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to treat as autobiographical, though some of his critics have done so, the picture of Vivian Grey. What that singular book shows is that, at an age when his contemporaries were lads at college, absorbed in cricket matches or Latin verse-making, Disraeli had already meditated profoundly on the conditions and methods of worldly success, had rejected the allurements of pleasure and the attractions of literature, as well as the ideal life of philosophy, had conceived of a character isolated, ambitious, intense, resolute, untrammelled by scruples, who moulds men to his purposes by the sheer force of his intellect, humouring their foibles, using their weaknesses, and luring them into his chosen path by the bait of self-interest.

To lay stress on the fact that Mr. Disraeli was of Hebrew birth is not, though some of his political antagonists stooped so to use it, to cast any reproach upon him: it is only to note a fact of the utmost importance for a proper comprehension of his position. The Jews were at the beginning of the nineteenth century still foreigners in England, not only on account of their religion, with its mass of ancient rites and usages, but also because they were filled with the memory of centuries of persecution, and perceived that in some parts of Europe the old spirit of hatred had not died out. The antiquity of their race, their sense of its long-suffering and isolation, their pride in the intellectual achievements of those ancestors whose blood, not largely mixed with that of any other race, flows in their veins, lead the stronger or more reflective spirits to revenge themselves by a kind of scorn upon the upstart Western peoples among whom their lot is cast. The mockery one finds in Heinrich Heine could not have come from a Teuton. Even while imitating, as the wealthier of them have latterly begun to imitate, the manners and luxury of those nominal Christians among whom they live, they retain their feeling of detachment, and are apt to regard with a coldly observant curiosity the beliefs, prejudices, enthusiasms of the nations of Europe. The same passionate intensity which makes the grandeur of the ancient Hebrew literature still lives among them, though often narrowed by ages of oppression, and gives them the peculiar effectiveness that comes from turning all the powers of the mind, imaginative as well as reasoning, into a single channel, be that channel what it may. They produce, in proportion to their numbers, an unusually large number of able and successful men, as any one may prove by recounting the eminent Jews of the last seventy years. This success has most often been won in practical life, in commerce, or at the bar, or in the press ; yet often also in the higher walks of literature or science, less frequently in art, most frequently in music.

Mr. Disraeli had three of these characteristics of his race in full measure--detachment, intensity, the passion for material success. Nature gave him a resolute will, a keen and precociously active intellect, a vehement individuality; that is to say, a consciousness of his own powers, and a determination to make them recognised by his fellows. In some men, the passion to succeed is clogged by the fear of failure; in others, the sense of their greatness is self-sufficing and indisposes them to effort. But with him ambition spurred self-confidence, and self-confidence justified ambition. He grew up in a cultivated home, familiar not only with books but with the brightest and most polished men and women of the day, whose conversation sharpened his wits almost from childhood. No religious influences worked upon him, for his father had ceased to be a Jew in faith without becoming even nominally a Christian, and there is little in his writings to show that he had ever felt anything more than an imaginative, or what may be called an historical, interest in religion. Thus his development was purely intellectual. The society he moved in was a society of men and women of the world--witty, superficial in its interests, without seriousness or reverence. He felt himself no Englishman, and watched English life and politics as a student of natural history might watch the habits of bees or ants. English society was then, and perhaps is still, more complex, more full of inconsistencies, of contrasts between theory and practice, between appearances and realities, than that of any other country. Nowhere so much limitation of view among the fashionable, so much pharisaism among the respectable, so much vulgarity among the rich, mixed with so much real earnestness, benevolence, and good sense; nowhere, therefore, so much to seem merely ridiculous to one who looked at it from without, wanting the sympathy which comes from the love of mankind, or even from the love of one's country. It was natural for a young man with Disraeli's gifts to mock at what he saw. But he would not sit still in mere contempt. The thirst for power and fame gave him no rest. He must gain what he saw every one around him struggling for. He must triumph over these people whose follies amused him; and the sense that he perceived and could use their follies would add zest to his triumph. He might have been a great satirist; he resolved to become a great statesman. For such a career, his Hebrew detachment gave him some eminent advantages. It enabled him to take a cooler and more scientific view of the social and political phenomena he had to deal with. He was not led astray by party cries. He did not share vulgar prejudices. He calculated the forces at work as an engineer calculates the strength of his materials, the strain they have to bear from the wind, and the weights they must support. And what he had to plan was not the success of a cause, which might depend on a thousand things out of his ken, but his own success, a simpler matter.

A still greater source of strength lay in his Hebrew intensity. It would have pleased him, so full of pride in the pure blood of his race, to attribute to that purity the singular power of concentration which the Jews undoubtedly possess. They have the faculty of throwing the whole stress of their natures into the pursuit of one object, fixing their eyes on it alone, sacrificing to it other desires, clinging to it even when it seems unattainable. Disraeli was only twenty-eight when he made his first attempt to enter the House of Commons. Four repulses did not discourage him, though his means were but scanty to support such contests; and the fifth time he succeeded. When his first speech in Parliament had been received with laughter, and politicians were congratulating themselves that this adventurer had found his level, he calmly told them that he had always ended by succeeding in whatever he attempted, and that he would succeed in this too. He received no help from his own side, who regarded him with suspicion, but forced himself into prominence, and at last to leadership, by his complete superiority to rebuffs. Through the long years in which he had to make head against a majority in the House of Commons, he never seemed disheartened by his repeated defeats, never relaxed the vigilance with which he watched his adversaries, never indulged himself by staying away from Parliament, even when business was slack; never missed an opportunity for exposing a blunder of his adversaries, or commending the good service of one of his own followers. The same curious tenacity was apparent in his ideas. Before he was twenty-two years of age he had, under the inspiration of Bolingbroke, excogitated a theory of the Constitution of England, of the way England should be governed at home and her policy directed abroad, from which he hardly swerved through all his later life. Often as he was accused of inconsistency, he probably believed himself to be, and in a sense he was, substantially faithful, I will not say to the same doctrines, but to the same notions or tendencies; and one could discover from the phrases he employed how he fancied himself to be really following out these old notions, even when his conduct seemed opposed to the traditions of his party. The weakness of intense minds is their tendency to narrowness, and this weakness was in so far his that, while always ready for new expedients, he was not accessible to new ideas. Indeed, the old ideas were too much a part of himself, stamped with his own individuality, to be forsaken or even varied. He did not love knowledge, nor enjoy speculation for its own sake; he valued views as they pleased his imagination or as they carried practical results with them; and having framed his theory once for all and worked steadily upon its lines, he was not the man to admit that it had been defective, and to set himself in later life to repair it. His pride was involved in proving it correct by applying it.

With this resolute concentration of purpose there went an undaunted courage--a quality less rare among English statesmen, but eminently laudable in him, because for great part of his career he had no family or party connections to back him up, but was obliged to face the world with nothing but his own self-confidence. So far from seeking to conceal his Jewish origin, he displayed his pride in it, and refused all support to the efforts which the Tory party made to maintain the exclusion of Jews from Parliament. Nobody showed more self-possession and more perfect self-command in the hot strife of Parliament than this suspected stranger. His opponents learnt to fear one who never feared for himself; his followers knew that their chief would not fail them in the hour of danger. His very face and bearing had in them an impassive calmness which magnetised those who watched him. He liked to surround himself with mystery, to pose as remote, majestic, self-centred, to appear above the need of a confidant. He would sit for hours on his bench in the House of Commons, listening with eyes half-shut to furious assaults on himself and his policy, not showing by the movement of a muscle that he had felt a wound; and when he rose to reply would discharge his sarcasms with an air of easy coolness. That this indifference was sometimes simulated appeared by the resentment he showed afterwards.

This defence will not surprise any one who is familiar with Disraeli's earlier novels. These stories are as far as possible from being immoral; that is to say, there is nothing in them unbecoming or corrupting. Friendship, patriotism, love, are all recognised as powerful and worthy motives of conduct. That which is wanting is the sense of right and wrong. His personages have for certain purposes the conventional sense of honour, though seldom a fine sense, but they do not ask whether such and such a course is conformable to principle. They move in a world which is polished, agreeable, dignified, averse to baseness and vulgarity, but in which conscience and religion scarcely seem to exist. The men live for pleasure or fame, the women for pleasure or love.

Some allowance must, of course, be made for the circumstances of Disraeli's position and early training. He was brought up neither a Jew nor a Christian. The elder people who took him by the hand when he entered life, people like Samuel Rogers and Lady Blessington, were not the people to give lessons in morality. Lord Lyndhurst, the first of his powerful political friends, and the man whose example most affected him, was, with all his splendid gifts, conspicuously wanting in political principle. Add to this the isolation in which the young man found himself, standing outside the common stream of English life, not sharing its sentiments, perceiving the hollowness of much that passed for virtue and patriotism, and it is easy to understand how he should have been as perfect a cynic at twenty-five as their experience of the world makes many at sixty. If he had loved truth or mankind, he might have quickly worked through his youthful cynicism. But pride and ambition, the pride of race and the pride of genius, left no room for these sentiments. Nor was his cynicism the fruit merely of a keen and sceptical intelligence. It came from a cold heart.

His mental powers were singularly well suited to the rest of his character--were, so to speak, all of a piece with it. One sometimes sees intellects which are out of keeping with the active or emotional parts of the man. One sees persons whose thought is vigorous, clear, comprehensive, while their conduct is timid; or a comparatively narrow intelligence joined to an enterprising spirit; or a sober, reflective, sceptical turn of mind yoked to an ardent and impulsive temperament. What we call the follies of the wise often spring from some such source. Not so with him. His intelligence had the same boldness, intensity, concentration, directness, which we discover in the rest of the man. It was just the right instrument, not perhaps for the normal career of a normal Englishman seeking political success, but for the particular kind of work Disraeli had planned to do; and this inner harmony was one of the chief causes of his success, as the want of it has caused the failure of so many gifted natures.

He could hardly be called a well-read man, nor were his intellectual interests numerous. His education had consisted mainly in promiscuous reading during boyhood and early youth. There are worse kinds of education for an active intelligence than to let it have the run of a large library. The wild browsings of youth, when curiosity is strong as hunger, stir the mind and give the memory some of the best food it ever gets. The weak point of such a method is that it does not teach accuracy nor the art of systematic study. In middle life natural indolence and his political occupations had kept Disraeli from filling up the gaps in his knowledge, while, in conversation, what he liked best was persiflage. He was, however, tolerably familiar with the ancient classics, and with modern English and French literature; enjoyed Quintilian and Lucian, preferred Sophocles to AEschylus and Horace to Virgil, despised Browning, considered Tennyson the best of contemporary poets, but "not a poet of a high order." Physical science seems never to have attracted him. Political economy he hated and mocked at almost as heartily as did Carlyle. People have measured his knowledge of history and geography by observing that he placed the Crucifixion in the lifetime of Augustus, and thought, down till 1878, when he had to make a speech about Afghanistan, that the Andes were the highest mountains in the world. But geography is a subject which a man of affairs does not think of reading up in later life: he is content if he can get information when he needs it. There are some bits of metaphysics and some historical allusions scattered over his novels, but these are mostly slight or superficial. He amused himself and the public by now and then propounding doctrines on agricultural matters, but would not appear to have mastered either husbandry or any other economical or commercial subject. Such things were not in his way. He had been so little in office as not to have been forced to apply himself to them, while the tide of pure intellectual curiosity had long since ebbed.

If his intellect was not of wide range, it was within its range a weapon of the finest flexibility and temper. It was ingenious, ready, incisive. It detected in a moment the weak point, if not of an argument, yet of an attitude or of a character. Its imaginative quality made it often picturesque, sometimes even impressive. Disraeli had the artist's delight in a situation for its own sake, and what people censured as insincerity or frivolity was frequently only the zest which he felt in posing, not so much because there was anything to be gained, as because he realised his aptitude for improvising a new part in the drama which he always felt himself to be playing. The humour of the situation was too good to be wasted. Perhaps this love of merry mischief may have had something to do with his tendency to confer honours on those whom the world thought least deserving.

In inquiring how far the gifts I have sought to describe qualified Disraeli for practical statesmanship, it is well to distinguish the different kinds of capacity which an English politician needs to attain the highest place. They may be said to be four. He must be a debater. He must be a parliamentary tactician. He must understand the country. He must understand Europe. This last is, indeed, not always necessary; there have been moments when England, leaving Europe to itself, may look to her own affairs only; but when the sky grows stormy over Europe, the want of knowledge which English statesmen sometimes evince may bode disaster.

An orator, in the highest sense of the word, Disraeli never was. He lacked ease and fluency. He had not Pitt's turn for the lucid exposition of complicated facts, nor for the conduct of a close argument. The sustained and fiery declamation of Fox was equally beyond his range. And least of all had he that truest index of eloquence, the power of touching the emotions. He could not make his hearers weep. But he could make them laugh; he could put them in good-humour with themselves; he could dazzle them with rhetoric; he could pour upon an opponent streams of ridicule more effective than the hottest indignation. When he sought to be profound or solemn, he was usually heavy and laboured--the sublimity often false, the diction often stilted. For wealth of thought or splendour of language his speeches will not bear to be compared--I will not say with those of Burke , but with those of three or four of his own contemporaries. Even within his own party, Lord Derby, Lord Ellenborough, and Lord Cairns in their several ways surpassed him. There is not one of his longer and more finished harangues which can be read with interest from beginning to end. But there is hardly any among them which does not contain some striking passage, some image or epigram, or burst of sarcasm, which must have been exceedingly effective when delivered. It is partly upon these isolated passages, especially the sarcastic ones , and still more upon the aptness of the speech to the circumstances under which it was made, that his parliamentary fame rests. If he was not a great orator he was a superb debater, who watched with the utmost care the temper of the audience, and said just what was needed at the moment to disconcert an opponent or to put heart into his friends. His repartees were often happy, and must sometimes have been unpremeditated. As he had not the ardent temperament of the born orator, so neither had he the external advantages which count for much before large assemblies. His voice was not remarkable either for range or for quality. His manner was somewhat stiff, his gestures few, his countenance inexpressive. Yet his delivery was not wanting in skill, and often added point, by its cool unconcern, to a stinging epigram.

What he lacked in eloquence he made up for by tactical adroitness. No more consummate parliamentary strategist has been seen in England. He had studied the House of Commons till he knew it as a player knows his instrument--studied it collectively, for it has a collective character, and studied the men who compose it: their worse rather than their better side, their prejudices, their foibles, their vanities, their ambitions, their jealousies, above all, that curious corporate pride which they have, and which makes them resent any approach to dictation. He could play on every one of these strings, and yet so as to conceal his skill; and he so economised himself as to make them always wish to hear him. He knew how in a body of men obliged to listen to talk, and most of it tedious talk, about matters in themselves mostly uninteresting, the desire for a little amusement becomes almost a passion; and he humoured this desire so far as occasionally to err by excess of banter and flippancy. Almost always respectful to the House, he had a happy knack of appearing to follow rather than to lead, and when he made an official statement it was with the air of one who was taking them into his confidence. Much of this he may have learned from observing Lord Palmerston; but the art came more naturally to that statesman, who was an Englishman all through, than to a man of Mr. Disraeli's origin, who looked on Englishmen from outside, and never felt himself, so to speak, responsible for their habits or ideas.

As leader of his party in Opposition, he was at once daring and cautious. He never feared to give battle, even when he expected defeat, if he deemed it necessary, with a view to the future, that the judgment of his party should have been pronounced in a formal way. On the other hand, he was wary of committing himself to a policy of blind or obstinate resistance. When he perceived that the time had come to yield, he knew how to yield with a good grace, so as both to support a character for reasonableness and to obtain valuable concessions as the price of peace. If difficulties arose with foreign countries he claimed full liberty of criticising the conduct of the Ministry, but ostentatiously abstained from obstructing or thwarting their acts, declaring that England must always present a united front to the foreigner, whatever penalties she might afterwards visit on those who had mismanaged her concerns. As regards the inner discipline of his party, he had enormous difficulties to surmount in the jealousy which many Tories felt for him as a new man, a man whom they could not understand and only partially trusted. Conspiracies were repeatedly formed against him; malcontents attacked him in the press, and sometimes even in Parliament. These he seldom noticed, maintaining a cool and self-confident demeanour which disheartened the plotters, and discharging the duties of his post with steady assiduity. He was always on the look-out for young men of promise, drew them towards him, encouraged them to help him in parliamentary sharp-shooting, and fostered in every way the spirit of party. The bad side of that spirit was seen when he came into office, for then every post in the public service was bestowed either by mere favouritism or on party grounds; and men who had been loyal to him were rewarded by places or titles to which they had no other claim. But the unity and martial fervour of the Tory party was raised to the highest point. Nor was Disraeli himself personally unpopular with his parliamentary opponents, even when he was most hotly attacked on the platform and in the press.

To know England and watch the shifting currents of its opinion is a very different matter from knowing the House of Commons. Indeed, the two kinds of knowledge are in a measure incompatible. Men who enter Parliament soon begin to forget that it is not, in the last resort, Parliament that governs, but the people. Absorbed in the daily contests of their Chamber, they over-estimate the importance of those contests. They come to think that Parliament is in fact what it is in theory, a microcosm of the nation, and that opinion inside is sure to reflect the opinion outside. When they are in a minority they are depressed; when they are in a majority they fancy that all is well, forgetting their masters out-of-doors. This tendency is aggravated by the fact that the English Parliament meets in the capital, where the rich and luxurious congregate and give their tone to society. The House of Commons, though many of its members belong to the middle class by origin, belongs practically to the upper class by sympathy, and is prone to believe that what it hears every evening at dinners or receptions is what the country is thinking. A member of the House of Commons is, therefore, ill-placed for feeling the pulse of the nation, and in order to do so must know what is being said over the country, and must frequently visit or communicate with his constituents. If this difficulty is experienced by an ordinary private member, it is greater for a minister whose time is filled by official duties, or for a leader of Opposition, who has to be constantly thinking of his tactics in the House. In Disraeli's case there was a keenness of observation and discernment far beyond the common. But he was under the disadvantages of not being really an Englishman, and of having never lived among the people. The detachment I have already referred to tended to weaken his power of judging popular sentiment, and appraising at their true value the various tendencies that sway and divide a nation so complex as the English. Early in life he had formed theories about the relations of the different classes of English society--nobility, gentry, capitalists, workmen, peasantry, and the middle classes--theories which were far from containing the whole truth; and he adhered to them even when the changes of half a century had made them less true. He had a great aversion, not to say contempt, for Puritanism, and for the Dissenters among whom it chiefly holds its ground, and pleased himself with the notion that the extension of the suffrage which he carried in 1867 had destroyed their political power. The Conservative victory at the election of 1874 confirmed him in this belief, and made him also think that the working classes were ready to follow the lead of the rich. He perceived that the Liberal ministry of 1868-74 had offended certain influential sections by appearing too demiss or too unenterprising in foreign affairs, and fancied that the bulk of the nation would be dazzled by a warlike mien, and an active, even aggressive, foreign policy. Such a policy was congenial to his own ideas, and to the society that surrounded him. It was applauded by some largely circulated newspapers which had previously been unfriendly to the Tory party. Thus he was more surprised than any other man of similar experience to find the nation sending up a larger majority against him in 1880 than it had sent up for him in 1874. This was the most striking instance of his miscalculation. But he had all through his career an imperfect comprehension of the English people. Individuals, or even an assembly, may be understood by dint of close and long-continued observation; but to understand a whole nation, one must also have sympathy, and this his circumstances, not less than his character, had denied him.

It was partly the same defect that prevented him from mastering the general politics of Europe. There is a sense in which no single man can pretend to understand Europe. Bismarck himself did not. The problem is too vast, the facts to be known too numerous, the undercurrents too varying. One can speak only of more or less. If Europe had been in his time what it was a century before, Disraeli would have had a far better chance of being fit to become what it was probably his dearest wish to become--its guide and arbiter. He would have taken the measure of the princes and ministers with whom he had to deal, would have seen and adroitly played on their weaknesses. His novels show how often he had revolved diplomatic situations in his mind, and reflected on the way of handling them. Foreign diplomatists are agreed that at the Congress of Berlin he played his part to admiration, spoke seldom, but spoke always to the point and with dignity, had a perfect conception of what he meant to secure, and of the means he must employ to secure it, never haggled over details or betrayed any eagerness to win support, never wavered in his demands, even when they seemed to lead straight to war. Dealing with individuals, who represented material forces which he had gauged, he was perfectly at home, and deserved the praise he obtained from Bismarck, who, comparing him with other eminent figures at the Congress, is reported to have said, bluntly but heartily, "Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann." But to know what the condition of South-Eastern Europe really was, and understand how best to settle its troubles, was a far more difficult task, and Disraeli possessed neither the knowledge nor the insight required. In the Europe of to-day, peoples count for more than the wills of individual rulers: one must comprehend the passions and sympathies of peoples if one is to forecast the future. This he seldom cared to do. He did not realise the part and the power of moral forces. Down to the outbreak of the American Civil War he maintained that the question between the North and the South was mainly a fiscal question between the Protectionist interests of the one and the Free Trade interests of the other. He always treated with contempt the national movement in Italy. He made no secret in the days before 1859 of his good-will to Austria and of his liking for Louis Napoleon--a man inferior to him in ability and in courage, but to whose character his own had some affinities. In that elaborate study of Sir Robert Peel's character, which is one of Disraeli's best literary performances, he observes that Peel "was destitute of imagination, and wanting imagination he wanted prescience." True it is that imagination is necessary for prescience, but imagination is not enough to give prescience. It may even be a snare.

Disraeli's imagination, his fondness for theories, and disposition rather to cling to them than to study and interpret facts, made him the victim of his own preconceived ideas, as his indolence deterred him from following the march of change and noting how different things were in the 'seventies from what they had been in the 'thirties. Mr. Gladstone said to me in 1876, "Disraeli's two leading ideas in foreign policy have always been the maintenance of the temporal power of the Pope, and the maintenance of the power of the Sultan." Unable to save the one, he clung to the hope of saving the other. He was possessed by the notion, seductive to a dreamy mind, that all the disturbances of Europe arose from the action of secret societies; and when the Eastern Question was in 1875 re-opened by the insurrection in Herzegovina, followed by the war of Servia against the Turks, he explained the event in a famous speech by saying, "The secret societies of Europe have declared war against Turkey"--the fact being that the societies which in Russia were promoting the Servian war were public societies, openly collecting subscriptions, while those secret "social democratic" societies of which we have since heard so much were strongly opposed to the interference of Russia, and those other secret societies in the rest of Europe, wherein Poles and Italians have played a leading part, were, if not hostile, at any rate quite indifferent to the movement among the Eastern Christians.

Against these errors there must be set several cases in which he showed profound discernment. In 1843 and 1844 he delivered, in debates on the condition of Ireland, speeches which then constituted and long remained the most penetrating and concise diagnosis of the troubles of that country ever addressed to Parliament. Ireland has, he said, a starving peasantry, an alien church, and an absentee aristocracy, and he went on to add that the function of statesmanship was to cure by peaceful and constitutional methods ills which in other countries had usually induced, and been removed by, revolution. During the American Civil War of 1861-65, Disraeli was the only leading statesman on his own side of politics who did not embrace and applaud the cause of the South. Whether this arose from a caution that would not commit itself where it recognised ignorance, or from a perception of the superior strength of the Northern States , it is not easy to decide; but whatever the cause, the fact is an evidence of his prudence or sagacity all the more weighty because Lord Palmerston, Lord Russell, and Mr. Gladstone, as well as Lord Derby and Sir Hugh Cairns, had each of them expressed more or less sympathy with, or belief in, the success of the Southern cause.

The most striking instance, however, of Disraeli's insight was his perception that an extension of the suffrage would not necessarily injure, and might end by strengthening, the Tory party. The Act of 1867 was described at the time as "a leap in the dark." But Disraeli's eyes had pierced the darkness. For half a century politicians had assumed that the masses of the people were and would remain under the Liberal banner. Even as late as 1872 it was thought on Liberal platforms a good joke to say of some opinion that it might do for Conservative working men, if there were any. Disraeli had, long before 1867, seen deeper, and though his youthful fancies that the monarchy might be revived as an effective force, and that "the peasantry" would follow with mediaeval reverence the lead of the landed gentry, proved illusory, he was right in discerning that wealth and social influence would in parliamentary elections count for more among the masses than the traditions of constitutional Whiggism or the dogmas of abstract Radicalism.

In estimating his statesmanship as a whole, one must give due weight to the fact that it impressed many publicists abroad. No English minister had for a long time past so fascinated observers in Germany and Austria. Supposing that under the long reign of Liberalism Englishmen had ceased to care for foreign politics, they looked on him as the man who had given back to Britain her old European position, and attributed to him a breadth of design, a grasp and a foresight such as men had revered in Lord Chatham, greatest in the short list of ministers who have raised the fame of England abroad. I remember seeing in a Conservative club, about 1880, a large photograph of Lord Beaconsfield, wearing the well-known look of mysterious fixity, under which is inscribed the line of Homer: "He alone is wise: the rest are fleeting shadows." It was a happy idea to go for a motto to the favourite poet of his rival, as it was an unhappy chance to associate the wisdom ascribed to Disraeli with his policy in the Turkish East and in Afghanistan, a policy now universally admitted to have been unwise and unfortunate. But whatever may be thought of the appropriateness of the motto, the fact remains that this was the belief he succeeded in inspiring. He did it by virtue of those very gifts which sometimes brought him into trouble--his taste for large and imposing theories, his power of clothing them in vague and solemn language, his persistent faith in them. He came, by long posing, to impose upon himself and to believe in his own profundity. Few people could judge whether his ideas of imperial policy were sound and feasible; but every one saw that he had theories, and many fell under the spell which a grandiose imagination can exercise. It is chiefly this gift, coupled with his indomitable tenacity, which lifts him out of the line of mere party leaders. If he failed to see how much the English are sometimes moved by compassion, he did see that it may be worth while to play to their imagination.

We may now ask again the question asked at first: How did a man, whatever his natural gifts, who was weighted in his course by such disadvantages as Disraeli's, by his Jewish origin, by the escapades of his early career, by the want of confidence which his habitual cynicism inspired, by the visionary nature of so many of his views,--how did he, in a conservative and aristocratic country like England, triumph over so many prejudices and enmities, and raise himself to be the head of the Conservative and aristocratic party, the trusted counsellor of the Crown, the ruler, almost the dictator, of a free people?

However high be the estimate formed of Disraeli's gifts, secondary causes must have been at work to enable him to overcome the obstacles that blocked his path. The ancients were not wrong in ascribing to Fortune a great share in human affairs. Now, among the secondary causes of success, that "general minister and leader set over worldly splendours," as Dante calls her, played no insignificant part. One of these causes lay in the nature of the party to which he belonged. The Tory party of the years between 1848 and 1865 contained a comparatively small number of able men. When J. S. Mill once called it the stupid party, it did not repudiate the name, but pointed to its cohesion and its resolution as showing how many things besides mere talent go to make political greatness. A man of shining gifts had within its ranks few competitors; and this was signally the case immediately after Peel's defection. That statesman had carried off with him the intellectual flower of the Conservatives. Those who were left behind to form the Protectionist Opposition in the House of Commons were broad-acred squires, of solid character but slender capacity. Through this heavy atmosphere Mr. Disraeli rose like a balloon. Being practically the only member of his party in the Commons with either strategical or debating power, he became indispensable, and soon established a supremacy which years of patient labour might not have given him in a rivalry with the distinguished band who surrounded Peel. During the twenty years that followed the great Tory schism of 1846 no man arose in the Tory ranks capable of disputing his throne. The conspiracies hatched against him might well have prospered could a candidate for the leadership have been found capable of crossing swords with the chieftain in possession. Fortune, true to her nursling, suffered none such to appear.

Another favouring influence not understood outside England was to be found in the character of the party he led. In his day the Tories, being the party of the property-holders, and having not to advance but to stand still, not to propose changes but to resist them, having bonds of interest as well as of sentiment to draw them close together, possessed a cohesion, a loyalty to their chiefs, a tenacious corporate spirit, far exceeding what was to be found among their adversaries, who were usually divided into a moderate or Whig and an advanced or Radical section. He who established himself as the Tory leader was presently followed by the rank and file with a devotion, an unquestioning submission and confidence, which placed his character and doctrines under the aegis of the party, and enforced loyalty upon parliamentary malcontents. This corporate spirit was of infinite value to Disraeli. The historical past of the great Tory party, its associations, the social consideration which it enjoys, all went to ennoble his position and efface the remembrance of the less creditable parts of his career. And in the later days of his reign, when no one disputed his supremacy, every Tory was, as a matter of course, his advocate and admirer, and resented assaults on him as insults to the party. When a man excites hatred by his words or deeds, attacks on his character are an inevitable relief to overcharged feelings. Technically regarded, they are not good politics. Misrepresentation sometimes succeeds; vituperation seldom. Let a man be personally untrustworthy or dangerous, still, it is only his own words that damage him, at least in England and America. Even his own words, however discrediting, even his acts, however culpable, may, if they belong to a past unfamiliar to the voter of to-day, tell little, perhaps too little, on the voter's mind when they are brought up against him. The average citizen has a short memory, and thinks that the dead may be allowed to bury their dead.

Let it be further noted that Disraeli's career coincided with a significant change in English politics, a change partly in the temper of the nation, partly in the balance of voting power. For thirty years after the Reform Act of 1832, not only had the middle classes constituted the majority of the electors, but the social influence of the great Whig families and the intellectual influence of the economic school of Cobden had been potent factors. These forces were, in the later part of Disraeli's life, tending to decline. The working-class vote was vastly increased in 1867. The old Whig light gradually paled, and many of the Whig magnates, obeying class sympathies rather than party traditions, drifted slowly into Toryism. A generation arose which had not seen the Free Trade struggle, or had forgotten the Free Trade arguments, and which was attracted by ideals other than those which Cobden had preached. The grievances which had made men reformers had been largely removed. The battle of liberty and nationality in Continental Europe had been in the main won, and Englishmen had lost the enthusiasm for freedom which had fired them in the days when the memory of their own struggle against the Crown and the oligarchy was still fresh. With none of these changes had Disraeli's personal action much to do, but they all enured to the benefit of his party, they all swelled the tide which bore him into office in 1874.

Finally, he had the great advantage of living long. Many a statesman has died at fifty, and passed from the world's memory, who might have become a figure in history with twenty years more of life. Had Disraeli's career closed in 1854, he would have been remembered as a parliamentary gladiator, who had produced a few incisive speeches, a crude Budget, and some brilliant social and political sketches. The stronger parts of his character might have remained unknown. True it is that a man must have greatness in order to stand the test of long life. Some are found out, like Louis Napoleon. Some lose their balance and therewith their influence, like Lord Brougham. Some cease to grow or learn, and if a statesman is not better at sixty than he was at thirty, he is worse. Some jog heavily on, like Metternich, or stiffen into arbitrary doctrinaires, like Guizot. Disraeli did not merely stand the test, he gained immensely by it. He gained by rising into a position where his strength could show itself. He gained also by so impressing his individuality upon people as to make them accept it as an ultimate fact, till at length they came, not so much to blame him for what he did in accord with his established reputation, as rather to relish and enter into the humour of his character. As they unconsciously took to judging him by a standard different from that which they applied to ordinary Englishmen, they hardly complained of deflections from veracity which would have seemed grave in other persons. He had given notice that he was not like other men, that his words must not be taken in their natural sense, that he was to be regarded as the skilful player of a great game, the consummate actor in a great part. And, once more, he gained by the many years during which he had opportunities of displaying his fortitude, patience, constancy under defeat, unwavering self-confidence--gifts rarer than mere intellectual power, gifts that deserve the influence they bestow. Nothing so fascinates mankind as to see a man equal to every fortune, unshaken by reverses, indifferent to personal abuse, maintaining a long combat against apparently hopeless odds with the sharpest weapons and a smiling face. His followers fancy he must have hidden resources of wisdom as well as of courage. When some of his predictions come true, and the turning tide of popular feeling begins to bear them toward power, they believe that he has been all along right and the rest of the world wrong. When victory at last settles on his crest, even his enemies can hardly help applauding a reward which seems so amply earned. It was by this quality, more perhaps than by anything else, by this serene surface with fathomless depths below, that he laid his spell upon the imagination of observers in Continental Europe, and received at his death a sort of canonisation from a large section of the English people.

What will posterity think of him, and by what will he be remembered? The glamour has already passed away, and to few of those who on the 19th of April deck his statue with flowers is he more than a name.

Yet history will not leave him without a meed of admiration. When all possible explanations of his success have been given, what a wonderful career! An adventurer foreign in race, in ideas, in temper, without money or family connections, climbs, by patient and unaided efforts, to lead a great party, master a powerful aristocracy, sway a vast empire, and make himself one of the four or five greatest personal forces in the world. His head is not turned by his elevation. He never becomes a demagogue; he never stoops to beguile the multitude by appealing to sordid instincts. He retains through life a certain amplitude of view, a due sense of the dignity of his position, a due regard for the traditions of the ancient assembly which he leads, and when at last the destinies of England fall into his hands, he feels the grandeur of the charge, and seeks to secure what he believes to be her imperial place in the world. Whatever judgment history may ultimately pass upon him, she will find in the long annals of the English Parliament no more striking figure.

No "authorised" life of Lord Beaconsfield, nor indeed any life commensurate with the part he played in English politics, has yet appeared.

Disraeli's family claimed to be of Spanish origin, but had come from Italy to England shortly before 1748.

Though it has been maintained that in the Dark and Middle Ages a considerable number of Gentiles found their way into Jewish communities and became Judaised.

On one occasion he went so far as to deny that he had asked Peel for office, relying on the fact that the letter which contained the request was marked "private," so that Peel could not use it to disprove his statement .

See Sir S. Northcote's report of a conversation with Disraeli in his last years .

"The old Jew, that is the man."

+Oi? pepnusthai, toi de skiai a?ssousin+ . Used of Tiresias, in the world of disembodied spirits.

To defend Disraeli by arguing that his policy had not a fair chance because his colleagues did not allow him to carry it through is to admit another error not less grave, for the path he took was one on which no minister ought to have entered unless satisfied that the Cabinet and the country would let him follow it to the end.

DEAN STANLEY

In the England of his time there was no personality more attractive, nor any more characteristic of the country, than Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster. England is the only European country in which such a figure could have appeared, for it is the only country in which a man may hold a high ecclesiastical post and yet be regarded by the nation, not specially as an ecclesiastic, but rather as a distinguished writer, an active and influential man of affairs, an ornament of social life. But if in this respect he was typical of his country, he was in other respects unique. He was a clergyman untouched by clericalism, a courtier unspoiled by courts. No one could point to any one else in England who occupied a similar position, nor has any one since arisen who recalls him, or who fills the place which his departure left empty.

Stanley was born in 1815. His father, then Rector of Alderley, in Cheshire, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, belonged to the family of the Stanleys of Alderley, a branch of that ancient and famous line the head of which is Earl of Derby. His mother, Catherine Leycester, was a woman of much force of character and intellectual power. He was educated at Rugby School under Dr. Arnold, the influence of whose ideas remained great over him all through his life, and at Oxford, where he became a fellow and tutor of University College. Passing thence to be Canon of Canterbury, he returned to the University as Professor of Ecclesiastical History, and remained there for seven years. In 1863 he was appointed Dean of Westminster, and at the same time married Lady Augusta Bruce . He died in 1881.

He had an extraordinarily active and busy life, so intertwined with the history of the University of Oxford and the history of the Church of England from 1850 to 1880, that one can hardly think of any salient point in either without thinking also of him. Yet it was perhaps rather in the intensity of his nature and the nobility of his sentiments than in either the compass or the strength of his intellectual faculties that the charm and the force he exercised lay. In some directions he was curiously deficient. He had no turn for abstract reasoning, no liking for metaphysics or any other form of speculation. He was equally unfitted for scientific inquiry, and could scarcely work a sum in arithmetic. Indeed, in no field was he a logical or systematic thinker. Neither, although he had a retentive memory, and possessed a great deal of various knowledge on many subjects, could he be called learned, for he had not really mastered any branch of history, and was often inaccurate in details. He had never been trained to observe facts in natural history. He had absolutely no ear for music, and very little perception either of colour or of scent. He learned foreign languages with difficulty and never spoke them well. He was so short-sighted as to be unable to recognise a face passing close in the street. Yet with these shortcomings he was a born traveller, went everywhere, saw everything and everybody worth seeing, always seized on the most characteristic features of a landscape, or building, or a person, and described them with a freshness which made one feel as if they had never been described before. Of the hundreds who have published books on the Desert of Sinai and the Holy Land, many of them skilful writers or men of profound knowledge, he is the only one who is still read and likely to continue to be read, so vivid in colour, so exquisite in feeling, are the pictures he has given. Nature alone, however, nature taken by herself, did not satisfy him, did not, indeed, in his later days greatly interest him. A building or a landscape had power to rouse his imagination and call forth his unrivalled powers of description only when it was associated with the thoughts and deeds of men.

The largest part of his literary work was done in the field of ecclesiastical history, a subject naturally congenial to him, and to which he was further drawn by the professorship which he held at Oxford during a time when a great revival of historical studies was in progress. It was work which critics could easily disparage, for there were many small errors scattered through it; and the picturesque method of treatment he employed was apt to pass into scrappiness. He fixed on the points which had a special interest for his own mind as illustrating some trait of personal or national character, or some moral lesson, and passed hastily over other matters of equal or greater importance. Nevertheless his work had some distinctive merits which have not received from professional critics the whole credit they deserved. In all that Stanley wrote one finds a certain largeness and dignity of view. He had a sense of the unity of history, of the constant relation of past and present, of the similarity of human nature in one age and country to human nature in another; and he never failed to dwell upon the permanently valuable truths which history has to teach. Nothing was too small to attract him, because he discovered a meaning in everything, and he was therefore never dull, for even when he moralised he would light up his reflections by some happy anecdote. With this he possessed a keen eye, the eye of a poet, for human character, and a power of sympathy that enabled him to appreciate even those whose principles and policy he disliked. Herein he was not singular, for the sympathetic style of writing history has become fashionable among us. What was remarkable in him was that his sympathy did not betray him into the error, now also fashionable, of extenuating moral distinctions. His charity never blunted the edge of his justice, nor prevented him from reprobating the faults of the personages who had touched his heart. For one sin only he had little historical tolerance--the sin of intolerance. So there was one sin only which ever led him to speak severely of any of his contemporaries--the sin of untruthfulness. Being himself so simple and straightforward as to feel his inability to cope with deceitful men, deceit incensed him. But he did not resent the violence of his adversaries, for though he suffered much at their hands he knew many of them to be earnest, unselfish, and conscientious men.

His sermons, like nearly all good sermons, will be inadequately appreciated by those who now peruse them, not only because they were composed for a given audience with special reference to the circumstances of the time, but also because the best of them gained so much by his impassioned delivery. They were all read from manuscript, and his handwriting was so illegible that it was a marvel how he contrived to read them. I once asked him, not long after he had been promoted to the Deanery of Westminster, whether he found it easy to make himself heard in the enormous nave of the Abbey church. His frame, it ought to be stated, was spare as well as small, and his voice not powerful. He answered: "That depends on whether I am interested in what I am saying. If the sermon is on something which interests me deeply I can fill the nave; otherwise I cannot." When he had got a worthy theme, or one which stimulated his own emotions, the power of his voice and manner was wonderful. His tiny body seemed to swell, his chest vibrated as he launched forth glowing words. The farewell sermon he delivered when quitting Oxford for Westminster lives in the memory of those who heard it as a performance of extraordinary power, the power springing from the intensity of his own feeling. No sermon has ever since so moved the University.

He was by nature shy and almost timid, and he was not supposed to possess any gift for extempore speaking. But when in his later days he found himself an almost solitary champion in Convocation of the principles of universal toleration and comprehension which he held, he developed a debating power which surprised himself as well as his friends. It was to him a matter of honour and conscience to defend his principles, and to defend them all the more zealously because he stood alone on their behalf in a hostile assembly. His courage was equal to the occasion, and his faculties responded to the call his courage made.

In civil politics he was all his life a Liberal, belonging by birth to the Whig aristocracy, and disposed on most matters to take rather the Whiggish than the Radical view, yet drawn by the warmth of his sympathy towards the working classes, and popular with them. One of his chief pleasures was to lead parties of humble visitors round the Abbey on public holidays. Like most members of the Whig families, he had no great liking for Mr. Gladstone, not so much, perhaps, on political grounds as because he distrusted the High Churchism and anti-Erastianism of the Liberal leader. However, he never took any active part in general politics, reserving his strength for those ecclesiastical questions which seemed to lie within his peculiar province. Here he had two leading ideas: one, that the Church of England must at all hazards continue to be an Established Church, in alliance with, or subjection to, the State , and recognising the Crown as her head; the other, that she must be a comprehensive Church, finding room in her bosom for every sort or description of Christian, however much or little he believed of the dogmas contained in the Thirty-nine Articles and the Prayer-Book, to which she is bound by statute. The former view cut him off from the Nonconformists and the Radicals; the latter exposed him to the fire not only of those who, like the High Churchmen and the Evangelicals, attach the utmost importance to these dogmas, but of those also among the laity who hold that a man ought under no circumstances to sign any test or use any form of prayer which does not express his own convictions. Stanley would, of course, have greatly preferred that the laws which regulate the Church of England should be so relaxed as to require little or no assent to any doctrinal propositions from her ministers. He strove for this; and he continued to hope that this might be ultimately won. But he conceived that in the meantime it was a less evil that men should be technically bound by subscriptions they objected to than that the National Church should be narrowed by the exclusion of those whose belief fell short of her dogmatic standards. It was remarkable that not only did he maintain this unpopular view of his with unshaken courage on every occasion, pleading the cause of every supposed heretic against hostile majorities with a complete forgetfulness of his own peace and ease, but that no one ever thought of attributing the course he took to any selfish or sinister motive. It was generally believed that his own opinions were what nine-tenths of the Church of England would call unorthodox. But the honesty and uprightness of his character were so patent that nobody supposed that this fact made any difference, or that it was for the sake of keeping his own place that he fought the cause of others.

What his theological opinions were it might have puzzled Stanley himself to explain. His mind was not fitted to grasp abstract propositions. His historical imagination and his early associations attached him to the doctrines of the Nicene Creed; but when he came to talk of Christianity, he laid so much more stress on its ethics than on its dogmatic side that his clerical antagonists thought he held no creed at all. Dr. Pusey once said that he and Stanley did not worship the same God. The point of difference between him and them was not so much that he consciously disbelieved the dogmas they held--probably he did not--as that he did not, like them, think that true religion and final salvation depended on believing them. And the weak point in his imagination was that he seemed never to understand their position, nor to realise how sacred and how momentous to them were statements which he saw in a purely imaginative light. He never could be got to see that a Church without any dogmas would not be a Church at all in the sense either of mankind in the past or of mankind in the present. An anecdote was current that once when he had in Disraeli's presence been descanting on the harm done by the enforcement of dogmatic standards, Disraeli had observed, "But pray remember, Mr. Dean, no dogma, no Dean."

Those who thought him a heathen would have assailed him less bitterly if he had been content to admit his own differences from them. What most incensed them was his habit of assuming that, except in mere forms of expression, there were really no differences at all, and that they also held Christianity to consist not in any body of doctrines, but in reverence for God and purity of life. They would have preferred heathenism itself to this kind of Universalism.

As ecclesiastical preferment had not discoloured the native hue of his simplicity, so neither did the influences of royal favour. It says little for human nature that few people should be proof against what the philosopher deems the trivial and fleeting fascinations of a court. Stanley's elevation of mind was proof. Intensely interested in the knowledge of events passing behind the scenes which his relations with the reigning family opened to him, he scarcely ever referred to those relations, and seemed neither to be affected thereby, nor to care a whit more for the pomps and vanities of power or wealth, a whit less for the friends and the causes he had learned to value in his youth.

In private, that which most struck one in his intellect was the quick eagerness with which his imagination fastened upon any new fact, caught its bearings, and clothed it with colour. His curiosity remained inexhaustible. His delight in visiting a new country was like that of an American scholar landing for the first time in Europe. A friend met him a year before his death at a hotel in the North of England, and found he was going to the Isle of Man. He had mastered its geography and history, and talked about it and what he was to explore there as one might talk of Rome or Athens when visiting them for the first time. When anybody told him an anecdote his susceptible imagination seized upon points which the narrator had scarcely noticed, and discovered a whole group of curious analogies from other times or countries. Whatever you planted in this fertile soil struck root and sprouted at once. Morally, he impressed those who knew him not only by his kindness of heart, but by a remarkable purity and nobleness of aim. Nothing mean or small or selfish seemed to harbour in his mind. You might think him right or wrong, but you never doubted that he was striving after the truth. He was not merely a just man; he loved justice with passion. It was partly, perhaps, because justice, goodness, honour, charity, seemed to him of such paramount importance in life that he made little of doctrinal differences, having perceived that these virtues may exist, and may also be found wanting, in every form of religious creed or philosophical profession. When the Convocation of the Anglican Church met at Westminster, it was during many years his habit to invite a great number of its leading members to the deanery, the very men who had been attacking him most hotly in debate, and who would go on denouncing his latitudinarianism till Convocation met again. They yielded--sometimes reluctantly, but still they yielded--to the kindliness of his nature and the charm of his manner. He used to dart about among them, introducing opponents to one another, as indeed on all occasions he delighted to bring the most diverse people together, so that some one said the company you met at the deanery were either statesmen and duchesses or starving curates and briefless barristers.

He had on the whole a happy life. It is true that the intensity of his attachments exposed him to correspondingly intense grief when he lost those who were dearest to him; true also that, being by temperament a man of peace, he was during the latter half of his life almost constantly at war. But his home, first in the lifetime of his mother and then in that of his wife, had a serene and unclouded brightness; and the care of the Abbey, rich with the associations of nearly a thousand years of history, provided a function which exactly suited him and which constituted a never-failing source of enjoyment. To dwell in the centre of the life of the Church of England, and to dwell close to the Houses of Parliament, in the midst of the making of history, knowing and seeing those who were principally concerned in making it, was in itself a pleasure to his quenchless historical curiosity. His cheerfulness and animation, although to some extent revived by his visit to America and the reception he met with there, were never the same after his wife's death in 1876. But the sweetness of his disposition and his affection for his friends knew no diminution. He remembered everything that concerned them; was always ready with sympathy in sorrow or joy; and gave to all alike, high or low, famous or unknown, the same impression, that his friendship was for themselves, and not for any gifts or rank or other worldly advantage they might enjoy. The art of friendship is the greatest art in life. To enjoy his was to be educated in that art.

When J. S. Mill was a candidate for Westminster in 1868, Stanley published a letter announcing his support, partly out of personal respect for Mill, partly because it gave him an opportunity of expressing an opinion on the Irish Church question, and of reprobating the charge of atheism which had been brought against Mill.

THOMAS HILL GREEN

The name of Thomas Green, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Oxford, was not, during his lifetime, widely known outside the University itself. But he is still remembered by students of metaphysics and ethics as one of the most vigorous thinkers of his time; and his personality was a striking one, which made a deep and lasting impression on those with whom he came in contact.

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