Part 3

In order to read Henry's character more correctly, if that be possible, than it is read by the "two voices," more light is needed. Let us see what an examination of Henry's bodily organisation, and especially of his parentage, will do for us. In this light--if it be light, and attainable light--it will be well to examine afresh (at the risk of some repetition) the grave charges which are so constantly and so confidently laid at his door and see what of vindication or modification or damning confirmation may follow. Before looking specially at Henry's organisation and inheritance, I purpose devoting a short chapter to a general view of the principles which can give such an examination any value. It will be for the most part a brief statement of views which I have already put forward in my little work on character as seen in body and parentage.

THE RELATION OF BODY AND PARENTAGE TO CHARACTER.

NOTE II.

It is unwise to turn aside from the investigation of any body of truths because it can only be partial in its methods or incomplete in its results. We do this however in the study of the science of character. It is true that past efforts have given but little result--little result because they ignored and avowedly ignored the connection which is coming to be more and more clearly seen to exist between character on the one hand and bodily organisation and proclivity, and especially the organisation and proclivity of the nervous system, on the other hand. Those who ignore the bearings of organisation and inheritance on character are, for the most part, those who prefer that "truth should be on their side rather than that they should be on the side of truth."

It is contended here that much serviceable knowledge may be obtained by the careful investigation, in given individuals, of bodily characteristics, and the union of these with mental and moral characteristics. The relationship of these combined features of body and mind to parentage, near and remote, and on both sides, should be traced as far back as possible. The greater the number of individuals brought under examination, the more exact and extensive will be the resulting knowledge.

Very partial methods of classifying character are of daily utility. We say, for example, speaking of the muscular system only, that men are strong or weak. But this simple truth or classification has various notable bearings. Both the strong and the weak may be dextrous, or both may be clumsy; both may be slow, or both may be quick; but they will be dextrous or clumsy, slow or quick, in different ways and degrees. So, going higher than mere bodily organisation, we may say that some men are bold and resolute while others are timid and irresolute; some again are parsimonious and others prodigal. Now these may possibly be all intelligent or all stupid, all good or all bad; but, nevertheless, boldness and timidity, parsimony and generosity, modify other phases of character in various ways. The irresolute man, for example, cannot be very wise, or the penurious man truly good. It must always be remembered in every sort of classification of bodily or of mental characteristics, that the lines of division are not sharply defined. All classes merge into each other by imperceptible degrees.

One of the most, perhaps the most, fundamental and important classification of men and women is that which puts them into two divisions or two temperaments, the active, or tending to be active, on the one hand, and the reflective, or tending to be reflective, on the other. To many students of character this is not anew suggestion, but much more is contended for here. It is contended that the more active temperament is alert, practical, quick, conspicuous, and--a very notable circumstance--less impassioned; the more reflective temperament is less active, less practical, or perhaps even dreamy, secluded, and--also a very notable circumstance--more impassioned. It is not so much that men of action always desire to be seen, or that men of thought desire to be hidden; action naturally brings men to the front; contemplation as naturally hides them; when active men differ, the difference carries itself to the housetops; when thinking men differ, they fight in the closet and by quieter methods. Busy men, moreover, are given to detail, and detail fills the eye and ear; men of reflection deal more with principles, and these lie beyond the range of ordinary vision.

The proposition which I here put forward, based on many years of observation and study, is fundamental, and affects, more or less, a wide range of character in every individual. The proposition is that in the active temperament the intellectual faculties are disproportionately strong--the passions are feebler and lag behind; in the reflective temperament the passions are the stronger in proportion to the mental powers. Character is dominated more by the intellect in one case, more by the emotions in the other. In all sane and healthful characters (and only these are considered here) the intellectual and emotional elements are both distinctly present. The most active men think; the most reflective men act. But in many men and women the intellect takes an unduly large share in the fashioning of life; these are called here the "less impassioned," the "unimpassioned," or for the sake of brevity, "the passionless." In many others the feelings or emotions play a stronger part; these are the "more impassioned" or the "passionate."

Character is not made of of miscellaneous fragments, of thought and feeling, of volition and action. Its elements are more or less homogeneous and run in uniform groups. The less impassioned, or passionless, for example, are apt to be changeable and uncertain; they are active, ready, alert; they are quick to comprehend, to decide, to act; they are usually self-confident and sometimes singularly self-important. They often seek for applause but they are sparing in their approval and in their praise of others. When the mental endowment is high, and the training and environment favourable, the unimpassioned temperament furnishes some of our finest characters. In this class are found great statesmen and great leaders. A man's public position is probably determined more by intellectual power than by depth of feeling. Now and then, especially when the mental gifts are slight, the less pleasing elements predominate: love of change may become mere fitfulness; activity may become bustle; sparing approval may turn to habitual detraction and actual censoriousness. Love of approbation may degenerate into a mania for notoriety at any cost; self-importance may bring about a reckless disregard of the well-being of others. Fortunately the outward seeming of the passionless temperament is often worse than the reality, and querulous speech is often combined with generous action. Frequently, too, where there is ineradicable caprice there is no neglect of duty.

The elements of character which, in various ways and degrees, cluster together in the more impassioned or passionate temperament are very different in their nature. In this temperament we find repose or even gentleness, quiet reflection, tenacity of purpose. The feelings--love, or hate, or joy, or grief, or anger, or jealousy--are more or less deep and enduring. In this class also there are fine characters, especially (as in the unimpassioned) when the mental gifts are high and the training refined. In this class too are found perhaps the worst characters which degrade the human race. In all save the rarest characters, the customary tranquillity may be broken by sullen cloud or actual storm. In the less capable and less elevated, devotion may become fanaticism, and tenacity may become blind prejudice, or sheer obstinacy. In this temperament too, in its lower grades, we meet too often--not all together perhaps, certainly not all in equal degree--with indolence, sensuality, inconstancy; or morbid brooding, implacability, and even cruelty.

I contend then that certain features of character, it may be in very varying degrees of intensity, belong to the more active and passionless temperament, and certain other features attend on the more reflective and impassioned temperament. If it can be shown that there are two marked groups of elements in character--the more impassioned group and the less impassioned group--and that each group may be inferred to exist if but one or two of its characteristic elements are clearly seen, why even then much would be gained in the interpretation of history and of daily life. But I contend for much more than this; the two temperaments have each their characteristic bodily signs; the more marked the temperament, the more striking and the more easily read are the bodily signs. In the intermediate temperament--a frequent and perhaps the happiest temperament--the bodily signs are also intermediate. The bodily characteristics run in groups also, as well as the mental. The nervous system of each temperament is enclosed in its own special organisation and framework. In my work on "character as seen in body and parentage," I treat this topic with some fulness, and what is stated there need not be repeated now. It may be noted, however, that in the two temperaments there are peculiarities of the skin--clearness or pigmentation; of the hair--feebleness or sparseness, or closeness and vigour of growth; of the configuration of the skeleton and consequent pose of the figure.

If the conclusions here put forward are true, they give a key which opens up much character to us. They touch, as I have already said, a great range of character in every individual, but they make no pretension to be a system. They have only an indirect bearing on many phases of character; for in both the active and reflective temperaments there may be found, for example, either wisdom or folly, courage or cowardice, refinement or coarseness.

It must always be remembered, too, that besides the more marked types of character, whether bodily or mental, there are numberless intervening gradations. When the temperaments, moreover, are distinctly marked, the ordinary concurrent elements may exist in very unequal degrees and be combined in very various ways. One or two qualities may perhaps absorb the sum-total of nerve force. In the passionless man or woman extreme activity may repress the tendency to disapprove; immense self-importance may impede action. In the impassioned individual, inordinate love or hate may enfeeble thought; deep and persistent thought may dwarf the affections.

As I have said elsewhere: 'For the ordinary purposes of life, especially of domestic and social life, the intervening types of character (combining thought and action more equally, though probably each in somewhat less degree) produce perhaps the most useful and the happiest results. But the progress of the world at large is mainly due to the combined efforts of the more extreme types--the supremely reflective and impassioned and the supremely active and unimpassioned. Both are needed. If we had men of action only, we should march straight into chaos; if we had men of thought only, we should drift into night and sleep!'

HENRY'S FAMILY PROCLIVITIES.

NOTE III.

If there is any truth in the views put forward in the foregoing chapter, and if history has at all faithfully portrayed a character concerning which it has had, at any rate, much to say, it is clear that Henry must be placed in the less impassioned class of human beings. When I first called attention to the three sorts of character--and the three groups of characteristics--the active, practical, and more or less passionless on the one hand; the less active, reflective, and impassioned on the other; and, thirdly, the intermediate class, neither Henry nor his period was in my mind. But when, at a later time (and for purposes other than the special study of character), I came to review the Reformation with its ideas, its men, its incidents, I saw at once, to my surprise, that Henry's life was a busy, active, conspicuous, passionless life. He might have sat for the portrait I had previously drawn. Markedly unimpassioned men tend to be fitful, petulant, censorious, self-important, self-willed, and eager for popularity--so tended Henry. The unimpassioned are frequently sincere, conscientious, pious, and conservative--Henry was all these. They often have, especially when capable and favourably encompassed, a high sense of duty and a strong desire to promote the well-being of those around them--these qualities were conspicuous in Henry's character.

How much of inherited organisation, how much of circumstance, how much of self-effort go to the making of character is a problem the solution of which is yet seemingly far off. Mirabeau, with fine perception, declared that a boy's education should begin, twenty years before he is born, with his mother. Unquestionably before a man is born the plan of his character is drawn, its foundations are laid, and its building is foreshadowed. Can he, later, close a door here or open a window there? Can he enlarge this chamber or contract that? He believes he can, and is the happier in the belief; but in actual life we do not find that it is given to one man to say, I will be active, I will be on the spot, I will direct here and rebuke there; nor to another man to say, I will give myself up to thought, to dreams, to seclusion. Henry never said, with unconscious impulse or with conscious words, "I will be this, or I will not be that."

Henry VIII. took altogether after his mother's side, and she, again, took after her father. Henry was, in fact, his grandfather Edward IV. over again. He had, however, a larger capacity than his mother's father, and he lived in a better epoch. Edward, it was said in his time, was the handsomest and most accomplished man in Europe. Henry was spoken of in similar words by his compeers both at home and abroad. Both were large in frame, striking in contour, rose-pink in complexion--then, as now, the popular ideal of manly perfection--and both became exceedingly corpulent in their later years. Both were active, courteous, affable, accessible; both busy, conspicuous, vain, fond of pleasure, and given to display. Both were unquestionably brave; but they were also (both of them) fickle, capricious, suspicious, and more or less cruel. Both put self in the foremost place; but Edward's selfishness drifted rather to self-indulgence, while Henry's took the form of self-importance. Extreme self-importance is usually based on high capacity, and Edward's capacity did not lift him out of the region of pomposity and frequent indiscretion.

Edward IV. was nevertheless an able man although less able than Henry. Like Henry he belonged to the unimpassioned class; he was without either deeply good or deeply evil passion, but probably he had somewhat stronger emotions than his grandson. In other words Henry had more of intellect and less of passion than his grandfather. Edward's early and secret marriage was no proof of passion. Early marriages are not the monopoly of any temperament; sometimes they are the product of the mere caprice, or the self-will and the feeble restraint of the passionless, and sometimes the product of the raw and immature judgment of the passionate. Edward deserves our pity, for he had everything against him; he had no models, no ideals, no education, no training. The occupation of princes at that time brought good neither to themselves nor anyone else. They went up and down the country to slay and be slain; to take down from high places the severed heads of one worthless dynasty and put up the heads of another dynasty equally worthless.

The eighth Henry derived nothing from his father--the seventh,--nothing of good, nothing of evil. One of the most curious errors of a purely literary judgment on men and families is seen in the use of the epithet "Tudor." We hear for example of the "Tudor" blood shewing itself in one, of the "Tudor" spirit flashing out in another. Whether Henry VII. was a Tudor or not we may not now stop to inquire. Henry VIII. we have seen took wholly after his Yorkist mother. Of Henry's children, Mary was a repetition of her dark dwarfish Spanish mother; the poor lad Edward, whether a Seymour or a Yorkist, was certainly not a Tudor. The big comely pink Elizabeth was her father in petticoats--her father in body, her father in mind. Henry VIII. in fact while Tudor in name was Lancastrian in dynasty, and Yorkist in blood. No two kings, no two men indeed could well have been more unlike, bodily, mentally, and morally, than the two Henrys--father and son. The eighth was communicative, confiding, open, frank; the seventh was silent, reserved, mysterious. The son was active, busy, practical, conspicuous; the father, although not indolent, and not unpractical, was nevertheless quiet, dreamy, reflective, self-restrained, and unobtrusive. One was prodigal, martial, popular; the other was prudent, peaceful, steadfast, and unpopular. He is said indeed to have been parsimonious, but the least sympathetic of his historians confess that he was generous in his rewards for service, that his charities were numerous, and that his state ceremonies were marked by fitting splendour. Henry VIII. changed (or destroyed) his ministers, his bishops, his wives, and his measures also, many times. Henry VII. kept his wife--perverse and mischievous as she was,--till she died; kept his ministers and bishops till they died; kept his policy and his peace till he died himself.

Henry VII. is noteworthy mainly for being but little noticed. The scribe of whatever time sees around him only that which is conspicuous and exceptional and often for the most part foolish, and therefore the documents of this Henry's reign are but few in number. The occupants of high places who are careful and prudent are rarely popular. His unpopularity was moreover helped on in various ways. Dynastic policy thrust upon him a wife of the busy unimpassioned temperament--a woman in whom deficient emotion and sympathy and affection were not compensated by any high qualities; a woman who was restless, mischievous, vain, intriguing, and fond of influence. Elizabeth of York had all the bad qualities of her father and her son and had very few of their good ones. A King Henry in feminine disguise without his virtues was not likely to love or be loved. Domestic sourness is probably a not infrequent cause of taciturnity and mystery and seclusion in the characters of both men and women. It was well that Henry was neither angry nor morose. It says much for him moreover that while he was the object of ceaseless intrigue and hostility and rancour he yet never gave way to cynicism or revenge or cruelty.

With a tolerably happy marriage, an assenting and a helpful nobility, and an unassailed throne, it is difficult to put a limit to the good which Henry VII. might have done and which it lay in him to do. As it was he smoothed the way for enterprise and discovery, for the printing press and the new learning. He was the first of English monarchs who befriended education--using the word in its modern sense. It is curious that the acutest changes in our history--the death of a decrepit mediaevalism, the birth of the young giant modernism--happened in our so-called sleepiest reign. Surely the "quiet" father had a smaller share of popular applause than he deserved, and as surely the "dashing" son a much larger share. But in all periods, old and new, popularity should give us pause: yesterday, for example, inquisitors were knelt to, hailed with acclamation and pelted with flowers, and heretics were spat upon, hissed at, and burnt, but to-day's flowers are for the heretics and the execrations are for the inquisitors.

Thus then in all characteristics--intellectual, moral and bodily--Henry VIII. must be placed in the unimpassioned class. It may be noted too in passing that all the portraits of Henry show us a feeble growth of hair on the face and signs of a convex back--convex vertically and convex transversely. We do not see the back it is true, but we see both the head and the shoulders carried forwards and the chin held down towards the chest--held indeed so far downward that the neck seems greatly shortened. It is interesting to observe the pose of the head and neck and shoulders in the portraits of noted personages. The forward head and shoulders, the downward chin (the products of a certain spinal configuration) are seen in undoubtedly different characters but characters which nevertheless have much in common: they are seen in all the portraits of Napoleon I. and, although not quite so markedly, in those of our own General Gordon. Napoleon and Gordon were unlike in many ways, and the gigantic self-importance and self-seeking of Napoleon were absent in the simpler and finer character. In other ways they were much alike. Both were brave active busy men; but both were fitful, petulant, censorius, difficult to please, and--which is very characteristic--both although changeable were nevertheless self-willed and self-confident. Both were devoid of the deeper passions.

THE WIVES QUESTION.

NOTE IV.

It is affirmed that no one save a monster of lust would marry six wives--a monster of lust being of course a man of over-mastering passion. It might be asked, in passing, seeing that six wives is the sign of a perfect "monster" if three wives make a semi-monster? Pompey had five wives, was he five-sixths of a monster. To be serious however in this wife question, it will probably never be possible to say with exactness how much in Henry's conduct was due to religious scruples; how much to the urgent importunity (state-born importunity) of advisers and subjects; how much to the then existing confusion of the marriage laws; how much to misfortune and coincidence; how much to folly and caprice; how much to colossal self-importance, and how much to "unbounded license."

History broadly hints that great delusions, like great revolutions, may overcome--especially if the overcoming be not too sudden--both peoples and persons without their special wonder. In such delusions and such revolutions the actors and the victims are alike often unconscious actors and unconscious victims. Neither Henry nor his people dreamt that the great marriage question of the sixteenth century would excite the ridicule of all succeeding centuries. Luther did not imagine that his efforts would help to divide religious Europe into two permanently hostile camps. Robespierre did not suspect that his name would live as an enduring synonym for blood. But to marry six wives, solely on licentious grounds, is a proceeding so striking and so uncomplicated that no delusion could possibly come over the performer and certainly not over a watchful people. Yet something akin to delusion there certainly was; its causes however were several and complex, and lust was the least potent of them. The statement may seem strange, but there was little of desire in Henry's composition. A monster he possibly was of some sort of folly; but strange as it may seem he was a monster of folly precisely because he was the opposite of a monster of passion. Unhappily unbounded lust is now and then a feature of the impassioned temperament. It is never seen however in the less impassioned, and Henry was one of the less impassioned. The want of dignity is itself a striking feature in the character of passionless and active men, and want of dignity was the one conspicuous defect in Henry's conduct in his marriage affairs. Perhaps too, dignity--personal or national--is, like quietness and like kindliness, among the later growths of civilisation.