Tegernsee October 3, 1880
Don't think me as prolific as ——, but I must begin again, as I had to send off my letter with nothing but an answer to your question in it. Lord Granville's visit must have been more busy than pleasant; and their dinner topic is provoking because one always hears that the best men were those one could not have known. Remembering Macaulay, Circourt, and Rémusat, I do not care to believe that Cousin or Radowitz was far superior to them in talk. But then I, again, look back to the people I knew with regret, and think my contemporaries less amusing.
If ever I see Hawarden again, I hope it will not be for a night and half a day, but I do not know when that will be. Let us fix our thoughts on Tegernsee, and pave the way to rest and distraction here next summer.
Without claiming the discernment of Tennyson, I hold fast to what I said. There may be people you dislike for one or two reasons. You have no tenderness for Dizzy; and I am not sure you cared much for either of our gondola companions. There are one or two unpardonable crimes in your code, and one or two chasms that even Dante's mercy cannot bridge. But you never show it, and ill-nature must show itself in speech. I have no doubt at all that the relish with which you held up the mirror of my vices the other day had more of sorrow than of anger, and only a scrap of malice. It must have been Cheney, especially if it was a reminiscence of Holmbury. Freddy Leveson has a touching fidelity to monotonous friendships. This one was laid down, I think, on Holland House foundations.
If I wrapped my poet in too thick a hide of mystery (observe the joke—own cousin to the Bite of Ecuador), it was because I fancied you knew that you have no business to be the P.M.'s daughter, and would never have been, but that Lady Waldegrave, lured by the sweep of the Thames at Nuneham, neglected, or failed, to hook that brilliant Young Englander, Monckton Milnes, poet and statesman. But I know several men, some you never heard of, who, looking back along the road where they took the wrong turning, say to themselves, or at least to their friends: "Well, well; but for this or that I should be P.M. now!"
I have been prevented from finishing by interruptions, one of which was the brief appearance of the Freddy Cavendishes, spoiled by their uncomfortable haste to get away. I suppose what makes her so nice is, partly her affection for her relations. There certainly was no arrière pensée in her way of speaking of your father.
You cannot too much cultivate his taste for Dickens. Beware of "Little Dorrit," "Oliver Twist," and "Dombey." In "Chuzzlewit" the English scenes are often amusing, but there is a story about Pecksniff that may repel him.
*****
Please do not destroy the ease and serenity and confidence of my letters, which are chatted and whispered, more than written, by wanting to show them—even to Morley, in whom I have great reliance. I should write quite differently, as you rightly say, if I was not writing to the most chosen of correspondents. To Mr. Gladstone I already wrote what was due to my friendship with St. Hilaire, especially as I fancied that Downing Street would be strongly prejudiced against him. Do not turn yourself from an end into a means—one does not justify the other....
Cannes Dec. 14, 1880
I have been afraid to write. The delicious and most spiritual gift[46] was sent to me here, whither we came early, only to find ourselves in sore trouble, for a child had died of diphtheria in our villa just before we arrived. We had to settle in half-furnished apartments, where Mrs. Flower[47] found us, bringing a flavour of Hawarden. What has stood in my way is this: Some time ago, recalling a foolish speech of mine, a year old, and spoken under the spell of a great charm, you asked me to repeat it on paper. I hesitated long, and whilst I hesitated, the little volume came, and made it churlish to decline any wish of yours. I resolved that the best sign of the sincerity of my gratitude would be to do what you had asked, and to be much more foolish than ever by putting on impertinent record the evanescent conversation of Tegernsee. But I have been so fearful of giving you more annoyance than pleasure, whether by the seeming of flattery or of censure, that I have allowed myself to slip into a much more grievous fault. Will you understand me and try to forgive me? I can never thank you enough for all the friendship of which that beautiful volume is the treasured symbol. There is so much of your thought in the beauty of it, and so much in the choice of it—more than you could guess. A dear friend of mine, now dead,[48] devoted himself to the study of the Sonnets, as the real key to Shakespeare, being the form of his own ideas, not what he gave to his characters. We discussed them much together in long evenings at Aldenham, and he wrote a book about them, which he followed up with a volume called "The School of Shakespeare"; and the two together are the best introduction to him that I know.... Swinburne himself has recognised their merit; so that a lost part of my life came back to me with your gift. All which is to say that, whereas all that comes from you is very precious to me, if anything could add to its price it was the happy chance that guided your hand.
Beyond that I must thank you very heartily for the confidence you showed me in sending me that early letter.[49] It fills a large blank in my conception and understanding of his life, for it shows—for the first time to me—how large a part of what we know and contemplate with wonder is an original gift, and was born with him, and how little, on the other hand, has been added by the training of life. There are things which experience has restrained, and checked in their exuberance; but there are almost all the germs of the power that rules the movements of half a world. When I read that skit of the revered philosopher,[50] it almost seemed to me as if I had sometimes doubted his greatness, and I think you were very good-natured. He is one of the few Englishmen of genius; one of the most perfect masters of our language that ever wrote; and when one has said that, and said it as forcibly as can be, one comes to a deplorable catalogue of evil qualities with which I shall not darken my pages. It was very good of you to send me that introduction.
I went to the Ghetto, and was amazed at the knowledge and conversation of a lady who turned out to be Mrs. Mark Pattison.... She seemed to be much in the secrets of the Chamberlain-Morley-Dilke faction, and despondent about the Pall Mall. But I like Mrs. Flower exceedingly, though I had only a glimpse of her. I thought her intelligent, sensible, and good—things not to be lightly spoken of anybody—and especially not to you. As to Lady Blennerhassett, she is kind-hearted, knows how to think straight, and is the cleverest woman I ever met out of St. John's Wood.[51] If I ever said less than this in her favour, it would be injustice to do so now. Sir Rowland Blennerhassett fell at one time into bad hands—hands of Midhat and of Newman.... I fancied he was half a jingo, half an Ultramontane; and his wife seemed to back him, and held much aloof from us. They have richly made up for it since, and there is no Irishman whom I should more wish to see in conference with your father just now. He told me so much that was curious and important and concrete, that I begged him to put our conversation on paper, that I might use it in the proper quarter. He has not chosen to do it, I fear from a motive of delicacy. For we suppose that a set is being made against Forster; and he would not like, by private letters, to contribute to it, as his statements certainly would have done. But all these are words of wisdom: it is time for foolishness. I remember the occasion. You wished that you could disengage your mind from its surroundings, and learn the judgment of posterity; and I said that, if you chose, you might hear it at once. How I retrieved my audacity I cannot tell; and it is an awkward matter to recall, unless, like the ghosts that looked so foolish in the vestibule of the "Inferno," I avoid both good and evil.
The generation you consult will be more democratic and better instructed than our own; for the progress of democracy, though not constant, is certain, and the progress of knowledge is both constant and certain. It will be more severe in literary judgments, and more generous in political. With this prospect before me I ought to have answered that hereafter, when our descendants shall stand before the slab that is not yet laid among the monuments of famous Englishmen, they will say that Chatham knew how to inspire a nation with his energy, but was poorly furnished with knowledge and ideas; that the capacity of Fox was never proved in office, though he was the first of debaters; that Pitt, the strongest of ministers, was among the weakest of legislators; that no Foreign Secretary has equalled Canning, but that he showed no other administrative ability; that Peel, who excelled as an administrator, a debater, and a tactician, fell everywhere short of genius; and that the highest merits of the five without their drawbacks were united in Mr. Gladstone. Possibly they may remember that his only rival in depth, and wealth, and force of mind was neither admitted to the Cabinet nor buried in the Abbey. They will not say of him, as of Burke, that his writing equalled his speaking, or surpassed it like Macaulay's. For though his books manifest the range of his powers, if they do not establish a distinct and substantive reputation, they will breed regret that he suffered anything to divert him from that career in which his supremacy was undisputed among the men of his time. People who suspect that he sometimes disparaged himself by not recognising the secret of his own superiority will incline to believe that he fell into another error of wise and good men, who are not ashamed to fail in the rigid estimate of characters and talents. This will serve them to explain his lofty unfitness to deal with sordid motives, and to control that undignified but necessary work, his inability to sway certain kinds of men, and that strange property of his influence, which is greatest with multitudes, less in society—and least at home. And it will help them to understand a mystery that is becoming very prominent, that he formed no school, and left no disciples who were to him what Windham, Grenville, Wellesley, Canning, Castlereagh were to Pitt; that his colleagues followed him because he had the nation at his back, by force more than by persuasion, and chafed as he did by the side of Palmerston.
Some keys, I imagine, will be lost, and some finer lines will yield to the effacing fingers: the impress left by early friendship with men who died young, like Hallam, or from whom he was parted, like Hope Scott; the ceremonious deference to authorities that reigned in college days under a system heavily weighted with tradition; the microscopic subtlety and care in the choice of words, in guarding against misinterpretation and in correcting it, which belonged to the Oxford training, which is a growth of no other school, which even in such eminent men as Newman and Liddon is nearly a vice, and is a perpetual stumbling-block and a snare for lesser men—these are points appreciable by those who know him that must be obscure to those who come after us. They will wonder how it was that an intellect remarkable for originality and independence, matchless in vigour, fertility, and clearness, continued so long shrouded in convictions imbibed so early as to be akin to prejudices, and was outstripped in the process of emancipation by inferior minds. The pride of democratic consistency will aim its shafts at those lingering footsteps, as a scientific age will resent the familiarity and sympathy with Italian thought to the detriment of more perfect instruments of knowledge and of power, and that inadequate estimate of the French and German genius which has been unfortunately reciprocal.
But all the things about which no New Zealander will feel as we do, do not disturb your appeal to the serene and impartial judgment of history. When our problems are solved and our struggles ended, when distance has restored the proportions of things, and the sun has set for all but the highest summits, his fame will increase even in things where it seems impossible to add to it. Ask all the clever men you know, who were the greatest British orators, and there are ten or twelve names that will appear on every list. There is no such acknowledged primacy among them as Mirabeau enjoys in France or Webster in America. Macaulay told me that Brougham was the best speaker he had heard; Lord Russell preferred Plunket; and Gaskell, Canning. I have heard people who judged by efficacy assign the first place to Peel, O'Connell, Palmerston, and to an evangelical lecturer, whom I dare say nobody but Lord Harrowby remembers, of the name of Burnett. But that illustrious chain of English eloquence that begins in the Walpolean battles, ends with Mr. Gladstone. His rivals divide his gifts like the generals of Alexander. One may equal him in beauty of composition, another in the art of statement, and a third, perhaps, comes near him in fluency and fire. But he alone possesses all the qualities of an orator; and when men come to remember what his speeches accomplished, how it was the same whether he prepared an oration or hurled a reply, whether he addressed a British mob or the cream of Italian politicians, and would still be the same if he spoke in Latin to Convocation, they will admit no rival. "C'est la grandeur de Berryer avec la souplesse de Thiers," was the judgment of the ablest of the Ultramontanes on his speech on Charities.
There are especially two qualities that will not be found in other men. First, the vigorous and perpetual progress of his mind. Later ages will know what in this critical autumn of a famous year is only guessed, that even now, at 70, in his second ministry, after half a century of public life, his thoughts are clearing, moving, changing, on the two highest of all political questions.[52]
His other pre-eminent characteristic is the union of theory and policy. Bonaparte must have possessed the same mastery of infinite detail; and the best democrats, Jefferson, Sieyès, and Mill, were firm and faithful in their grasp of speculative principle. But in democracy that doctrinal fidelity is neither difficult nor very desirable of attainment. Its disciples embrace a ready-made system that has been thought out like the higher mathematics, beyond the need or the chance of application. The sums have been worked, the answers are known. There is no secret about their art. Their prescriptions are in the books, tabulated and ready for use. We always know what is coming. We know that the doctrine of equality leads by steps not only logical, but almost mechanical, to sacrifice the principle of liberty to the principle of quantity; that, being unable to abdicate responsibility and power, it attacks genuine representation, and, as there is no limit where there is no control, invades, sooner or later, both property and religion. In a doctrine so simple, consistency is no merit. But in Mr. Gladstone there is all the resource and policy of the heroes of Carlyle's worship, and yet he moves scrupulously along the lines of the science of statesmanship. Those who deem that Burke was the first political genius until now, must at this point admit his inferiority. He loved to evade the arbitration of principle. He was prolific of arguments that were admirable but not decisive. He dreaded two-edged weapons and maxims that faced both ways. Through his inconsistencies we can perceive that his mind stood in a brighter light than his language; but he refused to employ in America reasons which might be fitted to Ireland, lest he should become odious to the great families and impossible with the King.[53] Half of his genius was spent in masking the secret that hampered it. Goldsmith's cruel line is literally true.[54]
Looking abroad, beyond the walls of Westminster, for objects worthy of comparison, they will say that other men, such as Hamilton and Cavour, accomplished work as great; that Turgot and Roon were unsurpassed in administrative craft; that Clay and Thiers were as dexterous in parliamentary management; that Berryer and Webster resembled him in gifts of speech, Guizot and Radowitz in fulness of thought; but that in the three elements of greatness combined, the man, the power, and the result—character, genius, and success—none reached his level.
The decisive test of his greatness will be the gap he will leave. Among those who come after him there will be none who understand that the men who pay wages ought not to be the political masters of those who earn them, (because laws should be adapted to those who have the heaviest stake in the country, for whom misgovernment means not mortified pride or stinted luxury, but want and pain, and degradation and risk to their own lives and to their children's souls,) and who yet can understand and feel sympathy for institutions that incorporate tradition and prolong the reign of the dead. Fill the blanks, deepen the contrasts, shut your eyes to my handwriting, and, if you make believe very much, you shall hear the roll of the ages.
Dec. 14, 1880
Don't let me be unjust to Lecky. Dr. Smith asked me to review his "Eighteenth Century," but added that if I found myself inclining to severity he would wish to recall the proposal, inasmuch as the Quarterly had just attacked Tyndall. For it happens that Smith[55] and I sometimes dine at a self-satisfied place that calls itself The Club. Good men belong to it, but stay away: Lowe, that he may not meet ——, whom he dislikes sober, and detests drunk; the P.M., because he too much appreciates the sweetness of home; others, for other futile reasons. The group that continues faithful and carries on the tradition of Johnson and Garrick is consequently small, and it is a delicate matter to meet in such close lists men one is editorially holding up to ridicule and obloquy. Indeed, the presence of both Edinburgh and Quarterly on that narrow stage imparts a taste of muttered thunder to most of our meetings. Tyndall and Lecky are members, and Smith did not like to be on with a new quarrel before he was off with the old. He had spoken unfavourably of an early and unripe book of Lecky's, who was gratified when he heard of the message I had received, and still more when Hayward reviewed him instead of me. I declined, because I was already in the clutches of a longer task, and because I find that people quarrel with me for reviewing them—not from dislike of the book. Hayward could find nothing in it he did not know before. But I was more fortunate; I learned a great deal, and should have said that it was solid, original, and just. Perhaps not deep or strong or lively, or even suggestive, for that is a refined quality, inconsistent with the habit of telling all one knows and thinks, and dotting all the i's. The book is lop-sided, having grown out of a desire to demolish Froude's Irish volumes. And it was a mistake to treat the central, political history as a thing generally known, that could be taken for granted. No part of modern history has been so searched and sifted as to be without urgent need of new and deeper inquiry, and the touch of a fresh mind. Here is a new volume of 600 pages on Mary Stuart, by a man I never heard of, in which every other page tells us something unknown before, and the times of Walpole, Pelham, Pitt, being stirred by no surviving strife, have been much less studied than the great dispute whether Protestant or Catholic should reign in England. Neglecting the inexhaustible discoveries before him in the Archives, Lecky has to give sentence when he gives too little evidence, to describe characters more fully than careers, and to obtrude his own very good sense where a true scholar and artist would take care not to be seen.
There is another defect, due to the secular tone of Lecky's mind, but common to most historians. The age he writes of was the last in which permanent political doctrines were formed by ecclesiastical principles. Men very easily shape their notions of what government ought to be by their conception of divine right, of that domain in which the actual legislator is God. As to one class of minds Church interests are the supreme law in politics, to others, Church forms are the supreme example. Nobody is so fanatical as Nigel Penruddocke; but through subtle channels the influence works, and it was not merely a propelling, but a constructive force in politics from the end of the Middle Ages until the middle of the eighteenth century, when it became fixed in the theories of men like Atterbury, Toland, Hoadley, Wilson, Warburton—whose innermost instincts might be better exposed.
As to the novel of the season,[56] it is so dull and so absurd that I cannot get beyond the first volume. Except querulousness, it has nearly all the bad qualities of old age; and if St. Barbe is meant for Thackeray, it is contemptible even in caricature. My neighbour Salisbury must feel that his time is soon coming.
There is a little disappointment for Hayward even in the "Life of Fox." There is less pioneer's work in it than in Fitzmaurice. But the fulness of knowledge, the force and finish of the style (you see by my three F's that I have been studying the Irish question) have revealed a new man. I see him compared to his uncle,[57] and I think it is not an exaggeration, though Taine says there have been only two men in the world who had Macaulay's perspicuity. G.O.[58] is as transparent as graceful, and more easy. The only thing that has shocked me yet is his presumptuous assurance about the authorship of Junius. It is a Whig dogma that Francis was Junius; but that is mere Macaulayolatry. I have seen half the arguments that convinced me thirty years ago fall to pieces; and I am provoked that Trevelyan gives me old conclusions instead of new proofs. If his speaking has made as much progress as his writing, the Government has acquired a future Secretary of State. But I am still unhappy at their meeting Parliament with Courtney out in the cold.
As I quote Taine, I ought to say that I do not agree with him. The problems Macaulay made so clear were not the most difficult. Fenwick's attainder, and the theory of standing armies—purple patches in the way of exposition—are trifles compared with questions which jurists, divines, economists have to discuss. The phases of the Pelagian controversy, or the principles of government about which the Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist, and Anglican Churches contended, would better have tested his power of making darkness clear.
I am glad that I wrote to Fagan before reading his book.[59] For I wrote about the Italian correspondence, which is curious. But the biography does not deserve the praise it gets from partial people in Downing Street. Houghton, I hear, has written ill-naturedly about Panizzi; but the book is as full as an egg of mistakes, and of things worse than mistakes, so that even remonstrance would be thrown away. You will read with interest two volumes of Mérimée's letters to Panizzi, just coming out. He was a bad man, and generally wrong; but few men ever wrote so well.
*****
I will get the Church Quarterly at Nice, where I go to see my friend Arnim, who is dying there, and shall be very curious to read the article.[60] There is not a more interesting or unexhausted topic in all history than Julian, but I would have waited for the promised edition of his work against the Christians, which had not appeared when I left Germany.
Here is Parker,[61] fresh from Hawarden; and when I think of your long and obstinate cold, I cannot help regretting that you did not make the Cardwells bring you to Montfleury, where they are our nearest neighbours. He is much better than half a year ago, but very weak. For three weeks the sun has shone all day. Greatcoats and umbrellas are obsolete; and we have the most beautiful walks.
T. B. Potter, also at Montfleury, and a great favourite with my children, keeps me supplied with Cobdenian literature, and I have read Brodrick[62] with much pleasure.
Of course we are always thinking of Ireland, wishing for heroic treatment, such as would have saved Louis XVI. and the old French Monarchy, despairing of the needful overwhelming majority in the Commons, of any majority in the Lords, of union and strength in the Ministry; cheered by several intelligent letters and articles in the newspapers, sure only of the chief, and more sure of his strong mind than of his strong hand. If he has time for anything else, I hope he has read La Belgique et le Vatican, the volume published by Frere-Orban, the Belgian Minister, a weighty study of Vaticanism.
I am under the shock of the sudden Cabinet and of the Standard article, and am waiting for an answer to a telegram to know whether I must come at once. If not now, then on Monday or Tuesday before the opening, for I want to get the cue of the situation from the P.M. (an affair of five minutes), to see you, not quite so rapid a proceeding, and to hear the first debates.
*****
Cannes Dec. 27, 1880
Your patient and forgiving letter is my best Xmas gift. It will be a joy indeed to see you again next week. I hope not only in the midst of gilded ceremonial.
It is so like you to take my nonsense kindly and only to dispute the praise. But I am not quite so far off as you imagine. In speaking of home I must have indicated by a—break, that there was a change of key; that I could not stay among the lofty entities that surround Tennyson even when he butters toast, that I was coming down from the silver side of the clouds and groping for things of earth. So that my climax is not quite literally meant. Having thus paved the way to retreat from an exposed position, let me take my stand for a moment, and say that I think it not quite untenable.... You yourself, who have shared so much of your father's thoughts and confidence, have hardly adapted yourself to his chosen tastes and special pursuits? In more than one of the later phases of his life, I fancy you hardly recognised the secret laws of the growth of his mind, and join him sometimes by an effort, over a gap. There is an ancient scholar at Cannes, who told me that he has such confidence in the P.M. that he feels sure he will succeed in defending his policy. I partly said and partly thought that anybody can be on Mr. Gladstone's side who waits to be under the thrall of his speech. The difficulty is to hear the grass growing, to know the road by which he travels, the description of engine, the quality of the stuff he treats with, the stars he steers by. The scholar is old and ugly, and, it may be, tiresome. It is impossible to be less like you. But is there not one bit of likeness—in the stars?
Really it is time for me to adopt the Carey tactics and run away from my post of defiance.
You know one of the two subjects. You will know the other on the last night of the debate on the address. I am only listening to the grass.
You will not resist what I said of our five Ministers if you will consider one word. I think I spoke of their best qualities, not of all their qualities. Pitt's art of making himself necessary to the King and the constituencies is unapproached. But then it is a vice, not a merit, to live for expedients, and not for ideas. Chatham was very successful as a War Minister. Mr. Gladstone has not rivalled him in that capacity. I fancy that both Pitt and Peel had a stronger hold than he has on the City. Please remember that I am possessed of a Whig devil, and neither Peel nor Pitt lives in my Walhalla. The great name of Mr. Canning and the greater name of Mr. Burke[63] are the only names that I hold in highest honour since party government was invented.
You can hardly imagine what Burke is for all of us who think about politics, and are not wrapped in the blaze and the whirlwind of Rousseau. Systems of scientific thought have been built up by famous scholars on the fragments that fell from his table. Great literary fortunes have been made by men who traded on the hundredth part of him. Brougham and Lowe lived by the vitality of his ideas. Mackintosh and Macaulay are only Burke trimmed and stripped of all that touched the skies. Montalembert, borrowing a hint from Döllinger, says that Burke and Shakespeare were the two greatest Englishmen.
But when I speak of Shakespeare the news of last Wednesday[64] comes back to me, and it seems as if the sun had gone out. You cannot think how much I owed her. Of eighteen or twenty writers by whom I am conscious that my mind has been formed, she was one. Of course I mean ways, not conclusions. In problems of life and thought, which baffled Shakespeare disgracefully, her touch was unfailing. No writer ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold, but disinterested and impartially observant sympathy. If Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had prospered like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival.
*****
I do think that, of the three greatest Liberals, Burke is equally good in speaking and writing; Macaulay better in writing, and Mr. Gladstone better in speaking. I doubt whether he feels it; and if he does not feel it, then I should say that there is a want of perfect knowledge and judgment. That want I see clearly in his views as to other men. He hardly ever, I think, judges them too severely. Sometimes I am persuaded he judges with an exceeding generosity, and I fancy it is because he will not charge his mind with uncharitableness, because he does not allow for the wind, that he does not always make bull's eyes.
*****
*****
Athenæum Jan. 14, 1881
It is impossible to leave England without emotion, when my last glimpse of your father was lying in bed and in the great doctor's hands. It will indeed be such a charity if you will send a line on a P.C. by to-morrow, Saturday's post, to me at Goschen's, Seacox Heath, Hawkhurst, Kent, that we may have Sunday's comfort in good news, and I say advisedly a P.C. that you may not suspect me of an artifice to obtain that other delight, of an early letter, such as those you write. Don't let the lesson of suspicion turn against the teacher. Don't even let it damage anybody much. I will not spoil my own ideal. That American book is too wicked![65]
Forgive me if there is one point, if only one, on which I do not agree with Ruskin, who never writes to any one what might hot be written to the world, on the fly-leaves of books.
Your mother must think me an ill-mannered wretch, even if she did not discover it before—for going away without thanking her for that beautiful photograph. I did not feel sure, at first, how much she was weighted with trouble, for I had never witnessed her serene courage. I will leave it to you, if you please, mindful of an exquisite proverb quoted this evening in the House as follows: Speech is silence, but silver is golden.
*****
*****
La Madeleine Jan. 20, 1881
What I said of Ruskin was only to excuse the platitude I wrote in his book, not to rescue my letters from appropriate destruction.
You evidently think that George Eliot is not the only novelist at whose feet I have sat, and that I have learned from "Endymion" the delicate art of flattery. So that the seed of suspicion has taken root after all, and I hang by my own rope.
We might perhaps agree about Trevelyan better than you suppose. I probably started from a lower estimate of the man, and was astonished at his fulness of knowledge and the vigour of his pen. The oblique style of narrative is said to be an invention of Gibbon, and Trevelyan is of course full of Gibbon's times and writings. And I quite agree with you that the business of historians is to get out of the way, and, like the man who plays Punch, to concentrate attention on their personages. Nobody, however, did this less than his illustrious uncle.
I shall look out with extreme interest for your kinsman's[66] review of George Eliot. I heard so many hard things said of her by Arnold and Palgrave, but Wolseley is one of her admirers.
*****
La Madeleine Jan. 21, 1881
My letter was hardly posted when yours arrived. Besides what you mention, Arthur Lyttelton would find an important paper in the Pall Mall of the last week of the year, on the early Warwickshire life of George Eliot, and a letter of hers on the original of Dinah. I fancy it would be worth while to look up some of her Westminster reviews between 1850 and 1854; and the last word of her philosophy is more outspoken in Lewes's scientific writings than in her own.
It is hard to say why I rate "Middlemarch" so high. There was a touch of failure in the two preceding books, in "Felix Holt," and even in "Romola." And it was "Middlemarch" that revealed to me not only her grand serenity, but her superiority to some of the greatest writers. My life is spent in endless striving to make out the inner point of view, the raison d'être, the secret of fascination for powerful minds, of systems of religion and philosophy, and of politics, the offspring of the others, and one finds that the deepest historians know how to display their origin and their defects, but do not know how to think or to feel as men do who live in the grasp of the various systems. And if they sometimes do, it is from a sort of sympathy with the one or the other, which creates partiality and exclusiveness and antipathies. Poets are no better. Hugo, who tries so hard to do justice to the Bishop and the Conventionnel, to the nuns and the Jacobinical priest, fails from want of contact with the royalist nobleman and the revolutionary triumvirate, as Shakespeare fails ignobly with the Roman Plebs. George Eliot seemed to me capable not only of reading the diverse hearts of men, but of creeping into their skin, watching the world through their eyes, feeling their latent background of conviction, discerning theory and habit, influences of thought and knowledge, of life and of descent, and having obtained this experience, recovering her independence, stripping off the borrowed shell, and exposing scientifically and indifferently the soul of a Vestal, a Crusader, an Anabaptist, an Inquisitor, a Dervish, a Nihilist, or a Cavalier without attraction, preference, or caricature. And each of them should say that she displayed him in his strength, that she gave rational form to motives he had imperfectly analysed, that she laid bare features in his character he had never realised.
I heard the close of Friday's debate, and was much distressed at the hopeless badness of C——'s speech. But the situation gained by the result, and still more by what passed on Monday.
The topic of the reason for delay is, as I hinted at my last moment, a very delicate one, and not to be discussed lightly. Suppose there is bloodshed in Ireland before the Protection Bill passes; then a reproach would lie at their door for thinking more of eventualities that regard themselves than of the immediate danger to life, and the heavy strain on families of small means dependent on their own or other people's rents. And there will be this argument to meet, that less severity in October or November would go farther than greater severity in March.
*****
The journey across France was really freezing. So I remained at Paris for a few hours' rest and no visits. Bisaccia came south in the same train, and Goldsmid, who gives me a dinner to-night. I see by the papers that it is still too cold for your pony-carriage.
My whole social philosophy consists in the desire not merely to gratify by civilities, but to bring men into contact with Mr. Gladstone—be it by breakfast, dinner, or small and early, or even by a formal talking to like ——'s—and your best art, together with the due discharge of pasteboard, will be to bring him to bear, directly, on the seventy or eighty men who want it, and are fit for it, and don't neglect Lady Spencer's parties, or Lady Granville's less multifarious evenings. It is the confrontation, not the ceremony, that matters. False believer,[67] because impostor, not to say hypocrite. I mean that, beyond his charitableness and a written eloquence that always fills me with an unspeakable admiration and delight, I do not believe in your artful philosopher; that the differences revealed to us by his writings, his conversation at Hawarden, the letter you treated so generously, cut down to the bone, and leave me no space or patience for anything better than a gracious courtesy. Therefore, in abetting your studies in Ruskinese, I am no better than a humbug, which is not a word to be written in books that will live and will irritate as long as the language.
La Madeleine Jan. 28, 1881
My faults are to you an opportunity of displaying those qualities to which you will not let me allude.
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Those are not truisms about George Eliot. The reality of her characters is generally perfect. They are not quite always vivid, or consistent. They degenerate sometimes into reminiscences. But they live a life apart from hers, and do not serve her purposes. I wonder whether Arthur Lyttelton knows any good German criticism of her; I don't think I have seen any.
*****
The Tories were sure to cheer as wildly as the Irish hit. You have, I fancy, felt the weakness of Forster's great speech,[68] which, to the eye of a practised revolutionist, slightly disparages the Government.
He makes out an irresistible case against those who think all is right in Ireland, so far at least as to need nothing exceptional from Parliament. He thinks little of the man—the imaginary hearer—who thinks that the Irish peasants have a case; that the suffering and the wrong are real, and are partly the work of the law; that the horrors which fill us with impatience are the direct—though not the unmixed—consequence thereof; that the first way to remove effects is to remove the cause; that, whereas all this is certain, it remains to be proved that the evil is beyond that treatment; and that the movement which has its root in the soil, cannot be so dissociated from the movement that has its root in America, that the one may heal and the other may starve. Probably he does not wish to speak of remedial measures beforehand, and in the same comminatory breath, or to dwell too much on the purely revolutionary peril, which is a delicate topic, about which people are not agreed, and which it is awkward to prove. But he is so little occupied with the one real objection, in this speech charged with the wisdom of many Cabinet discussions, that one wonders whether that other line of thought, so repugnant to the Castle,[69] was ever forcibly put forward in the Cabinet.
What you say of great men manifesting only themselves in their works—the predominance, one should say, of the lyrical mood—is profoundly true. Milton and Byron are supreme examples. It is the reason why there are so few great epics, and so few great—there are many good—histories. It is, in higher literary work, the same solicitude that makes it almost impossible for men to think of the right instead of the expedient. You can hardly imagine how people wondered what Mr. Gladstone's motives were in the Bulgarian affair. Most politicians would be ashamed of having done any considerable thing because it was right, from no motive more clever than duty.
Fancy the Encyclopædia Britannica asking me to do their article on Jesuits! I answered that I hoped they would have one on Mrs. Lewes. I have written my testimony to Mr. Cross,[70] encouraging him about the intended life.... Thank you a thousand times beforehand for every chance line you promise me. You do not know how to say things that are not interesting.