The journey succeeded beautifully, for it was the roughest passage I remember, and I was none the worse for it. At Calais one gets into a sleeping-car and gets out of it at Cannes, after dining and sleeping comfortably. A young Englishman described the Grasse Hotel to me, where he had lived with Cross, who was writing a book. He did not discover that it[[244]] was the book in my hand. I have sent it back with some considerable suggestions.
Mrs. Green writes an amusing account of Dr. Stubbs's violent language in politics when she approaches him with her history. I have advised her to sacrifice everything and everybody to the object of securing his help. Leviathan will not aid her.
I have strongly urged May to write a new chapter of Constitutional History, coming down to this our era of Good Feeling, as Americans call the last administration of Monroe.[[245]] It is the greatest landmark in English Politics; and it has the merit of all well-defined epochs, that it is not going to last.
At the British Museum, Gardiner was working, and I wished him joy on the endowment of Research.
*****
Cannes Dec. 18, 1884
If sleeplessness comes on again do represent the merits of Cannes in their proper light. January is often the finest month, and this is the finest season ever known. Also it is the emptiest. I hear that Thorenc is not to let, in the hope that the Wolvertons may take it. Such rest and change as he would get here, after so much hard work, might be quite invaluable, especially if it is in his thoughts that the Session of 1885 is to be his last in office. That would be worth refreshing for; and we shall do our best to occupy and distract him, and all of you, during your stay.
Croker[[246]] was so large and promising a morsel that I postponed temptation and read no part of him carefully; besides it is a question hot with hidden fire. Have you not discovered, have I never betrayed, what a narrow doctrinaire I am, under a thin disguise of levity? The Duke of Orleans nearly described my feelings when he spoke, testamentarily, of his religious flag and his political faith. Politics come nearer religion with me, a party is more like a church, error more like heresy, prejudice more like sin, than I find it to be with better men. And by these canons I am forced to think ill of Peel, to think, if you won't misunderstand me, that he was not a man of principle. The nature of Toryism is to be entangled in interests, traditions, necessities, difficulties, expedients, to manage as best one may, without creating artificial obstacles in the shape of dogma, or superfluous barriers of general principle. "Périssent les colonies plutôt que les principes" (which is a made-up sentence, no more authentic than "Roma locuta est"), expresses the sort of thing Liberalism means and Toryism rejects. Government must be carried on, even if we must tolerate some measure of wrong, use some bad reasons, trample on some unlucky men. Other people could recognise the face and the sanctity of morality where it penetrated politics, taking the shape of sweeping principle, as in Emancipation, Free Trade, and so many other doctrinaire questions. Peel could not until he was compelled by facts. Because he was reluctant to admit the sovereignty of considerations which were not maxims of state policy, which condemned his own past and the party to which he belonged.
But if party is sacred to me as a body of doctrine, it is not, as an association of men bound together, not by common convictions but by mutual obligations and engagements. In the life of every great man there is a point where fidelity to ideas, which are the justifying cause of party, diverges from fidelity to arrangements and understandings, which are its machinery. And one expects a great man to sacrifice his friends—at least his friendship—to the higher cause.
Progress depends not only on the victory, the uncertain and intermittent victory, of Liberals over Conservatives, but on the permeation of Conservatism with Liberal ideas, the successive conversion of Tory leaders, the gradual desertion of the Conservative masses by their chiefs—Fox, Grenville, Wellesley, Canning, Huskisson, Peel—Tory ministers passing Emancipation, Free Trade, Reform—are in the order of historic developments. Still the complaints of Croker are natural. He had been urged along a certain line, and being a coarse, blatant fellow, he overdid it, and wrote things from which there was no release. It was not in his brutal nature to appreciate the other side of questions. He did not begin by seeing the strong points of his enemy's case, and so far he was dishonest.