BOOKS.

MR. MORLEY ON CROMWELL.* MR. MORLEY prefaces his Cromwell with an apology for writing it. No apology is ever needed for a book with a character of its own, which offers its readers the results of independent thinking on great questions and a great mar, However voluminous the literature of the subject be, there is always room for such a book. The outline of a mountain varies with the angle and the distance from which it is viewed, and its true proportions are sometimes clearer to the more remote observer than to the laborious explorer of its lower slopes.

Mr. Morley accepts the facts of Cromwell's life and the main features of his character as they are set forth in the writings of Dr. Gardiner and other recent historians. But he does not accept them uncritically, and he frequently rejects hypotheses which seem to his judgment insufficiently proved. If he adds no new facts about Cromwell, he often elucidates his statement of the old by fresh illustrations from seventeenth- century literature, or by the reflections which modern political life suggests. The interest of the book resides not so much in the narrative of Cromwell's career as in the com- mentary of the author upon its critical phases, and upon the political problems connected with them. He rises continually from the local and temporary questions of a particular period of English history to the consideration of those large and lasting issues which belong to every age. There is also a certain tendency to generalisation in Mr. Morley's treatment of persons ; that is to say, the minor actors in the drama are realised rather as types than in- dividuals. Nevertheless, the principal personages are both justly and finely characterised. The portraits of Charles, Henrietta, Laud, Strafford, and Pym are of singular interest. For the King himself, it is true, Mr. Morley cannot say much. "His fault--and no statesman can have a worse— was that he never saw things as they were. He had taste, imagination, logic, but he was a dreamer, an idealist, and a theoriser, in which there might have been good rather than evil if only his dreams, theories, and ideals had not been out of relation with the hard duties of a day of storm." As for the Queen, her fortitude in adversity, and the strange vicissi- tudes of her fate, invest her with a romantic light which transfigures the form of the shallow and perverse woman who was the evil genius of her husband. The way in which Mr. Morley uses Bossuet's funeral sermon to produce this effect is an admirable piece of art. As to the other three, Pym receives unstinted admiration as the ideal of what a Parliamentary leader should be Laud is summed up as being neither the saint of Anglican hig,hliers, nor the bigot of Buckle and Macaulay, but rather the mischievous good man of contemporary historians, such as Whitelocke and May. Of Strafford we are told :— "He had energy, boldness, unsparing industry and attention,

• (giver Cromwell. By the Right Hon. John Morley. London: Macmillan And (k). LlOs. or las. net.]

long-sighted continuity of thought and plan, lofty flight, and as true a concern for order and the public service as Ppm or

Oliver or any of them." In another passage Mr. Morley compares Strafford and Cromwell as rulers of Leland, putting the Irish statesmanship of the latter far below that of his predecessor, for the reason that " Strafford had a grasp of the complications of social conditions in Ireland to which Crom- well could not pretend." This is true, but the rebellion with which Cromwell had to deal in Ireland was in part the result of Strafford's attempted plantations, and there is a fund. mental resemblance between the policy of the two.

Yet though here and elsewhere Mr. Morley judges Crom- well's statesmanship somewhat too severely, his appreciation of Cromwell's character is always just and sympathetic. There is an admirable description of Cromwell as he was at the outset of his political career :—

" Firm in his belief in direct communion with God, a sovereign power unseen; hearkening for the divine voice, his steps guided by the divine hand, yet he moved full in the world and in the life of the world. Of books he knew little. Of the yet more invigorating education of responsible contact with large affairs he had as yet had none. Into men and the ways of men, he had enjoyed no opportunity of seeing far He was both cautious and daring ; both patient and swift; both tender and fierce; both sober and yet willing to face tremendous risks ; both cool in head and yet with a flame of passion in his heart. His exterior rough and unpolished, and with an odd turn for rustic buffooneries, he had the quality of directing a steady, penetrating gaze into the centre of a thing. Nature had endowed him with a power of keeping his own counsel, that was sometimes to pass for dissimulation ; a keen eye for adjusting means to ends, that was often taken for craft ; and a high-hearted insistence on determined ends, that by those who loved to think the worst was counted as guilty ambition. The foundation of the whole was a temperament of energy, vigour, resolution. Cromwell was to show himself one of the men who are born to force great causes to the proof."

Equally admirable in a different way is the summary of Cromwell's character as a ruler in one of the concluding pages of the book :—

" In saying that Cromwell had the spirit, insight, and grasp that fit a man to wield power in the greatest affairs, we only repeat that he had the instinct of government, and this is a very different thing from either a taste for the abstract ideas of politics, or the passion for liberty. The instinct of order has been as often the gift of a tyrant as of a hero, as common to some of the worst hearts in human history as to some of the best. Cromwell was no Frederick the Great, who spoke of mankind as these verdammte Race, that accursed tribe. He belonged to the rarer and nobler type of governing men, who see the golden side, who count faith, pity, hope, among the counsels of practical wisdom, and who for political power must ever seek a moral base. This is the key to men's admiration for him."

One has heard it asserted by the a priori critics of the dinner table that Mr. Morley is scarcely the ideal biographer for a man such as Cromwell was,—that he is too much of a rationalist to understand Cromwell's mysticism, and too much of a doctrinaire to appreciate his opportunism. "It is not easy," owns Mr. Morley himself, "for us who are vain of living in an age of reason to enter into the mind of a mystic of the seventeenth century. Yet by virtue of the historic sense, even those who have moved furthest away in belief and faith from the books and symbols that lighted the inmost soul of Oliver, should still be able to do justice to his free and spacious genius, his high heart, his singleness of mind." By virtue of this sense, or by some natural sympathy with all sincere enthusiasms, Mr. Morley succeeds in judging Puritanism as fairly as he judges the Puritan leader, and that

without shutting his eyes to the faults of both. He understands the dominion of religious interests in an age "when the secu- lar state filled a smaller place in the imaginations of men than the mystic fellowship of the civitas dei—the city of God —when men were passionately moved about many a problem which for us is either settled or indifferent." The most striking passages in his book are those which describe the origin of Puritanism, the contrast between Calvinism and Arminianism, and the perpetual paradox which the influence of Calvinism on character presents. At one time he feels bound to criticise Cromwell's semi-theological politics "from

the point of view of a modern carnal reasoning." At another time Puritan assumptions of an intimate knowledge of the divine pleasure impel him to suggest, with Lucretius, "that the nature of the higher powers is too far above mortal things to be pleased or angry with us." But throughout he holds firmly to the principle that "history is only intelligible if we place ourselves at the point of view of the actor who makes it."

However, in judging the actor it is also necessary to appreciate the limitations which the stage imposed upon him, and in this Mr. Morley is less successful. He sees in the abstract the existence of these limitations. "In spite of the fine things that have been said of heroes and the might of their will, a statesman in such a case as Cromwell's soon finds how little he can do to create marked situations, and how the main part of his business is in slowly parrying, turning, managing circumstances for which he is not any more responsible than he is for his own existence, and yet which are his masters, and of which he can only make the best or the worst." But Mr. Morley rather forgets these maxims when he suggests that if Cromwell had been strong enough and enlightened enough there might have been a very different Cromwellian settlement of Ireland. The con- fiscation of Irish lands for the benefit of English colonists and the prohibition of Irish religion had been for a hundred years the cardinal principles of English policy towards Ireland, and both principles had been reaffirmed by the Long Parliament. Cromwell could not reverse them if he would. It were a happy thing if the statesman could be made the scapegoat for the sins of the nation whose will he voices, but we cannot elude condemnation so.

Mr. Morley is also too Parliamentarian in his criticism of Cromwell's attitude towards Parliaments. "The idea of a Parliament always sitting and actively reviewing the details of administration, was in his sight an intoler- able mischief. It was almost the only system against which his supple mind, so indifferent as it was to all constitutional forms, stood inflexible. Yet this for good or ill is our system to-day, and the system of the wide host of political communi- ties that have followed our Parliamentary model." This leaves out of account the fundamental difference which exists between the Long Parliament and the Parliaments of to-day.

It did not content itself with reviewing the details of admini- stration, but claimed to exercise judicial and executive as well as legislative power; it sat for twelve months in the year instead of for about seven; being secure from dissolution, it had practically shaken of all responsibility to its electors. The truest friend of constitutional government might reasonably object to a Parliamentarism which meant the dominion of an omnipotent and irresponsible single Chamber. It is because the Parliaments of to-day are not what the Long Parliament was that Parliamentary government has become universal.

Here and in some other places other than purely his- torical considerations seem to influence Mr. Morley's judg- ment of Cromwell. He fears lest the approval of some sides of Cromwell's policy should tend to encourage retrograde ideals in modern politics. "It can hardly be accident that has turned him into one of the idols of the school who hold, shyly as yet in England, but nakedly in Germany, that might is a token of right, and that the strength and power of a State is an end that tests and justifies all means." The fear is not unfounded. There was a time when the exaltation of Cromwell's Irish policy by Froude and Carlyle threatened to exert a pernicious influence on nineteenth-century states- manship; when wholesale emigration seemed likely to become the modern substitute for the systematic transplantation which was the panacea of seventeenth-century politicians ; when "Starvation or Canada" became the equivalent for "Hell or Connaught." But that time is past. The danger now, Mr. Morley hints, is rather unthinking admira- tion, and even imitation, of the Protector's forceful methods in foreign and Colonial politics. The remedy is to realise the distinction between the seventeenth and the twentieth century. To seek to see the past exactly as it was and the present exactly as it is, to look for the differences that under- lie superficial parallels, and to remember that historical precedents are often merely political pitfalls,—these are counsels never too trite to be repeated.