DISRAELI A STUDY IN PERSONALITY AND IDEAS BY WALTER SICHEL AUTHOR OF “BOLINGBROKE AND HIS TIMES” WITH THREE ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY LONDON: METHUEN & CO. 1904...

Page 22, line 2 note, for “called to the bar” read “entered at Lincoln’s Inn”...

The power of imagination is essential to supreme statesmanship. Indeed, no really originative genius in any domain of the mind can succeed without it. In literature it reigns paramount. Of art it is the soul. Without it the historian is a mere registrar of sequence, and no interpreter of characters. In science it decides the end towards which the daring of a Verulam, a Newton, a Herschel, a Darwin, can travel. On the battle-field, in both elements, it enabled Marlborough, Nelson, and Napoleon to

“A great mind that thinks and feels is never inconsistent and never insincere.... Insincerity is the vice of a fool, and inconsistency the blunder of a knave.... Let us not forget an influence too much underrated in this age of bustling mediocrity—the influence of individual character. Great spirits may yet arise to guide the groaning helm through the world of troubled waters—spirits whose proud destiny it may still be at the same time to maintain the glory of the Empire and to secure the happin

I wish to head this chapter by a most striking passage hitherto unquoted. It occurs in the fourth of Disraeli’s Letters to the Whigs, published in the first numbers of The Press —an organ founded by him in 1853 for the exposition of his views. 50 It unites the brilliance of his youth to the ripeness of his prime. It is a wonderful forecast of the future, and it embodies his ideas at a time when the “Coalition” alliance of Peelites, Whigs, and Manchester Radicals—one of “suspended opinions”—was e

In Vivian Grey , Disraeli mocks at the attitude of the early political economists towards Labour in the person of “Mr. Toad,” who defined it as “that exertion of mind or body which is not the involuntary effect of the influence of natural sensations.” In the second of his long series of election addresses, he promised to “withhold his support from every ministry which will not originate some great measure to ameliorate the condition of the lower orders, ... to liberate our shackled industry....”

“The equality of man,” exclaims Disraeli in Tancred , “can only be accomplished by the sovereignty of God. The longing for fraternity can never be satisfied but under the sway of a common Father ... announce the sublime and solacing principle of theocratic equality.” This is a Semitic idea; but, then, so is the Church. The State, on the other hand, is an Aryan conception. The real religion both of Athens and of Rome was the State. These radical ideas of Church and State, to which we have grown s

“To change back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a real throne ,” Disraeli ranks, with his ideal mission towards the Church, as “the trainer of the nation;” towards Labour, to “the moral and physical condition of the people;” towards Ireland, by governing it “according to the policy of Charles I., and not of Oliver Cromwell;” to Reform, by emancipating “the political constituency of 1832 from its sectarian bondage and contracted sympathies.” “Sovereignty,” he says, in the perorati

Before Disraeli had entered public life, at a time when public opinion remained stagnant regarding the reciprocal needs and splendid future of the Mother Country and her children, while it was still thought optional whether the parent supported the offspring or the offspring the parent, Disraeli had pondered on the problem, and brought imagination to bear upon it. The colonies were not merely commercial acquisitions, they were the free vents for the surplus energy of a great race, and the nurser

I have associated these two heads of discussion because they have long been coupled in home politics, at times disastrously, but now, it may be hoped, under favouring auspices. On the lighter side of American society and its first invasions of England he also touched. I shall touch these in the next chapter, reserving this for the political aspects of the question. My first chapter has already mentioned the paragraph in his earliest pamphlet, dedicated to Canning. Disraeli was always intensely i

Macaulay observes of Frances Burney that “while still a girl she had laid up such a store of materials for fiction as few of those who mix much in the world are able to accumulate during a long life. She had watched and listened to people of every class, from princes and great officers of State, down to artists living in garrets and poets familiar with subterranean cook-shops. Hundreds of remarkable persons had passed in review before her—English, French, German, Italian, lords and fiddlers, dea

Whatever Disraeli wrote was always literature, and never lecture. He was a born man of letters, and Dickens once lamented that politics had so long and often deprived fiction of a master. Disraeli is renowned for his wit; but he is not so generally famed for two qualities in which he excelled, though with limitations—his subtle sense of humour and his fine feeling for the picturesque and romantic. Like his own “Sidonia,” Disraeli “said many things that were strange, yet they instantly appeared t

The secrets of success, Disraeli has told us more than once, are knowledge of your capacities, constancy of purpose, and mastery of your subject. It is seldom that in one brain these qualities of grip, mental and moral, are fully combined; and, rarer still, when they do reside together, is the addition of the third requisite named by him—patience. It, with the tact it bears, is as necessary for the servant as the master. “The magic of the character,” he says of the courier in Contarini , “was hi