Points of View (Sherman)/The Disraelian Irony
In this world where, as he was to discover, "nothing is allowed and everything is done," Disraeli was born in 1804, and flourished—flourished is the word—continuously from 1826 till 1881. Certain pairs of celebrities are linked like Alpine climbers; so that if one slips into the crevasse of oblivion, the other pulls him out. Three or four years ago I mentioned to a friend of strongly conservative faith that I was reading Morley's "Gladstone," being at the time midway in the second thick volume of that intricate and austere record of parliamentary combinations and cabinet councils, and perhaps rather proud of my progress.
"You will never finish it," he said. Instantly he added, "Monypenny's 'Disraeli' is another matter."
I smiled and thought otherwise. For I had always admired the high moral seriousness of both Gladstone and his biographer, and had copied into my notebook abundance of the Grand Old Man's injunctions of this order: "Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling thing that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated and noble destiny."
Now Gladstone, whose influence upon the tone of public life was, as I still believe, far more elevating and ennobling than Disraeli's, was characterized by Disraeli as "a sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity." Disraeli himself spoke of life as a "dazzling farce" and an engrossing "game." One does not quite like the gamester's attitude in a statesman. Disraeli was animated, at least in his earlier years, by a peacock vanity. Carlyle had taught us to think of him as a "superlative Hebrew conjurer," to be disdained even by a conservative, provided he were a serious and sober conservative. It was my impression that "Dizzy" and his literary works were dead, and well dead, and that it would never be really necessary to return to them.
But my friend was right. I left Gladstone at the end of the second volume; and my intention of reading the third volume is still serving as pavement in an overpaved place. Eventually I turned to Disraeli. Everyone was doing so, usually with a contemptuous fling at Gladstone, which pricked curiosity.
When I began the Monypenny-Buckle "Life of Benjamin Disraeli," I repeated, in little, the experience of his own contemporaries; and this is clearly a tribute to the biographers' dispassionate, gradual, exhaustive elaboration of their hero. I contemned him, I ridiculed him, I disapproved of him, I compared his character unfavorably with that of his liberal adversary Gladstone and with that of his Tory leader Lord Derby. I distrusted him. Yet all the while I was amused, astonished, delighted, mystified, impressed, and never wearied by him. And I read straight through the six volumes of the Life—interspersing the novels at suitable points—with only a little flagging in the middle, with vivid interest in the final volume, to the victorious and triumphant end. And now I strangely sympathize with the English lady who was asked which she would prefer as a husband, Disraeli or Gladstone. With feelings mixed but not altogether muddled, she replied that she would prefer to be married to Gladstone but in the first year to elope with Disraeli.
To say, as has been said, that Gladstone possessed all the virtues and Disraeli all the charms, may account for the duplicity of the English lady's feelings; but it is too simple to explain, for example, the immense vogue of Disraeli's novels in America at a period when the type of society which they exhibited and the political party which they seemed to support were peculiarly obnoxious to the main current of American sentiment. Disraeli, delighted by the splendor of a life in the historic grand style and dreaming of a theocratic polity and an aristocratic renascence, despised the American scene and American institutions as affording no adequate theatre and no adequate rewards for great actors.
Yet multitudes of sober-suited American equalitarians read his duke-thronged novels and followed his parliamentary opposition to "democracy," as they had previously followed Frederick the Great and Napoleon, as they were soon to follow Bismarck, as they were later to follow William II—with fascinated interest and secret iniquitous adoration. When in his old age he came home from the Congress of Berlin, flushed with his great diplomatic victory, having manifestly maneuvred the spoils of the Russo-Turkish War from the very paws of the Russian Bear, even Lowell's old contempt for "Dizzy" struggled vainly against his new admiration. "I think," he said, "if Beaconsfield weren't a Jew, people would think him rather fine." Bismarck, who had studied with the keen, hard eye of a Real-Politiker all the celebrated contestants at that famous jousting, remarked without qualification: "Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann. . . ." (the old Jew, he is the man that understands the realities in the situation and deals with them effectively).
Bismarck frankly admired, most of us furtively admire, men who get what they go after, whatever it is. Though the better part of mankind respects principles, the greater part of mankind responds, in spite of principles, with the deep ungovernable applause of its primitive nature to exhibitions of successful power. Something within us instinctively murmurs: "Beautiful is virtue, and charm is ingratiating; but power, after all, is the source of all the charms and all the virtues, without which all the virtues and all the charms are but idle attitudes and futile gesticulations." Disraeli refreshes, delights and inspirits us because his life is a perpetually varied exhibition of successful power, in literature, in society, in politics—power overcoming difficulties, surmounting obstacles, setting itself almost inaccessible objectives, and attaining them by fertile resources and indefatigable tenacity. The pursuit of power and its perquisites and its glories was Disraeli's religion. It is one manifestation of his spirit which is untainted with a touch of insincerity. It is the dominating passion that unifies his life and illuminates all that is mysterious and paradoxical in his utterances and in his career.
The critic who centres his attention on the old prime minister, Earl of Beaconsfield and lord of Hughenden Manor, may attempt a unification by thinking of him as essentially a natural born Tory and, as Mr. Buckle calls him, an "aristocrat to the bone." It will not do. No one can dissipate the "mystery" of Disraeli who forgets for a moment that he was, like the first Napoleon, an adventurer risen from the people. What does he prove—that the aristocratic system welcomes such men as Disraeli, or that the aristocratic system can't keep such men out? His career on the whole impresses a Liberal less as a glory of the conservative principle than as a bewildering satire upon it. When he had chosen his part, he played it, to be sure, superbly, upholding as loyally as the bluest-blooded of old English nobles the prerogatives of the Crown, the prestige of the Church, the privileges of Parliament, and the predominance of the landed gentry. And yet behind the sallow mask, decorous and immobile, of the Earl of Beaconsfield who had refused a dukedom, there was seldom absent a suggestion of silent, mocking Semitic laughter. Says Bertie Tremaine in "Endymion," the last novel of one whose deadly banter had made him minister: "Men destined to the highest places should beware of badinage. . . . An insular country subject to fogs, and with a powerful middle class, requires grave statesmen. "Now, the best place from which to laugh at Bourbons is their throne.
Disraeli was not born an English Tory. He was born an emancipated Jew, the son of an emancipated Jew. His father Isaac, the literary antiquarian, had withdrawn from business because it bored him, had withdrawn from the synagogue because it annoyed him, had baptized his children because conformity was convenient, and had kept out of politics and other engagements in order to enjoy in the isolation of his rich library the free play of his curious, volatile, speculative mind. By his intellectual detachment, if not by his universal knowledge, he might have served as a model for the omniscient Sidonia of "Coningsby." Benjamin inherited from his father the volatile, speculative mind, with an additional tincture of Voltairean wit. His free intelligence sported throughout his life with a flame-like swiftness and levity over and under the surface of all things, human and divine. It is a charm of Disraeli and the secret of his pervasive and savory irony that his intellect never conformed, never lost its quick untrammeled lambency—that it remained to the end the most mobile of all earthy types of mind, the absolutely aweless intellect of the emancipated Jew.
In the composition of the son there was a fiery element, not present in the father, namely, a romantic imagination, which had been stirred by the French Revolution, colored by the romances of Scott, and kindled to a flame by the poetry of Shelley, and by the poetry, the picturesque travels, and the social celebrity of Lord Byron. As a boy in his teens, Benjamin attended with his father the publisher Murray's literary dinners; and among his earliest jottings is a record of a conversation between him and Tom Moore with regard to Byron who was then, 1822, in exile. The effect of these various stimuli upon his lively sensibility was to make him for the time being a literary and political radical, for a long time to come a Byronist in his moods and manners, and perhaps for the rest of his life something of a Byronist in his inexhaustible appetite for celebrity, for being conspicuous, for making an impression. He was to declare later that "a great man is one who affects the mind of his generation." His own experience proved to him that an imaginative writer who molds the purposes of young men entering their majority governs them as truly as the statesman who taxes their incomes.
Byron died in 1824. Disraeli "carried on" in 1826 by publishing at twenty-one his first novel, "Vivian Grey," in which the hero, meditating a career in Parliament, thinks "Don Juan" may serve as a model for his style in the Commons, Milton in the House of Lords. He introduced Byron as Apollo in his delectable skit "Ixion in Heaven" and as Lord Cadurcis in "Venetia." Travelling through the East in imitation of his predecessor, he conceived his "Revolutionary Epick," with its apotheosis of Napoleon, at a Byronic moment, "standing," as he tells us, with full sense of the romantic magnificence of his posture, "upon Asia, and gazing upon Europe with the broad Hellespont alone between us, and the shadow of night descending on the mountains." He carried on by returning to England smoking a chibouk in token of his oriental sojourn. He wrote oriental tales. He thought himself a great poet afflicted with a hopeless woe. He indulged in gloomy vapors and in outbursts of cynicism. He solaced himself with the society of fair women, with whom he quarreled melodramatically and whom he flattered extravagantly and successfully. He anticipated the sallies of Whistler and Wilde by remarking to a host who had praised his own wine at a dinner party and boasted that he had wine twenty times as good in the cellar: "No doubt, no doubt, but my dear fellow, this is quite good enough for such canaille as you have got to-day." He carried on the Byronic dandyism as a readily available means of imposing upon the imagination of his time. As late as 1833, he is described as appearing at a dinner in "a black velvet coat lined with satin; purple trousers with a gold band running down the outside seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles, falling down to the tips of his fingers, white gloves, with several brilliant rings outside them, and long black ringlets rippling down upon his shoulder."
The inside of his romantic ostentation at the age of twenty-nine, his clear-eyed egotism, the anguish of his ambition, the drive and direction of his lust for power, are revealed in a fragment of the journal that he kept in 1833:
My life has not been a happy one. Nature has iven me an awful ambition and fiery passions. My life has been a struggle, with moments of rapture—a storm with dashes of moonlight—Love, Poetry. . . . I make it a rule never to throw myself open to men. I do not grudge them the knowledge I could impart but I am always exhausted by composition when I enter society, and little inclined to talk, and as I never get anything in return, I do not think the exertion necessary. . . .
The world calls me conceited. The world is in error. I trace all the blunders of my life to sacrificing my own opinion to that of others. . . . I have an unerring instinct—I can read characters at a glance; few men can deceive me. My mind is a continental mind. It is a revolutionary mind. I am only truly great in action. If ever I am placed in a truly eminent position I shall prove this. I could rule the House of Commons, although there would be a great prejudice against me at first. . . The fixed character of our English society, the consequence of our aristocratic institutions, renders a career difficult.
Poetry is the safety-valve of my passions but I wish to act what I write. My works are the embodiment of my feelings. In Vivian Grey I have portrayed my active and real ambition. The Psychological Romance ("Contarini Fleming") is a development of my poetic character.
Every stroke of this veracious prophecy, this astonishing piece of self-delineation, lays bare with precision the excited nervous system of his genius; but let us pause to develop a little one remarkable sentence: "I have a revolutionary mind." At the time this passage was written, Disraeli was brooding upon his poem on Napoleon, which, as he conceived it, was to celebrate the spirit of his own time as the "Divine Comedy" had celebrated the Catholic Middle Ages, and as Milton's work had celebrated the consequences of the Reformation. "Since the revolt of America," he writes in December, 1833, "a new principle has been at work in the world, to which I trace all that occurs. This is the Revolutionary principle, and this is what I wish to embody in the Revolutionary Epick." He goes on to explain that he has the Feudal Genius and the Federal or Democratic Genius appear before the Omnipotent to plead their respective causes. The Omnipotent declares that "a man is born of supernatural energies and that whichever side he embraces will succeed [my italics]. The man is Napoleon, just about to conquer Italy. . . . He adopts the Federal or Democratic side."
It is obvious that at this period Disraeli thought of himself also as a man of "supernatural energies," and that he, too, heard the Omnipotent Power whispering in his ear that whichever side he embraced would succeed. It is equally obvious that the modernity of his intelligence, coupled with his immense self-confidence and his lack of any inherited position in the "feudal" ranks, powerfully suggested his espousing the cause of democracy. It is obvious from the following passage in "Coningsby," that ten years later he still regarded wealth and hereditary rank with the eyes of an intellectual radical and revolutionary:
Nothing is great but the personal. . . . The power of man, his greatness and his glory, depend on essential qualities. Brains every day become more precious than blood. You must give men new ideas, you must teach them new words, you must modify their manners, you must change their laws, you must root out prejudices, subvert convictions if you wish to be great. Greatness no longer depends on rentals, the world is too rich; nor on pedigrees, the world is too knowing.
The reasons are not one but many. First and foremost, his desire to "rule the House of Commons" quite transcended his interest in either of the parties. Secondly, after repeated failures to break into Parliament as an independent, he discovered that he should never get in without party support. Thirdly, toward the end of 1834 he formed a strong personal attachment to Lord Lyndhurst, which led to the establishment of Conservative connections. Fourthly, the Whig Government, which at the passing of the Reform Bill had expected to last "forever," began in 1834 to break up, and the Tory prospects to brighten. Fifthly, the Philosophic Radicals of the Bentham and Mill type were as antipathetic to him as they were to Carlyle: they were too dryly rational, they dwelt too much in the thin air of abstract rights, they were "logic-chopping doctrinaires." "The Utilitarians in politics," he said in 1883, "are like the Unitarians in religion; both omit imagination in their systems, and imagination governs mankind." Sixthly, the more Disraeli saw of high-bred Tories in London society and especially in their country houses, the more obvious it became to him that there was a vacancy in their ranks which his brains could fill. With the impressionable eye of an artist, he looked on the garter and riband and golden fleece of the Duke of Wellington, and saw how he could use such trappings to govern men through their imaginations.
His choice reminds one a little of a famous philosopher who at the most radical moment of his career decided upon the most moderate course of conduct. Descartes tells us with almost impenetrable irony in his "Discourse on Method," that when he arrived at his intellectual maturity he resolved to denude himself utterly of all past beliefs and in naked simplicity to seek the truth that was in him. But he hastens to add that expediency dictated his conforming in politics, religion, etc., to those with whom he should have to live. He adopted further the maxim that he was to be as firm and resolute in his actions as he was able, and "not to adhere less steadfastly to the most doubtful opinions, when once adopted, than if they had been highly certain." In such wise and in such a mood did the emancipated Jewish intelligence of Disraeli wrap the mantle of English Toryism about the naked sincerity of his approach to power. He wore his Tory mantle with a difference, for, as we have seen, he had a taste for a certain distinction, for a certain splendor, in his attire. He soon proposed a renovation of the old garment. He conceived a Young England, a new Toryism, of novel cut and arresting color, with a substance of modern philosophical weaving but embroidered with traditions and adorned with antique jewels, which should impose upon the imagination of beholders as his own personal raiment did, when in his gaudy youth he walked in such glory that the crowds gave way, "like the Red Sea," before him. Accordingly he harked back to the Stuarts for a theory of the royal prerogative as the diamond brooch for his mantle; he laced and braided it with the golden popular monarchism of Bolingbroke's dream and with the hierarchical conceptions of Burke's historical philosophy; he re-enforced it with the antiliberalism of Newman, the High Church revival and Catholic reaction of the eighteen-thirties; but the main stuff and the pattern were suggestive of the greatest living tailor to the Tories, Thomas Carlyle, the romantic and radical designer of the aristocracy of talent, the loyal subjection of the populace, and the imperial destiny of the English. When Disraeli became a professing Tory, he closed his Byron and opened his Carlyle.
His rôle was now to act upon the English stage the part of an arch-aristocrat of talent with such manifold arts and graces as to persuade the people that the Tory party was the truly national, the truly progressive, the truly popular party. His rôle was to wean the popular ear from Bright and Cobden and Gladstone, who went storming through the provinces on what he derisively called "passionate pilgrimages," crying up the "nostrums" of liberty and equality, and preaching such perilous doctrines as man's moral right to the ballot, Italy's moral right to nationality, and England's moral duty toward peoples subject to the Turkish sword. His rôle was to teach the country to chant after him the new Tory catchwords: "The splendor of the Crown, the lustre of the Peerage, the privileges of the Commons, the rights of the poor."
It was his business also to give as much reality to these conceptions as possible. I fear it cannot be shown that he took a very effective interest in the "rights of the poor," though he had a hand in conceding their political enfranchisement, driven to the measure by the tactics of the Opposition. Much has been made of the sympathy he exhibited for the wretched condition of the miners by writing his novel "Sybil," what though he voted against mine inspection to show his sympathy for his friend Lord Londonderry, who was a mine owner. He proved his respect for talent by putting his private secretary and his solicitor into the peerage. But his really conspicuous masterpieces of statesmanship were performed to enhance the splendor of the Crown. By purchasing the Egyptian shares in the Suez Canal he made straight the British highway into the Orient. He presided over the White Man, taking up his burden in South Africa and Afghanistan. He presented to his royal mistress as the most substantial of his magnificent compliments the title of Empress of India. And when that pious and patriotic lady, whose conceptions of the royal prerogative he had incessantly fostered and flattered—when that excitable lady repeatedly cracked the whip over him and his recalcitrantly pacific cabinet and threatened to resign her "crown of thorns" if he did not act, Disraeli at last girded up his old loins; sent a confidential threat of war to St. Petersburg; marched to Berlin; forced Russia to withdraw from Constantinople, to restore the outraged Christians to the Turk, and her Slavic friends to Austrian auspices; and so by a right John-Bullish settlement of a European problem laid a firm foundation for the war of 1914.
There are, of course, sacrifices to be made and embarrassments to be undergone by a Jewish radical but one generation removed from the merchant class, who becomes champion of the "gentlemen of England." It did very well for Disraeli to insist in his fashion that the new Toryism was to be unselfish, comprehensive, national. But it became his duty, as a practical politician bent upon overthrowing the "Whig oligarchy," to turn a disdainful back to his own class, to play the ends against the middle, to court the aristocracy and to flatter the peasantry, who, as he regretted to observe, were beginning to call themselves "labourers" and to form unions and to fraternize with the insolent middle class and to harken to middle class orators, instead of looking to the game-preserving lords of their land, as in the good old days of the Stuarts.
As leader of the country gentry, it behooved him to follow their ancient and honorable custom and occupation of "owning land." This was a rather serious responsibility for one whose chief accumulations consisted of an enormous mass of debts, on which he was paying extortionate interest, when he was not dodging his creditors and the bailiffs. But the man had genius. He married a coquettish widow who made him a "perfect wife," and also brought him £5,000 a year. He entered into a romantic correspondence with an eccentric lady of seventy or eighty who presently died leaving him a legacy of £30,000. He wrote a life of Lord George Bentinck, for which some interested person rewarded him in lordly fashion. Another admirer took charge of all his debts and apparently lent him unlimited thousands at two per cent. He never was out of debt, but with these helps and windfalls, and with the income of his offices and novels and his paternal inheritance, he managed eventually to possess and occupy, if not perfectly to own, land enough with manor, parks, timberland, peacocks, etc., to support the dignity of an English earl.
To touch on the economic aspects of Disraeli's adventure is to hint at a "seamy side" of life in the grand style, at what might have been, for a tender economic conscience, a kind of sham and ignominy embittering the external show. But Disraeli's conscience was not tender. Perhaps it had been toughened by recollection of the debts of other great prime ministers. Perhaps it had been prepared, spiritually prepared, by Lord Byron, who had looked at these pecuniary matters in a cool realistic way, or, as we should say nowadays, in a Butlerian way:
The unexpected death of some old lady
Or gentleman of seventy years complete,
Who've made "us youth" wait too—too long already
For an estate, or cash, or country seat.
Toughness, tenacity, relentless aggressiveness, and a diabolically cool remorseless wit had characterized Disraeli's approach to power in Parliament. According to his reputation and his record, copiously illustrated in the "Life," he was one of the most finished and formidable debaters who ever rose in the House. A great part of his forty years of public life he was in Opposition; and the business of an Opposition, as his biographer reminds us, is to oppose. At this task he was a matchless master. When he had perfected his style, his favorite technique at the crucial points of his philippics was in the manner of Tybalt's sword play: One! Two!—a flourish of a cambric handkerchief—and the third in your bosom! He cut up a great minister at his appointed hour with the apparent nonchalance of an epicure dismembering a quail. He studied invective like a fine art. While the victim twitched and paled, he launched his barbed and icy sarcasms with a finely precalculated murderous precision. When he himself was attacked, he sat immobile, impassive, impervious, or with head sunk on bosom, feigning indifference or sleep. He had the gift of making his silence ominous, his repose sphinxlike, sinister. In action, by the sheer thrust and flashing velocity of his edged intellect he dazzled his hearers till slower-witted men gave way before him and fell behind and followed him, as one falls behind a dangerous weapon.
Opportunist to the finger tips, he treated party "principles" as but expedients to be retained or discarded with reference to their utility in getting the government out and himself and his friends in. If a Liberal ministry became warlike and used a "strong hand" in China, he immediately became pacific and humane. But if Gladstone raised a humanitarian cry over Bulgarian atrocities, Disraeli remarked that the worst of the atrocities was Gladstone's pamphlet, and he spoke in Parliament with such playful levity of the massacre of ten or twenty thousand unarmed peasants that he fairly exposed himself to the charge of inhuman callousness. As advocate for the landed interest, he supported, in Opposition, the nefarious Corn Laws. But the very principle of Protection, which he employed with dramatic and ruthless force to destroy Peel, his former leader, who had abandoned it, he himself stealthily abandoned as soon as the work of destruction was accomplished, thus exactly duplicating the "treachery" with which he had charged the man whom he displaced, and proving that a practical politician is one who repeats the sins of his predecessor. In the course of his assault, he seems, as his biographer admits, to have lied deliberately and solemnly, to the House full of the "gentlemen of England," in denying that he had sought office under Peel. In 1865 he solemnly warned the House against sanctioning any "step that has a tendency to democracy"; for Lord Russell was pressing for an extension of the suffrage. But two years later, he himself strode toward democracy—or, as Carlyle screamed in septuagenarian panic, "leaped Niagara"—by putting through the Reform of 1867, which emancipated the lower as the legislation of 1832 had emancipated the middle class. Such things occur when a born revolutionary in a Tory mantle advances on power with perfect inflexibility of purpose and perfect mobility of principle.
Guizot said to Disraeli on his accession to acknowledged leadership: "I think your being the leader of the Tory party is the greatest triumph that Liberalism has ever achieved." Guizot was clairvoyant in perceiving the joke on the country gentry involved in their accepting the guidance of this radical mind; but he perhaps overstated the "triumph" of Liberalism in the ambiguous position and conduct of its "lost leader." Disraeli did indeed do something to liberalize the institutions of England and to prepare the way for that radically free aristocracy which his free Jewish intellect approved as the ideal form of society, as the truly conservative form. But he lowered the tone of his leadership, he corrupted the influence which he exerted upon his generation, by his public subscription to outworn conservative cant, by sacrificing his professed principles to momentary expediencies, by seeming always to yield to the pressure of liberal circumstances and the deep liberal current of the time grudgingly, fatalistically, cynically. The politician and the statesman ring hollow, like something which resembles an Ionic column of Ferrara but is really a stucco-coated contrivance of lath and plaster. Gladstone and Wordsworth were right when they agreed that "a man's personal character ought to be the basis of his politics." Disraeli's politics were not grounded squarely upon that basis.
Let us acknowledge that in this case the duplicity of the statesman is the peculiar spice of the novelist, and that our generation is just beginning to recognize how spicy Disraeli's novels are. Professor Saintsbury gives them but a paragraph in his history of literature in the nineteenth century; yet he remarks significantly that "good judges, differing widely in political and literary tastes, have found themselves at one as to the strange way in which the reader comes back to them as he advances in life.' What the mature reader discovers as he returns to them in that the purple of the purpurei panni is frequently finely royal; that the characterization, especially in the later books, is often masterly and occasionally exquisitely fine; that there are abundant passages of noble feeling and delicate sentiment; that the numberless epigrams which stud the pages from the exuberant "Vivian Grey" to the mellow sobriety of "Endymion" are not merely brilliant but increasingly sage, weighty with an experience in public affairs and in the society of the "great world" such as no other English novelist has enjoyed, wise with the distilled wisdom of native insight and of prolonged critical reflection upon the ways of human nature. But, above all, one discovers that these novels are far more subtle than a first reading revealed and far more deeply saturated with irony than most of Disraeli's contemporaries suspected.
In his lifetime his books were generally received and labeled as "fashionable novels," and as such they have come down to us. Their piquancy in their day seems to have consisted largely in the fact that many of the characters were understood to be portraits of contemporary celebrities, as indeed they were. To assist in the identification of the originals, the curious were provided with a "key." But that was comparatively puerile sport. The only true key, the master key, to the Disraelian fiction is such an insight into the personality of the author as one derives from passing back and forth between the novels and the Monypenny-Buckle biography, keeping always in mind this remark of St. Aldegonde in "Lothair":
"I hate a straightforward fellow. As Pinto says, if every man were straightforward in his opinions, there would be no conversation. The fun of talk is to find out what a man really thinks, and then contrast it with the enormous lies he has been telling all dinner, and, perhaps, all his life."
The inexhaustible fun which Disraeli offers to the student consists in contrasting the nervous, subtle, highly civilized intellectual that he was with the representative English country gentleman that he affected to be. The moment one enters into it, one is on the trail of Disraeli's own fun in life and in fiction. One perceives with fresh vividness that his grand society, his dukes and duchesses, his lords and ladies, and the entire bag and baggage of his traditional Tory system are riddled with his own Voltairean satire, are ablaze with his own sense of their comedy. The "Young Duke," whose coming of age "creates almost as great a sensation among the aristocracy of England as the Norman Conquest;" Lord Monmouth, who leaves his immense fortune to his natural daughter by an actress of the Théâtre Français; St. Aldegonde, who travels, by Jove, "three hundred miles for a slice of cod and a beefsteak"—these and countless other noble beings are pictured for derision. What the real Disraeli thought of the profuse and idle minions of splendor who paraded his pages he actually put into the mouth of Millbank, the Manchester manufacturer in "Coningsby":
"Is it not monstrous, then, that a small number of men, several of whom take the titles of Duke and Earl from towns in this very neighbourhood, towns which they never saw, which never heard of them, which they did not form, or build, or establish, I say is it not monstrous, that individuals so circumstanced, should be invested with the highest of conceivable privileges, the privilege of making laws? Dukes and Earls indeed! I say there is nothing in a masquerade more ridiculous."
Disraeli, like all of the "dark sex," was sensible to "female loveliness;" but probably no Jewish intellectual who ever lived could long be dazzled by good looks in a man, when unaccompanied by adequate mental equipment. Of Lord Deloraine, the gartered viceroy in "Sybil," he remarks demurely: "He might have been selected as the personification of aristocracy: so noble was his appearance. . . . He was also very accomplished and not ill-informed; had read a little, and thought a little, and was in every respect a superior man." Superior he was, presumably, to the Warwickshire peer in the same novel, who had thought not at all, and who, when confronted with the idea of social betterment, gasped indignantly: "Well, that is sheer radicalism—pretending that the people can be better off than they are, is radicalism and nothing else." Everyone will recall Arnold's remark about the "cock of Lord Elcho's hat" being "quite the finest thing we have." Disraeli parallels that vein of irony in "Lothair," where Mr. Phoebus extols the preoccupation of the aristocracy with the things of the body:
"What I admire in the order to which you belong is that they live in the air, that they excel in athletic sports; that they can only speak one language; and that they never read. This is not complete education, but it is the highest education since the Greek."
Even more deliciously mischievous toward the conservative principle and order which Disraeli professed to uphold, is the following bit of dialogue from "Endymion":
"How can any government go on without the support of the Church and the land?" cries Zenobia, the ruling lady among the Tories. "It is quite unnatural."
"That is the mystery," remarks the ambassador. "Here is a government, supported by none of the influences hitherto deemed indispensable, and yet it exists."
Someone remarks that the newspapers are behind it and the Dissenters, etc., and, "Then there is always a number of people who will support any government—and so the thing works."
"They have a new name for this hybrid sentiment," says the ambassador. "They call it public opinion."
"How very absurd!" Zenobia exclaims, "a mere nickname. As if there could be any opinion but that of the Sovereign and the two Houses of Parliament."
Now turn from this stiff Zenobian orthodoxy of Toryism to Disraeli himself as he exhibits, in private letters of 1862-3 addressed to Mrs. Willyams, his instinctive, spontaneous response of delight to the play of revolutionary power:
It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliant events. What an error to consider it an utilitarian age! It is one of infinite romance. Thrones tumble down and crowns are offered, like a fairy tale, and the most powerful people in the world, male and female, a few years back, were adventurers, exiles, and demireps. Vive la bagatelle. . . . The Greeks really want to make my friend Lord Stanley their king. This beats any novel. I think he ought to take the crown, but he will not. Had I his youth, I would not hesitate, even with the earldom of Derby in the distance.
Mr. Disraeli, commoner, glows, at the age of fifty-eight, at thought of a great adventure which fails to stir his young friend, the noble lord. It is an outflashing of the never quenched Napoleonic passion of his youth. It is an expression of a pure personal impulse to rule, with a sense that the power is in himself, a sense which is always accompanied by a certain tendency to regard parliamentary procedure impatiently and all the talk of either Whigs or Tories as but "eternal palaver." In his stronger imaginative moods, Disraeli becomes sincerely eloquent in praise of the aspiring will, the spirit behind the forms and shows of things, which saved him and his hero Coningsby from "profligacy" on the one hand and from "pedantry" on the other—
That noble ambition, the highest and the best, that must be born in the heart and organized in the brain, which will not let a man be content, unless his intellectual power is recognized by his race, and desires that it should contribute to their welfare. It is the heroic feeling; the feeling that in old days produced demi-gods; without which no State is safe; without which political institutions are meat without salt; the Crown a bauble; the Church an establishment, Parliaments debating-clubs, and Civilization itself but a fitful and transient dream.
The tragedy of the romantic dreamer and intellectual who seeks in action to embody his dream, is to discover with Sybil that "great thoughts have very little to do with the business of the world; that human affairs, even in an age of revolution, are the subject of compromise; and that the essence of compromise is littleness." The decrepit power which the radical had been taught existed only by sufferance Disraeli discovered, as Sybil discovered, "was compact and organized, with every element of physical power at its command, and supported by the interests, the sympathies, the honest convictions, and the strong prejudices of classes influential not merely from their wealth but even by their numbers." He had thought himself "a man of destiny;" he was to find, like Prince Florestan in "Endymion," that the "irresistible principle of historical necessity" was a principle "not recognized by Her Majesty's Ministers!"
There speaks the man who recognized the realities in the situation at the Congress of Berlin. From the novels, let us return once more to the biography, to the final volume, for a last specimen of the Disraelian irony playing upon himself and at the sare time upon the great German master of the arts which he himself practised. England, as part o: her share of the plunder divided by the victorious statesmen—England, or rather Disraeli personally, had secretly seized upon Cyprus; and in a confidential interview with the "honest broker" had communicated the fact to Bismarck. I quote the passage in which Disraeli reports this interview to his sovereign:
When he (Bismarck) heard about Cyprus, he said: "You have done a wise thing. This is progress. It will be popular; a nation likes progress." His idea of progress was evidently seiz ing something. He said he looked upon our relinquishment of the Ionian Isles as the first sign of our decadence. Cyprus put us right again.
"His idea of progress was evidently seizing something." Evidently Disraeli's idea of progress was not precisely that. The Bismarckian point of view and personality interested him, to be sure, piquantly. He was mildly amused by the "iron" statesman's table talk, with its "Rabelaisian monologues." He was astounded by his "endless revelations of things he ought not to mention." He was struck by the "ogre-like form" and pleased by the contrasting voice, "which is sweet and gentle." But the effect of Bismarck's fundamental conceptions upon his subtly civilized Semitic mind was that of something elementary, crude, barbaric. With an exquisite shade of sarcasm, he hints, just hints, at this effect, to his queen. For he knows that in the veins of his "adored" sovereign runs, after all, the same Teutonic blood, beating to the same barbaric rhythm. Had she not, in order to quicken the cooler blood of her dear Lord Beaconsfield in the months preceding the Congress—had she not written to him with her own royal hand that, if she were a man, "she would like to go and give those Russians such a beating!" He was her minister to do her good pleasure. And so, with a merciless diplomatic craft, which is the full intellectual "equivalent" of war, he gave those Russians "such a beating." He added Cyprus to her Crown. He played for her, with an intimate consciousness of its absurdity, the great game, which, along with shooting pheasants and horse racing, still delights the rude imaginations of these occidentals!
His action was, as Bismarck had predicted that it would be, popular—immensely popular. Der alte Jude was rewarded by a grateful sovereign with an English earldom. He now took a place of eminence and splendor in that order which his radical spokesman in "Sybil" had declared "stands before Europe the most gorgeous of existing spectacles," governing "the most miserable people on the face of the globe." With the loyalty to the temporal power characteristic of his race, he had rendered to Cæsar such service as Cæsar prizes. Judging by the standards of the people among whom he lived, his life, as he declared near the end of his tenure of it, had not been altogether vanity.
Yet in the end one recognizes regretfully in the man reserves of power of another sort, which his occasions never fully called forth, and potentialities of influence which his political choices made unavailing. He himself recognized them, when in his seventy-sixth year he abandoned the premiership for "Endymion." One likes to think of his return upon himself in his penultimate spring, when the days "were getting very long, and soft, and sweet," and he lay under the purple oaks of Hughenden, among his loved violets and primroses, lost in the fathomless revery of which he was capable—"one of those reveries when the incidents of our existence are mapped before us, when each is considered with relation to the rest, and assumes in our knowledge its destined and absolute position; when, as it were, we take stock of our experience, and ascertain how rich sorrow and pleasure, feeling and thought, intercourse with our fellow creatures and the fortuitous mysteries of life, have made us in wisdom." In those last calm days of illumination and quiet retrospection, what, one wonders, was his final judgment upon the ancient wisdom of his own race, when, secure in the sense of its spiritual supremacy and refusing to contend with the Napoleons and Czsars of the "impious younger world."
In patient deep disdain;
She let the legions thunder past,
And plunged in thought again.
What if, like the saints and martyrs whose heroic spirit really touched his imagination, he had declined the handful of silver, the riband to stick in his coat, and had undertaken the spiritual recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, a mission with which his Tancred trifles? "Strange power of the world," he exclaims with the insight of one who has yielded to it, "that the moment we enter it, our great conceptions dwarf!" Sympathy with the world dwarfs our dream in youth. The "sense of the ridiculous" dwarfs it in age. There was too much of Lucian, too much of Voltaire, too much of Don Juan, too much of Heine, and, above all, too much of the hard radical realism of Napoleon in Disraeli, for a saint. At the end of every aspiring flight, he returns to earth; he takes his stand on human nature as it is, not as the dreamer conceives it ought to be. And he concludes, with a richly experienced smile: "Perhaps these reveries of solitude may not be really great conceptions; perhaps they are only exaggerations; vague, indefinite, shadowy, founded on no sound principles, founded on no assured basis." Perhaps the world is right; and the beatific vision, only a dyspeptic dream.