The “Puseyite leavening” recalls the strictures of Carlyle on the High Church proclivities of a portion of the movement. Coleridge’s great book on the Church had undoubtedly stirred both thought and enthusiasm. Disraeli, as I shall show hereafter, wished to make the Church a living social regenerator of the “national spirit,” to see it at once disciplined and enthusiastic, to restore its original functions, to render it really “Anglican;” and in his old age—strenuously opposed as he ever was to the “mass in masquerade,” firmly resolved as he remained to uphold orderly Protestantism—he has outlined at once a portrait and a type of his permanent meaning in the person of “Nigel Penruddock;” just as he has drawn a picture of “Young England” Anglicanism in the “St. Lys” of Sybil, the prototype of whom was Faber.
In the spring of 1844, Carlyle thus characteristically addresses Monckton-Milnes—
“... On the whole, if ‘Young England’ would altogether fling its shovel-hat into the lumber-room, much more cast its purple stockings to the nettles, and honestly recognising what was dead, ... address itself frankly to the magnificent but as yet chaotic Future, ... telling men at every turn that it knew and saw for ever clearly the body of the Past to be dead (and even to be damnable, if it pretended to be still alive and to go about in a galvanic state), what achievement might not ‘Young England’ manage for us!” Carlyle was ever a free-thinking Puritan, a creedless Calvinist. “What was dead,” “what pretended still to be alive,” was the Church of England.... It is easy to deride that youthful display of poor metre, but fine enthusiasm, “England’s Trust,” by Lord John Manners.
“With Roncesvalles upon his banners
Comes prancing along my Lord John Manners.”
Carlyle misliked in him what he disliked in Scott, the “properties” of Romanticism. But the earnestness of Manners’s little volume is beyond question. In the Church it recognises the national recuperative force and salve for anarchy. “We laugh at all commandment save our own,” sighs the boyish devotee—
“Yes, through the Church must come the healing power
To bind our wounds in this tumultuous hour.”
And Labour had ever been the sacred trust of the Church. Divorce Labour from religion, and the State falls. It had been the fault of the Church herself that Labour had gone out of history, as it were, and crossed over to a more primitive form of true religious fervour under the Methodist revival; but the Church alone, as a national growth, could hope, if true to its high destinies, for the preservation of the great mass of the populace from the disruptive elements of unbelief. The Church, too, was the natural educator of the people. True, Manners’s Anglicanism was that of Laud; true, also, to that name he rhymes “adored.” But it is also true that the whole brotherhood felt that if the Church, and through it the State, was to be quickened, it must revert, like the State, to its origin; it must no more be regarded merely as an endowed official or as a consecrated police, but as a divine institution. Moreover, Disraeli also regarded the English Church as the special protectress of popular liberties. I shall return to this subject in its proper place hereafter; but I may here add that these convictions of “Young England” were vehemently advocated by Disraeli in his speeches on the Irish Church more than twenty years after the “Young England” brotherhood came to an end.
Disraeli always urged the immense importance of parochial life as even greater than political. Had the higher classes understood “the order of the peasantry,” ricks and dwellings would not have been burned down in the ’thirties. In advocating the claims of ancient country-side customs, he raised the plea of humanising ceremony—one certainly cherished by the upper classes for themselves. The people would not, it is true, be “fed” by morris revelries, and they starved equally without them.
It was not to be expected that such a cause, with such a leader, followed by aristocratic youth and attended by the revival of maypole dances and tournaments, should escape ridicule and even suspicion. Grey-headed noblemen, who resented any efforts to render institutions real, and for whom enthusiasm meant vulgarity, shook their heads over the follies of their sons, seduced by the wiles of a designing adventurer. But to such as still doubt Disraeli’s sincerity in these matters, and refuse to be convinced by a long chain of after-utterances, I would simply suggest the following fact. Disraeli’s speech of April 11, 1845, on the Maynooth grant[81] broke up the “Young England” association, and terminated his leadership of it. What was the main principle of that speech? It was this: “... You find your Erastian system crumbling from under your feet.... I have unfaltering confidence in the stability of our Church, but I think that the real source of the danger which threatens it is its connection with the State, which places it under the control of the House of Commons that is not necessarily of its communion.” He denied that the State had ever “endowed” the Church. The Church owned property which was the patrimony of the poor. He argued that since 1829 the State’s relation to the Church had altered. He implied, as he often afterwards asserted, that the union of Church and State was for the benefit of the State far more than for that of the Church. Now, this attitude was eminently that of his “Young England” professions. And yet its fearless expression dissolved a gathering which his detractors maintained was used merely as a step to personal advancement.
Carlyle, in the passage above cited, evinced the same irritable impatience that he exhibited in 1849, when he cursed parliamentary institutions because a particular Parliament had over-talked itself. He was an iconoclast who, however, often confused the symbol with the faith that underlies it, and in dethroning the image would have dashed the glamour of its shrine. In 1848—the year of anarchy—Disraeli made a famous speech (the speech which procured him his future leadership of the House). He upheld these institutions while he denounced that very Parliament which moved Carlyle’s indignation. The future has proved him right, and the sage wrong. The practical fruits of the future, too, have vindicated the peculiar tinge that Disraeli himself lent to the “Young England” brotherhood.