Curtain.
II
SECRET SOCIETIES
When Lord Scamperdale was angry with Mr. Sponge for riding over his hounds he called him "a perpendicular Puseyite pig-jobber"; and the alliteration was felt to emphasize the rebuke. If any Home Ruler is irritated by Sir Robert Anderson he may relieve his feelings by calling him a "preaching political policeman," and each word in the title will be true to life. Sir Robert combines in his single person the characters of barrister, detective, and theologian. He began life at the Irish Bar, was for many years head of the Criminal Investigation Department in London, then became Assistant Commissioner of Police, and all the while gave what leisure he could spare from tracking dynamiters and intercepting burglars to the composition of such works as "The Gospel and its Ministry," "A Handbook of Evangelical Truth," and "Daniel in the Critic's Den."
A career so diversified was sure to produce some interesting reminiscences, and the book[2] which Sir Robert has just published is as full of mystery and adventure, violence and strategy, plot and counterplot, as the romances which thrilled our youth. In those days some boys thought soldiering the one life worth living; some, in fancy, ran away to sea. Some loved tales of Piracy, and were peculiarly at home in a Smugglers' Cave. Others snatched a fearful joy from ghosts and bogies. Others enjoyed Brazilian forests and African jungles, hand-to-hand encounters with gorillas and hair-breadth 'scapes from watchful tigers. The present writer thought nothing so delightful as Secret Societies, and would have given his little all to know a password, a sign, or a secret code. Perhaps this idiosyncrasy was due to the fact that in the mid 'sixties every paper teemed with allusions to Fenianism, just then a very active force in the political world; and to Smith Minus, in the Fourth Form at Harrow, there was something unspeakably attractive in the thought of being a "Head Centre," a "Director," or an "Executive Officer of the Irish Republican Brotherhood," or even in the paler glory of writing the mystic letters "F.B." or "C.O." after his undistinguished name. It is in his account of the earlier days of Fenianism that Sir Robert Anderson is so intensely interesting. He traces it, from its origin in the abortive rebellion of 1848 and that "Battle of Limerick" which Thackeray sang, to its formal inauguration in 1860, and its subsequent activities at home and abroad; and the narrative begins, quite thrillingly, with the biography of the famous spy Henri le Caron, who played so striking a part before the Commission on Parnellism and Crime. Those who wish to learn these incidents in our recent history, or as much of them as at present can properly be disclosed, must read Sir Robert's book for themselves. I will not attempt even to epitomize it; and, indeed, I only mention it because of the "sidelights" which it throws, not on Home Rule, but on the part which Secret Societies have played in the fortunes of Modern Europe.
As far as I know, the only Englishman—if Englishman he could properly be called—who regarded the Secret Societies as formidable realities was Lord Beaconsfield. As long ago as 1844—long before he had official experience to guide him—he wrote, with regard to his favourite Sidonia (in drawing whom he drew himself):—
"The catalogue of his acquaintance in the shape of Greeks, Armenians, Moors, Secret Jews, Tartars, Gipsies, wandering Poles, and Carbonari would throw a curious light on those subterranean agencies of which the world in general knows so little, but which exercise so great an influence on public events."
Those were the days when Disraeli, a genius whom no one treated seriously, was uttering his inmost thoughts through the medium of romances to which fancy contributed at least as much as fact. Then came twenty years of constant activity in politics—that pursuit which, as Bacon says, is of all pursuits "the most immersed in matter,"—and, when next he took up the novelist's pen, he was a much older and more experienced, though he would scarcely be a wiser, man. In 1870 he startled the world with "Lothair"; and those who had the hardihood to fight their way through all the fashionable flummery with which the book begins found in the second and third volumes a profoundly interesting contribution to the history of Europe between 1848 and 1868. One of the characters says that "the only strong things in Europe are the Church and the Secret Societies"; and the book is a vivid narrative of the struggle for life and death between the Temporal Power of the Papacy and the insurrectionary movements inspired by Garibaldi. Every chapter of the book contains a portrait, and every incident is drawn from something which had come under the author's notice between 1866 and 1869, when he was the leading personage in the Tory Government and the Fenians were making open and secret war on English rule. He was describing the men whom he knew and the things which he had seen, and this fact makes the book so extraordinarily vivid, and won for it Froude's enthusiastic praise. Every one could recognize Capel and Manning and Antonelli and Lord Bute, and all their diplomatic and fashionable allies; it required some knowledge of the insurrectionary movements to see in "Captain Bruges" a portrait of General Cluseret, commander-in-chief of every insurgent army in Europe or America, or in Theodora the noble character of Jessie White-Mario, whose career of romantic devotion to the cause of Freedom closed only in this year.[3]