Benjamin Disraeli - Later Years
As Earl of Beaconsfield (failing health had compelled him to take refuge in the House of Lords in 1876) Benjamin Disraeli died in his house in Curzon Street on 19 April 1881. The likelihood of his death was publicly known for some days before the event, and then the greatness of his popularity and its warmth were declared for the first time. No such demonstration of grief was expected even by those who grieved the most.
Never till 1872 did he look upon the full cup of popularity. It might have been said that even at that, the intrigue to get rid of him had yet to cease in his own party; and but a few years before, a man growing old, he was still in the lowest deeps of his disappointments and humiliations. How, then, could it be imagined that with six years of power from his seventieth year, the Jew "adventurer," mysterious and theatrical to the last, should fill a greater space in the mind of England twenty years after death than Peel or Palmerston after five?
Political students find to their satisfaction that he never courted popularity, and never practised the art of working for "quick returns" of sympathy or applause. As "adventurer." he should have done so; yet he neglected the cultivation of that paying art for the wisdom that looks to the long future, and bears its fruit, perchance, when no one cares to remember who sowed the seed.
Even to his friends, and to many near him, he remained mysterious to the last. It is impossible to doubt that some two or three, four or five perchance, were at home in his mind, being freely admitted there; but of partial admissions to its inner places there seem to have been few or none. Men who were long associated with him in affairs, and had much of his stinted companionship, confessed that with every wish to understand his character they never succeeded. Sometimes they fancied they had got within the topping walls of the maze, and might hope to gain the point whence survey could be made of the whole; but as often they found themselves, in a moment, where they stood at last and at first — outside. His speeches carry but a little way beyond the mental range; his novels rather baffle than instruct.
For, though affable and generous, it was impossible to penetrate him: though unreserved in his manners his frankness was limited to the surface. He observed everything, thought ever, but avoided serious discussion. If you pressed him for an opinion he took refuge in raillery, and threw out some paradox with which it was not easy to cope. The secret history of- the world was his pastime. His great pleasure was to contrast the hidden motive with the public pretext of transactions. His pride in his knowledge of the English character was the pride of a student. No Englishman could approach Disraeli without some immediate consciousness that he was in the presence of a foreigner.
He was an Englishman in nothing but his devotion to England and his solicitude for her honor and prosperity. It was not wholly by volition and design that his mind was strange to others and worked in absolute detachment. He had "none of the hereditary prepossessions of the native Englishman." No such prepossessions disturbed his vision when it was bent upon the rising problems of the time, or rested on the machinery of government and the kind of men who worked it and their ways of working.
The student of his life understands that Disraeli's claim to remembrance rests not only on the breadth of his views, his deep insight, his long foresight, but even more on the courage which allowed him to declare opinions supplied from those qualities when there was no visible likelihood of their justification by experience, and therefore when their natural fate was to be slighted. His judgments had to wait the event before they were absolved from ridicule or delivered from neglect. The event arrives; he is in his grave; but his reputation loses nothing by that. It gains by regret that death was beforehand with him.
His last years of power might have been followed by as long a period of more acceptable government than his own, to the effacement of his own from memory; but that did not happen. What did follow was a time of universal turbulence and suspicion, in which the pride of the nation was wounded again and again. To say "Majuba" [the main battle of the First Boer War on on 27 February 1881 was a resounding defeat for the British] and "Gordon" [Chinese Gordon was killed by the Mahdi in Khartoum 26 January 1885] recalled its deepest hurts, but not all of them; and it may be that a pained and angry people, looking back, saw in the man whom they lately displaced more than they had ever seen before.
The rekindling of the Imperial idea was understood as a timely act of revolt and redemption: of revolt against continuous humiliations deeply felt, redemption from the fate of nations obviously weak and suspected of timidity. It has been called rescue-work—deliverance from the dangers of invited aggression and a philosophical neglect of the means of defence. And its first achievement for the country (this is again a mere statement of fact) was the restoration of a much-damaged self-respect. Disraeli was acknowledged as the regenerator and representative of the Imperial idea in England. He was also accused on the same grounds; and if the giver of good wine may be blamed for the guest who gets drunk on it, there is justice in the accusation.
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