To impress his ideas through his will on his generation, was Disraeli’s ruling purpose from the first; but to attain the position which would entitle him to do so he never regarded as more than a ladder towards his main ambition. Ambition[5] spurred him from the first. But, as the present Duke of Devonshire generously owned in the heat of party contest, Disraeli was never prompted by mean or unworthy motives; and—added the speaker—it would be the merest cant to pretend that honourable and honest ambition is not a main incitement to public life. At the outset he was convinced of a mission, and the visions over which he had long brooded in silent solitude became realised in the world of action. Both reverie and energy alternated even in his boyish being. “I fully believed myself the object of an omnipotent Destiny over which I had no control”—and yet “Destiny bears us to our lot, and Destiny is perhaps our own will.” “... There arose in my mind a desire to create things beautiful as that golden star;” and yet “... Nor could I conceive that anything could tempt me from my solitude ... but the strong conviction that the fortunes of my race depended on my effort, or that I could materially forward that great amelioration, ... in the practicability of which I devoutly believe.” As a boy he dreamed of “shaking thrones and founding empires;” and yet, he felt that he must not “pass” his “days like a ghost gliding in a vision.” These are among the echoes and glimpses afforded by his earliest fiction of his earliest self, and to this topic I shall recur in my last chapter. I mention them here for a material reason. In treating his thoughts we must distinguish between those notions which merely concern success or career, and those ideas which assured victory was to achieve. Nor should we omit the very vital distinction between personality and egotism, for confusion in this regard constantly obscures our estimates. Individuality with the forces that make for it is not “individualism;” yet the two are often confused.
The essential egotist is a sort of buccaneer. He roams the seas to rifle cargoes, and his conquests are the spoils of a freebooter. He seeks to exploit society for his own benefit—to burn down his neighbour’s roof-tree that he may boil his egg. He gives nothing that he can keep, and takes all he can grasp by whatever methods may advantage him. He leaves the world poorer when he goes, and as he leaves it, he wishes it. In Cowper’s words—
“Cruel is all he does. ’Tis quenchless thirst
Of ruinous ebriety that prompts
His every action, and imbrutes the man.”
The man, on the other hand, of overwhelming personality, aspires honourably to power, the very condition of which in his eyes is to guide and elevate the country which entrusts him with it. The responsibility of privilege, great position on the tenure of great duties, ambition not as a right but as the sole means of enforcing his ideals—these are his characteristics. He never covets place without power, and never power without influence; whereas some kind of covetousness is essential to the egotist. “He who has great honours,” Disraeli has urged, “must have great burdens.” And again: “... My conception,” he said, in a signal speech during 1846, “of a great statesman is of one who represents a great idea; an idea which he may and can impress on the mind and conscience of a nation.... That is a grand, that is indeed an heroic position. But I care not what may be the position of a man who never originates an idea—a watcher of the atmosphere, a man who ... takes his observations, and when he finds the wind in a certain quarter trims to suit it. Such a person may be a powerful Minister, but he is no more a great statesman than the man who gets up behind a carriage is a great whip. Both are disciples of progress; both perhaps may get a good place. But how far the original momentum is indebted to their powers, and how far their guiding prudence regulates the lash or the rein, it is not necessary for me to notice.”
Disraeli never stooped to trim; he always aspired to steer. When he started as a brilliant author, electric with ideas derided but since accepted—as an imaginative originator, “full of deep passions and deep thoughts”—it would have been easy for him to have followed the triumphal car of the Whigs who invited him.[6] It would have been easy for him to have suited himself to Sir Robert Peel’s vicissitudes of private, and desertion of public opinion, embodied in a great party which had raised him to power. In obeying again the central ideas which quickened him from the first, Disraeli broke up the “Young England” party, which looked up to and cheered him, whose main objects he inspired, and eventually realised. And in 1867, as we shall see, so far from “dishing” the Liberals with their own measure of Reform, he carried, in the teeth of his own supporters, one on lines peculiar to his own perpetual view of the subject, and at length achieved what he had urged in the ’thirties, the ’forties, and the ’fifties.
In the stubborn pursuit of his aims Disraeli even courted unpopularity. On every occasion when the object of the Jew bill was involved with other measures which he considered prejudical to its due interests, he risked misconstruction by withholding his vote. During the long spell of 1859–66, when a dispirited, and sometimes disloyal following often left him alone in his seat, he continued the pronouncements alike and the reticence which they disrelished. During the six years previous he dared to offend them equally by hammering the Government’s foreign policy, and insisting on his own convictions. Nobody, again, more regretted the precipitancy of Lord Derby in 1852, although his rash assumption of office afforded Disraeli his first hard-won opportunity of leadership. During three separate sets of discreditable intrigues to dethrone him, he kept place, counsel, and temper without wheedling concessions or recriminating revenges, though none could strike home harder when he chose.
“... Ah, why should such enthusiasm ever die? Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervour.”
The fact that both the mere egotist, and the man of intense personality, must, from the need of their respectively low and lofty concentrations, be self-centred, and infuse their temperaments into the objects of their energy, favours, it is true, the mistake to which I have referred. But the one is pettily fixed on self, the other intent on ideals. He leads a life of ideas which form his atmosphere, and which emanate from it. He mounts the chariot to drive it to a distant goal, while the other borrows or pilfers it for his own immediate convenience. Egoism—if I may coin a distinction—is one thing, egotism another. Goethe was an egoist—he is full of a radiating self; but such egoism is, if we reflect, the very opposite of the egotist, who is full of a shrivelled selfishness. Such were the later phases of Napoleon, who changed from a generous imparter into an absorbing monopolist. That was egotism. All genius, however, has been egoist, and ever will be; for genius is at once the ear, sensitive to the subtlest appeals of existence, and the voice which constrains others to enter the realm of its ideas. Its sensitiveness is part of its strength, and in this respect it shares the self-consciousness of the artist. It is in the real sense auto-suggestive; it implants ideas which its will generates into events. It is in some degree that—
“... which many people take for want of heart.
They err.—’Tis merely what is called mobility,
A thing of temperament, and not of art,
Though seeming so from its supposed facility;
And false though true; for surely they’re sincerest
Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest.”
And its faults, as I shall show in my closing chapter, are associated with its very qualities.