Some Diversions of a Man of Letters | Page 5

and Victor Hugo beyond Homer. We have
seen the latest freak of futurism preferred to The Lotus Eaters, and the
first Légende des Siècles rejected as unreadable. In face of this
whirlwind of doctrine the public ceases to know whether it is on its
head or its feet--"its trembling tent all topsy-turvy wheels," as an
Elizabethan has it. To me it seems that security can only be found in an
incessant exploration of the by-ways of literary history and analysis of
the vagaries of literary character. To pursue this analysis and this
exploration without bewilderment and without prejudice is to sum up
the pleasures of a life devoted to books.
August 1919.

THE SHEPHERD OF THE OCEAN[1]
Three hundred years have gone by to-day since Sir Walter Raleigh was

beheaded, in presence of a vast throng of spectators, on the scaffold of
Old Palace Yard in Westminster. General Gordon said that England is
what her adventurers have made her, and there is not in all English
history a more shining and violent specimen of the adventurous type
than Raleigh. I am desired to deliver a brief panegyric on this
celebrated freebooter, and I go behind the modern definition of the
word "panegyric" (as a pompous and ornamented piece of rhetoric) to
its original significance, which was, as I take it, the reminder, to a great
assembly of persons, of the reason why they have been brought
together in the name of a man long dead. Therefore I shall endeavour,
in the short space of time allotted to me, not so much to eulogise as to
explain and to define what Sir Walter Raleigh was and represents.
I suggest, therefore, before we touch upon any of the details of his
career and character, that the central feature of Raleigh, as he appears
to us after three hundred years, is his unflinching determination to see
the name of England written across the forehead of the world. Others
before him had been patriots of the purest order, but Raleigh was the
first man who laid it down, as a formula, that "England shall by the
favour of God resist, repel and confound all whatsoever attempts
against her sacred kingdom." He had no political sense nor skill in
statecraft. For that we go to the Burghleys or the Cecils, crafty men of
experience and judgment. But he understood that England had enemies
and that those enemies must be humbled and confounded. He
understood that the road of England's greatness, which was more to him
than all other good things, lay across the sea. The time was ripe for the
assertion of English liberty, of English ascendancy, too; and the
opportunity of the moment lay in "those happy hands which the Holy
Ghost hath guided," the fortunate adventurers. Of these Raleigh was the
most eminent as he was also, in a sense, the most unfortunate.
A heavy shadow lay all over the Western world, the shadow of a fierce
bird of prey hovering over its victim. Ever since Ferdinand expelled the
Moors out of Granada, Spain had been nursing insensate dreams of
universal empire. She was endeavouring to destroy the infant system of
European civilisation by every means of brutality and intrigue which
the activity of her arrogance could devise. The Kings of Spain, in their

ruthless ambition, encouraged their people in a dream of Spanish
world-dominion. Their bulletins had long "filled the earth with their
vainglorious vaunts, making great appearance of victories"; they had
spread their propaganda "in sundry languages in print," distributing
braggart pamphlets in which they boasted, for the benefit of neutrals, of
their successes against England, France, and Italy. They had "abused
and tormented" the wretched inhabitants of the Low Countries, and
they held that the force of arms which they brandished would weigh
against justice, humanity, and freedom in the servitude which they
meant to inflict upon Europe. It was to be Spanien über alles.
But there was one particular nation against which the malignity of the
great enemy blazed most fiercely. The King of Spain blasphemously
regarded himself as the instrument of God, and there was one country
which more than the rest frustrated his pious designs. This was England,
and for that reason England was more bitterly hated than any other
enemy. The Spaniards did "more greedily thirst after English blood
than after the lives of any other people of Europe." The avowed
purpose of Castile was to destroy that maritime supremacy of England
on which the very existence of the English State depends. The
significance of Sir Walter Raleigh consists in the clairvoyance with
which he perceived and the energy with which he combated this
monstrous assumption. Other noble Englishmen of his time, and before
his time, had been clear-sighted and had struck hard against the evil
tyranny