LORD BEACONSFIELD. (continued 2)
Reading edition
If it was worth while, very large deductions would have to be made from Lord Beaconsfield's seeming success if we look rationally at his whole career. No man who is supposed to have been anything like so successful as he is popularly held to be, ever had so many and such striking failures to look back upon. Looking at him as connected with letters, he is the author of works which have failed more completely than any written by any one who himself became known. Judged by their ambitious aims, these literary non-successes of Lord Beaconsfield are gigantic. The epic poem ("The Revolutionary Epick") which Mr. Disraeli supposed was to place him—he himself tells us so—by the side of, or else between, Homer and Milton, nobody would read; the play ("Alarcos") which he states he wrote to "revive the British stage," is never acted. Not one of his novels, when his political position has ceased to advertize them, will remain in the hands of the public. If you look back on his Parliamentary career, the dazzle came late, and after a dreary distance had been travelled. The political party he founded, "The Young England School," has for twenty-five years been as dead as the door-nail which typified the death of Marley. Nothing whatever came of it. The one only notable legislative measure that stands in his name,—the Reform Bill,—really belongs to the other side. Scrutinize his career how you will, and some abatements of this kind have to be made. He is supposed to have had a charm over men,—it has failed with the strong ones. Peel he tried very hard to win, but had to take up with Lord George Bentinck instead. At this moment he is supposed to be in favour with the Court: the impression he made upon the Prince Consort was far from satisfactory. He has quite recently lost Lord Derby and Lord Carnarvon; and there was a time when the Marquis of Salisbury and he stood in a very different relationship.
Lord Beaconsfield's social system is that of a novelist; his finance was ever that of a Will-o'-the-Wisp; and he has now added a Jack-o'-Lantern diplomacy. Surely nothing more is needed to justify disbelief in him.
A Whig.