Wellington's Beef Against Romanticism

This was written for a meeting of our local Jane Austen Society several years ago. The assignment was to select a prominent contemporary of Austen's and relate their life to hers. Since Mrs. Peperium has been so busy deliniating Austen's thoroughgoing anti-Romanticism, I thought I'd add my own thoughts.

Mr. Peperium

MISS AUSTEN AND THE DUKE

They never met. Wellington’s most comprehensive biography never mentions him picking up one of her novels. The closest contact between them seems to have occurred when, from the deck of a British vessel, her midshipman brother observed the smoke rising from one of Wellesley’s early victories in Portugal. Nevertheless, here were two minds of strikingly similar temper. And at the turn of the 19th Century, England’s greatest living soldier and greatest living novelist were fighting on the same side against a common adversary.

1.

Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, is one of history’s few undefeated captains. The arc of his career reached from Dublin, where he first served as an aide-de-camp in the occupying British army, to India where he won his first triumphs. As skillful as they were, these battles also earned him a fatal reputation as a “Sepoy general”: a man who could beat rag-tag colonials but not Continental troops. It was a reputation Wellesley overcame handily on the Peninsula of Portugal and Spain where, after six years of battles and sieges in which he was often outnumbered, he ejected the French and crossed into France itself. In the course of these campaigns he went through the roster of Napoleon’s best generals and marshals, defeating them all.

However the real adversary he was fighting, the true enemy both he and Jane Austen took up arms against, wasn’t Napoleon’s France. Rather, it was our human weakness for indulging our willful passions, a failing that just happened to be manifesting itself most prominently at the moment in France. Wellington biographer Arthur Bryant succinctly describes the spirit that animated the revolution and the empire:

[I]t was not a faith founded on the verities of existence. At its heart lay a pathetic and childlike lack of realism. The French were the slaves of an illusion.

Liberty, fraternity and equality, the promises of the Revolution, had atrophied quickly into Terror and then into what Wellington referred to time and again in his dispatches as “this obnoxious tyranny”. First empowered by revolutionary ideology, then propelled by military genius, Napoleon Bonaparte was able to impose his will on a continent. But like all human overreaching, all attempts to re-write the “verities of existence”, this one too had the qualities of a child’s temper tantrum. Ultimately, this monstrously unreasonable illusion was defeated by an Englishman who possessed what one of his friends called, “a genius for being reasonable”.

2.

“There is nothing in life” the Duke once said “like a clear definition”. Clarity and focus, a genuine lack of illusions, what G. K. Chesterton called “that most wild and soaring sort of imagination, the imagination to see what is there”; this was the primary quality Wellington and Austen shared. It was their greatest weapon against those who served and perpetuated illusions.

“Regular habits, a superb constitution and a well-regulated mind” writes one of Wellington’s biographers, “had been the foundations of all his triumphs”. For the Duke, a lack of illusions made routine and discipline essential. Upon arriving in India and sizing up the climate, he forsook alcohol, took up a regular exercise regimen and amazed everyone with the drive and energy he brought to his duties. On the Peninsula he hunted regularly. Those who observed that the Duke never bagged a fox missed the point. The aim was never game but exercise, so fundamental to maintaining a “well-regulated mind”.

Against the fevered emotionalism that drove the Emperor’s infantry in wild, headlong assaults that broke up all the other armies of Europe, Wellington relied on regularity. He had a positive suspicion of enthusiasm, remarking once that “there is nothing on earth so stupid as a gallant officer”. This was not mere prejudice or personal preference. Wellington had to work with stern military realities: his numerical disadvantages forced him to fight on the defensive, where impetuosity was not half so useful as steadfastness. His own steadiness was legendary. Advised during an ocean storm that his ship might go down and that he should slip on his boots and come up on deck, the general calmly replied that he could swim just as well with his boots off—and then went back to sleep.

As if to admit the illusions he spun, Napoleon once remarked “It is by baubles”—meaning medals, ribbons and titles—“that men are lead”. Wellington went at things differently. “90% of war” he said, “is biscuits and baggage”. By this he meant logistics, the million and one quotidian details and routines that keep an army in the field and fighting. “Regular habits” were indeed the foundations of his success.

True, the French Emperor said an army marches on its stomach, but in Spain his famous axiom meant looting the population, not supplying armies through official channels. Here again Wellington’s genius for the reasonable is on display. Marching and fighting on the soil of England’s only Continental allies, he could ill afford his men living off of the people they had been sent to defend. He made looting a hanging offense and, even after entering France, this rule was not relaxed but re-enforced. Just as the Portuguese and Spanish had had to be mollified, so the French people had to be won over. Wellington’s faith in rational behavior and discipline never wavered. His record is proof that faith was not misplaced.

3.

While Wellington drew his sword against men driven by illusions, Jane Austen wielded a pen that was just as sharp. Which of her heroes or heroines does not have, or does not learn to have, a “well-regulated mind”? Which must not overcome the temptation to self-indulgent behavior? Alternately, which novel fails to portray the unhappiness of those who allow themselves to be the slaves of illusions; people without the imagination to see things as they are?

Examples abound: Elizabeth’s misjudgments of Mr. D’Arcy and Mr. Wichham, Lydia’s elopement with Wickham, Emma’s condescending and conceited sponsorship of Harriet Smith and her mistreatment of Miss Bates (a very real offense against the “eternal verities” of society and the responsibility of her position), Edward’s infatuation with Mary Crawford, Sir Elliot’s foppish preoccupation with rank, Catherine Morland’s comic Romantic fantasies, Marianne Dashwood’s self-destructive ones.

At heart, the story in every one of her novels is the story of the attainment of a well-regulated mind. And of course, each book is the product of just such a mind. Little wonder then, that during World War I doctors actually prescribed her books to compose the shattered nerves of shell-shock cases.

Wellington’s enemy was a hero of the Romantic imagination, a tyrant whom he often referred to as “the great disturber” who sought to re-write the “verities of existence”. His campaigns and battles against this adversary covered hundreds of miles. Austen’s opponent was actually larger than the Duke’s, being Romanticism itself in all its impulsive enthusiasm, emphasis on personal feelings and contempt for order and discipline. Yet her campaigns fit between the covers of six books. Still, the battle was the same. Marrianne’s self-centered Romanticism is as devastating, as disturbing for her sister as Napoleon’s campaigns were for all of Europe. In both cases reason, rational conduct and proper perspective carry the day.

Not surprisingly, both the soldier and the writer spent much of their time pouring cold water on the hyperventilated Romantic antics of others. Jane Austen used letters and novels. Wellington used his dispatch book. When the family of a young major asked that their son be sent home before the boy’s fiancée died of love, the Duke’s response is so quietly biting and utterly reasonable that Austen herself might have penned it:

We read, occasionally, of desperate cases of this description, but I cannot say that I have ever known of a young lady dying of love. They contrive, in some manner, to live and look tolerably well, notwithstanding their despair and the continued absence of their lover; and some even have been known to recover so far as to be inclined to take another lover. I don’t suppose your protegee can ever recover so far, but I hope she will survive the continued necessary absence of the major, and enjoy with him thereafter many happy days.

4.

The Duke may never have picked up Persuasion. Nevertheless, the story of Wellington’s courtship of Kitty Pakenham bears an uncanny resemblance to the story of Ann Elliot and Captain Wentworth.

In Dublin a young “sprig of nobility” named Arthur Wellesley met and fell in love with Kitty. She was pretty and vivacious. He was dashing but poor. She accepted him. Her family refused him. Before he went off to India he made a promise in a letter: if he should ever return and if she was free and felt the same, he would feel the same also.

The sort of proposal Captain Wentworth regretted not making to Anne was a proposal that Arthur Wellesley lived to regret making to Kitty. It may go down as the only rash act in his well-regulated life. Eleven years later he did return rich, like Captain Wentworth, from distant victories. (Commanders of troops, like captains of ships, profited from a lion’s share of battlefield booty.) A mutual friend brought the pair together again. To her credit Kitty gave Arthur every opportunity to back out of his more than decade-old promise. Like Ann Elliot, she had changed—albeit mentally more than physically—having suffered what one biographer calls a nervous breakdown. But Arthur refused to back down from his pledge and they were married.

Unlike Ann and her captain, Kitty and her general were not happy. Yet the source of their marital difficulties highlights yet another subject on which Austen and Wellington would have seen eye to eye. A friend to whom the Duke unburdened himself about his marriage remembered,

The distress it was to be united to a person with whom he could not possibly live on terms of confidential intercourse…she could not enter with him into the consideration of all the important concerns which are continually occupying his mind.

The Duke could almost be describing Mr. and Mrs. Bennett or Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram. Alternately, one has only to think of Elizabeth and D’Arcy or Emma and Mr. Knightly to see that each couple’s happiness is founded upon exactly what Wellington most needed from his wife: profound mutual esteem and understanding. Granted, that kind of intimacy cannot be had for the asking, and all of Jane Austen’s heroines gain it only after trials. But Kitty Pakenham was unwilling—or unable—to even assay such happiness. Instead, her constant depressions and mood swings, her inability to keep a house in order and her constant “misappropriation” of funds lead as inevitably to unhappiness as the same failures do in Mary Musgrove’s household.

5.

Of course, the cultural tendencies Wellington and Austen stood against are still with us, if anything in more virulent forms. The emotional self-indulgence of Romanticism has lead, ineluctably, to what has been dubbed the “Oprah-fication” of America. We’ve been schooled to feel before they think, or else feel and then conflate it with thinking. Against such self-delusions Wellington can still serve to inspire, but his triumphs have passed into history; his army only marches in old prints. It is our good fortune that the novels of Jane Austen are still with us, still sharp and still very serviceable weapons.

Comments

[frml]

Wonderful essay, Mr. P. I liked that "well-regulated mind" phrase. I wonder if another phrase might be just as appropriate: "a well-educated heart". I believe E.M. Forster coined it. Also, I came across an article in the magazine First Things, entitled "Jane Austen, Public Theologian", which you and Mrs P. may find instructive. It can be accessed through the Internet.
frml

[Mrs. Peperium]

frml, thank you, I looked up that article and have begun to read it. It is very good and gives one much too think about. I have a not so vaugue recollection of reading it when it was originally published. We used to link to First Things and National Review but they both somehow disappeared. Mr. P will link to them again.

[Mr. Peperium]

A much-belated thank you from me, too, frml. The wide gaps between my posts should give you a fair idea of the time I have to spend on the blog. Responding gets even less attention from me which is not right because the whole point of starting this for me was to get the kind of conversations going that are not possible in our neck of the woods. Nevertheless, there it is.