Part 17

To convince this class that spiritual and temporal good can be improved upon by a more liberal policy has been a task a thousand times greater than the exciting of the poor to riot. It is easy to fire the discontented, but to arouse the rich and carry truth home to the blindly prejudiced is a different matter. Too often the reformer has been one who caused the rich to band themselves against the poor.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a Tory who defended the existing order on the plea of its usefulness.

He approached the vital issue from the inside, taught the conservative to think, and thus opened the eyes of the aristocrats without exciting their fears or unduly arousing their wrath.

Self-preservation prompts men to move in the line of least resistance. And that any man should ever have put his safety in peril by questioning the authority of those able and ready to confiscate his property and take away his life is very strange. Such a person must belong to one of two types. He must be either a revolutionist--one who would supplant existing authority with his own, thus knowingly and willingly hazarding all--or he is an innocent, indiscreet individual, absolutely devoid of all interest in the main chance.

Coleridge belonged to the last-mentioned type. Genius needs a keeper. Here was a man so absorbed in abstract thought, so intent on attaining high and holy truth, that he neglected his friends, neglected his family, neglected himself until his body refused to obey the helm. It is easy to find fault with such a man, but to refuse to grant an admiring recognition of his worth, on account of what he was not, is an error, pardonable only to the rude, crude and vulgar. The cultivated mind sees the good and fixes attention on that.

Coleridge formulated no system, solved no complex problems, made no brilliant discoveries. But his habit of analysis enriched the world beyond power to compute. He taught men to think and separate truth from error. He was not popular, for he did not adapt himself to the many. His business was to teach teachers--he conducted a Normal School, and taught teachers how to teach. Coleridge went to the very bottom of a subject, and his subtle mind refused to take anything for granted. He approached every proposition with an unprejudiced mind. In his "Aids to Reflection," he says, "He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and then end in loving himself better than all."

The average man believes a thing first, and then searches for proof to bolster his opinion. Every observer must have noticed the tenuous, cobweb quality of reasons that are deemed sufficient to the person who thinks he knows, or whose interests lie in a certain direction. The limitations of men seem to make it necessary that pure truth should come to us through men who are stripped for eternity. Kant, the villager who never traveled more than a day's walk from his birthplace, and Coleridge, the homeless and houseless aristocrat, with no selfish interests in the material world, view things without prejudice.

The method of Coleridge, from his youth, was to divide the whole into parts. Then he begins to eliminate, and divides down, rejecting all things that are not the thing, until he finds the thing. He begins all inquiries by supposing that nothing is known on the subject. He will not grant you that murder and robbery are bad--you must show why they are bad, and if you can not explain, he will take the subject up and divide it into heads for you.

First, the effect on the sufferer. Second, the evil to the doer. Third, the danger of a bad example. Fourth, the injury to society through the feeling of insecurity. Fifth, the pain given to the families of both doer and sufferer. Next he will look for excuses for the crime and give all the credit he can; and then finally strike a balance and give a conclusion.

One of Coleridge's best points was in calling attention to what constitutes proof; he saw all fallacies and discovered at a glance illusions in logic that had long been palmed off on the world as truth. He saw the gulf that lies between coincidence and sequence, and hastened the day when the old-time pedant with his mighty tomes and tiresome sermons about nothing should be no more. And so today, in the Year of Grace Nineteen Hundred, the man who writes must have something to say, and he who speaks must have a message. "Coleridge," says Principal Shairp, "was the originator and creator of the higher criticism." The race has gained ground, made head upon the whole; and thanks to the thinkers gone, there are thinkers now in every community who weigh, sift, try and decide. No statement made by an interested party can go unchallenged. "How do you know?" and "Why?" we ask.

That is good which serves--man is the important item, this earth is the place, and the time is now. So all good men and women and all churches are endeavoring to make earth heaven; and all agree that to live, now and here, the best you can, is the fittest preparation for a life to come.

We no longer accept the doctrine that our natures are rooted in infamy, and that the desires of the flesh are cunning traps set by Satan, with God's permission, to undo us. We believe that no one can harm us but ourselves, that sin is misdirected energy, that there is no devil but fear, and that the universe is planned for good. On every side we find beauty and excellence held in the balance of things. We know that work is needful, that winter is as necessary as summer, that night is as useful as day, that death is a manifestation of life, and just as good. We believe in the Now and Here. We believe in a power that is in ourselves that makes for righteousness.

These things have not been taught us by a superior class who have governed us for a consideration, and to whom we have paid taxes and tithes--we have simply thought things out for ourselves, and in spite of them. We have listened to Coleridge, and others, who said: "You should use your reason and separate the good from the bad, the false from the true, the useless from the useful. Be yourself and think for yourself; and while your conclusions may not be infallible they will be nearer right than the opinions forced upon you by those who have a personal interest in keeping you in ignorance. You grow through the exercise of your faculties, and if you do not reason now you never will advance. We are all sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. Claim your heritage!"

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

The stimulus subsided. The paroxysms ended in prostration. Some took refuge in melancholy, and their eminent chief alternated between a menace and a sigh. As I sat opposite the Treasury bench, the Ministers reminded me of those marine landscapes not unusual on the coasts of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes; not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest; but the situation is still dangerous: there are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the dark rumblings of the sea. --_Speech at Manchester_

[Illustration: BENJAMIN DISRAELI]

Since Disraeli was born a Jew, he was received into the Jewish Church with Jewish rites. But Judaism, standing in the way of his ambition, and his parents' ambition for him, the religion of his fathers was renounced and he became, in name, a Christian. Yet to the last his heart was with his people, and the glory of his race was his secret pride.

The fine irony of affiliating with a people who worship a Jew as their Savior, but who have legislated against, and despised the Jew--this attracted Disraeli. With them he bowed the knee in an adoration they did not feel, and while his lips said the litany, his heart repeated Ben Ezra's prayer. In temperament he belonged with the double-dealing East. He intuitively knew the law of jiu jitsu, best exemplified by the Japanese, and won often by yielding. He was bold, but not too bold.

Israel Zangwill, shrewdest, keenest and kindliest of Jews--with the tragedy of his race pictured on his furrowed face, a face like an ancient weather-worn statue on whose countenance grief has petrified--has summed up the character of Disraeli as no other man ever has or can. I will not rob the reader by quoting from "The Primrose Sphinx"--that gem of letters must ever stand together without subtraction of a word. It belongs to the realm of the lapidary, and its facets can not be transferred. Yet when Mr. Zangwill refers to the Mephistophelian curl of Lord Beaconsfield's lip, the word is used advisedly. No character in history so stands for the legendary Mephisto as does this man. The Satan of the Book of Job, jaunty, daring, joking with his Maker, is the Mephisto of Goethe and all the other playwriters who, have used the character. Mephisto is so much above the ordinary man in sense of humor--which is merely the right estimate of values--so sweeping in intellect, that Milton pictures him as a dispossessed god, the only rival of Deity.

Disraeli, not satisfied with playing the part of Mephisto and tempting men to their ruin, but thirsting for a wider experience, turns Faustus himself and sells his soul for a price. He knows that everything in life is sold--nothing is given gratis--we pay for knowledge with tears; for love with pain; for life with death. He haggles and barters with Fate, and pays the penalty because he must.

He alternately affronts and cajoles his enemies; takes all that the world has to give; knows every pleasure; wins every prize; makes love to the daughters of men (without loving them); and winning the one he selects, secretly thanks Jehovah, God of his fathers, that he leaves no offspring--because the woman fit for his mate and equal to mothering his children does not exist.

The sublimity of his egotism stands unrivaled. It is so great that it is admirable. We lift our hats to this man. Napoleon gained the field without prejudice; but this man enters the list with hate and prejudice arrayed against him. He plays the pawns of chance with literature, religion, politics, and moves the queen so as to checkmate all adversaries. He flouts love, but to show the world that he yet knows the ideal, he occasionally pictures truth and trusting affection in his speeches and books. This entire game of life is to him only a diversion.

They may jeer him down in the House of Commons, but his patience is unruffled. He says, "Very well, I will wait." Now and again he smiles that wondrous, contagious smile, showing his white teeth and the depth of his dark, burning eyes.

He knows his power. He revels in the wit he never expresses; he glories in this bright blade of the intellect that is never fully unsheathed.

They think he is interested in English politics--pish! Only world problems really interest him, and those that lie behind mean as much to him as those that are to come. He is one with eternity, and the vanquished glory of Rome, the marble beauty of Athens, the Assyrian Sphinx, the flight from Egypt under the leadership of one who had killed his man--yet had talked with God face to face--these and the dim uncertainty of the unseen, are the things that interest him. He is a dreamer of the Ghetto.

* * * * *

There was no taint of mixed blood in the veins of Benjamin Disraeli. He traced his ancestry in a record that looks like a chapter from the Book of Numbers. His forebears had known every persecution, every contumely, slight and disgrace. Driven from Spain by the Inquisition, barely escaping with life, when Jewish blood actually fertilized the fields about Granada, his direct ancestor became one of the builders of Venice. The Jews practically controlled the trade of the world in the sun-kissed days of prosperity, when Venice produced the books and the art of Christendom.

To trace an ancestry back to those who enthroned Venice on her hundred isles was surely something of which to be proud; and into the blood of Benjamin Disraeli went a dash of the gleam and glory and glamour of Venice--the Venice of the Doges.

This man's grandfather came to England with a goodly fortune, which he managed to increase as the years went by. He had one son, Isaac, who nearly broke his parents' heart in that he not only showed no aptitude for business, but actually wrote poems wherein commerce was held up to ridicule. The tendency of the artistic nature to speak with disdain of the "mere money-grabber," and the habit of the "money-grabber" to refer patronizingly to the helpless, theoretical and dreamy artist, is well known. Isaac Disraeli was an artist in feeling; he must have been a reincarnation of one of those bookmakers of Venice who touched hands with Titian and Giorgione and helped to invest wisely the moneys the merchants of the Rialto made. Never a Gratiano had a greater contempt for a merchant than he. Just to get him out of the way, his parents packed Isaac off to Europe, where he acquired several languages, and some other things, with that ease which the Jew always manifests. He dallied in art, pecked at books, and made the acquaintance of many literary men.

When his father died and left him a goodly fortune, he had the sense to turn the entire management of the estate over to his wife, a woman with a thorough business instinct, while he busied himself with his books.

Benjamin was the second child of these parents. He had a sister older than himself, and two brothers younger. Those philosophers who claim that spirits have their own individuality in the unseen world, and the accident of birth really does not constitute a kinship between brothers and sisters, will find here something that looks like proof. Benjamin Disraeli bore no resemblance in mental characteristics to his sister or brothers; he did, however, possess the mental virtues of both father and mother, multiplied by ten.

When twelve years of age he exhibited that intense disposition for mastery which was through life his distinguishing trait. The Jew does not outrank the Gentile in strength, but the average Jew surely does have the faculty of concentration which the average Gentile does not possess. And that is what constitutes strength--the ability to focus the mind on one thing and compass it: to concentrate is power.

When Ben was sent to the Unitarian school at Walthamstow, aged fifteen, it was his first taste of school life. Up to this time his father had been his tutor. Now he found himself cast into that den of wild animals--an English school for boys. His Jewish name and features and his dandy ways and attire made him the instant butt of the playground. Ben very patiently surveyed his tormentors, waited to pick his man, and then challenged the biggest boy in the school to single combat. The exasperating way in which he coolly went about the business set his adversary's teeth chattering before the call of "time." The result of the fight was that, even if "Dizzy" was not thoroughly respected from that day forth, no one ever called, "Old clo'! Old clo'!" within his hearing. Of course it was not generally advertised that the lad had been taking boxing lessons from "Coster Joe" for three years, with the villainies of a boys' school in view. In fact, boxing was this young man's diversion, and the Coster on several occasions expressed great regret that writing and politics had robbed the ring of one who showed promise of being the cleverest welter-weight of his time.

The main facts in both "Vivian Gray" and "Contarini Fleming" are autobiographical. Like Byron, upon whom Disraeli fed, the author never got far away from himself.

It was not long before the intense personality of young Disraeli made itself felt throughout the Walthamstow school. The young man smiled at the pedant's idolatry of facts, and seized the vital point in every lesson. He felt himself the superior of every one in the establishment, master included--and he was.

Before a year he split the school into two factions--those who favored Ben Disraeli, and those who were opposed to him. The master cast his vote with the latter class, and the result was that Ben withdrew, thus saving the authorities the trouble of expelling him. His leave-taking was made melodramatic with a speech to the boys, wherein impertinent allusions were made concerning all schoolmasters, and the master of Walthamstow in

## particular.

And thus ended the school life of Benjamin Disraeli, the year at Walthamstow being his first and last experience.

However, Ben was not indifferent to study; he felt sure that there was a great career before him, and he knew that knowledge was necessary to success. With his father's help he laid out a course of work that kept him at his tasks ten hours a day. His father was a literary man of acknowledged worth, and mingled in the best artistic society of London. Into this society Benjamin was introduced, meeting all his father's acquaintances on an absolute equality. The young man at eighteen was totally unabashed in any company; he gave his opinion unasked, criticized his elders, flashed his wit upon the guests and was looked upon with fear, amusement or admiration, as the case might be.

Froude says of him, "The stripling was the same person as the statesman at seventy, with this difference only, that the affectation which was natural in the boy was itself affected in the matured politician, whom it served well for a mask, or as a suit of impenetrable armor."

* * * * *

That literature is the child of parents is true. That is to say, it takes two to produce a book. Of course there are imitation books, sort o' wax figures that look like books, made through habit by those that have been many years upon the turf, and who work automatically; but every real, live, throbbing, pulsing book was written by a man with a woman at his elbow, or vice versa.

When twenty-one years of age Benjamin Disraeli produced "Vivian Gray." The woman in the case was Mrs. Austen, wife of a prosperous London solicitor. This lady was handsome, a brilliant talker, a fine musician and an amateur artist of no mean ability. She was much older than Disraeli--she must have been in order to comprehend that the young man's frivolity was pretense, and his foppery affectation. A girl of his own age, whose heart-depths had not been sounded by experience, would have fallen in love with the foppery (or else despised it--which is often the same thing); but Mrs. Austen, mature in years, with a decade of London "seasons" behind her, having met every possible kind of man Europe had to offer, discovered that the world did not know Ben Disraeli at all. She saw that the youth did not reveal his true self, and that instead of courting society for its own sake he had a supreme contempt for it. She intuitively knew that he was seething in discontent, and with prophetic vision she knew that his restless power and his ambition would yet make him a marked figure in the world of letters or politics, or both.

For love as a passion, or supreme sentiment, ruling one's life, Disraeli had no sympathy. He shunned love for fear it might bind him hand and foot. Love not only is blind, but love blinds its votary, and Disraeli, knowing this, fled for freedom when the trail grew warm. A man madly in love is led, subdued--imagine Mephisto captured, crying it out on his knees with his head in a woman's lap!

But Mrs. Austen was happily married, the mother of a family, and occupied a position high in London society.

Marriage with her was out of the question, and scandal and indiscretion equally so--Ben Disraeli felt safe with Mrs. Austen. With her he put off his domino and grew simple and confidential.

And so the lady, doubtless a bit flattered--for she was a woman--set herself to push on the hazard of new fortunes. She encouraged him to write his novel of "Vivian Gray"--discussed every phase of it, read chapter after chapter as they were produced, and by her gentle encouragement and warm sympathy fired the mind of the young man to the point of production.

The book is absurd in plot, and like most first books, flashy and overdrawn. And yet there is a deal of power in it, and the thinly veiled characters were speedily pointed out as living personages. Literary London went agog, and Mrs. Austen fanned the flame by inviting "the set" to her drawing-room to hear the great author read from his amusing work. The best feature of the book, and probably the saving feature, is that the central figure in the plot is Disraeli, himself, and upon his own head the author plays his shafts of wit and ridicule. The impertinence and impudence which he himself manifested were parodied, caricatured and played upon, to the great delight of the uninitiated rabble, who gave themselves much credit for having made a discovery.

The man who scorns, scoffs, gibes and jeers other men, and at the same time is willing to drop his guard and laugh at himself, is not a bad man. Very, very seldom is found a man under thirty who does not take himself and all his wit seriously. But Disraeli, the lawyer's clerk, at twenty was wise and subtle beyond all men in London Town. Mrs. Austen must have been wise, too, for had she been like most other good women she would have wanted her protege admired, and have rebelled in tears at the thought of placing him in a position where society would serve him up for tittle-tattle. Small men can be laughed down, but great ones, never.

A little American testimony as to the appearance of Disraeli in his manhood may not here be amiss. Says N.P. Willis: "He was sitting in a window looking on Hyde Park, the last rays of sunlight reflected from the gorgeous gold flowers of a splendidly embroidered waistcoat. Patent-leather pumps, a white stick with a black cord and tassel, and a quantity of chains about his neck and pockets, served to make him a conspicuous object. He has one of the most remarkable faces I ever saw. He is lividly pale, and but for the energy of his action and strength of his lungs would seem to be a victim of consumption. His eye is black as Erebus, and has the most mocking, lying-in-wait sort of expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind of working and impatient nervousness, and when he has burst forth, as he does constantly, with a

## particularly successful cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of