The Psychology of Disraeli
The recent centenary of the birth of Benjamin Disraeli renewed our interest in the most striking figure in the English history of the last century. Throughout his life Disraeli made it an important part of his métier to be interesting, and it is certainly a convincing proof both of his great natural fascination and of the adroitness with which he worked his pose, that even beyond the grave his character should still exercise our curiosity and blind us with the various facets of its brilliancy. He fairly bristles with paradoxes, this cynic, who was also a sentimentalist, this Oriental mystic, who was one of the most finished dandies in London, this shameless adventurer, with his pathetic and chivalrous devotion to his sovereign, this political Don Juan, who provided a classic example of conjugal affection. Many have essayed to solve the riddle of the “Primrose Sphinx”; but the best testimony to their almost universal failure is that nearly every biographer has produced a completely different version of his character. Mr. Hitchman, “one of the helpless, somnambulised cattle whom he led by the nose,” to use Carlyle’s phrase, portrays him (in The Public Life of the late Lord Beaconsfield) with charming naïveté as the “disinterested and patriotic statesman.” Mr. T. P. O’Connor, on the other hand, who, when still sowing his literary wild oats, painted Disraeli even blacker than the Prince of Darkness himself, in a book unworthy of any serious biographer, simply overshoots the mark. Froude, in his Life, comes nearer to the truth, but is hampered by being forced to compress the history of a crowded life and the psychology of a complex character into a narrow and inadequate compass. Both Froude, however, and Mr. Sichel, who has given us an interesting volume on Disraeli’s personality, lay too much stress on his imaginative and idealistic features.
The reason for this inability to comprehend a character, in many respects singularly typical of his age, lies not so much in the alleged inadequacy of the materials as in the incapacity of most English writers for handling general ideas. The English mind is too concrete for social psychology; it delights in the almost mechanical work of classifying animals, but fails to produce any classification of characters worth the name. The Disraeli problem is admittedly difficult; the secrecy which until recently kept us from all knowledge of the greater portion of his papers and correspondence is undoubtedly a handicap, but the difficulty is by no means insuperable, nor the material so scanty as is usually supposed. Let us take Disraeli in relation to his age, his environment, his ancestry, then what would otherwise have struck us as strange, not to say impossible, stands out clear and inevitable. Another valuable source of information is to be found in his novels, though it is always difficult to discriminate between what is and what is not autobiographical in these works.
A vigorous and imaginative mind, when writing about its own history, will naturally not stint itself in its licences; it will abandon itself to all kinds of hypotheses; it will take a certain phase of itself, frame circumstances to suit its development, and proceed on the fictitious assumption; it will indulge freely both in caricature and idealisation. In Vivian Grey, for instance, Disraeli has slightly exaggerated the more cynical side of his nature; Sidonia, on the other hand, is an idealised version of Disraeli; it is Disraeli raised to a higher power; it is what he would have liked to have been, but was not, any more than the actual Byron was as brave, as romantic, and as fascinating as the ideal Byron who is portrayed in Conrad, Childe Harold, and Don Juan.
Yet, none the less, Sidonia, Fakredeen, Vivian Grey, and Contarini Fleming possess a strong family likeness, and strike a genuine autobiographical note. With regard to the two latter, Mr. Sichel, in his study of Disraeli, is unwarranted in his attempted depreciation of their evidence, on the theory that they represent merely a distorted and transient phase of Disraeli’s development, to be ascribed to ill-health and immaturity. On the contrary, the contortions of great men in adolescence are peculiarly instructive. It is then that the very elements of the future man are fermenting in the crucible; and is not growth more significant than maturity? It is not a paradox, but a fundamental truth, to say that a man is never more himself than when he is not himself; it is in periods of violent upheaval that the conventional superstructure is destroyed and the innermost foundations of character are laid bare. It is far easier to tone down than to touch up, and the unrestrained sincerity of these early novels, written under the impetus of intense emotion, throws far more light on Disraeli’s real character than a book like Endymion, the official pronouncement of his maturer years. A prudent use, then, of the novels, and an examination of his relations to his age, environment, and ancestry should enable us to construct a psychology of Disraeli that should be at once convincing and consistent, and adequate to shed light on many of the obscure points of his character.
The Sturm und Drang age of the Revolution in which Disraeli was born marked the passing of Europe from childhood to manhood, from mediævalism to modernity. Like all transition periods, it was peculiarly complex; the tendencies being so varied, and were so frequently accompanied by the reactions against themselves, that it requires considerable care to disentangle the principal threads.
It was an age of progress where reaction was frequently to be seen at work; it was an age significant for a violent outburst of scientific materialism, and the consequently inevitable mysticism of a religious revival. It was an age at once scientific and romantic, individual and cosmopolitan. It was an age where circumstances produced strange mixtures, so that in England we are brought face to face with the paradox that Gladstone, the founder of democratic idealism, obtained his seat under the old system of close boroughs, while Disraeli, the most brilliant example of the new democratic theory of la carrière ouverte aux talentes, found his way to power as the head of the aristocratic and conservative party. The predominant note, however, was one of democratic individualism. With the French Revolution the yoke of responsibility, political and religious, was violently thrown off; new and wide fields had been opened out to commerce by the extended communications and the new mechanical inventions. A quickened life broke in upon the lethargy of the previous century. The struggle for existence entered on a sharper and intenser phase. Ambitious men vehemently dashed themselves against the social barrier, which day by day became more easy to climb. In every department it was the age of the clever and ambitious parvenu. In war and in politics Napoleon, in poetry Burns, in fiction Balzac, give convincing testimony to the power of the new regime. It was the age of the French Revolution and of the Holy Alliance, of Condillac and of Chateaubriand, of Laplace and of Shelley, of Godwin and of Tom Paine.
But equality is a medal with two faces: on the one side is written, “I am as good as, if not better than, everyone else”; on the other, “Everyone else is as good as, if not better than, myself.” The first was the motto of the rampant individualism and vigorous national policy of Disraeli, the latter of the hesitating Christian spirit and sentimental cosmopolitanism of Gladstone. Gladstone, indeed, is such an excellent foil to Disraeli that we may well be permitted the following quotations, where the rift in Gladstone’s lute, between the churchman and the politician, stands in pointed contrast to the unity of purpose that from his earliest years actuated his rival. Gladstone, torn between his missionary impulse and yearning for apostolic destination on the one hand, and healthy ambition on the other, writes to his father: “I am willing to persuade myself that in spite of other longings, which I often feel, my heart is prepared to yield other hopes and other desires for this: of being permitted to be the humblest of those who may be commissioned to set before the eyes of man the magnanimity and glory of Christian truth. Politics are fascinating to me, perhaps too fascinating. My temper is so excitable that I should fear giving up my mind to other subjects, which have ever proved sufficiently alluring to me, and which I fear would make my life a series of unsatisfied longings and expectations.” Disraeli is less undecided, as is clear from the following quotation from Contarini Fleming: “I should have killed myself if I had not been supported by my ambition, which now each day became more quickening, so that the desire of distinction and of astounding action raged in my soul, and when I realised that so many years must elapse before I could realise my ideal, I gnashed my teeth in silent rage and cursed my existence,” Disraeli will give up anything rather than his chance of being a great man. At a time when most clever young men of his age were thinking of a scholarship he had finally decided to go in for a premiership. He has planned his campaign, he will fool the world to the top of its bent. When yet a boy Disraeli says, as Vivian Grey: “We must mix with the herd, we must sympathise with the sorrow that we do not feel and share the merriment of fools. To rule men we must be men, to prove that we are strong we must be weak. Our wisdom must be concealed under folly, our constancy under caprice.”
None the less, Disraeli had too vivid an imagination, too keen a sense of the picturesque, not to be affected to a certain extent by the current Romanticism. We see this in the Eastern novels of Tancred and Alroy, also in Contarini Fleming, the English Wilhelm Meister, which exhibits the weaker and more morbid side of the author’s character, and is a useful supplement to Vivian Grey. But it is the latter, however, who represents most accurately the ideals and aspirations of the young Disraeli, and, taken generally, is a broad adumbration of his subsequent career. But the Disraeli of Vivian Grey was not so unique as is usually considered, and an analogy between him and the celebrated Frenchman, who wrote a novel about the same period, and one, moreover, singularly typical of his age, proves instructive. Benjamin Disraeli and Henri Beyle were in all superficial details so absolutely different that one might well hesitate before making the comparison, yet they were radically similar in many of their larger outlines, and in particular their characters, as revealed in the heroes of two novels, Vivian Grey and Le Rouge et le Noir, show an extraordinary resemblance. Both Julien Sorel and Vivian Grey are impelled by a violent and overwhelming ambition; both, originally excluded by their status from participation in the great prizes of the world, set out undaunted to conquer, the one as a priest, the other as a politician. Cynical, with that extreme and savage species of cynicism which is the reaction from intense sensitiveness, they both wage war on society in their passion for success, while the nobler and more generous instincts with which nature had endowed them perish in the struggle.
But this Time-Spirit of individualism was no mere cold-blooded philosophy of egoism. It was, after all, an age of genuine poetry, of fresh ideals. The halo of romance played around the most abandoned sinners. Individualism found, in addition, an æsthetic sanction, as was seen in the prodigious vogue of Byron, where the picturesque pose of the one man pitted against society appealed strongly to the popular imagination. How deeply Disraeli was imbued with Byronism is evidenced not only by the whole tone and manner of his early life, but by his resuscitation of the Byronic legend in Venetia.
This spirit of combined idealism and intense practical energy is met with again in Disraeli’s race and ancestry. The Jewish race is a compound of materialism and idealism. The Jew is the dreamer in action, combining fluid imagination with adamantine purpose. These two phases of the Jewish character are seen excellently in Disraeli’s father and paternal grandfather. The latter, an Italian Jew, came over to England about the middle of the eighteenth century, and quickly made a fortune by dint of his shrewd business talent and fixity. His son Isaac was gifted with an unfortunate superfluity of the poetic temperament. His youth was erratic and unhappy, but when close on thirty he found a secure refuge in the quiet waters of literature. To his Semitic blood is also to be traced Disraeli’s prodigious tenacity of purpose. He came of a stiff-necked people, so that opposition stimulated him, and his early failures served but to render sweeter his eventual success. He had, too, the calculating foresight of the Jew, and could pierce the future, if not with prophetic vision, at any rate, with marvellous intuition. His Oriental strain of mysticism served him in good stead. He never forgot that he was a scion of the Chosen People, and came of a race which had never sullied its purity of lineage by changing its blood. Was he not the chosen man of the chosen race? Could he not read his future, if not in the stars, “which are the brain of heaven,” yet in his own brilliant and meteoric brain? He had a full measure of the pride of race, and plumed himself to the last on what he may well have called “the Oriental ichor in his veins.” If his enemies dubbed him a parvenu he would fling the wretched taunt back in their faces, bidding them realise that they came from a parvenu and hybrid race, while he himself was sprung from the purest blood in Europe. How keen was this genealogical Judaism we can see from the classic letter to O’Connell, where he wrote that “the hereditary bondsman had forgotten the clank of his fetters,” and from his masterpiece of character-drawing, Sidonia, who, with wealth, intellect, and power at his command, yet found his chief “source of interest in his descent and in the fortunes of his race.” Disraeli’s Judaism, however, did not extend to the religious tenets of the creed. Few, no doubt, are the instances of a converted Jew proving a genuine Christian, but Disraeli had too much of the mystic in him to be an atheist, and if we take into account the elasticity of his imagination, there is little reason to doubt that he was at any rate reasonably sincere in his belief that Christianity was merely completed Judaism, Calvary but the logical corollary of Sinai; he would also, no doubt, find a malicious joy in reminding those who taunted him with his origin, that “one half of Christendom worships a Jew and the other half a Jewess.” Anyway, the Christian religion played nothing approaching an integral part in his life; while an amiable acquiescence in its dogmas was, at the best, as it has been with so many, but an intellectual habit. His Jewish origin helped him, moreover, in that he approached the problems of politics with a mind free from conventional British prejudices. He was never a thorough Englishman, and was proud of the fact, instead of thanking God “that he was born an Englishman,” as do many of his race, who betray in their every word and action their Jewish nationality. His admirable expert knowledge of the English character was throughout professional, not sympathetic.
When we turn to Disraeli’s early environment, we find that it was one calculated to foster both ambition and a literary imagination. He breathed from his earliest days the atmosphere of books, and almost from the cradle imbibed avidly the many volumes of Voltaire. Nothing is so stimulating to the youthful mind as the unchecked run of a library, with its delightful excursions into the unexplored country of literature. His natural sensitiveness was hardened by his experiences at school, where his nationality and cleverness rendered him unpopular. The reaction intensified his already precocious ambition, and gave him that consciousness of semi-isolation which formed one of the chief parts of his strength. His ambition was further heightened by the smart literary set which he met constantly at his father’s house, and his early glimpses of the great world. Disraeli is palpably exaggerating when he says, apropos of Vivian Grey, that “he was a tender plant in a moral hot-house,” but the following passage is significant:
“He became habituated to the idea that everything could be achieved by dexterity, that there was no test of conduct except success; to be ready to advance any opinion, to possess none; to look upon every man as a tool, and never to do anything which had not a definite though circuitous purpose.”
It is this trait of doing things with an object which supplied the true clue to Disraeli as a man of letters. We admit, of course, the verve and brilliancy of the novels, their claim to rank as classic, but it is impossible to arrive at a correct appreciation of them unless they be taken in the closest conjunction with their author’s political career. Vivian Grey, for instance, no doubt afforded an excellent outlet for the fermenting passion of Disraeli’s youth; it was itself one of the best society novels ever written, but it was something more. Before that time the future Premier had been hiding his light. How could he obtain a free field for the exercise of his gifts? His father’s Bohemian clique scarcely answered his purpose. How could he burst open the doors of society? The bombshell was supplied by Vivian Grey. It was a case of self-advertisement raised to the level of a fine art, and Disraeli introduced himself to the public with a bow of most elaborate flourishes. Contarini Fleming strikes a slightly different note, exhibiting the more poetic side of its author’s character; but we must not forget that at the time when it was published Disraeli’s long absence in the East had temporarily obscured his fame in London, and that it was the success of Contarini Fleming which secured for him once more the entrée into society. Similarly, Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred were, in the main, but the gospels in which, in the rôle of a political saviour, he propagated the new creed of Young England. Lothair and Endymion were partly written to replenish his empty exchequer. The protagonists, moreover, in all his chief novels were fashioned in the image of himself, and even Lord Cadurcis in Venetia, who is theoretically Byron, is portrayed with the physical features of the author, so as to ensure a vivid impression on the public mind of his own personality. Not that Disraeli did not experience a genuine joy in the wielding of the pen. He could soar high in his flights of mysticism and romance; could describe the picturesque and the beautiful in passages of inspired rhetoric, though it was in the dash and brilliancy of his satire which at its best equalled that of Heine, or Voltaire, or Byron, that he was most himself. His style is redolent of his race. It possesses the genuine Oriental glamour, the Oriental love of gorgeous and grandiose magnificence, the Oriental lack of symmetry and proportion. His prodigious genius for sarcasm was also Semitic, if we are to believe Mr. Bryce, who considers that gift a peculiar property of the race, instancing, as examples, Lucian and Heine, the greatest satirists of ancient and modern times.
This same combination of temperament and policy which explains Disraeli, the man of letters, explains Disraeli, the dandy. Living as he did in an age which revolted, under the leadership of Count D’Orsay, against the chaste and classic traditions of Brummel, and which offered in the elaborate picturesqueness of its dress an excellent medium for the expression of personality, is it to be wondered at that so ambitious a nature as Disraeli’s should, apart from other reasons, enter gaily into the sartorial arena? These early years remind us of Alcibiades, who, in his youth, his genius, his precocious political ambitions, his aristocratic lineage and superb insolence, his extravagance and irresponsibility, offers a fairly close analogy. Disraeli, however, was an Alcibiades with ballast, and his most erratic phases were governed by a consistent purpose. He had, it is true, the regular Hebrew love for the picturesque, the racial craving for flamboyant display; but the unique characteristic of the man was the ingenious method by which he exploited even his weaknesses to advance his purpose. Realising that nothing was more fatal to his career than the indifference of the public, that to be hated was better than to be ignored, and that notoriety was a passable substitute for fame, he was determined to bulk largely in the public eye. Living, fortunately, in an age when dandyism, if not an art, was at any rate a career, and when “wild, melancholy men” were still the rage among the ladies, he manipulated the dandy and Byronic pose with phenomenal success. But his social career was not all pose. Though political ambition was to him always the main point of existence, he was far too healthy to lose sight of the small change of life. He had, moreover, a genuine love of society. His remark apropos of Gladstone, “What can we do with a leader who is not even in society?” was sincere in spite of being an epigram, and the hosts of great ladies who crowd his novels attest conclusively to his social fastidiousness. But the most convincing proof of this lighter side of his nature is to be found in his correspondence with his sister. Those letters, dashed off hurriedly to his “dearest Sa,” written with that complete lack of ceremony which is the sign of a perfect intimacy, show with what zest he frequented balls and water-parties, dinners and soirées. Yet his ambition is never far in the background. He goes to the House of Commons, hears the big man speak, and then writes to his sister, “But between ourselves I could floor them all.” His genius for conversation is historic, and we are not surprised that he considered that the one unforgivable sin was to be a bore. He had not, it is true, Gladstone’s habit of unburdening himself freely to the most casual of acquaintances. How many, indeed, were there of his intimates who had penetrated into the secret places of his heart? But over-much sincerity is a hindrance to the art of conversation; and many of his most brilliant paradoxes were thrown off as an evasive retort to an impertinent question. When, however, we come to Disraeli’s social and private life, the most interesting question that presents itself is that of his relation to his wife. Even though he had discoursed in Contarini Fleming of the grand passion with all the high-flown sentimentalism of the age, it was obviously impossible for him, considering the disparity of their ages, to be seriously in love with Mrs. Disraeli; and it must have seemed that he had been forced to exchange the poetry of the mistress for the prose of the wife. Had he not, about ten years before his marriage, written to his sister, “How would you like Lady B—— for a sister-in-law? Clever, £25,000, and domestic. As for love, all my friends who have married for love either beat their wives or live apart from them. This is literally true. I may commit many follies, but never that of marrying for love, which, I am convinced, cannot but be a guarantee of infelicity.” Yet this union, based originally on mere policy and camaraderie, was eventually crowned with the most faithful of loves. It was his wife’s absorbing interest in his career that supplied the link. He has himself written that the most exquisite moment in a man’s life was when he surprised his lady-love reading the manuscript of his first speech, and the sympathy of Mrs. Disraeli in his successes may well have given them a yet further charm. The situation is well expressed in the remark of Mrs. Disraeli’s: “You know you married me for money, and I know that if you had to do it again you would do it for love.”
In fact the warm and constant affection Disraeli lavished on his wife during her lifetime, and the poignant grief that he evinced at her death, furnish a more than sufficient refutation to those who persist in regarding him as a mere cynical fortune-hunter. Disraeli, like Browning, had
“Two soul sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her.”
In the other departments of private life he was likewise exemplary. His hardness was limited to politics; he was the most dutiful of sons, the most affectionate of brothers, the most faithful of friends. His debts, for the most part, were incurred by backing the bills of other men. His touching and romantic friendship for Mrs. Brydges Williams, the eccentric old Cornish lady who gave him pecuniary assistance at a critical period of his career, is well known. The story, again, of the Premier and his wife dancing a Highland jig in their night apparel on hearing of the success of an old friend, shows how little the bitter struggles of politics had hardened his heart. Particularly touching, also, is the mutual affection between him and the Queen, that sweetened his last years. She was, as we read in a letter of Disraeli’s to the Marchioness of Ely, “the best friend he had in the world.”
But Disraeli, though he fulfilled himself in many ways, was first of all a politician, and it is Disraeli the politician rather than Disraeli the man of letters, the dandy, or the human being, that principally provokes our interest. What were his real views on politics? How far can we distinguish between the official edition of himself which he displayed for public inspection and the original that he alone could read? Given his policy, how far was it justifiable, how far rational? The view of his most devoted, but yet in reality, quite unappreciative, admirers, that throughout a political career of over half a century he remained consistently and absolutely faithful to his original ideals, and that he introduced into politics an integrity and disinterestedness that Parliament had rarely witnessed, is even more absurd than the opinion of his blind and malignant enemies that he was a mere charlatan who juggled with parties and the people without possessing a single genuine political faith of his own. Disraeli, as was inevitable in a man of so detached and unprejudiced a nature, simply took the then party system at its true worth, and, of course, realised from the outset that before he could do anything worth doing he must first obtain that power which alone could give him the opportunity of doing it. His attack on Peel was, primâ facie, an occasion that it would have been the depth of folly to have missed, and Mr. Birrell’s statement that Disraeli “ate his peck of dirt,” and his comparison of him to Casanova, is mere petulance. For these preliminary stages of the higher politics Disraeli was admirably fitted, and the following autobiographic passages from Tancred show how congenial were his Herculean labours: “To be the centre of a maze of manœuvres was his empyrean, and while he recognised in them the best means of success he found in their exercise a means of constant delight”; and again, “‘Intrigue,’ cried the young prince, using, as was his custom, a superfluity of expression both of voice and hand and eyes, ‘intrigue, it is life, it is the only thing. If you wish to produce a result you must make a combination, and you call combination intrigue.’” Disraeli viewed party politics from the dispassionate standpoint of a chess-player, “playing off the proud peers like pawns,” skilfully manœuvring his knights and bishops beneath the shadow of the old mediæval castles, though it was “in his masterly manipulation of his queen” that he really surpassed himself. What a contrast to Gladstone’s youthful frame of mind, who entered politics because he felt a strong moral duty to defend that Church which he was afterwards partly to disestablish against the insidious attacks of philosophic Radicalism. But Disraeli’s point of view was, after all, merely that which was obvious and rational. It is well known that in Disraeli’s day the whole efficiency of the party system as a means of carrying on the government was based on that sagacious inconsistency, so characteristic of this country, which, cheerfully accommodating the most untractable of facts to the most docile of theories, drew between the two parties no clear dividing line either of principle or of class. Those genuine lines of cleavage both of policy and interest that now tend to become more and more clearly marked did not then exist. The only vital political distinction then existing in England was that between the Ins and the Outs. Whigs and Tories were, in their origin, merely the names for the two rival organisations for the pursuit of political power into which the oligarchy of the time had divided itself, and the party catch-words then indicated as much essential difference as the badges by which the two sides of a “scratch” game symbolise a fictitious distinction.
Particularly interesting is the following quotation from a letter of Gladstone, written comparatively early in his career, which shows convincingly that the subsequent democratic idealist fully realised the intrinsic farce of the then party system: “Each of them, the Whig and the Tory Party, comprises within itself far greater divergencies than can be noticed as dividing the more moderate portion of the one from the more moderate portion of the other. The great English parties differ no more in their general outlines than by a somewhat different distribution of the same elements in each.” It is impossible for the opportunist position to be more cogently stated. It is, indeed, a strange paradox that political integrity should be traditionally associated with the name of Gladstone, who accomplished more than any other of our statesmen in changing statesmanship into demagogy. His pronouncedly religious temperament, however, led to extraordinary results, and his psychological condition was best expressed in the well-known epigram that “he followed his conscience in the same manner that the driver of a gig follows the horse.” It was not that he was deliberately insincere. He could deceive himself as well as others with his ingenious sophisms. His sincerity was merely so elastic, his enthusiasm so adaptable, that he found it easy to be sincere and enthusiastic, inter alia, about those things which coincided with his interests.
Carlyle hits the mark in dubbing Gladstone a deeper and unconscious juggler as contrasted with Disraeli, the clever, conscious juggler. The latter, at any rate, played the game straight with himself. He did not, like his rival, have recourse to super-natural inspiration for every argument that dropped from his specious lips, or degrade his deity into a veritable deus ex machinâ, whose function it was to sanction the most elementary dictates of Parliamentary tactics.
Yet, though he exhibited a prudent elasticity in his handling of the minor details of party politics, in the main outlines of his policy he remained consistent and true to himself throughout his career. The romantic strain in his temperament rendered him congenitally opposed to the cut and dried utilitarianism of the Whigs. The renovated Toryism of New England, for which he was largely responsible, though to a great extent merely a move in the game, is deeply stamped with the impress of his own nature. That his bias was naturally aristocratic no one can doubt who has read the passage in The Revolutionary Epicke on Equality, or has appreciated the tone of personal superiority and contempt for the mediocre that pervades all his writings. His Conservatism, however, was not the orthodox Conservatism of the Eldon school, “the barren mule of politics which engenders nothing,” to use his own phrase, but a more picturesque and practical policy. He poured successfully the new wine of Democracy into the old bottles of Toryism, and thus, while no doubt indulging the more romantic side of his nature, placed, his party on a more modern and workable basis. Disraeli’s policy, in fact, was always one of sane and rational opportunism. In the same way that Gambetta, the exponent of French Opportunism, opposed “a policy of results to the policy of chimeras” of the reactionaries, Disraeli opposed to Gladstone’s dangerous and visionary ideals a policy that was at once feasible and salutary. Disraeli invariably treated England as a definite country with a definite personality of its own, requiring individual attention and delicate handling, while Gladstone regarded her as a mere tabula rasa on which the latest new-fangled doctrines could be easily imprinted. Precisely the same spirit induced Gladstone to treat the Queen as a department of State and Disraeli to treat her as a woman. In home politics he has grasped well that transition from feudal to federal principles which was the keynote of the last century politics. His detractors object that no great measures stand identified with his name; but here the fates were against him. It was a cruel paradox that when at last he obtained an untrammelled power he was too old and jaded to initiate any new creative measure in domestic affairs. I quote Mrs. Disraeli: “You don’t know my Dizzy; what great plans he has long matured for the good and greatness of England. But they have made him wait and drudge so long, and now time is against him.” In his foreign policy, however, he displayed his characteristic combination of practical and imaginative strength. In the same spirit in which he himself had obtained the foremost place in England, he desired that England should acquire the foremost rank among the nations; while, as is shown by his Imperial policy, he infused something of his own picturesqueness into the policy of the most prosaic Power in Europe. His Indian policy, in particular, proves with what practical imagination he had divined how much lay in a name, and that to the feudatory princes it meant all the difference whether they paid their allegiance to the Queen of England or to the Empress of India.
Disraeli’s master-passion was ambition. But he was no monomaniac like Napoleon. In the same way that Sidonia, the complete and perfect man, according to Disraeli, played with a master-hand on the whole gamut of life, so did Disraeli, though in a lesser scale, live largely and fully. He lived in the solitudes of the Arabian deserts and in the crowded drawing-rooms of St. James’s; in the halls of Westminster and the shady quietude of Bradenham; in the privacy of his own study, and in the historic chambers of Downing Street. To few men has it been given to express themselves in so many different ways. What matter if his feats of statesmanship were restricted by the limitations of the Parliamentary system and the handicap of his own failing health? To such a nature the joy of life lay rather in the winning than in the using of the prize. It is the romance and character of the man that perpetuate his memory rather than his political achievements. He lives as a great career. When yet a boy he had mapped out his future, and he realised his ambition in every detail. By sheer force of intellect and determination he lifted himself from the Ghetto to the highest position in England. As he himself said, in one of Mrs. Craigie’s novels: “Many men have talent; few have genius; fewer still have character.”