rough the national psychology something
that has never had a name except the eccentric and indeed extraordinary
name of Robinson Crusoe; which is all the more English for being quite
undiscoverable in England. It may be doubted if a French or German boy
especially wishes that his cornland or vineland were a desert; but many
an English boy has wished that his island were a desert island. But we
might even say that the Englishman was too insular for an island. He
awoke most to life when his island was sundered from the foundations of
the world, when it hung like a planet and flew like a bird. And, by a
contradiction, the real British army was in the navy; the boldest of the
islanders were scattered over the moving archipelago of a great fleet.
There still lay on it, like an increasing light, the legend of the
Armada; it was a great fleet full of the glory of having once been a
small one. Long before Wellington ever saw Waterloo the ships had done
their work, and shattered the French navy in the Spanish seas, leaving
like a light upon the sea the life and death of Nelson, who died with
his stars on his bosom and his heart upon his sleeve. There is no word
for the memory of Nelson except to call him mythical. The very hour of
his death, the very name of his ship, are touched with that epic
completeness which critics call the long arm of coincidence and prophets
the hand of God. His very faults and failures were heroic, not in a
loose but in a classic sense; in that he fell only like the legendary
heroes, weakened by a woman, not foiled by any foe among men. And he
remains the incarnation of a spirit in the English that is purely
poetic; so poetic that it fancies itself a thousand things, and
sometimes even fancies itself prosaic. At a recent date, in an age of
reason, in a country already calling itself dull and business-like, with
top-hats and factory chimneys already beginning to rise like towers of
funereal efficiency, this country clergyman's son moved to the last in a
luminous cloud, and acted a fairy tale. He shall remain as a lesson to
those who do not understand England, and a mystery to those who think
they do. In outward action he led his ships to victory and died upon a
foreign sea; but symbolically he established something indescribable and
intimate, something that sounds like a native proverb; he was the man
who burnt his ships, and who for ever set the Thames on fire.

XVI

ARISTOCRACY AND THE DISCONTEN