It happened at the Grosvenor Gallery that it also fell to my lot to conduct Lord Beaconsfield round the exhibition of drawings by the old masters then arranged upon the walls. The contrast between the two men showed itself characteristically enough on the occasion to which I refer.
With sphinx-like face, and with hardly a spoken word, Lord Beaconsfield passed from the work of one great master to another, raising his eye-glass as he went, but displaying by no change of expression either criticism or appreciation, and at the finish he gracefully took his leave with a sentence that seemed to me, as he uttered it, to have been made ready for ultimate use even before he had entered the Gallery.
The drawings of Titian and Giorgione, of Michael Angelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, had apparently left him cold.
“I thank you,” he said, “for having been so good as to point out to me the examples of the great masters you admire, but I think for my part I prefer the eclectic school of the Caracci.”
In that one sentence he seemed to bring back the atmosphere of his earlier novels, and to image the taste of England at a time when connoisseurs made the grand tour.
His preference for the fashion of an earlier date in all matters appertaining to taste was, I suppose, deeply implanted in Disraeli’s nature, and I remember a story told me by Sir William Harcourt, which illustrates with what quiet and restrained sarcasm he could sometimes receive the announcement of a more modern development of thought.
It was during one of Sir William Harcourt’s visits to Hughenden that Disraeli turned to him after dinner and said, “Harcourt, I have had two young gentlemen from Oxford staying with me lately, and it seems from what I have learned from them that our judgments in all literary matters are sadly old-fashioned. These young gentlemen assured me that, according to the accepted canons of the present day, the late Lord Byron is to be admired, not so much for his qualities as a poet, as for the beauty of his moral character.”
Lord Beaconsfield’s appearance, as expressed in his dress, even at that later date when I first came in contact with him, still retained something of the florid taste that had characterised him as a youth. The bright colours he chose to affect stood in striking contrast with the impassive pallor of a countenance that seemed, as it gazed out upon the world, like some insoluble riddle of the East. The racial characteristics of his face were sufficiently marked, but the sense of death-like stillness that pervaded it gave it something of historic remoteness and antique calm. He looked out upon the present as though from the recesses of a buried past, and of all the representatives of his nation whom I have known, he appeared to me the only one who possessed in any pre-eminent degree the quality of self-possession in manner and bearing.
These external attributes served as the index of that extraordinary power of intellectual detachment which enabled him to sway the passions of others and to control his own. Such unquestioned authority as he ultimately acquired over the Tory party could, perhaps, only have been achieved by one who used their prejudices without sharing them, and who could appeal to their deeply rooted convictions rather as an artist than as a partisan.
As a speaker, he affected more of florid grace than was quite congenial to the taste of the time or the sympathies of his hearers, and his choice of language, whether in his novels or in his speeches, was sometimes insecurely poised between a leaning towards ornament that was sometimes tawdry, and a genuine and convincing eloquence.