Disraeli's belief, political and religious--Sympathy with the
people--Defends the Chartists--The people, the middle classes, and
the aristocracy--Chartist riots--Smart passage at arms in the House
of Commons--Marriage--Mrs. Wyndham Lewis--Disraeli as a husband.
[Sidenote: CREED, POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS]
Into this Maelstrom Disraeli was plunged when he entered Parliament. He
had his own views. He knew the condition of the poor both in England and
Ireland. He had declared that no Government should have his support
which did not introduce some large measure to improve that condition. He
had chosen the Conservative side because he had no belief in the
promises of the political economists, or in the blessed results to
follow from cutting the strings and leaving everyone to find his level.
He held to the old conception of the commonwealth that all orders must
work faithfully together; that trade was to be extended not by cheapness
and free markets, but by good workmanship and superior merit; and that
the object which statesmen ought to set before themselves was the
maintenance of the character of the people, not the piling up in
enormous heaps of what wealth had now come to mean. The people
themselves were groping, in their trades unions, after an organisation
which would revive in other forms the functions of the Guilds; and the
exact science of political economy would cease to be a science at all,
whenever motives superior to personal interest began to be acted upon.
Science was knowledge of facts; the facts most important to be known
were the facts of human nature and human responsibilities; and the
interpretation of those facts which had been revealed to his own race,
Disraeli actually believed to be deeper and truer than any modern
speculations. Though calling himself a Christian, he was a Jew in his
heart. He regarded Christianity as only Judaism developed, and, if not
completely true, yet as immeasurably nearer to truth than the mushroom
philosophies of the present age. He had studied Carlyle, and in some of
his writings had imitated him. Carlyle did not thank him for this.
Carlyle detested Jews, and looked on Disraeli as an adventurer fishing
for fortune in Parliamentary waters. His novels he despised. His chains
and velvets and affected airs he looked on as the tawdry love of vulgar
ornament characteristic of Houndsditch. Nevertheless, Disraeli had taken
his teaching to heart, and in his own way meant to act upon it. He
regarded the aristocracy, like Carlyle also, in spite of the double
barrels, as the least corrupted part of the community; and to them, in
alliance with the people, he looked for a return of the English nation
to the lines of true progress. The Church was moving at Oxford. A wave
of political Conservatism was sweeping over the country. He thought that
in both these movements he saw signs of a genuine reaction, and Peel, he
still believed, would give effect to his hopes.
[Sidenote: DISRAELI AND PEEL]
These were his theoretic convictions, while outwardly he amused himself
in the high circles which his Parliamentary notoriety had opened to him.
His letters are full of dukes and princes and beautiful women, and balls
and dinners. He ventured liberties, even in the presence of the great
Premier, and escaped unpunished. In the spring of 1839 he notes a dinner
in Whitehall Gardens. 'I came late,' he says, 'having mistaken the hour.
I found some twenty-five gentlemen grubbing in solemn silence. I threw a
shot over the table and set them going, and in time they became noisy.
Peel, I think, was pleased that I broke the awful stillness, as he
talked to me a good deal, though we were far removed.' But though he
enjoyed these honours and magnificences perhaps more than he need have
done, he kept an independence of his own. It was supposed that he was
looking for office, and that Peel's neglect of him in 1841 was the cause
of his subsequent revolt. Peel did make some advances to him through a
third person, and said afterwards in the House that Disraeli had been
ready to serve under him; but if office was really his object, never did
any man take a worse way of recommending himself. In the summer of the
same year (1839) the monster Chartist petition was brought down to the
House of Commons in the name of the working people of England, and the
general disposition was to treat it as an absurdity and an insult.
Disraeli, when his turn came to speak, was not ashamed to say that,
though he disapproved of the Charter, he sympathised with the Chartists.
They were right, he thought, in desiring a fairer share in the profits
of their labour, and that fairer share they were unlikely to obtain from
the commercial constituences whom the Reform Bill had enfranchised.
Great duties could alone confer great station, and the new class which
had been invested with political station had not been bound up with the
mass of the people by the exercise of corresponding obligations. Those
who possessed power without discharging its conditions and duties, were
naturally anxious to put themselves to the least possible expense and
trouble. Having gained their own object, they wished to keep it without
appeal to their pockets, or cost of their time. The true friends of the
people ought to be the aristocracy, and in very significant words he
added that 'the English nation would concede any degree of political
power to a class making simultaneous advances in the exercise of great
social duties.'
The aristocracy had lost their power because their duties had been
neglected. They might have wealth or they might have power; but not both
together. It was not too late to reconsider the alternative. The
Chartists, finding themselves scoffed out of the House of Commons, took
to violence. There were riots in Birmingham, and a Chartist convention
sat in London threatening revolution. Lord John Russell appealed for an
increase of the police. Disraeli was one of a minority of five who dared
to say that it was unnecessary, and that other measures ought to be
tried. When the leaders were seized, he supported his friend, Tom
Duncombe, in a protest against the harshness of their treatment. The
Chancellor of the Exchequer rebuked him. Fox Maule, a junior member of
the Government, charged him with being 'an advocate of riot and
disorder.' In later times Disraeli never struck at small game. When he
meant fight, he went for the leading stag of the herd. On this occasion
he briefly touched his two slight antagonists. 'Under-Secretaries,' he
said, 'were sometimes vulgar and ill-bred. From a Chancellor of the
Exchequer to an Under-Secretary of State was a descent from the sublime
to the ridiculous, though the sublime was on this occasion rather
ridiculous, and the ridiculous rather trashy!'
It is scarcely conceivable that if Disraeli was then aspiring to
harness under Sir Robert, he would have committed himself with such
reckless audacity; and his action was the more creditable to him as the
profession which he had chosen brought him no emoluments. His financial
embarrassments were thickening round him so seriously, that without
office it might soon become impossible to continue his Parliamentary
career. Like Bassanio,
When he had lost one shaft,
He shot his fellow of the self-same flight
The self-same way with more advised watch
To find the other forth, and by adventuring both
He oft found both.
But one shaft had disappeared after another till he had reached the last
in his quiver. He had not been personally extravagant. He had moved in
the high circles to which he had been admitted rather as an assured
spectator than as an imitator of their costly habits. But his resources
were limited to the profits of his writings, and to such sums as he
could raise on his own credit. His position was critical in the extreme,
and Disraeli's star might then have set like a planet which becomes
visible at twilight on the western horizon, and shows out in its
splendour only to set into the sea. The temptation to sell oneself under
such circumstances would have been too much for common Parliamentary
virtue. But Disraeli was a colt who was not to be driven in a team by a
master. Lord Melbourne had asked him once what he wished for. He had
answered coolly that he wished to be Prime Minister. The insanity of
presumption was in fact the insanity of second sight; but 'vaulting
ambition' would have 'fallen on the other side' if a divinity had not
come to his assistance.
[Sidenote: MARRIAGE]
The heroes of his political novels are usually made to owe their first
success to wealthy marriages. Coningsby, Egremont, Endymion, though they
deserve their good fortune, yet receive it from a woman's hand. Mr.
Wyndham Lewis, who had brought Disraeli into Parliament, died
unexpectedly the year after. His widow, the clever rattling flirt, as he
had described her on first acquaintance, after a year's mourning, became
Disraeli's wife. She was childless. She was left the sole possessor of a
house at Grosvenor Gate, and a life income of several thousands a year.
She was not beautiful. Disraeli was thirty-five, and she was approaching
fifty. But she was a heroine if ever woman deserved the name. She
devoted herself to Disraeli with a completeness which left no room in
her mind for any other thought. As to him, he had said that he would
never marry for love. But if love, in the common sense of the word, did
not exist between these two, there was an affection which stood the
trials of thirty years, and deepened only as they both declined into
age. She was his helpmate, his confidante, his adviser; from the first
he felt the extent of his obligations to her, but the sense of
obligation, if at first felt as a duty, became a bond of friendship
perpetually renewed. The hours spent with his wife in retirement were
the happiest that he knew. In defeat or victory he hurried home from the
House of Commons to share his vexation or his triumph with his
companion, who never believed that he could fail. The moment in his
whole life which perhaps gave him greatest delight was that at which he
was able to decorate her with a peerage. To her he dedicated 'Sybil.'
'I,' he says, 'would inscribe this work to one whose noble spirit and
gentle nature ever prompt her to sympathise with the suffering; to one
whose sweet voice has often encouraged, and whose taste and judgment
have ever guided its pages, the most severe of critics, but a "perfect
wife."' The experience of his own married life he describes in
'Coningsby' as the solitary personal gift which nature had not bestowed
upon a special favourite of fortune. 'The lot most precious to man, and
which a beneficent Providence has made not the least common--to find in
another heart a perfect and profound sympathy, to unite his existence
with one who could share all his joys, soften all his sorrows, aid him
in all his projects, respond to all his fancies, counsel him in his
cares and support him in his perils, make life charming by her charms,
interesting by her intelligence, and sweet by the vigilant variety of
her tenderness--to find your life blessed by such an influence, and to
feel that your influence can bless such a life; the lot the most divine
of divine gifts, so perfect that power and even fame can never rival its
delights--all this nature had denied to Sidonia.' It had not been denied
to Disraeli himself.
The carriage incident is well known. On an anxious House of Commons
night, Mrs. Disraeli drove down with her husband to Palace Yard. Her
finger had been caught and crushed in the carriage-door. She did not let
him know what had happened, for fear of disturbing him, and was not
released from her torture till he had left her. That is perfectly
authentic, and there are other stories like it. A husband capable of
inspiring and maintaining such an attachment most certainly never ceased
to deserve it. Savagely as he was afterwards attacked, his most
indignant enemy never ventured to touch his name with scandal. A party
of young men once ventured a foolish jest or two at Mrs. Disraeli's age
and appearance, and rallied him on the motives of his marriage.
'Gentlemen,' said Disraeli, as he rose and left the room, 'do none of
you know what gratitude means?' This was the only known instance in
which he ever spoke with genuine anger.
'Gratitude,' indeed, if deeply felt, was as deeply deserved. His
marriage made him what he became. Though never himself a rich man, or
endeavouring to make himself such, he was thenceforward superior to
fortune. His difficulties were gradually disposed of. He had no longer
election agents' bills to worry him, or debts to usurers running up in
compound ratio. More important to him, he was free to take his own line
in politics, relieved from the temptation of seeking office.