shattered moral tone of the individual to whom it was addressed. All about Canning subsequently, all about poor Castlereagh's sad and I fear disgraceful end, are most dramatic. That is the character of the volumes. They are full of life, and stirring life. The papers on the campaign, on the state of Spain and so on, all beyond praise. The effect of reading these volumes on me is this: that although my time for the past is now very limited, I shall certainly read the whole of your great father's works: a volume will always be at hand when I have time to recur to what has gone before us. The country owes you a debt of gratitude not easily to be repaid for the publication of this book. To Lord Henry Lennox. GROSVENOR GATE, Nov. 3, 71.-I thought your speech thoroughly capital: out-and-out, the star of the recess. I have not read Gladstone's.1 I tried, but I could not get on with it: not a ray of intellect or a gleam of eloquence. They tell me that, if I had persevered, I should have been repaid, by encountering a quotation from the Hyde Park Litany; either a burlesque of the Athanasian Creed or of the National Anthem; equally appropriate in the mouth of our most religious and loyal ruler. To Montagu Corry. HUGHENDEN, Dec. 4, '71.-. . . Our camp is struck, and, probably in 8 and 40 hours, we shall be settled permanently at G.G. The stable goes up to-morrow. The severe and savage weather, that prevents all outdoor employment, quite sickened my lady, who had trusted to planting and marking trees to amuse her. Now she sighs for Park Lane, and twilight talk and tea. The Canford party rather precipitated her resolve, but the prospect even of that being put off will not now change affairs here. . . . We have received telegrams from Sandringham every morning, and generally speaking Francis Knollys 2 has written by post with details which telegrams cannot convey. Our telegram this morning the most favorable we have yet received, and the second post, which brought your letter, brought also one from F. K. 1 Gladstone's famous speech of two hours in the open air at Blackheath, in the course of which he quoted, with approval, from a republican and secularist book of poems, a parody of the National Anthem. 2 Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales, and subsequently to King Edward and King George; now Viscount Knollys. 1871] PRINCE OF WALES'S ILLNESS 147 They are still very nervous at Sandringham, and very cautious in their language, but it is evident to me, that they think they have turned the corner. To Gathorne Hardy. GROSVENOR GATE, Dec. 23, 1871.-I had seen Noel1 before I received your letter, and had given him the same answer as you had done. Great wits, etc. The proposition is absurd. We cannot modify the position we have taken up on the Ballot, tho' many of our friends may wish to do so. It wd. break up the party, which is in a tolerably robust state at present. What we shd. do, is to get the Bill thro' our House with as much promptitude as decency permits. The Govt. wd. like to keep it there and distract attention from other matters. Our policy is the reverse. There must be a discussion on the principle, but it need not be a prolonged one, and, in Comm[itt]ee, we shd. confine ourselves to bona fide improvements of its machinery, wh. may be the foundation, if fortune favored us, of a future compromise. We are here rather unexpectedly, having been stopped in our progress to country houses by the impending calamity, and being too anxious to return to Hughenden; and now, in a few days, we shall have to fulfil some of these engagements, so I don't think we shall return to Bucks. . . . 1 One of the Whips. CHAPTER IV 1869-1870 In 1869 Disraeli had some real leisure, for the first time for many years. When he led the Opposition against Russell, Aberdeen, and Palmerston, it had been in Parliaments where parties were fairly balanced, and a change of Government was always a possibility. In these circumstances the labours of leadership were nearly as onerous in opposition as in office. But, with the large and compact majority of 1868, Gladstone's Government was for the time impregnable; and Disraeli's mind therefore naturally turned to his early love, literature. It was more than twenty years since the publication of his last novel, Tancred, in March, 1847; it was nearly twenty years since his last book, Lord George Bentinck, in December, 1851; it was more than a dozen years since he had ceased active journalism in the Press, in February, 1856. Tancred and Lord George Bentinck and the articles in the Press had still breathed, though not to the extent of his earlier political writing, the spirit of combat and propaganda; they had been the work of one who, though he had risen high, was still fighting for his ideas and for his place. Now he had arrived; he had carried a great historical measure; he had held the highest position under the Crown; his ambition was largely satisfied; and when he began to write again, in his sixty-fifth year, it was in a somewhat different vein. He surveyed the great world of his day, now intimately known by him, and he drew a picture of aristocratic and political society, and of the ideas animating it, together with the currents 1869-1870] FIRSTFRUITS OF RESIGNATION 149 of thought and action which were moulding the history of Europe. Like the great trilogy of Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred, Lothair was a political novel, and a political novel dealing with the events of the day; unlike them, its underlying purpose seems to have been subordinated to a desire to mirror and satirise the passing show. Unlike them, too, it observes a reticence, becoming in an ex-Premier, with regard to the leading figures in the political arena and to the immediate subjects of acute political dissension. Different as it was from the trilogy in its outlook, it was different also in the secrecy in which it was conceived and written. 'I make it a rule never to breathe a word on such matters to anyone,' Disraeli told a literary friend in 1872. My private secretary, Mr. Montagu Corry, who possesses my entire confidence in political matters, who opens all my letters, and enters my cabinet and deals, as he likes, with all my papers in my absence, never knew anything about Lothair until he read the advertisement in the journals.' This was a new practice for Disraeli, as in regard to the trilogy and to Lord George Bentinck he made confidences about his progress from time to time to his sister, and to his close friends such as Manners, Smythe, and Lady Londonderry. No such sources of information are available in regard to the composition of Lothair. But the incident which suggested the main action of the story, the reception of the third Marquis of Bute into the Church of Rome, only took place on Christmas Eve, 1868. Disraeli had then just resigned office; and we may therefore confidently look upon the book as the firstfruits of his retirement. The stimulus to write it may well have been provided by the offer of £10,000 for a novel, which was made to him by a publisher immediately on his resignation, but declined with thanks. The book was finished in the spring of 1870. The arrangement with Longmans for its publication was made in February of that year, and it appeared at the beginning of May. The story of Lothair covers almost exactly the period of Disraeli's third tenure of office; it is all comprised between the August of 1866 and the August of 1868; and yet, though a great number of his English characters are more or less politicians, there is no reference to the Reform struggles or to the passage of the Reform Bill, or (save as a matter involving urgent whips) to the debates on the Irish Church; nor is there any personal allusion to the Prime Ministers of the time, first Derby and then Disraeli himself. The political and social movements, the intellectual and spiritual problems, which form the background of Disraeli's story, had in truth little relation with actual proceedings in Westminster Palace. Secret societies and their international energies, the Church of Rome and her claims and methods, the eternal conflict between science and faith: these are the forces shown to be at work beneath the surface of that splendid pageant of English aristocracy in which most of Disraeli's characters move, and which he never described with more brilliance and gusto than in Lothair. So brilliant is that description that Froude even asks us to see the true value of the book in its perfect representation of patrician society in England flourishing in its fullest bloom, but, like a flower, opening fully only to fade. The plot is simple. The hero, one of those fortunate beings whom he loved to paint, an orphan peer-apparently a marquis of fabulous wealth, brought up and educated quietly in Presbyterian fashion in Scotland, is thrown, as he reaches adolescence, fresh upon the world, first of Oxford, and then of London and the great country houses. The priggishness born of his early education leads him at the outset to say, 'My opinions are already formed on every subject; that is to say, every subject of importance; and, what is more, they will never change.' But he is in reality very impressionable, and anxious to discover, like Tancred, what he ought to do and what he ought to believe. All the influences and all the teachers of the day are naturally concentrated upon one whose adhesion might be expected so materially to benefit any cause which he espoused. The main |