Part 20

Mr. Disraeli did not wait for his celebrity until he entered the House of Commons; he gathered the renown of authorship, and I might add, remembering the number of constituencies he tried before he was elected, the notoriety of out-door political life, before he plucked the fame of statesmanship. At the early age of twenty-two he was a literary lion in London society; his only claim to this premature publicity, though it was held to be quite sufficient, being that he was the writer of "Vivian Grey." It is quite impossible to begin to speak of Lord Beaconsfield in any other way than in connection with "Vivian Grey," although he is understood not altogether to approve of one's doing so.

All the world knows, or is supposed to know, this work. Mr. Disraeli's own description of its object was that it was meant to paint the career of a youth of talent in modern society, ambitious of political celebrity. Nearly everybody has persisted in regarding it as a kind of prospective autobiography, which the writer has ever since been occupied in realizing. Certainly Mr. Disraeli was at that time a youth, and a youth of talent; he must have been in society or he could not have known a great many people who are sketched in the pages; and it is impossible for him to deny that he was ambitious of political celebrity. The means Vivian Grey adopted for attaining that aim were, also, wonderfully like some of those which Mr. Disraeli himself afterwards, by some mistake, appeared to use. On the title-page of the book was the well-known quotation from "Ancient Pistol," to whom, in the eyes of some people, Lord Beaconsfield at certain moments of his career has ever had an indistinct resemblance. "The world is mine oyster," the motto stated, either on behalf of the writer or the hero; going on to add the rest, to the effect that either the one or the other meant to open it. Lord Beaconsfield has assuredly done so. The profound reflection which prompts the youthful hero of the book to his course of action was this:--"How many a powerful noble wants only wit to be a Minister; and what wants Vivian Grey to attain the same end? That noble's influence." Not many years after this Mr. Disraeli was seen in public very close to Lord Chandos. But it was not that Lord but Lord Carabas that Vivian Grey chose for his patron, which is, no doubt, a difference. The story most frankly relates how Vivian wins the marquis by teaching him how to make tomahawk punch, how he wins the marchioness by complimenting her poodle, and how during the task he consoles himself by such thoughts as this:--"Oh, politics, thou splendid juggle!" His settled purpose he thus sums up: "Mankind, then, is my great game." He expressly states that he is to win this game by the use of his "tongue," on which he states he is "able to perform right skilfully;" but it will, he recognises, be requisite "to mix with the herd" and to "humour their weaknesses." The chief guiding rule which he lays down for himself in the midst of it all is, "that he must be reckless of all consequences save his own prosperity."

There are people who still believe that in all this they see sketched the very determinations, maxims, and rules which are to be found deliberately carried out in Mr. Disraeli's actual career. It is perplexing. The parallel, they assert, runs into the closest correspondence of detail. Vivian Grey's model author is Bolingbroke; and everybody knows that he, also, was Mr. Disraeli's. The young man in the book shows his reverential admiration for Bolingbroke by inventing a few passages and putting them into that personage's mouth for the better bamboozling of Lord Carabas; and it is known that Mr. Disraeli, at different periods of his life, has taken passages from other people and put them into his own mouth. But I cannot pursue this comparison or contrast, or whatever it is, farther: it will be better seen as I go on, what grounds people have had for beholding Mr. Disraeli in Vivian Grey. For the present it is enough to say, that it was Mr. Disraeli, and not Vivian Grey, who wrote this book. So much as that is quite certain. A fiction of the kind above briefly hinted at was the first fruit of Mr. Disraeli's intellect; it was in penning those pages of caricature of everybody who was notable in London society that he expended the first fresh enthusiasm of his mind, and displayed the earlier untainted innocence of his disposition. Lord Beaconsfield has spoken of it as a book written by a boy. It was that which made it so marvellous. This boy began with satire, and it might have been predicted that the juvenile would develop into an exceptional man.

It was not until 1837, when Mr. Disraeli was about thirty-three years old, that he entered Parliament. Maidstone had the honour of finding him his first seat, though he had been willing to represent three other boroughs previously, if there had not been reluctance on the part of the constituencies. High Wycombe saw his earliest appearance on the hustings, and, indeed, it beheld him as a candidate more than once, but never as a member. He also offered himself to Marylebone. By some mistake it was supposed that in these instances he came forward as a Radical. Certainly his addresses spoke of short Parliaments, the ballot, and other measures commonly held to be Liberal. Mr. Joseph Hume, Mr. O'Connell, and Sir F. Burdett fell under the delusion, and wrote letters recommending him, though they afterwards withdrew them. But when, a little later, Mr. Disraeli contested Taunton as a Tory he explained it all. It seems that it arose out of a mystification. From the first he really stood as an "Anti-Whig," which the Liberals thought meant a Radical; and Mr. Disraeli, not wishing unnecessarily to disturb their minds, had let them go on thinking so. However, there was no doubt whatever as to his politics long before he was finally successful at Maidstone. He had become intimate with Lord Chandos, and had had his name toasted at banquets by the Aylesbury farmers as a friend of the agricultural interest. The whole question is one scarcely worth debating. I myself believe that the proper description of Mr. Disraeli at this time was not strictly either that of Radical or Tory; his accurate designation would have run,--"An intending politician determined somehow to get into Parliament, and looking eagerly for the first opening." Let me also add that, from a review of all his tastes, I further believe that he would have preferred the opening to offer on the Tory side, if only it had come soon enough.

The early part of Lord Beaconsfield's Parliamentary life will have to be compressed into a very brief space. Where would be the good of re-opening in any detail the closed story of those stale politics, all as dead as Queen Anne herself; or where the use of treating Mr. Disraeli's doings as very seriously forming part of those politics? He simply availed himself of his opportunities. For all practical purposes I might nearly skip--strange as that at first sight seems--to his second term of office in the post of Premier. It is only during a comparatively very few of these later years that Lord Beaconsfield has been of real importance in our politics. Of course, he had always much significance for his party, but it is of the nation I am speaking here. These individual tactics have only any general interest now through their making him successively Conservative leader, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Prime Minister. Nothing in this world, I should say, would be more tedious than tracing, for example, how Mr. Disraeli trimmed and tacked between Protection, Reciprocity, Revision of Taxation in the interests of the farmers, and a recognition of Free Trade. It all resulted in nothing; at least, the one single result it has brought forth has been--Lord Beaconsfield. But if a detailed retrospect of his lordship's earlier career would now have this dreary aspect, it was at the time lively enough, from moment to moment, not only on account of his debating smartness, but owing to a certain drollery which it for a long time wore.

A Minister, plainly, must get both his glory and his power from either domestic measures or from foreign policy. Very curiously, considering all the facts of Lord Beaconsfield's history down to the beginning of this last term of office, it was only to home matters that he should have looked for any distinction. An impression seems oddly to have popularized itself that he has a special genius for foreign affairs, and an enormous acquaintance with diplomacy. I can only say, that five years ago nobody knew it. The real truth is, that he had never any opportunities before of meddling with events abroad, and that we have been represented in these recent foreign complications by a Minister who, to that very moment, had had less to do with diplomacy than any English Premier for fully three-quarters of a century.

Lord Beaconsfield's mind has always been occupied with home affairs, and his characteristic views on these come from the quarter whence it is supposed all truth has been derived--the East. He somehow picked them up during two years of travel in those parts, from 1829 to 1831. About the former date, Mr. Disraeli's first brilliant but very brief literary success was over. He had published a second part of "Vivian Grey," which the public somehow was too busy to read; and had issued a further work of satire, "Popanilla," which it also neglected to buy. Mr. Disraeli immediately vanished into the Orient. When, after visiting Jerusalem, and lingering, as he tells us, on the plains of Troy, he returned to these shores, he brought back with him the Asian Mystery and a whole apparatus of political and social principles. He had also some manuscripts, which did not turn out to be of so much importance--"Contarini Fleming" and "The Young Duke." It was the most surprisingly fruitful voyage of discovery that any traveller ever made. Years elapsed before all the principles were given to the world, but Mr. Disraeli had them by him. Some of them are, indeed, hinted at as early as 1835, when he issued his "Vindication of the English Constitution," before he was in Parliament. Still, the system was not divulged in its entirety until he was in the House, and had founded what became known as the "Young England School." It is to the series of political novels which he then wrote that we must turn for the complete exposition of his fundamental ideas. Somehow, it has always seemed to everybody the most natural and fitting thing in the world that Mr. Disraeli should have corrected the inaccuracies of our national history, and shown our social fallacies, by writing works of fiction. The instruction with which he began the new training of the public was this--that our history is, in all the latter part of it, entirely wrong. In "Sybil," he thus gives his general opinion of the way in which it has been written:--"All the great events have been distorted, most of the important causes concealed, some of the principal characters never appear, and all who figure are so misunderstood and misrepresented that the result is a complete mystification."

Assuredly if this, or anything like it, was the state of things, Mr. Disraeli had not discovered it one moment too soon, and he was more than justified in making it known. On all the points named in the above summary he supplies most important rectifications. It seems that the people of this country, in so far, that is, as they were not the merest tools of their rulers, were under an entire mistake as to Rome wanting any domination in England in Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth's time; and that, strange to say, they also again fell into exactly the same delusion at the expulsion of James I. Mr. Disraeli puts the people who lived at those times right on these matters. But it was a section of nobles who at the latter juncture were to blame; those, namely, who had been enriched by the spoliation of the Church. Mr. Disraeli, indeed, gives the very simplest explanation of the Revolution of 1688. He states that the great Whig families were afraid that King James meant to reapply the Church lands to the education of the people and the support of the poor, and, in their alarm, they brought over Prince William, who gladly came, since it was only in England that he could reckon on being able to borrow money enough to carry on his failing war against France. In and from that hour happened the catastrophe which overwhelmed the English people--the Crown became enslaved by a Whig oligarchy. What Mr. Disraeli styles Venetian politics rushed in upon us, and these, by the aid of what he further calls Dutch finance--that is, the incurring of a National Debt--made foreign commerce necessary, and increased the obligation of home industry; nearly, as might be expected, ruining everything.

All the more modern period of our history had been, he in the most wonderful way explains, a fight to the death between these fearful Whig nobles on the one hand, and, on the other, a struggling heroic Crown and some enlightened patriotic Tory peers. The true incidents of this dark and stupendous conflict had never been clearly observed by the people in general at the time, nor had the real events been recorded in any of the common chronicles. But, as any one will be ready to allow, Mr. Disraeli could not be blamed for this. What was especially to his credit was that he had himself found out that the real ruler of England, in the era immediately preceding his own, was a certain Major Wildman, whom nobody before Mr. Disraeli had ever in the least suspected of wielding supreme power. I cannot stay to give the details of this portentous disclosure, but anybody may find them in Lord Beaconsfield's surprising pages. But in spite of superhuman exertions in the cause of the people by Lord Shelburne, and after him Mr. Pitt, the wicked Whigs always triumphed; the crowning act of duplicity on their part being, in fact, the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832.

The above is a highly condensed, but strictly accurate summary of Lord Beaconsfield's version of our national history. Any reader by the slightest rummaging in his own mind will know how far his own impressions agree with it. But this is only his Lordship's instruction of us as to facts: I must proceed to state the principles of action he founds upon them. Here, however, I find myself brought up a little. If the whole truth is to be spoken, this further task is more easily announced than performed. Mr. Disraeli, in those early days, assuredly made a great appearance of stating his political opinions; but it almost seems as if a novel, after all, is not the best means of expounding political doctrine. The more you attempt to lay hold of these principles the more they somehow show a lack of exactness. But let me try.

He again and again affirms that he is for our having a "real throne," which he asserts should be surrounded by "a generous aristocracy;" and he wishes, moreover, for a people who shall be "loyal and reverentially religious." All this certainly sounds as if it meant something very satisfactory. It is only when you try to penetrate into it that your over-curiosity leads to perplexity. Neither Mr. Disraeli nor Lord Beaconsfield has ever definitely explained, for example, how far a throne being "real" means that he or she sitting upon it shall have a personal veto. All that you can quite clearly make out as to securing "generousness" in the aristocracy is that they shall not be Whigs; you may suppose that they ought to be, and, in fact, no doubt would be, Tories. Pushed strictly home, it would seem to be implied that every peer who holds property which once belonged to the Church should be stripped of it, and it might be construed to mean that they should become commoners. Then, as to the people at large, how are they to be made loyal and religious, since it seems that they are neither of these now? From not the least important parts of Lord Beaconsfield's teaching, the first step logically to be taken with this view would be to ask the vote back from all of them who now have it. His own Household Franchise Bill will have given more work to do in this way. But the passing of that mysterious measure has been explained,--it was, at the moment, a necessary piece of party tactics. Strictly regarded, the explanation points to the conclusion that, if it could be done safely, the Act ought to be revoked to-morrow. But, certainly, it was no such measure as that he relied upon for elevating the condition of the people. What he did depend upon for doing it he has specified, and it is this,--the revival of Church Convocation on a particular basis, of which he knows the exact measurement. Possibly the reader, if he is not a political partisan, is growing puzzled. "Was nothing else," he may ask, "proposed in the Disraelian system for the cure of popular evils?" This, certainly, was not the whole of what it included some mention of. For example, the preface to "Lothair" states that one of Lord Beaconsfield's aims always was the establishment of what he terms "a commercial code on the principles successfully negotiated by----" No, it was not by Cobden and Bright, for it will be remembered Lord Beaconsfield did not adhere to that: but the full sentence runs,--"successfully negotiated by Lord Bolingbroke at Utrecht." He farther states that it is a principle with him that labour requires regulating no less than property. I myself cannot assert that I ever met with any one who professed to understand what this means; but "labour," and "regulating," and "property" are very good words, and if there has not been a great waste of language, the remark must signify a good deal. His system, also, does really make allusion to the electorate, for it specifies as another of his cherished purposes, "the emancipation of the constituencies of 1832." Other people used, in an old-fashioned way, to talk of enfranchising non-electors; but it is the voters that Lord Beaconsfield is for emancipating. The two most definite statements of his political theory are to be found in "Sybil," where he makes Gerard say that "the natural leaders of the people, and their only ones, are the aristocracy;" and adds, through the mouth of somebody else, that "the Church has deserted the people," to which he attributes their having become "degraded."

One of Lord Beaconsfield's very strongest points has always been this physical and moral degradation of the people. He has talked about it so much that it has nearly seemed that he had got some plan for doing something for it. In the sketches he gives in "Sybil" of the homes in Marner, the dens in which the working classes dwell, and the squalor of their condition, he nearly touches the heart. It somehow has an effect almost identical with the sentiment of the most advanced Liberal politics until you come to the remedies proposed. The use which Lord Beaconsfield makes of the towns in his teaching is worth noting. Any one who scrutinizes it closely will see that his ideal social system is the rustic one of the country parish, taking always for granted that it is perfect; and he kindly goes for examples of social failure to the towns,--the origin and condition of which, according to all strict reasoning, he must be supposed to attribute to the Whig nobility. How accurately this fits in with what is known of the development of modern manufactures every reader will know.

If anybody should say that he cannot see any accuracy in the above version of the national history, and that there is no real applicability to our affairs in such a system, or, as such an one would perhaps style it, pretended system of politics, I can only reply that if he is under the impression that he is an admirer of Lord Beaconsfield, then this is very sad. For these are certainly Lord Beaconsfield's views of our history and the scheme of his politics. Neither of them, I will venture to add, surprises me. It seems to me that if a political Will-o'-the-Wisp, such as the Liberals for so long a time would make out Lord Beaconsfield to be, got into the top-boots and heavy coat of an English squire, these are just the historical conclusions and political generalizations which he would make, when he began trying to think like a country gentleman; and, for anything I can say, he would make them with a certain sincerity, that kind of ratiocinative working being natural to the Will-o'-the-Wisp intellect, when smitten with a passion for Parliamentary life and an aspiration for counterfeiting philosophy. Moreover, both the home politics and the foreign policy seem to me exactly to fit; they really each display like qualities of mind, and I can see no reason for any one who can accept the latter stickling at the former. If what is really at the bottom of the objection is, as I suspect it is, a feeling that there is something flimsy, artificial, flashy about either, or both, the politics and the policy, is not that asking too much from the light glittering source I have described? The Liberals have always done Lord Beaconsfield the justice of never expecting more than this from him, and he, on his side, has never disappointed their expectations. If they had not previously thought much of him in connection with foreign policy, never in fact believing that he would actually preside at a critical juncture long enough for that question much to signify, there is not a person in our party who would not have known beforehand that any foreign policy of Lord Beaconsfield, if the occasion for one ever came, would be one of dazzle--Jack-o'-Lantern diplomacy and Will-o'-the-Wisp home politics rightly belonging to one another. The bright and bewildering flashes have now for a long time been ceaselessly playing here and there all over Europe from the direction of London; now hitting St. Petersburg; now gilding Berlin; then flickering over Constantinople; flaming terribly at Cabul; quivering at the Cape; striking Egypt at short intervals; and shimmering their mildest at Paris. The activity, as was likely in such a case, has been unprecedented. My own conviction is that Lord Beaconsfield has amazed, perplexed, it may be astounded, foreign diplomatists throughout Europe quite as much as he has done any of his opponents at home.