pposition? Briefly, have we left
off being brutal because we are too grand and generous to be brutal? Is
it really true that we are _better_ than brutality? Is it really true
that we have _passed_ the bludgeon stage?

I fear that there is, to say the least of it, another side to the
matter. Is it not only too probable that the mildness of our political
satire, when compared with the political satire of our fathers, arises
simply from the profound unreality of our current politics? Rowlandson
and Gilray did not fight merely because they were naturally pothouse
pugilists; they fought because they had something to fight about. It is
easy enough to be refined about things that do not matter; but men
kicked and plunged a little in that portentous wrestle in which swung to
and fro, alike dizzy with danger, the independence of England, the
independence of Ireland, the independence of France. If we wish for a
proof of this fact that the lack of refinement did not come from mere
brutality, the proof is easy. The proof is that in that struggle no
personalities were more brutal than the really refined personalities.
None were more violent and intolerant than those who were by nature
polished and sensitive. Nelson, for instance, had the nerves and good
manners of a woman: nobody in his senses, I suppose, would call Nelson
"brutal." But when he was touched upon the national matter, there sprang
out of him a spout of oaths, and he could only tell men to "Kill! kill!
kill the d----d Frenchmen." It would be as easy to take examples on the
other side. Camille Desmoulins was a man of much the same type, not only
elegant and sweet in temper, but almost tremulously tender and
humanitarian. But he was ready, he said, "to embrace Liberty upon a pile
of corpses." In Ireland there were even more instances. Robert Emmet was
only one famous example of a whole family of men at once sensitive and
savage. I think that Mr. F.C. Gould is altogether wrong in talking of
this political ferocity as if it were some sort of survival from ruder
conditions, like a flint axe or a hairy man. Cruelty is, perhaps, the
worst kind of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of
cruelty. But there is nothing in the least barbaric or ignorant about
intellectual cruelty. The great Renaissance artists who mixed colours
exquisitely mixed poisons equally exquisitely; the great Renaissance
princes who designed instruments of music also designed instruments of