Aubassun, Ispahan, and Axminster, so that your foot gave no more
sound as it trod upon the yielding plain than the shadow did which
followed you)--of white velvet painted with flowers, arabesques
and classic figures by Sir William Ross, J. M. W. Turner, Mrs. Mee
and Paul Delaroche, etc.
“Welcome to our snuggery, my Codlingsby. We are quieter here than
in the front of the house, and I wanted to show you a picture....
That Murillo was pawned to my uncle by Marie Antoinette.”
III
Disraeli’s style, in short, cried aloud for attack by critics who hated
him on other scores.
“Personal influences,” wrote he, “inevitably mingle in some degree
with such productions. There are critics who, abstractedly, do
not approve of successful books, particularly if they have failed
in the same style; social acquaintances also of lettered taste,
and especially contemporaries whose public life has not exactly
realised the vain dreams of their fussy existence, would seize the
accustomed opportunity of welcoming with affected discrimination
about nothing, and elaborate controversy about trifles, the
production of a friend: and there is always, both in politics and
literature, the race of the Dennises, the Oldmixons, and Curls,
who flatter themselves that by libelling some eminent personage of
their times, they have a chance of descending to posterity.”
This sounds well enough, indeed. But in point of fact Disraeli has
a persistent habit of wrapping up his incomparable gift of irony in
language so detestably fustian that even a fair critic has to search
his periods carefully, separating the true from the sham. A fine ear
will separate them: but it needs a fine ear, and will tax it the most
of its time. All his life, in letters as in politics, he posed somewhat
as a Man of Mystery: and your Man of Mystery must take the rough with
the smooth: and your Cagliostro or even your honest merchant who talks
at once too floridly and too cleverly cannot blame any plain auditor
for suspecting that he talks, all the while, with his tongue in his
cheek.
It is a pity: for I do not see how any fair-minded reader of Disraeli’s
novels can fail to acknowledge, at this distance of time, that the man
was eminently serious, and in earnest, and wise even. I spoke to you,
a fortnight ago--at too great a length, you may think--of the problem
of industrial England and how the misery of the poor, caught in its
machinery, forced itself through the imaginative sympathy of certain
writers upon the national conscience: and especially (you may remember)
I spoke of the children because the children won the battle. As Francis
Thompson says, “The grim old superstition was right. When man would
build to a lasting finish, he must found his building over a child.”
Well, I see no reason to doubt--no reason either in his writings or
his public action--that Disraeli’s concern over this industrial misery
was ever less than disinterested, sincere, even chivalrous. No one
can deny the sincerity, at least, of _Sybil_; no one the terrible
authenticity of its descriptive pages--such as the famous picture of a
gang emerging from a coal-mine: for research has shown that throughout
and almost sentence by sentence the author has been at silent pains to
document the almost incredible evidence of his own eyes with evidence
from Blue Books and Parliamentary Reports. I shall not harrow your
feelings by reading the passage, having harrowed them (as I say)
sufficiently a fortnight ago. But you may take it for the moment--as
you may amply satisfy yourselves by enquiry later and at leisure--that
the Inferno is faithfully depicted: that the mill-owners Shuffle
and Screw (Disraeli had a foible for such names and for running them
in double harness--you will recall those celebrated duettists, Taper
and Tadpole)--that the exactions of these men were real exactions,
that the sufferings of the handweaver Warner and his starving family
are sufferings that did actually break actual human hearts and that
even the upbringing of the factory urchin Devilsdust is not only true
to fact but typical. You may be excused for doubting as you read
how Devilsdust--so he came to be called, for he had no legitimate
name--“having survived a baby-farm by toughness of constitution, and
the weekly threepence ceasing on his mother’s death,” was thrown out
into the streets to starve or be run over: how 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....
You shudder as you read how the cholera visited the cellar where he and
other outcasts slept, until
--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 at the door of a factory.
--where he was taken in, not from charity, but because a brat of five
was useful. Do you tell yourself that Disraeli exaggerates? Then turn
to Hansard and read that before Hanway’s Act the annual death-rate
among these pauper children was estimated at something between 60
and 70 per cent.: that this Act, as Howlett grimly put it, caused
“a deficiency of 2,100 burials a year”: that the London parishes by
custom claimed a right to dispose at will of all children of a person
receiving relief, and disposed of them to the manufacturers; and that
one Lancashire mill-owner agreed with a London parish to take one idiot
with every twenty sound children supplied.[3]
[3] _The Town Labourer, 1760–1832_, by Mr. and Mrs. Hammond, p.
145. From Horner’s Speech, _Hansard_, June 6, 1815.
IV
Man, as Aristotle tells us, is a political animal: and among
imaginative writers in the ’thirties and ’forties of the last century,
Disraeli had an eminently political mind. I say, “eminently,” because
in the years that followed the great struggle over the Reform Bill all
men’s eyes--eyes of advocates as of opponents--were turned on this
wonderful Reformed Parliament, awaiting some transformation of our
society, for good or for evil. The expectancy operated on Disraeli as
on the rest. He was a House of Commons man with his ambition centred
on success in that House. He did not believe that this reformed House
was in any way capable of producing a millennium. With his own purpose
very steadily set to advance his career; with a sense of intrigue and a
courage steadily sharpened by disappointment; he perceived the nostrums
of the new Parliament to be nostrums no more honest than the old; as
he perceived the counteracting devices of his own party to be no more
than delaying devices devoid of principle. He hated the very name of
“the Conservative Party” invented by Croker:
I observe, indeed, a party in the State whose rule is to consent to
no change until it is clamorously called for, and then instantly to
yield; but these are _Concessionary_, not Conservative principles.
This party treats institutions as we do our pheasants, they
preserve but to destroy.
But he felt, with the feeling of England, that this evil of the factory
system demanded an instant redress only to be achieved by sharp
legislation: and, so far he was right. Ashley and his backers could
look nowhere but to Parliament for immediate cure. There happen from
time to time in the history of a nation (as sensible men must admit)
crises to which hasty methods must be applied, as you catch up and
spoil a valuable rug to smother an outbreak of fire.
V
We know how Disraeli, in those days, saw the full problem. Here was a
country, this England, divided into Two Nations, the rich and the poor.
Here were the nobles who should, by all _devoir_, be the saviours of
the State, standing by while the middle-class manufacturer held the
poor in misery; standing by while the authority of the Crown diminished
under steady depression by the Whigs; standing by while Churchmen
fought for preferment, neglecting the oppressed, for whom--by every
teaching of Christ--a true disciple is a trustee. You all know, I
doubt not, the main persons and principles of the Young England party
which rallied to Disraeli’s call. The men were all younger than he;
mostly of Eton and Cambridge--foremost George Smythe, later Viscount
Strangford, most brilliant of all, Lord John Manners, Alexander Baillie
Cochrane “the fiery and generous Buckhurst” of _Coningsby_. All of them
figure, under other names, in _Coningsby_, and, while that novel is
remembered, will be identified in its pages; that is, long after human
memory has ceased to care for the personal romance of young men once so
chivalrous and admired--
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form.
But the tenets of this Young England party which gathered so eagerly
about the maturer man, Disraeli, were these, as you know: the King
stood over all, with his prerogative to be vindicated. His rightful
vindicators were our ancient nobility, and their task was to exalt,
to sustain him as protector of the poor, and so to restore the
peasantry of England (including its mill-hands, famished families,
pauper children) to the supposedly happy conditions once enjoyed in
the golden age of the monasteries, but forfeit under the oppression
of middle-class “industrialists,” as we should now term them. I find,
for my part, no real evidence of this golden age of the monasteries,
and suspect the glow they reputedly shed over a consented medieval
countryside to be very vastly enlarged by the mist of romance. But
whatever they might or might not have been, their lethargy could never
have matched, for evil, the active cruelty of the new system. The
monasteries were dead, anyhow: the mills and the mines were grinding
lives into death by tens of thousands under men’s eyes. Disraeli
_knew_ how the bringing up of a Devilsdust turns the grown man into a
Chartist, and a danger. Disraeli understood Chartists.
VI
In September, 1841, Peel (who owed it to him) refused Disraeli office.
We need not go into that tortuous story, or the rights of it this way
or that. The point for us is that his exclusion gave him leisure to
write _Coningsby_.
What were his qualifications, what his disqualifications in writing
_Coningsby_?
To begin with the disqualifications--(1) He had the haziest notion of
constructing a plot. From first to last he never gets beyond an idea,
and a string of episodes. (2) His hero is, for all his recommendation,
an invariable nincompoop, and his heroine (Sybil particularly) not
of flesh and blood: not even an embodiment of an idea; a dream of it
rather. Coningsby does very much less than justice to Smythe, a man of
failings and infinite wit; while in _Lothair_ you will pass whole pages
in which the hero’s contribution to the wisdom of the world amounts to
“You don’t say so,” “I am more than a little surprised,” “I have never
looked into this matter upon which Your Grace sheds for me, I confess,
an entirely new light.” You may say that the heroes and heroines of
most Victorian novels are puppets conducted through adversity to a
chime of marriage bells. But Disraeli deliberately presenting his
heroes and heroines as grandiose creatures of ineffable charm, has
never the art to make them justify this by what they do or say. Their
golden, or raven, hair hangs down their back, and there it ends. Lastly
his prose lapses, as the rhetorician’s hand becomes subdued to what
it works in, into sentences more and more slipshod: while fatuities
abound, such as the exclamation, at the beginning of a chapter, “What
wonderful things are events!”
So far the devil’s advocate.... But set against this, first and in
front of it, the great fact that an inventor is great not only because
he does a thing well, but because he could do it at all. Disraeli
in _Coningsby_ invented the political novel: and I know nothing to
compare with that book unless it be his own _Endymion_ in which so
touchingly an old man, dejected from political office and power,
seeks back with all his worldly wisdom, as one walking out into a
garden in a lunar light of memory, to recapture the rose of youth. Of
the trilogy--_Coningsby_, _Sybil_, _Tancred_--I confess, tracing it
backward, that I have small use for _Tancred_, having (be it confessed)
not only a stark insensibility to Disraeli’s enthusiasm for a mongrel
religion neither of his breed nor of mine, but a constitutional
aversion to the Lion of Judah considered as a pet. _Sybil_, in addition
to its most vivid pictures of the factory poor, has at least a score of
pages which no student of the art of writing in English can afford to
neglect--take for example its _tour de force_ in exhibiting the rise of
the Marney family and the successive ennoblements of John Warren, club
waiter, and his progeny, through Sir John Warren, and Lord Fitz-Warene,
to Earl de Mowbray of Mowbray Castle. The juxtaposition of the selfish
and opulent Marney household with the wretched mines, close by, from
which they drew their wealth, is admirably managed. But, as I have
said, the heroine is but a shadowy figure, and I find the hero little
more lively: the pair of them “made for a purpose,” and that purpose
propaganda. No: _Coningsby_ is the masterpiece: and Peel’s refusal
which led to its composition--Peel’s own fatal loss, as it turned
out--is our delightful gain. You will easily find, in almost any period
of our prose literature since Defoe, a more noble novel: and if one
goes back to early romance and thinks (say) of a page of Malory--well,
it rebukes the sensual rapture. But, for all that, I defy you to find
a more vivacious, a more scintillating book--scintillating with joyful
and irresistible malice. At the turn of any page you may happen on such
a gem as this:
Lord and Lady Gaverstock were also there, who never said an unkind
thing of anybody: her ladyship was pure as snow: but, her mother
having been divorced, she ever fancied she was paying a kind of
homage to her parent by visiting those who might some day be in the
same predicament.
It dares history, and will, for a whole chapter, recount the fall
of a Government, the passing of a Bill, the formation of a Cabinet,
unravelling actual intrigue, carrying you along by sheer logic as
though you galloped with Dumas’ Three Musketeers. Disraeli could not
invent a character: but he could at once disguise and reveal one
borrowed from life. In _Coningsby_ he had actual men made to his hands,
to prompt the apotheosis or the caricature. He sentimentalises his
young friends, and the sense beneath the sensibility may be read in
the last paragraph of _Sybil_. What he could do with an enemy let the
portrait of Rigby attest.
VII
In _Coningsby_ he invented the Political Novel. That this _partus
masculus_ came so late to birth in our literature, as that it has
begotten few successors, admits (as Sir Thomas Browne would say) no
wide solution. Genius is rare, anyhow: the combination of political
with literary genius necessarily rarer. Given the two combined, as
they were in Burke, you still require, for superadding, the inventive
faculty, the mode, and the leisure. Not one man of letters in ten
thousand can match Disraeli’s close inner acquaintance with his
subject. Statesmen, in short, have not the leisure to write. Alcibiades
leaves no record of what Alcibiades did or suffered. By a glorious
fluke, Peel gave this chance and Disraeli took it.
VIII
For a last word to-day--
Quite apart from genuine coruscation of genius, and almost as widely
separating and casting from account that tinsel and tawdriness
which all can detect, one feels a mistrust (gnawing, as it were,
within our laurel) that even the best page of Disraeli does not
belong to us. We cannot match it somehow with a racy page of Dryden,
or of good Sir Walter Scott, of Izaak Walton, John Bunyan, grave
Clarendon, Bolingbroke. Gibbon is artificial enough, heaven knows;
yet somehow--and one remembers that he had served in the Hampshire
Militia--the scent of the hawthorn is never more afar than a field
away, even when he discourses of Tertullian or of Diocletian. From
Disraeli’s prose--or rather from my sense of it--I can never dispel
the smatch of burnt sandalwood, the smell of camels and the bazaar. He
officiates, somehow--he, a Prime Minister, over an altar not ours--we
admire the oracle, but its tongue is foreign.
Still his fame grows. I observe that, as the incense clears, each
successive study of him tells something better. He stands in politics
admittedly a champion; in literature, too, a figure certainly not among
the greatest, yet as certainly one of the great.
MRS. GASKELL
I
We think of her habitually--do we not?--by her married title of “Mrs.
Gaskell.” Who Mr. Gaskell was this generation does not, in an ordinary
way, pause to enquire: a neglect which does injustice to a gentleman
of fine presence, noble manners and high culture. She was a beautiful
woman: they married in 1832, and had children, and lived most happily.
So it is as “Mrs. Gaskell” that we think of her: and I dare to wager
that most of you think of her as Mrs. Gaskell, authoress of _Cranford_.
Now heaven forbid that anything I say this morning should daunt your
affection for _Cranford_, as heaven knows how long and sincerely I
have adored it. I have adored it at least long enough and well enough
to understand its devotees--for _Cranford_ has not only become popular
in the sense, more or less, that _Omar Khayyam_ has become popular--by
which I mean that, at this season or thereabouts, numbers of people
buy a copy in limp _suède_, with Hugh Thomson’s illustrations, and
only hesitate over sending it to the So-and-So’s with best wishes on
a chilling doubt that they sent it last year, with the identical good
wishes--if indeed they are not returning the identical volume they
received! Well, let us be merry and careless!--in the course of a week
or two these soft bricks will be dropping on every hearth.
But seriously, one finds devotees of _Cranford_ everywhere; and
especially, in my experience, among scholarly old men. They have
_Cranford_ written on their hearts, sometimes hardly covering a
cherished solution of _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_. _Cranford_ and
the novels of Jane Austen--you never know how many delightful persons
cherish them, have them by heart, pore over their text as over an Ode
of Pindar’s. And they are fierce, these devotees, as the noble new
edition of Jane Austen by Mr. Chapman of the Oxford Press has recently
been teaching us. Here are five volumes edited with all the care that
study and affection can lavish on the task. Yet from here, there and
everywhere lovers start up from firesides--scattered widowers of this
dear maiden--challenging over _variae lectiones_, feeling for the hilt
on the old hip to champion (we’ll say) “_screen_” as the right word
against “scene” as printed--
“Swerve to the left, Son Roger,” he said,
“When you catch his eyes through the helmet-slit.”
It is as serious, almost, as all that: and so it is with _Cranford_,
and Miss Jenkyns and Captain Brown and adorable Miss Matty.
Yet, let us admit there are certain works which conquer some of us, we
cannot tell why. To go a very long way from _Cranford_, take _Tristram
Shandy_. No one can really criticise _Tristram Shandy_, and all
pretence to do so is mere humbug. Either you like _Tristram Shandy_
(as I do, for one) or you don’t, and there’s an end to it. My sole
complaint against the devotees of _Cranford_ is that, admiring it,
revelling in it, they imagine themselves to have the secret of Mrs.
Gaskell, stop there, and do not go on to explore her other works of
which one at any rate I shall presently dare to proclaim to you as the
most perfect small idyll ever written in English prose.
II
The sin is the worse because every one acknowledges the _Life of
Charlotte Brontë_ to be--after Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_, admittedly
beyond competition--among the two or three best biographies in our
language. Conceive the Brontës--not Charlotte alone, but the whole
family--the whole of that terrible family in that terrible parsonage at
Haworth--as this staid lady, wife of a Unitarian minister, faithfully
depicts them--the wastrel son, Branwell: through long nights tearing
his own heart out, with his stern old father’s, in the bedroom they
had, for safety, to occupy together: in the end pulling himself up to
_die standing_: the shuddering sisters listening on the stairs; Emily,
doomed and fierce, she too in her turn standing up to die. Consider--I
will not say _Wuthering Heights_, or Charlotte’s well-known magnificent
description, in _Villette_, of Rachel and her tortured acting--but
consider if only by illustration of contrast this most maddened poem by
Emily--and there are others as tragic--
_The Prisoner_
Still let my tyrants know, I am not doom’d to wear
Year after year in gloom and desolate despair;
A messenger of Hope comes every night to me,
And offers for short life, eternal liberty.
He comes with Western winds, with evening’s wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars:
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.
Desire for nothing known in my maturer years,
When Joy grew made with awe, at counting future tears:
When, if my spirit’s sky was full of flashes warm,
I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunder-storm.
But first, a hush of peace--a soundless calm descends;
The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends.
Mute music soothes my breast--unutter’d harmony
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.
Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels;
Its wings are almost free--its home, its harbour found;
Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound.
O dreadful is the check--intense the agony--
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb--the brain to think again--
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.
Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less;
The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless;
And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine,
If it but herald Death, the vision is divine.
Consider, I say, that the authoress of _Cranford_ not only lived with
these fierce women and comforted them as their benign friend, with
a comfort that no soul can give to another without understanding,
but portrayed them (their struggles ended) in a book that combines
the English (even the Victorian English) with the Greek, a fidelity
to awful fact with a serene judgment, a tender mercy--the two so
discovering and covering all, that--whether it be in charity or in
justice--its core of truth has never been challenged: that it stands
yet among the noblest few of English biographies. I put it to you that,
if you but set together those two books--_Cranford_ and the _Life of
Charlotte Brontë_--at once you must recognise the operating hand--the
quietly operating hand--of genius. But this, even when Mrs. Gaskell’s
longer novels are thrown into the scale, has avoided, I think--because
she herself is so equable, so temperate--its right recognition.
Yes, her very portrait has a Hellenic look, so beautiful it is, so
penetrating its calm gaze.
III