III
Disraeli’s style, in short, cried aloud for attack by critics who hated him on other scores.
“Personal influences,” wrote he, “inevitably mingle in some degree with such productions. There are critics who, abstractedly, do not approve of successful books, particularly if they have failed in the same style; social acquaintances also of lettered taste, and especially contemporaries whose public life has not exactly realised the vain dreams of their fussy existence, would seize the accustomed opportunity of welcoming with affected discrimination about nothing, and elaborate controversy about trifles, the production of a friend: and there is always, both in politics and literature, the race of the Dennises, the Oldmixons, and Curls, who flatter themselves that by libelling some eminent personage of their times, they have a chance of descending to posterity.”
This sounds well enough, indeed. But in point of fact Disraeli has a persistent habit of wrapping up his incomparable gift of irony in language so detestably fustian that even a fair critic has to search his periods carefully, separating the true from the sham. A fine ear will separate them: but it needs a fine ear, and will tax it the most of its time. All his life, in letters as in politics, he posed somewhat as a Man of Mystery: and your Man of Mystery must take the rough with the smooth: and your Cagliostro or even your honest merchant who talks at once too floridly and too cleverly cannot blame any plain auditor for suspecting that he talks, all the while, with his tongue in his cheek.
It is a pity: for I do not see how any fair-minded reader of Disraeli’s novels can fail to acknowledge, at this distance of time, that the man was eminently serious, and in earnest, and wise even. I spoke to you, a fortnight ago—at too great a length, you may think—of the problem of industrial England and how the misery of the poor, caught in its machinery, forced itself through the imaginative sympathy of certain writers upon the national conscience: and especially (you may remember) I spoke of the children because the children won the battle. As Francis Thompson says, “The grim old superstition was right. When man would build to a lasting finish, he must found his building over a child.”
Well, I see no reason to doubt—no reason either in his writings or his public action—that Disraeli’s concern over this industrial misery was ever less than disinterested, sincere, even chivalrous. No one can deny the sincerity, at least, of Sybil; no one the terrible authenticity of its descriptive pages—such as the famous picture of a gang emerging from a coal-mine: for research has shown that throughout and almost sentence by sentence the author has been at silent pains to document the almost incredible evidence of his own eyes with evidence from Blue Books and Parliamentary Reports. I shall not harrow your feelings by reading the passage, having harrowed them (as I say) sufficiently a fortnight ago. But you may take it for the moment—as you may amply satisfy yourselves by enquiry later and at leisure—that the Inferno is faithfully depicted: that the mill-owners Shuffle and Screw (Disraeli had a foible for such names and for running them in double harness—you will recall those celebrated duettists, Taper and Tadpole)—that the exactions of these men were real exactions, that the sufferings of the handweaver Warner and his starving family are sufferings that did actually break actual human hearts and that even the upbringing of the factory urchin Devilsdust is not only true to fact but typical. You may be excused for doubting as you read how Devilsdust—so he came to be called, for he had no legitimate name—“having survived a baby-farm by toughness of constitution, and the weekly threepence ceasing on his mother’s death,” was thrown out into the streets to starve or be run over: how even this expedient failed—
The youngest and feeblest of the band of victims, Juggernaut spared him to Moloch. All his companions were disposed of. Three months’ play in the streets got rid of this tender company....
You shudder as you read how the cholera visited the cellar where he and other outcasts slept, until
—one night when he returned home he found the old woman herself dead and surrounded only by corpses. The child before this had slept on the same bed of straw with a corpse: but then there were also breathing things for his companions. A night passed only with corpses seemed to him itself a kind of death. He stole out of the cellar, quitted the quarter of pestilence, and, after much wandering, lay down at the door of a factory.
—where he was taken in, not from charity, but because a brat of five was useful. Do you tell yourself that Disraeli exaggerates? Then turn to Hansard and read that before Hanway’s Act the annual death-rate among these pauper children was estimated at something between 60 and 70 per cent.: that this Act, as Howlett grimly put it, caused “a deficiency of 2,100 burials a year”: that the London parishes by custom claimed a right to dispose at will of all children of a person receiving relief, and disposed of them to the manufacturers; and that one Lancashire mill-owner agreed with a London parish to take one idiot with every twenty sound children supplied.[3]
[3] The Town Labourer, 1760–1832, by Mr. and Mrs. Hammond, p. 145. From Horner’s Speech, Hansard, June 6, 1815.