The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

"If my wonderful adventure into the Beaconsfield country comes off, I shall want all the help which Lord D. offered to give me. I do not wonder that he and you were both startled at the proposition, and I am not at all sure that in a respectable series of Victorian Prime Ministers I should be allowed to treat the subject in the way that I wish. The point is to make out what there was behind the mask. Had it not been for Lothair I should have said nothing but a charlatan. But that altered my opinion, and the more often I read it the more I want to know what his real nature was. The early life is a blank filled up by imaginative people out of Vivian Grey. I am feeling my way indirectly with his brother, Ralph D'Israeli, and whether I go on or not will depend on whether he will help me."

"THE MOLT, November 12th, 1889,

"The difficulty is to find out the real man that lay behind the sphynx-like affectations. I have come to think that these affectations (natural at first) came to be themselves affected as a useful defensive armour which covered the vital parts. Anyway, the study of him is extremely amusing. I had nothing else to do, and I can easily throw what I write into the fire if it turns out unsatisfactory."

Although the book was necessarily a short one, it is too characteristic to be lightly dismissed. When Froude gave Mr. Reid the manuscript, he said, "It will please neither Disraeli's friends nor his foes. But it is at least an honest book." He heard, with more amusement than satisfaction, that it had pleased Gladstone. For the political estimate of a modern and Parliamentary statesman Froude lacked some indispensable qualifications. He knew little, and cared less, about the House of Commons, in which the best years of Disraeli's life were passed. He despised the party system, of which Disraeli was at once a product and a devotee. He had no sympathy with Lord Beaconsfield's foreign policy, and the colonial policy which he would have substituted for it was outside Lord Beaconsfield's scope. He had adopted from Carlyle the theory that Disraeli and Gladstone were both adventurers, the difference between them being that Disraeli only deceived others, whereas Gladstone deceived also himself. But Gladstone had ignored whereas Disraeli, with singular magnanimity, had offered to the author of Shooting Niagara a pension and a Grand Cross of the Bath.

It was, however, as a man of letters rather than as a politician that Disraeli fascinated Froude, so much so that he is betrayed into the paradox of representing his hero as a lover of literature rather than politics. Disraeli sometimes talked in that way himself, as when he was persuading Lightfoot to accept the Bishopric of Durham, and remarked, "I, too, have sacrificed inclination to duty." But he was hardly serious, and even in his novels it is the political parts that survive. Although Froude had found it impossible to review Endymion, the book is very like the author, and can only be appreciated by those who have been behind the scenes in politics. Froude's idea of Disraeli as a man with a great opportunity who threw it away, who might have pacified Ireland and preferred to quarrel with Russia, was naturally not agreeable to Disraelites, and as a general rule it is desirable that a biographer should be able, to write from his victim's point of view. Yet, all said and done, Froude's Beaconsfield is a work of genius, the gem of the series. Professional politicians, with the curious exception of Gladstone, thought very little of it. It was not written for them. Disraeli was a many-sided man, so that there is room for various estimates of his character and career. Of his early life Froude had no special knowledge. He was not even aware that Disraeli had applied for office to Peel. He shows sometimes an indifference to dry details, as when he makes Gladstone dissolve Parliament in 1873 immediately after his defeat on the Irish University Bill, and represents Russia as having by her own act repealed the Black Sea Clauses in the Treaty of Paris. Startling too is his assertion that the Parliament of 1868 did nothing for England or Scotland, on account of its absorption in Irish affairs. But he was not writing a formal history, and these points did not appeal to him at all. He drew with inimitable skill a picture of the despised and fantastic Jew, vain as a peacock and absurdly dressed, alien in race and in his real creed, smiling sardonically at English ways, enthusiasms, and institutions, until he became, after years of struggle and obloquy, the idol of what was then the proudest aristocracy in the world.

Disraeli's peculiar humour just suited Froude's taste. Disraeli never laughed. Even his smile was half inward. The irony of life, and of his own position, was a subject of inexhaustible amusement to him. There was nothing in his nature low, sordid, or petty. It was not money, nor rank, but power which he coveted, and at which he aimed. Irreproachable in domestic life, faithful in friendship, a placable enemy, undaunted by failure, accepting final defeat with philosophic calm, he played with political passions which he did not share, and made use of prejudices which he did not feel. Froude loved him, as he loved Reineke Fuchs, for his weird incongruity with everything stuffy and commonplace. From a constitutional history of English politics Disraeli might almost be omitted. His Reform Act was not his own, and his own ideas were seldom translated into practice. In any political romance of the Victorian age he would be the principal figure. In the Congress of Berlin, where he did nothing, or next to nothing, he attracted the gaze of every one, not for anything he said there, but because he was there at all. If he had left an autobiography, it would be priceless, not for its facts, but for its opinions. That Froude thoroughly understood him it would be rash to say. But he did perceive by sympathetic intuition a great deal that an ordinary writer would have missed altogether. For instance, the full humour of that singular occasion when Benjamin Disraeli appeared on the platform of a Diocesan Conference at Oxford, with Samuel Wilberforce in the chair, could have been given by no one else exactly as Froude gave it. Nothing like it had ever happened before. It is scarcely possible that anything of the kind can ever happen again. Froude found the origin of the Established Church in the statutes of Henry VIII. Gladstone found it, or seemed to find it, in the poems of Homer. In Disraeli's eyes its pedigree was Semitic, and it ministered to the "craving credulity" of a sceptical age, undisturbed by the provincial arrogance that flashed or flared in an essay or review.

"In the year 1864," says Froude, "Disraeli happened to be on a visit at Cuddesdon, and it happened equally that a Diocesan Conference was to be held at Oxford at the time, with Bishop Wilberforce in the chair. The clerical mind had been doubly exercised, by the appearance of Colenso on the 'Pentateuch' and Darwin on the 'Origin of Species.' Disraeli, to the surprise of every one, presented himself in the theatre. He had long abandoned the satins and silks of his youth, but he was as careful of effect as he had ever been, and had prepared himself in a elaborately negligent. He lounged into the assembly in a black velvet shooting-coat and a wide-awake hat, as if he had been accidentally passing through the town. It was the fashion with University intellect to despise Disraeli as a man with neither sweetness nor light; but he was famous, or at least notorious, and when he rose to speak there was a general curiosity. He began in his usual affected manner, slowly and rather pompously, as if he had nothing to say beyond perfunctory platitudes. The Oxford wits began to compare themselves favourably the dullness of Parliamentary orators; when first one sentence and then another startled them into attention. They were told that the Church was not likely to be disestablished. It would remain, but would remain subject to a Parliament which would not allow an imperium in imperio. It must exert itself and reassert its authority, but within the limits which the law laid down. The interest grew deeper when he came to touch on the parties to one or other of which all his listeners belonged. High Church and Low Church were historical and intelligible, but there had arisen lately, the speaker said, a party called the Broad, never before heard of. He went on to explain what Broad Churchmen were."

Disraeli's gibes at Colenso and Maurice are too well known to need repetition here. The equally famous reference to Darwin will bear to be quoted once more, at least as an introduction for Froude's incisive comment.

"What is the question now placed before society with a glibness the most astounding? The question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, am on the side of the angels."

"Mr. Disraeli," so Froude continues, "is on the side of the angels. Pit and gallery echoed with laughter. Fellows and tutors repeated the phrase over their port in the common room with shaking sides. The newspapers carried the announcement the next morning over the length and breadth of the island, and the leading article writers struggled in their comments to maintain a decent gravity. Did Disraeli mean it, or was it but an idle jest? and what must a man be who could exercise his wit on such a subject? Disraeli was at least as much in earnest as his audience. The phrase answered its purpose. It has lived and become historical when the decorous protests of professional divines have been forgotten with the breath which uttered them. The note of scorn with which it rings has preserved it better than any affectation of pious horror, which indeed would have been out of place in the presence of such an assembly."