The secrets of success, Disraeli has told us more than once, are knowledge of your capacities, constancy of purpose, and mastery of your subject. It is seldom that in one brain these qualities of grip, mental and moral, are fully combined; and, rarer still, when they do reside together, is the addition of the third requisite named by him—patience. It, with the tact it bears, is as necessary for the servant as the master. “The magic of the character,” he says of the courier in Contarini, “was his patience. This made him quicker and readier and more successful than all other men. He prepared everything, and anticipated wants of which we could not think.” The preparation for career—apart from its entitling endowments—should be education; but education, he held, even in its prescientific days, often started with a vital mistake. It proceeded on words, grammars, and systems. It should proceed on a knowledge of predisposition; others should know a man before he is called upon to know himself. “What we want is to discover the character of a man at his birth, and found his education upon his nature.... All is an affair of organisation.... Among men there are some points of similarity and sympathy. There are few alike; there are some totally unlike the mass.... Until we know more of ourselves, of what use are our systems?... We speculate upon the character of man; we divide and we subdivide. We have our generals, our sages, our statesmen. There is not a modification of mind that is not mapped out in our great atlas of intelligence. We cannot be wrong, because we have mapped out the past; and we are famous for discovering Preparation must be succeeded, and, indeed, attended, by meditation. I shall return to this idea shortly, and consider it in his own instance. But there comes a juncture when action must rise from the chrysalis of thought which encloses it. “... You must renounce meditation. Action is now your part. Meditation is culture. It is well to think until a man has discovered his genius and developed his faculties, but then let him put his intelligence in motion. Act, act, act without ceasing, and you will no longer talk of the vanity of life.” The perpetual thought of death he considered harmful. To live in present duty and energy was truer piety than to brood on the coming hour when no man can work; and the very sense of existence is a great happiness, and leads to hope. “... If, in striking the balance of sensation, misery were found to predominate, no human being would endure the curse of existence....”183 He would surely have echoed that fine saying of Gladstone—“Indifference to the world is not love of God.” He was infinitely sanguine in outlook, although extremely cautious in expedients. I may recall that when Coningsby has missed his fortune, Sidonia consoles him by a series of more disagreeable contingencies. Such, then, were for him the equipments of career. Of its It is not here my province to track the details of his own career. This book deals with his ideas. But with the interesting psychology of his early temperament I mean to deal, for it concerns his ideas. I might, had his career been within my scope, have cleared some doubts, and explained many misunderstandings. I could have shown, as I have shown elsewhere, the real truth about the Peel letter, and the events of 1851–52. I should have pointed out the dividing lines in his campaign and the halting-places in his march, the Eastern tour, his marriage, his estrangement from Peel, the Crimean War, his steady progress in social improvements, his Reform Bills of 1859 and 1867, the strong effect on his outlook of events of magnitude, and the last act of the drama—his imperialism. I might also have explained the moot points connected with the years 1833, 1835, 1837, 1846, 1851, and 1860.184 I might, perhaps, have been able to shed light on the delayed Malmesbury despatches in 1859. Nor should I have shirked his mistakes, notably the motion of censure on Lord Palmerston. And I would have dwelt on the striking influences which his sister and his wife exercised over him. But one brief topic I shall skim before I finally trace something of his own peculiar development. Much, too, has been prattled about his “audacity,” and I notice that the hackneyed quotation about “L’audace” is usually in these diatribes ascribed to Danton, and not to its author, Beaumarchais. Many of these “audacities” are now recognised as wisdom; but it has been after-wisdom that has recognised it; though Disraeli was usually Prometheus. “There are times,” he said in one of his early novels, “when I am influenced by a species of what I may term happy audacity, for it is a mixture of recklessness and self-confidence, which has a very felicitous effect upon the animal spirits. At these moments I never calculate consequences, yet everything seems to go right. I feel in good fortune; the ludicrous side of everything occurs to me; I think of nothing but grotesque images. I astonish people by bursting into laughter apparently without a cause....” Disraeli was naturally sensitive, but he studied self-repression. No one was more cut to the quick by contumely or impertinence; no one was more determined to hide the wound. “If,” once observed Jowett, “Dizzy were on the brink of the bottomless pit, and each moment about to fall into it, his look would never betray the fact; such is his pluck and power of countenance.” As he bore himself towards provocation, he bore himself towards pain. The last great speech he ever made was delivered with youthful jauntiness, yet he was forced to take a drug in order to deliver it. “One must meet death boldly,” he exclaimed to an intimate friend, after he had read the denial of the doctors’ assurance in their faces. Disraeli’s intellectual shortcomings are those, it seems to “... The clustering of their beauty seemed an evidence of poetic power: the management of these bright guests was an art of which I was ignorant. I received them all, and found myself often writing only that they might be accommodated.” As a child, his ruling mood was that of reverie. He had steeped himself in his father’s library, and his extraordinary imagination played upon the poets, the philosophers, and, above all, the historians. Dim dreams from the vast procession of the centuries took shape and became flesh. He beheld the great men and movements marching before him. Incarnate presences peopled his loneliness, and called to him with their voices— “The votary of a false idea, I linger in this shadowy life and feed on silent images which no eye but mine can gaze upon, till at length they are invested with the terrible circumstances of life, and breathe, and act, and form a stirring world of fate, beauty, time, death, and glory. And then, from out this dazzling wilderness of deeds, I wander forth and wake ... horrible! horrible!” “Often in reverie had I been an Alberoni, a Ripperda, a Richelieu....” “I sat in moody silence, revolving in reverie without the labour of thought....” He felt that he was not as others. He found that though at once proud and gentle, as a boy, his family were sometimes eyed askance as foreigners. He wished to frequent a public school; it was deemed unadvisable. The harder side of his nature began to assert itself. He would triumph over all, hew down every obstacle. His father suggested the University. He rejected the offer. Why waste his time in words The circumstances and results of the book I have touched in the preceding chapter. Disraeli grew ashamed of its fashionable success. The world was not merely his oyster. He would elevate and benefit by it. He mixed in society, but it neither raised his spirits nor slaked his thirst, although it did help him to see his measure and stature among mankind. That commerce with the world is the best cure for misjudged ambition he pressed in his fine address to youth at the Manchester AthenÆum; but ambition itself he regarded as elevating for man. At the crisis, however, that we have reached, his ambitions were still unsettled. He began to be soured and sceptical both of himself, of mankind, and of God. His spiritual fibre was shaken. His sister, with talents nearly equal to his, and faith and charity superior, came to his rescue. She healed his wounds; she ennobled his standard; she comforted him with her entire belief in his great future. She restored him to his higher self. Once more the shadow of ill health fell across the young Disraeli’s footsteps; this time a very critical malady—a complete nervous breakdown. He “fainted as he dressed.” He even had convulsions. He was overwhelmed by strange noises in his head. “... The falls of Niagara could not overpower the infernal roaring that I alone heard.”187 Travel was prescribed. He departed for two years from Europe, and mended. He returned, found his place, his mission, and his ideals. But still his discreet family opposed themselves to his entrance into public life. It was incredible, impossible, absurd. “So much for the maddest of mad acts, as my uncle said,” he wrote to his sister on his first return to Parliament. Every one remembers the story of his meeting with Lord Melbourne, and his answer, true or not, as to what the premier could “do for him.” “I wish to be Prime Minister.” At any rate, Mrs. Austin, in extreme old age, recalled a party at her house about this period, when the young Disraeli explained his plans for England, “when I am Prime Minister,” amid laughter and surprise. “You will see,” he said, bringing his fist down on the mantelpiece, “I shall be Prime Minister.” He felt, as he wrote to his sister after attending a great debate, that “he could floor them all.” His confidence in himself, like his sister’s in him, was colossal. So I read his earliest years from his earliest books. Thenceforward he marched from strength to strength, and he employed power when he obtained it conscientiously according to his best lights for the improvement of the people and the glory of the Empire. And yet how strange it is, that at the annual gatherings on his death-day, celebrated by the romance of his memory and his flower, the successors who, faltering from his footsteps, honour the good will of his enduring popularity, have never breathed his name! I can see him smile in the shades; for he found his party a quagmire, and he left it a township. At all times he toiled hard and long, though sometimes by fits and starts; and a study was reserved ready for his visits at Bradenham. Although in his later years he would sometimes play at indolence, it was really against the grain. The occasional air of listlessness which society remarked in his latter When he died, amid national mourning, the late Lord Salisbury, after singling out his unquenchable zeal for the glory of Britain, lasting to a period when “the gratification of every possible desire negatived the presumption of any inferior motive,” adverted to his “patience, his gentleness, his unswerving and unselfish loyalty to his colleagues and fellow-labourers.” Indisputably his moral character was high. Without question he, like Gladstone, raised the tone of parliamentary life from that of the days when politics were merely a squabble for place and a toss-up as to “whether England should be ruled by Tory nobles or by Whig.” His tone may not always have chimed with certain forms or formulas of earnestness, but he acted up to his own high standard. “It was impossible,” said the late Lord Granville, “to deny that Lord Beaconsfield had played a great part in British History. No one could deny his rare and splendid gifts and his force of character.” Character will always appeal to England. “But,” pursued the orator, after noticing his tolerance and forbearance, “he undoubtedly possessed the power of appealing to the imagination, not only of his countrymen, but of foreigners,188 and that power is not destroyed by death.” My book opened with Personality, Ideas, and Imagination. With Imagination, Ideas, and Personality it shall close. They can turn and change the semblances of material “facts,” for they abide behind the veil of time and of existence. |