Chapter II: Part 2

The range of his mind was not wide. All its products were like one another. No one of them gives the impression that Disraeli could, had he so wished, have succeeded in a wholly diverse line. It was a peculiar mind: there is even more variety in minds than in faces. It was not logical or discursive, liking to mass and arrange stores of knowledge, and draw inferences from them, nor was it judicial, with a turn for weighing reasons and reaching a decision which recognises all the facts and is not confused by their seeming contradictions. Neither was it analytically subtle. It reached its conclusions by a process of intuition or divination in which there was an imaginative as well as a reflective element. It might almost have been called an artist's mind, capable of deep meditation, but meditating in an imaginative way, not so much on facts as on its own views of facts, on the pictures which its own creative faculty had called up. The meditation became dreamy, but the dreaminess was corrected by an exceedingly keen and quick power of observation, not the scientific observation of the philosopher, but rather the enjoying observation of the artist who sees how he can use the characteristic details which he notes, or the observation of the forensic advocate (an artist, too, in his way) who perceives how they can be fitted into the presentation of his case. There are, of course, other qualities in Disraeli's work. As a statesman he was obliged to learn how to state facts, to argue, to dissect an opponent's arguments. But the characteristic note, both of his speeches and of his writings, is the combination of a few large ideas, clear, perhaps, to himself, but generally expressed with grandiose vagueness, and often quite out of relation to the facts as other people saw them, with a turn for acutely fastening upon small incidents or personal traits. In his speeches he used his command of sonorous phrases and lively illustrations, sometimes to support the views he was advancing, but more frequently to conceal the weakness of those views; that is, to make up for the absence of such solid arguments as were likely to move his hearers. Everybody is now and then conscious of holding with assured conviction theories which he would find it hard to prove to a given audience, partly because it is too much trouble to trace out the process by which they were reached, partly because uninstructed listeners could not be made to feel the full cogency of the considerations on which his own mind relies. Disraeli was usually in this condition with regard to his political and social doctrines. He believed them, but as he had not reached them by logic, he was not prepared to use logic to establish them; so he picked up some plausible illustration, or attacked the opposite doctrine and its supporters with a fire of raillery or invective. This non-ratiocinative quality of his thinking was a source both of strength and of weakness--of weakness, because he could not prove his propositions; of strength, because, stated as he stated them, it was not less hard to disprove them. That mark of a superior mind, that it must have a theory, was never wanting. Some one said of him that he was "the ruins of a thinker." He could not rest content, like many among his followers, with a prejudice, a dogma delivered by tradition, a stolid suspicion unamenable to argument. He would not acquiesce in negation. He must have a theory, a positive theory, to show not only that his antagonist's view was erroneous, but that he had himself a more excellent way. These theories generally had in them a measure of truth and value for any one who could analyse them; but as this was exactly what the rank and file of the party could not do, they got into sad confusion when they tried to talk his language.

He could hardly be called a well-read man, nor were his intellectual interests numerous. His education had consisted mainly in promiscuous reading during boyhood and early youth. There are worse kinds of education for an active intelligence than to let it have the run of a large library. The wild browsings of youth, when curiosity is strong as hunger, stir the mind and give the memory some of the best food it ever gets. The weak point of such a method is that it does not teach accuracy nor the art of systematic study. In middle life natural indolence and his political occupations had kept Disraeli from filling up the gaps in his knowledge, while, in conversation, what he liked best was persiflage. He was, however, tolerably familiar with the ancient classics, and with modern English and French literature; enjoyed Quintilian and Lucian, preferred Sophocles to Aeschylus and (apparently) Horace to Virgil, despised Browning, considered Tennyson the best of contemporary poets, but "not a poet of a high order."[8] Physical science seems never to have attracted him. Political economy he hated and mocked at almost as heartily as did Carlyle. People have measured his knowledge of history and geography by observing that he placed the Crucifixion in the lifetime of Augustus, and thought, down till 1878, when he had to make a speech about Afghanistan, that the Andes were the highest mountains in the world. But geography is a subject which a man of affairs does not think of reading up in later life: he is content if he can get information when he needs it. There are some bits of metaphysics and some historical allusions scattered over his novels, but these are mostly slight or superficial. He amused himself and the public by now and then propounding doctrines on agricultural matters, but would not appear to have mastered either husbandry or any other economical or commercial subject. Such things were not in his way. He had been so little in office as not to have been forced to apply himself to them, while the tide of pure intellectual curiosity had long since ebbed.

For so-called "sports" he had little taste. He liked to go mooning in a meditative way round his fields and copses, and he certainly enjoyed Nature; but there seems to be no solid evidence that the primrose was his favourite flower. In his fondness for particular words and phrases there was a touch of his artistic quality, and a touch also of the cynical view that words are the counters with which the wise play their game. There is a passage in _Contarini Fleming_ (a story into which he has put a good deal of himself) where this is set out. Contarini tells his father that he left college "because they taught me only words, and I wished to learn ideas." His father answers, "Few ideas are correct ones, and what are correct, no one can ascertain; but with words we govern men."

He went on acting on this belief in the power of words till he became the victim of his own phrases, just as people who talk cynically for effect grow sometimes into real cynics. When he had invented a phrase which happily expressed the aspect he wished his view, or some part of his policy, to bear, he came to believe in the phrase, and to think that the facts were altered by the colour the phrase put upon them. During the contest for the extension of the parliamentary franchise, he declared himself "in favour of popular privileges, but opposed to democratic rights." When he was accused of having assented, at the Congress of Berlin, to the dismemberment of the Turkish Empire, he said that what had been done was "not dismemberment, but consolidation." No statesman of recent times has given currency to so many quasi-epigrammatic expressions: "organised hypocrisy," "England dislikes coalitions," "plundering and blundering," "peace with honour," "_imperium et libertas_," "a scientific frontier," "I am on the side of the angels," are a few, not perhaps the best, though the best remembered, of the many which issued from his fertile mint. This turn for epigram, not common in England, sometimes led him into scrapes which would have damaged a man of less imperturbable coolness. No one else could have ventured to say, when he had induced the Tories to pass a Reform Bill stronger than the one they had rejected from the Liberals in the preceding year, that it had been his mission "to educate his party." Some of his opponents professed to be shocked by such audacity, and many old Tories privily gnashed their teeth. But the country received the dictum in the spirit in which it was spoken. "It was Disraeli all over."

If his intellect was not of wide range, it was within its range a weapon of the finest flexibility and temper. It was ingenious, ready, incisive. It detected in a moment the weak point, if not of an argument, yet of an attitude or of a character. Its imaginative quality made it often picturesque, sometimes even impressive. Disraeli had the artist's delight in a situation for its own sake, and what people censured as insincerity or frivolity was frequently only the zest which he felt in posing, not so much because there was anything to be gained, as because he realised his aptitude for improvising a new part in the drama which he always felt himself to be playing. The humour of the situation was too good to be wasted. Perhaps this love of merry mischief may have had something to do with his tendency to confer honours on those whom the world thought least deserving.

His books are not only a valuable revelation of his mind, but have more literary merit than critics have commonly allowed to them, perhaps because we are apt, when a man excels in one walk, to deem him to have failed in any other wherein he does not reach the same level. The novels foam over with cleverness; indeed, _Vivian Grey_, with all its youthful faults, gives as great an impression of intellectual brilliance as does anything Disraeli ever wrote or spoke. Their easy fertility makes them seem to be only, so to speak, a few sketches out of a large portfolio. There is some variety in the subjects--_Contarini Fleming_ and _Tancred_ are more romantic than the others, _Sybil_ and _Coningsby_ more political--as well as in the merits of the stories. The two latest, _Lothair_ and _Endymion_, works of his old age, are markedly inferior in spirit and invention; but the general features are the same in all--a lively fancy, a knack of hitting characters off in a few lines and of catching the superficial aspects of society, a brisk narrative, a sprightly dialogue, a keen insight into the selfishness of men and the vanities of women, with flashes of wit lighting up the whole stage. It is always a stage. The brilliance is never open-air sunshine. There is scarcely one of the characters whom we feel we might have met and known. Heroes and heroines are theatrical figures; their pathos rings false, their love, though described as passionate, does not spring from the inner recesses of the soul. The studies of men of the world, and particularly of heartless ones, are the most life-like; yet, even here, any one who wants to feel the difference between the great painter and the clever sketcher need only compare Thackeray's Marquis of Steyne with Disraeli's Marquis of Monmouth, both of them suggested by the same original. There is little intensity, little dramatic power in these stories, as also in his play of _Alarcos_; and if we read them with pleasure it is not for the sake either of plot or of character, but because they contain so many sparkling witticisms and reflections, setting in a strong light, yet not always an unkindly light, the seamy side of politics and human nature. The slovenliness of their style, which is often pompous, but seldom pure, makes them appear to have been written hastily. But Disraeli seems to have taken the composition of them (except, perhaps, the two latest) quite seriously. When he wrote the earlier tales, he meant to achieve literary greatness; while the middle ones, especially _Coningsby_ and _Sybil_, were designed as political manifestoes. The less they have a purpose or profess to be serious, the better they are; and the most vivacious of all are two classical burlesques, written at a time when that kind of composition had not yet become common--_Ixion in Heaven_ and _The Infernal Marriage_--little pieces of funning worthy of Thackeray, I had almost said of Voltaire. They recall, perhaps they were suggested by, similar pieces of Lucian's. Is Semitic genius specially rich in this mocking vein? Lucian was a Syrian from Samosata, probably a Semite; Heinrich Heine was a Semite; James Russell Lowell used to insist, though he produced little evidence for his belief, that Voltaire was a Semite.

Whether Disraeli could ever have taken high rank as a novelist if he had thrown himself completely into the profession may be doubted, for his defects were such as pains and practice would hardly have lessened. That he had still less the imagination needed by a poet, his _Revolutionary Epick_, conceived on the plains of Troy, and meant to make a fourth to the _Iliad_, the _Aeneid_, and the _Divina Commedia_, is enough to show. The literary vocation he was best fitted for was that of a journalist or pamphleteer; and in this he might have won unrivalled success. His dash, his verve, his brilliancy of illustration, his scorching satire, would have made the fortune of any newspaper, and carried dismay into the enemy's ranks.

In inquiring how far the gifts I have sought to describe qualified Disraeli for practical statesmanship, it is well to distinguish the different kinds of capacity which an English politician needs to attain the highest place. They may be said to be four. He must be a debater. He must be a parliamentary tactician. He must understand the country. He must understand Europe. This last is, indeed, not always necessary; there have been moments when England, leaving Europe to itself, may look to her own affairs only; but when the sky grows stormy over Europe, the want of knowledge which English statesmen sometimes evince may bode disaster.

An orator, in the highest sense of the word, Disraeli never was. He lacked ease and fluency. He had not Pitt's turn for the lucid exposition of complicated facts, nor for the conduct of a close argument. The sustained and fiery declamation of Fox was equally beyond his range. And least of all had he that truest index of eloquence, the power of touching the emotions. He could not make his hearers weep. But he could make them laugh; he could put them in good-humour with themselves; he could dazzle them with rhetoric; he could pour upon an opponent streams of ridicule more effective than the hottest indignation. When he sought to be profound or solemn, he was usually heavy and laboured--the sublimity often false, the diction often stilted. For wealth of thought or splendour of language his speeches will not bear to be compared--I will not say with those of Burke (on whom he sometimes tried to model himself), but with those of three or four of his own contemporaries. Even within his own party, Lord Derby, Lord Ellenborough, and Lord Cairns in their several ways surpassed him. There is not one of his longer and more finished harangues which can be read with interest from beginning to end. But there is hardly any among them which does not contain some striking passage, some image or epigram, or burst of sarcasm, which must have been exceedingly effective when delivered. It is partly upon these isolated passages, especially the sarcastic ones (though the witticisms were sometimes borrowed), and still more upon the aptness of the speech to the circumstances under which it was made, that his parliamentary fame rests. If he was not a great orator he was a superb debater, who watched with the utmost care the temper of the audience, and said just what was needed at the moment to disconcert an opponent or to put heart into his friends. His repartees were often happy, and must sometimes have been unpremeditated. As he had not the ardent temperament of the born orator, so neither had he the external advantages which count for much before large assemblies. His voice was not remarkable either for range or for quality. His manner was somewhat stiff, his gestures few, his countenance inexpressive. Yet his delivery was not wanting in skill, and often added point, by its cool unconcern, to a stinging epigram.

What he lacked in eloquence he made up for by tactical adroitness. No more consummate parliamentary strategist has been seen in England. He had studied the House of Commons till he knew it as a player knows his instrument--studied it collectively, for it has a collective character, and studied the men who compose it: their worse rather than their better side, their prejudices, their foibles, their vanities, their ambitions, their jealousies, above all, that curious corporate pride which they have, and which makes them resent any approach to dictation. He could play on every one of these strings, and yet so as to conceal his skill; and he so economised himself as to make them always wish to hear him. He knew how in a body of men obliged to listen to talk, and most of it tedious talk, about matters in themselves mostly uninteresting, the desire for a little amusement becomes almost a passion; and he humoured this desire so far as occasionally to err by excess of banter and flippancy. Almost always respectful to the House, he had a happy knack of appearing to follow rather than to lead, and when he made an official statement it was with the air of one who was taking them into his confidence. Much of this he may have learned from observing Lord Palmerston; but the art came more naturally to that statesman, who was an Englishman all through, than to a man of Mr. Disraeli's origin, who looked on Englishmen from outside, and never felt himself, so to speak, responsible for their habits or ideas.

As leader of his party in Opposition, he was at once daring and cautious. He never feared to give battle, even when he expected defeat, if he deemed it necessary, with a view to the future, that the judgment of his party should have been pronounced in a formal way. On the other hand, he was wary of committing himself to a policy of blind or obstinate resistance. When he perceived that the time had come to yield, he knew how to yield with a good grace, so as both to support a character for reasonableness and to obtain valuable concessions as the price of peace. If difficulties arose with foreign countries he claimed full liberty of criticising the conduct of the Ministry, but ostentatiously abstained from obstructing or thwarting their acts, declaring that England must always present a united front to the foreigner, whatever penalties she might afterwards visit on those who had mismanaged her concerns. As regards the inner discipline of his party, he had enormous difficulties to surmount in the jealousy which many Tories felt for him as a new man, a man whom they could not understand and only partially trusted.[9] Conspiracies were repeatedly formed against him; malcontents attacked him in the press, and sometimes even in Parliament. These he seldom noticed, maintaining a cool and self-confident demeanour which disheartened the plotters, and discharging the duties of his post with steady assiduity. He was always on the look-out for young men of promise, drew them towards him, encouraged them to help him in parliamentary sharp-shooting, and fostered in every way the spirit of party. The bad side of that spirit was seen when he came into office, for then every post in the public service was bestowed either by mere favouritism or on party grounds; and men who had been loyal to him were rewarded by places or titles to which they had no other claim. But the unity and martial fervour of the Tory party was raised to the highest point. Nor was Disraeli himself personally unpopular with his parliamentary opponents, even when he was most hotly attacked on the platform and in the press.

To know England and watch the shifting currents of its opinion is a very different matter from knowing the House of Commons. Indeed, the two kinds of knowledge are in a measure incompatible. Men who enter Parliament soon begin to forget that it is not, in the last resort, Parliament that governs, but the people. Absorbed in the daily contests of their Chamber, they over-estimate the importance of those contests. They come to think that Parliament is in fact what it is in theory, a microcosm of the nation, and that opinion inside is sure to reflect the opinion outside. When they are in a minority they are depressed; when they are in a majority they fancy that all is well, forgetting their masters out-of-doors. This tendency is aggravated by the fact that the English Parliament meets in the capital, where the rich and luxurious congregate and give their tone to society. The House of Commons, though many of its members belong to the middle class by origin, belongs practically to the upper class by sympathy, and is prone to believe that what it hears every evening at dinners or receptions is what the country is thinking. A member of the House of Commons is, therefore, ill-placed for feeling the pulse of the nation, and in order to do so must know what is being said over the country, and must frequently visit or communicate with his constituents. If this difficulty is experienced by an ordinary private member, it is greater for a minister whose time is filled by official duties, or for a leader of Opposition, who has to be constantly thinking of his tactics in the House. In Disraeli's case there was a keenness of observation and discernment far beyond the common. But he was under the disadvantages of not being really an Englishman, and of having never lived among the people.[10] The detachment I have already referred to tended to weaken his power of judging popular sentiment, and appraising at their true value the various tendencies that sway and divide a nation so complex as the English. Early in life he had formed theories about the relations of the different classes of English society--nobility, gentry, capitalists, workmen, peasantry, and the middle classes--theories which were far from containing the whole truth; and he adhered to them even when the changes of half a century had made them less true. He had a great aversion, not to say contempt, for Puritanism, and for the Dissenters among whom it chiefly holds its ground, and pleased himself with the notion that the extension of the suffrage which he carried in 1867 had destroyed their political power. The Conservative victory at the election of 1874 confirmed him in this belief, and made him also think that the working classes were ready to follow the lead of the rich. He perceived that the Liberal ministry of 1868-74 had offended certain influential sections by appearing too demiss or too unenterprising in foreign affairs, and fancied that the bulk of the nation would be dazzled by a warlike mien, and an active, even aggressive, foreign policy. Such a policy was congenial to his own ideas, and to the society that surrounded him. It was applauded by some largely circulated newspapers which had previously been unfriendly to the Tory party. Thus he was more surprised than any other man of similar experience to find the nation sending up a larger majority against him in 1880 than it had sent up for him in 1874. This was the most striking instance of his miscalculation. But he had all through his career an imperfect comprehension of the English people. Individuals, or even an assembly, may be understood by dint of close and long-continued observation; but to understand a whole nation, one must also have sympathy, and this his circumstances, not less than his character, had denied him.

It was partly the same defect that prevented him from mastering the general politics of Europe. There is a sense in which no single man can pretend to understand Europe. Bismarck himself did not. The problem is too vast, the facts to be known too numerous, the undercurrents too varying. One can speak only of more or less. If Europe had been in his time what it was a century before, Disraeli would have had a far better chance of being fit to become what it was probably his dearest wish to become--its guide and arbiter. He would have taken the measure of the princes and ministers with whom he had to deal, would have seen and adroitly played on their weaknesses. His novels show how often he had revolved diplomatic situations in his mind, and reflected on the way of handling them. Foreign diplomatists are agreed that at the Congress of Berlin he played his part to admiration, spoke seldom, but spoke always to the point and with dignity, had a perfect conception of what he meant to secure, and of the means he must employ to secure it, never haggled over details or betrayed any eagerness to win support, never wavered in his demands, even when they seemed to lead straight to war. Dealing with individuals, who represented material forces which he had gauged, he was perfectly at home, and deserved the praise he obtained from Bismarck, who, comparing him with other eminent figures at the Congress, is reported to have said, bluntly but heartily, "Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann."[11] But to know what the condition of South-Eastern Europe really was, and understand how best to settle its troubles, was a far more difficult task, and Disraeli possessed neither the knowledge nor the insight required. In the Europe of to-day, peoples count for more than the wills of individual rulers: one must comprehend the passions and sympathies of peoples if one is to forecast the future. This he seldom cared to do. He did not realise the part and the power of moral forces. Down to the outbreak of the American Civil War he maintained that the question between the North and the South was mainly a fiscal question between the Protectionist interests of the one and the Free Trade interests of the other. He always treated with contempt the national movement in Italy. He made no secret in the days before 1859 of his good-will to Austria and of his liking for Louis Napoleon--a man inferior to him in ability and in courage, but to whose character his own had some affinities. In that elaborate study of Sir Robert Peel's character,[12] which is one of Disraeli's best literary performances, he observes that Peel "was destitute of imagination, and wanting imagination he wanted prescience." True it is that imagination is necessary for prescience, but imagination is not enough to give prescience. It may even be a snare.

Disraeli's imagination, his fondness for theories, and disposition rather to cling to them than to study and interpret facts, made him the victim of his own preconceived ideas, as his indolence deterred him from following the march of change and noting how different things were in the 'seventies from what they had been in the 'thirties. Mr. Gladstone said to me in 1876, "Disraeli's two leading ideas in foreign policy have always been the maintenance of the temporal power of the Pope, and the maintenance of the power of the Sultan." Unable to save the one, he clung to the hope of saving the other. He was possessed by the notion, seductive to a dreamy mind, that all the disturbances of Europe arose from the action of secret societies; and when the Eastern Question was in 1875 re-opened by the insurrection in Herzegovina, followed by the war of Servia against the Turks, he explained the event in a famous speech by saying, "The secret societies of Europe have declared war against Turkey"--the fact being that the societies which in Russia were promoting the Servian war were public societies, openly collecting subscriptions, while those secret "social democratic" societies of which we have since heard so much were strongly opposed to the interference of Russia, and those other secret societies in the rest of Europe, wherein Poles and Italians have played a leading part, were, if not hostile, at any rate quite indifferent to the movement among the Eastern Christians.

Against these errors there must be set several cases in which he showed profound discernment. In 1843 and 1844 he delivered, in debates on the condition of Ireland, speeches which then constituted and long remained the most penetrating and concise diagnosis of the troubles of that country ever addressed to Parliament. Ireland has, he said, a starving peasantry, an alien church, and an absentee aristocracy, and he went on to add that the function of statesmanship was to cure by peaceful and constitutional methods ills which in other countries had usually induced, and been removed by, revolution. During the American Civil War of 1861-65, Disraeli was the only leading statesman on his own side of politics who did not embrace and applaud the cause of the South. Whether this arose from a caution that would not commit itself where it recognised ignorance, or from a perception of the superior strength of the Northern States (a perception which whoever visits the South even to-day is astonished that so few people in Europe should have had), it is not easy to decide; but whatever the cause, the fact is an evidence of his prudence or sagacity all the more weighty because Lord Palmerston, Lord Russell, and Mr. Gladstone, as well as Lord Derby and Sir Hugh Cairns, had each of them expressed more or less sympathy with, or belief in, the success of the Southern cause.

The most striking instance, however, of Disraeli's insight was his perception that an extension of the suffrage would not necessarily injure, and might end by strengthening, the Tory party. The Act of 1867 was described at the time as "a leap in the dark." But Disraeli's eyes had pierced the darkness. For half a century politicians had assumed that the masses of the people were and would remain under the Liberal banner. Even as late as 1872 it was thought on Liberal platforms a good joke to say of some opinion that it might do for Conservative working men, if there were any. Disraeli had, long before 1867, seen deeper, and though his youthful fancies that the monarchy might be revived as an effective force, and that "the peasantry" would follow with mediaeval reverence the lead of the landed gentry, proved illusory, he was right in discerning that wealth and social influence would in parliamentary elections count for more among the masses than the traditions of constitutional Whiggism or the dogmas of abstract Radicalism.

In estimating his statesmanship as a whole, one must give due weight to the fact that it impressed many publicists abroad. No English minister had for a long time past so fascinated observers in Germany and Austria. Supposing that under the long reign of Liberalism Englishmen had ceased to care for foreign politics, they looked on him as the man who had given back to Britain her old European position, and attributed to him a breadth of design, a grasp and a foresight such as men had revered in Lord Chatham, greatest in the short list of ministers who have raised the fame of England abroad. I remember seeing in a Conservative club, about 1880, a large photograph of Lord Beaconsfield, wearing the well-known look of mysterious fixity, under which is inscribed the line of Homer: "He alone is wise: the rest are fleeting shadows."[13] It was a happy idea to go for a motto to the favourite poet of his rival, as it was an unhappy chance to associate the wisdom ascribed to Disraeli with his policy in the Turkish East and in Afghanistan, a policy now universally admitted to have been unwise and unfortunate.[14] But whatever may be thought of the appropriateness of the motto, the fact remains that this was the belief he succeeded in inspiring. He did it by virtue of those very gifts which sometimes brought him into trouble--his taste for large and imposing theories, his power of clothing them in vague and solemn language, his persistent faith in them. He came, by long posing, to impose upon himself and to believe in his own profundity. Few people could judge whether his ideas of imperial policy were sound and feasible; but every one saw that he had theories, and many fell under the spell which a grandiose imagination can exercise. It is chiefly this gift, coupled with his indomitable tenacity, which lifts him out of the line of mere party leaders. If he failed to see how much the English are sometimes moved by compassion, he did see that it may be worth while to play to their imagination.

We may now ask again the question asked at first: How did a man, whatever his natural gifts, who was weighted in his course by such disadvantages as Disraeli's, by his Jewish origin, by the escapades of his early career, by the want of confidence which his habitual cynicism inspired, by the visionary nature of so many of his views,--how did he, in a conservative and aristocratic country like England, triumph over so many prejudices and enmities, and raise himself to be the head of the Conservative and aristocratic party, the trusted counsellor of the Crown, the ruler, almost the dictator, of a free people?

However high be the estimate formed of Disraeli's gifts, secondary causes must have been at work to enable him to overcome the obstacles that blocked his path. The ancients were not wrong in ascribing to Fortune a great share in human affairs. Now, among the secondary causes of success, that "general minister and leader set over worldly splendours," as Dante calls her,[15] played no insignificant part. One of these causes lay in the nature of the party to which he belonged. The Tory party of the years between 1848 and 1865 contained a comparatively small number of able men. When J. S. Mill once called it the stupid party, it did not repudiate the name, but pointed to its cohesion and its resolution as showing how many things besides mere talent go to make political greatness. A man of shining gifts had within its ranks few competitors; and this was signally the case immediately after Peel's defection. That statesman had carried off with him the intellectual flower of the Conservatives. Those who were left behind to form the Protectionist Opposition in the House of Commons were broad-acred squires, of solid character but slender capacity. Through this heavy atmosphere Mr. Disraeli rose like a balloon. Being practically the only member of his party in the Commons with either strategical or debating power, he became indispensable, and soon established a supremacy which years of patient labour might not have given him in a rivalry with the distinguished band who surrounded Peel. During the twenty years that followed the great Tory schism of 1846 no man arose in the Tory ranks capable of disputing his throne. The conspiracies hatched against him might well have prospered could a candidate for the leadership have been found capable of crossing swords with the chieftain in possession. Fortune, true to her nursling, suffered none such to appear.

Another favouring influence not understood outside England was to be found in the character of the party he led. In his day the Tories, being the party of the property-holders, and having not to advance but to stand still, not to propose changes but to resist them, having bonds of interest as well as of sentiment to draw them close together, possessed a cohesion, a loyalty to their chiefs, a tenacious corporate spirit, far exceeding what was to be found among their adversaries, who were usually divided into a moderate or Whig and an advanced or Radical section. He who established himself as the Tory leader was presently followed by the rank and file with a devotion, an unquestioning submission and confidence, which placed his character and doctrines under the aegis of the party, and enforced loyalty upon parliamentary malcontents. This corporate spirit was of infinite value to Disraeli. The historical past of the great Tory party, its associations, the social consideration which it enjoys, all went to ennoble his position and efface the remembrance of the less creditable parts of his career. And in the later days of his reign, when no one disputed his supremacy, every Tory was, as a matter of course, his advocate and admirer, and resented assaults on him as insults to the party. When a man excites hatred by his words or deeds, attacks on his character are an inevitable relief to overcharged feelings. Technically regarded, they are not good politics. Misrepresentation sometimes succeeds; vituperation seldom. Let a man be personally untrustworthy or dangerous, still, it is only his own words that damage him, at least in England and America. Even his own words, however discrediting, even his acts, however culpable, may, if they belong to a past unfamiliar to the voter of to-day, tell little, perhaps too little, on the voter's mind when they are brought up against him. The average citizen has a short memory, and thinks that the dead may be allowed to bury their dead.

Let it be further noted that Disraeli's career coincided with a significant change in English politics, a change partly in the temper of the nation, partly in the balance of voting power. For thirty years after the Reform Act of 1832, not only had the middle classes constituted the majority of the electors, but the social influence of the great Whig families and the intellectual influence of the economic school of Cobden had been potent factors. These forces were, in the later part of Disraeli's life, tending to decline. The working-class vote was vastly increased in 1867. The old Whig light gradually paled, and many of the Whig magnates, obeying class sympathies rather than party traditions, drifted slowly into Toryism. A generation arose which had not seen the Free Trade struggle, or had forgotten the Free Trade arguments, and which was attracted by ideals other than those which Cobden had preached. The grievances which had made men reformers had been largely removed. The battle of liberty and nationality in Continental Europe had been in the main won, and Englishmen had lost the enthusiasm for freedom which had fired them in the days when the memory of their own struggle against the Crown and the oligarchy was still fresh. With none of these changes had Disraeli's personal action much to do, but they all enured to the benefit of his party, they all swelled the tide which bore him into office in 1874.

Finally, he had the great advantage of living long. Many a statesman has died at fifty, and passed from the world's memory, who might have become a figure in history with twenty years more of life. Had Disraeli's career closed in 1854, he would have been remembered as a parliamentary gladiator, who had produced a few incisive speeches, a crude Budget, and some brilliant social and political sketches. The stronger parts of his character might have remained unknown. True it is that a man must have greatness in order to stand the test of long life. Some are found out, like Louis Napoleon. Some lose their balance and therewith their influence, like Lord Brougham. Some cease to grow or learn, and if a statesman is not better at sixty than he was at thirty, he is worse. Some jog heavily on, like Metternich, or stiffen into arbitrary doctrinaires, like Guizot. Disraeli did not merely stand the test, he gained immensely by it. He gained by rising into a position where his strength could show itself. He gained also by so impressing his individuality upon people as to make them accept it as an ultimate fact, till at length they came, not so much to blame him for what he did in accord with his established reputation, as rather to relish and enter into the humour of his character. As they unconsciously took to judging him by a standard different from that which they applied to ordinary Englishmen, they hardly complained of deflections from veracity which would have seemed grave in other persons. He had given notice that he was not like other men, that his words must not be taken in their natural sense, that he was to be regarded as the skilful player of a great game, the consummate actor in a great part. And, once more, he gained by the many years during which he had opportunities of displaying his fortitude, patience, constancy under defeat, unwavering self-confidence--gifts rarer than mere intellectual power, gifts that deserve the influence they bestow. Nothing so fascinates mankind as to see a man equal to every fortune, unshaken by reverses, indifferent to personal abuse, maintaining a long combat against apparently hopeless odds with the sharpest weapons and a smiling face. His followers fancy he must have hidden resources of wisdom as well as of courage. When some of his predictions come true, and the turning tide of popular feeling begins to bear them toward power, they believe that he has been all along right and the rest of the world wrong. When victory at last settles on his crest, even his enemies can hardly help applauding a reward which seems so amply earned. It was by this quality, more perhaps than by anything else, by this serene surface with fathomless depths below, that he laid his spell upon the imagination of observers in Continental Europe, and received at his death a sort of canonisation from a large section of the English people.

What will posterity think of him, and by what will he be remembered? The glamour has already passed away, and to few of those who on the 19th of April deck his statue with flowers is he more than a name.

Parliamentary fame is fleeting: the memory of parliamentary conflicts soon grows dim and dull. Posterity fixes a man's place in history by asking not how many tongues buzzed about him in his lifetime, but how great a factor he was in the changes of the world, that is, how far different things would have been twenty or fifty years after his death if he had never lived. Tried by this standard, the results upon the course of events of Disraeli's personal action are not numerous, though some of them may be deemed momentous. He was an adroit parliamentary tactician who held his followers together through a difficult time. By helping to keep the Peelites from rejoining their old party, he gave that party a colour different from the sober hues which it had worn during the leadership of Peel. He became the founder of what has in later days been called Tory democracy, winning over a large section of the humbler classes to the banner under which the majority of the wealthy and the holders of vested interests already stood arrayed. He saved for the Turkish Empire a part of its territories, yet in doing so merely prolonged for a little the death agony of Turkish power. Though it cannot be said that he conferred any benefit on India or the Colonies, he certainly stimulated the imperial instincts of Englishmen. He had occasional flashes of insight, as when in 1843 he perceived exactly what Ireland needed, and at least one brilliant flash of foresight when he predicted that a wide extension of the suffrage would bring no evil to the Tory party. Yet in the case of Ireland he did nothing, when the chance came to him, to give effect to the judgment which he had formed, while in the case of the suffrage he did but follow up and carry into effect an impulse given by others. The Franchise Act of 1867 is perhaps the only part of his policy which has, by hastening a change that induced other changes, permanently affected the course of events; and it remains the chief monument of his parliamentary skill. There was nothing in his career to set the example of a lofty soul or a noble purpose. He did not raise, he may even have lowered, the tone of English public life.

Yet history will not leave him without a meed of admiration. When all possible explanations of his success have been given, what a wonderful career! An adventurer foreign in race, in ideas, in temper, without money or family connections, climbs, by patient and unaided efforts, to lead a great party, master a powerful aristocracy, sway a vast empire, and make himself one of the four or five greatest personal forces in the world. His head is not turned by his elevation. He never becomes a demagogue; he never stoops to beguile the multitude by appealing to sordid instincts. He retains through life a certain amplitude of view, a due sense of the dignity of his position, a due regard for the traditions of the ancient assembly which he leads, and when at last the destinies of England fall into his hands, he feels the grandeur of the charge, and seeks to secure what he believes to be her imperial place in the world. Whatever judgment history may ultimately pass upon him, she will find in the long annals of the English Parliament no more striking figure.

-----

[1] No "authorised" life of Lord Beaconsfield, nor indeed any life
commensurate with the part he played in English politics, has
yet appeared.

[2] Disraeli's family claimed to be of Spanish origin, but had come
from Italy to England shortly before 1748.

[3] There are few legal allusions in his novels, fewer in proportion
than in Shakespeare's plays, but an ingenious travesty of the
English use of legal fictions may be found in the _Voyage of
Captain Popanilla_, a satire on the English constitution and
government. Popanilla, who is to be tried for treason, is, to
his astonishment, indicted for killing a camelopard.

[4] That historical interest he did feel deeply. One might almost say
of him that he was a Christian because he was a Jew, for
Christianity was to him the proper development of the ancient
religion of Israel. "The Jews," he observes in the _Life of
Lord George Bentinck_, "represent the Semitic principle, all
that is most spiritual in our nature.... It is deplorable that
several millions of Jews still persist in believing only a part
of their religion."

[5] Though it has been maintained that in the Dark and Middle Ages a
considerable number of Gentiles found their way into Jewish
communities and became Judaised.

The high average of intellectual power among the Jews need
not be attributed to purity of race; it is sufficiently
explained by their history. Nor is it clear that where two
of the more advanced races are mixed by intermarriage, the
product is inferior to either of the parent stocks. On the
contrary, such a mixture, _e.g._ of Teutonic and Slavonic
blood, or of Celtic and Teutonic, gives a result at least
equal in capacity to either of the pure-blooded races which
have been so commingled.

[6] He had an intellectual arrogance, which made him dislike what may
be called the Radical conception of human equality. In the
_Life of Lord George Bentinck_ he remarks, "The Jews are a
living and the most striking evidence of the falsity of that
pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of
man.... All the tendencies of the Jewish race are conservative.
Their bias is to religion, property, and natural aristocracy."

[7] On one occasion he went so far as to deny that he had asked Peel
for office, relying on the fact that the letter which contained
the request was marked "private," so that Peel could not use it
to disprove his statement (_Letters of Sir Robert Peel_, by C.
S. Parker, vol. ii. p. 486; vol. iii. pp. 347, 348).

[8] See Sir S. Northcote's report of a conversation with Disraeli in
his last years (_Life of Sir Stafford Northcote_, vol. ii.).

[9] In the _Life of Lord George Bentinck_ (written shortly after
Peel's death), Disraeli, after dilating upon the loyalty which
the Tory aristocracy had displayed towards Peel, observes, "An
aristocracy hesitates before it yields its confidence, but it
never does so grudgingly.... In political connections the
social feeling mingles with the principle of honour which
governs gentlemen.... Such a following is usually cordial and
faithful. An aristocracy is rather apt to exaggerate the
qualities and magnify the importance of a plebeian leader."

[10] When he did set himself to examine the condition of the people,
the diagnosis, if not always correct, was always suggestive,
_e.g._ the account of the manufacturing districts given in
_Sybil, or the Two Nations_.

[11] "The old Jew, that is the man."

[12] In the _Life of Lord George Bentinck_.

[13] +Oio pepnusthai, toi de skiai aissousin+ (_Od._ x. 495). Used of
Tiresias, in the world of disembodied spirits.

[14] To defend Disraeli by arguing that his policy had not a fair
chance because his colleagues did not allow him to carry it
through is to admit another error not less grave, for the path
he took was one on which no minister ought to have entered
unless satisfied that the Cabinet and the country would let him
follow it to the end.

[15] _Inf._ vii. 77.

DEAN STANLEY[16]

In the England of his time there was no personality more attractive, nor any more characteristic of the country, than Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster. England is the only European country in which such a figure could have appeared, for it is the only country in which a man may hold a high ecclesiastical post and yet be regarded by the nation, not specially as an ecclesiastic, but rather as a distinguished writer, an active and influential man of affairs, an ornament of social life. But if in this respect he was typical of his country, he was in other respects unique. He was a clergyman untouched by clericalism, a courtier unspoiled by courts. No one could point to any one else in England who occupied a similar position, nor has any one since arisen who recalls him, or who fills the place which his departure left empty.

Stanley was born in 1815. His father, then Rector of Alderley, in Cheshire, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, belonged to the family of the Stanleys of Alderley, a branch of that ancient and famous line the head of which is Earl of Derby. His mother, Catherine Leycester, was a woman of much force of character and intellectual power. He was educated at Rugby School under Dr. Arnold, the influence of whose ideas remained great over him all through his life, and at Oxford, where he became a fellow and tutor of University College. Passing thence to be Canon of Canterbury, he returned to the University as Professor of Ecclesiastical History, and remained there for seven years. In 1863 he was appointed Dean of Westminster, and at the same time married Lady Augusta Bruce (sister of the then Lord Elgin, Governor-General first of Canada and afterwards of India). He died in 1881.