The Political History of England – Vol XI

But this was only one of Bentinck's reforms. Armed with peremptory instructions from the home government, he effected large retrenchments in the growing expenditure of the Indian services, both civil and military, and a considerable increase in the Indian revenue. It may be doubted whether one of these retrenchments, involving a strict revision of officers' allowances known as "batta," was considerable enough to be worth the almost mutinous discontent which it provoked. Another, affecting the salaries of civilians, was aggravated, in their eyes, by the admission of natives to "primary jurisdiction," in other words, by enabling native judges to sit in courts of first instance. This important change had been gradually introduced before the arrival of Bentinck, but it was he who most boldly adopted the idea of governing India in the interest and by the agency of the natives. On the other hand, it was he who, supported by Macaulay's famous minute, but contrary to official opinion in Leadenhall Street, issued the ordinance constituting English the official language of India. In a like spirit, he promoted the work of native education, partly for the purpose of developing the political and judicial capacity of the higher orders among the Hindus, but partly also for the purpose of making the English language and literature the instrument of their elevation. He earnestly desired to raise the standard of Indian civilisation, but he equally desired to fashion it in an English mould.

THE EXTIRPATION OF "THAGÍ".

Under the rule of Bentinck, the revenue was largely augmented by a reassessment of land in the north-western provinces, where an increasing number of zamíndárs had fraudulently evaded the payment of rent, and by the imposition of licence-duties on the growers of opium in Málwá, who had carried on a profitable but illicit trade through foreign ports. But the social benefit of the people was ever his first concern, and not the least of his claims to their gratitude was the final extirpation of "thagí". This institution was a secret association of highway robbers and murderers who had plagued Central India almost as widely as the roving troops of Pindárís. Their victims were travellers whom they decoyed into their haunts, plundered, strangled, and buried on the spot. For years they carried on their infamous trade with impunity, and no member of the conspiracy had turned informer. At last, however, a clue was found by a skilful and resolute agent of the government, and the spell of mutual dread which held together the murderous confederacy was effectually broken in India. Meanwhile, the same period of peaceful development witnessed the execution of important public works, the relaxation of restrictions on the liberty of the press, and a general advance towards a more paternal despotism, coincident with the progress of liberal ideas at home. These benign influences were favoured by the continuance of peace and the maintenance of non-intervention, disturbed only by the minor annexations of Cachar and Coorg, to which may be added the assumption of direct control over Mysore.

When the charter of 1833 transformed the "company of British merchants trading to the east" into the "East India Company," with administrative powers only, Bentinck was in failing health, and he soon afterwards returned home. On his resignation in 1835, Metcalfe became provisional governor-general, but his liberal policy displeased the court of directors, and Lord Heytesbury was selected by the short-lived government of Peel as Bentinck's successor. Palmerston, however, on resuming the foreign office, was believed to have used his influence to set aside this nomination, and to procure the appointment of Lord Auckland, then first lord of the admiralty. The supposed objection to Heytesbury was his known sympathy with Russia, at a moment when distrust of Russia's designs on the north-west frontier was about to become the keynote of Anglo-Indian statesmanship. During the interregnum between Bentinck's retirement and Auckland's accession, three more remedial measures were carried into effect, the wisdom of which is not even yet beyond dispute. These were the complete liberation of the Indian press, the abolition of the exclusive privilege whereby British residents could appeal in civil suits to the supreme court at Calcutta, and the definite introduction of English text-books into schools for the people. For all these reforms Macaulay was largely responsible, but the impulse had been given by Bentinck, and was accelerated by Metcalfe.

During the years 1835-37 domestic affairs occupied much less space in the counsels of Indian statesmen than schemes for counteracting the growth of Russian influence at Tihran, and securing the predominance of British influence in Afghánistán. For a time their anxiety was concentrated on Herat, which the Sháh of Persia was besieging, with the intention of penetrating into the heart of Afghán territory, while the Afghán rulers themselves were suspected of secretly conspiring with Persia against our ally, Ranjít Singh. Since Persia, having again lost faith in British support, was drifting more and more into reliance on Russia, this forward movement was regarded as the first step of the Russian advance-guard towards India. The fate of India was felt to depend on the defence of Herat under Pottinger, a young British officer, who volunteered his services without instructions from home. The siege, conducted under Russian officers, lasted ten months, and its ultimate failure was hailed as a triumph of British policy, for Herat was recognised, since the days of Alexander the Great, as the western gate of India.

COMMUNICATION WITH INDIA.

About the same time the question of a shorter route to India attracted much attention both in Russia and in England. The first project was that, ultimately adopted, of a sea passage by Malta to Alexandria, a land transit across Egypt to Suez, and a second voyage by the Red Sea to Indian ports. The alternative line was more properly described as an "overland route," since it was proposed to make the journey from some port in the eastern Levant across Syria and by the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. Colonel Chesney was sent out in 1835 as the pioneer of an expedition by this route, and parliament twice voted money for its development, but it was vigorously opposed by Russia, and abandoned as impracticable owing to physical difficulties in navigating the Euphrates, then considered as a necessary channel of communication with the sea. The scheme has since been revived on a much grander scale in the form of a projected railway traversing Asia Minor to Baghdad, and running down the valley of the Tigris. In the meantime, the Red Sea route, at first discredited, has far more than justified the hopes of its promoters. With the aid of steam-vessels, since 1845, and of the Suez Canal, since 1869, it has reduced the journey to India from a period of four months to one of three weeks, and profoundly affected its relations with Great Britain.

It would be well if the premature, but not unfounded, fear of Russian invasion had produced no further effects on Anglo-Indian policy. Unhappily, those who justly perceived the importance of Afghánistán, as lying between Persia and the Punjab, were possessed with the delusion that it would prove a more solid buffer as a British dependency than as an independent state. In their ignorance of its internal condition and the sentiments of its unruly tribes, the Indian government despatched Sir Alexander Burnes to Kábul, nominally as a commercial emissary, but not without ulterior objects. They could not have chosen a more capable agent, for he added to a knowledge of several languages a minute geographical acquaintance with Central Asia and an insight into the character of its inhabitants which probably no other Englishman possessed. He was to proceed by way of Sind to Pesháwar, and in passing through Sind he received news of the siege of Herat, the significance of which he was not slow to appreciate. Thenceforward his mission inevitably assumed a political complexion, since the future of Afghánistán became a practical question. His rash negotiations with Dost Muhammad, the Amír of Kábul, and his brother at Kandahár, his return to India, his second mission to Afghánistán in support of a policy which he had deprecated, and his tragical death in the Kábul insurrection, – these are events which belong to a later chapter of history. But, though Burnes cannot be held responsible for the first Afghán war, there can be no doubt that his travels in disguise through Central Asia, and confidential reports on the border countries between the Russian and British spheres of influence, were the immediate prelude to a campaign the most ill-advised and the most disastrous ever organised by the Indian government and sanctioned by that of Great Britain.

CHAPTER XX.

LITERATURE AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

The period which elapsed between the resignation of Pitt and the battle of Waterloo was hardly less eventful in the history of British civilisation than in the history of British empire. To some, the boundary line between the society of the eighteenth and that of the nineteenth century appears to be marked by the outbreak of the French revolution, and the far-reaching effects of that catastrophe upon ideas, manners, and politics in Great Britain, as well as upon the continent, are too evident to be denied. But it is equally certain that, before the French revolution, an intellectual and industrial movement was in progress which must have given a most powerful impulse to civilisation, even if the French revolution had never taken place. In this country, especially, the great writers, philanthropists, scientific leaders, inventors, engineers, and reformers of various types, who adorned the latter part of George III.'s reign, largely drew their inspiration from an age, just preceding the French revolution, which is sometimes regarded as barren in originality.

When the nineteenth century opened, the classical authors of that pre-revolutionary age had mostly passed away. Hume died in 1776, Johnson in 1784, Adam Smith in 1790, Gibbon in 1794, Burns in 1796, Burke in 1797, Cowper in 1800. John Howard, the great pioneer of prison reform, became a martyr to philanthropy in 1790. The most remarkable of those manufacturing improvements and mechanical inventions upon which the commercial supremacy of England is founded date from the same period, and have been described in a previous volume. Steam navigation was still untried, but preliminary experiments had already been made on both sides of the Atlantic before 1789. The application of steam to locomotion by land had scarcely been conceived, but the facilities of traffic and travelling had been vastly developed in the first forty years of George III.'s reign.

It may truly be said, however, that English literature in the early party of the nineteenth century bears clear traces of the influence exercised on receptive minds by the French revolution. Three of the leading poets, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, were deeply infected by its spirit, and indulged in their youth fantastic dreams of a social millennium; Wordsworth, especially, who in his maturer years could be justly described as the priest of nature-worship and the poet of rural life, had imbibed violent republican ideas during a residence of more than a year in France. These were passing off in 1798, when he published, jointly with Coleridge, the volume of Lyrical Ballads containing the latter's immortal tale of the Ancient Mariner. In the following year he settled in the English lake-country, where Coleridge established himself for a while, and Southey for life. Hence the popular but very inaccurate title of the "Lake School," applied to a trio of poets who, except as friends, had little in common with each other. Indeed, after Wordsworth had developed his theory of poetical realism in the preface to a volume published in 1800, Coleridge rejected and criticised it as wholly untenable. All three, however, may be considered as comrades in a revolt against the conventional diction of eighteenth century poetry, from which Coleridge's "dreamy tenderness" and mystical flights of fancy were as remote as Wordsworth's rusticity and almost prosaic studies of humble life.

COLERIDGE AND SCOTT.

Although Coleridge survived to 1834 and Wordsworth to 1850, both seem to have lost at an early date that power of imagination, whether displayed in sympathy or in creation, in which their greatness consisted. Wordsworth wrote assiduously during the whole of this period; in 1807 he published a volume of poems, including the famous Ode on the Intimations of Immortality and several of his finest sonnets; but of his later work only an occasional lyric deserves to be ranked beside the poems published in 1800 and 1807. Coleridge, indeed, published two of his finest poems, Christabel and Kubla Khan, in 1816, but they were written long before, Christabel, partly in 1797 and partly in 1801, and Kubla Khan in 1798. Even the new metre of Christabel, which is not the least of Coleridge's contributions to English poetry, had, as early as 1805, been borrowed in the Lay of the Last Minstrel by Scott, to whom Coleridge had recited the poem. Nevertheless, Coleridge continued to exercise a great influence, partly through the charm of his conversation and partly through his prose works, in which he introduced to a British public, as yet unused to German literature, a vision of that mystical German thought which finds its father in Kant, and was represented at that day by Hegel in philosophy and Goethe in poetry. It is uncertain how far the general ignorance of German literature in England was responsible for the influence exercised in their own day by the few English or Scottish thinkers, such as Coleridge, Hamilton, and Carlyle, who had either fallen under the spell or learned the secret of the German mystics. The most important of Coleridge's prose works was Aids to Reflection, which appeared in 1828, and whatever be its literary value, it deserves the notice of the historian, as the least unsystematic treatise of an author who gave the principal philosophical impetus to the Oxford movement.

Two other poets, eminently the product of their age, though not the offspring of the French revolution, Scott and Byron, were equally in revolt against conventional diction. Scott elevated ballad-poetry to a level which it had never before attained, and composed some of the most beautiful songs in the English language. If it be remembered that he was cramped by the drudgery of legal offices during the best years of his life, that he was nearly thirty when he made his first literary venture, that he was crippled by financial ruin and broken health during his later years, that his anonymous contributions to periodicals would fill volumes, and that he died at the age of sixty-one, his fertility of production must ever be ranked as unique in the history of English literature. Already known as the author of various lyrical pieces, and the Border Minstrelsy, he published the Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, Marmion (with its fine stanzas on Pitt and Fox) in 1808, the Lady of the Lake in 1809, Don Roderick in 1811, and Rokeby in 1813, as well as minor poems of high merit. He is said to have abandoned poetry in deference to Byron's rising star, and it is certain that he now fills a higher place in the roll of English classics as a prose writer than as a poet. His first novel, Waverley, appeared in 1814, and was followed In the next four years by six of the greatest "Waverley Novels," as the series came to be called —Guy Mannering, the Antiquary, the Black Dwarf, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, and the Heart of Midlothian. It is not too much to say that by these works, both in poetry and in prose, he created the historical romance in Great Britain. The legends of chivalry and the folk-lore of his native land had deeply stirred his soul, and fired his imagination from childhood, and though later "research" has far outstripped the range of his antiquarian knowledge, no modern writer has ever done so much to awaken a reverence for olden times in the hearts of his countrymen. The easy flow of his style, the vivid energy of his thought, the graphic power of his descriptions, his shrewd and robust sympathy with human nature, and the evident simplicity of his own character, not unmingled with flashes of true poetical insight, justly rendered him the most popular writer of his time.

Byron was born in 1788, and first sprang into notice as the author of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a fierce and bitter reply to critics who had disparaged his first essay in poetry. This satire appeared in 1809, when he was just of age, after which he travelled with Hobhouse, and it was not until 1812 that he "woke to find himself famous," on publishing the first two cantos of Childe Harold. During the next three years, he poured forth a succession of characteristic poems, including the Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair, Lara, and the Siege of Corinth. His later work was of a more finished order, including the remaining cantos of Childe Harold, Manfred, Cain, and Mazeppa, and when he died at Mesolongi in 1824, he left unfinished what is, in some ways, the most remarkable of his works, Don Juan. Long before his death he had become the prophet and hero of a pseudo-romantic school, composed of young Englishmen dazzled by his intellectual brilliancy, and attracted rather than repelled by a certain Satanic taint in his moral sentiments. But he also won the admiration of Goethe, and the reaction against his fame in a later generation is as exaggerated as the idolatry of which he was the object under the regency. His morbid egotism, his stormy rhetoric, and his meretricious exaltation of passion, have lost their magical effect, but his poetical gifts would have commanded homage in any age. The message which he professed to deliver was a false message, but few poets have surpassed him in daring vigour of imagination, in descriptive force, in wit, or in pathos. His style was eminently such as to invite imitation, yet no one has successfully imitated him. Had he been a better man, and had his life been prolonged, he might perhaps have towered above his literary contemporaries as Napoleon did among the generals and rulers of Europe.

KEATS, SHELLEY, TENNYSON.

Yet among these contemporaries were Keats and Shelley, whom some critics of a younger generation would place above him in poetical originality. Their chief merit lay neither in thought nor in strength, but in an exquisite sweetness of expression, which in the case of Shelley at least was quite independent of the subject-matter. Keats, though junior to Shelley, has been described as his poetical father, but his chief poem, Endymion, did not appear until several years after Shelley had formed his own distinctive style. He died in 1821 at the age of twenty-six, leaving a poetical inheritance of the highest quality, which, though limited in quantity and unequal in workmanship, has gained an enduring reputation. Nevertheless his work lent itself readily to imitation, and he exercised a marked influence on the style of later poets, not only in this period, but in the Victorian age as well. The rebellious spirit of Shelley had already shown itself at an early age in his poetry, and especially in Queen Mab, printed in 1812. His ethereal fancy, his dreamy obscurity, and his witchery of language, designated him from the first as a master of lyrical poetry; though he wrote longer pieces, his fame rests on the numerous short poems which continued to appear till his death in 1822.

Perhaps the greatest master of melody was one who was only coming to the front at the close of this period, Alfred Tennyson, born in 1809, contributed with two of his brothers to a collection of verses, misleadingly entitled Poems by Two Brothers, which appeared in 1826. At Cambridge his Timbuctoo won the chancellor's prize, but the first proof of his powers was given by a volume of short poems published in 1830, followed by a similar volume two years later. By far the greater part of his work lies in the next period, but the volume of 1833 already included some of his best known poems.

Among minor poets of this period the highest rank must perhaps be assigned to Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore as authors of some of the most stirring and graceful lyrics in the English language. The former had attained celebrity by the Pleasures of Hope, published before the end of the eighteenth century, but his choicest poems, such as Ye Mariners of England, the fine verses on Hohenlinden and Copenhagen, and Gertrude of Wyoming, appeared between 1802 and 1809. The series of Moore's Irish melodies, on which his poetical fame largely rests, was begun in 1807, though not completed until long afterwards. They were followed by other lyrical pieces of great merit, and by a series of witty and malicious lampoons, collected in 1813 into a volume called the Twopenny Post Bag. Lalla Rookh, his most ambitious effort, was not published until 1817.

Two prose writers of the same epoch, Southey and Bentham, claim special notice, though Southey may also be numbered among the poets. Having established himself close to Keswick in 1804, he prosecuted a literary career with the most untiring industry until his mental faculties at last failed him some thirty-six years later. During this period he produced above a hundred volumes in poetry and prose, besides numerous scattered articles and other papers. Most of these were of merely ephemeral interest, but the Life of Nelson, published in 1813, may be said to have set a standard of simplicity, purity, and dignity in English prose which has been of permanent value. Bentham's style, on the contrary, was so wanting in beauty and perspicuity that one at least of his chief works is best known to English readers in the admirable French paraphrase of his friend Dumont. This is his famous Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, in which the doctrines of the utilitarian philosophy are rigorously applied to jurisprudence and the regulation of human conduct. Several of his numerous treatises had been planned, and others actually composed, before the end of the eighteenth century, but his practical influence, ultimately so great, first made itself felt in the early part of the nineteenth century. This influence may be compared within the sphere of social reform to that of Adam Smith within the sphere of economy. Many amendments of the law, an improved system of prison discipline, and even the reform of the poor law, may be directly traced to his counsels, and it was he who inspired the leading radicals when radicalism was not so much a destructive creed as a protest against real and gross abuses.

MALTHUS.

Perhaps, next to Bentham, no writer of this period influenced educated opinion so powerfully as Malthus, whose Essay on Population, first published anonymously in 1798, attracted comparatively little attention until 1803, when it was republished in a maturer form. No work has ever been more persistently misrepresented. While he shows that population, if unchecked, will surely increase in a ratio far outstripping any possible increase in the means of subsistence, he also shows, by elaborate proofs, that it will inevitably be checked by vice and misery, whether or not they are aided by moral restraint. Later experience has done little to weaken his reasoning, but it has proved that "moral restraint" (in the most general sense) operates more widely than he ventured to expect, and that larger tracts of the earth's surface than he recognised could be brought under profitable cultivation. With these modifications, his theory holds the field, and the people of Great Britain only escape starvation by ever-growing importations of grain from countries whose production – for the present – exceeds their consumption.

Several other writers of eminence, such as Sheridan and Paley, who lived in the latter days of George III. are more properly to be regarded as survivors of eighteenth century literature. Horne Tooke was returned for Old Sarum in 1801, and enjoyed a reputation in society until his death in 1812, but his old-fashioned radicalism had long since been superseded by a newer creed. Dugald Stewart continued to lecture on moral philosophy until 1809, and was fortunate in numbering among his pupils Palmerston, Lansdowne, and Russell. A younger student of philosophy was Richard Whately, who was born in 1787, and elected to a fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1811. He soon began to play an active part in university life, and, after being principal of St. Alban Hall, was removed to the archbishopric of Dublin in 1831. Though not a great philosopher, he was an acute logician, and his Logic, published in 1826, entitled him to a high place among the thinkers of his generation. But it was not merely as a teacher and writer that Whately promoted the cause of philosophy in Oxford. He was one of the leaders in that organisation of studies which made philosophy one of the principal studies, if not the principal study, of the abler students in that university, and gave elementary logic a place in the ordinary "pass-man's" curriculum.