f a ines Des tgition Are % Pee PUREE, . titer ES Foebuae po wrecatat BOTT begeel Y RERTTT HERE EL wh SCRSD Sree we yy Tee Setter tabs PUES STA Ie ht LEESON AE AICY. SE Ths FPR TE RIPE PL PSSsis tie teats swe ere gee aR a cae a 3 eeainase UNIVERSITY OF VI IRGIN UU mn 1398 | FPR, Senne MeTsLIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA FROM THE LIBRARIES OF GEORGE GORDON BATTLE AND ELLEN M. BAGBY } CUPACUL ALLL ') EREERE: we ' . : - a PELLET TTL EE EE LEP PLUA PET A TEE TE EEE V EEO O ETP HPPRERUA RTRUA ERAT ACERT USERRAU REE EU TOURER AONE EYER 7. ae ee 2 >)DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT E. T. RAYMONDPhoto W.& DD. Downey THE EARI, OF BEACONSFIELD I Ot SprPleceDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT BY EK. T. RAYMOND AUTHOR OF “UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES,” “‘MR. LLOYD GEORGE,” “PORTRAITS OF THE NINETIES,” “THE LIFE OF LORD ROSEBERY, ETC., ETC NEW ws YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANYCOPYRIGHT, 1925 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY GD) DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT —— A — PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICAILLUSTRATIONS Tur EARL OF BEACONSFIELD . . . . - -_ ~ Frontispiece PAGE BENJAMIN DiISRAELI, Esquire, M.P. [S30) 28 ee 70 Ture Ricuot HonourABLE B. DisrAELi, M.P., CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER UNG 1G52 9) co) i ner eee losDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOTTLE EEDISRAELI CHAPDE Re | OBODY,” said Lord Morley in explaining the poverty of his borrowings from the enormous mass of Glad- stone’s letters, “had fewer secrets, nobody ever lived and wrought in fuller sunshine.” Of Gladstone’s great rival almost the exact opposite 1s true. Disraeli valued the sunshine only as a super-limelight, to give the finishing touch to some theatrical display of himself. He used mystery as a weapon and enjoyed it as an amusement. He not only loved secrets; he made himself a secret, and the secret, truth to say, has survived his biographers as well as himself. From the record of their public activities it would be possible to compile a not incredible life of most of his contemporaries. The result would be dull, but it would not be absurd. Peel, Bright, Gladstone, Russell, Derby, O’Connell, Cobden, would stand out, not indeed as complete men, but as recognisable human figures. Disraeli thus treated is either a monster, as in Mr. T. P. O’Connor’s elongated lampoon, or a piece of barber’s waxwork, as in the pages of his pane- gyrists. Gladstone’s speeches are very Gladstone; the man who innocently played the Jesuit with himself is one with the politician whose jesuitry enchanted one party and exasperated the other. But we can never be sure of the real Disraeli in Disraeli’s speeches, however rich in objective truth; nor in his table talk, however spontaneous in seeming; nor in his letters, however frank and familiar. For the speeches were always those of a man at once deferential and contemptuous of his audience. The table talk was sometimes a means to self-intoxication, and sometimes a means to the intoxication 78 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT a of others. Every letter, however trivial, had its purpose, often another than the ostensible one. Disraeli was not a mere comedian; there was a real man, and a great man, beneath his many stage disguises. But for long the real man was so situated that he could only exist, as some insects do, on condition that he seemed to be something other than he was, and this business of seeming he managed so cleverly that it is only on occasion in the six fat volumes of his official biography that the inner truth concerning him flashes on the reader. I have called Disraeli the Alien Patriot. History is richly strewn with examples of the man of foreign blood who serves the country of his adoption with the fidelity of a native, and often with more than the native’s enthusiasm. We find q him in the Egypt of the Pharaohs, cornering wheat for his | adopted country. He is busy, with every tool of the creative ruler, in the England of the Conqueror. He does a commend- able work, though not consciously as “founder of the Mother | of Parliaments,’ in the England of the Plantagenets. He y is a constantly recurring figure in French history. He buys 1 Paris at the cost of a mass, and becomes the father of a people | whose every weakness he watches with cynical clearness through the cool eyes of a foreigner. He is found in the simar of a Cardinal, keeping together the distracted France of the Fronde. A century or a little more later we meet him, stiff with the correctitude of a Genevese banker, ineffectually seek- ing to stave off revolution by improved bookkeeping. By a trace of Irish accent the Alien Patriot is to be distinguished | in every court and camp of eighteenth-century Europe, and even Hindus in the Carnatic and mestizos in Chile note some strangeness in the names of Lally and O'Higgins. In the nineteenth century Alien Patriots of English or Scottish blood are found everywhere fighting, working, or scheming for their adopted countries, and one of the miracles of the Great War was the undoubted loyalty to England of men of princely German blood. But while every nation supplies its examples of the Alien Patriot, it is natural that the species should be most richly represented by the nation without a country. The Jew may A Sa ie eeDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 9 become, in relation to the land of his adoption, a true patriot, but he must always remain, for a multitude of purposes, an alien; and it is an injustice to his patriotism to gloss over his alienism. If we treat an honest Jew as one who has thrown in his lot with England or France, Spain or Germany, but cannot by the nature of things be English, French, Spanish, or German, we know exactly where we are. We appreciate what seems to us admirable, we understand what seems to us less admirable, we are not perplexed by what may be in itself neither good nor bad, but is simply foreign. But if we insist on regarding the Jew as an Englishman, a Frenchman, a Spaniard, or a German in no way differing from other Eng- lishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, or Germans, we shall not only be wrong about him, but in the wrong with him. He will have as much contempt for our eulogies as for our censures. The Jew, though he may bear insult “with a patient shrug,” does not like being called ‘“‘misbeliever, cut-throat dog,” and has a very natural loathing for anybody who “spits upon his Jewish gaberdine.” But he is probably little more partial to the Christian who, with all possible good humour, compliments him on the possession of the special virtues of a race he deems the inferior of his own. A Jewish audience will, no doubt, cheer loudly when a parliamentary candidate appeals to it to show once more the traditional British liking for fair play. But in its heart of hearts it despises its Christian flatterer, and will exclaim with Shylock, and not unjustly, “How like a fawning publican he looks,’ and “hate him for his low sim- plicity.” For the Jew, whatever outward reverence he may pay for policy’s sake to the code of the Gentile, wavers not in his conviction of the superiority, not only of his own great Law, but of his own minor rules concerning the game of life. What we call “cricket” may often fill him with contempt; but he has a “cricket” of his own which, if we took the trouble to study it, might fill us with respect, and even fear. We take no such trouble, and are therefore irrationally angry with a Jew who proves his Jewishness in one way, and irrationally admiring of him when he displays it in another. And when, as in the case of Benjamin Disraeli, some of us decide to make the10 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT Jew a British hero, we bind ourselves in advance to gloze over or apologise for the things of which he was probably most proud, and to glorify the things which he said or did with some shame simply because it served an immediate purpose, minor and perhaps ignoble, to say or do them. To keep steadily in mind that Disraeli saw facts, and was bound to see them, being a man of genius with an outlook the opposite of insular, in a light very different from that in which they could appear to the Englishman of the nineteenth century —this is the only means of understanding both the fundamen- tal sincerity of the man and the incidental insincerities of the Statesman. In the year 1529 fell Cardinal Wolsey, the last Englishman of European mind to control the policy of Eng- land. Nearly three and a half centuries were to pass before a mind equally capable of viewing European civilisation as a whole exercised dominion over the nation’s destinies. In the interim many stupid, a few brilliant, and one or two Sagacious men determined the part played by England in European affairs. But, whatever their natural ability or acquired knowledge, none of them escaped the handicap of a defect of vision. They were the victims of one great illusion which was the prolific mother of all sorts of minor errors. In the contempt of what they called the Roman superstition they overlooked the importance of the philosophy of life repre- sented by the Catholic Church. They confused Catholic eco- nomics with Catholic theology. In their hatred of the Papacy they set out to destroy what had grown up under the Papacy. In their war on the tares they plucked up much good wheat. It was no accident that Disraeli, when he spoke not as a politician but as a political philosopher, took Cobbett’s view of the Reformation in England. It was as little an accident that he surveyed Europe’s problems with something of Wolsey’s breadth of vision. But while Wolsey saw England, and England’s place in Europe, with the eyes of one belonging to a universal Church, Disraeli saw it with those of one belonging to a universal race. Wolsey was an Englishman; Disraeli was a Jew. The vision of the Victorian statesman was not less clear than that of theDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 11 Tudor. But his mind was that of an alien, and his heart was not that of an Englishman. He conquered England, he gov- erned England, he even came to love England. But it was always as a foreigner that he saw England, and, though he was very willing to do England a service, he lacked the quality of the true patriot—he was not willing to sacrifice himself for England. He saw more clearly than any of his contemporaries the dangers before his adopted country; on occasion he indicated them honestly and in terms of appro- priate emphasis. But there always came a time when, finding expostulation without avail, he acquiesced with a cynical shrug of the shoulders in the very follies he had denounced, and went on with his other business—the making of a career. Two circumstances have contributed to the obscuration of the vital fact that Disraeli was not only born a Jew but throughout his life thought, felt, and acted as a Jew. Both his friends and his enemies, for very different reasons, con- curred in glossing over his Judaism. To the Conservative Party Disraeli, after long years of suspicion, became a sort of political saint. It grew to be a habit to appeal to “Disraelian principles” as if they had the force of the Decalogue. Accept- ing Disraeli (who once talked—and that late in life—of the Colonial “‘millstone’”’) as the representative of Imperial Britain, it would have been treason to think of him as lacking anything English but an English name. On the other hand, whatever Liberals might mutter in private, however they might chuckle over Carlyle’s “superlative Hebrew juggler,” they considered it inconsistent with their latitudinarian professions to apply the adjective Jewish to the conduct and character of a Jew. It was part of their creed that “liberal institutions” made all men liberal: it was but a slight extension of the proposition to maintain that they made all men alike. And indeed it is difficult, if one looks only to the more obvi- ous aspects of Disraeli’s political life, to realise that we are deal- ing from first to last with a man of alien modes of thought. The man was an actor, and one of the thorough kind, who often blacked himself all over. He caught all kinds of cant with ease and could talk it with conviction. Moreover, like the. —, * ee ne aeitencetee em e = Se ie “es — ee ne a 12 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT French Marquess in The Newcomes, he was fond, especially in his later years, of playing the Englishman. Being a man of an uncertain sense of humour (though of a brilliant and abundant wit), he sometimes allowed the performance to descend to the ridiculous; with his corkscrew ringlets and pallid face he sat at farmers’ ordinaries, bestowed brass- buttoned blue coats on meritorious old labourers, punched fat cattle, and did other things only meet and proper to cropped heads and beefy jowls. But the comedy could take a more refined form. Disraeli could not, being a Jew, look an English- man. He could not, being a Jew, generally feel like an Englishman. Whenever he tried to speak as a great English- man speaks under the stress of deep emotion or on the inspira- tion of a splendid idea, he failed miserably. But, being a man of astounding cleverness, he could borrow at will the spiritual equivalents of the Tory’s breeches and gaiters, the Manchester man’s hard hat, or the Chadband’s white tie. He could adopt without difficulty English prejudices, compromises, and mental confusions. He could never expand himself to English great- ness, but he could squeeze himself easily enough into most English limitations. Thus, we can read to-day many columns of his political speeches without recognising anything—except vivacity of expression—to mark them from the common form of Victorian parliamentary eloquence; it is only at rare inter- vals that we pause on something that no Gladstone, no Derby, no Russell or Peel, no Roundell Palmer or Roebuck could have said. But the man who evades us when he is dealing with facts is not grudgingly revealed when we turn to his works of fiction. It is in the Disraeli novels, if anywhere, that we find the real Disraeli. In any novel which is more than a mere narrative much of the truth concerning the author will out, and Disraeli could no more hide himself than could Dickens, Thackeray, and Meredith in their day, or Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett in our own. Vivian Grey is as much Disraeli as David Copper- field was Dickens and much more than Kipps and Mr. Polly were Mr. Wells. And whatever Vivian Grey was or was not, he was certainly not English. The story of his schooldaysDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 13 outrages every English tradition. To begin with, he becomes at once “the most popular fellow in the school” because he is "a dandy ... so dashing . . . so completely up to every- thing.” Compare this in passing with the opinion of Master East, surely a more trustworthy authority on the mental habits of young English barbarians, who told Tom Brown that safety lay in having “nothing odd about him.” But Disraeli’s hero cannot be recognised as an English boy, and his schoolfellows are as foreign as he. Vivian is as surely an Oriental as Prince Djalma was a Frenchman. He treats the usher Mallett as a “species of upper servant.” Mallett, in revenge, sets the other boys against him; there is something of the same story in one of the Thousand and One Nights. Vivian then plans a double treason. Currying favour with the master, sneaking on the boys, he so contrives matters that an intolerable tyranny pro- duces desperate revolt. Four stout fellows seize the unhappy Mallett, four make a rush on Vivian: But stop: he sprang upon his desk, and, placing his back against the wall, held a pistol at the foremost: ‘““Not an inch nearer, Smith, or I fire. Let me not, however, baulk your vengeance on yonder hound; if I could suggest any refinements in torture, they would be at your service.”” Vivian Grey smiled, while the horrid cries of Mallett indicated that the boys were “roasting him.” It would be difficult, in a few pages, to reveal a more com- plete freedom from all the prejudices, conventions, taboos, standards, and ideals which Englishmen, if they do not always observe, at least profess to honour. Vivian Grey alone would testify that his creator, though clearly a man of spirit, knew not “cricket.” But Vivian Grey does not stand alone. Con- tarini Fleming is equally emancipated from the slavery of the unwritten law of the English; he is perhaps, indeed, even more authentically Oriental. At school he fights a boy two years older than himself, whom, attacking “like a wild beast,” he fells to the ground: He was up again in a moment; and indeed I would not have waited for their silly rules of mock combat, but havea 14 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT f destroyed him in his prostration. But he was Up again in a } moment. Again I flew upon him. He fought with subtle | energy, but he was like a serpent with a tiger. I fixed upon him: my blows told with the rapid precision of machinery. Fis bloody visage was not to be distinguished. ( After ten rounds Contarini’s enemy “fell down quite blind.” | The hero, with his knee upon the boy’s chest, demanded an | apology, which was refused: I lifted up my arm. Some advanced to interfere. (ORG2 I shouted, “Off, off.” [ seized the fallen chief, rushed through the gate, and dragged him like Achilles through the mead. At the bottom there was a dunghill. Upon it I flung the half | inanimate body. We do not feel here the presence of a coward. The school- boys’ fight could not have been described except by one who as a schoolboy knew what it was to give and receive hard blows; and Disraeli, as we know, was no poltroon. A little later he was always ready for a duel, and in his schooldays, no doubt, he did not shrink from a bloody nose. All the world knows what sort of 4 pugilist the Jewish race can produce. There is courage in Contarini—the spirit of a man. But not the spirit of an Englishman, or, for that matter, of a European. The point of view is simply Oriental : it comes straight from the Old Testament: the man who wrote thus in his twenties was Clearly one in mind and Spirit with those terrible Hebrew Warriors who, not content with conquering, must extirpate, and, not content with killing, must humiliate—the men who ripped up women with child and cast the bodies of beaten kings to the dogs. Somewhat later we find this alien tone less marked; there is less bitterness—or perhaps more prudence. But, in some degree, it can be detected in everything that Disraeli wrote. W henever he is stirred to sincerities, we find in him the Jew. But it is important to realise exactly what kind of Jew hemwass. “ian pure Sephardim,” Says Sidonia to Tancred.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 15 Disraeli made the same boast. Between the Jew who comes to England by way of the Mediterranean and the Jew of Russia, Poland, and Germany there may or may not be genuine racial differences, but there is certainly a real divergence in tempera- ment. The Jew in the north and east of Europe was uniformly subjected to a treatment which could not fail to depress char- acter. He lived in countries where he stood forth not only an unbeliever, but as a most obvious alien; and even had he em- braced Christianity he would still have been marked, by the fierce and uncultured people among whom he dwelt, as an intruder and an inferior. It was otherwise in those Mediter- ranean countries which, inheriting the necessarily liberal phi- losophy of Rome, made little distinction of colour and race. Here the Jew might be persecuted as the member of an ex- clusive sect; he was not branded as a separate and contemned sub-species. The Sephardim were Jews who had settled in Spain before the coming of the Goths. Under the Roman power they had ranked with other citizens. Naturally, they resented a new order which implied their bondage, and it was, according to Gibbon, largely their help that insured the swiftly decisive conquests of Tarik and his successors. While the Moslem sway endured the Jews lived on equal terms with the victorious Moors. Later, when the Christian sword had re- covered a large part of the lost territory, some at least of the Spanish Jews fared far from ill. From the thirteenth to the beginning of the fifteenth century we read of Jewish statesmen, scholars, and physicians at the Castilian Court, and such perse- cution as they may have suffered was neither continuous nor systematic. To the Jew who wished to share the full life of the Spanish Christian there was, moreover, No obstacle but his faith. He could enter the always open door of the Catholic Church. Once that portal was passed he was safe from everything but the suspicion which must attach to conversion bringing clear and immediate advantage to the convert. Vast numbers of Spanish Jews did in fact so conform. Gibbon estimates at ninety thousand the number who received baptism under the Gothic prince Sigebut, and Prescott records that St. Vincent Ferrer, some centuries later, by his own efforts won16 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT some thirty-five thousand of the race to the Cross. The “Nuevo” found no bar, social or political. He married into the proudest Spanish families. He rose to positions of power and dignity in the State. In the Church itself he obtained high pre- ferment. But he remained race-conscious, and the loyalty of the converted Jews to the State which thus tolerated and promoted them was in many cases incomplete. It was not a Roman Catholic historian, but the sceptic Gibbon, who affirmed that “the alliance between the disciples of Moses and of Mahomet was maintained till the final aera of their common expulsion.” The “new Christians” suffered a fiery persecution under Ferdinand and Isabella. The latter part of the fifteenth cen- tury was, all over Europe, especially an age of intolerance and an age of irresponsible power, and the policy of the Spanish sovereigns, as of the English Henry VII, aimed directly at the depression of the nobility. The exceeding prosperity of the Spanish Jews doubtless did much to sharpen what we (who have our own intolerance) are pleased to call “bigotry,” though in fact the purely political motive was no less strong than the desire of the Most Catholic monarch to extirpate heresy. The family of Disraeli seems to have been among the nominal Christians who secretly adhered to the ancient faith and cere- monies, and their descendant gloried alike in this conformity of convenience and in the immediate resumption of Judaism when, having left Spain for Venice, the exiles could dispense with an hypocrisy prolonged over six centuries. Out of gratitude to the God of Jacob for their preservation they assumed, accord- ing to Lord Beaconsfield, the name of D’Israeli, “never borne before or since by any other family, in order that their race might be for ever recognised.” This latter statement is inac- curate, since Benjamin, the first to land in England, seems also to have been the first to adopt the style of un homme a particule, his predecessors having been modestly content to write themselves Israeli. Benjamin the elder came to England in 1748, as London correspondent of the family firm. He enrolled himself as a member of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in London, but did not mix intimately with the Jewish community, and his second wife, who brought him a aDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 17 fortune, was still less disposed to the society of her own race. Though undoubtedly connected with the house of Villa Real, aristocrats of Jewry, “the second most illustrious family of Portugal,” according to Sichel, “and thrice intermarried with our own nobility,’ she constantly deplored, as a social obstacle, her husband’s name, and his adhesion, however formal and careless, to the faith in which he was born. In such a household an excess of religious temperature was not to be expected, and Isaac D’Israeli, the father of Lord Beaconsfield, grew up an agnostic, though for many years he maintained a nominal connection with the synagogue, and broke away at last only because he was offered a choice between accepting a definite office and paying a substantial fine. Isaac had no turn for business; he was an only son; his father’s position was comfortable; and with all his mildness he was not an easy person to dominate. Benjamin the elder therefore resigned himself, after several attempts to establish the young man in commerce, to what must have been a heavy disappoint- ment. Isaac, a born bookworm, became one of that “unpros- perous race of men,’ as Adam Smith has it, “called men of letters.” Before he was thirty he made himself a name by his Curiosities of Literature, which still survives, but his verses in the Augustan manner found little favour even in his own time, and his studies of the Stuart period are chiefly interesting as foreshadowing certain aspects of his distinguished son’s Toryism. His contempt of commerce, expressed in heroic couplets in his nonage, is also to be remarked as probably influencing in some degree the younger Benjamin, whose suspicion of “Dutch finance’? was always coupled with his contempt for the “Venetian constitution” of the Whig system. In 1802 Isaac Disraeli married Maria, the daughter of Joshua Basevi, an Italian Jew, and sister to George Basevi, an architect of some eminence. Mrs. Disraeli, a woman of gentle and domestic character, the precise antithesis of the “demon,” her mother-in-law, who, according to Lord Beacons- field, “‘lived until eighty without indulging a tender expres- sion,” gave birth to five children, of whom the great Benjamin was the second. Though doubts exist as to the date and place18 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT it is now generally accepted that the favourite Prime Minister of Queen Victoria was born on December 21, 1804, at a house in King’s Road, Bloomsbury, now known as 22 Theo- balds Road. Lord Beaconsfield himself said, “I was born in the Adelphi, and I may say in a library.” The first statement has been definitely disproved. The second was merely a liter- ary man’s exaggeration of the fact that books were to be found almost everywhere in his father’s house, and that some of them probably littered Mrs. Disraeli’s bedroom. Of Benjamin’s early youth the records are shadowy, and, as with much else, the novels are the best authority. Vivian Grey’s father, it will be recalled, ‘“was for Eton,” but his lady was “one of those women whom nothing in the world can persuade that a public school is anything else but a place where boys are roasted alive.’ There seems to have been a similar difference of opinion in the Disraeli family. Isaac had thoughts of a public school; Mrs. Disraeli, with maternal realism, saw that figuratively at least her boy would have to pass through the fires of persecution. Benjamin was there- fore sent to a succession of private schools, of which one was kept at Blackheath by a Mr. Poticary and another at Waltham- stow by Dr. Cogan, a Unitarian and a good classical scholar. Fven here the lad had his troubles. Vivian Grey, it may be remembered, is called by one of the masters a “seditious stranger,’ and the cry of “No stranger!” is taken up by a hostile faction among the boys. The words as they stand have no meaning; they become significant if we read “stranger” as “Jew,’ and “seditious” as “misbelieving.’”’ The passions and miseries of Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming, “who de- tested school more than he had ever abhorred the world in the darkest moment of experienced manhood,” were the passions and miseries of Benjamin Disraeli. He it was who was “born with a detestation of grammars’’—and even a certain incapac- ity to be grammatical, since he could rarely write a long sentence without a slip. He it was who felt “the folly of learning words instead of ideas,” and who indulged all sorts of heroic day-dreams which made the prose of his situation as a Jewish schoolboy in a Christian school the more intoler-DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 19 able. The insults which Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming resented, the one with cold guile and the other with furious passion, were the insults under which Benjamin Disraeli writhed impotently until he had acquired the skill—he never seems to have wanted the pluck—to avenge them with effect. The boy was a bad learner but an insatiable student; he hated the drudgery of the form, but was never happier than when turning over the books in his father’s library. “I read every book that | could get hold of,’ he says in his assumed character, “‘and studied as little as possible in my instructor’s museum of verbiage, whether his specimens appeared in the anatomy of a substantive, or the still more disgusting form of a dissected verb.’’ Viewing education, as he found it, as “the vile art of teaching words,” he was naturally not a satisfactory pupil. He left school at between sixteen and seventeen, with- out reaching the senior class; yet that he had read widely, if not deeply, of the classics is certain, though his own account of his adventures in ancient literature is scarcely credible. He claims to have been familiar, “in whole or part,’ with the works of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Euripides, Sopho- cles, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Theocritus, Cicero, Cesar, Tacitus, Lucian, Lucretius, Terence, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and Catullus. On the one hand there can only be wonder at the moderation which omitted from the list Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Cornelius Nepos, Ovid, and Plautus; on the other there is ground for some surprise that in after- life the possessor of so much learning showed little of the classical culture which distinguished his chief contemporaries in Parliament. The truth is, no doubt, that the youth pecked sparrow-like at anything that came his way; 1f an author inter- ested him, and was not too difficult for a very moderate tech- nical acquirement, backed by a quick mind and vivid imagina- tion, he went on; if an author seemed dull, or were otherwise too heavy metal, he was read only “in part.” At the same time, Dr. Cogan’s school was unquestionably a good one, and Froude’s sneer that the boys “could not have been distinguished for birth or good breeding” is patently unjust. No doubt little blue blood went the way of Walthamstow, but most of20 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT the pupils seem to have been the sons of professional men, and many of them became themselves distinguished in walks of life which fail to attract the vulgar. Though he entered this establishment late and left it early —he was over thirteen before he had exhausted the uses of Mr. Poticary—it was to Dr. Cogan that Disraeli was indebted for the greater part of his formal education. There is little evidence for the tradition that he spent some time at a school at Winchester. Years later, at a speech day at Shrewsbury, when he and a Mr. Tomline were standing as Tory candidates for the borough, the health of the latter was proposed as a ventleman educated at Eton,” and, according to a local journal, “the health of Mr. Disraeli was next given in connection with Winchester School, where he had been educated.’’ It is not very material whether, as some allege, Disraeli was at some time or another under a tutor in the Hampshire county town. It is certain he was never connected with the only school his audience would have understood as “‘Winchester.”’ It is equally certain, unless we assume a singular degree of malice and invention on the part of the local reporter, that he was not unwilling that his audience should think of him as a former pupil of one of the most famous schools in England. No doubt the announcement was the mistake of another, in which he merely acquiesced. Disraeli was no more incapable of telling an untruth than of profiting by an untruth already told. But no man of mature years, certainly no man as clever as he, would give birth to a lie so easy of detection. But, the statement having been made, he saw no reason to undeceive the com- pany, and he forgot the presence of the reporter. He could have had no premonition of what in the day of his fame would be made of this small incident. ‘The business is eloquent rather of incaution than of immorality; and stones have been thrown by people who have no missile to hurl against the invented pedigrees and disingenuous incompleteness of fact which swarm in Burke and Debrett. For the rest, the question of Disraeli’s schools is of small interest. His master at Walthamstow is said to have com- plained that he never understood the subjunctive. But heaa nC eS ee i Rs STi in le SN ES LI ial pe a Em sa ee Rl Ge DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 21 understood many things much more important, and all that was really important he taught himself. A much more essential fact than any relating to his schooling was his baptism, at the age of twelve years and seven months, as a member of the Church of England. On the eighth day of his life he had been “initiated into the Covenant of Abraham,” and therefore grew up a nominal as well as an actual Jew. His father, after the dispute with the synagogue, formed no new religious attach- ment, and saw no necessity for his children to make any formal change of profession. Isaac’s Gentile friends, however, repre- sented the advantages, from a civil point of view, of baptism. Samuel Rogers, the poet-banker, was among the insistent advocates of a course which would relieve the young people of the disabilities under which the unbaptised Jew still laboured —disabilities which, of course, would have closed public life to the future Prime Minister until long after all chance of suc- cess had passed. That Rogers, a man of notoriously loose life, employed any but material arguments is unlikely; and to Isaac, as to his friend, baptism would appear a mere formality. Benjamin was christened on July 31, 1817, shortly aiter the death of his grandfather. The ceremony took place at St. Andrews, Holborn. One of the sponsors was Sharon Turner, the Anglo-Saxon scholar; the other was a Mrs. Ellis, the wife of a literary critic. This good woman seems to have had a real if intermittent influence over the lad for some years. In one of his boyish memoranda appears the following resolu- tion : To be always sincere and open with Mrs. E. Never to say x . * + * = 1 but what | mean—point de moquerve, in which [ think I excel. Mrs. Ellis merits the gratitude of all good Disraelians for the part she took in making possible an Earl ot Beaconsfield, though it must be admitted that, in spite of her efforts, her godchild remained a mocker to the end. Isaac Disraeli had some idea of sending Benjamin to one of 1Quoted by Monypenny. He fails, however, to identify Mrs. E. with Mrs. Ellis.eel ne te { | / —— = 22 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT the universities, but this, like the public school project, was abandoned. The young man himself seems to have been for immediate experience of the world, as likely to teach him more than could be learned in the study of books. His earlier novels teem with contempt of academic ambition. “They spoke some- times of great men,” says Contarini Fleming of his tutors, “but their great men were always commentators. They some- times burst into a eulogium of a great work; you might be sure it was ever a huge bunch of annotations. An unrivalled exploit turned out to be a happy conjecture; a marvellous deed was the lion’s skin that covered the ears of a new reading. I was confounded to hear the same epithets applied to their obscure demigods that I associated with the names of Czsar, and Socrates, and Pericles, and Cicero. It was perplexing to find that Pharsalia or a Philippic, the groves of Academus or the fanes of the Acropolis, could receive no higher admiration than was lavished upon the unknown exploits of a hunter after syllables.” In Vivian Grey some youthful politician who had decided to spend three years at a university is spoken of as displaying “‘courage.’’ Youth to Disraeli, in short, was the time for great original deeds, and not for second-hand thoughts. He had ambitions which might be wild, but were definite. The first was to attain political power, for, like Fakredeen in Tancred, he “felt born with a predisposition to rule.’ There were moods, no doubt, in which he yearned for immortal fame as a writer, times when, like some of his heroes, he felt him- self craving to create, and esteemed nothing so glorious as the poet's power of giving shape to things not seen. But such dreams, though they returned from time to time, were not allowed to dominate. In Contarini Fleming we find the case put as, no doubt, it was often argued in his own mind: What were all those great poets of whom we talk so much? What were they in their life-time? 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 disgusting circumstances is the life of a great poet! A man of great energies aspires that theync cc SSR Bet Sd on eS Sad Sa Re = DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 23 should be felt in his life-time, that his existence shall be rendered more intensely vital by the constant consciousness of his multi- plied and multiplying power. Is posthumous fame a substitute for all this? As with art, so with other things. The end was not to express but to impress himself. By such a book as Viwan Grey he could challenge the world’s attention. By such a book as The Young Duke he could earn a much-needed cheque. By such a book as Alroy he could unburden his mind of his wilder thoughts, as some men rid themselves of their wilder passions, and feel his head the clearer for business when the thing was done. But if he cared little about art for art’s sake, he cared even less about money for money’s sake. When he gambled in Mexican mines, it was not that he wanted to be rich, but that he wanted “rascal counters” for the greater game. Every- thing in the Disraelian philosophy is a means to the one important end, which is to be a big sort of man, if not in this way, then in that. One must ride well, not that there is so much in riding, but because everybody who is anybody knows how to ride. One must be able to box, because one may have some day to chastise an impertinent person one cannot call out. One must know how to use a small-sword and a pistol, because an affair of honour cannot be refused. One must dance, because “without dancing you can never attain a per- fectly graceful carriage, which is of the highest importance in life.’ One must talk to women as much as one can, because that is “the best school,” and the easiest way to gain fluency, because “you need not care what you say, and had better not be sensible.” All these precepts of a very aged and shrewd Polonius Disraeli were charactered by a very young and ardent Laertes Disraeli. He cultivated gallantry with the calculation, though not with the baseness, of John Churchill. He watched himself critically, with sympathy but also without illusion, as if he had been a third party. “The nervous rapidity of my first rattle soon subsided into a continuous flow of easy nonsense. Im- pertinent and flippant, I was universally hailed an original24 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT a and awit. At the age of fifteen I had unexpectedly become one of the most affected, conceited, and intolerable atoms that ever peopled the sunbeam of society.” It is Contarini who speaks, but Benjamin was his twin brother. The handsome boy, with his ringlets and marvellous waistcoats, was anxious to catch the eyes of women, and ready to take the nearest means of doing so, but not because he was a natural puppy or because he attached much value to gallantries as an end in themselves, for, a philanderer at fifteen, he did not become a lover till the thirties. ‘The worthiest objects of the chase are women and power. After I married Mary Anne I desisted from the one and devoted my life to the pursuit of the other.” Thus Disraeli, grown middle-aged, who could afford to give prece- dence to women; the younger Disraeli would have placed power first, and indeed regarded women chiefly as the readiest means of getting power. He realised as justly as Napoleon, and at a much earlier age, the importance of women in affairs. No doubt he was fully aware also how far less are women than men influenced by racial prejudice. Florid as was the age, he overdressed the part of the Georgian dandy to a degree that incensed males. He carried rings too many in number and too brilliant in sparkle; his locks were too long and too heavily oiled; the slant of his tie was too insolently careless; the pat- tern of his waistcoat was over-gorgeous. But in the dress of a Methodist he would have still been unmistakably the Jew; and the insolent English youth would still have sneered. It was policy therefore to exaggerate. For if the men cursed his. dandified absurdities, they made the women in any company give him a second look; to look a second time was to note that he had wonderful eyes, and was as handsome in one way as Byron in another, and by then the Disraelian tongue potent as the serpent’s with Eve, had begun its work. But we are anticipating a little. Benjamin Disraeli, articled at seventeen to a firm of solicitors in Old Jewry, had little time between that age and his twentieth year to cultivate his natu- rally great social gifts. It is queer to think of him in the dull City office, with copying-presses and ‘“‘law calf’? round him, taking down letters from dictation, and making at least a showDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 25 of zeal—his head meanwhile full of strange fancies and fierce ambitions. As yet he went little into general society, and we can guess from Endymion how weary he felt of the dismal London of those days; but of literary men he saw something, and at the table of Murray the publisher he heard Tom Moore, whom he found “very entertaining,” discuss French wines and the growing stoutness of Byron. The acquaintance with Murray, formed through his father, was to have its results. There was a vague notion of his going to the Bar in due course; but, while seeming to acquiesce as a dutiful son, Ben- jamin had quite other ideas. ‘Law and bad jokes till we are forty, and then, with the most brilliant success, the prospect of gout and a coronet,” expressed his view of the profession on which the paternal heart was set; and when some sym- pathetic woman whispered that he had a genius above the office-stool his connection with Messrs. Swain, Stevens and Maples was as good as ended. During the three years of drudgery he dropped the apostrophe which his grandfather had assumed with the particle, and began to sign himself Disraeli instead of D’Israeli. He had grown to dislike the “foreign” look of the latter form. It was a delicacy of health which procured for him an easy though gradual release from his legal bondage. The law was not definitely given up, but interruption followed interruption, and Benjamin ceased to be a clerk almost as insensibly as the medizval peasant ceased to be a serf. His father’s decision to leave London and settle at Bradenham, near High Wycombe, made the break definite. The medical faculty no doubt has its technical explanation of the fits of giddiness which afflicted the young clerk. A lay imagination may, however, hazard the guess that, tied to a distasteful job, he had worn himself out by his impatience to get rid of it in one way or another. His indisposition was at least well timed. Coinciding with a wish on his father’s part for a change of scene, it resulted in a Continental tour through Belgium and up the Rhine. Ben- jamin’s diaries and his letters to his sister show him to have been a glutton for sensations, and skilful in describing them. In the Low Countries he sated himself with pictures and” he cries in the hour of his victory. “The decent patriarch ot a pastoral horde? Is the Lord of Hosts so light a God that we must place a barrier to his sovereignty. ... Well, I am clearly summoned . . . and where’s the priest shall dare impugn my faith because his altars smoke on other hills than those of Judah?” On the eve of Disraeli’s return to England in the summer of 1831 his friend Meredith died of smallpox at Cairo. He felt the loss keenly, and for his sister his grief was profound. of deep and strong natural affections, he was Always a man peculiarly happy in his family relations, but between him and ally there was the most perfect understanding, nce, a mass of which has been preserved, lingly lovable aspect. Sara made lith’s death devoted herselt de repaid her love his sister espect and their corresponde reveals both in an exceec Benjamin her idol, and after Merec entirely to his service while he on his st42 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT with all the tenderness of which in private life he was supremely capable. His most charming tribute to her is the delicate sketch of David Alroy’s love for his sister Miriam. Back from the East, with his mind and nerve restored to tone. he set himself again to literary labours. He had written much while abroad, and soon after his return was able to send the manuscript of Contarinit Fleming to Murray, with whom he was anxious to renew relations. Murray submitted it to Milman (afterwards Dean Milman, the editor of Gibbon), who thought it “very wild,’’ but recommended it for publication as a Childe Harold in prose. It was unfortunate, however, in the opportunity of its appearance. In 1532 Great Britain was too concerned in politics to have much time to spare for romantic fiction, and the book was at first scarcely noticed. Heine. however, declared that English letters had given “no offspring equal to Contarini Fleming,” and, regarded as auto- biography in the gangue, it is at least as precious as Vivian Grey. Contarini, a child of the Mediterranean, grows sadly up in a northern country. One day a stranger puts into his hand a book in which are inscribed the words: “Nature 1s more powerful than education” ; it is a history of his Venetian ances- tors. Another day, he, brought up a Lutheran, enters a Roman Catholic chapel, and immediately becomes a convert. Between them his historical reading and his religious meditation fill him with a passionate longing “‘to break away from those links which chained me as a citizen to a country which I abhorred.”’ Always before his eyes there gleams “the image of a distant and most romantic city.” Contarini is Disraeli in fancy dress. His visions of Venice are Disraeli’s visions of Jerusalem; his surrender to the Mass represents Disraeli’s craving for the Law. “Race,” said the author elsewhere, “is the key to history.” But for a while Contarini seeks to escape its influence. His father is all power- ful in the politics of his adopted country, and to the son, on reaching early manhood, “foreign policy opened a dazzling vista of splendid incidents.’ At a diplomatic meeting, by sheer audacity, he wins a triumph for the State he serves without love. ‘My son,” says his father, “you will be Prime Ministeree et . Gg re 2 See Saeed earner ee eee ee DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 43 of ———— perhaps something greater.”” But Contarini's fall is as sudden as his rise. He is tempted to write a satire in which he too openly ridicules the powers that be, and this error destroys the chance of acareer. Here, of course, is an apology for the indiscretions of Vivian Grey, addressed, no doubt, rather to Murray than to the political grandees, who cannot have taken it too seriously, or than to the public, which must have long forgotten even if it had been disinclined to forgive what, from its point of view, was scarcely an offence. Hence- forward the novel becomes much of a guide-book. There is a most charming and entertaining account of Disraeli’s travels in Spain, Italy, and the East; and in the end Contarini is left resolving to devote his life to the “creation of the beautiful.” Contarini Fleming reveals much of Disraeli as he was at the time he composed this “psychological romance.’ We see the stirring of the old blood, in contact with the mystery of Asia, ‘£ we substitute Palestine for the Italy of the text. We note the hesitation between political ambitions and the call of an artist’s temperament. We find once again the faith in impu- dence as an ingredient in statesmanship. but, strong as is his impulse to lyrical self-confession, Disraeli has now realised, as he did not in Vivian Grey, that he must not give too much away. He must speak in allegory. “Bitter jest,’ he exclaims in the last chapter, “that the most civilised portion of the globe should be considered incapable of self-government !” Contarin1 purports here to be lamenting the enslavement of Italy; but the cause which was to win English sympathy never gained Dis- raeli’s. Years later he championed the Austrian rule against Palmerston: and when he mourns over V enice and Naples he can only be understood to be weeping, with Rachel, over the oppressed children of Jewry. In Alroy, published in 1833, he was, as we have seen, bolder; but it must be remarked that there appeared with this novel a short story entitled The Kise of Iskander. In this he seeks to make the balance equal by glori- fying the Christian hero of Albania. No other purpose can be imagined. It is impossible to attribute sympathy with Christians struggling against the Moslem yoke to one who but4A DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT a few months before had meditated becoming a volunteer in the Turkish army operating in Iskander's own country. One other question must be considered. Did Disraeli ever “sbhor”’ England as Contarini “abhorred” the Scandinavian ~ land in which he passed his restless youth? Hostile critics have oe made much of the word. Admirers have carefully ignored it. An impartial judgment can hardly resist the conclusion that 1 Tr i j cy] i i there were moments when Disraeli did hate England and the English. He was proud, brave, sensitive: and there was much in the England of the time to affront his pride, rouse his spirit, lacerate his feelings. He was fully a citizen only because he had abjured the faith of his fathers. He was the orandson of a Jewess who almost cursed her race for the humiliations and limitations to which its blood condemned her. He had suffered contumely and petty oppression at school. In society he was snubbed, and even those who admired his talents and admitted his accomplishments must often have hurt as much by their patronage as his enemies wounded by their disdain. The old Governor at Gibraltar no doubt showed a sniffing sort of courtesy, the officers at Malta talked of the bumptious Jew boy. Tortured with a devouring ambition, Disraeli must have had moments of doubt whether all his pluck, all his ability, all his skill in the arts that raise obscurity would suffice to over- come the prejudice against his race and his origins. A lad of genius in such a situation could hardly love England. It 1s enough that he forgave, if he did not forget.CHAPTER Itt O far Disraeli had wavered between the literary and the political career. Everything now conspired to put an end to his hesitations. His strength was restored. He had come to understand, partially at least, his limitations as a writer. His elimpse of the East, rousing in him a full sense of the part played by the Semitic race in world history, had inflamed the will to rule. Further, there were strong practical reasons for preferring the life of action. The intense preoccupation of the public with political affairs lessened the possibility of large reward, either in fame or in money, from letters. There had been revolu- tions in France, Saxony, and the Netherlands, and in Britain the fear of a violent overthrow of the old order was constantly expressed. Such conditions promised ill for the unestablished novelist ; they held high hope for the political adventurer. In the confusion of old standards and currencies the chances were greater than dull and decorous times could afford for one lack- ing birth, wealth, connection, and even the education of the dominant caste. Moreover, it happened that a vacancy was expected in the Parliamentary representation of High Wycombe, a miniature borough almost at the gate of Braden- ham. To his friend Austen Disraeli confided that he intended to offer himself for the seat, and, spending most of the winter of 1831 at his father’s house, he divided his time between finishing his novels and nursing the constituency. The vacancy, however, did not come so soon as had been expected, and in the spring of 1832 he went to London. It was now that began that life of the salons which, according to some writers, he had led from his earliest manhood. He appears to have been received rather as the friend of Bulwer than as the son of his father or the author of Vivian Grey. Through Bulwer he met not only many peers and peeresses, dandies, 4546 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT literary men, and blue-stockings, but, what was more to the purpose, a certain number of people influential in politics. Dining with Lord Eliot (afterwards Earl St. Germans) he found himself one evening next to Sir Robert Peel, who was “most gracious” and “unbent with becoming haughtiness.” Disraeli replied with ‘‘dignified familiarity, © the attitude he considered proper on the part of “a present Radical’ towards a Tory ex-Minister. But most of the company he frequented was less serious, and though it may have been a couple of years later that he began to visit Lady Blessington, it was at the rooms of that queen of fashionable Bohemia that he completed his education in the ways of the polite world. There it was that he picked up an acquaintance with many distinguished and some disreputable people. Lady Blessington was a large- hearted potentate, and her charm, with the wit and talent of Count D’Orsay, made her house a kind of court at which the right of audience was the ability to be amusing. It was not a raffish society that met there, though it included raffish indi- viduals. ‘(Great ladies’ might frown on the equivocal estab- lishment, but their lords were for the most part less censorious, and there, as at a great modern gambling place or cure, it was possible to rub shoulders with the most substantial as well as with the most dubious of celebrities. It was there, no doubt, that Disraeli made his first advances to Lord Lyndhurst. There, probably, he met Louis Napoleon, whom, under the name of Prince Florestan, he was to describe in Endymion nearly half a century afterwards, and M. de Morny, later to become famous both as Minister of the Second Empire and a bravo of the Bourse, who may perhaps be identified with the Baron Sergius of the same novel. Some of his new acquaintances were decidedly expensive. The brilliant crowd included many young men at their wits’ end for money—some of them the spendthrift sons of rich fathers, others mere adventurers anxious whence the next week’s shot was to come. A Jew may not have money, but he is always suspected of being near it, and it was natural that Disraeli should listen to many tales of bills that must be re- newed and of loans that must be raised. He had old friendsScenes eecamensoe 9 a acne Mma Aiea tet eee 1. shah ano Sc Se aaa Se a ge es eg a eal DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 47 in the City, and if he could not lend money himself he could put his friends in the way of getting it, on terms. Good-natured and optimistic, he was always ready to oblige a friend and ever hopeful that the indirect advantage of doing so would in the long run outweigh the inconvenience which sometime fol- lowed. Thus he would back a bill, and if it were not met he would even borrow money to meet it himself. Froude vouches that he did so, though it 1s not easy to see what strictly commer- cial value his signature might have. Buta Jew who is a usurer is still a Jew, and there were, no doubt, a hundred obscure reasons why so talented a fellow-Jew should be allowed a good long stretch of rope. It is certain that Disraeli was obliging from calculation as well as from good-nature. In Vivian Grey he had written in his haste that if one made friends of women in society the men could be slighted, but that was a boyish opinion. Experience had taught him that the male, too, must be propitiated, and what a compliment is to a pretty woman, that—and more also—is a signature to a dissipated man. Froude suggests that except as providing lay figures for his literary work, the young men of the Blessington-D’Orsay set were to him of “a value less than zero.” That surely is a judg- ment lacking in worldly wisdom. Rakes and spendthrifts do not all of them go to the dogs. Many of them emerge as highly respectable people with a stake in the country. Justice Shallow, a connoisseur in bona robas when he lay at Clement’s Inn, ended up with land and beeves; and many of the most lavish sowers of wild oats who thought young Disraeli a devilish good fellow for arranging matters with Mr. Moss or Mr. Ahrens became 1n course of time pillars of the constitution. There are few things that bind like an early comradeship in joyous impecuni- osity, and the memory of ancient follies and ancient debts gave Disraeli in after years an intimate claim on the consideration of old fellow-Bohemians. Moreover, his variegated experience of life secured him, as a statesman, an advantage over colleagues and rivals who had been the industrious apprentices of politics. To live is to learn, and no one lives or learns who never quits respectability. A clever German-Jewish journalist, he who calls himself Maximilian Harden, once declared that the diplo-48 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT matic superiority of King Edward VII over the Emperor William was due to the difference in the ways they had spent their salad days. The one had been intimate with many sorts of men and women, while the latter grew to maturity knowing human nature only as it is revealed in courts. At any rate Disraeli, who should be an excellent judge of his own life, never regretted the experiences of his youth, and from Endymion may be gathered his contempt in old age for Ministers whose sole knowledge of men had been gained in Downing Street or in decorous country houses. While waiting for the Wycombe vacancy he made a definite entry into the political world with a pamphlet published under the title of Gallomania. Ten years later he was to be advocate of a close alliance with France, and the general character of his foreign policy was extremely friendly to the French. But it was now necessary to attack the Whigs, since at High Wycombe he would need the support of both Radicals and Conservatives. On the dominant question of reform he was obliged to sit on the fence, for fear of offending either of the schools to which he looked for votes. On foreign policy, however, he could not only speak freely but indulge in useful hysteria. Nine hun- dred and ninety-nine Englishmen in a thousand held the general notion that Frenchmen were un-English, which was perfectly true, and therefore abominable, which was a shade less true. But Palmerston, the Whig Foreign Secretary, had a certain natural sympathy with the new Orleans monarchy, and for the moment was working in co-operation with Louis Philippe’s Government. Disraeli judged righty that he could not do wrong in attacking a policy so untraditional, and his “‘very John Bull book,” as he described it to his sister, is thick and slab with the commonplaces of patriotism—‘“unnatural alliances,”’ “hereditary foes,” and so forth. Ingredients were added to the cauldron by a German Jew and a renegade Frenchman of the familiar emugré@ type. The gruel did little credit to the trio; as a serious contribution to the discussion of international politics Gallomamia is beneath contempt; but it served its imme- diate purpose: The Times honoured it with a leading article;DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 4.9 and it is worth notice still as illustrating the author’s growing realism. He was learning one great lesson in the politician's art—to humour the mob in matters esteemed indifferent in order to get one’s way in those considered vital. Later, when he had drawn closer to the Tories, but was still anxious not to estrange the Radicals, Disraeli showed similar discretion in avoiding the home policy of the Whigs and plunging into furious invective against their agreement with the Irish Catho- lics. No reader of Popanilla can imagine Disraeli’s mind as tinged with the mildest shade of orange, but Ireland, like the Continent, was a safe subject for the hustings. Few knew any- thing about it, but nearly everybody had prejudices, and a rousing speech, while doing good to the orator and harm to his enemies, was not likely to affect the main issue one way or the other. In June 1832 the expected vacancy at length occurred, and Disraeli arrived at Wycombe with letters of recommendation from Daniel O’Connell, Sir Francis Burdett, and Joseph Hume, all obtained through the good offices of Bulwer. Hume with- drew his support when he discovered that Disraeli was oppos- ing the Whig, but the young candidate, convinced that he was taking the town by storm, was undismayed. His public entry into the borough seems to have been exceptionally theatrical even for those days, and for a parallel to his dress and de- meanour we have to seek the pages of fiction. Except that he was very much better looking, Disraeli must have closely re- sembled the hero of Ten Thousand a Year when he sought the suffrages of Yatton. He came in a carriage drawn by four horses; his coat, laced and ruffled, was lined with pink silk; and a blue band added glory to his hat. As he drove through the streets he blew kisses at all the women and girls, and, dis- mounting at the Red Lion Inn, he addressed the crowd from the portico for an hour and a half. According to his own ac- count he made his auditors “all mad”; many cried; and poor tongue-tied Colonel Grey, the Prime Minister's son, who could only stumble lamely through a short written speech, was so out- classed that Disraeli told his sister he would “never dare ap- pear again.” On the other hand, the Bucks Gazette made50 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT merry at the “harlequinade”’ of Benjamin's triumphal proces- sion, and, while admitting ‘“‘some ability” in his speech, spoke of him as a “popinjay” and the “Adonis of the sable cheek.”’ Though supported by the Tory paper, and employing a Tory as his agent, Disraeli’s main appeal was to the Radicals. It was here that he made the declaration that he was “sprung from the people.” This expression has been used to suggest that Disraeli was not only aware of a plebeian origin but re- joiced in it. But it was also at Wycombe that he said, “T am not disposed to admit that my pedigree is not as good as that of the Cavendishes.” A patrician pose was in fact one of the constants in a life of many shifts and changes. “Sprung from the people” is an ambiguous phrase. To the crowd it implied kinship with Tom, Dick, and Harry, which Disraeli would not for a moment have admitted. To the orator himself it had an esoteric meaning. “THE PEOPLE” from whom he was sprung were the chosen people. In the still unreformed borough, with its tiny electorate, he could obtain only twelve votes to Grey’s twenty-three. Ina few months the dissolution gave him his second chance, this time with an enlarged register. The Whigs, he had written to The Times after his June defeat, had opposed him, and they should repent it. But they “never could have cast him off, since he had never had the slightest connection with them.” He declared that Lord John Russell had once put forward a fishing inquiry as to whether the Whigs could count on his support, and that he had replied with a quip. ‘You have one claim on my support,” he said, “you need it.” It is not easy to imagine the cold and proud Russell making timid advances to a young adventurer; but the story well illustrates Disraeli's own state of mind. He was taking himself with portentous gravity. About this time he met Melbourne and flabbergasted him with the almost casual announcement that he wanted to be Prime Minister; and the tone of his second election address at Wycombe contrasts queerly in its audacity with the actual posi- tion of the candidate, bothered with debts and regarded askance by respectability. “I come forward,” he wrote, “wearing the badge of no party and the livery of no faction’; and he askedDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 51 the voters to declare against the official politicians. “Rid our- selves of all that political jargon and factious slang of Whig and Tory—two names with one meaning used only to delude you—and unite in forming a great national party which can alone save the country from impending destruction.” Such language is common form with independent candidates, who in England are commonly foolish or vulgarly self-seeking men, and there was little to warn the political world of 1830 that these particular words emanated from one who, though a careerist, was also a man of genius and amazing vision. The rest of the address 1s a curious blend of Toryism and Radical- ism. Disraeli denounced political nepotism, demanded tri- ennial Parliaments, and promised to support any change in the Corn Laws which would “relieve the customer without in- juring the farmers.” He desired an alteration in the tithe system, yet appeared to favour an increase in the influence of the Church. He called for economy, but could follow no Gov- ernment which did not originate “some great measure to ameliorate the condition of the lower orders.” He was pre- pared to vote for the ballot, and told the people to rouse them- selves. Much of this was pure Radicalism, and yet every line suggested a Tory accent. The names most often on his lips were those of Bolingbroke and Sir William Wyndham. Some called him a Radical Tory, others a Tory Radical; he called himself a Nationalist. In Gallomania he had said that his politics could be described in the one word “England,” and perhaps there is no better short description, if we add that England was chiefly important in his eyes as claiming the allegiance of Benjamin Disraell. There is, of course, one sense in which the Jew posing as an English Nationalist must provoke a smile, but it is clear that Disraeli had a much juster conception than any native Englishman of what England then was. To him belonged the universal vision which had departed from the islanders with their exit from the European system under Henry VIII. He could see England with the eyes of a foreigner, or even more clearly, since he was free from the distortion of a foreigner’s antipathies or idealisations. He had not perhaps a deep knowl-oc ee a a | ' t 4 a greens aes 52 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT edge of English history, but what he had read he had read critically, and he knew how little Hampden loved liberty or Cromwell democracy. He could see all the more justly, as member of a race separated from the soil, how little the accu- mulations of commerce compensated for the destruction of a free peasantry. He could dismiss with contempt the common delusion that “progress” meant improvement all the time and in every way. He realised, as few others did, that the old oligarchy had broken down, and that there must be, to save ultimate anarchy, something in the nature of a Patriot King supported by a patriotic people. What he did not see was that the English hatred of ideas, the English contempt of mere ideologues, would make him suspect and impotent until he had, by quite irrelevant performances, given himself a commanding position in public life. He did not yet understand the English national mind. He thought it could be fired with enthusiasm for abstract principles. He did not understand that it was chiefly interested in politics as a gladiators’ show, and that therefore the independent candidate must be an annoying ele- ment of confusion in the political game. The second Wycombe election helped to open his eyes. Like the first, it ended in his discomfiture. The two Whig candi- dates, Colonel Grey and Mr. G. R. Smith, a brother of Lord Carrington, were returned, and Disraeli was at the bottom of the poll. Publicly he attributed his defeat to the fact that he was not of “noble blood’’; privately he suggested that he had lost because he could spend only £80 on the campaign, whereas Colonel Grey had expended ten times as much. But in any case there was little chance for a young man of no great consequence, who could be accused by the Tories of Radicalism and by the Radicals of Toryism. Disraeli next issued an address to the electors of the county, but withdrew when he found that two Tories had already been nominated. In the spring of 1833 he dallied with the borough of Marylebone, and published the pamphlet, What is he?, in order to rebut the charge that, because he belonged to no party, he was destitute of fixed principles. In this publication he urged a coalition between Tories and Radicals, who shouldDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 53 merge both nicknames in “the common, the intelligible, and the dignified title of a National Party.” Froude refers to the “ambitiously neutral tint” of this pronouncement. It was im- partial, but certainly not neutral. Indeed, it would be difficult to conceive anything less indecisive. Disraeli saw that the Reform Act had brought to an end the old era of purely aristo- cratic government. He foresaw that the compromise which was actually to be adopted, the working arrangement between the old wealth of the land and the new wealth of industrialism, must end in estranging the bulk of the population from the national life. His vision seems even to have reached to what has at last arrived—two nations with two Governments, the one in possession of the executive machinery, the other armed with the power of the vote and the ability, when it likes, to em- barrass and even strangle the means by which all the com- munity lives. He invariably speaks of trade unions with a certain awe, as if foreseeing the mischief which was to come of giving the working man political power without associating him with the national government. In What is he? we find more than a hint of the policy afterwards developed in Con- ingsby and Sybil. Disraeli’s views then, as ever, are sharp and clear. There is no English woolliness in his mind. When- ever he appears guilty of inconsistency or tergiversation, it 1S his sense of the expedient, and no impediment in his thought, which is responsible. Thus at Marylebone he has a sop for the urban elector. He advocates a change in taxation “with the object of relieving industry from those incumbrances which property is more capacitated to bear.’’ Here speaks the Disraell of shifts and devices. The real Disraeli, who knew that no development of town wealth will compensate for decline in the enterprise which is based on the land, is seen eighteen months later in a speech at Aylesbury: No nation could ever do without agriculture, and a peasantry attached to it: as for the manufacturers of Birmingham or Manchester, they would, if it suited them at any time, migrate to Belgium, France, or Egypt. The agriculturists had a spirit of patriotism.54 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT Time has proved the general truth of this much derided as- sertion, though its full moral has yet to be appreciated. But the nineteenth century critics of Disraeli could never grasp that when Disraeli spoke for agriculture he was not thinking solely or even chiefly of the great landlords. He was thinking of a people in process of being as surely dispossessed as his own had been. Two critical lines, both equally vain, are commonly taken as to the early adventures of Disraeli. The first is to interpret every change of front as indicating a deep-seated depravity, an absence of principle going far beyond the levity allowable in a young and impressionable man. The other is to explain, by the distortion of facts or the manufacture of motives, that there never was a time when Disraeli played for safety, spoke with his tongue in his cheek, or bent his knee in the House of Rimmon. The plain truth would seem to be that he entered life with political convictions which remained little changed by the lapse of half a century. But he also entered it with the personal conviction that Benjamin Disraeli must have a career. Apart from one or two weaknesses, chiefly connected with his race, no man ever had his mind clearer of cant. But he was by no means averse from the use of cant as a medium of polit- ical exchange. He was desperately anxious to reach the House of Commons, and to achieve that end he would just as soon flatter a pack of London shop-keepers as weave a web of en- chantments round a Buckinghamshire grandee. What he would not do so far was to deliver himself over intellectually to any gang or any individual. Nothing came of the Marylebone business, and Disraeli returned to “lounging and pleasure,’ with the sheriff's officer always in the offing. It was now, in his thirtieth year, that a crisis happened in his private life. He fell in love with the woman who served as the model for Henrietta Temple in the novel of that name. The affair lasted for three years, and in- volved him in an excitation which threatened his political am- bitions. Just before meeting the original of Henrietta he had written to his sister in that tone of calm and confident cynicismSN ee ER EET Fe ee Sa eee etary dhe Rr DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 55 which is so often succeeded in men of his type by a wave of passion : 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 of infelicity. A few months afterwards he was writing in his diary, quoted by Mr. Monypenny: One incident has indeed made this year the happiest of my life. How long will these feelings last? Even when his passion was at its fiercest, however, he had his doubts. That he, the convinced philanderer, was for once in his life under the dominion of an impulse so strong that he felt “fame a juggle and posterity a lie,” is certain. Huis nature was affectionate; his imagination vivid. But he was of the type which resents the slavery of love even in the rapture of the first surrender. From his biographers little can be gathered as to the character of his relations with the lady or as to the reasons which led him to end them. But more may be learned from the novel if we identify Henrietta Temple with his own Henrietta and Ferdinand Armine with himself. It would then be inferred that she was an unmarried girl, but that circumstances permitted a degree of intimacy unusual be- tween single persons of opposite sex in those closely chaper- oned days. It may also be surmised that the eventual cause of parting was the lady’s lack of means and the lover’s money embarrassments. The difficulties keep Armine and Henrietta apart until the last chapters. For the sake of the conventional happy ending the novelist at last finds her a great fortune, the romance of flesh and blood ended, as most flesh and blood romances do, in a confession of failure. Henrietta Temple, Dr. Brandes has written, “is altogether a book that speaks from the heart,’ and no discriminating reader can escape the im- pression that it is in the main as autobiographical as Daud Copperfield. Was the real Henrietta the wonderful being of56 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT the book, “‘a rare and extraordinary combination of intellectual strength and physical softness,” and one “for whom a man of genius would willingly peril the empire of the world?” The words were written under the dominion of a passion which “sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt,” and is equally prone to find wit in mere pertness, calm wisdom in stolidity, and gay innocence in coarseness. These questions are not readily re- solved owing to the inhuman reticence of those who should know much about the affair. We are left in doubt as to the extent of his actual commitment. Eminently masculine in mind, he was on the whole curiously sexless in the better known periods of his life; loving women’s society he apparently de- rived his chief pleasure from their prattle and their counsel; the desire of possession seems to have been small, and it 1s to be conjectured that Disraeli’s grand passion, powerfully as it affected his imagination, had no very robust animal basis. But whoever and whatever Henrietta was, whatever the charm with which she held his love, and whatever the degree to which her love got the better of his judgment and restraint, her reign came in due course to anend. Disraeli decided not to imperil on her account “‘the empire of the world,” or even his own then very problematical career. Nor does the affair, serious as it was while it lasted, seem to have left any permanent wound. The cynical wisdom so suddenly dropped is as suddenly resumed.’ * Henrietta in the novel is an unmarried girl. Was the real Henrietta a married woman? The following points are submitted for the con- sideration of the reader :— (1) The freedom with which she and Disraeli met, to be inferred not only from the novel but from Buckle’s references and questions from diaries, etc. (2) The length of time the affair lasted. Three years with no apparent suggestion of an engagement. (3) Buckle’s cautious and reticent handling of this passage in Disraeli’s life. (4) Disraeli’s acquaintance at this period with the wife of a certain Sir Francis Sykes, née Henrietta Villebois. Published fragments of Disraeli’'s papers show that, while he had no notion of Sir Francis’s conversation, he found Lady Sykes attractive. Sichel. in his Disraeli: A Study in Personality and Ideas, makes the curious remark that Lady Aphrodite, in The Young Duke, may have been drawn from “a certain Lady Sykes.” (5) If Lady Sykes were the Henrietta of Disraeli’s romance, 1t can be well understood why he brought the love affair to an end for the sake of his career.Rae he A ss AA nT i i Tats PN et Ta he eet a pee et a io = e . . - e DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 57 Despite the “lounging and pleasure” of this period, or per- haps even because of it, Disraeli was consolidating his position. By this time he could claim friends in great numbers and of all varieties. We see him becoming from the protégé the familiar of Count D’Orsay, Lady Blessington’s son-in-law, and we have a delightful letter in which the distinguished Bohemian, himself always in difficulties, lectures Disraeli on the futility of merely patching up his affairs—‘Tous ces plasterings-over,” he says, cannot take the place of a funda- mental settlement, preferably with old Isaac’s money. We see him with his so potent charm stirring the withered but still susceptible heart of the old countess of Cork, who had once enchanted Johnson and now loved one of whom Johnson might well have said piquant things. “Two duchesses at least give him a welcome that never wore thin. He is introduced to Almack’s and put up for Crockford’s. Among politicians he is now on a footing of intimacy with Lord Lyndhurst; he finds the Duke of Wellington “very civil’; while Lord Durham and Daniel O’Connell are useful in maintaining touch with the party in power. If nothing of length proceeded from his pen, he could afford to rest on his laurels, for his social successes had revived interest in Vivian Grey and the other novels, and there was now no danger of oblivion. He had more recently published two short satires entitled Jxion in Heaven and The Infernal Marriage. They have as much humour as wit, and he who wrote them must have been a happier man than the author of Popanilla. He himself is [xion, the mortal whom the immor- tals cannot awe, who examines their godhead with a cool scep- ticism, and at last falls through excess of daring. In The Infernal Marriage there is a touch of deeper thought. The comparison between the Elysians, “the very cream of terres- trial society,” and “The Gnomes,” a nation “made on purpose to wait on them,” has its sting; and there is a touch of personal bitterness in the tribute to the liberal nature of the Elysians, who, even if their social inferiors ‘could do nothing better then write a poem or a novel,” would always give them a bow, and “sometimes indeed even admitted them into their circles.” To the same period belongs The Revolutionary Epick pub-j yl nv, | . ie ; | : Tt V 58 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT lished in 1834, an ambitious literary adventure which can only be explained on the assumption that the Henrietta affair had produced a violent exaltation of mind. Disraeli, possessor of a poetical temperament, was not a poet. He had the poet's vision but not the power of giving shape to what he saw. nt was on the plains of Troy,’ he writes, “that I first conceived the idea of this work,” and he goes on in a strain that suggests that he had persuaded himself that he was in the hierarchical succession to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton. “Like the lightning which was then playing over Ida,” it flashed across his mind that the poet had ever embodied the spirit of his age. The Jliad was a heroic, the Aeneid a political, the Divine Comedy a national, Paradise Lost a religious Epic. “What,” I exclaimed, “the Revolution of France a less important event than the Siege of Troy? Is Napoleon a less interesting char- acter than Achilles? For me remains the Revolutionary Epick.”” Despite these brave words, however, some doubt re- mains to torture the ambitious young bard. He confesses that he was perhaps too rash to deem himself a Poet, and declares himself ready—a most unpoetlike attitude—to accept the ver- dict of his contemporaries; if it were unfavourable, he pro- posed, without a pang, to “hurl his lyre to Limbo.”’ These mis- givings are to be traced to a private recital of a canto of the epic, given before a small literary company at Austen's house. Samuel Warren, the author of Ten Thousand a Year, retorted with an impromptu parody, and the general reception was such that Disraeli’s sincerest friends discouraged him from further service to the muse. Nothing, however, could restrain him from challenging a public verdict. But when the beginning of the work was published he became convinced that Limbo was the fitting destination of his lyre, and the Epick was never completed. Thirty years after its unhappy ghost returned to haunt him. A political antagonist quoted some lines to show that the Disraeli, then a Conservative leader, had once been an advocate of tyrannicide: And blessed be the hand that dares to wave The regicidal steel that shall redeem A Nation’s sorrow with a tyrant’s blood.LES ERT I I AE YE EE ET DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 59 Two effective replies were open to him. He might have said that the sentiments were not his own, but those of one of the characters in the poem, or he might have pleaded the indiscre- tion of youth, with the added remark that if he had erred he had erred in pious company, since Mr. Gladstone himself had once concocted an ode to the Cato Street conspirators. Instead he took the very foolish step of reprinting the Epick, with the more bloodthirsty passages softened, thus giving point to a frivolous charge, and enabling John Bright to make more out of his evasion than the original affair justified. It 1s certain, for the rest, that Disraeli had never intended the Epick as a revolutionary manifesto. On the eve of publication, indeed, he had asked the Duke of Wellington to accept its dedication. If, as an author, Disraeli in love showed some signs of the imperfect balance common to that malady, the period was one in which he shone socially. His “wonderful powers of conver- sation” are attested in many memoirs of the thirties, and he was everywhere beginning to be marked as one of the charac- ters of the day—not as yet, however, in the least a serious character. The American writer, N. P. Willis, who met him at Lady Blessington’s, wrote in Pencillings by the Way: He is lividly pale, and, but for the energy of his action and the strength of his lungs, would seem to be the victim of con- sumption. His eye is black as Erebus, and has the most mocking, lying-in-wait sort of expression conceivable. .. . His hair is as extraordinary as his taste in waistcoats. A thick, heavy mass of jet black ringlets falls over his left cheek almost to his collarless stock, while on the right temple it is parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a girl's. On the evening that this chronicler met him Disraeli “in thrilling accents” related the famous story of the death of Sars- field. He gave it some astonishing embellishments and was wrong on every point of fact. The Jacobite General, mortally wounded at Landen, became in his tale ‘‘an Irish dragoon who was killed in the Peninsula,” and his cry, “If that had been fora 60 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT Ireland!” was introduced as a toast which the Iris hero pro- posed over a silver goblet which he had “filled with his own blood.”’ Yet, elsewhere, Willis writes that Disraeli was “any- thing but a declaimer,” and that if he caught himself in a rhetorical sentence he would mock at himself in the next breath. Both statements are no doubt true, though they are not recon- ciled; it can be well understood how swift changes of mood left all such observers gasping or carping. Simple people who looked for consistency were bound to find such a man as Dis- raeli merely incredible as anything but a mountebank and poser. They could not understand that the great man, notwithstanding the favourite generalisation of the biographers, is never simple. He may often have simplicity, which is a very different thing; but the very nature of greatness is a mixture of elements. Thus irony is on the whole the sworn foe of poetry, but the greatest of poets are always ironists. Shakespeare is so great because he can always laugh at himself in his sublimest flights; Milton is so much less great because he can never laugh at himself or, for that matter, at anything. Gladstone was a political Milton; Disraeli a political Shakespeare. Gladstone took Gladstone with the complete seriousness in which a horse takes itself, Disraeli in one sense always and sometimes in many senses took himself very seriously, but there were also times when it did appear to him exceedingly funny that he, a “forked radish,’ should have thoughts that reached the stars. He could, in short, mock at himself as well as at others: and that is disconcerting to equine types of men. But when he pleased he could charm all but everybody, and could suit himself to very different companies. He was steeped in Byron, and in advance of many of his contemporaries recognised the genius of Shelley; yet when he found himself sitting by some gushing young “blue” he could delight her with the assurance that Bob Southey was the greatest genius of the age. With great men, or at least men in great place, he had now gone far. On Lyndhurst and Durham, potentates in opposite camps, he had made a deep impression. The Duke of Welling- ton was civil, though a little cold. With the Marquess of Chandos, a power in Buckinghamshire, he played as cleverly asa a ee Seceneendiiaainetenetah a a a OG I a eS ia OU DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 6] Vivian Grey with his Marquess. But there was still little progress towards the realisation of his ambition. It was not merely the poor man’s normal difficulty of getting anything out of a rich man or even making the rich man pay a just price for what he takes. here was a most real difficulty of deciding which set of rich men to take up with. Disraeli to the mar- row of his bones was an enemy to Whiggism—if he held a con- stant principle it was this—and he had moreover the pre- science to see that, though the Whigs had come back with a majority of three hundred on the morrow of the Act, they had no staying power. They had only dealt with symptoms; the disease remained. The real demand was not votes, but bread; the people were not satisfied with the abolition of a few rotten boroughs; they wanted the removal of rotten economic condi- tions. The formations of trade unions filled with pained amaze Ministers such as Grey and Melbourne, who had imagined that all would be well once Manchester and Birmingham sent Mem- bers to Westminster. The Dorchester labourers who had had the audacity to combine were duly put on the sea to Australia; but there was no thought of dealing with the causes of their discontent; for the distress the Whigs had a single remedy— the workhouse. In Ireland, also, affairs were going from bad to worse; the Catholics were now theoretically emancipated, but in practice were excluded from every office of profit, and Stanléy, the Viceroy, was applying coercion in the harshest and least imaginative fashion. As Melbourne put it, “What all the wise men promised had not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen had come to pass.’ Reform and emancipation had brought no peace, but a new armoury of swords. Here, if ever, was the time for the renovation of the Tory Party which Disraeli’s speeches had advocated at Wycombe. But, unfortunately, of the two Tory leaders neither was likely to impress the national mind. There was little promise in Wel- lington, with his rigid military character, or in Peel, earnest and intelligent, but wholly lacking in imagination. The Radi- cals, with whom Disraeli still hoped an alliance might be formed, were little better. ‘The cant of Radicalism,’ says62 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT Froude, “was becoming distasteful to Disraeli.” Would it not have been truer to say that the spirit of Radicalism was y and bucolic patriot- changing? It was passing from the sturd ‘cm of William Cobbett to the pedlaresque internationalism of Richard Cobden, and rapidly becoming a merely urban and sectional creed. To Disraeli there was now simply a choice between two evils. To join any party was to limit himself, but experience had taught him the difficulty of standing alone. With a General Election apparently imminent, he decided that the main thing was to get a seat, and he was prepared, since no party offered him a creed to which he could unreservedly subscribe, to support that party which was ready to recognise him. He had friends in both camps. On the one side Lynd- hurst and Chandos were both working for him, and he believed, though probably without ground, that Wellington was doing as much. At the same time he did not hesitate to solicit the aid of Durham, who, however, after the manner of Radical Peers, was chary of committing himself and finally offered nothing but good wishes. A man thus willing to accept support from politicians as opposed as the High Tory Chandos, whom the slang of a late period would have dubbed a genuine backwoodsman, and the head of the House of Lambton, who rejoiced in the nickname of “Radical Jack,” could hardly escape suspicion. “A mighty impartial personage,” Greville described him. “I do not think,” he added, “such a man will do, though just such as Lord Lyndhurst would be connected with.” Lyndhurst, a spiritual ancestor of Lord Birkenhead, had few prejudices. Of Irish- American descent, the son of the painter Copley, a former Radical and almost a Jacobin, he was commonly conceived as being encumbered with no unnecessary impedimenta in the way of scruple, and he saw in his Jewish friend a fellow opportunist who would no doubt slough his whimsies the moment he arrived at Westminster. The patronage of a lawyer-statesman of this brilliant type was of dubious benefit to one whose vacillations had earned more distrust that they perhaps really merited, and Lyndhurst failed in his attempt to get the borough of Lynn, an appanage of the Bentinck family, for Disraeli. The ques-RE SE ES a I ee a ie DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 63 tion was put to Lord George Bentinck, afterwards to be so Closely allied with Lyndhurst’s protégé, but, according to Greville, Lord George “would not hear of him.” Meanwhile history was being rapidly made. In November, 1834, the King broke the rules of the Constitutional game, dismissed his Whig Ministers, and sent for Wellington, who advised him to ask Peel, who was then at Rome, to undertake charge of affairs. “It was a lively season, that winter of 1834,” wrote Disraeli in Coningsby. People sprang up like mushrooms; town suddenly became full. Everybody who had been in office, and everybody who wished to be in office; everybody who had ever had anything and everybody who ever expected to have anything, were alike visible. All of course by mere accident. ... But, after all, who were to form the Government, and what was the Govern- ment? Was it to be a Tory Government, or an Enlightened- Spirit-of-the-Age, Liberal-Moderate, Reform Government; was it to be a Government of high philosophy or of low prac- tice; of principle or of expediency; of great measures or of little men? A Government of statesmen or of clerks? Of Humbug or of Humdrum. Great questions these, but unfor- tunately there was nobody to answer them. Also, to judge from the conversation of Tadpole and Taper in the same novel, it was a season of much wire-pulling, in which Disraeli, no doubt, was not idle. But the coveted nom- ination did not materialise, and in the end he went for a third time to Wycombe, 1n a hopeless attempt to prevail against the Carrington-Grey interest. Although he was now recognised as the Tory candidate his address, later issued as a pamphlet under the title of The Crisis Examined, retained much of his old independence. Thus of Ireland he wrote that a year “must not pass over without the very name of Tithes in that country being abolished for ever” and to the English Dissenters he expressed himself equally liberal in the matter of Church rates. Yet, refusing to toe any line, he was emphatic against disen- dowment. “I know,” he said, “the love that great lords, and especially great Whig Lords, have for Abbey lands and great64 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT tithes: I remember Woburn, and I profit by the reminiscence.” His chief card, however, was relief for agriculturists, and on such a matter as the malt tax he used language which every farmer’s boy could understand. To the fallen Whigs he showed no mercy, but he would not yet commit himself to Pee]. “I am for measures, gentlemen,’ he said, “not men.” 24t the most remarkable passage at this time of day is that ‘n which he stated his views on consistency : A statesman is the creature of his age, the child of circum- stance, the creation of his times. A statesman is essentially a practical character. Lhe conduct and opinions of public men at different periods of their career must not be too curiously contrasted in a free and aspiring country. The people have their passions, and it is even the duty of public men occasionally to adopt sentiments with which they do not sympathise, because the people must have leaders. Disraeli, who believed in great men and the power of genius to overcome all obstacles, would almost certainly have agreed with Mr. Chesterton that the Zeitgeist is the one ghost which has never existed. ‘The spirit of the age is the very thing that a great man changes,’ says Sidonia in Coningsby. Sidonia’s creator did not utter the words quoted above as a mere apology for himself. [hey were written in anticipatory defence of the Conservative leaders, the men who had opposed emancipation and had stood for “conservation of Chaos,” but who, Disraeli now hoped, were about to promulgate a national and even a democratic policy. Peel would in that case be accused of turning his coat; Disraeli would welcome his ap- pearance in new colours, always supposing that the colours were to his taste. But Peel decided to be colourless. He issued the mass of elegant platitudes known as the Tamworth Mani- festo. Disraeli’s contempt, his bitter disappointment for that famous document, is eloquently expressed in Coningsby: The Tamworth Manifesto of 1834 was an attempt to con- struct a party without principles; its basis therefore was neces- sarily Latitudinarianism; and its inevitable consequence has been Political Infidelity.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 65 Instead of reviving Toryism, it inaugurated something called Conservatism : Conservatism assumes in theory that everything established should be maintained; but adopts in practice that everything that is established is indefensible. To reconcile this theory and this practice, they produce what they call “the best bargain’; some arrangement which has no principle and no purpose, ex- cept to obtain a temporary lull of agitation until the mind of the Conservative without a guide and without an aim, dis- tracted, tempted, and bewildered, is prepared for another ar- rangement, equally statesmanlike with the preceding one. Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for Antiquity, it offers no redress for the Present, and makes no preparation for the Future. Such was Disraeli’s frank opinion of the new policy, which so Closely reflected the cold and unimaginative nature of its author. To Peel three courses were open. He could maintain a merely obstructive attitude to all change, but with an elec- torate no longer to be sacred with Jacobins “sprung from night and hell’ that promised failure. He could revive Toryism as a positive and creative thing, fighting the old Whig Oligarchs and the new plutocracy, and forming an alliance of Throne, Church, and People. That was Disraeli’s plan, and there were some of the elements which promised success. Great numbers of people, weary of faction, were favourable to a moderate restoration of the Royal prerogatives, and the King’s dismissal of the Whig Ministers was decidedly popular. The Church was beginning to feel the effects of the ferment which the Wesleyan movement had, strangely enough, set working, though its effect was to stimulate ideas extremely unlike Wes- ley’s. The frost of eighteenth-century rationalism was losing its grip, and a new race of priests, keenly alive to the evils which had grown up in an age of practical unbelief, was exer- cising great influence on a new race of aristocrats. As for the masses, they were, to put the matter at its lowest, better disposed to distant tyrants than to the oppressors of the fields and the factories.66 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT But clearly any such policy demanded a great man. Whether Disraeli himself, under favouring circumstances, could have risen to the splendour of his own visions can now be only a matter of conjecture. It is certain that Peel, in no circum- stances. could have succeeded in giving to Toryism this charac- ter. He was above all a man of negative mind; too much ‘nterested in the working of the political machine to think much about its purpose, still less about the ultimate consequences of its operation. Superb in defence, he resembled those gen- erals who are admired for the perfect manner in which they lose a campaign. Where another man would look for victory, his mind was occupied with contriving the wholly satisfactory formula and explanation of surrender. In a word, his sole policy was to leave the initiative to the enemy, to delay and trip him up, and finally to secure at the sacrifice of his own rank-and-file honourable treatment and good consideration for himself. That was the secret of the Tamworth Manifesto. What was Disraeli to do? He saw, as clearly as man could see, that the policy was one of despair, that it must fail, and that some day the leader of “the gentlemen of England” would be re- pudiated as a betrayer. But meanwhile Peel was the head of a party which, by the unpopularity of the Whigs, was bound to come into office. It was Quixotism to let the chance go. Dis- raeli threw in his lot with the new Conservatism, not because of the Tamworth Manifesto, rather in spite of it. The thing might be annoyingly stupid. But atter all a stupid party has its advantages for a clever young man. In 1834 the die was cast. Disraeli is now to be classified as a Conservative.CHAP TER TLV. OR the third time the verdict of Wycombe went against Disraeli. In his Life of Wellington, Sir Herbert Maxwell quotes a letter which the defeated candidate wrote on the morrow of the poll: I have fought our battle and I have lost it. I am now a cipher ; but if the devotion of my energies to your cause, In and Out, can ever avail you, your Grace may count upon me, who seeks no greater satisfaction than that of serving a really great man. Disraeli could never condescend to the niceties of syntax, and occasionally his taste was no less defective than his gram- mar. What the Iron Duke thought of this somewhat excessive protestation of devotion must remain conjectural, but the third person note of acknowledgment suggests no great eagerness to bind Disraeli to him. Others, however, were more responsive. The General Elec- tion, though it cost the Whigs heavily, still left the Conserva- tives in a minority of a hundred, and Peel, in office but not in power, was compelled after a few months to resign. However, the combination of Whigs, Radicals and Irish which de feated him was anything but a happy family, and there was naturally much intriguing for the formation of a new coalition. In one such attempt, aiming at a combination between the Conserva- tives and those of the Whigs who disliked their allies of the Left Wing, Disraeli was a strictly unofficial liaison officer. An administration based on such a coalition would have been utterly repugnant to his tastes, but he loved a plot for its own sake, and this adventure offered him no little chance of distin- guishing himself as a go-between, for on the one hand he had the confidence of Lyndhurst, Peel’s Lord Chancellor, and on 67ee — Se j | a I; — aE Po — : caer " 7 7 <= < a oti Sa me _ a EE a 68 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT the other he was on terms of warm friendship with Mrs. Norton, the woman of letters whose relations with Melbourne were at least affectionate. Two members of a former Whig Government—Stanley and Graham—were shortly to cross the floor of the House of Commons, while Grey was certainly more in sympathy with Peel than with OC ‘onnell. But nothing could be done without Melbourne, and in counting on Mel- bourne the conspirators made a bad mistake. Superficially he was the most easy and casual of men. It was his comp aint of politics that people “‘hate each other so damnably,” and, apart from the pleasure of obliging an agreeable woman, he was on general principles all for letting no pedantry of principle inter- fere with personal amenity. But above all else he was the good party man. Of course, when Radical and Papist votes hae to be bought something had to be given in exchange; he could and did jettison certain cherished Whig principles; but the Whig name and party were sacred to him, Politics to him were a game, but that was all the more reason for playing it accord- ing to the rules, and to his very English character Disraelt had no key. The second coalition plot was wilder in appearance, but more promising in reality, and its success would have raised Disraeli at once to greatness; it would have afforded him, moreover, a chance to put some, at least, of e theories into practice, The King, having dismissed the Whigs, was naturally furious at their return, and ready to welcome any chance of ousting them. Peel was too respectful of constitutional usage to be of any service to him; but Lyndhurst had no such scruples, and while Peel was “silent in the House of Commons or sulking at Dray- ton” the lawyer and the monarch were in frequent consultation. Lyndhurst was as careless of his leader as of the Constitution. “What is Peel to me?’ he asked Lord Campbell. “Damn Peel.” On the other hand, his friendship with Brougham was very close, and Brougham, left out of the Government by Melbourne, was burning for revenge on his former associates. The two ex-Chancellors were confident of their ability to govern the country between them, and both had that touch of the gambler which is needed for a coup d’état. Disraeli wasi A a aR a RE I a AR I SE AR Na ER ey Sg hc ee Pe a : DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 69 privy to their plans, and place for him was a part of the com- pact. This was, to do him justice, not the whole attraction of the scheme; the tendency of his mind was ever towards something approaching autocracy, and whatever promised to strengthen the Royal prerogative harmonised with his general plans for the renovation of Toryism. Why the plot failed can only be a matter of conjecture. Lyndhurst was in the habit of burning his correspondence, and this practice, though it has not saved his reputation, has left considerable blanks 1n political history. Disraeli apparently remained under the belief that Peel’s timidity caused the public to rally to the Whigs at the critical moment, but it may well have been that the King, little as he liked Melbourne, had a still more invincible feeling against Brougham. When one remembers the tone of the latter's correspondence with William IV and the affair of the Great Seal, which he lost at a country house orgy, finding it again in the course of a game of blind man’s buff, the monarch’s distrust cannot be deemed unreasonable. Although nothing came of either plot, Disraeli’s share may have been a sign to the party managers that he was not a person to be safely neglected, and in 1835 he was invited to contest Taunton against one of the minor Whig Ministers seeking re- election on acceptance of office. It was stated at the time that he was liberally supplied with the money from the party fund, and it is known that Lord Chandos started a subscription for him at the Carlton Club. Possibly in consequence Disraeli thought it necessary to clear himself of all suspicion of holding heretical opinions. “Tf there be anything on which I pride myself,” he said, “it is my political consistency,” and with this he proceeded to unsay or explain away much that he had written or spoken only a few months before. In particular he withdrew his views as to tithe in Ireland—a subject which, owing to the “Rathcormack massacre” (a tithe incident in which thirteen people were killed), had become a burning question. He now argued that the tithe trouble had been caused by agitation: “Tt is agitation that has made the nuisance, and it is the Whig Party who for their own ends have encouraged the agitation.” At Taunton,70 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT where legends of Sedgemoor and King Monmouth still lingered, Protestant feeling was strong, and a sure way to draw a cheer was to say that the Whigs had offered the Whiteboys a pre- mium to do murder, to call O’Connell “traitor” and “incen- diary,” and to jeer at the ‘Popish tariff of salvation.” Rev- elling in such strong meat, the Somersetshire voters might for- get that this singular Conservative candidate had quite recently advocated the ballot and triennial Parliaments. But should their memory be tenacious he had an ingenious explanation; while the Whig Party seemed dominant, he declared, he favoured frequent dissolutions as a means of breaking their power; with the Whig Party shattered these measures were no longer necessary. For want of those “rascal counters,” in short, Disraeli was ceasing to bea free man. ‘To govern Ireland according to the policy of Charles I and not of Oliver Cromwell” is the ideal expressed in the Preface to Lothair, written when he was old in practical statesmanship, and it was in truth the only ideal for one who believed in the historical continuity of Toryism. But from Taunton onwards we are sure of finding the real Disraeli nowhere save in his novels. There he continued to speak his mind; on the platform and in Parliament he had to suit his utterance to the average sense of his party. No man of his genius could, of course, become a mere echo, but genius with- out cash finds itself acquainted with awkward bedfellows, with whom it cannot afford to quarrel. How he justified himself is best seen by a question from the study of Bolingbroke in the Vindication of the English Constitution: Opposed to the Whigs on principle, for an oligarchy is hostile to genius, and recoiling from the Tory tenets, which his unprejudiced and vigorous mind taught him at the same time to dread and to contemn, Lord Bolingbroke, at the outset of his career, incurred the commonplace imputation of insincerity and inconsistency, because in an age of unsettled parties with professions contradictory to their conduct, he maintained that vigilant and meditative independence which is the privilege of, an original and determined spirit. It is probable that in the earlier years of his career he meditated the formation of a newsy ee tnt ay Ponty my og RSLS ERS ae ASA Bo ees BENJAMIN DISRAELI, ESQUIRE, M.P., 1836DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 71 party, that dream of youthful ambition in a perplexed and discordant age, but destined in English politics to be never more substantial than a vision. More experienced in political life, he became aware that he had only to choose between the Whigs and the Tories. These words may be applied almost literally to the writer. Disraeli opposed the Whigs because their scheme held no place for genius—that is, for his own peculiar genius. He joined the Conservatives only when he saw no other chance of enter- ing public life. It was a choice between servitude and impotent and ruinously expensive freedom, and he chose servitude with the hope that once secure of a great position in the party he could play Bolingbroke’s part, and wean it from what he deemed its senilities. As to the difficulties of political inde- pendence in England he was undoubtedly right, but in estimat- ing his own potentialities of influence he was over-sanguine. In course of time he did “educate his party” into adopting measures which the average Radical of 1835 would hardly have demanded, but, save in one direction, he failed to change the Conservative mind. It remained on the whole a negative force. The Vindication of the English Constitution, which was a statement of those Tory Democratic principles which he hoped to instil, had far less effect than the merely opportunistic Tamworth Manifesto. The tendencies of the age were in truth against him. It was a time when men were too busy to think. They were making money, and had ears only for those who told them that every day they would make more money. The nineteenth century was saturated with the notion that there could be henceforth no essential change, but only progress on present lines. The man who preached that to-morrow might differ from to-day as much as to-day from yesterday might be entertaining as a paradox-monger. He was lightly regarded as a prophet. Taunton followed Wycombe in rejecting Disraeli, At a dinner after the poll he made a characteristic speech in defence of the Throne and the Church. “The King of England,” he said, “is in effect the great leader of the people against a72 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT usurping aristocracy.” The Church of England, established and endowed, was the popular Church, whereas the “voluntary system” in ecclesiastical matters was essentially aristocratic, since it meant that ‘‘no man should be saved who could not pay for salvation.’ But the Taunton adventure is chiefly memor- able for the quarrel with O’Connell. The Irish tribune, who, at Bulwer’s request, had acted as one of Disraeli’s sponsors at Wycombe, felt that he had a legitimate grievance when stig- matised as an incendiary and traitor by one who had so re- cently made use of his name and influence. Those were days of plain speaking, and Irishmen are at no time mealy-mouthed. O’Connell, however, went somewhat beyond the limits of con- troversial propriety even then obtaining. He described Disraeli as a liar, a creature, a disgrace to his species, a miscreant of abominable, foul, and atrocious nature, and “the heir-at-law of the blasphemous thief who died upon the cross.”’ Disraelt thereupon challenged O’Connell’s son—the elder O'Connell, having once killed his man in an affair of honour, had made a public vow never to fight again—but the invitation was de- clined. Disraeli, whose pluck could never be denied, seems to have been in a genuinely gunpowder mood, and declared that he would not be “insulted even by a Yahoo, without chastising it.” But, rage as he would, he could not get satisfaction, and even in the wordy war that followed he experienced the com- mon fate of users of the tu quoque. His sneers at O’Connell’'s religion were more bitter than witty, and there was something a little absurd in his threat of what would happen when he and O’Connell “met at Philippi’ —in other words, in the House of Commons. Disraeli had a genuine sense of humour, but it was undependable, and seems to have served him indifferently at this moment. He gained notoriety through the Taunton ept- sode, but little credit. Wellington, indeed, is said to have ap- plauded him for ‘“‘the most damned gentlemanly thing he had heard of for some time,” but the Spectator, impartial in its dislike of both parties, compared Disraeli to a “puppy yelping under the pain of a kick from some strong-limbed horse.” In one way, certainly, the affair was unfortunate. Disraelt could have brought to bear on Irish questions a clarity andDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 73 charity impossible to an Englishman, and both before and after the quarrel he insisted that the historical traditions and real character of the Tory Party were in conflict with the attitude towards Ireland common to nearly all British statesmen during the nineteenth century. But while the feud with O’Connell endured nobody did more to inflame anti-Irish feeling in Eng- land. His fulminations at Taunton, designed to catch yokel votes, would have been forgotten in a week. The series of letters he contributed to The Times at the beginning of 1836, under the pseudonym of “Runnymede,” were long invoked in Irish controversies. They contain many happy and ingenious phrases, much witty banter, passages of savage irony at the expense of the Whigs, and some fulsome flattery, obviously insincere, of Peel, ‘the only hope of a suffering people.” But the hatred of O’Connell that runs through the series suggests monomania. Of O’Connell, whatever his faults, it might be said, as it was of one of his far more formidable compatriots, that he was “less revolutionary than an average English shop- keeper,” yet in the first of the “Runnymede” articles Disraelt pictures him as “Eblis with Captain Rock’s bloody cap shadow- ing his atrocious countenance”; and in another article, dedi- cated to “the People of England,” he gives the following an- swer to the question, ‘‘Who is this O’Connell?” : O’Connell is not yet as great as Robespierre, although he resembles that terrific agitator in everything except his dis- interestedness. . . . This man. . . is the hired instrument of the Papacy; as such his mission is to destroy your Protestant society, and as such he is a more terrible enemy to England than Napoleon... . He has not a single quality of a great man. ... A systematic liar and a beggarly cheat, a swindler and a poltroon. . . . His public and his private life are equally profligate. . . . He has said that all your men are cowards and all your women wantons. He has reviled your illustrious princes, he has sneered at your pure religion, he has assailed your National Church. He has endeavoured to stir up rebellion against your august Senate, and has described your House of Commons, even when reformed, as an assembly of six hundred scoundrels.~*~ & 74 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT To such poor bludgeon-play could anger reduce one who had already proved himself a pretty master of the rapier. That in calm moments the wrist had not lost its strength and cunning is seen in a hundred delicate touches in these very letters. The description of Palmerston as “the Lord Fanny of diplomacy cajoling France with an airy compliment and menacing Russia with a perfumed cane” has become classical. The prayer to Melbourne that he should cease to “saunter over the destinies of the nation, and lounge away the glories of an empire,’ and the sketch of the same statesman “sipping the last novel of Paul de Kock, while lounging over a sun-dial” are no less admirable; while the portrait of Spring-Rice, made Chancellor of the Exchequer because he was “a man of busi- ness,” is good reading for a generation which has had ample experience of statesmen with similar qualifications. Lord Brougham’s genius he admits; it marks him from “the slaves who crouch to O’Connell.’”’ On the other hand, Lord John Russell, a member of the hated Whig oligarchy, “makes it possible to understand how the ancient Egyptians worshipped an insect’: while Lord William Bentinck is dismissed as a “drivelling nabob.” The letters to Peel and Stanley are too adulatory to be models even of the panegyrical style. When Disraeli years afterwards described Peel as “‘the greatest Mem- ber of Parliament that ever lived,’ he was probably sincere, though Gladstone pronounced the eulogy to be left-handed, and as such it was almost certainly intended. Disraeli felt towards his leader as the artist always must towards the mere artisan, a mixture of reluctant respect for his acquirements and spon- taneous contempt for his gifts. But in the “Runnymede” letters Peel, leaving the “halls and bowers of Drayton,” where he “realised the romance of Verulam” and enjoyed the “lettered leisure that Temple loved,’ to become the “saviour of the nation,” is treated like some god descending from Olympus. After all this it is a fall to the commonplace to be told that “Pitt himself in the plentitude of his power never enjoyed more cordial confidence.”” Most assuredly Disraeli never at any time felt like this of Peel. Even more certainly Stanley, whom he lauds for having left one Government and havingTE A Sy ees = Se ga Ee ee a DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 75 declined office in another, commanded none of his admiration. The deit rejection of awkward honours is a hereditary gift in the house of Stanley which has led them from strength to strength and from glory to glory; and it is quite improbable that Disraeli believed the abnegation of this “young eagle,” this “heir of the House of Derby,” to be anything but a manceuvre. Disraeli must have known that Stanley disliked him—loathing was rather the word—and that Stanley had called him a scoundrel. But Stanley was a rising power, and worth conciliating. Stanley, however, was not yet to be con- ciliated. Peel, less familiar with the way of the horse-coper, and never tired of hearing himself called “the Just,” seems on the other hand to have been pleasantly affected by flattery laid on so lavishly. Anyhow, since the young man had made some position for himself, Peel accepted him as he accepted every other accomplished fact. The “Runnymede” articles had another effect. As a con- tributor who had attracted much attention, Disraeli had the good will of The Times, his speeches were always noticed, and occasionally he received the distinction of a first person report. Things, in short, were going very well with him. Politically, money remained his chief trouble. His life was expensive; electioneering, with whatever help he may have received, must have been a costly business; his infatuation for Henrietta, which lost him the opportunity of at least one rich marriage, could hardly increase the indulgence of his creditors. A sudden rush of literary activity at this time is to be explained by the desperate nature of his finances when he at last roused him- self from the dream of a world well lost for love. He had begun Henrietta Temple in the full heyday of his passion; it was finished when that passion was spent. The novel was published towards the end of 1836 when the duns were in full hue and cry. Toa dinner of Buckinghamshire Conservatives, at which he was to propose the toast of the House of Lords, Disraeli went in the fear that he might be arrested before the eyes of the company, and a little earlier he had refused, with what anguish we may imagine, an invitation to dine with Peel~ @.. 76 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT ~~ ‘1 the dread that a sherift’s officer might tap him on the shoul- der on the great man’s very doorstep. In such circumstances finishing Henrietta Temple must have been a dreary business. The ashes of that love, scarcely cold, had to be shaken from their funeral urn and raked over for the materials to charm a cheque from the publisher. ‘That Dis- raeli felt the profanation is evident from the many passages in which his hero’s financial entanglements are lamented : Debt is the prolific mother of folly and crime; it taints the course of life in all its dreams. Hence so many unhappy mar- riages, so many prostituted pens, and venal politicians! It hath a small beginning but a giant’s growth and strength. When we make the monster we make our master, who haunts us at all hours, and shakes his whip of scorpions for ever in our sight. Yet when Disraeli could look back calmly on this season of pecuniary stress he regretted nothing. Dealing with usurers, making shifts and devising stratagems, had been a valuable part of his worldly education. In retrospect, at least, he was, like the young Fakredeen in Tancred, “‘tond of his debts.” “T should be incapable of anything,” said that strange person- age, “if it were not for my debts. I am naturally so indolent that if I did not remember in the morning that I was ruined I should never be able to distinguish myself. . . . What are my debts to my resources? That is the point... . A man may have an idea worth twenty estates, a principle of action that will bring in a greater harvest than all Lebanon.” Again: What should I be without my debts, dear companions of my life that never desert me? All my knowledge of human nature is owing to them; it is in managing my affairs that [ have sounded the depths of the human heart, recognised all the com- binations of human character, developed my own powers, and mastered the resources of others. What expedient in negotia- tion is unknown to me? What degree of endurance have | not calculated? What play of the countenance have [| not observed?An I i ii a ei tins wan MT aS Sha eS ie ere re ae xe SS SI RE hs Sr ree a ei ae DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 77 Yes, among my creditors I have disciplined that diplomatic ability that shall some day confound and control cabinets. Oh, my debts, I feel your presence like that of guardian angels! If I be lazy you prick me to action; if elate you subdue me to re- flection ; and thus it is that you alone can secure that continuous yet controlled energy which conquers mankind. But Fakredeen’s tormentors were also, to some extent, his victims. He had been plundered by every usurer in the Levant, but in turn had taken them in. We may be pretty certain that Disraeli also was no mere pigeon, and managed somehow to convince his creditors that their interest lay in keeping him going. A final quotation from Tancred illustrates another side of this curious matter: The usurers of Syria are as adroit and callous as those of all other countries, and possess, no doubt, all those repulsive qualities which are the consequence of an habitual control over every generous emotion. But instead of viewing them with feelings of vengeance or abhorrence, Fakredeen studied them unceasingly with a fine and profound investigation, and found in their society a deep psychological interest. His own rapa- cious soul delighted to struggle with their rapine, and it charmed him to baffle with his artifice their fraudulent dexterity. “Does not the reader,’ asks Dr. Brandes, “see Disraeli’s own character in this description?’ The opinion of a Jewish critic on a Jewish statesman cannot be ignored. Every race differs as to the point of honour; each has its own conception of the fitting and beautiful. To the European many a Japanese hero marvellously resembles a treacherous scoundrel, and many a Moslem saint must appear a ferocious sensualist. Disraeli was himself singularly free from the faults of Shylock. But he understood Shylock, and had none of the Gentile resentment of Shylock. It was a fair battle of wits between moneylender and spendthrift, and Disraeli felt no more malice against the usurers who had alternately accommodated and mulcted him, who at one time threatened to destroy him, and from whosea 78 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT toils he finally contrived to slip, than a Christian knight would have felt towards the foe he had overcome in honourable combat. Venetia followed swiftly on Henrietta Temple, and was also written under the spur of debt. Mr. Monypenny prints a letter which tells how, while Disraeli was racing through the last pages, the forms and faces of duns mingled in his mind with the “radiant countenance” of his heroine. Though bearing signs of stress and strain, the book is not uninterest- ing. Not in the narrower sense political, it is decide dly tenden- cious, and in the two leading characters are to be recognised the ficures of Byron and Shelley, t the prophets respectively of mili- tant and humanitarian democracy. In 1837 it required no little courage for a newly-elected member of the Carlton Cl ub, with the antecedents of Disraeli, to honour two characters so suspt- cious. Byron was, of course, then a fashion of youth, and for yielding to it even a duke’s son might be pardoned, for Byron, after all. was a lord as well as a Radical, and, if a sinner, was as gentlemanly as the father of sin. But Shelley was alto- gether beyond the pale; even the Whigs could only ofter apology, and, with Macaulay, admit that many of his ideas were both “pernicious and absurd.” Disraeli, however, hon- ours both poets without stint, and observes no restraint be- yond that imposed by his own critical judgment. Himself a man of action, he naturally makes Byron, as Cadurcis, the more sympathetic and convincing figure; Shelley, as Marmion Her- bert, is relatively unreal, yet it may be said that the author went far towards anticipating Arnold’s judgment of the “beautiful but ineffectual angel.”” There is rare discrimination in his hint, given towards the end of the novel, that Shelley died young enough, and Byron too young, for reputation’s sake. For while Shelley could only have become more and more vaporous with time another ten or twenty years might have enabled Byron to conquer his boyish egotism, reveal the real stuff there was in him, and turn his manly qualities to the service of mankind. Venetia was not a popular success, though it was praised in the Atheneum and noticed by the Edinburgh Review, whichsince tlt I ei Ti nin Mi an a Pa ie Soe eS a Ee i Ae ag == er Poe DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 79 had so far declined to recognise Disraeli’s literary existence. But within a few weeks the author had more important things to occupy his mind than the publisher’s royalty returns, On June 20, 1837, the old King died, and as in those days the demise of the Crown carried with it a dissolution of Parlia- ment the country was plunged into the excitement of a General Election. Disraeli’s rising importance was attested by the offer of a choice of several constituencies, of which the most promis- ing on all grounds was Maidstone. ‘That very corrupt borough then returned two members, and one of its late representatives was a Mr. Wyndham Lewis, with whom Disraeli was on terms of some intimacy. Five years before he had met Mrs. Lewis at Bulwer’s, and had described her as “a pretty little woman” of unequalled volubility. “I have no doubt about it,” he said dryly when she expressed her preference for “silent melan- choly men.” This “flirt and rattle’ claimed him as a frequent guest at her husband’s dinner parties, which he found dull, but, fortunately for himself, tolerated with a philosophy he did not always extend to ungifted hospitality. Wyndham Lewis now suggested him as a colleague. The seat was esteemed safe, but Disraeli took no risks. His address, short and orthodox, did no more than declare his loyalty to the Church, his devotion to the farmer, and his affection—the affection of the grandson of a Jewish immigrant—for the “ancient Constitution which was once the boast of our ’ fathers.’ Platitudes, however, could not long content him, and within a few days he was vigorously attacking the “new Poor Law,” which the Whigs had passed with the assent of the Tory leaders, as a moral crime, a political blunder, and an advertise- ment to the world that poverty was punished in England as a misdemeanour. To this question he was to return in later years, though he was never able to carry his party with him. A very human person, looking on the condition of the Eng- lish poor without the dull acquiescence of the native, he had something of that astonished indignation which inspired Dick- ens. The first reformed House of Commons, which had freed the West Indian negroes, had made a slave of the white pauper.a Y... 80 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT Under the old Elizabethan law poverty had been recognised as a misfortune, for which, as Chief Justice Hale put it, relief should be given for love of God and ones neighbour, and also because poverty weakened the fibre of men. A man might be helped, and still remain free and undisgraced. It was reserved for the liberal and emancipating nineteenth century to put a brand on the destitute, to shut them up in “Bastilles,” and deprive them of the rights of citizens. Disraeli seems to have stood alone among politicians in realising that the new Poor Law was not only cruel but dangerous, as tending to a loss of national solidarity. Later generations have, while striv- ing to mitigate the hardships of the poor, only accentuated the cleavage between classes, and the wisdom of Disraeli’s views on this and kindred questions has yet to be recognised by states- men. At the last moment a certain Colonel Perronet Thompson, editor of the Radical Westminster Review, appeared in opposi- tion to Lewis and Disraeli. This person was rude enough to emphasise the foreignness of Disraeli’s name: “Mr. Disraeli —I hope I pronounce his name aright.” In his next speech Disraeli made a point of referring to “Colonel Perronet Thomp- son—I hope I pronounce his name aright.’”’ The efforts to dis- credit the candidate as a renegade Radical and an alien— he was greeted on nomination day by cries of “Shylock” and “Old Clo’ ’—were unsuccessful. Lewis headed the poll; Dis- raeli was a good second. At thirty-three he had realised the first of his political ambitions, and the hardest fight, possibly, of his whole career had ended victoriously. Maidstone had given him, with much hope, present security. His creditors were now more patient and polite to one who enjoyed the im- munities of a Member of Parliament. The wife of his col- league, hitherto a pleasant acquaintance, had improved into a firm ally. He could look forward, though the Spectator told its public that he would be little more than a buffoon in Parliament, to a fair chance of being something of what nature and education qualified him to be. On November 13, 1837, he left his father’s house at Braden- ham to take his seat.ee tenant eee ee ee pe , 7 s CHARTER V) OBODY looked at me, and I was not at all uncomfortable, but voted in the majority with the utmost sangfroid.”’ So wrote Disraeli to his sister concerning almost his earliest division. It concerned what he called “the Jew question.” It was proposed to extend to his unconverted brethren the privi- lege accorded to Quakers of holding municipal office without taking the usual oath. As the Instruction to this effect was defeated by sixteen votes only, the new member could have gone into the other lobby without attracting unpleasant remark, but now, as on more important occasions, he adopted a discre- tion which some critics have stigmatised as pusillanimous. In fact, the discretion may have been literally discretion. “There are very few Englishmen of what is commonly called the Jewish faith,’ Disraeli wrote some fifteen years later, and probably it seemed of small importance to him whether those few should or should not be free to seek municipal office, or even to exercise the Parliamentary franchise. With the cry of “Old Clo’”’ still ringing in his ears, he may even have felt that it was not to the best interests of the race that Jews should unnecessarily court public attention. He had little of that belief in “emancipation” which distinguished so many nineteenth-century men and twentieth-century women, and, thinking as he did, his want of enthusiasm for the removal of the civil disabilities of his people cannot justly be set to his discredit. Even to-day the Jewish vote is of small importance except in a very few constituencies; and the influence of the Rothschilds has never been expressed in the fact that one of its members may sit in the House of Lords and another in the House of Commons. The gigantic power of the Jews in Ger- many under the Hohenzollern Empire was not lessened by the exclusion of members of the race from many positions of dignity and honour. Alroy shows what high ambitions Disraelt 8I82 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT entertained on behalf of his people, but he may well have cal- culated that the dream of a world-wide Jewish Empire would not be advanced, but might even be delayed, by Bills and In- structions to Committee such as were promoted by Grote, Macaulay, and others. On such a subject he would not argue in the English fashion; he brought to it the more tortuous but more realistic logic of the Oriental. Finally, as the descendant of Nuevos. who had long enjoyed high privileges by a nominal conformity, he may have reflected that for the Hebrew who wanted to gratify ambitions, either personal or unselfish, a few drops ot baptismal water were no great price to pay. It was one of his favourite theses that, while the racial purity of the Jew was of the utmost moment, the theological tenets which he held were of quite minor importance. He seems, in fact, to have been rather more proud of the concealed and Chris- tianised Israelite than of those who clung to their faith. His full contempt, it is true was reserved for the Jew who affected to despise Jews; but he was as innocent of theological narrow- ness as he was racially exclusive. ‘His explanation of Chris- tianity,’ says Dr. Brandes, “changed it into Judaism.” Politi- cally his bent was somewhat similar. He was more inclined to lag: the Christian voter down to the political powerlessness of the Jewish non-voter than to raise the latter. A day or two after this silent vote Disraeli for the first time broke silence in the House. It is an oft-told story, but doubt still exists whether his maiden speech was a brilliant effort brought to naught by malice or an absurd exhibition of vanity which earned its merited punishment. O’Connell had been speaking on Ireland, and Disraeli rose to administer that castigation which he had promised at the time of the Taunton election. He had threatened dreadful things when they “met at Philippi.” The time had now come to make good these breathings of vengeance. But, unfortunately for Disraelt, was nobody’s business in particular to further his retaliatory plans. He was still of no special importance. He represented no estate, no family, no interest. He was merely, to the general mass of the Conservative members, a rather bumptious andDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 83 ridiculously dressed back-bencher. On the other hand, it was a very special interest and pleasure on the part of O’Connell’s followers to insult, and if possible to ruin him. So the moment he referred to the Irish chief the air was thick with catcalls and shouts of mocking laughter. The Radicals, who had never forgiven the apostate, joined the chorus of ridicule. The Whigs added a titter of high-bred malice. Even the Tories found something absurd in the style and appearance of their spokesman, and though Peel took pains to cheer his follower, and was imitated by a dutiful minority, there were more scoffs than cheers from the nominally friendly benches. And for all this there was some excuse. It was not easy to preserve gravity in the presence of an orator whose gesture was so abundant, whose literary mannerisms were so pro- nounced, whose dress was so remarkable. Exuberant as was the fashion of the time, there was something almost monstrous in his affectation. ‘‘Bottle green frockcoat . . . waistcoat of white, of the Dick Swiveller pattern, the front a network of glittering chains, . . . large fancy-pattern pantaloons, a black tie, above which no shirt collar was visible, . . . coal-black hair, which, combed away from the right temple, fell in bunches of well-oiled ringlets over his left cheek.’’ Such is the description of an eye-witness quoted by Mr. T. P. O’Con- nor. Conceive this figure in violent motion, with restless hands and supple shoulders, indulging, as his agitation in- creased, in the characteristic gesticulation of his race, and it 1s clear that if the Irish laughter was forced that of many true- born Britons, and good Tories at that, was perfectly spontane- ous. But the speech itself, though as ornate as the speaker, does not seem to have been a bad one. In later years many such a speech from the same lips was heard with reverence on one side of the House and with alarm on the other. It is true that, unless the reports lie, Disraeli more than once, in the modern idiom, “asked for it.” Mr. O’Connor quotes him as saying “Why should I not have a tale to unfold tonight ?’’— a possible, if not a judicious, thing to say. Mr. Monypenny renders the sentence as: “Why should not I, too, have a tail, if it be only for a single night?” If this almost incredible* %.. 84 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT interpretation were generally accepted on the night it may be readily understood why the succeeding aughter was “loud and Hansard throws no light on the matter. [he mys- terious sentence is altogether omitted. Probably the want of modesty in the speaker told heavily against this first effort. Like his clothes, it was overdone. It ,% ” general was too consciously clever, as they were too consciously wonder- ful. It was too thickly studded with little jewels of diction, as his waistcoat was too lavishly adorned with little chains of gold. But, on the other hand, his pluck, good-humoured self- command, and tenacity should have commanded respect from a fair-minded audience, and the last words of the baffled speaker showed a spirit which was not to be mistaken. “I have begun several times many things, and I have often succeeded at last. Ay, Sir, and though I sit down now”’—this in a voice of exceed- ing loudness, the mouth stretched to its utmost limits—'‘the time will come when you will hear me.” The words sound like a biographer’s invention, but it is quite certain that they were used. For the rest of the evening he sat with arms folded, gloom and mortification on his brow; but to his sister he put on a brave front, talked of his “undaunted pluck” and “unruffled temper,’ boasted that he had made “good isolated hits,” re- ported that Peel had sent him a friendly message through Chandos, and signed himself “Yours in Very Good Spirits.” Stanley, who had spoken immediately after him, rather un- generously ignored the incident, but Campbell offered him an apology on behalf of the Front Bench Whigs, and a few days later Sheil, the most chivalrous of Irish adversaries, while congratulating him on his courage and his command of lan- guage, gave him some excellent advice. “Forget your genius for awhile; be dull and statistical; never present a perfect argu- ment ; strive to repress a fine phrase.”’ It was excellent advice. The House of Commons, then as now, was in the main a collection of mediocrities very jealous of its privileges as a high court of judgment. It took, then as now, a positive pleasure in assailing any reputation made out- side its walls, and, in default of due humility on the part of theDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 85 snubbed newcomer, it persisted in its hostility. On the other hand, it was almost foolishly ready to embrace the offender who should take his punishment good-humouredly. Disraeli, deferring to this foible, won his reward. The next time he rose —it was only seven days later—he was regarded with much curiosity. How would he conduct himself? Would he show himself sulky, resentful, plaintive, or savage? Would he scold, or scream, or grovel? ‘The interest was by this time not un- kindly. Even O’Connell, having dealt his blow, was in no mood to go farther; and the rest of the House felt that some amends were due to one who was, after all, a person of some distinction and, however affected, a man of ability. Disraeli took Sheil’s advice to the letter. His speech was short, and his phrasing simple. He perfectly understood the subject, which was that of copyright. Making no allusion to his late misfortune, he contrived, on this non-party matter, to pay a pleasant little compliment to the Whigs, and when he sat down the victory was his. Indeed the conspiracy designed to ruin him proved, as matters turned out, a considerable asset. It had given him a fine advertisement, and now that he had shown that he could be both sensible and modest the more intelligent Members began to remember that failure in a maiden speech is generally due to an excess of ideas rather than to their deficiency. A dull man rarely makes a grave mistake on such occasions. A very intelligent man courts failure because he will not content himself with mere platitude and the easy phrase, and his uneasiness leads him to appear ridiculous even when he is really talking excellent sense in good form. Peel, at any rate, seems not to have been misled. But while he realised the ability of his new follower he was in error in sup- posing, as he seems to have done, that Disraeli was specially devoted to himself—which as Mr. Stirling Taylor says in his Modern English Statesmen, “only showed what a dull fellow Sir Robert was.” A word may be added here as to the attitude of Disraeli to this copyright question. To the end of his career his warm sympathy with men of letters contrasted pleasantly with the attitude of his political contemporaries. He took the veryeis a ee ————— et = 86 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT un-English view that the intellectual standing of a country is no less important than its material advance, and was all for the active encouragement of letters by the State. Still more did he interest himself in the protection of literary property, which the unimaginative mind of the average Whig or Tory politician had always tended to regard as far less worthy ot consideration than a corkscrew or a button-hook. It may or may not be accounted strange that Macaulay, another literary politician, took the other side. Macaulay, who owed his very pleasant position to his value to the Whigs as a literary bravo, ever ready to employ his great abilities for the slandering of opponents and the whitewashing of associates, could never say anything uncharitable enough about professional men of letters who were his superiors in honesty and independence. All writers in Macaulay’s view belonged to Grub Street, except such as were fit to be received, as well-paid amateurs, at Holland House, and though he made very many thousands from his pen he regarded literature as a livelihood with a scorn that was, in the circumstances, preposterous. “The thought of becoming a bookseller’s hack,”’ ie wrote in 1833, “of spurring a jaded fancy to reluctant exertion, of ae sheets with trash merely that sheets may be filled, of bearing from publishers and editors what Dryden bore from Tomson and what Mackintosh bore from Lardner, is horrible to me.”” It never seems to have struck Macaulay that the only difference between himself and the poorest hack who wrote for Bolingbroke or Godolphin was the difference between a comfortably kept woman and one so unfortunate as to have to sell herself to advantage. A man so viewing the literary career even when Bes honestly, contemptuous of Johnson no less than of Steele, and excessively respecting Addison because he got place and profit on et large scale, should have been the more ready to secure the wretched author he pitied a treatment reasonably approximating to that of other owners of property. But the famous Whig historian, with his usual materialism and illiberality, opposed and suc- ceeded in defeating for a time any attempt to place the literary worker on something like a level with any other kind of pro- ducer. Macaulay, taking the view that no gentleman shouldEien tanh saedlanetnaliee es ~_ — a it a a a mam ea En DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 87 write for the booksellers, because any gentleman who could write well enough, and stood out for his price, would find him- self well paid otherwise, was contemptuous of property in books. Disraeli, on the other hand, had subsisted on his pen and had known what it was to await a publisher's remittance with the eagerness of a lover watching for the rise of the moon, and when such trifles ceased to interest him personally he did not forget his less fortunate fellow-craftsmen. Hence the affection in which he was held by many literary men who cared nothing for his politics, and to this partiality is perhaps due something of the constant rise in his reputation since his death. The writer, after all, has the last word, and the writer who 1s disinterested outlasts him who is venal. Mr. Gladstone was fortunate in having for his official biographer the most finished literary man of the day. But as time goes on the late Lord Morley’s panegyric will be more and more heavily discounted, while in all probability the immense and increasing mass of Disraeli’s literature will some day attract a man of genius who, perhaps, may first fall in love with the subject on account of his sympathetic attitude to letters. In such a summary as this little space need be given to the events of the next few years. While in opposition Disraeli contrived to be a quite tractable Conservative. When the main business is to throw stones a party leader is not likely to be particular whether an occasional halt{-brick is included; and if Disraeli’s line of attack was not always conventional the eccen- tricity was either unnoticed or readily forgiven. Meanwhile his social talents told. Men who had actively disliked him could not remain insensible to his charm when they got to close quarters in the smoking-room, and even the Irish forgave him over the bottle, Unless you were a very special kind of person he was indeed a man not easy to dislike, and he was not at all a man to pass over in a crowd. Trust was longer in coming than affection, and it was long before he ceased to be regarded with a certain suspicion. The debates in which he joined were for the most part on subjects long forgotten, but one or two of his early speeches deserve to be distinguished. In a discussion on Lord Johnee Sear ieee a > a a a a = 88 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT - Russell’s Bill to make a grant for elementary education and to subject the aided schools to G yvernmental inspection and con- trol, both Gladstone and Disraeli intervened. The former ibli on the sround that while he believed education should be SCI eral he did not think it should be in the hands of the State. The State. he said, immured old age in the workhouses on the — + shed Church. Disraelt opposed in the interests of the Est 4 plea of relieving destitution ; it would tyrannise in the nursery plea of giving instruction. Its real object was to break young wills to “implicit obedience, © with the inevitable result that “all would be thrown into the same mint and all would come out with the same impress and superscription.”” He pro- tested that this idea of State education, borrowed from China and Prussia, must alter English character for the worse. They are many, no doubt, who would still say he was wrong, but full lc lt with the children have un- + experience of the State's dealings doubtedly increased the number who share his opinion. In the same year—1839—he made a somewhat remarkable speech on Chartism. Both parties treated Chartism as some- thing either to be cheated or repressed. It lay altogether out- oo o> side the formal politics of the period. Some ot its watchwords, indeed. were derived from the democratic Radicalism, marvel- lously like old Toryism, of the Cobbett school: but it had no affinity whatever with the newer Radicalism, which was essen- tially middle class and had for its leading lights men like Grote, the historian of Greece, and John Stuart Mill, philoso- pher, feminist, and logician. It was intensely hostile, also, to that other group of politicians which, with Charles Villiers as its first prophet, was preaching Free Trade as the universal panacea, The movement really had no leaders. Some of the men who took part in it—Jones, Williams, Frost, and others— were punished because they stood a half inch higher than the mob: but Chartism was in the main an inarticulate and instinc- tive rising of the mass. Leaders were sought, and it 1s curious that it was at first to the aristocracy that the Chartists looked for the man who should plead their cause. They were misled into thinking that the Earl of Durham was the man for the part, and finally they took as their commander-in-chief oneDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 89 Feargus O’Connor, whose claim to noble lineage seems to have been his chief recommendation. Chartism, in Disraeli’s opinion, should have received Tory sympathy, and might well have been given Tory guidance. Manhood suffrage, ballot, payment of Members, and so forth might seem to threaten the landed interest, but Disraeli held that since 1832 power had already passed from the owners of the soil. He saw in fact that there were but two choices open to the landlords. They might throw in their lot with the insur- gent people, or they might make a bargain with the manutac- turers and shop-keepers to co-operate in keeping the lower orders in submission and, if possible, in good-humour. Disraeli saw clearly that the angry discontent of the working man was less with the old masters than with the new. It might be a choice of evils for the squires, but the evil of alliance with the working class he felt to be, in the interest of the squires as well as of the nation, less than that of a surrender to the Manchester school. His view was disregarded. The Conser- vative Party made its choice. Chartism perished. Free Trade triumphed. Until the day before yesterday it was madness and almost treason to suggest that everything did not happen for the best. The chartists figure in the history commonly written as mere sedition-mongers. The Manchester school is credited not only with its real virtue—a narrow sincerity and unafraid of logic—but with a moral dignity it never possessed. To-day, when, though we can all still honour much in Cobden’s manly character, many have lost faith in the universal efficacy of his formula; to-day, when many think of Bright less as a Christian saint than as a very hard-fisted man of business, glorying in the slavery of children, measuring national pros- perity by trade figures, tolerant of human conditions involving degradation so long as they showed a money profit, Disraelt's views as expressed in the ’thirties suggest a man very much in advance of the thought of his time. While most of his en- lizhtened contemporaries could see nothing but benefit to the State from the growth of an industrial plutocracy, he perceived possibilities of danger :» 5 =< 90 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 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 great mass of the people by the exercise of social duties. Those who thus possessed power without dis- charging its conditions and duties were naturally anxious to put themselves to the least possible expense and trouble. Having gained that object, for which others were content to sacrifice trouble and expense, they were anxious to keep it without any appeal to their pocket, and without any cost of their time. In other words, he realised that the new rich, without a vestige of the tradition of responsibility which had partially grown up since the last great pillage at the time of the Retorma- tion, would by their close attention to business soon complete that process, which he had already noted, of alienating the masses from the rest of the nation. Already the Reform Act had done much in that direction. He looked on Chartism as analogous to the Pilgrimage of Grace and the rebellion of Ket. All came alike from the disturbance of old order, and from the transfer of wealth and influence from men who, though partly corrupt, were not ungenerous or without a sense of social obligation, to others who would simply use influence to create riches, and riches to buy new influence. In Tudor times More saw sheep eating men. In early Victorian times Disraeli as clearly saw coalpits and cotton looms as devourers of the people. For his defence of the Chartist—he expressly disavowed defence of the Charter—Disraeli was branded by a Whig Under-Secretary as “fan advocate of riot and confusion.”’ He got no compensatory support from his own side. Peel had once pleaded for “an entrance channel for the broadest prin- ciple of popular representation,” but he was far too cautious to dig the first sod, and he was probably already leaning in private to the specific—the remission of the Corn Laws—which he ultimately adopted. On this problem, also, Disraeli made a notable speech early in his Parliamentary career. His defence of Protectionism was forcible and clever enough to bring him a remarkable tributeDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 91 from outside the ranks of his own party. Russell, whom he had counted a natural enemy, allowed a message of congratula- tion to reach him, and Disraeli, ever sensitive to appreciation and even to its grosser form of flattery,—'I am inordinately vain and delight in praise,” he once confided to Lady Laming- ton,—thenceforth took a much more favourable view of the Whig leader’s character and capacity. Lord John, whom in the Runnymede letters he had called an insect, now grew in his eyes, and by the time he wrote the Life of Lord G@orge Bentinck was fully visible as a statesman, ill used and misunder- stood. The Tories were of course enthusiastic, and when Dis- raeli had finished trouncing Villiers and reviling Adam Smith his hand was wrung by many a Hardcastle and Western. “They were so grateful,” he wrote to his sister, ‘and well they might be, for certainly they had nothing to say for them- selves.”’ 7 On other questions he could hardly have been so popular. In a division on a measure granting the corporation of Bir- mingham power to establish a police force to cope with the Chartists he marched boldly into the ‘“No” lobby with a couple of democratic Radicals against the whole of the rest of the House. Such an eccentricity, however, could be pardoned in one who had so well proved himself the friend of the fat cattle party and the defender of the gentlemen of England. The latter had been dumfounded by recent questionings of their dogma that the interests of the landed classes were identical with the interests of the nation. To the facts and arguments of the Free Traders they were unable to oppose much beyond the rhetoric which sufficed for court-leet dinners. When, therefore, this astounding son of the Ghetto undertook to prove their position by quotations from Listz their admiration was considerable. They could not, of course, support him in his fad of countenancing fractious labourers, but after all it was amusing, too, to find that here also he could embarrass the Whip and annoy the tradesmen. But still more important than such appreciation in his political 1Monypenny, vol. il, p. 24.i ry i ‘ 5 “ty ; te orm . waa I =" 92 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT stock was the event which now arrived to change the whole tenor of Disraeli’s life, and give to his position the substan- tiality it had often lacked. Wyndham Lewis, his colleague, died in 1838, and after a year’s widowhood Mrs. Lewis ac- cepted Disraeli as a husband. He was then thirty-five ; she was fifty. Her portraits show a woman of, at least, agreeable appearance, and one feels that the description of her by one Sir William Gregory as “most repulsive—flat, angular, under- bred,’ was as unjust as it was unkind. The only adjective which might be accepted is the last. Lady Beaconsfield was not a woman of the highest breeding; but an under-bred woman, like an under-bred dog, is not always the worst or the least faithful, or, for that matter, the least amusing. Disraeli found in his marriage complete comfort and happiness. It was not, of course, a match of sentiment on his side, though he conducted the courtship with a colourable imitation of passions, and often, indeed, to judge from the extravagance of his letters —found all his ardour necessary to conquer occasional doubts on the lady’s part. She was under little illusion as to herself, and still less as to her lover; she knew he wanted her for her money. Disraeli, on his side, tried to pretend that money in such a limited sense was not an object, though it might be a necessity, if he were to marry; hence a mass of correspondence which, it must be confessed, shows the wooer in a slightly ridic- ulous light. The stake in the country for which Disrael1 married was not so large as many supposed, and it does not seem to have been so large as he himself imagined when he made the first advances. For many years he was still to sup- port a heavy load of debt, but the nightmare of the sponging- house vanished at the altar. His escape was the happier because matters financial had at last approached a definite crisis. There was hardly a shot left in Disraeli’s locker when Mrs. Lewis’s few thousands a year—she enjoyed only a life interest— enabled him to look the world serenely in the face. Disraeli was better than his bargain. One of the most amiable fea- tures of a generally amiable character was his capacity for gratitude. He never forgot a good turn, though he often scorned to remember a bad one, and the woman who had givenDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 93 him safety he repaid by a steadfast and grateful loyalty which gradually ripened into the warmest affection. If he were an excellent husband she in her turn was a perfect wife. In almost every particular she was fitted to be his complement. Of sturdy West Country yeoman stock, she made up in sound sense what she lacked in depth of intellect, and without being clever herself she had enough appreciation of genius to value properly the man whom she might without such sense of proportion have scorned as a mere fortune-hunter. Nor was the relation be- tween them of that sedately dull kind that one might imagine inevitable to such an alliance. As a lover Disraeli’s natural skill had improved by considerable experience, and he held it part of his contract to be a lover as well as a husband. When we recall the Corisandes, Zenobias, Alcestes and Schirenes ot his novels we may smile to find him paying extravagant tribute to his Mary Anne. But that she really gained the power to charm him, just as he won her heart without being able to deceive her shrewd commonsense, is attested by a thousand evidences, and their marriage, becoming more perfect with every month of the thirty odd years it endured, was a fact none the less splendid because it had something of the element of comedy. Unquestionably Mrs. Disraeli deserved the tribute her husband paid to her on the dedication page of Sybil— “a perfect wife.” Disraeli may have begun his suit in a mean spirit; it is highly characteristic of him that he ended better than men of much more lofty pretensions, In fact, when we think of the long years during which the Jewish adventurer struggled, with no more potent weapon than his pen, against accumulating debts and difficulties, we must, while deploring some insincerities which his enemies have unduly magnified, feel amazement that so high a standard of personal intergrity could be maintained. The man who might at any moment be cast into a debtor’s prison would not sell himself. He would not sponge on his friends. Small indelicacies, trucklings, strat- agems, tergiversations, and fawnings there had been, but no great surrender. He could still call his soul his own; he would not plunder his father, and now, with the superiority to fortune which his marriage gave him, he was less than ever94. DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT inclined to the industrious meanness which he has so happily satirised in his analysis of the twelve-hundred-a-year mind: It is a peculiar class that; £1,200 per annum paid quarterly, is their idea of political science and human nature. To re- ceive £1,200 per annum is government; to try to receive $1,200 per annum is opposition; to wish to receive £1,200 per annum is ambition. If a man wants to get into Parliament, and does not want £1,200 per annum, they look upon him as daft; asa benighted being. They stare in each other’s face and ask, “What can ———— want to get into Parliament for?” They have as much idea of fame or celebrity, even of the masculine impulse of an honourable pride, as eunuchs of manly joys. His new independence was soon to be illustrated. In 1841 the Whig Government fell, after enjoying a short respite by sheltering at a critical moment behind the petticoats of the ladies of the Queen’s bedchamber. Defeated on a vote of confidence Ministers dissolved, and the ensuing election at last gave Peel his majority. Disraeli, having apparently found Maidstone too expensive, stood for Shrewsbury, and was successful. A few weeks later, when Peel was forming his Ministry, he re- ceived two letters by the same post. One was from Disraell, the other from Disraeli’s wife. Both bore the same burden. They hinted at a recognition for services rendered, or, in less delicate language, a place in the Government. Somewhat coldly Sir Robert intimated his regret that he had nothing to offer. Brilliance, apparently, was well enough on the back Opposition benches, but dangerous in a Cabinet Minister, All this was in Peel’s character. “He disliked Canning,’ says a writer in the Quarterly Review; “he distrusted Palmerston; he never appreciated Disraeli; he misunderstood Gladstone. The minds with which he preferred to co-operate were the practical, matter-of-fact minds of Wellington or Sir James Graham. Peel, as we have seen, had early marked Disraeli as a clever man in his way, but he seems never to have had an idea that the man who wanted to serve and ended by destroying him was a genius. Such want of perception is no great mys-DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 95 tery; Peel was a very ordinary, Disraeli a very extraordinary man, and while the extraordinary mind can always appreciate the qualities of the ordinary mind the converse is not true. So Peel left Disraeli on the back benches, thinking,.a good easy man, that he would merely rail in the smoking-room like any other disappointed nobody, and then awoke one night to find himself flung to political perdition by one whom he could have attached to himself for ever by a present Under-Secre- taryship with the implied promise of a Cabinet post. He had offended the pride of a great intellect, and there are few more deadly mistakes a middling intellect can make. For a time, however, Disraeli ostensibly remained what he had professed himself at Shrewsbury, the “humble but fervent” supporter of the Conservative chief. The new Parliament was what he called it in Endymion, a “political economy Parlia- ment,” and, as Lady Montfort remarked in that novel, ‘finance and commerce are everybody’s subjects.’”’ Disraeli, indeed, was to prove himself on one occasion equal to an argumentative battle with Ricardo, dullest of all dull exponents of the dismal science, but in this department he could not hope to be even primus inter pares; there would always be some pedantic bag- man or inspired cotton spinner able to trip him up in his tacts and figures. In foreign affairs it was different; that field he could have much to himself; he knew that while most Par- liamentarians had prejudices, few had even the elementary knowledge necessary to intervene with credit in debate. ml want to see you give your mind to foreign affairs,” said Lady Montfort to Endymion; “there, you will have no rival.” There in fact Endymion’s creator had but one rival—Palmerston, who, if he had never read a book and spoke like a justice of the peace, possessed shrewdness and character, knew how to make himself feared, and was in all ways a foeman worthy of the most ambitious private Members’ steel. “You are one of the few who have broken lances with Palmerston and rode away in triumph,’ Lord Eliot, the then Chief Secretary for Ireland, said to Disraeli, according to a letter to Mrs. Disraeli in 1842.1 That the compliment was *Monypenny, vol. ii, p. 124.~ tee mE ee ge me Sa 96 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT translated is evident from the faulty grammar, so characteristic of Beaconsfield, but of the substantial authenticality there is no doubt, for the speech in question was well received, and Disraeli was generally thought to have had the best of the exchanges. Encouraged to persevere in this particular field, he paid atten- tion to his French, and visited Paris after the prorogation. There he met a number of leading statesmen and men of let- g, and with characteristic au- lilippe a project for an Anglo- — ters, had an audience of the Kin dacity communicated to Louis PI French alliance. Gallomania was now long forgotten, while Palmerston, who had once courted the French, was by this time disliked and distrusted in Paris. Disraeli represented to the King that under a Conservative Government improved rela- tions were possible. It was true that Lord Aberdeen, the For- eion Secretary, was under the German spell which had been cast by the Romantics of his younger days, but he could, Disraelt suggested, be won over. In fact, Disraeli seems to have con- ceived the notion that Peel’s Government could be influenced, and even directed, so far as concerned foreign policy, by a eroup of which he aspired to be the leader. His memorandum on the subject ? makes it clear that Peel could no longer depend on the agriculturists, and there was a possibility that, if another independent Conservative section could be organised, it would be in a position to sway the Administration. What he had obviously in mind was the Young England Party that was actu- ally established during the next year. His hopes of that com- bination were, as the event proved, extravagant; but there seemed at the time to be some substance behind them. His essays in foreign policy were no doubt largely inspired by a desire for personal advancement, but he seems to have been con- vinced of their essential soundness, and in his memorandum to the French King there is a passage of amazing shrewdness, and one which has application even at the present day: He perceives that in France the enlightened classes are gen- erally in favour of the English connection but that the great ” Published as an appendix to the second volume of the Monypenny biography.————————eEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeE———eEeEeEeeee——————eeeee——eee DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 97 body of the nation is hostile to England. In England, on the contrary, the great body of the people is friendly to France, while the superior classes look to France with no cordiality. Yet there is reason to believe that in neither instance is this hostility the result of the ancient prejudices of the two nations. In England it is habit; in France it is passion. The reason of the classes in England must therefore be instructed, the vanity of the classes in France must therefore be soothed. Some qualification must be made. The English people are not precisely friendly to France; it can only be said that they think better of the French than of most foreigners. But it is true that the chief obstacle to Franco-British friendship is on the French side, a popular distrust fed by a cheap, chauvinistic, and largely venal press, while on the English side opinion 1s made by a curious combination of great men with vested prej- udices, great usurers with vested interest, and small pedants nursed in the German tradition. Although the project for an alliance did not mature, rela- tions with France decidedly improved while Aberdeen was at the Foreign Office, and when Palmerston’s return seemed 1m- minent some years later the prospect was regarded in France with dismay. At that juncture Disraeli took a highly honour- able course. In 1845 he strove, at an interview with Louts Philippe and Guizot, to remove French apprehensions, while at the same time making tactful representations to Palmerston as to the course best calculated, in the light of the knowledge he had gained, to allay’French alarm. His examination of the state of Europe had convinced him that good understanding between the two leading nations was of primary importance, and it was a view from which he never departed. Seeing Eng- land and France through eyes free from national prejudice, he was better able than either Frenchmen or Englishmen to assess the common interest of both. So might an Englishman settled in Central America be in a better position than any native to suggest a policy for governing the relations of Honduras or Nicaragua. It was while Disraeli was in Paris at the end of 1842 that the Young England group began to form itself under his egis.sae, 7 — a naan eee = PT stl inal — a 98 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT Apart from himself the most interesting member of the Party was George Sydney Smythe, and the most influential Lord John Manners, the former the heir of Lord Strangford, the latter heir to the Duke of Rutland. Smythe is generally as- sumed to have been the original of Waldenshare in Endymion —‘‘the child of whim and the slave of an imagination so freak- ish and deceptive, that it was always impossible to foretell his course.” When an echo of the Oxford movement reached him as a Cambridge undergraduate he sat at the foot of the man who was afterwards to be known as Father Faber. Waldenshare, we are told, “prayed and fasted,” but, from a concurrent addiction to French literature, “his views respect- ing both Church and State became modified—at least in private.” So only could Disraeli imagine it must have been with the most brilliant and promising of his allies—of a bril- liance which was futile and of a promise that was not fulfilled. Smythe, in debt and addicted early to drink, derived nothing but good from the association with Disraeli, though his father strongly disapproved of it. Manners, the Lord Henry Sydney of Coningsby, was a very different person from this wayward but generous man, in whom, as he himself said, there was “a spice of that genius which borders on madness.’’ Manners “devoted his time and thought, labour, and life to one vast and noble purpose, the elevation of the condition of the great body of the people.’”’ But well meaning as he undoubtedly was, he was also pompous and humourless, and it is unfortunately impossible to mention his name without immediate recollection of one of the immortal fatuities: Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die, But leave us still our old nobility. The other leading members of the group in the House of Commons were Baillie Cochrane, a rather arid young Scot, and Ferrand, a Yorkshire squire, Member for Knaresborough, whose talent for abusive language was especially exercised when denouncing manufacturers as slave-drivers. The ideal of Young England was simply the revival of OldDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 99 England. It had no more respect for the status quo than the fiercest Radical, but, unlike the Radical, it put no faith in eman- cipation. Its desire was to return to the days of a paternal aristocracy and an ordered society in which duty would be assigned and due security and maintenance assured to the lower orders by their conscientious superiors. Harry Coningsby ex- presses its temper a good deal better than Lord John Manners could have done: Let me see authority once more honoured; a solemn rever- ence again the habit of our lives; let me see property acknowl- edging, as in the days of old faith, that labour is his twin brother, and that the essence of all tenure is the performance of duty. Like the early French Romantics the Young Englanders placed their faith in Throne and Altar. But the Stuarts rather than the reigning dynasty were the objects of their Royalist enthusiasm. In Endynuon it will be remembered Waldenshare actually paid his court to the Duke of Modena, and was dis- appointed at finding that his highness had no immediate inten- tion of claiming that English throne which was his right. Such was their tepid admiration of the illustrious House of Bruns- wick. With the Anglican compromise in religion, at least, as it had subsisted under more than a century of pure Erastian- ism, they had even less sympathy. They wanted the Church to be Catholic. Whether they had hopes of England’s sub- mission to Rome, or still wilder expectation of Rome spon- taneously embracing a Church of England purged of Puritan and Erastian influence, is not clear. But they were for making the monarch, as “the only power that has no class sympathy,” the agent in restoring to purity and unselfishness a corrupted aristocracy and reconquering the loyalty and affection of a neglected democracy, and they looked to a spiritual revival which should make the Church once again ‘“‘the medium by which the despised and degraded classes assert the native equality of man and vindicate the rights and power of in- tellect.” The party could not be called democratic, since its— 4 ¥ i eG ge ee 100 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT avowed object was a revival of responsible aristocracy urged to its duty by a strong sovereign and a mighty priesthood. But to the ordinary Conservative of the time its sentiments seemed almost as anarchic and unsettling as those of Chartism itself. That Disraeli made use of the movement to further his private ambitions is certain. To him it was, to use the argot of our own period, but a stunt of just the kind for a pushing politician, since it brought him in familiar touch with men of high rank. How far he shared in the animating ideas of Young England is an interesting question. Not impossibly k him a considerable part of the road on which they were impelled by sentiment. These young Tories were, in- reason too deed, preaching many of the doctrines for which he had been denounced as a mountebank when he first gave them expression on the Wycombe hustings. In their antiquarian enthusiasm he, of course, had no part. He could hardly, as the grandson of a Jewish immigrant, feel romantically about the Stuarts. He could not, as a born Jew, feel in his bones their affection for Mother Church. Whenever he goes back to the past he makes it clear that he has no wish to revive obsolete institutions, but wishes only to regain the essential spirit of the old Toryism. With such qualification, it is probable that he had a quite genuine sympathy with the movement. It was a permanent conviction of his that the first of political reforms was the restoration to the monarch of many of the powers which had been filched from him under the long Whig domination. He was never tired of talking of the Venetian constitution con- templated in the seventeenth and made effective in the eighteenth century, That constitution he regarded as destroyed by the Reform Act, and, having “no faith in the remedial qualities of a government carried on by a neglected democracy who, for three centuries, have received no education,” he looked to a monarch no longer a “Doge’”’ as “‘the proper leader of the people.’ His vigorous and masculine intellect had always rejected Rationalism in religion as a contradiction in terms; religion he felt to be a necessary bulwark against mere anarchic materialism, and he was equally convinced that the only religionDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 101 to combat a purely utilitarian philosophy was a religion sure of itself. Moreover, though he never joined Manners in pro- claiming trade a “‘curse,’’ he did most decisively hold that trade should exist for man and not man for trade. In short, if Disraeli smiled, as he must often have done, at the enthusiasm of his young associates, he may yet have felt that they were nearer the root of the matter than Whig, Radical, or Conservative. There was, also, one side of Young England that appealed to something other than his calculation. Whatever the Young Englanders were or were not, pictur- esqueness could not be denied them; and Disraeli loved the picturesque. It was his taste, even more than his intellect, which turned him away from the Utilitarians and Mr. Flum- mery Flum, which made him detest the Manchester school and Mr. Bright’s whisker, and which gave him his nausea for the formulas and standards that satisfied Macaulay.se, ©. CHAPTER VI J T was written in the book of the ironic fates that Disraeli and Peel should fall out at some time and in some way though Peel’s lack of sagacity unnecessarily ante-dated the rupture. I’wo men could hardly have been more incompatible —the one brilliant, humorous, long in vision, thinking on the grandiose scale and detesting small details, of over-opulent imagination and over-florid style, saved only from charlatan- ism by that touch of the prophetic which is so often found in dubious and so seldom in unimpeachable characters; the other prim, precise, “level-headed,’’ methodical, seeing everything under his nose and nothing much beyond it, revelling in the minutiz of business, thinking of all things in terms of Parlia- mentary success or failure, the type of man in whom the middle classes put their trust and under whom they will go contentedly down into the abyss. If every vestige of Disraeli’s constructive statesmanship were destroyed, he would still be remembered for his epigrams, would still be studied for his flashes of insight. Peel was, perhaps, a more solid builder. It is possible to imagine a time when the English sovereign will be no longer Emperor of India, and already little remains of the Berlin Treaty and “Peace with Honour.” But the London ‘Bobbie,’’ whose popular name perpetuates that under which Peel was pledged to renounce the powers of evil, does suggest immortality, and Free Trade, even if it were abandoned. would still have left indelible traces on the national character and destiny. Yet, of all that Peel said in a life of wonderful industry and loquacity, nothing is remembered but a single word thrice repeated. “Register! Register! Register!’ The exhortation sum- marised Peel. He was the politician made perfect. He loved the mere machinery of politics, quite apart from any purpose for which the machinery might be used. He was not on occa- 102DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 103 sion untouched with the ambition to go down to history as the solver of certain great problems. But to make multitudes of speeches, to write myriads of letters, to manage subordinates, to arrange the business of the House of Commons, to answer critics, fence with or placate adversaries . . . all this he would have preferred of all possible occupations even if there had never been a practical issue involved. So far as in him lay, indeed, he strove to keep the wheels of his Parliamentary mill grinding without grist. He never did anything until forced, and then he surrendered, in perfect array, to superior strength. The love of busy futility, of course, is common to all politicians, and Disraeli as well as another felt satisfaction in being some- body even when there was little definite idea of doing some- thing. But he had small relish for the details which were Peel’s joy. He was as much concerned as Peel, for example, in winning elections; but he could only feel contempt for the politician to whom the machinery of party organisation was not a tiresome necessity but an abiding joy. He would gladly use such a man as Wilson Croker; he would never have toler- ated Croker, after the way of Peel, as the closest of personal friends. Disraeli’s sketch of Peel in Lord George Bentinck was written long after the emotions of the early forties were extinct, and is conceived in terms that suggest magnanimity to a fallen foe. But contempt is none the less apparent. It speaks of a man dexterous because of his timidity, and lucid because he was never profound. For the rest, “his judgment was faultless provided he had not to deal with the future.” In other words, as became one sprung from a commercial stock, Peel was eminently a man of business, capable in dealing with the day’s affairs, but destitute of that length of view which is the essence of high statesmanship. ey It was, however, by slow degrees that the incompatibility between leader and follower declared itself. In a speech which did not ring with conviction Disraeli had defended the lowered Tariff of 1842. In 1843, when Stanley introduced a Bill which all but abolished the duty on corn from Canada, Disraeli recorded his “silent suffrage” against it. In the interval he had told his constituents that he was no enemy to Free Trade3 © 104. DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT according to his own idea of it, but that he would use all his energies to “the preponderance of the landed interest.” When I talk of the landed interest do not for a moment sup- pose that I mean merely the preponderance of squires of high degree, that in fact I am thinking only of justices of the peace. My thought wanders further than a lordly tower or a manorial hall. I am looking, in using that phrase, to what I consider the vast majority of the English nation. I am looking to the population of our innumerable villages, to the crowds in our rural towns; aye, and | mean something even more than that by the landed interest—I mean the estate of the poor which, in my opinion, has already been tampered with, dan- gerously tampered with. [ mean by the estate of the poor the estate of the Church, which has before this time secured our liberty, and may, for aught I know, still secure our civilisation. This was the last occasion on which he made any attempt to defend Peel against the agricultural malcontents. The first suggests that Disraeli, like most of the Whigs and many of the Conservatives, was hoping for a modus vivendi on the Corn Laws, for while he foresaw that their repeal would turn England from an agricultural into an industrial country (with, as he thought, calamitous consequences), he had no wish to commit himself to the existing duties as irreducible. ‘“A peculiar characteristic of the Free Trade School,” he said at Westminster, “is their total neglect of circumstances,” but the characteristic was also shared by most Protectionists. Dis- raeli stood almost alone in holding that there are no principles in economics, but only questions of expediency. His first open assault on the Conservative Government was not made until late in the session of 1843, and it had nothing to do with the dominant issue between corn and cotton. Peel had introduced a Coercion Bill for Ireland. Disraeli at once opposed it. Considering the attitude he had assumed on Irish affairs since the quarrel with O’Connell, this choice of an oc- casion for the breach on which he had now determined may seem surprising, but O’Connell had just started the RepealDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 105 movement, which seemed to separate him from any established English party, and Disraeli had also to bear in mind that his Young England associates, with their Catholic and Cavalier leanings, were averse from a policy of the “Hell or Connaught” type. Further, he was doubtless moved by the fact that a Young Ireland Party was being formed, with Smith O’Brien as its Parliamentary leader, matching the group which he him- self swayed. A working alliance was within the bounds of possibility, and it would have been foolish to jeopardise this by pursuance of the old grudge against O’Connell. Disraeli did not vote either way on the Coercion Bill, but he spoke of it as futile, declared that Ireland was governed by Britain in a way injurious to both countries, and added the expression of a hope that measures would be taken in time to “put an end to a state of things that is the bane of England and the oppro- brium of Europe.” Some few days later, intervening in a debate on the Balkans, he criticised the Government with severity, appearing not for the first or the last time as the champion of the Turks. Minis- ters were deeply incensed. We find Graham writing to Croker that Disraeli was “unprincipled and disappointed,” and was responsible for moving the Young England “puppets” : Disraeli alone is mischievous; and with him I have no desire to keep terms. It would be better for the Party if he were driven into the ranks of our open enemies." Yet before the year was out Disraeli was quietly asking Graham for an appointment for one of his brothers. On this Peel’s comment was: It is a good thing when such a man puts his shabbiness on record. Heasked me for office himself, and I was not surprised that being refused he became independent and a patriot. But to ask favours after his conduct last session is too bad. How- ever, it is a bridle in his mouth.” 1 Croker Papers, vol. ii. 2 Parker’s Peel, vol. 111.2 >- SETE ee a 106 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT At the opening of the 1844 session Disraeli was excom- municated. Party communication men were no longer sent to him. Neither the presence of the bridle nor the absence of the whip, however, availed to reduce him to submission. When Lord John Russell moved for inquiry into the state of Ire- land he made a speech which commanded general attention. He asked the House to consider the case of an island inhabited by a dense population in extreme distress, “where there was an Established Church which was not their Church, and a territorial aristocracy, the richest of whom lived in distant capitals”: Thus 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. What would honourable gentlemen say if they were reading of a country in that position? They would say at once that the remedy was revolution. But the Irish could not have a revolution, be- cause Ireland was connected with another and more power ful country. ... If the connection with England prevented a revolution, and a revolution were 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. ... With regard to the proposals of the noble Lord (John Russell), if he, or any other hon. Member came forward with a comprehensive plan which would certainly settle the question of Ireland, no matter what the sacrifice might be, I should support it, though I might afterwards feel it necessary to retire from Parliament, or to place my seat again at the disposal of my constituents. From this speech two things are clear. Young England had determined to stand by Young Ireland, and Disraeli was ready to make alliance with the Whigs, or, more accurately, with their leader. Probably he had already seen that Young Eng- land could not last. He had now nothing to hope from Peel. As to the mere Protectionists, his view of them in 1844 1s fairly indicated by a passage from Coningsby, published inDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 107 May of that year, in which he asks whether Conservative prin- ciples mean anything higher than “a perpetuation of fiscal arrangements, some of them impolitic, none of them impor- tant.’ But in this novel also is evidence that he wanted to stand well with Russell. After allowing him the virtues of imagination, moral intrepidity, and sagacity, he proceeds: He is experienced in debate, quick in reply, fertile in resource, takes large views, and frequently compensates for a dry and hesitating manner by the expression of those noble truths that flash across the fancy, and rise spontaneously to the lips of men of poetic temperament when addressing popular assemblies. If we add to this a private life of dignified repute, the accidents of his birth and rank, which never can be severed from the man, the scion of a great historic family, and born, as it were, to the hereditary service of the State, it is difficult to ascertain at what period, or under what circumstances, the Whig Party have ever possessed, or could obtain, a more efficient leader. This tribute is the more remarkable because, taken as a whole, Coningsby is a strong and carefully meditated con- demnation of the Whig system. Take these words of the hero: The cause for which Hampden died in the field and Sydney on the scaffold was the cause of the Venetian Republic... . and a Venetian constitution did govern England from the acces- sion of the House of Hanover until 1832. Whiggery is constantly represented as the interested rule of an aristocratic caste which had reduced the monarch to the position of a Doge, had plundered and imprisoned the Church, and had appropriated the substance of the poor. It is, however, to be noted that the Whigs are attacked only for their past. Of parties as they existed at the time of writing the Conservative is the most heartily reviled. There 1s no attractive representative of the followers of Peel and the Duke of Wellington. Monmouth is sinister, Rigby sinister and contemptible, Tadpole and ‘Taper contemptible merely. It108 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT would, perhaps, be unfair to suggest that Disraeli at this time was angling for terms on which to cross the floor of the House with his corporal’s guard, But as leader of a diminutive party he was acute enough to see the wisdom of establishing friendly relations amid the regular Opposition. Lord Ran- wh Churchill imitated him in this 7 i i dolp as in many other ways, a the Fourth Party would have been far less effective without Irish support. Lord John Russell, however, did not rise to the bait—could not, indeed, recognise it as a bait. At no time did he take Disraeli very seriously, and even twenty years later he could write: “I am told Dizzy expects to be the first President of the British Republic Before the end of the session of 1844 Disraeli had carried far the war against his leaders. In May he was supporting Ashley (Lord Shaftesbury) in an effort to limit the hours of “young cane in factories to ten daily, while Bright with the support of the Government was pleading with sonorous and sanctified eloquence for twelve. In June we find him op- posing the Government on a question of sugar duties, voting for a preference for sugar grown in the British colonies against sugar grown in slave-holding countries. This proposal was carried in the teeth of the Government. Peel thereupon de- manding that the House should rescind its vote, Disraeli for the first es dropped all appearance of civility, and became frankly abusive of the Conservative leader, whom he described, not iceaie: unjustly, as “menacing his friends and cring- ing to his opponents.” Peel gained the day, but with a nar- row majority, and on the morrow the Queen wrote of the incident to the King of the Belgians: We were really in the greatest possible danger of having a resignation of the Government without knowing to whom to turn, and this from the recklessness of a handful of foolish halt-Puseyite, half-Young-England people. Young England’s passion for the Throne was ill requited by its occupant. But it can easily be understood that, though Queen Victoria at a later period listened eagerly enoughDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 109 to the voice of the charmer whom she now condemned, she had no fancy to revive times when, as Lord John Manners wrote: Haughtiest kings did stoop to kiss the rod Wielded by some poor minister of God. Disraeli, of course, could have had no direct knowledge of the royal displeasure, but some instinct seems to have warned him to take an early opportunity of soothing august susceptibilities. At any rate, a change of tone is discernible about this time. In Coningsby the Hanoverian dynasty 1s denounced and derided as a Whig institution; and in still earlier days when the Queen’s affection for her Whig ladies had temporarily delayed the accession of the Conservatives to power, Disraeli had written in a public print an open letter to her Majesty, courteous in tone, but none the less a lecture. Soon, however, in Sybil, he was to sound a new note, Vic- toria, “fair and serene,” is acclaimed as one to whom not only allegiance but affectionate homage is due. Her “sweet and thrilling voice’ is associated in a single sentence with her ‘absorbing’ sense of august duty.” When he wrote this he was evidently thinking some way ahead. For the moment, however, he might cheerfully have put up with the absence of Court favour if he had but enjoyed the patronage of one or two of the Queen’s more powerful sub- jects. He had been writing grandiloquently about the nation being “saved by its youth.” But actually he was finding the want of years in his followers a considerable inconvenience. Manners and Smythe, fervent crusaders, were also more or less dutiful sons, who sat for their fathers’ boroughs and could not afford to stand on their fathers’ corns. When young men of the upper classes adopt democratic politics the paternal bosom is seldom wrung. Noble mothers may be occasionally distressed by the incursion of uncouth strangers, but noble sires are generally philosophic enough to recognise that this sort of thing is an intellectual measles, with a practically negli- gible percentage of mortality, to which any bright young110 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT fellow is liable. But it is one thing to profess levelling opin- ions, and quite another to go to the length of nearly upsetting some Ministry which alone stands between society and the powers of anarchy. The Duke of Rutland and Lord Strang- ford felt it was time to intervene. ‘They disliked Disrael1; they had no notion of calling their labourers the “order of the peasantry”; they had no intention whatever of re-erecting may- poles; they were perfectly content with parsons who knew their place; and if they did not understand precisely what was meant by a “Doge” they justly deemed it was not a proper name to apply to the monarch and fountain of honour. It was time to put a stop to a lot of boys’ nonsense that was being used, for his own purposes, by a guileful Hebrew. “It 1s grievous,’ wrote his grace of Rutland to his lord- ship of Strangford, “that two young men like John and Mr. Smythe should be led by one of whose integrity of purpose I have an opinion similar to your own, though I can judge only by his public career. The admirable character of our sons only makes them the more assailable by the arts of a designing person, I will write to John to-morrow.” John was written to on the morrow. He did not come at once to heel. Both he and Smythe supported Disraeli at a great Young England meeting at Manchester in the autumn of 1844, and in the next year appeared Sybil, which is often described as Young England’s manifesto on the problems of the day. But it could almost be better designated as Young England’s epitaph, for when it appeared the party had already, for all practical pur- poses, dissolved. Young aristocracy had discovered that old aristocracy, when it means business, has curiously persuasive arguments, A definite break came when in 1845 Disraeli spoke and voted against the Government grant for the training of Roman Catholic priests at Maynooth. Disraeli has been accused of invoking against Peel on this occasion two sen- timents to which a statesman should be ashamed to appeal— religious hatred and racial animosity. But from end to end of the speech there is in fact no suggestion of “No Popery,” and equally no attempt to raise English feeling against Ireland. The only enemy is Peel. Animosity is just enough restrained,rs TE ee Se Baden al —_ sen c FS ES Rabe Bn hee Te ee ee DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 111 and no more, to give wit its due penetrative power and accu- racy of objective. Disraeli’s mockery of the Minister was the more devastating because it was recognisably just: I never knew the right honourable gentleman bring forward, not what I call a great measure, but a measure which assumes to settle a great controversy—there is a difference—without saying that three courses were open to him. In a certain sense, and looking to his own position, he is right. There is the course the right honourable gentleman has left. There is the course the right honourable gentleman is following ;, and there is usually the course the right honourable gentleman ought to follow. ... The right honourable gentleman tells us to go back to precedents; with him a great measure is always founded on a small precedent. He traces the steam engine always back to the tea kettle. Still more bitter was the appeal to the Roman Catholic Members to reject the wretched grant: Who is he who introduces it? Iteis the same individual whose bleak shade fell on the sunshine of your hopes tor more than a quarter of acentury. . . . If it were the boon it ts said to be, would you accept it from hands polluted? Finally there is the appeal to the pride of the Whigs: I should have thought that the noble lord opposite (Russell) was almost weary of being dragged at the triumphal car of a conqueror who did not conquer him in fair fight. The whole speech may be justly called spiteful and fac- tious, but it had no element of bigotry. Disraeli’s object was simply to discredit Peel by exposing his inconsistency. Just as the man who was once Protestant champion was now offering “boons” to Rome, so, “returned to power as the head of the landed interest,” he was “moving rapidly towards Cobdenism.” In emphasising the significance of the Maynooth business Disraeli was simply building up a general case of inveterate and innate untrustworthiness againstarmel ae I _ » & 112 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT Peel. In so doing it may have caused him some little pain to break finally with the three or four young men who had been his allies. They were his first disciples. They were pleasant and honest people. They were—and this was sen- timentally important to Disraeli—high-born and gracefully mannered. But after all they were a very small group, they had embarrassing fathers, their ideas were a little wild. Be- sides, a wider prospect was opening. The discontent of the Tory rank and file was growing daily. For the present it was mainly inarticulate; the grumbling was in the lobbies and not on the floor of the House; but so much the more chance for the man bold enough to say to-day what hundreds might be saying to-morrow. He would have established a claim. Disraeli, quick to see to what Peel’s self-education was lead- ing, was now determined to give up all peddling play, and stake everything on the chance of ruining the leader who had neglected him. Whether, had the case been otherwise, he could ever have made anything of Young England is highly doubtful, If there be such a thing as a Zeitgeist it must be admitted that the spirit of the Victorian period was dead against the ideals of Smythe and Manners. Some fine minds might reveal bewild- ered sympathy, but the coarse energies of the age were uni- formly hostile. It was a time, as every line of Macaulay at- tests, when the typical culture was at one with the typical Philistinism in seeking a solution of every political and moral problem in the mere multiplication of wealth. The few who, like Carlyle, protested that the scramble of self-seekers must end in social disruption had nothing very attractive to offer in the place of “anarchy plus a police constable”: for benevolent despotism of the Prussian type did not, fortunately, attract English imaginations. The romance as well as the prose of the time looked forward rather than backward, and the Vir- gilian tones of Tennyson, no less than the clipped, precise accents of Mill, proclaimed the coming of a millennium based mainly on a more cunning adjustment of forces and cogwheels. It was well enough to respect the old forms of the Church, and religion could be admired so long as it did not intrude intoDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 113 economics. But it was generally agreed that the soul of man must not be recognised in statecraft, for no one really knew if man had a soul, whereas it was certain that steam would move a piston and that cotton could be sold for good money, in which the poorest would share! Moreover, anybody with a modicum of brains—anybody of what Carlyle called the ‘beaver intellect’”—could go to work and make money; whereas the reconstruction of society wanted thought—more thought than the best English families could give it between the last of fox-hunting and the first of shooting. The ruling classes desired to retain their rule, but it must always be as amateurs, and this was no amateur’s job. As to the ruled, they had for some time been convinced though highly respectable anarchists, and the theory that the best form of government is no government had rapidly extended from the middle classes to the politically-minded working man. People in this mood were not likely to listen with respect to the arguments of a few young aristocrats that a world organised on a basis of free contract should return to conditions of fixed status. Further, there was in the Toryism of Smythe, as in the So- cialism of William Morris, something that repelled the robust commonsense of the average Englishman, who hates above all things the precious and the pretentious, and has made mere terms of abuse of many harmless adjectives originally indi- cating a preference for moral or material beauty. A contem- porary Young Irelander who was to suffer transportation for his convictions seems to have come pretty near the truth. “A hell of a fellow is Young England,’ wrote John Mitchel to a friend, “and has handsome language at command, as also very gentlemanly clothes, and most respectable hats.”’ If Young England had frankly thrown in its lot with Chartism something, of course, might have happened. In fact nothing did happen. In one sense Dr. Brandes states the fact when he says that the group “never had any influence on the history of England.’ It left no mark on the Statute book. It produced no definite effect on the course of social development. But it did not wholly perish from the minds of men, and the memory of it served often to remind modern- angie aan TR. 114 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT Conservatism of its descent—a considerable descent—from old Toryism, And it certainly brought out the most impor- tant and respectable component in that marvellous assem- blage of queerly assorted elements whom we call Benjamin and Disraeli. As a statesman it is often impossible to think of him but as a comedian playing a part. But in Coningsby and Sybil, he is something more than a clever man or a shrewd man or an eloquent man—he rises to the elevation of the prophet. He could see the present as vividly as Carlyle, but he could also do what to Carlyle was impossible. He could see the past without prejudice and as a whole. Carlyle, ac- cording as he worked with the sunlight of his free imagina- tion or by the magnesium glare of the prejudices which en- slaved him, could tell picturesque truths or graphic lies con- cerning certain episodes. But he had not the steady vision of Disraeli, who as an outsider could view three hundred years of English history as the climber of a desolate Alpine peak views three hundred miles of country. No doubt he made endless errors in detail, but he got the general lay of the land simply because he surveyed it from a distance and saw it through the eyes of one only concerned to note broad truths. Coningsby is still valuable, not only as a guide to history but as a manual of political wisdom. As in Disraeli’s work generally, the narrative is tedious. No doubt the author was thankful when he could dismiss Edith Millbank for a few chapters and settle down to snug discussion of ‘Venetian Constitution” and “Dutch Finance”: no doubt he eroaned heavily when the needs of the story dictated that his hero, after sixty pages or so of close argument and flashing epigram, should relapse into false and stilted rhapsodies. But the thing had to be done. It would have been false pretences in those days to offer the public what purported to be a novel without giving it its bellyful of sentiment and cross-purposes. A toolish convention still compels the lay preacher to present his thoughts—or those at least which he wishes to reach the larger public—in fiction form. But the modern novelist has at least this advantage—that he need not, unless he likes, trouble much about his lovers; still better he can make hisDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 115 lovers interested, as flesh-and-blood lovers quite commonly are, in things other than themselves. He can talk to his heart’s content, without troubling about incident, so long as he talks through half a dozen pairs of lips. Disraeli, unhappily for him and for his readers to-day, was debarred such liberties, and the gems with which his great works abound must be gath- ered at the expense of much tedium and dusty exasperation. But of the fineness of these jewels when found there can be no question. The characters of Coningsby are immortal, or at least their life can end only with the disappearance of Par- liamentary institutions. Tadpole, whose one idea is to gain the Wesleyan vote, is still ultra-modern, for did not Mr. Lloyd George, when he told a dissenting audience that the spirit of Wesley alone raised the British and American peoples above the lesser breeds of mankind, take a leaf from Tadpole’s book? And Taper, though his “political reading was con- fined to an intimate acquaintance with the Red Book and Beatson’s Political Index, which he could repeat backwards,’ is still an indispensable pillar of representative government. Rigby, too, “who neither felt nor thought, but who possessed in a very remarkable degree a restless instinct for adroit business,” is a person without whom no modern Administra- tion is complete. There is no more singular contrast than that between the wildness of the real Young Englanders and the extraordinary shrewdness with which the philosophy of their position was set forth in the literary testament of the movement. Coningsby is full of piercing things. “You may make aristocracies by laws,” says the Radical manufacturer, “you can only maintain them by manners.”’ This was said at a time when the old stateliness was still substantially intact, but Disraeli’s prophetic eye was not deceived; the lines were already set which were to conduct the great to their present position of political insignificance and almost of social depen- dence. In Lady Blessington’s salon he had a glimpse of the night clubs of to-day, where the duke dances with the latest adventurer’s favourite and fawns on her protector for a Stock Exchange tip. Coningsby, in one pregnant sentence, foretells the decline of the old static and aristocratic wealth in com-ge 116 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT petition with that industrial wealth which ever renews itself: “Greatness no longer depends on rentals, the world is too rich; nor on pedigrees, the world is too knowing.” Mightily shrewd, also, is the retort on the Whig lord who asks what it signifies whether a man be called a labourer or a peasant? “And what can it signify?’ asked his brother-in-law, “whether a man be called Mr. Howard or Lord Everingham?”’ In the production of flashing dialogue Disraeli was certainly the equal of Mr. Shaw, and it is not mere irrelevant brilliance, but real wit, that is to say, wisdom polished and sharpened. He always means something; his nails go home with one blow. On many occasions he does not seem to have cared very deeply, as a practical matter, whether his adopted land went right or wrong. He would, of course, have preferred it to take the course he thought wisest, but he was resolute not to be set aside as a mere nuisance or visionary, and it could not, indeed, be expected that for a stepmother, not always a kind one, he could have a greater love than that of her real sons, most of whom also dealt not in self-sacrifice. It was enough that what he saw very clearly he said, when he could without political detriment, very frankly and with the most benevolent interest. Sybil is a yet more remarkable, though a much less amusing book than Coningsby. Perhaps its sub-title, The Two Na- tions, 1s the most remarkable thing about it: “Two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding and fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.” “You speak of said Egremont, hesitatingly. “THE RICH AND THE Poor.” 3,7 At the time this must have seemed to many an extravagant paradox; even towards the close of the nineteenth century itDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 117 was a dark saying. The gulf between rich and poor was wide and widening, but there was still a vague Christian tradition that had survived the substance of religion, and that sufficed to console the average observer with the thought that while the differences between classes were superficial and transitory, their unity was essential and permanent. Macaulay the Whig, who could not deny that it was the Church which had welded two peoples into one nation, was also able to persuade himself that rationalism could keep them one. Disraeli the Tory, or rather, Disraeli the Jew—for it was his Judaism that told him that without vision the people perish—did not so deceive him- self. He realised that rationalism must be rational, and that slavery of all human institutions is perhaps the easiest to defend by logic. Given a purely material basis to civilisation, the highly artificial conception of a fundamental equality transcending all differences of education and circumstances must give way, and society must inevitably relapse into the only two divisions which a purely materialistic philosophy can conceive. That it has so relapsed is the grand fact of to-day. The Two Nations exist but there are also two Governments. The Poor or Serf Nation, now more politely known as Labour, has evolved its own organ—the trade union of which Disraelt writes with a prophetic terror—which is always in concealed or open war with the organ of the Rich, and the public peace subsists only by the uncertain equipoise of the two opposed powers. Disraeli’s paradox has in eighty years become a platitude. Everything of the Young England movement that was worth preserving has been retained in these two novels. Lord Morley declared Sybil the “sincerest” of Disraeli’s works, and it is certainly that in which he has expressed most clearly the genuine political faith which was in him—a faith most imperfectly translated into his political career. There we find the reaction of a kind heart and a sagacious mind to the aw ful anarchy of industrialism which to men morally of much higher pretension seemed full of satisfaction for the present and of hope for the future. There we find a mordant note which it is hardly ridiculous to compare with that of Carlyle’s118 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT best work, his Chartism and certain of the Latter Day Pamphlets. The affected flippancy with which the author describes the birth and education of the workman Devilsdust is in its way not less powerful than that famous passage con- cerning the poor sempstress who proved her sisterhood to the great ladies by giving them typhoid fever. “Infanticide,’ says Disraeli, “is practised as extensively and as legally in Eng- land as it is on the banks of the Ganges,’ but Devilsdust was one of those infants “that will defy even starvation and poison.” Sending him out to play in order that he should be run over succeeded no better; “Juggernaut spared him to Moloch’; he lived to be a factory hand and a force in the trade union. This, and much else, is a transcript direct from life. Disraeli had seen what he wrote about, and, having no investments in industrial shares, he could allow himself to hate what he had seen. Most other politicians, who were not too idle or too nice to grope into manufacturing mysteries, drew profit from the human degradation so powerfully de- scribed in Sybil. The special note of humanitarian indigna- tion is mainly lacking in Coningsby, but it has not a little true passion as well as clear wisdom. The Jewish financier, Sidonia, is introduced for two purposes. In the first place it is he who has to explain England to an Englishman, and very well he does it: You will observe one curious trait in the history of this country. [he depository 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 one hundred and fifty years power has been deposited in the Parliament, and for the last sixty or seventy years it has been becoming more and more unpopular... . It is impossible to resist the impression that this body also is doomed to be destroyed.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 119 Parliament still lives, but that does not prove Sidonia a false prophet. The disrepute into which representative insti- tutions have fallen, a disrepute curiously reaching its height at the moment of “making the world safe for democracy,” seems rather to vindicate him, For the rest, Parliament has in one special and very important sense fallen. It is no longer, as it was in Disraeli’s time, the dominant power in the State. It is neither the chief governing nor the chief checking power. The governing power is the bureaucracy; the checking power is society, which in practice means the great financiers, and the people, which in practice means the trade unions. Miunis- ters and permanent officials are not chiefly concerned in ask- ing what Parliament will say; they make their calculations as to what the classes and the people will stand, or, as regards any unorganised part of the people, what they can stand. the tendency of advanced civilisation,” said Sidonia, “is in truth to pure monarchy’’; elsewhere he says that “man was made to adore and to obey.”’ The monarchy to which so much progress has been made since his time is certainly monarchy in that it is the negation of representative government. But it is in no sense pure monarchy, and though it gives its subjects plenty of practice in obeying it cannot afford any great satisfaction to those who yearn to adore. In discussing England Sidonia is a creature of pure intel- lect. When he begins to talk of the Jewish race he is all lyric fire: You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the Jews do not greatly participate. The first Jesuits were Jews; that mysterious Russian diplomacy which so alarms Western Europe is organized and principally carried on by Jews; that mighty revolution which is at this moment pre- paring in Germany, and which will be in fact a second and greater Reformation, and of which so little is as yet known 1n England, is entirely developing under the auspices of Jews, who almost monopolise the professorial chairs of Germany.... Favoured by nature and by nature’s God, we produced the lyre of David; we gave you Isaiah and Ezekiel... . What are all the schoolmen, Aquinas himself, to Maimonides? And120 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT as for modern philosophy, all springs from Spinoza. ... The three great creative minds to whose exquisite inventions all nations at this moment yield, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, are of the Hebrew race; and little do your men of fashion, your muscadins of Paris and your dandies ot London, as they thrill with rapture at the notes of a Pasta or a Grisi, little do they 2 suspect that they are oftering their homage to the “sweet singers of Israel.” It should be remembered, 1n reading the fanfaronade of which this is only a short extract, that Disraeli belonged to the first generation of modern Jews who had been born out of bondage. Wherever the eagles of Napoleon had passed the Jews had received the privilege of citizenship. In every city brought under the sway of the Republic or the Empire, the walls of the Ghetto had been levelled. And, while the Im- perial liberator of Israel, turning from his last battlefield, was driving post on the road that led to Paris and Longwood, one Nathan Mayer was speeding towards the one capital Napo- leon had neglected to conquer, there to win a mighty victory for his race, and to become, as the head of the house of Roth- schild, what Sidonia is in the romance, the unseen mover of half the strings in Kurope. To the Jew it might well seem that two million Gentiles had died mainly for the advantage of his race. “From buffet to buffet, from stripe to stripe,” wrote Michelet, “the Jews are mounting to the very throne of the world.” To Disraeli the Empire and the rule were of much more moment than the diadem, It was little matter if the Jews still suffered small social and political disabilities, were still unable to become town councillors or members of Parliament, when they were courted by powerful monarchs and could embarrass any Government which failed in proper respect to the race. The boasts of Sidonia came from the swelling pride of the first emancipated generation; but there was eratitude min- gled with the triumph. Disraeli, the advocate of Anglo-French amity and the apologist of the third Napoleon, was not for- getful of what France and the Bonapartes had done for his people.GHAPTER. Vit re understand a past transaction, and especially to appre- ciate the emotions generated by it, the imagination must be forced to strong and continuous effort. Everything that ever occurred tends to seem the only thing that could have occurred. We see, long before the catastrophe, the dagger stretched over Cesar, the axe ground for Charles, the taggot laid for Joan, the theme prepared for Luther, and we com- monly forget that to contemporaries the issue of every great conflict was problematical almost to the point ot decision. Such illusion must first be dispelled if we are to under- stand the coming of Free Trade and its reactions on the for- tunes of politicians. Readers of histories written tainly from one standpoint see Free Trade marching steadily to triumph from the publication of the Wealth of Nations to the moment that Peel decided on the repeal of the Corn Laws. They imagine the victory as one of light over darkness, of a rational creed over a poisonous superstition. They find in it, in short, something analogous to the success of Christianity at the expense of antique paganism; and view Peel rather as one of those Early Fathers who, born in the old faith, gradually finds it impossible, is at last compelled by conscience to attack what he once honestly believed, and ends as a martyr for truth. The actual course of things was very different. There was no general consensus of opinion in favour of Free Trade in the early ’forties. Free Trade was not what people to-day call “practical politics.” It was a theory highly debatable and toughly debated, and to perhaps a majority it was very much like a fad. The case against it was not sustained solely by foolish or interested men. ‘The case for it had the support of a vast deal of selfishness and some honest stupidity. If the landlords wanted the State to keep up their rents, the A |ee ee — 122 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT manufacturers equally wanted the State to pay part of their wages. If the Protectionist was extravagant in declaiming that the repeal of the Corn Laws meant ruin to the country, the Free Trader was equally extravagant in promising that his remedy would solve every national problem. ‘The position was very much like that of the female suffrage question in I9QIO or 1911. The Tory Party was almost solidly opposed to the abolition of the Corn Laws. Nearly all the Whigs whose names are venerated for their liberality were either hostile or indifferent. Lord John Russell was a Protectionist. Macau- lay was quite as contemptuous of Cobdenism as Mr. Asquith was of suffragism. Almost the only politician of good social position who could be called a strong and convinced Free Trader was Pelham Villiers. This is not to deny that the movement was a formidable one. It was engineered with a cool skill and energy rare at any time, and especially rare in those days of rudimentary political organisation. It pos- sessed in Cobden an agitator of very unusual intellect and character, and it had a great deal of the new money behind it. It was supported also by a powerful body of urban working class opinion. It might very conceivably have triumphed at length on its own merits. But it won in 1846 for one reason, and one reason only. It won because Peel, in a dark moment for his fame, decided for the second time to betray his party. In 1845, far from being seen as something fated and in- evitable, Free Trade could not be said to be even in the balance. To speak of the issue as much less a certainty than the result of the next year’s Derby would be inadequate to describe the fact. For the next year’s Derby at least was almost certain to be run, while for anything people knew Free Trade might in twelve months’ time be superseded in public interest by the outbreak of a little war or the discovery of a big gold mine. Even granting a race, Free Trade was an ex- ceedingly dark horse. Knowing people, it is true, had sug- gested for some time that Peel had been playing with Cob- denism. People still more knowing went so far as to say that he had always been a Free Trader. Some rumour of all this had reached the squires, and they were a little angry andDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 123 uneasy, but their mood hardly amounted to suspicion. There are some things fairly honest men cannot bring themselves to believe of men reputed fairly honest, and in view of Peel’s past as the head of a strongly Protectionist party, having regard to his oft-expressed pride in leading the “gentlemen of England,” Protectionists to a man, it seemed hardly credible that he could in any circumstances consent to give legislative effect to the formulas of the Manchester School. A change of opinion is not a crime, and it cannot be 1m- puted to Peel that he wronged his party in allowing himself to be converted—if he needed conversion—to the economic views of Cobden. Such an avowal must indeed, in any case, have been disastrous to the Conservatives. But, though it might be deplored, it could not justly be resented; to desertion there would not have been added betrayal. When Peel felt that he could no longer stand for Protection his course was clear. He should have resigned. If it proved impossible for the Government to be carried on for the time being by another Minister then he should have left the question open. In no circumstances should he have consented to use a posi- tion given him on the understanding that he was to pursue one line of policy, in order to impose on the country, definitively and irrevocably, a course of policy wholly antagonistic. When the incredible happened Melbourne, in a conversation with the Queen, gave vent to a general sentiment, “Ma’am,” he said, with a freedom of language which only his favoured position made safe, “‘it’s a damned dishonest act.’’ The opin- ion of people who thought like Melbourne was not dependent on their view of the economic issue. The whole matter was assumed to be one, not of politics but of elementary hon- our. It was felt, rather naively perhaps, 1n consideration of the precedent of Pitt and the Roman Catholics, that a Prime Minister did not break his pledges. But Disraeli had long assumed, not only that Peel was capable of betrayal, but that he had made up his mind to betray. He spent the whole year 1845 warning the agriculturists that the pass was about to be sold. He was not believed, because belief implied a disloyalty which seemed monstrous, and thisi. =% 124 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT decision to trust the leader despite all the evidence of his un- trustworthiness explains the strength of the ultimate resent- ment against Peel and the ease with which Disraeli became accepted as a Conservative leader. Ihe betrayer was never forgiven; the betrayer’s exposer had established a claim which vas not disregarded even when, in the course of time, he him- self gave up the Protectionist cause. ‘The one recantation was a crime, the other a veniality. Peel was like a man who deserts a woman on the day fixed for the wedding; Disraeli like one who quietly lets the affair lapse after a discreet interval of lukewarmness. Or, to vary the metaphor, we may compare the Protectionist Party to a lover robbed of his mistress by a trick. Very commonly he is soon reconciled to his loss, and may bless the treason, but he does not any the more pardon the traitor. It was thus with Free Trade. The angry agri- culturists, after a while, found that things were on the whole by no means so bad in their special industry. A great many of them added largely to their wealth by taking advantage of the new industrial opportunities, others benefited richly by the increased price of land in the neighbourhood of new towns. Perhaps a majority were soon converted to the new doctrine; determined opponents were at any rate a very small minority; and as the time went on it became almost a solecism to question Cobdenic principles. But the treachery of Peel was never pardoned, and Disraeli’s part in predicting and punishing the treachery remains always to his credit. Throughout 1845 he continually warned the agriculturists that they were to be cozened. In February, satirising Peel’s plagiaristic policy, he amused the House of Commons with a figure which passed at once into the common currency. The right honourable gentleman, he said, had “caught the Whigs bathing, and had walked away with their clothes.”” Some time before Peel, in denouncing him, had been so injudicious as to quote Canning’s lines: Give me the avowed, the erect, the manly foe, Firm I can meet, perhaps can turn, the blow: But of all plagues, good heaven, thy wrath can send, Save me, oh, save me, from the candid friend.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 125 Peel’s relations to Canning had been “ambiguous’’; in plainer language, he was generally thought to have treated Canning very badly. Disraeli took cruel advantage of the opening. After complimenting Peel, who was given to pompous quota- tion, on his success in that art, a success explained “partly be- cause he seldom quoted a passage which had not already re- ceived the meed of Parliamentary approbation,” he briefly raked up the Canning-Peel past, and ended by exclaiming: “Mr. Can- ning! and quoted by the right honourable gentleman! The theme, the poet, the speaker—what a felicitous combination!” The next month, in a speech nominally on agricultural distress, he returned to the attack with fresh charges of in- constancy : You must not contrast too strongly the hours of courtship and the years of possession. ’Tis very true that the right honourable gentleman’s conduct is very different. I remember him making his Protection speeches. They were the best speeches I ever heard. It was a great thing to hear the right honourable gentleman say, “I would rather be the leader of the gentlemen of England than possess the confidence of sovereigns.” We don’t hear much of “the gentlemen of England” now. But what of that? They have the pleasure of memory—the charms of reminiscence. They were his first love, and though he may not kneel to them now as in the hour of passion, still they can recall the past. The sarcasm was biting, but it was only a preparation lead- ing up to the most memorable peroration Disraeli ever made: Protection appears to be in about the same condition that Protestantism was in 1828. The country will draw its moral. For my part if we are to have Free Trade, I, who honour genius, prefer that such measures should be proposed by the hon. Member for Stockport (Mr. Cobden) than by one who through skilful Parliamentary manceuvres has tampered with the generous confidence of a great people and of a great party. For myself, I care not what may be the result. Dissolve, 11 you please, the Parliament you have betrayed, and appeal to the people who, I believe, mistrust you. For me there remainsye i 126 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT this at least—the opportunity of expressing thus publicly my belief that a Conservative Government is an organised hypocrisy. According to a contemporary writer in the Press the success of the speech was “unparalleled,” but, by Disraelis account much of the applause came from the Opposition benches ; the Tories when they cheered did so “with downcast eyes, as if they yet hesitated to give utterance to feelings too long and too pain- fully suppressed.”’ The squires in fact behaved as men in their position generally do. They were much like the © ‘ginger’ poli- ticians of a later day. Uneasy about Peel, wanting to make him toe a line and come up to a scratch, they inwardly ap- plauded things they would hardly have dared themselves to say; but still believing in Peel’s ultimate loyalty they did not carry their demonstrations to a point which might have dis- turbed their leader’s confidence. “Practically speaking,” says Disraeli in Lord George Bentinck, “the Conservative Govern- ment at the end of the Session of ’45 was far stronger than even at the beginning of the Session of ’42.” That is a frank acknowledgment of the failure of his philippics. Despite all that he could advance to show the untrustworthiness of Peel in general, and his unsatisfactory attitude to Free Trade in particular, the Conservatives generally declined to believe that he would sell the pass. Indeed, on the known facts, why should they? Harvests had been good. The price of wheat had fallen in two years from 60s. to 45s. a quarter. Trade was prosper- ous. The one industry which was not doing well was agricul- ture itself. In such circumstances, the Manchester School was “reduced to silence.’ Even had Peel, the leader of a Protec- tionist Party, become a Free Trader pure and simple, the time might well have seemed inopportune for an announcement of his conversion. It soon became, however, evident that Disraeli had reason. By this time Cobden himself was not a more convinced Free Trader than Peel. His natural sympathies, as one sprung him- self from trade, were rather with the rising manufacturing and commercial class than with the agricultural interest. His 1n-DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 127 tellect, in its narrowness no less than in its lucidity, was of the kind to be impressed with the one unanswerable argument that Free Trade would increase the wealth of the country. So much was almost self-evident, and a Protectionist could only reply that wealth was not everything, and that the quality of the wealth produced by Free Trade could not make for the ultimate good of the nation. But such an argument could only appeal to a statesman of some imagination, taking a long view. Peel, with no imagination, was incapable of a long view. The conviction that Free Trade meant an increase in the national wealth no doubt decided the whole question in his mind, and Disraeli’s divination of his conversion in no sense anticipated but only noted the fact. But with things as they were during the Session of 1845 it was impossible for him to declare for the abolition of the Corn Laws, for, even 1f he could have carried with him some obedient Conservatives, he would still have had the opposition of the Whigs. As Disraeli guessed, during all those months of baiting, he was only await- ing his opportunity. It came with the autumn, A modern enemy of the Free Trade system reposed his hope of its ruin on “two bad win- ters.” Free Trade has, in fact, survived many bad winters, but one bad summer sufficed for its establishment. The Eng- lish harvest of 1845 was spoiled by heavy rains. Such things, however, had happened before, and a single failure of the wheat crop could not in itself be alleged as a sufficient cause for reversing the whole fiscal tradition of the country. Some- thing more sensational was needed. That something was sup- plied by the “Irish famine.” The Irish potato crop had also failed, and the potato was then the main food of the great mass of the Irish people. So much was grim and incontestable fact. There was the most acute suffering, and some actual starvation, in Ireland. But there was no such thing as an Irish famine, On the contrary there was actual overproduc- tion of food in Ireland in 1845; men and women were dying of want in the midst of superabundance; the land of misery was also a land of plenty. There was an excellent supply of corn. There was an abundant stock of cattle, sheep, and pigs.128 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT When it became clear that the potato blight was likely to deprive hundreds of thousands of their normal food there was certainly a case for forbidding all exports of food from Ireland, and for proceeding to large measures of rationing and relief. But no Irish belly could be filled, no Irish suffering could be diminished, by simply permitting the free importa- tion of food. There was food in Ireland already in ample quantity; what was lacking was simply the means of buying food. It was not, curious to say, a disinterested love of the potato, a daft admiration for the qualities of that tuber, or a superstition that its consumption was pleasing to the saints, that had made the poor Irish a race of root-feeders. They ate potatoes mainly because they could afford nothing else. The potato was the cheapest food they could drag out of the soil, and on it they sustained their own poor life; while they grew corn for export, they fed cattle and pigs for export, because that was the only means by which they could pay the land- lord’s rent. This simple fact the English statesman either would not or could not grasp. Many things could have been done for the stricken Irish peasant which were not done. The thing that was done was surely the most singular measure of relief ever taken by a Government. “The remedy,” wrote Peel to the Lord Lieutenant on the first breathing of trouble, “is the removal of all impediments to the imports of all kinds of human food—that is, the total and absolute repeal for ever of all duties on all articles of sub- sistence.”’ } And this extraordinary fallacy was accepted at the time and has been accepted, in the main, ever since. The extreme re- moteness of Ireland sufficiently explains why Englishmen, even those who should have been most ashamed to allow themselves to talk nonsense, have acquiesced in the theory that the Irish famine “forced Peel’s hand.” Less easy is it to explain the neglect of Irish writers, Mr. T. P. O’Connor in his Life of Lord Beaconsfield, and the late Mr. Justin McCarthy in his Sir Robert Peel and History of Our Own Time, to throw light on this dark business. It can only be suggested that *Parker’s Peel, vol. 111.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 129 their long connection with an English party from which they expected favours made it a point of honour with them to say nothing which might indicate artifice on the part of the Minis- ter who “gave the people cheap bread.’’ Of more value is the evidence of an Irish writer, who, free from English as- sociations, saw facts with unperplexed vision. William Dil- lon, dealing with the repeal of the Corn Laws in his Life of John Mitchel, says: This measure was loudly demanded by the great city populations of England and as loudly resisted by the farming population. In first announcing his conversion to Free T’rade in corn, Sir Robert Peel laid muchestress upon the condition of Ireland and upon the probable effect of his proposed measure in averting the famine. Now, without being disposed to judge Peel at all as severely as Mitchel does in his Last Conquest, one may well wonder how so able a man as he was could really have believed that Free Trade in corn was likely to benefit Ireland in her then condition. The class that was most hostile to the proposed reform in England was precisely the class which constituted the great majority of the Irish population. To lower the price of farm products in order to benefit a nation of farmers—this was, in effect, what Sir Robert Peel proposed to do. It only remains to add that Free Trade did nothing to avert the “starvation,” and that its introduction at such a time suggested to masses of Irishmen that, having ruined their manufactures by Protection, England was now bent on ruin- ing their agriculture by free imports. In November Peel called together his Cabinet. It was much divided. With the Prime Minister were Aberdeen, Graham, and Sidney Herbert, who were definitely in favour of suspension of the Corn Laws, though Peel made no secret of his conviction that suspension and repeal meant one and the same thing. The Duke of Wellington had a soldierly objec- tion to surrender, but an equally soldierly objection to deser- tion, Stanley knew enough about Ireland to re ject the famine130 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT pretext, and took a strong line against Peel. The other Min- isters wavered, with an inclination against the Prime Minister. Nothing was, therefore, settled. Shortly atterwards, how- ever, Lord John Russell, in a letter to his London constituents, declared for repeal. Lord John had always been a moderate Protectionist, but he knew how Peel’s mind was working, and, conscious of having been already caught “bathing,” was doubtless sensitive about further appropriation of the clothes of his party. Should the Conservatives array themselves in Manchester cotton, the Whigs would find themselves very much out of the mode. Disraeli has been charged with greatly exaggerating the effect of Russell’s letter on Peel. Of course, no politician will ever admit that in taking a course calculated to win some popularity he has been influenced by the fear that he might be forestalled by a rival. We may be sure that the Conserva- tive Ministers never acknowledged to each other, to their wives, or even to themselves, that Russell’s move had the least to do with their decision. No doubt they all talked solemnly about their duty in a great national crisis, “sinking”’ this and “putting aside’ that. Nevertheless, anyone who has experience of these matters, without being sufficiently con- cerned in them to be deceived as politicians deceive themselves, will readily believe that the scrawl of Lord John Russell had = 7 much more part in making up the minds of the wavering col- leagues of Sir Robert than had all the speeches of Cobden and all the tomes of Ricardo. From a much divided and be- devilled assembly the Cabinet quickly settled into a calm and almost unanimous one. When Ministers met again Stanley and Wellington stood alone against repeal. Stanley asked for forty-eight hours to consider his position; the Duke let it be understood that he was for unity, right or wrong. Peel could now bear himself boldly. At the beginning of the month, says Disraeli, he had submitted to be over-ruled; at the end of it he was “dictating his measures with the menace of resigna- tion.” In the interval the economic facts had undergone no change. Nothing had happened except the avowed conver- sion of Lord John Russell.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 131 At the next meeting of the Cabinet, on December 2, Stan- ley resigned. The Duke of Wellington was still against re- peal. Another Duke (Buccleuch) followed Stanley, but, “much agitated,” returned to the Ministry at the earliest op- portunity. Three days later Peel offered his seals to the Queen. Lord John Russell was summoned, but, having no majority, suggested that Stanley should be tried. Stanley’s refusal has been characterised by Mr. Saintsbury * as justity- ing Disraeli’s charge that he was guilty of “timidity as a leader,’’ and had Disraeli been at his side the case would no doubt have been different. The Protectionist, in order to avoid repeal, would have agreed to modification of the duties, and Stanley could have counted on Palmerston and the great body of the Whig Party. However, Stanley, lett to himself, did refuse; Lord John, again summoned to the Palace, tried to form a Ministry and failed; and finally “handed back with courtesy the poisoned chalice to Sir Robert.” Nothing loth, Peel resumed office, and the place left vacant by Stanley was filled by Gladstone. During the whole of these confused transactions Disraelt had been abroad. His judgment on the situation 1s found in a letter from Paris to Lord John Manners.” It shows on most points his usual penetration. After quoting Thiers, who said, “If it be a real famine, Sir Robert will be a great man; if it be a false famine, he is lost,” he proceeds to give his own opinion that the famine was false, and that the question was not ripe for the “fantastic tricks’ of Sir Robert, who, he said, is “so vain that he wants to figure in history as the settler of all the great questions; but a Parliamentary constitution is not favourable to much ambition.” Disraeli was right in thinking the famine a false pretext. He may have been right in thinking that Peel was chiefly ac- tuated by vanity. He was wrong in believing that Peel would not be able to carry the project through, immediately and 1r- revocably. Disraeli gravely under-estimated forces. To the enormous influence of commercialism was Now added senti- 1 Biography of the Earl of Derby. 7 Monypenny, vol. il.132 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT ment; the money-makers were recruited by the philanthropists. For the famine story, which has been more fortunate than the kindred warming-pan story in never having been officially dis- credited, had done its work. Hundreds of thousands of those vaguely kind-hearted people with which, then as now, England swarmed, were convinced that in some mysterious way a won- der would be performed in Ireland, at that time exporting wheat, by opening the ports to let other wheat in. Mighty 1s commercialism in England. Mighty, too, is sentiment. But when the commercialists can make the sentimentalists believe that higher dividends imply an enlargement of righteousness the combination is irresistible. Ireland went on starving, but that was her own Papish obstinacy. She could no longer com- plain that food was withheld. Parliament re-assembled on January 22, 1846. The Speech from the Throne dealt mainly with assassinations and pota- toes, both Irish, and for the rest consisted of a eulogy on the recent commercial legislation, the tendency of which had been towards the reduction of import duties, a rather vague in- timation being added that Parliament would be asked to con- sider whether this policy might not “with advantage be yet more extensively applied.” As soon as the Address had been proposed and seconded Peel rose. Usually he was very lucid and a little common- place. He was now very lucid, more than usually common- place, and so exceedingly prolix that there can be little doubt that the dullness of the speech was intentional, and that it was designed to act as an anodyne on the country gentlemen. The House was soon reduced to yawning apathy; in its sense of boredom it lost all perception of the sinister meaning behind the Prime Muinister’s platitudes. Russell. with or without de- sign, helped to confirm the impression that there could be little danger in proceedings so dreary. His spiritless review of events was heard with fatigue, and the debate, expected to yield so much sensation, appeared to be about to collapse. “Perceiving this,’ writes Disraeli, “a Member who, though on the Tory benches, had been from two sessions in op-DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 133 position to the Ministry, ventured to rise and attack the Ministers.”’ The Member, of course, was Disraeli himself. His time had come. The lonely man of genius, fresh to the House of Commons, with no assets but character and motherwit, had for two years waged unequal war on the “sublime mediocrity,” strong in wealth, prestige, vast Parliamentary experience, and the firm loyalty of a party pathetically faithful to its leaders. There had been times when the business must have seemed hopeless, and the fight was not one, it must be agreed, in which the assailant could be heartened in failure by a sense of the sacredness of his cause. It was no crusade, but partly a vendetta, partly an affair of self-seeking, to which Disraeli had devoted himself. He had an intellectual quarrel with Peel; he had an intellectual contempt for Peel. But he would have supported Peel, followed Peel, made excuses for Peel, had Peel only given him a place. There may be scorn for Disraeli's motives, disgust for his factitiousness, a smile for his affecta- tions, a frown for his cruelty. But for the ordinary sinner who loves a fighter, even when he fights not quite fairly, there must be also some thrill of sympathy. The whole thing was so plucky, so clever, so delightfully impudent—the work of a sort of gamin-Satan, whom so far Peel could always dismiss with cold contempt, even when most irritated by his darts of satire, as not quite the gentleman. But now with the catas- trophe the gamin disappeared, and it was a stately Prince of Darkness that rose in sombre impressiveness to announce to Peel that his hour had come. We can see Disraeli as he stood then, the black ringlets encircling the livid face, the thin features perfectly under command, the coal-black eye alone telling of the gratification of long-baulked hatred. We can hear the quiet, cruel voice making each murderous point with cool malignity, while the victim, with sly eyes downcast, shifted uneasily on his seat. “T am not one of the converts, I am perhaps one of a fallen party,” he began; and then launched into a philippic against the chief convert—the “watcher of the atmosphere, a man who, when he finds the wind in a certain quarter, turns to suit it.”134 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT He recalled how, on Catholic Emancipation, this same Peel, after resisting cogent arguments, “always ready with his fal- lacies ten thousand times exploded, always ready with his Vir- gilian quotations,’ had yielded to panic on the morrow of the Clare election. History was now repeating itself. Peel had been converted by some by-elections in the North of England. Nursed in the House of Commons, entertaining no idea but that of Parliamentary success, “if you wish to touch him to the quick, you must touch him on the state of the poll.” Sir Robert, he continued, had said that he was thinking of the country’s future: What an advantage to a country to be governed by a Minister who thinks only of posterity. . . . Throw your eyes over the Treasury Bench. See stamped on each ingenuous front “the last infirmity of noble minds.” They are all of them, as Spenser Says, “imps of fame.” They are just the men in the House you will fix upon as thinking only of posterity. The only thing is, when one looks at them, seeing of what they are composed, one is hardly certain whether “the future’ of which they are thinking is indeed posterity, or only the coming quarter-day.... If you had a daring, dashing Minister, a Danby or a Walpole, who tells you frankly, “I am corrupt and I wish you to be corrupt also,” we might guard against this; but what I cannot endure is to hear a man come down and say, “I will rule without respect of party, though I rose by party, and I will care not for your judgment, for I look to posterity... .’’ But one thing is evident, that while we are appealing to posterity, while we are admitting the principle of relaxed commerce, there is extreme danger of admitting the principle of relaxed politics. I advise, therefore, that we all, whatever may be our opinions about Free Trade, oppose the introduction of free politics. Let men stand by the prin- ciples by which they rise, be they right or wrong. Disraeli’s speech is to be reckoned among those that have deflected the course of history. Left to themselves the betrayed squires, after much grumbling and perhaps an abortive mu- tiny, would probably have come to heel. Nothing is more helpless than a leaderless mob, especially if it be a mob ofDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 135 gentlemen, who, contrary to the accepted belief, have little capacity for improvising any sort of Government, being by the nature of things always under the thumb of some expert: their own butlers, stewards, gardeners, huntsmen, and magis- trates’ clerks. Few things, on the other hand, are stronger than the power of party discipline. The dread of empty space, the fear of being alone, affect the political as the natural man. We have seen in our own day how the mass of the Tory party, during several years, watched with ineffective fury the proceedings of a Government whose policy it consistently sup- ported in the division lobby. The leaders, reviled at every dinner table, were obeyed in Parliament and extolled on the platform until someone had been found round whom the mal- contents could rally, when there was a general stampede. Dis- raeli was the Stanley Baldwin of that January of 1846. His audacity gave courage to those who thought with him but would never have dared to act without him; their cheers em- boldened him to further temerities; his redoubled assurance convinced them that they could not be wrong; and so the process of mutual intoxication proceeded until at last orator and audience were one, Both had gone beyond retreat. Peel, the betrayer, was repudiated before those who spurned him well knew what they were doing; Disraeli, who had foreseen and predicted the treachery, was in the same act hailed as a leader of the future. It was soon apparent, however, that the revolt had come too late, and was powerless for any purpose but the execution of vengeance. On January 27 Peel, in the much criticised presence of the Prince Consort, sitting in the body of the House, explained his policy. His speech is unreadable to-day, but for that very fact it was the more dexterous. “He played with the House as on an old fiddle,” wrote Disraeli, delighted connoisseurship triumphing over every other feeling. Every party was managed but the Protectionists, and they were forced into a position in which manoeuvre was impossible and pitched battle almost hopeless. Even if they had had better advantages and a less skilled tactician against them, their case would have been hard. They were an army withoutAS 136 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT officers. In the Lords they had, indeed, an embarrassment of dukes. There was the Duke of Richmond, who used to talk to Ministers of the Crown as 1f they were his own footmen. There was the Duke of Newcastle, who had just caused his own son to be defeated at a by-election for daring to take office under Peel. There was the Duke of Buckingham, Dis- raelis old patron. But these high and puissant princes were either slenderly endowed in national faculty, or had little ac- quired political talent. Stanley was not without ability or experience, but was irresolute as to his course and was not at once available; not until March, when the Protectionist party was surely established, did he consent to accept its leadership. Such was the position in the Upper Chamber, where the landed interest was naturally strongest. The Protectionists’ plight in the Commons was still more forlorn. It seemed for a moment that Disraeli could count only on a crowd of obscure country gentlemen, fit for little but cheering. From their ranks, however, there presently emerged a remarkable figure. Lord George Bentinck, a descendant of that Dutchman who, by the favour of William III, received, with the Duchy of Portland, enormous grants of English and Irish land, had been no friend of Disraeli’s. He had said “No!” almost with oaths and curses when the young adventurer’s name was put before him in connection with one of the family boroughs. Disraeli, moreover, had once described his uncle, Lord Wil- liam Bentinck, as “a drivelling nabob,” and Lord George must have resented the quip even if he agreed with it. People often think meanly of their relatives, but they dislike other people publicly translating the thoughts into words. There was hardly a point in which Bentinck and Disraeli were not in opposition. In 1845 Lord George had condemned as unjusti- fied the philippics against Peel, and he clearly believed them to be actuated by the worst motives. But now that the Prime Minister had shown his hand Bentinck promptly put aside old prejudices, acknowledged that Disraeli had been right, and hastened to strengthen the hand of the only man who, as he instantaneously recognised, could hold his own against the Front Bench. Bentinck was in many ways a re-DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 137 markable personage. He had, in his own words, “sate in eight Parliaments without having taken part in any great debate’ ; but he was regular in his attendance, and so conscientious in all his duties that he often hurried in hunting kit from the country to take part in important divisions. Keeping horses in three counties, he had been told that Free Trade would save him £1,500 a year. “I don’t care for that,” he replied vigorously, “what I can’t bear is being sold’? Peels he telt; had sold him and his kind, and Peel must smart for it. Fora “tragic vindictiveness,” to borrow the phrase of Lord Rose- bery, was part of Bentinck’s character. He would not for- give or forget injury to himself, to a friend, or to a cause. Peel had doubly offended him, first by his desertion of Can- ning, secondly by his desertion of Protection. The first injury he had revenged only by occasional insubordination ; the sec- ond, in his view, admitted of no retribution short of destruc- tion; it may be inferred, therefore, that he placed public before private wrongs. He was a wretched speaker, but he had a head for figures, and his political opinions were in many ways curiously liberal for one who, in all externals, was reaction incarnate. Disraeli and Bentinck made a formidable combination. Dis- raeli brought to the partnership vision, dexterity, wit, and the wizardry of words. Bentinck’s high rank, stately figure, ob- vious integrity, industry, and military eye for tactics gave it solidity and respectability. Rivalry between men so unlike was impossible, and the admiration each learned to feel for the other was deep and genuine, Bentinck 1s dismissed by Lord Rosebery as an “extraordinarily bad judge of men.” But Disraeli, at least, was an extraordinarily good one, and he seems to have decided at once that Bentinck was no Case for Oriental finesse, and could be managed only by direct dealing. Whether Bentinck was in fact lacking in perception may be doubted; he was an excellent judge of horses, and, as a great philosopher has observed, a good judge ot horses is a good judge of anything. He died too soon for his full quality to be revealed; had he reached the normal span, he might have taken a respectable place among English states-138 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT men. He had not the gift of words, but in natural mental en- dowment he seems not to have been Peel’s inferior; he had rather more culture than Palmerston; his character was in- finitely stronger and finer than Stanley's. Under this partnership, formed and maintained under con- ditions of dignity on both sides, the Protectionists from a rab- ble were turned into some kind of fighting force. Bentinck became, in spite of himself, their leader; Disraeli, with true Hebrew instinct, made himself the power behind the throne. The debate on the motion to go into Committee on the Government proposals lasted for twelve nights. Disraeli spoke on the sixth. Neither of his two chief speeches during this memorable Session can be considered wholly satisfactory. He had no difficulty in showing that Peel was not the man to repeal the Corn Laws; even Cobden felt that to be an im- propriety. He was less happy in stating the case for Protec- tion. There was one powerful argument which he had al- ready used in 1843—the only argument, indeed, by which Free Trade could be challenged. Cobden was undoubtedly right, and every intelligent man of the time could see that he was right, in holding that Free Trade would increase the wealth of the country, and he could be opposed on national and patriotic grounds only by the argument that certain great industries, of which agriculture was the chief, were vital to the welfare of the nation for other than purely economic rea- sons, The real question before the country then was whether England should be a land mainly of farms or mainly of fac- tories. It had to choose whether it should become the lop- sided thing we now know, or whether a chance should still remain open for a more symmetrical development. A chance —the case for retaining the Corn Laws could hardly at the moment be put higher than that. For it was certain that 1f the agricultural party remained a landlord party, it could not indefinitely bend the country to its will. There would never have been the smallest chance for Free Trade had England possessed a peasantry at that time; and it could have been defeated had the landlords, instead of relying on mere obstruc- tion, taken the initiative on lines which Disraeli had indicatedDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 139 in his novels—if they had adopted the essential spirit of Young England, without its incidental fantasies. But in truth there was little to choose between the owners of the old wealth and the owners of the new. The landlords had the advantage that they were at least patriotic according to their own lights. They thought a great deal of England if they did not think a great deal of most Englishmen. But neither they nor the Manchester philosophers were big enough to see that the ultimate great- ness of a people, whether it be expressed in money or genius or dominion, must depend on the health and faculties of the great mass of the people. The country magnates resembled the manufacturing magnates in one respect if in no other, that they cared very much for their own personal rights and profits, and very little for the happiness of those who created their wealth. It was therefore easy for the manutacturers to set against them popular opinion in the towns, and there was no corresponding strength of popular opinion behind them in the country. The loaf was a thing everybody understood. It could not be denied that taxation made the loaf dearer than it need be, and to all appearance the only class benefited by taxa- tion was the monopolist in land. So the moment the monop- olist ranks were split a motley array of enemies appeared from all quarters to make the rout decisive, and the land- owners in their extremity were without effective support from the labourers or even the farmers. It was probably consciousness of these facts which dictated Disraeli’s tactics. He evaded, as far as possible, the main issue. The argument that agriculture should be protected on other than economic grounds, because of its importance to the country, would have been readily met by the taunt that “the country” simply meant broad-acred squires and nobles. And if, in reply to such taunts, he should extend the definition of ‘landed interest’? and outline a policy for the restoration of the yeomanry and peasantry, it was quite certain that his own people would take fright. Apart from their hatred of ideas as ideas, such ideas as these savoured o republicanism. Finally, it is evident t] antagonise unnecessarily the industrialists. £ French atheism and iat he did not want to In Sybil he had140 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT given a perfectly truthful and very ugly picture of the system for the benefit of which Free Trade, as implying cheap labour, was demanded: Naked to the waist, an iron chain fastened to a belt of leather runs between their legs clad in canvas trousers, while on hands and feet an English girl, for twelve, sometimes tor sixteen hours a day, hauls and hurries tubs of coal up sub- terranean roads, dark, precipitous, and plashy; circumstances that seem to have escaped the notice of the Society tor the Abolition of Negro Slavery. Those worthy gentlemen appear to have been singularly unconscious of the sufferings of the little trappers, which was remarkable, as many of them were in their own employ. . . . Infants of four and five years of age, many of them girls, pretty and still soft and timid. Their labour ... is passed in darkness and in solitude. They endure that punishment which philosophical philanthropy has invented for the direst criminals, and which those criminals deem more terrible than the death for which it is substituted. What Disraeli thought of the industrial system of his time we know from his novel. But in the House of Commons he was all compliments for Mr. Cobden. The explanation is not obscure. Since his uppermost desire was the destruction of Peel, he had to reflect carefully before making any unnecessary enemies. ‘The Free Traders must be opposed, but should not be offended. On some other issue they might be useful allies in the one all-important business. Thus it is that we seek in vain, in his speech on the motion for going into Committee, for the sort of insight and passion or for the broad philosophic view which distinguished the novels in which he deals with the question. There are only one or two passages to raise the speech above the common- place. His repudiation of the theory that, if England adopted Free Trade, other nations would follow her example, has been justified by time. But it can still be argued, though with decreasing force, that the economic loss has not been Eng- land’s. More impressive, in the light of events seventy years later, was his warning of the peril in time of war to a nationDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 141 depending mainly on imported foodstuffs. But the most in- teresting part of the whole speech was its conclusion: We have been told, and by one (Mr. Cobden) who on this subject should be the highest authority, that we shall derive from this great struggle not merely the repeal of the Corn Laws, but the transfer of power from one class to another— to one distinguished by its wealth and intelligence—the manu- facturers of England. . . . I must confess my deep mortifica- tion that in an age of political regeneration, when all social evils are ascribed to the operation of class interests, it should be suggested that we are to be rescued from the alleged power of one class, only to sink under the avowed dominion of another. If this is to be the end of all our struggle—if this is to be the great result of our enlightened age—l, for one, protest against the ignominous catastrophe. I believe that the monarchy of England, its sovereignty mitigated by the acknowledged au- thority of the estates of the realm, has its roots in the hearts of the people, and is capable of securing the happiness of the nation and the power of the State. But, Sir, if this be a worn- out dream, if indeed there is to be a change, I for one hope that the foundation of it may be deep, the scheme comprehensive, and that instead of falling under such a thraldom, under the thraldom of capital—under the thraldom of those who, while they boast of their intelligence, are more proud of their wealth —if we must find a new force to maintain the ancient throne and immemorial monarchy of England, I for one hope that we may find that novel power in the invigorating energies of an educated and enfranchised people. In a single phrase he had defined the whole issue, so far as concerned the nation. For the labourer Free Trade meant cheap bread. For the manufacturer it meant cheap labour. For the country it meant the “thraldom of capital.” In the second reading debate he took no part. He may, as Mr. Monypenny says, have been in bad health, but he was certainly busy behind the scenes, and he may have felt that such subterranean activities were more important than making speeches. Bentinck had developed a certain power of speak- ing, repulsive but not ineffective, and what h e lacked in— = ti aid * — — oe — | if bed + uy 142 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT inspiration he made up in industry, since he spent all his morn- ings in being coached by experts, and could not be trusted to leave the House even for a meal. Disraeli was no doubt chiefly engaged in seeking allies. [his was his only hope. The Government on second reading got a majority of 88, and thus on their sole strength the Protectionists were clearly beaten. “Two possibilities presented themselves. Palmerston, who professed himself in principle a Free Trader, had just spoken, to the general surprise, in favour of a “moderate fixed duty,’ and there was some hope that the Whigs, who after all had as large a landed interest as the Conservatives, and per- haps even more, might, despite Lord John Russell’s Edin- burgh letter, he brought into a combination against Peel. Something, too, might be hoped from the Irish. O’Connell, a shade of his former self, “‘a feeble old man muttering over a table,’ as Disraeli described him at this time, was supporting Free Trade because he realised that, once having carried the measure by Opposition votes, Peel must fall, leaving office to the Whigs. To the Whigs O’Connell belonged body and soul, having virtually abandoned repeal for the prospects of patron- age. But some at least of his party were still free men. Smith O’Brien, in particular, was ready to strike a bargain with the Protectionists, and the circumstances appeared on the whole favourable to its completion. For the Government’s energies were not monopolised by the legislation which was to bring about a social revolution in Eng- land. It was also busily pushing forward a Bill for the coer- cion of Ireland, anticipating no serious opposition from any English party. ‘‘However they may differ,” wrote Mitchel, “‘as to the propriety of feeding the Irish people, they agree most cordially in the policy of taxing, persecuting and hanging them.” This statement exaggerated the facts. Exception should have been made for both Bentinck and Disraeli. Ben- tinck, whose politics must have been learned anywhere but at Westminster, “nursed in his secret soul a great scheme for the regeneration and settlement of Ireland, which he thought ought to be one of the mainstays of a Conservative policy.”” When coercion was demanded as the only means of preventing IrishDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 143 landlords being shot by their tenants, he was not at once ready to take the responsibility of opposition, but he was still un- convinced that the means were either adequate or well chosen. Disraeli’s view was more decided. “In less than a century,” he wrote, “there had been seventeen coercive Acts for Ire- land, a circumstance which might make some ponder whether such legislation was as efficacious as it was violent’; and he asked his associates to hesitate before pledging themselves to the Government. His request, however, at first elicited little sympathy ; the well-known mixture of dullness and scruple was too formidable to be immediately previous to the argu- ments of one who was neither dull nor scrupulous. Finally, however, he got his supporters to agree to a compromise; they would support the Bill, but only on their own terms. The argument was that if the Bill was really meant to stop assassinations, then it was wanted without the loss of an hour; if it were denied precedence over other business, then it was not needed at all, and should be opposed. ‘This was good tactics as well as good logic. For if time were taken up over Ireland the Corn Bill would be delayed, and the Lords would have a pretext for declining to pass it. In his Life of George Bentinck Disraeli is discreetly vague concern- ing the negotiations with Smith O’Brien. He throws the onus on the latter, and is reticent regarding himself—facts which can be amply explained by the Young Ireland leader’s con- viction and transportation to Tasmania. Light on the sub- ject, denied by Disraeli’s prudence, is provided by a few sen- tences from Sir Charles Gavan Duffy’s Four Years of Irish History: O’Brien and one or two others were approached by a new party, composed of seconders from Peel. . . . Of the Minister’s Bills the new party detested one, and approved the other: but Mr. Disraeli taught them not only to resist the measure they disliked by a system of Parliamentary obstruc- tion, never so effectually employed before, but to resist the measure they approved, the Coercion Bill, on the ingenious hypothesis that to arm a Government with extraordinary power is in effect to express extraordinary confidence in it,,144 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT and as Peel had forfeited their confidence he was not entitled to this tribute. The Irish Members would have failed, as they had often failed before, to avert coercion, but for this unex- pected ally. From this it must be inferred that the first move came, probably by indirect means, from Disraeli, The speeches both of O’Brien and Bentinck show clearly that at least a limited understanding was reached, and the fact was evident to inter- ested observers in the House of Commons, The Free Traders were much alarmed, as well they might be, for between them Protectionists and Irish commanded a clear majority. Cobden, furious at the prospect of defeat by a union between the two agricultural interests, was stung into declaring that it was not they “‘but the people who live in towns,” who were going to rule the country. Peel was accused of cheering this state- ment, but the point was really immaterial; supremacy of the towns was implicit in his legislation. The much dreaded alliance, however, came too late to change the course of British economic history. The force of habit persisted among country gentlemen, who had always re- garded Irish Coercion Bills as things to be voted without ques- tion. On first reading the measure was supported by most of the Protectionists, though Disraeli, who could not very well go into the lobby against his followers, walked out of the House rather than take part in the division. “Strong mea- sures,” he wrote afterwards in regretful strain, “were popular with many most respectable people who, not having very deeply investigated the conditions of our sister isle, held that violence could only be successfully encountered by restraint.” Peel, thus victorious, was at liberty to follow his programme. The ‘most respectable persons’? among the Protectionists were, in fact, depending on the House of Lords to throw out the Corn Law Bill, and the Prime Minister was protected from any recurrence of the Irish danger by the temporary disappear- ance of Smith O’Brien, who was locked in the cellar for some infringement of rules. O’Connell, safe to do nothing toDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 145 offend the Whigs, was once again undisputed leader of the Irish. Disraeli’s speech on the third reading extended over three hours. Perhaps its most interesting passage is that in which he warned his hearers against entrusting the life of England to the new industries. If agriculture decayed, would the fac- tories be able to supply and support the people? Would not the progress of invention and the employment of women and children tend always to reduce the number of men workers, on whom, after all, the country must depend for its ultimate safety? But though he thus showed his distrust of the Free Trade vision of England as “the workshop of the world,” though he suggested clearly the dangers of a whole nation getting away from its land, he made no attempt to give the House of Commons his full mind. That must be sought 1n his novels, His speeches on Free Trade were no doubt suited to his audience and circumstances, but who cares now about statistics concerning Congou tea, Bengal sugar, Mysore coffee, and the corn-growing capacities of “the exuberant plains of the Ukraine’? Nevertheless, all this no doubt convinced his followers that they were fortunate in having as an advocate so knowledgeable a fellow, and imparted a certain authority to the most bitter of his attacks on Peel: For between forty and fifty years, from the days of Mr. Horner to those of the hon. Member for Stockport (Mr. Cob- den), that right honourable gentleman has traded on the ideas and intelligence of others. His life has been one great Appro- priation Clause. He is a burglar of others’ intellect. Search the index of Beatson from the days of the Conqueror to the termination of the last reign, there 1s no statesman who has committed political petty larceny on so great a scale . . . Sif, the right honourable gentleman tells us he does not feel humiliated. It is impossible for anyone to know what are the feelings of another. Feeling depends upon temperament, it depends upon the idiosyncrasy of the individual; it depends upon the organisation of the animal that feels. But this I will tell the right honourable gentleman, that though he may not feel humiliated, his country ought to feel humiliated.146 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT Under these taunts, cheered loudly by the gentlemen of England he had expressed himself so proud to lead, Peel is left to writhe and blush, while his tormentor goes on to his magnificent conclusion : I know, Sir, that we appeal to a people debauched by public gambling—stimulated and encouraged by an inefficient and short-sighted Minister. I know that the public mind is polluted with economic fancies; a depraved desire that the rich may become richer without the interference of industry and toil. I know, Sir, that all confidence in public men is lost. but, Sir, I have faith in the primitive and enduring elements of the English character. It may be vain now, in the midnight of their intoxication, to tell them that there will be an awakening of bitterness; it may be idle now, in the springtide of their economic frenzy, to warn them that there may be an ebb of trouble. But the dark and inevitable hour will arrive. Then, when their spirit is softened by misfortune, they will recur to those principles that made England great, and which, in our belief, can alone keep England great. Then, too, perchance, they may remember, not with unkindness, those who, betrayed and deserted, were neither ashamed nor afraid to struggle for “the good old cause’’—the cause with which are associated principles the most popular, sentiments the most entirely national, the cause of labour, the cause of the people, the cause of England. But neither statistics nor invective could compensate the Protectionists for their failure to secure Irish votes, and on May 15, 1846, in a House of 560 members, the decision was taken that has made much of England a slum and more of it a desert. The third reading of the Bill for the Repeal of the Corn Laws was carried by a majority of 98.eecintn tnd tt a eel os meee — 5 z : etal il ns A a a ae Sg saci Sa ams M nee aml i cs e elRtaS h CHAPTER VIII TANLEY’S listless leadership made matters easy for the Government in the House of Lords. He still disliked Disraeli, and his heart was not really in the business of opposi- tion. From Bosworth Field onwards the Stanleys have shown no great attachment for lost causes, and he must have recog- nised very soon after his resignation that the cause was lost. The atmosphere of the Upper House was, moreover, quite different from that of the lower. In the Commons the strug- gle was real, and therefore bitter. In the Lords the main notion—one with which the present generation is familiar— was amenity; it was more important to preserve party unity than to defeat a possibly obnoxious measure. But was the measure, after all, so very obnoxious? In fact the great Peers were less threatened for the moment than the country gentle- men, and many of them, having already made vast sums out of the sale of land for railways and the leasing of land in the neighbourhood of growing industrial towns, were not ill disposed to a system which, promoting urban development, promised even richer opportunities. Love of peace and love of pelf carried the day, and on second reading there was a substantial majority of 47. The Protectionist hopes were now destroyed. “Vengeance therefore,” wrote Disraeli, “had succeeded in most breasts to the more sanguine sentiment.” Free Trade clearly must be: the more reason that its author should perish. From the time it became clearly hopeless the warfare took on a complex- ion of utter savagery. It was no longer sufficient to discredit Peel: he must be extinguished. “‘In this state of affairs,’ says Disraeli, “it was submitted to Lord George Bentinck that there appeared only one course to be taken, and which, though beset with difficulties was, with boldness and dexterity, at least sus- ceptible of success.” In other words Disraeli proposed to put 147148 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT Peel in a minority by voting against the second reading of the Coercion Bill. If the Protectionists went into the lobby against Peel he was clearly doomed, for the Whigs, with a chance of office, would undoubtedly take the same course, and with them, of course, would go the followers of O’Connell. The chief doubt was whether the “most respectable persons” who had shown scruple before would now help in throwing out what Bentinck himself had called “the anti-murder Bill.” ithe desire for vengeance, it would seem, has more impelling power than either self-interest or patriotism. The “most respectable persons’’ sincerely believed that their own rents were in danger from the Corn Bill. They sincerely believed that England’s true interests were threatened. Yet while action might still have saved all they had declined to act. It was only after all had been lost that nearly a third of their number yielded to the persuasions of Disraeli. On June 25, 1846, the Corn Bill passed its final stages in the Lords. On the same night—or more exactly, in the small hours of the next morn- ing—the division on the second reading of the Coercion Bill was taken in the Commons. A few days before Disraeli had warned Peel that Nemesis was ready to “seal with the stigma of Parliamentary reprobation the catastrophe of a sinister career.” ‘he moment had now arrived to show he had uttered no idle threat. Into the lobby against the Government trooped the “gentle- men of England” Peel had been so proud to lead. After the Mannerses, the Somersets, the Bentincks, the Lowthers, and the Lennoxes trooped “the men of metal and large-acred squires. . . . Mr. Bankes, with a Parliamentary name of two centuries, and Mr. Christopher from that broad Lincolnshire which Protection had created; and the Miles and the Henleys were there; and the Duncombes, the Liddells, and the Yorkes; and Devon had sent the stout heart of Mr. Buck, and Wiltshire the pleasant presence of Mr. Long.’ With them, too, went the Whigs, who, with their own Coercion Bill up their sleeves, had no hesitation in opposing the restrictive proposals of a tottering enemy. And with them also went the Irish, rejected as allies in a constructive policy, but good enough to speedry pe fica it Se ae ra I EE ha ae DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 149 the plan of revenge. Even Cobden voted political death to the statesman who had given his system legislative lite: “They say we are beaten by seventy-five!” whispered the most important Member of the Cabinet in a tone of surprise to Peel. Sir Robert did not reply or even turn his head. He looked very grave, and extended his chin, as was his habit when he was annoyed and cared not to speak. He began to comprehend his position, and that the Emperor was without his army. A pity that no great artist was there to imprison for ever on an inspired canvas the expression which animated Disraeli's pale features in that moment of triumph. It was a victory too empty for elation, but there must have been in him some- thing of that furious pleasure he describes Contarini Fleming as feeling when he flung on the dung-heap the half inanimate body of his schoolboy adversary. No doubt his lips assumed that “curl of triumphant scorn” which Willis had noted years before at Lady Blessington’s. Within a week Peel resigned, and a few days later Russell was kissing hands at Windsor. There had been an unsuccess- ful attempt to patch up peace between the two Conservative factions. Lyndhurst, for the Peelites, had held out the olive branch to Stanley, who was himself willing enough, but Ben- tinck would not consent to shake hands with what he regarded as treason, Disraeli’s views have not been preserved, but he was no doubt on Bentinck’s side. Self-interest would alone suffice to dictate such an attitude. After his terrible attacks on Peel co-operation with that statesman was impossible ; there are some injuries which cannot be forgiven either by those who suffer or by those who inflict. Moreover, Disraeli’s posi- tion in a united Conservative party could only be relatively unimportant, whereas among the detached Protectionists he must enjoy pre-eminence. a The political position, indeed, was almost exactly similar to that produced nearly eighty years later by an unauthorisedo — 150 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT change of policy on the part of the Conservative leaders. In 15406 Peel committed his party to Free Trade against the wishes, if not of a majority of the party, at any rate of all the most vital and honest elements of that party. In 1922 Mr. Austen Chamberlain committed his party to Irish semi-inde- pendence against the wishes, if not of a majority of the party, at any rate of every element definitely and honestly Conserva- tive. Bentinck the titular leader, Disraeli the virtual leader, of the one revolt, find their analogues in situation, if not in character and talent, in Mr. Bonar Law and Mr. Stanley Bald- win. When such a split takes place new vested interests are at once created, and as between the old and the new the advantage is almost invariably on the side of the latter. For it is seldom that the dispossessed statesmen take a cool and objective view of their position. Their tendency is to exag- gerate their popularity, to think too highly of themselves and too meanly of their rivals, to imagine themselves regretted by the country, to regard a restoration as always imminent. They await in sulky dignity their recalling by the acclamations of the populace, and the longer the acclamations are delayed the less their disposition to unbend. The usurper, on the other hand, is always on his mettle, always distrustful of himself and the popular mood, eager to conciliate. enterprising in his search for new allies. He has, moreover, the immense advantage of being in possession. He has enormous patronage to distribute. Few are too great to reject what it is his to give. Few are too proud to disdain the gift because they dislike or distrust the giver. The sight of a sieve full of corn appeals to the thorough- bred no less than to the roughest farm drudge. Thus it is that weak Governments and Governments of “second-class brains,” formed in the sequel of a great political division, so > often show a vitality disappointing to dispossessed demigods. It was so with Disraeli. The split raised him at once to the first importance. The clever but suspected adventurer suddenly towers up a statesman who may be reviled but must not be ignored. A few months before Peel’s conversion the Duke of Rutland was “writing to John” concerning that noble youth’s unwise attachment to a mistrusted lew trickster; now wea ere a i ten fe ar at er ~ Se ee SaaS ea a a a erm a a ae te 3 one sake oes get hee © Sr ee ca 2 Soe = = DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 151 find Disraeli, as statesman, an honoured guest at Belvoir Castle, there by no minor’s invitation, but at the gracious wish of the noble Duke himself. Isaac Disraeli could no longer say, “What does Ben know about Dukes?’ Ben knew that Dukes have mouths for pudding and knees for Garters. But though he had secured his personal position, there is the best evidence that this triumph did not prevent his being in a very real sense a disappointed man. During the winter, while Bentinck was occupied with plans for fighting starvation in Ireland, Disraeli set himself to complete a novel which he had begun or planned in his Young England days. Jancred he himself rated as his best book. It is interesting biographi- cally because it indicates how the events of 1846 had given the author a new and a distinctly lower political standpoint. On entering politics he had described himself as a Nationalist, though others could only see him as a Radical. In his subse- quent appearance as a Tory there was no major inconsistency. The original Tory faith had been in essence national, and had a great deal of kinship with the kind of Radicalism professed by Cobbett, which was worlds asunder from Whiggery, from the Manchester School, from Gladstonian Liberalism, and from the more modern Social Reform Radicalism. Disraeli saw past and present very much as Cobbett did. He had formed his own view of the maladies from which England had sut- fered from the Reformation to the Reform Act; he was under no illusion as to the efficacy of the political cure offered by the Whigs or the economic cure offered by the Free Traders ; but up to 1846 he seemed never to have lost faith in the great- ness of England, the island kingdom. He seems never to have doubted her capacity to recover her lost health. Chartism had suggested to him the existence of a popular will strong enough to prevent the new plutocracy succeeding to the powers of the old “Venetian oligarchy.’ The Tractarian movement had promised a spiritual no less than a political re-birth ; and, whatever Disraeli’s own theological judgments, he would then have been ready to range himself with Pusey, or even with Wiseman, against the materialism of the school of Bentham. As late as 1845 he could believe, apparently, that the fight wasi 152 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT hopeful. ‘The Utilitarian system is dead,” said Coningsby. “It has passed through the Heavens of philosophy like a hail- storm, cold, noisy, sharp, and peppering, and it has melted away.” No man marked with a less illusioned eye the physical and moral rottenness the unchecked industrialism of his day was producing. But he saw in “the landed interest’ —by which he did not mean simply the interest of landlords—a solid core of health and strength, which might enable the nation to conquer the cancer and throw out the virus. But with the repeal of the Corn Laws the whole situation, as he saw it, was changed. The rising of the people was to end in mere bluster. Decisive political power was to pass from a class which, however selfish, was at least national, to a class which, however well meaning, was essentially cosmopolitan in its outlook. With the masses definitely divorced from the land, their dependence on the capitalist must be absolute. When trade was bad they would be riotous; when trade was good they would be tractable; but the mutiny would be that of a starved, the content that of a well-fed slave. The new economic conditions might bring to the people fullness or want, or an alternation of each; what it could not bring them was power to govern their conditions. It might bring for a time more and more wealth to Belvoir Castle, but though the walls should yet stand awhile the foundations are already being sapped. The Duke might still maintain the mere state of a potentate, but without a peasantry or yeomanry his solid in- fluence must vanish, and the passage of time must leave him an anachronism and a shadow. It was claimed for Peel that he saved England from Revolution: Disraeli would have re- plied that he had delivered England over to a deadlier thing, evolution, the dominion of blind forces, the most degrading of all tyrannies, implying the subjection of the will of men to the tendency of things. For Free Trade in its essence was as surely a form of Calvinism as Darwinism itself. Theological Calvinism assumed an implacable God, political Calvinism an implacable law of supply and demand, scientific Calvinism an implacable law of “biological necessity.” Thinking as he did, Disraeli, had he been an Englishman,oe er et ae a * ar = ee a a a 2 == DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 153 might well have retired from politics. The party to which he belonged had had an intelligible cause. That cause it had lost, through which he must have considered sheer stupidity. It had neglected his astute counsel, and had been ruled, in reject- ing the Irish alliance which might have saved it, not by his clear brain, but by “the stout heart of Mr. Buck.” A patriot who thought only in terms of England, and was convinced, as Disraeli certainly was, that England had committed a capital error in deciding to be the workshop of the world, could hardly have turned, as he did, with a light heart to the next move in a party game that was now meaningless. But Disraeli was not only a careerist. He was also a Jew, that is to say a foreigner, attached to England, as foreigners often are, but not of England. He might think that England had abdicated her position as a nation. ‘That was sad for England, a little sad for himself, who fancied England and believed himself equal to seeing her through her troubles. Sad, but not utterly tragic. England might be doomed as Eng- land, but after all there was a wider world than England, and even than Europe. England had doomed herself as England, the insular kingdom. But she might have another chance if she made herself the head of an Empire; what kind of Empire did not, roughly speaking, matter. It was in 1846 that Disraeli ceased to be a Nationalist, and became an Imperialist. Tancred makes very clear what was in his mind on the morrow of Manchester’s victory over the agricultural party. The Emir Fakredeen, speaking to Montacute, is simply Disraeli speaking to himself. The Oriental's opening advice is significant : The Queen will listen to what you say; especially if you talk to her as you talk to me, and say such fine things in such a beautiful voice. ... You will magnetise the Queen as you have magnetised me. At this date it is unlikely that Disraeli had ever spoken to the Queen, but that time, he had determined, was to come, and he was confident that he would speak with success. Withx i + 154 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT his knowledge of the heart of a woman, and his shrewd guess at the inscrutable hearts of princes, he, if anybody, could talk convincingly to a female sovereign. “Gloze it over as you may,’ continues Fakredeen, “‘one thing For this astonishing ,% . is clear; it is finished with England statement three reasons are given. In the first place there 1s the drain and strain of Ireland, “O’Connell appropriating to himself the revenues of one half of her Majesty's dominions.” 1e accepted fallacy of “‘the workshop of the world” : “The cottons; the world begins to get a little disgusted with those cottons; naturally everybody prefers silk; I am sure as a ~ Secondly. t that the Levant in time could supply the whole world with Thirdly, the diminishing security given by the British Navy in an age of new inventions: “With this steam your great ships have become a respectable Noah’s Ark.” “The silk.” 7 game is up,” goes on Fakredeen. But Now see a coup d'état that saves all. You must perform the Portuguese scheme on a great scale. Let the Queen of the English collect a great fleet, let her stow away all her treasure, bullion, gold plate, and precious stones; be accompanied by all her court and chief people, and transfer the seat of her Empire from London to Delhi. There she will find an immense Empire ready made, a first-rate army, and a large revenue. . . Your Queen is young; she has an avenir. Aberdeen and Sir Robert Peel will never give her this advice; their habits are formed. ‘They are too old, too rusés. But, you see! the greatest Empire that ever existed; besides which she gets rid of the embarrassment of her Chambers. And quite practi- cable; for the only difficult part, the conquest of: India, which baffled Alexander, is all done! Lord Rosebery once indulged a vision of such a “sublime transference”; it is a way with non-English Imperialists. But the Empire of Lord Rosebery’s fancy had its seat in America and was white. Disraeli the Oriental drew no colour line. It may be objected that it is absurd to seek for the serious opin- ions of the author in the rhodomontades of one of his charac- ters; and the Delhi plan, no doubt, can be treated much asee ee ee = —= — ee =r a Ss a MR ai ee Sa Sh Sa a Ril a a i a li cena DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 155 Lord Rosebery’s American hejira, that is to say, as a flight of fancy implying no set conviction, but throwing some light on the habit of mind of the dreamer. But, in fact, Fakredeen is utterly nonsensical as an Emir; no Syrian of the time could possibly have had his insight into English affairs; and not only is his analysis of the situation Disraeli’s, but it proves Disraeli to have observed contemporary facts, with an astonishingly prophetic vision. To men of the time it must have seemed the wildest nonsense to say “itis finished with England.”’ But, literally and strictly, the thing was true. It was finished with England, the com- pact island entity of ten centuries, from the moment its rulers decided that the bulk of the food its people lived on must be produced by foreigners and dependent communities. From that moment England could not develop on national lines. She had a choice between expanding overseas and shrinking in Europe; she could make herself an Empire, to the loss of some of her individuality, or she could sink into a greater Holland, unless perchance her enemies decided that she should experi- ence the fate of a lesser Carthage. This idea is implicit in Fakredeen’s remark about the cottons. The fancy of the Vic- torians that for ever, and in ever increasing quantities, all the nations of the earth would buy from England did not deceive Disraeli, Asa Jew he had no prejudices, and it was impossible for him to believe that Europeans, Americans, Colonials, of for that matter Asiatics would for all time be incapable of supplying their own wants. He saw that the struggle for markets must grow more and more bitter as the necessities of England, with her unhealthily swollen industrial population, grew more and more imperious. To Disraeli the system which made Staffordshire depend on the passion of Bolivia or Siam for English-style wraps and bedroom china must be an unstable system, “Palmerston,’ says one of the Syrians in Tancred, “will never rest till he gets Jerusalem.” Another agrees, be- cause “the English must have markets.” at Fakredeen is otherwise equally sapient. In realising the gravity of the Irish problem Disraeli was far in advance of nearly all his contemporaries ; and, if he contributed nothing156 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT to its solution, he nearly always spoke commonsense concern- ing it. The feud with O’Connell had led him astray from his precociously statesmanlike attitude; but he made due atone- ment during his Young England and Protectionist periods, and in wisdom he persisted until circumstances made it plainer that Ireland must either be ruled as a conquered country or allowed to go her own way. Reconcilation was possible while the inter- ests of the two islands remained mainly agricultural. Wauth the sundering of that bond all hope vanished. To the antagonism of creed, race, and temperament was added the much more serious difficulty of any understanding between two communi- ties fundamentally divided in interest. To the town popula- tions at least in England Free Trade long appeared a blessing. To the dwindling and impoverished agricultural population of Ireland it bore only the aspect of a new curse imposed by the English. As to the third of Fakredeen’s prophecies, 1t was super- ficially inexact, but was it fundamentally untrue? In spite of steam the “great ships’ of the British Navy continued omnipotent, and no successor of Louis Philippe could “‘take Windsor Castle whenever he pleased, with the wind in his teeth.” But though Disraeli was wrong for the moment, and though his eye did not penetrate to a sky swarming with aircraft and a sea alive with submarines, he had at least the prescience to see that the march of scientific invention was especially a danger for a country of concentrated industries and dependent commerce. Had Nelson’s whole fleet been sunk at Trafalgar England might still have survived. Nothing could have saved the British Empire had Jellicoe risked and lost his whole force at Jutland. The political ideas in Tancred have been very inadequately examined. Indeed, many decades had to pass before they be- came intelligible to critics imbued with the strong delusions of their time. The book has been noticed chiefly as an ex- position of Disraeli’s religious ideas. On this side his inten- tion was clear enough; it was to demonstrate that Christianity is simply an extension of Judaism. But with him Judaismpcre ah a Oe a SEY f eel a Ta aan saa ess eee gee mR ae Meee Snel oh line ne tte DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 157 is something wider than the Jews. There is a mystic virtue in the whole Arab race. “Tet men doubt of unicorns,” says the Moslem chief Amalek, “but of one thing there can be no doubt, that God never spoke except to an Arab.” “Sheikh of Sheikhs,” says Fakredeen to Amalek, “there is but one God; now is it Allah or Jehovah?” “The palm-tree is sometimes called a date-tree,’ replies Amalek, “but there is only one tree.” “God,” says Fakredeen, quizzing the young English lord, ‘had never spoken to a European.” “Pray,” says a Jewish maiden to Tancred, “are you of those Franks who worship a Jewess, or of those who revile her, break her image, and blaspheme her pictures ?” “I venerate, though I do not adore, the mother ot God,” answers the hero, who is an Anglican of the Oxford movement. “Ah!” ex- claimed his companion, “the mother of Jesus... . He was a great man but he was a Jew... . Now tell me: suppose the Jews had not prevailed upon the Romans to crucify Jesus, what would have become of the Atonement?” In fine, the author’s object is to emphasise the world’s debt to the Semitic race, and the special pleading is for the most part brilliant. But while the common origin of Judaism and Christianity needed no proof the attempt to demonstrate that the creeds to-day are for all practical purposes identical was futile. The facts were too stubborn. No Christian becomes a Jew. Few Jews become even nominal Christians, fewer still become Christian believers. A difference which permits of no compromise must be fundamental, and it is felt as funda- mental on both sides. Indeed, unless we think of Disraeli as a sceptic, whose pride in Judaism was racial and whose belief in Christianity was political, this fallacious breadth of view 1S quite incomprehensible in a man of his intellect. In fact, of course, he was a sceptic. His position was in essence that of many Japanese thinkers who, while rejecting Christian dogma desired their country to adopt Christianity as a more potent influence on the masses than the less energetic Buddhist creed. Buckle quotes him as saying that the Jew ‘ This shrewd saying had support in Disraeli’s novels, ever the best index to his mind. In Sybil he said: ‘The people are not strong; the people never can be strong. Their attempts at selt- vindication will end only in their suffering and confusion.”’ Disraeli had far too realistic a mind to be misled into believing, as so many eminent Victorians did, that the wide distribution of the vote means a correspondingly wider distribution of political power. With men like Bright there seemed to be an idea that franchise extension was like a practice sum—so many articles at so much per article make so much. To Disraeli the matter was much more like one of those astonishing exercises in algebra, in which, after multiplying and multiplying, one Pere the re- sult: 20,000,000 mutliplied by zero ental zero. ‘Ihe spectres which haunted Lowe and Cranborne did not trouble him, be- cause while he had none of the nineteenth century’s faith in the vote he also had little fear of it. He saw it was something— though perhaps less than might appear—when possessed by a very small minority, but that it could be nothing (beyond a tiny fraction of a voice in the choice between two sets of masters once in five or six years) when it was the possession of many millions. Carlyle was rating the vote far too highly when he talked of it as establishing the right to a ten-thousandth share in a “master of tongue-fence.” If it did that it would have some sort of efficacy. In fact the “master of tongue- fence” —and he is seldom a master—never dreams of regard- ing himself as the representative of anybody. He is in Parlia- ment for his own purposes, and since the degradation of the franchise they have been, as a general rule, purposes increas- ingly separate from any idea of the public good. Disraeli, in Coningsby, made Sidonia say that, while there is “‘no error so vulgar as to believe that revolutions are occasioned by economical causes,” he is “still less of opinion” that the * History of England, Lingard and Belloc, vol. x1.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 249 troubles of the age ‘‘can be removed by any new disposition of political power.” Disraeli wrote sincerely here. He had spoken sincerely when, as leader of the Opposition, he had de- clared that degradation of the franchise would spell the ruin of Parliament. But the ruin of Parliament would give him no deep pain. For Parliament he had merely the devotion of a man to his business, a devotion scarcely touched with affec- tion, not at all informed with reverence. Like Mr. Balfour after him, he enjoyed the Parliamentary game, because he could play it so supremely well, without being at all impressed by Parliament, after the manner of most Englishmen, as a device of government. “Thanks to Parliamentary government,” he wrote in Sybil, “the people of England were saved from ship-money, which money the wealthy paid, and only got in its stead the customs and the excise, which the poor mainly supply.” Parliamentary government appeared to him to have been always selfish, and he did not regard its character in this respect as having been changed by the Act of 1832, which ended the reign of pure or nearly pure aristrocracy. The admission of the rich middle class had only spread the selfishness over a little wider surface. “The middle classes,” he once said, “emancipated the negroes, but they never proposed a Ten Hours Bill.” Thus if the Act of 1867 did in truth strike a blow at the power of Parliament, Disraeli was not the man to think himself a criminal for delivering it, or permitting it to be delivered. To quote Sidonia once more, ‘‘an educated nation recoils from the im- perfect vicariate of what is called a representative government’ and “the tendency of advanced civilisation is in truth to pure monarchy.” Keeping in view these dicta, it is not difficult to divine Disraeli’s inner mind and to understand how, like a Japanese jiu-jitsu wrestler, he made the suspended strength of his opponent subserve his own secret purposes. He seems to have reached, many decades earlier, the view taken by the neo- absolutists of to-day. “The advantage of ‘divine right,’ or ‘rremovable legitimacy,’ says Mr. Chesterton in his Short History of England, “is this: that here is a limit to the am- bitions of the rich. Roi ne puis; the royal power, whether or250 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT not it was the power of heaven, was in one respect like the power of heaven. It was not for sale. Constitutional moralists have often implied that a tyrant and a rabble have the same vices. It has perhaps been less noticed that a tyrant and a rabble most emphatically have the same virtues. And one virtue which they very markedly share is that neither tyrants nor rabbles are snobs; they do not care a button what they do to wealthy people. It is true that tyranny was sometimes treated as com- ing from the heavens almost in the lesser and more literal sense of coming from the sky ; a man was no more expected to be the king than to be the west wind or the morning star. But, at least, no wicked miller can chain the wind to turn only his own mill; no pedantic scholar can trim the morning star to be his own reading-lamp.”’ Things like this are scattered all through the more important works of Disraeli. He desired, it is evi- dent, a government which should be impartial between the vari- ous sections of the population, and like Bolingbroke before him, he saw the chance of such a government in increased power for the Crown. He seems to have felt that political free- dom is reserved for peoples economically independent, who, while strong enough to defend themselves against absorption, are unencumbered with world-wide interests. After 1846 that destiny was impossible for England; to be anything she must be an Empire, and an Empire required concentrated sover- eignty, which meant bureaucracy, while in the long run bureau- cracy, if it were to be kept sweet, meant monarchy. Disraeli, of course, might also have a personal point of view. The aristocracy and the middle class had refused him their confidence, the one because he was not enough of a gentleman by birth, the other because he was too much of a gentleman by habit and nature. He must have known that he had qualities fitting him to fascinate monarchs and to dazzle the people; but whether he considered his own aggrandisement, and if so whether incidentally or chiefly, is a point affecting judgment of his character rather than of his policy. It may be said that it is chiefly because his aims and thoughts were so different from those of any Englishmen of his time that so much obscurity attaches to them, that so much un-DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 251 merited censure has been bestowed by his adversaries, and so much unmeaning eulogy has been poured forth by his admirers. He was misunderstood equally by friend and enemy. ‘That was the inevitable consequence of his position. As a Conserva- tive leader elsewhere, he could have followed the logic of his opinions, and delivered a frontal attack on Parliamentary insti- tutions. Here ridicule and failure would have been his portion had he followed such a course. He could proceed only by indirect means, sapping and mining, weakening where he seemed to strengthen, strengthening where he seemed to weaken, never more essentially Conservative than when he seemed most Radical. Disraeli could not help being a great man, and he certainly did not fall below the limited praise of Froude that he was “not less honest than other politicians because his professions were few.”’ But he would have been, probably, a far greater man, and left a far less twisted skein for the student to unravel, had Benjamin Disraeli the elder chosen to take up his abode in some country where the intellectual atmosphere is clearer than in these brumous isles.—_——— — CHAPTER XIII HE third Derby-Disraeli Government depends for its reputation on a single Act. Apart from Reform, its activities were purely departmental. The historian of the Empire may, perhaps, find in the British North America Act, which federated the chief Canadian provinces, an importance he denies to any domestic event. But it hardly concerns the present writer. The statesman so often distinguished as the pioneer of Imperialism showed no interest in this measure. Disraeli, in fact, had little of that enthusiasm for the colonies which has marked his successors. Once he went so far as to write to Malmesbury that the Colonial Em- pire was a “millstone.” So far as can be ascertained, his settled conviction was that most of the British oversea domin- ions were to be regarded by a statesman as examples of wasted opportunity. Thus he said as late as 1872: Self-government, in my opinion, when it was conceded, ought to have been conceded as a part of a great policy of Imperial consolidation, and to have been accompanied by an Imperial tariff, by securities for the people of England for the enjoyment of unappropriated lands which belonged to the Sovereign as their trustee, and by a military code which would have precisely defined the means and responsibilities by which the colonies should be defended, and by which, if necessary, this country should call for aid from the colonies. The British North America Act contained no such provision. Lord Carnarvon, the Minister in charge, expressed a belief that Canada would adopt Free Trade, and in that faith Canada was left free to erect the tariff wall she in fact quickly set up against the mother country. There, as elsewhere, the colo- nists were given full liberty to close their ports to immigrants, while the whole question of mutual aid in war was left open. 252DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 253 Unlike the Manchester Radicals, Disraeli did discern a potential value in colonies, but he did not consider that it had been realised, or was likely to be realised, under such arrangements. His ideal seems to have been a connection giving equal advan- tages to both parties, but if such equality were impossible he considered that the Colonial Empire should rather exist for the English people than the English people for the Colonial Em- pire. He saw as anomalous, and likely to lead to serious complications with foreign powers, the arrangement which gave the colonies real independence with a nominally subject status. But here again he made a practical confession of 1m- potence before the spirit of the age, which in every department interpreted liberty in terms of divorce. In Europe the Government had no great difficulties. Sated for the moment by her victory over Austria, Prussia was rest- ine for her next spring, and Stanley was able to earn a little easy credit for English diplomacy by helping to settle the Lux- emburg question, then at issue between Paris and Berlin. In another quarter of the world British arms won prestige on inexpensive terms. For the Abyssinian trouble, ending in Napier’s capture of Magdala without loss of life, the Liberal Government had been responsible. In 1862 the Negus Theo- dore addressed a letter to the Queen, but Russell seems to have been unaware of the dignity of the correspondent who claimed to be the descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The letter was accordingly left unanswered by the Foreign Office. Theodore’s resentment was exasperated by a tactless consul, and a few British subjects who happened to be within the remote potentate’s reach suffered in chains for Russell’s neglect. That Disraeli’s grasp of Abyssinian niceties was frmer than his predecessor’s is highly dubious. Moving a vote of thanks to the victorious British forces after Napier had destroyed Magdala and Theodore had destroyed himself, he rejoiced that “the standard of St. George” had been “hoisted upon the mountains of Rasselas.” He seems to have been under the impression that the hero of Johnson’s rather dismal essay was a flesh-and-blood personage.gee 254 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT Meanwhile Lord Derby had retired. Yielding definitely to his old enemy the gout he resigned the Premiership in February, 1868. There were only two possible successors . . . one his own son Stanley, the other Disraeli. To many in the party the choice seemed to be one between evils. If Disraeli was distrusted as certainly an adventurer and as perhaps a concealed Radical, Stanley was deemed too like an ordinary Liberal to be a satisfactory leader. Blood, however, was still a prime consideration, and if at any time during the next four or five years Stanley had chosen to mount the Tory high horse half the party would have galloped with him. Stanley, how- ever, had no inclination that way. Steadily loyal to Disraeli on every personal issue, true to his own convictions in public matters, he possessed neither talent for intrigue nor desire for his own aggrandisement. For Disraeli his affection and admiration were boundless, and the affection Disraeli recipro- cated, though it is possible to detect some slight tincture of disdain. Stanley’s refusal of the Greek crown must have earned the astonished contempt of a man of Disraeli’s tempera- ment. To prefer “Knowsley to the Parthenon and Lancashire to the Attic plains” was to shock an imagination which has been described as “too fervent to be tried by the multiplication table.” Even before Derby had tendered his resignation the Queen’s choice had fallen on Disraeli. Her old aversion had yielded to his so potent art. She had been touched by his “under- standing” condolences on the death of the Prince Consort, by his support of the Albert Memorial scheme, and, it may be added, by the gross flattery in which Disraeli had not hesitated to enlarge on the virtues of the Prince, in whom he professed to find ‘an union of the manly graces and sublime simplicity of chivalry with the intellectual splendour of the Attic Aca- deme”—a "rare combination of romantic energy and classic repose.”’ Disraeli’s past was now forgiven, and even forgotten, for the Queen, womanlike, would see no ill in a favourite any more than she would distinguish redeeming features in any man or woman so unfortunate as to have earned her disfavour. She saw both people and questions in terms of black and white;DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 255 her temperament knew no half-tones, and against the whiteness of her new Prime Minister the figure of Gladstone, which had never favourably impressed her, was regarded with a more sombre disapproval. The Conservative Party as a whole was acquiescent with- out enthusiasm; Cranborne remained hostile, but despite his high character and brilliance as a writer and speaker, he could command only a small following. Like his sons, he seems to have lacked any spontaneous gift for working in harmony with other men. Only after submitting himself to Disraeli's rule—and then but in a limited degree—did he acquire the art of co-operation. Whatever danger there was of continued schism, however, was removed by the policy of the Opposition. The Conservative ranks began to close from the moment that the Liberal leader opened his attack on the Irish Church. In “dishing the Whigs” the Derby Government had robbed Liberalism of an effective battle-cry. To the philosophic mind the injury might seem slight; an earnest reformer, it might be inferred, should rejoice to see his aims accomplished, even though by another agency. But it is part of the character of Liberalism, which represents the restless element in human nature, to value a project more than an acquisition ; and by a simple extension we arrive at the state of mind in which one 1s actually displeased when a project, long and passionately urged, unexpectedly reaches realisation. Where the realisation 1s effected by a rival party, other feelings come into play, and everything combines to stimulate a search for a new appeal to the desire for change. It was so in 1868. The possibilities of Reform being now exhausted, the Liberal leaders thought it necessary to find some other means of vindicating the claim to be in the van of progress, and Gladstone, casting his gaze across St. George’s Channel, promptly persuaded himself that the cause of all Irish troubles was the Protestant ascendancy. One symbol of that ascendancy was the Established Church in Ireland, and Gladstone now declared that the axe must be put to the upas tree beneath the shadow of which there could be no healthy life. In embarking in this crusade, the Liberal256 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT leader incidentally did Disraeli an excellent turn, The Church in Ireland was, indeed, difficult to defend, and Disraeli had him- self pronounced it indefensible. But to create an Irish question was to put English questions in the shade, and nothing suited him better than the raising of an issue which promised to repair such lesions as still remained in the Conservative Party. Moreover, as Prime Minister he was finding the Church of England, and especially the problem of ecclesiastical patronage, exceedingly troublesome. Transfer of “the holy strife of dis- putatious men” to the neighbouring island promised consider- able relief. Before he had been many months in supreme control, two bishoprics and several deaneries fell vacant, and in the autumn of 1868 died Dr. Longley, Archbishop of Canterbury. This was all very awkward for Disraeli. He knew little about the dignified clergy. At Hughenden he observed the good squire’s habit of regular attendance at the parish church—Sir Roger de Coverley himself could not have done the thing better— but a visit to Westminster Abbey to hear a noted preacher provoked his ingenuous wonder. “I would not,” he told Dean Stanley, “have missed the sight for anything.” * | When ap- pointments were to be made he generally had resource to Crock- ford, and no doubt he must sometimes have wished that the information in that valuable work of reference had been some- what more coloured and less concise. Lending his pen in Young England days to Tractarian ideas, a variety of reasons had since impelled him towards the Evangelical camp. It is not easy to conceive of his imagination being attracted by the Low Church, but he had been impressed by the importance of Protestantism as a political power to be captured; Gladstone was a High Churchman, and that was in itself a reason why Disraeli should be the opposite ; and, finally and decisively, the Court was definitely hostile to Ritualism. No Puseyite could expect to be in good odour with the Queen. That Disraeli’s conduct of ecclesiastical affairs was either wise or happy cannot be claimed. He was seriously misled over the “No Popery” business of the early ’fifties, viewing as the * Dean Stanley's Life, vol. it.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 257 start of a new conflagration what was only the leaping up of a dying flame. Wiseman, a Prince of the Church born at Seville, had alarmed the mid-century public by riding through the streets of London in a coach the heavy magnificence of which could only have failed to excite notice in the streets of Rome. Manning, never more like an Archdeacon than when he was a Cardinal, could cause no such alarm, and by the time Disraeli was Prime Minister the fear of a Roman danger was almost confined to a small and constantly diminishing section of the middle class. Darwin, too, had not written in vain. For think- ing Christians outside the Roman Communion the apprehen- sion was not that there might be too much faith but too little. Of Disraeli’s anxiety to strengthen the Anglican Church there can be no doubt. He wanted it to be a strong power, on the side of authority and against revolutions, but his notion of in- vigorating it by the appointment to its chiet offices of divines whose chief recommendation was their fervent Protestantism had in the late ’sixties ceased to be practical. Moreover, he soon discovered that the Queen whom he wished to please did not share his views. For the seat of Canterbury the royal candidate was Tait, a Broad Churchman. Most of the Queen’s theological ideas had been made in Germany, and she liked a touch of rationalism in religion. Disraeli, on the contrary, dreaded and detested such tendencies. A Church which was “Broad,” he perceived, would soon cease to be a Church, in the sense of commanding any popular allegiance. “No dogmas, no deans, Mr. Dean,” he once said to a gaitered latitudinarian. Or, still worse, nothing but deans. His personal attitude to religion, as we have seen, was that of Gibbon’s Roman magistrate to poly- theism. But if he were, in reference to the Christian theology, very much of the conforming sceptic his belief in the miracu- lous cannot be questioned. At a diocesan meeting at Ayles- bury in 1861 he had reviewed the various stages through which the German philosophical theologians had passed. First they had accepted the sacred narratives, explaining the supernatural incidents by natural causes; next they had proved that Ration- alism was irrational, and had reduced the sacred narratives to258 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT collections of ancient myths; finally they had fallen back on a revival of pagan pantheism: No religious creed (he said) was ever destroyed by a philo- sophic theory; philosophers destroy themselves. Epicurus was as great a man, I apprehend, as Hegel; but it was not Epicurus who subverted the religion of Olympus. In his own novels, though the foreground is often occupied by the politicians and the butterflies oi Mayfair, the reader is always treading on the frontiers of another world. “Dreams, visions, prophecies,” exclaims Contarini Fleming, “I believe in them all,” and it is in a church, among the tombs of his ancestors, that his fate is mysteriously revealed to him. Ven- etia’s prayer is given a miraculous answer. Tancred, who wants an archangel instead of an archbishop to guide him, does actually meet an angel on the top of Mount Sinai. Alroy is guided by spirits. To the critics this may be but the machinery of melodrama, but it is Disraeli’s taste rather than his sincerity which can be impugned. “Even Mormon counts more votaries than Bentham,” says Sidonia, evidently with satisfaction. Through the Queen’s insistence, Tait was made Primate of All England, and Wilberforce, by far the most notable Church- man of the period, was not only not even considered for Canter- bury, but was passed over for the diocese of London, which Tait vacated, Disraeli suspecting him of Romish tendencies. Between them Queen and Minister blundered sadly. The High Church Party, vital and growing, was estranged. Wil- berforce was thrown into the arms of Gladstone. The Ration- alists, whom Disraeli would have checked, were encouraged ; the Evangelicals, whom he patronised as much as the Court would allow, had no longer the strength to take advantage of a helping hand. On the ultimate consequences there is no need to dwell here; but the immediate results could not have been satisfactory either to the Prime Minister or to the royal lady jointly responsible with him. In view of Gladstone’s at- tacks on the Irish Establishment, “a good Church cry” was as necessary as when Mr. Tadpole recommended it to ‘Lord Fitz-DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 259 booby, but the cry, when uttered, failed to carry far. In Lancashire, thanks to the Derby influence, the Conservatives obtained in the election of 1868 an almost solid Anglican vote, but elsewhere there was little enthusiasm. It was, indeed, a paradox disastrous to the Conservatives that Gladstone, assail- ing the Church, should be recognised as an admirable Church- man, while Disraeli, its defender, could only figure as at best an Erastian and at worst a cynic. But if the Irish affair produced no unity in the English Church it was certainly a distraction from the worrying prob- lem of High, Low, and Broad, and it prevented the schism in the Conservative Party, arising from the Reform Act, from spreading. Disraeli's own feeling was that the Liberal demand for Disestablishment and Disendowment should be met witha proposal for concurrent endowments. In the past he had him- self denounced the Irish Establishment as “alien,” and indeed its existence as a specially privileged corporation was a manifest absurdity. Even in the diocese ot Dublin, the capital of the Pale, there were nineteen parishes in which not a single mem- ber of the Established Church resided. In such circumstances Disraeli, and Stanley also, favoured some form of endowment for the Roman Catholics. But Cairns, the Lord Chancellor, an Ulster Protestant, was bitterly adverse, and the party as a whole did not favour the plan. Gladstone’s resolutions on Disestablishment were passed by the Commons, which disregarded Stanley’s meek proposal that the whole matter should be left to the next Parliament. The situation was awkward. Resignation was the Government's natural course, and indeed appeared to be inevitable to many, since Ministers could not dissolve, as the new registers were still in preparation, and the Reform Bills for Scotland and Ireland were yet being considered. Disraeli, however, had in advance consulted the Queen, and was made aware of her strong reluctance to send for Gladstone in such a conjuncture. The Liberals in office, she represented, would at once proceed to the destruction of the Irish Church, and she would be asked to give her sanction to their measure, in violation, as she held,= —_—— . - a - te — — te 260 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT of her coronation oath. Disraeli, therefore, put forward a novel plan for a deferred dissolution: Conservative Ministers to remain at their posts for another six months or so until a decision could be given by the reformed constituencies, Parlia- ment in the meanwhile giving the Cabinet its “cordial co-opera- tion.” For such a plan there was no precedent, and any other Minister, in Disraeli’s position, would either have declined to accept it, or would have put it forward as embodying the view of the Cabinet. In fact, the Prime Minister horrified his col- leagues by bringing the scheme cut and dried from Osborne, while in Parliament he did not hesitate to link it with the Queen’s name, and present it practically as a Royal command. Everybody was shocked. ‘Ministers,’ wrote Malmesbury, “are very angry with Disraeli for going to the Queen without calling a Cabinet.” The Duke of Marlborough, who was Lord President of the Council, threatened to resign. John Bright described Disraeli’s account of his interviews with Her Maj- esty as “a mixture of pompousness and servility.”’ But when all is said it is clear that, however improper Disraeli’s behaviour might be from the point of view of those who held that the Sovereign must be kept out of politics, it was quite proper from the point of view of Disraeli, who held that the Sovereign must be brought into politics. He was condemned as falsely representing the Queen as his ally. In fact there was no such falsity. The Queen was his ally, or, rather, in this special matter he was hers. It is certain that he realised the 1m- possibility of saving the Irish Church by an appeal to the new electorate, and that he knew that the Conservatives must suffer in credit by staying in office after notice to quit. But to Disraeli there was, no doubt, a compensating gain. The Crown, as Palmerston had reason to know, had never become a cipher in politics, but its influence had for many years been carefully concealed. Disraeli was pleased that it should be exercised in full view of the public, and, as it were, in defiance of the House of Commons. One may add that the course he took would almost certainly have been that of any Conservative statesman on the Continent.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 261 Meanwhile he had carefully improved his opportunities near the Royal person. The Queen had welcomed him as a Prime Minister; she was to part from him, when his few months of office were over, as friend parts from friend. The secret of his success was simple, though the manceuvres by which it was achieved may have been complicated. Alone among her Min- isters since Melbourne—and Melbourne was an old man petting a mere girl—he ventured to treat her as a woman, and the woman in-her responded. It would undoubtedly be a mistake to interpret his jest concerning the laying on of flattery with a trowel as implying either coarseness on his own side or lack of discrimination on the Queen’s. There was quality no less than volume in his adulation; it might be as extravagant as Romeo’s, but it was as free from mere servility. Only a man perfectly appreciating the frontiers between the piquant and the respectful could have succeeded in the game Disraeli played—if it were indeed only a game. For it would be rash to conclude that he was merely acting a part when he babbled of primroses and snowdrops; when he coupled the Queen's name with his own in the phrase ‘We Authors”; when he wrote of her as the “Sovereign whom he adores,” and “the most loved and illustrious being.’ He was probably the only person who ever went out of his way to compliment Queen Victoria on the possession of high esthetic perception. He was probably the only person who, when she was past sixty, addressed to her the kind of compliments appropriate only to youth. But his own taste was perhaps not very remote from hers, and there is plenty of evidence that in his commerce with the other sex he was conscious neither of his own age nor that of those who interested him. And, 1f he flattered, he also loved flattery, and what flattery could equal that implied in the Queen’s marked partiality : After all, it was something, after a life largely spent in dodging duns and courting younger sons, to receive letters from the great ‘Queen signed “ever yours affectionately and gratefully.” It was, no doubt, nothing to Disraeli's disadvantage that he could on occasion be a trifle peremptory. Ordinarily he addressed the Queen as if she were an absolute monarch. “It262 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT is yours, ma’am,” he said when he had completed the purchase of the Khedive’s interest in the Suez Canal. Nor was this submission merely verbal. He served the Queen rather than the party in the matter of the Irish Church, and in that of Tait’s preferment he allowed the Royal wish to prevail against his own judgment. But this was at a time when he seems to have felt his conquest incomplete. With his ascendancy fully established he mingled with his deference a suggestion of his own indispensability which at once enhanced the enjoyment of his flattery and raised the value of his devotion. Under his management business, which had been a trouble since the death of the Prince Consort, and was to be a nightmare during the five years of Gladstone’s dominance, became a delight. The “Sovereign Mistress,” whom Gladstone found cold and for- bidding, who to John Morley “‘wore a moody, and, if I must confess, not an attractive look,’ was “‘wreathed in smiles” as she “tattled,” and “glided about the room like a bird’ when she received her “Primo.” The Queen probably did not know that he often referred to her in correspondence as ‘““The Faery.” If she had known she would hardly have been displeased. But it was written in the book of the electoral fates that, before the Queen had tasted the full flavour of Disraeli’s court- iership, she should writhe under a lengthy experience of Glad- stone’s very different methods. The popular verdict against the Government was overwhelming. Disraeli, creating another constitutional precedent, resigned before Parliament met. He had retained office in deference to the will of the Queen; he left office in deference to the will of the people. In the one case he set at naught a decision of the House of Commons; in the other he did not trouble to await the decision of the House of Commons. In the former case his own party was somewhat shocked; in the latter it was almost unanimous in approval. People did not seem to realise that he was tacitly denying the right of the House of Commons to be regarded as more than a collection of persons bound to carry out the mandate of the electorate, not only im the spirit but in the letter. In short, he had emphasised in the one action his respect for the Crown, in the other his respect for the people, in both hisDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 263 want of respect for the sovereignty of the House of Commons. He seems momentarily to have thought of retirement. He was now sixty-four, and his wife was fifteen years his senior. He had realised his ambition to be Prime Minister; he had made his mark on English history. For the rest the future offered no inviting prospect. The country had declared itself decisively against the party he led. The people he had en- franchised had voted for his great rival, and he was too acute not to perceive the reason. On the one side were positive aims ; they might be wise or unwise, but they had positive sentiment behind them. On the other side, especially on the dominant issue of Ireland, were negations, and he had already had suf- ficient experience of the difficulty of getting the Conservatives to abandon a purely negative attitude. Temporarily he was, no doubt, discouraged, and inclined to seek again in literature a freer expression of his personality. The matter, however, was decided for him: by the Queen. She parted with him as Prime Minister with a flattering regret. She insisted with an equally flattering vehemence that he should remain leader of the Opposition. Disraeli consented, and was rewarded by a signal mark of the Royal favour. He himself did not desire a peerage, but at his request a viscounty was bestowed on his wife, who became Lady Beaconsfield. It is scarcely necessary for the present purpose to follow Disraeli in the routine of Opposition during the earlier years of Gladstone’s great reforming administration. His health was at times bad; his interest was little engaged; some of his speeches were described by members of his own following as “wretched” and leaving no impression of “real earnestness and conviction.” It will suffice to sketch his attitude towards the enormous drama on the Continent which, before the Session of 1870 ended, diverted attention from domestic issues. What would have been Disraeli’s attitude to the Franco-Prussian War had he been in power? The answer must be dubious, and even his action as Opposition leader has been variously interpreted.264 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT To France he had long been friendly ; of Prussia he once enter- tained a sleepless suspicion; but it is evident that in 1868, when Prime Minister, his opinions regarding the latter Power had undergone a change. For information on foreign politics he seems to have placed reliance on the great Jews of inter- national finance, and certain correspondence published in Mr. Buckle’s biography! suggests that a member of the German branch of the Rothschild family had persuaded him that Bis- marck was reducing Prussia’s armaments. It may, further, be supposed that his views were coloured by the Germanophile sentiments of the Court. Whatever the case, it is certain that in the early part of 1870 he had no suspicion of the coming attack on France, and when the war clouds gathered it 1s highly possible that he was inclined to blame the French. Of the trouble threatened by the Hohenzollern candidature he spoke with amazing lightness: I cannot induce myself to believe (he said in the House of Commons) that in the nineteenth century with its extended sympathies and its elevating tendencies, anything so barbarous can occur as a war of succession. It is difficult to understand, remembering the quality of the mind with which we are dealing, and its almost undue prone- ness to subtleties of diplomatic conception, how he could have been blind to the nature of the German scheme, or insensible to the natural alarm felt by the French at the prospect of a Prussian dependency beyond the Pyrenees. Later he was to blame Gladstone for being caught unprepared, but on his own showing he himself must have been equally taken by surprise, and with much less excuse, since he was interested in foreign affairs and Gladstone was not. On July 15, two days after the Ems telegram had been falsified by Bismarck, and one day after the French Cabinet had decided on war, Gladstone reported to the Queen: Mr. Disraeli made inquiries from the Government respecting the differences between France and Prussia, and in so doing *Vol. v.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 265 expressed opinions strongly adverse to France as the apparent aggressor.’ This was a somewhat exaggerative interpretation of the long question addressed by Disraeli to the Prime Minister, but it was at least founded on fact. Knowing nothing of how Bismarck had converted ‘‘surrender into defiance’ by a few deft strokes of his forger’s pen, Disraeli seems to have con- cluded that the crisis was the consequence of Napoleon’s am- bitions. He erred, it is true, in company with the great major- ity of Englishmen of the time, but this thickness of vision was so untypical that we can only infer that his native faculty for guessing was paralysed by undue respect for the opinions of more highly placed but less gifted persons. Two things, however, are to be noted. Although Disraeli may have too readily accepted the pro-Prussian point of view in the middle of July, he was within a fortnight suggesting in the House of Commons a line of policy which, had it been adopted by the Government, would have gone far to check- mate Bismarck’s designs. Secondly, though he was accused by a political opponent of expressing opinions “strongly adverse to France,” French writers generally regret that he was not in Gladstone’s place at the time of their country’s calamity. On August 1, when the first clash of the armies had actually ar- rived, he made a speech to which adequate attention was not civen in this country. By the terms arranged at the Vienna Congress Britain and Russia had guaranteed to Prussia certain territories previously Saxon. Disraeli now proposed that Brit- ain and Russia, acting in concert, should use this guarantee to secure that the terms of the post-bellum settlement should not be to their detriment or to that of Europe. On his point M. Maurice Courcelle, in an interesting study of Disraeli, has written: Tandis que M. Gladstone mettait ses principes humanitaires au service de la force, et que le méme ministre qui devait ordonner plus tard l’inutile bombardement d’Alexandrie prenait initiative de cette coalition d’égoismes que fut la Ligue 1Morley’s Life of Gladstone.—_— 266 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT des Neutres, Disraeli prit occasion, le I” Aout, d’une discussion sur l’ensemble du budget des dépenses, pour rapeller au Parle- ment que l’Angleterre qui avait signé tous les grands engage- ments internationaux de ce siécle pouvait y puiser le droit de s’entremettre entre les belligerents et d’arréter une guerre meurtriére. . . . Il est permis de penser que si Disraeli avait dirigé la politique de l’Angleterre en 1870, la guerre eut pu étre évitée, comme elle l’avait été en 1867, grace a l’intervention amicale de Lord Derby dans les affaires de Luxembourg, comme elle le sera quelques années plus tard, lorsque Bismarck, inquiet du relévement de la France, verra sa nouvelle tentative d’aggression de 1875 dejouée par la fermeté combinee du cabinet de Disraeli et du Tsar. There is, of course, some doubt how far Disraeli’s proposals for vigorous diplomatic action in 1870 were practicable. The difficulties on the Russian side, real as they were, could pos- sibly have been overcome, and Austria might have been induced to join any combination to check Prussia. But the real diffi- culty was the state of Great Britain. Her armaments were in no condition to support diplomacy ; sympathies were, to say the least, divided; and the Court leaned heavily to the German side. Disraeli, therefore, might have been obliged to remain as weakly neutral as the Liberal Government. On the other hand, he was quite free from the illusion common among the Liberals that the war was one in whick England need only take the languid interest of a pained humanitarian people: It is no common war (he said). It is the German Revolu- tion, a greater political revolution than the French Revolution of last century. I do not say a greater, or as great a social event. What its social consequences may be are in the future, but not a single principle accepted for guidance by all states- men in the management of our foreign affairs up to six months ago any longer exists. . . . You have a new world, new in- fluences at work, new and unknown objects and dangers with which to cope. . . . The balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers and feels the effect of this great change most is England.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 267 England was soon to find that a quiet life is not to be had simply by shelving responsibility. Russia tore up the Black Sea Treaty, and Bismarck asked why she had not made the pieces even smaller. America peremptorily pressed those Ala- bama claims which Disraeli compared to a tribute exacted from a conquered people. All over the Continent British prestige sank to nothingness. Disraeli had disapproved the Palmerston- ian policy of constant intervention; but he drew a distinction between being neutral and being neuter, between continence and impotence. Bismarck had declared that a word from Eng- land to Napoleon would have prevented the war. The peace which followed the war could have been deprived of its most irritant features but for the embarrassed timidity which reigned in Downing Street. Meanwhile, in the early summer, Disraeli had published the last but one of his novels. Lothair, according to Froude, is “a work of enduring value,” and every page “glitters with wit or shines with humour.” Its merit, however, was not every- where recognised. In the Quarterly Review it was denounced as “a sin against good taste and justice,” and derided as being “as dull as ditchwater and as flat as a flounder.” The Dublin Review unkindly called its author “Titus Oates exposing the last Popish Plot in three volumes.” Sir Leslie Stephen, though an admirer of Disraeli’s earlier work, found it “a practical joke on a large scale.” Lothair certainly does not deserve Froude’s description. It is not “immeasurably superior” to Disraeli’s previous works. It gives no sign of the political sagacity and historical insight which redeem the literary defects of Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred. It possesses none of the autobiographical interest belonging to Vivian Grey, Henrvetta Temple, and Contarim Fleming. It is far more tawdry than any of the novels, except The Young Duke. It could not, of course, be an entirely bad book. It contains epigrams of great brilliance, some of the minor characters are cleverly drawn, and it can be accepted as a vivid if over-charged picture of the society of the day in cer-268 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT tain of its aspects. But it lacks the spontaneity of the earlier books, and it is tainted with a radical insincerity. The series of novels which closed with Tancred contained much bombast. They were often defective in taste. Some of them set forth a code of honour strongly at variance with the English, or rather the European code. But they were inspired with a high seri- ousness and a fundamental nobility. The writer had something great to say on great subjects, and on the whole he said it greatly. In Lothair he was writing perhaps for money, per- haps for fame, perhaps for amusement, but not primarily be- cause he had any message to deliver. In fact he had none. The time had gone when he could afford to tell the truth either about himself or about the country he lived in. Lothavr, im- mensely popular in its time, was in the worse sense a popular novel. It set out deliberately to please a frame of mind which could not have been the author’s. “Disraeli,” to quote M. Courcelle, “honoured and respected religion, but it would be difficult to say which religion.” In Lothair he appears as the whole Protestant animal. As a politician, of course, he had already assumed this guise, and was to assume it again; but the interest of his earlier books is the separation of the novelist from the politician, The reader never feels the presence of Benjamin Disraeli, candidate or M.P., a man as mentally fet- tered as his own Tadpoles and Tapers. He is conscious of a free and adventurous spirit capable of understanding the past, elimpsing the future, and being somewhat careless of the pres- ent. In Lothair, on the contrary, we have the impression of the mere Right Honourable who, having hit on what he thinks a good cry, proceeds to make the most of it, without regard to anything but the expediency of the hour. At the time of the novel’s appearance there appeared to some people to be a prospect of carrying England off its feet by a new “No Popery” cry. The notion was hopefully entertained by certain Conservatives who, desiring the destruction of Gladstone, wished the public to think of him, not as “the Peo- ple’s William,” but as the High Churchman, the concealed Jesuit, the friend of Wilberforce and Manning, the agent of the Pope, and the ally of Irish Fenians. The proclamation ofDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 269 Papal Infallibility had caused a stir in limited but influential circles, and the conversion of a very wealthy young nobleman served to point the warnings of those who, like Froude, be- lieved that “‘of the many dangers which threatened England there was none more insidious than the intrigues of ultra- montane proselytisers.” Disraeli, with an instinct which can only be called journalistic, seized the case of the young Peer for the plot of his story. Lothair is, perhaps, the most fatuous hero in all fiction. It is not simply that he hovers helplessly through the greater part of three volumes between Rome and Canterbury—places sufficiently distinct. He is also inclined for a time to throw in his lot with the anti-clerical revolution- aries of Italy. In the case of a being so mentally confused it is obviously absurd to trouble about his final decision. But if the character of Lothair deprives the book of any pretence of philosophical seriousness, the machinery is too silly for a good sensational novel. Lothair is the centre of a plot in which the subtlest minds of the Roman hierarchy are engaged, and the whole object of the book is to put the simple-minded Briton on his guard against the devilish ingenuity of these unscrupulous agents of a noxious superstition. But on a candid reader the effect would be to convince him of the exceeding smallness of those dangers which oppressed the mind of Froude. The priests and prelates might be very wicked, but they could not, in view of their invincible stupidity, be very menacing. Petticoat influence has brought Lothair to Mentana to fight for Garibaldi. Left for dead on the field, he is saved by the wife of a Roman tailor and nursed back to life by some English Roman Catholics. Then begins the effort to secure his con- version. The methods pursued are singular. First, he is asked to believe that the tailor’s wife was none other than the Virgin; then he is told, in defiance of facts of which he retains a per- fect memory, facts also well known to many people, that he was wounded while serving, not with the Red Shirts, but with the Papal forces. Finally he is informed that, because he has been induced to walk in a procession carrying a lighted taper, he is committed irrevocably to the Roman Church. At this stage he takes literally to his heels, and is in the end safely—_ 270 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT married to a rigid Protestant, who has the further advantage of being a Duke’s daughter. The absurdity is, of course, less conspicuous in the book than in this bald summary. The passages in which Cardinal Grandison seeks to prove that Lothair knew nothing of what happened to himself at the battle of Mentana are, in fact, ex- cellent satire. But the very excellence of the satire increases the presumption against the sincerity of the satirist. Disraeli may not have known much about the ways of Cardinals and Monsignori. But he knew well enough that Rome is served by high intelligence, and that the frauds he attributed to the plotters against Lothair were not intelligent. He was, in fact, writing down to his public in a manner inconsistent with his dignity both as an author and a great statesman. The character sketches of Lothair are of varying merit. Cardinal Grandison, identified as Manning, was no doubt meant to represent the prelate. A few years earlier Disraeli had sought Manning’s help over a scheme for a Roman Catho- lic University for Ireland, but the Irish proving intractable, he blamed the Cardinal. The portrait in Lothair was probably Disraeli’s revenge. Manning was not greatly ruffled. Later, when on the same question of an educational settlement in Ire- land he had differences with Gladstone, he remarked that when Disraeli lost his temper he kept his head, whereas Gladstone lost simultaneously both temper and head. It was not only Papists, however, who suffered from the sharpness of the Dis- raelian pen in Lothair. In the Anglican Bishop whose “face beamed with Christian kindness” but who had “a twinkle in his eye which seemed not entirely superior to mundane self- complacency,” Wilberforce is easily recognisable. The Oxford professor who, about to dine with one of the aristocracy, © 1n- stead of indulging in his usual invectives against Peers and Princes . . . was content to dazzle and amuse him,’ was so evidently a caricature of Goldwin Smith that the victim was led to make public protest. Whenever Disraeli gives his wit fair play Lothair is all that Froude claims for it. Whenever he has a moral to elaborate he becomes wearisome. Lothair is, perhaps, the only one of his novels in whichDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 271 he can never be taken seriously; even The Young Duke has its touches of sincerity. Yet the public liked the book better than any he had written. Much of it amused them, and none of it puzzled them. Lothar is to-day an out-of-date topicality, a thing mainly of antiquarian interest. Tancred, an “Asia mys- tery’ when it first appeared, has gained in significance in each decade which has since passed.CHAPTER XIV LADSTONE’S greatest administration might have sur- vived its errors; it perished of its virtues. Undeniably it was a Government of remarkable and in many ways of beneficent achievement. Its destructive energy was almost equalled by its capacity in building. It disestablished the Irish Church, abolished sectarian tests at the Universities, re- pealed Russell’s panic-bred Ecclesiastical Titles Act, and, as part of a sweeping army reform, made an end of purchased commissions. But it also established popular education ; passed the first of the Irish Land Acts, reformed the judicial system, recast the civil service, and made voting secret. Nor were there any grievous mistakes to be set against its successes. One reform, the abolition of commissions by purchase, was achieved by a straining of the prerogative that scandalised many even of Mr. Gladstone’s followers. But the main complaints to be discerned by him who studies the annals of the times concerned Lowe’s attempt to tax lucifer matches, the appointment of a Cambridge graduate to a living which by statute should have been conferred on an Oxonian, and a Licensing Act which prevented people drinking on Sunday afternoons and in the small hours of the mornings. To a later generation, inured to misgovernment—to a gen- eration which has in some important particulars lost the very idea of liberty; which has seen the most high-handed acts carried out in the most casual way and justified with languid contempt of public opinion; which is subjected, so far as con- cerns the main taxpaying body, to a corvée of from two to five months out of the twelve in order to support the charges of incapable and partial Governments, plundering the public purse for sectional donatives ; which is under the heel of a too power- ful bureaucracy that, in its desire for still less restraint, is ever regardless of the spirit and sometimes impatient of the letter 272DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 273 of the law; which accepts waste and incompetence, muddled thought and fuddled action as part of the natural law of things —to such a generation, chastised by the scorpions of war and reconstruction Government, it may well seem strange that such unformidable whips could sting, and that Ministers who did so much work, including some manifestly good work, who did it so cheaply, and made so few blunders could earn in a few years profound unpopularity. But while Gladstone’s Govern- ment was pure, honest, and well intentioned, neither it nor its work was calculated to inspire the popular enthusiasm neces- sary to compensate it for the antagonism that all reform must necessarily engender. Gladstone, says Froude, was “inatten- tive to the symptoms of the temper of the people.” The fact was that he rarely thought of the people, or rather that to him the people meant the middle class. He, no doubt, regarded the abolition of purchase in the army as a measure of democratic reform which must appeal to the masses. But, in fact, the masses cared nothing whether the test for a commission were ability to sign a large cheque or capacity to pass a fairly stiff examination in Latin and Algebra. And the masses, from their point of view, were fully justified in such indifference. They knew perfectly well that a commission was still beyond the reach of a poor man, They guessed, rightly, that influence would still count. They guessed, again rightly, that competi- tive examination was no infallible means of getting good and excluding bad officers. Again, Gladstone thought, no doubt, that in setting up elementary schools he was conferring the sreatest boon a statesman could extend to the common people. 2 at in the nature of things it was a boon that could not be immediately appreciated, and would, by some, be thought no boon at all, but an act of tyranny. The virtues of the Government, in brief, were not those which chiefly appeal to the masses, while they were emphati- cally those which infuriate vested interests. On the other hand, the administration had precisely the faults which inspire popular contempt. It was a little parochial, a little mean, a little fussy, a little domineering, a little unctuous. Its foreign policy imparted a sense of humiliation. Its Irish policy' iy - —~ —— > ene —— 27 4 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT seemed to have the inspiration more of panic than of gener- osity. Many good people were afraid of the Republicanism of a section of Radicals for whom Sir Charles Dilke, soon to be joined by Joseph Chamberlain, spoke. Nor was the figure of Gladstone at that time quite what it afterwards became. He was able and industrious, but, though perhaps more of a reality, was far less a legend than the Gladstone of the ‘eighties. The middle classes respected him as a financier and a moralist, but he had very little hold on the working men, and what Froude calls his “slightly ostentatious piety’ seemed in those days somewhat distastefully incongruous with his position as the head of a composite majority which, on the whole, was far from friendly to the Church, or, indeed, to religion in any form. Those who viewed Gladstone as a reckless innovator, those who thought of him as a concealed Tory, and those who contrasted his timid foreign policy with the gay recklessness of Palmerston, made up between them a decided majority of the British population. Disraeli, perhaps more from lassitude than through design, had pursued from the first a highly prudent course. He had discouraged those of his followers who would have re- sisted every measure to the bitter end, and had contented him- self with just that amount of criticism which would damage the Government in the eyes of the nation without rousing its supporters to increased enthusiasm. His phrases were of the kind which are remembered long after their occasion 1s for- gotten. “We have legalised confiscation, we have consecrated sacrilege, we have condoned treason” was one. Another was his famous description of the position of the Government in 1872, when it experienced a sudden decline in its popularity: As time advances extravangance is being substituted for energy. The unnatural stimulus is subsiding. Their paroxysms end in prostration. Some take refuge in melancholy, and their eminent chief alternates between a menace and a sigh. As I sat opposite the Treasury Bench the Ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest. ButDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 275 the situation is still dangerous. There are occasional earth- quakes, and ever and anon the dark rumblings of the sea. “You have now had four years of it,’ he told Gladstone, in 1873. “You have despoiled churches. You have threatened every corporation and every endowment in the country. You have examined into everybody’s affairs. You have criticised every profession and vexed every trade. No one ts certain of his property and nobody knows what duties he may have to perform to-morrow. I believe that the people of this coun- try have had enough of this policy of confiscation.” This is the one infallible appeal to any over-governed people. It was precisely the appeal of Mr, Bonar Law’s watchword of “tranquillity” in 1922. Disraeli, like Mr. Bonar Law, was himself merely careful to give no “programme’’—the country, he saw, was sick of programmes. All he recommended was “sanitary legislation” — Sanitas sanitatum, omnia santas: Pure air, pure water, the inspection of unhealthy habitation, the adulteration of food, these and many kindred matters may be legitimately dealt with by the legislature. This was his prouncement at a great meeting at Manchester in 1872. A little earlier, when driving to St. Paul’s to take part in a service of thanksgiving for the recovery of the Prince of Wales from a dangerous illness, he had been loudly cheered by the crowd, and it was now apparent that in the very home of Free Trade Radicalism the tide had turned against Glad- stone. His speech declared that the programme of the Con- servative Party was to “maintain the institutions of the coun- try,” and chief among those institutions was the Throne. To the stability of the Throne he attributed the accumulation of capital, the elevation of labour, the improvement of cultiva- tion, and even “those admirable factories which cover your district.’ He praised the wisdom and experience of the Sover- eign. He lauded the influence of the Crown as a solvent of party prejudice. He clorified the Royal Family as a— 276 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT pattern in a country where “the home is revered and the hearth is sacred.” And he let it be understood that the only dependable defender of the Throne was the Conservative Party. A little later in the same year, Midsummer Day, 1872, he addressed a meeting of the National Union of Conservative Association at the Crystal Palace. The National Union was his own work, Though the last man in the world to revel in the details of Party organisation, he had seen that a caucus was necessary, and had placed the task of its construction in the capable hands of Mr. John Gorst. In due time the Tory caucus was imitated by Joseph Chamberlain, and thencetor- ward it was all but impossible for an independent member to reach the House of Commons. If such a system had obtained in his youth, Disraeli himself must have remained for ever an outsider, but as leader of the Party it gave him a well-drilled and subordinated following whose seats depended on his will. The caucus was the natural corollary to the Reform Act. The masses had the vote, but the vote gave them only the choice between two sets of masters. “Disraeli’s judicious admirers,” says Mr. Buckle, “are hardly likely to claim much credit for him on the score of this fact.” His impartial critics, however, will not miss its significance. In his address to the faithful at the Crystal Palace Disraeli began to preach that gospel of Empire with which his name was to be chiefly connected in posthumous tradition. India had always fascinated, the colonies had generally wearied him. But India was the business chiefly of the upper and upper middle class, and it was probably the consciousness that Can- ada and Australia were of more interest to the newly-enlarged electorate that explained his sudden enthusiasm for the white constituents of “the Empire of England.” Disraeli may seem to have anticipated Joseph Chamberlain in talking of an “Im- perial Tariff,’ and constant and continuous relations between the Colonies and the home Government by means of “some responsible council in the metropolis.” But there was little. really in common between the two points of view. Disraell, though an alien, looked at the colonies from an English angle.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 277 Chamberlain, though the most English of men, adopted mainly the Colonial point of view. The three points of the programme, monarchy, Empire, and social reform, made an attractive combination. Bread and butter practically, plus the jam of romance, were excellent; and ‘f the child. after all, should come off poorly in the matter of , victuals, there was always the gleam of the Crown and its attendant jewels to keep it amused. Gladstone, with his mind already more than half given to Ireland, had nothing so attrac- tive to offer. As to foreign policy, Disraelt suggested “proud reserve,” or, in other words, a compromise between the old Palmerstonian recklessness and the new Gladstonian gospel of peace at any price. Disraeli, for the first time, became in a true sense a popular figure. He had never been a middle-class favourite, and poli- tics, so far as they were not an aristocratic game, had so far been a middle-class interest. But the poor were beginning to take a hand, the poor were attracted by him. Wherever he went the crowd cheered for “Dizzy.” He was liked by the artisan, the small clerk, and all working-class people of a hu- morous turn. They enjoyed his jokes, approved his velvet coat, relished his humanity, recognised with joy that he was not a Puritan, and dimly divined that he was something nearer to them than Gladstone or Bright. These manifestations of popular affection reacted on his own party, which began to realise his full value as an asset. It was felt that he was bringing Conservatism to the end of its long sojourn in the wilderness, and that before long he would give compensation, in the spoils of office, for such sacrifices as he had imposed on them. Impressed by the favour of the Court, the aristocracy had forgotten half its prejudice against him, and a new gener- ation of the middle class included many who, in revulsion againts the ostentatious rectitude of Gladstone, thought kindly of one who, while not a mere comedian, could regard much of life in the spirit of comedy.278 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT In such circumstances he should have been well contented with the world. Yet the spirits which had availed him in ad- versity seem to have lost some of their elasticity in his dawning prosperity. Fortune, as usual, refused to come with both hands full, and the full meal of glory found him with but a poor stomach. In the last month of 1872 his wife, who had long been ill, died. It was a terrible wrench. She had adored her great man. He had been happy in romanticising a grateful affection, while enjoying the practical side of her assiduous care. The loss of her deranged his whole life; and with his grief, abundant and sincere though it was, there mingled a large element of self-pity. He saw before him a prospect of homelessness that appalled. He had long lost all bachelor 1n- stincts; he cared little now for the society of men except when working with them; and for some months he was the victim of a profound melancholy. ‘‘Marriage,” he wrote to Gladstone, in one of the few gracious letters that passed between them, “is the greatest earthly happiness, when founded on complete sym- pathy. That hallowed lot was mine.” * Some men, thus smitten, would have crept into a corner with their grief. Others would have sought relief by intense absorption in work. Neither was Disraeli’s way. He fought sorrow with the weapon of an augmented levity. On the public side he gave, not more, but less, of himself to politics. On the private side, while never losing a reverent and affection- ate memory for his wife, he sought such compensations as were available to an elderly invalid whose heart was the youngest part of him. Politically he must be reckoned, despite the brilliance of his position and prospects, a disappointed man. He had been Prime Minister. He was leader of a great Party. He was almost certain to be Prime Minister again. All the ambitions of Vivian Grey had been wonderfully realised—but too late. The power was ebbing in him. He had nearly com- pleted the span of life. He was becoming a valetudinarian, and gout was soon to make him hobble. In every sense that mattered he was isolated—without intimate friends, without hearty colleagues, without even pupils. He was intellectually * Buckle, vol. v.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 279 separated from all Englishmen, and from his Party most of all. In old age Palmerston had enjoyed his greatest political comfort. But Palmerston’s effort had been easy, because in the main he represented the English mind of the period. There was no such affinity between the mind of England and the mind of Disraeli. Time was when he might have hoped, as a dictator, to lay a course and bid his followers abide it. Old as he now was, the strain of such an effort was too great; nine cases out of ten, he realised, he must go their way. He, therefore, laid down a new course of life. In politics he would play an old man’s part, giving no more of himselt than was strictly necessary. In private he sought, for the satisfaction of that in him which remained youthful, a renewal of his youth. Feeble he might be in body and old in mind, but his slowing pulse could still be stirred by the interest of a woman. The strange story revealed for the first time in the pages of Mr. Buckle has distinguished parallels in the history of the East and of the Continent, but is almost unique in our annals. Disraeli had become a widower only a few months when he had again given his heart to a woman, or rather to two women. Many years before he had enjoyed the lively so- ciety of a bevy of girls, the daughters of Lord Forrester, who was his neighbour in Buckinghamshire. Two only of the sisters were now alive, Anne, Countess of Chesterfield, a widow, and the Countess of Bradford, wife of a sporting peer who had held a Court appointment in Disraeli’s administration. Lady Chesterfield was two years his senior; Lady Bradford fifteen years his junior. That master of the art of life, Harold Skimpole, classified his children; there was a Beauty daughter, a Sentiment daughter, and a Comedy daughter. Disraeli seems to have bestowed his homage on somewhat similar principles. Apparently he wanted different qualities which neither of the sisters could provide severally, but which both could supply jointly. Lady Chesterfield, by years and temperament, was fitted to appeal to that part of him which wanted mothering; he was happy in her grave and gentle sagacity. On the other hand, he was charmed by the archness and vivacity of Lady Bradford. Whether even so consummate a lover and diplo-280 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT matist could have maintained sentimental relations with two unrelated women is doubtful. But the peculiar circumstances allowed him without serious difficulty to enjoy the society of each separately, and of both together. There were, indeed, ripples on the current of the romance. That was inevitable, having regard not only to the difficult situation of the two la- dies, but the different degrees in which their admirer acknowl- edged their fascination. Up to a point they were both per- fectly satisfied to share his devotion. Lady Chesterfield, at any rate, seems at first to have found unmixed pleasure in his affectionate homage. In Lady Bradford, however, there was a certain emotional flutter, for if on the one hand she might deem herself to have attained the age of safety she was still a wife, and it was perturbing to receive letters from the most famous man in England conceived in the language of a love- sick stripling. Time and time again the “adored being,” the “most fascinating of women,” whose ‘every movement was grace,’ and whose countenance was one of “radiant innocence,” felt it incumbent on her to check the enthusiasm of her ad- mirer and abate with cold sense the “turbulence” of his heart. But she relented when he exclaimed against the “cruelty of farewells,” spoke of his “hunger” for her presence, and im- plored her to vouchsafe him, loving as he loved, a more fre- quent sight of her “adorable person.” ! To Lady Chesterfield, Disraeli wrote in another style. He seems to have realised that he could not, without being both ridiculous and insulting, act Sylvius to her Phoebe. His let- ters were touched with gallantry, but free from ardour; and when he proposed marriage it was in a manner befitting the age of both parties. Two reasons, no doubt, prompted his offer, and one fully accounts for her refusal. Craving for female companionship and sympathy, Disraeli wanted a wife; he would have preferred Lady Bradford, but since Lady Brad- ford was not free Lady Chesterfield was the next best choice. Moreover, as the husband of the one sister, he could enjoy to an extent impossible in other circumstances the society of the other. But, though Disraeli understood women better I a eee Quotations from Buckle, vol. iii.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 281 than most men, his proposal shows that he had still something to learn. Even at seventy a woman’s heart is not immune from some touch of jealousy. Lady Chesterfield could be content to share Disraeli, as an admirer, with her sister. She would not agree to marry him in the knowledge that her sister was and would remain the favourite. No long estrangement followed her refusal. Disraeli con- tinued to see much of the sisters, and in the course of the next few years wrote them several hundreds of letters, some strictly personal, some dealing with matters of public con- cern. With Lady Chesterfield the tone is for the most part cousinly and even brotherly, and it is easy to see that after the first stage both accepted the situation, and were ready to be dear friends in every sense but the French one. With Lady Bradford, on the other hand, there are the alternations of tiff and reconciliation, of chiding and tenderness, which tell their own plain tale. She complains of his extravagance; he mourns her reserve; she relents for a moment, and a gush of dangerous sentiment compels her once again to be cruel. laura was never more tantalising or Petrarch more patient. The lady, woman-like, could not bear to lose him, but was resolved to keep him at the lowest possible price, and she did, as nearly as the thing could be done, succeed in eating her cake and having it. She enjoyed all the satisfaction—and it seems to have been considerable—of seeing the greatest man of the day languishing for her, while she was able to assure herself that she had not departed, even in spirit, from witfely propriety. The man’s case was perhaps less comfortable; there is a kind of heartache running through the letters to Lady Bradford that checks the smile which their extravagance would otherwise provoke. One feels that what may be a trifle to Dulcinea, herself something of a trifler, is bitter earnest, to the poor Don, who, however absurd, is no trumpery thing. More than once Disraeli reveals a minor secret of state to Lady Bradford by way of a bribe, and in the hope of eliciting a word of tenderness. The word is duly given, but nothing more substantial. Such a situation would have been scandal- ous had there existed a suggestion of deceit or impropriety.282 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT It would have been merely ridiculous had the philandering been altogether unserious. Disraeli’s special character, with his yearning loneliness, makes it simply pathetic. The friendship with the sisters endured to the end of his life. How much concerning it was known to contemporaries is a little difficult to decide. Disraeli, writing love-letters to Lady Bradford from his seat in the House of Commons, can- not be said to have attempted concealment; and the’ special messengers who carried his billets, and who were instructed to wait if necessary all day for a reply, must have been miracu- lously discreet if they never dropped a hint as to the nature of the case. Yet no fragment of the strange story seems to have reached print until Mr. Buckle told it in full. It 1s true that the press of the period was more reticent concern- ing such matters than it had been, or than it was to be, yet the absence of even the most oblique reference to the affair is curious. In some degree, of course, the age of the parties guarded them, but the very facts which forbade scandal also invited laughter; and that malicious wit found nothing for its exercise, or were afraid to wound, must be reckoned a proof that there was in Disraeli a dignity for which he was rarely given sufficient credit. He used to say in his later years, when told that some attractive woman wished to meet him, that he was “too old for that sort of thing’; but this was generally an excuse for avoiding somebody whose husband wanted a title or an office. Disraeli was never too old to feel interest in women, never too old to be amused by them; never too old to be fooled by them. But his ideals of womanhood were high, and, though he may have played with fire in the case of the mysterious Henrietta, he was curiously lacking in the temperament which would have made his elderly infatua- tion merely unpleasant. Lady Cardigan’s claim that he pro- posed to her shortly after his wife’s death is inherently 1m- probable. But it is quite possible that she proposed to him. In her Recollections she displays a significant animus against Lady Bradford. It was perhaps his emotional preoccupation which contrib- uted to the singularly judicious line followed by Disraeli dur-DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 283 ing the last years of the Gladstone administration. Almost uniformly he acted on the principle of giving the Government enough rope to hang itself. The fatal cord turned out to be the Irish University Bill of 1873. This measure was designed to please everybody, or, at least, to offend nobody. In tact, ‘t was derided by English educationists like the blind Profes- sor Fawcett: it was equally hateful to Irish Roman Catholics and Irish Protestants; and on March 11 it was refused a second reading by a majority of three. Disraeli, after a long period of restraint, had, seeing how things were going, spoken against it with full vigour, though it was the Govern- ment’s record in general, rather than the Bill itself, that he arraigned. The Government resigned, but Disraelt, who had had enough of office without power, refused to carry on in condi- tions which would imply “no wholesale censure but retail humiliation.” 1 Nor would he form a ministry with a view to dissolution; “the pear, he judged, in a party sense, was nearly but not quite ripe.’ 2 Thus Gladstone had reluctantly to return to office, angrily conscious that the longer he re- mained the greater must be his loss of prestige. A few months later his position was further weakened by what in those days, when Parliament watched expenditure with great jealousy, was considered a grave financial scandal. A sum of money had been used without Parliamentary sanction for the extension of the telegraphic service. In the twentieth century a few scoffing or menacing words from an Under-Secretary would have put critics in their place, but Gladstone was com- pelled to reconstruct his Government, and, taking himself the vacant Exchequer, found in his plan to abolish the income- tax what he conceived to be a good election issue on which to appeal to the country in the following year. Nothing could have shown more clearly his small under- standing of the new electorate. The poor voters of the boroughs cared nothing for the remission of taxes which they did not pay, and as the ‘ncome-tax in those favoured days 1 Buckle, vol. v. ; 2Marriott’s England since Waterloo.284. DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT amounted to only threepence in the pound, even the classes most immediately concerned were moderate in their grati- tude. Indeed, when it was understood that abolition would mean stinting the defences, there was an outburst of patriotic indignation, of which Disraeli took deft advantage. Remark- ing casually that the Conservative Party always favoured reduction of taxation, he fell fiercely on the Government for what he described as its neglect of British interests abroad. “A little more energy in foreign policy, and a little less in domestic legislation,’ would, he said, have been better for the country. He had read the public mind aright. The country was amazingly prosperous. It was enormously tired of the very word reform. It did not object to the spending of a little money more or less, but it was uneasily conscious that Eng- land under Gladstone had not made a very splendid figure in the eyes of the outside world. “It’s mean, guv’nor; it’s mean, that’s what it is; it’s mean,” said the Dickensian prize-fighter to his patron, who was all the time under the impression that he had done something rather noble. The British public was in the mood of the Game Chicken; and Mr. Gladstone was no less shocked than Mr. Toots by stupidity so perverse. Disraeli had expected a majority, but the size of it sur- prised him. Never since the split of 1846 had a Conserva- tive Prime Minister held office except on sufferance. He was now master, and, as the event proved, master in a sense far beyond his nominal strength. While he had a clear majority of fifty, the Opposition was utterly demoralised. Nothing was wanting to the Disraelian triumph, for he had what Glad- stone had always lacked, the enthusiastic sympathy of the Queen. From Windsor Lady Ely wrote immediately after the Liberal Prime Minister’s resignation: “My dear mistress will be very happy to see you again. . . . You understand her so well.” What were his feelings in the hour of victory? Six years * Buckle, vol. v.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 285 before, on becoming Prime Minister for the first time, he had said, “It is twenty years too late.” His sense of the mockery of fate must now have been intensified. In everything he had written he had glorified youth, discredited mere experience, derided age; and all this was no mere pose. What he said in Coningsby undoubtedly remained his fixed conviction when he had himself passed into the sere and yellow leat: Don John of Austria won Lepanto at twenty-five. Gaston de Foix was only twenty-three when he stood a victor on the plain of Ravenna. . . . Gustavus Adolphus died at thirty-eight. . . . Cortes was little more than thirty when he gazed on the golden cupolas of Mexico. ... Innocent III, the greatest of the Popes, was the despot of Christendom at thirty-seven. . . . John de Medici was a Cardinal at fifteen. Pascal wrote a great work at sixteen, and died at thirty- seven, the greatest of Frenchmen... . [hen there were Bolingbroke and Pitt, both Munisters when other men left off cricket. . . . Grotius was in great practice at seventeen, and attorney-general at twenty-four. And Aquaviva, Aqua- viva was General of the Jesuits, ruled every cabinet in Europe, and colonised America before he was thirty-seven... . The history of heroes is the history of Youth. But though he, of all men, was least deceived as to the meaning of his triumph, he could still feel gratification in the personal success. Montagu Corry, his private secretary, wrote during the elections: The Carlton is crowded till midnight; all the dear “old lot”? whom we know so well—all the frondeurs and the cynics, professors, now, of a common faith—cry for “The Chief.” That part of the business must have been as potent as the kindest of Lady Bradford’s letters in stirring the pulse of the valetudinarian, If his delight was cynical, it was none the less delight. All the men who had intrigued against him, scoffed at him, slighted him, scorned him as a Jew, were now prone before the dazzling trophy of his success. His past was forgotten, or rather only remembered with reverence. How4 ff W ~~ ~ yee op ee, we ” VS Fore Sl sepia a cache a SF prey ji a — —_— ¥ oe ee ge Sr —_— - w ame me — -~“h \ =e 286 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT clever of him to realise, when men were talking in terror of the “leap in the dark,” that the “residuum’’ emancipated in 1867 would prove a Conservative asset! How wonderfully he had worked, watched, and waited all these years, educating his party against its inclinations. For the man who had broken the power of Liberalism, who had shown that the Conservative Party, well organised, could appeal successtully to the working man, there was now the frenzy of idolatry. Mean pride paid him mean homage. The aristocrats did low obeisance. Salisbury himself, whom Disraeli had character- istically approached through his step-mother, Lady Derby, was reconciled—ready, nay, eager to join the new Cabinet. No cleft or fissure impaired the new solidarity of the Party. And to crown all, a month later, Gladstone, baffled and beaten, retired from the Liberal leadership in circumstances which made even Liberals feel the disadvantageous contrast with the calm courage, patience, and perseverance with which his rival had faced years of opposition and of office without power. Time was to prove how much political life was left in Gladstone. But few then believed that he could return, and Disraeli could indulge the pride that he outlasted a rival five years his junior—one, moreover, of whose malignity to him- self he was convinced. During his last six months of life, while sitting to Sir John Millais for his portrait, he told the artist that he had never disliked Gladstone, but had never understood him. It is certain that Gladstone for his part was even further from understanding and perhaps from charity. The Government Disraeli formed was well named the Min- istry of all the Opportunities. It is not easy to parry the gibe that most of the opportunities were missed. Its foreign policy now appears to have been, on the whole, mistaken. It did nothing to put into practice the policy of Imperial consolida- tion. It let pass a golden chance of settling the Irish question. Nothing is more ordinary than to find in Conservative speeches and writings references to the necessity of getting back to or maintaining “Disraelian principles.” A candid in- quirer is baffled in the attempt to understand this dark saying. Disraeli undoubtedly had principles. But they were by noDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 287 means generally deducible from his practice, and they have never been the principles of the modern Conservative Party. The Session of 1874 should have given contemporaries a very fair answer, so far as domestic affairs were concerned, to the question, ‘““What will he do with it?” Left alone Disraeli would apparently have done nothing—on the whole, consider- ing his years and health, an intelligent thing to do. But power- ful interests decided adversely to his dream of one year at least of rest in thankfulness. The bishops saw their oppor- tunity to bring forward a long meditated attempt to “put down ritualism.’’ Who better as the agent of such a policy than that fervent Protestant, the author of Lothair? An even higher personage than Archbishop Tait desired to free the country from the taint of idolatry. When the Primate introduced his Public Worship Regulation Bill the Queen expressed her “earnest wish” that the Government would go as far as it could, without embarrassment to itself, to facilitate the passage of the measure, thus “satisfying the Protestant feeling of the country.” * In fact, Disraeli could go no step without “embarrassing the Government,” and even endangering it. For both Salisbury and Gathorne-Hardy were High Churchmen who could hardly fail to regard with disfavour this partial measure. They might accept a Bill to discipline alike those who were too High and those who were too Low. The Book, the whole Book, and nothing but the Book was a tenable proposition. But Tait himself, while calling for terrors against clergymen who lichted candles, was an innovator who wanted the Athanasian creed omitted from the Church service. It was clearly a case of heterodoxy being the other man’s “doxy.”’ However, there it was. The Queen could not have a blunt “No,” and there was no reasonable excuse to offer on the ground of the pressure of other business. Disraeli was forced to afford facilities, and he could not escape appearing personally as the champion of the Bill. It was productive of some piquant situations. Harcourt, the Erastian, quarrelled with Gladstone, the Arminian; Disraeli reproved that “great master of gibes and flouts,” his newly- 2 Buckle, vol. v._ -~ 7 - = * oS a att peal a = -_——S =. — a _ . f | f | | 288 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT rejoined lieutenant Salisbury. The measure was futile, and worse than futile. While it encouraged many Churchmen to question whether the State and Church were after all desirable, it gave a considerable impetus to the practices it set out to abolish. Disraeli jeered at “the mass in masquerade’ ; great- hearted curates thenceforward celebrated the mass with no masquerade at all. For every candle extinguished a hundred more were lighted, and the once respectable word “Protestant” became merely an abusive epithet. But, “pretentiously and irri- tatingly futile’ as Mr. Traill in his Life of Lord Salisbury pro- nounces the Bill, Disraeli’s handling of it was amazingly clever. Despite acute differences in the Party and the Cabinet, the split was confined to the Bill itself, there were no resignations, and none of the Prime Minister’s colleagues seem to have borne any grudge against him. Gladstone would have shed half-a- dozen Ministers over an issue so troublesome. It was impos- sible, however, that Disraeli’s charm could soothe the wider circle which lay beyond the power of his personal appeal. High Churchmen in general were deeply angered, and later, when Disraeli was absorbed in foreign politics, were ready to put the worst construction on his acts. Gladstone, on the other hand, became, in the words of the late Mr. G. W. E. Russell, “the delight and glory of the Ritualists,”’ and the fact had consider- able influence in the Liberal revival of the late ’seventies. The only other notable feature in the Session of 1874 was the Irish discussion, in which the Prime Minister intervened with a speech full of smart debating points. “It might be urged,” he said, “that they (the Irish) had been conquered by Cromwell. What of it? Had not Cromwell previously con- quered England? Why should my eloquent and imaginative friends try to extract a peculiar grievance out of a common misfortune”? ‘Entertaining prattle,” wrote Mr. F. H. O'Don- nell of this speech. Disraeli seems to have regarded his achieve- ment with a considerable lack of humour. He actually wrote to Lady Bradford the next day that Home Rule had “received its coup de grace.” 1 Perhaps he believed so. Home Rule was then a novel idea, and Isaac Butt was not the man to make it * Buckle, vol. v.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 289 impressive; while Disraeli was within measurable distance, by this time, of taking the conventional Conservative view of the Irish, if not of Ireland. However, “his cosmopolitan spirit,’ says Mr. O’Donnell,! ‘never descended to the nadir of prejudice of the British Philistine,’ and, though he chaffed the Home Rulers, he treated them with civility, while they on their part never forgot that he and Bentinck and Manners had once be- friended them. But, as Prime Minister and a rather tired old man, Disraeli did think of Ireland as a pestilent nuisance, all the more because he could not get it entirely off his conscience. In the autumn of 1874 he contemplated going across the Channel, and it was perhaps a misfortune for two nations that the gout and an unimaginative friend’s expostulations pre- vented the visit. Though he had lost the vivid sympathy with Ireland which distinguished him in youth, and his private correspondence suggests that he thought the Home Rulers troublesome cattle, he still remained enough of the statesman to realise that there should be a Conservative policy for Ireland as an alternative to recurrent coercion, and study of the prob- lem on the spot might have moved him to a fit of energy. But energy was now not superabundant. The line of least resistance had increasing charm. Besides, it was pleasant to have more time for epistolary flirtation with Lady Bradford and bandying compliments with the Queen. Her Majesty was erateful for his gallantry in the cause of true religion, and the Queen’s gratitude meant much—exactly how much it is still a puzzle to say. One thing, of very great importance, it meant to the enfeebling man of seventy, and that was comfort. A pleased Queen asked him to sit down when he had the gout, whereas poor Lord Derby, when the agony was greatest on him, had always had to stand. Also, the Royal favour secured him from one of the standing bugbears of Victorian statesmen, the frequent journey to Balmoral. Once, when he felt ill there, the Queen visited him in his bedroom, and was so sorry for him that she excused further attendance in that palace of freezing etiquette and icy physical atmosphere. No mark of condescension left. Disraeli more grateful. His race has gen- * History of the Irish Parliamentary Party.—, ae 290 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT erally avoided Scotland, and he had little passion for Balmoral, even though a place was found for him on the famous tartan hearthrug which was pressed by so few non-royal feet. Disraeli had by this time learned the art of taking things easily; and his very economy of effort was generally an advan- tage. In the days of his youthful sincerity, when he really would have delighted to practise what he preached, he won the reputation of a dangerous charlatan. Now, when age had robbed him of his energy, and security had made him careless, his very faults were accounted high statesmanship. Hazard, says Marshal Foch, often passes in war for calculation. In politics timidity commonly wins the praise of judgment, and sloth is applauded as circumspection. It was now Disraeli’s lot to enjoy what was largely the unearned increment of applause. He remains the most quotable of all the great Vic- torian Ministers, largely because he made no attempt to settle the problems which he discussed. He is entitled to so high a respect for his thought, sometimes profound and always original, that it comes almost as a shock to find how little he actually did when he reached office with power. But if he thus disappoints any candid newcomer in the field of research who has hitherto accepted hearsay for fact, his own saying of “Twenty years too late’ must be remembered. “I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole,” he once said. Climbing the greasy pole for half a century is an exhausting business. Outside politics Disraeli signalises his accession to supreme power by a notable gesture. ‘‘Can nothing be done for litera- ture?’ he wrote to the Queen, suggesting that ‘““Mr. Tennyson could sustain a baronetcy,” while Carlyle might be offered the Grand Cross of the Bath, together with a pension not less than that which the Queen’s grandfather had bestowed on Dr. Johnson.1 There was, no doubt, a mixture of motives. Derby had suggested to the Prime Minister that to do something for Carlyle, who, if he disliked Disraeli, loathed Gladstone, would be “a really good political investment.” It is, therefore, exag- gerative to speak of Disraeli’s action as “magnanimity.”’ Yet, considering that Carlyle had written about him not only * Buckle, vol. vi.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 291 savagely but with insolence, as a “superlative Hebrew con- juror,’ the grace with which the step was taken marks Disraelt, despite those occasional floridities which an Occidental is prone to censure as vulgarities when they are only the graces of an alien, as a man of princely mind. The letter he wrote to Carlyle, despite a few pomposities on the duty of Govern- ments to “recognise intellect,” is fine both in feeling and expression: I have advised the Queen (he wrote) to offer to conter a baronetcy on Mr. Tennyson, and the same distinction should be at your command, if you liked it. But I have remembered that, like myself, you are childless, and may not care for hereditary honours. . . . I will speak with frankness on an- other point. It is not well that in the sunset of life you should be disturbed by common cares. I see no reason why a great author should not receive from the nation a pension as well as a lawyer and a statesman. Unfortunately, the personal power of Her Majesty in this respect is limited; but still it is in the Queen’s capacity to settle on an individual an amount equal to a good fellowship.” In a letter full of straight feeling and twisted English Carlyle declined both honour and money. But he was, says Froude, “sensible of the compliment, and touched at the quarter from which it came.” As a political investment the offer bore no interest. Carlyle, with great impartiality, continued to be- labour both Disraeli and Gladstone, and was soon to become one of the fiercest critics of the formers patronage of the Unspeakable Turk. Tennyson, for his part, preferred to wait for a peerage. He might have worded his refusal more strongly had he known that Disraeli had referred to him, in the letter to Carlyle, as a “real poet,” but not perhaps a “great” one. Disraeli was ever generous, as well as placable, and if we omit the case of Peel it might almost be said that, while he never forgot a friend, he never remembered an enemy. His kindness to literary men has earned a posthumous reward. His 1 Buckle, vol. v.292 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT general dealings with the craft of the pen were devoid of the superciliousness so common in English politicians. He was, perhaps, inclined to underrate the dull thinker, but he had always a pleasant word, and often a useful thought, for the kind of writer who had no recommendation but his own genius. Consequently, he was respected as few politicians are by liter- ary men, and after his death they secured reverence for his memory. When he had been forty years in his grave there were still one or two old men in literature and the press to hand on to youth the tradition that he, alone among British politicians, never failed in his sympathy with talent not im- mediately useful to him.CHAPTER XV LEXANDER MACDONALD, one of the two first Labour Members of the House of Commons, declared in 1879 that the Conservatives had done more for the workers in five years than the Liberals had done in fifty. The impor- tance of the social reform legislation introduced in conformity with the policy of sanitas sanitatum has, no doubt, been exag- gerated, and Disraeli himself comically over-estimated it when he wrote that he had “settled the long and vexatious conflict between capital and labour.” Nevertheless he certainly did prove himself much more alive than Gladstone to the needs of the masses. The Artisans’ Dwelling Act, introduced by Cross, a new member of the Administration, a Lancashire man with a knowledge of law and commerce, was a not unimportant sani- tary measure empowering the corporations of the larger towns to purchase land by compulsion and build houses where existing accommodation had been declared insanitary. The Bill was opposed by Fawcett and the orthodox Radicals on the ground that it was class legislation. Humanity may censure this atti- tude, but it was not, as is often assumed, merely pedantic. For unless the State should simultaneously proceed to undertake responsibility for the housing of dukes, a measure to provide accommodation for’ the working-class created a legal distinc- tion between rich and poor, with the certainty that, though the latter might obtain some immediate benefit, they would sooner or later suffer loss of liberty. Nobody who reflects on the number of measures since passed for the special protection or oppression of certain classes, and who recognises how tar, con- currently with immense extensions of the franchise, we have passed from the conception of the equality of all classes of citizens—the working man being regarded as a person and to be sometimes controlled, sometimes subsidised, sometimes ex- 293294 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT empted, but never to have the liberties or responsibilities of people of a higher station—will condemn the arguments of Fawcett and others as puerile. But Disraeli for his part had already answered their objections in Sybil. Industrialism hav- ing, in his view, already divided England into two nations, the fact might as well be recognised, the State intervening with laws to soften the asperity of conditions which could only be altered by social upheaval. A Friendly Societies Act, to promote thrift and safeguard the accumulations of the poor, was also passed during this session; but the most important outcome of the deliberations of Parliament was the legislation dealing with the relations of employer and employed. Until 1871 a trade union had been held to be an illegal association “in restraint of trade,” toler- ated indeed, but without a legal right even to proceed against an official who absconded with its funds. In 1871 the Liberals had brought the unions within the law, but rather in the sense of putting them in custody than of admitting them to freedom. A strike became lawful, but “anything done in pursuance of a strike was criminal.’’! While breach of contract by a work- man remained a criminal offence, breach of contract by the employer was simply a matter for action in the civil courts. Both these questions were dealt with by the Government. “Peaceful picketing’ was legalised. The theory of a strike as a conspiracy was destroyed by a provision laying down that nothing done in a trade dispute by two or more persons should be regarded as a conspiracy unless it would have been criminal if done by a single individual. Finally, as regarded contracts, employer and employed were placed on an equal footing. Cross was the Minister mainly responsible for the conduct of these measures, but the Cabinet would not have received them but for Disraeli’s warm support. He tells Lady Bradford * that when Cross explained his scheme ‘‘many were against it, and none for it but myself.’’ Not that the average Tory landowner had any objection to discomfiting the manufacturer, but there was a certain fear, explicable by the recent occurrence of an ew ebb’s History of Trade Umonism. Buckle, vol. v.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 295 embittered strike among Suffolk labourers, that the concessions might also be used against agricultural employers. On another subject—that which was the main concern of the Merchant Shipping Act—Disraeli had to be pushed. The object of the measure was to put an end to the scandal of overloaded and over-insured vessels, sent to sea with a cynical disregard to the lives of the men on board. As everybody knows, the matter was decided by the vehemence of Samuel Plimsoll, the Member for Derby, who, denouncing the ship- owners as “ship-knackers” and “villains,” shook his fist at the Prime Minister when it appeared that legislation on the subject was to be deferred. Plimsoll, of whom Disraeli wrote that he was “half rogue, half enthusiast,” and “a Moody and Sankey in politics,” gained more by his indecorum than he would have achieved by the most piercing eloquence. Disraeli’s mistake in under-estimating him and his fanaticism is not without significance. In one who had so often declared that men are ereat through their passions, it was a sien of how far old age had not only frozen his sympathies but dulled his perceptions. However, the Session of 1875 was certainly the most useful of the Parliament which he dominated, and Liberals should be the last to belittle his essays in social reform because some of them, lacking compulsory clauses, might be taken or left by those whom they concerned. ‘Permissive legislation,’ Disraeli said, “1s the character of a free people,’ and no apter motto could be imagined for a text-book of political science written by an orthodox Radical of the Manchester School. Moreover, though he appeared at the time to be engaged only in domestic problems, it is now known that the Prime Minister was forced to deal with a very grave foreign crisis, which he handled with skill and decision. Bismarck, chagrined at the rapidity with which France had recovered from the blow of 1870, desired to pick a new quarrel in order to avert for ever the danger of a war of restitution. “Bismarck,” wrote Disraeli, “is really another old Bona- parte, and must be bridled.! In his old age Disraeli seems to 1 Buckle, vol. v.296 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT have lost much of the clear vision in European affairs which distinguished him in his youth and prime. For example, he appears to have taken, after the reverse of 1870, the fashionable view of France as a dying nation. We find him talking—per- haps when he was feeling very weak—about the possibility of France being divided by the Great Powers, as Poland had been. But there was this distinction between him and most of the other politicians who had come under the influence of the German professors, and now saw the proof of their theories in the success of the German arms. He may ‘have believed France dying, but he could not think of her as “better dead.” He deplored what others thought a capital business. “It is curious,’ we find him writing to Lady Bradford, “but since the fall of France, who used to give us so much trouble, the conduct of foreign affairs for England has become infinitely more difficult.” 1 In concert with Russia he took steps to foil the new plot, and, fortunately for himself and France, the indiscretion of Bismarck had given him the warm support of the Queen. Naturally predisposed as she was to the German point of view, she was delighted at an opportunity to snub the Iron Chancellor, who had made himself highly objectionable to her daughter and son-in-law. Nor was her attitude deter- mined solely by trivial motives of this kind. She was inspired by a high though sometimes mistaken patriotism, and had a great sense of her position as Queen of England. Her German connections did not prevent her being, in many respects, more sensitive than the English themselves when any slight was done to the country she represented. She might regard Germany as England’s natural partner, but Germany must not be the senior partner, and Bismarck was too obviously working to make her so. With such powerful backing, Disraeli found his task simple. War was averted without difficulty. France was saved. But Bismarck was soon to show how bitterly he re- sented the derangement of his plans. Nothing was known to the public at the time of this, per- haps the most useful of all Disraeli’s public acts— an act which alone would have justified his displacement of Gladstone, since * Buckle, vol. vi.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 297 the latter would undoubtedly have permitted France to be crushed definitively under Germany’s heel. A much more measurable feat, however, added enormously to the prestige of the Ministry and the chief Minister. The Khedive of Egypt, financially embarrassed, determined to sell his shares, amount- ing to nearly a moiety of the whole original holding, in the Suez Canal Company. The news that he was negotiating with a French syndicate reached the Government through two sources. Frederick Greenwood, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, receiving the information from one Oppenheimer, conveyed it to Lord Derby, who, of course, was the last man in England to act on it. Disraeli heard what was afoot from a member of the Rothschild family, and was at once interested. There were many difficulties in the way. Parliament had risen for the year. Derby was scandalised when the Prime Minister proposed that the Cabinet should act on its own re- sponsibility, and from this time dated a certain cooling in the almost affectionate relations which had so far subsisted between the old statesman and the son of his former chiet. Stafford Northcote, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, also expressed the objections of a financial purist, though in the long run he yielded assent. The Queen was enraptured. After the prelimi- nary difficulties had been settled, there remained the question of getting the money. Disraeli, with an optimism born of his early experience in obtaining “temporary accommodation” on much less solid security than the word of a Cabinet, was not to be baulked. Having secured the option, he got in touch with the Rothschilds, and with scarcely a moment's hesitation they advanced him the cash. When the coup was revealed, the plaudits were loud and general. Certain criticisms, however, made themselves heard above the roar of applause. Many who on the whole approved, and who could not condemn the Prime Minister for acting without authorisation from the House of Commons—for delay would have lost the deal—found an unpleasantly Jewish flavour ‘n the methods actually adopted. Why had Disraeli gone to the Rothschilds without first approaching the Bank of Eng- land? And was not the interest of 15 per cent. a little usurious ?, ; ‘ ‘ 298 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT About the same time Disraeli concluded an agreement with Japan, with the object of bringing combined pressure on China over a small matter then in dispute. The affair is only worth mention as an example of Disraeli’s foresight. Japan, he said, was “the Sardinia of the Mongolian East.” Probably he was the first statesman in Europe to give more than an amused attention to the newly-emerged Island Empire. Altogether 1875 was a year of triumph, and Disraeli’s spirits reacted to the sunshine of popularity. He showed himself much in society. He dined in the City, sometimes indifferently —witness that famous banquet at which, after passing course after course as not only badly cooked but cold, he greeted the first glass of champagne with the remark, “Thank Heaven for something really hot at last!’ He was even seen occasion- ally at race meetings. The Ministerial whitebait dinners at Greenwich were positively hilarious. No opposition in the House of Commons, boundless enthusiasm in the country, eternal sunshine at the Court—the aged Minister seemed to have left trouble finally behind him. Lord Hartington (whom Disraeli always called ‘“‘Harty-tarty’ ) was not the man to keep Ministers awake at nights; he had some difficulty in perform- ing that office for himself. And as for the country and the Queen, Disraeli had recipes for keeping both in good humour. Mr. Lloyd George, it has been said, made government part and parcel of the art of the cinematograph. Disraeli, who lived in the days of the panorama, exhibited policy in a series of brilliantly coloured pictures. The Suez Canal coup was an excellent example of the method. Everything could be seen standing out with stereoscopic emphasis—the Canal itself, still new enough to be an eighth wonder of the world, an Egyptian prince bankrupt through exotic pleasures, stealthy French financiers seeking profit from his necessities, a vigilant Prime Minister forestalling them on mysteriously gathered informa- tion, a Jewish man of millions who weighed out from his Alad- din’s cave the requisite gold, a Royal lady who beamed approval of the deft stroke. The thing was as exciting as a novel. It was, indeed, a novel; a corrected proof of Vivian Grey. In furtherance of the panorama scheme Disraeli persuadedDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 299 the Queen to open in person the Session of 1876. It was a fitting prelude to a sitting which was to be peculiarly his and hers. The Prime Minister seems to have himself suggested to the Queen that she ought to be called Empress of India. Possibly he had no other object than to be pleasant ; perhaps the whole thing was only a variant of the “tomahawk punch” which Vivian Grey promised to concoct for the Marquess of Carabas. But Queen Victoria was no Marchioness of Carabas to forget all about such a matter by the next day. An able and conscientious monarch, she was still a woman, with a woman's taste for frippery. What the half-promise of a new hat might have been to one of her humble female subjects, the suggestion of an Imperial diadem was to her. Once the idea had been implanted in the Royal mind, there could be no rest until it had reached the status of legal fact. There were difficulties, how- ever. Precisely the kind of people who were, on general grounds, most favourable to the Throne, and most willing to enlarge its dignity or prerogative, were also precisely the people who in their Conservatism disliked any tinkering with old- established usage. There was, moreover, more than a prejudice against the imperial title. It stood in English minds for one of two things—an autocratic European system or a barbarous Asiatic one, something to be feared, or something to be de- spised. To the Radical it was a challenge. The Conservative it as something infinitely less venerable than the oO regarded 1 ancient title of King. At the best there was bound to be dislike of the change or— what was equally undesirable—ridicule. Matters were made worse by the way in which the Prime Minister sprang his proposal on Parliament. Ordinarily, when legislation affect- ing the Royal Family is in question, a Prime Minister consults ‘4 advance the leaders of the Opposition, in order to secure that debate on a subject so delicate shall be as brief and as little acrimonious as possible. Disraeli, however, approached neither Hartington nor Granville. Probably he was a little shy. There ‘s no reason to believe that he, personally, saw anything ridic- ulous in the Bill; on the contrary, his whole character would suggest that he firmly believed in its value as a gesture to India300 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT and as an appeal to Royalist sentiments in the masses at home. But an old man about to marry a girl of twenty, while fully convinced that he need not fear laughter, does in fact fear it, and generally takes steps to let nothing of his intentions appear until they have been carried out. Disraeli was in a similar case. He might feel that his scheme was perfectly common- sense. But it by no means follows that he would like to expose his scheme, in the freedom of private conversation, to the downright commentary of a solid person like Hartington. He no doubt expected that the Liberal leaders would be awed by the raptures of the populace when he sprang upon them un- awares a definite Parliamentary proposal. The extent of his misapprehension was apparent when the matter reached Parlia- ment. Disraeli found that the alien in him had confused his judgment of one side of the character of the people among whom he had lived for seventy years. He had not stunned the English imagination. He had merely roused that formid- able thing, the hostile laughter of a humorous people. It might have gone hard with him had he not been saved by the mistake of anenemy. Lowe, who had most qualities but commonsense and common courtesy, inveighed against the proposal with a vehemence and ill-nature that disregarded all the bounds both of proportion and decency. The Queen, he declared, had asked previous Prime Ministers to make her an Empress, and they had all refused. Only in Disraeli had she found a suff- ciently subservient tool. This excess of violence produced its natural result. To refute the charge in detail was easy; Lowe was placed in a position of the utmost humiliation; in the revulsion of feeling the Bill was passed with ease; the title, once established by law, became quickly respectable in the eyes of most, and ina few years was regarded, by the Conservatives at least, as a valuable asset of the Crown. At Christmas Disraeli received from the proud and grateful Queen a card signed ‘Victoria R. and I.” A writer in the Quarterly Review,’ described the dinner at which the Prime Minister for the first time proposed the health of “the Empress of India,’ making “a little speech as flowery as the oration of a maharajah,” and * April 1gol.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 301 tells how at its conclusion the Queen made him a “pretty smil- ing bow, half a courtesy.” Meanwhile in the region of foreign affairs there were not wanting signs that the ease which the Prime Minister had chiefly coveted was to be denied him. Russia’s growing domi- nation of Central Asia was on the one hand felt as constituting a menace to British interests in the East. On the other hand the condition of Turkey in Europe, following a rising against the Sultan’s authority in Herzegovina, was fast becoming a scandal. Some months before the public had begun to take an interest in the question, the Ottoman problem had engaged the attention of Continental governments, and in December 1875, Count Andrassy, the Austrian Chancellor, on behalf of Ger- many and Russia as well as of his own country, drew up a Note to the Porte. This grave document recited Turkey’s failure to fulfil her many promises of reform, warned her that unless they were put in effect Serbia and Montenegro might be driven to join hands with the rebels of Herzegovina, and in- formed her that the signatory Powers were resolved to obtain fulfilment of Turkey’s pledges in regard to the treatment of the Christian populations. In the drafting of this document there had been no consul- tation with Great Britain, France, or Italy. France was a defeated Power, Italy an upstart Power, England (since 1870) a negligible Power—such seems to have been the reasoning of the statesmen of the three Empires. France and Italy, how- ever, at once acquiesced in the Note. England delayed. Derby disliked any intervention, even in alliance with all Europe, which might mean war; Disraeli objected to England being allotted a subordinate part in any European matter. Eventually concurrence was signified, but the delay had been fatal. The Porte realised that the unanimity of Europe was unreal, and, satisfied that it might regard England as an abettor and ally, merely emitted the most transparent insincerities. In May 1876 the three Continental Empires again took counsel, and produced the “Berlin Memorandum,” which warned Turkey that, failing compliance with the demands for reform, force would be used. France and Italy again con-ey — a -_ a 302 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT curred. This time Great Britain quite definitely refused to associate herself with the policy of the Note, on the double ground that she had not been consulted as to the policy and that she dissented from the policy on its merits. Disraeli had decided to assert himself. Policy apart, he seems to have welcomed the opportunity of a theatrical appearance. He was by now in the mood for adventure. Perhaps he was urged by the Queen to assert himself. Perhaps he remembered how Palmerston had won peace and admiration by taking the chances of war. Perhaps he was merely touched with the frivolity of old age; in a letter to Lady Bradford he had expressed the desire to “expire in a blaze’; and the adulation he enjoyed over the Suez Canal affair may have had some effect. In the early summer of 1876 Derby had seen reason to tear that he was heading for war. There could certainly be no more dangerous combination than that of a timid Foreign Minister and a Prime Minister whose mind moved on the lines of drama. Derby’s main idea of policy was to take no step lest he should take a wrong step. But the case was one which did not permit indefinite procrastination. Things were moving rapidly. Owing to England’s refusal to subscribe to the Berlin Memorandum it was not presented. The situation developed unchecked. Serbia and Montenegro declared war against the Porte. The Bulgarians rose against their Turkish oppressors, and from Bulgaria soon came a tale of horror. During June there began to appear in the Daily News reports of atrocities perpetrated by the Sultan’s troops during the suppression of the Bulgar revolt. A member of the news- paper staff, J. R. MacGahan, gave the result of personal in- vestigation in a series of articles, of which a single quotation, relating to what took place at Batak, will suffice. The cor- respondent saw there dogs feeding upon a heap which con- sisted of corpses of two hundred girls who, he was told, had been imprisoned, dishonored, and finally beheaded. In the ruins of the school were the remains of two hundred women who had been burnt alive within its walls. The churchyard was heaped with dead to the height of three or four feet. The church itself was half filled with charred and putrefyingDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 303 bodies. Of a family of twenty members only a single old woman survived. It was a common incident to find the muti- lated remains of children. One woman was seen moaning over three little skulls which lay in her lap. Englishmen, it should be noted, could not think of these as matters which, however horrible, lay beyond the scope of their concern. For England had been in a very special sense the protector of Turkish dominion in Europe. The Crimean war had been fought to defend the Turkish Empire, and Palmer- ston’s policy had been uniformly Turcophile. Nor was this ancient history; within the last few months England had again appeared, this time in isolation from all the rest of Christen- dom, as the Turks’ champion. The Bulgarian revelations were, therefore, highly embarrassing to the Government. People who would on general principles have approved Derby’s policy of non-intervention began to murmur that England must make common cause with the other Powers to end such in- famies. Others, who on general principles took the view of Disraeli, who regarded Turkey as a valuable buffer, and who resented the subordinate part allotted to England by the three Empires, were yet horrified to find these barbarities committed virtually under British protection. Disraeli himself remained apparently unmoved. He seemed, indeed, to think and speak with a sneer. Fastening on the allegations of torture, he remarked that Orientals usually “‘ter- minated their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner.” This was commonly interpreted as the expression of a callous indifference, and indeed in anybody else such an ‘diom would have been assailable on the ground of taste, but Disraeli’s diction was often marked by an almost foreign insensibility to the inappropriate, and there is every reason to think that he believed himself to be stating a serious argument ‘1 serious terms. He was, at any rate, vastly annoyed when some members of the House of Commons sniggered at the expression. Nevertheless his impassivity needs explanation. Even when consular reports began to paint the Bulgarian horrors in colours scarcely less lurid than those employed by the journalists he— —.~ 304 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT talked of ‘‘coffee-house babble. Mr. MacGahan had said that out of eight or nine thousand people at Batak only twelve or fifteen hundred had been left alive. Mr. Walter Baring, ordered to make an official investigation, reduced the number of victims to five thousand. Gloating over this discrepancy, Disraeli seemed to forget that the murder of five thousand people could not be deemed an inconsiderable affair, and that, 1f it were to be defended at all, an appeal must be made to quite other than arithmetical arguments. Had his character been generally callous there would be no mystery. But he was in fact a man of more than ordinary kindliness. Things which had not distressed the otherwise oc- cupied mind of Gladstone, things which had been a positive satisfaction to the interested mind of Bright, had roused 1n him a passionate sympathy with the oppressed which had found expression in burning words, when he had only words to offer, and, when the opportunity came, in measures of value and sincerity. All his life he had protested against the sweating of children, and his Government had only this very year passed an education measure absolutely prohibiting the employment of boys and girls under the age of ten. Only this very year, also, he had interested himself in legislation to restrict the “horrible practice’ of vivisection, in relation to which he shared the deep aversion which Queen Victoria felt for such expert- ments. He was, undeniably, not only a good-natured man but a man of much deeper feeling than most—a man who, with all Gladstone’s humanitarianism, possessed an experience and im- agination which Gladstone lacked. Why, then, did these horrors leave him cold? Why did he think of them as a mere inconvenience? He recognised readily enough that they made it extremely difficult for him to give full support to Turkey, but he never wavered in his desire to give Turkey all the sup- port he could, and he appears to have been absolutely con- temptuous of those who used the atrocities as an argument for a change of policy. Two lines of explanation may be suggested. For his general attitude on the Eastern Question more can now be said than his most fervent supporters then imagined. At the time theDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 305 Russian peril naturally obsessed all minds. It is now seen that Disraeli was thinking quite as much about the two Central Empires, whose plan it was to isolate Great Britain. Knowing more and seeing further than any English statesman of his time, he was naturally exasperated by the turn of events in Bulgaria, which upset his calculations and complicated his task. Yet even so it might have been imagined that some sign of his disgust with the work of the Turkish butchers would, if but involuntarily, have escaped him. No such sign was given. All his wrath was reserved for those who suggested that the Turk could no longer be considered the second gentleman in Europe. ‘There was surely more than a spice of truth in Glad- stone’s remark to Argyll that this belittlement of the atro- cities was due to “Dizzy’s crypto-Judaism.” Dimly, and, it may be, unconsciously, the Prime Minister was feeling the influence of his blood. The secular sympathy of Jew for Moslem was roused in him, and with it went the Jew’s hatred for the Christians of the East. Disraeli might interest him- self, as an English landlord, in the services of Hughenden, and assert his right to a memorial seat which an innovating High Church vicar would have abolished. But when the East swam before him he was pure Jew; and now, while the massacre of Christians awoke in many Englishmen some spark of the old spirit which had sent Cceur de Lion to Joppa, he found himself suddenly an alien, and even in a sense an enemy alien. It is possible to justify his policy in terms of British interest. His callousness was a private matter. The cynicism alternating with explosions of temper marked genuine bewilderment and pained anger. Once before, at the time of the Indian Mutiny, he had felt this aloofness from the people among whom he lived, and for whom he worked. Then his isolation was en- nobled by the part his racial separation enabled him to play. Now, appearing as the apologist of the desolator of Bulgaria, he was seen to less advantage. But the man’s mind had remained constant; it was only circumstances which had changed. During the session of 1876 there was little debate on these questions. Granville and Hartington, the responsible leaders306 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT of the Opposition, were fully imbued with the respectable tra- dition that a Government must not be embarrassed in questions of foreign policy. Thus on the whole the agitation of the country found little reflection in the House of Commons. On August 11, Disraeli, in reply to Harcourt, made a somewhat fuller statement of his intentions than he had so far vouchsafed. “Our duty at this critical moment,” he said, “is to maintain the Empire of England,” but he allowed it to be understood that the Empire of Turkey must be maintained with it. He ad- mitted that twelve thousand Bulgarians had been murdered. But, he added, there was “nothing to justify us in talking in such a vein of Turkey as has been, and is being, at this time entertained.” They were the last words he was to speak as a member of the House of Commons. Immediately after he had made the announcement he rose from his seat, took a long glance round the House, and disappeared behind the Speaker’s chair. The next day it was announced that he had been created Earl of Beaconsfield. The double labour of Prime Minister and leader of the House of Commons was beyond his strength at a time which he, better than most men, realised to be critical. He was too much interested in the situation to have any serious thought of retiring, though the thought of resignation did once enter his mind, only to be ousted by the energetic re- monstrance of the Queen. But to play his part in the time before him he must conserve his energies, and only in the House of Lords could be divest himself of the cares of con- trolling Parliament. It is said that on the last day his eyes filled with tears. He had never loved or respected the House of Commons as other men had done, yet it had been so much of his life that he could not leave it unaffected. So much of the best part of him had been buried there that he might almost feel as if he were at his own graveside. The next month,! Gladstone published his famous pamphlet on the Bulgarian horrors, and the Christian Party had a leader. Disraeli was at first little moved, dismissing Gladstone as a reckless bigot, under the influence of “envy, vindictiveness, * September 1876.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 307 hypocrisy and superstition.” 1 But when it became impossible to ignore the effect of Gladstone’s writing Disraeli adopted a new line; the Gladstonian policy, he declared, would mean a European war. In this contention there was probably more truth than was generally allowed. It has been argued that, since Russia, Germany, and Austria were already acting in concert, and France and Italy had expressed acquiescence, no war could have followed drastic action against Turkey. England, it seemed, had only to join the other Powers in put- ting pressure on the Porte in order to secure not only the safety of the Christian populations but also international peace. Doubt, however, 1s permissible. The unity of purpose between the three Empires was illusory. Russia may have been, as Argyle and others believed, genuinely anxious to co-operate with England in the Balkans on behalf of the Christian peoples, but Beaconsfield himself was convinced that the main peril of an outbreak of general hostilities did not reside with Russia. Bismarck was, as Disraeli saw, the most dangerous person in Europe; and Bismarck wanted war—war of almost any sott. He was extremely willing that England and Russia should be embroiled, standing as he did to gain by the weakness of either, or both. But if England should take common action with Russia, then, by inducing Austria to consider her interests imperiled, he might start a conflagration which would so weaken all the chief Powers as to leave Germany a multitude of opportunities. ‘There was Poland to be snatched from Russia; there was the final crushing of France to be accomplished ; there was Belgium to be over-run, and Holland to be over- awed if England were sufficiently bled not to be able to forbid the presence of a Great Power at the mouths of the Meuse and the Scheldt. That Beaconsfield had a firmer grasp of all this side of the situation than any other English statesman is probable, but his real opinions on the German danger can only be gathered from his official and intimate correspondence. In his speeches Ger- many is never even mentioned. Consequently, to those among his contemporaries who were adverse to him he seemed very 2 Buckle, vol. vi—speaking to Lord Derby.308 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT much the hypocrite when he spoke of himself as the preserver of peace, and condemned Gladstone as a war-monger. Neither could he offer substantial justification for the profession, nor for the accusation could he offer substantial justification. To- day his sincerity is, in a measure, at least, revealed. For, while he was not working for peace in the absolute sense of Derby, he did with might and main, with every resource of his agile and subtle intellect, with all the energy that was leit to an old and aging man, with all the wile that had been cultivated in the life-long battle of wits, waged against every manner of adversary from the duke to the moneylender, work to save his country from involvement in such a war as that in which Bis- marck aimed to reap the wrecker’s profit.CHAPTER XVI ()* the first day of November 1876, Disraeli was at the theatre, seeing Mrs. Kendal in a play called Peril. The title at least was apposite to the situation, for on the day before Russia had despatched to Turkey an ultimatum. However, the immediate danger passed. The Sultan lost no time in com- plying with the Russian demand, and shortly afterwards the British Government proposed a conference of the Powers at Constantinople. In view of subsequent events it is no less curious than neces- sary to note that up to this time the Government had been blamed chiefly for its inactivity. John Bright, representing the party which favoured strict neutrality, had gone out of his way to acquit it of provocation, but the passivity which he praised was exactly the Government’s crime in the eyes of Gladstone and his followers. The Gladstonian group was strictly an ad hoc party. The official Liberal leaders held aloof from it; the Manchester Radicals were not of it. It was in fact an essentially religious party, a coalition of the two most vital spiritual forces in the country, the High Churchmen and the Nonconformists. Its ramifications extended even to the Cabinet, for Carnarvon, the Colonial Secretary, was one of its members, and Salisbury himself was at least influenced by it for a period. From first to last, on the other hand, all the forces of finance were ranged on the side of the Prime Minister. The City of London, famous for its comprehending generosity, refused, much to Beaconsfield’s glee, to subscribe to a fund for the relief of the Bulgarians. Here, again, the lines of party de- marcation were crossed. Despite a professed difference in politics, Beaconsfield had the Rothschilds at his back. Goschen, a rising hope of the Liberals, was warm in his support, and the Daily Telegraph, founded as a Liberal organ, went over de- 309310 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT cisively to the Conservative side. Mr. Winston Churchill, in his biography of Lord Randolph, wrote that “the powers of fashion and clubland” delighted in Beaconsfield, having “never before found a leader so much to their temper.” But this rally to the sign of the Crescent marked a later stage of the Near Eastern controversy. The City gave the lead; “fashion and clubland’” followed, at first a little dubiously. It was almost the first time that Beaumanoir humbly followed the initiative of Change Alley. Mammon having declared on his side, Disraeli cared little for the fury of the saints. He had never been alarmed by Gladstone’s pamphlet, and when he spoke at the Lord Mayor's banquet, it was with perfect assurance that he declared his attitude : There is no country so interested in the maintenance ot peace as England. Peace is especially an English policy. She is not an aggressive Power, for there is nothing which she desires. She covets no cities and no provinces. ... But although the policy of England is peace, there is no country so well prepared for war as our own. If she enters into conflict in a righteous cause—and I will not believe that England will go to war except for a righteous cause—if the contest is one which concerns her liberty, her independence, or her Empire, her resources, I feel, are inexhaustible. She is not a country that, when she enters into a campaign, has to ask herself whether she can support a second or a third campaign. She enters into a campaign which she will not terminate till right is done. One feature of this declaration was demonstrably insincere, for it is now certain that the Prime Minister already contem- plated such changes in the map as would provide another bril- liant set of scenes for his panorama. He had talked to Derby about the possibility of neutralising “Constantinople with an adequate district” and making it a “free port, in the custody and under the guardianship of England.” 1 Perhaps even his subtle brain could not overcome the difficulty of reconciling * Buckle, vol. vi.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 311 custody and freedom, but no sooner was this pro ject abandoned than he began to dream of placing Varna under the British flag; and, like Mr. Lloyd George over forty years later, he revelled for some space in visions of an extended Greece, sub- servient to British influence. Though the speech was read as a challenge to Russia, Beaconsfield was far from any intention of forcing that country to take up arms. He did not, in fact, believe that Russia needed more than words; there was more contempt than hatred ‘n his attitude to that Power; the colossus which had so long awed Europe did not appal the Jew, who had some instinct for its rottenness. His main consideration, now and hereafter, was Germany. He wanted to let Bismarck know that England, while ready, if necessary, to fight for her own hand, was resolved not to play any game of his. In this speech Beaconsfield announced that Salisbury would represent England at the Constantinople Conference. The ap- pointment was a clever stroke of policy. It went tar to dis- arm critics at home, for Salisbury, a High Churchman, was genuinely anxious to secure the Eastern Christians, and passed for being more pro-Russian than pro-Turk; it was a guarantee of circumspection, since it was a cardinal principle of policy with Salisbury that a cordial understanding must be maintained with Austria; further, as the Minister who had twice been in charge of Indian affairs, Salisbury could only be presumed to possess, despite his Anglicanism, a due sense of the importance of regarding Moslem susceptibilities. Probably Beaconsfield expected no successful issue to the Conference. But it represented a vain of time, and time he wanted for many reasons. Military and naval force had to be prepared for the support of diplomacy ; and in regard to the alternative plans he had formed delay was desirable for the one and necessary for the other. Either agreement must be reached with Germany, or a real settlement must be postponed until France had so tar recovered from her defeats as to be able to take her place as England’s chief Continental ally. In the ensuing months Beaconsfield swayed from one plan to the other, while always keeping both in sight. It was in vain that Bis-312 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT marck sought to commit him by pressing on him the occupation of Egypt, which, of course, would have definitely alienated the French. That net was spread in vain in the sight of a very wary old bird. More and more convinced that Bismarck de- sired to promote some sort of war against an isolated England, he watched the Chancellor with a cool and good-humoured detachment in which there was much respect, but not a particle of awe. Before the long crisis was over Bismarck had to declare that “the old Jew was the big man.” His age was against him. But he was at least as dexterous as the Pomera- nian ; he possessed more self-control ; and—the greatest advan- tage of all—he was, as a Jew, comparatively without prejudice. To the very end he played his balancing game without com- mitting himself. Ultimately the closer understanding was formed with Germany, but not until all Bismarck’s schemes to British detriment had been foiled one by one. Time was wanted, also, at home. When Beaconsfield at- tempted to think in English terms he often made gross mis- takes. When he looked on England through the eyes of the intelligent foreigner he often saw a great deal that was hidden to Englishmen themselves. At this moment he was very decidedly the intelligent foreigner, and the fact gave increased keenness to his perception of certain values, though it rendered him altogether oblivious to others. Thus he recognised that, while the English are of all peoples in the world (except possibly the Americans) the most subject to violent fits of sentiment, they are also singular in feeling a definite dread of sentiment. For the sake of simplicity let us imagine an extravagant case. Many Englishmen would be extremely shocked if the Prime Minister of the day set out to deride the Sermon on the Mount. But he would probably continue Prime Minister. But if the Prime Minister announced, in sufficiently precise detail, that he proposed to regulate his political conduct by the Sermon on the Mount, he would undoubtedly be swept from office by one convulsive movement of all the respectable classes. We will apply this parable to the circumstances of 1876. Disraeli was at first in the position of our blasphemous statesman, repri- manded but not dismissed; Gladstone was finally in the posi-DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 313 tion of our pious statesman, swept aside as an absurd and dangerous impossibilist. A great many people enjoyed reading about the Bulgarians; a smaller number enjoyed sending small cheques to the Bulgarian Relief Fund; it was an enjoyment much like that which admirers of the worst Dickens (then as- sumed the better) felt in reading the death of Little Nell. But when the definite question had to be answered—shall we go to war with Turkey on behalf of the Bulgarians or shall we not? the dread of sentiment began immediately to operate. At a great meeting in London addressed by Gladstone, Freeman, the historian, exclaimed, “Perish the interests of England, perish our dominion in India, rather than we should strike one blow or speak one word on behali of the wrong against the right.” While that sentiment could be applauded by a great body of people Beaconsfield recognised that neither war for Turkey nor strong diplomatic action on Turkey’s behalf was for the moment possible. But he also saw that reaction was ‘nevitable, and that it would probably be swift. The Queen was in this matter, as on some others, only a little way ahead of her middle-class subjects. In many ways she was very decidedly a sentimentalist; but she also repre- sented, in an extreme degree, the British dread of sentiment. She soon enraged herself over the “mawkish” conduct of the Gladstonians, and in this view she was presently joined by the majority of her subjects. 3 At the beginning of 1877 Beaconsfield, suffering from gout, asthma, and bronchitis, and naturally in no sweet temper, was blaming Salisbury, who seemed “not to be aware that his prin- cipal object in being sent to Constantinople is to keep the Rus- sians out of Turkey and not to create ideal conditions for the Turkish Christians.” ? It was not, however, in any way Salis- bury’s fault that the Conference broke up in failure. Bismarck was intent on producing a war, while the Turks, relying on England, were even more anxious to break the peace. — “In spite of all the declarations of the English Cabinet,” Midhat Pasha wrote a little later, “it appeared to us to be absolutely impossible for her (England) to avoid interfering sooner OF 1 Buckle, vol. vi.314 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT later in this Eastern dispute.’’ In these words, Beaconsfield’s policy, wise in some respects, has its true condemnation. So long as he acted as an English Minister, thinking only of Europe, he fully earned the gratitude of his country, which owed him more than any man of his generation for defeating the designs of Bismarck. But on the special question of the Near East he was a Jew inspired by Semitic prejudice, and his weakness was the weakness of his policy. His statesmanship saved the worst evils of his partiality. But his partiality pre- cipitated evils which might have been avoided. In April Russia declared war. In view of the divided opinion in England there was no course but neutrality, yet it was hard to make the neutrality genuine and absolute. It was not the ordinary case of a war party and a peace party. There were two war parties—pro-Turkish and pro-Russian; both were represented in the Cabinet itself, and the fiercest member of one sat on the Throne. Queen Victoria’s disapproval of the Gladstonians was unmeasured. She wanted the Attorney- General set at Gladstone and others for venturing merely to express condemnation of the Turks. Now, when war was declared, she expressed herself furiously against those who desired England to join Russia in what the Spectator described as the justest and most necessary war of the age. Beacons- field, who himself recognised the impossibility of going to war as Turkey’s ally, was unable to make her understand the neces- sity for caution. Her “blood boiled,” and she could not see why it should not boil over. “Tf,” she wrote to her Prime Minister, “England is to kiss Russia’s feet, she (the Queen) would not be a party to the humiliation of England, and would lay down her crown.” 1 It seemed shocking to her that Carnar- von and others should take the Russian side on religious grounds. “It is natural,’ she wrote, “that everyone should have their own opinion, especially on religion, but when the policy of Great Britain comes into consideration . . . all private feel- ings should be over-ruled.”’1 When Derby and Salisbury seemed to stand in the way of more vigorous policy, the Queen would have had both of them resign. In June she threatened * Buckle, vol. vi.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 315 for the second time to abdicate, and Disraeli was for ever urged to greater boldness. The idea of a rival atrocity cam- paign, directed against the Cossacks, appealed strongly to her. “The Queen must say she can’t stand it,” was her terse com- ment on the pacific methods of the Foreign Office. And at last, in the culminating note of rage, she wrote, “Oh, if the Queen were a man, she would like to go and give these Rus- sians, whose word one cannot believe, such a beating.” ; Beaconsfield, putting up as best he might with this running shriek of pugnacity, pursued his policy, which was to ‘obtain pledges for the security of British interests. The integrity of the Turkish capital being held to be a British interest, it was obvious that Russia’s military leaders must find our neutrality exceedingly troublesome and preparation had to be made to ‘nfluence British minds to the war point if, after all, war should come. To this end a diplomatic change was necessary. Sir Henry Layard was sent out to Constantinople in place of Sir Henry Elliott, who, though a strong Turcophil, had made damaging admissions. Layard, an old Palmerstonian, carried to the point of genius a talent for believing what he found con- venient to believe; he had even believed in the existence of a Spanish Protestant party. This faculty was, no doubt, his main qualification for his new employment. England had to be given a better idea of Turkey before any really firm stand could be made on her behalf. Meanwhile a cautious official Opposition refused countenance to Gladstone’s militancy. From Parliament the Government had little to fear. Its real trouble was the division in the ranks of Ministers themselves. Derby, who had strongly supported Beaconsfield against those who desired war on behalf of the Balkan Christians, was equally emphatic against any sugges- tion of intervention on the other side. Carnarvon actually wanted Russia to take and hold Constantinople for Christen- dom. Salisbury would have let the Russians take Constan- tinople on a pledge of evacuation after the signing of peace. Cross, Cairns, and others were for peace, provided Russia agreed not to occupy Constantinople. Hardy, Manners, and a 1 Buckle, vol. vi.—.~———- = 316 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT new Minister, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, favoured immediate support of Turkey, and formed the Queen’s party in the Ministry. Beaconsfield himself was more circumspect. He wished rather to use the threat of war than actually to make war. A certain fineness of mind told him that war was in itself a confession of failure, and he hoped to gain more by keeping the nation’s powder dry than by burning it. ‘During the first weeks of the Russian advance he was called on to perform daily miracles of tact and management in resist- ing the Queen’s pressure and keeping his Cabinet together. Flis wisdom and skill had their reward. In July his difficulties were sensibly relieved by the Turkish stand at Plevna. The Turk, ravishing, burning, and disembowelling, had unfavour- ably affected one side of English sensibility; the Turk at bay, a dogged hero after the heart of our own people, appealed to another. Moreover, argument, or rather reiterated affirma- tion, had produced its effect. The British people, not for the first time or the last time, were persuaded that Constantinople was the strategic centre of the world and the key to all Empire, and were even led to believe that it would be a simple matter for the Czar’s forces, once on the banks of the Bosphorus, to march thence through Syria on the Suez Canal. That the Prime Minister himself actually credited the latter possibility, and even regarded it as a pressing danger, is not impossible. His notion of war was a civilian’s, and invasion of Asiatic Russia through Armenia was one of the tentative projects which he put before the Cabinet during this year. But whether or not he himself was really perturbed for the safety of the British Empire, the Queen grew more and more warlike. Nowhere could he escape her telegrams, and her letters were of such bellicose vehemence as sometimes to suggest to him resigna- tion—or at least the threat of it—as the only exit from his Worries. With the fall of Plevna in the second week of December the respite was at an end. Beaconsfield, feeling that something decisive, or at least impressive, must be done, was for meeting Parliament with a proposal to mediate, and a demand for large additions to the fighting forces. The Cabinet, however, wasDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 317 still hopelessly divided, and only a threat of his own resignation could bring Ministers temporarily into line. Derby decided to go some steps further along the road of danger. Salisbury, conscious that his career could not afford the shock of two secessions, proved amenable, in spite of his serious fear of Beaconsfield’s policy. ‘I have triumphed, © Beaconsfield wrote to Lady Bradford on December 9. “On Monday night there was virtually no Government, but on Tuesday the recusants fell upon their knees and surrendered at discretion.” Car- narvon alone remained recalcitrant, and talked to a Colonial deputation about “lashing ourselves into a nervous apprehen- sion for so-called British honour and British interests.” The situation, however, remained tense, and Beaconsfield, when Parliament opened, spoke in a way that testified to his embarrassments. Trade was bad. Revenue was declining. It was clear that the forward policy for which the Queen was pressing would be extraordinarily unpopular in those indus- trial districts which, largely under the Stanley influence, had shown Conservative majorities at the last election. If Derby feared Disraeli’s resignation, Disraeli feared Derby’s scarcely less. It would have been pleasant, in his capacity of Court favourite, to gratify her Majesty and approve himself the paladin of her dreams. It would have been equally pleasant, in his capacity of Jew, to support Turkey by arms as well as by diplomacy. But in his capacity as Party politician he saw that caution was a sheer necessity, and to his higher vision as states- man the general aspect of affairs on the Continent was still unpropitious for decisive action. Though Beaconsfield often failed to appreciate military problems, he had the true instinct for a diplomatic situation. He sometimes forgot that an army fought on its stomach. He always remembered that the task of diplomacy is to save blood by using brains, and the prospect of facing the Russians with the beaten Turk as sole ally, gave him pause. An alliance with Austria was in prospect when, at the end of January, orders were given to the fleet to enter the Dar- danelles. Derby and Carnarvon, to the Queen’s immense relief, at once resigned, but within twenty-four hours the orders were318 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT countermanded, and Derby returned to the Cabinet. The cause of this hasty change of plans still remains something of a mystery. The ships were in the first place ordered to move be- cause a Russian occupation of Constantinople was expected immediately. Then Layard telegraphed that an armistice was signed, and the countermanding order was given. So far all is simple. But immediately afterwards a second message was received from the Ambassador, announcing that, despite the armistice, the Russians were still advancing. Of this com- munication no notice was taken. Would the fleet have been again instructed to move had Derby proved more pliant in the first instance, or had he possessed less influence in Lancashire ? Carnarvon, Churchman and idealist, Beaconsfield made no effort to retain. Cotton counted for much more than clericalism. But by this time the public had taken a hand. The Jingo fever had laid hold of London and that part of England which takes its tone from London; the enthusiasm of the capital caused Lancashire to recede a little into the background; and the general atmosphere encouraged the Prime Mu£nister to greater daring. When the fleet was again ordered to move, only a fortnight after Carnarvon’s resignation, Salisbury was ready to go all lengths, and Derby professed agreement with the declaration of his chief, that the Turco-Russian peace terms must be submitted to the judgment of Europe. Meanwhile, though Derby doubtless hoped to be a drag on the wheel, Beaconsfield had become virtually his own Foreign Minister. A hundred brilliant ideas were flashing through his brain. This day he would take Crete, that day he would take Batoum or Acre, or Mytilene as the price of a loan to Turkey. Something far more splendid than the Suez Canal coup must stand to his credit. He felt himself strong. France, partly to reassert herself in Europe, partly because of the influence of the Anglophil Gambetta, favoured the British proposal for a conference. His fear of Bismarck was passing. Russia, despite her victory, was exhausted; and the Pomeranian had begun secretly, though not so secretly as to leave Disraeli un- informed, to urge a rather hesitant Austria to support theDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 319 English. All this was a contrast to the position of England when she had been ignored in the preparation of the Berlin memorandum. Beaconsfield was largely to blame for the war, since his encouragement stiffened Turkey, and for the bolster- ing up of the rotten fabric of Ottoman Power a later gener- ation owed him no thanks. But in one way his achievement had been great. He found England despised and disregarded as the sequel to her failure to assert herself in the matter of Denmark and in the Franco-German peace terms; he had in a few months made the whole world think of British good will as something to be valued and diligently cultivated. During months when he himself knew war to be impossible, he had by clever bluff given the world to believe that he was only holding an impatient and formidable England in leash. At the beginning of March 1878, Turkey, under duress, signed the Treaty of San Stefano. Its terms were in many ways moderate. The indemnity was small. Russia obtained at Turkey’s expense no territory in Europe. But the creation of a large Bulgaria, to be occupied for two years by Russian garrisons, displeased the Turcophils, and certain provisions affected the Treaty of Paris, to which Britain, Austria, and Italy had been parties. Beaconsfield, representing the Treaty as outrageous, declaring that it completely abrogated what was known as Turkey in Europe and placed the Sultan in a state of “absolute subjugation to Russia,” insisting that the new Bulgaria would be a mere appanage of the Czar, laboured with care to create the impression of a desperate situation. The public fell to his manipulations. Believing that gains under the Treaty would be immense, it naturally concluded that they were worth fighting for on the one side, and worth fight- ing against on the other. Beaconsfield, of course, knew better. He understood well enough that while Turkey stood to lose much in Europe by many clauses in the Treaty, Russia stood to gain very little. For such arrangements as “Creater Bul- aria’ the Czar’s Government might be expected to contest diplomatically, as a matter of ancour propre, but not to fight. In fact, Beaconsfield saw in the Treaty the assurance of his triumph. What Russia really gained by the Treaty, Batoum320 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT and Bessarabia (the latter at the expense of Rumania), he would let her retain. On other points she would, he was assured, give way after just such a degree of resistance as would make his victory seem more resplendent. The military preparations which followed were, of course, necessary to the success of the scheme. They cost the Prime Minister his Foreign Minister, for concurrently with the news that the Cabinet had decided to call out, the reserves Lord Derby resigned, this time definitively. Derby had finally broken with Beaconsfield when he found that his chief, while ostensibly making a stand for the integrity of the Ottoman dominions, had resolved on appropriating oddments of Otto- man territory. Nothing in the career of the sober and scrupu- lous Stanley was more to his credit, than this interruption of it. Nothing in the life of the fascinating and unscrupulous Disraeli was more charming than his gesture when the resignation had taken effect. Three days afterwards he offered Derby the Garter. “I always intended it for you,” he wrote, “but there were difficulties in my way. I hope you will now accept it, in memory of our long friendship, if of nothing else.” Later, as a politician, he was to goad Derby to exasperation by his cibes, but the offer suggests a personal absence of meanness rare in political history. Parliament rose for a rather long Easter recess with the assurance that nothing had occurred for some time to cause immediate anxiety. On the next day, it was announced through the newspapers that seven thousand Indian troops were to be sent to Malta. This move, to which the Cabinet had given its assent some while before, was a complete surprise to the country, and it can well be understood that Beaconsfield did not wish it to be discussed by Parliament until it was an accomplished fact. Gladstone declared it unconstitutional, Selborne illegal. To the politicians of that day the theory of the British Constitution was familiar, and the old jealousy of the Crown still lived. To many the importation of soldiers from India was an act reminiscent of James II’s importation of Irish soldiers, Nobody’s imagination went so far, of course,DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 321 as to envisage vast hordes of turbaned soldiers landing at Southampton to extinguish English liberties and endow Queen Victoria with absolute power. But there was enough left of the ancient spirit to resent any irregularity in the vital matter of authority over the armed forces of the Crown, and the Prime Minister*no doubt preferred to defer debate until the public, which liked his panorama and cared very little for constitutional nicety, had declared itself-on his side. He was justified in his anticipation that the act would be popular. The English proletarian has always been flattered and impressed by the manipulation of dark troops; perhaps he regards it as a symbol of his own majesty—the billycock giving orders to the turban. Seven thousand sepoys in a European war would not count for much, but they made a brave show, and they were, no doubt, of value as an advertisement of Great Britain’s resources. To Beaconsfield they were certainly worth more than the equivalent of English bayonets. They were an illus- tration of the Oriental theory he had elavorated in Tancred. “The intellectual colony of Arabia, once called Christendom, © was being reminded that the world’s centre of gravity might again have to be sought in the Kast. The Indians began to land at Malta on the birthday of the OQueen-Empress. It was a suitable return for all the primroses she had sent to him in the spring of the year—those “‘ambassa- dors of spring,” as he called them, those ‘gems and jewels of nature,’ that “offering from the Fauns and Dryads of Osborne,” “more precious than rubies” to the Prime Minister, because gathered by the hands of “a sovereign whom he adores.”CHAPTER XVII F we study the debates and articles of the ’seventies—it is a weary task—we shall be struck by the unanimity with which Beaconsfield’s critics condemn his wisest and most adroit stroke of policy. Even his eulogists are a little shamefaced over that arrangement, long notorious as the Schouvaloft Treaty, which made the Berlin Conference merely a splendid stage scene. They are thrilled with the high gestures, the fine coups du thédtre, the dispatch of the Indian troops, and the calling out of the reserves; they are a little chilled by glimpses they get of the cool commerce behind the scenes. Yet, unless we insist on this side, even to the belittlement of the more theatrical element, we lose most of the quality which entitles Beaconsfield to be recognised as a true statesman, if in this matter an unduly reckless one. Judged by his public acts alone he might be set down as a prancing mountebank en joying un- merited luck; it is only when we leave the limelit circle that we begin to understand how cleverly a dangerous gamble was made good. Salisbury’s first act as Derby’s successor at the Foreign Office was to issue a circular declaring that England could not accept the Treaty of San Stefano, laying down that all the powers must be consulted, but intimating also that the status quo ante bellum could not be restored. Gortchakoff, for Russia, replied in firm but courteous language; and the matter was then left to be thrashed out between the British Foreign Secretary and Schouvaloff, the Russian Ambassador in London. It was essential to arrive at an understanding before the Powers met. In any conference the only chance of success resides in such preliminary agreement, but in this case, with the adroit and malevolent Bismarck watching his opportunity to provoke a war by which Germany would benefit, it was especially neces- sary that the differences should be narrowed down by secret 322DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 323 interchanges of view. Disraeli was blamed at the time, and has been attacked since, for the “scandal” of the Schouvaloft negotiations. He would, in fact, have merited impeachment had he exposed his country, without such precaution, to the hazard of a Congress. What he did was simply to let Russia know on what points he was going to insist. Stated in general terms, they were simple enough; the “Great Bulgaria’”’ scheme must be modified, and if the Russians insisted on retaining their conquests in Asia, Great Britain must have compensation ‘n some island or station on the coast of Asia Minor. The perfect success of the plan testified to the cunning which in- spired it. Russia was asked to yield exactly what she could most cheaply relinquish; she was permitted to retain what she most valued. On the other hand, England gained what Disraeli chiefly wanted—advertisement. Her unspectacular concessions were of great value; in return she was allowed to figure as the successful dictator of terms in a theatre the least important to Russia but the most impressive in the eyes of Europe. Bismarck’s chances of mischief were gone when agreement was reached on the main points, and, recognising his defeat, he made the best of the fact, and definitely proposed that Berlin should be the scene of the Congress which was to settle these large matters, or rather to register the decisions made in London. Beaconsfield had mastered him, and he realised the fact. He had failed to estrange France and Britain, and, to ensure against the clearly reviving strength of France the conquests made in 1870, he must now seek a friendly under- standing with London. He therefore decided on the role of “honest broker.” Unfortunately for Beaconsfield, by the treachery of a clerk and the enterprise of a newspaper, the agreement with Schouvaloff was printed before the Berlin Congress met, and the dramatic effect of that gathering accord- ingly suffered. Though he had taken such precautions, how- ever, Beaconsfield, still suspicious of Bismarck, and mindful of the possibility of an eleventh-hour treason, left nothing to chance. Reaching Berlin late in the evening, he went straight to the Chancellor. The two talked and smoked. Disraeli, choking with asthma, managed by a miracle of will-power to324 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT make something of a German porcelain pipe, and still retain breath enough to make plain his case. Bismarck’s reply was no less to the point, and in a quarter of an hour the pair had agreed on all essentials. The Pomeranian was convinced that the “old Jew” meant business. The rest of the Congress was really an affair for the gallery—the sonorous speeches and splendid banquets, the “‘golden coats and glittering stars,” even the special train ostentatiously ordered by the English Prime Minister to take him home should the Russians remain obdurate on a point which they had no real intention of making a casus belli. Disraeli’s pronunciation of casus belli in the English way made, by the way, an enormous and solemn im- pression among the Continental diplomatists—when it was at length understood. His Latin was more English than his English. The Treaty of Berlin was signed on July 13, 1878. The chief difference between it and the Treaty of San Stefano concerned Bulgaria. The “Great Bulgaria” scheme was scrapped, and Bulgaria was divided into three parts. The first, to be called Bulgaria, was given actual independence under nominal Turkish suzerainty. The second, variously called Southern Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia, was restored to the Sultan under a Christian governor, Seven years later, with the full approval of Great Britain, the two provinces were united. The third part, providing the window to the Aegean Sea, remained Turkish until well into the twentieth century, when the Turks were driven from it by the Balkan allies. Beaconsfield’s chief triumph was, therefore, not enduring. What he could do he did for his Turkish friends, but even he could not do much. His patronage had led them into war, but could not avail to save them the consequences of defeat. Most English writers, even the least friendly, agree in representing Beaconsfield as the chief figure at the Congress. Foreign observers were less impressed. M. Gabriel Hanotaux, in the Révue des Deux Mondes, 1908, speaks of the German Chancellor as occupying a position of indisputable predomi- nance, and of the two English Ministers as deferring to him. The judgments, however, are not irreconcilable. Bismarck,DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 325 ) with his “military brusqueness,” was no doubt outwardly the strong man. Beaconsfield, eternally the Jew, might well be content to be the power behind the throne. Yet, though he might play second fiddle in public, he was, according to Madame Waddington, “slightly arrogant’; and he could not resist the pleasure of baiting the Russians. When the problem of Bessa- rabia arose he gave full play to his irony. Russia, who had gone to war for Christendom, was now despoiling her Ruma- nian allies. Gortchakoff, an old-fashioned diplomatist who loved to embower unpleasant truths in the rose-leaves of fine phraseology, could not endure the cruelty of his tongue. But a retort might well have been made. For if Russia treated the Rumanians scurvily Britain behaved little better to the Greeks, who had been encouraged to hope much, or to the Turks, who had a strong claim on Beaconsfield to see them through their difficulties. In one important respect the Treaty was, from the Turkish point of view, an aggravation of that of San Stefano. Bosnia and Herzegovina were handed over from Turkish to Austrian control. It was the price paid to Bismarck for his honest brokerage. He desired Austria to become more and more Slav, in order to deprive her of any claim to dispute Prussia’s title to the headship of the German body. Beaconsfield seems to have consented without demur to this calamitous arrangement which, forty years later, was to involve Europe in frightful disaster. Whilst at Berlin he was so tortured with gout that he was sometimes prevented from writing to the Queen, It was from a particularly bad attack that he rose to sign the Treaty, and that duty done, he left as quietly as possible for London. London, however, declined to receive him quietly. The Lord Mayor met him at Charing Cross Station, converted for the occasion into a bower of palms and orange trees. As the train approached the whole station “woke up with demon- strative life. ... Every eye searched for him. Men started up, hat in hand, and pushed their way .. . anxious for a near view of the noble Earl, and hoping, perhaps, to grasp his hand.” The Daily Telegraph adds that “even ladies came326 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT forward with a like object,” but with true Victorian carefulness explains that they were “under escort.” From a Downing Street window, fresh from the con- gratulatory embrace of Sir Moses Montefiori, the doyen of Jewry in England, Beaconsfield declared that he had bought ‘Peace with Honour.” The peace proved to contain the prolific mother of wars, including the greatest war in history. The honour depends on the point of view. Jt would not be easy to maintain that England’s part in these transactions augmented her reputation for plain dealing. Turkey, encouraged to fight, had been abandoned in her failure. Greece, coaxed not to fight, was defrauded at the peace-making. Russia could complain of secret deals with Bismarck; Bismarck could complain of secret deals with Russia. All the little peoples of the Balkans had been taught to distrust the Powers, of which England had shown herself one of the greatest. Nor was there any con- siderable benefit to offset moral detriment. England gained Cyprus, a rather unhealthy island, utterly useless and involv- ing a certain expenditure. “The English want Cyprus,’ wrote Disraeli in Tancred. Few among them had the vaguest idea of Cyprus before the Earl of Beaconsfield told them they ought to want it. Then, indeed, it was received in the way such things are received. There was the usual vague idea that the Indian possessions of the British Crown were being re- insured. There was the usual vague idea that Cyprus was an added buttress to the fabric of the Empire, instead of another package, though a small one, flung across the back of that patient ass the British taxpayer. The gain of Cyprus was cele- brated in the usual British manner. The Bible Society held a special committee meeting. In most provincial towns a new slum was called Cyprus. Numberless primary school pupils had to copy the word with the imperfectly understood accom- paniment, “ceded to Great Britain, 1878.’’ And there the matter ended. Why, then, was Beaconsfield in 1878 undoubtedly the most popular man in England, and why was it that Gladstone, his one open enemy, scarcely dared show himself in the London streets? The answer is simple. In whatever else BeaconsfieldDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 327 had failed, he had stirred the national spirit and raised that curious thing called British prestige. Writing of the scenes on his return, M. Hanotaux says: Ce fut, en effet, un grand jour pour ce peuple qui vit resplendir, sur le ciel déchiré de Europe, l’astre Britannique a son apogee. Disraeli had always grasped one profound truth, that a people is great through its passions rather than its reason. England had every material reason for satisfaction under Gladstone, but while she felt rich she also felt rather mean, and conscious of being meanly regarded. She now felt herself, and knew that she was felt, great among the peoples. It is true that Beaconsfield had hardly restored the position she had held, though on a most precarious tenure, in the days of Palmerston, In the first place England was no longer England, but the British Empire, which made a difference. Secondly, high as the English star might seem, everybody in Europe was conscious of a rival brilliance with perhaps tougher sub- stance behind it. No part of Germany was comparable with the England of former days. But it was quite arguable that the new German Empire was a more formidable combination, lying as it did close-knit in the very centre of European civilisa- tion, than the loose and rather casual structure which acknowl- edged the sway of the first English monarch to assume the Imperial title. If we examine the positive achievements of Beaconsfield with the detachment possible at this date, the triumphs for which he was applauded seem unspeakably trivial. It was nothing that for a few years Southern Bulgaria should be called Eastern Rumelia. The retention of Turkey in Europe was the mere perpetuation of a wasting fever. The unsatisfied ambitions of the Balkan peoples led, after a generation of uneasiness, to a frightful explosion. The gift of Bosnia to Austria provided the match which was to start that explosion and wreck Europe. It is only when we consider the things ¥ f et IP which were invisible to contemporaries that Beaconsfield’s true328 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT services can be discerned. He showed amazing wisdom in avoiding the traps constantly set for him by Bismarck. His refusal to take Egypt, which was constantly being dangled before him, has often been quoted to his discredit. It was, in fact, the thing which above all others proves that even in extreme old age, and when his vision was most distorted by racial prejudice, he had not lost his old intuition. From the first he marked Bismarck as the one dangerous enemy, and Bismarck’s Prussian duplicity was no match for the veteran guile of the Oriental. Gladstone attacked, as an “insane proposal,” the agreement by which England took Cyprus and agreed in return to protect Turkey in Asia. Beaconsfield’s reply suggests that the general worship had produced in him a quite unusual intoxication: Which do you believe the most likely to enter into an insane convention—a body of English gentlemen honoured by the favour of their Sovereign and the confidence of their fellow subjects, managing your affairs for five years, I hope with prudence, -and not altogether without success, or a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own ver- bosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself? Gladstone, writing for an explanation of this astounding attack, received as answer only a sarcastically phrased third person message. JBeaconsfield could indeed afford for the moment to treat Gladstone with contempt. The populace and the classes were at one in magnifying him, while Gladstone seemed to have sunk to be the oracle of a few Noncomformist congregations and a number of Ritualistic clergymen. On his return from Berlin the Queen gave him the Garter, as well as a quantity of flowers from Osborne. A proffered dukedom he declined. “What does our Ben know about dukes?’ By 1878 he knew at least this much—that a poor duke was ridiculous, and that a duke of any kind was not quite the important person he once had been. To his credit Beacons- held was still all too poor for even an earldom. He had moreDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 329 reason than Clive to be “astounded at his own moderation.” Enjoying opportunities which, had he deigned to use them, might have brought him gigantic fortune, he had remained always poor and sometimes embarrassed. In close touch with the great House of Rothschild, only his pride and virtue stood in the way of his enrichment. Had he condescended to the attitude of several prominent twentieth-century statesmen he could, without more than “‘indelicacy,” have drawn immense profit from speculation on hints which the best-informed of financiers would have been most ready to give. When we consider that in youth he had been a stock-gambler, and that he had experienced during the greater part of his life the sharp- est inconvenience from want of “rascal counters,” it is much that no shadow of suspicion ever rested on him. ‘The story goes that he was once approached with a proposition of a kind which would have meant great profits for himself as well as for others—‘“Once,” says Froude, “but never again.” His reply was too discouraging for a repetition of the incident. For money he cared nothing, save as a means of procuring better things; and, though he had large ideas and the sumptu- ous manner, his personal habits were simple and he lacked vices. So, though the expansiveness of his disposition kept him always poor, there was not added that extravagance which evaporates all but the largest means, and his pride never per- mitted him to be so poor as to be forced to sell honour. In the end he died worth £80,000, but there was a mortgage of £57,000 on Hughenden, and the difference between the two stims was mainly a matter of profits from the sale of his novels. All these facts must be considered in the final estimate of his character. With his personal cleanness he could afford an occasional economy in political scruple. Many writers have debated why Beaconsfield did not dis- solve at the end of the 1878 Session, when his popularity was at its height. He was no purist to esteem it a defect of taste to seek a party victory on “Peace with Honour.’ Probably the explanation is simply to be found in his physical state. He was too tired to face an election. With gout and bronchitisa — 330 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT as his daily companions he had scarcely the energy to read. “The lightest social excitement,’ he wrote to Lady Chesterfield in August, “injures me.’ + The exhaustion which had fallen on him made his triumph an empty thing. Long years before he had described Contarini Fleming’s wild joy after gaining a spectacular victory over the assembled statesmen of Europe. That elation he was never to feel in his own person. He was too old; no doubt also he understood too well the real flimsiness of his seemingly splendid performance. Huis letters to Salis- bury suggest that his mind was full of foreboding regarding Bismarck, checked but not checkmated. “The grand chance,’ says Froude, “had been given to English Conservatism, and had been lost in a too ambitious dream.” The year 1878 saw the last of the Government's essays in domestic reform. The Factory and Workshop Act, by absolutely forbidding the employment of children under ten, and limiting older children to half-time, was quite in the spirit of Sybil. Shaftesbury declared that millions would bless the day when Cross went to the Home Office, but of this gratitude a large share is surely due to the Prime Minister who had so long contended against the Radical plutocrats. The fight, however, was almost finished. Realities at home were perforce neglected in the pursuit of shadows abroad. The character of a Prime Minister influences the character of his subordinates, and when he has struck the note of policy he is often compelled, by the imitative energy of inferior minds, to carry things farther than he wishes. Thus it was with Beaconsfield. Cabinet, Party, and officialdom were now all imbued with what they conceived to be the Disraelian spirit. Unfortunately, however, the school-piece is never the equal of the master-performance, and while it was easy to imitate the vices of Beaconsfield it was impossible to reproduce his skill, caution, and essential moderation. The two last years of his administration were darkened by small wars which were not so very small, brought about by the restlessness or maladroit- ness of ambitious agents. * Buckle, vol. vi.DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 331 The Afghan war was one for which Beaconsfield had partly to thank himself. He had sent Lord Lytton to India with instructions to pursue a “forward” policy, or in other words to bring Afghanistan within the orbit of British influence as a counter-move to the Russian advance in Turkestan. Shere Ali, the Amir, appears to have been only anxious to be let alone. He was, as an Anglo-Indian offical said to Lord Salis- bury, “an earthen pipkin between two iron pots,’ and much afraid of being broken. When Lytton sent a military Mission to his frontiers, with a pressing offer of British protection, he began to intrigue with agents of the Czar, and a few weeks after the signing of the Berlin Treaty General Stolatoff ap- peared at the court of Cabul. By this time Beaconsfield was in no mood for Asiatic embroilments, but Lytton, not realising that circumstances alter cases, remained under the impression that he must still be “forward.” Beaconsfield told the Queen, in the late summer of 1878, that he no longer felt the “continuous flow of power” necessary for his position.! The truth of this admission is seen in his curious attitude to Lytton. He was annoyed by, and yet he seemed to relish, the persistency of the. Viceroy. At one moment deploring his rashness, at another he was admiring his firmness. Always afraid Lytton might go too far, he never contrived a sufficient halter to restrain him. At last an ultimatum was sent to the Amir, insisting on the reception of the British Mission, and Beaconsfield, while waiting a reply, made an extraordinary speech announcing the need of a “scien- 6c frontier” for North-Western India, thus admitting that ‘f war followed it would be a war for the express purpose of annexing Afghan territory. Several of his colleagues were horrified, but Beaconsfield was gleeful. “The party,” he wrote to Lady -Bradford, “is what is called on its legs again, and ingoism is triumphant.” ? Probably the explanation of all this curious alternation of moods, this sandwiching of caution and recklessness, is to be found in his state of health. Physically, he needed tranquillity ; mentally, he could no longer live without the stimulus of excitement. # Buckle, vol. vi.a et 332 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT War followed in due course. It was strongly opposed by the Liberals, and Hartington satirised Lytton as “mimicking at Delhi the fallen state of the Mogul Empire.” Fortunately Russia made no move to complicate matters; the English troops were well led; and after Roberts had defeated the Afghan forces at Peiwar Khotal Shere Ali fled, and peace was signed with Yakub Khan, his successor. “We have secured a scientific and adequate frontier for our Indian Empire,” Beaconsfield wrote to Lytton, but before the letter reached India Major Cavagnari, who had been sent to Cabul as British rep- resentative, had been murdered with all his staff and guard. The weary business had to be begun once again. Stewart and Roberts again distinguished themselves, and in the end the Afghans were thoroughly beaten outside Kandahar, but by that time a Liberal Government was in power, England was weary of the war, and the troops evacuated Kandahar, leaving behind yet another Amir to reign at Kabul. The Zulu war, though better justified, was far less well managed, The year 1877 had seen the annexation of the bank- rupt South African Republic, and with Boer territory the British Government took over the Boer quarrel with the Zulu king, Cetewayo. South Africa had been one of Carnar- von’s hobbies when at the Colonial Office. Beaconsfield, who called Carnarvon “Tatters,” and could never take him quite seriously, was in an almost comic state of despair when he found what liabilities the noble earl had acquired with the doubtful advantage of a few thousand disaffected new sub- jects. He would undoubtedly have kept the peace had it been possible. This kind of enterprise had no kind of attraction for him. In India he could take an interest, but South African barbarism and semi-barbarism were too crude for his highly civilised taste. By the time his attention had been directed to the question, however, things had gone too far. Sir Bartle Frere, the High Commissioner for South Africa, was an able and conscientious administrator, but afflicted by that malady which some future light in psycho-analysis may dis- tinguish as the proconsular complex. Magnifying the impor-DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 333 tance of South Africa, as part of the importance of himself, his imagination was troubled by the vision of an appalling struggle in the near future between all the blacks on the one side and all the whites on the other. That very dangerous combination, an earnest Imperialist and a deeply religious man, Frere looked on the extension of British territory and the spread of the Gospel as objects equally sacred and for all prac- tical purposes identical. To him the Zulus represented at once a danger to the Empire and an obstacle to the evangelisation of Africa. Beaconsfield, as might have been expected, viewed them with more humour. “A very remarkable people, the Zulus,’ he said once, “they defeat our generals, they convert our bishops, they have settled the fate of a great European dynasty.”’ It may be noted that Colenso, the converted Bishop, had convinced himself while in South Africa not only of the falsity of the Pentateuch but of the gentleness of Cetewayo’s subjects, Considering that Zulu braves were compelled to a strict celibacy until they had earned the right to marry by washing their spears in an adversary’s blood, there appears to have been more ground for Frere’s very opposite conclusions. Frere saw no hope except in the disbandment of the Zulu army. Cetewayo refused to disband, and war resulted. “Ex- tremely inconvenient,” was the Prime Minister’s comment. The annihilation of a British column of eight hundred at Isandhlwana was more than inconvenient. To Beaconsfield it was “unintelligible,” and the news for some time prostrated him. Both publicly and privately he blamed Frere, whom, however, he left at his post. Fortunately for him the Liberals, whose true policy would have been to arraign the Government, could not resist the temptation of assailing a public servant in whom they detected the taint of Imperialism, and thus aided the Cabinet found it easy to shift the burden of responsibility on to the shoulders of the man on the spot. The Zulu war led to a tiff—the most serious in the history of their relationship—between the Queen and Beaconsfield. The Prime Minister soon transferred the bulk of his indigna- tion to Lord Chelmsford, the British commander in the field. Chelmsford was one of those generals whom Ministers dislikegO 334 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT because they are always asking for reinforcements, and he was certainly no genius. Beaconsfield decided that he should be superseded by Garnet Wolseley, who, young and ambitious, might be expected to win victories without bothering the War Office for men. In addition, Wolseley was to take over most of Frere’s functions. The Queen did not like the arrange- ment, It savoured of surrender to the outcry which had fol- lowed Isandhlwana, and, to her imperious nature, anything like deference to popular clamour was hateful. However, Beacons- field decided to have his way, and when repeated doses of flat- tery produced no effect he ventured on a respectful defiance. In fact, Chelmsford contrived to win the war before Wolse- ley arrived in Africa, but on his return Beaconsfield refused to see him. The Queen, on the other hand, received the unfor- tunate General at Osborne, and sent to Frere a copy of the Prince Consort’s Life. The death of the French Prince Im- perial, killed by a Zulu spear while serving in the British Army, caused further trouble between Monarch and Minister. The body, on the Queen’s command, was decorated with the Grand Cross of the Bath, and given high military honours on its return to England. Beaconsfield, with his eye on Repub- lican France, deprecated this display of sympathy as injudi- cious, and there was a tartness on both sides which had been absent from the most excited moments of the Russian crisis. The state of trade made these expensive and inglorious wars the more unpopular. The artificial industrial system, on which England was more and more depending, could only remain stable so long as the rest of the world, in high cabal, con- spired to uphold it. If other nations were so inconsiderate as to order their politics without regard to British needs, if they preferred to fight among themselves, instead of trading with the English, if they fancied steel more than cotton, Manchester must suffer, and it was no adequate compensation that there might be an incidental demand at Sheffield for bowie knives or at Birmingham for rifles. During the middle and late ‘seventies foreign nations, once so obliging, had been seriously forgetful of British wants. They had gone to war. They hadDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 335 erected new tariffs. They had “destroyed confidence” and rent the ‘“‘delicate fabric of international credit.” As a consequence distress and unemployment had prevailed among a population multiplied to excess during the years of brisk trade. A long period of peace, as things turned out, followed the Russo-Turkish war, and British manufacturers, though their supremacy was challenged, recovered, and even prospered, in an absolute though not in a relative sense, more than ever. But for the time being the trouble was grave, and its effect was the more heavily felt because agricultural depression had now begun in earnest. For many years the effect of Corn Law Repeal had been disguised by the natural protection in- volved in the mere distance oversea food supplies had to be carried to the home markets. Invention, however, had now marvellously reduced the most of transportation; the British farmer was beginning to find that intense culture could not, in an old, highly rented, heavily taxed country, prevail against the competitor who paid next to nothing for his land and saved labour by slovenly methods. A succession of bad harvests brought the trouble to a head. Beaconsfield was finding his prophecies fulfilled. But it was small comfort to him to recall that in the days of Peel he had almost exactly predicted all that was now coming to pass. Of practical counsel he had none. He was too old, weary, and disillusioned to give sympathetic attention to those who now talked about “Fair Trade” as an alternative to “Free Trade.” When his own speeches were quoted he spoke derogatively of “rusty phrases,” flatly refused legislation, and did two of the things always done by tired or stupid politicians. He talked about the nation being saved by its own energy and he agreed to the appointment of a Royal Commission. This was certainly not the Disraeli of the past, but the problem was baffling, and to-day it is even farther from solution. Better times for the agriculturists must mean, for the moment at any rate, worse times for the townsmen, and the townsmen, themselves at the mercy of every twist and turn in foreign affairs, were predominant. Beaconsfield in his prime might have been equal to difficulties which none of his succes-ae 336 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT sors have been able to grapple. But his eyes had waxed dim, and his hands were those of an old man. Time had been when he would have welcomed any such tendency as that illus- trated in the Radical plan derided as “‘three acres and a cow.” He might have decided to “dish the Whigs” to genuine pur- pose. Now he could only oppose them with a fantastic theory in which landlord, farmer, and labourer figured as a kind of divinely appointed trinity to displace which would be sacrilege. It was-all a little pathetic. He who fifty years ago had pre- dicted the decay of Beaumanoir had now arrived at the stand- point of Beaumanoir in its decay. In truth he was himself by now little but a ruin, though a picturesque one, and the waning of his powers could not be more decisively attested than by this failure to seize on an opportunity, or this despair of impressing it on the only party which could deal funda- mentally with land reform—a question which the Radicals, bound as they were to the industrialism they had erected, were unable then or later to attack on bold and comprehensive lines. Yet if he indulged a fatalistic lethargy at home, he main- tained to the end a certain grip on foreign affairs. This was shown in the autumn of 1879 by his reception of Bismarck’s overtures for a triple alliance of Germany, Austria, and Great Britain. Bismarck, believing Beaconsfield to be preoccupied with the East, suggested this scheme as a check on Russian aggression. Beaconsfield, while quite willing to enter into an understanding that would counter any possible designs of Russia, would hear of nothing which might imply hostility to France. This, of course, failed to satisfy Bismarck, whose only object was a guarantee against the revival of the French power, and the plan was therefore dropped. Beaconsfield was largely responsible for the notion that the basis of British policy must be an understanding with Germany, but he never contemplated that subservience to Berlin which afterwards became the mark of British statesmanship ; and he never forgot for long that France, being Britain’s nearest neighbour, must be either her most useful friend or her most dangerous enemy. Early in 1880 the Government, encouraged by the success ef Mr. (afterwards Sir Edward) Clarke in a South LondonDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 337 by-election, decided on dissolution. On the eve of the election Beaconsfield issued his manifesto in the shape of a letter to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Ireland was suffering yet more severely than England trom agricultural distress; the Land League, with its cry of “No Rent,” was at its full strength, and ‘n the House of Commons Stafford Northcote had been utterly unable to cope with the obstructionist mehods of Parnell, Biggar, and O’Donnell. The Prime Minister now called on “all men of light and leading” to resist the attempt which was being made “‘to sever the constitutional tie’ which united Ire- land to Britain “in that bond which has favoured the power and prosperity of both.” The document was badly worded, and its only effect was to turn the whole Irish vote against the Conservatives. Moreover, the insinuations it contained were unjust, for, though a Liberal candidate at Liverpool had de- clared himself in sympathy with Home Rule, the Liberal Party generally was still firm for the Union. There appeared, there- ~ fore, no reason why on this issue people should vote Conserva- tive. and the cry, in fact, merely provoked ridicule. Yet, poorly as the manifesto was conceived for its immediate pur- pose, it was strangely prescient. Either Beaconsfield had made a wondrously lucky shot in the dark or he had written in a moment of extraordinary intuition. He had divined that one party or the other must in the next few years take up the Irish cattse on a new basis, and he foresaw that the Liberals were the more likely to be converted. Almost alone among the politicians of his age, he had understood that there was an Irish Question which could be settled neither by bribes nor handcuffs. Tt was soon clear that Beaconsfield had wholly misappre- hended the feeling of the country. Overwhelmed at the polls, he resigned without waiting for the adverse vote of the new House of Commons, The Queen was appalled. The tiff over 7ululand was forgotten; only the pleasant excitements of the first glorious years of Disraeli's premiership were remembered. The electorate’s verdict implied a parting which had much of the finality and not a little of the bitterness of death. In the nature of things her favourite could not return to her side, and338 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT unless at her side he could not, by constitutional usage, remain a favourite, or even in any vital sense a friend. Small wonder if the Queen in her soul exclaimed against the hard fate of a limited monarch, or in open fury raged against the coming of Gladstone—of Gladstone the prolix and prosy, whose enormous energy at once terrified and irritated, who never sent a sword to one of the little princes or asked after a dog or a canary, who cared nothing for “harbingers of spring” or “faery gifts,” who quoted Blue Books and Acts of Parliament, and regarded herself as the embodiment of the Act of Settlement. It was a nightmare, she declared, and when the Board of Trade was allotted to one Joseph Chamberlain, a declared Republican, her horror was complete. Beaconsfield was disappointed but philosophical—more stoical, indeed, at the moment than he was to show himself some months later. What anoyed him most was the importu- nity of his followers for jobs and titles. Those for whom he had a personal liking he rewarded with delight. For the mere party man, whom he had known well enough how to use, he had nothing but scorn, and at the last he allowed himself the luxury of showing his contempt.CHAPTER XVIII UT a single year of life remained to Beaconsfield after the downfall of his Government. Quit of office, he quietly returned to his work as a novelist, setting out to finish the book called Endymion, which he had lett half written when he arrived at power in 1874. The critics who have over-rated Lothar have under-rated Endymion. It is an old man’s book, and a book of memories ; but it is informed by a sincerity which the earlier volume lacks: and though Disraeli wanted money, and was promised £10,000 in advance for the novel, it is pretty certain that, if he did not write it to please himself, he pleased himself in writ- ing it. Endymion has dignity, wit, and wisdom, and that proud detachment which betokens the man who has no object but to tell the truth as he sees it. There is no axe to grind, no party Moloch to placate, no popular prejudice to flatter. Indeed, the most curious point of Endymion is that, written by a Tory leader, it has a Whig hero, and comments through Whig characters on the events of the ’thirties, ‘forties, and ‘efties. Its tone is gently and probably unconsciously cynical. Endymion, the hero, is well connected, the son and grandson of a Privy Councillor, but suffers in early life from a lack of money. He is a colourless person, with no strong convictions, and though he happens to be a Whig there is no particular reason why he should not have been a Tory. Good-looking and industrious, he has neither conspicuous ability nor strength of character. His own parts would not have carried him far. But women like his face and manner, a tailor dresses him on credit as a speculation; and in due time he arrives. He has not found either his poverty or his want of genius much of a handicap. " Endymion is very far from being the author’s self; yet in 339340 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT drawing the figure Beaconsfield must surely have had the thought of his early self before him. Early lack of funds was the case common to the character and its creator. But while Beaconsfield had brilliance and imagination Endymion was blessed only with steadiness and a good pedigree. Beaconsfield makes it clear that in his view the compensation was more than adequate. In this book he deals freely and without remorse with the Young England group, of which he was once leader, contessing its futility in the field of real politics, The moral of the book, in fact, may well be that genius and vision do not pay. He himself had them, and required them, but that was only because of his special circumstances. A Jew of his day had need of these things. For a young English aristocrat they were superfluous—perhaps even detrimental. And he himself, once established, had had comparatively little use for them either. He might have been more comfortable had he more readily fallen in with the jog-trot of the mediocrities. There is little bitterness in the political musings—the author is too old to care much about anything—but there is some sadness. From another point of view the book is a woman-lover’s tribute to women. The importance of woman’s part in the making of a man’s career is emphasised almost on every page. Endymion’s sister Myra is, of course, his own sister Sara, and there are many others, all engaged in the pleasant duty of helping a young man to success. And yet the novel is curiously sexless. In most Victorian fiction sex is heavily veiled, but one is mostly aware that the veiling is deliberate. But except in Vivian Grey, The Young Duke, and Henrietta Temple, Beaconsfield seems to have forgotten its existence, and in the two first of these books it appears to have been in- troduced more out of youthful haughtiness than from any realisation of its natural place in life. In Endymion there are many marriages, flirtations, and friendships of men and women, but the people show no sign of being of like passions with the common run of the human race. Here, for instance, are the hero’s feeling in regard to the woman—a beautiful and wealthy widow—whom he is anon to marry:TTUTTaL DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 341 Under the immediate influence of her presence, he became spell-bound as of yore, and in the intoxication of her beauty, the brightness of her mind, and her ineffable attraction, he felt he would be content with any lot, provided he might retain her kind thoughts and pass much of his life in her society. Did ever a young man feel thus? Could middle-age be so content? Beaconsfield, of course, was a very old man when he wrote these words, but his memory was clear enough, and age, whatever else it may be, is not given to idealisation of sex. One is forced to conclude that at no time of his life, except perhaps, in the brief period of the Henrietta affair, would he have found any incongruity in such phrases. Endymion goes far to explain his relations with women. It is the tribute of a grateful but peculiarly constituted votary. It is also a tribute to the tailor. Women and clothes together make or mar the man, and Endymion is the kind of man they are most likely to make in nineteenth-century England. Several of the minor characters are interesting. The sketch of St. Barbe is a mordant but not specially unjust satire of Thackeray, for whom Beaconsfield, for some reason, had no kindness. He could laugh good-humouredly at Dickens as Gushy and dismiss him, but he sufficiently disliked Thackeray to spend much time and ingenuity in exposing his weaknesses. The young St. Barbe, who complains that “gentlemen and men of education” should be reduced to earn a living, and boasts to a new acquaintance that there were “several dignitaries of the Church and one Admiral” in his family; the middle aged St. Barbe, who stands arrogantly in a room decorated with cards of invitation and vaunts that the world is at his feet; the elderly St. Barbe, full of sneers for his benetactors and envy for his rivals—these are indeed not Thackeray, but they do represent certain things in Thackeray. The book contains one notable lapse trom the sincerity which otherwise marks ‘++ Beaconsfield introduces a group of the Rothschild family, somewhat idealised but quite recognisable. Yet he insists on————— = 342 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT representing them as Swiss settlers. By 1880 he had lost the frankness of his impetuous youth. The book apart, he allowed himself little rest. His duties as leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords were not exacting, and his failing health often obliged him to neglect them, but his mind was constantly occupied with politics, and especially with the less elevated aspects of politics. His hatred for Gladstone at this time assumed almost the stage of obses- sion. To have been worsted by Hartington would not have wounded him, but defeat at Gladstone’s hands was bitter. In the last months one found him as much of a Die-Hard as the stout-hearted Mr. Buck could have been. The Liberals and all their works are anathema. The relatively harmless Ground Game Act, which allowed a farmer to shoot hares and rabbits on his land, appears to him the “most devilish of the Arch- Villain’s schemes.” ? In his private correspondence “Arch- Villain” or “the A.-V.,” always signifies Gladstone, who is seldom mentioned in any other way. Towards the end of 1880 he expressed the opinion that “Old England” was “tumbling to pieces,” 1 but this was little more than the familiar plaint of the club-window veteran. “Old England,” of course, was in truth tumbling to pieces, had mostly tumbled already; and his term of office, what with his diminished vigour and his taste for fireworks, had done little to check the process. If he meant that the new British Empire was in any special danger because the Liberals had decided to evacuate Kandahar he was talking nonsense. In fact, he meant nothing of the kind; against the peevishness of the moment his considered opinion may be quoted. For in his last important speech in the House of Lords he declared in a mem- orable phrase that the “keys of India” were in London. The expression was borrowed, like so many of his expressions, but it is likely that the conviction of its truth was in his mind. In spite of Tancred, in spite of the Royal Titles Act, in spite of all the glittering dreams of an Asiatic Empire, there seems to have come back to him at the end a realisation that poor, neglected England mattered most: * Buckle, vol. vi,DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 343 My lords, the key of India is not Herat or Kandahar. The key of India is London. The majesty and sovereignty, the spirit and vigour of your Parliament, the inexhaustible re- sources, the ingenuity and determination of your people— these are the keys of India. He still devoted himself to society. To many who casually met him he appeared a merely pathetic figure, deaf and dodder- ing. A few, who possessed the power to rouse some spark of the old Disraeli, found him still charming: “very pretty and polite in all his ways and all he said,” says Dilke. To those beginning life he was uniformly gracious, the man who looked the image of death seemed to find a fascination in youth. For Dilke, the rising young Radical, he foresaw a great career, and, it is said, he had him as a study for the hero of Endymion. His last visit to the House of Commons was taken to see the Fourth Party in action. He admired Balfour, and was fond of Randolph Churchill, while he had long shown his fulltappre- ciation of Gorst’s abilities. With the revolt of the Fourth Party against the sedate leadership of Northcote he telt a sym- pathy he could not conceal. “I was never respectable myself,” he said to Drummond Wolff. For a while after leaving Downing Street he occupied a suite of apartments in the house of Alfred de Rothschild, but after- wards took on long lease a house in Curzon Street, which he furnished with elaborate bad taste. His last speech in the House of Lords was made in seconding a vote of condolence to the Queen on the assassination of the Czar. All things considered, there was suitable irony in this exit from public life. At last came the fatal chill, caught in returning from one of those dinners in which the lonely old man sought refuge from tedium. For nearly four weeks he lay ill, a gentle and amiable patient, listening with pleasure to the reading of the Parlia- mentary reports by one or other of his secretaries. The Queen sent him primroses and a letter signed “Ever yours very aff” V.RI..” in which she explained that she had only refrained344 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT from a “‘little visit”” because it was better that he should be “quite quiet,’ and begged that he would be “‘very good and obey the doctors.” Lady Bradford paid her “little visit’; hers was the last woman’s face on which his eyes rested. Visitors found the ghost of the old manner, and occasionally there came a flash of the wit which had set the table in a roar. But his strength was fast ebbing, and there were long intervals of silence. Sometimes, it would seem, his thoughts were on things recent and formal. On one occasion, when he received a letter from the Queen, he showed himself still conscious of the etiquette which 1s to the statesman what discipline is to the soldier, and bids him use his last effort of will in a salute. But the mind of a dying man cannot always play the courtier, and in his musings the figure of the Queen he had found, and the Em- press he had made must have been jostled by a crowd of humbler ghosts. To those in health who wearily await the coming of sleep the cinema of the brain in its flickering irrele- vance confuses all values, so that there is a stab of pathos in the recollection of an old pun, and an old heart-ache is remembered with half a smile. So, perhaps, it was with the sick man. His wandering fancy may have passed lightly over the garish pan- orama tableaux of the great Premiership—‘“Peace with Hon- our,’ the uniforms and stars of Berlin, the shouting crowds at Downing Street, the blushes and courtesies of the Empress- Queen—to scenes humbler and more remote. Perhaps the things which had made him great seemed smaller in retrospect than the things he shared with the little, Gladstone, the ““Arch- Villain,’ with his stately moralities and prolixities; Derby, the tool whom he had yet to call master, with his gout and his vacillations; Palmerston, with his flippant masterfulness; Bentinck, the direful but chivalrous comrade; Peel, the dig- nified victim; Manners and Smythe, Chandos, and Lyndhurst; and O’Connell, and Murray may have had small part in such an inconsequent review of half a century of aspiration and strife. Clearer even may have been the figures of old comrades in the racketty days of the Blessington salon; clearer almost cer- tainly, the long-vanished Henrietta, who taught him, if onlyDISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT 345 for a moment, that ambition is a lesser thing than passion; as clear, and yet more gracious, the warm-hearted if eccentric wife who proved to him the mighty power of quietly devoted female affection. But possibly the mind of the dying man turned most persistently, with the egotistical pity age feels for its own youth, to the school at Walthamstow, with its hopes, its yearnings, and its immature agonies, and to the old Jewish home, with sister Sara, and old Isaac, the mild, spectacled book- worm, and the terrible old woman who never had a gentle thought or a kind word for anybody. There had been many Disraelis since then to fret their hour on stages large and small. But father of all of them was the little Benjamin who loved his father, idolised his sister, trembled before his erand-dame, and cowered under the blows of rough Christian boys until he had learned to revenge them. | He died in the early morning of April 19, 1881, in the presence of the doctors and of his two secretaries, Rowton and Barrington, and of his friend, Sir Philip Rose, on whose aid he had so often relied in private business and in the details of party management. A quartet of an hour earlier he had eaised himself in bed and his lips had moved. Those who surrounded him had a fancy that he was attempting to make a speech, but no word was heard. Dr. Kidd, who attended him, left a statement to the effect that he died in the true faith of a Christian :— To myself sitting by his bed at night he spoke twice on spiritual matters, in a manner indicating his appreciation of the work of Christ and of the Redemption.* The honour of a public funeral was suitably offered by a Liberal Government, and still more suitably refused when among his intimate papers was found a letter from his wife expressing a wish that they should share one grave at Hughen- den. To the village churchyard his remains were carried by tenants of the estate, and there followed the Prince of Wales 1 Nineteenth Century, July, 1899.346 DISRAELI: ALIEN PATRIOT and others of the Royal Family, nearly all the members of the late Conservative Cabinet, Harcourt for the Government (Gladstone was ill), and most of the great men of the day. The Queen’s wreath of primroses was prominent on the coffin. Four days later she herself visited the grave, and at her private expense was erected in Hughenden Church the memorial on which are inscribed the words, “Kings love him that speaketh right.” She at least—his “grateful Sovereign and friend’— had had little to quarrel with in any of the words of the great courtier-statesman., The tributes in Parliament by Gladstone, Granville, and others were as generous and as inapposite as such things always are. Salisbury’s oft-quoted dictum that ‘Zeal for the great- ness of England was the passion of his life’’ yields little en- lightenment. Had any of these great men in a moment of mad frankness risen to declare that he whom they were praising was the one unquestionable genius of his age among the states- men of England, but that the fame of his practical statesman- ship would be dim long before his qualities as a writer and thinker had been fully recognised; that he was the strangest mixture of prophet and comedian; that his make-believes and insincerities, though they were many, were superficial, and that his honesty was fundamental; that he served England as well as she allowed him; that he learned to love England, but could never feel for her as son feels for mother ; that he had always an imperfect sympathy with the party he led, and indeed with the party system itself: that he had proved himself in most respects a man ot honour and fine feeling, but in all respects a Jew—if this had been said, everybody would have been pro- foundly shocked, but something near the truth would have been told. 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