As an important addition to the work of the theatre, a permanent school has been established at Bayreuth for the sake of training young musicians to take part in the festival performances, which were at first exclusively, and then partially, undertaken by artists from other German and foreign theatres. The special feature upon which most stress has been laid, ever since Wagner’s death in 1883, has been not so much the musical as the dramatic significance of the works; it is contended by the inmost circle of Wagnerian adherents that none but they can fully realize the master’s intentions or hand down his traditions. What is called the “Bayreuth Idea” is set forth in much detail from this point of view by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, in hisRichard Wagner(1897 and 1900).
As an important addition to the work of the theatre, a permanent school has been established at Bayreuth for the sake of training young musicians to take part in the festival performances, which were at first exclusively, and then partially, undertaken by artists from other German and foreign theatres. The special feature upon which most stress has been laid, ever since Wagner’s death in 1883, has been not so much the musical as the dramatic significance of the works; it is contended by the inmost circle of Wagnerian adherents that none but they can fully realize the master’s intentions or hand down his traditions. What is called the “Bayreuth Idea” is set forth in much detail from this point of view by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, in hisRichard Wagner(1897 and 1900).
BAZA,a town of southern Spain, in the province of Granada; in the Hoya de Baza, a fruitful valley of the Sierra Nevada, not far from the small river Gallego, and at the terminus of a railway from Lorca. Pop. (1900) 12,770. The dome-shaped mountain of Javaleon (4715 ft.) overlooks the town from the north-west. The ancient collegiate church of San Maximo occupies the traditional site of a cathedral founded by the Visigothic king Reccared about 600, and afterwards converted into a mosque. There is a brisk local trade in farm produce, and in the linen, hempen goods and pottery manufactured in Baza. The town nearly doubled its population in the last quarter of the 10th century. Sulphurous springs exist in the vicinity.
Baza is the RomanBasti, the medievalBastaorBastiana; and numerous relics of antiquity, both Roman and medieval, have been found in the neighbourhood. Its bishopric was founded in 306. Under Moorish rule (c.713-1489) it was one of the three most important cities in the kingdom of Granada, with an extensive trade, and a population estimated at 50,000. In 1489, after a stubborn defence lasting seven months, it was captured by the Spaniards under Isabella of Castile, whose cannon still adorn theAlamedaor public promenade. On the 10th of August 1810 the French under Marshal Soult defeated a large Spanish force close to the town.
BAZAAR(Pers.bazar, market), a permanent market or street of shops, or a group of short narrow streets of stalls under one roof. The word has spread westward into Arabic, Turkish and, in special senses, into European languages, and eastward it has invaded India, where it has been generally adopted. In southern India and Ceylon bazaar means a single shop or stall. The word seems to have early reached South Europe (probably through Turkish), for F. Balducci Pegolotti in his mercantile handbook (c.1340) gives “bazarra” as a Genoese word for market-place. The Malayan peoples have adopted the word aspazar. The meaning of the word has been much extended in English, where it is now equivalent to any sale, for charitable or mere commercial purposes, of mixed goods and fancy work.
BAZAINE, ACHILLE FRANÇOIS(1811-1888), marshal of France, was born at Versailles on the 13th of February 1811. He entered the army as a private soldier in 1831, with a view to service in Algeria, and received a commission as sub-lieutenant in 1833. By his gallantry in action he won the cross of the Legion of Honour, and he was promoted lieutenant in 1835. He served two campaigns with the Foreign Legion against the Carlists in Spain in 1837-38, returning to Africa as captain in 1839. During the succeeding decade he saw continual active service in Africa, and rose to be a brigadier-general with the charge of the district of Tlemçen. In the Crimean War he commanded a brigade, and maintained his reputation in the trenches before Sevastopol. On the capture of the south side he was appointed governor of the place, and was promoted general ofdivision. He also commanded the French forces in the expedition to Kinburn. In Lombardy in 1859 he was wounded when in command of a division at Melegnano, and took a conspicuous part in the battle of Solferino. For his services in the campaign he received the grand cross of the Legion of Honour, of which he was already (1855) a commander. He commanded with great distinction the first division under General (afterwards marshal) Forey in the Mexican expedition in 1862, succeeded him in supreme command in 1863, and became marshal and senator of France in the following year. He at first pursued the war with great vigour and success, entering Mexico in 1863 and driving President Juarez to the frontier. The marshal’s African experience as a soldier and as an administrator stood him in good stead in dealing with the guerrilleros of the Juarez party, but he was less successful in his relations with Maximilian, with whose court the French headquarters was in constant strife. Here, as later in his own country, Bazaine’s policy seems to have been directed, at least in part, to his own establishment in the rôle of a mayor of the palace. His own army thought that he aspired to play the part of a Bernadotte. His marriage to a rich Mexican lady, whose family were supporters of Juarez, still further complicated his relations with the unfortunate emperor, and when at the close of the American Civil War the United States sent a powerful war-trained army to the Mexican frontier, the French forces were withdrawn (seeMexico,History). Bazaine skilfully conducted the retreat and embarkation at Vera Cruz (1867). On his return to Paris he was but coldly received by his sovereign; public opinion was, however, in his favour, and he was held to have been made a scapegoat for the faults of others.
At the outbreak of the Franco-German War (q.v.) Marshal Bazaine was placed in command of the III. corps of the Army of the Rhine. He took no part in the earlier battles, but Napoleon III. soon handed over the chief command of the army to him. How far his inaction was the cause of the disaster of Spicheren is a matter of dispute. The best that can be said of his conduct is that the evil traditions of warfare on a small scale and the mania for taking up “strong positions,” common to the French generals of 1870, were in Bazaine’s own case emphasized by his personal dislike for the “schoolmaster” Frossard, lately the Prince Imperial’s tutor and now commander of the army corps posted at Spicheren. Frossard himself, the leader of the “strong positions” school, could only blame his own theories for the paralysis of the rest of the army, which left the corps at Spicheren to fight unsupported. Bazaine, indeed, when called upon for help, moved part of his corps forward, but only to “take up strong positions,” not to strike a blow on the battlefield. A few days later he took up the chief command, and his tenure of it is the central act in the tragedy of 1870. He found the army in retreat, ill-equipped and numerically at a great disadvantage, and the generals and staffs discouraged and distrustful of one another. There was practically no chance of success. The question was one of extricating the army and the government from a disastrous adventure, and Bazaine’s solution of it was to bring back his army to Metz. For the events which led up to the battles before Metz and the investment of Bazaine’s whole army in the fortress, seeFranco-german WarandMetz,Battles.
It seems to be clearly established that the charges of treason to which later events gave so strong a colour had, as yet, no foundation in fact. Nor, indeed, can his unwillingness to leave the Moselle region, while there was yet time to slip past the advancing enemy, be considered even as proof of special incompetence. The resolution to stay in the neighbourhood of Metz was based on the knowledge that if the slow-moving French army ventured far out it would infallibly be headed off and brought to battle in the open by superior numbers. In “strong positions” close to his stronghold, however, Bazaine hoped that he could inflict damaging repulses and heavy slaughter on the ardent Germans, and in the main the result justified the expectation. The scheme was creditable, and even heroic, but the execution throughout all ranks, from the marshal to the battalion commanders, fell far short of the idea. The minutely cautious methods of movement, which Algerian experience had evolved suitable enough for small African desert columns, which were liable to surprise rushes and ambushes, reduced the mobility of a large army, which had favourable marching conditions, to 5 m. a day as against the enemy’s rate of 15. When, before he had finally decided to stay in Metz, Bazaine attempted half-heartedly to begin a retreat on Verdun, the staff work and organization of the movement over the Moselle was so ineffective that when the German staff calculated that Bazaine was nearing Verdun, the French had in reality barely got their artillery and baggage trains through the town of Metz. Even on the battlefield the marshal forbade the general staff to appear, and conducted the fighting by means of his personal orderly officers. After the cumbrous army had passed through Metz it encountered an isolated corps of the enemy, which was commanded by the brilliant leader Constantin von Alvensleben, and promptly attacked the French. At almost every moment of the day victory was in Bazaine’s hands. Two corps of the Germans fought all day for bare existence. But Bazaine had no confidence in his generals or his troops, and contented himself with inflicting severe losses on the most aggressive portions of the German army. Two days later, while the French actually retreated on Metz—taking seven hours to cover 5 to 6 m.—the masses of the Germans gathered in front of him, intercepting his communication with the interior of France. This Bazaine expected, and feeling certain that the Germans would sooner or later attack him in his chosen position, he made no attempt to interfere with their concentration. The great battle was fought, and having inflicted severe punishment on his assailants, Bazaine fell back within the entrenched camp of Metz. But although he made no appeals for help, public opinion, alarmed and excited, condemned the only remaining army of France, Marshal MacMahon’s “Army of Châlons,” to rescue Bazaine at all costs. The adventure ended at Sedan, and with Sedan the Third Empire collapsed.
Up to this point Bazaine had served his country perhaps as well as circumstances allowed, and certainly with enough skill and a sufficient measure of success to justify his appointment. His experience, wide as it was, had not fitted him for the command of a large army in a delicate position. Since his Mexican expedition, moreover, he had himself fallen into a state of moral and physical lethargy, which, imperceptible on the field of battle, because his reputation for impassive bearing under fire was beyond question, was only too obvious in the staff offices, where the work of manoeuvring the army and framing plans and orders was chiefly done. But, in spite of these defects, it cannot be asserted that any one of Bazaine’s subordinates would have done better, with the possible exception of Ladmirault, and Ladmirault was one of the junior corps commanders.
Bazaine, therefore, in the main justified his reputation for ability. He was now to justify his reputation for intriguing and underhand diplomacy. If in Mexico he aspired to the rôle of mayor of the palace, it was far more so in Metz, where, as commander of the only organized army of France, he conceived himself to be the ruler of the country’s destiny. Accordingly he engaged in a series of diplomatic intrigues, some of which to this day have never been properly cleared up. Negotiations passed between the outer world and the besieged commander, the purport of which remains still to some extent obscure, but it is beyond question that he proposed with the permission of the Germans to employ his army in “saving France from herself.” The scheme, however, collapsed, and the army of the Rhine became prisoners of war to the number of 140,000. At the moment of the surrender a week’s further resistance would have enabled the levies of the National Defence government to crush the weak forces of the Germans on the Loire and to relieve Paris. But the army of Prince Frederick Charles, set free by the surrender, hurried up in time to check and to defeat the great effort at Orleans (q.v.). The responsibility for this crushing blow was naturally enough, and justly enough, placed on Bazaine’s shoulders, and although, when he returned from captivity, themarshal enjoyed a brief immunity, he was in 1873 brought to trial before a military court. He was found guilty of negotiating with and capitulating to the enemy before doing all that was prescribed by duty and honour, and sentenced to degradation and death, but very strongly recommended to mercy. His sentence was commuted to twenty years’ seclusion, and the humiliating ceremonies attending degradation were dispensed with. He was incarcerated in the Ile Sainte-Marguérite and treated rather as an exile than as a convict; thence he escaped in 1874 to Italy. He finally took up his abode in Madrid, where he was treated with marked respect by the government of Alfonso XII. He died there on the 23rd of September 1888. He publishedÉpisodes de la guerre de 1870(Madrid, 1883). He also wroteL’Armée du Rhin(Paris, 1872).
See the bibliography appended to the articleFranco-German War; also memoir by C. Pelletan inLa Grande Encyclopédie; for Bazaine’s conduct seeBazaine et l’armée du Rhin(1873); J. Valfrey,Le Maréchal et l’armée du Rhin(1873); Count A. de la Guerronière,L’Homme de Metz(1871); Rossel,Les Derniers Jours de Metz(1871). See also the articleBourbakifor the curious Regnier episode connected with the surrender of Metz.
See the bibliography appended to the articleFranco-German War; also memoir by C. Pelletan inLa Grande Encyclopédie; for Bazaine’s conduct seeBazaine et l’armée du Rhin(1873); J. Valfrey,Le Maréchal et l’armée du Rhin(1873); Count A. de la Guerronière,L’Homme de Metz(1871); Rossel,Les Derniers Jours de Metz(1871). See also the articleBourbakifor the curious Regnier episode connected with the surrender of Metz.
BAZALGETTE, SIR JOSEPH WILLIAM(1819-1891), English engineer, was born at Enfield on the 28th of March 1819. At the age of seventeen he was articled to an engineer, and a few years later he began to practise successfully on his own account. His name is best known for the engineering works he carried out in London, especially for the construction of the main drainage system and the Thames embankment. In 1848 the control of London drainage, which had hitherto been divided among eight distinct municipal bodies, was consolidated under twelve commissioners, who were in 1849 superseded by a second commission. Under the latter Bazalgette accepted an appointment which he continued to hold under the three successive commissions which in the course of a year or two followed the second one, and when finally in 1855 these bodies were replaced by the Metropolitan Board of Works, he was at once appointed its chief engineer. His plans were ready, but the work was delayed by official obstruction and formality until 1858. Once begun, however, it was vigorously pushed on, and in 1865 the system was formally opened. It consisted of 83 m. of large intercepting sewers, draining more than 100 sq. m. of buildings, and calculated to deal with 420 million gallons a day. The cost was £4,600,000. Almost simultaneously Bazalgette was engaged on the plans for the Thames embankment. The section between Westminster and Vauxhall on the Surrey side was built between 1860 and 1869, and the length between Westminster and Blackfriars was declared open by the prince of Wales in 1870. The Chelsea embankment followed in 1871-1874, and in 1876 Northumberland Avenue was formed. The total outlay on the scheme exceeded £2,000,000. Bazalgette was also responsible for various other engineering works in the metropolitan area, designing, for example, new bridges at Putney and Battersea, and the steam ferry between north and south Woolwich. He also prepared plans for a bridge over the river near the Tower and for a tunnel under it at Blackwall, but did not live to see either of these projects carried out. He died on the 15th of March 1891 at Wimbledon.
BAZARD, AMAND(1791-1832), French socialist, the founder of a secret society in France corresponding to the Carbonari of Italy, was born at Paris. He took part in the defence of Paris in 1815, and afterwards occupied a subordinate situation in the prefecture of the Seine. About 1820 he united some patriotic friends into a society, calledAmis de la vérité. From this was developed a complete system of Carbonarism, the peculiar principles of which were introduced from Italy by two of Bazard’s friends. Bazard himself was at the head of the central body, and, while taking a general lead, contributed extensively to the Carbonarist journal,L’Aristarque. An unsuccessful outbreak at Belfort ruined the society, and the leaders were compelled to conceal themselves. Bazard, after remaining for some time in obscurity in Paris, came to the conclusion that the ends of those who wished well to the people would be most easily attained, not through political agitation, but by effecting a radical change in their social condition. This train of thinking naturally drew him towards the socialist philosophers of the school of Saint-Simon, whom he joined. He contributed to their journal,Le Producteur; and in 1828 began to give public lectures on the principles of the school (seeSaint-Simon). His opposition to the emancipation of women brought about a quarrel with Enfantin (q.v.) in 1831, and Bazard found himself almost deserted by the members of the society. He attacked Enfantin violently, and in a warm discussion between them he was struck down by apoplexy. After lingering for a few months he died on the 29th of July 1832.
BAZAS, a town of south-western France, in the department of Gironde, 38½ m. S.S.E. of Bordeaux by rail. Pop. (1906) town, 2505; commune, 4684. The town, which was the seat of a bishop from at least the beginning of the 6th century till 1790, has a Gothic church (formerly the cathedral) dating from the 13th to the 16th centuries. There are remains of ramparts (15th and 16th centuries) and several old houses of the 16th century. The vineyards of the vicinity produce white wine. The town is capital of an arrondissement, and carries on tanning, &c., and trade in the well-known Bazadais cattle.
Bazas (Cossio) was capital of the ancient tribe of theVasates, and under the Romans one of the twelve cities of Novempopuluna. In later times it was capital of the district of Bazadais. It was the scene of much bloodshed during the religious wars of the 16th century.
BAZIGARS, a nomad gipsy-folk of India, found throughout the peninsula, and variously known as Bazigars, Panchpiri, Nats, Bediyas, &c. They live a life apart from the surrounding Hindu population, and still preserve a certain ethnical identity, scarcely justified by any indications given by their physique. They make a living as jugglers, dancers, basket-weavers and fortune-tellers; and in true European gipsy fashion each clan has its king.
BAZIN, RENÉ(1853- ), French novelist and man of letters, was born at Angers on the 26th of December 1853. He studied law in Paris, and on his return to Angers became professor of law in the Catholic university there. He contributed to Parisian journals a series of sketches of provincial life and descriptions of travel, but he made his reputation byUne Tache d’encre(1888), which received a prize from the Academy. Other novels of great charm and delicacy followed:La Sarcelle bleue(1892);Madame Corentine(1893);Humble Amour(1894);De toute son âme(1897);La Terre qui meurt(1899);Les Oberlé(1901), an Alsatian story which was dramatized and acted in the following year;L’Âme alsacienne(1903);Donatienne(1903);L’Isolée(1905);Le Blé qui lève(1907);Mémoires d’une vieille fille(1908).La Terre qui meurt, a picture of the decay of peasant farming and a story of La Vendée, is an indirect plea for the development of provincial France. A volume ofQuestions littéraires et socialesappeared in 1906. René Bazin was admitted to the Academy on the 28th of April 1904.
BAZIRE, CLAUDE(1764-1794), French revolutionist, was deputy for the Côte d’Or in the Legislative Assembly, and made himself prominent by denouncing the court and the “Austrian committee” of the Tuileries. On the 20th of June 1792 he spoke in favour of the deposition of the king. In the Convention he sat with the Mountain, opposed adjourning the trial of Louis XVI., and voted for his death. He joined in the attack upon the Girondists, but, as member of the committee of general security, he condemned the system of the Terror. He was implicated by François Chabot in the falsification of a decree relative to the East India Company, and though his share seems to have been simply that he did not reveal the plot, of which he knew but part, he was accused before the Revolutionary Tribunal at the same time as Danton and Camille Desmoulins, and was executed on the 5th of April 1794.
BDELLIUM(βδέλλιον, used by Pliny and Dioscorides as the name of a plant which exuded a fragrant gum), a name applied to several gums or gum-resins that simulate and are sometimes found as adulterants of true myrrh (q.v.).
BEACH,a word of unknown origin; probably an old dialect word meaning shingle, hence, by transference, the place covered by shingle. Beach sometimes denotes the material thrown up by the waves, sometimes the long resulting ridge, but more frequently the area between high and low water, or even the area between land and sea covered with material thrown up by exceptional storms.
The actual character of beach material depends upon the nature and structure of the rocks inshore, the strength and direction of currents, and the force of the waves. The southern shore of the Isle of Wight furnishes a good example. The island ends westward in the well-known “Needles,” consisting of chalk with flints. The disintegration of this rock by wave action separates the finer chalk, which is carried seawards in suspension, from the hard flint, which is piled in rough shingle upon the shore. The currents sweep constantly eastward up channel, and the rough flint shingle is rolled along by wave action toward the Ventnor rampart, and ground finer and finer until it arrives as a very fine flinty gravel at Ventnor pier. The sweep of Sandown Bay follows, where the cliffs are composed for the most part of greensand, and here the beach at low water is sandy and smooth. The eastern end of the island is again composed of chalk with flints, and here the beach material as at the western end consists of very coarse flint shingle. In this, as in similar cases, the material has been dragged seawards from the land by constant action of the undertow that accompanies each retreating tide and each returning wave. The resulting accumulated ridge is battered by every storm, and thrown above ordinary high-water mark in a ridge such as the Chesil Bank or the long grass-grown mound that has blocked the old channel of the Yar and diverted its waters into Yaverland Bay. Sandown furnishes an instructive example of the power of the eastward currents carrying high-storm waves. The groins built to preserve the foreshore are piled to the top with coarse shingle on the western side, while there is a drop of over 8 ft. on to the sands east of the wall, many thousands of tons of shingle having been moved bodily by the waves and deposited against each groin. The force of the waves has been measured on the west coast of Scotland and found to be as much as 3 tons per square foot. Against these forces the preservation of the shore from the advance of the sea becomes an extremely difficult and often a hopeless undertaking, since blocks of rock over 100 tons in weight have been moved by the waves. The beach is therefore unstable in its position. It advances in front of the encroaching sea, burying former beaches under the sand and mud of the now deeper water, or it retreats when the sea is withdrawn from the land or the land rises locally, leaving the old shingle stranded in a “raised beach,” but its formation is in all cases due to the form and structure of the shore, the sapping action of the waves, the backward drag of the undertow plastering the shore with material, which is in turn bombarded by waves and swept by currents that cover the finer débris of the undertow with a layer of coarse fragments that are re-sorted by the daily action of currents and tides.
BEACHY HEAD,a promontory on the coast of Sussex, England, S.W. of Eastbourne, about 3 m. from the centre of the town. It consists of a perpendicular chalk cliff 532 ft. high, and forms the eastern termination of the hill-range known as the South Downs. The old Bell Tout lighthouse, 285 ft. above high-water mark, erected in 1831 on the second cliff to the westward, in 0° 10′ 18″ E., 50° 43′ 30″ N., has been superseded by a new lighthouse built in the sea at the foot of the head itself.
Battle of Beachy Head.—This naval battle, known to the French as Bévisier (a corruption of Pevensey), was fought on the 30th of June 1690. An allied force of 37 British sail of the line, under command of the earl of Torrington (Arthur Herbert), and of 22 Dutch under C. Evertsen, was at anchor under the headland, while a French fleet of over 70 sail, commanded by the comte de Tourville, was anchored some miles off to the south-west. The French fleet had orders to co-operate with an expected Jacobite rising in England. Torrington, to whom the general direction of the allied fleet belonged, was much disturbed by the enemy’s superiority in number, and on the 26th had written to the Council of Regency suggesting that he ought to retire to the Gunfleet at the mouth of the Thames, and observe the enemy from a distance till he could be reinforced. The council, which had the support of Admiral Russell, afterwards earl of Orford, considered that a retreat to the Gunfleet would have fatal consequences, by which they no doubt meant that it would leave the French free to land troops for the support of the Jacobites. They therefore ordered Herbert not to lose sight of the enemy, but rather to fight if he could secure an advantage of position. The admiral, who was on very bad terms with the council, elected to treat this as a peremptory order to fight. At daybreak on the 30th he got under way and bore down on the enemy. The wind was at north-east and gave him the weather-gage. As his fleet was only 57 sail in all he was not able to engage the enemy from end to end, but as the French were arranged in a line from east to west he could have fallen on the end nearest him, and could have guarded himself by telling off a part of his ships to watch the remainder. Torrington preferred to bring his fleet down in such a way that his van, consisting of the Dutch ships, should be opposite the enemy’s van, his centre opposite their centre, and his rear should engage their rear. The inferiority of the allies in numbers made it therefore inevitable that there should be gaps between the different divisions. As the fleets actually did come to action, the Dutch with a few English ships pressed on the French van, their leading ship being abreast of the ninth or tenth Frenchman. Torrington took his station opposite the rear of the French centre, leaving a great gap between himself and the ships in the van. Being apprehensive that the French centre would tack and pass this gap so as to put him between two fires, he kept a long way off so as to be free to manoeuvre against them if they made the attempt. The English rear division, consisting of the English blue squadron under Sir Ralph Delaval, fought a close action with the French opposite to them. In the meantime the French ships, ahead of the leading Dutchman, succeeded in turning to windward and putting part of Evertsen’s squadron between two fires. The Dutch ships suffered heavily, and one of them which was dismasted drifted among the French and was taken. More severe loss would have followed if the better average seamanship of the English and Dutch had not stood them in good stead. The tide turned from flood to ebb during the action, and the surface current which in the Channel sets to the west with the ebb began to carry the fleets with it. The Dutch and English dropped anchor. The French, who were not equally alert, did not and were carried westward. When the tide turned the allies retreated to the Thames, abandoning several of the most damaged ships in Pevensey Bay. The pursuit of the French was ineffective, for Tourville persisted in keeping his ships in line of battle, which forced them to regulate their speed by the slowest among them. Torrington was tried for his conduct but acquitted.
A full account of the battle of Beachy Head, written with ample quotation of documents, and for the purpose of vindicating Herbert, will be found in Admiral Colomb’sNaval Warfare(London, 1899).
A full account of the battle of Beachy Head, written with ample quotation of documents, and for the purpose of vindicating Herbert, will be found in Admiral Colomb’sNaval Warfare(London, 1899).
(D. H.)
BEACON(from the O. Eng.béacn, a sign, cf. “beckon,” another form of the same word), a signal, especially a fire lit on a high hill, structure or building for the purpose of sending a message of alarm or of important news over long distances. Such was the courier-fire (ἄγγαρος πῦρ) that brought the news of the fall of Troy to Argos (Aeschylus,Agamemnon), or the chain of signals that told of the approach of the Spanish Armada, or which circled the British Isles in the jubilee years of 1887 and 1897. The word occurs in many names for lofty and conspicuous hills, such as Dunkery Beacon in Somerset, the highest point on Exmoor. On many such hills the remains of old beacon towers and cressets are still found. The word is used generally of a lighthouse, but technically it means either a small unattended light, a superstructure on a floating buoy, such as a staff and cage, or staff and globe, or an unlighted structure, forming a conspicuous object at sea, used in each case to guide or warn sailors. (SeeLighthouseandBuoy.)
BEACONSFIELD, BENJAMIN DISRAELI,Earl of(1804-1881), British statesman, second child and eldest son of Isaac D’Israeli (q.v.) and Maria Basevi, who were married in 1802, was born at No. 6 John Street, Bedford Row, on the 21st of December 1804. Of Isaac D’Israeli’s other children, Sarah was born in 1802, Naphtali in 1807, Ralph (Raphael) in 1809, and James (Jacob) in 1813. None of the family was akin to Benjamin for genius and character, except Sarah, to whom he was deeply indebted for a wise, unswerving and sympathetic devotion, when, in his earlier days, he needed it most. All Isaac D’Israeli’s children were born into the Jewish communion, in which, however, they were not to grow up. It is a reasonable inference from Isaac’s character that he was never at ease in the ritual of Judaism. His father died in the winter of 1816, and soon afterwards Isaac formally withdrew with all his household from the Jewish church. His son Benjamin, who had been admitted to it with the usual rites eight days after his birth, was baptized at St Andrew’s church in Holborn on the 31st of July 1817. One of Isaac D’Israeli’s reasons for quitting the tents of his people was that rabbinical Judaism, with its unyielding laws and fettering ceremonies, “cuts off the Jews from the great family of mankind.” Little did he know, when therefore he cut off the D’Israeli family from Judaism, what great things he was doing for one small member of it. The future prime minister was then short of thirteen years old, and there was yet time to provide the utmost freedom which his birth allowed for the faculties and ambitions he was born with. Taking the worldly view alone, of course, most fortunate for his aspirations in youth was his withdrawal from Judaism in childhood. That it was fully sanctioned by his intellect at maturity is evident; but the vindication of unbiased choice would not have been readily accepted had Disraeli abandoned Judaism of his own will at the pushingVivian Greyperiod or after. And though a mind like Disraeli’s might work to satisfaction with Christianity as “completed Judaism,” it could but dwell on a breach of continuity which means so much to Jews and which he was never allowed to forget amongst Christians. With all, he was proud of his race as truly, if not as vehemently, as his paternal grandmother detested it. Family pride contributed to the feeling in his case; for in his more speculative moods he could look back upon an ancestry which was of those, perhaps, who colonized the shores of the Mediterranean from before the time of the Captivity. More definite is the history of descent from an ennobled Spanish family which escaped from the Torquemada persecutions to Venice, there found a new home, took a new name, and prospered for six generations. The Benjamin D’Israeli, Lord Beaconsfield’s grandfather, who came to England in 1748, was a younger son sent at eighteen to try his fortune in London. “A man of ardent character, sanguine, courageous, speculative, fortunate, with a temper which no disappointment could disturb” (so Lord Beaconsfield described him), he soon made the beginnings of a handsome fortune and turned country gentleman. That his grandson exaggerated his prosperity is highly probable; but that he became a man of wealth and consideration is certain. He married twice. His second wife was Sarah Siprout de Gabay, “a beautiful woman of strong intellect” and importunate ambitions, who hated the race she belonged to because it was despised by others. She felt so keenly the social disabilities it brought upon her, and her husband’s indifference to them, that “she never pardoned him his name.” Her literary son Isaac suffered equally or even more; for though he had ambitions he had none that she could recognize as such. She could ridicule him for the aspirations which he had not and for those which he had; on the other hand, he never heard from her a tender word “though she lived to be eighty.” Nor did any other member of her family, according to her grandson.
Isaac D’Israeli was devoted to the reading and writing of books in domestic quiet; and his son Benjamin suffered appreciably from his father’s gentle preoccupations. As a child—unruly and disturbing no doubt—he was sent to a school of small account at Blackheath, and was there “for years” before he was recalled at the age of twelve on the death of his grandfather. Isaac D’Israeli was his father’s sole heritor, but change of fortune seems to have awakened in him no ambitions for the most hopeful of his sons. At fifteen, not before, Benjamin was sent to a Unitarian school at Walthamstow—a well-known school, populous enough to be a little world of emulation and conflict but otherwise unfit. Not there, nor in any similar institution at that illiberal time, perhaps, was a Jewish boy likely to make a fortunate entry into “the great family of mankind.” His name, the foreign look of him, and some pronounced incompatibilities not all chargeable to young Disraeli (as afterwards the name came to be spelt), soon raised a crop of troubles. His stay at Walthamstow was brief, his departure abrupt, and he went to school no more. With the run of his father’s library, and the benefits of that born bookman’s guidance, he now set out to educate himself. This he did with an industry stiffened by matchless self-confidence and by ambitions fully mature before he was eighteen. Yet he yielded to an attempt to make a man of business of him. He was barely seventeen when (in November 1821) he was taken into the office of Messrs Swain, Stevens and Co., solicitors, in Frederick’s Place, Old Jewry. Here he remained for three years—“most assiduous in his attention to business,” said one of the partners, “and showing great ability in the transaction of it.” It was then determined that he should go to the bar; and accordingly he was entered at Lincoln’s Inn in 1824. But Disraeli had found other studies and an alien use for his pen. Though “assiduous in his attention to business” in Frederick’s Place, he found time to write for the printer. Dr Smiles, in hisMemoirs of John Murray, tells of certain pamphlets on the brightening prospects of the Spanish South American colonies, then in the first enjoyment of emancipation—pamphlets seemingly written for a Mr Powles, head of a great financial firm, whose acquaintance Disraeli had made. In the same year, apparently, he wrote a novel—his first, and never published.Aylmer Papillonwas the title of it, Dr Smiles informs us; and he prints a letter from Disraeli to the John Murray of that day, which indicates its character pretty clearly. The last chapter, its author says, is taken up with “Mr Papillon’s banishment under the Alien Act, from a ministerial misconception of a metaphysical sonnet.” About the same time he edited aHistory of Paul Jones, originally published in America, the preface of the English edition being Disraeli’s first appearance as an author. Murray could not publishAylmer Papillon, but he had great hopes of its boyish writer (Isaac D’Israeli was an old friend of his), “took him into his confidence, and related to him his experiences of men and affairs.” Disraeli had not completed his twenty-first year when (in 1825) Murray was possessed by the idea of bringing out a great daily newspaper;“The Representative.”and if his young friend did not inspire that idea he keenly urged its execution, and was entrusted by Murray with the negotiation of all manner of preliminaries, including the attempt to bring Lockhart in as editor. The title of the paper,The Representative, was Disraeli’s suggestion. He chose reporters, looked to the setting-up of a printing-office, busied himself in all ways to Murray’s great satisfaction, and, as fully appears from Dr Smiles’s account of the matter, with extraordinary address. But when these arrangements were brought to the point of completion, Disraeli dropped out of the scheme and had nothing more to do with it. He was to have had a fourth share of the proprietorship, bringing in a corresponding amount of capital. His friend Mr Powles, whom he had enlisted for the enterprise, was to have had a similar share on the same conditions. Neither seems to have paid up, and that, perhaps, had to do with the quarrel which parted Benjamin Disraeli and John Murray before a sheet of the lucklessRepresentativewas printed. Many years afterwards (1853) Disraeli took an active interest inThe Press, a weekly journal of considerable merit but meagre fortunes.
At the death of the elder Benjamin (1817), his son Isaac had moved from the King’s Road, Gray’s Inn (now Theobald’s Road), to No. 6 Bloomsbury Square. Here he entertained the many distinguished friends, literary and political, who had been drawn to him by his “Curiosities” and other ingenious works,and here his son Benjamin also had their acquaintance and conversation. In Bloomsbury Square lived the Austens, and to their house, a great resort of similar persons, Mrs Austen cordially welcomed him. Murray’s friendship and associations helped him in like manner, no doubt; and thus was opened to Disraeli the younger a world in which he was to make a considerable stir. The very much smaller society of that day was, of course, more comprehensible to sight and hearing, when once you were within its borders, than the society of this. Reverberations of the gossip of St James’s and Mayfair extended to Bloomsbury in those days. Yet Disraeli’s range of observation“Vivan Grey.”must have been not only brief but limited when he sat down at twenty or twenty-one to writeVivian Grey. It is therefore a probable conjecture that Mrs Austen, a clever woman of the world, helped him from her knowledge. His own strongly perceptive imagination (the gift in which he was to excel every other politician of his time) and the bent of political reading and aspiration from boyhood completed his equipment; and so the wonder that so young a man in Disraeli’s social position should write a book likeVivian Greyis accounted for. It was published in 1826. The success of this insolently clever novel, the immediate introduction of its author to the great world, and the daring eccentricities of dress, demeanour, and opinion by which he fixed attention on himself there, have always been among the most favourite morsels of Disraeli’s history. With them it began, and successive generations of inquirers into a strange career and a character still shrouded and baffling refer to them as settled starting-points of investigation. What was the man who, in such a society and with political aspirations to serve, could thrive by such vagaries as these, or in spite of them? If unaffected, what is to be thought of them as keys to character? If affected, what then? Inquiry still takes this shape, and when any part of Disraeli’s career is studied, the laces and essences, the rings over gloves, the jewelled satin shirt-fronts, the guitareries and chibouqueries of his early days are never remote from memory. The report of them can hardly be doubted; and as the last relation was made (to the writer of this article) not with intent to ridicule Mr Disraeli’s taste but to illustrate his conquering abilities, the story is repeated here. One of Disraeli’s first friends in the world of fashion and genius was Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer. “And,” said Sir Henry Bulwer (“Pelham’s” brother), “we heard so much at the time of Edward’s amazingly brilliant new friend that we were the less inclined to make his acquaintance.” At length, however, Sir Edward got up a little dinner-party to convince the doubters. It was to meet at the early hour of those days at one of the Piccadilly hotels. “There was my brother, Alexander Cockburn, myself and (I think) Milnes; but for a considerable time no Mr Disraeli. Waiting for Mr Disraeli did not enhance the pleasure of meeting him, nor when he did arrive did his appearance predispose us in his favour. He wore green velvet trousers, a canary-coloured waistcoat, low shoes, silver buckles, lace at his wrists, and his hair in ringlets.” The description of the coat is forgotten. “We sat down. Not one of us was more than five-and-twenty years old. We were all—if you will allow me to include myself—on the road to distinction, all clever, all ambitious, and all with a perfect conceit of ourselves. Yet if on leaving the table we had been severally taken aside and asked which was the cleverest of the party, we should have been obliged to say ‘the man in the green velvet trousers.’” This story is a little lamp that throws much light. Here we see at their sharpest the social prejudices that Disraeli had to fight against, provocation of them carried to its utmost in every way open to him, and complete conquest in a company of young men less likely to admit superiority in a wit of their own years, probably, than any other that could have been brought together at that time.
Soon after the publication ofVivian Grey, Disraeli, who is said by Froude to have been “overtaken by a singular disorder,” marked by fits of giddiness (“once he fell into a trance, and did not recover for a week”), went with the Austens on a long summer tour in France, Switzerland and Italy. Returning to a quiet life at Bradenham—an old manor-house near High Wycombe, which his father had taken—Disraeli put law in abeyance and resumed novel-writing. His weakest book, and two or three other productions, brief, but in every literary sense the finest of his works, were written in the next two or three years. But forIxion in Heaven,The Infernal Marriage, andPopanilla, Disraeli could not be placed among the greater writers of his kind; yet none of his imaginative books have been so little read as these. The mysterious malady continued, and Disraeli set out with WilliamTravel.Meredith, who was to have married Sarah Disraeli, for a tour in southern Europe and the nearer East. He saw Cadiz, Seville, Granada, Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cairo, Thebes; played the corsair with James Clay on a yacht voyage from Malta to Corfu; visited the terrible Reschid, then with a Turkish army in the Albanian capital; landed in Cyprus, and left it with an expectation in his singularly prescient mind that the island would one day be English. These travels must have profited him greatly, and we have our share of the advantage; not so much, however, inThe Wondrous Tale of AlroyorTancred, or the “Revolutionary Epic” which he was inspired to write on “the windy plains of Troy,” but in the letters he sent home to his sister. These letters, written with the utmost freedom and fullness to the one whose affection and intellect he trusted more than any, are of the greatest value for interpreting the writer. Together with other letters also published some time after Disraeli’s death, they tell more of him than anything that can be found in print elsewhere. They show, for example, that his extraordinary exuberances were unforced, leaping by natural impulse from an overcharged source. They also show that his Oriental fopperies were not so much “purposed affectation” as Froude and others have surmised. That they were so in great part is confessed again and again in these letters, but confessed in such a way as to reveal that they were permitted for his own enjoyment of them as much as planned. The “purposed affectation” sprang from an unaffected delight in gauds of attire, gauds of fancy and expression. It was not only to startle and impress the world that he paraded his eccentricities of splendour. His family also had to be impressed by them. It was to his sober father that he wrote, at the age of twenty-six: “I like a sailor’s life much, though it spoils the toilette.” It is in a letter from Gibraltar to the same hand that we read of his two canes—“a morning and an evening cane”—changed as the gun fires. And the same correspondent must be told that “Ralph’s handkerchief which he brought me from Paris is the most successful thing I ever wore.”
When Disraeli returned to England in 1831, all thought of the law was abandoned. The pen of romance was again taken up—the poet’s also and the politician’s. In the next five years he wroteContarini Fleming, theRevolutionary Epick, Alroy, Henrietta Temple, What is He?(aLiterary production.pamphlet expository of his opinions), theRunnymede Letters, aVindication of the British Constitution, and other matter of less note. The epic, begun in great hope and confidence, was ended in less, though its author was to the last unwilling that it should be forgotten. The novels revived the success he had withVivian Grey, and restored him to his place among the brilliancies and powers of the time. The political writing, too, much of it in a garish, extravagant style, exercised his deeper ambitions, and stands as witness to the working of original thought and foresight. Both qualities are conspicuous inWhat is He?and theVindication, of which it has been truly said that in these pages he “struck the keynote to the explanations he afterwards consistently offered of all his apparent inconsistencies.” Here an interpretation of Tory principles as capable of running with the democratic idea, and as called upon to do so, is ingeniously attempted. The aristocratic principle of government having been destroyed by the Reform Bill, and the House of Lords being practically “abrogated” by that measure, it became necessary that Toryism should start from the democratic basis, from which it had never been alien. The filched liberties of the crown and the people should be restored, and the nation redeemed from the oligarchies which had stolen from both. When at the beginning of all thiswriting Disraeli entered the political arena as candidate for High Wycombe (1832), he was nominated by a Tory and seconded by a Radical—in vain; and vain were two subsequent attempts in the autumn of 1832 and in 1834. In the first he was recommended to the electors by Daniel O’Connell and the Radical Hume. In his last candidature at Wycombe he stood on more independent ground, commending himself by a series of speeches which fully displayed his quality, though the prescience which gemmed them with more than one prophetic passage was veiled from his contemporaries. Among Disraeli’s great acquaintances were many—Lyndhurst at their head—whose expectations of his future were confirmed by the Wycombe speeches. He was “thought of” for various boroughs, Marylebone among the number, but his democratic Toryism seems to have stood in his way in some places and his inborn dislike of Radicalism in others. It was an impracticable situation—no getting on from it; and so, at Lyndhurst’s persuasion, as he afterwards acknowledged, he determined to side with the Tories. Accordingly, when in the spring of 1835 a vacancy occurred at Taunton, Disraeli contested the seat in the Tory interest with Carlton Club support. Here again he failed, but with enhanced reputation as a fighting politician and with other consequences good for notoriety. It was at Taunton that Disraeli fell upon O’Connell, rather ungratefully; whereupon the Liberator was roused to retort on his assailant vehemently as “a liar,” and humorously as a probable descendant of the impenitent thief. And then followed the challenge which, when O’Connell declined it, was fastened on his son Morgan, and the interruption of the duel by seizure of Mr Disraeli in his bed, and his famous appearance in the Marylebone police court. He declared himself very well satisfied with this episode, but nothing in it can really have pleased him, not even the noise it made.
Here the first period of Disraeli’s public life came to an end, a period of preliminaries and flourishes, and of what he himself called sowing his political wild oats. It was a more mature Disraeli who in the general election of 1837 wasEnters Parliament.returned for Maidstone as the colleague of his providential friend Mr Wyndham Lewis. Though the fortunes of the Tory party were fast reviving under Peel’s guidance, the victory was denied him on this occasion; but, for once, the return of the Whigs to power was no great disappointment for the junior member for Maidstone. To gain a footing in the House of Commons was all that his confident spirit ever asked, and Froude vouches for it that he succeeded only just in time to avert financial ruin. His electioneering ventures, the friendly backing of bills, and his own expense in keeping up appearances, had loaded him with debt. Yet (mark his worldly wisdom) “he had never entangled his friends in his financial dealings. He had gone frankly to the professional money-lenders, who made advances to him in a speculation on his success”: they were to get their money back with large interest or lose it altogether. Such conditions were themselves incitement enough to a prompt redemption of the promise of parliamentary distinction, even without the restless spurring of ambition. And Disraeli had another promise to redeem: that which he uttered when he told O’Connell that they would meet again at Philippi. Therefore when, three weeks after the session began, a debate on Irish election petitions gave him opportunity, Disraeli attempted that first House of Commons speech which imagination still dwells upon as something wondrous strange. That he should not have known better, even by hearsay, than to address the House of Commons in fantastic phrase from the mouth of a fantastic figure is indeed remarkable, but not that he retained self-confidence enough to tell the unwitting crew who laughed him down that a time would come when they would hear him. It was one of the least memorable of his prophecies. The speech was a humiliating but not an oppressive failure. In about a week afterwards he spoke again, which shows how little damage he felt, while the good sense, brevity, and blameless manner of the speech (on a copyright bill) announced that he could learn. And for some time thereafter he affected no importance in the House, though not as withdrawing from attention.
Meanwhile, consciously and unconsciously, as is the way with men of genius, his mind was working upon problems of government, the magnitude, the relations and the natural developments of which he was more sensible of than any known politician of his time. “Sensible of,” we say, to mark the difference between one sort of understanding and another which comes of labour and pains alone. Disraeli studied too, no doubt, reading and inquiring and applying set thought, but such means were insufficient to put into his mind all that he found there. It seems that opinions may be formed of inquiry and study alone, which are then constructive; but where intuitive perception or the perceptive imagination is a robust possession, the fruits of research become assimilative—the food of a divining faculty which needs more or less of it according to the power of divination. The better judgment in all affairs derives from this quality, which has some very covetable advantages for its possessor. His judgments may be held with greater confidence, which is an intellectual advantage; and, standing in his mind not soMental characteristics.much an edifice as a natural growth, they cannot be so readily abandoned at the call of ease or self-interest. They may be denied assertion or even outraged for a purpose, but they cannot be got rid of,—which is a moral advantage. Disraeli’s mind and its judgments were of this character. Its greatest gift was not the romantic imagination which he possessed abundantly and employed overmuch, but the perceptive, interpretative, judicial or divining imagination, without which there can be no great man of affairs. Breadth of view, insight, foresight, are more familiar but less adequate descriptions of a faculty which Disraeli had in such force that it took command of him from first to last. Although he knew and acted on the principle that “a statesman is a practical character,” whose business is to “serve the country according to its present necessities,” he was unable to confine his vision to the nearer consequences of whatever policy, or course of action, or group of conditions it rested on. Without effort, and even without intention probably, it looked beyond first consequences to the farther or the final outcome; and to complete the operation, the faculty which detected the remoter consequences did not allow them to remain in obscurity, but brought them out as actualities no less than the first and perhaps far more important than the first. Moreover, it did not allow him to keep silence where the remoter consequences were of that character, and ought to be provided for betimes. Of course silence was always possible. These renderings to foresight might be denied assertion either for the sake of present ease (and Disraeli’s prescience of much of his country’s later troubles only made him laughed at) or in deference to hopes of personal advancement. But the same divining imagination which showed him these things also showed him the near time when it would be too late to speak of them, and when not to have spoken would leave him irredeemably in the common herd of hand-to-mouth politicians. Therefore he spoke.
Remembrance of these characteristics—remembrance, too, that his mind, which was neither English nor European, worked in absolute detachment—should accompany the traveller through all the turns and incidents of Disraeli’s long career. They are sometimes puzzling, often speculative; yet nearly all that is obscure in them becomes clear, much apparent contradiction disappears, when read by these persistent unvarying lights. The command which his idiosyncrasies had upon him is shown, for example, by reproachful speeches on the treatment of Ireland, and by a startling harangue on behalf of the Chartists, at a time when such irregularities could but damage him, a new man, where he hoped for influence and office. At about the same time his political genius directed him to open a resolute critical campaign against the Conservatism of the party he“Coningsby,” “Sybil.”proposed to thrive in, and he could but obey. This he did in writingConingsby, a novel of the day and for the day, but commended to us of a later generation not only by the undimmed truth of its character-portraits, but by qualities of insight and foresight which we who have seen the proof of them can measure as his contemporariescould not.Sybil, which was written in the following year (1845), is still more remarkable for the faculties celebrated in the preceding paragraph. WhenSybilwas written a long historic day was ending in England, a new era beginning; and no eyes saw so clearly as Disraeli’s the death of the old day, the birth of the new, or what and how great their differences would be. InConingsbythe political conditions of the country were illustrated and discussed from the constitutional point of view, and by light of the theory that for generations before the passing of the Reform Bill the authority of the crown and the liberties of the people had been absorbed and extinguished in an oligarchic system of government, itself become fossilized and soulless. InSybilwere exhibited the social relations of rich and poor (the “two nations”) under this régime, and under changes in which, while the peasantry were neglected by a shoddy aristocracy ignorant of its duties, factory life and a purblind gospel of political economy imbruted the rest of the population. These views were enforced by a startling yet strictly accurate representation of the state of things in the factory districts at that time. Taken from the life by Disraeli himself, accompanied by one or two members of the Young England party of which he was the head, it was the first of its kind; and the facts as there displayed, and Disraeli’s interpretation of them—a marvel of perceptive and prophetic criticism—opened eyes, roused consciences, and led direct to many reforms.
These two books, theVindication, published in 1835, and his speeches up to this time and a little beyond, are quite enough to show what Disraeli’s Tory democracy meant, how truly national was its aim, and how exclusive of partisanship for the “landed interest”; though he did believe the stability and prosperity of the agricultural class a national interest of the first order, not on economic grounds alone or even chiefly. And if Disraeli, possessed by these views, became aggressively insubordinate some time before Peel’s proclaimed conversion to Free Trade, we can account for it on reasonable and even creditable grounds. Spite, resentment at being passed over when Peel formed the 1841 government, is one explanation of these outbreaks, and a letter to Peel, lately published, is proof to many minds that Disraeli’s denial to Peel’s face in 1846 that he had ever solicited office was daringly mendacious. The letter certainly reads like solicitation in the customary half-veiled form. All that can be said in doubt is that since the ’41 government came into existence on the 6th of September, and the letter was written on the 5th, its interpretation as complaint of being publicly neglected, as a craving forsomemark of recognition, is possible. More than possible it is if Disraeli knew on the 5th (as he very well might from his friend Lyndhurst, Peel’s lord chancellor) that the appointments were then complete. The pecuniary need of office, if that comes into the question, had been lightened, if not extinguished, two years before by his marriage with Mrs Wyndham Lewis. Mrs Lewis—a lady fifteen years his senior—brought him a considerable fortune which, however, was but for her life. She lived to a great age, and would gladly have lived longer, in any of the afflictions that time brings on, to continue her mere money-worth to her “Dizzy.” Her devotion to him, and his devotion to her, is the whole known story of their private life; and we may believe that nothing ever gratified him more than offering her a coronet from Mr Disraeli.
Disraeli made Peel’s acquaintance early in his career and showed that he was proud of it. In hisLife of Lord George Bentinckhe writes of Peel fairly and even generously. But they were essentially antipathetic persons; and it is clear that the great minister and complete Briton took no pains to understand the dazzling young Jew of whom Lyndhurst thought so much, and wished to have little to do with him. Such men make such feelings evident; and there is no reason for thinking that when, after 1841, Disraeli charged at Peel in obedience to his principles, he gave himself pain. It was not long after it had settled in office that Peel’s government, the creature of an anxious Conservative reaction, began to be suspected of drifting toward Manchester. That it was forced in that direction we should say rather, looking back, for it was a time of dire distress, especially in the manufacturing districts of the north; soPolitics. 1841-67.that in his second session Peel had to provide some relief by revising the corn laws and reducing import dues generally. His measures were supported by Disraeli, who understood that Protection must bend to the menacing poverty of the time, though unprepared for total abolition of the corn tax and strongly of opinion that it was not for Peel to abolish it. In the next session (1843) he and his Young England party took up a definitely independent rôle, which became more sharply critical to the end. Disraeli’s first strong vote of hostility was on a coercion bill for perishing and rebellious Ireland. It was repeated with greater emphasis in the session of 1844, also in a condition-of-Ireland debate; and from that time forth, as if foreseeing Peel’s course and its effect on the country party, Disraeli kept up the attack. Meanwhile bad harvests deepened the country’s distress, Ireland was approached by famine, the Anti-Corn-Law League became menacingly powerful, and Peel showed signs of yielding to free trade. Disraeli’s opportunity was soon to come now; and in 1845, seeing it on the way, he launched the brilliantly destructive series of speeches which, though they could not prevent the abolition of the corn-laws, abolished the minister who ended them. These speeches appeal more to admiration than to sympathy, even where the limitations of Disraeli’s protectionist beliefs are understood and where his perception of the later consequences of free trade is most cordially acknowledged. That he remained satisfied with them himself is doubtful, unless for their foresight, their tremendous effect as instruments of punishment, and as they swept him to so much distinction. Within three years, on the death of Lord George Bentinck, there was none to dispute with him the leadership of the Conservative party in the House of Commons.
In the parliament of 1841 he was member for Shrewsbury. In 1847 he was returned for Buckinghamshire, and never again had occasion to change his constituency. Up to this time his old debts still embarrassed him, but now his private and political fortunes changed together. Froude reports that he “received a large sum from a private hand for hisLife of Lord George Bentinck” (published in 1852), “while a Conservative millionaire took upon himself the debts to the usurers; the 3% with which he was content being exchanged for the 10% under which Disraeli had been staggering.” In 1848 his father Isaac D’Israeli died, leaving to his son Benjamin nearly the whole of his estate. This went to the purchase of Hughenden Manor—not, of course, a great property, but with so much of the pleasant and picturesque, of the dignified also, as quite to explain what it was to the affectionate fancy of its lord. About this time, too (1851), his acquaintance was sought by an old Mrs Brydges Willyams—born a Spanish Jewess and then the widow of a long-deceased Cornish squire—who in her distant home at Torquay had conceived a restless admiration for Benjamin Disraeli. She wrote to him again and again, pressing for an appointment to consult on an important matter of business: would meet him at the fountain of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. Her importunity succeeded, and the very small, oddly-dressed, strange-mannered old lady whom Disraeli met at the fountain became his adoring friend to the end of her life. Gratitude for her devotion brought him and his wife in constant intimacy with her. There were many visits to Torquay; he gratified her with gossiping letters about the great people with whom and the great affairs with which the man who did so much honour to her race was connected, that being the inspiration of her regard for him. She died in 1863, leaving him all her fortune, which was considerable; and, as she wished, was buried at Hughenden, close to the grave where Disraeli was to lie.
It is agreed that the first three years of Disraeli’s leadership in Opposition were skilfully employed in reconstructing the shattered Tory party. In doing this he made it sufficiently clear that there could be no sudden return to Protectionist principles. At the same time, however, he insisted (as he didfrom first to last) on the enormous importance to the country, to the character of its people no less than to its material welfare, of agricultural contentment and prosperity; and he also obtainedAs leader in the House of Commons.a more general recognition of the fact that “the land” had borne fiscal burdens under the old régime which were unfair and unendurable under the new. So far he did well; and when in 1852 he took office as chancellor of the exchequer in Lord Derby’s first administration, the prospect was a smiling one for a man who, striving against difficulties and prejudices almost too formidable for imagination in these days, had attained to a place where he could fancy them all giving way. That, however, they were not. New difficulties were to arise and old prejudices to revive in full force. His first budget was a quaint failure, and was thrown out by a coalition of Liberals and Peelites which he believed was formed against Mr Disraeli more than against the chancellor of the exchequer. It was on this occasion that he exclaimed, “England does not love coalitions.” After a reign of ten months he was again in Opposition, and remained so for seven years. Of the Crimean War he had a better judgment than those whose weakness led them into it, and he could tell them the whole truth of the affair in twenty words: “You are going to war with an opponent who does not want to fight, and whom you are unwilling to encounter.” Neither were they prepared; and the scandals and political disturbances that ensued revealed him as a party leader who could act on such occasions with a dignity, moderation and sagacity that served his country well, maintained the honour of party government and cost his friends nothing. The mismanagement of the war broke down the Aberdeen government in 1855, and then Disraeli had the mortification of seeing a fortunate chance of return to office lost by the timidity and distrust of his chief, Lord Derby—the distrust too clearly including the under-valuation of Disraeli himself. Lord Derby wanted Lord Palmerston’s help, Mr Gladstone’s, Mr Sidney Herbert’s. This arrangement could not be made; Lord Derby therefore gave up the attempt to form a ministry and Lord Palmerston came in. The next chance was taken in less favouring times. The government in which Disraeli was again financial minister lasted for less than eighteen months (1858-1859), and then ensued another seven years in the cold and yet colder shade of Opposition. Both of these seven-year outings were bad, but the second by far the worse. Parliamentary reform had become a burning question and an embarrassing one for the Tory party. An enormous increase of business, consequent upon the use of steam machinery and free-trade openings to commerce, filled the land with prosperity, and discredited all statesmanship but that which steered by the star over Manchester. Mr Gladstone’s budgets, made possible by this prosperity, were so many triumphs for Liberalism. Foreign questions arose which strongly excited English feeling—the arrangements of peace with Russia, Italian struggles for freedom, an American quarrel, the “Arrow” affair and the Chinese war, the affair of the French colonels and the Conspiracy Bill; and as they arose Palmerston gathered into his own sails (except on the last occasion) every wind of popular favour. Amid all this the Tory fortunes sank rapidly, becoming nearly hopeless when Lord Palmerston, without appreciable loss of confidence on his own side, persuaded many Tories in and out of parliament that Conservatism would suffer little while he was in power. Yet there was great despondency, of course, in the Conservative ranks; with despondency discontent; with discontent rancour. The prejudice against Disraeli as Jew, the revolt at his theatricalisms, the distrust of him as “mystery man,” which up to this time had never died out even among men who were his nearest colleagues, were now more openly indulged. Out of doors he had a “bad press,” in parliament he had some steady, enthusiastic friends, but more that were cold. Sometimes he was seen on the front Opposition bench for hours quite alone. Little conspiracies were got up to displace him, and might have succeeded but for an unconquerable dread of the weapon that destroyed Peel. In this state of things he patiently held his ground, working for his party more carefully than it knew, and never seizing upon false or discrediting advantages. But it was an extremely bad time for Benjamin Disraeli.
Though Lord Palmerston stumbled over his Foreign Conspiracy Bill in 1858, his popularity was little damaged, and it was in no hopeful spirit that the Tories took office again in that year. They were perilously weak in the House of Commons, and affairs abroad, in which they had small practice and no prestige, were alarming. Yet the new administration did very well till, after resettling the government of India, and recovering from a blunder committed by their Indian secretary, Lord Ellenborough, they must needs launch a Reform Bill to put that dangerous question out of controversial politics. The well-intended but fantastic measure brought in for the purpose was rejected. The country was appealed to, with good but insufficient results; and at the first meeting of the new parliament the Tories were turned out on a no-confidence vote moved by Lord Hartington. Foreign affairs supplied the motive: failure to preserve the peace of Europe at the time of the Italian war of independence. It is said that the foreign office had then in print a series of despatches which would have answered its accusers had they been presented when the debate began, as for some unexplained reason they were not. Lord Palmerston now returned to Downing Street, and while he lived Disraeli and his colleagues had to satisfy themselves with what was meant for useful criticism, though with small hope that it was so for their own service. A Polish insurrection, the Schleswig-Holstein question, a commercial treaty with France, the Civil War in America, gave Disraeli occasions for speech that was always forcible and often wiser than all could see at the time. He never doubted that England should be strictly neutral in the American quarrel when there was a strong feeling in favour of the South. All the while he would have gladly welcomed any just means of taking an animated course, for these were dull, dark days for the Conservatives as a parliamentary party. Yet, unperceived, Conservatism was advancing. It was much more than a joke that Palmerston sheltered Conservative principles under the Liberal flag. The warmth of his popularity, to which Radical applause contributed nothing in his later days, created an atmosphere entirely favourable to the quiet growth of Conservatism. He died in 1865. Earl Russell succeeded him as prime minister, Mr Gladstone as leader of the House of Commons. The party most pleased with the change was the Radical; the party best served was Disraeli’s. Another Reform Bill, memorable for driving certain good Liberals into a Cave of Aduilam, broke up the new government in a few months; Disraeli contributing to the result by the delivery of opinions not new to him and of lasting worth, though presently to be subordinated to arguments of an inferior order and much less characteristic. “At this rate,” he said in 1866, “you will have a parliament that will entirely lose its command over the executive, and it will meet with less consideration and possess less influence.” Look for declining statesmanship, inferior aptitude, genius dying off. “Instead of these you will have a horde of selfish and obscure mediocrities, incapable of anything but mischief, and that mischief devised and regulated by the raging demagogue of the hour.” The Reform legislation which promised these results in 1866 was thrown out. Lord Derby’s third administration was then formed in the summer of the same year, and for the third time there was a Tory government on sufferance. Its followers were still a minority in the House of Commons; an angry Reform agitation was going on; an ingenious resolution founded on the demand for an enlarged franchise serviceable to Liberals might extinguish the new government almost immediately; and it is pretty evident that the Tory leaders took office meaning to seek a cure for thisReform Bill of 1867.desperate weakness by wholesale extension of the suffrage. Their excuses and calculations are well known, but when all is said, Lord Derby’s statement of its character, “a leap in the dark,” and of its intention, “dishing the Whigs,” cannot be bettered. Whether Lord Derby or Mr Disraeli originated this resolve has been much discussed, and it remains an unsettled question. It is known that Disraeli’s private secretary, Mr Ralph Earle, quarrelled with him violently at about this time; and Sir William Fraser relates that, meetingMr Earle, that gentleman said: “I know what your feelings must be about this Reform Bill, and I think it right to tell you that it was not Disraeli’s bill, but Lord Derby’s. I know everything that occurred.” Mr Earle gave the same assurances to the writer of these lines, and did so with hints and half-confidences (quite intelligible, however) as to the persuasions that wrought upon his chief. Mr Earle’s listener on these occasions confesses that he heard with a doubting mind, and that belief in what he heard still keeps company with Mahomet’s coffin. One thing, however, is clear. To suppose Disraeli satisfied with the excuses made for his adoption of the “dishing” process is forbidden by the whole tenor of his teaching and conduct. He could not have become suddenly blind to the fallacy of the expectations derived from such a course; and all his life it had been his distinction to look above the transient and trafficking expedients of the professional politician. However, the thing was done. After various remodellings, and amid much perturbation, secession, violent reproach, the Household Suffrage Bill passed in August 1867. Another memorable piece of work, the confederation of Canada, had already been accomplished. A few days after parliament metPremier, 1868.in the next year Lord Derby’s failing health compelled him to resign and Mr Disraeli became prime minister. Irish disaffection had long been astir; the Fenian menace looked formidable not only in Ireland but in England also. The reconstructed government announced its intention of dealing with Irish grievances. Mr Gladstone approved, proposing the abolition of the Irish Church to begin with. A resolution to that effect was immediately carried against the strong opposition of the government. Disraeli insisted that the question should be settled in the new parliament which the franchise act called for, and he seems to have had little doubt that the country would declare against Mr Gladstone’s proposal. He was mistaken. It was the great question at the polls; and the first elections by the new constituencies went violently against the authors of their being.