BRITISH PRIME MINISTER - BENJAMIN DISRAELI

IN THE MEMOIR WHICH DISRAELI contributed to a collected edition of his father's writings, no mention was made of his mother, Mrs. Isaac Disraeli. His sister, Sarah, whom Disraeli loved, wrote to her brother : " I do wish that one felicitous stroke, one tender word, had brought our dear mother into the picture ".

Few men were more fertile, when they wished, in felicitous strokes, and few were more tender hearted. Disraeli wrote, in 1874, that he felt fortunate in serving a female Sovereign : " I owe everything to woman ; and if, in the sunset of life, I have still a young heart, it is due to that influence ". But of his mother, throughout his life, he had never a word to say, and it is a little strange that his biographers should not have made more of this profoundly significant fact. The monumental " Life" of Buckle and Monypenny passes hastily over it. Mrs. Isaac Disraeli was a good mother; but between her and her complex, brilliant son no bond of sympathetic love or intellectual understanding existed. Its absence determined the pattern of his life. It also explains the secret of his "way with the patrician conservatives " for which Mr. A. P. Ryan, in a recent article on Lord Salisbury, said that he had searched the pages of Buckle and Monypenny in vain.

Disraeli was born in 1804. As a boy he had that insistent passion to be admired which comes from a deep-seated sense of inner conflict and insecurity. The dark, handsome Jewish boy felt that his race and religion were keeping him apart from his comrades with blue eyes and flaxen hair: " I am neither Whig nor Tory ", he once wrote. " My politics are described by one word, and that word is England." He was in love with England, and had imbibed Burke's romantic view of the state as a mysterious partnership between the living, the dead, and the unborn. He and his sister often talked over the strange problem of Jews and Christians ; but they obtained little help from their parents. Their mother could not, or would not understand. Their father, whose outlook was sceptical, like that of Voltaire, shrugged his shoulders. Isaac Disraeli's attitude was conditioned in part by that of his mother, whom Disraeli described as " the daughter of a family who had suffered from persecution ", and who had, accordingly, " imbibed that dislike for their race which the vain are apt to adopt when they find that they are born to public contempt ". Isaac Disraeli was proud of his race, but he regarded all religions as outmoded superstitions. He met few Jews he was appreciated by a wide circle of friends he felt no difficulty. To his son, however, in whom the intoxicating hopes and ambitions of the rising middle classes were incarnate, Judaism seemed for a time, as it did to Heine, not a religion, but a misfortune.

The young Disraeli was resolved to set his stamp upon the great and glowing English world which lay around him like a land of dreams. But at the start of his career Judaism was a cross which he had to carry. He came presently to terms with it, rose above it, and, like the happy warrior, turned his necessity to glorious gain. In his boyhood and youth, however, a mother's love and tenderness were needed to salve the bitterness of a wound which many sensitive Jewish boys have experienced from the same cause. The pains caused by wounds of the spirit are allayed and salved by that intuitive sympathy and understanding which women offer. Disraeli's mother never offered it. When Isaac Disraeli removed his own name from the synagogue and caused his children to be baptized, something was gained, and his son's path was smoothed. But the sensitiveness engendered by his mother's failure to respond to his nature's most urgent need remained always with Disraeli. In all his subsequent relationships with women it was a mother's love, a mother's care, a mother's tender sympathy and understanding that he sought. If he had not found it, his nature would never have thrived.

Disraeli first found the response he required in his sister, Sarah. He may have found it also in the lady who was, for a short time, his mistress, about whom he wrote his novel Henrietta Temple. He found it, above all, in his wife, Mrs. Wyndham Lewis, who was nearly thirteen years older than he: " She believed in me ", he wrote, " when men despised me It was an ideally happy marriage, and after her death his wife left him a letter "God bless you, my kindest, dearest ! You have been a perfect husband to me ... Do not live alone, dearest. Someone, I earnestly hope, you may find as attached to you as your own, devoted, MARY ANNE ".

Lady Beaconsfield (she was created a peeress in her own right) died in 1872, but the solace her husband craved was provided by numerous other women friends. Outstanding among these were old Mrs. Brydges Williams, who left him a fortune, and the two sisters, Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield, daughters of Lord Forester, the head of a well-known Shropshire family. At the end of his life, overwhelmed with the cares of office and struggling with ill-health, he snatched whatever moments he could to see one or other of these two sisters, and he wrote them countless letters filled with protestations of fond love and devotion. Finally, there was Victoria herself, with whom his relations became warm and intimate. Disraeli dubbed her " the Faery ", and turned her, to Gladstone's disgust, into a partizan.

There were many women besides these, such as Lady Blessington and Frances, Lady Londonderry, whose sympathetic appreciation warmed Disraeli's life and assisted his career "My nature ", he wrote in an exuberant moment during his youth, "demands that my life should be perpetual love ". The love he meant was a chivalrous devotion, independent, as Buckle said, of physical attraction or the appeal of youth. It was akin to the sentiment with which Queen Elizabeth surrounded herself, or to that which Castiglioni depicts as existing around the Duchess of Urbino. "I require sympathy ", Disraeli wrote to Lady Bradford in May, 1875, "but male sympathy does not suit me ". In October, 1874, he had written to her about his secretary, the faithful Montague Corry (Lord Rowton) " I like him very much better than any other man, but, as a rule, except upon business, male society is not much to my taste ". He often complained of loneliness after his wife's death, but when an obvious remedy was suggested to him, he told Lady Bradford " I hate clubs, not being fond of male society ".


Like many well-to-do Victorians, Disraeli had never been polished by the community life of a great public school. His deep-seated prediction for feminine society provided the mainspring of his early success. In the 1830's the worlds of fashion and politics were indistinguishable, and entrance to the House of Commons could be gained most easily through the London drawing-rooms. Those drawing-rooms were presided over by women whom Disraeli conquered by his vivid charm and gaiety, and by his complete understanding of their minds and hearts. With women he was always perfectly at ease and assured, whereas with men he was, in his youth at any rate, sometimes self-conscious, and, alternately, slightly arrogant or timid. When government is aristocratic, the personal factor is of supreme importance; society was then ruled by a group of spontaneous, vital, frivolous, intelligent, and accomplished women. It was they who gave Disraeli his entrée to the inner conservative citadel. Once he had secured admission, his genius enabled him to consolidate his position with the men, and to make himself indispensable. He then patiently laid his foundations deep in the support and opinions of an aristocracy which was still, socially and politically very strongly entrenched. Before he died he had successfully caused those opinions to be re-oriented, to meet the needs of an age of expanding horizons and universal change.

Unlike Gladstone, Disraeli deliberately cultivated an air of mystery and an enigmatic quality. Gladstone, Harcourt, Dilke, Morley and Chamberlain, all sought to cultivate educated middle-class opinion by contributing to the press, and to the reviews which then wielded great influence. Disraeli did not do this. He kept the public at a distance and never appealed directly to the serious middle class, which he regarded as selfish and narrow. He preferred, when out of office, to express himself through the medium of fiction, which appealed largely to women. He was no snob, but his best work was done when his genius was fed and his imagination fired by the glamour of the patrician world in which he had become acclimatized. His direct message, therefore, was addressed through the conservative patricians to the nation at large. The Tory section of the aristocracy was never quite so exclusive as its Whig counterpart. The Whigs were for a long time a family party, so that it was said that whereas a gentleman might become a Tory, he had to be born a Whig. Disraeli became a Conservative after the failure of his early radical experiments. The power of the governing class in both pates was rooted in land and the countryside. After the great Reform Act of 1832, the power accruing from that landed interest began formally to be shared with power based on other interests which had been strengthened or called into being by the industrial revolution. But the process then initiated took more than a century to complete. As late as the General Election of 1868 the House of Commons, returned on a franchise of about 2½ millions for the whole British Isles, contained no less than eighty sons of peers among its members.

Disraeli once declared that, for a successful public career, a man needed to be pre-eminent by birth, wealth, or genius. He might have found a place for charm; but although the proportionate values to be attached to those attributes vary considerably from age to age, they are all significant at almost any period. Nor was it wholly impossible, even during the eighteenth century, to attain high office without any of them. Charles Jenkinson, who led " The King's Friends " after Bute retired, was of comparatively poor and humble origin. He was not a lawyer, but he held many important political offices, was made Earl of Liverpool, and left a son who became Prime Minister. Neither father, nor son, possessed genius. It was, however, genius, reinforced by iron resolution and great personal charm, which raised Disraeli to the leadership of the Conservative party. He gave that party a new doctrine, adapted to a changing social and economic framework. That framework had lost its old appearance of timelessness and had begun, at a constantly accelerating pace, to take on the appearance of a series of dissolving views. In the early 'forties, Disraeli found a platform in the " Young England " group which he inspired and led. The aim of those young men was somewhat sentimental; it envisaged a revived aristocracy ruling the nation on principles of social justice.

The fantastic nature of one aspect of the views of that group was epitomized in two lines of verse from the pen of Lord John Manners, a poetaster, and friend of Disraeli

"Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die, But leave us still our old nobility."

Disraeli's novel Coningsby, or The New Generation (1844) contained, however, a rather more practical statement of the new doctrine. Disraeli urged the youth of England to seek a form of government based on sentiment and imagination rather than on force and material self-interest. In Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845) he painted a picture of the two nations, the rich and the poor, into which England was divided: "We live in an age when to be young and to be indifferent are no longer synonymous. We must prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the future are represented by suffering millions, and the youth of a nation are the trustees of posterity)"

Thirty years were to pass before the promises made by " Young England " were to be redeemed, in some degree, in the legislation passed by Disraeli's great government of 1874-1880. But from Coningsby and Sybil it is already possible to distil the essence of his thought. He saw two great realities - the throne and the people : " The privileges of the multitude and the prerogatives of the Sovereign had grown up together, and together they had waned ". It was necessary to redeem both not only from the Whig oligarchy which had usurped them, but from the no less selfish and far less attractive middle class which had taken the place of that oligarchy. The question of the franchise was one of political mechanics; it was of little significance by comparison with the need for re-instituting an effective system of social legislation on the lines of that pursued by Elizabeth and the early Smarts. That legislation had constituted a national policy which had been set aside first by the Whig oligarchy and, later, by selfish and narrow middle-class capitalists of the type of Peel. Disraeli could not fail to appreciate the inevitable drift towards democracy, but he foresaw, as a corollary to this, a revival in the popularity of the throne and of government. He summed it all up in two brief sentences in the general preface of his novels (1870) : " The feudal system may have worn out, but its main principle - that the tenure of property should be the fulfillment of duty - is the essence of good government. The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress, and without it, government sinks into police, and a nation is degraded into a mob."

By the time Sybil appeared, the "Young England " group had faded away, and Disraeli was occupied in the more practical task of hounding his leader, Peel, from the political field. Successfully achieving this in 1846, he assured for himself the direct succession to the leadership of the party, after Stanley. Peel's action, in his capacity as party leader, in turning against the policy of agricultural protection is hard to defend. Disraeli disliked Peel, who had refused him office and humiliated him; he seized the appropriate moment to strike and overthrow Peel. For this purpose he whipped into a blaze, by a succession of fiery philippics, the smouldering resentment of the Conservative backbenchers, but there is no reason to suppose that he was himself animated by any burning conviction. Within a short time he was himself gaily speaking of protection as being " dead and damned " ; and, after he had educated his party, he executed a volle-face just as complete as Peel's, when in 1867, he passed the second Reform Act.

The repeal of the Corn Laws broke up the Conservative party and virtually excluded it from office for twenty years. During that period, Disraeli indoctrinated it with the view that democracy could be rallied to conservative principles and tradition. All his life he maintained that the object of politics was social justice, involving social reform. He held that the welfare of the people was the sole end of government. When in 1874, 350 Conservatives were returned against 245 Liberals (there were also 57 " home rulers ", a minority of whom claimed to be conservative), he had at last an unrestricted opportunity to put his policies into effect. He was then in his seventieth year, and much troubled by ill-health. For that reason he had to seek relief, in 1876, by entering the less strenuous atmosphere of the House of Lords, as Earl of Beaconsfield. But the record of legislation passed during those six years is impressive Sanitas sanitatum, omnia sanitas, was his characteristic slogan.

In 1875 two Labour Acts were passed. The first put master and man on an equal level in regard to breaches of contract. Hitherto, in the case of a breach, the workman had been liable to criminal prosecution, whereas the employer, in a similar case, had been liable only in the civil courts. The second Labour Act protected trades unions from the law of conspiracy, except when they did anything which would have been criminal in the case of an individual; it legalized peaceful picketing during strikes. Disraeli told the Queen that these were the two most important social laws of her reign. In the same year an Agricultural Holdings Act gave tenants compensation for unexhausted improvements, and a Public Health Act was passed which created a sanitary authority in every area and became the basis of all subsequent legislation.

Factory legislation occupied a great deal of parliamentary time from 1874 until 1878. In the latter year, a Consolidated Factory Act was passed which established a 56-hour working week. Shaftesbury spoke of this measure with unbounded satisfaction in the Lords, and paid tribute to the steady support which Disraeli had always given to the edifice of factory legislation since the days of "Young England ", in face of the bitter hostility of Bright and the Manchester School. In other acts, provision was made for inspecting and regulating canal boats, and for preventing the overloading and over-insuring of merchant ships - a practice which had cost the lives of merchant seamen. Housing, savings, and education were each tackled with similar vigour. An Artizans Dwelling Act called in public authorities, for the first time, to remedy defects in private dwelling-houses. In large towns they were empowered to pull down slums for sanitary reasons, and to replace them by new buildings reserved for the use of workmen. It was this Act which enabled Chamberlain, later, to carry through his programme in Birmingham. The people's savings were promoted and protected by a Friendly Societies Act, and Forster's Education Act of 1870 was amended by a new Act widely extending the benefits of free and compulsory elementary education. In 1877 the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were reformed. Such was Tory democracy, in action at last, and the spirit which Disraeli breathed into it has endured.
In foreign affairs, Disraeli renewed the connection between his party and the dramatic assertion of British national interests. The Congress of Berlin, in 1878, at which he was the outstanding figure, marked the zenith of his career. He made Britain the principal supporter of the Turk in Europe, as a barrier against the expansion of Russian influence, and returned, bringing " Peace with Honour ", at the height of his popularity. In imperial and colonial affairs he sought to gather the far-flung colonies and empire around the Queen as the central sun. Forgotten were the days when he had described the colonies as "millstones" round our necks. It was as an imperial country that he thought of Britain now. He purchased the Khedive of Egypt's shares in the Suez Canal in 1875. Before the news was made public he wrote, characteristically, to the Queen, on 24th November, 1875

It is just settled. You have it, Madam. The French Government has been outgeneraled. They tried too much, offering loans at an usurious rate which would have virtually given them the government of Egypt.

The Khedive, in despair and disgust, offered your Majesty's Government to purchase his shares outright. He never would listen to such a proposition before. Four millions sterling ! and almost immediately. There was only one firm that could do it - Rothschilds. They behaved admirably; advanced the money at a low rate, and the entire interest of the Khedive is now yours, Madam."

In the following year Disraeli caused Victoria to be proclaimed Empress of India.

He died one year after the General Election of 1880, which put Gladstone and the Liberals back in power. The cause of his defeat is to be sought largely in the moral fervour excited against some aspects of the new imperialism by Gladstone in his astonishing Midlothian campaign. The country was passing through a financial and agricultural crisis, and it turned over, like a restless, bed-ridden invalid, to the opposite side. It was said at the time that women everywhere, from the Queen downwards, were for Disraeli. But they had no vote, and Disraeli accepted his defeat with equanimity. He was old, ill, and tired. His work was done, and he knew that it would live after him. He had taught the upper classes to go out into the streets, and into the villages, in order to appeal to the masses, not only on matters of imperial and national interest, but on cardinal bread-and-butter issues. It is occasionally argued by critics on the extreme right that Disraeli sold the fort by inducing his patty to enter into competition with the Liberals in rapid extensions of the franchise, and in social legislation. But if there were any substance in the charge, it would represent an indictment not of Disraeli, but of the democratic system. No power on earth could have resisted the current on which the nation was launched, a current set in motion by the unceasing development of the industrial revolution, reinforced by the ideas released at the time of the American and French Revolutions. It was Disraeli's task to marry conservative principles with the new democracy whose imagination he had captured. To that end he had reorganized his party, by setting up a central office with a network of democratic local organizations throughout the country. The work was supplemented after his death by the institution of the Primrose League, dedicated to the preservation of his memory and doctrine.

The last months of his life were spent finishing the last of his novels, Endymion. Longmans paid ten thousand pounds for the manuscript, and it was published at the end of November, 1880, when he was in his seventy-sixth year. The theme is the decisive importance of the part played by women in shaping the life of the hero, who becomes Prime Minister, at about the age of forty, mainly by their influence. The setting is the world of Disraeli's youth, to which he looked back with fond affection in his old age. It is probable that the romantic title represented a cryptic dedication to Selina Bradford. For in the Greek myth the human youth, Endymion, was the lover of Selene, the Moon-goddess. But Lady Bradford never pretended to be able to enjoy Disraeli's novels.

Four months after Endymion appeared, Disraeli died. The affection in which he had come to be held by all classes of his countrymen was demonstrated on a nation-wide scale, and as the Primrose Day festival came round each year, it almost seemed for a time as though he were being canonized, in popular estimation, as a saint. He was wise, human, and supremely able, but he was no saint. André Maurois, in a luminous phrase, compared him to some old Spirit of Spring. He had shown what could be accomplished in a cold and hostile world by an unconquerable " youthfulness of heart ".