Coningsby. It a German student who was accumulating materials for the History of Chris- "A few years back we were applied to by Russia. Now there has been "And is Soult a Hebrew?' “Yes, and several of the French Marshals, and the most famous; Massena, for example; his real name was Manasseh: but to my anecdote. The consequence of our consultations was that some Northern power should be applied to in a friendly and mediative capacity. We fixed on Prussia, and the President of the Council made an application to the Prussian Minister, who attended a few days after our conference. Count Arnim entered the cabinet, and I beheld a Prussian Jew. So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.' "You startle, and deeply interest me.' "You must study physiology, my dear child. Pure races of Caucasus may be persecuted, but they cannot be despised, except by the brutal ignorance of some mongrel breed, that brandishes fagots and howls exterminations, but is itself exterminated without persecutions by that irresistible law of nature which is fatal to curs.' "But I come also from Caucasus,' said Coningsby. "Verily, and thank your Creator for such a destiny: and your race is sufficiently pure. You come from the shores of the Northern Sea, land of the blue eye, and the golden hair, and the frank brow; 'tis a famous breed, with whom we Arabs have contended long; from whom we have much suffered; but these Goths, and Saxons, and Normans, were doubtless great men.' "But so favoured by Nature, why has not your race produced great poets, great orators, great writers?' "Favoured by Nature and by Nature's God, we produced the lyre of David; we gave you Isaiah and Ezekiel; they are our Olynthians, our Philippics. Favoured by Nature we still remain: but in exact proportion as we have been favoured by Nature we have been persecuted by Man. After a thousand struggles; after acts of heroic courage that Rome has never equalled; deeds of divine patriotism that Athens, and Sparta, and Carthage have never excelled; we have endured fifteen hundred years of supernatural slavery, during which, every device that can degrade or destroy man has been the destiny that we have sustained and baffled. The Hebrew child has entered adolescence only to learn that he was the Pariah of that ungrateful Europe that owes to him the best part of its laws, a fine portion of its literature, all its religion. Great poets require a public; we have been content with the immortal melodies that we sung more than two thousand years ago by the waters of Babylon and wept. They record our triumphs; they solace our affliction. Great orators are the creatures of popular assemblies; we were permitted only by stealth to meet even in our temples. And as for great writers the catalogue is not blank. What are all the school-men, Aquinas himself, to Maimonides; and as for modern philosophy, all springs from Spinoza. "But the passionate and creative genius that is the nearest link to divinity, and which no human tyranny can destroy, though it can divert it; that should have stirred the hearts of nations by its inspired sympathy, or governed senates by its burning eloquence, has found a medium for its expression, to which, in spite of your prejudices and your evil passions, you have been obliged to bow. The ear, the voice, the fancy teeming with combinations, the imagination fervent with picture and emotion, that came from Caucasus and which we have preserved unpolluted, have endowed us with almost the exclusive privilege of MUSIC; that science of harmonious sounds which the ancients recognised as most divine, and deified in the person of their most beautiful creation. I speak not of the past, though were I to enter into the history of the lords of melody, you would find it the annals of Hebrew genius. But at this moment even, musical Europe is ours. There is not a company of singers, not an orchestra in a single capital, that are not crowded with our children, under the feigned names which they adopt to conciliate the dark aversion which your posterity will some day disclaim with shame and disgust. Almost every great composer, skilled musician, almost every voice that ravishes you with its transporting strains, spring from our tribes. The catalogue is too vast to enumerate; too illustrious to dwell for a moment on secondary names, however eminent. Enough for us that the three great creative minds to whose exquisite inventions all nations at this moment yield-Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelsohn-are of Hebrew race. And little do your men of fashion, your 'muscadins' of Paris, and your dandies of London, as they thrill into raptures at the notes of a Pasta, or a Grisi, little do they suspect that they are offering their homage to the sweet singers of Israel!'" We have no sufficient access to the facts to judge of the accuracy of all this; but there is much of it which we find it easy to credit. Like Sidonia, or the Mr. D'Israeli who portrays Sidonia, we are, to some considerable extent, believers in the influence of blood, thinking it an agent which, after the lapse of centuries and millenniums, often proves more powerful than all calculations, schemes, laws, and institutions. At the same time, be his facts true or not, or whatever be the extent to which they are true, it is not, as we conceive, from them that a son of Abraham, who, like our author, has embraced the Faith of the Gospel, ought to derive gratification, or to feel, as a Jew may, we think, legitimately feel, that he is of the world's truly aristocratic race-the nation which has stamped its uneffaceable impression on the brotherhood of mankind. Mohammedanism, we need scarcely say, is but the concentrated operation of certain elements of the Hebrew faith, and becomes weak just where, like Judaism itself, it has stopped short and cut off the growth of wide, overshadowing fertility. But it is to the Christian Church, as being, though not by lineal descent, yet by no mere figure of speech, in deed and in truth, the true Israel, that a Hebrew may look with legitimate pride as to the consummation and full universal triumph of his race. He may see in that, how indeed "out of Zion hath gone forth the Law" paramount of all mankind; how the great and glorious Hebrew type has been imprinted on the whole European race, and all the laws and customs of Christendom; how the ancient utterances of the Hebrew mind have been made to lie at the root of all our deepest thoughts, and all our most passionate aspirations; so that whether he look at the venerable fabric of the Christian Law, or the rich solemnity of the Christian Liturgies, or the ample and varied stores of Christian art and literature, the Dantes, Shakespears, Calderons, and Spensers, of Europe, he may trace the expansion of the chosen seed, and exult in the high mysterious bearing of his nation upon the destinies of mankind. The most amusing parts of this novel are the political conversations; in which the common run of what are commonly called Conservative sentiments, is very well exposed. In fact, the whole work may be considered as directed against the pretensions of the Conservative party. Witness the following conversation at Cambridge after one of its triumphs there, which a certain very accurate Quarterly reviewer may without difficulty prove did not take place at the time alleged; instead. of the Conservative Etonian of Mr. D'Israeli, no less a person than her Majesty's Whig Chancellor of the Exchequer, having been then returned for Cambridge, with a Radical for his colleague. "By Jove,' said the panting Buckhurst, throwing himself on the sofa, 'it was well done; never was anything better done. An immense triumph! The greatest triumph the Conservative cause has had. And yet,' he added, laughing, if any fellow were to ask me what the Conservative cause was, I am sure I should not know what to say.' "Why it's the cause of our glorious institutions,' said Coningsby. A Crown robbed of its prerogatives; a Church controlled by a commission; and an Aristocracy that does not lead.' "Under whose genial influence, the order of the Peasantry, a country's pride," has vanished from the face of the land,' said Henry Sydney, and is succeeded by a race of serfs, who are called labourers and who burn ricks.' "Under which,' continued Coningsby, 'the crown has become a cipher; the church a sect; the nobility drones; and the people drudges.' "It is the great constitutional cause,' said Lord Vere, that refuses everything to opposition; yields everything to agitation: conservative in Parliament, destructive out of doors; that has no objection to any change, provided only it be effected by unauthorized means.' "The first public association of men,' said Coningsby, who have worked for an avowed end, without enunciating a single principle.' "And who have established political infidelity throughout the land,' said Lord Henry. "By Jove!' said Buckhurst, what infernal fools we have made ourselves this last week!' "Nay,' said Coningsby, smiling, it was our last schoolboy weakness. Floreat Etona, under all circumstances.' 666 "I certainly, Coningsby,' said Lord Vere, ‘shall not assume the Conservative Cause, instead of the Cause for which Hampden died in the field, and Sydney on the scaffold.' "The cause for which Hampden died in the field, and Sydney on the scaffold,' said Coningsby, was the cause of the Venetian Republic.' "How-how?' said Buckhurst. "I repeat it,' said Coningsby. The great object of the Whig leaders in England, from the first movement under Hampden to the last more successful one in 1688, was to establish in England a high aristocratic republic on the model of the Venetian, then the study and admiration of all speculative politicians. Read Harrington; turn over Algernon Sydney; and you will see how the minds of the English leaders in the seventeenth century were saturated with the Venetian type. And they at length succeeded. William III. found them out in an instant. He told the Whig leaders, "I will not be a Doge." He balanced parties; he baffled them as the Puritans baffled them fifty years before. The reign of Anne was a struggle between the Venetian and the English systems. Two great Whig nobles, Argyle and Shrewsbury, worthy of seats in the Council of Ten, forced their Sovereign on her death-bed to change the ministry. They accomplished their object. They brought in a new family on their own terms. George I. was a Doge; George II. was a Doge; they were what William III., a great man, would not be. George III. tried not to be a Doge, but it was impossible materially to resist the deeply-laid combination. He might get rid of the Whig magnificoes, but he could not rid himself of the Venetian constitution. And a Venetian constitution did govern England from the accession of the House of Hanover until 1832. Now I do not ask you, Vere, to relinquish the political tenets which in ordinary times would have been your inheritance. All I say is, the constitution introduced by your ancestors having been subverted by their descendants your contemporaries, beware of still holding Venetian principles of government when you have not a Venetian constitution to govern with. Do what I am doing, what Henry Sydney and Buckhurst are doing, what other men that I could mention are doing, hold yourself aloof from political parties which, from the necessity of things, have ceased to have distinctive principles, and are therefore, practically, only factions; and wait and see, whether with patience, energy, honour, and Christian faith, and a desire to look to the national welfare and not to sectional and limited interests; whether, I say, we may not discover some great principles to guide us, to which we may adhere, and which then, if true, will ultimately guide and control others.' "The Whigs are worn out,' said Vere, Conservatism is a sham, and Radicalism is pollution.' In short, Mr. D'Israeli is generally considered a member of that section of public men, which has received the name of "Young England;" and this work is regarded as a literary manifesto from that quarter, an exposition of many of the principles avowed and acted on there; although we imagine that some of the opinions avowed in Coningsby must be taken simply as Mr. D'Israeli's own. In common with more than one recent inquirer into the true genius of the British Constitution, our author looks upon real monarchy as its essential and enduring element; and as that in which all classes would find their best protection. We are all complaining one way or another of class legislation; whereupon Mr. D'Israeli reminds us that a king is of no class, and there Coningsby. fore if he really govern, he is not very likely to govern with a But this best, and noblest, and freest government, has long been obscured in England by the influence of an aristocracyand that, not as a whole, the ancient one of the country, but one created partly by the plunder of the Church, partly by yet more modern political intrigue. Until the Reform Bill, this aristocracy worked in and through Parliament, to which branch of the constitution it had, for its own purposes, contrived to give an undue prominence. Thus Sovereign, Church, and People, have alike been defrauded of their due position and power in the body politic, the principle of class legislation has reigned supremely; and along with it that of political exclusion; which last our author maintains to be not more inconsistent with the British Constitution than the genius of ancient and genuine Toryism; the Irish Orange party being designated by him (and rightly) as the true Whigs. If to these articles of belief, we add, that Mr. D'Israeli seems opposed to commercial restriction, and indirect taxation, and that he is no lover of Russia, we shall have perhaps completed the outline of his political creed, in the common sense of the word. It may be further observed, that while professing himself anxious for the restoration to the peasantry of its ancient recognition as an order of the State, its ancient privileges, and its ancient enjoyments; he is no sentimentalist on the subject of steam-engines and machinery, considers that "Manchester, rightly viewed, is as great a wonder as Athens," and makes his Socrates, Sidonia, pronounce that "the age of ruins is past."-In short, Mr. D'Israeli's cast of thought may be analyzed into a strong infusion of Lord John Manners, mixed with a tolerably powerful influence of Mr. Urquhart, and flavoured by a dash of Mr. Carlyle. We have not, it must be observed, been reviewing Coningsby on the whole as a novel; and, therefore, our readers must not judge of its power of entertaining them, either from our remarks or our extracts. This remarkable work, interesting though it be in itself, is to us more interesting as a symptom of what is going on, and because of the subjects which it suggests, concerning which we would now say a word or two. We are not prepared to join in the whole of Mr. D'Israeli's political creed, or to repose undoubting confidence on all his historical sketches and disquisitions on the English Constitution; nor, as we have already hinted, have we any right to implicate the party with whom he acts in all that he has laid down. But NO. XLII.-N.S. 4 s |