which he asserts should be surrounded by "a generous aristocracy;"
and he wishes, moreover, for a people who shall be "loyal and
reverentially religious." All this certainly sounds as if it meant
something very satisfactory. It is only when you try to penetrate into
it that your over-curiosity leads to perplexity. Neither Mr. Disraeli
nor Lord Beaconsfield has ever definitely explained, for example, how
far a throne being "real" means that he or she sitting upon it shall
have a personal veto. All that you can quite clearly make out as to
securing "generousness" in the aristocracy is that they shall not be
Whigs; you may suppose that they ought to be, and, in fact, no doubt
would be, Tories. Pushed strictly home, it would seem to be implied
that every peer who holds property which once belonged to the Church
should be stripped of it, and it might be construed to mean that they
should become commoners. Then, as to the people at large, how are they
to be made loyal and religious, since it seems that they are
neither of these now? From not the least important parts of Lord
Beaconsfield's teaching, the first step logically to be taken with
this view would be to ask the vote back from all of them who now have
it. His own Household Franchise Bill will have given more work to
do in this way. But the passing of that mysterious measure has been
explained,--it was, at the moment, a necessary piece of party tactics.
Strictly regarded, the explanation points to the conclusion that, if
it could be done safely, the Act ought to be revoked to-morrow. But,
certainly, it was no such measure as that he relied upon for elevating
the condition of the people. What he did depend upon for doing it he
has specified, and it is this,--the revival of Church Convocation on
a particular basis, of which he knows the exact measurement. Possibly
the reader, if he is not a political partisan, is growing puzzled.
"Was nothing else," he may ask, "proposed in the Disraelian system for
the cure of popular evils?" This, certainly, was not the whole of what
it included some mention of. For example, the preface to "Lothair"
states that one of Lord Beaconsfield's aims always was the
establishment of what he terms "a commercial code on the principles
successfully negotiated by----" No, it was not by Cobden and Bright,
for it will be remembered Lord Beaconsfield did not adhere to
that: but the full sentence runs,--"successfully negotiated by Lord
Bolingbroke at Utrecht." He farther states that it is a principle with
him that labour requires regulating no less than property. I myself
cannot assert that I ever met with any one who professed to understand
what this means; but "labour," and "regulating," and "property" are
very good words, and if there has not been a great waste of language,
the remark must signify a good deal. His system, also, does really
make allusion to the electorate, for it specifies as another of his
cherished purposes, "the emancipation of the constituencies of 1832."
Other people used, in an old-fashioned way, to talk of enfranchising
non-electors; but it is the voters that Lord Beaconsfield is for
emancipating. The two most definite statements of his political
theory are to be found in "Sybil," where he makes Gerard say that
"the natural leaders of the people, and their only ones, are the
aristocracy;" and adds, through the mouth of somebody else, that "the
Church has deserted the people," to which he attributes their having
become "degraded."
One of Lord Beaconsfield's very strongest points has always been this
physical and moral degradation of the people. He has talked about it
so much that it has nearly seemed that he had got some plan for doing
something for it. In the sketches he gives in "Sybil" of the homes in
Marner, the dens in which the working classes dwell, and the squalor
of their condition, he nearly touches the heart. It somehow has
an effect almost identical with the sentiment of the most advanced
Liberal politics until you come to the remedies proposed. The use
which Lord Beaconsfield makes of the towns in his teaching is worth
noting. Any one who scrutinizes it closely will see that his ideal
social system is the rustic one of the country parish, taking always
for granted that it is perfect; and he kindly goes for examples of
social failure to the towns,--the origin and condition of which,
according to all strict reasoning, he must be supposed to attribute to
the Whig nobility. How accurately this fits in with what is known of
the development of modern manufactures every reader will know.
If anybody should say that he cannot see any accuracy in the
above version of the national history, and that there is no real
applicability to our affairs in such a system, or, as such an one
would perhaps style it, pretended system of politics, I can only
reply that if he is under the impression that he is an admirer of
Lord Beaconsfield, then this is very sad. For these are certainly Lord
Beaconsfield's views of our history and the scheme of his politics.
Neither of them, I will venture to add, surprises me. It seems to me
that if a political Will-o'-the-Wisp, such as the Liberals for so long
a time would make out Lord Beaconsfield to be, got into the top-boots
and heavy coat of an English squire, these are just the historical
conclusions and political generalizations which he would make, when
he began trying to think like a country gentleman; and, for anything
I can say, he would make them with a certain sincerity, that kind of
ratiocinative working being natural to the Will-o'-the-Wisp intellect,
when smitten with a passion for Parliamentary life and an aspiration
for counterfeiting philosophy. Moreover, both the home politics and
the foreign policy seem to me exactly to fit; they really each display
like qualities of mind, and I can see no reason for any one who can
accept the latter stickling at the former. If what is really at the
bottom of the objection is, as I suspect it is, a feeling that there
is something flimsy, artificial, flashy about either, or both, the
politics and the policy, is not that asking too much from the light
glittering source I have described? The Liberals have always done Lord
Beaconsfield the justice of never expecting more than this from him,
and he, on his side, has never disappointed their expectations. If
they had not previously thought much of him in connection with foreign
policy, never in fact believing that he would actually preside at a
critical juncture long enough for that question much to signify, there
is not a person in our party who would not have known beforehand that
any foreign policy of Lord Beaconsfield, if the occasion for one
ever came, would be one of dazzle--Jack-o'-Lantern diplomacy and
Will-o'-the-Wisp home politics rightly belonging to one another.
The bright and bewildering flashes have now for a long time been
ceaselessly playing here and there all over Europe from the direction
of London; now hitting St. Petersburg; now gilding Berlin; then
flickering over Constantinople; flaming terribly at Cabul; quivering
at the Cape; striking Egypt at short intervals; and shimmering their
mildest at Paris. The activity, as was likely in such a case, has been
unprecedented. My own conviction is that Lord Beaconsfield has amazed,
perplexed, it may be astounded, foreign diplomatists throughout Europe
quite as much as he has done any of his opponents at home.
What fitness, I should like to ask, has Lord Beaconsfield ever shown
for appreciating the great events which, during his time, have
gone forward in the world. During this generation, two stupendous
rearrangements of States, completely recasting all the international
relationships of Western Europe, have taken place--the unification
of Italy and the transformation of Prussia into a German Empire.
Political earthquakes like those do not come about all in a moment;
these two were, in fact, long in preparation; there were throes, there
were signs, there were symptoms. Some English statesmen--we could name
several on the Liberal side--read the intimations rightly. But
what subtle diplomatic sensitiveness did they challenge in Lord
Beaconsfield--what preternaturally quick prognostications had he
of the foreign marvels that were about to happen? Look first to the
Prussian transformation. He severely blamed Chevalier Bunsen for
indulging what he styled "the dreamy and dangerous nonsense called
German nationality." Turn to Italy. Lord Beaconsfield characterized
the earliest attempts of those patriots determined to win back
national life or die as "mere brigandage." He spoke of the "phantom
of a United Italy." All the world knows that so late even as the
publication of his novel, "Lothair," he was under the impression that
everything that had happened in the Italian peninsula and in Sicily
was the work of a few secret societies, of whom Garibaldi was the
figure-head. Take another example. He glossed over the former policy
of the Austrian rulers towards Hungary, as innocent as the youngest
baby in any cradle in any of our embassies, of discerning that in a
few years it would be Hungary that would dominate the empire. In fact,
Lord Beaconsfield has never shown the slightest true prevision of
anything that was to happen abroad. But I must not be so unfair as
to forget that Lord Beaconsfield took the side of the North in the
American Civil War. Accidents will happen at times in the play of any
kind of intellect; and this, at the very moment, had something of the
appearance of being an abnormality of the Disraelian mind. When you
look into the instance more closely, it proves not fully to contradict
the other cases. Mr. Disraeli uttered a prophecy as to the future
of America, and it was this: "It will be a mart of arms, a scene of
diplomacies, of rival States, and probably of frequent wars."
The result has vindicated his Lordship--nothing of the sort has
happened.[1] Come, however, still nearer home. The French Commercial
Treaty, which was the first practical attempt to bring the peoples
on each side of the Channel into real intercourse, sure to make
them permanent friends in the end, was urgently opposed by Lord
Beaconsfield. It was towards him that Mr. Cobden had to turn at
every stage of his nearly superhuman labours to see what was the next
obstacle he would have to set himself to try and overcome.
I venture to say that the foreign policy of such a Minister is certain
to end in being one of isolation. Jack-o'-Lantern is always so busy
in converting all he does into some private business of his own, that,
by-and-by, he is sure to be alone in the transaction. Let us test the
diplomatic situation as it now stands, by this rule, and, if it turns
out that the English diplomacy has really established concert on our
part with anybody, it will have of necessity to be admitted by me that
I have been quite wrong in all that is said above. The position I take
up is that a Will-o'-the-Wisp could not in his movements bring himself
to coincide long enough with anybody else's activity to give any such
result.
France is nearer to us than any other Continental Power, not only
geographically but politically. How has the recent foreign policy
turned out with respect to her? Our very first diplomatic move,
that of hastily snatching at the Suez Canal shares, risked our
understanding with France entirely. We do not hear much about Egypt
now from the supporters of the Government. There are good reasons for
it. Nothing could possibly have resulted worse than everything we did
in that quarter. France did not allow a march to be stolen upon her;
and the next moment we had Italy on our hands as well as France.
But come to the Berlin Conference. France there, in pursuance of a
traditional policy, backed up Greece. Lord Beaconsfield stood quite
aloof from France. Come down to the very latest moment. The alliance
between Germany and Austria is the one recent occurrence which is
of all others most distasteful to Frenchmen, and Lord Salisbury, on
behalf of his chief, not merely goes into slightly profane raptures
over it, but works hard to create the impression that they two,
indirectly though not directly, brought it about. This is how matters
have been made to stand between us and France. With respect to Germany
and Austria-Hungary, our Government is, of course, not within their
arrangements, but, practically there seems to be an outside relation
implied. Those two Powers are understood to reckon upon England as in
some way restraining France if Russia made any move. At any rate, if
France joined Russia, it is whispered, we should have to do something
which would somehow aid Austria and Germany. Why, Chancellor
Bismarck's chuckling at this position of things can distinctly be
heard all the way from Varzin. Prince Gortschakoff is by no means the
one at whom he is laughing hardest. Nothing need be said, I suppose,
as to our relations with Russia: it is the special boast of our
Government that in the case of the greatest Asiatic Power next to
ourselves they have prevented any understanding at all. Just so, too,
we have alienated Greece and the newly-formed Principalities. But
there is Turkey. All that we have done has told in her favour,--surely
we are at one with her? Lord Beaconsfield has just countermanded the
orders to our fleet to get up steam and direct the muzzles of its
guns towards Turkey. But a wonderful success, we are told, has already
resulted from this. What does the recent flourish of telegrams really
amount to? That the Porte has added one more sheet to the plentiful
waste-paper heap of its proclamations. What our people were known to
desire was a change of Minister: and Turkey, in place of that, offers
to name Baker Pasha to look after the moral and social improvement of
Asia Minor. The test of whether it is Will-o'-the-Wisp, or an ordinary
statesman, who is at the head of our affairs gives the result I
anticipated. England stands absolutely alone, and the last touch of
preposterousness is added to the situation by the statement that it
was at the advice of Russia that the Porte pretended to yield to our
demands, and that though the Northern Powers are getting into motion
again for some ends of their own, they do not in the least intend to
meddle with us in Asia Minor. Indeed, I should think not. A splendid
morass lies in that part of the world, with Turkey on one side and
Russia on the other, and Jack-o'-Lantern has led us right into the
middle of it. That is the present issue of the Beaconsfield foreign
policy which was to have produced European concert,--we have Asia
Minor on our hands, solitarily; and are going to set about immediately
reforming it, before the next elections, against the willingness of
Turkey, but with the sanction of Russia, and by the means of Baker
Pasha. In the meantime, or at any time, Russia may use the situation
against us just as best suits her.
I think it will now be admitted that Lord Beaconsfield's foreign
policy is every whit as wonderful as the measures of home politics he
ought to be urging, if he was only at liberty for that; and further,
that they both bespeak exactly the same order of mind.
* * * * *
I must now try to bring together the personal impressions his Lordship
makes on the mind of a Liberal. The noble Earl is very brilliant.
That, of course, is accepted on all sides: there never was a member
of the Wisp family who was not. Not to be brilliant would be against
their nature; in fact, shine is their peculiarity. Moreover, standing
now behind the event, we seem to see Lord Beaconsfield in Mr. Disraeli
from the very beginning. Those who had the privilege of beholding him
on his very first appearances in London high society, in, say, the
Countess of Blessington's _salon_, where he would be grouped with
Count D'Orsay, Prince Napoleon, and Count Morny, give a gorgeous
description of him. It seems that he did not depend for celebrity
solely upon his witticisms, either printed or spoken, but relied,
also, in some measure, on the splendour of his walking canes. The
jewels on his hands are said to have rivalled, and at times excelled,
the pearls upon his lips; the display in both respects bearing witness
that his native tastes were Oriental. His ringlets, in particular, are
said to have been the admiration, if not the envy, of the ladies. It
seemed almost necessary to give up a line or two to these personal
particulars, for the younger people of this generation never saw Mr.
Disraeli in his full splendour. As he developed his later powers,
he moderated his earlier waistcoats. But he never was an ordinary
commoner; he always moved in our public life like a superior being
in disguise. He was with us but not of us. Since he is an Earl, the
impression he makes has become more natural. The promotion to
our peerage gives to some personages an artificial aspect; in Mr.
Disraeli's case, the effect was simplifying; and though, after all,
it is not quite gorgeous enough, it is befitting. There is a
little something not quite in the English style,--a slight foreign
incongruity; still, that was always there, and it is, in fact, less
noticeable now under the coronet and beneath the ermine.
But--and this is the point sought to be brought out in the above
remarks--it was evident from the earliest moment that this splendid
person meant to achieve social success. And he has certainly done
it. There would be injustice in pretending that he has not had other
motives; but celebrity was his leading passion. He has himself made
a frank confession on this point. In the days when it was not yet
certain that there was a political career before him, the likelihood
rather being that he might have wholly to depend upon literature as
his means of distinction, he rushed into poetry, having just failed in
prose. But he warned the public in the preface of his "Revolutionary
Epick," that if they did not purchase and admire it, he had done with
song. "I am not," so ran the naïvely self-disclosing sentence, "one of
those who find consolation for the neglect of my contemporaries in the
imaginary plaudits of posterity." No, nothing in this world, we are
quite certain, would ever have consoled Mr. Disraeli for the neglect
of his contemporaries. But he took sure measures not to undergo it. He
positively raged to get into Parliament; trying one constituency
after another, and only succeeding with the fourth. To judge from the
fierceness of Mr. Disraeli's struggles, there was in his eyes nothing
worth living for, if he were not inside the House of Commons. But he
had got into the newspapers before he got into Parliament. The town
was kept ringing with Mr. Disraeli's name. In London he was just as
much talked of forty-seven years ago as he is to-day.
If the rudeness of a little terseness is passed over, I may fairly say
that publicity was Mr. Disraeli's passion; in the circumstances of
his position, audacity was his only means; and, with his style of
character and intellect, inaccuracy was his necessity. A very few
words will establish each point. Was he not studiously audacious? The
first book he wrote was a skit on the whole of the higher circle of
London society; the candidate he sought to set aside at his first
Parliamentary contest was the son of the then Premier; before he was
in Parliament he threatened O'Connell; he had not been in the House
long before he attacked Sir Robert Peel. It was a glorious audacity on
his part, considering the disadvantage of his race, to throw into the
face of the British public the supremacy of "Semitic" blood, and to
confound us all with the Asian Mystery. But, in turning next to his
inaccuracies, we are positively awed by the number and the enormity
of the blunders Mr. Disraeli and Lord Beaconsfield between them have
committed, in, as it would seem, the most natural way. It was a mere
trifle that, when propounding his second Budget, Mr. Disraeli should
have thought that he had a surplus to the _bagatelle_ amount of
£400,000, until Mr. Gladstone kindly explained to him and to the
country that it was a deficiency of that small sum. Some people would
be touched deeper to find that in his "Life of Lord George Bentinck"
he is of opinion that the crucifixion of the Saviour took place in the
reign of Augustus Cæsar. In the course of the debates on one of the
early Reform measures, he thought, when Lord Dunkellin made a
proposal relating to the "rental valuation" in connection with voting
qualification, that it was payment of rates that was in question. In
his oration on the death of the Duke of Wellington, he, as all Europe
soon knew, mistook long passages from an article written by M. Thiers
as being his own composition. He fell into just the same error as to
some splendid sentences of Lord Macaulay and also, as to a fine burst
of eloquence belonging really to the late Mr. David Urquhart. Very
early in his career, when acknowledging his health proposed by
mistake in the guise of an old scholar of the famous public school
of Winchester, he became momentarily under the impression that he was
really educated on that noble foundation, though he had never stood
under its roof. Very late in his career, so late as the affair known
as the Pigott appointment, he believed that the Rev. Mr. Pigott, the
rector of his own parish, had voted against him at the poll in his own
county some time after that reverend gentleman's death. But there
is really no end to these instances of Lord Beaconsfield having
innocently said the thing that is not. With respect to a number of
examples of another kind, it would be puzzling to know whether to put
them in the category of audacities or inaccuracies; the only way of
quite getting over the difficulty would, perhaps, be to consider them
as belonging to both. For instance, in 1847, he quoted Mr. J. S. Mill
as a friend of Protection, and said Mr. Pitt was the author of Free
Trade. On a not very far back occasion, he remarked: "I never attacked
any one in my life." Perhaps, with that quotation, it is right to
stop.
One of the peculiarities of Lord Beaconsfield's mind has seemed to
some people an affectation, that, namely, by which, in reference
to any case of much importance, he is sure to miss what seems to
everybody else the significant feature of the business, and to fasten
on some detail which arrests nobody else. Hardly any one will have yet
forgotten the instance of the "Straits of Malacca," and only just the
other day a new example was furnished. The revival of trade being the
topic, while everybody else's thoughts went to cotton and iron and
pottery, Lord Beaconsfield's lighted upon--chemicals. It is all
explained on the footing I earlier hinted, that in Lord Beaconsfield's
mind the imagination is in just the place the reason occupies in the
minds of ordinary people. This makes it obligatory that he shall avoid
the common facts, and make some opportunity for exaggerating the value
of some detail overlooked by everybody else. It is only in this way
that Lord Beaconsfield conclusively certifies to himself that his
intellect has really acted.
I am myself quite sincere in saying that I believe there is in all
this a certain kind of sincerity in Lord Beaconsfield. Where most
people remember, his Lordship fancies; and in his case what is most
convenient, naturally offers itself. This has very much increased his
brilliancy, for the process leaves its practiser utterly unhampered.
But nobody should ask for both strict accuracy and Lord Beaconsfield's
quick, free wit. It is demanding an unreasonable combination. If other
people had only _not_ remembered, his career would have been even
still finer than it is. That is what has partially spoiled things for
him. It is even possible that this amazing foreign policy of his may
be in a measure explainable on certain suggestions of what we may call
pictorial working rules, if we were only inside his mind. Certainly
his home politics give some hints that they were framed on a principle
of picturesqueness,--a very sophisticated canon of rustic taste can
be detected dimly lying at the bottom of them. By only leaving out the
towns, and repressing the growth of modern manufactures, and subduing
foreign commerce, something might possibly--I cannot say--be made of
them. In this foreign diplomacy, there is a certain imaginativeness in
bringing dark-skinned soldiers from Asia into Europe, in turning our
homely English Queen into an Oriental Empress, in becoming possessor
of a fresh island in the Mediterranean, in shifting a frontier line
in India, in adding a new province in Africa. All this has meant
massacre, and fire, and bloodshed, with the imminent risk of very much
more of all of them; and Sir Stafford Northcote, as Chancellor of the
Exchequer, has been kept working as hard as a sprite in a pantomime
pouring out millions of our taxation. But if it be Will-o'-the-Wisp we
have at the head of affairs, nothing of this is likely very greatly to
affect him. Assuredly, nothing of it has affected Lord Beaconsfield,
and we may be sure he is ready to go over it all again to-morrow.
If it was worth while, very large deductions would have to be made
from Lord Beaconsfield's seeming success if we look rationally at his
whole career. No man who is supposed to have been anything like so
successful as he is popularly held to be, ever had so many and such
striking failures to look back upon. Looking at him as connected with
letters, he is the author of works which have failed more completely
than any written by any one who himself became known. Judged by their
ambitious aims, these literary non-successes of Lord Beaconsfield are
gigantic. The epic poem ("The Revolutionary Epick") which Mr. Disraeli
supposed was to place him--he himself tells us so--by the side of,
or else between, Homer and Milton, nobody would read; the play
("Alarcos") which he states he wrote to "revive the British stage,"
is never acted. Not one of his novels, when his political position has
ceased to advertize them, will remain in the hands of the public. If
you look back on his Parliamentary career, the dazzle came late, and
after a dreary distance had been travelled. The political party he
founded, "The Young England School," has for twenty-five years been
as dead as the door-nail which typified the death of Marley. Nothing
whatever came of it. The one only notable legislative measure that
stands in his name,--the Reform Bill,--really belongs to the other
side. Scrutinize his career how you will, and some abatements of this
kind have to be made. He is supposed to have had a charm over men,--it
has failed with the strong ones. Peel he tried very hard to win, but
had to take up with Lord George Bentinck instead. At this moment he is
supposed to be in favour with the Court: the impression he made upon
the Prince Consort was far from satisfactory. He has quite recently
lost Lord Derby and Lord Carnarvon; and there was a time when the
Marquis of Salisbury and he stood in a very different relationship.
Lord Beaconsfield's social system is that of a novelist; his
finance was ever that of a Will-o'-the-Wisp; and he has now added a
Jack-o'-Lantern diplomacy. Surely nothing more is needed to justify
disbelief in him.
A WHIG.