The Burning Book

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Title:     The Burning Book
Author: Henry W. Nevinson [More Titles by Nevinson]

"How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!" cried Walt Whitman, as I quoted in the last essay. He was thinking, perhaps, of Harper's Ferry and of John Brown hanging on the crab-apple tree, while his soul went marching on. It is the lament of all writers and speakers who are driven by inward compulsion to be something more than artists in words, and who seek to jog the slow-pacing world more hurriedly forward. How long had preachers, essayists, orators, and journalists argued slavery round and round before the defiant deed crashed and settled it! "Who hath believed our report?" the prophets have always cried, until the arm of the Lord was revealed; and the melancholy of all prophetic writers is mainly due to the conscious helplessness of their words. If men would only listen to reason--if they would listen even to the appeals of justice and compassion, we suppose our prophets would grow quite cheerful at last. But to justice and compassion men listen only at a distance, and the prophet is near.

Nevertheless, in his address as Chancellor of Manchester University in June 1912, Lord Morley, who has himself often sounded the prophetic note, asserted that "a score of books in political literature rank as acts, not books." He happened to be speaking on the anniversary of Rousseau's birth, two hundred years ago, and in no list of such books could Rousseau's name be forgotten. "Whether a score or a hundred," Lord Morley went on, "the _Social Contract_ was one," and, as though to rouse his audience with a spark, he quoted once more the celebrated opening sentence, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." That sentence is not true either in history or in present life. It would be truer to say that man has everywhere been born in chains and, very slowly, in some few parts of the world, he is becoming free. The sentence is neither scientific as historic theory nor true to present life, and yet Lord Morley rightly called it electrifying. And the same is true of the book which it so gloriously opens. As history and as philosophy, it is neither original nor exact. It derived directly from Locke, and many aspects of the world and thought since Darwin's time confute it. But, however much anticipated, and however much exposed to scientific ridicule, it remains one of the burning books of the world--one of those books which, as Lord Morley said, rank as acts, not books.

"Let us realise," he continued, "with what effulgence such a book burst upon communities oppressed by wrong, sunk in care, inflamed by passions of religion or of liberty, the two eternal fields of mortal struggle." So potent an influence depends much upon the opportunity of time--the fulfilment of the hour's need. A book so abstract, so assertive of theory, and standing so far apart from the world's actual course, would hardly find an audience now. But in the eighteenth century, so gaily confident in the power of reason, so trustful of good intentions, so ready to acclaim noble phrase and generality, and so ignorant of the past and of the poor--in the midst of such a century the _Social Contract_ was born at the due time. Add the vivid imagination and the genuine love for his fellow-men, to which Lord Morley told us Maine attributed Rousseau's ineffaceable influence on history, and we are shown some of the qualities and reasons that now and again make words burn with that effulgence, and give even to a book the power of a deed.

Lord Morley thought there might be a score, or perhaps even a hundred, of such books in political literature. He himself gave two other instances beside the _Social Contract_. He mentioned _The Institutions of the Christian Religion_, of Calvin, "whose own unconquerable will and power to meet occasion made him one of the commanding forces in the world's history." And he mentioned Tom Paine's _Common Sense_ as "the most influential political piece ever composed." I could not, offhand, give a list of seventeen other books of similar power to make up the score. I do not believe so many exist, and as to ninety-seven, the idea need not be considered. There have been books of wide and lasting political influence--Plato's _Republic_, Aristotle's _Politics_, Machiavelli's _Prince_, Hobbes's _Leviathan_, Locke's _Civil Government_, Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, Paine's _Right of Man_, Mill's _Liberty_ and _The Subjection of Women_, Green's _Political Obligation_, and many more. But these are not burning books in the sense in which the _Social Contract_ was a burning book. With the possible exception of _The Subjection of Women_, they were cool and philosophic. With the possible exception of Machiavelli, their writers might have been professors. The effect of the books was fine and lasting, but they were not aflame. They did not rank as acts. The burning books that rank as acts and devour like purifying fire must be endowed with other qualities.

Such books appear to have been very few, though, in a rapid survey, one is likely to overlook some. In all minds there will arise at once the great memory of Swift's _Drapier's Letters_, passionately uttering the simple but continually neglected law that "all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery." Carlyle's _French Revolution_ and _Past and Present_ burnt with similar flame; so did Ruskin's _Unto this Last_ and the series of _Fors Clavigera;_ so did Mazzini's _God and the People_, Karl Marx's _Kapital_, Henry George's _Progress and Poverty_, Tolstoy's _What shall we do?_ and so did Proudhon's _Qu'est ce que la Propriete?_ at the time of its birth. Nor from such a list could one exclude _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, by which Mrs. Beecher Stowe anticipated the deed of Harper's Ferry nine years before it came.

These are but few books and few authors. With Lord Morley's three thrown in, they still fall far short of a score. Readers will add other names, other books that ranked as acts and burnt like fire. To their brief but noble roll, I would also add one name, and one brief set of speeches or essays that hardly made a book, but to which Lord Morley himself, at all events, would not be likely to take exception. He mentioned Burke's famous denunciation of Rousseau, and, indeed, the natures and aspects of no two distinguished and finely-tempered men could well be more opposed. But none the less, I believe that in Burke, before growing age and growing fears and habits chilled his blood, there kindled a fire consuming in its indignation, and driving him to words that, equally with Rousseau's, may rank among the acts of history. In support of what may appear so violent a paradox when speaking of one so often claimed as a model of Conservative moderation and constitutional caution, let me recall a few actual sentences from the speech on "Conciliation with America," published three years before Rousseau's death. The grounds of Burke's imagination were not theoretic. He says nothing about abstract man born free; but, as though quietly addressing the House of Commons to-day, he remarks:

"The Colonies complain that they have not the characteristic
mark and seal of British freedom. They complain that they
are taxed in a Parliament in which they are not represented."

That simple complaint had roused in the Colonies, thus deprived of the mark and seal of British freedom, a spirit of turbulence and disorder. Already, under a policy of negation and suppression, the people were driving towards the most terrible kind of war--a war between the members of the same community. Already the cry of "no concession so long as disorders continue" went up from the central Government, and, with passionate wisdom, Burke replied:

"The question is not whether their spirit deserves
blame or praise, but what, in the name of God, shall
we do with it?"

Then come two brief passages which ought to be bound as watchwords and phylacteries about the foreheads of every legislator who presumes to direct our country's destiny, and which stand as a perpetual indictment against all who endeavour to exclude the men or women of this country from constitutional liberties:

"In order to prove that the Americans have no right to
their liberties, we are every day endeavouring to
subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of
our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be
free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom
itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage
over them in debate without attacking some of those
principles or deriding some of those feelings for
which our ancestors have shed their blood."

The second passage is finer still, and particularly apt to the present civil contest over Englishwomen's enfranchisement:

"The temper and character which prevail in our Colonies
are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. We cannot,
I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and
persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in
whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language
in which they would hear you tell them this tale would
detect the imposition. Your speech would betray you. An
Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue
another Englishman into slavery."

It may be said that these words, unlike the words with which Rousseau kindled revolution, failed of their purpose. The Government remained deaf and blind to the demand of British freedom; a terrible war was not averted; one of the greatest disasters in our history ensued. None the less, they glow with the true fire, and the book that contains them ranks with acts, and, indeed, with battles. That we should thus be coupling Rousseau and Burke--two men of naturally violent antipathy--is but one of the common ironies of history, which in the course of years obliterates differences and soothes so many hatreds. To be accepted and honoured by the same mind, and even for similar service, the two apparent opposites must have had something in common. What they had in common was the great qualities that Maine discovered in Rousseau--the vivid imagination and the genuine love for their fellow-men; and by imagination I mean the power of realising the thoughts, feelings, and sufferings of others. Thus from these two qualities combined in the presence of oppression, cruelty, or the ordinary stupid and callous denial of freedom, there sprang that flame of indignation from which alone the burning book derives its fire. Examine those other books whose titles I have mentioned, and their origin will in every case be found the same. They are the flaming children of rage, and rage is begotten by imaginative power out of love for the common human kind.

[The end]
Henry W. Nevinson's essay: The Burning Book

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