This novel was the first of three which comprised Disraeli’s Young England trilogy. In a somewhat unsubstantial way, the three books set forth the principles which were to create a revitalized Tory party. In The Political Novel Morris Speare concludes that the four major points of the program deal with the nobility, the middle class, the working class, and the English church. The nobility was to reassume the leadership it held before patents of nobility were doled out freely to clever entrepreneurs and favorite retainers of great families. An aristocracy in function as well as name, it was to be assisted by the vigorous industrial and mercantile middle class which had arisen in England since the industrial revolution. The lot of the working class was to be bettered by a sympathetic government rather than by militant movements from within its own ranks. Moral and spiritual leadership was to be supplied by a revitalized church true to its fundamental religious tradition. Harry Coningsby, grandson of the dissolute and immensely powerful Lord Monmouth, is the personification of Young England. A hero at Eton and Cambridge, he returns from a year of travel on the continent to enter politics. Refusing to sit in Parliament for one of Monmouth’s rotten boroughs and act as a rubber stamp for old Tory policies, Coningsby is cut out of Monmouth’s will. Monmouth’s death and a neatly juggled legacy eventually pave the way for Coningsby’s entry into Parliament on his own terms. Patly, Coningsby of the nobility marries Edith Millbank, daughter of a middle class tycoon.
A year later, Sybil followed Coningsby. Like substitutes in a football game, Charles Egremont and Trafford go in for Coningsby and Millbank. Much of the book is concerned with the working class. Disraeli shows the reader the horrible conditions in which many of its members live and the violence of their attempts to better them. Bishop Hatton, barbarous ruler of the locksmiths of the mining district village of Wodgate, leads his “Hell-cats” in an assault upon ancient Mowbray Castle. Unions are presented as groups of violent men, cloaked and hooded. Supplementing this portrayal is one of a decaying and greedy aristocracy. One can perhaps imagine the reaction of the landed or moneyed English voter. He might well accept Disraeli’s opinion that something had to be done.
Tancred completed the trilogy in 1847. The hero is the sheltered great-grandson of the Duke of Bellamont, who “might almost be placed at the head of the English nobility.” The introspective Tancred is preoccupied with religion and the direction it can give to human affairs particularly in the areas of politics and government. Unable to find the answers to his questions in England and unwilling to enter Commons until he has them, he makes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. At this point the novel dissolves into a panorama of kidnapings, desert intrigues, and mountain kingdoms reminiscent of Rudolph Valentino movies. Tancred becomes absorbed with “the great Asian mystery” which is to assist in the moral regeneration of the West, particularly England. Overwhelmed by Emirs and Sheikhs, Turks and Druses, the novel is the weakest of the three. But together the books are a prime example of an art form carefully selected and used to gain a hearing for a political program.
Henry James: The Breakup of Victorian Tranquillity
The Princess Casamassima, published by Henry James in 1886, is one of the novels which focused upon the revolutionary currents beginning to stir beneath the surface of English political life. Irving Howe has called it a warning that something had to be done to alleviate the misery of the poor. These conditions had given rise to radical groups such as that which met at the Sun and Moon Tavern under the leadership of Paul Muniment. The personal tragedy of his friend Hyacinth Robinson forms the novel’s central theme. The sensitive, disinherited inhabitant of two worlds, Robinson is the illegitimate son of a Frenchwoman who had murdered her titled lover. Robinson’s maternal grandfather had fallen on the barricades of the French Revolution. Raised with the help of Eustache Poupin, exiled veteran of the French Commune, Robinson feels that he is heir to a revolutionary background. Emotionally exalted, he declares his willingness for self-sacrifice at a group meeting. From that time on, like the protagonist of The Beast in the Jungle, Robinson waits for the summons to fulfill his destiny. But meanwhile he falls under the spell of the Princess, who takes a dilettante interest in the lives of the poor and the activities of the radical movement. Partly under her influence and partly as a result of a trip to Venice and Paris made possible by a small legacy, Robinson finds his revolutionary ardor waning. In his admiration for the richness of European civilization, he becomes reluctant to act as an agent of its eventual destruction. When the summons comes for him to assassinate a duke, he shoots himself instead. James presents a gallery of types: the guilty aristocrat, a member of the decayed gentility, the professional revolutionary, and the industrious poor. In this novel James is concerned as always with personal relationships, backgrounds, and motivations. He also presents an environment out of which political violence can explode. And his feelings about the need for preventing it are clear.
Joseph Conrad: Early Cloak and Dagger
In 1907 Joseph Conrad explored this problem from the same point of view in The Secret Agent. In the author’s note which introduced the novel, Conrad wrote that a friend had mentioned anarchist activities. This was the germ of the story:
I remember, however, remarking on the criminal futility of the whole thing, doctrine, action, mentality; and on the contemptible aspect of the half-crazy pose as of a brazen cheat exploiting the poignant miseries and passionate credulities of a mankind always so tragically eager for self-destruction. That was what made for me its philosophical pretences so unpardonable.
Conrad then had his point of view; his recollection of an attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory gave him the outlines of his plot. A “delegate of the Central Red Committee,” Adolf Verloc is actually an informer and agent provocateur for many years in the pay of the embassy of a “great power” (probably Russia). His principal function is to transmit warnings of planned bomb-throwings to insure the safety of “royal, imperial, or grand-ducal journeys....” Called to the embassy, Verloc is told by first secretary Vladimir that the conference in Milan is lagging in its “deliberations upon international action for the suppression of political crime....” England is chiefly responsible, Vladimir tells him. He orders Verloc to provide a stimulus in the form of an attack “with all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy.” Verloc is ordered to blow up the Observatory. Always a businessman and never a terrorist, he is deeply disturbed. Obtaining a bomb, Verloc sends his admiring half-wit brother-in-law Stevie out with it. But Stevie stumbles and blows up himself rather than the Observatory. When Verloc’s wife learns what has happened, she kills him and then commits suicide. To add to the impact of the story, Conrad wove into it the characters of Karl Yundt, an evil old terrorist, and the Professor, a “perfect anarchist” who spends his life in experiments to develop the perfect detonator. In The Great Tradition F. R. Leavis has rightly called this book “one of Conrad’s two supreme masterpieces.” In its structure, its delineation of personality, and its masterful manipulation of point of view, the book is a classic. It is an example of the superiority of the European political novel, one of the finest works in the entire genre.
Under Western Eyes was written from the same point of view as The Secret Agent. Appearing in 1910, the novel dealt with the same sort of groups Conrad had treated three years earlier. But now the area was wider, the figures larger, and the stakes bigger. Kirylo Razumov, another illegitimate like Hyacinth Robinson, is studying at St. Petersburg University for a career in the civil service. His life is disrupted when Victorovitch Haldin seeks refuge in his rooms after blowing up the President of a Repressive Commission which had imprisoned, exiled, or hanged many Russians considered disloyal to the Czar. Afraid of being suspected of complicity and enraged at what he feels is gratuitous destruction of the only life he can make for himself, Razumov, on the advice of his father, Prince K——, betrays Haldin to the police. His life now completely disoriented, Razumov is persuaded by the Prince and Councilor Mikulin to go to Geneva. Regarded as a hero and the accomplice of Haldin, he enters the revolutionary circle led by the famous Peter Ivanovitch. His job is to report their plans to Mikulin. But then, despite himself, he falls in love with Haldin’s sister Nathalia. He confesses his betrayal of Haldin to her and then to the circle. Maimed by the circle’s executioner, Razumov stumbles out onto the street and into the path of a tram car. At the novel’s end he has returned to Russia with but a short time to live. Again, Conrad’s point of view affects the reader through the tragedies he describes, the object-lesson characters he creates, and the comments they make. The narrator and Conrad’s raisonneur, an anonymous teacher of English in Geneva, is the source of many of these comments. When he sees Nathalia about to return to Russia as a dedicated worker, he thinks of her believing in “the advent of loving accord springing like a heavenly flower from the soil of men’s earth, soaked in blood, torn by struggles, watered with tears.”