Here is a wonderful career, not less wonderful to those who live in the midst of English politics and society than it appears to observers in other countries. A man with few external advantages, not even that of education at a university, where useful friendships are formed, with grave positive disadvantages in his Jewish extraction and the vagaries of his first years of public life, presses forward, step by step, through slights and disappointments which retard but never dishearten him, assumes as of right the leadership of a party—the aristocratic party, the party in those days peculiarly suspicious of new men and poor men,—wins a reputation for sagacity which makes his early errors forgotten, becomes in old age the favourite of a court, the master of a great country, one of the three or four arbiters of Europe. There is here more than one problem to solve, or, at least, a problem with more than one aspect. What was the true character of the man who had sustained such a part? Did he hold any principles, or was he merely playing with them as counters? 17 By what gifts or arts did he win such a success? Was there really a mystery beneath the wizard’s robe which he delighted to wrap around him? And how, being so unlike the Englishmen among whom his lot was cast, did he so fascinate and rule them?
Imagine a man of strong will and brilliant intellectual powers, belonging to an ancient and persecuted race, who finds himself born in a foreign country, amid a people for whose ideas and habits he has no sympathy and scant respect. Suppose him proud, ambitious, self-confident—too ambitious to rest content in a private station, so self-confident as to believe that he can win whatever he aspires to. To achieve success, he must bend his pride, must use the language and humour the prejudices of those he has to deal with; while his pride avenges itself by silent scorn or thinly disguised irony. Accustomed to observe things from without, he discerns the weak points of all political parties, the hollowness of institutions and watchwords, the instability of popular passion. If his imagination be more susceptible than his emotions, his intellect more active than his conscience, the isolation in which he stands and the superior insight it affords him may render him cold, calculating, self-centred. The sentiment of personal honour may remain, because his pride will support it; and he will be tenacious of the ideas which he has struck out, 18 because they are his own. But for ordinary principles of conduct he may have small regard, because he has not grown up under the conventional morality of the time and nation, but has looked on it merely as a phenomenon to be recognised and reckoned with, because he has noted how much there is in it of unreality or pharisaism—how far it sometimes is from representing or expressing either the higher judgments of philosophy or the higher precepts of religion. Realising and perhaps exaggerating the power of his own intelligence, he will secretly revolve schemes of ambition wherein genius, uncontrolled by fears or by conscience, makes all things bend to its purposes, till the scruples and hesitations of common humanity seem to him only parts of men’s cowardice or stupidity. What success he will win when he comes to carry out such schemes in practice will largely depend on the circumstances in which he finds himself, as well as on his gift for judging of them. He may become a Napoleon. He may fall in a premature collision with forces which want of sympathy has prevented him from estimating.
In some of his novels, and most fully in the first of them, Mr. Disraeli sketched a character and foreshadowed a career not altogether unlike that which has just been indicated. It would be unfair to treat as autobiographical, though some of his critics have done so, the picture of Vivian 19 Grey. What that singular book shows is that, at an age when his contemporaries were lads at college, absorbed in cricket matches or Latin verse-making, Disraeli had already meditated profoundly on the conditions and methods of worldly success, had rejected the allurements of pleasure and the attractions of literature, as well as the ideal life of philosophy, had conceived of a character isolated, ambitious, intense, resolute, untrammelled by scruples, who moulds men to his purposes by the sheer force of his intellect, humouring their foibles, using their weaknesses, and luring them into his chosen path by the bait of self-interest.
To lay stress on the fact that Mr. Disraeli was of Hebrew birth is not, though some of his political antagonists stooped so to use it, to cast any reproach upon him: it is only to note a fact of the utmost importance for a proper comprehension of his position. The Jews were at the beginning of the nineteenth century still foreigners in England, not only on account of their religion, with its mass of ancient rites and usages, but also because they were filled with the memory of centuries of persecution, and perceived that in some parts of Europe the old spirit of hatred had not died out. The antiquity of their race, their sense of its long-suffering and isolation, their pride in the intellectual achievements of those ancestors whose blood, not largely mixed with 20 that of any other race, flows in their veins, lead the stronger or more reflective spirits to revenge themselves by a kind of scorn upon the upstart Western peoples among whom their lot is cast. The mockery one finds in Heinrich Heine could not have come from a Teuton. Even while imitating, as the wealthier of them have latterly begun to imitate, the manners and luxury of those nominal Christians among whom they live, they retain their feeling of detachment, and are apt to regard with a coldly observant curiosity the beliefs, prejudices, enthusiasms of the nations of Europe. The same passionate intensity which makes the grandeur of the ancient Hebrew literature still lives among them, though often narrowed by ages of oppression, and gives them the peculiar effectiveness that comes from turning all the powers of the mind, imaginative as well as reasoning, into a single channel, be that channel what it may. They produce, in proportion to their numbers, an unusually large number of able and successful men, as any one may prove by recounting the eminent Jews of the last seventy years. This success has most often been won in practical life, in commerce, or at the bar, or in the press (which over the European continent they so largely control); yet often also in the higher walks of literature or science, less frequently in art, most frequently in music.
Mr. Disraeli had three of these characteristics 21 of his race in full measure—detachment, intensity, the passion for material success. Nature gave him a resolute will, a keen and precociously active intellect, a vehement individuality; that is to say, a consciousness of his own powers, and a determination to make them recognised by his fellows. In some men, the passion to succeed is clogged by the fear of failure; in others, the sense of their greatness is self-sufficing and indisposes them to effort. But with him ambition spurred self-confidence, and self-confidence justified ambition. He grew up in a cultivated home, familiar not only with books but with the brightest and most polished men and women of the day, whose conversation sharpened his wits almost from childhood. No religious influences worked upon him, for his father had ceased to be a Jew in faith without becoming even nominally a Christian, and there is little in his writings to show that he had ever felt anything more than an imaginative, or what may be called an historical, interest in religion.[4] Thus his development was purely intellectual. The society he moved in was a society of men and women of the world—witty, superficial in its interests, without seriousness 22 or reverence. He felt himself no Englishman, and watched English life and politics as a student of natural history might watch the habits of bees or ants. English society was then, and perhaps is still, more complex, more full of inconsistencies, of contrasts between theory and practice, between appearances and realities, than that of any other country. Nowhere so much limitation of view among the fashionable, so much pharisaism among the respectable, so much vulgarity among the rich, mixed with so much real earnestness, benevolence, and good sense; nowhere, therefore, so much to seem merely ridiculous to one who looked at it from without, wanting the sympathy which comes from the love of mankind, or even from the love of one’s country. It was natural for a young man with Disraeli’s gifts to mock at what he saw. But he would not sit still in mere contempt. The thirst for power and fame gave him no rest. He must gain what he saw every one around him struggling for. He must triumph over these people whose follies amused him; and the sense that he perceived and could use their follies would add zest to his triumph. He might have been a great satirist; he resolved to become a great statesman. For such a career, his Hebrew detachment gave him some eminent advantages. It enabled him to take a cooler and more scientific view of the social and political phenomena he had to deal 23 with. He was not led astray by party cries. He did not share vulgar prejudices. He calculated the forces at work as an engineer calculates the strength of his materials, the strain they have to bear from the wind, and the weights they must support. And what he had to plan was not the success of a cause, which might depend on a thousand things out of his ken, but his own success, a simpler matter.
A still greater source of strength lay in his Hebrew intensity. It would have pleased him, so full of pride in the pure blood of his race,[5] to attribute to that purity the singular power of concentration which the Jews undoubtedly possess. They have the faculty of throwing the whole stress of their natures into the pursuit of one object, fixing their eyes on it alone, sacrificing to it other desires, clinging to it even when it seems unattainable. Disraeli was only twenty-eight when he made his first attempt to enter the House of Commons. Four repulses did not discourage him, though his means were but scanty to support such contests; and the fifth 24 time he succeeded. When his first speech in Parliament had been received with laughter, and politicians were congratulating themselves that this adventurer had found his level, he calmly told them that he had always ended by succeeding in whatever he attempted, and that he would succeed in this too. He received no help from his own side, who regarded him with suspicion, but forced himself into prominence, and at last to leadership, by his complete superiority to rebuffs. Through the long years in which he had to make head against a majority in the House of Commons, he never seemed disheartened by his repeated defeats, never relaxed the vigilance with which he watched his adversaries, never indulged himself (though he was physically indolent and often in poor health) by staying away from Parliament, even when business was slack; never missed an opportunity for exposing a blunder of his adversaries, or commending the good service of one of his own followers. The same curious tenacity was apparent in his ideas. Before he was twenty-two years of age he had, under the inspiration of Bolingbroke, excogitated a theory of the Constitution of England, of the way England should be governed at home and her policy directed abroad, from which he hardly swerved through all his later life. Often as he was accused of inconsistency, he probably believed 25 himself to be, and in a sense he was, substantially faithful, I will not say to the same doctrines, but to the same notions or tendencies; and one could discover from the phrases he employed how he fancied himself to be really following out these old notions, even when his conduct seemed opposed to the traditions of his party.[6] The weakness of intense minds is their tendency to narrowness, and this weakness was in so far his that, while always ready for new expedients, he was not accessible to new ideas. Indeed, the old ideas were too much a part of himself, stamped with his own individuality, to be forsaken or even varied. He did not love knowledge, nor enjoy speculation for its own sake; he valued views as they pleased his imagination or as they carried practical results with them; and having framed his theory once for all and worked steadily upon its lines, he was not the man to admit that it had been defective, and to set himself in later life to repair it. His pride was involved in proving it correct by applying it.
With this resolute concentration of purpose there went an undaunted courage—a quality less rare among English statesmen, but eminently 26 laudable in him, because for great part of his career he had no family or party connections to back him up, but was obliged to face the world with nothing but his own self-confidence. So far from seeking to conceal his Jewish origin, he displayed his pride in it, and refused all support to the efforts which the Tory party made to maintain the exclusion of Jews from Parliament. Nobody showed more self-possession and (except on two or three occasions) more perfect self-command in the hot strife of Parliament than this suspected stranger. His opponents learnt to fear one who never feared for himself; his followers knew that their chief would not fail them in the hour of danger. His very face and bearing had in them an impassive calmness which magnetised those who watched him. He liked to surround himself with mystery, to pose as remote, majestic, self-centred, to appear above the need of a confidant. He would sit for hours on his bench in the House of Commons, listening with eyes half-shut to furious assaults on himself and his policy, not showing by the movement of a muscle that he had felt a wound; and when he rose to reply would discharge his sarcasms with an air of easy coolness. That this indifference was sometimes simulated appeared by the resentment he showed afterwards.
Ambition such as his could not afford to be scrupulous, nor have his admirers ever claimed conscientiousness as one of his merits. One who 27 sets power and fame before him as the main ends to be pursued may no doubt be restrained by pride from the use of such means as are obviously low and dishonourable. Other questionable means he may reject because he knows that the opinion of those whose good-will and good word he must secure would condemn them. But he will not be likely to allow kindliness or compassion to stand in his way; nor will he be very regardful of truth. To a statesman, who must necessarily have many facts in his knowledge, or many plans in his mind, which the interests of his colleagues, or of his party, or of the nation, forbid him to reveal, the temptation to put questioners on a false scent, and to seem to agree where he really dissents, is at all times a strong one. An honest man may sometimes be betrayed into yielding to it; and those who know how difficult are the cases of conscience that arise will not deal harshly with a possibly misleading silence, or even with the evasion of an embarrassing inquiry, where a real public interest can be pleaded, for the existence of such a public interest, if it does not justify, may palliate omissions to make a full disclosure of the facts. All things considered, the standard of truthfulness among English public men has (of course with some conspicuous exceptions) been a high one. Of that standard Disraeli fell short. People did not take his word for a thing as they would have 28 taken the word of the Duke of Wellington, or Lord Althorp, or Lord Derby, or Lord Russell, or even of that not very rigid moralist, Lord Palmerston. Instances of his lapses were not wanting as late as 1877. His behaviour toward Sir Robert Peel, whom he plied with every dart of sarcasm, after having shortly before lavished praises on him, and sought office under him, has often been commented on.[7] Disraeli was himself (as those who knew him have often stated) accustomed to justify it by observing that he was then an insignificant personage, to whom it was supremely important to attract public notice and make a political position; that the opportunity of attacking the powerful Prime Minister, at a moment when their altered attitude towards the Corn Laws had exposed the Ministry to the suspicions of their own party, was too good to be lost; and that he was therefore obliged to assail Peel, though he had himself no particular attachment to the Corn Laws, and believed Peel to have been a bona-fide convert. It was therefore no personal resentment against one who had slighted him, but merely the exigencies of his own career, that drove him to this course, whose fortunate result proved the soundness of his calculations.
This defence will not surprise any one who is familiar with Disraeli’s earlier novels. These stories are as far as possible from being immoral; that is to say, there is nothing in them unbecoming or corrupting. Friendship, patriotism, love, are all recognised as powerful and worthy motives of conduct. That which is wanting is the sense of right and wrong. His personages have for certain purposes the conventional sense of honour, though seldom a fine sense, but they do not ask whether such and such a course is conformable to principle. They move in a world which is polished, agreeable, dignified, averse to baseness and vulgarity, but in which conscience and religion scarcely seem to exist. The men live for pleasure or fame, the women for pleasure or love.