TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. DISRAELI FROM A NEW SIDE.
EVERY one is gratified when a man of note is able to work
out in real life that conception of his career which has been elicited from him as his own ideal in his previous writings. And Mr. Disraeli has at last, as Prime Minister, done something which to some extent realises his own early idea of statesmanship, something bearing on it the impress of the mind which produced " Coningsby," " Tancred," and " Ahoy." Even Mr. Kinglake will be pleased at the first step towards the literal fulfilment of his own youthful prophecy that "the Englishman, straining far over to hold his loved India, will plant a firm foot on the banks of the Nile, and sit in the seats of the Faithful ;" and all who have thought that the reve- lation made to Mr. Disraeli's Tancred on Mount Sinai, that he was to " announce the sublime and solacing doctrine of theocratic equality," and to " find a ready instrument in every human being," had perhaps some slight connection with Mr. Disraeli's desire to give the suffrage to the masses, and so to find ready political instruments for a grand policy of his own in the enfranchised " residuum," will be gratified to find their sus- picions confirmed by the cropping-up of other leading notions of the same work, and especially by the secret and dramatic negotiation through "Sidonia " of a loan which gives England a virtual protectorate in Egypt, and makes one step towards the solution of the Eastern question, if not towards the penetration of " the Asian mystery " so closely connected with it in Mr. Disraeli's imagination. Hitherto, certainly, Mr. Disraeli as Prime Minister had done scant justice to the political ideals of his youth. He once wittily ridiculed the Conservatism of Sir Robert Peel, by declaring that it could not be better described than in the words of a Paris advertise- ment, " Grand Magasin de nouveautes tres-anciennes ; prix fire, avec quelques rabais." But till now his own policy might have been quite as aptly described in the same terms. His novelties have been very old ones, and his terms absolutely fixed—except for certain abatements whenever the oppo- site party insisted on them. He had told us so often that " man is only truly great when he acts from the passions, never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination," that it was really a disappointment to see the tedious and even stupid reasonableness of his Government, which in its milk-and-water moderation contained far less appeal, either to the passions or the imagination, than that of his predecessor. We began to fear that Mr. Disraeli might illustrate in his own person his own apoph- thegm, " Youth is a blunder, Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret," and that after preaching for half a century that "all is race, there is no other truth," he might retire from public life without even leaving one grandiose or characteristic act to illustrate the premiership of Coningsby and the counsels of Sidonia. It is therefore singularly pleasant to know that it will not be so, that Mr. Disraeli has at last managed to rise above that dreary fate which, to use his own words, condemns " the most energetic men in Europe to be mere busybodies, empires to be governed like parishes, and great statesmen to be only select vestrymen." Certainly he has done something at last to associate his name with the growth of the British Empire, and especially with its growth eastwards, which will tend to repay the benefits derived from the loan of that " Semitic idea " of the power and fruitfulness of which Mr. Disraeli has said so many magnificent things, though all of them falling short of absolute belief in its truth. And if, as a result of this great step, he seats Sidonia, as rumour anticipates, among the Peers, he will certainly have realised more than most ambitious men of his early dreams, by proving the great resources of the Jewish race, and lighting up with a gleam of Eastern splendour the parochial Conservatism of his party. In his first Premiership, when Abyssinia yielded to our arms, he announced, in that rococo style of Parliamentary rhetoric which he has made his own, that " the standards of St. George floated over the mountains of Rasselas." If he is able to announce in his second Premiership that the standards of St. George float over the historic waters where Israel " saw the Egyptians dead upon the sea-shore," and so secure for us as safe a passage to our political destiny in the East across the dry land which a nation of sailors so much dreads, as even Moses secured for his people through the divided waters of the Red Sea, he will, indeed, seem to have been the link between the English race and those countries of grand Oriental traditions across which his own ancestry travelled to us, when they first adopted that national policy of sell-expatriation described by Mr. Disraeli as " purely an Oriental custom."
What makes this last move of Mr. Disraeli's specially char- acteristic of his political ideal, though by no means of his practice, is that it was done without consulting Parliament, in the strong conviction that Parliament would gladly accept his lead. Now, Mr. Disraeli has in his books often urged the- notion that Parliamentary government is a mere transition- stage between the personal government of old times and the personal government of new, and that " an educated nation_ recoils from the imperfect vicariat of what is called a repre- sentative government." But though this has been his literary opinion, it has hitherto been a literary opinion only, and in his actual life as leader of a party he has leaned on Parliament far more heavily and absolutely than any other Minister of our time. He has, indeed, as many critics have told him, been too apt to live from hand to mouth on the fragments of Parliamentary suggestion which his quick wits can catch up from day to day. No Minister has done so little in the way of guiding the popular will and " finding a ready instru- ment" for his policy in every human being. He has been played upon by Parliament even more than he has ever played upon Parliament, and this is almost the first instance of his taking a great and sagacious resolve when he has invited Parliament to follow him, instead of first feeling the pulse of Parliament, and judging with almost servile care by the indications he observed. Yet, in theory, as we have said, he has always been of the opinion that States are safely governed only by heroes, by men of great passions and great imagination, men of that heroic mould " without which no State is safe, without which poli- tical institutions are meat without salt, the Crown a bauble,. the Church an establishment, Parliaments debating-clubs, and civilisation itself but a fitful and transient dream." But in practice, his political leadership has waited even far more on circumstance than that of his chief opponent ; he has been content to give us the meat without its savour, to favour the theory that the Church is an establishment and little more, to turn Parliament into a debating-club, and to dream rather passively the fitful and transient dream of civilisation.
But now we have the awakening out of sleep. That superficial but glowing physical imagination of Mr. Disraeli's, which has- hitherto been content to gild epigrammatic retorts, and give a certain grace and brilliance to his delineations of Parliamentary antagonists, has helped him to take the first grave step to- wards the solution of the Eastern Question by securing the• stability of our Eastern Empire. It was a step which required a certain amount of nerve, secrecy, and resource, just the quali- ties for which Mr. Disraeli had always given his ideal heroes— his Sidonias and Jabasters—the amplest credit ; and no doubt it also gave some little satisfaction to that delight in transferring,. with ostentatious lavishness, fabulous sums of money, which has always had a marvellous charm for the Oriental imagination, and for none more than Mr. Disraeli's. The Saturday Review has already remarked on the similarity which must have suggested itself to almost every reader of Mr. Disraeli's works, between the- order to draw on Messrs. Rothschild at sight for four millions sterling, as telegraphed from Alexandria, and Sidonia's letter to Adam Besso ordering him to credit Tancred with "as much gold as would make the lion on the right hand on the front step of Solomon the King; and if he want more, as much gold as would form the lion on the left, and so on through every stair of the royal seat." Indeed, it is remarkable enough that while the race from which Mr. Disraeli is so proud to boast his origin, has given to the world an inheritance of moral and spiritual truths and deeds of the highest order of charm for the human im- agination, and except the most original music, hardly anything else at all, its greatest modern representatives have seldom or never touched the truly moral or spiritual region in their imaginative flights. Its greatest poet is Heine, who used the world of moral and spiritual ideas only to point the edge of sensuous satire ; its greatest philosopher, Spinoza, has ignored altogether the true region of morality in a grand dream•_ of intellectual Pantheism ; and its statesmen, of whose merits Mr. Disraeli has never ceased to chaunt the praises, have limited themselves almost wholly to the region of finance. Nor is Mr. Disraeli himself an exception to the rule. It is true that he has conjured with the great ideas of his race, but never with- out first eliminating their moral essence. If there be one conviction which is characteristic of the true literature of Israel, it is the conviction of sin, which is entirely absent from Mr. Disraeli's writings, though, in spite of its absence,
he has conjured grandly with the great idea of "Expiation," of which the former is the very essence. When he makes his spiritual hero, Tancred, long to introduce new thoughts into the religion and politics of the English people, he pictures him as elaborating the notion that inspiration is a local quality, which has some mysterious affinity with the mountains of Arabia where the first great revelation descended upon man ; and the revelation which Tancred is supposed actually to re- ceive there is a revelation without even the germ in it of that haunting Jewish conscience that constitutes the very life of "the Law." Through all Mr. Disraeli's works it is "the passions and the imagination," not the conscience, to which he appeals. And so now it is to the supply of the fundamental physical necessities of the British Empire, that this last happy flight of Mr. Disraeli's political imagination is exclusively addressed. Fortunately, there is nothing in it of that unscrupulous daring which he would have imputed by preference to one of his own imaginary heroes. It is bold without being unscrupulous, and skilful without any flavour even of wile. But " the heroic feeling," to use his own words, which has made him conceive and execute this stroke of policy so successfully, has little in it beyond that grandiose physical imagination, which has always made a part of the Premier's resources as a debater and a novelist. He has a great love for the extraordinary and the magnificent, and a still greater love for them when they take him towards the East than when they take him anywhere else. Thus it has fortunately happened to him both to devise a stroke of policy which, by its aptness and its suddenness, has won the approval of the whole world, and at the same moment to assist the land of his adoption in laying a strong hand on the land to which his ancestors were exiled, and so bringing his new country very close to the Wilderness in which the Law was given, and even the Land of Promise itself. Joseph saving Egypt from the desolation which threatened it, will seem but an early anticipation of Mr. Disraeli saving it from the waste- fulness of the Khedive's Government; and if he gain it ultimately for English rule, he will have greatly surpassed Joseph in the benefits which his statesmanship will have conferred, not only on the land of his own expatriation, but on that in which his great ancestor grew to power. And yet, if we could but penetrate Mr. Disraeli's secret breast, what we should like best to know is whether, after all, he thinks the English race worthy of the benefit he has secured for it,—whether, indeed, he would have secured it for a nation of Saxons, if the step had not shed as much distinction round the names of two great descendants of Israel as it will round the throne of Great Britain and the destinies of the British Empire. Probably he thinks us hardly worthy to receive the favours he confers ; but yet we trust we may deserve them, if only by using them with more of the lofty moral spirit of his ancestors than Mr. Disraeli, with all his reverence for Israel, has ever embodied in his policy, or shadowed forth in his highest flights of political and literary rhetoric.
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