“The magic of the character,” he says of the courier in Contarini, “was his patience. This made him quicker and readier and more successful than all other men. He prepared everything, and anticipated wants of which we could not think.”
The preparation for career—apart from its entitling endowments—should be education; but education, he held, even in its prescientific days, often started with a vital mistake. It proceeded on words, grammars, and systems. It should proceed on a knowledge of predisposition; others should know a man before he is called upon to know himself. “What we want is to discover the character of a man at his birth, and found his education upon his nature.... All is an affair of organisation.... Among men there are some points of similarity and sympathy. There are few alike; there are some totally unlike the mass.... Until we know more of ourselves, of what use are our systems?... We speculate upon the character of man; we divide and we subdivide. We have our generals, our sages, our statesmen. There is not a modification of mind that is not mapped out in our great atlas of intelligence. We cannot be wrong, because we have mapped out the past; and we are famous for discovering the future when it has taken place. Napoleon is First Consul, and would found a dynasty.... But what use is the discovery, when the Consul is already tearing off his republican robe and snatching the imperial diadem? And suppose, which has happened, and may and will happen again—suppose a being of a different organisation from Napoleon or Cromwell placed in the same situation—a being gifted with a combination of intelligence hitherto unknown—where, then, is our moral philosophy? How are we to speculate upon results which are to be produced by unknown causes?... The whole system of moral philosophy is a delusion, fit only for the play of sophists in an age of physiological ignorance.” So, too, he had reason to think of some physicians “who decide by precedents which have no resemblance, and never busy themselves about the idiosyncrasies of their patients.”[182] “Until,” he wrote again, “men are educated with reference to their nature, there will be no end of domestic fracas.” He remembered his grandfather’s misconstruction of his father’s temperament, and his uncle’s of his own. Even illness he considered “as much a part of necessary education as travel or study.” And his constant idea, that national literature ought to be native and not imported, allied itself to his educational ideas also. “The duty of education is to give ideas. When our limited intelligence was confined to the literature of two dead languages, it was necessary to acquire them.... But now each nation has its literature.... Let education, then, be confined to the national literature, and we should soon perceive the beneficial effects upon the mind of the student. Study would then be a profitable delight. I pity the poor Gothic victim of the grammar and the lexicon. The Greeks, who were masters of composition, were ignorant of all languages but their own. They concentrated the genius of the study of expression upon one tongue. To this they owe that blended simplicity and strength of style, which the imitative Romans, with all their splendour, never attained.... The ancients invented their Governments according to their wants; the moderns have adopted foreign policies, and then modelled their conduct upon this borrowed regulation. This circumstance has occasioned our manners and customs to be so confused, absurd, and unphilosophical. What business had we, for instance, to adopt the Roman law—a law foreign to our manners, and consequently disadvantageous? He who profoundly meditates upon the situation of modern Europe will also discover how productive of misery has been the senseless adoption of Oriental customs by Northern peoples. Whence came that divine right of kings which has deluged so many countries with blood?—that pastoral and Syrian law of tithes, which may yet shake the foundations of so many ancient institutions?” The spirit of this passage was ever present to his mind. He went even further. He has asserted that the mere fact of copying or assuming ideas deprives them of their native virtue, and that all that is second-hand loses the vigour and flavour of its originals in imitating them.
Preparation must be succeeded, and, indeed, attended, by meditation. I shall return to this idea shortly, and consider it in his own instance. But there comes a juncture when action must rise from the chrysalis of thought which encloses it.
“... You must renounce meditation. Action is now your part. Meditation is culture. It is well to think until a man has discovered his genius and developed his faculties, but then let him put his intelligence in motion. Act, act, act without ceasing, and you will no longer talk of the vanity of life.”
The perpetual thought of death he considered harmful. To live in present duty and energy was truer piety than to brood on the coming hour when no man can work; and the very sense of existence is a great happiness, and leads to hope. “... If, in striking the balance of sensation, misery were found to predominate, no human being would endure the curse of existence....”[183] He would surely have echoed that fine saying of Gladstone—“Indifference to the world is not love of God.” He was infinitely sanguine in outlook, although extremely cautious in expedients. I may recall that when Coningsby has missed his fortune, Sidonia consoles him by a series of more disagreeable contingencies.
Such, then, were for him the equipments of career. Of its arts in attaining what it designs to exercise for the good of others, much will have been gleaned from many citations as to tact and temper. There is one other maxim of worldly wisdom which is worth recording: “If you wish a man to be your friend, allow him to confute you.” His idea of power was that it was “a divine trust,” but it was also a cumulative fund. “The very exercise of power only teaches me that it may be wielded for a greater purpose.” Mrs. Disraeli said, when her husband had, in his own words, “climbed to the top of the greasy pole at last,” “You don’t know my Dizzy, what great plans he has long matured for the good and greatness of England. But they have made him wait and drudge so long—and now time is against him.”
It is not here my province to track the details of his own career. This book deals with his ideas. But with the interesting psychology of his early temperament I mean to deal, for it concerns his ideas.
I might, had his career been within my scope, have cleared some doubts, and explained many misunderstandings. I could have shown, as I have shown elsewhere, the real truth about the Peel letter, and the events of 1851–52. I should have pointed out the dividing lines in his campaign and the halting-places in his march, the Eastern tour, his marriage, his estrangement from Peel, the Crimean War, his steady progress in social improvements, his Reform Bills of 1859 and 1867, the strong effect on his outlook of events of magnitude, and the last act of the drama—his imperialism. I might also have explained the moot points connected with the years 1833, 1835, 1837, 1846, 1851, and 1860.[184] I might, perhaps, have been able to shed light on the delayed Malmesbury despatches in 1859. Nor should I have shirked his mistakes, notably the motion of censure on Lord Palmerston. And I would have dwelt on the striking influences which his sister and his wife exercised over him.
But one brief topic I shall skim before I finally trace something of his own peculiar development.
Much has been talked of his alien “aloofness.” As for alien, Mazarin was in this sense an “alien,” not to speak of the less worthy examples, Alberoni and Ripperda. In the eighteenth century a Scotch premier was in England an “alien.” Augustus was partly, Napoleon wholly, an “alien.” And what but “aliens” were Manin, Gambetta, Lasker, Midhat, and Emin? Nobody understood his countrymen more shrewdly at once and sympathetically than Disraeli. His was no sham patriotism, and he loved John Bull fondly, even when he poked fun at him. Nor had any pondered more deeply the lessons which history imparts. There are, however, two grains of truth in this reproach. He did regard the world and its history as a fleeting show. He believed in recurring cycles. What is now old was once new; what is new will one day be old. So long as individuals worked their best, what did it matter? One civilisation succeeds another, and the last state of a mighty nation is often worse than the first. “The whirligig of Time brings about his revenges.” In this sense—the historical and philosophical sense—he might be called indifferentist. And again, he understood England, but it took long for his countrymen to understand him. When they came to do so, he met with that generosity which immense bravery and perseverance always eventually receive; but, meanwhile, he had struggled against a jealous malice which is, perhaps, peculiar to politics. He had “educated” his followers, but suspicion and misunderstanding hampered his every step. During two spans of some six years each (without counting his early period) he had to play the losing game with an unruffled brow, an encouraging smile, and an unwearied resource, which included the transformation of a party and foundation of a political magazine. He had to hearten the despairing, the recalcitrant, the slothful, and the sullen. He had to deplore the stupidity of missed opportunities;[185] he had to humour the engrossers of office; and, even, in the intervals of power, to bend his neck to the grindstone of finance. “I am not,” he once sarcastically rejoined, alluding to Sir Charles Wood opposite, “a born Chancellor of the Exchequer.” His hour struck. At sixty-four he began to govern England on lines planned and with projects pondered full thirty years earlier; and even then he had to confront anonymous endeavours to sap his leadership from quarters which should have disarmed suspicion. His own mind was impartial in the extreme. The same “aloofness” which he is alleged to have displayed to British affairs, he certainly displayed in his books with regard to Eastern emirs, who talk with the aspirations of the West. “Alroy” himself is very European, and never more so than when he disdains the isolating fanaticism of “Jabaster.”