(D. H.)
BEACON (from the O. Eng. béacn, a sign, cf. “beckon,” another form of the same word), a signal, especially a fire lit on a high hill, structure or building for the purpose of sending a message of alarm or of important news over long distances. Such was the courier-fire (ἄγγαρος πῦρ) that brought the news of the fall of Troy to Argos (Aeschylus, Agamemnon), or the chain of signals that told of the approach of the Spanish Armada, or which circled the British Isles in the jubilee years of 1887 and 1897. The word occurs in many names for lofty and conspicuous hills, such as Dunkery Beacon in Somerset, the highest point on Exmoor. On many such hills the remains of old beacon towers and cressets are still found. The word is used generally of a lighthouse, but technically it means either a small unattended light, a superstructure on a floating buoy, such as a staff and cage, or staff and globe, or an unlighted structure, forming a conspicuous object at sea, used in each case to guide or warn sailors. (See [Lighthouse] and [Buoy].)
BEACONSFIELD, BENJAMIN DISRAELI, Earl of (1804-1881), British statesman, second child and eldest son of Isaac D’Israeli (q.v.) and Maria Basevi, who were married in 1802, was born at No. 6 John Street, Bedford Row, on the 21st of December 1804. Of Isaac D’Israeli’s other children, Sarah was born in 1802, Naphtali in 1807, Ralph (Raphael) in 1809, and James (Jacob) in 1813. None of the family was akin to Benjamin for genius and character, except Sarah, to whom he was deeply indebted for a wise, unswerving and sympathetic devotion, when, in his earlier days, he needed it most. All Isaac D’Israeli’s children were born into the Jewish communion, in which, however, they were not to grow up. It is a reasonable inference from Isaac’s character that he was never at ease in the ritual of Judaism. His father died in the winter of 1816, and soon afterwards Isaac formally withdrew with all his household from the Jewish church. His son Benjamin, who had been admitted to it with the usual rites eight days after his birth, was baptized at St Andrew’s church in Holborn on the 31st of July 1817. One of Isaac D’Israeli’s reasons for quitting the tents of his people was that rabbinical Judaism, with its unyielding laws and fettering ceremonies, “cuts off the Jews from the great family of mankind.” Little did he know, when therefore he cut off the D’Israeli family from Judaism, what great things he was doing for one small member of it. The future prime minister was then short of thirteen years old, and there was yet time to provide the utmost freedom which his birth allowed for the faculties and ambitions he was born with. Taking the worldly view alone, of course, most fortunate for his aspirations in youth was his withdrawal from Judaism in childhood. That it was fully sanctioned by his intellect at maturity is evident; but the vindication of unbiased choice would not have been readily accepted had Disraeli abandoned Judaism of his own will at the pushing Vivian Grey period or after. And though a mind like Disraeli’s might work to satisfaction with Christianity as “completed Judaism,” it could but dwell on a breach of continuity which means so much to Jews and which he was never allowed to forget amongst Christians. With all, he was proud of his race as truly, if not as vehemently, as his paternal grandmother detested it. Family pride contributed to the feeling in his case; for in his more speculative moods he could look back upon an ancestry which was of those, perhaps, who colonized the shores of the Mediterranean from before the time of the Captivity. More definite is the history of descent from an ennobled Spanish family which escaped from the Torquemada persecutions to Venice, there found a new home, took a new name, and prospered for six generations. The Benjamin D’Israeli, Lord Beaconsfield’s grandfather, who came to England in 1748, was a younger son sent at eighteen to try his fortune in London. “A man of ardent character, sanguine, courageous, speculative, fortunate, with a temper which no disappointment could disturb” (so Lord Beaconsfield described him), he soon made the beginnings of a handsome fortune and turned country gentleman. That his grandson exaggerated his prosperity is highly probable; but that he became a man of wealth and consideration is certain. He married twice. His second wife was Sarah Siprout de Gabay, “a beautiful woman of strong intellect” and importunate ambitions, who hated the race she belonged to because it was despised by others. She felt so keenly the social disabilities it brought upon her, and her husband’s indifference to them, that “she never pardoned him his name.” Her literary son Isaac suffered equally or even more; for though he had ambitions he had none that she could recognize as such. She could ridicule him for the aspirations which he had not and for those which he had; on the other hand, he never heard from her a tender word “though she lived to be eighty.” Nor did any other member of her family, according to her grandson.
Isaac D’Israeli was devoted to the reading and writing of books in domestic quiet; and his son Benjamin suffered appreciably from his father’s gentle preoccupations. As a child—unruly and disturbing no doubt—he was sent to a school of small account at Blackheath, and was there “for years” before he was recalled at the age of twelve on the death of his grandfather. Isaac D’Israeli was his father’s sole heritor, but change of fortune seems to have awakened in him no ambitions for the most hopeful of his sons. At fifteen, not before, Benjamin was sent to a Unitarian school at Walthamstow—a well-known school, populous enough to be a little world of emulation and conflict but otherwise unfit. Not there, nor in any similar institution at that illiberal time, perhaps, was a Jewish boy likely to make a fortunate entry into “the great family of mankind.” His name, the foreign look of him, and some pronounced incompatibilities not all chargeable to young Disraeli (as afterwards the name came to be spelt), soon raised a crop of troubles. His stay at Walthamstow was brief, his departure abrupt, and he went to school no more. With the run of his father’s library, and the benefits of that born bookman’s guidance, he now set out to educate himself. This he did with an industry stiffened by matchless self-confidence and by ambitions fully mature before he was eighteen. Yet he yielded to an attempt to make a man of business of him. He was barely seventeen when (in November 1821) he was taken into the office of Messrs Swain, Stevens and Co., solicitors, in Frederick’s Place, Old Jewry. Here he remained for three years—“most assiduous in his attention to business,” said one of the partners, “and showing great ability in the transaction of it.” It was then determined that he should go to the bar; and accordingly he was entered at Lincoln’s Inn in 1824. But Disraeli had found other studies and an alien use for his pen. Though “assiduous in his attention to business” in Frederick’s Place, he found time to write for the printer. Dr Smiles, in his Memoirs of John Murray, tells of certain pamphlets on the brightening prospects of the Spanish South American colonies, then in the first enjoyment of emancipation—pamphlets seemingly written for a Mr Powles, head of a great financial firm, whose acquaintance Disraeli had made. In the same year, apparently, he wrote a novel—his first, and never published. Aylmer Papillon was the title of it, Dr Smiles informs us; and he prints a letter from Disraeli to the John Murray of that day, which indicates its character pretty clearly. The last chapter, its author says, is taken up with “Mr Papillon’s banishment under the Alien Act, from a ministerial misconception of a metaphysical sonnet.” About the same time he edited a History of Paul Jones, originally published in America, the preface of the English edition being Disraeli’s first appearance as an author. Murray could not publish Aylmer Papillon, but he had great hopes of its boyish writer (Isaac D’Israeli was an old friend of his), “took him into his confidence, and related to him his experiences of men and affairs.” Disraeli had not completed his twenty-first year when (in 1825) Murray was possessed by the idea of bringing out a great daily newspaper; “The Representative.” and if his young friend did not inspire that idea he keenly urged its execution, and was entrusted by Murray with the negotiation of all manner of preliminaries, including the attempt to bring Lockhart in as editor. The title of the paper, The Representative, was Disraeli’s suggestion. He chose reporters, looked to the setting-up of a printing-office, busied himself in all ways to Murray’s great satisfaction, and, as fully appears from Dr Smiles’s account of the matter, with extraordinary address. But when these arrangements were brought to the point of completion, Disraeli dropped out of the scheme and had nothing more to do with it. He was to have had a fourth share of the proprietorship, bringing in a corresponding amount of capital. His friend Mr Powles, whom he had enlisted for the enterprise, was to have had a similar share on the same conditions. Neither seems to have paid up, and that, perhaps, had to do with the quarrel which parted Benjamin Disraeli and John Murray before a sheet of the luckless Representative was printed. Many years afterwards (1853) Disraeli took an active interest in The Press, a weekly journal of considerable merit but meagre fortunes.
At the death of the elder Benjamin (1817), his son Isaac had moved from the King’s Road, Gray’s Inn (now Theobald’s Road), to No. 6 Bloomsbury Square. Here he entertained the many distinguished friends, literary and political, who had been drawn to him by his “Curiosities” and other ingenious works, and here his son Benjamin also had their acquaintance and conversation. In Bloomsbury Square lived the Austens, and to their house, a great resort of similar persons, Mrs Austen cordially welcomed him. Murray’s friendship and associations helped him in like manner, no doubt; and thus was opened to Disraeli the younger a world in which he was to make a considerable stir. The very much smaller society of that day was, of course, more comprehensible to sight and hearing, when once you were within its borders, than the society of this. Reverberations of the gossip of St James’s and Mayfair extended to Bloomsbury in those days. Yet Disraeli’s range of observation “Vivan Grey.” must have been not only brief but limited when he sat down at twenty or twenty-one to write Vivian Grey. It is therefore a probable conjecture that Mrs Austen, a clever woman of the world, helped him from her knowledge. His own strongly perceptive imagination (the gift in which he was to excel every other politician of his time) and the bent of political reading and aspiration from boyhood completed his equipment; and so the wonder that so young a man in Disraeli’s social position should write a book like Vivian Grey is accounted for. It was published in 1826. The success of this insolently clever novel, the immediate introduction of its author to the great world, and the daring eccentricities of dress, demeanour, and opinion by which he fixed attention on himself there, have always been among the most favourite morsels of Disraeli’s history. With them it began, and successive generations of inquirers into a strange career and a character still shrouded and baffling refer to them as settled starting-points of investigation. What was the man who, in such a society and with political aspirations to serve, could thrive by such vagaries as these, or in spite of them? If unaffected, what is to be thought of them as keys to character? If affected, what then? Inquiry still takes this shape, and when any part of Disraeli’s career is studied, the laces and essences, the rings over gloves, the jewelled satin shirt-fronts, the guitareries and chibouqueries of his early days are never remote from memory. The report of them can hardly be doubted; and as the last relation was made (to the writer of this article) not with intent to ridicule Mr Disraeli’s taste but to illustrate his conquering abilities, the story is repeated here. One of Disraeli’s first friends in the world of fashion and genius was Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer. “And,” said Sir Henry Bulwer (“Pelham’s” brother), “we heard so much at the time of Edward’s amazingly brilliant new friend that we were the less inclined to make his acquaintance.” At length, however, Sir Edward got up a little dinner-party to convince the doubters. It was to meet at the early hour of those days at one of the Piccadilly hotels. “There was my brother, Alexander Cockburn, myself and (I think) Milnes; but for a considerable time no Mr Disraeli. Waiting for Mr Disraeli did not enhance the pleasure of meeting him, nor when he did arrive did his appearance predispose us in his favour. He wore green velvet trousers, a canary-coloured waistcoat, low shoes, silver buckles, lace at his wrists, and his hair in ringlets.” The description of the coat is forgotten. “We sat down. Not one of us was more than five-and-twenty years old. We were all—if you will allow me to include myself—on the road to distinction, all clever, all ambitious, and all with a perfect conceit of ourselves. Yet if on leaving the table we had been severally taken aside and asked which was the cleverest of the party, we should have been obliged to say ‘the man in the green velvet trousers.’” This story is a little lamp that throws much light. Here we see at their sharpest the social prejudices that Disraeli had to fight against, provocation of them carried to its utmost in every way open to him, and complete conquest in a company of young men less likely to admit superiority in a wit of their own years, probably, than any other that could have been brought together at that time.
Soon after the publication of Vivian Grey, Disraeli, who is said by Froude to have been “overtaken by a singular disorder,” marked by fits of giddiness (“once he fell into a trance, and did not recover for a week”), went with the Austens on a long summer tour in France, Switzerland and Italy. Returning to a quiet life at Bradenham—an old manor-house near High Wycombe, which his father had taken—Disraeli put law in abeyance and resumed novel-writing. His weakest book, and two or three other productions, brief, but in every literary sense the finest of his works, were written in the next two or three years. But for Ixion in Heaven, The Infernal Marriage, and Popanilla, Disraeli could not be placed among the greater writers of his kind; yet none of his imaginative books have been so little read as these. The mysterious malady continued, and Disraeli set out with William Travel. Meredith, who was to have married Sarah Disraeli, for a tour in southern Europe and the nearer East. He saw Cadiz, Seville, Granada, Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cairo, Thebes; played the corsair with James Clay on a yacht voyage from Malta to Corfu; visited the terrible Reschid, then with a Turkish army in the Albanian capital; landed in Cyprus, and left it with an expectation in his singularly prescient mind that the island would one day be English. These travels must have profited him greatly, and we have our share of the advantage; not so much, however, in The Wondrous Tale of Alroy or Tancred, or the “Revolutionary Epic” which he was inspired to write on “the windy plains of Troy,” but in the letters he sent home to his sister. These letters, written with the utmost freedom and fullness to the one whose affection and intellect he trusted more than any, are of the greatest value for interpreting the writer. Together with other letters also published some time after Disraeli’s death, they tell more of him than anything that can be found in print elsewhere. They show, for example, that his extraordinary exuberances were unforced, leaping by natural impulse from an overcharged source. They also show that his Oriental fopperies were not so much “purposed affectation” as Froude and others have surmised. That they were so in great part is confessed again and again in these letters, but confessed in such a way as to reveal that they were permitted for his own enjoyment of them as much as planned. The “purposed affectation” sprang from an unaffected delight in gauds of attire, gauds of fancy and expression. It was not only to startle and impress the world that he paraded his eccentricities of splendour. His family also had to be impressed by them. It was to his sober father that he wrote, at the age of twenty-six: “I like a sailor’s life much, though it spoils the toilette.” It is in a letter from Gibraltar to the same hand that we read of his two canes—“a morning and an evening cane”—changed as the gun fires. And the same correspondent must be told that “Ralph’s handkerchief which he brought me from Paris is the most successful thing I ever wore.”
When Disraeli returned to England in 1831, all thought of the law was abandoned. The pen of romance was again taken up—the poet’s also and the politician’s. In the next five years he wrote Contarini Fleming, the Revolutionary Epick, Alroy, Henrietta Temple, What is He? (a Literary production. pamphlet expository of his opinions), the Runnymede Letters, a Vindication of the British Constitution, and other matter of less note. The epic, begun in great hope and confidence, was ended in less, though its author was to the last unwilling that it should be forgotten. The novels revived the success he had with Vivian Grey, and restored him to his place among the brilliancies and powers of the time. The political writing, too, much of it in a garish, extravagant style, exercised his deeper ambitions, and stands as witness to the working of original thought and foresight. Both qualities are conspicuous in What is He? and the Vindication, of which it has been truly said that in these pages he “struck the keynote to the explanations he afterwards consistently offered of all his apparent inconsistencies.” Here an interpretation of Tory principles as capable of running with the democratic idea, and as called upon to do so, is ingeniously attempted. The aristocratic principle of government having been destroyed by the Reform Bill, and the House of Lords being practically “abrogated” by that measure, it became necessary that Toryism should start from the democratic basis, from which it had never been alien. The filched liberties of the crown and the people should be restored, and the nation redeemed from the oligarchies which had stolen from both. When at the beginning of all this writing Disraeli entered the political arena as candidate for High Wycombe (1832), he was nominated by a Tory and seconded by a Radical—in vain; and vain were two subsequent attempts in the autumn of 1832 and in 1834. In the first he was recommended to the electors by Daniel O’Connell and the Radical Hume. In his last candidature at Wycombe he stood on more independent ground, commending himself by a series of speeches which fully displayed his quality, though the prescience which gemmed them with more than one prophetic passage was veiled from his contemporaries. Among Disraeli’s great acquaintances were many—Lyndhurst at their head—whose expectations of his future were confirmed by the Wycombe speeches. He was “thought of” for various boroughs, Marylebone among the number, but his democratic Toryism seems to have stood in his way in some places and his inborn dislike of Radicalism in others. It was an impracticable situation—no getting on from it; and so, at Lyndhurst’s persuasion, as he afterwards acknowledged, he determined to side with the Tories. Accordingly, when in the spring of 1835 a vacancy occurred at Taunton, Disraeli contested the seat in the Tory interest with Carlton Club support. Here again he failed, but with enhanced reputation as a fighting politician and with other consequences good for notoriety. It was at Taunton that Disraeli fell upon O’Connell, rather ungratefully; whereupon the Liberator was roused to retort on his assailant vehemently as “a liar,” and humorously as a probable descendant of the impenitent thief. And then followed the challenge which, when O’Connell declined it, was fastened on his son Morgan, and the interruption of the duel by seizure of Mr Disraeli in his bed, and his famous appearance in the Marylebone police court. He declared himself very well satisfied with this episode, but nothing in it can really have pleased him, not even the noise it made.