I was reading just now, apropos of a new work on Burke, the estimate of him expressed by Macaulay who declared him to be “the greatest man since Milton.” I paused over the verdict, and the subject led me naturally enough to ask myself who were the great Englishmen in history—for the sake of argument, the six greatest. I found the question so exciting that I had reached the end of my journey (I was in a bus at the time) almost before I had reached the end of my list. I began by laying down my premises or principles. I would not restrict the choice to men of action. The only grievance I have against Plutarch is that he followed that course. His incomparable “Lives,” would be still more satisfying, a still more priceless treasury of the ancient world, if, among his crowd of statesmen and warriors, we could make friends with Socrates and Virgil, Archimedes and Epictetus, with the men whose work survived them as well as with the men whose work is a memory. And I rejected the blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I would not have in my list a mere homicidal genius. My great man may have been a great killer of his kind, but he must have some better claim to inclusion than the fact that he had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On the other hand, I would not exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to be a bad man. Henry Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad men. “Greatness,” he said, “consists in bringing all manner of mischief upon mankind, and goodness in removing it from them.” And it was to satirise the traditional view of greatness that he wrote that terrific satire “The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great,” probably having in mind the Marlboroughs and Fredericks of his day. But while rejecting the traditional view, we cannot keep out the bad man because he was a bad man. I regard Bismarck as a bad man, but it would be absurd to deny that he was a great man. He towers over the nineteenth century like a baleful ogre, a sort of Bluebeard, terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless, ruthless jests, heaving with his volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent, merciless as a tiger, but great beyond challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a sort of mastodon of the primeval world, born as a terrific afterthought of nature.

Nor is power alone a sufficient title to greatness. It must be power governed by purpose, by a philosophy, good or bad, of human life, not by mere spasms of emotion or an itch for adventure. I am sure Pericles was a great man, but I deny the ascription to Alcibiades. I am sure about CÆsar, but I am doubtful about Alexander, loud though his name sounds down twenty centuries. Greatness may be moral or a-moral, but it must have design. It must spring from deliberate thought and not from mere accident, emotion or effrontery, however magnificent. It is measured by its influence on the current of the world, on its extension of the kingdom of the mind, on its contribution to the riches of living. Applying tests like these, who are our six greatest Englishmen? For our first choice there would be a unanimous vote. Shakespeare is the greatest thing we have done. He is our challenger in the fists of the world, and there is none to cross swords with him. Like Sirius, he has a magnitude of his own. Take him away from our heavens, conceive him never to have been born, and the imaginative wealth of fife shrinks to a lower plane, and we are left, in Iago's phrase, “poor indeed.” There is nothing English for which we would exchange him. “Indian Empire or no Indian Empire,” we say with Carlyle, “we cannot do without our Shakespeare.”

For the second place, the choice is less obvious, but I think it goes indisputably to him who had

“... a voice whose sound was like the sea.”

Milton plays the moon to Shakespeare's sun. He breathed his mighty harmonies into the soul of England like a god. He gave us the note of the sublime, and his influence is like a natural element, all pervasive, intangible, indestructible. With him stands his “chief of men”—the “great bad man” of Burke—the one man of action in our annals capable of measuring his stature with Bismarck for crude power, but overshadowing Bismarck in the realm of the spirit—the man at whose name the cheek of Mazarin turned pale, who ushered in the modern world by sounding the death-knell of despotic monarchism, who founded the naval supremacy of these islands and who (in spite of his own ruthlessness at Drogheda) first made the power of England the instrument of moral law in Europe.

But there my difficulties begin. I mentally survey my candidates as the bus lumbers along. There comes Chaucer bringing the May morning eternally with him, and Swift with his mighty passion tearing his soul to tatters, and Ruskin filling the empyrean with his resounding eloquence, and Burke, the prose Milton, to whose deep well all statesmanship goes with its pail, and Johnson rolling out of Bolt Court in his brown wig, and Newton plumbing the ultimate secrets of this amazing universe, and deep-browed Darwin unravelling the mystery of life, and Wordsworth giving “to weary feet the gift of rest,” and Dickens bringing with him a world of creative splendour only less wonderful than that of Shakespeare. But I put these and a host of others aside. For my fourth choice I take King Alfred. Strip him of all the legends and improbabilities that cluster round his name, and he is still one of the grand figures of the Middle Ages, a heroic, enlightened man, reaching out of the darkness towards the light, the first great Englishman in our annals. Behind him comes Bacon. At first I am not quite sure whether it is Francis or Roger, but it turns out to be Roger—there by virtue of precedence in time, of the encyclopaedic range of his adventurous spirit and the black murk of superstition through which he ploughed his lonely way to truth.

I am tempted, as the bus turns my corner, to finish my list with a woman, Florence Nightingale, chosen, not as the romantic “lady of the lamp,” but as the fierce warrior against ignorance and stupidity, the adventurer into a new field, with the passion of a martyr controlled by a will of iron, a terrific autocrat of beneficence, the most powerful and creative woman this nation has produced.. But I reject her, not because she is unworthy, but because she must head a companion fist of great Englishwomen. I hurriedly summon up two candidates from among our English saints—Sir Thomas More and John Wesley. In spite of the intolerance (incredible to modern ears) that could jest so diabolically at the martyrdom of the “heretic,” Sir Thomas Fittar, More holds his place as the most fragrant flower of English culture, but if greatness be measured by achievement and enduring influence he must yield place to the astonishing revivalist of the eighteenth century who left a deeper mark upon the spiritual life of England than any man in our history.

There is my list—Shakespeare, Milton, Cromwell, King Alfred, Roger Bacon, John Wesley—and anybody can make out another who cares and a better who can. And now that it is made I find that, quite unintentionally, it is all English in the most limited sense. There is not a Scotsman, an Irishman, or a Welshman in it. That will gall the kibe of Mr Bernard Shaw. And I rejoice to find another thing.

There is no politician and no professional soldier in the half-dozen. It contains two poets, two men of action, one scientist and one preacher. If the representative arts have no place, it is not because greatness cannot be associated with them. Bach and Michael Angelo cannot be left out of any list of the world's great men. But, matchless in literature, we are poor in art, though in any rival list I should be prepared to see the great name of Turner.

Original

Original