogging
of certain English soldiers under a guard of German mercenaries.
It is essential to realise that the accent is on the word English
and the word German.  He was not merely a humanitarian protesting
against inhumanity.  He was a patriot protesting against his
countrymen being tortured to make a spectacle for foreigners.
Being a very genuine Englishman, he cared nothing for all the nonsense
about allies and enemies, in comparison with the real difference
between Englishmen and foreigners.  Indeed, by the whole trend
of his mind he would always have preferred the French to the German;
and nobody would have rejoiced more than he at that great
and just alliance that brought about the downfall of Prussia.
Anyhow he printed his protest; and instantly discovered that
he had touched the spring which launched a whole huge engine
of destruction against himself.  The great Tory Government,
which he had come back from America to serve, had no doubt
about how it should deal with this sort of patriotic service.
He was instantly pinned with a prosecution, tried before the usual
packed jury of the White Terror, and eventually sentenced
to imprisonment for two years in Newgate, accompanied by a fine
that meant ruin.

Cobbett was bewildered by the blow; and seems at first
to have been reduced to despair.  It is said that he talked
of throwing up his whole public work, since it could not
be conducted without involv­ing his family in such ruin.
There has been much dispute about the story of some such
despairing surrender being communicated to the Government.
It seems to me that Cobbett's own account of the incident
is probably true in the main; all the more as he owned frankly
that his family had once persuaded him to this course:
of which, he said, he had afterwards repented.  There was some talk
of a letter that he had recalled being maliciously published.
It is possible:  but the whole story seems rather confused.
Certainly Cobbett was fought through all his life with weapons
of a peculiar baseness; a certain mean spirit which is rather
peculiar to such aristocracies when alarmed.  It was that mean
spirit that stole and published the scandalous poem of Wilkes.
It was that spirit which used for political ends the private
fault of Parnell.  Cobbett suffered from this often enough;
but his complaints in this case are rather chaotic and inconsistent.
It is very characteristic of Cobbett that even in repudiating
the action he argued in defence of it; pointing out that there
would be nothing immoral in a private man out of private
affection abandoning public work that nobody could demand
of him as a duty.  His argument was sound enough; but it did
not give a real picture of his complex and confused situation.
In order to understand the meaning of the whole business, we must
under­stand two things that are relevant to the whole of his life;
though the first refers more particularly to this earlier
passage in his life.  It will be well to get these conceptions
clear before this chapter concludes.

First, it must be clearly understood that Cobbett was not yet
a Revolutionist; even if he was already a Radical, he was still
subconsciously the Tory patriot who had made his name by waging war
on all Revolutionists.  He had indeed kept his English journalism
independent of parties; but if he had originally had any party,
it was the Tory party.  In other words, his disappointment
had begun, but he still had enough admiration to be disappointed.
He was still sufficiently orthodox to be troubled by doubt.
Then came the shameful and incredible shock of the Constitution
he had once defended swinging round and knocking him silly.
It was no wonder if, for the moment, it did knock him very silly.
But it is reading the last lucid rage of the Radical Cobbett into
the first dark and confused doubts of the Conservative Cobbett to expect
him to have met his first trial in as he met his second trial in His
real revolutionary spirit was not the cause of his imprisonment;
it was the result of it.

The fools who put Cobbett in prison probably did believe they
were crushing a Jacobin, when they were really creating one.
And they were creating a Jacobin out of the best Anti-Jacobin
of the age.  Apart from all political labels, they were
manufacturing the greatest rebel, of English history out of the most
unpromis­ing materials.  Perhaps he was the only real rebel that
was ever manufactured out of purely English materials.  But he was
all the more a furious rebel because he was a reluctant rebel.
For the man who paced that cell, like a lion in a cage, had not
any of the detachment given either by idealism or cynicism.
He had not fully learned to expect injustice; he had not
yet survived disappointment, the dark surprise of youth.
The man in that cell was no Stoic, trained in the Latin
logic of Condorcet or Carnot, seeing his own virtues
as part of the ideal system of the Republic and his own
sufferings as part of the inevitable system of the Kings.
He was no Irish martyr, schooled to breathe the very air
of tragedy and tyranny and vengeance, and living in a noble
but unnatural exaltation of wholly spiritual hate.  Like most men
of a very English type, he was inordinately fond of happiness.
And happiness to him was concrete and not abstract;
it was his own farm, his own family, his own children.
Like most men of a very masculine type, he was probably a good deal
dominated by his wife.  And his wife and family had evidently
hung on heavily to drag him back from his political precipice.
But the worst of it was that he was suffer­ing for an idea;
and as yet did not quite know what idea.  That is where this great
angry and bewildered Englishman differed from the French Stoics
or the Irish patriots.  They appealed to the gods against
the kings, to the ideas against the facts; but it seemed
to the Englishman that his own god and king had condemned him.
They saw clear skies above a confused world; but it was upon
him that his own sky had fallen.  He had indeed in his mind
all that volcanic amalgam of ancient loyalties and popular
sympathies which puzzles the student of party labels; but it
was still in his subconscious mind.  He had not yet a creed
as Robespierre or Jefferson or O'Connell had a creed.  In fact,
he was not suffering for an idea he was suffering for an instinct.
But the instinct seemed to him a natural part of that natural
order which had suddenly sprung on him an unnatural revenge.
In so far as he had originally believed in anything,
it was in the authorities that had thrown him into gaol.
In so far as he had any creed, it had been the Constitution which
condemned him as a felon.  He had acted on a patriotic impulse;
and patriotism had punished him for being patriotic.
All this first transition of bewilderment must be allowed for;
but when it is allowed for, something else remains.
Even when his head had cleared and his creed consolidated,
there remained something about him for which the reader must
be prepared to make allowances; as much as when we see him
swaying rather blindly under this first blow.

Cobbett was a particular human type; the very last to be fairly
understood in those quiet times of which the virtue is sociability
and the vice is snobbery.  He was the imperfect martyr.
The modern and popular way of putting it is to say that a man
can really be a martyr without being by any means a saint.
The more subtle truth is that he can even be a saint and still
have that sort of imperfection.  The first of Christian saints
was in that sense a very imperfect martyr.  He eventually
suffered martyrdom for a Master whom he had cursed and denied.
That marks the tre­mendous realism of our religion:  its heroes
had not heroic faults.  They had not those Byronic vices that can
pose almost as virtues.  When they said they were miserable sinners,
it was because they really dared to confess the miserable sins.
Tradition says that the saint in question actually asked
to be crucified upslde-down, as if making himself a mere
parody of a martyr.  And there is something of the same sacred
topsy-turvydom in the strange fancy by which he is haunted
in all hagiological art and legend by the symbol of his failure.
The crowing of a cock, which has become a phrase for insolence,
has in this case actually become an emblem of meek­ness. Rome
has lifted up the cock of Peter higher than the eagle of Caesar,
not to preach pride to kings but to preach humility to pontiffs.
The cock is crowing for ever that the saint may never crow.

Cobbett was a much more imperfect martyr; for he lived and died
by a much more imperfect light.  But this is the contradiction that
explains all his con­tradictions. His courage was not con­sistent,
complete, a thing working itself out by a perfectly clear principle.
His heroic stature was not properly or perfectly proportioned,
it was merely heroic.  He sometimes fell below himself;
but it was because he had a far higher and more arduous standard
of manhood than most men, especially the men around him.
He began tasks that he did not always finish; he took up rash
positions that he sometimes found to be untenable.

More than once in his career there comes in an element of anti-climax
and bathos, at which the world will find it easy to laugh.
But the world will have no sort of right to laugh.
In the lives of most of us there is no such anti-climax simply
because there is no climax.  If we do not abandon those tasks
it is because we do not attempt them; and we are not crucified
upside-down because we have no intention of being crucified at all.
The ordinary Sophist or Sadducee, passing the grotesque crucifixion,
would have no right to mock the martyr with the crowing of the cock.
The ordinary politician or political writer of Cobbett's time
or ours had no right to mock the inconsistencies of Cobbett.
The whole scheme and standard of his life was higher and harder
than theirs, even of the best of them.  Men like Bentham
and Brougham were sincere reformers in the ordinary sense.
Men like Macaulay and Mackintosh were good men in the normal fashion.
But they served their world; they never set out to fight the whole
world as Cobbett did.  Good and bad alike, they are like civilians
sitting at home and criticising a shattered and shell-shocked soldier.
There is no particular disgrace in being a civilian; though there
may be in being an ungenerous civilian.

One example may illustrate what is meant by the comparison.
Cobbett got himself flung into a common gaol for protesting against
the flogging of British soldiers in the middle of the Napoleonic war;
he afterwards went to America to avoid being flung into prison again.
Macaulay, nearly a generation later, in time of peace, when the general
mood was much more humanitarian, had the ordinary official task
of apologising for flagrantly savage floggings of the same sort,
simply because he happened to be Secretary for War and the blustering
Lord Cardigan happened to be Commander of the Forces in London.
Nobody in his senses would call Macaulay a cruel man.
He simply regarded himself as a good party man, making the best
of a bad case, as a part of his least agreeable parliamentary duties.
His biographer, Sir George Trevelyan, certainly a very liberal
and humane man, expresses no particular surprise at it;
and nobody felt any particular surprise at it.  Most people probably
regarded it as we regard the uncomfortable duty of a barrister,
who has to minimise the acts of a monster who has tortured children.
It was part of the routine, of the rules of the game, of the way
of the world.  But the man who accepts everything and defends such
things is not in the same world with the man who risks everything,
or even anything, to denounce them.  We may well say about Macaulay
what he himself said about Cranmer:  `It is no great condemnation
of a man to say that he did not possess heroic fortitude.'
And it is no great condemnation of him to say that he will never come
within a thousand miles of the man who does possess heroic fortitude,
even for a moment.

For if the common or conventional man is not to be condemned for
failing to be a hero, still less is the other man to be condemned
for succeeding in being half a hero or nine-tenths of a hero.
The imperfect martyr may be judged by the perfect martyr,
but not by anybody else; and the perfect martyr will probably
have the charity as well as the patience of the perfect saint.
Nobody will pretend that Cobbett had the patience of the perfect saint.
He had not enough of the charity, though he had more than many
might suppose, especially the people who make a point of being
charitable to the rich.  It is true that even his heroism was
incal­culable and inconsequent; but the ques­tion of proportion
and even of quantity does not touch the question of quality.
One moment of Cobbett's courage is of a different quality
from a lifetime of Macaulay's common sense.  Macaulay, in his
life as in his logic, was nothing worse than superficial.
It was the tragedy of Cobbett that he was fundamental.
Of all our social critics lie was by far the most fundamental.
He could not help seeing a fight of first principles deadly
enough to daunt any fighter.  He could not help realising
an evil too large for most men to realise, let alone resist.
It was as if he had been given an appalling vision, in which the whole
land he looked at, dotted with peaceful houses and indifferent men,
had the lines and slopes of a slow earthquake.

Macaulay, it has been noted, said about Cranmer that he could
not be blamed for not being a hero and a martyr.  But for all that
Macaulay blamed him a good deal for being a coward and a snob.
Cobbett said about Cranmer that the very thought that such a being
had walked the earth on two legs was enough to make the reeling
brain doubt the existence of God; but that peace and faith flow back
again into the soul when we remember that he was burned alive.
I quote the sentiment from memory; but that was the substance
of the remark.  It is a remark touched with a certain exaggeration.
It is not an observation marked primarily by measure or
precise proportion or the mellowing of truth with charity.
Macaulay's criticism of Cranmer is more effective for everyday purposes;
as when he says that the crime of the Tudor poli­tician was not in being
too indifferent to be killed, but in killing other people for things
about which he was indifferent, and enacting laws against anyone
`who should do from conviction what he had done from cowardice.'
But there is a quality in that outburst of Cobbett about Cranmer
which we must learn to appreciate or leave off troubling about Cobbett.
There is a volume and a violence of humanity in such hatred; a hatred
straight from the heart like a knockout blow straight from the shoulder.
It is a blast from a furnace.  And it is only in such a furnace
seven times heated that men suffer for an idea-or even suffer
for an impulse.

Anyhow, the only effect of the imprisonment was to turn
an impulse into an idea.  He may have lacked some of the
virtues of a philosopher; even including the philosophy.
He may not have been perfect as a hero; or even have possessed
any of the qualities of a martyr except the martyrdom.
But he was emphatically the sort of man with whom one cannot afford
to be in the wrong.  It was suicidally silly to act with such
injustice to a man with such a talent for expounding justice,
including intellectual justice.  It would have been wiser
in the governing class to have gone on their natural course
and continued to harry the imbecile and to torment the dumb.
Thousands of poor men have been and are persecuted quite as
unjustly as Cobbett by the police and plutocracy of modern states;
but a certain political instinct and practical intuition have
generally and wisely guided the authorities to hit the sort
of man who cannot possibly hit them back.  It is impossible
not to comment on the very curious carelessness, which in this
case allowed the rich and the rulers to commit the customary
cruelties upon a man eminently capable of telling the tale.
They threw him into gaol for nothing, or for anything,
or for something more or less meritori­ous, for all the world
as if he had been his own grandfather the agricultural labourer.

Certainly if they put him in prison, they ought never to
have let him out.  Surely the flexible British Constitution
of Pitt and Castlereagh would have been equal to the necessity
of sending him to Botany Bay for life.  For that Constitution
was very free when it came to attacking freedom.
The man who came out of that prison was not the man who went in.
It is not enough to say that he came out in a rage, and may be said
to have remained in a rage; to have lived in a rage for thirty years,
until he died in a rage in his own place upon the hills of Surrey.
There are rages and rages, and they ought to have seen in his eyes
when they opened the door that they had let loose a revolution.
We talk of a man being in a towering passion and that
vigorous English phrase, so much in his own literary manner,
is symbolic of his intellectual importance.  He did indeed
return in a towering passion, a passion that towered above towns
and villages like a waterspout, or a cyclone visible from ten
counties and crossing England like the stride of the storm.
The most terrible of human tongues was loosened and went through
the country like a wandering bell, of in­cessant anger and alarum;
till men must have wondered why, when it was in their power,
they had not cut it out.








CHAPTER V

THE AMATEUR HISTORIAN

There is a joke with which we are all familiar, about the rustic
who relates some local legend, as of a hero who hurled a huge rock
into a river, and who says that it must be true because the rock
is till there.  As is commonly the case in the small talk of a
scientific age, the satire is directed against popular ideas.
As is also commonly the case in such an age, the satire is really
very shallow.  When the critics mock a man for saying `I believe it
because I have seen the rock,' nine-tenths of them could not give
any sort of reason for their own historic beliefs, beyond saying,
'I believe it because I saw it somewhere set out in printer's ink
by somebody I never knew, referring to evidence I have never seen,
and telling a tale which I cannot test in any way whatever,
even by the look of the landscape.'  The rustic does not rely
merely on the rock but on the tradition--that is, the truthfulness
of a certain sort of people, many of whom he has known.
But at least the rock and the river do fit in with the tradition;
and to that limited extent consistency is corroboration.
It is far more superstitious to assume that print is proof.
So far as print is concerned, the whole of history might be as
utterly imaginationary as that mazy river and that dancing rock
in the dizzy pipe-dream of `Kubla Khan'.

But there are others whose state of mind is still more extraordinary.
They not only do not need the landscape to corroborate their history,
but they do not care if the landscape contradicts their history.
They are not content with the very reasonable statement that the
existence of the rock does not prove the existence of the hero.
They are so anxious to show that there was no hero, that they
will shut their eyes and say there is no rock.  If the map marks
the place as a waterless desert, they will declare it is as dry
as a bone, though the whole valley resound with the rushing river.
The whole huge rock will be invisible, if a little book on geology says
it is impossible.  This is at the opposite extreme to the irrational
credulity of the rustic, but it is infinitely more irrational.
It is not inferring something from the rock that the rock does not prove;
it is denying what the rock does prove.  Or rather it is denying
what the rock is; that ultimate and terrible rock of reality,
that veritable rock of offence, against which all delusions will
dash themselves to pieces.  This great delusion of the prior claim
of printed matter, as something anterior to experience and capable
of contradicting it, is the main weakness of modern urban society.
The chief mark of the modern man has been that he has gone through
a landscape with his eyes glued to a guidebook, and could actually
deny in the one anything that he could not find in the other.
One man, however, happened to look up from the book and see things
for himself; he was a man of too impatient a temper, and later he showed
too hasty a disposition to tear the book up, or toss the book away.
But there had been granted to him a strange and high and heroic sort
of faith.  He could believe his eyes.

William Cobbett was pre-eminently a man with eyes in his head.
He had of course other human attributes; such as a tongue in
his head.  Many considered it a merely bitter or blasphemously
seditious tongue; but it was a tongue that could sometimes
be for great mobs like the tocsin from a great tower.
But when all emotional effects of such demagogy or deafening
sensationalism have died away, the impression that will remain
longest in the mind is the quiet and constant use that he made
of his eyes.  It is as if, after all passions had chased
each other like shadows across his face, we saw his face at
last in repose and realised that he had the eyes of a sailor;
the eyes that can see a dot or speck on the distant horizon.
But he could see dots and specks in the foreground as well.
He could focus his sight at many different ranges;
an organic power which is the point of what Carlyle said
of somebody else that he had eyes and not merely spectacles.
Because his eyes were sharp they were clear; because his
sight was exact it was even subtle.  At its best it could
really measure things, and even the degrees of things.
It could place anything from the face of a stranger to
the strength of a horse; from the shade of ripeness in a
cornfield to the shade of rottenness in a Cabinet Minister.
The ultimate impression of his personality is not so much
of violence as of vigilance.  So strong is this impression,
that any one who has been long in his literary company
cannot shake off an uncanny impression of being watched.
He cannot help fancying that this man who has been dead a hundred
years has his eye on events in England and may suddenly speak--
probably not in an amiable manner.  It is as if, in some
elfin tale, those strange eyes in one man's head were stars
that could survive him.

But there is one particular form of this faculty in Cobbett
which is not so sharply apprehended; and perhaps is not so easy
to apprehend.  For in this sense it is a faculty which few people,
if any people fully possess in the urban population of to day.
It is destroyed rather than helped by the urban education of to day.
Cobbett was very far from being an enemy of education.
He was, as has been said elsewhere, a great educationist.
He published French and English grammars of his own composition,
and exhorted all young people to learn.  Here and there
he even showed a touch of that too crude and earnest respect
for education which so often marks the self educated man.
But for all that, he had a native power or piece of good
fortune which education never gives and sometimes destroys.
In one thing he was a very lucky and lonely mortal.

He could see before he could read.  Most modern people
can read before they can see.  They have read about a
hundred things long before they have seen one of them.
Most town children have read about corn or cattle as if they
were dwarfs or dragons, long before they have seen a grain of
wheat or a cow.  Many of them have read about ships or churches,
or the marching of soldiers or the crowd cheering a king,
or any other normal sight, which they have never seen.
By a weird mesmerism which it is not here necessary to analyse,
what people read has a sort of magic power over their sight.
It lays a spell on their eyes, so that they see what they
expect to see.  They do not see the most solid and
striking things that contradict what they expect to see.
They believe their schoolmasters too well to believe
their eyes.  They trust the map against the mountain.
Cobbett was a man without these magic spectacles.
He did not see what he expected to see, but what he saw.
He liked books; but he could not only read between the lines
but through the book.

Now, in nothing is this more vivid than in his vision of history.
Most of us know what was the accepted general version of English history
when we were at school; at anyrate when I was at school, and still more,
of course, when Cobbett was at school-in so far as he ever was at school.
England had emerged out of a savage past to be the greatest empire
in the world, with the best-balanced constitution in the world,
by a wise and well-timed progress or series of reforms, that ever
kept in mind the need of constitutionalism and of balance.
The Barons had extorted a constitutional charter from the King, in advance
of that feudal `age' and a foundation for parliamentary freedom.
The Commons came into the struggle for parliamentary freedom when it
was waged against the Stuarts.  By that time the Revival of Learning
had led to the Reformation or sweeping away of the superstition
that had been the only religion of the ruder feudal time.
This enlightenment favoured the growth of democracy; and though the
aristocrats still remained, and remain still, to give dignity to the state
with their ancient blazonry of the Conquest and the Crusades, the law
of the land is no longer controlled by the lords but by the citizens.
Hence the country has been filled with a fresh and free population,
made happy by humane and rational ideas, where there were once
only a few serfs stunted by the most senseless superstitions.
I ask any one if that is not a fair summary of the historical
education in which most modern people over forty were brought up.
And having read it first, we went to look at the towns and
castles and abbeys afterwards, and saw it or tried to see it.
Cobbett, not having read it, or not caring whether he had read it,
saw something totally different.  He saw what is really there.

What would a man really see with his eyes if he simply walked
across England?  What would he actually see in the solid farms
and towns of three-quarters of the country, if he could see
them without any prejudice of historical interpretation?
To begin with, he would see one thing which Cobbett saw,
and nobody else seems ever to have seen, though it stared
and still stares at everybody in big bulk and broad daylight.
He would find England dotted with a vast number of little hamlets
consisting entirely of little houses.  Considered as little
houses there is much that might be said about them both critical
and sympathetic.  They are generally picturesque cottages;
they are often what is described as picturesque tumbledown cottages.
They are the most beautiful houses in the world for all
appreciative people who have ever been outside them.
For the less obvious and outstanding people who have always
been inside them, it would be an exaggeration to say that they
are the most beautiful houses in the world.  About these people
inside also a great deal that is good and bad might be said;
they are kindly and full of English humours and all the virtues
that belong to an atmosphere of ale.  But they are not citizens
and do not want to be; they have hardly even heard of the word.
They can no more imagine the vanishing of the squire than the vanishing
of the sky; though they may grumble at the moods of both.
But anyhow the point is that their houses are little houses, and'
especially low houses; so that a tall man walking past them
would sometimes have to stoop down under the eaves to peer into
the front window, as if he were travelling in a town of the dwarfs.
And the town is a very little town; often only a handful
of houses to be counted on the fingers.

In the midst of this little cluster or huddle of low houses rises
something of which the spire or tower may be seen for miles.
Relatively to the roofs beneath it, the tower is as much an exception
as the Eiffel Tower.  Relatively to the world in which it was built,
it was really an experiment in engineering more extraordinary than
the Eiffel Tower.  For the first Gothic arch was really a thing more
original than the first flying-ship. And indeed something of its leap
and its uplifting seems to make architecture akin to aviation.
Its distant vaulted roof looks like a maze of mathematical patterns
as mysterious as the stars; and its balance of fighting gravitations
and flying buttresses was a fine calculation in medieval mathematics.
But it is not bare and metallic like the Eiffel Tower or the Zeppelin.
Its stones are hurled at heaven in an arc as by the kick of a catapult;
but that simple curve has not the mere cruelty of an engine of war.
The whole building is also a forest of images and symbols and stories.
There are saints bringing their tales from all the towns
and countries in Europe.  There are saints bearing the tools
of all the trades and crafts in England.  There are traces
of trade brotherhoods as egalitarian as trades unions.  There are
traditions of universities more popular than popular education.
There are a thousand things in the way of fancy and parody and pantomime;
but with the wildest creative variety it is not chaotic.
From the highest symbol of God tortured in stone and in silence,
to the last wild gargoyle flung out into the sky as a devil cast
forth with a gesture, the whole plan of that uplifted labyrinth
shows the mastery of an ordered mind.

It is the parish church, and it is often very old; for it
was built in the days of darkness and savage superstition.
The picturesque cottages are all of much later date;
for they belong to the ages of progress and enlightenment.

If people saw the Great Pyramid and found scattered about its
base a few patchwork tents of a few ragged Bedouins, they would
hardly say there had been no civilisation in that land until
the Bedouins brought it.  Yet a Pyramid is as plain as a post
of wood compared with the dizzy balance and delicate energy
of the Gothic.  If they had seen some dingy tribe of barbarians
living in their little mud huts, when high above their heads
went the soaring arch of a Roman aqueduct almost as remote
as the rainbow, they would hardly say that the Romans must
have been savages and that the savages alone were civilised.
Yet the round Roman arch is really rudimentary compared
with the prism of forces in the pointed Gothic arch.
But the truth is that the Catholics, having some humility
even in their hatred, never did make this absurd pretence
that paganism was barbaric, as their enemies afterwards
made the absurd pretence that Catholicism was barbaric.
They denounced the wickedness of the world, but they recognised
the Pyramids and the Coliseum as wonders of the world.
It was only the great medieval civilisation whose conquerors were
base enough to pretend that it had not been a civilisation at all.
But that is not the aspect of the ease immediately important here.
The point immediately important here is that this solid stone
object did and does stand up among the others like a mountain
among molehills; and that nobody could see it but Cobbett.
We talk of not seeing the wood for the trees; but one would
think anybody could see a poplar-tree in spite of the presence
of six rhododendron-trees. Yet we may repeat, in a spiritual
but most realistic sense, that nobody except Cobbett could
see the church spire.

He did not by any means see all that was to be seen in the church,
or all that has here been noted in the church.  For that he would
really have required more education; and not the sort of
education that he could then have got merely by being educated.
He was a simple man in a rationalistic age, and he saw something.
It was something very primitive and elementary; but he saw it.
He saw the size.  He tells us again and again that he has
found a village of which the whole present population could
be put into the porch of the village church, leaving the whole
vast and varied interior as empty and useless as Stonehenge.
What had become of all the people?  Why should anybody, in any age,
pay to build a church serving two thousand people when he only had
to serve twenty people?  Was it true, could it be true, after all,
that the population of England had so hugely increased from what
had once been a mere handful?  Was it only that the new towns
had hugely increased, leaving the countryside a mere wilderness?
And could it be true that the men who built such things were a sort
of Pictish dwarfs or troglodytes of the twilight, when what they
had left looked so like the houses of a generation of giants,
which could not even be filled with a generation of dwarfs?

These doubts had much to do with historical and social views
of Cobbett to be considered in their order; but in the first
place they are to be noted as a working model of his power
to see things simply and as they stand.  Hundreds of elegant
essayists and artists had traced the more graceful proportions
of Gothic buildings, vaguely regarding them as ruins.
The end of the eighteenth century is full of these painters
in watercolours and first cousins to the Earl of Cork.
What Cobbett saw was not the graceful proportions but rather
the disgraceful disproportions.  He saw a colossal contrast;
the contrast between a village that was hardly a hamlet
and a village church that was almost a cathedral.
It was the biggest and baldest of all the facts;
and yet it was the fact that nobody else saw.  The others
did not see it because they had been educated not to see it;
because they had been educated to see the opposite.  Since liberty
and light had come to the Commons with the Whig revolution,
the Commons must somewhere or other be free and enlightened;
they could not still be living in hovels under the shadow of a
huge old church.  There had been nothing before that revolution
but feudal ferocity and priest craft.  So, somehow or other,
somebody had built the church by sheer ferocity; or priest
craft can be made a complete substitute for every other craft,
including the craft of the sculptor and the stonemason.
But Cobbett began with the big fact that he could see with
his own eyes, and with that he contrived, with tremendous
reconstructive power, to turn all English history upside down.

His view involved another truth that may be symbolised by
another building.  When we said that there was nothing but small
houses to compete with the church, we meant of course that there
was nothing else within the immediate circuit of the church:
that the village church was the only big building in the village.
There was another very big building at some distance from the village
which bulked very much larger in the minds of the villagers.
Indeed, it might be said that they lived in the material shadow
of the church and in the moral shadow of the country house.
Now the example of the squire's house is yet another which illustrates
the illusion that is general and the realism that is exceedingly rare.
All that Cobbett could have read in books, all that he could have
learnt at school, would have taught him a view of the manor-house
or country seat which is still a commonplace in novels and newspapers.
It is almost literally a view; in the sense of a landscape seen in the
mind's eye.  But men only see that sort of view by shutting their eyes.
Cobbett formed his views by opening his eyes.  The universal impression
or illusion was that the Tory squires were an ancient aristocracy,
full of feudal notions and Norman blood; and from this it followed
logically that they lived in castles or at anyrate in moated granges,
Tudor manor-houses, and other ancient and appropriate haunts.
If Cobbett had believed in historical novels, or in the histories that
were all on the same model as the historical novels, he would have gone
about looking for the Castle of Otranto in the valleys of England:
and never seen the little temple that Horace Walpole really stuck
up for himself on the top of Strawberry Hill.

But Cobbett had this strange power of faith:  he could believe his eyes.
Most people cannot believe their eyes; it is the very last thing
in which they can believe.  They can believe in the wildest creeds
and the crudest philosophies; similarly they can believe in a past
made up of The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho.
But they cannot believe in the present; in the thing present
to their sight; in the thing in whose real presence they stand.
But Cobbett really had this unearthly detachment, this dry
light of reality, this vision of a man from the moon.
In that light he probably saw what the country houses are really like;
as he certainly saw what the parish churches are really like.
Here and there, there is really a castle; now generally a show place.
Here and there, there is really an old Tudor manor,
often preserved as carefully as a model in a museum.
But the house of the squire dominating a hundred countrysides all over
England is something quite different; something quite unmistakable;
and something to a large extent uniform.  It is emphatically
a rule, where the romantic castles and manors are exceptions.
It is a rule in more senses than one; for the populace has the squire
for a landlord, for an employer, and, it may be added, for a judge;
for the magistracy is made up of the gentry.  Anyhow, the house
has a positive character which amounts to a pattern.

It really looks rather like a large public building from a large
city exiled in the provinces.  It looks like a Town Hall taken away
on the wings of the fairies, and set down far away in the woodlands.
It looks like a Palais de Justice rusticating for some reason
or other and taking a ramble in the country.  It is not only
very large, but it does not look like a private house at all.
It is like something conscious that it is a seat of government and
power over men--as it is.  It is nothing like so cosy as a castle.
It is rather open in the same sense as a law-court. Above all,
it is built in the same style as the average modern law-court.
What makes that style important is its date.  Very few of the real
countryseats are really of a Tudor type; hardly any are of a
medieval type.  The type and pattern of them is of a sort that bears
the stamp of a subsequent and clearly marked epoch of society.
Generally they are Georgian houses; often they are rather earlier,
and correspond to the quainter style of William of Orange and Queen Anne.
But nearly all belong to what the French call the Classic Age;
meaning that stretch of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
in which the full result of the Renaissance worked itself out,
becoming if anything more and more classical until its shell was
broken by the Romantic movement and the French Revolution.  In short,
the whole architecture is the recent creation of a rationalistic age.
It belongs as much to the Age of Reason as the books of Voltaire.

But people were blinded to this fact by books they knew better
than those of Voltaire.  Every novel and novelette told them
that a bad baronet lived in a castellated tower; and they could
not see that he lived in a sort of comfortable classic temple.
Tennyson, calling in his youth on the Lady Clara Vere de Vere,
suffered the delusion of seeing a lion on her old stone gates.
Most probably it was really a nymph or an urn.  For that matter,
Tennyson would probably have made some curious discoveries if he had
looked more closely into Lady Clara's claims to Norman blood,
however it might be with her claims to coronets.  But for the moment
I am speaking simply of things seen, or rather of things not seen.
I am speaking of the veil which our version of history hangs
between us and the real facts about our fathers, even the facts
in front of our eyes.  Very few people saw that the aristocratic
country house is commonly a comparatively new building,
and looks more like a General Post Office than a feudal fortress.
Such ornament as it has is a curious cold exuberance of heathen nymphs
and hollow temples.  Because it stands for the age of the sceptics,
its gods are not only dead but have never been alive.  Its gardens
are full of shrines without idols or idols without idolaters.

Finally, as has been hinted already, there does exist a third historic
memorial and variety of architecture or the use of architecture.
Among these aristocratic houses and estates, setting aside such
curiosities as castles, there does appear fairly commonly one type
of country house that really is old and really is medieval.
The medieval part of it is often in ruins, and only valued
because it is in ruins.  But the ruins have the same soaring
and skyward lines as those of the large and empty parish church.
Yet the house as a whole is by no means a ruin, but is turned
into a country house quite as comfortable, or rather luxurious,
as the more common pattern of the Georgian houses.
But the very name of that house of luxury remains a medieval name;
and a very queer name too.

We should think it rather odd if a profiteer had a country
house that was called The Cathedral.  We might think it strange
if a stockbroker had built a villa and habitually referred to it
as a church.  But we can hardly see the preposterous profanity
by which one chance rich man after another has been able to
commandeer or purchase a house which he still calls an Abbey.
It is precisely as if he had gone to live in the parish church;
had breakfasted on the altar, or cleaned his teeth in the font.
That is the short and sharp summary of what has happened in
English history; but few can get it thus foreshortened or in any
such sharp outline.  Anyhow, this third type of monument of
the past does offer itself visibly to the eye like the other two.
The romantic reactionary at the end of the eighteenth century
might not often find the Bad Baronet in a castle, but might
really find him in an abbey.  The most attractive of all
such reactionaries, Miss Catherine Morland, was not altogether
disappointed in her search for the Mysteries of Udolpho.
She knew at least that General Tilney lived in an abbey;
though even she could hardly have mistaken General Tilney
for an abbot.  Nor was she wrong in supposing that a crime
had been committed by that gentleman in Northanger Abbey.
His crime was not being an abbot.  But Jane Austen, who had so
piercing a penetration of the shams of her own age, had had a little
too much genteel education to penetrate the shams of history.
Despite the perverse humour of her juvenile History of England,
despite her spirited sympathy with Mary Stuart, she could
not be expected to see the truth about the Tudor transition.
In these matters she had begun with books, and could not be expected
to read what is written in mere buildings and big monuments.
She was educated, and had not the luck to be self-educated
like Cobbett.  The comparison is not so incongruous as it may seem.
They were the four sharpest eyes that God had given to
the England of that time; but two of them were turned inward
into the home, and two were looking out of the window.
I wish I could think that they ever met.

Anyhow, all this is written in large letters of stone and clay across
the land; in a giant alphabet of arch and column and flying buttress.
And these three striking things stand out to tell the main talc
of English history, even to a man who had never opened a book.
The first is a very ancient and artistically beautiful parish church,
far too big for its parish.  The second is an aristocratic mansion
of much later date, and looking like the palace of a German
prince of the eighteenth century.  The third is a similar palace
constructed out of the ruins, if not of a similar parish church,
at least of a religious building similar to the parish church.
With those three solid facts alone a man might have pieced together
the truth that no historians would tell him.  Somehow or other there
had once been a larger religious life which was also a popular life.
Some­how or other its memorials had been taken over by a new race
of men, who had become great lords in the land, and had been able
to disdain alike the people and the religion.

Cobbett was an amateur historian in that sense; that he used his
own wits.  Those who sniff at such amateur history are not using theirs.
They say the amateur's views cannot be correct, because they
are not founded on research.  In other words, they say he cannot
see what is there, because he sees what is obviously there.
He cannot have seen the sun, because he evidently did not have
to extract the sunbeams from cucumbers.  He cannot have really
understood that two and two make four, because he understood
it at once.  But allowing for this, such academic characters
underrate even the detailed information of men like Cobbett.
It must once more be emphasised very strongly that Cobbett did
not in the least despise books.  He had far too much common sense
to despise any common and convenient way of obtaining information.
He was the very reverse of the sort of sentimental reactionary who thinks
that all humanity would be innocent if only it were illiterate.
But he did not allow what he read to contradict what he had seen.
And when he really began to read, he found that what he read
confirmed what he had seen.

I say he really began to read; for there is a distinction in this case.
It is not merely a question of the books, but rather of the books behind
the books.  The fashionable book of history is at best little better
than a leading article; it is founded on the documents as a leading
article is founded on the news; in both cases a rather careful selection.
Like a leading article the historical summary is generally partisan;
and never quite so partisan as when it professes to be impartial.
Cobbett had to go a little deeper than these superficial summaries to
trace in the past the truths he had already discovered in the present.
It was a fortunate coincidence that it was precisely at this
time that the most learned and laborious of English historians
produced the work on which so many other works have been founded.
John Lingard was a very moderate man, but even the prejudices he was
presumed to have gave him a detached position from the fashionable
fallacies of that particular age.  With a mass of material he established
his own very moderate version of what had really happened in England;
and by the use of that material Cobbett produced his own version,
which some have hesitated to call moderate.

This was the celebrated History of the Reformation, published in 1824.
The real question at issue about the History of the Reformation
is not so much concerned with a certain state of things as with
the right reaction to that state of things.  What ought a man
to do when he believes that public opinion has grown accustomed
to repose confidently in a completely wrong picture of the past?
A man might agree with Cobbett about the existence of the error,
without in the least agreeing with Cobbett about the proper process
of the enlightenment.  The very name of Lingard is enough to prove
the possibility.  Lingard had a strong case, and deliberately
understated the case to give a greater impression of impartiality.
Cobbett had the same strong case, and deliberately flung away all such
airs of impartiality to prove how completely he had been convinced.
When Cobbett found that what he conceived to be a truth had been
concealed by a trick, his reaction was a towering passion;
and whether that or a more patient exposition be appropriate
to controversy, there is no doubt about which is appropriate
to Cobbett.  He would have said that when he found a man robbing
his hen-roost he called out `Stop, thief!' and not `Stop,
philosophical communist invading the thesis of private property!'
He would have said that when a man told lies he called him a liar,
and not a person insensible to the value of objective reality.
Yet it is probably true that many listened to Lingard who could
not listen to Cobbett.  And it is true to say that such persons
could not hear him because he talked so loud.  But as to questioning
what he said--that is quite different and much more difficult.
Those who suppose that he must be talking nonsense because he was talking
too loud are much less clearheaded and even cool-headed than he was.
Veracity has nothing to do with violence, one way or the other.
One historian may prefer to say, `The Emperor Nero set on foot
several conspiracies against the life of Agrippina his mother,
and expressed satisfaction when the final attempt was successful.'
Another may say, `The bloody and treacherous tyrant foully murdered
his own mother, and fiendishly exulted in the detestable deed.'
But the second statement records the same fact as the first,
and records it equally correctly.  It is accurate to say,
'The Rev. Titus Oates declared on oath his knowledge of a
Papist conspiracy; but his statements, which led to the execution
of many Papists, were subsequently found to be fictitious.'
But it is every bit as accurate to say, `The liar and perjurer Oates
cruelly swore away the lives of innocent Catholics, blasphemously calling
on God to witness to his murderous lie.'  The violent man is telling
the truth quite as logically and precisely as the more dignified man.
It is a question of what we consider superiority of literary form;
not of any sort of superiority in historical fact.  And this was
substantially the chief difference between Cobbett and Lingard;
not to mention all the modern scholars who are pupils of Lingard.

Cobbett stated all his facts in one prolonged and almost
monotonous fury.  But if he was wrong, he was wrong in his fury,
not especially in his facts.  There are many mistakes in his
History of the Reformation, as there are in most histories;
though most people did not even know what they were until they
were carefully discovered and tabulated by Cardinal Gasquet.
I doubt if there are so many of them as could be found by so good
a scholar in all the more cautious and constitutional historians.
Cobbett did not begin with whole masses of obvious myth
and romance, like those which Macaulay criticised in Hume.
He did not depend on the expurgated extravagances of manifestly
mad sectarians, like those which Aytoun criticised in Macaulay.
The truth is that the general impression that Cobbett wrote a wild
romance is really only a general impression.  It does not rest,
and it never did rest, on the discovery of the particular points
in which he was wrong.  The impression was one of paradox;
the mere fact that he seemed to be calling black white,
when he declared that what was white had been blackened,
or that what seemed to be white had only been whitewashed.
But the shock came from the moral comment or application rather
than from the definite details.  For the definite details
even then, very often, were not in dispute.  For instance,
it is supremely characteristic of Cobbett that he reversed
the common titles by talking of Bloody Bess and Good Queen Mary.
He could always find a popular phrase for an unpopular opinion.
For he was always speaking to the mob, even when he was defying it.
But this is an excellent example; for it is not shaken by any
particular controversy about facts.  Everybody knew even then
that Queen Elizabeth was bloody, if pursuing people with
execution and persecution and torture makes a person bloody;
and that was the only reason for saying it of Mary.
Everybody knew even then that Mary was good, if certain real
virtues and responsibilities make a person good; a great deal
more indubitably good than Elizabeth.  It was the too obvious
and biased motive of the inversion that irritated people.
It was not really Cobbett's history that was in controversy;
it was his controversialism.  It was not his facts that
were challenged; it was his challenge.

Here we are only concerned with his controversy as a part
of his character.  And of this sort of challenge we
may almost say that it was the whole of his character.
We must see the situation very simply, if we would see it
as he saw it.  He was simply a man who had discovered a crime:
ancient like many crimes; concealed like all crimes.
He was as one who had found in a dark wood the bones
of his mother, and suddenly knew she had been murdered.
He knew now that England had been secretly slain.  Some, he would say,
might think it a matter of mild regret to be expressed in murmurs.
But when he found a corpse he gave a shout; and if fools laughed
at anyone shouting, he would shout the more, till the world
should be shaken with that terrible cry in the night.

It is that ringing and arresting cry of `Murder!' wrung from
him as he stumbled over those bones of the dead England,
that distinguishes him from all his contemporaries.  It is not the mere
discovery of the bones, or in a sense even the study of them.
It was not really, I repeat, the facts that were in dispute.
The Gothic tower overhanging the modern cottage was as plain
as a skeleton hanging on a gibbet.  Some held that the bones
were justly gibbeted; that the old England was fortunately dead.
Others held that the bones were so old and decayed that they
could now be the object of merely archaeological interest,
like Egyptian mummies.  What was peculiar to Cobbett was the way
in which he treated this question of the past as a question
of the present.  He treated it, not as a historical point
to be decided, but rather as a legal wrong to be righted.
If he did not exactly answer the question, `Can these dry bones live?'
he did say in another sense, `I know that their avenger liveth.'
He was prepared to make those bones his business, like those of Paine;
to be a detective in a mystery story, and present himself ex
ossibus ultor.  One might suppose a detective story would be more
popular than an antiquarian essay; and a charge of crime more lucid
than a meditation on archaeology.  Yet this was not wholly so;
and the paradox is relevant to the whole riddle of Cobbett.
The cry that rang through the startled village was loud but hardly clear.
It may be that it was too loud to be clear.

It is possible to speak much too plainly to be understood.
Most men with any convictions in a confused and complicated age
have had the almost uncanny sensation of shouting at people
that a mad dog is loose or the house is on fire, to be met
merely with puzzled and pain­fully respectful expressions,
as if the remark were a learned citation in Greek or Hebrew.
For men in such an age are used to long words and cannot understand
short ones.  This comic sort of cross-purposes was especially the ease
with Cobbett.  The world, in the sense of the ordinary political
and literary world, could not understand him or what he said.
People could not understand it because it was not obscure enough.
It did not soothe them with those formless but familiar obscurities
which they expected as the proper prelude to any political suggestion.
He came to the point too quickly; and it deafened them like
an explosion and blinded them like a flash of lightning.
His rapidity produced all the effect of remoteness.
People of this political and literary sort understood much better
the speakers they were used to; or liked much better the speakers
they did not understand.  The pompous and polysyllabic felicities
of the diction of Pitt seemed to them comforting if not comprehensible.
The rich and loaded style of Burke seemed like some display
of imperial wealth which could be admired though not calculated.
It was the same with the literary as with the political utterance
of the time.  It was much easier to persuade people to listen
to the merely romantic praise of the past as uttered by Scott
than to the realistic praise of the past as uttered by Cobbett.
Men vaguely felt that any sympathy with things thus lost
in the mists of antiquity ought to be conveyed in more or less
misty language, and with the air of one dealing with things
not only dead but even unreal.  It was more soothing to be
told by a Great Enchanter what ghosts might haunt a ruined
abbey than to be asked by a hard-headed bully of a yeoman
how many people would fit into the porch of a parish church.
Men found Melrose Abbey more visible by moonlight than their own
parish church by daylight.  The world will never pay its debt
to the great genius of Walter Scott, who effected in European
literature that second Renaissance that was called Romance.
He opened those high dikes of mud that cut men off from the rivers
of popular romantic tradition, and irrigated the dry garden of
the Age of Reason.  It is no disrespect to him to say that lie was,
like his own hero, an antiquary and at the same time a sceptic.
But he was fashionable because he assured men that medievalism
was only a romance; and Cobbett was far less fashionable
when he urged it as a reality.  Scott was merely sentimental
about Mary Stuart, as he was about Charles Edward Stuart;
he was singing `Will ye no' come back again?' to people who would
have been a horrible nuisance to him if they had come back again.
But Cobbett was not sentimental about Mary Tudor; he did solidly
believe that with her the good times went; and he did really
want them to return.

Anyhow, when he revised history the revision really was a revelation.
The revision may be revised, but it will not be reversed.  The revelation
may reveal itself further, but it will never hide itself again.
Cobbett let the cat out of the bag; and this is nonetheless true
because it was rather a wild cat when it came out of his bag.
Nobody could pretend that because it was a wild cat it was a
fabulous animal, when it was so obviously careering down the street.
In other words, he drew attention to a fact; a fact which others
have followed up and matched and balanced with other facts, a fact
which others have restated more mildly or analysed more delicately,
but still the original fact which he furiously asserted and his foes
furiously denied.  In so far as modern histories do really differ
from the History of the Reformation, it is mostly because we have come
to repeat with decorum what even he only dared to hurl with defiance.
Ruskin and William Morris and many more pursued his path through
that living labyrinth that had once been regarded as the dead shell
of a village church.  Maitland and Gasquet and many others justified
by laborious study and annotation his wild but shrewd guesses
about the greatness of medieval sociology.  It.  was easy for them
to state the medieval argument more mildly; simply because the modern
audience had become more mild.  But Cobbett's dis­covery can
never be undiscovered; that is, it can never be covered up again.
And that for the reason stated at the starting-point of this chapter.

A city that is set on a, hill cannot be hid; a church set
high above a city is even more hard to hide, when once it
has been discovered.  You cannot undiscover the elephant.
That is why it is essential in this chapter to insist on the size
and simplicity of the neglected thing, and the plain picture
of the Surrey farmer standing staring at the village spire.
Since Cobbett's historical conceptions have increasingly prevailed,
there have been many attempts among the opponents of medieval
ideals to get rid of this medieval renascence.  There have been
many efforts to explain away the elephant or minimise the cathedral.
And they all fail by beginning at the trivial end and trying
to chop inches off the elephant's tail; or seeking to set
the ugliness of a gargoyle against the beauty of a cathedral.
Thus they will pick this or that hole in the application
of the Guild principle, without noticing that everything
is conceded with the Guild principle itself; the simple fact
that the principle of medieval trade was admittedly comradeship
and justice, while the principle of modern trade was avowedly
competition and greed.  They will say that the Guild spirit
was deficient in this and that; without beginning to touch
the truth that we are deficient in the Guild spirit.
In short, the attempts to rebut the revelations of medieval
culture and creative reform are above all things trivial.
They not only pick very small holes in a very large thing,
but they do not seem to realise that the rest of the world
can now look at the large thing as well as the small hole.
But it was really William Cobbett, alighted from his horse,
and standing for some idle moment in a church porch
out of the rain, who first had a vision of this towering
resurrection of a forgotten Christendom; and lifted up his eyes
to things so lofty and remote that men had let them float
unheeded over their heads like the tree-tops or the clouds.
Perhaps the real story of Jack the Giant Killer is that Jack
was the first man who was even tall enough to see the giant.



CHAPTER VI

THE RURAL RIDER

Even the most elementary sketches of Cobbett have tended
to give too much of his biography and too little of his life.
He had a picturesque career, if the pictures sometimes seemed
to his critics to be comic pictures; he was always fighting,
he was flung into gaol, he went wandering in foreign lands.
And yet there was a sense in which everything he did was
directed towards peace; a peace that he never fully gained.
I have said that he swept across the country like a whirlwind;
but in the heart of the whirlwind there is a calm.
The picture in his own mind was a quiet picture; only, he was
never left alone to enjoy it quietly.  Perhaps it would be truer
to say that he never left himself alone to enjoy it quietly.
Anyhow, it was only occasionally in his wanderings through the world
that he encountered the romantic adventure of staying at home.
In the midst of his mind there was a secret landscape of field
and farm under the evening light, which was continually being jerked
out of the field of vision like a picture in a jolting camera.
It is very difficult in practice to present the whole of his mind
except as a fragmentary, mind; but perhaps the most continuous
scroll of all that he liked and thought about can be found
in the long, rolling panorama of the Rural Rides.

A little while before the affair of his imprisonment he had taken a farm
at Botley in Hampshire; where he lived for a time the sort of life
he liked, spoiling his children and sparring with his neighbours;
especially with the Botley parson.  This reverend gentleman figured
so prominently in Cobbett's satire as to become a sort of proverb;
and yet the origin of a proverb is often difficult to trace.
And it is by no means clear in what respect the infamy of the incumbent
of Botley differed from that of other country clergymen.  But he stands
as a symbol of Cobbett's quarrel with the clergy of the Church of England;
which in most of the other cases had other and more serious grounds.
Two things may be noted, even at this stage, about his own rather
curious sort of anti-clericalism. One is that if he scoffed at
the Anglican clergy, he had not less but much more scorn and fury
for the Dissenting Ministers and the Methodists and the Quakers.
And second, that his first serious reason for dislike concerned
the corruption of pluralism, and especially family favouritism.
He execrated for economic reasons the large clerical families
that kept their hold on a vast variety of livings and tithes.
He was as yet unconscious that this road was leading him,
past the comfortable vicarage which he cursed as he passed it,
towards the gateway of a grey ruin that was still called an abbey.

In the confusion accompanying his great catastrophe, he had been
obliged to sell his place at Botley; but much of his early life
had radiated from there, and it makes a sort of starting-point
for considering him in his capacity of a Rural Rider.

The Rural Rides are a landscape; but they are also a portrait.
Sometimes we seem to be watching under rolling clouds
the rolling country of the shires, valleys coloured like maps,
or downs that seem to shoulder away the sky; and then again
we are only looking at the changes on one stubborn face
as it relapses into good humour or hardens into hate.
That combination of the object and the subject is what makes
writing into literature; and the Rural Rides are pure literature.
Perhaps they are all the more literature because they
might be counted loose and colloquial even for language.
It would be a breathless experience even to hear a man talk
in as slap-dash a style as Cobbett wrote; but the thing
would be brilliant as well as breathless.  Everything comes
into this great soliloquy:  details, dogmas, personalities,
political debates, private memories, mere exclamations such
as a man utters in really riding along a road.  But through
all there is the assumption that heaven has appointed him,
or he has appointed himself (and perhaps he was too prone
to confuse the conditions), to be a sort of national surveyor
of the whole land of England and publish his report to the world.
His notes simply as notes never fail to be amusing.
Anybody with his wits about him may well read Cobbett for amusement,
even when there is no question of agreement.  He could make great
buildings and even landscapes look ludicrous, like landscapes
of topsy-turvydom, when he turned on them that Gargantuan grin.
We shall note later how for him great London was simply;
'the Wen,' a big boil and repulsive eruption on the body politic.
We shall see how Old Sarum was `the Accursed Hill.'
He made the Martello towers look even sillier than they look now.
Nothing was ever better in its way than the dramatic
derision with which he pointed at the canal at Hythe,
and told the people that this was meant to keep out the French
armies-that had just crossed the Rhine and the Danube.
More questionable, but equally laughable, was his irreverent
picture of the fortifications on the cliffs of Dover;
which he described, with a sort of impudent innocence,
as a hill full of holes to hide Englishmen from Frenchmen.
So simple a view of the science of fortification it is perhaps
needless to maintain; but even here we have the sort of cranky
common sense that was never far distant from Cobbett, even when
he was talking about what he did not in the least understand;
as when he pointed out that it was very unlikely that the French
would try to land on a precipice at Dover when they had the whole
flat stretch away to East Sussex and the levels of Rye and Pevensey,
where all the conquerors had landed since history began.

He had hatreds that seemed too big for their object; like his
loathing of tea and potatoes.  But in his hate there was humour,
and even conscious humour.  Many social reformers who have a hankering
after his principles would be much distressed by his prejudices.
But it was one of his principles to have such prejudices.
Nor indeed is it an unintelligent or unintelligible principle.
He believed in the traditions of the past and the instincts of
the people.  And these things have always moved along generalisations,
touching certain social types or local atmospheres.  You cannot have
that sort of common sense of the countryside if it is not allowed to say
that Yorkshiremen are this or Kentishmen are that, or that one course
is the best way with Gypsies or another the usual habit of Jews.
Most people are still allowed to express these general impressions,
until they come to the case of the Jews.  There (for some reason I
have never understood), the whole natural tendency has been to stop;
and anybody who says anything whatever about Jews as Jews is supposed
to wish to burn them at the stake.  Cobbett was so exceedingly and
almost alarmingly hearty in the expression of his dislikes that he can
hardly be said to have laboured to remove the last impression.
For anybody whose horror of persecution has not yet entirely
destroyed his sense of humour, nothing could be more exhilarating
than the passage in which Cobbett, having heard a Methodist preaching
in a village, and being afterwards shown an antiquated pair of stocks
on the village green, comments indignantly on the incongruity,
the incon­sequence, the intellectual outrage of having these two
things so near to each other and not bringing the two things together
into one harmonious whole.

The primary picturesqueness of his work has therefore something
of the knockabout farce or even pantomime; like Mr. Punch,
he fights with the cudgel, the heavy but humorous and relatively
even humane English weapon.  When he hits our noble lords
and learned judges such thundering cracks, we have the same
causes of consolation as in the case of Punch and Judy.
We have reason to know the weapon is made of wood.
We have still better reason to know the heads are made of wood.
All this superficial and broad farce must be allowed for first
as part of the fun.  He got a great deal of fun out of it,
and we get a great deal of fun out of him; even if it
is not only his foes who are made to look a little funny.
But to be content with considering this pantomimic energy
is to miss the paradox and therefore miss the point.
The interesting thing is that this swashbuckler who, as we say,
put on so much side had very notably another side; which might
be called a soft side.  But it was also decidedly a sober side.
For instance, he who was the most impatient of men was the most
patient of fathers.  He was even the most patient of schoolmasters.
The ploughman was capable of plodding as well as kicking.
He could be not only soft but even subtle; and if we read
the Rural Rides a second time, so to speak, we shall
see certain things that are the moral of the book:
and were never put there by a mere bully.

For instance, there is the educational element in him.
Cobbett was a demagogue in the literal sense;
that is, he was a demagogue in the dignified sense.
He was a mob-leader; but he was not merely a man mob-led.
He certainly was not a man merely seeking to ingratiate
himself with the crowd, or indeed with anybody else.
At least, if he were supposed to be ingratiating himself,
he must be credited with a curious and original selection
of words with which to do it.  But the truth is that it was
not his words but his ideas that were curious and original.
He wished to arouse a mob, or if you will a rabble, to support
those ideas; but not to support any ideas--least of all to
support any ideas that they might happen to have already.
Fundamentally and almost unconsciously he was indeed appealing
to popular instincts that were not only equally fundamental
but equally unconscious.  But in the mere form and method
of his utterance, he was much more disposed to ram information
down their throats than to take hints from their faces.
If he was in his way demagogic, he was much more definitely didactic.
Education was an enthusiasm with him:  from teaching economics
as he taught French by a sort of public correspondence,
to helping his own little boy with a horn-book. But while he was
in private the very gentlest of teachers, he was in public,
when talking to a crowd of farmers instead of to a little boy,
the most violent and even offensive; to the child he was
rather persuasive than didactic, and to the men not so much
didactic as dictatorial.

We have already noted something of the sort about the English Grammar.
He was a logician as well as a grammarian.  He was the last man
in the world to be really a pedant.  He would always have preferred
splitting infinitives to splitting straws.  These criticisms of
diction are also criticisms of thought; or of absence of thought.
This was the period of which it used to be said, with all solemnity,
that an English statesman never quite recovered from having
uttered a false quantity in a Latin quotation in early life.
It sounds like a parody on the secret sin of the mysterious baronet;
but indeed he recovered easily enough from deserting the
village maiden; and he never tried to recover from being drunk.
Under these circumstances, Cobbett was surely justified in suggesting
that too much notice was taken of a false quantity in Latin, and too
little of a false quality in English.  To some it may seem a rather
remote question whether the English statesman in talking Latin accented
it right, considering that he almost certainly pronounced it wrong:
But in any ease Cobbett, if we may extend the metaphor, always threw
the moral accent far back and let it fall on the root of the word.
In that and many other respects he was really a Radical.

But our concern here is not so much with whether it
was correct as with whether it was characteristic.
Of course, if Cobbett had treated any abstract science it would
have become a concrete science.  If he had merely undertaken
to set out the multiplication table it would have run:
`Twice one useless regiment is two useless regiments;
twice two venal Ministers is four venal Ministers;
twice three pluralistic parsonages is six pluralistic parsonages
like those possessed by the Reverend Mr. Hugg of Netherwallop,'
and so on.  If he had set out a system of astronomy,
and had merely to give the names of the stars, he would have
been unable to mention Mars without saying something caustic
about Lord Wellington or Mercury, without a few contemporary
illustrations of the connection between commerce and theft.
No icy abstractions could freeze out that ferocious familiarity.
It is said that the discoverer of the North Pole would see
a Scotsman's cap on it; certainly the sight of that cap would
fill Cobbett with sentiments sufficient to keep him warm.
On that side the grammatical experiment illustrates only his
obvious pugnacity; his tendency to personify everything in order
to pelt it with personalities.  But it illustrates something
else as well.  And it is exactly that something else that seems
in a sense contrary, and yet is the completion of the character,
without which it cannot be understood.

There was something cool about Cobbett, for all his fire;
and that was his educational instinct, his love of alphabetical
and objective teaching.  He was a furious debater; but he was
a mild and patient schoolmaster.  His dogmatism left off
where most dogmatism begins.  He would always bully an equal;
but he would never have bullied a pupil.  Put a child before him
to be taught arithmetic or the use of the globes, and he became
in the most profound and even touching sense a different man.
There came about him like a cold air out of the clean heavens,
cooling his hot head, something that counted with him more
than it does with most men; something about which we hear
perhaps too much now as too little then; something that
only too easily provides perorations for politicians
or themes for ethical societies; but something which does
exist in some men and did emphatically exist in this one.
The pure passion of education went through him like a purging wind;
he thirsted to tell young people about things-not about theories
or parties or political allegations, but about things.
Whether they were grammatical roots or vegetable roots or cube roots,
he wanted to dig them up; to show them and to share them.
He had the schoolmaster's enthusiasm for being followed,
for being understood; his inmost ideal was a sort of
white-hot lucidity.  He above all men made the appeal:
He that hath ears to hear, let him hear; though he was too
prone to decorate with very long ears the rivals who would
certainly refuse to hear.  But the dunces were the dons.
There was no dunce in the class he taught; for the whole fury
of his genius was poured into simplifying his lesson to suit
it to the village idiot.

For this reason also, and not only for the other,
he had decorated his Grammar with grotesque caricatures.
He was resolved to make English grammar amusing; and he did.
It is not true that his only pleasure was in execrating
somebody or even exposing something.  Stronger even than
these was his rational rapture in explaining something.
He had learnt that in order to explain something it is necessary
to hold the attention; and his examples always do hold the attention.
In some ways, therefore, the two contrary forces in him
come together, more than anywhere, in this strange volume;
in what some would call this mad text-book.

But he appears as a better because a broader teacher in the
Rural Rides.  He really had a great talent for teaching; in the real
sense in which a schoolmaster like a poet is born and not made.
He could go back with the beginner to the beginnings.
He could understand the pupil's failure to understand.
He would take trouble to make everything mean something, and sift
the language for terms to which other terms could be reduced.
A model of educational method may be found in his little talk
with the farmhand at Beaulieu Abbey.  Most educated men,
even of a didactic turn, would be content to tell the man that,
it was spelt Beaulieu but pronounced Buley, and leave the man
merely puzzled.  At best they would have told him that Beau
is the French for fine and lieu the French for place;
and left him with an arbitrary fact fallen out of the air,
like the Hebrew word for hat or the Chinese word for umbrella.
But Cobbett really translated the words, making them part
of the man's own language.  He pointed out that even in English
we talk of a beau when we mean a buck or dandy; and talk of
taking goods in lieu of money when we mean in place of money.
There is not one educated man in a thousand who would think
of those illustrations to make things clear to a yokel in a lane;
and the man who habitually talked like that was one of the great
schoolmasters of the world.

It is quite impossible to pick up all the varied and vivid
trifles that are scattered through the Rural Rides.
It would be undesirable even if it were not impossible.
It would be saving the reader the trouble of reading the book;
and it ought to be no trouble.  The man who does not find one
of Cobbett's books amusing is doomed to find every book dull.
They contain a hundred frag­ments from which the whole habit of his
life has been built up.  They show him to us in a series of snapshots,
in attitudes so active as to amount to the animation of a cinema.
We can picture him swaggering about on his own farm at Botley,
in the red waistcoat that he wore so appropriately, like a
defiance to a whole herd of bulls.  We can watch him peering
over fences and hedges in his eager and shameless vanity,
enquiring everywhere about Cobbett's Corn (the name he modestly
gave to the maize he brought from America), and sternly admonishing
those who were unconscious of their good luck in possessing it.
We can behold him as he curses London from the hills;
he always called it the Wen.  But here again his humour is
more subtle than it seems.  We have noticed the same offhand
offensiveness in his quotations in the English Grammar.
With his artless artistry, he gives more weight to this
abusive term by using it not so much abusively as allusively.
Instead of saying, `This vile city is only one monstrous Wen,'
he is careful to say quite carelessly, `I was coming from
the Wen,' as if he were saying, `I was coming from the Wood.'
He seems to assume that everybody knows it by that name.
It is impossible, I say, to deal with all these details;
we can only pick out one or two because they are symbolic
and consider the social view they symbolise.

For instance, we can see that even as a reactionary he was
a realist.  An excellent example of Cobbett's general
attitude may be found in his view of fairs and markets.
This is especially true in that his attitude is emphatically not
what most of his critics and some of his supporters would suppose.
On the theory that he was a sort of retrospective rustic,
merely regretting the good old times, it would be easy
enough to make a picture of such a sentimental veteran
recalling the romance of his youth at fair and market.
But Cobbett is really concerned with the business of the market,
and not merely with the fun of the fair.  He does not imagine that
village maidens pass their whole lives dancing round the Maypole.
Some of the later romantics of Young England would have been
quite capable of making them set up a Maypole at Christmas,
perhaps with a Christmas pudding on top of it.  He does not even
cling to that yet nobler pillar of Christendom, the greasy-pole
with a leg of mutton on top of it; more truly Christian
because offering more opportunities for a cheerful humility.
He does not see it as an old-world pageant, in the manner of Ruskin
or William Morris.  He sees it as an economic question as strictly
as Ricardo or John Stuart Mill.  Only, rightly or wrongly,
he turns the economic argument the other way.  It is also quite
typical of him that his economics are really economical.
He does not primarily praise the fair as a place in which
people can spend money.  He actually praises it as a way
in which they can save money.  And his argument, whether we
agree with it or not, is perfectly practical and prosaic.
I do not mean, of course, that he would not sympathise with
the Maypole and the greasy-pole; for he certainly would.
I do not mean that he would not enjoy the enjoyment,
for he certainly did.  He had a pretty taste in pretty girls,
as have many men who are quite happy with their own wives;
he would certainly have liked to see them dancing round a Maypole;
though perhaps he would not have been sufficiently modern
and advanced to enjoy seeing one of them asserting sex equality
and making her own career by climbing the greasy pole.
He would have entirely sympathised with the girl whose lover
lingered at the fair, when he had promised to buy her a bunch
of blue ribbons, as it says in the song, to tie up her bonny
brown hair.  Perhaps, again, he would have been so old-fashioned
as to doubt whether the girl would gain very much by never buying
ribbon for her hair, but only ribbon for her typewriter.
But all this was a matter of light sentiment with him;
and he was quite sane enough to take his sentiment lightly.
The basis of his argument was in no sense sentimental;
it was perfectly practical as far as it went.  It was that
the young man would not have to pay so much for ribbons
for the young woman, because the person selling the ribbons
would not have to pay so much for building or renting a shop.
Somebody somewhere else, he argued, living in an ordinary cottage
and garden, would make the ribbons at home, as the old country
lace makers made lace, and would then walk into the nearest
market-town and sell them to the young; man, who had also walked
into the same market-town to buy them.  The young woman would get
her ribbons, and the n young man would have so much more left
to go towards Cottage Economy and the expenses of married life,
which do not consist entirely of the purchase of ribbons.
But suppose (Cobbett's argument ran) the cottage woman,
instead of working in her own cottage in her own way,
had to go to a special place for working, all the expenses
of that place must be thrown in.  Suppose the cottage woman
has to come into the market and put up four walls and a roof
in order to sell a ribbon.  The expenses of the shop are also
added to the expenses of the ribbon; and the young woman has
fewer ribbons or (more probably) less housekeeping money.
I am not now arguing whether this economic argument is sound.
I am only pointing out that this economic argument is economic.
Cobbett seldom felt comfortable unless his strongest
sentimental instincts had some such solid foundation.
I think on the whole the argument is quite sound as far as it goes;
and it goes a good way, until we come into the world of such
very large and very lifeless mass production that things can
be produced cheaply, especially by huge and rich monopolies
by which they can even be, for some time, produced at a loss.
In other words, it probably is true that one big millionaire
might own one big machine with wheels incessantly going round
and reeling off interminable lengths of the same very ugly ribbon;
and that he might even sell it below cost price for the pleasure
of driving every other sort of better and more varied ribbon
out of the market.  But some (including the present writer)
do not like monopolies of that kind or machines of that kind,
or millionaires of that kind, or even ribbons of that kind;
and some of us even decline under any circumstances to use them
to tie up our bonny brown hair.  In any case, in this sketch
we are concerned less with controversy than with character;
and it is essential to the character of Cobbett that he believed
that a market was better than a shop, not merely because it
was brighter or quainter or more picturesque, but because
he thought it was cheaper.  It must be noted as marking him
off from the romantic reactionary, and even from the school
of Ruskin when it denounced the economical tendency of economics.
We can all sympathise with what Ruskin' meant by the Lamp
of Sacrifice.  Even Cobbett could have sympathised,
as his love of the great Gothic churches had shown;
but if he had been arranging such an allegorical illumination,
he would probably have added a Lamp of Thrift.

In this limited and definite sense he did object to England being
a nation of shopkeepers.  Today, of course, England is most
unmistakably not a nation of shopkeepers.  I myself, in a moment of
controversial exaggeration, described it as a nation of shopwalkers.
But anyhow, it is obvious that the process which Cobbett condemned has not
only gone far beyond anything that he described, but has gone far enough
to destroy itself, as a thing covered by that description.  If ownership
be the test, it has been a process and a period of people losing things
and not gaining them.  It has been a process of people going into service,
in the language of servants, into service if not into servitude.
It has been a process of people losing even the little booth at the fair,
that was thought so poor a substitute for the little farm in the fields.
Somewhat sadly we can now toss away from us the taunt of our great enemy.
By the best proof of all, the English are not a nation of shopkeepers.
They have not kept their shops.

But the point here is that Cobbett was not weeping over
lost causes; he was rather if anything raving over lost cash:
or at anyrate lost capital.  He was perfectly practical;
but he was sorry that the small capitalists were being ruined;
and in the long run he may possibly turn out to be right.
As we have said, he was emphatically not a mere laudator
temporis acti.  He was not merely crying over spilt milk;
he was crying for justice over stolen cows.  But he was
not reckless in the sense of a friend to recklessness:
on the contrary, he felt that such a licence to theft
was the end of thrift.  He gave his enemies beans,
as the saying is, but he knew how many beans make five:
and even counted them carefully.

It is curious that men of the type of Brougham were always
lecturing the poor on foresight, when the one thing they
could not do was to foresee the future of the poor.
They were always urging them to thrift and urging them to set
up a system which would make it impossible to be thrifty.
Those who used the word thrift twenty times a day never looked
at the word once.  If they had, they would have seen that thrift
depends upon thriving.  In Shakespeare, it is used as practically
meaning property or wealth; `where thrift may follow fawning.'
Unfortunately, in a modern plutocracy it can only follow fawning.
It certainly cannot follow saving.  A servant who is agreeably
servile may possibly have a fortune by favouritism.
But by no possibility could he save enough out of common wages to buy
a farm, still less a shop in the town where land is priceless;
and those are the sort of things for which men save.
But it is the paradox of the whole position that the Utilitarians
who were always preaching prudence committed this country
to one of the most really reckless revolutions in history--
the industrial revolution.  They destroyed agriculture and turned
England into a workshop; a workshop in which the workers were liable
at any moment to be locked up and left to eat hammers and saws.
The Radicals who did that were as picturesque as pirates, so far
as pirates become specially picturesque when they burn their boats.
In truth they were not so much metaphorically burning their boats:
they were almost literally burning their barns.  But there is
something fitting in the accident by which the term Free Trader
used to mean a smuggler.  If romantic recklessness be the test,
Cobden and Bright should always have appeared brandishing
cutlasses and with a belt full of pistols.

But Cobbett did really value foresight; Cobbett did really
believe in forethought; Cobbett did really believe in thrift.
He was ever ready to urge a wise economy of expenditure with
the wildest extravagance of words.  He praised prudence in a series
of the most appallingly imprudent speeches ever made by man.
He howled and bellowed all the beauties of a sober and sensible
and quiet life.  But he was perfectly sincere; and it was really
thrift and forethought and sobriety that he recommended.
Only, it was the trouble with his forethought that it was,
among other things, thought; and of his foresight that he could
see a little further.  He could see a little further than
his nose; or that supercilious nose on which the spectacles
of the economist were balanced.  He saw that even when
the economists were right in recommending economy, they were
recommending it to people who could not possibly be economical.
He saw that the economists were not even creating their own
monster of an Economic Man; they were creating nothing
but the thriftless thousands of a wandering proletariat.
As for the ordinary Whigs and champions of Reform, he did
not believe they were even trying to create anything except
salaries and sinecures for themselves.

Then again, his coarseness is not only touched by shrewdness
but by tenderness; of a sort much too shrewd to be sentimental.
His charity was not cheap.  To say that he had a sense of human equality
will convey little to those who can make no sense of that sense.
Perhaps it would be more intelligible to say that there are some
who sympathise with the poor from the outside and some who can
sympathise from the inside.  There is one kind of man who pities
a beggar because the beggar is so different from himself,
and another who does it because the beggar is so similar.
Many a perfectly sincere reformer will say, `Imagine a man
starving in such a slum,' as he would say, `Imagine a man
being really boiled by cannibals in a pot,' or, `Imagine that
a man really was-chopped in pieces by Chinese torturers.'
His phrase is a piece of perfectly honest rhetoric; but he knows
that we do not really imagine it.  But when Cobbett writes about it,
we do imagine it.  He does not deal in lurid description;
in this matter he is rather unusually responsible and reasonable.
He simply has the knack of making the thing happen to himself
and therefore to his reader.  There is an excellent illustration
of his quieter method in one passage in the Rural Rides.
He describes, in that plain and almost naked narrative style that seems
to lie like strong morning daylight upon every detail of the day,
how he started out riding with his son at dawn; how some hitch
occurred about the inn at which he had intended to breakfast,
and he rode on hoping to reach another hostelry in reasonable time;
how other hitches occurred which annoyed him, making him scold
the boy for some small blunders about the strapping of a bag;
and how he awoke at last to a sort of wonder as to why
he should be so irritable with a child whom he loved so much.
And then it dawned upon him that it was for the very simple
reason that he had had no breakfast.  He, who had fed
well the night before and intended to feed well again,
who was well clothed and well mounted, could not deny that
a good appetite might gradually turn into a bad temper.
And then, with one of his dramatic turns or gestures, he suddenly
summons up before us all the army of Englishmen who had no hope
of having any breakfast until they could somehow beg work from
hard or indifferent men; who wandered about the world in a normal
state of hunger and anger and blank despair about the future;
who were exposed to every insult and impotent under every wrong;
and who were expected by the politicians and the papers to be
perfectly mild and moderate in their language, perfectly loyal
and law-abiding in their sentiments, to invoke blessings on
all who were more fortunate and respectfully touch their hats
to anybody who had a little more money.

Now, the unconscious ingenuity of that approach is that it
surprises us from the inside.  The man writing it has not struck
any attitudes of a demagogue or a prophet of woe; he has not set
out to describe slums as a missionary to describe savages.
The man reading it does not know what is coming; but when it
comes it comes to him and not to some remote stranger.
It is he that feels the sinking within him that comes from
the withdrawal of all our, bodily supports; it is his own stomach
that is hollow and his own heart that is sick with hope deferred.
It will be all the better for him if it is his own brain
that grows black and his own tongue bitter; if it teaches him
for a moment what it must be to be a tramp walking with pain
and bludgeoned by perpetual snubs and sneers and refusals.
When a man has imagined that for a moment for himself,
he knows for the first time what is meant by saying
that men are brothers, and not merely poor relations.
That is the psychological experience corresponding to the
philosophical doctrine which for many remains a mystery:
the equality of man.

It must also always be remembered, if we are to make any meaning
of the tale, that it was this type of the very poor man,
the tramp or the beggar, whom Cobbett almost unconsciously made
the test of the time.  He was not the man for whom it was possible
to represent it as a good time.  He was not the man who was being
tolerated by toleration acts or enfranchised by reform bills.
He was not the man who was being educated by Brougham's popular
science or equipped by Arkwright's mechanical discoveries.
He was not one of those whom the new world was making richer.
As Cobbett would have put it in his bitter way, he had not
the advantage of being a Jew who blasphemed Christ or a Quaker
who ran away from patriotism.  He was only a normal national
baptized Englishman with nothing to eat.  He was only a poor man;
and he was quite certainly growing poorer.

Tyranny varies with temperament, especially national temperament.
Some have taxed the poor, and some have enslaved the poor, and a few
have massacred the poor; but the English rulers simply forgot
the poor.  They talked as if they did not exist; they generalised
as if no such people need be included in the generalisation.
They drew up reports of progress and prosperity in which the common
people did not figure at all.  They did not suppress the subject;
by that time they simply did not think of it any more than a man
shooting pheasants prides himself on killing flies or an angler
counts the midges.  It was said that the English founded an empire
in a fit of absence of mind.  It must be somewhat sadly added
that they neglected a nation with the same absence of mind.
Oligarchies far harsher and more arbitrary in legal form would
probably have more responsibility in the sense of remembrance.
A Roman official might have written in a famine, `There is
still food enough for the citizens and even the slaves.'
A Victorian gentleman in the Hungry Forties simply sat down
at his groaning mahogany and said, `There is enough food.'
A planter in South Carolina might well have been heard saying,
`The Blockade is starving the blacks as well as ourselves,'
The merchant in Manchester was only heard saying, `There may be a slump;
but with the next boom we shall completely recover ourselves.'
That is the mental blank peculiar to this mentality.  They did
not even look down with scorn and say, `We are all comfortable,
even if these vagabonds are beggared by their own vices.'
They looked round with complete satisfaction and said,
`We are all comfortable.'

This distinction is simply a fact, and should not be mixed up with moral
or sentimental recriminations.  It is a character of the condition
called capitalism, whether we dwell on the economic dependence
or the political independence of the worker under capitalism.
In part, doubtless, the proletarian was forgotten because he was free.
The slave was remembered because he was always under the eye
of the master.  But I am not now arguing about whether nineteenth
century capitalism has been better or worse than slavery.
I am pointing out that the whole business of hiring men and sacking
men did allow of forgetting men.  It allowed of it much more
than the servile system of owning men.  Capitalism has produced
a peculiar thing, which may be called oppression by oblivion.
And this negative and indirect injustice was native both
to what is good and what is bad in the English temper.
It is the paradox of the English that they are always being cruel
through an aversion to cruelty.  They dislike quite sincerely
the sight of pain, and therefore shut their eyes to it; and it
was not unnatural that they should prefer a system in which men
were starved in slums but not scourged in slave-compounds.

Now, here again we have one of the subtleties under the
superficial simplicities of Rural Rides.  Cobbett, it has been
often repeated, was as English as any Englishman who ever lived.
He had all the English virtues:  the love of loafing and
of lonely adventure; the spirit of the genial eccentric;
the capacity to be a hermit without being a misanthrope;
the love of landscape and of roads astray; and above all,
that love of the grotesque that is as brave as a broad grin.
Nor, as we say, was he without that softer side,
only that with him it was generally the inside.
I mean that it was in his private and domestic character that we
see the English aversion to what is painful and severe.
He was a very gentle father and schoolmaster, not only in practice
but in theory; and much that he wrote on education almost
anticipates the complete amnesty of the Montessori school,
He always expressed himself strongly about the stupidity
of schoolmasters knocking children about, though he did it
with a cheerful readiness to knock the schoolmasters about.
Here he does indeed touch something in the English that is
behind their dislike of a scene.  Victor Hugo in his Art
of being a Grandfather describes in his rather boastful
fashion how he had lashed the world like Isaiah or Juvenal,
and refused to descend to the bathos of slapping a child.
Cobbett had lashed the world like nobody in the world but Cobbett.
And he had a better right than Hugo to say truly of himself
that `thunder should be mild at home.'

But when all this element in the great Englishman has been
allowed for, it is still true that there was one quality
in him that was not English.  He was extremely provocative.
He was as pro­vocative as an.  Irishman.  He refused to leave
people alone.  He refused emphatically to let sleeping dogs lie.
It is not surprising that at the end he had the whole pack
in full cry after him; and that it only gave him a further
opportunity for turning on them and telling them they were all curs
and mongrels, not to mention mad dogs.  He always trailed his coat,
especially so as to make men say that he had turned his coat.
He rejoiced and exulted in a scene.  There is nothing more vivid than
that scene on which Mr. Edward Thomas touched with great felicity,
the great meeting which Cobbett had worked up to the point
of a passionate enthusiasm for throwing him out.  `I stood up,'
he says,'that they might see the man they had to throw out.'
That phrase is a photograph before the days of photography;
the picture of that big, snorting, bellicose farmer, standing up
with distended nostrils and the expression which in the prize
ring is called being a glutton.

Now, the combination in Cobbett of the deepest English humours
and the love and understanding of England with this quality
which is rare in England, the aggressive and challenging quality,
is a sort of coincidence or contradiction which gave him his
whole value in our politics and history.  It was exactly because
he was English in everything else, and not English in this,
that he did serve England, and very nearly saved England.
He very nearly saved her from that oppression by oblivion,
that absent-minded cruelty of the mere capitalist, which has
now brought upon her such accumulated and appalling problems in
the industrial world.  He was capable of being candid about cruelty;
and indeed of being cruel about cruelty.  He would not let sleeping
dogs lie; he also would not let progressive politicians lie.
While a rather oily optimism was being applied like oil,
lie rubbed in his pessimism like pepper.  To a society that was
more and more covering itself up with its own superficial success,
he was always deliberately digging up the mass of submerged failure.
To use a metaphor that would have appealed to him, he was always
refusing to judge our society by the top-layer of apples
or strawberries in the basket, and always declaring that the
shop­keeper was a swindler and the fruit underneath was rotten.
While the whole of that version of things afterwards called
Victorian was gently pressing everybody to judge England by an
idealised version of the public schoolboy and the gentle­man,
he delighted to pester our very imagination with beggars and tramps.
While the New Poor Law was putting away such people in prisons
and police institutions, he delighted to exhibit them with all
their sores like the cripples on the steps o