MR. GRANT DUFF'S POLITICAL SURVEY.
MR. GRANT DUIP is a wonderfully clever man, and there is no political duty in the year easier and pleasanter for a politician than the reading of his speeches to his Elgin con- stituents. If Hazlitt could have got into the House of Com- mons he might have addressed his constituents much as Mr. Grant Duff does, though Hazlitt would scarcely have been so uncommonly certain of everything as is the Member for Elgin. He might, indeed, have given little sketches of the Opposition and Conservative leaders, and of any other chiefs as obnoxious to criticism as (say) the great Lord Elcho, just in Mr. Grant Duff's brilliant and biting way, but he would, we think, have seen more complexity and difficulty than Mr. Grant Duff in the great ecclesiastical questions of which the Scotch political epigrammatist disposes so easily. Our own complaint of Mr. Grant Duff is not that which rises most instinctively to the lips of English critics,—the complaint which we heard come involuntarily the other day from the lips of another very clever man, to the full as Radical as Mr. Grant Duff, "Deuced clever, but somehow not English,"—for we think it is a very great advantage to us dull Britons to hear the criticisms of a student as accomplished as Mr. Grant Duff, whose modes of thought have the full benefit of the Continental no less than the English discipline. What we really do dislike,—not, we think, without substantial reason,—in these very telling and often brilliant surveys of the political world, is the bird's- eye-view omniscience, or at least the consciousness of his own election to the small society of just politicians made perfect, which pervades Mr. Duff's treatment of all the greatest ques- tions of the day. He speaks less like a student of history who has studied carefully movements of which the antecedents are deeply buried in the past, and the future ramifications still quite untraceable, than as one of those brilliant French thinkers, who seems to have got access to a ground-plan of the universe, and to feel nothing but contempt for those who have not availed themselves of the same easy clue to the secrets of the future. On all subjects on which painstaking English politi- cians look up to the problem with which they have to deal, and try to discriminate the signs of the times, Mr. Grant Duff looks down upon it from above the clouds, and smiles at the needless perplexities of fellow-creatures who are anxiously puzzling out that to which he has the solution pat in his own hand. Thus, Mr. Grant Duff tells us in a moment, without a vibration of hesitation, how little we ought to mind the "doubtful morality" of the recent Tory abdication of principle. "After all," he says, "you send us to the House of Commons to look to the political interests of the country, not to be professors of ethics,"—a dictum which, if it has any truth in it, would repudiate that whole doctrine of confidence in ministries on which, even where there is no direct quarrel as to policy, the fate of a ministry has so oftenturned. If the House ef Commons has no business to be influenced by the merely ethical bearing of a ministerial manceuvre, the characters of public men are no longer public property, and Mr. Grant Duff's own rather free though brilliant criticisms of them would become impertinent intrusions on private life. The truth is, that Mr. Duff is impatient of the restraints of ethical rules over the intellects of the children of light ; he regards Geist as above conscience ; and visibly frets at the drag which our heavy English respect for moral generalizations puts upon: the chariot wheels of intellectual progress.
Again, he puts down thoughtful Conservatism with as cavalier a wave of the hand as ethical scruples. He sees no. good in faithful adherence to what is noble in the past. Here- is his brief judgment on Conservatives,—that it is better they should be led by men of no principle than by men of principle, for in the former case they will be more easily routed, and we- shall have less vexation from their Fabian policy and the tenacity- of their affections. "If Mr. Disraeli," he says, "has spread self-distrust and self-reproach in his own ranks, so much the better. It is always easier to fight a demoralized army. The- party of resistance cannot have a better leader than Mr. Disraeli. It is not a very dignified spectacle. But after all, is there anything particularly dignified in the two other species of leaders which the party is apt to- have,—the one typified by the evil family which learns. nothingand forgets nothing,—which sees the whole world change around it without giving up one iota of its political creed,—the other, so well known to out own history,—a man holding false position after false position, always in good faith,—always retreating just when it is too late to do so with credit, —always Liberal after the fact, always obstructive while- obstruction can do mischief ? Entre fiipon et fripon, as the French say, as between one equivocal character and the other, I, gentlemen, am on the side of the defender of the angels,"—which means that Conservatism is wholly bad, that a party wholly bad had better be led by some one who has no belief in it, than by one who has, in order that he may open their eyes to the hopelessness of their position, before they have put forth the full strength of a fanatical belief. Well, we can only say, in reply to that, that though we are no Con- servatives, have indeed the reputation of " extreme " Liber- alism, it never even occurred to us to suppose that the Con- servative creed does not, for the most part, rest on ideals and feelings and traditions which are entitled to real respect, to considerate argument, to anxious deliberation, all which they probably would not get without the undue attachment of a great party to these ideals, feelings, and traditions. The- Conservative party is, or ought to be, the safeguard of the con- tinuity of our history, of the development, rather than the- abrupt destruction and rebuilding, of our institutions. We should have supposed it better a thousand times that such a party should be led by a man who really loved and saw what was good in these institutions, even though he were ever sc blind to the urgency of change, than by one who was playing his men, as Mr. Duff asserts that Mr. Disraeli does, as the mere- pawns and bishops of a game of political chess, with no object beyond a party success leading to personal distinction. But by Mr. Duff the party which is not his, is held unworthy to have honest attachments and earnest convictions at all. He can wish them nothing better than self-delusion dire,—to find the- emptiness of human things and the confusion they so well deserve. He can seriously believe it best for the State that a. great party should be led by a man without faith in order that it may lose all faith itself. It is the view of a thinker who looks- down on human affairs from such a height that he is impatient of the process by which history is evolved, and would fain. legislate his own dogmas into the condtitution of the universe, without ever testing or modifying them by the reciprocal action. of the various existing forces of political life. Look, again, at Mr. Duff's cavalier dogma on Mr. Gladstone : —"Mr. Gladstone, with his unceasing energy, his vast power of comprehension, his quick sympathy, and great power of expression, would be the model of the kind of statesman this. country wants, if he could get rid of the rags and tags of mediasval superstition which hang about him, and shake him- self free from the entanglements which grapple him to un- worthy things and persons; if, in short, he could, in the words of the poet, spring over his own shadow,—which is, it must be admitted, a tolerably large 'if.'" This appears to mean' that if Mr. Gladstone's "quick sympathy" and "vast power of comprehension" were exercised only towards Mr. Duff's own views, and were to fail him on all other sides of political thought, he would be the model statesman, and if not, not.. We suppose that we all like sympathy with our own views. better than sympathy with those of our opponents, but we sus- pect Mr. Gladstone would lose his most characteristic power,— in which, however, we do not deny that equally characteristic defects are involved,—and this not merely as a national, but- also as a Liberal statesman, if he could east loose as easily as Mr. Duff wishes all that the Member for Elgin means by. "the rags and tags of mediceval superstition." To take as a mere illustration, Mr. Gladstone's suggestion for solving the Church-Rate difficulty. It is true that in naked legal effect, his proposal to leave the machinery of a rate without the compulsory power is identical with repeal, but the sympathy with the Conservative feeling as to the advantages of that machinery over a purely arbitrary voluntary subscription which dictated the form of his proposal, has been as great a gain to the Liberal party as it has been soothing to Conservatives. Strip him of what Mr. Duff calls the rags and tags of mediasval feeling in the matter, and he would have been weaker not only as a national, but as a Liberal statesman.
Again, listen to Mr. Grant Duff's smart,—almost metallic, —dogmatic assertion of the evil of Church establishments. In the sharp, clear atmosphere of his mind there is but one side to the question. All that men have truly pleaded, and still more deeply felt, as to the larger justice of civil tribunals, of the comparative liberty of spiritual teachers protected by the State against the dictation of those whom they are to teach, —of the senselessness of leaving to the law of supply and de- mand, in ignorant and wretched districts, the very sort of in- struction which needs a good supply before it can be in any demand,—all this makes no impression, however transient, on Mr. Grant Duff. These considerations do not even strike him as some of the conditions of the great and difficult problem requiring solution. He waves them all aside with a grand assurance that those who urge these things have "mistaken the clock," and deserve only to be stabbed by an epigram. " for one, am wholly opposed to the scheme for endowing the Roman Catholic clergy, and to the cry for giving Ireland de- nominational education because we have it in England. As well might they clamour against us for not importing that orna- ment of our English heaths,—the viper." That is very clever indeed, but it is not the saying of a man who fairly estimates the truth in his opponents' convictions, even while he prefers his own. Mr. Grant Duff is too neat and complete for truth. His view of English politics is brilliant, sharply defined, full of esprit. But it is not the view of a man studying great laws of progress from beneath. It is the view of neat omniscience, with a bird's-eye view of the presumable future mapped from above. It makes very pleasant reading, and, as Mr. Disraeli said last session, may " subserve private com- placency." But it does not give us the full help we look for from a man so accomplished as Mr. Grant Duff. The universe—political, no less than spiritual and moral and physi- cal—is an exceedingly complicated one, and when we see half its complexities ignored for the sake of the greater neatness and brilliancy of the chart, we do not feel much in- clined to guide our own steps by it, merely on the ground that it is so complete in itself, and so easy to understand.
Previous page
