Table of Contents

• CHAPTER I
  • CHAPTER II
  • CHAPTER III
  • CHAPTER IV
  • CHAPTER V
  • CHAPTER VI
  • CHAPTER VII
  • CHAPTER VIII
  • CHAPTER IX
  • CHAPTER X

DISRAELI

A STUDY IN PERSONALITY AND IDEAS

BY WALTER SICHEL
AUTHOR OF “BOLINGBROKE AND HIS TIMES”

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

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 uncommon 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. Ambition5 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.