THE "FALL OF PRINCE FLORESTAN."
THIS is too elaborate a joke, not without a certain element of mild humour, but with a strain put on it that the amount of humour will hardly bear. It is evidently written by a political and literary disciple of Mr. Matthew Arnold's, a political disciple, because it preaches the same general doctrine that English politics are apt to be ignorant and pretentious and to offer as cures for the ills of the whole world what are at best but very rude empirical remedies for the diseases of one small ease of tough constitutions; a literary disciple, because his English somposition is of the same pure, natural kind, and his incidental criticisms of events and persons have a similar turn of irony. We do not wonder that the squib* was at first attributed to Mr. Arnold himself, though it has not his personal mark on it ; but probably that eminent writer will take the mistake as poetical justice administered to his own weakness for harping too long and too heavily on a happy stroke. The main object of the squib is, of course, to show that English Radicalism is a kind of Self-denying Ordinance by which, under the name of principle, men cripple their power for good, and which is even ridiculously ill-suited to the task of softening the rigidity of Continental superstitions. Prince Florestan is the cousin of the heir to the throne of Monaco, being so connected through the marriage of a princess of the House of Grimaldi with a branch of the Wurtemberg family,—and indeed, we believe that such a Prince Florestan of Wurtemberg really exists, though not old enough to be the hero of the political fable here nar- rated. The whole of the reigning family of Monaco is swept out of the way by a bold fiction, and Prince Florestan, who is undergoing the course of a Cambridge undergraduate, receives suddenly a telegram to tell him of his accession to the throne of Monaco, as his Serene Highness Florestan II. The despatch finds the new Sovereign an ultra-radical of the Cambridge undergraduate kind, full of de- testation for Mr. Gladstone,—for "there are no Radicals at Cam- bridge ; we are all rank republicans or champions of right divine,"— full of "the enthusiasm of his party and his age," one who had "sub- scribed to the Women's Rights Association, to Mr. Bradlaugh's election expenses, to the Anti-Game Law Association, and to the Education League." In fact, says Prince Florestan, "I was that which the republican Mayor of Birmingham, Mr. Joseph Cham- berlain, in his jocular speech proposing the Prince of Wales's health at the Mayors' banquet,_ said that one of his friends bad been trying by argument to make the Prince,—with, as yet, only partial success, a republican king. I would have gone only to Monaco to proclaim the republic, had I not known that the strange despotism—presided over, not as a despotism should be, by one clever despot, but by two stupid despots, the Dukes of Magenta and Broglie,—which is called the French Re- public, would not permit the existence of a small model for herself in the middle of her commune of Roquebrune." Prince Florestan leaves Cambridge without taking leave of anybody but his tutor and his bedusaker, the former grimly remarking .that, "as a
• The Fall of Prince Floreefan of Monaco. By Himself. London Macmillan.
sovereign prince," he probably need not " take an exeat." The Prince's entry into his dominions, and first aequaidtance with his official advisers, is amusingly described. Before he crosses the frontier, "after reading the telegram which announced the return of Mr. Gladstone by a discerning people as junior colleague to a gin-distiller," "he was presented with an address by the Gambettist mayor at the desire of the Legitimist prefet. The mayor, being a red-hot republican in politics, but a carriage-builder by trade, lectured me on the drawbacks of despotism in his address, but informed me in conversation after- wards that he had had the honour of building a victoria for Prince Charles Honor6 —which was next door to giving me his business card. The address, however, also assumed that the Princes of Monaco were suffered only by Providence to exist in order that the trade of Nice, the nearest large French town, might thrive." One of the best touches in the squib is the comparison made between M. Blanc, the proprietor of the great gambling- house at Monaco, and the source of all the revenue of that State, and M. niers :—" As •we left the station building, a little man in black, who, when he is twenty years older, will be as like M. Thiess in person as be already is in tact, in power of talk, and in the combination of a total absence of fixed opinions with a decided manner, made a low bow, accompanied with the shrewdest smile that I had seen." Of course M. Blanc is the new Sovereign's first resource when he is medi- tating how to introduce more liberal ideas into his principality. And the first consultation given is rather well detailed. The Prince, going incognito, visits him in his bank, and finds one of M. Blanc's clerks translating for him into French the prac- tical and humorous wisdom of Mr. Bagehot's contributions to the Economist, from whom, by the way, the sentences about French Rentes in the passage we are about to quote might very well have been borrowed :— "I found him literally 'a counting out his money.' That is to say, two clerks were counting ronleaux of gold while he at a small table was quietly playing patience with two packs of cards. At a bureau was a third clerk, an Englishman, translating into French for his benefit one of Mr. Bagohot's leaders in the Economist. He knew me at once, although ho had seen me but for a moment and in a wholly different dress. Bowing low, and speaking not to me, but to his clerks, he said, ' Qu'on none lame.' The moment they had left the room he bowed to the ground again, and said, 'Ah! monseigneur, votre seigneurerie me fait trop d'honneur J'allais ecrire a monsieur le chambellan pour lui demander de vouloir hien solicitor une audience en mon nom, afin de deposer meg respectueux hommages aux pieds de votre Altesse. Elle me comble en Tenant chez moi incognito.' I found M. Blanc's mind running upon the question of whether English families would be most attracted to Monaco by pigeon-shooting or by an English church. The church he fancied most, but owing to the opposition of Pere Police it would have to be built upon the hill a mile off from the Casino, in the territory of France. will authorise you to disregard Pero Pellico's bigotry, and to build it where you please,' I cried. M. Blanc smiled, and said, • If your Serene Highness will excuse me, I had sooner not go against the Jesuits.' I wasn't king in my own country, as it appeared. Expel the Jesuits, the tempter within me suggested ; but then I wasn't Bismarck, and I hadn't a 'national liberal' party at my back. I rapidly exposed my views to M. Blanc. I was much struck by the fact that his practical mind insisted on viewing my reforms as questions not of principles, but of men. 'You have no men to back you,' he kept saying; 'and if you turn out your present set and get some clever Germans you will be deposed.' He 'had dropped the excessive formality of speech with which he had begun. Several times he used the phrase, 'Dr. Coulon is the only man you have.' Then, after thinking for a time, 'What do you propose to gain by your reforms ? You are rich. Your people are contented. Why trouble yourself ? As for works of art, as for theatre, as for orchestra, these things are matters of money, and I will do my best to help. I am not sure that as a mere investment they will not pay, and at all events I will do my best to make them do so ; but as for your reforms of army, church, and education that you talk about, I beg your Highness to leave it all alone. The shares in the bank will fall ten per cent, when it is known. My shares here are like the funds at Paris, they hate liberty. The loss liberty, the higher they stand. It is just the same at Paris. Suppress a journal, and the rentes rise a franc. Suppress all the journals, and they would rise five francs! Suppress the Assembly, and they would rise ten ! Does your Serene Highness take part in pigeon-shooting ?' " otwithstanding M. Blanc's sagacity in discouraging all the reform- ing suggestions of his sovereign, Prince Florestan does not give him up, but tries him on a future occasion with a proposal to force secular education on the people of Monaco,—the attempt which is the cause of his "fall,"—but M. Blanc is obdurate, and inside on replying by elaborate accounts of the various attempts of specu- lators to ruin his bank, including the expedient of" Jacob's ladder" and other infallible systems—which he evidently regards as the true analogies for his Prince's unnecessary zeal for secular education :— " I strolled up the terraces of Monte Carlo, which always reminded me of John Martin's idea of heaven, and consulted 14. Blanc. He was in especially good humour that day, because 'Madame Brisebanque ' and 'the Maltese' had both been losing money. Still, when I talked of my parliament and my education reform, he talked of 'Jacob's ladder' and of other infallible systems of raining him which never had any -result except that of beggaring their authors. He told me a long- winded story of how at Homburg a company called 'La Contrebanque ' had won twenty-four days in succession, and how on the twenty-fifth they had sent for a watchman and an iron chest to guard their winnings, how that afternoon their secretary had lost the whole capital in eighteen 'coups, and how the innocent watchman had marched up and down all -night religiously guarding an empty chest. I tried to hark back to my subject, when off he went again at a tangent, and told me how the day before, on opening the bienfaisance' collection-box in the hall of the hotel they had found no money, but all the letters of an American gentleman who had posted them there the year before. Another of his anecdotes was of a lady who, having lost, had eaten a thousand-franc note on a slice of bread-and-butter to improve her luck."
We need hardly relate the dinotement, how Prince Florestan insisted on decreeing secular education, how it was received very sullenly by a population trained by the Jesuits,—and how on occasion of a visit of Garibaldi's to the Prince, the mob attack the palace, and the Prince makes his final " exeat" from his kingdom under -the protection of some English tars. One of the best con- 'ceiv'ed touches, and one of those most after Mr. Arnold's -school, is the description of the loyal devotion to Prince Florestan manifested by the pions Catholic cure, l'Abbe Ramin, who makes no objection to Prince Florestan's plan of with- drawing the grant to the priests, including that to himself, but
begins to weep when the Prince propounds the necessity of pro. curing lay teachers, and says, with a sweet smile, "that he would go with my reforms so far as he could, that so just a man as my highness would not harm his country, that God would watch over his Church." The Abbe Ramin is meant as a sort of Catholic equivalent for the Dean of Westminster, a man of sweetness and light, by whose help the Prince could have done much, if he had not been given up to a "fixed idea" of radical progress. He is intended as a contrast to the Jesuit
-father, Pellico, who is too astute to dispute with his Prince, but turns his flank after this fashion :— " I spoke then of the Church; he was indifferent—the salaries of his four professors could easily be got from Italy. I then touched upon 'education. Pere Pellico, to my astonishment, exclaimed, 'But on the contrary; my opinions are not different from those of your High- ness. They are the same. But as a democrat I do not venture, although I may be wrong, to force them upon the people.' Here was a change of base. 'If I were your Highness,' he continued, 'I would dismiss the Council of State, and call an elected parliament to frame a constitution. That would be a more regular method of proceeding than limiting your own prerogative by the exercise of that very pre- rogative itself.'—'Father,' I replied, 'is not the country somewhat small for the complicated machinery of parliament ?—'Why then not try a Plebiscite, " yes " or "no," upon certain written propositions, as in Zurich ?'—'How liberal a politician can afford to be when he has the people with him,' I thought to myself, as I bowed out Father Pellico."
The upshot of the book,—that all politics are relative, that po- litical wisdom consists in making the best use of the materials really at hand for the purpose of gradually widening and raising the general condition of any people, and that the crotchets of certain English schools of thought are so far from being principles for all time and all places, that they are not particularly applicable -even to the one moment and the one place where they are now most successfully advanced, is useful enough in drift ; but we should be not very hopeful for any country in which all the liberal politicians were of like mind with the author of this -rather mild and lengthy, though certainly rather humorous squib. While this class of thinkers see the narrowness of political formulm, they do not apparently see the great value of definite rules of right,—rules not elastic for the minds which hold them,—and which become the fibre and backbone of political manliness in such minds. Were all Liberals of the way of thinking of this ironic writer, we should have every- one willing to do anything which seemed expedient in tendency at the moment, whether that expediency involved a complete moral accommodation of minds brought up in one class of moral sympathies to minds brought up in another totally different class, or not. Now, it may be, and we think is quite true, that all true political reform is relative to the political condition of the society needing such reform. But it does not in the least follow that all men can properly accommodate themselves to the conditions of a mode of life which is utterly alien to their principles and con- victions, and yet this is the implied teaching of the school to 'which this ironic writer belongs. That school tends to make all political, nay, even all social morality fluid,—pliant to the touch of every mind and every will. It tends to make the rule for in- dividuals the same as the rule for the body politic,—a rule of :universal disposition for mutual accommodation for the sake of a gross average of gain. That is not at all to our liking. We believe that it is a genuinely good principle inherent in our English politics that every sincere political, religious, and moral standard is regarded as binding the individual conscience even where it is unsuited to the State,—and that the firm protection and candid study of such inner types of faith and duty, are held to be the great securities of a healthy national life. We see nothing of this in the somewhat superficial irony and easy scorn for all narrow and sectional views of men and things which penetrate the political fable of Prince Florestan IL's fall.
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