Two for the SeeSaw

Exotic as an antimacassar, playful as a prayer meeting, William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) seemed born to baffle and irritate Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)–an invitation to which Disraeli normally responded with a dash and flash his rival customarily repaid with anger and disdain.

Queen Victoria adored Disraeli, the Conservative leader and theoretician who, after all, had purchased the Suez Canal for Great Britain and augmented Her Majesty’s dignities in proclaiming her Empress of India. Upon the Liberal leader Gladstone’s defeat of her favorite, in 1880, the Queen, according to her secretary, called the incoming prime minister a “half-mad firebrand who would soon ruin everything and be a dictator.” (Victoria was rarely, if ever, amused by the generally non-amusing Gladstone.) The two statesmen were oil and water, plaid and herringbone. As Richard Aldous relates, they “loathed each other from an early stage and could hardly bear to be in the same room.”

There were intervals of civility, as when Gladstone called to inquire after Disraeli’s dying wife, Mary Anne. But afterwards it was back to battling. “I see no chances of salvation unless he goes really mad,” Disraeli wrote of his adversary in 1880, “but he is such a hypocrite, that I shall never believe that till he is in Bedlam.” Gladstone judged that for a “distinct decline in the standard of public life .  .  . one man and one man alone is responsible–Disraeli.”

The odd thing is that their lives defined Victorian England in as large a degree as those of Darwin and Dickens, Ruskin and Rossetti. Disraeli had romantic charm, Gladstone a bottomless supply of moral earnestness. Gladstone, a sincere devotee of the Church of England, possessed moral purpose in the highest degree. Disraeli, brought to Anglicanism by his Jewish father, always had something of the East about him that was careless and exuberant, showy and even a little languid. In these two the Britain of quill pens and counting-house stools met the Britain of gaudy rugs and jewels from the imperial possessions that lay on the other side of Suez. Temperamental differences between the two men were too great for friendship, or even cooperation. Their ambitions and powers of mind put them in each other’s way too often for anything but rivalry of the most intense and enduring sort.

Back and forth they tossed the chores of office. Disraeli became prime minister for the first time in 1868. Gladstone evicted him, serving from 1869-74. Then Disraeli evicted Gladstone, serving from 1874-80. Then Gladstone came back for a five-year run. Disrael died in 1881. For the surviving rival, two brief premierships lay ahead. There is just a frock-coated sniff here of the Bushes and Clintons. Each rival knew the other’s qualities, even sometimes acknowledged them, with Gladstone saying at the end of Disraeli’s life, “There is no more extraordinary man surviving him in England, perhaps none in Europe.” Disraeli’s accomplishments–shaping the Congress of Berlin, projecting British power, conferring the franchise on the rural voters he took for natural Conservatives–were more marked than those of Gladstone, a technician at heart, more concerned about the budget than the greatness of Great Britain.

Why such a book as this? Well, for enjoyment, among other things. Aldous, an Irish historian and political analyst, is a gifted writer (in spite of occasional lapses such as “No problem”). We meet two fascinating individuals, the earnest Gladstone competing peculiarly with the exotic Disraeli for attention. The Grand Old Man’s now-well-known habit of combing London streets for streetwalkers to talk and pray with isn’t to be ranked with the Princess Diana saga, yet the incomprehensible elements in both tales remind us that people in high places sometimes take crazy chances.

If Disraeli and Gladstone–the Lion and the Unicorn, to borrow from a John Tenniel cartoon displaying them in open strife “for the crown”–seem figures from the far-off, when people took seriously things like Empire and the Anglican religion, still their story more than entertains. It instructs. There’s the energy of the period, for one thing, with a bustling Britain at the center of world affairs, clamoring for definition of one kind or another. Great choices bring to the fore great tensions, in a sometimes-repetitive way. Dizzy and the Grand Old Man tangled over foreign military interventions, including one in Afghanistan where, according to Gladstone, British policy had driven “mother and children forth from their homes to perish in the snow.” (Could Nancy Pelosi have phrased it more cagily?) Why not, instead, for Britain, said Gladstone, the path to “the blessed ends of prosperity and justice, and of liberty and peace?” We seem, perhaps, to have heard this before.

Because what changes, really, in human life? The quality of the human actors themselves? It’s no bad guess. Nineteenth-century Britain, a fearlessly fecund time and place, yielded up actors extraordinary enough to know their own qualities in others, and to strive against each other for mastery. But not on YouTube; not with armies of “bundlers” at their beck; not with professional consultants plucked from advertising agencies. Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone were, magically, themselves: all the more adored for it, all the more missed and regretted.

William Murchison is the Radford distinguished professor of journalism at Baylor.