Genius is both light and heat; it combines enthusiasm with insight. Such a genius was Disraeli. He was eminently a man of ideas, and not merely of abnormal perceptions. This distinction again is material, and too often ignored.

The eminently perceptive man is at root a critic, while the man of ideas is by prerogative a creator; and yet the quick perceiver is often mistaken for a creative genius, and keenness confused with originality. In politics, for instance, this was the case with such different beings as Peel and Gambetta; in literature, with Addison and Arnold; in art, with Kneller and Lawrence. Disraeli’s ideas were at once his creations and companions, and he moved in their inner circle with a sort of extravagant intensity. They were no shadows. He was convinced of their substance almost to fatalism, and his immense will-power forced and projected them into movement. In his extreme youth, before his character had matured, these ideas flickered as fantasies. The restlessness of a volition felt, but not yet freed or directed, caused some masquerade of guise, and a perpetual strain on the intuition that sought to forestall experience. Realisation alone, with power and experience, brought repose. But at all periods an idea that had once seized him tinged his whole being. Its reality haunted him till he had given it place and shape.[7] An inward and ideal energy possessed him. Ideas were for him far more tangible, even far more sociable, than the outward and fleeting phantasms around him, as is evidenced in his fiction by his constant habit of transferring environment and transplanting personalities to accentuate their ideal essence. Thus, in Venetia, the soul of Lady Byron animates the form of Shelley’s wife, while the very date is put back some thirty years, that Shelley himself might be enabled to have braved in action what he mused in poetry. So, again, in Contarini, the hero’s development blends something of his own with something of his father’s character; while Baron Fleming is his grandfather reincarnated as a noble.[8] About the ironies of these, the arabesques of his playful fancy flickered. For him they were mostly the pretexts of things, but ideas were the causes, and he loved to contrast “the pretext with the cause;” but even here romance blent with irony, and invested the seemingly trivial with wonder. Some, too, of his ideas hovered, as it were, over the present scene, in a flight bound other-whither and beyond. In a word, Disraeli was an artist, conscious and confident of an over-mastering call. As he has written in a striking passage from the work of his youth, Contarini Fleming: “I never labour to delude myself; and never gloss over my own faults. I exaggerate them; for I can afford to face truth, because I feel capable of improvement.... I am never satisfied.... The very exercise of power teaches me that it may be wielded for a greater purpose.... No one could be influenced by a greater desire of knowledge, a greater passion for the beautiful, or a deeper regard for his fellow-creatures.... I want no false fame. It would be no delight to me to be considered a prophet, were I conscious of being an impostor. I ever wish to be undeceived; but if I possess the organisation of a poet, no one can prevent me from exercising my faculty, any more than he can rob the courser of his fleetness, or the nightingale of her song.”

The “ill-regulated will,” “the undercurrent of feelings he was then unable to express,” portrayed in Vivian Grey, developed into the higher and more elevating purposes of which his transforming imagination was all along capable. That very book contained the germs of what its composition revealed to his own mind—that out of a young adventurer with purpose and genius, the school of life forms a strong character and a great man. In Contarini Fleming the irresistible power of predisposition, the hollowness of a nurture which ignores it and substitutes “words” for “ideas,” the interactions of imagination and experience, the fatuity of contradicting or overstraining Nature, are pursued; nor, as regards this novel, should it be forgotten that in some portions of its analysis there are traces in allusive undertone to the fatalities of the great and stricken Dean of St. Patrick’s.[9]

In Disraeli’s case, as so often before him, “the dreaming part of mankind” has “prevailed over the waking.” His flouted dreams came true. They still hold sway. To give effectual substance to these higher and abiding dreams, those other dreams of ascendency, through which alone his will could realise his ideas, were also verified. “It is the will”—he speaks by the lips of the young “Alroy”—“that is father to the deed, and he who broods over some long idea, however wild, will find his dream was but the prophecy of coming fate.” “All is ordained,” he had said as a stripling, “yet man is master of his own actions.”[10] Disraeli’s career was itself a romance—a romance of the will that defies circumstance, and moulds the soil where ideas are to flourish. An inward, personal energy is the parent of faith, and faith in oneself is the sole security for the issue of faith among others. He lived to triumph, but not in order to triumph; and he remains a standing protest against those who believe in cliques and disbelieve in personal influence. The former are only compact in appearance; they are unsympathetic associations, welded together by interest alone. Joint-stock enterprise is not fellowship, and the test of direction is liability. Nor is it without significance that “Fortune,” even in the ancient world a real though blind goddess, has come, in the modern, to mean little more than cash; so that capital leans away from labour, plutocracy is cemented, solidarity declines, and worth too often is resolved by the question, “Worth how much?”

It is this idea of personality that lies at the very root of united nationality; for a nation is an idealised individual, no aggregate of atoms. Still less is it the experimenting room of doctrinaires or the dumping-ground of the Tapers and Tadpoles, the Paul Prys of politics, who “whisper nothings that sound like somethings;” or of those “Marneys,” “Fitz-Aquitaines,” and “Mowbrays” who deem that the end of an administration is “two garters to begin with;” or again of “the good old gentlemanlike times, when Members of Parliament had nobody to please, and Ministers of State nothing to do;” of those who, like “Rigby,” mistake peddling with constituencies for representing the country; or of those petty placemen to whom, as he has said, party means the machinery for receiving “£1200” a year, career the pursuit of it, and success its attainment.

“... I prefer” (the passage is from Sybil) “association to gregariousness.... It is a community of purpose that constitutes society ... without that men may be drawn into contiguity, but they will continue virtually isolated....” What does this imply but the sympathetic power of personality? The more individual societies become, the greater their efficacy. The less individual they are the more they display the tameness and unfruitfulness that enfeeble a copy.

“But what is an individual,” exclaimed “Coningsby,” “against a vast public opinion?”

“Divine,” said the stranger. “God made man in His own image; but the Public is made by newspapers, Members of Parliament, excise officers, Poor Law guardians. Would Philip have succeeded, if Epaminondas had not been slain? And if Philip had not succeeded? Would Prussia have existed, had Frederick not been born? And if Frederick had not been born? What would have been the fate of the Stuarts, if Prince Henry had not died, and Charles I., as was intended, had been Archbishop of Canterbury?”

This was written in 1844. Since then, would Germany have been united if Bismarck had not been born? And if Bismarck had not been born? In 1865 a powerful party, promising success, reinforced by commanding talent, and concerting an intelligible plan with immense vigour, began to demand the disintegration of Great Britain. And if Disraeli had not been born?——

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