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The Earl of Beaconsfield

Uniform with this volume, 3s. 6d. each, with Portrait.

THE QUEEN’S PRIME MINISTERS,

A SERIES OF POLITICAL BIOGRAPHIES

EDITED BY
STUART J. REID,

AUTHOR OF ‘THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SYDNEY SMITH.’

The Volumes will contain Portraits, and will be published at periodical intervals.

• THE EARL OF BEACONSFIELD, K.G. By J. A. Froude, D.C.L.
• VISCOUNT MELBOURNE. By Henry Dunckley, LL.D. (‘Verax.’)
• SIR ROBERT PEEL. By Justin McCarthy, M.P.
• VISCOUNT PALMERSTON. By the Marquis of Lorne, K.T.
• EARL RUSSELL. By Stuart J. Reid.
• THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P. By G. W. E. Russell.
• THE EARL OF ABERDEEN. By Sir Arthur Gordon, G.C.M.G. &c.
• THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY. By H. D. Traill, D.C.L.
• THE EARL OF DERBY. By George Saintsbury.

London:
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, Limited,
St. Dunstan’s House, Fetter Lane, Fleet Street, E.C.

The Prime Ministers of
Queen Victoria

EDITED BY
STUART J. REID

LORD BEACONSFIELD

PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON

LORD BEACONSFIELD

BY J. A. FROUDE

He was a man, take him for all in all,
We shall not look upon his like again

Hamlet, Act I. Scene 2

SECOND EDITION

LONDON
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON
LIMITED
St. Dunstan’s House
FETTER LANE, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1890

[All rights reserved]

[CONTENTS]

[LORD BEACONSFIELD]

[CHAPTER I]

Carlyle on Lord Beaconsfield—Judgment of the House of Commons—Family History—The Jews in Spain—Migration to Venice—Benjamin D’Israeli the Elder—Boyhood of Isaac Disraeli.

CARLYLE’S OPINION OF HIM

Carlyle, speaking to me many years ago of parliamentary government as he had observed the working of it in this country, said that under this system not the fittest men were chosen to administer our affairs, but the ‘unfittest.’ The subject of the present memoir was scornfully mentioned as an illustration; yet Carlyle seldom passed a sweeping censure upon any man without pausing to correct himself. ‘Well, well, poor fellow,’ he added, ‘I dare say if we knew all about him we should have to think differently.’ I do not know that he ever did try to think differently. His disposition to a milder judgment, if he entertained such a disposition, was scattered by the Reform Bill of 1867, which Carlyle regarded as the suicide of the English nation. In his ‘Shooting Niagara’ he recorded his own verdict on that measure and the author of it.

‘For a generation past it has been growing more and more evident that there was only this issue; but now the issue itself has become imminent, the distance of it to be guessed by years. Traitorous politicians grasping at votes, even votes from the rabble, have brought it on. One cannot but consider them traitorous; and for one’s own poor share would rather have been shot than have been concerned in it. And yet, after all my silent indignation and disgust, I cannot pretend to be clearly sorry that such a consummation is expedited. I say to myself, Well, perhaps the sooner such a mass of hypocrisies, universal mismanagements, and brutal platitudes and infidelities ends, if not in some improvement then in death and finis, may it not be the better? The sum of our sins increasing steadily day by day will at least be less the sooner the settlement is. Nay, have I not a kind of secret satisfaction of the malicious or even of the judiciary kind (Schadenfreude, “mischief joy,” the Germans call it, but really it is “justice joy” withal) that he they call Dizzy is to do it; that other jugglers of an unconscious and deeper type, having sold their poor mother’s body for a mess of official pottage, this clever, conscious juggler steps in? “Soft, you, my honourable friends: I will weigh out the corpse of your mother—mother of mine she never was, but only step-mother and milch cow—and you shan’t have the pottage—not yours you observe, but mine.” This really is a pleasing trait of its sort; other traits there are abundantly ludicrous, but they are too lugubrious even to be momentarily pleasant. A superlative Hebrew conjuror spell-binding all the great lords, great parties, great interests of England to his hand in this manner, and leading them by the nose like helpless mesmerised somnambulist cattle to such issue! Did the world ever see a flebile ludibrium of such magnitude before? Lath-sword and scissors of Destiny, Pickle-herring and the three Parcæ alike busy in it. This too I suppose we had deserved; the end of our poor old England (such an England as we had at last made of it) to be not a fearful tragedy, but an ignominious farce as well.’

The consequences of the precipitation over the cataract not being immediate, and Government still continuing, over which a juggler of some kind must necessarily preside, Carlyle, though hope had forsaken him, retained his preference for the conscious over the unconscious. He had a faint pleasure in Disraeli’s accession to power in 1874. He was even anxious that I should myself accept a proposal of a seat in Parliament which had been made to me, as a quasi follower of Disraeli—not that he trusted him any better, but he thought him preferable to a worse alternative. He was touched with some compunction for what he had written when Disraeli acknowledged Carlyle’s supremacy as a man of letters—offered him rank and honours and money, and offered them in terms as flattering as his own proudest estimate of himself could have dictated. Accept such offers Carlyle could not; but he was affected by the recognition that of all English ministers the Hebrew conjuror should have been the only one who had acknowledged his services to his country, and although he disapproved and denounced Disraeli’s policy in the East he did perceive that there might be qualities in the man to which he had not done perfect justice.

However that may be, Disraeli was a child of Parliament. It was Parliament and the confidence of Parliament which gave him his place in the State. For forty years he was in the front of all the battles which were fought in the House of Commons, in opposition or in office, in adversity or in success, in conflict and competition with the most famous debaters of the age. In the teeth of prejudice, without support save in his own force of character, without the advantage of being the representative of any popular cause which appealed to the imagination, he fought his way till the consent of Parliament and country raised him to the Premiership.

Extraordinary qualities of some kind he must have possessed. No horse could win in such a race who had not blood and bone and sinew. Whether he was fit or unfit to govern England, the House of Commons chose him as their best; and if he was the charlatan which in some quarters he is supposed to have been, the Parliament which in so many years failed to detect his unworthiness is itself unfit to be trusted with the nation’s welfare. He was not borne into power on the tide of any outside movement. He was not the advocate of any favourite measure with which his name was identified. He rose by his personal qualifications alone, and in studying what those qualifications were we are studying the character of Parliament itself.

THE JEWS IN SPAIN

The prophets who spoke of the dispersion of the Jews as a penalty for their sins described a phenomenon which probably preceded the Captivity. Through Tyre the Hebrew race had a road open through which they could spread along the shores of the Mediterranean. There was a colony of them in Rome in the time of Cicero. In Carthage they were among a people who spoke their own language. It is likely that they accompanied the Carthaginians in their conquests and commercial enterprises, and were thus introduced into Spain, where a Jewish community undoubtedly existed in St. Paul’s time, and where it survived through all changes in the fortunes of the Peninsula. Under the Arabs the Jews of Spain preserved undisturbed their peculiar characteristics. As the crescent waned before the cross they intermarried with Christian families, and conformed outwardly with the established faith while they retained in secret their own ceremonies.

The Jewish people, says Isaac Disraeli in his ‘Genius of Judaism,’ are not a nation, for they consist of many nations. They are Spanish or Portuguese, German or Polish, and, like the chameleon, they reflect the colours of the spot they rest on. The people of Israel are like water running through vast countries, tinged in their course with all varieties of the soil where they deposit themselves. Every native Jew as a political being becomes distinct from other Jews. The Hebrew adopts the hostilities and the alliances of the land where he was born. He calls himself by the name of his country. Under all these political varieties the Jew of the Middle Ages endeavoured to preserve his inward peculiarities. In England, in France, in Germany, in Italy, he enjoyed for the sake of his wealth a fitful toleration, with intervals of furious persecution. From England he was expelled at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and his property was confiscated to the State. In crusading Spain he had not ventured to practise his creed in the open day, and thus escaped more easily. He was unmolested as long as he professed a nominal Christianity. He was wealthy, he was ingenious, he was enterprising. In his half-transparent disguise he intermarried with the proudest Castilian breeds. He took service under the State, and rose to the highest positions, even in the Church itself. A Jew who had not ceased to be a Jew in secret became Primate of Spain, and when the crowns of Castile and Aragon became united it was reckoned that there was scarcely a noble family in the two realms pure from intermixture of Jewish blood. His prosperity was the cause of his ruin. The kingdom of Granada fell at last before Ferdinand and Isabella, and the Church of Spain addressed itself, in gratitude to Providence, to the purifying of the Peninsula from the unholy presence of the wealthy unbeliever.

The Jews who were willing to break completely with their religious associations remained undisturbed. The Inquisition undertook the clearance of the rest, and set to work with characteristic vigour. Rank was no protection. The highest nobles were among the first who were called for examination before Torquemada’s tribunal. Tens of thousands of the ‘new Christians’ who were convicted of having practised the rites of their own religion after outward conformity with Christianity, were burnt at the stake as ‘relapsed.’ Those who could escape fled to other countries where a less violent bigotry would allow them a home. Venice was the least intolerant. Venice lived upon its commerce, and the Jews there, as always, were the shrewdest traders in the world. The Venetian aristocrats might treat them as social pariahs, rate them on the Rialto, and spit upon their gabardines, but they had ducats, and their ducats secured them the protection of the law.

THE DISRAELI FAMILY

Among those who thus sought and found the hospitality of the Adriatic republic at the end of the fifteenth century was a family allied with the house of Lara, and perhaps entitled to bear its name. They preferred, however, to break entirely their connection with the country which had cast them off. They called themselves simply D’Israeli, or Sons of Israel, a name, says Lord Beaconsfield, never borne before or since by any other family, in order that their race might be for ever recognised. At Venice they lived and throve, and made money for two hundred years. Towards the middle of the last century, when Venice was losing her commercial pre-eminence, they began to turn their eyes elsewhere. Very many of their countrymen were already doing well in Holland. England was again open to them. Jews were still under some disabilities there, but they were in no danger of being torn by horses in the streets under charge of eating children at their Passover. They could follow their business and enjoy the fruits of it; and the head of the Venetian house decided that his second son, Benjamin, ‘the child of his right hand,’ should try his fortune in London. The Disraelis retained something of their Spanish pride, and did not like to be confounded with the lower grades of Hebrews whom they found already established there. The young Benjamin was but eighteen when he came over; he took root and prospered, but he followed a line of his own and never cordially or intimately mixed with the Jewish community, and the tendency to alienation was increased by his marriage.

ISAAC DISRAELI

‘My grandfather,’ wrote Lord Beaconsfield, ‘was a man of ardent character, sanguine, courageous, speculative, and fortunate; with a temper which no disappointment could disturb and a brain full of resources.’ He made a fortune, he married a beautiful woman of the same religion as his own and whose family had suffered equally from persecution. The lady was ambitious of social distinction, and she resented upon her unfortunate race the slights and disappointments to which it exposed her. Her husband took it more easily. He was rich. He had a country house at Enfield, where he entertained his friends, played whist, and enjoyed himself, ‘notwithstanding a wife who never pardoned him his name.’ So successful he had been that he saw his way to founding a house which might have been a power in Europe. But the more splendid his position the more bitter would have been his wife’s feelings. He retired therefore early from the field, contented with the wealth which he had acquired. Perhaps his resolution was precipitated by the character of the son who was the only issue of his marriage. Isaac Disraeli was intended for the heir of business, and Isaac showed from the first a determined disinclination for business of any sort or kind. ‘Nature had disqualified the child from his cradle for the busy pursuits of men.’ ‘He grew up beneath a roof of worldly energy and enjoyment, indicating that he was of a different order from those with whom he lived.’ Neither his father nor his mother understood him. To one he was ‘an enigma,’ to the other ‘a provocation.’ His dreamy, wandering eyes were hopelessly unpractical. His mother was irritated because she could not rouse him into energy. He grew on ‘to the mournful period of boyhood, when eccentricities excite attention and command no sympathy.’ Mrs. Disraeli was exasperated when she ought to have been gentle. Her Isaac was the last drop in her cup of bitterness, and ‘only served to swell the aggregate of many humiliating particulars.’ She grew so embittered over her grievances that Lord Beaconsfield says ‘she lived till eighty without indulging a tender expression;’ and must have been an unpleasant figure in her grandson’s childish recollections. The father did his best to keep the peace, but had nothing to offer but good-natured commonplaces. Isaac at last ran away from home, and was brought back after being found lying on a tombstone in Hackney Churchyard. His father ‘embraced him, gave him a pony,’ and sent him to a day school, where he had temporary peace. But the reproaches and upbraidings recommenced when he returned in the evenings. To crown all, Isaac was delivered of a poem, and for the first time the head of the family was seriously alarmed. Hitherto he had supposed that boys would be boys, and their follies ought not to be too seriously noticed; but a poem was a more dangerous symptom; ‘the loss of his argosies could not have filled him with a more blank dismay.’

The too imaginative youth was despatched to a counting-house in Holland. His father went occasionally to see him, but left him for several years to drudge over ledgers without once coming home, in the hope that in this way, if in no other, the evil spirit might be exorcised. Had it been necessary for Isaac Disraeli to earn his own bread the experiment might have succeeded. His nature was gentle and amiable, and though he could not be driven he might have been led. But he knew that he was the only child of a wealthy parent. Why should he do violence to his disposition and make himself unnecessarily miserable? Instead of book-keeping he read Bayle and Voltaire. He was swept into Rousseauism and imagined himself another Emile. When recalled home at last the boy had become a young man. He had pictured to himself a passionate scene in which he was to fly into his mother’s arms, and their hearts were to rush together in tears of a recovered affection. ‘When he entered, his strange appearance, his gaunt figure, his excited manner, his long hair, and his unfashionable costume only filled her with a sentiment of tender aversion. She broke into derisive laughter, and noticing his intolerable garments reluctantly lent him her cheek.’ The result, of course, was a renewal of household misery. His father assured him that his parents desired only to make him happy, and proposed to establish him in business at Bordeaux. He replied that he had written another poem against commerce, ‘which was the corruption of man,’ and that he meant to publish it. What was to be done with such a lad? ‘With a home that ought to have been happy,’ says Lord Beaconsfield, ‘surrounded with more than comfort, with the most good-natured father in the world and an agreeable man, and with a mother whose strong intellect under ordinary circumstances might have been of great importance to him, my father, though himself of a very sweet disposition, was most unhappy.’ To keep him at home was worse than useless. He was sent abroad again, but on his own terms. He went to Paris, made literary acquaintance, studied in libraries, and remained till the eve of the Revolution amidst the intellectual and social excitement which preceded the general convulsion. But his better sense rebelled against the Rousseau enthusiasm. Paris ceasing to be a safe residence, he came home once more, recovered from the dangerous form of his disorder, ‘with some knowledge of the world and much of books.’

His aversion to the counting-house was, however, as pronounced as ever. Benjamin Disraeli resigned himself to the inevitable—wound up his affairs and retired, as has been said, upon the fortune which he had realised. Isaac, assured of independence, if not of great wealth, went his own way; published a satire, which the old man overlived without a catastrophe, and entered the literary world of London. Before he was thirty he brought out his ‘Curiosities of Literature,’ which stepped at once into popularity and gave him a name. He wrote verses which were pretty and graceful, verses which were read and remembered by Sir Walter Scott, and were at least better than his son’s. But he was too modest to overrate their value. He knew that poetry, unless it be the best of its kind, is better unproduced, and withdrew within the limits where he was conscious that he could excel. ‘The poetical temperament was not thrown away upon him. Because he was a poet he was a popular writer, and made belles-lettres charming to the multitude.... His destiny was to give his country a series of works illustrative of its literary and political history, full of new information and new views which time has ratified as just.’

[CHAPTER II]

Family of Isaac Disraeli—Life in London—Birth of his Children—Abandons Judaism and joins the Church of England—Education of Benjamin Disraeli—School Days—Picture of them in ‘Vivian Grey’ and ‘Contarini Fleming’—Self-education at Home—Early Ambition.

BIRTH AND EDUCATION

Isaac Disraeli, having the advantage of a good fortune, escaped the embarrassments which attend a struggling literary career. His circumstances were easy. He became intimate with distinguished men; and his experiences in Paris had widened and liberalised his mind. His creed sate light upon him, but as long as his father lived he remained nominally in the communion in which he was born. He married happily a Jewish lady, Maria, daughter of Mr. George Basevi, of Brighton, a gentle, sweet-tempered, affectionate woman. To her he relinquished the management of his worldly affairs, and divided his time between his own splendid library, the shops of book collectors or the British Museum, and the brilliant society of politicians and men of letters. His domestic life was unruffled by the storms which had disturbed his boyhood; a household more affectionately united was scarcely to be found within the four seas. Four children were born to him—the eldest a daughter, Sarah, whose gifts and accomplishments would have raised her, had she been a man, into fame; Benjamin, the Prime Minister that was to be, and two other boys, Ralph and James. The Disraelis lived in London, but changed their residence more than once. At the outset of their married life they had chambers in the Adelphi. From thence they removed to the King’s Road, Gray’s Inn, and there, on December 21, 1804, Benjamin was born. He was received into the Jewish Church with the usual rites, the record of the initiation being preserved in the register of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue Bevis Marks. No soothsayer having foretold his future eminence, he was left to grow up much like other children. He was his mother’s darling, and was naturally spoilt. He was unruly, and a noisy boy at home perhaps disturbed his father’s serenity. At an early age it was decided that he must go to school, but where it was not easy to decide. English boys were rough and prejudiced, and a Jewish lad would be likely to have a hard time among them. No friend of Isaac Disraeli, who knew what English public schools were then like, would have recommended him to commit his lad to the rude treatment which he would encounter at Eton or Winchester. A private establishment of a smaller kind had to be tried as preliminary.

SCHOOL LIFE

Disraeli’s first introduction to life was at a Mr. Poticary’s, at Blackheath, where he remained for several years—till he was too old to be left there, and till a very considerable change took place in the circumstances of the family. In 1817 the grandfather died. Isaac Disraeli succeeded to his fortune, removed from Gray’s Inn Road, and took a larger house—No. 6 Bloomsbury Square, then a favourite situation for leading lawyers and men of business. A more important step was his formal withdrawal from the Jewish congregation. The reasons for it, as given by himself in his ‘Genius of Judaism,’ were the narrowness of the system, the insistence that the Law was of perpetual obligation, while circumstances changed and laws failed of their objects. ‘The inventions,’ he says, ‘of the Talmudical doctors, incorporated in their ceremonies, have bound them hand and foot, and cast them into the caverns of the lone and sullen genius of rabbinical Judaism, cutting them off from the great family of mankind and perpetuating their sorrow and their shame.’ The explanation is sufficient, but the resolution was probably of older date. The coincidence between the date of his father’s death and his own secession points to a connection between the two events. His mother’s impatience of her Jewish fetters must naturally have left a mark on his mind, and having no belief himself in the system, he must have wished to relieve his children of the disabilities and inconveniences which attached to them as members of the synagogue. At all events at this period he followed the example of his Spanish ancestors in merging himself and them in the general population of his adopted country. The entire household became members of the Church of England. The children read their Prayer Books and learned their catechisms. On July 31 in that year Benjamin Disraeli was baptised at St. Andrew’s Church, Holborn, having for his godfather his father’s intimate friend the distinguished Sharon Turner.

The education problem was thus simplified, but not entirely solved. The instruction at Mr. Poticary’s was indifferent. ‘Ben’ had learnt little there. The Latin and Greek were all behindhand, and of grammar, which in those days was taught tolerably effectively in good English schools, he had brought away next to nothing. But he was quick, clever, impetuous. At home he was surrounded with books, and had read for himself with miscellaneous voracity. In general knowledge and thought he was far beyond his age. His father’s wish was to give him the best education possible—to send him to Eton, and then to a university. His mother believed that a public school was a place where boys were roasted alive. ‘Ben’ was strong and daring, and might be trusted to take care of himself. The objections, however, notwithstanding the removal of the religious difficulty, were still considerable. The character of a public school is more determined by the boys than by the masters. There were no institutions where prejudice had freer play at the beginning of the present century. The nationality of a Disraeli could neither be concealed nor forgotten, and though he might be called a Christian, and though he might be ready to return blow for blow if he was insulted or ill-used, it is not likely that at either one of our great public foundations he would have met with any tolerable reception. He would himself have willingly run the risk, and regretted afterwards, perhaps, that he had no share in the bright Eton life which he describes so vividly in ‘Coningsby.’ It was decided otherwise. The school chosen for him was at Walthamstow. The master was a Dr. Cogan, a Unitarian. There were many boys there, sons most of them of rich parents; but the society at a Unitarian school seventy years ago could not have been distinguished for birth or good breeding. Neither ‘Vivian Grey’ nor ‘Contarini Fleming’ can be trusted literally for autobiographical details; but Disraeli has identified himself with Contarini in assigning to him many of his own personal experiences, and Vivian has been always acknowledged as a portrait sketched from a looking-glass. In both these novels there are pictures of the hero’s school days, so like in their general features that they may be taken as a fair account of Disraeli’s own recollections. He was fifteen when he went to Walthamstow, and was then beyond the age when most boys begin their school career.

‘For the first time in my life,’ says Contarini, ‘I was surrounded by struggling and excited beings. Joy, hope, sorrow, ambition, craft, dulness, courage, cowardice, beneficence, awkwardness, grace, avarice, generosity, wealth, poverty, beauty, hideousness, tyranny, suffering, hypocrisy, tricks, love, hatred, energy, inertness, they were all there and sounded and moved and acted about me. Light laughs and bitter cries and deep imprecations, and the deeds of the friendly, the prodigal, and the tyrant, the exploits of the brave, the graceful, and the gay, and the flying words of native wit and the pompous sentences of acquired knowledge, how new, how exciting, how wonderful!’

EDUCATION AT HOME

Contarini is Disraeli thus launched into a school epitome of the world after the Unitarian pattern. It was a poor substitute for Eton. The young Disraeli soon asserted his superiority. He made enemies, he made friends, at all events he distinguished himself from his comrades. School work did not interest him, and he paid but slight attention to it. He wanted ideas, and he was given what seemed to him to be but words. He lost the opportunity of becoming an exact scholar. On the other hand in thought, in imagination, in general attainments, he was superior to everyone about him, masters included. Superiority begets jealousy. Boys never pardon a comrade who is unlike themselves. He was taunted with his birth, as it was inevitable that he would be. As inevitably he resented the insult. Contarini Fleming and Vivian Grey both fight and thrash the biggest boy in their school. The incident in the novels is evidently taken from the writer’s experience. Disraeli was a fighter from his youth, with his fist first, as with his tongue afterwards. It was characteristic of him that he had studied the art of self-defence, and was easily able to protect himself. But both his heroes were unpopular, and it may be inferred that he was not popular any more than they. The school experiment was not a success and came to an abrupt end. Vivian Grey was expelled; Contarini left of his own accord, because he learnt nothing which he thought would be of use to him, and because he ‘detested school more than he ever abhorred the world in the darkest moment of experienced manhood.’ The precise circumstances under which Disraeli himself made his exit are not known to me, but his stay at Walthamstow was a brief one, and he left to complete his education at home. His father, recollecting the troubles of his own youth, abstained from rebukes or reproaches, left him to himself, helped him when he could, and now and then, if we may identify him with Vivian, gave him shrewd and useful advice. Disraeli wanted no spurring. He worked for twelve hours a day, conscious that he had singular powers and passionately ambitious to make use of them. He was absolutely free from the loose habits so common in the years between boyhood and youth; his father had no fault to find with his conduct, which he admitted had been absolutely correct. The anxiety was of another kind. He did not wish to interfere with his son’s direction of himself, but warned him, very wisely, ‘not to consider himself a peculiar boy.’ ‘Take the advice,’ said Mr. Grey to Vivian, ‘of one who has committed as many—aye, more—follies than yourself. Try to ascertain what may be the chief objects of your existence in this world. I want you to take no theological dogmas for granted, nor to satisfy your doubts by ceasing to think; but whether we are in this world in a state of probation for another, or whether at death we cease altogether, human feelings tell me that we have some duties to perform to our fellow-creatures, to our friends, and to ourselves.’

THE YOUNG DISRAELI

Disraeli’s conception of himself was that he had it in him to be a great man, and that the end of his existence was to make himself a great man. With his father’s example before him literature appeared the readiest road. Contarini when a boy wrote romances and threw them into the river, and composed pages of satire or sentiment ‘and grew intoxicated with his own eloquence.’ He pondered over the music of language, studied the cultivation of sweet words, and constructed elaborate sentences in lonely walks, and passed his days in constant struggle to qualify himself for the part which he was determined to play in the game of life. Boyish pursuits and amusements had no interest for him. In athletic games he excelled if he chose to exert himself, but he rarely did choose unless it was in the science of self-defence. He rode well and hard, for the motion stimulated his spirits; but in galloping across the country he was charging in imagination the brooks and fences in the way of his more ambitious career.

This was one side of him in those early years; another was equally remarkable. He intended to excel among his fellow-creatures, and to understand what men and women were like was as important to him as to understand books. The reputation of Vivian Grey’s father—in other words, his own father—had always made him an honoured guest in the great world. For this reason he had been anxious that his son should be as little at home as possible, for he feared for a youth the fascination of London society. This particular society was what Disraeli was most anxious to study, and was in less danger from it than his father fancied. He was handsome, audacious, and readily made his way into the circle of the family acquaintances. ‘Contarini was a graceful, lively lad, with enough of dandyism to prevent him from committing gaucheries, and with a devil of a tongue.’ ‘He was never at a loss for a compliment or a repartee,’ and ‘was absolutely unchecked by foolish modesty.’ ‘The nervous vapidity of my first rattle,’ says the alter ego Vivian, ‘soon subsided into a continuous flow of easy nonsense. Impertinent and flippant, I was universally hailed as an original and a wit. I became one of the most affected, conceited, and intolerable atoms that ever peopled the sunbeam of society.’ The purpose which lay behind Disraeli’s frivolous outside was as little suspected by those who saw him in the world as the energy with which he was always working in his laborious hours. The stripling of seventeen was the same person as the statesman of seventy, with this difference only, that the affectation which was natural in the boy was itself affected in the matured politician, whom it served well as a mask or as a suit of impenetrable armour.

[CHAPTER III]

The Austen Family—Choice of a Profession—Restlessness—Enters a Solicitor’s Office—‘Vivian Grey’—Illness—Travels Abroad—Migration of the Disraelis to Bradenham—Literary Satires—‘Popanilla’—Tour in the East—Gibraltar—Cadiz—Seville—Mountain Adventures—Improved Health—Malta—James Clay—Greece—Yanina—Redshid Pasha—Athens—Constantinople—Plains of Troy and Revolutionary Epic—Jaffa—Jerusalem—Egypt—Home Letters—Death of William Meredith—Return to England.

DREAMS AND AMBITIONS

In the neighbourhood of the square in which the Disraelis now resided there lived a family named Austen, with whom the young Benjamin became closely intimate. Mr. Austen was a solicitor in large practice; his wife was the daughter of a Northamptonshire country gentleman—still beautiful, though she had been for some years married, a brilliant conversationalist, a fine musician, and an amateur artist of considerable power. The house of this lady was the gathering-place of the young men of talent of the age. She early recognised the unusual character of her friend’s boy. She invited him to her salons, talked to him, advised and helped him. A writer in the ‘Quarterly Review’ (January 1889), apparently a connection of the Austens, remembers having been taken by them as a child to call on the Disraelis. ‘Ben, then perhaps a school-boy returned for the holidays, was sent for, and appeared in his shirt-sleeves with boxing gloves.’ His future destination was still uncertain. Isaac Disraeli, who had no great belief in youthful genius, disencouraged his literary ambition, and was anxious to see him travelling along one of the beaten roads. Mr. Austen was probably of the same opinion. ‘Ben’s’ own views on this momentous subject are not likely to have been much caricatured in the meditations of Vivian Grey.

‘The Bar!—pooh! Law and bad jokes till we are forty, and then with the most brilliant success the prospect of gout and a coronet. Besides, to succeed as an advocate I must be a great lawyer, and to be a great lawyer I must give up my chances of being a great man. The “services” in war time are fit only for desperadoes (and that truly am I), and in peace are fit only for fools. The Church is more rational. I should certainly like to act Wolsey, but the thousand and one chances are against me, and my destiny should not be a chance.’ Practical always Disraeli was, bent simply on making his way, and his way to a great position. No ignes fatui were likely to mislead him into spiritual morasses, no love-sick dreams to send him wandering after imaginary Paradises. He was as shrewd as he was ambitious, and he took an early measure of his special capabilities. ‘Beware,’ his father had said to him, ‘of trying to be a great man in a hurry.’ His weakness was impatience. He could not bear to wait. Byron had blazed like a new star at five-and-twenty; why not he? Pitt had been Prime Minister at a still earlier age, and of all young Disraeli’s studies political history had been the most interesting to him. But to rise in politics he must get into Parliament, and the aristocrats who condescended to dine in Bloomsbury Square, and to laugh at his impertinence, were not likely to promise him a pocket borough. His father could not afford to buy him one, nor would have consented to squander money on so wild a prospect. He saw that to advance he must depend upon himself and must make his way into some financially independent position. While chafing at the necessity he rationally folded his wings, and on November 18, 1821, when just seventeen, he was introduced into a solicitor’s office in Old Jewry. Mr. Maples, a member of the firm, was an old friend of Isaac Disraeli, and to Mr. Maples’s department ‘Ben’ was attached. Distasteful as the occupation must have been to him, he attached himself zealously to his work. He remained at his desk for three years, and Mr. Maples described him as ‘most assiduous in his attention to business, as showing great ability in the transaction of it,’ and as likely, if allowed to go to the Bar, to attain to eminence there.

‘VIVIAN GREY’

If the project had been carried out the anticipation would probably have been verified. The qualities which enabled Disraeli to rise in the House of Commons would have lifted him as surely, and perhaps as rapidly, into the high places of the profession. He might have entered Parliament with greater facility and with firmer ground under his feet. He acquiesced in his father’s wishes; he was entered at Lincoln’s Inn, and apparently intended to pursue a legal career; but the Fates or his own adventurousness ordered his fortunes otherwise. His work in the office had not interfered with his social engagements. He met distinguished people at his father’s table—Wilson Croker, then Secretary to the Admiralty; Samuel Rogers; John Murray, the proprietor of the ‘Quarterly Review,’ and others of Murray’s brilliant contributors. The Catholic question was stirring. There were rumours of Reform, and the political atmosphere was growing hot. Disraeli observed, listened, took the measure of these men, and thought he was as good as any of them. He began to write in the newspapers. The experienced Mr. Murray took notice of him as a person of whom something considerable might be made. These acquaintances enabled him to extend his knowledge of the world, which began to shape itself into form and figure. To understand the serious side of things requires a matured faculty. The ridiculous is caught more easily. With Mrs. Austen for an adviser, and perhaps with her assistance, he composed a book which, however absurd in its plot and glaring in its affectation, revealed at once that a new writer had started into being, who would make his mark on men and things. That a solicitor’s clerk of twenty should be able to produce ‘Vivian Grey’ is not, perhaps, more astonishing than that Dickens, at little more than the same age, should have written ‘Pickwick.’ All depends on the eye. Most of us encounter every day materials for a comedy if we could only see them. But genius is wanted for it, and the thing, when accomplished, proves that genius has been at work.

The motto of Vivian Grey was sufficiently impudent:

Why, then, the world’s mine oyster,

Which with my sword I’ll open.

The central figure is the author himself caricaturing his own impertinence and bringing on his head deserved retribution; but the sarcasm, the strength of hand, the audacious personalities caught the attention of the public, and gave him at once the notoriety which he desired. ‘Vivian’ was the book of the season; everyone read it, everyone talked about it, and keys were published of the characters who were satirised. Disraeli, like Byron, went to sleep a nameless youth of twenty-one and woke to find himself famous.

A successful novel may be gratifying to vanity, but it is a bad introduction to a learned profession. Attorneys prefer barristers who stick to business and do not expatiate into literature. A single fault might be overlooked, and ‘Vivian Grey’ be forgotten before its author could put on his wig, but a more serious cause interrupted his legal progress. He was overtaken by a singular disorder, which disabled him from serious work. He had fits of giddiness, which he described as like a consciousness of the earth’s rotation. Once he fell into a trance, from which he did not completely recover for a week. He was recommended to travel, and the Austens took him abroad with them for a summer tour. They went to Paris, to Switzerland, to Milan, Venice, Florence, Geneva, and back over Mont Cenis into France. His health became better, but was not re-established, and he returned to his family still an invalid.

BRADENHAM

The ‘law’ was postponed, but not yet abandoned. In a letter to his father, written in 1832, he spoke of his illness as having robbed him of five years of life; as if this, and this alone, had prevented him from going on with his profession. Meanwhile there was a complete change in the outward circumstances of the Disraeli household. Isaac Disraeli, who had the confirmed habits of a Londoner, whose days had been spent in libraries and his evenings in literary society, for some reason or other chose to alter the entire character of his existence. Like Ferrars in ‘Endymion,’ though not for the same cause, he tore himself away from all his associations and withdrew with his wife and children to an old manor house in Buckinghamshire, two miles from High Wycombe. Bradenham, their new home, is exactly described in the account which Disraeli gives of the Ferrars’s place of retirement; and perhaps their first arrival there and their gipsy-like encampment in the old hall, the sense, half-realised, that they were being taken away from all their interests and associations, may equally have been drawn from memory. The Disraelis, however, contrived happily enough to fit themselves to their new existence. Disraeli all through his life delighted in the country and country scenes. The dilapidated manor house was large and picturesque. The land round it was open down, or covered thinly with scrub and woods. They had horses and could gallop where they pleased. They had their dogs and their farmyard; they made new friends among the tenantry and the labourers. Disraeli’s head continued to trouble him, but the air and the hills gave him his best chance of recovery. His father, contented with an occasional lecture, left him to himself. He was devoted to his mother and passionately attached to his sister. Altogether nothing could be calmer, nothing more affectionately peaceful than the two or three years which he passed at Bradenham after this migration. Though he could not study in London chambers, he could read and he could write, and over his writing he worked indefatigably, if not with great success. He added a second part to ‘Vivian Grey.’ Clever it could not help being, but it had not the flavour of the first. He wrote the ‘Young Duke,’ a flashy picture of high society which might have passed muster as the ephemeral production of an ordinary novelist. Neither of these, however, indicated any literary advance, nor did he himself attach any value to them. In a happier interval, perhaps, when he had a respite from his headaches, he threw off three light satires, which, with one exception, are the most brilliant of all his productions. ‘Ixion in Heaven’ is taken from the story of the King of Thessaly who was carried to Olympus and fell in love with the queen of the gods. Disraeli’s classical knowledge probably went no farther than Lemprière’s Dictionary, but Lemprière gave him all that he wanted. The form and tone are like Lucian’s, and the execution almost as good. No characters in real life are more vivid than those which he draws of the high-bred divinities at the court of the Father of the gods, while the Father himself is George IV. Apollo Byron, and the ladies well-known ornaments of the circles of the Olympians of May Fair.

POLITICAL SATIRES

Equally good is the ‘Infernal Marriage,’ the rape of Proserpine and her adventures in her dominions below. The wit which we never miss in Disraeli rises here into humour which is rare with him, and a deeper current of thought can be traced when the Queen of Hell pays a visit to Elysium, finding there the few thousand families who spend their time in the splendid luxury of absolute idleness; high-born, graceful beings without a duty to perform, supported by the toil of a million gnomes, and after exhausting every form of amusement ready to perish of ennui.

The third fragment, written in these years, which Lord Beaconsfield included in his collected works (he probably wrote others which are lost in the quicksands of keepsakes and annuals) was ‘Popanilla,’ a satire on the English Constitution. He has changed his manner from Lucian’s to Swift’s. ‘Popanilla’ might have been another venture of Mr. Lemuel Gulliver if there had been malice in it. The satire of Swift is inspired by hatred and scorn of his race. The satire of Disraeli is pleasant, laughing, and good-humoured. In all his life he never hated anybody or anything, never bore a grudge or remembered a libel against himself. Popanilla is a native of an unknown island in an unknown part of the Pacific, an island where modern civilisation had never penetrated and life was a round of ignorant and innocent enjoyment. In an evil hour a strange ship is wrecked upon the shore. A box of books is flung up upon the sands, books of useful knowledge intended for the amelioration of mankind, spiritual, social, moral, and political. Popanilla finds it, opens it, and with the help of these moral lights sets to work to regenerate his countrymen. He makes himself a nuisance, and is sent floating in a canoe which carries him to Vray Bleusia, or modern England. Being a novelty, he is enthusiastically welcomed, becomes a lion, and is introduced to the charms and wonders of complicated artificial society. The interest is in the light which is thrown on Disraeli’s studies of English politics. The chapter on ‘Fruit’ is a humorously correct sketch of the Anglican Church. Mr. Flummery Flum represents political economy, and the picture of him betrays Disraeli’s contempt for that once celebrated science, now relegated to the exterior planets. ‘Popanilla’ can be still read with pleasure as a mere work of fancy. It has more serious value to the student of Disraeli’s character. As a man of letters he shows at his best in writings of this kind. His interest in the life which he describes in his early novels was only superficial, and he could not give to others what he did not feel. In ‘Ixion,’ in the ‘Infernal Marriage,’ in ‘Popanilla’ we have his real mind, and matter, style, and manner are equally admirable.

His future was still undetermined. His father continued eager to see him at the Bar, but his health remained delicate and his disinclination more and more decided. There was a thought of buying an estate for him and setting him up as a country gentleman. But to be a small squire was a poor object of ambition. He wished to travel, travel especially in the East, to which his semi-Asiatic temperament gave him a feeling of affinity. The Holy Land, as the seat of his own race, affected his imagination. He had a romantic side in his mind in a passion for Jerusalem. His intellect had been moulded by the sceptical philosophy of his fathers; but, let sceptics say what they would, a force which had gone out from Jerusalem had governed the fate of the modern world.

His desire, when he first made it known, was not encouraged. ‘My wishes,’ he said, ‘were knocked on the head in a calmer manner than I could have expected from my somewhat rapid but too indulgent sire.’ He lingered on at Bradenham till even his literary work had to end. He could not ‘write a line without effort,’ and he wandered aimlessly about the woods; ‘solitude and silence’ not making his existence easy, but at least tolerable.

FOREIGN TOUR

The objection to his travelling had been perhaps financial. If this was the difficulty it was removed by his friends the Austens, who, we are briefly told, came to his assistance and enabled him to carry out his purpose. He found a companion ready to go with him in Mr. William Meredith, a young man of talent and good fortune who was engaged to be married to his sister. They started in June 1830, and their adventures are related in a series of brilliant and charming letters to his family, letters which show the young Disraeli no longer in the mythological drapery of ‘Vivian Grey’ and ‘Contarini Fleming,’ but under his own hand as he actually was. Spain was their first object. The Disraelis retained their pride in their Spanish descent in a dim and distant fashion, and had not forgotten that in right of blood they were still Spanish nobles. Steam navigation was in its infancy, but small paddle-wheeled vessels ran from London to Cork and Dublin, touching at Falmouth, from which outward-bound ships took their departure. They reached Falmouth with no worse adventure than a rough passage, and Disraeli was flattered to find that the family fame had so far preceded him. He met a Dr. Cornish there, who was full of admiration for ‘Vivian Grey,’ ‘knows my father’s works by heart and thinks our revered sire the greatest man that ever lived.’ From Gibraltar on July 1 he wrote to his father himself:—

‘The rock is a wonderful place, with a population infinitely diversified—Moors with costumes radiant as a rainbow in an Eastern melodrama, Jews with gabardines and skull caps, Genoese highlanders and Spaniards whose dress is as picturesque as those of the sons of Ivor.... In the garrison are all your works, in the merchants’ library the greater part. Each possesses the copy of another book supposed to be written by a member of our family which is looked upon at Gibraltar as one of the masterpieces of the nineteenth century. At first I apologised and talked of youthful blunders and all that, really being ashamed, but finding them, to my astonishment, sincere, and fearing they were stupid enough to adopt my last opinion, I shifted my position just in time, looked very grand, and passed myself off for a child of the sun, like the Spaniards in Peru.’

Government House opened its hospitalities. Sir George D——, a proud, aristocratic, but vigorous old man, was not a person likely to find such a pair of travellers particularly welcome to him. Disraeli’s affectations of dress and manner approached vulgarity, and Meredith, though a superior person, was equally absurd in this respect. But Disraeli, at any rate where he cared to please, never failed to make himself liked. Sir George was polite, Lady D. more than polite. Though she was old and infirm, ‘her eyes were so brilliant and so full of moquerie that you forgot her wrinkles.’ Of course they were welcome guests in the regimental mess-rooms, clever young civilians who could talk and were men of the world being an agreeable change in the professional monotony, though perhaps the visitors mistook to some extent the impression which they produced.

‘Tell my mother,’ Disraeli wrote, ‘that as it is the fashion among the dandies of this place (that is, the officers, for there are no others) not to wear waistcoats in the morning, her new studs come into fine play and maintain my reputation for being a great judge of costume, to the admiration and envy of many subalterns. I have also the fame of being the first who ever passed the Straits with two canes, a morning and an evening cane. I change my cane on the gun-fire and hope to carry them both on to Cairo. It is wonderful the effect those magical wands produce. I owe to them even more attention than to being the supposed author of—what is it? I forget.’

ADVENTURES IN SPAIN

With Gibraltar for head-quarters they made excursions into the Spanish territory; the first through the Sierra Nevada, on a route arranged for them by the governor. Travelling was dangerous, and accommodation no better than at Don Quixote’s enchanted castle. The banditti were everywhere. Two Englishmen had just arrived from Cadiz whom José Maria had stopped and rifled on the way. The danger was exciting. They set out in the long hot days of July, taking a model valet with them. Brunet had been all over the world and spoke all languages except English. Their baggage was of the slightest, not to tempt José Maria, Disraeli confining himself to ‘the red bag’ which his mother had made for his pistols.

‘We were picturesque enough in our appearance,’ he wrote. ‘Imagine M. and myself on two little Andalusian mountain horses with long tails and jennet necks, followed by a large beast of burden, with Brunet in white hat and slippers, lively, shrivelled, and noisy as a pea dancing upon tin; our Spanish guide, tall and with a dress excessively brodé and covered with brilliant buttons, walking by the side. The air of the mountains, the rising sun, the rising appetite, the variety of picturesque persons and things we met, and the impending danger made a delightful life, and had it not been for the great enemy I should have given myself up entirely to the magic of the life. But that spoiled all. It is not worse. Sometimes I think it lighter about the head, but the palpitation about the heart greatly increases; otherwise my health is wonderful. Never have I been better. But what use is this when the end of all existence is debarred me? I say no more upon this melancholy subject, by which I am ever and infinitely depressed, and often most so when the world least imagines it. To complain is useless and to endure almost impossible.’

José Maria was in everyone’s mouth, but the travellers did not fall in with him. After a week they were again enjoying the hospitalities of Gibraltar. The climate, the exercise, the novelty were all delightful. Disraeli was a child of the sun, as he often said of himself. His health mended and his spirits rose. He wore his hair in long curls. The women, he said, mistook it for a wig, and ‘I was obliged to let them pull it to satisfy their curiosity.’ The Judge Advocate buttonholed him. ‘I found him a bore and vulgar. Consequently I gave him a lecture upon canes, which made him stare, and he has avoided me ever since.’ But everyone liked Disraeli. ‘Wherever I go,’ he said, ‘I find plenty of friends and plenty of attention.’ He had not come to Spain to linger in a garrison town. The two friends were soon off again for a ride through Andalusia. Cadiz was enchanting with its white houses and green jalousies sparkling in the sun; ‘Figaro in every street and Rosina in every balcony.’ He saw a bull-fight; he was introduced to the Spanish authorities, and conducted himself with Vivian Grey-like impudence. ‘Fleuriz, the governor of Cadiz,’ he wrote, ‘is a singular brute. The English complain that when they are presented to him he bows and says nothing. The consul announced me to him as the son of the greatest author in England; the usual reception, however, only greeted me. But I, being prepared for the savage, was by no means silent, and made him stare for half an hour in a most extraordinary manner. He was sitting over some prints just arrived from England—a view of Algiers and—the fashions for June. The question was whether the place was Algiers, for it had no title. I ventured to inform his Excellency that it was, and that a group of gentlemen displaying their extraordinary coats and countenances were personages no less eminent than the Dey and his principal councillors of State. The dull Fleuriz, after due examination, insinuated scepticism, whereupon I offered renewed arguments to prove the dress to be Moorish. Fleuriz calls a young lady to translate the inscription, which proves only that they are fashions for June. I add at Algiers. Fleuriz, unable to comprehend badinage, gives a Mashallah look of pious resignation, and has bowed to the ground every night since that he has met me.’

After Cadiz Seville, and then Malaga. Brigands everywhere, but not caring to meddle with travellers who had so little with them worth plundering. Once only there was alarm. ‘We saved ourselves by a moonlight scamper and a change of road.’ An adventure, however, they had at Malaga which recalls Washington Irving’s story of the inn at Terracina, with this difference, that Disraeli and his companion did not show the gallantry of Irving’s English hero.

‘I was invited,’ he says, ‘by a grand lady of Madrid to join her escort to Granada, twenty foot-soldiers armed, and tirailleurs in the shape of a dozen muleteers. We refused, for reasons too long to detail, and set off alone two hours before, expecting an assault. I should tell you we dined previously with her and her husband, having agreed to meet to discuss matters. It was a truly Gil Blas scene. My lord, in an undress uniform, slightly imposing in appearance, greeted us with dignity; the señora young and really very pretty, with infinite vivacity and grace. A French valet leant on his chair, and a dueña such as Staphenaff would draw, broad and supercilious, with jet eyes, mahogany complexion, and a cocked up nose, stood by my lady bearing a large fan. She was most complaisant, as she evidently had more confidence in two thick-headed Englishmen with their Purdeys and Mantons than in her specimens of the once famous Spanish infantry. She did not know that we were cowards upon principle. I could screw up my courage to a duel in a battle—but——’

In short, in spite of the lady’s charms and their united eloquence, Disraeli and Meredith determined to start alone. They had learnt that a strong band of brigands were lying in wait for the noble pair. They took a cross road, lost their way, and slept with pack-saddles for pillows, but reached Granada without an interview with José. A fine description of Granada and Saracenic architecture was sent home from the spot. In return Disraeli requires his sister to ‘tell him all about Bradenham—about dogs and horses, orchards, gardens; who calls, where you go, who my father sees in London, what is said.’ ‘This is what I want,’ he writes; ‘never mind public news. There is no place like Bradenham, and each moment I feel better I want to come back.’

Affectation, light-heartedness, and warm home feelings are strangely mixed in all this; and no one of his changing moods is what might be expected in a pilgrim to Jerusalem in search of spiritual light. But this was Disraeli—a character genuine and affectionate, whose fine gifts were veiled in foppery which itself was more than half assumed. His real serious feeling comes out prettily in a passage in which he sums up his Peninsular experiences. ‘Spain is the country for adventure. A weak government resolves society into its original elements, and robbery becomes more honourable than war, inasmuch as the robber is paid and the soldier is in arrears. A wonderful ecclesiastical establishment covers the land with a privileged class.... I say nothing of their costume. You are wakened from your slumbers by the rosario, the singing procession by which the peasantry congregate to their labours. It is most effective, full of noble chants and melodious responses, that break upon the still fresh air and your ever fresher feelings in a manner truly magical. Oh, wonderful Spain! I thought enthusiasm was dead within me and nothing could be new. I have hit, perhaps, upon the only country which could have upset my theory, a country of which I have read little and thought nothing.’

Health was really mending. ‘This last fortnight,’ he says, ‘I have made regular progress, or rather felt, perhaps, the progress which I had already made. It is all the sun—not society or change of scene. This, however agreeable, is too much for me and ever turns me back. It is when I am alone and still that I feel the difference of my system, that I miss the old aches and am conscious of the increased activity and vitality and expansion of the blood.’

MALTA

After Spain Malta was the next halting-place; Malta, with its garrison and military society, was Gibraltar over again, with only this difference, that Disraeli fell in with a London acquaintance there in James Clay, afterwards member for Hull and a figure in the House of Commons.

The arrival of a notoriety was an incident in the uniformity of Maltese existence. ‘They have been long expecting your worship’s offspring,’ he tells his father, ‘so I was received with branches of palm.’ He accepted his honours with easy superiority. ‘To govern men,’ he said, ‘you must either excel them in their accomplishments or despise them. Clay does one, I do the other, and we are both equally popular. Affectation here tells better than wit. Yesterday at the racket court, sitting in the gallery among strangers, the ball entered and lightly struck me and fell at my feet. I picked it up, and observing a young rifleman excessively stiff, I humbly requested him to forward its passage into the court, as I really had never thrown a ball in my life.... I called on the Governor, and he was fortunately at home. I flatter myself that he passed through the most extraordinary quarter of an hour of his existence. I gave him no quarter, and at last made our nonchalant Governor roll on the sofa from his risible convulsions. Clay confesses my triumph is complete and unrivalled.’

‘I continue much the same,’ he reported of himself—‘still infirm but no longer destitute of hope. I wander in pursuit of health like the immortal exile in pursuit of that lost shore which is now almost glittering in my sight. Five years of my life have been already wasted, and sometimes I think my pilgrimage may be as long as that of Ulysses.’ Like the Greek he was exposed to temptations from the Circes and the Sirens, but he understood the symptoms and knew where to look for safety. ‘There is a Mrs. —— here in Malta,’ he writes to Ralph Disraeli, ‘with a pretty daughter, cum multis aliis; I am sorry to say, among them a beauty very dangerous to the peace of your unhappy brother. But no more of that. In a few weeks I shall be bounding, and perhaps sea-sick, upon the Egean, and then all will be over. Nothing like an emetic in these cases.’

ALBANIAN RIDE

James Clay was rich, and had provided a yacht in which, with the Byronic fever on him, he professed to intend to turn corsair. He invited Disraeli and Meredith to join him, and they sailed for Corfu in October equipped for enterprise. ‘You should see me,’ he said, ‘in the costume of a Greek pirate—a blood-red shirt with silver studs as big as shillings, an immense scarf for girdle, full of pistols and daggers, red cap, red slippers, broad blue-striped jacket and trowsers.’ ‘Adventures are to the adventurous;’ so Ixion had written in Athene’s album. Albania was in insurrection. Unlike Byron, whom he was supposed to imitate, Disraeli preferred the Turks to the Greeks whom he despised, and thought for a moment of joining Redshid’s army as a volunteer, to see what war was like. When they reached Corfu the rebellion was already crushed, but Redshid was still at Yanina, the Albanian capital, and he decided at least to pay the Grand Vizier a visit. The yacht took them to Salora. There they landed, and proceeded through the mountains with a handful of horse for an escort. They halted the first night at Arta, ‘a beautiful town now in ruins.’ ‘Here,’ he said, ‘for the first time I reposed upon a divan, and for the first time heard a muezzin from a minaret.’ In the morning they waited on the Turkish governor. ‘I cannot describe to you,’ he wrote in a humorous description of his interview, ‘the awe with which I first entered the divan of a great Turk, and the curious feeling with which I found myself squatting on the right hand of a bey, smoking an amber-mouthed chibouque, drinking coffee, and paying him compliments through an interpreter.’

The Turks had been kind to his own race at a time when Jews had no other friends, and from the first Disraeli had an evident liking for them. They set out again after a few hours. ‘We journeyed over a wild mountain pass,’ the diary continues, ‘a range of ancient Pindus, and before sunset we found ourselves at a vast but dilapidated khan as big as a Gothic castle, situated on a high range, built as a sort of half-way house for travellers by Ali Pasha, now turned into a military post.’ They were received by a bey, who provided quarters for them. They were ravenously hungry; but the bey could not understand their language, nor they his. He offered them wine; they produced brandy, and communication was thus established. ‘The bey drank all the brandy; the room turned round; the wild attendants who sat at our feet seemed dancing in strange and fantastic whirls. The bey shook hands with me; he shouted English, I Greek. “Very good,” he had caught up from us. “Kalo, kalo,” was my rejoinder. He roared; I smacked him on the back. I remember no more. In the middle of the night I woke, found a flagon of water, and drank a gallon at a draught. I looked at the wood fire and thought of the blazing blocks in the hall at Bradenham; asked myself whether I was indeed in the mountain fortress of an Albanian chief, and shrugging my shoulders went to bed and woke without a headache. We left our jolly host with regret. I gave him my pipe as a memorial of our having got tipsy together.’

YANINA

At Yanina they found the Turkish army quartered in the ruins of the town. The Grand Vizier occupied the castle with the double dignity of a prince and a general. He was surrounded with state, and they were made to wait ten minutes before they could be admitted to his presence.

‘Suddenly we are summoned to the awful presence of the pillar of the Turkish Empire, the renowned Redshid; an approved warrior, a consummate politician, unrivalled as a dissembler in a country where dissimulation is part of the moral culture.... The hall was vast, covered with gilding and arabesques.... Here, squatted up in a corner of a large divan, I bowed with all the nonchalance of St. James’s Street to a little ferocious-looking, shrivelled, careworn man, plainly dressed, with a brow covered with wrinkles and a countenance clouded with anxiety and thought.... I seated myself on the divan of the Grand Vizier, who, the Austrian consul observed, “had destroyed in the course of the last three months, not in war, upwards of 4,000 of my acquaintance,” with the self-possession of a morning call. Some compliments passed between us. Pipes and coffee were brought. Then his Highness waved his hand, and in an instant the chambers were cleared. Our conversation I need not repeat. We congratulated him on the pacification of Albania. He rejoined that the peace of the world was his only object and the happiness of mankind his only wish. This went on for the usual time. He asked us no questions about ourselves or our country, as the other Turks did, but seemed quite overwhelmed with business, moody and anxious. While we were with him three separate Tartars arrived with despatches. What a life!... I forgot to tell you that with the united assistance of my English, Spanish, and fancy wardrobe I sported a costume in Yanina which produced a most extraordinary effect on that costume-loving people. A great many Turks called on purpose to see it. “Questo vestito Inglese, o di fantasia?” asked a little Greek physician. I oracularly replied, “Inglese e fantastico.”’

Had the Greek physician enquired not about the vestito, but about the wearer of it, the answer might have been the same.

The account of this visit to Yanina was composed after the return of the party to the yacht. Here is a description in Disraeli’s other manner:—

‘I write you this from that Ambracian gulf where the soft triumvir gained more glory by defeat than attends the victory of harsher warriors. The site is not unworthy of the beauty of Cleopatra. From the summit of the land the gulf appears like a vast lake walled in on all sides by mountains more or less distant. The dying glory of a Grecian eve bathes with warm light promontories and gentle bays and infinite modulation of purple outline. Before me is Olympus, whose austere peak glitters yet in the sun. A bend in the land alone hides from me the islands of Ulysses and Sappho. When I gaze upon this scene, and remember the barbaric splendour and turbulent existence which I have just quitted with disgust, I recur to the feelings in the indulgence of which I can alone find happiness and from which an inexorable destiny seems resolved to shut me out.’

In a sketch like the present the tour cannot be followed minutely. Athens is finely painted, but Disraeli’s classical education had been too imperfect to enable him to fill with figures and incidents the scenes which he was looking upon. The golden city was more after his heart. ‘It is near sunset,’ he wrote on November 20, ‘and Constantinople is in full sight. It baffles description, though so often described. I feel an excitement which I thought dead.’ He did describe, however, and drew magnificent pictures of the towns and palaces, and the motley-coloured crowd which thronged the bazaars. Lytton Bulwer was one of his London acquaintances. To him he wrote from Constantinople—

‘I confess to you that my Turkish prejudices are very much confirmed by my residence in Turkey. The life of this people greatly accords with my taste. To repose on voluptuous divans and smoke superb pipes, daily to indulge in the luxury of a bath which requires half a dozen attendants for its perfection, to court the air in a carved caique by shores which are a perpetual scene, and to find no exertion greater than a canter on a barb, this I think a more sensible life than the bustle of clubs, the boring of drawing-rooms, and the coarse vulgarity of our political controversies.’

THE PLAIN OF TROY

Disraeli’s English contemporaries who were aspiring to Parliamentary fame, and with whom in a few years he was to cross swords, were already learning the ways of the House of Commons, or training in subordinate official harness. Little would any of those who saw him lounging on divans, with a turban on his head and smoking cherry sticks longer than himself, have dreamt that here was the man who was to rise above them all and be Prime Minister of England. He too was forming himself for something, though as yet he could not tell for what. Ambitious visions haunted his imagination, even grander than he was ever to realise. On their way back through the Dardanelles the party paused for a sight of the Plain of Troy. As Disraeli stood on the sacred soil and gazed on the grass mound which was called the tomb of Patroclus, the thought passed through him that as the heroic age had produced its Homer, the Augustan era its Virgil, the Renaissance its Dante, the Reformation its Milton, why should not the revolutionary epoch produce its representative poet? Why should not that poet be himself? Why not but for two reasons? that the modern European revolution is disintegration and not growth, the product of man’s feebleness, not of his greatness, and therefore no subject for a poem; and again because Disraeli could never learn to detach himself from his work and forget the fame with which success was to reward him; and therefore to be a poet was not among the gifts which the Fates had in store for him. It was well for him, however, to indulge the dream. No man ever rises to greatness in this world who does not aim at objects beyond his powers.

Cyprus followed, and then Jaffa, and from Jaffa they crossed the mountains to Jerusalem. Disraeli was not given to veneration, but if he venerated anything it was the genius and destiny of his own race. Even the Holy City could not transport him out of himself, but it affected him more than anything which he had ever seen in his life. The elaborate but artificial account of his impressions, which is to be read in ‘Tancred,’ is a recollection of what he wrote to his sister about twenty years before.

‘From Jaffa, a party of six, well mounted and armed, we departed for Jerusalem, and crossed the plain of Ramle, vast and fertile. Ramle—the ancient Arimathea—is the model of one’s idea of a beautiful Syrian village—all the houses isolated and each surrounded by palm trees; the meadows and the exterior of the village covered with olive trees, or divided by rich plantations of Indian fig.... Next day, at length, after crossing a vast hill, we saw the Holy City. I will describe it to you from the Mount of Olives. This is a high hill, still partially covered with the tree which gives it its name. Jerusalem is situated upon an opposite height which descends as a steep ravine and forms, with the assistance of the Mount of Olives, the narrow valley of Jehosaphat. Jerusalem is entirely surrounded by an old feudal wall, with towers and gates of the time of the crusaders, and in perfect preservation. As the town is built upon a hill you can from the opposite height discern the roof of almost every house. In the front is the magnificent mosque built upon the site of the Temple. A variety of domes and towers rise in all directions. The houses are of bright stone. I was thunderstruck. I saw before me apparently a gorgeous city. Nothing can be conceived more wild and terrible and barren than the surrounding scenery, dark, strong, and severe; but the ground is thrown about in such picturesque undulation that the mind [being] full of the sublime, not the beautiful, rich and waving woods and sparkling cultivation would be misplaced.

JERUSALEM

‘Except Athens I never saw anything more essentially striking, no city except that whose sight was so pre-eminently impressive. I will not place it below the city of Minerva. Athens and Jerusalem in their glory must have been the first representatives of the beautiful and the sublime. Jerusalem in its present state would make a wonderful subject for Martin, and a picture from him could alone give you an idea of it.

‘This week has been the most delightful of all our travels. We dined every day on the roof of a house by moonlight; visited the Holy Sepulchre of course, though avoided the other coglionerie. The House of Loretto is probability to them. But the Easterns will believe anything. Tombs of the Kings very fine. Weather delicious; mild summer heat. Made an immense sensation. Received visits from the Vicar-General of the Pope, two Spanish priors, &c.... Mr. Briggs, the great Egyptian merchant, has written from England to say that great attention is to be paid me, because I am the son of the celebrated author.’

The extracts must be cut short. The visit to Jerusalem was in February 1831. In April Disraeli was in Egypt, and ascended the Nile to Thebes. ‘Conceive a feverish and tumultuous dream full of triumphial gates, processions of paintings, interminable walls of heroic sculpture, granite colossi of gods and kings, prodigious obelisks, avenues of sphinxes, and halls of a thousand columns thirty feet in girth and of proportionate height. My eyes and mind yet ache with a grandeur so little in unison with our own littleness. The landscape was quite characteristic; mountains of burning sand. Vegetation unnaturally vivid, groves of cocoa trees, groups of crocodiles, and an ebony population in a state of nudity armed with spears of reeds.’

Far in the future lay the Suez Canal and the influence which the young visitor was one day to exercise over the fortunes of Egypt. The tour was over. His health was recovered. He was to return to England and take to work again, uncertain as yet whether he was not to go back to his Coke and Blackstone. His thoughts for the present were turned on Bradenham and its inmates. A chest of Eastern armour, pipes, and other curiosities was ready-packed at the end of May, to accompany him home for the decoration of the hall. On May 28 he wrote in high spirits of his approaching return: ‘I am delighted with my father’s progress. How I long to be with him, dearest of men, flashing our quills together, standing together in our chivalry as we will do, now that I have got the use of my brain for the first time in my life.’

These letters from abroad, and the pictures which Disraeli draws of himself and of his adventures in them, show him as he really was, making no effort to produce an effect, in the easy undress of family confidence, not without innocent vanities, but light-hearted and gay at one moment, at another deeply impressionable with anything which was interesting or beautiful. The affectations which so strongly characterised his public appearances were but a dress deliberately assumed, to be thrown off when he left the stage like a theatrical wardrobe.

The expedition, which had remained so bright to the end, unhappily had a tragic close. On the eve of departure William Meredith caught the small-pox at Alexandria, and died after a few days’ illness. His marriage with Sarah Disraeli was to have taken place immediately after their arrival in England. The loss to her was too deep for reparation; she remained single to her own life’s close. To Disraeli himself the shock gave ‘inexpressible sorrow,’ and ‘cast a gloom over him for many years.’

[CHAPTER IV]

‘Contarini Fleming’—The Poetical Life—Paternal advice—A Poet, or not a Poet?—‘Revolutionary Epic’—Unfavourable verdict—Success of the Novels—Disraeli a new Star—London Society—Political ambition—Mrs. Wyndham Lewis—Financial embarrassments—Portraits of Disraeli by N. P. Willis—Lady Dufferin and others—Stands for High Wycombe—Speech at the Red Lion—Tory Radicalism—Friendship with Lord Lyndhurst—Self-confidence—Vindication of the British Constitution—Conservative Reaction—Taunton Election—Crosses swords with O’Connell—The Runnymede Letters—-Admitted into the Carlton Club—‘Henrietta Temple’ and ‘Venetia.’

CHOICE OF A PROFESSION

The law had not been finally abandoned—perhaps in deference to Isaac Disraeli’s continued anxiety on the subject. Schemes and projects, however, which had shaped themselves in Disraeli’s own mind during his travels had to be executed first. He brought home with him a brain restored to energy, though with saddened spirits. There was the ‘Revolutionary Epic’ to be written, and an Eastern story which was brought out afterwards as the tale of ‘Alroy.’ Before undertaking either of them, however, he drew a second portrait of himself in ‘Contarini Fleming.’ Vivian Grey was a clever, independent youth, with the world before him, with no purpose save to make himself conspicuous. Disraeli now hoped to be a poet, and in ‘Contarini’ his aim, he said, was to trace the development and function of the poetic character. The flippancy of ‘Vivian’ is gone. The tone is calm, tender, and at times morbid. The hero is taken through a series of adventures. He tries politics, but politics do not interest him. He falls in love. The lady of his affections dies and leaves him in despair. Contarini revives to find a desire, and perhaps a capacity—for he cannot be confident that he is not deceiving himself—to become the poet which Disraeli was then aspiring to make himself. The outward characteristics of that character could at least be assumed. Contarini becomes a wanderer like Byron, and visits the same scenes from which Disraeli had just returned. The book contains passages of striking beauty, so striking that Goethe sent praises and compliments, and Milman, who reviewed it, said it was a work in no way inferior to ‘Childe Harold,’ and equally calculated to arrest public attention. Yet the story ends in nothing. The river loses itself in the sands. Contarini is but Disraeli himself in the sick period of undetermined energies. He meditates on the great problems of life, and arrives at the conclusions adopted almost universally by intellectual men before they have learnt to strike out their course and to control circumstances and their own nature.

‘I believe in that destiny before which the ancients bowed. Modern philosophy has infused into the breast of man a spirit of scepticism, but I think that ere long science will become again imaginative, and that as we become more profound we may also become more credulous. Destiny is our will, and our will is nature. The son who inherits the organisation of the father will be doomed to the same fortunes as his sire, and again the mysterious matter in which his ancestors were moulded may in other forms, by a necessary attraction, act upon his fate. All is mystery; but he is a slave who will not struggle to penetrate the mystery.’

Such passages as this were not ominous of much success in the high functions to which Contarini was aspiring. Much more interesting, because more natural, is a dialogue which was probably an exact reproduction of a conversation between Disraeli and his father. The father of Contarini entirely objects to his son’s proposed destination of himself.

‘A poet!’ exclaims the old man. ‘What were the great poets in their lifetime? The most miserable of their species—depressed, doubtful, obscure, or involved in petty quarrels and petty persecutions; often unappreciated, utterly uninfluential, beggars, flatterers of men, unworthy even of their recognition. What a train of disgustful incidents! what a record of degrading circumstances is the life of a great poet! A man of great energies aspires that they should be felt in his lifetime; that his existence should be rendered more intensely vital by the constant consciousness of his multiplied and multiplying powers. Is posthumous fame a substitute for all this? Try the greatest by this test, and what is the result? Would you rather have been Homer or Julius Cæsar, Shakespeare or Napoleon? No one doubts. We are active beings, and our sympathy, above all other sympathies, is with great actions. Remember that all this time I am taking for granted you may be a Homer. Let us now recollect that it is perhaps the most impossible incident that can occur. The high poetic talent, as if to prove that the poet is only at the best a wild, although beautiful, error of nature, is the rarest in creation. What you have felt is what I have felt myself. Mix in society and I will answer for it that you lose your poetic feeling; for in you, as in the great majority, it is not a matter of faculty originating in a peculiar organisation, but simply the consequence of nervous susceptibility that is common to us all.’

Contarini admits the truth of what his father said, but answers that his ambition is great, as if he must find some means to satisfy it. He did not think he would find life tolerable unless he was in an eminent position, and was conscious that he deserved it. Fame, and not posthumous fame, was necessary to his felicity. Such a feeling might lead to exertion, and on some roads might lead to success; but poetry is a jealous mistress and must be pursued for her own sake if her favours are ever to be won. Disraeli would not part with his hope till the experiment had been tried. He destroyed a tragedy which he had already composed; but he was better satisfied with his ‘Revolutionary Epic.’ Three cantos were written, and fifty copies were printed. These he resolved to submit to the judgment of his friends. If the verdict was unfavourable he would burn his lyre.

THE REVOLUTIONARY EPIC

The recitation was at a party at Mrs. Austen’s, and a scene is thus described which ‘was never to be forgotten’ by those who witnessed it. ‘There was something irresistibly comic in the young man dressed in the fantastic coxcombical costume that he then affected—velvet coat thrown wide open, ruffles on the sleeves, shirt collars turned down in Byronic fashion, an elaborate embroidered waistcoat from which issued voluminous folds of frill, shoes adorned with red rosettes, his black hair pomatumed and elaborately curled, and his person redolent with perfume. Standing with his back to the fire, he explained the purpose of his poem. It was to be to the revolutionary age what the ‘Iliad,’ the ‘Æneid,’ and ‘Paradise Lost’ had been to their respective epochs. He had imagined the genius of feudalism and the genius of federation appearing before the almightly throne and pleading their respective and antagonistic causes.’[1]

With this prelude he recited his first canto. It was not without passages sonorous and even grand, but the subject itself was hopeless. Disraeli had not yet discerned that modern revolution had nothing grand about it, that it was merely the resolution of society into its component atoms, that centuries would have to pass before any new arrangement possessing worth or dignity would rise out of the ruin. The audience was favourably disposed, but when the poet left the room a gentleman present declaimed an impromptu burlesque of the opening lines, which caused infinite merriment to those present. Disraeli said afterwards of himself that in his life he had tried many things, and though he had at first failed he succeeded at last. This was true; but poetry was not one of these many things. He was wise enough to accept the unfavourable verdict, and to recognise that, although his ambition was feverish as ever, on this road there were no triumphs before him. The dream that he could become a great poet was broken.

POLITICAL AMBITION

His prose writings deserved better and fared better. ‘Contarini Fleming’ and the tale of ‘Alroy’ were well received. Milman, as was said above, compared ‘Contarini’ to ‘Childe Harold.’ Beckford found ‘Alroy’ wildly original, full of intense thought, awakening, delightful. Both these eminent critics were too lavish of their praise, but they expressed the general opinion. The fame of ‘Vivian Grey’ was revived. The literary world acknowledged that a new star had appeared, and Disraeli became a London lion. The saloons of the great were thrown open to him. Bulwer he knew already. At Bulwer’s house he was introduced to Count d’Orsay, Lady Morgan, Mrs. Norton, Mrs. Gore, and other notabilities. Lady Blessington welcomed him at Kensington. Flying higher he made acquaintance with Lord Mulgrave, Lord William Lennox, and Tom Moore. He frequented the fashionable smoking-rooms, sporting his Eastern acquirements. A distinguished colonel, supposing that he meant to push his good fortune, gave him a friendly warning. ‘Take care, my good fellow. I lost the most beautiful woman in the world by smoking; it has prevented more liaisons than the dread of a duel or Doctors’ Commons.’ ‘You have proved it a very moral habit,’ replied Disraeli. His ambition did not run in the line which the colonel suspected. Success as a novelist might gratify vanity, but could never meet Disraeli’s aspirations. He met public men, and studied the ways of them, dimly feeling that theirs was the sphere where he could best distinguish himself. At a dinner at Lord Eliot’s he sat next to Peel. ‘Peel most gracious,’ he reported to his sister next day.[2] ‘He is a very great man indeed, and they all seem afraid of him. I observed that he attacked his turbot almost entirely with his knife. I could conceive that he could be very disagreeable; but yesterday he was in a most condescending humour, and unbent with becoming haughtiness. I reminded him by my dignified familiarity both that he was an ex-Minister and I a present Radical.’ He went to the gallery of the House of Commons, ‘heard Macaulay’s best speech, Shiel, and Charles Grant. Macaulay admirable, but between ourselves I could floor them all. This entre nous. I was never more confident of anything than that I could carry everything before me in that House.’ In that House, perhaps. He knew that he had a devil of a tongue, that he was clever, ready, without fear, and, however vain, without the foolish form of vanity which is called modesty. He had studied politics all his life, and having no interests at stake with either of the great parties, and, as being half a foreigner, lying outside them both, he could take a position of his own. In that House; but, again, how was he to get there? Young men of genius may be invited to dinners in the great world, but seats in Parliament will be only found for them if they will put on harness and be docile in the shafts. Disraeli had shown no qualities which promised official usefulness; he called himself a Radical, but he was a Radical in his own sense of the word. He did not talk democratic platitudes, and insisted that if he entered Parliament he would enter it independent of party ties. Notoriety as a novelist even in these more advanced days is no recommendation to a constituency, unless backed by money or connection, and of these Disraeli had none.

One chance only seemed to offer. There was a possibility of a vacancy at High Wycombe, close to his father’s house. There he was personally known, and there, if the opportunity were offered, he intended to try. Meantime he extended his London acquaintance, and one friend he acquired the importance of whom to his future career he little dreamt of. He was introduced by Lytton Bulwer, ‘at particular desire,’ to Mrs. Wyndham Lewis, ‘a pretty little woman,’ he says, ‘a flirt and a rattle—indeed, gifted with a volubility, I should think, unequalled. She told me she liked silent, melancholy men. I answered that I had no doubt of it.’

DISRAELI IN SOCIETY

The intimacy with Mrs. Wyndham Lewis was matured, and was extended to her husband, a gentleman of large fortune and member for Maidstone. Meantime his chief associates in London were the set who gathered about Lady Blessington, young men of fashion and questionable reputation, who were useful to him perhaps as ‘studies’ for his novels, but otherwise of a value to him less than zero. Although he never raced, never gambled, or gave way to any kind of dissipation, his habits of life were expensive, and his books, though they sold well, brought him money in insufficient quantity. His fashionable impecunious friends who wanted loans induced him to introduce them to men in the City who knew him, or who knew his connections. These persons were ready to make advances if Disraeli would give his own name as an additional security. The bills, when due, were not paid. Disraeli had to borrow for himself to meet them,[3] and to borrow afterwards on his own account. When he was once involved the second step was easy, and this was the beginning of difficulties which at one time brought him to the edge of ruin. He was careless, however, careless in such matters even to the end of his life. His extraordinary confidence in his own powers never allowed him to doubt.

Several sketches of him have been preserved as he appeared in these years in the London world. N. P. Willis, the American, met him at a party at Lady Blessington’s.

‘He was sitting in a window looking on Hyde Park, the last rays of sunlight reflected from the gorgeous gold flowers of a splendidly embroidered waistcoat. Patent leather pumps, a white stick with a black cord and tassel, and a quantity of chains about his neck and pockets, served to make him a conspicuous object. He has one of the most remarkable faces I ever saw. He is lividly pale, and but for the energy of his action and the strength of his lungs would seem to be a victim of consumption. His eye is black as Erebus, and has the most mocking, lying in wait sort of expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind of working and impatient nervousness; and when he has burst forth, as he does constantly, with a particularly successful cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be worthy of Mephistopheles. His hair is as extraordinary as his taste in waistcoats. A thick, heavy mass of jet black ringlets falls on his left cheek almost to his collarless stock, which on the right temple is parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a girl. The conversation turned on Beckford. I might as well attempt to gather up the foam of the sea as to convey an idea of the extraordinary language in which he clothed his description. He talked like a racehorse approaching the winning post, every muscle in action.’

His dress was purposed affectation. It led the listener to look for only folly from him, and when a brilliant flash broke out it was the more startling as being so utterly unlooked for from such a figure. Perhaps he overacted his extravagance. Lady Dufferin told Mr. Motley that when she first met him at a dinner party he wore a black velvet coat lined with satin, purple trousers with a gold band running down the outside seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles falling down to the tips of his fingers, white gloves with several brilliant rings outside them, and long black ringlets rippling down upon his shoulders. She told him that he made a fool of himself by appearing in such fantastic shape, never guessing for what reason it had been adopted.

Here is another picture from Mr. Madden’s memoirs of Lady Blessington:—‘I frequently met Disraeli at her house. Though in general society he was usually silent and reserved, he was closely observant. It required generally a subject of more than common interest to animate and stimulate him into the exercise of his marvellous powers of conversation. When duly excited, however, his command of language was truly wonderful, his powers of sarcasm unsurpassed. The readiness of his wit, the quickness of his perception, the grasp of his mind, that enabled him to seize all the points of any subject under discussion, persons would only call in question who had never been in his company at the period I refer to.’

HIGH WYCOMBE

Such was Disraeli when, in the summer of 1832, he offered himself as a candidate to the electors of High Wycombe. The expected vacancy had occurred. It was the last election under the unreformed constituency. The voters were only some forty or fifty in number. One seat in the borough had been a family property of the Whig Carringtons; the other was under the influence of Sir Thomas Baring, whose interest went with the Government. Disraeli started as a Radical. He desired generally to go into Parliament as a profession, as other men go to the Bar, to make his way to consequence and to fortune. But he did not mean to take any brief which might be offered him. He was infected to some extent by the general Reform enthusiasm. Lord Grey’s measure had taken half their power from the aristocracy and the landed interest, and had given it to the middle classes. There the Whigs desired to stop and to put off the hungry multitude (who expected to be better clothed and fed and housed) with flash notes on the Bank of Liberty. Ardent young men of ability had small belief in the virtues of the middle classes. They were thinking of a Reform which was to make an end of injustice and misery, a remodelling of the world. Carlyle, in the Dumfriesshire Highlands, caught the infection, and believed for a time in the coming of a new era. Disraeli conceived that ‘Toryism was worn out, and he could not condescend to be a Whig.’ He started against the Carringtons on the line of the enthusiasts, advocating the ballot and triennial Parliaments. For cant of all kinds he had the natural hatred which belongs to real ability. The rights of man to what was called liberty he never meddled with. He desired practical results. His dislike of the Whigs recommended him to their enemies, and half his friends in the borough were Tories. The local newspapers supported him as an independent. But help was welcome from any quarter but the Whigs. Bulwer, who worked hard for him, procured commendatory letters from O’Connell, Burdett, and Hume, and these letters were placarded ostentatiously in the Wycombe market-place.

The Government was in alarm for Sir T. Baring’s seat; Colonel Grey, Lord Grey’s son, was brought down as their candidate. Isaac Disraeli seems to have stood aloof and to have left his son to his own resources. Disraeli himself did not mean to lose for want of displaying himself. He drove into Wycombe in an open carriage and four, dressed with his usual extravagance—laced shirt, coat with pink lining, and the morning cane which had so impressed the Gibraltar subalterns. Colonel Grey had arrived on his first visit to the borough, and Disraeli seized the opportunity of his appearance for an impromptu address. ‘All Wycombe was assembled,’ he wrote, describing the scene. ‘Feeling it was the crisis, I jumped upon the portico of the ‘Red Lion’ and gave it them for an hour and a quarter. I can give you no idea of the effect. I made them all mad. A great many absolutely cried. I never made so many friends in my life, and converted so many enemies. All the women are on my side, and wear my colours—pink and white.’ Colonel Grey told Bulwer that he never heard a finer command of words. Wycombe was prouder than ever of its brilliant neighbour; but of course he failed. Hume had shaken the Radicals by withdrawing his support before the election; Government influence and the Carringtons did the rest. Disraeli, however, had made a beginning and never let himself be disheartened.

This election was in June. On August 16 Parliament was dissolved, and he offered himself a second time to the new constituency. He invited them, in his address, to have done with ‘political jargon,’ to ‘make an end of the factious slang of Whig and Tory, two names with one meaning, and only to delude the people,’ and to ‘unite in forming a great national party.’ ‘I come before you,’ he said, ‘to oppose this disgusting system of factions; I come forward wearing the badge of no party and the livery of no faction. I seek your suffrages as an independent neighbour.... I will withhold my support from every Ministry which will not originate some great measure to ameliorate the condition of the lower orders.’ This too was not to serve him. Party government may be theoretically absurd when the rivalry is extended from measures to men. When the functions of an Opposition are not merely to resist what it disapproves, but to dethrone the other side, that they may step into its place, we have a civil war in the midst of us, and a civil war which can never end because the strength of the combatants is periodically renewed at the hustings. Lord Lyndhurst and the Duke of Wellington were by this time interested in Disraeli.

‘The Duke and the Chancellor are besetting old Carrington in my favour,’ he wrote. ‘They say he must yield. I am not sanguine, but was recommended to issue the address. The Duke wrote a strong letter to the chairman of the election committee, saying if Wycombe was not ensured something else must be done for Disraeli, as a man of his acquirements and reputation must not be thrown away. L. showed me the letter, but it is impossible to say how things will go. It is impossible for anyone to be warmer than the Duke or Lyndhurst, and I ought to say the same of Chandos.’

The Carrington family would not yield; Disraeli was defeated again, and it became clear that he must look elsewhere than to Wycombe. More than one seat might have been secured for him if he would have committed himself to a side, but he still insisted that if he entered Parliament he would enter it unfettered by pledges. There was an expected chance at Marylebone. When he proposed himself as a candidate he was asked on what he intended to stand. ‘On my head,’ he answered. Lyndhurst wished him to stand at Lynn as a friend of Lord Chandos. Lord Durham offered to return him as a Radical. ‘He must be a mighty independent personage,’ observed Charles Greville, when he persisted in the same reply. He realised by degrees that he was making himself impossible, but he would not yield without a further effort. There was curiosity about him, which he perhaps overrated, for he published a pamphlet as a self-advertisement, with the title ‘What is He?’ of the same ambitiously neutral tint. His object now was to make himself notorious, and the pamphlet, he said, ‘was as much a favourite with the Tories as with the Rads.’

O’CONNELL AND THE WHIGS

In society he was everywhere, dining with Lyndhurst, dining with O’Connell, or at least invited to dine with him, at fêtes and water parties, at balls and suppers. D’Orsay painted his picture. The world would have spoilt him with vanity if his self-confidence had not been already so great that it would admit of no increase. His debts were growing. He had again borrowed for his election expenses. It was hinted to him that he might mend his fortune by marriage. ‘Would you like Lady —— for a sister-in-law?’ he says in a letter to Miss Disraeli. ‘Very clever, 25,000l., and domestic.’ ‘As for love,’ he added, ‘all my friends who married for love and beauty either beat their wives or live apart from them. This is literally the case. I may commit many follies in life, but I never intend to marry for love, which I am sure is a guarantee for infelicity.’

Whatever might be his faults he was no paltry fortune-hunter. He trusted to himself, and only himself. He did not sit down upon his disappointments. The press at any rate was open to him. He wrote incessantly, ‘passing days in constant composition.’ In the season he was always in London; in the winter either at Bradenham or at some quiet place by himself, riding for health and ‘living solely on snipes.’ Determined to be distinguished, he even made a show, and not a bad one, in the hunting field. Writing from Southend in 1834, he says, ‘Hunted the other day with Sir H. Smythe’s hounds, and though not in pink was the best mounted man in the field, riding an Arabian mare, which I nearly killed—a run of thirty miles, and I stopped at nothing.’

It was as a politician that he was desiring to keep himself before men’s eyes, if not in Parliament yet as a political writer; his pen was busy with a ‘Vindication of the British Constitution,’ but he meant also to be known for the manly qualities which Englishmen respect.

Public events meantime hastened on. In England after each rush in the direction of Liberalism there is always a reaction. Within two years of the passing of the Reform Bill Lord Grey and his friends had disgusted the Radicals in Parliament. The working men, finding that they had been fed with chaff instead of corn, had turned to Chartism. The Tories closed up their broken ranks. The king dismissed the Ministers, and sent to Rome for Peel to take the helm. The step itself may have been premature; but Sir Robert was able to take a commanding position before the country, and form a party strong enough to hold the Whigs in check if too weak to prevent their returning to office. Disraeli, though he never much liked Peel, had found by this time that there was no place in Parliament for a man who had a position to make for himself, unless he joined one party or the other. He swallowed his pride, probably on the advice of Lyndhurst, with whom he was now on intimate terms. The cant of Radicalism was distasteful to him. The Whigs were odious. He made up his mind to enlist under Peel. In the spring of 1835 Lord Melbourne came back in alliance with O’Connell, while the world was ringing with the Rathcormack massacre. Thirteen lives had been lost, and ‘something was to be done’ for the pacification of Ireland. ‘O’Connell is so powerful,’ wrote Disraeli, ‘that he says he will be in the Cabinet. How can the Whigs submit to this? It is the Irish Catholic party that has done all this mischief.’ O’Connell was not taken into the Cabinet, but under the new arrangement would be more powerful than if restrained by office. Disraeli, who had shown in ‘Popanilla’ what he thought about the English administration of that unfortunate island, had said openly that large changes were needed there, but it was another thing to truckle to anarchy and threats of rebellion.

SPEECH AT TAUNTON

Mr. Labouchere, the member for Taunton, was in the new Ministry. Custom required that he should resign his seat and be re-elected. Disraeli, supported by the Carlton Club, went down to oppose him in the Tory interest. He was late in the field. He soon saw that for the present occasion at least he must again fail; but he found supporters enough to make it worth his while to fight and keep himself conspicuous. ‘As to Taunton itself,’ he wrote in the heat of the conflict,[4] ‘the enthusiasm of Wycombe is a miniature to it, and I believe in point of energy, eloquence, and effect I have far exceeded my former efforts.’ He was beaten, though two-thirds of the electors promised him their votes on the next opportunity. The Taunton election went by, and would have been forgotten like a thousand others but for an incident which grew out of it. Disraeli desired notoriety, and notoriety he was to have. The Irish alliance was not popular in England. Irish alliances never are popular when the meaning of them is to purchase the support of a disloyal faction, to turn the scale in a struggle for power between English parties. Such an alliance had been last tried by Strafford and Charles I., with unpleasant consequences both to them and to Ireland. Now the Whigs were trying the same game—the Whigs, who were the heirs of the Long Parliament. The combination of English Liberals and Irish Papists was in itself a monstrous anomaly. Disraeli had no personal dislike of O’Connell, and had been grateful for his support at Wycombe; but he was now retained on the Tory side, and he used the weapons which were readiest to his hand. In one of the speeches which he thought so successful he had called O’Connell an incendiary, and spoke of the Whigs as ‘grasping his bloody hand.’ The Protestant Somersetshire yeomen no doubt cheered him to his heart’s content. The speech, being exceptionally smart, was reported at length and fell under O’Connell’s eyes. O’Connell was good-natured, but he knew Disraeli only as a young politician whom he had asked to dinner and had endeavoured to serve. Disraeli had gone out of his way to call him bad names, he might well have thought ungraciously and ungratefully. He was himself the unrivalled master of personal abuse. He saw an opening for a bitter joke, and very naturally used it. At a public meeting in Dublin he mentioned the part which he had taken at Wycombe; he had been repaid, he said, by an atrocity of the foulest description.

‘The miscreant had the audacity to style me an incendiary. I was a greater incendiary in 1831 than I am at present, if ever I was one, and he is doubly so for having employed me. He calls me a traitor; my answer to this is, he is a liar. His life is a living lie. He is the most degraded of his species and kind, and England is degraded in tolerating and having on the face of her society a miscreant of his abominable, foul, and atrocious nature. His name shows that he is by descent a Jew. They were once the chosen people of God. There were miscreants amongst them, however, also, and it must certainly have been from one of those that Disraeli descended. He possesses just the qualities of the impenitent thief that died upon the cross, whose name I verily believe must have been Disraeli. For aught I know the present Disraeli is descended from him, and with the impression that he is I now forgive the heir at law of the blasphemous thief that died upon the cross.’

O’CONNELL AND DISRAELI

All the world shouted with laughter. The hit was good, and the provocation, it was generally felt, had been on Disraeli’s side. But there are limits to license of tongue even in political recrimination, and it was felt also that O’Connell had transgressed those limits. An insult so keen and bitter could be met in one way only. Disraeli had already been spattered by the mud which flies so freely in English political contests. He had found that ‘the only way to secure future ease was to take up a proper position early in life, and to show that he would not be insulted with impunity.’ He put himself into the hands of Count d’Orsay. D’Orsay considered that a foreigner should not interfere in a political duel, and found Disraeli another friend; but he undertook himself the management of the affair. O’Connell having once killed an antagonist on an occasion of this kind, had ‘registered a vow in heaven’ that he would never fight again. But Morgan O’Connell had recently fought Lord Alvanley in his father’s behalf, and was now invited to answer for the Dublin speech. If he was to meet every person who had suffered from his father’s tongue his life would have been a short one. He replied that he had fought Lord Alvanley because Lord Alvanley had insulted his father; he was not accountable for what his father might say of other people. Disraeli undertook to obviate this difficulty. He addressed O’Connell in a letter published in the ‘Times,’ which, if less pungent, at least met Morgan O’Connell’s objection. ‘Although,’ he said, ‘you have placed yourself out of the pale of civilisation I am one who will not be insulted even by a yahoo without chastising it.... I admire your scurrilous allusion to my origin; it is clear the hereditary bondsman has already forgotten the clank of his fetters.... I had nothing to appeal to but the good sense of the people. No threatening skeleton canvassed for me. A death’s-head and cross-bones were not blazoned on my banners; my pecuniary resources too were limited. I am not one of those public beggars that we see swarming with their obtrusive boxes in the chapels of your creed, nor am I in possession of a princely revenue from a starving race of fanatical slaves.’

He expected, he said in conclusion, to be a representative of the people before the repeal of the Union. ‘We shall meet at Philippi.’

Disraeli waited at home till the night of the day on which the letter appeared for the effect of his missive. No notice being taken of it, ‘he dressed and went to the opera.’ When Peel had challenged O’Connell some years before, the police interfered; on this occasion the same thing had happened. ‘As I was lying in bed this morning,’ Disraeli wrote on May 9 to his sister, ‘the police officers from Marylebone rushed into my chamber and took me into custody. I am now bound to keep the peace in 500l. sureties—a most unnecessary precaution, as if all the O’Connells were to challenge me I could not think of meeting them now. The general effect is the thing, and that is that all men agree I have shown pluck.’

NOVELS AND SPEECHES

If Disraeli gained nothing by this encounter he at least lost nothing. He was more than ever talked about, and he had won approval from a high authority at any rate. ‘You have no idea,’ said Lord Strangford to him, ‘of the sensation produced at Strathfieldsaye. The Duke said at dinner it was the most manly thing done yet.’ On one side only his outlook was unfavourable. The Taunton election had been a fresh expense. He had again to borrow, and his creditors became pressing. Judgments were out against him for more debts than he could meet. About this time—the date cannot be fixed exactly, but the fact is certain—a sheriff’s officer appeared at Wycombe on the way to Bradenham to arrest him. Dr. Rose,[5] a medical man in the town, heard of the arrival, and sent on an express with a warning ‘to hide Ben in the well.’ Affairs were again smoothed over for the moment. ‘Ben,’ undaunted as ever, worked on upon his own lines. He completed his ‘Vindication of the British Constitution’—vindication rather of Democratic Toryism—amidst the harassing of duns. It was dedicated to Lyndhurst, and Lyndhurst paid him a visit at his father’s house. He had a smart quarrel with the ‘Globe’ over a revival of the O’Connell business. In the spring of 1836 appeared the Runnymede letters in the ‘Times,’ philippics against the Whig leaders after the manner of Junius. He was elected at the Carlton Club, to his great satisfaction, and when the newspapers abused him he quoted a saying of Swift, ‘that the appearance of a man of genius in the world may be always known by the virulence of dunces.’ To assist his finances a proposal was made to him ‘to edit the “Arabian Nights” with notes and an additional tale by the author of “Vivian Grey.”’ He described it as ‘a job which would not take up more than a month of his time’ and by which he might make ‘twelve or fifteen hundred pounds.’ Happily for his literary reputation this adventure was not prosecuted. Some one in the City introduced him to a speculation connected with a Dutch loan, which took him twice to the Hague and taught him the mysteries of finance. More legitimately in the midst of embarrassments and platform speeches he wrote ‘Henrietta Temple’ and ‘Venetia,’ the first a pretty love-story which offered no opportunities for his peculiar gifts, the second an attempt to exhibit in a novel the characters of Byron and Shelley. They would have made a reputation for an ordinary writer. They sustained the public interest in Disraeli. Of his speeches there was one at Wycombe in which he said that there would be no tranquillity in Ireland ‘till the Irish people enjoyed the right to which the people of all countries were entitled, to be maintained by the soil which they cultivated with their labour.’ In another there is a prophetic passage. ‘I cannot force from my mind the conviction that a House of Commons concentrating in itself the whole powers of the State might—I should say would—constitute a despotism of the most formidable and dangerous description.’ A third was the celebrated Ducrow speech—the Whig Premier as Ducrow first riding six horses at once, and as they foundered one by one left at last riding a jackass, which showed what Disraeli could do as a mob orator when he chose to condescend to it.

Bulwer said of one of these speeches that it was the finest in the world, and of one of the novels that it was the very worst. The criticism was smartly worded, and on both sides exaggerated; but it was true that, if Disraeli had been undistinguished as a speaker, his early novels would have been as the ‘flowers of the field,’ charming for the day that was passing over them and then forgotten. His political apprenticeship was at last over; the object of his ambition, the so deeply coveted seat in the House of Commons, was within his reach, and he was to pass into his proper sphere—to pass into it too while still young, for after all that he had done and experienced he was still only thirty-three. Few men, with the odds so heavy against them, had risen so high in so short a time.

[CHAPTER V]

Returned to Parliament for Maidstone—Takes his place behind Sir R. Peel—Maiden speech—Silenced by violence—Peel’s opinion of it—Advice of Shiel—Second speech on Copyright completely successful—State of politics—England in a state of change—Break-up of ancient institutions—Land and its duties—Political Economy and Free Trade—Struggle on the Corn Laws.

The acquaintance with Mr. and Mrs. Wyndham Lewis had grown into a close friendship. Mr. Lewis, as has been said, was member for Maidstone, and had large local influence in the borough. The death of William IV., in the summer of 1837, dissolved Parliament; and Disraeli, being adopted by Mr. Lewis as his colleague, was returned by an easy majority. The election again gave the Whigs a majority, but not a large one. The tide was fast ebbing, and the time was near when the Conservatives, as the Tories now called themselves, were to see the balance turn in their favour. Lord Melbourne meanwhile remained Minister, but a Minister who desired to be able to do nothing. Ministers with a powerful party behind them are driven occasionally into measures which they would have preferred to avoid. The electors who have given them power require them to use it. Whigs and Tories alike know that their time will be short unless by some sensational policy they can gratify public expectation. Nothing was expected of Lord Melbourne, and persons who dreaded change of any kind, from whichever side it might come, were satisfied that it should be so. I remember Bishop Philpotts rubbing his hands over the situation, and saying that he hoped never more to see a strong Government.

It was a time of ‘slack water;’ nevertheless Disraeli was supremely happy. He had now a career open before him, and a career in which he was certain that he could distinguish himself. His delight was boyish. He said, ‘It makes a difference in public opinion of me.’ The election was in July, and Parliament met in November. He took his seat on the second bench behind Peel, a place which he intended, if possible, to secure for himself. Peel’s character had rallied the Conservative party, and to Peel personally they looked for guidance. Yarde Buller being asked his opinion on some question, replied that Peel had not made up his mind; Old Toryism was gone with Lord Eldon; the Reform Bill, once passed, was to be the law of the land. Disraeli had no personal interest in any of the great questions which divided English opinion. He owned no land; he was unconnected with trade; he had none of the hereditary prepossessions of a native Englishman. He was merely a volunteer on the side with which, as a man of intellect, he had most natural sympathy. He took a brief from the Conservatives, without remuneration in money, but trusting to win fame, if not fortune, in an occupation for which he knew that he was qualified. He began in the ranks, and Peel was his leader; and his leader, till he had made a place for himself, he loyally prepared to serve.

‘Peel welcomed me very warmly,’ he reported to Bradenham, ‘and all noticed his cordial demeanour. He looks very well, and asked me to join a swell dinner at the Carlton on Thursday—a House of Commons dinner purely,’ he said. ‘By that time we shall know something of the temper of the House.’ A fortnight later he mentioned, with evident pride, that he had met Peel again, and Peel took wine with him.

FINANCIAL EMBARRASSMENTS

MAIDEN SPEECH IN HOUSE OF COMMONS

Success to Disraeli in the House of Commons was the alternative of a financial catastrophe. His debts were large; money had been necessary to him for the position to which he aspired. He had no securities to offer, and never entangled friends in his pecuniary dealings. He had gone frankly to the professional money-lenders, who had made advances to him in a speculation upon his success. There was no deception on either side—Disraeli was running his talents against the chance of failure. If he succeeded the loans would be paid. If he did not succeed, the usurers had played for a high stake and had lost it, that was all. At worst he was but following the example of Burke and the younger Pitt. As his bills fell due, they had been renewed at 8 and 10 per cent. and even more, and when he commenced his political life would have been formidable to anyone but himself. They were all eventually paid, and he was never charged, even in thought, with having abused afterwards the opportunities of power to relieve himself. But it was with this weight upon his back that he began his Parliamentary career. He had started on his own merits, for he had nothing else to recommend him, and he had challenged fate by the pretensions which he had put forward for himself. His birth was a reproach to be got over. He had no great constituency at his back, no popular cause to represent. He was without the academic reputation which so often smooths the entrance to public life, and the Tory gentlemen, among whom he had taken his place, looked upon him with dubious eyes. ‘Had I been a political adventurer,’ he said at Wycombe, ‘I had nothing to do but join the Whigs.’ The Radicals would have welcomed him into their ranks; but the Radicals looked on him as an apostate, as a mischievous insect to be crushed on the first opportunity. The ‘Globe’ had assailed him brutally, and he had replied in kind. ‘The Whig Samson should never silence him with the jaw of an ass. He would show the world what a miserable poltroon, what a craven dullard, what a literary scarecrow, what a mere thing stuffed with straw and rubbish was the soi-disant director of public opinion and official organ of Whig politics.’ A first speech in the House of Commons is usually treated with indulgence. The notoriety which Disraeli had brought on himself by these encounters was to make him a solitary exception. He had told O’Connell that they would meet at Philippi. Three weeks after Disraeli had taken his seat there was a debate upon some election manœuvres in Ireland. Hard blows had been exchanged. Sir F. Burdett had called O’Connell a paid patriot. O’Connell had replied that he had sacrificed a splendid professional income to defend his country’s rights. ‘Was he for this to be vilified and traduced by an old renegade?’ Immediately after O’Connell Disraeli rose. His appearance was theatrical, as usual. He was dressed in a bottle-green frock coat, with a white waistcoat, collarless, and with needless display of gold chain. His face was lividly pale, his voice and manner peculiar. began naturally and sensibly, keeping to the point of the debate. He was cheered by his own side, and might have got through tolerably enough; but the gentlemen below the gangway had determined that his Philippi should not end with a victory. Of course he did not yet know the House of Commons. Affected expressions, which would have been welcomed at Wycombe or Taunton, were received with scornful laughter. He bore it for a time good-humouredly, and begged them to hear him out. He was answered with fresh peals of mockery. He had to speak of the alliance between the Whigs and the Irish Catholics. With a flourish of rhetoric he described Melbourne as flourishing in one hand the keys of St. Peter, in the other, he was going to say, ‘the cap of Liberty,’ but the close of the sentence was drowned in derisive shouts. The word had gone out that he was to be put down. Each time that he tried to proceed the storm burst out, and the Speaker could not silence it. Peel cheered him repeatedly. The Tory party cheered, but to no purpose. At last, finding it useless to persist, he said he was not surprised at the reception which he had experienced. He had begun several times many things and had succeeded at last. Then pausing and looking indignantly across the House, he exclaimed in a loud and remarkable tone, which startled even the noisy hounds who were barking loudest, ‘I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me.’

No one suffers long through injustice. His ill-wishers had tried to embarrass him and make him break down. They had not succeeded, and probably even O’Connell himself felt that he had been unfairly dealt with. People watched him curiously the rest of the evening to see how he bore his treatment. He was said to have sat with his arms folded, looking gloomily on the floor. His own account shows that he was not depressed at all, and that indeed the experience was not entirely new.

CRITICAL OPINIONS

‘I made my maiden speech last night,’ he tells his sister, ‘rising very late after O’Connell, but at the request of my party and with the full sanction of Sir Robert Peel. I state at once that my début was a failure—not by my breaking down or incompetency on my part, but from the physical power of my adversaries. It was like my first début at Aylesbury, and perhaps in that sense may be auspicious of ultimate triumph in the same scene. I fought through all with undaunted pluck and unruffled temper, made occasionally good isolated hits when there was silence, and finished with spirit when I found a formal display was ineffectual. My party backed me well, and no one with more zeal and kindness than Peel, cheering me repeatedly, which is not his custom. The uproar was all organised by the Rads and the Repealers. In the lobby, at the division, Chandos, who was not near me in speaking, came up and congratulated me. I replied I thought there was no cause for congratulation, and muttered “Failure.” “No such thing,” said Chandos; “you are quite wrong. I have just seen Peel, and I said to him, ‘Now tell me exactly what you think of Disraeli.’ Peel replied, ‘Some of my party were disappointed and talk of failure; I say just the reverse. He did all that he could under the circumstances; I say anything but failure: he must make his way.’” The Attorney-General (Campbell), to whom I never spoke in my life, came up to me in the lobby and spoke to me with great cordiality. He said, “Now, Mr. Disraeli, could you just tell me how you finished one sentence in your speech? We are anxious to know. ‘In one hand the keys of St. Peter and in the other ——’” “In the other the cap of Liberty, Sir John.” He smiled and said, “A good picture.” I replied, “But your friends would not allow me to finish my picture.” “I assure you,” he said, “there was the liveliest desire to hear you from us. It was a party at the bar, over whom we have no control; but you have nothing to be afraid of.” Now I have told you all.—Yours, D., in very good spirits.’

Disraeli’s collapse was the next day’s delight at the clubs. Shiel, though an Irish leader, declined to join in it. ‘I have heard what you say,’ he answered to the wits who appealed to him, ‘and what is more, I heard this same speech of Mr. Disraeli; and I tell you this: If ever the spirit of oratory was in a man it is that man. Nothing can prevent him from being one of the first speakers of the House of Commons.’

The speech, however, might have been a failure, Shiel admitted, if Disraeli had been allowed to go on. The manner was unusual; the House of Commons had not grown accustomed to it. ‘Get rid of your genius for a session,’ he said to Disraeli himself. ‘Speak often, for you must not show yourself cowed, but speak shortly. Be very quiet; try to be dull; only argue and reason imperfectly. Astonish them by speaking on subjects of detail; quote figures, dates, and calculations. In a short time the House will sigh for the wit and eloquence they know are in you. They will encourage you to pour them forth, and thus you will have the ear of the House and be a favourite.’

Disraeli’s sense was stronger than his vanity. His whole fate was at stake, and he knew it. He took Shiel’s advice. A week after he had been howled down he spoke again on the Copyright Bill, a subject which he perfectly understood. Again when he rose he was observed with curious attention. It was thought that he would allude to his first misadventure; he made not the least reference to it. His voice, naturally impressive, was in good condition. What he said was exactly to the purpose. His conclusion, if simple, was excellent.

‘I am glad to hear from her Majesty’s Government that the interests of literature have at length engaged their attention. It has been the boast of the Whig party, and a boast not without foundation, that in many brilliant periods of our literary annals they have been the patrons of letters. As for myself, I trust that the age of literary patronage has passed; and it will be honourable to the present Government if under its auspices it is succeeded by that of literary protection.’

The House was willing to be pleased. Lord John Russell cheered the allusion to his Liberal predecessors. The Radicals approved of the independence which he claimed for the future of his own profession. Peel loudly applauded, and never after had Disraeli to complain that he was not listened to with respect. The cabal which would have silenced him had, in fact, made his reputation. His colleague and his Maidstone constituents were delighted. In the remainder of the session he was frequently on his feet, but only to say a few sensible sentences and never putting himself forward on great occasions.

Notwithstanding all that has been said and continues to be said about the outset of his Parliamentary career, he had made solid progress in the estimation of the House and, far more to the purpose, his quick apprehension had learnt the temper and disposition of the House itself.

ENGLAND, PAST AND PRESENT

Before proceeding further a brief sketch must be given of the state of public affairs when Disraeli’s political life commenced. The British Islands were covered with the shells of institutions which no longer answered the purpose for which they were intended. The privileges remained. The duties attaching to them were either unperformed or, from change of circumstances, incapable of performance. Down to the Reformation of the sixteenth century the beliefs and habits of the English nation were formed by the Catholic Church. Men and women of all ranks were brought up on the hypothesis that their business in this world was not to grow rich, but to do their duties in the state of life to which they had been called. Their time on earth was short. In the eternity which lay beyond their condition would wholly depend on the way in which it had been spent. On this principle society was constructed, and the conduct, public and private, of the great body of the people was governed by the supposition that the principle was literally true.

History takes note of the exception of the foolish or tyrannical king, the oppressive baron, the profligate Churchman, the occasional expressions of popular discontent. Irregularities in human life are like the river cataracts and waterfalls which attract the landscape painter. The historian dwells upon them because they are dramatically interesting, but the broad features of those ages must be looked for in the commonplace character of everyday existence, which attracts little notice and can be traced only in the effects which it has produced. It was thus that the soil of this island was cleared and fenced and divided into fields as by a pencil. It was then that in every parish there arose a church, on which piety lavished every ornament which skill could command, and then and thus was formed the English nation, which was to exercise so vast an influence on the fortunes of mankind. They were proud of their liberty. A race never lived more sternly resolute to keep the soil of their sea-girt island untrodden by the foot of the invader. Liberty in the modern sense, liberty where the rights of man take the place of the duties of a man—such a liberty they neither sought nor desired. As in an army, each man had had his own position under a graduated scale of authority, and the work was hardest where the rank was highest. The baron was maintained in his castle on the produce of the estate. But the baron had the hardest knocks in the field of battle. In dangerous times he was happy if he escaped the scaffold. He maintained his state in the outward splendour which belonged to his station, but in private he lived as frugally as his tenants, sleeping on a hard bed, eating hard, plain food, with luxury unheard of and undreamt of. The rule was loyalty—loyalty of the lord to the king, loyalty of lord to peasant and of peasant to lord. So deeply rooted was the mutual feeling that for long generations after the relation had lost its meaning, and one of the parties had forgotten that it ever had a meaning, reverence and respect to the owner of the land lingered on and is hardly extinct to-day.

In the towns the trades were organised under the guilds. The price of food, the rate of wages from household servant to field labourer and artisan, were ordered by statute on principles of equity. For each trade there was a council, and false measure and bad quality of goods were sharply looked to. The miller could not adulterate his flour. The price of wheat varied with the harvest, but the speculator who bought up grain to sell again at famine price found himself in the hands of the constable. For the children of the poor there was an education under the apprentice system, to which the most finished school-board training was as copper to gold. Boys and girls alike were all taught some useful occupation by which they could afterwards honestly maintain themselves. If there were hardships they were not confined to a single class, but were borne equally by the great and the humble. A nation in a healthy state is an organism like the human body. If the finger says to the hand, ‘I have no need of thee; I will go my way, touch what pleases me, and let alone what I do not care to meddle with,’ the owner of the hand will be in a bad way. A commonwealth, or common weal, demands that each kind shall do the work which belongs to him or her. When he or she, when individuals generally begin to think and act for themselves, to seek their rights and their enjoyments, and forget their duties, the work of dissolution has already set in.

PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE

The fear of God made England, and no great nation was ever made by any other fear. When the Catholic Church broke down it survived under Protestant forms, till Protestantism too dwindled into opinion and ceased to be a rule of life. We still read our Bibles and went to church; we were zealous for the purity of our faith, and established our societies to propagate it; but the faith itself became consistent with the active sense that pleasure was pleasant and wealth was power, and while our faith would make things right in the next world we might ourselves make something out of the present. From the Restoration downwards the owners of land began to surround themselves with luxuries, and the employers of labour to buy it at the cheapest rate. Selfishness became first a practice and then developed boldly into a theory. Life was a race in which the strongest had a right to win. Every man was to be set free and do the best which he could for himself. The Institutions remained. Dukes and earls and minor dignitaries still wore their coronets and owned the soil. Bishops were the spiritual lords of their dioceses, and the rector represented the Church in his parish. The commercial companies survived in outward magnificence. But in aiming at wealth they all alike forfeited their power. Competition became the sole rule of trade; a new philosophy was invented to gild the change; artisans and labourers were taught to believe that they would gain as largely as the capitalists. They had been bondsmen; they were now free, and all would benefit alike. Yet somehow all did not benefit alike. The houses of the upper classes grew into palaces, and the owners of them lived apart as a separate caste; but the village labourer did not find his lot more easy because he belonged to nobody. As population increased his wages sank to the lowest point at which he could keep his family alive. The ‘hands’ in the towns fared no better. If wages rose the cost of living rose along with them. The compulsory apprentice system was dropped, and the children were dragged up in squalor upon the streets. Discontent broke out in ugly forms: ricks were burnt in the country, and in the northern cities there was riot and disorder. They were told that they must keep the peace and help themselves. Their labour was an article which they had to sell, and the value of it was fixed by the relations between supply and demand. Man could not alter the laws of nature, which political economy had finally discovered. Political economy has since been banished to the exterior planets; but fifty years ago to doubt was heresy, to deny was a crime to be censured in all the newspapers. Carlyle might talk scornfully of the ‘Disraeli science.’ Disraeli might heap ridicule on Mr. Flummery Flum. But Mr. Flummery Flum was a prophet in his day and led the believers into strange places. The race for wealth went on at railroad speed. Vast fortunes were accumulated as the world’s markets opened wider. The working classes ought to have shared the profits, and they were diligently instructed that they had gained as much as their employers. But their practical condition remained unaltered, and they looked with strange eyes upon the progress in which, for one cause or another, they did not find that they participated. The remedy of the economists was to heat the furnace still hotter, to abolish every lingering remnant of restraint, and stifle complaint by admitting the working men to political power. The enlightened among the rich were not afraid, for they were entrenched, as they believed, behind their law of nature. In its contracts with labour capital must always have the advantage; for capital could wait and hungry stomachs could not wait. In the meantime let the Corn Laws go. Let all taxes on articles of consumption go. Trade would then expand indefinitely, and all would be well. ‘The wealth of the nation,’ the Free-Traders of Manchester said, depends on its commerce. The commerce of England is shackled by a network of duties. The consumer pays dear for the necessaries of life, which he might buy cheap but for artificial interference. The raw materials of our industry are burdened with restrictions. But for these we might multiply our mills, expand our connections, provide work and food for the millions who are now hungry. With your Corn Laws you are starving multitudes to maintain the rents of a few thousand Elysians, who neither toil nor spin, who might be blotted off the surface of the soil to-morrow and none would miss them; who consume the labours of the poor on a splendour of living unheard of since the Roman Empire, and extort the means of this extravagance by an arbitrary law. You say you must have a revenue to maintain your fleets and armies, and that it cannot be raised except by customs duties. Your fleets and armies are not needed. Take away your commercial fetters, allow the nations of the earth a free exchange of commodities with us, and you need not fear that they will quarrel with us: wars will be heard of no more, and the complaints of the poor that they are famished to supply the luxuries of the rich will no longer cry to Heaven.

The Free-Traders might have been over-sanguine, but on the Corn Laws it was hard to answer them. The duties attaching to the ownership of land had fallen to shadows. The defence of the country had passed to the army. Internal peace was maintained by the police. Unless they volunteered to serve as magistrates the landlords had but to receive their rents and do as they pleased with their own. An aristocracy whose achievements, as recorded in newspapers, were the slaughter of unheard of multitudes of pheasants, an aristocracy to one of whose distinguished members a granite column was recently erected on a spot where he had slain fifty brace of grouse in half an hour, were scarcely in a position to demand that the poor man’s loaf should be reduced in size, for fear their incomes should suffer diminution. Carlyle said that he had never heard an argument for the Corn Laws which might not make angels weep. If the fear of suffering in their pockets had been the only motive which influenced the landed interest in its opposition to free trade, there would have been nothing to be said for it; but if that had been all, Corn Laws in such a country as England could never have existed at all. Protection for native industry had been established for centuries. It had prevailed and still prevails in spite of the arguments of free-traders all the world over, and under all forms of government. The principle of it has been and is that no country is in a sound or safe condition which cannot feed its own population independent of the foreigner. Peace could not be counted on with an empire so extended as ours. Occasions of quarrel might arise which no prudence could avert. The world had seen many a commercial commonwealth rise to temporary splendour, but all had gone the same road, and a country which depended on its imports for daily bread would be living at the mercy of its rivals. Christianity had failed to extinguish war. It was not likely that commerce would succeed better, and the accidents of a single campaign, the successful blockade of our ports even for a month or a fortnight, might degrade us into a shameful submission. British agriculture was the creation of protection. Under the duties which kept out foreign corn waste lands had been reclaimed, capital had been invested in the soil, and with such success and energy that double the wheat was raised per acre in England as was produced in any country in the world. The farmer prospered, the labourer at least existed, and the country population was maintained. Take protection away and wheat would cease to be grown. The plough would rust in the shed; the peasantry of the villages would dwindle away. They would drift into the towns in festering masses, living precariously from day to day, ever pressing on the means of employment with decaying physique and growing discontent. Cobden said the cost of carriage would partially protect the farmer. His own industry must do the rest. The ocean steamers have made short work of the cost of carriage; the soil could yield no more than it was bearing already. Cobden’s more daring followers said that if the country districts returned to waste and forest the nation itself would be no poorer. In the defence of protection and in the denunciation of it there was alike a base element. The landlords were alarmed for their private interests. The manufacturer did expect that if the loaf was cheaper labour would be cheaper, for by orthodox doctrine labour adjusted itself to the cost of living. But to statesmen, whose business it was to look beyond the day that was passing over them, there was reason to pause before rushing into a course from which there could be no return, and which in another century might prove to have been a wild experiment. The price of food might be gradually reduced without immediate revolution, and the opportunity might be used to attach the colonies more closely to the mother country. The colonies and India, with the encouragement of an advantage in the home market, could supply corn without limit, and their connection with us would be cemented by interest; while if they were placed on the same level as foreigners they would perhaps take us at our word and become foreigners. The traders insisted that if we opened our ports all the world would follow our example. But prophecies did not always prove correct, and, if the world did not follow our example, to fight prohibitive duties with free imports might prove a losing bargain.

[CHAPTER VI]

Disraeli’s belief, political and religious—Sympathy with the people—Defends the Chartists—The people, the middle classes, and the aristocracy—Chartist riots—Smart passage at arms in the House of Commons—Marriage—Mrs. Wyndham Lewis—Disraeli as a husband.

CREED, POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS

Into this Maelstrom Disraeli was plunged when he entered Parliament. He had his own views. He knew the condition of the poor both in England and Ireland. He had declared that no Government should have his support which did not introduce some large measure to improve that condition. He had chosen the Conservative side because he had no belief in the promises of the political economists, or in the blessed results to follow from cutting the strings and leaving everyone to find his level. He held to the old conception of the commonwealth that all orders must work faithfully together; that trade was to be extended not by cheapness and free markets, but by good workmanship and superior merit; and that the object which statesmen ought to set before themselves was the maintenance of the character of the people, not the piling up in enormous heaps of what wealth had now come to mean. The people themselves were groping, in their trades unions, after an organisation which would revive in other forms the functions of the Guilds; and the exact science of political economy would cease to be a science at all, whenever motives superior to personal interest began to be acted upon. Science was knowledge of facts; the facts most important to be known were the facts of human nature and human responsibilities; and the interpretation of those facts which had been revealed to his own race, Disraeli actually believed to be deeper and truer than any modern speculations. Though calling himself a Christian, he was a Jew in his heart. He regarded Christianity as only Judaism developed, and, if not completely true, yet as immeasurably nearer to truth than the mushroom philosophies of the present age. He had studied Carlyle, and in some of his writings had imitated him. Carlyle did not thank him for this. Carlyle detested Jews, and looked on Disraeli as an adventurer fishing for fortune in Parliamentary waters. His novels he despised. His chains and velvets and affected airs he looked on as the tawdry love of vulgar ornament characteristic of Houndsditch. Nevertheless, Disraeli had taken his teaching to heart, and in his own way meant to act upon it. He regarded the aristocracy, like Carlyle also, in spite of the double barrels, as the least corrupted part of the community; and to them, in alliance with the people, he looked for a return of the English nation to the lines of true progress. The Church was moving at Oxford. A wave of political Conservatism was sweeping over the country. He thought that in both these movements he saw signs of a genuine reaction, and Peel, he still believed, would give effect to his hopes.

DISRAELI AND PEEL

These were his theoretic convictions, while outwardly he amused himself in the high circles which his Parliamentary notoriety had opened to him. His letters are full of dukes and princes and beautiful women, and balls and dinners. He ventured liberties, even in the presence of the great Premier, and escaped unpunished. In the spring of 1839 he notes a dinner in Whitehall Gardens. ‘I came late,’ he says, ‘having mistaken the hour. I found some twenty-five gentlemen grubbing in solemn silence. I threw a shot over the table and set them going, and in time they became noisy. Peel, I think, was pleased that I broke the awful stillness, as he talked to me a good deal, though we were far removed.’ But though he enjoyed these honours and magnificences perhaps more than he need have done, he kept an independence of his own. It was supposed that he was looking for office, and that Peel’s neglect of him in 1841 was the cause of his subsequent revolt. Peel did make some advances to him through a third person, and said afterwards in the House that Disraeli had been ready to serve under him; but if office was really his object, never did any man take a worse way of recommending himself. In the summer of the same year (1839) the monster Chartist petition was brought down to the House of Commons in the name of the working people of England, and the general disposition was to treat it as an absurdity and an insult. Disraeli, when his turn came to speak, was not ashamed to say that, though he disapproved of the Charter, he sympathised with the Chartists. They were right, he thought, in desiring a fairer share in the profits of their labour, and that fairer share they were unlikely to obtain from the commercial constituences whom the Reform Bill had enfranchised. Great duties could alone confer great station, and the new class which had been invested with political station had not been bound up with the mass of the people by the exercise of corresponding obligations. Those who possessed power without discharging its conditions and duties, were naturally anxious to put themselves to the least possible expense and trouble. Having gained their own object, they wished to keep it without appeal to their pockets, or cost of their time. The true friends of the people ought to be the aristocracy, and in very significant words he added that ‘the English nation would concede any degree of political power to a class making simultaneous advances in the exercise of great social duties.’

The aristocracy had lost their power because their duties had been neglected. They might have wealth or they might have power; but not both together. It was not too late to reconsider the alternative. The Chartists, finding themselves scoffed out of the House of Commons, took to violence. There were riots in Birmingham, and a Chartist convention sat in London threatening revolution. Lord John Russell appealed for an increase of the police. Disraeli was one of a minority of five who dared to say that it was unnecessary, and that other measures ought to be tried. When the leaders were seized, he supported his friend, Tom Duncombe, in a protest against the harshness of their treatment. The Chancellor of the Exchequer rebuked him. Fox Maule, a junior member of the Government, charged him with being ‘an advocate of riot and disorder.’ In later times Disraeli never struck at small game. When he meant fight, he went for the leading stag of the herd. On this occasion he briefly touched his two slight antagonists. ‘Under-Secretaries,’ he said, ‘were sometimes vulgar and ill-bred. From a Chancellor of the Exchequer to an Under-Secretary of State was a descent from the sublime to the ridiculous, though the sublime was on this occasion rather ridiculous, and the ridiculous rather trashy!’

It is scarcely conceivable that if Disraeli was then aspiring to harness under Sir Robert, he would have committed himself with such reckless audacity; and his action was the more creditable to him as the profession which he had chosen brought him no emoluments. His financial embarrassments were thickening round him so seriously, that without office it might soon become impossible to continue his Parliamentary career. Like Bassanio,

When he had lost one shaft,

He shot his fellow of the self-same flight

The self-same way with more advised watch

To find the other forth, and by adventuring both

He oft found both.

But one shaft had disappeared after another till he had reached the last in his quiver. He had not been personally extravagant. He had moved in the high circles to which he had been admitted rather as an assured spectator than as an imitator of their costly habits. But his resources were limited to the profits of his writings, and to such sums as he could raise on his own credit. His position was critical in the extreme, and Disraeli’s star might then have set like a planet which becomes visible at twilight on the western horizon, and shows out in its splendour only to set into the sea. The temptation to sell oneself under such circumstances would have been too much for common Parliamentary virtue. But Disraeli was a colt who was not to be driven in a team by a master. Lord Melbourne had asked him once what he wished for. He had answered coolly that he wished to be Prime Minister. The insanity of presumption was in fact the insanity of second sight; but ‘vaulting ambition’ would have ‘fallen on the other side’ if a divinity had not come to his assistance.

MARRIAGE

The heroes of his political novels are usually made to owe their first success to wealthy marriages. Coningsby, Egremont, Endymion, though they deserve their good fortune, yet receive it from a woman’s hand. Mr. Wyndham Lewis, who had brought Disraeli into Parliament, died unexpectedly the year after. His widow, the clever rattling flirt, as he had described her on first acquaintance, after a year’s mourning, became Disraeli’s wife. She was childless. She was left the sole possessor of a house at Grosvenor Gate, and a life income of several thousands a year. She was not beautiful. Disraeli was thirty-five, and she was approaching fifty. But she was a heroine if ever woman deserved the name. She devoted herself to Disraeli with a completeness which left no room in her mind for any other thought. As to him, he had said that he would never marry for love. But if love, in the common sense of the word, did not exist between these two, there was an affection which stood the trials of thirty years, and deepened only as they both declined into age. She was his helpmate, his confidante, his adviser; from the first he felt the extent of his obligations to her, but the sense of obligation, if at first felt as a duty, became a bond of friendship perpetually renewed. The hours spent with his wife in retirement were the happiest that he knew. In defeat or victory he hurried home from the House of Commons to share his vexation or his triumph with his companion, who never believed that he could fail. The moment in his whole life which perhaps gave him greatest delight was that at which he was able to decorate her with a peerage. To her he dedicated ‘Sybil.’

‘I,’ he says, ‘would inscribe this work to one whose noble spirit and gentle nature ever prompt her to sympathise with the suffering; to one whose sweet voice has often encouraged, and whose taste and judgment have ever guided its pages, the most severe of critics, but a “perfect wife.”’ The experience of his own married life he describes in ‘Coningsby’ as the solitary personal gift which nature had not bestowed upon a special favourite of fortune. ‘The lot most precious to man, and which a beneficent Providence has made not the least common—to find in another heart a perfect and profound sympathy, to unite his existence with one who could share all his joys, soften all his sorrows, aid him in all his projects, respond to all his fancies, counsel him in his cares and support him in his perils, make life charming by her charms, interesting by her intelligence, and sweet by the vigilant variety of her tenderness—to find your life blessed by such an influence, and to feel that your influence can bless such a life; the lot the most divine of divine gifts, so perfect that power and even fame can never rival its delights—all this nature had denied to Sidonia.’ It had not been denied to Disraeli himself.

The carriage incident is well known. On an anxious House of Commons night, Mrs. Disraeli drove down with her husband to Palace Yard. Her finger had been caught and crushed in the carriage-door. She did not let him know what had happened, for fear of disturbing him, and was not released from her torture till he had left her. That is perfectly authentic, and there are other stories like it. A husband capable of inspiring and maintaining such an attachment most certainly never ceased to deserve it. Savagely as he was afterwards attacked, his most indignant enemy never ventured to touch his name with scandal. A party of young men once ventured a foolish jest or two at Mrs. Disraeli’s age and appearance, and rallied him on the motives of his marriage. ‘Gentlemen,’ said Disraeli, as he rose and left the room, ‘do none of you know what gratitude means?’ This was the only known instance in which he ever spoke with genuine anger.

‘Gratitude,’ indeed, if deeply felt, was as deeply deserved. His marriage made him what he became. Though never himself a rich man, or endeavouring to make himself such, he was thenceforward superior to fortune. His difficulties were gradually disposed of. He had no longer election agents’ bills to worry him, or debts to usurers running up in compound ratio. More important to him, he was free to take his own line in politics, relieved from the temptation of seeking office.

[CHAPTER VII]

The enthusiasm of progress—Carlyle and Disraeli—Protection and Free Trade—Sir Robert Peel the Protectionist Champion—High Church movement at Oxford—The Church as a Conservative power—Effect of the Reform Bill—Disraeli’s personal views—Impossible to realise—Election of 1841—Sir Robert Peel’s Ministry—Drifts towards Free Trade—Peel’s neglect of Disraeli—Tariff of 1842—Young England—Symptoms of revolts—First skirmish with Peel—Remarkable speech on Ireland.

ENGLISH PROGRESS

The discovery of the steam engine had revolutionised the relations of mankind, and during the decline of the Melbourne Ministry was revolutionising the imagination of the English nation. The railroads were annihilating distances between town and town. Roads were opening across the ocean, bringing the remotest sea-coasts in the world within sure and easy reach. Possibilities of an expansion of commerce practically boundless inflated hopes and stimulated energies. In past generations England had colonised half the new world; she had become sovereign of the sea; she had preserved the liberties of Europe, and had made her name feared and honoured in every part of the globe; but this was nothing compared to the prospect, which was now unfolding itself, of becoming the world’s great workshop. She had invented steam; she had coal and iron in a combination and quantity which no other nation could rival; she had a population ingenious and vigorous, and capable, if employment could be found for them, of indefinite multiplication. The enthusiasm of progress seized the popular imagination. No word was tolerated which implied a doubt, and the prophets of evil, like Carlyle, were listened to with pity and amusement. The stars in their courses were fighting for the Free Traders. The gold-discoveries stimulated the circulation in the national veins, and prosperity advanced with leaps and bounds.

The tide has slackened now; other nations have rejected our example, have nursed their own industries, and supply their own wants. The volume of English trade continues to roll on, but the profits diminish. The crowds who throng our towns refuse to submit to a lowering of wages, and perplex economists and politicians with uneasy visions: we are thus better able to consider with fairness the objections of a few far-seeing statesmen forty and fifty years ago.

THE CORN LAWS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

As far as the thoughts of an ambitious youth who had taken Pistol’s ‘The world’s mine oyster’ as the motto of his first book, and perhaps as the rule of his life—of a gaudy coxcomb who astonished drawing-rooms with his satin waistcoats, and was the chosen friend of Count D’Orsay—as far as the thoughts of such a person as this could have any affinity with those of the stern ascetic who, in the midst of accumulating splendour, was denouncing woe and desolation, so far, at the outset of his Parliamentary life, the opinions of Benjamin Disraeli, if we take ‘Sybil’ for their exponent, were the opinions of the author of ‘Past and Present.’ Carlyle thought of him as a fantastic ape. The interval between them was so vast that the comparison provokes a smile. Disraeli was to fight against the Repeal of the Corn Laws: Carlyle said that of all strange demands, the strangest was that the trade of owning land should be asking for higher wages; and yet the Hebrew conjuror, though at a humble distance, and not without an eye open to his own advancement, was nearer to him all along than Carlyle imagined. Disraeli did not believe any more than he that the greatness of a nation depended on the abundance of its possessions. He did not believe in a progress which meant the abolition of the traditionary habits of the people, the destruction of village industries, and the accumulation of the population into enormous cities, where their character and their physical qualities would be changed and would probably degenerate. The only progress which he could acknowledge was moral progress, and he considered that all legislation which proposed any other object to itself would produce, in the end, the effects which the prophets of his own race had uniformly and truly foretold.

Under the old organisation of England, the different orders of men were bound together under reciprocal obligations of duty. The economists and their political followers held that duty had nothing to do with it. Food, wages, and all else had their market value, which could be interfered with only to the general injury. The employer was to hire his labourers or his hands at the lowest rate at which they could be induced to work. If he ceased to need them, or if they would not work on terms which would remunerate him, he was at liberty to turn them off. The labourers, in return, might make the best of their own opportunity, and sell their services to the best advantage which competition allowed. The capitalists found the arrangement satisfactory to them. The people found it less satisfactory, and they replied by Chartism and rick-burnings. The economists said that the causes of discontent were the Corn Laws and the other taxes on food. Farmers and landowners exclaimed that if the Corn Laws were repealed, the land must go out of cultivation. The Chartists were not satisfied with the remedy, because they believed that, with cheap food, wages would fall, and they would be no better off than they were. It was then slack water in the political tides. Public feeling was at a stand, uncertain which way to turn. The Reform Bill of 1832 had left to property the preponderance of political power, and everyone who had anything to lose began to be alarmed for himself. The Conservative reaction became more and more evident. The faith of the country was in Sir Robert Peel. He had been opposed to the Reform Bill, but when it was passed he had accepted it as the law of the land, and had reconstituted his party out of the confidence of the new constituencies. He had been a declared Protectionist. He had defended the Corn Laws, and had spoken and voted for them. He had resisted the proposal by the Whigs of a fixed eight-shilling duty, and had accepted and gloried in the position of being the leader of the gentlemen of England. But he had refused to initiate any policy of his own. He was known to be cautious, prudent, and a master of finance. He was no believer in novel theories or enthusiastic visions, but he had shown by his conduct on the Catholic question that he could consider and allow for the practical necessities of things. He was, however, above all things an avowed Conservative, and as a Conservative the country looked to him to steer the ship through the cataracts.

CHURCH REVIVAL

Another phenomenon had started up carrying a Conservative colour. Puseyism had appeared at Oxford, and was rapidly spreading. The Church of England, long paralysed by Erastianism and worldliness, was awaking out of its sleep, and claiming to speak again as the Divinely-appointed ruler of English souls. Political economy had undertaken to manage things on the hypothesis that men had no souls, or that their souls, if they possessed such entities, had nothing to do with their commercial relations to one another. The Church of England, as long as it remained silent or sleeping, had seemed to acquiesce in the new revelation, but it was beginning to claim a voice again in the practical affairs of the world, and the response, loud and strong, indicated that there still remained among us a power of latent conviction which might revive the force of noble and disinterested motive. A Church of England renovated and alive again might, some thought, become an influence of incalculable consequence. Carlyle’s keen, clear eyes refused to be deceived. ‘Galvanic Puseyism,’ he called it, and ‘dancings of the sheeted dead.’ A politician like Disraeli looking out into the phenomena in which he was to play his part, and thinking more of what was going on among the people than of the immediate condition of Parliamentary parties, conceived that he saw in the new movement, not only an effort of Conservative energy, but an indication of a genuine recoil from moral and spiritual anarchy towards the Hebrew principle in which he really believed. Two forces he saw still surviving in England which had been overlooked, or supposed to be dead—respect for the Church, and the voluntary loyalty (which, though waning, might equally be recovered) of the people towards the aristocracy. Perhaps he overrated both because he had been himself born and bred outside their influence, and thus looked at them without the insight which he gained afterwards on more intimate acquaintance. To some extent, however, they were realities, and were legitimate subjects of calculation. Extracts from his writings will show how his mind was working. He had been studying the action of the Reform Bill of 1832. No one pretended, he said, that it had improved the character of Parliament itself.

‘But had it exercised a beneficial influence in the country? Had it elevated the tone of the public mind? Had it cultivated the popular sensibilities to noble and ennobling ends? Had it proposed to the people of England a higher test of national respect and confidence?... If a spirit of rapacious covetousness, desecrating all the humanities of life, has been the besetting sin of England for the last century and a half, since the passing of the Reform Act the altar of Mammon has blazed with a triple worship. To acquire, to accumulate, to plunder each other by virtue of philosophic phrases—to propose a Utopia to consist only of Wealth and Toil—this has been the business of enfranchised England for the last twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious strife by the wail of intolerable serfage.’[6]

EFFECTS OF THE REFORM BILL

Again: ‘Born in a library, and trained from early childhood by learned men who did not share the passions and the prejudices of our political and social life, I had imbibed on some subjects conclusions different from those which generally prevail, and especially with reference to the history of our own country. How an oligarchy had been substituted for a kingdom, and a narrow-minded and bigoted fanaticism flourished in the name of religious liberty, were problems long to me insoluble, but which early interested me. But what most attracted my musing, even as a boy, were the elements of our political parties, and the strange mystification by which that which was national in our Constitution had become odious, and that which was exclusive was presented as popular.

‘What has mainly led to this confusion is our carelessness in not distinguishing between the excellence of a principle and its injurious or obsolete application. The feudal system may have worn out; but its main principle—that the tenure of property should be the fulfilment of duty—is the essence of good government. The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants; but the divine right of government is the key of human progress, and without it governments sink into a police, and a nation is degraded into a mob.... National institutions were the ramparts of a multitude against large estates, exercising political power, derived from a limited class. The Church was in theory, and once it had been in practice, the spiritual and intellectual trainer of the people. The privileges of the multitude and the prerogative of the sovereign had grown up together, and together they had waned. Under the plea of Liberalism, all the institutions which were the bulwark of the multitude had been sapped and weakened, and nothing had been substituted for them. The people were without education, and relatively to the advance of science and the comfort of the superior classes, their condition had deteriorated and their physical quality as a race was threatened.

‘To change back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a real throne; to infuse life and vigour into the Church as the trainer of the nation by the revival of Convocation, then dumb, on a wise basis; to establish a commercial code on the principles successfully negotiated by Lord Bolingbroke at Utrecht, and which, though baffled at the time by a Whig Parliament, were subsequently and triumphantly vindicated by his pupil and political heir, Mr. Pitt; to govern Ireland according to the policy of Charles I., and not of Oliver Cromwell; to emancipate the political constituency of 1832 from its sectarian bondage and contracted sympathies; to elevate the physical as well as the moral condition of the people by establishing that labour required regulation as much as property—and all this rather by the use of ancient forms and the restoration of the past, than by political revolutions founded on abstract ideas—appeared to be the course which the circumstances of the country required, and which, practically speaking, could only, with all their faults and backslidings, be undertaken and accomplished by a reconstructed Tory party.

‘When I attempted to enter public life, I expressed these views, long meditated, to my countrymen.... I incurred the accustomed penalty of being looked on as a visionary.... Ten years afterwards, affairs had changed. I had been some time in Parliament, and had friends who had entered public life with myself, who listened always with interest, and sometimes with sympathy.... The writer, and those who acted with him, looked then upon the Anglican Church as a main machinery by which these results might be realised. There were few great things left in England, and the Church was one. Nor do I doubt that if a quarter of a century ago there had arisen a Churchman equal to the occasion, the position of ecclesiastical affairs in this country would have been very different from that which they now occupy. But these great matters fell into the hands of monks and schoolmen. The secession of Dr. Newman dealt a blow to the Church under which it still reels. That extraordinary event has been “apologised” for, but it has never been explained. The tradition of the Anglican Church was powerful. Resting on the Church of Jerusalem modified by the Divine school of Galilee, it would have found that rock of truth which Providence, by the instrumentality of the Semitic race, had promised to St. Peter. Instead of that, the seceders sought refuge in mediæval superstitions; which are generally only the embodiments of Pagan ceremonies and creeds.’[7]

DISAPPOINTED HOPES

Writing after the experience of thirty years of Parliamentary life, Disraeli thus described the impressions and the hopes with which he commenced his public career. He was disappointed by causes which he partly indicates, and by the nature of things which he then imperfectly realised. But, carefully considered, they explain the whole of his action down to the time when he found his expectation incapable of realisation. His Church views were somewhat hazy, though he was right enough about the Pagan ceremonies.

After their marriage, the Disraelis spent two months on the Continent. They went to Baden, Munich, Frankfort, Ratisbon, Nuremburg, seeing galleries and other curiosities. In November they returned to England, to the house in Grosvenor Gate which was thenceforward their London home, and Disraeli took his place on an equal footing as an established member of the great world. He was introduced to the Duke of Wellington, who had hitherto known him only by reputation. He received Peel’s congratulations on his marriage with admitted pride and pleasure, and began to give dinners on his own account to leading members of his party. The impecunious adventurer had acquired the social standing without which the most brilliant gifts are regarded with a certain suspicion.

POWERS IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

At the general election in 1841, Sir Robert Peel was borne into power, with a majority returned on Protectionist principles, larger than the most sanguine enthusiast had dared to hope for, Disraeli himself being returned for Shrewsbury—his connection with Maidstone having been probably broken by his late colleague’s death. When the new Parliament settled to work, Peel took the reins, and settled the finances by an income-tax—then called a temporary expedient, but in fact a necessary condition of the policy which at once he proceeded to follow. Duties were reduced in all directions, but there was no word of commercial treaties. Free Trade principles were visibly to be adopted, so far as the state of parties would allow, and the indications grew daily stronger that no such policy as Disraeli desired had come near the Premier’s mind. The middle classes had confidence in Peel. It seemed that Peel had confidence in them, and Disraeli had none at all. Still, Peel was his political chief, and Disraeli continued to serve him, and to serve effectively and zealously. More and more he displayed his peculiar powers. When he chose he was the hardest hitter in the House of Commons; and as he never struck in malice, and selected always an antlered stag for an adversary, the House was amused at his audacity. Palmerston on some occasion regretted that the honourable member had been made an exception to the rule that political adherents ought to be rewarded by appointments. He trusted that before the end of the Session the Government would overlook the slight want of industry for the sake of the talent. Disraeli ‘thanked the noble viscount for his courteous aspirations for his political promotion. The noble viscount was a master of the subject. If the noble viscount would only impart to him the secret by which he had himself contrived to retain office during so many successive administrations, the present debate would not be without a result.’ Such a passage at arms may have been the more entertaining because Disraeli was supposed to have resented the neglect of his claims when Peel was forming his Administration. It is probable that Peel had studied the superficial aspects of his character, had underrated his ability, had discerned that he might not be sufficiently docile, or had suspected and resented his advocacy of the Chartists. Disraeli may have thought that the offer ought to have been made to him, but it is evident that on other grounds the differences between them would tend to widen. The Tariff of 1842 was the first note of alarm to the Conservative party—Disraeli defended it, but not with an entire heart. ‘Peel,’ he said in a letter to his sister,[8] ‘seems to have pleased no party, but I suppose the necessity of things will force his measure through: affairs may yet simmer up into foam and bubble, and there may be a row.’ The Conservatives had been trusted by the country with an opportunity of trying their principles which, if allowed to pass, might never be renewed. Their leader was not yet openly betraying them, but everyone but himself began to perceive that the Conservatism of the Government was only to be Liberalism in disguise.

Disraeli individually had the satisfaction of feeling that he was becoming a person of consequence. He ran across to Paris, and dined privately with Louis Philippe. In London he was presented to the King of Hanover, ‘the second king who has shaken hands with me in six months.’ Public affairs he found ‘uncertain and unsatisfactory,’ Peel ‘frigid and feeble,’ and ‘general grumbling.’ He continued to speak, and speak often and successfully; but the mutual distrust between him and his chief was growing.

Peel among his magnificent qualities had not the art of conciliating the rank-and-file of his supporters. He regarded them too much as his own creatures, entitled to no consideration. Disraeli, taking the whole field of politics for his province, met with rebuke after rebuke. He had seen by this time that for his own theories there was no hope of countenance from the present chief. He had formed a small party among the younger Tory members—men of rank and talent, with a high-bred enthusiasm which had been kindled by the Church revival. A party including Lord John Manners, George Smyth, Henry Hope, and Baillie Cochrane was not to be despised; and thus reinforced and encouraged, he ventured to take a line of his own.

Among the articles of faith was the belief that Ireland ought to be treated on the principles of Charles I., and not on the principles of Cromwell. O’Connell in 1843 was setting Ireland in a flame again, and Peel, better acquainted with Ireland than Disraeli, and hopeless of other remedy, had introduced one of the periodic Coercion Bills. The Young Englanders, as he and his friends were now called, had Catholic sympathies, and they imagined that religion was at the bottom of these perpetual disturbances. Coercion answered only for the moment. A more conciliatory attitude towards the ancient creed might touch the secret of the disease. Disraeli perhaps wished to show that he bore no malice against O’Connell or against his tail. He thought that he could persuade the Irish that they had more to hope for from Cavalier Tories than from Roundhead Whigs. Of Irish history he knew as little as the rest of the House of Commons. He had heard, perhaps, of the Glamorgan Articles and Charles I.’s negotiations with the Kilkenny Parliament. Peel, when in opposition, had talked about conciliation. In office he had nothing to propose but force. Disraeli, when the Bill came before the House, gave the first sign of revolt; he said that it was one of those measures which to introduce was degrading, and to oppose disgraceful. He would neither vote for it nor against it; but as Peel had departed from the policy which he had led his party to hope that he meant to pursue before he came into power, he (Disraeli), speaking for himself and his friends, declared that they were now free from the bonds of party on this subject of Ireland, for the right hon. gentleman himself had broken them. They had now a right to fall back on their own opinions.

PERSONAL INDEPENDENCE

Something still more significant was to follow. A few days later (August 1843) the Eastern question came up. Disraeli, whose friendship for the Turks was of old standing, asked a question relating to Russian interference in Servia. Peel gave an abrupt answer to end the matter. Palmerston, however, taking it up, Disraeli had a further opportunity of speaking. He complained that Turkey had been stabbed in the back by the diplomacy of Europe; that the integrity and independence of the Turkish dominions were of vital consequence, &c. But the point of his speech was in the sting with which it concluded. Winding up in the slow, deliberate manner which he made afterwards so peculiarly effective, he reminded the House of his own previous question, couched, he believed, in Parliamentary language, and made with all that respect which he felt for the right hon. gentleman. ‘To this inquiry,’ he said, ‘the right hon. gentleman replied with all that explicitness of which he was a master, and all that courtesy which he reserved only for his supporters.’

THE IRISH QUESTION

The House of Commons had much of the generous temper of an English public school. Boys like a little fellow who has the courage to stand up to a big one, and refuses to be bullied. The Whigs were amused at the mutiny of a Tory subordinate. The Tory rank-and-file had so often smarted under Peel’s contempt that the blow told, and Disraeli had increased his consequence in the House by another step. Those who judge of motive by events, and assure themselves that when the actions of a man lead up to particular effects, those effects must have been contemplated by himself from the outset of his career, see indication in these speeches of a deliberate intention on Disraeli’s part to supersede Sir Robert Peel in the leadership of the Conservative party. The vanity of such a purpose, had it been really entertained, would have been exceeded by the folly of his next movement. In the following year O’Connell’s monster meetings had become a danger to the State. Peel had again to apply to the House of Commons, with a general sense on both sides that the authority of the Crown must be supported. Disraeli, almost alone among the English members, took the same daring attitude which he had assumed on the Chartist petition. Being in reality a stranger in the country of his adoption, he was able to regard the problems with which it was engaged in the light in which they appeared to other nations. The long mismanagement of Ireland, its chronic discontent and miserable state, were regarded everywhere as the blot upon the English escutcheon, and the cause of it was the mutual jealousy and suspicion of parties at Westminster. If a remedy was ever to be found, party ties must be thrown to the winds. What, he asked, did this eternal Irish question mean? One said it was a physical question, another a spiritual question. Now it was the absence of an aristocracy, then the absence of railroads. It was the Pope one day, potatoes the next. Let the House consider Ireland as they would any other country similarly situated, in their closets. They would see a teeming population denser to the square mile than that of China, created solely by agriculture, with none of those sources of wealth which are developed by civilisation, and sustained upon the lowest conceivable diet. That dense population in extreme distress inhabited an island where there was an Established Church which was not their Church, and a territorial aristocracy the richest of whom lived in distant capitals. They had a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and, in addition, the weakest executive in the world. That was the Irish question. Well, then, what would honourable gentlemen say if they were reading of a country in that position? They would say at once ‘the remedy was revolution.’ But Ireland could not have a revolution; and why? Because Ireland was connected with another and more powerful country. Then what was the consequence? The connection with England became the cause of the present state of Ireland. If the connection with England prevented a revolution, and a revolution was the only remedy, England logically was in the odious position of being the cause of all the misery in Ireland. What, then, was the duty of an English Minister? To effect by his policy all those changes which a revolution would do by force. That was the Irish question in its integrity.... If the noble lord (Lord John Russell) or any other honourable member came forward with a comprehensive plan, which would certainly settle the question of Ireland, no matter what the sacrifice might be, he would support it, though he might afterwards feel it necessary to retire from Parliament or to place his seat at the disposal of his constituency (‘Life of Lord Beaconsfield,’ T. P. O’Connor, 6th edition p. 255, &c.).

Truer words had not been spoken in Parliament on the subject of Ireland for half a century, nor words more fatal to the immediate ambition of the speaker, if ambition he then entertained beyond a patriotic one; and many a session, and many a century perhaps, would have to pass before a party could be formed in England strong enough to carry on the government on unadulterated principles of patriotism.

[CHAPTER VIII]

Young England and the Oxford Tractarians—Disraeli a Hebrew at heart—‘Coningsby’—Sidonia—‘Sybil; or, the Two Nations’—The great towns under the new creed—Lords of the soil as they were and as they are—Disraeli an aristocratic Socialist—Practical working of Parliamentary institutions—Special importance of ‘Sybil.’

YOUNG ENGLAND

According to Disraeli’s theory of government, the natural rulers of England were the aristocracy, supported by the people. The owners of the soil were the stable element in the Constitution. Capitalists grew like mushrooms, and disappeared as rapidly; the owners of the land remained. Tenants and labourers looked up to them with a feeling of allegiance; and that allegiance might revive into a living principle if the aristocracy would deserve it by reverting to the habits of their forefathers. That ancient forces could be awakened out of their sleep seemed proved by the success of the Tractarian movement at Oxford. The bold motto of the ‘Lyra Apostolica’ proclaimed that Achilles was in the field again, and that Liberalism was to find its master. The Oxford leaders might look doubtfully on so strange an ally as a half-converted Israelite. But Disraeli and the Young Englanders had caught the note, and were endeavouring to organise a political party on analogous lines. It was a dream. No such regeneration, spiritual or social, was really possible. Times were changed, and men had changed along with them. The Oxford movement was already undermined, though Disraeli knew it not. The English upper classes were not to be persuaded to alter habits which had become a second nature to them, or the people to be led back into social dependence by enthusiasm and eloquence. Had any such resurrection of the past been on the cards, Disraeli was not the necromancer who could have bid the dead live again. No one had a keener sense of the indications in others than he had. Fuller self-knowledge would have told him that the friend of D’Orsay and Lady Blessington, of Tom Duncomb and Lytton Bulwer, was an absurd associate in an ecclesiastical and social revival. He seemed to think that if Newman had paid more attention to ‘Coningsby,’ the course of things might have been different. Saints had worked with secular politicians at many periods of Christian history; why not the Tractarian with him? Yet the juxtaposition of Newman and Disraeli cannot be thought of without an involuntary smile. It would be wrong to say that Disraeli had no sincere religious convictions. He was a Hebrew to the heart of him. He accepted the Hebrew tradition as a true account of the world, and of man’s place in it. He was nominally a member of the Church of England; but his Christianity was something of his own, and his creed, as sketched in his ‘Life of Lord George Bentinck,’ would scarcely find acceptance in any Christian community.

‘CONINGSBY’

I have mentioned ‘Coningsby.’ It is time to see what ‘Coningsby’ was. Disraeli’s novels had been brilliant, but he had touched nowhere the deeper chords of enduring feeling. His characters had been smart, but trivial; and his higher flights, as in the ‘Revolutionary Epic,’ or his attempts to paint more delicate emotion, as in ‘Henrietta Temple’ or in ‘Venetia,’ if not failures, were not successes of a distinguished kind. He had shown no perception of what was simple, or true, or tender, or admirable. He had been at his best when mocking at conventional humbug. But his talent as a writer was great, and, with a subject on which he was really in earnest, might produce a powerful effect. To impress the views of the Young Englanders upon the public, something more was needed than speeches in Parliament or on platforms. Henry Hope, son of the author of ‘Anastasius,’ collected them in a party at his house at Deepdene, and there first ‘urged the expediency of Disraeli’s treating in a literary form those views and subjects which were the matter of their frequent conversations.’ The result was ‘Coningsby’ and ‘Sybil.’

‘Coningsby; or, the New Generation’ carried its meaning in its title. If England was to be saved by its aristocracy, the aristocracy must alter their ways. The existing representatives of the order had grown up in self-indulgence and social exclusiveness; some excellent, a few vicious, but all isolated from the inferior ranks, and all too old to mend. The hope, if hope there was, had to be looked for in their sons.

As a tale, ‘Coningsby’ is nothing; but it is put together with extreme skill to give opportunities for typical sketches of character, and for the expression of opinions on social and political subjects. We have pictures of fashionable society, gay and giddy, such as no writer ever described better; peers, young, middle-aged, and old, good, bad, and indifferent, the central figure a profligate old noble of immense fortune, whose person was easily recognised, and whose portrait was also preserved by Thackeray. Besides these, intriguing or fascinating ladies, political hacks, country gentlemen, mill-owners, and occasional wise outsiders, looking on upon the chaos and delivering oracular interpretations or prophecies. Into the middle of such a world the hero is launched, being the grandson and possible heir of the wicked peer. Lord Monmouth is a specimen of the order which was making aristocratic government impossible. To tax corn to support Lord Monmouth was plainly impossible. The story opens at Eton, which Disraeli describes with an insight astonishing in a writer who had no experience of English public school life, and with a fondness which confesses how much he had lost in the substitutes to which he had been himself condemned. There Coningsby makes acquaintance with the high-born youths who are to be his companions in the great world which is to follow, then in the enjoyment of a delightful present, and brimming with enthusiastic ambitions. They accompany each other to their fathers’ castles, and schemes are meditated and begun for their future careers; Disraeli letting fall, as he goes on, his own political opinions, and betraying his evident disbelief in existing Conservatism, and in its then all-powerful leader. He finds Peel constructing a party without principles, with a basis therefore necessarily latitudinarian, and driving into political infidelity. There were shouts about Conservatism; but the question, What was to be conserved? was left unanswered. The Crown was to keep its prerogatives provided they were not exercised; the House of Lords might keep its independence if it was never asserted; the ecclesiastical estate if it was regulated by a commission of laymen. Everything, in short, that was established might remain as long as it was a phrase and not a fact. The Conservatism of Sir Robert ‘offered no redress for the present, and made no preparations for the future. On the arrival of one of those critical conjunctures which would periodically occur in all States, the power of resistance would be wanting; the barren curse of political infidelity would paralyse all action, and the Conservative Constitution would be discovered to be a caput mortuum.

‘Coningsby found that he was born in an age of infidelity in all things, and his heart assured him that a want of faith was a want of nature. He asked himself why governments were hated and religions despised, why loyalty was dead and reverence only a galvanised corpse. He had found age perplexed and desponding, manhood callous and desperate. Some thought that systems would last their time, others that something would turn up. His deep and pious spirit recoiled with disgust and horror from lax chance medley maxims that would, in their consequence, reduce men to the level of brutes.’

He falls in with all varieties of men bred in the confusion of the old and the new. An enthusiastic Catholic landlord tries to revive the customs of his ancestors, supported by his faith, but perplexed by the aspect of a world no longer apparently under supernatural guidance. ‘I enter life,’ says Mr. Lyle, ‘in the midst of a convulsion in which the very principles of our political and social system are called in question. I cannot unite myself with the party of destruction. It is an operative cause alien to my being. What, then, offers itself? The duke talks to me of Conservative principles, but he does not inform me what they are. I observe, indeed, a party in the State whose rule it is to consent to no change until it is clamorously called for, and then instantly to yield: but those are concessionary, not Conservative, principles. This party treats our institutions as we do our pheasants. They preserve only to destroy them. But is there a statesman among these Conservatives who offers us a dogma for a guide, or defines any great political truth which we should aspire to establish? It seems to me a barren thing, this Conservatism; an unhappy cross-breed, the mule of politics, that engenders nothing.’

Coningsby had saved the life of a son of a Northern mill-owner at Eton. They became attached friends, though they were of opposite creeds. Coningsby’s study of the social problem carries him to Manchester, where he hears from Millbank the views entertained in the industrial circles of the English aristocracy. Mr. Millbank dislikes feudal manners as out of date and degenerate.

‘I do not understand,’ he says, ‘how an aristocracy can exist, unless it is distinguished by some quality which no other class of the community possesses. Distinction is the basis of aristocracy. If you permit only one class of the population, for example, to bear arms, they are an aristocracy: not much to my taste, but still a great fact. That, however, is not the characteristic of the English peerage. I have yet to learn that they are richer than we are, better informed, or more distinguished for public or private virtue. Ancient lineage! I never heard of a peer with an ancient lineage. The real old families of the country are to be found among the peasantry. The gentry, too, may lay claim to old blood: I know of some Norman gentlemen whose fathers undoubtedly came in with the Conqueror. But a peer with an ancient lineage is to me quite a novelty. The thirty years’ Wars of the Roses freed us from these gentlemen, I take it. After the battle of Tewkesbury a Norman baron was almost as rare a being as a wolf.... We owe the English peerage to three sources—the spoliation of the Church, the open and flagrant sale of its honours by the elder Stuarts, and the borough-mongering of our own times. These are the three main sources of the existing peerages of England, and in my opinion disgraceful ones.’

‘And where will you find your natural aristocracy?’ asked Coningsby. ‘Among those,’ Millbank answers, ‘whom a nation recognises as the most eminent for virtue, talents, and property, and, if you will, birth and standing in this land. They guide opinions, and therefore they govern. I am no leveller; I look upon an artificial equality as equally pernicious with a factitious aristocracy, both depressing the energies and checking the enterprise of a nation. I am sanguine. I am the disciple of progress, but I have cause for my faith. I have witnessed advance. My father often told me that in his early days the displeasure of a peer of England was like a sentence of death.’

A more remarkable figure is Sidonia, the Hebrew financier, who is represented very much in the position of Disraeli himself, half a foreigner, and impartial onlooker, with a keen interest in the stability of English institutions, but with the insight possible only to an outsider, who observes without inherited prepossessions. Sidonia, the original of whom is as easily recognised, is, like Disraeli, of Spanish descent. His father staked all that he was worth on the Waterloo Loan, became the greatest capitalist in Europe, and bequeathed his business and his fortune to his son.

The young Sidonia ‘obtained, at an early age, that experience of refined and luxurious society which is a necessary part of a finished education.

‘It gives the last polish to the manners. It teaches us something of the powers of the passions, early developed in the hotbed of self-indulgence. It instils into us that indefinable tact seldom obtained in later life, which prevents us from saying the wrong thing, and often impels us to do the right. He was admired by women, idolised by artists, received in all circles with great distinction, and appreciated for his intellect by the very few to whom he at all opened himself; for, though affable and generous, it was impossible to penetrate him: though unreserved in his manners, his frankness was limited to the surface. He observed everything, thought ever, but avoided serious discussion. If you pressed him for an opinion, he took refuge in raillery, and threw out some grave paradox with which it was not easy to cope.... He looked on life with a glance rather of curiosity than contempt. His religion walled him out from the pursuits of a citizen. His riches deprived him of the stimulating anxieties of a man. He perceived himself a lone being without cares and without duties. He might have discovered a spring of happiness in the sensibilities of the heart; but this was a sealed fountain to Sidonia. In his organisation there was a peculiarity, perhaps a great deficiency: he was a man without affection. It would be harsh to say that he had no heart, for he was susceptible of deep emotions; but not for individuals—woman was to him a toy, man a machine.’

Though Sidonia is chiefly drawn from another person, Disraeli himself can be traced in this description. The hand is the hand of Esau; the voice is the voice of Jacob. ‘The secret history of the world was Sidonia’s pastime.’ ‘His great pleasure was to contrast the hidden motive with the public pretext of transactions.’ This was Disraeli himself, and through Sidonia’s mouth Disraeli explains to Coningsby the political condition of England. The Constitution professed to rest on the representation of the people. Coningsby asks him what a representative system means. He replies: ‘It is a principle of which only a limited definition is current in this country. People may be represented without periodic elections of neighbours who are incapable to maintain their interests, and strangers who are unwilling.... You will observe one curious trait in the history of this country. The depositary of power is always unpopular: all combine against it: it always falls. Power was deposited in the great barons; the Church, using the king for its instrument, crushed the great barons. Power was deposited in the Church; the king, bribing the Parliament, plundered the Church. Power was deposited in the king; the Parliament, using the people, beheaded the king, expelled the king, changed the king, and finally for a king substituted an administrative officer. For a hundred and fifty years Power has been deposited in Parliament, and for the last sixty or seventy years it has been becoming more and more unpopular. In 1832, it endeavoured by a reconstruction to regain the popular affection; but, in truth, as the Parliament then only made itself more powerful, it has only become more odious. As we see that the barons, the Church, the king, have in turn devoured each other, and that the Parliament, the last devourer, remains, it is impossible to resist the impression that this body also is doomed to be devoured; and he is a sagacious statesman who may detect in what form and in what quarter the great consumer will arise.’

‘Whence, then,’ Coningsby asks, ‘is hope to be looked for?’ Sidonia replies:

‘In what is more powerful than laws and institutions, and without which the best laws and the most skilful institutions may be a dead letter or the very means of tyranny: in the national character. It is not in the increased feebleness of its institutions that I see the peril of England. It is in the decline of its character as a community. In this country, since the peace, there has been an attempt to advocate a reconstruction of society on a purely rational basis. The principle of utility has been powerfully developed. I speak not with lightness of the disciples of that school: I bow to intellect in every form: and we should be grateful to any school of philosophers, even if we disagree with them: doubly grateful in this country where for so long a period our statesmen were in so pitiable an arrear of public intelligence. There has been an attempt to reconstruct society on a basis of material motives and calculations. It has failed. It must ultimately have failed under any circumstances. Its failure in an ancient and densely-peopled kingdom was inevitable. How limited is human reason the profoundest engineers are most conscious. We are not indebted to the reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress. It was not reason that besieged Troy. It was not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world, that inspired the Crusader, that instituted the monastic orders. It was not reason that created the French revolution. Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions, never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination. Even Mormon counts more votaries than Bentham. The tendency of advanced civilisation is, in truth, to pure monarchy. Monarchy is indeed a government which requires a high degree of civilisation for its full development. It needs the support of free laws and manners, and of a widely-diffused intelligence. Political compromises are not to be tolerated except at periods of rude transition. An educated nation recoils from the imperfect vicariate of what is called representative government. Your House of Commons, that has absorbed all other powers in the State, will in all probability fall more rapidly than it rose. Public opinion has a more direct, a more comprehensive, a more efficient organ for its utterance than a body of men sectionally chosen. The printing-press absorbs the duties of the sovereign, the priest, the Parliament. It controls, it educates, it discusses.’

No attempt can be made here to analyse ‘Coningsby.’ The object of these extracts is merely to illustrate Disraeli’s private opinions. Space must be made for one more—a conversation between Coningsby and the younger Millbank. ‘Tell me, Coningsby,’ Millbank says, ‘exactly what you conceive to be the state of parties in this country.’

Coningsby answers:

‘The principle of the exclusive Constitution of England having been conceded by the Acts of 1827-1832, a party has arisen in the State who demand that the principle of political Liberalism shall consequently be carried to its full extent, which it appears to them is impossible without getting rid of the fragments of the old Constitution which remain. This is the destructive party, a party with distinct and intelligible principles. They are resisted by another party who, having given up exclusion, would only embrace as much Liberalism as is necessary for the moment—who, without any embarrassing promulgation of principles, wish to keep things as they find them as long as they can; and these will manage them as they find them, as well as they can: but, as a party must have the semblance of principles, they take the names of the things they have destroyed. Thus, they are devoted to the prerogatives of the Crown, although in truth the Crown has been stripped of every one of its prerogatives. They affect a great veneration for the Constitution in Church and State, though everyone knows it no longer exists. Whenever public opinion, which this party never attempts to form, to educate, or to lead, falls into some perplexity, passion, or caprice, this party yields without a struggle to the impulse, and, when the storm has passed, attempts to obstruct and obviate the logical and ultimately inevitable results of the measures they have themselves originated, or to which they have consented. This is the Conservative party.

‘As to the first school, I have no faith in the remedial qualities of a government carried on by a neglected democracy who for three centuries have received no education. What prospect does it offer us of those high principles of conduct with which we have fed our imaginations and strengthened our wills? I perceive none of the elements of government that should secure the happiness of a people and the greatness of a realm. But if democracy be combated only by Conservatism, democracy must triumph and at no distant date. The man who enters political life at this epoch has to choose between political infidelity and a destructive creed.’

‘Do you declare against Parliamentary government?’

‘Far from it: I look upon political change as the greatest of evils, for it comprehends all. But if we have no faith in the permanence of the existing settlement ... we ought to prepare ourselves for the change which we deem impending.... I would accustom the public mind to the contemplation of an existing though torpid power in the Constitution capable of removing our social grievances, were we to transfer to it those prerogatives which the Parliament has gradually usurped, and used in a manner which has produced the present material and moral disorganisation. The House of Commons is the house of a few: the sovereign is the sovereign of all. The proper leader of the people is the individual who sits upon the throne.’

‘Then you abjure the representative principle?’

‘Why so? Representation is not necessarily, or even in a principal sense, Parliamentary. Parliament is not sitting at this moment: and yet the nation is represented in its highest as well as in its most minute interests. Not a grievance escapes notice and redress. I see in the newspapers this morning that a pedagogue has brutally chastised his pupil. It is a fact known over all England—opinion is now supreme, and opinion speaks in print. The representation of the Press is far more complete than the representation of Parliament. Parliamentary representation was the happy device of a ruder age, to which it was admirably adapted. But it exhibits many symptoms of desuetude. It is controlled by a system of representation more vigorous and comprehensive, which absorbs its duties and fulfils them more efficiently.... Before a royal authority, supported by such a national opinion, the sectional anomalies of our country would disappear. Under such a system even statesmen would be educated. We should have no more diplomatists who could not speak French, no more bishops ignorant of theology, no more generals-in-chief who never saw a field. There is a polity adapted to our laws, our institutions, our feelings, our manners, our traditions: a polity capable of great ends, and appealing to high sentiments: a polity which, in my opinion, would render government an object of national affection, would terminate sectional anomalies, and extinguish Chartism.’

Disraeli was singularly regardless of the common arts of party popularity. He had spoken in defence of the Chartists when he was supposed to be bidding for a place under Sir Robert Peel; he had used language about Ireland, sweeping, peremptory, going to the heart of the problem, which Whig and Tory must have alike resented; and he had risked his seat by his daring. He was now telling the country, in language as plain as Carlyle’s, that Parliament was an effete institution—and the House of Commons which he treated so disdainfully was in a few years to choose him for its leader. The anomalies in Disraeli’s life grow more astonishing the deeper we look into them.

‘SYBIL’

‘Sybil,’ published the next year, is more remarkable than even ‘Coningsby.’ ‘Sybil; or, the Two Nations,’ the two nations being the Rich and the Poor. Disraeli had personally studied human life in the manufacturing towns. He had seen the workman, when trade was brisk and wages high, enjoying himself in his Temple of the Muses; he had seen him, when demand grew slack, starving with his family in the garret, with none to help him. He had observed the insolent frauds of the truckmaster. He had seen the inner side of our magnificent industries which legislation was struggling to extend: he had found there hatred, anarchy, and incendiarism, and he was not afraid to draw the lurid picture in the unrelieved colours of truth.

The first scene opens on the eve of the Derby, when, in a splendid club-room, the languid aristocrats, weary of the rolling hours, are making up their betting-books—they the choicest and most finished flowers of this planet, to whom the Derby is the event of the year. They are naturally high-spirited young men, made for better things, but spoilt by their education and surroundings.

From the youth we pass to the mature specimens of the breed who are in possession of their estates and their titles. Lord Marney’s peerage dates from the suppression of the monasteries, in which his ancestor had been a useful instrument.

The secretary of Henry VIII.’s vicar-general had been rewarded by the lands of a northern abbey. The property had grown in value with the progress of the country. The family for the three centuries of its existence had never produced a single person who had contributed any good thing to the service of the commonwealth. But their consequence had grown with their wealth, and the Lord Marney of ‘Sybil’ was aspiring to a dukedom. He is represented (being doubtless drawn from life) as the harshest of landlords, exacting the utmost penny of rent, leaving his peasantry to squalor and disease, or driving them off his estates to escape the burden of the poor-rate, and astonished to find Swing and his bonfires starting up about him as his natural reward. The second great peer of the story, Lord Mowbray, of a yet baser origin and character, owns the land on which has grown a mushroom city of mills and mill-hands. The ground-rents have made him fabulously rich, while, innocent of a suspicion that his wealth has brought obligations along with it, he lives in vulgar luxury in his adjoining castle.

On both estates the wretchedness is equal, though the character of it is different. Lord Marney rules in a country district. A clergyman asks him how a peasant can rear his family on eight shillings a week. ‘Oh, as for that,’ said Lord Marney, ‘I have generally found the higher the wages, the worse the workmen. They only spend their money in the beershops. They are the curse of the country.’ The ruins of the monastery give an opportunity for a contrast between the old England and the new, by a picture of the time when the monks were the gentlest of landlords, when exactions and evictions were unknown, and when churches were raised to the service of God in the same spots where now rise the brick chimneys and factories as the spires and temples of the modern Mammon-worship.

In Mowbray, the town from which the earl of that name drew his revenue, the inhabitants were losing the elementary virtues of humanity. Factory-girls deserted their parents, and left them to starve, preferring an independence of vice and folly; mothers farmed out their children at threepence a week to be got rid of in a month or two by laudanum and treacle. Disraeli was startled to find that ‘infanticide was practised as extensively and legally in England as it was on the banks of the Ganges.’ It is the same to-day: occasional revelations lift the curtains, and show it active as ever; familiarity has led us to look upon it as inevitable; the question, what is to be done with the swarms of children multiplying in our towns, admitting, at present, of no moral solution.

With some elaboration, Disraeli describes the human creatures bred in such places which were growing up to take the place of the old English.

‘Devilsdust’—so one of these children came to be called, for he had no legitimate name or parentage—having survived a baby-farm by toughness of constitution, and the weekly threepence ceasing on his mother’s death, was turned out into the streets to starve or to be run over.

Even this expedient failed. The youngest and feeblest of the band of victims, Juggernaut spared him to Moloch. All his companions were disposed of. Three months’ play in the streets got rid of this tender company, shoeless, half-naked, and uncombed, whose ages varied from two to five years. Some were crushed, some were lost; some caught cold and fever, crept back to their garrets or their cellars, were dosed with Godfrey’s Elixir, and died in peace. The nameless one, Devilsdust, would not disappear: he always got out of the way of the carts and horses, and never lost his own. They gave him no food: he foraged for his own, and shared with the dogs the garbage of the streets. But still he lived: stunted and pale, he defied even the fatal fever which was the only habitant of his cellar that never quitted it, and slumbering at night on a bed of mouldering straw, his only protection against the plashy surface of his den, with a dung-heap at his head and a cesspool at his feet, he still clung to the only roof that sheltered him from the tempest. At length, when the nameless one had completed his fifth year, the pest which never quitted the nest of cellars of which he was a citizen raged in the quarter with such intensity that the extinction of its swarming population was menaced. The haunt of this child was peculiarly visited. All the children gradually sickened except himself: and one night when he returned home he found the old woman herself dead and surrounded only by corpses. The child before this had slept on the same bed of straw with a corpse; but then there were also breathing things for his companions. A night passed only with corpses seemed to him itself a kind of death. He stole out of the cellar, quitted the quarter of pestilence, and, after much wandering, lay down near the door of a factory.

The child is taken in, not out of charity, but because an imp of such a kind happens to be wanted, and Devilsdust grows up, naturally enough, a Chartist and a dangerous member of society. But was there ever a more horrible picture drawn? It is like a chapter of Isaiah in Cockney novelist dress. Such things, we are told, cannot happen now. Can they not? There was a recent revelation at Battersea not so unlike it. The East-end of London produces crimes which are not obliterated because they are forgotten; and rag bundles may be seen on frosty nights at London house-doors, which, if you unroll them, discover living things not so unlike poor Devilsdust. For the future, these waifs and strays are at least to be sent to school. The school will do something, especially if one full meal a day is added to the lessons; but what is the best of Board schools compared to the old apprenticeship? The apprentice had his three full meals a day, and decent clothes, and decent lodging, and was taught some trade or handicraft by which he could earn an honest living when his time was out. The school cannot reach the miserable home. The school teaches no useful occupation, and when school-time is over the child is again adrift upon the world. He is taught to read and write. His mind is opened. Yes. He is taught to read the newspapers, and the penny dreadfuls, and his wits are sharpened for him. Whether this will make him a more useful or more contented member of society, time will show.

Devilsdust was but one of many products of the manufacturing system which Disraeli saw and meditated upon.

He found a hand-loom weaver starving with his children in a garret, looking back upon the time when his loom had given him a cottage and a garden in his native village. The new machinery had ruined him, and he did not complain of the inevitable. But, as it was too late for him to learn another trade, he argued that if a society which had been created by labour suddenly became independent of it, that society was bound to maintain those whose only property was labour, out of the profits of that other property which had not ceased to be productive.

He talks with a superior artisan, who says to him:

‘There is more serfdom in England now than at any time since the Conquest. I speak of what passes under my daily eyes when I say that those who labour can as little change or choose their masters now as when they were born thralls. There are great bodies of the working classes of this country nearer the condition of brutes than they have been at any time since the Conquest. Indeed, I see nothing to distinguish them from brutes, except that their morals are inferior. Incest and infanticide are as common among them as among the lower animals. The domestic principle wanes weaker and weaker every year in England: nor can we wonder at it when there is no comfort to cheer and no sentiment to hallow the home.

‘I am told a working man has now a pair of cotton stockings, and that Henry VIII. himself was not as well off.... I deny the premisses. I deny that the condition of the main body is better now than at any other period of our history—that it is as good as it has been at several. The people were better clothed, better lodged, and better fed just before the Wars of the Roses than they are at this moment. The Acts of Parliament, from the Plantagenets to the Tudors, teach us alike the prices of provisions and the rate of wages.’

‘And are these the people?’ the hero of the story asks himself, after such conversations. ‘If so, I would I lived more among them. Compared with this converse, the tattle of our saloons has in it something humiliating. It is not merely that it is deficient in warmth and depth and breadth; that it is always discussing persons instead of principles; choking its want of thought in mimetic dogmas, and its want of feeling in superficial raillery. It is not merely that it has neither imagination, nor fancy, nor sentiment, nor knowledge to recommend it, but it appears to me, even as regards manners and expressions, inferior in refinement and phraseology, trivial, uninteresting, stupid, really vulgar.’