MR. DISRAELI AS A. MAN OF THE WORLD.
11R. DISRAELI improves every year as a man of the world. VI Much the best speech which he has yet delivered this Session was that in which he criticised Dr. Kenealy's motion yesterday week. In that speech you could hardly recognise at all the difficulty he has so often displayed in hitting the tone of English common-sense, and avoiding everything like bizarre intelligence. He made light of the amazing charges brought by Dr. Kenealy on no evidence at all against the most illustrious men. He quizzed the Member for Stoke on the magnificence of his expectations as to the results of the debate. He suggested that the end of the House of Commons would not be come even if it should reject Dr. Kenealy's proposals, and that the anticipation that it would never assemble again might be premature. He observed that the Secretary for War, who was kept at home by indisposition, would yet never have been prevented by such a cause from confiding to his chief any serious danger of a mutiny in the Army, and that if Mr. Secretary Cross had apprehended a popular rising, he would not have failed to tell the Prime Minister of his fears. For himself, he hoped he should reach home in safety that night. Then he made fun of the stress laid by Dr. Kenealy upon the tittle-tattle of drawing or dining-rooms, as to the Lord Chief Justice's occasional mots about the Tichborne trial ; and he recalled, as a parallel case, the attack made upon Mr. Shell for ex- tricating himself from the toils of a bore, who was also unfortunately a member of the House of Commons, by some random saying at the Club, while he was "solacing himself with a cutlet and a glass of claret," as to the then pending Irish Coercion Bill, a saying which the bore immediately treated as serious, and made the foundation of a grave charge of insincerity in the House of Commons. In short, Mr. Disraeli showed all the skill of which he is so great a master in depreciating the importance of Dr. Kenealy's attack on the Bench, and burlesquing the perils which the House was supposed to incur by its rejection of Dr. Kenealy's prayer. He never did anything better in its way. The easy levity of his condescension, the mock serious- ness of his fears, the hard, common-sense contempt shown for Dr. Kenealy's alleged new evidence, the hint that in great cases lawyers always do find that the best evidence has been forgotten, just as after critical divisions one always does hear that certain Members were snowed-up in the country whose votes would have turned the scale,—all were given with Mr. Disraeli's boldest air, the Vivian-Grey manner which has cowed so many opponents and gained him so many ad- mirers. Nor is this the first time this Session that he has played the part of a Prime Minister -who is also an accomplished man. of the world in very good style. His rap at Mr. Newdegate's solemnity, in making a somewhat impertinent allusion to that gentleman's morning devotions,—his fling at the Irish Mem- bers who doubted the existence of Ribanclism in Ireland, when he told them that they were just as much to be trusted as those persons who, in Canning's language, professed to like "dry champagne," and his cool ridicule, on the first night of the Session, of all news-sheets and public prints which had for years echoed his own cry about blundering and plundering, as if they were ex- travagant journals to which no man of sense would think of paying any serious attention, were all admirably conceived in the same vein. No one can express the scorn of a man of the world with more ability than Mr. Disraeli, when at least he happens to feel scorn for the same things as English men of the world. In all probability, scorn is one of the commonest of his states of mind. All the epigrams ascribed to him,— and every Session one hears at least half-a-dozen new ones,— have a flavour of scorn in them. It is a feeling which in general he conceals very successfully from the House of Corn- mons,—an Assembly to which indeed he is profusely defer- ential, sometimes almost to the point of weakness,—but it is always in him, and he never speaks so well as when the exigencies of public affairs really make it desirable that he should express it, and when it is the same kind of scorn which ordinary Englishmen feel.
And yet Mr. Disraeli is not a man of the world at all, in the sense in which Lord Palmerston, or even the late Lord Derby, was a man of the world. He studies the world, it is true, and has learned its attitudes as an acute critic learns them; but he is not formed by our English world ; he has no instinctive sym- pathy with its prejudices ; and he has to appreciate its lessons carefully, and sometimes not without difficulty, before he can pose as a man of the world to the House of Commons. Not unfrequently the scorn which he feels for the world in which he lives breaks out, instead of that safer and more common- place scorn which the world in which he lives, feels for those either above it or below it, or simply outside it, who do not understand its ways and accept its principles. Mr. Disraeli's temptation has always been to indulge a sincere scorn for many of the instincts of the world he knows, and of course, this temp- tation, though it is part of the secret of his power, is also a great source of difficulties. Mr. Disraeli is by no means less worldly than the world he lives in, but he hardly shares its specific tastes, and does not at all share its habits of thought. He would be more likely, if he had not to govern it, to laugh at the world than with it, and this tendency is not unfrequently a source of political weakness. When last year he extricated himself from the difficulties of a foolish Cabinet measure,—the Endowed Schools Bill,—by professing that he was quite incompetent to understand its obscure provisions, the measure having been previously considered and adopted by the Cabinet without any discovery of that obscurity, he showed a cynical contempt for Ministerial usage which was by no means worldly, though it was by no means unworldly. And when about the same time he publicly attacked a colleague as a "great master of jibes, and flouts, and sneers," with- out even first asking him whether he had or had not said what was attributed to him, Mr. Disraeli again came out rather as Vivian Grey than as an English man of the world. So, too, in policy he has always had a considerable difficulty in understanding what English men of the world would like, and therefore of course in ministering to their tastes. It is still doubtful whether some of his oddest political freaks were played in ignorance of English tastes, or in intentional carica- ture of them. Was "Lothair" a squib on the vulgarity of English plutolatry, or was it a sacrifice on the shrine of wealth? Was "India Bill No. 2" a serious attempt to conciliate the commercial pride of Manchester and Liverpool, or was it a practical joke at their (and also at Mr. Disraeli's own) expense? Was the device of plural voting in the Reform Bill of 1867 seriously intended, or was it simply provided as a tub to throw to the whale of English Toryism ? Was Mr. Disraeli's lean- ing to the secular power of the Pope in 1858-9 a genuine poli- tical leaning, or was it a mere cynical experiment on the nerves of English Conservatives ? Did he really dream of guranteeing Saxony during the war of 1870, or did he throw out that brilliant suggestion in pure satire on the imbecility of the English Foreign - Office ? Whatever answers we accept to these questions, they will equally prove that Mr. Disraeli was not an English man of the world when he threw out these suggestions. If he were serious, his mind must really be of the kind which cannot distinguish between coloured glass and precious stones ; and if he were j quizzing, there is nothing less like English statemanship than ' to hazard a reputation on a cynical joke. Lord Palmerston never ventured on such an attempt, and if he had, he would I not have succeeded. He always laughed with the world, never at it. Indeed, its ideas were too deeply ingrained into his character, for them to appear amusing, or anything but a second nature to him.
But as Mr. Disraeli grows older, he understands Lord Palmerston's type of mind better, and it is possible that if he reigns over us till he is as old as was Lord Palmerston, he may almost begin to feel like a jocular British statesman of what he would call the mere Philistine type, at last. It is now some seven years, we think, since we have heard any- thing at all of "the Semitic idea," except, indeed, in "Lothair," and all that was bizarre and spasmodic in Mr. Disraeli's statesmanship is gradually subsiding, till we may hope to settle down into a policy of rest and thankfulness, tempered only by jokes. It was chiefly in straining after a brilliant or original view of politics that Mr. Disraeli laid bare the strange gulf which separated him from ordi- nary English statesmen, and he has made a good deal of progress even since last year in learning that, just now at least, brilliant and original suggestions, even if thoroughly English, are distasteful to the English people. Wit like Mr. Canning's he finds it very useful to display, but a heroic policy like Mr. Canning's is, he is now aware, a fatal mistake. Consequently he is more and more ignoring the grotesque inspirations which made so large a part of his earlier career and of all his literary works, and gliding into the grooves of that commonplace thought for which in secret no doubt he still entertains a sovereign contempt. He is deeply convinced that both Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone lost ground with the Liberal party by not being sufficiently men of the world,—the former being too pedantically Whiggish in the Lord Somers-ish, the sixteen-hundred-and-eighty-eightish sense, and the latter too tragically earnest in the sense in which modern parsons use the word. He himself certainly is never likely to make either blunder ; and the blunder he did seem in danger of making last year, of trying to provide strong excitement for the strong taste of a controversial age, in the shape of" putting down Ritualism," he seems this year quite inclined to correct. To the last, we suspect, he will find it difficult to believe how the English people can like to be so dull. To the last, he will hanker after a chance of holding out to the public a meretricious policy and bombastic promises ; to the last he will feel more secret respect for Dr. Kenealy's "Magna Charta " movement, and the wonderful expedients by which the Member for Stoke has made himself so conspicuous a person on the political scene, than he will ever feel for the political drudge who gets up statistics carefully in the long vaca- tion and pours them out in speeches in Committee ; to the last he will feel a certain sympathy with enter- prising attempts to catch the fancy of the mob, even though he is officially compelled to expose those attempts ; but yet we suspect that he has now finally made up his mind that however excellent these bizarreries may be as baits to draw public attention, they do not pay in a practical statesman who, even while he scorns the world he knows, should never fail to scorn also, if he can, that which the world he knows scorns. It is clear that Mr. Disraeli is more and more every day adopting the ideal held up to him by Lord Palmerston, and embodying it with more and more effect in his own conduct. It would be curious if the apostle of the "Asian Mystery" should live to govern England in precisely the same fashion, and by the use of the same weapons, as the great confessor of that naïf interpretation of the English Catechism, according to which it is simply a self-evident proposition that "all children are born good."
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