IT is nearly a week since Kenelm had met Cecilia, and he is sitting in
his rooms with Lord Thetford at that hour of three in the afternoon
which is found the most difficult to dispose of by idlers about town.
Amongst young men of his own age and class with whom Kenelm assorted
in the fashionable world, perhaps the one whom he liked the best, and
of whom he saw the most, was this young heir of the Beaumanoirs; and
though Lord Thetford has nothing to do with the direct stream of my
story, it is worth pausing a few minutes to sketch an outline of one
of the best whom the last generation has produced for a part that,
owing to accidents of birth and fortune, young men like Lord Thetford
must play on that stage from which the curtain is not yet drawn up.
Destined to be the head of a family that unites with princely
possessions and a historical name a keen though honourable ambition
for political power, Lord Thetford has been care fully educated,
especially in the new ideas of his time. His father, though a man of
no ordinary talents, has never taken a prominent part in public life.
He desires his eldest son to do so. The Beaumanoirs have been Whigs
from the time of William III. They have shared the good and the ill
fortunes of a party which, whether we side with it or not, no
politician who dreads extremes in the government of a State so
pre-eminently artificial that a prevalent extreme at either end of the
balance would be fatal to equilibrium, can desire to become extinct or
feeble so long as a constitutional monarchy exists in England. From
the reign of George I. to the death of George IV., the Beaumanoirs
were in the ascendant. Visit their family portrait gallery, and you
must admire the eminence of a house which, during that interval of
less than a century, contributed so many men to the service of the
State or the adornment of the Court,--so many Ministers, Ambassadors,
Generals, Lord Chamberlains, and Masters of the Horse. When the
younger Pitt beat the great Whig Houses, the Beaumanoirs vanish into
comparative obscurity; they reemerge with the accession of William
IV., and once more produce bulwarks of the State and ornaments of the
Crown. The present Lord of Beaumanoir, /poco curante/ in politics
though he be, has at least held high offices at Court; and, as a
matter of course, he is Lord Lieutenant of his county, as well as
Knight of the Garter. He is a man whom the chiefs of his party have
been accustomed to consult on critical questions. He gives his
opinions confidentially and modestly, and when they are rejected never
takes offence. He thinks that a time is coming when the head of the
Beaumanoirs should descend into the lists and fight hand-to-hand with
any Hodge or Hobson in the cause of his country for the benefit of the
Whigs. Too lazy or too old to do this himself, he says to his son,
"You must do it: without effort of mine the thing may last my life.
It needs effort of yours that the thing may last through your own."
Lord Thetford cheerfully responds to the paternal admonition. He
curbs his natural inclinations, which are neither inelegant nor
unmanly; for, on the one side, he is very fond of music and painting,
an accomplished amateur, and deemed a sound connoisseur in both; and,
on the other side, he has a passion for all field sports, and
especially for hunting. He allows no such attractions to interfere
with diligent attention to the business of the House of Commons. He
serves in Committees, he takes the chair at public meetings on
sanitary questions or projects for social improvement, and acquits
himself well therein. He has not yet spoken in debate, but he has
only been two years in Parliament, and he takes his father's wise
advice not to speak till the third. But he is not without weight
among the well-born youth of the party, and has in him the stuff out
of which, when it becomes seasoned, the Corinthian capitals of a
Cabinet may be very effectively carved. In his own heart he is
convinced that his party are going too far and too fast; but with that
party he goes on light-heartedly, and would continue to do so if they
went to Erebus. But he would prefer their going the other way. For
the rest, a pleasant, bright-eyed young fellow, with vivid animal
spirits; and, in the holiday moments of reprieve from public duty he
brings sunshine into draggling hunting-fields, and a fresh breeze into
heated ballrooms.
"My dear fellow," said Lord Thetford, as he threw aside his cigar, "I
quite understand that you bore yourself: you have nothing else to do."
"What can I do?"
"Work."
"Work!"
"Yes, you are clever enough to feel that you have a mind; and mind is
a restless inmate of body: it craves occupation of some sort, and
regular occupation too; it needs its daily constitutional exercise.
Do you give your mind that?"
"I am sure I don't know, but my mind is always busying itself about
something or other."
"In a desultory way,--with no fixed object."
"True."
"Write a book, and then it will have its constitutional."
"Nay, my mind is always writing a book (though it may not publish
one), always jotting down impressions, or inventing incidents, or
investigating characters; and between you and me, I do not think that
I do bore myself so much as I did formerly. Other people bore me more
than they did."
"Because you will not create an object in common with other people:
come into Parliament, side with a party, and you have that object."
"Do you mean seriously to tell me that you are not bored in the House
of Commons?"
"With the speakers very often, yes; but with the strife between the
speakers, no. The House of Commons life has a peculiar excitement
scarcely understood out of it; but you may conceive its charm when you
observe that a man who has once been in the thick of it feels forlorn
and shelved if he lose his seat, and even repines when the accident of
birth transfers him to the serener air of the Upper House. Try that
life, Chillingly."
"I might if I were an ultra-Radical, a Republican, a Communist, a
Socialist, and wished to upset everything existing, for then the
strife would at least be a very earnest one."
"But could not you be equally in earnest against those revolutionary
gentlemen?"
"Are you and your leaders in earnest against them? They don't appear
to me so."
Thetford was silent for a minute. "Well, if you doubt the principles
of my side, go with the other side. For my part, I and many of our
party would be glad to see the Conservatives stronger."
"I have no doubt they would. No sensible man likes to be carried off
his legs by the rush of the crowd behind him; and a crowd is less
headlong when it sees a strong force arrayed against it in front. But
it seems to me that, at present, Conservatism can but be what it now
is,--a party that may combine for resistance, and will not combine for
inventive construction. We are living in an age in which the process
of unsettlement is going blindly at work, as if impelled by a Nemesis
as blind as itself. New ideas come beating into surf and surge
against those which former reasoners had considered as fixed banks and
breakwaters; and the new ideas are so mutable, so fickle, that those
which were considered novel ten years ago are deemed obsolete to-day,
and the new ones of to-day will in their turn be obsolete to-morrow.
And, in a sort of fatalism, you see statesmen yielding way to these
successive mockeries of experiment,--for they are experiments against
experience,--and saying to each other with a shrug of the shoulders,
'Bismillah! it must be so; the country will have it, even though it
sends the country to the dogs.' I don't feel sure that the country
will not go there the sooner, if you can only strengthen the
Conservative element enough to set it up in office, with the certainty
of knocking it down again. Alas! I am too dispassionate a looker-on
to be fit for a partisan: would I were not! Address yourself to my
cousin Gordon."
"Ay, Chillingly Gordon is a coming man, and has all the earnestness
you find absent in party and in yourself."
"You call him earnest?"
"Thoroughly, in the pursuit of one object,--the advancement of
Chillingly Gordon. If he get into the House of Commons, and succeed
there, I hope he will never become my leader; for if he thought
Christianity in the way of his promotion, he would bring in a bill for
its abolition."
"In that case would he still be your leader?"
"My dear Kenelm, you don't know what is the spirit of party, and how
easily it makes excuses for any act of its leader. Of course, if
Gordon brought in a bill for the abolition of Christianity, it would
be on the plea that the abolition was good for the Christians, and his
followers would cheer that enlightened sentiment."
"Ah," said Kenelm, with a sigh, "I own myself the dullest of
blockheads; for instead of tempting me into the field of party
politics, your talk leaves me in stolid amaze that you do not take to
your heels, where honour can only be saved by flight."
"Pooh! my dear Chillingly, we cannot run away from the age in which we
live: we must accept its conditions and make the best of them; and if
the House of Commons be nothing else, it is a famous debating society
and a capital club. Think over it. I must leave you now. I am going
to see a picture at the Exhibition which has been most truculently
criticised in 'The Londoner,' but which I am assured, on good
authority, is a work of remarkable merit. I can't bear to see a man
snarled and sneered down, no doubt by jealous rivals, who have their
influence in journals, so I shall judge of the picture for myself. If
it be really as good as I am told, I shall talk about it to everybody
I meet; and in matters of art I fancy my word goes for something.
Study art, my dear Kenelm. No gentleman's education is complete if he
does n't know a good picture from a bad one. After the Exhibition I
shall just have time for a canter round the Park before the debate of
the session, which begins to-night."
With a light step the young man quitted the room, humming an air from
the "Figaro" as he descended the stairs. From the window Kenelm
watched him swinging himself with careless grace into his saddle and
riding briskly down the street,--in form and face and bearing a very
model of young, high-born, high-bred manhood. "The Venetians,"
muttered Kenelm, "decapitated Marino Faliero for conspiring against
his own order,--the nobles. The Venetians loved their institutions,
and had faith in them. Is there such love and such faith among the
English?"
As he thus soliloquized he heard a shrilling sort of squeak; and a
showman stationed before his window the stage on which Punch satirizes
the laws and moralities of the world, "kills the beadle and defies the
devil."