[120] This point is admirably elucidated by Mr. Ewald in his “Life and Times of Lord Beaconsfield.”
[121] Chiefly that of the Turkish frontier in Europe, and of the Russian in Asia.
[122] A most interesting collection might be made of Disraeli’s ready and fluent illustration by precedents. For of precedent his memory was quite as retentive as Gladstone’s. In his famous Address to the Crown of 1864, he was sharply blamed for referring to “the just influence of England being lowered” in the extraordinary tangle of alternate brag and whimper that attended the Government’s action in the Danish embroilment. This language was solemnly declared “unprecedented since the great days of the Norths and the Foxes.” But Disraeli instantly proved that Fox himself had used language in his own Address far more violent and censorious of the Ministry in 1846. So, again, on at least two occasions when the phrases “political morality” and “political infamy” were bandied for partisan purposes, he effectively hurled back the taunts in the teeth of their inventors, and refuted present profession by past conduct. When Palmerston again twitted him, in 1846, he received a reminder which brought home the jaunty service of seven successive Administrations, and all this, though he never attacked small game, and never any “unless he had been first assailed.” In the earlier numbers of The Press are many most interesting historical instances of how “principles” may be confused with “measures,” when the latter have to be relinquished in office from the practical duty of carrying on the Government, while at the same time the former can be developed in other directions when the national condemnation of the particular measure is deliberate. So Fox had acted towards Catholic emancipation, Russell towards the Appropriation Bill, the Whigs in the ’forties towards the Income Tax, and Disraeli in 1852 towards “Protection.” So, he argued in many previous utterances, the principle must now be followed by relieving the land, now placed under unfair conditions of competition, of its burdens.
[123] Of Disraeli’s Indian policy this much may here be noted. While allowing Russia to expand where she was entitled or compelled by war, or allowed by opening intrigues, he wished to baffle her as against Great Britain.
(1) By an independent Afghanistan, with a proper frontier and its Indian “gates” barred.
(2) By preventing Russia through Turkestan’s approaches to Afghan and Persia’s eastern border.
(3) By precluding her from Persia’s western border through the regions of the Euphrates Valley, (a) through making Turkey compact in Asia (Erzeroum and Bayazid); (b) through Cyprus guarding the Mediterranean approaches.
[124] “... Do you think a man like that, called upon to deal with a Metternich or a Pozzo, has no advantage over an individual who never leaves his chair in Downing Street except to kill grouse? Pah! Metternich and Pozzo know very well that Lord Roehampton knows them....” “Roehampton” is Palmerston. The prophecy of the Congress repeats one in Contarini.
[125] Of the many passages that may be read in this connection, including that fine ironical one of the Feast of Tabernacles in Tancred, paralleled by that about “Moses Lump” in Heine, and the telling chapter in the Life of Lord George Bentinck, I will only cite one less familiar from Alroy: “... All was silent: alone the Hebrew prince stood, amid the regal creation of the Macedonian captains. Empires and dynasties flourish and pass away; the proud metropolis becomes a solitude, the conquering kingdom even a desert; but Israel still remains, still a descendant of the most ancient kings breathed amid these royal ruins, and still the eternal sun could never arise without gilding the towers of living Jerusalem.” This (with its after-irony of “Alroy’s” seizure by the Kourdish bandits) may be compared with the satire in which Disraeli encountered Mr. Newdegate’s appeals to “prophecy:” “... They have survived the Pharaohs, they have survived the Cæsars, they have survived the Antonines and the Seleucidæ, and I think they will survive the arguments of the right honourable member....” Mr. Morley tells that Mr. Gladstone said that Disraeli asserted that only those nations that behaved well to the Jews prospered. Disraeli, in saying so, however, only repeated a dictum of Frederick the Great.
[126] “Say what they like,” so “Herbert” in Venetia, “there is a spell in the shores of the Mediterranean Sea which no others can rival. Never was such a union of natural loveliness and magical associations! On these shores have risen all that interests us in the past—Egypt and Palestine, Greece, Rome, and Carthage, Moorish Spain and feudal Italy. These shores have yielded us our religion, our arts, our literature, and our laws. If all that we have gained from the shores of the Mediterranean was erased from the memory of man, we should be savages.”
[127] It was translated into Greek, as Alroy was into Hebrew.
[128] He mentions it both in his Home Letters and in Tancred as to be acquired by England.