possible explanations of his success have been given, what a wonderful
career! An adventurer foreign in race, in ideas, in temper, without
money or family connections, climbs, by patient and unaided efforts,
to lead a great party, master a powerful aristocracy, sway a vast
empire, and make himself one of the four or five greatest personal
forces in the world. His head is not turned by his elevation. He never
becomes a demagogue; he never stoops to beguile the multitude by
appealing to sordid instincts. He retains through life a certain
amplitude of view, a due sense of the dignity of his position, a due
regard for the traditions of the ancient assembly which he leads, and
when at last the destinies of England fall into his hands, he feels
the grandeur of the charge, and seeks to secure what he believes to be
her imperial place in the world. Whatever judgment history may
ultimately pass upon him, she will find in the long annals of the
English Parliament no more striking figure.
-----
[1] No "authorised" life of Lord Beaconsfield, nor indeed any life
commensurate with the part he played in English politics, has
yet appeared.
[2] Disraeli's family claimed to be of Spanish origin, but had come
from Italy to England shortly before 1748.
[3] There are few legal allusions in his novels, fewer in proportion
than in Shakespeare's plays, but an ingenious travesty of the
English use of legal fictions may be found in the _Voyage of
Captain Popanilla_, a satire on the English constitution and
government. Popanilla, who is to be tried for treason, is, to
his astonishment, indicted for killing a camelopard.
[4] That historical interest he did feel deeply. One might almost say
of him that he was a Christian because he was a Jew, for
Christianity was to him the proper development of the ancient
religion of Israel. "The Jews," he observes in the _Life of
Lord George Bentinck_, "represent the Semitic principle, all
that is most spiritual in our nature.... It is deplorable that
several millions of Jews still persist in believing only a part
of their religion."
[5] Though it has been maintained that in the Dark and Middle Ages a
considerable number of Gentiles found their way into Jewish
communities and became Judaised.
The high average of intellectual power among the Jews need
not be attributed to purity of race; it is sufficiently
explained by their history. Nor is it clear that where two
of the more advanced races are mixed by intermarriage, the
product is inferior to either of the parent stocks. On the
contrary, such a mixture, _e.g._ of Teutonic and Slavonic
blood, or of Celtic and Teutonic, gives a result at least
equal in capacity to either of the pure-blooded races which
have been so commingled.
[6] He had an intellectual arrogance, which made him dislike what may
be called the Radical conception of human equality. In the
_Life of Lord George Bentinck_ he remarks, "The Jews are a
living and the most striking evidence of the falsity of that
pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of
man.... All the tendencies of the Jewish race are conservative.
Their bias is to religion, property, and natural aristocracy."
[7] On one occasion he went so far as to deny that he had asked Peel
for office, relying on the fact that the letter which contained
the request was marked "private," so that Peel could not use it
to disprove his statement (_Letters of Sir Robert Peel_, by C.
S. Parker, vol. ii. p. 486; vol. iii. pp. 347, 348).
[8] See Sir S. Northcote's report of a conversation with Disraeli in
his last years (_Life of Sir Stafford Northcote_, vol. ii.).
[9] In the _Life of Lord George Bentinck_ (written shortly after
Peel's death), Disraeli, after dilating upon the loyalty which
the Tory aristocracy had displayed towards Peel, observes, "An
aristocracy hesitates before it yields its confidence, but it
never does so grudgingly.... In political connections the
social feeling mingles with the principle of honour which
governs gentlemen.... Such a following is usually cordial and
faithful. An aristocracy is rather apt to exaggerate the
qualities and magnify the importance of a plebeian leader."
[10] When he did set himself to examine the condition of the people,
the diagnosis, if not always correct, was always suggestive,
_e.g._ the account of the manufacturing districts given in
_Sybil, or the Two Nations_.
[11] "The old Jew, that is the man."
[12] In the _Life of Lord George Bentinck_.
[13] +Oio pepnusthai, toi de skiai aissousin+ (_Od._ x. 495). Used of
Tiresias, in the world of disembodied spirits.
[14] To defend Disraeli by arguing that his policy had not a fair
chance because his colleagues did not allow him to carry it
through is to admit another error not less grave, for the path
he took was one on which no minister ought to have entered
unless satisfied that the Cabinet and the country would let him
follow it to the end.
[15] _Inf._ vii. 77.
DEAN STANLEY[16]
In the England of his time there was no personality more attractive,
nor any more characteristic of the country, than Arthur Penrhyn
Stanley, Dean of Westminster. England is the only European country in
which such a figure could have appeared, for it is the only country in
which a man may hold a high ecclesiastical post and yet be regarded by
the nation, not specially as an ecclesiastic, but rather as a
distinguished writer, an active and influential man of affairs, an
ornament of social life. But if in this respect he was typical of his
country, he was in other respects unique. He was a clergyman untouched
by clericalism, a courtier unspoiled by courts. No one could point to
any one else in England who occupied a similar position, nor has any
one since arisen who recalls him, or who fills the place which his
departure left empty.
Stanley was born in 1815. His father, then Rector of Alderley, in
Cheshire, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, belonged to the family of the
Stanleys of Alderley, a branch of that ancient and famous line the
head of which is Earl of Derby. His mother, Catherine Leycester, was a
woman of much force of character and intellectual power. He was
educated at Rugby School under Dr. Arnold, the influence of whose
ideas remained great over him all through his life, and at Oxford,
where he became a fellow and tutor of University College. Passing
thence to be Canon of Canterbury, he returned to the University as
Professor of Ecclesiastical History, and remained there for seven
years. In 1863 he was appointed Dean of Westminster, and at the same
time married Lady Augusta Bruce (sister of the then Lord Elgin,
Governor-General first of Canada and afterwards of India). He died in
1881.
He had an extraordinarily active and busy life, so intertwined with
the history of the University of Oxford and the history of the Church
of England from 1850 to 1880, that one can hardly think of any salient
point in either without thinking also of him. Yet it was perhaps
rather in the intensity of his nature and the nobility of his
sentiments than in either the compass or the strength of his
intellectual faculties that the charm and the force he exercised lay.
In some directions he was curiously deficient. He had no turn for
abstract reasoning, no liking for metaphysics or any other form of
speculation. He was equally unfitted for scientific inquiry, and could
scarcely work a sum in arithmetic. Indeed, in no field was he a
logical or systematic thinker. Neither, although he had a retentive
memory, and possessed a great deal of various knowledge on many
subjects, could he be called learned, for he had not really mastered
any branch of history, and was often inaccurate in details. He had
never been trained to observe facts in natural history. He had
absolutely no ear for music, and very little perception either of
colour or of scent. He learned foreign languages with difficulty and
never spoke them well. He was so short-sighted as to be unable to
recognise a face passing close in the street. Yet with these
shortcomings he was a born traveller, went everywhere, saw everything
and everybody worth seeing, always seized on the most characteristic
features of a landscape, or building, or a person, and described them
with a freshness which made one feel as if they had never been
described before. Of the hundreds who have published books on the
Desert of Sinai and the Holy Land, many of them skilful writers or men
of profound knowledge, he is the only one who is still read and likely
to continue to be read, so vivid in colour, so exquisite in feeling,
are the pictures he has given. Nature alone, however, nature taken by
herself, did not satisfy him, did not, indeed, in his later days (for
in his boyhood he had been a passionate lover of the mountains)
greatly interest him. A building or a landscape had power to rouse his
imagination and call forth his unrivalled powers of description only
when it was associated with the thoughts and deeds of men.
The largest part of his literary work was done in the field of
ecclesiastical history, a subject naturally congenial to him, and
to which he was further drawn by the professorship which he held at
Oxford during a time when a great revival of historical studies was
in progress. It was work which critics could easily disparage, for
there were many small errors scattered through it; and the picturesque
method of treatment he employed was apt to pass into scrappiness. He
fixed on the points which had a special interest for his own mind as
illustrating some trait of personal or national character, or some
moral lesson, and passed hastily over other matters of equal or
greater importance. Nevertheless his work had some distinctive merits
which have not received from professional critics the whole credit
they deserved. In all that Stanley wrote one finds a certain
largeness and dignity of view. He had a sense of the unity of
history, of the constant relation of past and present, of the
similarity of human nature in one age and country to human nature in
another; and he never failed to dwell upon the permanently valuable
truths which history has to teach. Nothing was too small to
attract him, because he discovered a meaning in everything, and he
was therefore never dull, for even when he moralised he would light
up his reflections by some happy anecdote. With this he possessed a
keen eye, the eye of a poet, for human character, and a power of
sympathy that enabled him to appreciate even those whose principles
and policy he disliked. Herein he was not singular, for the
sympathetic style of writing history has become fashionable among
us. What was remarkable in him was that his sympathy did not
betray him into the error, now also fashionable, of extenuating moral
distinctions. His charity never blunted the edge of his justice, nor
prevented him from reprobating the faults of the personages who had
touched his heart. For one sin only he had little historical
tolerance--the sin of intolerance. So there was one sin only which
ever led him to speak severely of any of his contemporaries--the
sin of untruthfulness. Being himself so simple and straightforward as
to feel his inability to cope with deceitful men, deceit incensed
him. But he did not resent the violence of his adversaries, for
though he suffered much at their hands he knew many of them to be
earnest, unselfish, and conscientious men.
His pictures of historical scenes are admirable, for with his interest
in the study of character there went a large measure of dramatic
power. Nothing can be better in its way than the description of the
murder of St. Thomas of Canterbury given in the _Memorials of
Canterbury_, which, after _Sinai and Palestine_ and the _Life of
Arnold_, may be deemed the best of Stanley's books. Whether he could,
with more leisure for careful thought and study, have become a
great historian, was a question which those of us who were dazzled
by his Public Lectures at Oxford used often to discuss. The leisure
never came, for he was throughout life warmly interested in every
current ecclesiastical question, and ready to bear a part in
discussing it, either in the press--for he wrote in the _Edinburgh
Review_, and often sent letters to the _Times_ under the signature of
"Anglicanus"--or in Convocation, where he had a seat during the
latter part of his career. These interruptions not only checked the
progress of his studies, but gave to his compositions an air of
haste, which made them seem to want system and finish. The habit
of rapid writing for magazines or other ephemeral purposes is alleged
to tell injuriously upon literary men: it told the more upon
Stanley because he was also compelled to produce sermons rapidly.
Now sermon-writing, while it breeds a tendency to the making of
rhetorical points, subordinates the habit of dispassionate inquiry to
the enforcement of a moral lesson. Stanley, who had a touch of
the rhetorical temperament, and was always eager to improve an
occasion, certainly suffered in this way. When he brings out a
general truth he is not content with it as a truth, but seeks to turn
it also to edification, or to make it illustrate and support some
view for which he is contending at the time. When he is simply
describing, he describes rather as a dramatic artist working for
effect than as a historian solely anxious to represent men and
events as they were. Yet if we consider how much a historian gains,
not only from an intimate knowledge of his own time, but also, and
even more largely, from playing an active part in the events of his
own time, from swaying opinion by his writings and his speeches,
from sitting in assemblies and organising schemes of attack and
defence, we may hesitate to wish that Stanley's time had been more
exclusively given to quiet investigation. The freshness of his
historical portraits is notably due to the sense he carried about
with him of moving in history and being a part of it. He never
mounted his pulpit in the Abbey or walked into the Jerusalem
Chamber when Convocation was sitting without feeling that he was about
to do something which might possibly be recorded in the annals of
his country. I remember his mentioning, to illustrate undergraduate
ignorance, that once when he was going to give a lecture to his
class, he suddenly recollected that Mr. Goldwin Smith, then Regius
Professor of Modern History, was announced to deliver a public
lecture at the same hour. Telling the class that they would be
better employed in hearing Mr. Goldwin Smith than himself, he led
them all there. The next time the class met, one of them, after
making some acute comments on the lecture, asked who the lecturer
was. "I was amazed," said Stanley, "that an intelligent man should
ask such a question, and then it occurred to me that probably he did
not know who I was either." There was nothing of personal vanity or
self-importance in this. All the men of mark among whom he moved
were to him historical personages, and he would describe to his
friends some doing or saying of a contemporary statesman or
ecclesiastic with the same eagerness, the same sense of its being a
fact to be noted and remembered, as the rest of us feel about a
personal anecdote relating to Oliver Cromwell or Cardinal Richelieu.
His sermons, like nearly all good sermons, will be inadequately
appreciated by those who now peruse them, not only because they were
composed for a given audience with special reference to the
circumstances of the time, but also because the best of them gained so
much by his impassioned delivery. They were all read from manuscript,
and his handwriting was so illegible that it was a marvel how he
contrived to read them. I once asked him, not long after he had been
promoted to the Deanery of Westminster, whether he found it easy to
make himself heard in the enormous nave of the Abbey church. His
frame, it ought to be stated, was spare as well as small, and his
voice not powerful. He answered: "That depends on whether I am
interested in what I am saying. If the sermon is on something which
interests me deeply I can fill the nave; otherwise I cannot." When he
had got a worthy theme, or one which stimulated his own emotions, the
power of his voice and manner was wonderful. His tiny body seemed to
swell, his chest vibrated as he launched forth glowing words. The
farewell sermon he delivered when quitting Oxford for Westminster
lives in the memory of those who heard it as a performance of
extraordinary power, the power springing from the intensity of his own
feeling. No sermon has ever since so moved the University.
He was by nature shy and almost timid, and he was not supposed to
possess any gift for extempore speaking. But when in his later days he
found himself an almost solitary champion in Convocation of the
principles of universal toleration and comprehension which he held, he
developed a debating power which surprised himself as well as his
friends. It was to him a matter of honour and conscience to defend his
principles, and to defend them all the more zealously because he
stood alone on their behalf in a hostile assembly. His courage was
equal to the occasion, and his faculties responded to the call his
courage made.
In civil politics he was all his life a Liberal, belonging by birth to
the Whig aristocracy, and disposed on most matters to take rather the
Whiggish than the Radical view, yet drawn by the warmth of his
sympathy towards the working classes, and popular with them. One of
his chief pleasures was to lead parties of humble visitors round the
Abbey on public holidays. Like most members of the Whig families, he
had no great liking for Mr. Gladstone, not so much, perhaps, on
political grounds as because he distrusted the High Churchism and
anti-Erastianism of the Liberal leader. However, he never took any
active part in general politics, reserving his strength for those
ecclesiastical questions which seemed to lie within his peculiar
province.[17] Here he had two leading ideas: one, that the Church of
England must at all hazards continue to be an Established Church, in
alliance with, or subjection to, the State (for his Erastianism was
unqualified), and recognising the Crown as her head; the other, that
she must be a comprehensive Church, finding room in her bosom for
every sort or description of Christian, however much or little he
believed of the dogmas contained in the Thirty-nine Articles and the
Prayer-Book, to which she is bound by statute. The former view cut him
off from the Nonconformists and the Radicals; the latter exposed him
to the fire not only of those who, like the High Churchmen and the
Evangelicals, attach the utmost importance to these dogmas, but of
those also among the laity who hold that a man ought under no
circumstances to sign any test or use any form of prayer which does
not express his own convictions. Stanley would, of course, have
greatly preferred that the laws which regulate the Church of England
should be so relaxed as to require little or no assent to any
doctrinal propositions from her ministers. He strove for this; and he
continued to hope that this might be ultimately won. But he conceived
that in the meantime it was a less evil that men should be technically
bound by subscriptions they objected to than that the National Church
should be narrowed by the exclusion of those whose belief fell short
of her dogmatic standards. It was remarkable that not only did he
maintain this unpopular view of his with unshaken courage on every
occasion, pleading the cause of every supposed heretic against hostile
majorities with a complete forgetfulness of his own peace and ease,
but that no one ever thought of attributing the course he took to any
selfish or sinister motive. It was generally believed that his own
opinions were what nine-tenths of the Church of England would call
unorthodox. But the honesty and uprightness of his character were so
patent that nobody supposed that this fact made any difference, or
that it was for the sake of keeping his own place that he fought the
cause of others.
What his theological opinions were it might have puzzled Stanley
himself to explain. His mind was not fitted to grasp abstract
propositions. His historical imagination and his early associations
attached him to the doctrines of the Nicene Creed; but when he came to
talk of Christianity, he laid so much more stress on its ethics than
on its dogmatic side that his clerical antagonists thought he held no
creed at all. Dr. Pusey once said that he and Stanley did not worship
the same God. The point of difference between him and them was not so
much that he consciously disbelieved the dogmas they held--probably he
did not--as that he did not, like them, think that true religion and
final salvation depended on believing them. And the weak point in his
imagination was that he seemed never to understand their position, nor
to realise how sacred and how momentous to them were statements which
he saw in a purely imaginative light. He never could be got to see
that a Church without any dogmas would not be a Church at all in the
sense either of mankind in the past or of mankind in the present. An
anecdote was current that once when he had in Disraeli's presence been
descanting on the harm done by the enforcement of dogmatic standards,
Disraeli had observed, "But pray remember, Mr. Dean, no dogma, no
Dean."
Those who thought him a heathen would have assailed him less bitterly
if he had been content to admit his own differences from them. What
most incensed them was his habit of assuming that, except in mere
forms of expression, there were really no differences at all, and that
they also held Christianity to consist not in any body of doctrines,
but in reverence for God and purity of life. They would have preferred
heathenism itself to this kind of Universalism.
As ecclesiastical preferment had not discoloured the native hue of his
simplicity, so neither did the influences of royal favour. It says
little for human nature that few people should be proof against what
the philosopher deems the trivial and fleeting fascinations of a
court. Stanley's elevation of mind was proof. Intensely interested in
the knowledge of events passing behind the scenes which his relations
with the reigning family opened to him, he scarcely ever referred to
those relations, and seemed neither to be affected thereby, nor to
care a whit more for the pomps and vanities of power or wealth, a whit
less for the friends and the causes he had learned to value in his
youth.
In private, that which most struck one in his intellect was the quick
eagerness with which his imagination fastened upon any new fact,
caught its bearings, and clothed it with colour. His curiosity
remained inexhaustible. His delight in visiting a new country was like
that of an American scholar landing for the first time in Europe. A
friend met him a year before his death at a hotel in the North of
England, and found he was going to the Isle of Man. He had mastered
its geography and history, and talked about it and what he was to
explore there as one might talk of Rome or Athens when visiting them
for the first time. When anybody told him an anecdote his susceptible
imagination seized upon points which the narrator had scarcely
noticed, and discovered a whole group of curious analogies from other
times or countries. Whatever you planted in this fertile soil struck
root and sprouted at once. Morally, he impressed those who knew him
not only by his kindness of heart, but by a remarkable purity and
nobleness of aim. Nothing mean or small or selfish seemed to harbour
in his mind. You might think him right or wrong, but you never doubted
that he was striving after the truth. He was not merely a just man; he
loved justice with passion. It was partly, perhaps, because justice,
goodness, honour, charity, seemed to him of such paramount importance
in life that he made little of doctrinal differences, having perceived
that these virtues may exist, and may also be found wanting, in every
form of religious creed or philosophical profession. When the
Convocation of the Anglican Church met at Westminster, it was during
many years his habit to invite a great number of its leading members
to the deanery, the very men who had been attacking him most hotly in
debate, and who would go on denouncing his latitudinarianism till
Convocation met again. They yielded--sometimes reluctantly, but still
they yielded--to the kindliness of his nature and the charm of his
manner. He used to dart about among them, introducing opponents to one
another, as indeed on all occasions he delighted to bring the most
diverse people together, so that some one said the company you met at
the deanery were either statesmen and duchesses or starving curates
and briefless barristers.