LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL ON THE DESCENT OF WOMAN.
WHEN that supremely self-conscious and dissatisfied personage, Childe Harold, related the story of his pilgrimage in several cantos for the benefit of his despised fellow-creatures, he was wont to vary the monotony of his descriptive writing by the insertion of moral reflections upon the general baseness and futility of humanity in contrast with the beauty of Nature. His powers of description, however, were so great, and the pictures that he sometimes drew so ex- quisitely beautiful, that his readers were well content to skip the intrusive morality, and forget it in their rapt contem- plation of what really constituted one of the finest poems in the English language. Unfortunately, it is not so with a more modern pilgrim, Lord Randolph Churchill, whose literary powers are not upon the same level, and whose readers, bored with the wearisome iteration of what they have long known, and the bald barrenness of the narrative, seize with avidity upon the scanty scraps of philosophy with which that original thinker has seasoned his pages. More especially was this noticeable in the last letter that the wanderer addressed from South Africa to the Daily Graphic, in which he gave a lengthy description of the great diamond- mines that he had visited. The diamonds did not sparkle in Lord Randolph's hands ; the mines became as dull and un- interesting as coal-pits, as unreal as a commercial prospectus; .and it was with a greediness of joy that his readers once more recognised the original Lord Randolph in the delightful moral that ended so many dreary columns, in the "cold conclusion," as he calls it, to which the sight of piles upon piles of diamonds arranged for export had brought him. How would such a sight as that have affected any other man ? The fingers of many of Lord Randolph's former colleagues would have itched to possess themselves of some portion of that glittering store,—for even a Member of the House of Commons is but human, and diamonds have an attraction of their own. Mr. Grant Allen, we are sure, would have veiled his face as though from the naked sight of original sin, and fled away to make one more passionate appeal to democracy, never, never to degrade itself by wearing diamonds. But not so Lord Randolph Churchill. Cool and unmoved as was his great ancestor upon the day of battle, he stood before those glittering heaps; coolly he calculated their value and the cost of their finding; coldly he came to a conclusion that was all his own. His is the genuine philosopher's temperament, that nothing can daunt, nothing can surprise, nothing move to a show of emotion. And yet many a valiant man would have shrunk from the expression of such a conclusion as that to which he had come. "Whatever may have been the origin of man," he cries, "of this I am coldly convinced, that woman- kind are descended from monkeys."
In the face of that swift summary of facts and swifter flight of thought, one cannot but look back with a kind of pity to the laborious life-work of Mr. Darwin. After how many years of patient -toil, with what infinite industry of research, with what labour of brain and searchings of conscience did he come to the final conclusions that are contained in the Dar- winian theory of descent ; and here is a man—exceptionally gifted, it is true—who is easily carried to the same conclusion by the mere sight of a heap of diamonds and a few minutes of cool reflection. Coldly, we too may come to a conclusion,— that all men are not equally equipped by Nature for every line of life ; that some are born poets, some are born statesmen, and some are born scientific philosophers,—and that Lord Randolph Churchill, who has so long missed his vocation, has at last found it in the field of scientific research. We have now seen him playing his part in many characters, as a man of the world, as a demagogue, as a statesman, and lately as a man of letters ; but in none of them has he appeared to us so admirable as in this his last role, a scientific philosopher. Certainly in no other part have his utterances attained to the same high value, and we sincerely trust that he may be moved to play out this part to its final conclusion with more constancy and persistence than he generally displays. Until now it has seemed that a leaping ambition has combined with a rather petulant impatience of details to keep him always in the rank of the might-have-beens. Knowing his own eminent fitness for a position at the extreme top of the ladder, he could never bring himself to climb the painful rungs. As a racing man, he might have been the owner of a Derby-winner, but he did not give the Turf a fair chance ; as a popular leader, he might have outrivalled Mr. Burns, but popular favour requires much anxious seeking on the part of him who would find it; as a statesman, he might have been Prime Minister, but—he was not, and he soon tired of a minor post; as a man of letters, he might have been the most brilliant litterateur of his day, or at least he might have been credited with that reputation, if only he had not written letters from South Africa. In this last case, it was rather unfortunate that he did persevere. Here, however, as a moral and scientific philosopher he stands out at once facile princeps, unsurpassable and unapproachable : what other man in the world could have balanced so weighty, so stupendous a conclusion upon such a slender basis of facts and reasoning P Like Childe Harold before the ruins of the Colosseum, he stood before the desola- tion of a diamond-mine and deeply considered. What are diamonds, he argued, but the glittering rubbish with which a woman adorns herself. What are the women who thus adorn themselves at the cost of man's life and labour ? Are they
not often neither young, nor beautiful, nor virtuous P That also is true. Therefore women are descended from monkeys. What a conclusion to have come to so coldly ! A lesser mind might have been baulked of it by the oonsideration that monkeys, although very often neither young, nor beautiful, nor virtuous, do not, as a rule, wear diamonds ; bat the keen eye of the philosopher, in its unerring pursuit of truth, was not to be blinded by such trivial and fallacious reasoning. Nothing that we have yet read in our Pilgrim's progress has filled us with so much pleasure and wonder as this, his latest discovery. The departure from England, the passage across the Bay of Biscay, the exploration of the unknown city of Lisbon, and the adventurous lunch that he ate there, even the hardships of ship life and the terrible tale of the privations that have to be endured therein, left us comparatively unmoved and unad- miring. Nor did the pictures with which the Daily Graphic adorned its correspondent's story stir us to any like enthu- siasm ; not even when we were shown a picture of the ship, with Lord Randolph himself on the quarter-deck ; a picture of the coast of Africa, with Lord Randolph in the fore- ground ; a mountain, with Lord Randolph on the top of it ; a mine, with Lord Randolph at the bottom of it ; or a railway- engine, with the same gentleman on the cow-catcher and a constituent from Paddington in the background. Admirable and astonishing as these productions were, they pale into utter insignificance before this last picture that he himself presents before our mental vision,—the descent of woman, with Lord Randolph Churchill as its discoverer. - Diamonds, according to Mr. Grant Allen, exercise a most demoralising effect upon democracy ; but it would appear that upon an aristocrat, even when that aristocrat is possessed of democratic tendencies, they exert a quickening influence. Surely some of his Lordship's brilliance upon this occasion must have been borrowed from the stones upon which he moralised. It was a happy accident that caused him to meet with one of his Paddington constituents upon a cow-catcher in South Africa—a sign of the far-reaching influence that is attached to his personality even in the uttermost parts of the world—but do not let him accept it as an omen that summons Eim back to political life in England. Let him rather think that this discovery of his in the diamond-fields, a discovery more precious than any of the precious stones by which he was surrounded, is likely to be but one of many, but the threshold to a glorious career of scientific inquiry. As a statesman, we have done very well without him, and shall probably continue to do very well,—absence has not made our hearts any fonder of him in that capacity. As a man of the world, he does not seem to have succeeded in endearing him- self to his fellow-travellers,—popularity is bat a fickle chase, and unworthy of his seeking. As a writer of letters, he leaves much to be desired, and we cannot heartily congratulate the Daily Graphic upon its last special correspondent. But as a man of science and a philosopher, he seems to us to be beyond all praise. Above all others is the life of contempla- tion held in honour ; let him lead it. Nothing is required for it but seclusion and silence ; and his fellow-countrymen, who have so readily forgiven him his silence, will gladly give him also all the seclusion that he needs.
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