V
Now, I dare say some of you, even while I read this, were dismissing it in your minds as early-Victorian humanitarianism, faded philanthropy, outworn sentiment. Yes, but even a sentiment, if it works simultaneously upon a generation of great and very dissimilar writers, is a fact in the story of our literature—a phenomenon, at least, which made itself an event—to be studied by you scientifically. One of the first rules of good criticism, and the sheet-anchor of the historical method, is to put yourself (as near as may be) in the other fellow’s place: and if you take but a very little pains to do so, you will soon discover that Mrs. Browning was not writing “for the fun of the thing,” exuding, or causing to be exuded, any cheap tears. We are accustomed to Manchester to-day: we take it for granted as a great community with a most honourable Press to represent its opinions. But we only take it for granted because it has become tolerable, and it only became tolerable, then dignified—it only became a city—because our Victorian writers shamed its manufacturers out of their villainies. In the twenties, thirties, and “hungry forties” of the last century Manchester was merely a portent, and a hideous portent, the growth of which at once fascinated our economists and frightened our rulers. Think of the fisherman in the Arabian Nights who, unstopping the bottle brought ashore in his net, beheld a column of smoke escape and soar and spread, and anon and aloft, overlooking it, the awful visage of a Genie. Even so our economists watched an enormous smoke ascend from Manchester and said, “Here is undreamed-of national prosperity”; while our ministers stared up into the evil face of a monster they had no precedent to control. You understand, of course, that I use “Manchester” as a symbolic name, covering a Lancashire population which grew in the first twenty years of the century from 672,000 to 1,052,000. But let a very different person from Mrs. Browning—let Benjamin Disraeli, then a young man, describe the portent.
From early morn to the late twilight our Coningsby for several days devoted himself to the comprehension of Manchester. It was to him a new world, pregnant with new trains of thought and feeling. In this unprecedented partnership between capital and science—
Mark you, not between capital and labour, but between capital and science, still by machinery arming capital to vaster strength—
In this unprecedented partnership between capital and science, working on a spot which Nature had indicated as the fitting theatre for their exploits, he beheld a great source of the wealth of nations which had been reserved for these times, and he perceived that this wealth was rapidly developing classes whose power was imperfectly recognised in the constitutional scheme, and whose duties to the social system seemed altogether omitted
—“and whose duties to the social system seemed altogether omitted.” There, in Disraeli’s words, you have it. Every prolonged war raises a new governing class of prosperous profiteers who turn their country’s necessity to glorious gain. So it was a hundred years ago at the conclusion of the long Napoleonic struggle: so it is to-day. So it goes on ever. A profiteering class of speculators and (as Cobbett would say) “loan-mongers” emerges at the top of any great war. Ex-soldiers tramp the roads for work, for bread. Decent folk, bred in the incurable belief that England, whoever suffers, must pay her debts, sell out and suffer, breaking up old homes, cutting neighbourly ties, disappearing, taxed out of endurance, electing to suffer, for honour’s sake. Succeeds a generation or two which, at school or University, are baptised into the old honourable cult. The gravity of an Englishman, because they are English after all, revives and takes possession of young hearts, made generous by education, forgetful of old woes. And so in time—give it a couple of generations—the descendants of the sponge and the parvenu will have shed the hair from the hoof, will leap to the summons of noblesse oblige, and in their turn make haste to die by Ypres or the Somme, transmitting somehow the mettle of England into a future denied to them.