Various - Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885

An aristocratical society like ours is often said to be the society from which artists and men of letters have most to gain. But an institution is to be judged, not by what one can oneself gain from it, but by the ideal which it sets up. And aristocracy – if I may once more repeat words which, however often repeated, have still a value from their truth – aristocracy now sets up in our country a false ideal, which materialises our upper class, vulgarises our middle class, brutalises our lower class. It misleads the young, makes the worldly more worldly, the limited more limited, the stationary more stationary. Even to the imaginative, whom Lord John Manners thinks its sure friend, it is more a hindrance than a help. Johnson says well: “Whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.” But what is a Duke of Norfolk or an Earl Warwick, dressed in broadcloth and tweed, and going about his business or pleasure in hansom cabs and railways like the rest of us? Imagination herself would entreat him to take himself out of the way, and to leave us to the Norfolks and Warwicks of history.

I say this without a particle of hatred, and with esteem, admiration, and affection for many individuals in the aristocratical class. But the action of time and circumstance is fatal. If one asks oneself what is really to be desired, what is expedient, one would go far beyond the substitution of an elected Second Chamber for the present House of Lords. All confiscation is to be reprobated, all deprivation (except in bad cases of abuse) of what is actually possessed. But one would wish, if one set about wishing, for the extinction of title after the death of the holder, and for the dispersion of property by a stringent law of bequest. Our society should be homogeneous, and only in this way can it become so.

But aristocracy is in little danger. “I suppose, sir,” a dissenting minister said to me the other day, “you found, when you were in America, that they envied us there our great aristocracy.” It was his sincere belief that they did, and such probably is the sincere belief of our middle class in general; or at any rate, that if the Americans do not envy us this possession, they ought to. And my friend, one of the great Liberal party which has now, I suppose, pretty nearly run down its deceased wife’s sister, poor thing, has his hand and heart full, so far as politics are concerned, of the question of church disestablishment. He is eager to set to work at a change which, even if it were desirable (and I think it is not,) is yet off the line of those reforms which are really pressing.

Mr. Lyulph Stanley, Professor Stuart, and Lord Richard Grosvenor are waiting ready to help him, and perhaps Mr. Chamberlain himself will lead the attack. I admire Mr. Chamberlain as a politician because he has the courage – and it is a wise courage – to state large the reforms we need, instead of minimising them. But like Saul before his conversion, he breathes out threatenings and slaughter against the Church, and is likely, perhaps, to lead an assault upon her. He is a formidable assailant, yet I suspect he might break his finger-nails on her walls. If the Church has the majority for her, she will of course stand. But in any case this institution, with all its faults, has that merit which makes the great strength of institutions – it offers an ideal which is noble and attaching. Equality is its profession, if not always its practice. It inspires wide and deep affection, and possesses, therefore, immense strength. Probably the Establishment will not stand in Wales, probably it will not stand in Scotland. In Wales it ought not, I think, to stand. In Scotland I should regret its fall; but Presbyterian churches are born to separatism, as the sparks fly upward. At any rate, it is through the vote of local legislatures that disestablishment is likely to come, as a measure required in certain provinces, and not as a general measure for the whole country. In other words, the endeavor for disestablishment ought to be postponed to the endeavor for far more important reforms, not to precede it. Yet I doubt whether Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Lyulph Stanley will listen to me when I plead thus with them; there is so little lucidity in England, and they will say I am priest-ridden.

One man there is, whom above all others I would fain have seen in Parliament during the last ten years, and beheld established in influence there at this juncture – Mr. Goldwin Smith. I do not say that he was not too embittered against the Church; in my opinion he was. But with singular lucidity and penetration he saw what great reforms were needed in other directions, and the order of relative importance in which reforms stood. Such were his character, style, and faculties, that alone perhaps among men of his insight he was capable of getting his ideas weighed and entertained by men in power; while amid all favor and under all temptations he was certain to have still remained true to his insight, “unshaken, unseduced, unterrified.” I think of him as a real power for good in Parliament at this time, had he by now become, as he might have become, one of the leaders there. His absence from the scene, his retirement in Canada, is a loss to his friends, but a still greater loss to his country.

Hardly inferior in influence to Parliament itself is journalism. I do not conceive of Mr. John Morley as made for filling that position in Parliament which Mr. Goldwin Smith would, I think, have filled. If he controls, as Protesilaos in the poem advises, hysterical passion (the besetting danger of men of letters on the platform and in Parliament) and remembers to approve “the depth and not the tumult of the soul,” he will be powerful in Parliament; he will rise, he will come into office; but he will not do for us in Parliament, I think, what Mr. Goldwin Smith would have done. He is too much of a partisan. In journalism, on the other hand, he was as unique a figure as Mr. Goldwin Smith would, I imagine, have been in Parliament. As a journalist, Mr. John Morley showed a mind which seized and understood the signs of the times; he had all the ideas of a man of the best insight, and alone, perhaps, among men of his insight, he had the skill for making these ideas pass into journalism. But Mr. John Morley has now left journalism. There is plenty of talent in Parliament, plenty of talent in journalism, but no one in either to expound “the signs of this time” as these two men might have expounded them. The signs of the time, political and social, are left, I regret to say, to bring themselves as they best can to the notice of the public. Yet how ineffective an organ is literature for conveying them compared with Parliament and journalism!

Conveyed somehow, however, they certainly should be, and in this disquisition I have tried to deal with them. But the political and social problem, as the thinkers call it, must not so occupy us as to make us forget the human problem. The problems are connected together, but they are not identical. Our political and social confusions I admit; what Parliament is at this moment, I see and deplore. Yet nowhere but in England even now, not in France, not in Germany, not in America, could there be found public men of that quality – so capable of fair dealing, of trusting one another, keeping their word to one another – as to make possible such a settlement of the Franchise and Seat Bills as that which we have lately seen. Plato says with most profound truth: “The man who would think to good purpose must be able to take many things into his view together.” How homogeneous American society is, I have done my best to declare; how smoothly and naturally the institutions of the United States work, how clearly, in some most important respects, the Americans see, how straight they think. Yet Sir Lepel Griffin says that there is no country calling itself civilised where one would not rather live than in America, except Russia. In politics I do not much trust Sir Lepel Griffin. I hope that he administers in India some district where a profound insight into the being and working of institutions is not requisite. But, I suppose, of the tastes of himself and of that large class of Englishmen whom Mr. Charles Sumner has taught us to call the class of gentlemen, he is no untrustworthy reporter. And an Englishman of this class would rather live in France, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, than in the United States, in spite of our community of race and speech with them! This means that, in the opinion of men of that class, the human problem at least is not well solved in the United States, whatever the political and social problem may be. And to the human problem in the United States we ought certainly to turn our attention, especially when we find taken such an objection as this; and some day, though not now, we will do so, and try to see what the objection comes to. I have given hostages to the United States, I am bound to them by the memory of great, untiring, and most attaching kindness. I should not like to have to own them to be of all countries calling themselves civilised, except Russia, the country where one would least like to live. — Nineteenth Century.