Even at this time, with the spectres of doubt and illness athwart his way, he could not stifle the secret assurance of his destiny. I have seen a letter to a friend, who had shared a financial misadventure, in which he deplores his condition, but declares that “something within me whispers that one day I shall be famous. Be assured, if ever that time comes, you will be the first that I shall remember.”
He returned, found his place, his mission, and his ideals. But still his discreet family opposed themselves to his entrance into public life. It was incredible, impossible, absurd. “So much for the maddest of mad acts, as my uncle said,” he wrote to his sister on his first return to Parliament.
Every one remembers the story of his meeting with Lord Melbourne, and his answer, true or not, as to what the premier could “do for him.” “I wish to be Prime Minister.” At any rate, Mrs. Austin, in extreme old age, recalled a party at her house about this period, when the young Disraeli explained his plans for England, “when I am Prime Minister,” amid laughter and surprise. “You will see,” he said, bringing his fist down on the mantelpiece, “I shall be Prime Minister.” He felt, as he wrote to his sister after attending a great debate, that “he could floor them all.” His confidence in himself, like his sister’s in him, was colossal.
So I read his earliest years from his earliest books. Thenceforward he marched from strength to strength, and he employed power when he obtained it conscientiously according to his best lights for the improvement of the people and the glory of the Empire.
And yet how strange it is, that at the annual gatherings on his death-day, celebrated by the romance of his memory and his flower, the successors who, faltering from his footsteps, honour the good will of his enduring popularity, have never breathed his name! I can see him smile in the shades; for he found his party a quagmire, and he left it a township. At all times he toiled hard and long, though sometimes by fits and starts; and a study was reserved ready for his visits at Bradenham. Although in his later years he would sometimes play at indolence, it was really against the grain. The occasional air of listlessness which society remarked in his latter days was the attendant of failing health, and only filmed an activity that neither age nor illness could overcome. In the long recess of 1848 he was working over ten hours a day, rising at five and retiring at nine. In the long session of 1852 he was working considerably more. To the last he read the classics while he dined. As he lay dying he corrected his speeches. He never relaxed that infinite interest in everything and everybody of purport and meaning, which the French well style “la grande curiosité.”
When he died, amid national mourning, the late Lord Salisbury, after singling out his unquenchable zeal for the glory of Britain, lasting to a period when “the gratification of every possible desire negatived the presumption of any inferior motive,” adverted to his “patience, his gentleness, his unswerving and unselfish loyalty to his colleagues and fellow-labourers.” Indisputably his moral character was high. Without question he, like Gladstone, raised the tone of parliamentary life from that of the days when politics were merely a squabble for place and a toss-up as to “whether England should be ruled by Tory nobles or by Whig.” His tone may not always have chimed with certain forms or formulas of earnestness, but he acted up to his own high standard. “It was impossible,” said the late Lord Granville, “to deny that Lord Beaconsfield had played a great part in British History. No one could deny his rare and splendid gifts and his force of character.” Character will always appeal to England. “But,” pursued the orator, after noticing his tolerance and forbearance, “he undoubtedly possessed the power of appealing to the imagination, not only of his countrymen, but of foreigners,[188] and that power is not destroyed by death.”
My book opened with Personality, Ideas, and Imagination. With Imagination, Ideas, and Personality it shall close. They can turn and change the semblances of material “facts,” for they abide behind the veil of time and of existence.
FOOTNOTES
[1] “... These are concessionary, not Conservative principles. This party treats institutions as we do our pheasants, they preserve only to destroy them.”