CHAPTER XXXV

1874

LORD BEACONSFIELD

Lord Beaconsfield was always singularly kind to me. One evening, soon after I went into the Foreign Office, I sat next to Mrs. Disraeli at a dinner at the house of Lord Combermere, the old Peninsular hero. All of a sudden she turned round to me and said, “Dizzy has got his eye upon you.” And so it proved to be, for many years after, when the kind old lady whom Queen Victoria created Viscountess Beaconsfield was dead, he, still Mr. Disraeli, gave me the first important appointment which fell to his gift as Prime Minister in 1874. He was then seventy years of age, but he looked older in spite of his carefully dyed and curled hair and a certain dandiness of dress, a relic of the D’Orsay days, which remained with him to the end.

I used sometimes to fancy that when he walked in the streets leaning on the arm of his faithful “mastiff,” as he playfully called Lord Abergavenny, or Monty Corry, there was a slight purposeful exaggeration of the old-man stoop; certainly when he stood upright to make a speech, fired with excitement, there was no indication of any failing of strength, though his eyes latterly lost their brilliancy. Those eyes were the despair of Von Angeli when he painted his portrait for the Queen. “Das Auge ist tot,” he said. The _Vanity Fair_ picture of him in his long, pale brown coat, walking with Monty Corry, handsome, smart, carefully groomed, and obviously so proud of his charge, was admirable. Certainly no politician ever had a more devoted shadow than my dear old friend Monty was to him. The affection between them was most touching. Indeed Disraeli’s was one of those natures which compel affection by their own generous power of giving it. He loved his friends and they loved him.

One man, whom he had made, betrayed him; I knew that man well and was acquainted with the whole story; but Disraeli had the magnanimity of a noble character; no one ever heard him utter a word against the confidential subordinate who had used him so ill. This may, perhaps, be contrasted with the bitterness of his early attacks upon Peel. But at the time of which I am writing he was no longer a disappointed man struggling, as the French say, to “arrive.” He had “arrived,” and in his proud position took no heed of the malice and venom of lesser men.

His conversation was always delightful; but nowhere did he shine more than at the Sunday dinners of Baron Lionel de Rothschild. Those dinners were indeed brilliant—Dizzy, Charles Villiers, the famous free-trade member for Wolverhampton, and Bernal Osborne were almost always there; John Delane, the Jupiter of the _Times_, another frequent guest.[37] To listen to those wonderful wits, talking not for the gallery, but throwing the ball to and fro for their own pleasure, was something worth remembering. Those were conversational fireworks.

There were always one or two of the smartest and most beautiful women present, and one or two young men—often Henry Calcraft and myself. Baron Lionel himself was one of the wisest, kindest and noblest men that I ever knew, and the Baroness, who must have been so beautiful in her youth, was as a matron the picture of grace and dignity. In a Jewish house Disraeli was always happy. He retained (witness “Coningsby”) the greatest admiration for the people from whom it was his pride to have sprung. One day I went to call upon Baron Lionel in Piccadilly.

“Your friend has just left me,” said the Baron.

“Whom do you mean?” I asked.

“Why, Dizzy, to be sure—he is your friend, isn’t he?”

I asked at haphazard what they had been talking about.

“Oh!” said the Baron, “as usual, the Race.”

The great fascination of Lord Beaconsfield’s talk lay in the grotesque turn which he could give to the most ordinary subjects. His epithets were sometimes quite startling, even in his Parliamentary speeches. A friend of mine (I cannot remember who it was) once put this to me very wittily and very sadly. The House of Commons had been sitting all night. I went down to the House—to which my office gave me access—and saw the green benches, not crowded, but occupied by a number of members looking hideously debauched and being addressed by an Irishman, wild, unkempt, unshorn. As I entered the lobby my friend came out. “This is a pretty state of things,” he said, “and there is no one in authority. Hartington has gone to Goodwood, Dizzy has gone to the Lords, and Gladstone is reading Homer at Hawarden! If only Dizzy had been here he would have crushed these men with an adjective!” It was so true!

One amusing instance of Dizzy’s adjectival powers is worth recording. Sir William Harcourt had attacked him in one of his most telling speeches, with which he had evidently shown great self-satisfaction, as, indeed, was his right, though it was a little imprudent to do so, seeing with whom he had to deal. When Sir William sat down Dizzy got up to reply, and in his quiet, imperturbable way chaffed the honourable member about his “Herodian oratory.” This puzzled all the newspapers, who made many futile guesses at what the Prime Minister had meant. At last one paper—I think it was the _Pall Mall Gazette_—said that the word which Mr. Disraeli had used was Rhodian, not Herodian, the orators of Rhodes being in old times famous for their eloquence! The next day there was a luncheon party at Sir Stafford Northcote’s in Downing Street, and the conversation turned upon the speech and the much-discussed adjective. Lady Northcote asked Dizzy, who was present, what he really had said, and what he really had meant. “My dear lady,” was the very solemn answer, “are we not told that Herod made an oration and that he gave not God the glory?” There was a roar of laughter, in which we all joined.

There was much sympathy between Sir William Harcourt and Disraeli. Indeed, so close was the affection which the two bore to one another that there was a moment when people imagined that they might join hands politically. But that could not be. Sir William, for all his blue blood, and his royal extraction, was too convinced a Radical to be able to palter with the Carlton Club. He was a delightful companion, witty, accomplished; it was a pleasure to the two heroes to fence socially, sharpening their blades when the buttons were on the foils; but politically, when the buttons were off, the tierce and quart were furious enough.

Between Gladstone and Disraeli there was no love lost; the two rivals were utterly opposite and cordially disliked one another. Disraeli almost always spoke of Gladstone with a spice of contempt. Once he told us how the Emperor of Brazil had sent him and Mr. Gladstone the grand cordon of some order. “I wrote him a letter of warmest thanks which could make the dear man believe that he had satisfied the one ambition of my life; Gladstone sent his star back, with an expression of regret that his Sovereign did not permit him to accept foreign decorations. Clumsy fellow! Could he not have put it away in a drawer, as I did?” I remember well the gusto with which he accentuated the words “Clumsy fellow!” The truth is that there was in Gladstone a lack of that man-of-the-worldliness which Dizzy admired so much in Lord Granville.

The patronage of the Captaincy of Deal Castle belongs to the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. When Lord Clanwilliam died Lord Granville, who was Lord Warden, appointed Lord Sydney in his place; at the same time, lest there should be any misconception, Lord Granville, with that courtesy of which he was such a master, wrote and told Lord Beaconsfield what he had done. The answer was short and characteristic:

“Hughenden Manor, October 21st, 1879.

“MY DEAR LORD,

“Happy Sydney to be your neighbour!

“Yours sincerely,

“BEACONSFIELD.”

His notes were always charming. When he was living in Whitehall he wrote to Count Pierre Schuvaloff, the Russian Ambassador, inviting him to a little informal dinner, saying, “You will make six ladies happy and five men jealous.” “Mon cher ami,” Schuvaloff said, when he showed me the note, “elles étaient toutes grandmères!” He had, by the by, a very high opinion of Schuvaloff’s ability. When he came back from Berlin he was talking to me one day about the Congress, and the different statesmen and diplomatists who had taken part in it, with several of whom I was acquainted. Prince Gortchakoff and Schuvaloff were the two Russian representatives, but Prince Gortchakoff was a very different man from the Gortchakoff whom I had known some fifteen years before at St. Petersburg. He had grown old and feeble, and, as Lord Beaconsfield put it, lachrymose. Schuvaloff had to fight his battle alone, and, said Lord Beaconsfield, “I was amazed at the way in which he held his own against us all.” With all his dandified, rather frivolous ways, Schuvaloff struck him as a very strong foeman.

That Bismarck shared this view of Count Schuvaloff is evident from his “Gedanken und Erinnerungen.” Between Bismarck and Prince Gortchakoff there had long been a sort of silent feud. Gortchakoff rather posed as if he had been something like a Mentor to Bismarck, who latterly grew to look upon him with ill-disguised contempt. He laughed at his vanity, his boastfulness, and even at his readiness to accept a diplomatic snuffbox mounted in diamonds, provided that they were “de bonnes grosses pierres” (“Gedanken,” etc., Vol. II., p. 125). For Schuvaloff, on the contrary, Bismarck had a great liking, and, indeed, the correspondence between the two statesmen bears witness to an exceptional degree of respect and even affection on both sides (II., 249-252).

Bismarck says in so many words that it was against the wish of the Emperor of Russia that Gortchakoff took part in the Congress of Berlin, and that although, as Chancellor of the Empire, he nominally had precedence, it was Schuvaloff, officially his subordinate, who was the real and only plenipotentiary for Russia, but Bismarck’s opinion of him, formed during his embassy at St. Petersburg, is evident from the following passage in the “Gedanken.” “Peter Schuvaloff, the most far-seeing brain with which I came into contact there, a man who only needed industry to play a leading part” (Vol, II., p. 244).

It is disappointing to find Lord Beaconsfield hardly mentioned in Bismarck’s reminiscences. He had found his match and there was, perhaps, a slight unwillingness (great men are not always above small vanities), to allude to the man who, far more than himself, was master of the situation during the Congress; but Berlin has not yet forgotten the historic words with which he summed up his impressions of that famous meeting: “Der alte Jude ist der Mann”—“The old Jew is the man.” It was a great, if involuntary, tribute! The ordering of the special train, which brought Bismarck post-haste to “the old Jew’s” quarters and forced England’s views upon the panic-stricken Congress, was a volcanic triumph such as has rarely, if ever, been equalled in diplomacy. That is how peace with honour was carried back to England, to be proclaimed to the eager crowd from a window in Downing Street.

There was one amusing incident in connection with the Berlin Congress: one day it was announced that on the morrow Lord Beaconsfield was to address the assembled statesmen and that he would speak in French. Lord Odo Russell, who was a master of tongues, heard this with no little alarm, for it was well known that Lord Beaconsfield’s French was very much of the Stratford-atte-Bowe type. Lord Odo, always clever, went to him and adroitly turned the conversation on to the next day’s conference. Lord Beaconsfield announced his intention of speaking. “In what language do you propose to speak?” asked Lord Odo. “In French,” was the answer. “I am afraid that will be a very great disappointment to the colleagues,” said Lord Odo. “You see, they know that they have here in you the greatest living master of English oratory, and of course they are longing to hear you.” The great man smiled his pleasure, and the speech was delivered in English. Lord Odo was wont to declare that he never knew whether he took the hint or accepted the compliment.

Poschinger, in his “Conversations with Prince Bismarck,” records the following appreciation by the latter of Lord Beaconsfield during the Berlin Congress: “I frequently had him to spend the evening with us; as he was unwell he only came on the condition of being alone, and I thus had many an opportunity of getting to know him well. I must say that, in spite of his fantastic novel writing, he is a capable statesman, far above Gortchakoff and many others. It was easy to transact business with him; in a quarter of an hour you knew exactly how you stood with him; the limits to which he was prepared to go were clearly defined, and a rapid summary soon precised matters. Beaconsfield speaks magnificent and melodious English, and has a good voice; he spoke nothing but English at the Congress. The Crown Princess asked me about this time whether Beaconsfield did not speak French very beautifully. I answered that I had not heard anything of it up till then. ‘But in the Congress?’ she inquired further. ‘He only speaks English,’ said I; ‘and here she dropped the conversation,’ added the Chancellor in English, with a significant gesture of his hand.”[38]

As regards what Bismarck called his “fantastic novel writing,” there may be a word to be said. Perhaps of all his writings the one to which the epithet “fantastic” might the most righteously be applied was “Lothair,” and yet even in that book, of which superficial readers spoke with some contempt, persons of more penetrating philosophical and political judgment perceived depths which were unsuspected by the vulgar herd of circulating-library subscribers. Lord Russell, for instance—no friend to the author—expressed his amazement that people should fail to see what deep significance underlay the gaudy trappings. In his view it was the book of a political seer; and he was right. Did it not forewarn us of the dangers of the Commune? The fiction of the novel-writer was in his hands a vehicle for impressing the truths of the politician as they appeared to him.

“Born in a library,” as he said of himself, he had amassed a rich store of out-of-the-way book-lore, and would often puzzle the reporters with some quotation that was quite new to them. I remember a speech to the point (not that Horace could be called an out-of-the-way book), in which he said that if anybody should disagree with him “naviget Anticyras.”[39] This plunged the newspapers into the blackest of fogs. I met him the next day and we laughed a good deal over their bewilderment and their struggles to get out of the gloom. “Let this be a lesson to you, my dear boy, never to use a quotation with which the reporters are not familiar.”

One day when he was in the House of Lords he was attacked by the Duke of Argyll upon an Indian question, as to which he was only partially instructed, and in his reply he made some hideous blunder which fortunately nobody detected. Monty Corry, who had been listening on tenterhooks, was waiting for him outside, and they walked away together, as usual. “How could you make such a mistake?” asked Monty, “it was uncommonly lucky that nobody found you out.” Lord Beaconsfield stopped dead short, reflected for a second or two, and then said gravely and solemnly: “My dear Monty, God is great! And upon my word I think He grows greater and greater every day!”

I don’t think that he had much love for the Duke of Argyll. When Lord Grey de Wilton (I think it was) spoke upon the address to the Queen at an opening of Parliament he alluded to the Prime Minister as the “man at the helm not to be spoken to.” The Duke presently got up and delivered one of his slashing party speeches, in which his noble voice rang out like a trumpet: “The noble lord has spoken of the man at the helm. My Lords, there is _no_ man at the helm.” Lord Beaconsfield sat sphinx-like, immovable, unreadable—but I do not think he liked it.

When it was expected that he would make a great speech in the House of Lords the red benches were crowded. I once was present at the bar of the House when an Indian question was raised by the Duke of Argyll in a very powerful oration. Dizzy got up and answered the Duke, saying that the papers would shortly be laid, and that he hoped the Duke would read them “with pleasure and profit.” That was all—there was no speech, and great disappointment. That time I don’t think the Duke liked it.

[Illustration: LORD BEACONSFIELD AND LORD ROWTON.

_From the “Vanity Fair” cartoon by Leslie Ward (“Spy”), by permission of the Editor._]

One evening—it must have been in 1880, or very early in 1881—I met Lord Beaconsfield at a dinner-party at Lady Airlie’s. He was in high good humour, and when he had greeted the hostess came up to me and said, “We have been having great fun in the House of Lords—a first-rate set-to between the Duke of Argyll and Lytton.” I asked who got the best of it. “Lytton! He gave the Duke two black eyes and a bloody nose.” Then Matthew Arnold came up, and he changed the subject. I wondered if he was thinking of the day when he acted as bottleholder to James Clay[40] in his great fight with the skipper at Constantinople. He was very proud of “Bob” Lytton, the son of his old friend—the man whom he made Governor-General of India—recognizing in him a certain Oriental colouring and poetic mysticism in which there was a kinship to his own genius.

Biography has so far scarcely done justice to Lord Beaconsfield’s memory. Monypenny’s scholarly book is a wonderful example of the infinite capacity for taking pains, but it altogether lacks that personal note which is so attractive in the best biographies—Boswell’s “Johnson,” Trevelyan’s “Macaulay,” Morley’s “Gladstone,” “The Life of Lord Randolph Churchill,” are delightful, not only as history, but also and mainly because of the long, intimate and personal connection in each case between the writer and his subject.

It is difficult to say who could have given us a perfectly satisfactory life of Disraeli, handing down to posterity a living picture of the man. Lord Rowton had all the materials, but he suffered from acute laziness, and there is nothing to show that he had the gift of penmanship. Henry Calcraft, had he lived, might have done it. He knew Lord Beaconsfield as intimately as it would be possible for a younger man to know one so much his elder. He was very much behind the scenes in politics, and he could write. I know no one else who could have had so much chance of success.

Monypenny’s book is like a posthumous portrait painted from photographs in memory of a great man, by one who never knew him—it is wanting in the life spark which only sittings could give. The study is excellent history, but how one longs for those deft touches which belong to what Goethe called “the world of the eye.” Mr. Buckle, on the other hand, in his continuation has been more successful. He has contrived to breathe soul into the cold marble statue of the first two volumes, and makes his reader regret that he did not undertake the work from the beginning.

Disraeli’s veneration for his father, his love for his sister and correspondent, Sarah, the tender reverence and gratitude in which he embalmed the memory of his wife, his faithful, unswerving allegiance to his friends, dead and alive, all these are traits in his character, which could hardly be told with living force save by those who heard his familiar talk, and listened to the music of a far-off sorrow which would sometimes come into that noble voice. Happily he himself in his “Letters Home,” and indirectly in his novels, has told us much of all this.

One morning, when he was living in Downing Street, I went to see him. It happened to be the Queen’s birthday, and after we had sat talking for a little while he made me give him my arm to walk across to the Foreign Office and see the preparations for his official dinner. We stood looking at the table, the flowers and all the glittering furniture of a great state banquet, when all of a sudden he turned round, his eyes were dim, and his voice husky, as he said: “Ah! my dear fellow, you are happy, you have a wife.” He was thinking of that devoted lady who could literally endure torture for his sake, and whose help he sorely missed to the end of his days.

The story of her heroic devotion on a memorable occasion is so old that it may be almost new. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer and was to make a great speech. Mrs. Disraeli drove with him to the House, where she was to leave him. In shutting the carriage the footman jammed her hand in the door; the agony was excruciating, but she sat like grim death and uttered never a word lest she should distract him at a moment when he needed all his wits; when he left the carriage she fell back in a dead faint! All her thoughts, all her heart, were centred in her husband and his fame; he knew it, and was deeply grateful. She was older than he was, but had been pretty, and as the widow of his colleague in the representation of Maidstone she brought him a comfortable little private gentleman’s fortune; but the expenses of public life were great, and I doubt whether, even in spite of the legacy which he received from Mrs. Brydges Williams, he was ever financially quite at his ease.

Of art for the sake of the beauty that is in it I do not think that he had any very great appreciation—sculpture galleries, the glories of Holbein, Raphael, Van Dyck, Sir Joshua, Gainsborough and the great masters seemed to appeal to him chiefly as the fitting appanage of powerful nobles and stately palaces. Just as Kant saw in pictures no more than the vanity of the man who hung them up, so to Disraeli they were sacred rather as representing pedigree and tradition than as the inspiration of genius in the artist and a source of æsthetic pleasure to the possessor.

On music I have heard him descant with but slight discrimination; but success always appealed to him, and so he would be moved by the fame of a great musician, or a great painter, whose art might perhaps fail to stir his pulses. If he was as callous in these matters as I imagine him to have been, it is curious that the only time when I saw him show any excitement—for he was past master in the art of concealing what he felt—should have been about a matter connected with art.

Sir Francis Grant died in 1878, and there was to be an election to the honour of President of the Royal Academy. On the evening of the election my wife and I dined at a very small party at Kensington Palace. I sat next to Lord Beaconsfield. Before dinner was announced he asked me whether I had heard anything as to the chances of the election. I told him that I knew that Horsley was a rival candidate, but that he could not have much prospect of beating Leighton. “Surely they will never be so foolish as to elect anybody else. He is the very man for the place.” More than once during dinner he returned eagerly to the subject, in which he took no pains to hide his interest. “Ah! well!” I remember his saying at last, looking at the clock, “it’s all over by now.”

I have spoken of his familiarity with rather out-of-the-way books. Upon one occasion we were talking of Schliemann’s discoveries at Troy and of Lowe’s refusal, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, to purchase the contents of King Priam’s treasure house—a decision which I greatly regretted. I mentioned that Lowe snuffed out the suggestion with a quotation: “Etiam periere ruinæ” was all that he said. “Ah!” said Lord Beaconsfield, “from Lucan’s ‘Pharsalia,’ a fine poem.” The quotation is of course well known, but as Lucan is not one of the authors whom the head masters have taken under their wing, I much doubt whether there were two men in the two Houses of Parliament who could have said offhand whence it came, or have given an opinion as to the merits of the poem.

Deeply read as he was, I never heard him talk of modern literature. The only comparatively modern book that I knew him to praise was “Walpole’s Letters.” Of those he spoke with enthusiasm: “No man need be dull who possesses ‘Walpole’s Letters.’” Indeed, although he was himself a man of letters, and had the deepest veneration for his father as a literary man, he had but little knowledge of the writers of his own day. Probably he was too much absorbed by politics to care for the society of the literary brotherhood. On one occasion he asked me whether there was any man whom he could invite to his official dinner on the Queen’s birthday as the representative of letters.

His answer to a fine lady who at one of the Foreign Office parties asked him “whether he wanted a really good novel?” raised much laughter. “My dear, when I want a good novel I write it.”

Lord Beaconsfield as an actor was inimitable. He was a master of stage effect, and he never gave a better example of his histrionic powers than when, in 1877, he was attacked upon his appointment of Mr. Pigott to the Controllership of the Stationery Office, which a committee of the House of Commons had declared ought to be filled by a professional stationer and printer. Ignoring this for wise and practical reasons, when the office became vacant he appointed to the post, which was worth £1,500 a year, Mr. Pigott, a clerk in the War Office. The truffle dogs of the House of Commons scented a job, and yapped all the more fiercely when they found out that Mr. Pigott was the son of the former rector of Hughenden. The Conservative Whips somehow mismanaged the affair, and a vote of censure was passed in the lower House by a majority of four votes. There was a great commotion in the country and the _Times_ condemned the appointment as “too splendidly audacious.”

I went to the House of Lords to hear the great man’s answer to all this hubbub. Never shall I forget the air of dejection, the hangdog look, with which he entered the House. His head was bent, his gait uncertain, and he sat down wearily beside the Duke of Richmond. When the clerk of the Parliaments called upon him he rose slowly and proceeded to explain the motives which had led him to the selection of Mr. Pigott. Then came the personal note. “My Lords, it has been said in an assembly almost as classical as that which I am addressing, that this appointment was a job—that the father of Mr. Pigott was the parson of my parish, that I had relations of long and intimate friendship with him, that he busied himself in county elections, and that in my earlier contests in the county with which I am connected I was indebted to his exertions. My Lords, this is really a romance.”

Here his face began to brighten. “Thirty years ago there was a vicar of my parish of the name of Pigott, and he certainly was father to this gentleman. He did not owe his preferment to me, nor was he ever under any obligation to me. Shortly after I succeeded to the property Mr. Pigott gave up his living and retired to a distant county. I have never had any relations with him. With regard to our intimate friendship and his electioneering assistance, all I know of his interference in county elections is”—here he drew himself up to his full height and looked round the House with his hands in his favourite attitude, one on each hip with the thumbs turned outwards—“is that before he departed from the County of Buckingham he registered his vote against me.” The effect was electric; the House of Lords for once was galvanized into something like life, and as he sat down radiant and triumphant amid the cheers and laughter of the good peers, I felt that I never had seen, and never again should see, so fine a piece of acting. The Lord Beaconsfield who walked out of the House that evening with a firm step was twenty years younger than the poor old man, borne down with care, and the weight of years who had shuffled into it so feebly an hour earlier.

The House of Commons apologized. Is this unique?

In June, 1879, London was stirred by the news of the death of the Prince Imperial in the Zulu war. That afternoon Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay had invited a few people to see the pictures at the Grosvenor Gallery. As I was going away I met Lord Beaconsfield on the stairs. He stopped me. “This is terrible news,” he said. “Yes,” I answered, “and I am afraid that the French will accuse our people of having deserted him and left him to his fate.” “I am not so sure that they will be wrong,” he said, and then after a pause, he added, “Well! my conscience is clear. I did all that I could to stop his going. But what can you do when you have to deal with two obstinate women?” With that he went on up the stairs, leaving me under the impression that he wished what he had said to be repeated.

The Empress overpersuaded the Queen, and the Prince went out. It was a wild-cat scheme, for he was sent out with no status in the army and therefore with no object, but the Empress thought that being a Buonaparte fighting would give him and the dynasty prestige with his people—and so an important life which could not but have weighed in the history of Europe was sacrificed. He was a gallant lad, with good abilities, and a great favourite with his contemporaries at our military college of whom my brother-in-law was one and a great friend of his. I only met him once, but was much struck by his charm of manner.

The weaknesses of great men should be recorded, otherwise anything in the shape of a memoir, or even sketch, becomes what a German critic would call a mere _Ja und Amen Buch_. Lord Beaconsfield’s weakness consisted in occasionally, perhaps unconsciously, borrowing a good saying or epigram which had struck his imagination and serving it up as his own. In the famous case of his speech on the death of the Duke of Wellington he went a step further and translated verbatim a speech or essay by Thiers on the qualities which go to make up a great Captain.

Of course this was duly shown up[41] and was the subject of much ridicule at the time—but he lived it down as he did all his other mistakes; all men, great and small, make mistakes, but whereas the small men are drowned, the great men rise up again; that is one true sign of greatness.

Almost his last speech, certainly his last great speech, was delivered on March the 4th, 1881, upon the subject of the proposed evacuation of Candahar, against which he fought stoutly and eloquently. In that speech he used these words which have been preserved as a classical utterance: “But, my Lords, the key of India is not Herat or Candahar. The key of India is London.”

Prince Lobanoff was at that time Russian ambassador, and three years later, when he was Chancellor of the Empire, we met at Contrexéville, and used to breakfast, drive out, and dine together every day. He talked a great deal of his London days and of his admiration for Lord Beaconsfield. But he told me that the day before the delivery of the Candahar speech he called in Curzon Street and had a long talk with Lord Beaconsfield on the Indian question—the Russian question, as it was called in England at that time. Lord Beaconsfield said: “We cannot evacuate Candahar, for it is the key of India.” Prince Lobanoff answered: “No! London is the key of India.” “Le lendemain il a reproduit mon mot dans son fameux discours!”

Prince Lobanoff, by the by, was a great wit and a very accomplished man. His collection of books, papers, pasquinades and MSS. concerning the great French Revolution was unique. His sudden and tragic death at Schepetowka when travelling in the suite of the Tsar on the return journey from Vienna to Kiew on the 30th of August, 1896, meant a great loss not only to Russia, but to his foreign friends. For a Russian statesman and diplomatist he was singularly outspoken. We were talking once about Russian politics. In answer to an observation of mine as to the personal power of the Tsar he remarked: “Yes! so long as he is in accord with the policy of his ministers. Lorsqu’un Empereur de Russie a voulu s’opposer à la volonté de ses ministres, on a toujours trouvé moyen de s’en débarrasser.” I was amazed!

Seldom has the month of March been more cruel, even in England, than it was in 1881. The weather was bitter, and the blighting east wind seemed to reduce men’s skin to powder. About the middle of the month we heard that Lord Beaconsfield was ailing. The old story, a slight chill. At first there was no anxiety, but when men were told after some days that he was still in bed, they began to shake their heads. That sick bed in a dull Curzon Street house (No. 19) was watched by some half dozen faithful friends, Rowton, Barrington and two or three others, who prayed, and prayed in vain, that the east wind might cease, for the doctors had said that all depended upon a change from the west bringing a little warm moisture into the air. It was hoping against hope; day after day the blasts, charged with all the filth of the great city, blew fiercely and yet more fiercely, bringing poison to those parched lungs. On the 19th of April he died, choked by London.

The mourning was universal all over the country; never, except in the case of King Edward’s death, have I seen so much feeling shown; he had won his way into the hearts of the people, who knew that in him England had lost not only a great statesman but a true lover. A mighty man had fallen. Even his political enemies admitted that he left a void which could not be filled.

There was no public funeral—no gorgeous ceremony in Westminster Abbey or St. Paul’s Cathedral. He had willed it otherwise. He was buried as he wished to be, by the side of his dearly loved wife, almost under the shadow of those trees which had been so much to him and which gave their name to the county[42] with which he was so long bound up. “You may tire of mountains and rivers, you may tire of the sea, but you can never tire of trees,” was a favourite saying of his. And so we laid him in his grave, simply, reverently. There was none of the paid panoply of woe, but great grief and true mourning. Men of all ranks were there, colleagues and foes.

As I stood by the open grave I happened to be next to Sir William Harcourt. In all that concourse there was no sadder face than that of the man who had been his enemy and his friend for so many years. No one mourned him more sincerely than the Queen, whose faithful servant he had been, and who rewarded him with an affectionate gratitude which was characteristic of her. She visited his grave and laid upon it an offering of primroses, with the inscription in her own hand, “His favourite flower.” Alive she had loaded him with honours; when he was dead she paid that last simple tribute of respect to his memory.

The “his” in the Queen’s inscription referred to the Prince Consort, whose favourite flower the primrose was. Borthwick, Drummond Wolf and others took it to refer to Lord Beaconsfield, and upon that mistake the Primrose League was founded! Lord Beaconsfield loved all trees and all flowers except the chrysanthemum—“the only vulgar flower”—he once said to me; but chrysanthemums have been wonderfully improved since his day. The Queen had been in the habit of talking much to Lord Beaconsfield about the Prince Consort, and his sympathy never failed her. He would have understood the Queen’s meaning when she spoke of “his” favourite flower. It was a tender and a gracious thought to lay upon that grave a nosegay of the humble flower which was dear to her because it had been dear to the husband whom she had lost and whom she had never ceased to mourn.

In the month of June I had to go and see Dean Stanley in order to settle with him the place in Westminster Abbey for Lord Beaconsfield’s statue—a last sad duty in connection with the dead Chief. The Dean suggested the position where the statue now stands—I concurred—“and,” said he, “I shall put Gladstone there, facing him.” Very shortly afterwards I had to go abroad, and at St. Moritz I received the news of the dear Dean’s death. Mr. Gladstone, whom he intended to “place there,” survived him by seventeen years.

That was the last time that I saw Dean Stanley, with whom I often had official relations, rendered the pleasanter in that he was a connection of my wife’s and the much loved friend of her family. As we were leaving the Abbey, I made some remark about the vandals who carve and write their names in the most sacred places. “Yes,” he said, “but even in these outrages there are sometimes compensations,” and he led me to a place where, scratched on the wall, were the letters I. W., saying, “Isaac Walton, I truly believe.”

Dean Stanley was a little man, insignificant in stature, rather shabbily dressed, with a sharply cut nose and chin, a keen, penetrating look. His lustrous eyes would sometimes blaze up as if lighted by some hidden flame. He was not exactly eloquent, nor great in conversation. But when he was excited his enthusiasm was arresting and infectious. His great charm was universally acknowledged even by his bitterest theological opponents, and personally, everybody loved him, from the Queen downwards. He and his wife were among her trustiest friends. His attitude to the dogmas of the Churches was that of St. Paul to “Jewish fables.” His Christianity was the teaching of Christ. I have often thought that, unless the haziest of traditions be absolutely worthless, the small, eager, dark man that was St. Paul must have been very like Dean Stanley. Both zealots, both fierce fighters, both so lovable.

One last word about Lord Beaconsfield. The abuse that has been showered upon him would fill volumes. No less has been written in his defence. He has been accused of being an adventurer, a pretentious fop, an impostor, a self-seeking charlatan, who by some uncanny means contrived to cajole the Tory party, and to become master of the landed gentry of England. Nothing could be more untrue. Had he been what his detractors described him, he never could have won the confidence of perhaps the most exclusive caste in the whole world.

Benjamin Disraeli was an aristocrat to his fingers’ tips. He belonged by descent to the Sephardim, that proud race of Jews who, “in the time of Cicero, had been settled immemorially in Spain.”[43] Theirs was a nobility which dated back by tradition to Abraham, that Arab chieftain whose wanderings from the fringe of the desert to Damascus and Padan-Aram are recorded in the Book of Genesis. “That,” says a great writer who is no friend to the Jews, “is nobility in the fullest sense of the word, genuine nobility of race! Beautiful forms, noble heads, dignity in speech and deportment ... that out of such men prophets and psalmists should go forth, that I understood at the first glance.” Those words might stand for a portrait of Disraeli.

The aristocracy to which he belonged sprang from another continent, another world from ours; but alien though it might be, it brought him into close sympathy with the bluest blood in England, and that, I take it, is why he was able to gain an intimate personal influence in the inner sanctuaries of politics and of society which had never been achieved by men springing from the middle class, not even by Sir Robert Peel. “When I was a young and struggling man,” he is reported to have said shortly before his death, “they taunted me with being an adventurer. Now that I have succeeded they still bring the same reproach against me. Me! whose ancestors may have had personal relations with the Queen of Sheba!” It was a jest expressing a conviction, for, like the poet Heine—also a Jew by birth, a Christian by confession, in whom the Philhellenic attraction of years paled before the romance of the Old Testament—as he grew older he became more and more imbued with a sacred sense of ancestry.

No mere vulgar adventurer could have welded into shape the Young England party—his first great political achievement. Lord John Manners, Baillie Cochrane (Lord Lamington), George Smythe, afterwards Lord Strangford, were men of family, high culture, and distinction. Not for one moment would they have admitted to their intimacy, and fallen under the sway of, a man whom they did not deem their equal. But Benjamin Disraeli, the descendant of the Princes of the Desert, possessed a magnetic spark of the mysterious sacred fire which made him as welcome to those great Dames who ruled Almack’s with a rod of iron as to Kensington Gore, where D’Orsay was King and Lady Blessington Queen of a society half aristocratic, half Bohemian, wholly delightful. This it was which finally enabled him to win over and mould to his purpose the haughty magnates of the Carlton Club.

Almost all his associations, almost all his friends, were among those whose forbears had made history. He was fascinated by the power of race, though sometimes he could not help remembering that even the descendants of Crusaders were but the mushroom aristocracy of a single night by the side of those of the courtiers of King Solomon. “Don’t talk to me of dukes! Dukes can be made!” he said impatiently on a memorable occasion when a great public dinner was kept waiting for a duke who was to take the chair. But those were mere passing whims. To the end the ladies whose society he courted were those who had been foremost queens of fashion in his boyish days. The Russian Ambassador might sneer at them as being “toutes grand’mères,”—for Dizzy, their race endowed them with the charm of eternal youth; he enwrapped them in a poetical halo which had the magic power of the Fontaine de Jouvence. Chief among them were the three beautiful Forester sisters—Lady Chesterfield, Mrs. Anson and Lady Bradford. Mrs. Anson died comparatively young, but the other two sisters reigned as goddesses in his Olympus so long as he lived. Tithonus grows old; Aurora never.

Among his male friends there was none of whom he spoke with such affectionate admiration as he did of Count D’Orsay. Dandy, wit and artist, recognized as the handsomest man of his day, the grandson of a King, the spoilt child of society in Paris and London—the brilliant Frenchman appealed to an Oriental imagination which, as is well known, was always dazzled by splendour and colour. I never saw Count D’Orsay, for he died when I was but fifteen years old, and he had left England for a year or two before that; but according to the testimony of such various men as my father, Lord Beaconsfield, Jem Macdonald, Alfred Montgomery, and others he must have been a striking personality, exceptionally gifted and attractive. Even the great Duke of Wellington could not resist his fascination.

I have already mentioned some of the men to whom Dizzy was attached, but there was one for whom he entertained an especial liking and respect, though in him, as his estimate of him quoted by Monypenny shows, he was sensible of some shortcomings. Apart from ancient lineage, which he lacked, Lord Lyndhurst possessed many of the beauties, both of mind and form, in which Lord Beaconsfield recognized the hero. When I knew him the ex-Chancellor was a very old man, for he died at the age of ninety-one in 1863. Aged as he was, his mind was as active and bright as ever, and though he wore a wig, he retained to the end something more than traces of the splendid masculine beauty for which he had once been famous. I have heard men say that when he delivered one of his great speeches he was as good to look upon as he was to hear. He was at one time threatened with blindness, but mercifully his eyes were saved. It was a green old age, noble and beautiful, tended by the love of wife and daughter.

His memory was prodigious. I remember one remarkable instance of it. I was dining one night at his house in George Street, Hanover Square, when there were two or three racing grandees present—among them Baron Meyer de Rothschild (Lady Rosebery’s father), Sir Robert Peel, and Lord Coventry. Baron Meyer had at that time a mare called Tomyris about which there was some excitement among Turfites. “Baron, what made you call that mare of yours Tomȳris?” asked Sir Robert, with a strong accent on the second syllable. “I’m sure I don’t know,” answered the Baron, “I suppose because she’s by King Tom.” But the old Lord had caught Sir Robert’s false quantity. “Tomȳris! who said Tomȳris?” he asked. “Don’t you remember the story of Tomȳris the Queen of the Massagetæ who conquered and killed Cyrus?” and then he went off at score telling the gruesome legend of how, to avenge the death of her son, she caused the dead King’s head to be cut off and put into a skin filled with human blood, saying: “You wanted to drink blood, now drink your fill of it!” And then the old Lord added: “You will find the whole story at the end of the first book of Herodotus.” When I got home I looked up the passage. Surely a marvellous example of memory.

Immersed as he had been in law and politics for seventy years—a life-time—how many years must have passed since he could have had leisure to read Herodotus? Outside his own house I never met him but once. There was a great ball at Apsley House, and the grand old Chancellor had himself carried upstairs and wheeled into the ballroom to see the young folk dance. I was standing by his chair when the Duke of Wellington came up to bid him welcome. There was a touch of pathos in the handsome old man’s voice as he said, “Ah! time was when I used to skip up those stairs gaily enough, when I came to see your dear father.” The great Duke was but three years older than Lord Lyndhurst, but he had already been dead some ten years. The two had not only been political allies when Lord Lyndhurst was Chancellor in the Duke’s Administration, but they were firm friends, and the affection lived in the survivor when the friendship had ceased to be aught but a happy memory.

To us who loved him, Lord Beaconsfield remains a brilliant and an inspiring memory; of those who did not love him I believe that none would now even listen to the malignity with which he was once assailed. Though they disapprove of his principles, they admit that he was actuated by no selfish motives and that under his rule England was governed in a spirit of true patriotism. That verdict would have been the realization of all his ambition.

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