Chapter X: Career (1)

The secrets of success, Disraeli has told us more than once, are knowledge of your capacities, constancy of purpose, and mastery of your subject. It is seldom that in one brain these qualities of grip, mental and moral, are fully combined; and, rarer still, when they do reside together, is the addition of the third requisite named by him--patience. It, with the tact it bears, is as necessary for the servant as the master.

“The magic of the character,” he says of the courier in _Contarini_, “was his patience. This made him quicker and readier and more successful than all other men. He prepared everything, and anticipated wants of which we could not think.”

The preparation for career--apart from its entitling endowments--should be education; but education, he held, even in its prescientific days, often started with a vital mistake. It proceeded on words, grammars, and systems. It should proceed on a knowledge of predisposition; others should know a man before he is called upon to know himself. “What we want is to discover the character of a man at his birth, and _found his education upon his nature_.... All is an affair of organisation.... Among men there are some points of similarity and sympathy. There are few alike; there are some totally unlike the mass.... Until we know more of ourselves, of what use are our systems?... We speculate upon the character of man; we divide and we subdivide. We have our generals, our sages, our statesmen. There is not a modification of mind that is not mapped out in our great atlas of intelligence. We cannot be wrong, because we have mapped out the past; and we are famous for discovering the future when it has taken place. Napoleon is First Consul, and would found a dynasty.... But what use is the discovery, when the Consul is already tearing off his republican robe and snatching the imperial diadem? And suppose, which has happened, and may and will happen again--suppose a being of a different organisation from Napoleon or Cromwell placed in the same situation--a being gifted with a combination of intelligence hitherto unknown--where, then, is our moral philosophy? How are we to speculate upon results which are to be produced by unknown causes?... The whole system of moral philosophy is a delusion, fit only for the play of sophists in an age of physiological ignorance.” So, too, he had reason to think of some physicians “who decide by precedents which have no resemblance, and never busy themselves about the idiosyncrasies of their patients.”[182] “Until,” he wrote again, “men are educated with reference to their nature, there will be no end of domestic fracas.” He remembered his grandfather’s misconstruction of his father’s temperament, and his uncle’s of his own. Even illness he considered “as much a part of necessary education as travel or study.” And his constant idea, that national literature ought to be native and not imported, allied itself to his educational ideas also. “The duty of education is to give ideas. When our limited intelligence was confined to the literature of two dead languages, it was necessary to acquire them.... But now each nation has its literature.... Let education, then, be confined to the national literature, and we should soon perceive the beneficial effects upon the mind of the student. Study would then be a profitable delight. I pity the poor Gothic victim of the grammar and the lexicon. The Greeks, who were masters of composition, were ignorant of all languages but their own. They concentrated the genius of the study of expression upon one tongue. _To this they owe that blended simplicity and strength of style, which the imitative Romans, with all their splendour, never attained.... The ancients invented their Governments according to their wants; the moderns have adopted foreign policies, and then modelled their conduct upon this borrowed regulation._ This circumstance has occasioned our manners and customs to be so confused, absurd, and unphilosophical. What business had we, for instance, to adopt the Roman law--a law foreign to our manners, and consequently disadvantageous? He who profoundly meditates upon the situation of modern Europe will also discover how productive of misery has been the senseless adoption of Oriental customs by Northern peoples. Whence came that divine right of kings which has deluged so many countries with blood?--that pastoral and Syrian law of tithes, which may yet shake the foundations of so many ancient institutions?” The spirit of this passage was ever present to his mind. He went even further. He has asserted that the mere fact of copying or assuming ideas deprives them of their native virtue, and that all that is second-hand loses the vigour and flavour of its originals in imitating them.

Preparation must be succeeded, and, indeed, attended, by meditation. I shall return to this idea shortly, and consider it in his own instance. But there comes a juncture when action must rise from the chrysalis of thought which encloses it.

“... You must renounce meditation. Action is now your part. Meditation is culture. It is well to think until a man has discovered his genius and developed his faculties, but then let him put his intelligence in motion. Act, act, act without ceasing, and you will no longer talk of the vanity of life.”

The perpetual thought of death he considered harmful. To live in present duty and energy was truer piety than to brood on the coming hour when no man can work; and the very sense of existence is a great happiness, and leads to hope. “... If, in striking the balance of sensation, misery were found to predominate, no human being would endure the curse of existence....”[183] He would surely have echoed that fine saying of Gladstone--“Indifference to the world is not love of God.” He was infinitely sanguine in outlook, although extremely cautious in expedients. I may recall that when _Coningsby_ has missed his fortune, _Sidonia_ consoles him by a series of more disagreeable contingencies.

Such, then, were for him the equipments of career. Of its arts in attaining what it designs to exercise for the good of others, much will have been gleaned from many citations as to tact and temper. There is one other maxim of worldly wisdom which is worth recording: “If you wish a man to be your friend, allow him to confute you.” His idea of power was that it was “a divine trust,” but it was also a cumulative fund. “The very exercise of power only teaches me that it may be wielded for a greater purpose.” Mrs. Disraeli said, when her husband had, in his own words, “climbed to the top of the greasy pole at last,” “You don’t know my Dizzy, what great plans he has long matured for the good and greatness of England. But they have made him wait and drudge so long--and now time is against him.”

It is not here my province to track the details of his own career. This book deals with his ideas. But with the interesting psychology of his early temperament I mean to deal, for it concerns his ideas.

I might, had his career been within my scope, have cleared some doubts, and explained many misunderstandings. I could have shown, as I have shown elsewhere, the real truth about the Peel letter, and the events of 1851-52. I should have pointed out the dividing lines in his campaign and the halting-places in his march, the Eastern tour, his marriage, his estrangement from Peel, the Crimean War, his steady progress in social improvements, his Reform Bills of 1859 and 1867, the strong effect on his outlook of events of magnitude, and the last act of the drama--his imperialism. I might also have explained the moot points connected with the years 1833, 1835, 1837, 1846, 1851, and 1860.[184] I might, perhaps, have been able to shed light on the delayed Malmesbury despatches in 1859. Nor should I have shirked his mistakes, notably the motion of censure on Lord Palmerston. And I would have dwelt on the striking influences which his sister and his wife exercised over him.

But one brief topic I shall skim before I finally trace something of his own peculiar development.

Much has been talked of his alien “aloofness.” As for alien, Mazarin was in this sense an “alien,” not to speak of the less worthy examples, Alberoni and Ripperda. In the eighteenth century a Scotch premier was in England an “alien.” Augustus was partly, Napoleon wholly, an “alien.” And what but “aliens” were Manin, Gambetta, Lasker, Midhat, and Emin? Nobody understood his countrymen more shrewdly at once and sympathetically than Disraeli. His was no sham patriotism, and he loved John Bull fondly, even when he poked fun at him. Nor had any pondered more deeply the lessons which history imparts. There are, however, two grains of truth in this reproach. He did regard the world and its history as a fleeting show. He believed in recurring cycles. What is now old was once new; what is new will one day be old. So long as individuals worked their best, what did it matter? One civilisation succeeds another, and the last state of a mighty nation is often worse than the first. “The whirligig of Time brings about his revenges.” In this sense--the historical and philosophical sense--he might be called indifferentist. And again, he understood England, but it took long for his countrymen to understand _him_. When they came to do so, he met with that generosity which immense bravery and perseverance always eventually receive; but, meanwhile, he had struggled against a jealous malice which is, perhaps, peculiar to politics. He had “educated” his followers, but suspicion and misunderstanding hampered his every step. During two spans of some six years each (without counting his early period) he had to play the losing game with an unruffled brow, an encouraging smile, and an unwearied resource, which included the transformation of a party and foundation of a political magazine. He had to hearten the despairing, the recalcitrant, the slothful, and the sullen. He had to deplore the stupidity of missed opportunities;[185] he had to humour the engrossers of office; and, even, in the intervals of power, to bend his neck to the grindstone of finance. “I am not,” he once sarcastically rejoined, alluding to Sir Charles Wood opposite, “a born Chancellor of the Exchequer.” His hour struck. At sixty-four he began to govern England on lines planned and with projects pondered full thirty years earlier; and even then he had to confront anonymous endeavours to sap his leadership from quarters which should have disarmed suspicion. His own mind was impartial in the extreme. The same “aloofness” which he is alleged to have displayed to British affairs, he certainly displayed in his books with regard to Eastern emirs, who talk with the aspirations of the West. “Alroy” himself is very European, and never more so than when he disdains the isolating fanaticism of “Jabaster.”

Much, too, has been prattled about his “audacity,” and I notice that the hackneyed quotation about “L’audace” is usually in these diatribes ascribed to Danton, and not to its author, Beaumarchais. Many of these “audacities” are now recognised as wisdom; but it has been after-wisdom that has recognised it; though Disraeli was usually Prometheus.

“There are times,” he said in one of his early novels, “when I am influenced by a species of what I may term happy audacity, for it is a mixture of recklessness and self-confidence, which has a very felicitous effect upon the animal spirits. At these moments I never calculate consequences, yet everything seems to go right. I feel in good fortune; the ludicrous side of everything occurs to me; I think of nothing but grotesque images. I astonish people by bursting into laughter apparently without a cause....”

Disraeli was naturally sensitive, but he studied self-repression. No one was more cut to the quick by contumely or impertinence; no one was more determined to hide the wound. “If,” once observed Jowett, “Dizzy were on the brink of the bottomless pit, and each moment about to fall into it, his look would never betray the fact; such is his pluck and power of countenance.” As he bore himself towards provocation, he bore himself towards pain. The last great speech he ever made was delivered with youthful jauntiness, yet he was forced to take a drug in order to deliver it. “One must meet death boldly,” he exclaimed to an intimate friend, after he had read the denial of the doctors’ assurance in their faces.

Disraeli’s intellectual shortcomings are those, it seems to me, belonging to an intense, as opposed to a diffused imagination. His mind shed both heat and light, but both the light and the heat were over-concentrated. The same applies, perhaps, to his will, and to his character also. Everything in him was focussed. His ideas possessed him, and he chafed, like a sculptor at work, to embody them. Outside the forms of those ideas he could not penetrate. In relation to them, he judged all junctures and all endeavours. It is this averseness to the abstract that pervades his every outlook. He could not conceive of ideas as unmaterialised or disembodied. They had been the companions of his boyish solitude.

“... The clustering of their beauty seemed an evidence of poetic power: the management of these bright guests was an art of which I was ignorant. I received them all, and found myself often writing only that they might be accommodated.”

As a child, his ruling mood was that of reverie. He had steeped himself in his father’s library, and his extraordinary imagination played upon the poets, the philosophers, and, above all, the historians. Dim dreams from the vast procession of the centuries took shape and became flesh. He beheld the great men and movements marching before him. Incarnate presences peopled his loneliness, and called to him with their voices--

“The votary of a false idea, I linger in this shadowy life and feed on silent images which no eye but mine can gaze upon, till at length they are invested with the terrible circumstances of life, and breathe, and act, and form a stirring world of fate, beauty, time, death, and glory. And then, from out this dazzling wilderness of deeds, I wander forth and wake ... horrible! horrible!” “Often in reverie had I been an Alberoni, a Ripperda, a Richelieu....” “I sat in moody silence, revolving in reverie without the labour of thought....”

He felt that he was not as others. He found that though at once proud and gentle, as a boy, his family were sometimes eyed askance as foreigners. He wished to frequent a public school; it was deemed unadvisable. The harder side of his nature began to assert itself. He would triumph over all, hew down every obstacle. His father suggested the University. He rejected the offer. Why waste his time in words that might prove a school for deeds? “A miserable lot is mine to feel everything and be nothing.” He was destined, appointed, reserved. As he grew older these convictions deepened. “Am I a man, and a man of strong passions and deep thoughts? And shall I, like a vile beggar, upon my knees crave the rich heritage that is my own by right?” But how? The very thought bewildered, oppressed, and embittered him. “Everything is mysterious, though I have always been taught the reverse.” In a dangerous moment he began to lay it down as a principle “that all considerations must yield to the gratification of my ambition.” Life without power, and power that he felt deserved, was intolerable. His father remonstrated. He warned him against the fatal tyranny of the imagination. “I think,” he said, “you have talents indeed for anything ... that a rational being can desire to attain; but you sadly lack judgment.” The boy replied, “I wish, sir, to influence men.... I am impressed with a most earnest and determined resolution to become a practical man. You must not judge of me by my boyish career. The very feelings that made me revolt at the discipline of schools will insure my subordination in the world. I took no interest in their petty pursuits, and their minute legislation interfered with my extended views.” In answer, he was admonished that a nature so “headstrong and imprudent” would lead to situations ridiculous and even dangerous; that his lack of regulated balance would warp his excellent instincts. The boy persisted that, if not by deeds yet by words, he would sway his fellows. “Mix in society,” rejoined his father, with a shrug of the shoulders, “and I will answer that you lose your poetic feeling; for in you, as in the great majority, it is not a creative faculty, originating in a peculiar organisation, but simply the consequence of a nervous susceptibility that is common to all.” The youth continued to fret, and brood, and calculate. He felt method within him as well as frenzy. In his old age he was once driving past Bradenham with a lady who knew how happy his home relations had been. “Ah!” he sighed, “there is where I passed my miserable youth.”--“Miserable!” she replied; “impossible! Surely you were happy there.”--“Not then. I was devoured by an irresistible ambition which I could not gratify.”[186] It reminds me of that passage in Swift where the great dean ascribes the first pricks of ambition, in the career which the inequalities of his situation had urged, to the rage and mortification he experienced as a boy in failing to land a big fish. He grew distracted; for a time he had to inhabit a darkened room. With the Austins he travelled in Germany and Italy. The result was _Vivian Grey_--the “Don Juan” of politics.

The circumstances and results of the book I have touched in the preceding chapter. Disraeli grew ashamed of its fashionable success. The world was not merely his oyster. He would elevate and benefit by it. He mixed in society, but it neither raised his spirits nor slaked his thirst, although it did help him to see his measure and stature among mankind. That commerce with the world is the best cure for misjudged ambition he pressed in his fine address to youth at the Manchester Athenæum; but ambition itself he regarded as elevating for man. At the crisis, however, that we have reached, his ambitions were still unsettled. He began to be soured and sceptical both of himself, of mankind, and of God. His spiritual fibre was shaken. His sister, with talents nearly equal to his, and faith and charity superior, came to his rescue. She healed his wounds; she ennobled his standard; she comforted him with her entire belief in his great future. She restored him to his higher self.

Once more the shadow of ill health fell across the young Disraeli’s footsteps; this time a very critical malady--a complete nervous breakdown. He “fainted as he dressed.” He even had convulsions. He was overwhelmed by strange noises in his head. “... The falls of Niagara could not overpower the infernal roaring that I alone heard.”[187] Travel was prescribed. He departed for two years from Europe, and mended.

Even at this time, with the spectres of doubt and illness athwart his way, he could not stifle the secret assurance of his destiny. I have seen a letter to a friend, who had shared a financial misadventure, in which he deplores his condition, but declares that “something within me whispers that one day I shall be famous. Be assured, if ever that time comes, you will be the first that I shall remember.”

He returned, found his place, his mission, and his ideals. But still his discreet family opposed themselves to his entrance into public life. It was incredible, impossible, absurd. “So much for the maddest of mad acts, as my uncle said,” he wrote to his sister on his first return to Parliament.

Every one remembers the story of his meeting with Lord Melbourne, and his answer, true or not, as to what the premier could “do for him.” “I wish to be Prime Minister.” At any rate, Mrs. Austin, in extreme old age, recalled a party at her house about this period, when the young Disraeli explained his plans for England, “when I am Prime Minister,” amid laughter and surprise. “You will see,” he said, bringing his fist down on the mantelpiece, “I _shall_ be Prime Minister.” He felt, as he wrote to his sister after attending a great debate, that “he could floor them all.” His confidence in himself, like his sister’s in him, was colossal.

So I read his earliest years from his earliest books. Thenceforward he marched from strength to strength, and he employed power when he obtained it conscientiously according to his best lights for the improvement of the people and the glory of the Empire.

And yet how strange it is, that at the annual gatherings on his death-day, celebrated by the romance of his memory and his flower, the successors who, faltering from his footsteps, honour the good will of his enduring popularity, have never breathed his name! I can see him smile in the shades; for he found his party a quagmire, and he left it a township. At all times he toiled hard and long, though sometimes by fits and starts; and a study was reserved ready for his visits at Bradenham. Although in his later years he would sometimes play at indolence, it was really against the grain. The occasional air of listlessness which society remarked in his latter days was the attendant of failing health, and only filmed an activity that neither age nor illness could overcome. In the long recess of 1848 he was working over ten hours a day, rising at five and retiring at nine. In the long session of 1852 he was working considerably more. To the last he read the classics while he dined. As he lay dying he corrected his speeches. He never relaxed that infinite interest in everything and everybody of purport and meaning, which the French well style “la grande curiosité.”

When he died, amid national mourning, the late Lord Salisbury, after singling out his unquenchable zeal for the glory of Britain, lasting to a period when “the gratification of every possible desire negatived the presumption of any inferior motive,” adverted to his “patience, his gentleness, his unswerving and unselfish loyalty to his colleagues and fellow-labourers.” Indisputably his moral character was high. Without question he, like Gladstone, raised the tone of parliamentary life from that of the days when politics were merely a squabble for place and a toss-up as to “whether England should be ruled by Tory nobles or by Whig.” His tone may not always have chimed with certain forms or formulas of earnestness, but he acted up to his own high standard. “It was impossible,” said the late Lord Granville, “to deny that Lord Beaconsfield had played a great part in British History. No one could deny his rare and splendid gifts and his force of character.” Character will always appeal to England. “But,” pursued the orator, after noticing his tolerance and forbearance, “he undoubtedly possessed the power of appealing to the imagination, not only of his countrymen, but of foreigners,[188] and that power is not destroyed by death.”

My book opened with Personality, Ideas, and Imagination. With Imagination, Ideas, and Personality it shall close. They can turn and change the semblances of material “facts,” for they abide behind the veil of time and of existence.

FOOTNOTES

[1] “... These are concessionary, not Conservative principles. This party treats institutions as we do our pheasants, they preserve only to destroy them.”

[2] Swift, adverting to National Debt.

[3] Cardinal Newman afterwards inveighed against the same union of faithlessness and Mammon in one of his finest sermons. Disraeli constantly dwelt on the dangers that liberty might suffer, if a democracy unreconciled to monarchy and its institutions became a class instead of an element, and was brought into collision with the “three per cents.” The despotisms of bare democracy and of aggravated plutocracy were equally distasteful to him, and he feared their union. _Cf._ many striking passages in _The Press_, 1853-59.

[4] With this passage should be compared the striking remarks on p. 222 of _The Political Biography of Lord George Bentinck_.

[5] “It was that noble ambition, the highest and the best, that must be born in the heart and organised in the brain, which will not let a man be content unless his intellectual power is recognised by his race, and desires that it should contribute to their welfare.” Thus he speaks of _Coningsby_, the castle of whose fathers is not to be one “of Indolence.”

[6] Through Lord Durham, Lord J. Russell, and Lord Melbourne, whom he met early at Mrs. Norton’s.

[7] I may mention that when he wrote _Alarcos_ in six weeks, an intimate (I think Lord Strangford) asked him why he had turned his energies to tragedy. “The idea haunted me,” was the reply, “and I could not rest until I had given it expression.”

[8] There is a touch also of his grandfather in the “Mr. Putney Giles” of _Lothair_, who: “never made difficulties, but always overcame them.” In both “Miriam” (_Alroy_) “Venetia” and “Myra” (_Endymion_) there are direct transferences from his sister’s temperament; and “St. Barbe” is far more Hayward than Thackeray.

[9] _Cf._ the moralisations in its strange account of the hero’s malady.

[10] _The Infernal Marriage._

[11] So called owing to Lord Grey’s query in a letter. His brother had just opposed the young Disraeli, standing as an “independent” and a “reformer” at High (or “Chepping”) Wycombe; and his brilliant speeches on the hustings had been republished as _The Crisis Examined_.

[12] After he had been articled to a firm of solicitors at seventeen, and eventually called to the bar, his father had wished him to enter a government office. _Cf._ Mr. Lake’s “Reminiscences.”

[13] _Cf._ p. 254.

[14] It treated of a hero outlawed under the Alien Act by a Ministry resenting a poem (_cf._ Smiles’ “Memoirs of John Murray”). Disraeli had also edited a “history” of _Paul Jones_. Of his early American pamphlet, I speak later on. A Mr. Powles--“something in the city”--was concerned in assisting both this and the _Representative_.

[15] Of Keats it sings--

“Who grasped the Theban shell and struck a tone,
No master yet had wakened--save its own.”

[16] It succeeded a respectable pro-Canning and pro-Queen-Caroline weekly, to which Disraeli seems to have contributed as a lad also. Its foundation brought him to Sir Walter Scott, and to Lockhart, who at first disdained to be “editor,” but melted when Disraeli assured him that he would be “Director-general” of a controlling organ. Only a temporary breach with Murray was caused by Disraeli’s speedy withdrawal from the concern. But for Lockhart, as a “tenth-rate novelist,” Disraeli expressed contempt in 1833, when he proposed to write for the _Edinburgh_, presided over by Napier. _Cf._ British Museum, Add. MS. 34,616, f. 45.

[17] This is no imaginary picture. _Cf._ Isaac Disraeli’s letters in the British Museum, Add. MS. 34,571, ff. 94, 96. Bradenham Manor, now the residence of my friend, Mr. Graves, had been under Queen Anne the seat of the Earl of Strafford through his marriage with a City heiress.

[18] In a future chapter I shall revert to this episode, which Disraeli ever deplored. His valet, in bachelor days, at 35, Duke Street, St. James--one Whittlestone, like Disraeli’s servant in the East, Byron’s Tita, provided for as attendant in a government office by his master--used to retail many scraps of such gossip. The young Disraeli’s novels, he averred, were written in bed. Heroes truly should dispense with valets.

[19] In _The Press_ (1853-59)--which vies with Swift in the _Examiner_ and Bolingbroke in the _Craftsman_, and to which Lord Derby and Shirley Brooks also contributed--Disraeli finely characterises Chatham as “a forest oak in a suburban garden.”

[20] Of this virtue, singled out with domestic purity by Gladstone for praise in Disraeli, the late Lady J. Manners wrote, “He feared nobody but God.” In my eighth chapter I shall quote Jowett’s verdict.

[21] “The Later Years of Lord Beaconsfield,” by Janetta, Lady J. Manners, Blackwood, 1881.

[22] In 1852 he sought and obtained a long interview with Feargus O’Connor, whose correspondence in the _Star_ he had utilised seven years before in _Sybil_.

[23] “Thus, amid all the strange vicissitudes of life, we are ever, as it were, moving in a circle.”

[24] In 1832.

[25] His Edinburgh speech of 1867 and his Glasgow address of 1873--on “Representation” and “Equality” respectively rank among his best.

[26] So also does another. Lady Beaconsfield, waiting up, as was her wont even in extreme age, for her husband’s return after a critical effort, entered the library in the small hours of the morning (and in _négligée_), and impetuously embraced what turned out to be Lord Cairns writing an important minute before Disraeli’s arrival.

[27] When Lord Derby came in in 1852, “At last we have got a _status_,” he said; “I feel like a young girl going to her first ball.”

[28] British Museum Add. MS. 34,645, f. 19.

[29] In _The Press_ Disraeli illustrates this historical fact with infinite knowledge in a remarkable passage.

[30] In 1850, 1852, 1855, and 1859.

[31] Like most of the Peelites, Mr. Gladstone was not proof against a certain air of over-righteous condescension and patronage. Even in the ’sixties he notes in his diary that, meeting Disraeli at a time of trial, he extended his hand, which was “kindly accepted.” But he honestly admired his gifts, and in 1859 generously disdained to “bargain” him “out of the saddle.”

[32] Not only convictions, but tactics also. Mr. Gladstone often blamed actions in others which he afterwards adopted; Disraeli never did. I subjoin a few instances. In 1852 he blamed Disraeli’s budget-proposal for repealing half the malt tax; he himself afterwards repealed the whole. In 1867 he blamed Disraeli’s first introduction of the Reform Act by resolutions; next year he did the same with his Irish Church Bill. In 1869 he severely blamed Disraeli for resigning without meeting Parliament; in 1874 he himself followed suit.

[33] Some of the best in his earliest speeches are derived from “Don Quixote.”

[34] Letters to the Whigs, _The Press_, May 7, 1853.

[35] Letters to the Whigs, _The Press_, May 14, 1853.

[36] Disraeli always insisted on the indispensability of the party system. As he pointed out of Bolingbroke, so in his own case, the idea of a “national” party had to be accommodated to conservatism. Gladstone, too, said of Peel, in 1846, that “to abjure party was impossible” (Morley, i. 295; _cf._ Disraeli’s _Life of Lord George Bentinck_, p. 224). After repeal was carried, Peel gave great offence to his followers--and especially to Mr. Gladstone--by singling out its illustrious and original champion for praise.

[37] “As for the Irish bill on which he had turned Peel out, it was one of the worst of all coercion bills; Peel, with 117 followers, evidently could not have carried on the Government, and what sense could there have been in voting for a bad bill in order to retain in office an impossible Ministry?”--He might have added that the bill--supported some months earlier by Lord John and Lord G. Bentinck--under protest as only excusable through urgency, was delayed by Peel to carry the repeal, until its necessity had vanished.

[38] He said (1846): “... It was no wonder they (the Protectionists) regarded themselves as betrayed, and unfortunately it had been the fate of Sir R. Peel to perform the same operation twice.” From the party standpoint there was abundant justification. Gladstone in old age declared that “Disraeli’s brilliant philippics surpassed even their reputation, and that, under their lash, Peel sat powerless.” _Cf._ Morley’s “Gladstone,” i. 296, iii. 465. “Dealt with them with a kind of righteous dulness”--“The Protectionist secession due to three men. Derby contributed prestige; Bentinck backbone; and Dizzy parliamentary brains.” The real fault found with Disraeli by his enemies (but afterwards) was that he “did not care a straw” for Protection. The reader must judge after my two next chapters.

[39] It was a sail, however, that could not bear being crossed by contrary winds. From youth upwards Gladstone could never brook opposition.

[40] In 1831 Sir Henry Bulwer--_teste_ Mr. Frederick Greenwood--was asked by his famous brother to meet his marvellous new friend at dinner. The company was all young, ambitious, and able; yet all agreed that their master was “the man in the green trousers.” Perhaps they were not quite so green as Sir Henry’s recollection painted them.

[41] The title of “Beaconsfield,” long before foreshadowed in _Vivian Grey_, was adopted in homage to the abode of Burke.

[42] This phrase was used by Disraeli in a speech of the ’fifties. Its origin, though not its phrasing, is to be found in Bolingbroke.

[43] His conviction, however, that our Lord came to fulfil, not to abolish, was directly derived from his father’s “Genius of Judaism.”

[44] I am informed, through the kindness of my friend Mr. George Russell, that the original of “Theodora” was one Madame Mario, _née_ Jessie White.

[45] “Shelley and Lord Beaconsfield.” Blackwood, 1881. For private circulation. Only twenty-five copies printed.

[46] Canning’s ideas on variety of representation influenced Disraeli.

[47] It must be remembered that in 1833 the Radicals were a very small band, and differed vastly from their successors of the Manchester School. They were thoroughly discontented with the middle-class legislation of the Reform Bill, and they were violently opposed to the Whig pretensions to popular emancipation. Disraeli shared these feelings.

[48] It should be remembered that in the brilliant characterisation of Bolingbroke in Disraeli’s _Letter to Lord Lyndhurst_, he says, “that despite the Whig affectation of popular sympathies, and the Tory admiration of arbitrary power, Bolingbroke penetrated appearances, and perceived that the choice really lay ‘between oligarchy and democracy.’”

[49] A sentence from his appeal to Mr. Gladstone in 1859.

[50] _The Press_, June 11, 1853. The whole series is full of great strokes; and there is also a critique on the dividing periods of English history, which is most bold and original.

[51] _Vide_ “Chartism,” p. 35.

[52] _Contarini Fleming._ For a like passage of about the same date, _cf._ _ante_, p. 48.

[53] And _cf._ _post_ at the opening of Chapter VI.

[54] _The Spirit of Whiggism._

[55] _Cf._ his fine speech on “Agricultural Distress,” April 29, 1879. He urged the same, almost in the same words, on February 17, 1863.

[56] Letter to Lord Lyndhurst. So, too, in his early _Spirit of Whiggism_. In a speech of 1865 he defines an Estate as “a political body invested with political power for the government of the country and for the public good,” and “therefore a body founded upon _privilege_ and not upon _right_,” and “in the noblest and properest sense of the term an _aristocratic_ body.” Under the Plantagenets it was at one time mooted whether the _Law_ should not be raised into such an “Estate.” He says the same in a letter of explanation to Lord Malmesbury.

[57] “Our constituent body should be _numerous_ enough to be independent, and _select_ enough to be responsible.” In 1865 he distinguished between the constitution, absorbing the best from each class, and a “democracy”--“the tyranny of one class.”

[58] _Runnymede Letters._

[59] In 1733 Walpole objected to the repeal of the Septennial Act precisely on the grounds that it would involve over-confidence in the people, and democratise England.

[60] “... He (Pitt) created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of second-rate squires and fat graziers. He caught them in the alleys of Lombard Street, and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill....”--_Sybil._

[61] The motion was designed to throw the burden of taxation on land. Disraeli showed that land was no monopoly, while it remained a security for good government; and that the rental of property in Great Britain, if equally divided among its proprietors, would only amount to £170 as an average annual income per head.

[62] “... But thanks to parliamentary patriotism, the people of England were saved from Ship-money, which money the wealthy paid, and only got in its stead the customs and the excise, which the poor mainly supply....”--_Sybil._

[63] “... Burke effected for the Whigs what Bolingbroke in a preceding age had done for the Tories: he restored the moral existence of the party. He taught them to recur to the ancient principles of their connection.... He raised the tone of their public discourse; he breathed a high spirit into their public acts....”--_Ibid._

[64] “... In my time” (said Mr. Ormsby) “... a proper majority was a third of the House. That was Lord Liverpool’s majority. Lord Monmouth used to say that there were ten families in this country who, if they could only agree, could always share the government. Ah! those were the good old times!...”

[65] That this object was of direct design is proved by a correspondence of Cobden with Sir Robert Peel.

[66] In a speech of 1864, Disraeli said: “... For my own part, believing that parliamentary government is practically impossible without two organised parties, that without them it would be the most contemptible and corrupt system which could be devised, I always regret anything that may damage the just influence of either of the great parties in the State.”

[67] The great depression of 1847-51 was not wholly caused by the fiscal change. It was largely due to reaction after the railway mania, as Disraeli pointed out in a speech of 1879. It was followed by a rise in wages, due, not to Free Trade, but to the large imports of newly discovered gold; and by an increased purchasing power which _was_ due to Peel’s large abatements of the tariff.

[68] It should be borne in mind that Disraeli sometimes employs the words “aristocracy” and “democracy” to mean the order of aristocrats and democrats, sometimes to mean the systems of exclusion and inclusion, sometimes to mean the government by the best and by the miscellaneous, and oftener as indicating elements in our Constitution.

[69] This phrase is American, and refers to the democrat extremists, conduct in Tammany Hall in 1834. The same year had seen the invention of the “self-lighting” cigar.

[70] At that time, under the full spell of the analogy which the age of Walpole presented, he believed that triennial parliaments and the ballot might redress the balance of constitutional power and foil the oligarchs who had baffled the people by espousing a popular cry. In 1852, however, he said, with regard to those proposals brought forward by Mr. Hume: “... He did not object to them, but he saw no necessity to adopt them. His objections to the latter were distinctly founded on the limits of the franchise which the settlement of 1832 had not sufficiently extended, but ... if they had universal suffrage they came to a new constitution--a constitution commonly called the ‘Sovereignty of the People,’ but that is not the Constitution of England; for, wisely modified as that monarchy may be, the Constitution of England is the sovereignty of Queen Victoria.”

[71] _Cf._ speech, May 18, 1871. The Whigs, who in 1843 called it “a fungus of monopoly,” worked and upheld it afterwards as “Liberals.” Now that a democracy and an Empire are being “run” at the same time, its permanence, for many years questioned, seems assured.

[72] This preluded the “Lodger franchise,” of which, in 1867, Disraeli said he had been “the father” (_cf._ p. 108).

[73] _Cf._ p. 109.

[74] This once more is emphasised by De Tocqueville as the essence of centralisation.

[75] _Cf._ Morley’s “Gladstone,” vol. i. p. 262.

[76] _Cf._ the passage from _The Press_, cited _ante_, p. 7 note, and _post_ at opening of Chapter VI.

[77] Bishop Latimer--quoted as motto to _Sybil_.

[78] Book iv. ch. iv.: “... To be a noble Master among noble Workers will again be the first ambition with some few; to be a rich Master only the second.”

[79] “Sidonia” stands for several types in addition to Disraeli’s own. “Oswald Millbank” is in part painted from the young Gladstone. Most of the other characters in _Coningsby_ are familiarly ascribed to their originals.

[80] This phrase he twice repeats; the first time in that fine speech at the Manchester Athenæum (1844), on the “Acquirement of Knowledge,” which expressed his undying sympathy with the ideals, perplexities, and possibilities of youth.

[81] This was the speech in which he said that Gladstone founded “a great measure on a small precedent. He traces the steam-engine always back to the tea-kettle.”

[82] The rise in wages and prices about 1851 was mainly due not to “Free Trade,” but to the influx of newly discovered gold. In 1842, when Peel was revising the tariff, bread was actually cheaper than it had been for many years previously, or till 1849 afterwards. In 1851 corn had sunk to about 40_s._, nearly 8_s._ lower than Peel had contemplated as possible. The immediate results of repeal were not the cheapening of bread; but the sudden cheapening of commodities _was_ effected by Peel’s revision of the tariff. In 1851, however, all other agricultural produce but wheat was at fair prices, and Disraeli then wrote, “It is possible that agriculture may flourish without a high price of wheat or without producing any” (_Correspondence_, p. 262).

[83] “... A large system of commercial intercourse on the principle of reciprocal advantage.”

[84] The land was promised compensation, but received none worth the name. It was deluded by vague promises of actual benefit under the new system. Peel even asserted that corn would never fall under forty-eight shillings per quarter.

It is often forgotten that in 1843 Peel favoured a preferential tariff for Canada, and that both he and Gladstone were then for Canadian “retaliation” on America.

[85] It is only the old evil of over-production and “glut in the market.” While England was still the main manufacturer and exporter, she herself periodically “dumped,” and suffered from the process.

[86] A satirical passage in his very early _Popanilla_ may be compared.

[87] These he had long before predicted, and his forecast that they would cause some of the prosperity of manufacture, apart from “Free Trade,” has come true.

[88] “History of Israel,” vol. iv. p. 286.

[89] That the Church was “a main obstacle to oligarchical power,” Disraeli pointed out as early as in his _Runnymede Letters_.

[90] Answer to “Eikon Basilike.”

[91] “The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Commonwealth.”

[92] Here we find an early beginning of “the Venetian oligarchy.”

[93] These paradoxes, like “Sidonia’s,” have been constantly proved true. I may mention a fantastic description of a sculptured Eastern cavern, which recent discovery has confirmed.

[94] _Cf._ _Vivian Grey_. This idea is derived from Bolingbroke’s philosophical works.

[95] A very favourite idea of Disraeli’s, and the source of his disbelief in any “equality of man.” _Cf._ “All is race” in _Coningsby_, and the passage already quoted in my second chapter from _Contarini Fleming_. So again in the Preface to _Lothair_, “One of the consequences of the Divine government of this world, which has ordained that the sacred purposes should be effected by the instrumentality of various human races, must be occasionally a jealous discontent with the revelation entrusted to a particular family.... The documents will yet bear a greater amount both of erudition and examination than they have received; but the Word of God is eternal, and will survive the spheres.”

[96] “... What is styled Materialism is in the ascendant. To those who believe that an Atheistical society, though it may be polished and amiable, involves the seeds of anarchy, the prospect is full of gloom.”

[97] “... Let us at length discover that no society can long subsist that is based upon metaphysical absurdities.... Before me is a famous treatise on human nature by a Professor of Königsberg. No one has more profoundly meditated on the attributes of his subject. It is evident that in the deep study of his own intelligence he has discovered a noble method of expounding that of others. Yet when I close his volumes, can I conceal from myself that all this time I have been studying a treatise upon the nature--not of man, but of a German?”--_Contarini Fleming._

[98] The hackneyed _mot_ of “Sensible men never tell” is derived from _Voltaire_.

[99] In the Preface to _Lothair_ he says:--“The sceptical efforts of the discoveries of science, and the uneasy feeling that they cannot co-exist with our old religious convictions, have their origin in the conviction that the general body who have suddenly become conscious of these physical truths are not so well acquainted as is desirable with the past history of man. Astonished by their unprepared emergence from ignorance to a certain degree of information, their amazed intelligence takes refuge in the theory of what is conveniently called Progress, and every step in scientific discovery seems further to remove them from the path of primæval inspiration. But there is no fallacy so flagrant as to suppose that the modern ages have the peculiar privilege of scientific discovery, or that they are distinguished as the epochs of the most illustrious inventions. No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as language. What are the most brilliant of our chemical discoveries compared with the invention of fire and the metals? It is a vulgar belief that our astronomical knowledge dates only from the recent century, when it was rescued from the monks who imprisoned Galileo. But Hipparchus, who lived before our Divine Master ... discovered the precession of the equinoxes; and Copernicus ... avows himself as only the champion of Pythagoras.... Even the most modish schemes of the day on the origin of things ... will be found mainly to rest on the atom of Epicurus and the monad of Thales. Scientific, like spiritual truth, has ever from the beginning been descending from heaven to man....” So, too, in a speech of 1861, dealing both with science and the higher criticism, “Epicurus was, I apprehend, as great a man as Hegel; but it was not Epicurus who subverted the religion of Olympus.”

[100] Probably always in England. In France the reverse is happening.

[101] This idea is, among other speeches, worked out in that delivered at Amersham, December 4, 1860, where he says: “The parish is one of the strongest securities for local government, and on local government mainly depends our political liberty.” He points out that the Church is not oligarchical, and does not claim those exclusive privileges which the Nonconformists often do. It is national in its comprehensive ties with the country and its inclusiveness. The abolition of the parish system would alone prove a national and social upheaval.

[102] This policy was pressed by Peel in the early ’forties, and led to the fine work of the National Schools.

[103] That of Strauss.

[104] In the Croker Papers will be found a masterly letter from Sir Robert Peel on the importance of the Church rising to her educational opportunities. It was Peel’s foresight that produced the National Schools. Peel, though latitudinarian, was a Church statesman.

[105] I may add that what Disraeli resented in Gladstone’s thwarted proposals for his Catholic University scheme was that it sought to exclude theology and philosophy--an exception unworthy of any “Universitas rerum,” and deeply repugnant to the Catholics.

[106] Letter to D. O’Connell, 1835.

[107] This has been elaborately developed by Bolingbroke in his “Philosophical Works.”

[108] How true this has now proved itself in France!

[109] Elsewhere Disraeli said that Paris always remains a republic.

[110] It will be noticed that Sir Robert goes beyond Disraeli’s ideas of direct kingship.

[111] In 1872, Disraeli said, after stating that Lord Derby’s successor was no enemy to Russian aggression, “... I speak of what I know, not of what I believe, but of what I have evidence in my possession to prove, _that the Crimean War would never have happened if Lord Derby had remained in office_....” Lord Derby’s error in resigning in 1853 he always deplored; just as he regretted equally his rash acceptance of office during the previous year, and his more fatal timidity in shrinking from assuming it in 1855.

[112] This passage was written before the events of 1903.

[113] This was realised some ten years later by the repeal of the Sugar Duties.

[114] The speech about Income Tax, which contains another masterly analysis of the displacement of labour. Previously, in 1845, he had said of Canada, “... I am not one of those who think that its inevitable lot is to become annexed to the United States. Canada has all the elements of a great and independent country, and is destined, I sometimes believe, to be the Russia of the New World.”

[115] “Ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀπολώλεκ’ ἀλλὰ καταπεφρόντικα.”

[116] It will be remembered that in _Coningsby_ “Rigby’s” election speech called everything with which he disagreed “un-English.” Dickens’s satire of the misuse of “un-English” in the person of “Podsnap” may be compared.

[117] “Light and leading,” which Disraeli employed long before the famous letter to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, in a speech of 1858, comes of course from Burke. His theory of the House of Lords in 1861 as “an intermediate body” is derived from Bolingbroke and Burke. “Peace with honour” he employed in one of his Crimean speeches. Many of his phrases were derived from the works of his father.

[118] He had in an earlier speech considered this question with regard to Canada.

[119] This very phrase was repeated by Lord Beaconsfield in 1876.

[120] This point is admirably elucidated by Mr. Ewald in his “Life and Times of Lord Beaconsfield.”

[121] Chiefly that of the Turkish frontier in Europe, and of the Russian in Asia.

[122] A most interesting collection might be made of Disraeli’s ready and fluent illustration by precedents. For of precedent his memory was quite as retentive as Gladstone’s. In his famous Address to the Crown of 1864, he was sharply blamed for referring to “the just influence of England being lowered” in the extraordinary tangle of alternate brag and whimper that attended the Government’s action in the Danish embroilment. This language was solemnly declared “unprecedented since the great days of the Norths and the Foxes.” But Disraeli instantly proved that Fox himself had used language in his own Address far more violent and censorious of the Ministry in 1846. So, again, on at least two occasions when the phrases “political morality” and “political infamy” were bandied for partisan purposes, he effectively hurled back the taunts in the teeth of their inventors, and refuted present profession by past conduct. When Palmerston again twitted him, in 1846, he received a reminder which brought home the jaunty service of seven successive Administrations, and all this, though he never attacked small game, and never any “unless he had been first assailed.” In the earlier numbers of _The Press_ are many most interesting historical instances of how “principles” may be confused with “measures,” when the latter have to be relinquished in office from the practical duty of _carrying on the Government_, while at the same time the former can be developed in other directions when the national condemnation of the particular measure is deliberate. So Fox had acted towards Catholic emancipation, Russell towards the Appropriation Bill, the Whigs in the ’forties towards the Income Tax, and Disraeli in 1852 towards “Protection.” So, he argued in many previous utterances, the principle must now be followed by relieving the land, now placed under unfair conditions of competition, of its burdens.

[123] Of Disraeli’s Indian policy this much may here be noted. While allowing Russia to expand where she was entitled or compelled by war, or allowed by opening intrigues, he wished to baffle her as against Great Britain.

(1) By an independent Afghanistan, with a proper frontier and its
Indian “gates” barred.

(2) By preventing Russia through Turkestan’s approaches to Afghan
and Persia’s eastern border.

(3) By precluding her from Persia’s western border through the
regions of the Euphrates Valley, (_a_) through making Turkey
compact in Asia (Erzeroum and Bayazid); (_b_) through Cyprus
guarding the Mediterranean approaches.

[124] “... Do you think a man like that, called upon to deal with a Metternich or a Pozzo, has no advantage over an individual who never leaves his chair in Downing Street except to kill grouse? Pah! Metternich and Pozzo know very well that Lord Roehampton knows them....” “Roehampton” is Palmerston. The prophecy of the Congress repeats one in _Contarini_.