“‘Ah! You want to get at our estates,’ said Lord Valentine, smiling, ‘but the effort on your part may resolve society into its original elements, and the old sources of distinction may again develop themselves.’
“‘Tall barons will not stand against Paixhans’ rockets,’ said the delegate. ‘Modern science has vindicated the natural equality of man.’
“‘And I must say I am very sorry for it,’ said the other delegate; ‘for human strength always seems to me the natural process of settling affairs.’”
To cherish national unison as a higher form of human harmony than the discordant bond of automatic groups; to force the governing to sympathise with the governed; to establish that “Labour requires regulation as much as Property;” to raise, train, improve and establish labour “rather,” as he wrote in 1870, “by the use of ancient forms and the restoration of the past than by political revolutions founded on abstract ideas,” were Disraeli’s aims. In all except the important one of the last, the means for accomplishing them, Carlyle’s message is the same. There is a passage in Coningsby where Disraeli dreams that a day may come when industry will cease to obey mere industrialism. There is another in Carlyle’s “Past and Present”[78] to the same effect. For both, the nobility of labour was a central idea; for both, the conviction that the cavaliers of England should prove its captains; for both, Sanitas sanitatum was a practical ideal. “Deliver me,” cries Carlyle, “these rickety perishing souls of infants, and let your cotton trade take its chance.” Disraeli and Carlyle alike abominated the doctrine that national happiness consists merely in material wealth. A shared or common wealth of endeavour and influence was a goal for each; for each, too, the main problem remained, “How, in conjunction with inevitable democracy, indispensable sovereignty is to exist.”
“... If there be a change,” said Sybil, “it is because in some degree the People have learnt their strength.”
“Ah! Dismiss from your mind those fallacious fancies,” said Egremont. “The People are not strong; the People never can be strong. Their attempts at self-vindication will end only in their suffering and confusion. It is civilisation that has effected, that is effecting, this change. It is that increased knowledge of themselves that teaches the educated their social duties. There is a day-spring in the history of this nation which perhaps those only who are on the mountaintops can as yet recognise. You deem you are in darkness, and I see a dawn. The new generation of the aristocracy of England are not tyrants, not oppressors, Sybil.... Their intelligence, better than that, their hearts, are open to the responsibility of their situation. But the work that lies before them is no holiday work. It is not the fever of superficial impulse that can remove the deep-fixed barriers of centuries of ignorance and crime. Enough that their sympathies are awakened; time and thought will bring the rest. They are the natural leaders of the People, Sybil....”
I may be permitted to point out a likeness and a contrast. The seething ferment on the Continent was pricking Labour into an insurgent materialism which, in the dearth of ancient and active institutions fraught with the balm of healing, leagued itself to attack all forms of authority, kingship and capital alike.
“Ah, the People, this poor King in tatters,” wrote Heine from Paris in 1848, “has fallen on flatterers far more shameless, as they swing their censers around his head, than the courtiers of Byzantium or Versailles. These court lackeys of the People incessantly vaunt its virtues and excellences, crying aloud: ‘How beautiful is the People! how good is the People! how intelligent is the People!’ No, you lie. The People is not beautiful; on the contrary, it is very ugly. But its ugliness is due to its dirt, and will vanish with public baths for the free ablutions of his Majesty. A piece of soap, too, will do no harm; and we shall then see a People in the beauty of cleanliness—a washen People. The People whose goodness is thus magnified is not good at all. It is often as bad as other potentates. But its baseness flows from hunger. When once it has well eaten and drunk, it will smile, gracious and well-favoured as the rest. Nor is his Majesty over-intelligent. He is possibly stupider than the others—stupid with the bestiality of his minions; he will only love or heed the speakers, or howlers, of the jargon of his passions: he hates every brave soul that converses in the speech of reason, and that would ennoble and enlighten him.”
Heine was leading “Young Germany.” A few years earlier, Disraeli was leading “Young England.” The contrast between the atmosphere of the two countries deserves a passing comment. “Young England” aimed at betterment in that very feudal spirit which the poet—the “unfrocked Romantic”—by turns breathed and spurned. In Germany the weird medley of the “Romantic School” had for fifty years been striving to rewaken the myths, the chivalry, the wistfulness of the past. But its direct influences were merely æsthetic, and mainly sentimental; while they eventually became actually anæmic—a vague reverie of mediæval moonlight and pallid ghosts. The uprooting French Revolution had swept away both castle and cobwebs, and in Germany the “folk-song” was the sole antiquity to which this Romantic attachment could cling, and by which it could touch the patriotism of a disunited people. But in England, Scott’s “buff-jerkin” revival, at which Carlyle so unjustly scoffed, was more than a literary sport; it had already braced the nation with the fresh breeze of an invigorating tradition. It brought back and home the inheritance of a real throne and a real nobility, of chivalry, of daring, and of prowess; it reminded the people that the humblest was once protected by the highest; and though it perhaps burked or omitted much that disgraced the age of the tournament, the foray, and the cloister, it quickened its best, its most hopeful and most cheerful elements. It took the dry bones from their mouldering tomb and put the breath of life, the wholesome laughter of humour, and the brightness of beauty into and about their scattered fragments; whereas in Germany the Romantics rather embalmed and buried the living energies of the present in a Gothic mausoleum, weird with wan emblems, and chill and solemn as a cathedral vault.
Disraeli recognised that our country thrives by adaptation and adjustment; that it is the region of natural growth, and not of sudden blossom; of the oak, not the aloe. In inter-dependence, even more than independence, in the mutual ties of classes, Disraeli discerned the English root for democratic ideas which had all along lurked in the soil. England is great because of that same insular inaccessibility to ideas which repelled Heine. Her slowness of insight vanishes gradually, and not by leaps and bounds—through growth and conduct rather than through universal theories. An idea knocks at our gates for generations before it wins admittance; but when it once enters, it becomes naturalised and ceases to be alien; it becomes actualised; it dwells and walks and votes, and has commerce at large. It becomes part of the popular life and parcel of the national behaviour.