Victorian Worthies

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It was to be no easy task. For nearly five years he was to wrestle with
the subject, trying in vain to give it adequate shape and form, and then
to scrap the labours of years and to start again on a new plan; but in
the end he was to win another signal victory. While the _French
Revolution_ may be the higher artistic triumph, _Cromwell_ is more
important for one who wishes to understand the life-work of Carlyle and
all for which he stood. The emptiness of political theories and
institutions, the enduring value of character, are lessons which no one
has preached more forcibly. In his opinion the success of the English
revolution, the blow to tyranny and misgovernment in Church and State,
was not due to eloquent members of the Long Parliament, but to plain
God-fearing men, who, if they quoted scripture, did so not from
hypocrisy but because it was the language in which they habitually
thought. Nor could they build up a new England till they had found a
leader. It was the ages which had faith to recognize their worthiest man
and to accept his guidance which had achieved great things in the world,
not those which prated of democracy and progress. To make his
countrymen, in this age of fluent political talk, see the true moral
quality of the men of the seventeenth century--this it was which
occupied seven years of Carlyle's life and filled his thoughts. It was
indeed a labour of Hercules. Much of the material was lost beyond
repair, much buried in voluminous folios and State papers, much obscured
by the cant and prejudice of eighteenth-century authors. To recall the
past, Carlyle needed such help as geography would give him, and he spent
many days in visiting Dunbar, Worcester, and other sites. To Naseby he
went in 1842, in company with Dr. Arnold, and 'plucked two gowans and a
cowslip from the burial heaps of the slain'. A more important task was
to recover authentic utterances of Cromwell and his fellow workers, and
to put these in the place of the second-hand judgements of political
partisans; and this involved laborious researches in libraries. Above
all, he had to interpret these records in a new spirit, exercising true
insight and sympathy, to put life into the dry bones and to present his
readers with the living image of a man. He combined in unique fashion
the laborious research of a student with the moral fervour of a prophet.

Despite the strain of these labours Carlyle showed few signs of his
fifty years. The family were of tough stock; and the years which he had
spent in moorland air had increased the capital of health on which he
could draw. The flight of time was chiefly marked by his growing
antipathy to the political movements of the day, and by a growing
despondency about the future. People might buy his books; but he looked
in vain for evidence that they paid heed to the lessons which he
preached. The year of revolutions, 1848, followed by the setting up of
the French Empire and the collapse of the Roman Republic, produced
nothing but disappointment, and he became louder and more bitter in his
judgements on democracy. 1849 saw the birth of the _Latter-Day
Pamphlets_ in which he outraged Mill and the Radicals by his scornful
words about Negro Emancipation, and by the savage delight with which he
shattered their idols. He loved to expose what seemed to him the
sophistries involved in the conventional praise of liberty. Of old the
mediaeval serf or the negro slave had some one who was responsible for
him, some one interested in his physical well-being. The new conditions
too often meant nothing but liberty to starve, liberty to be idle,
liberty to slip back into the worst indulgences, while those who might
have governed stood by regardless and lent no help. Such from an extreme
point of view appeared the policy of _laisser-faire_; and he was neither
moderate nor impartial in stating his case. 'An idle white gentleman is
not pleasant to me;... but what say you to an idle black gentleman, with
his rum bottle in his hand,... no breeches on his body, pumpkin at
discretion, and the fruitfullest region of the earth going back to
jungle round him?' In a similar vein he dealt with stump oratory, prison
reform, and other subjects, tilting in reckless fashion at the shields
of the reforming Radicals of the day; nor was he less outspoken when he
met in person the champions of these views. A letter to his wife in 1847
tells of a visit to the Brights at Rochdale; how 'John and I discorded
in our views not a little', and how 'I shook peaceable Brightdom as with
a passing earthquake'. From books he could learn: to human teachers he
proved refractory. Had he been more willing to listen to others, his
judgements on contemporary events might have been more valuable. All his
life he was, as George Meredith says, 'Titanic rather than Olympian, a
heaver of rocks, not a shaper'; and this fever of denunciation grew with
advancing years. But with these spurts of volcanic energy alternate
moods of the deepest depression. His journal for 1850 says, 'This seems
really the Nadir of my fortunes; and in hope, desire, or outlook, so far
as common mortals reckon such, I never was more bankrupt. Lonely, shut
up within my contemptible and yet _not_ deliberately ignoble self,
perhaps there never was, in modern literary or other history, a more
solitary soul, _capable_ of any friendship or honest relation to
others.' By this time he was feeling the need of another task, and in
1851 he chose Frederick the Great of Prussia for the subject of his next
book.

To this generation apology seems to be needed for an English author who
lavishes so much admiration on Prussian men and institutions. But
Carlyle, whose chief heroes had been men of intense religious
convictions, like Luther, Knox, and Cromwell, could find no hero after
his heart in English history subsequent to the Civil War. Eloquent Pitts
and Burkes, jobbing Walpoles and Pelhams, were to him types of
politicians who had brought England to her present plight. German
literature had always kept its influence over him and had directed his
attention to German history; Frederick, without religion as he was,
seemed at any rate sincere, recognized facts, and showed practical
capacity for ruling (essential elements in the Carlylean hero), and the
subject would be new to his readers. The labour involved was stupendous;
it was to fill his life and the lives of his helpers for thirteen
years. Of these helpers the chief credit is due to Joseph Neuberg, who
piloted him over German railways, libraries, and battle-fields in the
search for picturesque detail, and to Henry Larkin, who toiled in London
to trace references in scores of authors, and who finally crowned the
work by laborious indexing, which made Carlyle's labyrinth accessible to
his readers. There were masses of material hidden away and unsifted;
and, as in the case of Cromwell, only a man of original genius could
penetrate this inert mass with shafts of light and make the past live
again. The task grew as he continued his researches. He groped his way
back to the beginning of the Hohenzollerns, and sketched the portraits
of the old Electors in a style unequalled for vividness and humour. He
drew a full-length portrait of Frederick William, most famous of
drill-sergeants, and he studied the campaigns of his son with a
thoroughness which has been a model to soldiers and civilians ever
since. We have the record of two tours which he made in Germany to view
the scene of operations;[5] and it is amazing how exact a picture he
could bring away from a short visit to each separate battle-field. His
diligence, accuracy, and wide grasp of the subject satisfied the
severest judges; and the book won him a success as complete and enduring
in Germany as in England and America.

[Note 5: Froude, _Carlyle, Life in London_, vol. ii, pp. 100 and
217.]

When this was finished, Carlyle was on the verge of seventy and his work
was done; though the evening of his life was long, his strength was
exhausted. His wife lived just long enough to see the seal set upon his
fame, and to hear of his election to be Lord Rector of Edinburgh
University. But in April 1866, while he was in Scotland for his
installation, which she was too weak to attend, he heard the news of her
sudden death from heart failure in London; and after this he was a
broken man. By reading her journal he learnt, too late, how much his
own inconsiderate temper had added to her trials, and his remorse was
bitter and lasting. He shut himself off from all his friends except
Froude, who was to be his literary executor, and gave himself to
collecting and annotating the memorials which she had left. Each letter
is followed by some words of tender recollection or some cry of
self-reproach. He has erected to her the most singular of literary
monuments, morbid perhaps, but inspired by a feeling which was in his
case natural and sincere.

About 1870 he began to lose the use of his right hand and he found it
impossible to compose by dictation. Of the last years of his life there
is little to narrate. The offer of a baronetcy or the G.C.B. from Mr.
Disraeli in 1874 pleased him for the moment, but he resolutely refused
external honours. He took daily walks with Froude, daily drives when he
became too weak to go on foot. Towards the end the Bible and Shakespeare
were his most habitual reading. He had long ceased to be a member of any
church, but his belief in God and in God's working in history was the
very foundation of his being, and the lessons of the Bible were to him
inexhaustible and ever new. Death came to him peacefully in February,
1881; and as he had expressed a definite wish, he was buried at
Ecclefechan, though a public funeral in the Abbey was offered and its
acceptance would have met with the approval of his countrymen.

The very wealth of records makes it difficult to judge his character
fairly. Few men have so laid bare the thoughts and feelings of their
hearts. It is easy to blame the unmanly laments which he utters over his
health, his solitude, and his sufferings, real or imaginary; few
imaginative writers have the every-day virtues. His egotism, too, is
difficult to defend. If, as he himself admits, he invariably took an
undue share of talk, often in fact monopolizing it, wherever he was, we
must remember that the brilliance of his gifts was admitted by all;
less pardonable is his habit of disparaging other men, and especially
other men of letters. His pen-pictures of Mill, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and others, are wonderfully vivid but too often sour in flavour; his
sketch of Charles Lamb is an outrage on that generous and kindly soul.
Too often he was unconscious of the pain given by such random words.
When he was brought to book, he was honourable enough to recant. Fearing
on one occasion to have offended even the serene loyalty of Emerson, he
cries out protestingly, 'Has not the man Emerson, from old years, been a
Human Friend to me? Can I ever forget, or think otherwise than lovingly
of the man Emerson?'

But whatever offence Carlyle committed with his ungovernable tongue or
pen, he had rare virtues in conduct. His generosity was as unassuming as
it was persistent; and it began at home. Long before he was free from
anxieties about money for himself, he was helping two of his brothers to
make a career, one in agriculture, and the other in medicine. In his
latter days he regularly gave away large sums in such a way that no one
knew the source from which they came. His letters show a deep tenderness
of affection for his mother, his wife, and others of the family; and the
humble Annandale home was always in his thoughts. His charity embraced
even those whose claim on him was but indirect. When his wife was dead,
he could remember to celebrate her birthday by sending a present to her
old nurse. He was scrupulous in money-dealing and frugal in all matters
of personal comfort; in his innermost thoughts he was always
pure-hearted and sincere; for nothing on earth would he traffic in his
independence or in adherence to the truth.

His style has not largely influenced other historians; and this is as
well, since imitations of it easily fall into mere obscurity and
extravagance. But his historical method has been of great value, the
patient study of original authorities, the copious references quoted,
the careful indexing, all being proof how anxious he was that the
subject should be presented clearly and veraciously, rather than that
the books should shine as literary performances. How far the principles
which he valued and taught have spread it is difficult to say. Party
politicians still appeal to the sacred name of liberty without inquiring
what true liberty means; publicists still speak as if the material gains
of modern life, cheap food and machine-made products, meant nothing but
advance in the history of the human race; but there are others who look
to the spiritual factors and wish to enlarge the bounds of political
economy.

The writings of Carlyle, and of Ruskin, on whom fell the prophet's
mantle, certainly made their influence felt in later books devoted to
that once 'dismal' science. Few can be quite indifferent to the man or
to his message. Those who demand moderation, clearness, and Attic
simplicity, will be repelled by his extravagances or by his mysticism.
Others will be attracted by his glowing imagination and by his fiery
eloquence, and will reserve for him a foremost place in their
affections. These will echo the words which Emerson was heard to say on
his death-bed, when his eyes fell on a portrait of the familiar rugged
features, '_That_ is the man, my man'.

[Illustration: SIR ROBERT PEEL

From the painting by J. Linnell in the National Portrait Gallery]

SIR ROBERT PEEL

1788-1850

1788. Born near Bury, Lancashire, July 5.
1801-4. Harrow School.
1805. Christ Church, Oxford.
1809. M.P. for Cashel, Ireland.
1811. Under-Secretary for the Colonies.
1812-18. Chief Secretary for Ireland.
1817. M.P. for Oxford University.
1819. President of Bullion Committee.
1820. Marriage to Julia, daughter of General Sir John Floyd.
1822-7. Home Secretary in Lord Liverpool's Government.
1827. Canning's short ministry and death.
1828-30. Home Secretary and leader in Commons under the Duke of Wellington.
1829. Catholic Emancipation carried.
1832. Lord Grey's Reform Bill carried.
1834-5. Prime Minister; Tamworth manifesto.
1839. 'Bedchamber Plot': Peel fails to form ministry.
1841-6. Prime Minister a second time.
1844. Peel's Bank Act.
1846. Corn Laws repealed. Peel, defeated on Irish Coercion Bill, resigns.
1850. Accident, June 29, and death, July 2.

SIR ROBERT PEEL

STATESMAN

In the years that lay between the Treaty of Utrecht and the close of the
Napoleonic wars British politics were largely dominated by Walpole and
the two Pitts: their great figures only stand out in stronger relief
because their place was filled for a time by such weak ministers as
Newcastle and Bute, as Grafton and North. In the nineteenth century
there were many gifted statesmen who held the position of first
minister of the Crown. Disraeli and Palmerston by shrewdness and force
of character, Canning and Derby by brilliant oratorical gifts, Russell
and Aberdeen by earnest devotion to public service, were all commanding
figures in their day, whose claims to the chieftainship of a party and
of a government were generally admitted. Gladstone, the most versatile
genius of them all, had abilities second to none; but his place in
history will for long be a subject of acute controversy. He stands too
close to our own time to be fairly judged. Of the others no one had the
same combination of gifts as Sir Robert Peel, no one had in the same
measure that particular knowledge, judgement, and ability which
characterize the _statesman_. His career was the most fruitful, his work
the most enduring: he has left his mark in English history to a degree
which no one of his rivals can equal.

The Peel family can be traced back to the misty days of Danish inroads.
Its original home in England is disputed between Yorkshire and
Lancashire; but as early as the days of Elizabeth the branch from which
our statesman was descended is certainly to be found at Blackburn, and
its members lived for generations as sturdy yeomen of that district. The
first of them known to strike out an independent line was his
grandfather, Robert Peel, who with his brother-in-law, Mr. Haworth,
started the first firm for calico-printing in Lancashire about the year
1760, ceasing the practice of sending the material to be printed in
France. This grandfather was a type of the men who were making the new
England, leading the way in the creation of industries that were to
transform the North and Midlands. The business prospered and he moved
from Blackburn to Burton-on-Trent, where he built three new mills. His
third son, named Robert, was also gifted with resource. Beginning as a
member of the family firm, he soon came to be its chief director, and
added another branch at Tamworth, where later he built the house of
Drayton Manor, the family seat in the nineteenth century. He was a Tory
and a staunch follower of the younger Pitt, who rewarded his services
with a baronetcy in 1800. He too was a typical man of his age and class,
an age of material progress and expansion, a class full of
self-confidence and animated by a spirit of stubborn resistance to
so-called un-English ideas. His eldest son, the third Robert and the
second baronet, is our subject. It is impossible to grasp the springs of
his conduct unless we know what traditions he inherited from his
forbears.

Peel's education was begun at home with a specific purpose. Though his
father had every reason to be satisfied with his own success, for his
son he cherished a yet higher ambition and one which he did not conceal.
He said openly that he intended him to be Prime Minister of his country.
The knowledge of this provoked many jests among the boy's friends and
caused him no slight embarrassment. It conspired with the shyness and
reserve, which were innate in him, to win him from the outset a
reputation for pride and aloofness. If he had not been forced to mix
with those of his own age, and if he had not resolutely set himself to
overcome this feeling, he might have grown into a student and a recluse.
Both at school and college he did 'attend to his book': at Harrow he
roused the greatest hopes. His brilliant schoolfellow, Lord Byron, while
claiming to excel him in general information and history, admits that
Peel was greatly his superior as a scholar. The working of their minds,
now and afterwards, was curiously different. Bagehot[6] illustrates the
contrast by a striking metaphor: Byron's mind, he says, worked by
momentary eruptions of volcanic force from within and then relapsed into
inactivity. Peel on the other hand steadily accumulated knowledge and
opinions, his mind receiving impressions from outward experience like
the alluvial soil deposited by a river in its course. But this is to
anticipate. At Oxford Peel was the first man to win a 'Double First'
(i.e. a first class both in classics and mathematics), in which
distinction Gladstone alone, among our Prime Ministers, equalled him.
But he also found time during the term to indulge in cricket, in rowing,
and in riding, while in the vacation he developed a more marked taste
for shooting, and thus freed himself from the charge of being a mere
bookworm. He was good-looking, rather a dandy in his dress, stiff in his
manner, regular in his habits, conforming to the Oxford standards of
excellence and as yet showing few signs of independence of character.

[Note 6: Walter Bagehot, _Biographical Studies_, p. 17 (Longmans,
1907).]

Peel went into Parliament early, after the fashion of the day. He was
twenty-one when, in 1809, a seat was offered him at Cashel in Ireland.
The system of 'rotten boroughs' had many faults--our text-books of
history do not spare it--but it may claim to have offered an easy way
into Parliament for some men of brilliant talents. Peel's family
connexions and his own training marked out the path for him. It was
difficult for the young Oxford prizeman not to follow Lord Chancellor
Eldon, that stout survival of the high old Tories: it was impossible for
his father's son not to sit behind the successors of Pitt. We shall see
how far his own reasoning powers and clear vision led him from this
path; but the early influences were never quite effaced. His first
patron was Lord Liverpool, to whom he became private secretary in the
following year. This nobleman, described by Disraeli in a famous passage
as an 'arch-mediocrity' was Prime Minister for fifteen years. He owed
his long tenure of office largely to the tolerance with which he allowed
his abler lieutenants to usurp his power: perhaps he owed it still more
to the victories which Wellington was then winning abroad and which
secured the confidence of the country; but at least he seems to have
been a good judge of men. In 1811 he promoted Peel to be
Under-Secretary for the Colonies, and in 1812 to be Chief Secretary for
Ireland. His abilities must have made a great impression to win him such
promotion: he must have had plenty of self-confidence to undertake such
duties, for he was only twenty-four years old. We are accustomed to-day
to under-secretaries of forty or forty-five; but we must remember that
the younger Pitt led the House of Commons at twenty-four and was Prime
Minister at twenty-five.

At Dublin Castle Peel was not expected to deal with the great political
questions which convulsed Parliament at different periods of the
century. He had to administer the law. It was routine work of a tedious
and difficult kind; it involved the close study of facts--not in order
to make a showy speech or to win a case for the moment, but in order to
frame practical measures which would stand the test of time. Peel
eschewed the usual recreations of Dublin society, and flung himself into
his work whole-heartedly. In Roman history we see how Caesar was trained
in the details of administration as quaestor, aedile, praetor, consul,
while Pompeius passed in a lordly progress from one high command to
another; how Caesar voluntarily exiled himself from Rome for ten years
to conquer and develop Gaul, while Cicero bewailed himself over a few
months' absence from the Forum. Of these three famous men only one
proved himself able to guide the ship of state in stormy waters. Analogy
must not be too closely pressed; but we see that, while Canning for all
his ability established no durable influence, and his oratory burnt
itself out after a brief blaze, while Wellington's fame paled year after
year from his inability to control the course of civil strife, Peel's
light burnt brighter every decade, as he rose from office to office and
faced one difficult situation after another with coolness and success.
He stayed at his post in Dublin for six years: he worked at the details
of his office--education, agriculture, and police--and brought in many
practical reforms. His beneficial activity is still better seen in the
years 1821 to 1827 when he was Home Secretary. To-day he is chiefly
remembered as the eponymous hero of our police; but in many other ways
his tenure of the latter office is a landmark in departmental work. It
may be that he originated little himself: that Romilly was the pioneer
in the humanizing of law, that Horner taught him the doctrines of sound
finance, that Huskisson led the way in freeing trade from the shackles
with which it had been bound. But Peel in all these cases lent generous
support and made their cause his own. He had a cool head and a warm
heart, a knowledge of Parliament and an influence in Parliament already
unrivalled. He saw what could be done, and how it could be done, and so
he was able to push through successfully the reforms which his
colleagues initiated. The value of his work in this sphere has never
been seriously contested.

The point on which Peel's enemies fastened in judging his career was the
number of times that he changed his convictions, abandoned his party,
and carried through a measure which he himself had formerly opposed. To
understand his claim to be called a great statesman it is particularly
necessary to study these changes.

The first instance was the Reform of the Currency. Early in the French
wars the London banks had been in difficulties. The Government was
forced to borrow large sums from the Bank of England in order to give
subsidies to our allies, and was unable to pay its debts. The Bank could
not at the same time meet the demands of the Government and the claims
of its private customers. Since a panic might at any moment cause an
unprecedented run on its reserves, Pitt suspended cash payments till six
months after the conclusion of peace. The Bank was thus allowed to
circulate notes without being obliged to pay full cash value for them
immediately on demand, and the purchasing power of these notes tended to
vary far more than that of a metal currency. Also foreigners refused to
accept a pound note in the place of a pound sterling; foreign payments
had to be made in specie, and the gold was rapidly drained abroad. When
the war was over, Horner and other economists began to draw attention to
the bad effect of this on foreign trade and to the varying price of
commodities at home, due to the want of a fixed currency. As Pitt had
allowed the system of inconvertible paper, the Tories generally
applauded and were ready to perpetuate it. The elder Sir Robert Peel had
been always a firm supporter of these views and his son began by
accepting them. He continued to acquiesce in them till his attention was
definitely turned to the subject. In 1819 he was asked to be a member of
a committee of very eminent men, including Canning and Mackintosh, which
was to investigate the question, and he was elected chairman of it. But,
though his verdict was taken for granted by his party, his mind was so
constituted that he could not shut it against evidence. He listened to
arguments, and judged them fairly; and, being by nature unable to palter
with the truth, once he was convinced of it, he threw in all his weight
with the reformers and reported in favour of a return to cash payments.
History has vindicated his judgement, and he himself crowned his
financial work by the famous Bank Act of 1844, passed when he was Prime
Minister.

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