What matter now the debts, the duns, the embarrassments for which he blushes?[18] What matter the heartless allurements of siren fashion? His course is clear before him. He must win. He “has begun several times many things, and has often succeeded at last.” As for the taunt of “adventurer,” what are all original spirits that “burst their birth’s invidious bar” but adventurers? Such were Chatham,[19] and Burke, and Canning, and Peel himself. But when the “adventurer” is one by temperament as well as occasion, how miraculous becomes his progress! “Adventures are to the adventurous.”
“The man who with undaunted toils
Sails unknown seas to unknown soils,
With various wonders feasts his sight:
What stranger wonders does he write!”
Many of us remember Disraeli in his age as he sauntered dreamily and slowly with the late Lord Rowton, and none who ever heard one of his last orations in the House of Lords can forget how, even when he was in pain, he sprang from his seat with the quick step of youth. The physical charm had disappeared. Few who gazed on that drawn countenance could have discerned in it the poetry and enthusiasm of his prime; only the unworn eyes preserved their piercing fires, and the sunken jaw was still masterful. A long discipline of iron self-control, much disillusion, growing disappointments with crowning triumphs, and latterly a great desolation, had subdued the fiercer force and the elastic buoyancy of his hey-day. Yet the intellectual charm, and the spell of mind and spirit had deepened their outward traces. Fastidious discernment, dispassionate will, penetrating insight, courage,[20] patience, a certain winning gentleness underneath the scorn of shams, stamp every lineament. Below habitual insouciance, intensity, bigness of soul and purpose are prominent. The arch of the noble brow retains its height and curve. Surrounded though he be by friends and flatterers, he looks lonelier than of old. “I do not feel solitude,” he said, “it gives one repose.” Interested in every movement, and even in every trifle that engages thought, his gaze appears more turned within.
We know from Lady John Manners,[21] and from other sources, how he loved flowers, and forestry, and study during the dinner-hour, more than all the social glitter; how he communed with the unseen; how far-reaching were his sympathies; what interest and curiosity he displayed in every form of career and purpose; how often to all the splendour which he had conquered he preferred converse with the weak, the lowly, the suffering; how his wise counsel and inexhaustible resource were sought and coveted by cottagers, by the toilers whose cause he made his own, by princes; how delicately considerate he was in his appointments, and for all in contact with him, how he would sacrifice a keen personal wish rather than disturb a pleasure or abridge a holiday; and yet how his playfulness of fancy mixed in pithy ironies with his very considerateness. A familiar instance—that of the attached servant who was to enjoy “the pleasures of memory”—occurred as he lay dying from the illness long and bravely concealed even from his intimates. He was truly unselfish, and he was never known to blame a subordinate. If things went wrong, he took the whole burden on his own shoulders. He exerted infinite pains to understand the conditions of and the organisations affecting labour.[22] The Buckinghamshire peasants still cherish his memory; and it may be said with truth that the deepest affections of this extraordinary man, whom vapid worldlings sneered at as a callous cynic, were reserved for his country, his county, his home, and his friends, for effort and for distress. Many a young aspirant to fame, moreover, in literature or public life, has owed much to his generous encouragement. He liked to dwell on the vicissitudes of things,[23] and his own motto, “Forti nihil difficile,” represents his conviction. In private, when he was not entertaining, his habits were of the simplest. In two things only he was profuse; books and light. He loved to see every room of Hughenden illuminated with candles. He was utterly careless of money. It is related, that when he accepted the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, he sent for the celebrated Mr. Padwick, and asked for a necessary advance. “On what security?” inquired the sporting speculator. “That of my name and my career,” was the answer. And the money was at once forthcoming, and punctually repaid. As is well known, he would often make his greatest efforts half dinnerless; and his delight was, after the strain and the plaudits had ceased, to betake himself in the dim hours of dawn to the supper which his devoted wife, who spared him every detail of management, had prepared, and there to recount to her the excitements of the debate. The pair would certainly have endorsed those verses of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, of which Byron was so fond—
“But when the long hours of public are past,
And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last,
May every fond pleasure that moment endear,
Be banished afar both discretion and fear!
Forgetting or scorning the airs of the crowd,
He may cease to be formal, and I to be proud,
Till lost in the joy, we confess that we live,
And he may be rude, and yet I may forgive.”
His public and touching tribute to Mrs. Disraeli deserves repetition here; nor will the reader forget, among many hackneyed stories, that stern rebuke to the triflers overheard discussing the reasons for his marriage—“Because of a feeling to which such as you are strangers—gratitude.”
It was at Edinburgh, in 1867, when his old ally, Baillie Cochrane (Lord Lamington), toasted Mrs. Disraeli as her illustrious husband’s helper and his own dear friend for many years before Disraeli met her.[24] Disraeli opened with the characteristic remark that their mutual intimate “certainly had every opportunity of studying the subject to which he has drawn attention.” And he went on to say, “I do owe to that lady all I think that I have ever accomplished, because she has supported me with her counsel, and consoled me by the sweetness of her mind and disposition.” Six years after his marriage, he had dedicated the three volumes of his Sybil, “To one whose noble spirit and gentle nature ever prompt her to sympathise with the suffering; to one whose sweet voice has often encouraged, and whose taste and judgment have ever guided their pages; the most severe of critics, but—a perfect wife.”
Several of his nice things were said in Scotland, and one of the nicest was his compliment when he was installed Rector of Glasgow University. He described his visit to Abbotsford, whither he had repaired in his extreme youth with an enthusiastic letter from John Murray the First, his father’s old friend, to Sir Walter Scott, that father’s old acquaintance. “He showed me,” he said of the laird, “his demesne, and he treated me, not as if I was an obscure youth, but as if I were already Lord Rector of Glasgow University.”[25]
Disraeli’s marriage was the happiest turning-point in his career; and that which had begun partly in interest, soon developed into the warmest, the most entire and the most mutual affection. Mrs. Disraeli, at a great country house, always used to commence conversation by the query, “Do you like my Dizzy? Because, if you don’t——” From another, on a visit most advantageous to him, Disraeli departed, despite pressing remonstrance, on the plea that the “air” disagreed with Mrs. Disraeli—because she had complained of their host’s rudeness. It will one day be found that to this gifted and selfless woman, English history owed much at several serious conjunctures. I cannot resist relating a good story in another vein. Shortly after Disraeli’s marriage, a guest at Grosvenor Gate, pointing to a portrait of the late Mr. Wyndham Lewis, Mrs. Disraeli’s first husband and with Disraeli member for Maidstone, asked him whom it represented. “Our former colleague,” was the rejoinder. At a much later date Mr. Frith was painting a group in which Disraeli figured. As her husband was going, Mrs. Disraeli whispered to the artist, “Remember one thing, if you don’t mind, his pallor is his beauty.” She was afraid that his complexion would be coloured. To the last she would say, as she did during his interrupted speech at Aylesbury in 1847:—“He mind them! Not a bit of it. He’s a match for them all.” Sir Horace Rumbold has just told us how, at the scene of Disraeli’s investiture as Earl, a sob was heard from the crowd. It was the grief of an old and faithful servant sighing, “Ah! If only she had lived to see him now!”
Like childless men in general, he was devoted to children. More than one still living remembers his happy words of playful intimacy. To women from the days of his pet Sheridans to those of the present Lady Currie, he appealed with magnetism throughout his career, and there are few more romantic episodes than his meetings, after hesitation, with the elderly Mrs. Bridges Williams at the fountain in the Exhibition of 1862, the existing correspondence which ensued, and the thumping legacy which crowned it. One who has read that correspondence has assured me that its gentle chivalry is most striking. In the midst of engrossing occupation he never ceased to cheer the old lady with gossip of his doings, and even to argue with her, as on an affair of state, regarding the advisability of Struve’s seltzer water as a remedy.