Although Lytton started out as a Liberal, he ended as a Conservative, and furnishes some counter satire against democracy. In Night and Morning he speaks of men losing their democratic enthusiasm; and in The Coming Race he gives proof that his is entirely lost. The family of the narrator are Americans, “rich and aristocratic, therefore disqualified for public service;” his father, defeated by his tailor in the race for Congress, decides on the superior beauty of private life. The Vrilya have a very expressive compound word. Koom means a profound hollow; Posh is a term of utter contempt; “Koom-Posh is their name for the government of the many, or the ascendency of the most ignorant and hollow.”[291] This contempt, distributed impartially over dishonest demagogue and gullible public, is nothing new. Smollett, for instance, in his Adventures of an Atom, appreciates the art of oratory:
“Our orator was well acquainted with all the legerdemain of his own language, as well as with the nature of the beast he had to rule. He knew when to distract its weak brain with a tumult of incongruous and contradictory ideas: he knew when to overwhelm its feeble faculty of thinking, by pouring in a torrent of words without any ideas annexed.”
The same Adventurer notes that the names of the two political parties of Japan signify respectively More Fool than Knave, and More Knave than Fool. It is, of course this aspect of democracy that leads Lowell to picture it as “Helpless as spilled beans on a dresser.”
Statemanship was Disraeli’s whole existence, and his art a handmaiden to politics. More than any other nineteenth century novelist he complemented destructive criticism by a definite constructive policy. To a contemporary critic, a reforming Tory was a white blackbird; but our own generation, having witnessed the phenomenon of Progressive Republicanism, has less difficulty in understanding the paradox. It was not indifference to the welfare of the masses that induced Disraeli’s belief in the rule of a selected class, but a distrust of popular ability and judgment, and a conviction (acknowledged in our own time as a truth and the real salvation of democracy) that efficiency can come only from expert knowledge and training. From such a viewpoint satire would naturally be directed not against the people but against its incapable and dishonest leadership. Peacock’s scorn of this exploitation of popular ignorance and helplessness is taken up by both his nearest successors, expressed, as it happens, in a pair of portraits of the ward-politician type.
Pelham repudiates Vincent’s proposed new party because of its bad personnel, men—[292]
“* * * who talk much, who perform nothing—who join ignorance of every principle of legislation to indifference for every benefit to the people:—who are full of ‘wise saws’, but empty of ‘modern instances’—who level upwards, and trample downwards—and would only value the ability you are pleased to impute to me, in the exact proportion that a sportsman values the ferret, that burrows for his pleasure, and destroys for his interest.”
Montacute draws a more concrete and ironic picture:[293]
“Find a man who, totally destitute of genius, possesses nevertheless considerable talent; who has official aptitude, a volubility of routine rhetoric, great perseverance, a love of affairs, who, embarrassed neither by the principles of the philosopher nor by the prejudices of the bigot, can assume, with a cautious facility, the prevalent tone, and disembarrass himself of it, with a dexterous ambiguity, the moment it ceases to be predominant: recommending himself to the innovator by his approbation of change ‘in the abstract,’ and to the conservative by his prudential and practical respect for that which is established; such a man, though he be one of an essentially small mind, though his intellectual qualities be less than moderate, with feeble powers of thought, no imagination, contracted sympathies, and a most loose public morality; such a man is the individual whom kings and parliaments would select to govern the State or rule the Church.”
It is not to be supposed, however, that the people would choose any better than kings and parliaments; on the contrary,—[294]
“The Thirty at Athens were at least tyrants. They were marked men. But the obscure majority, who, under our present constitution, are destined to govern England, are as secret as a Venetian conclave. Yet on their dark voices all depends.”