_BENJAMIN DISRAEI_
I always count it among the happy accidents of my life that I happened
to be in London during the summer of 1867. I was going to Harrow
in the following September, and for the next five years my chance
of hearing Parliamentary debates was small. In the summer of 1866,
when the Russell-Gladstone Reform Bill was thrown out, I was in the
country, and therefore I had missed the excitement caused by the
demolition of the Hyde Park railings, the tears of the terrified
Home Secretary, and the litanies chanted by the Reform League under
Gladstone's window in Carlton House Terrace. But in 1867 I was in
the thick of the fun. My father was the Sergeant-at-Arms attending
the House of Commons, and could always admit me to the privileged
seats "under the Gallery," then more numerous than now. So it came
about that I heard all the most famous debates in Committee on
the Tory Reform Bill, and thereby learned for the first time the
fascination of Disraeli's genius. The Whigs, among whom I was reared,
did not dislike "Dizzy" as they disliked Lord Derby, or as Dizzy
himself was disliked by the older school of Tories. But they absolutely
miscalculated and misconceived him, treating him as merely an amusing
charlatan, whose rococo oratory and fantastic tricks afforded a
welcome relief from the dulness of ordinary politics.
To a boy of fourteen thus reared, the Disraeli of 1867 was an
astonishment and a revelation--as the modern world would say, an
eye-opener. The House of Commons was full of distinguished men--Lord
Cranborne, afterwards Lord Salisbury; John Bright and Robert Lowe,
Gathorne Hardy, Bernal-Osborne, Goschen, Mill, Kinglake, Renley,
Horsman, Coleridge. The list might be greatly prolonged, but of
course it culminates in Gladstone, then in the full vigour of his
powers. All these people I saw and heard during that memorable
summer; but high above them all towers, in my recollection, the
strange and sinister figure of the great Disraeli. The Whigs had
laughed at him for thirty years; but now, to use a phrase of the
nursery, they laughed on the wrong side of their mouths. There
was nothing ludicrous about him now, nothing to provoke a smile,
except when he wished to provoke it, and gaily unhorsed his opponents
of every type--Gladstone, or Lowe, or Beresford-Hope. He seemed,
for the moment, to dominate the House of Commons, to pervade it
with his presence, and to guide it where he would. At every turn
he displayed his reckless audacity, his swiftness in transition,
his readiness to throw overboard a stupid colleague, his alacrity
to take a hint from an opponent and make it appear his own. The
Bill underwent all sorts of changes in Committee; but still it
seemed to be Disraeli's Bill, and no one else's. And, indeed, he
is entitled to all the credit which he got, for it was his genius
that first saw the possibilities hidden in a Tory democracy.
To a boy of fourteen, details of rating, registration, and residential
qualification make no strong appeal; but the personality of this
strange magician, un-English, inscrutable, irresistible, was profoundly
interesting. "Gladstone," wrote Lord Houghton to a friend, "seems
quite awed with the diabolical cleverness of Dizzy, who, he says,
is gradually driving all ideas of political honour out of the House,
and accustoming it to the most revolting cynicism." I had been
trained by people who were sensitive about "Political honour,"
and I knew nothing of "cynicism"; but the "diabolical cleverness"
made an impression on me which has lasted to this day.
What was Dizzy in personal appearance? If I had not known the fact,
I do not think that I should have recognized him as one of the
ancient race of Israel. His profile was not the least what we in
England consider Semitic. He might have been a Spaniard or an Italian,
but he certainly was not a Briton. He was rather tall than short,
but slightly bowed, except when he drew himself up for the more
effective delivery of some shrewd blow. His complexion was extremely
pale, and the pallor was made more conspicuous by contrast with his
hair, steeped in Tyrian dye, worn long, and eked out with artificial
additions.
He was very quietly dressed. The green velvet trousers and rings
worn outside white kid gloves, which had helped to make his fame
in "the days of the dandies," had long since been discarded. He
dressed, like other men of his age and class, in a black frock-coat
worn open, a waistcoat cut rather deep, light-coloured trousers,
and a black cravat tied in a loose bow--and those spring-sided
boots of soft material which used to be called "Jemimas." I may
remark, in passing, that these details of costume were reproduced
with startling fidelity in Mr. Dennis Eadie's wonderful play--the
best representation of personal appearance that I have ever seen
on the stage.
Disraeli's voice was by nature deep, and he had a knack of deepening
it when he wished to be impressive. His articulation was extremely
deliberate, so that every word told; and his habitual manner was
calm, but not stolid. I say "habitual," because it had variations.
When Gladstone, just the other side of the Table, was thundering his
protests, Disraeli became absolutely statuesque, eyed his opponent
stonily through his monocle, and then congratulated himself, in a
kind of stage drawl, that there was a "good broad piece of furniture"
between him and the enraged Leader of the Opposition. But when it
was his turn to simulate the passion which the other felt, he would
shout and wave his arms, recoil from the Table and return to it,
and act his part with a vigour which, on one memorable occasion,
was attributed to champagne; but this was merely play-acting, and
was completely laid aside as he advanced in years.
What I have written so far is, no doubt, an anachronism, for I
have been describing what I saw and heard in the Session of 1867,
and Disraeli did not become Prime Minister till February, 1868; but
six months made no perceptible change in his appearance, speech,
or manner. What he had been when he was fighting his Reform Bill
through the House, that he was when, as Prime Minister, he governed
the country at the head of a Parliamentary minority. His triumph
was the triumph of audacity. In 1834 he had said to Lord Melbourne,
who enquired his object in life, "I want to be Prime Minister"--and
now that object was attained. At Brooks's they said, "The last
Government was the Derby; this is the Hoax." Gladstone's discomfiture
was thus described by Frederick Greenwood:
"The scorner who shot out the lip and shook the head at him across
the Table of the House of Commons last Session has now more than
heart could wish; his eyes--speaking in an Oriental manner--stand
out with fatness, he speaketh loftily; and pride compasseth him
about as with a chain. It is all very well to say that the candle
of the wicked is put out in the long run; that they are as stubble
before the wind, and as chaff that the storm carries away. So we
were told in other times of tribulation. This was the sort of
consolation that used to be offered in the jaunty days of Lord
Palmerston. People used then to soothe the earnest Liberal by the
same kind of argument. 'Only wait,' it was said, 'until he has
retired, and all will be well with us.' But no sooner has the storm
carried away the wicked Whig chaff than the heavens are forthwith
darkened by new clouds of Tory chaff."
Lord Shaftesbury, as became his character, took a sterner view.
"Disraeli Prime Minister! He is a Hebrew; this is a good thing.
He is a man sprung from an inferior station; another good thing
in these days, as showing the liberality of our institutions. But
he is a leper, without principle, without feeling, without regard
to anything, human or Divine, beyond his own personal ambition."
The situation in which the new Prime Minister found himself was, from
the constitutional point of view, highly anomalous. The settlement
of the question of Reform, which he had effected in the previous
year, had healed the schism in the Liberal party, and the Liberals
could now defeat the Government whenever they chose to mass their
forces. Disraeli was officially the Leader of a House in which his
opponents had a large majority. In March, 1868, Gladstone began his
attack on the Irish Church, and pursued it with all his vigour, and
with the support of a united party. He moved a series of Resolutions
favouring Irish Disestablishment, and the first was carried by a
majority of sixty-five against the Government.
This defeat involved explanation. Disraeli, in a speech which Bright
called "a mixture of pompousness and servility," described his
audiences of the Queen, and so handled the Royal name as to convey
the impression that Her Majesty was on his side. Divested of verbiage
and mystification, his statement amounted to this--that, in spite of
adverse votes, he intended to hold on till the autumn, and then to
appeal to the new electorate created by the Reform Act of the previous
year. As the one question to be submitted to the electors was that
of the Irish Church, the campaign naturally assumed a theological
character. On the 20th of August Lord Shaftesbury wrote: "Dizzy is
seeking everywhere for support. He is all things to all men, and
nothing to anyone. He cannot make up his mind to be Evangelical,
Neologian, or Ritualistic; he is waiting for the highest bidder."
Parliament was dissolved in November, and the General Election
resulted in a majority of one hundred for Gladstone and Irish
Disestablishment. By a commendable innovation on previous practice,
Disraeli resigned the Premiership without waiting for a hostile
vote of the new Parliament. He declined the Earldom to which, as
an ex-Prime Minister, he was by usage entitled; but he asked the
Queen to make his devoted wife Viscountess Beaconsfield. As a youth,
after hearing the great speakers of the House which he had not
yet entered, he had said, "Between ourselves, I could floor them
all"--but now Gladstone had "floored" him, and it took him five
years to recover his breath.
V
_WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE_
Most people remember Gladstone as an old man. He reached the summit
of his career when he had just struck seventy. After Easter, 1880,
when he dethroned Lord Beaconsfield and formed his second
Administration, the eighteen years of life that remained to him
added nothing to his fame, and even in some respects detracted
from it. Gradually he passed into the stage which was indicated
by Labouchere's nickname of "The Grand Old Man"; and he enjoyed
the homage which rightly attends the closing period of an exemplary
life, wonderfully prolonged, and spent in the service of the nation.
He had become historical before he died. But my recollections of
him go back to the earlier sixties, when he was Chancellor of the
Exchequer in Lord Palmerston's Government, and they become vivid
at the point of time when he became Prime Minister--December, 1868.
In old age his appearance was impressive, through the combination of
physical wear-and-tear with the unconquerable vitality of the spirit
which dwelt within. The pictures of him as a young man represent
him as distinctly handsome, with masses of dark hair thrown back
from a truly noble forehead, and eyes of singular expressiveness.
But in middle life--and in his case middle life was continued till
he was sixty--he was neither as good-looking as he once had been,
nor, as grand-looking as he eventually became. He looked much older
than his age. When he met the new Parliament which had been elected
at the end of 1868, he was only as old as Lord Curzon is now; but
he looked old enough to be Lord Curzon's father. His life had been,
as he was fond of saying, a life of contention; and the contention
had left its mark on his face, with its deep furrows and careworn
expression. Three years before he had felt, to use his own phrase,
"sore with conflicts about the public expenditure" (in which old
Palmerston had always beaten him), and to that soreness had been
added traces of the fierce strife about Parliamentary Reform and
Irish Disestablishment. F. D. Maurice thus described him: "His
face is a very expressive one, hard-worked, as you say, and not
perhaps specially happy; more indicative of struggle than of victory,
though not without promise of that. He has preserved the type which
I can remember that he bore at the University thirty-six years
ago, though it has undergone curious development."
My own recollection exactly confirms Maurice's estimate. In Gladstone's
face, as I used to see it in those days, there was no look of gladness
or victory. He had, indeed, won a signal triumph at the General
Election of 1868, and had attained the supreme object of a politician's
ambition. But he did not look the least as if he enjoyed his honours,
but rather as if he felt an insupportable burden of responsibility.
He knew that he had an immense amount to do in carrying the reforms
which Palmerston had burked, and, coming to the Premiership on the
eve of sixty, he realized that the time for doing it was necessarily
short. He seemed consumed by a burning and absorbing energy; and,
when he found himself seriously hampered or strenuously opposed, he
was angry with an anger which was all the more formidable because
it never vented itself in an insolent or abusive word. A vulnerable
temper kept resolutely under control had always been to me one of
the most impressive features in human character.
Gladstone had won the General Election by asking the constituencies
to approve the Disestablishment of the Irish Church; and this was
the first task to which he addressed himself in the Parliament
of 1869. It was often remarked about his speaking that in every
Session he made at least one speech of which everyone said, "That
was the finest thing Gladstone ever did." This was freely said
of it he speech in which he introduced the Disestablishment Bill
on the 1st of March, 1869, and again of that in which he wound up
the debate on the Second Reading. In pure eloquence he had rivals,
and in Parliamentary management superiors; but in the power of
embodying principles in legislative form and preserving unity of
purpose through a multitude of confusing minutiæ he had neither
equal nor second.
The Disestablishment Bill passed easily through the Commons, but
was threatened with disaster in the Lords, and it was with profound
satisfaction that Mrs. Gladstone, most devoted and most helpful of
wives, announced the result of the division on the Second Reading.
Gladstone had been unwell, and had gone to bed early. Mrs. Gladstone
who had been listening to the debate in the House of Lords, said
to a friend, "I could not help it; I gave William a discreet poke.
'A majority of thirty-three, my dear.' 'Thank you, my dear,' he
said, and turned round, and went to sleep on the other side." After
a stormy passage through Committee, the Bill became law on the
26th of July.
So Gladstone's first great act of legislation ended, and he was
athirst for more. Such momentous reforms as the Irish Land Act, the
Education Act, the abolition of religious tests in the University,
the abolition of purchase in the Army, and the establishment of the
Ballot, filled Session after Session with excitement; and Gladstone
pursued each in turn with an ardour which left his followers out
of breath.
He was not very skilful in managing his party, or even his Cabinet.
He kept his friendships and his official relations quite distinct.
He never realized the force of the saying that men who have only
worked together have only half lived together. It was truly said
that he understood MAN, but not men; and meek followers in the
House of Commons, who had sacrificed money, time, toil, health,
and sometimes conscience, to the support of the Government, turned,
like the crushed worm, when they found that Gladstone sternly ignored
their presence in the Lobby, or, if forced to speak to them, called
them by inappropriate names. His strenuousness of reforming purpose
and strength of will were concealed by no lightness of touch, no
give-and-take, no playfulness, no fun. He had little of that saving
grace of humour which smoothes the practical working of life as much
as it adds to its enjoyment. He was fiercely, terribly, incessantly
in earnest; and unbroken earnestness, though admirable, exhausts
and in the long run alienates.
There was yet another feature of his Parliamentary management which
proved disastrous to his cause, and this was his tendency to what the
vulgar call hair-splitting and the learned casuistry. At Oxford men
are taught to distinguish with scrupulous care between propositions
closely similar, but not identical. In the House of Commons they
are satisfied with the roughest and broadest divisions between
right and wrong; they see no shades of colour between black-and
white. Hence arose two unfortunate incidents, which were nicknamed
"The Ewelme Scandal" and "The Colliery Explosion"--two cases in
which Gladstone, while observing the letter of an Act of Parliament,
violated, or seemed to violate, its spirit in order to qualify
highly deserving gentlemen for posts to which he wished to appoint
them. By law the Rectory of Ewelme (in the gift of the Crown) could
only be held by a graduate of the University of Oxford. Gladstone
conferred it on a Cambridge man, who had to procure an _ad eundem_
degree at Oxford before he could accept the preferment. By law no
man could be made a paid member of the Judicial Committee of the
Privy Council unless he had served as a judge. Gladstone made his
Attorney-General, Sir John Collier, a Judge for three weeks, and then
passed him on to the Judicial Committee. Both these appointments
were angrily challenged in Parliament. Gladstone defended them with
energy and skill, and logically his defence was unassailable. But
these were cases where the plain man--and the House of Commons
is full of plain men--feels, though he cannot prove, that there
has been a departure from ordinary straightforwardness and fair
dealing.
Yet again; the United States had a just complaint against us; arising
out of the performances of the _Alabama_, which, built in an English
dockyard and manned by an English crew, but owned by the Slaveowners'
Confederacy, had got out to sea, and, during a two years' cruise of
piracy and devastation, had harassed the Government of the United
States. The quarrel had lasted for years, with ever-increasing
gravity. Gladstone determined to end it; and, with that purpose,
arranged for a Board of Arbitration, which sat at Geneva, and decided
against England. We were heavily amerced by the sentence of this
International Tribunal. We paid, but we did not like it. Gladstone
gloried in the moral triumph of a settlement without bloodshed; but
a large section of the nation, including many of his own party,
felt that national honour had been lowered, and determined to avenge
themselves on the Minister who had lowered it.
Meanwhile Disraeli, whom Gladstone had deposed in 1868, was watching
the development of these events with sarcastic interest and effective
criticism, till in 1872 he was able to liken the great Liberal,
Government to "a range of exhausted volcanoes," and to say of its
eminent leader that he "alternated between a menace and a sigh." In
1873 Gladstone introduced a wholly unworkable Bill for the reform
of University education in Ireland. It pleased no one, and was
defeated on the Second Reading. Gladstone resigned. The Queen sent
for Disraeli; but Disraeli declined to repeat the experiment of
governing the country without a majority in the House of Commons,
and Gladstone was forced to resume office, though, of course, with
immensely diminished authority. His Cabinet was all at sixes and
sevens. There were resignations and rumours of resignation. He
took the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, and, as some authorities
contended, vacated his seat by doing so. Election after election
went wrong, and the end was visibly at hand.
At the beginning of 1874 Gladstone, confined to his house by a
cold, executed a _coup d'état_. He announced the Dissolution of
Parliament, and promised, if his lease of power were renewed, to
repeal the income-tax. _The Times_ observed: "The Prime Minister
descends upon Greenwich" (where he had taken refuge after being
expelled from South Lancashire) "amid a shower of gold, and must
needs prove as irresistible as the Father of the Gods." But this
was too sanguine a forecast. Greenwich, which returned two members,
placed Gladstone second on the poll, below a local distiller, while
his followers were blown out of their seats like chaff before the
wind. When the General Election was over, the Tories had a majority
of forty-six. Gladstone, after some hesitation, resigned without
waiting to meet a hostile Parliament. Disraeli became Prime Minister
for the second time; and in addressing the new House of Commons
he paid a generous compliment to his great antagonist. "If," he
said, "I had been a follower of a Parliamentary chief so eminent,
even if I thought he had erred, I should have been disposed rather
to exhibit sympathy than to offer criticism. I should remember the
great victories which he had fought and won; I should remember
his illustrious career; its continuous success and splendour, not
its accidental or even disastrous mistakes."
The roost loyal Gladstonian cannot improve upon that tribute, and
Gladstone's greatest day was yet to come.