No spectacle is more extraordinary than the power which Disraeli acquired after being laughed down by everyone; acquired, and wields still, so many years after his death. I think that his most potent philtre lay in his flattery. He flattered his Sovereign, his party, and the nation itself, with all the florid eloquence and subtle suggestion of which he was so admirable a master. His famous 'Peace with Honour' was an exact sample of his style; the peace was brittle and the honour was dubious, but his manner of presenting them was so magnificent that they were received as though they were gifts from heaven. An able writer has said that the English are deficient in the power of observation, and I believe it is true. They do not examine critically before committing themselves to embrace a cause or an idea; they can easily be led into any extravagance which humours their national humour. Disraeli played on this weakness. He had himself a passion for advertisement, for varnish and gilding, and florid decoration; all his speeches and all his romances are spoilt by these; and he succeeded in inoculating with this taste the English character to which it was naturally alien.
The first sign of the nation having been so inoculated was given when it allowed Disraeli to call the Queen of England the Empress of India, and change an ancient monarchy into a parvenu empire. The first step taken, the rest followed; the mania of what is considered aggrandisement has acquired possession of the national life, and has made of a nation, naturally noble and great, a swollen boaster, bawling of its millions, its might, and its superiority, although surely vanity is no more admirable in a country than in an individual? This alteration in the British temper, which was primarily the work of Disraeli and of the new nobility (chiefly commercial and largely Jewish), which was called into being, prepared the ground for Chamberlain's Imperialism, a much coarser and greedier thing, without any of the veil of ideality which Disraeli lent to his creeds. In the time of Disraeli, the temper of England was still largely coloured by an old aristocracy, retaining, with the prejudices, the principles of gentlemen; now, the financiers and the speculators make the old aristocracy dance to whatever music they choose, and riches are the sole thing sought.
Every Ministry in England, on going out of office, leaves its contingent of ennobled tradesmen, raised to the peerage solely for their money, and for the way in which they have spent their money for the Party. In this way the so-called Conservative leaders possess a solid phalanx of supporters whose wealth makes them irresistible in the country, and who practically send up to Westminster any men they choose. These great richards find Joseph Chamberlain more to their taste than Lord Salisbury, who is too scholarly, too satirical, and too great a gentleman for them; his health is failing, he speaks rarely, there is a cynical contempt in his occasional speeches which cuts the novi homines like a whip. It is impossible that a man of Lord Salisbury's pride of character and acuteness of intellect should much longer consent to be the mere echo of his Colonial Secretary. There is every sign that his retirement will be followed by the accession to the premiership of Chamberlain. For months past the Imperialist Press, and notably that journal which is the property of the Chancellor of the Primrose League, has been insinuating that no one except Chamberlain is capable of rising to the height required by advanced Imperialism: and what this journal says is certain to be echoed by that party, which, with an audacity almost sublime, still calls itself Conservative.
Chamberlain has continued the work of Disraeli, but he has done so by vulgarising and brutalising it. The best qualities of the English character are, under his influence, lost in a blatant self-admiration. Its sense of morality is blunted; its leaders accept any denial or excuse of the Minister of the Colonies, and he is applauded when, as an independent Member said a few weeks since in the House of Commons, he should be called to the bar of the House. Parliament, and the nation after it, accept the suppression of despatches and telegrams, the use and abuse of censorship, the denial and interruption of free speech, the closure of debate at the moment when its continuance would be inconvenient to ministers: all things previously intolerable to the English people. Chamberlain has educated them into the abandonment of all their ancient virtues. If, as he is almost certain to do if he live, he become before long the Premier of England, he will do immeasurable harm both to Great Britain and the world.
The reign of Queen Victoria has been a long succession of wars; few, if any, were either necessary or inevitable. But not one of these has been a war of defence at home; the English citizen and peasant know nothing in their own land of the horrors of war; they have never seen its desolation and its horrors; they have never seen their little children crushed under the hoofs and wheels of a battery, their homes set on fire by a shell, their sons starving, their fields devastated, their towns beleaguered. They have never seen a battle, a siege, a trench full of dead; therefore they do not know the hideous suffering which they inflict when they let loose, in pride of spirit and lightness of heart and triumphant vanity, the fiends of war upon a distant people and a far-off land. This is the excuse of a large portion of the nation for the present war; but it is at the same time the strongest condemnation of those who preach war to it as a divine creed, and appeal to its most brutal instincts, and abuse its ignorance to lead it into crime. The victories now gained will be dearly bought, for they, and the national madness they produce, will certainly set Joseph Chamberlain in the seat of supreme power, and no one will have the courage to restrain his hand. Bellona has served him so well now, she will be his chosen handmaid in the future.[9]
VIII
UNWRITTEN LITERARY LAWS
There has been some idea mooted of forming an Academy in England on the lines of the Academy of France, but it would never be the same kind of institution, or exercise the same authority. The English temper is not academic, the Royal Academy is proof enough of that. Moreover, Englishmen are indifferent to the use or abuse of their language, and the first care of an Academy must be to keep the national language pure, and clear, and elegant. The well of English undefiled is sadly muddy, nowadays, and any roaring screamer of English or American slang is as welcome to those who call themselves critics as though he wrote like Matthew Arnold or John Morley. Lacking an Academy of Letters, and the writers who would make one, there is in London what is called a Society of Authors, which is supposed to resemble the Société des Gens de Lettres in Paris, but the English Society appears to be chiefly an association for the multiplication and publication of inferior works, and its authority on literature is nil. In addition to these, there are persons who call themselves literary agents; but the latter have a decidedly anti-intellectual influence, and to them is probably, in part, due the enormous increase in the issue of rubbish of all kinds, which is at the present time doing so much injury to the English literary reputation.