Rousseau’s “Return” was a sentimental one, for sentimentality often attends materialism. The best side of Rousseau was that he did undoubtedly leaven the irreverence of his generation with some feeling for God. But Rousseau invented a past on which he founded his hopefulness of sensibility—an inverted optimism. He cried aloud in hysterics, “Man is born free; everywhere he is in chains.” To what freedom was man born? The freedom of confusion. The order that he evolves is the parent of his true freedom—the freedom to work and serve, and to receive justice. The real “Rights of Man” are the rights to justice that order creates. And if that order belies its name, and injustice, disorder, masquerade as divine government, why then Fifth-Monarchy men, French Revolutions, ruining cataclysm, witness to the heavenly destinies, and order is born once more. Rousseau’s sobs resembled those of the hero of French melodrama, who under stage moonshine and stage misfortune, always ejaculates, “Ma mère!” His mere emotion worked on nerves of sterner fibre and facts of harder quality.
Since Disraeli’s death, Nietzsche has propounded a physical “Return to Nature,” which, however, excludes the humanitarian side of the French “Equality.” He has sighed for a gigantic brood of antediluvian anarchs. He has tried to make anarchy heroic. But a monster is not even a man, still less a hero.
All such systems must fail, because, as Disraeli has finely said, “Man is born to adore and to obey.” They contradict the spiritual facts of our structure. For the true Right of Man is to lead wisely and be led loyally in public affairs; neither to steal nor be stolen from in private. These are what Carlyle terms his “correctly articulated mights.” Leadership, loyalty, and social honesty belong to no “state of nature” of which record or even guess is possible. And Disraeli agreed with Carlyle when the latter wrote, after the former had in effect said the same: “... ‘Supply and demand’ we will honour also; and yet how many ‘demands’ are there, entirely indispensable, which have to go elsewhere than to the shops!”
But Nietzsche’s theories are luckily untranslatable into action, and inconsistent with any form of the “state.” Rousseau’s theories, on the other hand, are the more dangerous because they are feasible. The “Rights of Man” is a doctrine absolutely at issue with the “Rights of Nations.” The abstract notion of universal “rights” is also at variance with the pressing impulses of physical “wants.” Low wages and long hours are not redressed by the apparatus of ballot-boxes or the cant of independence. Physical needs due to economical causes, which can be modified only by the earnest statesmanship of leaders rising to their responsibilities, are not to be dismissed by the vague generalities of “moral force.” This aspect is powerfully emphasised in Sybil.
“... Add to all these causes of suffering and discontent among the workmen the apprehension of still greater evils, and the tyranny of the ’butties,’ or middlemen, and it will with little difficulty be felt that the public mind of this district was well prepared for the excitement of the political agitator, especially if he were discreet enough rather to descant on their physical sufferings and personal injuries, than to attempt the propagation of abstract political principles with which it was impossible for them to sympathise.... It generally happens, however, that where a mere physical impulse urges the people to insurrection, though it is often an influence of slow growth and movement, the effects are more violent and sometimes more obstinate than when they move under the blended authority of moral and physical necessity, and mix up together the rights and the wants of man.”
The pendant to the “rights” is the “equality” of man. Here, again, nothing is more self-evident than man’s natural inequality. The whole development of societies, which we call civilisation, is for the very purpose of redressing or relieving these inequalities of occasion, of equipment. By nature man, like the brute, starts without equality and without rights. By his “mights” he has created these ideas, and acquired something of their substance by his superior faculties, by the spiritual energy which differentiates him. His “rights” spring from the “law” which he has propagated. The political equality which he has founded more than compensates him for the personal inequality of his beginnings. The “personal equation,” indeed, would imply the reversal both of his nature and of his craftsmanship; of all conditions, moreover, compatible with variety of character and freedom of action. It means, in fact, a denial of the existence of that natural aristocracy which we find in every class and every order, and which decides that everywhere the game of “follow my leader” must be played. What is wanted is a real aristocracy which “claims great privileges for great purposes.” What is always dangerous is the monopoly of action by an aristocracy that shirks its duties, that plays at government, that is dilettante in leadership or sybarite in life; or that, as in the three decades preceding the French Revolution, revenges its exclusion from influence by multiplying sinecures. It is such a class, as contrasted with individuals—wherever found—of genuine capacities, that so often evoked Disraeli’s irony, and has lately been satirised by Mr. Barrie in a whimsy accentuating the natural inequality of man. Speaking through the lips of “Egremont,” in that fine passage where he cheers “Sybil”—the noble daughter of the people, disappointed by the Charter and the Chartists—with a vista of the future, Disraeli says: “The mind of England is the mind ever of the rising race. Trust me it is with the People.... Predominant opinions are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing.... It will be a product hostile to the oligarchical system. The future principle of English politics will not be a levelling principle; not a principle adverse to privileges, but favourable to their extension. It will seek to ensure equality, not by levelling the few, but by elevating the many.” And again, the great manufacturer, “Millbank,” in Coningsby, is made to remark (after giving distinction as the basis of aristocracy), “that ‘natural aristocracy’ ought to be found ... among those men whom a nation recognises as the most eminent for virtue, talents, and property, and, if you please, birth and standing in the land. They guide opinion, and therefore they govern. I am no leveller. I look upon an artificial equality as equally pernicious with a factitious aristocracy; both depressing and checking the enterprise of a nation. I like man to be free—really free; free in his industry as well as his body....” As Carlyle puts it: “... I say you did not make the land of England; and by the possession of it you are bound to furnish guidance and government to England....”—“A high class without duties to do is like a tree planted on precipices.”[51]
It should not be forgotten, and I shall afterwards illustrate, that in these and many other respects Carlyle’s teaching chimes with Disraeli’s. “... That speciosities which are not realities can no longer be.... What is an aristocracy? A corporation of the best, of the bravest.... Whatsoever aristocracy does not even attempt to be that, but only to wear the clothes of that, is not safe; neither is the land it rules in safe.... We must find a real aristocracy....” And so with priesthood.
In “Angela Pisani”—a dazzling dream-picture of three generations in France—by Disraeli’s early intimate, Lord Strangford, occurs a striking outburst against natural equality, that solecism in ideas, that remainder biscuit of the French Revolution.
“... Go and preach equality to the deep seas, ... that the oyster is equal to the whale or the starfish to the shark; you will succeed there sooner than you will be able to alter the relative grades of the five races of humanity. It is a law which man must unmake himself, ere he can change, that the Caucasian will aspire as the highest, and the negro will grovel as the basest.” Disraeli’s attitude was the same in Contarini Fleming:—
“... The law that regulates man must be founded on a knowledge of his nature, or that law leads him to ruin. What is the nature of man? In every clime and every creed we shall find a new definition.... What then? Is the German a different animal from the Italian? Let me inquire in turn whether you conceive the negro of the Gold Coast to be the same being as the Esquimaux who tracks his way over the Polar snows? The most successful legislators are those who have consulted the genius of the people.... One thing is quite certain, that the system we have pursued to attain a knowledge of man has entirely failed....”