CHAPTER I

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[Illustration:

_Kenneth Macleay_

_The Young Disraeli._]

DISRAELI

A Study in Personality and Ideas

by

WALTER SICHEL

Author of “Bolingbroke and His Times”

With Three Illustrations

New York

Funk & Wagnalls Company

London: Methuen & Co.

1904

ERRATUM

Page 22, line 2 note, _for_ “called to the bar” _read_ “entered at

Lincoln’s Inn”

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION. ON THE IMAGINATIVE QUALITY 1

CHAPTER I

DISRAELI’S PERSONALITY 21

CHAPTER II

DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATION 53

CHAPTER III

LABOUR--“YOUNG ENGLAND”--“FREE TRADE” 112

CHAPTER IV

CHURCH AND THEOCRACY 145

CHAPTER V

MONARCHY 180

CHAPTER VI

COLONIES--EMPIRE--FOREIGN POLICY 199

CHAPTER VII

AMERICA--IRELAND 246

CHAPTER VIII

SOCIETY 268

CHAPTER IX

LITERATURE: WIT, HUMOUR, ROMANCE 289

CHAPTER X

CAREER 316

INDEX 327

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

TO FACE PAGE

PORTRAIT OF THE YOUNG DISRAELI. FROM THE MINIATURE BY

KENNETH MACLEAY IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

_Frontispiece_

PORTRAIT OF DISRAELI THE YOUNGER. AFTER A WATER COLOUR

BY A. E. CHALON 23

PORTRAIT OF DISRAELI IN 1852. AFTER A PAINTING BY SIR

FRANCIS GRANT, P.R.A. 289

“TIME IS REPRESENTED WITH A SCYTHE AS WELL AS WITH AN

HOUR-GLASS. WITH THE ONE HE MOWS DOWN, WITH THE OTHER HE

RECONSTRUCTS.”--DISRAELI, _in The Press_, 1853.

“GREAT MINDS MUST TRUST TO GREAT TRUTHS AND GREAT TALENTS FOR THEIR

RISE, AND NOTHING ELSE.”

“TRUE WISDOM LIES IN THE POLICY THAT WOULD EFFECT ITS AIMS BY THE

INFLUENCE OF OPINION, AND YET BY THE MEANS OF EXISTING FORMS.”

“... THE PAST IS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF OUR POWER.”--_Speech on Mr.

Cobden’s death, April 3, 1865._

DISRAELI

INTRODUCTION

ON THE IMAGINATIVE QUALITY

The power of imagination is essential to supreme statesmanship. Indeed,

no really originative genius in any domain of the mind can succeed

without it. In literature it reigns paramount. Of art it is the soul.

Without it the historian is a mere registrar of sequence, and no

interpreter of characters. In science it decides the end towards which

the daring of a Verulam, a Newton, a Herschel, a Darwin, can travel. On

the battle-field, in both elements, it enabled Marlborough, Nelson, and

Napoleon to revolutionise tactics. In the law its influence is perhaps

less evident; but even here a masterful insight into the spirit of

precedent marks the creative judge. By lasting imagination, far more

than by the colder weapon of shifting reason, the world is governed.

“Even Mormon,” wrote Disraeli, “counts more votaries than Bentham.” For

imagination is a vivid, intellectual, half-spiritual sympathy, which

diverts the flood of human passion into fresh channels to fertilise the

soil; just as fancy again is the play of intellectual emotion. Whereas

reason, the measure of which varies from age to age, can only at best

dam or curb the deluge for a time. Reason educates and criticises, but

Imagination inspires and creates. The magnetic force which is felt is

really the spell of personal influence and the key of public opinion.

It solves problems by visualising them, and kindles enthusiasm from

its own fascinating fires. And more: Imagination is in the truest

sense prophetic. Could one only grasp with a perfect view the myriad

provinces of suffering, enterprise, and aspiration with which the

Leader is called upon to grapple, not only would the expedients to meet

them suggest themselves as by a divine flash, but their inevitable

relations and meanings would start into vision. For what the herd call

the Present, is only the _literal_ fact, the shell, of environment.

Its _spirit_ is the Future; and the highest imagination in seeing it

foresees. Imagination, once more, is the mainspring of spontaneity. Its

vigour enables the will to beget circumstance, instead of being the

creature of surroundings; “for Imagination ever precedeth voluntary

motion,” says Bacon. It empowers the will of one to sway and mould the

wills of many. And it is the very source of that capacity for idealism

which alone distinguishes man from the brute. Viewing in 1870 the

general purport of his message, Disraeli wrote with truth that it “...

ran counter to the views which had long been prevalent in England, and

which may be popularly, though not altogether accurately, described

as utilitarian;” that it “recognised imagination in the government

of nations as a quality not less important than reason;” that it

“trusted to a popular sentiment which rested on an heroic tradition,

and was sustained by the high spirit of a free aristocracy;” that its

“economical principles were not unsound,” but that it “looked upon

the health and knowledge of the multitude as not the least precious

part of the wealth of nations;” that “in asserting the doctrine of

race,” it “was entirely opposed to the equality of man, and similar

abstract dogmas, which have destroyed ancient society without creating

a satisfactory substitute;” that “resting on popular sympathies and

popular privileges,” it “held that no society could be durable unless

it was built upon the principles of loyalty and religious reverence.”

How comes it, then, that, in the art of governing a free people, this

imaginative fellowship with unseen ideas, this power which men call

Genius, “to make the passing shadow serve thy will,” is so constantly

suspected and mistrusted; that _un_common sense, until it triumphs,

is a stone of stumbling to the common sense of the average man?

That Cromwell was called a self-seeking maniac for his vision of

Theocracy; William of Orange, a cold-blooded monster for his quest

after union and empire; Bolingbroke, a charlatan for his fight against

class-preponderance, and on behalf of united nationality; Chatham, an

actor for his dramatic disdain of shams; Canning, by turns a charlatan

and buffoon, for preferring the traditions of a popular crown to the

innovations of a crowned democracy, and at the same time seeking to

break the charmed circle of a patrician syndicate; that Burke was

hounded out by jealous oligarchs for refusing to confound the “nation”

with the “people,” and cosmopolitan opinions with national principles?

The main answer is simple. What is above the moment is feared by it,

and malice is the armour of fear: “It is the abject property of most

that being parcel of the common mass, and destitute of means to raise

themselves, they sink and settle lower than they need. They know not

what it is to feel within a comprehensive faculty that grasps great

purposes with ease, that turns and wields almost without an effort

plans too vast for their conception, which they cannot move;” and there

are always the jealous who--

“... If they find

Some stain or blemish in a name of note,

Not grieving that their greatest are so small,

Inflate themselves with some insane delight,

And judge all Nature from her feet of clay.”

There are the puzzled whom novelty bewilders, and there are the

cautious who suspect it. And there is the wholesome instinct of

the plain majority to pin itself to immediate “measures” without

recognising that a “principle” may change expedients for bringing its

idea into effect. Again, there are many--especially in England--who, in

their genuine scorn of pinchbeck, mistake the great for the grandiose,

and certain that nothing which glitters can be gold, invest imaginative

brilliance with the tinsel spangles of Harlequin. There are, too, the

second-rate and the second-hand, whose life is one long quotation, and

who doubt every coin unissued from the nearest mint; and there is,

moreover, a sort of stolid crassness readily dignified into sterling

solidity. All this is natural. Institutions and traditions themselves

have been aliens until naturalised in and by the community. Imagination

gave them birth, national needs accept them; and the contemporary sneer

is often succeeded by the posthumous statue.

Perhaps the most curious feature of the prosaic and imperceptive man is

his ready confusion of the dramatic with the theatrical, of attitude

with posture, of pointed effects for a big purpose with affectations

for a small. Flirtation might just as well be confounded with love, or

foppery with breeding. And yet these same unimaginative censors have

often contradicted their protests by their actions, and squandered

great opportunities by futile strokes of the theatre.

So early as 1837, Sheil, who from the first admired the young Disraeli

(then Bulwer’s intimate and the meteor of three seasons), whom Disraeli

praised in one of his earliest election speeches, and who was surely

no mean judge of intellectual eloquence, warned him after his _début_

that “the House will not allow a man to be a wit and an orator,

unless they have the credit of finding it out.... You have shown the

House that you have a fine organ, that you have an unlimited command

of language, that you have courage, temper, and readiness. Now get

rid of your genius for a session; speak often, for you must not show

yourself cowed, but speak shortly. Be very quiet, try to be dull, only

argue and reason imperfectly, for if you reason with precision, they

will think you are trying to be witty. Astonish them by speaking on

subjects of detail. Quote figures, dates, calculations, and in a short

time the House will sigh for the wit and eloquence which they all know

are in you; they will encourage you to pour them forth, and then you

will have the ear of the House, and be a favourite.” Seventeen years

afterwards, when the dashing _littérateur_ had become Chancellor of the

Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons, Mr. Walpole thus defended

him against his enemies on the Budget. “... Whence is it that these

extraordinary attacks are made against my right honourable friend? What

is the reason, what is the cause, that he is to be assailed at every

point, when he has made two financial statements in one year, which

have both met with the approbation of this House, and I believe also

with the approbation of the country? Is it because he has laboured

hard and long, contending with genius against rank and power and the

ablest statesmen, until he has attained the highest eminence which an

honourable ambition may ever aspire to--the leadership and guidance

of the Commons of England? Is it because he has verified in himself

the dignified description of a great philosophical poet of antiquity,

portraying equally his past career and his present position--

‘Certare ingenio; contendere nobilitate;

Noctes atque dies niti præstante labore

Ad summas emergere opes, rerumque potiri’?”

Yes! This is the sort of barrier piled in the path of the brilliant

by the “practical” man--“the man who practises the blunders of his

predecessors,” the “prophet of the past.” Still greater, because

deeper laid, are the obstacles which confront him when he has mastered

the drudgery of office and the strategy of debate; when, from the

vantage-ground of political pre-eminence and public approval, he dares

to look over the heads of his compeers and prepare strong foundations

for the future of his country. Then that becomes true which Bolingbroke

has so splendidly expressed: “The ocean which environs us is an emblem

of our government, and the pilot and the minister are in similar

circumstances. It seldom happens that either of them can steer a direct

course, and they both arrive at their port by means which frequently

seem to carry them from it. But as the work advances, the conduct

of him who leads it on with real abilities clears up, the appearing

inconsistencies are reconciled, and when it is once consummated, the

whole shows itself so uniform, so plain, and so natural, that every

dabbler in politics will be apt to think that he could have done the

same.”

It is this that Disraeli effected by reverting to fundamental elements

and substituting the generous, inclusive, and “national” Toryism of

Bolingbroke, Wyndham, and Pitt, for the perverted Toryism of Eldon;

the “party without principles,” the “Tory men and Whig measures,” the

“organised hypocrisy” that followed on the “Tamworth Manifesto;” the

Conservatism that “preserved” institutions as men “preserve” game,

only to kill them; and the outworn Whiggism that excluded all but a

few governing families from power; and, after its great achievement

of religious liberty, exploited the extension of civil privileges

as the mere muniment of its own title. He ended the confederacies

and revived the creed.[1] He repudiated the system under which “the

Crown had become a cipher, the Church a sect, the nobility drones,

and the people drudges.” “... But we forget,” he urges in _Sybil_,

“Sir Robert Peel is not the leader of the Tory party--the party that

resisted the ruinous mystification that metamorphosed direct taxation

by the Crown into indirect taxation by the Commons; that denounced

the system which mortgaged industry to protect property;[2] the party

that ruled Ireland by a scheme which reconciled both Churches, and by

a series of parliaments which counted among them lords and commons

of both religions; that has maintained at all times the territorial

constitution of England as the only basis and security for local

government, and which nevertheless once laid on the table of the House

of Commons a commercial tariff negotiated at Utrecht, which is the

most rational that was ever devised by statesmen; a party that has

prevented the Church from being the salaried agent of the State, and

has supported the parochial polity of the country which secures to

every labourer a home. In a parliamentary sense that great party has

ceased to exist; but I will believe that it still lives in the thought

and sentiment ... of the English nation. It has its origin in great

principles and noble instincts; it sympathises with the lowly, it looks

up to the Most High; it can count its heroes and its martyrs.... Even

now, ... in an age of political materialism, of confused purposes and

perplexed intelligence, that aspires only to wealth because it has

faith in no other accomplishment;[3] as men rifle cargoes on the verge

of shipwreck, Toryism will yet rise from the tomb ... _to bring back

strength to the Crown, liberty to the subject, and to announce that

power has only one duty--to secure the social welfare of the people_.”

And, again, this from the close of _Coningsby_: “... he looked upon a

government without distinct principles of policy as only a stop-gap

to a widespread and demoralising anarchy; ... he for one could not

comprehend how a free government could endure without national

opinions to uphold it.... As for Conservative government, the natural

question was, ‘What do you mean to conserve?... Things or only names,

realities or merely appearances? Do you mean to continue the system

commenced in 1834, and with a hypocritical reverence for the principles

and a superstitious adherence to the forms of the old _exclusive_

constitution, carry on your policy by latitudinarian practice?’”

His lifelong purpose as a statesman was to refresh institutions with

reality, and to show by practice, as well as by precept, that, in

all classes, an aristocracy without inherent superiority is doomed.

De Tocqueville, in his famous treatise on “The Old Régime and the

Revolution,” does the same.

Eighteenth-century Toryism, a smitten cause espousing popular

privileges, taught that unless the Crown ruled for the people as well

as reigned over them, unless the nobles led them independently to high

issues, unless the people themselves recognised that they were the

privileged order in a nation, and that their representatives should

form “a senate supported by the sympathy of millions,” the traditional

principles of England had dwindled into a sham.

“No one,” says Disraeli in _Coningsby_, again adverting to the critical

issues of 1834, “had arisen either in Parliament, the Universities, or

the Press, to lead the public mind to the investigation of principles;

and not to mistake in their reformations the corruption of practice

for fundamental ideas. It was this perplexed, ill-informed, jaded,

shallow generation, repeating cries which they did not comprehend, and

wearied with the endless ebullitions of their own barren conceit, that

Sir Robert Peel was summoned to govern. It was from such materials,

ample in quantity, but in all spiritual qualities most deficient; with

great numbers, largely acred, consoled up to their chins, but without

knowledge, genius, thought, truth, or faith, that Sir Robert Peel was

to form ‘a great Conservative party on a comprehensive basis....’” Even

Sir Robert’s single-mindedness and supremacy over Parliament failed to

secure strength of Government. By universal consent, including his own

avowal, he wrecked a great party in a country where great parties form

the main pledge for the due representation of political opinion, and

under a system where they remain the chief preventive against public

corruption.

The first two Georges had reigned over the towns, but not over the

country. After the Reform Bill it seemed as though the great cities

themselves would swamp the land. How was Sir Robert to save the

situation in 1834? Speaking with respect for Sir Robert, but with

contempt for his “Tamworth Manifesto,” Disraeli, in his discussion

of that famous document, repeats his message once more: “... There

was indeed considerable shouting about what they called Conservative

principles; but the awkward question naturally arose, ‘What will

you conserve?’ The prerogatives of a Crown, provided they are not

exercised; the independence of the House of Lords, provided it is not

asserted; the ecclesiastical estate, provided it is regulated by a

commission of laymen. Everything, in short, that is established, as

long as it is a phrase and not a fact.”[4]

It is thus that the man of ideas is, in the long run, eminently

practical; and it is thus, too, that in the realm of art ideas are the

surest realities. But here also the immediate appeal constantly falls

to the lot of what is called “realism,” and few feel what they cannot

touch until the popular voice tells them that it is “real.” “Madame,”

says Heine in his “Buch Legrand,” “have you the ghost of an idea what

an idea is? ‘I have put my best ideas into this coat,’ says my tailor.

My washerwoman says the parson has filled her daughter’s head with

ideas, and unfitted her for anything sensible; and coachman Pattensen

mumbles on every occasion, ‘That is an idea.’ But yesterday, when I

inquired what he meant, he snarled out, ‘An idea is just an idea; it is

any silly stuff that comes into one’s head.’”

No memorial of Disraeli’s magical career can be adequate without access

to the papers confided to the late Lord Rowton, as well as to much

private and unpublished correspondence. It is no slur on the “Lives”

that have already appeared to say that they lack the materials for a

complete picture. The best of these beyond question is Mr. Froude’s;

but not only is it tinged with considerable prejudice, but it is

very faulty in its facts; and, moreover, in common with Mr. Bryce’s

cursory essay and Herr Brandes’s minuter study, it has perhaps fallen

into the error of misreading Disraeli’s mature character and career

from isolated and indiscriminate use of such sidelights as they are

pleased to discover in his earliest novels. To trace Disraeli’s

development, it is necessary to follow the long and continuous thread

of his words and actions, to consider the changes experienced during

the fifty years of his political outlook in England and in Europe, and

to ascertain how many of these tendencies were foreseen, produced, or

modified by him. The criticisms current are either those of men (often

partisans) who lack this length of view, and interpret the latter

manifestations of Disraeli’s genius, with which alone they are even

outwardly acquainted, in the light of preconceived notions, or the

few circulated comparatively early in his career, before its eventual

drift was revealed, and while the full blaze of hostile bitterness was

raging. There exists, it is true, a most able, a most appreciative, a

most detailed account of his political career, compiled by Mr. Ewald

shortly after Lord Beaconsfield’s death, but this is mainly a long

parliamentary chronicle. Mr. Kebbel’s enlightening edition of selected

speeches is illustrative though limited. To both of these, among many

other sources, direct and indirect, I here gratefully acknowledge my

obligation.

A real biography, therefore, is at present impossible. Disraeli’s

acknowledged debt to his darling sister and devoted wife (“Women,” he

has said, “are the priestesses of pre-destination”); his correspondence

and commerce with many eminent men, including both Louis Philippe and

Napoleon III.; his letters to our late Queen; his notes of policy;

the rough drafts for compositions, both literary and parliamentary;

his State papers and official memoranda; his relations to many men of

letters and leading; such known, though unpublished, correspondence as

even that with Mrs. Williams; the glimpses of him as a youth through

Mrs. Austin, Bulwer, Lord Strangford, the Sheridans, with many others;

in his age, through a privileged circle of distinguished and devoted

associates--all these, and many more, must be pressed into service

if even the rudiments are to be portrayed. And none of these are yet

available.

I have therefore thought that, pending such an enterprise, some

account, however imperfect, of the ideas that governed him

throughout--a slight biography, as it were, of his mind--might prove

acceptable. It will endeavour to depict the spirit of his attitude to

the world in which he moved and for which he worked. It will aim at

representing the temperature of his opinions immanent alike in his

writings and speeches. His utterance was never bounded by the mere

occasion, and light and guidance may be found in it for the problems of

to-day. In most that he wrote or said, a certain swell of soul, a sweep

and stretch of mind are strikingly manifest.

“How very seldom,” he has written, “do you encounter in the world a

man of great abilities, acquirements, experience, who will unmask his

mind, _unbutton his brains_, and pour forth in careless and picturesque

phrase all the results of his studies and observations, his knowledge

of men, books, and nature!”

Such a contribution is anyhow feasible, and is fraught with more than

even the glamour linked with the person by whom these ideas were

clothed in words and deeds. For principles are applied ideas; habits

are applied principles. Disraeli’s ideas have, to some extent, become

ruling principles, several of them are at this moment national habits;

while some of them, unachieved during his lifetime, seem in process

of accomplishment. Disraeli was a poet--one of those “unacknowledged

legislators of the world” described by “Herbert” in _Venetia_; but his

imaginative fancy was allied to a very strong character. It is a rare

combination. To Bolingbroke’s youthful genius he united that force of

will and purpose for which Bolingbroke had long to wait, and which,

perhaps, he never fully attained. This analogy was pressed on Disraeli

on the threshold of his career by a distinguished friend.

Above all things Disraeli was a personality. Personality is independent

of training, except in the rare cases where education accords with

predisposition. It is the will. And in authorship, when expression

chimes with intention, it is the style. Personality is the clue to

history, for events proceed from character, more than character from

events. Commenting on the adoption of the “Charter” by non-chartists

groaning under the injustice of industrial slavery, Disraeli observes

most truly: “... But all this had been brought about, as most of the

great events of history, by the unexpected and unobserved influence

of individual character.” Personality is the salt of politics; it is

the spirit of our party system; and woe betide every era in England

when figure-heads replace head-figures. It is an atmosphere enchanting

the landscape. “... It is the personal that interests mankind, that

fires their imagination and wins their hearts. A cause is a great

abstraction, and fit only for students: embodied in a party, it

stirs men to action; but place at the head of that party a leader

who can inspire enthusiasm, he commands the world....” Association,

groups, co-operative principles, these are the mechanisms invented

by the brain, and guided by the hand of individuality, the fuel that

individuality gathers and enkindles. Without it they remain dead

lumber, and can never of themselves prove originative forces. What

men crave is, once more in Disraeli’s parlance, “... A primordial and

creative mind; one that will say to his fellows, ‘Behold, God has

given me thought, I have discovered truth, and you _shall_ believe.’”

Personality is the contradiction of the mechanical and of the dead

level; it is the soul of influence. How depressing is the reverse side

of the medal!--“Duncan Macmorrogh” (the utilitarian in _The Young

Duke_), “cut up the Creation and got a name. His attack upon mountains

was most violent, and proved, by its personality that he had come

from the lowlands. He demonstrated the inability of all elevation, and

declared that the Andes were the aristocracy of the globe. Rivers he

rather patronised, but flowers he quite pulled to pieces, and proved

them to be the most useless of existences.... He informed us that

we were quite wrong in supposing ourselves to be the miracle of the

Creation. On the contrary, he avowed that already there were various

pieces of machinery of far more importance than man; and he had no

doubt in time that a superior race would arise, got by a steam-engine

on a spinning-jenny....”

To impress his ideas through his will on his generation, was Disraeli’s

ruling purpose from the first; but to attain the position which would

entitle him to do so he never regarded as more than a ladder towards

his main ambition. Ambition[5] spurred him from the first. But, as

the present Duke of Devonshire generously owned in the heat of party

contest, Disraeli was never prompted by mean or unworthy motives;

and--added the speaker--it would be the merest cant to pretend that

honourable and honest ambition is not a main incitement to public life.

At the outset he was convinced of a mission, and the visions over which

he had long brooded in silent solitude became realised in the world of

action. Both reverie and energy alternated even in his boyish being. “I

fully believed myself the object of an omnipotent Destiny over which

I had no control”--and yet “Destiny bears us to our lot, and Destiny

is perhaps our own will.” “... There arose in my mind a desire to

create things beautiful as that golden star;” and yet “... Nor could

I conceive that anything could tempt me from my solitude ... but the

strong conviction that the fortunes of my race depended on my effort,

or that I could materially forward that great amelioration, ... in the

practicability of which I devoutly believe.” As a boy he dreamed of

“shaking thrones and founding empires;” and yet, he felt that he must

not “pass” his “days like a ghost gliding in a vision.” These are

among the echoes and glimpses afforded by his earliest fiction of his

earliest self, and to this topic I shall recur in my last chapter. I

mention them here for a material reason. In treating his thoughts we

must distinguish between those notions which merely concern success

or career, and those ideas which assured victory was to achieve.

Nor should we omit the very vital distinction between personality

and egotism, for confusion in this regard constantly obscures our

estimates. Individuality with the forces that make for it is not

“individualism;” yet the two are often confused.

The essential egotist is a sort of buccaneer. He roams the seas to

rifle cargoes, and his conquests are the spoils of a freebooter.

He seeks to exploit society for his own benefit--to burn down his

neighbour’s roof-tree that he may boil his egg. He gives nothing

that he can keep, and takes all he can grasp by whatever methods may

advantage him. He leaves the world poorer when he goes, and as he

leaves it, he wishes it. In Cowper’s words--

“Cruel is all he does. ’Tis quenchless thirst

Of ruinous ebriety that prompts

His every action, and imbrutes the man.”

The man, on the other hand, of overwhelming personality, aspires

honourably to power, the very condition of which in his eyes is

to guide and elevate the country which entrusts him with it. The

responsibility of privilege, great position on the tenure of great

duties, ambition not as a right but as the sole means of enforcing

his ideals--these are his characteristics. He never covets place

without power, and never power without influence; whereas some kind of

covetousness is essential to the egotist. “He who has great honours,”

Disraeli has urged, “must have great burdens.” And again: “... My

conception,” he said, in a signal speech during 1846, “of a great

statesman is of one who represents a great idea; an idea which he may

and can impress on the mind and conscience of a nation.... That is a

grand, that is indeed an heroic position. But I care not what may be

the position of a man who never originates an idea--a watcher of the

atmosphere, a man who ... takes his observations, and when he finds

the wind in a certain quarter trims to suit it. Such a person may be

a powerful Minister, but he is no more a great statesman than the man

who gets up behind a carriage is a great whip. Both are disciples of

progress; both perhaps may get a good place. But how far the original

momentum is indebted to their powers, and how far their guiding

prudence regulates the lash or the rein, it is not necessary for me to

notice.”

Disraeli never stooped to trim; he always aspired to steer. When he

started as a brilliant author, electric with ideas derided but since

accepted--as an imaginative originator, “full of deep passions and

deep thoughts”--it would have been easy for him to have followed the

triumphal car of the Whigs who invited him.[6] It would have been easy

for him to have suited himself to Sir Robert Peel’s vicissitudes of

private, and desertion of public opinion, embodied in a great party

which had raised him to power. In obeying again the central ideas which

quickened him from the first, Disraeli broke up the “Young England”

party, which looked up to and cheered him, whose main objects he

inspired, and eventually realised. And in 1867, as we shall see, so

far from “dishing” the Liberals with their own measure of Reform, he

carried, in the teeth of his own supporters, one on lines peculiar to

his own perpetual view of the subject, and at length achieved what he

had urged in the ’thirties, the ’forties, and the ’fifties.

In the stubborn pursuit of his aims Disraeli even courted unpopularity.

On every occasion when the object of the Jew bill was involved with

other measures which he considered prejudical to its due interests, he

risked misconstruction by withholding his vote. During the long spell

of 1859-66, when a dispirited, and sometimes disloyal following often

left him alone in his seat, he continued the pronouncements alike and

the reticence which they disrelished. During the six years previous

he dared to offend them equally by hammering the Government’s foreign

policy, and insisting on his own convictions. Nobody, again, more

regretted the precipitancy of Lord Derby in 1852, although his rash

assumption of office afforded Disraeli his first hard-won opportunity

of leadership. During three separate sets of discreditable intrigues

to dethrone him, he kept place, counsel, and temper without wheedling

concessions or recriminating revenges, though none could strike home

harder when he chose.

“... Ah, why should such enthusiasm ever die? Life is too short to be

little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and

expresses himself with frankness and with fervour.”

The fact that both the mere egotist, and the man of intense

personality, must, from the need of their respectively low and lofty

concentrations, be self-centred, and infuse their temperaments into the

objects of their energy, favours, it is true, the mistake to which I

have referred. But the one is pettily fixed on self, the other intent

on ideals. He leads a life of ideas which form his atmosphere, and

which emanate from it. He mounts the chariot to drive it to a distant

goal, while the other borrows or pilfers it for his own immediate

convenience. Egoism--if I may coin a distinction--is one thing, egotism

another. Goethe was an egoist--he is full of a radiating self; but such

egoism is, if we reflect, the very opposite of the egotist, who is full

of a shrivelled selfishness. Such were the later phases of Napoleon,

who changed from a generous imparter into an absorbing monopolist.

That was egotism. All genius, however, has been egoist, and ever will

be; for genius is at once the ear, sensitive to the subtlest appeals

of existence, and the voice which constrains others to enter the realm

of its ideas. Its sensitiveness is part of its strength, and in this

respect it shares the self-consciousness of the artist. It is in the

real sense auto-suggestive; it implants ideas which its will generates

into events. It is in some degree that--

“... which many people take for want of heart.

They err.--’Tis merely what is called mobility,

A thing of temperament, and not of art,

Though seeming so from its supposed facility;

And false though true; for surely they’re sincerest

Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest.”

And its faults, as I shall show in my closing chapter, are associated

with its very qualities.

Genius is both light and heat; it combines enthusiasm with insight.

Such a genius was Disraeli. He was eminently a man of ideas, and not

merely of abnormal perceptions. This distinction again is material, and

too often ignored.

The eminently perceptive man is at root a critic, while the man of

ideas is by prerogative a creator; and yet the quick perceiver is often

mistaken for a creative genius, and keenness confused with originality.

In politics, for instance, this was the case with such different

beings as Peel and Gambetta; in literature, with Addison and Arnold;

in art, with Kneller and Lawrence. Disraeli’s ideas were at once his

creations and companions, and he moved in their inner circle with a

sort of extravagant intensity. They were no shadows. He was convinced

of their substance almost to fatalism, and his immense will-power

forced and projected them into movement. In his extreme youth, before

his character had matured, these ideas flickered as fantasies. The

restlessness of a volition felt, but not yet freed or directed, caused

some masquerade of guise, and a perpetual strain on the intuition that

sought to forestall experience. Realisation alone, with power and

experience, brought repose. But at all periods an idea that had once

seized him tinged his whole being. Its reality haunted him till he

had given it place and shape.[7] An inward and ideal energy possessed

him. Ideas were for him far more tangible, even far more sociable,

than the outward and fleeting phantasms around him, as is evidenced

in his fiction by his constant habit of transferring environment and

transplanting personalities to accentuate their ideal essence. Thus, in

_Venetia_, the soul of Lady Byron animates the form of Shelley’s wife,

while the very date is put back some thirty years, that Shelley himself

might be enabled to have braved in action what he mused in poetry.

So, again, in _Contarini_, the hero’s development blends something of

his own with something of his father’s character; while Baron Fleming

is his grandfather reincarnated as a noble.[8] About the ironies of

these, the arabesques of his playful fancy flickered. For him they were

mostly the pretexts of things, but ideas were the causes, and he loved

to contrast “the pretext with the cause;” but even here romance blent

with irony, and invested the seemingly trivial with wonder. Some, too,

of his ideas hovered, as it were, over the present scene, in a flight

bound other-whither and beyond. In a word, Disraeli was an artist,

conscious and confident of an over-mastering call. As he has written in

a striking passage from the work of his youth, _Contarini Fleming_: “I

never labour to delude myself; and never gloss over my own faults. I

exaggerate them; for I can afford to face truth, because I feel capable

of improvement.... I am never satisfied.... The very exercise of power

teaches me that it may be wielded for a greater purpose.... No one

could be influenced by a greater desire of knowledge, a greater passion

for the beautiful, or a deeper regard for his fellow-creatures....

I want no false fame. It would be no delight to me to be considered

a prophet, were I conscious of being an impostor. I ever wish to be

undeceived; but if I possess the organisation of a poet, no one can

prevent me from exercising my faculty, any more than he can rob the

courser of his fleetness, or the nightingale of her song.”

The “ill-regulated will,” “the undercurrent of feelings he was then

unable to express,” portrayed in _Vivian Grey_, developed into

the higher and more elevating purposes of which his transforming

imagination was all along capable. That very book contained the germs

of what its composition revealed to his own mind--that out of a young

adventurer with purpose and genius, the school of life forms a strong

character and a great man. In _Contarini Fleming_ the irresistible

power of predisposition, the hollowness of a nurture which ignores it

and substitutes “words” for “ideas,” the interactions of imagination

and experience, the fatuity of contradicting or overstraining Nature,

are pursued; nor, as regards this novel, should it be forgotten that in

some portions of its analysis there are traces in allusive undertone

to the fatalities of the great and stricken Dean of St. Patrick’s.[9]

In Disraeli’s case, as so often before him, “the dreaming part of

mankind” has “prevailed over the waking.” His flouted dreams came

true. They still hold sway. To give effectual substance to these

higher and abiding dreams, those other dreams of ascendency, through

which alone his will could realise his ideas, were also verified. “It

is the will”--he speaks by the lips of the young “Alroy”--“that is

father to the deed, and he who broods over some long idea, however

wild, will find his dream was but the prophecy of coming fate.” “All is

ordained,” he had said as a stripling, “yet man is master of his own

actions.”[10] Disraeli’s career was itself a romance--a romance of the

will that defies circumstance, and moulds the soil where ideas are to

flourish. An inward, personal energy is the parent of faith, and faith

in oneself is the sole security for the issue of faith among others.

He lived to triumph, but not in order to triumph; and he remains a

standing protest against those who believe in cliques and disbelieve

in personal influence. The former are only compact in appearance; they

are unsympathetic associations, welded together by interest alone.

Joint-stock enterprise is not fellowship, and the test of direction is

liability. Nor is it without significance that “Fortune,” even in the

ancient world a real though blind goddess, has come, in the modern, to

mean little more than cash; so that capital leans away from labour,

plutocracy is cemented, solidarity declines, and worth too often is

resolved by the question, “Worth how much?”

It is this idea of personality that lies at the very root of united

nationality; for a nation is an idealised individual, no aggregate

of atoms. Still less is it the experimenting room of doctrinaires

or the dumping-ground of the Tapers and Tadpoles, the Paul Prys of

politics, who “whisper nothings that sound like somethings;” or of

those “Marneys,” “Fitz-Aquitaines,” and “Mowbrays” who deem that the

end of an administration is “two garters to begin with;” or again of

“the good old gentlemanlike times, when Members of Parliament had

nobody to please, and Ministers of State nothing to do;” of those who,

like “Rigby,” mistake peddling with constituencies for representing

the country; or of those petty placemen to whom, as he has said, party

means the machinery for receiving “£1200” a year, career the pursuit of

it, and success its attainment.

“... I prefer” (the passage is from _Sybil_) “association to

gregariousness.... It is a community of purpose that constitutes

society ... without that men may be drawn into contiguity, but they

will continue virtually isolated....” What does this imply but the

sympathetic power of personality? The more individual societies become,

the greater their efficacy. The less individual they are the more they

display the tameness and unfruitfulness that enfeeble a copy.

“But what is an individual,” exclaimed “Coningsby,” “against a vast

public opinion?”

“Divine,” said the stranger. “God made man in His own image; but the

Public is made by newspapers, Members of Parliament, excise officers,

Poor Law guardians. Would Philip have succeeded, if Epaminondas had

not been slain? And if Philip had not succeeded? Would Prussia have

existed, had Frederick not been born? And if Frederick had not been

born? What would have been the fate of the Stuarts, if Prince Henry

had not died, and Charles I., as was intended, had been Archbishop of

Canterbury?”

This was written in 1844. Since then, would Germany have been united

if Bismarck had not been born? And if Bismarck had not been born? In

1865 a powerful party, promising success, reinforced by commanding

talent, and concerting an intelligible plan with immense vigour, began

to demand the disintegration of Great Britain. And if Disraeli had not

been born?----

* * * * *

Nothing is more striking in modern parliamentary life than the growing

neglect of the past. Great issues are mooted by men ignorant of, or

ignoring, their historical origin. Young members discuss weighty

problems with no study save that of omniscience. The ancestry of

events is disregarded. Development is relegated to musty students and

mouldy volumes. The fact that statesmanship is able to look forward

because it has already looked back, is flouted or forgotten. Public

interest is gradually being withdrawn from debate, just because it is

getting out of touch with the organic changes of national life. The

genius which transfigures facts with imagination has been replaced by

the opportunism which invests emptiness with solemnity; and this, in a

country where national growth depends on continuous tradition.

The utterances of Disraeli from the early ’twenties to the latest

’seventies display a wonderful harmony of coherence in progress. They

form one long suite of variations on the central _motif_ of persistent

and consistent ideas. To understand them aright one must view them

successively, both in his books and his speeches, which illustrate each

other; nor in so doing should the contexts of personal development,

events private as well as public, be lost from sight.

This I have endeavoured to accomplish in the following chapters. I have

classified their themes in groups broad enough to admit of kindred

topics. After a fresh portrait of Disraeli’s personality, I treat first

of his constitutional ideas, because these are at the root of his

political standpoint; they underlie, too, his conception of the State.

Then follows his attitude towards Labour and the causes it involved.

Next come his distinctive views on Church and Christianity; his views,

equally distinctive, on Monarchy occupy a separate chapter. Colonies,

Empire, and Foreign Policy are then grouped together; and it may excite

surprise to mark the earliness and the correctness of his prophecies.

Under this head I also consider his thoughts on India. America and

Ireland succeed; and here again his justified originality is most

remarkable. Perhaps the light chapters on _Society_, _Literature_,

_Wit_, _Humour_, and _Romance_, with the closing study of _Career_,

may be considered not the least suggestive. I have not drawn on Mr.

Meynell’s delightful “Disraeliana” (the pleasure of reading which I

purposely postponed), because I wished this portraiture of the man and

his mind to be wholly original.

CHAPTER I

DISRAELI’S PERSONALITY

“A great mind that thinks and feels is never inconsistent and never

insincere.... Insincerity is the vice of a fool, and inconsistency

the blunder of a knave.... Let us not forget an influence too much

underrated in this age of bustling mediocrity--the influence of

individual character. Great spirits may yet arise to guide the groaning

helm through the world of troubled waters--spirits whose proud destiny

it may still be at the same time to maintain the glory of the Empire

and to secure the happiness of the people.”

So wrote “Disraeli the Younger” during the perplexed crisis of 1833

in his rare pamphlet, _What is he?_[11] which embodies his own large

attitude. The sentence is characteristic and prophetic. Its last

words were repeated more than forty years afterwards in the message

of farewell to his constituents, when he quitted the lively scene of

his triumphs for that grave assemblage, of which he once said that its

aptitudes were best rehearsed among the tombstones.

In my last three chapters I shall touch on some unique phases of his

boyhood, and outline several of his relations to his home, to society,

to literature, to character, and to career. But here I shall attempt a

less detailed account of his individuality and of the main ideas which

flowed from it.

And first let me venture on two glimpses--one of his youth, the other

of his age.

It is not difficult to collect from many scattered presentments some

likeness of

“The wondrous boy

That wrote _Alroy_.”

Imagine, then, a romantic figure, a Southern shape in a Northern

setting, a kind of Mediterranean Byron; for the stock of the Disraelis

hailed from the _Sephardim_--Semites who had never quitted the midland

coasts, and were powerful in Spain before the Goths. The form is lithe

and slender, with an air of repressed alertness. The stature, above

middle height. The head, long and compact; its curls, fantastic. The

oval face, pale rather than pallid, with dark almond eyes of unusual

depth, size, and lustre under a veil of drooping lashes. The chin,

pointed with decision. The expression holds one, by turns keen and

pensive; about it hovers a strange sense of inner watchfulness and

ambushed irony, half mocking in defiance, half eager with conscious

power. A languid reserve marks his bearing; it conceals a smouldering

vehemence; its observant silence prepares amazement directly interest

excites intercourse. Then indeed the scimitar, as it were, flashes

forth unsheathed, and dazzles by its breathless fence of words with

ideas. This ardour is not always pleasant; it breathes of storm; it

speaks out elemental passions and grates against the smooth edges of

civilisation. In the London medley he, like his friend Bulwer, studies

a purposed posture. Dandyism and listlessness mask unsleeping energy.

But at Bradenham, his constant retreat, the “Hurstley” of his last

novel, all is natural and unconstrained. Here at least he is free.

Here he “drives the quill” with his famous father, reads and rides,

meditates and is mirthful. Here, with that gifted sister “Sa”--“Sa,” a

name soon afterwards doubly endeared to him through Lord Lyndhurst’s

daughter; “Sa,” who, while others doubt or twit, ever believes in and

heartens him--he dreams, improvises, discourses. The rest may treat him

as a moonstruck Bombastes,[12] but his lofty visions are real to

the gentle insight of affection. In the language of Shakespeare’s fine

colloquy:--

“‘Say what thou art that talk’st of Kings and Queens?’--

‘More than I seem, and less than I was born to.’--

‘Aye, but thou talk’st as if thou wert a King!’--

‘Why, so I am in mind, and that’s enough.’”

[Illustration: DISRAELI THE YOUNGER

_After a water colour by A. E. Chalon_]

Already, like one of those his biting pen had satirised, he too, it

must be owned, teems with “confidence in the nation--and himself.”

There was a daredevilry about him, and in those days a romantic

melancholy, akin to that of the Spanish artist Goya. Far behind have

faded those consuming pangs of boyish restlessness, when fevered

imagination played vaguely on inexperience. Far behind, those schools

of “words” which never slaked his thirst for ideas, and where he

ran wild as rebel ringleader.[13] Far away now, those boxing bouts

witnessed by Layard’s mother. Past, that earliest and unpublished

novel of _Aylmer Papillon_,[14] which Murray praised but would not

print. Past, that fugitive satire of the “New Dunciad,” which does not

deserve to remain waste-paper.[15] Past, that abortive journal, which

in transforming an old periodical while adopting its name was to have

revolutionised opinion.[16] Vanished, too, those first outbursts of

unchastened brilliance under the favouring auspices of the Layards’

fair kinswoman, Mrs. Austin. And the vista of his two long journeys

have receded; the alternate spells of Venice, the Rhine and Rome,

and afterwards of Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem. Past, also, the

strange malady for which his Eastern travels proved the stranger cure.

As he muses, the ball is at his feet. Yet, when the daydream fades, is

he, perhaps, after all, only Alnaschar of the broken glass, bemoaning

vain reveries amid the ruined litter of his overturned basket in the

jeering market-place? The seed-time of reflection is over: he pants for

action. No more for him the beaten tracks. Hitherto he had fed on books

and dreams. The former had led him to a pondered plan, with Bolingbroke

for clue and Pitt as example. The latter fired his ambition--his

presumption--to realise them by restoring vanished life to a now

mouldering party--by suiting old forms to new phases and heading them.

Next morning the secluded scholar, so friendly a contrast with his

daring son, is bound for Oxford to receive his long delayed honours.

This very day that son’s earliest election-procession starts from the

doorway of the tranquil manor house.[17] Already the budding genius has

descried the dim future of his country, which he has proclaimed must be

governed for and through the nation; of which, too, he has already sung

in halting verse:--

“... ceased the voice

Of Great Britannia; vanished as it ceased

Her glance imperial.”

What matter now the debts, the duns, the embarrassments for which he

blushes?[18] What matter the heartless allurements of siren fashion?

His course is clear before him. He must win. He “has begun several

times many things, and has often succeeded at last.” As for the taunt

of “adventurer,” what are all original spirits that “burst their

birth’s invidious bar” but adventurers? Such were Chatham,[19] and

Burke, and Canning, and Peel himself. But when the “adventurer” is

one by temperament as well as occasion, how miraculous becomes his

progress! “Adventures are to the adventurous.”

“The man who with undaunted toils

Sails unknown seas to unknown soils,

With various wonders feasts his sight:

What stranger wonders does he write!”

Many of us remember Disraeli in his age as he sauntered dreamily and

slowly with the late Lord Rowton, and none who ever heard one of his

last orations in the House of Lords can forget how, even when he was

in pain, he sprang from his seat with the quick step of youth. The

physical charm had disappeared. Few who gazed on that drawn countenance

could have discerned in it the poetry and enthusiasm of his prime;

only the unworn eyes preserved their piercing fires, and the sunken

jaw was still masterful. A long discipline of iron self-control, much

disillusion, growing disappointments with crowning triumphs, and

latterly a great desolation, had subdued the fiercer force and the

elastic buoyancy of his hey-day. Yet the intellectual charm, and the

spell of mind and spirit had deepened their outward traces. Fastidious

discernment, dispassionate will, penetrating insight, courage,[20]

patience, a certain winning gentleness underneath the scorn of shams,

stamp every lineament. Below habitual _insouciance_, intensity,

bigness of soul and purpose are prominent. The arch of the noble brow

retains its height and curve. Surrounded though he be by friends and

flatterers, he looks lonelier than of old. “I do not feel solitude,” he

said, “it gives one repose.” Interested in every movement, and even in

every trifle that engages thought, his gaze appears more turned within.

We know from Lady John Manners,[21] and from other sources, how he

loved flowers, and forestry, and study during the dinner-hour, more

than all the social glitter; how he communed with the unseen; how

far-reaching were his sympathies; what interest and curiosity he

displayed in every form of career and purpose; how often to all the

splendour which he had conquered he preferred converse with the weak,

the lowly, the suffering; how his wise counsel and inexhaustible

resource were sought and coveted by cottagers, by the toilers whose

cause he made his own, by princes; how delicately considerate he was

in his appointments, and for all in contact with him, how he would

sacrifice a keen personal wish rather than disturb a pleasure or

abridge a holiday; and yet how his playfulness of fancy mixed in pithy

ironies with his very considerateness. A familiar instance--that of the

attached servant who was to enjoy “the pleasures of memory”--occurred

as he lay dying from the illness long and bravely concealed even from

his intimates. He was truly unselfish, and he was never known to blame

a subordinate. If things went wrong, he took the whole burden on his

own shoulders. He exerted infinite pains to understand the conditions

of and the organisations affecting labour.[22] The Buckinghamshire

peasants still cherish his memory; and it may be said with truth that

the deepest affections of this extraordinary man, whom vapid worldlings

sneered at as a callous cynic, were reserved for his country, his

county, his home, and his friends, for effort and for distress. Many

a young aspirant to fame, moreover, in literature or public life, has

owed much to his generous encouragement. He liked to dwell on the

vicissitudes of things,[23] and his own motto, “Forti nihil difficile,”

represents his conviction. In private, when he was not entertaining,

his habits were of the simplest. In two things only he was profuse;

books and light. He loved to see every room of Hughenden illuminated

with candles. He was utterly careless of money. It is related, that

when he accepted the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, he sent for the

celebrated Mr. Padwick, and asked for a necessary advance. “On what

security?” inquired the sporting speculator. “That of my name and my

career,” was the answer. And the money was at once forthcoming, and

punctually repaid. As is well known, he would often make his greatest

efforts half dinnerless; and his delight was, after the strain and

the plaudits had ceased, to betake himself in the dim hours of dawn

to the supper which his devoted wife, who spared him every detail of

management, had prepared, and there to recount to her the excitements

of the debate. The pair would certainly have endorsed those verses of

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, of which Byron was so fond--

“But when the long hours of public are past,

And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last,

May every fond pleasure that moment endear,

Be banished afar both discretion and fear!

Forgetting or scorning the airs of the crowd,

He may cease to be formal, and I to be proud,

Till lost in the joy, we confess that we live,

And he may be rude, and yet I may forgive.”

His public and touching tribute to Mrs. Disraeli deserves repetition

here; nor will the reader forget, among many hackneyed stories,

that stern rebuke to the triflers overheard discussing the reasons

for his marriage--“Because of a feeling to which such as you are

strangers--gratitude.”

It was at Edinburgh, in 1867, when his old ally, Baillie Cochrane (Lord

Lamington), toasted Mrs. Disraeli as her illustrious husband’s helper

and his own dear friend for many years before Disraeli met her.[24]

Disraeli opened with the characteristic remark that their mutual

intimate “certainly had every opportunity of studying the subject to

which he has drawn attention.” And he went on to say, “I do owe to

that lady all I think that I have ever accomplished, because she has

supported me with her counsel, and consoled me by the sweetness of her

mind and disposition.” Six years after his marriage, he had dedicated

the three volumes of his _Sybil_, “To one whose noble spirit and gentle

nature ever prompt her to sympathise with the suffering; to one whose

sweet voice has often encouraged, and whose taste and judgment have

ever guided their pages; the most severe of critics, but--a perfect

wife.”

Several of his nice things were said in Scotland, and one of the nicest

was his compliment when he was installed Rector of Glasgow University.

He described his visit to Abbotsford, whither he had repaired in

his extreme youth with an enthusiastic letter from John Murray the

First, his father’s old friend, to Sir Walter Scott, that father’s

old acquaintance. “He showed me,” he said of the laird, “his demesne,

and he treated me, not as if I was an obscure youth, but as if I were

already Lord Rector of Glasgow University.”[25]

Disraeli’s marriage was the happiest turning-point in his career;

and that which had begun partly in interest, soon developed into the

warmest, the most entire and the most mutual affection. Mrs. Disraeli,

at a great country house, always used to commence conversation by

the query, “Do you like my Dizzy? Because, if you don’t----” From

another, on a visit most advantageous to him, Disraeli departed,

despite pressing remonstrance, on the plea that the “air” disagreed

with Mrs. Disraeli--because she had complained of their host’s

rudeness. It will one day be found that to this gifted and selfless

woman, English history owed much at several serious conjunctures. I

cannot resist relating a good story in another vein. Shortly after

Disraeli’s marriage, a guest at Grosvenor Gate, pointing to a portrait

of the late Mr. Wyndham Lewis, Mrs. Disraeli’s first husband and with

Disraeli member for Maidstone, asked him whom it represented. “Our

former colleague,” was the rejoinder. At a much later date Mr. Frith

was painting a group in which Disraeli figured. As her husband was

going, Mrs. Disraeli whispered to the artist, “Remember one thing, if

you don’t mind, his pallor is his beauty.” She was afraid that his

complexion would be coloured. To the last she would say, as she did

during his interrupted speech at Aylesbury in 1847:--“_He_ mind them!

Not a bit of it. He’s a match for them all.” Sir Horace Rumbold has

just told us how, at the scene of Disraeli’s investiture as Earl, a

sob was heard from the crowd. It was the grief of an old and faithful

servant sighing, “Ah! If only _she_ had lived to see him now!”

Like childless men in general, he was devoted to children. More than

one still living remembers his happy words of playful intimacy. To

women from the days of his pet Sheridans to those of the present Lady

Currie, he appealed with magnetism throughout his career, and there are

few more romantic episodes than his meetings, after hesitation, with

the elderly Mrs. Bridges Williams at the fountain in the Exhibition of

1862, the existing correspondence which ensued, and the thumping legacy

which crowned it. One who has read that correspondence has assured me

that its gentle chivalry is most striking. In the midst of engrossing

occupation he never ceased to cheer the old lady with gossip of his

doings, and even to argue with her, as on an affair of state, regarding

the advisability of Struve’s seltzer water as a remedy.

Of Queen Victoria’s affection for him I will only say that it was

because he treated her as a woman. She grew to lean on his wisdom and

his judgment. On more than one occasion he acted as mediator in her

family. He was sincerely attached to her. His witticism, when asked for

a reason of her favour, will bear repetition: “I never argue, I never

contradict, but I sometimes forget.”

His influence over the late Queen was more remarkable even than has

hitherto been disclosed. And in this regard I am able to state that,

while out of office, he negotiated with extreme tact, under delicate

circumstances, the peerage conferred on a most amiable prince, now

no more; and further, that at each stage of all its bearings Queen

Victoria consulted and deferred to his counsel, kindness, and resource.

I may add that he also devised a means of providing the same lamented

prince with an absorbing occupation.

He was a firm friend; loyalty he always extolled as a sovereign

virtue. Not many have the faculty for friendship in old age as Lord

Beaconsfield had it. His passion for mastery, his addiction to mystery

were rivalled by his immense faithfulness. If he was always “the man

of destiny,” he was also ever “faithful unto death.” And his real

friendships were warm as well as constant. While he was at Glasgow to

be inaugurated Lord Rector of its University, he heard good tidings of

an old associate. “Mrs. Disraeli and I,” he wrote, “were over-joyed,

and we danced a Highland fling in our nightgowns.” The picture raises a

smile,[26] but it also strikes an unexpected chord.

Of music and of art in general he was a devotee, as many passages

in his novels attest. He had his own theories of their influence on

composition and on literature. Murillo was his favourite painter,

Mozart his favourite composer. He ever deplored the insensibility

of the Government to the duty of elevating taste for the beautiful.

When the Blacas collection of gems was in the market at the price of

£70,000, the Administration of the day at first refused to entertain

the purchase, but Disraeli persuaded them by offering to find the money

himself, if they persisted. In this case, as in so many others (notably

that of the Suez Canal shares), imagination forwarded the public

interest; for this collection is now worth some threefold of what was

expended. When a great work by Raphael was offered to the Government,

and Disraeli’s colleagues were in doubt, Disraeli sent for the leading

dealer, in whose hands the commission had been placed, inspected the

picture himself, discoursed charmingly and critically of its merits,

with the result that it is now in the National Gallery. Since even

trifles about the eminent possess interest, I may add the following

story of his old age. He was showing a distinguished visitor (still

living) his family portraits at Hughenden. He paused before a pastel

of a lovely child wafted by seraphs through the skies. “That,” he

exclaimed, “is a pet picture; observe how exquisitely the draperies of

the angels are arranged. _The baby’s me!_” His fondness for beautiful

form extended to his own handwriting.

In matters of courtesy he was old-fashioned and punctilious. To the

last he resented that grotesque disfigurement which was beginning to

make manners ugly before he died. Even at an earlier date, “Manners are

easy,” said “Coningsby,” “and life is hard.” “And I wish to see things

exactly the reverse,” said “Lord Henry,” “the modes of subsistence less

difficult, the conduct of life more ceremonious.”

In his fiction it was often objected that he over-depicted great

splendour and supreme beauty; that it was thronged with “daughters” and

mansions “of the gods.” But, if he erred in these respects, it was from

familiarity and not from ostentation, as Lady John Manners has pointed

out at some length. “It must be recollected,” she wrote, thinking of

_Lothair_, “that many of those who most appreciated him, and whose

friendship he warmly reciprocated, are surrounded in daily life by

a certain amount of state which employs their dependants.” So, too,

with regard to the peaceful and prosperous marriages of those homes of

forty years ago on which he delighted to dwell. He loved the gentle

Buckinghamshire landscape, with its treasures of association in every

cranny, more than all the remembered luxuriance of the South and glare

of the East. And it should also be remembered that his works abound in

sympathetic descriptions of all kinds and conditions of men, including

the strangest and humblest. They were taken from personal observation,

and he himself would penetrate the queerest haunts to gain the most

curious insight. The common and the uncommon people fascinated him, for

in them he found ideas; the middling charmed him less. He delighted to

invest the seemingly commonplace with significance, and also to strip

the pretentiously important of its wonder. Not even Dickens, as I shall

hint hereafter, knew or loved his London better. I shall also, in the

proper place, touch on the exotic element in his style and accent.

Mr. John Morley has aptly compared it to Goethe’s dictum about St.

Peter’s, that, though it is _baroque_; it is always the expression of

something great and not merely grandiose. His big words are never for

little things. Undoubtedly some of his earliest works are deficient in

taste; and there is a certain fierce hardness in their abrupt violence.

Mrs. Austin advised him in omissions from the original manuscript

of _Vivian Grey_; it was to women that he owed his training in these

directions. His knowledge was vast and profound, and he exercised the

habit of pursuing long trains of thought in reflection. He seldom

worked at night, preferring that season for brooding over his ideas.

But at all times, contrary to the superficial opinion, he worked long

and hard, sometimes over ten hours a day. His gift of divination never

dimmed his passion for study, until old age and ill-health warned

him that it must pause. He never ceased to deplore the want of “that

boundless leisure which we literary men need.” To the last, as Lord

Iddesleigh has pointed out, he studied the Bible in the earliest hours.

In church attendance he was what Mr. Gladstone used to call a “oncer.”

He was a regular communicant.

By success he was never inflated, by reversals never depressed,

although by nature elastic.[27] It was not until 1874 that his

power became wholly unfettered, and then foreign crisis claimed the

attention that he longed to bestow on social improvements and Colonial

Confederation. His three previous spans of office had been equally

brief. For some twenty years he headed, at intervals, a despairing

Opposition, whose mistrustful murmurs had to be stilled, whose doubts

had to be dispelled, and the immense difficulties of whose management

he has graphically portrayed in a notable passage from his _Life of

Lord George Bentinck_. To the printed diatribes which assailed him he

was indifferent. In parliamentary generalship, demanding an infinite

insight and management, an instant recognition of movements in the

mass, and “creation of opportunity,” he was unsurpassed even by Peel,

who played on Parliament “as on an old fiddle.” To his urgent control

even so early as 1854, and when out of office, the correspondence with

Spencer Walpole affords a striking insight. “My dear Walpole,” he

writes on November 29 of that year, “remember to write to the Queen

if anything of interest happens to-night. Tell somebody, Harry Lennox

or another, to send me a bulletin by this messenger of what is taking

place, but not later than ten o’clock, as I shall retire early, that

being my only chance. Be positive that the financial statement will be

made on Friday.”[28]

What he really valued in power was its faculty of influence. Otherwise

it was bitter-sweet. He once told a high aspirant for high office, that

as for its _pleasures_, they lay chiefly in contrasting the knowledge

it afforded of what was really being done with the ridiculous chatter

about affairs in the circles that one frequented.

His wit, his brightness of humour, and lightness of touch, long

prevented many of his contemporaries from taking him seriously.

Literary statesmen are often belittled by their generation; imaginative

statesmen, always. They have usually to await a career after death. The

stereotyped character imposed on him till his pluck and power appealed

to the nation at large was largely due to the old Whigs (“oligarchy is

ever hostile to genius”[29]), who for years refused to regard him with

anything but amusement, yet whose drawing-rooms had been the readiest

to applaud those sparkling sallies of 1845 and 1846 that demolished the

premier whom they too wished to destroy; that coterie so long trained

to make popular causes preserve their exclusive power, and of whom he

wrote in 1833, “A Tory, a Radical, I understand; a Whig, a democratic

aristocrat, I cannot comprehend.” It was not due to the Peelites, who

frankly hated him as an open foe. Even the Liberals (many of whom he

counted as personal friends), when he warned them of the underground

rumblings, ominous of social earthquake in Ireland, shrugged their

shoulders; and when he was reported, glass in eye, to have answered a

duchess inquisitive about the exact date of the dissolution with “You

darling,” they split their sides, and guffawed, “There he is again!”

They agreed with his old family acquaintance, Bernal Osborne (if it

was he), to whom the heartlessness was attributed of saying, when Lord

Beaconsfield was stricken with his lingering illness, “Overdoing it, as

usual.”

And yet how interesting it is to find Disraeli in the Grant-Duff

diaries discoursing eagerly in the faint dawn on Westminster Bridge of

Lord John Russell. Perhaps Disraeli’s greatest admirer among opponents

was Cobden, and that admiration was warmly returned. Both of them

had one great virtue in common, and a rare one, especially in public

life--gratitude; and both could afford to be generous. Read the letter

now first disclosed by Mr. John Morley, whose literary appreciation of

Disraeli is manifest, in which Disraeli sought to win Gladstone with

“deign to be magnanimous.”

Disraeli’s own magnanimity--frankly owned by Mr. Gladstone--was

conspicuous though it is unfamiliar. During the decade of the ’fifties,

on at least four occasions[30] he offered to sacrifice his personal

position to Graham, Palmerston, and Gladstone successively for the

interests of his country and his party. In 1868 and 1869 he indignantly

defended the last against the carping “tail” of his supporters,

rebuking alike the “frothy spouters of sedition,” and those who

preferred remembrance of “accidental errors” to gratitude for “splendid

gifts and signal services.” His unstinted praise of worthy foes, his

conduct even towards the ostracised Dr. Kenealy, are constant proofs of

a leading _trait_. He always forebore to strike an opponent to please

the whim or the passion of the popular breeze.

_À propos_ of Mr. Gladstone, who himself paid a tribute to the absence

of rancour in his rival, I may be permitted to recall an anecdote

told me by the late Sir John Millais. When Disraeli stood (though

then suffering, he refused to _sit_) for his last portrait, his “dear

Apelles” noticed his gaze riveted on an engraving of the artist’s

fine portrait of the great premier. “Would you care to have it?” he

inquired. “I was rather shy of offering it to you.” “I should be

delighted to have it,” was the reply. “Don’t imagine that I have ever

disliked Mr. Gladstone; on the contrary, my only difficulty with him

has been _that I could never understand him_.” And Carlyle himself

thawed when Disraeli, whom he had so long hysterically abused, but

many of whose ideas, as I shall prove, he shared, offered him public

recognition in a letter which gave as a reason for uninheritable

honours, “I have remembered that you too, like myself, are childless.”

But Carlyle, who had aspersed him, never denied that he looked facts

in the face without mistaking phantoms for them. Even from the first

he owned length of view. In his old age a certain far-awayness of

expression was very noticeable.

I have mentioned Mr. Gladstone. It was well for England that two great

attitudes towards great questions should have been thrown into sharp

relief for nearly a score of years by the duel between two great

personalities; and it was also well for Disraeli that “England does

not love coalitions.” We know from Mr. Gladstone’s own lips that much

in his rival had won his respect, while from Mr. Morley we glean that

Mr. Gladstone even struggled with a sort of subacid liking for one whom

he too could “never comprehend.”[31] The letters of both after Lady

Beaconsfield’s death are refreshing instances of how sworn enemies of

the arena may grasp hands under the softening solemnity of bereavement,

and for a moment forget the hard words which, under irritation, they

certainly used of each other.

Disraeli was older than Gladstone, and had been early acquainted with

him. In the ’thirties he sat next to “young Gladstone” at the Academy

dinner, and regretted that he had been relegated from “the wits,” with

whom he had been ranged in the year previous, to “the politicians.”

In the ’forties Disraeli made one of his few mistakes in prognostic,

when he wrote to his sister, “I doubt if he has an ‘avenir’;” but the

significance of Gladstone’s resignation at this juncture on “Maynooth,”

and the peculiar circumstances of the Peelites must be borne in mind.

Disraeli could scarcely then divine the surprises of oscillation in

store.

Except in vigour of undaunted character, and in a sort of inward

loneliness, their qualities were opposed. The intensity of the one was

austere, imperious, imposing, and didactic; of the other, buoyant,

lively, and poignant. Frequently the flippancy of certain leaders

provoked his gravity; more frequently the solemnity of others upset

his own. Gladstone moved by violent reaction and hasty rebound;

Disraeli, by a spring of step, it is true, but of a step measured,

wary, and equal. Disraeli stamped himself on his age; it was often

the “Time-Spirit” that impressed itself on Mr. Gladstone, a list of

whose changeful “convictions”[32] from 1836 to 1896 might fill a small

volume. Again, Disraeli’s utterance left a stronger sense of reserve

power, of something serious behind the veil. Mr. Gladstone’s phases,

always sincere, in the main struck more the conscience of certain

sections; Disraeli’s ideas, the national feelings. Mr. Gladstone’s

subtleties were those of a theologian; they did not quicken the lay

mind. Disraeli’s were the subtleties of an artist; they put things in

new perspectives. It might be said that by nature and unconscious bent,

the one hid simplicity under the form of subtlety, while with the other

the process was the converse. In oratory, Mr. Gladstone convinced by

height and redundance of enthusiasm, by depth of feeling and weight or

wealth of words and gestures; Disraeli, more by grasp, incisiveness,

and point; his imagination played all round many sides of his subject.

Gladstone’s eloquence resembled the storminess and the mist of the

North Sea; Disraeli’s, the strange lights and shadows, the subtle and

tideless lustre of the Mediterranean. As Mr. Gladstone warmed to his

theme, he increased in eloquence; his perorations are always great.

It was in peroration that Disraeli sometimes failed, except in his

after-dinner speeches, which never missed fire from start to finish.

Mr. Gladstone was saturated, Disraeli tinctured, with the classics.

Mr. Gladstone was essentially the scholar, and he was Homeric, while

Disraeli was Horatian and Tacitean. His ready acquaintance with Latin

masterpieces was shown when he first took the oaths as Chancellor

of the Exchequer, and hit off a most happy quotation on the spur of

the moment; nor will it be forgotten that once, when he was citing a

classic in the House, he added, “Which, for the sake of the successful

capitalists around me, I will now try to translate.”

Again, despite Mr. Gladstone’s immense versatility, there was always

something cloistral about him. He himself confessed that till he was

fifty he did not “know the world.” I venture to doubt if he ever knew

it, and it was just this academic simplicity that so often led his huge

brain-power to deal with unsubstantial material.

Mr. Gladstone will not live through his books. He was far more a

writer than an author, though he was always distinguished in all his

undertakings. But he was doctrinaire; and he was almost devoid of any

real sense of humour. On the appearance of “Nicholas Nickleby” he

owned its merit, but singled out its pathos with the criticism that

he was grieved by the absence from it of the religious sentiment--“No

Church!” In this respect Disraeli and Gladstone were brought into

amusing contrast during the Bulgarian atrocity campaign. Mr. Gladstone

had characterised the Premier’s attitude as “diabolical.” Disraeli,

in a speech, referred to Mr. Gladstone’s having called him “a devil.”

Mr. Gladstone denied the impeachment, and asked for verse and chapter.

Disraeli rejoined by writing that “the gentlemen who so kindly assist

me in the conduct of public affairs” had used their best endeavours to

ascertain the precise time and place when the Prince of Darkness had

been named, but hitherto without success.

A famous bookseller, with whom both statesmen frequently conversed,

used to recount that Disraeli once inquired, as was his wont, what

of new interest was forthcoming. He mentioned one of Mr. Gladstone’s

Vatican pamphlets. “No,” was the answer; “please not that. Mr.

Gladstone is a powerful writer, but nothing that he writes is

literature.”

In the House of Commons Disraeli had schooled himself from the first

to conceal the emotions of a nature naturally quick and sensitive.

He early lit on two mechanical devices for this purpose: the one was

to stroke his knees regularly with his hand, the other to scan the

clock. When he was much angered it was only by a change of colour that

his agitation was ever betrayed. It must be confessed that he loved to

“draw” Mr. Gladstone, and those who remember how, when Disraeli sat

down and relapsed into impassivity, Mr. Gladstone jumped up with a look

of rage and a voice of thunder, will admit that both performances were

perfect. But the audience expected the scene which became habitual,

and even supreme actors are influenced by the expectation of their

audience. Neither Gladstone nor Disraeli ever stooped to ill-nature.

Great men are not petty. But the moral indignation of the one, and

the intellectual indignation of the other, which sometimes exchanged

places, lent the semblance of pique or of quarrel. Disraeli’s dislike

of spleen is well displayed by what he once said of Abraham Hayward,

the caustic reviewer: “If that man were to be run over in the streets,

you would see his venom swimming in the gutters.”

In debate, Disraeli’s characteristics were a quick readiness and an

inexhaustible power of diverting discussion to new channels and of

defeating expectation. The occasion when, in reply to Mr. Whalley

concerning the Jesuits, he answered that one of their pet devices was

to send over Jesuits in disguise to decry the Jesuits, will recur

to the memory. His power of literary illustration needs no comment.

Two brilliant instances are that of the boots of the Lion embracing

the chambermaid of the Boar in connection with the _Edinburgh_ and

_Quarterly Reviews_, and that charming one about the Abyssinian

expedition, where he reminded us that the standard of St. George was

flying over the mountains of Rasselas.[33] In retort he was supreme.

Two of the best instances are to be noted in the rejoinder to Peel

about “candid friends” and Canning, and in the pause he made when in

a much later speech he said, “I have never attacked any one” (cries

of “Peel”) “unless I was first assailed.” I shall relate some others

hereafter. His self-imposed impassiveness of demeanour in the House was

that of a sentinel on bivouac; it became exaggerated by the contrast

of his illustrious compeer’s extreme excitability. Disraeli was very

zealous for the honour of the House in which he passed the greater

portion of his life. On one occasion a young and violent adversary

insinuated that Disraeli had told a lie. Disraeli calmly cleared

himself to the general satisfaction, and his denouncer began to feel

uncomfortable; still more so when he was sent for to the great man’s

private room. What was his surprise when he was shaken warmly by the

hand. “We all make mistakes,” said Disraeli, “when we are young. But

please to remember all your life that the House of Commons is a house

of gentlemen.”

For sheer insight into the march of ideas and reach of vision there is

no comparison between the two. Even in the ’forties Disraeli perceived

that the coming choice lay between absolute democracy and a monarchical

democracy. Afterwards--in the early ’fifties, while monarchy in England

was still far from popular--he laid his plans--as is apparent from

his contributions to his organ, _The Press_, in 1853--to popularise

monarchy and educate democracy before enfranchising it; and, not

till that was accomplished, to re-imperialise Great Britain. “He has

not,” he wrote in 1853 of Lord John Russell, “comprehended that for

the last twenty years the choice is between the maintenance of those

institutions and habits of thought which preserve monarchy, and that

gradual change into absolute democracy to which Tocqueville somewhere

rashly considered all the tendencies of our age impel the destinies

of Europe.... The Whigs should have been conservative of the reformed

constitution, and have developed it....”[34] While Gladstone was

refining a rather tortuous conscience into making the forlorn Peelites

alternate between the Conservatives and the Whigs, Disraeli was

reconstructing and developing a national party. While Gladstone and

Sidney Herbert, in righteous indignation at Peel’s memory, were enraged

at the delinquency of not struggling for absolute protection when the

Derby Ministry assumed office, Disraeli showed that the _principle_ of

his struggle (continued as regarded the sugar repeal) had been land

and labour. He must now benefit these by alleviations, rather than, as

a responsible Minister, attempt an upheaval of what the nation had

finally endorsed, and set private opinion as to particular measures at

variance with the possibility of government at all. Had he done so he

would have been doing what Fox himself had not attempted with regard

to Catholic emancipation, what Lord John Russell had not thought of

in 1847, what no responsible Minister could have compassed, and what,

Lord John Russell added, the Whigs could not do in 1835. And yet, out

of sheer honest hatred, he was vilified by those “high and stubborn

spirits who, with the severity peculiar to those censors who cannot

aspire to be consuls, refuse to acknowledge that there could be any

virtue of necessity, ... and could not enlarge their comprehension of

the requisites of a statesman beyond quotations from ‘Hansard.’ There

were surely some juster thinkers in the House of Commons who must have

trembled at the doctrine that men in office are rigidly to carry out

the opinions they proposed in opposition.”[35] That, he points out, is

the function of opposition, and the duty of supporting opinions which a

nation has cancelled never arises unless those opinions have sent you

to office. As he puts it, “Themis is the goddess of opposition, but

Nemesis sits in Downing Street.” In the overthrow of Peel lay a very

different moral, and by that overthrow he wished to lay bare the choice

between “Liberal opinions” and “popular principles,” between Peel’s

sudden adoption of the “physical enjoyment” theory of regeneration and

his own. By that destruction he eventually ended the Whigs and Peelites

alike, and set before the country the true choice that awaited it,

instead of the perplexity of parties[36] which, joined to detestation

of himself, caused the coalition of 1853 and prevented the contrast of

the ideas which really divided the minds of men from being prominent in

true proportions.

As a practical statesman, Disraeli thought more of those moral elements

by which the State can square private duty with public interest;

Gladstone, more of those elements above and beyond conduct. Gladstone

was perhaps more of an apostle, Disraeli of a seer. Gladstone owned a

noble heart with lofty spiritual standards, and an enormous quality of

moral resentment; but his Church views coloured his life as much as

his religious convictions, while his minute and perplexing scruples

too often changed the forms of his enthusiasms, led zeal to chime with

prejudice, and sometimes sent him astray altogether into self-deception.

Gladstone was a strange compound of diverse elements--of Highlander and

Lowlander, of Scotland, Liverpool, Oxford, and Italy. In some respects

he might even be termed the Dante of politics; but in others he was

occasionally deemed its Ignatius Loyala. Disraeli, on the other hand,

depended on his singular force of independence and of native sight

and foresight. Those who admired the early Gladstone as Sir Galahad

never wished him to sit on the seat of Merlin; nay, Gladstone himself

perpetually deemed Disraeli, Machiavelli, or even Cagliostro. In

relation to Disraeli, Gladstone would have perhaps addressed England

with “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?” while Disraeli

might have retorted by the witticism of Sarah, Duchess of Marborough,

on the eagerness of James the Second to drag his country to heaven with

him. It was just Disraeli’s originality and length of view that caused

him to be maligned as well as misunderstood, though by some his conduct

towards Peel was not unnaturally eyed askance. And yet, in Mr. Morley’s

“Life,” Lord John Russell is to be found vindicating his own share

in that transaction,[37] and Sir James Graham himself admitting that

Peel provoked what he suffered.[38] In the eyes of many, Gladstone

was Homer’s “old man of the sea” trying to hold Proteus, and yet none

proved more Protean through enlarging aspirations than “the old man”

himself. Perhaps Gladstone regarded the world more as the “Pilgrim’s

Progress,” Disraeli more as “Vanity Fair.” Gladstone had more sail,[39]

Disraeli more ballast. The one floated on waves of agitation, the other

desired a strong government by steadying the people and attaching them

to institutions. Moreover, Gladstone constantly viewed the State from

the standpoint of his particular Church opinions. Disraeli believed

that the principle of the Revolution had never been perfected by the

due development of popular institutions. He agreed with Pym that “the

best form of government is that which doth dispose and actuate _every_

part and member of a State to the common good.”

Disraeli owned, of course, his foibles, though he was too proud ever

to be very vain. As we shall find later on, when I come to his faults

of temperament, his grasp of ideas occasionally pressed them too

literally both on life and letters. He tended to overstrain his lights

and shadows. His imagination sometimes ran riot in its colours, and

throughout tended to exaggerate the forms of events, though hardly

ever their significance, which he was often the first to divine. He is

said to have cherished some superstitions about lucky days and unlucky

colours, but for these I cannot vouch. I can, however, for the fact

that he was once seen by intimates to wear a green velvet smoking-coat,

though one of the few occasions on which he troubled the newspapers

was to refute the slander of having, when young, appeared in green

trousers.[40] And here I may perhaps be pardoned for inserting a

slight story about Mrs. Disraeli, which comes from the same source as

the last. Dr. Guthrie was once staying at Grosvenor Gate, and invited

his hostess to visit him at Glasgow. “I will,” she smiled, “if you

will promise to wear your kilt in the streets.” “Perhaps I will,”

he replied, with hesitation. “You had better be careful, Guthrie,”

interposed Disraeli, “for that woman, I assure you, means what she

says.”

In taste and in phrase he was naturally extravagant, but his epigrams

were never for the sake of paradox, and were always the summaries

of wisdom and reflection. They were light, not frivolous; they

were imaginative proverbs. There never was a wittier man, and his

wit lent itself to his ironic humour. He loved effects that struck

imagination, but ever for a crucial purpose. It was said of him by

an intimate that one of his sentences--and in conversation he was

sparing--left more behind than a long talk with others of consummate

talent. As for the scathing sarcasm--his weapon of self-defence during

his earlier stages--at times over-savage and belying his normal

cheeriness--sobriety of judgment is compatible with--

“The stinging of a heart the world hath stung.”

But, undoubtedly, the too quick transitions of a susceptible fancy

from--

“Grave to gay, from lively to severe,”

often irritated and even offended not only the dull, but the serious.

And yet in life, as in literature, is there more than one step in the

descent from the sublime to the ridiculous?

Like all celebrated wits, he suffered both from the ascription of his

own _bons mots_ to others, and from those of others being fathered

upon him. Thus the “without a redeeming vice” (about Lord Hatherley)

was his, not Westbury’s, while the “dinner all cold except the ices,”

was said not by him, but by Sir David Dundas. His pithy sentences were

simply one manifestation of his naturally laconic turn of mind.

He was occasionally over-adroit, especially in his desire to gain

distinguished recruits for his party; and he sometimes, perhaps,

magnified the machinations of secret conspiracies, although their

hidden tyranny was gauged by him with unerring instinct. His

predilection both in art and nature was for extremes. Full of

atmosphere himself, he owned the social nerves which suffer overmuch

from lack of it in others. He detested bores, those masterpieces of

nature’s bad art. One of them (if I may say so without disrespect to

his kindness and amiability, since departed) has told with artless

humour how at one of the last dinner-parties that Lord Beaconsfield

attended, he engaged him in conversation, but was pained to notice

how ill and absent he seemed. Suddenly, however, on the arrival of a

distinguished guest, a Russian diplomatist, the great man brightened

and grew young again, as if by miracle!

After his elevation to the peerage,[41] when he would often revisit the

“glimpses of the moon,” and watch new members with rapt interest, on

one occasion he listened patiently to a long speech of ideal dreariness

from the lips of one unknown to him. He inquired, as usual, who the

speaker was, and learned that Mr. ---- had no other peculiarity but

deafness. “Poor fellow!” he sighed, “and yet he seems unaware of his

natural advantages. He cannot hear himself speak.”

Of Disraeli’s attitude towards fashionable society, as well as towards

that which really fascinated him, I shall say more in my eighth

chapter; but one incident of his old age must be presented here. I

can vouch for it, since it was told me by an eye-witness--a political

opponent.

It was after “Peace with honour”[42]--after he had “descended from

the Teutonic chariot,” after the congress where he discovered the

alternative Russian map of Bulgaria, concealed by diplomacy, where

he earned Bismarck’s undying praise and admiration. The scene was a

magnificent reunion in an historic mansion. All the fine flower of

society was gathered in a galaxy of splendour and of grandeur. In one

of the saloons a brilliant crowd was awaiting Lord Beaconsfield’s

entry. As the big doors opened, a thrill went through them. Haughty

ladies in the feeling of the moment made obeisance as if to royalty,

while that pale figure with the inscrutable smile passed along their

serried ranks. Unmoved and immovable, he went straight forward, his

eyes fixed on the future, scarcely conscious of their presence, except

for his recognition of their homage.

Such are some of his leading features. They combine and reconcile the

seeming contradictions of a nature at once calm and impetuous, deep

and light, astute and far-seeing in affairs of importance; in trifles,

careless. These contrasts, united by genius, pursue the forms of his

mind--his ideas. He was, of course, no monster of consistency, but the

ideas that animated his actions and utterance sprang from a singularly

consistent outlook and a most definite personality. In every case they

were the outcome on the one hand of his race, on the other of his

nationality. The antithesis between nationality and mere race is most

important, and too often ignored. There is no such thing as a nation

of a single strain. The national idea is the fusion of reconcilable

races, the creation of an artificial and ideal individuality, of a

consolidating pattern; the absorption of discordant races and their

replacement by a central idea which subordinates instinct to society.

Later civilisation means little else, if we reflect, than a gradual

process of this description; and it is not a little curious that the

distinctive greatness of English literature is largely due to the

admission and naturalisation of foreign influences--to England’s free

trade in ideas, to the openness of her literary ports. What would it

have proved had it remained purely insular; if Italy, France, and

Germany had not infused both form and spirit; above all, if it had not

been inspired by the noble rhythm of the Englished Bible and by the

supreme models of Greece and Rome? Disraeli’s wit, which is to find a

due consideration hereafter, is half eighteenth century in form, half

talmudic. The shape of his ideas was also partly determined by the time

of his birth and by the circumstances of his home.

He was born at the parting of the ways. His early reading, and,

indeed, his cast of mind, were steeped in the style of the eighteenth

century; but the movements of the nineteenth, the significance of

the French Revolution and of Napoleon, who had made all things new,

simmered in him from the first, and his earliest reflections were how

to attune the democratic idea to the vital institutions of an ancient

empire. As regards his home, he was truly, as he has put it, “born in

a library;” and this circumstance contributed as much as others to

a certain detachment of thought which in politics afforded him the

clue to the character of movements, and, above all, to the movements

of character; in fiction, as will be apparent from my ninth chapter,

it led him to regard things as they appeared of themselves, and not

always as they seemed to others; while under the play of fancy he

transposed their outward environments to accentuate their essence. Of

his father, himself a most interesting study, I shall have more to say

in my eighth chapter. Here, I only wish to draw attention to the fact

that Isaac Disraeli’s influence on his son’s ideas was twofold. On

the one hand, his views on “predisposition,” on the use of solitude,

on the true meaning of education, on historical “cause and pretext,”

on the hollowness of “joint-stock felicity,” on the self-recognition

of creative minds before their late acknowledgment by contemporaries,

with others glanced at in my later chapters, were directly derived by

Disraeli from his father. From him, too, he inherited his fondness for

Burke. On the other hand, Disraeli’s native leanings reacted against

many of that peripatetic philosopher’s opinions. His interpretation

of the Bible was, if not at variance with, at any rate different

from his father’s,[43] and was, I fancy, shared by his sister. His

admiration for Bolingbroke, as genius and constitutional interpreter,

was in direct opposition, just as that father’s own dispassionate

outlook remained independent and often the reverse of his own early

associations. Byron, however, entered Disraeli’s mental being through

his father; and of three main influences on his boyhood--the Bible,

Bolingbroke, and Byron (strange conjunction!), the last was not the

least.

Outside politics, the contradictions combined in Disraeli’s mind are

patent throughout his fiction, and they were reconciled by his leading

idea that everything great in the world springs from individuality

alone. Thus, for example, as regards Destiny, he was both for free

will and fatalism--the individual will was for him the universal fate.

If a man, he has said, is ready to die for an object, he must attain

it unless he has utterly miscalculated his powers. Then again, the

twin sympathies of his mind, both with antique authority and modern

revolution, its bias towards the Chartism of _Sybil_, the chivalry of

her aristocratic deliverer, and the discipline of her time-honoured

creed, towards the noble personality of “Theodora” in _Lothair_ (his

finest heroine),[44] and the noble ideals of “Coningsby”--these are

reconciled by the national idea, the idea that sets earned privilege

and reciprocal duties above and against illimitable and irresponsible

“rights.” “Conspiracies are for aristocrats, not for nations.”

In this regard it is most interesting to observe the influence of

Shelley on Disraeli--a subject which has been treated by Dr. Richard

Garnett in a masterly monograph.[45] From many of his conclusions I

dissent, but his facts are most enlightening, and form an entrancing

comment on the character of “Herbert” in _Venetia_. He shows that

probably through Trelawny, whom he met often at Lady Blessington’s,

Disraeli gleaned many recollections and even thoughts and words,

unpublished till the Shelley Papers were given to the world some

years afterwards; that his description too of the ethereal poet as

“a golden phantom” is probably Trelawny’s own; that subtle shades of

admiring appreciation are to be traced throughout; that Disraeli was

undoubtedly influenced by Shelley’s thoughts. The discovery of these

in some portions of the _Revolutionary Epick_ (where “Demogorgon”

is introduced) does not seem to me conclusive; nor are the verbal

resemblances singled out for comparison very striking. I cannot close

this branch of my subject without noticing a fact almost unknown.

In 1825, when Disraeli was a stripling, he published an anonymous

pamphlet, which may be found in the British Museum, on the restrictions

enforced by the Government upon the British working of American mines.

The tract is boldly dedicated “by a sincere admirer” to Canning,[46]

as “one who has reformed without bravery or scandal of former times or

persons; asking counsel of both times; _of the ancient times that which

is best, of the modern times, that which is fittest_;” and it further

contains this remarkable passage, if we remember its date, about

America--

“... The prosperity of England mainly depends upon its relations with

America, and in proportion as the energies of America are developed and

her resources strengthened, will the power and prosperity of England be

confirmed and increased.”

In the domain of politics Disraeli, as I shall show at length, divined

in the national institutions the chief engine for the revival of unity

and for social regeneration. When he denounced the Conservatism of the

early ’forties as an “organised hypocrisy,” he did so just because, as

it seemed to his eyes, the hopes once centred on Peel as the restorer

of a truly “national” party were being shattered by his failure, under

ordeal, to govern, to develop the institutions which he was called

on to preserve, by his erection of “registration” into a party idol,

by his policy of polls, by his cold indifference and suspicion of

the youthful regenerators, who confronted the middle classes with

the middle ages. “Whenever,” indignantly urged Disraeli in 1845,

“whenever the young men of England allude to any great principle of

political or parliamentary conduct, are they to be recommended to go

to a railway committee?” And he found in his once chief’s temperament

of discouraging formality and timorous desire for “fixity of tenure,”

for _staying_ power, a reason for the stultification of the House of

Lords: “... It is not Radicalism; it is not the revolutionary spirit

of the nineteenth century which has consigned ‘another place’ to

illustrious insignificance; it is ‘Conservatism’ and a Conservative

dictator.”

Disraeli was one born with aristocratic perceptions, yet with a bent

“popular” rather than “democratic” in the strict sense of those

terms. “Democracy” in the concrete he considered as the unsettlement

of compact nationality through the undue preponderance of a single

class; democracy in the abstract he considered as a lever for ambitious

tribunes. But the welfare of the people was ever his chief concern,

and he knew full well that it is constantly foiled by the side-aims

of those vociferous on its behalf. When he first appeared on the

political horizon, neither of the great historical parties owned

popular sympathies. The Tories dreaded “Radicalism” because they were

blind to the possibilities of its adoption into the order of the

State. Of the Whigs, democratic enthusiasms were at once the tools and

the abhorrence. Disraeli determined to infuse them into those free

yet settled institutions of which the Tories were the natural but

forgetful guardians. His main purpose from the outset was to implant

the new ideas of freedom on the ancient soil of order; to engraft them

productively without uprooting the native undergrowth; to harmonise the

modern democratic idea with those English traditions which had always

harboured its older forms. His work was to accommodate federal to

feudal principles; to render democracy in England national and natural;

to popularise leadership; to make democracy aristocratic in the truest

sense of the term; to undo the closed aristocracy of caste and to

revive the open aristocracy of excellence wherever displayed. My next

two chapters investigate this idea; and it will be found afterwards,

when I discuss his notion of empire and his attitude towards our

colonies, that his ideals of Great Britain’s destiny and responsibility

flow straight from this ruling outlook. The same consideration applies

to the many other problems which I shall discuss in the light of

Disraeli’s relations to them. Throughout, in one form or another, and

in many applications, the free play of responsible individuality forms

the keynote. He constantly opposes it alike to the barren uniformity

of republican models, and to the centralising dictatorship whether of

groups or of tyrants. He contrasts the personal with the mechanical.

The State in his eyes should prove the sympathetic expression of the

whole community. These aspects will find ample exposition hereafter. In

this place I wish only to quote their bold and broad emphasis in the

unfamiliar pamphlet of _What is he?_ with one citation from which I

opened this chapter. It will explain those passages in his _Runnymede

Letters_ and _The Spirit of Whiggism_, where he expects and adjures

Peel to head a “national party” and to replace confederacies by a

creed. It will also illustrate that passage in the election address to

High Wycombe during 1832, which preludes his mission as the renewer of

a popular Conservatism. “... Englishmen, behold the unparalleled empire

raised by the heroic energies of your fathers, rouse yourselves in this

hour of doubt and danger, rid yourselves of all that political jargon

and factious slang of Whig and Tory, two names with one meaning, used

only to delude you, and unite in forming a great national party....”

“The first object of a statesman,” he says (and he was then barely

twenty-nine years of age), “is a _strong Government_, without which

there can be no security. Of all countries in the world, England most

requires one, since the prosperity of no society so much depends upon

public confidence as that of the British nation.”

He then declares that the old principle of exclusion (common alike to

the Whig oligarchs and the debased Toryism of Eldon) is dead.

“... The moment the Lords passed the Reform Bill from menace instead

of conviction, the aristocratic principle of government in this

country, in my opinion, expired for ever.” The democratic principle

becomes necessary to maintain a Government at all. “If the Tories,” he

continues, “indeed despair of restoring the aristocratic principle, and

are sincere in their avowal that the State cannot be governed with the

present machinery, it is their duty to coalesce with the Radicals,[47]

and permit both political nicknames to merge into the common, the

intelligible, and the dignified title of a national party.”[48]

He proceeds to prove in a few decisive strokes that the towns are now

the safeguards against any military invasion of rights, and that a

coalition between the then Whigs and the then Tories is impossible;

the only alternative, therefore, is the inclusion of the democratic

principle.

“Without being a system-monger,” he resumes, repeating the refrain

of his previous _Revolutionary Epick_, “I cannot but perceive that

the history of Europe for three hundred years has been a transition

from feudal to federal principles.” If not their origin, these

contending principles have blended with all the struggles that have

occurred.--“The revolt of the Netherlands impelled, if it did not

produce, our revolution against Charles I. That of the Anglo-American

colonies impelled, if it did not produce, the Revolution in France.”

“This,” he says, “is not a party pamphlet, and appeals to the passions

of no order of the State.” “It is wise,” he concludes, “to be sanguine

in public as well as in private life; yet the sagacious statesman

must view the present portents with anxiety, if not with terror. It

would sometimes appear that the loss of our colonial empire must be

the necessary consequence of our prolonged domestic discussions. Hope,

however, lingers to the last. In the sedate but vigorous character of

the British nation we may place great confidence.” The very pressing

unsettlement of those days will afterwards claim a mention; nor should

I now omit Disraeli’s sentence in his _Crisis Examined_, to the effect

that “Lord Grey refusing the Privy Seal and Lord Brougham soliciting

the Chief Barony” were “two epigrammatic episodes in the history of

reform that never can be forgotten.”

Mr. John Morley has well observed that about all Disraeli’s utterance

there was something spacious. The ideas that I am about to examine

are not to be brushed away by the sneers of triflers. Whatever may

be thought of them, and however they may fairly be encountered by

criticism, dissented from or condemned by judgment, they are still

alive. Disraeli bathed the political landscape in a large and luminous

atmosphere. To literature, as I shall hope to show, he lent a fresh and

original charm. Over existence he never ceased to spread the glow of

endeavour, of aspiration, and of purpose. His heart was with the youth

and the labour of England. He made for the strength and union of every

divergent class. He struck and stirred the national imagination.

Disraeli’s sincerity was that of a master in the world’s studio,

imbuing the fainter shapes around him with the vivid colours of the

true pictures in his own brain. It was that, also, of a great man of

action who translates dreams into deeds. It is not often that the

literary mind is allied to a practical bent. He himself has reminded us

that such an union--“as in the case of Caius Julius”--is irresistible.

He was always himself, and never under “the dangerous sympathy with the

creations of others.” He believed that “every man performs his office,

and there is a Power, greater than ourselves, that disposes of all

this.”[49]

Disraeli’s European prominence is evidenced through the space occupied

by the polyglot literature relating to him in the book catalogue alone

of the British Museum. It extends to eleven of those huge pages. His

importance at home before he became pre-eminent is shown by a shower of

virulent abuse.

Science assures us that the difference between life and death is

that the former holds the powers of growth and reproduction, while

inanimateness is incapable of either. A great man is surely one who

possesses and imparts these qualities of life. Disraeli, without

question, powerfully affected the thought of his generation and the

destinies of the future.