and Tacitean," ; and spurious epigrams, such as—" Puri- tanism
was cradled among small traders, conscious of their virtues, but socially ill at ease," to which an historian like Mr. Uchel should scarcely condescend. It is diffi- cult sometimes to follow Mr. Sichel's taste. He quotes with approval Disraeli's rhetoric about the standard of St. George flying over the mountains of Besselas, and about Russia cooling the hoofs of her horses in the waters of the Oxus. We turned up the first of these quotations and read the whole passage, and found it difficult to see anything in it but a very turgid and inapposite metaphor, which was well deserving of the laughter with which it was received at the time. To praise such a performance is to lower one's appreciation of Disraeli's really admirable historical allusions, as in that wonderful attack on political moralists, "those censors who cannot aspire to be Consuls." It is hard, as we have said, to follow always the •sequence of Mr. Sichel's thought. Frequently he seems to us to make false deductions from acts and sayings of Disraeli ; and, on the other hand, he is apt to overdo his argument, and, as in his defence of Disraeli's political consistency, to claim for him a virtue which, if it were possible, would be a grave political vice. Sometimes we simply cannot understand what he means. There is a passage on p. 18: "Joint-stock enterprise is not fellowship, and the test of direction is liability," lec., where the general meaning is clear, but the exact interpretation is beyond us. On p. 256 we read : "And this brings me to Disraeli's ideas concerning the romantic, the persecuted, the generous, the witty, the pathetic Ireland." This is not an extract from the memoirs of Barry Lyndon; it is Mr. Sidles own.
The truth is that Disraeli demands above all things a sober commentator. The immense value of his political teaching must be separated from the rhetoric with which it was over- laid before it can be acceptable to posterity. He was neither the omniscient wizard of Mr. Sichel nor the mountebank of Mr. Meynell, but a great statesman, who did much and said much of permanent value to the world, which it is high time the world recognised. Sobriety and lucidity must be the first requirements in his biographer ; the appreciation of the romance of his career and the intricacies of his tem- perament may come later. We are far from denying that Mr. Sichel's book has great merits. He has real enthusiasm, considerable acuteness, and a remarkable industry. With the main lines of his reading of Disraeli we are in complete agree- ment, and often he says true and memorable things on dis- puted questions. But we wish that the statesmanship stood out a little clearer in the book, and were less obscured by the secondary qualities. It is useless to praise Disraeli through. out, He was full of faults of character and intellect : be made great mistakes, be was guilty of great folly, and he had certain very unlovely characteristics. It is only when we have admitted all these to the full that the ground is clear for portraying the great statesman. He was that rarest of beings, a politician sincere with himself. "It would be no delight to me to be considered a prophet, were I conscious of being an im- postor : I ever wish to be undeceived." He was also the foe of parochialism, bringing into statesmanship a spacious imagina. tion, and, as Mr. Sichel well says, "bathing the political land- scape in a large and luminous atmosphere." He was the foe of abstraction, of "paper reforms," and the whole bag of lack- lustre dogmas which the formalist, Tory or Radical, carried on his back. In the highest sense of the word, he was a constructive statesman, recognising, as Burke recognised, the foundations of racial character and institutions, on which the future must be built; a leader of the people, and no follower of the people's will. "My conception of a great statesman," he said in 1846, "is of one who represents a great idea ; an idea which he may and can impress upon the conscience of a nation But I care not what may be the position of a man who never originates an idea—a watcher of the atmosphere, a man who takes his observations, and when he finds the wind in a certain quarter trims to suit it." His contributions to modern political theory are to be found in the fact that he carried on Burke's .conception of the organic nature of the State, that as a corollary he expanded the doctrine of race, and placed Imperialism on its only true and enduring basis. (We may notice in passing an
admirable passage in Mr. Sichel's book where he, to our mind correctly, forecasts what Disraeli's attitude would have been to any scheme for a mechanical Imperial federation at the cost of the English people.) The word which seems to us best to describe his statesmanship is "positive." He warred against abstraction on the one side, and indifference on the other. Working on the material be found prepared, he gave a new value to ourconception of many English institutions. He had a Continental hatred of the bourgeoisie, the persona who " build big mills, who come from God knows where, and, when they have worked their millions out of flesh and bone, go God knows where" and this grossly unjust contempt led him into many extravagances. Yet in certain of his extravagances there was a truth, and he was a pioneer in that movement for real reform, the reform of society, which went behind the titular democracy to the people, whose instincts, as he believed, were truer and more serious than the hollow creed of those who claimed to speak for them. It is well for English history that he had during his best years of public life a great opponent who threw into relief his qualities. Mr. Sichel has drawn a very illuminating comparison between Disraeli and Gladstone. Both were mystics of a kind, advo- cates of the spiritual life; but their temperaments were in eternal opposition. Perhaps Mr. Sichel's statement is as near the truth as any,--" Gladstone was more of an apostle, Disraeli of a seer."
Disraeli will always be the centre of myth. His acknow- ledged wit and the glamour of his mysterious figure have made him a personality to which floating stories naturally attach themselves. Mr. Sichel's book contains many, some trivial enough, but a few so admirable that it is difficult to refrain from quotation. We will content ourselves with the tale of the occasion when he made a classical quotation in the House, and added "which, for the sake of the successful capitalists around me, I will now try to translate,"—a piece of Parliamentary irony borrowed, however, from Sheridan, who, quoting Greek, added "which I will now translate for the benefit of the country gentlemen." Irony is, indeed, one of the keys with which we may unlock this Asian mystery. "I write in irony and they call it bombast," was Disraeli's own criticism of his work in fiction. If by irony we mean some- thing nobler than sarcasm, ibis "luciferous phrase" goes far to explain Disraeli's whole career.
It will be long before Englishmen lose interest in that strange being who so greatly influenced their destinies. If genius be, as Bolingbroke defined it, "great coolness of judgment united to great warmth of imagination," then few have a more indisputable claim to it. Nor must we forget that high quest of the public good which glorified all his career. To quote his own summary,— "Throughout my public life I have aimed at two chief results. Not insensible to the principle of progress, I have endeavoured to reconcile change with that respect for tradition which is one of the main elements of our social strength ; and in external affairs I have endeavoured to develop and strengthen our Empire, believing that a combination of achievement and responsibility elevates the character and condition of a people."
THE ANTI-JACOBIN.*
THE excellent selection from the prose and verse of the Anti- Jacobin. which Mr. Lloyd Sanders has judiciously edited for Messrs. Methuen's "Little Library' recalls attention to the work of Canning and his associates at a most appropriate time. For when certain deductions have been made, many of the tendencies which the Anti-Jacobin combated are hardly less provocative of satirical reprobation now than in 1797. England still needs to be saved from the candid friend—" the friend of every country but his own "—from the votaries of "simpering Freedom," from the political Jellybys who excited the protests of the "New Morality." Allowance must cer- tainly be made in Canning's ease for the zeal of the convert, nor can it be denied that in his desire to "score off" his opponents lie subjected extremists and moderates alike to indiscriminate obloquy. As Mr. Lloyd Sanders reminds us, his anti-Revolu- tionary. zeal caused him to confound good men with rogues, and to ignore private virtue or conspicuous literary ability; and
• Selections from the AntiJacobin, together with Some Letter Poems by Georg. Canning. Edited by Lloyd Souders. "The Little Library." London Methuen, and Co. [la Bd. net.)
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