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This defence will not surprise any one who is familiar with Disraeli’s earlier novels. These stories are as far as possible from being immoral; that is to say, there is nothing in them unbecoming or corrupting. Friendship, patriotism, love, are all recognised as powerful and worthy motives of conduct. That which is wanting is the sense of right and wrong. His personages have for certain purposes the conventional sense of honour, though seldom a fine sense, but they do not ask whether such and such a course is conformable to principle. They move in a world which is polished, agreeable, dignified, averse to baseness and vulgarity, but in which conscience and religion scarcely seem to exist. The men live for pleasure or fame, the women for pleasure or love.

Some allowance must, of course, be made for the circumstances of Disraeli’s position and early training. He was brought up neither a Jew nor a Christian. The elder people who took him by the hand when he entered life, people like Samuel Rogers and Lady Blessington, were not the people to give lessons in morality. Lord Lyndhurst, the first of his powerful political friends, and the man whose example most affected him, was, with all his splendid gifts, conspicuously wanting in political principle. Add to this the isolation in which the young man found himself, standing outside the common stream of English life, not sharing its sentiments, perceiving the 30 hollowness of much that passed for virtue and patriotism, and it is easy to understand how he should have been as perfect a cynic at twenty-five as their experience of the world makes many at sixty. If he had loved truth or mankind, he might have quickly worked through his youthful cynicism. But pride and ambition, the pride of race and the pride of genius, left no room for these sentiments. Nor was his cynicism the fruit merely of a keen and sceptical intelligence. It came from a cold heart.

The pursuit of fame and power, to which he gave all his efforts, is presented in his writings as the only alternative ideal to a life of pleasure; and he probably regarded those who pursued some other as either fools or weaklings. Early in his political life he said one night to Mr. Bright (from whom I heard the anecdote), as they took their umbrellas in the cloak-room of the House of Commons: “After all, what is it that brings you and me here? Fame! This is the true arena. I might have occupied a literary throne; but I have renounced it for this career.” The external pomps and trappings of life, titles, stately houses and far-spreading parks, all those gauds and vanities with which sumptuous wealth surrounds itself, had throughout his life a singular fascination for him. He liked to mock at them in his novels, but they fascinated him none the less. One can understand how they might fire the imagination 31 of an ambitious youth who saw them from a distance—might even retain their charm for one who was just struggling into the society which possessed them, and who desired to feel himself the equal of the possessors. It is stranger that, when he had harnessed the English aristocracy to his chariot, and was driving them where he pleased, he should have continued to admire such things. So, however, it was. There was even in him a vein of inordinate deference to rank and wealth which would in a less eminent person have been called snobbishness. In his will he directs that his estate of Hughenden Manor, in Buckinghamshire, shall pass under an entail as strict as he could devise, that the person who succeeds to it shall always bear the name of Disraeli. His ambition is the common, not to say vulgar, ambition of the English parvenu, to found a “county family.” In his story of Endymion, published a few months before his death, the hero, starting from small beginnings, ends by becoming prime minister: this is the crown of his career, the noblest triumph an Englishman can achieve. It might have been thought that one who had been through it all, who had realised the dreams of his boyhood, who had every opportunity of learning what power and fame come to, would have liked to set forth some other conception of the end of human life, or would not have told the world so naively of his 32 self-content at having attained the aim he had worked for. With most men the flower they have plucked withers. It might have been expected that one who was in other things an ironical cynic would at least have sought to seem disillusionised.

To say that Disraeli’s heart was somewhat cold is by no means to say that he was heartless. He was one of those strong natures who permit neither persons nor principles to stand in their way. His doctrine was that politics had nothing to do with sentiment; so those who appealed to him on grounds of humanity appealed in vain. No act of his life ever so much offended English opinion as the airy fashion in which he tossed aside the news of the Bulgarian massacre of 1876. It incensed sections who were strong enough, when thoroughly roused, to bring about his fall. But he was far from being unkindly. He knew how to attach men to him by friendly deeds as well as friendly words. He seldom missed an opportunity of saying something pleasant and cheering to a débutant in Parliament, whether of his own party or the opposite. He was not selfish in little things; was always ready to consider the comfort and convenience of those who surrounded him. Age and success, so far from making him morose or supercilious, softened the asperities of his character and developed the affectionate side of it. His last novel, published a few months before his death, contains more human kindliness, 33 a fuller recognition of the worth of friendship and the beauty of sisterly and conjugal love, than do the writings of his earlier manhood. What it wants in intellectual power it makes up for in a mellower and more tender tone. Of loyalty to his political friends he was a model, and nothing did more to secure his command of the party than its sense that his professional honour, so to speak, could be implicitly relied upon. To his wife, a warm-hearted woman older than himself, and inferior to him in education, he was uniformly affectionate and indeed devoted. The first use he made of his power as Prime Minister was to procure for her the title of viscountess. Being once asked point blank by a lady what he thought of his life-long opponent, Mr. Gladstone answered that two things had always struck him as very admirable in Lord Beaconsfield’s character—his perfect loyalty to his wife, and his perfect loyalty to his own race. A story used to be told how, in Disraeli’s earlier days, when his political position was still far from assured, he and his wife happened to be the guests of the chief of the party, and that chief so far forgot good manners as to quiz Mrs. Disraeli at the dinner-table. Next morning Disraeli, whose visit was to have lasted for some days longer, announced that he must leave immediately. The host besought him to stay, and made all possible apologies. But Disraeli was inexorable, 34 and carried off his wife forthwith. To literary men, whatever their opinions, he was ready to give a helping hand, representing himself as one of their profession. In paying compliments he was singularly expert, and few used the art so well to win friends and disarm enemies. He knew how to please Englishmen, and especially the young, by showing interest in their tastes and pleasures, and, without being what would be called genial, was never wanting in bonhomie. In society he was a perfect man of the world—told his anecdote apropos, wound up a discussion by some epigrammatic phrase, talked to the guest next him, if he thought that guest’s position made him worth talking to, as he would to an old acquaintance. But he had few intimates; nor did his apparent frankness unveil his real thoughts.

He was not of those who complicate political opposition with private hatreds. Looking on politics as a game, he liked, when he took off his armour, to feel himself on friendly terms with his antagonists, and often seemed surprised to find that they remembered as personal affronts the blows which he had dealt in the tournament. Two or three years before his death, a friend asked him whether there was in London any one with whom he would not shake hands. Reflecting for a moment, he answered, “Only one,” and named Robert Lowe, who had said hard things of him, and to whom, when Lowe was on one occasion 35 in his power, he had behaved with cruelty. Yet his resentments could smoulder long. In Lothair he attacked, under a thin disguise, a distinguished man of letters who had criticised his conduct years before. In Endymion he gratified what was evidently an ancient grudge by a spiteful presentation of Thackeray, as he had indulged his more bitter dislike of John Wilson Croker by portraying that politician in Coningsby under the name of Nicholas Rigby. For the greatest of his adversaries he felt, there is reason to believe, genuine admiration, mingled with inability to comprehend a nature so unlike his own. No passage in the striking speech which that adversary pronounced, one might almost say, over Lord Beaconsfield’s grave—a speech which may possibly go down to posterity with its subject—was more impressive than the sentence in which he declared that he had the best reason to believe that, in their constant warfare, Lord Beaconsfield had not been actuated by any personal hostility. Brave men, if they can respect, seldom dislike, a formidable antagonist.

His mental powers were singularly well suited to the rest of his character—were, so to speak, all of a piece with it. One sometimes sees intellects which are out of keeping with the active or emotional parts of the man. One sees persons whose thought is vigorous, clear, comprehensive, while their conduct is timid; or a comparatively 36 narrow intelligence joined to an enterprising spirit; or a sober, reflective, sceptical turn of mind yoked to an ardent and impulsive temperament. What we call the follies of the wise often spring from some such source. Not so with him. His intelligence had the same boldness, intensity, concentration, directness, which we discover in the rest of the man. It was just the right instrument, not perhaps for the normal career of a normal Englishman seeking political success, but for the particular kind of work Disraeli had planned to do; and this inner harmony was one of the chief causes of his success, as the want of it has caused the failure of so many gifted natures.

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 37 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 38 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 39 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 Æschylus 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 40 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 41 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 42 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 43 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 44 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 45 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 Æneid, 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.

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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 47 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, 48 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 49 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 50 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 51 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 52 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 53 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 54 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 55 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 56 ’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 57 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 58 “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 mediæval 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 59 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 60 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 61 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.