So wrote “Disraeli the Younger” during the perplexed crisis of 1833 in his rare pamphlet, What is he?11 which embodies his own large attitude. The sentence is characteristic and prophetic. Its last words were repeated more than forty years afterwards in the message of farewell to his constituents, when he quitted the lively scene of his triumphs for that grave assemblage, of which he once said that its aptitudes were best rehearsed among the tombstones.

In my last three chapters I shall touch on some unique phases of his boyhood, and outline several of his relations to his home, to society, to literature, to character, and to career. But here I shall attempt a less detailed account of his individuality and of the main ideas which flowed from it.

And first let me venture on two glimpses—one of his youth, the other of his age.

It is not difficult to collect from many scattered presentments some likeness of

Imagine, then, a romantic figure, a Southern shape in a Northern setting, a kind of Mediterranean Byron; for the stock of the Disraelis hailed from the Sephardim—Semites who had never quitted the midland coasts, and were powerful in Spain before the Goths. The form is lithe and slender, with an air of repressed alertness. The stature, above middle height. The head, long and compact; its curls, fantastic. The oval face, pale rather than pallid, with dark almond eyes of unusual depth, size, and lustre under a veil of drooping lashes. The chin, pointed with decision. The expression holds one, by turns keen and pensive; about it hovers a strange sense of inner watchfulness and ambushed irony, half mocking in defiance, half eager with conscious power. A languid reserve marks his bearing; it conceals a smouldering vehemence; its observant silence prepares amazement directly interest excites intercourse. Then indeed the scimitar, as it were, flashes forth unsheathed, and dazzles by its breathless fence of words with ideas. This ardour is not always pleasant; it breathes of storm; it speaks out elemental passions and grates against the smooth edges of civilisation. In the London medley he, like his friend Bulwer, studies a purposed posture. Dandyism and listlessness mask unsleeping energy. But at Bradenham, his constant retreat, the “Hurstley” of his last novel, all is natural and unconstrained. Here at least he is free. Here he “drives the quill” with his famous father, reads and rides, meditates and is mirthful. Here, with that gifted sister “Sa”—“Sa,” a name soon afterwards doubly endeared to him through Lord Lyndhurst’s daughter; “Sa,” who, while others doubt or twit, ever believes in and heartens him—he dreams, improvises, discourses. The rest may treat him as a moonstruck Bombastes,12 but his lofty visions are real to the gentle insight of affection. In the language of Shakespeare’s fine colloquy:—

Already, like one of those his biting pen had satirised, he too, it must be owned, teems with “confidence in the nation—and himself.” There was a daredevilry about him, and in those days a romantic melancholy, akin to that of the Spanish artist Goya. Far behind have faded those consuming pangs of boyish restlessness, when fevered imagination played vaguely on inexperience. Far behind, those schools of “words” which never slaked his thirst for ideas, and where he ran wild as rebel ringleader.13 Far away now, those boxing bouts witnessed by Layard’s mother. Past, that earliest and unpublished novel of Aylmer Papillon,14 which Murray praised but would not print. Past, that fugitive satire of the “New Dunciad,” which does not deserve to remain waste-paper.15 Past, that abortive journal, which in transforming an old periodical while adopting its name was to have revolutionised opinion.16 Vanished, too, those first outbursts of unchastened brilliance under the favouring auspices of the Layards’ fair kinswoman, Mrs. Austin. And the vista of his two long journeys have receded; the alternate spells of Venice, the Rhine and Rome, and afterwards of Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem. Past, also, the strange malady for which his Eastern travels proved the stranger cure. As he muses, the ball is at his feet. Yet, when the daydream fades, is he, perhaps, after all, only Alnaschar of the broken glass, bemoaning vain reveries amid the ruined litter of his overturned basket in the jeering market-place? The seed-time of reflection is over: he pants for action. No more for him the beaten tracks. Hitherto he had fed on books and dreams. The former had led him to a pondered plan, with Bolingbroke for clue and Pitt as example. The latter fired his ambition—his presumption—to realise them by restoring vanished life to a now mouldering party—by suiting old forms to new phases and heading them.

Next morning the secluded scholar, so friendly a contrast with his daring son, is bound for Oxford to receive his long delayed honours. This very day that son’s earliest election-procession starts from the doorway of the tranquil manor house.17 Already the budding genius has descried the dim future of his country, which he has proclaimed must be governed for and through the nation; of which, too, he has already sung in halting verse:—

What matter now the debts, the duns, the embarrassments for which he blushes?18 What matter the heartless allurements of siren fashion? His course is clear before him. He must win. He “has begun several times many things, and has often succeeded at last.” As for the taunt of “adventurer,” what are all original spirits that “burst their birth’s invidious bar” but adventurers? Such were Chatham,19 and Burke, and Canning, and Peel himself. But when the “adventurer” is one by temperament as well as occasion, how miraculous becomes his progress! “Adventures are to the adventurous.”

Many of us remember Disraeli in his age as he sauntered dreamily and slowly with the late Lord Rowton, and none who ever heard one of his last orations in the House of Lords can forget how, even when he was in pain, he sprang from his seat with the quick step of youth. The physical charm had disappeared. Few who gazed on that drawn countenance could have discerned in it the poetry and enthusiasm of his prime; only the unworn eyes preserved their piercing fires, and the sunken jaw was still masterful. A long discipline of iron self-control, much disillusion, growing disappointments with crowning triumphs, and latterly a great desolation, had subdued the fiercer force and the elastic buoyancy of his hey-day. Yet the intellectual charm, and the spell of mind and spirit had deepened their outward traces. Fastidious discernment, dispassionate will, penetrating insight, courage,20 patience, a certain winning gentleness underneath the scorn of shams, stamp every lineament. Below habitual insouciance, intensity, bigness of soul and purpose are prominent. The arch of the noble brow retains its height and curve. Surrounded though he be by friends and flatterers, he looks lonelier than of old. “I do not feel solitude,” he said, “it gives one repose.” Interested in every movement, and even in every trifle that engages thought, his gaze appears more turned within.

We know from Lady John Manners,21 and from other sources, how he loved flowers, and forestry, and study during the dinner-hour, more than all the social glitter; how he communed with the unseen; how far-reaching were his sympathies; what interest and curiosity he displayed in every form of career and purpose; how often to all the splendour which he had conquered he preferred converse with the weak, the lowly, the suffering; how his wise counsel and inexhaustible resource were sought and coveted by cottagers, by the toilers whose cause he made his own, by princes; how delicately considerate he was in his appointments, and for all in contact with him, how he would sacrifice a keen personal wish rather than disturb a pleasure or abridge a holiday; and yet how his playfulness of fancy mixed in pithy ironies with his very considerateness. A familiar instance—that of the attached servant who was to enjoy “the pleasures of memory”—occurred as he lay dying from the illness long and bravely concealed even from his intimates. He was truly unselfish, and he was never known to blame a subordinate. If things went wrong, he took the whole burden on his own shoulders. He exerted infinite pains to understand the conditions of and the organisations affecting labour.22 The Buckinghamshire peasants still cherish his memory; and it may be said with truth that the deepest affections of this extraordinary man, whom vapid worldlings sneered at as a callous cynic, were reserved for his country, his county, his home, and his friends, for effort and for distress. Many a young aspirant to fame, moreover, in literature or public life, has owed much to his generous encouragement. He liked to dwell on the vicissitudes of things,23 and his own motto, “Forti nihil difficile,” represents his conviction. In private, when he was not entertaining, his habits were of the simplest. In two things only he was profuse; books and light. He loved to see every room of Hughenden illuminated with candles. He was utterly careless of money. It is related, that when he accepted the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, he sent for the celebrated Mr. Padwick, and asked for a necessary advance. “On what security?” inquired the sporting speculator. “That of my name and my career,” was the answer. And the money was at once forthcoming, and punctually repaid. As is well known, he would often make his greatest efforts half dinnerless; and his delight was, after the strain and the plaudits had ceased, to betake himself in the dim hours of dawn to the supper which his devoted wife, who spared him every detail of management, had prepared, and there to recount to her the excitements of the debate. The pair would certainly have endorsed those verses of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, of which Byron was so fond—

His public and touching tribute to Mrs. Disraeli deserves repetition here; nor will the reader forget, among many hackneyed stories, that stern rebuke to the triflers overheard discussing the reasons for his marriage—“Because of a feeling to which such as you are strangers—gratitude.”

It was at Edinburgh, in 1867, when his old ally, Baillie Cochrane (Lord Lamington), toasted Mrs. Disraeli as her illustrious husband’s helper and his own dear friend for many years before Disraeli met her.24 Disraeli opened with the characteristic remark that their mutual intimate “certainly had every opportunity of studying the subject to which he has drawn attention.” And he went on to say, “I do owe to that lady all I think that I have ever accomplished, because she has supported me with her counsel, and consoled me by the sweetness of her mind and disposition.” Six years after his marriage, he had dedicated the three volumes of his Sybil, “To one whose noble spirit and gentle nature ever prompt her to sympathise with the suffering; to one whose sweet voice has often encouraged, and whose taste and judgment have ever guided their pages; the most severe of critics, but—a perfect wife.”

Several of his nice things were said in Scotland, and one of the nicest was his compliment when he was installed Rector of Glasgow University. He described his visit to Abbotsford, whither he had repaired in his extreme youth with an enthusiastic letter from John Murray the First, his father’s old friend, to Sir Walter Scott, that father’s old acquaintance. “He showed me,” he said of the laird, “his demesne, and he treated me, not as if I was an obscure youth, but as if I were already Lord Rector of Glasgow University.”25

Disraeli’s marriage was the happiest turning-point in his career; and that which had begun partly in interest, soon developed into the warmest, the most entire and the most mutual affection. Mrs. Disraeli, at a great country house, always used to commence conversation by the query, “Do you like my Dizzy? Because, if you don’t——” From another, on a visit most advantageous to him, Disraeli departed, despite pressing remonstrance, on the plea that the “air” disagreed with Mrs. Disraeli—because she had complained of their host’s rudeness. It will one day be found that to this gifted and selfless woman, English history owed much at several serious conjunctures. I cannot resist relating a good story in another vein. Shortly after Disraeli’s marriage, a guest at Grosvenor Gate, pointing to a portrait of the late Mr. Wyndham Lewis, Mrs. Disraeli’s first husband and with Disraeli member for Maidstone, asked him whom it represented. “Our former colleague,” was the rejoinder. At a much later date Mr. Frith was painting a group in which Disraeli figured. As her husband was going, Mrs. Disraeli whispered to the artist, “Remember one thing, if you don’t mind, his pallor is his beauty.” She was afraid that his complexion would be coloured. To the last she would say, as she did during his interrupted speech at Aylesbury in 1847:—“He mind them! Not a bit of it. He’s a match for them all.” Sir Horace Rumbold has just told us how, at the scene of Disraeli’s investiture as Earl, a sob was heard from the crowd. It was the grief of an old and faithful servant sighing, “Ah! If only she had lived to see him now!”

Like childless men in general, he was devoted to children. More than one still living remembers his happy words of playful intimacy. To women from the days of his pet Sheridans to those of the present Lady Currie, he appealed with magnetism throughout his career, and there are few more romantic episodes than his meetings, after hesitation, with the elderly Mrs. Bridges Williams at the fountain in the Exhibition of 1862, the existing correspondence which ensued, and the thumping legacy which crowned it. One who has read that correspondence has assured me that its gentle chivalry is most striking. In the midst of engrossing occupation he never ceased to cheer the old lady with gossip of his doings, and even to argue with her, as on an affair of state, regarding the advisability of Struve’s seltzer water as a remedy.

Of Queen Victoria’s affection for him I will only say that it was because he treated her as a woman. She grew to lean on his wisdom and his judgment. On more than one occasion he acted as mediator in her family. He was sincerely attached to her. His witticism, when asked for a reason of her favour, will bear repetition: “I never argue, I never contradict, but I sometimes forget.”

His influence over the late Queen was more remarkable even than has hitherto been disclosed. And in this regard I am able to state that, while out of office, he negotiated with extreme tact, under delicate circumstances, the peerage conferred on a most amiable prince, now no more; and further, that at each stage of all its bearings Queen Victoria consulted and deferred to his counsel, kindness, and resource. I may add that he also devised a means of providing the same lamented prince with an absorbing occupation.

He was a firm friend; loyalty he always extolled as a sovereign virtue. Not many have the faculty for friendship in old age as Lord Beaconsfield had it. His passion for mastery, his addiction to mystery were rivalled by his immense faithfulness. If he was always “the man of destiny,” he was also ever “faithful unto death.” And his real friendships were warm as well as constant. While he was at Glasgow to be inaugurated Lord Rector of its University, he heard good tidings of an old associate. “Mrs. Disraeli and I,” he wrote, “were over-joyed, and we danced a Highland fling in our nightgowns.” The picture raises a smile,26 but it also strikes an unexpected chord.

Of music and of art in general he was a devotee, as many passages in his novels attest. He had his own theories of their influence on composition and on literature. Murillo was his favourite painter, Mozart his favourite composer. He ever deplored the insensibility of the Government to the duty of elevating taste for the beautiful. When the Blacas collection of gems was in the market at the price of £70,000, the Administration of the day at first refused to entertain the purchase, but Disraeli persuaded them by offering to find the money himself, if they persisted. In this case, as in so many others (notably that of the Suez Canal shares), imagination forwarded the public interest; for this collection is now worth some threefold of what was expended. When a great work by Raphael was offered to the Government, and Disraeli’s colleagues were in doubt, Disraeli sent for the leading dealer, in whose hands the commission had been placed, inspected the picture himself, discoursed charmingly and critically of its merits, with the result that it is now in the National Gallery. Since even trifles about the eminent possess interest, I may add the following story of his old age. He was showing a distinguished visitor (still living) his family portraits at Hughenden. He paused before a pastel of a lovely child wafted by seraphs through the skies. “That,” he exclaimed, “is a pet picture; observe how exquisitely the draperies of the angels are arranged. The baby’s me!” His fondness for beautiful form extended to his own handwriting.

In matters of courtesy he was old-fashioned and punctilious. To the last he resented that grotesque disfigurement which was beginning to make manners ugly before he died. Even at an earlier date, “Manners are easy,” said “Coningsby,” “and life is hard.” “And I wish to see things exactly the reverse,” said “Lord Henry,” “the modes of subsistence less difficult, the conduct of life more ceremonious.”

In his fiction it was often objected that he over-depicted great splendour and supreme beauty; that it was thronged with “daughters” and mansions “of the gods.” But, if he erred in these respects, it was from familiarity and not from ostentation, as Lady John Manners has pointed out at some length. “It must be recollected,” she wrote, thinking of Lothair, “that many of those who most appreciated him, and whose friendship he warmly reciprocated, are surrounded in daily life by a certain amount of state which employs their dependants.” So, too, with regard to the peaceful and prosperous marriages of those homes of forty years ago on which he delighted to dwell. He loved the gentle Buckinghamshire landscape, with its treasures of association in every cranny, more than all the remembered luxuriance of the South and glare of the East. And it should also be remembered that his works abound in sympathetic descriptions of all kinds and conditions of men, including the strangest and humblest. They were taken from personal observation, and he himself would penetrate the queerest haunts to gain the most curious insight. The common and the uncommon people fascinated him, for in them he found ideas; the middling charmed him less. He delighted to invest the seemingly commonplace with significance, and also to strip the pretentiously important of its wonder. Not even Dickens, as I shall hint hereafter, knew or loved his London better. I shall also, in the proper place, touch on the exotic element in his style and accent. Mr. John Morley has aptly compared it to Goethe’s dictum about St. Peter’s, that, though it is baroque; it is always the expression of something great and not merely grandiose. His big words are never for little things. Undoubtedly some of his earliest works are deficient in taste; and there is a certain fierce hardness in their abrupt violence. Mrs. Austin advised him in omissions from the original manuscript of Vivian Grey; it was to women that he owed his training in these directions. His knowledge was vast and profound, and he exercised the habit of pursuing long trains of thought in reflection. He seldom worked at night, preferring that season for brooding over his ideas. But at all times, contrary to the superficial opinion, he worked long and hard, sometimes over ten hours a day. His gift of divination never dimmed his passion for study, until old age and ill-health warned him that it must pause. He never ceased to deplore the want of “that boundless leisure which we literary men need.” To the last, as Lord Iddesleigh has pointed out, he studied the Bible in the earliest hours. In church attendance he was what Mr. Gladstone used to call a “oncer.” He was a regular communicant.

By success he was never inflated, by reversals never depressed, although by nature elastic.27 It was not until 1874 that his power became wholly unfettered, and then foreign crisis claimed the attention that he longed to bestow on social improvements and Colonial Confederation. His three previous spans of office had been equally brief. For some twenty years he headed, at intervals, a despairing Opposition, whose mistrustful murmurs had to be stilled, whose doubts had to be dispelled, and the immense difficulties of whose management he has graphically portrayed in a notable passage from his Life of Lord George Bentinck. To the printed diatribes which assailed him he was indifferent. In parliamentary generalship, demanding an infinite insight and management, an instant recognition of movements in the mass, and “creation of opportunity,” he was unsurpassed even by Peel, who played on Parliament “as on an old fiddle.” To his urgent control even so early as 1854, and when out of office, the correspondence with Spencer Walpole affords a striking insight. “My dear Walpole,” he writes on November 29 of that year, “remember to write to the Queen if anything of interest happens to-night. Tell somebody, Harry Lennox or another, to send me a bulletin by this messenger of what is taking place, but not later than ten o’clock, as I shall retire early, that being my only chance. Be positive that the financial statement will be made on Friday.”28

What he really valued in power was its faculty of influence. Otherwise it was bitter-sweet. He once told a high aspirant for high office, that as for its pleasures, they lay chiefly in contrasting the knowledge it afforded of what was really being done with the ridiculous chatter about affairs in the circles that one frequented.

His wit, his brightness of humour, and lightness of touch, long prevented many of his contemporaries from taking him seriously. Literary statesmen are often belittled by their generation; imaginative statesmen, always. They have usually to await a career after death. The stereotyped character imposed on him till his pluck and power appealed to the nation at large was largely due to the old Whigs (“oligarchy is ever hostile to genius”29), who for years refused to regard him with anything but amusement, yet whose drawing-rooms had been the readiest to applaud those sparkling sallies of 1845 and 1846 that demolished the premier whom they too wished to destroy; that coterie so long trained to make popular causes preserve their exclusive power, and of whom he wrote in 1833, “A Tory, a Radical, I understand; a Whig, a democratic aristocrat, I cannot comprehend.” It was not due to the Peelites, who frankly hated him as an open foe. Even the Liberals (many of whom he counted as personal friends), when he warned them of the underground rumblings, ominous of social earthquake in Ireland, shrugged their shoulders; and when he was reported, glass in eye, to have answered a duchess inquisitive about the exact date of the dissolution with “You darling,” they split their sides, and guffawed, “There he is again!” They agreed with his old family acquaintance, Bernal Osborne (if it was he), to whom the heartlessness was attributed of saying, when Lord Beaconsfield was stricken with his lingering illness, “Overdoing it, as usual.”

And yet how interesting it is to find Disraeli in the Grant-Duff diaries discoursing eagerly in the faint dawn on Westminster Bridge of Lord John Russell. Perhaps Disraeli’s greatest admirer among opponents was Cobden, and that admiration was warmly returned. Both of them had one great virtue in common, and a rare one, especially in public life—gratitude; and both could afford to be generous. Read the letter now first disclosed by Mr. John Morley, whose literary appreciation of Disraeli is manifest, in which Disraeli sought to win Gladstone with “deign to be magnanimous.”

Disraeli’s own magnanimity—frankly owned by Mr. Gladstone—was conspicuous though it is unfamiliar. During the decade of the ’fifties, on at least four occasions30 he offered to sacrifice his personal position to Graham, Palmerston, and Gladstone successively for the interests of his country and his party. In 1868 and 1869 he indignantly defended the last against the carping “tail” of his supporters, rebuking alike the “frothy spouters of sedition,” and those who preferred remembrance of “accidental errors” to gratitude for “splendid gifts and signal services.” His unstinted praise of worthy foes, his conduct even towards the ostracised Dr. Kenealy, are constant proofs of a leading trait. He always forebore to strike an opponent to please the whim or the passion of the popular breeze.

À propos of Mr. Gladstone, who himself paid a tribute to the absence of rancour in his rival, I may be permitted to recall an anecdote told me by the late Sir John Millais. When Disraeli stood (though then suffering, he refused to sit) for his last portrait, his “dear Apelles” noticed his gaze riveted on an engraving of the artist’s fine portrait of the great premier. “Would you care to have it?” he inquired. “I was rather shy of offering it to you.” “I should be delighted to have it,” was the reply. “Don’t imagine that I have ever disliked Mr. Gladstone; on the contrary, my only difficulty with him has been that I could never understand him.” And Carlyle himself thawed when Disraeli, whom he had so long hysterically abused, but many of whose ideas, as I shall prove, he shared, offered him public recognition in a letter which gave as a reason for uninheritable honours, “I have remembered that you too, like myself, are childless.” But Carlyle, who had aspersed him, never denied that he looked facts in the face without mistaking phantoms for them. Even from the first he owned length of view. In his old age a certain far-awayness of expression was very noticeable.

I have mentioned Mr. Gladstone. It was well for England that two great attitudes towards great questions should have been thrown into sharp relief for nearly a score of years by the duel between two great personalities; and it was also well for Disraeli that “England does not love coalitions.” We know from Mr. Gladstone’s own lips that much in his rival had won his respect, while from Mr. Morley we glean that Mr. Gladstone even struggled with a sort of subacid liking for one whom he too could “never comprehend.”31 The letters of both after Lady Beaconsfield’s death are refreshing instances of how sworn enemies of the arena may grasp hands under the softening solemnity of bereavement, and for a moment forget the hard words which, under irritation, they certainly used of each other.

Disraeli was older than Gladstone, and had been early acquainted with him. In the ’thirties he sat next to “young Gladstone” at the Academy dinner, and regretted that he had been relegated from “the wits,” with whom he had been ranged in the year previous, to “the politicians.” In the ’forties Disraeli made one of his few mistakes in prognostic, when he wrote to his sister, “I doubt if he has an ‘avenir’;” but the significance of Gladstone’s resignation at this juncture on “Maynooth,” and the peculiar circumstances of the Peelites must be borne in mind. Disraeli could scarcely then divine the surprises of oscillation in store.

Except in vigour of undaunted character, and in a sort of inward loneliness, their qualities were opposed. The intensity of the one was austere, imperious, imposing, and didactic; of the other, buoyant, lively, and poignant. Frequently the flippancy of certain leaders provoked his gravity; more frequently the solemnity of others upset his own. Gladstone moved by violent reaction and hasty rebound; Disraeli, by a spring of step, it is true, but of a step measured, wary, and equal. Disraeli stamped himself on his age; it was often the “Time-Spirit” that impressed itself on Mr. Gladstone, a list of whose changeful “convictions”32 from 1836 to 1896 might fill a small volume. Again, Disraeli’s utterance left a stronger sense of reserve power, of something serious behind the veil. Mr. Gladstone’s phases, always sincere, in the main struck more the conscience of certain sections; Disraeli’s ideas, the national feelings. Mr. Gladstone’s subtleties were those of a theologian; they did not quicken the lay mind. Disraeli’s were the subtleties of an artist; they put things in new perspectives. It might be said that by nature and unconscious bent, the one hid simplicity under the form of subtlety, while with the other the process was the converse. In oratory, Mr. Gladstone convinced by height and redundance of enthusiasm, by depth of feeling and weight or wealth of words and gestures; Disraeli, more by grasp, incisiveness, and point; his imagination played all round many sides of his subject. Gladstone’s eloquence resembled the storminess and the mist of the North Sea; Disraeli’s, the strange lights and shadows, the subtle and tideless lustre of the Mediterranean. As Mr. Gladstone warmed to his theme, he increased in eloquence; his perorations are always great. It was in peroration that Disraeli sometimes failed, except in his after-dinner speeches, which never missed fire from start to finish.

Mr. Gladstone was saturated, Disraeli tinctured, with the classics. Mr. Gladstone was essentially the scholar, and he was Homeric, while Disraeli was Horatian and Tacitean. His ready acquaintance with Latin masterpieces was shown when he first took the oaths as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and hit off a most happy quotation on the spur of the moment; nor will it be forgotten that once, when he was citing a classic in the House, he added, “Which, for the sake of the successful capitalists around me, I will now try to translate.”

Again, despite Mr. Gladstone’s immense versatility, there was always something cloistral about him. He himself confessed that till he was fifty he did not “know the world.” I venture to doubt if he ever knew it, and it was just this academic simplicity that so often led his huge brain-power to deal with unsubstantial material.

Mr. Gladstone will not live through his books. He was far more a writer than an author, though he was always distinguished in all his undertakings. But he was doctrinaire; and he was almost devoid of any real sense of humour. On the appearance of “Nicholas Nickleby” he owned its merit, but singled out its pathos with the criticism that he was grieved by the absence from it of the religious sentiment—“No Church!” In this respect Disraeli and Gladstone were brought into amusing contrast during the Bulgarian atrocity campaign. Mr. Gladstone had characterised the Premier’s attitude as “diabolical.” Disraeli, in a speech, referred to Mr. Gladstone’s having called him “a devil.” Mr. Gladstone denied the impeachment, and asked for verse and chapter. Disraeli rejoined by writing that “the gentlemen who so kindly assist me in the conduct of public affairs” had used their best endeavours to ascertain the precise time and place when the Prince of Darkness had been named, but hitherto without success.

A famous bookseller, with whom both statesmen frequently conversed, used to recount that Disraeli once inquired, as was his wont, what of new interest was forthcoming. He mentioned one of Mr. Gladstone’s Vatican pamphlets. “No,” was the answer; “please not that. Mr. Gladstone is a powerful writer, but nothing that he writes is literature.”

In the House of Commons Disraeli had schooled himself from the first to conceal the emotions of a nature naturally quick and sensitive. He early lit on two mechanical devices for this purpose: the one was to stroke his knees regularly with his hand, the other to scan the clock. When he was much angered it was only by a change of colour that his agitation was ever betrayed. It must be confessed that he loved to “draw” Mr. Gladstone, and those who remember how, when Disraeli sat down and relapsed into impassivity, Mr. Gladstone jumped up with a look of rage and a voice of thunder, will admit that both performances were perfect. But the audience expected the scene which became habitual, and even supreme actors are influenced by the expectation of their audience. Neither Gladstone nor Disraeli ever stooped to ill-nature. Great men are not petty. But the moral indignation of the one, and the intellectual indignation of the other, which sometimes exchanged places, lent the semblance of pique or of quarrel. Disraeli’s dislike of spleen is well displayed by what he once said of Abraham Hayward, the caustic reviewer: “If that man were to be run over in the streets, you would see his venom swimming in the gutters.”

In debate, Disraeli’s characteristics were a quick readiness and an inexhaustible power of diverting discussion to new channels and of defeating expectation. The occasion when, in reply to Mr. Whalley concerning the Jesuits, he answered that one of their pet devices was to send over Jesuits in disguise to decry the Jesuits, will recur to the memory. His power of literary illustration needs no comment. Two brilliant instances are that of the boots of the Lion embracing the chambermaid of the Boar in connection with the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, and that charming one about the Abyssinian expedition, where he reminded us that the standard of St. George was flying over the mountains of Rasselas.33 In retort he was supreme. Two of the best instances are to be noted in the rejoinder to Peel about “candid friends” and Canning, and in the pause he made when in a much later speech he said, “I have never attacked any one” (cries of “Peel”) “unless I was first assailed.” I shall relate some others hereafter. His self-imposed impassiveness of demeanour in the House was that of a sentinel on bivouac; it became exaggerated by the contrast of his illustrious compeer’s extreme excitability. Disraeli was very zealous for the honour of the House in which he passed the greater portion of his life. On one occasion a young and violent adversary insinuated that Disraeli had told a lie. Disraeli calmly cleared himself to the general satisfaction, and his denouncer began to feel uncomfortable; still more so when he was sent for to the great man’s private room. What was his surprise when he was shaken warmly by the hand. “We all make mistakes,” said Disraeli, “when we are young. But please to remember all your life that the House of Commons is a house of gentlemen.”

For sheer insight into the march of ideas and reach of vision there is no comparison between the two. Even in the ’forties Disraeli perceived that the coming choice lay between absolute democracy and a monarchical democracy. Afterwards—in the early ’fifties, while monarchy in England was still far from popular—he laid his plans—as is apparent from his contributions to his organ, The Press, in 1853—to popularise monarchy and educate democracy before enfranchising it; and, not till that was accomplished, to re-imperialise Great Britain. “He has not,” he wrote in 1853 of Lord John Russell, “comprehended that for the last twenty years the choice is between the maintenance of those institutions and habits of thought which preserve monarchy, and that gradual change into absolute democracy to which Tocqueville somewhere rashly considered all the tendencies of our age impel the destinies of Europe.... The Whigs should have been conservative of the reformed constitution, and have developed it....”34 While Gladstone was refining a rather tortuous conscience into making the forlorn Peelites alternate between the Conservatives and the Whigs, Disraeli was reconstructing and developing a national party. While Gladstone and Sidney Herbert, in righteous indignation at Peel’s memory, were enraged at the delinquency of not struggling for absolute protection when the Derby Ministry assumed office, Disraeli showed that the principle of his struggle (continued as regarded the sugar repeal) had been land and labour. He must now benefit these by alleviations, rather than, as a responsible Minister, attempt an upheaval of what the nation had finally endorsed, and set private opinion as to particular measures at variance with the possibility of government at all. Had he done so he would have been doing what Fox himself had not attempted with regard to Catholic emancipation, what Lord John Russell had not thought of in 1847, what no responsible Minister could have compassed, and what, Lord John Russell added, the Whigs could not do in 1835. And yet, out of sheer honest hatred, he was vilified by those “high and stubborn spirits who, with the severity peculiar to those censors who cannot aspire to be consuls, refuse to acknowledge that there could be any virtue of necessity, ... and could not enlarge their comprehension of the requisites of a statesman beyond quotations from ‘Hansard.’ There were surely some juster thinkers in the House of Commons who must have trembled at the doctrine that men in office are rigidly to carry out the opinions they proposed in opposition.”35 That, he points out, is the function of opposition, and the duty of supporting opinions which a nation has cancelled never arises unless those opinions have sent you to office. As he puts it, “Themis is the goddess of opposition, but Nemesis sits in Downing Street.” In the overthrow of Peel lay a very different moral, and by that overthrow he wished to lay bare the choice between “Liberal opinions” and “popular principles,” between Peel’s sudden adoption of the “physical enjoyment” theory of regeneration and his own. By that destruction he eventually ended the Whigs and Peelites alike, and set before the country the true choice that awaited it, instead of the perplexity of parties36 which, joined to detestation of himself, caused the coalition of 1853 and prevented the contrast of the ideas which really divided the minds of men from being prominent in true proportions.

As a practical statesman, Disraeli thought more of those moral elements by which the State can square private duty with public interest; Gladstone, more of those elements above and beyond conduct. Gladstone was perhaps more of an apostle, Disraeli of a seer. Gladstone owned a noble heart with lofty spiritual standards, and an enormous quality of moral resentment; but his Church views coloured his life as much as his religious convictions, while his minute and perplexing scruples too often changed the forms of his enthusiasms, led zeal to chime with prejudice, and sometimes sent him astray altogether into self-deception.

Gladstone was a strange compound of diverse elements—of Highlander and Lowlander, of Scotland, Liverpool, Oxford, and Italy. In some respects he might even be termed the Dante of politics; but in others he was occasionally deemed its Ignatius Loyala. Disraeli, on the other hand, depended on his singular force of independence and of native sight and foresight. Those who admired the early Gladstone as Sir Galahad never wished him to sit on the seat of Merlin; nay, Gladstone himself perpetually deemed Disraeli, Machiavelli, or even Cagliostro. In relation to Disraeli, Gladstone would have perhaps addressed England with “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?” while Disraeli might have retorted by the witticism of Sarah, Duchess of Marborough, on the eagerness of James the Second to drag his country to heaven with him. It was just Disraeli’s originality and length of view that caused him to be maligned as well as misunderstood, though by some his conduct towards Peel was not unnaturally eyed askance. And yet, in Mr. Morley’s “Life,” Lord John Russell is to be found vindicating his own share in that transaction,37 and Sir James Graham himself admitting that Peel provoked what he suffered.38 In the eyes of many, Gladstone was Homer’s “old man of the sea” trying to hold Proteus, and yet none proved more Protean through enlarging aspirations than “the old man” himself. Perhaps Gladstone regarded the world more as the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” Disraeli more as “Vanity Fair.” Gladstone had more sail,39 Disraeli more ballast. The one floated on waves of agitation, the other desired a strong government by steadying the people and attaching them to institutions. Moreover, Gladstone constantly viewed the State from the standpoint of his particular Church opinions. Disraeli believed that the principle of the Revolution had never been perfected by the due development of popular institutions. He agreed with Pym that “the best form of government is that which doth dispose and actuate every part and member of a State to the common good.”

Disraeli owned, of course, his foibles, though he was too proud ever to be very vain. As we shall find later on, when I come to his faults of temperament, his grasp of ideas occasionally pressed them too literally both on life and letters. He tended to overstrain his lights and shadows. His imagination sometimes ran riot in its colours, and throughout tended to exaggerate the forms of events, though hardly ever their significance, which he was often the first to divine. He is said to have cherished some superstitions about lucky days and unlucky colours, but for these I cannot vouch. I can, however, for the fact that he was once seen by intimates to wear a green velvet smoking-coat, though one of the few occasions on which he troubled the newspapers was to refute the slander of having, when young, appeared in green trousers.40 And here I may perhaps be pardoned for inserting a slight story about Mrs. Disraeli, which comes from the same source as the last. Dr. Guthrie was once staying at Grosvenor Gate, and invited his hostess to visit him at Glasgow. “I will,” she smiled, “if you will promise to wear your kilt in the streets.” “Perhaps I will,” he replied, with hesitation. “You had better be careful, Guthrie,” interposed Disraeli, “for that woman, I assure you, means what she says.”

In taste and in phrase he was naturally extravagant, but his epigrams were never for the sake of paradox, and were always the summaries of wisdom and reflection. They were light, not frivolous; they were imaginative proverbs. There never was a wittier man, and his wit lent itself to his ironic humour. He loved effects that struck imagination, but ever for a crucial purpose. It was said of him by an intimate that one of his sentences—and in conversation he was sparing—left more behind than a long talk with others of consummate talent. As for the scathing sarcasm—his weapon of self-defence during his earlier stages—at times over-savage and belying his normal cheeriness—sobriety of judgment is compatible with—