Novelists From England

"Yet now, as he roared across the night sky toward an unknown destiny, he found himself facing that bleak and ultimate question which so few men can answer to their satisfaction. What have I done with my life, he asked himself, that the world will be poorer if I leave it."

"They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge ... no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command ... But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young."

"He had discharged his destiny; now, perhaps, he could begin to live."

"It is not my duty as an historian to predict the future, only to observe and interpret the past. But its lesson is clear enough; we have lived too long out of contact with reality, and now the time has come to rebuild our lives."

"All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest."

"After a while Hilvar did his best to steer the conversation away from these meaningless morasses of theology in order to concentrate on the ascertainable facts."

"The fact was that he suffered from an incurable malady which, it seemed, attacked only Homo sapiens among all the intelligent races of the universe. That disease was religious mania. Throughout the earlier part of its history, the human race had brought forth an endless succession of prophets, seers, messiahs, and evangelists who convinced themselves and their followers that to them alone were the secrets of the universe revealed. Some of them succeeded in establishing religions which survived for many generations and influenced billions of men; others were forgotten even before their deaths. The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, not the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as they contemplated the stupendous universe in which they found themselves. What it did weaken, and finally obliterate, were the countless religions, each of which claimed with unbelievable arrogance, that it was the sole repository of the truth and that its millions of rivals and predecessors were all mistaken."

"There was only one thing of which he could be certain now. Boredom would not be a serious problem for a considerable time to come."

"Khedron was content with the order of things as it was. True, he might upset that order from time to time—but only by a little. He was a critic, not a revolutionary. On the placidly flowing river of time, he wished only to make a few ripples; he shrank from diverting its course."

"There still remained, for all men to share, the linked worlds of love and art. Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached with love."

"Somewhere back at the beginning I was chosen to be Jester, and there is only one Jester at a time in Diaspar. Most people think that is one too many."

"If the artist did not know his goal, even the most miraculous of tools could not find it for him."

"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

"Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor — but they have few followers now."

"We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return ... The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation ... the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began."

"Others, one suspects, are afraid that the crossing of space, and above all contact with intelligent but nonhuman races, may destroy the foundations of their religious faith. They may be right, but in any event their attitude is one which does not bear logical examination — for a faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets."

"It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars."

"If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run — and often in the short one — the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative."

"I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have broken the glass of the fire-alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long"

"The more you are talked about the less powerful you are."

"The "landed interest" and its possibilities always fired the imagination of Disraeli... In Disraeli the agricultural landlords had the most eloquent champion of their class and cause that England or any other country has ever seen. Disraeli believed in them more than some of them believed in him, and was not ashamed to say so. "Good-bye, my dear lord," said he at the end of a visit to one of the stately homes of England, "you have shown me the finest spectacle these islands can afford—a great nobleman living at home among his own people." What could be better?"

"Sybil can be read now as the production of a future Conservative Prime Minister, and hence in the narrow sense as a political novel. The elements of political pleading are indeed evident in any reading of it. Their curiosity, their partisanship and their opportunism are matched only by their brilliance of address. The novel would be fascinating if it were only political. The stucco elegance of Disraeli’s writing has a consonance with one kind of political argument. What is intolerable in his descriptions of persons and feelings becomes in his political flights a rather likeable panache. The descriptions of industrial squalor are very like those of Dickens on Coketown: brilliant romantic generalizations—the view from the train, from the hustings, from the printed page—yet often moving, like all far-seeing rhetoric. There are similar accounts of the conditions of the agricultural poor which need to be kept in mind against the misleading contrasts of North and South. Again, in a quite different manner, there is in Sybil the most spirited description of the iniquities of the tommy-shop, and of the practical consequences of the system of truck, to be found anywhere. Disraeli's anger—the generalized anger of an outsider making his way—carries him often beyond his formal text. The hostile descriptions of London political and social life are again generalization, but they have, doubtless, the same rhetorical significance as those of the forays among the poor. Anyone who is prepared to give credit to Disraeli's unsupported authority on any matter of social fact has of course mistaken his man, as he would similarly mistake Dickens. But Disraeli, like Dickens, is a very fine generalizing analyst of cant, and almost as fine a generalizing rhetorician of human suffering. Both functions, it must be emphasized, are reputable."

"He looked to national consensus in the 1830s and again in the 1870s; it does not follow that the intermediate decades were consistent. In the 1840s, Young England was more about social cohesion than national identity... It was only in the 1870s that the two themes of social cohesion and national identity were finally integrated... Many Conservative parties elsewhere failed to make the crucial move from élite parties to mass parties, partly because they did not have a brand image, or not one that could be put across in popular terms. It is to Disraeli's mental footwork as much as anything that the Conservatives owe their survival."

"Disraeli was a racial thinker. He thought race "the key of history". "All is race", he wrote; "All is race; there is no other truth", said Sidonia. Race, for him, transcended everything: it explained religion; it explained politics. Disraeli was far more of a racial thinker than a social or religious thinker... Disraeli's racial doctrine went the whole hog. Not only was race the key to history, but some races were far superior to others. There were master races, and there were the rest. Their superiority was a biological matter rather than just a cultural one, and depended on purity of blood. Interbreeding caused racial degeneration. If such doctrines ring oddly today, let us recall that they were advanced for the best of reasons: to raise a downtrodden people, the Jews, in the esteem of mankind, and to raise them, moreover, not to equality, but to a position of hardly deserved superiority among the nations. Disraeli was unusual not because he used the common coin of pseudo-scientific racial thought, but because he used it for Jewish (and therefore, in the circumstances, virtuous) ends. Disraeli said little about the lower races; his object was to praise, not to disparage. There was an absence of malign intent. Still, Disraeli believed that to think racially was to be modern and scientific."

"The present man will do well, and will be particularly loyal and anxious to please me in every way. He is vy. peculiar, but vy. clever and sensible and vy. conciliatory."

"Disraeli has become a code name for "collectivist" or, as they now put it, rather inaccurately, "corporatist" policies. He is the mascot of the "wets". This is a grievous distortion of history. It is true that, in his romantic youth, he wrote the only phrase which the majority of his present-day admirers have ever read from his pen – about there being a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor. His paternalism, however, was superficial. In so far as he ever favoured authoritarian measures for the defence of what are now ludicrously called the "under-privileged" he favoured them not so much in the name of abstract social justice as in that of national cohesion. What he believed in was the Nation which he tended in those benighted days to call the Race. This is his one, valid, surviving contribution to Conservative thinking. He was an imperialist."

"In whatever he has written he has affected something which has been intended to strike his readers as uncommon and therefore grand. Because he has been bright and a man of genius, he has carried his object as regards the young. He has struck them with astonishment and aroused in their imagination ideas of a world more glorious, more rich, more witty, more enterprising, than their own. But the glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been a wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers, and the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks."

"Mr. Gladstone ranked Disraeli as the greatest master of parliamentary wit that had ever been. He looked upon his character as a great mystery, and it pained him to feel that the mystery will never be solved."

"What distinguished Lord Beaconsfield from the ordinary Tory leaders was his readiness to trust the English people whom they did not trust, and his total indifference to the barriers of caste, which for them were the be-all and end-all of politics. In the inarticulate mass of the English populace which they held at arm's length he discerned the Conservative working man, as the sculptor perceives the angel prisoned in a block of marble. He understood that the common Englishman, even when he personally has nothing to guard beyond a narrow income and a frugal home, has yet Conservative instincts as strong as those of the wealthiest peer."

"Disraeli was an artist in politics, whose principal achievement was his own career. But he had an imaginative appreciation of the nature of political power which no one in his generation could match... The majesty of power Disraeli saw as a genuine element in the world. Thus, to approach it with some show of pomp and circumstance was not to indulge in theatrical nonsense—even if admitting that it was a show. When he spoke of jewels in the imperial diadem, Conservative members would say that this was just Dizzy's way, but he was putting into words for them romantically patriotic convictions that they themselves would never express... Sir Henry Lawrence...had once written that it was 'the due admixture of Romance and Reality that best carries a man through life'. Disraeli seemed to know what that precise admixture should be. It was this inner sureness of touch and grasp, this mastery of occasion, that had carried him against all odds into the command of the political ideas of so many dukes, squires, soldiers, lawyers, brewers, and private gentlemen. Disraeli, his party felt, dumbly but truly, knew what politics were about."

"The real hit of the congress was the personal tie between Bismarck and Beaconsfield. No doubt Bismarck flattered "the old Jew" in order to extract concessions for Russia's benefit. But the mutual affection was genuine. The two men recognised their common qualities... Each admired the actor in the other, and characteristically each noted the beauty of the other's voice. Both had the brooding melancholy of the Romantic movement in its Byronic phase; both had broken into the charmed circle of privilege—Bismarck as a boorish Junker, Disraeli as a Jew; both had a profound contempt for political moralising. Was it Disraeli or Bismarck who said of himself: "My temperament is dreamy and sentimental. People who paint me all make the mistake of giving me a violent expression"? Was it Disraeli or Bismarck who said on becoming prime minister: "Well, I've climbed to the top of the greasy pole"? In politics both men had used universal suffrage to ruin liberalism or, in the English phrase, "to dish the Whigs". Both genuinely advocated social reform; Disraeli had once defended protective tariffs. Both used foreign success to strengthen their position at home. When Bismarck was told of the British occupation of Cyprus, he exclaimed: "This is progress! It will be popular: a nation loves progress!" Beaconsfield was annoyed at having the words taken out of his mouth and commented sourly: "His idea of progress obviously consists in taking something from somebody else"—an idea which Beaconsfield had made the basis of Tory policy."

"No doubt Bismarck and Disraeli dominated the Congress of Berlin, and equally there is no doubt that Disraeli found Bismarck a fascinating and bizarre figure. Bismarck behaved in an unusual way to Disraeli as well. He called upon him, something he never did after he achieved his great status, and he invited him to a family dinner, a confidence accorded to literally no other foreign statesman."

"Disraeli, like his successors, saw society in terms of a trust, drawing its cohesion from the observance of mutual obligations and its rulers ready to employ where necessary the huge engine of government to promote the wellbeing of the people. Toryism needed—and needs—to identify itself with forces and feelings making for stability, the preservation of national institutions and the enlargement of national prestige."

"Disraeli's proclamation at the Crystal Palace of the "three great objects" of "the national party", to maintain the monarchy, the House of Lords and the church, to "uphold the Empire of England", and to elevate "the condition of the people" summed up the Tory doctrines he had been preaching for nearly forty years. He was reasserting the indispensability of his leadership by defining Toryism in the terms he had patented, summoning his followers to march to the music only he knew how to play. The strategy of protecting the institutional and social order by seeking national integration both through the focusing of popular sentiment on the symbols of crown and empire and through attention to the material bases of popular well-being in the frame of national efficiency would supply the Conservative party with the major elements of its appeal to the mass electorate for almost a century."

"Disraeli, in his youth, laid down the principles on which the England of his time ought to have been based, and his comparative failure to convince his contemporaries...left his country the richer by a supreme instance of political genius and the poorer by its slums, its wasted physique, and its industrial unrest and class hatred. If a Providence could have made Disraeli a dictator in the early 'thirties, there would have been no social problem to-day. That great man desired to build up the new industrial State on the principles and practice which had animated the older rural and urban dispensations—on the community of interest between master and man, between capitalist and employee, between guild and guild, between agricultural labourer and town workman. What was best in the feudal conception of the past was to be applied to the new progressive forces of the nineteenth century, and the aristocracy of industry was to follow in the tradition of the aristocracy of feudalism and make itself the guardian, and not the exploiter, of its new retainers."

"They say, and say truly enough, What an actor the man is!—and yet the ultimate impression is of absolute sincerity and unreserve. Grant Duff will have it that he is an alien. What's England to him or he to England? There is just where they are wrong. Whig or Radical or Tory don't matter much perhaps; but this mightier Venice—this Imperial Republic on which the sun never sets—that vision fascinates him, or I am much mistaken. England is the Israel of his imagination, and he will be the Imperial Minister before he dies—if he gets the chance."

"Disraeli's substantial achievement at Manchester [in 1872] was to blend advantageously the old doctrines of constitutional Conservatism with new emphases on social reform and empire... [T]here was an even more significant body of opinion bewildered and resentful at the eclipse of Britain as a European power and very much in need of comfort and reassurance. Without actually using words as revealing as "consolation" or "compensation", Disraeli went as near as made no difference to offering empire to the "national" public for precisely such a purpose... Disraeli proceeded [at Crystal Palace in 1872] to analyse the "three great objects" of "the Tory party, or as I will venture to call it, the National party". These were to maintain the institutions of the country, to uphold the empire, and to elevate the condition of the people."

"One of Disraeli's main legacies to the party was reclaiming its position as the patriotic "party of empire"... Disraeli...saw an opportunity after Palmerston's death to champion the Empire and bolster Britain's prestige, and he squeezed every last drop out of the opportunity... Sensing a growing public demand for patriotism, Disraeli used his speeches at Manchester and Crystal Palace in 1872 to mark out a bold imperial vision for his party. Disraeli's commitment to the Empire continued in office after 1874. The following year, he took the audacious step of purchasing nearly half of the Suez Canal Company shares... In 1876, Disraeli cemented his warm relationship with Victoria, his "Faerie Queen", by bestowing on her the title "Empress of India". Gladstone denounced the gesture as distinctly "un-English", but it instantaneously raised the status of the monarchy and India became the "jewel in the crown" of the Empire."

"Zeal for the greatness of England was the passion of his life... [T]he people of this country recognized the force with which this desire dominated his actions, and they repaid it by an affection and reverence which did not depend upon, nor had any concern with, their opinion as to the particular policy pursued. My Lords, this was his great title to their attachment—that above all things he wished to see England united, powerful, and great."

"Here's the man who rode the race, who took the time, who kept the time, and who did the trick!"

"In each of the two novels, Coningsby and Sybil, two other themes are interwoven with the main allegory of a nation reunited and a working class elevated. They are themes that were never far away from Disraeli's political thinking; and in later novels...they were to form the main themes. They are race and the Church... In words such as those lies perhaps the one political mission to which that kaleidoscopic and enigmatical character Benjamin Disraeli genuinely felt himself called: to teach the English their nationhood... Disraeli sounds the authentic Tory note of faith in instinct – not instinct disembodied and abstract but the national instinct of a homogeneous people. "Tell them," says Disraeli as Prime Minister in a Punch cartoon when asked what answer to give to enquirers who want to know Conservative policy, "tell them that we shall rely upon the sublime instincts of an ancient people.""

"Of all our Prime Ministers, Disraeli is unique in having founded a political faith... Disraeli, dead now seventy-two years, still gives inspiration to a great political movement, and evokes an affectionate veneration which grows rather than diminishes with the lapse of time... [T]hose who had scarcely known him, or to whom he was solely a character of history, found in his writings – the novels, the speeches, the essays, especially those of his earlier and middle years – a deposit of pure instruction and delight; and a hitherto hidden consistency and connection of principles and practice, reflection and act, came to light. Like Joshua, he appeared as both prophet and captain... [T]wo characteristics of Disraeli which are specifically Jewish do help to account for the lasting importance of his thought. They are characteristics exemplified in Sidonia, the nearest approach to self-portraiture in Disraeli's novels. They are intellectual aloofness, and a belief in the significance of race... "Race," says Sidonia to Coningsby, the idealised young Englishman, "is everything," and he proceeds to dilate upon the parallel between the Jewish and English "races", guided along the path of their respective destinies by instinct... It all sounds to us fanciful and rather Hitlerian, but only if we fail to see that the desire to produce a parallel between Britain and Judah had led Disraeli to say "race" where we should say "nation", and, incidentally, that "race" has overtones for us which it had not for our grandfathers. "Instinct", too, is the word we should use; for biology and anthropology have given us new categories of thought and language. Disraeli claimed to be "on the side of the angels"; but when he talked about "relying on the instincts of the race", he was actually dealing in the ideas of evolution."

"No spectacle is more extraordinary than the power which Disraeli acquired after being laughed down by everyone; acquired, and wields still, so many years after his death. I think that his most potent philtre lay in his flattery. He flattered his Sovereign, his party, and the nation itself, with all the florid eloquence and subtle suggestion of which he was so admirable a master."

"My approach is probably that of a Disraeli conservative—a strong foreign policy, strong adherence to basic values that the nation believes in, and to conserving those values and not being destructive of them, but combined with reform—reform that will work, not reform that destroys."

"It is very difficult to say what Lord Beaconsfield's real view of politics was, but my own impression is that he was deeply attached to the traditions of government by aristocracy, the romantic side of which appealed to his imagination and nature. At heart I think he feared the eventual triumph of a sort of mob rule, the coming of which it was ever his object to delay. Undoubtedly in his last years he was extremely pessimistic as to the future, having, rightly or wrongly, no particular confidence in the political sagacity of an English democracy, the judgment of which he thought could be easily swayed by unprincipled and specious agitators."

"He was a great statesman. Look at his vision of democracy, his Reform Bill, his views on the American Civil War. And look at his courage! His speech vindicating the Jews—Lord John Russell sat opposite during its delivery, and turned to his neighbours on the Front Bench and said, "What courage! There is not a man on the Tory benches around him but doesn't disapprove of every word he says.""

"'Why is Gladstone like a telescope?' was a riddle which had a great vogue in Tory circles. 'Because Disraeli draws him out, looks through him, and shuts him up.'"

"The Congress of Berlin was in a way a fitting climax to the career of the Prime Minister. From the beginning of the Eastern crisis he had fought for his image of the greatness of Britain... [H]is sense of country was as strong and deep as perhaps any feelings he had. The enthusiasm and affection with which he was received in England upon his return from Berlin was a partial recognition of this. If he and Salisbury had not exactly brought back peace with honour they had secured peace with prestige. It marked the end of a period of fifteen years during which the policy and position of England were too often marked by self-effacement, embarrassment, and ignominy. For many, a bracing assertion of national strength and purpose was welcome nectar after so long a drought. In so far as this assertion was the work of any single individual, it was the contribution of Beaconsfield."

"Few democratic political parties can have so systemically and ruthlessly called into question the integrity, the devotion to the institutions of the country, and the patriotism of its opponents. In illustrating this argument it is appropriate to begin with Disraeli's Crystal Palace speech in 1872, one of the most important public speeches ever made by a Conservative leader. He argued...that it was the threefold purpose of the Conservative Party "to maintain the institutions of the country..., to uphold the empire of England..., [and] to elevate the condition of the people." It is with the enunciation of the second Conservative purpose that the party took its first long step to becoming the party of empire and indeed of imperialism... In the years that immediately followed Disraeli's pre-emption of the Empire as a uniquely Conservative cause, an increasingly strident note creeps into party literature whenever reference is made to the Liberals' attitude on imperial and foreign issues."

"The novelist who has not been revived is Disraeli. Yet, though he is not one of the great novelists, he is so alive and intelligent as to deserve permanent currency, at any rate in the trilogy Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred: his own interests as expressed in these books—the interests of a supremely intelligent politician who has a sociologist's understanding of civilization and its movement in his time—are so mature."