1874
LORD BEACONSFIELD
Lord Beaconsfield was always singularly kind to me. One evening, soon
after I went into the Foreign Office, I sat next to Mrs. Disraeli at a
dinner at the house of Lord Combermere, the old Peninsular hero. All of a
sudden she turned round to me and said, “Dizzy has got his eye upon you.”
And so it proved to be, for many years after, when the kind old lady
whom Queen Victoria created Viscountess Beaconsfield was dead, he, still
Mr. Disraeli, gave me the first important appointment which fell to his
gift as Prime Minister in 1874. He was then seventy years of age, but he
looked older in spite of his carefully dyed and curled hair and a certain
dandiness of dress, a relic of the D’Orsay days, which remained with him
to the end.
I used sometimes to fancy that when he walked in the streets leaning
on the arm of his faithful “mastiff,” as he playfully called Lord
Abergavenny, or Monty Corry, there was a slight purposeful exaggeration
of the old-man stoop; certainly when he stood upright to make a speech,
fired with excitement, there was no indication of any failing of
strength, though his eyes latterly lost their brilliancy. Those eyes
were the despair of Von Angeli when he painted his portrait for the
Queen. “Das Auge ist tot,” he said. The _Vanity Fair_ picture of him in
his long, pale brown coat, walking with Monty Corry, handsome, smart,
carefully groomed, and obviously so proud of his charge, was admirable.
Certainly no politician ever had a more devoted shadow than my dear old
friend Monty was to him. The affection between them was most touching.
Indeed Disraeli’s was one of those natures which compel affection by
their own generous power of giving it. He loved his friends and they
loved him.
One man, whom he had made, betrayed him; I knew that man well and was
acquainted with the whole story; but Disraeli had the magnanimity of
a noble character; no one ever heard him utter a word against the
confidential subordinate who had used him so ill. This may, perhaps,
be contrasted with the bitterness of his early attacks upon Peel. But
at the time of which I am writing he was no longer a disappointed man
struggling, as the French say, to “arrive.” He had “arrived,” and in his
proud position took no heed of the malice and venom of lesser men.
His conversation was always delightful; but nowhere did he shine more
than at the Sunday dinners of Baron Lionel de Rothschild. Those dinners
were indeed brilliant—Dizzy, Charles Villiers, the famous free-trade
member for Wolverhampton, and Bernal Osborne were almost always there;
John Delane, the Jupiter of the _Times_, another frequent guest.[37]
To listen to those wonderful wits, talking not for the gallery, but
throwing the ball to and fro for their own pleasure, was something worth
remembering. Those were conversational fireworks.
There were always one or two of the smartest and most beautiful women
present, and one or two young men—often Henry Calcraft and myself. Baron
Lionel himself was one of the wisest, kindest and noblest men that I ever
knew, and the Baroness, who must have been so beautiful in her youth,
was as a matron the picture of grace and dignity. In a Jewish house
Disraeli was always happy. He retained (witness “Coningsby”) the greatest
admiration for the people from whom it was his pride to have sprung. One
day I went to call upon Baron Lionel in Piccadilly.
“Your friend has just left me,” said the Baron.
“Whom do you mean?” I asked.
“Why, Dizzy, to be sure—he is your friend, isn’t he?”
I asked at haphazard what they had been talking about.
“Oh!” said the Baron, “as usual, the Race.”
The great fascination of Lord Beaconsfield’s talk lay in the grotesque
turn which he could give to the most ordinary subjects. His epithets
were sometimes quite startling, even in his Parliamentary speeches. A
friend of mine (I cannot remember who it was) once put this to me very
wittily and very sadly. The House of Commons had been sitting all night.
I went down to the House—to which my office gave me access—and saw the
green benches, not crowded, but occupied by a number of members looking
hideously debauched and being addressed by an Irishman, wild, unkempt,
unshorn. As I entered the lobby my friend came out. “This is a pretty
state of things,” he said, “and there is no one in authority. Hartington
has gone to Goodwood, Dizzy has gone to the Lords, and Gladstone is
reading Homer at Hawarden! If only Dizzy had been here he would have
crushed these men with an adjective!” It was so true!
One amusing instance of Dizzy’s adjectival powers is worth recording. Sir
William Harcourt had attacked him in one of his most telling speeches,
with which he had evidently shown great self-satisfaction, as, indeed,
was his right, though it was a little imprudent to do so, seeing with
whom he had to deal. When Sir William sat down Dizzy got up to reply, and
in his quiet, imperturbable way chaffed the honourable member about his
“Herodian oratory.” This puzzled all the newspapers, who made many futile
guesses at what the Prime Minister had meant. At last one paper—I think
it was the _Pall Mall Gazette_—said that the word which Mr. Disraeli had
used was Rhodian, not Herodian, the orators of Rhodes being in old times
famous for their eloquence! The next day there was a luncheon party at
Sir Stafford Northcote’s in Downing Street, and the conversation turned
upon the speech and the much-discussed adjective. Lady Northcote asked
Dizzy, who was present, what he really had said, and what he really had
meant. “My dear lady,” was the very solemn answer, “are we not told that
Herod made an oration and that he gave not God the glory?” There was a
roar of laughter, in which we all joined.
There was much sympathy between Sir William Harcourt and Disraeli.
Indeed, so close was the affection which the two bore to one another
that there was a moment when people imagined that they might join hands
politically. But that could not be. Sir William, for all his blue blood,
and his royal extraction, was too convinced a Radical to be able to
palter with the Carlton Club. He was a delightful companion, witty,
accomplished; it was a pleasure to the two heroes to fence socially,
sharpening their blades when the buttons were on the foils; but
politically, when the buttons were off, the tierce and quart were furious
enough.
Between Gladstone and Disraeli there was no love lost; the two rivals
were utterly opposite and cordially disliked one another. Disraeli
almost always spoke of Gladstone with a spice of contempt. Once he told
us how the Emperor of Brazil had sent him and Mr. Gladstone the grand
cordon of some order. “I wrote him a letter of warmest thanks which
could make the dear man believe that he had satisfied the one ambition
of my life; Gladstone sent his star back, with an expression of regret
that his Sovereign did not permit him to accept foreign decorations.
Clumsy fellow! Could he not have put it away in a drawer, as I did?”
I remember well the gusto with which he accentuated the words “Clumsy
fellow!” The truth is that there was in Gladstone a lack of that
man-of-the-worldliness which Dizzy admired so much in Lord Granville.
The patronage of the Captaincy of Deal Castle belongs to the Lord Warden
of the Cinque Ports. When Lord Clanwilliam died Lord Granville, who was
Lord Warden, appointed Lord Sydney in his place; at the same time, lest
there should be any misconception, Lord Granville, with that courtesy of
which he was such a master, wrote and told Lord Beaconsfield what he had
done. The answer was short and characteristic:
“Hughenden Manor, October 21st, 1879.
“MY DEAR LORD,
“Happy Sydney to be your neighbour!
“Yours sincerely,
“BEACONSFIELD.”
His notes were always charming. When he was living in Whitehall he wrote
to Count Pierre Schuvaloff, the Russian Ambassador, inviting him to
a little informal dinner, saying, “You will make six ladies happy and
five men jealous.” “Mon cher ami,” Schuvaloff said, when he showed me
the note, “elles étaient toutes grandmères!” He had, by the by, a very
high opinion of Schuvaloff’s ability. When he came back from Berlin
he was talking to me one day about the Congress, and the different
statesmen and diplomatists who had taken part in it, with several of
whom I was acquainted. Prince Gortchakoff and Schuvaloff were the two
Russian representatives, but Prince Gortchakoff was a very different man
from the Gortchakoff whom I had known some fifteen years before at St.
Petersburg. He had grown old and feeble, and, as Lord Beaconsfield put
it, lachrymose. Schuvaloff had to fight his battle alone, and, said Lord
Beaconsfield, “I was amazed at the way in which he held his own against
us all.” With all his dandified, rather frivolous ways, Schuvaloff struck
him as a very strong foeman.
That Bismarck shared this view of Count Schuvaloff is evident from his
“Gedanken und Erinnerungen.” Between Bismarck and Prince Gortchakoff
there had long been a sort of silent feud. Gortchakoff rather posed as
if he had been something like a Mentor to Bismarck, who latterly grew to
look upon him with ill-disguised contempt. He laughed at his vanity, his
boastfulness, and even at his readiness to accept a diplomatic snuffbox
mounted in diamonds, provided that they were “de bonnes grosses pierres”
(“Gedanken,” etc., Vol. II., p. 125). For Schuvaloff, on the contrary,
Bismarck had a great liking, and, indeed, the correspondence between the
two statesmen bears witness to an exceptional degree of respect and even
affection on both sides (II., 249-252).
Bismarck says in so many words that it was against the wish of the
Emperor of Russia that Gortchakoff took part in the Congress of Berlin,
and that although, as Chancellor of the Empire, he nominally had
precedence, it was Schuvaloff, officially his subordinate, who was
the real and only plenipotentiary for Russia, but Bismarck’s opinion
of him, formed during his embassy at St. Petersburg, is evident from
the following passage in the “Gedanken.” “Peter Schuvaloff, the most
far-seeing brain with which I came into contact there, a man who only
needed industry to play a leading part” (Vol, II., p. 244).
It is disappointing to find Lord Beaconsfield hardly mentioned in
Bismarck’s reminiscences. He had found his match and there was, perhaps,
a slight unwillingness (great men are not always above small vanities),
to allude to the man who, far more than himself, was master of the
situation during the Congress; but Berlin has not yet forgotten the
historic words with which he summed up his impressions of that famous
meeting: “Der alte Jude ist der Mann”—“The old Jew is the man.” It was
a great, if involuntary, tribute! The ordering of the special train,
which brought Bismarck post-haste to “the old Jew’s” quarters and forced
England’s views upon the panic-stricken Congress, was a volcanic triumph
such as has rarely, if ever, been equalled in diplomacy. That is how
peace with honour was carried back to England, to be proclaimed to the
eager crowd from a window in Downing Street.
There was one amusing incident in connection with the Berlin Congress:
one day it was announced that on the morrow Lord Beaconsfield was to
address the assembled statesmen and that he would speak in French. Lord
Odo Russell, who was a master of tongues, heard this with no little
alarm, for it was well known that Lord Beaconsfield’s French was very
much of the Stratford-atte-Bowe type. Lord Odo, always clever, went to
him and adroitly turned the conversation on to the next day’s conference.
Lord Beaconsfield announced his intention of speaking. “In what language
do you propose to speak?” asked Lord Odo. “In French,” was the answer. “I
am afraid that will be a very great disappointment to the colleagues,”
said Lord Odo. “You see, they know that they have here in you the
greatest living master of English oratory, and of course they are longing
to hear you.” The great man smiled his pleasure, and the speech was
delivered in English. Lord Odo was wont to declare that he never knew
whether he took the hint or accepted the compliment.
Poschinger, in his “Conversations with Prince Bismarck,” records the
following appreciation by the latter of Lord Beaconsfield during the
Berlin Congress: “I frequently had him to spend the evening with us; as
he was unwell he only came on the condition of being alone, and I thus
had many an opportunity of getting to know him well. I must say that, in
spite of his fantastic novel writing, he is a capable statesman, far
above Gortchakoff and many others. It was easy to transact business with
him; in a quarter of an hour you knew exactly how you stood with him;
the limits to which he was prepared to go were clearly defined, and a
rapid summary soon precised matters. Beaconsfield speaks magnificent and
melodious English, and has a good voice; he spoke nothing but English
at the Congress. The Crown Princess asked me about this time whether
Beaconsfield did not speak French very beautifully. I answered that I
had not heard anything of it up till then. ‘But in the Congress?’ she
inquired further. ‘He only speaks English,’ said I; ‘and here she dropped
the conversation,’ added the Chancellor in English, with a significant
gesture of his hand.”[38]
As regards what Bismarck called his “fantastic novel writing,” there may
be a word to be said. Perhaps of all his writings the one to which the
epithet “fantastic” might the most righteously be applied was “Lothair,”
and yet even in that book, of which superficial readers spoke with
some contempt, persons of more penetrating philosophical and political
judgment perceived depths which were unsuspected by the vulgar herd of
circulating-library subscribers. Lord Russell, for instance—no friend to
the author—expressed his amazement that people should fail to see what
deep significance underlay the gaudy trappings. In his view it was the
book of a political seer; and he was right. Did it not forewarn us of the
dangers of the Commune? The fiction of the novel-writer was in his hands
a vehicle for impressing the truths of the politician as they appeared to
him.
“Born in a library,” as he said of himself, he had amassed a rich store
of out-of-the-way book-lore, and would often puzzle the reporters with
some quotation that was quite new to them. I remember a speech to the
point (not that Horace could be called an out-of-the-way book), in which
he said that if anybody should disagree with him “naviget Anticyras.”[39]
This plunged the newspapers into the blackest of fogs. I met him the
next day and we laughed a good deal over their bewilderment and their
struggles to get out of the gloom. “Let this be a lesson to you, my dear
boy, never to use a quotation with which the reporters are not familiar.”
One day when he was in the House of Lords he was attacked by the Duke
of Argyll upon an Indian question, as to which he was only partially
instructed, and in his reply he made some hideous blunder which
fortunately nobody detected. Monty Corry, who had been listening on
tenterhooks, was waiting for him outside, and they walked away together,
as usual. “How could you make such a mistake?” asked Monty, “it was
uncommonly lucky that nobody found you out.” Lord Beaconsfield stopped
dead short, reflected for a second or two, and then said gravely and
solemnly: “My dear Monty, God is great! And upon my word I think He grows
greater and greater every day!”
I don’t think that he had much love for the Duke of Argyll. When Lord
Grey de Wilton (I think it was) spoke upon the address to the Queen at
an opening of Parliament he alluded to the Prime Minister as the “man at
the helm not to be spoken to.” The Duke presently got up and delivered
one of his slashing party speeches, in which his noble voice rang out
like a trumpet: “The noble lord has spoken of the man at the helm. My
Lords, there is _no_ man at the helm.” Lord Beaconsfield sat sphinx-like,
immovable, unreadable—but I do not think he liked it.
When it was expected that he would make a great speech in the House of
Lords the red benches were crowded. I once was present at the bar of the
House when an Indian question was raised by the Duke of Argyll in a very
powerful oration. Dizzy got up and answered the Duke, saying that the
papers would shortly be laid, and that he hoped the Duke would read them
“with pleasure and profit.” That was all—there was no speech, and great
disappointment. That time I don’t think the Duke liked it.
[Illustration: LORD BEACONSFIELD AND LORD ROWTON.
_From the “Vanity Fair” cartoon by Leslie Ward (“Spy”), by permission of
the Editor._]
One evening—it must have been in 1880, or very early in 1881—I met Lord
Beaconsfield at a dinner-party at Lady Airlie’s. He was in high good
humour, and when he had greeted the hostess came up to me and said, “We
have been having great fun in the House of Lords—a first-rate set-to
between the Duke of Argyll and Lytton.” I asked who got the best of
it. “Lytton! He gave the Duke two black eyes and a bloody nose.” Then
Matthew Arnold came up, and he changed the subject. I wondered if he
was thinking of the day when he acted as bottleholder to James Clay[40]
in his great fight with the skipper at Constantinople. He was very
proud of “Bob” Lytton, the son of his old friend—the man whom he made
Governor-General of India—recognizing in him a certain Oriental colouring
and poetic mysticism in which there was a kinship to his own genius.
Biography has so far scarcely done justice to Lord Beaconsfield’s memory.
Monypenny’s scholarly book is a wonderful example of the infinite
capacity for taking pains, but it altogether lacks that personal note
which is so attractive in the best biographies—Boswell’s “Johnson,”
Trevelyan’s “Macaulay,” Morley’s “Gladstone,” “The Life of Lord Randolph
Churchill,” are delightful, not only as history, but also and mainly
because of the long, intimate and personal connection in each case
between the writer and his subject.
It is difficult to say who could have given us a perfectly satisfactory
life of Disraeli, handing down to posterity a living picture of the man.
Lord Rowton had all the materials, but he suffered from acute laziness,
and there is nothing to show that he had the gift of penmanship. Henry
Calcraft, had he lived, might have done it. He knew Lord Beaconsfield as
intimately as it would be possible for a younger man to know one so much
his elder. He was very much behind the scenes in politics, and he could
write. I know no one else who could have had so much chance of success.
Monypenny’s book is like a posthumous portrait painted from photographs
in memory of a great man, by one who never knew him—it is wanting in
the life spark which only sittings could give. The study is excellent
history, but how one longs for those deft touches which belong to what
Goethe called “the world of the eye.” Mr. Buckle, on the other hand, in
his continuation has been more successful. He has contrived to breathe
soul into the cold marble statue of the first two volumes, and makes his
reader regret that he did not undertake the work from the beginning.
Disraeli’s veneration for his father, his love for his sister and
correspondent, Sarah, the tender reverence and gratitude in which he
embalmed the memory of his wife, his faithful, unswerving allegiance
to his friends, dead and alive, all these are traits in his character,
which could hardly be told with living force save by those who heard his
familiar talk, and listened to the music of a far-off sorrow which would
sometimes come into that noble voice. Happily he himself in his “Letters
Home,” and indirectly in his novels, has told us much of all this.
One morning, when he was living in Downing Street, I went to see him. It
happened to be the Queen’s birthday, and after we had sat talking for a
little while he made me give him my arm to walk across to the Foreign
Office and see the preparations for his official dinner. We stood looking
at the table, the flowers and all the glittering furniture of a great
state banquet, when all of a sudden he turned round, his eyes were dim,
and his voice husky, as he said: “Ah! my dear fellow, you are happy, you
have a wife.” He was thinking of that devoted lady who could literally
endure torture for his sake, and whose help he sorely missed to the end
of his days.
The story of her heroic devotion on a memorable occasion is so old that
it may be almost new. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer and was to make
a great speech. Mrs. Disraeli drove with him to the House, where she was
to leave him. In shutting the carriage the footman jammed her hand in the
door; the agony was excruciating, but she sat like grim death and uttered
never a word lest she should distract him at a moment when he needed all
his wits; when he left the carriage she fell back in a dead faint! All
her thoughts, all her heart, were centred in her husband and his fame;
he knew it, and was deeply grateful. She was older than he was, but had
been pretty, and as the widow of his colleague in the representation
of Maidstone she brought him a comfortable little private gentleman’s
fortune; but the expenses of public life were great, and I doubt whether,
even in spite of the legacy which he received from Mrs. Brydges Williams,
he was ever financially quite at his ease.
Of art for the sake of the beauty that is in it I do not think that he
had any very great appreciation—sculpture galleries, the glories of
Holbein, Raphael, Van Dyck, Sir Joshua, Gainsborough and the great
masters seemed to appeal to him chiefly as the fitting appanage of
powerful nobles and stately palaces. Just as Kant saw in pictures no
more than the vanity of the man who hung them up, so to Disraeli they
were sacred rather as representing pedigree and tradition than as the
inspiration of genius in the artist and a source of æsthetic pleasure to
the possessor.
On music I have heard him descant with but slight discrimination; but
success always appealed to him, and so he would be moved by the fame
of a great musician, or a great painter, whose art might perhaps fail
to stir his pulses. If he was as callous in these matters as I imagine
him to have been, it is curious that the only time when I saw him show
any excitement—for he was past master in the art of concealing what he
felt—should have been about a matter connected with art.
Sir Francis Grant died in 1878, and there was to be an election to the
honour of President of the Royal Academy. On the evening of the election
my wife and I dined at a very small party at Kensington Palace. I sat
next to Lord Beaconsfield. Before dinner was announced he asked me
whether I had heard anything as to the chances of the election. I told
him that I knew that Horsley was a rival candidate, but that he could not
have much prospect of beating Leighton. “Surely they will never be so
foolish as to elect anybody else. He is the very man for the place.” More
than once during dinner he returned eagerly to the subject, in which he
took no pains to hide his interest. “Ah! well!” I remember his saying at
last, looking at the clock, “it’s all over by now.”
I have spoken of his familiarity with rather out-of-the-way books. Upon
one occasion we were talking of Schliemann’s discoveries at Troy and of
Lowe’s refusal, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, to purchase
the contents of King Priam’s treasure house—a decision which I greatly
regretted. I mentioned that Lowe snuffed out the suggestion with a
quotation: “Etiam periere ruinæ” was all that he said. “Ah!” said Lord
Beaconsfield, “from Lucan’s ‘Pharsalia,’ a fine poem.” The quotation is
of course well known, but as Lucan is not one of the authors whom the
head masters have taken under their wing, I much doubt whether there
were two men in the two Houses of Parliament who could have said offhand
whence it came, or have given an opinion as to the merits of the poem.
Deeply read as he was, I never heard him talk of modern literature. The
only comparatively modern book that I knew him to praise was “Walpole’s
Letters.” Of those he spoke with enthusiasm: “No man need be dull who
possesses ‘Walpole’s Letters.’” Indeed, although he was himself a man of
letters, and had the deepest veneration for his father as a literary man,
he had but little knowledge of the writers of his own day. Probably he
was too much absorbed by politics to care for the society of the literary
brotherhood. On one occasion he asked me whether there was any man whom
he could invite to his official dinner on the Queen’s birthday as the
representative of letters.
His answer to a fine lady who at one of the Foreign Office parties asked
him “whether he wanted a really good novel?” raised much laughter. “My
dear, when I want a good novel I write it.”
Lord Beaconsfield as an actor was inimitable. He was a master of stage
effect, and he never gave a better example of his histrionic powers
than when, in 1877, he was attacked upon his appointment of Mr. Pigott
to the Controllership of the Stationery Office, which a committee of
the House of Commons had declared ought to be filled by a professional
stationer and printer. Ignoring this for wise and practical reasons,
when the office became vacant he appointed to the post, which was worth
£1,500 a year, Mr. Pigott, a clerk in the War Office. The truffle dogs
of the House of Commons scented a job, and yapped all the more fiercely
when they found out that Mr. Pigott was the son of the former rector
of Hughenden. The Conservative Whips somehow mismanaged the affair,
and a vote of censure was passed in the lower House by a majority of
four votes. There was a great commotion in the country and the _Times_
condemned the appointment as “too splendidly audacious.”
I went to the House of Lords to hear the great man’s answer to all this
hubbub. Never shall I forget the air of dejection, the hangdog look,
with which he entered the House. His head was bent, his gait uncertain,
and he sat down wearily beside the Duke of Richmond. When the clerk of
the Parliaments called upon him he rose slowly and proceeded to explain
the motives which had led him to the selection of Mr. Pigott. Then came
the personal note. “My Lords, it has been said in an assembly almost as
classical as that which I am addressing, that this appointment was a
job—that the father of Mr. Pigott was the parson of my parish, that I
had relations of long and intimate friendship with him, that he busied
himself in county elections, and that in my earlier contests in the
county with which I am connected I was indebted to his exertions. My
Lords, this is really a romance.”
Here his face began to brighten. “Thirty years ago there was a vicar of
my parish of the name of Pigott, and he certainly was father to this
gentleman. He did not owe his preferment to me, nor was he ever under
any obligation to me. Shortly after I succeeded to the property Mr.
Pigott gave up his living and retired to a distant county. I have never
had any relations with him. With regard to our intimate friendship and
his electioneering assistance, all I know of his interference in county
elections is”—here he drew himself up to his full height and looked round
the House with his hands in his favourite attitude, one on each hip with
the thumbs turned outwards—“is that before he departed from the County of
Buckingham he registered his vote against me.” The effect was electric;
the House of Lords for once was galvanized into something like life, and
as he sat down radiant and triumphant amid the cheers and laughter of the
good peers, I felt that I never had seen, and never again should see, so
fine a piece of acting. The Lord Beaconsfield who walked out of the House
that evening with a firm step was twenty years younger than the poor old
man, borne down with care, and the weight of years who had shuffled into
it so feebly an hour earlier.
The House of Commons apologized. Is this unique?
In June, 1879, London was stirred by the news of the death of the Prince
Imperial in the Zulu war. That afternoon Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay had
invited a few people to see the pictures at the Grosvenor Gallery. As
I was going away I met Lord Beaconsfield on the stairs. He stopped me.
“This is terrible news,” he said. “Yes,” I answered, “and I am afraid
that the French will accuse our people of having deserted him and left
him to his fate.” “I am not so sure that they will be wrong,” he said,
and then after a pause, he added, “Well! my conscience is clear. I did
all that I could to stop his going. But what can you do when you have
to deal with two obstinate women?” With that he went on up the stairs,
leaving me under the impression that he wished what he had said to be
repeated.
The Empress overpersuaded the Queen, and the Prince went out. It was
a wild-cat scheme, for he was sent out with no status in the army and
therefore with no object, but the Empress thought that being a Buonaparte
fighting would give him and the dynasty prestige with his people—and so
an important life which could not but have weighed in the history of
Europe was sacrificed. He was a gallant lad, with good abilities, and a
great favourite with his contemporaries at our military college of whom
my brother-in-law was one and a great friend of his. I only met him once,
but was much struck by his charm of manner.
The weaknesses of great men should be recorded, otherwise anything in the
shape of a memoir, or even sketch, becomes what a German critic would
call a mere _Ja und Amen Buch_. Lord Beaconsfield’s weakness consisted in
occasionally, perhaps unconsciously, borrowing a good saying or epigram
which had struck his imagination and serving it up as his own. In the
famous case of his speech on the death of the Duke of Wellington he went
a step further and translated verbatim a speech or essay by Thiers on the
qualities which go to make up a great Captain.
Of course this was duly shown up[41] and was the subject of much ridicule
at the time—but he lived it down as he did all his other mistakes;
all men, great and small, make mistakes, but whereas the small men are
drowned, the great men rise up again; that is one true sign of greatness.
Almost his last speech, certainly his last great speech, was delivered
on March the 4th, 1881, upon the subject of the proposed evacuation of
Candahar, against which he fought stoutly and eloquently. In that speech
he used these words which have been preserved as a classical utterance:
“But, my Lords, the key of India is not Herat or Candahar. The key of
India is London.”
Prince Lobanoff was at that time Russian ambassador, and three years
later, when he was Chancellor of the Empire, we met at Contrexéville,
and used to breakfast, drive out, and dine together every day. He
talked a great deal of his London days and of his admiration for Lord
Beaconsfield. But he told me that the day before the delivery of the
Candahar speech he called in Curzon Street and had a long talk with
Lord Beaconsfield on the Indian question—the Russian question, as it
was called in England at that time. Lord Beaconsfield said: “We cannot
evacuate Candahar, for it is the key of India.” Prince Lobanoff answered:
“No! London is the key of India.” “Le lendemain il a reproduit mon mot
dans son fameux discours!”
Prince Lobanoff, by the by, was a great wit and a very accomplished
man. His collection of books, papers, pasquinades and MSS. concerning
the great French Revolution was unique. His sudden and tragic death
at Schepetowka when travelling in the suite of the Tsar on the return
journey from Vienna to Kiew on the 30th of August, 1896, meant a great
loss not only to Russia, but to his foreign friends. For a Russian
statesman and diplomatist he was singularly outspoken. We were talking
once about Russian politics. In answer to an observation of mine as to
the personal power of the Tsar he remarked: “Yes! so long as he is in
accord with the policy of his ministers. Lorsqu’un Empereur de Russie a
voulu s’opposer à la volonté de ses ministres, on a toujours trouvé moyen
de s’en débarrasser.” I was amazed!
Seldom has the month of March been more cruel, even in England, than it
was in 1881. The weather was bitter, and the blighting east wind seemed
to reduce men’s skin to powder. About the middle of the month we heard
that Lord Beaconsfield was ailing. The old story, a slight chill. At
first there was no anxiety, but when men were told after some days that
he was still in bed, they began to shake their heads. That sick bed in a
dull Curzon Street house (No. 19) was watched by some half dozen faithful
friends, Rowton, Barrington and two or three others, who prayed, and
prayed in vain, that the east wind might cease, for the doctors had said
that all depended upon a change from the west bringing a little warm
moisture into the air. It was hoping against hope; day after day the
blasts, charged with all the filth of the great city, blew fiercely and
yet more fiercely, bringing poison to those parched lungs. On the 19th of
April he died, choked by London.
The mourning was universal all over the country; never, except in the
case of King Edward’s death, have I seen so much feeling shown; he had
won his way into the hearts of the people, who knew that in him England
had lost not only a great statesman but a true lover. A mighty man had
fallen. Even his political enemies admitted that he left a void which
could not be filled.
There was no public funeral—no gorgeous ceremony in Westminster Abbey
or St. Paul’s Cathedral. He had willed it otherwise. He was buried as
he wished to be, by the side of his dearly loved wife, almost under the
shadow of those trees which had been so much to him and which gave their
name to the county[42] with which he was so long bound up. “You may tire
of mountains and rivers, you may tire of the sea, but you can never tire
of trees,” was a favourite saying of his. And so we laid him in his
grave, simply, reverently. There was none of the paid panoply of woe, but
great grief and true mourning. Men of all ranks were there, colleagues
and foes.
As I stood by the open grave I happened to be next to Sir William
Harcourt. In all that concourse there was no sadder face than that of
the man who had been his enemy and his friend for so many years. No one
mourned him more sincerely than the Queen, whose faithful servant he
had been, and who rewarded him with an affectionate gratitude which was
characteristic of her. She visited his grave and laid upon it an offering
of primroses, with the inscription in her own hand, “His favourite
flower.” Alive she had loaded him with honours; when he was dead she paid
that last simple tribute of respect to his memory.
The “his” in the Queen’s inscription referred to the Prince Consort,
whose favourite flower the primrose was. Borthwick, Drummond Wolf and
others took it to refer to Lord Beaconsfield, and upon that mistake the
Primrose League was founded! Lord Beaconsfield loved all trees and all
flowers except the chrysanthemum—“the only vulgar flower”—he once said to
me; but chrysanthemums have been wonderfully improved since his day. The
Queen had been in the habit of talking much to Lord Beaconsfield about
the Prince Consort, and his sympathy never failed her. He would have
understood the Queen’s meaning when she spoke of “his” favourite flower.
It was a tender and a gracious thought to lay upon that grave a nosegay
of the humble flower which was dear to her because it had been dear to
the husband whom she had lost and whom she had never ceased to mourn.
In the month of June I had to go and see Dean Stanley in order to settle
with him the place in Westminster Abbey for Lord Beaconsfield’s statue—a
last sad duty in connection with the dead Chief. The Dean suggested the
position where the statue now stands—I concurred—“and,” said he, “I
shall put Gladstone there, facing him.” Very shortly afterwards I had
to go abroad, and at St. Moritz I received the news of the dear Dean’s
death. Mr. Gladstone, whom he intended to “place there,” survived him by
seventeen years.
That was the last time that I saw Dean Stanley, with whom I often had
official relations, rendered the pleasanter in that he was a connection
of my wife’s and the much loved friend of her family. As we were leaving
the Abbey, I made some remark about the vandals who carve and write their
names in the most sacred places. “Yes,” he said, “but even in these
outrages there are sometimes compensations,” and he led me to a place
where, scratched on the wall, were the letters I. W., saying, “Isaac
Walton, I truly believe.”
Dean Stanley was a little man, insignificant in stature, rather shabbily
dressed, with a sharply cut nose and chin, a keen, penetrating look.
His lustrous eyes would sometimes blaze up as if lighted by some hidden
flame. He was not exactly eloquent, nor great in conversation. But when
he was excited his enthusiasm was arresting and infectious. His great
charm was universally acknowledged even by his bitterest theological
opponents, and personally, everybody loved him, from the Queen downwards.
He and his wife were among her trustiest friends. His attitude to the
dogmas of the Churches was that of St. Paul to “Jewish fables.” His
Christianity was the teaching of Christ. I have often thought that,
unless the haziest of traditions be absolutely worthless, the small,
eager, dark man that was St. Paul must have been very like Dean Stanley.
Both zealots, both fierce fighters, both so lovable.
One last word about Lord Beaconsfield. The abuse that has been showered
upon him would fill volumes. No less has been written in his defence. He
has been accused of being an adventurer, a pretentious fop, an impostor,
a self-seeking charlatan, who by some uncanny means contrived to cajole
the Tory party, and to become master of the landed gentry of England.
Nothing could be more untrue. Had he been what his detractors described
him, he never could have won the confidence of perhaps the most exclusive
caste in the whole world.
Benjamin Disraeli was an aristocrat to his fingers’ tips. He belonged
by descent to the Sephardim, that proud race of Jews who, “in the time
of Cicero, had been settled immemorially in Spain.”[43] Theirs was a
nobility which dated back by tradition to Abraham, that Arab chieftain
whose wanderings from the fringe of the desert to Damascus and Padan-Aram
are recorded in the Book of Genesis. “That,” says a great writer who is
no friend to the Jews, “is nobility in the fullest sense of the word,
genuine nobility of race! Beautiful forms, noble heads, dignity in speech
and deportment ... that out of such men prophets and psalmists should go
forth, that I understood at the first glance.” Those words might stand
for a portrait of Disraeli.
The aristocracy to which he belonged sprang from another continent,
another world from ours; but alien though it might be, it brought
him into close sympathy with the bluest blood in England, and that,
I take it, is why he was able to gain an intimate personal influence
in the inner sanctuaries of politics and of society which had never
been achieved by men springing from the middle class, not even by Sir
Robert Peel. “When I was a young and struggling man,” he is reported
to have said shortly before his death, “they taunted me with being an
adventurer. Now that I have succeeded they still bring the same reproach
against me. Me! whose ancestors may have had personal relations with the
Queen of Sheba!” It was a jest expressing a conviction, for, like the
poet Heine—also a Jew by birth, a Christian by confession, in whom the
Philhellenic attraction of years paled before the romance of the Old
Testament—as he grew older he became more and more imbued with a sacred
sense of ancestry.
No mere vulgar adventurer could have welded into shape the Young England
party—his first great political achievement. Lord John Manners, Baillie
Cochrane (Lord Lamington), George Smythe, afterwards Lord Strangford,
were men of family, high culture, and distinction. Not for one moment
would they have admitted to their intimacy, and fallen under the sway
of, a man whom they did not deem their equal. But Benjamin Disraeli,
the descendant of the Princes of the Desert, possessed a magnetic spark
of the mysterious sacred fire which made him as welcome to those great
Dames who ruled Almack’s with a rod of iron as to Kensington Gore,
where D’Orsay was King and Lady Blessington Queen of a society half
aristocratic, half Bohemian, wholly delightful. This it was which finally
enabled him to win over and mould to his purpose the haughty magnates of
the Carlton Club.
Almost all his associations, almost all his friends, were among those
whose forbears had made history. He was fascinated by the power of race,
though sometimes he could not help remembering that even the descendants
of Crusaders were but the mushroom aristocracy of a single night by the
side of those of the courtiers of King Solomon. “Don’t talk to me of
dukes! Dukes can be made!” he said impatiently on a memorable occasion
when a great public dinner was kept waiting for a duke who was to take
the chair. But those were mere passing whims. To the end the ladies
whose society he courted were those who had been foremost queens of
fashion in his boyish days. The Russian Ambassador might sneer at them as
being “toutes grand’mères,”—for Dizzy, their race endowed them with the
charm of eternal youth; he enwrapped them in a poetical halo which had
the magic power of the Fontaine de Jouvence. Chief among them were the
three beautiful Forester sisters—Lady Chesterfield, Mrs. Anson and Lady
Bradford. Mrs. Anson died comparatively young, but the other two sisters
reigned as goddesses in his Olympus so long as he lived. Tithonus grows
old; Aurora never.
Among his male friends there was none of whom he spoke with such
affectionate admiration as he did of Count D’Orsay. Dandy, wit and
artist, recognized as the handsomest man of his day, the grandson of
a King, the spoilt child of society in Paris and London—the brilliant
Frenchman appealed to an Oriental imagination which, as is well known,
was always dazzled by splendour and colour. I never saw Count D’Orsay,
for he died when I was but fifteen years old, and he had left England for
a year or two before that; but according to the testimony of such various
men as my father, Lord Beaconsfield, Jem Macdonald, Alfred Montgomery,
and others he must have been a striking personality, exceptionally gifted
and attractive. Even the great Duke of Wellington could not resist his
fascination.
I have already mentioned some of the men to whom Dizzy was attached, but
there was one for whom he entertained an especial liking and respect,
though in him, as his estimate of him quoted by Monypenny shows, he was
sensible of some shortcomings. Apart from ancient lineage, which he
lacked, Lord Lyndhurst possessed many of the beauties, both of mind and
form, in which Lord Beaconsfield recognized the hero. When I knew him the
ex-Chancellor was a very old man, for he died at the age of ninety-one
in 1863. Aged as he was, his mind was as active and bright as ever, and
though he wore a wig, he retained to the end something more than traces
of the splendid masculine beauty for which he had once been famous. I
have heard men say that when he delivered one of his great speeches he
was as good to look upon as he was to hear. He was at one time threatened
with blindness, but mercifully his eyes were saved. It was a green old
age, noble and beautiful, tended by the love of wife and daughter.
His memory was prodigious. I remember one remarkable instance of it. I
was dining one night at his house in George Street, Hanover Square, when
there were two or three racing grandees present—among them Baron Meyer de
Rothschild (Lady Rosebery’s father), Sir Robert Peel, and Lord Coventry.
Baron Meyer had at that time a mare called Tomyris about which there was
some excitement among Turfites. “Baron, what made you call that mare of
yours Tomȳris?” asked Sir Robert, with a strong accent on the second
syllable. “I’m sure I don’t know,” answered the Baron, “I suppose because
she’s by King Tom.” But the old Lord had caught Sir Robert’s false
quantity. “Tomȳris! who said Tomȳris?” he asked. “Don’t you remember the
story of Tomȳris the Queen of the Massagetæ who conquered and killed
Cyrus?” and then he went off at score telling the gruesome legend of
how, to avenge the death of her son, she caused the dead King’s head to
be cut off and put into a skin filled with human blood, saying: “You
wanted to drink blood, now drink your fill of it!” And then the old Lord
added: “You will find the whole story at the end of the first book of
Herodotus.” When I got home I looked up the passage. Surely a marvellous
example of memory.
Immersed as he had been in law and politics for seventy years—a
life-time—how many years must have passed since he could have had leisure
to read Herodotus? Outside his own house I never met him but once. There
was a great ball at Apsley House, and the grand old Chancellor had
himself carried upstairs and wheeled into the ballroom to see the young
folk dance. I was standing by his chair when the Duke of Wellington came
up to bid him welcome. There was a touch of pathos in the handsome old
man’s voice as he said, “Ah! time was when I used to skip up those stairs
gaily enough, when I came to see your dear father.” The great Duke was
but three years older than Lord Lyndhurst, but he had already been dead
some ten years. The two had not only been political allies when Lord
Lyndhurst was Chancellor in the Duke’s Administration, but they were firm
friends, and the affection lived in the survivor when the friendship had
ceased to be aught but a happy memory.
To us who loved him, Lord Beaconsfield remains a brilliant and an
inspiring memory; of those who did not love him I believe that none would
now even listen to the malignity with which he was once assailed. Though
they disapprove of his principles, they admit that he was actuated by no
selfish motives and that under his rule England was governed in a spirit
of true patriotism. That verdict would have been the realization of all
his ambition.