IV
To come down to more recent times, for open belief in what they doubted, for doubt well controlled in its expenditure, for doubt as raising questions of meaning rather than the more radical questions of reality and existence, perhaps no people of Christendom has been so conspicuous as the English. Of course, as has been remarked, expenditure may often become too conservative, and the question of mere meaning may encourage casuistry; and into the pits of undue conservatism and casuistry the English have certainly fallen more than once, so that certain critics have even found them, and in some measure the Anglo-Saxons generally, given over to hollow disingenuous living. In English political life, for example, the attitude during the conflict with the American colonies in the eighteenth century affords a conspicuous illustration of this, and intellectually and religiously English life, has its chapters of an unfortunate reserve. But although no good and honest American can fail to find objectionable solecisms, some of them decidedly British, in the formulated and manifested life of the Anglo-Saxons; nevertheless English history is a very obstinate argument in behalf of the English temper. Frenchmen, though so neighbourly to England, have been conspicuously more radical than the English in their doubts and problems, and in consequence have been at once more reckless and more vacillating in their solutions. The English, always so practical, throughout their history have held to their world as primarily real and consistent, and have therefore neither lost themselves whether in fear or in hope of some other sphere, nor been only fickle servants of this. Consistently and constantly they have sought only the ever more effective use of what they had, of what they found about them. Not revolution, then, but evolution has been the keynote of their history. Their other world, in practice, has meant other parts of this—witness their colonial activity as well as their missionary enterprises—or only other in the sense of deeper and fuller expression of this—witness the testimony of so many of their historians. Macaulay, for a classic example, dwells at some length and with much emphasis upon the English people’s genius for a progressive conservatism, remarking that in religion and politics and social life they have given up less of their past than any other people, and yet at the same time have kept in the forefront of modern progress. It may be contended that this was truer in Macaulay’s day than at the present time, but there is enough truth in it now to give it point.
Instead of courting doubt as if it had worth in itself, the English may be said on the whole to have courted candour. Candour does not exclude doubt, but it is never merely negative, and for this reason it is peculiarly normal and wholesome, although of course having its own dangers. To be candid, in the sense of the word here intended, is to accept what is, which in lack of a better term we may call nature, and to insist only on seeing this, and living up to it, deeply and fully. The doubting French have appealed to truth and righteousness or reality as only an innate conviction, and so have easily missed the possible realism of such conviction. Descartes made just such an appeal, and though he did indeed gain, or rather regain, a real world, the reality did not quite receive even from him, as we have seen, its full due of closeness and intimacy with human life. Rousseau, later, made the same appeal, finding his own personal will intrinsically good, but his philosophy, though a passionate, uncontrolled belief in reality, was taken, not unnaturally, as a call to revolution. But the simple, candid English, on their side of the Channel, have appealed, not primarily to anything abstractly within the self, not to a mere ideal or sentiment or subjective belief, but to reality embodied and palpable—in a word, to nature, the great all-inclusive sphere of candid experience. In France, again, nature has failed ever to be a thoroughly practical thing, a positive, directly interesting, wholly pertinent situation. It has been a cry, of course, sometimes of alarm, sometimes of hope; a great enthusiasm, too; a dream; an ideal—if not unideal—substitute for the present life; a sphere often, too often, quite opposed to God and government and organized society; but never, or almost never, a present responsibility to be clearly recognized and calmly measured; never, or almost never, a part and parcel of the present life; never, or almost never, something that lives in and through God and government and society. In England, on the other hand, so differently, if Bacon and Locke and Berkeley and even David Hume may be trusted; if Shakespeare and Coleridge and Wordsworth, or Hobbes and Burke and Blackstone, or Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer are representative; in England nature has ever been very real and very present; not outside of manifest English life, but actually incorporated in it. How else understand English deism; the laissez faire economics; the peculiar nature and growth of the English constitution; the pragmatism of English science; the sun-warmed atmosphere of English literature; the nature-homage and bodily vigour of English recreation? How else account for the English people’s progressive conservatism?
The most radical doubt must eventually appeal to nature and, what is more, must sooner or later bring man to live with nature practically and responsibly, intimately and sympathetically; but candour, like the candour of the English, that never doubts without at the same time believing, lives ever with her. Perhaps the English people need to have what they seem never to have had—though the Armada threatened something of the kind, and the loss of the thirteen colonies, or even the Boer war was, not without its value—a great, overpowering disaster, a deep all-searching despair; yet, be this as it may, their part in the struggle of a life that must always doubt in order to grow is always instructive and is often inspiring.