[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.
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.
THE JEWS IN SPAIN