Much, too, has been prattled about his “audacity,” and I notice that the hackneyed quotation about “L’audace” is usually in these diatribes ascribed to Danton, and not to its author, Beaumarchais. Many of these “audacities” are now recognised as wisdom; but it has been after-wisdom that has recognised it; though Disraeli was usually Prometheus.
“There are times,” he said in one of his early novels, “when I am influenced by a species of what I may term happy audacity, for it is a mixture of recklessness and self-confidence, which has a very felicitous effect upon the animal spirits. At these moments I never calculate consequences, yet everything seems to go right. I feel in good fortune; the ludicrous side of everything occurs to me; I think of nothing but grotesque images. I astonish people by bursting into laughter apparently without a cause....”
Disraeli was naturally sensitive, but he studied self-repression. No one was more cut to the quick by contumely or impertinence; no one was more determined to hide the wound. “If,” once observed Jowett, “Dizzy were on the brink of the bottomless pit, and each moment about to fall into it, his look would never betray the fact; such is his pluck and power of countenance.” As he bore himself towards provocation, he bore himself towards pain. The last great speech he ever made was delivered with youthful jauntiness, yet he was forced to take a drug in order to deliver it. “One must meet death boldly,” he exclaimed to an intimate friend, after he had read the denial of the doctors’ assurance in their faces.
Disraeli’s intellectual shortcomings are those, it seems to me, belonging to an intense, as opposed to a diffused imagination. His mind shed both heat and light, but both the light and the heat were over-concentrated. The same applies, perhaps, to his will, and to his character also. Everything in him was focussed. His ideas possessed him, and he chafed, like a sculptor at work, to embody them. Outside the forms of those ideas he could not penetrate. In relation to them, he judged all junctures and all endeavours. It is this averseness to the abstract that pervades his every outlook. He could not conceive of ideas as unmaterialised or disembodied. They had been the companions of his boyish solitude.
“... The clustering of their beauty seemed an evidence of poetic power: the management of these bright guests was an art of which I was ignorant. I received them all, and found myself often writing only that they might be accommodated.”
As a child, his ruling mood was that of reverie. He had steeped himself in his father’s library, and his extraordinary imagination played upon the poets, the philosophers, and, above all, the historians. Dim dreams from the vast procession of the centuries took shape and became flesh. He beheld the great men and movements marching before him. Incarnate presences peopled his loneliness, and called to him with their voices—
“The votary of a false idea, I linger in this shadowy life and feed on silent images which no eye but mine can gaze upon, till at length they are invested with the terrible circumstances of life, and breathe, and act, and form a stirring world of fate, beauty, time, death, and glory. And then, from out this dazzling wilderness of deeds, I wander forth and wake ... horrible! horrible!” “Often in reverie had I been an Alberoni, a Ripperda, a Richelieu....” “I sat in moody silence, revolving in reverie without the labour of thought....”
He felt that he was not as others. He found that though at once proud and gentle, as a boy, his family were sometimes eyed askance as foreigners. He wished to frequent a public school; it was deemed unadvisable. The harder side of his nature began to assert itself. He would triumph over all, hew down every obstacle. His father suggested the University. He rejected the offer. Why waste his time in words that might prove a school for deeds? “A miserable lot is mine to feel everything and be nothing.” He was destined, appointed, reserved. As he grew older these convictions deepened. “Am I a man, and a man of strong passions and deep thoughts? And shall I, like a vile beggar, upon my knees crave the rich heritage that is my own by right?” But how? The very thought bewildered, oppressed, and embittered him. “Everything is mysterious, though I have always been taught the reverse.” In a dangerous moment he began to lay it down as a principle “that all considerations must yield to the gratification of my ambition.” Life without power, and power that he felt deserved, was intolerable. His father remonstrated. He warned him against the fatal tyranny of the imagination. “I think,” he said, “you have talents indeed for anything ... that a rational being can desire to attain; but you sadly lack judgment.” The boy replied, “I wish, sir, to influence men.... I am impressed with a most earnest and determined resolution to become a practical man. You must not judge of me by my boyish career. The very feelings that made me revolt at the discipline of schools will insure my subordination in the world. I took no interest in their petty pursuits, and their minute legislation interfered with my extended views.” In answer, he was admonished that a nature so “headstrong and imprudent” would lead to situations ridiculous and even dangerous; that his lack of regulated balance would warp his excellent instincts. The boy persisted that, if not by deeds yet by words, he would sway his fellows. “Mix in society,” rejoined his father, with a shrug of the shoulders, “and I will answer that you lose your poetic feeling; for in you, as in the great majority, it is not a creative faculty, originating in a peculiar organisation, but simply the consequence of a nervous susceptibility that is common to all.” The youth continued to fret, and brood, and calculate. He felt method within him as well as frenzy. In his old age he was once driving past Bradenham with a lady who knew how happy his home relations had been. “Ah!” he sighed, “there is where I passed my miserable youth.”—“Miserable!” she replied; “impossible! Surely you were happy there.”—“Not then. I was devoured by an irresistible ambition which I could not gratify.”[186] It reminds me of that passage in Swift where the great dean ascribes the first pricks of ambition, in the career which the inequalities of his situation had urged, to the rage and mortification he experienced as a boy in failing to land a big fish. He grew distracted; for a time he had to inhabit a darkened room. With the Austins he travelled in Germany and Italy. The result was Vivian Grey—the “Don Juan” of politics.
The circumstances and results of the book I have touched in the preceding chapter. Disraeli grew ashamed of its fashionable success. The world was not merely his oyster. He would elevate and benefit by it. He mixed in society, but it neither raised his spirits nor slaked his thirst, although it did help him to see his measure and stature among mankind. That commerce with the world is the best cure for misjudged ambition he pressed in his fine address to youth at the Manchester Athenæum; but ambition itself he regarded as elevating for man. At the crisis, however, that we have reached, his ambitions were still unsettled. He began to be soured and sceptical both of himself, of mankind, and of God. His spiritual fibre was shaken. His sister, with talents nearly equal to his, and faith and charity superior, came to his rescue. She healed his wounds; she ennobled his standard; she comforted him with her entire belief in his great future. She restored him to his higher self.
Once more the shadow of ill health fell across the young Disraeli’s footsteps; this time a very critical malady—a complete nervous breakdown. He “fainted as he dressed.” He even had convulsions. He was overwhelmed by strange noises in his head. “... The falls of Niagara could not overpower the infernal roaring that I alone heard.”[187] Travel was prescribed. He departed for two years from Europe, and mended.