LORD IDDESLEIGH.
PROBABLY no statesman's death since the death of Sir Robert Peel, has caused the public so keen a sense of having lost a friend, as Lord Iddesleigh's. There were very few who could call Lord Beaconsfield a friend, and that cer- tainly was not his repute among the people. The late Lord Derby, great as was the admiration he inspired, did not exactly
make the general public who did not personally know him think of him as a friend. He had vanished too long from the House of Commons to be in the front rank of popular states- men, and he was, perhaps, feared at least as much as he was loved. Lord Palmerston was very popular, but he was eminently the man of the world, and it is not a typical man of the world who reaches any very high point in that feel- ing of mingled respect and confidence which attaches to the name of a friend. Lord Iddesleigh's statesmanship was not, perhaps, of the highest rank, partly, perhaps, because the man was so thoroughly amiable and self-forgetful, because he was so willing to "coach" Mr. Disraeli whenever Mr. Disraeli wanted coaching,—and Mr. Disraeli wanted a great deal of coaching in the business of administration,—and so anxious to stand aside whenever he thought that the advantage of the State required him to stand aside. We all of us recognise that Lord Iddesleigh assented to policies of which he would certainly never have been the author,—the policy of the last Afghan War, for in- stance, a policy quite at variance with his own when he was Minister for India. Now, a statesman who has to apologise for policies of the first order of importance which no one believes that he himself would ever have originated, never occupies the front rank among us as a statesman. But it was precisely that quality in Lord Iddesleigh which makes us assign him his place among the second rank of statesmen, that makes us also assign him a higher place among men than that which even his chiefs occupied. Not only his colleagues were attracted by him, but even the people who only knew him as a man, by the same sort of instinct to which Lord Iddesleigh once attributed the reader's knowledge of Cordelia in King Lear, in spite of her habit of silence,—that is, by some imaginative insight gained through words, but which yet seemed to convey a deeper know- ledge of character than words themselves could convey. The people evidently were singularly attracted by him, and have felt his loss, as we have said, more like the loss of a friend than the loss of a leader ; there was something " good " about him which was not in any special manner expressed by his political opinions or statesmanship, something that lingered about his presence and manner, and conveyed itself, by a sort of con- tagion, even to those who had never seen him or heard him speak. Men said that it was impossible to conceive his con- niving at a dishonourable act, even under the highest pressure of a high-pressure political life. He was loyal to colleagues in a sense in which few statesmen are loyal, a sense in which some of them think loyalty both a blunder and a vice. Yet no one believed that in Sir Stafford Northcote, loyalty of that kind would ever pass the bounds of the strictest integrity. In a word, he was both trusted as only the best men are trusted, and loved as few but self-denying men are loved. It is creditable to English parties and the English people that this thorough goodness and disinterestedness in Sir Stafford Northcote was so clearly discerned, for what he was most deficient in as a public man was that superabundant vitality which generally seems a condition of the power to impress the popular imagination. This Sir Stafford Northcote had not,—very probably because there seems to have been something a little amiss with his heart from before the period of his first entrance into the House of Commons. No doubt it takes the most abounding sense of vigour to bear all the fatigues of the House of Commons life, and yet to rise superior to them, and have plenty of energy at your disposal for retort, or irony, or ridicule, or indignation, whenever the occasion arises for the display of these powers. Sir Stafford Northcote during his House of Commons career was generally careworn, which means probably that his physical energies were a little below the mark, instead of decidedly above it. All the more we should have expected that the true character of the man would hardly be known to the people, as it evidently has been, —that they would have failed to catch the deeper notes of his character. Certainly it has not been so. Occasionally, though rarely, careworn men manage to impress themselves even better on the imagination of the people than men of superabundant vitality, at least when that which remains when all the super- ficial play of character is exhausted, is of the very essence of kindness and goodness as it was in Sir Stafford Northcote.
Probably even Lord Randolph will now regret the exhaustion which his tricks in the House of Commons must have pro- duced night after night in Sir Stafford Northcote.
And yet there was no statesman of our day, if we except Mr. Gladstone, in whom there was a greater amount of that life for which political duty and political conflict fail to find expression, than Sir Stafford Northcote. No one could read his lectures on Nothing, on Literature as the monument of
national life, and on Youth, without feeling that there was in the man an amount of humour, of poetical feeling, of reflective sagacity, for which it would be by no means easy to find an effective parallel. Of course, Mr. Disraeli wrote more ; but then, what he wrote, though it was full of wit which Sir Stafford Northcote could not rival, and of cynical shrewdness which he would not have claimed, was also full of pretension and of folly, of which in Sir Stafford Northcote there was not a trace. It is evident that he felt the charm of majestic form more keenly even than the charm of exuberant life, or he would not have told us that since the death of Milton there had been no great development of literary power in this country. The same feeling is notable in the criticism on Cordelia, that her character " lingers about our recollections as if we had seen some being more beautiful and purer than a thing of earth, who had communicated with us by a higher medium than that of words." His mind was evidently very deeply affected by any sign of great reserves of force, such as Milton's wonderful power of producing the moat imposing effects with a very few words always conveys, and which Shakespeare's studiously reserved picture of Cordelia's love also conveys. That special admiration was a very fitting one for a pillar of the Conservative Party. Reverence for impressive form and for reserves of force, is the sheet-anchor of Conservatism, and Sir Stafford Northcote had it in ample measure, while his leader, Mr. Disraeli, the inventor of Democratic Toryism, had it not at all. Indeed, Mr. Disraeli was anything but a Conservative. As he declared himself, he regarded a " Conservative Govern- ment " as an " organised hypocrisy," and his great effort was
to make all things new. Sir Stafford Northcote fell on evil times when he found himself compelled to throw his weight into the scale with Mr. Disraeli, and to chasten the boisterous trickiness of Lord Randolph Churchill. Those were hardly times when reverence for the greater forms of our national past would suffice as a guiding principle in politics, and yet it was, we believe, the principle which chiefly moulded Lord Iddesleigh's political sympathies. Had he been chief in 1874 instead of Mr. Disraeli, we should have had something more like the foreign policy of the late Lord Aberdeen, than the foreign policy of Lord Beaconsfield. His political ideal was tranquil. He would have paid off debt, and kept the Empire at peace, and made friends with the United States, and put down Irish obstruc- tion, and maintained the Union, and magnified the House of Lords, and kept all the older national institutions very much what they have been for the last century, if he could. And to him, we imagine, it was a great trouble to have to become responsible for household suffrage, and for the histrionic policy of Lord Beaconsfield in India and on the Continent of Europe. But he evidently admired a type of mind with which he had himself little sympathy, and admired it too loyally to desert his bold leader when the latter got into scrapes. Loyalty to his colleagues in him was perhaps almost a fault. But then he had a genius for it, and doubtless it was as much as anything that genius for loyalty which has won him such true affection in the bosoms of the rank and file of the Con- servative Party. He " coached " a leader whom many a man with his knowledge would have tripped up. And he gave way to a vain and ignorant junior whom many a man with his knowledge would have exposed. Thereby he may have lost as a statesman, but he certainly gained as a man. He has left behind him a passion of regret which threatens rather to exceed than to fall short of the feeling excited by the death even of Sir Robert Peel.