Young England and the Oxford Tractarians--Disraeli a Hebrew at
heart--'Coningsby'--Sidonia--'Sybil; or, the Two Nations'--The
great towns under the new creed--Lords of the soil as they were and
as they are--Disraeli an aristocratic Socialist--Practical working of
Parliamentary institutions--Special importance of 'Sybil.'
[Sidenote: YOUNG ENGLAND]
According to Disraeli's theory of government, the natural rulers of
England were the aristocracy, supported by the people. The owners of the
soil were the stable element in the Constitution. Capitalists grew like
mushrooms, and disappeared as rapidly; the owners of the land remained.
Tenants and labourers looked up to them with a feeling of allegiance;
and that allegiance might revive into a living principle if the
aristocracy would deserve it by reverting to the habits of their
forefathers. That ancient forces could be awakened out of their sleep
seemed proved by the success of the Tractarian movement at Oxford. The
bold motto of the 'Lyra Apostolica' proclaimed that Achilles was in the
field again, and that Liberalism was to find its master. The Oxford
leaders might look doubtfully on so strange an ally as a half-converted
Israelite. But Disraeli and the Young Englanders had caught the note,
and were endeavouring to organise a political party on analogous lines.
It was a dream. No such regeneration, spiritual or social, was really
possible. Times were changed, and men had changed along with them. The
Oxford movement was already undermined, though Disraeli knew it not. The
English upper classes were not to be persuaded to alter habits which had
become a second nature to them, or the people to be led back into social
dependence by enthusiasm and eloquence. Had any such resurrection of the
past been on the cards, Disraeli was not the necromancer who could have
bid the dead live again. No one had a keener sense of the indications in
others than he had. Fuller self-knowledge would have told him that the
friend of D'Orsay and Lady Blessington, of Tom Duncomb and Lytton
Bulwer, was an absurd associate in an ecclesiastical and social revival.
He seemed to think that if Newman had paid more attention to
'Coningsby,' the course of things might have been different. Saints had
worked with secular politicians at many periods of Christian history;
why not the Tractarian with him? Yet the juxtaposition of Newman and
Disraeli cannot be thought of without an involuntary smile. It would be
wrong to say that Disraeli had no sincere religious convictions. He was
a Hebrew to the heart of him. He accepted the Hebrew tradition as a true
account of the world, and of man's place in it. He was nominally a
member of the Church of England; but his Christianity was something of
his own, and his creed, as sketched in his 'Life of Lord George
Bentinck,' would scarcely find acceptance in any Christian community.
[Sidenote: 'CONINGSBY']
I have mentioned 'Coningsby.' It is time to see what 'Coningsby' was.
Disraeli's novels had been brilliant, but he had touched nowhere the
deeper chords of enduring feeling. His characters had been smart, but
trivial; and his higher flights, as in the 'Revolutionary Epic,' or his
attempts to paint more delicate emotion, as in 'Henrietta Temple' or in
'Venetia,' if not failures, were not successes of a distinguished kind.
He had shown no perception of what was simple, or true, or tender, or
admirable. He had been at his best when mocking at conventional humbug.
But his talent as a writer was great, and, with a subject on which he
was really in earnest, might produce a powerful effect. To impress the
views of the Young Englanders upon the public, something more was needed
than speeches in Parliament or on platforms. Henry Hope, son of the
author of 'Anastasius,' collected them in a party at his house at
Deepdene, and there first 'urged the expediency of Disraeli's treating
in a literary form those views and subjects which were the matter of
their frequent conversations.' The result was 'Coningsby' and 'Sybil.'
'Coningsby; or, the New Generation' carried its meaning in its title. If
England was to be saved by its aristocracy, the aristocracy must alter
their ways. The existing representatives of the order had grown up in
self-indulgence and social exclusiveness; some excellent, a few vicious,
but all isolated from the inferior ranks, and all too old to mend. The
hope, if hope there was, had to be looked for in their sons.
As a tale, 'Coningsby' is nothing; but it is put together with extreme
skill to give opportunities for typical sketches of character, and for
the expression of opinions on social and political subjects. We have
pictures of fashionable society, gay and giddy, such as no writer ever
described better; peers, young, middle-aged, and old, good, bad, and
indifferent, the central figure a profligate old noble of immense
fortune, whose person was easily recognised, and whose portrait was also
preserved by Thackeray. Besides these, intriguing or fascinating
ladies, political hacks, country gentlemen, mill-owners, and occasional
wise outsiders, looking on upon the chaos and delivering oracular
interpretations or prophecies. Into the middle of such a world the hero
is launched, being the grandson and possible heir of the wicked peer.
Lord Monmouth is a specimen of the order which was making aristocratic
government impossible. To tax corn to support Lord Monmouth was plainly
impossible. The story opens at Eton, which Disraeli describes with an
insight astonishing in a writer who had no experience of English public
school life, and with a fondness which confesses how much he had lost in
the substitutes to which he had been himself condemned. There Coningsby
makes acquaintance with the high-born youths who are to be his
companions in the great world which is to follow, then in the enjoyment
of a delightful present, and brimming with enthusiastic ambitions. They
accompany each other to their fathers' castles, and schemes are
meditated and begun for their future careers; Disraeli letting fall, as
he goes on, his own political opinions, and betraying his evident
disbelief in existing Conservatism, and in its then all-powerful leader.
He finds Peel constructing a party without principles, with a basis
therefore necessarily latitudinarian, and driving into political
infidelity. There were shouts about Conservatism; but the question, What
was to be conserved? was left unanswered. The Crown was to keep its
prerogatives provided they were not exercised; the House of Lords might
keep its independence if it was never asserted; the ecclesiastical
estate if it was regulated by a commission of laymen. Everything, in
short, that was established might remain as long as it was a phrase and
not a fact. The Conservatism of Sir Robert 'offered no redress for the
present, and made no preparations for the future. On the arrival of one
of those critical conjunctures which would periodically occur in all
States, the power of resistance would be wanting; the barren curse of
political infidelity would paralyse all action, and the Conservative
Constitution would be discovered to be a _caput mortuum_.
'Coningsby found that he was born in an age of infidelity in all things,
and his heart assured him that a want of faith was a want of nature. He
asked himself why governments were hated and religions despised, why
loyalty was dead and reverence only a galvanised corpse. He had found
age perplexed and desponding, manhood callous and desperate. Some
thought that systems would last their time, others that something would
turn up. His deep and pious spirit recoiled with disgust and horror from
lax chance medley maxims that would, in their consequence, reduce men to
the level of brutes.'
He falls in with all varieties of men bred in the confusion of the old
and the new. An enthusiastic Catholic landlord tries to revive the
customs of his ancestors, supported by his faith, but perplexed by the
aspect of a world no longer apparently under supernatural guidance. 'I
enter life,' says Mr. Lyle, 'in the midst of a convulsion in which the
very principles of our political and social system are called in
question. I cannot unite myself with the party of destruction. It is an
operative cause alien to my being. What, then, offers itself? The duke
talks to me of Conservative principles, but he does not inform me what
they are. I observe, indeed, a party in the State whose rule it is to
consent to no change until it is clamorously called for, and then
instantly to yield: but those are concessionary, not Conservative,
principles. This party treats our institutions as we do our pheasants.
They preserve only to destroy them. But is there a statesman among these
Conservatives who offers us a dogma for a guide, or defines any great
political truth which we should aspire to establish? It seems to me a
barren thing, this Conservatism; an unhappy cross-breed, the mule of
politics, that engenders nothing.'
Coningsby had saved the life of a son of a Northern mill-owner at Eton.
They became attached friends, though they were of opposite creeds.
Coningsby's study of the social problem carries him to Manchester, where
he hears from Millbank the views entertained in the industrial circles
of the English aristocracy. Mr. Millbank dislikes feudal manners as out
of date and degenerate.
'I do not understand,' he says, 'how an aristocracy can exist, unless it
is distinguished by some quality which no other class of the community
possesses. Distinction is the basis of aristocracy. If you permit only
one class of the population, for example, to bear arms, they are an
aristocracy: not much to my taste, but still a great fact. That,
however, is not the characteristic of the English peerage. I have yet to
learn that they are richer than we are, better informed, or more
distinguished for public or private virtue. Ancient lineage! I never
heard of a peer with an ancient lineage. The real old families of the
country are to be found among the peasantry. The gentry, too, may lay
claim to old blood: I know of some Norman gentlemen whose fathers
undoubtedly came in with the Conqueror. But a peer with an ancient
lineage is to me quite a novelty. The thirty years' Wars of the Roses
freed us from these gentlemen, I take it. After the battle of Tewkesbury
a Norman baron was almost as rare a being as a wolf.... We owe the
English peerage to three sources--the spoliation of the Church, the open
and flagrant sale of its honours by the elder Stuarts, and the
borough-mongering of our own times. These are the three main sources of
the existing peerages of England, and in my opinion disgraceful ones.'
'And where will you find your natural aristocracy?' asked Coningsby.
'Among those,' Millbank answers, 'whom a nation recognises as the most
eminent for virtue, talents, and property, and, if you will, birth and
standing in this land. They guide opinions, and therefore they govern. I
am no leveller; I look upon an artificial equality as equally pernicious
with a factitious aristocracy, both depressing the energies and checking
the enterprise of a nation. I am sanguine. I am the disciple of
progress, but I have cause for my faith. I have witnessed advance. My
father often told me that in his early days the displeasure of a peer of
England was like a sentence of death.'
A more remarkable figure is Sidonia, the Hebrew financier, who is
represented very much in the position of Disraeli himself, half a
foreigner, and impartial onlooker, with a keen interest in the stability
of English institutions, but with the insight possible only to an
outsider, who observes without inherited prepossessions. Sidonia, the
original of whom is as easily recognised, is, like Disraeli, of Spanish
descent. His father staked all that he was worth on the Waterloo Loan,
became the greatest capitalist in Europe, and bequeathed his business
and his fortune to his son.
The young Sidonia 'obtained, at an early age, that experience of refined
and luxurious society which is a necessary part of a finished education.
'It gives the last polish to the manners. It teaches us something of
the powers of the passions, early developed in the hotbed of
self-indulgence. It instils into us that indefinable tact seldom
obtained in later life, which prevents us from saying the wrong thing,
and often impels us to do the right. He was admired by women, idolised
by artists, received in all circles with great distinction, and
appreciated for his intellect by the very few to whom he at all opened
himself; for, though affable and generous, it was impossible to
penetrate him: though unreserved in his manners, his frankness was
limited to the surface. He observed everything, thought ever, but
avoided serious discussion. If you pressed him for an opinion, he took
refuge in raillery, and threw out some grave paradox with which it was
not easy to cope.... He looked on life with a glance rather of curiosity
than contempt. His religion walled him out from the pursuits of a
citizen. His riches deprived him of the stimulating anxieties of a man.
He perceived himself a lone being without cares and without duties. He
might have discovered a spring of happiness in the sensibilities of the
heart; but this was a sealed fountain to Sidonia. In his organisation
there was a peculiarity, perhaps a great deficiency: he was a man
without affection. It would be harsh to say that he had no heart, for he
was susceptible of deep emotions; but not for individuals--woman was to
him a toy, man a machine.'
Though Sidonia is chiefly drawn from another person, Disraeli himself
can be traced in this description. The hand is the hand of Esau; the
voice is the voice of Jacob. 'The secret history of the world was
Sidonia's pastime.' 'His great pleasure was to contrast the hidden
motive with the public pretext of transactions.' This was Disraeli
himself, and through Sidonia's mouth Disraeli explains to Coningsby the
political condition of England. The Constitution professed to rest
on the representation of the people. Coningsby asks him what a
representative system means. He replies: 'It is a principle of which
only a limited definition is current in this country. People may be
represented without periodic elections of neighbours who are incapable
to maintain their interests, and strangers who are unwilling.... You
will observe one curious trait in the history of this country. The
depositary of power is always unpopular: all combine against it: it
always falls. Power was deposited in the great barons; the Church, using
the king for its instrument, crushed the great barons. Power was
deposited in the Church; the king, bribing the Parliament, plundered the
Church. Power was deposited in the king; the Parliament, using the
people, beheaded the king, expelled the king, changed the king, and
finally for a king substituted an administrative officer. For a hundred
and fifty years Power has been deposited in Parliament, and for the last
sixty or seventy years it has been becoming more and more unpopular. In
1832, it endeavoured by a reconstruction to regain the popular
affection; but, in truth, as the Parliament then only made itself more
powerful, it has only become more odious. As we see that the barons, the
Church, the king, have in turn devoured each other, and that the
Parliament, the last devourer, remains, it is impossible to resist the
impression that this body also is doomed to be devoured; and he is a
sagacious statesman who may detect in what form and in what quarter the
great consumer will arise.'
'Whence, then,' Coningsby asks, 'is hope to be looked for?' Sidonia
replies:
'In what is more powerful than laws and institutions, and without
which the best laws and the most skilful institutions may be a dead
letter or the very means of tyranny: in the national character. It
is not in the increased feebleness of its institutions that I see
the peril of England. It is in the decline of its character as a
community. In this country, since the peace, there has been an
attempt to advocate a reconstruction of society on a purely
rational basis. The principle of utility has been powerfully
developed. I speak not with lightness of the disciples of that
school: I bow to intellect in every form: and we should be grateful
to any school of philosophers, even if we disagree with them:
doubly grateful in this country where for so long a period our
statesmen were in so pitiable an arrear of public intelligence.
There has been an attempt to reconstruct society on a basis of
material motives and calculations. It has failed. It must
ultimately have failed under any circumstances. Its failure in an
ancient and densely-peopled kingdom was inevitable. How limited is
human reason the profoundest engineers are most conscious. We are
not indebted to the reason of man for any of the great achievements
which are the landmarks of human action and human progress. It was
not reason that besieged Troy. It was not reason that sent forth
the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world, that inspired the
Crusader, that instituted the monastic orders. It was not reason
that created the French revolution. Man is only truly great when he
acts from the passions, never irresistible but when he appeals to
the imagination. Even Mormon counts more votaries than Bentham. The
tendency of advanced civilisation is, in truth, to pure monarchy.
Monarchy is indeed a government which requires a high degree of
civilisation for its full development. It needs the support of free
laws and manners, and of a widely-diffused intelligence. Political
compromises are not to be tolerated except at periods of rude
transition. An educated nation recoils from the imperfect vicariate
of what is called representative government. Your House of Commons,
that has absorbed all other powers in the State, will in all
probability fall more rapidly than it rose. Public opinion has a
more direct, a more comprehensive, a more efficient organ for its
utterance than a body of men sectionally chosen. The printing-press
absorbs the duties of the sovereign, the priest, the Parliament. It
controls, it educates, it discusses.'
No attempt can be made here to analyse 'Coningsby.' The object of these
extracts is merely to illustrate Disraeli's private opinions. Space must
be made for one more--a conversation between Coningsby and the younger
Millbank. 'Tell me, Coningsby,' Millbank says, 'exactly what you
conceive to be the state of parties in this country.'
Coningsby answers:
'The principle of the exclusive Constitution of England having been
conceded by the Acts of 1827-1832, a party has arisen in the State
who demand that the principle of political Liberalism shall
consequently be carried to its full extent, which it appears to
them is impossible without getting rid of the fragments of the old
Constitution which remain. This is the destructive party, a party
with distinct and intelligible principles. They are resisted by
another party who, having given up exclusion, would only embrace as
much Liberalism as is necessary for the moment--who, without any
embarrassing promulgation of principles, wish to keep things as
they find them as long as they can; and these will manage them as
they find them, as well as they can: but, as a party must have the
semblance of principles, they take the names of the things they
have destroyed. Thus, they are devoted to the prerogatives of the
Crown, although in truth the Crown has been stripped of every one
of its prerogatives. They affect a great veneration for the
Constitution in Church and State, though everyone knows it no
longer exists. Whenever public opinion, which this party never
attempts to form, to educate, or to lead, falls into some
perplexity, passion, or caprice, this party yields without a
struggle to the impulse, and, when the storm has passed, attempts
to obstruct and obviate the logical and ultimately inevitable
results of the measures they have themselves originated, or to
which they have consented. This is the Conservative party.
'As to the first school, I have no faith in the remedial qualities
of a government carried on by a neglected democracy who for three
centuries have received no education. What prospect does it offer
us of those high principles of conduct with which we have fed our
imaginations and strengthened our wills? I perceive none of the
elements of government that should secure the happiness of a people
and the greatness of a realm. But if democracy be combated only by
Conservatism, democracy must triumph and at no distant date. The
man who enters political life at this epoch has to choose between
political infidelity and a destructive creed.'
'Do you declare against Parliamentary government?'
'Far from it: I look upon political change as the greatest of
evils, for it comprehends all. But if we have no faith in the
permanence of the existing settlement ... we ought to prepare
ourselves for the change which we deem impending.... I would
accustom the public mind to the contemplation of an existing though
torpid power in the Constitution capable of removing our social
grievances, were we to transfer to it those prerogatives which the
Parliament has gradually usurped, and used in a manner which has
produced the present material and moral disorganisation. The House
of Commons is the house of a few: the sovereign is the sovereign of
all. The proper leader of the people is the individual who sits
upon the throne.'
'Then you abjure the representative principle?'
'Why so? Representation is not necessarily, or even in a principal
sense, Parliamentary. Parliament is not sitting at this moment: and
yet the nation is represented in its highest as well as in its most
minute interests. Not a grievance escapes notice and redress. I see
in the newspapers this morning that a pedagogue has brutally
chastised his pupil. It is a fact known over all England--opinion
is now supreme, and opinion speaks in print. The representation of
the Press is far more complete than the representation of
Parliament. Parliamentary representation was the happy device of a
ruder age, to which it was admirably adapted. But it exhibits many
symptoms of desuetude. It is controlled by a system of
representation more vigorous and comprehensive, which absorbs its
duties and fulfils them more efficiently.... Before a royal
authority, supported by such a national opinion, the sectional
anomalies of our country would disappear. Under such a system even
statesmen would be educated. We should have no more diplomatists
who could not speak French, no more bishops ignorant of theology,
no more generals-in-chief who never saw a field. There is a polity
adapted to our laws, our institutions, our feelings, our manners,
our traditions: a polity capable of great ends, and appealing to
high sentiments: a polity which, in my opinion, would render
government an object of national affection, would terminate
sectional anomalies, and extinguish Chartism.'
Disraeli was singularly regardless of the common arts of party
popularity. He had spoken in defence of the Chartists when he was
supposed to be bidding for a place under Sir Robert Peel; he had used
language about Ireland, sweeping, peremptory, going to the heart of the
problem, which Whig and Tory must have alike resented; and he had risked
his seat by his daring. He was now telling the country, in language as
plain as Carlyle's, that Parliament was an effete institution--and the
House of Commons which he treated so disdainfully was in a few years to
choose him for its leader. The anomalies in Disraeli's life grow more
astonishing the deeper we look into them.
[Sidenote: 'SYBIL']
'Sybil,' published the next year, is more remarkable than even
'Coningsby.' 'Sybil; or, the Two Nations,' the two nations being the
Rich and the Poor. Disraeli had personally studied human life in the
manufacturing towns. He had seen the workman, when trade was brisk and
wages high, enjoying himself in his Temple of the Muses; he had seen
him, when demand grew slack, starving with his family in the garret,
with none to help him. He had observed the insolent frauds of the
truckmaster. He had seen the inner side of our magnificent industries
which legislation was struggling to extend: he had found there hatred,
anarchy, and incendiarism, and he was not afraid to draw the lurid
picture in the unrelieved colours of truth.
The first scene opens on the eve of the Derby, when, in a splendid
club-room, the languid aristocrats, weary of the rolling hours, are
making up their betting-books--they the choicest and most finished
flowers of this planet, to whom the Derby is the event of the year. They
are naturally high-spirited young men, made for better things, but
spoilt by their education and surroundings.
From the youth we pass to the mature specimens of the breed who are in
possession of their estates and their titles. Lord Marney's peerage
dates from the suppression of the monasteries, in which his ancestor had
been a useful instrument.
The secretary of Henry VIII.'s vicar-general had been rewarded by the
lands of a northern abbey. The property had grown in value with the
progress of the country. The family for the three centuries of its
existence had never produced a single person who had contributed any
good thing to the service of the commonwealth. But their consequence had
grown with their wealth, and the Lord Marney of 'Sybil' was aspiring to
a dukedom. He is represented (being doubtless drawn from life) as the
harshest of landlords, exacting the utmost penny of rent, leaving his
peasantry to squalor and disease, or driving them off his estates to
escape the burden of the poor-rate, and astonished to find Swing and his
bonfires starting up about him as his natural reward. The second great
peer of the story, Lord Mowbray, of a yet baser origin and character,
owns the land on which has grown a mushroom city of mills and
mill-hands. The ground-rents have made him fabulously rich, while,
innocent of a suspicion that his wealth has brought obligations along
with it, he lives in vulgar luxury in his adjoining castle.
On both estates the wretchedness is equal, though the character of it
is different. Lord Marney rules in a country district. A clergyman asks
him how a peasant can rear his family on eight shillings a week. 'Oh, as
for that,' said Lord Marney, 'I have generally found the higher the
wages, the worse the workmen. They only spend their money in the
beershops. They are the curse of the country.' The ruins of the
monastery give an opportunity for a contrast between the old England and
the new, by a picture of the time when the monks were the gentlest of
landlords, when exactions and evictions were unknown, and when churches
were raised to the service of God in the same spots where now rise the
brick chimneys and factories as the spires and temples of the modern
Mammon-worship.
In Mowbray, the town from which the earl of that name drew his revenue,
the inhabitants were losing the elementary virtues of humanity.
Factory-girls deserted their parents, and left them to starve,
preferring an independence of vice and folly; mothers farmed out their
children at threepence a week to be got rid of in a month or two by
laudanum and treacle. Disraeli was startled to find that 'infanticide
was practised as extensively and legally in England as it was on the
banks of the Ganges.' It is the same to-day: occasional revelations lift
the curtains, and show it active as ever; familiarity has led us to look
upon it as inevitable; the question, what is to be done with the swarms
of children multiplying in our towns, admitting, at present, of no moral
solution.
With some elaboration, Disraeli describes the human creatures bred in
such places which were growing up to take the place of the old English.
'Devilsdust'--so one of these children came to be called, for he had no
legitimate name or parentage--having survived a baby-farm by toughness
of constitution, and the weekly threepence ceasing on his mother's
death, was turned out into the streets to starve or to be run over.
Even this expedient failed. The youngest and feeblest of the band
of victims, Juggernaut spared him to Moloch. All his companions
were disposed of. Three months' play in the streets got rid of this
tender company, shoeless, half-naked, and uncombed, whose ages
varied from two to five years. Some were crushed, some were lost;
some caught cold and fever, crept back to their garrets or their
cellars, were dosed with Godfrey's Elixir, and died in peace. The
nameless one, Devilsdust, would not disappear: he always got out of
the way of the carts and horses, and never lost his own. They gave
him no food: he foraged for his own, and shared with the dogs the
garbage of the streets. But still he lived: stunted and pale, he
defied even the fatal fever which was the only habitant of his
cellar that never quitted it, and slumbering at night on a bed of
mouldering straw, his only protection against the plashy surface of
his den, with a dung-heap at his head and a cesspool at his feet,
he still clung to the only roof that sheltered him from the
tempest. At length, when the nameless one had completed his fifth
year, the pest which never quitted the nest of cellars of which he
was a citizen raged in the quarter with such intensity that the
extinction of its swarming population was menaced. The haunt of
this child was peculiarly visited. All the children gradually
sickened except himself: and one night when he returned home he
found the old woman herself dead and surrounded only by corpses.
The child before this had slept on the same bed of straw with a
corpse; but then there were also breathing things for his
companions. A night passed only with corpses seemed to him itself a
kind of death. He stole out of the cellar, quitted the quarter of
pestilence, and, after much wandering, lay down near the door of a
factory.
The child is taken in, not out of charity, but because an imp of such a
kind happens to be wanted, and Devilsdust grows up, naturally enough, a
Chartist and a dangerous member of society. But was there ever a more
horrible picture drawn? It is like a chapter of Isaiah in Cockney
novelist dress. Such things, we are told, cannot happen now. Can they
not? There was a recent revelation at Battersea not so unlike it. The
East-end of London produces crimes which are not obliterated because
they are forgotten; and rag bundles may be seen on frosty nights at
London house-doors, which, if you unroll them, discover living things
not so unlike poor Devilsdust. For the future, these waifs and strays
are at least to be sent to school. The school will do something,
especially if one full meal a day is added to the lessons; but what is
the best of Board schools compared to the old apprenticeship? The
apprentice had his three full meals a day, and decent clothes, and
decent lodging, and was taught some trade or handicraft by which he
could earn an honest living when his time was out. The school cannot
reach the miserable home. The school teaches no useful occupation, and
when school-time is over the child is again adrift upon the world. He is
taught to read and write. His mind is opened. Yes. He is taught to read
the newspapers, and the penny dreadfuls, and his wits are sharpened for
him. Whether this will make him a more useful or more contented member
of society, time will show.
Devilsdust was but one of many products of the manufacturing system
which Disraeli saw and meditated upon.
He found a hand-loom weaver starving with his children in a garret,
looking back upon the time when his loom had given him a cottage and a
garden in his native village. The new machinery had ruined him, and he
did not complain of the inevitable. But, as it was too late for him to
learn another trade, he argued that if a society which had been created
by labour suddenly became independent of it, that society was bound to
maintain those whose only property was labour, out of the profits of
that other property which had not ceased to be productive.
He talks with a superior artisan, who says to him:
'There is more serfdom in England now than at any time since the
Conquest. I speak of what passes under my daily eyes when I say
that those who labour can as little change or choose their masters
now as when they were born thralls. There are great bodies of the
working classes of this country nearer the condition of brutes than
they have been at any time since the Conquest. Indeed, I see
nothing to distinguish them from brutes, except that their morals
are inferior. Incest and infanticide are as common among them as
among the lower animals. The domestic principle wanes weaker and
weaker every year in England: nor can we wonder at it when there is
no comfort to cheer and no sentiment to hallow the home.
'I am told a working man has now a pair of cotton stockings, and
that Henry VIII. himself was not as well off.... I deny the
premisses. I deny that the condition of the main body is better now
than at any other period of our history--that it is as good as it
has been at several. The people were better clothed, better lodged,
and better fed just before the Wars of the Roses than they are at
this moment. The Acts of Parliament, from the Plantagenets to the
Tudors, teach us alike the prices of provisions and the rate of
wages.'
'And are these the people?' the hero of the story asks himself, after
such conversations. 'If so, I would I lived more among them. Compared
with this converse, the tattle of our saloons has in it something
humiliating. It is not merely that it is deficient in warmth and depth
and breadth; that it is always discussing persons instead of principles;
choking its want of thought in mimetic dogmas, and its want of feeling
in superficial raillery. It is not merely that it has neither
imagination, nor fancy, nor sentiment, nor knowledge to recommend it,
but it appears to me, even as regards manners and expressions, inferior
in refinement and phraseology, trivial, uninteresting, stupid, really
vulgar.'
The tattle of politics was no better than the tattle of the saloons.
Disraeli's experience in the northern towns had shown him what a problem
lay before any Government of England which deserved the name. The Reform
Bill was now twelve years old, and political liberty, so far, had not
touched the outside of the disease. London, with its cliques and
parties, its balls and festivities, seemed but an iridescent scum over
an abyss of seething wretchedness. Here was work for rulers, if ruling
was ever again to mean more than intrigue for office and manipulation of
votes. Devilsdusts by thousands were generating in the vapour of Free
Trade industry, while the Tadpoles and the Tapers, the wirepullers of
the House of Commons, were in a fever of agitation whether the Great
Bedchamber question was to bring back the Melbourne Ministry, or whether
Peel was to have his way.
_Tadpole_: The malcontent Liberals who have turned them out are not
going to bring them in again. That makes us equal. Then we have an
important section to work upon, the Sneaks, the men who are afraid
of a dissolution. I will be bound we make a good working
Conservative majority of twenty-five out of the Sneaks.
_Taper_: With the Treasury patronage, fears and favours combined,
and all the places we refuse our own men, we may count on the
Sneaks.
_Tadpole_: There are several religious men who have wanted an
excuse for a long time to rat. We must get Sir Robert to make some
kind of a religious move, and that will secure Sir Litany Lax and
young Mr. Salem.
_Taper_: It will never do to throw over the Church Commission.
Commissions and committees ought always to be supported.
_Tadpole_: Besides, it will frighten the saints. If we could get
Sir Robert to speak at Exeter Hall, were it only a slavery
meeting!--that would do.
_Taper_: It is difficult: he must be pledged to nothing, not even
to the right of search. Yet if we could get up something with a
good deal of sentiment and no principle involved, referring only to
the past, but with his practical powers touching the present! What
do you think of a monument to Wilberforce or a commemoration of
Clarkson?
_Tadpole_: There is a good deal in that. At present go about and
keep our fellows in good humour. Whisper nothings that sound like
something. But be discreet. Do not let there be more than
half-a-hundred fellows who believe they are going to be
Under-Secretaries of State. And be cautious about titles. If they
push you, give a wink and press your finger to your lips. I must
call here on the Duke of FitzAquitaine. This gentleman is my
particular charge. I have been cooking him these three years. I had
two notes from him yesterday, and can delay no longer. The worst of
it is he expects I shall bear him the non-official announcement of
his being sent to Ireland, of which he has about as much chance as
I have of being Governor-General of India. It must be confessed
ours is critical work sometimes, friend Taper. But never mind: we
have to do with individuals; Peel has to do with a nation; and
therefore we ought not to complain.
Is this a libel, or is it a fair account of the formation and working of
English governments? Let those answer who have read the memoirs of the
leading statesmen of the present century. Is there anywhere to be found,
in the records of the overthrow or building-up of Cabinets, any hint,
even the slightest, of an insight into the condition of the country, or
of a desire to mend it? Forces were at work shattering the bodily frames
and destroying the souls of millions of those whom they were aspiring to
guide. Do we find anything at all, save manœuvres for a new turn of the
political kaleidoscope? Might not Sidonia, might not Disraeli himself,
reasonably doubt whether such methods of selecting administrations would
be of long continuance?
Enough of 'Sybil.' Disraeli skilfully contrives to distribute poetical
justice among his imaginary characters--to bring his unworthy peers to
retribution, and to reward the honest and the generous. He could do it
in a novel. Unfortunately, the reality is less tractable. 'A year ago,'
he says, in concluding the story, 'I presumed to offer to the public
some volumes ("Coningsby") that aimed at calling their attention to the
state of political parties, their origin, their history, their present
position. In an age of mean passions and petty thoughts, I would have
impressed upon the rising race not to despair, but to seek in a right
understanding of the history of their country, and in the energies of
heroic youths, the elements of national welfare. The present work
advances a step in the same emprise. From the state of parties it would
draw public thought to the state of the people whom those parties for
two centuries have governed. The comprehension and the cure of this
greater theme depend upon the same agencies as the first. It is the past
alone that can explain the present, and it is youth alone that can mould
the remedial future.... The written history of our country for the last
ten years has been a mere phantasm.... Oligarchy has been called
Liberty; an exclusive priesthood has been christened a National Church.
Sovereignty has been the title of something that has had no dominion,
while absolute power has been wielded by those who profess themselves
the servants of the people. In the selfish strife of factions, two great
existences have been blotted out of the history of England: the monarch
and the multitude. As the power of the Crown has diminished, the
privileges of the people have disappeared, till at length the sceptre
has become a pageant, and the subject has degenerated again into a
serf....
'That we may live to see England once more possess a free monarchy, and
a privileged and prosperous people, is my prayer; that these great
consequences can only be brought about by the energy and devotion of our
youth, is my persuasion.... The claims of the future are represented by
suffering millions, and the youth of a nation are the trustees of
posterity.'