Novelists From England

"I still retain a vivid recollection of his appearance, his black curly hair, his affected manner, and his somewhat fantastic dress... He excited my wonder—perhaps my admiration—by his extraordinary and foppish dress. He wore waistcoats of the most gorgeous colours and the most fantastic patterns, with much gold embroidery, velvet pantaloons, and shoes adorned with red rosettes."

"He was an aristocrat of aristocrats. He had no notion of allowing political power to be divorced from the principle of birth and property. He always spoke of the country gentlemen of England as the natural leaders of the rural population. Both in his speeches and in his writings he loved to dwell on the advantages of what he called "a territorial constitution." And perhaps he did not always make sufficient allowance for the inroads which had been made in it during the fifty years that followed the first Reform Bill. Such, at least, is the impression which his language on the subject has left upon my own mind. His sarcasms at the expense of the English aristocracy were limited to a very small section of them, though often mistaken for contempt of aristocracy in general. There could not be a greater error. He believed himself to possess a pedigree compared with which the pedigrees of the oldest families in Christendom were as things of yesterday."

"He never adopted with any heartiness the new régime which was established by the Reform Bill of 1832. Of ancient and illustrious descent, he could sympathise with a genuine aristocracy. A self-made man...he could sympathise with labour. But with the great "middle man"—the great middle class so long regarded as the backbone of English life—his sympathies, I suspect, were small. Herein, I think, lies the key to his entire policy... [H]e said in 1839, speaking of the throne of Louis Philippe, "I have no faith in a middle-class monarchy". He saw that the old aristocratic régime, with all its external anomalies, and all the fictions which he satirized, represented fixed principles and contained large elements of power. He believed the same of a great popular monarchy based on the love and loyalty of the people, such as he believed the monarchy of the Tudors to have been. But he evidently did not believe in the stability of institutions founded only on a compromise and appealing only to the selfish instincts of capitalists."

"Lord Beaconsfield was one of the three great Tory Ministers of the last hundred years ... The other two are Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Pitt ... Pitt virtually put an end to the quarrel between the King and the aristocracy, and reconciled the Tory doctrine of Monarchy with the Whig doctrine of Parliament. Peel accommodated Toryism to the new régime established by the Reform Bill, and his name will always be identified with the progress of middle-class reform. Lord Beaconsfield carried Toryism into the next stage, and made it the business of his life to close up the gap in our social system which, during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, had, as he thought, gradually been widening, and to reconcile the working classes to the Throne, the Church, and the Aristocracy."

""The landed interest of England" was, to the day of his death, the object of his devotion; and on it he constantly maintained that the greatness of England had been reared. Hence his opinions on Free Trade and Protection."

"For an earlier period, Disraeli would surely be the locus classicus. But it would be hard to say that Disraeli was ever pursuing an intellectual agenda, or that his purposes were fully realized in his political undertakings. He had unusually sharp political instincts, both about what was possible and what was necessary: about how much change was needed if you wished to keep the important things as they were. In this respect Disraeli is the living embodiment of the Edmund Burke–Thomas Macaulay version of English history: a story in which the country serially and successfully undertakes minor adjustments in order to avoid major transformations across the centuries. But of course, it all depends what you mean by "minor" and "major." Disraeli was responsible for the 1867 Second Reform Act which added a million voters to the election rolls. Even if we assume that this too was a calculated release of the political safety valve—a move meant to head off popular demands for more radical reform—it still bespeaks a political intelligence beyond the norm. Disraeli, the first conservative politician to grasp the possibilities of mass electoral support and appreciate that democracy need not undermine the core powers of a ruling elite, was also unusual among his mid-Victorian contemporaries in appreciating at an early stage how much Britain would need to change if it were to remain a world power."

"Lord O. Russell said that the impression which Lord Beaconsfield made at Berlin was extraordinarily great, and that it was impossible to overrate the extreme ability with which he conducted much of the Congress business. The other representatives were evidently afraid of him, and of all the marked men assembled there, no one was regarded with so much curiosity or treated with so much deference."

"The last phase of principled politics in England came with the appearance of Benjamin Disraeli. He learned to think inductively from his profound father Isaac Disraeli, and moulded his political scepticism on the principles of Bolingbroke. Disraeli failed because his insight into politics coincided with the hey-day of laisser-faire. The transitory economic advantages of that system brooked no criticism while they lasted, Disraeli laboured after a precautionary unity that was not for the moment an economic necessity. In the Conservatism of Sir Robert Peel, he found a middle-class and short-sighted policy. The Conservative party was in much the same state as it is to-day, appealing to moderate opinion because it was entirely noncommittal through a confusion of values. It tried to apply Tory standards to Liberal conditions and inevitably sacrificed the standards to the conditions. The ruling classes had lain fallow since the Napoleonic wars, and principles of government were laid aside heedless of the future. Disraeli looked on the growing City of London as a Whig creation, and he understood Protection as Bismarck did, and later Joseph Chamberlain, from a national and not a manufacturers' point of view. To Disraeli the items that figured on a balance sheet were only important so far as they fostered the character of the people. He legalised the Trade Unions and one can fairly surmise that he recognised in Socialism an exhibition of the unled forces of revolting Toryism. It is doubtful if in August, 1930, he would have called a Government national that was opposed to those forces. Disraeli would have co-ordinated industry even in those days on a national and static basis. He was sixty years before his time in attempting to achieve unity in modern industrialism. In comparison with Mr. Baldwin it is important to remember that Disraeli's theory of the two nations might have rendered a great service to political concord, if later Conservatives had not taken to appealing to middle-class opinion."

"I never knew a greater master, in writing, in speaking, and in conversation, of censure and of eulogy. His long habit of sparkling literary composition, his facility in dealing with epigram, metaphor, antithesis, and even alliteration, gave him a singular power of coining and applying phrases which at once laid hold of the popular mind, and attached praise or blame to actions of the contending Parties in the State. Lord Beaconsfield had certainly the power of appealing in his policy, in his character, and in his career, to the imagination of his countrymen and of foreigners, a power which was not extinguished even by death."

"Mr. G. seemed to attribute much or most of the cross-fighting and personal running in Parliament to the infection of Disraeli's character and career. He said he felt most deeply the dreadful mischief he had done to his party and politics generally... In past times the Tory Party had principles by which it would and did stand for bad and for good. All this Dizzy destroyed."

"I who...thought his doctrines false, but the man more false than his doctrine; who believe that he demoralised public opinion, bargained with diseased appetites, stimulated passions, prejudices, and selfish desires, that they might maintain his influence; that he weakened the Crown by approving its unconstitutional leanings, and the Constitution by offering any price for democratic popularity,—who, privately, deem him the worst and most immoral minister since Castlereagh."

"In death he remains as he was in life. All show with no substance."

"The downfall of Beaconsfieldism is like the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle in an Italian romance."

"...a man who is never beaten. Every reverse, every defeat is to him only an admonition to wait and catch his opportunity of retrieving his position."

"Earlier in the century, according to Disraeli, the Conservative Party had been severed from its philosophical roots and withered. Successive Liberal ministries...had borrowed "cosmopolitan" principles to justify an assault upon the venerable institutions. Now, however, the people were weary of alien doctrines and reckless legislation, and Conservatives were poised to embark upon restoration, because they had reconstituted themselves as a national party able to nourish the patriotic sentiments of propertied and working classes alike... Disraeli now added a vision, calculated to appeal to all classes, of a Britain sitting astride an empire, which, though threatened by the anti-colonial policies of Liberal governments, might become an even richer source of national pride and greatness."

"He has an odd dislike of middle-class men, though they are the strength of our party."

"Walk with Pender... His own friends, strong Liberals up to the present date...believe that Gladstone, half out of ambition and half out of sentimental sympathy, is ready to throw all the influence of the state into the scale against the employer. But while they dislike Gladstone, they are equally suspicious and afraid of Disraeli: they think him the enemy of the capitalist class."

"Lady Augusta Stanley, who is an authority on Court matters, told me that Dizzy writes daily letters to the Queen in his best novel style, telling her every scrap of political news dressed up to serve his own purpose, and every scrap of social gossip cooked to amuse her. She declares that she has never had such letters in her life, which is probably true, and that she never before knew everything!"

"Lord Beaconsfield was the great enemy of Mr. Gladstone, and everybody called him 'Dizzy.' However, this time [1880] 'Dizzy' had been thoroughly beaten by Mr. Gladstone, so we were all flung out into Opposition and the country began to be ruined very rapidly. Everyone said it was 'going to the dogs.' And then on top of all this Lord Beaconsfield got very ill. He had a long illness; and as he was also very old, it killed him. I followed his illness from day to day with great anxiety, because everyone said what a loss he would be to his country and how no one else could stop Mr. Gladstone from working his wicked will upon us all. I was always sure Lord Beaconsfield was going to die, and at last the day came when all the people I saw went about with very sad faces because, as they said, a great and splendid Statesman, who loved our country and defied the Russians, had died of a broken heart because of the ingratitude with which he had been treated by the Radicals."

"I think I could not offer a greater offence to my Conservative friends here or anywhere than to tell them that they are not a progressive party. They may not have agreed to the demand for revolutionary changes in the past, but they have been in a special sense—and it cannot be denied by any fair critic—the great apostles of social reform. And who was their teacher? Who was their leader? It was Mr. Disraeli, who laid the seeds of his doctrine in his great novel Sybil. Though he found his party slow to educate, they made such progress under his guidance, and under the subsequent guidance of Lord Randolph Churchill and others, that they have now arrived at a position in which they may fairly claim that it is to their efforts and to their legislation that the great social reforms now impressed upon the Statute-book of this country are due."

"The great European figures of the later nineteenth century were Disraeli and Bismarck, who strove to weld together the "two nations" into one through the agencies of the social service state, popular education and imperialism, refuted the taunt that "the worker has no country", and paved the way for "national labour", "national socialism" and even "national communism"."

"[T]his was the anniversary of the death of one of the most remarkable of English statesmen, who passed away amid the genuine sorrow of untold thousands. It had been his duty and his privilege to act with Lord Beaconsfield ... and he wished Lord Beaconsfield could be recalled from his grave now to lend his counsel and the experience of his long life to a country harassed and vexed and storm-tossed as ours was now. Lord Beaconsfield's great quality was a genuine and ardent love of his country, love of its greatness, and jealously for its ancient honour. In him there was no preference for foreign practices and cosmopolitan ideas."

"What strikes me most singular in you is, that you are fonder of Power than of Fame."

"He was deeply imbued with the spirit of England’s history and institutions... At the back of Disraeli’s mind lay always certain ancient English ideals—the one Tudor and the other medieval—of a united nation and of a continuing community composed of men and women possessing inalienable privileges and rights secured by a stronger tenure than that of their own lives. His conception of society was essentially religious and humane—an ordered hierarchy based on a universal recognition of human needs and rights. He wished to restore dignity, romance and personal influence to the throne, responsibility to the nobility and gentry, moral authority to the Church, above all, status, pride of craft and security to the peasant and worker."

"The idea of private wealth not based on the fulfilment of social duty was repugnant to him because it was contrary to nature. The vice of the laissez-faire economists was that they regarded capital as an economic commodity divorced from political and social activity. They treated its use as a purely private affair. Disraeli saw capital not as a commodity of value but as political and social power: as something to be used as a trust. He therefore wished to see its possession permanently associated with social obligations. The ownership of land was capable of giving such association. That of stocks and shares was not. In all this Disraeli was a Socialist before Socialism became a political force."

"Benjamin Disraeli was a great man. Alone among statesmen of his generation he perceived the fallacy of the Manchester School and of the departure in national policy which it had initiated. The immediate interests of the factory owner, the worker and the investor might be served by a free trade policy. But in the long run he knew that the policy must leave the nation at the mercy of world-wide forces beyond its control."

"Disraeli has been possessed by a devouring ambition, not to preach and act the truth, but to distinguish himself. "We come here for fame!" he said to me many years ago, and he has distinguished himself, but on a low field, and with no results which can be looked back upon with satisfaction."

"Now, Mr. Disraeli is a man who does what may be called the conjuring for his party. He is what, amongst a tribe of Red Indians, would be called "the mystery man." He invents phrases for them... Mr. Disraeli is a man of brains, of genius, of great capacity for action, of a wonderful tenacity of purpose, and of a rare courage. He would have been a statesman if his powers had been directed by any noble principle or idea."

"Disraeli was in many ways a very "unVictorian" figure... [His] scepticism makes Disraeli a less "dated" figure than almost any contemporary politician. Morally and intellectually Gladstone was his superior... But he was, far more than Disraeli, a man of his times. It is hard to imagine him living in any other period, whereas it is quite easy to envisage Disraeli living either today or in the era of Lord North. It is this timelessness that gives his best novels their lasting fascination, and makes his wit as good now as it was a hundred years ago. There is a champagne-like sparkle about him which has scarcely been equalled and never surpassed among statesmen."

"Where Disraeli excelled was in the art of presentation. He was an impresario and an actor manager. He was a superb parliamentarian, one of the half dozen greatest in our history. He knew how much depends upon impression, style, colour; and how small a part is played in politics by logic, cool reason, calm appraisal of alternatives. This is why politicians appreciate him."

"Disraeli added certain features peculiarly his own to the pattern with which he was to stamp the Conservative party, and these enhanced the contrast with Gladstonian liberalism: belief in empire; adoption of a tough, "no nonsense", foreign policy; assertion of Britain's...greatness in the world. Disraeli was unsympathetic to all forms of nationalism except English nationalism – this was quite compatible with being most unEnglish himself – and he saw no reason, whether in Ireland or the Balkans or elsewhere, to allow what he considered English interests to be overridden by the supposedly higher moral law that encourages the emancipation of nations "rightly struggling to be free". ... His attitude decisively orientated the Conservative party for many years to come, and the tradition which he started was probably a bigger electoral asset in winning working-class support during the last quarter of the century than anything else."

"Time and time again the stories we read about Disraeli's demeanour, dress and conversation remind us not so much of the grave sedate bourgeois England that he was destined to govern as of the England which flourished ten years after his death – the England of the Yellow Book and Oscar Wilde. Wilde acknowledged his debt. It was no accident that he chose the title of Dorian Gray for one of his most extravagant books, and his own famous epigrams might well, without incongruity, have appeared in the pages of a Disraeli novel."

"Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann!"

"Toryism, as we know it, was illuminated, expounded, and made a gospel for a large portion of this country by the genius of Benjamin Disraeli. Most of us who have worked for our great party have founded our beliefs on, and derived our inspiration from that statesman."

"I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will that will stake even existence for its fulfilment."

"He was quite remarkable enough to fill a volume of Éloge. Someone wrote to me yesterday that no Jew for 1800 years has played so great a part in the world. That would be no Jew since St. Paul; and it is very startling."

"Whenever we would prepare the mind by a forcible appeal, an opening quotation is a symphony preluding on the chords those tones we are about to harmonize."

"The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation."

"The art of governing mankind by deceiving them."

"Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation."

"Mediocrity can talk; but it is for genius to observe."

"Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm."

"Candour is the brightest gem of criticism."

"The more extensive an author's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do."

"Under this roof are the heads of the family of Rothschild a name famous in every capital of Europe and every division of the globe. If you like, we shall divide the United States into two parts, one for you, James, and one for you, Lionel. Napoleon will do exactly and all that I shall advise him to do; and to Bismark will be suggested such an intoxicating programme as to make him our abject slave."

"John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich: "Foote, I have often wondered what catastrophe would bring you to your end; but I think, that you must either die of the pox, or the halter." Samuel Foote: "My lord, that will depend upon one of two contingencies; -- whether I embrace your lordship's mistress, or your lordship's principles.""

"They that touch pitch will be defiled."

"The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation."

"Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most."

"Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning."