Lord Beaconsfield; a study

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Introduction i

I. The Family '. 6

Introduction

It is usual to draw a decided distinction between politicians and literary men. There seems to be a great gulf between the men of letters and the men of action. Every one can bring forward instances to show that distinguished savans, orators, poets, and professors have shown a want of common sense or political. ability if they have left the paths of literature for the career of a statesman. We have often seen political theorists condemned to play but a subordinate part, or to exercise but a temporary influence, in the parliament of their country, and humanitarian poets, like Lamartine, who have wearied the national assembly with their lyrics, and whose political career has been confined to a single great moment. As a rule, then, eminent literary ability precludes political action, and, vice versa, political action suppresses the development of literary powers. Practical politicians, therefore, often somewhat undervalue those who come to politics fresh from the ranks of literature ; while, on the other hand, men of speculative tendencies and refined culture are apt to have something of the same feeling towards the men of eminent administrative or diplomatic talents; and when, like Renan, for example, they see their fine-spun political theories rejected, they find compensation for their wounded pride in the idea that shrewd and worldly wise mediocrity, in most cases, suffices for the politician.

Nevertheless, there is an aspect under which leading statesmen become literary characters, and fall within the sphere of the literary critic. Within certain limits, every political magnate has a literary side. At any rate, there are his speeches and letters, and Carlyle has shown how much insight may be gained from the letters and speeches of even so illiterate a statesman as Cromwell. These productions have also, for the most part, a direct literary value ; for a superior man, whatever his education may have been, generally finds expression for his thoughts in a way peculiar to himself : he is original, that is, he is in possession of the secret, often withheld from many an author by profession, of characterizing or caricaturing a person or subject by some mimic or graphic word.

Still, in spite of the contrast between theoretical and practical men, a long series of exceptions has

\ Introduction. 3

shown that literary and political talents may be found united. The political historian is sometimes transformed into the practical politician, and there are still more instances of the transition from politics to history. Cicero and Thiers were at once eminent authors and statesmen, Julius Caesar and Frederick the Great were both men of literary tastes, and were at the same time politicians and military geniuses.

Artistic, and still more poetic, gifts are, in the case of leading statesmen, very rare, the rarest of all. Cavour was a good speaker ; Bismarck is an excellent speaker, but he is not a born orator, nor was Cavour, who was entirely without artistic training ; near the close of his life, after a visit to Tuscany, he said, " I have discovered in myself a taste which I did not know that I possessed — the taste for art," a saying which accords with what he used to say when conversation turned to this subject : " I cannot make a sonnet, but I can make Italy." Scarcely any one would suspect Bismarck of secret poetical productions; a romance or a poem from him sounds still more improbable than a sonnet by Cavour. Yet there are so many literary productions by his hand, that a shrewd critic might try to delineate his character from them ; but it would be anything but exhaustive: it is only in his actions that we see the whole man ; the chief characteristics of a statesman such as he is are concealed from the eyes of the literary critic.

It is all the more interesting for the critic, when by a solitary chance, one of the leading statesmen of Europe is also a distinguished author, a poet, and a politician, who has portrayed his own character and given us his ideas in. his works. The critic hereby gains an insight, seldom granted him, into the psychology of such a personage. Each work by his hand is an instrument which he has fabricated for us himself, wherewith we may penetrate into the workshop of his ideas ; each book that he has written is a window through which "we may look into his mind. Each train of thought which he has revealed to us, every character he has devised, every feeling that he has described, contains, partly, a series of confessions which he has consciously laid bare, and which must be carefully examined, as well as a series of involuntary confessions running parallel to them, which may be detected ; only no attempt should be made to extract them by force, or you would be apt only to extract what you had yourself put in. If the critic be on his guard, both as regards himself and the, author, these literary productions will afford him more than mere literary insight ; for the ideas and sentiments expressed belong to the statesman, and not to him in his character of novelist alone ; they are the outcome of his

Introduction. 5

whole character as a man, which is the common source and deepest spring of his political and literary gifts.

It will be my endeavour to apply a literary-critical method to the present Prime Minister of England. The study of the statesman Lord Beaconsfield, through the novelist Benjamin Disraeli, is attractive to me. Complete materials for the task I do not possess, as I write of a man still living, and whom I have only seen and heard from a distance, as many others have seen and heard him, and for knowledge of whom not a single special source is open to me. After careful perusal of what already exists on the subject, I hope that my method of treating it will be found new. Lord Beaconsfield's writings have not yet been made the subject of conscientious study, unbiassed by party spirit. The portrait of the author has been painted in turn by Whigs and Tories, political foes and political friends, and hate or partisanship has mingled the colours. To me Disraeli is neither an object of admiration nor dislike, but simply a highly original and interesting character; and after long study of it, I have not been able to resist the desire to reproduce it on paper,

Chapter I. The Family

It is only in royal and ancient noble families, in which the records of a long series of ancestors has been carefully preserved, that it is possible to trace with certainty the qualities inherited by an individual, and to follow the combinations and transformations which the mental faculties of the race have experienced in the course of time. Of the ancestors of eminent personages we generally know too few, and of the personages themselves too little, to study the process of the formation of their characters in the family.

Benjamin Disraeli is a descendant of one of the Jewish families compelled by the Spanish Inquisition to leave the Peninsula towards the end of the fifteenth century. These families, who, although expelled from Palestine, had never wandered from the originally civilized countries of ancient times — those in the Mediterranean basin, and who had never been exposed to a rigid climate uncongenial to the race, formed for a long time the natural aristocracy of the Jewish people. They had resided, happy and respected, partly in the large cities, partly on their estates in Aragon, Andalusia, and Portugal, for the acquisition of landed property was not then denied to them. Fanaticism afterwards deprived them, by one blow, of all their rights and hopes. Lord Beaconsfield's ancestors, therefore, took refuge in the Venetian Republic, and, according to a family tradition, as soon as they trod the soil of Venice, renounced their Spanish name, and " from gratitude to the God of Jacob, who had led them through unexampled trials, and unheard-of dangers," took the name of dTsraeli, by which the family was henceforth to be known. It grew and flourished without let or hindrance for more than two hundred years.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a member of the family resolved to send his youngest son, Benjamin, to England, which seemed then to secure religious Jiberty to the Jews, and offered a favourable opening for commercial undertakings on a large scale. Religious liberty, however, was neither of long standing nor complete in England. The Jews had been expelled from the country long before they had been driven from Spain or Portugal. They were only tolerated from the reign of William the Conqueror to that of Richard Cceur de Lion ; cruel persecutions then broke out, until, in 1290, the accusation which we meet with during all the Middle Ages, that they used the blood of slaughtered Christian children at their Easter sacrifices, caused them to be so ill treated and plundered that they finally had to leave the country.

A ballad in Percy's " Old English Ballads " shows that the popular fancy was constantly occupied with the banished race ; these fellow-countrymen and murderers of the Redeemer, though the people had never seen them, became bloodthirsty monsters in their eyes ; and in English literature, Marlowe's Barabbas and Shakespeare's Shylock are memorials of the superstitious disgust and terror which they inspired up to the period of the Renaissance. The " Jew of Malta " was, to a certain extent, the pattern for his fellow in the " Merchant of Venice." There was good reason, in both cases, for laying the scene in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, for there were scarcely any Jews in England. But it was with less reason that in both dramas the southern Jew is represented as a type of cruelty ; for while on the stage in England he poisoned his daughter and whetted his knife to slay his creditor, thousands of the race, of both sexes, in Spain and Portugal, chose rather to suffer martyrdom at the stake than to abjure the faith of their fathers. The most sorely tried martyrs of that age were repre-

IO Lord Be aeons field.

sented on the English stage as murderers and hangmen.*

It was not until the time of the Commonwealth that, protected by Cromwell himself, though not by any law, the Jews began to return to England. Under George II., the Minister, Lord Pelham, was favourable to them, and during his ministry, Benjamin d'Israeli, the grandfather and namesake of Lord Beaconsfield, became, in the year 1748, an English citizen, without civil rights. His wife, who belonged to a family which had suffered much from persecution, and who was vain and ambitious, was ashamed of her Jewish origin, and by an ignoble, but not uncommon association of ideas, transferred her embitterment at belonging to a despised caste from the oppressors to the oppressed. Meanwhile, her energetic husband quickly made a fortune, bought an estate, laid out a garden in the Italian style, entertained company, ate maccaroni prepared by the Venetian consul in London, played whist, sang canzonets, and, " in spite of a wife who never forgave him his name, and a son who thwarted all his plans," he lived vigorous and happy till he was nearly ninety years of age.

In seeking precursors of the characteristics of the grandson, our attention is involuntarily arrested by

* " Studienreisen in England," p. 272, von Jul. Rodenberg. "Curiosities of Literature," introd., by Isaac d'Israeli.

The Family. II

the picture which he himself has given us of his grandfather. He was a man of warm blood, sanguine, enterprising, and successful, with a temperament never ruffled by disappointment, and a brain ever fertile in resources, even when one disaster followed quickly upon another.

It had always been the hope of this ambitious and practical merchant, who was, in 1815, a rival of the house of Rothschild, to found a finance dynasty ; but this favourite scheme was frustrated by the exclusively literary tastes of his only son. Isaac d'Israeli (as he wrote his name) grew up misunderstood by both his parents, and without ever having a good word from his mother, who foresaw a life of humiliation for her son. His first poem excited real terror in his parents' house. He was sent to school in Amsterdam, in order that he might forget his poetic fancies ; but the school-master, a negligent man, lived and moved in the atmosphere of the eighteenth century, and had a large library of the authors of that age, which young d'Israeli eagerly devoured. Before he was fifteen he had read Voltaire, and tried his strength on Bayle ; at eighteen he returned to England, a disciple of Rousseau. His stay at home was but short. His father told him that he had decided to send him away again — this time to a large mercantile house at Bordeaux. The incorrigible literary son answered that he had written a great poem against trade as the ruin of mankind. Instead of Bordeaux, he contented himself with going to Paris, where, until 1788, he spent his time in libraries and among savans. In England, he soon after began to publish poetical attempts, as well as those, annals, or rather anecdotes of literature, which made his name as an author, though they are remarkable neither for spirit nor accuracy.

The character of the quiet man of letters and bookworm forms in many respects a marked contrast to that of his son. At first sight, it is like the contrast between a learned Benedictine monk in his quiet cell, and a restless tribune, whose life is passed amidst the turmoil of the forum. Isaac dTsraeli was of a shy and retiring nature ; in his youth he was inclined to melancholy ; in manhood he was a collector ; as an old man he was given up to contemplation, too critical to be satisfied with his own performances, and too retiring ever to gain confidence in himself. Not even his growing reputation could give it him, for he best knew his own shortcomings, and he felt an inward schism between himself and the spirit of the age. In a literary point of view, he stood in England beneath a waning star ; he was a disciple of Pope and Boileau. Nevertheless, he saw the necessity, even by reason of his early enthusiasm for Rousseau, of giving more scope and freer play to nature and passion in poetry, without, on the other hand, possessing the powers of mind which would have enabled him to anticipate the coming change in English poetry. When the great naturalistic revolution in the literature of England was proclaimed and carried out by others, he was no longer young or pliant enough to take part in the movement. He lived for literature, but when he was young literature was old, and when he was old it had renewed its youth. The results of this discrepancy were, on the one hand, the continual secret distrust of his own powers, which is a weakness ; on the other, utter absence of vanity, always rare, and especially so in an author. Neither the weakness nor the virtue was inherited by his famous son. The simple bookworm produced a self-confident bravado, who has had both adroitness enough to conform to the powers that be, and power so to transform the tendencies of the age, that they have taken the stamp of his mind and will.

Even in outward things there is a contrast between father and son. Isaac dTsraeli lived in seclusion. When at home, although a married man, he generally spent the whole day and evening in his library ; his only diversion in London was going from one bookseller's to another. It would be scarcely possible to imagine a greater contrast than his son, who bears the complete stamp of a man of the world. But the contrast is still more striking when they are compared in their relations to politics. The father not only never took part in politics, he did not even understand them. It is clear that the son did not inherit his practical political vocation from his father.

And yet nature was experimenting with Isaac d'Israeli's mind, and laying the foundations for larger abilities. First, his literary studies and tastes were of great importance for his son. Nothing tends more to easy and rapid acquisition of faculty in the use of language than a literary forerunner in the race. Then some of the deepest primary faculties in Benjamin Disraeli's mind are obviously derived from his father. He was, in many respects, a genuine child of the eighteenth century, and everything in his son's mind which is in unison with the character and style of that age was inherited in a direct line. In a literary point of view, the father was not much more than a living lexicon of authors, but a lexicon of the times of the Encyclopaedists ; he had early laid aside the prejudices of his contemporaries, in order to imbibe their philosophy, and was a decided, though quiet free-thinker, destitute of a creed both in the literal or intellectual sense of the word. In 1833 he published a work called " The Genius of Judaism," in which he ridicules, from a deistic standpoint, the Israelitish constitution of the

Mosaic laws and regulations about health and food, regarded as revealed and eternal truth. He long entertained a project of writing a history of the English free-thinkers. He was all his life an unprejudiced sceptic, with a tendency to sarcastic wit.

This keen and negative quality is also the first to show itself in the son. The mystical and romantic Benjamin Disraeli begins as a satirist. The first part of "Vivian Grey," " Popanilla," " Ixion in Heaven," and "The Infernal Marriage," are so many satires in the spirit of the eighteenth century. " Vivian Grey " is a type for Beaumarchais ; " Popanilla," a fantastic journey in Swift's style ; the family descent of the two mythological tales is to be traced to no less a person than Lucian ; they would certainly not disgrace Voltaire, of whom they remind one, and might, without profanation, be set to music by Offenbach, so blasphemous are they against the gods of Greece. We should not understand anything of the character of Benjamin Disraeli if we overlooked the fact that even his theories and fantasies, which bear the strongest impress of the great romantic reaction, had been, without exception, disinfected by born scepticism and early developed critical faculty. Even in his castles in the air, you do not find the malaria arising from the Maremmas of superstition and prejudice; they are the Fata Morganas of the desert, the products, consciously constructed, of an arid and fiery fantasy ; by careful observation they may be easily distinguished from the structures of dreamland and reverie, which owe their existence to naive and thorough mysticism.

Not only the critical and negative, but also the positive, romantic, Conservative tendencies of Benjamin Disraeli are derived from his father. The old litterateur, although Radical in a religious sense, had an instinctive liking for the Tory way of thinking. He was attracted by the house of Stuart; he laboured for five years on his work on the reign of Charles I., and received for it an Oxford diploma, with the dedication, " Optimi regis optimo vindici ; " he considered his work on James I. a literary matter of conscience. In both cases it was his conviction that he was the vindicator of men who had been misunderstood, but it was not mere accident that they were both crowned heads who coveted absolute power, and were defeated in the struggle with Puritanism and parliament. The son has followed in his father's footsteps in these sympathies ; in sundrypassages in his writings he has broken a lance for the Stuarts ; he has adopted and defended the title of " martyr " for Charles I., and he even says, in " Sybil/' that never did a man die a hero's death for a greater cause — the cause of the Church and the poor. That these two unpopular monarchs of for-

The Family. iy

mer times were dissenters from the dominant religion has, perhaps, conduced to ensure sympathy with authors who Sprung from a dissenting body. It is plain, however, that the younger Disraeli, however little Conservative when he first appeared as a politician, was not influenced by political Radicalism in the parental home. With the Voltairean opinions which then prevailed in good society, he received, much earlier, some germs of decided Toryism, germs which were enveloped in a certain spirit of opposition to the popular conception of the political history of England, but which, under favourable circumstances, were strong enough to develop themselves.

We know too little of Disraeli's mother to judge what qualities he may have inherited from her. She died after forty-five years of married life, in her seventy-second year. He seems to consider that he derived his faculties exclusively from the paternal side. And we find in the practical energy and enterprising character of the grandfather, the complement of the purely literary and contemplative nature of the father, which seems to be necessary to weld and polish the practical and literary gifts of a descendant of the race into a two-edged sword.

As the son of Isaac d'Israeli, the future statesman was born not only with a certain range of qualities, but in a somewhat exceptional social position. Authors then enjoyed higher consideration in Great Britain than now, and the elder d' Israeli had a popular and respected name. Besides his colleagues, among whom the poet and epicure Samuel Rogers was his friend, he was acquainted with many of the enlightened politicians and aristocrats of the day. The son, therefore, from his youth saw many distinguished men and women in his father's house, and the father's name opened many an aristocratic house to the son. The advantage generally enjoyed by the born aristocrat alone of having in early youth made acquaintances and connections which are otherwise the reward of long years of labour, was richly enjoyed by the young Disraeli. In his youthful works there are now and then traces that he was not unaware of the advantage of having such a father. Vivian Grey likes to hear his famous father praised ; in the " Young Duke " Disraeli dwells on the benefit, even to a boy, of having a living proof that the family blood is good for something, and says : " There is no pride like the pride of ancestry, for it is a blending of all emotions." And while the author seems involuntarily to be comparing his lot with that of the aristocracy, he continues: "How immeasurably superior to the herd is the man whose father' only is famous ! Imagine, then, the feelings of one who can trace his line through a thousand years of heroes and of princes ! " *

♦ Disraeli's singular pride of ancestry goes far beyond pride in his distinguished father ; but while his descent was necessarily only a disadvantage to him in a worldly point of view, and was the chief obstacle in his path, his position as his father's son gave him the start in the course offered him by destiny in the great European race for fame and distinction.

* " The Young Duke," p. 88.

Note. — The edition referred to throughout is Lord Beaconsfield's Novels and Tales in io vols. Great pains have been taken to find all the quotations, but as in many cases no references are given in the original work, a few very short ones have eluded me, and may not be quite verbatim. — Tr.

Chapter II. Boyhood

Benjamin Disraeli himself gives 1805 as the year of his birth, but he really seems to have been born on 21st of December, 1804.* His mother, Maria Basevi, bore first a daughter, Sarah, then three sons, of whom he was the eldest. He was received into the Jewish community; but when his father afterwards separated himself from it — if report speaks truly — he gave his friend Samuel Rogers leave to take him to church and have him baptized. Rogers was totally indifferent to religion, but it seemed to him a pity— so it is said — that this fine, intelligent boy should be excluded by his creed from the most important civil rights and Jiighest social advantages. Anyhow, the baptism took place in the parish of St. Andrews, on 31st of July, 1817. In the church registers, Benjamin Disraeli is spoken of as " about twelve years old."

He was sent to a private school at Winchester, and was afterwards placed for a short time in a

* Picciotto : " Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History," p. 300.

Boyhood. 21

lawyer's office. All desired information as to his inner life in his boyhood and early youth may be found in his novels. We learn from " Vivian Grey " and "Contarini Fleming," which contain unmistakable autobiographical elements relating to these years, what we should expect, that in this early period of Disraeli's life humiliations abounded as well as triumphs. In both books the hero is the decided favourite among the boys, from his abilities, his boldness, and his talents as a leader, and is acknowledged, so to speak, unanimously, as the cleverest and most original boy in the school. His English essays and verses are admired and copied. In short, he is the popular hero, while he regards his schoolfellows as beings whom he is resolved to rule. But behind all this popularity, the possibility of a general hatred is concealed, not only the envy which always pursues success, but fierce ill will of a special kind, brutal in its origin, and cruel in its exercise — in a word, the hatred of race. When the usher's dislike to Vivian Grey first breaks out, he uses the expression, " seditious stranger ; " and no sooner has the word been given, than his schoolfellows join in with, " No stranger ! no stranger ! " * This expression does not find its motive in the book, for in no sense of the word can Vivian Grey

LC be called a stranger in the school. The word has obviously crept into the novel from some reminiscence of the author's childhood ; only it was not the word used in reality, which more decidedly pointed to a foreign nationality, and sounded far more contemptuous.

On this subject, "Contarini Fleming" comes still nearer the truth, in which the hero, with his southern appearance and Italian descent, finds himself unhappy among his fair half-brothers in the north. " They were called my brothers, but Nature gave the lie to the reiterated assertion. There was no similitude between us. Their blue eyes, their flaxen hair, and their white visages, claimed no kindred with my Venetian countenance. Wherever I moved I looked around me, and beheld a race different from myself. There was no sympathy between my frame and the rigid clime whither I had been brought to live." *

If we add to the Venetian type the still deeper Israelitish stamp, and to the national contrast the religious prejudice as it existed in an English school in 1820, we shall be able to form an idea of Disraeli's feelings when he emerged from his father's house into boy's estate, and found that he was not looked upon as an equal, but as a " foreigner " of

Boyhood. 23

lower caste. Such an impression in those earlyyears is one of the deepest which can be received — one of those never effaced from sensitive and aristocratic minds. To feel yourself disgraced without being conscious of any fault ! To be looked down upon because of your appearance, your father, your people, your religion, your race ! A poor boy among rich ones, an illegitimate child among legitimate, a Catholic among Protestants, a deformed boy among well-grown schoolfellows, feels himself, each in his own way, thrust aside and humiliated. But a Jewish boy in a Christian school of the old-fashioned sort felt something of what all these feel put together. He learnt for the first time that he was a Jew, and all that the name implies. He discovered that he was not reckoned as one of the people among whom he lived, had no part in the deeds of their forefathers or in their history, but was an isolated being: and yet was constantly thrown with others, whom he did not know and had never seen before ; who regarded him as ugly, nay, even repulsive ; to whom his mode of speaking was ridiculous, nay, even repugnant ; and who pointed at him the ringer of scorn. In the reading lessons, a Jew was inevitably a ridiculous, vulgar, or mean and avaricious person, a cheat, a usurer, or a coward. And in the same class, or one close by, there was sure to be another boy of Jewish origin, whose countenance was branded with the mark of slavery, abject and degraded to the last degree, made to be a scapegoat and clown ; and at every blow struck at this poor wretch, he felt his own cheek burn, and every dastardly act of his was felt to be his own shame. Even when, by severe struggles, he had won comparative immunity for himself, he had not the slightest power to protect his brother Jew, or to secure this caricature of himself from general contempt and brutality. And why should he suffer all this ? Not at home, but at school did he find the answer. His people, who once in far distant ages were the blest and chosen people, were now cursed and rejected, were suffering the penalty for a crime committed by their fathers nearly two thousand years ago. O ignominy! Unconsciously and against his will, to belong to this despised and accursed nation ! Was not his grandmother at Enfield in the right in denying her kinship with them ; and was it not the most natural thing in the world to hate them himself, and thus to acquire the right to be considered an exception?