Part 5

And "shame on you all!" is the cry that leaps to the lips of every true Briton who thinks of the former historical glories of his country, and at the same time observes the lamentable unsteadiness, the lack of courage, the dearth of principle in politicians of every grade to-day. Parliament gabbles; it does not speak. Often it resembles a cackling chorus of old women striving to describe their own and their friends' various ailments. Why is Radicalism rampant? Why is there any Radicalism? Because so many Radicals are honest, hard-working men--honest in their opinions, honest in the utterance of those opinions, honest in thinking that their cause is good. And you, my dear Lord, have a certain sympathy with this active, energetic, vital, if wrong-headed honesty--you know you have. You love your Sovereign, you love your country, you love the constitution, but for all that you cannot but sympathise with integrity. You know that the Monarch has left England pretty much to itself for the last thirty years, and that she has allowed the people to realise that they can get on without her, seeing she will take no part with them in their daily round. A pity! but the evil is done, and it is too late to remedy it. There is practically no social ruler of the realm, and you must confess, good Salisbury, that this fact makes your work difficult. The mass of the people can only be got to understand a monarch who behaves like one, and the more intellectual food you put into them, the more obstinate they become on the point. With similar pigheadedness they can only understand the personality of a prince whose conduct is a princely example; they are quite sure about themselves here, and have the most appallingly distinct notions concerning right and wrong. They do not go to church for these notions--no. Many cobblers and coalheavers would be mentally refreshed if they were allowed to kick a few seeming-holy clerics whose hypocrisies are apparent despite sermons on Sunday. It must not be forgotten that education is making huge strides among the populace; it has got its seven-leagued boots on, and is clearing all manner of difficulties at a bound. When your greengrocer studies Plato o' nights, when your shoemaker carries the maxims of Marcus Aurelius about in his pocket to refresh himself withal in the intervals of stitching leather, when the wife of your butcher sheds womanly tears over Keats' "Pot of Basil," a poem which the "cultured" dame has "no time" to read--these be the small signs and tokens of a wondrous change by and by. Cheap literature, especially when it is a selection of the finest in the world, is a dangerous "factor" in the making of revolutions, and among other purveyors of literary food for the million, one who calleth himself Walter Scott, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, is unconsciously doing a curious piece of work. He is putting into the hands of the "lower classes," for the moderate price of one shilling (discount price ninepence) small volumes well bound and well printed, which contain the grandest thoughts of humanity, such as "Epictetus," "Seneca," Mazzini's "Essays," "Sartor Resartus," "Past and Present," the "Religio Medici," the Emerson "Essays," and what not--and it is necessary to take into consideration the fact that the people who buy these books read them. Yes, they read them, every line, no matter how slowly or laboriously; for whether they have expended a shilling or the discount ninepence, they always want to know what they have got for their money. This is the peculiar disposition of the "masses"; the "upper ten" are not so particular, and will lay out a few guineas on Mudie by way of annual subscription, getting scarce anything back of value in exchange. After this fashion, too, the "upper ten" entertain the ungrateful, keep horses and carriages for display, and trot the dreary round of season after season, striving to extract amusement from the dried-up gourd of modern social life, and finding nothing in it all but a bitter jest or a sneering laugh at the slips in morality of their so-called "friends" and neighbours. And thus it is, my dear Lord, that the balance of things is becoming alarmingly unequal; the "aristocratic" set are a scandal to the world with their divorce cases, their bankruptcies, their laxity of principle, their listless indifference to consequences; they never read, they never learn, they never appear to see anything beyond themselves. Whereas the "bas-peuple" _are_ reading, and reading the books that have helped to make national destinies--they _are_ learning, and they are not afraid to express opinions. They do not think a duke who seduces his friend's wife merely "unfortunate"--they call him in plain language a low blackguard. They cannot be brought to believe that the heir to a great name who has gambled away all his estates on the turf a "gentleman"--they call him a "loose fish" without parley. Now you, excellent and true-hearted Salisbury, have to look on two sides of the question. On the one are your own people, the aristocrats, the Tories, lazy, indifferent, inert, many of them--fond of what they term "pleasure," and as careless of the interests of the country (with a few rare exceptions) as they can well be. On the other hand you have the sturdy, loyal, splendid English "masses," who in their heart of hearts are neither Radicals, Whigs, or Tories, but are simply as they always have been--"For God and the Right!" It matters not which party expresses what they consider the Right; it is the Right they want, and the Right they will have, and they will try all means and appliances in their power till they get it. And it is with this clamour for the Right that you, my Lord, sympathise, because you know how much there is just now that is wrong; how politicians shuffle and lie and play at cross-purposes simply to attain their own personal ends; how over-competition is cutting the throat of Free Trade; how foolishly the tricksters have played with poor distracted Ireland; how openly we have lowered the standard of society by admitting into it men and women of well-known degraded reputation, as well as the painted mimes and puppets of the stage; how wives are bargained for and bought for a price, almost as shamelessly as in an open market; how good faith, chivalry, honour, and modesty are every day becoming rarer and rarer among men; and how, worst of all, we try to cover our vices by a cloak of hypocrisy--the most canting hypocrisy current in the world. English hypocrisy, the ultra-pious form--oh! "it is rank; it smells to heaven!" There is nothing like it anywhere--nothing--no devil so well sainted by psalm-singing, church-going, Sunday observance, and charitable subscription lists. The married woman of title and high degree who sells the jewel of her wifely chastity for the trifling price of a fool's praise, is ever careful to look after the poor, and give her "distinguished" patronage to church-bazaars. Pah! such things are as a sickness to the mind; one's gorge rises at them; and yet they are, as the Queen said to Hamlet, "common." So common, i' faith, that we are beginning to accept them as an inevitable part of our "social observances." And, alas, my Lord of Salisbury, you can do nothing to remedy these things, and yet it is precisely "these things" that swell the rising wave of Radicalism. And despite all the power of your keen, capacious brain, and all the love of country working in your soul, believe me, the storm will break. Nothing will keep it back; because, though there are men of genius in the realm, these men are not permitted to speak. The tyrant Journalism forbids. Why "tyrant"? Is not Journalism free? Not so, my Lord; it is not the "voice of the people" at all; it is simply the voice of a few editors. Were the most gifted man that ever held a pen to write a letter to any of the papers on a crying subject of national shame, he would be refused a hearing unless he were a friend of the proprietors of whatever journal he elected to write to. And men of genius seldom are friends of editors--a curious fact, but true. And so we never really hear the "voice of the people" save in some great crisis, and when we do, it invariably astonishes us. It upsets our nerves, too, for a long time afterwards. It is always so horribly loud, authoritative and convincing! The "voices of editors" die away on these occasions like the alarmed squealings of cats chased by infuriated hounds, and into the place of such a smug and well-satisfied person as the Editor of the _Times_, for example, leaps a shabby, dirty, hungry, eager-eyed creature like Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, instead of a clean and carefully prepared pen, uses for the nonce a red, sputtering torch of revolution, which, setting fire to old abuses, spreads wide conflagration through the land. And how the heart leaps, how the blood thrills, when old abuses _are_ destroyed! When the rats' nests of cliques are thrust out to perish in the gutter, when the dirty cobwebs of self-interest and love of gain are swept down, and the fat spiders within them trampled under foot, when the great white palace of national Honour is cleansed and made sweet and fresh for habitation, even at the cost of groaning labour, confusion, and stress, how one breathes again, how one lives the life of a true man in the purified strong air!

As you know well, my Lord, I am of no political party. I am proud to be as one with this great nation in its vital desire for the Right and the Just. Wherever the Right appears I am its follower to the death. I hate false things; I hate bubble reputations, empty wind-bags of policy, dried skeletons of faith. Why not leave this dubious handling of bones and dusty material? It is too late to set wry matters straight. They are an obstruction, and must be cleared from the path of England. Had you the temerity, as I know you have the will, you would speak your thoughts more openly than you have yet done. You would say: "I refuse to lead cowards. I will call to my side men of proved brain and honesty and skill, with whom honour is more than pelf; I will get at the heart of England, and move with _its_ pulsations; and of those who are not with this heart I will have none. I will at once make some attempt to remedy the frightful abuses of the law; I will move heaven and earth till England, not party, is satisfied!"

And oh, my most excellent friend, what a wise thing you would do, if you would only keep a watchful eye on the scribblers--the poor and hungry and ambitious scribblers especially! Your party at all times of history has been foolishly prone to neglect this sort of inky folk, and what an error of policy is such neglect! These same inky folk, my Lord, do cause thrones to fall and empires to tremble, wherefore you and all whom it concerns should look after them warily. Make friends with them; soothe their irritated nerves; take time and trouble to explain a situation to them, and remember, never was there dusty, crusty writing-biped yet but could not be moved to a pale, pleased smile of response to a royal hand-shake, a royal greeting, given in good season. It is not singers and twiddlers on musical strings that a wise Court should patronise, but the wielders of pens--they, who, if despised and neglected, take relentless vengeance, and, fearing neither God nor devil, proceed to make strange bargains with both. The Press is a plebeian creature--yes, I know; but for all that, it has stumbled with its big, hob-nailed shoes and Argus eyes into the Royal precincts, and stands there smacking its greasy lips and staring rudely, after the fashion of all plebeians unaccustomed to polite society. It is vulgar, this Press--there is no doubt of that; it dresses badly, and wears, not a sword by its side, but a stumpy pen stuck unbecomingly behind its ear, and it gives itself a vast amount of coarse swagger because it is for the most part deficient in education, and picks up its knowledge by hearsay--nevertheless it has power. And it is a power which neither you nor any one else can afford to despise; wherefore, good friend, when you have any grand object in view and want to attain it, let all else go if necessary, but gather a grand muster-roll of Pens. These shall win you your cause if you only know how to lead them, and without their assistance you shall be lost in a sea of contradictions. Some of these Pens are already yours to command; but others are not, and you trouble not your head concerning these "others" which are the very ones you should secure. As for me, I could go on advising you with the most infinite tedium on sundry matters, but I will not now, inasmuch as we shall have frequent opportunities for discourse in the library at Hatfield. And so, till we meet again, accept the assurance of my admiration and devoted service. You are one of the noblest of living Englishmen; you have the kindest heart in the world; your foreign policy means peace and satisfaction to Europe; and yet, with it all, and with my ardent friendship for you, I cannot help asking myself the question whether, if the storm breaks and the waves rise mountains high, will you have the strength to be a pilot for the ship of England in her dark hour? And if it should be proved that you cannot steer us, Who shall be found that can?

VII.

CHATTETH WITH THE GRAND OLD MAN.

Dost thou remember, my dear Mr. Gladstone, a certain warm and pleasant July afternoon when thou didst honour and oppress me with thy Grand Old Presence for a couple or more of weary hours, regardless of the fact that the "House" expected thee to appear and reply on some moot point or other to Mr. Goschen? There in my modest studio thou didst sit, rubbing that extensive ear of thine with one long forefinger, and smiling suavely at such regular intervals as almost to suggest the idea of there being a patent smiling-machine secreted behind thy never-resting jaw!

Ah, that was a day! We talked--but no! 'twas thou didst talk, thou noble old man! and I--as all poor mortals must needs do in thy company--listened. Listened intently; helpless to remove thee from the chair in which thou sattest; hopeless of putting any stop to thine eloquence; while on, on, on, still on, rolled the stream of thy fluent and wordy contradictions, till my mind like a ship broken loose from its moorings, rocked up and down in a wild, dark sea of uncertainty as to what thou didst mean; or whether thy meaning, if it could by chance be discovered, should in truth be meant? Hadst thou been a Book instead of a Man, I should have flung thee aside, walked the room, and clutched my hair after the manner of the intense tragedian; but with thee, thou astonishing Biped, I could do no more than stare stonily at thy careless collar-ends and concentrate all my soul on my powers of hearing. "Listen, fool!" I said to my inner self--"Listen! It is Gladstone who is speaking--Gladstone the old man eloquent; Gladstone the thinker; Gladstone the Bible scholar; Gladstone the Greek translator; Gladstone the Scotchman, Gladstone the Irishman, Gladstone the--the--the--Wood-cutter! Listen!"

And, as I live, I listened to thee, Gladstone; I swallowed, as it were, thine every word, in spite of increasingly lethargic mental indigestion. Specially did I strive to follow thee in thy wild flights up the stairs of many religious theories, when with gray hair ruffled and eyes aglare, thou didst solemnly rend piecemeal "Robert Elsmere," forgetting, O thou grand old Paradox, that if thou hadst never lifted up that clamant voice of thine in _Nineteenth-Century-Magazine_ utterance, Robert and his oppressive religious troubles might scarcely have attracted notice? Didst thou not "boom" Robert, and then feign surprise at the result? Ay, venerable Splitter of Straws and Hewer of Logs, wilt deny the truth? And shall I not advise thee in thine own terms to retire from public life, not "now," but "at present." Or if not "at present" then "now"? Either will serve, before thou dost make more blows with thy hatchet-brain (somewhat dulled at the edge) at the future honour and welfare of thy country.

Ah, what things I could have said to thee, thou Quibble, when thou didst venture to assail me with thy converse, if thou hadst but taken decent pause for breathing! Why, amongst other marvels, didst thou deem it worth thy while to flatter me, or to praise the casual sputterings of my pen? Thy unctuous insinuations carried no persuasion; thy "nods and becks and wreathed smiles" were wasted on me; thy soft assurances of the "certainty of my future brilliant fame" went past my ears like the murmur of an idle wind. For a fame "assured" by thee is nothing worth; and thy Polonius-like approbation of any piece of work, literary or otherwise, is as a mark set on it to make it seem ridiculous. For thou art destitute of humour save in wood-cutting; and thou needest many a lesson from my dear friend Andrew Lang before thou canst successfully comprehend the subtly critical art of proving a goose to be a swan. And so, by monosyllables slipt in like frailest wedges between thy florid bursts of ambiguity, I strove to entice thy wandering wits back to the discussion of personal faith in matters religious, wherein I found thee most divertingly inchoate, but my feeble efforts were of small avail. For lo, while yet I strove to understand whether thou wert in truth a Roman Papist, a Calvinist, a Hindoo, a Theosophist, or a Special Advocate of the _War Cry_, the subject of Creed, like a magic-lantern slide, disappeared from thy mental view, and Divorce came up instead. Frightful and wonderful, according to thee, goodman Gladstone, are the wicked ways of the married! No sooner are they united than they move heaven and earth to get parted--so it is at any rate very frequently in the free and happy American Republic, where the disagreeing parties need not move heaven and earth, but simply make a mutual assertion. Oh, of a truth here was no smiling matter! No Deity in question, but a very positive Devil, needing thy exhortation and exorcism; and thy jaws clacked on sternly, strenuously, and with a resolute gravity and persistency that seemed admirable. Not every man could be expected to find a Mrs. Gladstone, but surely all were bound to try and discover such a paragon. If all married society were composed of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstones, why, married society would realise the fabled Elysium. And supposing there continued to be only one Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, and all the rest were quite a different set of hopelessly different temperaments, then, naturally, it was impossible to state what disasters might ensue. It would be a case of Noah and his wife over again--after them the Deluge. In the interim, Divorce was shocking, abominable, sinful, diabolical, ungodly--an upsetting of the most sacred foundations of morality--and it was chiefly because Gladstonian domestic tastes were not universal. This, at least, is what I seemed to gather from thee in thine onslaughts against the large and melancholy mass of the Miserably Married; I say I "seemed" to gather it, because it "seemed" thy meaning, but as thy whole mode of speech and action is only "seems," I cannot be absolutely sure either of myself or thyself. For thou didst set out an attractive row of various learned propositions, gently, and with the bland solicitude of a hen-wife setting out her choicest eggs for sale, then suddenly and incontinently, and as one in a fit of strangest madness, thou didst sweep them up and fling them aside into airy nothingness without concern for the havoc wrought. Thou didst calmly state what appeared to be a Fact, reasonable and graspable; and with all the powers of my being I seized upon it as a grateful thing and good for consideration; when suddenly thy senile smile obscured the intellectual horizon, and thy equably modulated voice murmured such words as these: "Not that I desire to imply by any means that this is so, or should be so, but that it might (under certain circumstances, and provided certain minds were at harmony upon the point) probably become so." Ah, thou embodied Confusion worse Confounded! Had it not been for this constant playing of thine at thy favourite shuffling game of cross-purposes, I should have roused my soul from its stupor of forced attention to demand of thee more of thy profound Bible scholarship. Whether, for example, if Divorce, thy bugbear, were ungodly, and the Bible true, a man should not have two, three, nay, half-a-dozen wives at his pleasure for as long or as short a time as he chose, and find situations for them afterwards as servants, telegraph-clerks, and bookkeepers, when their beauty was gone and snappishness of temper had taken the place of endearing docility. Whether English harem-life, lately set in vogue by certain great and distinguished "Upper" people, could not be easily proved pleasing unto the Most High Jehovah? For did not God love His servant Abraham? and did not Abraham bestow his affections on Sarai and Hagar? and when the hoary old reprobate was "well stricken in years" and "the Lord had blessed him in all things" did he not again take a wife named Keturah, who presented him in his centenarian decrepitude with six sons?--all "fine babies," no doubt. What sayest thou to these morals of Holy Writ, thou "many-sounding" mouthpiece of opinion? Answer me on a postcard, for with thee, more than with any other man, should brevity be the soul of wit!