Nor is he lacking in a constructive outlook. In connection with a fling at the “amusingly inconsistent, however well-meant scene in Coningsby,” in which Disraeli illustrates his idea of a beneficent aristocracy, he has one of his characters meditate that—[444]
“It may suit the Mr. Lyles of this age * * * to make the people constantly and visibly comprehend that property is their protector and their friend, but I question whether it will suit the people themselves, unless they can make property understand that it owes them something more definite than protection.”
At that time there was not much disposition to believe these ills could be cured by legislation. On the contrary, the numerous satiric hits at various governmental departments were aimed not at the general laissez faire policy of the State, but at its indifferent success in the matters over which it had already assumed jurisdiction, and its unwarranted encroachment into others. The reasoning seemed to be that an institution which had been unfaithful and convicted of inertness, graft, and stupidity in its limited operations would be unlikely to be more alert, honest, and intelligent if its burdens were increased. David Copperfield is shocked to learn from Mr. Spenlow the ways of the law, and still more so at Mr. Spenlow’s coldness toward the idea of reform.[445] Henry Little wades through and climbs over all sorts of official obstacles until “he had done, in sixty days, what a true inventor will do in twenty-four hours, whenever the various metallic ages shall be succeeded by the age of reason.”[446] A prison inspector is finally confronted with actual facts of a horrifying nature:[447]
“How unreal and idle appeared now the twenty years gone in tape and circumlocution! Away went his life of shadows—his career of watery polysyllables meandering through the great desert into the Dead Sea.”
But more subtle and vital than all these errors,—the error indeed at the root of them all,—is the failure of the State to utilize the fine material placed at its disposal, potentially if not actually, in the lives of noble and capable youth. No one before Lytton could have laid at the door of society the wasted possibilities of a Godolphin. No one before Meredith could have made the thwarted career of a Beauchamp a pitiful satire on “his indifferent England,” who appeared, “with a quiet derision that does not belie her amiable passivity, to have reduced in Beauchamp’s career the boldest readiness for public action, and some good stout efforts besides, to the flat result of an optically discernible influence of our hero’s character in the domestic circle: perhaps a faintly outlined circle or two beyond it.”[448]
In Society and the State all opposition is necessarily factional, for none can stand entirely outside. This was true of the Church also, during its undisputed supremacy, when to be excommunicated was equivalent to being imprisoned or otherwise put outside the pale. But by the sixteenth century Skelton could say in Colyn Clout,
“For, as farre as I can se,
It is wrong with eche degre;
For the temporalte
Accuseth the spiritualte;