In debate, Disraeli’s characteristics were a quick readiness and an inexhaustible power of diverting discussion to new channels and of defeating expectation. The occasion when, in reply to Mr. Whalley concerning the Jesuits, he answered that one of their pet devices was to send over Jesuits in disguise to decry the Jesuits, will recur to the memory. His power of literary illustration needs no comment. Two brilliant instances are that of the boots of the Lion embracing the chambermaid of the Boar in connection with the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, and that charming one about the Abyssinian expedition, where he reminded us that the standard of St. George was flying over the mountains of Rasselas.[33] In retort he was supreme. Two of the best instances are to be noted in the rejoinder to Peel about “candid friends” and Canning, and in the pause he made when in a much later speech he said, “I have never attacked any one” (cries of “Peel”) “unless I was first assailed.” I shall relate some others hereafter. His self-imposed impassiveness of demeanour in the House was that of a sentinel on bivouac; it became exaggerated by the contrast of his illustrious compeer’s extreme excitability. Disraeli was very zealous for the honour of the House in which he passed the greater portion of his life. On one occasion a young and violent adversary insinuated that Disraeli had told a lie. Disraeli calmly cleared himself to the general satisfaction, and his denouncer began to feel uncomfortable; still more so when he was sent for to the great man’s private room. What was his surprise when he was shaken warmly by the hand. “We all make mistakes,” said Disraeli, “when we are young. But please to remember all your life that the House of Commons is a house of gentlemen.”
For sheer insight into the march of ideas and reach of vision there is no comparison between the two. Even in the ’forties Disraeli perceived that the coming choice lay between absolute democracy and a monarchical democracy. Afterwards—in the early ’fifties, while monarchy in England was still far from popular—he laid his plans—as is apparent from his contributions to his organ, The Press, in 1853—to popularise monarchy and educate democracy before enfranchising it; and, not till that was accomplished, to re-imperialise Great Britain. “He has not,” he wrote in 1853 of Lord John Russell, “comprehended that for the last twenty years the choice is between the maintenance of those institutions and habits of thought which preserve monarchy, and that gradual change into absolute democracy to which Tocqueville somewhere rashly considered all the tendencies of our age impel the destinies of Europe.... The Whigs should have been conservative of the reformed constitution, and have developed it....”[34] While Gladstone was refining a rather tortuous conscience into making the forlorn Peelites alternate between the Conservatives and the Whigs, Disraeli was reconstructing and developing a national party. While Gladstone and Sidney Herbert, in righteous indignation at Peel’s memory, were enraged at the delinquency of not struggling for absolute protection when the Derby Ministry assumed office, Disraeli showed that the principle of his struggle (continued as regarded the sugar repeal) had been land and labour. He must now benefit these by alleviations, rather than, as a responsible Minister, attempt an upheaval of what the nation had finally endorsed, and set private opinion as to particular measures at variance with the possibility of government at all. Had he done so he would have been doing what Fox himself had not attempted with regard to Catholic emancipation, what Lord John Russell had not thought of in 1847, what no responsible Minister could have compassed, and what, Lord John Russell added, the Whigs could not do in 1835. And yet, out of sheer honest hatred, he was vilified by those “high and stubborn spirits who, with the severity peculiar to those censors who cannot aspire to be consuls, refuse to acknowledge that there could be any virtue of necessity, ... and could not enlarge their comprehension of the requisites of a statesman beyond quotations from ‘Hansard.’ There were surely some juster thinkers in the House of Commons who must have trembled at the doctrine that men in office are rigidly to carry out the opinions they proposed in opposition.”[35] That, he points out, is the function of opposition, and the duty of supporting opinions which a nation has cancelled never arises unless those opinions have sent you to office. As he puts it, “Themis is the goddess of opposition, but Nemesis sits in Downing Street.” In the overthrow of Peel lay a very different moral, and by that overthrow he wished to lay bare the choice between “Liberal opinions” and “popular principles,” between Peel’s sudden adoption of the “physical enjoyment” theory of regeneration and his own. By that destruction he eventually ended the Whigs and Peelites alike, and set before the country the true choice that awaited it, instead of the perplexity of parties[36] which, joined to detestation of himself, caused the coalition of 1853 and prevented the contrast of the ideas which really divided the minds of men from being prominent in true proportions.
As a practical statesman, Disraeli thought more of those moral elements by which the State can square private duty with public interest; Gladstone, more of those elements above and beyond conduct. Gladstone was perhaps more of an apostle, Disraeli of a seer. Gladstone owned a noble heart with lofty spiritual standards, and an enormous quality of moral resentment; but his Church views coloured his life as much as his religious convictions, while his minute and perplexing scruples too often changed the forms of his enthusiasms, led zeal to chime with prejudice, and sometimes sent him astray altogether into self-deception.
Gladstone was a strange compound of diverse elements—of Highlander and Lowlander, of Scotland, Liverpool, Oxford, and Italy. In some respects he might even be termed the Dante of politics; but in others he was occasionally deemed its Ignatius Loyala. Disraeli, on the other hand, depended on his singular force of independence and of native sight and foresight. Those who admired the early Gladstone as Sir Galahad never wished him to sit on the seat of Merlin; nay, Gladstone himself perpetually deemed Disraeli, Machiavelli, or even Cagliostro. In relation to Disraeli, Gladstone would have perhaps addressed England with “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?” while Disraeli might have retorted by the witticism of Sarah, Duchess of Marborough, on the eagerness of James the Second to drag his country to heaven with him. It was just Disraeli’s originality and length of view that caused him to be maligned as well as misunderstood, though by some his conduct towards Peel was not unnaturally eyed askance. And yet, in Mr. Morley’s “Life,” Lord John Russell is to be found vindicating his own share in that transaction,[37] and Sir James Graham himself admitting that Peel provoked what he suffered.[38] In the eyes of many, Gladstone was Homer’s “old man of the sea” trying to hold Proteus, and yet none proved more Protean through enlarging aspirations than “the old man” himself. Perhaps Gladstone regarded the world more as the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” Disraeli more as “Vanity Fair.” Gladstone had more sail,[39] Disraeli more ballast. The one floated on waves of agitation, the other desired a strong government by steadying the people and attaching them to institutions. Moreover, Gladstone constantly viewed the State from the standpoint of his particular Church opinions. Disraeli believed that the principle of the Revolution had never been perfected by the due development of popular institutions. He agreed with Pym that “the best form of government is that which doth dispose and actuate every part and member of a State to the common good.”
Disraeli owned, of course, his foibles, though he was too proud ever to be very vain. As we shall find later on, when I come to his faults of temperament, his grasp of ideas occasionally pressed them too literally both on life and letters. He tended to overstrain his lights and shadows. His imagination sometimes ran riot in its colours, and throughout tended to exaggerate the forms of events, though hardly ever their significance, which he was often the first to divine. He is said to have cherished some superstitions about lucky days and unlucky colours, but for these I cannot vouch. I can, however, for the fact that he was once seen by intimates to wear a green velvet smoking-coat, though one of the few occasions on which he troubled the newspapers was to refute the slander of having, when young, appeared in green trousers.[40] And here I may perhaps be pardoned for inserting a slight story about Mrs. Disraeli, which comes from the same source as the last. Dr. Guthrie was once staying at Grosvenor Gate, and invited his hostess to visit him at Glasgow. “I will,” she smiled, “if you will promise to wear your kilt in the streets.” “Perhaps I will,” he replied, with hesitation. “You had better be careful, Guthrie,” interposed Disraeli, “for that woman, I assure you, means what she says.”
In taste and in phrase he was naturally extravagant, but his epigrams were never for the sake of paradox, and were always the summaries of wisdom and reflection. They were light, not frivolous; they were imaginative proverbs. There never was a wittier man, and his wit lent itself to his ironic humour. He loved effects that struck imagination, but ever for a crucial purpose. It was said of him by an intimate that one of his sentences—and in conversation he was sparing—left more behind than a long talk with others of consummate talent. As for the scathing sarcasm—his weapon of self-defence during his earlier stages—at times over-savage and belying his normal cheeriness—sobriety of judgment is compatible with—
“The stinging of a heart the world hath stung.”
But, undoubtedly, the too quick transitions of a susceptible fancy from—
“Grave to gay, from lively to severe,”
often irritated and even offended not only the dull, but the serious. And yet in life, as in literature, is there more than one step in the descent from the sublime to the ridiculous?