TOPICS OF THE DAY.

LORD BEACONSFIELD.

TT is strangely difficult to associate the idea of death with the great man who has just left us. Indeed, it is not easy to associate with him any turn of human fortune to which he could not oppose a certain air of indifference, or even of easy superiority. In his books he does not often speak of death, but when he does, it is without awe, without the deeper tone which the mere thought of death usually inspires. The heroine in " Venetia " reflects thus on the death of him whom she is supposed to have "so madly loved" :—" His death! Terrible and disheartening thought! Plantagenet was no more, but he had not died without

a record and would dwell for ever on the lips of his fellow-men " We can conceive Lord Beaconsfield

musing over his own death in something of the same cold strain, possibly in almost these very words. Would he not regard it as a " terrible and disheartening thought," redeemed to some extent by the political immortality attaching to his name,—but still as a thought alien to, and incommensurable with, the genius of his life, rather than as one in any sense tragically concluding, or dramatically com- pleting it ? "They say that everything is calculation," says one of the characters in his Eastern story of " Tancred." " No," replies the other with energy, " everything is adven- ture." And, were it possible for any man so to regard it, Lord Beaconsfield would have been very apt to look even upon the last great change, in this calm, impassive light, as a new kind of adventure, with which, however unsuited to his genius, his bold spirit was called upon to cope. That it is impossible so to view it, constitutes the real difficulty of conceiving the change it would work in the great man who is gone. He seemed to us to use life, rather than to live, and we can hardly help thinking of him as trying at best to use death, instead of dying,—so effectually has the spell of his singular genius made us think of him as moulding for himself the framework of his own history, even in its most critical moments, instead of as being moulded by it into the man he was.

It is a platitude to say that all men are limited by their own circumstances and nature. So, no doubt, was Lord Beacons- field ; and yet to say this of him appears almost a paradox. He was born a Jew ; he became the leader of a great Norman and Saxon aristocracy. He was born in the privacy and obscurity of purely literary society, and became the famous Prime Minister of the most practical country in the wor]d, He was born a free-lance, and became not only the captain of the proudest and most prejudiced political army which any man ever had to lead, but a commander as absolute as Napoleon,— able to boast, and to boast without losing either loyalty or influence, that he had "educated' his party. Of course, in effecting all this, Mr. Disraeli must have availed himself of his own gifts ; and these gifts, of course, were liberal. But assuredly no gifts ever looked less like the seeds of the harvest which they ultimately bore, than his looked in early life. Not the seed of the orange or the grape looks less like the golden or purple fruit which eventually hangs thick on boughs and branches, than the jaunty gifts which were possessed by the audacious and flippant "Disraeli the Younger " looked like the strange harvest of political influence, Ministerial authority, and even diplomatic pretension, with which his name will now be ever indissolubly connected. In reality, however, the explanation, so far as we can give an explanation, of his strange career, is doubtless to be found in that very union of large powers and perfect presence of mind with complete freedom from every- thing like the constraint of calculable antecedents, which was in all probability Mr. Disraeli's most effective equipment for the political career in which he reached so high a place.

Mr. Disraeli has himself studied and analysed the failure of the two great Conservative chiefs who preceded him in the lead of the party, the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel.

And he has ascribed their failure to that very inheritance of misleading party traditions and prepossessions from which he himself had been so completely exempt. Doubtless, that in- heritance of party traditions and feelings gave to both the great Duke and to Sir Robert Peel a kind of special influence which Lord Beaconsfield himself never wielded. Yet it so tied their hands as to deprive them of all effectual liberty and command. Of the Duke of Wellington, Mr. Disraeli said that

his weakness lay in never having attained any adequate know- ledge of England, The Duke knew the Continent and its statesmen ; he knew something of his own class,—the English aristocracy ; he knew nothing whatever of the middle-class,, and treated its political pretensions " with contumely " hence his downfall. Of Sir Robert Peel, as every one knows, Mr. Disraeli's criticism was still more elaborate :—" There are few- things more remarkable in Parliamentary history than the- manner in which Sir Robert Peel headed an Opposition for ten years, without attempting to form the opinions of his friends, or instilling into them a single guiding principle ; but himself' displaying all the time, on every subject of debate, wise coun- sels, administrative skill, and accomplished powers of discus-. sion He was the unconscious parent of political agita- tion; he literally forced the people out of doors to become. statesmen ; and the whole tendency of his policy was to render

our institutions mere forms In 1830, he visited his. failure on the Duke of Wellington, in '46 on the political ties. of '41; but if he had been a man of genius, he would have guided the Duke of Wellington, and in '41 would have given. a creed to his party,—always devoted to him,--instead oF borrowing their worn-out ideas." No one can doubt that Mr.. Disraeli knew bow to avoid both these mistakes. He has him- self described, though in a passage professedly referring to Lord John Russell, the anxious attention which such a leader as he himself was, must give to the duties of leading a

heartened Opposition during the winter of their dis- content :"— " There are few positions loss inspiriting than that of the leader, of a discomfited part,y. The labours and anxieties of a Minister, or of his rival on the contested threshold of office, may be alleviated by the exercise or sustained by the anticipation or power ; both artr surrounded by eager, anxious, excited, perhaps enthusiastic:. adherents. There is sympathy, appreciation, prompt counsel, pro- fuse assistance. But he who, in the Parliamentary field, watches over the fortunes of routed troops, must be prepared to sit often, alone. Fow care to share the labour which is deemed to be fruitless, and none are eager to diminish the responsibility of him vvhoso course, however adroit, must necessarily be ineffectual. Nor can or man of sensibility in such a post easily obviate these discourage– meats. It is ungracious to appeal to the grey-headed to toil for a. harvest which they may probably never reap, and scarcely less pain- ful to cell upon glittering youth to sacrifice its rosy hours for a. result as remote as the experience in which it does not believe. Adversity. is necessarily not a sanguine season, and in this respect a political party is no exception to all other human combinations. Indoors and out.of-doors a disheartened Opposition will be querulous and cap- tions. A. discouraged multitude have no future ; too depressed to. indulge in a large and often hopeful horizon of contemplation, they busy themselves in peevish detail, and by a natural train of senti-: !tient, associate their own conviction of ill.lnek, incapacity, and failure with the more responsible member of their confederation,. while all the time inexorable duty demands, or rather that honour which is the soul of public life, that he should be as vigilant, as laborious, should exercise as complete a control over his intelligence and temper, should be as prompt to represent their principles in de- bate, and as patient and as easy of access in private conference, should be as active and as thoughtful as if he were sustained by alD that encourages exertion,—the approbation of the good and thee applause of the wise."

And these uphill efforts of Mr. Disraeli's were, for a time at leastr all the more barren of result, on account of his own inability to. enter into English feelings. Yet it must, we think, be said that Mr. Disraeli's complete detachment from the blinding in- fluences of inherited political traditions and ties contributed much more to his success than to his errors, though it con- tributed to both ; that but for this, he could neither have. studied the drift of English opinion so intelligently, nor have forced both his chief and his followers so successfully into the path which he intended them to take. Lord Beaconsfieldr indeed, never thoroughly understood, or could have under- stood, the English people. But he understood them well, so far as the intelligent foreigner ever does understand them;. and for many useful purposes, that is probably better than the way in which the member of a true English class or political clique understands them, who, indeed, though more thoroughly English in his way of holding his own prepossessions and thoughts, is much leas capable of entering into the views of Large sections of society whose prepossessions and thoughts are widely different from his own. And whenever Lord Beacons- field clearly knew in what direction he desired to influence the minds of his colleagues or his followers, he had a singular tact for directing them effectually, and "with some pressure," as he himself put it, towards that view of it, He could, indeed, force an opinion on his colleagues with a magic almost as astonishing as that with which a conjuror forces a card upon the spectator of his performances.

For leadership of this sort, there could hardly be conceived any greater advantage than Mr. Disraeli possessed in the fewness and the extreme flexibility of his own prepossessions

and prejudices. Indeed, that from the very beginning to the end of his career, he really saw, and saw without dismay, the influence of the people, of the masses, of the Democracy, looming larger and larger in the future, no one now can doubt. Alike in starting in life as a Radical and in passing over to the Conservatives, he always kept in view, and pressed upon his party for the time being, that the Government of this country must aim more and more at being "popular," and at avoiding the spirit of an oligarchy. No doubt, he was not always quite true to this teaching, for he suppressed his evident bias towards Free-trade, in order to take the leading part he did in destroying Sir Robert Peel's Government ; but even then he did all in his power to compensate for his defence of the Corn Laws by taking the side of the working- classes in relation to the Ten Hours' Bill, and by giving to Protection itself as much of a national and popular aspect as was in any way possible under the unmanage- able circumstances of the case. But though the coer- cion of Opportunity,—which he calls " more powerful even than conquerors and prophets,"—compelled him to adopt an unpopular cause, when his only chance lay in ex- pressing epigrammatically the Tory disgust at Sir Robert Peel's desertion of the Corn Law s,—it was the urgency of Opportunity only, not that of conviction, which then forced him out of the path of least resistance. In fact, the path of least resistance for himself as a statesman diverged at that point from the path of least resistance as regarded the political exigency of the hour, and therefore for a time, and for a time only, he was compelled to abandon the alliance with a popular idea. But where there was no such necessary divergence, Mr. Disraeli's fie° use of popular forces was not in any way checked through the clinging of old opinions. Perhaps, indeed, it is difficult to discern any deep-rooted conviction moulding the career of the great man who is gone, with two exceptions,— his conviction of the vast importance of race, as determining the relative dominance both of societies and of individuals ; and the conviction, to which we have already referred, of the grow- ing influence of the people in the administration of political affairs. Those two assumptions granted, Lord Beaconsfield manipulated all other opinions just as the opportunity of the hour seemed to demand. As he himself says of his model hero, Sicionia, "He observed everything, thought ever, but avoided serious discussion. If you pressed him for an opinion, he took refuge in raillery, or threw out some grave paradox, with which it was not easy to cope." Lord Beaconsfield brought to politics a penetrative intellect, "assisted," as he also remarks of Sidonia, "by that absolute freedom from prejudice which was the compensatory possession of a man without a country." Lord Beaconsfield believed, indeed, in "the Semitic principle ;" but the Semitic principle, as de- veloped by him, came to little more than this,—thet the imagination rather than the reason controls nations, and that faith in the Semitic revelation actually controls,—whether this control be intellectually justifiable or otherwise,—the imagination of the greatest races of the earth.

And political principles were all the more flexible in Lord Beaconsfield's hands, that he could see clearly the weak side both of modern knowledge and modern action. In one respect, and in one alone, he resembled the late Mr. Carlyle, —that he made light of the so-called omnipotence of modern science. "Command over Nature 1" says Tailored, replying to the assertion that Europe, after so many mountains had, been tunnelled, and so many great trains and vessels had been carried hither and thither without horses and without winds over the surface of earth and sea, could never again believe in a power superior to that of Science,—" command over Nature ! Why, the humblest root that serves for the food of men has mysteriously withered throughout Europe, and they are already pale at the possible consequences. This slight eccentricity of that Nature which they boast they can command has already shaken empires, and may decide the fate of nations. No; Europe is not happy. And, in spite of its false excitement, its bustling invention, and its endless toil, a profound melancholy broods over its spirit, and gnaws its heart. In vain they baptise their tumults by the name of Progress ; the whisper of a demon is ever asking them, Progress from whence, and to what?' " With such a vision as this of the weak side of modern thought and action,—with no particular faith in anything which could strengthen the trembling hands and confirm the tottering knees of our civilisation—with a mordant genius for satire, and a keen though piecemeal insight into character, no wonder that Mr. Disraeli—for, after all, Lord Beaconsfield was only Mr. Disraeli working out in his deeline some few of the brilliant ideas of

his youth—despised Conservatism, and tried, with more or less success, to create a Toryism at once more brilliant and more Oriental. His epigrammatic epitaph on Conservatism as " Un grand Magasin de nouveautiis tres-anciennes, prix fixe avec quelque rabais," expressed his deep scorn for the system which he attacked when he assailed Sir Robert Peel. Whether, indeed, out of his revived prerogative of the Crown, his creation of an Empress, his calling the East into existence to redress the balance of the West, his diplomatic rockets, and his seizure of a great Mediterranean " place of arms," he really created anything less like "an organised hypocrisy" than the policy he despised, will be a matter differently judged by different parties. But this at least is certain, that he displayed the genius of a political magician in making English nobles, and English squires, and English merchants prostrate themselves. before the image of the policy which he had set up.

We have said that we find the greatest difficulty in realising that those indomitable eyes are really quenched in death. Lord Beaconsfield's spirit is not one which we can fit easily into, the scenery of a purely spiritual world ; but still less is it one which we can conceive extinguished by any incident of' the human lot. He, if any man, had the stamina of immortality, —though, it may be, with no special aptitude for those purely moral and spiritual aspects of human nature with which we are accustomed exclusively to associate the life of the world to, come.