MUCH has been written on Raleigh, and much will always
be written, for to retell the tale of the man who got so much joy and sorrow from life is a worthy and heartening occupation. Since the large Life by Edwards, we have had Sir J. Pope Hennessy's study of his doings in Ireland, Mr. Stebbing's learned monograph, and Major Martin Hume's excellent summary of the latest research. Mr. Gardiner, too, has written of him, as of all others of• his time, with insight and wisdom. But there is ample room for another study of the man, since certain events in his life are ever coming into • Sir Walter Raleigh. By Sir Rennell Redd. "English Ken of Action." I.onclop Knomilhux and Co. pa, 613 clearer perspective, and it is well to have the lines often result and the colours freshened. Sir Rennell Road, following up the subject of his old " Newdigate " poem, has found time in a busy life to prepare an exceedingly careful narrative of Raleigh's career, and an acute and sympathetic study of his mind and character. It is well that such a Life should be written by a man of affairs, for Raleigh moved in the air of the open world, and no academic dissection can find the secret of that swift and brilliant spirit. Sir Rennell Rodd has examined the tangled web of his history with much industry, and all the impartiality that could be desired. He seems to us not quite to realise the strength of the legal case against Raleigh at his first trial, on the current view of the law of treason. Sir Walter throughout his whole life suffered much from injustice, but it was rarely technical injustice, since he had an unfortunate gift of putting himself formally in the wrong. The true apologia for him is not an attack upon his traducers so much as a glorification of the extraordinary mental and spiritual qualities which transcend his frequent mistakes. To estimate his position requires subtlety and sympathy, as with all men of genius, and a prosaic record of achievements involves us in contradictions. His popular fame is second to none, for he has accomplished the rare feat of capturing the imagination of his countrymen. This in itself means greatness ; but to explain the why and the wherefore of it is not so simple.
There is no figure of more dazzling versatility in our English history, and to this brilliance he owed his mis- fortunes. There was no unity in his mind or his career, and therein he typifies the great age of Elizabeth, when the whole world went a-pioneering. Had he been bound to a hard profession, seafaring or soldiering or high politics, his nature might have been constrained into a narrower channel, and he would have gained in effectiveness what he lost in attraction ; but his fate was courtiership and adventure, which aggravated in a sense his natural faults. We have his own confession on the solemn eve of death that he was a "man full of vanity," who had lived his life "in such callings as have been most inducing to it." He had the brilliant man's contempt for dulness, the swift man's contempt for the slow, the many- sided man's contempt for the narrow, the subtle man's con- tempt for the formal and the pedantic : all of which were
dangerous endowments at the Court of Elizabeth or James "He was a tall, handsome, and bold man," wrote Aubrey, "but his naeve was that he was damnable proud He had an awfulness and ascendency in his aspect over other mortals." Modelling himself, consciously no doubt, on the cortegiano of Baldassare Castiglione, be was well fitted to win the first moves in the game of Court favour, but certain to be the loser at the end. For he was not made for a subordinate in any sphere. No man ever was more essentially a leader, dominating his followers with affection and awe, inspiring them with his own unshaken confidence and unfaltering courage. The farce of rivalry with a Cecil or an Essex could not long be kept up ; indeed, it is to Raleigh's credit that he was capable of so losing himself in a great cause that, as at Cadiz, he could submit to dictation from his inferiors in all save rank. Like all men of his stamp, he was popular only with his few intimates and with his followers. The populace suspected and disliked him. A man who criticised his superiors as he did in his Irish administration could not be loved by the formal lords in office. The clergy saw in his toleration and his eager mind a "denying of God's being and omnipotence." It was only when imprisonment took him from the arena of strife that people had time to reflect how great a spirit burned in the man.
His tangible achievements are hard to estimate. He has written one or two immortal lyrics and several volumes of stately prose. In home politics he had at no time great influence, and we can judge of his value only from a few recorded opinions. His History of the World was, perhaps, the earliest work to preach clearly the doctrine that England's first line of defence must always be at sea, an original opiniou in those days in spite of the brilliant record of Elizabethan seamen. Though his practice did not always consort with his creed, he may be taken as the earliest advocate of Free- trade. "I think," be said in the House of Commons, "the beet course is to set corn at liberty, and leave every man free, which is the desire of a true Englishman." His real fame, however, rests upon his travels and colonisation. "Give me
taken as the motto of Raleigh's own life. He wished to serve his country in enterprises which had "daylight and honour "in them, and to give to England "a better Indies than the King of Spain has any." But it was no mere lust of conquest. He desired colonies, new Britains oversea, peopled with his own race, and not a vague protectorate over savages. Like some of a later day, he "thought in continents," and like these same he spent his private fortune on his dreams.
The plantation of Virginia cost him 240,000, and the Guiana Expedition left him nearly bankrupt. He saw little fruit of his labours, for England had still to learn the art of colonising and of dealing with native tribes, and serve a long and bloody apprenticeship before she acquired that aptitude for foreign administration which is her chief glory to-day. He introduced also the doctrine that a British sub- ject must be protected at whatever cost in any part of the world, and that the honour of the flag cannot be made a counter in any diplomatic game. His famous declaration on the eve of death gives him the right, as Sir Rennell Rodd well says, to the title of the first apostle of Empire. There is something extraordinarily touching in the tenacity with which he held to his ideals, for even in prison he spent on Virginia whatever he could save from the wreck of his fortune. "I shall yet live," he wrote to Cecil, "to see it an English nation." His apparent failure was the founda- tion of success, and Sir Rennell Rodd has written of it in words as just as they are eloquent :—
"He was the first who dared to conceive the expansion of England, and he adhered with a passionate faith to the conviction that the unpeopled shores of earth were the inevitable inherit- ance of his own hardy race. To him his countrymen, accepting their high mission and proud of their world-wide dominion, must ever gratefully look back as the pioneer and prophet of Empire. To him the great kindred people, blood of his own blood, whose genius of energy has quickened the vast northern continent from sea to sea, must ever pay honour as the first who opened to civilising influences the threshold of their limitless domain."
The truth is that his failure was the failure with which all pathfinders must begin. They cannot in the nature of things hope for success. They have to teach the world new things, and the world must start with rejecting them. An old insti- tution cannot be broken down, or a new country settled, in a day ; and if they win an easy victory, there is generally some- thing cheap and shallow in their message. This is the fore- most reason why side by side with the sounding reputation of Raleigh we can set so little actual achievement. Another may be found in his faults of temperament, though perhaps his inconstancy is more than balanced by his versatility. Had his character been cast in a more sober mould, his figure, as we look back, would not have stood at the head of so many long avenues of thought and action. It was because he saw so many ideals, and desired so many things fiercely, that he achieved little in fact, but set moving a spirit which achieved all. "Eloquent, just and mighty death" did for his fame and his ideals what his own hand had failed to do. "It needed the scaffold at Westminster to complete his triumphant vindication, to open to his spirit that sphere of attainment which it was not his fortune to take by storm in life." For just as the murder of Caesar set the seal of completion upon the Roman Empire, so the execution of Raleigh may be said to have established his noble Imperialism as the standard and tradition of his countrymen.
THE DE CRE■ QUY MEMOIRS.*
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