Art. 11.-DISRAELI; THE MIDDLE PHASE.

The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, 1846-1868. Vol. III, by W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle; Vol. IV, by G. E. Buckle. Murray, 1914, 1916. THE War, whose influence permeates everywhere, leaves, or seems to leave, nothing unchanged. Even towards the biographer groping in his study among the relics of dead men it feels its way, modifying his landmarks and causing his judgments to tremble. He may ignore it, but it will not for that spare him. A change of values has run through the society he inhabits; and even the shades of men will be tried by unfamiliar measures. The cataclysm caught Lord Beaconsfield's biographers half-way upon their road. Mr Monypenny had laid his plans in the gay sunshine of a smiling world, to which visionaries foretold eternal peace, and where politics had grown to seem a game and the wrath of politicians as the wrath of lovers; but he himself was cut off before his race was run, and the friend who has taken his place has had to bear the double burden of a task unfinished and ill-conceived and a public temper changed out of all recognition. For the laughing and luxurious crowds have scattered to the winds. Cynicism has become bad taste, and worse. The eternal moralities are once more in the ascendant. Politics are reckoned a grave concern ; solemn plausibilities are on every tongue; Vengeance cries aloud in the streets. It is the hour of Gladstone, not of Disraeli.

If the protagonist be wanting the programme at least is to the fore. Gladstonian principles are borne on all the winds that blow. It is, we are assured on every hand, the battle of democracy that we fight; and the suffrage, when peace is signed, or even before, is likely to be distributed on the most lavish lines, to all and sundry, without check or hindrance. Christian ethics, or at least some more or less accurate conception of them, have been asserted with truly Gladstonian confidence; and the cause of civilisation is presented as the cause of the saints. The rights of small nations are a common article of faith. Home Rule has followed in their wake. The Turk, whose empire we had preserved,

and whose iniquities we had condoned, is now finally abjured. And Disraeli's ghost has been sent before its time to walk behind the footlights, where, indeed, Disraeli's self had always in some sense moved.

This, then, or something like it, is the change which the War has wrought in the subject of Mr Buckle's studies. Disraeli, one might perhaps say, was a creed and is a character. The world will not indeed altogether forget him, but the new generation that is growing up under the shadow of the widest of all wars will think of him rather as we had been accustomed to think of 'the Jesuit of Berkeley Square,' or of Bolingbroke or Halifax; not having much use for him, perhaps, except in an idle hour as an enigma to be solved. Every year a biography is delayed, its potentialities, except in the case of the greatest men or the greatest biographers, are reduced by so many pages; and the Life which in 1890 might have safely extended to five volumes will in 1920 seem over long in three. And a five-volume Life, which makes its appearance volume by volume, suffers, besides, every immediate disadvantage. The intelligent reader is repelled by the barbarous arrangements of the serial story. The fire is kindled and then perishes again; by the close of the strange drama, we have half forgotten the commencement. If Mr Buckle is unsympathetic, the ghost of Disraeli, one may at least be confident, would, if appealed to, not withhold its compassion-would, in fact, quickly appropriate a familiar witticism and sardonically apologise for taking so unconscionable a time in coming to birth.

But enough has been made of such complaints; and it would be ungracious to the dead and unjust to the living to dwell upon them. Mr Buckle has discharged a task in any case difficult, and rendered doubly difficult by Mr Monypenny's death, with all the competence and all the care that the world has a right to expect in one who has filled a unique position and occupied a famous chair. The book displays a continuity of treatment which is truly admirable. If it is not the product of one author, it is at least the work of one school, and that school the best in English journalism. The language is of that character, at once distinguished and confident, for which we are accustomed to look to Printing-House

Square. And the thought is in keeping with it, betraying no secrets, risking no intimacies, climbing no heights nor plumbing any depths, but remaining always urbane, temperate, and abounding in adaptability. Who could fail to suspect that the mind which steers us so skilfully through the mazy windings of Disraelite ethics is one and the same with that which we had once recognised as the benevolent autocrat of our breakfast tables, to whose persuasive influences our minds had often yielded in the submissive hours of common day, but against which we had sometimes chanced to rebel amid the republican fashions of the evening? For the stiller and more critical seasons, when the growing darkness without provokes the inward eye to an unnatural alertness, Mr Buckle's philosophy, it must be confessed, does not altogether suffice. It is not merely that at such times the palate welcomes those strong wines of morality, with which the biographer of Disraeli's great opponent seasons every page he writes; it is that, in fact, the waters Mr Buckle provides, being neither sweet nor bitter, furnish no manner of refreshment.

Roughly speaking, the two volumes under review describe respectively Disraeli's attempts to convert his party to free-trade and to democracy. In each case he proved brilliantly successful; but, in the one instance, he was himself adopting a policy for the adoption of which he had once assailed another human being with all and more than all the venom of the political vocabulary; and, in the other, he was responsible for introducing, without having first resigned or consulted the constituencies, a change more fundamental than, and as little expected as, any for which Peel had been responsible. The moralisation of statecraft and the canonisation of statesmen are, of course, some of the less admirable functions of the Daily Press. But, when politics pass into history, such operations cease to carry conviction; and in the case of Disraeli they are peculiarly ill-judged. No serious critic will ever place him amongst the honest people of the world; and no amount of conventional morality will ever embellish a being so altogether original. He was both an audacious adventurer and a brilliant actor; and he dared and posed with humorous

and, it must be owned at this distance of time, rather engaging cynicism. Political virtue owes nothing to him; and he scarcely troubled to pay it even the tribute of hypocrisy. His is essentially a portrait requiring high lights and deep shadows; and, because Mr Buckle fears to darken the shadows, he partly fails to show the lights. For Disraeli's cynicism was not all-pervading. There were things he cared about, though they were not the things that men mostly cared about in his day. His temptations would have been fewer, though his success would have been less assured, if he had lived in the twentieth instead of in the nineteenth century.

The ground surveyed in the third and fourth volumes of the Life is that which lies between 1846 and 1868, or, to substitute events for dates, between the fall of Peel and the resignation of Derby. Its principal feature, from our present point of view, is, as has been said, the reconstitution of the Conservative party on the basis of freetrade and democracy-a contour difficult to depict, and demanding a bolder and a swifter brush than Mr Buckle has always at his command, but affording also charming studies, of which advantage has been taken in the chapters on Mrs Brydges Willyams and Disraeli's relations with the Court. From these the reader will derive a keener pleasure and towards them he will direct a softer gaze. Some general notion of the country thus delineated -and there is space here for nothing more-may be best obtained by first following the main track to its conclusion and then straying a little into the by-ways.

No one can justly measure Disraeli's political enterprise and political achievement, who has not first considered the condition of the Tory party at the close of 1846. It had then all the appearance of a room swept and garnished. Its effective programme, as well as its most commanding personalities, had been lost with Peel; and it was Palmerston and not Derby who for the two succeeding decades embodied that unphilosophic conservatism, dear to the English mind, which rests upon a dislike of change and a recognition of the fait accompli. Among the small remnant of Conservative leaders in the Commons there was not one, Bentinck (and of course Disraeli) excepted, whom any but the erudite now recall;

and even Bentinck owes it mainly to Disraeli that his memory has survived. Herries and Bankes were the only men in the whole company who had enjoyed the experience of office. For the rest, the Protectionists depended upon Thomas Baring, Henley, Inglis and the brothers Manners. Since the fall of Bolingbroke the Tory party had never, probably, been so destitute. It needed both philosophy and leadership-to know itself and to marshal its forces. The hour was pregnant with opportunity-one of those rare occasions, such as promises to occur at the close of the present war-when parties are ripe for reshaping, and insight and imagination reap a reward too often denied them. So far, at least, Disraeli had everything to his advantage. But, if there was a fair field, there was far from being no favour. The gentlemen of England-and Disraeli made it plain that the leadership of gentlemen was at the core of his political system *-neither thought him a gentleman nor desired him for a leader. In the months which succeeded the resignation of Bentinck he was evidently a great embarrassment. Stanley (as Derby still was then) felt it to be equally impossible to offer him the leadership in the Commons or to offer it to another; and an attempt to induce him to serve under a figure-head met with a firm refusal. He knew his market value and was resolved to get the proper price. A veil was eventually thrown over the unpalatable fact. The leadership in the Commons was put in commission, and Disraeli, Granby, and Herries were formed into a triumvirate; but, as Aberdeen justly observed, there was no doubt who would play the part of First Consul. And, indeed, in about as many weeks as Napoleon took years Disraeli had shaken off his colleagues.

Thenceforward there were only three characters that counted for anything in the Tory combination-the two Stanleys, father and son, and Disraeli himself; and his relations with the two men form not the least interesting nor the least important part of Mr Buckle's story. Towards the elder Stanley-that same Stanley whom reverential politicians styled 'the Rupert of Debate' and irreverent ones 'the Jockey,' and whose behaviour in the

*The proper leaders of the people are the gentlemen of England.'