The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, December 1879Various
Religion
The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, December 1879
Various
Arts -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals; Political science -- Periodicals
more of all of them; and Sir Stafford Northcote, as Chancellor of the
Exchequer, has been kept working as hard as a sprite in a pantomime
pouring out millions of our taxation. But if it be Will-o'-the-Wisp we
have at the head of affairs, nothing of this is likely very greatly to
affect him. Assuredly, nothing of it has affected Lord Beaconsfield,
and we may be sure he is ready to go over it all again to-morrow.
If it was worth while, very large deductions would have to be made
from Lord Beaconsfield's seeming success if we look rationally at his
whole career. No man who is supposed to have been anything like so
successful as he is popularly held to be, ever had so many and such
striking failures to look back upon. Looking at him as connected with
letters, he is the author of works which have failed more completely
than any written by any one who himself became known. Judged by their
ambitious aims, these literary non-successes of Lord Beaconsfield are
gigantic. The epic poem ("The Revolutionary Epick") which Mr. Disraeli
supposed was to place him--he himself tells us so--by the side of,
or else between, Homer and Milton, nobody would read; the play
("Alarcos") which he states he wrote to "revive the British stage,"
is never acted. Not one of his novels, when his political position has
ceased to advertize them, will remain in the hands of the public. If
you look back on his Parliamentary career, the dazzle came late, and
after a dreary distance had been travelled. The political party he
founded, "The Young England School," has for twenty-five years been
as dead as the door-nail which typified the death of Marley. Nothing
whatever came of it. The one only notable legislative measure that
stands in his name,--the Reform Bill,--really belongs to the other
side. Scrutinize his career how you will, and some abatements of this
kind have to be made. He is supposed to have had a charm over men,--it
has failed with the strong ones. Peel he tried very hard to win, but
had to take up with Lord George Bentinck instead. At this moment he is
supposed to be in favour with the Court: the impression he made upon
the Prince Consort was far from satisfactory. He has quite recently
lost Lord Derby and Lord Carnarvon; and there was a time when the
Marquis of Salisbury and he stood in a very different relationship.
Lord Beaconsfield's social system is that of a novelist; his
finance was ever that of a Will-o'-the-Wisp; and he has now added a
Jack-o'-Lantern diplomacy. Surely nothing more is needed to justify
disbelief in him.
A WHIG.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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