LITERATURE AND EDUCATION

Lord John’s position in 1855—His constituency in the City—Survey of his work in literature—As man of letters—His historical writings—Hero-worship of Fox—Friendship with Moore—Writes the biography of the poet—‘Don Carlos’—A book wrongly attributed to him—Publishes his ‘Recollections and Suggestions’—An opinion of Kinglake’s—Lord John on his own career—Lord John and National Schools—Joseph Lancaster’s tentative efforts—The formation of the Council of Education—Prejudice blocks the way—Mr. Forster’s tribute.

Men talked in the autumn of 1855 as if Lord John Russell’s retirement was final, and even his brother, the Duke of Bedford, considered it probable that his career as a responsible statesman was closed. His health had always been more or less delicate, and he was now a man of sixty-three. He had been in Parliament for upwards of forty years, and nearly a quarter of a century had passed since he bore the brunt of the wrath and clamour and evil-speaking of the Tories at the epoch of Reform. He had been leader of his party for a long term of difficult years, and Prime Minister for the space of six, and in that capacity had left on the statute book an impressive record of his zeal on behalf of civil and religious liberty. No statesman of the period had won more distinction in spite of ‘gross blunders,’ which he himself in so many words admitted. He was certainly entitled to rest on his laurels; but it was nonsense for anyone to suppose that the animosity of the Irish, or the indignation of the Ritualists, or the general chagrin at the collapse—under circumstances for which Lord John was by no means alone responsible—of the Vienna Conference, could condemn a man of so much energy and courage, as well as political prescience, to perpetual banishment from Downing Street.

There were people who thought that Lord John was played out in 1855, and there were many more who wished to think so, for he was feared by the incompetent and apathetic of his own party, as well as by those who had occasion to reckon with him in honourable but strenuous political conflict. The great mistake of his life was not the Durham Letter, which has been justified, in spite of its needless bitterness of tone, by the inexorable logic of accomplished events. It was not his attitude towards Ireland in the dark years of famine, which was in reality far more temperate and generous than is commonly supposed. It was not his action over the Vienna Conference, for, now that the facts are known, his reticence in self-defence, under the railing accusations which were brought against him, was magnanimous and patriotic. The truth is, Lord John Russell placed himself in a false position when he yielded to the importunity of the Court and the Peelites by consenting to accept office under Lord Aberdeen. The Crimean War, which he did his best to prevent, only threw into the relief of red letters against a dark sky the radical divergence of opinion which existed in the Coalition Government.

For nearly four years after his retirement from office Lord John held an independent political position, and there is evidence enough that he enjoyed to the full this respite from the cares of responsibility. He gave up his house in town, and the quidnuncs thought that they had seen the last of him as a Minister of the Crown, whilst the merchants and the stockbrokers of the City were supposed to scout his name, and to be ready to lift up their heel against him at the next election.

Meanwhile, Lord John studied to be quiet, and succeeded. He visited country-houses, and proved a delightful as well as a delighted guest. He travelled abroad, and came back with new political ideas about the trend in foreign politics. He published the final volume of his ‘Memoirs and Correspondence of Thomas Moore,’ and busied himself over his ‘Life and Times of Charles James Fox,’ and other congenial literary tasks. He appeared on the platform and addressed four thousand persons in Exeter Hall, in connection with the Young Men’s Christian Association, on the causes which had retarded moral and political progress in the nation. He went down to Stroud, and gave his old constituents a philosophic address on the study of history. He spoke at the first meeting of the Social Science Congress at Birmingham, presided over the second at Liverpool, and raised in Parliament the questions of National Education, Jewish Disabilities, the affairs of Italy, besides taking part, as an independent supporter of Lord Palmerston, in the controversies which arose from time to time in the House of Commons. His return to office grew inevitable in the light of the force of his character and the integrity of his aims.

It is, of course, impossible in the scope of this volume to describe at any length Lord John Russell’s contributions to literature, even outside the range of letters and articles in the press and that almost forgotten weapon of controversy, the political pamphlet. From youth to age Lord John not merely possessed the pen of a ready writer, but employed it freely in history, biography, criticism, belles-lettres, and verse. His first book was published when George III. was King, and his last appeared when almost forty years of Queen Victoria’s reign had elapsed. The Liverpool Administration was in power when his biography of his famous ancestor, William, Lord Russell, appeared, and that of Mr. Disraeli when the veteran statesman took the world into his confidence with ‘Recollections and Suggestions.’ It is amusing now to recall the fact that two years after the battle of Waterloo Lord John Russell feared that he could never stand the strain of a political career, and Tom Moore’s well-known poetical ‘Remonstrance’ was called forth by the young Whig’s intention at that time to abandon the Senate for the study. When Lord Grey’s Ministry was formed in 1830 to carry Reform, Lord John was the author of several books, grave and gay, and had been seventeen years in Parliament, winning already a considerable reputation within and without its walls. It was a surprise at the moment, and it is not even yet quite clear why Russell was excluded from the Cabinet. Mr. Disraeli has left on record his interpretation of the mystery: ‘Lord John Russell was a man of letters, and it is a common opinion that a man cannot at the same time be successful both in meditation and in action.’ If this surmise is correct, Lord John’s fondness for printer’s ink kept him out of Downing Street until he made by force his merit known as a champion of popular rights in the House of Commons. Literature often claimed his pen, for, besides many contributions in prose and verse to periodicals, to say nothing of writings which still remain in manuscript and prefaces to the books of other people, he published about twenty works, great and small. Yet, his strength lay elsewhere.

His literary pursuits, with scarcely an exception, represent his hours of relaxation and the manner in which he sought relief from the cares of State. In the pages of ‘William, Lord Russell,’ which was published in 1819, when political corruption was supreme and social progress all but impossible, Lord John gave forth no uncertain sound. ‘In these times, when love of liberty is too generally supposed to be allied with rash innovation, impiety, and anarchy, it seems to me desirable to exhibit to the world at full length the portrait of a man who, heir to wealth and title, was foremost in defending the privileges of the people; who, when busily occupied in the affairs of public life, was revered in his own family as the best of husbands and of fathers; who joined the truest sense of religion with the unqualified assertion of freedom; who, after an honest perseverance in a good cause, at length attested, on the scaffold, his attachment to the ancient principles of the Constitution and the inalienable right of resistance.’ The interest of the book consists not merely in its account—gathered in part at least from family papers at Woburn and original letters at Longleat—of Lord Russell, but also in the light which is cast on the period of the Restoration, and the policy of Charles II. and the Duke of York.

Two years later, Lord John published an ‘Essay on the History of the English Government and Constitution,’ which, in an expanded form, has passed through several editions, and has also appeared in a French version. The book is concerned with constitutional change in England from the reign of Henry VII. to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Lord John made no secret of his conviction that, whilst the majority of the Powers of Europe needed revolutionary methods to bring them into sympathy with the aspirations of the people, the Government of England was not in such an evil case, since its ‘abuses easily admit of reforms consistent with its spirit, capable of being effected without injury or danger, and mainly contributing to its preservation.’ The historical reflections which abound in the work, though shrewd, can scarcely be described as remarkable, much less as profound. The ‘Essay on English Government’ is, in fact, not the confessions of an inquiring spirit entangled in the maze of political speculation, but the conclusions of a young statesman who has made up his mind, with the help of Somers and Fox.

Perhaps, however, the most important of Lord John’s contributions to the study of the philosophy of history was ‘Memoirs of the Affairs of Europe from the Peace of Utrecht.’ It describes at considerable length, and often with luminous insight, the negotiations which led to the treaty by which the great War of the Spanish Succession was brought to an end. It also throws light on men and manners during the last days of Louis XIV., and on the condition of affairs in France which followed his death. The closing pages of the second volume are concerned with a survey of the religious state of England during the first half of the eighteenth century. Lord John in this connection pays homage to the work of Churchmen of the stamp of Warburton, Clarke, and Hoadly; but he entirely fails to appreciate at anything like their true value the labours of Whitfield and Wesley, though doing more justice to the great leaders of Puritanism, a circumstance which was perhaps due to the fact that they stand in the direct historical succession, not merely in the assertion of the rights of conscience, but in the ordered growth of freedom and society.

Amongst the most noteworthy of Lord John Russell’s literary achievements were the two works which he published concerning a statesman whose memory, he declared, ought to be ‘consecrated in the heart of every lover of freedom throughout the globe’—Charles James Fox, a master of assemblies, and, according to Burke, perhaps the greatest debater whom the world has ever seen. The books in question are entitled ‘Memorials and Correspondence,’ which was published in four volumes at intervals between the years 1853 and 1857, and the more important ‘Life and Times of Charles James Fox,’ which appeared in three volumes between the years 1859 and 1866. This task, like so many others which Lord John accomplished, came unsought at the death of his old friend, Lady Holland, in 1845. It was the ambition of Lord Holland, ‘nephew of Fox and friend of Grey,’ as he used proudly to style himself, to edit the papers and write the life of his brilliant kinsman. Politics and society and the stately house at Kensington, which, from the end of last century until the opening years of the Queen’s reign, was the chief salon of the Whig party, combined, with an easy procrastinating temperament, to block the way, until death ended, in the autumn of 1840, the career of the gracious master of Holland House. The materials which Lord Holland and his physician, librarian, and friend, Dr. John Allen, had accumulated, and which, by the way, passed under the scrutiny of Lord Grey and Rogers, the poet, were edited by Lord John, with the result that he grew fascinated with the subject, and formed the resolution, in consequence, to write ‘The Life and Times’ of the great Whig statesman. He declared that it was well to have a hero, and a hero with a good many faults and failings.

Fox did more than any other statesman in the dull reign of George II. to prepare the way for the epoch of Reform, and it was therefore fitting that the statesman who more than any other bore the brunt of the battle in 1830-32 should write his biography. Lord Russell’s biography of Fox, though by no means so skilfully written as Sir George Otto Trevelyan’s vivacious description of ‘The Early History of Charles James Fox,’ is on a more extended scale than the latter. Students of the political annals of the eighteenth century are aware of its value as an original and suggestive contribution to the facts and forces which have shaped the relations of the Crown and the Cabinet in modern history. Fox, in Lord John’s opinion, gave his life to the defence of English freedom, and hastened his death by his exertion to abolish the African Slave Trade. He lays stress, not only on the great qualities which Fox displayed in public life, but also on the simplicity and kindness of his nature, and the spell which, in spite of grievous faults, he seemed able to cast, without effort, alike over friends and foes.

One of the earliest, and certainly one of the closest, friendships of Lord John Russell’s life was with Thomas Moore. They saw much of each other for the space of nearly forty years in London society, and were also drawn together in the more familiar intercourse of foreign travel. It was with Lord John that the poet went to Italy in 1819 to avoid arrest for debt, after his deputy at Bermuda had embezzled 6,000l. Moore lived, more or less, all his days from hand to mouth, and Lord John Russell, who was always ready in a quiet fashion, in Kingsley’s phrase, to help lame dogs over stiles, frequently displayed towards the light-hearted poet throughout their long friendship delicate and generous kindness. He it was who, in conjunction with Lord Lansdowne, obtained for Moore in 1835 a pension of 300l. a year, and announced the fact as one which was ‘due from any Government, but much more from one some of the members of which are proud to think themselves your friends.’ Moore died in 1852, and when his will was read—it had been made when Lord John was still comparatively unknown—it was discovered that he had, to give his own words, ‘confided to my valued friend, Lord John Russell (having obtained his kind promise to undertake the service for me), the task of looking over whatever papers, letters, or journals I may leave behind me, for the purpose of forming from them some kind of publication, whether in the shape of memoirs or otherwise, which may afford the means of making some provision for my wife and family.’ Although Lord John was sixty, and burdened with the cares of State, if not with the cares of office, he cheerfully accepted the task. Though it must be admitted that he performed some parts of it in rather a perfunctory manner, the eight volumes which appeared between 1853 and 1856 of the ‘Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore’ represent a severe tax upon friendship, as well as no ordinary labour on the part of a man who was always more or less immersed in public affairs.

Lord John also edited the ‘Correspondence of John, fourth Duke of Bedford,’ and prefaced the letters with a biographical sketch. Quite early in his career he also tried his hand at fiction in ‘The Nun of Arrouca,’ a story founded on a romantic incident which occurred during his travels in the Peninsula. The book appeared in 1822, and in the same year—he was restless and ambitious of literary distinction at the time, and had not yet found his true sphere in politics—he also published ‘Don Carlos,’ a tragedy in blank verse, which was in reality not merely a tirade against the cruelties of the Inquisition, but an impassioned protest against religious disabilities in every shape or form. ‘Don Carlos,’ though now practically forgotten, ran through five editions in twelve months, and the people remembered it when its author became the foremost advocate in the House of Commons of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Amongst other minor writings which belong to the earlier years of Lord John Russell, it is enough to name ‘Essays and Sketches of Life and Character,’ ‘The Establishment of the Turks in Europe,’ ‘A Translation of the Fifth Book of the Odyssey,’ and an imitation of the Thirteenth Satire of Juvenal, as well as an essay on the ‘Causes of the French Revolution,’ which appeared in 1832.

It is still a moot point whether ‘Letters Written for the Post, and not for the Press,’ an anonymous volume which appeared in 1820, and which consists of descriptions of a tour in Scotland, interspersed with dull moral lectures on the conduct of a wife towards her husband, was from his pen. Mr. George Elliot believes, on internal evidence, too lengthy to quote, that the book—a small octavo volume of more than four hundred pages—is erroneously attributed to his brother-in-law, and the Countess Russell is of the same opinion. Mr. Elliot cites inaccuracies in the book, and adds that the places visited in Scotland do not correspond with those which Lord John had seen when he went thither in company with the Duke and Duchess in 1807; and there is no evidence that he made another pilgrimage north of the Tweed between that date and the appearance of the book. He adds that his father took the trouble to collect everything which was written by Lord John, and the book is certainly not in the library at Minto. Moreover, Mr. Elliot is confident that either Lord Minto or Lord John himself assured him that he might dismiss the idea of the supposed authorship.

After his final retirement from office, Lord John published, in 1868, three letters to Mr. Chichester Fortescue on ‘The State of Ireland,’ and this was followed by a contribution to ecclesiastical history in the shape of a volume of essays on ‘The Rise and Progress of the Christian Religion in the West of Europe to the Council of Trent.’ The leisure of his closing years was, however, chiefly devoted to the preparation, with valuable introductions, of selections from his own ‘Speeches and Despatches;’ and this, in turn, was followed, after an interval of five years, by a work entitled ‘Recollections and Suggestions, 1813-1873,’ which appeared as late as 1875, and which was of singular personal interest as well as of historical importance. It bears on the title-page two lines from Dryden, which were often on Lord John’s lips in his closing years:

The old statesman’s once tenacious memory was failing when he wrote the book, and there is little evidence of literary arrangement in its contents. If, however, Lord John did not always escape inaccuracy of statement or laboured discursiveness of style, the value not only of his political reminiscences, but also of his shrewd and often pithily expressed verdicts on men and movements, is unquestionable, and, on the whole, the vigour of the book is as remarkable as its noble candour. Mr. Kinglake once declared that ‘Lord John Russell wrote so naturally that it recalled the very sound of his voice;’ and half the charm of his ‘Recollections and Suggestions’ consists in the artlessness of a record which will always rank with the original materials of history, between the year in which Wellington fought the battle of Vittoria and that in which, just sixty years later, Napoleon III. died in exile at Chislehurst. In speaking of his own career, Lord Russell, writing at the age of eighty-one, uses words which are not less manly than modest:

‘I can only rejoice that I have been allowed to have my share in the task accomplished in the half-century which has elapsed from 1819 to 1869. My capacity, I always felt, was very inferior to that of the men who have attained in past times the foremost place in our Parliament and in the councils of our Sovereign. I have committed many errors, some of them very gross blunders. But the generous people of England are always forbearing and forgiving to those statesmen who have the good of their country at heart. Like my betters, I have been misrepresented and slandered by those who know nothing of me; but I have been more than compensated by the confidence and the friendship of the best men of my own political connection, and by the regard and favourable interpretation of my motives, which I have heard expressed by my generous opponents, from the days of Lord Castlereagh to these of Mr. Disraeli.’

There were few questions in which Lord John Russell was more keenly interested from youth to age than that of National Education. As a boy he had met Joseph Lancaster, during a visit of that far-seeing and practical friend of poor children to Woburn, and the impression which the humble Quaker philanthropist made on the Duke of Bedford’s quick-witted as well as kind-hearted son was retained, as one of his latest speeches show, to the close of life. At the opening of the new British Schools in Richmond in the summer of 1867, Lord John referred to his father’s association with Joseph Lancaster, and added: ‘In this way I naturally became initiated into a desire for promoting schools for the working classes, and I must say, from that time to this I never changed my mind upon the subject. I think it is absolutely necessary our schools should not merely be secular, but that they should be provided with religious teaching, and that religious teaching ought not to be sectarian. There will be plenty of time, when these children go to church or chapel, that they should learn either that particular form of doctrine their parents follow or adopt one more consistent with their conscientious feelings; but I think, while they are young boys and girls at school, it ought to be sufficient for them to know what Christ taught, and what the apostles taught; and from those lessons and precepts they may guide their conduct in life.’

Lord John put his hand to the plough in the day of small things, and, through good and through evil report, from the days of Lancaster, Bell, and Brougham, to those of Mr. Forster and the great measure of 1870, he never withdrew from a task which lay always near to his heart. It is difficult to believe that at the beginning of the present century there were less than three thousand four hundred schools of all descriptions in the whole of England, or that when the reign of George III. was closing one-half of the children of the nation still ran wild without the least pretence of education. At a still later period the marriage statistics revealed the fact that one-third of the men and one-half of the women were unable to sign the register. The social elevation of the people, so ran the miserable plea of those who assuredly were not given to change, was fraught with peril to the State. Hodge, it was urged, ought to be content to take both the Law and the Commandments from his betters, since a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. As for the noisy, insolent operatives and artisans of the great manufacturing towns, was there not for them the strong hand of authority, and, if they grew too obstreperous, the uplifted sabre of the military as at Peterloo? It was all very well, however, to extol the virtues of patience, contentment, and obedience, but the sense of wrong and of defiance rankled in the masses, and with it—in a dull and confused manner—the sense of power.

The Reform Bill of 1832 mocked in many directions the hopes of the people, but it at least marked a great social as well as a great political departure, and with it came the dawn of a new day to modern England. As the light broadened, the vision of poets and patriots began to be realised in practical improvements, which came home to men’s business and bosom; the standard of intelligence rose, and with it freedom of thought, and the, sometimes passionate, but more often long-suffering demand for political, social, and economic concessions to justice. It was long before the privileged classes began to recognise, except in platform heroics, that it was high time to awake out of sleep and to ‘educate our masters;’ but the work began when Lord Althorp persuaded the House of Commons to vote a modest sum for the erection of school buildings in England; and that grant of 20,000l. in 1832 was the ‘handful of corn on the top of the mountains’ which has brought about the golden harvest of to-day. The history of the movement does not, of course, fall within the province of these pages, though Lord John Russell’s name is associated with it in an honourable and emphatic sense. The formation, chiefly at his instance, in 1839 of a Council of Education paved the way for the existing system of elementary education, and lifted the whole problem to the front rank of national affairs.

He was the first Prime Minister of England to carry a measure which made it possible to secure trained teachers for elementary schools; and his successful effort in 1847 to ‘diminish the empire of ignorance,’ as he styled it, was one of the events in his public life on which he looked back in after years with the most satisfaction. During the session of 1856 Lord John brought forward in the House of Commons a bold scheme of National Education. He contended that out of four million children of school age only one-half were receiving instruction, whilst not more than one-eighth were attending schools which were subject to inspection. The vast majority were to be found in schools where the standard of education, if not altogether an unknown quantity, was deplorably low. He proposed that the number of inspectors should be increased, and that a rate should be levied by the local authorities for supplying adequate instruction in places where it was unsatisfactory. He contended that the country should be mapped out in school districts, and that the managers should have the power to make provision for religious instruction, and, at the same time, should allow the parents of the children a voice in the matter. Prejudices ecclesiastical and social blocked the way, however, and Lord John was compelled to abandon the scheme, which suggested, and to a large extent anticipated Mr. Forster’s far-reaching measure, which in 1870 met with a better fate, and linked the principles of local authority and central supervision in the harmonious working of public education. When the victory was almost won Mr. Forster, with characteristic kindliness, wrote to the old statesman who had laboured for the people’s cause in years of supreme discouragement:—‘As regards universal compulsory education, I believe we shall soon complete the building. It is hard to see how there would have been a building to complete, if you had not, with great labour and in great difficulty, dug the foundations in 1839.’ Happily Lord John lived to witness the crowning of the edifice by the Gladstone Administration.