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STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY BIOGRAPHY
by
JAMES BRYCE
Author of
'The Holy Roman Empire,' 'The American Commonwealth', etc.
London
Macmillan and Co., Limited
New York: The Macmillan Company
1903
All rights reserved
Copyright in the United States of America 1903
To
CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT
President of Harvard University
IN COMMEMORATION OF A LONG AND VALUED FRIENDSHIP
PREFACE
The first and the last of these Studies relate to persons whose fame
has gone out into all lands, and about whom so much remains to be said
that one who has reflected on their careers need not offer an apology
for saying something. Of the other eighteen sketches, some deal with
eminent men whose names are still familiar, but whose personalities
have begun to fade from the minds of the present generation. The rest
treat of persons who came less before the public, but whose brilliant
gifts and solid services to the world make them equally deserve to be
remembered with honour. Having been privileged to enjoy their
friendship, I have felt it a duty to do what a friend can to present a
faithful record of their excellence which may help to keep their
memory fresh and green.
These Studies are, however, not to be regarded as biographies, even
in miniature. My aim has rather been to analyse the character and
powers of each of the persons described, and, as far as possible, to
convey the impression which each made in the daily converse of life.
All of them, except Lord Beaconsfield, were personally, and most of
them intimately, known to me.
In the six Studies which treat of politicians I have sought to set
aside political predilections, and have refrained from expressing
political opinions, though it has now and then been necessary to point
out instances in which the subsequent course of events has shown the
action of Lord Beaconsfield, Mr. Lowe, and Mr. Gladstone to have been
right or wrong (as the case may be) in the action they respectively
took.
The sketches of T. H. Green, E. A. Freeman, and J. R. Green were
originally written for English magazines, and most of the other
Studies have been published in the United States. All of those that
had already appeared in print have been enlarged and revised, some
indeed virtually rewritten. I have to thank the proprietors of the
_English Historical Review_, the _Contemporary Review_, and the _New
York Nation_, as also the Century Company of New York, for their
permission to use so much of the matter of the volume as had appeared
(in its original form) in the organs belonging to them respectively.
_March 6, 1903._
CONTENTS
Page
I. Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield 1804-1881 1
II. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of
Westminster 1815-1881 69
III. Thomas Hill Green 1836-1882 85
IV. Archibald Campbell Tait, Archbishop of
Canterbury 1811-1882 100
V. Anthony Trollope 1815-1882 116
VI. John Richard Green 1837-1883 131
VII. Sir George Jessel 1824-1883 170
VIII. Hugh M'Calmont Cairns, Earl
Cairns 1819-1885 184
IX. James Fraser, Bishop of Manchester 1818-1885 196
X. Stafford Henry Northcote, Earl of
Iddesleigh 1818-1887 211
XI. Charles Stewart Parnell 1846-1891 227
XII. Henry Edward Manning, Archbishop and
Cardinal 1808-1892 250
XIII. Edward Augustus Freeman 1823-1892 262
XIV. Robert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke 1811-1892 293
XV. William Robertson Smith 1846-1894 311
XVI. Henry Sidgwick 1838-1900 327
XVII. Edward Ernest Bowen 1836-1901 343
XVIII. Edwin Lawrence Godkin 1831-1902 363
XIX. John Emerich Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton 1834-1902 382
XX. William Ewart Gladstone 1809-1898 400
BENJAMIN DISRAELI, EARL OF BEACONSFIELD[1]
When Lord Beaconsfield died in 1881 we all wondered what people would
think of him fifty years thereafter. Divided as our own judgments
were, we asked whether he would still seem a problem. Would opposite
views regarding his aims, his ideas, the sources of his power, still
divide the learned, and perplex the ordinary reader? Would men
complain that history cannot be good for much when, with the abundant
materials at her disposal, she had not framed a consistent theory of
one who played so great a part in so ample a theatre? People called
him a riddle; and he certainly affected a sphinx-like attitude. Would
the riddle be easier then than it was for us, from among whom the man
had even now departed?
When he died, there were many in England who revered him as a profound
thinker and a lofty character, animated by sincere patriotism.
Others, probably as numerous, held him for no better than a cynical
charlatan, bent through life on his own advancement, who permitted no
sense of public duty, and very little human compassion, to stand in
the way of his insatiate ambition. The rest did not know what to
think. They felt in him the presence of power; they felt also
something repellent. They could not understand how a man who seemed
hard and unscrupulous could win so much attachment and command so much
obedience.
Since Disraeli departed nearly one-half of those fifty years has
passed away. Few are living who can claim to have been his personal
friends, none who were personal enemies. No living statesman professes
to be his political disciple. The time has come when one may discuss
his character and estimate his career without being suspected of doing
so with a party bias or from a party motive. Doubtless those who
condemn and those who defend or excuse some momentous parts of his
conduct, such as, for instance, his policy in the East and in
Afghanistan from 1876 to 1879, will differ in their judgment of his
wisdom and foresight. If this be a difficulty, it is an unavoidable
one, and may never quite disappear. There were in the days of Augustus
some who blamed that sagacious ruler for seeking to check the
expansion of the Roman Empire. There were in the days of King Henry
the Second some who censured and others who praised him for issuing
the Constitutions of Clarendon. Both questions still remain open to
argument; and the conclusion any one forms must affect in some measure
his judgment of each monarch's statesmanship. So differences of
opinion about particular parts of Disraeli's long career need not
prevent us from dispassionately inquiring what were the causes that
enabled him to attain so striking a success, and what is the place
which posterity is likely to assign to him among the rulers of
England.
First, a few words about the salient events of his life, not by way of
writing a biography, but to explain what follows.
He was born in London, in 1804. His father, Isaac Disraeli, was a
literary man of cultivated taste and independent means, who wrote a
good many books, the best known of which is his _Curiosities of
Literature_, a rambling work, full of entertaining matter. He belonged
to that division of the Jewish race which is called the Sephardim, and
traces itself to Spain and Portugal;[2] but he had ceased to frequent
the synagogue--had, in fact, broken with his co-religionists. Isaac
had access to good society, so that the boy saw eminent and polished
men from his early years, and, before he had reached manhood, began
to make his way in drawing-rooms where he met the wittiest and
best-known people of the day. He was articled to a firm of attorneys
in London in 1821, but after two or three years quitted a sphere for
which his peculiar gifts were ill suited.[3] Samuel Rogers, the poet,
took a fancy to him, and had him baptized at the age of thirteen. As
he grew up, he was often to be seen with Count d'Orsay and Lady
Blessington, well-known figures who fluttered on the confines of
fashion and Bohemia. It is worth remarking that he never went either
to a public school or to a university. In England it has become the
fashion to assume that nearly all the persons who have shone in public
life have been educated in one of the great public schools, and that
they owe to its training their power of dealing with men and
assemblies. Such a superstition is sufficiently refuted by the
examples of men like Pitt, Macaulay, Bishop Wilberforce, Disraeli,
Cobden, Bright, and Cecil Rhodes, not to add instances drawn from
Ireland and Scotland, where till very recently there have been no
public schools in the current English sense.
Disraeli first appeared before the public in 1826, when he published
_Vivian Grey_, an amazing book to be the production of a youth of
twenty-two. Other novels--_The Young Duke_, _Venetia_, _Contarini
Fleming_, _Henrietta Temple_--maintained without greatly increasing
his reputation between 1831 and 1837. Then came two political stories,
_Coningsby_ and _Sybil_, in 1844 and 1845, followed by _Tancred_ in
1847, and the _Life of Lord George Bentinck_ in 1852; with a long
interval of silence, till, in 1870, he produced _Lothair_, in 1880
_Endymion_. Besides these he published in 1839 the tragedy of
_Alarcos_, and in 1835 the more ambitious _Revolutionary Epick_,
neither of which had much success. In 1828-31 he took a journey
through the East, visiting Constantinople, Syria, and Egypt, and it
was then, no doubt, in lands peculiarly interesting to a man of his
race, that he conceived those ideas about the East and its mysterious
influences which figure largely in some of his stories, notably in
_Tancred_, and which in 1878 had no small share in shaping his policy
and that of England. Meanwhile, he had not forgotten the political
aspirations which we see in _Vivian Grey_. In 1832, just before the
passing of the Reform Bill, he appeared as candidate for the petty
borough of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, and was defeated by a
majority of twenty-three to twelve, so few were the voters in many
boroughs of those days. After the Bill had enlarged the constituency,
he tried his luck twice again, in 1833 and 1835, both times
unsuccessfully, and came before two other boroughs also, Taunton and
Marylebone, though in the latter case no contest took place. Such
activity in a youth with little backing from friends and comparatively
slender means marked him already as a man of spirit and ambition. His
next attempt was more lucky. At the general election of 1837 he was
returned for Maidstone.
His political professions during this period have been keenly
canvassed; nor is it easy to form a fair judgment on them. In 1832 he
had sought and obtained recommendations from Joseph Hume and Daniel
O'Connell, and people had therefore set him down as a Radical.
Although, however, his professions of political faith included dogmas
which, like triennial parliaments, the ballot, and the imposition of a
new land-tax, were part of the so-called "Radical" platform, still
there was a vague and fanciful note in his utterances, and an
aversion to the conventional Whig way of putting things, which showed
that he was not a thorough-going adherent of any of the then existing
political parties, but was trying to strike out a new line and
attract men by the promise of something fresher and bolder than the
recognised schools offered. In 1834 his hostility to Whiggism was
becoming more pronounced, and a tenderness for some Tory doctrines
more discernible. Finally, in 1835, he appeared as an avowed Tory,
accepting the regular creed of the party, and declaring himself a
follower of Sir Robert Peel, but still putting forward a number of
views peculiar to himself, which he thereafter developed not only
in his speeches but in his novels. _Coningsby_ and _Sybil_ were
meant to be a kind of manifesto of the "Young England" party--a party
which can hardly be said to have existed outside his own mind, though
a small knot of aristocratic youths who caught up and repeated his
phrases seemed to form a nucleus for it.
The fair conclusion from his deliverances during these early years is
that he was at first much more of a Liberal than a Tory, yet with
ideas distinctively his own which made him appear in a manner
independent of both parties. The old party lines might seem to have
been almost effaced by the struggle over the Reform Bill; and it was
natural for a bold and inventive mind to imagine a new departure, and
put forward a programme in which a sort of Radicalism was mingled with
doctrines of a different type. But when it became clear after a time
that the old political divisions still subsisted, and that such a
distinctive position as he had conceived could not be maintained, he
then, having to choose between one or other of the two recognised
parties, chose the Tories, dropping some tenets he had previously
advocated which were inconsistent with their creed, but retaining
much of his peculiar way of looking at political questions. How far
the change which passed over him was a natural development, how far
due to mere calculations of interest, there is little use discussing:
perhaps he did not quite know himself. Looking back, we of to-day
might be inclined to think that he received more blame for it than he
deserved, but contemporary observers generally set it down to a want
of principle. In one thing, however, he was consistent then, and
remained consistent ever after--his hearty hatred of the Whigs. There
was something in the dryness and coldness of the great Whig families,
their stiff constitutionalism, their belief in political economy,
perhaps also their occasional toyings with the Nonconformists (always
an object of dislike to Disraeli), which roused all the antagonisms of
his nature, personal and Oriental.
When he entered the House of Commons he was already well known to
fashionable London, partly by his striking face and his powers of
conversation, partly by the eccentricities of his dress--he loved
bright-coloured waistcoats, and decked himself with rings,--partly by
his novels, whose satirical pungency had made a noise in society. He
had also become, owing to his apparent change of front, the object of
angry criticism. A quarrel with Daniel O'Connell, in the course of
which he challenged the great Irishman to fight a duel, each party
having described the other with a freedom of language bordering on
scurrility, made him, for a time, the talk of the political world.
Thus there was more curiosity evoked by his first speech than usually
awaits a new member. It was unsuccessful, not from want of ability,
but because its tone did not suit the temper of the House of Commons,
and because a hostile section of the audience sought to disconcert him
by their laughter. Undeterred by this ridicule, he continued to speak,
though in a less ambitious and less artificial vein, till after a few
years he had become one of the most conspicuous unofficial members. At
first no one had eulogised Peel more warmly, but after a time he edged
away from the minister, whether repelled by his coldness, which showed
that in that quarter no promotion was to be expected, or shrewdly
perceiving that Peel was taking a line which would ultimately separate
him from the bulk of the Conservative party. This happened in 1846,
when Peel, convinced that the import duties on corn were economically
unsound, proposed their abolition. Disraeli, who, since 1843, had
taken repeated opportunities of firing stray shots at the powerful
Prime Minister, now bore a foremost part not only in attacking him,
but in organising the Protectionist party, and prompting its leader,
Lord George Bentinck. In embracing free trade, Peel carried with him
his own personal friends and disciples, men like Gladstone, Sidney
Herbert, Lord Lincoln, Sir James Graham, Cardwell, and a good many
others, the intellectual _elite_ of the Tory party. The more numerous
section who clung to Protection had numbers, wealth, respectability,
cohesion, but brains and tongues were scarce. An adroit tactician and
incisive speaker was of priceless value to them. Such a man they found
in Disraeli, while he gained, sooner than he had expected, an
opportunity of playing a leading part in the eyes of Parliament and
the country. In the end of 1848, Lord George Bentinck, who, though a
man of natural force and capable of industry when he pleased, had been
to some extent Disraeli's mouthpiece, died, leaving his prompter
indisputably the keenest intellect in the Tory-Protectionist party. In
1850, Peel, who might possibly have in time brought the bulk of that
party back to its allegiance to him, was killed by a fall from his
horse. The Peelites drifted more and more towards Liberalism, so that
when Lord Derby, who, in 1851, had been commissioned as head of the
Tory party to form a ministry, invited them to join him, they refused
to do so, imagining him to be still in favour of the corn duties, and
resenting the behaviour of the Protectionist section to their own
master. Being thus unable to find one of them to lead his followers in
the House of Commons, Lord Derby turned in 1852 to Disraeli, giving
him, with the leadership, the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The appointment was thought a strange one, because Disraeli brought to
it absolutely no knowledge of finance and no official experience. He
had never been so much as an Under-Secretary. The Tories themselves
murmured that one whom they regarded as an adventurer should be raised
to so high a place. After a few months Lord Derby's ministry fell,
defeated on the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Budget, which had been
vehemently attacked by Mr. Gladstone. This was the beginning of that
protracted duel between him and Mr. Disraeli which lasted down till
the end of the latter's life.
For the following fourteen years Disraeli's occupation was that of a
leader of Opposition, varied by one brief interval of office in
1858-59. His party was in a permanent minority, so that nothing was
left for its chief but to fight with skill, courage, and resolution a
series of losing battles. This he did with admirable tenacity of
purpose. Once or twice in every session he used to rally his forces
for a general engagement, and though always defeated, he never
suffered himself to be dispirited by defeat. During the rest of the
time he was keenly watchful, exposing all the mistakes in domestic
affairs of the successive Liberal Governments, and when complications
arose in foreign politics, always professing, and generally
manifesting, a patriotic desire not to embarrass the Executive, lest
national interests should suffer. Through all these years he had to
struggle, not only with a hostile majority in office, but also with
disaffection among his own followers. Many of the landed aristocracy
could not bring themselves to acquiesce in the leadership of a new
man, of foreign origin, whose career had been erratic, and whose ideas
they found it hard to assimilate. Ascribing their long exclusion from
power to his presence, they more than once conspired to dethrone him.
In 1861 these plots were thickest, and Disraeli was for a time left
almost alone. But as it happened, there never arose in the House of
Commons any one on the Conservative side possessing gifts of speech
and of strategy comparable to those which in him had been matured and
polished by long experience, while he had the address to acquire an
ascendency over the mind of Lord Derby, still the titular head of the
party, who, being a man of straightforward character, high social
position, and brilliant oratorical talent, was therewithal somewhat
lazy and superficial, and therefore disposed to lean on his lieutenant
in the Lower House, and to borrow from him those astute schemes of
policy which Disraeli was fertile in devising. Thus, through Lord
Derby's support, and by his own imperturbable confidence, he
frustrated all the plots of the malcontent Tories. New men came up
who had not witnessed his earlier escapades, but knew him only as the
bold and skilful leader of their party in the House of Commons. He
made himself personally agreeable to them, encouraged them in their
first efforts, diffused his ideas among them, stimulated the local
organisation of the party, and held out hopes of great things to be
done when fortune should at last revisit the Tory banner.
While Lord Palmerston lived, these exertions seemed to bear little
fruit. That minister had, in his later years, settled down into a sort
of practical Toryism, and both parties acquiesced in his rule. But, on
his death, the scene changed. Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone brought
forward a Reform Bill strong enough to evoke the latent Conservative
feeling of a House of Commons which, though showing a nominally
Liberal majority, had been chosen under Palmerstonian auspices. The
defeat of the Bill, due to the defection of the more timorous Whigs,
was followed by the resignation of Lord Russell's Ministry. Lord Derby
and Mr. Disraeli came into power, and, next year, carried a Reform
Bill which, as it was finally shaped in its passage through the House,
really went further than Lord Russell's had done, enfranchising a much
larger number of the working classes in boroughs. To have carried this
Bill remains the greatest of Disraeli's triumphs. He had to push it
gently through a hostile House of Commons by wheedling a section of
the Liberal majority, against the appeals of their legitimate leader.
He had also to persuade his own followers to support a measure which
they had all their lives been condemning, and which was, or in their
view ought to have been, more dangerous to the Constitution than the
one which they and the recalcitrant Whigs had thrown out in the
preceding year. He had, as he happily and audaciously expressed it, to
educate his party into doing the very thing which they (though
certainly not he himself) had cordially and consistently denounced.
The process was scarcely complete when the retirement of Lord Derby,
whose health had given way, opened Disraeli's path to the post of
first Minister of the Crown. He dissolved Parliament, expecting to
receive a majority from the gratitude of the working class whom his
Act had admitted to the suffrage. To his own surprise, and to the
boundless disgust of the Tories, a Liberal House of Commons was again
returned, which drove him and his friends once more into the cold
shade of Opposition. He was now sixty-four years of age, had suffered
an unexpected and mortifying discomfiture, and had no longer the great
name of Lord Derby to cover him. Disaffected voices were again heard
among his own party, while the Liberals, reinstalled in power, were
led by the rival whose unequalled popularity in the country made him
for the time omnipotent. Still Mr. Disraeli was not disheartened. He
fought the battle of apparently hopeless resistance with his old tact,
wariness, and tenacity, losing no occasion for any criticism that
could damage the measures--strong and large measures--which Mr.
Gladstone's Government brought forward.
Before long the tide turned. The Dissenters resented the Education Act
of 1870. A reaction in favour of Conservatism set in, which grew so
fast that, in 1874, the general election gave, for the first time
since 1846, a decided Conservative majority. Mr. Disraeli became again
Prime Minister, and now a Prime Minister no longer on sufferance, but
with the absolute command of a dominant party, rising so much above
the rest of the Cabinet as to appear the sole author of its policy. In
1876, feeling the weight of age, he transferred himself to the House
of Lords as Earl of Beaconsfield. The policy he followed (from 1876
till 1880) in the troubles which arose in the Turkish East out of the
insurrection in Herzegovina and the massacres in Bulgaria, as well as
that subsequently pursued in Afghanistan and in South Africa, while it
received the enthusiastic approval of the soldiers, the stockbrokers,
and the richer classes generally, raised no less vehement opposition
in other sections of the nation, and especially in those two which,
when heartily united and excited, have usually been masters of
England--the Protestant Nonconformists and the upper part of the
working class. An election fought with unusual heat left him in so
decided a minority that he resigned office in April 1880, without
waiting for an adverse vote in Parliament. When the result had become
clear he observed, "They," meaning his friends, "will come in again,
but I shall not." A year later he died.
Here is a wonderful career, not less wonderful to those who live in
the midst of English politics and society than it appears to observers
in other countries. A man with few external advantages, not even that
of education at a university, where useful friendships are formed,
with grave positive disadvantages in his Jewish extraction and the
vagaries of his first years of public life, presses forward, step by
step, through slights and disappointments which retard but never
dishearten him, assumes as of right the leadership of a party--the
aristocratic party, the party in those days peculiarly suspicious of
new men and poor men,--wins a reputation for sagacity which makes his
early errors forgotten, becomes in old age the favourite of a court,
the master of a great country, one of the three or four arbiters of
Europe. There is here more than one problem to solve, or, at least, a
problem with more than one aspect. What was the true character of the
man who had sustained such a part? Did he hold any principles, or was
he merely playing with them as counters? By what gifts or arts did he
win such a success? Was there really a mystery beneath the wizard's
robe which he delighted to wrap around him? And how, being so unlike
the Englishmen among whom his lot was cast, did he so fascinate and
rule them?
Imagine a man of strong will and brilliant intellectual powers,
belonging to an ancient and persecuted race, who finds himself born
in a foreign country, amid a people for whose ideas and habits he
has no sympathy and scant respect. Suppose him proud, ambitious,
self-confident--too ambitious to rest content in a private station,
so self-confident as to believe that he can win whatever he aspires
to. To achieve success, he must bend his pride, must use the language
and humour the prejudices of those he has to deal with; while his
pride avenges itself by silent scorn or thinly disguised irony.
Accustomed to observe things from without, he discerns the weak
points of all political parties, the hollowness of institutions and
watchwords, the instability of popular passion. If his imagination be
more susceptible than his emotions, his intellect more active than
his conscience, the isolation in which he stands and the superior
insight it affords him may render him cold, calculating, self-centred.
The sentiment of personal honour may remain, because his pride will
support it; and he will be tenacious of the ideas which he has
struck out, because they are his own. But for ordinary principles of
conduct he may have small regard, because he has not grown up
under the conventional morality of the time and nation, but has
looked on it merely as a phenomenon to be recognised and reckoned
with, because he has noted how much there is in it of unreality or
pharisaism--how far it sometimes is from representing or expressing
either the higher judgments of philosophy or the higher precepts of
religion. Realising and perhaps exaggerating the power of his own
intelligence, he will secretly revolve schemes of ambition wherein
genius, uncontrolled by fears or by conscience, makes all things bend
to its purposes, till the scruples and hesitations of common humanity
seem to him only parts of men's cowardice or stupidity. What
success he will win when he comes to carry out such schemes in
practice will largely depend on the circumstances in which he finds
himself, as well as on his gift for judging of them. He may become a
Napoleon. He may fall in a premature collision with forces which
want of sympathy has prevented him from estimating.
In some of his novels, and most fully in the first of them, Mr.
Disraeli sketched a character and foreshadowed a career not altogether
unlike that which has just been indicated. It would be unfair to treat
as autobiographical, though some of his critics have done so, the
picture of Vivian Grey. What that singular book shows is that, at an
age when his contemporaries were lads at college, absorbed in cricket
matches or Latin verse-making, Disraeli had already meditated
profoundly on the conditions and methods of worldly success, had
rejected the allurements of pleasure and the attractions of
literature, as well as the ideal life of philosophy, had conceived of
a character isolated, ambitious, intense, resolute, untrammelled by
scruples, who moulds men to his purposes by the sheer force of his
intellect, humouring their foibles, using their weaknesses, and luring
them into his chosen path by the bait of self-interest.
To lay stress on the fact that Mr. Disraeli was of Hebrew birth is
not, though some of his political antagonists stooped so to use it, to
cast any reproach upon him: it is only to note a fact of the utmost
importance for a proper comprehension of his position. The Jews were
at the beginning of the nineteenth century still foreigners in
England, not only on account of their religion, with its mass of
ancient rites and usages, but also because they were filled with the
memory of centuries of persecution, and perceived that in some parts
of Europe the old spirit of hatred had not died out. The antiquity of
their race, their sense of its long-suffering and isolation, their
pride in the intellectual achievements of those ancestors whose blood,
not largely mixed with that of any other race, flows in their veins,
lead the stronger or more reflective spirits to revenge themselves by
a kind of scorn upon the upstart Western peoples among whom their lot
is cast. The mockery one finds in Heinrich Heine could not have come
from a Teuton. Even while imitating, as the wealthier of them have
latterly begun to imitate, the manners and luxury of those nominal
Christians among whom they live, they retain their feeling of
detachment, and are apt to regard with a coldly observant curiosity
the beliefs, prejudices, enthusiasms of the nations of Europe. The
same passionate intensity which makes the grandeur of the ancient
Hebrew literature still lives among them, though often narrowed by
ages of oppression, and gives them the peculiar effectiveness that
comes from turning all the powers of the mind, imaginative as well as
reasoning, into a single channel, be that channel what it may. They
produce, in proportion to their numbers, an unusually large number of
able and successful men, as any one may prove by recounting the
eminent Jews of the last seventy years. This success has most often
been won in practical life, in commerce, or at the bar, or in the
press (which over the European continent they so largely control); yet
often also in the higher walks of literature or science, less
frequently in art, most frequently in music.
Mr. Disraeli had three of these characteristics of his race in
full measure--detachment, intensity, the passion for material success.
Nature gave him a resolute will, a keen and precociously active
intellect, a vehement individuality; that is to say, a consciousness
of his own powers, and a determination to make them recognised by
his fellows. In some men, the passion to succeed is clogged by the
fear of failure; in others, the sense of their greatness is
self-sufficing and indisposes them to effort. But with him ambition
spurred self-confidence, and self-confidence justified ambition. He
grew up in a cultivated home, familiar not only with books but with
the brightest and most polished men and women of the day, whose
conversation sharpened his wits almost from childhood. No religious
influences worked upon him, for his father had ceased to be a Jew in
faith without becoming even nominally a Christian, and there is little
in his writings to show that he had ever felt anything more than
an imaginative, or what may be called an historical, interest in
religion.[4] Thus his development was purely intellectual. The society
he moved in was a society of men and women of the world--witty,
superficial in its interests, without seriousness or reverence. He
felt himself no Englishman, and watched English life and politics as a
student of natural history might watch the habits of bees or ants.
English society was then, and perhaps is still, more complex, more
full of inconsistencies, of contrasts between theory and practice,
between appearances and realities, than that of any other country.
Nowhere so much limitation of view among the fashionable, so much
pharisaism among the respectable, so much vulgarity among the rich,
mixed with so much real earnestness, benevolence, and good sense;
nowhere, therefore, so much to seem merely ridiculous to one who
looked at it from without, wanting the sympathy which comes from the
love of mankind, or even from the love of one's country. It was
natural for a young man with Disraeli's gifts to mock at what he
saw. But he would not sit still in mere contempt. The thirst for
power and fame gave him no rest. He must gain what he saw every one
around him struggling for. He must triumph over these people whose
follies amused him; and the sense that he perceived and could use
their follies would add zest to his triumph. He might have been a
great satirist; he resolved to become a great statesman. For such a
career, his Hebrew detachment gave him some eminent advantages. It
enabled him to take a cooler and more scientific view of the social
and political phenomena he had to deal with. He was not led astray
by party cries. He did not share vulgar prejudices. He calculated
the forces at work as an engineer calculates the strength of his
materials, the strain they have to bear from the wind, and the weights
they must support. And what he had to plan was not the success of a
cause, which might depend on a thousand things out of his ken, but his
own success, a simpler matter.
A still greater source of strength lay in his Hebrew intensity. It
would have pleased him, so full of pride in the pure blood of his
race,[5] to attribute to that purity the singular power of concentration
which the Jews undoubtedly possess. They have the faculty of throwing
the whole stress of their natures into the pursuit of one object,
fixing their eyes on it alone, sacrificing to it other desires,
clinging to it even when it seems unattainable. Disraeli was only
twenty-eight when he made his first attempt to enter the House of
Commons. Four repulses did not discourage him, though his means were
but scanty to support such contests; and the fifth time he
succeeded. When his first speech in Parliament had been received with
laughter, and politicians were congratulating themselves that this
adventurer had found his level, he calmly told them that he had
always ended by succeeding in whatever he attempted, and that he
would succeed in this too. He received no help from his own side, who
regarded him with suspicion, but forced himself into prominence, and at
last to leadership, by his complete superiority to rebuffs. Through
the long years in which he had to make head against a majority in the
House of Commons, he never seemed disheartened by his repeated
defeats, never relaxed the vigilance with which he watched his
adversaries, never indulged himself (though he was physically
indolent and often in poor health) by staying away from Parliament,
even when business was slack; never missed an opportunity for exposing
a blunder of his adversaries, or commending the good service of one of
his own followers. The same curious tenacity was apparent in his
ideas. Before he was twenty-two years of age he had, under the
inspiration of Bolingbroke, excogitated a theory of the Constitution of
England, of the way England should be governed at home and her
policy directed abroad, from which he hardly swerved through all his
later life. Often as he was accused of inconsistency, he probably
believed himself to be, and in a sense he was, substantially faithful,
I will not say to the same doctrines, but to the same notions or
tendencies; and one could discover from the phrases he employed how
he fancied himself to be really following out these old notions, even
when his conduct seemed opposed to the traditions of his party.[6] The
weakness of intense minds is their tendency to narrowness, and this
weakness was in so far his that, while always ready for new
expedients, he was not accessible to new ideas. Indeed, the old ideas
were too much a part of himself, stamped with his own individuality, to
be forsaken or even varied. He did not love knowledge, nor enjoy
speculation for its own sake; he valued views as they pleased his
imagination or as they carried practical results with them; and having
framed his theory once for all and worked steadily upon its lines, he
was not the man to admit that it had been defective, and to set
himself in later life to repair it. His pride was involved in proving
it correct by applying it.
With this resolute concentration of purpose there went an undaunted
courage--a quality less rare among English statesmen, but eminently
laudable in him, because for great part of his career he had no family
or party connections to back him up, but was obliged to face the world
with nothing but his own self-confidence. So far from seeking to
conceal his Jewish origin, he displayed his pride in it, and refused
all support to the efforts which the Tory party made to maintain the
exclusion of Jews from Parliament. Nobody showed more self-possession
and (except on two or three occasions) more perfect self-command in
the hot strife of Parliament than this suspected stranger. His
opponents learnt to fear one who never feared for himself; his
followers knew that their chief would not fail them in the hour of
danger. His very face and bearing had in them an impassive calmness
which magnetised those who watched him. He liked to surround himself
with mystery, to pose as remote, majestic, self-centred, to appear
above the need of a confidant. He would sit for hours on his bench in
the House of Commons, listening with eyes half-shut to furious
assaults on himself and his policy, not showing by the movement of a
muscle that he had felt a wound; and when he rose to reply would
discharge his sarcasms with an air of easy coolness. That this
indifference was sometimes simulated appeared by the resentment he
showed afterwards.
Ambition such as his could not afford to be scrupulous, nor have his
admirers ever claimed conscientiousness as one of his merits. One who
sets power and fame before him as the main ends to be pursued may no
doubt be restrained by pride from the use of such means as are
obviously low and dishonourable. Other questionable means he may
reject because he knows that the opinion of those whose good-will and
good word he must secure would condemn them. But he will not be likely
to allow kindliness or compassion to stand in his way; nor will he be
very regardful of truth. To a statesman, who must necessarily have
many facts in his knowledge, or many plans in his mind, which the
interests of his colleagues, or of his party, or of the nation, forbid
him to reveal, the temptation to put questioners on a false scent, and
to seem to agree where he really dissents, is at all times a strong
one. An honest man may sometimes be betrayed into yielding to it; and
those who know how difficult are the cases of conscience that arise
will not deal harshly with a possibly misleading silence, or even with
the evasion of an embarrassing inquiry, where a real public interest
can be pleaded, for the existence of such a public interest, if it
does not justify, may palliate omissions to make a full disclosure of
the facts. All things considered, the standard of truthfulness among
English public men has (of course with some conspicuous exceptions)
been a high one. Of that standard Disraeli fell short. People did not
take his word for a thing as they would have taken the word of the
Duke of Wellington, or Lord Althorp, or Lord Derby, or Lord Russell,
or even of that not very rigid moralist, Lord Palmerston. Instances of
his lapses were not wanting as late as 1877. His behaviour toward Sir
Robert Peel, whom he plied with every dart of sarcasm, after having
shortly before lavished praises on him, and sought office under him,
has often been commented on.[7] Disraeli was himself (as those who
knew him have often stated) accustomed to justify it by observing that
he was then an insignificant personage, to whom it was supremely
important to attract public notice and make a political position; that
the opportunity of attacking the powerful Prime Minister, at a moment
when their altered attitude towards the Corn Laws had exposed the
Ministry to the suspicions of their own party, was too good to be
lost; and that he was therefore obliged to assail Peel, though he had
himself no particular attachment to the Corn Laws, and believed Peel
to have been a _bona-fide_ convert. It was therefore no personal
resentment against one who had slighted him, but merely the exigencies
of his own career, that drove him to this course, whose fortunate
result proved the soundness of his calculations.
This defence will not surprise any one who is familiar with Disraeli's
earlier novels. These stories are as far as possible from being
immoral; that is to say, there is nothing in them unbecoming or
corrupting. Friendship, patriotism, love, are all recognised as
powerful and worthy motives of conduct. That which is wanting is the
sense of right and wrong. His personages have for certain purposes the
conventional sense of honour, though seldom a fine sense, but they do
not ask whether such and such a course is conformable to principle.
They move in a world which is polished, agreeable, dignified, averse
to baseness and vulgarity, but in which conscience and religion
scarcely seem to exist. The men live for pleasure or fame, the women
for pleasure or love.
Some allowance must, of course, be made for the circumstances of
Disraeli's position and early training. He was brought up neither a
Jew nor a Christian. The elder people who took him by the hand when he
entered life, people like Samuel Rogers and Lady Blessington, were not
the people to give lessons in morality. Lord Lyndhurst, the first of
his powerful political friends, and the man whose example most
affected him, was, with all his splendid gifts, conspicuously wanting
in political principle. Add to this the isolation in which the young
man found himself, standing outside the common stream of English life,
not sharing its sentiments, perceiving the hollowness of much that
passed for virtue and patriotism, and it is easy to understand how he
should have been as perfect a cynic at twenty-five as their experience
of the world makes many at sixty. If he had loved truth or mankind, he
might have quickly worked through his youthful cynicism. But pride and
ambition, the pride of race and the pride of genius, left no room for
these sentiments. Nor was his cynicism the fruit merely of a keen and
sceptical intelligence. It came from a cold heart.
The pursuit of fame and power, to which he gave all his efforts, is
presented in his writings as the only alternative ideal to a life of
pleasure; and he probably regarded those who pursued some other as
either fools or weaklings. Early in his political life he said one
night to Mr. Bright (from whom I heard the anecdote), as they took
their umbrellas in the cloak-room of the House of Commons: "After all,
what is it that brings you and me here? Fame! This is the true arena.
I might have occupied a literary throne; but I have renounced it for
this career." The external pomps and trappings of life, titles,
stately houses and far-spreading parks, all those gauds and vanities
with which sumptuous wealth surrounds itself, had throughout his life
a singular fascination for him. He liked to mock at them in his
novels, but they fascinated him none the less. One can understand how
they might fire the imagination of an ambitious youth who saw them
from a distance--might even retain their charm for one who was just
struggling into the society which possessed them, and who desired to
feel himself the equal of the possessors. It is stranger that, when he
had harnessed the English aristocracy to his chariot, and was driving
them where he pleased, he should have continued to admire such things.
So, however, it was. There was even in him a vein of inordinate
deference to rank and wealth which would in a less eminent person have
been called snobbishness. In his will he directs that his estate of
Hughenden Manor, in Buckinghamshire, shall pass under an entail as
strict as he could devise, that the person who succeeds to it shall
always bear the name of Disraeli. His ambition is the common, not to
say vulgar, ambition of the English _parvenu_, to found a "county
family." In his story of _Endymion_, published a few months before his
death, the hero, starting from small beginnings, ends by becoming
prime minister: this is the crown of his career, the noblest triumph
an Englishman can achieve. It might have been thought that one who had
been through it all, who had realised the dreams of his boyhood, who
had every opportunity of learning what power and fame come to, would
have liked to set forth some other conception of the end of human
life, or would not have told the world so naively of his self-content
at having attained the aim he had worked for. With most men the flower
they have plucked withers. It might have been expected that one who
was in other things an ironical cynic would at least have sought to
seem disillusionised.