I
For two reasons or (shall we say) against two main obstacles, both serious, Benjamin Disraeli found it hard to gain the ear of Parliament and, having gained it, had yet a long fight before attaining office. To begin with, his race and reputation were against him. He was a Jew, and he had written novels. He was admittedly clever to excess: but cleverness, specially when tainted by literary skill, is, of all others, the reputation which our British Senate most profoundly (and perhaps on the whole wisely) distrusts. That the House “hates a man who makes it think” was the observation of a cynic, no doubt. But I have also heard it said by one long a member of it, that a speaker there must always count on somebody—he knows not whom—who knows the subject more thoroughly than he. Its instinct being for solidity, it shrinks from brilliance as a danger: and this was specially true of the party to which Disraeli allied himself—upon which, we may say, he thrust himself—a Jew, an adventurer, an ambitious, esurient fellow without any stake in the country. What had a party, which didn’t in the least object to being called stupid, to gain by the support of such an outsider?
And it is obvious that, for Parliamentary success, Disraeli had to overcome something more serious—a certain bumptiousness of manner, a youthful confidence and ease in Sion, helped out by elaborate ringlets, mannerisms and a foppish dress very much overdone: an opulence of speech and waistcoat, both jarring on the very men—and probably most upon these—into whose less-oiled heads he was fighting to drive some ideas. There is a great deal of tactlessness in the story of Disraeli, right up to the moment of Peel’s fall. But the story witnesses not only to a growing mastery, won by amazing courage, over the House but—better—to a discipline won over himself.