Chapter 1

Chapter 13,853 wordsPublic domain

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STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY BIOGRAPHY

JAMES BRYCE

Author of 'The Holy Roman Empire,' 'The American Commonwealth', etc.

London Macmillan and Co., Limited New York: The Macmillan Company 1903

CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT President of Harvard University

IN COMMEMORATION OF A LONG AND VALUED FRIENDSHIP

PREFACE

The first and the last of these Studies relate to persons whose fame has gone out into all lands, and about whom so much remains to be said that one who has reflected on their careers need not offer an apology for saying something. Of the other eighteen sketches, some deal with eminent men whose names are still familiar, but whose personalities have begun to fade from the minds of the present generation. The rest treat of persons who came less before the public, but whose brilliant gifts and solid services to the world make them equally deserve to be remembered with honour. Having been privileged to enjoy their friendship, I have felt it a duty to do what a friend can to present a faithful record of their excellence which may help to keep their memory fresh and green.

These Studies are, however, not to be regarded as biographies, even in miniature. My aim has rather been to analyse the character and powers of each of the persons described, and, as far as possible, to convey the impression which each made in the daily converse of life. All of them, except Lord Beaconsfield, were personally, and most of them intimately, known to me.

In the six Studies which treat of politicians I have sought to set aside political predilections, and have refrained from expressing political opinions, though it has now and then been necessary to point out instances in which the subsequent course of events has shown the action of Lord Beaconsfield, Mr. Lowe, and Mr. Gladstone to have been right or wrong (as the case may be) in the action they respectively took.

The sketches of T. H. Green, E. A. Freeman, and J. R. Green were originally written for English magazines, and most of the other Studies have been published in the United States. All of those that had already appeared in print have been enlarged and revised, some indeed virtually rewritten. I have to thank the proprietors of the _English Historical Review_, the _Contemporary Review_, and the _New York Nation_, as also the Century Company of New York, for their permission to use so much of the matter of the volume as had appeared (in its original form) in the organs belonging to them respectively.

_March 6, 1903._

CONTENTS

Page I. Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield 1804-1881 1 II. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster 1815-1881 69 III. Thomas Hill Green 1836-1882 85 IV. Archibald Campbell Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury 1811-1882 100 V. Anthony Trollope 1815-1882 116 VI. John Richard Green 1837-1883 131 VII. Sir George Jessel 1824-1883 170 VIII. Hugh M'Calmont Cairns, Earl Cairns 1819-1885 184 IX. James Fraser, Bishop of Manchester 1818-1885 196 X. Stafford Henry Northcote, Earl of Iddesleigh 1818-1887 211 XI. Charles Stewart Parnell 1846-1891 227 XII. Henry Edward Manning, Archbishop and Cardinal 1808-1892 250 XIII. Edward Augustus Freeman 1823-1892 262 XIV. Robert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke 1811-1892 293 XV. William Robertson Smith 1846-1894 311 XVI. Henry Sidgwick 1838-1900 327 XVII. Edward Ernest Bowen 1836-1901 343 XVIII. Edwin Lawrence Godkin 1831-1902 363 XIX. John Emerich Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton 1834-1902 382 XX. William Ewart Gladstone 1809-1898 400

BENJAMIN DISRAELI, EARL OF BEACONSFIELD[1]

When Lord Beaconsfield died in 1881 we all wondered what people would think of him fifty years thereafter. Divided as our own judgments were, we asked whether he would still seem a problem. Would opposite views regarding his aims, his ideas, the sources of his power, still divide the learned, and perplex the ordinary reader? Would men complain that history cannot be good for much when, with the abundant materials at her disposal, she had not framed a consistent theory of one who played so great a part in so ample a theatre? People called him a riddle; and he certainly affected a sphinx-like attitude. Would the riddle be easier then than it was for us, from among whom the man had even now departed?

When he died, there were many in England who revered him as a profound thinker and a lofty character, animated by sincere patriotism. Others, probably as numerous, held him for no better than a cynical charlatan, bent through life on his own advancement, who permitted no sense of public duty, and very little human compassion, to stand in the way of his insatiate ambition. The rest did not know what to think. They felt in him the presence of power; they felt also something repellent. They could not understand how a man who seemed hard and unscrupulous could win so much attachment and command so much obedience.

Since Disraeli departed nearly one-half of those fifty years has passed away. Few are living who can claim to have been his personal friends, none who were personal enemies. No living statesman professes to be his political disciple. The time has come when one may discuss his character and estimate his career without being suspected of doing so with a party bias or from a party motive. Doubtless those who condemn and those who defend or excuse some momentous parts of his conduct, such as, for instance, his policy in the East and in Afghanistan from 1876 to 1879, will differ in their judgment of his wisdom and foresight. If this be a difficulty, it is an unavoidable one, and may never quite disappear. There were in the days of Augustus some who blamed that sagacious ruler for seeking to check the expansion of the Roman Empire. There were in the days of King Henry the Second some who censured and others who praised him for issuing the Constitutions of Clarendon. Both questions still remain open to argument; and the conclusion any one forms must affect in some measure his judgment of each monarch's statesmanship. So differences of opinion about particular parts of Disraeli's long career need not prevent us from dispassionately inquiring what were the causes that enabled him to attain so striking a success, and what is the place which posterity is likely to assign to him among the rulers of England.

First, a few words about the salient events of his life, not by way of writing a biography, but to explain what follows.

He was born in London, in 1804. His father, Isaac Disraeli, was a literary man of cultivated taste and independent means, who wrote a good many books, the best known of which is his _Curiosities of Literature_, a rambling work, full of entertaining matter. He belonged to that division of the Jewish race which is called the Sephardim, and traces itself to Spain and Portugal;[2] but he had ceased to frequent the synagogue--had, in fact, broken with his co-religionists. Isaac had access to good society, so that the boy saw eminent and polished men from his early years, and, before he had reached manhood, began to make his way in drawing-rooms where he met the wittiest and best-known people of the day. He was articled to a firm of attorneys in London in 1821, but after two or three years quitted a sphere for which his peculiar gifts were ill suited.[3] Samuel Rogers, the poet, took a fancy to him, and had him baptized at the age of thirteen. As he grew up, he was often to be seen with Count d'Orsay and Lady Blessington, well-known figures who fluttered on the confines of fashion and Bohemia. It is worth remarking that he never went either to a public school or to a university. In England it has become the fashion to assume that nearly all the persons who have shone in public life have been educated in one of the great public schools, and that they owe to its training their power of dealing with men and assemblies. Such a superstition is sufficiently refuted by the examples of men like Pitt, Macaulay, Bishop Wilberforce, Disraeli, Cobden, Bright, and Cecil Rhodes, not to add instances drawn from Ireland and Scotland, where till very recently there have been no public schools in the current English sense.

Disraeli first appeared before the public in 1826, when he published _Vivian Grey_, an amazing book to be the production of a youth of twenty-two. Other novels--_The Young Duke_, _Venetia_, _Contarini Fleming_, _Henrietta Temple_--maintained without greatly increasing his reputation between 1831 and 1837. Then came two political stories, _Coningsby_ and _Sybil_, in 1844 and 1845, followed by _Tancred_ in 1847, and the _Life of Lord George Bentinck_ in 1852; with a long interval of silence, till, in 1870, he produced _Lothair_, in 1880 _Endymion_. Besides these he published in 1839 the tragedy of _Alarcos_, and in 1835 the more ambitious _Revolutionary Epick_, neither of which had much success. In 1828-31 he took a journey through the East, visiting Constantinople, Syria, and Egypt, and it was then, no doubt, in lands peculiarly interesting to a man of his race, that he conceived those ideas about the East and its mysterious influences which figure largely in some of his stories, notably in _Tancred_, and which in 1878 had no small share in shaping his policy and that of England. Meanwhile, he had not forgotten the political aspirations which we see in _Vivian Grey_. In 1832, just before the passing of the Reform Bill, he appeared as candidate for the petty borough of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, and was defeated by a majority of twenty-three to twelve, so few were the voters in many boroughs of those days. After the Bill had enlarged the constituency, he tried his luck twice again, in 1833 and 1835, both times unsuccessfully, and came before two other boroughs also, Taunton and Marylebone, though in the latter case no contest took place. Such activity in a youth with little backing from friends and comparatively slender means marked him already as a man of spirit and ambition. His next attempt was more lucky. At the general election of 1837 he was returned for Maidstone.

His political professions during this period have been keenly canvassed; nor is it easy to form a fair judgment on them. In 1832 he had sought and obtained recommendations from Joseph Hume and Daniel O'Connell, and people had therefore set him down as a Radical. Although, however, his professions of political faith included dogmas which, like triennial parliaments, the ballot, and the imposition of a new land-tax, were part of the so-called "Radical" platform, still there was a vague and fanciful note in his utterances, and an aversion to the conventional Whig way of putting things, which showed that he was not a thorough-going adherent of any of the then existing political parties, but was trying to strike out a new line and attract men by the promise of something fresher and bolder than the recognised schools offered. In 1834 his hostility to Whiggism was becoming more pronounced, and a tenderness for some Tory doctrines more discernible. Finally, in 1835, he appeared as an avowed Tory, accepting the regular creed of the party, and declaring himself a follower of Sir Robert Peel, but still putting forward a number of views peculiar to himself, which he thereafter developed not only in his speeches but in his novels. _Coningsby_ and _Sybil_ were meant to be a kind of manifesto of the "Young England" party--a party which can hardly be said to have existed outside his own mind, though a small knot of aristocratic youths who caught up and repeated his phrases seemed to form a nucleus for it.

The fair conclusion from his deliverances during these early years is that he was at first much more of a Liberal than a Tory, yet with ideas distinctively his own which made him appear in a manner independent of both parties. The old party lines might seem to have been almost effaced by the struggle over the Reform Bill; and it was natural for a bold and inventive mind to imagine a new departure, and put forward a programme in which a sort of Radicalism was mingled with doctrines of a different type. But when it became clear after a time that the old political divisions still subsisted, and that such a distinctive position as he had conceived could not be maintained, he then, having to choose between one or other of the two recognised parties, chose the Tories, dropping some tenets he had previously advocated which were inconsistent with their creed, but retaining much of his peculiar way of looking at political questions. How far the change which passed over him was a natural development, how far due to mere calculations of interest, there is little use discussing: perhaps he did not quite know himself. Looking back, we of to-day might be inclined to think that he received more blame for it than he deserved, but contemporary observers generally set it down to a want of principle. In one thing, however, he was consistent then, and remained consistent ever after--his hearty hatred of the Whigs. There was something in the dryness and coldness of the great Whig families, their stiff constitutionalism, their belief in political economy, perhaps also their occasional toyings with the Nonconformists (always an object of dislike to Disraeli), which roused all the antagonisms of his nature, personal and Oriental.

When he entered the House of Commons he was already well known to fashionable London, partly by his striking face and his powers of conversation, partly by the eccentricities of his dress--he loved bright-coloured waistcoats, and decked himself with rings,--partly by his novels, whose satirical pungency had made a noise in society. He had also become, owing to his apparent change of front, the object of angry criticism. A quarrel with Daniel O'Connell, in the course of which he challenged the great Irishman to fight a duel, each party having described the other with a freedom of language bordering on scurrility, made him, for a time, the talk of the political world. Thus there was more curiosity evoked by his first speech than usually awaits a new member. It was unsuccessful, not from want of ability, but because its tone did not suit the temper of the House of Commons, and because a hostile section of the audience sought to disconcert him by their laughter. Undeterred by this ridicule, he continued to speak, though in a less ambitious and less artificial vein, till after a few years he had become one of the most conspicuous unofficial members. At first no one had eulogised Peel more warmly, but after a time he edged away from the minister, whether repelled by his coldness, which showed that in that quarter no promotion was to be expected, or shrewdly perceiving that Peel was taking a line which would ultimately separate him from the bulk of the Conservative party. This happened in 1846, when Peel, convinced that the import duties on corn were economically unsound, proposed their abolition. Disraeli, who, since 1843, had taken repeated opportunities of firing stray shots at the powerful Prime Minister, now bore a foremost part not only in attacking him, but in organising the Protectionist party, and prompting its leader, Lord George Bentinck. In embracing free trade, Peel carried with him his own personal friends and disciples, men like Gladstone, Sidney Herbert, Lord Lincoln, Sir James Graham, Cardwell, and a good many others, the intellectual _élite_ of the Tory party. The more numerous section who clung to Protection had numbers, wealth, respectability, cohesion, but brains and tongues were scarce. An adroit tactician and incisive speaker was of priceless value to them. Such a man they found in Disraeli, while he gained, sooner than he had expected, an opportunity of playing a leading part in the eyes of Parliament and the country. In the end of 1848, Lord George Bentinck, who, though a man of natural force and capable of industry when he pleased, had been to some extent Disraeli's mouthpiece, died, leaving his prompter indisputably the keenest intellect in the Tory-Protectionist party. In 1850, Peel, who might possibly have in time brought the bulk of that party back to its allegiance to him, was killed by a fall from his horse. The Peelites drifted more and more towards Liberalism, so that when Lord Derby, who, in 1851, had been commissioned as head of the Tory party to form a ministry, invited them to join him, they refused to do so, imagining him to be still in favour of the corn duties, and resenting the behaviour of the Protectionist section to their own master. Being thus unable to find one of them to lead his followers in the House of Commons, Lord Derby turned in 1852 to Disraeli, giving him, with the leadership, the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. The appointment was thought a strange one, because Disraeli brought to it absolutely no knowledge of finance and no official experience. He had never been so much as an Under-Secretary. The Tories themselves murmured that one whom they regarded as an adventurer should be raised to so high a place. After a few months Lord Derby's ministry fell, defeated on the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Budget, which had been vehemently attacked by Mr. Gladstone. This was the beginning of that protracted duel between him and Mr. Disraeli which lasted down till the end of the latter's life.

For the following fourteen years Disraeli's occupation was that of a leader of Opposition, varied by one brief interval of office in 1858-59. His party was in a permanent minority, so that nothing was left for its chief but to fight with skill, courage, and resolution a series of losing battles. This he did with admirable tenacity of purpose. Once or twice in every session he used to rally his forces for a general engagement, and though always defeated, he never suffered himself to be dispirited by defeat. During the rest of the time he was keenly watchful, exposing all the mistakes in domestic affairs of the successive Liberal Governments, and when complications arose in foreign politics, always professing, and generally manifesting, a patriotic desire not to embarrass the Executive, lest national interests should suffer. Through all these years he had to struggle, not only with a hostile majority in office, but also with disaffection among his own followers. Many of the landed aristocracy could not bring themselves to acquiesce in the leadership of a new man, of foreign origin, whose career had been erratic, and whose ideas they found it hard to assimilate. Ascribing their long exclusion from power to his presence, they more than once conspired to dethrone him. In 1861 these plots were thickest, and Disraeli was for a time left almost alone. But as it happened, there never arose in the House of Commons any one on the Conservative side possessing gifts of speech and of strategy comparable to those which in him had been matured and polished by long experience, while he had the address to acquire an ascendency over the mind of Lord Derby, still the titular head of the party, who, being a man of straightforward character, high social position, and brilliant oratorical talent, was therewithal somewhat lazy and superficial, and therefore disposed to lean on his lieutenant in the Lower House, and to borrow from him those astute schemes of policy which Disraeli was fertile in devising. Thus, through Lord Derby's support, and by his own imperturbable confidence, he frustrated all the plots of the malcontent Tories. New men came up who had not witnessed his earlier escapades, but knew him only as the bold and skilful leader of their party in the House of Commons. He made himself personally agreeable to them, encouraged them in their first efforts, diffused his ideas among them, stimulated the local organisation of the party, and held out hopes of great things to be done when fortune should at last revisit the Tory banner.

While Lord Palmerston lived, these exertions seemed to bear little fruit. That minister had, in his later years, settled down into a sort of practical Toryism, and both parties acquiesced in his rule. But, on his death, the scene changed. Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone brought forward a Reform Bill strong enough to evoke the latent Conservative feeling of a House of Commons which, though showing a nominally Liberal majority, had been chosen under Palmerstonian auspices. The defeat of the Bill, due to the defection of the more timorous Whigs, was followed by the resignation of Lord Russell's Ministry. Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli came into power, and, next year, carried a Reform Bill which, as it was finally shaped in its passage through the House, really went further than Lord Russell's had done, enfranchising a much larger number of the working classes in boroughs. To have carried this Bill remains the greatest of Disraeli's triumphs. He had to push it gently through a hostile House of Commons by wheedling a section of the Liberal majority, against the appeals of their legitimate leader. He had also to persuade his own followers to support a measure which they had all their lives been condemning, and which was, or in their view ought to have been, more dangerous to the Constitution than the one which they and the recalcitrant Whigs had thrown out in the preceding year. He had, as he happily and audaciously expressed it, to educate his party into doing the very thing which they (though certainly not he himself) had cordially and consistently denounced.

The process was scarcely complete when the retirement of Lord Derby, whose health had given way, opened Disraeli's path to the post of first Minister of the Crown. He dissolved Parliament, expecting to receive a majority from the gratitude of the working class whom his Act had admitted to the suffrage. To his own surprise, and to the boundless disgust of the Tories, a Liberal House of Commons was again returned, which drove him and his friends once more into the cold shade of Opposition. He was now sixty-four years of age, had suffered an unexpected and mortifying discomfiture, and had no longer the great name of Lord Derby to cover him. Disaffected voices were again heard among his own party, while the Liberals, reinstalled in power, were led by the rival whose unequalled popularity in the country made him for the time omnipotent. Still Mr. Disraeli was not disheartened. He fought the battle of apparently hopeless resistance with his old tact, wariness, and tenacity, losing no occasion for any criticism that could damage the measures--strong and large measures--which Mr. Gladstone's Government brought forward.