Tancred - Benjamin Disraeli (little readers txt) 📗

in these respects produces that bustle and delay which distract many an agreeable conversation and spoil many a pleasant dish. These two excellent characteristics were never wanting at the dinners of Sidonia. At no house was there less parade. The appearance of the table changed as if by the waving of a wand, and silently as a dream. And at this moment, the dessert being arranged, fruits and their beautiful companions, flowers, reposed in alabaster baskets raised on silver stands of filigree work.

There was half an hour of merry talk, graceful and gay: a good story, a _bon-mot_ fresh from the mint, some raillery like summer lightning, vivid but not scorching.

'And now,' said Edith, as the ladies rose to return to the library, 'and now we leave you to Maynooth.'

'By-the-bye, what do they say to it in your House, Lord Marney?' inquired Henry Sydney, filling his glass.

'It will go down,' said Lord Marney. 'A strong dose for some, but they are used to potent potions.'

'The bishops, they say, have not made up their minds.'

'Fancy bishops not having made up their minds,' exclaimed Tancred: 'the only persons who ought never to doubt.'

'Except when they are offered a bishopric,' said Lord Marney.

'Why I like this Maynooth project,' said Tancred, 'though otherwise it little interests me, is, that all the shopkeepers are against it.'

'Don't tell that to the minister,' said Coningsby, 'or he will give up the measure.'

'Well, that is the very reason,' said Vavasour, 'why, though otherwise inclined to the grant, I hesitate as to my vote. I have the highest opinion of the shopkeepers; I sympathise even with their prejudices. They are the class of the age; they represent its order, its decency, its industry.'

'And you represent them,' said Coningsby. 'Vavasour is the quintessence of order, decency, and industry.'

'You may jest,' said Vavasour, shaking his head with a spice of solemn drollery; 'but public opinion must and ought to be respected, right or wrong.'

'What do you mean by public opinion?' said Tancred.

'The opinion of the reflecting majority,' said Vavasour.

'Those who don't read your poems,' said Coningsby.

'Boy, boy!' said Vavasour, who could endure raillery from one he had been at college with, but who was not over-pleased at Coningsby selecting the present occasion to claim his franchise, when a new man was present like Lord Montacute, on whom Vavasour naturally wished to produce an impression. It must be owned that it was not, as they say, very good taste in the husband of Edith, but prosperity had developed in Coningsby a native vein of sauciness which it required all the solemnity of the senate to repress. Indeed, even there, upon the benches, with a grave face, he often indulged in quips and cranks that convulsed his neighbouring audience, who often, amid the long dreary nights of statistical imposture, sought refuge in his gay sarcasms, his airy personalities, and happy quotations.

'I do not see how there can be opinion without thought,' said Tancred; 'and I do not believe the public ever think. How can they? They have no time. Certainly we live at present under the empire of general ideas, which are extremely powerful. But the public have not invented those ideas. They have adopted them from convenience. No one has confidence in himself; on the contrary, every one has a mean idea of his own strength and has no reliance on his own judgment. Men obey a general impulse, they bow before an external necessity, whether for resistance or action. Individuality is dead; there is a want of inward and personal energy in man; and that is what people feel and mean when they go about complaining there is no faith.'

'You would hold, then,' said Henry Sydney, 'that the progress of public liberty marches with the decay of personal greatness?'

'It would seem so.'

'But the majority will always prefer public liberty to personal greatness,' said Lord Marney.

'But, without personal greatness, you never would have had public liberty,' said Coningsby.

'After all, it is civilisation that you are kicking against,' said Vavasour.

'I do not understand what you mean by civilisation,' said Tancred.

'The progressive development of the faculties of man,' said Vavasour.

'Yes, but what is progressive development?' said Sidonia; 'and what are the faculties of man? If development be progressive, how do you account for the state of Italy? One will tell you it is superstition, indulgences, and the Lady of Loretto; yet three centuries ago, when all these influences were much more powerful, Italy was the soul of Europe. The less prejudiced, a Puseyite for example, like our friend Vavasour, will assure us that the state of Italy has nothing to do with the spirit of its religion, but that it is entirely an affair of commerce; a revolution of commerce has convulsed its destinies. I cannot forget that the world was once conquered by Italians who had no commerce. Has the development of Western Asia been progressive? It is a land of tombs and ruins. Is China progressive, the most ancient and numerous of existing societies? Is Europe itself progressive? Is Spain a tithe as great as she was? Is Germany as great as when she invented printing; as she was under the rule of Charles the Fifth? France herself laments her relative inferiority to the past. But England flourishes. Is it what you call civilisation that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the arbiter of the world? Clearly not. It is her inhabitants that have done this; it is an affair of race. A Saxon race, protected by an insular position, has stamped its diligent and methodic character on the century. And when a superior race, with a superior idea to work and order, advances, its state will be progressive, and we shall, perhaps, follow the example of the desolate countries. All is race; there is no other truth.'

'Because it includes all others?' said Lord Henry.

'You have said it.'

'As for Vavasour's definition of civilisation,' said Coningsby, 'civilisation was more advanced in ancient than modern times; then what becomes of the progressive principle? Look at the great centuries of the Roman Empire! You had two hundred millions of human beings governed by a jurisprudence so philosophical that we have been obliged to adopt its laws, and living in perpetual peace. The means of communication, of which we now make such a boast, were far more vast and extensive in those days. What were the Great Western and the London and Birmingham to the Appian and Flaminian roads? After two thousand five hundred years, parts of these are still used. A man under the Antonines might travel from Paris to Antioch with as much ease and security as we go from London to York. As for free trade, there never was a really unshackled commerce except in the days when the whole of the Mediterranean coasts belonged to one power. What a chatter there is now about the towns, and how their development is cited as the peculiarity of the age, and the great security for public improvement. Why, the Roman Empire was the empire of great cities. Man was then essentially municipal.'

'What an empire!' said Sidonia. 'All the superior races in all the superior climes.'

'But how does all this accord with your and Coningsby's favourite theory of the influence of individual character?' said Vavasour to Sidonia; 'which I hold, by-the-bye,' he added rather pompously, 'to be entirely futile.'

'What is individual character but the personification of race,' said Sidonia, 'its perfection and choice exemplar? Instead of being an inconsistency, the belief in the influence of the individual is a corollary of the original proposition.'

'I look upon a belief in the influence of individual character as a barbarous superstition,' said Vavasour.

'Vavasour believes that there would be no heroes if there were a police,' said Coningsby; 'but I believe that civilisation is only fatal to minstrels, and that is the reason now we have no poets.'

'How do you account for the Polish failure in 1831?' said Lord Marney. 'They had a capital army, they were backed by the population, but they failed. They had everything but a man.'

'Why were the Whigs smashed in 1834,' said Coningsby, 'but because they had not a man?'

'What is the real explanation of the state of Mexico?' said Sidonia. 'It has not a man.'

'So much for progress since the days of Charles the Fifth,' said Henry Sydney. 'The Spaniards then conquered Mexico, and now they cannot govern it.'

'So much for race,' said Vavasour. 'The race is the same; why are not the results the same?'

'Because it is worn out,' said Sidonia. 'Why do not the Ethiopians build another Thebes, or excavate the colossal temples of the cataracts? The decay of a race is an inevitable necessity, unless it lives in deserts and never mixes its blood.'


CHAPTER XXI.


Sweet Sympathy


I AM sorry, my dear mother, that I cannot accompany you; but I must go down to my yacht this morning, and on my return from Greenwich I have an engagement.'

This was said about a week after the dinner at Sidonia's, by Lord Montacute to the duchess. 'That terrible yacht!' thought the duchess. Her Grace, a year ago, had she been aware of it, would have deemed Tancred's engagement as fearful an affair. The idea that her son should have called every day for a week on a married lady, beautiful and attractive, would have filled her with alarm amounting almost to horror. Yet such was the innocent case. It might at the first glance seem difficult to reconcile the rival charms of the Basilisk and Lady Bertie and Bellair, and to understand how Tancred could be so interested in the preparations for a voyage which was to bear him from the individual in whose society he found a daily gratification. But the truth is, that Lady Bertie and Bellair was the only person who sympathised with his adventure.

She listened with the liveliest concern to his account of all his progress; she even made many admirable suggestions, for Lady Bertie and Bellair had been a frequent visitor at Cowes, and was quite initiated in the mysteries of the dilettante service of the Yacht Club. She was a capital sailor; at least she always told Tancred so. But this was not the chief source of sympathy, or the principal bond of union, between them. It was not the voyage, so much as the object of the voyage, that touched all the passion of Lady Bertie and Bellair. Her heart was at Jerusalem. The sacred city was the dream of her life; and, amid the dissipations of May Fair and the distractions of Belgravia, she had in fact all this time only been thinking of Jehoshaphat and Sion. Strange coincidence of sentiment--strange and sweet!

The enamoured Montacute hung over her with pious rapture, as they examined together Mr. Roberts's Syrian drawings, and she alike charmed and astonished him by her familiarity with every locality and each detail. She looked like a beautiful prophetess as she dilated with solemn enthusiasm on the sacred scene. Tancred called on her every day, because when he called the first time he had announced his immediate departure, and so had been authorised to promise that he would pay his respects to her every day till he went. It was calculated that by these means, that is to say three or four visits, they might perhaps travel through Mr. Roberts's views together before he