Commons, who did not like Disraeli, and never professed to like him.
This was Lord Robert Cecil, who subsequently became Viscount Cranbourne,
and now sits in the House of Lords as Marquis of Salisbury. Lord Robert
Cecil was by far the ablest scion of noble Toryism in the House of
Commons. Younger than Lord Stanley he had not Lord Stanley's solidity
and caution; but he had much more of original ability; he had brilliant
ideas, great readiness in debate, and a perfect genius for saying bitter
things in the bitterest tone. The younger son of a wealthy peer, he had,
in consequence of a dispute with his father, manfully accepted honorable
poverty, and was glad, for no short time, to help out his means by the
use of his pen. He wrote in the "Quarterly Review," the time-honored
organ of Toryism; and after a while certain political articles regularly
appearing in that periodical became identified with his name. One great
object of these articles seemed to be to denounce Mr. Disraeli and warn
the Tory party against him as a traitor, certain in the end to sell and
surrender their principles. Lord Robert Cecil was an ultra-Tory--or at
least thought himself so--I feel convinced that his intellect and his
experience will set him free one day. He was a Tory on principle and
would listen to no compromise. People did not at first see how much
ability there was in him--very few indeed saw how much of genuine
manhood and nobleness there was in him. His tall, bent, awkward figure;
his prematurely bald crown, his face with an outline and a beard that
reminded one of a Jew pedler from the Minories, his ungainly gestures,
his unmelodious voice, and the extraordinary and wanton bitterness of
his tongue, set the ordinary observer strongly against him. He seemed to
delight in being gratuitously offensive. Let me give one illustration.
He assailed Mr. Gladstone's financial policy one night, and said it was
like the practice of a pettifogging attorney. This was rather coarse and
it was received with loud murmurs of disapprobation, but Lord Robert
went on unheeding. Next night, however, when the debate was resumed, he
rose and said he feared he had used language the previous evening which
was calculated to give offence, and which he could not justify. There
were murmurs of encouraging applause--nothing delights the House of
Commons like an unsolicited and manly apology. Yes, he had, on the
previous night, in a moment of excitement, compared the policy of the
Chancellor of the Exchequer to the practice of a pettifogging attorney.
That was language which on sober consideration he felt he could not
justify and ought not to have used, "and therefore," said Lord Robert,
"I beg leave to offer my sincere apology"--here Mr. Gladstone half rose
from his seat, with face of eager generosity, ready to pardon even
before fully asked--"I beg leave to tender my sincere apology--to the
attorneys!" Half the House roared with laughter, the other half with
anger--and Gladstone threw himself back in his seat with an expression
of mingled disappointment, pity and scorn, on his pallid, noble
features.
There was something so wanton, something so nearly approaching to
outrageous buffoonery, in conduct like this, on the part of Lord Robert
Cecil, that it was long before impartial observers came to recognize the
fine intellect and the manly character that were disguised under such an
unprepossessing exterior. When the Tories came into power, the great
place of Secretary for India was given to Lord Robert, who had then
become Viscount Cranbourne, and the responsibilities of office wrought
as complete a change in him as the wearing of the crown did in Harry the
Fifth. No man ever displayed in so short a time greater aptitude for the
duties of the office he had undertaken, or a loftier sense of its
tremendous moral and political responsibility, than did Lord Cranbourne
during his too brief tenure of the Indian Secretaryship. The cynic had
become a statesman, the intellectual gladiator an earnest champion of
exalted political principle. The license of tongue, in which Lord
Cranbourne had revelled while yet a free lance, he absolutely renounced
when he became a responsible minister. He extorted the respect and
admiration of Gladstone and Bright, and indeed of every one who took the
slightest interest in the condition and the future of India. The manner
of his leaving office became him, too, almost as much as his occupation
of it. He was sincerely opposed to a sudden lowering of the franchise,
and he insisted that his party ought to think nothing of power when
compared with principle. He found that Disraeli was determined to
surrender anything rather than power, and he withdrew from the
uncongenial companionship. He resigned office, and dropped into the
ranks once more, never hesitating to express his conviction of the utter
insincerity of the Conservative leader. He would have been a sharp and
stinging thorn in Disraeli's side, only that death intervened and took
away, not him, but his father. The death of his elder brother had made
Lord Robert Cecil, Viscount Cranbourne; the death of his father now
converted Viscount Cranbourne into the Marquis of Salisbury, and
condemned him to the languid, inert, lifeless atmosphere of the House of
Peers. The sincere pity of all who admired him followed the brilliant
Salisbury in his melancholy descent. I should despair of conveying to an
American reader unacquainted with English politics any adequate idea of
the profundity and hopelessness of the fall which precipitates a young,
ardent and gifted politician from the brilliant battle-ground of the
House of Commons into the lifeless, Lethean pool of the House of Lords.
Still, the Tory party may be led, as it has been, by a chief in the
House of Lords, although its great and splendid fights must be fought in
the Commons. If then, in our time, Toryism ever should again become a
principle which a man of genius and high character could fairly fight
for, it has a leader ready to its hand in the Marquis of Salisbury. For
the present it has Lord Cairns. The Earl of Derby's health no longer
allows him to undertake the serious and laborious duties of party
leadership. When he withdrew from the front, an attempt was made to put
up with Lord Malmesbury. But Malmesbury is stupid and muddle-headed to a
degree which even Tory peers cannot endure in a Tory peer; and it has
somehow been "borne in upon him" that he had better leave the place to
some one really qualified to fill it. Now, the Tories in the House of
Commons, the country gentlemen of England, the men whose ancestors came
over, perhaps, with the Conqueror, the men who imbibed family Toryism
from the breasts of their mothers, are driven, when they want a capable
leader, to follow a renegade Radical, the son of a middle-class Jew. In
like manner the Tory Lords, also sadly needing an efficient leader, are
compelled to take up with a lawyer from Belfast, the son of middle-class
parents in the North of Ireland, who has fought his way by sheer talent
and energy into the front rank of the bar, into the front bench of the
Parliamentary Opposition, and at last into a peerage. Lord Cairns is a
very capable man; his sudden rise into high place and influence proves
the fact of itself, for he was not a young man when he entered
Parliament, obscure and unknown, and he is now only in the prime of
life, while he leads the Opposition in the House of Lords. He is one of
the most fluent and effective debaters in either House; he has great
command of telling argument; his training at the bar gives him the
faculty of making the very most, and at the shortest notice, of all the
knowledge and all the facts he can bring to bear on any question. He has
shown more than once that he is capable of pouring forth a powerful,
almost indeed, a passionate invective. An orator in the highest sense he
certainly is not. No gleam of the poetic softens or brightens his lithe
and nervous logic; no deep feeling animates, inspires and sanctifies it.
He has made no speeches which anybody hereafter will care to read. He
has made, he will make, no mark upon his age. When he dies, he wholly
dies. But living, he is a skilful and a capable man--far better
qualified to be a party leader than an Erskine or a Grattan would be. A
North of Ireland Presbyterian, he has made his way to a peerage, and now
to be the leader of peers, with less of native genius than that which
conducted Wolfe Tone, another North of Ireland Presbyterian, to
rebellion and failure and a bloody death. He has, above all things,
skill and discretion; and he can lead the Tory party well, so long as no
great cause has to be vindicated, no splendid phantom of a principle
maintained. His name and his antecedents are useful to us now, inasmuch
as they serve still farther to illustrate the fact that Toryism is not
led by Tories.
In speaking of Tory leaders one ought not, of course, to leave out the
name of Lord Stanley. But Lord Stanley is only a Tory _ex officio_, and
by virtue of his position as the eldest son and heir of the great Earl
of Derby. I have never heard of Lord Stanley's uttering a Tory
sentiment, even when he had to play a Tory part. His speeches are all
the speeches of a steady, respectable, thoughtful sort of Liberal,
inclined to study carefully both or all sides of a question, and opposed
to extreme opinions either way. He will never, it is quite clear, be
guilty of the audacity of openly breaking with his party while his
father lives; and perhaps when he becomes Earl of Derby, there may be
nothing distinctively Tory worth fighting about. Lord Stanley is indeed
totally devoid of that generous ardor which makes men open converts. He
is no longer young, and he will probably remain all his life where he
stands at present. But a genuine Tory he is not. I confess that at one
time I looked to him with great hope, as a man likely to develop into
statesmanship of the highest order, and to announce himself as a votary
of political and intellectual progress. Some years ago I wrote an
article in the "Westminster Review," the object of which was to point to
Lord Stanley as the future colleague of Gladstone in a great and a
really liberal government. I have changed my opinion since. Lord Stanley
wants, not the brains, but the heart for such a place. He has not the
spirit to step out of his hereditary way. He is one of the sort of men
of whom Goethe used to say, "If only they would commit an extravagance
even, I should have some hope for them." He seems to care for little
beyond accuracy of judgment and propriety; and I do not suppose accuracy
of judgment and propriety ever made a great statesman. There is nothing
venturesome about Lord Stanley--therefore there is nothing great. A man
to be great must brave being ridiculous; and I do not remember that Lord
Stanley has ever run the risk of being ridiculous. One of the finest and
most celebrated passages of modern Parliamentary eloquence is that in
which George Canning, vindicating his recognition of the South American
republics, proclaimed that he had called in the New World to redress the
balance of the Old. I once heard a member of the House of Lords, now
dead, who sat in the House of Commons near Canning, when Canning spoke
that famous speech, say that when the orator came to the great climax
the House was actually breaking into a titter, so absurd then did any
grandiloquence about South American republics seem; and it was only the
earnestness and resolve of his manner that commanded a respectful
attention, and thus compelled the House to recognize the genuine
grandeur of the idea, and to break into a tempest of applause. I have
heard something the same told of one of the grandest passages in any of
Bright's speeches--that in one of his orations against the Crimean War,
in which he declared that he already heard, during the debate, the
beating of the wings of the Angel of Death. The House was under the
influence of a war fever, and disposed to scoff at all appeals to
prudence or to pity; and it was just on the verge of a laugh at the
orator's majestic apostrophe, when his earnestness conquered, the
grandeur of the moment was recognized, and a peal of irrepressible
applause proclaimed the triumph of his eloquence. Now, these are the
risks that a man like Lord Stanley never will run. Only genius makes
such ventures. He is always safe: great statesmen must sometimes brave
terrible hazards. In England he has received immense praise for the part
he took in averting a war between France and Prussia on the Luxembourg
question. Now, it is quite true that he did much; that, in fact, he lent
all the influence of England to the mode of arrangement by which both
the contending Powers were enabled to back decently out of a dangerous
and painful position. But the idea of such a mode of settlement did not
come from him. It was originated by Baron von Beust, the Austrian Prime
Minister, and it was quietly urged a good deal before Lord Stanley saw
it. Von Beust, who has a keener wit than Stanley, knew that if the
proposition came directly from him it would, _ipso facto_, be odious to
Prussia; and he was, therefore, rejoiced when Lord Stanley took it up
and adopted it as his own and England's. Von Beust was well content, and
so was Lord Stanley--just as Cuddie Headrigg, in "Old Mortality," is
content that John Gudyill shall have the responsibility and the honor of
the shot which the latter never fired. The one original thing which Lord
Stanley did during the controversy was to write a dispatch to Prussia
recommending her to come to terms, because of the superior navy of
France, and the certainty, in the event of war, that France would have
the best of it at sea.
Now, this was a capital argument to influence a man like Lord Stanley
himself--calm, cold-blooded, utterly rational. But human ingenuity could
hardly have devised an appeal less likely to influence Prussia in the
way of peace. Prussia, flushed with her splendid victories over Austria,
and deeply offended by the arrogant and dictatorial conduct of France,
was much more likely to be stung by such an argument, if it affected her
at all, into flinging down the gauntlet at once, and inviting France to
come if she dared. The use of such a mode of persuasion is, indeed, an
adequate illustration of the whole character of Lord Stanley. Cool,
prudent, and rational, he is capable enough of weighing things fairly
when they are presented to him; but he can neither create an opportunity
nor run a risk. Therefore, he remains officially a Tory, mentally a
Liberal, politically neither the one nor the other. His bones are
marrowless, his blood is cold. He can forfeit his own career, and hazard
his reputation for his party; but that is all. He cannot give his mind
to it, and he cannot redeem himself from his futile bondage to it. He is
a respectable speaker, despite his defective articulation and his
lifeless manner; he will be a respectable politician, despite his want
of faith in, or zeal for the cause he tries to follow. That is his
career; that is the doom to which he voluntarily condemns himself.
I do not know that there are any other Tory chiefs worth talking about.
Sir Stafford Northcote looks like a Bonn or Heidelberg professor, and
has a fair average intellect, fit for commonplace finance and elementary
politics; there is not a ghost of an idea in him. Walpole is a pompous,
well-meaning, gentlemanlike imbecile. Gathorne Hardy is fluent, as the
sand in an hourglass is fluent--he can pour out words and serve to mark
the passing of time. Sir John Pakington is an educated Dogberry, a
respectable Justice Shallow. Not upon men like these do the political
fortunes of the Tory party of our day depend, although Walpole and
Pakington fairly represent the sincerity, the manhood, and the
respectability of Toryism.
I come back to the point from which I started--that Toryism, in itself,
is only another word for stupidity, and that any triumphs the party have
won or may win are secured by the surrender of the principle they
profess to be fighting for, and by the skilful management of men whose
conscience permits them to adapt the means unscrupulously to the end.
Were the Tory party led by genuine Tories it would have been extinct
long ago. It lives and looks upon the earth, it has its triumphs and its
gains, its present and its future, only because by very virtue of its
own dulness it has allowed itself to be led by men whom it ought to
detest, whom it sometimes does distrust, but who have the wit to sell
principle in the dearest market, and buy reputation in the cheapest.
"GEORGE ELIOT" AND GEORGE LEWES.
Literary reputations are, in one respect, like wines--some are greatly
improved by a long voyage, while others lose all zest and strength in
the process of crossing the ocean. There ought to be hardly any
difference, one would think, between the literary taste of the public of
London and that of the public of New York; and yet it is certain that an
author or a book may be positively celebrated in the one city and only
barely known and coldly recognized in the other. Every one, of course,
has noticed the fact that certain English authors are better known and
appreciated in New York than in London; certain American writers more
talked of in London than in New York. The general public of England do
not seem to me to appreciate the true position of Whittier and Lowell
among American poets. The average Englishman knows hardly anything of
any American poet but Longfellow, who receives, I venture to think, a
far more wholesale and enthusiastic admiration in England than in his
own country. Robert Buchanan, the Scottish poet, lately, I have read,
described "Evangeline" as a far finer poem than Goethe's "Hermann und
Dorothea," a judgment which I presume and hope it would be impossible to
get any American scholar and critic to indorse or even to consider
seriously. On the other hand, it is well known that both the
Brownings--certainly Mrs. Browning--found quicker and more cordial
appreciation in America than in England. Lately, we in London have taken
to discussing and debating over Walt Whitman with a warmth and interest
which people in New York do not seem to manifest in regard to the author
of "Leaves of Grass." Charles Dickens appears to me to have more devoted
admirers among the best class of readers here than he has in his own
country. Of course, it would be hardly possible for any man to be more
popular and more successful than Dickens is in England; but New York
journals quote him and draw illustrations from him much more frequently
than London papers do--I do not think any day has passed since first I
came to this country, six or seven months ago, that I have not seen at
least two or three allusions to Dickens in the leading articles of the
daily papers--and I question whether, among critics standing as high in
London as George William Curtis does here, Dickens could find the
enthusiastic, the almost lyrical devotion of Curtis's admiration.
Charles Reade, again, is more generally and warmly admired here than in
England. Am I wrong in supposing that the reverse is the case with
regard to the authoress of "Romola" and "The Mill on the Floss?" All
American critics and all American readers of taste, have doubtless
testified practically their recognition of the genius of this
extraordinary woman; but there seems to me to be relatively less
admiration for her in New York than in London. The general verdict of
English criticism would, I feel no doubt, place George Eliot on a higher
pedestal than Charles Dickens. We regard her as belonging to a higher
school of art, as more nearly affined to the great immortal few whose
genius and fame transcend the fashion of the age and defy the caprice of
public taste. So far as I have been able to observe, I do not think this
is the opinion of American criticism.
In any case, the mere question will excuse my writing a few pages about
a woman whom I regard as the greatest living novelist of England; as, on
the whole, the greatest woman now engaged in European literature. Only
George Sand and Harriet Martineau could fairly be compared with her;
and, while Miss Martineau, of course, is far inferior in all the higher
gifts of imagination and the higher faculties of art, George Sand, with
all her passion, her rich fancy, and daring, subtle analysis of certain
natures, has never exhibited the serene, symmetrical power displayed in
"Romola" and in "Silas Marner." Mrs. Lewes (it would be affectation to
try to assume that there is still any mystery about the identity of
"George Eliot") is what George Sand is not--a great writer, merely as a
writer. Few, indeed, are the beings who have ever combined so many high
qualities in one person as Mrs. Lewes does. Her literary career began as
a translator and an essayist. Her tastes seemed then to lead her wholly
into the somewhat barren fields where German metaphysics endeavor to
come to the relief or the confusion of German theology. She became a
contributor to the "Westminster Review;" then she became its assistant
editor, and worked assiduously for it under the direction of Dr. John
Chapman, the editor, with whose family she lived for a time, and in
whose house she first met George Henry Lewes. She is an accomplished
linguist, a brilliant talker, a musician of extraordinary skill. She has
a musical sense so delicate and exquisite that there are tender, simple,
true ballad melodies which fill her with a pathetic pain almost too keen
to bear; and yet she has the firm, strong command of tone and touch,
without which a really scientific musician cannot be made. I do not
think this exceeding sensibility of nature is often to be found in
combination with a genuine mastery of the practical science of music.
But Mrs. Lewes has mastered many sciences as well as literatures.
Probably no other novel writer, since novel writing became a business,
ever possessed one tithe of her scientific knowledge. Indeed, hardly
anything is rarer than the union of the scientific and the literary or
artistic temperaments. So rare is it, that the exceptional, the almost
solitary instance of Goethe comes up at once, distinct and striking, to
the mind. English novelists are even less likely to have anything of a
scientific taste than French or German. Dickens knows nothing of
science, and has, indeed, as little knowledge of any kind, save that
which is derived from observation, as any respectable Englishman could
well have. Thackeray was a man of varied reading, versed in the lighter
literature of several languages, and strongly imbued with artistic
tastes; but he had no care for science, and knew nothing of it but just
what every one has to learn at school. Lord Lytton's science is a mere
sham. Charlotte Bronte was all genius and ignorance. Mrs. Lewes is all
genius and culture. Had she never written a page of fiction, nay, had
she never written a line of poetry or prose, she must have been regarded
with wonder and admiration by all who knew her as a woman of vast and
varied knowledge; a woman who could think deeply and talk brilliantly,
who could play high and severe classical music like a professional
performer, and could bring forth the most delicate and tender aroma of
nature and poetry lying deep in the heart of some simple, old-fashioned
Scotch or English ballad. Nature, indeed, seemed to have given to this
extraordinary woman all the gifts a woman could ask or have--save one.
It will not, I hope, be considered a piece of gossipping personality if
I allude to a fact which must, some day or other, be part of literary
history. Mrs. Lewes is not beautiful. In her appearance there is nothing
whatever to attract admiration. Hers is not even a face like that of
Charlotte Cushman, which, at least, must make a deep impression, and
seize at once the attention of the gazer. Nor does it seem, like that of
Madame de Stael or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, informed and illuminated
by the light of genius. Mrs. Lewes is what we in England call decidedly
plain--what people in New York call homely; and what persons who did not
care to soften the force of an unpleasant truth would describe probably
by a still harder and more emphatic adjective.
This woman, thus rarely gifted with poetry and music and
imagination--thus disciplined in man's highest studies and accustomed to
the most laborious of man's literary drudgery--does not seem to have
found out, until she had passed what is conventionally regarded as the
age of romance, that she had in her, transcendent above all other gifts,
the faculty of the novelist. When an author who is not very young makes
a great hit at last, we soon begin to learn that he had already made
many attempts in the same direction, and his publishers find an eager
demand for the stories and sketches which, when they first appeared,
utterly failed to attract attention. Thackeray's early efforts,
Trollope's, Charles Reade's, Nathaniel Hawthorne's, all these have been
lighted into success by the blaze of the later triumph. But it does not
seem that Miss Marion Evans, as she then was, ever published anything in
the way of fiction previous to the series of sketches which appeared in
"Blackwood's Magazine," and were called "Scenes of Clerical Life." These
sketches attracted considerable attention, and were much admired; but I
do not think many people saw in them the capacity which produced "Adam
Bede" and "Romola." With the publication of "Adam Bede" came a complete
triumph. The author was elevated at once and by acclamation to the
highest rank among living novelists. I think it was in the very first
number of the "Cornhill Magazine" that Thackeray, in a gossiping
paragraph about novelists of the day, whom he mentioned alphabetically
and by their initials, spoke of "E" as a "star of the first magnitude
just risen on the horizon." Thackeray, it will be remembered, was one of
the first, if not, indeed, the very first, to recognize the genius
manifested in "Jane Eyre." The publishers sent him some of the proof
sheets for his advice, and Thackeray saw in them the work of a great
novelist.