The episode illustrates the curious perversion of the English sense of honor when the privileges and prestige of the aristocracy are at stake.  Mr. Frank Harris said, after the disastrous battle of Modder River, that the English, having lost America a century ago because they preferred George III, were quite prepared to lose South Africa to-day because they preferred aristocratic commanders to successful ones.  Horace Walpole, when the parliamentary recess came at a critical period of the War of Independence, said that the Lords could not be expected to lose their pheasant shooting for the sake of America.  In the working class, which, like all classes, has its own official aristocracy, there is the same reluctance to discredit an institution or to “do a man out of his job.”  At bottom, of course, this apparently shameless sacrifice of great public interests to petty personal ones, is simply the preference of the ordinary man for the things he can feel and understand to the things that are beyond his capacity.  It is stupidity, not dishonesty.

Burgoyne fell a victim to this stupidity in two ways.  Not only was he thrown over, in spite of his high character and distinguished services, to screen a court favorite who had actually been cashiered for cowardice and misconduct in the field fifteen years before; but his peculiar critical temperament and talent, artistic, satirical, rather histrionic, and his fastidious delicacy of sentiment, his fine spirit and humanity, were just the qualities to make him disliked by stupid people because of their dread of ironic criticism.  Long after his death, Thackeray, who had an intense sense of human character, but was typically stupid in valuing and interpreting it, instinctively sneered at him and exulted in his defeat.  That sneer represents the common English attitude towards the Burgoyne type.  Every instance in which the critical genius is defeated, and the stupid genius (for both temperaments have their genius) “muddles through all right,” is popular in England.  But Burgoyne’s failure was not the work of his own temperament, but of the stupid temperament.  What man could do under the circumstances he did, and did handsomely and loftily.  He fell, and his ideal empire was dismembered, not through his own misconduct, but because Sir George Germain overestimated the importance of his Kentish holiday, and underestimated the difficulty of conquering those remote and inferior creatures, the colonists.  And King George and the rest of the nation agreed, on the whole, with Germain.  It is a significant point that in America, where Burgoyne was an enemy and an invader, he was admired and praised.  The climate there is no doubt more favorable to intellectual vivacity.

I have described Burgoyne’s temperament as rather histrionic; and the reader will have observed that the Burgoyne of the Devil’s Disciple is a man who plays his part in life, and makes all its points, in the manner of a born high comedian.  If he had been killed at Saratoga, with all his comedies unwritten, and his plan for turning As You Like It into a Beggar’s Opera unconceived, I should still have painted the same picture of him on the strength of his reply to the articles of capitulation proposed to him by his American conqueror General Gates.  Here they are: