To judge fairly all that Carlyle effected by his book on Heroes we must put ourselves at the point of view of the time when it was written, the days of Wellington and Melbourne, Brougham and Macaulay, Southey and Coleridge. None of these men understood the heroic in Norse mythology, or the grandeur of Oliver Cromwell, or the supreme importance of theDivina Commediaas the embodiment of Catholic Feudalism. All this Carlyle felt as no Englishman before him had felt, and told us in a voice which has since been accepted as conclusive. How far deeper is the view of Carlyle about some familiar personality like Johnson than is that of Macaulay, how much farther does Carlyle see into the Shakesperean firmament than even Coleridge! How far better does he understand Rousseau and Burns than did Southey, laureate and critic as he was hailed in his time. The book is a collection of Lectures, and we now know how entirely Carlyle loathed that kind of utterance, how much he felt the restraints and limits it involved. And for that reason, the book is the simplest and most easily legible of his works, with the least of his mannerism and the largest concessions to the written language of sublunary mortals. Nearly all the judgments he passes are not only sound, but now almost universally accepted. To deal with the heroic in history, he needed, as he said, six months rather than six days. It was intended, he told his hearers, "to break ground," to clear up misunderstandings. It has done this: and a rich crop has resulted from his ploughshare.
Nothing but a few sketches could be compressed into six hours. But it is curious how many things seem omitted in this survey of the heroic. At the age of forty-five Carlyle had not recognised Friedrich at all, for he does not figure in the "Hero as King." Napoleon takes his place, though Bonaparte was a "hero" only in the bad sense of hero which Carlyle was seeking to explode. It is well that, since he finished theFrench Revolution, Carlyle seems to have found out that Bonaparte "parted with Reality," and had become a charlatan, a sham. Still for all that, he remains "our last great man." Mazzini was present at the delivery of these lectures: and when he had listened to this last, he went up to Carlyle and told him that he had undone his Hero-Worship and had fallen from the truth; and from that hour Mazzini would hold no terms with the gospel of One-Man. To make Hero-Worship close with the installation of Napoleon as "our last great man," was to expose the inherent weakness of the Sartorian creed—that humanity exists for the sake of its great men. The other strange delusion is the entire omission from the "Hero as Priest" of any Catholic hero. Not only are St. Bernard, and St. Francis, Becket and Lanfranc—all the martyrs and missionaries of Catholicism—consigned to oblivion:—but not a word is said of Alfred, Godfrey, St. Louis, St. Ferdinand, and St. Stephen. In a single volume there must be selection of types. But the whole idea of Hero-Worship was perverted in a plan which had no room for a single Catholic chief or priest.
This perverse exaggeration of Puritan religion, and the still more unjust hatred of Catholic religion, unfortunately runs through all Carlyle's work, and perhaps nowhere breaks out in so repulsive a form as in the piece called "Jesuitism" (1850), in theLatter-Day Pamphlets(No. VIII.). Discarding the creed, the practice, and the language of Puritanism, Carlyle still retained its narrowness, its self-righteousness, its intolerance, and its savagery. The moralist, to whom John Knox was a hero, but St. Bernard was not, but only a follower of the "three-hatted Papa," and an apostle of "Pig's-wash," was hardly the man to exhaust the heroic in history. In the "Hero as Man-of-Letters," Carlyle was at home. If ever pure letters produced a hero, the sage of Chelsea was one. With Johnson, with Rousseau, he is perfectly rational, and the mass of literature which has accumulated round the names of these two, only tends to confirm the essential justice of Carlyle's estimate. Nor need we dispute his estimate of the vigour and manliness of Burns. It is only when Carlyle describes him as "the most gifted British soul" in the eighteenth century—the century of Hume, Adam Smith, Fielding, and Burke—that we begin to smile. Burns was a noble-hearted fellow, as well as a born poet. But perhaps the whole cycle of Sartorian extravaganza contains no saying so futile as the complaint, that the British nation in the great war with France entrusted their destinies to a phantasmic Pitt, instead of to "the Thunder-god, Robert Burns." Napoleon would no doubt have welcomed such a change of ministry. It is incoherences of this sort which undo so much of the splendid service that Carlyle gave to his age.
But we are not willing to let the defects of Carlyle's philosophy drive out of mind the permanent and beautiful things in his literary work.Past and Present(1843) is certainly a success—a happy and true thought, full of originality, worked out with art and power. The idea of embedding a living and pathetic picture of monastic life in the twelfth century, and a minute study of the labours of enlightened churchmen in the early struggles of civilisation—the idea of embedding this tale, as if it were the remains of some disinterred saint, in the midst of a series of essays on the vices and weaknesses of modern society—was a highly original and instructive device, only to be worked to success by a master. And the master brought it to a delightful success. In all his writings of thirty volumes there are few pages more attractive than the story of Jocelin of Brakelond, Abbot Hugo, Abbot Samson, and the festival of St. Edmund, which all pass away as in a vision leaving "a mutilated black ruin amidst green expanses"—as we so often see in our England to-day after the trampling of seven centuries over the graves of the early monks.
And then, when the preacher passes suddenly from the twelfth century to the nineteenth, from toiling and ascetic monks to cotton spinners and platform orators—the effect is electric—as though some old Benedictine rose from the dead and began to preach in the crowded streets of a city of factories. Have we yet, after fifty years of this time of tepid hankering after Socialism and Theophilanthropic experiments, got much farther than Thomas Carlyle in his preaching in Book IV. on "Aristocracies," "Captains of Industry," "The Landed," "The Gifted"? What truth, what force in the aphorism:—"To predict the Future, to manage the Present, would not be so impossible, had not the Past been so sacrilegiously mishandled; effaced, and what is worse, defaced!"—"Of all Bibles, the frightfulest to disbelieve in is this 'Bible of Universal History'"—"The Leaders of Industry, if Industry is ever to be led, are virtually the Captains of the World." What new meaning that phrase has acquired in these fifty years! "Men of letters may become a 'chivalry,' an actual instead of a virtual Priesthood." Well! not men of letters exactly: but perhaps philosophers, with an adequate moral and scientific training. Here, as so often, Carlyle just missed a grand truth to which his insight and nobility of soul had led him, through his perverse inability to accept any systematic philosophy, and through his habit to listen to the whispering of his own heart as if it were equivalent to scientific certainty. But the whole book,Past and Present, is a splendid piece and has done much to mould the thought of our time. It would impress us much more than it does, were it not already become the very basis of all sincere thought about social problems and the future conditions of industry.
Of theCromwell's Letters and Speeches(1845) we have already spoken, as the greatest of our author's effective products, inasmuch as it produced the most definite practical result in moulding opinion, and a result of the highest importance. But it is not, as we have seen, a work of art, or even an organic work at all, and it cannot compare in literary charm with some other of the author's works. We do not turn to theCromwellagain and again, as we do to theFrench Revolution, or toSartor, which we can take up from time to time as we do a poem or a romance. Many of the great books of the world are not read and re-read by the public, just as none but special students continually resort to theNovum Organum, or theWealth of Nations. For similar reasons, theCromwellwill never be a favourite book with the next century, as it cannot be said to have been with ours. It has done its work with masterly power; and its work will endure. And some day perhaps, from out these materials, and those collected by Mr. Gardiner, and by [Transcriber's note: next two words transliterated from Greek]oi periGardiner, aLife of Cromwellmay be finally composed.
It is true that Carlyle's determination to force Oliver upon us as perfect saint and infallible hero is irritating and sometimes laughable; it is true that his zeal to be-dwarf every one but Cromwell himself is unjust and untrue; and the depreciation of every man who declines to play into Oliver's hands is too often manifest. But, on the whole, the judgments are so sound, the supporting authorities are so overwhelming, the work of verification is so thorough, so scrupulous, so perfectly borne out by all subsequent research—that the future will no doubt look on theCromwell, not only as the most extraordinary, but the most satisfactory and effective of all Carlyle's work; although for the reasons stated, it can never have the largest measure of his literary charm or possess the full afflatus of his poetic and mystical genius.
By the time thatCromwellwas published, Thomas Carlyle was turned of fifty, and had produced nearly two-thirds of his total work. It may be doubted if any later book will be permanently counted amongst his masterpieces.Friedrich, for reasons set forth, was an attempt in late life to repeat the feat of theCromwell: it was a much less urgent task: and it was not so well performed. TheLatter-Day Pamphlets(1850) do not add much that is new toPast and Present(1843) or toSartor(1831); and little of what they add is either needful or true. The world had been fully enlightened about Wind-bags, Shams, the approach to Tophet, Stump-orators, Palaver-Parliaments, Phantasm-Captains, and the rest of the Sartorian puppet-pantomime. There was a profound truth in all of these invectives, warnings, and prophecies. But the prophet's voice at last got so shrieky and monotonous, that instead of warning and inspiring a second generation, these terrific maledictions began to pall upon a practical world. An ardent admirer of the prophet has said that, when he first heard Carlyle speak face to face, he could hardly resist the impression that he was listening to an actor personating the Sage of Chelsea, and mimicking the stock phrases of theLatter-Day Pamphlets. Certainly no man of sense can find any serious guidance on any definite social problem from these "Pamphlets" of his morbid decline. Carlyle at last sat eating his heart out, like Napoleon on St. Helena. His true friends will hasten to throw such a decent covering as Japhet and Shem threw around Noah, over the latest melancholy outbursts about Negroes, Reformers, Jamaica massacres, and the anticipated conflagration of Paris by the Germans. It is pitiful indeed to find in "the collected and revised works," thirty-six volumes, the drivel of his Pro-Slavery advocacy, and of ill-conditioned snarling at honest men labouring to reform ancient abuses.
It is perilous for any man, however consummate be his genius, to place himself on a solitary rock apart from all living men and defiant of all before him, as the sole source of truth out of his own inner consciousness. It is fatal to any man, however noble his own spirit, to look upon this earth as "one fuliginous dust-heap," and the whole human race as a mere herd of swine rushing violently down a steep place into the sea. Nor can the guidance of mankind be with safety entrusted to one who for eighty-six years insisted on remaining by his own hearth-stone a mere omnivorous reader and omnigenous writer of books. Carlyle was a true and pure "man of letters," looking at things and speaking to men, alone in his study, through the medium of printed paper. All that a "man of letters," of great genius and lofty spirit, could do by consuming and producing mere printed paper, he did. And as the "supreme man of letters" of his time he will ever be honoured and long continue to be read. He deliberately cultivated a form of speech which made him unreadable to all except English-speaking readers, and intelligible only to a select and cultivated body even amongst them. He wrote in what, for practical purposes, is a local, or rather personal, dialect. And thus he deprived himself of that world-wide and European influence which belongs to such men as Hume, Gibbon, Scott, Byron—even to Macaulay, Tennyson, Dickens, Ruskin, and Spencer. But his name will stand beside theirs in the history of British thought in the nineteenth century; and a devoted band of chosen readers, wherever the Anglo-Saxon tongue is heard, will for generations to come continue to drink inspiration from the two or three masterpieces of the Annandale peasant-poet.
Macaulay, who counted his years of life by those of this century, may fairly claim to have had the greatest body of readers, and to be the most admired prose-writer of the Victorian Age. It is now some seventy years since his first brilliant essay on "Milton" took the world by storm. It is half a century since that fascinating series ofEssayswas closed, and little short of that time since his famousHistoryappeared. The editions of it in England and in America are counted by thousands; it has six translations into German, and translations into ten other European languages. It made him rich, famous, and a peer. Has it given him a foremost place in English literature?
Here is a case where the judgment of the public and the judgment of experts is in striking contrast. The readers both of the Old and of the New World continue to give the most practical evidence that they love his books. Macaulay is a rare example of a writer all of whose works are almost equally popular, and believed by many to be equally good.Essays, Lays, History, Lives—all are read by millions: as critic, poet, historian, biographer, Macaulay has achieved world-wide renown. And yet some of our best critics deny him either fine taste, or subtlety, or delicate discrimination, catholic sympathies, or serene judgment. They say he is always more declaimer than thinker—more advocate than judge. The poets deny that theLaysare poetry at all. The modern school of scientific historians declare that theHistoryis a splendid failure, and it proves how rotten was the theory on which it is constructed. The purists in style shake their heads over his everlasting antitheses, the mannerism of violent phrases and the perpetual abuse of paradox. His most indulgent friends admit the force of these defects, which they usually speak of as his "limitations" or his "methods." Here, indeed, is an opportunity for one of those long-drawn antitheses of which Macaulay was so great a master. How he would himself have revelled in the paradox—"that books which were household words with every cow-boy in Nevada, and every Baboo in Bengal, were condemned by men of culture as the work of a Philistine and a mannerist"; "how ballads which were the delight of every child were ridiculed by critics as rhetorical jingles that would hardly win a prize in a public school"; "how the most famous of all modern reviewers scarcely gave us one example of delicate appreciation or subtle analysis"; how it comes about "that the most elaborate of modern histories does not contain an idea above the commonplaces of a crammer's textbook"—and so forth, in the true Black-and-White style which is so clear and so familiar. But let us beware of applying to Macaulay himself that tone of exaggeration and laborious antithesis which he so often applied to others. Boswell, he says, was immortal, "becausehe was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb." It would be a feeble parody to retort that Macaulay became a great literary power "because he had no philosophy, little subtlety, and a heavy hand." For my part, I am slow to believe that the judgment of the whole English-speaking race, a judgment maintained over more than half a century, can be altogether wrong; and the writer who has given such delight, has influenced so many writers, and has taught so much to so many persons, can hardly have been a shallow mannerist, or an ungovernable partisan. No one denies that Macaulay had a prodigious knowledge of books; that in literary fecundity and in varied improvisation he has rarely been surpassed; that his good sense is unfailing, his spirit manly, just, and generous; and lastly, that his command over language had unequalled qualities of precision, energy, and brilliance. These are all very great and sterling qualities. And it is right to acknowledge them with no unstinted honour—even whilst we are fully conscious of the profound shortcomings and limitations that accompanied but did not destroy them.
In a previous paper we discussed the permanent contribution to English literature of Thomas Carlyle; and it is curious to note how complete a contrast these two famous writers present. Carlyle was a simple, self-taught, recluse man of letters: Macaulay was legislator, cabinet minister, orator, politician, peer—a pet of society, a famous talker, and member of numerous academies. Carlyle was poor, despondent, morbid, and cynical: Macaulay was rich, optimist, overflowing with health, high spirits, and good nature. The one hardly ever knew what the world called success: the other hardly ever knew failure. Carlyle had in him the elements that make the poet, the prophet, the apostle, the social philosopher. In Macaulay these were singularly wanting; he was the man of affairs, the busy politician, the rhetorician, the eulogist of society as it is, the believer in material progress, in the ultimate triumph of all that is practical and commonplace, and in the final discomfiture of all that is visionary and Utopian. The Teufelsdröckhian dialect is obscure even to its select students: the Macaulay sentence is plain as that of Swift himself. Carlyle's gospel is full of passion, novelty, suggestion, theory, and social problems. Macaulay turned his back on social problems and disdained any kind of gospel. He had no mission to tell the world how bad it is; on the contrary, he was never wearied with his proofs that it ought to be well satisfied with its lot and its vast superiority in all things to its ancestors.
The great public, wherever English books penetrate, from the White Sea to Australia, from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, loves the brilliant, manly, downright optimist; the critics and the philosophers care more for the moody and prophetic pessimist. But this does not decide the matter; and it does not follow that either public or critic has the whole truth. If books were written only in the dialect, and with the apocalyptic spirit ofSartor, it is certain that millions would cease to read books, and could gain little from books if they did. And if the only books were such "purple patches" of history as Macaulay left us, with their hard and fast divisions of men into sheep and goats, and minute biographies of fops, pedants, and grandees, narrated in the same resonant, rhetorical, unsympathetic, and falsely emphatic style—this generation would have a very patchwork idea of past ages and a narrow sense of the resources of our English language. There is room for both literary schools, and we need teachers of many kinds. We must not ask of any kind more than they can give. Macaulay has led millions who read no one else, or who never read before, to know something of the past, and to enjoy reading. He will have done them serious harm if he has persuaded them that this is the best that can be done in historical literature, or that this is the way in which the English language can be most fitly used. Let us be thankful for his energy, learning, brilliance. He is no priest, philosopher, or master. Let us delight in him as a fireside companion.
In one thing all agree—critics, public, friends, and opponents. Macaulay's was a life of purity, honour, courage, generosity, affection, and manly perseverance, almost without a stain or a defect. His life, it was true, was singularly fortunate, and he had but few trials, and no formidable obstacles. He was bred up in the comfortable egoism of the opulent middle classes; the religion of comfort,laisser-faire, and social order was infused into his bones. But, so far as his traditions and temper would permit, his life was as honourable, as unsullied, and as generous, as ever was that of any man who lived in the fierce light that beats upon the famous. We know his nature and his career as well as we know any man's; and we find it on every side wholesome, just, and right. He has been fortunate in his biographers, and amply criticised by the best judges. His nephew, Sir George Trevelyan, has written his life at length in a fine book. Dean Milman and Mark Pattison have given us vignettes; Cotter Morison has adorned theMen of Lettersseries with a delightful and sympathetic sketch; and John Morley and Leslie Stephen have weighed his work in the balance with judicial acumen and temperate firmness. There is but one voice in all this company. It was a fine, generous, honourable, and sterling nature. His books deserve their vast popularity and may long continue to maintain it. But Macaulay must not be judged amongst philosophers—nor even amongst the real masters of the English language. And, unless duly corrected, he may lead historical students astray and his imitators into an obtrusive mannerism.
Let us take a famous passage from one of his most famous essays, written in the zenith of his powers after his return from India, at the age of forty—an essay on a grand subject which never ceased to fascinate his imagination, composed with all his amazing resources of memory and his dazzling mastery of colour. It is the third paragraph of his well-known review of Von Ranke'sHistory of the Popes. The passage is familiar to all readers, and some of its phrases are household words. It is rather long as well as trite; but it contains in a single page such a profusion of historical suggestion; it is so vigorous, so characteristic of Macaulay in all his undoubted resources as in all his mannerism and limitations; it is so essentially true, and yet so thoroughly obvious; it is so grand in form, and yet so meagre in philosophic logic, that it may be worth while to analyse it in detail; and for that purpose it must be set forth, even though it convey to most readers little more than a sonorous truism.
There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth, to the farthest ends of the world, missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated her for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendancy extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which, a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all the other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had crossed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
Here we have Macaulay in all his strength and all his limitations. The passage contains in the main a solid truth—a truth which was very little accepted in England in the year 1840—a truth of vast import and very needful to assert. And this truth is clothed in such pomp of illustration, and is hammered into the mind with such accumulated blows; it is so clear, so hard, so coruscating with images, that it is impossible to escape its effect. The paragraph is one never to be forgotten, and not easy to be refuted or qualified. No intelligent tiro in history can read that page without being set a-thinking, without feeling that he has a formidable problem to solve. Tens of thousands of young minds must have had that deeply-coloured picture of Rome visibly before them in many a Protestant home in England and in America. Now, all this is a very great merit. To have posed a great historical problem, at a time when it was very faintly grasped, and to have sent it ringing across the English-speaking world in such a form that he who runs may read—nay, he who rides, he who sails, he who watches sheep or stockmustread—this is a real and signal service conferred on literature and on thought. Compare this solid sense with Carlyle's ribaldry about "the three-hatted Papa," "pig's wash," "servants of the Devil," "this accursed nightmare," and the rest of his execrations—and we see the difference between the sane judgment of the man of the world and the prejudices of intolerant fanaticism.
But, unfortunately, Macaulay, having stated in majestic antitheses his problem of "the unchangeable Church," makes no attempt to provide us with a solution. This splendid eulogium is not meant to convert us to Catholicism—very far from it. Macaulay was no Catholic, and had only a sort of literary admiration for the Papacy. As Mr. Cotter Morison has shown, he leaves the problem just where he found it, and such theories as he offers are not quite trustworthy. He does not suggest that the Catholic Church is permanent because it possesses truth: but, rather, because men's ideas of truth are a matter of idiosyncrasy or digestion. The whole essay is not a very safe guide to the history of Protestantism or of Catholicism, though it is full of brilliant points and sensible assertions. And in the end our essayist, the rebel from his Puritan traditions, and the close ally of sceptical Gallios, after forty pages of learnedprosandcons, declares that he will not say more for fear of "exciting angry feelings." He rather sneers at Protestant fervour: he declaims grand sentences about Catholic fervour. He will not declare for either of them; and it does not seem to matter much in the long run for which men declare, provided they can be kept well in hand by saving common-sense. In the meantime the topic is a mine of paradox to the picturesque historian. This is not philosophy, it is not history, but it is full of a certain rich literary seed.
The passage, though a truism to all thoughtful men, was a striking novelty to English Protestants fifty years ago. But it will hardly bear a close scrutiny of these sweeping, sharp-edged, "cock-sure" dogmas of which it is composed. The exact propositions it contains may be singly accurate; but as to the most enduring "work of human policy," it is fair to remember that the Civil Law of Rome has a continuous history of at least twenty-four centuries; that the Roman Empire from Augustus to the last Constantine in New Rome endured for fifteen centuries; and from Augustus to the last Hapsburg it endured for eighteen centuries. There is a certain ambiguity between the way in which Macaulay alternates between the Papacy and the Christian Church, which are not at all the same thing. The Papacy, as a European or cosmical institution, can hardly be said to have more than twelve centuries of continuous history on the stage of the world. The religion and institutions of Confucius and of Buddha have twice that epoch; and the religion and institutions of Moses have thirty centuries; and the Califate in some form or other is nearly coeval with the Papacy. The judicious eulogist has guarded himself against denying in words any of these facts; but a cool survey of universal history will somewhat blunt the edge of Macaulay's trenchant phrases. After all, we must admit that the passage as a whole, apart from the superlatives, is substantially true, and contains a most valuable and very striking thought.
Passing from the thought to the form of this famous passage, with what a wealth of illustration is it enforced, with what telling contrasts, with what gorgeous associations! How vivid the images, how stately the personages, who are called up to heighten the lights of the tableau of the Vatican! Ancient and modern civilisation are joined by it; it recalls the Pantheon and the Colosseum; it gave sanction to the Empire of Charlemagne and to that of Napoleon, it inspired Augustin, and confronted Attila; Venice is a mere modern foundation; the Church is older than Hengist and Horsa, Clovis, or Mahomet; yet it stretches over the Atlantic continent from Missouri to Cape Horn, and still goes on conquering and to conquer. And the climax of this kaleidoscopic "symphony in purple and gold"—the New Zealander sketching the ruins of St. Paul's from a broken arch of London Bridge—has become a proverb, and is repeated daily by men who never heard of Macaulay, much less of Von Ranke, and is an inimitable bit of picturesque colouring. It is very telling, nobly hyperbolic, no man can misunderstand it, or forget it. The most practised hand will not find it easy to "go one better than" Macaulay in a swingeing trope. It is a fascinating literary artifice, and it has fascinated many to their ruin. In feebler hands, it degenerates into what in London journalistic slang is known as "telegraphese." A pocket encyclopaedia and a copious store of adjectives have enabled many a youth to roar out brilliant articles "as gently as a sucking dove." But all men of power have their imitators, and are open to parody and spurious coining. Now, Macaulay, however brilliant and kaleidoscopic, is always using his own vast reading, his own warm imagination, his unfailing fecundity, and his sterling good sense.
Turn to the style of the passage—it is perfectly pellucid in meaning, rings on the ear like the crack of a rifle, is sonorous, rich, and swift. One can fancy the whole passage spoken by an orator; indeed it is difficult to resist the illusion that it was "declaimed" before it was written. We catch the oratorial tags and devices, the repeated phrase, the incessant antithesis, the alternate rise and fall of eloquent speech. It is declamation—fine declamation—but we miss the musical undertones, the subtle involutions, the unexpected bursts, and mysterious cadences of really great written prose. The term "the Republic of Venice" is repeated three times in three lines: the term "the Papacy" is repeated three times in two lines. Any other writer would substitute a simple "it" for most of these; and it is difficult to see how the paragraph would lose. The orator aids his hearers by constant repetition of the same term; the writer avoids this lest he prove monotonous. The short sentences of four or five words interposed to break the torrent—the repetition of the same words—the see-saw of black and white, old and young, base and pure—all these are the stock-in-trade of the rhetorician, not of the master of written prose. Now, Macaulay was a rhetorician, a consummate rhetorician, who wrote powerful invectives or panegyrics in massive rhetoric which differed from speeches mainly in their very close fibre, in their chiselled phrasing, and above all in their dazzling profusion of literary illustration. If it was oratory, it was the oratory of a speaker of enormous reading, inexhaustible memory, and consummate skill with words.
There is nothing at all exceptional about this passage which has been chosen for analysis. It is a fair and typical piece of Macaulay's best style. Indeed his method is so uniform and so mechanical that any page of his writing exhibits the same force and the same defects as any other. Take one of the most famous of his scenes, the trial of Warren Hastings, toward the end of that elaborate essay, written in 1841. Every one knows the gorgeous and sonorous description of Westminster Hall, beginning—"The place was worthy of such a trial." In the next sentence the word "hall" recurs five times, and the relative "which" occurs three times, and is not related to the same noun. Ten sentences in succession open with the pronoun "there." It is a perfect galaxy of varied colour, pomp, and illustration; but the effect is somewhat artificial, and the whole scene smells of the court upholsterer. The "just sentence of Bacon" pairs off with "the just absolution of Somers"; the "greatest painter" sits beside the "greatest scholar of the age"; ladies have "lips more persuasive than those of Fox"; there, too, is "the beautiful mother of a beautiful race." And in the midst of these long-drawn superlatives and glittering contrasts come in short martial phrases, as brief and sharp as a drill-sergeant's word of command. "Neither military nor civil pomp was wanting"—"The avenues were lined with grenadiers"—"The streets were kept clear by cavalry." No man can forget these short, hard decisive sentences.
The artificial structure of his paragraphs grew upon Macaulay with age. HisHistory of Englandopens with a paragraph of four sentences. Each of these begins with "I purpose," "I shall"; and the last sentence of the four has ten clauses each beginning with "how." The next paragraph has four successive sentences beginning "It will be seen"—and the last sentence has again three clauses each beginning with "how." The fourth paragraph contains the word "I" four times in as many lines. This method of composition has its own merits. The repetition of words and phrases helps the perception and prevents the possibility of misunderstanding. Where effects are simply enumerated, the monotony of form is logically correct. Every successive sentence heralded by a repeated "how," or "there," or "I," adjusts itself into its proper line without an effort of thought on the reader's part. It is not graceful; it is pompous, and distinctly rhetorical. But it is eminently clear, emphatic, orderly, and easy to follow or to remember. Hence it is unpleasing to the finely-attuned ear, and is counted somewhat vulgar by the trained lover of style, whilst it is immensely popular with those who read but little, and is able to give them as much pleasure as it gives instruction.
The famous passage about Westminster Hall, written in 1841, may be compared with the equally known passage on the Chapel in the Tower which occurs in the fifth chapter of theHistory, written in 1848. It begins as all lovers of English remember—"In truth there is no sadder spot on the earth than this little cemetery." The passage continues with "there" and "thither" repeated eight times; it bristles with contrasts, graces and horrors, antithesis, climax, and sonorous heraldries. "Such was the dust with which the dust of Monmouth mingled." It is a fine paragraph, which has impressed and delighted millions. But it is, after all, rather facile moralising; its rhetorical artifice has been imitated with success in many a prize essay and not a few tall-talking journals. How much more pathos is there in a stanza from Gray'sElegy, or a sentence from Carlyle'sBastille, or Burke'sFrench Revolution!
The habit of false emphasis and the love of superlatives is a far worse defect, and no one has attempted to clear Macaulay of the charge. It runs through every page he wrote, from his essay on Milton, with which he astonished the town at the age of twenty-five, down to the close of hisHistorywherein we read that James II. valued Lord Perth as "author of the last improvements on the thumb-screw." Indeed no more glaring example of Macaulay'smegalomaniaor taste for exaggeration can be found than the famous piece in theMiltonon the Restoration of Charles II.
Then came those days, never to be recalled without a blush, the days of servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The king cringed to his rival that he might trample on his people, sank into a viceroy of France, and pocketed, with complacent infamy, her degrading insults, and her more degrading gold. The caresses of harlots and the jests of buffoons regulated the policy of the State. The government had just ability enough to deceive and just religion enough to persecute. The principles of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean. In every high place, worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and Moloch; and England propitiated these obscene and cruel idols with the blood of her best and bravest children. Crime succeeded to crime, and disgrace to disgrace, till the race, accursed of God and man, was a second time driven forth, to wander on the face of the earth, and to be a by-word and a shaking of the head to the nations.
This is vigorous invective, in the style of Cicero against Catiline, or Junius attacking a duke; it is brilliant rhetoric and scathing satire. At bottom it has substantial truth, if the attention is fixed on Whitehall and the scandalous chronicle of its frequenters. It differs also from much in Macaulay's invectives in being the genuine hot-headed passion of an ardent reformer only twenty-five years old. It is substantially true as a picture of the Court at the Restoration: but in form how extravagant, even of that! Charles II. is Belial; James is Moloch; and Charles ispropitiatedby the blood of Englishmen!—Charles, easy, courteous, good-natured, profligate Charles. And all this of the age of theParadise Lostand theMorning Hymn, of Jeremy Taylor, Izaak Walton, Locke, Newton, and Wren! Watch Macaulay banging on his antithetic drum—"servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love"—"dwarfish talents and gigantic vices"—"ability enough to deceive"—"religion enough to persecute." Every phrase is a superlative; every word has its contrast; every sentence has its climax. And withal let us admit that it is tremendously powerful, that no one who ever read it can forget it, and few even who have read it fail to be tinged with its fury and contempt. And, though a tissue of superlatives, it bears a solid truth, and has turned to just thoughts many a young spirit prone to be fascinated by Charles's good-nature, and impressed with the halo of the divine consecration of kings.
But the savage sarcasms which are tolerable in a passionate young reformer smarting under the follies of George IV., are a serious defect in a grave historian, when used indiscriminately of men and women in every age and under every condition. In hisMachiavelli, Macaulay hints that the best histories are perhaps "those in which a little of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed." "Much," he says, "is gained in effect." It is to be feared that this youthful indiscretion was never wholly purged out of him. Boswell, we know, was "a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb"—and thereforeimmortal. He was one of "the smallest men that ever lived," of "the meanest and feeblest intellect," "servile," "shallow," "a bigot and a sot," and so forth—and yet, "a great writer,becausehe was a great fool." We all know what is meant; and there is a substratum of truth in this; but it is tearing a paradox to tatters. How differently has Carlyle dealt with poor dear Bozzy! Croker'sBoswell's Johnson"is as bad as bad can be," full of "monstrous blunders"—(he had put 1761 for 1766) "gross mistakes"—"for which a schoolboy would be flogged." Southey is "utterly destitute of the power of discerning truth from falsehood." He prints a joke which "is enough to make us ashamed of our species." Robert Montgomery pours out "a roaring cataract of nonsense." One of his tropes is "the worst similitude in the world." And yet Macaulay can rebuke Johnson for "big words wasted on little things"!
Neither Cicero, Milton, Swift, nor Junius ever dealt in more furious words than Macaulay, who had not the excuse of controversy or passion. Frederick William of Prussia was "the most execrable of fiends, a cross between Moloch and Puck"; "his palace was hell"; compared with the Prince, afterwards Frederick the Great, "Oliver Twist in the workhouse, and Smike at Dotheboys Hall were petted children." It would be difficult for Mark Twain to beat that. "The follies and vices of King Johnwere the salvationof England." Cranmer was peculiarly fitted to organise the Church of England by being "unscrupulous, indifferent, a coward, and a time-server." James I. was given to "stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears," alternating between the buffoon and the pedagogue. James II. "amused himself with hearing Covenanters shriek"; he was "a libertine, singularly slow and narrow in understanding, obstinate, harsh, and unforgiving." The country gentleman of that age talked like "the most ignorant clown"; his wife and daughter were in taste "below a stillroom maid of the present day." The chaplain was a mere servant, and was expected to marry a servant girl whose character had been blown upon.
But it ought to be remembered that all of these descriptions are substantially true. Macaulay's pictures of the Stuarts, of Cromwell, of the Restoration and its courtiers, of Milton, of William III., are all faithful and just; Boswellwasoften absurd; Southeywasshallow; Montgomerywasan impostor; Frederick Williamdidtreat his son brutally; the country squire and the parson two centuries ago were much rougher people than they are to-day. And if Macaulay had simply told us this in measured language of this kind, he would have failed in beating his lesson into the mind. Not only was "a little of fictitious narrative judiciously employed," but not a little of picturesque exaggeration and redundant superlatives. Carlyle is an even worse offender in this line. Did he not call Macaulay himself "squat, low-browed, commonplace"—"a poor creature, with his dictionary literature and his saloon arrogance"—"no vision in him"—"will neither see nor do any great thing"?[1] Ruskin, Freeman, Froude, and others have been tempted to deal in gross superlatives. But with all these it has been under the stimulus of violent indignation. With Macaulay the superlatives pour out as his native vernacular without heat or wrath, as a mere rhetorician's trick, as the favourite tones of a great colourist. And though the trick, like all literary tricks, grows upon the artist, and becomes singularly offensive to the man of taste, it must always be remembered that, with Macaulay, the praise or blame is usually just and true; he is very rarely grossly unfair and wrong, as Carlyle so often is; and if Macaulay resorts too often to the superlative degree, he is usually entitled to use the comparative degree of the same adjective.
The style, with all its defects, has had a solid success and has done great things. By clothing his historical judgments and his critical reflections in these cutting and sonorous periods, he has forced them on the attention of a vast body of readers wherever English is read at all, and on millions who have neither time nor attainments for any regular studies of their own. How many men has Macaulay succeeded in reaching, to whom all other history and criticism is a closed book, or a book in an unknown tongue! If he were a sciolist or a wrong-headed fanatic, this would be a serious evil. But, as he is substantially right in his judgments, brimful of saving common-sense and generous feeling, and profoundly well read in his own periods and his favourite literature, Macaulay has conferred most memorable services on the readers of English throughout the world. He stands between philosophic historians and the public very much as journals and periodicals stand between the masses and great libraries. Macaulay is a glorified journalist and reviewer, who brings the matured results of scholars to the man in the street in a form that he can remember and enjoy, when he could not make use of a merely learned book. He performs the office of the ballad-maker or story-teller in an age before books were known or were common. And it is largely due to his influence that the best journals and periodicals of our day are written in a style so clear, so direct, so resonant. We need not imitate his mannerism; we may all learn to be outspoken, lucid, and brisk.
It is the very perfection of his qualities in rousing the interest of the great public which has drawn down on Macaulay the grave rebukes of so many fine judges of the higher historical literature. Cotter Morison, Mark Pattison, Leslie Stephen, and John Morley all agree that his style has none of the subtler charms of the noblest prose, that his conception of history is radically unsound, that, in fact, it broke down by its own unwieldy proportions. Mr. Morison has very justly remarked that if theHistory of Englandhad ever been completed on the same scale for the whole of the period as originally designed, it would have run to fifty volumes, and would have occupied in composition one hundred and fifty years. As it is, the eight duodecimo volumes give us the events of sixteen years, from 1685 to 1701; so that the history of England from Alfred would require five hundred similar volumes. Now, Gibbon's eight octavo volumes give us the history of the world for thirteen centuries; that is to say, Gibbon has recounted the history of a century in nearly the same space that Macaulay records the history of a year. There cannot be a doubt that Gibbon'sDecline and Fallis immeasurably superior to Macaulay's fragment, in thought, in imagination, in form, in all the qualities of permanent history; it stands on a far higher plane; it will long outlast and overshadow it. Compared with this, Macaulay's delightful and brilliant pictures are mere glorified journalism.
Macaulay, who was no braggart, has put it on record that his conception of history was more just than that of Hume, Robertson, Voltaire, and Gibbon. It is perfectly true that his conception was different from theirs, his execution was different, and he does not address the same class of readers. But his conception of history was not just; it was a mistake. His leading idea was to make history a true romance. He has accomplished this; and he has given usa historical novel drawn from authentic documents. This is, no doubt, a very useful thing to do, a most interesting book to read; it is very pleasant literature, and has a certain teaching of its own to a certain order of readers. But it is not history. It sacrifices the breadth of view, the organic life, the philosophy, the grand continuity of human society. It must be a sectional picture of a very limited period in a selected area; it can give us only the external; it inevitably tends to trivial detail and to amusing personalities; it necessarily blinds us to the slow sequence of the ages. Besides this, it explains none of the deeper causes of movement; for, to make a picture, the artist must give us the visible and the obvious. History, in its highest sense, is the record of the evolution of humanity, in whole or in part. To compose an historical novel from documents is to put this object aside. History, said Macaulay in hisHallam, "is a compound of poetry and philosophy." But in practice, he substituted word-painting for poetry, and anecdote for philosophy. His own delightful and popularHistory of Englandis a compound of historical romance and biographical memoir.
Macaulay's strong point was in narrative, and in narrative he has been surpassed by hardly any historian and even by few novelists. Scott and Victor Hugo have hardly a scene more stirring than Macaulay's death of Charles II., Monmouth's rebellion, the flight of James II., the trial of Titus Gates, the inner life of William III. This is a very great quality which has deservedly made him popular. And if Macaulay had less philosophy than almost any historian of the smallest pretension, he has a skill in narration which places him in a fair line with the greatest. Unfortunately, this superb genius for narration has rarely been devoted to the grander events and the noblest chiefs in history. Even his hero William III. hardly lives in his canvas with such a glowing light as Charles II., Monmouth, and Jeffreys. The expulsion of James II. was a very poor affair if compared with the story of Charles I. and the Parliament. If Macaulay had painted for us the Council Chamber of Cromwell as he has painted the Whitehall of Charles II.; if he had described the battle of Naseby as well as he has pictured the fight of Sedgemoor; if he had narrated the campaigns of Marlborough as brilliantly as he has told that which ended at the Boyne—how much should we have had!
But it could not be. His own conception of history made this impossible. It is well said that he planned his history "on the scale of an ordnance map." He did what a German professor does when he tries to fathom English society by studying theTimesnewspaper day by day. The enormous mass of detail, the infinitesimal minuteness of view, beat him. As he complained about Samuel Johnson, he runs into "big words about little things." Charles's mistress, her pug-dog, the page-boy who tended the dog, nay, the boy's putative father, occupy the foreground: and the poet, the statesman, and the hero retire into the middle distance or the background. What would we not have given to have had Macaulay'sHistory of Englandcontinued down to his own time, the wars of Marlborough, the reign of Anne, the poets, wits, romancers, inventors, reformers, and heroes of the eighteenth century, the careers of Walpole, Chatham, Pitt, Burke, Fox, Nelson, Wellington, Brougham, Bentham, and Canning—the formation of the British Empire—the great revolutionary struggle in Europe! The one thought which dims our enjoyment of this fascinating collection of memoirs, and these veracious historical romances, is the sense of what we might have had, if their author had been a great historian as well as a magnificent literary artist.
[1] Froude'sCarlyle, i. 192.
In the blaze of the political reputation of the Earl of Beaconsfield we are too apt to overlook the literary claims of Benjamin Disraeli. But many of those who have small sympathy with his career as a statesman find a keen relish in certain of his writings; and it is hardly a paradox to augur that in a few generations more the former chief of the new Tory Democracy may have become a tradition, whilst certain of his social satires may continue to be widely read. Bolingbroke, Swift, Sheridan, and Macaulay live in English literature, but are little remembered as politicians; and Burke, the philosopher, grows larger in power over our thoughts, as Burke, the party orator, becomes less and less by time. We do not talk of Viscount St. Albans, the learned Chancellor: we speak only of Bacon, the brilliant writer, the potent thinker. And so perhaps in the next century, we shall hear less of Lord Beaconsfield, the Imperial Prime Minister: but Benjamin Disraeli's pictures of English society and the British Parliament may still amuse and instruct our descendants.
It is true that the permanent parts of his twenty works may prove to be small. Pictures, vignettes, sketches, epigrams will survive rather than elaborate works of art; these gems of wit and fancy will have to be picked out of a mass of rubbish; and they will be enjoyed for their vivacious originality and Voltairean pungency, not as masterpieces or complete creations. That Disraeli wrote much stuff is true enough. But so did Fielding, so did Swift, and Defoe, and Goldsmith. Writers are to be judged by their best; and it does not matter so very much if that best is little in bulk. Disraeli's social and political satires have a peculiar and rare flavour of their own, charged with an insight and a vein of wit such as no other man perhaps in this century has touched—so that, even though they be thrown off in sketches and sometimes in merejeux d'esprit, they bring him into the company of Swift, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. He is certainly inferior to all these mighty satirists both in wit and passion, and also in definite purpose. But he has touches of their lightning-flash irradiating contemporary society. And it seems a pity that the famousMen of Lettersseries which admits (and rightly admits) Hawthorne and De Quincey, could find no room for the author ofIxion in Heaven,The Infernal Marriage,Coningsby, andLothair.
Disraeli's literary reputation has suffered much in England by the unfortunate circumstance of his having been the leader of a political party. As the chief of a powerful party which he transformed with amazing audacity, as the victorious destroyer of the old Whig oligarchy and the founder of the new Tory democracy, as a man of Jewish birth and alien race, as a man to whom satire was the normal weapon and bombastic affectation a deliberate expedient for dazzling the weak—Disraeli, even in his writings, has been exposed in England to a bitter system of disparagement which blinds partisans to their real literary merit. His political opponents, and they are many and savage, can see little to admire in his strange romances: his political worshippers and followers, who took him seriously as a great statesman, are not fond of imagining their hero as an airy satirist. His romances as well as his satires are wholly unlike anything English; and though he had brilliant literary powers, he never acquired any serious literary education. Much as he had read, he had no learning, and no systematic knowledge of any kind. He was never, strictly speaking, even an accurate master of literary English. He would slip, as it were, unconsciously, into foreign idioms and obsolete words. In America, where his name arouses no political prejudice, he is better judged. To the Englishman, at least to the pedant, he is still a somewhat elaborate jest.
Let us put aside every bias of political sympathy and anything that we know or suspect of the nature of the man, and we may find in the writer, Benjamin Disraeli, certain very rare qualities which justify his immense popularity in America, and which ought to maintain it in England. In his preface toLothair(October 1870), he proudly said that it had been "more extensively read both by the people of the United Kingdom and the United States than any work that has appeared for the last half century." This singular popularity must have a ground. Disraeli, in truth, belongs to that very small group of real political satirists of whom Swift is the type. He is not the equal of the terrible Dean; but it may be doubted if any Englishman since Swift has had the same power of presenting vivid pictures and decisive criticisms of the political and social organism of his times. It is this Aristophanic gift which Swift had. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rabelais, Diderot, Heine, Beaumarchais had it. Carlyle had it for other ages, and in a historic spirit. There have been far greater satirists, men like Fielding and Thackeray, who have drawn far more powerful pictures of particular characters, foibles, or social maladies. But since Swift we have had no Englishman who could give us a vivid and amusing picture of our political life, as laid bare to the eye of a consummate political genius.
It must be admitted that, with all the rare qualities of Disraeli's literary work, he hardly ever took it quite seriously, or except as an interlude and with some ulterior aim. In his early pieces he simply sought to startle the town and to show what a wonderfully clever young fellow had descended upon it. In his later books, such asConingsby,Sybil, andTancred, he wished to propound a new party programme.Lothairwas a picture of British society, partly indulgent and sympathetic, partly caustic or contemptuous, but presented all through with a vein ofpersiflage, mockery, and extravaganza. All this was amusing and original; but every one of these things is fatal to sustained and serious art. If an active politician seeks to galvanise a new party by a series of novels, the romances cannot be works of literary art. If a young man wants only to advertise his own smartness, he will not produce a beautiful thing. And if a statesman out of office wishes to amuse himself by alternate banter and laudation of the very society which he has led and which looks to him as its inspiration, the result will be infinitely entertaining, but not a great work of art. Disraeli therefore with literary gifts of a very high order never used them in the way in which a true artist works, and only resorted to them as a means of gaining some practical and even material end.
But, if Disraeli's ambition led him to political and social triumphs, for which he sacrificed artistic success and literary honours, we ought not to be blind to the rare qualities which are squandered in his books. He did not produce immortal romances—he knew nothing of an ingenious plot, or a striking situation, or a creative character—but he did give us inimitable political satires and some delicious social pantomimes; and he presented these with an original wit in which the French excel, which is very rare indeed in England. Ask not of Disraeli more than he professes to give you, judge him by his own standard, and he will still furnish you with delightful reading, with suggestive and original thoughts. He is usually inclined to make game of his reader, his subject, and even of himself; but he lets you see that he never forgets this, and never attempts to conceal it. He is seldom dull, never sardonic or cruel, and always clean, healthy, and decent. His heroines are ideal fairy queens, his heroes are all visionary and chivalrous nincompoops; and even, though we know that much of it is whimsical banter and nonsensical fancy, there is an air of refined extravaganza in these books which may continue to give them a lasting charm.
The short juvenile drolleries of his restless youth are the least defective as works of art; and, being brief and simplejeux d'espritof a rare order, they are entirely successful and infinitely amusing.Ixion in Heaven,The Infernal Marriage, andPopanilla, are astonishing products of a lad of twenty-three, who knew nothing of English society, and who had had neither regular education nor social opportunities. They have been compared with the social satirettes of Lucian, Swift, and Voltaire. It is true they have not the fine touch and exquisite polish of the witty Greek of Samosata, nor the subtle irony of Voltaire and Montesquieu, nor the profound grasp of the Dean. But they are full of wit, observation, sparkle, and fun. The style is careless and even incorrect, but it is full of point and life. The effects are rather stagey, and the smartness somewhat strained—that is, if these boyish trifles are compared withCandideand theLettres Persanes. As pictures of English society, court, and manners in 1827 painted in fantastic apologues, they are most ingenious, and may be read again and again. TheInfernal Marriage, in the vein of theDialogues of the Dead, is the most successful.Ixionis rather broader, simpler, and much more slight, but is full of boisterous fun.Popanilla, a more elaborate satire in direct imitation ofGulliver's Travels, is neither so vivacious nor so easy as the smaller pieces, but it is full of wit and insight. Nothing could give a raw Hebrew lad the sustained imagination and passion of Jonathan Swift; but there are few other masters of social satire with whom the young genius of twenty-three can be compared. These three satires, which together do not fill 200 pages, are read and re-read by busy and learned men after nearly seventy years have passed. And that is in itself a striking proof of their originality and force.
It is not fair to one who wrote under the conditions of Benjamin Disraeli to take any account of his inferior work: we must judge him at his best. He avowedly wrote many pot-boilers merely for money; he began to write simply to make the world talk about him, and he hardly cared what the world might say; and he not seldom wrote rank bombast in open contempt for his reader, apparently as if he had made a bet to ascertain how much stuff the British public would swallow.Vivian Greyis a lump of impudence;The Young Dukeis a lump of affectation;Alroyis ambitious balderdash. They all have passages and epigrams of curious brilliancy and trenchant observation; they have wit, fancy, and life scattered up and down their pages. But they are no longer read, nor do they deserve to be read.Contarini Fleming,Henrietta Temple,Venetia, are full of sentiment, and occasionally touch a poetic vein. They had ardent admirers once, even amongst competent judges. They may still be read, and they have scenes, descriptions, and detached thoughts of real charm, and almost of true beauty. They are not, in any sense, works of art; they are ill constructed, full of the mawkish gush of the Byronic fever, and never were really sincere and genuine products of heart and brain. They were show exercises in the Byronic mode. And, though we may still take them up for an hour for the occasional flashes of genius and wit they retain, no one believes that they can add much permanent glory to the name of Benjamin Disraeli.
Apart from the three early burlesques of which we have spoken—trifles indeed and crude enough, but trifles that sparkle with penetration and wit—the books on which Disraeli's reputation alone can be founded areConingsby,Sybil, andLothair. These all contain many striking epigrams, ingenious theories, original suggestions, vivacious caricatures, and even creative reflections, mixed, it must be admitted, with not a little transparent nonsense. But they are all so charged with bright invention, keen criticism, quaint paradox, they are so entirely unlike anything else in our recent literature, and they pierce, in a Voltairean way, so deeply to the roots of our social and political fabric, that they may long continue to be read. In the various prefaces, and especially in the general preface toLothair(of October 1870), Disraeli has fully explained the origin and aim of these and his other works. It is written, as usual, with his tongue in his cheek, in that vein of semi-bombastic paradox which was designed to mystify the simple and to amuse the acuter reader. But there is an inner seriousness in it all; and, as it has a certain correspondence with his public career and achievements, it must be taken as substantially true.Coningsby(1844) andSybil(1845) were written in the vigour of manhood and the early days of his political ambition, with an avowed purpose of founding a new party in Parliament. It must be admitted that they did to some extent effect their purpose—not immediately or directly, and only as part of their author's schemes. But the Primrose League and the New Tory Democracy of our day bear witness to the vitality of the movement which, fifty years ago, Disraeli propounded to a puzzled world.Lothair(1870) came twenty-five years later—when he had outlived his illusions; and in more artistic and more mellow tones he painted the weaknesses of a society that he had failed to inspire, but which it gratified his pride to command.
"Coningsby,Sybil, andTancred," says he, in his grandiose way, "form a real Trilogy." "The derivation and character of political parties,"—he goes on to explain—"was the subject ofConingsby." "The condition of the people which had been the consequence of them"—was the subject ofSybil. "The duties of the Church as a main remedial agency" and "the race who had been the founders of Christianity" [although, surely, friend Benjamin, if we are to believe the Gospels, the murderers and persecutors of Christ and His Apostles]—were the subjects ofTancred(1847).Tancred, though it has some highly amusing scenes, may be dismissed at once. Disraeli fought for the Chosen Race, their endowments and achievements, with wonderful courage and ingenuity. It was perhaps the cause which he had most deeply at heart, from its intimate relation to his own superb ambition and pride. But it has made no real way, nor has it made any converts, unless we countDaniel Derondaas amongst them. Thackeray's "Codlingsby" has almost extinguished "Sidonia." And the strange phantasmagoria of the Anglican Church, revivified by the traditions of Judaism, and ascending to the throne of St. Peter, is perhaps the most stupendous joke which even Disraeli had ever dared to perpetrate. In the preface toLothairwe read:—
The tradition of the Anglican Church was powerful. Resting on the Church of Jerusalem, modified by the divine school of Galilee, it would have found that rock of truth which Providence, by the instrumentality of the Semitic race, had promised to St. Peter.
Whatever this jargon may mean, the public has allowed it to fall flat. It seems to suggest that the Archbishop of Canterbury, by resuming the tradition of Caiaphas, as "modified" by the Sermon on the Mount, might oust the Pope of Rome as was foretold by the Divine young Jewish reformer when he called the fishermen of Galilee. It is difficult to believe that Disraeli himself was serious in all this. In the last scene, as Tancred is proposing to the lovely Jewess, their privacy is disturbed by a crowd of retainers around the papa and mamma of the young heir. The last lines ofTancredare these:—"The Duke and Duchess of Bellamont had arrived at Jerusalem." This is hardly the way in which to preach a New Gospel to a sceptical and pampered generation.
But, if the regeneration of the Church of England by a re-Judaising process and by return to the Targum of the Pharisees has proved abortive, it must be admitted that, from the political point of view, the conception announced in the "trilogy," and rhapsodically illustrated inTancred—the conception of the Anglican Church reviving its political ascendancy and developing "the most efficient means of the renovation of the national spirit"—has not proved quite abortive. It shows astonishing prescience to have seen fifty years ago that the Church of England might yet become a considerable political power, and could be converted, by a revival of Mediaeval traditions, into a potent instrument of the New Tory Democracy. Whatever we may think about the strengthening of the Established Church from the point of view of intellectual solidity or influence with the nation, it can hardly be doubted that in the fifty years that have passed since the date of the "trilogy," the Church as a body has rallied to one party in the State, and has proved a potent ally of militant Imperialism and Tory Democracy. Lord Beaconsfield lived to witness that great transformation in the Church of the High and Dry Pluralists and the Simeonite parsons, which he had himself so powerfully organised in Parliament, in society, and on the platform. His successor to-day can count on no ally so sure and loyal as the Church. But it was a wonderful inspiration for a young man fifty years ago to perceive that this could be done—and to see the way in which it might be done.
ConingsbyandSybilat any rate were active forces in the formation of a definite political programme. And this was a programme which in Parliament and in the country their author himself had created, organised, and led to victory. It cannot be denied that they largely contributed to this result. And thus these books have this very remarkable and almost unique character. It would be very difficult to mention anything like a romance in any age or country which had ever effected a direct political result or created a new party.Don Quixoteis said to have annihilated chivalry;Tartuffedealt a blow at the pretensions of the Church; and theMarriage of Figaroat those of the oldnoblesse. It is possible thatBleak Housegave some impulse to law reform, andVanity Fairhas relieved us of a good deal of snobbery. But no novel before or since ever created a political party and provided them with a new programme.ConingsbyandSybilreally did this; and it may be doubted if it could have been done in any other way. "Imagination, in the government of nations" (we are told in the preface toLothair) "is a quality not less important than reason." Its author trusts much "to a popular sentiment which rested on a heroic tradition and which was sustained by the high spirit of a free aristocracy."
Now this is a kind of party programme which it was almost impossible to propound on the platform or in Parliament. These imaginative and somewhat Utopian schemes of "changing back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a real throne," of "infusing life and vigour into the Church as the trainer of the nation," of recalling the popular sympathies "to the principles of loyalty and religious reverence"—these were exactly the kind of new ideas which it would be difficult to expound in the House of Commons or in a towns-meeting. In the preface toConingsbythe author tells us that, after reflection, the form of fiction seemed to be the best method of influencing opinion. These books then present us with the unique example of an ambitious statesman resorting to romance as his means of reorganising a political party.
There is another side to this feature which is also unique and curiously full of interest. These romances are the only instances in which any statesman of the first rank, who for years was the ruling spirit of a great empire, has thrown his political conceptions and schemes into an imaginative form. And these books, fromVivian Grey(1825) toEndymion(1880), extend over fifty-five years; some being published before his political career seemed able to begin, some in the midst of it, and the later books after it was ended. In the grandiloquent style of the autobiographical prefaces, we may say that they recall to us theMeditationsof Marcus Aurelius, thePolitical Testamentof Richelieu, and theConversationsof Napoleon at St. Helena.
In judging these remarkable works, we ought to remember that they are not primarily romances at all, that they do not compete with genuine romances, and they ought to be read for the qualities they have, not for those in which they fail. They are in part autobiographical sketches, meditations on society, historical disquisitions, and political manifestoes. They are the productions of a statesman aiming at a practical effect, not of a man of letters creating a work of imaginative art. The creative form is quite subsidiary and subordinate. It would be unreasonable to expect in them elaborate drawing of character, complex plot, or subtle types of contemporary life. Their aim is to paint the actual political world, to trace its origin, and to idealise its possible development. And this is done, not by an outside man of letters, but by the very man who had conquered a front place in this political world, and who had more or less realised his ideal development. They are almost the only pictures of the inner parliamentary life we have; and they are painted by an artist who was first and foremost a great parliamentary power, of consummate experience and insight. If the artistic skill were altogether absent, we should not read them at all, as nobody reads Lord Russell's dramas or the poems of Frederick the Great. But the art, though unequal and faulty, is full of vigour, originality, and suggestion. Taken as a whole, they are quite unique.
Coningsby; or, the New Generation, was the earliest and in some ways the best of the trilogy. It is still highly diverting as a novel, and, as we see to-day, was charged with potent ideas and searching criticism. It was far more real and effective as a romance than anything Disraeli had previously written. There are scenes and characters in the story which will live in English literature. Thackeray could hardly have created more living portraits than "Rigby," "Tadpole," and "Taper," or "Lord Monmouth." These are characters which are household words with us like "Lord Steyne" and "Rawdon Crawley." The social pictures are as realistic as those of Trollope, and now and then as bright as those of Thackeray. The love-making is tender, pretty, and not nearly so mawkish as that of "Henrietta Temple" and "Venetia." There is plenty of wit, epigram, squib, andbon mot. There is almost none of that rhodomontade which pervades the other romances, except as to "Sidonia" and the supremacy of the Hebrew race—a topic on which Benjamin himself was hardly sane.Coningsby, as a novel, is sacrificed to its being a party manifesto and a political programme first and foremost. But as a novel it is good. It is the only book of Disraeli's in which we hardly ever suspect that he is merely trying to fool us. It is not so gay and fantastic asLothair. But, being far more real and serious, it is perhaps the best of Disraeli's novels.
As a political manifesto, Coningsby has been an astonishing success. The grand idea of Disraeli's life was to struggle against what he called the "Venetian Constitution," imposed and maintained by the "Whig Oligarchy." As Radical, as Tory, as novelist, as statesman, his ruling idea was "to dish the Whigs," in Lord Derby's historic phrase. And he did "dish the Whigs." The old Whigs have disappeared from English politics. They have either amalgamated with the Tories, become Unionist Conservatives, henchmen of Lord Salisbury, or else have become Gladstonians and Radicals. The so-called Whigs of 1895, if any politicians so call themselves, are far more Tory than the Whigs of 1844, and the Tories of 1895 are far more democratic than the Whigs of 1844. This complete transformation is very largely due to Disraeli himself.
Strictly speaking, Disraeli has eliminated from our political arena both "Whig" and "Tory," as understood in the old language of our party history. And the first sketch of the new policy was flung upon an astonished public inConingsby, just fifty years ago. No doubt, the arduous task of educating the Conservative Party into the new faith of Tory Democracy was not effected byConingsbyalone. But it may be doubted if Mr. Disraeli would have accomplished it by his speeches without his writings. As a sketch of the inner life of the parliamentary system of fifty years ago,Coningsbyis perfect and has never been approached. Both Thackeray and Trollope have painted Parliament and public life so far as it could be seen from a London club. But Disraeli has painted it as it was known to a man who threw his whole life into it, and who was himself a consummate parliamentary leader.