The recent centenary of the birth of Benjamin Disraeli renewed our
interest in the most striking figure in the English history of the last
century. Throughout his life Disraeli made it an important part of his
_métier_ to be interesting, and it is certainly a convincing proof
both of his great natural fascination and of the adroitness with which
he worked his pose, that even beyond the grave his character should
still exercise our curiosity and blind us with the various facets of
its brilliancy. He fairly bristles with paradoxes, this cynic, who
was also a sentimentalist, this Oriental mystic, who was one of the
most finished dandies in London, this shameless adventurer, with his
pathetic and chivalrous devotion to his sovereign, this political
Don Juan, who provided a classic example of conjugal affection.
Many have essayed to solve the riddle of the "Primrose Sphinx"; but
the best testimony to their almost universal failure is that nearly
every biographer has produced a completely different version of his
character. Mr. Hitchman, "one of the helpless, somnambulised cattle
whom he led by the nose," to use Carlyle's phrase, portrays him
(in _The Public Life of the late Lord Beaconsfield_) with charming
_naïveté_ as the "disinterested and patriotic statesman." Mr. T. P.
O'Connor, on the other hand, who, when still sowing his literary
wild oats, painted Disraeli even blacker than the Prince of Darkness
himself, in a book unworthy of any serious biographer, simply
overshoots the mark. Froude, in his _Life_, comes nearer to the truth,
but is hampered by being forced to compress the history of a crowded
life and the psychology of a complex character into a narrow and
inadequate compass. Both Froude, however, and Mr. Sichel, who has given
us an interesting volume on Disraeli's personality, lay too much stress
on his imaginative and idealistic features.
The reason for this inability to comprehend a character, in many
respects singularly typical of his age, lies not so much in the
alleged inadequacy of the materials as in the incapacity of most
English writers for handling general ideas. The English mind is too
concrete for social psychology; it delights in the almost mechanical
work of classifying animals, but fails to produce any classification
of characters worth the name. The Disraeli problem is admittedly
difficult; the secrecy which until recently kept us from all knowledge
of the greater portion of his papers and correspondence is undoubtedly
a handicap, but the difficulty is by no means insuperable, nor the
material so scanty as is usually supposed. Let us take Disraeli in
relation to his age, his environment, his ancestry, then what would
otherwise have struck us as strange, not to say impossible, stands out
clear and inevitable. Another valuable source of information is to be
found in his novels, though it is always difficult to discriminate
between what is and what is not autobiographical in these works.
A vigorous and imaginative mind, when writing about its own history,
will naturally not stint itself in its licences; it will abandon
itself to all kinds of hypotheses; it will take a certain phase of
itself, frame circumstances to suit its development, and proceed on the
fictitious assumption; it will indulge freely both in caricature and
idealisation. In _Vivian Grey_, for instance, Disraeli has slightly
exaggerated the more cynical side of his nature; _Sidonia_, on the
other hand, is an idealised version of Disraeli; it is Disraeli raised
to a higher power; it is what he would have liked to have been, but
was not, any more than the actual Byron was as brave, as romantic, and
as fascinating as the ideal Byron who is portrayed in _Conrad, Childe
Harold_, and _Don Juan_.
Yet, none the less, _Sidonia, Fakredeen, Vivian Grey,_ and _Contarini
Fleming_ possess a strong family likeness, and strike a genuine
autobiographical note. With regard to the two latter, Mr. Sichel, in
his study of Disraeli, is unwarranted in his attempted depreciation of
their evidence, on the theory that they represent merely a distorted
and transient phase of Disraeli's development, to be ascribed to
ill-health and immaturity. On the contrary, the contortions of great
men in adolescence are peculiarly instructive. It is then that the
very elements of the future man are fermenting in the crucible; and
is not growth more significant than maturity? It is not a paradox,
but a fundamental truth, to say that a man is never more himself than
when he is not himself; it is in periods of violent upheaval that the
conventional superstructure is destroyed and the innermost foundations
of character are laid bare. It is far easier to tone down than to touch
up, and the unrestrained sincerity of these early novels, written under
the impetus of intense emotion, throws far more light on Disraeli's
real character than a book like _Endymion_, the official pronouncement
of his maturer years. A prudent use, then, of the novels, and an
examination of his relations to his age, environment, and ancestry
should enable us to construct a psychology of Disraeli that should be
at once convincing and consistent, and adequate to shed light on many
of the obscure points of his character.
The _Sturm und Drang_ age of the Revolution in which Disraeli was
born marked the passing of Europe from childhood to manhood, from
mediævalism to modernity. Like all transition periods, it was
peculiarly complex; the tendencies being so varied, and were so
frequently accompanied by the reactions against themselves, that it
requires considerable care to disentangle the principal threads.
It was an age of progress where reaction was frequently to be seen at
work; it was an age significant for a violent outburst of scientific
materialism, and the consequently inevitable mysticism of a religious
revival. It was an age at once scientific and romantic, individual
and cosmopolitan. It was an age where circumstances produced strange
mixtures, so that in England we are brought face to face with the
paradox that Gladstone, the founder of democratic idealism, obtained
his seat under the old system of close boroughs, while Disraeli, the
most brilliant example of the new democratic theory of _la carrière
ouverte aux talentes_, found his way to power as the head of the
aristocratic and conservative party. The predominant note, however, was
one of democratic individualism. With the French Revolution the yoke
of responsibility, political and religious, was violently thrown off;
new and wide fields had been opened out to commerce by the extended
communications and the new mechanical inventions. A quickened life
broke in upon the lethargy of the previous century. The struggle for
existence entered on a sharper and intenser phase. Ambitious men
vehemently dashed themselves against the social barrier, which day by
day became more easy to climb. In every department it was the age of
the clever and ambitious parvenu. In war and in politics Napoleon, in
poetry Burns, in fiction Balzac, give convincing testimony to the power
of the new régime. It was the age of the French Revolution and of the
Holy Alliance, of Condillac and of Chateaubriand, of Laplace and of
Shelley, of Godwin and of Tom Paine.
But equality is a medal with two faces: on the one side is written,
"I am as good as, if not better than, everyone else"; on the other,
"Everyone else is as good as, if not better than, myself." The first
was the motto of the rampant individualism and vigorous national
policy of Disraeli, the latter of the hesitating Christian spirit
and sentimental cosmopolitanism of Gladstone. Gladstone, indeed, is
such an excellent foil to Disraeli that we may well be permitted the
following quotations, where the rift in Gladstone's lute, between
the churchman and the politician, stands in pointed contrast to the
unity of purpose that from his earliest years actuated his rival.
Gladstone, torn between his missionary impulse and yearning for
apostolic destination on the one hand, and healthy ambition on the
other, writes to his father: "I am willing to persuade myself that in
spite of other longings, which I often feel, my heart is prepared to
yield other hopes and other desires for this: of being permitted to
be the humblest of those who may be commissioned to set before the
eyes of man the magnanimity and glory of Christian truth. Politics are
fascinating to me, perhaps too fascinating. My temper is so excitable
that I should fear giving up my mind to other subjects, which have ever
proved sufficiently alluring to me, and which I fear would make my life
a series of unsatisfied longings and expectations." Disraeli is less
undecided, as is clear from the following quotation from _Contarini
Fleming_: "I should have killed myself if I had not been supported by
my ambition, which now each day became more quickening, so that the
desire of distinction and of astounding action raged in my soul, and
when I realised that so many years must elapse before I could realise
my ideal, I gnashed my teeth in silent rage and cursed my existence,"
Disraeli will give up anything rather than his chance of being a great
man. At a time when most clever young men of his age were thinking of a
scholarship he had finally decided to go in for a premiership. He has
planned his campaign, he will fool the world to the top of its bent.
When yet a boy Disraeli says, as Vivian Grey: "We must mix with the
herd, we must sympathise with the sorrow that we do not feel and share
the merriment of fools. To rule men we must be men, to prove that we
are strong we must be weak. Our wisdom must be concealed under folly,
our constancy under caprice."
None the less, Disraeli had too vivid an imagination, too keen a
sense of the picturesque, not to be affected to a certain extent
by the current Romanticism. We see this in the Eastern novels of
_Tancred_ and _Alroy_, also in _Contarini Fleming_, the English
Wilhelm Meister, which exhibits the weaker and more morbid side of the
author's character, and is a useful supplement to Vivian Grey. But it
is the latter, however, who represents most accurately the ideals and
aspirations of the young Disraeli, and, taken generally, is a broad
adumbration of his subsequent career. But the Disraeli of Vivian Grey
was not so unique as is usually considered, and an analogy between
him and the celebrated Frenchman, who wrote a novel about the same
period, and one, moreover, singularly typical of his age, proves
instructive. Benjamin Disraeli and Henri Beyle were in all superficial
details so absolutely different that one might well hesitate before
making the comparison, yet they were radically similar in many of their
larger outlines, and in particular their characters, as revealed in
the heroes of two novels, _Vivian Grey_ and _Le Rouge et le Noir_,
show an extraordinary resemblance. Both Julien Sorel and Vivian Grey
are impelled by a violent and overwhelming ambition; both, originally
excluded by their status from participation in the great prizes of the
world, set out undaunted to conquer, the one as a priest, the other as
a politician. Cynical, with that extreme and savage species of cynicism
which is the reaction from intense sensitiveness, they both wage war
on society in their passion for success, while the nobler and more
generous instincts with which nature had endowed them perish in the
struggle.
But this Time-Spirit of individualism was no mere cold-blooded
philosophy of egoism. It was, after all, an age of genuine poetry, of
fresh ideals. The halo of romance played around the most abandoned
sinners. Individualism found, in addition, an æsthetic sanction, as
was seen in the prodigious vogue of Byron, where the picturesque pose
of the one man pitted against society appealed strongly to the popular
imagination. How deeply Disraeli was imbued with Byronism is evidenced
not only by the whole tone and manner of his early life, but by his
resuscitation of the Byronic legend in _Venetia_.
This spirit of combined idealism and intense practical energy is met
with again in Disraeli's race and ancestry. The Jewish race is a
compound of materialism and idealism. The Jew is the dreamer in action,
combining fluid imagination with adamantine purpose. These two phases
of the Jewish character are seen excellently in Disraeli's father and
paternal grandfather. The latter, an Italian Jew, came over to England
about the middle of the eighteenth century, and quickly made a fortune
by dint of his shrewd business talent and fixity. His son Isaac was
gifted with an unfortunate superfluity of the poetic temperament. His
youth was erratic and unhappy, but when close on thirty he found a
secure refuge in the quiet waters of literature. To his Semitic blood
is also to be traced Disraeli's prodigious tenacity of purpose. He
came of a stiff-necked people, so that opposition stimulated him, and
his early failures served but to render sweeter his eventual success.
He had, too, the calculating foresight of the Jew, and could pierce
the future, if not with prophetic vision, at any rate, with marvellous
intuition. His Oriental strain of mysticism served him in good stead.
He never forgot that he was a scion of the Chosen People, and came of
a race which had never sullied its purity of lineage by changing its
blood. Was he not the chosen man of the chosen race? Could he not read
his future, if not in the stars, "which are the brain of heaven," yet
in his own brilliant and meteoric brain? He had a full measure of the
pride of race, and plumed himself to the last on what he may well have
called "the Oriental ichor in his veins." If his enemies dubbed him a
parvenu he would fling the wretched taunt back in their faces, bidding
them realise that they came from a parvenu and hybrid race, while he
himself was sprung from the purest blood in Europe. How keen was this
genealogical Judaism we can see from the classic letter to O'Connell,
where he wrote that "the hereditary bondsman had forgotten the clank of
his fetters," and from his masterpiece of character-drawing, Sidonia,
who, with wealth, intellect, and power at his command, yet found his
chief "source of interest in his descent and in the fortunes of his
race." Disraeli's Judaism, however, did not extend to the religious
tenets of the creed. Few, no doubt, are the instances of a converted
Jew proving a genuine Christian, but Disraeli had too much of the
mystic in him to be an atheist, and if we take into account the
elasticity of his imagination, there is little reason to doubt that he
was at any rate reasonably sincere in his belief that Christianity was
merely completed Judaism, Calvary but the logical corollary of Sinai;
he would also, no doubt, find a malicious joy in reminding those who
taunted him with his origin, that "one half of Christendom worships
a Jew and the other half a Jewess." Anyway, the Christian religion
played nothing approaching an integral part in his life; while an
amiable acquiescence in its dogmas was, at the best, as it has been
with so many, but an intellectual habit. His Jewish origin helped him,
moreover, in that he approached the problems of politics with a mind
free from conventional British prejudices. He was never a thorough
Englishman, and was proud of the fact, instead of thanking God "that he
was born an Englishman," as do many of his race, who betray in their
every word and action their Jewish nationality. His admirable expert
knowledge of the English character was throughout professional, not
sympathetic.
When we turn to Disraeli's early environment, we find that it was one
calculated to foster both ambition and a literary imagination. He
breathed from his earliest days the atmosphere of books, and almost
from the cradle imbibed avidly the many volumes of Voltaire. Nothing
is so stimulating to the youthful mind as the unchecked run of a
library, with its delightful excursions into the unexplored country of
literature. His natural sensitiveness was hardened by his experiences
at school, where his nationality and cleverness rendered him unpopular.
The reaction intensified his already precocious ambition, and gave him
that consciousness of semi-isolation which formed one of the chief
parts of his strength. His ambition was further heightened by the smart
literary set which he met constantly at his father's house, and his
early glimpses of the great world. Disraeli is palpably exaggerating
when he says, _apropos_ of Vivian Grey, that "he was a tender plant in
a moral hot-house," but the following passage is significant:
"He became habituated to the idea that everything could
be achieved by dexterity, that there was no test of
conduct except success; to be ready to advance any
opinion, to possess none; to look upon every man as a
tool, and never to do anything which had not a definite
though circuitous purpose."
It is this trait of doing things with an object which supplied the true
clue to Disraeli as a man of letters. We admit, of course, the _verve_
and brilliancy of the novels, their claim to rank as classic, but it is
impossible to arrive at a correct appreciation of them unless they be
taken in the closest conjunction with their author's political career.
_Vivian Grey_, for instance, no doubt afforded an excellent outlet for
the fermenting passion of Disraeli's youth; it was itself one of the
best society novels ever written, but it was something more. Before
that time the future Premier had been hiding his light. How could
he obtain a free field for the exercise of his gifts? His father's
Bohemian clique scarcely answered his purpose. How could he burst open
the doors of society? The bombshell was supplied by _Vivian Grey_. It
was a case of self-advertisement raised to the level of a fine art, and
Disraeli introduced himself to the public with a bow of most elaborate
flourishes. _Contarini Fleming_ strikes a slightly different note,
exhibiting the more poetic side of its author's character; but we must
not forget that at the time when it was published Disraeli's long
absence in the East had temporarily obscured his fame in London, and
that it was the success of _Contarini Fleming_ which secured for him
once more the _entrée_ into society. Similarly, _Coningsby, Sybil_,
and _Tancred_ were, in the main, but the gospels in which, in the rôle
of a political saviour, he propagated the new creed of Young England.
_Lothair_ and _Endymion_ were partly written to replenish his empty
exchequer. The protagonists, moreover, in all his chief novels were
fashioned in the image of himself, and even Lord Cadurcis in _Venetia_,
who is theoretically Byron, is portrayed with the physical features of
the author, so as to ensure a vivid impression on the public mind of
his own personality. Not that Disraeli did not experience a genuine
joy in the wielding of the pen. He could soar high in his flights of
mysticism and romance; could describe the picturesque and the beautiful
in passages of inspired rhetoric, though it was in the dash and
brilliancy of his satire which at its best equalled that of Heine, or
Voltaire, or Byron, that he was most himself. His style is redolent of
his race. It possesses the genuine Oriental glamour, the Oriental love
of gorgeous and grandiose magnificence, the Oriental lack of symmetry
and proportion. His prodigious genius for sarcasm was also Semitic,
if we are to believe Mr. Bryce, who considers that gift a peculiar
property of the race, instancing, as examples, Lucian and Heine, the
greatest satirists of ancient and modern times.
This same combination of temperament and policy which explains
Disraeli, the man of letters, explains Disraeli, the dandy. Living
as he did in an age which revolted, under the leadership of Count
D'Orsay, against the chaste and classic traditions of Brummel,
and which offered in the elaborate picturesqueness of its dress an
excellent medium for the expression of personality, is it to be
wondered at that so ambitious a nature as Disraeli's should, apart
from other reasons, enter gaily into the sartorial arena? These early
years remind us of Alcibiades, who, in his youth, his genius, his
precocious political ambitions, his aristocratic lineage and superb
insolence, his extravagance and irresponsibility, offers a fairly close
analogy. Disraeli, however, was an Alcibiades with ballast, and his
most erratic phases were governed by a consistent purpose. He had,
it is true, the regular Hebrew love for the picturesque, the racial
craving for flamboyant display; but the unique characteristic of the
man was the ingenious method by which he exploited even his weaknesses
to advance his purpose. Realising that nothing was more fatal to his
career than the indifference of the public, that to be hated was better
than to be ignored, and that notoriety was a passable substitute for
fame, he was determined to bulk largely in the public eye. Living,
fortunately, in an age when dandyism, if not an art, was at any rate
a career, and when "wild, melancholy men" were still the rage among
the ladies, he manipulated the dandy and Byronic pose with phenomenal
success. But his social career was not all pose. Though political
ambition was to him always the main point of existence, he was far too
healthy to lose sight of the small change of life. He had, moreover,
a genuine love of society. His remark _apropos_ of Gladstone, "What
can we do with a leader who is not even in society?" was sincere in
spite of being an epigram, and the hosts of great ladies who crowd his
novels attest conclusively to his social fastidiousness. But the most
convincing proof of this lighter side of his nature is to be found in
his correspondence with his sister. Those letters, dashed off hurriedly
to his "dearest Sa," written with that complete lack of ceremony which
is the sign of a perfect intimacy, show with what zest he frequented
balls and water-parties, dinners and _soirées_. Yet his ambition is
never far in the background. He goes to the House of Commons, hears the
big man speak, and then writes to his sister, "But between ourselves I
could floor them all." His genius for conversation is historic, and we
are not surprised that he considered that the one unforgivable sin was
to be a bore. He had not, it is true, Gladstone's habit of unburdening
himself freely to the most casual of acquaintances. How many, indeed,
were there of his intimates who had penetrated into the secret places
of his heart? But over-much sincerity is a hindrance to the art of
conversation; and many of his most brilliant paradoxes were thrown off
as an evasive retort to an impertinent question. When, however, we come
to Disraeli's social and private life, the most interesting question
that presents itself is that of his relation to his wife. Even though
he had discoursed in _Contarini Fleming_ of the grand passion with all
the high-flown sentimentalism of the age, it was obviously impossible
for him, considering the disparity of their ages, to be seriously in
love with Mrs. Disraeli; and it must have seemed that he had been
forced to exchange the poetry of the mistress for the prose of the
wife. Had he not, about ten years before his marriage, written to his
sister, "How would you like Lady B---- for a sister-in-law? Clever,
£25,000, and domestic. As for love, all my friends who have married for
love either beat their wives or live apart from them. This is literally
true. I may commit many follies, but never that of marrying for love,
which, I am convinced, cannot but be a guarantee of infelicity." Yet
this union, based originally on mere policy and camaraderie, was
eventually crowned with the most faithful of loves. It was his wife's
absorbing interest in his career that supplied the link. He has himself
written that the most exquisite moment in a man's life was when he
surprised his lady-love reading the manuscript of his first speech, and
the sympathy of Mrs. Disraeli in his successes may well have given them
a yet further charm. The situation is well expressed in the remark of
Mrs. Disraeli's: "You know you married me for money, and I know that if
you had to do it again you would do it for love."
In fact the warm and constant affection Disraeli lavished on his wife
during her lifetime, and the poignant grief that he evinced at her
death, furnish a more than sufficient refutation to those who persist
in regarding him as a mere cynical fortune-hunter. Disraeli, like
Browning, had
"Two soul sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her."
In the other departments of private life he was likewise exemplary.
His hardness was limited to politics; he was the most dutiful of sons,
the most affectionate of brothers, the most faithful of friends. His
debts, for the most part, were incurred by backing the bills of other
men. His touching and romantic friendship for Mrs. Brydges Williams,
the eccentric old Cornish lady who gave him pecuniary assistance at a
critical period of his career, is well known. The story, again, of the
Premier and his wife dancing a Highland jig in their night apparel on
hearing of the success of an old friend, shows how little the bitter
struggles of politics had hardened his heart. Particularly touching,
also, is the mutual affection between him and the Queen, that
sweetened his last years. She was, as we read in a letter of Disraeli's
to the Marchioness of Ely, "the best friend he had in the world."
But Disraeli, though he fulfilled himself in many ways, was first
of all a politician, and it is Disraeli the politician rather than
Disraeli the man of letters, the dandy, or the human being, that
principally provokes our interest. What were his real views on
politics? How far can we distinguish between the official edition of
himself which he displayed for public inspection and the original that
he alone could read? Given his policy, how far was it justifiable, how
far rational? The view of his most devoted, but yet in reality, quite
unappreciative, admirers, that throughout a political career of over
half a century he remained consistently and absolutely faithful to his
original ideals, and that he introduced into politics an integrity and
disinterestedness that Parliament had rarely witnessed, is even more
absurd than the opinion of his blind and malignant enemies that he
was a mere charlatan who juggled with parties and the people without
possessing a single genuine political faith of his own. Disraeli, as
was inevitable in a man of so detached and unprejudiced a nature,
simply took the then party system at its true worth, and, of course,
realised from the outset that before he could do anything worth
doing he must first obtain that power which alone could give him the
opportunity of doing it. His attack on Peel was, _primâ facie_, an
occasion that it would have been the depth of folly to have missed, and
Mr. Birrell's statement that Disraeli "ate his peck of dirt," and his
comparison of him to Casanova, is mere petulance. For these preliminary
stages of the higher politics Disraeli was admirably fitted, and the
following autobiographic passages from _Tancred_ show how congenial
were his Herculean labours: "To be the centre of a maze of manœuvres
was his empyrean, and while he recognised in them the best means of
success he found in their exercise a means of constant delight"; and
again, "'Intrigue,' cried the young prince, using, as was his custom, a
superfluity of expression both of voice and hand and eyes, 'intrigue,
it is life, it is the only thing. If you wish to produce a result
you must make a combination, and you call combination intrigue.'"
Disraeli viewed party politics from the dispassionate standpoint of
a chess-player, "playing off the proud peers like pawns," skilfully
manœuvring his knights and bishops beneath the shadow of the old
mediæval castles, though it was "in his masterly manipulation of his
queen" that he really surpassed himself. What a contrast to Gladstone's
youthful frame of mind, who entered politics because he felt a strong
moral duty to defend that Church which he was afterwards partly to
disestablish against the insidious attacks of philosophic Radicalism.
But Disraeli's point of view was, after all, merely that which was
obvious and rational. It is well known that in Disraeli's day the whole
efficiency of the party system as a means of carrying on the government
was based on that sagacious inconsistency, so characteristic of this
country, which, cheerfully accommodating the most untractable of facts
to the most docile of theories, drew between the two parties no clear
dividing line either of principle or of class. Those genuine lines
of cleavage both of policy and interest that now tend to become more
and more clearly marked did not then exist. The only vital political
distinction then existing in England was that between the Ins and the
Outs. Whigs and Tories were, in their origin, merely the names for the
two rival organisations for the pursuit of political power into which
the oligarchy of the time had divided itself, and the party catch-words
then indicated as much essential difference as the badges by which the
two sides of a "scratch" game symbolise a fictitious distinction.
Particularly interesting is the following quotation from a letter of
Gladstone, written comparatively early in his career, which shows
convincingly that the subsequent democratic idealist fully realised
the intrinsic farce of the then party system: "Each of them, the Whig
and the Tory Party, comprises within itself far greater divergencies
than can be noticed as dividing the more moderate portion of the one
from the more moderate portion of the other. The great English parties
differ no more in their general outlines than by a somewhat different
distribution of the same elements in each." It is impossible for
the opportunist position to be more cogently stated. It is, indeed,
a strange paradox that political integrity should be traditionally
associated with the name of Gladstone, who accomplished more than any
other of our statesmen in changing statesmanship into demagogy. His
pronouncedly religious temperament, however, led to extraordinary
results, and his psychological condition was best expressed in the
well-known epigram that "he followed his conscience in the same manner
that the driver of a gig follows the horse." It was not that he was
deliberately insincere. He could deceive himself as well as others
with his ingenious sophisms. His sincerity was merely so elastic,
his enthusiasm so adaptable, that he found it easy to be sincere and
enthusiastic, _inter alia_, about those things which coincided with his
interests.
Carlyle hits the mark in dubbing Gladstone a deeper and unconscious
juggler as contrasted with Disraeli, the clever, conscious juggler. The
latter, at any rate, played the game straight with himself. He did not,
like his rival, have recourse to super-natural inspiration for every
argument that dropped from his specious lips, or degrade his deity into
a veritable _deus ex machinâ_, whose function it was to sanction the
most elementary dictates of Parliamentary tactics.
Yet, though he exhibited a prudent elasticity in his handling of the
minor details of party politics, in the main outlines of his policy
he remained consistent and true to himself throughout his career. The
romantic strain in his temperament rendered him congenitally opposed to
the cut and dried utilitarianism of the Whigs. The renovated Toryism
of New England, for which he was largely responsible, though to a
great extent merely a move in the game, is deeply stamped with the
impress of his own nature. That his bias was naturally aristocratic no
one can doubt who has read the passage in _The Revolutionary Epicke_
on Equality, or has appreciated the tone of personal superiority
and contempt for the mediocre that pervades all his writings. His
Conservatism, however, was not the orthodox Conservatism of the Eldon
school, "the barren mule of politics which engenders nothing," to
use his own phrase, but a more picturesque and practical policy. He
poured successfully the new wine of Democracy into the old bottles
of Toryism, and thus, while no doubt indulging the more romantic
side of his nature, placed, his party on a more modern and workable
basis. Disraeli's policy, in fact, was always one of sane and rational
opportunism. In the same way that Gambetta, the exponent of French
Opportunism, opposed "a policy of results to the policy of chimeras"
of the reactionaries, Disraeli opposed to Gladstone's dangerous and
visionary ideals a policy that was at once feasible and salutary.
Disraeli invariably treated England as a definite country with a
definite personality of its own, requiring individual attention and
delicate handling, while Gladstone regarded her as a mere _tabula rasa_
on which the latest new-fangled doctrines could be easily imprinted.
Precisely the same spirit induced Gladstone to treat the Queen as a
department of State and Disraeli to treat her as a woman. In home
politics he has grasped well that transition from feudal to federal
principles which was the keynote of the last century politics. His
detractors object that no great measures stand identified with his
name; but here the fates were against him. It was a cruel paradox
that when at last he obtained an untrammelled power he was too old
and jaded to initiate any new creative measure in domestic affairs.
I quote Mrs. Disraeli: "You don't know my Dizzy; what great plans he
has long matured for the good and greatness of England. But they have
made him wait and drudge so long, and now time is against him." In his
foreign policy, however, he displayed his characteristic combination
of practical and imaginative strength. In the same spirit in which
he himself had obtained the foremost place in England, he desired
that England should acquire the foremost rank among the nations;
while, as is shown by his Imperial policy, he infused something of
his own picturesqueness into the policy of the most prosaic Power in
Europe. His Indian policy, in particular, proves with what practical
imagination he had divined how much lay in a name, and that to the
feudatory princes it meant all the difference whether they paid their
allegiance to the Queen of England or to the Empress of India.
Disraeli's master-passion was ambition. But he was no monomaniac like
Napoleon. In the same way that Sidonia, the complete and perfect man,
according to Disraeli, played with a master-hand on the whole gamut
of life, so did Disraeli, though in a lesser scale, live largely and
fully. He lived in the solitudes of the Arabian deserts and in the
crowded drawing-rooms of St. James's; in the halls of Westminster and
the shady quietude of Bradenham; in the privacy of his own study, and
in the historic chambers of Downing Street. To few men has it been
given to express themselves in so many different ways. What matter if
his feats of statesmanship were restricted by the limitations of the
Parliamentary system and the handicap of his own failing health? To
such a nature the joy of life lay rather in the winning than in the
using of the prize. It is the romance and character of the man that
perpetuate his memory rather than his political achievements. He lives
as a great career. When yet a boy he had mapped out his future, and he
realised his ambition in every detail. By sheer force of intellect and
determination he lifted himself from the Ghetto to the highest position
in England. As he himself said, in one of Mrs. Craigie's novels: "Many
men have talent; few have genius; fewer still have character."