TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE EARL OF DERBY. AFTER a political career of about forty-five years, during which he has been three times Prime Minister, the Earl of Derby has at last vanished from the scene. He has not been a great statesman. He has hardly matured a single historical measure ; for any credit which the Household Suffrage Reform Act may have reflected upon his Govern- ment belonged rather to Mr. Disraeli than to himself. But there has scarcely ever been a party leader whose name had so great a spell in it for the imaginations of his supporters, or whose pungent sarcasm in debate was so keen a terror to his opponents, as the Earl of Derby. In the Upper House especially his speeches have broken the torpor of the heavy atmosphere, and lent a sonorous animation to discussions that would otherwise have been too often languid and sluggish. Wherever Lord Derby moved in politics, the air became eager at his presence, and that alone has been no small benefit to the dignified dulness of the Peers. If he was wrong, as he was apt to be, he was wrong with an imperious confidence of manner which provoked even titled tranquillity into dissent and disputation. The same spirit which perversely ridiculed the Railways, which clung so long to the Corn Law, and struck a last and desperate blow for the Protestant Establishment in Ireland, could not but kindle a genuine flame of opposition even in the apathetic temperaments of Whig Lords. The Earl of Derby at least succeeded in the capacity of stimulant and tonic both to his followers and his antagonists.
"Clear as the trumpet's voice which calls to arms Some town encompassed round with hostile bands, Rang out the voice of great /Eacides."
He was a partizan by nature, and not one of a half-and-half kind ; he fought more for a party than a cause ; prepossession had always a larger share than reason in his mind, and his speeches were perfect political contrasts to his son's sober, lucid, and frigid expositions ; but no man knew better than the Earl of Derby how to avoid anything that vulgarized or lowered the tone of political battle, how to make aristocratic hauteur a law unto itself, setting a bound to political passion which it was never permitted to pass, and thus turning debate into something of the same sort of training and discipline for the temper of militant politicians which the tournament was for the warriors of the middle ages. Lord Derby was neither one of the "earnest" politicians of the late generation, nor one of the scientific poli- ticians of this. He was rather one of those who loved combat for combat's sake ;—indeed, there were fewer political theses with which he was personally identified than could be enume- rated in the case of any one of his contemporaries or colleagues. But then he knew exactly what the rules of combat must be for men who love combat for combat's sake, and he never countenanced any transgression of them. For so gallant a leader, so little restrained by any motive of prudence or for- bearance, it could scarcely have been easy to fight as he did so strictly within the laws.
But Lord Derby's vast popularity with his party has pro- bably been due in a very considerable measure to his defi- ciencies as a statesman, no less than to his gallantry as a poli- tical commander. It is not in reasoned views, or at least par- tially reasoned views, like those of the late Sir Robert Peel, or Lord Stanley, or Sir Stafford Northcote, that you can find the elements of anything like Tory enthusiasm. In order to draw forth that enthusiasm, you need not a little of unreasoned pre- possession,—of that temper which nails the old colours to the mast without thinking or caring whether or not they really represent the old cause. Lord Derby has been wonderfully in harmony in this sense with the lingering asperities of the Con- servative party-feeling, after such intellect as they had had been convinced that they were in the wrong. When Sir Robert Peel felt his economic reasons for the Corn Law giving way beneath him he changed ; but Lord Derby remained true to the landed interest,' though any more scientific statesman would have seen that the landed interest was identified with the opposite policy to that which he pursued. And the landed interest, on the whole, followed its old leader in his error, and angrily repudiated the new leader in his truth. Again, when Lord Stanley felt his reasons for the Irish Establishment failing him, he pretty openly threw up his false position ; but Lord Derby remained eagerly true to the Protestant Establishment in Ireland, though scientific statesmen could have seen that the Protestant Church in Ireland was really identified with the opposite policy to that which he recommended ; and, again, the Protestant Church in Ireland followed its old leader in his error, and angrily repudiated the cold wisdom of the younger and shrewder Conservative. You cannot have a genuinely popular Conser- vative leader without something also in him of the Tory,— something of the hallucinations of the past,—something of the disposition to resent argument when argument disturbs the• equanimity of prejudice. The Standard of Monday, in verses of really great spirit, praised Lord Derby's statesmanship as it certainly would never have praised it, if he had had any true statesmanship to praise :— " Oh, statesman! All too soon those eyes have Blumberg. Our hope was once more thou weulds't rule the realm.. Never our England, through the years unnumbered, Shall know a wiser pilot at the helm."
Now of all the Conservative ministries of this century, Lord Derby's were certainly those which had all but the very least wise statesman at the helm. Lord Liverpool, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen were all men of far more political wisdom than Lord Derby. Perhaps he was the superior of Mr. Perceval, but that is not saying, much. Yet if Lord Derby had been a wiser Conservative, he would have been less truly mourned by the Conservatives he leaves behind. Lord Derby's asperity of feeling against the disturbing innovations of modern thought has always been one of the vital principles of his popularity and his eloquence.. Like Jonah, he thought he did well to be angry when the spreading branches and leaves of the old institutions to which he had been attached withered away from above his head ; and as he was always able to give to this sentiment of angry surprise the outward form and style of statesmanship,—to. clothe it in that language of diffuse but stately animosity which best disguises its temporary and personal character, his mode of expressing the bitterness of spirit felt by the party at large has always been hailed with delight by the dumb vexation of which it was the voice.
As an orator, Lord Derby was not only far better to hear than to read, but the difference between his speeches as they read, and his speeches as they sounded to the ear, was pro- portionately greater than in the case of any other real orator of his time. There was literary power in Lord Derby, as his Iliad sufficiently shows ; but there was no literary originality. The relish of a new descriptive term,—a new political defini- tion,—a literary surprise in the way of grotesque suggestion, such as dot Mr. Disraeli's speeches with unexpected pleasures to the reader no less than the hearer, was never given by the speeches of Lord Derby. On the other hand, there was seldom sufficient political substance in them to adorn them with that marvel of exposition and arrangement which marks Mr. Gladstone's speeches as much when read as when pronounced. Nor was there anything in them of the compressed force of passion and appeal which leaves its impress so deeply even on the reported language of Mr. Bright that as you read you seem to be listening to thunder under an angry morning sky. Lord Derby's speeches are not even picturesque to study, for picturesqueness itself requires some originality of touch here and again, to rouse the dormant faculty of vision. Then they were far too diffuse for effective reading. The impres- sion was frittered away—diluted in a multitude of paraphrases. But to hear them was always a stimulus. There was a threat- ening air about Lord Derby, an imperious sarcasm in the tone with which he dealt with opponents, a rapidity and eagerness of movement which gave even to the most diffuse passages of his orations a sense of something brewing—something to come, —a. haughtiness of superiority such as marked the chieftains of the older clans, an air at once menacing, incisive, and august. Thus the speeches of Lord Derby, as they sounded upon the ear, con- tained something of excitement and of power which escaped when you came to read them in a report. Then, though he was rarely picturesque, he was often recklessly frank in his phrases and epithets, and you came every now and then upon an audacious expression, which was startling in its candour,—like the cele- brated description of his own last reform bill as " a leap in the dark," and his contemptuous admission that the Roman Catholic oath had been intended to "muzzle" the Catholics on the subject of their grievances. This sudden flash and glitter of the cold steel in the air gave half its interest to those who saw the frown with which Lord Derby masked the impending wrath and awaited the unexpected confidences of his dangerous moods. One of the questions which remains last upon our minds when we lose a prominent statesman is his relation to the future. Was he marked by political forethought, did his mind turn fascinated towards the past, or was he chiefly content with computing the precise strength of the forces of the pre-
sent Certainly, Lord Derby had no political forethought. Nothing bewildered and distressed him more than the conse- quences of his own acts. The first great reform bill, which he supported vigorously almost immediately produced measures -which he could not endorse, and the reaction from which made him a Tory. The second reform bill which he carried two sears ago, immediately, and even before the Parliament which passed it had been dissolved, spurred the members of it into a marvellous alacrity to do what Lord Derby most sincerely dreaded and disapproved. To him the Bill of 1867 was indeed a
leap in the dark,' for it was a leap into a popular Irish policy for Ireland,—while Lord Derby's own avowed policy on taking office in the previous year was to govern Ireland even more than hitherto by the county magnates, that is, by aliens in
blood, language, and religion.' With regard to the free- trade movement, he was not only unable to forecast the future, but to understand the present. His speech on taking office in 1852 was a mere wilderness of fallacies, resem- bling more nearly our recent correspondent's (Mr. Coningsby's) account of the confusions which darken the counsels of the -United States' artizans by words without knowledge, than the clear estimate formed by a statesman of opinions which he had learned to understand and expound, even though he did not share them. In his foreign policy Lord Derby was curiously .malleable to the most opposite views under different influ- ences. He always had a real care for the dignity and honour of England, but that dominant feeling once satisfied, no one could say that he had a policy at all. During the great American war, while his lieutenants in the Commons were .cautious to an extreme,—and one of them at least, Mr. Dis- raeli, seemed to lean to the side of the greater power, the power of the North,—Lord Derby never for a moment disguised his own strong sympathy with the Southern cause. Again, while in Opposition, and even in office while Lord Malmes- bury was his Foreign Secretary, his policy always leaned to the Austrian side, and many were his assaults on the Italian policy of Lord Russell. But when he returned to power, and placed Lord Stanley in the Foreign Office, his most radical enemies were not merely satisfied, but delighted, with the course of his administration. In fact, as a statesman, Lord Derby wanted a backbone of principle. He lived from hand to mouth,—giving a certain style and polish of effect to all he touched, but failing even to wish for a coherent scheme of political thought. Yet, whether he were in opposition or in power, his first thought was for the splendour and prosperity of the Empire, and no man could ever honestly charge him with making the embarrassments of his country the occasion for personal or party aggrandizement.
' We have lost in-him a brilliant and even splendid Conserva- tive general of division, though only a third-rate commander- in-chief. But whatever political qualities he missed, he had -at least the undeniable gift of even making blunders with
distinction ;' and in a political atmosphere so liable to become thick and turbid and full of vulgar dust as ours, it is some- thing of no little moment for our leaders to lead, as Lord Derby did everything, in the grand style.'
Previous page
