that he was heartless. He was one of those strong natures who
permit neither persons nor principles to stand in their way. His
doctrine was that politics had nothing to do with sentiment; so those
who appealed to him on grounds of humanity appealed in vain. No act
of his life ever so much offended English opinion as the airy
fashion in which he tossed aside the news of the Bulgarian massacre of
1876. It incensed sections who were strong enough, when thoroughly
roused, to bring about his fall. But he was far from being unkindly.
He knew how to attach men to him by friendly deeds as well as
friendly words. He seldom missed an opportunity of saying something
pleasant and cheering to a _debutant_ in Parliament, whether of his
own party or the opposite. He was not selfish in little things; was
always ready to consider the comfort and convenience of those who
surrounded him. Age and success, so far from making him morose or
supercilious, softened the asperities of his character and developed
the affectionate side of it. His last novel, published a few months
before his death, contains more human kindliness, a fuller
recognition of the worth of friendship and the beauty of sisterly
and conjugal love, than do the writings of his earlier manhood.
What it wants in intellectual power it makes up for in a mellower and
more tender tone. Of loyalty to his political friends he was a
model, and nothing did more to secure his command of the party than
its sense that his professional honour, so to speak, could be
implicitly relied upon. To his wife, a warm-hearted woman older than
himself, and inferior to him in education, he was uniformly
affectionate and indeed devoted. The first use he made of his
power as Prime Minister was to procure for her the title of
viscountess. Being once asked point blank by a lady what he thought
of his life-long opponent, Mr. Gladstone answered that two things
had always struck him as very admirable in Lord Beaconsfield's
character--his perfect loyalty to his wife, and his perfect
loyalty to his own race. A story used to be told how, in Disraeli's
earlier days, when his political position was still far from
assured, he and his wife happened to be the guests of the chief of
the party, and that chief so far forgot good manners as to quiz Mrs.
Disraeli at the dinner-table. Next morning Disraeli, whose visit
was to have lasted for some days longer, announced that he must
leave immediately. The host besought him to stay, and made all
possible apologies. But Disraeli was inexorable, and carried off his
wife forthwith. To literary men, whatever their opinions, he was
ready to give a helping hand, representing himself as one of their
profession. In paying compliments he was singularly expert, and few
used the art so well to win friends and disarm enemies. He knew
how to please Englishmen, and especially the young, by showing
interest in their tastes and pleasures, and, without being what
would be called genial, was never wanting in _bonhomie_. In
society he was a perfect man of the world--told his anecdote apropos,
wound up a discussion by some epigrammatic phrase, talked to the
guest next him, if he thought that guest's position made him worth
talking to, as he would to an old acquaintance. But he had few
intimates; nor did his apparent frankness unveil his real thoughts.
He was not of those who complicate political opposition with private
hatreds. Looking on politics as a game, he liked, when he took off his
armour, to feel himself on friendly terms with his antagonists, and
often seemed surprised to find that they remembered as personal
affronts the blows which he had dealt in the tournament. Two or three
years before his death, a friend asked him whether there was in London
any one with whom he would not shake hands. Reflecting for a moment,
he answered, "Only one," and named Robert Lowe, who had said hard
things of him, and to whom, when Lowe was on one occasion in his
power, he had behaved with cruelty. Yet his resentments could smoulder
long. In _Lothair_ he attacked, under a thin disguise, a distinguished
man of letters who had criticised his conduct years before. In
_Endymion_ he gratified what was evidently an ancient grudge by a
spiteful presentation of Thackeray, as he had indulged his more bitter
dislike of John Wilson Croker by portraying that politician in
_Coningsby_ under the name of Nicholas Rigby. For the greatest of his
adversaries he felt, there is reason to believe, genuine admiration,
mingled with inability to comprehend a nature so unlike his own. No
passage in the striking speech which that adversary pronounced, one
might almost say, over Lord Beaconsfield's grave--a speech which may
possibly go down to posterity with its subject--was more impressive
than the sentence in which he declared that he had the best reason to
believe that, in their constant warfare, Lord Beaconsfield had not
been actuated by any personal hostility. Brave men, if they can
respect, seldom dislike, a formidable antagonist.
His mental powers were singularly well suited to the rest of his
character--were, so to speak, all of a piece with it. One sometimes
sees intellects which are out of keeping with the active or emotional
parts of the man. One sees persons whose thought is vigorous, clear,
comprehensive, while their conduct is timid; or a comparatively
narrow intelligence joined to an enterprising spirit; or a sober,
reflective, sceptical turn of mind yoked to an ardent and impulsive
temperament. What we call the follies of the wise often spring from
some such source. Not so with him. His intelligence had the same
boldness, intensity, concentration, directness, which we discover in
the rest of the man. It was just the right instrument, not perhaps for
the normal career of a normal Englishman seeking political success,
but for the particular kind of work Disraeli had planned to do; and
this inner harmony was one of the chief causes of his success, as the
want of it has caused the failure of so many gifted natures.
The range of his mind was not wide. All its products were like one
another. No one of them gives the impression that Disraeli could, had
he so wished, have succeeded in a wholly diverse line. It was a
peculiar mind: there is even more variety in minds than in faces. It
was not logical or discursive, liking to mass and arrange stores of
knowledge, and draw inferences from them, nor was it judicial, with a
turn for weighing reasons and reaching a decision which recognises all
the facts and is not confused by their seeming contradictions. Neither
was it analytically subtle. It reached its conclusions by a process of
intuition or divination in which there was an imaginative as well as a
reflective element. It might almost have been called an artist's mind,
capable of deep meditation, but meditating in an imaginative way, not
so much on facts as on its own views of facts, on the pictures which
its own creative faculty had called up. The meditation became dreamy,
but the dreaminess was corrected by an exceedingly keen and quick
power of observation, not the scientific observation of the
philosopher, but rather the enjoying observation of the artist who
sees how he can use the characteristic details which he notes, or the
observation of the forensic advocate (an artist, too, in his way) who
perceives how they can be fitted into the presentation of his case.
There are, of course, other qualities in Disraeli's work. As a
statesman he was obliged to learn how to state facts, to argue, to
dissect an opponent's arguments. But the characteristic note, both of
his speeches and of his writings, is the combination of a few large
ideas, clear, perhaps, to himself, but generally expressed with
grandiose vagueness, and often quite out of relation to the facts as
other people saw them, with a turn for acutely fastening upon small
incidents or personal traits. In his speeches he used his command of
sonorous phrases and lively illustrations, sometimes to support the
views he was advancing, but more frequently to conceal the weakness of
those views; that is, to make up for the absence of such solid
arguments as were likely to move his hearers. Everybody is now and
then conscious of holding with assured conviction theories which he
would find it hard to prove to a given audience, partly because it is
too much trouble to trace out the process by which they were reached,
partly because uninstructed listeners could not be made to feel the
full cogency of the considerations on which his own mind relies.
Disraeli was usually in this condition with regard to his political
and social doctrines. He believed them, but as he had not reached them
by logic, he was not prepared to use logic to establish them; so he
picked up some plausible illustration, or attacked the opposite
doctrine and its supporters with a fire of raillery or invective. This
non-ratiocinative quality of his thinking was a source both of
strength and of weakness--of weakness, because he could not prove his
propositions; of strength, because, stated as he stated them, it was
not less hard to disprove them. That mark of a superior mind, that it
must have a theory, was never wanting. Some one said of him that he
was "the ruins of a thinker." He could not rest content, like many
among his followers, with a prejudice, a dogma delivered by tradition,
a stolid suspicion unamenable to argument. He would not acquiesce in
negation. He must have a theory, a positive theory, to show not only
that his antagonist's view was erroneous, but that he had himself a
more excellent way. These theories generally had in them a measure of
truth and value for any one who could analyse them; but as this was
exactly what the rank and file of the party could not do, they got
into sad confusion when they tried to talk his language.
He could hardly be called a well-read man, nor were his intellectual
interests numerous. His education had consisted mainly in promiscuous
reading during boyhood and early youth. There are worse kinds of
education for an active intelligence than to let it have the run of a
large library. The wild browsings of youth, when curiosity is strong
as hunger, stir the mind and give the memory some of the best food it
ever gets. The weak point of such a method is that it does not teach
accuracy nor the art of systematic study. In middle life natural
indolence and his political occupations had kept Disraeli from filling
up the gaps in his knowledge, while, in conversation, what he liked
best was persiflage. He was, however, tolerably familiar with the
ancient classics, and with modern English and French literature;
enjoyed Quintilian and Lucian, preferred Sophocles to Aeschylus and
(apparently) Horace to Virgil, despised Browning, considered Tennyson
the best of contemporary poets, but "not a poet of a high order."[8]
Physical science seems never to have attracted him. Political economy
he hated and mocked at almost as heartily as did Carlyle. People have
measured his knowledge of history and geography by observing that he
placed the Crucifixion in the lifetime of Augustus, and thought, down
till 1878, when he had to make a speech about Afghanistan, that the
Andes were the highest mountains in the world. But geography is a
subject which a man of affairs does not think of reading up in later
life: he is content if he can get information when he needs it. There
are some bits of metaphysics and some historical allusions scattered
over his novels, but these are mostly slight or superficial. He amused
himself and the public by now and then propounding doctrines on
agricultural matters, but would not appear to have mastered either
husbandry or any other economical or commercial subject. Such things
were not in his way. He had been so little in office as not to have
been forced to apply himself to them, while the tide of pure
intellectual curiosity had long since ebbed.
For so-called "sports" he had little taste. He liked to go mooning in
a meditative way round his fields and copses, and he certainly enjoyed
Nature; but there seems to be no solid evidence that the primrose was
his favourite flower. In his fondness for particular words and phrases
there was a touch of his artistic quality, and a touch also of the
cynical view that words are the counters with which the wise play
their game. There is a passage in _Contarini Fleming_ (a story into
which he has put a good deal of himself) where this is set out.
Contarini tells his father that he left college "because they taught
me only words, and I wished to learn ideas." His father answers, "Few
ideas are correct ones, and what are correct, no one can ascertain;
but with words we govern men."
He went on acting on this belief in the power of words till he
became the victim of his own phrases, just as people who talk
cynically for effect grow sometimes into real cynics. When he had
invented a phrase which happily expressed the aspect he wished his
view, or some part of his policy, to bear, he came to believe in
the phrase, and to think that the facts were altered by the colour
the phrase put upon them. During the contest for the extension of
the parliamentary franchise, he declared himself "in favour of
popular privileges, but opposed to democratic rights." When he was
accused of having assented, at the Congress of Berlin, to the
dismemberment of the Turkish Empire, he said that what had been done
was "not dismemberment, but consolidation." No statesman of recent
times has given currency to so many quasi-epigrammatic expressions:
"organised hypocrisy," "England dislikes coalitions," "plundering and
blundering," "peace with honour," "_imperium et libertas_," "a
scientific frontier," "I am on the side of the angels," are a few,
not perhaps the best, though the best remembered, of the many which
issued from his fertile mint. This turn for epigram, not common in
England, sometimes led him into scrapes which would have damaged a man
of less imperturbable coolness. No one else could have ventured to
say, when he had induced the Tories to pass a Reform Bill stronger
than the one they had rejected from the Liberals in the preceding
year, that it had been his mission "to educate his party." Some of
his opponents professed to be shocked by such audacity, and many
old Tories privily gnashed their teeth. But the country received the
dictum in the spirit in which it was spoken. "It was Disraeli all
over."
If his intellect was not of wide range, it was within its range a
weapon of the finest flexibility and temper. It was ingenious, ready,
incisive. It detected in a moment the weak point, if not of an
argument, yet of an attitude or of a character. Its imaginative
quality made it often picturesque, sometimes even impressive. Disraeli
had the artist's delight in a situation for its own sake, and what
people censured as insincerity or frivolity was frequently only the
zest which he felt in posing, not so much because there was anything
to be gained, as because he realised his aptitude for improvising a
new part in the drama which he always felt himself to be playing. The
humour of the situation was too good to be wasted. Perhaps this love
of merry mischief may have had something to do with his tendency to
confer honours on those whom the world thought least deserving.
His books are not only a valuable revelation of his mind, but have
more literary merit than critics have commonly allowed to them,
perhaps because we are apt, when a man excels in one walk, to deem
him to have failed in any other wherein he does not reach the same
level. The novels foam over with cleverness; indeed, _Vivian Grey_,
with all its youthful faults, gives as great an impression of
intellectual brilliance as does anything Disraeli ever wrote or spoke.
Their easy fertility makes them seem to be only, so to speak, a few
sketches out of a large portfolio. There is some variety in the
subjects--_Contarini Fleming_ and _Tancred_ are more romantic than the
others, _Sybil_ and _Coningsby_ more political--as well as in the
merits of the stories. The two latest, _Lothair_ and _Endymion_,
works of his old age, are markedly inferior in spirit and invention;
but the general features are the same in all--a lively fancy, a knack
of hitting characters off in a few lines and of catching the
superficial aspects of society, a brisk narrative, a sprightly
dialogue, a keen insight into the selfishness of men and the vanities
of women, with flashes of wit lighting up the whole stage. It is
always a stage. The brilliance is never open-air sunshine. There is
scarcely one of the characters whom we feel we might have met and
known. Heroes and heroines are theatrical figures; their pathos
rings false, their love, though described as passionate, does not
spring from the inner recesses of the soul. The studies of men of
the world, and particularly of heartless ones, are the most
life-like; yet, even here, any one who wants to feel the difference
between the great painter and the clever sketcher need only
compare Thackeray's Marquis of Steyne with Disraeli's Marquis of
Monmouth, both of them suggested by the same original. There is
little intensity, little dramatic power in these stories, as also in
his play of _Alarcos_; and if we read them with pleasure it is not
for the sake either of plot or of character, but because they contain
so many sparkling witticisms and reflections, setting in a strong
light, yet not always an unkindly light, the seamy side of politics
and human nature. The slovenliness of their style, which is often
pompous, but seldom pure, makes them appear to have been written
hastily. But Disraeli seems to have taken the composition of them
(except, perhaps, the two latest) quite seriously. When he wrote the
earlier tales, he meant to achieve literary greatness; while the
middle ones, especially _Coningsby_ and _Sybil_, were designed as
political manifestoes. The less they have a purpose or profess to
be serious, the better they are; and the most vivacious of all are
two classical burlesques, written at a time when that kind of
composition had not yet become common--_Ixion in Heaven_ and _The
Infernal Marriage_--little pieces of funning worthy of Thackeray, I
had almost said of Voltaire. They recall, perhaps they were
suggested by, similar pieces of Lucian's. Is Semitic genius specially
rich in this mocking vein? Lucian was a Syrian from Samosata,
probably a Semite; Heinrich Heine was a Semite; James Russell
Lowell used to insist, though he produced little evidence for his
belief, that Voltaire was a Semite.
Whether Disraeli could ever have taken high rank as a novelist if he
had thrown himself completely into the profession may be doubted,
for his defects were such as pains and practice would hardly have
lessened. That he had still less the imagination needed by a poet, his
_Revolutionary Epick_, conceived on the plains of Troy, and meant
to make a fourth to the _Iliad_, the _Aeneid_, and the _Divina
Commedia_, is enough to show. The literary vocation he was best
fitted for was that of a journalist or pamphleteer; and in this he
might have won unrivalled success. His dash, his verve, his
brilliancy of illustration, his scorching satire, would have made
the fortune of any newspaper, and carried dismay into the enemy's
ranks.
In inquiring how far the gifts I have sought to describe qualified
Disraeli for practical statesmanship, it is well to distinguish the
different kinds of capacity which an English politician needs to
attain the highest place. They may be said to be four. He must be a
debater. He must be a parliamentary tactician. He must understand the
country. He must understand Europe. This last is, indeed, not always
necessary; there have been moments when England, leaving Europe to
itself, may look to her own affairs only; but when the sky grows
stormy over Europe, the want of knowledge which English statesmen
sometimes evince may bode disaster.
An orator, in the highest sense of the word, Disraeli never was. He
lacked ease and fluency. He had not Pitt's turn for the lucid
exposition of complicated facts, nor for the conduct of a close
argument. The sustained and fiery declamation of Fox was equally
beyond his range. And least of all had he that truest index of
eloquence, the power of touching the emotions. He could not make his
hearers weep. But he could make them laugh; he could put them in
good-humour with themselves; he could dazzle them with rhetoric; he
could pour upon an opponent streams of ridicule more effective than
the hottest indignation. When he sought to be profound or solemn, he
was usually heavy and laboured--the sublimity often false, the diction
often stilted. For wealth of thought or splendour of language his
speeches will not bear to be compared--I will not say with those of
Burke (on whom he sometimes tried to model himself), but with those of
three or four of his own contemporaries. Even within his own party,
Lord Derby, Lord Ellenborough, and Lord Cairns in their several ways
surpassed him. There is not one of his longer and more finished
harangues which can be read with interest from beginning to end. But
there is hardly any among them which does not contain some striking
passage, some image or epigram, or burst of sarcasm, which must have
been exceedingly effective when delivered. It is partly upon these
isolated passages, especially the sarcastic ones (though the
witticisms were sometimes borrowed), and still more upon the aptness
of the speech to the circumstances under which it was made, that his
parliamentary fame rests. If he was not a great orator he was a superb
debater, who watched with the utmost care the temper of the audience,
and said just what was needed at the moment to disconcert an opponent
or to put heart into his friends. His repartees were often happy, and
must sometimes have been unpremeditated. As he had not the ardent
temperament of the born orator, so neither had he the external
advantages which count for much before large assemblies. His voice was
not remarkable either for range or for quality. His manner was
somewhat stiff, his gestures few, his countenance inexpressive. Yet
his delivery was not wanting in skill, and often added point, by its
cool unconcern, to a stinging epigram.
What he lacked in eloquence he made up for by tactical adroitness. No
more consummate parliamentary strategist has been seen in England. He
had studied the House of Commons till he knew it as a player knows his
instrument--studied it collectively, for it has a collective
character, and studied the men who compose it: their worse rather than
their better side, their prejudices, their foibles, their vanities,
their ambitions, their jealousies, above all, that curious corporate
pride which they have, and which makes them resent any approach to
dictation. He could play on every one of these strings, and yet so as
to conceal his skill; and he so economised himself as to make them
always wish to hear him. He knew how in a body of men obliged to
listen to talk, and most of it tedious talk, about matters in
themselves mostly uninteresting, the desire for a little amusement
becomes almost a passion; and he humoured this desire so far as
occasionally to err by excess of banter and flippancy. Almost always
respectful to the House, he had a happy knack of appearing to follow
rather than to lead, and when he made an official statement it was
with the air of one who was taking them into his confidence. Much of
this he may have learned from observing Lord Palmerston; but the art
came more naturally to that statesman, who was an Englishman all
through, than to a man of Mr. Disraeli's origin, who looked on
Englishmen from outside, and never felt himself, so to speak,
responsible for their habits or ideas.
As leader of his party in Opposition, he was at once daring and
cautious. He never feared to give battle, even when he expected
defeat, if he deemed it necessary, with a view to the future, that the
judgment of his party should have been pronounced in a formal way. On
the other hand, he was wary of committing himself to a policy of blind
or obstinate resistance. When he perceived that the time had come to
yield, he knew how to yield with a good grace, so as both to support a
character for reasonableness and to obtain valuable concessions as the
price of peace. If difficulties arose with foreign countries he
claimed full liberty of criticising the conduct of the Ministry, but
ostentatiously abstained from obstructing or thwarting their acts,
declaring that England must always present a united front to the
foreigner, whatever penalties she might afterwards visit on those who
had mismanaged her concerns. As regards the inner discipline of his
party, he had enormous difficulties to surmount in the jealousy which
many Tories felt for him as a new man, a man whom they could not
understand and only partially trusted.[9] Conspiracies were repeatedly
formed against him; malcontents attacked him in the press, and
sometimes even in Parliament. These he seldom noticed, maintaining a
cool and self-confident demeanour which disheartened the plotters, and
discharging the duties of his post with steady assiduity. He was
always on the look-out for young men of promise, drew them towards
him, encouraged them to help him in parliamentary sharp-shooting, and
fostered in every way the spirit of party. The bad side of that spirit
was seen when he came into office, for then every post in the public
service was bestowed either by mere favouritism or on party grounds;
and men who had been loyal to him were rewarded by places or titles to
which they had no other claim. But the unity and martial fervour of
the Tory party was raised to the highest point. Nor was Disraeli
himself personally unpopular with his parliamentary opponents, even
when he was most hotly attacked on the platform and in the press.