The Earl of Beaconsfield

by James Anthony Froude

No attempt can be made here to analyse ‘Coningsby.’ The object of these extracts is merely to illustrate Disraeli’s private opinions. Space must be made for one more—a conversation between Coningsby and the younger Millbank. ‘Tell me, Coningsby,’ Millbank says, ‘exactly what you conceive to be the state of parties in this country.’

Coningsby answers:

‘The principle of the exclusive Constitution of England having been conceded by the Acts of 1827-1832, a party has arisen in the State who demand that the principle of political Liberalism shall consequently be carried to its full extent, which it appears to them is impossible without getting rid of the fragments of the old Constitution which remain. This is the destructive party, a party with distinct and intelligible principles. They are resisted by another party who, having given up exclusion, would only embrace as much Liberalism as is necessary for the moment—who, without any embarrassing promulgation of principles, wish to keep things as they find them as long as they can; and these will manage them as they find them, as well as they can: but, as a party must have the semblance of principles, they take the names of the things they have destroyed. Thus, they are devoted to the prerogatives of the Crown, although in truth the Crown has been stripped of every one of its prerogatives. They affect a great veneration for the Constitution in Church and State, though everyone knows it no longer exists. Whenever public opinion, which this party never attempts to form, to educate, or to lead, falls into some perplexity, passion, or caprice, this party yields without a struggle to the impulse, and, when the storm has passed, attempts to obstruct and obviate the logical and ultimately inevitable results of the measures they have themselves originated, or to which they have consented. This is the Conservative party.

‘As to the first school, I have no faith in the remedial qualities of a government carried on by a neglected democracy who for three centuries have received no education. What prospect does it offer us of those high principles of conduct with which we have fed our imaginations and strengthened our wills? I perceive none of the elements of government that should secure the happiness of a people and the greatness of a realm. But if democracy be combated only by Conservatism, democracy must triumph and at no distant date. The man who enters political life at this epoch has to choose between political infidelity and a destructive creed.’

‘Do you declare against Parliamentary government?’

‘Far from it: I look upon political change as the greatest of evils, for it comprehends all. But if we have no faith in the permanence of the existing settlement ... we ought to prepare ourselves for the change which we deem impending.... I would accustom the public mind to the contemplation of an existing though torpid power in the Constitution capable of removing our social grievances, were we to transfer to it those prerogatives which the Parliament has gradually usurped, and used in a manner which has produced the present material and moral disorganisation. The House of Commons is the house of a few: the sovereign is the sovereign of all. The proper leader of the people is the individual who sits upon the throne.’

‘Then you abjure the representative principle?’

‘Why so? Representation is not necessarily, or even in a principal sense, Parliamentary. Parliament is not sitting at this moment: and yet the nation is represented in its highest as well as in its most minute interests. Not a grievance escapes notice and redress. I see in the newspapers this morning that a pedagogue has brutally chastised his pupil. It is a fact known over all England—opinion is now supreme, and opinion speaks in print. The representation of the Press is far more complete than the representation of Parliament. Parliamentary representation was the happy device of a ruder age, to which it was admirably adapted. But it exhibits many symptoms of desuetude. It is controlled by a system of representation more vigorous and comprehensive, which absorbs its duties and fulfils them more efficiently.... Before a royal authority, supported by such a national opinion, the sectional anomalies of our country would disappear. Under such a system even statesmen would be educated. We should have no more diplomatists who could not speak French, no more bishops ignorant of theology, no more generals-in-chief who never saw a field. There is a polity adapted to our laws, our institutions, our feelings, our manners, our traditions: a polity capable of great ends, and appealing to high sentiments: a polity which, in my opinion, would render government an object of national affection, would terminate sectional anomalies, and extinguish Chartism.’

Disraeli was singularly regardless of the common arts of party popularity. He had spoken in defence of the Chartists when he was supposed to be bidding for a place under Sir Robert Peel; he had used language about Ireland, sweeping, peremptory, going to the heart of the problem, which Whig and Tory must have alike resented; and he had risked his seat by his daring. He was now telling the country, in language as plain as Carlyle’s, that Parliament was an effete institution—and the House of Commons which he treated so disdainfully was in a few years to choose him for its leader. The anomalies in Disraeli’s life grow more astonishing the deeper we look into them.

‘SYBIL’

‘Sybil,’ published the next year, is more remarkable than even ‘Coningsby.’ ‘Sybil; or, the Two Nations,’ the two nations being the Rich and the Poor. Disraeli had personally studied human life in the manufacturing towns. He had seen the workman, when trade was brisk and wages high, enjoying himself in his Temple of the Muses; he had seen him, when demand grew slack, starving with his family in the garret, with none to help him. He had observed the insolent frauds of the truckmaster. He had seen the inner side of our magnificent industries which legislation was struggling to extend: he had found there hatred, anarchy, and incendiarism, and he was not afraid to draw the lurid picture in the unrelieved colours of truth.

The first scene opens on the eve of the Derby, when, in a splendid club-room, the languid aristocrats, weary of the rolling hours, are making up their betting-books—they the choicest and most finished flowers of this planet, to whom the Derby is the event of the year. They are naturally high-spirited young men, made for better things, but spoilt by their education and surroundings.

From the youth we pass to the mature specimens of the breed who are in possession of their estates and their titles. Lord Marney’s peerage dates from the suppression of the monasteries, in which his ancestor had been a useful instrument.

The secretary of Henry VIII.’s vicar-general had been rewarded by the lands of a northern abbey. The property had grown in value with the progress of the country. The family for the three centuries of its existence had never produced a single person who had contributed any good thing to the service of the commonwealth. But their consequence had grown with their wealth, and the Lord Marney of ‘Sybil’ was aspiring to a dukedom. He is represented (being doubtless drawn from life) as the harshest of landlords, exacting the utmost penny of rent, leaving his peasantry to squalor and disease, or driving them off his estates to escape the burden of the poor-rate, and astonished to find Swing and his bonfires starting up about him as his natural reward. The second great peer of the story, Lord Mowbray, of a yet baser origin and character, owns the land on which has grown a mushroom city of mills and mill-hands. The ground-rents have made him fabulously rich, while, innocent of a suspicion that his wealth has brought obligations along with it, he lives in vulgar luxury in his adjoining castle.

On both estates the wretchedness is equal, though the character of it is different. Lord Marney rules in a country district. A clergyman asks him how a peasant can rear his family on eight shillings a week. ‘Oh, as for that,’ said Lord Marney, ‘I have generally found the higher the wages, the worse the workmen. They only spend their money in the beershops. They are the curse of the country.’ The ruins of the monastery give an opportunity for a contrast between the old England and the new, by a picture of the time when the monks were the gentlest of landlords, when exactions and evictions were unknown, and when churches were raised to the service of God in the same spots where now rise the brick chimneys and factories as the spires and temples of the modern Mammon-worship.