‘Very proper of the Queen to offer it,’ said the conductor of a Chelsea omnibus to me, ‘and more proper of he to say that he would have nothing to do with it. ’Tisn’t they who can do honour to the likes of he.’ But Disraeli saved his country from the reproach of coming centuries, when Carlyle will stand among his contemporaries as Socrates stands among the Athenians, the one pre-eminently wise man to whom all the rest are as nothing.
[CHAPTER XVII]
Retirement from office—Dignity in retreat—Hughenden—Lord Beaconsfield as a landlord—Fondness for country life—‘Endymion’—Illness and death—Attempted estimate of Lord Beaconsfield—A great man? or not a great man?—Those only great who can forget themselves—Never completely an Englishman—Relatively great, not absolutely—Gulliver among Lilliputians—Signs in ‘Sybil’ of a higher purpose, but a purpose incapable of realisation—Simplicity and blamelessness in private life—Indifference to fortune—Integrity as a statesman and administrator.
‘Was man in der Jugend wünscht, davon hat man im Alter die Fülle’ (What one desires in one’s youth one has enough of in one’s age).
Disraeli had won it all, all that to his young ambition had seemed the only object for which it was worth while to live. Yet he had gained the slippery height only, perhaps, to form a truer estimate of the value of a personal triumph. It was his to hold but for a moment, and then he fell, too late in life to retrieve another defeat. When the shadows lengthen and the sun is going down, earthly greatness fades to tinsel, and nothing is any longer beautiful to look back upon but the disinterested actions, many or few, which are scattered over the chequered career. Disraeli, like many other distinguished men, had to pay the penalty of his character. A fool may have his vanity satisfied with garters and peerages; Disraeli must have been conscious of their emptiness.
FATE OF THE CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT
When the result of the elections of 1880 was known he again accepted his fate, as Mr. Gladstone had done six years before, without waiting for the meeting of Parliament. He submitted with dignity, though with the fatal consciousness that at his age he could not hope to witness a reversal of the judgment upon him. He did not talk petulantly of retiring from politics. He took his place again as leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords, and showed no signs of weakened power. But he had always been impatient of the details of business, and his chief pleasure was now to retire to Hughenden, with or without companions, most frequently alone. For a fortnight together he would remain there in solitude, wandering through the park or through the Bradenham woods, which in his youth had been the scene of so many ambitions or moody meditations. His trees, his peacocks, his swans, his lake and chalk stream were sadly associated with the memories of his married life. He was so fond of his trees that he directed in his will that none of them should be cut down. He was on pleasant terms with his tenants and labourers; he visited them in their cottages, and was specially kind to old people and to little children. The ‘policy of sewage,’ with which he had been taunted as a Minister, was his practice as a landlord. No dust-heaps, or cesspools, or choked drains, or damp floors were to be seen among the Hughenden tenements. To such things he looked with his own eyes, and he said he never was so happy as when left to himself in these occupations.