The Earl of Beaconsfield

by James Anthony Froude

Of his reflections at this period some may be found hereafter in the papers which he bequeathed to Lord Rowton. No particular traces appear in the last literary work which in his final leisure he contrived to accomplish. He had left ‘Endymion’ half finished when he took office in 1874; he went on with it when office had left him, perhaps because he had thought himself obliged to buy a house in London on retiring from Downing Street and wanted money.

There is nothing remarkable in ‘Endymion’ except the intellectual vivacity, which shows no abatement. It is in the style of his earlier novels, and has little of the serious thought which is so striking in ‘Sybil’ and ‘Lothair.’ There are the same pictures of London fashionable life and fashionable people, in the midst of them a struggling youth pushing his way in the great world, and lifted out of his difficulties, as he himself had been, by a marriage with a wealthy widow. As before many of the figures are portraits. Myra, the heroine, impatient, restless, ambitious, resolute to raise herself and her brother above the injuries of fortune, is perhaps a likeness of himself in a woman’s dress. But the calm mastery of modern life, the survey, wide as the world, of the forces working in English society, the mellow and impartial wisdom which raises ‘Lothair’ from an ephemeral novel into a work of enduring value, all this is absent. It is as if disappointment had again clouded his superior qualities and had brought back something of his original deficiencies. The most interesting feature in ‘Endymion’ is the exact photograph of the old manor house at Bradenham, and the description of the feelings with which a fallen and neglected statesman of once brilliant promise retired there into unwelcome poverty. Except for this the book might have been unwritten and nothing would have been lost of Disraeli’s fame. It throws no fresh light upon his own character. He wanted money and it brought him ten thousand pounds.

ILLNESS AND DEATH

The sand ran rapidly out. Lord Beaconsfield was in his place at the opening of the session of 1881. The effects of the return of the Liberal party were already visible in all parts of the Empire. He spoke with something of his old force on the state of things which was to be expected in Ireland. He spoke on India and foreign politics. He could not foresee the bombardment of the Alexandrian forts, the conquest of Egypt, to be followed by the disgrace of Khartoum. He escaped the mortification of the surrender to Russia on the Afghan frontier. But he lived to hear of the conclusion of the annexation of the Transvaal. He saw the enemies of England again at their work across St. George’s Channel, and a Government again in power whose rule was to purchase peace by concession. His own part was played out. He had not succeeded, and it was time for him to be gone. In the middle of March he had an attack of gout, which was aggravated by a cold. At first no danger was anticipated, but he grew worse day after day, and on the 19th of April Benjamin Disraeli had taken his last leave of a scene in which he had so long been so brilliant an actor. When an English statesman dies, complimentary funeral orations are spoken over him in Parliament as part of the ordinary course; but Disraeli had been so uncommon a man that the displays on this occasion had more in them than they often have of genuine sincerity. He had been so long among us that his name had become a household word. The whole nation, of all shades of politics, felt that a man was gone whose place could not be filled, who in a long and chequered career had not only won his honours fairly but deserved affectionate remembrance.

He was infinitely clever. In public or private he had never done a dishonourable action; he had disarmed hatred and never lost a personal friend. The greatest of his antagonists admitted that when he struck hardest he had not struck in malice. A still higher praise belongs to himself alone that he never struck a small man.

The Abbey was offered, and a public funeral; and if honour there be in such interments he had an ample right to it. By his own desire he was buried at Hughenden, by the side of his wife and the romantic friend who had conceived so singular an attachment to him. There those three rest side by side, Disraeli and his faithful companion disguised as Earl and Viscountess, but thought of only by the present generation under their own familiar name, and the eccentric and passionate widow who had devoted her fortune to him. In life there had been a peculiar bond between these three. Disraeli had innumerable admirers, but there were not many to whom he trusted his inmost confidence. Gratitude was stronger in him even than ambition, and as to his wife and to Mrs. Willyams he owed the most, to them, perhaps, he was most completely attached. It was a strange union, but they had strange natures, and they lie fitly and well together—far away from the world, for which neither of them cared, in a quiet parish church in Buckinghamshire.

CONDITIONS OF HUMAN GREATNESS

A biography, however brief, must close with a general estimate. What estimate is to be formed of Disraeli? We have a standard by which to measure the bodily stature of a man; we have none by which to measure his character; neither need we at any time ask how great any man is, or whether great at all, but rather what he is. Those whom the world agrees to call great are those who have done or produced something of permanent value to humanity. We call Hipparchus great, or Newton, or Kepler, because we owe to them our knowledge of the motion of the earth and the stars. Poets and artists have been great men; philosophers have been great men. The mind of Socrates governs our minds at the present day. Founders of religion have been great men; reformers have been great men: we measure their worth by the work which they achieved. So in society and politics we call those great who have devoted their energies to some noble cause, or have influenced the course of things in some extraordinary way. But in every instance, whether in art, science, religion, or public life, there is an universal condition, that a man shall have forgotten himself in his work. If any fraction of his attention is given to the honours or rewards which success will bring him there will be a taint of weakness in what he does. He cannot produce a great poem, he cannot paint a great picture, he cannot discover secrets of science, because these achievements require a whole mind and not a divided mind. The prophet will be a prophet of half-truths, because the whole truth will not be popular. The statesman who has not purified himself of personal motives will never purify a disordered Constitution. Even kings and conquerors who are credited with nothing but ambition—the Alexanders and the Cæsars, the Cromwells and Napoleons—have been a cause in themselves, have been the representatives of some principle or idea. Their force, when they have succeeded, has been an impulse from within. They have aimed at power to impress their own personality outside them, but their operations are like the operations of the forces of nature, working from within outwards rather than towards an end of which they have been conscious. A man whose object is to gain something for himself often attains it, but when his personal life is over his work and his reputation perish along with him.

In this high sense of the word Lord Beaconsfield cannot be called great, either as a man of letters or as a statesman. ‘Vivian Grey’ is nothing but a loud demand on his contemporaries to recognise how clever a man has appeared among them. In every one of his writings there is the same defect, except in ‘Sybil’ and in ‘Lothair.’ It is absent in ‘Sybil’ because he had been deeply and sincerely affected by what he had witnessed in the great towns in the North of England; it is absent in ‘Lothair’ because when he wrote that book his personal ambition had for the time been satisfied, and he could look round him with the siccum lumen of his intellect. He had then reached the highest point of his political aspiration, and money he did not care for unless required for pressing necessities. It is clear from ‘Sybil’ that there had been a time when he could have taken up as a statesman, with all his heart, the cause of labour. He had suffered himself in the suffering and demoralisation which he had witnessed, and if the ‘young generation’ to whom he appealed would have gone along with him he might have led a nobler crusade than Cœur de Lion. But it was not in him to tread a thorny road with insufficient companionship. He had wished, but had not wished sufficiently, to undertake a doubtful enterprise. He was contented to leave things as he found them, instead of reconstructing society to make himself Prime Minister.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS