In the domain of politics Disraeli, as I shall show at length, divined in the national institutions the chief engine for the revival of unity and for social regeneration. When he denounced the Conservatism of the early ’forties as an “organised hypocrisy,” he did so just because, as it seemed to his eyes, the hopes once centred on Peel as the restorer of a truly “national” party were being shattered by his failure, under ordeal, to govern, to develop the institutions which he was called on to preserve, by his erection of “registration” into a party idol, by his policy of polls, by his cold indifference and suspicion of the youthful regenerators, who confronted the middle classes with the middle ages. “Whenever,” indignantly urged Disraeli in 1845, “whenever the young men of England allude to any great principle of political or parliamentary conduct, are they to be recommended to go to a railway committee?” And he found in his once chief’s temperament of discouraging formality and timorous desire for “fixity of tenure,” for staying power, a reason for the stultification of the House of Lords: “... It is not Radicalism; it is not the revolutionary spirit of the nineteenth century which has consigned ‘another place’ to illustrious insignificance; it is ‘Conservatism’ and a Conservative dictator.”
Disraeli was one born with aristocratic perceptions, yet with a bent “popular” rather than “democratic” in the strict sense of those terms. “Democracy” in the concrete he considered as the unsettlement of compact nationality through the undue preponderance of a single class; democracy in the abstract he considered as a lever for ambitious tribunes. But the welfare of the people was ever his chief concern, and he knew full well that it is constantly foiled by the side-aims of those vociferous on its behalf. When he first appeared on the political horizon, neither of the great historical parties owned popular sympathies. The Tories dreaded “Radicalism” because they were blind to the possibilities of its adoption into the order of the State. Of the Whigs, democratic enthusiasms were at once the tools and the abhorrence. Disraeli determined to infuse them into those free yet settled institutions of which the Tories were the natural but forgetful guardians. His main purpose from the outset was to implant the new ideas of freedom on the ancient soil of order; to engraft them productively without uprooting the native undergrowth; to harmonise the modern democratic idea with those English traditions which had always harboured its older forms. His work was to accommodate federal to feudal principles; to render democracy in England national and natural; to popularise leadership; to make democracy aristocratic in the truest sense of the term; to undo the closed aristocracy of caste and to revive the open aristocracy of excellence wherever displayed. My next two chapters investigate this idea; and it will be found afterwards, when I discuss his notion of empire and his attitude towards our colonies, that his ideals of Great Britain’s destiny and responsibility flow straight from this ruling outlook. The same consideration applies to the many other problems which I shall discuss in the light of Disraeli’s relations to them. Throughout, in one form or another, and in many applications, the free play of responsible individuality forms the keynote. He constantly opposes it alike to the barren uniformity of republican models, and to the centralising dictatorship whether of groups or of tyrants. He contrasts the personal with the mechanical. The State in his eyes should prove the sympathetic expression of the whole community. These aspects will find ample exposition hereafter. In this place I wish only to quote their bold and broad emphasis in the unfamiliar pamphlet of What is he? with one citation from which I opened this chapter. It will explain those passages in his Runnymede Letters and The Spirit of Whiggism, where he expects and adjures Peel to head a “national party” and to replace confederacies by a creed. It will also illustrate that passage in the election address to High Wycombe during 1832, which preludes his mission as the renewer of a popular Conservatism. “... Englishmen, behold the unparalleled empire raised by the heroic energies of your fathers, rouse yourselves in this hour of doubt and danger, rid yourselves of all that political jargon and factious slang of Whig and Tory, two names with one meaning, used only to delude you, and unite in forming a great national party....”
“The first object of a statesman,” he says (and he was then barely twenty-nine years of age), “is a strong Government, without which there can be no security. Of all countries in the world, England most requires one, since the prosperity of no society so much depends upon public confidence as that of the British nation.”
He then declares that the old principle of exclusion (common alike to the Whig oligarchs and the debased Toryism of Eldon) is dead.
“... The moment the Lords passed the Reform Bill from menace instead of conviction, the aristocratic principle of government in this country, in my opinion, expired for ever.” The democratic principle becomes necessary to maintain a Government at all. “If the Tories,” he continues, “indeed despair of restoring the aristocratic principle, and are sincere in their avowal that the State cannot be governed with the present machinery, it is their duty to coalesce with the Radicals,[47] and permit both political nicknames to merge into the common, the intelligible, and the dignified title of a national party.”[48]
He proceeds to prove in a few decisive strokes that the towns are now the safeguards against any military invasion of rights, and that a coalition between the then Whigs and the then Tories is impossible; the only alternative, therefore, is the inclusion of the democratic principle.
“Without being a system-monger,” he resumes, repeating the refrain of his previous Revolutionary Epick, “I cannot but perceive that the history of Europe for three hundred years has been a transition from feudal to federal principles.” If not their origin, these contending principles have blended with all the struggles that have occurred.—“The revolt of the Netherlands impelled, if it did not produce, our revolution against Charles I. That of the Anglo-American colonies impelled, if it did not produce, the Revolution in France.” “This,” he says, “is not a party pamphlet, and appeals to the passions of no order of the State.” “It is wise,” he concludes, “to be sanguine in public as well as in private life; yet the sagacious statesman must view the present portents with anxiety, if not with terror. It would sometimes appear that the loss of our colonial empire must be the necessary consequence of our prolonged domestic discussions. Hope, however, lingers to the last. In the sedate but vigorous character of the British nation we may place great confidence.” The very pressing unsettlement of those days will afterwards claim a mention; nor should I now omit Disraeli’s sentence in his Crisis Examined, to the effect that “Lord Grey refusing the Privy Seal and Lord Brougham soliciting the Chief Barony” were “two epigrammatic episodes in the history of reform that never can be forgotten.”
Mr. John Morley has well observed that about all Disraeli’s utterance there was something spacious. The ideas that I am about to examine are not to be brushed away by the sneers of triflers. Whatever may be thought of them, and however they may fairly be encountered by criticism, dissented from or condemned by judgment, they are still alive. Disraeli bathed the political landscape in a large and luminous atmosphere. To literature, as I shall hope to show, he lent a fresh and original charm. Over existence he never ceased to spread the glow of endeavour, of aspiration, and of purpose. His heart was with the youth and the labour of England. He made for the strength and union of every divergent class. He struck and stirred the national imagination.
Disraeli’s sincerity was that of a master in the world’s studio, imbuing the fainter shapes around him with the vivid colours of the true pictures in his own brain. It was that, also, of a great man of action who translates dreams into deeds. It is not often that the literary mind is allied to a practical bent. He himself has reminded us that such an union—“as in the case of Caius Julius”—is irresistible. He was always himself, and never under “the dangerous sympathy with the creations of others.” He believed that “every man performs his office, and there is a Power, greater than ourselves, that disposes of all this.”[49]
Disraeli’s European prominence is evidenced through the space occupied by the polyglot literature relating to him in the book catalogue alone of the British Museum. It extends to eleven of those huge pages. His importance at home before he became pre-eminent is shown by a shower of virulent abuse.