Tancred

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'My lord duke,' said Mr. Bernard, 'had yourself or her Grace ever spoken
to me on this subject, I would have taken the liberty of expressing what
I say now. I have ever found Lord Montacute inscrutable. He has formed
himself in solitude, and has ever repelled any advance to intimacy,
either from those who were his inferiors or his equals in station. He
has never had a companion. As for myself, during the ten years that I
have had the honour of being connected with him, I cannot recall a
word or a deed on his part which towards me has not been courteous and
considerate; but as a child he was shy and silent, and as a man, for I
have looked upon him as a man in mind for these four or even five years,
he has employed me as his machine to obtain knowledge. It is not very
flattering to oneself to make these confessions, but at Oxford he had
the opportunity of communicating with some of the most eminent men
of our time, and I have always learnt from them the same result. Lord
Montacute never disburthened. His passion for study has been ardent; his
power of application is very great; his attention unwearied as long
as there is anything to acquire; but he never seeks your opinions, and
never offers his own. The interview of yesterday with your Grace is the
only exception with which I am acquainted, and at length throws some
light on the mysteries of his mind.'

The duke looked sad; his wife seemed plunged in profound thought; there
was a silence of many moments. At length the duchess looked up, and
said, in a calmer tone, and with an air of great seriousness, 'It seems
that we have mistaken the character of our son. Thank you very much for
coming to us so quickly in our trouble, Mr. Bernard. It was very kind,
as you always are.' Mr. Bernard took the hint, rose, bowed, and retired.

The moment that he had quitted the room, the eyes of the Duke and
Duchess of Bellamont met. Who was to speak first? The duke had nothing
to say, and therefore he had the advantage: the duchess wished her
husband to break the silence, but, having something to say herself, she
could not refrain from interrupting it. So she said, with a tearful eye,
'Well, George, what do you think we ought to do?' The duke had a great
mind to propose his plan of sending Tancred to Jerusalem, with Colonel
Brace, Mr. Bernard, and Mr. Roby, to take care of him, but he hardly
thought the occasion was ripe enough for that; and so he suggested that
the duchess should speak to Tancred herself.

'No,' said her Grace, shaking her head, 'I think it better for me to
be silent; at least at present. It is necessary, however, that the most
energetic means should be adopted to save him, nor is there a moment to
be lost. We must shrink from nothing for such an object. I have a plan.
We will put the whole matter in the hands of our friend, the bishop.
We will get him to speak to Tancred. I entertain not a doubt that the
bishop will put his mind all right; clear all his doubts; remove all his
scruples. The bishop is the only person, because, you see, it is a case
political as well as theological, and the bishop is a great statesman as
well as the first theologian of the age. Depend upon it, my dear George,
that this is the wisest course, and, with the blessing of Providence,
will effect our purpose. It is, perhaps, asking a good deal of the
bishop, considering his important and multifarious duties, to undertake
this office, but we must not be delicate when everything is at stake;
and, considering he christened and confirmed Tancred, and our long
friendship, it is quite out of the question that he can refuse. However,
there is no time to be lost. We must get to town as soon as possible;
tomorrow, if we can. I shall advance affairs by writing to the bishop
on the subject, and giving him an outline of the case, so that he may be
prepared to see Tancred at once on our arrival. What think you, George,
of my plan?'

'I think it quite admirable,' replied his Grace, only too happy that
there was at least the prospect of a lull of a few days in this great
embarrassment.

CHAPTER X.

_A Visionary_

ABOUT the time of the marriage of the Duchess of Bellamont, her noble
family, and a few of their friends, some of whom also believed in the
millennium, were persuaded that the conversion of the Roman Catholic
population of Ireland to the true faith, which was their own, was at
hand. They had subscribed very liberally for the purpose, and formed an
amazing number of sub-committees. As long as their funds lasted, their
missionaries found proselytes. It was the last desperate effort of a
Church that had from the first betrayed its trust. Twenty years ago,
statistics not being so much in vogue, and the people of England being
in the full efflorescence of that public ignorance which permitted them
to believe themselves the most enlightened nation in the world, the
Irish 'difficulty' was not quite so well understood as at the present
day. It was then an established doctrine, and all that was necessary
for Ireland was more Protestantism, and it was supposed to be not more
difficult to supply the Irish with Protestantism than it had proved, in
the instance of a recent famine, 1822, to furnish them with potatoes.
What was principally wanted in both cases were subscriptions.

When the English public, therefore, were assured by their
co-religionists on the other side of St. George's Channel, that at last
the good work was doing; that the flame spread, even rapidly; that
not only parishes but provinces were all agog, and that both town and
country were quite in a heat of proselytism, they began to believe that
at last the scarlet lady was about to be dethroned; they loosened
their purse-strings; fathers of families contributed their zealous five
pounds, followed by every other member of the household, to the babe
in arms, who subscribed its fanatical five shillings. The affair
looked well. The journals teemed with lists of proselytes and cases of
conversion; and even orderly, orthodox people, who were firm in their
own faith, but wished others to be permitted to pursue their errors in
peace, began to congratulate each other on the prospect of our at last
becoming a united Protestant people.

In the blaze and thick of the affair, Irish Protestants jubilant, Irish
Papists denouncing the whole movement as fraud and trumpery, John Bull
perplexed, but excited, and still subscribing, a young bishop rose in
his place in the House of Lords, and, with a vehemence there unusual,
declared that he saw 'the finger of God in this second Reformation,'
and, pursuing the prophetic vein and manner, denounced 'woe to those who
should presume to lift up their hands and voices in vain and impotent
attempts to stem the flood of light that was bursting over Ireland.'

In him, who thus plainly discerned 'the finger of God' in transactions
in which her family and feelings were so deeply interested, the young
and enthusiastic Duchess of Bellamont instantly recognised the 'man of
God;' and from that moment the right reverend prelate became, in all
spiritual affairs, her infallible instructor, although the impending
second Reformation did chance to take the untoward form of the
emancipation of the Roman Catholics, followed in due season by the
destruction of Protestant bishoprics, the sequestration of Protestant
tithes, and the endowment of Maynooth.

In speculating on the fate of public institutions and the course of
public affairs, it is important that we should not permit our attention
to be engrossed by the principles on which they are founded and the
circumstances which they present, but that we should also remember
how much depends upon the character of the individuals who are in the
position to superintend or to direct them.

The Church of England, mainly from its deficiency of oriental knowledge,
and from a misconception of the priestly character which has been the
consequence of that want, has fallen of late years into great straits;
nor has there ever been a season when it has more needed for its guides
men possessing the higher qualities both of intellect and disposition.
About five-and-twenty years ago, it began to be discerned that the time
had gone by, at least in England, for bishoprics to serve as appanages
for the younger sons of great families. The Arch-Mediocrity who
then governed this country, and the mean tenor of whose prolonged
administration we have delineated in another work, was impressed with
the necessity of reconstructing the episcopal bench on principles of
personal distinction and ability. But his notion of clerical capacity
did not soar higher than a private tutor who had suckled a young noble
into university honours; and his test of priestly celebrity was the
decent editorship of a Greek play. He sought for the successors of the
apostles, for the stewards of the mysteries of Sinai and of Calvary,
among third-rate hunters after syllables.

These men, notwithstanding their elevation, with one exception, subsided
into their native insignificance; and during our agitated age, when the
principles of all institutions, sacred and secular, have been called
in question; when, alike in the senate and the market-place, both the
doctrine and the discipline of the Church have been impugned, its power
assailed, its authority denied, the amount of its revenues investigated,
their disposition criticised, and both attacked; not a voice has been
raised by these mitred nullities, either to warn or to vindicate; not a
phrase has escaped their lips or their pens, that ever influenced public
opinion, touched the heart of nations, or guided the conscience of a
perplexed people. If they were ever heard of it was that they had been
pelted in a riot.

The exception which we have mentioned to their sorry careers was that
of the too adventurous prophet of the second Reformation; the _ductor
dubitantium_ appealed to by the Duchess of Bellamont, to convince her
son that the principles of religious truth, as well as of political
justice, required no further investigation; at least by young
marquesses.

The ready audacity with which this right reverend prelate had stood
sponsor for the second Reformation is a key to his character. He
combined a great talent for action with very limited powers of thought.

Bustling, energetic, versatile, gifted with an indomitable perseverance,
and stimulated by an ambition that knew no repose, with a capacity for
mastering details and an inordinate passion for affairs, he could
permit nothing to be done without his interference, and consequently
was perpetually involved in transactions which were either failures or
blunders. He was one of those leaders who are not guides. Having little
real knowledge, and not endowed with those high qualities of intellect
which permit their possessor to generalise the details afforded by study
and experience, and so deduce rules of conduct, his lordship, when he
received those frequent appeals which were the necessary consequence
of his officious life, became obscure, confused, contradictory,
inconsistent, illogical. The oracle was always dark.

Placed in a high post in an age of political analysis, the bustling
intermeddler was unable to supply society with a single solution.
Enunciating secondhand, with characteristic precipitation, some big
principle in vogue, as if he were a discoverer, he invariably shrank
from its subsequent application the moment that he found it might be
unpopular and inconvenient. All his quandaries terminated in the same
catastrophe; a compromise. Abstract principles with him ever ended
in concrete expediency. The aggregate of circumstances outweighed the
isolated cause. The primordial tenet, which had been advocated with
uncompromising arrogance, gently subsided into some second-rate measure
recommended with all the artifice of an impenetrable ambiguity.

Beginning with the second Reformation, which was a little rash but
dashing, the bishop, always ready, had in the course of his episcopal
career placed himself at the head of every movement in the Church which
others had originated, and had as regularly withdrawn at the right
moment, when the heat was over, or had become, on the contrary,
excessive. Furiously evangelical, soberly high and dry, and fervently
Puseyite, each phasis of his faith concludes with what the Spaniards
term a 'transaction.' The saints are to have their new churches, but
they are also to have their rubrics and their canons; the universities
may supply successors to the apostles, but they are also presented
with a church commission; even the Puseyites may have candles on their
altars, but they must not be lighted.

It will be seen, therefore, that his lordship was one of those
characters not ill-adapted to an eminent station in an age like the
present, and in a country like our own; an age of movement, but of
confused ideas; a country of progress, but too rich to risk much change.
Under these circumstances, the spirit of a period and a people seeks a
safety-valve in bustle. They do something, lest it be said that they
do nothing. At such a time, ministers recommend their measures as
experiments, and parliaments are ever ready to rescind their votes.
Find a man who, totally destitute of genius, possesses nevertheless
considerable talents; who has official aptitude, a volubility of routine
rhetoric, great perseverance, a love of affairs; who, embarrassed
neither by the principles of the philosopher nor by the prejudices of
the bigot, can assume, with a cautious facility, the prevalent tone, and
disembarrass himself of it, with a dexterous ambiguity, the moment it
ceases to be predominant; recommending himself to the innovator by his
approbation of change 'in the abstract,' and to the conservative by his
prudential and practical respect for that which is established; such
a man, though he be one of an essentially small mind, though his
intellectual qualities be less than moderate, with feeble powers of
thought, no imagination, contracted sympathies, and a most loose public
morality; such a man is the individual whom kings and parliaments
would select to govern the State or rule the Church. Change, 'in the
abstract,' is what is wanted by a people who are at the same time
inquiring and wealthy. Instead of statesmen they desire shufflers; and
compromise in conduct and ambiguity in speech are, though nobody will
confess it, the public qualities now most in vogue.

Not exactly, however, those calculated to meet the case of Tancred.
The interview was long, for Tan-cred listened with apparent respect
and deference to the individual under whose auspices he had entered the
Church of Christ; but the replies to his inquiries, though more adroit
than the duke's, were in reality not more satisfactory, and could not,
in any way, meet the inexorable logic of Lord Montacute. The bishop
was as little able as the duke to indicate the principle on which the
present order of things in England was founded; neither faith nor
its consequence, duty, was at all illustrated or invigorated by his
handling. He utterly failed in reconciling a belief in ecclesiastical
truth with the support of religious dissent. When he tried to define
in whom the power of government should repose, he was lost in a maze of
phrases, and afforded his pupil not a single fact.

'It cannot be denied,' at length said Tancred, with great calmness,
'that society was once regulated by God, and that now it is regulated by
man. For my part, I prefer divine to self-government, and I wish to know
how it is to be attained.'

'The Church represents God upon earth,' said the bishop.

'But the Church no longer governs man,' replied Tancred.

'There is a great spirit rising in the Church,' observed the bishop,
with thoughtful solemnity; 'a great and excellent spirit. The Church of
1845 is not the Church of 1745. We must remember that; we know not what
may happen. We shall soon see a bishop at Manchester.'

'But I want to see an angel at Manchester.'

'An angel!'

'Why not? Why should there not be heavenly messengers, when heavenly
messages are most wanted?'

'We have received a heavenly message by one greater than the angels,'
said the bishop. 'Their visits to man ceased with the mightier advent.'

'Then why did angels appear to Mary and her companions at the holy
tomb?' inquired Tancred.

The interview from which so much was anticipated was not satisfactory.
The eminent prelate did not realise Tancred's ideal of a bishop, while
his lordship did not hesitate to declare that Lord Montacute was a
visionary.

CHAPTER XI.

_Advice from a Man of the World_

WHEN the duchess found that the interview with the bishop had been
fruitless of the anticipated results, she was staggered, disheartened;
but she was a woman of too high a spirit to succumb under a first
defeat. She was of opinion that his lordship had misunderstood the case,
or had mismanaged it; her confidence in him, too, was not so illimitable
since he had permitted the Puseyites to have candles on their altars,
although he had forbidden their being lighted, as when he had declared,
twenty years before, that the finger of God was about to protestantise
Ireland. His lordship had said and had done many things since that
time which had occasioned the duchess many misgivings, although she had
chosen that they should not occur to her recollection until he failed in
convincing her son that religious truth was to be found in the parish
of St. James, and political justice in the happy haunts of Montacute
Forest.

The Bishop had voted for the Church Temporalities' Bill in 1833, which
at one swoop had suppressed ten Irish episcopates. This was a queer
suffrage for the apostle of the second Reformation. True it is that
Whiggism was then in the ascendant, and two years afterwards, when
Whiggism had received a heavy blow and great discouragement; when we had
been blessed in the interval with a decided though feeble Conservative
administration, and were blessed at the moment with a strong though
undecided Conservative opposition; his lordship, with characteristic
activity, had galloped across country into the right line again,
denounced the Appropriation Clause in a spirit worthy of his earlier
days, and, quite forgetting the ten Irish bishoprics, that only
four-and-twenty months before he had doomed to destruction, was all for
proselytising Ireland again by the efficacious means of Irish Protestant
bishops.

'The bishop says that Tancred is a visionary,' said the duchess to her
husband, with an air of great displeasure. 'Why, it is because he is
a visionary that we sent him to the bishop. I want to have his false
imaginings removed by one who has the competent powers of learning and
argument, and the authority of a high and holy office. A visionary,
indeed! Why, so are the Puseyites; they are visionaries, and his
lordship has been obliged to deal with them; though, to be sure, if he
spoke to Tancred in a similar fashion, I am not surprised that my son
has returned unchanged! This is the most vexatious business that ever
occurred to us. Something must be done; but what to fix on? What do
you think, George? Since speaking to the bishop, of which you so much
approved, has failed, what do you recommend?'

While the duchess was speaking, she was seated in her boudoir, looking
into the Green Park; the duke's horses were in the courtyard, and he was
about to ride down to the House of Lords; he had just looked in, as was
his custom, to say farewell till they met again.

'I am sorry that the interview with the bishop has failed,' said the
duke, in a hesitating tone, and playing with his riding-stick; and then
walking up to the window and looking into the Park, he said, apparently
after reflection, 'I always think the best person to deal with a
visionary is a man of the world.'

'But what can men of the world know of such questions?' said the
duchess, mournfully.

'Very little,' said her husband, 'and therefore they are never betrayed
into arguments, which I fancy always make people more obstinate, even if
they are confuted. Men of the world have a knack of settling everything
without discussion; they do it by tact. It is astonishing how many
difficulties I have seen removed--by Eskdale, for example--which it
seemed that no power on earth could change, and about which we had been
arguing for months. There was the Cheadle churches case, for example; it
broke up some of the oldest friendships in the county; even Hungerford
and Ilderton did not speak. I never had a more anxious time of it; and,
as far as I was personally concerned, I would have made any sacrifice
to keep a good understanding in the county. At last I got the business
referred to Eskdale, and the affair was ultimately arranged to
everybody's satisfaction. I don't know how he managed: it was quite
impossible that he could have offered any new arguments, but he did it
by tact. Tact does not remove difficulties, but difficulties melt away
under tact.'

'Heigho!' sighed the duchess. 'I cannot understand how tact can tell
us what is religious truth, or prevent my son from going to the Holy
Sepulchre.'

'Try,' said the duke.

'Shall you see our cousin to-day, George?'

'He is sure to be at the House,' replied the duke, eagerly. 'I tell you
what I propose, Kate: Tancred is gone to the House of Commons to hear
the debate on Maynooth; I will try and get our cousin to come home and
dine with us, and then we can talk over the whole affair at once. What
say you?'

'Very well.'

'We have failed with a bishop; we will now try a man of the world; and
if we are to have a man of the world, we had better have a firstrate
one, and everybody agrees that our cousin----'

'Yes, yes, George,' said the duchess, 'ask him to come; tell him it is
very urgent, that we must consult him immediately; and then, if he be
engaged, I dare say he will manage to come all the same.'

Accordingly, about half-past eight o'clock, the two peers arrived at
Bellamont House together. They were unexpectedly late; they had been
detained at the House. The duke was excited; even Lord Esk-dale looked
as if something had happened. Something had happened; there had been a
division in the House of Lords. Rare and startling event! It seemed
as if the peers were about to resume their functions. Divisions in
the House of Lords are now-a-days so thinly scattered, that, when one
occurs, the peers cackle as if they had laid an egg. They are quite
proud of the proof of their still procreative powers. The division
to-night had not been on a subject of any public interest or importance;
but still it was a division, and, what was more, the Government had been
left in a minority. True, the catastrophe was occasioned by a mistake.
The dictator had been asleep during the debate, woke suddenly from a
dyspeptic dream, would make a speech, and spoke on the wrong side.
A lively colleague, not yet sufficiently broken in to the frigid
discipline of the High Court of Registry, had pulled the great man once
by his coat-tails, a House of Commons practice, permitted to the Cabinet
when their chief is blundering, very necessary sometimes for a lively
leader, but of which Sir Robert highly disapproves, as the arrangement
of his coat-tails, next to beating the red box, forms the most important
part of his rhetorical accessories. The dictator, when he at length
comprehended that he had made a mistake, persisted in adhering to it;
the division was called, some of the officials escaped, the rest were
obliged to vote with their ruthless master; but his other friends, glad
of an opportunity of asserting their independence and administering to
the dictator a slight check in a quiet inoffensive way, put him in a
minority; and the Duke of Bellamont and Lord Eskdale had contributed to
this catastrophe.

Dinner was served in the library; the conversation during it was chiefly
the event of the morning. The duchess, who, though not a partisan, was
something of a politician, thought it was a pity that the dictator had
ever stepped out of his military sphere; her husband, who had never
before seen a man's coat-tails pulled when he was speaking, dilated much
upon the singular circumstance of Lord Spur so disporting himself on the
present occasion; while Lord Eskdale, who had sat for a long time in
the House of Commons, and who was used to everything, assured his cousin
that the custom, though odd, was by no means irregular. 'I remember,'
said his lordship, 'seeing Ripon, when he was Robinson, and Huskisson,
each pulling one of Canning's coat-tails at the same time.'

Throughout dinner not a word about Tancred. Lord Eskdale neither asked
where he was nor how he was. At length, to the great relief of the
duchess, dinner was finished; the servants had disappeared. The duke
pushed away the table; they drew their chairs round the hearth; Lord
Eskdale took half a glass of Madeira, then stretched his legs a little,
then rose, stirred the fire, and then, standing with his back to it
and his hands in his pockets, said, in a careless tone approaching to a
drawl, 'And so, duchess, Tancred wants to go to Jerusalem?'

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