Part 14

But the tenets of this Young England party which gathered so eagerly about the maturer man, Disraeli, were these, as you know: the King stood over all, with his prerogative to be vindicated. His rightful vindicators were our ancient nobility, and their task was to exalt, to sustain him as protector of the poor, and so to restore the peasantry of England (including its mill-hands, famished families, pauper children) to the supposedly happy conditions once enjoyed in the golden age of the monasteries, but forfeit under the oppression of middle-class “industrialists,” as we should now term them. I find, for my part, no real evidence of this golden age of the monasteries, and suspect the glow they reputedly shed over a consented medieval countryside to be very vastly enlarged by the mist of romance. But whatever they might or might not have been, their lethargy could never have matched, for evil, the active cruelty of the new system. The monasteries were dead, anyhow: the mills and the mines were grinding lives into death by tens of thousands under men’s eyes. Disraeli _knew_ how the bringing up of a Devilsdust turns the grown man into a Chartist, and a danger. Disraeli understood Chartists.

VI

In September, 1841, Peel (who owed it to him) refused Disraeli office. We need not go into that tortuous story, or the rights of it this way or that. The point for us is that his exclusion gave him leisure to write _Coningsby_.

What were his qualifications, what his disqualifications in writing _Coningsby_?

To begin with the disqualifications--(1) He had the haziest notion of constructing a plot. From first to last he never gets beyond an idea, and a string of episodes. (2) His hero is, for all his recommendation, an invariable nincompoop, and his heroine (Sybil particularly) not of flesh and blood: not even an embodiment of an idea; a dream of it rather. Coningsby does very much less than justice to Smythe, a man of failings and infinite wit; while in _Lothair_ you will pass whole pages in which the hero’s contribution to the wisdom of the world amounts to “You don’t say so,” “I am more than a little surprised,” “I have never looked into this matter upon which Your Grace sheds for me, I confess, an entirely new light.” You may say that the heroes and heroines of most Victorian novels are puppets conducted through adversity to a chime of marriage bells. But Disraeli deliberately presenting his heroes and heroines as grandiose creatures of ineffable charm, has never the art to make them justify this by what they do or say. Their golden, or raven, hair hangs down their back, and there it ends. Lastly his prose lapses, as the rhetorician’s hand becomes subdued to what it works in, into sentences more and more slipshod: while fatuities abound, such as the exclamation, at the beginning of a chapter, “What wonderful things are events!”

So far the devil’s advocate.... But set against this, first and in front of it, the great fact that an inventor is great not only because he does a thing well, but because he could do it at all. Disraeli in _Coningsby_ invented the political novel: and I know nothing to compare with that book unless it be his own _Endymion_ in which so touchingly an old man, dejected from political office and power, seeks back with all his worldly wisdom, as one walking out into a garden in a lunar light of memory, to recapture the rose of youth. Of the trilogy--_Coningsby_, _Sybil_, _Tancred_--I confess, tracing it backward, that I have small use for _Tancred_, having (be it confessed) not only a stark insensibility to Disraeli’s enthusiasm for a mongrel religion neither of his breed nor of mine, but a constitutional aversion to the Lion of Judah considered as a pet. _Sybil_, in addition to its most vivid pictures of the factory poor, has at least a score of pages which no student of the art of writing in English can afford to neglect--take for example its _tour de force_ in exhibiting the rise of the Marney family and the successive ennoblements of John Warren, club waiter, and his progeny, through Sir John Warren, and Lord Fitz-Warene, to Earl de Mowbray of Mowbray Castle. The juxtaposition of the selfish and opulent Marney household with the wretched mines, close by, from which they drew their wealth, is admirably managed. But, as I have said, the heroine is but a shadowy figure, and I find the hero little more lively: the pair of them “made for a purpose,” and that purpose propaganda. No: _Coningsby_ is the masterpiece: and Peel’s refusal which led to its composition--Peel’s own fatal loss, as it turned out--is our delightful gain. You will easily find, in almost any period of our prose literature since Defoe, a more noble novel: and if one goes back to early romance and thinks (say) of a page of Malory--well, it rebukes the sensual rapture. But, for all that, I defy you to find a more vivacious, a more scintillating book--scintillating with joyful and irresistible malice. At the turn of any page you may happen on such a gem as this:

Lord and Lady Gaverstock were also there, who never said an unkind thing of anybody: her ladyship was pure as snow: but, her mother having been divorced, she ever fancied she was paying a kind of homage to her parent by visiting those who might some day be in the same predicament.

It dares history, and will, for a whole chapter, recount the fall of a Government, the passing of a Bill, the formation of a Cabinet, unravelling actual intrigue, carrying you along by sheer logic as though you galloped with Dumas’ Three Musketeers. Disraeli could not invent a character: but he could at once disguise and reveal one borrowed from life. In _Coningsby_ he had actual men made to his hands, to prompt the apotheosis or the caricature. He sentimentalises his young friends, and the sense beneath the sensibility may be read in the last paragraph of _Sybil_. What he could do with an enemy let the portrait of Rigby attest.

VII

In _Coningsby_ he invented the Political Novel. That this _partus masculus_ came so late to birth in our literature, as that it has begotten few successors, admits (as Sir Thomas Browne would say) no wide solution. Genius is rare, anyhow: the combination of political with literary genius necessarily rarer. Given the two combined, as they were in Burke, you still require, for superadding, the inventive faculty, the mode, and the leisure. Not one man of letters in ten thousand can match Disraeli’s close inner acquaintance with his subject. Statesmen, in short, have not the leisure to write. Alcibiades leaves no record of what Alcibiades did or suffered. By a glorious fluke, Peel gave this chance and Disraeli took it.

VIII

For a last word to-day--

Quite apart from genuine coruscation of genius, and almost as widely separating and casting from account that tinsel and tawdriness which all can detect, one feels a mistrust (gnawing, as it were, within our laurel) that even the best page of Disraeli does not belong to us. We cannot match it somehow with a racy page of Dryden, or of good Sir Walter Scott, of Izaak Walton, John Bunyan, grave Clarendon, Bolingbroke. Gibbon is artificial enough, heaven knows; yet somehow--and one remembers that he had served in the Hampshire Militia--the scent of the hawthorn is never more afar than a field away, even when he discourses of Tertullian or of Diocletian. From Disraeli’s prose--or rather from my sense of it--I can never dispel the smatch of burnt sandalwood, the smell of camels and the bazaar. He officiates, somehow--he, a Prime Minister, over an altar not ours--we admire the oracle, but its tongue is foreign.

Still his fame grows. I observe that, as the incense clears, each successive study of him tells something better. He stands in politics admittedly a champion; in literature, too, a figure certainly not among the greatest, yet as certainly one of the great.

MRS. GASKELL

I

We think of her habitually--do we not?--by her married title of “Mrs. Gaskell.” Who Mr. Gaskell was this generation does not, in an ordinary way, pause to enquire: a neglect which does injustice to a gentleman of fine presence, noble manners and high culture. She was a beautiful woman: they married in 1832, and had children, and lived most happily.

So it is as “Mrs. Gaskell” that we think of her: and I dare to wager that most of you think of her as Mrs. Gaskell, authoress of _Cranford_. Now heaven forbid that anything I say this morning should daunt your affection for _Cranford_, as heaven knows how long and sincerely I have adored it. I have adored it at least long enough and well enough to understand its devotees--for _Cranford_ has not only become popular in the sense, more or less, that _Omar Khayyam_ has become popular--by which I mean that, at this season or thereabouts, numbers of people buy a copy in limp _suède_, with Hugh Thomson’s illustrations, and only hesitate over sending it to the So-and-So’s with best wishes on a chilling doubt that they sent it last year, with the identical good wishes--if indeed they are not returning the identical volume they received! Well, let us be merry and careless!--in the course of a week or two these soft bricks will be dropping on every hearth.

But seriously, one finds devotees of _Cranford_ everywhere; and especially, in my experience, among scholarly old men. They have _Cranford_ written on their hearts, sometimes hardly covering a cherished solution of _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_. _Cranford_ and the novels of Jane Austen--you never know how many delightful persons cherish them, have them by heart, pore over their text as over an Ode of Pindar’s. And they are fierce, these devotees, as the noble new edition of Jane Austen by Mr. Chapman of the Oxford Press has recently been teaching us. Here are five volumes edited with all the care that study and affection can lavish on the task. Yet from here, there and everywhere lovers start up from firesides--scattered widowers of this dear maiden--challenging over _variae lectiones_, feeling for the hilt on the old hip to champion (we’ll say) “_screen_” as the right word against “scene” as printed--

“Swerve to the left, Son Roger,” he said, “When you catch his eyes through the helmet-slit.”

It is as serious, almost, as all that: and so it is with _Cranford_, and Miss Jenkyns and Captain Brown and adorable Miss Matty.

Yet, let us admit there are certain works which conquer some of us, we cannot tell why. To go a very long way from _Cranford_, take _Tristram Shandy_. No one can really criticise _Tristram Shandy_, and all pretence to do so is mere humbug. Either you like _Tristram Shandy_ (as I do, for one) or you don’t, and there’s an end to it. My sole complaint against the devotees of _Cranford_ is that, admiring it, revelling in it, they imagine themselves to have the secret of Mrs. Gaskell, stop there, and do not go on to explore her other works of which one at any rate I shall presently dare to proclaim to you as the most perfect small idyll ever written in English prose.

II

The sin is the worse because every one acknowledges the _Life of Charlotte Brontë_ to be--after Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_, admittedly beyond competition--among the two or three best biographies in our language. Conceive the Brontës--not Charlotte alone, but the whole family--the whole of that terrible family in that terrible parsonage at Haworth--as this staid lady, wife of a Unitarian minister, faithfully depicts them--the wastrel son, Branwell: through long nights tearing his own heart out, with his stern old father’s, in the bedroom they had, for safety, to occupy together: in the end pulling himself up to _die standing_: the shuddering sisters listening on the stairs; Emily, doomed and fierce, she too in her turn standing up to die. Consider--I will not say _Wuthering Heights_, or Charlotte’s well-known magnificent description, in _Villette_, of Rachel and her tortured acting--but consider if only by illustration of contrast this most maddened poem by Emily--and there are others as tragic--

_The Prisoner_

Still let my tyrants know, I am not doom’d to wear Year after year in gloom and desolate despair; A messenger of Hope comes every night to me, And offers for short life, eternal liberty.

He comes with Western winds, with evening’s wandering airs, With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars: Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire, And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.

Desire for nothing known in my maturer years, When Joy grew made with awe, at counting future tears: When, if my spirit’s sky was full of flashes warm, I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunder-storm.

But first, a hush of peace--a soundless calm descends; The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends. Mute music soothes my breast--unutter’d harmony That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.

Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals; My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels; Its wings are almost free--its home, its harbour found; Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound.

O dreadful is the check--intense the agony-- When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; When the pulse begins to throb--the brain to think again-- The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less; The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless; And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine, If it but herald Death, the vision is divine.

Consider, I say, that the authoress of _Cranford_ not only lived with these fierce women and comforted them as their benign friend, with a comfort that no soul can give to another without understanding, but portrayed them (their struggles ended) in a book that combines the English (even the Victorian English) with the Greek, a fidelity to awful fact with a serene judgment, a tender mercy--the two so discovering and covering all, that--whether it be in charity or in justice--its core of truth has never been challenged: that it stands yet among the noblest few of English biographies. I put it to you that, if you but set together those two books--_Cranford_ and the _Life of Charlotte Brontë_--at once you must recognise the operating hand--the quietly operating hand--of genius. But this, even when Mrs. Gaskell’s longer novels are thrown into the scale, has avoided, I think--because she herself is so equable, so temperate--its right recognition. Yes, her very portrait has a Hellenic look, so beautiful it is, so penetrating its calm gaze.

III

Yet maybe you think it strange that I find so much of high Hellenic quality in this quiet lady--born a Stevenson, to be sure--but christened Elizabeth Cleghorn, names not to us reminiscential of Hybla or the Ilissus. Her father was a Unitarian minister, who preached in that capacity, in Dob Lane Chapel, Manchester--which again does not suggest the Acropolis. In 1832 she married a Unitarian minister, son of a prosperous manufacturer, minister to a Chapel in Cross Street, Manchester, and prominent on the Home Missionary Board. For these and some particulars that follow I go to the best sources known to me.[4]

[4] Sir Adolphus Ward’s various Introductions to the Knutsford Edition (8 volumes, published by John Murray) and the article on her in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, by the same writer, whose scholarship, when devoted to this dead lady, reaches to a religious note of chivalry.

Her married life was one of unbroken happiness. Her husband had literary leanings, and in 1838 she writes to Mrs. Howitt, “We once thought of _trying_ to write sketches among the poor, _rather_ in the manner of Crabbe (now don’t think this presumptuous), but in a more beauty-seeing spirit: and one--the only one--was published in _Blackwood_, January, 1837.[5] But I suppose we spoke our plan near a dog-rose, for it never went any further.”

[5] The curious may read it in _Blackwood’s Magazine_, Vol. XLI, No. CCIV, or in Sir Adolphus Ward’s _Biographical Introduction_.

So you see that she had already made Manchester her home, and was already interested in the poor.

Also one may interpose here that (without evidence of her portrait) she was acknowledged by all who met her to be a person of quite remarkable beauty, and as little conscious of it as any beautiful woman has any right to be: since as Jaques noted:

if ladies be but young and fair, They have the gift to know it.

Above all, she had the ineffable charm of being the least assertive, the most concerned with others, in any company. I think that of her rather than of any other writing-woman one may quote Mrs. Browning’s lines on her Kate--

I doubt if she said to you much that could act As a thought or suggestion: she did not attract In the sense of the brilliant or wise: I infer ’Twas her thinking for others made you think of her.

She never found fault with you, never implied Your wrong by her right: and yet men at her side Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town The children were gladder that pulled at her gown....

The weak and the gentle, the ribald and rude, She took as she found them, and did them all good: It always was so with her--see what you have! She has made the grass greener even here ... with her grave.

Such a woman, as I trace her portrait, was Mrs. Gaskell, and I think the end of the story will confirm my reading of her. She made no show: without interfering she saw beauty in the lives of the poor: she lived with the misery of Manchester and pitied it; and across a personal bereavement--or (shall we say?) out of the very anguish of her own breast--she relieved her heart in her first long book in pity for that place.

In 1844 Mr. and Mrs. Gaskell revisited Festiniog, in North Wales, a halt of their wedding tour. They took their children with them; and at the inn there the eldest daughter caught the scarlet fever. Mrs. Gaskell removed her with her infant brother to Portmadoc, where he sickened of the fever and died. It was in search of an anodyne for sorrow that the mother began to write _Mary Barton_. Read that book with just these two or three facts in your mind, and you will find an illustration--though it almost shames me to give you one so poignant--of the way in which the sincerest art is begotten and brought forth: that is, by lifting one’s own experience up to a Universal, and then bringing it back to _reclothe_ it in imaginary, particular, men and women.

IV

In two previous lectures, Gentlemen, I have given you--it may well be _ad nauseam_--the conditions of life among the industrial poor of that period as they can be gathered from Blue Books and out of Hansard. In my last lecture I tried to indicate how they affected the ambitious (and to that extent selfish) but yet chivalrous mind of Disraeli. I shall be shorter with Mrs. Gaskell, who invents no political novel, but just tells the tale and passes on. But she tells it, and I select here to read to you a passage to illustrate rather how gently and charitably she tells it than to make out the worst of the case, which yet may be found in her pages.

At all times it is a bewildering thing to the poor weaver to see his employer removing from house to house, each one grander than the last, till he ends in building one more magnificent than all, or withdraws his money from the concern, or sells his mill, to buy an estate in the country, while all the time the weaver, who thinks he and his fellows are the real makers of this wealth, is struggling on for bread for his children, through the vicissitudes of lowered wages, short hours, fewer hands employed, etc. And when he knows trade is bad, and could understand (at least partially) that there are not buyers enough in the market to purchase the goods already made, and consequently that there is no demand for more; when he would bear and endure much without complaining, could he also see that his employers were bearing their share; he is, I say, bewildered and (to use his own word) “aggravated” to see that all goes on just as usual with the mill-owners. Large houses are still occupied, while spinners’ and weavers’ cottages stand empty, because the families that once filled them are obliged to live in rooms or cellars. Carriages still roll along the streets, concerts are still crowded by subscribers, the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers while the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough of food,--of the sinking health, of the dying life, of those near and dear to him. The contrast is too great. Why should he alone suffer from bad times?

I know that this is not really the case; and I know what is the truth in such matters: but what I wish to impress is what the workman feels and thinks.

But there are earnest men among these people, men who have endured wrongs without complaining, but without ever forgetting or forgiving those whom (they believe) have caused all this woe.

Among these was John Barton. His parents had suffered; his mother had died from absolute want of the necessaries of life. He himself was a good, steady workman, and, as such, pretty certain of steady employment. But he spent all he got with the confidence (you may also call it improvidence) of one who was willing, and believed himself able, to supply all his wants by his own exertions. And when his master suddenly failed, and all hands in the mill were turned back, one Tuesday morning, with the news that Mr. Hunter had stopped, Barton had only a few shillings to rely on; but he had good heart of being employed at some other mill, and accordingly, before returning home, he spent some hours in going from factory to factory, asking for work. But at every mill was some sign of depression of trade! Some were working short hours, some were turning off hands, and for weeks Barton was out of work, living on credit. It was during this time that his little son, the apple of his eye, the cynosure of all his strong power of love, fell ill of the scarlet fever. They dragged him through the crisis, but his life hung on a gossamer thread. Everything, the doctor said, depended on good nourishment, on generous living, to keep up the little fellow’s strength, in the prostration in which the fever had left him. Mocking words! when the commonest food in the house would not furnish one little meal. Barton tried credit; but it was worn out at the little provision shops, which were now suffering in their turn. He thought it would be no sin to steal, and would have stolen; but he could not get the opportunity in the few days the child lingered. Hungry himself, almost to an animal pitch of ravenousness, but with bodily pain swallowed up in anxiety for his little sinking lad, he stood at one of the shop windows, where all edible luxuries are displayed; haunches of venison, Stilton cheeses, moulds of jelly--all appetising sights to the common passer by. And out of this shop came Mrs. Hunter, his late employer’s wife! She crossed to her carriage, followed by the shopman loaded with purchases for a party. The door was quickly slammed to, and she drove way; and Barton returned home with a bitter spirit of wrath in his heart, to see his only boy a corpse!