BOOKS.

BENJAMIN DISRAELI.*

WE cannot begin a review of the second volume of Mr. Monypenny's Life of Disraeli better than. by repeating. a quotation given in. our notice of the first volume. It is front Disraeli's own diary, written when he was twenty-nine. "I have an unerring instinct,. I can read characters at a glance ; few . men can deceive me. My mind is a continental mind.. It, is a revolutionary mind. I am only truly great in action. If ever I am placed in a truly great position I shall prove this." Disraeli is not the only man who has written this of himself. He is the only man, perhaps, who has both written it and written it truly. The common, and in most cases the correct, estimate of overweening conceit is that. it has. no foundation. But Disraeli's conceit had an ample foundation. He was all that he fancied. himself. He became everything that he felt sure of becoming. It was long before his contem- poraries understood this; they saw in him only a. clever charlatan. And the wonder of his career is that he com- pletely disproved this estimate. All that he saw is himself he compelled the world to recognize in him. This was an extraordinary triumph, and his admirers do well to make the most of it, for it was his only triumph. A month ago it might have been said that, of all he laboured to do,. nothing remained but the Berlin Treaty. To-day even' this has disappeared. The explanation is that the personal note was never at rest in him. He had great natural kindliness. He was a good. son, a good brother, a good husband. He showed in Sybil a very early and a very vivid sense of the sufferings of the poor under the double pressure of the conversion of England from an agricultural to a manufacturing community, and of the refusal of remedial legislation which was characteristic of . the early Manohester school. But he did nothing to benefit • Ths Lift of Benjamin- Disraeli, Bart of Reseolugtem. By W. P. Monypenny. vol. II. London: John Murray. [128. net.]

those he pitied beyond voting for Bills brought in by other people. His own career was always before his eyes, and all his actions were governed by a far-sighted devotion to that object. There was nothing petty about his ambition, but a grand ambition can be as purely self-regarding as a small one, and we can see nothing in Disraeli that deserves any higher praise.

The accuracy of his judgment of himself is very well shown in reference to his first speech. Greville speaks of it as "his first exhibition, beginning with *florid assurance, speedily degenerating into ludicrous absurdity, and at last being put

down with inextinguishable shouts of laughter." The speaker himself was not discouraged. He had been shouted down by the Irish members, whose hoatility "he bad gone out of his way

to provoke." But he had managed to say what he wanted, he had been on his legs for exactly the time he had proposed to himself, and his closing words, "The time will come when you will hear me," were fulfilled to the letter. There was no failure, because Disraeli never for a moment lost confidence in himself.

Shell advised him to speak often and shortly, to try to be dull,_to reason imperfectly, "for if you reason with precision they will think you are trying to be witty," and he followed the advice as far as his genius would allow. Peel early

paid him attention, and even when Disraeli separated himself from his leader and spoke against the Whig measure for the

reform of the Irish Corporations, Peel said nothing more than that he had taken "the only proper line of opposition to the Bill."

That line was the probability that the Bill would weaken the central Government. "In England, where society was strong, they tolerated a weak Government; but in Ireland, where society was weak, the policy should be to have the Qovernment strong "—a sentence, adds Mr. Monypenny, in which "there is more of wisdom and enlightenment than in many thousands of the dreary pages of Irish debate that are buried in the volumes of Hansard." At the opening of the session of 1840 Peel invited him to a conference of the principal members of the Opposition—" sixteen in all, of whom, as Mrs. Disraeli proudly records, Dizzy was the only one who had not been in office.'" From this and other marks of appreciation Disraeli expected, with some reason, to be included in -the Conservative Government of 1841. But though on a Monday Peel had kissed hands, and by the end of the week most of the subordinate offices in the Ministry had been filled, "day followed day, and no messenger or message came to Grosvenor Gate, and on the Sunday, in despair, Disraeli wrote to the Prime Minister." Mr. Monypenny thinks it "almost certain that Peel really wanted to give Disraeli office." With the exception of Gladstone and Dalhousie—and the eminence of the latter was still to be discovered—Disraeli was by far

the ablest young man and the best speaker in the party. A Prime Minister would naturally wish to secure a supporter who had already. shown that he might be dangerous as an opponent. But the list of the new Cabinet did not contain a single name -which did not belong to the "governing classes," and a Prime Minister has—and at that time had much more—

to consult the ideas and feelings of his colleagues; and to give office to a brilliant adventurer, which was all that Disraeli was as yet considered, would, in the eyes of the rest of those col- leagues, have been an act of singular and useless rashness. If Disraeli could have put himself in Peel's place be would not have written the closing words of his letter. "I confess to be unrecognized at this moment by you appears to me to be over- whelming, and I appeal to your own heart—to that justice and magnanimity whieh I feel are your characteristics—to save me from an intolerable humiliation." It is extraordinary that a proud and sensitive man, and Disraeli was both, should have been unable to restrain himself from making this humiliating appeal—an appeal which was completely disposed of by Peel's dignified expression of confidence that

"when candidates for parliamentary office . . . -review the names of those previously connected with me in public life whom I have been absolutely compelled to exclude, the elaims founded on acceptance of office in 1834 with the almost hopeless prospects of that day, the claims, too, founded on new party combinations, they will then understand how perfectly insufficient ate the means at my disposal to meet the ivishes that are conveyed to me by men whose co-operation I should be proud to have, and whose qualifications and pretensions for office I do net contest."

The work of speaking for a Government of which he was not a member was not to Disraeli's mind. "The supporter of administration," he writes to Mrs, Disraeli, "who is not in

place and power himself is a solitary animal. He has neither hope nor fear." His conduct in his new position justified his own forecast. "Exclusion from the Government had the appearance of setting the seal" on the dubious reputation which still clung to him persistently, "and for the moment he seemed to lose much of the ground which he had won. He

was wanting in Parliamentary tact. There was "an element of pretentiousness and presumption in his speech which the, House of Commons resented." Mr. Monypenny makes a very shrewd criticism when he adds that "the oracular manner,

which became a positive asset when he had reached a high

position, tended to delay his ascent" His supreme opinion o himself, of his "continental" and revolutionary mind, needed to be justified by success and, until it was so justified, was a

real disadvantage. Englishmen had despised conceit again and again in the past, and the result had proved them right. Now for once conceit animated a man who judged

himself more accurately than his countrymen could at first believe, and for the time he suffered by their slowness to appreciate the combination of qualities which they had

been accustomed to treat as incompatible. It was not till the session of 1844, Mr. Monypenny thinks, that be seemed to "catch the peculiar intonation of Parliamentary debate." The change coincided with the assumption of a new attitqde towards Peel. Until now he had given him a general sup- port, and more than once had made effective speeches in defence of particular measures. But in 1848 there had been signs of divergence. He had commented with great fieverity on the Irish Arms Bill, and in a debate on the foreign policy of the Government had made the occasion memorable by aiming a personal shot, the first of many, at Peel. It was in this speech that he gave the first hint of the Eastern policy which was to make him famous more than thirty years

later.

"Turkey, indeed, was prostrate [this is Mr. Monypenny's sum- mary] but what ground was there for the assumption that her regeneration was hopeless ? If she had lost her finest provinces, so had England little more than half a century back; if her capital bad been occupied, that was a calamity that had befallen every State in Europe with the exception of England."

These two speeches seemed to Peel a sufficient reason for not sending him the customary circular at the opening of the

following session. Still, in the first great debate of 1844 he voted with the Government, though only because though Ministers "offered [Ireland] a great deal for them, Lord John Russell offered little, though he offered it in a great way." But he spoke in a way which could hardly have been other than distasteful to the leader he had not yet openly broken with.

"A dense population in extreme distress inhabit an island where there is an established Church which is not their Church, and a territorial aristocracy the richest of whom live in distant capitals. Thus you have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, an alien Church, and, in addition, the weakest executive in the world. That is the Irish question."

This is the speech of which, as Mr. Monypenny reminds us, Disraeli -said a quarter of a century later, "It may have been expressed with the heedless rhetorie which I suppose is the appanage of all who it below the gangway, but in my historical conscience the sentiment of that speech was right."

An historical conscience has the advantage over the ordinary variety that it has no pricks.

It will always be matter of dispute whether the cause of Disraeli's final severance from Peel was personal or political. The form which his attacks on the Minister took had certainly a large element of personal dislike. The two men were utterly unlike in every particular, and Peel's manner, which wan gracious to no one, would naturally seem specially offensive

to a man of Disraeli's temperament. A Parliamentary leader, he says in Coningsby, who wants the faculty of inspiring enthusiasm "may shroud himself in artificial reserve and study with undignified arrogance an awkward haughtiness, but he wiji

nevertheless be as far from controlling the spirit as from captivating the hearts of his sullen followers." We have, - however, from Disraeli's own pen seven years later a quite opposite and far truer description.

"Peel," he says, in the Life of Lord George Bentinck, "had ' obtained a complete control over his temper, which was by nature somewhat fiery. His disposition was good; there was nothing petty about him : he was very free from rancour; he was not only . not vindictive, but partly by temperas:taut, and still more perhaps by discipline, he was even magnanimous:" We may hope that Disraeli, to whom any annoyance caused by an attack would have been lost in the joy at the opportunity it gave him for revenge, neither knew, nor would have understood, the pain he was able to give to Peel. No consideration of the kind ever stayed his hand in inflicting it. But, after all, the judgment on Disraeli's conduct towards Peel must be decided by the relative importance we assign to party and to country. If we agree with Mr. Monypenny we shall have no doubt to which to give the preference. Peel's "weakness as a statesman lay in his failure to understand the significance of a great historic party as an organ of government not easily to be created, not lightly to be destroyed." Was not his failure rather due to his determination to set the significance of a great national crisis before the interest of any party, however great and however historic ? Whether Peel judged the situation correctly, whether the immediate adoption of Free Trade was as indispensable as he thought it. whether he ought not to have taken his party—and, if that led to nothing, the electorate—into his confidence, are questions which at that time did not admit of an answer, and may be hard to answer even now. But what history has to pass judgment on is not the soundness of Peel's convictions but their sincerity, and upon that we believe that its verdict will not be that pro- nounced by his great adversary.

Mr. Monypenny has done his readers a valuable service in bringing together from Sybil and Coningsby the passages which deal with English history since the death of James I. These are, we are inclined to think, the things by which Disraeli will be best remembered. The triumph of "the Venetian Constitution" at the death of Anne ; the consent of George L and George IL to be the Doge which William III. had refused to be ; the hopeless struggle of George IIL to be something better; the manner in which "the supreme genius of Edward Burke effected for the W bigs what Bolingbroke, in a preceding age, had done for the Tories—he restored the moral existence of the party"; the sketches of the younger Pitt, of Shelburne, whom Disraeli may be said to have created afresh, of Lord Liverpool, of the Duke of Wellington, of Lord John Russell, of the Peel of the Tamworth manifesto —are admirable examples of what genius can do for history. The theories may be as wrong as possible, but they are always vita], and where that rare quality is present the reader will never turn away in indifference from the great subject so handled. We must not take leave of Mr. Monypenny without giving him warm praise for the manner in which the work has been done. There is no need of any apology for the length at which the years from 1837 to 1846 have been treated. He is quite right in thinking this "the period when Disraeli's genius was at its greatest height and vigour," and it is also one without a knowledge of which much of his hero's later life must be unintelligible. And quite apart from anything that Mr. Monypenny has still to give us, the present volume is one of singular interest and importance.