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THE FREETHINKER London, England 26 January 1930 (pages 58-59)
Time's Revenges.
It is enlightening for the modest student of history to notice how human values change. The “great man” of the day before yesterday shrinks into the outmoded professionalist who was “lucky”; the despised, unpopular outcast gets the statue centuries after his death. “So runs the world away.” The forgotten scrap of holograph in the fist of “the Master” is catalogued by the autograph-dealer at a price that would have kept the writer alive for another six months. The irony is at once agonizing and delicious. Fate, with the heavy hand and the cruel smile, is a stern but witty deity, capable of amazing and unexpected generosity, usually when it is too late.
George Gissing’s tragedy was that he was never able, even in the days of his fame, to make enough money to be “easy.” The other day one of his “firsts” went for three hundred and twenty-five pounds, and the dealers laughed. Imagine, if you can, what that little sum would have meant to poor, worried Gissing. Where is he now. Anywhere? No one knows. But if he gets “news” now, we wonder what he thinks of the world and its ways, seen in perspective? If Gissing retain any part of his consciousness, we cannot help wondering how he regards the transaction. Morley Roberts, his faithful friend and biographer, tells how sometimes he had not a penny wherewith partly to satisfy his hunger. And one copy of one of his books, when Gissing is beyond the need of food, “goes” for very much more than he got for writing it. Could there be bitterer irony? Who can deny the goodness of the gods to mortals?
No matter! We will cease speculating upon the insoluble, and turn to the past. Recently, rambling in an old furniture shop, we lighted upon a set of Chamber’s Papers for the People; Volume 12, No. 8, of that forgotten work, of which we now possess a set, consists of an account of the famous Duke of Wellington, “The Iron Duke,” as he was called by the success-adoring Victorians.
The last paragraph thrilled us, as showing how the world rewards the successful soldier. Here it is, in full:—
The Duke of Wellington’s titles and offices are perhaps the most exalted and numerous ever conferred upon a single individual. We subjoin the list: Duke and Viscount Wellington; Baron Douro; Knight of the Garter, and Grand Cross of the Bath; Prince of Waterloo in the Netherlands; Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo, and Grandee of Spain; Duke of Vittoria; Marquis of Torres-Vedras; Count Vimiera in Portugal; Knight of the foreign orders of the Guelph of Hanover, St. Andrew of Russia, the Black Eagle of Prussia, the Golden Fleece of Spain, the Elephant of Denmark, St. Ferdinand of Merit, and St. Januarius of the Two Sicilies, Maximilian-Josepli of Bavaria, Maria-Theresa of Austria, the Sword of Sweden, of William of the Netherlands; Field-Marshal in the Armies of Austria, Russia, Prussia, Portugal, the Netherlands; Captain-General of Spain; Commander-in-Chief; Colonel of Grenadier Guards; Colonel-in-Chief of Rifle Brigade; Constable of the Tower and Dover Castle; Warden of the Cinque Ports; Lord-Lieutenant of Hampshire and the Tower Hamlets; Chancellor of the University of Oxford; Master of Trinity House; Vice-President of the Scottish Naval and Military Academy; Governor of King’s College; and D.C.L.
This precious string of pompous jargon, published in the Year of Grace, 1851, is a list of the honours bestowed by a grateful world upon a successful soldier, who was, incidentally, one of the most unloveable characters of whom we have any record. This “Iron Duke” and Tin God was also rewarded by a grateful country with seven hundred thousand pounds, two-thousand-a-year besides, “and perquisites.” Enough of this dreary account of human sycophancy and snobbery; but it is amusing, perhaps, to recall the fact that when His Grace had the misfortune to differ from the citizens of London and Westminster about the expediency of a Reform Bill, the fickle mob, whose country he was supposed to have “saved” at the Battle of Waterloo, showed their dissent from, and their gratitude to, their saviour by smashing the windows of Apsley House, Piccadilly, His Grace’s town residence. “So runs the world away.”
All the great ceremonial religions—Buddhism, Catholicism, Judaism—and all the great imaginative writers, Homer, Aristophanes, Goethe, Dante, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Swift, Whitman, know the humanly-valuable worth of the litany as a psychological enlightener. These human catalogues!
As a counterblast to the list-history of the Duke of Wellington, here is an almost-contemporary list-history of Charles Southwell, the forgotten hero whom we are trying to restore to his rightful place in English social history.
In The Lancashire Beacon for November 10, 1849—thus almost contemporarily with the list of Wellington’s “honours”—Southwell, after claiming to be “the best abused man in all England,” gives a catalogue of the kind things said about him by his orthodox and pious opponents. We transcribe this list in full; in the hope that it will amuse our readers as much as it has amused us:—
“Gentleman mountebank; Napoleon-minded anti-Christian demagogue; destroying monster atheist; midnight reveller; man Southwell; of never-to-be-beaten spirit; king of himself alone; man with a melancholy soul; Voltaire the second; friend of Christ; hypocrite; fellow; hero of mischief; pest of society; infidel.”—Christian Beacon, No. 1.
“Wandering vagabond; strolling player; restless, unhappy man; poor wanderer; little cop; infidel Charles Southwell.”—Christian Beacon, No. 2.
“Hop-o’-my-thumb; blethering skate; hotch potch genius; little argus-eyed Tom Thumb; Bombastes Furioso; dear Voltaire; base and villainous designer; infamous editor; blasphemous, vituperative, demoralizing, abandoned; cod-seller; shark; jackanapes; liar; will-o’-the-wisp; mountebank stage doctor; broker; general dealing conglomerist; editor of this dark lanthorn; showman; cantino hypocrite; dancing shop keeper; braggadacio; calumniator; whited sepulchre; tinkling symbal.”—Christian Beacon, No. 3.
Avowed blasphemer; denier of Almighty God; scoffer of His revealed word; traducer of religion; vilifier of the clergy; malignant fellow; shrimp of wretchedness; libel on mankind; brazen-faced; Satan’s representative; public disturber of the peace; maligner; libeller; monster shape; low leader of an atheistical mob; idle mountebank; pestiferous monster; beast.”—London Era, quoted in the Christian Beacon, No. 3.
“Chartist from London; impudent cockney; extractor of thunder from cucumber frames.”—Manchester Courier, No. 1478.
Southwell’s crime was that he wished to liberate men’s minds from the tryanny of the superstitions of his day. The world rewarded him by bestowing the praises that he had such glee in recording. The volatile reader might now do worse than turn to “Laud” Tennyson’s famous Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, published in 1852. In his middle age the most “eminent” and popular of the Victorian poets was already a militarist, a toady, and a violent jingo. He falls over himself in beslavering the dead soldier; he writes as though the world ought to end because a successful and extremely-well-paid warrior has died. This will suffice; we will not quote from the lick-spittle laureate. Instead, we will quote a few lines from Holyoake upon Southwell’s death:—
“Still pursuing a profitless journalism, struggling against difficulties too great for his strength or his means, lie dies as he has lived. It is so sorrowful that he should die so far away, where no old friend could soothe by affectionate attention his last hours, and pay the last tribute of honour at his grave.”
“So runs the world away.” Meantime, in our brief hour it is well to remember how values alter. The condemned criminal, howled-at on the way to execution by the “God”-sodden mob of yesterday, is to-day canonized and has monographs written about his views by “respectable” dons. The fashionable theological prince of his day, author of twenty volumes in elephant-folio, deferred-to by popes, princes and plutocrats, is to-day a shadow of a name, his mouldy pages lying neglected upon the top shelves of public libraries, his doctrines superseded, his works forgotten.
What are ultimate values? Are there any ultimate values at all? The only voice that could reply satisfactorily would be a voice from the Unknown. And the Unknown is dumb. Such is the tragedy of human life and work.
Nevertheless, there are signs—and manifold signs at that!—that an age is approaching wherein the forgotten and neglected pioneers of the race will come into their own; and in that age, not far distant, we think, the gaudy reputations of politicians and generals will be known for the tinsel and stucco that they are; and the true gold of those who worked and brought and suffered for the love of man will be recognized and valued at its true worth.
“Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things.”
This single line of the greatest of the Victorian Poets is final and decisive. When the magnificent obsequies of the Iron Duke are forgotten, and his vast reputation is an historical curiosity, our descendants will be gathering around the monument erected to the revived memory of Charles Southwell.
There is no moral; but there is, maybe, material herein for the student of humanity to consider. “So runs the world away.”
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