There is less pioneer's work in it than in Fitzmaurice. But the
fulness of knowledge, the force and finish of the style (you see by my
three F's that I have been studying the Irish question) have revealed a
new man. I see him compared to his uncle,[57] and I think it is not an
exaggeration, though Taine says there have been only two men in the
world who had Macaulay's perspicuity. G.O.[58] is as transparent as
graceful, and more easy. The only thing that has shocked me yet is his
presumptuous assurance about the authorship of Junius. It is a Whig
dogma that Francis was Junius; but that is mere Macaulayolatry. I have
seen half the arguments that convinced me {53} thirty years ago fall to
pieces; and I am provoked that Trevelyan gives me old conclusions
instead of new proofs. If his speaking has made as much progress as
his writing, the Government has acquired a future Secretary of State.
But I am still unhappy at their meeting Parliament with Courtney out in
the cold.
As I quote Taine, I ought to say that I do not agree with him. The
problems Macaulay made so clear were not the most difficult. Fenwick's
attainder, and the theory of standing armies--purple patches in the way
of exposition--are trifles compared with questions which jurists,
divines, economists have to discuss. The phases of the Pelagian
controversy, or the principles of government about which the Lutheran,
Zwinglian, Calvinist, and Anglican Churches contended, would better
have tested his power of making darkness clear.
I am glad that I wrote to Fagan before reading his book.[59] For I
wrote about the Italian correspondence, which is curious. But the
biography does not deserve the praise it gets from partial people in
Downing Street. Houghton, I hear, has written ill-naturedly about
Panizzi; but the book is as full as an egg of mistakes, and of things
worse than mistakes, so that even remonstrance would be thrown away.
You will read with interest two volumes of Merimee's letters to
Panizzi, just coming out. He was a bad man, and generally wrong; but
few men ever wrote so well.
* * * * *
I will get the _Church Quarterly_ at Nice, where I go to see my friend
Arnim, who is dying there, and shall {54} be very curious to read the
article.[60] There is not a more interesting or unexhausted topic in
all history than Julian, but I would have waited for the promised
edition of his work against the Christians, which had not appeared when
I left Germany.
Here is Parker,[61] fresh from Hawarden; and when I think of your long
and obstinate cold, I cannot help regretting that you did not make the
Cardwells bring you to Montfleury, where they are our nearest
neighbours. He is much better than half a year ago, but very weak.
For three weeks the sun has shone all day. Greatcoats and umbrellas
are obsolete; and we have the most beautiful walks.
T. B. Potter, also at Montfleury, and a great favourite with my
children, keeps me supplied with Cobdenian literature, and I have read
Brodrick[62] with much pleasure.
Of course we are always thinking of Ireland, wishing for heroic
treatment, such as would have saved Louis XVI. and the old French
Monarchy, despairing of the needful overwhelming majority in the
Commons, of any majority in the Lords, of union and strength in the
Ministry; cheered by several intelligent letters and articles in the
newspapers, sure only of the chief, and more sure of his strong mind
than of his strong hand. If he has time for anything else, I hope he
has read _La Belgique et le Vatican_, the volume published by
Frere-Orban, the Belgian Minister, a weighty study of Vaticanism.
I am under the shock of the sudden Cabinet and of {55} the Standard
article, and am waiting for an answer to a telegram to know whether I
must come at once. If not now, then on Monday or Tuesday before the
opening, for I want to get the cue of the situation from the P.M. (an
affair of five minutes), to see you, not quite so rapid a proceeding,
and to hear the first debates.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _Cannes Dec. 27, 1880_]
Your patient and forgiving letter is my best Xmas gift. It will be a
joy indeed to see you again next week. I hope not only in the midst of
gilded ceremonial.
It is so like you to take my nonsense kindly and only to dispute the
praise. But I am not quite so far off as you imagine. In speaking of
home I must have indicated by a--break, that there was a change of key;
that I could not stay among the lofty entities that surround Tennyson
even when he butters toast, that I was coming down from the silver side
of the clouds and groping for things of earth. So that my climax is
not quite literally meant. Having thus paved the way to retreat from
an exposed position, let me take my stand for a moment, and say that I
think it not quite untenable.... You yourself, who have shared so much
of your father's thoughts and confidence, have hardly adapted yourself
to his chosen tastes and special pursuits? In more than one of the
later phases of his life, I fancy you hardly recognised the secret laws
of the growth of his mind, and join him sometimes by an effort, over a
gap. There is an ancient scholar at Cannes, who told me that he has
such confidence in the P.M. that he feels sure he will succeed in
defending his policy. I partly said and partly thought that anybody
can be on {56} Mr. Gladstone's side who waits to be under the thrall of
his speech. The difficulty is to hear the grass growing, to know the
road by which he travels, the description of engine, the quality of the
stuff he treats with, the stars he steers by. The scholar is old and
ugly, and, it may be, tiresome. It is impossible to be less like you.
But is there not one bit of likeness--in the stars?
Really it is time for me to adopt the Carey tactics and run away from
my post of defiance.
You know one of the two subjects. You will know the other on the last
night of the debate on the address. I am only listening to the grass.
You will not resist what I said of our five Ministers if you will
consider one word. I think I spoke of their best qualities, not of all
their qualities. Pitt's art of making himself necessary to the King
and the constituencies is unapproached. But then it is a vice, not a
merit, to live for expedients, and not for ideas. Chatham was very
successful as a War Minister. Mr. Gladstone has not rivalled him in
that capacity. I fancy that both Pitt and Peel had a stronger hold
than he has on the City. Please remember that I am possessed of a Whig
devil, and neither Peel nor Pitt lives in my Walhalla. The great name
of Mr. Canning and the greater name of Mr. Burke[63] are the only names
that I hold in highest honour since party government was invented.
You can hardly imagine what Burke is for all of us who think about
politics, and are not wrapped in the blaze and the whirlwind of
Rousseau. Systems of scientific thought have been built up by famous
scholars on the fragments that fell from {57} his table. Great
literary fortunes have been made by men who traded on the hundredth
part of him. Brougham and Lowe lived by the vitality of his ideas.
Mackintosh and Macaulay are only Burke trimmed and stripped of all that
touched the skies. Montalembert, borrowing a hint from Doellinger, says
that Burke and Shakespeare were the two greatest Englishmen.
But when I speak of Shakespeare the news of last Wednesday[64] comes
back to me, and it seems as if the sun had gone out. You cannot think
how much I owed her. Of eighteen or twenty writers by whom I am
conscious that my mind has been formed, she was one. Of course I mean
ways, not conclusions. In problems of life and thought, which baffled
Shakespeare disgracefully, her touch was unfailing. No writer ever
lived who had anything like her power of manifold, but disinterested
and impartially observant sympathy. If Sophocles or Cervantes had
lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had prospered like Manzoni,
George Eliot might have had a rival.
* * * * *
I do think that, of the three greatest Liberals, Burke is equally good
in speaking and writing; Macaulay better in writing, and Mr. Gladstone
better in speaking. I doubt whether he feels it; and if he does not
feel it, then I should say that there is a want of perfect knowledge
and judgment. That want I see clearly in his views as to other men.
He hardly ever, I think, judges them too severely. Sometimes I am
persuaded he judges with an exceeding generosity, and I fancy it is
because he will not charge his mind with uncharitableness, because he
{58} does not allow for the wind, that he does not always make bull's
eyes.
* * * * *
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Jan. 14, 1881_]
It is impossible to leave England without emotion, when my last glimpse
of your father was lying in bed and in the great doctor's hands. It
will indeed be such a charity if you will send a line on a P.C. by
to-morrow, Saturday's post, to me at Goschen's, Seacox Heath,
Hawkhurst, Kent, that we may have Sunday's comfort in good news, and I
say advisedly a P.C. that you may not suspect me of an artifice to
obtain that other delight, of an early letter, such as those you write.
Don't let the lesson of suspicion turn against the teacher. Don't even
let it damage anybody much. I will not spoil my own ideal. That
American book is too wicked![65]
Forgive me if there is one point, if only one, on which I do not agree
with Ruskin, who never writes to any one what might hot be written to
the world, on the fly-leaves of books.
Your mother must think me an ill-mannered wretch, even if she did not
discover it before--for going away without thanking her for that
beautiful photograph. I did not feel sure, at first, how much she was
weighted with trouble, for I had never witnessed her serene courage. I
will leave it to you, if you please, mindful of an exquisite proverb
quoted this evening in the House as follows: Speech is silence, but
silver is golden.
* * * * *
{59}
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _La Madeleine Jan. 20, 1881_]
What I said of Ruskin was only to excuse the platitude I wrote in his
book, not to rescue my letters from appropriate destruction.
You evidently think that George Eliot is not the only novelist at whose
feet I have sat, and that I have learned from "Endymion" the delicate
art of flattery. So that the seed of suspicion has taken root after
all, and I hang by my own rope.
We might perhaps agree about Trevelyan better than you suppose. I
probably started from a lower estimate of the man, and was astonished
at his fulness of knowledge and the vigour of his pen. The oblique
style of narrative is said to be an invention of Gibbon, and Trevelyan
is of course full of Gibbon's times and writings. And I quite agree
with you that the business of historians is to get out of the way, and,
like the man who plays Punch, to concentrate attention on their
personages. Nobody, however, did this less than his illustrious uncle.
I shall look out with extreme interest for your kinsman's[66] review of
George Eliot. I heard so many hard things said of her by Arnold and
Palgrave, but Wolseley is one of her admirers.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _La Madeleine Jan. 21, 1881_]
My letter was hardly posted when yours arrived. Besides what you
mention, Arthur Lyttelton would find an important paper in the _Pall
Mall_ of the last week of the year, on the early Warwickshire life of
George Eliot, and a letter of hers on the original of Dinah. I fancy
it would be worth while to look up {60} some of her Westminster reviews
between 1850 and 1854; and the last word of her philosophy is more
outspoken in Lewes's scientific writings than in her own.
It is hard to say why I rate "Middlemarch" so high. There was a touch
of failure in the two preceding books, in "Felix Holt," and even in
"Romola." And it was "Middlemarch" that revealed to me not only her
grand serenity, but her superiority to some of the greatest writers.
My life is spent in endless striving to make out the inner point of
view, the _raison d'etre_, the secret of fascination for powerful
minds, of systems of religion and philosophy, and of politics, the
offspring of the others, and one finds that the deepest historians know
how to display their origin and their defects, but do not know how to
think or to feel as men do who live in the grasp of the various
systems. And if they sometimes do, it is from a sort of sympathy with
the one or the other, which creates partiality and exclusiveness and
antipathies. Poets are no better. Hugo, who tries so hard to do
justice to the Bishop and the Conventionnel, to the nuns and the
Jacobinical priest, fails from want of contact with the royalist
nobleman and the revolutionary triumvirate, as Shakespeare fails
ignobly with the Roman Plebs. George Eliot seemed to me capable not
only of reading the diverse hearts of men, but of creeping into their
skin, watching the world through their eyes, feeling their latent
background of conviction, discerning theory and habit, influences of
thought and knowledge, of life and of descent, and having obtained this
experience, recovering her independence, stripping off the borrowed
shell, and exposing scientifically and indifferently the soul of a
Vestal, a Crusader, an Anabaptist, an Inquisitor, a Dervish, a
Nihilist, or a Cavalier without {61} attraction, preference, or
caricature. And each of them should say that she displayed him in his
strength, that she gave rational form to motives he had imperfectly
analysed, that she laid bare features in his character he had never
realised.
I heard the close of Friday's debate, and was much distressed at the
hopeless badness of C----'s speech. But the situation gained by the
result, and still more by what passed on Monday.
The topic of the reason for delay is, as I hinted at my last moment, a
very delicate one, and not to be discussed lightly. Suppose there is
bloodshed in Ireland before the Protection Bill passes; then a reproach
would lie at their door for thinking more of eventualities that regard
themselves than of the immediate danger to life, and the heavy strain
on families of small means dependent on their own or other people's
rents. And there will be this argument to meet, that less severity in
October or November would go farther than greater severity in March.
* * * * *
The journey across France was really freezing. So I remained at Paris
for a few hours' rest and no visits. Bisaccia came south in the same
train, and Goldsmid, who gives me a dinner to-night. I see by the
papers that it is still too cold for your pony-carriage.
My whole social philosophy consists in the desire not merely to gratify
by civilities, but to bring men into contact with Mr. Gladstone--be it
by breakfast, dinner, or small and early, or even by a formal talking
to like ----'s--and your best art, together with the due discharge of
pasteboard, will be to bring him to bear, directly, on the seventy or
eighty men who want it, and are fit for it, and don't neglect Lady
Spencer's {62} parties, or Lady Granville's less multifarious evenings.
It is the confrontation, not the ceremony, that matters. False
believer,[67] because impostor, not to say hypocrite. I mean that,
beyond his charitableness and a written eloquence that always fills me
with an unspeakable admiration and delight, I do not believe in your
artful philosopher; that the differences revealed to us by his
writings, his conversation at Hawarden, the letter you treated so
generously, cut down to the bone, and leave me no space or patience for
anything better than a gracious courtesy. Therefore, in abetting your
studies in Ruskinese, I am no better than a humbug, which is not a word
to be written in books that will live and will irritate as long as the
language.
[Sidenote: _La Madeleine Jan. 28, 1881_]
My faults are to you an opportunity of displaying those qualities to
which you will not let me allude.
* * * * *
Those are not truisms about George Eliot. The reality of her
characters is generally perfect. They are not quite always vivid, or
consistent. They degenerate sometimes into reminiscences. But they
live a life apart from hers, and do not serve her purposes. I wonder
whether Arthur Lyttelton knows any good German criticism of her; I
don't think I have seen any.
* * * * *
The Tories were sure to cheer as wildly as the Irish hit. You have, I
fancy, felt the weakness of Forster's great speech,[68] which, to the
eye of a practised revolutionist, slightly disparages the Government.
He makes out an irresistible case against those who {63} think all is
right in Ireland, so far at least as to need nothing exceptional from
Parliament. He thinks little of the man--the imaginary hearer--who
thinks that the Irish peasants have a case; that the suffering and the
wrong are real, and are partly the work of the law; that the horrors
which fill us with impatience are the direct--though not the
unmixed--consequence thereof; that the first way to remove effects is
to remove the cause; that, whereas all this is certain, it remains to
be proved that the evil is beyond that treatment; and that the movement
which has its root in the soil, cannot be so dissociated from the
movement that has its root in America, that the one may heal and the
other may starve. Probably he does not wish to speak of remedial
measures beforehand, and in the same comminatory breath, or to dwell
too much on the purely revolutionary peril, which is a delicate topic,
about which people are not agreed, and which it is awkward to prove.
But he is so little occupied with the one real objection, in this
speech charged with the wisdom of many Cabinet discussions, that one
wonders whether that other line of thought, so repugnant to the
Castle,[69] was ever forcibly put forward in the Cabinet.
What you say of great men manifesting only themselves in their
works--the predominance, one should say, of the lyrical mood--is
profoundly true. Milton and Byron are supreme examples. It is the
reason why there are so few great epics, and so few great--there are
many good--histories. It is, in higher literary work, the same
solicitude that makes it almost impossible for men to think of the
right instead of the expedient. You can hardly imagine how people
wondered what Mr. Gladstone's motives were in the {64} Bulgarian
affair. Most politicians would be ashamed of having done any
considerable thing because it was right, from no motive more clever
than duty.
Fancy the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ asking me to do their article on
Jesuits! I answered that I hoped they would have one on Mrs. Lewes. I
have written my testimony to Mr. Cross,[70] encouraging him about the
intended life.... Thank you a thousand times beforehand for every
chance line you promise me. You do not know how to say things that are
not interesting.
[Sidenote: _La Madeleine Feb. 2, 1881_]
There is no way of describing the light and the joy which your letters
bring to this place of exile, with all the reality of the old country,
and with the ideal which belongs only to you and yours. I was hoping
that you had heard the glorious speech.[71] It must have been a treat
for you; and we saw at once, from our _Pall Mall_ itself, how profound
the impression had been. My imaginary listener, if he had listened,
might not have remained unconverted. Certainly, as you say, the
strongest confirmation of both speech and policy is the attitude of
these ill-conditioned Irishmen. As I have paired with Lord Limerick
(who has married a Miss Colquhoun of Cannes, and prefers bondage at his
father-in-law's villa to the protection of the land-league in his
ancestral domain, and who would support the Bill), I have virtually
paired against it, and am, I dare say, the only peer on that side,
unless Henry Stanley[72] escapes from Clare, where he is detained,
under pretence of Boycotting, by the transparent artifices of
friends....
{65}
I was prepared to believe the _Standard_ account by a visit from
Wolverton, who offered to show me his last letter from Downing Street,
and I told him I thought he could do it. He was delighted to find the
Hawarden photograph at Cannes. You will not see him for a fortnight,
unless he lost all his money to-day at Monte Carlo. He deserves to
lose it. He wants a strong Coercion Bill and an illusory Land Bill;
but his party and personal loyalty make up for much obdurate deafness
to the Morley predications.
I am very much obliged indeed for your message about Trevelyan. I
talked about bringing in outsiders, and men not of one's own politics;
and I spoke of Trollope and Morley in the former capacity, and of
Goschen in the latter. Trollope is condemned as noisy. There are
obvious objections to a newspaper editor, and the particular Lyttelton
objection was urged, in a letter to me, by Reeve.[73] Derby and Arthur
Russell put forward G.O.,[74] and I leave Goschen in the lurch until he
answers my letter from Paris pointing out the error of his ways; but I
hope you will be gracious to him before he goes. Goschen is above
sordid motives. He dreads the Radicals, detests ----, despises ----,
and, if left to himself and the nearest influences, he will drift away.
His lips have never been touched with the sacred fire of Liberty. His
international soul has never glowed with the zeal of the good old
cause. He is moved by the fears to which City men are prone, and there
are people more calculating than he is, who work those fears, partly to
check the Government, partly to provide a new chief for the Opposition.
Nobody can keep him straight but Mr. Gladstone. There is nothing
present to offer him, as {66} I take it for granted that one Budget
will not satisfy his--the P.M.'s--vast financial designs. But he can
employ the plan of Napoleon, who said to reluctant tribunes: "Que ne
venez vous discuter avec moi, dans mon Cabinet? Nous aurions des
conversations de famille." It is not a profound constitutional view of
the uses of an opposition; but there is a hint in it for Mr. Gladstone,
who underrates his own power over men in private. The bill as sketched
by the _Standard_ will strengthen his hold on Goschen.
Chamberlain has been often as indiscreet as the theory he expounded to
F. Cavendish implies, but he can hardly have prompted the _Standard_.
I am glad to think of Dizzy dining at No. 18. I wonder whether it is
because Lord Granville has heard he is Rowchester.[75] Your choice of
topics shows how you were on your guard with Sir Bartle. The true
thing about him is the strength, not the softness. I know that many
have been taken in by that assumed quality, and much resented it. The
right place for him would be in Asia Minor.
If you were to see those letters you would say that Burne-Jones is not
the only hand at missing a likeness; but in politics you would
recognise exactly what must have been your impression, that I had
strung my expectations a little above practicable height, and came down
with anguish to the baseness of prose--like the heroine of my dreams (I
mean Dorothea, not the lady whose name is in your letter).
I fear there is a perceptible change for the worse in Cardwell.
{67}
[Sidenote: _La Madeleine Feb. 10, 1881_]
You have gone through an anxious time, and I need not say where my
thoughts were fixed during the week of Revolution.[76] I trust you are
well out of it, and found relief at Lubbock's. Wolverton is growing
excited and goes back. I shall miss his good spirits, his keen
pugnacity, his singularly practical and unphilosophical view of
politics, and Godley's[77] letters. And I don't know whether the
Government will gain an adviser prompt, if they make a mistake, to help
them to find it out.
I have suggested to May[78] a precedent for the action of the Speaker
in stopping the discussion. It was three days before the Little
Gentleman in Black Velvet[79] at Hampton Court changed the dynasty.
The House was in Committee; the Tories were getting the worst of it and
wished to prevent a division. The Whigs would not hear of an
adjournment, and were jubilant, when one of their number had a stroke
of apoplexy. Harley, the Speaker, in concert with the Chairman, seized
the opportunity, took the chair, and closed the debate. Although the
majority was floored, nobody seems to have remonstrated. I presume it
is not on the Journals, and does not count.