The Earl of Beaconsfield
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Title: The Earl of Beaconsfield
Author: James Anthony Froude
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THE QUEEN'S PRIME MINISTERS,
A SERIES OF POLITICAL BIOGRAPHIES
EDITED BY
STUART J. REID,
AUTHOR OF 'THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SYDNEY SMITH.'
_The Volumes will contain Portraits, and will be published at periodical
intervals._
=THE EARL OF BEACONSFIELD, K.G.= By J. A. FROUDE, D.C.L.
=VISCOUNT MELBOURNE.= By HENRY DUNCKLEY, LL.D. ('Verax.')
=SIR ROBERT PEEL.= By JUSTIN MCCARTHY, M.P.
=VISCOUNT PALMERSTON.= By the MARQUIS OF LORNE, K.T.
=EARL RUSSELL.= By STUART J. REID.
=THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P.= By G. W. E. RUSSELL.
=THE EARL OF ABERDEEN.= By Sir ARTHUR GORDON, G.C.M.G. &c.
=THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY.= By H. D. TRAILL, D.C.L.
=THE EARL OF DERBY.= By GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
LONDON:
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, Limited,
St. Dunstan's House, FETTER LANE, FLEET STREET, E.C.
The Prime Ministers of
Queen Victoria
EDITED BY
STUART J. REID
_LORD BEACONSFIELD_
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
[Illustration]
LORD BEACONSFIELD
BY
J. A. FROUDE
_He was a man, take him for all in all,
We shall not look upon his like again_
Hamlet, Act I. Scene 2
SECOND EDITION
LONDON
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON
_LIMITED_
St. Dunstan's House
FETTER LANE, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1890
[_All rights reserved_]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
Carlyle on Lord Beaconsfield--Judgment of the House of
Commons--Family history--The Jews in Spain--Migration to
Venice--Benjamin D'Israeli the elder--Boyhood of Isaac
Disraeli 1
CHAPTER II
Family of Isaac Disraeli--Life in London--Birth of his
children--Abandons Judaism and joins the Church of
England--Education of Benjamin Disraeli--School
days--Picture of them in 'Vivian Grey' and 'Contarini
Fleming'--Self-education at home--Early ambition 12
CHAPTER III
The Austen family--Choice of a
profession--Restlessness--Enters a solicitor's
office--'Vivian Grey'--Illness--Travels abroad--Migration of
the Disraelis to Bradenham--Literary
satires--'Popanilla'--Tours in the
East--Gibraltar--Cadiz--Seville--Mountain
adventures--Improved health--Malta--James
Clay--Greece--Yanina--Redshid
Pasha--Athens--Constantinople--Plains of Troy and
Revolutionary epic--Jaffa--Jerusalem--Egypt--Home
letters--Death of William Meredith--Return to England 20
CHAPTER IV
'Contarini Fleming'--The poetical life--Paternal advice--A
poet, or not a poet?--'Revolutionary Epic'--Disraeli submits
to an unfavourable verdict--Success of the novels--Disraeli
a new star--London society--Political ambition--Mrs. Wyndham
Lewis--Financial embarrassments--Portraits of Disraeli by N.
P. Willis--Lady Dufferin and others--Stands for High
Wycombe--Speech at the Red Lion--Tory Radicalism--Friendship
with Lord Lyndhurst--Self-confidence--Vindication of the
British Constitution--Conservative reaction--Taunton
election--Crosses swords with O'Connell--The Runnymede
Letters--Admitted into the Carlton Club--'Henrietta Temple'
and 'Venetia' 45
CHAPTER V
Returned to Parliament for Maidstone--Takes his place behind
Sir R. Peel--Maiden speech--Silenced by violence--Peel's
opinion of it--Advice of Shiel--Second speech on Copyright
completely successful--State of politics--England in a state
of change--Break-up of ancient institutions--Land and its
duties--Political economy and Free Trade--Struggle on the
Corn Laws 67
CHAPTER VI
Disraeli's beliefs, political and religious--Sympathy with the
people--Defends the Chartists--The people, the
middle-classes, and the aristocracy--Chartist Riots--Smart
passage at arms in the House of Commons--Marriage--Mrs.
Wyndham Lewis--Disraeli as a husband 83
CHAPTER VII
The enthusiasm of progress--Carlyle and Disraeli--Protection
and Free Trade--Sir Robert Peel the Protectionist
champion--High Church movement at Oxford--The Church as a
Conservative power--Effect of the Reform Bill--Disraeli's
personal views--Impossible to realise--Election of 1841--Sir
Robert Peel's Ministry--Drift towards Free Trade--Peel's
neglect of Disraeli--Tariff of 1842--Young England--Symptoms
of revolt--First skirmish with Peel--Remarkable speech on
Ireland 91
CHAPTER VIII
Young England and the Oxford Tractarians--Disraeli a Hebrew at
heart--'Coningsby'--Sidonia--'Sybil; or the Two
Nations'--The great towns under the new creed--Lords of the
soil, as they were and as they are--Disraeli an aristocratic
socialist--Practical working of Parliamentary
institutions--Special importance of 'Sybil' 107
CHAPTER IX
The New Gospel--Effect on English character--The Manchester
School--Tendencies of Sir Robert Peel--The Corn Laws--Peel
brought into office as a Protectionist--Disraeli and
Peel--Protracted duel--Effect of Disraeli's speeches--Final
declaration of Peel against the Corn Laws--Corn Laws
repealed--Lord George Bentinck--Irish Coercion Bill--The
Canning episode--Defeat and fall of Peel--Disraeli succeeds
to the Leadership of the Conservative Party 129
CHAPTER X
Disraeli as Leader of the Opposition--Effects of Free
Trade--Scientific discoveries--Steam--Railroads--Commercial
revolution--Unexampled prosperity--Twenty-five years of
Liberal government--Disraeli's opinions and general
attitude--Party government and the conditions of it--Power
of an Opposition Leader--Never abused by Disraeli for party
interests--Special instances--The _coup d'état_--The Crimean
War--The Indian Mutiny--The Civil War in America--Remarkable
warning against playing with the Constitution 149
CHAPTER XI
Literary work--'Tancred; or, the New Crusade'--Modern
philosophy--The 'Vestiges of the Natural History of
Creation'--'Life of Lord George Bentinck'--Disraeli's
religious views--Revelation as opposed to Science--Dislike
and dread of Rationalism--Religion and statesmanship--The
national creed the supplement of the national law--Speech in
the theatre at Oxford--Disraeli on the side of the angels 165
CHAPTER XII
Indifference to money--Death of Isaac Disraeli--Purchase of
Hughenden--Mrs. Brydges Willyams of Torquay--An assignation
with unexpected results--Intimate acquaintance with Mrs.
Willyams--Correspondence--Views on many subjects--The Crown
of Greece--Louis Napoleon--Spanish pedigree of Mrs. Willyams 178
CHAPTER XIII
Fall of the Whigs in 1867--Disraeli as Chancellor of the
Exchequer--Reform Bill, why undertaken--Necessities, real or
fancied, of a Party Leader--Alternatives--Split in the
Cabinet--Disraeli carries his point--Niagara to be
shot--Retirement of Lord Derby--Disraeli Prime
Minister--Various judgments of his character--The House of
Commons responsible for his elevation--Increasing popularity
with all classes 188
CHAPTER XIV
Reply of the Liberals to the Tory Reform Bill--State of
Ireland--The Protestant Establishment--Resolutions proposed
by Mr. Gladstone--Decay of Protestant feeling in
England--Protestant character of the Irish Church--The Upas
Tree--Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy--General effect on
Ireland of the Protestant Establishment--Voltaire's
opinion--Imperfect results--The character of the Protestant
gentry--Nature of the proposed change--Sprung on England as
a surprise--Mr. Gladstone's resolutions carried--Fall of
Disraeli's Government 199
CHAPTER XV
The calm of satisfied ambition--A new novel--'Lothair'--Survey
of English society--The modern aristocracy--Forces working
on the surface and below it--Worship of rank--Cardinal
Grandison--Revolutionary Socialism--Romeward drift of the
higher classes--'Lothair' by far the most remarkable of all
Disraeli's writings 215
CHAPTER XVI
The exhausted volcanoes--Mr. Gladstone's failure and
unpopularity--Ireland worse than before--Loss of influence
in Europe--The Election of 1874--Great Conservative
majority--Disraeli again Prime Minister with real power--His
general position as a politician--Problems waiting to be
dealt with--The relations between the Colonies and the
Empire--The restoration of the authority of the law in
Ireland--Disraeli's strength and Disraeli's
weakness--Prefers an ambitious foreign policy--Russia and
Turkey--The Eastern Question--Two possible policies and the
effects of each--Disraeli's choice--Threatened war with
Russia--The Berlin Conference--Peace with honour--Jingoism
and fall of the Conservative party--Other features of his
administration--Goes to the House of Lords as Earl of
Beaconsfield and receives the Garter--Public Worship
Act--Admirable distribution of patronage--Disraeli and
Carlyle--Judgment of a conductor of an omnibus 232
CHAPTER XVII
Retirement from office--Dignity in retreat--Hughenden--Lord
Beaconsfield as a landlord--Fondness for country
life--'Endymion'--Illness and death--Attempted estimate of
Lord Beaconsfield--A great man? or not a great man?--Those
only great who can forget themselves--Never completely an
Englishman--Relatively great, not absolutely--Gulliver among
Lilliputians--Signs in 'Sybil' of a higher purpose, but a
purpose incapable of realisation--Simplicity and
blamelessness in private life--Indifference to
fortune--Integrity as a statesman and administrator 254
INDEX 263
LORD BEACONSFIELD
CHAPTER I
Carlyle on Lord Beaconsfield--Judgment of the House of Commons--Family
History--The Jews in Spain--Migration to Venice--Benjamin D'Israeli
the Elder--Boyhood of Isaac Disraeli.
[Sidenote: CARLYLE'S OPINION OF HIM]
Carlyle, speaking to me many years ago of parliamentary government as he
had observed the working of it in this country, said that under this
system not the fittest men were chosen to administer our affairs, but
the 'unfittest.' The subject of the present memoir was scornfully
mentioned as an illustration; yet Carlyle seldom passed a sweeping
censure upon any man without pausing to correct himself. 'Well, well,
poor fellow,' he added, 'I dare say if we knew all about him we should
have to think differently.' I do not know that he ever did try to think
differently. His disposition to a milder judgment, if he entertained
such a disposition, was scattered by the Reform Bill of 1867, which
Carlyle regarded as the suicide of the English nation. In his 'Shooting
Niagara' he recorded his own verdict on that measure and the author of
it.
'For a generation past it has been growing more and more evident that
there was only this issue; but now the issue itself has become
imminent, the distance of it to be guessed by years. Traitorous
politicians grasping at votes, even votes from the rabble, have brought
it on. One cannot but consider them traitorous; and for one's own poor
share would rather have been shot than have been concerned in it. And
yet, after all my silent indignation and disgust, I cannot pretend to be
clearly sorry that such a consummation is expedited. I say to myself,
Well, perhaps the sooner such a mass of hypocrisies, universal
mismanagements, and brutal platitudes and infidelities ends, if not in
some improvement then in death and _finis_, may it not be the better?
The sum of our sins increasing steadily day by day will at least
be less the sooner the settlement is. Nay, have I not a kind of
secret satisfaction of the malicious or even of the judiciary kind
(_Schadenfreude_, "mischief joy," the Germans call it, but really it is
"justice joy" withal) that he they call Dizzy is to do it; that other
jugglers of an unconscious and deeper type, having sold their poor
mother's body for a mess of official pottage, this clever, conscious
juggler steps in? "Soft, you, my honourable friends: _I_ will weigh out
the corpse of your mother--mother of mine she never was, but only
step-mother and milch cow--and you shan't have the pottage--not yours
you observe, but mine." This really is a pleasing trait of its sort;
other traits there are abundantly ludicrous, but they are too lugubrious
even to be momentarily pleasant. A superlative Hebrew conjuror
spell-binding all the great lords, great parties, great interests of
England to his hand in this manner, and leading them by the nose like
helpless mesmerised somnambulist cattle to such issue! Did the world
ever see a _flebile ludibrium_ of such magnitude before? Lath-sword and
scissors of Destiny, Pickle-herring and the three Parcæ alike busy in
it. This too I suppose we had deserved; the end of our poor old England
(such an England as we had at last made of it) to be not a fearful
tragedy, but an ignominious farce as well.'
The consequences of the precipitation over the cataract not being
immediate, and Government still continuing, over which a juggler of some
kind must necessarily preside, Carlyle, though hope had forsaken him,
retained his preference for the conscious over the unconscious. He had a
faint pleasure in Disraeli's accession to power in 1874. He was even
anxious that I should myself accept a proposal of a seat in Parliament
which had been made to me, as a _quasi_ follower of Disraeli--not that
he trusted him any better, but he thought him preferable to a worse
alternative. He was touched with some compunction for what he had
written when Disraeli acknowledged Carlyle's supremacy as a man of
letters--offered him rank and honours and money, and offered them in
terms as flattering as his own proudest estimate of himself could have
dictated. Accept such offers Carlyle could not; but he was affected by
the recognition that of all English ministers the Hebrew conjuror should
have been the only one who had acknowledged his services to his country,
and although he disapproved and denounced Disraeli's policy in the East
he did perceive that there might be qualities in the man to which he had
not done perfect justice.
However that may be, Disraeli was a child of Parliament. It was
Parliament and the confidence of Parliament which gave him his place in
the State. For forty years he was in the front of all the battles which
were fought in the House of Commons, in opposition or in office, in
adversity or in success, in conflict and competition with the most
famous debaters of the age. In the teeth of prejudice, without support
save in his own force of character, without the advantage of being the
representative of any popular cause which appealed to the imagination,
he fought his way till the consent of Parliament and country raised him
to the Premiership.
Extraordinary qualities of some kind he must have possessed. No horse
could win in such a race who had not blood and bone and sinew. Whether
he was fit or unfit to govern England, the House of Commons chose him as
their best; and if he was the charlatan which in some quarters he is
supposed to have been, the Parliament which in so many years failed to
detect his unworthiness is itself unfit to be trusted with the nation's
welfare. He was not borne into power on the tide of any outside
movement. He was not the advocate of any favourite measure with which
his name was identified. He rose by his personal qualifications alone,
and in studying what those qualifications were we are studying the
character of Parliament itself.
[Sidenote: THE JEWS IN SPAIN]
The prophets who spoke of the dispersion of the Jews as a penalty for
their sins described a phenomenon which probably preceded the Captivity.
Through Tyre the Hebrew race had a road open through which they could
spread along the shores of the Mediterranean. There was a colony of them
in Rome in the time of Cicero. In Carthage they were among a people who
spoke their own language. It is likely that they accompanied the
Carthaginians in their conquests and commercial enterprises, and were
thus introduced into Spain, where a Jewish community undoubtedly existed
in St. Paul's time, and where it survived through all changes in the
fortunes of the Peninsula. Under the Arabs the Jews of Spain preserved
undisturbed their peculiar characteristics. As the crescent waned before
the cross they intermarried with Christian families, and conformed
outwardly with the established faith while they retained in secret their
own ceremonies.
The Jewish people, says Isaac Disraeli in his 'Genius of Judaism,' are
not a nation, for they consist of many nations. They are Spanish or
Portuguese, German or Polish, and, like the chameleon, they reflect the
colours of the spot they rest on. The people of Israel are like water
running through vast countries, tinged in their course with all
varieties of the soil where they deposit themselves. Every native Jew as
a political being becomes distinct from other Jews. The Hebrew adopts
the hostilities and the alliances of the land where he was born. He
calls himself by the name of his country. Under all these political
varieties the Jew of the Middle Ages endeavoured to preserve his inward
peculiarities. In England, in France, in Germany, in Italy, he enjoyed
for the sake of his wealth a fitful toleration, with intervals of
furious persecution. From England he was expelled at the beginning of
the fourteenth century, and his property was confiscated to the State.
In crusading Spain he had not ventured to practise his creed in the open
day, and thus escaped more easily. He was unmolested as long as he
professed a nominal Christianity. He was wealthy, he was ingenious, he
was enterprising. In his half-transparent disguise he intermarried with
the proudest Castilian breeds. He took service under the State, and rose
to the highest positions, even in the Church itself. A Jew who had not
ceased to be a Jew in secret became Primate of Spain, and when the
crowns of Castile and Aragon became united it was reckoned that there
was scarcely a noble family in the two realms pure from intermixture of
Jewish blood. His prosperity was the cause of his ruin. The kingdom of
Granada fell at last before Ferdinand and Isabella, and the Church of
Spain addressed itself, in gratitude to Providence, to the purifying of
the Peninsula from the unholy presence of the wealthy unbeliever.
The Jews who were willing to break completely with their religious
associations remained undisturbed. The Inquisition undertook the
clearance of the rest, and set to work with characteristic vigour. Rank
was no protection. The highest nobles were among the first who were
called for examination before Torquemada's tribunal. Tens of thousands
of the 'new Christians' who were convicted of having practised the rites
of their own religion after outward conformity with Christianity, were
burnt at the stake as 'relapsed.' Those who could escape fled to other
countries where a less violent bigotry would allow them a home. Venice
was the least intolerant. Venice lived upon its commerce, and the Jews
there, as always, were the shrewdest traders in the world. The Venetian
aristocrats might treat them as social pariahs, rate them on the Rialto,
and spit upon their gabardines, but they had ducats, and their ducats
secured them the protection of the law.
[Sidenote: THE DISRAELI FAMILY]
Among those who thus sought and found the hospitality of the Adriatic
republic at the end of the fifteenth century was a family allied with
the house of Lara, and perhaps entitled to bear its name. They
preferred, however, to break entirely their connection with the country
which had cast them off. They called themselves simply D'Israeli, or
Sons of Israel, a name, says Lord Beaconsfield, never borne before or
since by any other family, in order that their race might be for ever
recognised. At Venice they lived and throve, and made money for two
hundred years. Towards the middle of the last century, when Venice was
losing her commercial pre-eminence, they began to turn their eyes
elsewhere. Very many of their countrymen were already doing well in
Holland. England was again open to them. Jews were still under some
disabilities there, but they were in no danger of being torn by horses
in the streets under charge of eating children at their Passover. They
could follow their business and enjoy the fruits of it; and the head of
the Venetian house decided that his second son, Benjamin, 'the child of
his right hand,' should try his fortune in London. The Disraelis
retained something of their Spanish pride, and did not like to be
confounded with the lower grades of Hebrews whom they found already
established there. The young Benjamin was but eighteen when he came
over; he took root and prospered, but he followed a line of his own and
never cordially or intimately mixed with the Jewish community, and the
tendency to alienation was increased by his marriage.
[Sidenote: ISAAC DISRAELI]
'My grandfather,' wrote Lord Beaconsfield, 'was a man of ardent
character, sanguine, courageous, speculative, and fortunate; with a
temper which no disappointment could disturb and a brain full of
resources.' He made a fortune, he married a beautiful woman of the same
religion as his own and whose family had suffered equally from
persecution. The lady was ambitious of social distinction, and she
resented upon her unfortunate race the slights and disappointments to
which it exposed her. Her husband took it more easily. He was rich. He
had a country house at Enfield, where he entertained his friends, played
whist, and enjoyed himself, 'notwithstanding a wife who never pardoned
him his name.' So successful he had been that he saw his way to
founding a house which might have been a power in Europe. But the more
splendid his position the more bitter would have been his wife's
feelings. He retired therefore early from the field, contented with the
wealth which he had acquired. Perhaps his resolution was precipitated by
the character of the son who was the only issue of his marriage. Isaac
Disraeli was intended for the heir of business, and Isaac showed from
the first a determined disinclination for business of any sort or kind.
'Nature had disqualified the child from his cradle for the busy pursuits
of men.' 'He grew up beneath a roof of worldly energy and enjoyment,
indicating that he was of a different order from those with whom he
lived.' Neither his father nor his mother understood him. To one he was
'an enigma,' to the other 'a provocation.' His dreamy, wandering eyes
were hopelessly unpractical. His mother was irritated because she could
not rouse him into energy. He grew on 'to the mournful period of
boyhood, when eccentricities excite attention and command no sympathy.'
Mrs. Disraeli was exasperated when she ought to have been gentle. Her
Isaac was the last drop in her cup of bitterness, and 'only served to
swell the aggregate of many humiliating particulars.' She grew so
embittered over her grievances that Lord Beaconsfield says 'she lived
till eighty without indulging a tender expression;' and must have been
an unpleasant figure in her grandson's childish recollections. The
father did his best to keep the peace, but had nothing to offer but
good-natured commonplaces. Isaac at last ran away from home, and was
brought back after being found lying on a tombstone in Hackney
Churchyard. His father 'embraced him, gave him a pony,' and sent him to
a day school, where he had temporary peace. But the reproaches and
upbraidings recommenced when he returned in the evenings. To crown all,
Isaac was delivered of a poem, and for the first time the head of the
family was seriously alarmed. Hitherto he had supposed that boys would
be boys, and their follies ought not to be too seriously noticed; but a
poem was a more dangerous symptom; 'the loss of his argosies could not
have filled him with a more blank dismay.'
The too imaginative youth was despatched to a counting-house in
Holland. His father went occasionally to see him, but left him for
several years to drudge over ledgers without once coming home, in the
hope that in this way, if in no other, the evil spirit might be
exorcised. Had it been necessary for Isaac Disraeli to earn his own
bread the experiment might have succeeded. His nature was gentle and
amiable, and though he could not be driven he might have been led. But
he knew that he was the only child of a wealthy parent. Why should he do
violence to his disposition and make himself unnecessarily miserable?
Instead of book-keeping he read Bayle and Voltaire. He was swept into
Rousseauism and imagined himself another Emile. When recalled home at
last the boy had become a young man. He had pictured to himself a
passionate scene in which he was to fly into his mother's arms, and
their hearts were to rush together in tears of a recovered affection.
'When he entered, his strange appearance, his gaunt figure, his excited
manner, his long hair, and his unfashionable costume only filled her
with a sentiment of tender aversion. She broke into derisive laughter,
and noticing his intolerable garments reluctantly lent him her cheek.'
The result, of course, was a renewal of household misery. His father
assured him that his parents desired only to make him happy, and
proposed to establish him in business at Bordeaux. He replied that he
had written another poem against commerce, 'which was the corruption of
man,' and that he meant to publish it. What was to be done with
such a lad? 'With a home that ought to have been happy,' says Lord
Beaconsfield, 'surrounded with more than comfort, with the most
good-natured father in the world and an agreeable man, and with a mother
whose strong intellect under ordinary circumstances might have been of
great importance to him, my father, though himself of a very sweet
disposition, was most unhappy.' To keep him at home was worse than
useless. He was sent abroad again, but on his own terms. He went to
Paris, made literary acquaintance, studied in libraries, and remained
till the eve of the Revolution amidst the intellectual and social
excitement which preceded the general convulsion. But his better sense
rebelled against the Rousseau enthusiasm. Paris ceasing to be a safe
residence, he came home once more, recovered from the dangerous form of
his disorder, 'with some knowledge of the world and much of books.'
His aversion to the counting-house was, however, as pronounced as ever.
Benjamin Disraeli resigned himself to the inevitable--wound up his
affairs and retired, as has been said, upon the fortune which he had
realised. Isaac, assured of independence, if not of great wealth, went
his own way; published a satire, which the old man overlived without a
catastrophe, and entered the literary world of London. Before he was
thirty he brought out his 'Curiosities of Literature,' which stepped at
once into popularity and gave him a name. He wrote verses which were
pretty and graceful, verses which were read and remembered by Sir
Walter Scott, and were at least better than his son's. But he was too
modest to overrate their value. He knew that poetry, unless it be the
best of its kind, is better unproduced, and withdrew within the limits
where he was conscious that he could excel. 'The poetical temperament
was not thrown away upon him. Because he was a poet he was a popular
writer, and made _belles-lettres_ charming to the multitude.... His
destiny was to give his country a series of works illustrative of its
literary and political history, full of new information and new views
which time has ratified as just.'
CHAPTER II
Family of Isaac Disraeli--Life in London--Birth of his
Children--Abandons Judaism and joins the Church of England--Education
of Benjamin Disraeli--School Days--Picture of them in 'Vivian Grey'
and 'Contarini Fleming'--Self-education at Home--Early Ambition.
[Sidenote: BIRTH AND EDUCATION]
Isaac Disraeli, having the advantage of a good fortune, escaped the
embarrassments which attend a struggling literary career. His
circumstances were easy. He became intimate with distinguished men; and
his experiences in Paris had widened and liberalised his mind. His creed
sate light upon him, but as long as his father lived he remained
nominally in the communion in which he was born. He married happily a
Jewish lady, Maria, daughter of Mr. George Basevi, of Brighton, a
gentle, sweet-tempered, affectionate woman. To her he relinquished the
management of his worldly affairs, and divided his time between his own
splendid library, the shops of book collectors or the British Museum,
and the brilliant society of politicians and men of letters. His
domestic life was unruffled by the storms which had disturbed his
boyhood; a household more affectionately united was scarcely to be found
within the four seas. Four children were born to him--the eldest a
daughter, Sarah, whose gifts and accomplishments would have raised her,
had she been a man, into fame; Benjamin, the Prime Minister that was to
be, and two other boys, Ralph and James. The Disraelis lived in London,
but changed their residence more than once. At the outset of their
married life they had chambers in the Adelphi. From thence they removed
to the King's Road, Gray's Inn, and there, on December 21, 1804,
Benjamin was born. He was received into the Jewish Church with the usual
rites, the record of the initiation being preserved in the register of
the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue Bevis Marks. No soothsayer having
foretold his future eminence, he was left to grow up much like other
children. He was his mother's darling, and was naturally spoilt. He was
unruly, and a noisy boy at home perhaps disturbed his father's serenity.
At an early age it was decided that he must go to school, but where it
was not easy to decide. English boys were rough and prejudiced, and a
Jewish lad would be likely to have a hard time among them. No friend of
Isaac Disraeli, who knew what English public schools were then like,
would have recommended him to commit his lad to the rude treatment which
he would encounter at Eton or Winchester. A private establishment of a
smaller kind had to be tried as preliminary.
[Sidenote: SCHOOL LIFE]
Disraeli's first introduction to life was at a Mr. Poticary's, at
Blackheath, where he remained for several years--till he was too old to
be left there, and till a very considerable change took place in the
circumstances of the family. In 1817 the grandfather died. Isaac
Disraeli succeeded to his fortune, removed from Gray's Inn Road, and
took a larger house--No. 6 Bloomsbury Square, then a favourite situation
for leading lawyers and men of business. A more important step was his
formal withdrawal from the Jewish congregation. The reasons for it, as
given by himself in his 'Genius of Judaism,' were the narrowness of the
system, the insistence that the Law was of perpetual obligation, while
circumstances changed and laws failed of their objects. 'The
inventions,' he says, 'of the Talmudical doctors, incorporated in their
ceremonies, have bound them hand and foot, and cast them into the
caverns of the lone and sullen genius of rabbinical Judaism, cutting
them off from the great family of mankind and perpetuating their sorrow
and their shame.' The explanation is sufficient, but the resolution was
probably of older date. The coincidence between the date of his father's
death and his own secession points to a connection between the two
events. His mother's impatience of her Jewish fetters must naturally
have left a mark on his mind, and having no belief himself in the
system, he must have wished to relieve his children of the disabilities
and inconveniences which attached to them as members of the synagogue.
At all events at this period he followed the example of his Spanish
ancestors in merging himself and them in the general population of his
adopted country. The entire household became members of the Church of
England. The children read their Prayer Books and learned their
catechisms. On July 31 in that year Benjamin Disraeli was baptised at
St. Andrew's Church, Holborn, having for his godfather his father's
intimate friend the distinguished Sharon Turner.
The education problem was thus simplified, but not entirely solved. The
instruction at Mr. Poticary's was indifferent. 'Ben' had learnt little
there. The Latin and Greek were all behindhand, and of grammar, which in
those days was taught tolerably effectively in good English schools, he
had brought away next to nothing. But he was quick, clever, impetuous.
At home he was surrounded with books, and had read for himself with
miscellaneous voracity. In general knowledge and thought he was far
beyond his age. His father's wish was to give him the best education
possible--to send him to Eton, and then to a university. His mother
believed that a public school was a place where boys were roasted alive.
'Ben' was strong and daring, and might be trusted to take care of
himself. The objections, however, notwithstanding the removal of the
religious difficulty, were still considerable. The character of a public
school is more determined by the boys than by the masters. There were no
institutions where prejudice had freer play at the beginning of the
present century. The nationality of a Disraeli could neither be
concealed nor forgotten, and though he might be called a Christian, and
though he might be ready to return blow for blow if he was insulted or
ill-used, it is not likely that at either one of our great public
foundations he would have met with any tolerable reception. He would
himself have willingly run the risk, and regretted afterwards, perhaps,
that he had no share in the bright Eton life which he describes so
vividly in 'Coningsby.' It was decided otherwise. The school chosen for
him was at Walthamstow. The master was a Dr. Cogan, a Unitarian. There
were many boys there, sons most of them of rich parents; but the
society at a Unitarian school seventy years ago could not have been
distinguished for birth or good breeding. Neither 'Vivian Grey' nor
'Contarini Fleming' can be trusted literally for autobiographical
details; but Disraeli has identified himself with Contarini in assigning
to him many of his own personal experiences, and Vivian has been always
acknowledged as a portrait sketched from a looking-glass. In both these
novels there are pictures of the hero's school days, so like in their
general features that they may be taken as a fair account of Disraeli's
own recollections. He was fifteen when he went to Walthamstow, and was
then beyond the age when most boys begin their school career.
'For the first time in my life,' says Contarini, 'I was surrounded by
struggling and excited beings. Joy, hope, sorrow, ambition, craft,
dulness, courage, cowardice, beneficence, awkwardness, grace, avarice,
generosity, wealth, poverty, beauty, hideousness, tyranny, suffering,
hypocrisy, tricks, love, hatred, energy, inertness, they were all there
and sounded and moved and acted about me. Light laughs and bitter cries
and deep imprecations, and the deeds of the friendly, the prodigal, and
the tyrant, the exploits of the brave, the graceful, and the gay, and
the flying words of native wit and the pompous sentences of acquired
knowledge, how new, how exciting, how wonderful!'
[Sidenote: EDUCATION AT HOME]
Contarini is Disraeli thus launched into a school epitome of the world
after the Unitarian pattern. It was a poor substitute for Eton. The
young Disraeli soon asserted his superiority. He made enemies, he made
friends, at all events he distinguished himself from his comrades.
School work did not interest him, and he paid but slight attention to
it. He wanted ideas, and he was given what seemed to him to be but
words. He lost the opportunity of becoming an exact scholar. On the
other hand in thought, in imagination, in general attainments, he was
superior to everyone about him, masters included. Superiority begets
jealousy. Boys never pardon a comrade who is unlike themselves. He was
taunted with his birth, as it was inevitable that he would be. As
inevitably he resented the insult. Contarini Fleming and Vivian Grey
both fight and thrash the biggest boy in their school. The incident in
the novels is evidently taken from the writer's experience. Disraeli
was a fighter from his youth, with his fist first, as with his tongue
afterwards. It was characteristic of him that he had studied the art of
self-defence, and was easily able to protect himself. But both his
heroes were unpopular, and it may be inferred that he was not popular
any more than they. The school experiment was not a success and came to
an abrupt end. Vivian Grey was expelled; Contarini left of his own
accord, because he learnt nothing which he thought would be of use to
him, and because he 'detested school more than he ever abhorred the
world in the darkest moment of experienced manhood.' The precise
circumstances under which Disraeli himself made his exit are not known
to me, but his stay at Walthamstow was a brief one, and he left to
complete his education at home. His father, recollecting the troubles of
his own youth, abstained from rebukes or reproaches, left him to
himself, helped him when he could, and now and then, if we may identify
him with Vivian, gave him shrewd and useful advice. Disraeli wanted no
spurring. He worked for twelve hours a day, conscious that he had
singular powers and passionately ambitious to make use of them. He was
absolutely free from the loose habits so common in the years between
boyhood and youth; his father had no fault to find with his conduct,
which he admitted had been absolutely correct. The anxiety was of
another kind. He did not wish to interfere with his son's direction of
himself, but warned him, very wisely, 'not to consider himself a
peculiar boy.' 'Take the advice,' said Mr. Grey to Vivian, 'of one who
has committed as many--aye, more--follies than yourself. Try to
ascertain what may be the chief objects of your existence in this world.
I want you to take no theological dogmas for granted, nor to satisfy
your doubts by ceasing to think; but whether we are in this world in a
state of probation for another, or whether at death we cease altogether,
human feelings tell me that we have some duties to perform to our
fellow-creatures, to our friends, and to ourselves.'
[Sidenote: THE YOUNG DISRAELI]
Disraeli's conception of himself was that he had it in him to be a great
man, and that the end of his existence was to make himself a great man.
With his father's example before him literature appeared the readiest
road. Contarini when a boy wrote romances and threw them into the river,
and composed pages of satire or sentiment 'and grew intoxicated with his
own eloquence.' He pondered over the music of language, studied the
cultivation of sweet words, and constructed elaborate sentences in
lonely walks, and passed his days in constant struggle to qualify
himself for the part which he was determined to play in the game of
life. Boyish pursuits and amusements had no interest for him. In
athletic games he excelled if he chose to exert himself, but he rarely
did choose unless it was in the science of self-defence. He rode well
and hard, for the motion stimulated his spirits; but in galloping across
the country he was charging in imagination the brooks and fences in the
way of his more ambitious career.
This was one side of him in those early years; another was equally
remarkable. He intended to excel among his fellow-creatures, and to
understand what men and women were like was as important to him as to
understand books. The reputation of Vivian Grey's father--in other
words, his own father--had always made him an honoured guest in the
great world. For this reason he had been anxious that his son should be
as little at home as possible, for he feared for a youth the fascination
of London society. This particular society was what Disraeli was most
anxious to study, and was in less danger from it than his father
fancied. He was handsome, audacious, and readily made his way into the
circle of the family acquaintances. 'Contarini was a graceful,
lively lad, with enough of dandyism to prevent him from committing
_gaucheries_, and with a devil of a tongue.' 'He was never at a loss for
a compliment or a repartee,' and 'was absolutely unchecked by foolish
modesty.' 'The nervous vapidity of my first rattle,' says the _alter
ego_ Vivian, 'soon subsided into a continuous flow of easy nonsense.
Impertinent and flippant, I was universally hailed as an original and a
wit. I became one of the most affected, conceited, and intolerable atoms
that ever peopled the sunbeam of society.' The purpose which lay behind
Disraeli's frivolous outside was as little suspected by those who saw
him in the world as the energy with which he was always working in his
laborious hours. The stripling of seventeen was the same person as the
statesman of seventy, with this difference only, that the affectation
which was natural in the boy was itself affected in the matured
politician, whom it served well as a mask or as a suit of impenetrable
armour.
CHAPTER III
The Austen Family--Choice of a Profession--Restlessness--Enters a
Solicitor's Office--'Vivian Grey'--Illness--Travels Abroad--Migration
of the Disraelis to Bradenham--Literary Satires--'Popanilla'--Tour in
the East--Gibraltar--Cadiz--Seville--Mountain Adventures--Improved
Health--Malta--James Clay--Greece--Yanina--Redshid
Pasha--Athens--Constantinople--Plains of Troy and Revolutionary
Epic--Jaffa--Jerusalem--Egypt--Home Letters--Death of William
Meredith--Return to England.
[Sidenote: DREAMS AND AMBITIONS]
In the neighbourhood of the square in which the Disraelis now resided
there lived a family named Austen, with whom the young Benjamin became
closely intimate. Mr. Austen was a solicitor in large practice; his wife
was the daughter of a Northamptonshire country gentleman--still
beautiful, though she had been for some years married, a brilliant
conversationalist, a fine musician, and an amateur artist of
considerable power. The house of this lady was the gathering-place of
the young men of talent of the age. She early recognised the unusual
character of her friend's boy. She invited him to her salons, talked to
him, advised and helped him. A writer in the 'Quarterly Review' (January
1889), apparently a connection of the Austens, remembers having been
taken by them as a child to call on the Disraelis. 'Ben, then perhaps a
school-boy returned for the holidays, was sent for, and appeared in his
shirt-sleeves with boxing gloves.' His future destination was still
uncertain. Isaac Disraeli, who had no great belief in youthful genius,
disencouraged his literary ambition, and was anxious to see him
travelling along one of the beaten roads. Mr. Austen was probably of the
same opinion. 'Ben's' own views on this momentous subject are not likely
to have been much caricatured in the meditations of Vivian Grey.
'The Bar!--pooh! Law and bad jokes till we are forty, and then with the
most brilliant success the prospect of gout and a coronet. Besides, to
succeed as an advocate I must be a great lawyer, and to be a great
lawyer I must give up my chances of being a great man. The "services" in
war time are fit only for desperadoes (and that truly am I), and in
peace are fit only for fools. The Church is more rational. I should
certainly like to act Wolsey, but the thousand and one chances are
against me, and my destiny should not be a chance.' Practical always
Disraeli was, bent simply on making his way, and his way to a great
position. No _ignes fatui_ were likely to mislead him into spiritual
morasses, no love-sick dreams to send him wandering after imaginary
Paradises. He was as shrewd as he was ambitious, and he took an early
measure of his special capabilities. 'Beware,' his father had said to
him, 'of trying to be a great man in a hurry.' His weakness was
impatience. He could not bear to wait. Byron had blazed like a new star
at five-and-twenty; why not he? Pitt had been Prime Minister at a still
earlier age, and of all young Disraeli's studies political history had
been the most interesting to him. But to rise in politics he must get
into Parliament, and the aristocrats who condescended to dine in
Bloomsbury Square, and to laugh at his impertinence, were not likely to
promise him a pocket borough. His father could not afford to buy him
one, nor would have consented to squander money on so wild a prospect.
He saw that to advance he must depend upon himself and must make his way
into some financially independent position. While chafing at the
necessity he rationally folded his wings, and on November 18, 1821, when
just seventeen, he was introduced into a solicitor's office in Old
Jewry. Mr. Maples, a member of the firm, was an old friend of Isaac
Disraeli, and to Mr. Maples's department 'Ben' was attached. Distasteful
as the occupation must have been to him, he attached himself zealously
to his work. He remained at his desk for three years, and Mr. Maples
described him as 'most assiduous in his attention to business, as
showing great ability in the transaction of it,' and as likely, if
allowed to go to the Bar, to attain to eminence there.
[Sidenote: 'VIVIAN GREY']
If the project had been carried out the anticipation would probably have
been verified. The qualities which enabled Disraeli to rise in the House
of Commons would have lifted him as surely, and perhaps as rapidly, into
the high places of the profession. He might have entered Parliament
with greater facility and with firmer ground under his feet. He
acquiesced in his father's wishes; he was entered at Lincoln's Inn, and
apparently intended to pursue a legal career; but the Fates or his own
adventurousness ordered his fortunes otherwise. His work in the office
had not interfered with his social engagements. He met distinguished
people at his father's table--Wilson Croker, then Secretary to the
Admiralty; Samuel Rogers; John Murray, the proprietor of the 'Quarterly
Review,' and others of Murray's brilliant contributors. The Catholic
question was stirring. There were rumours of Reform, and the political
atmosphere was growing hot. Disraeli observed, listened, took the
measure of these men, and thought he was as good as any of them. He
began to write in the newspapers. The experienced Mr. Murray took notice
of him as a person of whom something considerable might be made. These
acquaintances enabled him to extend his knowledge of the world, which
began to shape itself into form and figure. To understand the serious
side of things requires a matured faculty. The ridiculous is caught more
easily. With Mrs. Austen for an adviser, and perhaps with her
assistance, he composed a book which, however absurd in its plot and
glaring in its affectation, revealed at once that a new writer had
started into being, who would make his mark on men and things. That a
solicitor's clerk of twenty should be able to produce 'Vivian Grey' is
not, perhaps, more astonishing than that Dickens, at little more than
the same age, should have written 'Pickwick.' All depends on the eye.
Most of us encounter every day materials for a comedy if we could only
see them. But genius is wanted for it, and the thing, when accomplished,
proves that genius has been at work.
The motto of Vivian Grey was sufficiently impudent:
Why, then, the world's mine oyster,
Which with my sword I'll open.
The central figure is the author himself caricaturing his own
impertinence and bringing on his head deserved retribution; but the
sarcasm, the strength of hand, the audacious personalities caught the
attention of the public, and gave him at once the notoriety which he
desired. 'Vivian' was the book of the season; everyone read it, everyone
talked about it, and keys were published of the characters who were
satirised. Disraeli, like Byron, went to sleep a nameless youth of
twenty-one and woke to find himself famous.
A successful novel may be gratifying to vanity, but it is a bad
introduction to a learned profession. Attorneys prefer barristers who
stick to business and do not expatiate into literature. A single fault
might be overlooked, and 'Vivian Grey' be forgotten before its author
could put on his wig, but a more serious cause interrupted his legal
progress. He was overtaken by a singular disorder, which disabled him
from serious work. He had fits of giddiness, which he described as like
a consciousness of the earth's rotation. Once he fell into a trance,
from which he did not completely recover for a week. He was recommended
to travel, and the Austens took him abroad with them for a summer tour.
They went to Paris, to Switzerland, to Milan, Venice, Florence, Geneva,
and back over Mont Cenis into France. His health became better, but was
not re-established, and he returned to his family still an invalid.
[Sidenote: BRADENHAM]
The 'law' was postponed, but not yet abandoned. In a letter to his
father, written in 1832, he spoke of his illness as having robbed him of
five years of life; as if this, and this alone, had prevented him from
going on with his profession. Meanwhile there was a complete change in
the outward circumstances of the Disraeli household. Isaac Disraeli, who
had the confirmed habits of a Londoner, whose days had been spent in
libraries and his evenings in literary society, for some reason or other
chose to alter the entire character of his existence. Like Ferrars in
'Endymion,' though not for the same cause, he tore himself away from all
his associations and withdrew with his wife and children to an old manor
house in Buckinghamshire, two miles from High Wycombe. Bradenham, their
new home, is exactly described in the account which Disraeli gives of
the Ferrars's place of retirement; and perhaps their first arrival
there and their gipsy-like encampment in the old hall, the sense,
half-realised, that they were being taken away from all their interests
and associations, may equally have been drawn from memory. The
Disraelis, however, contrived happily enough to fit themselves to their
new existence. Disraeli all through his life delighted in the country
and country scenes. The dilapidated manor house was large and
picturesque. The land round it was open down, or covered thinly with
scrub and woods. They had horses and could gallop where they pleased.
They had their dogs and their farmyard; they made new friends among the
tenantry and the labourers. Disraeli's head continued to trouble him,
but the air and the hills gave him his best chance of recovery. His
father, contented with an occasional lecture, left him to himself. He
was devoted to his mother and passionately attached to his sister.
Altogether nothing could be calmer, nothing more affectionately peaceful
than the two or three years which he passed at Bradenham after this
migration. Though he could not study in London chambers, he could read
and he could write, and over his writing he worked indefatigably, if not
with great success. He added a second part to 'Vivian Grey.' Clever it
could not help being, but it had not the flavour of the first. He wrote
the 'Young Duke,' a flashy picture of high society which might have
passed muster as the ephemeral production of an ordinary novelist.
Neither of these, however, indicated any literary advance, nor did he
himself attach any value to them. In a happier interval, perhaps, when
he had a respite from his headaches, he threw off three light satires,
which, with one exception, are the most brilliant of all his
productions. 'Ixion in Heaven' is taken from the story of the King of
Thessaly who was carried to Olympus and fell in love with the queen of
the gods. Disraeli's classical knowledge probably went no farther than
Lemprière's Dictionary, but Lemprière gave him all that he wanted. The
form and tone are like Lucian's, and the execution almost as good. No
characters in real life are more vivid than those which he draws of the
high-bred divinities at the court of the Father of the gods, while the
Father himself is George IV. Apollo Byron, and the ladies well-known
ornaments of the circles of the Olympians of May Fair.
[Sidenote: POLITICAL SATIRES]
Equally good is the 'Infernal Marriage,' the rape of Proserpine and her
adventures in her dominions below. The wit which we never miss in
Disraeli rises here into humour which is rare with him, and a deeper
current of thought can be traced when the Queen of Hell pays a visit to
Elysium, finding there the few thousand families who spend their time in
the splendid luxury of absolute idleness; high-born, graceful beings
without a duty to perform, supported by the toil of a million gnomes,
and after exhausting every form of amusement ready to perish of ennui.
The third fragment, written in these years, which Lord Beaconsfield
included in his collected works (he probably wrote others which are lost
in the quicksands of keepsakes and annuals) was 'Popanilla,' a satire on
the English Constitution. He has changed his manner from Lucian's to
Swift's. 'Popanilla' might have been another venture of Mr. Lemuel
Gulliver if there had been malice in it. The satire of Swift is inspired
by hatred and scorn of his race. The satire of Disraeli is pleasant,
laughing, and good-humoured. In all his life he never hated anybody or
anything, never bore a grudge or remembered a libel against himself.
Popanilla is a native of an unknown island in an unknown part of the
Pacific, an island where modern civilisation had never penetrated and
life was a round of ignorant and innocent enjoyment. In an evil hour a
strange ship is wrecked upon the shore. A box of books is flung up upon
the sands, books of useful knowledge intended for the amelioration of
mankind, spiritual, social, moral, and political. Popanilla finds it,
opens it, and with the help of these moral lights sets to work to
regenerate his countrymen. He makes himself a nuisance, and is sent
floating in a canoe which carries him to Vray Bleusia, or modern
England. Being a novelty, he is enthusiastically welcomed, becomes a
lion, and is introduced to the charms and wonders of complicated
artificial society. The interest is in the light which is thrown on
Disraeli's studies of English politics. The chapter on 'Fruit' is a
humorously correct sketch of the Anglican Church. Mr. Flummery Flum
represents political economy, and the picture of him betrays Disraeli's
contempt for that once celebrated science, now relegated to the exterior
planets. 'Popanilla' can be still read with pleasure as a mere work of
fancy. It has more serious value to the student of Disraeli's character.
As a man of letters he shows at his best in writings of this kind. His
interest in the life which he describes in his early novels was only
superficial, and he could not give to others what he did not feel. In
'Ixion,' in the 'Infernal Marriage,' in 'Popanilla' we have his real
mind, and matter, style, and manner are equally admirable.
His future was still undetermined. His father continued eager to see him
at the Bar, but his health remained delicate and his disinclination more
and more decided. There was a thought of buying an estate for him and
setting him up as a country gentleman. But to be a small squire was a
poor object of ambition. He wished to travel, travel especially in the
East, to which his semi-Asiatic temperament gave him a feeling of
affinity. The Holy Land, as the seat of his own race, affected his
imagination. He had a romantic side in his mind in a passion for
Jerusalem. His intellect had been moulded by the sceptical philosophy of
his fathers; but, let sceptics say what they would, a force which had
gone out from Jerusalem had governed the fate of the modern world.
His desire, when he first made it known, was not encouraged. 'My
wishes,' he said, 'were knocked on the head in a calmer manner than I
could have expected from my somewhat rapid but too indulgent sire.' He
lingered on at Bradenham till even his literary work had to end. He
could not 'write a line without effort,' and he wandered aimlessly about
the woods; 'solitude and silence' not making his existence easy, but at
least tolerable.
[Sidenote: FOREIGN TOUR]
The objection to his travelling had been perhaps financial. If this was
the difficulty it was removed by his friends the Austens, who, we are
briefly told, came to his assistance and enabled him to carry out his
purpose. He found a companion ready to go with him in Mr. William
Meredith, a young man of talent and good fortune who was engaged to be
married to his sister. They started in June 1830, and their adventures
are related in a series of brilliant and charming letters to his family,
letters which show the young Disraeli no longer in the mythological
drapery of 'Vivian Grey' and 'Contarini Fleming,' but under his own hand
as he actually was. Spain was their first object. The Disraelis retained
their pride in their Spanish descent in a dim and distant fashion, and
had not forgotten that in right of blood they were still Spanish nobles.
Steam navigation was in its infancy, but small paddle-wheeled vessels
ran from London to Cork and Dublin, touching at Falmouth, from which
outward-bound ships took their departure. They reached Falmouth with no
worse adventure than a rough passage, and Disraeli was flattered to find
that the family fame had so far preceded him. He met a Dr. Cornish
there, who was full of admiration for 'Vivian Grey,' 'knows my father's
works by heart and thinks our revered sire the greatest man that ever
lived.' From Gibraltar on July 1 he wrote to his father himself:--
'The rock is a wonderful place, with a population infinitely
diversified--Moors with costumes radiant as a rainbow in an Eastern
melodrama, Jews with gabardines and skull caps, Genoese highlanders and
Spaniards whose dress is as picturesque as those of the sons of Ivor....
In the garrison are all your works, in the merchants' library the
greater part. Each possesses the copy of another book supposed to be
written by a member of our family which is looked upon at Gibraltar as
one of the masterpieces of the nineteenth century. At first I apologised
and talked of youthful blunders and all that, really being ashamed, but
finding them, to my astonishment, sincere, and fearing they were stupid
enough to adopt my last opinion, I shifted my position just in time,
looked very grand, and passed myself off for a child of the sun, like
the Spaniards in Peru.'
Government House opened its hospitalities. Sir George D----, a proud,
aristocratic, but vigorous old man, was not a person likely to find such
a pair of travellers particularly welcome to him. Disraeli's
affectations of dress and manner approached vulgarity, and Meredith,
though a superior person, was equally absurd in this respect. But
Disraeli, at any rate where he cared to please, never failed to make
himself liked. Sir George was polite, Lady D. more than polite. Though
she was old and infirm, 'her eyes were so brilliant and so full of
_moquerie_ that you forgot her wrinkles.' Of course they were welcome
guests in the regimental mess-rooms, clever young civilians who could
talk and were men of the world being an agreeable change in the
professional monotony, though perhaps the visitors mistook to some
extent the impression which they produced.
'Tell my mother,' Disraeli wrote, 'that as it is the fashion among the
dandies of this place (that is, the officers, for there are no others)
not to wear waistcoats in the morning, her new studs come into fine play
and maintain my reputation for being a great judge of costume, to the
admiration and envy of many subalterns. I have also the fame of being
the first who ever passed the Straits with two canes, a morning and an
evening cane. I change my cane on the gun-fire and hope to carry them
both on to Cairo. It is wonderful the effect those magical wands
produce. I owe to them even more attention than to being the supposed
author of--what is it? I forget.'
[Sidenote: ADVENTURES IN SPAIN]
With Gibraltar for head-quarters they made excursions into the Spanish
territory; the first through the Sierra Nevada, on a route arranged for
them by the governor. Travelling was dangerous, and accommodation no
better than at Don Quixote's enchanted castle. The banditti were
everywhere. Two Englishmen had just arrived from Cadiz whom José Maria
had stopped and rifled on the way. The danger was exciting. They set out
in the long hot days of July, taking a model valet with them. Brunet had
been all over the world and spoke all languages except English. Their
baggage was of the slightest, not to tempt José Maria, Disraeli
confining himself to 'the red bag' which his mother had made for his
pistols.
'We were picturesque enough in our appearance,' he wrote. 'Imagine M.
and myself on two little Andalusian mountain horses with long tails and
jennet necks, followed by a large beast of burden, with Brunet in white
hat and slippers, lively, shrivelled, and noisy as a pea dancing upon
tin; our Spanish guide, tall and with a dress excessively _brodé_ and
covered with brilliant buttons, walking by the side. The air of the
mountains, the rising sun, the rising appetite, the variety of
picturesque persons and things we met, and the impending danger made a
delightful life, and had it not been for the great enemy I should have
given myself up entirely to the magic of the life. But that spoiled all.
It is not worse. Sometimes I think it lighter about the head, but the
palpitation about the heart greatly increases; otherwise my health is
wonderful. Never have I been better. But what use is this when the end
of all existence is debarred me? I say no more upon this melancholy
subject, by which I am ever and infinitely depressed, and often most so
when the world least imagines it. To complain is useless and to endure
almost impossible.'
José Maria was in everyone's mouth, but the travellers did not fall in
with him. After a week they were again enjoying the hospitalities of
Gibraltar. The climate, the exercise, the novelty were all delightful.
Disraeli was a child of the sun, as he often said of himself. His health
mended and his spirits rose. He wore his hair in long curls. The women,
he said, mistook it for a wig, and 'I was obliged to let them pull it to
satisfy their curiosity.' The Judge Advocate buttonholed him. 'I found
him a bore and vulgar. Consequently I gave him a lecture upon canes,
which made him stare, and he has avoided me ever since.' But everyone
liked Disraeli. 'Wherever I go,' he said, 'I find plenty of friends and
plenty of attention.' He had not come to Spain to linger in a garrison
town. The two friends were soon off again for a ride through Andalusia.
Cadiz was enchanting with its white houses and green _jalousies_
sparkling in the sun; 'Figaro in every street and Rosina in every
balcony.' He saw a bull-fight; he was introduced to the Spanish
authorities, and conducted himself with Vivian Grey-like impudence.
'Fleuriz, the governor of Cadiz,' he wrote, 'is a singular brute. The
English complain that when they are presented to him he bows and says
nothing. The consul announced me to him as the son of the greatest
author in England; the usual reception, however, only greeted me. But I,
being prepared for the savage, was by no means silent, and made him
stare for half an hour in a most extraordinary manner. He was sitting
over some prints just arrived from England--a view of Algiers and--the
fashions for June. The question was whether the place was Algiers, for
it had no title. I ventured to inform his Excellency that it was, and
that a group of gentlemen displaying their extraordinary coats and
countenances were personages no less eminent than the Dey and his
principal councillors of State. The dull Fleuriz, after due examination,
insinuated scepticism, whereupon I offered renewed arguments to prove
the dress to be Moorish. Fleuriz calls a young lady to translate the
inscription, which proves only that they are fashions for June. I add at
Algiers. Fleuriz, unable to comprehend badinage, gives a Mashallah look
of pious resignation, and has bowed to the ground every night since that
he has met me.'
After Cadiz Seville, and then Malaga. Brigands everywhere, but not
caring to meddle with travellers who had so little with them worth
plundering. Once only there was alarm. 'We saved ourselves by a
moonlight scamper and a change of road.' An adventure, however, they had
at Malaga which recalls Washington Irving's story of the inn at
Terracina, with this difference, that Disraeli and his companion did not
show the gallantry of Irving's English hero.
'I was invited,' he says, 'by a grand lady of Madrid to join her escort
to Granada, twenty foot-soldiers armed, and _tirailleurs_ in the shape
of a dozen muleteers. We refused, for reasons too long to detail, and
set off alone two hours before, expecting an assault. I should tell you
we dined previously with her and her husband, having agreed to meet to
discuss matters. It was a truly Gil Blas scene. My lord, in an undress
uniform, slightly imposing in appearance, greeted us with dignity; the
señora young and really very pretty, with infinite vivacity and grace. A
French valet leant on his chair, and a dueña such as Staphenaff would
draw, broad and supercilious, with jet eyes, mahogany complexion, and a
cocked up nose, stood by my lady bearing a large fan. She was most
complaisant, as she evidently had more confidence in two thick-headed
Englishmen with their Purdeys and Mantons than in her specimens of the
once famous Spanish infantry. She did not know that we were cowards upon
principle. I could screw up my courage to a duel in a battle--but----'
In short, in spite of the lady's charms and their united eloquence,
Disraeli and Meredith determined to start alone. They had learnt that a
strong band of brigands were lying in wait for the noble pair. They took
a cross road, lost their way, and slept with pack-saddles for pillows,
but reached Granada without an interview with José. A fine description
of Granada and Saracenic architecture was sent home from the spot.
In return Disraeli requires his sister to 'tell him all about
Bradenham--about dogs and horses, orchards, gardens; who calls, where
you go, who my father sees in London, what is said.' 'This is what I
want,' he writes; 'never mind public news. There is no place like
Bradenham, and each moment I feel better I want to come back.'
Affectation, light-heartedness, and warm home feelings are strangely
mixed in all this; and no one of his changing moods is what might be
expected in a pilgrim to Jerusalem in search of spiritual light. But
this was Disraeli--a character genuine and affectionate, whose fine
gifts were veiled in foppery which itself was more than half assumed.
His real serious feeling comes out prettily in a passage in which he
sums up his Peninsular experiences. 'Spain is the country for adventure.
A weak government resolves society into its original elements, and
robbery becomes more honourable than war, inasmuch as the robber is paid
and the soldier is in arrears. A wonderful ecclesiastical establishment
covers the land with a privileged class.... I say nothing of their
costume. You are wakened from your slumbers by the _rosario_, the
singing procession by which the peasantry congregate to their labours.
It is most effective, full of noble chants and melodious responses, that
break upon the still fresh air and your ever fresher feelings in a
manner truly magical. Oh, wonderful Spain! I thought enthusiasm was dead
within me and nothing could be new. I have hit, perhaps, upon the only
country which could have upset my theory, a country of which I have read
little and thought nothing.'
Health was really mending. 'This last fortnight,' he says, 'I have made
regular progress, or rather felt, perhaps, the progress which I had
already made. It is all the sun--not society or change of scene. This,
however agreeable, is too much for me and ever turns me back. It is when
I am alone and still that I feel the difference of my system, that I
miss the old aches and am conscious of the increased activity and
vitality and expansion of the blood.'
[Sidenote: MALTA]
After Spain Malta was the next halting-place; Malta, with its garrison
and military society, was Gibraltar over again, with only this
difference, that Disraeli fell in with a London acquaintance there in
James Clay, afterwards member for Hull and a figure in the House of
Commons.
The arrival of a notoriety was an incident in the uniformity of Maltese
existence. 'They have been long expecting your worship's offspring,' he
tells his father, 'so I was received with branches of palm.' He accepted
his honours with easy superiority. 'To govern men,' he said, 'you must
either excel them in their accomplishments or despise them. Clay does
one, I do the other, and we are both equally popular. Affectation here
tells better than wit. Yesterday at the racket court, sitting in the
gallery among strangers, the ball entered and lightly struck me and fell
at my feet. I picked it up, and observing a young rifleman excessively
stiff, I humbly requested him to forward its passage into the court, as
I really had never thrown a ball in my life.... I called on the
Governor, and he was fortunately at home. I flatter myself that he
passed through the most extraordinary quarter of an hour of his
existence. I gave him no quarter, and at last made our nonchalant
Governor roll on the sofa from his risible convulsions. Clay confesses
my triumph is complete and unrivalled.'
'I continue much the same,' he reported of himself--'still infirm but
no longer destitute of hope. I wander in pursuit of health like the
immortal exile in pursuit of that lost shore which is now almost
glittering in my sight. Five years of my life have been already wasted,
and sometimes I think my pilgrimage may be as long as that of Ulysses.'
Like the Greek he was exposed to temptations from the Circes and the
Sirens, but he understood the symptoms and knew where to look for
safety. 'There is a Mrs. ---- here in Malta,' he writes to Ralph
Disraeli, 'with a pretty daughter, _cum multis aliis_; I am sorry to
say, among them a beauty very dangerous to the peace of your unhappy
brother. But no more of that. In a few weeks I shall be bounding, and
perhaps sea-sick, upon the Egean, and then all will be over. Nothing
like an emetic in these cases.'
[Sidenote: ALBANIAN RIDE]
James Clay was rich, and had provided a yacht in which, with the Byronic
fever on him, he professed to intend to turn corsair. He invited
Disraeli and Meredith to join him, and they sailed for Corfu in October
equipped for enterprise. 'You should see me,' he said, 'in the costume
of a Greek pirate--a blood-red shirt with silver studs as big as
shillings, an immense scarf for girdle, full of pistols and daggers, red
cap, red slippers, broad blue-striped jacket and trowsers.' 'Adventures
are to the adventurous;' so Ixion had written in Athene's album. Albania
was in insurrection. Unlike Byron, whom he was supposed to imitate,
Disraeli preferred the Turks to the Greeks whom he despised, and thought
for a moment of joining Redshid's army as a volunteer, to see what war
was like. When they reached Corfu the rebellion was already crushed, but
Redshid was still at Yanina, the Albanian capital, and he decided at
least to pay the Grand Vizier a visit. The yacht took them to Salora.
There they landed, and proceeded through the mountains with a handful
of horse for an escort. They halted the first night at Arta, 'a
beautiful town now in ruins.' 'Here,' he said, 'for the first time I
reposed upon a divan, and for the first time heard a muezzin from a
minaret.' In the morning they waited on the Turkish governor. 'I cannot
describe to you,' he wrote in a humorous description of his interview,
'the awe with which I first entered the divan of a great Turk, and the
curious feeling with which I found myself squatting on the right hand of
a bey, smoking an amber-mouthed chibouque, drinking coffee, and paying
him compliments through an interpreter.'
The Turks had been kind to his own race at a time when Jews had no other
friends, and from the first Disraeli had an evident liking for them.
They set out again after a few hours. 'We journeyed over a wild mountain
pass,' the diary continues, 'a range of ancient Pindus, and before
sunset we found ourselves at a vast but dilapidated khan as big as a
Gothic castle, situated on a high range, built as a sort of half-way
house for travellers by Ali Pasha, now turned into a military post.'
They were received by a bey, who provided quarters for them. They were
ravenously hungry; but the bey could not understand their language, nor
they his. He offered them wine; they produced brandy, and communication
was thus established. 'The bey drank all the brandy; the room turned
round; the wild attendants who sat at our feet seemed dancing in strange
and fantastic whirls. The bey shook hands with me; he shouted English, I
Greek. "Very good," he had caught up from us. "Kalo, kalo," was my
rejoinder. He roared; I smacked him on the back. I remember no more. In
the middle of the night I woke, found a flagon of water, and drank a
gallon at a draught. I looked at the wood fire and thought of the
blazing blocks in the hall at Bradenham; asked myself whether I was
indeed in the mountain fortress of an Albanian chief, and shrugging my
shoulders went to bed and woke without a headache. We left our jolly
host with regret. I gave him my pipe as a memorial of our having got
tipsy together.'
[Sidenote: YANINA]
At Yanina they found the Turkish army quartered in the ruins of the
town. The Grand Vizier occupied the castle with the double dignity of a
prince and a general. He was surrounded with state, and they were made
to wait ten minutes before they could be admitted to his presence.
'Suddenly we are summoned to the awful presence of the pillar of the
Turkish Empire, the renowned Redshid; an approved warrior, a consummate
politician, unrivalled as a dissembler in a country where dissimulation
is part of the moral culture.... The hall was vast, covered with gilding
and arabesques.... Here, squatted up in a corner of a large divan, I
bowed with all the nonchalance of St. James's Street to a little
ferocious-looking, shrivelled, careworn man, plainly dressed, with a
brow covered with wrinkles and a countenance clouded with anxiety and
thought.... I seated myself on the divan of the Grand Vizier, who, the
Austrian consul observed, "had destroyed in the course of the last three
months, not in war, upwards of 4,000 of my acquaintance," with the
self-possession of a morning call. Some compliments passed between us.
Pipes and coffee were brought. Then his Highness waved his hand, and in
an instant the chambers were cleared. Our conversation I need not
repeat. We congratulated him on the pacification of Albania. He rejoined
that the peace of the world was his only object and the happiness of
mankind his only wish. This went on for the usual time. He asked us no
questions about ourselves or our country, as the other Turks did, but
seemed quite overwhelmed with business, moody and anxious. While we were
with him three separate Tartars arrived with despatches. What a life!...
I forgot to tell you that with the united assistance of my English,
Spanish, and fancy wardrobe I sported a costume in Yanina which produced
a most extraordinary effect on that costume-loving people. A great many
Turks called on purpose to see it. "Questo vestito Inglese, o di
fantasia?" asked a little Greek physician. I oracularly replied,
"Inglese e fantastico."'
Had the Greek physician enquired not about the _vestito_, but about the
wearer of it, the answer might have been the same.
The account of this visit to Yanina was composed after the return of the
party to the yacht. Here is a description in Disraeli's other manner:--
'I write you this from that Ambracian gulf where the soft triumvir
gained more glory by defeat than attends the victory of harsher
warriors. The site is not unworthy of the beauty of Cleopatra. From the
summit of the land the gulf appears like a vast lake walled in on all
sides by mountains more or less distant. The dying glory of a Grecian
eve bathes with warm light promontories and gentle bays and infinite
modulation of purple outline. Before me is Olympus, whose austere peak
glitters yet in the sun. A bend in the land alone hides from me the
islands of Ulysses and Sappho. When I gaze upon this scene, and remember
the barbaric splendour and turbulent existence which I have just quitted
with disgust, I recur to the feelings in the indulgence of which I can
alone find happiness and from which an inexorable destiny seems
resolved to shut me out.'
In a sketch like the present the tour cannot be followed minutely.
Athens is finely painted, but Disraeli's classical education had been
too imperfect to enable him to fill with figures and incidents the
scenes which he was looking upon. The golden city was more after his
heart. 'It is near sunset,' he wrote on November 20, 'and Constantinople
is in full sight. It baffles description, though so often described. I
feel an excitement which I thought dead.' He did describe, however,
and drew magnificent pictures of the towns and palaces, and the
motley-coloured crowd which thronged the bazaars. Lytton Bulwer was one
of his London acquaintances. To him he wrote from Constantinople--
'I confess to you that my Turkish prejudices are very much confirmed by
my residence in Turkey. The life of this people greatly accords with my
taste. To repose on voluptuous divans and smoke superb pipes, daily to
indulge in the luxury of a bath which requires half a dozen attendants
for its perfection, to court the air in a carved caique by shores which
are a perpetual scene, and to find no exertion greater than a canter on
a barb, this I think a more sensible life than the bustle of clubs, the
boring of drawing-rooms, and the coarse vulgarity of our political
controversies.'
[Sidenote: THE PLAIN OF TROY]
Disraeli's English contemporaries who were aspiring to Parliamentary
fame, and with whom in a few years he was to cross swords, were already
learning the ways of the House of Commons, or training in subordinate
official harness. Little would any of those who saw him lounging on
divans, with a turban on his head and smoking cherry sticks longer than
himself, have dreamt that here was the man who was to rise above them
all and be Prime Minister of England. He too was forming himself for
something, though as yet he could not tell for what. Ambitious visions
haunted his imagination, even grander than he was ever to realise. On
their way back through the Dardanelles the party paused for a sight of
the Plain of Troy. As Disraeli stood on the sacred soil and gazed on the
grass mound which was called the tomb of Patroclus, the thought passed
through him that as the heroic age had produced its Homer, the Augustan
era its Virgil, the Renaissance its Dante, the Reformation its Milton,
why should not the revolutionary epoch produce its representative poet?
Why should not that poet be himself? Why not but for two reasons? that
the modern European revolution is disintegration and not growth, the
product of man's feebleness, not of his greatness, and therefore no
subject for a poem; and again because Disraeli could never learn to
detach himself from his work and forget the fame with which success was
to reward him; and therefore to be a poet was not among the gifts which
the Fates had in store for him. It was well for him, however, to indulge
the dream. No man ever rises to greatness in this world who does not aim
at objects beyond his powers.
Cyprus followed, and then Jaffa, and from Jaffa they crossed the
mountains to Jerusalem. Disraeli was not given to veneration, but if he
venerated anything it was the genius and destiny of his own race. Even
the Holy City could not transport him out of himself, but it affected
him more than anything which he had ever seen in his life. The elaborate
but artificial account of his impressions, which is to be read in
'Tancred,' is a recollection of what he wrote to his sister about twenty
years before.
'From Jaffa, a party of six, well mounted and armed, we departed for
Jerusalem, and crossed the plain of Ramle, vast and fertile. Ramle--the
ancient Arimathea--is the model of one's idea of a beautiful Syrian
village--all the houses isolated and each surrounded by palm trees; the
meadows and the exterior of the village covered with olive trees, or
divided by rich plantations of Indian fig.... Next day, at length, after
crossing a vast hill, we saw the Holy City. I will describe it to you
from the Mount of Olives. This is a high hill, still partially covered
with the tree which gives it its name. Jerusalem is situated upon an
opposite height which descends as a steep ravine and forms, with the
assistance of the Mount of Olives, the narrow valley of Jehosaphat.
Jerusalem is entirely surrounded by an old feudal wall, with towers and
gates of the time of the crusaders, and in perfect preservation. As the
town is built upon a hill you can from the opposite height discern the
roof of almost every house. In the front is the magnificent mosque built
upon the site of the Temple. A variety of domes and towers rise in all
directions. The houses are of bright stone. I was thunderstruck. I saw
before me apparently a gorgeous city. Nothing can be conceived more wild
and terrible and barren than the surrounding scenery, dark, strong, and
severe; but the ground is thrown about in such picturesque undulation
that the mind [being] full of the sublime, not the beautiful, rich and
waving woods and sparkling cultivation would be misplaced.
[Sidenote: JERUSALEM]
'Except Athens I never saw anything more essentially striking, no city
except that whose sight was so pre-eminently impressive. I will not
place it below the city of Minerva. Athens and Jerusalem in their glory
must have been the first representatives of the beautiful and the
sublime. Jerusalem in its present state would make a wonderful subject
for Martin, and a picture from him could alone give you an idea of it.
'This week has been the most delightful of all our travels. We dined
every day on the roof of a house by moonlight; visited the Holy
Sepulchre of course, though avoided the other _coglionerie_. The House
of Loretto is probability to them. But the Easterns will believe
anything. Tombs of the Kings very fine. Weather delicious; mild summer
heat. Made an immense sensation. Received visits from the Vicar-General
of the Pope, two Spanish priors, &c.... Mr. Briggs, the great Egyptian
merchant, has written from England to say that great attention is to be
paid me, because I am the son of the celebrated author.'
The extracts must be cut short. The visit to Jerusalem was in February
1831. In April Disraeli was in Egypt, and ascended the Nile to Thebes.
'Conceive a feverish and tumultuous dream full of triumphial gates,
processions of paintings, interminable walls of heroic sculpture,
granite colossi of gods and kings, prodigious obelisks, avenues of
sphinxes, and halls of a thousand columns thirty feet in girth and of
proportionate height. My eyes and mind yet ache with a grandeur so
little in unison with our own littleness. The landscape was quite
characteristic; mountains of burning sand. Vegetation unnaturally vivid,
groves of cocoa trees, groups of crocodiles, and an ebony population in
a state of nudity armed with spears of reeds.'
Far in the future lay the Suez Canal and the influence which the young
visitor was one day to exercise over the fortunes of Egypt. The tour was
over. His health was recovered. He was to return to England and take to
work again, uncertain as yet whether he was not to go back to his Coke
and Blackstone. His thoughts for the present were turned on Bradenham
and its inmates. A chest of Eastern armour, pipes, and other curiosities
was ready-packed at the end of May, to accompany him home for the
decoration of the hall. On May 28 he wrote in high spirits of his
approaching return: 'I am delighted with my father's progress. How I
long to be with him, dearest of men, flashing our quills together,
standing together in our chivalry as we will do, now that I have got the
use of my brain for the first time in my life.'
These letters from abroad, and the pictures which Disraeli draws of
himself and of his adventures in them, show him as he really was, making
no effort to produce an effect, in the easy undress of family
confidence, not without innocent vanities, but light-hearted and gay at
one moment, at another deeply impressionable with anything which was
interesting or beautiful. The affectations which so strongly
characterised his public appearances were but a dress deliberately
assumed, to be thrown off when he left the stage like a theatrical
wardrobe.
The expedition, which had remained so bright to the end, unhappily had a
tragic close. On the eve of departure William Meredith caught the
small-pox at Alexandria, and died after a few days' illness. His
marriage with Sarah Disraeli was to have taken place immediately after
their arrival in England. The loss to her was too deep for reparation;
she remained single to her own life's close. To Disraeli himself the
shock gave 'inexpressible sorrow,' and 'cast a gloom over him for many
years.'
CHAPTER IV
'Contarini Fleming'--The Poetical Life--Paternal advice--A Poet, or not
a Poet?--'Revolutionary Epic'--Unfavourable verdict--Success of the
Novels--Disraeli a new Star--London Society--Political ambition--Mrs.
Wyndham Lewis--Financial embarrassments--Portraits of Disraeli by N.
P. Willis--Lady Dufferin and others--Stands for High Wycombe--Speech
at the Red Lion--Tory Radicalism--Friendship with Lord
Lyndhurst--Self-confidence--Vindication of the British
Constitution--Conservative Reaction--Taunton Election--Crosses swords
with O'Connell--The Runnymede Letters---Admitted into the Carlton
Club--'Henrietta Temple' and 'Venetia.'
[Sidenote: CHOICE OF A PROFESSION]
The law had not been finally abandoned--perhaps in deference to Isaac
Disraeli's continued anxiety on the subject. Schemes and projects,
however, which had shaped themselves in Disraeli's own mind during his
travels had to be executed first. He brought home with him a brain
restored to energy, though with saddened spirits. There was the
'Revolutionary Epic' to be written, and an Eastern story which was
brought out afterwards as the tale of 'Alroy.' Before undertaking either
of them, however, he drew a second portrait of himself in 'Contarini
Fleming.' Vivian Grey was a clever, independent youth, with the world
before him, with no purpose save to make himself conspicuous. Disraeli
now hoped to be a poet, and in 'Contarini' his aim, he said, was to
trace the development and function of the poetic character. The
flippancy of 'Vivian' is gone. The tone is calm, tender, and at times
morbid. The hero is taken through a series of adventures. He tries
politics, but politics do not interest him. He falls in love. The lady
of his affections dies and leaves him in despair. Contarini revives to
find a desire, and perhaps a capacity--for he cannot be confident that
he is not deceiving himself--to become the poet which Disraeli was then
aspiring to make himself. The outward characteristics of that character
could at least be assumed. Contarini becomes a wanderer like Byron, and
visits the same scenes from which Disraeli had just returned. The book
contains passages of striking beauty, so striking that Goethe sent
praises and compliments, and Milman, who reviewed it, said it was a work
in no way inferior to 'Childe Harold,' and equally calculated to arrest
public attention. Yet the story ends in nothing. The river loses itself
in the sands. Contarini is but Disraeli himself in the sick period of
undetermined energies. He meditates on the great problems of life, and
arrives at the conclusions adopted almost universally by intellectual
men before they have learnt to strike out their course and to control
circumstances and their own nature.
'I believe in that destiny before which the ancients bowed. Modern
philosophy has infused into the breast of man a spirit of scepticism,
but I think that ere long science will become again imaginative, and
that as we become more profound we may also become more credulous.
Destiny is our will, and our will is nature. The son who inherits the
organisation of the father will be doomed to the same fortunes as his
sire, and again the mysterious matter in which his ancestors were
moulded may in other forms, by a necessary attraction, act upon his
fate. All is mystery; but he is a slave who will not struggle to
penetrate the mystery.'
Such passages as this were not ominous of much success in the high
functions to which Contarini was aspiring. Much more interesting,
because more natural, is a dialogue which was probably an exact
reproduction of a conversation between Disraeli and his father. The
father of Contarini entirely objects to his son's proposed destination
of himself.
'A poet!' exclaims the old man. 'What were the great poets in their
lifetime? The most miserable of their species--depressed, doubtful,
obscure, or involved in petty quarrels and petty persecutions; often
unappreciated, utterly uninfluential, beggars, flatterers of men,
unworthy even of their recognition. What a train of disgustful
incidents! what a record of degrading circumstances is the life of a
great poet! A man of great energies aspires that they should be felt in
his lifetime; that his existence should be rendered more intensely vital
by the constant consciousness of his multiplied and multiplying powers.
Is posthumous fame a substitute for all this? Try the greatest by this
test, and what is the result? Would you rather have been Homer or Julius
Cæsar, Shakespeare or Napoleon? No one doubts. We are active beings, and
our sympathy, above all other sympathies, is with great actions.
Remember that all this time I am taking for granted you may be a Homer.
Let us now recollect that it is perhaps the most impossible incident
that can occur. The high poetic talent, as if to prove that the poet is
only at the best a wild, although beautiful, error of nature, is the
rarest in creation. What you have felt is what I have felt myself. Mix
in society and I will answer for it that you lose your poetic feeling;
for in you, as in the great majority, it is not a matter of faculty
originating in a peculiar organisation, but simply the consequence of
nervous susceptibility that is common to us all.'
Contarini admits the truth of what his father said, but answers that his
ambition is great, as if he must find some means to satisfy it. He did
not think he would find life tolerable unless he was in an eminent
position, and was conscious that he deserved it. Fame, and not
posthumous fame, was necessary to his felicity. Such a feeling might
lead to exertion, and on some roads might lead to success; but poetry is
a jealous mistress and must be pursued for her own sake if her favours
are ever to be won. Disraeli would not part with his hope till the
experiment had been tried. He destroyed a tragedy which he had already
composed; but he was better satisfied with his 'Revolutionary Epic.'
Three cantos were written, and fifty copies were printed. These he
resolved to submit to the judgment of his friends. If the verdict was
unfavourable he would burn his lyre.
[Sidenote: THE REVOLUTIONARY EPIC]
The recitation was at a party at Mrs. Austen's, and a scene is thus
described which 'was never to be forgotten' by those who witnessed it.
'There was something irresistibly comic in the young man dressed in the
fantastic coxcombical costume that he then affected--velvet coat thrown
wide open, ruffles on the sleeves, shirt collars turned down in Byronic
fashion, an elaborate embroidered waistcoat from which issued voluminous
folds of frill, shoes adorned with red rosettes, his black hair
pomatumed and elaborately curled, and his person redolent with perfume.
Standing with his back to the fire, he explained the purpose of his
poem. It was to be to the revolutionary age what the 'Iliad,' the
'Æneid,' and 'Paradise Lost' had been to their respective epochs. He
had imagined the genius of feudalism and the genius of federation
appearing before the almightly throne and pleading their respective and
antagonistic causes.'[1]
With this prelude he recited his first canto. It was not without
passages sonorous and even grand, but the subject itself was hopeless.
Disraeli had not yet discerned that modern revolution had nothing grand
about it, that it was merely the resolution of society into its
component atoms, that centuries would have to pass before any new
arrangement possessing worth or dignity would rise out of the ruin. The
audience was favourably disposed, but when the poet left the room a
gentleman present declaimed an impromptu burlesque of the opening lines,
which caused infinite merriment to those present. Disraeli said
afterwards of himself that in his life he had tried many things, and
though he had at first failed he succeeded at last. This was true; but
poetry was not one of these many things. He was wise enough to accept
the unfavourable verdict, and to recognise that, although his ambition
was feverish as ever, on this road there were no triumphs before him.
The dream that he could become a great poet was broken.
[Sidenote: POLITICAL AMBITION]
His prose writings deserved better and fared better. 'Contarini Fleming'
and the tale of 'Alroy' were well received. Milman, as was said above,
compared 'Contarini' to 'Childe Harold.' Beckford found 'Alroy' wildly
original, full of intense thought, awakening, delightful. Both these
eminent critics were too lavish of their praise, but they expressed the
general opinion. The fame of 'Vivian Grey' was revived. The literary
world acknowledged that a new star had appeared, and Disraeli became a
London lion. The saloons of the great were thrown open to him. Bulwer he
knew already. At Bulwer's house he was introduced to Count d'Orsay,
Lady Morgan, Mrs. Norton, Mrs. Gore, and other notabilities. Lady
Blessington welcomed him at Kensington. Flying higher he made
acquaintance with Lord Mulgrave, Lord William Lennox, and Tom Moore. He
frequented the fashionable smoking-rooms, sporting his Eastern
acquirements. A distinguished colonel, supposing that he meant to push
his good fortune, gave him a friendly warning. 'Take care, my good
fellow. I lost the most beautiful woman in the world by smoking; it has
prevented more liaisons than the dread of a duel or Doctors' Commons.'
'You have proved it a very moral habit,' replied Disraeli. His ambition
did not run in the line which the colonel suspected. Success as a
novelist might gratify vanity, but could never meet Disraeli's
aspirations. He met public men, and studied the ways of them, dimly
feeling that theirs was the sphere where he could best distinguish
himself. At a dinner at Lord Eliot's he sat next to Peel. 'Peel most
gracious,' he reported to his sister next day.[2] 'He is a very great
man indeed, and they all seem afraid of him. I observed that he attacked
his turbot almost entirely with his knife. I could conceive that he
could be very disagreeable; but yesterday he was in a most condescending
humour, and unbent with becoming haughtiness. I reminded him by my
dignified familiarity both that he was an ex-Minister and I a present
Radical.' He went to the gallery of the House of Commons, 'heard
Macaulay's best speech, Shiel, and Charles Grant. Macaulay admirable,
but between ourselves I could floor them all. This _entre nous_. I was
never more confident of anything than that I could carry everything
before me in that House.' In that House, perhaps. He knew that he had a
devil of a tongue, that he was clever, ready, without fear, and, however
vain, without the foolish form of vanity which is called modesty. He had
studied politics all his life, and having no interests at stake with
either of the great parties, and, as being half a foreigner, lying
outside them both, he could take a position of his own. In that House;
but, again, how was he to get there? Young men of genius may be invited
to dinners in the great world, but seats in Parliament will be only
found for them if they will put on harness and be docile in the shafts.
Disraeli had shown no qualities which promised official usefulness; he
called himself a Radical, but he was a Radical in his own sense of the
word. He did not talk democratic platitudes, and insisted that if he
entered Parliament he would enter it independent of party ties.
Notoriety as a novelist even in these more advanced days is no
recommendation to a constituency, unless backed by money or connection,
and of these Disraeli had none.
One chance only seemed to offer. There was a possibility of a vacancy at
High Wycombe, close to his father's house. There he was personally
known, and there, if the opportunity were offered, he intended to try.
Meantime he extended his London acquaintance, and one friend he acquired
the importance of whom to his future career he little dreamt of. He was
introduced by Lytton Bulwer, 'at particular desire,' to Mrs. Wyndham
Lewis, 'a pretty little woman,' he says, 'a flirt and a rattle--indeed,
gifted with a volubility, I should think, unequalled. She told me she
liked silent, melancholy men. I answered that I had no doubt of it.'
[Sidenote: DISRAELI IN SOCIETY]
The intimacy with Mrs. Wyndham Lewis was matured, and was extended to
her husband, a gentleman of large fortune and member for Maidstone.
Meantime his chief associates in London were the set who gathered about
Lady Blessington, young men of fashion and questionable reputation, who
were useful to him perhaps as 'studies' for his novels, but otherwise of
a value to him less than zero. Although he never raced, never gambled,
or gave way to any kind of dissipation, his habits of life were
expensive, and his books, though they sold well, brought him money in
insufficient quantity. His fashionable impecunious friends who wanted
loans induced him to introduce them to men in the City who knew him, or
who knew his connections. These persons were ready to make advances if
Disraeli would give his own name as an additional security. The bills,
when due, were not paid. Disraeli had to borrow for himself to meet
them,[3] and to borrow afterwards on his own account. When he was once
involved the second step was easy, and this was the beginning of
difficulties which at one time brought him to the edge of ruin. He was
careless, however, careless in such matters even to the end of his life.
His extraordinary confidence in his own powers never allowed him to
doubt.
Several sketches of him have been preserved as he appeared in these
years in the London world. N. P. Willis, the American, met him at a
party at Lady Blessington's.
'He was sitting in a window looking on Hyde Park, the last rays of
sunlight reflected from the gorgeous gold flowers of a splendidly
embroidered waistcoat. Patent leather pumps, a white stick with a black
cord and tassel, and a quantity of chains about his neck and pockets,
served to make him a conspicuous object. He has one of the most
remarkable faces I ever saw. He is lividly pale, and but for the energy
of his action and the strength of his lungs would seem to be a victim of
consumption. His eye is black as Erebus, and has the most mocking, lying
in wait sort of expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind
of working and impatient nervousness; and when he has burst forth, as he
does constantly, with a particularly successful cataract of expression,
it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be worthy of
Mephistopheles. His hair is as extraordinary as his taste in waistcoats.
A thick, heavy mass of jet black ringlets falls on his left cheek almost
to his collarless stock, which on the right temple is parted and put
away with the smooth carefulness of a girl. The conversation turned on
Beckford. I might as well attempt to gather up the foam of the sea as to
convey an idea of the extraordinary language in which he clothed his
description. He talked like a racehorse approaching the winning post,
every muscle in action.'
His dress was purposed affectation. It led the listener to look for only
folly from him, and when a brilliant flash broke out it was the more
startling as being so utterly unlooked for from such a figure. Perhaps
he overacted his extravagance. Lady Dufferin told Mr. Motley that when
she first met him at a dinner party he wore a black velvet coat lined
with satin, purple trousers with a gold band running down the outside
seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles falling down to the tips of
his fingers, white gloves with several brilliant rings outside them, and
long black ringlets rippling down upon his shoulders. She told him that
he made a fool of himself by appearing in such fantastic shape, never
guessing for what reason it had been adopted.
Here is another picture from Mr. Madden's memoirs of Lady
Blessington:--'I frequently met Disraeli at her house. Though in general
society he was usually silent and reserved, he was closely observant. It
required generally a subject of more than common interest to animate
and stimulate him into the exercise of his marvellous powers of
conversation. When duly excited, however, his command of language was
truly wonderful, his powers of sarcasm unsurpassed. The readiness of his
wit, the quickness of his perception, the grasp of his mind, that
enabled him to seize all the points of any subject under discussion,
persons would only call in question who had never been in his company at
the period I refer to.'
[Sidenote: HIGH WYCOMBE]
Such was Disraeli when, in the summer of 1832, he offered himself as a
candidate to the electors of High Wycombe. The expected vacancy had
occurred. It was the last election under the unreformed constituency.
The voters were only some forty or fifty in number. One seat in the
borough had been a family property of the Whig Carringtons; the other
was under the influence of Sir Thomas Baring, whose interest went with
the Government. Disraeli started as a Radical. He desired generally to
go into Parliament as a profession, as other men go to the Bar, to make
his way to consequence and to fortune. But he did not mean to take any
brief which might be offered him. He was infected to some extent by the
general Reform enthusiasm. Lord Grey's measure had taken half their
power from the aristocracy and the landed interest, and had given it to
the middle classes. There the Whigs desired to stop and to put off the
hungry multitude (who expected to be better clothed and fed and housed)
with flash notes on the Bank of Liberty. Ardent young men of ability
had small belief in the virtues of the middle classes. They were
thinking of a Reform which was to make an end of injustice and misery, a
remodelling of the world. Carlyle, in the Dumfriesshire Highlands,
caught the infection, and believed for a time in the coming of a new
era. Disraeli conceived that 'Toryism was worn out, and he could not
condescend to be a Whig.' He started against the Carringtons on the line
of the enthusiasts, advocating the ballot and triennial Parliaments. For
cant of all kinds he had the natural hatred which belongs to real
ability. The rights of man to what was called liberty he never meddled
with. He desired practical results. His dislike of the Whigs recommended
him to their enemies, and half his friends in the borough were Tories.
The local newspapers supported him as an independent. But help was
welcome from any quarter but the Whigs. Bulwer, who worked hard for him,
procured commendatory letters from O'Connell, Burdett, and Hume, and
these letters were placarded ostentatiously in the Wycombe market-place.
The Government was in alarm for Sir T. Baring's seat; Colonel Grey, Lord
Grey's son, was brought down as their candidate. Isaac Disraeli seems to
have stood aloof and to have left his son to his own resources. Disraeli
himself did not mean to lose for want of displaying himself. He drove
into Wycombe in an open carriage and four, dressed with his usual
extravagance--laced shirt, coat with pink lining, and the morning cane
which had so impressed the Gibraltar subalterns. Colonel Grey had
arrived on his first visit to the borough, and Disraeli seized the
opportunity of his appearance for an impromptu address. 'All Wycombe was
assembled,' he wrote, describing the scene. 'Feeling it was the crisis,
I jumped upon the portico of the 'Red Lion' and gave it them for an hour
and a quarter. I can give you no idea of the effect. I made them all
mad. A great many absolutely cried. I never made so many friends in my
life, and converted so many enemies. All the women are on my side, and
wear my colours--pink and white.' Colonel Grey told Bulwer that he never
heard a finer command of words. Wycombe was prouder than ever of its
brilliant neighbour; but of course he failed. Hume had shaken the
Radicals by withdrawing his support before the election; Government
influence and the Carringtons did the rest. Disraeli, however, had made
a beginning and never let himself be disheartened.
This election was in June. On August 16 Parliament was dissolved, and he
offered himself a second time to the new constituency. He invited them,
in his address, to have done with 'political jargon,' to 'make an end of
the factious slang of Whig and Tory, two names with one meaning, and
only to delude the people,' and to 'unite in forming a great national
party.' 'I come before you,' he said, 'to oppose this disgusting system
of factions; I come forward wearing the badge of no party and the livery
of no faction. I seek your suffrages as an independent neighbour.... I
will withhold my support from every Ministry which will not originate
some great measure to ameliorate the condition of the lower orders.'
This too was not to serve him. Party government may be theoretically
absurd when the rivalry is extended from measures to men. When the
functions of an Opposition are not merely to resist what it disapproves,
but to dethrone the other side, that they may step into its place, we
have a civil war in the midst of us, and a civil war which can never end
because the strength of the combatants is periodically renewed at the
hustings. Lord Lyndhurst and the Duke of Wellington were by this time
interested in Disraeli.
'The Duke and the Chancellor are besetting old Carrington in my favour,'
he wrote. 'They say he must yield. I am not sanguine, but was
recommended to issue the address. The Duke wrote a strong letter to the
chairman of the election committee, saying if Wycombe was not ensured
something else must be done for Disraeli, as a man of his acquirements
and reputation must not be thrown away. L. showed me the letter, but it
is impossible to say how things will go. It is impossible for anyone to
be warmer than the Duke or Lyndhurst, and I ought to say the same of
Chandos.'
The Carrington family would not yield; Disraeli was defeated again, and
it became clear that he must look elsewhere than to Wycombe. More than
one seat might have been secured for him if he would have committed
himself to a side, but he still insisted that if he entered Parliament
he would enter it unfettered by pledges. There was an expected chance at
Marylebone. When he proposed himself as a candidate he was asked on what
he intended to stand. 'On my head,' he answered. Lyndhurst wished him to
stand at Lynn as a friend of Lord Chandos. Lord Durham offered to return
him as a Radical. 'He must be a mighty independent personage,' observed
Charles Greville, when he persisted in the same reply. He realised by
degrees that he was making himself impossible, but he would not yield
without a further effort. There was curiosity about him, which he
perhaps overrated, for he published a pamphlet as a self-advertisement,
with the title 'What is He?' of the same ambitiously neutral tint. His
object now was to make himself notorious, and the pamphlet, he said,
'was as much a favourite with the Tories as with the Rads.'
[Sidenote: O'CONNELL AND THE WHIGS]
In society he was everywhere, dining with Lyndhurst, dining with
O'Connell, or at least invited to dine with him, at fêtes and water
parties, at balls and suppers. D'Orsay painted his picture. The world
would have spoilt him with vanity if his self-confidence had not been
already so great that it would admit of no increase. His debts were
growing. He had again borrowed for his election expenses. It was hinted
to him that he might mend his fortune by marriage. 'Would you like Lady
---- for a sister-in-law?' he says in a letter to Miss Disraeli. 'Very
clever, 25,000_l._, and domestic.' 'As for love,' he added, 'all my
friends who married for love and beauty either beat their wives or live
apart from them. This is literally the case. I may commit many follies
in life, but I never intend to marry for love, which I am sure is a
guarantee for infelicity.'
Whatever might be his faults he was no paltry fortune-hunter. He
trusted to himself, and only himself. He did not sit down upon his
disappointments. The press at any rate was open to him. He wrote
incessantly, 'passing days in constant composition.' In the season he
was always in London; in the winter either at Bradenham or at some quiet
place by himself, riding for health and 'living solely on snipes.'
Determined to be distinguished, he even made a show, and not a bad one,
in the hunting field. Writing from Southend in 1834, he says, 'Hunted
the other day with Sir H. Smythe's hounds, and though not in pink was
the best mounted man in the field, riding an Arabian mare, which I
nearly killed--a run of thirty miles, and I stopped at nothing.'
It was as a politician that he was desiring to keep himself before
men's eyes, if not in Parliament yet as a political writer; his pen was
busy with a 'Vindication of the British Constitution,' but he meant also
to be known for the manly qualities which Englishmen respect.
Public events meantime hastened on. In England after each rush in the
direction of Liberalism there is always a reaction. Within two years of
the passing of the Reform Bill Lord Grey and his friends had disgusted
the Radicals in Parliament. The working men, finding that they had been
fed with chaff instead of corn, had turned to Chartism. The Tories
closed up their broken ranks. The king dismissed the Ministers, and sent
to Rome for Peel to take the helm. The step itself may have been
premature; but Sir Robert was able to take a commanding position before
the country, and form a party strong enough to hold the Whigs in check
if too weak to prevent their returning to office. Disraeli, though he
never much liked Peel, had found by this time that there was no place in
Parliament for a man who had a position to make for himself, unless he
joined one party or the other. He swallowed his pride, probably on the
advice of Lyndhurst, with whom he was now on intimate terms. The cant of
Radicalism was distasteful to him. The Whigs were odious. He made up his
mind to enlist under Peel. In the spring of 1835 Lord Melbourne came
back in alliance with O'Connell, while the world was ringing with the
Rathcormack massacre. Thirteen lives had been lost, and 'something was
to be done' for the pacification of Ireland. 'O'Connell is so powerful,'
wrote Disraeli, 'that he says he will be in the Cabinet. How can the
Whigs submit to this? It is the Irish Catholic party that has done all
this mischief.' O'Connell was not taken into the Cabinet, but under the
new arrangement would be more powerful than if restrained by office.
Disraeli, who had shown in 'Popanilla' what he thought about the English
administration of that unfortunate island, had said openly that large
changes were needed there, but it was another thing to truckle to
anarchy and threats of rebellion.
[Sidenote: SPEECH AT TAUNTON]
Mr. Labouchere, the member for Taunton, was in the new Ministry. Custom
required that he should resign his seat and be re-elected. Disraeli,
supported by the Carlton Club, went down to oppose him in the Tory
interest. He was late in the field. He soon saw that for the present
occasion at least he must again fail; but he found supporters enough to
make it worth his while to fight and keep himself conspicuous. 'As to
Taunton itself,' he wrote in the heat of the conflict,[4] 'the
enthusiasm of Wycombe is a miniature to it, and I believe in point of
energy, eloquence, and effect I have far exceeded my former efforts.' He
was beaten, though two-thirds of the electors promised him their votes
on the next opportunity. The Taunton election went by, and would have
been forgotten like a thousand others but for an incident which grew out
of it. Disraeli desired notoriety, and notoriety he was to have. The
Irish alliance was not popular in England. Irish alliances never are
popular when the meaning of them is to purchase the support of a
disloyal faction, to turn the scale in a struggle for power between
English parties. Such an alliance had been last tried by Strafford and
Charles I., with unpleasant consequences both to them and to Ireland.
Now the Whigs were trying the same game--the Whigs, who were the heirs
of the Long Parliament. The combination of English Liberals and Irish
Papists was in itself a monstrous anomaly. Disraeli had no personal
dislike of O'Connell, and had been grateful for his support at Wycombe;
but he was now retained on the Tory side, and he used the weapons which
were readiest to his hand. In one of the speeches which he thought so
successful he had called O'Connell an incendiary, and spoke of the Whigs
as 'grasping his bloody hand.' The Protestant Somersetshire yeomen
no doubt cheered him to his heart's content. The speech, being
exceptionally smart, was reported at length and fell under O'Connell's
eyes. O'Connell was good-natured, but he knew Disraeli only as a young
politician whom he had asked to dinner and had endeavoured to serve.
Disraeli had gone out of his way to call him bad names, he might well
have thought ungraciously and ungratefully. He was himself the
unrivalled master of personal abuse. He saw an opening for a bitter
joke, and very naturally used it. At a public meeting in Dublin he
mentioned the part which he had taken at Wycombe; he had been repaid, he
said, by an atrocity of the foulest description.
'The miscreant had the audacity to style me an incendiary. I was a
greater incendiary in 1831 than I am at present, if ever I was one, and
he is doubly so for having employed me. He calls me a traitor; my answer
to this is, he is a liar. His life is a living lie. He is the most
degraded of his species and kind, and England is degraded in tolerating
and having on the face of her society a miscreant of his abominable,
foul, and atrocious nature. His name shows that he is by descent a Jew.
They were once the chosen people of God. There were miscreants amongst
them, however, also, and it must certainly have been from one of those
that Disraeli descended. He possesses just the qualities of the
impenitent thief that died upon the cross, whose name I verily believe
must have been Disraeli. For aught I know the present Disraeli is
descended from him, and with the impression that he is I now forgive the
heir at law of the blasphemous thief that died upon the cross.'
[Sidenote: O'CONNELL AND DISRAELI]
All the world shouted with laughter. The hit was good, and the
provocation, it was generally felt, had been on Disraeli's side. But
there are limits to license of tongue even in political recrimination,
and it was felt also that O'Connell had transgressed those limits. An
insult so keen and bitter could be met in one way only. Disraeli had
already been spattered by the mud which flies so freely in English
political contests. He had found that 'the only way to secure future
ease was to take up a proper position early in life, and to show that he
would not be insulted with impunity.' He put himself into the hands of
Count d'Orsay. D'Orsay considered that a foreigner should not interfere
in a political duel, and found Disraeli another friend; but he undertook
himself the management of the affair. O'Connell having once killed an
antagonist on an occasion of this kind, had 'registered a vow in heaven'
that he would never fight again. But Morgan O'Connell had recently
fought Lord Alvanley in his father's behalf, and was now invited to
answer for the Dublin speech. If he was to meet every person who had
suffered from his father's tongue his life would have been a short one.
He replied that he had fought Lord Alvanley because Lord Alvanley had
insulted his father; he was not accountable for what his father might
say of other people. Disraeli undertook to obviate this difficulty. He
addressed O'Connell in a letter published in the 'Times,' which, if less
pungent, at least met Morgan O'Connell's objection. 'Although,' he said,
'you have placed yourself out of the pale of civilisation I am one who
will not be insulted even by a yahoo without chastising it.... I admire
your scurrilous allusion to my origin; it is clear the hereditary
bondsman has already forgotten the clank of his fetters.... I had
nothing to appeal to but the good sense of the people. No threatening
skeleton canvassed for me. A death's-head and cross-bones were not
blazoned on my banners; my pecuniary resources too were limited. I am
not one of those public beggars that we see swarming with their
obtrusive boxes in the chapels of your creed, nor am I in possession of
a princely revenue from a starving race of fanatical slaves.'
He expected, he said in conclusion, to be a representative of the people
before the repeal of the Union. 'We shall meet at Philippi.'
Disraeli waited at home till the night of the day on which the letter
appeared for the effect of his missive. No notice being taken of it, 'he
dressed and went to the opera.' When Peel had challenged O'Connell some
years before, the police interfered; on this occasion the same thing had
happened. 'As I was lying in bed this morning,' Disraeli wrote on May 9
to his sister, 'the police officers from Marylebone rushed into my
chamber and took me into custody. I am now bound to keep the peace in
500_l._ sureties--a most unnecessary precaution, as if all the
O'Connells were to challenge me I could not think of meeting them now.
The general effect is the thing, and that is that all men agree I have
shown pluck.'
[Sidenote: NOVELS AND SPEECHES]
If Disraeli gained nothing by this encounter he at least lost nothing.
He was more than ever talked about, and he had won approval from a high
authority at any rate. 'You have no idea,' said Lord Strangford to him,
'of the sensation produced at Strathfieldsaye. The Duke said at dinner
it was the most manly thing done yet.' On one side only his outlook was
unfavourable. The Taunton election had been a fresh expense. He had
again to borrow, and his creditors became pressing. Judgments were out
against him for more debts than he could meet. About this time--the date
cannot be fixed exactly, but the fact is certain--a sheriff's officer
appeared at Wycombe on the way to Bradenham to arrest him. Dr. Rose,[5]
a medical man in the town, heard of the arrival, and sent on an express
with a warning 'to hide Ben in the well.' Affairs were again
smoothed over for the moment. 'Ben,' undaunted as ever, worked on
upon his own lines. He completed his 'Vindication of the British
Constitution'--vindication rather of Democratic Toryism--amidst the
harassing of duns. It was dedicated to Lyndhurst, and Lyndhurst paid him
a visit at his father's house. He had a smart quarrel with the 'Globe'
over a revival of the O'Connell business. In the spring of 1836 appeared
the Runnymede letters in the 'Times,' philippics against the Whig
leaders after the manner of Junius. He was elected at the Carlton Club,
to his great satisfaction, and when the newspapers abused him he quoted
a saying of Swift, 'that the appearance of a man of genius in the world
may be always known by the virulence of dunces.' To assist his finances
a proposal was made to him 'to edit the "Arabian Nights" with notes and
an additional tale by the author of "Vivian Grey."' He described it as
'a job which would not take up more than a month of his time' and by
which he might make 'twelve or fifteen hundred pounds.' Happily for his
literary reputation this adventure was not prosecuted. Some one in the
City introduced him to a speculation connected with a Dutch loan, which
took him twice to the Hague and taught him the mysteries of finance.
More legitimately in the midst of embarrassments and platform speeches
he wrote 'Henrietta Temple' and 'Venetia,' the first a pretty love-story
which offered no opportunities for his peculiar gifts, the second an
attempt to exhibit in a novel the characters of Byron and Shelley. They
would have made a reputation for an ordinary writer. They sustained the
public interest in Disraeli. Of his speeches there was one at Wycombe in
which he said that there would be no tranquillity in Ireland 'till the
Irish people enjoyed the right to which the people of all countries were
entitled, to be maintained by the soil which they cultivated with their
labour.' In another there is a prophetic passage. 'I cannot force from
my mind the conviction that a House of Commons concentrating in itself
the whole powers of the State might--I should say would--constitute a
despotism of the most formidable and dangerous description.' A third was
the celebrated Ducrow speech--the Whig Premier as Ducrow first riding
six horses at once, and as they foundered one by one left at last riding
a jackass, which showed what Disraeli could do as a mob orator when he
chose to condescend to it.
Bulwer said of one of these speeches that it was the finest in the
world, and of one of the novels that it was the very worst. The
criticism was smartly worded, and on both sides exaggerated; but it was
true that, if Disraeli had been undistinguished as a speaker, his early
novels would have been as the 'flowers of the field,' charming for the
day that was passing over them and then forgotten. His political
apprenticeship was at last over; the object of his ambition, the so
deeply coveted seat in the House of Commons, was within his reach, and
he was to pass into his proper sphere--to pass into it too while still
young, for after all that he had done and experienced he was still only
thirty-three. Few men, with the odds so heavy against them, had risen so
high in so short a time.
CHAPTER V
Returned to Parliament for Maidstone--Takes his place behind Sir R.
Peel--Maiden speech--Silenced by violence--Peel's opinion of
it--Advice of Shiel--Second speech on Copyright completely
successful--State of politics--England in a state of change--Break-up
of ancient institutions--Land and its duties--Political Economy and
Free Trade--Struggle on the Corn Laws.
The acquaintance with Mr. and Mrs. Wyndham Lewis had grown into a close
friendship. Mr. Lewis, as has been said, was member for Maidstone, and
had large local influence in the borough. The death of William IV., in
the summer of 1837, dissolved Parliament; and Disraeli, being adopted by
Mr. Lewis as his colleague, was returned by an easy majority. The
election again gave the Whigs a majority, but not a large one. The tide
was fast ebbing, and the time was near when the Conservatives, as the
Tories now called themselves, were to see the balance turn in their
favour. Lord Melbourne meanwhile remained Minister, but a Minister who
desired to be able to do nothing. Ministers with a powerful party behind
them are driven occasionally into measures which they would have
preferred to avoid. The electors who have given them power require them
to use it. Whigs and Tories alike know that their time will be short
unless by some sensational policy they can gratify public expectation.
Nothing was expected of Lord Melbourne, and persons who dreaded change
of any kind, from whichever side it might come, were satisfied that it
should be so. I remember Bishop Philpotts rubbing his hands over the
situation, and saying that he hoped never more to see a strong
Government.
It was a time of 'slack water;' nevertheless Disraeli was supremely
happy. He had now a career open before him, and a career in which he was
certain that he could distinguish himself. His delight was boyish. He
said, 'It makes a difference in public opinion of me.' The election was
in July, and Parliament met in November. He took his seat on the second
bench behind Peel, a place which he intended, if possible, to secure for
himself. Peel's character had rallied the Conservative party, and to
Peel personally they looked for guidance. Yarde Buller being asked his
opinion on some question, replied that Peel had not made up his mind;
Old Toryism was gone with Lord Eldon; the Reform Bill, once passed, was
to be the law of the land. Disraeli had no personal interest in any of
the great questions which divided English opinion. He owned no land; he
was unconnected with trade; he had none of the hereditary prepossessions
of a native Englishman. He was merely a volunteer on the side with
which, as a man of intellect, he had most natural sympathy. He took a
brief from the Conservatives, without remuneration in money, but
trusting to win fame, if not fortune, in an occupation for which he knew
that he was qualified. He began in the ranks, and Peel was his leader;
and his leader, till he had made a place for himself, he loyally
prepared to serve.
'Peel welcomed me very warmly,' he reported to Bradenham, 'and all
noticed his cordial demeanour. He looks very well, and asked me to join
a swell dinner at the Carlton on Thursday--a House of Commons dinner
purely,' he said. 'By that time we shall know something of the temper of
the House.' A fortnight later he mentioned, with evident pride, that he
had met Peel again, and Peel took wine with him.
[Sidenote: FINANCIAL EMBARRASSMENTS]
[Sidenote: MAIDEN SPEECH IN HOUSE OF COMMONS]
Success to Disraeli in the House of Commons was the alternative of a
financial catastrophe. His debts were large; money had been necessary to
him for the position to which he aspired. He had no securities to offer,
and never entangled friends in his pecuniary dealings. He had gone
frankly to the professional money-lenders, who had made advances to him
in a speculation upon his success. There was no deception on either
side--Disraeli was running his talents against the chance of failure. If
he succeeded the loans would be paid. If he did not succeed, the usurers
had played for a high stake and had lost it, that was all. At worst he
was but following the example of Burke and the younger Pitt. As his
bills fell due, they had been renewed at 8 and 10 per cent. and even
more, and when he commenced his political life would have been
formidable to anyone but himself. They were all eventually paid, and he
was never charged, even in thought, with having abused afterwards the
opportunities of power to relieve himself. But it was with this weight
upon his back that he began his Parliamentary career. He had started on
his own merits, for he had nothing else to recommend him, and he had
challenged fate by the pretensions which he had put forward for himself.
His birth was a reproach to be got over. He had no great constituency at
his back, no popular cause to represent. He was without the academic
reputation which so often smooths the entrance to public life, and the
Tory gentlemen, among whom he had taken his place, looked upon him with
dubious eyes. 'Had I been a political adventurer,' he said at Wycombe,
'I had nothing to do but join the Whigs.' The Radicals would have
welcomed him into their ranks; but the Radicals looked on him as an
apostate, as a mischievous insect to be crushed on the first
opportunity. The 'Globe' had assailed him brutally, and he had replied
in kind. 'The Whig Samson should never silence him with the jaw of an
ass. He would show the world what a miserable poltroon, what a craven
dullard, what a literary scarecrow, what a mere thing stuffed with straw
and rubbish was the _soi-disant_ director of public opinion and official
organ of Whig politics.' A first speech in the House of Commons is
usually treated with indulgence. The notoriety which Disraeli had
brought on himself by these encounters was to make him a solitary
exception. He had told O'Connell that they would meet at Philippi. Three
weeks after Disraeli had taken his seat there was a debate upon some
election manœuvres in Ireland. Hard blows had been exchanged. Sir F.
Burdett had called O'Connell a paid patriot. O'Connell had replied that
he had sacrificed a splendid professional income to defend his country's
rights. 'Was he for this to be vilified and traduced by an old
renegade?' Immediately after O'Connell Disraeli rose. His appearance was
theatrical, as usual. He was dressed in a bottle-green frock coat, with
a white waistcoat, collarless, and with needless display of gold chain.
His face was lividly pale, his voice and manner peculiar. He began
naturally and sensibly, keeping to the point of the debate. He was
cheered by his own side, and might have got through tolerably enough;
but the gentlemen below the gangway had determined that his Philippi
should not end with a victory. Of course he did not yet know the House
of Commons. Affected expressions, which would have been welcomed at
Wycombe or Taunton, were received with scornful laughter. He bore it
for a time good-humouredly, and begged them to hear him out. He was
answered with fresh peals of mockery. He had to speak of the alliance
between the Whigs and the Irish Catholics. With a flourish of rhetoric
he described Melbourne as flourishing in one hand the keys of St. Peter,
in the other, he was going to say, 'the cap of Liberty,' but the close
of the sentence was drowned in derisive shouts. The word had gone out
that he was to be put down. Each time that he tried to proceed the
storm burst out, and the Speaker could not silence it. Peel cheered
him repeatedly. The Tory party cheered, but to no purpose. At last,
finding it useless to persist, he said he was not surprised at the
reception which he had experienced. He had begun several times many
things and had succeeded at last. Then pausing and looking indignantly
across the House, he exclaimed in a loud and remarkable tone, which
startled even the noisy hounds who were barking loudest, 'I will sit
down now, but the time will come when you will hear me.'
No one suffers long through injustice. His ill-wishers had tried to
embarrass him and make him break down. They had not succeeded, and
probably even O'Connell himself felt that he had been unfairly dealt
with. People watched him curiously the rest of the evening to see how he
bore his treatment. He was said to have sat with his arms folded,
looking gloomily on the floor. His own account shows that he was not
depressed at all, and that indeed the experience was not entirely new.
[Sidenote: CRITICAL OPINIONS]
'I made my maiden speech last night,' he tells his sister, 'rising very
late after O'Connell, but at the request of my party and with the full
sanction of Sir Robert Peel. I state at once that my _début_ was a
failure--not by my breaking down or incompetency on my part, but from
the physical power of my adversaries. It was like my first _début_ at
Aylesbury, and perhaps in that sense may be auspicious of ultimate
triumph in the same scene. I fought through all with undaunted pluck and
unruffled temper, made occasionally good isolated hits when there was
silence, and finished with spirit when I found a formal display was
ineffectual. My party backed me well, and no one with more zeal and
kindness than Peel, cheering me repeatedly, which is not his custom. The
uproar was all organised by the Rads and the Repealers. In the lobby, at
the division, Chandos, who was not near me in speaking, came up and
congratulated me. I replied I thought there was no cause for
congratulation, and muttered "Failure." "No such thing," said Chandos;
"you are quite wrong. I have just seen Peel, and I said to him, 'Now
tell me exactly what you think of Disraeli.' Peel replied, 'Some of my
party were disappointed and talk of failure; I say just the reverse. He
did all that he could under the circumstances; I say anything but
failure: he must make his way.'" The Attorney-General (Campbell), to
whom I never spoke in my life, came up to me in the lobby and spoke to
me with great cordiality. He said, "Now, Mr. Disraeli, could you just
tell me how you finished one sentence in your speech? We are anxious to
know. 'In one hand the keys of St. Peter and in the other ----'" "In the
other the cap of Liberty, Sir John." He smiled and said, "A good
picture." I replied, "But your friends would not allow me to finish my
picture." "I assure you," he said, "there was the liveliest desire to
hear you from us. It was a party at the bar, over whom we have no
control; but you have nothing to be afraid of." Now I have told you
all.--Yours, D., in very good spirits.'
Disraeli's collapse was the next day's delight at the clubs. Shiel,
though an Irish leader, declined to join in it. 'I have heard what you
say,' he answered to the wits who appealed to him, 'and what is more, I
heard this same speech of Mr. Disraeli; and I tell you this: If ever the
spirit of oratory was in a man it is that man. Nothing can prevent him
from being one of the first speakers of the House of Commons.'
The speech, however, might have been a failure, Shiel admitted, if
Disraeli had been allowed to go on. The manner was unusual; the House of
Commons had not grown accustomed to it. 'Get rid of your genius for a
session,' he said to Disraeli himself. 'Speak often, for you must not
show yourself cowed, but speak shortly. Be very quiet; try to be dull;
only argue and reason imperfectly. Astonish them by speaking on subjects
of detail; quote figures, dates, and calculations. In a short time the
House will sigh for the wit and eloquence they know are in you. They
will encourage you to pour them forth, and thus you will have the ear of
the House and be a favourite.'
Disraeli's sense was stronger than his vanity. His whole fate was at
stake, and he knew it. He took Shiel's advice. A week after he had been
howled down he spoke again on the Copyright Bill, a subject which he
perfectly understood. Again when he rose he was observed with
curious attention. It was thought that he would allude to his first
misadventure; he made not the least reference to it. His voice,
naturally impressive, was in good condition. What he said was exactly to
the purpose. His conclusion, if simple, was excellent.
'I am glad to hear from her Majesty's Government that the interests of
literature have at length engaged their attention. It has been the boast
of the Whig party, and a boast not without foundation, that in many
brilliant periods of our literary annals they have been the patrons of
letters. As for myself, I trust that the age of literary patronage has
passed; and it will be honourable to the present Government if under its
auspices it is succeeded by that of literary protection.'
The House was willing to be pleased. Lord John Russell cheered the
allusion to his Liberal predecessors. The Radicals approved of the
independence which he claimed for the future of his own profession. Peel
loudly applauded, and never after had Disraeli to complain that he was
not listened to with respect. The cabal which would have silenced him
had, in fact, made his reputation. His colleague and his Maidstone
constituents were delighted. In the remainder of the session he was
frequently on his feet, but only to say a few sensible sentences and
never putting himself forward on great occasions.
Notwithstanding all that has been said and continues to be said about
the outset of his Parliamentary career, he had made solid progress in
the estimation of the House and, far more to the purpose, his quick
apprehension had learnt the temper and disposition of the House itself.
[Sidenote: ENGLAND, PAST AND PRESENT]
Before proceeding further a brief sketch must be given of the state of
public affairs when Disraeli's political life commenced. The British
Islands were covered with the shells of institutions which no longer
answered the purpose for which they were intended. The privileges
remained. The duties attaching to them were either unperformed or, from
change of circumstances, incapable of performance. Down to the
Reformation of the sixteenth century the beliefs and habits of the
English nation were formed by the Catholic Church. Men and women of all
ranks were brought up on the hypothesis that their business in this
world was not to grow rich, but to do their duties in the state of life
to which they had been called. Their time on earth was short. In the
eternity which lay beyond their condition would wholly depend on the way
in which it had been spent. On this principle society was constructed,
and the conduct, public and private, of the great body of the people was
governed by the supposition that the principle was literally true.
History takes note of the exception of the foolish or tyrannical king,
the oppressive baron, the profligate Churchman, the occasional
expressions of popular discontent. Irregularities in human life are like
the river cataracts and waterfalls which attract the landscape painter.
The historian dwells upon them because they are dramatically
interesting, but the broad features of those ages must be looked for in
the commonplace character of everyday existence, which attracts little
notice and can be traced only in the effects which it has produced. It
was thus that the soil of this island was cleared and fenced and divided
into fields as by a pencil. It was then that in every parish there arose
a church, on which piety lavished every ornament which skill could
command, and then and thus was formed the English nation, which was to
exercise so vast an influence on the fortunes of mankind. They were
proud of their liberty. A race never lived more sternly resolute to keep
the soil of their sea-girt island untrodden by the foot of the invader.
Liberty in the modern sense, liberty where the rights of man take the
place of the duties of a man--such a liberty they neither sought nor
desired. As in an army, each man had had his own position under a
graduated scale of authority, and the work was hardest where the rank
was highest. The baron was maintained in his castle on the produce of
the estate. But the baron had the hardest knocks in the field of battle.
In dangerous times he was happy if he escaped the scaffold. He
maintained his state in the outward splendour which belonged to his
station, but in private he lived as frugally as his tenants, sleeping on
a hard bed, eating hard, plain food, with luxury unheard of and undreamt
of. The rule was loyalty--loyalty of the lord to the king, loyalty of
lord to peasant and of peasant to lord. So deeply rooted was the mutual
feeling that for long generations after the relation had lost its
meaning, and one of the parties had forgotten that it ever had a
meaning, reverence and respect to the owner of the land lingered on and
is hardly extinct to-day.
In the towns the trades were organised under the guilds. The price of
food, the rate of wages from household servant to field labourer and
artisan, were ordered by statute on principles of equity. For each trade
there was a council, and false measure and bad quality of goods were
sharply looked to. The miller could not adulterate his flour. The price
of wheat varied with the harvest, but the speculator who bought up grain
to sell again at famine price found himself in the hands of the
constable. For the children of the poor there was an education under the
apprentice system, to which the most finished school-board training was
as copper to gold. Boys and girls alike were all taught some useful
occupation by which they could afterwards honestly maintain themselves.
If there were hardships they were not confined to a single class, but
were borne equally by the great and the humble. A nation in a healthy
state is an organism like the human body. If the finger says to the
hand, 'I have no need of thee; I will go my way, touch what pleases me,
and let alone what I do not care to meddle with,' the owner of the hand
will be in a bad way. A commonwealth, or common weal, demands that each
kind shall do the work which belongs to him or her. When he or she, when
individuals generally begin to think and act for themselves, to seek
their rights and their enjoyments, and forget their duties, the work of
dissolution has already set in.
[Sidenote: PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE]
The fear of God made England, and no great nation was ever made by any
other fear. When the Catholic Church broke down it survived under
Protestant forms, till Protestantism too dwindled into opinion and
ceased to be a rule of life. We still read our Bibles and went to
church; we were zealous for the purity of our faith, and established our
societies to propagate it; but the faith itself became consistent with
the active sense that pleasure was pleasant and wealth was power, and
while our faith would make things right in the next world we might
ourselves make something out of the present. From the Restoration
downwards the owners of land began to surround themselves with luxuries,
and the employers of labour to buy it at the cheapest rate. Selfishness
became first a practice and then developed boldly into a theory. Life
was a race in which the strongest had a right to win. Every man was to
be set free and do the best which he could for himself. The Institutions
remained. Dukes and earls and minor dignitaries still wore their
coronets and owned the soil. Bishops were the spiritual lords of their
dioceses, and the rector represented the Church in his parish. The
commercial companies survived in outward magnificence. But in aiming at
wealth they all alike forfeited their power. Competition became the sole
rule of trade; a new philosophy was invented to gild the change;
artisans and labourers were taught to believe that they would gain as
largely as the capitalists. They had been bondsmen; they were now free,
and all would benefit alike. Yet somehow _all_ did not benefit alike.
The houses of the upper classes grew into palaces, and the owners of
them lived apart as a separate caste; but the village labourer did not
find his lot more easy because he belonged to nobody. As population
increased his wages sank to the lowest point at which he could keep his
family alive. The 'hands' in the towns fared no better. If wages rose
the cost of living rose along with them. The compulsory apprentice
system was dropped, and the children were dragged up in squalor upon the
streets. Discontent broke out in ugly forms: ricks were burnt in the
country, and in the northern cities there was riot and disorder. They
were told that they must keep the peace and help themselves. Their
labour was an article which they had to sell, and the value of it was
fixed by the relations between supply and demand. Man could not alter
the laws of nature, which political economy had finally discovered.
Political economy has since been banished to the exterior planets; but
fifty years ago to doubt was heresy, to deny was a crime to be censured
in all the newspapers. Carlyle might talk scornfully of the 'Disraeli
science.' Disraeli might heap ridicule on Mr. Flummery Flum. But Mr.
Flummery Flum was a prophet in his day and led the believers into
strange places. The race for wealth went on at railroad speed. Vast
fortunes were accumulated as the world's markets opened wider. The
working classes ought to have shared the profits, and they were
diligently instructed that they had gained as much as their employers.
But their practical condition remained unaltered, and they looked with
strange eyes upon the progress in which, for one cause or another, they
did not find that they participated. The remedy of the economists was to
heat the furnace still hotter, to abolish every lingering remnant of
restraint, and stifle complaint by admitting the working men to
political power. The enlightened among the rich were not afraid, for
they were entrenched, as they believed, behind their law of nature. In
its contracts with labour capital must always have the advantage; for
capital could wait and hungry stomachs could not wait. In the meantime
let the Corn Laws go. Let all taxes on articles of consumption go. Trade
would then expand indefinitely, and all would be well. 'The wealth of
the nation,' the Free-Traders of Manchester said, depends on its
commerce. The commerce of England is shackled by a network of duties.
The consumer pays dear for the necessaries of life, which he might buy
cheap but for artificial interference. The raw materials of our industry
are burdened with restrictions. But for these we might multiply our
mills, expand our connections, provide work and food for the millions
who are now hungry. With your Corn Laws you are starving multitudes to
maintain the rents of a few thousand Elysians, who neither toil nor
spin, who might be blotted off the surface of the soil to-morrow and
none would miss them; who consume the labours of the poor on a splendour
of living unheard of since the Roman Empire, and extort the means of
this extravagance by an arbitrary law. You say you must have a revenue
to maintain your fleets and armies, and that it cannot be raised except
by customs duties. Your fleets and armies are not needed. Take away your
commercial fetters, allow the nations of the earth a free exchange of
commodities with us, and you need not fear that they will quarrel with
us: wars will be heard of no more, and the complaints of the poor that
they are famished to supply the luxuries of the rich will no longer cry
to Heaven.
The Free-Traders might have been over-sanguine, but on the Corn Laws it
was hard to answer them. The duties attaching to the ownership of land
had fallen to shadows. The defence of the country had passed to the
army. Internal peace was maintained by the police. Unless they
volunteered to serve as magistrates the landlords had but to receive
their rents and do as they pleased with their own. An aristocracy whose
achievements, as recorded in newspapers, were the slaughter of unheard
of multitudes of pheasants, an aristocracy to one of whose distinguished
members a granite column was recently erected on a spot where he had
slain fifty brace of grouse in half an hour, were scarcely in a position
to demand that the poor man's loaf should be reduced in size, for fear
their incomes should suffer diminution. Carlyle said that he had never
heard an argument for the Corn Laws which might not make angels weep. If
the fear of suffering in their pockets had been the only motive which
influenced the landed interest in its opposition to free trade, there
would have been nothing to be said for it; but if that had been all,
Corn Laws in such a country as England could never have existed at all.
Protection for native industry had been established for centuries. It
had prevailed and still prevails in spite of the arguments of
free-traders all the world over, and under all forms of government. The
principle of it has been and is that no country is in a sound or safe
condition which cannot feed its own population independent of the
foreigner. Peace could not be counted on with an empire so extended as
ours. Occasions of quarrel might arise which no prudence could avert.
The world had seen many a commercial commonwealth rise to temporary
splendour, but all had gone the same road, and a country which depended
on its imports for daily bread would be living at the mercy of its
rivals. Christianity had failed to extinguish war. It was not likely
that commerce would succeed better, and the accidents of a single
campaign, the successful blockade of our ports even for a month or a
fortnight, might degrade us into a shameful submission. British
agriculture was the creation of protection. Under the duties which kept
out foreign corn waste lands had been reclaimed, capital had been
invested in the soil, and with such success and energy that double the
wheat was raised per acre in England as was produced in any country in
the world. The farmer prospered, the labourer at least existed, and the
country population was maintained. Take protection away and wheat would
cease to be grown. The plough would rust in the shed; the peasantry of
the villages would dwindle away. They would drift into the towns in
festering masses, living precariously from day to day, ever pressing on
the means of employment with decaying physique and growing discontent.
Cobden said the cost of carriage would partially protect the farmer. His
own industry must do the rest. The ocean steamers have made short work
of the cost of carriage; the soil could yield no more than it was
bearing already. Cobden's more daring followers said that if the country
districts returned to waste and forest the nation itself would be no
poorer. In the defence of protection and in the denunciation of it there
was alike a base element. The landlords were alarmed for their private
interests. The manufacturer did expect that if the loaf was cheaper
labour would be cheaper, for by orthodox doctrine labour adjusted itself
to the cost of living. But to statesmen, whose business it was to look
beyond the day that was passing over them, there was reason to pause
before rushing into a course from which there could be no return, and
which in another century might prove to have been a wild experiment. The
price of food might be gradually reduced without immediate revolution,
and the opportunity might be used to attach the colonies more closely to
the mother country. The colonies and India, with the encouragement of an
advantage in the home market, could supply corn without limit, and their
connection with us would be cemented by interest; while if they were
placed on the same level as foreigners they would perhaps take us at our
word and become foreigners. The traders insisted that if we opened our
ports all the world would follow our example. But prophecies did not
always prove correct, and, if the world did not follow our example, to
fight prohibitive duties with free imports might prove a losing
bargain.
CHAPTER VI
Disraeli's belief, political and religious--Sympathy with the
people--Defends the Chartists--The people, the middle classes, and
the aristocracy--Chartist riots--Smart passage at arms in the House
of Commons--Marriage--Mrs. Wyndham Lewis--Disraeli as a husband.
[Sidenote: CREED, POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS]
Into this Maelstrom Disraeli was plunged when he entered Parliament. He
had his own views. He knew the condition of the poor both in England and
Ireland. He had declared that no Government should have his support
which did not introduce some large measure to improve that condition. He
had chosen the Conservative side because he had no belief in the
promises of the political economists, or in the blessed results to
follow from cutting the strings and leaving everyone to find his level.
He held to the old conception of the commonwealth that all orders must
work faithfully together; that trade was to be extended not by cheapness
and free markets, but by good workmanship and superior merit; and that
the object which statesmen ought to set before themselves was the
maintenance of the character of the people, not the piling up in
enormous heaps of what wealth had now come to mean. The people
themselves were groping, in their trades unions, after an organisation
which would revive in other forms the functions of the Guilds; and the
exact science of political economy would cease to be a science at all,
whenever motives superior to personal interest began to be acted upon.
Science was knowledge of facts; the facts most important to be known
were the facts of human nature and human responsibilities; and the
interpretation of those facts which had been revealed to his own race,
Disraeli actually believed to be deeper and truer than any modern
speculations. Though calling himself a Christian, he was a Jew in his
heart. He regarded Christianity as only Judaism developed, and, if not
completely true, yet as immeasurably nearer to truth than the mushroom
philosophies of the present age. He had studied Carlyle, and in some of
his writings had imitated him. Carlyle did not thank him for this.
Carlyle detested Jews, and looked on Disraeli as an adventurer fishing
for fortune in Parliamentary waters. His novels he despised. His chains
and velvets and affected airs he looked on as the tawdry love of vulgar
ornament characteristic of Houndsditch. Nevertheless, Disraeli had taken
his teaching to heart, and in his own way meant to act upon it. He
regarded the aristocracy, like Carlyle also, in spite of the double
barrels, as the least corrupted part of the community; and to them, in
alliance with the people, he looked for a return of the English nation
to the lines of true progress. The Church was moving at Oxford. A wave
of political Conservatism was sweeping over the country. He thought that
in both these movements he saw signs of a genuine reaction, and Peel, he
still believed, would give effect to his hopes.
[Sidenote: DISRAELI AND PEEL]
These were his theoretic convictions, while outwardly he amused himself
in the high circles which his Parliamentary notoriety had opened to him.
His letters are full of dukes and princes and beautiful women, and balls
and dinners. He ventured liberties, even in the presence of the great
Premier, and escaped unpunished. In the spring of 1839 he notes a dinner
in Whitehall Gardens. 'I came late,' he says, 'having mistaken the hour.
I found some twenty-five gentlemen grubbing in solemn silence. I threw a
shot over the table and set them going, and in time they became noisy.
Peel, I think, was pleased that I broke the awful stillness, as he
talked to me a good deal, though we were far removed.' But though he
enjoyed these honours and magnificences perhaps more than he need have
done, he kept an independence of his own. It was supposed that he was
looking for office, and that Peel's neglect of him in 1841 was the cause
of his subsequent revolt. Peel did make some advances to him through a
third person, and said afterwards in the House that Disraeli had been
ready to serve under him; but if office was really his object, never did
any man take a worse way of recommending himself. In the summer of the
same year (1839) the monster Chartist petition was brought down to the
House of Commons in the name of the working people of England, and the
general disposition was to treat it as an absurdity and an insult.
Disraeli, when his turn came to speak, was not ashamed to say that,
though he disapproved of the Charter, he sympathised with the Chartists.
They were right, he thought, in desiring a fairer share in the profits
of their labour, and that fairer share they were unlikely to obtain from
the commercial constituences whom the Reform Bill had enfranchised.
Great duties could alone confer great station, and the new class which
had been invested with political station had not been bound up with the
mass of the people by the exercise of corresponding obligations. Those
who possessed power without discharging its conditions and duties, were
naturally anxious to put themselves to the least possible expense and
trouble. Having gained their own object, they wished to keep it without
appeal to their pockets, or cost of their time. The true friends of the
people ought to be the aristocracy, and in very significant words he
added that 'the English nation would concede any degree of political
power to a class making simultaneous advances in the exercise of great
social duties.'
The aristocracy had lost their power because their duties had been
neglected. They might have wealth or they might have power; but not both
together. It was not too late to reconsider the alternative. The
Chartists, finding themselves scoffed out of the House of Commons, took
to violence. There were riots in Birmingham, and a Chartist convention
sat in London threatening revolution. Lord John Russell appealed for an
increase of the police. Disraeli was one of a minority of five who dared
to say that it was unnecessary, and that other measures ought to be
tried. When the leaders were seized, he supported his friend, Tom
Duncombe, in a protest against the harshness of their treatment. The
Chancellor of the Exchequer rebuked him. Fox Maule, a junior member of
the Government, charged him with being 'an advocate of riot and
disorder.' In later times Disraeli never struck at small game. When he
meant fight, he went for the leading stag of the herd. On this occasion
he briefly touched his two slight antagonists. 'Under-Secretaries,' he
said, 'were sometimes vulgar and ill-bred. From a Chancellor of the
Exchequer to an Under-Secretary of State was a descent from the sublime
to the ridiculous, though the sublime was on this occasion rather
ridiculous, and the ridiculous rather trashy!'
It is scarcely conceivable that if Disraeli was then aspiring to
harness under Sir Robert, he would have committed himself with such
reckless audacity; and his action was the more creditable to him as the
profession which he had chosen brought him no emoluments. His financial
embarrassments were thickening round him so seriously, that without
office it might soon become impossible to continue his Parliamentary
career. Like Bassanio,
When he had lost one shaft,
He shot his fellow of the self-same flight
The self-same way with more advised watch
To find the other forth, and by adventuring both
He oft found both.
But one shaft had disappeared after another till he had reached the last
in his quiver. He had not been personally extravagant. He had moved in
the high circles to which he had been admitted rather as an assured
spectator than as an imitator of their costly habits. But his resources
were limited to the profits of his writings, and to such sums as he
could raise on his own credit. His position was critical in the extreme,
and Disraeli's star might then have set like a planet which becomes
visible at twilight on the western horizon, and shows out in its
splendour only to set into the sea. The temptation to sell oneself under
such circumstances would have been too much for common Parliamentary
virtue. But Disraeli was a colt who was not to be driven in a team by a
master. Lord Melbourne had asked him once what he wished for. He had
answered coolly that he wished to be Prime Minister. The insanity of
presumption was in fact the insanity of second sight; but 'vaulting
ambition' would have 'fallen on the other side' if a divinity had not
come to his assistance.
[Sidenote: MARRIAGE]
The heroes of his political novels are usually made to owe their first
success to wealthy marriages. Coningsby, Egremont, Endymion, though they
deserve their good fortune, yet receive it from a woman's hand. Mr.
Wyndham Lewis, who had brought Disraeli into Parliament, died
unexpectedly the year after. His widow, the clever rattling flirt, as he
had described her on first acquaintance, after a year's mourning, became
Disraeli's wife. She was childless. She was left the sole possessor of a
house at Grosvenor Gate, and a life income of several thousands a year.
She was not beautiful. Disraeli was thirty-five, and she was approaching
fifty. But she was a heroine if ever woman deserved the name. She
devoted herself to Disraeli with a completeness which left no room in
her mind for any other thought. As to him, he had said that he would
never marry for love. But if love, in the common sense of the word, did
not exist between these two, there was an affection which stood the
trials of thirty years, and deepened only as they both declined into
age. She was his helpmate, his confidante, his adviser; from the first
he felt the extent of his obligations to her, but the sense of
obligation, if at first felt as a duty, became a bond of friendship
perpetually renewed. The hours spent with his wife in retirement were
the happiest that he knew. In defeat or victory he hurried home from the
House of Commons to share his vexation or his triumph with his
companion, who never believed that he could fail. The moment in his
whole life which perhaps gave him greatest delight was that at which he
was able to decorate her with a peerage. To her he dedicated 'Sybil.'
'I,' he says, 'would inscribe this work to one whose noble spirit and
gentle nature ever prompt her to sympathise with the suffering; to one
whose sweet voice has often encouraged, and whose taste and judgment
have ever guided its pages, the most severe of critics, but a "perfect
wife."' The experience of his own married life he describes in
'Coningsby' as the solitary personal gift which nature had not bestowed
upon a special favourite of fortune. 'The lot most precious to man, and
which a beneficent Providence has made not the least common--to find in
another heart a perfect and profound sympathy, to unite his existence
with one who could share all his joys, soften all his sorrows, aid him
in all his projects, respond to all his fancies, counsel him in his
cares and support him in his perils, make life charming by her charms,
interesting by her intelligence, and sweet by the vigilant variety of
her tenderness--to find your life blessed by such an influence, and to
feel that your influence can bless such a life; the lot the most divine
of divine gifts, so perfect that power and even fame can never rival its
delights--all this nature had denied to Sidonia.' It had not been denied
to Disraeli himself.
The carriage incident is well known. On an anxious House of Commons
night, Mrs. Disraeli drove down with her husband to Palace Yard. Her
finger had been caught and crushed in the carriage-door. She did not let
him know what had happened, for fear of disturbing him, and was not
released from her torture till he had left her. That is perfectly
authentic, and there are other stories like it. A husband capable of
inspiring and maintaining such an attachment most certainly never ceased
to deserve it. Savagely as he was afterwards attacked, his most
indignant enemy never ventured to touch his name with scandal. A party
of young men once ventured a foolish jest or two at Mrs. Disraeli's age
and appearance, and rallied him on the motives of his marriage.
'Gentlemen,' said Disraeli, as he rose and left the room, 'do none of
you know what gratitude means?' This was the only known instance in
which he ever spoke with genuine anger.
'Gratitude,' indeed, if deeply felt, was as deeply deserved. His
marriage made him what he became. Though never himself a rich man, or
endeavouring to make himself such, he was thenceforward superior to
fortune. His difficulties were gradually disposed of. He had no longer
election agents' bills to worry him, or debts to usurers running up in
compound ratio. More important to him, he was free to take his own line
in politics, relieved from the temptation of seeking office.
CHAPTER VII
The enthusiasm of progress--Carlyle and Disraeli--Protection and Free
Trade--Sir Robert Peel the Protectionist Champion--High Church
movement at Oxford--The Church as a Conservative power--Effect of the
Reform Bill--Disraeli's personal views--Impossible to
realise--Election of 1841--Sir Robert Peel's Ministry--Drifts towards
Free Trade--Peel's neglect of Disraeli--Tariff of 1842--Young
England--Symptoms of revolts--First skirmish with Peel--Remarkable
speech on Ireland.
[Sidenote: ENGLISH PROGRESS]
The discovery of the steam engine had revolutionised the relations of
mankind, and during the decline of the Melbourne Ministry was
revolutionising the imagination of the English nation. The railroads
were annihilating distances between town and town. Roads were opening
across the ocean, bringing the remotest sea-coasts in the world within
sure and easy reach. Possibilities of an expansion of commerce
practically boundless inflated hopes and stimulated energies. In past
generations England had colonised half the new world; she had become
sovereign of the sea; she had preserved the liberties of Europe, and had
made her name feared and honoured in every part of the globe; but this
was nothing compared to the prospect, which was now unfolding itself, of
becoming the world's great workshop. She had invented steam; she had
coal and iron in a combination and quantity which no other nation could
rival; she had a population ingenious and vigorous, and capable, if
employment could be found for them, of indefinite multiplication. The
enthusiasm of progress seized the popular imagination. No word was
tolerated which implied a doubt, and the prophets of evil, like Carlyle,
were listened to with pity and amusement. The stars in their courses
were fighting for the Free Traders. The gold-discoveries stimulated the
circulation in the national veins, and prosperity advanced with leaps
and bounds.
The tide has slackened now; other nations have rejected our example,
have nursed their own industries, and supply their own wants. The volume
of English trade continues to roll on, but the profits diminish. The
crowds who throng our towns refuse to submit to a lowering of wages, and
perplex economists and politicians with uneasy visions: we are thus
better able to consider with fairness the objections of a few far-seeing
statesmen forty and fifty years ago.
[Sidenote: THE CORN LAWS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY]
As far as the thoughts of an ambitious youth who had taken Pistol's 'The
world's mine oyster' as the motto of his first book, and perhaps as the
rule of his life--of a gaudy coxcomb who astonished drawing-rooms with
his satin waistcoats, and was the chosen friend of Count D'Orsay--as far
as the thoughts of such a person as this could have any affinity with
those of the stern ascetic who, in the midst of accumulating splendour,
was denouncing woe and desolation, so far, at the outset of his
Parliamentary life, the opinions of Benjamin Disraeli, if we take
'Sybil' for their exponent, were the opinions of the author of 'Past and
Present.' Carlyle thought of him as a fantastic ape. The interval
between them was so vast that the comparison provokes a smile. Disraeli
was to fight against the Repeal of the Corn Laws: Carlyle said that of
all strange demands, the strangest was that the trade of owning land
should be asking for higher wages; and yet the Hebrew conjuror, though
at a humble distance, and not without an eye open to his own
advancement, was nearer to him all along than Carlyle imagined. Disraeli
did not believe any more than he that the greatness of a nation depended
on the abundance of its possessions. He did not believe in a progress
which meant the abolition of the traditionary habits of the people, the
destruction of village industries, and the accumulation of the
population into enormous cities, where their character and their
physical qualities would be changed and would probably degenerate. The
only progress which he could acknowledge was moral progress, and he
considered that all legislation which proposed any other object to
itself would produce, in the end, the effects which the prophets of his
own race had uniformly and truly foretold.
Under the old organisation of England, the different orders of men were
bound together under reciprocal obligations of duty. The economists and
their political followers held that duty had nothing to do with it.
Food, wages, and all else had their market value, which could be
interfered with only to the general injury. The employer was to hire his
labourers or his hands at the lowest rate at which they could be induced
to work. If he ceased to need them, or if they would not work on terms
which would remunerate him, he was at liberty to turn them off. The
labourers, in return, might make the best of their own opportunity, and
sell their services to the best advantage which competition allowed. The
capitalists found the arrangement satisfactory to them. The people found
it less satisfactory, and they replied by Chartism and rick-burnings.
The economists said that the causes of discontent were the Corn Laws and
the other taxes on food. Farmers and landowners exclaimed that if the
Corn Laws were repealed, the land must go out of cultivation. The
Chartists were not satisfied with the remedy, because they believed
that, with cheap food, wages would fall, and they would be no better off
than they were. It was then slack water in the political tides. Public
feeling was at a stand, uncertain which way to turn. The Reform Bill of
1832 had left to property the preponderance of political power, and
everyone who had anything to lose began to be alarmed for himself. The
Conservative reaction became more and more evident. The faith of the
country was in Sir Robert Peel. He had been opposed to the Reform Bill,
but when it was passed he had accepted it as the law of the land, and
had reconstituted his party out of the confidence of the new
constituencies. He had been a declared Protectionist. He had defended
the Corn Laws, and had spoken and voted for them. He had resisted the
proposal by the Whigs of a fixed eight-shilling duty, and had accepted
and gloried in the position of being the leader of the gentlemen of
England. But he had refused to initiate any policy of his own. He was
known to be cautious, prudent, and a master of finance. He was no
believer in novel theories or enthusiastic visions, but he had shown by
his conduct on the Catholic question that he could consider and allow
for the practical necessities of things. He was, however, above all
things an avowed Conservative, and as a Conservative the country looked
to him to steer the ship through the cataracts.
[Sidenote: CHURCH REVIVAL]
Another phenomenon had started up carrying a Conservative colour.
Puseyism had appeared at Oxford, and was rapidly spreading. The Church
of England, long paralysed by Erastianism and worldliness, was awaking
out of its sleep, and claiming to speak again as the Divinely-appointed
ruler of English souls. Political economy had undertaken to manage
things on the hypothesis that men had no souls, or that their souls, if
they possessed such entities, had nothing to do with their commercial
relations to one another. The Church of England, as long as it remained
silent or sleeping, had seemed to acquiesce in the new revelation, but
it was beginning to claim a voice again in the practical affairs of the
world, and the response, loud and strong, indicated that there still
remained among us a power of latent conviction which might revive the
force of noble and disinterested motive. A Church of England renovated
and alive again might, some thought, become an influence of incalculable
consequence. Carlyle's keen, clear eyes refused to be deceived.
'Galvanic Puseyism,' he called it, and 'dancings of the sheeted dead.' A
politician like Disraeli looking out into the phenomena in which he was
to play his part, and thinking more of what was going on among the
people than of the immediate condition of Parliamentary parties,
conceived that he saw in the new movement, not only an effort of
Conservative energy, but an indication of a genuine recoil from moral
and spiritual anarchy towards the Hebrew principle in which he really
believed. Two forces he saw still surviving in England which had been
overlooked, or supposed to be dead--respect for the Church, and the
voluntary loyalty (which, though waning, might equally be recovered) of
the people towards the aristocracy. Perhaps he overrated both because he
had been himself born and bred outside their influence, and thus looked
at them without the insight which he gained afterwards on more intimate
acquaintance. To some extent, however, they were realities, and were
legitimate subjects of calculation. Extracts from his writings will show
how his mind was working. He had been studying the action of the Reform
Bill of 1832. No one pretended, he said, that it had improved the
character of Parliament itself.
'But had it exercised a beneficial influence in the country? Had it
elevated the tone of the public mind? Had it cultivated the popular
sensibilities to noble and ennobling ends? Had it proposed to the people
of England a higher test of national respect and confidence?... If a
spirit of rapacious covetousness, desecrating all the humanities of
life, has been the besetting sin of England for the last century and a
half, since the passing of the Reform Act the altar of Mammon has blazed
with a triple worship. To acquire, to accumulate, to plunder each other
by virtue of philosophic phrases--to propose a Utopia to consist only of
Wealth and Toil--this has been the business of enfranchised England for
the last twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious strife
by the wail of intolerable serfage.'[6]
[Sidenote: EFFECTS OF THE REFORM BILL]
Again: 'Born in a library, and trained from early childhood by learned
men who did not share the passions and the prejudices of our political
and social life, I had imbibed on some subjects conclusions different
from those which generally prevail, and especially with reference to the
history of our own country. How an oligarchy had been substituted for a
kingdom, and a narrow-minded and bigoted fanaticism flourished in the
name of religious liberty, were problems long to me insoluble, but which
early interested me. But what most attracted my musing, even as a
boy, were the elements of our political parties, and the strange
mystification by which that which was national in our Constitution had
become odious, and that which was exclusive was presented as popular.
'What has mainly led to this confusion is our carelessness in not
distinguishing between the excellence of a principle and its injurious
or obsolete application. The feudal system may have worn out; but its
main principle--that the tenure of property should be the fulfilment of
duty--is the essence of good government. The divine right of kings may
have been a plea for feeble tyrants; but the divine right of government
is the key of human progress, and without it governments sink into a
police, and a nation is degraded into a mob.... National institutions
were the ramparts of a multitude against large estates, exercising
political power, derived from a limited class. The Church was in theory,
and once it had been in practice, the spiritual and intellectual trainer
of the people. The privileges of the multitude and the prerogative of
the sovereign had grown up together, and together they had waned. Under
the plea of Liberalism, all the institutions which were the bulwark of
the multitude had been sapped and weakened, and nothing had been
substituted for them. The people were without education, and relatively
to the advance of science and the comfort of the superior classes, their
condition had deteriorated and their physical quality as a race was
threatened.
'To change back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a real
throne; to infuse life and vigour into the Church as the trainer of the
nation by the revival of Convocation, then dumb, on a wise basis; to
establish a commercial code on the principles successfully negotiated by
Lord Bolingbroke at Utrecht, and which, though baffled at the time by a
Whig Parliament, were subsequently and triumphantly vindicated by his
pupil and political heir, Mr. Pitt; to govern Ireland according to the
policy of Charles I., and not of Oliver Cromwell; to emancipate the
political constituency of 1832 from its sectarian bondage and contracted
sympathies; to elevate the physical as well as the moral condition of
the people by establishing that labour required regulation as much as
property--and all this rather by the use of ancient forms and the
restoration of the past, than by political revolutions founded on
abstract ideas--appeared to be the course which the circumstances of the
country required, and which, practically speaking, could only, with all
their faults and backslidings, be undertaken and accomplished by a
reconstructed Tory party.
'When I attempted to enter public life, I expressed these views, long
meditated, to my countrymen.... I incurred the accustomed penalty of
being looked on as a visionary.... Ten years afterwards, affairs had
changed. I had been some time in Parliament, and had friends who had
entered public life with myself, who listened always with interest, and
sometimes with sympathy.... The writer, and those who acted with him,
looked then upon the Anglican Church as a main machinery by which these
results might be realised. There were few great things left in England,
and the Church was one. Nor do I doubt that if a quarter of a century
ago there had arisen a Churchman equal to the occasion, the position of
ecclesiastical affairs in this country would have been very different
from that which they now occupy. But these great matters fell into the
hands of monks and schoolmen. The secession of Dr. Newman dealt a blow
to the Church under which it still reels. That extraordinary event has
been "apologised" for, but it has never been explained. The tradition of
the Anglican Church was powerful. Resting on the Church of Jerusalem
modified by the Divine school of Galilee, it would have found that rock
of truth which Providence, by the instrumentality of the Semitic race,
had promised to St. Peter. Instead of that, the seceders sought refuge
in mediæval superstitions; which are generally only the embodiments of
Pagan ceremonies and creeds.'[7]
[Sidenote: DISAPPOINTED HOPES]
Writing after the experience of thirty years of Parliamentary life,
Disraeli thus described the impressions and the hopes with which he
commenced his public career. He was disappointed by causes which he
partly indicates, and by the nature of things which he then imperfectly
realised. But, carefully considered, they explain the whole of his
action down to the time when he found his expectation incapable of
realisation. His Church views were somewhat hazy, though he was right
enough about the Pagan ceremonies.
After their marriage, the Disraelis spent two months on the Continent.
They went to Baden, Munich, Frankfort, Ratisbon, Nuremburg, seeing
galleries and other curiosities. In November they returned to England,
to the house in Grosvenor Gate which was thenceforward their London
home, and Disraeli took his place on an equal footing as an established
member of the great world. He was introduced to the Duke of Wellington,
who had hitherto known him only by reputation. He received Peel's
congratulations on his marriage with admitted pride and pleasure, and
began to give dinners on his own account to leading members of his
party. The impecunious adventurer had acquired the social standing
without which the most brilliant gifts are regarded with a certain
suspicion.
[Sidenote: POWERS IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS]
At the general election in 1841, Sir Robert Peel was borne into power,
with a majority returned on Protectionist principles, larger than the
most sanguine enthusiast had dared to hope for, Disraeli himself being
returned for Shrewsbury--his connection with Maidstone having been
probably broken by his late colleague's death. When the new Parliament
settled to work, Peel took the reins, and settled the finances by an
income-tax--then called a temporary expedient, but in fact a necessary
condition of the policy which at once he proceeded to follow. Duties
were reduced in all directions, but there was no word of commercial
treaties. Free Trade principles were visibly to be adopted, so far as
the state of parties would allow, and the indications grew daily
stronger that no such policy as Disraeli desired had come near the
Premier's mind. The middle classes had confidence in Peel. It seemed
that Peel had confidence in them, and Disraeli had none at all. Still,
Peel was his political chief, and Disraeli continued to serve him, and
to serve effectively and zealously. More and more he displayed his
peculiar powers. When he chose he was the hardest hitter in the House of
Commons; and as he never struck in malice, and selected always an
antlered stag for an adversary, the House was amused at his audacity.
Palmerston on some occasion regretted that the honourable member had
been made an exception to the rule that political adherents ought to be
rewarded by appointments. He trusted that before the end of the Session
the Government would overlook the slight want of industry for the sake
of the talent. Disraeli 'thanked the noble viscount for his courteous
aspirations for his political promotion. The noble viscount was a
master of the subject. If the noble viscount would only impart to him
the secret by which he had himself contrived to retain office during so
many successive administrations, the present debate would not be without
a result.' Such a passage at arms may have been the more entertaining
because Disraeli was supposed to have resented the neglect of his claims
when Peel was forming his Administration. It is probable that Peel had
studied the superficial aspects of his character, had underrated his
ability, had discerned that he might not be sufficiently docile, or had
suspected and resented his advocacy of the Chartists. Disraeli may have
thought that the offer ought to have been made to him, but it is evident
that on other grounds the differences between them would tend to widen.
The Tariff of 1842 was the first note of alarm to the Conservative
party--Disraeli defended it, but not with an entire heart. 'Peel,' he
said in a letter to his sister,[8] 'seems to have pleased no party, but
I suppose the necessity of things will force his measure through:
affairs may yet simmer up into foam and bubble, and there may be a row.'
The Conservatives had been trusted by the country with an opportunity of
trying their principles which, if allowed to pass, might never be
renewed. Their leader was not yet openly betraying them, but everyone
but himself began to perceive that the Conservatism of the Government
was only to be Liberalism in disguise.
Disraeli individually had the satisfaction of feeling that he was
becoming a person of consequence. He ran across to Paris, and dined
privately with Louis Philippe. In London he was presented to the King of
Hanover, 'the second king who has shaken hands with me in six months.'
Public affairs he found 'uncertain and unsatisfactory,' Peel 'frigid and
feeble,' and 'general grumbling.' He continued to speak, and speak often
and successfully; but the mutual distrust between him and his chief was
growing.
Peel among his magnificent qualities had not the art of conciliating the
rank-and-file of his supporters. He regarded them too much as his own
creatures, entitled to no consideration. Disraeli, taking the whole
field of politics for his province, met with rebuke after rebuke. He had
seen by this time that for his own theories there was no hope of
countenance from the present chief. He had formed a small party among
the younger Tory members--men of rank and talent, with a high-bred
enthusiasm which had been kindled by the Church revival. A party
including Lord John Manners, George Smyth, Henry Hope, and Baillie
Cochrane was not to be despised; and thus reinforced and encouraged, he
ventured to take a line of his own.
Among the articles of faith was the belief that Ireland ought to be
treated on the principles of Charles I., and not on the principles of
Cromwell. O'Connell in 1843 was setting Ireland in a flame again, and
Peel, better acquainted with Ireland than Disraeli, and hopeless of
other remedy, had introduced one of the periodic Coercion Bills. The
Young Englanders, as he and his friends were now called, had Catholic
sympathies, and they imagined that religion was at the bottom of these
perpetual disturbances. Coercion answered only for the moment. A more
conciliatory attitude towards the ancient creed might touch the secret
of the disease. Disraeli perhaps wished to show that he bore no malice
against O'Connell or against his tail. He thought that he could persuade
the Irish that they had more to hope for from Cavalier Tories than from
Roundhead Whigs. Of Irish history he knew as little as the rest of the
House of Commons. He had heard, perhaps, of the Glamorgan Articles and
Charles I.'s negotiations with the Kilkenny Parliament. Peel, when in
opposition, had talked about conciliation. In office he had nothing to
propose but force. Disraeli, when the Bill came before the House, gave
the first sign of revolt; he said that it was one of those measures
which to introduce was degrading, and to oppose disgraceful. He would
neither vote for it nor against it; but as Peel had departed from the
policy which he had led his party to hope that he meant to pursue before
he came into power, he (Disraeli), speaking for himself and his friends,
declared that they were now free from the bonds of party on this subject
of Ireland, for the right hon. gentleman himself had broken them. They
had now a right to fall back on their own opinions.
[Sidenote: PERSONAL INDEPENDENCE]
Something still more significant was to follow. A few days later (August
1843) the Eastern question came up. Disraeli, whose friendship for the
Turks was of old standing, asked a question relating to Russian
interference in Servia. Peel gave an abrupt answer to end the matter.
Palmerston, however, taking it up, Disraeli had a further opportunity of
speaking. He complained that Turkey had been stabbed in the back by the
diplomacy of Europe; that the integrity and independence of the Turkish
dominions were of vital consequence, &c. But the point of his speech was
in the sting with which it concluded. Winding up in the slow, deliberate
manner which he made afterwards so peculiarly effective, he reminded the
House of his own previous question, couched, he believed, in
Parliamentary language, and made with all that respect which he felt for
the right hon. gentleman. 'To this inquiry,' he said, 'the right hon.
gentleman replied with all that explicitness of which he was a master,
and all that courtesy which he reserved only for his supporters.'
[Sidenote: THE IRISH QUESTION]
The House of Commons had much of the generous temper of an English
public school. Boys like a little fellow who has the courage to stand up
to a big one, and refuses to be bullied. The Whigs were amused at the
mutiny of a Tory subordinate. The Tory rank-and-file had so often
smarted under Peel's contempt that the blow told, and Disraeli had
increased his consequence in the House by another step. Those who judge
of motive by events, and assure themselves that when the actions of a
man lead up to particular effects, those effects must have been
contemplated by himself from the outset of his career, see indication in
these speeches of a deliberate intention on Disraeli's part to supersede
Sir Robert Peel in the leadership of the Conservative party. The vanity
of such a purpose, had it been really entertained, would have been
exceeded by the folly of his next movement. In the following year
O'Connell's monster meetings had become a danger to the State. Peel had
again to apply to the House of Commons, with a general sense on both
sides that the authority of the Crown must be supported. Disraeli,
almost alone among the English members, took the same daring attitude
which he had assumed on the Chartist petition. Being in reality a
stranger in the country of his adoption, he was able to regard the
problems with which it was engaged in the light in which they appeared
to other nations. The long mismanagement of Ireland, its chronic
discontent and miserable state, were regarded everywhere as the blot
upon the English escutcheon, and the cause of it was the mutual jealousy
and suspicion of parties at Westminster. If a remedy was ever to be
found, party ties must be thrown to the winds. What, he asked, did this
eternal Irish question mean? One said it was a physical question,
another a spiritual question. Now it was the absence of an aristocracy,
then the absence of railroads. It was the Pope one day, potatoes the
next. Let the House consider Ireland as they would any other country
similarly situated, in their closets. They would see a teeming
population denser to the square mile than that of China, created solely
by agriculture, with none of those sources of wealth which are developed
by civilisation, and sustained upon the lowest conceivable diet. That
dense population in extreme distress inhabited an island where there was
an Established Church which was not their Church, and a territorial
aristocracy the richest of whom lived in distant capitals. They had a
starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and,
in addition, the weakest executive in the world. That was the Irish
question. Well, then, what would honourable gentlemen say if they were
reading of a country in that position? They would say at once 'the
remedy was revolution.' But Ireland could not have a revolution; and
why? Because Ireland was connected with another and more powerful
country. Then what was the consequence? The connection with England
became the cause of the present state of Ireland. If the connection with
England prevented a revolution, and a revolution was the only remedy,
England logically was in the odious position of being the cause of all
the misery in Ireland. What, then, was the duty of an English Minister?
To effect by his policy all those changes which a revolution would do by
force. That was the Irish question in its integrity.... If the noble
lord (Lord John Russell) or any other honourable member came forward
with a comprehensive plan, which would certainly settle the question of
Ireland, no matter what the sacrifice might be, he would support it,
though he might afterwards feel it necessary to retire from Parliament
or to place his seat at the disposal of his constituency ('Life of Lord
Beaconsfield,' T. P. O'Connor, 6th edition p. 255, &c.).
Truer words had not been spoken in Parliament on the subject of Ireland
for half a century, nor words more fatal to the immediate ambition of
the speaker, if ambition he then entertained beyond a patriotic one; and
many a session, and many a century perhaps, would have to pass before a
party could be formed in England strong enough to carry on the
government on unadulterated principles of patriotism.
CHAPTER VIII
Young England and the Oxford Tractarians--Disraeli a Hebrew at
heart--'Coningsby'--Sidonia--'Sybil; or, the Two Nations'--The
great towns under the new creed--Lords of the soil as they were and
as they are--Disraeli an aristocratic Socialist--Practical working of
Parliamentary institutions--Special importance of 'Sybil.'
[Sidenote: YOUNG ENGLAND]
According to Disraeli's theory of government, the natural rulers of
England were the aristocracy, supported by the people. The owners of the
soil were the stable element in the Constitution. Capitalists grew like
mushrooms, and disappeared as rapidly; the owners of the land remained.
Tenants and labourers looked up to them with a feeling of allegiance;
and that allegiance might revive into a living principle if the
aristocracy would deserve it by reverting to the habits of their
forefathers. That ancient forces could be awakened out of their sleep
seemed proved by the success of the Tractarian movement at Oxford. The
bold motto of the 'Lyra Apostolica' proclaimed that Achilles was in the
field again, and that Liberalism was to find its master. The Oxford
leaders might look doubtfully on so strange an ally as a half-converted
Israelite. But Disraeli and the Young Englanders had caught the note,
and were endeavouring to organise a political party on analogous lines.
It was a dream. No such regeneration, spiritual or social, was really
possible. Times were changed, and men had changed along with them. The
Oxford movement was already undermined, though Disraeli knew it not. The
English upper classes were not to be persuaded to alter habits which had
become a second nature to them, or the people to be led back into social
dependence by enthusiasm and eloquence. Had any such resurrection of the
past been on the cards, Disraeli was not the necromancer who could have
bid the dead live again. No one had a keener sense of the indications in
others than he had. Fuller self-knowledge would have told him that the
friend of D'Orsay and Lady Blessington, of Tom Duncomb and Lytton
Bulwer, was an absurd associate in an ecclesiastical and social revival.
He seemed to think that if Newman had paid more attention to
'Coningsby,' the course of things might have been different. Saints had
worked with secular politicians at many periods of Christian history;
why not the Tractarian with him? Yet the juxtaposition of Newman and
Disraeli cannot be thought of without an involuntary smile. It would be
wrong to say that Disraeli had no sincere religious convictions. He was
a Hebrew to the heart of him. He accepted the Hebrew tradition as a true
account of the world, and of man's place in it. He was nominally a
member of the Church of England; but his Christianity was something of
his own, and his creed, as sketched in his 'Life of Lord George
Bentinck,' would scarcely find acceptance in any Christian community.
[Sidenote: 'CONINGSBY']
I have mentioned 'Coningsby.' It is time to see what 'Coningsby' was.
Disraeli's novels had been brilliant, but he had touched nowhere the
deeper chords of enduring feeling. His characters had been smart, but
trivial; and his higher flights, as in the 'Revolutionary Epic,' or his
attempts to paint more delicate emotion, as in 'Henrietta Temple' or in
'Venetia,' if not failures, were not successes of a distinguished kind.
He had shown no perception of what was simple, or true, or tender, or
admirable. He had been at his best when mocking at conventional humbug.
But his talent as a writer was great, and, with a subject on which he
was really in earnest, might produce a powerful effect. To impress the
views of the Young Englanders upon the public, something more was needed
than speeches in Parliament or on platforms. Henry Hope, son of the
author of 'Anastasius,' collected them in a party at his house at
Deepdene, and there first 'urged the expediency of Disraeli's treating
in a literary form those views and subjects which were the matter of
their frequent conversations.' The result was 'Coningsby' and 'Sybil.'
'Coningsby; or, the New Generation' carried its meaning in its title. If
England was to be saved by its aristocracy, the aristocracy must alter
their ways. The existing representatives of the order had grown up in
self-indulgence and social exclusiveness; some excellent, a few vicious,
but all isolated from the inferior ranks, and all too old to mend. The
hope, if hope there was, had to be looked for in their sons.
As a tale, 'Coningsby' is nothing; but it is put together with extreme
skill to give opportunities for typical sketches of character, and for
the expression of opinions on social and political subjects. We have
pictures of fashionable society, gay and giddy, such as no writer ever
described better; peers, young, middle-aged, and old, good, bad, and
indifferent, the central figure a profligate old noble of immense
fortune, whose person was easily recognised, and whose portrait was also
preserved by Thackeray. Besides these, intriguing or fascinating
ladies, political hacks, country gentlemen, mill-owners, and occasional
wise outsiders, looking on upon the chaos and delivering oracular
interpretations or prophecies. Into the middle of such a world the hero
is launched, being the grandson and possible heir of the wicked peer.
Lord Monmouth is a specimen of the order which was making aristocratic
government impossible. To tax corn to support Lord Monmouth was plainly
impossible. The story opens at Eton, which Disraeli describes with an
insight astonishing in a writer who had no experience of English public
school life, and with a fondness which confesses how much he had lost in
the substitutes to which he had been himself condemned. There Coningsby
makes acquaintance with the high-born youths who are to be his
companions in the great world which is to follow, then in the enjoyment
of a delightful present, and brimming with enthusiastic ambitions. They
accompany each other to their fathers' castles, and schemes are
meditated and begun for their future careers; Disraeli letting fall, as
he goes on, his own political opinions, and betraying his evident
disbelief in existing Conservatism, and in its then all-powerful leader.
He finds Peel constructing a party without principles, with a basis
therefore necessarily latitudinarian, and driving into political
infidelity. There were shouts about Conservatism; but the question, What
was to be conserved? was left unanswered. The Crown was to keep its
prerogatives provided they were not exercised; the House of Lords might
keep its independence if it was never asserted; the ecclesiastical
estate if it was regulated by a commission of laymen. Everything, in
short, that was established mig
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