C LORD GEORGE BENTINCK A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY BY B. DISRAELI MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT FOR THE COUNTY OF BUCKINGHAM WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHARLES WHIBLEY 'He left us the legacy of heroes; the memory of his LONDON ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LIMITED 1905 INTRODUCTION I The Life of Lord George Bentinck is in a sense the most serious of Disraeli's works. It was composed at a time when he had abandoned fiction for the more sternly engrossing pursuit of politics. During the years, which had passed since the writing of his novels, he had devoted himself with all his inspired energy to the business of the House of Commons, and Sybil and Tancred were but interludes in a life of affairs. 'Literature he has abandoned for politics,' wrote Mrs. Disraeli to Peel as early as 1841, and when, in 1852, he essayed in Lord George Bentinck the portraiture of an English worthy, Disraeli was already better known as a statesman than as a novelist. His brilliant and pitiless campaign against Peel had overshadowed .the victories won in another field; and his political biography was received with a respect not always shown to those who have practised successfully the art of fiction. And it deserved all the respect accorded to its sound judgment and well-balanced style. Fashioned after the best models, it is embellished, like the works of Livy and Thucydides, with deftly-drawn characters and authentic speeches. The biographer, moreover, was writing of what he had seen and heard: not merely were all the documents ready to his hand; he himself had taken a foremost part in the events which he chronicled. But nowhere in his book will you find the taint of journalism. On every page there is a sense of great issues and lofty purposes. Though Disraeli was removed but a year or two from the battles of wit and reason, which are the matter of his history, his imagination allowed him to see the immediate past in a just perspective, and his one defect, amiable and deliberate, is to underrate with a true modesty the importance of his own part. So gravely does he consider the personages in his drama, that they might have been ancient Romans, or the subjects of a despotic doge. And then how skilful is the narrative, how right the feeling of proportion! None but a master could interweave pages of Hansard, 'the Dunciad of Downing Street,' into the substance of his book, and make every chapter interesting. Sternly political though it be, the biography is always dramatic, and the two chief actors in the drama, Lord George Bentinck and Sir Robert Peel, are brilliantly disengaged from the dingy background of the House of Commons. Of these he writes in the true spirit of romance. The picture of Peel sitting unmoved and unconscious in the deserted House can never be forgotten. 'The benches had become empty,' thus runs the passage, 'the lights were about to be extinguished; it is the duty of the clerk of the House to examine the chamber before the doors are closed, and to-night it was also the strange lot of this gentleman to disturb the reverie of a statesman.' But, while Disraeli saw even the arch-enemy through the softening mist of imagination, Lord George, as he drew him, seems to have stepped straight out of the pages of fiction. 'One man alone brooded over the unexampled scene,' says he at the outset, and you are reminded straightway of Henrietta Temple or The Young Duke. Again, he tells us that, to make his first speech, 'Bentinck rose long past the noon of night.' It is such touches as this that make the book acceptable to those who do not regard politics as the end of life, and his admirers will surprise the true Disraeli upon every page. Like all great men, he rises with the occasion, and the description of Lord George's death is the work of a true artist. With the noble extravagance, characteristic of his style, he takes leave of his hero 'upon the perron of Harcourt House, the last of the great hotels of an age of stately manners, with its wings, and courtyard, and carriage portal, and huge outward walls.' And when he tells the last sad tale in a few pages of admirable dignity, he is inspired to quote the ΑγαπὮ Θάνατε, Θάνατε, νῦν μ' ἐπίσκεψαι μολών—though Greek quotations seldom came from his pen. In brief, the whole work is cast in the mould of fancy, and, accurate and impartial though it be, it never sinks to the arid prose of conventional biography. Disraeli, moreover, being always sincere, does not suppress his own qualities, even in so impersonal an affair as biography. The narrative sparkles with humour, and is alive with wit. The Sugar question, not a lively one, is an excuse for a jest, that has not yet lost its point. 'Strange,' says he, 'that a manufacture which charms infancy and soothes old age, should so frequently occasion political disaster.' And, while he gives free play to his wonderful gift of irony, he does not mitigate his stern convictions. Though he proclaims with enthusiasm the fortunate truth that 'the history of England is the history of reaction,' he admits that' 'progress and reaction are but words to mystify the million. They mean nothing, they are nothing; they are phrases, and not facts. All is race.' So he returns to the gospel preached with eloquent sincerity in his novels; and it may be said of him, as of few men, that, whatever may be the subject of his discourse, he is always honestly and candidly himself. He conceals nothing, he attenuates nothing; he deals not in 'ifs' and 'ans'; and thus he presents the strongest contrast to the politician who in after years was his fiercest opponent and most dangerous rival. |