II.—WHY WE DISBELIEVE IN HIM.
If a Whig had been asked ten or a dozen years ago, or indeed six years back, to write his impressions of Mr. Disraeli, he would have set about it in a strikingly different spirit from that which the task awakens now. Lord Beaconsfield has recently become much too serious a joke in the national history, but for a very long time the jocosity was light enough. In the eyes of all Liberals who had not fully acquired the gravity of their own fundamental principles, there was, down to a very late period, always something diverting about Mr. Disraeli. He might and did vex them, but shortly they were again smiling at him. The explanation was this, that for a long time his presence in Parliament hardly at all hindered the progress of Liberal measures. Whenever a legislative reform was proposed, he invariably spoke against it, and at some stage afterwards the Conservatives voted in a body the same way. From the voting being subsequent to the speaking, there was an illusive appearance of Mr. Disraeli's speechifying being the cause of the Tory division list. But, in reality, there was no such connection, and the Liberals were aware of it. They all knew that the Conservatives would have voted just the same without a word being spoken. If, during all the years Lord Palmerston was in power, almost the whole of Lord Russell's earlier and later official terms, and down to nearly the end of Mr. Gladstone's Ministry, Mr. Disraeli, instead of making speeches, had amused his audience by pirouetting on one leg night after night, the practical result would have been exactly the same. It could not have been so entertaining to the Liberals, because, looking at some members of the Conservative party, it would have exceeded the bounds of belief to suppose that Mr. Disraeli was really twirling for the whole, whereas it did somehow come to be accepted that he was speaking for all of them. The unlooked-for thoughts he pretended to put into their minds, and the preposterous words he did put upon their lips, kept all Englishmen who were not Conservatives shaking their sides with laughter. It was as if a foreign Will-o'-the-Wisp had strayed into the British Parliament, always, however, keeping himself and his antics on the Conservative side, as being, we suppose, the worst-drained part of the House, where the morasses lay. Even when, to the amazement of the country generally, Mr. Disraeli found his way into office, the merriment did not stop. Nobody who has reached mature years can forget what an astounding drollery it was thought to be when Mr. Disraeli was made Chancellor of the Exchequer by Lord Derby. For the time it seemed to convert English politics into pantomime. Will-o'-the-Wisp had been asked by the country party to undertake the post of chief financier. Everybody on the other side was prepared beforehand to laugh at his Budgets; and, when they were propounded, the Liberals did laugh a little more even than they had expected to do. When he brought in his India Bill, the merriment grew perfectly uproarious,—Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast, and the other large commercial towns exploding one after the other. It was the same when he proposed to give sixteen millions for Irish railways; it was the same with the first sketches of his Reform Bill. Surely nobody can have forgotten the "fancy franchises?" In a word, every domestic measure that Mr. Disraeli ever proposed was, in the first shape in which it was presented, received with mirth from nearly every quarter excepting his immediate rear. There sat his supporters, usually in those years wearing rather long faces during the earlier period of the statements, and apparently wondering if their ears could possibly be telling them rightly.
But all this, as there is not a single Liberal in the country but will admit, is a good deal altered. Lord Beaconsfield has recently signed foreign treaties on England's behalf, insisting most successfully, he tells us, on what kind of treaties they should be; he has undoubtedly put our armies and fleets into motion; and, while risking war in Europe, has actually waged it in Asia and Africa. The bustle of these events, and a certain dazzle and glitter attending them, cause people in general, at this moment, to forget all that prior long period of non-success on his part in everything else but making successive steps of personal advancement. What has happened lately in Lord Beaconsfield's career has certainly worn a look of importance, and it has undoubtedly embodied political power. If, as the Liberals will have it, he is still really Will-o'-the-Wisp as much as ever, he has managed to get hold of the sword of England, and has for some time been playing with it to the great wonder of foreign nations. But how has this change in his position been worked? This is the question I want now to consider.
A Hebrew by descent, a Christian by profession, and in politics a Tory—such is Lord Beaconsfield. This description, on the very face of it, is a rather mixed one, and implies a singular career. It is, however, the last item which specially fixes my attention. Mr. Disraeli, sparse though the instances are, was not the first of his race who changed his faith. Also, there have been, and indeed still are, other Hebrews who have entered public life in England, and attained conspicuousness in it. But those, while remaining nearly invariably Jews in religion, became Liberals in politics. In fact, Lord Beaconsfield is the only Hebrew of importance known who turned Tory. It was—and at first sight it gives a highly religious air to the Conservative party—indispensable to his doing this that he should first be a Christian. Not being that he would indeed have had to wait till the Liberals carried their Bill for the Removal of Jewish Disabilities before he could have joined the Conservatives inside Parliament. That circumstance, again, seems to give to his career a curious aspect. In fact, the reflection is forced upon one so early as this,—what an utter failure Mr. Disraeli must have been if he had not so amazingly succeeded! To be a Hebrew-Tory left just two issues, either to become the leader of the party or the very humblest member of it. All the circumstances would seem to point to the latter alternative as being the natural one, but it is the other which has somehow come about. Mr. Disraeli has flowered into the Earl of Beaconsfield, and has now twice been, and will remain for a little time longer, the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
Mr. Disraeli did not wait for his celebrity until he entered the House of Commons; he gathered the renown of authorship, and I might add, remembering the number of constituencies he tried before he was elected, the notoriety of out-door political life, before he plucked the fame of statesmanship. At the early age of twenty-two he was a literary lion in London society; his only claim to this premature publicity, though it was held to be quite sufficient, being that he was the writer of "Vivian Grey." It is quite impossible to begin to speak of Lord Beaconsfield in any other way than in connection with "Vivian Grey," although he is understood not altogether to approve of one's doing so.
All the world knows, or is supposed to know, this work. Mr. Disraeli's own description of its object was that it was meant to paint the career of a youth of talent in modern society, ambitious of political celebrity. Nearly everybody has persisted in regarding it as a kind of prospective autobiography, which the writer has ever since been occupied in realizing. Certainly Mr. Disraeli was at that time a youth, and a youth of talent; he must have been in society or he could not have known a great many people who are sketched in the pages; and it is impossible for him to deny that he was ambitious of political celebrity. The means Vivian Grey adopted for attaining that aim were, also, wonderfully like some of those which Mr. Disraeli himself afterwards, by some mistake, appeared to use. On the title-page of the book was the well-known quotation from "Ancient Pistol," to whom, in the eyes of some people, Lord Beaconsfield at certain moments of his career has ever had an indistinct resemblance. "The world is mine oyster," the motto stated, either on behalf of the writer or the hero; going on to add the rest, to the effect that either the one or the other meant to open it. Lord Beaconsfield has assuredly done so. The profound reflection which prompts the youthful hero of the book to his course of action was this:—"How many a powerful noble wants only wit to be a Minister; and what wants Vivian Grey to attain the same end? That noble's influence." Not many years after this Mr. Disraeli was seen in public very close to Lord Chandos. But it was not that Lord but Lord Carabas that Vivian Grey chose for his patron, which is, no doubt, a difference. The story most frankly relates how Vivian wins the marquis by teaching him how to make tomahawk punch, how he wins the marchioness by complimenting her poodle, and how during the task he consoles himself by such thoughts as this:—"Oh, politics, thou splendid juggle!" His settled purpose he thus sums up: "Mankind, then, is my great game." He expressly states that he is to win this game by the use of his "tongue," on which he states he is "able to perform right skilfully;" but it will, he recognises, be requisite "to mix with the herd" and to "humour their weaknesses." The chief guiding rule which he lays down for himself in the midst of it all is, "that he must be reckless of all consequences save his own prosperity."
There are people who still believe that in all this they see sketched the very determinations, maxims, and rules which are to be found deliberately carried out in Mr. Disraeli's actual career. It is perplexing. The parallel, they assert, runs into the closest correspondence of detail. Vivian Grey's model author is Bolingbroke; and everybody knows that he, also, was Mr. Disraeli's. The young man in the book shows his reverential admiration for Bolingbroke by inventing a few passages and putting them into that personage's mouth for the better bamboozling of Lord Carabas; and it is known that Mr. Disraeli, at different periods of his life, has taken passages from other people and put them into his own mouth. But I cannot pursue this comparison or contrast, or whatever it is, farther: it will be better seen as I go on, what grounds people have had for beholding Mr. Disraeli in Vivian Grey. For the present it is enough to say, that it was Mr. Disraeli, and not Vivian Grey, who wrote this book. So much as that is quite certain. A fiction of the kind above briefly hinted at was the first fruit of Mr. Disraeli's intellect; it was in penning those pages of caricature of everybody who was notable in London society that he expended the first fresh enthusiasm of his mind, and displayed the earlier untainted innocence of his disposition. Lord Beaconsfield has spoken of it as a book written by a boy. It was that which made it so marvellous. This boy began with satire, and it might have been predicted that the juvenile would develop into an exceptional man.
It was not until 1837, when Mr. Disraeli was about thirty-three years old, that he entered Parliament. Maidstone had the honour of finding him his first seat, though he had been willing to represent three other boroughs previously, if there had not been reluctance on the part of the constituencies. High Wycombe saw his earliest appearance on the hustings, and, indeed, it beheld him as a candidate more than once, but never as a member. He also offered himself to Marylebone. By some mistake it was supposed that in these instances he came forward as a Radical. Certainly his addresses spoke of short Parliaments, the ballot, and other measures commonly held to be Liberal. Mr. Joseph Hume, Mr. O'Connell, and Sir F. Burdett fell under the delusion, and wrote letters recommending him, though they afterwards withdrew them. But when, a little later, Mr. Disraeli contested Taunton as a Tory he explained it all. It seems that it arose out of a mystification. From the first he really stood as an "Anti-Whig," which the Liberals thought meant a Radical; and Mr. Disraeli, not wishing unnecessarily to disturb their minds, had let them go on thinking so. However, there was no doubt whatever as to his politics long before he was finally successful at Maidstone. He had become intimate with Lord Chandos, and had had his name toasted at banquets by the Aylesbury farmers as a friend of the agricultural interest. The whole question is one scarcely worth debating. I myself believe that the proper description of Mr. Disraeli at this time was not strictly either that of Radical or Tory; his accurate designation would have run,—"An intending politician determined somehow to get into Parliament, and looking eagerly for the first opening." Let me also add that, from a review of all his tastes, I further believe that he would have preferred the opening to offer on the Tory side, if only it had come soon enough.
The early part of Lord Beaconsfield's Parliamentary life will have to be compressed into a very brief space. Where would be the good of re-opening in any detail the closed story of those stale politics, all as dead as Queen Anne herself; or where the use of treating Mr. Disraeli's doings as very seriously forming part of those politics? He simply availed himself of his opportunities. For all practical purposes I might nearly skip—strange as that at first sight seems—to his second term of office in the post of Premier. It is only during a comparatively very few of these later years that Lord Beaconsfield has been of real importance in our politics. Of course, he had always much significance for his party, but it is of the nation I am speaking here. These individual tactics have only any general interest now through their making him successively Conservative leader, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Prime Minister. Nothing in this world, I should say, would be more tedious than tracing, for example, how Mr. Disraeli trimmed and tacked between Protection, Reciprocity, Revision of Taxation in the interests of the farmers, and a recognition of Free Trade. It all resulted in nothing; at least, the one single result it has brought forth has been—Lord Beaconsfield. But if a detailed retrospect of his lordship's earlier career would now have this dreary aspect, it was at the time lively enough, from moment to moment, not only on account of his debating smartness, but owing to a certain drollery which it for a long time wore.
A Minister, plainly, must get both his glory and his power from either domestic measures or from foreign policy. Very curiously, considering all the facts of Lord Beaconsfield's history down to the beginning of this last term of office, it was only to home matters that he should have looked for any distinction. An impression seems oddly to have popularized itself that he has a special genius for foreign affairs, and an enormous acquaintance with diplomacy. I can only say, that five years ago nobody knew it. The real truth is, that he had never any opportunities before of meddling with events abroad, and that we have been represented in these recent foreign complications by a Minister who, to that very moment, had had less to do with diplomacy than any English Premier for fully three-quarters of a century.
Lord Beaconsfield's mind has always been occupied with home affairs, and his characteristic views on these come from the quarter whence it is supposed all truth has been derived—the East. He somehow picked them up during two years of travel in those parts, from 1829 to 1831. About the former date, Mr. Disraeli's first brilliant but very brief literary success was over. He had published a second part of "Vivian Grey," which the public somehow was too busy to read; and had issued a further work of satire, "Popanilla," which it also neglected to buy. Mr. Disraeli immediately vanished into the Orient. When, after visiting Jerusalem, and lingering, as he tells us, on the plains of Troy, he returned to these shores, he brought back with him the Asian Mystery and a whole apparatus of political and social principles. He had also some manuscripts, which did not turn out to be of so much importance—"Contarini Fleming" and "The Young Duke." It was the most surprisingly fruitful voyage of discovery that any traveller ever made. Years elapsed before all the principles were given to the world, but Mr. Disraeli had them by him. Some of them are, indeed, hinted at as early as 1835, when he issued his "Vindication of the English Constitution," before he was in Parliament. Still, the system was not divulged in its entirety until he was in the House, and had founded what became known as the "Young England School." It is to the series of political novels which he then wrote that we must turn for the complete exposition of his fundamental ideas. Somehow, it has always seemed to everybody the most natural and fitting thing in the world that Mr. Disraeli should have corrected the inaccuracies of our national history, and shown our social fallacies, by writing works of fiction. The instruction with which he began the new training of the public was this—that our history is, in all the latter part of it, entirely wrong. In "Sybil," he thus gives his general opinion of the way in which it has been written:—"All the great events have been distorted, most of the important causes concealed, some of the principal characters never appear, and all who figure are so misunderstood and misrepresented that the result is a complete mystification."
Assuredly if this, or anything like it, was the state of things, Mr. Disraeli had not discovered it one moment too soon, and he was more than justified in making it known. On all the points named in the above summary he supplies most important rectifications. It seems that the people of this country, in so far, that is, as they were not the merest tools of their rulers, were under an entire mistake as to Rome wanting any domination in England in Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth's time; and that, strange to say, they also again fell into exactly the same delusion at the expulsion of James I. Mr. Disraeli puts the people who lived at those times right on these matters. But it was a section of nobles who at the latter juncture were to blame; those, namely, who had been enriched by the spoliation of the Church. Mr. Disraeli, indeed, gives the very simplest explanation of the Revolution of 1688. He states that the great Whig families were afraid that King James meant to reapply the Church lands to the education of the people and the support of the poor, and, in their alarm, they brought over Prince William, who gladly came, since it was only in England that he could reckon on being able to borrow money enough to carry on his failing war against France. In and from that hour happened the catastrophe which overwhelmed the English people—the Crown became enslaved by a Whig oligarchy. What Mr. Disraeli styles Venetian politics rushed in upon us, and these, by the aid of what he further calls Dutch finance—that is, the incurring of a National Debt—made foreign commerce necessary, and increased the obligation of home industry; nearly, as might be expected, ruining everything.
All the more modern period of our history had been, he in the most wonderful way explains, a fight to the death between these fearful Whig nobles on the one hand, and, on the other, a struggling heroic Crown and some enlightened patriotic Tory peers. The true incidents of this dark and stupendous conflict had never been clearly observed by the people in general at the time, nor had the real events been recorded in any of the common chronicles. But, as any one will be ready to allow, Mr. Disraeli could not be blamed for this. What was especially to his credit was that he had himself found out that the real ruler of England, in the era immediately preceding his own, was a certain Major Wildman, whom nobody before Mr. Disraeli had ever in the least suspected of wielding supreme power. I cannot stay to give the details of this portentous disclosure, but anybody may find them in Lord Beaconsfield's surprising pages. But in spite of superhuman exertions in the cause of the people by Lord Shelburne, and after him Mr. Pitt, the wicked Whigs always triumphed; the crowning act of duplicity on their part being, in fact, the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832.
The above is a highly condensed, but strictly accurate summary of Lord Beaconsfield's version of our national history. Any reader by the slightest rummaging in his own mind will know how far his own impressions agree with it. But this is only his Lordship's instruction of us as to facts: I must proceed to state the principles of action he founds upon them. Here, however, I find myself brought up a little. If the whole truth is to be spoken, this further task is more easily announced than performed. Mr. Disraeli, in those early days, assuredly made a great appearance of stating his political opinions; but it almost seems as if a novel, after all, is not the best means of expounding political doctrine. The more you attempt to lay hold of these principles the more they somehow show a lack of exactness. But let me try.
He again and again affirms that he is for our having a "real throne," which he asserts should be surrounded by "a generous aristocracy;" and he wishes, moreover, for a people who shall be "loyal and reverentially religious." All this certainly sounds as if it meant something very satisfactory. It is only when you try to penetrate into it that your over-curiosity leads to perplexity. Neither Mr. Disraeli nor Lord Beaconsfield has ever definitely explained, for example, how far a throne being "real" means that he or she sitting upon it shall have a personal veto. All that you can quite clearly make out as to securing "generousness" in the aristocracy is that they shall not be Whigs; you may suppose that they ought to be, and, in fact, no doubt would be, Tories. Pushed strictly home, it would seem to be implied that every peer who holds property which once belonged to the Church should be stripped of it, and it might be construed to mean that they should become commoners. Then, as to the people at large, how are they to be made loyal and religious, since it seems that they are neither of these now? From not the least important parts of Lord Beaconsfield's teaching, the first step logically to be taken with this view would be to ask the vote back from all of them who now have it. His own Household Franchise Bill will have given more work to do in this way. But the passing of that mysterious measure has been explained,—it was, at the moment, a necessary piece of party tactics. Strictly regarded, the explanation points to the conclusion that, if it could be done safely, the Act ought to be revoked to-morrow. But, certainly, it was no such measure as that he relied upon for elevating the condition of the people. What he did depend upon for doing it he has specified, and it is this,—the revival of Church Convocation on a particular basis, of which he knows the exact measurement. Possibly the reader, if he is not a political partisan, is growing puzzled. "Was nothing else," he may ask, "proposed in the Disraelian system for the cure of popular evils?" This, certainly, was not the whole of what it included some mention of. For example, the preface to "Lothair" states that one of Lord Beaconsfield's aims always was the establishment of what he terms "a commercial code on the principles successfully negotiated by——" No, it was not by Cobden and Bright, for it will be remembered Lord Beaconsfield did not adhere to that: but the full sentence runs,—"successfully negotiated by Lord Bolingbroke at Utrecht." He farther states that it is a principle with him that labour requires regulating no less than property. I myself cannot assert that I ever met with any one who professed to understand what this means; but "labour," and "regulating," and "property" are very good words, and if there has not been a great waste of language, the remark must signify a good deal. His system, also, does really make allusion to the electorate, for it specifies as another of his cherished purposes, "the emancipation of the constituencies of 1832." Other people used, in an old-fashioned way, to talk of enfranchising non-electors; but it is the voters that Lord Beaconsfield is for emancipating. The two most definite statements of his political theory are to be found in "Sybil," where he makes Gerard say that "the natural leaders of the people, and their only ones, are the aristocracy;" and adds, through the mouth of somebody else, that "the Church has deserted the people," to which he attributes their having become "degraded."
One of Lord Beaconsfield's very strongest points has always been this physical and moral degradation of the people. He has talked about it so much that it has nearly seemed that he had got some plan for doing something for it. In the sketches he gives in "Sybil" of the homes in Marner, the dens in which the working classes dwell, and the squalor of their condition, he nearly touches the heart. It somehow has an effect almost identical with the sentiment of the most advanced Liberal politics until you come to the remedies proposed. The use which Lord Beaconsfield makes of the towns in his teaching is worth noting. Any one who scrutinizes it closely will see that his ideal social system is the rustic one of the country parish, taking always for granted that it is perfect; and he kindly goes for examples of social failure to the towns,—the origin and condition of which, according to all strict reasoning, he must be supposed to attribute to the Whig nobility. How accurately this fits in with what is known of the development of modern manufactures every reader will know.
If anybody should say that he cannot see any accuracy in the above version of the national history, and that there is no real applicability to our affairs in such a system, or, as such an one would perhaps style it, pretended system of politics, I can only reply that if he is under the impression that he is an admirer of Lord Beaconsfield, then this is very sad. For these are certainly Lord Beaconsfield's views of our history and the scheme of his politics. Neither of them, I will venture to add, surprises me. It seems to me that if a political Will-o'-the-Wisp, such as the Liberals for so long a time would make out Lord Beaconsfield to be, got into the top-boots and heavy coat of an English squire, these are just the historical conclusions and political generalizations which he would make, when he began trying to think like a country gentleman; and, for anything I can say, he would make them with a certain sincerity, that kind of ratiocinative working being natural to the Will-o'-the-Wisp intellect, when smitten with a passion for Parliamentary life and an aspiration for counterfeiting philosophy. Moreover, both the home politics and the foreign policy seem to me exactly to fit; they really each display like qualities of mind, and I can see no reason for any one who can accept the latter stickling at the former. If what is really at the bottom of the objection is, as I suspect it is, a feeling that there is something flimsy, artificial, flashy about either, or both, the politics and the policy, is not that asking too much from the light glittering source I have described? The Liberals have always done Lord Beaconsfield the justice of never expecting more than this from him, and he, on his side, has never disappointed their expectations. If they had not previously thought much of him in connection with foreign policy, never in fact believing that he would actually preside at a critical juncture long enough for that question much to signify, there is not a person in our party who would not have known beforehand that any foreign policy of Lord Beaconsfield, if the occasion for one ever came, would be one of dazzle—Jack-o'-Lantern diplomacy and Will-o'-the-Wisp home politics rightly belonging to one another. The bright and bewildering flashes have now for a long time been ceaselessly playing here and there all over Europe from the direction of London; now hitting St. Petersburg; now gilding Berlin; then flickering over Constantinople; flaming terribly at Cabul; quivering at the Cape; striking Egypt at short intervals; and shimmering their mildest at Paris. The activity, as was likely in such a case, has been unprecedented. My own conviction is that Lord Beaconsfield has amazed, perplexed, it may be astounded, foreign diplomatists throughout Europe quite as much as he has done any of his opponents at home.
What fitness, I should like to ask, has Lord Beaconsfield ever shown for appreciating the great events which, during his time, have gone forward in the world. During this generation, two stupendous rearrangements of States, completely recasting all the international relationships of Western Europe, have taken place—the unification of Italy and the transformation of Prussia into a German Empire. Political earthquakes like those do not come about all in a moment; these two were, in fact, long in preparation; there were throes, there were signs, there were symptoms. Some English statesmen—we could name several on the Liberal side—read the intimations rightly. But what subtle diplomatic sensitiveness did they challenge in Lord Beaconsfield—what preternaturally quick prognostications had he of the foreign marvels that were about to happen? Look first to the Prussian transformation. He severely blamed Chevalier Bunsen for indulging what he styled "the dreamy and dangerous nonsense called German nationality." Turn to Italy. Lord Beaconsfield characterized the earliest attempts of those patriots determined to win back national life or die as "mere brigandage." He spoke of the "phantom of a United Italy." All the world knows that so late even as the publication of his novel, "Lothair," he was under the impression that everything that had happened in the Italian peninsula and in Sicily was the work of a few secret societies, of whom Garibaldi was the figure-head. Take another example. He glossed over the former policy of the Austrian rulers towards Hungary, as innocent as the youngest baby in any cradle in any of our embassies, of discerning that in a few years it would be Hungary that would dominate the empire. In fact, Lord Beaconsfield has never shown the slightest true prevision of anything that was to happen abroad. But I must not be so unfair as to forget that Lord Beaconsfield took the side of the North in the American Civil War. Accidents will happen at times in the play of any kind of intellect; and this, at the very moment, had something of the appearance of being an abnormality of the Disraelian mind. When you look into the instance more closely, it proves not fully to contradict the other cases. Mr. Disraeli uttered a prophecy as to the future of America, and it was this: "It will be a mart of arms, a scene of diplomacies, of rival States, and probably of frequent wars." The result has vindicated his Lordship—nothing of the sort has happened.[1] Come, however, still nearer home. The French Commercial Treaty, which was the first practical attempt to bring the peoples on each side of the Channel into real intercourse, sure to make them permanent friends in the end, was urgently opposed by Lord Beaconsfield. It was towards him that Mr. Cobden had to turn at every stage of his nearly superhuman labours to see what was the next obstacle he would have to set himself to try and overcome.
I venture to say that the foreign policy of such a Minister is certain to end in being one of isolation. Jack-o'-Lantern is always so busy in converting all he does into some private business of his own, that, by-and-by, he is sure to be alone in the transaction. Let us test the diplomatic situation as it now stands, by this rule, and, if it turns out that the English diplomacy has really established concert on our part with anybody, it will have of necessity to be admitted by me that I have been quite wrong in all that is said above. The position I take up is that a Will-o'-the-Wisp could not in his movements bring himself to coincide long enough with anybody else's activity to give any such result.
France is nearer to us than any other Continental Power, not only geographically but politically. How has the recent foreign policy turned out with respect to her? Our very first diplomatic move, that of hastily snatching at the Suez Canal shares, risked our understanding with France entirely. We do not hear much about Egypt now from the supporters of the Government. There are good reasons for it. Nothing could possibly have resulted worse than everything we did in that quarter. France did not allow a march to be stolen upon her; and the next moment we had Italy on our hands as well as France. But come to the Berlin Conference. France there, in pursuance of a traditional policy, backed up Greece. Lord Beaconsfield stood quite aloof from France. Come down to the very latest moment. The alliance between Germany and Austria is the one recent occurrence which is of all others most distasteful to Frenchmen, and Lord Salisbury, on behalf of his chief, not merely goes into slightly profane raptures over it, but works hard to create the impression that they two, indirectly though not directly, brought it about. This is how matters have been made to stand between us and France. With respect to Germany and Austria-Hungary, our Government is, of course, not within their arrangements, but, practically there seems to be an outside relation implied. Those two Powers are understood to reckon upon England as in some way restraining France if Russia made any move. At any rate, if France joined Russia, it is whispered, we should have to do something which would somehow aid Austria and Germany. Why, Chancellor Bismarck's chuckling at this position of things can distinctly be heard all the way from Varzin. Prince Gortschakoff is by no means the one at whom he is laughing hardest. Nothing need be said, I suppose, as to our relations with Russia: it is the special boast of our Government that in the case of the greatest Asiatic Power next to ourselves they have prevented any understanding at all. Just so, too, we have alienated Greece and the newly-formed Principalities. But there is Turkey. All that we have done has told in her favour,—surely we are at one with her? Lord Beaconsfield has just countermanded the orders to our fleet to get up steam and direct the muzzles of its guns towards Turkey. But a wonderful success, we are told, has already resulted from this. What does the recent flourish of telegrams really amount to? That the Porte has added one more sheet to the plentiful waste-paper heap of its proclamations. What our people were known to desire was a change of Minister: and Turkey, in place of that, offers to name Baker Pasha to look after the moral and social improvement of Asia Minor. The test of whether it is Will-o'-the-Wisp, or an ordinary statesman, who is at the head of our affairs gives the result I anticipated. England stands absolutely alone, and the last touch of preposterousness is added to the situation by the statement that it was at the advice of Russia that the Porte pretended to yield to our demands, and that though the Northern Powers are getting into motion again for some ends of their own, they do not in the least intend to meddle with us in Asia Minor. Indeed, I should think not. A splendid morass lies in that part of the world, with Turkey on one side and Russia on the other, and Jack-o'-Lantern has led us right into the middle of it. That is the present issue of the Beaconsfield foreign policy which was to have produced European concert,—we have Asia Minor on our hands, solitarily; and are going to set about immediately reforming it, before the next elections, against the willingness of Turkey, but with the sanction of Russia, and by the means of Baker Pasha. In the meantime, or at any time, Russia may use the situation against us just as best suits her.
I think it will now be admitted that Lord Beaconsfield's foreign policy is every whit as wonderful as the measures of home politics he ought to be urging, if he was only at liberty for that; and further, that they both bespeak exactly the same order of mind.
I must now try to bring together the personal impressions his Lordship makes on the mind of a Liberal. The noble Earl is very brilliant. That, of course, is accepted on all sides: there never was a member of the Wisp family who was not. Not to be brilliant would be against their nature; in fact, shine is their peculiarity. Moreover, standing now behind the event, we seem to see Lord Beaconsfield in Mr. Disraeli from the very beginning. Those who had the privilege of beholding him on his very first appearances in London high society, in, say, the Countess of Blessington's salon, where he would be grouped with Count D'Orsay, Prince Napoleon, and Count Morny, give a gorgeous description of him. It seems that he did not depend for celebrity solely upon his witticisms, either printed or spoken, but relied, also, in some measure, on the splendour of his walking canes. The jewels on his hands are said to have rivalled, and at times excelled, the pearls upon his lips; the display in both respects bearing witness that his native tastes were Oriental. His ringlets, in particular, are said to have been the admiration, if not the envy, of the ladies. It seemed almost necessary to give up a line or two to these personal particulars, for the younger people of this generation never saw Mr. Disraeli in his full splendour. As he developed his later powers, he moderated his earlier waistcoats. But he never was an ordinary commoner; he always moved in our public life like a superior being in disguise. He was with us but not of us. Since he is an Earl, the impression he makes has become more natural. The promotion to our peerage gives to some personages an artificial aspect; in Mr. Disraeli's case, the effect was simplifying; and though, after all, it is not quite gorgeous enough, it is befitting. There is a little something not quite in the English style,—a slight foreign incongruity; still, that was always there, and it is, in fact, less noticeable now under the coronet and beneath the ermine.
But—and this is the point sought to be brought out in the above remarks—it was evident from the earliest moment that this splendid person meant to achieve social success. And he has certainly done it. There would be injustice in pretending that he has not had other motives; but celebrity was his leading passion. He has himself made a frank confession on this point. In the days when it was not yet certain that there was a political career before him, the likelihood rather being that he might have wholly to depend upon literature as his means of distinction, he rushed into poetry, having just failed in prose. But he warned the public in the preface of his "Revolutionary Epick," that if they did not purchase and admire it, he had done with song. "I am not," so ran the naïvely self-disclosing sentence, "one of those who find consolation for the neglect of my contemporaries in the imaginary plaudits of posterity." No, nothing in this world, we are quite certain, would ever have consoled Mr. Disraeli for the neglect of his contemporaries. But he took sure measures not to undergo it. He positively raged to get into Parliament; trying one constituency after another, and only succeeding with the fourth. To judge from the fierceness of Mr. Disraeli's struggles, there was in his eyes nothing worth living for, if he were not inside the House of Commons. But he had got into the newspapers before he got into Parliament. The town was kept ringing with Mr. Disraeli's name. In London he was just as much talked of forty-seven years ago as he is to-day.
If the rudeness of a little terseness is passed over, I may fairly say that publicity was Mr. Disraeli's passion; in the circumstances of his position, audacity was his only means; and, with his style of character and intellect, inaccuracy was his necessity. A very few words will establish each point. Was he not studiously audacious? The first book he wrote was a skit on the whole of the higher circle of London society; the candidate he sought to set aside at his first Parliamentary contest was the son of the then Premier; before he was in Parliament he threatened O'Connell; he had not been in the House long before he attacked Sir Robert Peel. It was a glorious audacity on his part, considering the disadvantage of his race, to throw into the face of the British public the supremacy of "Semitic" blood, and to confound us all with the Asian Mystery. But, in turning next to his inaccuracies, we are positively awed by the number and the enormity of the blunders Mr. Disraeli and Lord Beaconsfield between them have committed, in, as it would seem, the most natural way. It was a mere trifle that, when propounding his second Budget, Mr. Disraeli should have thought that he had a surplus to the bagatelle amount of £400,000, until Mr. Gladstone kindly explained to him and to the country that it was a deficiency of that small sum. Some people would be touched deeper to find that in his "Life of Lord George Bentinck" he is of opinion that the crucifixion of the Saviour took place in the reign of Augustus Cæsar. In the course of the debates on one of the early Reform measures, he thought, when Lord Dunkellin made a proposal relating to the "rental valuation" in connection with voting qualification, that it was payment of rates that was in question. In his oration on the death of the Duke of Wellington, he, as all Europe soon knew, mistook long passages from an article written by M. Thiers as being his own composition. He fell into just the same error as to some splendid sentences of Lord Macaulay and also, as to a fine burst of eloquence belonging really to the late Mr. David Urquhart. Very early in his career, when acknowledging his health proposed by mistake in the guise of an old scholar of the famous public school of Winchester, he became momentarily under the impression that he was really educated on that noble foundation, though he had never stood under its roof. Very late in his career, so late as the affair known as the Pigott appointment, he believed that the Rev. Mr. Pigott, the rector of his own parish, had voted against him at the poll in his own county some time after that reverend gentleman's death. But there is really no end to these instances of Lord Beaconsfield having innocently said the thing that is not. With respect to a number of examples of another kind, it would be puzzling to know whether to put them in the category of audacities or inaccuracies; the only way of quite getting over the difficulty would, perhaps, be to consider them as belonging to both. For instance, in 1847, he quoted Mr. J. S. Mill as a friend of Protection, and said Mr. Pitt was the author of Free Trade. On a not very far back occasion, he remarked: "I never attacked any one in my life." Perhaps, with that quotation, it is right to stop.
One of the peculiarities of Lord Beaconsfield's mind has seemed to some people an affectation, that, namely, by which, in reference to any case of much importance, he is sure to miss what seems to everybody else the significant feature of the business, and to fasten on some detail which arrests nobody else. Hardly any one will have yet forgotten the instance of the "Straits of Malacca," and only just the other day a new example was furnished. The revival of trade being the topic, while everybody else's thoughts went to cotton and iron and pottery, Lord Beaconsfield's lighted upon—chemicals. It is all explained on the footing I earlier hinted, that in Lord Beaconsfield's mind the imagination is in just the place the reason occupies in the minds of ordinary people. This makes it obligatory that he shall avoid the common facts, and make some opportunity for exaggerating the value of some detail overlooked by everybody else. It is only in this way that Lord Beaconsfield conclusively certifies to himself that his intellect has really acted.
I am myself quite sincere in saying that I believe there is in all this a certain kind of sincerity in Lord Beaconsfield. Where most people remember, his Lordship fancies; and in his case what is most convenient, naturally offers itself. This has very much increased his brilliancy, for the process leaves its practiser utterly unhampered. But nobody should ask for both strict accuracy and Lord Beaconsfield's quick, free wit. It is demanding an unreasonable combination. If other people had only not remembered, his career would have been even still finer than it is. That is what has partially spoiled things for him. It is even possible that this amazing foreign policy of his may be in a measure explainable on certain suggestions of what we may call pictorial working rules, if we were only inside his mind. Certainly his home politics give some hints that they were framed on a principle of picturesqueness,—a very sophisticated canon of rustic taste can be detected dimly lying at the bottom of them. By only leaving out the towns, and repressing the growth of modern manufactures, and subduing foreign commerce, something might possibly—I cannot say—be made of them. In this foreign diplomacy, there is a certain imaginativeness in bringing dark-skinned soldiers from Asia into Europe, in turning our homely English Queen into an Oriental Empress, in becoming possessor of a fresh island in the Mediterranean, in shifting a frontier line in India, in adding a new province in Africa. All this has meant massacre, and fire, and bloodshed, with the imminent risk of very much more of all of them; and Sir Stafford Northcote, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been kept working as hard as a sprite in a pantomime pouring out millions of our taxation. But if it be Will-o'-the-Wisp we have at the head of affairs, nothing of this is likely very greatly to affect him. Assuredly, nothing of it has affected Lord Beaconsfield, and we may be sure he is ready to go over it all again to-morrow.
If it was worth while, very large deductions would have to be made from Lord Beaconsfield's seeming success if we look rationally at his whole career. No man who is supposed to have been anything like so successful as he is popularly held to be, ever had so many and such striking failures to look back upon. Looking at him as connected with letters, he is the author of works which have failed more completely than any written by any one who himself became known. Judged by their ambitious aims, these literary non-successes of Lord Beaconsfield are gigantic. The epic poem ("The Revolutionary Epick") which Mr. Disraeli supposed was to place him—he himself tells us so—by the side of, or else between, Homer and Milton, nobody would read; the play ("Alarcos") which he states he wrote to "revive the British stage," is never acted. Not one of his novels, when his political position has ceased to advertize them, will remain in the hands of the public. If you look back on his Parliamentary career, the dazzle came late, and after a dreary distance had been travelled. The political party he founded, "The Young England School," has for twenty-five years been as dead as the door-nail which typified the death of Marley. Nothing whatever came of it. The one only notable legislative measure that stands in his name,—the Reform Bill,—really belongs to the other side. Scrutinize his career how you will, and some abatements of this kind have to be made. He is supposed to have had a charm over men,—it has failed with the strong ones. Peel he tried very hard to win, but had to take up with Lord George Bentinck instead. At this moment he is supposed to be in favour with the Court: the impression he made upon the Prince Consort was far from satisfactory. He has quite recently lost Lord Derby and Lord Carnarvon; and there was a time when the Marquis of Salisbury and he stood in a very different relationship.
Lord Beaconsfield's social system is that of a novelist; his finance was ever that of a Will-o'-the-Wisp; and he has now added a Jack-o'-Lantern diplomacy. Surely nothing more is needed to justify disbelief in him.
A Whig.
[1] Since writing the above I have met with an article in the October No. of The North American Review, on "Louis Napoleon and the Southern Confederacy," which puts this alleged friendship for the North in a very doubtful light. Among some State Papers found in Richmond, a despatch from Mr. Slidell says,—"Lindsay saw Disraeli, who expressed great interest in our affairs, and fully concurred in the views of the Emperor." Louis Napoleon was then intriguing hard to get the South recognised.