VI

The rich man has always material comfort, freedom from daily and hourly anxieties; he is at liberty to go wherever he likes, to do whatever he pleases; he enjoys, if he have the true faculty for enjoyment; he can make himself obeyed, if the obedience be but eye-service; he can surround himself with beautiful objects; and he can freely indulge the luxury of generosity, although it is the one luxury of which the rich are not enamoured, the rich man in general never gives except to see his name in print in the newspapers. The compassion of the Rosnys for the rich is scarcely justified, since their greatest burden isennui, and this is an artificial kind of suffering due to defective sympathies, as cold feet are due to sluggish circulation. The statement, put in the mouth of Dargelle, that suicide is much more general amongst the rich than the poor, is certainly not based on fact or on statistics. The rich man, moreover, has one great and most precious exemption: he is free from petty, carking bodily cares; he never knows the greatest agony possible, that of seeing those dear to him hungry and homeless; he can be always warm in cold weather, cool in hot weather; in illness he has every palliative and assistance; his home is his own if he care for it, intangible and immutable; the whole world is his if he possess perception enough to enjoy it; his sufferings may be considerable from dyspepsia and discontent, and, if he be of a high nature, from irritation at the ingratitude and insincerity of human nature, but it is absurd to compare his pains with those of the poor—above all, when the poor are of fine temper, sensitive nerve and cultured intellectlike the Fougeraye and Lamarque of the Rosnys. It is well to remind society that there are sorrows of the soul from which the rich may suffer more acutely than the poor; but it is to exceed this truth to represent the rich as often suffering from this cause. The rich man is usually a complete egotist, whose philanthropy has a political purpose or a social ambition as its mainspring. A Dargelle may exist, does exist; but he is one in ten millions. He is legitimate in his place as a character in romance, but as a character in real life he is met with but very rarely.

There are many social questions and many philosophic theories discussed inL'Impérieuse Bonté. An unkind critic might say that it is rather a social and philosophic essay than a romance. But in much it conforms to and fulfils the highest demands of fiction, and the naturalness and lovableness of the chief personages lend to it throughout the interest of romance. The mission of Fougeraye in the expenditure of Dargelle's money introduces, perforce, many phases of social misery. It was probably to do this that the book was written; but the harmony and interest of the action of the novel, as a novel, are not sacrificed to this intention. In these chapters all affectation, all artifice drop from the style, and the writers become masters of strong, simple and infinitely touching prose. It is to be regretted that the influence of their time should ever mislead them into tortuous and strained exaggerations and archaisms when it is possible for them to write thus simply and eloquently:—

'The few precious things—the brooch and earrings of Madame Lamarque, even her wedding-ring, alas! then the china service, saved with such effort from the fire, with a little rosewood secrétaire, and two Sèvres vases won at a lottery for charity, the gift to it of the Empress Eugénie—all disappeared, all were devoured by the monster Misery. Georges suffered as much as his parents; his nature was inclined towards the adoration of relics, of frail things, of the semi-vitality of objects.'It rained a little; in the shadow of the fortifications the lamps trembled under gusts of wind; the reflections touched the wet grass, which seemed for the moment as fresh as the turf of meadows. Everywhere solitude—solitude filled with a sense of near and hidden human life in the closed houses from which came the subdued light of unseen chambers in vague suggestion of mysterious joys. But there was no living creature out of doors except in the openings of the ramparts; on the grass, a dog looking as furtive as a hunting wolf. The boy's eyes gazed at the sky, at the grass, at the long vista of burning lamps, at the grey stony road under his feet. A sense of beauty came into his soul, but a beauty sombre as the psalms of All Saints' Day.'Beside him his mother carried the mattress which had been sold; he bore one side of it on his shoulder.'They walk thus, beaten, conquered, the child full of suffocating revolt, the mother humble and resigned, like the meek beasts of the stall, with occasional flickers of wrath soon extinguished. They go thus, saying to each other a few words, muffled andheavyhearted, which are the mere dull echoes of their souls. "We must turn down that street. How will it end?—why does not the family help?" At a corner they stop, and suddenly Georges is overwhelmed with pity for his mother, as he sees her profile wet with rain in the light of the street lamp.'He gazes at her. He remembers, in his earliest childhood, a time when there had been two servants in their house; when his mother had been a gentlewoman, going out for a walk with his father, while the bonne pushed the little carriage of the baby François. And here she was, his own mother, with a mattress for sale on her shoulder, on foot in the mud at this time of night. "Mamma! mamma! dear little mamma!" he cried, sobbing, without a single selfish thought, caring only for her, so profoundly, so intensely!'

'It rained a little; in the shadow of the fortifications the lamps trembled under gusts of wind; the reflections touched the wet grass, which seemed for the moment as fresh as the turf of meadows. Everywhere solitude—solitude filled with a sense of near and hidden human life in the closed houses from which came the subdued light of unseen chambers in vague suggestion of mysterious joys. But there was no living creature out of doors except in the openings of the ramparts; on the grass, a dog looking as furtive as a hunting wolf. The boy's eyes gazed at the sky, at the grass, at the long vista of burning lamps, at the grey stony road under his feet. A sense of beauty came into his soul, but a beauty sombre as the psalms of All Saints' Day.

'Beside him his mother carried the mattress which had been sold; he bore one side of it on his shoulder.

'They walk thus, beaten, conquered, the child full of suffocating revolt, the mother humble and resigned, like the meek beasts of the stall, with occasional flickers of wrath soon extinguished. They go thus, saying to each other a few words, muffled andheavyhearted, which are the mere dull echoes of their souls. "We must turn down that street. How will it end?—why does not the family help?" At a corner they stop, and suddenly Georges is overwhelmed with pity for his mother, as he sees her profile wet with rain in the light of the street lamp.

'He gazes at her. He remembers, in his earliest childhood, a time when there had been two servants in their house; when his mother had been a gentlewoman, going out for a walk with his father, while the bonne pushed the little carriage of the baby François. And here she was, his own mother, with a mattress for sale on her shoulder, on foot in the mud at this time of night. "Mamma! mamma! dear little mamma!" he cried, sobbing, without a single selfish thought, caring only for her, so profoundly, so intensely!'

Again, there is the same intense sympathy in the author with the suffering of the spirit when the two Sèvres vases are taken to their new home, sold for twenty francs, the poor, pretty, familiar things which look so elegant, so slender, so aristocratic amongst the coarse, vulgar ornaments of their new owners, that Georges is proud of their superiority amidst the anguish with which he thinks of them, lost for ever:

'Frail penates, saturated with the soul of home. Ah! how many birthday mornings, how many twilights of study, how many long rainy days and gentle suns of springtime, how many dreams of future voyages in far lands, how many nights fearful with storm or mute with falling snow, had these objects seen!They had been always there, fixing themselves inalienably on the retina in their unalterable attitude of delicacy and art: and now they were lost for ever, given over to an alien hand for a coin of gold which would last two days!'

Nothing can be more touching, more sincere, more eloquent than this episode.

Take again the magnificent opening chapter of the fire at which Lamarque contracts the illness which ultimately kills him. It is too long to quote here, but its description is of a force incomparable, and of a truth as great. No one of his contemporaries could have written this chapter; its sobriety and veracity, united to its splendour of diction and its terror of suggestion, make it amagnum opus.

It has only one defect; it gives the reader the impression that it cost great effort to the author. It does not convey that sense of the author's spontaneous fertility and joy in creation which Pierre Loti, François Coppée, Anatole France, feel and give.L'Impérieuse Bontéis a great work, but its greatness must have cost painful thought and unremitting labour.

One feels that there is nothing of improvisation, of careless and happy inspiration, about it. It is the matured fruit of profound observation, and of complicated doubt, of an unselfish sorrow, and of a noble altruism. It is a work which must impress and elevate all readers who are capable of comprehending its teaching. But there is no laughter in it, nor is there even a smile, save that sad divine smile which accompanies the tears of pity.

There are few men of our time more interesting than the man who bears this name. Fresh with English air, and dark with desert suns, passionately liberal in thought and nobly independent in opinion, spending his winters on the shores of the Nile, on the edge of the desert, and his summers between the vale of Shoreham, and the alder-shaded water of the humble Mole, he touches, and has always touched, life at its most different facets. Not without knowledge has he written of the green Sussex weald, and of the woodcocks and the thrushes, the oak trees and the yew trees, of 'Evelyn's land'; not without love as though he were also a son of the soil has he written of that other far-off country where—

'We may make terms with Nature, and awhilePut as it were our souls to grass, and runBarefooted and bareheaded in the smileOf that long summer which still girds the Nile.'

His private life, likewise, is equally of interest to the most indifferent, since he is the husband of Byron'sgranddaughter, the father-in-law of Neville Lytton, the companion in youth of Owen Meredith, the friend of the Arab, the champion of the dumb, and the standard-bearer of all lost causes. In few personalities is there united so much which is uncommon, and idiosyncrasies which are so varied. He has been so fortunate, often-times, in his friends and his fortunes, that it is perhaps only to be human that he should, in his editor who is his friend, fail to be so fortunate as one could wish. Mr Henley, who selected his poems, has excluded many; one is disposed to resent and to rebel; Mr Henley is apt at all times to arouse that sensation in the reader of his somewhat too condescending criticisms.

Many of the verses excluded were political; now it is precisely in politics that Mr Blunt is most delightful to those amongst us who abhor actual governments.

I wish that these poems had come before the public without this species of apology with which Mr Henley heads them. They do not need so uncertain a prefatory note. They are certainly not likely to be popular. They will not be recited over a little tambourine, and used to collect monies for woollen socks and chocolate. They will be little appreciated by the lovers of ballads of blood and fury, and odes of war which scream like a steam-hooter. They are made to be read in quiet places where daffodils blossom, and the black-cap sings; where lake waters lie calm in mountain shadows, or where, through the stillness of a studio or study, a summer breeze blows dropped rose-leaves across the threshold.

Mr Henley raises one standard of great verse: Milton's: and below that nothing to him is great. Iknow not where he places Shelley, but does Milton ever touch the heart except perhaps in the Lycidas? Who can care for the exiles of Eden?

I do not think that it was necessary for Mr Henley to say that Mr Blunt is not John Milton. It would not occur to anyone that he was. But then, neither to my thinking is he Byron or Burns, whom Mr Henley thinks that he is, nor is he either Owen Meredith, to whom Mr Henley likewise compares him. He is, to my thinking, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; alone in his verse as he is also alone (or almost alone) in his opinions and his politics. I dislike comparisons in criticisms. It is a meagre way to define what is, this habit of declaring what it is not; and I love not either the diminution of the living for the exaltation of the dead, or the praise of the living for the depreciation of the dead. Nor is it to me either wit or wisdom to say that Byron 'followed.' Who did he follow? Who was his precursor? Who showed him his matchless double rhymes? Who before him struck the splendid chords of his Juan? Who crowded into a few years of life such accomplishment, such eloquence such romance of existence? Who resembled Byron before Byron lived?

Poets who are not great, and do not aspire to be so, may touch the chords of memory, may unseal the fountains of tears, may make dead loves arise and smile, and the springs of dead years return, and do this with a line, a verse, a suggestion. This is what Owen Meredith did in his song; so does his friend and comrade in his. There is a strongly virile quality in his verse: it is not epicene, nor ever effeminate;the thoughts are always the thoughts of a man who has felt the hoof of the desert horse cast up the sand of the desert, and seen the circle of the waiting vultures poised in the blue air; and heard 'God's thunder upon Horeb'; who has read his Augustine and Chrysostom on the shores of the Dead Sea, and his Horace and his Herrick lying on the short sheep-cropped grass of Sussex; who knows many a bank whereon the wild thyme grows in lowly Kentish lanes, and has walked with the shades of Dante and of Byron in the marble streets of Ravenna, and under the dying pines of its forest; who has loved and laughed in the artificial passions and mocking mirth of Paris, and has dwelt in the solitudes where the hair tents of the sons of Shem are dark against the east.

Mr Henley, in his somewhat autocratic manner, says that a man lives for posterity in proportion as he figures the gestures and sets forth the emotions of his own time. We can none of us judge what posterity may do or say. I fear it will be too engrossed with itself to take much heed of anything which went before it. Or, possibly, there will be no posterity at all, but only a shattered earth; scattered into space by some exploit of that boastful Icarus called Science. But taking Mr Henley's dictum as it stands, is it true, seeing (as its context shows) that he means an Englishman must be judged by what he writes of England? If this were true, where would go the Juan and the Parisina, the Anactoria and the Atalanta in Calydon, the Cenci and the Adonaïs, the Lucille and the Clytemnestra? Scott would be greater than Shelley, and Cowper than Coleridge. The theory will not hold water.Which is the greater play of Shakespeare—'King John' or 'The Tempest'? 'Henry the Fifth' or 'Romeo and Juliet'? 'Richard the Third' or 'Hamlet'? What are esteemed the greatest epics of the human race—Milton's and Dante's—are located in no known province of our narrow sphere, but, in worlds, heavenly and infernal, whither no traveller has gone, save in the spirit. 'Country' is but a restricted boundary for whoever has the vision which sees beyond the ordinary range of men. To the true poet his native land lies wherever what is beautiful can be beloved, or that which is sorrowful needs solace.

The only thing that personally I regret in these verses is their author's tendency to be too careless in his rhymes. Many of them grate upon one's ear, and such assunandstonevex one's sense of melody, indeed, are not rhymes: whilst some words used, such as for instanceRevenue, accord ill with verse at all. He deems himself quit of obligation to observe these delicacies of metrical beauty, because he says peevishly that he is no poet. But he is a poet; and is so strongly one in feeling that there is no excuse for him not to be more observant of style.

For style is the reed-pipe through which the singer's breath blows music, and he should take heed that his syrinx be well chosen, and well cut, so that each air played on it be clear as the throstle's note.

But rough though many of his compositions are—rough and unstudied—yet, when read in fitting atmosphere, they will be beloved, and in the mind of the reader they will linger like the lilt of a moorland song heard on an autumn eve. There is thevoxhumanain their melody. They come from the heart of a man who has suffered. They are unequal, extremely unequal; the poet has gone through the woods and gathered together grass and orchis, and gorse, and the sceptered meadow sweet and the bearded barley, all together, just as they happened to come in his path; common things sometimes, or such as seem so to those who do not see the sun shine through and the dew tremble on them.

They are not put together with great care. I should not think that they were turned, and returned, and pondered over, and doubted about. They are too spontaneous, or seem so, to be the subject of great meditation. They are the natural children of a forest-lover. As you read them you receive the irresistible impression that they were written involuntarily as a full heart sighs, as a glad heart sings, but the sigh is more frequent than the song.

He has a great love of rural things. He says:—

'You cannot know,In your bald cities where no cowslips blow,How dear life is to us. The tramp of feetBrushes all other footsteps from the streetAnd you see nothing of the graves you tread.With us they are still present, the poor dead.Being so near the places where they sleepWho sowed these fields, we in their absence reap.'

Again:—

'This ridgeIs only thirty miles from London Bridge,And when the wind blows north, the London smokeComes down upon us, and the grey crows croak,For the great city seems to reach aboutWith its dark arms, and grip them by the throat.Time may yet prove them right. The wildernessMay be disforested, and Nature's faceStamped out of beauty by the heel of manWho has no room for beauty in his plan.'

Again:—

'The dove did lend me wings. I fled awayFrom the loud world which long had troubled me.Oh, lightly did I flee when hoyden MayThrew her wild[8]mantle on the hawthorn tree.I left the dusty highroad, and my wayWas through deep meadows, shut with copses fair,A choir of thrushes poured its roundelayFrom every hedge and every thicket there;Mild, moon-faced kine looked on, where in the grassAll heaped I lay, from noon till eve.And hares unwitting close to me did passAnd still the birds sang....'

A certain similarity there is in his verse to Owen Meredith's, but this is due to the fact that they were friends and companions always, in youth and manhood, and that Wilfrid Blunt had an intense and adoring sentiment for his friend which made him regard the other with a feeling which was almost religious in its strength and sincerity.

The following sonnet might have come out of 'The Wanderer,' and I imagine the house called here Palazzo Pagani is the villa in Bellosguardo whichin 'The Wanderer' shelters the lovers of the 'Eve and May.'

'This is the house where twenty years agoThey spent a spring and summer. This shut gateWould lead you to the terrace, and belowTo a rose-garden long since desolate.Here they once lived. How often I have satTill it was dusk among the olive trees,Waiting to hear their coming horse hoofs grazeUpon the gravel, till the freshening breezeBore down a sound of voices. Even yetA broken echo of their laughter ringsThrough the deserted terraces. And see,While I am speaking, from the parapetThere is a hand put forth, and someone flingsHer very window open overhead.How sweet it is, the scent of rosemary,These are the last tears I shall ever shed.'

Here the influence of Owen Meredith is very strong, but it is the influence due to sympathy, not to imitation.

But where he is entirely unlike Owen Meredith is in his passion of pity, which is his dominant instinct, and which in the other is rarely perceptible. Owen Meredith was entirely personal; Wilfrid Blunt is strongly impersonal. The sorrows of man, and of one man in especial, constituted the be all, and end all, of the former; the woes of all creation lie heavy on the soul of the latter. The bird with a broken wing is to Wilfrid Blunt as pitiful a tragedy as the human lover with his ruined joys was to the author of 'The Wanderer'; the chained eagle dying in an iron cageis to him as cruel a captive as his own soul pining to be free from the limits of sense and the blindness of mortality. He reaches a high level in altruism, which is in him of a very pure kind.

Such pity thrills through these lines on the stricken hart:—

'The stricken hart had fled the brake,His courage spent for life's dear sake,He came to die beside the lake.'The golden trout leaped up to view,The moorfowl clapped his wings and crew,The swallow brushed him as she flew.'He looked upon the glorious sun,His blood dropped slowly on the stone,He loved the life so nearly won,'And then he died. The ravens foundA carcase couched upon the ground,They said their god had dealt the wound.'The Eternal Father calmly shookOne page untitled from life's book—Few words. None ever cared to look.'Yet woe for life thus idly riven,He blindly loved what God had given,And love, some say, has conquered Heaven.'

'The stricken hart had fled the brake,His courage spent for life's dear sake,He came to die beside the lake.

'The golden trout leaped up to view,The moorfowl clapped his wings and crew,The swallow brushed him as she flew.

'He looked upon the glorious sun,His blood dropped slowly on the stone,He loved the life so nearly won,

'And then he died. The ravens foundA carcase couched upon the ground,They said their god had dealt the wound.

'The Eternal Father calmly shookOne page untitled from life's book—Few words. None ever cared to look.

'Yet woe for life thus idly riven,He blindly loved what God had given,And love, some say, has conquered Heaven.'

What Wilfrid Blunt perceives and feels more keenly than greater English poets, more keenly indeed than any English poet except Shelley and Matthew Arnold, are the pathos, the value, the infinite sadness, of these free forest, or desert, lives struck down in thefulness of their strength and beauty by the brutal pursuit of that ravenous and insatiable brute which is Man. It is this emotion which has inspired in him the strange poem named 'Satan Absolved.'

'Satan Absolved' was not written when Mr Henley edited the books of earlier poems, and I imagine that it has scared Mr Henley and displeased him. I do not know this, I have not asked, but I imagine that 'Satan Absolved' must make Mr Henley extremely uncomfortable.

Briefly, the motive of 'Satan Absolved' is the accusation brought by Satan against Man; and against God, as the Creator and Authoriser of Man. This will sound in many ears a profanity; but it is not so, and Satan has sad reason in his arguments. It was a fine and lofty courage which made the author produce it at a moment when the English people are drunk and delirious with the lust of carnage and of conquest, and the great thinker Herbert Spencer has accepted its dedication, whilst the great painter Watts has given it its frontispiece.

It is a poem which will alienate many, affright many, and to many no doubt will appear blasphemous; but it is absolutely true in its hardy and original conception of the sins of mankind against the other races of the earth, and of the hypocrisy, brutality, and avarice of man, clothed and cultured, against man primitive and helpless. It is acri de coeur, breaking almost involuntarily from a heart swollen with indignation, and scorn, and pain, before the emptiness of creeds, the impudence of prayer and praise, the vileness of aggression and of war-lust.

'Hast Thou not heard their chanting? Nay, Thou dost not hear,Or Thou hadst loosed Thy hand, like lightning in the clear,To smite their ribald lips with palsy!'

Like all poems in which Satan is the hero, the Fallen Angel dwarfs Deity. The rebel, not the lord, is in the right. This is inevitable.

Especially it is inevitable here, where Satan is the holder of the scales of justice; the advocate of all those countless races upon earth, who in their birth, and in their death, in their up-rising, and their down-lying, in every day which dawns, and night which falls, curse Man, their merciless master.

'The Earth is a lost force, Man's lazar house of woeUndone by his lewd will. We may no longer strive,The evil hath prevailed. There is no soul aliveThat shall escape his greed. We spend our days in tearsMourning the world's lost beauty in the night of years.All pity is departed. Each once happy thingThat on Thy fair Earth moves how fleet of foot or wing,How glorious in its strength, how wondrous in design,How royal in its raiment tinctured opaline,How rich in joyous life, the inheritor of forms,All noble, all of worth which had survived the storms,The chances of decay in the World's living plan,From the remote fair past when still ignoble ManOn his four foot soles went, and howled thro' the lone hillsIn moody bestial wrath, unclassed amongst Earth's ills.Each one of them is doomed. From the deep Central SeasTo the white Poles, Man ruleth, pitiless Lord of these,And daily he destroyeth. The great whales he drivethBeneath the northern ice, and quarter none he giveth,Who perish there of wounds in their huge agony.He presseth the white bear on the white frozen seaAnd slaughtereth for his pastime. The wise amorous sealHe flayeth big with young, the walrus cubs that kneelBut cannot turn his rage, alive he mangleth them,Leaveth in breathing heaps, outrooted branch and stem.In every land he slayeth. He hath new engines madeWhich no life may withstand, nor in the forest shade,Nor in the sunlit plain, which wound all from afar,The timorous with the valiant, waging his false war,Coward, himself unseen. In pity, Lord, look downOn the blank widowed plains which he hath made his ownBy right of solitude. Where, Lord God, are they now,Thy glorious bison herds, Thy ariels white as snow.Thy antelopes in troops, the zebras of Thy plain?Behold their whitened bones on the dull track of men.Thy elephants, Lord, where? For ages Thou did'st buildTheir frames' capacity, the hide which was their shieldNo thorn might pierce, no sting, no violent tooth assail,The tusks which were their levers, the lithe trunk their flail.Thou strengthenedst their deep brain. Thou madest them wise to know,And wiser to ignore, advised, deliberate, slow,Conscious of power supreme in right. The manifest tokenOf Thy high will on earth, Thy natural peace unbroken,Unbreakable by fear. For ages did they moveThus, kings of Thy deep forest swayed by only love.Where are they now, Lord God? A fugitive spent fewUsed as Man's living targets by the ignoble crewWho boast their coward skill to plant the balls that fly,Thy work of all time spoiled, their only use to dieThat these sad clowns may laugh. Nay, Lord, we weep for Thee,And spend ourselves in tears for Thy marred majesty.Behold, Lord, what we bring,—this last proof in our hands,Their latest fiendliest spoil from Thy fair tropic-lands,The birds of all the Earth, unwinged to deck the headsOf their unseemly women: plumage of such redsAs not the sunset teach, such purples as no throne,Not even in heaven showeth, hardly, Lord, Thine own;Such azures as the sea's, such greens as are in springThe oak trees' tenderest buds of watched-for blossoming,Such opalescent pearls as only in Thy skiesThe lunar bow revealeth to night's sleep-tired eyes.Behold them, Lord of Beauty, Lord of Reverence,Lord of Compassion, Thou who metest means to ends,Nor madest Thy world fair for less than Thine own fame,Behold Thy birds of joy, lost, tortured, put to shame,For these vile strumpets' whim. Arise, or cease to beJudge of the quick and dead! These dead wings cry to Thee,Arise, Lord, and avenge!'

The use of the six-foot Alexandrine couplet may seem to many readers as a thing unknown and unwelcome in English verse. Others may say that here and there the language has not been sufficiently carefully weighed, that there is repetition of thought in some places, and of words in others, as for instance the word 'plain' recurs three times in seven lines. But when hypercriticism has said and done its worst, the work remains a just and generous indictment; heroic in its courage and vigorous in its eloquence, pleading the cause of those who cannot plead their own. The human race will be ill-pleased by the denunciation; for their vanity must be wounded by one who incessantly reminds it of its kinship to 'the lewd,bare-buttocked ape,' and who calls it full rightly, 'sad creature without shame,' and calls it also:—

'A presence saturnine,In stealth among the rest, equipped as none of theseWith Thy mind's attributes, low crouched beneath the trees,Betraying all and each.'The red Japhetic stock of the bare plains, which rolledA base-born horde on Rome erewhile in lust of gold,Tide following tide, the Goth, Gaul, Vandal, Lombard, Hun,Spewed forth from the white North, to new dominionIn the fair Southern lands, with famine at their heelAnd rapine in their van, armed to the lips with steel.'The master-wolf of all men call the Sassenach,The Anglo-Norman dog who goeth by land and sea,As his forefathers went in chartered piracy,Death, fire, in his right hand.'

'A presence saturnine,In stealth among the rest, equipped as none of theseWith Thy mind's attributes, low crouched beneath the trees,Betraying all and each.

'The red Japhetic stock of the bare plains, which rolledA base-born horde on Rome erewhile in lust of gold,Tide following tide, the Goth, Gaul, Vandal, Lombard, Hun,Spewed forth from the white North, to new dominionIn the fair Southern lands, with famine at their heelAnd rapine in their van, armed to the lips with steel.

'The master-wolf of all men call the Sassenach,The Anglo-Norman dog who goeth by land and sea,As his forefathers went in chartered piracy,Death, fire, in his right hand.'

Again, who, in the vain-glorious Britain of our time, will pardon this?—

'The head knaves of the horde,Those who inspire the rest and give the master word,The leaders of their thought, their lords political,Sages, kings, poets, priests, in their hearts one and all,For all their faith avowed and their lip service doneIn face of Thy high fires each day beneath the sun,Ay, and their prelates too, their men of godliest worth,Believe no word of Thee as master of their Earth,Controllers of their acts, no word of Thy high rightTo bend men to obedience, and at need to smite,No word of Thy true law, the enforcement of Thy peace,Thy all-deciding arm in the world's policies,They ignore Thee on the earth. They grant Thee, as their "God,"The kingdom of the heavens, seeing it a realm untrod,Untreadable, by man, a space, ares nullius,Or No Man's Land which they, as loyal men and pious,Leave and assign to Thee to deal with as Thou wilt,To hold as Thy strong throne or loose as water spilt,For sun and wind to gather in the wastes of air.Whether of a Truth thouart, they know not, Lord, nor care;Only they name Thee "God," and pay Thee their prayers vain,As dormant over-lord and pensioned suzerain,The mediatised blind monarch of a world, outgrownOf its faith's swaddling clothes, which wills to walk alone.'

These lines must be bitter in the teeth of the men of his generation, of the men who say openly that religion is for the seventh day, not for the week of work and war; who, churchgoers and chapelgoers alike, uphold the campaign of blood and plunder; who prate of Helots, and treat the Kaffir worse than any Helot that ever lived; who seek warrant in their Scriptures for endless slaughter, and for endless slavery, of all in any manner weaker than themselves; and who, with their jargon of civilisation, and their doggerel of cant, bear fire and pestilence over all the globe.

Doubtless to man, convinced in deformity of his own beauty, in disease of his own health, in crime of his own virtue, in blood-lust of his own religious aims, the portrait of Man as given here in Satan's scathing words will be very offensive. All honour be to the man who has dared to draw it!

It might be perhaps easy to show the fallacy of this upbraiding, and prove the facts of the maintenance of life by the destruction of life which has always prevailed on earth; the facts that the python and the cobra, if not the tiger, and the eagle, slays, as man slays, for sport in addition to food; that in the depths of the unfathomed seas, and in the azure space of highest air, and in the green twilight of virgin forests, the god of cruelty reigns and prevails; that the elephant and the rhinoceros wrestled and the keen cheetah sprang on the meek cameleopard, and the jaws of the crocodile opened for the playful gazelle before ever the steel and the lead of the human brute touched and slew them. But when this has been said and admitted, it does not invalidate the truth of Satan's charge; that man has laid waste the earth and slaughtered for greed, for savage pleasure, for mere wantonness, as never any other creature before him or beside him on this planet, has done or has ever wished to do.

To blast the harmless, gentle, colossal whale with the coward's tool of dynamite; to strip the fur coat off the living seal and drive her tender body over sharp rocks it was never made to cross; to castrate the lion and tear his flesh with red-hot irons that he may make the sport of fools; to rear the timid pheasant by millions, hand fed and unsuspecting, only that they may fall under the breechloaders of princes and lords and gentlemen; to penetrate into virgin forests and plunge in untroubled streams to seize the heron on her nest, and poison the lyre-bird in his haunts, and snatch his golden plumes from the bird of paradise, and his rosy wings from the flamingo, that commerce may flourishand women be adorned—all these things, and more like them, crimes of every clime and every hour, are human sins, and human sins alone; and justify in its strongest accusations the charge of Satan against Man as the most brutal murderer on earth; the same creature of destruction still, in the comedy which he calls civilisation, as when in his cave and his lake dwellings he first sharpened a stone, and then stole out to kill.

And it is herein there lie alike the courage and the value of the 'Satan Absolved.' It is by no means a perfect poem; it would have been well if it had received much more meditation and amplification, if passages which approach the grotesque like the 'old world furniture,' the 'linen long in press' of Heaven in the first page had been altered; and the destiny and mission of Satan at the close are enwrapped in a mystery which is to me at least incomprehensible; but when the utmost has been said against it which can be urged, the poem remains a noble effort to proclaim a supreme truth, which, as all great truths have done, dawns slowly on the human mind—the solidarity of life.

The preface alone to the book should make everyone obtain and cherish it. This time the writer has penned his own presentation, and is not ushered in by Mr Henley. It is enough to say that the introduction, like the work, is worthy of the Englishman who, amidst a deafening roar of national vanity and triumph, dared to denounce the injustice and the inhumanity of Omdurman.

It must not be forgotten that this poet is also a writer of prose; prose clear, terse and strong. His letters to the leading journal of London, and hisworks on the present state of India and the future state of Islam are virile in thought and fearless in expression. A Sussex landowner, and the possessor of a fortune sufficient to give him entire independence, he has been the nominee of no party and the slave of no prejudice. His temper is essentiallyfrondeur; he has, what so few possess, absolute independence of judgment; he refuses to see through other men's spectacles, whether of smoked or of rose-coloured glass. Again and again has he had the courage to oppose the policy of ministers who were his personal friends. He opposed Mr Gladstone's and Lord Granville's policy in Egypt, considering it alike unjust and unwise; and he appealed alike to Parliament and to the nation against it, uselessly but not the less manfully. The eloquence which he used so nobly at that time must remain in the memories of many. He equally opposed the recent campaign in the Soudan of Lord Salisbury's Cabinet, and the brutal carnage commanded and excused by Kitchener. In India he was, at an interval of a few years, the guest of two Viceroys, yet he never for a moment consented to accept the views of either, although for both he had strong personal friendship and regard. He thought (and thinks) the whole system of English administration in India a cruel, costly and most perilous mistake.

'I believe,' he says, 'the natives capable of governing themselves much better than we can do, and at about a tenth part of the expense.'I have found a vast economic disturbance, caused partly by the selfish commercial policy of the EnglishGovernment, partly by the no less selfish expenditure of the English official class. I have found the Indian peasantry poor, in some districts, to starvation; deeply in debt, and without the means of improving their position; the wealth accumulated in a few great cities and in a few rich hands, the public revenues spent to a large extent abroad, and by an absentee Government. I have been unable to convince myself that India is not a poorer country, now, than it was a hundred years ago, when we first began to manage its finances. I believe, in common with all native economists, that its modern system of finance is unsound, that far too large a revenue is raised from the land, and that this is only maintained at its present high figure by drawing on what may be called the capital of the country, namely, the material welfare of the agricultural class; probably, too, the productive power of the soil. I find a large public debt and foresee further financial difficulties.'Again, I find the ancient organisation of society broken up, the interdependence of class upon class disturbed, the simple customary law of the East replaced by a complicated jurisprudence imported from the West, increased powers given to the recovery of debt, and consequently increased facilities of litigation and usury. Also, great centralisation of power in the hands of officers daily more and more automatons and less and less interested in the special districts they administer. In a word, new machinery replacing, on many points disadvantageously, the old. I do not say that all these things are unprofitable, but they are not natural to the country and are costly and out ofall proportion to the good. India has appeared to me in the light of a large estate which has been experimented on by a series of Scotch bailiffs who have all gone away rich.'

'I believe,' he says, 'the natives capable of governing themselves much better than we can do, and at about a tenth part of the expense.

'I have found a vast economic disturbance, caused partly by the selfish commercial policy of the EnglishGovernment, partly by the no less selfish expenditure of the English official class. I have found the Indian peasantry poor, in some districts, to starvation; deeply in debt, and without the means of improving their position; the wealth accumulated in a few great cities and in a few rich hands, the public revenues spent to a large extent abroad, and by an absentee Government. I have been unable to convince myself that India is not a poorer country, now, than it was a hundred years ago, when we first began to manage its finances. I believe, in common with all native economists, that its modern system of finance is unsound, that far too large a revenue is raised from the land, and that this is only maintained at its present high figure by drawing on what may be called the capital of the country, namely, the material welfare of the agricultural class; probably, too, the productive power of the soil. I find a large public debt and foresee further financial difficulties.

'Again, I find the ancient organisation of society broken up, the interdependence of class upon class disturbed, the simple customary law of the East replaced by a complicated jurisprudence imported from the West, increased powers given to the recovery of debt, and consequently increased facilities of litigation and usury. Also, great centralisation of power in the hands of officers daily more and more automatons and less and less interested in the special districts they administer. In a word, new machinery replacing, on many points disadvantageously, the old. I do not say that all these things are unprofitable, but they are not natural to the country and are costly and out ofall proportion to the good. India has appeared to me in the light of a large estate which has been experimented on by a series of Scotch bailiffs who have all gone away rich.'

In another place he says with equal frankness:—

'India seems to me just as ill-governed as the rest of Asia. There is just the same heavy taxation, government by foreign officials, and waste of money that one sees in Turkey. The result is the same; and I don't see much difference between making the starving Hindoo pay for a cathedral at Calcutta and taxing Bulgarians for a palace on the Bosphorus. Want cuts up all these great empires in their centralised governments.''The "natives" as they call them,' he writes farther on, 'are a race of slaves, frightened, unhappy, and terribly thin. I own to being shocked at the Egyptian bondage in which they are held, and my faith in British institutions has received a severe blow.... I never could see the moral obligations Governments acknowledge of taxing people for debts which the Governments, and not the people, have incurred. All public debts, even in a self-governing country, are more or less dishonest, but in a despotism like India they are a swindle.' 'It is my distinct impression,' he states in another portion of his too brief work, 'from all that I have seen and heard, that the ill-feeling now existing in India between the English there and the indigenous races is one which, if it be not allayed by a more generous treatment, will in a few years makethe continued connection between England and India altogether impossible, and that a final rupture of friendly relations will ensue between the two countries, which will be an incalculable misfortune for both, and may possibly be marked by scenes of violence such as nothing in the past history of either will have equalled. The people are beginning to awake and to resent the stupidity of those who, representing England in India, wantonly affront them, and unless the English public at home, with whom as yet the Indian races have no quarrel, becomes awake, too, to the danger of its own indifference, the irreparable result of a general race hatred will follow. Only it should be remembered that India is a vast continent peopled by races ten times more numerous than ourselves, and then the convulsion, when it comes, will be on a scale altogether out of proportion to our experience, and so the more alarming. Let India once be united in a common sentiment of hatred for all that is English and our rule there willipso factocease. Let it once finally despair of English justice, and English force will be powerless to hold it in subjection. The huge mammal, India's symbol, is a docile beast and may be ridden by a child. He is sensible, docile and easily attached. But ill-treatment he will not bear forever, and when he is angered in earnest his vast bulk alone makes him dangerous, and puts it beyond the strength of the strongest to guide him.'

'The "natives" as they call them,' he writes farther on, 'are a race of slaves, frightened, unhappy, and terribly thin. I own to being shocked at the Egyptian bondage in which they are held, and my faith in British institutions has received a severe blow.... I never could see the moral obligations Governments acknowledge of taxing people for debts which the Governments, and not the people, have incurred. All public debts, even in a self-governing country, are more or less dishonest, but in a despotism like India they are a swindle.' 'It is my distinct impression,' he states in another portion of his too brief work, 'from all that I have seen and heard, that the ill-feeling now existing in India between the English there and the indigenous races is one which, if it be not allayed by a more generous treatment, will in a few years makethe continued connection between England and India altogether impossible, and that a final rupture of friendly relations will ensue between the two countries, which will be an incalculable misfortune for both, and may possibly be marked by scenes of violence such as nothing in the past history of either will have equalled. The people are beginning to awake and to resent the stupidity of those who, representing England in India, wantonly affront them, and unless the English public at home, with whom as yet the Indian races have no quarrel, becomes awake, too, to the danger of its own indifference, the irreparable result of a general race hatred will follow. Only it should be remembered that India is a vast continent peopled by races ten times more numerous than ourselves, and then the convulsion, when it comes, will be on a scale altogether out of proportion to our experience, and so the more alarming. Let India once be united in a common sentiment of hatred for all that is English and our rule there willipso factocease. Let it once finally despair of English justice, and English force will be powerless to hold it in subjection. The huge mammal, India's symbol, is a docile beast and may be ridden by a child. He is sensible, docile and easily attached. But ill-treatment he will not bear forever, and when he is angered in earnest his vast bulk alone makes him dangerous, and puts it beyond the strength of the strongest to guide him.'

All who are interested in the future of England and India should read this volume, which, although written as far back as Lord Ripon's viceroyalty, applies in allits lessons and all its warnings with ten times greater force to the India of to-day, which, with the three-fold curse upon it of famine, of drought, and of plague, finds the British Government too engrossed in its aggressive and criminal war in South Africa to come to the relief of its Indian Empire, where tens of thousands of human lives, and millions of animals, are wasting in death and in despair.

Several years ago, at the moment when Mr Chamberlain, having abandoned the Liberal Party, was adored by the party which calls itself Conservative, I looked at him one evening after a dinner in a well-known house in Belgrave Square. He was standing, surrounded by the loveliest and most fashionable women of society, who were offering him a homage which must have been delightful to him. It was an interesting, if rather comical, spectacle, and I imagine that Chamberlain, though he gave no sign of doing so, enjoyed it extremely, and laughed at it in his sleeve. His physiognomy indicates his character; it has no distinction, but it is full of energy, intelligence, and resolution; it is the physiognomy of a tradesman, not of a statesman, of a person extremely keen and acute, obstinate and cruel, but not by any means intellectual. The eternal eyeglass serves to hide such expression as his features might have, and the nose, short andrétroussé, makes plebeian lineaments which might without this defect be sufficiently regular. In these later times he has aged more than his years perhapsjustify, and it is said that he suffers from neuralgia and gout. He is always well dressed; 'too well' an ex-Viceroy murmured to me that evening; and he is never seen, as everyone knows, without an orchid in his button-hole; a flower always culled in one of those famous orchid-houses at Highbury, which, before his conversion, the Tory ladies longed so passionately to burn down, in days when he was considered odious, accursed, almost an Antichrist!—days not so very distant as the life of a nation counts.

It was always said, at the time of his apostasy, that he left the Radicals out of jealousy of Gladstone's greater powers, and of the magnetism which Gladstone exercised over all his colleagues; and also because amongst the Liberals there was Lord Rosebery, then in the fulness of promise; there was Vernon Harcourt, then extremely eloquent and much followed; and there was also in the Home Rule Party that great genius, known amongst men as Charles Stewart Parnell, in whom Chamberlain felt an irresistible superiority. If this were the reason, he must now be content, since in his present party he has no rival in the Cabinet, no one ventures to contradict him, and he isde facto, though not yetde jure, the head of the present Government. There have been many men of distinction before him in the somewhat subordinate post of Secretary of the Colonies, notably the late Lord Carnarvon, and the first Lord Lytton; but no one has ever made of this Department the throne of the Suprema Lex as Mr Chamberlain has contrived to do. The fault of whom, or the fault of what, liesat the root of this successful usurpation? Let us endeavour to discover, for the problem is interesting; and one of its most strange phenomena is to see Robert Cecil, Marquis of Salisbury, fallen under the dominion of the Birmingham screw-maker.

In the whole of the Tory Party, Chamberlain has no one who opposes him, no one who approaches him for strength of character and for acuteness of perception, one may also add for unscrupulousness in principle and in action. The sole person of the party who could have imposed authority upon him by superiority of intellect would have been Lord Salisbury; but either through force of energy on his own part, or by lack of energy on his chief's, he has been able completely to rule and influence the master of Hatfield, as he has succeeded in ruling and influencing all others who sit round the ministerial table in Downing Street. A friend of mine speaking once to me of Lord Salisbury, whom he knew intimately, said, 'He is a fine big cannon, but he won't go off; I doubt if he will ever go off.' It is probable that Chamberlain had the same opinion, and therefore resolved himself to manœuvre and fire the cannon. Anyhow, he has acted well for himself in leaving the Radicals to ally himself with their adversaries. If posterity blame him, and call him a turncoat, I imagine that he is a man to whom the verdict of posterity is absolutely indifferent. He is as 'hard as nails,' to use an appropriate if common phrase; he is cynical and selfish; and to a politician of this stamp, reputation in history is a matter of extreme indifference; fame must seem to him only a carnival-masquer, noisily blowing a tin trumpet.

Napoleon, after the campaign of Egypt, said once, 'If I die to-morrow I shall only have half a page in a universal dictionary.' To Chamberlain, I believe, it would be wholly indifferent to have the half page, or even a whole page. What suffices to him is to dominate and lead other men while he lives. He is called inordinately ambitious, but his ambition is essentially practical, not ideal. He wishes for the loaves and fishes; a laurel crown would be to him a useless thing, unless it represented to him solid lucre. Would he have succeeded if he had been born half a century earlier? I doubt it. In the first half of the past century, men admired in the ministers who ruled them very different qualities to those which he possesses. On the other hand, his qualities are precisely those which beget and command fortune in the actual moment; and by this I intend no compliment either to him or to his times.

In an epoch more courageous, more honest, more well-bred than the present, a great Party calling itself Conservative would have repulsed with contempt any renegade Radical, however disguised in the domino of a Unionist. Instead, this Party has received him with open arms, nay, with prostrate self-effacement, and worshipped him with enthusiasm; indeed, the victory of the so-called Tories at the urns in 1895 would not have been possible if Chamberlain had not permitted it; which he would not have done unless he had been assured that he would enter and dominate the Salisbury Cabinet. He has been equally happy in the occasions which have presented themselves to him, and in his own capability in using them; in the mediocrity of the men who combine with him,and of the men who oppose him; in his infinite ability in influencing the first, and in intimidating the last; he has been fortunate also in the fact that the English people are less bigoted in religion than of old; for in an earlier time they would have seen with horror a Unitarian entering the Government. But his greatest good fortune of all was in the rise of the Home Rule question at the very moment when he conceived the project of going over to the Tory camp, which, without such an opportune reason to give for it, would have appeared mere unworthy treachery. Without the platform of Home Rule from which to make hissaut pèrilleux, the leap would have probably broken his neck; at any rate he could not have made it with the certainty of being welcomed and rewarded by his new allies, and of occupying amongst them a position far more conspicuous than he ever occupied with the Radicals.

His favouring star has also given him the marvellous good luck that in the past year the death of Lord Salisbury's consort has so depressed and preoccupied the Premier that the latter has almost entirely ceased to occupy himself with the cares of office, and the Colonial Secretary has been given more and more completely, with every month, a free hand.

To me it has always seemed, during these later months of 1899, and since, that the Sovereign should have bidden Lord Salisbury either dismiss Chamberlain from office, or surrender office himself; for since Chamberlain was allowed virtually to hold the helm of the State, heshould have been forced to accept the responsibility of the State's navigation.

Chamberlain has frequently declared that he has not changed in anything; that he has not been an opportunist; that the Tory Party has come to him, and has granted all his desires, accepted all his policy; and in this statement of his there is some truth, if not an entire truth. As two negatives make an affirmative, perhaps two desertions make a fidelity! It is certain that the Tory Party has forsaken its old paths quite as much as Chamberlain has his, indeed probably far more, for there is no conservatism whatsoever in the acts of the so-called Conservative Cabinets, and in his there is a great deal of radicalism still, even of socialism, though this is oddly united to a hybrid and artificial toryism.

An eminent Conservative, a member of the Upper House, assured me the other day that he honestly believed that Chamberlain had never done anything which would prevent him at any time from being able, honourably, to become the leader of the Radical Party. If this be admitted, what are we to think of the Tory Party which can find no other guide and saviour than this consistent Radical? Either the consistent Radical, or the inconsistent Conservative Party, has 'ratted' in the most barefaced manner. One or the other has been false to primal faith; and there is only a very small band of independent thinkers who venture to declare this. For Chamberlain has had the supreme cleverness to get himself taken by the public as a patriot, and to oppose him, therefore, lays open his opponent to a charge of want ofpatriotism. This is extremely absurd; but it is to him enormously useful; and he knows that the nation which he 'personally conducts' is not logical or critical. He has taken its measure very accurately.

The new hysterical creed of 'Imperialism' doubtless gained an impetus, Home Rule equally certainly lost, by the change of front of 'Birmingham Joe.' But the aristocratic party was harnessed like a cab-horse to the triumphal car of the New Unionist, and has ever since then remained thus harnessed. In the history of English politics these passages will contribute a chapter which will not edify the readers of the next generation; especially if its climax be, as it will be almost certainly, the apotheosis of Chamberlain after a campaign of aggression and conquest conceived and carried out by him and the Yellow Press which he inspires. It is he who is responsible for the financiers' war in South Africa; he might call it proudly, 'my war,' as the Empress Eugénie called the war with Germany, 'ma guerre à moi.' If he had never been anything higher than Mayor of Birmingham the farmers of the Transvaal would still be ploughing their lands in peace.

The war was desired, conceived, and imposed on his colleagues by the Minister of the Colonies, without any appeal to or sanction of Parliament. He denies this, but it is clearly proved by his famous speech at Highbury and by the text of his irritating and provocative despatches; and it was only when that war was begun, beyond all possibility of alteration, that the Prime Minister, after long silence, accepted the responsibility ofit in his speech at the Guildhall. Lord Salisbury, in that Mansion House speech, of course, denied the allegation then made by the President of the French Chamber of Commerce as to the motives and causes of the war; but no one who has attentively followed the actions and expressions of Chamberlain before and after the Jameson Raid, and his conduct at the enquiry held upon the conduct therein of Cecil Rhodes, can for a moment doubt the intimate relations which united the Colonial Secretary and the founder of Rhodesia and the Chartered.

Chamberlain, who, at the close of the Committee of Enquiry of 1897, had, in common with other signatories, signed a statement that Rhodes was culpable, declared a few days later in the House of Commons that Rhodes was a man whose honour was untarnished! This, more than any other fact, shows to what depths it is now possible to descend in English politics. Certainly, in the time of Peel or of the earlier Governments of Gladstone, a Minister capable of such conduct would have lost alike office and seat in Parliament. Chamberlain, living in times of more elastic morality, did not lose even a single follower.

'Joseph Chamberlain has brought into English politics the habits and criterions of a commercial traveller,' an eminent Englishman wrote to me the other day. 'And of a commercial traveller not burdened by scruples.' Now, the man of trade may have considerable qualities, great intelligence, and great enterprise, but his mind and his acts are those of a tradesman, not those of a gentleman, or of a statesman. Chamberlain boasted in public one day that he belonged to the Partyof Gentlemen; now no gentleman would ever have so expressed himself.

The tradesman inevitably brings into public life the traditions of his counting-house; those traditions are to try, invariably,de rouler les autres. Now public life should be something more than, and very different to, the pursuit of speculation; and its aims should be higher than the mere desire to trick a rival and send shares up or down. True, statecraft in our day is chiefly 'land-grabbing' and an effort to bridle democracy by taxation. Still it is a different art to the art of the merchant's or manufacturer's office. When Chamberlain endeavours to be diplomatic he becomes inane: a person (who must have been verynaïf) wrote to him the other day to ask if it were true that it had always been his wish and intention to make war on the Boers, he replied to this simpleton of a correspondent, 'I fear there will always be those who will attribute to me the worst motives. Tennyson has said that every man attributes to another the motives which would actuate himself'—and that was all! I imagine he thought this reply very ingenious and tactful.

He is no doubt adroit and ingenious in his management of men; but his cunning does not wear the smiling and elegant mask which a politician's should do. He does not possess the talent most necessary of all to a politician, of taking refuge in exquisitely-turned phrases which seem to reveal everything and reveal nothing. His voice is flexible and fine, his deliverance imposes, but his statements are frequently impudently cynical, and it is easy todiscern that he holds men very cheap, and in no way hesitates to use, to abuse, and to deceive them. He is never really frank in his replies, though he affects candour; he often approaches brutality; he loses his temper easily; and the spectator sees by the nerves of his face and the movements of his limbs that he has not the self-control andsang-froid, which are natural gifts of the man of race and breeding. But despite these defects and these offences he has conquered both society and his colleagues, and one sees scholarly and refined men like Mr Arthur Balfour hopelessly and helplessly hypnotised by him. He has taken with him into Downing Street the manners and the methods with which he governed the town councillors of Birmingham; and these succeed equally well in his altered atmosphere. 'We are all horribly afraid of him,' one of his colleagues said the other day to a friend of mine; probably because he is the only man amongst them ill-bred and ill-tempered enough to be disagreeable and dangerous. In earlier days, in those of Derby, of Palmerston, of Melbourne, Westminster would not have tolerated him for a single session; in times when orators quoting Greek or Latin verse were sure to be understood by either House, when classical allusions were caught flying, when accuracy and consistency were esteemed necessary in debate, the speeches of the present Colonial Secretary would not have been thought tolerable.

But the Great Britain of Lord Grey, of Canning, of Sydney Herbert, of the Rupert of Debate, of the first half of Gladstone's political life is dead and gone; and Disraeli has passed over its grave,of which he was the digger. Disraeli and his influence have dominated and penetrated English political and social atmospheres, in their highest strata, as a contagious fever enters and reigns in a district. It was a strange phenomenon, the Venetian Jew leading by the leash the entire English aristocracies. To trace the manifold reasons which enabled a man so alien and antipathetic to the British nation in blood, in manner, in appearance, in opinions, to dominate that nation so completely would require many folio volumes; for there has never been anything more singular, or more due to innumerable causes, all converging to one end.

No spectacle is more extraordinary than the power which Disraeli acquired after being laughed down by everyone; acquired, and wields still, so many years after his death. I think that his most potent philtre lay in his flattery. He flattered his Sovereign, his party, and the nation itself, with all the florid eloquence and subtle suggestion of which he was so admirable a master. His famous 'Peace with Honour' was an exact sample of his style; the peace was brittle and the honour was dubious, but his manner of presenting them was so magnificent that they were received as though they were gifts from heaven. An able writer has said that the English are deficient in the power of observation, and I believe it is true. They do not examine critically before committing themselves to embrace a cause or an idea; they can easily be led into any extravagance which humours their national humour. Disraeli played on this weakness. He had himself a passion for advertisement,for varnish and gilding, and florid decoration; all his speeches and all his romances are spoilt by these; and he succeeded in inoculating with this taste the English character to which it was naturally alien.

The first sign of the nation having been so inoculated was given when it allowed Disraeli to call the Queen of England the Empress of India, and change an ancient monarchy into aparvenuempire. The first step taken, the rest followed; the mania of what is considered aggrandisement has acquired possession of the national life, and has made of a nation, naturally noble and great, a swollen boaster, bawling of its millions, its might, and its superiority, although surely vanity is no more admirable in a country than in an individual? This alteration in the British temper, which was primarily the work of Disraeli and of the new nobility (chiefly commercial and largely Jewish), which was called into being, prepared the ground for Chamberlain's Imperialism, a much coarser and greedier thing, without any of the veil of ideality which Disraeli lent to his creeds. In the time of Disraeli, the temper of England was still largely coloured by an old aristocracy, retaining, with the prejudices, the principles of gentlemen; now, the financiers and the speculators make the old aristocracy dance to whatever music they choose, and riches are the sole thing sought.

Every Ministry in England, on going out of office, leaves its contingent of ennobled tradesmen, raised to the peerage solely for their money, and for the way in which they have spent their money for the Party. Inthis way the so-called Conservative leaders possess a solid phalanx of supporters whose wealth makes them irresistible in the country, and who practically send up to Westminster any men they choose. These greatrichardsfind Joseph Chamberlain more to their taste than Lord Salisbury, who is too scholarly, too satirical, and too great a gentleman for them; his health is failing, he speaks rarely, there is a cynical contempt in his occasional speeches which cuts thenovi homineslike a whip. It is impossible that a man of Lord Salisbury's pride of character and acuteness of intellect should much longer consent to be the mere echo of his Colonial Secretary. There is every sign that his retirement will be followed by the accession to the premiership of Chamberlain. For months past the Imperialist Press, and notably that journal which is the property of the Chancellor of the Primrose League, has been insinuating that no one except Chamberlain is capable of rising to the height required by advanced Imperialism: and what this journal says is certain to be echoed by that party, which, with an audacity almost sublime, still calls itself Conservative.

Chamberlain has continued the work of Disraeli, but he has done so by vulgarising and brutalising it. The best qualities of the English character are, under his influence, lost in a blatant self-admiration. Its sense of morality is blunted; its leaders accept any denial or excuse of the Minister of the Colonies, and he is applauded when, as an independent Member said a few weeks since in the House of Commons, he should be called to the bar of the House. Parliament,and the nation after it, accept the suppression of despatches and telegrams, the use and abuse of censorship, the denial and interruption of free speech, the closure of debate at the moment when its continuance would be inconvenient to ministers: all things previously intolerable to the English people. Chamberlain has educated them into the abandonment of all their ancient virtues. If, as he is almost certain to do if he live, he become before long the Premier of England, he will do immeasurable harm both to Great Britain and the world.

The reign of Queen Victoria has been a long succession of wars; few, if any, were either necessary or inevitable. But not one of these has been a war of defence at home; the English citizen and peasant know nothing in their own land of the horrors of war; they have never seen its desolation and its horrors; they have never seen their little children crushed under the hoofs and wheels of a battery, their homes set on fire by a shell, their sons starving, their fields devastated, their towns beleaguered. They have never seen a battle, a siege, a trench full of dead; therefore they do not know the hideous suffering which they inflict when they let loose, in pride of spirit and lightness of heart and triumphant vanity, the fiends of war upon a distant people and a far-off land. This is the excuse of a large portion of the nation for the present war; but it is at the same time the strongest condemnation of those who preach war to it as a divine creed, and appeal to its most brutal instincts, and abuse its ignorance to lead it into crime. The victories now gained will be dearlybought, for they, and the national madness they produce, will certainly set Joseph Chamberlain in the seat of supreme power, and no one will have the courage to restrain his hand. Bellona has served him so well now, she will be his chosen handmaid in the future.[9]

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