ENGLAND'S LOSS IN MR. DISRAELI'S SUCCESS.
IT is impossible to ignore another side to the account. That it
is good for the nominal and real power to be united by Mr. Disraeli's Premiership we have always strongly maintained,— but not a little because we wish to see it brought home to the English people what that arbitrary and unscrupulous spirit is, which has so long directed their policy from its strong ambuscade within the brain of the Stanleys. It is a great gain to England that Mr. Disraeli must rest now on himself, and will no longer be half cloaked by the popular imagination in the chivalrous Conservatism of the Earl of Derby. But it is scarcely a matter for congratulation that the political character which has worked its way up to so high a pinnacle of power and success should be what it is ; —that the chief who will meet the new House of Commons which his own tact and genius has created, should be one to whom only the most fanatical of Mr. Disraeli's admirers can wish to see that House of Commons heartily loyal. It is well that true political intelligence like Mr. Disraeli's can prove its power to tunnel its way through the heavy resisting medium of English rank and caste and wealth. But it is not well that we all recognize in the force which has effected this difficult achieve- ment, an intellectual blasting powder used without any purpose that we can well imagine to be higher than that of honourable individual ambition ;—which first arrested public attention by its proved power to shatter a Government greatly in advance of the Toryism of the day,—and which sprang a mine under the last Liberal Ministry with the deliberate intention, as we now know, of supplanting only to outbid it. It is satisfactory that intelligence should show itself stronger than wealth, rank, or caste. It is not satisfactory that a light-armed intelligence, which does not encumber itself with the heavy baggage of principles, should seem to be only the more powerful on that account. It is well to have an honest trial of the full force of what has been so much vaunted under the name of Tory Democracy. It is not well that the very combination of words, and all the expositions which we have had of them from Mr. Disraeli in his various works, suggest a manoeuvre and a trick, —a policy of hoodwinking the multitude, and relying not on their knowledge and independence, but their ignorance and dependence,—of stealing their physical force for the purpose of a Government that wishes to be to them politically what the Roman Catholics mean by a " spiritual director," that is, a guide who asks a confidence founded not on knowledge, but prestige, and who proposes to win prestige by making much of the glitter and pageantry of an aristocracy, and by flaunting before the people's eyes a national or imperial policy of much show and little meaning. Again, it is no doubt a good thing for England to see the success of a statesman who is not in any sense insular, who is familiar with the value of a class of political ideas which seem speculative, and in some%ense tran- scendental, to our heavy English constitutionalism. But it is hardly so well that the ideas by the use of which he achieves such a power over men should be his playthings, not his con- victions, and should be used by him rather to dazzle than to enlighten or guide the minds of the party whom he leads.
Mr. Disraeli has long been the real leader of the Tory party, and it is always a step for the better when any kind of veil is withdrawn which tends to confuse between the semblance and the reality. But can it be a subject of satis- faction that such an intellect as .Mr. Disraeli's,—one so com- pletely disenthralled from all ties of conviction or belief,— one so ready to accept any conclusions, from Democracy to Toryism, from Protection to Free Trade, from " Semitic " to Secularist principles of government, from the most specula- tive criticism in politics to the most contemptible prejudice which is needful to mortar together the loose stones of the country party,—should be the chosen Minister of the English people E As it is so, it is indefinitely better that the fact should be recognized ; but how are we to look upon the fact itself, and how can we suppose that it will influence the careers of rising English politicians ? Sir Robert Peel surrendered his convictions to the protest of events, but Mr. Disraeli has moulded a party out of the scattered frag- ments of what his keen intellect must, at the very time he was using them, have recognized as a mistaken and defeated clique. Who believes that Mr. Disraeli was really a Protectionist in 1846, or opposed to household suffrage in 1866E He himself has denied that he was the latter, and no one who has fol- lowed him with the slightest care,—no one, certainly, who has studied his life of Lord George Bentinck,—supposes for a-moment that it was anything but the exigencies of his own individual circumstances which gave him as a leader to the fury of landowners' passions in 1845. It would have been wholly impossible for a statesman whose heart as well as his brain had chosen the words in which Mr. Disraeli inveighed against Sir Robert Peel's hypocrisy, to write in 1849 the chapters which show how impartially and acutely he had surveyed the situation from its beginning to its close. Indeed, if any view of any public man can be esteemed certain, it is that Mr. Disraeli has throughout his career found for his party's convictions an expression only the more brilliant exactly because he has never felt them, and for his party's animosities a voice the more felicitously vindictive exactly because he has so faintly shared them. Standing like a com- mander-in-chief outside the field of battle, he has seen critically "what was necessary to his position " only the more distinctly because he has been aware that the position was, as regarded his own inward feelings, an absolutely indifferent one,—one forced on him more by circumstances than by choice,—partly by the obtuseness of Sir Robert Peel to his genius, and partly by the extremely necessitous condition of the phalanx whom Sir Robert Peel was supposed to have betrayed. From Vivian Grey to the speech on the second reading of his own Reform Bill, when he lamented that no " stray philosopher " had risen to defend the most hopeless of his own provisions, and begged his opponents only to pass the Bill and then turn out the Ministry, Mr. Disraeli has never yet done anything considerable which did not somewhere show his highly theatrical concep- tion of the game of politics, his belief in strategical feints and manoeuvres, his subtlety in manipulating baits, his tact and ingenuity in inventing war-cries to suit .the state of parties, his still greater tact in moulding his party to suit his war- cry. If Mr. Disraeli's success illustrates anything in the world except the almost magical power of steady persever- ance and unrelaxing ambition, what it does illustrate is the natural advantage in the conflict for political existence of being wholly without prepossessions in politics, and of being willing at any time to take up with any creed which will unite a following, or disunite an enemy. Can anything not impossible seem hopeless to a young man of much talent and little scruple after Vivian Grey has become Prime Minister ? Could Mr. Disraeli ever have reached the position he has now attained, if he had not been ready at a moment's notice to attack fiercely a statesman under whom he would have been quite willing to serve, and to lighten the ship when in office by throwing over all the principles he had made most show of in opposition ? In spite of wildness, and vie winess, and speculativeness, and comparative poverty, and want of high connections, Mr. Disraeli has risen to the very highest point of English politics ; and so far, well. But the force by which he has surmounted all these grave obstacles has been at least as much due to its perfect disposibility as to its intrinsic magni- tude,—at least as much due to the absence of moral limita- tions which so often tie men down, as to the quantity of capacity at Mr. Disraeli's service. The very same man, hampered,—if you could possibly suppose him so ham- pered,—with an inability to advocate a mistaken and decaying prejudice, would at most be still among the second file of auxiliary statesmen. The very same man ham- pered,—if you could concede for a moment the gross impos- sibility that he could be so hampered, with an inability to throw overboard such a prejudice at the right moment, would be far back among the crowd of dim, common poli- ticians. Mr. Disraeli's first and most difficult step was
gained by his ability to express prejudices he could not feel ; his last and highest step by his greater willingness to throw them over when they were clearly in his way. Can it be other than a loss for England to have bestowed the highest prize which the most restless ambition craves on one who has vanquished the greatest conceivable obstacles by such a facility as this ? "Am I to play the hermit in the drama of life," says Mr. Disraeli's first hero, " because my fellow- creatures are sometimes fools, and occasionally knaves If the Marquis has done you the ill service Fame says he has, your sweetest revenge will be to make him your tool ; your most perfect triumph to rise to power by his influence." If such a view, on the part of the boy, bears such splendid fruits, what will the boys of to-day think of the historical lesson we are giving ?
The brilliant success of Mr. Disraeli is likely enough to give an impulse not only to moral detachment ' from all sorts of political principle, but to a sort of artificiality which will be far more odious in clever young Englishmen's hands than in his own. Mr. Disraeli is artificial, but there is a simplicity about his artificiality, as of one who has never been untrue to nature, because in him nature has always meant intellectual art. Where other men move to motives, he handles them. There has always been a composite character (as of French cookery) about his politics, a preconceived mingling of high and piquant flavours ; for instance, a dramatic nationalism mixed with a tone of high Cosmopolitan superiority to English prepossessions,—a disposition to teach the Catholics what they ought to concede as subjects of a Protestant Government, combined with a desire to teach the Protestants to love the secular power of the Pope,—a profound respect for Continental despotisms, sometimes Austria, sometimes France, seasoned somewhat arbitrarily with an unexampled obsequious- ness to parliamentary opinion at home,—in short, an intense appreciation of the piquancy caused by the crossing of the most opposite veins of political thought. Vivian Grey some- where gives his noble patron a new receipt for " Tomahawk " punch, which strikes us as curiously illustrative both of Mr. Disraeli's literary humour and of the ingeniously artificial com- binations to which his fancy devotes itself :—" To every two bottles of still champagne, one pint of Curacoa ; catch the aroma of a pound of green tea, and dash the whole with Glen- livet. The nice point, however, which is impossible to define, is catching the aroma. Remember particularly it must be iced." What can resemble more closely the composition of this Tomahawk ' punch, with its curious ingredients of stimulant and sedative all carefully " iced," than the cold, complex combination of stimulants to useful self-interest and sedatives to threatening vanity administered in many of Mr. Disraeli's speeches and embodied in some of his measures ?—take, for example, the curious conceptions so audaciously mingled in the India Bill No. 2, or his last Reform Bill with its Dual vote for the elite and its Household Suffrage for the mass, its educational franchise and its ardour for the old pot- wallopers. The cold-blooded, imaginative ingenuity with which Mr. Disraeli compounds the elements of his speeches and his measures cannot but remind us of his youthful genius, in suggesting new and startling ingredients for his Tomahawk punch.
What we fear for England, then, in Mr. Disraeli's success is that it will be felt as a premium on unscrupulous statesman- ship, and on the artificial ingenuities of mere literary talent. His direct influence, moreover, on Parliament itself is disinte- grating. His habit of pumping Parliament for his policy, and his exceedingly clever diagnosis of the symptoms which show him what it will be most likely to accept,—a habit, no • doubt, due to some extent to his unfortunate position at the head of a minority, but not a little owing also to his intrinsic indifference to anything but success,—is one of the most dangerous influences that can affect the House of Commons. It tends directly to relax the earnestness and sense of respon- sibility of all political parties, and to set, in the highest quar- ters, the example of giving advice which is not meant seriously, but only as a first bid to set the political auction going, on the understanding that the measure is to be knocked down to the highest bidder. A spirit of indifference in the House, of mere idolatry of strategic talent and fertility in artificial com- binations of resources out of it, may be expected to receive a real impulse from this enthronement of Mr. Disraeli. That the nation should avow clearly what sort of exotic talent it has so long been worshipping is clearly well. That it should have given it so much secret worship as to lead to this apotheosis of unscrupulous ability cannot be well.
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