LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

always the chaff of a gentleman.

      Lord Beaconsfield, writing to a friend, once said that he had just emerged from an attack of the gout, "of renovating ferocity," and this phrase might have been applied to the long succession of gouty illnesses which were always harassing Lord Derby. Unfortunately, as we advance in life, the "renovating" effects of gout become less conspicuous than its "ferocity;" and Lord Derby, who was born in 1799, was older than his years in 1867. In January and February, 1868, his gout was so severe that it threatened his life. He recovered, but he saw that his health was no longer equal to the strain of office, and on the 24th of February he placed his resignation in the Queen's hands.

      But during the year and a half that remained to him he was by no means idle. He had originally broken away from the Whigs on a point which threatened the temporalities of the still-established Church of Ireland; and in the summer of 1868 Gladstone's avowal of the principle of Irish Disestablishment roused all his ire, and seemed to quicken him into fresh life. The General Election was fixed for November, and the Liberal party, almost without exception, prepared to follow Gladstone in his Irish policy. On the 29th of October Bishop Wilberforce noted that Derby was "very keen," and had asked: "What will the Whigs not swallow? Disraeli is very sanguine still about the elections."

      The question about the Whigs came comically from the man who had just made the Tories swallow Household Suffrage; and Disraeli's sanguineness was ill-founded. The election resulted in a majority of one hundred for Irish Disestablishment; Disraeli resigned, and Gladstone became for the first time Prime Minister.

      The Session of 1869 was devoted to the Irish Bill, and Lord Derby, though on the brink of the grave, opposed the Bill in what some people thought the greatest of his speeches in the House of Lords. He was pale, his voice was feeble, he looked, as he was, a broken man; but he rose to the very height of an eloquence which had already become traditional. His quotation of Meg Merrilies' address to the Laird of Ellangowan, and his application of it to the plight of the Irish Church, were as apt and as moving as anything in English oratory. The speech concluded thus:

      "My Lords, I am now an old man, and, like many of your Lordships, I have already passed three score years and ten. My official life is entirely closed; my political life is nearly so; and, in the course of nature, my natural life cannot now be long. That natural life commenced with the bloody suppression of a formidable rebellion in Ireland, which immediately preceded the union between the two countries. And may God grant that its close may not witness a renewal of the one and a dissolution of the other."

      This speech was delivered on the 17th of June, 1869, and the speaker died on the 23rd of the following October.

IV

       Table of Contents

      BENJAMIN DISRAEI

      I always count it among the happy accidents of my life that I happened to be in London during the summer of 1867. I was going to Harrow in the following September, and for the next five years my chance of hearing Parliamentary debates was small. In the summer of 1866, when the Russell-Gladstone Reform Bill was thrown out, I was in the country, and therefore I had missed the excitement caused by the demolition of the Hyde Park railings, the tears of the terrified Home Secretary, and the litanies chanted by the Reform League under Gladstone's window in Carlton House Terrace. But in 1867 I was in the thick of the fun. My father was the Sergeant-at-Arms attending the House of Commons, and could always admit me to the privileged seats "under the Gallery," then more numerous than now. So it came about that I heard all the most famous debates in Committee on the Tory Reform Bill, and thereby learned for the first time the fascination of Disraeli's genius. The Whigs, among whom I was reared, did not dislike "Dizzy" as they disliked Lord Derby, or as Dizzy himself was disliked by the older school of Tories. But they absolutely miscalculated and misconceived him, treating him as merely an amusing charlatan, whose rococo oratory and fantastic tricks afforded a welcome relief from the dulness of ordinary politics.

      To a boy of fourteen thus reared, the Disraeli of 1867 was an astonishment and a revelation—as the modern world would say, an eye-opener. The House of Commons was full of distinguished men—Lord Cranborne, afterwards Lord Salisbury; John Bright and Robert Lowe, Gathorne Hardy, Bernal-Osborne, Goschen, Mill, Kinglake, Renley, Horsman, Coleridge. The list might be greatly prolonged, but of course it culminates in Gladstone, then in the full vigour of his powers. All these people I saw and heard during that memorable summer; but high above them all towers, in my recollection, the strange and sinister figure of the great Disraeli. The Whigs had laughed at him for thirty years; but now, to use a phrase of the nursery, they laughed on the wrong side of their mouths. There was nothing ludicrous about him now, nothing to provoke a smile, except when he wished to provoke it, and gaily unhorsed his opponents of every type—Gladstone, or Lowe, or Beresford-Hope. He seemed, for the moment, to dominate the House of Commons, to pervade it with his presence, and to guide it where he would. At every turn he displayed his reckless audacity, his swiftness in transition, his readiness to throw overboard a stupid colleague, his alacrity to take a hint from an opponent and make it appear his own. The Bill underwent all sorts of changes in Committee; but still it seemed to be Disraeli's Bill, and no one else's. And, indeed, he is entitled to all the credit which he got, for it was his genius that first saw the possibilities hidden in a Tory democracy.

      To a boy of fourteen, details of rating, registration, and residential qualification make no strong appeal; but the personality of this strange magician, un-English, inscrutable, irresistible, was profoundly interesting. "Gladstone," wrote Lord Houghton to a friend, "seems quite awed with the diabolical cleverness of Dizzy, who, he says, is gradually driving all ideas of political honour out of the House, and accustoming it to the most revolting cynicism." I had been trained by people who were sensitive about "Political honour," and I knew nothing of "cynicism"; but the "diabolical cleverness" made an impression on me which has lasted to this day.

      What was Dizzy in personal appearance? If I had not known the fact, I do not think that I should have recognized him as one of the ancient race of Israel. His profile was not the least what we in England consider Semitic. He might have been a Spaniard or an Italian, but he certainly was not a Briton. He was rather tall than short, but slightly bowed, except when he drew himself up for the more effective delivery of some shrewd blow. His complexion was extremely pale, and the pallor was made more conspicuous by contrast with his hair, steeped in Tyrian dye, worn long, and eked out with artificial additions.

      He was very quietly dressed. The green velvet trousers and rings worn outside white kid gloves, which had helped to make his fame in "the days of the dandies," had long since been discarded. He dressed, like other men of his age and class, in a black frock-coat worn open, a waistcoat cut rather deep, light-coloured trousers, and a black cravat tied in a loose bow—and those spring-sided boots of soft material which used to be called "Jemimas." I may remark, in passing, that these details of costume were reproduced with startling fidelity in Mr. Dennis Eadie's wonderful play—the best representation of personal appearance that I have ever seen on the stage.

      Disraeli's voice was by nature deep, and he had a knack of deepening it when he wished to be impressive. His articulation was extremely deliberate, so that every word told; and his habitual manner was calm, but not stolid. I say "habitual," because it had variations. When Gladstone, just the other side of the Table, was thundering his protests, Disraeli became absolutely statuesque, eyed his opponent stonily through his monocle, and then congratulated himself, in a kind of stage drawl, that there was a "good broad piece of furniture" between him and the enraged Leader of the Opposition. But when it was his turn to simulate the passion which the other felt, he would shout and wave his arms, recoil from the Table and return to it, and act his part with a vigour which, on one memorable occasion, was attributed to champagne; but this was merely play-acting, and was completely laid aside as he advanced in years.

      What I have written so far is, no doubt, an anachronism, for I have been describing what I saw and heard in the Session of 1867, and Disraeli did not become Prime Minister till February, 1868; but six months made no perceptible change in his appearance, speech, or manner. What he had been when he was fighting his Reform Bill through

Скачать книгу