LORD BEACONSFIELD.
 
 THE 
 
 POLITICAL ADVENTURES 
 
 OF 
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 
 
 743 AND 745 BROADWAK.
 
 PUBLISHERS' NOTE. 
 
 THE remarkable papers here reprinted ap- 
 peared anonymously in the Fortnightly Review 
 at the moment when the career of their sub- 
 ject reached its apparent climax. The fact that 
 recent events have made Lord Beaconsfield for 
 the time a central figure in European politics, 
 has called a more than national attention to 
 this brilliant and incisive analysis ; and the same 
 fact gives a sufficient reason for its republication 
 in America, even while for the public at least 
 the question of its authorship is still unsolved.
 
 THE POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 
 
 I. 
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD 's career has been reviewed 
 at different stages of it by many able critics and 
 biographers variously affected to their subject. Per- 
 haps the time has now come when it may be expe- 
 dient to take another survey of it. Lord Beacons- 
 field has reached a point beyond which it is not 
 constitutionally possible that he should pass. He 
 cannot be more than Prime Minister of England and 
 a peer of the realm. Whatever be the duration of 
 his premiership and his parliamentary life, his career 
 will simply be continued ; it can scarcely have new 
 features. The point will be lengthened into a line, 
 and that is all. The record is not closed, but there
 
 8 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 cannot be much to add to it of a kind likely to affect 
 its general character or the public judgment. Lord 
 Beaconsfield has been the subject of bitter attack and 
 of unscrupulous praise. His career has been de- 
 scribed as demoralising to the national character, and 
 as lowering the standard and aims of English poli 
 tics. We should say that it is rather unmoralising 
 than demoralising. We are, at any rate, not con- 
 scious of depraving influences as the result of a con- 
 tinuous survey of it ; its effects seem to be merely 
 privative. Lord Beaconsfield appears somehow 01 
 other to be outside the sphere of moral judgment. 
 You do not, as a too indulgent critic said of the 
 dramatists of the Restoration, get into a world in 
 which considerations of right and wrong have no 
 place, but you see introduced into the affairs of 
 the ordinary world a creature to whom apparently 
 these considerations do not apply. Like the Sor- 
 cerer, in Mr. Gilbert's play, he moves about taking 
 part in all that concerns men's businesses and bo- 
 Boms, wearing the dress, speaking the language, using 
 the slang, and not exempt from the other vulgarities 
 of ordinary life. Still you feel that he has come from 
 another world, and that he is to be judged by the law
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 9 
 
 of his domicile, wherever that may be, rather than by 
 the rule according to which Englishmen pass moral 
 sentence upon each other. Robin Goodfellow, or 
 the Elfin King, or any other weird or graceful crea- 
 ture of extra-natural superstition, seems to have as 
 much connection with our prosaic world as the Earl 
 of Beaconsfield. If some fine day he should cast 
 aside his peer's robes, and the dull vesture of decay 
 which seems to hem him in less closely and more in- 
 congruously than it sits upon other men, and if he 
 should appear in a blaze of light as the Genius of 
 the Gardens of Joy, or descend in red fire through a 
 trap-door, the transformation would not appear more 
 strange or theatrical than many incidents of his his- 
 tory. On the whole, we are not disposed to think 
 that Lord Beaconsfield has done as much harm to 
 political morality as might be thought likely. People 
 have declined to think of political morality in con- 
 nection with him ; they have found it impossible to 
 associate the two ideas, and therefore it has escaped 
 injury or deterioration. He has done most mischief 
 by the sort of charm which he has exercised over 
 creatures of a different sphere. He has tempted un- 
 gainly mortals of respectable character, successful
 
 10 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 parliamentary lawyers, and squires moulded out of 
 their own heavy clays, to imitate his wanton and 
 sportive gambols with a result to which no ^sopian 
 fable can do justice. He has done Sir William Har- 
 court and Mr. Henry Chaplin much harm. On the 
 other hand, he has been of some use to the British 
 public. He has helped to prevent them from taking 
 life and politics too ponderously ; he has stimulated 
 their sense of wonder, and applied incentives to the 
 somewhat slow and feeble imagination of a rather 
 dull and prosaic community. From the beginning 
 Lord Beaconsfield has at least never failed to pique 
 curiosity. We propose to try and satisfy it by follow- 
 ing, in two or three articles, his political life. Before 
 essaying to do so, it may be well to endeavour to get 
 some general idea of the influences of race, of an- 
 cestry, and of contemporary circumstances which at 
 least contributed to make the man what he was and 
 is. Lord Beaconsfield's parliamentary career began 
 with the first session of the first parliament of the 
 present reign. In some respects no single life more 
 instructively connects and illustrates the various as- 
 pects of the Victorian epoch of our history. 
 
 Very early in his career, Lord Beaconsfield or as
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. II 
 
 he then used to style himself, Disraeli the Younger 
 published a pamphlet with the title, " What is He ? " 
 The He in question was of course Mr. Disraeli, who 
 has always been a good deal occupied with himself. 
 The inquiry to which in this instance he volunteered 
 a reply is said to have been made in conversation by 
 the late Earl Grey. The Whig chief had heard with 
 amazement, and probably some feeling of half artic- 
 ulate indignation, of a young man unknown in the 
 lobbies and saloons, unvouched for either by Mr. 
 Ellice or by Lady Holland, who had ventured to 
 stand against one of Lord Grey's sons as a candidate 
 for High Wycombe, that "very respectable street" 
 which subsequently had the honour of being repre- 
 sented by Mr. Bernal Osborne, who paid historic 
 tribute to it in the phrase which we have just quoted. 
 On a later occasion, when a candidate for another 
 constituency, Mr. Disraeli explained to a plebeian 
 inquirer, as curious as Lord Grey, that High Wy- 
 combe was a borough in Buckinghamshire belonging 
 to his father, who, he added with a certain territorial 
 pride which has marked him through his career, 
 owned property in three counties. Since Dogberry 
 modestly vaunted his possession of two gowns and
 
 13 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 everything handsome about him, a more ingenuously 
 pleasing declaration has not been made. Unhappily 
 the pamphlet in which the younger Disraeli stood 
 and unfolded himself for the edification of Lord Grey 
 has perished. It is unknown to the shelves of the 
 British Museum. It remains dispersed over a multi- 
 tude of scattered trunks, defying the industry of the 
 most indefatigable collector to bring them together 
 and to reconstruct it. The loss is to be deplored. 
 In this little work Lord Beaconsfield stood forth, 
 avowing in substance : " I am my own interpreter, 
 and I will make it plain." 
 
 The pamphlet is probably, like its author, unique 
 in English, or in any other literature. There have 
 been men in abundance who have written apologies 
 and confessions, some of which the world could have 
 very well spared. They have given an account of 
 the things they have done and of the motives by 
 which they were actuated. Lord Beaconsfield took 
 a different course. He began his career by writing a 
 preface to a life of which scarcely the first pages were 
 composed, and of which nobody had at that time 
 shown any disposition to turn the leaves. In one of 
 his essays, Dr. James Martineau refers to a German
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 13 
 
 play in which Adam is introduced crossing the stage, 
 going to be created. This is something like the posi- 
 tion in which Mr. Disraeli presents himself in this 
 early explanation of himself to the wondering mind 
 of the old Whig peer. The loss of Mr. Disraeli's early 
 treatise inoon himself is irreparable, and there is no 
 use in shedding more tears over it. In one sense the 
 pamphlet and the question to which it offers a reply 
 may be considered as prefiguring the attitude of the- 
 public to Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Beaconsfield's 
 attitude towards himself. For fifty years " the great 
 lubber," as he somewhere styles the nation which has 
 made him Prime Minister, has been rubbing its eyes 
 and scratching its head and asking, with a perplexed 
 amazement like Lord Grey's, " What is He ? " Lord 
 Beaconsfield in his turn has made reply, during half 
 a century, in speeches and essays and novels, which 
 together form a considerable bulk of literature. Still 
 his countrymen ask, " What is he ? " So we get no 
 further. He is himself alone. To explain is to refer 
 to more general categories. Lord Beaconsfield can 
 scarcely be classified; no one but himself can be his 
 parallel. 
 
 Nevertheless attempts have been made from time to
 
 14 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 time to gather together the scattered voices and to put 
 some sort of interpretation upon them. They are 
 likely to be continued. An enigma however trivial, 
 a mystery however worthless, piques curiosity ; and 
 Lord Beaconsfield's strange character and fortunes, 
 neither trivial nor worthless, will always possess a cer- 
 tain degree of interest for the student of human nature 
 in its more eccentric and whimsical developments. 
 In the dull succession of arch mediocrities who for 
 the greater part make up the list of English prime 
 ministers, his fantastic figure must always draw atten- 
 tion and stimulate speculation. How he came to be 
 what he was and where he is, is likely to be a theme 
 of mildly renewed surprise and conjectural explana- 
 tion for many generations. A Hebrew proverb which 
 Lord Beaconsfield quotes in one of his novels, speak- 
 ing of what is to happen in the fulness of time, an- 
 nounces that "We shall yet see an ass mount a lad- 
 der." We are reluctant to quote the proverb in this 
 connection; but the ass, it must be remembered, is 
 in the East a very fleet, spirited, and beautiful crea- 
 ture, and is held there in high and just esteem. Lord 
 Beaconsfield, if we recollect rightly, applies the pro- 
 verb to the wonderful elevation of his own wonderful
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 15 
 
 Alroy, who, from being the prince of the captivity, 
 became the King of Judah and the deliverer of his 
 people. In a similar sense, and disembarrassed of 
 the injurious associations with which centuries of op- 
 pression and domestic servitude have surrounded a 
 once noble and still useful quadruped, the image may 
 be applied to Lord Beaconsfield. The Hebrew prov- 
 erb has received its fulfilment : we have seen the ass 
 mount the ladder. Not only so, he has maintained 
 himself there as if the posture and situation were nat- 
 ural. This personal elevation may, perhaps, be con- 
 sidered as part of a more general phenomenon. It 
 applies not only to Lord Beaconsfield, but to the his- 
 toric race of which he is one of the most remarkable 
 illustratory ornaments. Some time ago a respectable 
 member of Parliament in arguing some question, we 
 forget what, found it necessary to recall to the recol- 
 lection of his hearers the historic fact that we do not 
 now live under the Mosaic dispensation. Lord Bea- 
 consfield held office at the time, and gazed at the 
 orator from the Treasury bench. The Opposition 
 laughed. Even the docile ministerialists tittered and 
 coughed The impression seemed to prevail that we 
 do live in some sense under a Mosaic dispensation.
 
 1 6 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 In administration, in finance, and in journalism, 
 Jewish influences notoriously shape and guide Eng- 
 lish politics. This is not a new thing in European 
 history, though in England it is now more pronounced 
 and obvious than it has ever been before. The phe- 
 nomenon itself, however, is two thousand years old. 
 In the latest volume of his Hisloire des Origines 
 du Christianisme, M. Renan, speaking of Josephus, 
 says : " II avait cette facilite superficielle qui fait que 
 le Juif, transport^ dans une civilisation qui lui est 
 6trang6re, se met avec une merveilleuse prestesse au 
 courant des idees au milieu desquelles il se trouve 
 jet6, et voit par quel col6 il peut les exploiter." The 
 same phenomenon is observable now. The politicians 
 and journalists who carry on the largest trade in 
 patriotic phrases and national prejudices, are Jews 
 who, like Josephus, transported into a civilisation 
 which is foreign to them have placed themselves with 
 marvellous dexterity in the current of the ideas which 
 float about them in order to find a means of turning 
 them to account. In one of his early papers, Thack- 
 eray describes an incident at a city dinner : " The 
 Royal health having been imbibed, the professional 
 gentlemen ejaculated a part of the national anthem ;
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. I 7 
 
 and I do not mean any disrespect to them personally 
 in mentioning that this eminently religious hymn was 
 performed by Messrs. Shadrach and Meshech, two 
 well-known melodists of the Hebrew persuasion." 
 Later in the evening, "the elderly Hebrew gentleman 
 before mentioned began striking up a wild patriotic 
 ditty about the ' Queen of the Isles ' on whose sea- 
 girt shores the bright sun smiles and the ocean roars, 
 whose cliffs never knew, since the bright sun rose, 
 but a people true who scorned all foes." Practically 
 this has been the course of politics during the last two 
 years. The parliamentary Shadrachs and the jour- 
 nalistic Meshechs have been singing the national 
 anthem and patriotic melodies to an amused and ex- 
 cited audience who have shouted and banged their 
 glasses, and have believed in the spontaneity and dis- 
 interestedness and genuine British feeling of Shadrach 
 and Meshech and the other Hebrew gentleman, who 
 pays these pipers. 
 
 Everybody who has read Lord Beaconsfield's novels 
 must recollect one of the cleverest things in any of 
 them, the conversation in Tancred about The Reve- 
 lations of Qiaos, a work which occupied the world of 
 Lord Beaconsfield's characters at the time when the
 
 1 8 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 world of flesh and blood was talking about The Ves- 
 tiges of Creation. " You know all is development : 
 the principle is perpetually going on. First, there 
 was nothing, then there was something ; then, I for- 
 get the next, I think there were shells, then fishes ; 
 then we came. Let me see did we come next ? 
 Never mind that, we came at last : and the next 
 change, there will be something very superior to us ; 
 something with wings. Ah, that's it : we were fishes 
 and I believe we shall be crows." No one, how- 
 ever proud he may be of having been a fish, or how- 
 ever anxious he may be to become a crow, can ob- 
 ject to banter of this kind which, like the noises in 
 Prospero's island, "gives delight and hurts not" even 
 the doctrine which it plays with. Earlier, however, 
 in his course of philosophic speculation, Lord Bea- 
 consfield had professed a different theory, which has 
 more affinity than his later view with what is funda- 
 mental in his writings, and especially with his doc- 
 trine of race. In Contarini Fleming he sets forth the 
 proposition that "the various tribes (of men) that 
 people this globe, in all probability spring from dif- 
 ferent animals." Civilisation, he complains, has de- 
 serted the regions and intellects she once most
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 19 
 
 favoured. The Persians, the Arabs, the Greeks are 
 now unlettered slaves in barbarous lands. " The 
 arts are yielded to the flat-nosed Franks." Lord 
 Beaconsfield has never been able to get over his dis- 
 like, or even to refrain from the expression of his 
 deep-seated repugnance for the unfortunate Frankish 
 nose. " And they toil and study and invent theories 
 to account for their own incompetence. Now it is 
 the climate, now the religion, now the government ; 
 everything but the mortifying suspicion that their or- 
 ganization may be different ; that they may be as 
 distinct a race from their models as they undoubtedly 
 are from the Kalmuck and the negro." We may ad- 
 mit to Lord Beaconsfield that distinctions of race, 
 whether they be aboriginal or derivative, of animal 
 or of circumstantial origin, have at last been formed, 
 and ought to be taken into account. There is no one 
 from a consideration of whose life they can be less 
 safely omitted than from his own. There is little 
 nsed of reserve on the subject, for Lord Beaconsfield 
 has practised none himself, and his relations to his 
 own people are the most honourable and attractive 
 element in his story. 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield is the most remarkable illustra
 
 2O POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 tion of his own doctrine of the ascendancy of Hebrew 
 genius in modern Europe. The latest philosophy 
 propounds that what is peculiar to himself in each 
 individual is really a smaller part of him than the 
 qualities which he derives from his personal ancestry 
 and the race to which he and they belong. Lord 
 Beaconsfield unites, in a manner which the history of 
 his family explains, the qualities of the Hebrew and 
 of the " super-subtle Venetian." In the sketch of his 
 father's life which is prefixed to one of the editions of 
 the Curiosities of Literature, he narrates the fortunes 
 of his house. In the fifteenth century, some of his 
 ancestors, driven from Spain by Torquemada and 
 the Inquisition, took refuge in Venice. During two 
 centuries they remained there. Possibly sufficiently 
 careful research might detect some trace of them 
 in the relics of the old Hebrew burial-ground on 
 the Lido. ' Like Timon " entombed upon the very 
 hem of the sea," these poor Jews have " made 
 their everlasting mansion upon the beached verge 
 01 the salt flood." Slabs of stone, half buried 
 into the earth or covered with grass and creeping 
 vegetation, recall in their often still legible Hebrew 
 characters the names and families of the Jews ban
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 21 
 
 ished in their death from the society in which they 
 were barely tolerated during their lives. The favour- 
 able position of Mr. Pelham gave a new opening to 
 Jewish enterprise in England towards the middle of 
 the eighteenth century. In 1 749 Benjamin Disraeli, 
 the grandfather of the present Prime Minister, who 
 may, perhaps, have had Shylock or Tubal among his 
 ancestors, settled in England. At this time, Lord 
 Beaconsfield records, " There might be found, among 
 other Jewish families flourishing in this country, the 
 Villa Reals, who brought wealth to these shores 
 almost as great as their name, though that is the 
 second in Portugal, and who have twice allied them- 
 selves with the English aristocracy : the Medinas, 
 the Laras, who were our kinsmen, and the Mendez 
 de Costas, who, I believe, still exist." Mr. Pelham's 
 good intentions bore fruit, but not very lasting fruit. 
 The Jews' Naturalisation Bill, which he succeeded in 
 passing in 1753, was repealed the next year after his 
 death by the Duke of Newcastle, under the influence 
 of a popular and ecclesiastical clamour which must 
 have taught the Venetian emigrant that he had little 
 to expect from liberal opinion in England. Sir John 
 Barnard put the conclusive argument that if the Jews
 
 22 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 were allowed to hold land in this country, all security 
 would be gone for the maintenance of Christianity as 
 the fashionable religion. But the argument of the 
 streets was yet more decisive. Political recognition 
 would probably have cost the Jews such social tolera- 
 tion as they enjoyed by the connivance of interest 
 rather than that of generosity or friendship. If the 
 policy of Mr. Pelham had been persisted in and ex- 
 tended, the character and career of the present Prime 
 Minister might have been very different from that 
 which we propose to examine. The Jewish families, 
 his among the rest, were forced to remain foreigners 
 and Israelites. They were not allowed to become 
 Englishmen. The development of a new species, by 
 the process of evolution and transformation, is, accord- 
 ing to the most trustworthy authorities in natural his- 
 tory, a very slow one, except in cases of very rare 
 flexibility. There has not yet been time for the con- 
 version of the Jew into the true Briton. This would 
 require Ovid's metamorphosis, and not Darwin's. 
 Certainly a century and a quarter of residence in Eng- 
 land on the part of his ancestors and himself has left 
 little trace on the mind and character of Lord Lea- 
 consfield. He is in almost every essential point far
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 23 
 
 more of a Venetian and a Jew than of an Englishman. 
 The two cities to which his imagination stretches 
 backwards most constantly and affectionately are 
 Jerusalem and Venice. They enter into his political 
 visions, in which Lord Beaconsfield takes things a 
 great deal more seriously than he does his dealings 
 with practical English politics, in which there is 
 always a great deal of make-believe, too obvious to 
 be called deceptive. Thackeray has remarked upon 
 the odd fate which sent Mr. G. P. R. James as con- 
 sul to the only city in Europe in which it would be 
 impossible for him to encounter the two horsemen, 
 at least with their horses, who figure on the first page 
 of nearly all his romances. It was an odder destiny 
 which derived the champion of the British territorial 
 interest and landed aristocracy from a race debarred 
 from owning property in land, and from a city in 
 which from the nature of the case a territorial aristo- 
 cracy could not exist. Perhaps the principle of re- 
 action and antagonism made the descendant of a 
 family of Venetian Jews, the champion and represen- 
 tative of the large-acred lords and squires of England. 
 More probably it was his possession in the nine- 
 teenth century of that faculty which Renan has
 
 24 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 noted in the Jew of the first century. It is another 
 instance of the wonderful dexterity of the Hebrew in 
 throwing himself into the current of ideas foreign to 
 him, and of humouring the prejudices of the people 
 among whom he may be thrown for his own advan- 
 tage. 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield has described the home of his 
 grandfather at Enfield in a few delicate yet distinct 
 touches. The Venetian settler was a zealous man 
 of business and an accomplished man of the world. 
 He occupied himself impartially in trade and pleasure, 
 dividing his time between activity in making a for- 
 tune and the sweet indolence of its enjoyment. He 
 laid out an Italian garden at Enfield, he played whist 
 with Sir Horace Mann, he ate macaroni which was 
 dressed by the Venetian consul who, we hope, was 
 worthy of the confidence thus reposed in him, and 
 dressed his macaroni as skilfully as the Prime Minis- 
 ter in Conlarini Fleming was reported to have made 
 cream cheeses. Lord Beaconsfield, who was a lad 
 of twelve when his grandfather died, draws his char- 
 acter with evident sympathy for it, both in its fine 
 gentleman or macaroni aspect, and on its more 
 strenuous business side. Perhaps there is some con-
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 25 
 
 sciousness of inherited qualities and aptitudes in his 
 delineation of the Venetian emigrant as a man of 
 "ardent character, sanguine, courageous, speculative 
 and fortunate ; with a temper which no disappoint- 
 ment could disturb and a brain amid reverses full of 
 resource." In the sketch of his father there is more 
 tenderness, and even a touch of something like af- 
 fectionate compassion. Isaac Disraeli lived only in 
 his library and his literary projects, careless of the 
 politics of the day, and indeed utterly unintelligent of 
 them. In these two men it is not perhaps fanciful to 
 trace in addition to the workings of natural character 
 and tastes, the influences of isolation from the society 
 in which they lived, owing to the prejudices of race, 
 religion, and the undefined social prescription thence 
 derived, which hemmed them in in a sort of moral 
 Ghetto or Juden Strasse. The grandfather sought a 
 refuge in the ordinary commercial enterprises of 
 the Jew and in the amusements of the exile. The 
 father fled from his own world and his own time into 
 the past and to his books. A sense of isolation and 
 detachment was apparently impressed upon the 
 household. 
 
 But to complete the understanding of the silent
 
 26 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 influence of persons and feelings which is likely to 
 have contributed insensibly to shape the character 
 and aims of the lad who was afterwards to be Prime 
 Minister of England, another figure needs to be 
 sketched in the family group. Lord Beaconsfield has 
 not omitted it from his picture of a Jewish interior, 
 though it must have required some courage to "draw 
 its outlines, as he has done, with stern strokes and an 
 unfaltering hand. In the two men, father and son, 
 we see the flexible and accommodating nature of the 
 Jew who bows to circumstances, and with a patient 
 shrug lets the world pass in which he is disinherited 
 and proscribed. But the Jewish character has an- 
 other side than that of accommodation and acquies- 
 cence. It has a fierceness of hate and resentment 
 which, when it cannot wreak its passions upon its 
 enemies and persecutors, preys upon and rends itself. 
 Lord Beaconsfield describes his grandmother as hat- 
 ing her race, and as detesting the very name which 
 her marriage had given her, and which was a per- 
 petual witness of her Jewish connexions. He adds 
 that she was " so mortified by her social position that 
 she lived until eighty without indulging a tender 
 expression." It is perhaps from this strange figure,
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 27 
 
 ji which it is easy to recognise in an introverted form 
 the stern lineaments that have marked the zealots and 
 fanatics of the race, that the aathor of Daniel Deronda 
 has drawn the Jew-hating Jewess who is the mother of 
 her hero. Lord Beacon sfield had never probably at 
 any period of his career much in common with the 
 amiable walking gentleman whom the genius of George 
 Eliot has vainly endeavoured to convert into a man 
 of thought and action. But Daniel Deronda could 
 not more thoroughly and openly avow the ties of 
 blood, which in spite of an ostensibly Christian pro- 
 fession and training bound him to his people, than 
 Lord Beaconsfield has always done. So far as has 
 depended upon himself, he has been faithful to the 
 purpose of his ancestors, who on their escape from 
 Spain to Venice " assumed the name of Disraeli, a 
 name never borne before or since by any other family 
 in order that their race might be forever recognised." 
 Lord Beaconsfield has never been untrue in spirit to 
 this virtual vow of a persecuted house, " grateful to 
 the God of Jacob, who had sustained them through un- 
 precedented trials, and guarded them through un- 
 heard-of perils." Perhaps on the "whole, though the 
 error is on the side of courage and manliness, he has
 
 28 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 been almost too ostentatiously faithful to it. Judaism 
 and the Jews have been thrust by him with an almost 
 unnecessary pertinacity into English politics and 
 literature. The consciousness of his race and of 
 their faith seems never to escape him. Lord Bea- 
 consfield has made that a matter of honourable pride, 
 and even occasionally of something like bravado, 
 which was to his ancestress one of life-long shame and 
 torment. He has never been able to leave the 
 matter alone, and to consider the question of Jew 
 or Gentile as a thing socially and politically indif- 
 ferent. Perhaps this would have been impossible in 
 the midst of the prejudices of race and religion by 
 which he has been surrounded, and in face of the 
 coarse insults which those prejudices have occasion- 
 ally prompted. Lord Beaconsfield's conduct on this 
 point during the whole of his political and literary 
 career is entitled to genuine and cordial respect. 
 Even the extravagances into which he has been be- 
 trayed are extravagances of courageous championship 
 and of manly self-assertion. They deserve indulgent 
 and tender treatment. No one can judge of them 
 fairly who does not keep in mind the mortifying and 
 sometimes painful and cruel domestic experiences
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 29 
 
 out of which they have sprung. Of the builders of 
 the Temple in Jerusalem it is recorded that " every 
 one with one of his hands wrought in the work, and 
 with the other hand held a weapon. For the builders 
 every one had his sword girded by his side and so 
 builded." In rebuilding the fortunes of their race in 
 Europe the Jews have laboured under precisely 
 similar conditions. Toiling under the eyes of watch- 
 ful and relentless enmity, with one of their hands they 
 have wrought in the work, and with the other hand 
 held a weapon. In no one has this militant attitude, 
 half defensive, half offensive, but only aggressive for 
 the sake of more effectual self-defence, been more 
 conspicuous and successful than in Lord Beaconsfield. 
 But the success is not personal merely or his alone. 
 He is but the signal type, the prerogative instance 
 of the completeness of the conquest by which the 
 Jewish captivity, like captive Greece, has taken 
 captive its fierce victor. Lord Beaconsfield has been 
 in his way, not less than his Alroy, a Prince of the 
 Captivity, and to have become Prime Minister of 
 England, even at the cost of quitting the faith of his 
 fathers, is not a less achievement than, like his hero, 
 to have become caliph.
 
 30 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 In literature, Lord Beaconsfield has been essentially 
 a Jewish apologist; Josephus and the false Aristo- 
 bulus simply anticipated his method, or rather he 
 applied theirs with a difference. They set themselves 
 to prove to an indifferent and laughing Gentile world 
 that the philosophy and morals of the Greek and 
 Roman poets and sages were derived from the He- 
 brew Scriptures ; and perpetrated not a few forgeries 
 to make good their point. Lord Beaconsfield has 
 with more boldness claimed as of Jewish race nearly 
 all the most distinguished men of science and art, of 
 thought and action, whom modern Europe has pro- 
 duced, and in doing so has been genealogically a 
 rather credulous Apella. He has pleaded the cause 
 of his race and original faith with one great advantage. 
 He has done so as an ostensible convert to Christi- 
 anity. But he is essentially, if we may use a distinc- 
 tion as old as the religion itself, a Hebrew and not a 
 Gentile Christian. His view of the religion is perhaps 
 rather peculiar in our day, whatever it may have been 
 two thousand years ago. He apparently regards it 
 as a kind of second part or continuation of Judaism, 
 bearing the same sort of relation to it of affiliation and 
 of inferiority as that which the second part of Faust
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 3! 
 
 sustains to the first ; or which Paradise Regained 
 has to Paradise Lost. The work is genuine ; it is, 
 perhaps, a necessary supplement to its predecessor 
 and recompletion of it, but showing signs of the old 
 age and the declining powers of the race from whose 
 religious genius it has sprung. Of course, Lord 
 Beaconsfield does not say as much as this. He does 
 not even insinuate it. Nevertheless, an impression 
 such as that we have conveyed is distinctly produced. 
 If we may trust statements commonly made, Lord 
 Beaconsfield owes in the main to accident his oppor- 
 tunity of pleading, in the character of a professor of 
 the second part of the Jewish religion, on behalf of 
 the social and personal claims and the civil rights of 
 those of his race who accept only the first. Through 
 a personal quarrel Isaac Disraeli broke off relations 
 with the synagogue without entering into any rela- 
 tions with the Church. It is said that the Church of 
 England is indebted to the good nature of that hea- 
 then money-changer and verse-maker, Samuel Rogers, 
 for the presence of Lord Beaconsfield among its faith- 
 ful sons. Rogers did not kidnap the young Benjamin 
 Disraeli as the young Mortara was kidnapped. He 
 was not consumed by any zeal for souls. Thinking
 
 32 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 it hard that an empty form should stand in the way 
 of a clever boy's prospects, Rogers it is said, we do 
 not know with what truth, took him off to St. An- 
 drew's Church, Holborn. There it is certain that on 
 3ist of July, 1817, Benjamin Disraeli, "said to be 
 about twelve years of age," as the baptismal register 
 records, was made perhaps as much of a Christian as 
 he ever became. Whatever the instrumentality em- 
 ployed, Benjamin Disraeli became a member of the 
 Church of England in the year 1817, and as such 
 entered upon all the privileges, civil and political, 
 which were still denied not only to Jews and unbe- 
 lievers but to Papists and dissenters. 
 
 The discipline of a private academy, and, it is said, 
 of a solicitor's office, were substituted in his case for 
 that of the public school and the university. What- 
 ever the loss to him may have been morally and 
 socially, Lord Beaconsfield has never been deficient 
 in those intellectual attainments which it is common 
 to connect with university training too exclusively, 
 as the names of Mill and Grote have sufficiently 
 shown even to a British House of Commons. It is 
 perhaps to be regretted that what seems a premature 
 mannishness should have thrust young Disraeli into
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 33 
 
 the world of action and of authorship, when he would 
 have -been more naturally and profitably under the 
 discipline of pupilage and spurred by the emulation 
 and friendships of college life. A certain self-enclos- 
 ure and isolation to which he has been prone through 
 life might have been in some degree combated, if 
 Lord Beaconsfield had ever been a boy among boys 
 or a young man among young men. Silence and the 
 concentrated self-absorption, which save at rare 
 moments have marked him in Parliament and in 
 general society, might have given way if more genial 
 influences in early manhood had followed upon the~ 
 unhappy experience to which his race and religion 
 subjected his childhood. It would probably be a 
 mistake to read the more remarkable of his earlier 
 novels, Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming, as direct- 
 ly and designedly autobiographic. If the author had 
 been consciously drawing his own portrait in either, 
 the lineaments would almost certainly have been more 
 pi :asing. The tone of mockery and burlesque with 
 which the young heroes comment on their own pro- 
 ceedings would have been spared. It is quite obvi- 
 ous that the author of Vivian Grey and Contarini 
 Fleming regards those young gentlemen as very often
 
 34 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 a pair of intolerably conceited and unamiable jacka- 
 napes, who would have been the better for a chasten- 
 ing. Unconsciously, however, the ideas over which 
 the author's mind was brooding, ideas springing out 
 of his own position in society and his relations to life, 
 constantly appear. A very young writer who has had 
 .very little experience of mankind and the world, de- 
 scribes himself without knowing it because he has 
 nothing else to describe. Vivian Grey's lament: "If 
 I were the son of a millionaire or a noble, I might 
 have all. Curse on my lot ! that the want of a few 
 rascal counters, the possession of a little rascal blood, 
 should mar my fortune," is very likely, with the 
 patriotic change of a single word, to have been on 
 the lips of the younger Disraeli. In the preface to 
 Contarini Fleming, again, the author sets forth one 
 of the aims which he had in writing. He "endeav- 
 oured," he says, "to conceive a character whose 
 position in life should be at variance and, as it 
 were, in constant conflict with his temperament. 
 . . . The combination that connected in one 
 being Scandinavia and the South, and made the 
 image of a distant and most romantic city con- 
 tinually act upon a nervous temperament sur
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 35 
 
 rounded by the snows and forests of the north, 
 though novel, it is believed, in literature, was by no 
 means an impossible or even an improbable one." If 
 we substitute the mist and rain of England for the 
 snows and forests of Scandinavia, and conceive the 
 image of Jerusalem as well as that of Venice con- 
 stantly present to the mind of the exile, we have a 
 combination not only possible in literature but actual 
 in the author's own experience. Contarini Fleming 
 grew out of a pilgrimage to the East and to Jerusa- 
 lem, which took in Spain and Venice and all the an- 
 cestral lands through which the author's race and 
 house had passed during the long wanderings of their 
 exile. The feeling which animates the passage we 
 have quoted from the preface of Contarini Fleming, 
 finds constant expression all through the work. There 
 is very likely no conscious personal identification of 
 the author and the hero ; but the pervading sentiment 
 is for that all the deeper. " Some exemption," Con- 
 tarini hopes, " from the sectarian prejudices which 
 embitter life may be surely expected from one who, 
 by a curious combination of circumstances, finds him- 
 self without country, without kindred, and without 
 friends. Wherever I moved I looked around me and
 
 36 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 beheld a race different from myself. There was no 
 sympathy between my frame and the rigid climate 
 whither I had been brought to live." "Their blue 
 eyes, their flaxen hair and their white visages claimed 
 no kith and kindred with my Venetian countenance." 
 Again Contarini declaims against " the vast quantity 
 of dull, lowering, entangling ties that formed the great 
 domestic mesh, and bound me to a country which I 
 detested, covered me with a climate which killed me, 
 surrounded me with manners with which I could not 
 sympathize." In Vivian Grey and Contarini Flem- 
 ing the two barriers which stood in the way of politi- 
 cal ambition are presented separately. In a pluto- 
 cratic aristocracy a poor plebeian laments his posses- 
 sion of rascal blood, or blood more damaging than 
 that of rascaldom, and his lack of rascal counters. 
 In Scandinavia the hero meets the obstacle of foreign 
 race and uncongenial temperament. The foreign ad- 
 venturers vho have been able to overcome difficul- 
 ties such as these are the object of Contarini Flem- 
 ing's most constant and earnest admiration. Alberoni 
 and Ripperda are statesmen for whom something like 
 enthusiasm is expressed. Lord Beaconsfield has 
 been more lucky or more dexterous than either of
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 37 
 
 these political fortune-hunters, between the latter of 
 whom and himself there is a certain resemblance, es- 
 pecially in the theological speculations with which 
 they have amused their leisure. 
 
 A character and a mind formed in the domestic 
 .and social circumstances out of which the stories of 
 Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming naturally came, 
 and which they expressed with a faithfulness all the 
 greater for being undesigned, needed above all others 
 the discipline of an English home, and would have 
 been the better for the equal companionship of the 
 public school and the university. By no one of these 
 roots was Lord Beaconsfield fixed in British soil. He 
 may be compared rather to one of those air-plants 
 which draw their nourishment and take their color 
 from the atmosphere which surrounds them, and in 
 which they float, but which lay no hold of the solid 
 earth. Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming were 
 written at some interval of time, the former appear- 
 ing in 1826, the latter in 1831. There is, however, a 
 certain natural connection between the two in the 
 unwitting disclosure of their author's purpose and 
 character which they contain. They reveal to us the 
 aims and feelings with which their author entered
 
 38 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 upon the political career which we propose to review, 
 and of which they are the preface. It is impossible 
 to understand Lord Beaconsfield without them. It 
 may not be possible quite to understand him with 
 them. But neither the books nor the man can be 
 comprehended or judged -with due indulgence apart 
 from each other. To the same literary period belong 
 The Young Duke, Alroy, and The Revolutionary 
 Epic. All these works seem to have been produced 
 not because the writer was full of some theme or con- 
 ception which claimed expression, but because he 
 was a candidate for personal distinction, and was 
 resolved to obtain it by one means or another. The 
 Revolutionary Epic is suggested by the reflection 
 that Homer having produced the heroic epic, and 
 Virgil the political epic, Dante the national epic, and 
 Milton the religious epic, for Disraeli the Younger 
 there remained the revolutionary epic. In the event 
 of the public failing to recognise, and to be quick 
 about it, the poetic heir of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and 
 Milton, the inspired poet pledged himself " without a 
 pang to hurl his Lyre to Limbo," both of which 
 words begin most fortunately and expressively with 
 L. He had no desire to sing to a world which was
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 39 
 
 as the deaf adder to the charmer. Repeating a re- 
 mark which he had formerly put into the mouths of 
 Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming, " I am not," he 
 says, "one of those who find consolation for the 
 neglect of my contemporaries in the imaginary plaud- 
 its of a more sympathetic posterity." With Lord 
 Beaconsfield it is all a question of applause. The 
 title-page of the Revolutionary Epic sets forth in 
 monumental style that it is " the work of Disraeli the 
 Younger, author of the Psychological Romance," a 
 species of composition of which Disraeli the Younger 
 seems to have supposed that he was the inventor in 
 Contarini Fleming. In that work he had set forth a 
 doctrine of poetical expression which seems after- 
 wards to have commended itself to Mr. Carlyle. 
 LOL .! Beaconsfield holds, or then held, that the metri- 
 cal form of poetry is due to the fact that it was at 
 first composed to be sung to the lyre, and that the 
 artifices of diction and the barbaric clash of rhyme 
 are ill adapted to an age in which reading has taken 
 the place of recitation. 
 
 The Wonderful Tale of Alroy, which, however, 
 does not want its artifices of diction, and its occa- 
 sional clash of rhj me, was composed in its more im-
 
 40 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 passioned portions on this principle. Disraeli the 
 Younger was essentially an inventor and projector in 
 literature. The craving for fame prompted one ex- 
 travagant design after another. Expressed in the 
 plainest terms, and urged with a reiteration which even 
 the author's liveliness does not always rescue from 
 tediousness in his early writings, Vivian Grey and 
 Contarini Fleming have no other aim in life than to 
 be notorious and powerful, chiefly by duping or terri- 
 fying others. Contarini had a deep conviction that 
 life would be intolerable unless he were the greatest 
 of men. The desire of distinction and of astound- 
 ing action raged in his infantile soul. Nor does he 
 care to win by fair means. His description of a 
 schoolboy fight and of his demeanour in it is pro- 
 phetic of the spirit in which the writer's political 
 gladiatorship has been conducted. It is the author 
 of the Letters of Runnymede and the assailant of Sir 
 Robert Peel who writes of this schoolboy struggle : 
 " I would not have waited for their silly rules of 
 mock-combat, but have destroyed him in his prostra- 
 tion." A similar indifference to the rules of the ring 
 and to fair' hitting has frequently been observable in 
 Lord Beaconsfield's political encounters. Fame is
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 4! 
 
 essential to Contarini, though not posthumous fame. 
 Whether it is to be won as a brigand or as a warrior, 
 as a prime minister or as a revolutionary leader, as a 
 diplomatist or as a conspirator, is a matter of only 
 secondary moment. That may be as time and chance 
 shall determine. The great thing is to wield author- 
 ity conspicuously and magnificently, to be feared and 
 to be envied. That this power is to be used for the 
 good of others never for one moment occurs to the 
 heroes of Lord Beaconsfield's early novels. It may 
 be said that he is simply describing the wild notions 
 and dreams with which the brains of boys swarm, 
 while they are still in the merely predatory and ani- 
 mal stage which precedes the civilised and human 
 one, in the development of individual character as 
 well as of nature and society. We are quite ready 
 to make such allowance as this consideration re- 
 quires. But Lord Beaconsfield's heroes never pass 
 into a further stage. There is no sign that he recog- 
 nises one. It is quite easy to see the explanation of 
 this shortcoming. The bonds of country and of 
 class have from the very nature of the case scarcely 
 existed for Lord Beaconsfield. The non-personal 
 elements wh : ch bind most men by a thousand ties t<?
 
 42 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 the community of which they are members, and to 
 the lesser communities, local or of organized senti- 
 ment and opinion, into which every nation is divided, 
 have been for him as if they were not. The circum- 
 stances of his birth, the legislation and social temper 
 of the country to which his ancestry transferred them- 
 selves a century and a quarter since, the inherited 
 qualities of a race whose habits of mind and charac- 
 ter have been formed by nearly two thousand years 
 of persecution and social slight, have hindered Lord 
 Beaconsfield from cultivating that subordination of 
 mere personal greed, whether of fame, or wealth, or 
 power, to the well-being of a sect, a party, a class, a 
 nation, without which a genuine community is impos- 
 sible. In this moral banishment the social and even 
 human element in man is suppressed, or grows up 
 but feebly from its root in what is individual, self- 
 seeking and animal. The one apparent exception in 
 Lord Beaconsfield's case is, when properly viewed, 
 simply an illustration . of the general rule. He has 
 been true to the Jewish people who are really his 
 country air.d church. He has quitted them in sem- 
 blance, but in so doing he has helped them, to plead 
 for them the more effectually. For the rest a certain
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 43 
 
 fidelity, as of a Swiss mercenary to the chief or party 
 in whose service he has enlisted, belongs to him con- 
 spicuously. 
 
 It is scarcely Lord Beaconsfield's fault, all things 
 considered, that his career has not been in its main 
 features that of an English statesman, but rather that 
 of a foreign political adventurer. An unfair standard 
 is applied to it when it is judged by the tests by 
 which we try politicians of English blood and train- 
 ing. The Philippe Daims, the Alberonis, the Ripper- 
 das of countries and times different and remote from 
 our own, are the politicians with whom at least during 
 a great part of his public life he may most naturally 
 and fairly be compared. Among political adven- 
 turers, admitting the lawfulness of the calling, he 
 holds an intellectually conspicuous, and even by com- 
 parison a morally respectable place. The hatred of 
 the Whig oligarchy which runs through the Letters of 
 Runnymede, and which has inspired many a gibe and 
 scoff from Lord Beaconsfield's lips and pen during 
 half a century, is probably as genuine a sentiment as 
 either he or any one else has ever entertained. It 
 springs from the same root as his admiration of Bol- 
 ingbroke. A personal rule, the monarchy of a patriot
 
 44 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 king holding himself above the strife of party, and 
 therefore beyond its control, gives the adventurer and 
 the favourite opportunities which it is not easy to find 
 under any other system. It opens doors which an 
 oligarchy, Venetian or Whig, tries to keep closed. 
 Lord Beaconsfield has not only defended Boling- 
 broke's doctrines in his Letters to a Noble and 
 Learned Lord in Vindication of the English Consti- 
 tution, and elsewhere, but he has striven in later 
 years to give effect to them. He has done so, it is 
 true, by the instrumentality of that very system of 
 government by party, which in his more candid mo- 
 ments he decries, and of that aristocratic class for 
 which he every now and then intimates a sort of 
 good-natured contempt. Circumstances made Lord 
 Beaconsfield a political soldier of fortune. In the 
 reign of Queen Anne he would probably have been 
 the pamphleteer of a faction. Under George III. 
 he would have been the dependant and parliament- 
 ary spokesman of a great noble, as Barre was of 
 Lord Shelburne, whom Lord Beaconsfield admires 
 only less than he admires Bolingbroke, and in part 
 for the same reasons. Under the reign of Queen 
 Victoria he has passed through both these embryc
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 45 
 
 stages, as is the law with fully developed animals. 
 He has been the pamphleteer of a party, and the par- 
 liamentary spokesman of aristocratic chiefs. He was 
 the Barre of Lord George Bentinck and of Lord 
 Derby. But he has brought the art of political ad- 
 venture to a higher point than it has reached in Eng- 
 land since the full development of parliamentary in- 
 stitutions. Probably two things were needed for this 
 perfect and final success. The formation under the 
 personal and hereditary influences which we have 
 endeavoured to trace of a typical adventurer was 
 one of these conditions. The reign of a female sove- 
 reign was the other. It was Queen Anne who made 
 Bolingbroke possible. Queen Victoria has been as 
 essential to Lord Beaconsfield. The faint parody of 
 Bolingbroke's career and doctrine which Lord Bea- 
 consfield has been able to exhibit has required a state 
 of things resembling, though but distantly, that which 
 prevailed under the latest preceding Queen Regnant.
 
 II. 
 
 FROM 1826 TO 1837, 
 
 IN the preceding pages we have spoken of the 
 race and parentage of Lord Beaconsfield. To some 
 minds it seems impossible that you can say that a 
 man is a Jew without intending to reproach him for 
 being a Jew. Unfortunately, the strength of still- 
 surviving prejudices makes this confusion only too 
 natural ; and the imputation of an ungenerous appeal 
 to hatreds of creed and race cannot be avoided by 
 any writer who discusses the character of the present 
 Prime Minister. If Lord Beaconsfield' s political ad- 
 ventures could be truly narrated without any refer- 
 ence to his Jewish blood and to the inherited quali- 
 ties which are deeply stamped upon his nature, phy- 
 sical and moral, we should be very glad to keep the . 
 things apart. But the blood is the life, in another 
 sense than that which the Hebrew law-giver attached 
 to the phrase ; and the secret of Lord Beaconsfield's 
 life lies in his Jewish blood. It is not a matter for
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 47 
 
 self-glorification, though it seems to be so to him ; it 
 is nof a matter for disparagement and contempt, 
 though both his assailants and eulogists often appear 
 to regard it as such. It is a simple question of fact 
 and of natural history. So with the characteristics 
 which two thousand years of persecution and suffer- 
 ing have impressed upon the Jewish Captivity in 
 Europe. If Israel was not the worse for what it had 
 undergone, cruelty and wrong-doing would be merely 
 physical calamities. If a man loses half his worth on 
 the day on which he becomes a slave, the nation 
 which has been in servitude for two thousand years 
 is not likely to be morally the better for the experi- 
 ence. That the Jews have imbibed servile vices in 
 nineteen centuries of bondage is as obvious in fact as 
 it was certain in theory. That freedom will bring to 
 them the virtues of freemen we do not doubt ; at 
 present it has stopped at a period of transition, and 
 has brought them the equivocal qualities of freedmen. 
 Their persons have been enfranchised, but not their 
 minds. They display too often the habits of a manu- 
 mitted slave. It is not matter for wonder that Epic- 
 tetus should be a rarer product of slavery than Nar- 
 cissus. The Venetian is almost as conspicuous in
 
 48 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield as the Jew. The organization is 
 due to his race. The environment of several cen- 
 turies, acting upon the organization, has been sup- 
 plied by the republic of St. Mark. Lord Beacons- 
 field has always discussed English politics in terms 
 of the Venetian state-system. To him the British 
 aristocracy are Venetian magnificoes ; the sovereign 
 is a doge whom an oligarchy has enslaved. George 
 
 III. was a sort of Marino Faliero who struggled 
 against the bondage by which an usurping oligarchy 
 fettered him ; and in the struggle, which has Lord 
 Beaconsfield's intense sympathy, forfeited not his life 
 but his reason. 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield's manhood began in the days 
 of George IV. and the preparatory part of his 
 career, his apprenticeship in literature and politics, 
 extends over the last four years of the life of that 
 sovereign and over the whole of the reign of William 
 
 IV. His parliamentary life, which in England is the 
 only form of political life, opens with the Parliament 
 which was assembled on the accession of the Queen. 
 The circumstances of the time, the men who occu- 
 pied conspicuous positions in the State, and the evi-
 
 LORD BEACONSI'IELD. 49 
 
 dent transition which was impending from an old to 
 a new era, were such as would have roused the ar- 
 dour of a generous and humane mind. The long 
 Tory domination, which had been marked by the sel- 
 fish foreign" policy of Castlereagh and the domestic 
 oppression of Sidmouth, by political prosecutions 
 and Peterloo massacres, was obviously drawing to a 
 close. Huskisson had begun that policy of Free 
 Trade which twenty years later was to receive its 
 full development at the hands of Peel ; the political 
 emancipation of Nonconformists and of Roman 
 Catholics was obviously at hand, and formed the 
 subjects of ardent strife ; Parliamentary Reform 
 threatened a revolution in the near future. It was 
 an era of great causes and struggling principles, 
 which powerfully appealed to all minds in which the 
 love of freedom and the sense of justice were strong, 
 and in which there was any consciousness of power 
 to aid the right cause and to combat the wrong. The 
 young Disraeli, a politician in his scloolboy days, 
 felt no summons to the field. The history of his own 
 race did not bid him sympathize with those who suf- 
 fered from kindred oppression. The dreadful dis- 
 tress among the poor did not win from him any cry 
 4
 
 50 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 of indignation nor stir him to any efforts for its miti- 
 gation or removal. The successive Liberal adminis- 
 trations of Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne, with 
 many weaknesses and follies, and much slothful in- 
 action, yet unloosed one heavy burden after another 
 from the necks of the English people, and opened 
 one closed pathway after another to the energies and 
 talents hitherto denied their free scope. Lord l!ea- 
 consfield, in the days which ought to have been those 
 of youthful enthusiasm, gave no help to the work. 
 He watched it closely ; he stood by and railed at 
 those who were doing it, striving by scoff and jeer to 
 discredit them. If he did not hinder it, it was for 
 lack of power and not for lack of will. The presence 
 of Canning and Huskisson in the Cabinet of Lord 
 Liverpool was a sign that the era in which it had 
 been possible for Burke to be the political dependent 
 of a Marquis of Rockingham and a Duke of Port- 
 land, was passing away ; and the Premiership of 
 Canning confirmed the augury. Yet when Canning 
 was persecuted to his death and Huskisson was 
 driven from office, no word of rebuke or indignation 
 rose to the lips of the young candidate for fame. To 
 him, at a period when every ingenuous and sincere
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 5! 
 
 mind was stirred to noble thoughts and strenuous 
 action, politics and politicians were simply the theme 
 of literary satire or a field for personal intrigue and 
 adventure. At a time when in literature the medita- 
 tions of Wordsworth and the speculations of Cole- 
 ridge, the hardy realism of Crabbe, the mystic dreams 
 of Shelley, the generous enthusiasm of Byron in his 
 better moods, and the manly historic sense of Scott, 
 had breathed a new and healthier soul into English 
 imagination, the young Disraeli felt no contagious 
 inspiration of nobleness, and took his place among 
 the novelists of high life and of political society, with 
 Theodore Hook and the author of Tremaine, with 
 Mrs. Gore and Lady Blessington. A free and gener- 
 ous spirit would have raised itself above the degrad- 
 ing influences of a servile condition and ancestry. 
 Lord Beaconsfield, in his boyhood, as in his man- 
 hood and old age, was content now to flatter, now to 
 mock and gibe, to be now the parasite and now the 
 bravo of the great, to write now a begging and now a 
 threatening letter. The ten years which preceded 
 his entrance into parliament contained the promise 
 which has been fulfilled in the forty years of his par- 
 liamentary life.
 
 52 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield's first adventure was literary 
 rather than political; but it was literature with a 
 large element of politics in it. Vivian Grey, or 
 rather the first part of it, which is alone much remem- 
 bered now, appeared in 1826, when the author was 
 just of age. It was written probably in his latest 
 boyhood. Lord Beaconsfield affects now to be 
 ashamed of the work, which he says that he has 
 vainly endeavoured to suppress. He speaks of it as 
 a puerile production ; but it really does not differ 
 morally or intellectually from most of his other nov- 
 els. The survival of boyishness in Lothair and the 
 premature mannishness of Vivian Grey bring both 
 stories to about the same level. Apart from the con- 
 temporary allusions with which each work is filled, 
 Vivian Grey might have been the child of Lord Bea- 
 consfield's old age and Lothair the indiscretion of his 
 youth. The work of the sexagenarian lacks ripeness 
 and maturity ; the work of the boy has no tinge of 
 ingenuousness. It lacks the hue of virtue. Rather 
 the advantage is in this respect with the more recent 
 work, which has not the unabashed hardihood of the 
 earlier. In Vivian Grey, however, the key-note of 
 Lord Beaconsfield's career is struck. We need not
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 53 
 
 tell the story which is familiar to every one. The 
 type of character is that of the adventurer bent upon 
 climbing by whatever means to the highest point of 
 ambition. He fails, and there is a good deal of 
 virtuous moralising about his crimes and faults. In 
 Vivian Grey, as in Contarini Fleming the person, 
 we mean, and not the novel there is a curious 
 blending of Beaumarchais and of Byron. The slip- 
 pery adventurer, who is not much above the moral or 
 intellectual level of the intriguing slave and valet of 
 the classical and French comedy, is mixed up with the 
 grand passions, the crime, and the remorse of Lara 
 and the Corsair ; and the combination is not a little 
 ridiculous. But the basis of the character is the im- 
 pudent schemer. 
 
 The story, as we have said, or rather its first part, 
 was published in 1826, and it bears some traces of 
 the time of its production. Lord Liverpool was 
 Prime Minister, and when the second part of Vivian 
 Grey appeared, he had been succeeded by Mr. Can- 
 ning, of whom, and of Brougham, and Lord Eldon, 
 there are perhaps traces in Mr. Charlatan Gas, Mr. 
 Foaming Fudge, and Lord Past Century, though we 
 have the names only and not the men. Who Mr.
 
 54 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Stapyltan Toad and Mr. Liberal Snake may have 
 been, it is not worth while to inquire. Sir Chris- 
 topher Mowbray, who, on Liberal Snake's "presum- 
 ing to inform him what rent was, damned himself 
 several times from sheer astonishment at the impu- 
 dence of the fellow," and whose "most peculiar char- 
 acteristic was an inexplicable habit of styling political 
 economists French smugglers," is perhaps the liveliest 
 sketch in the book. Sir Christopher, we are told, 
 " is perfectly aware of the present perilous state of 
 the country, and watches with the greatest interest 
 all the plots and plans of this enlightened age. The 
 only thing which he does not exactly comprehend is 
 the London University. This affair really puzzles 
 the worthy gentleman, who could as easily fancy a 
 county member not being a freeholder, as a univer- 
 sity not being at Oxford or Cambridge. Indeed, to 
 this hour, the old gentleman believes that the whole 
 business is a hoax, and if you tell him that .... 
 there are actually four acres of very valuable land 
 purchased near White Conduit Street for the erection 
 .... the old gentleman looks up to heaven, as if 
 determined not to be taken in, and leaning back in 
 his chair, sends forth a sceptical and smiling, ' No 1
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 55 
 
 no ! no ! that won't do.' " In Sir Christopher Mow- 
 bray damning French wines, Bible Societies, and Mr. 
 Huskisson, surrounded by lecturing political econo- 
 mists, and incredulous of the London University ; in 
 the inarticulate man of science, Mr. Macaw, who is 
 contrasted with " the mealy-mouthed professors of 
 the Royal Institution, who get patronised by the 
 blues the Lavoisiers of May Fair," a sneer we take 
 it at Sir Humphry Davy or Faraday ; in Mr. Stapyl- 
 tan Toad's pamphlet on the Corn Laws, " which ex- 
 cited the dire indignation of the Political Economy 
 Club " the commencement of what we may call 
 the Brougham period of politics may be noted. The 
 schoolmaster began to get abroad, and men talked 
 about the popularisation of science and the diffusion 
 of useful knowledge. The movement which may be 
 supposed to have its personification in the contest 
 between Lord Past Century and Mr. Liberal Princi- 
 ples had its weak and even its ludicrous side. Vivian 
 Grey cannot be said to give a full picture of it in its 
 earliest stage ; still there are in the book glimpses of 
 it, drawn in a sketchy and scratchy manner, but show- 
 ing a conception of its real character. 
 
 To Lord Beaconsfield, as a boy, the situation on
 
 56 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 its literary side seems simply to have offered him op- 
 portunities as a satirist, and if he had made a literary 
 career his own, this mode of treating the society of 
 his time would not have been fairly open to severe 
 censure. There are men to whom the cynical view 
 of human life is natural, as there are others to whom 
 life presents itself simply in its artistic aspects. The 
 indifference of Goethe to the great struggles of his 
 age showed a constitutional defect of character ; and 
 the mocking temper which is always conspicuous in 
 Vivian Grey, and is unabated in Lothair, is not an 
 amiable feature of youth or of old age. If Lord Bea- 
 consfield had been content to play the part of a gib- 
 ing chorus to the drama passing under his eyes, it 
 would have been matter for regret that he should have 
 seen only one aspect of the human and English life 
 of his time ; but that too ought to be seen, and it 
 can be seen through his eyes. For other phases of 
 ". we must trust to the perceptions of other intellects 
 and characters. The real ignobleness which is im- 
 pressed on Lord Beaconsfield's writings and political 
 life lies in this, that while men with any greatness of 
 character withdraw from the pursuits and associations 
 for which they feel a contempt, Lord Beaconsfield has
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 57 
 
 been impelled into them in spite of, or even by, this 
 very scorn. The meannesses and weaknesses which 
 he ridiculed he felt could turn to the account of his 
 own ambition. The satirist was also an adventurer. 
 
 His early manhood was the beginning of a period 
 which seemed to promise a new epoch. The Cabinet 
 of Lord Liverpool in 1826, when in Vivian Grey 
 Lord Beaconsfield took his first survey of English 
 society and politics, contained two men of genius on 
 whom the hatred of aristocratic dulness and monopoly 
 had conferred the name of adventurers. Mr. Can- 
 ning and Mr. Huskisson had fought their way from 
 difficult and inconsiderable beginnings to high places 
 in the service of the State. Surrounded by heavy 
 peers and squires, in a Ministry presided over by the 
 very genius of decorous respectability, their political 
 fortunes may have helped to fire the ambition of the 
 younger Disraeli, who perhaps saw a Marquis of 
 Carabas in Lord Liverpool and a Vivian Grey in Mr. 
 Canning. But though Canning and Huskisson, and 
 before them Burke, were stigmatized as adventurers, 
 and although in a certain sense the name belongs to 
 them, they cannot be brought into the same class 
 with Lord Beaconsfield. With a truer self-respect,
 
 58 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Burke perhaps would not have been content to serve 
 great nobles, and to be rewarded in his earlier years 
 with a private secretaryship under Lord Rockingham, 
 and in his maturer manhood with an office outside the 
 Cabinet into which Charles Fox, while yet a youth, 
 was admitted. Something of the servility which the 
 prevalence of an aristocratic system produces even 
 in genius and worth, is apparent in his submission. 
 But Burke's too humble attitude was redeemed by 
 passionate political convictions and. by devoted per- 
 sonal attachments. He served these in serving his great 
 Whig patrons. Canning never failed in his enthusiasm 
 for Pitt and in his steady friendship with Jenkinson ; and 
 Huskisson's consistency as an economic statesman 
 was born of unwavering conviction. These men were 
 adventurers in politics only in the sense in which the 
 man who, not being born in the purple, wins his way 
 to fortune is an adventurer ; or as the founder, by 
 genius a.nd enterprise, of a great commercial house, 
 which he has raised from low beginnings or from 
 nothing, is an adventurer, when he is compared with 
 the inheritor of a business that has dealings with all 
 the world. In the sense in which the word carries 
 moral odium with it, as implying indifference to per-
 
 LOPD BEACONSFIELD. 59 
 
 sons and principles, it is not applicable to them. 
 This is the sense in which it is used when it is inju- 
 riously applied to Lord Beaconsfield ; and this use of 
 the term, we fear, his career too conclusively justifies. 
 In his interpretation of the motives of the great man 
 whose unworn title he has audaciously borrowed, 
 Lord Beaconsfield throws a strong light upon his own 
 aims. He thinks that Burke's passionate denuncia- 
 tion of the French Revolution was simply a vehicle 
 for his exploding hatred of the Whigs whom he had 
 served for hire, and who had kept his wages from 
 him. When Fox was admitted to the Cabinet, from 
 which he was excluded, " hard necessity," says Lord 
 Beaconsfield, " made Mr. Burke submit to the yoke, 
 but the humiliation could never be forgotten. Pour- 
 ing forth the vials of his hoarded vengeance .... 
 he dashed to the ground the rival who had robbed 
 him of his hard-earned greatness," and "rent in twain 
 the oligarchy that had dared to use and to insult him." 
 We quote from Sybil, one of the novels of Lord Bea- 
 consfield's maturer manhood. Lord Beaconsfield 
 reads his own political spite and malice into the ma- 
 jestic though disordered movements of Burke's genius. 
 He attributes to him the anger of a discarded and
 
 60 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 slighted servant. He fancies that the author of the 
 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs was animated 
 by the neo- Judaic hatred of a Venetian oligarchy. 
 
 The second part of Vivian Grey, which only sur- 
 vives in a dead-alive union with the first, is a sort of 
 prose Childe Harold. The penitent wanderings of 
 the discomforted adventurer have picturesque and 
 amusing passages ; but the political allusions are few. 
 Lord Beaconsfield has himself imitated in later years 
 the policy of the plebeian minister of the Grand 
 Duke of Reisenburg, who took care to distribute offi- 
 ces among great nobles, so that, having no family in- 
 fluence of his own, he might organize the family in- 
 fluence of others. In this, says the author of Vivian 
 Grey, " he resembles the Prime Minister of a neigh- 
 bouring state, whose private secretary is unable to 
 write a sentence, almost to direct a letter, but he is a 
 noble." Mr. Canning was then Prime Minister of 
 England, and Lord George Bentinck was, we believe, 
 his private secretary. 
 
 In 1828 Lord Beaconsfield published the Adven- 
 tures of Captain Popanilla. One of the most re- 
 markable things about this work is the fact that the 
 author has forgotten that he ever wrote it. In the
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 6t 
 
 general preface prefixed to one of the later editions 
 of Lothair, Lord Beaconsfield speaks of Contarini 
 Fleming as his second work. It was really, at the 
 very least, his fourth, Popanilla and the Young 
 Duke, a three-volume novel, coming between it and 
 Vivian Grey. Lord Beaconsfield appears to labour 
 under the curious notion that by suppressing a pas- 
 sage or a book he makes it never to have been, and 
 becomes justified in asserting that no such thing was 
 ever written. When in 1864 a question was raised 
 as to the tyrannicidal doctrines attributed to Mazzini, 
 and the complicity of a subordinate member of Lord 
 Palmerston's Government in the enterprises of the 
 great Italian revolutionist, Lord Beaconsfield was 
 virtuously indignant, and did not rest until the offend- 
 ing member had been cut off. In the meantime 
 some curious busybody perhaps the person who 
 afterwards traced a celebrated eulogy on the Duke 
 of Wellington to M. Thiers, got hold of a copy of 
 the Revolutionary Epick, and quoted thence some 
 lines which justified tyrannicide as explicitly as Maz- 
 zini was supposed to have done. To clear himself 
 from this accusation, and to enable the public to 
 judge between him and his calumniators, Lord Bea-
 
 62 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 consfield promptly republished the poem, leaving out 
 the lines impugned. More recently he has adopted 
 a still more thorough procedure. In the preface of 
 which we have spoken, he intimates that between 
 1832 and 1837 he wrote nothing at all. " There was 
 yet a barren interval of five years of my life, so far as 
 literature is concerned." The Revolutionary Epick, 
 which was published in 1834, is thus got rid of in the 
 most effectual manner. This is hurling his lyre to 
 limbo with a vengeance. " I'll disown you, I'll dis- 
 inherit you, I'll unget you," says Sir Anthony Abso- 
 lute to his son. Lord Beaconsfield apparently thinks 
 that by disowning he can unwrite such of his works 
 as he no longer finds it agreeable to acknowledge. 
 He can not only make them cease to be, but cause 
 them never to have been. But this is a feat which it 
 is proverbially beyond the power of omnipotence to 
 accomplish /<z<:2V/; infectum facere nequit. Since 
 he achieved respectability, Lord Beaconsfield has 
 thought it necessary to affect a certain degree of 
 penitence for having written Vivian Grey. He emu- 
 lates the contrition of Chaucer and Dryden. Such, 
 he represents, was his sense of the demerits of the 
 work, that when his second novel was published, he
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 63 
 
 did not describe himself as the author of that story. 
 The fact is that Popanilla, which was published in 
 1828 ; the Young Duke, which was published in 
 1831; Alroy, which was published in 1833; and 
 Venetia, which was published in 1837, were all de- 
 scribed on the title-pages as by " the author of Vivian 
 Grey." They were recommended to the public by 
 that fact. Contarini Fleming, which, as we have 
 said, was neither the second nor the third, but the 
 fourth of Lord Beaconsfield's works, is the only one 
 on the title-page of which Vivian Grey is not men- 
 tioned. This work, afterwards called a " psychologi- 
 cal romance," was originally announced as a " psy- 
 chological autobiography." There was therefore an 
 obvious propriety in veiling its real authorship. 
 Lord Beaconsfield, however, having persuaded him- 
 self that Vivian Grey was repented of as soon as 
 written, proceeds to make a series of circumstantial 
 statements in corroboration of that fact. The origin 
 and growth of myths is ihus pleasingly illustrated in 
 an example to which historic inquirers ought to attach 
 some value. A fixed idea generates a detailed nar- 
 rative to support and confirm it. The idea gives 
 credit to the narrative, and the narrative supports the
 
 64 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 idea, and yet both are fiction. It is interesting to 
 observe the processes which have created religions in 
 operation before our very eyes. A myth, it should 
 be observed, does not involve conscious falsehood, 
 but only a creative imagination embodying its con- 
 ceptions in narratives, and straightway believing the 
 narrative because it embodies its conceptions. 
 
 There are, of course, reasons why Lord Beacons- 
 field should be desirous of ignoring Popanilla and 
 the Revolutionary Epick, and should regret that 
 Vivian Grey's tenacity of life has resisted all at- 
 tempts to smother it. Popanilla does not respect 
 the foundations of society, and there are passages in 
 it which the future leader of the Protectionist party 
 might be excused for wishing to deal with, as the as- 
 sailant of Mazzini and Mr. Stansfeld dealt with the 
 tyrannicidal preachments of the Revolutionary Epick. 
 It is impossible to avoid some association of Popa- 
 nilla with its author. The shipwrecked adventurer, 
 brought from the island of Fantaisie to the coast of 
 Vraibleusia, and mingling with the crowds in the 
 streets of Hubbabub, was not more foreign to the 
 scenes and people among whom he found himself, 
 than the younger Disraeli in the politics and society
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 6<J 
 
 of London. The description of the statue, of the 
 aboriginal inhabitants, and of the twelve managers, 
 in which the sovereign, the landed aristocracy, and 
 the Cabinet were ridiculed, is perhaps the cleverest 
 portion of Popanilla. In the arrangements which the 
 aboriginal inhabitant makes for forcing his own agri- 
 cultural produce on the inhabitants of Vraibleusia, the 
 doctrine and practice of protection to native industry 
 is openly ridiculed. It is clear that at this turn of 
 his life he was fully possessed of the arguments in 
 favour of Free Trade, and understood them more 
 clearly than might have been expected. His eulogies 
 in other works on the economic doctrines which 
 Shelburne and the younger Pitt derived from Adam 
 Smith, show that until political exigencies made the 
 advocacy of protection expedient, Lord Beaconsfield 
 was a free-trader. His phrases vary as occasion sug- 
 gests, but his general doctrine is unmistakeable. 
 The story is a clever boyish parody and imitation, 
 which shows enough acquaintance with the terms of 
 the political, philosophical, and religious fashions of 
 le time to enable the author to make fun of them. 
 >rd Beaconsfield has never thought it necessary to 
 much deeper into matters than phrases and catch-
 
 66 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 words will lead him. Mankind, in his view, is gov- 
 erned by phrases and catchwords, and to study thor- 
 oughly what you do not intend to treat thoroughly 
 would be a waste of time. Lord Beaconsfield has 
 never treated either his subjects or the public seriously, 
 and the public has been content to laugh at and with 
 him until the present moment, when it may begin to 
 think itself of the crackling of thorns under the 
 pot. 
 
 In such exercises as these, and in the travels in 
 Europe and the East to which we have referred, Lord 
 Beaconsfield prepared himself for that public life in 
 which he was anxious to play a conspicuous part. 
 In the preface to Lothair, of which we have before 
 spoken, he lays claim to a sort of political consistency. 
 He represents himself as having through life avowed 
 certain principles, which were the result of early 
 study and meditation. " Born in a library and trained 
 from early childhood by learned men who did not 
 share the passions and prejudices of our political and 
 social life, I had imbibed on some subjects conclu- 
 sions different from those which generally prevail, 
 and especially with reference to the history of our 
 own country." Lord Beaconsfield then proceeds to 

 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 67 
 
 set forth, in language suitable to a man who had been, 
 and hoped to be again, Prime Minister of England, 
 and who was still leader of the Conservative party, 
 some ghostly shadow of the old doctrines about 
 the Doge and the Venetian oligarchy, though those 
 familiar names are never mentioned. He was not, 
 however, so exclusively the recluse student working 
 out his own solitary conclusions in his natal library 
 and among the learned men who trained his early 
 childhood, as might be fancied from the description. 
 The discipline of a dissenting boarding-school and 
 the bustle of an attorney's office had their share with 
 the learned men who were free from the passions and 
 prejudices of our political and social life, in the for- 
 mation of the young Disraeli's mind and character. 
 Familiarity with these passions and prejudices, wher- 
 soever derived, is more conspicuous in Vivian Grey, 
 Popanilla, and the Young Duke than new readings of 
 English history and theories of the English constitu- 
 tion. These appear later 1te.,ord Beaconsfield's life 
 and writings. The library ancT the learned men have 
 probably had very little to do with them, except in 
 furnishing an imposing and half-barbarous jargon of 
 magnificoes and doges, in which the new doctrines
 
 68 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 were expressed for the greater bewilderment of the 
 pull lie, prepared to take omne ignotum pro magnifico. 
 Lord Beaconsfield's view of the British Constitution 
 at ihe commencement of his political adventures may 
 be briefly expressed. It was a view from the outside. 
 Its high walls and closed doors and barred windows 
 were the objects presented to his gaze, and he re- 
 solved to surmount them. In a man who has a high 
 conception of politics, and who is eager .to level un- 
 just barriers that stand in the way of others as well 
 as himself, attack upon oligarchic monopoly and 
 privilege may be commended as a noble and gener- 
 ous enterprise. To Lord Beaconsfield, however, by 
 his repeated confession, and still more emphatically 
 by the clear tenor of his life and writings, politics 
 have been simply an exciting game in which he de- 
 sired to take part, and politicians have formed an 
 exclusive society into which he was resolved to force 
 himself. The exclusion which he resented was the 
 exclusion of himself. 
 
 There has been much discussion as to whether 
 Lord Beaconsfield made his first appearance in poli- 
 tics as a Tory, or as a Radical, or as a Tory-Radical. 
 The fact is that he was an anti-Whig, and his Tory-
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 69 
 
 ism, or Radicalism, or Tory-Radicalism, were only so 
 many phases of his opposition to the Whigs and their 
 oligarchical beati possidentes. We need not go into 
 the details of Lord Beaconsfield's candidature for 
 High Wycombe, and his unsuccessful overtures to 
 other constituencies, until his election for Maidstone 
 in 1837. The story has been sufficiently told in 
 Mr. Macknight's able biography, and is repeated 
 with more detail in the carefully compiled volume 
 entitled, " Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield." 
 He stood twice in 1832 for the first-named borough; 
 issued, in hope of a vacancy which did not occur, an 
 address to the electors of Marylebone in 1833 ; and 
 stood unsuccessfully against the late Mr. Labouchere 
 for Taunton in 1835. In the latter year he first ap- 
 peared distinctly as a Conservative. Up till then he 
 had hovered between Toryism and Radicalism, advo- 
 cating the measures proposed by Mr. Hume and Mr. 
 O'Connell on grounds drawn from the writings and 
 the conduct of Bolingbroke and Sir William Wynd- 
 ham, who were in favour of triennial parliaments, and 
 who, for good reasons, had certainly never said any- 
 thing against vote by ballot or the repeal of the taxes 
 on knowledge. In 1834 Lord Beaconsfield appears
 
 70 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 to have been still hesitating between the two ele- 
 ments of his Tory-Radicalism. According to a pas- 
 sage in the late Mr. Greville's diary, he was unde- 
 cided whether to seek his Marquis of Carabas in 
 Lord Chandos or in Lord Durham. One thing only 
 is clear. Lord Beaconsfield was bent on a political 
 career, and found that the exclusiveness of the Whig 
 oligarchy was the main obstacle in his way. His 
 hatred of the Whigs was, we believe, genuine, and it 
 dressed itself up in the guise of a principle. Politi- 
 cal adventurers who are not content to be the mere 
 servants and lackeys of a great lord, have usually 
 played either one or other of two games. They may 
 be courtiers or they may be demagogues ; they may 
 flatter the mob, or they may be the sycophants of the 
 Crown. They sometimes play these parts in succes- 
 sion, as Wilkes did. They have not often combined 
 them at one and the same time. This, however, is 
 what Lord Beaconsfield has done. The Crown and 
 the multitude are set forth as natural allies against a 
 rapacious, recreant, and haughty parliament. The 
 Reform Act is described as issuing out of " the popu- 
 lar frenzy of a mean and selfish revolution, which 
 emancipated neither the Crown nor the people."
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 7 1 
 
 The cause for which Hampden died in the field and 
 Sydney on the scaffold was the cause of the Venetian 
 republic. From the very beginning of his career, 
 Lord Beaconsfield has doubled the apparently incon- 
 sistent parts of king's friend and mobsman. Under 
 different conditions, and with a different ultimate ob- 
 ject, he has played the same game in England as 
 Louis Napoleon played in France. It is singular, 
 however, that his political detestation of the aristoc- 
 racy has been accompanied by an enormous social 
 veneration of them. As a novelist, he is never easy 
 when he is in any other society. His veneration, it 
 is true, is mainly for their houses, their furniture, their 
 grounds, and their liveries. His novels abound in 
 descriptions of the mansions and parks of great peo- 
 ple, all done in the style of a great auctioneer's ad- 
 vertisements. The tone and phrases of the house- 
 furnisher, the appraiser, and the salesman run through 
 all the still life of his novels. A tailor matching pat- 
 terns, unrolling his sample -book, and combining a 
 sweet thing in waistcoats with an article he can rec- 
 ommend for trousers, is the image which Lord Bea- 
 consfield's inventory of the dresses of his heroes re- 
 calls. To him the Emperor Hadrian is almost at the
 
 72 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 head of mankind as being " the most sumptuous 
 character of antiquity." A love of power, wealth, 
 and finery, and a mixed hatred and reverence of the 
 persons who possess them, is the common inspiration 
 of Lord Beaconsfield's politics and of his literature. 
 In the curious mixture of servility and of mockery 
 which runs through his description of the lives and 
 conversation of the high nobility, where reverence 
 ends and contempt begins it is impossible to say. 
 They are both obviously there, and, inconsistent as 
 they seem, they are inextricably mixed. 
 
 This habit of mind, this inability to see much ex- 
 cept the results of a large income and a patronage 
 bestowed, wholly regardless of expense, on the tailor, 
 the jeweller, the house-furnisher, and the ornamental 
 gardener, are as the tares which choke the wheat in 
 Lord Beaconsfield's writings. There are every now 
 and then glimpses of better feelings and of a more 
 disinterested enjoyment of what is beautiful in nature 
 and in human life ; but these things are evanescent. 
 The angry sense of exclusion and the greed of coveted 
 possession deform and discolour all but here and 
 there a few pages. Apart from the purely satirical 
 passages, the most natural and skilful touches are
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 73 
 
 those in which the talk and games of boys, their brag 
 and self-confidence, their absolute theories of life and 
 purposes of action unqualified by a dream of failure, 
 are set forth ; with a certain humour that is not with- 
 out its veiled pathos. There is some delicacy, too, 
 mixed with much fine writing and superfine sentiment 
 of the Minerva press school in Lord Beaconsfield's 
 heroines. Women do not enter into competition 
 with men, and there is no sense therefore of struggle 
 with rivals fortunately placed, to embitter his views 
 of them. On the whole, the sort of mixture of a fit- 
 ful generosity and nobleness, with the recklessness 
 of the brigand and pirate of the circulating library, 
 marks Lord Beaconsfield's earlier stories. 
 
 In these social feelings, the hatred of a plebeian and 
 of a man of foreign origin and despised race, for an 
 aristocracy whose power he would have liked to 
 share, whose houses, grounds, clothes, and jewellery 
 he admired, and in whose society he pined to live, 
 we get the inspiration of Lord Beaconsfield's policy, 
 clothed in phrases borrowed from. Bolingbroke. In 
 1834 he was elected a member of the Westminster 
 Reform Club, and in the following year he appeared 
 at Taunton as the candidate of the Conservative
 
 74 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Club and the supporter of Sir Robert Peel. These 
 are facts not involving greater inconsistencies than 
 those which mark every period of his life. He has 
 been everything except a Whig, not only in succes- 
 sion, but simultaneously. His conflict with O'Con- 
 nell, arising out of a speech made during his unsuc- 
 cessful candidature at Taunton, has a certain interest 
 as illustrating the qualities which were displayed by 
 Lord Beaconsfield later in life in his assaults on Sir 
 Robert Peel. He had courted O'ConnelFs political 
 support when he was a candidate three years before 
 at High Wycombe. He had indulged in private ex- 
 pressions of esteem and regard, which amounted to a 
 solicitation of O'Connell's friendship. But O'Con- 
 nell, after denouncing the base, bloody, and brutal 
 Whigs, was supposed to have entered into the agree- 
 ment with them known as the Tichfield House Com- 
 pact. Next to his love of the Jews, Lord Beacons- 
 field's strongest passion, as we have seen, has been 
 hatred of the Whigs ; and O'Connell and Lord Mel- 
 bourne's administration were both denounced in 
 terms which our readers would not thank us for re- 
 peating. O'Connell repaid his assailant in kind. 
 The license of political and personal controversy was
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 75 
 
 more excessive than it is now; but it may be safely 
 said that English gentlemen, of the attainments and 
 intellectual power of either of the two combatants, 
 could not have indulged in the reciprocal ribaldry 
 and insult with which they bespattered each other. 
 O'Connell and Mr. Disraeli, however, came each 
 from a servile race and a proscribed and insulted 
 religion. Through no fault of their own, the vices 
 of slaves were in their hearts and found expression 
 in their tongues. Self-respect was difficult to men 
 whose ancestors through a long course of centuries 
 had been taught to cringe under a yoke, and who, 
 when they did not speak low and in a bondsman's 
 key, exploded in violent and indecent insults. We 
 have spoken of the vices of slaves as illustrated in 
 this reciprocal vituperation. We ought rather to 
 have said that they displayed the vices of freedmen, 
 from whom the restraints of servitude have been re- 
 moved, but who have not yet learned the moral re- 
 straints of personal self-respect. 
 
 The parallel does, however, some injustice to 
 O'Connell. With some of the vices of the slave, the 
 railing and licentious tongue, and the slippery and 
 tricky nature, he combined the large and generous
 
 76 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 impulses of the patriot. Whether he had the self- 
 denial which would have accepted poverty, or exile, 
 or unpopularity for a just but losing cause, is fairly 
 open to question. There are few traces in him of 
 the temperament of the hero or of the martyr. But, 
 though he had not the sensitive and exacting honoui 
 which would shrink from a paid and retained patri- 
 otism ; though he did not feel that the suspicion of 
 selling himself to the advocacy of aims which he 
 knew to be illusions was at any cost to be shunned ; 
 there is no reason whatsoever for thinking that the 
 paid patriot would ever have been the purchased 
 apostate. Justice and freedom, his country and his 
 church, were not simply articles of merchandise in 
 which he carried on a trade : they were to him, in 
 spite of many meaner and debasing elements, a 
 sacred inspiration. This large and generous nature 
 could feel the fascination of a great and noble cause. 
 The mixture of the buffoon and the mountebank with 
 the patriot and the national liberator, belongs to the 
 transition period in Irish history and character. The 
 old servitude and the newer freedom blend in this 
 ambiguous result. 
 
 The disgrace of this gladiatorial combat of manu-
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 77 
 
 mitted slaves rests largely with the nation which, by 
 proscribing them, their race, and their faith, helped 
 to make them what they were. The penalty rests 
 with it too. Sinister interests, and powerful influ- 
 ences which are not English, sway English politics. 
 Finance and religion are cosmopolitan, and men 
 whose country is their counting-house indirectly 
 govern us. The rulers of the synagogue are more 
 largely than is suspected the rulers of England. 
 Lord Beaconsfield's language to O'Connell, as his 
 language afterwards to Peel, passing at once from 
 fulsome eulogy to unmeasured vituperation, simply 
 exhibits the transition from the obsequiousness of 
 the mercenary seeking a place to the insolence of 
 the mercenary refused or dismissed from one. In the 
 Letters of Runnymede, which appeared in the follow- 
 ing year, these qualities are very conspicuous. The 
 author directly addresses the leading Whig statesmen 
 of the day by name in terms of personal insult, which 
 do not differ from the abuse with which a street- 
 beggar who has been denied alms, will sometimes 
 pursue a passer-by. 
 
 In 1834, as we have seen from Mr. Greville's 
 Diary, Mr. Disraeli was hesitating between two
 
 78 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 patrons. There was a chance of his entering Parlia- 
 ment as a Radical by Lord Durham's aid, and some 
 hope of doing so as a Tory by the help of Lord 
 Lyndhurst. From whatever motive, the latter course 
 was decided upon ; and Mr. Disraeli went down to 
 Taunton in 1835. Possibly his friendship for Lord 
 Lyndhurst decided him. In the preface to Lothair, 
 which contains Lord Beaconsfield's latest confes- 
 sions, he speaks of Lord Lyndhurst as one of the two 
 best friends he ever had. Lord Beaconsfield is just 
 the man to appreciate the brilliant intellectual gifts 
 of Lyndhurst, and he passes what may be a just 
 eulogy upon the qualities he displayed in private life, 
 " the tenderness of his disposition, the sweetness of 
 his temper, his ripe scholarship, and the playfulness 
 of his bright and airy spirit." Lord Lyndhurst's os- 
 tentatious indifference to political principles, and the 
 readiness with which he took the large retaining fee 
 of professional and political employment and promo- 
 tion, by which he was bought off from the Liberal 
 side in politics, and became the advocate of Tory 
 principles, are not likely to have impressed Lord 
 Beaconsfield unfavourably. Scruples, he has said, are 
 usually the creatures of perplexity, not of con-
 
 LORD BBACONSFIELD. 79 
 
 science ; and he would have thought Lord Lyndhurst 
 a fool to have thrown away his chances. The friend- 
 ship of the two men had one political result in the 
 Letter to a Noble and Learned Lord in Vindication 
 of the English Constitution, which was published in 
 1835, the year following that in which the Revolu- 
 tionary Epick appeared. The Vindication does 
 not rank as a permanent contribution to English 
 political philosophy. It is a queer medley of Burke 
 and Bolingbroke, whose streams of thought do not 
 readily mix, with that sort of Tory-Democratic doc- 
 trine in which renegade Radicals often endeavour to 
 hide their apostasy. 
 
 The second of the two best friends Lord Beacons- 
 field ever had was " the inimitable D'Orsay, the most 
 accomplished and the most engaging character that 
 has figured in this century, who with the form and 
 universal genius of an Alcibiades, combined a bril- 
 liant wit and a heart of quick affection, and who, 
 placed in a public position, would have displayed a 
 courage, a judgment, and a commanding intelligence 
 which would have ranked him with the leaders of 
 mankind." Henrietta Temple, which was dedicated 
 to Count D'Orsay, contains a portrait of him under
 
 8o POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 the name of Count Alcibiades de Mirabel, from 
 which one may judge of the qualities which in Lord 
 Beaconsfield's view went to form the most accom- 
 plished and engaging character of this century. It 
 might be unfair to judge the hero by the hero-wor- 
 shipper ; but it is not unfair to judge the hero-wor- 
 shipper by the hero, or at any rate by his idealised 
 conception of the hero. Count Alcibiades de Mirabel 
 is a glorified Beau Brummel ; and although the fault 
 may be in Lord Beaconsfield's portraiture, the type 
 of character is not doubtful. A dashing and showy 
 social adventurer, who would have been a first-rate 
 drawing-master, music-master, writing-master, French 
 master, elocution-master, riding-master, courier, tailor, 
 or cook a master of all those arts by which " our life 
 is only drest for show : mean handiwork of craftsman, 
 cook, or groom " is to Lord Beaconsfield, in his 
 advanced age, the most accomplished and engaging 
 character and universal genius of the century. The 
 impulses which inspire the reason, and direct the con- 
 science, and shape the life to nobler ends than politi- 
 cal advancement or social enjoyment, are left out of 
 his reckoning. His gaze is fixed on the D'Orsays, 
 and the Tom Buncombes, and the Louis Napoleons,
 
 LORD BEACONSBIELD. 8 1 
 
 with whom he associated at Gore House, the spend- 
 thrifts and adventurers and conspirators who found 
 themselves in salons to which "gentlemen" only 
 (gentlemen as distinguished from ladies) went. 
 Prince Louis Napoleon conquered a precarious re- 
 spectability by his reception at Windsor. Lord Bea- 
 consfield achieved a similar position when he was 
 acknowledged by the late Lord Derby. His properly 
 political life begins with his entrance into Parliament 
 in 1837 on the accession of the Queen. His literary 
 career was at the same time brought to a pause of 
 seven years, which was broken in 1844 by the publi- 
 cation of Coningsby. The two stories, Venetia and 
 Henrietta Temple, published in 1837, and dedicated 
 to Lord Lyndhurst and Count D'Orsay, have no poli- 
 tical motive or character. They are attempts in pure 
 art, and cannot be deemed successful save in a few 
 strokes of social satire. Byron is out-Byronized, 
 and the Werther period of Goethe out-Werthered. 
 In Venetia, Caduras and Herbert are recognisable as 
 Byron and Shelley, not by any truth of portraiture, 
 but by plagiarism from their real lives. Lord Bea- 
 consfield's dealings with the grand passions always 
 
 suggest the Porte St. Martin and the Surrey Theatre. 
 6
 
 82 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 His heroic vein lies perilously near to the mock 
 heroic. There is a genuine breath of social and poli- 
 tical satire animating his works which might have 
 earned him a more honourable place in English liter- 
 ature than the parliamentary career, on the threshold 
 of which we leave him for the present, has won for 
 him in English history. 
 
 In writing this sketch, we lay our account with 
 some censure, which we have no choice but to con- 
 front. The public career of Lord Beaconsfield is in 
 our view the opprobrium of English politics during 
 the past forty years, and his political character is, in 
 the situation which he holds, a danger and defiance 
 to England, and a threat to the peace of the world. 
 There can be no reason why, without exaggeration, 
 but without reserve, we should not say what we 
 believe to be the truth about it. In discussing the 
 actions of a politician from day to day it is neither 
 desirable nor possible to be always examining charac- 
 ter. Life is too short for business of that sort. 
 The man must be taken for granted, in the position 
 to which he has raised himself, and in which the pub- 
 lic sees him with acquiescence, and even maintains
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 83 
 
 him with deliberate purpose. But this abeyance, for 
 convenience' sake, of the moral judgment this refu- 
 sal to raise the previous question of general char- 
 acter and motives at every step in social inter- 
 course or every stage of the public business cer- 
 tainly does not involve the permanent renunciation 
 of moral judgment. It is impossible to leave men to 
 the appreciation of history only. To treat Lord Bea- 
 consfield as if he were a Chatham, would simply be 
 ludicrous twenty-five years hence. No one will 
 grudge any paradox-monger of the twentieth century 
 an amusement of that sort, if he can find nothing 
 better or more plausible. But what will be historic 
 folly then is a very present danger now. a danger 
 against which it is impossible without what is called 
 attacking an individual. We speak only of Lord 
 Beaconsfield's public character. His admirers have 
 not even the least right to protest against personality 
 in politics. The life of the hero has been little more 
 than a series of personal assaults. 
 
 This example, however, is the last by which we 
 should desire to justify ourselves, and we have no in- 
 tention of imitating it. The motive which has urged 
 us to the task of studying his political career is of a
 
 84 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 different order. At present the doctrine of the per- 
 sonal power is loudly proclaimed. An attempt is 
 being made to revive the pretensions which George 
 III. strove unsuccessfully to assert. This effort has 
 always been tried under foreign inspiration. An 
 able German, Baron Stockmar, .undertook to instruct 
 the Prince Consort in the theory and practice of the 
 British Constitution, and the ideas of the Prince Con- 
 sort were, of course, transmitted to the Queen, and 
 shaped her practice. English statesmen, by a care- 
 less compliance, due in part to the deference which 
 they found it difficult to withhold from one whom, to 
 use a phrase of Lord Palmerston's, both as a sover- 
 eign and a lady it was unbecoming to thwart, too 
 hastily yielded assent to doubtful pretensions. They 
 even framed a theory of the Constitution to suit these 
 ideas. Lord John Russell consented, on a celebrated 
 occasion, to become the mouthpiece of Stockmarism 
 in the House of Commons. The speech which he 
 delivered when the action of the Prince Consort was 
 called in question, has become historic. It is habit- 
 ually cited by apologists who desire to aggrandize 
 the power and functions of the Crown. Like almost 
 all attempts to frame a theory of the Constitution, it
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 85 
 
 sought the living among the dead. By the time that 
 a scheme of the English Constitution is concocted, it 
 has almost of necessity ceased to be true. Depending, 
 as the Constitution does, upon a balance of powers and 
 forces which are in a constant state of relative growth 
 ixfid decline, the theory, even if it be brought up to 
 the very latest date at the time when it is framed, is 
 pretty sure to be out of date at the time when it is 
 published. The position of things has changed. 
 Baron Stockmar and the Prince Consort, drawing 
 their doctrine out of old English books and historic 
 precedents, illustrated by foreign, and chiefly Ger- 
 man, analogies, adopted a procedure more certain 
 perhaps than any other that could be devised, to lead 
 them astray. Even if they possessed, as they cer- 
 tainly did not, the flexibility of mind and quickness 
 of intuitive perception needful to discern the genius 
 of a people and the character of institutions foreign 
 to their personal experience, the method which they 
 employed, and the conditions which surrounded them 
 as observers, were almost of a necessity fatal to suc- 
 cess. A court, even a court so pure as that of Eng- 
 land, is the very last place in which parliamentary 
 government can be fairly studied. A Prince Consort,
 
 86 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 even a Prince Consort so admirable in intention, so 
 respectable in character, so conscientious and pains- 
 taking in every relation of life as Prince Albert was, 
 is the very last person to comprehend the working of 
 Parliamentary institutions so developed as those of 
 England. It is too rough to be congenial to a situa- 
 tion so delicate, difficult, and even equivocal as that 
 of the husband of a reigning queen, and the father of 
 an heir-apparent to the throne. The assistance of a 
 kind of private physician-minister, such as Baron 
 Stockmar was, would make matters rather worse than 
 better. The disposition to minimize parliamentary 
 authority, and to assert an influence of the court and 
 of the Crown above and beyond them, is in such cir- 
 cumstances inevitable. 
 
 The premature death of the Prince Consort, the 
 withdrawal of the Queen for a long term of years from 
 active interest in political affairs, and the long Pre- 
 mierships of Lord Palmerston and Mr. Gladstone, 
 men very dissimilar in most respects, but neither of 
 them courtiers, nor possessing the qualities likely to 
 make them the favourites of court favourites men of 
 great natural vigour of character, of strong purpose, 
 and of resolute political convictions all these things
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 87 
 
 have contributed to keep in check for a time the 
 assumptions which Baron Stockmar encouraged. 
 Under Lord Beaconsfield's administration they have 
 revived, and revived in a more mischievous form and 
 under worse guidance than ever before. They are 
 ostentatiously set forth in courtier-like Memoirs ap- 
 pearing under the royal sanction, and in political 
 manifestos of important Conservative organs. They 
 fit in with the doctrines which Lord Beaconsfield has 
 professed with more steadiness than any other of his 
 fluctuating opinions, and which he probably seriously 
 entertains. They are likely enough to receive very 
 mischievous development at his hands a develop- 
 ment in which there may be the seeds of future 
 troubles, unless a more modest view of the functions 
 of the Crown in the Constitution than that which he 
 encourages, be adopted and acted upon in future. 
 The personal power of the monarch is in danger of 
 becoming either a means of thwarting a minister who 
 has the confidence of the country without the good- 
 will of the sovereign ; or, what might be yet more 
 calamitous, the personal power of an adroit flatterer 
 and a daring adventurer is likely, under forms of ob- 
 seq.iious submission, to take the place of the persona/
 
 88 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 power of the monarch. Cardinal Wolsey wrote, Ego 
 et rex meus. Lord Beaconsfield makes a very near 
 approach sometimes to a similar egotism. It is no 
 longer possible to treat him with the half-contemp- 
 tuous indulgence that was thought to be due to a 
 political comedian. Up till 1874 Mr. Disraeli was 
 treated by the whole political press of England as a 
 joke, although he was often treated and especially 
 in the Quarterly Review as a very misplaced and 
 untimely joke. In 1878, without being a serious per- 
 sonage, he holds very serious issues in his hands. It 
 is essential that men should be reminded what man- 
 ner of man he is, to whom the English people, the 
 English Parliament, and the Queen of England, ha\e 
 committed a sort of political dictatorship.
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 89 
 
 III. 
 
 FROM 1837 TO 1852. 
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD'S political adventures have 
 three stages. The first, extending from 1826 to 
 1837, exhibits his beginnings in literature and poli- 
 tics, and shows how he struggled with reluctant con- 
 stituencies until at last he forced his way into the 
 House of Commons. It is really the most important 
 of all, for in it the man was formed and displayed, 
 and the peculiarities of his character and genius were 
 disclosed with less restraint than afterwards. He 
 gambolled with unchecked license. The fierce play 
 of an untamed nature gave itself free vent. After- 
 wards, Lord Beaconsfield found it necessary to clothe 
 himself in parliamentary, official, and social decorum. 
 Only now and then in the wild sallies, and still often- 
 er in the demure smile, do we see that the man is in 
 disguise. Still, every now and then the aboriginal 
 savage looks through his eyes, and occasionally 
 shrieks in his voice, and displays itself in his excited
 
 90 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 gestures. The impish " nature breaks at seasons 
 through the gilded pale." The next period is com- 
 pressed within the years from 1837 to 1852. It re- 
 cords Lord Beaconsfield's struggles in the House of 
 Commons to parliamentary toleration, to parliament- 
 ary recognition, to parliamentary eminence, through 
 the spokesmanship first of a rather ridiculous coterie, 
 then of an angry faction, and afterwards of an organ- 
 ized party, raising him into office, and the ministerial 
 leadership in the House of Commons. Lord Bea- 
 consfield began by wearing the livery of Peel ; he 
 then, with ribbons in his hat and tabor in his mouth, 
 masqueraded as a rural swain, dancing with his 
 young England companions round a Maypole ; and 
 finally in the breeches and top-boots of a stage 
 squire, smacked his hunting whip against his thigh, 
 denounced the villainy of the traitor Peel, who had 
 deceived him and other simple-minded country gen- 
 tlemen into a belief that he was a Protectionist, and a 
 friend of the land and of the corn laws, while he was 
 nothing but a manufacturer and free-trader. Lord 
 Beaconsfield's rapid changes of costume and charac- 
 ter resemble those of the elder and younger Mathews 
 in some of their startling transformations. The third
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 9! 
 
 period of his political adventures, in which England 
 now has the perilous honour and excitement of living, 
 is that of his official and ex-official life. It extends 
 from the year 1852 to this present month of June, 
 1878, and probably will extend considerably beyond 
 it. It is really that which most interests the world ; 
 but the second period, which engages us now, must 
 first be rapidly surveyed. 
 
 The year 1837 then saw Mr. Disraeli fairly launch- 
 ed in the career in which for more than forty years he 
 has played a conspicuous, and for thirty of those 
 forty, a distinguished, and on some questions, a deci- 
 sive part. The law, since altered, required that a new 
 parliament shall be summoned on the accession of a 
 new sovereign ; and he was a member of the first 
 House of Commons that met under the reign of 
 Queen Victoria. He had been elected for Maid- 
 stone. He won this victory not over hir old enemies 
 the Whigs, but over his former friends and allies, the 
 Radicals, defeating the veteran Colonel Perronet 
 Thompson. This Barrabean preference on the part 
 of the Kentish borough has since been atoned for by 
 wiser elections to subsequent parliaments. Such tri- 
 umphs of the sciolist and the adventurer over the
 
 92 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 man of pure and public purpose, of fixed principles, 
 and of reasoned convictions, are, however, incidents 
 of public life too common and natural to attract 
 much attention. It has been Lord Beaconsfield's 
 purpose in life to advance himself, and he has sue* 
 ceeded. It was the purpose of Colonel Perronet 
 Thompson to advance the doctrines which he be- 
 lieved to be true, and to promote the reforms which 
 he deemed to be necessary. Both have had the tri- 
 umph which they most coveted. Each illustrates the 
 value of singleness of purpose, be the purpose good 
 or evil, in public or in private life. It is natural to 
 desire that a man who promotes a great cause shall 
 also promote himself. But the conditions of human 
 life and character do not often allow of this double 
 victory ; and the man who has this twofold aim in 
 view is not likely to realize either part of it. Usual- 
 ly he must either sacrifice himself to his cause, or his 
 cause to himself. To desire to be disinterested and 
 rewarded is a state of mind logically contradictory, 
 but in practice too easily and too frequently realized. 
 To strive only for principles, and to reap place and 
 power, titles and decorations, public honour and 
 popular gratitude, is a combination very flattering
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 93 
 
 to that inward eye which is the bliss of meditative 
 and ambitious solitude. The internal delight of satis- 
 fied virtue, and the gratified vanity of external hon- 
 ours, are scarcely to be had together except in the fan- 
 ciful forecast of a sentimental virtue veiling personal 
 greed. The man who has no cause but himself, 
 and the man who, if we may say so, has no self but 
 his cause, are alone likely to reach the goal that they 
 set before them. The men who are a little for virtue 
 and a. great deal for themselves will probably end by 
 being all for themselves, and so sink into the first 
 class. The men who are too virtuous to be unscru- 
 pulous, but not virtuous enough to lose sight of them- 
 selves, will probably share the misfortune of the dog 
 that courses two hares at once. Lord Beaconsfield 
 has had one steady and consistent purpose through 
 life ; and, to use Burke's expression, he has varied 
 his means in order to preserve the essential unity of 
 his end. To climb ever higher and higher, to fix 
 more and more steadily the public gaze, to wield 
 power, to receive and distribute honours, to be the 
 talk of his coterie, of England, of Europe, of the 
 world, has been his aim, and in this he has succeeded. 
 No career ever illustrated more remarkably the vir-
 
 94 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 tues, if they be such apart from the ends to which 
 they are directed, of steady and unshaken purpose, of 
 perseverance, patience, and audacity, of the skill 
 which knows when to wait and when to act. Lord 
 Beaconsfield is the great modern professor and prac- 
 titioner in its personal application of that doctrine of 
 opportunism, which Peel, in its more legitimate po- 
 litical aspects, made a system in England, and to 
 which the tactics of M. Gambetta have given a name 
 in France. The debauching effect of the French 
 Empire, even upon such opponents as the Repub- 
 lican leader of France, is to be seen in his undis- 
 guised admiration for Lord Beaconsfield. 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield, who had been alternately a 
 Tory-Radical, and a Radical-Tory, as convenience 
 might dictate, appeared at Maidstone as a simple 
 Conservative. For the next six or seven years of 
 his life he can best be described by a term which had 
 not then taken its place in political nomenclature. 
 He was a Peelite, though not of course in the later 
 meaning of the word, in which it denoted a school of 
 political doctrine and practice. He was a Peelite in 
 a more personal sense, such as that in which the 
 "gallant, gay domestics" of High Life below Stairs
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 95 
 
 assume the names, as they wear the livery, of the 
 noblemen and gentlemen on whom they condescend 
 to wait. His insight into personal character enabled 
 him to single out the really capable man of his age. 
 His perception of political tendencies led him to 
 recognise that the hour was bringing his opportunity 
 to the man ; and he flung himself into the current 
 which was carrying place and power, and meaner 
 things and persons with it, to the feet of Peel. The 
 impatience and alarmed prejudices of William IV. 
 had anticipated matters. But the extraordinary skill 
 and address with which Sir Robert Peel, in 1834 5, 
 had maintained himself as the Minister of a minority, 
 imposed by the royal pleasure upon a hostile Parlia- 
 ment and country, only showed that the approaching 
 time had not yet arrived. It illustrated all the more 
 signally the unrivalled ascendancy of the man. 
 Curiously enough, it has fallen to Lord Beaconsfield 
 to display more than once a somewhat similar power 
 as the leader of a Government in a minority, before 
 showing what he could do as a Prime Minister with 
 an undisputed majority behind him. In 1836 Lord 
 Beaconsfield had addressed one of the letters of 
 Runnymede to Sir Robert Peel. It is characteristic
 
 96 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 of the upholsterer and ornamental gardener in the 
 present Prime Minister, that his expressions of almost 
 adoring confidence in the man are mingled with ex- 
 pressions of admiration of the big house and well-laid 
 out grounds in which Sir Robert Peel spent his re- 
 tirement. Lord Beaconsfield does not hate Persian 
 displays or love a Sabine farm. A great man not 
 clothed in purple and fine linen, nor faring sump- 
 tuously every day, a great man moderately housed 
 and attended, is to him scarcely a great man at all. 
 " The halls and bowers of Dray ton ; those gardens 
 and that library where you have realised the romance 
 of Verulam and where you enjoy the lettered ease 
 that Temple loved," rouse the ingenuous enthusiast 
 to a rapturous eloquence which shows that George 
 Robins need not have lacked a successor if Lord 
 Beaconsfield had had anything but himself to put up 
 to auction. These things are as essential to his 
 image of Sir Robert Peel as the panoply of "your 
 splendid talents and your spotless character." Sir 
 Robert Peel was declared to be " like the Knight of 
 Rhodes" in Schiller's heroic ballad, " the only hope 
 of a suffering isle." The letter is a lyrical invocation, 
 a sort of prose-parody on the ode in which Horace
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. Q7 
 
 compared Augustus to Jupiter, to the equal discredit 
 of the god, the emperor, and the poet. Lord Bea- 
 consfield saw that the opportunity of Peel and of the 
 Conservative party was coming, and he lost no time 
 in proclaiming himself on the side of the winners. 
 
 The electioneering addresses at Maidstone were 
 couched in the same vein as the letters of Runny- 
 mede. That personal and political hatred of the 
 Whigs, which is one of the few things in which he has 
 been consistent, is freely expressed. Lord Beacons- 
 field perceived that they were a declining and perish- 
 ing party, though they still had a name to live, and 
 persisted in existence from mere continuance. As a 
 tree, whose roots are decaying in the earth, still for a 
 season puts forth leaves and flowers, and sometimes 
 bears good fruit, so the Whigs have for a generation 
 produced useful measures. But practically their work 
 was done in 1832. The Reform Bill, which was their 
 greatest achievement, destroyed them as well as the 
 abuses at which it was aimed. The conditions of po- 
 litical existence were wholly changed ; and in these 
 altered conditions the Whig party could not flourish. 
 It is unjust to deny the genuineness of their Liberal- 
 ism and the value of their services to Liberalism. 
 7
 
 <)8 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Under the political conditions of the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries, the contest against the (^spotism 
 of the later Stuarts, and against the pretensions of 
 George III. to magnify the prerogatives and personal 
 power of the Crown, could be waged with success 
 only by the great houses. An oligarchical character 
 was therefore almost of necessity impressed upon the 
 defence of the principles of the constitution. The 
 three statesmen whom, after Bolingbroke and Wynd- 
 ham, Lord Beaconsfield most admires, are Chatham, 
 Shelburne, and the younger Pitt. He eulogises their 
 Liberal doctrines with respect to constitutional lib- 
 erty, to freedom of trade, and Parliamentary reform, 
 as genuine Toryism. But they derived those doc- 
 trines from Whig traditions in the first case, to which 
 in the two latter must be added the influence of Adam 
 Smith's writings, and of personal intercourse with the 
 Nonconformists Price and Priestley. There was no- 
 thing in Toryism to make Chatham and Shelburne ad- 
 vocates of American freedom, nor to make Shelburne 
 and the younger Pitt defenders of free-trade. The men 
 whom Lord Beaconsfield calls Tories were known in 
 their own time more correctly as Chatham Whigs, that 
 is to say, they were scarcely Whigs at all. They tried,
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 99 
 
 with a real though a premature and inopportune wis- 
 dom, a wisdom therefore rather of speculation than of 
 practice, to be Liberals without being Whigs. Chat- 
 ham was strong enough in virtue of his wonderful 
 ascendancy of personal character, and of his transcen- 
 dent success in foreign policy and the conduct of our 
 European wars, to hold his own against both the 
 Crown and the great families. Shelburne, theoreti- 
 cally, and to some extent in practice, an advanced 
 Liberal of the modern type, was obliged to strengthen 
 himself by the support of the Crown against Whig 
 oligarchy, and as theory often follows practice, he 
 was led to formulate doctrines of a patriot king ruling 
 independently of parties, which brought him danger- 
 ously near to the insidious Tory democracy of Boling- 
 broke. The domestic factions into which the French 
 Revolution divided English parties made Pitt, who 
 never was a Tory, the head of a Tory government 
 and the agent of a Tory policy. But in all that does 
 these men most honour, in all that makes party zeal- 
 otry anxious to claim the sanction of their names, they 
 were only not Whigy, because they were something 
 more and better than Whigs. They were Liberals of 
 a more modern type, endeavouring to emancipate
 
 TOO POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 themselves too soon from the conditions under which 
 alona a Liberal policy was possible in the eighteenth 
 century. They were thus drawn into dangerous alli- 
 ances with Tory principle of personal rule, and in the 
 case of Pitt into a Tory policy both in home and 
 foreign politics. The Whigs were an oligarchical 
 party, because the great families opposed the only or- 
 ganization by which the pretensions of the Crown 
 could be effectually combated, and the principles 
 established in 1689, could be defended against the 
 Court and against Church-and-king-mobs. 
 
 This strange combination of oligarchical rule and 
 liberal principle, inevitable and useful though it was, 
 had done its work in 1832. From that time it be- 
 came an anachronism and an offence. A century and 
 a half of struggle under these conditions has inefface- 
 ably stamped its character upon the Whig aristocracy. 
 A Whig is a Liberal who believes that Liberal princi- 
 ples can be only asserted under the guardianship and 
 by the representatives of certain old families. He 
 imports the historic conditions of the eighteenth 
 century into the nineteenth. He does not perceive 
 that the Reform Act of 1832 in part, and that of 
 1867 almost completely, abolished him ; and that
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. IOI 
 
 modern Liberalism, whether it be moderate or ad- 
 vanced, exists under conditions involving his trans- 
 formation or his departure from the political scene. 
 The hot-house protection of an oligarchical party, 
 needful to the delicate plant of constitutional free- 
 dom, is simply a hindrance to the health and devel- 
 opment of the vigorous tree. The great noble in 
 politics must share the fate of the patron in litera- 
 ture. The Whigs deserve that historic honour and 
 political gratitude which Lord Beaconsfield denies 
 them. But the doom which falls on those who have 
 done their work, though it may have been a noble 
 one, cannot be avoided. If, however, the aristocratic 
 patronage of Liberal principles is obsolete, the equal 
 service of Liberals of every class, patrician or plebeian, 
 to the common cause is still to be desired. The 
 principle of exclusion directed against men of rank 
 and lineage would of course be as absurd as the princi- 
 ple of exclusion asserted by them. There is little dan- 
 ger in the present constitution of English society that 
 any such proscription will be attempted. Name and 
 birth and wealth will always have something more 
 than their proper advantage, if any advantage be 
 proper in English political life. If anything could re-
 
 102 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 vive Lord Beaconsfield's pet aversion, the Venetian 
 oligarchy, it would be the re-establishment of that per- 
 sonal power of the Crown of which he has almost 
 always been the advocate in theory, and which he 
 seems inclined to assert in practice. But the pop- 
 ular power does not now need to shelter itself, like 
 the towns of the Middle Ages, in the shadow of some 
 feudal castle. It is not for Lord Beaconsfield to 
 bring us back to the obsolete struggles of the time of 
 Anne and of the first three Georges. England is no 
 longer merely the spectatress, or the stake, of the 
 game for ascendancy, played by monarchy and aris- 
 tocracy. 
 
 The principal charge which Lord Beaconsfield has 
 made against the Whigs is their indifference to the 
 interests and feelings of the poor. The Condition-of- 
 England question did not occupy them. No imputa- 
 tion is more entirely devoid of truth. The great 
 characteristic of English politics since the passing of 
 the Reform Act is the part which social politics have 
 played in it. Either in principle or in actual fact the 
 disputes of generations had been settled during the 
 years which immediately preceded, or in those which 
 closely followed, the great meas T jL"e of 1832. Reli-
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 103 
 
 gious liberty, involving in its further development 
 religious equality, won the victory which was sure 
 to carry all the rest with it, when the Tests and 
 Corporation Acts were repealed, and Catholic Eman- 
 cipation was achieved. The system on which Ireland 
 must be governed was decided when the latter meas- 
 ure was passed, and it was further acknowledged in 
 the unsectarian character of the National System of 
 Education established in Ireland. The unsuccessful 
 Appropriation Clause contained in principle Irish re- 
 establishment ; and the Civil M r arriages Act was a 
 further extrusion of the ecclesiastical principle by the 
 secular in human affairs. The ascendancy of the 
 democratic principle in the constitution, though yet 
 waiting its accomplishment, had the promise of its 
 fulfilment in the Reform Act of 1832. The Poor 
 Relief Act, notwithstanding its imputed harshness, 
 proclaimed to the poor the doctrine of energy and 
 self-reliance, and emancipated them from a degrading 
 aiv! servile dependence on the alms of the rich. 
 The legislation of Huskisson contained within it the 
 germs of that passing of Free Trade, which has since 
 been more completely developed than any other ac- 
 knowledged principle in our legislation. The Munici-
 
 IO4 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 pal Corporations Act established local self-govern- 
 ment, though it did not apply it completely and uni- 
 versally or thoroughly. The final severance, at the 
 accession of the Queen, of the Crown of Hanover 
 from that of England, was the pledge of a disen- 
 tanglement from European projects and alliances, and 
 symbolized the substitution of an insular for a con- 
 tinental policy in foreign affairs. 
 
 The Queen succeeded to an era of settled ques- 
 tions, of questions settled that is in principle, though 
 their development and application still had to be 
 contended for. Hence the calm and steady progress 
 which has been the characteristic hitherto of her forty 
 years' reign. The force of facts, that practical logic 
 which may be disputed but cannot be long disobeyed, 
 made Conservative as well as Liberal governments, 
 Peel as well as Melbourne and Russell, the heads 
 and instruments of that progress. The Reform Act, 
 and the measures of civil, religious, and commercial 
 freedom which immediately preceded and followed, 
 called a new England into existence ; and the first 
 business of those who had created or discovered it 
 was to survey the country, and trace what manner of 
 land it was on which they were about to enter.
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. IOJ 
 
 Hitherto it had been a terra incognita to those who 
 ruled it. Its new rulers did their best to find out 
 what it was like. This was the period when, accord- 
 ing to Sydney Smith, " the whole earth was in fact in 
 commission." Sanitas sanitatum, omnia sanitas is the 
 phrase in which Lord Beaconsfield a few years ago 
 summed up his domestic policy. Systematic inqui- 
 ries into the prevalence of fever in the metropolis ; 
 into the need of open spaces ; into the practice of 
 interment in towns ; into the conditions of the labour 
 ing classes, first in England and Wales, and after- 
 wards in Scotland ; into the employment of women 
 and children in mines ; the reduction of the hours of 
 labour in factories ; grants in aid of education ; these 
 are but some of the proofs that the health of the peo- 
 ple, physical and moral, from the first engaged the 
 attention of the Liberal governments which ruled 
 England during the opening years of the present 
 reign. That they did not do more, was due in part, 
 no doubt, to their own hesitation and infirmity, but 
 in a greater degree still to the resistance, on most of 
 these questions, which they met from the party to 
 which Lord Beaconsfield attached himself. Lord 
 Beaconsfield' s attempts to represent England asgov-
 
 106 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 erned before the Reform Act by an oligarchy indiffer- 
 ent to the poor, and ruled since by a plutocracy hostile 
 to them, have about as much historic truth as we 
 look for, or at any rate find, in his statements. 
 
 The Parliament in which Lord Beaconsfield took 
 his seat was elected under the Whig Ministry which 
 the failure of King William IV.'s attempt to govern 
 by a Conservative minority in the House of Commons 
 had restored to office with a parliamentary majority, 
 won at the general election of 1835. Its achieve- 
 ments had been the Municipal Corporation Act, 
 the Tithe Commutation Act, the General Registra- 
 tion Act, the reduction of the stamp duty on news- 
 papers and of the duty on paper, the Act allow- 
 ing counsel to prisoners, and a partial reform of 
 the jail system of the country measures one of 
 them of the first magnitude, and others important as 
 being the first steps taken in a direction in which 
 large advances have been made since. Its great 
 failure was to give effect to the motion for the appro- 
 priation to educational purposes of the surplus rev- 
 enues of the Irish Church, which had brought the 
 Whigs back to office. The Ministry itself was in 
 1837 practically what it had been in 1835.
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. loj 
 
 The letters of Runnymede abound in compliments 
 to its leading members, who are addressed frankly in 
 the second person. Lord Melbourne is " the sleek- 
 est swine in epicurean sty." " Contemptible as you 
 are," he is told yet so-and-so, and so, which we 
 need not quote. " With the exception of an annual 
 oration against Parliamentary Reform, your career in 
 the House of Commons was never remarkably distin- 
 guished." " When I recall to my bewildered mem- 
 ory the perplexing circumstance that William Lamb 
 is Prime Minister of England, it seems to me that I 
 recollect with labour the crowning incident of some 
 grotesque dream." " It is perhaps hopeless that 
 your lordship should rouse yourself from the embraces 
 of that Siren Deridia, to whose fatal influence you 
 are not less a slave than our second Charles." Mr. 
 Disraeli's character of Lord Melbourne is a savage 
 version of the well-known banter of Sydney Smith. 
 Lord John Russell is informed : " Your character is 
 a curious one . . . . You were born with a strong 
 ambition and a feeble intellect." He is flattered 
 with the statements that " your intellect produced " 
 in succession "the feeblest tragedy in our language," 
 " the feeblest romance in our literature," and " the
 
 I08 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 feeblest political essay on record." " Your memoirs 
 of the Affairs of Europe . . . retailed in frigid sen- 
 tences, a feeble compilation from the gossip of those 
 pocket tomes of small talk, which abound in French 
 literature . . . This luckless production closed your 
 literary career ; you flung down your futile pen in in- 
 capable despair ; and your feeble intellect having 
 failed in literature, your strong ambition took refuge 
 in politics." As an orator, " cold, inanimate, with a 
 weak voice, and a mincing manner, the failure of 
 your intellect was complete." Under this double 
 disappointment, " you subsided for some years into a 
 state of listless moroseness, which was even pitiable." 
 " This was the period when, among your intimates, 
 you talked of retiring from that public life in which 
 you had not succeeded in making yourself public, 
 when you traced, like a feeble Catiline, the avenues 
 of Holland House." " Your friends always treated 
 you with a species of contempt." " A miniature Mo- 
 kanna, you are now exhaling upon the constitution of 
 
 your country all ' that long-hoarded venom 
 
 and all those distempered humours that have for 
 years accumulated in your petty heart, and tainted 
 the current of your mortified life." Lord John Rus-
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 109 
 
 sell is told that he is " an infinitely small scarabaeus." 
 When the foreigner learns " that you are the leader 
 of the House of Commons, our traveller may begin 
 to. comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped AN 
 INSECT." 
 
 Later in Mr. Disraeli's career, it became his cue 
 to flatter Lord Russell as resolutely as in the letters 
 of Runnymede he had bespattered him. In Coningsby, 
 his " strong ambition " and " dark and dishonour- 
 able intrigues " are converted into "this moral intre- 
 pidity which prompts him ever to dare that which his 
 intellect assures him is politic. He is consequently 
 at the same time sagacious and bold in council ; as 
 an administrator, he is prompt and indefatigable." 
 The " cold and inanimate" temperament, the " weak 
 voice and mincing manner," " the imbecile accents 
 that struggle for sound in the chamber echoing but a 
 few years back with the glowing periods of Canning," 
 become " physical deficiencies which even a Demos- 
 thenic impulse could scarcely overcome." But these 
 disadvantages detract little from the parliamentary in- 
 fluence of a statesman who " is experienced in debate, 
 quick in reply, fertile in resources, takes large views, 
 and frequently compensates for a dry and hesitat-
 
 IIO POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 ing manner by the expression of those noble truths 
 that flash across the fancy, and rise spontaneously to 
 the lips of men of poetic temperament when address- 
 ing popular assemblies." " The noble " of the Runny- 
 inede letters, " who with a historic name and no 
 fortune, a vast ambition and a baulked career, and 
 soured, not to say malignant, from disappointment," 
 offered " prime materials for the leader of a revolu- 
 tionary faction," becomes one whose "private life of 
 dignified repute," and " the antecedents of whose birth 
 and rank," added to the personal qualities before 
 eulogised, make the best leader the Whigs have ever 
 had or could have." The " individual " of Runny- 
 mede, "who, on the principle that good vinegar is 
 the corruption of bad wine, has been metamorphosed 
 from an incapable author into an eminent politician," 
 becomes in the biograprr of Lord George Bentinck 
 an instance, along with Mr. Burke, " Caius Julius," 
 and Frederick the Great, of the union of pre-eminent 
 capacity, both in meditation and in action. It is 
 pretty certain that Lord Beaconsfield never thought 
 as ill or as highly of Lord John Russell as he has at 
 different times pretended to do. The two characters 
 which he has drawn of this eminent statesman throw
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. Ill 
 
 light upon his treatment of Sir Robert P-eel, for 
 whom a different fate was reserved, to be first the 
 victim of Lord Beaconsfield's praise, and then the 
 object of his slander " tooth that poisons as it 
 bites." 
 
 We need not quote further flowers of speech from 
 the garlands of compliments with which Lord Bea- 
 con sfield crowned the smaller members of the Whig 
 cabinet which he found in power when he entered 
 Parliament in 1837. But it may be interesting to 
 recall some of the compliments which he addressed 
 to Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston is described 
 as a minister who has maintained himself in power 
 "in spite of the contempt of a whole nation." "Our 
 language commands no expression of scorn which has 
 not been exhausted in the celebration of your char- 
 acter, there is no conceivable idea of degradation 
 which has not been at some period or another asso- 
 ciated with your career." He is congratulated on 
 " that dexterity which has never deserted you, and 
 which seems a happy compound of the smartness of 
 an attorney's clerk and the intrigue of a Greek of 
 the lower empire." Lord Palmerston's parliamentary 
 shortcomings are attributed rather to " a want of
 
 112 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 breeding than to a deficiency of self-esteem. The 
 leader of the Whig Opposition was wont to say . . . 
 that your lordship reminded him of a favourite foot- 
 man on easy terms with his mistress." The qualities 
 exhibited in these elegant extracts are those which 
 Lord Beacon sfield offered for sale, as he stood idle 
 in the political market-place, because as yet no man 
 had hired him. These gifts of political scurrility he 
 brought with him into the House of Commons. He 
 had shown them before in his encounters with 
 O'Connell, and he was afterwards to display them in 
 his tirades against Sir Robert Peel, at this period the 
 subject of his unbounded eulogy. 
 
 The beginning of Lord Beaconsfield's parliament- 
 ary career did not give much promise of the dis- 
 tinction he has since obtained. We need not tell 
 the old story of the failure of his first speech, and of 
 the verified prediction of subsequent success which 
 it contained. That was rather a cry of anguish, the 
 breathing of " a hope which was too like despair for 
 patience to smother," than an expression of reason- 
 able and manly self-confidence, which in such cir- 
 cumstances would have waited for the event, rather 
 than have vaunted itself in prospective braggadocio
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 113 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield discovered th..t he was a stranger 
 in the House of Commons ; and, with the instinct of 
 an intelligent foreigner, he set himself to learn the 
 language and to acquire the usages of this strange 
 community in which he found himself, and in which 
 he was determined to push his fortunes. He spoke 
 with moderate success on some of the principal 
 topics that occupied this Parliament, working with 
 the regular Opposition headed by Sir Robert Peel, 
 but not taking a prominent part in it. The organized 
 warfare of regular parties was not at that time suited 
 to Mr. Disraeli's genius, which was then of the 
 guerilla order. He went with what has since been 
 called the " Front Opposition Bench," in resisting 
 Lord John Russell's measures, without much dis- 
 crimination as to their character. He spoke against 
 the grants in aid of education, and against the Repeal 
 of the Corn Laws, with respect to which and to Free- 
 trade generally he followed the changing tactics and 
 adapted himself to the growing Liberalism of Sir 
 Robert Peel. 
 
 His most remarkable avowal was his declaration, 
 which had some boldness and generosity, of sympathy 
 
 with the Chartists, though he disapp/oved of the 
 8
 
 114 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Charter. Lord Beaconsfield has shown from time to 
 time imaginative sensitiveness for the sufferings of 
 the poor, and an understanding of the motives which 
 impelled the Chartist agitation. In Sibyl we have 
 the expressions of this sympathy, as in Lothair there 
 is certainly an intelligent understanding, which seems 
 to betray a covert liking for the revolutionary pro- 
 jects and leaders of the continent. A very little 
 change in circumstances, or perhaps, we should rather 
 say, a slight but vital modification of character, might 
 have made Lord Beaconsfield the ally of Fergus 
 O'Connor and the partisan of Mazzini. The hand 
 which drew Walter Gerard and Stephen Morley, and 
 Sybil herself, which sketched Mirandola and Captain 
 Bruges and Theodora, the Marianne and the National 
 Convention and the Fenian Brotherhood, is not that 
 of a coarse caricaturist and assailant. There is a 
 good deal of true insight and of kindly appreciation 
 in Lord Beaconsfield's sketches of men and organiza- 
 tions, who to the vulgar and scared rich are objects 
 at once of terror and contempt. But the thing never 
 goes beyond an artistic sentiment. Chartists and 
 Mazzinists are to him picturesque figares in a drama. 
 There is as little that is moral in his feelings towards
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 1 15 
 
 them, as in a sensitiveness to music. Lord Beacons- 
 field's fatal love of rank and wealth and power has 
 made him always more ready to use the prejudices of 
 their possessors for his own political advancement, 
 than to combat them in the interests of persons and 
 classes for whose sufferings he has shown in his nov- 
 els and in his speeches a literary and oratorical ten- 
 derness, and whose aims he has understood and 
 considerately interpreted. Acts of personal kindness 
 are attributed to him, as in the case of the Chartist 
 poet, Thomas Cooper, and we are glad to believe in 
 their genuineness. The words of kindly compassion 
 which Lord Beaconsfield gives to Mr. Smith O'Brien, 
 in his life of Lord George Bentinck, are creditable to 
 him. He can understand motives and characters 
 which break loose from routine, even into hare- 
 brained and Quixotic enterprises. Lord Beaconsfield 
 could write a description of Mazzini, under the name 
 of Mirandola, which even his friends might accept ; 
 but he vilified Mazzini in his own name and character, 
 and pursued him in the persons of his friends in the 
 House of Commons. He could make heroes of the 
 Chartist leaders and respectable enthusiasts of Fenian 
 head-centres, but he poured contempt on the obsolete
 
 Il6 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 advocates of stale sedition in Parliament. The fine 
 and generous qualities which are not absent from 
 Lord Beaconsfield's writings, are the weightiest con- 
 demnation of his public conduct. So far as practical 
 politics are concerned, Lord Beaconsfield's sympathy 
 for the sufferings of the poor, and his intelligence of 
 their aims, even when most vain and mischievous, 
 does little more than furnish a basis for his denuncia- 
 tions of Whig indifference to these things. 
 
 The Parliament which the hostile vote of 1841 
 brought to a close, left Lord Beaconsfield in a politi- 
 cal position which might have made hopes of a junior 
 lordship, or even an under-secretaryship, not unrea- 
 sonable in the almost certain event of the general 
 election returning a Conservative majority to the 
 House of Commons. On the dissolution of Parlia- 
 ment, Lord Beaconsfield sought the suffrages, not of 
 Maidstone, but of Shrewsbury. After a contest 
 marked by the coarsest personalities, of which this 
 time he was rather the object than the author, he was 
 returned second on the poll, with a Conservative col- 
 league, the Liberals being in a comparatively small 
 minority. Sir Robert Peel was still 'the object of his 
 unmeasured eulogy and of his unqualified confidence.
 
 LORD BEACONSFIEI.D. 117 
 
 He described himself as "his humble but fervent sup- 
 porter." He used something like the language of a 
 stage confidant, imparting secrets into which he had 
 been admitted for the sake of reassuring the electors 
 of Shrewsbury. Sir Robert Peel was almost too great 
 a man for the merely finite intelligence of Lord Bea- 
 consfield completely to grasp. He represented him- 
 self as baffled, " when he attempted to discover how 
 from the scattered remnants of a political party Sir 
 Robert Peel had collected a power sufficient to direct 
 the fate of an empire . . . and in an age of 
 quick transition he had discovered the tone and spirit 
 of the age." The contemplation of such achieve- 
 ments left him lost in admiration for Sir Robert Peel's 
 "great talents and matchless foresight." It was as a 
 supporter of Sir Robert Peel, and nothing else, that 
 he was elected for Shrewsbury in 1841, and he pro- 
 claimed the satisfaction which he had had in " writing 
 to Sir Robert Peel to inform him that the electors of 
 Shrewsbury had done their duty." 
 
 In August, 1841, the WhigSj who had appealed to 
 the country, faced on the ministerial benches a Con- 
 servative majority in the House of Commons. Prac- 
 tically they had been defeated at the general election
 
 Il8 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 upon the question of a modification of commercial 
 legislation in the direction of freer trade, but the 
 amendment to the Address which was moved by the 
 Opposition did not directly raise that issue. In that 
 fact was an indication, which Lord Beaconsfield at 
 least understood, that Sir Robert Peel was not a can- 
 didate for power as a minister pledged to Protection. 
 Whoever else may have been deceived, he was not. 
 In the speech which he made on the motion of want 
 of confidence, Lord Beaconsfield took pains to point 
 out that Sir Robert Peel was not pledged to Protec- 
 tion, and moreover that it was not an article of the 
 Tory creed. The election, he said, did not turn on 
 the question of the import duties and of the com- 
 mercial reforms proposed by the Whigs, but on their 
 incapacity for affairs and their inability to carry out 
 their own policy. The progress of commercial re- 
 form had been stopped by the Reform Act. In other 
 words, the principles of Huskisson, of whom Peel 
 had been the colleague, and was, in a certain sense, 
 the successor, had failed to receive their proper de- 
 velopment through the accession of the Whigs to 
 power. In the debate on Sir Robert Peel's financial 
 scheme of 1842, a scheme which practically, though
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 1 19 
 
 timidly, applied the doctrines of free-trade, and 
 which was introduced by the Prime Minister in a 
 speech which stated and defended them theoretically, 
 Lord Beaconsfield again vindicated both the measures 
 and the doctrines of his chief. He repeated his 
 statement that the Tories were the true and original 
 free-traders. Mr. Pitt, in 1787, first promulgated 
 free-trade principles, which were opposed by Fox, 
 Sheridan, and Burke, which Lord Hawkesbury, Mr. 
 Robinson, and Mr. Wallace developed, which Mr. 
 Huskisson received from them, and which Sir Robert 
 Peel had taken up from him. The Tories passed 
 from hand to hand the torch of sound economic doc- 
 trine which the Whigs strove to blow out. Sir Rob- 
 ert Peel was, in this respect, by legitimate affiliation 
 through the statesmen just named, the lineal descend- 
 ant and true representative of Mr. Pitt. Afterwards, 
 when the opportunity arose of heading the revolt 
 against Sir Robert Peel on pretexts of which Lord 
 Beaconsfield himself had years before shown the 
 holiowness, he discovered that the true Free-Trader 
 was the judicious Protectionist ; and he invented a 
 phrase to cover this ingenious combination. The 
 phrase was "regulated competition." Mr. Pitt, Mr.
 
 I2O POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Wallace, Mr. Robinson, Mr. Huskisson, and the rest, 
 were " regulated competitors." Competition is regu- 
 lated when in a race you leave one runner free and 
 tie the legs of the others. The barren question 
 whether free-trade owes most to Tories or to Whigs 
 is only part, however, of a larger discussion, of which 
 Lord Beaconsfield has always been fond, and on 
 which we have already spoken at some length. He 
 has from time to time contended that the Tories and 
 not the Whigs are the true reformers. His case con- 
 sists in a reference to the name of Mr. Pitt, who was 
 the author of a project of household suffrage, and to 
 those of Lord Shelburne and even Lord Chatham. 
 These statesmen, as we have shown, were neither 
 orthodox Whigs, still less genuine Tories. They 
 were in their characteristic opinions, Reformers, who 
 constituted in the eighteenth century the Liberal doc- 
 trine of the nineteenth century. 
 
 It is clear from what has preceded that Lord Bea- 
 consfield understood perfectly this issue which was 
 placed before the country in the general election of 
 1841, tne principles of commercial policy on which 
 Sir Robert Peel's Government was formed, and the 
 character of its first measures of which the Repeal of
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 121 
 
 the Corn Laws was the natural and inevitable devel- 
 opment. In that Government, as all the world 
 knows, he was not included. In one of the speeches 
 which he made. in that saturnalia of personal vilifi- 
 cation in which the emancipated slave exceeded the 
 extremes! license of his order, Sir Robert Peel re- 
 ferred to the fact that at one time Mr. Disraeli had 
 given practical signs of his confidence in him by his 
 expressed willingness to take office. Overtures, it is 
 believed, were made which were not prosecuted, and 
 the discontinuance of which was not perhaps ex- 
 plained with sufficient courtesy to the expectant 
 minister, and has not been explained to the public. 
 When the memoirs and correspondence of Sir Robert 
 Peel are published, a disclosure, it is believed, will 
 take place which will furnish a fresh illustration of, 
 if it does not throw new light on the characters, of 
 the two eminent men concerned. It is curious to re- 
 flect on what might have been Mr. Disraeli's career, 
 had he taken the subordinate office under the new 
 Conservative Government, which was dangled before 
 his longing eyes only to be withdrawn from his grasp. 
 It would possibly have been more respectable it is 
 not likely to have been so distinguished. Mr. Dis-
 
 122 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 raeli was scarcely the man to work his way up by 
 parliamentary docility and administrative industry 
 and success, through an ascending scale of more and 
 more important parts, to a high place in the Cabinet. 
 He is a man of surprises and seizures, likely either to 
 gain everything by a bound, or to fall back bruised,- 
 and broken, and empty-handed. It might have been 
 left to him, if Sir Robert Peel had been kinder, to 
 illustrate, after the manner of the late Mr. Wilson 
 Croker, that union of action and contemplation, of 
 literature and affairs, of which Caius Julius, Fred- 
 erick the Great, "both eminently literary characters," 
 Mr. Burke, and Lord John Russell were signal in- 
 stances, and to have furnished another Rigby to the 
 mocking pen of some succeeding satirist. Fortune 
 was better disposed to Mr. Disraeli than she seemed 
 to be, and the under-secretary manque was the mate- 
 rial out of which the Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 and Prime Minister and the successor of Sir Robert 
 Peel in the leadership of the Conservative party was 
 framed. 
 
 The success of Sir Robert Peel's second adminis- 
 tration was a disproof of the sorrowful foreboding 
 with which the Duke of Wellington had beheld the
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 1 23 
 
 accession of a female sovereign. The Duke of Wel- 
 lington mournfully contrasted his own superficial 
 graces and accomplishments and those of Sir Robert 
 Peel with the fascinations of the adorable Melbourne. 
 " There is no chance of a Conservative Government," 
 he is reported to have said; "I have no small talk, 
 and Peel has no manners." Happily, small talk and 
 manners are not the conditions of office under a par- 
 liamentary system, even though it be a constitutional 
 monarchy with a female sovereign on the throne. It 
 is creditable to the Queen that no minister ever won 
 her confidence and personal friendship so completely 
 as Sir Robert Peel, unless, upon evidence happily as 
 yet inconclusive, we are to make an exception of 
 Lord Beaconsfield himself. Lord Beaconsfield is 
 fond of dwelling upon Sir Robert Peel's defects of 
 manner, his constraint and awkwardness, and his in- 
 capacity of making an after-dinner speech without 
 " saying something stilted and even a little ridicu- 
 lous," though he parts from the contemplation of 
 these faults in a great parliamentary statesman with a 
 pious valediction, a " peace be to his ashes." It was 
 one of Sir Robert Peel's inconsistencies that the man 
 who consented to take office at the personal dictation
 
 124 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 of William IV., under conditions as unconstitutional 
 as those which have made the i6th of May a memor- 
 able date in French history, should have resisted with 
 spirit and firmness the ill-advised attempt of the 
 Queen, or rather of her Whig advisers, to force the 
 ladies of the great Whig men as bedchamber women 
 upon a Conservative Government. It is not astonish- 
 ing to find Mr. Disraeli approving Sir Robert Peel's 
 conduct in 1834, for he approved everything Sir 
 Robert Peel did ; and, moreover, it was in harmony 
 with the lessons he himself had learned and taught out 
 of Bolingbroke. In the Runnymede letters he praises 
 Sir Robert Peel for having accepted the premiership 
 in 1834, and having kept it until 1835, in spite of a 
 hostile parliamentary majority. " You retained your 
 post," he adds, " until you found you were endanger- 
 ing the King's prerogative, to support which you had 
 alone accepted his Majesty's confidence." In his 
 speech upon the motion of want of confidence in 
 Lord Melbourne's Government, in 1841, he de- 
 nounced in the strongest language the use of the 
 sovereign's name, the attempt to make "the majesty 
 of England a second candidate upon some paltry 
 poll," and the presumed intention of the Whig minis-
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 125 
 
 try to defy the House of Commons, and, in spite of 
 a hostile vote, to declare that the Government, in 
 being supported by the Crown, had the best support 
 a minister could have. This is sound constitutional 
 doctrine. It has often been asserted against Lord 
 Beaconsfield himself, notably by Mr. Bright in 1867. 
 But Lord Beaconsfield never expresses sound consti- 
 tutional principles, except when the Whigs have been 
 betrayed into unsound constitutional practice, or are 
 suspected of it. 
 
 Mr. Disraeli's parliamentary career from 1841 to 
 1846 follows like a shadow the history of Sir Robert 
 Peel's administration. But the shade is at last seen 
 to be thrown by a sullen cloud. For a time he was 
 the umbra of the prime minister. Soon the fervent 
 blessings of the mendicant are exchanged for doubtful 
 and angry looks, and afterwards for threats and im- 
 precations. Yet Sir Robert Peel simply followed 
 the course which Mr. Disraeli had approvingly pre- 
 dicted, and which he had described as the triumph of 
 consummate statesmanship. In a very early speech 
 he lays down doctrines of political casuistry, which 
 would cover acts far more questionable than any 
 which, on the least favourable reading of his motives
 
 126 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 and conduct, can be attributed to Sir Robert Peel, 
 and which would even shelter Lord Beaconsfield's 
 own career from moral censure. " A statesman," 
 he said, "is the creature of his age, the child of cir- 
 cumstances, the creation of his times. A statesman 
 is essentially a practical character ; and when he is 
 called upon to take office, he is not to inquire what 
 his opinions might or might not have been upon this 
 or upon that subject, he is only to ascertain the need- 
 ful, the beneficial, and the most feasible manner in 
 which affairs are to be carried on. The fact is, that 
 the conduct and opinions of public men must not be 
 too curiously contrasted in a free and aspiring coun- 
 try. The people have their passions, and it is even 
 the duty of public men occasionally to adopt senti- 
 ments with which they do not sympathise 
 
 I laugh, therefore, at the objections against a man 
 that at a former period of his career he advocated a 
 policy different to his present one ; all I seek to as- 
 certain is whether his present policy is a necessary 
 expedient ; whether he is at the present moment pre- 
 pared to serve his country according to its present 
 necessities." 
 
 The moral principles on which Lord Beaconsfield
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 127 
 
 was prepared to censure Sir Robert Peel are not 
 clearly deducible from this passage, which he might 
 publish as the text of a political Apologia pro vita 
 sua. But the contemplation of Sir Robert Peel's 
 actual career in the House of Commons from Mr. 
 Disraeli's impartial position outside the administra- 
 tion, recalled this somewhat lax moralist to a severer 
 political virtue. Growing, but not yet decided, dis- 
 approval is indicated in the tone of his comments. 
 The perturbation of the country gentlemen among 
 whom he sat, at the economic tendencies of the min- 
 ister, communicated themselves to Lord Beaconsfield, 
 on whom the idea soon dawned that competition 
 ought to be more and more " regulated," in its appli- 
 cation to articles which country gentlemen were con- 
 cerned in producing. These workings of an uneasy 
 mind were accompanied by the stirrings of an awak- 
 ened conscience; and Lord Beaconsfield grew more 
 and more sensible of the political immorality of Sir 
 Robert Peel's conduct. Instead of having inherited' 
 free-trade principles by legitimate Conservative deri- 
 vation from Pitt, through Lord Hawkesbury, Mr. 
 Robinson, Mr. Wallace, and Mr. Huskisson. Sir 
 Robert Peel was found to have purloined them from
 
 128 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 the Whigs, who had hitherto figured in Mr. Disraeli's 
 speeches as the great antagonists of free-trade, but 
 were now discovered to be its real founders. Sir 
 Robert Peel was charged with having stolen their 
 clothes while they were bathing, with being a great 
 middleman, and, politically, a vast appropriation 
 clause. If free-trade was to be established, Lord 
 Bcaconsfield, honouring genius, would prefer to re- 
 ceive it from Mr. Cobden, rather than from one who, 
 though a skilful parliamentary manoeuverer, has tam- 
 pered with the generous confidence of a great people 
 and a great party. 
 
 The country gentlemen, however, though preparing 
 to withdraw their confidence from Peel, were not 
 ready to give it to his antagonist, who resolved, there- 
 fore, to create a party which should have confidence 
 in him, and the very basis of whose existence should 
 be that confidence. Only very young men, and those 
 not very wise ones, could satisfy these conditions, 
 and out of the materials which they presented to him 
 Lord Beaconsfield formed the Young England party. 
 Of these, the only survivors are Lord John Manners, 
 who is comfortably within the ministerial fold, and 
 Mr. Baillie Cochrane, who wanders disconsolately on
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 129 
 
 the outside of it. " The atrocious crime of being a 
 young man," to which a great parliamentary orator 
 had at one time indignantly pleaded guilty, became 
 an exalted merit, a sort of supernatural and sacra- 
 mental grace ; and to be told by Sir Robert Peel to 
 serve on railway committees, when you were con- 
 scious of a divine summons to serve your country, 
 was little less than a profanity. Only those, however, 
 who have lost their youth value it very highly, and it 
 was natural that a party formed on this basis should 
 be formed and commanded by a middle-aged leader. 
 " We youth," says Falstaff on one occasion ; and 
 Lord Beaconsfield parodied him. The recently pub- 
 lished memoirs of Lord Strangford show the feelings 
 with which this new intimacy was regarded by the 
 respectable peres nobles, to whom the influence which 
 Mr. Disraeli had gained over their sons was a sorrow- 
 ful perplexity over which they shook their heads and 
 exchanged condolences. The Duke of Rutland de- 
 plores to one correspondent the connection of Lord 
 John Manners with Lord Beaconsfield, much as the 
 father of Lord Frederick Verisopht might have la- 
 mented his son's addiction to the society of Sir Mul- 
 berry Hawk. Young England, however, was merely 
 9
 
 130 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 a passing fashion or craze, memorable rather in 
 literature than in politics. The necessity of finding 
 some sort of imaginative and intellectual basis for it 
 led Lord Beaconsfield to write his three ablest novels, 
 Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred, in which his doctrines 
 of Church and State are set forth in blended disquisi- 
 tion and narratives. England was to be saved by its 
 youth, and especially by its aristocratic youth ; alms- 
 giving was to be restored ; young noblemen and gen- 
 tlemen were to dance with charming female peasants 
 in parks, and to play cricket on village greens with 
 athletic and docile rustics. The direct power of the 
 Crown was to be exercised for the benefit of the 
 people at large, unfettered by a selfish and for the 
 greater part ignoble parvenu oligarchy and a rapa- 
 cious House of Commons, and the principles of 
 government encouraged by Charles I., the martyr 
 of direct taxation, were to be established once more. 
 The Church was to return to its proper work of diffus- 
 ing Asian ideas among the flat-nosed Franks. " Is 
 our civilisation a failure ? " asks an American poet, 
 " or is the Caucasian played out ? " Our civilisation 
 is a failure, Lord Beaconsfield contended, but the 
 Caucasian, the unmixed Caucasian, who in Lord
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 131 
 
 Beacon sfield's eccentric ethnological nomenclature is 
 the Jew, was only now beginning, in Lord Beacons- 
 field's person, to play his proper part in English poli- 
 tics. Although the youthful aristocracy and country 
 gentry were to be the instruments of this great res- 
 toration, the humble aid of the right-minded manu- 
 facturer was not altogether rejected. Milbank is 
 admitted into companionship with Coningsby and 
 Henry Sydney ; and Young England, in a body, made 
 a missionary journey to the Manchester Athenaeum, 
 and preached the gospel to heathen capitalists and 
 anxiously inquiring clerks and shopkeepers. It is 
 difficult to feel certain whether or not the whole 
 scheme of Young England, political and literary, was 
 a mystification. Lord Beaconsfield's most fantastic 
 notions are apparently his most genuine beliefs. His 
 practical politics are but the accommodations of an 
 Eastern mind and character to the habits of the 
 foreign country in which he lives. Young England, 
 however, was but a passing dream from which Mr. 
 Disraeli soon awoke. Coningsby attached himself to 
 the traitor and miscreant Peel, and became his Un- 
 der Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. The 
 growing distrust felt towards the Prime Minister, as
 
 132 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 he pursued his liberalising course in economic policy, 
 made a Protectionist party possible, and to its forma- 
 tion Mr. Disraeli addressed himself. 
 
 His alliance for this purpose with Lord George 
 Bentinck is one of the most curious incidents of his 
 career. Lord George Bentinck was everything which 
 up to a recent period Lord Beaconsfield had de- 
 nounced. He was, as Lord Beaconsfield himself 
 records, by descent and in political connection, a 
 Whig of 1689. He held to the old-fashioned Whig 
 notions of toleration, and voted, at the risk of forfeit- 
 ing his newly won leadership, for the emancipation of 
 the Jews on grounds of religious freedom, and, not 
 with Lord Beaconsfield, on grounds of religious truth. 
 He had a strong jealousy of that influence of the 
 Court which Lord Beaconsfield would augment at the 
 expense of the power of Parliament. He held those 
 Protectionist doctrines in commerce to which Lord 
 Beaconsfield was now a professing convert, but which 
 a few years ago he had stigmatized as a part of the 
 selfish policy of the Whig aristocracy. But though 
 he loved Protection much, he hated Peel more ; and 
 of this feeling common to him with the majority of 
 the Conservative country gentlemen, Lord Beacons-
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 133 
 
 field condescended to make himself the organ. He 
 barbed and winged the heavy arrows of their malice, 
 and gave literary force to their uncouth and inarticu- 
 late spite. 
 
 The language which Mr. Disraeli had for most of 
 his life used with respect to Peel, his elaborate justi- 
 fication of the doctrines of free trade as the true and 
 traditional Tory policy, and his defence of Peel's 
 principle of opportunism and accommodation to cir- 
 cumstances as the essential condition of modern 
 statesmanship, have been already spoken of. It was 
 competent to Lord Beaconsfield to alter his opinions 
 on these points, if he had any opinions to alter, and 
 if he had a sufficient motive for doing so. But, apart 
 from the character of the person assuming to be a 
 censor, it was not within his moral right to stigmatize 
 conduct which with full knowledge he had eulogised, 
 and principles of political casuistry which he himself 
 had set forth. This ex post facto condemnation of 
 .things once approved, assumes that they had ac- 
 quired from the personal vindictiveness of the assail- 
 ant an _un worthiness which did not originally or in- 
 trinsically belong to them. To accusations of politi- 
 cal treason to his party, accusations which Lord Bea-
 
 134 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 consfield had himself elaborately refuted in advance, 
 were added imputations indescribably base of per- 
 sonal un truthfulness and treachery in Peel's treatment 
 of Canning. The dull mind of Lord George Bentinck 
 was probably not aware of the wrong he was doing. 
 Lord Beaconsfield cannot accept this excuse ; and his 
 own keen pleasure in the pain which he inflicted on 
 Peel was obvious to every one who listened night 
 after night to his attacks. Patriotism and the charity 
 which sinks its personal feelings in a passion for the 
 public good have perhaps reached their highest ex- 
 pression in the spectacle, which has been exhibited 
 during the present year, of the son of Sir Robert 
 Peel, the inheritor of his name and his title, protest- 
 ing his unbounded confidence in Lord Beaconsfield, 
 and rallying opinion to his support in the House of 
 Commons and on demagogic platforms. The ties of 
 blood and the memory of unexampled outrage are as 
 nothing compared with a constraining sense of public 
 duty. The repeal of the Corn Laws was followed by 
 the defeat of Sir Robert Peel on the Irish Coercion 
 Bill, through a coalition of Whigs and Protectionists. 
 A Liberal Government presided over by Lord John 
 Russell succeeded.
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 135 
 
 We have seen that it was as the disciple of Sir 
 Robert Peel that Lord Beaconsfield found his way 
 into the Parliaments of 1837 and 1841. It was as his 
 assailant that he made his first step to the position* 
 which he now occupies. Yet it may be said with 
 truth that Lord Beaconsfield' s estimate of the man 
 has never changed. He always recognised in him 
 precisely the same qualities, eulogising them at one 
 moment as marks of the most consummate states- 
 manship, and at another as proofs of the meanest 
 peddling in politics. Some of the sentences in which 
 he denounced or ridiculed Peel are worth quoting : 
 " When I examine the career of this minister, which 
 has now filled a great space in the parliamentary his- 
 tory of this country, I find that for between thirty 
 and forty years, from the days of Horner to the days 
 of the honourable member for Stockport (Mr. Cob- 
 den), the right honourable gentleman has traded on 
 the ideas and intelligence of others." Perhaps we 
 may say in parentheses that this is better than trad- 
 ing on their want of ideas and their absence of intel- 
 ligence, as later Conservative statesmen have done. 
 " His life has been one great appropriation clause. 
 He is a burglar of others' intellect. Search the
 
 136 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 index of Beatson from the days of the Conqueror to 
 the termination of the last reign, there is no states- 
 man who has committed political petty larceny on so 
 great a scale." The most striking instance of this 
 petty larceny is well known. " The right honourable 
 gentleman caught the Whigs bathing, and walked 
 away with their clothes. He has left them in the full 
 enjoyment of their Liberal position, and he is himself 
 a strict Conservative of their garments." Again : 
 " Something has risen up in this country as fatal in 
 the political world as it has been in the landed world 
 of Ireland we have a great parliamentary middle- 
 man. It is well known what a middle-man is. He 
 is a man who bamboozles one party and plunders the 
 other, till, having obtained a position to which he is 
 not entitled, he cries out, ' Let us have no party 
 questions, but fixity of tenure.' " Against this degra- 
 dation of statesmanship Mr. Disraeli protested in 
 lofty moral tones. "While we are admitting,'' he 
 said, " the principles of relaxed commerce, there is 
 extreme danger of our admitting the principles of 
 relaxed politics. I advise, therefore, that we all, 
 whatever may be our opinion about free trade, 
 oppose the introduction of free politics. Let men
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 137 
 
 stand by the principles by which they rise, right or 
 wrong. I make no exception. If they be in the 
 wrong, they must retire to that shade of private life 
 with which our present rulers have often threatened 
 us." " My conception of a great statesman is of one 
 who represents a great idea an idea which may lead 
 him to power, an idea with which he may identify 
 himself, an idea which he may develope, an idea 
 which he may and can impress on the mind and con- 
 science of the nation. That, sir, is my notion of a 
 great statesman. I do not care whether he be a 
 manufacturer or a manufacturer's son. But I care 
 not what may be the position of a man who never 
 originates an idea, a watcher of the atmosphere, a 
 man who, as he says, takes his observations, and 
 when he finds the wind in a certain quarter turns to 
 suit it. Such a person may be a powerful minister, 
 but he is no more a great statesman than the man 
 who gets up behind a carriage is a great whip." 
 
 There is much more to the same effect. Lord 
 Beaconsfield has always been a master of the art of 
 saying the same thing in many different ways. These 
 citations are perhaps among the best examples that 
 could be furnished of that very peculiar intellectual
 
 138 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 product, House of Commons wit. " Scotch wit " has 
 passed into a proverb, as an example of what logi- 
 cians call the contradictio in adjecto, the adjective 
 qualifying the substantive much as in the case of 
 German silver, or (to be quite impartial) Britannia 
 metal, or Brummagem plate are qualified. In like 
 manner House of Commons wit simulates the sort of 
 thing which is called wit in other connections, with- 
 out really being so. It is generally recognisable by 
 the "laughter" which the reporters kindly append 
 to its recorded utterance. Lord Beaconsfield has 
 always been a master in the production of this com- 
 modity, and he sometimes gives the genuine thing. 
 This is a digression. We shall speak of him after- 
 wards as a parliamentary orator. What we are now 
 concerned with is his theory of statesmanship. If he 
 had been contrasting the higher and the lower orders 
 of statesmanship, little exception could be taken to 
 his doctrine. Peel. certainly was not a statesman of 
 the first rank. He was not an originator. If he had 
 been, he probably would not have been a politician ; 
 he certainly would not have been a Minister of State 
 in England. He might have been a professor, a 
 writer of books, or an agitator, but he would never
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 139 
 
 have been an official statesman. The closest ap- 
 proach which any one has made in modern times to 
 Lord Beaconsfield's idea of statesmanship was made 
 by Mazzini, whom Lord Beaconsfield would probably 
 deny to be a statesman at all. He, if any one ever 
 did, represented an idea, not indeed an idea which 
 led him to power, in the sense in which Lord Bea- 
 consfield understands power, since it doomed him to 
 imprisonment, exile, and poverty. Still it was one 
 which he impressed on the mind and conscience of 
 his country, with which he indentified himself, and 
 which he developed. In Lord Beaconsfield's sense, 
 Mazzini was a greater statesman than Cavour. In 
 the same sense, Burke was a statesman when he 
 raged in prophetic fury against the French Revolu- 
 tion, carrying the national feeling with him in his 
 frenzy, but not when he framed and carried his 
 scheme of economic reform. Cobden, as a free- 
 trader, was a statesman and Peel was not. Mr. 
 Bright, in his agitation for household suffrage, showed 
 a statesmanship which Lord Beaconsfield did not dis- 
 play in passing the bill for which that agitation pre- 
 pared the way and created the necessity. The fact 
 probably is that statesmanship, as a merely practical
 
 140 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 art, does not deserve the high intellectual ranlt some- 
 times assigned to it. Original ideas are out of place 
 in it. The statesman in modern times and in quiet 
 days is four or five removes from originality. This 
 was so with Peel. The originator, so far as English 
 theory and practice is concerned, of sound economic 
 ideas was Adam Smith. Between him and Sir 
 Robert Peel, popular exponents of economic doc- 
 trine, such as Bastiat in France, and Colonel Perro- 
 net Thompson in England, authors of Economic So- 
 pliisms and Catechisms of Free Trade, have first to 
 be interposed. But they are only the first link in the 
 chain. Then came the popular agitation of Cobden 
 and Bright, and the Parliamentary advocacy of Mr. 
 Villiers. Last in the chain, and dragged along by it, 
 conquered rather than conquering, comes the suc- 
 cessful Minister with whose name the hardly-won 
 reform is associated. The discoverer, the expositor, 
 the agitator, the Parliamentary leader educated 
 opinion, popular opinion, House of Commons opin- 
 ion, and ministerial conversion or apostasy two 
 words for the same thing looked at with hostile or 
 friendly eyes these are the stages by which a vital 
 political idea struggles into realisation. To complain
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 14! 
 
 that a statesman does not originate is to utter treason 
 against the doctrine of the division of labour. He 
 simply delivers the article that others have made. If 
 Sir Robert Peel had originated anything in theory, he 
 would probably have failed directly to accomplish 
 anything in practice. He would have been Adam 
 Smith and not Sir Robert Peel. He was the convert, 
 the honest convert, of public opinion. His mind by 
 a sort of pre-established harmony was so constituted 
 as to see what ought to be done just when the mo- 
 ment for doing it had arrived, but not a moment too 
 soon nor a moment too late. Such an intelligence 
 is not of the highest order. But it is useful in the 
 conduct of life. The proper contrast is not that 
 which Lord Beaconsfield draws between the adapting 
 and adopting statesman and the originator ; but be- 
 tween the statesman who gives eifect to tardy and yet 
 timely convictions, and the trading politician who re- 
 sists measures which he knows in his heart to be just 
 and expedient in order to humour a faction or tc 
 gratify personal spite and ambition. The Conserva- 
 tive party has within a generation had leaders of both 
 sorts. It is worth noting by those who think that in 
 politics we still have judgment here, that Sir Robert
 
 142 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Peel died an exile from his party, distrusted and 
 hated by them ; and that Lord Beaconsfield is able 
 to boast of unwavering majorities in both Houses, of 
 the confidence of the Crown, and of the enthusiastic 
 support of the mobs and music halls which he sup- 
 poses to represent the country.
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 143 
 
 IV. 
 
 FROM 1852 TO AUGUST, 1878. 
 
 THE sensible public is never blinded by the vdgar 
 glitter of stars and garters. Wise Frenchmen saw 
 behind the splendour of the Tuileries the Man of 
 December, and waited for Mexico and Sedan. Eng- 
 lishmen with good memories see under this new 
 blue riband the political bravo who struck at Peel. 
 The scenic effects have undoubtedly been good. 
 Not satisfied with his triumphs on the domestic 
 stage, Lord Beaconsfield was ambitious of performing 
 a great part on foreign boards. To add to the 
 theatric effect, he was attended, as the Court Circu- 
 lar says of royal personages and their humble com- 
 panions, by the Marquis of Salisbury. This strange 
 companionship has been one of the small surprises 
 of the day. In an amusing passage in one of his 
 speeches, Lord Beaconsfield accounted for the prac- 
 tice of twofold parliamentary representation. Two
 
 144 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 members, according to him, were chosen, because 
 neither dared go alone. They travelled together, 
 because they were afraid of robbers ; they slept in 
 the same room, because they were afraid of ghosts. 
 We forget whether he added that each went to keep 
 an eye on the other, whom he distrusted. Possibly 
 Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury have been as- 
 sociated on the principle which is said in the Roman 
 Catholic Church to require that members of certain 
 religious orders shall work and travel in pairs, so as 
 to give an external guarantee for zeal and good be- 
 haviour. With the recollection of the things said 
 and done by Lord Salisbury in Constantinople, Lord 
 Beaconsfield may not have been prepared to trust his 
 colleague out of his sight. In the presence of the 
 Prime Minister the Foreign Secretary could be only 
 in name a Plenipotentiary. 
 
 By remaining in the Cabinet, after the retirement 
 of Lord Carnarvon and Lord Derby, Lord Salisbury 
 has probably secured for himself the reversion of the 
 Premiership. To rise very high, he has stooped very 
 low, and he may find it necessary to stoop lower yet. 
 He has apparently adopted to the full those ethics of 
 political adventure which he once denounced in the
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 145 
 
 bitterest . and the most scornful language, and in 
 which he foresaw the degradation of English public 
 life through the lowering of the character of English 
 public men. In the controversy which followed his 
 secession from Lord Derby's administration in 1867, 
 he pointed to the character and conduct of Lord 
 Beaconsfield as of evil omen for England. Lord 
 Beaconsfield smiled then ; he has better reason for 
 smiling now. The bitter assailant has become the 
 humble disciple ; the scandalized moralist has been 
 the adroit abettor and imitator. The legerdemain of 
 the secret agreement with Russia, balanced by the 
 secret convention with Turkey, was not a combina- 
 tion of a very high intellectual order ; but it showed 
 a superiority to moral scruples, to which happily it is 
 difficult to find a parallel in English diplomacy. The 
 British Plenipotentiaries at the Congress were play- 
 ing with cards in their sleeves. Lord Salisbury has 
 acquired Lord Beaconsfield's art of answering, using 
 words in a double sense, one intended to reassure 
 his hearers at the moment ; the other, when the trick 
 comes to light, to furnish a justification for himself. 
 His denial of dissensions in the Cabinet, and his 
 repudiation of the Globe copy cf the Anglo-Russian
 
 146 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 agreement, were conveyed in words which meant on 
 thing to him and another to his hearers. His contra- 
 diction of Lord Derby's statement as to his motives 
 in quitting office requires to be taken, therefore, with 
 the greatest reserve. Henceforward, indeed, Lord 
 Salisbury's statements will need an interpretation 
 clause, such as is found in acts of parliament, deter- 
 mining that such and such a term shall be taken in 
 such and such a meaning. Lord Salisbury has made 
 a sacrifice of political character to his political for- 
 tunes. He will probably find before long that even 
 from the point of view of personal ambition only, he 
 has made a mistake which it will take many years to 
 repair. The trick played upon the Congress by the 
 two secret agreements with Russia and Turkey is, 
 however, less censurable than the trick played 
 through the same instruments upon England herself. 
 The nation has been committed to a task not simply 
 difficult and dangerous, difficulty and danger may 
 l>e confronted and overcome, but to obligations 
 which it is impossible to discharge. England and 
 Turkey have been drawing bills upon each other, 
 which cannot be paid, and offering them to Europe 
 as good security. The protectorate over Asia Minor,
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 147 
 
 of which the occupation of Cyprus is simply one of 
 the conditions, is a piece of gigantic charlatanism. 
 Lord Beaconsfield's triumphant entry into London, 
 and the theatrical procession from Charing Cross, 
 was a bit of harlequinade from which, one would 
 have thought, the self-respect and reserve of an Eng- 
 lish statesman and gentleman would have shrunk. 
 Neither Lord Beaconsfield nor Lord Salisbury 
 showed any shrinking. A troop of horse-riders visits 
 a country town much in the same way, and endeav- 
 ours to bring idlers to its booth, as Lord Beacons- 
 field tried to manage public opinion. The whole 
 thing was mountebank to the last degree ; but it was 
 not the less in harmony with the career of the Cag- 
 liostro-Chatham who was its principal figure. Lord 
 Salisbury was a secondary figure in the parade. To 
 some who, on the i6th of July, observed him sitting 
 in the same carriage with Lord Beaconsneld, and 
 humbly taking the dregs of mob applause after his 
 chief had drained the cup, Sydney Herbert's indig- 
 nant scorn may have recurred ; and they may have 
 applied to Lord Salisbury the remarks which he 
 addressed to Mr. Disraeli sitting on the Treasury 
 Bench, and professing a free-trade policy, " If a
 
 148 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 man wants to see humiliation, which God knows is 
 always a painful sight, he needs bnt look there." 
 
 The apologists for Lord Beaconsfield may, how- 
 ever, plead excuses for him, which cannot be urged 
 on behalf of Lord Salisbury. One of the earliest 
 critics of Vanity Fair suggested a parallel which 
 must have occurred to many other people. " If 
 Becky could have changed sexes with her husband, 
 all would have gone well. She might have can- 
 vassed a borough as a Radical, and a county as a 
 Tory ; might have gained the ear of the House by 
 malignity, and kept it by effrontery ; might have risen 
 into notoriety by attacking the first men of the age, 
 and become the leader of a party by joining one 
 which all persons of sense had deserted." In one 
 most important respect, Lord Beaconsfield was more 
 fortunate than his feminine counterpart. His Jos. 
 Sedley and Rawdon Crawley periods, his coquettings 
 with young England and Protectionist boobies, had 
 a sequel to which there is nothing corresponding in 
 the social adventures of Miss Becky Sharp. His 
 alliance with Lord Derby (to speak in terms derived 
 from the vicissitudes of the other sex) made a respect- 
 able man of Mr. Disraeli. Henceforth he was re-
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 149 
 
 ceived into the purest and most virtuous society. A 
 veil was drawn over the past, and no curious inqui- 
 ries were to be made. 
 
 The death of Lord George Bentinck, in 1848, made 
 Lord Beaconsfield the real leader of the Protectionist 
 faction ; and his acceptance by the late Lord Derby, 
 then the head of the Tory party, made him, after 
 Peel's death, the conservative leader in the House of 
 Commons. This officious position became official 
 with his appointment, in 1852, as Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer in Lord Derby's first administration. 
 Though Lord Beaconsfield has three times held this 
 office, no one has ever thought of him as a minister of 
 finance. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 
 1852, in 1857, and in 1866, because it was necessary 
 that, as ministerial leader in the House of Com- 
 mons, he should hold one of the great offices of State, 
 and because this particular office was the only one 
 which it suited the royal pleasure that Lord Beacons- 
 field at that time should hold. The usage which made 
 it necessary that one of the Secretaries of State should 
 be the minister in attendance upon the Queen, was 
 in force when Lord Derby formed his first administra- 
 tion in 1852 ; and the objection of the Queen to have
 
 150 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield as one of the ministers in attend- 
 ance upon her was, there is good ground for believing, 
 the reason for his appointment to the almost ludi- 
 crously unsuitable office of Chancellor of the Exche- 
 quer. Lord Beaconsfield was a finance minister who 
 never affected to know or care much about finance ; 
 and having mastered his budgets sufficiently to make 
 the opening statement with credit, left the details to 
 be fought out by Secretaries of the Treasury and other 
 statistical persons the calculating boys of the Gov- 
 ernment, who had a shopkeeper's acquaintance with 
 Cocker and his rules. The sublime indifference with 
 which Lord Beaconsfield used to look on, or scarcely 
 to look on at these encounters, but rather to detach 
 himself in apparently profound reveries from the de- 
 tails of the department of which he was the responsi- 
 ble head, will be remembered by all who knew the 
 House of Commons during his Chancellorship. Dux 
 sum et super arithmeticam " I am the leader of the 
 House of Commons, and have nothing to do with fig- 
 ures " was a sentiment impressed on his whole atti- 
 tude and bearing. The inconvenient limitation upon 
 freedom of ministerial arrangements, of which we have 
 spoken, and consequent hindrance to the efficient con-
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 151 
 
 duct of public business, exist no longer. But there 
 were compensations. If the old usage had been de- 
 parted from earlier, Lord Beaconsfield's decisive influ- 
 ence on the conduct of public affairs would possibly 
 have been anticipated by some twenty years or so. 
 The first condition of Lord Beaconsfield's success is 
 that he has been a devoted leader. For more than a 
 quarter of a century he has given himself up to the 
 service of the Conservative party, abandoning his 
 whole mind and energies to them, and making a sac- 
 rifice of literary taste and ambition and social leisure 
 to the task which he had undertaken. He has not 
 tried to serve two masters. He has acknowledged no 
 conflict between a higher and a lower law. The vii 
 tue which he has shown is not the highest, nor is the 
 recompense which he has reaped the noblest. But 
 the one is appropriate to the other. He has been 
 a vigilant and faithful party leader, and he has reaped 
 a vigilant and faithful party leader's reward. His 
 minutest attention has been given to everything which 
 could keep his followers together. Youthful aspirants 
 have been flattered and encouraged ; disappointed 
 vanities have been soothed, and elderly ambitions 
 have been satisfied. Mr. Gladstone has had highei
 
 152 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 aims and has done a nobler work than Lord Beacons- 
 field ; but he neglected the ordinary arts of party man- 
 agement while he was Prime Minister, and threw up 
 the leadership when he grew tired of it. The mere 
 party feeling which the two men excite, reflects the 
 faults of the greater and better man, and the merits 
 of the lower mind and character ; and in both cases 
 is natural and inevitable. The qualities which have 
 helped the one and hindered the other in Parliament 
 and the world, may possibly have had corresponding 
 effects at Court. Whatever Lord Beaconsfield's gifts, 
 it is only since the retirement of the late Lord Derby, 
 and his own appointment to the Premiership ten years 
 ago, that he has had the opportunity of practising 
 them at Windsor and Balmoral. His doctrines of the 
 personal power of the monarch, and his or her place 
 and work in the constitution, are naturally acceptable 
 to holders and expectants of the royal office ; and 
 there is some truth probably in the current opinion 
 that, since he has been First Minister of the Crown, 
 the sovereign and the heir apparent have played a 
 larger part in public business, and especially in the 
 control of foreign policy, than at any period since the 
 reign of George HI. Lord Beaconsfield is not the
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 153 
 
 man, like George Grenville, and perhaps later minis- 
 ters, to be wearisome and dictatorial in the royal 
 closet, and to present the decisions of the Cabinet as 
 edicts to be registered in a royal bed of justice. The 
 power of the sovereign has been revived and aggran- 
 dized under his direction. In any future contrasts 
 which may be drawn between constitutional monarchy 
 in England and the Republican system, it may be de- 
 sirable to keep in mind that the former is not neces- 
 sarily as pure an example of government by Cabinet 
 government that is to say, by a committee of both 
 Houses, responsible to the elected Chamber as it 
 has of late been assumed to be. 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield's influence in debate is due, in 
 part, to the qualities which we have described, and is 
 certainly not owing to that business-like directness 
 and knowledge of affairs which it is customary to 
 represent as the essential conditions, in our times, of 
 authority in the House of Commons. As a parlia- 
 mentary orator, he may claim the verdict of success. 
 There is no man who is more to the taste of both 
 Houses, whose rising has always been hailed with 
 more expectant curiosity, who is rewarded with closer 
 attention, and who is greeted with prompter laughter
 
 154 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 and applause, with that gathering and swelling nmr- 
 mur of cheers which is to the parliamentary speaker 
 what the sound of meeting palms is to the actoi. Yet 
 Lord Beaconsfield is by no means an ideal orator. 
 Mechanism, and not life, characterizes his speaking. 
 Vivian Grey, in reviewing his resources for playing the 
 part of a political impostor, counts as the principal 
 among them that he " can perform right skilfully upon 
 that most splendid of musical instruments the human 
 voice." Lord Beaconsfteld's voice is a powerful and 
 delicate organ, capable of almost all tones and inflex- 
 ions ; but it is an instrument on which an external 
 artist appears to be performing, pulling out the stops, 
 and putting down the pedals, and pressing the keys. 
 So with his gestures ; they are often vehement and 
 excited, but they are always angular and stiff. Some- 
 body seems to be jerking strings or wires, with more 
 or less force and skill. There is a game which chil- 
 dren are fond of seeing played, in which two persons 
 are concealed behind a curtain, the head of one and the 
 arms of the other only appearing. The head declaims 
 and the arms gesticulate as nearly in harmony as may 
 be, or with as ridiculous an incongruity as can be de- 
 vised. Lord Beaconsfield's voice and gestures never
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 155 
 
 seem to be in much closer relation to each other than 
 those of the composite orator of the children's game. 
 You never, as with Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright, see 
 the whole man, thought, feeling, voice, and frame, 
 fused into a single expression of the ruling mood or 
 idea. Instead of losing the parts in the whole, the 
 whole seems always with Lord Beaconsfield to be re- 
 solving itself into its parts. There is no nature, there 
 is not even consummate art, which is but the most 
 perfect and careful expression of nature ; but there 
 is very dexterous artifice, and you are pleased, as 
 with the exhibition of a difficult and cleverly-exe- 
 cuted trick. The interest which Lord Beaconsfield's 
 speeches excite and repay is that of a public enter- 
 tainment. He is essentially a comedian. 
 
 The descriptions which are from time to time 
 given of him proceed upon this assumption, often 
 unconsciously made, of his real character in public 
 life. We are told, as if an opera singer was in ques- 
 tion, that on such and such an occasion he was in 
 capital voice, and his make-up is criticized, or rather 
 described, with admiring particularity. As to the 
 substance of his speeches, they present the same 
 characteristic of parts not fused into a whole, which
 
 156 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 is exhibited in his manner. Dazzling ornaments, 
 precious stones or painted glass, diamonds or paste, 
 are strung together on a piece of common tw.'ne. 
 When Lord Beaconsfield has to make a long exposi- 
 tion or a protracted argument, nothing can be drea- 
 rier; he has seldom mastered his subject as a whole, 
 and he does not put it clearly before the House. In 
 his financial statements and in his Reform Bill 
 speeches, and on nearly every occasion on which he 
 has had to place a complicated topic before parlia- 
 ment at the opening of the debate, Lord Beacons- 
 field was evidently speaking from cram, like a counsel 
 who has hurriedly read his brief, and relies upon his 
 juniors and his solicitors. A casual objection or in- 
 quiry which interrupted the thread of his prepared 
 statements is, or was for in the House of Lords 
 Lord Beaconsfield seldom undertakes work of this 
 sort met with a joke or with a reference of the ob- 
 jector to some future occasion. Mr. Gladstone, on 
 the other hand, in being the absolute master of de- 
 tails, is in turn occasionally mastered by them. They 
 assume, now and then, a magnitude before his mind 
 which is out of proportion to the whole subject, and 
 which is checked only by his equal knowledge of all
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 157 
 
 other details. Lord Beaconsfield never masters de- 
 tails, but he is never mastered bj them, simply 
 because he leaves them alone, dexterously dodging 
 them and slipping by on the other side. 
 
 In this fact is the secret of some portion of Lord 
 Beaconsfield' s success as a ministerial leader, and of 
 Mr. Gladstone's partial failure. Mr. Gladstone has, 
 almost always apparently, known a great deal more 
 about the business of every department than the head 
 of it did, and has been more intimately acquainted with 
 every bill than the ministerial colleague who has had 
 charge of it. He hears a blundering exposition, or a 
 lame defence, with the intellectual impatience of a 
 master who sees a good cause weakened, or a bad 
 cause made gratuitously worse instead of better, in 
 the handling. He interposes, usually very effectually, 
 so far as the mere argument is concerned, to set 
 matters right. The result is sometimes to raise a 
 secondary or third-rate question into primary im- 
 portance, to make a small ministerial crisis out of the 
 ordinary incidents of legislation and debate, and to 
 decide by convincing arguments issues which might 
 reasonably have been left to a conclusive majority. 
 Having the better cause, Mr. Gladstone cannot bear
 
 158 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 to seem to have the worse. It wounds him that good 
 arguments which his colleagues have not known how 
 to employ should be allowed to rust unused. His 
 colleagues, who do not know that their arguments 
 are bad, and who think probably that they have made 
 out an unanswerable case, do not like to see the 
 honour of victory snatched out of their hands. They 
 are prone to believe that they have persuaded the 
 majority which was created for them beforehand. 
 This is an innocent illusion, at which it would have 
 been charitable to wink. The too ruthless destruc- 
 tion of it has done something to prevent Mr. Glad- 
 stone's having any devoted personal following in 
 Parliament, or even any very strong political friend- 
 ships on the front Liberal bench. Lord Beacons- 
 field has never in this way unconsciously wounded 
 the self-love of the people who sit about him. He 
 has been patient of bad arguments when he has had 
 a good majority, and he has been willing to leave his 
 lieutenants masters of the field and with the honours 
 of victory. If a colleague has got into a scrape, from 
 which a division will extricate him, he has been con- 
 tent to let him fight his way out of it without tender- 
 ing humiliating and distasteful assistance ; thus saving
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 159 
 
 the complacency of a friend, and not too closely 
 associating the ministry as a whole, in the person of 
 its chief, with the blunder of a department. 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield has said that a ministerial leader 
 ought to be reluctant to speak, and, if such a happy 
 gift could be hoped for, unable to speak. He him- 
 self can always intervene when it is necessary, rather 
 indeed to divert the attention of the House by badi- 
 nage or invective from strong arguments, than to con- 
 vert them by arguments yet stronger. But he is 
 never tempted to speak by his superior knowledge 
 of the subject in debate, or by that excessive facility 
 in giving rhetorical form to the suggestions and im- 
 pulses of the moment, which is often as fatal to the 
 highest eloquence as it' is dangerous in parliamentary 
 management. Oratory, after all, is an instrumental 
 art ; and in the English House of Commons, as it is 
 now constituted, it is a means for the conduct of 
 public business. Probably no one has ever used it 
 so effectively for this purpose as Mr. Gladstone. 
 Tn; growing perplexity of public affairs, in which 
 every question is involved in a web of tangled de- 
 tails, demanded, and, perhaps, in a certain degree 
 created, at any rate it stimulated and developed, that
 
 l6o POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 particular type of statesmanship and of eloquence 
 of which Mr. Gladstone is a master. He is at his 
 strongest and best as a legislator in arranging compli- 
 cated details into an orderly whole as in his greater 
 budgets and in the Irish Church and Land Bills ; and 
 his eloquence reflects his statesmanship in his power 
 of lucid exposition and arrangement of facts and topics 
 which probably no other man could carry in his head, 
 or bring out in perfect order and completeness in 
 speech. Mr. Gladstone's easy movement through a 
 crowd and crush of embarrassing topics, his copious, 
 unfaltering, and unstrained speech, mark the man 
 who is at home with every branch of his subject 
 who knows the smallest minutiae of it, in themselves, 
 in their relation to each other, and to the whole. 
 In the laboured and stilted English of what should be 
 the level parts of Lord Beaconsfield's speeches 
 the Johnsonese vocabulary and the Holofernian dic- 
 tion you see traces of a man labouring in matters 
 with which he is not familiar. The pedestrian speech 
 of Lord Beaconsfield does not suggest easy advance 
 upon a smooth and fair high road, but a toilsome 
 stumbling up a rough and barren hillside. The 
 dreariness of the way is relieved by piquant para-
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. l6l 
 
 doxes and pungent personal satire, and the expec- 
 tation of these keeps attention alive, or stimulates 
 it when it is flagging. Lord Beacon sfield's repu- 
 tation as an orator will depend in the future, as 
 it does now, on isolated sentences or short passages 
 admitting of separation from the speeches in which 
 they are found, because they have in reality no vital 
 connection with them. They are ornaments stuck 
 on or purple patches let into a sometimes thread- 
 bare robe. Lord Beaconsfield's oratorical ability 
 will probably in future be rated higher than it de- 
 serves, because of this facility of detachment. He 
 has converted his intellectual wealth into portable 
 property, as peasants abroad invest their savings in 
 golden ear-rings and bracelets, or as Eastern mer- 
 chants carry theirs in diamonds and precious stones. 
 Mr. Gladstone's eloquence will be to future genera- 
 tions rather a tradition of parliamentary history than 
 a continued life. It is not to be judged by extracts. 
 Each part of his speech depends on the whole, and 
 each speech, we may almost say, on the discussion 
 of which it formed usually the most important ele- 
 ment. Mr. Gladstone's oratory is that of the man 
 
 of affairs, the statesman, in the true sense of the term, 
 ii
 
 1 62 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 and is imbedded in the public business of the time. 
 Lord Bcaconsfield's oratory consists of the sallies of 
 a fashionable entertainer, and his cleverer hits and 
 repartees may have a sort of jest-book immortality, 
 along with the best things of Foote and Theodore 
 Hook. Nothing can be better than his nicknames. 
 There is something of genius in them. The " su- 
 perior person" the "inspired schoolboy" and the 
 "extinct volcanoes," of the Liberal front bench, have 
 been named and labelled once for all. The House 
 of Commons misses these things, and such stories as 
 that of the Irish deputation who waited upon Lord 
 Beaconsfield, and after a very agreeable and cordial 
 interview, went away without telling him what they 
 had come for. His withdrawal has eclipsed its gaiety. 
 Lord Beaconsfield has found it easier to communi- 
 cate some of his least desirable moral qualities to his 
 colleagues in both Houses, than his intellectual vi- 
 vacity. There are traces of the master in the disin- 
 genuousness with which Sir Stafford Northcote and 
 Lord Salisbury have learned to answer questions, 
 using words formally true to convey a misleading 
 impression. 
 
 The year which saw Lord Beaconsfield for the first
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 163 
 
 time a minister of the Crown was otherwise even 
 more memorable. By a curious coincidence it wit- 
 nessed the the death of the Duke of Wellington, and 
 the restoration of the French empire under Napoleon 
 III. It fell to Lord Beaconsfield, on behalf of her 
 Majesty's Government, to announce in the House of 
 Commons the Queen's recognition, as Emperor of 
 the French, of the friend and fellow-adventurer who 
 had been enigmatically silent, and daringly paradoxi- 
 cal with him at Gore House. The era of blunder 
 and swagger and national Chauvinism, of tawdry and 
 flashy Government, which Napoleon III. introduced 
 in France, Lord Beaconsfield more than twenty years 
 afterwards was to initiate in England. Lord Bea- 
 consfield has consciously imitated Napoleon III. 
 and the Second Empire in his methods of govern, 
 ment ; but for a long time he unconsciously pro- 
 duced a nearer resemblance to Soulouque II. and 
 the Empire of Hayti. The French Empire was a 
 powerful though pestilent reality. Lord Beacons- 
 field, until he devised the British protectorate of 
 Asiatic Turkey, was unable to commit the country 
 to anything more than whimsical and irritating ex- 
 travagancies. He has abundantly made up for post-
 
 164 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 poned opportunity. On the very day on which the 
 Hous~ of Commons heard the ministerial statement 
 oi th: recognition of Napoleon, it, with a sort of 
 ironical appropriateness, voted a large sum of money 
 for the solemn interment of the Duke of Wellington. 
 It buried one era before entering upon another; and 
 Lord Beaconsfield was the man to officiate at both 
 ceremonies. It fell to him, in the name of the Com- 
 mons of England, to pronounce the national farewell 
 to its great hero. How he did it, it is almost super- 
 fluous to say. Lord Beaconsfield could not find 
 words of his own suitable to the occasion, and he 
 availed himself of the language in which M. Thiers 
 had commended the services of some second-rate 
 French marshal ; without, however, mentioning either 
 M. Thiers or the French marshal. 
 
 That Lord Beaconsfield was not lifted into sincer- 
 ity when he assumed to speak of the dead Duke of 
 Wellington in the name of the Commons of Eng'and, 
 gives a glimpse of the way in which use and habit 
 may degrade a nature not originally without generos- 
 ity and sensibility. Perhaps, .however, Lord Beacons- 
 field did not think that the Duke of Wellington 
 deserved more than the second-hand praises in which
 
 LORb BEACONSFIELD. 1 65 
 
 a second-rate French marshal had been posthu- 
 mously dressed out. His estimate of the Duke and 
 of what he calls Dukism, has been given in one of 
 his writings, and it is by no means of a very exalted 
 order. 
 
 Lord Derby's first ministry purchased a few weeks' 
 tenure of office after the general election of 1852, by 
 accepting the resolution which pledged them to the 
 theory and practice of free trade. But Lord Beacons- 
 field's first budget was more than even the contemp- 
 tuous indulgence of the House of Commons could 
 bear. The coalition ministry of Lord Aberdeen, 
 which brought Whigs, Peelites, and Radicals into the 
 same Cabinet and the same party, followed. The 
 history of the next two-and-twenty years is, with little 
 interruption, the history of Liberal government in 
 England, with which Lord Beaconsfield had nothing 
 to do except as a sharp, but unavailing critic. His 
 political adventures may be said to cease for a time 
 at this point ; for henceforth he acted for and with his 
 party, and they share with him the responsibility for the 
 things said and done in their name. The much-vaunted 
 chivalry of the late Lord Derby had its full share in 
 the exploits of the politician with whom he entered
 
 1 66 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 into partnership, and whom he designated as his suc- 
 cessor when broken health dictated his retirement 
 from office. Through the greater part of a quarter 
 of a century Lord Beaconsfield was the patient and 
 wary leader of the Opposition. In debate he was a 
 sort of railing and vituperative chorus in a drama the 
 action of which was carried on by others than himself. 
 The six years which intervened between Lord Bea- 
 consfield' s first and second tenure of office, derive 
 their historic importance from the financial measures 
 of Mr. Gladstone, from the Crimean War, from the 
 establishment of relations of friendship with France 
 (which has outlasted and, it is reasonable to hope, 
 will outlast the unworthy instrument and motives in 
 which it originated), and the Indian mutiny. Lord 
 Beaconsfield renewed against Lord Aberdeen, though 
 with more reserve and with some sense of his own 
 changed position and ex-official dignity, the bitter 
 and unscrupulous attacks which he had made some 
 years before on Sir Robert Peel. He opposed with 
 epigrams the development of that free-trade policy 
 which he and his party, by their own votes and 
 speeches, on Mr. Villiers's resolution in 1852, were 
 pledged to carry out. He subjected himself, by his
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 167 
 
 criticisms on the diplomatic conduct by the Govern- 
 ment of the Eastern Question, to the imputation of 
 factious and unpatriotic motives, which during the 
 past two years have been flung at the head of Mr. 
 Gladston e ; and when the Indian mutiny broke out, 
 he answered the question " Ought India to be con- 
 tent?" in a manner which might have subjected him 
 to the threat of a vote of personal censure, if any 
 Liberal Mr. Hanbury had at that time sat on the 
 Ministerial side of the House. It is curious that in 
 the debate in 1854, on the unconstitutional interfe- 
 rence attributed to the Prince Consort, Lord Beacons- 
 field, though as leader of the Opposition he might 
 naturally, and it would have been thought must ne- 
 cessarily, have spoken, left it to Mr. Walpole to ex- 
 press the concurrence of the Conservative party in 
 the doubtful doctrines laid down by Lord John Rus- 
 sell. In 1852, when Lord Palmerston was dismissed 
 from office, Lord Beaconsfield had strongly censured 
 the frequent and improper introduction by Lord John 
 Russell of the Queen's name into the controversy. 
 In so doing, he was consistent with his vindication, 
 many years before, of Sir Robert Peel's conduct in 
 the Bed-chamber affair ; but he was inconsistent with
 
 1 68 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 the general tone of both his earlier and his later 
 writings on the functions and power cf the Sovereign 
 in the constitution, and with his own practice since 
 he has held the office of Prime Minister. 
 
 Defeated in 1857 on the Conspiracy Bill, Lord 
 Palmerston, who in 1855 na d succeeded Lord Aber- 
 deen, resigned, and Lord Derby and Lord Beacons- 
 field returned to office. The attempt to govern by a 
 minority in the House of Commons, which Sir Robert 
 Peel had made in 1834, and which Lord Derby had 
 repeated in 1852, was now renewed, with no more 
 success than it deserved. The only measure of im- 
 portance passed by the administration was the Act 
 for the transfer of the government of India from the 
 East India Company to the Crown. The confusion 
 of bills and resolutions, and of bills No. i, No. 2, and 
 No. 3, had scarcely any precedent in legislation ; and 
 it had no parallel until Lord Derby and Lord Bea- 
 consfield had to deal with the Reform question in 
 1867. The fantastic scheme of the Government, 
 which apparently proceeded from the same curiously 
 constructed intellect as Lord Beaconsfield's only 
 original budget, and as the first Reform Bill of i867 > 
 was transformed into a reasonable and possible rneas
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 169 
 
 ure by the Opposition, and accepted ty the Govern- 
 ment and the nation at their hands. 
 
 In the meantime, since the conclusion of the Cri- 
 mean War, and the signature in 1856 of the Treaty 
 of Paris, home questions had begun to reassume 
 their importance. England returning from her per- 
 haps Quixotic enterprises abroad, had begun to see 
 the necessity of cultivating her own fields ; and it 
 was doubtful whether the instruments in her hand 
 afforded the best means of doing so. The political 
 machinery needed improving. In other words, par- 
 liamentary reform was a necessity which politicians of 
 all parties, Liberal and Conservative, Radical, Whig, 
 and Tory, had to confront. The Act of 1832 had 
 ceased to be in harmony with the England in which in 
 1858 men had for some time been living. Those in- 
 genious writers who are always engaged in a lively 
 protest alike against Radical reforms, and Whig or 
 doctrinaire tampering with the constitution, and who 
 demand a settlement which shall last, fail to under- 
 stand not only the world, but in a more conspicuous 
 degree still the country in which they live. In 
 China, political ingenuity has succeeded in producing 
 a settlement which has, in its main features, lasted
 
 170 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 for some thousands of years ; but even the Chinese, 
 appropriately worshipping their ancestors, have not 
 absolutely succeeded. Death, in truth, is the only 
 settlement which lasts. One of our Chinese politi- 
 cians represented Lord John Russell as arguing : " I 
 was very hungry ; I had a hearty dinner which did 
 me good, and I must, therefore, now dine again." 
 This philosopher apparently considered that one din- 
 ner in a lifetime ought to satisfy any one ; and that 
 having dined to-day it would be absurd and a wanton 
 tampering with one's constitution to think of dining 
 to-morrow. The languid Administration of Lord 
 John Russell owed its feebleness in some degree to 
 the inefficiency of the men of whom it was composed, 
 but in a greater degree to the fact that the constitu- 
 encies which the Act of 1832 had created, no longer 
 represented the country. Between the industrial 
 England and the social England of that day a great 
 and wide gulf had arisen. The Chartist movement of 
 1848 was a symptom of that divergence. That was 
 an inarticulate outburst which lacked reasonable guid- 
 ance and interpretation. The handful of men in 
 Parliament who perceived the real state of affairs, 
 and endeavoured to discover and apply a timely rem-
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. I?! 
 
 edy, were described as factious innovators, bent on 
 revolution and destruction for the pleasure of the 
 thing. The respectable Mr. Hume was denounced 
 by the Liberal leader of the day as a chartered liber- 
 tine. The fact is that the men who were bent upon 
 improvement were the first to perceive the insuffici- 
 ency of the parliamentary machinery for accomplish- 
 ing it. Even to the last the men who were the unwill- 
 ing and humiliated instruments of the enfranchisement 
 of 1867, proclaimed that the necessity which they 
 obeyed was entirely factitious in its origin, the result 
 of party manoeuvres and personal ambitions, and not 
 the expression of any real demand on the part of 
 the country. The Reform Bills unsuccessfully in- 
 troduced by Lord John Russell, during his own Ad- 
 ministration and that of Lord Aberdeen, were rather 
 attempts to abate what was considered a nuisance 
 within the walls of Parliament, and to buy off Mr. 
 Hume and Mr. Bright, than dictated by a sense of 
 political justice and expediency in any large sense. 
 The same may be said of the Bill brought forward by 
 Lord Beaconsfield in 1859. It was argued, almost 
 in so many words, that the popular indifference gave 
 a good opportunity of effecting ostensible changes
 
 172 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 which should in reality change nothing. Lord Beacons- 
 field's Reform Bill did change something. It changed 
 the Government. It is unnecessary to describe the 
 fantastic provisions of that ludicrous scheme, which 
 was destroyed by its own absurdities and eccentrici- 
 ties. Lord Beaconsfield has always denounced the 
 the Reform Act of 1832 as a retrogressive and anti- 
 democratic measure. His idea of Tory democracy 
 is government by the Crown or the aristocracy through 
 the residuum, to use the phrase which Mr. Bright in- 
 troduced into our political vocabulary. The old free- 
 men were precisely such a residuum as he needed. 
 It is true that during the whole of the agitation, in 
 and out of Parliament, he deprecated what he called 
 the degradation of the franchise, and argued for its 
 lateral as opposed to its vertical extension. But 
 when Lord Salisbury, then sitting in the House of 
 Commons as Lord Cran borne, denounced the incon- 
 sistency of these professions with the Reform Bill of 
 1867, in its final shape, Lord Beaconsfield appealed 
 to the fact, which he challenged his antagonist to 
 verify by reference to still living witnesses, that in 
 the deliberations of successive cabinets he had always 
 advocated a household qualification as the only solid
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 173 
 
 ground on which the franchise could rest. Lord Bea- 
 consfield is occasionally in the habit of making strong 
 statements based on what turns out afterwards to be 
 an imperfect recollection. But there is no improba- 
 bility in this assertion. If a man's consistency is to 
 be judged solely by comparing the beginning and the 
 end of his career, Lord Beaconsfield might be ac- 
 counted one of the most consistent of politicians. 
 But there is an intervening space, occupying the 
 greater part, and the most decisively influential part, 
 of his career ; and that cannot be left out of the 
 reckoning. 
 
 The charge which is made against Lord Beacons- 
 field is that for long periods he has persistently de- 
 nied convictions which he all along steadily held. It 
 is quite probable that he has always been as much of 
 a free-trader as he was when, more than fifty years 
 ago, he published Popanilla, a work the very exist- 
 ence of which he forgot, as we pointed out in a 
 former article, when he wrote the preface to the new 
 edition of Lothair, but which since has been brought 
 to his memory and included in the most recently 
 issued volume of his collected works. Nevertheless, 
 this did not prevent his assailing Sir Robert Peel and
 
 174 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 assuming the leadership of the Protectionist party. He 
 ma}' have advocated household suffrage in the Cabinet, 
 but he denounced it in "Parliament as involving peril 
 and degradation. His Reform Bill of 1859, which 
 contained no provision for lowering the franchise in 
 boroughs, was defeated on a resolution of Lord John 
 Russell's, signalising that and other faults in the 
 measure. The ministry determined on dissolving. 
 The general election echoed the disapproval of Parlia- 
 ment when the new House of Commons met. A mo- 
 tion of want of confidence proposed by Lord Harting- 
 ton was carried, and Lord Derby and his colleagues 
 resigned. The new ministry, with Lord Palmerston 
 at its head, brought the Whigs and Peelites together 
 once more in the same Government, Mr. Milner 
 Gibson and Mr. Villiers representing the Radical 
 party in a Cabinet which Mr. Cobden declined to 
 enter, and which Mr. Bright was not invited to join. 
 
 The great achievements of this ministry were like 
 those of the Aberdeen Cabinet, the financial measures 
 of Mr. Gladstone, including the negotiation, mainly 
 through Mr. Cobden, of the treaty of commerce with 
 France. Out of doors the country was stirred by Mr. 
 Bright' s agitation for household suffrage and a redis-
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 1 75 
 
 tribution ; and divided by the conflict of opinion to 
 which the American civil war gave rise. Considering 
 the sentiments of his party, whose passions were as 
 fiercely enlisted on the side of the slave-holders as 
 they are now on behalf of the Turks, Lord Beacons- 
 field's reticence is deserving of credit. He probably 
 had some sympathy with the territorial democracy of 
 the North, and no particular liking for the Southern 
 oligarchy. It would have been too much to expect 
 him to try and give right moral guidance to his party. 
 It is to his credit that he did not flatter and inflame 
 their prejudices and passions. During the whole of 
 Lord Palmerston's administration, it was Lord Bea- 
 consfield's humour to affect a sort of patronage of the 
 Prime Minister, to represent him as the Conserva- 
 tive chief of a Liberal government, obeying the leader 
 of the Opposition, and holding in check his own 
 revolutionary followers. Though the Liberals had 
 place, which he did not envy them, the Tories had 
 power ; and with this Lord Beaconsfield's noble and 
 generous ambition was content. It was reserved for 
 him to show for yet the third time that place without 
 power was not absolutely unendurable, and that a 
 Conservative ministry in a minority was more to his
 
 176 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 mind. Lord Palmerston's death, in 1865, terminated 
 the period of rest and thankfulness. Lord Russoll 
 succeeded his old colleague, of whom he had been 
 alternately leader and follower, a cordial friend and an 
 intimate enemy ; and with his return to the Premier- 
 ship, he returned to his first love, Reform. That was 
 the question to which Lord Russell's character and 
 ambition, his convictions, and his natural desire, 
 quickened by previous failures, to complete his own 
 great measure, gave new prominence. Mr. Glad- 
 stone's assumption of the leadership of the Govern- 
 ment and the Liberal party in the House of Com- 
 mons, practically made the ministry, slight as were the 
 personal changes in its composition, a new one, and 
 created a new' Liberalism. We need not record the 
 intrigues, and the secessions into the cave of Adullam, 
 which defeated the Reform Bill of 1866, and the Gov- 
 ernment with it, and once more recalled Lord Derby 
 and Mr. Disraeli to office ; nor the chapter of acci- 
 dents and surprises in the House of Commons, and the 
 agitation and threatened tumult out of doors, which 
 made Lord Derby the sponsor of household suffrage, 
 and enabled Lord Beaconsfield to boast that after all 
 the Tories were, as he had always declared, the
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. I 77 
 
 national party, whose policy was that of trust in the 
 people. 
 
 In spite of defeats on vital questions of policy, and 
 notably on the question of the Disestablishment of the 
 Irish Church, Mr. Disraeli, whom Lord Derby's retire- 
 ment had elevated to the Premiership, persisted in 
 retaining office, and keeping in his own hands the set- 
 tlement of the Reform question by those Scotch and 
 Irish Bills which were the necessary accompaniment 
 of the English measure. Nothing but a direct vote 
 of want of confidence would have led to his retire- 
 ment. This he magniloquently and safely challenged. 
 Seeing that the party of resistance to the encroach- 
 ments of the democracy, and to the degradation of 
 the franchise, were prepared to concede household 
 suffrage, it would have been folly to have given them 
 the opportunity, pretty certain to be used, of resisting 
 it anew, and with the aid of the Adullamites success- 
 fully ; or to have encountered the disturbances, diffi- 
 culties, and uncertainties of a dissolution. It was 
 better that the Whigs should be dished, than that a 
 great reform should be marred and hindered. Lord 
 Beaconsfield missed an opportunity for the display of 
 that generosity which he would have shown if he had
 
 178 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 imitated in regard to Mr. Bright and Parliamentary 
 Reform, the language in which Sir Robert Peel spoke 
 of Mr. Cobden and free trade. He connected his own 
 name, though nothing else, with a really great politi- 
 cal measure, and kept the management of the election 
 of 1868 in his hands. The prediction attributed to 
 him of the immediate entrance of a Conservative ad- 
 ministration on a term of office as lasting as that of 
 Lord Liverpool's government, did not make in 1868 
 the first step towards its verification. An overwhelm- 
 ing defeat in the polling booths terminated, by a sort 
 of national vote of censure, the existence of an inglo- 
 rious and apostate administration. Lord Beacons- 
 field bowed to the decision of the country without 
 waiting for its formal ratification in the House of 
 Commons ; and Mr. Gladstone became Prime Minis- 
 ter by the distinct designation of the newly created 
 constituencies. The great measures which marked 
 tae course of the new Government need not be re- 
 counted, nor need we dwell upon the great errors 
 which weakened its strength, culminating in the error 
 which at the least expedient moment led to Mr. Glad- 
 stone's appeal to the country. A momentary impulse 
 on the part of the Prime Minister coincided with a
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 179 
 
 probably only temporary mood of irritation in the 
 nation, and the dismissal which Mr. Gladstone had 
 welcomed in advance, and had almost solicited, was 
 vouchsafed him. 
 
 Imitating the example of very doubtful constitu- 
 tional expediency set by Lord Beaconsfield in 1867, 
 Mr. Gladstone in the beginning of 1874 resigned 
 without waiting for a formal vote of want of confi- 
 dence on the part of the House of Commons. It is 
 to be hoped that there will be no further and future 
 imitation of this double precedent. The fiction that 
 the House of Commons is a freely deliberating assem- 
 bly, judging after debate, and on the merits of the ques- 
 tion submitted to it, is a convenient and healthy one. 
 It is vital indeed to Parliamentary rule. Simply to 
 count up the election returns, and to forecast future 
 votes by reference to party organization and candida- 
 ture, is to make a dangerous approach to the plebisci- 
 tary system of government. It is desirable that a min- 
 istry, presumably defeated at the polling booths, should 
 meet the House of Commons, to which it is immedi- 
 ately responsible, and should keep and lay down office 
 at its direct bidding. It is the duty of the head of a gov- 
 ernment, to vindicate its measures and policy before
 
 l8o POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 Parliament, and in justifying its conduct in the past, 
 to indicate for the party which it represents the prin- 
 ciples by which it will be guided, and the application 
 which it will make of those principles in the future. 
 Such a statement by Mr. Gladstone, at the opening 
 of the session of 1874, in the only place in which he 
 and his antagonists could meet face to face, would 
 have possessed historic value, and would possibly 
 have had an effect on public and parliamentary 
 opinion, which might have helped to restrain some of 
 the wilder eccentricities and extravagances of his suc- 
 cessor. It would at any rate have been a dignified 
 ending to a great ministerial career. 
 
 In forming his Cabinet, Lord Beaconsfield had the 
 good sense to restrict its numbers, even below the 
 mystic thirteen which used to be its outside limit be- 
 fore it reached the unwieldy size of recent govern- 
 ments. Twelve is a sacred number both in Hebrew 
 and English history ; and to this number the Cabinet 
 was restricted until Lord Sandon became its thirteenth 
 member or odd man. Before this, it seemed as if 
 Lord Beaconsfield held the old superstition that it 
 is unlucky to sit down thirteen at a table ; and the 
 supposititious thirteenth member of the Cabinet no
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. l8l 
 
 doubt looked upon his more fortunate brethren much 
 as the occupant of the forty-first arm-chair in the 
 French Academy regards the favoured forty immor- 
 tals. It is to be hoped that Lord Beaconsfield's 
 example will be followed when the next Liberal 
 Cabinet is formed. It will require some courage tc 
 resist the claims of long-established and respectable 
 failures. The want of homogeneity in the Liberal 
 party, and its division into strongly marked sections 
 of opinion, each with a fair title to representation in 
 the Cabinet, make the restriction of its numbers diffi- 
 cult. But if it is to retain authority and efficiency, 
 the widening and weakening process to which it has 
 been submitted by Liberal Prime Ministers must be 
 checked. It is easy to soothe disappointed ambition 
 by peerages and orders : 
 
 "Nor mean the gift the royal grace affords, 
 All shall be knights save those that shall be lords." 
 
 The upper chamber seems to have been providen- 
 tially preserved as a place of honourable exile. It is 
 much better than the Turkish system, which sends a 
 discredited Pacha to govern a remote and barbaous 
 province. Unfortunately, Lord Beaconsfield doei
 
 182 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 not confine himself to the distribution of titles and 
 ribbons, which seem to have the same attraction for 
 English politicians as strings of beads and painted 
 glass have for more savage chieftains. Not content 
 with a wide distribution of these baubles, Lord Bea- 
 consfield offered more substantial consolations to 
 the wounded feelings of disappointed colleagues. 
 The appointments of Lord Hampton and Sir Sey- 
 mour Fitzgerald to lucrative commissionerships, for 
 which neither of them had the slightest qualification, 
 were only conspicuous illustrations, two instances, 
 among many, of a deliberate return to the worst 
 abuses of patronage as it was exercised before the 
 Reform Bill. Lord Beaconsfield exhibited, in the 
 formation of his ministry, the disposition, which he 
 satirized in Vivian Grey, of a plebeian Prime Min- 
 ister to surround himself with great nobles and social 
 magnates. He is his own Mr. Beckendorff. The 
 attitude of the English aristocracy towards him dis- 
 plays, in return, that fidelity which he says, in his 
 Life of Lord George Bentinck, that great nobles are 
 always ready to show to a chief not of their own order. 
 Lord Beaconsfield's subsequent experience has proba- 
 bly verified his statement. One instance is at the
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 183 
 
 rery moment very conspicuous. It is no secret that 
 Lord Beaconsfield had great difficulty in inducing 
 some eminent politicians, on whose assistance he set 
 the highest value, to take office not, as on previous 
 occasions, with him, but distinctly under him. Lord 
 Salisbury, in particular, it is believed, was captured 
 with the utmost difficulty, and, for some time, seemed 
 to be but imperfectly tamed. Now he has been 
 completely subdued. 
 
 Though not Prime Minister for the first time in 
 1874, Lord Beaconsfield was then for the first time 
 Prime Minister with a working and thoroughly disci- 
 plined and docile majority in both Houses, and with 
 the support, sometimes ostentatiously vaunted, at 
 other times significantly hinted, of the Crown and the 
 Court. Since the fall of Sir Robert Peel's adminis- 
 tration, in 1846, no Government had had the same 
 combination of advantages. Lord Beaconsfield had 
 previously shown the greatest skill as a leader of op- 
 position and of Governments which, without any vio- 
 lent straining of words, may be said to have been 
 practically in opposition since they were confronted 
 by a hostile majority in the House of Commons. He 
 had proved himself to be a master of the arts of delay
 
 184 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 and of evasion, skilful in playing off one section of his 
 opponents against another. Under LorJ Derby's suc- 
 cessive governments and his own first administra- 
 tion, barren sessions and insufficient work were ex- 
 cused as the inevitable consequences of their position. 
 It had now to be seen whether, with all the instru- 
 ments in his hand which Sir Robert Peel had used with 
 such benefit to the public, and which no minister since 
 Sir Robert Peel had possessed, he could transact the 
 business of the country, or even conduct business in 
 the House. In Mr. Cross he had probably the best 
 Home Secretary since Sir George Lewis, perhaps 
 since Sir James Graham. The Exchequer, and the 
 Colonial and Indian Offices, were filled with more 
 than usual efficiency, and, under any other Prime 
 Minister than Lord Beaconsfield himself, Lord Derby 
 would probably have been- a sound and judicious For- 
 eign Secretary of the Aberdeen type. Some injustice 
 has possibly been done to Lord Derby. While he was 
 in office the world saw how little he did. Since his 
 retirement from the Foreign Secretaryship, and Lord 
 Salisbury's appointment, it has had means of knowing 
 how much he may have hindered. Lord Cairns may 
 claim a place among the great Chancellors and polit-
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 18$ 
 
 ical lawyers. In spite of these aids, Lord Beacons- 
 field's conduct of business in the House of Commons 
 during the sessions of 1874, 1875, and 1876, was a 
 failure. He has never, as we have said, been a mas- 
 ter of details, he has never been interested in them, 
 he has seldom taken the pains to acquaint himself 
 with them, and all the pains and skill of the able man 
 of business who was at that time Secretary of the 
 Treasury, and who has since been deservedly pro- 
 moted to one of the great offices of State, were un- 
 able to prevent his erratic leader from traversing and 
 overthrowing the careful and difficult arrangements 
 which had been minutely concerted beforehand. 
 Lord Beaconsfield's tact and skill in dealing with per- 
 sons, his knowledge of the feelings of the House and 
 of its different sections, his powers of adroit flattery 
 and delicate irony, amusing and stingless when he 
 chooses that it shall be so, would probably have pre- 
 vented the scenes of anarchy and confusion which 
 have marred the consideration and repute of the 
 House of Commons during the present and previous 
 session of Parliament. The Irish obstructives have 
 been able to obstruct because the leader of the 
 House of Commons has been helpless, and its presid-
 
 1 86 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 ing officers have been, capriciously and in turn, per- 
 emptory and lax. But Lord Beaconsfield did not 
 conduct public business in the House, and scarcely 
 affected to do so. The failure was due, in a consid- 
 erable degree, no doubt, to the declining health and 
 strength which led him to retire from it. It was also 
 owing largely to the fact that Lord Beaconsfield evi- 
 dently considered the office of Prime Minister as 
 chiefly desirable because it enabled him to exercise a 
 paramount control over foreign affairs, and to devote 
 himself to those considerations of high imperial pol- 
 icy as he regards them, in which for four or five years 
 he has been absorbed. One of his political heroes is 
 Lord Carteret, who anticipated the present leader 
 of the Liberal party in the title of Earl Granville. 
 "What is it to me," said Carteret, when some one 
 came to him about business which he thought beneath 
 him, " who is a judge or who is a bishop ? It is my 
 business to make kings and emperors, and to main- 
 tain the balance of Europe." This seems to be Lord 
 Beaconsfield's idea of a Prime Minister's office. 
 
 The history of Lord Beaconsfield's second adminis- 
 tration is the history of the Eastern Question. In re- 
 gard to it, his statesmanship seems the product rather
 
 LORD BEACONSHELD. 187 
 
 of an erratic Oriental imagination than of a European 
 intelligence. He has introduced the wild dreams 
 and projects of his Eastern heroes into the practical 
 politics of the West. Years ago he published a pro- 
 phetic burlesque of his own present policy, with the 
 fantastic exaggerations which are habitual to him, bat 
 which are not incompatible with his own deep-seated 
 belief that there is truth beneath the extravagance. 
 The only difference between the scheme to which 
 Lord Beacorsfield has given effect, and that which 
 the Emir Fakredeen propounded to Tancred is the 
 difference between reality and bold caricature : 
 " The Queen will listen to what you say, especially if 
 you speak to her as you speak to me, and say such 
 fine things in such a beautiful voice. Nobody ever 
 opened my mind like you. You will magnetize the 
 Queen as you have magnetized me. Go back to 
 
 England and arrange this You must perform 
 
 the Portuguese scheme on a great scale ; quit a petty 
 and exhausted position for a vast and prolific empire. 
 Let the Queen of the English collect a great fleet, let 
 her stow away all her treasure, bullion, gold plate, 
 and precious arms, be accompanied by all her court 
 and chief people, and transfer the seat of her Empire
 
 1 88 POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 from London to Delhi. There she will find an im- 
 mense empire ready-made, a first-rate army, and a 
 large revenue We acknowledge the Em- 
 press of India as our suzerain, and secure for her the 
 Levantine Coast. If she likes she shall have Alexan- 
 dria as she now has Malta ; it could be arranged. 
 You see ! the greatest empire that ever ex- 
 isted ; besides which she gets rid of the embarrass- 
 ment of her Chambers ! And quite practicable ; for 
 the only difficult part, the conquest of India, which 
 baffled Alexander, is all done." Lord Beaconsfield is 
 probably never so sincere as when he is talking non- 
 sense, conscious that there is some nonsense in what 
 he is saying, but believing that there is at bottom a 
 great deal more truth. The secret of some of his 
 wildest freaks of policy is to be found in the most gro- 
 tesque passages of his old novels. There lie the 
 ideas which, after a half or a quarter of a century's 
 patient waiting, he endeavours to carry out. Already 
 the Emir Beaconsfield has given effect to a large part 
 of the scheme of the Emir Fakredeen. We have an 
 Empress of India. The convention with Turkey 
 gives England the protectorate and the reversion of 
 the sovereignty of the Levant, and, indeed, of the
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 189 
 
 whole of Asiatic Turkey. Negotiations were at one 
 time in progress which would have given us Alexan- 
 dria, as we now have Malta. To avoid wounding 
 French susceptibilities, we have taken Cyprus in- 
 stead. The capital of the empire has not yet been 
 transferred from London to Delhi; but Indian troops 
 have been summoned to fight our battles in Europe, 
 and the first step has been taken towards making 
 England, in a military sense, dependent upon what 
 used to be her dependency of India. Above all, the 
 Emir Beaconsfield has done something to get rid of 
 the embarrassment of the English Chambers, and the 
 Chambers have acquiesced in a series of unconstitu- 
 tional invasions and evasions of their legitimate au- 
 thority, which, if the precedents now set were fol- 
 lowed, would seriously limit the scope and efficiency 
 of parliamentary control. 
 
 If Lord Beaconsfield were anything more than a 
 grotesque foreign accident in our English political 
 history if, in the nature of things, he could have 
 successors the situation, not without danger as it is, 
 but still more ridiculous and annoying than danger- 
 ous, would be fraught with grave peril. Lord Bea- 
 consfield's peculiar genius was under restraint, when
 
 I QO POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF 
 
 he held only the second place in Conservative Gov- 
 ernments and the Conservative party, and when he 
 had to face and defer to a critical and suspicious, and 
 occasionally a directly hostile parliamentary majority. 
 Since the beginning of 1874, ne nas been delivered 
 from any checks, save those which, at particular pe- 
 riods, have been imposed upon him by the roused 
 feeling of the country. These, however, from the 
 very nature of popular impulses, have acted only 
 from time to time. Bowing to the storm, he has let 
 it pass, and when it has gone its way, has resumed 
 his suspended, but never abandoned, purpose. He 
 has known how to appeal to the blatant and bluster- 
 ing Chauvinism of the coarsest and least educated 
 part of every class in the community, from the highest 
 to the lowest. The noisiest and vulgarest noblemen 
 and the noisiest and vulgarest mobsmen have been 
 upon his side. A too timid parliamentary Opposition 
 has not exercised even such imperfect control as 
 would have been possible to higher courage and 
 steadier persistence. The one statesman who has set 
 himself, in defiance of insult and clamour, to oppose 
 the prevailing madness, has addressed a wearied and 
 exhausted condition of popular intelligence and feel-
 
 LORD BEACONSFIELD. igi 
 
 ing. The only elements of resistance in the Cabinet 
 have been got rid of, and Lord Beaconsfield has 
 found himself the sole Minister as completely as ever 
 Walpole was. Lord Salisbury has been content to 
 walk as the first and most distinguished captive in his 
 triumphal procession. England has played, during 
 the last four or five years, that part in the affairs of 
 Europe which Lord Beaconsfield wished that it should 
 play, and it closely resembles that which he has cho- 
 sen for himself. It has been reduced into swagger 
 and self-assertion, a determination to push to the 
 front, merely for the sake of being there and of being 
 pointed to, talked of, and wondered at. The nation 
 has been dressed up in the tawdry finery of titles 
 borrowed from imperial France and imperial Hayti ; 
 ridiculous orders for women have been invented ; the 
 theatrical mission to Berlin has been devised ; a gro- 
 tesque and fantastic imagination has been allowed 
 free play. M. Jourdain, habited as the great Marna- 
 mouchi, was not more ridiculously accoutred than 
 this sober and historic nation now is with Eastern 
 robe and diadem. 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield's resources of dextrous charla- 
 tanism show no signs of exhaustion. He is justified
 
 192 LORD BEACONSFIELD. 
 
 in a contemptuous confidence in the gullibility of this 
 nation, which allows him to govern it. The senti- 
 ment which his own Hebrew Besso inscribed on the 
 wall of his house when Contarini Fleming visited it, 
 and which was to be seen there still, when Tancred 
 made his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, declared " I will 
 not believe in those who must believe in me." It 
 was intended to express the attitude of Judaism to 
 Christianity. With very little alteration, it will prob- 
 ably convey Lord Beaconsfield's feeling towards 
 his English worshippers and followers. He cannot 
 easily believe in those who believe in him. In the 
 meantime, Lord Beaconsfield's adventures are not 
 over ; the last chapter of them remains to be written. 
 The materials for it are accumulating, and the story 
 may reach a new point by the time these words are 
 before the eyes of the reader; but it cannot yet be 
 fully told, nor its moral completely drawn. 
 
 END.